This weekend, Beth and I drove down to Virginia to visit my grandmother, my mom's mom, who's my only living grandparent. She's ninety-five and living in an assisted living community, and not doing very well but surviving. She has a lot of trouble seeing, and seems kind of bored. I guess mortality has been on my mind recently. Two people I didn't ( Read more... )

I haven't written here in a while, but I have a few things I wanted to mention that I didn't think would fit into my WordPress format. I doubt anyone else cares, but I still try to keep those posts topic-specific, while this entry will likely be all over the place. My last temporary job ended a month ago, but it looks like I'm going to be starting ( Read more... )

Friday was the fifteenth anniversary of when bethje and I officially became a couple, although there isn't much to tell about that. We were talking on the phone, and she asked if we should be a couple, and I basically said, "Yeah, okay." I was reluctant about getting into a relationship, but once I was in it I wanted it to last. And even though we didn't ( Read more... )

I don't know how bethje does it. She hardly sleeps at all on weekdays, then makes up for it by sleeping pretty much all day on weekends. If I don't get enough sleep on any one day, that results in my basically walking around in a daze. Sure, I can do things if I've been up long enough, but all I really want to do is go back to bed ( Read more... )

I realize that I'm not exactly saying anything you don't already know here, but I think it's interesting how straight girls are often willing to admit their attraction to other girls, while that's generally not true for straight guys. Part of it is because our society teaches both genders that women are more aesthetically appealing. That hasn't ( Read more... )

I haven't been listening to much holiday music on my own this month. Honestly, I haven't really been in the mood. I can't help hearing some of it on the radio and in businesses, however. In fact, at Chili's today, they played XTC's "Thanks for Christmas," one of the few XTC songs I've heard in public. Actually, it gets played quite a bit around ( Read more... )

Well, it's Veterans' Day again today. Not that I ever do anything for it, but hey, it's important to honor veterans. They did a dangerous job that the rest of us don't want to do, after all. Sure, you hear the stories about bad apples like the torturers at Abu Ghraib, but I'm willing to accept that they're in the minority. And could behavior ( Read more... )

Happy Independence Day to my fellow residents of the United States! In honor of today, I'm going to cover a nationalistic sort of mythology, that of the national personification. The most famous one for the States is, of course, Uncle Sam, the bearded guy in star-spangled clothes who points rudely at you until you agree to go die in Iraq.


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Well, I might as well finish up my song-by-song reviews of XTC albums, since I only have one more to go anyway. And that one is, of course, Apple Venus Volume 2, better known as Wasp Star. While the first Apple Venus was full of light, pastoral music, its counterpart was planned as a rock album. It's not exactly a return to the sound of White ( Read more... )

My original plan for today was a post on Theseus, but listening to the song "Green Man" tempted me to find out a little about...well, I think you can figure it out. What's harder to figure out, however, is exactly who the Green Man figures were supposed to represent. The name "Green Man" wasn't coined until 1939, and refers to various stone faces ( Read more... )