Egads!

This is the sight over Iowa City last night. And apparently, the downtown looks like a war zone. We were traveling from Ames to Washington last night and had to go by Iowa City to get there, and it's a good thing we left late or we'd have driven right into that.

More stuff here.

Las Vegas, here were come

Well, we booked our flight to Las Vegas to see the Confessions Tour last night. Despite what many people at work told me, I could find neither outrageously inexpensive airfare to Las Vegas nor a direct flight from Des Moines. So we ended up paying about $300 a piece for airfare. We're leaving Des Moines at 7:22 AM on Saturday morning, May 27th with a connecting flight in Chicago. We'll get to Vegas around noon on Saturday. The concert isn't until 8PM, so we'll have plenty of time to take in the Vegas strip, and since the MGM Grand is on the strip, we'll be right there so no worries. And rather than book a hotel, Jeff and I will be hopping a 12:40 AM flight from Las Vegas to Dallas-Ft. Worth early Sunday morning -- getting back to Des Moines around 8:30AM on Sunday. So we'll spend a grand total of 12 hours or so in Vegas, but I'm not really a gambler so who really cares. We're going to see the concert, not gamble.

I'm not sure how my nearly 34 year old body will take that kind of abuse, but I think it's better than spending the night in a hotel -- certainly cheaper and plus as I've looked around for hotels, there really aren't any available that weekend that are anywhere remotely close to the strip. Plus, with it being a holiday weekend, price gouging is definitely the rule -- although I was surprised to find that on non-holiday weekdays, the MGM Grand is actually reasonably priced! However, for Memorial Day weekend, it's 400+ dollars a night, and there aren't any rooms anyhow, so there ya go.

Only six weeks away! And I figured it out, if Madonna performs for 2 hours, we'll be paying roughly $4.50 a minute for the privilege of seeing her live. While I have mixed feelings about that -- I mean, does she really need the money at this point in her career? (and if she does, shame on her for not investing more wisely) -- I'm mostly just happy to be going. I know there's not one single artist besides her that I'd shell out that kind of cash to see, and consequently, I shook off the nearly immediate buyer's remorse that hit me yesterday.

Oh well, it's not like someone held a gun to my head and made me buy the tickets. I guess she charges that much for tickets because she can. Although Jeff and I were laughing last night because $265 seats at Drowned World Tour probably would have been front row seats!

Fours

I stumbled across this quick and easy Enneagram test online, and I'm posting it because I'm a four through and through, and whenever I refer to my inner four, this is what I'm referring to, for those readers (the few that I actually have) that may not know.

ENNEAGRAM TYPE 4

How to Get Along with Me

• Give me plenty of compliments. They mean a lot to me.
  

• Be a supportive friend or partner. Help me to learn to love and value myself.


• Respect me for my special gifts of intuition and vision.


• Though I don't always want to be cheered up when I'm feeling melancholy,
  I sometimes like to have someone lighten me up a little.


• Don't tell me I'm too sensitive or that I'm overreacting!

What I Like About Being a Four

• my ability to find meaning in life and to experience feeling at a deep level


• my ability to establish warm connections with people


• admiring what is noble, truthful, and beautiful in life


• my creativity, intuition, and sense of humor


• being unique and being seen as unique by others


• having aesthetic sensibilities


• being able to easily pick up the feelings of people around me

What's Hard About Being a Four

• experiencing dark moods of emptiness and despair


• feelings of self-hatred and shame; believing I don't deserve to be loved
  


• feeling guilty when I disappoint people


• feeling hurt or attacked when someone misundertands me


• expecting too much from myself and life


• fearing being abandoned


• obsessing over resentments


• longing for what I don't have

Fours as Children Often

• have active imaginations: play creatively alone or organize playmates in original games


• are very sensitive


• feel that they don't fit in


• believe they are missing something that other people have


• attach themselves to idealized teachers, heroes, artists, etc.


• become antiauthoritarian or rebellious when criticized or not understood
  


• feel lonely or abandoned (perhaps as a result of a death or their parents' divorce)

Fours as Parents

• help their children become who they really are


• support their children's creativity and originality


• are good at helping their children get in touch with their feelings


• are sometimes overly critical or overly protective


• are usually very good with children if not too self-absorbed

We're going!!!

