The Annotated Life

I'm probably chancing death at the hands of our Facebook Overlords for contradicting my profile, but the truth which must be told is that I did not in fact end up going on tour with the band for spring break (Minor complications such as temporarily non-functional limbs tend to get in the way of such things as weeks spent living out of a mini-van and playing music, although I really expected to have gained another lease on left-handedness by now), instead heading to Portland for Family Time. Mostly though, I've been reading and eating asparagus and other green things. As a side note, my parents categorically refuse to try Odwalla Superfood, made from:

Which turns out to look more like:

none-the-less, putting your lips to a glass of this stuff is the culinary equivalent of being a princess full of toad-lust: turns out this liquid of questionable appearance is fucking delicious.

Found a superastic book in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by the very talented and slightly megalomaniacal Dave Eggers. The title may come off as pretentious but is meant in a self-deprecating way; Eggers relates in memoir form the death of his parents and subsequent sociology experiment that is the upbringing given by the then 21 year old author to his 8 year old brother in San Francisco. Some of it is weird, some of it is depressing, a lot of it is funny, but it's all great writing.

To wit:

Addressing Toph's presents is up to me, and the night before, I do everything I can to spruce up the task, to forge new ground. Some I address to ficticious recipients, or to other kids in the neighborhood. Many of Toph's presents I address to myself. Those that actually bear his name are misspelled. Or else I do what I do when filling out school forms: I get his name wrong, writing "Terry" or "Penelope," then cross it out and write his real name, smallish, below. I sign a few from "Us," a few from "Santa," but prefer this:
FROM: God.
He doesn't know what to think. He does not want to seem overly cavalier when reaping the booty, and we exploit his eagerness to please. A package of colored clay is opened.
"Thank you," he says.
"Thank who?"
"I don't know. You?"
"No, not me. Jesus."
"Thank you, Jesus?"
"Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun."
"He did?"
I turn to Bill. Bill is staying out of it.
"He did," I say. "Beth, did he not?"
"Indeed he did. Indeed he did."

Also: ordered a MacBook Pro. I'd been looking for a laptop that would be able to take the place of the tower, which size and noise-wise almost counts as a roommate, and after a few months settled on this. Never thought I'd ever find myself getting a Mac, always had a beef with Apple's ethic of controlling the hardware/software tether, but they've come along way in the last few years, to the point where the hardware (x86 switch is new and a boon, but the design always was) and OS are just better than anything else available. What washed away my remaining doubts over using a Mac was the recent (and successful) efforts to get Windows running on an x86 Mac; at some point there will be a Win-native app that I need to run, but if I can dual boot OS X and XP, I can have the best of both worlds. Alright, so now I've confirmed your suspicions (an improbably spelled word) that I'm a geek. And I READ /., TOO! Not only a geek, but a Nigerian Spam-Mailer:

Which Nigerian spammer are You?

This entry was posted on 3.27.2006 at 14:27. You can skip to the end and leave a response.