thursday was one of my favorite days of the year.
grand nubbins’ day? free lapdance day? give-a-wedgie day?
no, it was the nba trading deadline.
this is the last day of the season where nba teams can trade players with each other. after this day, they’re forced to go the rest of the season and (hopefully) the playoffs with the roster they’ve got.
the exciting part of it is that you never know what will happen. could there be big blockbuster deals? a huge three-team extravaganza? or a bunch of little piddly trades between irtrelevant teams involving players no one cares about?
what’s really interesting is that it radically changes the makeups of teams and therefore their playoff prospects and thus the playoff prospects of every other team in the league.
for example, one of the huge last-minute trades this year was trading chris webber from the sacramento kings to the philadelphia seventy-sixers. suddenly, a.i. has a incredibly talented big man with a great post game, giving them a scoring punch down low but not interfering with his perimeter game. suddenly philly is odds on favorite to win the pathetic atlantic division.
on the other hand, sacramento gives away the player who more or less single-handedly ressurected their moribund franchise to not only respectability, but into a true contender. and for what? basically, magic beans!
furthermore, you have to realize that these aren’t just parts in a machine, but atheletes with typically fragile psyches. will cwebb be able to accept being a second option, after being the man for so long in sactown? will peja be happy and step up now that cwebb is gone? how will gp respond after not only not getting his wish to play on a contender, but instead being shipped to atlanta, possibly the worst team in the league? can antoine walker play with paul pierce again after being shipped out just last year?
it’s like wifeswap, but you don’t get your mom back. ever. until maybe next year. but then she might be played by someone else.
then you factor in the coaches and the general managers into the equation as well, having players love/hate/appreciate/be resentful of how they’ve been traded/traded away, then suddenly it’s like a polyamory swing party. all the intrigue, all the gossip, but even better because there’s scoring and games that actually let you know how well things are working out as a result!
it’s like you can rate the effectiveness of swinging with other couples. with statistics.
beautiful.
there’s also a bizarre side effect: after the trades, what happens when some other player on your new team already has “your number”?
When Drew Gooden was traded from the Orlando Magic to the Cleveland Cavaliers after the 2003-04 season, Gooden wanted to wear the No. 0 he wore with the Magic and at the University of Kansas. But Jeff McInnis, who previously wore No. 5 with the Los Angeles Clippers and at the University of North Carolina, wanted $25,000 for the number. Gooden called off his quest and took No. 90 instead.
also in the new york times yesterday, you can sign up for a 3g girlfriend:
If you marry her in a virtual ceremony, you even end up with a virtual mother-in-law who really does call you in the middle of the night on your cellphone to ask where you are and whether you have been treating her daughter right.
…
Vivienne, the product of computerized voice synthesis, streaming video and text messages, is meant not only to bring business to Artificial Life (she will be available for a monthly fee of $6, not including the airtime costs paid to cellphone operators or the price of virtual chocolates and flowers). But she is also meant to be a lure for the new, higher-tech, third generation, or 3G, cellphones.
Vivienne, who may soon be joined by a virtual boyfriend for women and, after that, a virtual boyfriend for gay men and a virtual girlfriend for lesbians, is at the leading edge of a wave of services that companies are developing to take advantage of the much faster data transmission rates made possible by 3G technology.
…
Vivienne’s largest database is for processing those difficult conversations about romance and intimacy. “People will see that they can’t have sex with her, but they’ll try to,” and Vivienne has many ways to hold them off, Mr. Schöneburg said.
Vivienne is fairly prudish, partly because Artificial Life is hoping the market will include teenagers from affluent families. Artificial Life has been contacted by companies interested in the development of a racier version, and perhaps even a pornographic version, and may license the technology but will not enter that market itself.
Partly to prevent anyone from becoming addicted to Vivienne’s charms, the program will limit users to an hour of play time a day.
