Outside The Party

More and more often these days I'm noticing that in crowd situations -- parties or loud restaurants or public spaces -- I can only hear about half of what anyone is saying. It feels a little bit like being a foreign exchange student with a limited vocabulary: I can usually get the gist of the conversation by backtracking from the words I do catch and filling in the blanks, or by waiting for someone to say something that'll fill in whatever context I missed. But it makes it really difficult to participate in the conversation, as opposed to just sitting there watching it: by the time I've figured out what people are talking about, they've moved on to the next subject and I'm lost again. Someone'll make a joke and I'm just sitting there with a blank look on my face while I try to figure out what it was.

We also have lots of conversations at home which go like this:

A: [statement]
B: What?
A: [statement]
[pause]
B: What?
A: [STATEMENT!]
B: response
A: What?
B: [RESPONSE!]

...and so on. I always wrote that off to the fact that we're both kind of low talkers, but I'm starting to wonder if there isn't more to it than that.

I have an audiogram from a few years ago which shows "mild loss (30dB at 500Hz, 40dB at 1000Hz) bilaterally" -- which, conveniently, seems to be smack in the middle of the pitch range for human speech -- so I know this isn't all in my head. Well, strictly speaking it literally is in my head, I guess. But at the time the doctor sort of laughed it off, made some joke about spouses never listening to each other anyway, so I figured it wasn't enough loss to be concerned about.

I guess this whole post is boiling down to: Hey, bayleaf, whaddya think? Is it hearing aid time? Or would that just make the crowd noise louder instead of helping me understand the conversation?

Tonight's snow is optimized for volume.

Fun little toy, this.

Haiku2 for outsidetheparty
have to fall backwards and trust someone to let go for a little more
@ aboutmylife.netadvogato.orgblogger.comblogs.gnome.orgblogspot.comdeadjournal.comgreatestjournal.cominsanejournal.comlivejournal.commyspace.comspaces.msn.com
Created by Grahame

Another (somewhat less dignified) one it gave me was

i could accept this
ritual i just finished
but it's still too wet

Or, better: (why, yes, I am reloading it over and over and over, why do you ask?)

in between they had
to help her stand afterwards
her legs were shaking

Can't hope to compare to stealthmuffin's haiku, of course.

Silly meme (aren't they all?) borrowed from bsdinobaby:
Follow these easy steps:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Here's mine, which I actually want to listen to now:


(There ought to be a step 4 that randomizes the font selection, so we graphic designer types can't obsess over picking just the right font...)

Up until last night, one of the things I found pleasing about the Berkshires is that I felt comfortable leaving my car unlocked.

Not gonna do that anymore.

What's even worse is that it's possible I even saw who lifted my ipod (it wasn't out in plain sight, I'm not *that* dumb; it was in a little closed compartment between the seats, but yes officer the door was unlocked so really it's my fault in the end) -- I'd parked in front of NBCA for my drum class, and we could see a bunch of skaters out there in the lot at one point, zooming around; they even made some passes by the window, looking in perhaps to see which one of us was dumb enough to leave a newish ipod in an unlocked car. I don't want to be the kind of grumpy old guy who distrusts skaters, because Skateboarding Is Not A Crime™ and so on, but now I'm always going to have that nagging little bit of resentment when I see them (even though it might be purely coincidental that I happened to see them out there, of course). And I'm going to lock my car.

Sigh. This is how young liberals turn into old republicans, I think. Enough little incidents like this, build up lots of little fears and resentments and prejudices, justifiable or not, and before long you're installing security systems in your house and buying a gun for "protection" and supporting ideas like youth curfews and border fences and strip-searches in airports.

I woke up this morning filled with energy -- which is to say, I woke up groggy and discombobulated as ever, but my morning coffee was unusually effective -- so decided to tackle a backlog of emails and other miscellaneous work stuff I'd let pile up, before starting work in earnest.

I just finished, but it's now 3:10 PM, and I have a call coming in in twenty minutes, and I forgot to have lunch. Or breakfast, unless you count a banana as breakfast. So so much for working in earnest today. Or at all.

The good news is that I now have two new potential jobs lined up (one with an old friend I've worked with a lot in the past, so I know that'll be good. The other another with a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who I don't know anything about, other than that he's starting a new website and needs a designer, and somebody I trust says he has funding, so it's all good. And get this! It's a social networking website! Hooray! (Seriously, what the hell is up with all these social network startups lately? Don't they realize that market filled itself way past capacity three years ago?) He asked me to sign an incredibly overzealous non-compete agreement and NDA and so forth, so I'm pretty sure this is his first startup -- the beginners always hire too many lawyers and think their brilliant idea will be stolen by everyone they talk to. The jaded cynics know that the brilliant idea is the easy part; the implementation is what's important. Dunno. May not take this job; I'll wait to see what he's like in person.

Meanwhile, it's an absolutely gorgeous indian-summer day which if I'd known I wasn't going to get any work done anyway I'd have spent more of outside. Frank and I took a nice walk down to the mailbox, nice sunlight in the yellow leaves, then I gleefully entered every one of the stack of catalogs in it into this website which promises that they'll stop people sending me those catalogs. Hooray for saving trees. I've been doing it for less than a week now and already have fifty or so catalogs entered... very satisfying (if it actually works.) I can't think of how many trees have died so that we could have the privilege of throwing away two copies of the Pottery Barn catalog every three weeks. (Also, it's a well-designed ajax website, which I plan to use as an example to show clients the Right Way To Do Things.)

