Another weird thing is how wellness and power can be bought but these coins aren’t good for transportation. We can build lifts with invisible pulleys, but have no decent subways? Just keep moving, I guess.

Really though, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to go through these lives of mine. If I stop to catch my breath I’m pushed along until death between the edge of time and a hard place. Pick up the pace!

But where am I going? Why are there so many castles and only two discernible figureheads? Where are the houses and grocery stores? Everyone I meet couldn’t truly be an enemy. It’s me, isn’t it? Treading on the shells of my neighbors, what am I fighting for?

I have some questions too. Why don’t people demand the same top notch work they expect of the folks waiting on them in restaurants, fixing their cars, and teaching their children, from entertainers? You want the best service everywhere else, but not from television writers or comedians? Whatever boring shtick they’ve got laying around will do? No need to go to any trouble putting out any effort… like someone would just stay at whatever damp moldy hotel is available and then defend it on Yelp when someone is like “I didn’t enjoy my stay and I wouldn’t recommend it.” That’s not a real thing that is going to happen — yet people accept whatever pile of tepid shit is under  the silver lid served up at the Academy Awards because the host is funny by virtue of being billed as a funny guy.

The thing is that when it was announced that MacFarlane was going to host the Oscars, every single person familiar with even a small fraction of his work could predict the direction this was going. High school kids in creative writing class who’ve already done that part of the course where you pick an author, read an assortment of their work and write a piece in their style could very easily have written his Oscar material. How is this acceptable to anyone from a savvy consumer point of view let alone a talent/art crit perspective. The real joke is the one where that lazy ass gets paid more money than most of us will ever see to produce boring leftover slop with minimal effort and by taking zero risks and still gets positive reviews for being edgy. And all the haters are the losers who “just don’t get it.” Righto.

He doesn’t have to try at all and people will say he is great because one time he did something that people found amusing and no one wants to cop to having been a fan of someone kind of dull so they will fiercely defend the rights of artists or comedians or noodley-musicians who’ve produced work with a short shelf life. MacFarlane will eventually be a vaguely familiar sounding name in a long Wikipedia List of American Comedians. His material is not even relevant today, and I don’t know about you but I need to believe in a future where he’s basically Gallagher and no one is inviting him to televised events or paying much to syndicate his shows.

Am I judging you? I don’t know, maybe?! How do you feel about the things that strike you as funny? Would they be funny if you changed the butt of the joke? Is what you like fresh and new uncharted territory? Does it make your jaw drop because it’s sharp or because it’s “hee-hee, aren’t we all baaaaaad kids?” If you strip it down to its basic element is it at heart a broads-can’t-make-up-their-minds joke? Or the one about sandwiches that makes an easy segue into the one about fatness? (I can’t keep up with all these new horizons of edginess!)

Here’s my metric for deciding whether to place value in pretty much anything: if my racist, barely literate, abusive ex-cop stepfather thinks it is great/hilarious/cool –it isn’t. I’m sure you know someone just like him because unfortunately he’s a dime a dozen. I’ve had some coworkers that would probably follow him on Tumblr in that nightmarish scenario where he steps outside of his weather forecasts and photos-of-guns Internet comfort zone. You don’t even have to take it that far and bum yourself out; it’s pretty simple. Would Jay Leno dig it? Then it is shit. Would someone wearing a bowling shirt with flames on it think this is cool? Utter crap. Perhaps fans of Two and A Half Men? Yikes. How about that lady from your office who gets stoked when the IT dudes tell her she’s cool because she’s not like other girls? Sad. What about those guys who make kissy sounds at half of the people who walk by? Gross. Have some standards and some respect for yourself, for others, and for art and talent. Demand quality.

Life, right?

It’s been almost a year since my last update. I suppose social media stuff makes it seem a bit redundant, but I started to notice I’m making less connections these days because I stay in my bubble and am trying to work on that. I keep things semi-private, because I am more concerned with not hurting the feelings of people I am purposefully keeping at a distance –even if I am doing so for my own well-being. It’s time to get over it. Demons out, luck in!