…
Users eager to advance quickly toward a virtual kiss or even marriage should know that she has a faintly mercenary appreciation for gifts, from flowers and chocolates to cars and diamond rings. Some virtual gifts are free, but others will require users to make real charges against their monthly phone bills of 50 cents to $2.
not that virtual dating games are anything new, as they’ve been popular (mostly in asia) for years and years. but that’s something you can play with on your own time without it having the ability to call on you and interrupt your real life. suddenly, now you’re talking about something that’s tamagotchi v3 (3g?).
it’s not unlike the ilovebees alternate reality game last year that integrated fake corrupted websites, emails, and phone calls, ultimately to promo the release of halo 2.
now you’re paying for the priviledge of being called by virtual mothers-in-law and getting harrassed for not taking good enough care of their virtual daughters. and if you can’t turn it off, where will it end? will they call you up and demand that $2 diamond ring because you haven’t paid enough sms attention to them?
creepy. and to think i was all worked up earlier this week because i you can now buy sports illustrated swimsuit edition mobile phone wallpaper. that’s kid stuff.
you can see the bad hollywood pitch already:
at first it was a harmless game. a virtual wife for a lonely working guy. then he tired of the novelty and cancelled the service, but the calls kept on coming. his virtual wife kept calling, threatening him with jealous rages. and then his friends started dying…
MOBILE ATTRACTION: where caller id can’t help you
starring freddie prinz jr. and meeno peluce. coming to a 3g phone near you this fall.
interesting article in the new york times about how video games can help doctors increase skills for laparoscopic surgery:
The complex manual dexterity required to be a stellar video gamer and minimally invasive surgeon are strikingly similar, said Dr. Rosser, chief of minimally invasive surgery and director of the hospital’s Advanced Medical Technology Institute. More important, he is using video games to help develop and train a new generation of surgeons who may have unwittingly acquired an aptitude for laparoscopic surgery while wiling away thousands of hours playing Mortal Kombat, BloodRayne and the like.
…
Last year Dr. Rosser was a co-author of a study that concluded that surgeons who played video games for at least three hours a week were 27 percent faster and made 37 percent fewer mistakes than surgeons who did not play video games.
now to find a good doctor, not only do you have to check what medical school they went to, but also find out what their frag count was…
we’re going to paris.
that’s right, paris.
the city of lights. uh, windy city? or was it city of brioche? oh wait, city of love. or is that sea of love? starring ellen barkin and al pacino? or sung by the honeydrippers?
anyway, we’re flying out next wednesday, and coming back on the following friday. sorry space cowboys! and even more, sorry to everyone i rounded up to go to snowfest, but i’ve got to bail on you.
because it’s not every day you get to go to paris and stay for free. where is it? well, of course, it’s going to be my place in paris! apparently in the charming and historic Gobelins district, on the cusp of the 5th and 13th arrondissements of the Left Bank. whatever that means. ask me next week.
to be honest, i’ve been a little jealous at everyone who’s playing around in new york this month. hmc went and i couldn’t go because of work. and then cc went, and i know that kt is out there, as well as c-stone, laz, spot, paris hilton, spongebob squarepants, and yer momma. goddamn everyone.
well that’s a big fuck you to everyone in new york. fuck your new york, fuck your 24 hour city, fuck your christo gates, and fuck your metropolitan museum.
because we’re going to paris, baby!
the sudden question of the day:
1. snowboarding & tunes with the space cowboys in tahoe
2. march andc
3. a week in paris
choose two of three.
#1 and #2 were already on the schedule and in process. but now out of the blue, #3 is under consideration. how? the chance to stay for free in paris.
for free.
sure, there may be some working of the streets and a little of the dosie-do, but free is free, right?
actually, hmc’s friend has two weeks free in an apartment in paris as a housing trade but can’t use it.
can we use it? i’m working, hmc’s unemployed. sounds like a hell yeah! thanks for the unemployment, suckers! thanks for the comission checks!
as for work, eh, whatever. i got people to cover me. i gots time in the bank.
the only question: do you go snowboarding and party immediately before and then go to paris, or do you go to paris and then come back and party all night after?
it’s possible a week from today i could be flying to paris.
that’s nutty.
i’ll try not to talk too much about how i wanted to go to tahoe this weekend for some snowboarding but i’m still here in the rain.
not that rain here = snow there or anything.
we decided too late, and then opted to go early sunday morning, only we overslept because we went out for a late dinner on saturday night with hmc’s friends from sony, one of which was in town for the holiday (ha!) weekend, and the other works at the orphanage up here in the presidio.
hmc came down with a cold, to boot. cold + fear of snowboarding because you might hurt your already hurty self + getting up super late = no tahoe trip.
so instead we watched movies…
we finally got around to watching wong kar-wai’s latest, 2046. finally being sort of an odd word, since it hasn’t come out here yet, on the other hand i’ve had a copy that i ordered from hong kong on dvd for over a month now. thus, finally.