Oh. My. God. I can't believe it. I actually got tickets to Madonna's Confessions Tour in Las Vegas for Memorial Day weekend. They were ungodly expensive -- 265 dollars a seat, but you know what? I don't do anything else -- I don't go out for beers every other night with the guys, we don't have cable, we own one car, I walk to work. I deserve it -- most definitely. And I have a back up plan if Memorial Day weekend ends up being my weekend to work, so there!

Now it's time to find airfare and hotel. Jeff's going to pay the airfare -- will likely be comparable to the ticket price. And then trying to find a hotel.

I'm so excited!!! The seats aren't spectacular -- better than our Drowned World Tour seats (nothing above us but ceiling) and not quite as good as our Re-Invention Tour seats, but we're in the arena!!

Confessions Tour

It's that time again. Madonna's hitting the road and even though I told myself that I probably wouldn't be able to go, I got one look at the rumoured set list and now I want to go like nothing else. Ticket prices are, as expected, astronomical. And any hope I had of going to see her in Phoenix and stay at my brother's is history as it doesn't work for Jeff and I can't get the day off work anyway. Chicago, the closest she's coming around here is out as well as I can't get the day off work and, truth be told, I wasn't that crazy about the United Center anyway.

So I talked to Jeff tonight and we're thinking about trying to get tickets to her show in Las Vegas on Memorial Day weekend. However, I looked for flights and hotel combos and they're all rather pricey, which doesn't surprise me too much because all those hotels on the Vegas strip are going to be expensive. It stinks because I don't want to stay so far out that I have to rely on a cab to get back after the show (we learned our lesson at the DWT when my very pregnant wife came and picked us up in a cab she got from the hotel as there wasn't a cab to be found after the show was over.) However, I also don't want to spend a fortune because tickets are probably going to be around 200 bucks by the time it's all said and done. Besides, Memorial Day may end up being my weekend to work -- a baby has to be born a bit early for it to happen, but theoretically it could happen.

I've been looking into the Philadephia show which is July 12th. Airfare isn't too bad and the hotels are a little more reasonable. Only trouble is I don't know Philadelphia at all so I don't know where a good place to stay is -- as in, I don't want to stay in the ghetto (cue Dolly's back up singers -- sorry, inside joke) or have to risk life and limb to get to the concert. Sorry Madonna, you're not worth that.

In the end, I have to say that I'm a bit torked that she thinks she has to charge so dang much money for her concerts. But that's another post entirely.

But in talking to Jeff tonight, we're both on the same page. We've seen her twice, which is more than a lot of my Madonna fan friends I know have seen her, and if we have to wait for the DVD on this one, well, I guess it'll have to be that way. Truth be told, I wish the tour started in Europe and finished in the States as August is a much better month for me to get time off work!!

Oh well, if it's meant to be, it'll happen. Never in a million years would I have dreamt that we would be going to Washington, D.C. to see the Re-Invention Tour a couple years ago. Time will tell.

Is it too late to hope for a last minute add of the Wells Fargo Arena? :)

Get the point? Good, now wash.

This was taken in the men's room of a family restaurant that we were at last weekend for my grandparents' 65th wedding anniversary. (whoa! 65 years!) If I hadn't already been planning to wash my hands after using the bathroom, I don't think I could have withstood the guilt I would have felt thanks to that sign.

I guess in a few years it'll say "Dirty hands spread H5N1. WASH HANDS!"

Death

I've been (rather inadvertantly) reading quite a few books about death these days. I finished Stephen King's Cell a while back (his take on the zombie genre) and quite unwittingly followed it up with Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man -- although actually it's the fact that Reaper Man is a de facto zombie book as well, but more about that later. And finally, as if on cue, I run across Christopher Moore's latest novel A Dirty Job at Borders this weekend when we were out looking for the new Jennifer Crusie novel Don't Look Down (hits stores April 4th but Heidi's been hearing that it's been available early in some places.)

In A Dirty Job, a nice Beta-male finds out that he's basically, well, Death. With a capital D.

I've only read one of Moore's novels -- and that was The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror. I mean, how could I refuse it? It was Christmas AND zombies!!! And it was a really good book, even though it got off to a slow start, it ended up being well worth the read. I've never gotten around to reading Lamb, but it's on my to-be-read pile.