In May I moved into my own place, and shortly after my family moved in too. (It’s cool; I needed more towels.) In somewhat recent history, there was a hurricane and an absurd flu outbreak that knocked my office out of whack. I turned 34, and because I am a sucker I fell in love with a handsome beastly jerk and a living Pokemon and adopted them.

They don’t like each other. Horace grew up on the street and cannot be convinced that the food bowls will be refilled on a regular basis, so he gets into everything that might possibly be edible. He likes the counter and the sink and the trash can, and whatever you’re holding and basically, everything you so much as look at. I am not entirely sure he wouldn’t attempt to snack on the other cat if they were left alone for a while. Nibbles on the other hand, is wider than she is tall, with short legs and approximately six inches of tail, and cannot jump up on anything too high or keep him from bullying her away from her own food dish. She looks like she was painted in pastel watercolors and is just as soft to the touch. She walks around going, “reh reh reh.” As my brother says, you can’t look at her without smiling. She’d been at PAWS since April endearing herself to the volunteers and staff but oddly not finding any luck with potential adopters. I don’t get it, but I’m glad it worked out because she’s mine-all-mine.

Fun Nibbles facts: when you scritch above her tail she reflexively licks the air keeping time with your motion and it is the best thing ever. I kept her shelter name because it suits her so well; she pulls each piece of food out of her dish, onto the floor and eats them individually. It takes her a half hour to eat a quarter cup of kibble.

Horace was a new face at the shelter that I clicked with immediately. First of all, look at his beautiful swirls and stripes, and secondly his name was Horace. He’s very affectionate, and I admit that the first time we met was my best makeout session of 2012. He bites when he’s annoyed and also when he’s excited, and anytime he feels like it. We have a special connection — deep inside a part of me is jealous of his free expression. I can’t just knock shit over when I’m pissed. Or chomp on everything that seems potentially delicious. Horace is truly living the dream. Cats are cool.

Here’s what I’ve been into lately that isn’t Nibbles & Horace related:

• Growing out my signature bangs because I have an actual hair goal in mind for a change.
• Watching nearly 700 hours of anime since I moved. (Yes, over 25 days worth in under a year.) I have a lot of things to say about this, and plan to. 
• Add the time spent on Korean television dramas to that, and, no. Please don’t.
• Going on OkCupid adventures and making a ton of friends. The trick to OKC is to filter out all the straights. (You’re welcome.)
• Attempting to keep my 2013 New Year resolution to only talk about work in my nightmare addled sleep. The NDA makes not talking about the actual work super easy, but in turn you find yourself talking about all of the non-project-related office inanity. It’s a work in progress. 

(Word count:  666.)

• Was hit by a car while walking to work. (I’m doing ok! Bruises/torn ligament? Not too big a deal.)
• Saw Peter Murphy.
• Got a promotion / suddenly feel good about waking up and going into the office.
• Spent Thanksgiving alone, which was kind of awesome. Grilled cheese and tomato soup! No travel/traffic!
• One of my friends gave me a tv he was getting rid of and I ordered a Roku player — changing my life. (read: addicted to Miss Marple & Columbo)
• Spent a weird week and a half, feverish and mostly sleeping. Woke up and decided it was time to look for my own place.
• Promptly got sick again? Currently have the sorest throat because my room warps into a dry riverbed at night that I flop around in gasping for breath. Yes, like a fish. Picture one of those fancy egg shaped goldfish with the black ruffly fins. Spooky and sad.
• Oh and check this out, I managed to reach Reader Zero in the same week I hit Inbox Zero at the office:

And now a mix:

out damned spot from surpluscats on 8tracks.

1. Performance, Tones On Tail, Everything, 1998
2. But I’m Not, Cocteau Twins , Garlands
3. Dancing, Bauhaus, 1979-1983 Vol 1, 1986
4. Dive In Deep, Red Temple Spirits, If Tomorrow I Were Leaving For Lhasa, I Wouldn’t Stay A Minute More…, 1989
5. The Dog-End of a Day Gone By, Love and Rockets, Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven, 1985
6. I’ll Fall With Your Knife, Peter Murphy, Cascade, 1995
7. Witness ( to a Scream), In The Nursery, Prelude 1983 – 1985, 1989
8. Broken, The Creatures, U.S. Retrace, 2000
9. Dead City, Patti Smith, Peace And Noise, 1997

