So, last Saturday my wife ordered me a new overdrive pedal, the Rockbox Boiling Point. Hand built, hand wired hand painted, and no two look remotely the same... which is what you expect for something costing $350. By comparison, the Ibanez Tube Screamer that famous folks like Stevie Ray Vaughan used can be had for as little as $100.
So, mine showed up, and it is beautiful!!
I felt lucky to get the color I wanted, because they are hand made and never in stock. I was actually lucky to get one AT ALL. Last week the store I bought it from, ProGuitarShop.com, had maybe 45-50 of them in stock. Today they are down to their last one. In a WEEK! They sold like $15,000-$17,000 worth of these things in just 7 days.
And worth every penny. Every damned cent. Best pedal I've every owned, hands down. I can do the sort of smooth lead tone that you get from like Santana or Pink Floyd, right in a little box. Unfortunately, this means reorganizing my pedal board once again, to make room for it. I may wait until I get the last 2-3 pedals I need, and do it all at once and hopefully never again. For at least a few weeks.
Also got my cool Fender bar stools. They had to be assembled, and I have to tell you that putting something together has never been so easy. I got to use my new toolbox and my wife helped me line everything up, and it took probably 20 minutes each. And they look snazzy!
I was inspired to get these because it is almost Thanksgiving. Last year we had a bunch of people in the house and nowhere for them to sit and lots of dragging chairs around. Now there's a couple of extra seats in my office, for when everyone comes in here to listen to me play guitar. Yay!!!
... is just WONDERFUL!! I've got a corned beef brisket boiling in spices and beef stock on the stove. In a few hours, I'll be slicing it onto rye bread and making some killer reuben sammiches, with pesto potato salad on the side.
Any second now, a UPS guy is going to ring my doorbell, and I'll have some barstools, the ones I've wanted since I couldn't find the ones I wanted all those many years ago.
Life is good, friends and far-off neighbors. Unless you're a "feminist", in which case everything is bad and everyone who disagrees with you is The Man.
I don't know... I think it is fucking hilarious, but I got blasted by a feminist for saying so. I've already done my "feminists are fucking morons" entry for the year, so this one won't cover that ground a second time.
Instead, I want to talk to you about humor. As Steve Martin says in "My Blue Heaven", everyone thinks they have a good sense of humor, but few people actually do have one. As Joe says, all comedy is about someone getting hurt... at least the good stuff. Every comedian worth a damn digs into the pain in their lives, and the lives of their friends and family, and that's where the good material comes from. It's a fact. If you don't think so, I'd like to hear 10 very funny jokes where no one gets hurt, where there's no element of physical or emotional pain or at least discomfort involved. I can't think of one off-hand, but maybe someone else can. Knock-knock jokes don't count.
And, since comedy is about bad stuff that means that rape is just as valid a subject of comedy as anything else. There needs to be a certain amount of kill involved... There are people who just say cruel things and then laugh, and claim that's a valid form of comedy, but that's as simplistic as a knock-knock joke with the added odor of evil about it. On the other hand, there are funny jokes about being sick, about getting arrested, about fights and divorces, racism and sexism and weight discrimination, about getting old and even about dying. There's no subject that is off-limits, that can't be made into a funny joke in the hands of the right person.
Except rape, apparently. Because some people's pain is so much more important than anyone else's pain that it is somehow sacred and must be protected and revered and put on a pedestal to be worshiped and respected. Hmmmmm... there's the problem, isn't it? There's a catharsis in humor, and something else beyond letting go of stuff that is also saying "these things don't have the same power over me that they used to" or "I'm not going to let fear of things get ahold of me." That can be felt by the comedian or the audience, sometimes both... and even if the fear isn't yours, the laughter at fear and pain and all that stuff in general is a positive thing. And a good laugh is worth a whole lot in any situation.
On the other hand, you have people who seem to me to be in love with their hurt feelings and their traumatic memories. Instead of integrating the experience into their lives, and making it a part of them, they keep it fresh and new and never get over it at all. They don't want to get over it and move on, for whatever reasons. Maybe if they never let go they never have to really accept what happened. Maybe being obsessed over past victimization allows some people to feel important and part of a community of fellow victims. Whatever the reasons, what they really need to do is get over themselves and learn to have a sense of humor about life...
... especially the bad parts. Even the sensitive ones.
Hey friends and far-off neighbors... I'm DONE with my macroeconomics class. And I got an A!!
That was the shortest AND longest class I've ever taken. It was a 7-week accelerated online class, but every moment I worked on it felt like an eternity. I had to drink a whole lot to deal with the writing assignments, and I wrote the paper in one long crazy rush last Monday... got a 100 on the paper, which means the professor may have been grading mostly by word count. Like I care! And then, I had to take the final exam on Thursday, and got 95%.
Also had Chemistry and Calculus tests this week, so I'm crazy burned out on school. My wife decided to buy me a present to celebrate my success so far. I'm getting a set of bar stools, and an overdrive pedal to go on the board with the rest of the guitar effects. This one is a work of art, as well as a musical tool. Take a look:
Mine... all mine! No two are alike, mine is numbered #1335, and it cost more than I've ever spent on any single effect in my entire life. Scared the crap out of me, until I realized that I have 60 days to try it and then I can return it if I'm unhappy with it. And it sounds like this:
Pink Floyd FTW!
My wife tells me I'm worth it... and who am I to argue?
Man, I am BEAT! Churning out an economics paper in less than 8 hours, and then prepping for a test that isn't until FRIDAY? I've got nothing left, the tank is empty. I've got a lab tomorrow, two tests on Thursday, and a test on Friday. I'm not sure I've got what it takes to deal with it. I guess I'll muddle through, I'm still good at that at least.