The unfortunate thing is that I'm having to resort to the library in order to read A Dirty Job, which means there are 7 people in front of me waiting to read it. I guess as soon as I'm done with Reaper Man (and what a hoot it is!) I'm going to read that James Frey's A Million Little Pieces just to see what all the commotion is about. Someone at work loaned it to me so it's not like I went out and bought it or anything.

Radioactive dreams

Another in my recent slew of intensely vivid dreams occurred the other night. I'm not sure what brought it about, but I dreamt that there was a nuclear war. The plot of my dream played very closely to that of the 1980s TV movie The Day After -- which I remember watching as a kid and being alternately petrified of and fascinated by (something that I think pretty much sums up a key component of my personality.) Anyway, I remember that we were at Heidi's grandparents' house and I distinctly remember the mushroom clouds -- they looked just like they did in The Day After. Windows broke, the blast wave came across the town and then it was over. After that, the sun was shining and cars were driving and it looked just fine, but I knew that the radiation level was too high -- it was all a ruse.

I looked up what it meant to dream of a nuclear bomb and according to the dream interpretations site that I frequently go to in cases like this. This is what it said:

• To dream of a nuclear bomb, suggests feelings of helplessness, being threatened and loss of control. You may be experiencing great hostility and rage to the point of being destructive.
• Alternatively, you may be expressing a desire to wipe out some aspect of yourself.
• It may also be an indication that something crucial and precious to you has ended and important changes are about to occur.

I'm not sure what to make of that -- I'd like to chalk it up to my deeply embedded fear of nuclear war. It's one I don't consciously think of much anymore, but the thought of nuclear war just petrified me as a kid. During the 80s, before the Cold War started to thaw a little bit, I lived in fear that I'd wake up in the middle of the night with the air raid sirens going off, ICBMs inbound from the Soviet Union. Saying that makes it sound like I thought of nothing else, which isn't true, of course, but it was a very real fear that I had. I remember being in college and waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of the civil defense sirens and all that same 10 year old boy fear welled right back up, even though by then, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Cold War was pretty much over. I didn't even think of tornadoes, which would be a really common reason for civil defense sirens to be going off in Iowa, I thought of nuclear annihalation.

When I was in the 8th grade, I did a research paper on the effects of an atomic blast. There was a book that I got from the library from which I did a lot of my research called Nuclear War in the 1980s? Of course, completely dated now, but how I'd like to get my hands on a copy of that book for my late 20th century history library that I've managed to accrue.

(image courtesy Wikipedia)

An evening with Anne Murray

Well, I got back from the Anne Murray concert about an hour ago, and it was a really fun show! It was at C.Y. Stephens Auditorium here in Ames which is the mid-sized venue at the Iowa State Center. It's where a lot of the touring Broadway musicals end up playing, Anna has her dance recital there. It probably seats around 2500 people, so it's not like a big arena where major draws are going to play. Consequently, it's really a fun place to see concerts because there isn't a bad seat in the house. The performers don't look like tiny bugs running around on a stage and it's a pretty intimate setting.

Anne was pretty much sold out -- there were only isolated seats empty. As I suspected, she played a lot of her late 70s-early 80s crossover hits. "Shadows In The Moonlight," "I Just Fall In Love Again," "You Needed Me," & "Could I Have This Dance" (complete with audience sing-a-long) were all featured rather prominently. She also played a lot of standards as that's apparently what she's been recording these days. Her latest album is all songs written before 1940 and she sang a lot of those songs.

She pretty much knew that she was a nostalgia act, and played it for all it was worth. Her self-depracating humor was great -- that's one of the things I love about going to these shows where the artists are a little bit past their prime. They aren't afraid to make fun of themselves because they have absolutely nothing to lose. She's not exactly a spring chicken anymore (she's 60 years old) so there were a lot of age jokes. She talked about how she had glasses in every room in her house and still can't find a pair when she needs one. And she looked pretty good for being my mom's age. I mean, she reminded me a lot of Katherine Chancellor from "The Young & The Restless" only without all the bangles and baubles. But that frosted hair! What was that all about?

