Quodlibets

Favregate

Look, I don't know what everyone thinks they're playing at with the Farve thing, but I would like to state for the record that I would gladly watch Favre quarterbacking for the Chicago Bears.  Will it happen?  No, because the Chicago Bears, unlike virtually every single team in NFL, refuse to admit that the quarterback is pretty much the measure of success of a football team.  You can quibble with me, and say "Oh, but Sexy Rexy took them to the Super Bowl."  Yes, he sure did, and then we got our asses handed to us like the bush-league dumbasses we are.  Frankly, I'm a little miffed that the Bears didn't even bother to draft a quarterback.  (And don't tell me how they signed some no-name after the draft.  I don't care about that.)  I'd at least enjoy if they gave the appearance of wanting to win, instead of looking like a group of men who simply CANNOT. admit. they. are. wrong.  It's probably good Cedric Benson was as big a fuck-up as he was in the off-season, or we'd still be operating under the mantle of "Cedric Benson is the running game". 

When I said the Bears were bush-league, I wasn't really referring to GW Bush, but the more I type, the more they're seeming like it.  I'm not confident that they'll ever make a good decision regarding the way to build a winning football team; hence, I'm quite sure they won't deal for Favre.  (Prounounced Faaav-ruuuuh.)

I feel kind of bad for Favre, which is absurd, because....well, why is it absurd?  The man just wants to play some football!  And he's hot!  And oh wait, he's only one of the best quarterbacks of the modern era.  What team wouldn't want him?

Oh yeah.  His team.  The team he's played for for virtually his entire career.  I get it, sort of.  I mean, they've got a guy that been riding the bench, who's been promised the job, and then....BAM!  Brett wants to come back.  No one knows if he's really a good quarterback (what happens if he loses three in a row and GB traded Favre?  Is Green Bay going to experience a riot and the literal sacking of Aaron Rodgers?  What do you think?), because you know, he's barely played.  Here's an understatement:  Favre?  He was nothing if not consistent.  Two hundred and seventy some games consistent.  (Did I also mention that he is hot?  Never underestimate hotness as being a measure of a quarterback.  Brady?  Hello!  Manning?  Not so much.  Which explains his one ring.  The Bears are NOT blessed with hotness.)

Maybe I'm naive, but this still seems like kind of a no-brainer to me.  Everyone seems to think it's a given that Favre should NOT play again for the Packers, and I kind of think.....errr, couldn't Aaron Rodgers be out of the NFL in a year or two?  He's a completely untested property.  I guess what I'm saying is, how disastrous is it REALLY if Rodgers leaves after this year?  I don't know the answer, but maybe it's a no brainer in the other direction, and the Pack should just say good riddance and get as much as they can for him from any team in the league that might want him.  Including, god forbid, the Minnesota Vikings.  That prospect does strike fear into my heart, because Favre?  Adrian Peterson?  Same team?  No thank you very much. 

The point is, it'd be such a shame for a quarterback like Favre to sit on the bench.  I don't care if he turned his papers in and "retired", because did anyone think that was for sure?  I mean, 100%?  It seems...doubtful.  I just think if the man wants to play, the man should be given a chance to play.  In Chicago.  Home of Sexy Rexy and that other one.  The one with the beard.

The sweet fruit of late July

I assume you know that I'm talking about tomatoes, if you know me at all.  My lunch today, a heavenly sandwich of sourdough bread and tomatoes, nearly sent me into a pleasure coma.  Combined with the small Greek salad I made, with a homegrown (though not by me.  Black thumb, remember.) cucumber and some Penzey's herbs, it made possibly the best meal I've had in a long time.  Fresh and juicy and deliciously sweet and filling.  I could probably apply rosy adjectives to it for pages and pages.