Hmm, he's late. I hate waiting for scheduled calls. Never know what to do with myself in the meantime.

Work progresses on the house; the hammering and sawblades are very distracting, but it's looking good. I think it'll look a lot more like it was meant to be part of the house than the original sunroom did, and it does fun things to the roofline. I've been taking daily photos while the carpenter is on his lunch break, see if we can't get some nice timelapse action going.

Okay, call just came in. Interesting. I think he may actually have an idea worth building. How unusual. I'll have to try talking him out of describing it as 'social networking,' though, because it isn't. As it turns out, I can't do what he called to ask for, but I might be able to do what he didn't know he needed later on. Funny how often that happens. And I was able to recommend some friends to him who maybe *can* do what he called for, which is always nice.

(And while I was on the call, yet another friend emailed about *another* job. This always happens. Nothing new for months, I start to think it's all over, time to pack it in, then everything happens in one afternoon. Explain that.)

And now it's the end of the day, time to go on to drum class, and I definitely did not get any work done at all, unless you count that sort of networking as work. Which it probably is, it's necessary to get the work after all, but it doesn't pay and isn't satisfying like real work. Oh well.

And now it's time to venture forth and leave the house for the first time in, um.... rather a large number of days, as it happens. Tempting to keep this open and keep the running commentary going when I get back, but that way lies madness. Or an infinitely long post which never gets posted. Which is much the same thing. I have still not had lunch. Or breakfast. Just that banana and the coffee. One of these days my body will stop allowing me to do this to myself. I'll grab something after drum class.

And now it's the middle of the night, because class ran late, and then enough dancers showed up so there was a dance class too, which is unusual, and then I came home and spent a couple hours answering even more emails. And then behind them I see this form still here, unposted, because I apparently forgot to click the button. So now I will click the button. Hello. How are you?

Once again with the your-party-will-be-more-successful-if-you-remember-to-invite-people-to-it:

Halloween. I'm thinking the weekend after, both because of squirrelhaven's out-of-townness and because it maximizes the chance of our house not still having a big hole in it.

More formal invitations will be forthcoming; this is mostly an availability check:  are you all free on November three?   Or would november two be better for you?

(As for the event itself: we were batting around several ideas, andsylvantechie made a suggestion which has been growing on me:  let's play Assumption.   Which if you don't know what that is, it's sort of like poker, but with creepy undertones.  It's also possible I'll build a labyrinth of some sort because I've been thinking that might be fun; if anyone's interested in helping with the design or the construction or both, let me know.)

[ETA:  if the idea of a card game fills you with meh, please don't let that dissuade you from coming; the intent is for it to be a thing that happens during the party, not the thing that is the party.]

( Well, everyone else was doing it. )

So it turns out I should do something with computers. Or art. Preferably both. Shocking!

Not too subtle, this quiz, though: "How would you like a career which involves being interested in sales?" Hm. Wonder what kind of careers will be recommended if I answer yes to that?

I remember back in high school, playing with what must have been an early version of this same sort of thing: budding little computer nerd that I was, I started reverse-engineering it, trying out different responses to see how they'd affect the results.

I don't remember what careers it actually did suggest for me, but I do recall that no matter what your input, one of the high-ranked suggested career paths was always "warehouse manager." There must have been a shortage of warehouse managers that year.

I'm having a hard time switching back to real life. I've been vaguely out of sorts and groggy ever since I got back... sleeping weird hours -- which for me means I'm waking up at 8 or 9 in the morning, in bed before midnight, usually a nap or at least a long hazy period of uselessness in the afternoon. (Ok, when I write it out like that it doesn't sound all that weird, it's perfectly normal, but trust me: for me, those are some strange-ass hours.)

I keep catching myself in this cycle:
"I am bored" -> "Well, you could do X, or Y, or Z" -> "Those all feel like work, I'm too tired and can't think straight" -> "Ok, so don't do those then" -> "I am bored"

...which is a bit of a problem, because there really is a lot of work I ought to be doing, both of the paid and unpaid varieties. And I know inactivity just makes me even more groggy and useless, and having a backlog of work piled up makes me more reluctant to tackle it -- this whole thing is self-reinforcing about six different ways.

I drove two hours Saturday night to Grafton, for a drum circle that's apparently held every month out there. (It turns out this stuff is going on all the time; all you need to do is find the right mailing lists.) I got as far as the front door, could hear the drummers already started inside, and was suddenly filled with the unexpected certainty: no, this isn't where I want to be right now. So I went back to my car and drove back home.

Which was actually kind of okay: it was turning dusky, that magic-hour light that can make even semi-industrial feeder roads beautiful. I started out by getting on the turnpike going the wrong direction, which was annoying until I remembered it's not like I'm in a hurry or anything. So I just sort of drove around aimlessly through little towns in central MA for a while while it got dark, and then went home. Got there just in time to almost run over squirrelhaven, who had just gotten home herself moments before, and was standing in the driveway looking up at the stars.

I just got back from spiritfire. It was nothing like what I expected, and exactly what I needed.

More later, after I've had some sleep.