The crowd was very much a geriatric crowd. I'd say that the average age was probably 55 or so, putting me well in the tail end of the bell curve. But having said that, it seemed appropriate that I was seeing her perform, and in Ames, the place where I walked around the Iowa State campus listening to her music on my Walkman 16 years ago.

And for those of you who may not have ever heard Anne Murray, here's an MP3, available for a limited time. It's her cover of the Monkees' "Daydream Believer."

Anne Murray -- Daydream Believer

Buy Anne Murray CDs.

Guiltiest of guilty

Pleasures, that is. Tonight I'm going to see Anne Murray here in Ames with my folks. And that's no April Fools joke either. My wife wasn't interested and my daughter's just a little bit too young to take to something like that, although I have no doubt that she'd like the music. I have no idea what Anne Murray is going to sing in concert -- whether it'll be a collection of her hits from the 70s and 80s or if it'll be all standards or what. Hopefully, she'll do just like Olivia Newton-John did at her concert that we saw last fall -- know she's a nostalgia act and play it for every penny it's worth.

I have a rather odd history with Anne Murray. It all started when we were on vacation one summer and my mom and dad played Anne Murray's Greatest Hits in the van over and over again. I remember liking the song "Broken Hearted Me' -- most likely because it was a bit on the dramatic side and appealed to the four in me. So anyway, I was away at college, my freshman year at Iowa State right here in Ames, and I venture to say that I was the only 18 year old male on the campus listening to Anne Murray on my Walkman. I would dare anyone to out-geek that. I do remember how my friend Kelly always used to ask me if "A Little Good News" was on that tape, which sadly, it was not.

I'll be sure to write a full report of the concert here later tonight.

Now I'm off to see if any of Madonna's tour dates are leaking this weekend -- they're set to be announced on Monday!!

The Sun Is Burning

I'm really into the latest project Casey Stratton has put out on his web site -- a collection of traditional folk songs called The Sun Is Burning. He released it last week on St. Patrick's Day -- which is fitting because the bulk of it is Irish folk songs (although there is a French one thrown in for good measure.)

Funny thing is I wouldn't have suspected that I would like it as much as I do, traditional Irish folk music is not something that I normally listen to. It helps a lot that Casey does a fantastic job interpreting these songs -- the production isn't fancy at all, but that actually helps a lot. These are folk songs after all, they don't really fit fancy arrangements or state-of-the-art production.

I had to laugh when I started listening to the song "The Ash Grove" because I swore that I knew the tune from somewhere, but just couldn't place it. As it turns out, it's the tune to the old Lutheran hymn "Sent Forth By God's Blessing" -- the lyrics of which you can't find anywhere on the web because apparently us Lutherans are sticklers for copyright. But it's a great interpretation of the song. It's been fun investigating the origins of these songs that I previously hadn't been exposed to.

And on the other end of the Casey spectrum, I found his techno-ambient cover of New Order's "Regret" on iTunes. Yay--because I was about to spring for the whole Blue Order: A Tribute To New Order CD just to get that one track. Glad I didn't have to. "Regret" is probably my favorite New Order track, and I just love Casey's version of it.

Buy: The Sun Is Burning by Casey Stratton
Buy: "Regret" by Casey Stratton from Blue Order: A Tribute To New Order

Finally kicked the ... skunk?

Well, I think I've finally coughed up the last of the crud that infected all of us last week. I still have this dry, hacky cough, but I feel so much better. There's nothing like being sick to remind you of how good you feel the rest of the time! Anna's on day 8 of her antibiotic for her ear infection, and I asked her if her ear still hurt, to which she replied, "it's still kind of loud" which I assume means that it's full of fluid, but she says it doesn't hurt anymore.

In completely unrelated news, the other night I dreamt that I was walking down the street with Anna and someone we were about to meet was walking a skunk on a leash. Now, I figured this had to mean something, and sure enough it does. And sure enough, it's something bad. To see a skunk in your dream means either 1) you're driving people away or turning people off or 2) all is calm with the situation an you don't particularly like it or agree with it. Not sure what to make of that, but obviously hope it's not the former!

