Another family crisis (getting good at this).

Just when things seemed to be getting back to normal, it's another trip to the hospital. My dad called me from work Friday afternoon with severe abdominal pain. He's still trying to recover from Miller-Fisher syndrome, an incredibly rare neurological disease that almost killed him last October, so I had no idea what to think, I just dropped everything and drove to midtown.

Wheeled him in an office chair to the car, because he couldn't stand, and drove to the ER. Turns out he had an "incarcerated inguinal hernia." Rushed to emergency surgery. Lots of doom-and-gloom, worst case information from the surgeon. Imminent-death sort of talk. Scariest two hours of my life. Then he came out of surgery with a best-possible outcome. The next morning he was cleared to go home. My personal life expectancy dropped one month due to stress.

The Lovely Jenny went above and beyond this weekend. She was there for my dad, and she was there for me. Genuinely my personal hero. In less than a year, I've dealt with my mother having multiple surgeries, including a double-mastectomy and the complications that arose from that, my dad being ambushed by Miller-Fisher and almost dying from it, and now this severe hernia. Jenny has helped me and my parents through it all. And meanwhile, her own aunt died of cancer and both her grandparents have been hospitalized, for a stroke in one case. She is officially the best person who ever lived.

Opposites attract.

Tonight Jenny came home from school all wound up, for some reason, like a Jack Russell on speed. I'm trying to wind down. As she was (rapidly) talking, I leaned back in my chair and started this song:

She paused, and said, "We're like complete opposites right now."

Can't really argue with that, but I wouldn't change it for the world.

I'm in pain.

Like the title says, I'm in pain. My teeth hurt, and I can't do anything about it. It's actually pretty bad. Painkillers are running through my system, as are about eight beers, so I can only imagine how bad the pain really is. It's a combination of wisdom teeth that should have been pulled ten years ago and just plain old broken, rotting teeth. It happens to all of us, but most of us, these days, have either extra income or dental insurance to take care of this kind of thing. I don't. In Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut asked, "What chain of events in evolution should we thank for our mouthfuls of rotting crockery"?

It's a good question. Our mouths just don't work properly, do they? Even with all our knowledge of tooth care and modern dentistry, orthodontics, periodontics, and other -dontics that I'm not aware of, we all end up toothless, eventually. Our teeth are evolutionary casualties of all the other stuff we upright bipedal primates got right. We have binocular vision, we have opposable thumbs, we can walk upright for, well, our whole lives, we can reason and empathize and invent civilization (and, eventually, Civilization, the digital simulation of civilization). But we're stuck with teeth that fall, inevitably, inexorably, into a painful fucking mouthful of rotting crockery.

I only read Galapagos once, when I was on a Vonnegut bender a few years ago, and I barely remember the book. But that one phrase, "rotting crockery," lodged itself into my head. It's just the perfect description, isn't it? It floats back into my consciousness whenever my teeth start hurting again, which is fairly often.

Look, I'm no martyr. I want to get 'em fixed, but I don't have the means. The extra money we just don't have, we're paycheck-to-paycheck around here. We have insurance at work, but it's a group plan. We needed one more person for it, for at least a little coverage. $1,000 per year for something like $20 per 90 days. But my retard roommate Richard (who I work with and is in fact the way I found out about the job in the first place two years ago and I don't know to this day if I should be grateful or burn him in effigy for putting me at that place) didn't want to pay it, because he gets his own dental work done at a local fucking dental college for a bargain. And then he wants to gripe -- endlessly and repeatedly -- about how awful they are and how long it takes.

This is my life.

So I'm sitting here unable to sleep on Thanksgiving night because my teeth feel like they're trying to wrench themselves free of my skull to do, I don't know what, put on a musical production about making me miserable and unable to enjoy my turkey (had no problem with dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, or green bean casserole) or something equally fucking stupid.

I'm going to watch another episode of Dexter and try to ignore the pain for another hour. Then I'll watch another one. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Please give thanks for all your loved ones and whatnot, and be thankful your rotting crockery has a professional looking after it. I wish mine did.

Perspective.

This is an image I saw years ago, and it always stuck with me. It's been making the rounds online lately, and I wanted to post the original shot, along with the one with Carl Sagan's thoughts.

As I remember the story, Voyager 1 was leaving the solar system, and Sagan wanted to have it turned around for a parting shot of earth. Most of the people in charge of its operation were more interested in what lay ahead, but eventually they acquiesced. It took this picture:

There's a tiny dot in the right-most band of sunlight refracted into Voyager's lens, and it's earth. Our planet. The place where every human who has ever lived was born and died. Where all of our revolutions, spiritual movements, and scientific breakthroughs occurred. On that single pixel. Carl says it better:

Don't read this.