it’s pretty good. once we sorted out that it’s not really a time travel epic (whew!), and not even really a science fiction story, we were able to see parallels in the triptych-ness like chungking express and fallen angels, and also in the (un)love story/period piece like in the mood for love. one thing that hmc noted was that it had a real fetishization of objects: a lot of shots just focused on one thing in the excess of the actual plot or the movie as a whole. after she brought it up i saw it everywhere, but now we need to go back to the old movies to see if that’s something he’s always done that we didn’t notice, or maybe we were just being hypersensitive. i mean, there were those cans of peaches in chungking express, right?
we also went out to see kore-eda hirokazu’s nobody knows. it’s a wonderful film that was inspired by a real eventknown as the “affair of the four abandoned children of nishi-sugamo.” in 1988, born of different fathers, these children never went to school and didn’t legally exist because their births were never declared. abandoned by their mother, they lived on their own for six months. it’s an incredibly beautiful movie, but also an incredibly sad movie. i don’t know if you can make a sadder movie. there are things like schindler’s list where the topic is inherently more sad, but the blatant heavy-handedness and manipulation falsifies the experience. here the touch is very light and realistic, a la edward yang, allowing the sadness of the actual content to show through.
lucky you!
well, i’m not sad about missing snowboarding anymore. i’m now sad about abandoned children.
aren’t movies wonderful?
we went out ice skating last night for the rs fng.
ice skating? do they still do that?
wasn’t hockey season cancelled? besides, aren’t we living in california, land of sunshine, blue skies, and beaches filled with voluptuous baywatch babes?
unfortunately, we’re in northern california, where it rains incessantly during the winter (where’s my drought when i really need it?), and the beaches are goddamn cold. and the babes are more hippy-chick/granola types, which is also ok with me.
charles schulz, as i recall from the disappointing visit up to santa rosa, built a huge professional level ice rink there, due to his love for things icy: hockey, figure skating, snow-cones, and curling. well, maybe not curling. was there ever a peanuts cartoon where snoopy was a world-class curler? not that i recall. ask me again after i’m done reading every single peanuts released in ten years.
back to ice skating, i haven’t done that since i was a kid back in ann arbor. living in michigan, while you get a lot of snow, most of the exciting snow sports are oddly enough out of your reach. given that michigan is almost entirely flat, the skiing is pretty crappy. there’s one place to ski in lower michigan, mount brighton, which is this tiny lump of a hill where everyone goes to ski or learns to ski. which is what i did one winter and had a miserable time.
did i mention that mount brighton is actually made of landfill?
learning to ski on a pile of crap. literally.
what michigan is actually ideal for is cross-country skiing. lots of snow. lots of flatness. lots of wide open spaces. somehow, i never got around to it.
my winter sport was snowshoeing. or, as i like to call it, walking home from school. and without the snowshoes.
actually my big winter activity was sledding. we lived on golfside road, which was, uh, beside a golf course. on the north part of the road, there was a huge hill that was perhaps five stories high. and you really wanted to sled down that road, but you never could, since, well, you’d be afraid of getting run over. so instead, we climbed over the fence to the golf course, where the hill was even steeper and rougher, and had a frozen pond at the bottom.
because that’s the safer option.
that’s what you did as a kid. fear? you don’t have any fear! you’re going to live forever! if not, well, at least you heal easily. but hell, you didn’t even think of that. you’re out to have fun, man!
and that’s the difference between ice skating as a kid and as an adult.
as a kid, you’re out there having fun, barrelling around and all over the ice. if you fall down or plow into people, no big deal. you get up, and start barrelling around again. but as an adult, now you’re all cautious about falling. bruising things. breaking. you’re aware how much it hurts to break your tailbone, and even worse, how long it takes to heal from a broken tailbone.
i used to be pretty good. whipping around the ice with abandon, crossover turns, and hockey stops. hockey stops! and skating backwards, even. yesterday i realized that i couldn’t even conceive how to skate backwards.
it’s a wonder that we’re able to learn anything as adults. how did i manage to start snowboarding, with all this fear of breakage surrounding us? hey, it’s easy, right, just don’t fall!
whew, there’s the answer. duh.
or, at the very least, you can revel in being an adult. go home. drink some whiskey. buy a car. have sex.
