frazzle rock

i just wrote a friend to tell him i am feeling “frazzled, stressed and angry today,” and i wasn’t kidding.

yesterday’s visit to the oral surgeon prompted me to make sure my blood sugar was where it should be — i once again had fallen off the regular testing wagon, and was pretty horrified to find my fasting blood sugar this morning was 171. i tested it again to be sure (because the test strip crumpled a bit when i put it in the first time), and it was 182. no one to blame but myself, but i need my fasting numbers to be in the range of 90-110, and 182 is way too close to 200 for my comfort. i need to stay on the wagon when it comes to testing every day, and i guess outing my bad habits here is one way of trying to make that happen.

the other stress comes from the fact that i took yesterday off from work to deal with my dental issues, and coming in this morning, it seemed like i had four times the usual amount of work to do. not only did no one take care of anything in my absence, but people seem determined to misunderstand or outright screw up the simplest matters today, and it’s made for a very aggravating and exasperating first half of the day.

hi, anxiety!

just back from the oral surgeon, my initial consulation. man, was my blood pressure through the roof. i sure did not want to be there.

i’ll be sedated for my two extractions on september 4th. insurance will cover 90 percent of the cost, thankfully. we’re profoundly lucky to have the dental insurance we do, and don’t think for a minute i don’t know it. without it this would cost over a thousand dollars, which means it likely would not get done at all.

haven’t been sedated since i had my tonsils out when i was six. should be interesting.

snychronicity

last night i made some popcorn and watched a little bit of jaws, which i had recorded in hd on the dvr. i hadn’t seen the movie since it first came out (I was 8 or 9, i think, and it scared the hell out of me), and i was pleasantly surprised how well it held up.

while i was watching it, my wife decided to get out the weed wacker and do some weed wacking outside while the sun was still up and the humidity was low.

when i saw her fiddling with the window in the laundry room, i mentioned that she should run the power cord from somewhere else, because i have heard the buzzing of wasps in that window when i do laundry, and i figured leaving that window alone was a good idea.

if you’ve seen jaws, you know that roy scheider’s character warns everybody to stay out of the water, and nobody listens and bad things happen.

i couldn’t help but note the synchronicity of those scenes with the results of my wife’s insect-disturbing window-fiddling.

she got stung twice, and apparently had to kill dozens of the little bastards once they got het up and went on the attack.

and my daughter just discovered one in the living room window. i wonder if today will be jaws 2.

and so this was saturday

had a great day today, despite the worsening soreness of my broken tooth (seeing an oral surgeon thursday of next week, not a minute too soon). the whole family went to saratoga springs, where i arranged for the custom framing of a justice league lithograph i got a few weeks ago. the guys at ac moore spent a good amount of time letting us compare moldings and mattes to get the look just right, and although i nearly had a  heart attack at the initial cost estimate (just shy of 900 freaking dollars), eventually deciding on a cheaper but still nice looking molding and a lower quality but still uv-resistant glass brought it down to about 245 bucks. i had hoped to frame this piece for 200, so considering the original 900 dollar estimate, i felt pretty okay about the 245 figure.

afterward we had pizza and ice cream outside; this was the nicest day of the summer with temps comfortably in the 70s and non-existent humidity. the boy got some star wars action figures (yes, more, including the coveted general grievous), the girl and i both got some art supplies and my wife got to keep most of the money she made today at her part-time job, since i felt so guilty about spending 245 bucks on framing that i coughed up for dinner and dessert…

all in all, weather- and together-wise, one of the nicest days we’ve all had as a family since i don’t know when.

currently listening to 2

sun kil moon, april

currently listening to

kate bush, hounds of love.

and so this is thursday

man, i cannot get my brain started this morning. i have felt sleepy and disconnected since i woke up this morning. stopped on the way to work and got a diet mountain dew in the hopes that caffeine would spark a few synapses, but i still feel like i could crawl under my desk and take a nap for about 10 hours.

today is the day our pseudo-intern comes in to help out at the radio station. two great anecdotes about him:

1. when quizzing him on history once, i asked him to name three presidents named george. his answers were “george washington,” “george bush,” and “george hamilton,” thankfully in that exact order.

