Quodlibets

All Systems Go

We are go for launch.  I'm shutting my computer down, and I don't know if or when I'll be blogging next.  It's off to Italy for me!

Holy Hair Removal, Batman

Yes, I've come into my Italian womanhood.  At the age of 27, I've begun the mustache waxing.  I knew it was coming, because I could look in the mirror and see the beginnings of those dark pelty hairs on my lip, but I didn't know it would be this soon.  For the last two or three weeks, I'd sort of been wondering if those hairs hadn't gotten longer and darker, but S told me that they weren't so bad, and you could barely see them.  But then I'd be washing my face or brushing my teeth and I'd see them, and I mean, it wasn't like I was face-to-face with the mirror.  It was making me uncomfortable, and so last night I asked my aesthetician what she thought, and she confirmed my suspicions, and told me she might just wax the corners, and not the whole lip.  She did spend some time warning me how painful it was going to be, telling me that she had just waxed her own upper lip fuzz a few weeks ago, and she was unprepared for how awful it was going to be.  And I mean, this is a woman who waxes people for a living.  Anyway, what could I do?  Say no?  No, the hair was unsightly, and I figured it couldn't be that much worse than the eyebrow waxes I've been getting for 5 years.

I was wrong.  She tried to tell me it was worse, and I wouldn't listen.  In fact, it was so painful that as she pulled off the fabric for the second time, I pretty much yelled fuck, and by pretty much I mean that I was conscious that I shouldn't be yelling but was having a hard time not screaming bloody murder.  It's worse.  It's so much worse that today the skin is still sore and now it has some welty-looking bumps on it, and you can now see very clearly that there used to be hair there and now there isn't.  It looks like I had a very painful procedure done, and well, I did.  It's ugly and disgusting, and I hate it.  But I hated my mustache, too, and so here we are in a classic Catch-22.  I was miserable with the hair, and now I'm miserable without it.  I suspect, though, that the redness and welty things will go away at some point (sooner, rather than later, please please please; I do not want red lumps all over me when S is taking 1 million pictures with me in them in Rome), and then I'll be happy as a clam.

You know, until the next time I have to get my 'stache waxed.  Because I am, let's face it, Italian, and so this is going to be a forever thing, unless I decide that I'm okay having a baby mustache, which I don't think is going to happen.  I know that I have to go back and get this stuff taken off again, because if I don't, in a few years, S and I will have matching mustaches.  What a pleasant thought, eh?

Is this thing on?

Ummm, hi.  Yeah, it's been a week since I've posted, because frankly, I don't have anything to say.  It's not that I'm busy, because I'm not really.  All I've been doing for the past week is loafing on the couch and going to bed ridiculously early.  Things are getting busy this weekend, what with a visit from S's mom and a two year-old's birthday party, and an eyebrow wax and lash tint on Monday.  Also, (hey mom!), I'm hoping my mom will make split pea soup on Monday, not that that has anything to do with anything.  Things aren't really quieting down any, either, because supposedly there is a meat festival trip in the works on Tues. or Weds.  And you know, Thursday, we're getting on an airplane and we're going to Rome.  So I would say that in the few days before Thurs. we'll be busy enough, as it is, with getting shit ready for the trip.

Right now, things seem paused.  I still have today, plus three more days of work to deal with, and these are going to be doozies, because I'm going to try very hard to make up some extra hours when I can.  And things have been increasingly boring here, to the point where I now have to amuse myself for longer than 8 hours if I'm staying extra, and it's getting really, really pointless and boring.  I'm trying to find constructive things to do, I swear it.  I'm just not being very successful at it.  And the reading?  Oh god, I love reading, but sometimes I just CAN'T anymore.  I finished two books yesterday, and I'd only really started one of them.  This is not the first two book day.  There've been others.  And I know it sounds nice, or whatever, but really?  It's not the best thing in the world.  (Although it's nice practice for the flights upcoming.)  So I spend a lot of my time thinking or staring or just...being.  It's zen work.

Meanwhile, there's this little ticker in my head:  in one week, we'll be getting ready to get on a plane.  At one today, in a week, we'll be in a limo on the way to the airport.  Etc.  You get the picture.  It's not a very productive way to live.  Can you fast-forward through a week?  Except, grrr, I don't really want to, because there are good things happening.  Like I mentioned up above.  This is a really, really difficult week.  And okay, I'll stop bitching now and stop blogging again.