I've never actually seen a wild skunk, which is something else because they're not exactly uncommon in Iowa. However, I've sure smelled them while driving at night in the country. But I guess they are nocturnal, and plus, who really wants to meet up with a skunk? It's one of the animals that the CDC automatically considers rabid in the case of a bite and therefore you get to have the series of not entirely fun (but not as bad as popular urban folklore would have you believe) rabies shots. And besides, they stink anyway.

Down with the sickness

Ugh...we've got plague at our house. And Anna was definitely Patient Zero in this infestation. She ran almost frighteningly high fevers on Thursday and Friday -- so much so that we ended up taking her into the clinic just to make sure there wasn't something worse going on than what we could see. Then Friday afternoon, I came home from work with all-over body aches and by the time I went to bed at 9pm, I was so achy and chilled that I pretty much would rather have been dead (dramatic, I know!) And then last night, it hit Heidi just about the same way.

Anna's pretty much recovered, although she still hacks a lot ("Daddy, I don't wanna cough forever!") I have lovely junk in my lungs and my chest hurts from coughing. And what's better is my sister moved back to my parents' house this weekend, but not before being infected with whatever this is. And then add into the picture the fact that my brother and his wife are here from Arizona and will likely get infected as well. Happy spring break!

But I haven't been able to get that Richard Cheese version of "Down With The Sickness" out of my head since this all started -- you know the one that was in the remake of Dawn of the Dead a couple years back. Something about "you fucker get up, come on get down with the sickness" done in a lounge lizard version just tickles my funny bone.

Obligatory Oscar post

So I stayed up and watched the Oscars last night like we've done every year since whatever year it was that Braveheart won Best Picture and I can't help but feel like someone pulled the rug out from underneath me while I wasn't looking. I have to say that I was stunned when Brokeback Mountain didn't win Best Picture. Wait -- that's not entirely true. I did watch Crash last week because I knew it had a chance of sneaking in and taking Best Picture, so it didn't come as a complete shock when Jack Nicholson read that film's name at the end of the Oscar telecast last night. It's a good film -- and after I got done watching it, I said to myself, "Now, if that wins Best Picture instead of Brokeback, I won't feel too bad." And truthfully, it was a good film. Not the best movie I've ever seen in my life, but still very capable.

But for some reason, I still can't get over Brokeback Mountain not winning. A lot of the blogs this morning and screaming "homophobia!" which I'm not sure I entirely agree with. While the case could be made that even members of the generally liberal AMPAS were turned off by the subject matter of Brokeback, I'm more inclined to think that Brokeback Mountain suffered from the split-the-difference factor that seems to have become more common in recent Oscar years. What I think happened is that a lot of Academy members decided to vote for Brokeback by voting for Ang Lee's direction, and then to recognize Crash's Paul Haggis by voting for Crash for Best Picture. At least that's what I'd like to believe anyway, and for the most part, I don't think there was some conspiracy to cheat Brokeback out of the Best Picture Oscar. There's certainly plenty of precedence for splitting the Best Director/Best Picture Oscar.

But a part of me just can't get the bad taste out of my mouth. Perhaps it's because Brokeback affected me much more deeply than Crash did and on that alone, I feel it was the best film of the year. I know that Heidi will disagree with me, and Jeff will too. It's silly to admit, but every time I heard that Brokeback theme "The Wings" during the Oscars, I just started to tear up a little bit. I'm not sure why, but I just did. I'm very glad that the score won the Oscar, because it is by far the most original score I've heard in a while and it fit the movie just perfectly. And besides, even though John Williams has lost 40 Oscars, he's won five which is probably more than this guy will ever win in his lifetime.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the night for me was reserved for the usually uneventfuly Best Original Song. I so wanted Dolly Parton to win and it seemed like she was poised to win, but then that utterly ridiculous rap song from Hustle & Flow beat her out in the end. To her credit, Dolly seemed genuinely happy for them, but I couldn't help but think about the relatively few opportunities Dolly Parton is going to have to win an Oscar. Not that it matters to her, I'm sure. She has a closet full of awards I'm sure, but I just felt like an Oscar would be a good way to reward her 40+ year career of songwriting. But I suppose that's not what the Oscars are about, really. And as Heidi pointed out, how many more chances are the guys who won going to get at Oscar? Valid point.