But I'm not going to talk about the fresh tomato, the (love) apple of my eye.  I'm going to talk about cooked tomatoes, and the revulsion I've recently developed for them.  That's right, I don't like cooked tomatoes.  I don't like tomato sauce anymore.  The thought of eating pizza covered in sauce leaves me cold and clammy; I'd rather eat a bowl of cereal, thanks.  Can you order a pizza with no tomato sauce?  I may be finding out very soon.I wasn't always this way, that's for sure.  It's a pretty recent prejudice.  In fact, the thought of eating pasta with a plain tomato sauce is also repulsive to me, and I used to gobble up a good marinara. I even turned my mom's venerable meat sauce into a marinara, that's how much I liked it.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to exceptions, and there are two major plain tomato sauce ones:  my mom's meat sauce, which doesn't sound bad to me at all, and my dad's pizza sauce, which I'd happily eat any day of the week.  And three times on Sunday.  I'm not sure if it's because those are hugely familiar sauces, and the taste for them will never go away, or if it's simply that they're (to my mind) superior examples of a plain tomato sauce.  I'm not saying this just to be nice; I'm pretty sure my parents know that they kick ass at their respective Italian food dishes.

There is one other exception to the tomato sauce thing, and that's when you doctor up a tomato sauce with cream, mascarpone, and vodka.  I can eat that stuff all the time too.

This isn't to say that I don't love pasta; I just love pasta with non-sauces.  (Because I don't really like cream sauce either.)  So give me some rigatoni tossed with peas and turkey sausage.  Or with sausage and asparagus and lemon.  Or with greens and sausage.  Or mushrooms and chicken in a light marsala.  All those things sound delicious to me, but they mostly don't involved tomatoes.

This is all very odd; you'd think that since I worship the raw tomato, I'd like everything you can do with it.  But no.  Cook it, and I'm out.  Make a nice bruschetta with it instead, that's my suggestion.  Or a fresh pico de gallo.  Or better yet, add it to some guac.  Or....my very favorite of all time, the tomato-mayonnaise sandwich.  Doesn't get any better in the dog days of summer.

Roads

If the next time you see me one of my eyes is bulging out and bloodshot, it will be because of the expressways in the fine metro area of Chicago.  The area is fine; the expressways are not.  All week, the commute was bad.  One morning there was a stalled truck in the center lane before Harlem.  Yesterday afternoon, the commute was literally the WORST commute I have had in 2 full years of doing this.  I've never seen it backed up so far, or crawling along so slowly.  It took me a very long time to get home (though due to weather, I've had longer commutes), which is infuriating when all it is due to is bad drivers or too many drivers.  This morning, in by far the worst expressway experience of my entire life, I hit and drove over SOMETHING that flattened my rear passenger tire, though thankfully not until after I had arrived at work.  Essentially, I stood outside my car and watched the tire deflate.  (And so sadly, this was also the tire that I had replaced about 3 months ago, after it was clearly reliably deflating every 2 days or so; that was due to a nail.)  I don't know what I hit.  I was going fast; I was watching the road carefully (I was in heavy traffic), and the guy in front of me swerved only slightly, so I thought he was looking at traffic ahead.  But then before I could register the item, I had hit it instead of swerving, and et Voila!  Flat tire.  The replacing of which led me to be on the expressway a full hour later than normal on my commute home.  4 pm on Friday?  I dare you to take the Ike. 

So suffice it to say, it was an exhausting week based just on the commute.  But then on Tuesday, we went to see Coldplay (meh.), and then I took Wednesday off.  I cleaned, basically.  I cleaned the house fairly thoroughly, and then the girls came over for Rock Band and Project Runway.  At 3:45 am on Thursday morning (Wednesday night?), I awoke and smelled the heinous smell of burning plastic.  After a blind search around the room with Sam's help, we came up with nothing smoking, and nothing warm.  So we went back to bed.  Or rather, he went back to bed while I laid in bed and tried to figure out what the hell we would do if the apartment burned while we were at work.  The hard drives!  All my books!  HIS HARD DRIVES!  The damn mostly finished cross stitch would be gone!  My new dress!  So I fretted, and I fretted.  I slept some, but it wasn't good sleep.  It was "am I going to die from smoke inhalation?" sleep.  So I took a half-assed nap on Thursday, and then I went to a super-fun crafty thing with my sister (thanks Kate!) but which exhausted me and kept me adrenalized all at the same time.  So I slept poorly again last night.  And then this morning, and the flat tire.  I just feel weary right now.  (And the thought that I might have jury duty on Monday isn't helping that.)

