- I just put my iPod on all shuffle mode. The first song to come on: Say It Ain't So. I can't lie and say that this song isn't a Rock Band song to me. When I hear it, and sing along, I'm thinking of how I sing it when I play Rock Band, and I'm thinking of the way it is to play it on the guitar. This may be stupid, but this is also the song I think I've played the most on the game. It's also one of the handful of songs I can play while singing and guitar-ing at the same time. Yes, you read that right. I've advanced to being able to do both. It's fairly simple: take your Xbox provided headset, and plug it into one of the game controllers. Unplug the microphone from the USB extender. Et Voila! You have a headset. My one problem with the scenario is having to stand close enough to something to put the controller on. The controller and headset and connected by a wire, after all. It can get to be something of a pain in the ass. The other problem with the whole scenario is that you really do have to know almost perfectly the words to the song, or you're sunk. Or at least I am. I haven't yet mastered the art of seeing both the guitar parts and words at the same time. Anyone else doing this have any hints? Seriously, though, it's the most super-fun ever. Especially since Sam won't play with me, and I end up playing Rock Band alone unless it's Weds. night. Plus it makes me feel good about myself! Look! I can sing and pretend to play guitar at the same time! Woooo-hooooo!
- For the first time ever, I'm re-listening to an audiobook. For the past month or so, I'd just been listening to Kevin Smith's podcasts, jettisoning the audiobooks. They got kind of boring, and I was having trouble finding shit I wanted to listen to. But now I've exhausted those podcasts, and I'm ready to do audiobooks again. So I used my credits to get a few, and then when I was loading them on the iPod, I saw this one, and thought, oh man, that was good. It's Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst, and it is as good the second time as the first. It's got me excited about audiobooks again, and I really needed it yesterday as I sat in traffic for an hour and ten minutes.
- I had a bizarre dream last night about our old dog, Maggie. My mom hadn't actually put Maggie down a few years ago, but had given Maggie to my dad, who shipped her down to his house in Florida and hired a caretaker for her. Seems neither one of them could let her go. Except they still told us (the kids) that Maggie had been put down. It was like the OPPOSITE of telling your kids that the dog had been "given to a farm", and just about the weirdest thing ever. Maggie was put down (in real life) because she was peeing constantly, everywhere, so I asked my dad's wife, M, what they were doing about the peeing thing, and she said they had this one dresser that they moved around to cover pee spots. What??? It's totally bizarre, and I remember so vividly from the dream the feeling of Maggie's head in my hands as I pet her. I woke up feeling Maggie's fuzziness. All the same, I didn't awake from the dream unhappy in any sense at all, just really glad that I got to see Maggie again. Again, very vivid dream. Insanely vivid.
- Last night I saw a very bad billboard. It had two babies sitting next to each other (and I want to say that they were dressed up funny, but I only caught a passing glance at it. It's on the inbound Eisenhower right near the Budweiser mural, as far as I can recall), and there was either a thought bubble or a speech bubble above them, and it said something like this: "Embryos are just little babies!" I know it was a pro-life billboard, because I did catch those exact words--pro-life--on one side of the thing. It disgusted me.
- Here's something kind of sick. One of the legacies of the diet is that whenever I'm really hungry (and know I'm not going to be eating--such as last night, when I ate a good piece and a half of Lou Malnati's pizza, a meal that would not make me hungry normally, but did last night--this is the old thing rearing its ugly head. I eat plenty of food but always feel hungry, so I just don't eat when I'm hungry. I only eat when it's a meal-time. It's not exactly intuitive eating, but it's the right thing, right now.)--anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. When I'm really hungry, and don't eat, I feel skinnier. I know I'm not, because hello, I totally ate dinner. A fine, filling dinner. But my brain tricks me into feeling skinnier. And even worse, I feel more virtuous. It's like this sense of....moral rightness takes over, and it feels damn good. I'm not saying this to provoke anything, I'm just saying, it's really insanely fucked up that the world can do this to you. That diet (which my therapist at the time convinced me was a good idea), really messed with my understanding of what a normal person is supposed to feel like. Hunger? NOT morally superior. Skinny? Not morally superior. Not eating? Not somehow linked to moral superiority. I fucking HATE feeling this way. I feel betrayed by my mind and body. It's the worst feeling in the world, and my brain is trying to trick me into thinking it's the best. So yeah. These things, they just don't go away.
Anyway, I have to go. It's ref desk time.
Two more:
- One of the notions I've been disabused of in playing Rock Band is the idea that everyone can make their voices go up or down an octave if they want to. I'm not saying this to be a jerk AT ALL, I'm just saying that I thought could do it, because I can. For instance, in singing Creep, I have to go up an octave because Thom York from Radiohead hits some low notes I can't if I sing at the original tone. I sort of assumed anyone could do that if they could hit the pitch on some songs. But I guess not. Maybe I'm not as musically dumb as I've always thought I was.
- And finally, and this is political and I don't care, I'm so sickened by Hillary Clinton's suggesting that a REPUBLICAN might be better for this country than Barack Obama, simply for the fact that John McCain is no doubt going to continue many of Mr. Bush's worst policies. For Hillary to put her own interests above a) the interests of the Party and b) most of all, the interests of this country is unconscionable. Every day, she says something that strengthens my resolve not to vote for her. If she's trying to tear the liberals in this country apart, she's doing a damn good job, and she's proving in the PRIMARY that she's no uniter. She's a damn divider, like George W. across the aisle. I'm honestly disappointed that this is the way this is playing out. For shame, Hillary Clinton. Bitch may be the new black, but selfish bitch isn't.
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