Seriously, it's not worth the time. I'm up late for no reason. I'm wide awake and I don't know why. My face hurts. That's probably it. I couldn't get over this cold because I had to work. Three days doing manual labor in the sun is bad for you when you're trying to get rid of a head cold. I just found this out.

My new phone, it turns out, is a great MP3 player, but I can't put music on it yet, and even if I could, I couldn't listen to it. At work, I'm constantly having to decide what to do and take responsibility for everything, even though I've been at it for 11 months and I work with a guy approaching his eighth year. In almost all of my games I've gotten to the most irritating part and have stopped playing. I have this blog, but I never have anything to say. I take care of all the bills in my household, but I'm terrible with money. My fiancée is getting frustrated with me being tired all the time, and I'm too tired to begin to approach how to think about what I should consider doing about it.

This is turning into a world-class rant. I like it. There, I have something to write about on this blog, that's one problem solved. Now I just have to figure out how to replace all the major appliances in this house, and how to collate that decision with the one that will determine whether there's any point in doing so in the first place. I also have to figure out what the fuck I'm going to do about my truck. I have to replace it, but I can't. I can't even trade it in, because it doesn't really belong to me, and only one third of it even belongs to the person it actually belongs to (mostly). Do you see why I have a headache?

No, that's the head cold. And also all of the above. Mostly the head cold though.

Probably.

It's nearly 2:30 in the morning, so I might as well make myself go to bed, even if my insomnia is telling me it's pointless. Jenny is up there, and that will help. The only thing I can rely on with all this bullshit I don't know how to fix is that I love her, and she makes me feel at ease. Even when she's asleep.

At last, I am home.

So yeah, haven't posted in, what, three months? See, it really wasn't my fault. I went on a backpacking trip to the Ukraine in June, and somewhere outside Odessa I got lost. Damnedest thing. Spent two months living off the land, Survivorman-style; you know, trapping game, building shelters out of twigs and leaves, etc. Figured out how to start a fire using only some copper wires I pulled from my cell phone, a flint, and kindling. In retrospect, I should probably have just used the phone to call for help; I had a decent signal. Live and learn, I guess.

Eventually some hikers found me, but they were lost, too. Long story short, I had to eat them.

Afterwards I found a stray bear cub, his mother had been shot by poachers. I raised him and he helped me hunt and defend my makeshift shelters from predators. After we hunted down the scoundrals who shot his mother and exacted revenge (we killed their mothers), I turned him loose into the wild. I won't lie, I cried: a single, manly tear ran down my cheek as I watched him follow is kindred into the woods.

Finally, I decided that enough was enough, tore down my most recent shelter, and started the long, torturous hike out of the Ukrainian wilds. I headed due north until I found a road. Determined to follow that road until I reached civilization, I stopped only every two or three days to build a fire with what was left of my cell phone and sleep for a few hours. After several weeks I finally found what I'd been hoping for all these months: people! Unfortunately, it was only a small mining outpost, with minimal contact with the outside world.

Anyway, I ate them.

So I continued my trek along that deserted road until finally, after what seemed like eons, I found myself back home, here in Memphis. I have no idea how I got from eastern Europe to Tennessee, but one of these days I'll Google Map it.

So anyway, I've moved into the Raleigh house with Jenny, I have a full-time job servicing forklift batteries, and things are going pretty well. The end.

No, I'm not boycotting Blogger.

I'm just lazy.

71 days since my last post, pretty sure that's a record. I won't go into why it's been so long, because... Actually, I will. It's because I'm lazy and nobody reads this anyway. So there you go.

Got up obscenely early again today. Don't know why, I just woke up. Worked around the house and then spent the afternoon burning gas around north Memphis trying to get someone to fucking hire me, already. No dice so far. At this point it's moved past irritation to the point of surrealism. I've had around a dozen jobs in my life, so it's not like I don't know how to get one. Maybe the job market is just that bad in Memphis now, maybe it's businesses scared off by my over-qualification, maybe it's my brand of shampoo, I honestly have no idea. I can learn to do any job in a day, I'm experienced, (semi) mature, and I'm willing to work any hours for any pay, because I just need the goddamned cash. But I can't get hired. What the fuck is going on?