All the while, mind you, I've been trying to figure out if I'm going to apply to grad school--for the Spring '09 semester.  I thought I was going to; I talked about it, acquired some transcripts, talked to a couple people who would do recommendations for me, and the more I did, the worse I felt about it.  I believe pretty strongly that something that is truly wrong will feel truly wrong, that you'll just know it.  And the growing dread I was feeling about grad school just really made me uneasy.  I shouldn't be dreading it, I really shouldn't.  I can't cry every day because I don't want to be doing what I'm doing.  So during my long half-sleep night on Wednesday, I decided that the right thing, right now, is to NOT do it.  Saying it, and telling my recommenders of the decision was like....like the biggest weight off of me.  I'm still intending to do it at some point, but I need to be in a space where it doesn't feel like the worst thing ever.  I don't know how to describe the feeling I've been having about it, other than to say I've only really felt this badly about a decision (the decision to go, not the decision to not go) when I took a job out of desperation after the LTA program's end.  I sat in my interview and I KNEW I would be miserable at the job.  I KNEW it was the wrong thing for me.  But I did it because everyone said it'd be a good starting place in the library world and I did need to have some income coming in.  Three days into the job, I quit.  I WAS miserable.  I felt simply awful every minute I knew that I had to go there.  Listen, it just felt wrong.  Everything about it felt wrong.

And that's how this grad school thing felt.  I do feel some trepidation because I do feel a LOT of pressure from the outside to get that damn MLS.  A lot of people have told me I'm too smart not to get one, and a lot of people have used others who are in the process of getting them to really try to goad me into one.  Young people who want to work in libraries just get the MLS.  It's what they do.  There's a sort of "why the hell not?" attitude about it.  And I don't have an answer that will make any sense to anyone else, because there are about a hundred good reasons to get it.  But the biggest reason for not getting it is the one that keeps rearing its ugly head, and it's inside me.  For whatever reasons, it just doesn't feel right to me.  And I need to listen to that part of me, and silence everything around me, and do what's right for me (and will ultimately be right for Sam, who now won't have to deal with a miserable partner every day of the week).  Like I said, this isn't never.  This is just....not right now. 

And so I did mean to blog all this all week, I really did.  But it was one thing after another, and it just didn't happen.  This long post'll have to do.

Badger

I'm an Obama supporter, and one phone call won't change that.  But I can't deny that I'm slightly miffed at the Obama volunteer that called my house last night and tried to badger me into donating to the campaign.  I understand that Obama needs money; that's how you win the White House.  I donated money twice to his campaign during the primaries, and I might donate again.  I'm not sure yet.  I told this plucky volunteer this, and to my mind, the appropriate response to someone saying, "You know, I might donate again, but it won't be now because I'm in between paychecks." is:  Thanks very much for your support.  I hope you decide to donate again at a later date. 

But that's not what this volunteer did.  She came at me a second time.  And a third.  And then one last time.  She REALLY wanted me to commit to a certain amount of money last night, and she just wouldn't let it go.  Frankly, it pissed me off.  It makes me feel less like donating to Obama.  Do those sorts of tactics work on other people?  Because no matter what I told her, she came at me like I hadn't said anything, or like I was maybe fibbing so she'd leave me alone. 

And I do understand that these people have a job to do, and it's to get money from people so that there's enough to run a good campaign.  I get it.  And if I was maybe wishy-washy, I could see pressing me.  (Okay, that's a little bit of a lie.  I totally do not approve of heavy-handed attempts to get me to do anything, be it donating to a political campaign or buying something.)  But I felt like this was so over the line that it might have turned someone off completely, maybe even off voting for the Senator.