So overall, it was kind of a disappointing Oscar year because the one big upset was half-predicted and then everything else fell right into the place where all the Oscar prognositcators said. And in the end, it's just the fucking Oscars.

Skewed statistics

Well, my Lastfm.com statistics are going to be completely wonky when they go to compile them next Sunday. It seems I left iTunes playing all night long while I was at work (11 hours) and not only that, I left it playing on my Casey Stratton/Tori Amos playlist. So they are the only two artists who have played for the last 11 hours.

Not that this is altogether a bad thing. I've been trying to get my iTunes play counts up since my complete computer re-do in January. That's one way to do it.

Happenstance

It's been a while since I've blogged and I really have no good reason for not having blogged. I've been at the computer and have had ample time to blog, but I guess I just haven't had much to say these days. I'm getting ready for a stint of overnights at work which always messes with my internal clock more than I care to think about, but it'll be fine.

The other day, I pulled the 1987 Dolly Parton CD Rainbow off the shelf and imported it into iTunes. This CD has the distinction of being the most expensive single CD I've ever purchased. This all-pop album, which bombed bigger than life for Dolly nearly 20 years ago (egads! where has the time gone?) and has been out of print for just about as long. And since 1987 was toward the beginning of the CD age, the CD version is especially difficult to come by. The Iowa City Public Library had a copy of it that I checked out numerous times while I lived in Iowa City. Just as music was starting to make the jump from CDs to mp3s and other digital files, I decided that I wanted to get a copy of this CD, so I went to eBay to see what I could find. I found a few copies there, so I went ahead and bid on one, only to lose it in the last minute of the auction (imagine that--like that ever happens on eBay!)

My next auction I was a little more fortunate, except for the fact that I got in a bidding war with someone toward the end of the auction. I think I ended up spending somewhere between 50 and 60 dollars for the CD -- insane, I know! -- but I'd procured a copy of the CD. If I had only waited 6 more months, by then I was fully into Napster and the mp3 revolution, and all I would have had to do was check out the CD from the Iowa City Public Library and voila -- I'd have a copy. Still, I don't have all that many regrets about spending the money. Even though I buy a majority of my music through iTunes these days, there's still something about having the CD to hold in your hand along with all the accompanying artwork that goes along with it (and believe me, the artwork in this one is cheesy with a capital C.)

Rainbow is Dolly at her cheesiest. I almost wrote that it was the nadir of her career, but I don't think that's entirely true either. The trouble with the CD is that it has a very "phoned-in" feel to it -- almost as if Dolly laid down the vocals and the instrumentation was completely changed from what it originally was. Almost every song has this "lost in a wind tunnel" quality to it, with Dolly's vocals relegated to the background and crappy 80s synths layered to hell over the top of it. It contains her single most embarrassing song "Dump The Dude" in which Dolly opines "Girl, I know you think this is none of my business/But the fact that we're friends makes it my business/I care about you, and I ain't preachin'/But I think you shoud dump the dude." At least she didn't write it.

I talk rather harshly about a CD that I coughed up 60 bucks for, but I love the cheesiness of it. I love the cheesball song "Savin' It For You" which she sang on her TV show from right around the same time. But perhaps what I love most about it is it reminds me of my first semester at Iowa -- just like Madonna's Erotica CD does -- and the memories that it evokes more than make up for the bad songwriting and dated production. And the funny thing is, that when the album was released in 1987, I could have easily bought it then. I mean, I liked Dolly even back then, but for reasons I don't know, I never purchased it. And think if I'd bought it back then, I'd have a whole different set of memories associated with it. It was just happenstance that I didn't discover it until I was 20 rather than when I was 15.

Anyway, enough of my mindless babbling about Dolly. Here, enjoy this video from You Tube, which prompted me to import the Rainbow CD to iTunes in the first place. "Savin' It For You" performed live on the Dolly show in 1987. (As is standard operating procedure for most You Tube videos, this can be a bit slow to load, so be patient.)

Valentine's Day

This is proof positive that I have the best wife ever. (The February 14th post) And it has nothing to do with the fact that I get off easy on Valentine's Day. It goes so much deeper than that.

Hands off, guys, I'm keeping her.