fuck you, kids!
the masses speak, and so i listen.
really? xz wants to talk about basketball?
wonderous things happen when there are large articles in the sunday ny times. they make topics that are abhorrent to you suddenly interesting, and then you want to know more and more! but this is by and large how journalism works, right? otherwise, how would the common man be interested in topiary gardens, toyota fj45 land cruisers, or identifying different types of fish?
and thus we are brought to basketball.
or what’s wrong with basketball, according to the new york times:
The American men, in defeat, chose to focus on how much better the rest of the world’s players have become and how unfamiliar the U.S. players were with one another and the somewhat different style and rules of international basketball. The larger point, they would not face: after a month together and with the noted basketball teacher Larry Brown of the Detroit Pistons as their coach, they still played as strangers.
much of this was talked about in depth, especially around the olympics last year, notably after the u.s. team’s defeat to the hands of basketball powerhouse (hardly) puerto rico. and to a great extent, it’s all true. there’s no longer a lot of fundamentals being taught properly, and the streetball and-1 mixtape mentality does award flashy plays and thundering dunks over teamwork and good shooting.
as for the other points in the article, they all have some validity. the dunk is hurting the game, or rather the emphasis on the dunk. is it going away? no. the fans love it.
the three pointer is, oddly enough, also hurting the game because people take the three instead of the midrange. it’s that sort of high risk/reward mentality that gives risk analysis people a field day. yet despite the wild claims, if you actually run the statistics you’ll find there’s value to the shot. mark cuban, the owner of the dallas mavericks, has a blog where he posts findings on stuff like this, since he’s fanatical about his team, and also employs statisticians to look at this stuff. (man, i need to get that job!) from a recent post analyzing the three point shot, he looked at the difference in shooting percentages for teams who took the longer 3 point shot (23’9”) straight on versus ones that took the shorter 3 point shot (22’) out of the corners. startlingly, when you look at actual players, it turns out that even though the percentages are much lower than a dunk or a midrange shot, the higher point value can actually make it a better shot, percentage-wise:
Joe Johnson has made the most from the corner. He has hit 51 pct of his 112 attempts for an Effective FG (EFF FG) pct of 77.68 %! Cutino Mobley and Mike Miller both have EFF FG of greater than 80 pct from the corner. But they all pale compared to the Mayor in Minny. Freddy Hoiberg has taken 31 corner 3s, and hit 21 of them. Thats an EFF FG of greater than 100 pct ! Shaq for a dunk or the Mayor from the corner… The Mayor gets you more!
also of note, the nbdl, which is the nba’s developmental league designed to develop young talent and an effort to address the issue of too many players coming out too young, actually are in the midst of an experiment this year where there is no three point shot until the last five minutes of a game and in overtime. thus all shots are the same point value until crunch time. will this rule ever hit the nba? probably not. but will this help the players? only time will tell.
speaking of the three, my favorite player of all time, reggie miller, announced that he is retiring after this year. he’s the record holder for most three point shots made, currently with 2,508 and counting.
but more than that, i love reggie for being the man who can hit the big shots. the game winner in ‘98 over michael jordan. 25 points in the fourth quarter to win game five of the ‘94 eastern conference playoffs over the knicks. the amazing 39 foot three point shot to force overtime against the nets in ‘02.
and of course, the incredible eight points in the final 8.9 seconds to deliver a stunning 107-105 victory over the knicks in game one of the ‘95 eastern conference semifinals.
pretty amazing for a jump shooter. and even more amazing for a kid who had to wear braces on his legs growing up. and to think that he might not have been the most talented basketball player in his family.
now aren’t you sorry you brought up basketball?
i was at oracle today, and in the lobby of the 400 building they had flowers out for sale, just in case you forgot to get roses for your honey.
notably, the roses were being sold by some really hot chick wearing incredibly tight pants.
so what’s worse: you are so daft that you forgot to buy flowers and had to be reminded on valentine’s day, or that you were only reminded because there was a hot chick selling the flowers?
don’t look at me, i didn’t have to resort to such base tactics. i plan ahead.
dinner. at a real restaurant. that serves chocolate. in everything.
flowers, my ass.
i was going to have a post about how i was being tempted away from firefox to opera because it was just so much faster. faster like the flash is faster than, say, government.