That's certainly not the case with me; I'll obviously still cast my vote for Obama in November.  As if it is even a question.  Still, I do NOT approve of the script these volunteers are being asked to follow.

Dave Matthews Band, "Under the Table and Dreaming" (1994)

How can I possibly encapsulate the importance of this album--this band--in my life in a blog post.  It sounds dramatic, doesn't it?  Except that, even though I don't listen to much DMB anymore, they are arguably the most passionate love affair I've ever had with music.  You can knock them now (and many people do), but when I first started liking DMB (before September 1996, when I saw my first DMB concert), it wasn't the rampantly disgusting scene it is now.  I went to a lot of DMB concerts between '96 and '06--twenty-something for sure--and the scene only got ugly towards the very end.  In the beginning, it wasn't drunk and high out of control teenagers doing questionable things, it was college kids and adults enjoying the music.  Before Crash, there wasn't such radio popularity.  Before Crash, things were different.  My first DMB concert, in fact, he was opening for Neil Young.  Which shows just how different a time it was.

It's cliche to say now that you liked the band before they were popular, so ha ha ha! but when it's true, it's true.  UTD (how I've always abbreviated the album) was another album that my dad brought home, and that I co-opted at some point.  When exactly, I can't say.  Why exactly, another question mark.  Suffice it to say that it happened, and that I liked the album enough to keep listening.  Sometimes, and this might be a hairy confession now, I still get chills when I hear the first notes and words of the first song on the album (Hey my friend, it seems your eyes are troubled, care to share your time with me?  Would you say you're feeling low and so a good idea would be to get out of your head...and so on.  Those lyrics were all typed straight out of my head, and believe it or not, I could probably get down pretty well 75% of the DMB songs made before the album Everyday, including all the oddities and things from the live albums released before 2002.), and some songs are still just exhilerating.  It is what it is.  As far as I know, my sister's all time favorite DMB song is from UTD--"Typical Situation"--and while I can't say the same (mine has GOT to be "Two Step"), I can say that the album contains some other all time favorites:  "Dancing Nancies" and "Warehouse" especially.  Then again, it also includes the DMB song I always hated the most, "Satellite".  (Uniformly derided by all the other DMB fans I was friends with back in the day.)

I can't speak to how good UTD is as an album by a band.  I can't look at it with anything less than the rosy bias I'll probably always feel towards DMB's early albums.  I can't speak about this album in rational terms, because my love for it was always slightly irrational.  It catipulted me into a land where I went to midnight sales of albums, where I itched and yearned to go to four or five concerts every summer by the same band, where I ascribed such meaning to each song.  It was never just about fun for me.  I truly LOVED this band.  I truly LOVED the music.  It changed my life.  Changed. my. life. 

Now, of course, I'm out.  I don't even know if I have their last album.  Let alone all the live releases.  My passion, now frankly spent, started waning by the time I was a college senior (but not before the girl who would be my 2nd semester Rome roommate and I shared our DMB love, something that I think was a stepping stone to that roommate-dom), started waning and never stopped.  Lackluster album followed by lackluster album just leached the excitement.  And I worked in a music store, essentially, which broadened my horizons too far for DMB to be the main thing.  And the concerts.  The concerts, which were once so fun, seemed to be taken over by kids.  By my brother (who is 8 years younger than me) and his friends, and they weren't going for the music, by and far.  They were going for the drugs and alcohol and the social opportunities.  And that really, really put the final nail in.  While it wasn't about the fun for me, it certainly wasn't fun anymore to be surrounded by puking kids who only knew the singles.  When the crowd stopped being interested in "Granny", I stopped being interested in being in the crowd. 

And so I don't really love DMB anymore.  But I did, oh I did.  And UTD started it all.