1. Hold On Don’t Go, The Passions, Sanctuary, 1982
2. Terror Couple Kill Colonel, Bauhaus, 1979-1983: Volume One, 1986
3. This town ain’t enough for the, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Through The Looking Glass, 1987
4. Collapsing New People, Fad Gadget, Gag, 1984
5. Get The Balance Right, Depeche Mode, The Singles 81-85, 1999
6. A Days Wait, Altered Images, Collected Images: Best Of Altered Images
7. War Child, Blondie, Atomic
8. Chercher le garçon (version gb), Taxi Girl, Quelqu’Un Comme Toi, 1989
9. Lay All Your Love On Me, Information Society, Information Society, 1988
10. Accept Yourself, The Smiths, Hatful Of Hollow, 1983
11. All Through The Night, Cyndi Lauper, Time After Time – The Best Of Cyndi Lauper
12. Secrets, The Cure, Seventeen Seconds, 1980

(a love song)

I’ve never been one to express much more than doubt
But I got this new feeling and I need to work it out
It burns and aches and confuses
So I’m gonna call upon a different set of muses

Like Kovalevskaya I’ve got some conditions
for the existence of solutions to partial differential equations
With respect to all variables, and the seeming distinctness of your
physical phenomena
colorfully illustrated like Merian’s rejection of spontaneous
generation in Lepidoptera
it’d be easy to get all swept into poetical exuberance,
ascribing your finer attributes to divine beneficence
and pass like Diotima from appreciation of Beauty
to rapt spirituality

Would that like Aglaonike, I could calculate the time when we align
and make the moon disappear to blow your mind, an omen, a sign!
And like Tapputi, distill the essence of your select elements
to analyze the origin of my intents with ancient fantastic instruments,
then back to Earth like Tereshkova with stunning observations like Jump-Cannon
proving there’s more to chart than the many moons between now and then
when things were unknown but not unknowable, and I, too, just wanted
to be friends
What price a connection that through time and space transcends?

Would that like Lovelace I could write an algorithm, a system of instructions
to solving this mind-body dichotomy proposed by Elisabeth of Bohemia’s
deductions
that stumped Descartes, and goes on to list the order of operations needed
for two separate entities to interact unimpeded
Reason and feeling, my fear and your … ambivalence?
Apply some logic, check for false inference
Determine our positions in orbit, like Cunitz’s solution to Kepler’s problem
Diagram the intersection between best-of and more-than.

Here’s my hypothesis,
my educated guess
provisionally accepted,
based on the data collected
There’s a case to be made
shown in my visual aid
See Figure 1: Constructive Interferences
Mutual reinforcement produces
a single amplitude equaling the sum
of two individual waves becoming one
We’re better as a pair
I know what we’ve got is rare
But here’s my sentiment
Let’s do this experiment

1. Branquias Bajo El Agua, Derribos Arias, Branquias Bajo El Agua 7″, 1982
2. Newsreel, Fad Gadget, Fireside Favorites, 1980
3. Countdown, Kas Product, Try Out, 1981
4. Zu Jung, Zu Alt, X-Mal Deutschland, Incubus Sucubus 12″, 1982
5. Swampland, The Birthday Party, Mutiny/The Bad Seed, 1989
6. Situations, Middle Class, VA – Earcom #3 2×7″, 1979
7. Inventory, Colin Newman, A-Z, 1980
8. Simple Machines, Dancing Cigarettes, 1980-81: The Gulcher Recordings, 1980
9. The Sky Is Blue Again, The Ex, Disturbing Domestic Peace, 1980
10. Isn’t It Interesting How Neutron Bombs Work?, Diagram Brothers, Some Marvels of Modern Science, 1981

Have you heard the earlier stuff?
Everything was better before
And nothing new will be good enough
Have you heard? The earlier stuff
harsh and deep and rough
By virtue of age just… more.
Have you heard the earlier stuff?
Everything was better before.

Painting: Émile Friant, Les Amoureux, 1888.

Painting: Thomas Gainsborough, Conversation In A Park. 1745.