2. when telling me about a sexy college girl from macedonia that he works with at a summer resort north of here, he said despite coming from macedonia, “she speaks decently english.”

i have more funny things he’s said, but more than two seems like it would be piling on.

and so this is wednesday

chloe in january 2006

wife was sleeping as i went about my morning routine and got ready for work this morning. she said the cat woke her up about 11:30 yesterday morning, probably because she’s almost always awake by 11 and the cat gets lonely for attention, although she always determines exactly how much of it she will accept once she starts getting it.

chloe’s a funny cat, to me. i’ve had cats that were completely standoffish and ice-cold at all times, clearly only accepting human contact as a necessary evil; and i once had a cat, spot, that was as open and affectionate as any dog could ever be. he’s been gone 14 years now, and i still miss his companionship and affection every day of my life.

but chloe is right in the middle, definitely enjoying human contact and wanting to be near one of us in the house at almost all times. but she doesn’t much like to be picked up, and will put up with being petted only for very limited amounts of time. the kids haven’t always understood that, being kids, but they’re older now and i think for the most part i think everyone in the house respects the cat’s rather mercurial approach to being a part of the family.

damn, almost full up

i have about 210 mb left on my 4 gb mp3 player. got about 550 songs on it so far, so figure i can get maybe 600 max on it, keeping in mind i try to get as many 320k mp3s as possible for the best sound quality.

i broke down and added some of my favourite but more mainstream bands, picking and choosing songs by inxs, u2, fleetwood mac, the who and like that. for now i’m happy just listening to everything on shuffle, but i am sure sooner or later i’ll want to delete most or all of what i have on there and reorganize everything in some other manner…

shuffling my teeth

a co-worker called me “chickenshit” for doing so, but i rescheduled my oral surgery appointment that was supposed to be thursday. it hit me that that appointment was to talk about a root canal that i don’t think i want done; i have another appointment with another oral surgeon/dentist/podiatrist/whatever the hell they are next week to talk about extracting the other bad tooth (which definitely can’t be saved), and i’ve decided to talk to him first about whether i should just have both teeth pulled. i want this to be over as quickly and with as little inconvenience as possible, and if i kept that original appointment this week i’d likely get bogged down in multiple procedures that ultimately would fail anyway, because that’s just how my teeth roll.

my writing about my teeth here, by the way, is my attempt to get past my crippling dental phobia by finally bringing it out into the open. i apologize if you’re anything at all like me, but if you are, chances are you’re not even reading these posts once you realize they’re about teeth.

and so this is tuesday

my wife is working a godawful 12-hour shift every day this week, so i’m taking the car to work while she catches up on whatever sleep the kids and cat let her get this morning. i was awake by 6:30, had breakfast and was way too early to go to work, so i stopped by wal-mart.

i know, i need to rein in this ridiculous spending — and i did, i didn’t spend a dime there — but the boy laid a minor guilt trip on me when he saw that i, too had gotten an mp3 player and he still is without. oh, the problems of consumerist america. i swear, it’s usually not like this in my house. again, i blame dentistry. see below.

general grievous

anyway, i wanted to see if wal-mart could match or beat the $15.00-after-rebate price on a 1 gb mp3 player like the one we got my daughter the other day. turns out they couldn’t, the cheapest seemed to be in the $35.00 range, which made not buying one at wal-mart easy as pie.

i did check out the star wars action figures because he’s let me know which other characters he wants, including luke as a jedi (black outfit, robot hand) and general grievous. and damn if they didn’t have both. but reason prevailed as i realized this would be the third consecutive day i bought star wars action figures. which is just nuts. but now i know where they have him when i do decide to break down again, anyway.

they also had a wal-mart exclusive display of “droid factory” two-packs, almost all of which had characters i am pretty sure he would be happy to have, like darth vader and that aggravating guy from episode one: the phantom menace. no, not jar jar, the aggravating guy who flies and is immune to the force. i am so happy i don’t remember his name, i can’t even tell you.

plus 6 is 69, ha ha, ha

wordpress assures me this blog received 63 visitors on monday, a record high number of visitors since i started it…the day before. wordpress also assures me it does not count my own visits to the blog, which are for the purposes of making sure everything looks right and reminding myself that i just do not have enough blogs.

i find wordpress’s assurances strangely…assuring, as if i can trust in their statistics because they look so web 2.0. i just wish their magickal blogworks could have rounded the edges of the image i used for the logo, the way it looked when it was just a big blotch of colour in the template.