The Humble Robot

While I was away from the blog, I saw the film Wall-E twice.  The first time, it's not an exaggeration to say that I cried for at least 45 minutes of the movie.  The second time, maybe 5 minutes.  Clearly a better situation.  However, I can't say that the second time, I was actually less sad than the first.  I still thought (and think) that the movie was sad in ways that I'm not sure it was meant to be.  I've thought about it quite a bit, because my reaction was so incredibly extreme, and there has to be a reason.  If you haven't seen the movie, and you plan on it, you probably shouldn't read further, because I am going to talk about the film in specific terms.

First of all, I found the beginning of the film unspeakably sad.  Even though Wall-E had a cockroach friend, there was no sort of companionship in that.  Wall-E is alone.  When he's returning to his "home" after a long day's work, and he's zooming past what must be hundreds of dead wall-e units, my heart just drooped.  It's sad, ok?  He's ALONE.  Clearly this solitude has enabled him to become sentient in some way; Wall-E feels, and we know it because of his reaction to the love scene in "Hello, Dolly".  (Why "Hello, Dolly" is another question altogether.  Seriously, Pixar, why "Hello, Dolly"?)  But to me, Wall-E was essentially an innocent.  Yes, he yearns for togetherness and love, but it's an innocent yearning.  I didn't see much complexity to that desire, and I think that this continues thoughout the entire film.  Wall-E is single-minded; he doesn't care about danger or nuance.  Eve is pretty and Eve is the single thing that breaks his solitude; thus he loves her.

And this, to me, brings about the saddest few scenes in the film.  The first time I saw this part, I was crying so hard that I missed parts of these scenes.  The second time, I still found them as sad, but was able to control myself more.  Wall-E shows Eve the plant; the plant is sucked up by Eve and she shuts down, fulfilling her purpose as a machine.  Wall-E basically screams her name in robot voice (heart-breaking) and then begins to "do" things with her.  He leads her around with a string of Xmas lights.  He holds an umbrella over her head when it rains.  He sits and watches a sunset with her.  Even though she's, for all intents and purposes, dead.   She doesn't know what's going on; she literally CANNOT experience the things her and Wall-E are doing "together".  Bleak.  Simply one of the saddest things I can imagine.  My mom, by contrast, said she thought it was "cute".  I can't figure out how to see these scenes as benign, and harmless, because to me, regardless of how the movie ends (and it's PIXAR, so I'm sure you can guess how, and even I KNEW WHILE WATCHING that things would most likely work out), I just can't imagine anything worse. 

It's like....a coma.  Only not really, because human beings are too complex for things to be so simple, as they are for Wall-E.  A human would never drag their loved one's hospital bed to a sunset and watch it "with her."  And ok, yes, these are machines.  I get that, but I also think that Pixar is tricksy, and they're tricksy because they're making you feel for the robots as if they were humans, and they're treating the robots as humans, and you feel like they're humans, and then BOOM!  The robot does something that would be so unspeakably sad for a human to do that you can't help but feel wrecked when the robot does it.  That's my little analysis as to why I felt so incredibly ruined by the film, which after the first time, I did.  Anytime I thought about those scenes (or heard Wall-E's "Eve" scream in my head), I got teary.  Ruined.

And yet, I did see the film again, because quite frankly, it might have been one of the best films I've seen in 5 years.  All the things it made me feel means it worked, right?  It was beautiful and masterful.  Wall-E was endearing and sweet, and the movie DID have its funny moments.  Also, to be fair, no one else I know had the reaction I did, and I'm not just talking about Sam and I as being the pool of possible criers. 

I don't plan on seeing the film a third time, not in theaters, but I'm guessing that Sam and I will eventually own the movie (because actually, I think we own all Pixar films save "Cars"), and I'm sure I'll watch it again some day.  I can't imagine feeling less sad, to be honest.

My version of a Meta-blog post

I have no desire to go all meta on you for paragraphs and paragraphs, so suffice it to say that for the last month or so I've been trying to figure out if I ever want to blog again.  Shortest answer?  I still don't know.

But starting Monday, I'll be resuming regular posting to decide for reals.