it was going to be a big dilemma, because while the speed was intoxicating, it meant giving up all the cool firefox hacks, such as ad blocking and finally an official yahoo toolbar extension, so i can get at my bookmarks!
then it turned out that the tabbrowser extensions extension i was using was buggy and the culprit all along. i switched to tabbrowser preferences, and now it’s all peppy.
so much for dilemmas.
if you want, we can debate farm-raised salmon or buying on red-supporting amazon instead.
with hmc out of town, it’s up to me to bear the load and participate in family activities.
not my family, that is. my family consists of my mom and my dad, who are safely esconced in diamond bar and know good enough to leave me alone. i’ve got them trained, bless their heart, to expect nothing more than a phone call once every couple of weeks or so.
ah, but wait, i’m married now, right? so that means that hmc’s family is now also my family, so now my family includes parents who want to do stuff all the time. or as dooce would say, ALL THE TIME.
being a veteran of avoiding this type of responsibility, i usually follow a strict but simple methodology of evading these activities:
however, hmc, obviously not having been raised in an asian family, is still pitifully affected by guilt since she hasn’t been exposed to the real thing and built up a proper resistance. it’s like growing up in a cave all your life, as opposed to being reared near the equator on a mountain. she’s lacking guilt melanin.
thus whenever she’s in lost angels, a lot of her time is spent doing “family activities,” with parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.
“foolish, foolish!” i say. and this is the point where she gives me the stare, and that is the point where i shut up.
today, her parents called out of the blue, for some obvious activity. do i follow the method? or do i take the call, since hmc is still in new york, and i know that she’ll just feel guilty in absentia?
i take the bullet.
as it turns out, they just called to see if i wanted to see a movie at the sf indie film festival. besides, they movie they wanted to see was the one that i actually had picked out to see last week, and was planning to see until the whole thought of it fell out of my head.
fact of the matter is that the whole festival fell out of my head, and i forgot entirely that it was going on. i supposed this means that work really is keeping me busy nowadays. or it’s early onset alzheimer’s.
we went to see the screening of blueberry, which is perhaps described as a psychedelic western. loosely based on a comic by french master moebius, it mixes a western plot with shamanistic journeys. it’s certainly the most pro-iowasca western i’ve ever seen.
it does also have a companion film, other worlds, about amazon shamen, which kounen filmed while doing research for this film. the trippy parts are halfway between 2001: a space odyssey and unfortunately, lawnmower man, due to the cg-slithery things. although it didn’t look anywhere that bad, nor did it have jeff fahey or pierce brosnan in it.
what it did have was juliette lewis, who was 1. singing and 2. completely naked in different parts of the movie.
i’ll leave it to you to determine which one of those is good and bad.
i love the pistons’ rip hamilton, but, uh, what?
Detroit Pistons guard Richard Hamilton sports his hair styled after Goodyear’s TripleTred.
Some people model their hairstyles after celebrities. Detroit Pistons guard Richard Hamilton takes his cue from tires.
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., North America’s largest tire maker, paid Hamilton to wear his hair in the style of the tread pattern of the company’s Assurance TripleTred product.
Hamilton, who helped the Pistons win last season’s National Basketball Association championship, wore the hairstyle two days ago against the New York Knicks in Detroit and plans to keep it for about a week, company spokesman Ed Markey said Monday.
Neither Markey nor Josh Nochimson, Hamilton’s business manager, would say how much Hamilton was paid. The player also received free tires, Markey said.
…
Hamilton even displayed the hairstyle to U.S. President George W. Bush, who hosted the Pistons at the White House on Monday in honor of their championship.
i went down to san jose to play hooky today.
now i’m sure you’re thinking, “why go all the way down to san jose just to play hooky? if you have to drive for an hour just to play hooky, is it really worth it?” well, if you work at home, your home is your office. and by definition, you got to skip out of the office to play hooky. going into the other room to watch full metal alchemist or to take a nap just doesn’t really cut it. that’s just like any other day working at home, right?
besides, i had a good reason. i had free tickets to the SAP open in san jose, which is the only pro tennis tournament they hold in the bay area. (hmm, is this actually true? i think so. it’s certainly the only ATP event held up here, although truth be told, i’d rather see a WTA event. as everyone knows, i like the ladies.)