Whatever. Here's some trivial nonsense. My new favorite basketball site is Basketbawful, because those guys ignore the mainstream media story lines and aim squarely at the balls. Metaphorically. Because groin-shots are funny (have you even seen America's Funniest Home Videos?). Because I'm a homer, 3 Shades of Blue is now in the 2-slot, ahead of TrueHoop. The ESPN and SI NBA pages have dropped completely off my radar (and RSS subscriptions).

Just ran out to get milk and smokes (two great tastes that taste great together). Where was I? Oh, right. Rambling. Here's something funny:



See? Robert Downey Jr. is the funniest comedic actor this side of Tina Fey. I'm looking forward to Tropic Thunder, if only because it points out, completely obliquely, how badly named Island Thunder was, the second expansion to the original Ghost Recon. It was super kick-ass (and really, really hard), but "Island Thunder"? Really?

I'll end with the news that my one and only Jenny has carved out her own spot here on Blogger after getting fed up with technical problems with LiveJournal's editor. You should read it, and by "you" I mean "Jenny" because you're probably the only one reading this, baby. Love you!

All slack, all the time.

But you don't care.

So yeah, haven't posted in a selfishly long time. After the usual spiel of schoolwork, Real Life, etc., I got sick. Horribly, evilly sick. Some ungodly combination of strep and flu. My one and only Jenny caught it taking care of me, so now I'm at the Raleigh house for a few days taking care of her and hoping/guessing I have leftover antibodies that will keep me from getting it again.

Been playing some games lately, mostly Quake III with Jen. That girl has got some deeply buried bloodlust or something, I've never seen someone so unused to shooters take to a game like this before. "Don't shoot Lucy, that fucking cunt is MINE." That sort of thing. Fucking awesome. Also playing Psychonauts after finding a rare retail copy for 6 bucks at Big Lots. God, what a great game, though Yahtzee wasn't kidding about the crazy-ass difficulty curve. I'm at the very end, and a sudden onslaught of jumping puzzles is making me want to start over from the beginning to have some actual fun again.

There's more to tell, but I really need to get to bed. Jenny takes some looking after when she's sick, and I can't do it passed out.

Life should have a fast-forward button.

Seriously, someone get on that.

Not a huge amount to report right now. Things are changing for me, but slowly. I'm in the opening stages of writing a new, much better chapter of my life, but it's taking time. I'm looking for work, getting ready for a move, and cutting back on school to accommodate. Reconnecting with the love of my life has changed everything; I have a new purpose now, and something phenomenal to look forward to. Even now while things are still in flux I'm happier than I can ever remember being.

For now I'm just plugging along in my client-side JavaScript and basic networking courses and trying to find a job. Filling the gaps by spending every possible minute with Jen and practicing bass when I can't be with her. She's tuned me into some amazing bands I might not have found otherwise, like The Radio Dept, The Libertines, Damien Rice, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. My secondary hard drive is rapidly filling up with new music and videos.

I'm also still trying to help with FABA! in the limited ways I'm able. I'll be designing a flier for the resurrected FABA! Bash soon, and have finally gotten hold of a copy of Photoshop 7 to help with that. I realized not long ago that there's only so much I can do with Paint.NET and GIMP, and I think I've hit that ceiling. Simple things like the transform tools I took for granted just don't seem to exist in those apps, and I'm tired of jumping through hoops to do shit that Photoshop makes easy. Now I just need Illustrator and Dreamweaver...

Turning point.

My life, reloaded.
by AC - permalink

So in the last week, my entire life has been turned upside down. Ok, that's a little dramatic. Let's say I've found new meaning, after finding a long lost love, and I've never been so hopeful that things are going to be very good soon. Not right away, and there's some hard work ahead of us, but I'm up for it. In fact I can't wait. It's too soon to go into details, but I'm happy. Anxious, nervous, but happy. Look for a massive post on this soon, which nobody will read.

Seems like everyone I know is sick, so I'm sort of hiding out in my bedroom today. Watching a live stream of the Griz game (via Channelsurfing.net), babbling on IM, etc. God the Griz are down 20 in the 4th. This is ridiculous. They've already beaten Houston this year, and they don't even have McGrady tonight. The defense is nonexistent, and there's still no explanation for it. They're making Scola look like a fucking All Star, and they shut him down completely in the first game. Warrick and Stoudamire need to be traded now, they're killing the offensive flow. Bah. Whatever.

So the Christmas season came and went, it was marginally less annoying than usual. In fact Christmas day itself, despite a grating, endless family get-together, was the best I've had in years uncounted, thanks to Jen. I get the feeling a lot of posts are going to be ending like that soon.