Knock on Wood

The pop culture blogger/columnist at the Tribune, Mark Caro, is complaining about iPods today.  He says his 2nd iPod has died after 11 months of use, just as his first iPod died.  Predictably, in the comments, there's a mishmash of opinion, with some people saying that Apple products are crap and why would anyone spend that much when a portable CD player works just as well (uh, sir, no it doesn't; it may work just fine, but then you have to carry forty million CDs everywhere, or something like it.  And don't even get me started on audiobooks on CD.) and for god's sake they're over $300 and that's ridiculous and you should try the iRiver/Creative Labs/Jukebox model and you'll be happier with that, and of course, the Apple loyalists who rant about how if you use your iPod improperly, of course it will break, you cretin, what did you do, step on it?  run it over? and buy a player with a flash drive you idiot instead of a hard drive because HARD DRIVES fail, numbnuts, and anyway, everyone knows that the iPod is more intuitive and it's just better than everything else out there which is how it became so popular in the first place, you complainer.

Of course, it's probably a little bit of both.  It sucks a LOT when your iPods fails, for whatever reason.  My first iPod had some diminishing battery hours problems, but I'd had it pretty long when it did start to fail, so I wasn't too upset.  I was ready for a new model by then, anyway.  It's not a perfect machine; and as many people (and me) pointed out, there are indeed wrong ways to use your iPod.  One of them is to work out with a regular iPod on you; jostling isn't good for a machine with a hard drive in it.  That's just the fact of it.  If you want to work out with an mp3 player, it is indeed a better idea to get one with a flash drive.  As someone else pointed out, it is only a matter of time before the bigger gig iPods come with flash drives, so Caro might wait until then to buy something.  It's not complicated.  Caro was beating his iPod up, whether he knew it or not; he doesn't want something with smaller storage capacity because he has a lot of music, but he wants something he can work out with.  Currently, Apple doesn't make that product.

That said, I can understand some of the complaints against Apple.  iPods do really become a kind of music prison once you start using them.  I can't imagine ever having anything besides an iPod, very basically because of DRM, which ensures that anything I've ever bought off of iTunes has to be played on one.  It's a racket, all right, but it's a racket I bought into and now I'm stuck.  I do love my iPod, but let's be honest, there's only a small number of things that could lead me to abandon them, and Steve Jobs has seen to it that that's the case for literally MILLIONS of people the world over.  And listen, you can bitch and moan about it all you like, but if you're a long-time iTunes user, the new DRM-EMI agreement is nice, but does practically very little for you.  Unless the only music you've ever bought from iTunes is EMI music.  Until the iTunes music store goes 100% anti-DRM, we're locked into iPods, and Apple knows it.  The commenters who say that are 100% right.

But for my money, and of course, I'm biased, but still, for my money, it's the best option out there.  I had a friend who bought a competitor's problem, and within months, she was having problems.  Big problems, the kind that impair your usage of the item.  I don't know anyone who's ever had problems operationally with the iPod.  It's easy to get music onto it, it's easy to organize, and it's easy to update.  It's a peach at organizing audiobooks vs. music, on-the-go playlists are fun and easy to make, and universal shuffle is just about the biggest thing to ever to happen to my music.  I can't speak for those other machines, because I've never had one, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say again that there must be something about it that made it the most popular mp3 player ever, and I have a hunch it's not just because it had some cachet.  (At the wedding I was at in CA a few weekends ago, the groom's iPod provided the music at the ceremony.  He wanted to back it up, and asked if someone wouldn't mind having the music on their iPod just in case.  I'm telling you, every single person in the room whipped out an iPod, metaphorically or physically.  Not a iRiver or a Creative Labs thing or a Sony thing, but an iPod.  It made it sinfully easy to back-up his wedding music, and that might have been the only part of the wedding weekend that was sinfully easy.  It was also super-easy to play the correct music in the correct order, to fade in and out the music [with some manual, brotherly help], and really, it was perfect.)  You can bitch about it all you like, but I really do believe that the iPod is the best thing out there, right at this moment.

Does the Apple DRM suck?  Yeah.  Does the iPod?  Not really.  It's a devil's bargain, I guess, and for better or worse, Caro made his choice when he bought his first iPod.  I really think that if you use an iPod properly, though, you won't have it die after 11 months.  Time for Caro to invest in a small nano and a big iPod.  So he can run with one, and use the other one everywhere else.  Sucky, but there it is.