our company bought the tickets so us sales folks could invite customers out and treat them and ply them with cheap drinks and passable imitation of fast food, hopefully resulting in future sales and big big commission checks yee-haw! because that’s how sales works, in part. if you’re not getting this sort of treatment from your sales guys, you either need better sales guys, or you’re probably not going to get it ever, because they probably think you ain’t worth shit. sorry. try working for a big company with a huge spending budget. maybe then you’ll get the invites to nekkid playmate golf!
truth be told, as it turns out, people at oracle aren’t that interested in attending the SAP open. something about “damn competitors.” or maybe it’s the fact that it’s a tuesday afternoon. that’s probably the reason that nobody else could get a customer to go on this day, either, right?
but that makes it perfect for hooky!
first off, the seats are fantastic. front row. literally. i’m not kidding. when was the last time you were front row for anything? and for a sporting event? unheard of! punk rock kickball not withstanding. we were in the corner of the court, literally ten feet from the players.
there are only a few top name players at this event, like andy roddick or andre agassi. i didn’t get to see either of them, but did get to see a couple of recognizable names, like vince spadea and james blake. vince spadea ended 2004 with a career high ranking of 19. however, my friend pete pointed out that what he’s really known for is his record losing streak: he lost 21 matches in a row, back in 1999-2000. that’s at least 20 tournaments where you go there, show up, and doink! you’re out in the first round. next!
it also turns out that vince spadea is a jerk.
being that close, you can see little thing that goes on, including the interactions between the players and the ball boys. sure it looks fun on tv, and who hasn’t thought, “hey, i could chase those balls around! that would be a blast.” of course there’s that episode of seinfeld where kramer does exactly that.
let me tell you, being a ball boy sucks ass. big fat rude tennis player ass. not only do you have to chase around balls, which is actually not that big a deal, but you need to toss balls to the players as they get ready to serve. the only thing is, sometimes they want two, sometimes they want three, sometimes the guy who wants two now wants three. and meanwhile, there’s the balls that the running around ball boys grabbed from the last point that are flying in towards you that you’re trying to catch while tossing a ball to the guy who wants two or was it three?
and then there’s spadea, who’s all pissy because he dropped the first game and the first set, so he’s yelling “BALL!” because you’re not tossing them to him fast enough or in the exact right place.
imagine a reality show where your job is to comb donald trump’s hair every morning. and it’s windy. and all you have is a mitten.
on the other hand, james blake was really nice. he would say, “thanks” to the ball boys when they tossed him the balls, and he wouldn’t even swear, but would exclaim, “gosh!” or “gosh darn it!” seriously. i don’t want to be stereotypical, but unless he’s some crazy christian, then, uh, gosh darn it, i don’t know what his deal is.
maybe he needs more balls?
in any case, the tennis was great. it’s a trip to see it really close, just to get a sense of how incredibly far beyond any level you could possibly reach. and they’re not even the ones at the top of the tour.
as david foster wallace writes in his excellent and highly recommended (even if you’re not a tennis or sports fan) essay on tennis from a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again:
amen to that. it’s a shame that i don’t get the tickets for this weekend, when the semis and the finals are being played. that’s when the real customers are showing up.
but who needs to play hooky on saturday, anyway?
last week i was busy.
incredibly busy.
“doing what?” you ask.
i have no idea.
honestly, i really don’t know where the time went or what i was doing or why i felt so frantic and beat down and exhausted. only that i did. it was like the week before, where i was spending every waking hour studying, only that i wasn’t.
yet somehow i was busy, and didn’t have any time for anything but whatever i did.
when periods like that start happening, things start falling by the wayside. first posting blogs. then reading blogs. they start piling up, like huge piles of shit in your blog reader. you keep passing them by, and seeing them grow, and think, “damn, look at that huge pile of shit! i better do something about that before it gets unmanageable.” maybe you read a little bit of it, and it gets a little smaller, and it doesn’t smell so much.
but then it keeps growing and growing.
it’s like the litter box that you know you have to get around to changing. (oh, and did i mention the litter box needs changing?)
what else? reading newspapers. i take them in every day, maybe look at the sports section for about a minute, and then they pile up, unread. perhaps if i’m lucky, i’ll look at the arts section long enough for a front-page article to spoil the entire plot of million dollar baby for me. thanks, new york times! thank goodness hmc reads them, otherwise i’d turn into her mother, with piles and piles of newspapers from the last year waiting for me to catch up on them during some vacation, and exclaim, “terrorist attack? did you guys know that happened! governor schwarzenegger?”