UPDATE, 1AM: Forgot to mention, I haven't updated in a while because this blog was flagged by a Blogger robot as being a potential spam blog, locking me out. It took a week for it to be cleared again. WTF is that about? And why is it impossible to contact Blogger directly by email? Look into it, they have no contact information anywhere. All you can do is post to the Blogger support Google group and hope someone answers. That sucks, Blogger-owning Google overlords. Fix it.

It's crunch time, whatever that means.

That was quick...
by AC - permalink

The end of the semester is suddenly here. I managed to get caught up in all but one of my classes, somehow. I still have labs due next week in PERL and HTML, as well as a test each, and my final HTML project, but at least I'm not behind anymore after last night's marathon coding session (thanks, Mountain Dew and cheap beer). I'm done, for all intents and purposes, with my 1001 Office class. The only thing left to turn in is PowerPoint tutorials 1 and 2, and I did them this afternoon. I won't even mention that geo class. I may be kinda screwed there, but it's my own fault. I got too behind while working on my short film.

Annie did manage to submit our tapes on Monday, and I owe her for that as she and CMB were evidently editing her short until 4am that morning. It's a good thing I got in, as I've been handing out copies of a flier to my friends at school that Monica threw together in class yesterday. I have a revised version I'm going to get approved for posting around campus tomorrow. We want as many people as possible to come out to the fest on the 15th.

My mobile playlist in the car and at school lately has condensed to Deftones, Flyleaf, Portishead, and Violent Femmes. At home I'm still looping my .flv library of cool bass songs. More school work has meant less TV and more music as I'm spending hour after hour in front of my PC. All I've really made time for is Heroes (which is over now) and Grizzlies games, which are bittersweet most of the time. I've been breaking from work to play bass and write email, and occasionally to eat. Haven't had time for much else. I guess this is what the next three semesters will be like.

Finally managed to speak in person to my new advisor today, he seems like a nice enough guy. He's actually involved in planning courses for the Web tech major, so he should be exactly the guy I need. Have a meeting with him Thursday at 4, so by the end of the week I should know what kind of course load I'll have in the Spring. Trying to balance it with what I'd like to do in the local film scene will be the tricky part. Turns out a local director/musician, who I randomly bumped into twice in the last week, lives like three blocks from me. Hopefully some opportunities will open up for me there. We'll see.

Finding something meaningful.

Bail out now, because this post is just for me.
by AC - permalink

The word "busy" cannot even begin to approach how complicated things have gotten lately. But I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way. First, of course, we have school. The semester is winding down, and my workload on that front has jumped up considerably. While I've managed to stay ahead of things in my HTML class despite a pretty imposing workload, I'm barely keeping up with my programming. Each lab assignment is built upon the last, which was built upon the last, etc. That means each of the three to four programs in every lab incorporates everything from each previous lab's programs. Things are getting complicated here, and I'm working my ass off to maintain the A average I promised myself I would have in my second stab at college.

But the real reason I've been so busy is the short film I'm making. I'm directing a short I wrote for Live From Memphis' eighth quarterly Lil' Film Fest. It's been a tremendous amount of work, but I don't think I've ever worked so hard at something so satisfying. Everyone in the Memphis indie film scene who has been helping me has been fantastic, as have my friends who have also never done this before. My friend Monica encouraged me to make this after reading my first draft, which I basically threw together on a whim out of sheer boredom, and before I knew it, she had contacted some great people who are volunteering to act in it, edit it, and just generally hold my hand as I try to do something I've never even considered attempting before.

To add to the stress, shooting was pushed back to next Saturday, just two days before it has to be submitted to be eligible for the festival on December 15. With so much going on, I feel like I'm on the clock 24 hours a day, unpaid, as I'm continually fielding questions about the film from those involved and perfecting the script and schedule, all while trying to take care of my house and my dogs, who are getting needier every day because of my long absences, and trying to maintain my insane grades in school.

Going back to school, I'm sort of in uncharted territory here. I'd never been more than a C+/B- student before, at least outside of standardized testing, and I'm averaging high-A's in everything now. This was my goal when I decided to go back to school, but realistically, I didn't think I could pull it off. Now I'm trying to maintain it, and the pressure is building. On top of that, I'm putting more into my music (playing bass guitar) than I ever have before. I still can't explain it, but I've never been better, and I'm determined to build on it. So I'm forcing myself to find at least an hour every day to practice. All manner of songs and genres, in multiple keys and styles. If I didn't enjoy it so much, I wouldn't be working so hard.