Sorry for the shortness of the post, but life's been busy. Back probably tomorrow with something more substantial.

Angstroms

I found myself thinking about angstroms today. I'm not entirely sure why I was but I didn't question it. Nonetheless, it was still an odd thing to find myself thinking about. An angstrom, as everyone knows, is one hundred-millionth of a centimeter (OK, I admit it, I had to look up precisely what it was, but I did remember the scientific notation for an angstrom, just couldn't remember how to express it.) Anyway, it reminds me a girl named Sarah that I knew in college -- she was the roommate of a friend of my roommate's. I really liked her - she was a little bit of a case, but it just heightened her appeal. I think I did awkwardly ask her out once, to our class formal, but she had other plans (i.e. she wasn't interested in me that way) but that was really ok. In an event, she was obsessed with angstroms. We thought that angstroms should really be the unit of measure for teenage angst, because really, when you think about it, that's probably how big teenage angst really is compared to what most teenagers (my teenage self included) make it out to be.

Surreality bites

The other night I dreamt that I was a vampire. And it was the strangest thing. I had had a couple glasses of wine before bed that night, and in the middle of the night, I remember stirring slightly and noting that I didn't feel very good. In the dream, this sick feeling got translated into my transformation into a vampire -- not dissimilar from the process described in Interview With The Vampire. I found myself noting that I didn't need to breathe and that my heart was no longer beating. And suddenly, I was back in college and a lot of my friends from that period of my life were there, sitting in a lecture hall. I sat down in a seat near the top of the lecture hall on an aisle, hoping that no one would notice my transformation into one of the undead. And just as quickly as I was in the lecture hall, I was suddenly sitting at a table with several friends, both past and present, while Heidi desperately tried to explain to them that just because I was a vampire didn't make me a bad person. After all, the only other vampires she'd known had been Angel and Spike, and they both had souls and eventually worked for good in the world. As she was talking, I found myself still feeling that "sick" feeling and realized that it must be because I needed blood -- I hadn't fed at all. So I began to ask people if they'd mind so much if I bit their necks and drank some blood -- not enough to kill them, but enough to make me feel better. Not surprisingly, no one obliged. Then Heidi came up with a great idea. She had me drink that fake vampire blood you get in tubes at Halloween. I remember it being gross, but it did make me feel better.

Strange, eh? I looked up what dreaming you're a vampire means and here's what I found: To dream that you are a vampire, signifies that you are sucking in the life energy of others for your own selfish benefit.

Funny, I don't feel like that fits -- I'm more likely to chalk it up to the wine.

Two new books

I got a couple new books this week -- one was a gift and one was a rare hardcover book purchase (I almost always wait for them to come out in paperback.) The first book is Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, which Kevin sent to me. The book is about a woman who dressed up as a man to experience what it was like to be a man in today's society. She did this on a dare from a friend of hers and what she finds out (according to the reviews) will come as no surprise to a lot men in society. While men have a certain amount of freedom that may not necessarily come to women by virtue of gender roles, they come at a bit of a cost. According to the book jacket, the book is much in the vein of Black Like Me and Nickeled & Dimed (I've only read the latter) I'm eager to start reading it, and it's only appropriate that Kevin gave it to me considering we met on a listserv discussing men's issues.

The other book was one that I actually bought, and to say I bought it sight unseen would be lying, even though I probably would have. It's Stephen King's new book Cell, the first two chapters of which were published a couple weeks back in Entertainment Weekly. The premise, basically is that on a sunny day in October, The Pulse is sent out over everybody's cell phone, and anyone who happened to be on their cell phone at the time is turned into a crazed, flesh-eating zombie. Now as I've outlined here ad infinitum, I will pretty much watch or read anything that has to do with zombies as they are without a doubt my favorite of all movie monsters. So I have high hopes for the novel. Not that I haven't been disappointed by King before -- the climax of It, the entirety of The Tommyknockers, but he is also capable of brilliance -- 'Salem's Lot, which I read at the age of 25 and was still scared to death and the short story collection Night Shift. Many dismiss King for being a hack, but as Heidi mentions, he really cares about the craft of writing and if nothing else, he sure knows how to tell a story. Let's just hope they don't turn Cell into a movie because the movies based on his books almost always disappoint.