Italy Dreaming

Last night I dreamt about Italy.  Only not really, because what I actually dreamed of was the stupid airplane ride over there.  I had two flying dreams, and they were both awful.  Not the kind of awful where you wake up sweating and crying, but just vaguely unsettling.  They both jarred me out of sleep, one at 2 am and the other at 5, and after the awakening at 5, I didn't really go back to bed.  If this happens every night from now until Italy, I'll be a wreck. 

I have a fair amount of flying dreams normally, so it's not that shocking.  I don't enjoy flying (even though I love the travel part that comes after), and I'm a very nervous flyer besides.  I'm scared of crashes and breathing problems and blood clots and that makes me hate every minute I spend in the sky.  The 9 hours to Italy sucks, but I'm willing to do it because, well, I'm in Italy when the plane finally lands.  The joy of that mitigates the suck of the flying. 

I'd be lying, though, if I said I wasn't nervous about going back.  This is exactly how I felt last time I went back, a tinge of fear and worry combined with the overwhelming sensation of excitement to be going back.  And it seems as if the fear and worry get bigger, the closer I get.  Rome is such a loaded city for me; the last time, I cried on the tram from the Trastevere train station all the way into Largo Argentina.  I mean, just tears pouring down my face.  The plan is a bit different this trip; we're flying into Rome but then going to Florence straight-away, no stop in Rome.  Rome comes after Florence.  I can't imagine crying in Florence (actually, I dislike Florence, but feel S should see it), and I don't know if I'll be shocked into the kind of emotion I was last time by coming into Rome after two days in Italy.  I'd like to not cry.

Anyway, I'm afraid because Rome is a loaded city, and I'm afraid that I'll round a corner and something won't be where it's supposed to be.  (Oh, please be there, Enzo's restaurant.)  I'm also worried that I won't connect with it like I once did, and that's even worse.  I've, in some ways, built my life around Rome, and the time I spent there, and to not love it now would be a nightmare.  Rationally, I can't imagine that would happen.  But I'm not always a rational creature, and in the two weeks leading to this trip, I'm sure the irrationality of this all will hold sway.  It's the kind of person I am. 

But I've been waiting for this trip for four and a half years (since the last time I was in Rome) and I am just ready.  I am so ready.  April 19th cannot come fast enough.  (But no more Rome dreams, hopefully.)

Forget about it....

The bad thing about iPods is that it completely removes CDs from your life.  At least, it has for me.  Partly, this means that if you forget to rip something, you pretty much forget it.  The other day, I was looking at the line-up for the Crossroads Guitar Festival (Hi Dad!  I know you're excited.) and noticed that Alison Krauss and Union Station are on the list.  Five million years ago, I was a fan of their live CD.  I used to make some of my colleagues in the music dept. crazy by putting it on every day.  I liked to sing to it.  But it never got ripped, and it never got onto my iPod, and I swear, I forgot about it until just the other day.  I found it, and have been happily listening to it in the car every couple days. 

But I hate carrying around CDs, especially in my car, because B.I. (before iPod), my car was a graveyard for CDs.  I just got so careless and annoyed that they ended up stashed here and stashed there and they were breaking (in half! in quarters!) and they were getting scratched beyond use and it was a gigantic pain in the ass.  On the other hand, it is sort of a pain in the ass to get the music all ripped.  It's an even bigger pain in the ass in my house, because of the way our music is stored.  We essentially combined two VERY LARGE music collections, and when S did it, all kinds of wacky-ass things happened.  Buying music through iTunes is risky, because I know that I've lost music in the transfer process.  And if I rip discs, S then has to somehow get them onto the hard drive that stores all our music, and update things and sheesh, I don't know how it works.  All our music is on one hard drive, and getting that music onto my iPod through my computer seems to be a problem.  That's all I know.

So things don't get ripped, or I have to wait for S to rip them, and essentially, what I'm saying is that there is old music missing.  And I don't buy music anymore.  I'm not saying I steal it, no.  What I'm saying is that I really don't buy any music anymore.  If S gets a new CD that he thinks I'll like, I try it out (sometimes; sometimes I just bitch and moan that I don't WANT new music and could he please leave me alone????) and sometimes I like it and it ends up on my iPod (usually he's the one who gets it there) and then I can listen to it or not, depending.  But the days of me going to stores and buying CDs is over.  Or it seems to be, anyway.  S still buys CDs, so I guess I'll mostly be depending on him.  It's fine.  It doesn't bother me.  Frankly, I'm more into audiobooks these days anyway.