But all this is wreaking havoc on me physically. My insomnia is worse than ever, despite how tired I am. I'm also losing weight, which is not a great thing, as I've always struggled with gaining weight, and right now I'm 6'2" and barely reaching 160. My appetite is virtually nil, I have to force myself to eat. I'm intentionally eating healthier food, and I started working out again daily two months ago, but I think all that's doing is decreasing what little fat reserves I have while building a little muscle mass, which my abnormally high metabolism immediately starts consuming. If I had the resources, I'd consult a nutritionist, but I don't even have a fucking GP.

Still and all, I think I'm getting to a really good place. I'm done playing catch-up to my younger days, when I was first on my own, going to college, and things were still on the upswing. Trying to get back to that point -- over a decade ago now -- was a fucking pipe dream, and I held onto it for far too long. I'm hitting a new plateau now, doing things both personally and professionally that I didn't know I ever could. I have a great new friend with a beautiful little daughter, and this afternoon she handed me a painting she made, and said it was just for me. I have no idea what the hell it's supposed to be, but it's one of the most beautiful gifts I've ever been given. That's the kind of purity, artistically and personally, that I'm trying to reach now. I don't care if it's with music, or film, or web design, or just being a good person. For the record, I put it on my refrigerator.

A while ago, Monica said to me, just in passing, referring to another conversation she'd had, that we're just into our thirties, and that's not old; we're entering the prime of our lives. When she said that, everything went blurry for a moment as I realized I'd just heard something very important, and I needed to figure out why. No one had ever said that to me before. And she was right. Now is the time to make the most of life, because this is when the really good shit starts to happen. I'm grabbing every new opportunity that comes along now, because I'm tired of playing conservatively. I feel like I have the tools to do anything now, and if I fail, fine. It's a feeling I haven't had since I was as little kid, and the implications of suddenly finding my potential again at 31 are so profound that I'm sort of still processing it. The only thing I know for sure is that I'm, if not entirely happy, at least hopeful again, and that's not a feeling that you can fool yourself into believing in.

Changes coming. Maybe.

Also, I'm really busy.
by AC - permalink

I'd apologize for the lack of updates, but nobody reads this anyway. I'm thinking hard about archiving a number of posts and relaunching the blog with a new, ground-up redesign. I'm kickin' ass and takin' names (yes, literally) in my HTML course, and I think it's giving me an undeserved confidence in all things Web. My average is currently something like 99.6, and that's only because I keep passing on simple extra credit opportunities. The overall average from all four courses I'm taking is in the 97-98 range, but it's only because I'm doing virtually nothing else but schoolwork.

Real Life (read: having a life) is also eating up my free time, but in a good way. Saturday night I went with my friend Monica to the Memphis MeDiA Co-op to see the premier of a local indie film called omg/HaHaHa that she and her daughter had bit parts in. The film was fucking unbelievable. Director Morgan Fox, who's a really sweet guy, btw, addressed the unexpectedly large crowd before it started, and extended an open invitation to play Pac-Man on the big screen before the event started. Don't even try to rank that on the Midtown-o-meter, it'll just break. The movie itself was indescribable, so I won't try to describe it. But it was touching, and sad, and hilarious, and real, and thoughtful, and joyous, and beautiful, and experimental in any number of ingenious ways. He's working on getting a limited run at the Studio on the Square, and I can't wait to see it again (and again, and again...).

An extended trailer, more of a mini-cut, really, of Morgan's new documentary, This is What Love in Action Looks Like, ran before omg, and unbelievably, it looks even better. The trailer alone choked me up, it's just (and I'm going to do this again, but shorter) illuminating, and uplifting, and heartbreaking, and will definitely demand attention, just as omg will when it hits the festivals. More of Morgan's films and those he supports can be found at the sawed-off collaboratory pictures MySpace page.

To make the weekend even more surreal, I was back in Cooper-Young the very next afternoon to visit my grandma with my dad. Prowling exactly the same streets just hours after watching such a moving film all about the dynamic between parents and children for such a reason was... interesting, to say the least. I think I'm still processing it.

This seems weird and wrong, but I'm going to go ahead and move on to basketball now (that was my half-assed segue, and I'm not apologizing for it). The Grizzlies had a ridiculous night against the Rockets this evening. Darko went off (20 and 6), Lowry out-rebounded Yao, and Pau stepped up and clinched it with four straight freebies in the final minute. Miller had another solid all-around game after his slow start, and Rudy is proving to me that he's determined to bring something really special to the floor every night this season. His game is improved in every possible facet over last year, and his confidence is off the charts. This kid could be really, really good. My 6pm class ran long, so I missed most of the first half, but it was still a great way to wrap up a long, exhausting day.