do you know how bad it is? my dear friends, those who know me, who truely know me, will be shocked, horrified, and concerned by this next statement, so please brace yourselves.
i’ve been too busy to watch basketball.
yes, i know, the unthinkable. but even on tivo, i can’t seem to spare the hour of time to concentrate on a game. i keep getting up, doing this and that, thinking that there are all these pressing activities to do.
where is my mind?
i think that being married itself is turning out to be quite time consuming. it wasn’t so bad when we were living in separate cities, but now that she’s around, a lot of the time you had to yourself to finish up little things, or just fuss around with this or that is now taken up spent with your spouse, making sure that she’s ok, or just talking and being with her.
i told w this, and she said that being in non-married relationships is very time consuming as well.
i replied, “you have no idea.”
there’s just something different, somehow. maybe because it means more. maybe because she’s the love of your life, so nothing else matters. maybe because you can’t decide not to and go away and go home and be alone.
again, it’s certainly not a complaint, but regardless, i’m exhausted all the time.
i told this to rae at dirt lounge, and she said the same thing was happening to her as well (except for the being married part). after coming home from work, and then eating, and then you want us to go out to do what? are you kidding? maybe we’re just old and don’t have that extra energy like we used to.
personally, i think it’s that constant eating.
three times a day every day is a lot of work.
that’s lots of valuable basketball time right there.
hmc’s off in new york for a week and a half, visiting jo to help her deal with her new wedding anxieties, since she got engaged late last year.
although i’m not sure that hmc really is the best person for this, as i think she herself still has wedding anxieties. the one thing in her favor is that since we got married over a year ago, there’s no actual wedding to fear any more. or maybe she’s the perfect one because of it: if a worrier like hmc can overcome the fear and get married (forcibly, with the help of her friends who planned the whole thing for us), then certainly jo can overcome the fear as well.
speaking of fear, if you ever feared changing your cell phone service, i can now vouch for you that it’s a rational and justified fear.
i just went through the process of switching my cell phone from att to cingular, and it was the most incredibly painful process i’ve ever experienced. maybe since the time i got my wisdom teeth pulld. or the last time i tried to change my cell phone service.
granted, i was doing something pretty complicated, pulling my service off of our corporate account, switching it to individual fiscal responsibility, migrating it from att to cingular, switching to gsm, and then pairing it to hmc’s personal cell phone as well. i wasn’t expecting it to be easy as pie. but hard as fruitcake? urgh. try spending at least a half an hour a day for over a week with them. try not being able to activate the new phone for three days. and then having it activated, yet having your call still go to your old phone for another three days, thus requiring you to carry around two phones. and the try spending an hour and a half on the last day, only to tell you that they need to submit a service ticket about it, and they’ll hopefully fix it tomorrow.
it’s finally working now, but it’s been a long time coming.
honestly, i don’t think this is actually anything wrong with cingular per se, but just the fucked up cell situation i ended up in.
however, it was easier when i just lost my cell on the slopes of northstar.
because at least then i was snowboarding.
j’s right: i forgot all about seth! well, that’s not exactly true. i kept looking out for snowboarder x, but never saw it on tv. it turns out that it was held on the first day of the winter x games, which is the same day i forgot that it was even happening.
but thanks to expn, we get the results:
Xavier de le Rue (orange bib), Seth Wescott (gray) and Nate Holland (green) get a whiff of airtime during the men’s final. De le Rue floated to the gold medal.
In the final, Xavier de le Rue and Seth Wescott dueled to the end in a winner-take-gold final. Nate Holland contended early, but he crashed out attempting a move midway down the 2,400-foot course. At the front, de le Rue and Wescott pushed to the finish, never more than a board-length apart. De le Rue carved the course perfectly, blocking Wescott at each turn and crossed the finish line with five feet to spare. The silver was Wescott’s fifth X Games medal since 1998, though he has yet to round out his collection with a gold. De le Rue, who broke his collarbone just six weeks ago, won gold in UltraCross in 2003, but this was his first Boarder X medal.
Seth Wescott spent his downtime on the top of the mountain in seclusion, visualizing his runs and listening to his iPod. When asked what song he listened to before the final, he took a long pause … “You know what? I don’t know,” he said. “I put together a mix for the World Championships last week and that’s what I kept for the X Games. It was definitely something by Rage Against the Machine.”