the scales fall from my eyes like saul on the road to damascus

i was listening to a song while scrolling through the four pictures i had downloaded onto the mp3 player, when the thing froze up. totally. i remembered my friend chris telling me how his ipod would periodically turn up totally empty, and he traded it in i think twice before his complaints subsided, and i totally panicked when i could not get the damned thing to do anything. i tried hooking it up to the computer via usb port, in hopes it would unfreeze, but it didn’t even show up as a drive on my computer.

desperate, i took a lancet from my diabetic test kit and poked the teeny tiny little hole designed to “reset” the player. i feared/assumed this would return all factory settings to their original point and delete all my stuff, but no, it just shut off and then i could turn it back on and everything was fine.

no more picture-browsing while listening to music.

the image with this post is one of the pics i put on it, for larfs. i always say if i ever get a tattoo, this is what it will look like. one of the others is the full version of the van gogh painting that i used in creating the logo at the top of this blog.

which reminds me, i hate it when people use the word “blog” to mean “individual blog post.” it’s like saying “paragraph,” when you mean “book.”

my medicine by snoop dogg

first song specifically downloaded to put on the new player. in case you were wondering. sorry to obsess.

the music, it is loaded

for some reason i couldn’t bring myself to port over anything in the “classic rock” folder of my hard drive to the new mp3 player, even though i dearly love the beatles and u2. my folder divisions would baffle anybody, though — when i first split everything up by genre i had thought “alternative rock” and “classic rock” would be enough, but i ended up with folders for rap, country and jazz as well, even if those are sparsely populated by comparison to “the big two.”

setting up the folders and such was a breeze, and navigating my way around the mp3 players seems quite easy. my biggest fear, honestly, is that i am going to drop or otherwise damage this tiny little thing. But, so far, so good.

pondering music

so i’m thinking about what to load on my mp3 player when i can get to my home computer this evening. my taste in music is similar to my taste in comics, in that i crave what’s new and what’s next, so i think it will mostly be alternative rock of recent vintage plus forward-looking bands of recent decades like talking heads. for some reason talking heads music always works for me. i have 60 gigs of music to sift through to get onto a 4 gig player, so it should be an enlightening process of selecting what makes the cut. i think playlists of various artists rather than entire albums will be the way to go…i don’t have the patience to listen all the way through to most albums anymore. probably want to get some police on there; they were in town last week, and i recently flipped through a 2007 art book of photos from their glory days, and i definitely want to spend some time re-engaging with what was my favourite band 25 years ago.

bleeding cash like a stuck pig

i have spent a lot of money the past few days, on my mp3 player, action figures and a video game for the boy, shopping money for my daughter, books, it really hit me today that i have been spending, as mom would have said, “like a drunken sailor on leave.” and once again, i lay it all at the doorstep of my impending dental work. i think it’s all been to distract myself from the horrors to come. thank god for sedation dentistry.

my mp3 player is fully charged

i don’t think it took five hours like it said in the manual, either.

i won’t know for certain what I think until i get it fully loaded with music and spend some time with it, but the menus seem pretty intuitive, and i like that it also has a radio and stores images and a few other features i wasn’t expecting. it’s like a little 4 gb computer, which funnily enough is 12 times the harddrive space of my first desktop computer circa 1999.

oh, man, i might not have enough money for the oral surgery

i stopped in to target on the way to work and bought my own mp3 player, as threatened in the earlier post. it’s a phillips gogear 4gb audio/video player. lucky i opened it right away, because it takes five hours to charge. but the kind of cool thing is it charges through the usb connection to my computer, rather than taking batteries.

if i had to guess, i’d say that buying a comforting, unnecessary object like this is preventative palliative therapy in anticipation of this week’s oral surgery. i mean, sojourn.

it’s funny how my brain works

for weeks, i could relax firm in the knowledge that my first visit to the oral surgeon to fix my two bad teeth were weeks away. just three days ago, i could relax firm in the knowledge that it was “next week.” now it’s this week and panic is setting in. first visit is thursday. this week.

as i said to lora the other day, paraphrasing bender from futurama, “i hate my teeth and they hate me.”