It was so bad today that I felt like I was going to fall asleep at the wheel at 10:30 in the morning. There's no way I can do another day like yesterday. The plan for tonight is to finish this blog entry, take a nap, and then sit in front of the TV and veg out until bed time. I'll probably sip on some beers while I'm at it... not so many that they make tomorrow a repeat of today. Just enough to sort of put me in a mellow state. If I were a stoner tonight I would be smoking weed, but since I'm one of the good guys it is just beer for me.
I hope everyone else is doing better than I am. This shit sucks!
I just wrote a 3100 page paper where I started my research at 3:30 in the afternoon, took a three hour break for dinner and Judge Judy and House, and I'm done at 9:45.
I would read an article, take five minutes, and then bang out 600 words in about 30 minutes. If nothing else, it was too fast for me to actually plagiarize... on account of I have to look at the keyboard to type. I'm doing well enough in the class that I will be happy with a solid B.
Is it bad that I started working on my 3000-word economics paper at 10AM, when it is due at midnight tonight? I didn't even do any research. The three hour nap probably didn't help either. Or the hour playing video games. It is 5PM now... maybe I need to put my nose to the grindstone? I gotta get done by the time House comes on!
Yeah, it has become that time again. I'm not sure where we'll find room, but it is starting to look necessary.
Part of the issue is that we bought SUPERCHEAP bookshelves, like $30 each. If you put too many books on them, the shelves buckle and break. That's fine and whatever, because we'll be moving in a couple of years and we can just abandon these particle-board shelves instead of trying to move them with us. Since we don't have the money or really even space in this house for nice ones, we might as well buy the cheapest thing possible. So... looks like I'm buying two of them, and putting one on either side of the TV. That's the only place left in the house to put them. Not today, not next week, but by next summer at the latest.
Also, I bought a PlayStation 3 Friday afternoon. Our Blu-ray player was getting buggy, and has had a hard time playing newer movies. It is a combo Blu-ray/HD-DVD player, probably 4-5 years old and originally cost $700 or so when it was new. I got it on clearance for like $200-250, and it is at the end of its practical lifespan. There's limits to how much more it can be updated before it becomes incapable of playing new discs, and I have a feeling that the most recent firmware update will be the last one they do. So, since I had a little extra money this week, I decided to replace it.
Here's how I worked this out:
A new 3D-capable player costs $200-400.
A PlayStation 3 is 3D-capable.
A PlayStation 3 costs $300.
A PlayStation 3 also plays games, has a basic web browser, and does a bunch of other stuff too.
Therefore, PlayStation 3! I'm having great fun, especially since GameStop is offering a "buy two get one free" deal on the used games, and there's a whole bunch of cool old games I can get for cheap. Some games are exclusive to each system, so there's a whole long list of games that I wanted to play but couldn't. Now I can, and I'm all crazy pleased about it.
What I'm NOT pleased about is the 3000-word economics paper I have to turn in tomorrow. I'm a raging progressive who doesn't buy into the "free market" nonsense that is the current "common wisdom", so taking a macroeconomics class is sort of difficult for me. I usually have to drink a few beers to do the writing assignments. For a big paper, I'm going to need more than a few beers. This is going to suck monkey nuts, since the only thing I can think of to write about that long is the lie that private industry is ALWAYS more effective and efficient than government.
My wife and I have been married for coming on six years, lived together for a year before that, and slept together for a year before that. That's eight full years sharing a bed, most of it in a huge-ass king sized bed, and most of it miserable. She complains about me stealing the covers, I complain about her crowding me and taking up most of the bed, and neither of us sleeping well. She winds up in the middle of the bed, and I wind up on the edge of the bed... even when we're taking naps separately.
Turns out, we were both SLEEPING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE BED!!!!
I discovered this last weekend, when my wife had to go into work and cover half of a late-night nursing shift(one of the downsides of being #1 nurse is the occasional fill-in spot. On the plus side, she makes double and then some whatever that regular nurse makes.) She was going to be very late, and rather than me go to bed and be woken up by her when she got home, or her having to sneak in with all the lights off and not be able to wind down before going to bed, I decided to get in the spare bedroom and shut the door. I got in the bed on the closer side to the door, and on what is normally my wife's side of the bed. Slept like a fucking baby, didn't wind up on the edge of the bed.
I wound up in there a few more times this week, when I woke up at 2-3 in the morning and couldn't get back to sleep. We talked about it, and figured we should maybe try switching sides. Just a couple of hours ago, my wife laid down for a short nap. She decided that now would be the time to switch. I walked in to wake her up, and she was completely on one side of the bed. Shocking!!! So just for shits and grins, I climbed in with her. Lo and behold! I was centered on my new side of the bed, instead of hugging the edge of the mattress.
I swear, it is a fucking miracle... and proof that even after a few years, there's still new stuff to figure out. Joy!
I have been on a crazy ramen kick the past two weeks. It started with my parents being here for my birthday, and my wife and I wanting to feel free to spend money we didn't have. The plan was to buy something cheap and simple to eat on days that I didn't feel like cooking dinner, instead of ordering pizza or eating out. I got ramen for me, and my wife volunteered to eat peanut better and jelly sandwiches. Saved us a ton of cash...
Then I decided to make a meal out of ramen. A real meal. So last night I got cooking. I fried up some chicken in Asian chili oil, added carrots and green beans and mushrooms and garlic. At the very end, I dumped in some of the ramen seasoning, the cooked noodles, and a handful of thin-sliced cabbage.
IT WAS AWESOME!!!!!!
More importantly, it taught me something important about cooking for my wife. She's not going to eat more than a tiny portion of anything I cook, no matter how good it is. I might as well make something cheap and flavorful, since she's not eating much of it anyways. I'm going to try cooking the next week or two with that in mind. She's getting appetizers for meals, in other words.