well, shit

my wife had promised our daughter an mp3 player if she passed 9th grade with no failing grades on her report card, and today lora and i went and bought one for her. now, it’s not an ipod — i wouldn‘t buy anything with digital rights management involved, ever. if you want to know why, look at how yahoo recently screwed, well, everybody who ever bought a drm-infected song from them. so we bought a fairly cheap, no-name brand one (that’s actually a picture of it to the right, there) that has no drm and as a bonus had a rebate that means it ultimately cost only fifteen bucks.

now, it only holds a gigabyte of music, but that will be more than enough to get her started on a lifetime of mp3 addiction, and if she really needs an upgrade someday, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

the “well, shit” title of this post comes from the fact that i just downloaded every song on my computer that i thought was up her alley (i.e., either emo or gay-friendly or both, plus some james kochalka, colin clary and a lot of other stuff), and while she’s out of the house briefly with her mom, i plugged in the earbuds to see what it sounds like.

hmm. well, shit. sounds like i need one too.

eggplant parm at 3 AM

went to bed around 8 after having a couple of adult beverages with dinner; that always makes me sleepy. awoke a short time ago starving and made a sandwich out of my daughter’s leftover eggplant parm from dinner. wife did the grocery shopping while i slept. nodded off after reading The Fart Party by julia wertz which is totally and completely awesome. new word for asses: “turd cutter.” there’s my $13.95 worth of fun right there.

now it’s 3 in the morning and everyone is asleep but me. no idea what lies ahead for sunday but i shall doubtless dick around on the internet for a bit and then fall asleep.

and so this is saturday

wife making pancakes. i have to jump in the shower. then after breakfast, i have to drive her to her saturday job up north, and then the day is mine. “carpe diem,” i almost certainly shall not do. but maybe i’ll be inspired…

argh, daughter is up too early. she’s watching some loud, obnoxious thing on tv. it has talking french fries that just said they updated their myspace page. i never update my myspace page.

in bed by 8, awake by midnight

had to pee, yes, but also my tooth was vexing me. i wonder if tim made it to the police concert. checked cell-phone voicemail, no message. that might be a good thing; usually if he has a nightmare time of it, he calls and leaves a bitter play by play.

discovering it is easier for me to touch-type using only lower-case letters. that is very interesting to me and reason alone to continue this experiment. i never learned to type, you see.

i’m well into the civil war in my re-read of howard zinn’s a people’s history of the united states and am a bit horrified about how little i knew/remembered from my earlier read, of how reluctant lincoln was to free the slaves. the history of the united states as it is commonly perceived is nothing but lies and golden-hued public relations, but damn, lincoln was all about saving the union and said right out loud that if keeping blacks in slavery accomplished that goal, then he was all for it. zinn provides numerous examples, in lincoln’s own words, of his weakness on the issue. given how mightily we are told that he was a hero of the emancipation, damn, his actual words on the subject of slavery literally made me a little sick.

zinn’s book is a national treasure, a second opinion on the history and health of our nation, and it ought to be required reading, on an annual basis, of every man, woman and child in the country. reading it makes the machinations of war criminals like bush, cheney, rove and the rest seem altogether transparent and subpoena-worthy.

the weekend before me

my friend tim is in saratoga springs tonight at the police and elvis costello concert. i think i would have enjoyed the show, and he even half-invited me a few days ago, but damn i am curmudgeonly and resistant to changes in routine at the ripe old age of 42.

every weekend seems pregnant with possibility until it arrives; by 6:30 friday evening i have usually had a botched abortion. this feels like one of those weekends.

i have some good stuff in my reading pile, at least there’s that. but one of my two bad teeth is increasingly aggravating and i can’t stop fucking with it with my tongue. we’re so close to just being animals, it’s not even funny.

me and my miserable life

well, it isn ‘t always miserable. but sometimes it is, and since i currently in need of not one but two oral surgeries, let’s just say i’m not not miserable, okay?

i don’t want this blog to be about comics. i don’t want it to be about writing. or james kochalka. or any of the other subjects i have blogged about in the past or am currently blogging about. just sort of, me and where i’m at now and what the hell is going on. all in lower case, because i figure it will save me time, although maybe not because i keep making my first-person “i” upper-case.

another reason i want to give this a shot, is that i have never gotten comfortable with wordpress, and in fact had one disastrous experience with it about four years ago, when we tried to convert comic book galaxy to wordpress and let’s just say it didn’t work out, mostly because of my own lack of knowledge and fear of destroying a half-decade worth of archives.