So, I’m studying Dutch now, but I’ve studied French, German, and Spanish in the past. I’m trying to focus on Dutch, but the process that happens, when I get to something I don’t know or I’m more familiar with in another language, is that I grab the nearest not-English thing I can think of.

This leads to conversations with myself like:

Ich brauche….nee, dat is Duits… ik heb nodig de quelque chose… nee, dat is Frans… Ik studeerde depuis j’au eu negen jaar… wait. Shit. Start over.

Thankfully I didn’t study Latin for more than a single 12-week quarter, and that mostly for etymological curiosity than anything else, otherwise I’d be completely screwed. God, I wonder how real polyglots do it. I feel so grappig right now!

Here are the 2013 results.

Tue 31 Dec 2013 – Elbow, “One Day Like This”
Fri 20 Dec 2013 – Jonsi, “Go Do”
Wed 18 Dec 2013 – Pink Floyd, “Have a Cigar (remastered)”
Mon 16 Dec 2013 – Guus Meeuwis, “Het is een nacht”
Fri 13 Dec 2013 – Spandau Ballet, “True”
Sun 20 Oct 2013 – Kanye West, “All of the Lights, ft. Rihanna, Kid Cudi”
Fri 18 Oct 2013 – The Clash, “White Man in Hammersmith Palais (Live, Capitol Theatre, Passaic, NJ March 1980)”
Sun 13 Oct 2013 – Kid Cudi, “Immortal”
Mon 07 Oct 2013 – Everything Everything, “Don’t Try”
Sun 06 Oct 2013 – Johnny Stimson, “Human Man”
Wed 02 Oct 2013 – Kylie, “Your Disco Needs You”
Mon 30 Sep 2013 – Kid Cudi ft MGMT, “Pursuit of Happiness”
Fri 27 Sep 2013 – Bastille, “Pompeii”
Thu 15 Aug 2013 – Pixies, “Wave of Mutilation”
Tue 13 Aug 2013 – Bastille, “Things We Lost in the Fire”
Tue 13 Aug 2013 – Florence + the Machine, “Dog Days are Over (2010 version)”
Sun 11 Aug 2013 – Tiesto, “Century (feat. Calvin Harris)”
Tue 6 Aug 2013 – Everything Everything, “Duet”
Tue 30 Jul 2013 – Snow Patrol, “Called Out in the Dark”
Mon 29 Jul 2013 – The Vaccines, “Melody Calling (Audio)”
Sun 28 Jul 2013 – The Chemical Bros, “Block Rockin’ Beats”
Wed 24 Jul 2013 – Justin Timberlake, “Take Back the Night (Audio)”
Fri 19 Jul 2013 – REM, “It’s the End of the World”
Fri 19 Jul 2013 – Pet Shop Boys, “Love is a Bourgeois Construct (Audio)”
Sun 14 Jul 2013 – Elton John, “I’m Still Standing”
Thu 11 Jul 2013 – Janelle Monae, “Q.U.E.E.N.”
Wed 10 Jul 2013 – REM, “Stand”
Sun 7 Jul 2013 – Foals, “My Number”
Fri 5 Jul 2013 – Gogol Bordello, “American Wedding”
Fri 5 Jul 2013 – Beck, “Hell Yes”
Fri 5 Jul 2013 – Bastille, “Laura Palmer”
Thu 4 Jul 2013 – CHVRCHES, “Gun”
Mon 17 Jun 2013 – Kid Cudi, “Up Up and Away”
Mon 10 Jun 2013 – Fitz and the Tantrums, “Out of My League”
Sat 8 Jun 2013 – The Tragically Hip, “Poets”
Sat 1 Jun 2013 – Etienne Charry, “Je Tue le Temps”
Wed 29 May 2013 – Stromae, “Formidable”
Mon 20 May 2013 – Spitting Image, “Commons of House”
Sun 5 May 2013 – Arcade Fire, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”
Fri 3 May 2013 – Peter, Bjorn and John, “Amsterdam”
Wed 24 Apr 2013 – Ben Howard, “Call Me Maybe (Radio 1 Live Lounge)”
Mon 22 Apr 2013 – Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams, “Get Lucky”
Sat 20 Apr 2013 – Scissor Sisters, “Baby Come Home”
Wed 17 Apr 2013 – Greg James, “22 (parody)”
Thu 11 Apr 2013 – Example, “Kickstarts”
Tue 9 Apr 2013 – Foster the People, “Warrant (live)”
Sat 6 Apr 2013 – The Commodores, “Brick House”
Fri 5 Apr 2013 – Filter, “Take a Picture”
Mon 1 Apr 2013 – M83, “Reunion”
Sun 31 Mar 2013 – The Naked and Famous, “Young Blood”
Wed 27 Mar 2013 – Fitz and the Tantrums, “Moneygrabber”
Mon 25 Mar 2013 – Deadmau5 ft Kaskade, “I Remember”
Sat 23 Mar 2013 – Ke$ha, “Fuck Him (He’s a DJ)”
Thu 21 Mar 2013 – The Tragically Hip, “Bobcaygeon”
Tue 19 Mar 2013 – Steve Goodman, “Lincoln Park Pirates”
Sat 16 Mar 2013 – Kid Cudi, “Immortal”
Tue 12 Mar 2013 – Capital Children’s Choir, “Shake it Out”
Tue 5 Mar 2013 – Out of the Closet thrift shop, “(One Stop) Thrift Shop (parody)”
Tue 5 Mar 2013 – pomDeter, “Call me a Hole (mashup/parody)”
Wed 27 Feb 2013 – YACHT x ADHD, “Second Summer”
Wed 27 Feb 2013 – David Bowie, “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”
Sat 23 Feb 2013 – Kid Cudi ft MGMT, “Pursuit of Happiness”
Sat 23 Feb 2013 – Jane’s Addiction, “I Would for You”
Mon 11 Feb 2013 – Scissor Sisters, “Let’s Have a Kiki”
Sun 10 Feb 2013 – Bob Mould, “If I Can’t Change Your Mind (live)”
Sat 9 Feb 2013 – Basement Jaxx, “Red Alert”
Thu 7 Feb 2013 – Laura Mvula, “Green Garden”
Tue 5 Feb 2013 – Capital Children’s Choir, “Shake it Out”
Tue 5 Feb 2013 – HAIM, “Don’t Save Me”
Mon 28 Jan 2013 – Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, “Thrift Shop”
Sat 26 Jan 2013 – Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”
Mon 21 Jan 2013 – Elbow, “Grounds for Divorce (live acoustic)”
Tue 8 Jan 2013 – HAIM, “Don’t Save Me”
Tue 1 Jan 2013 – British Sea Power, “Carrion”

Curious to see what new (and beloved old) music 2014 will bring!

Screwing with my inner obsessive-compulsive. OH NOES! HALP ME!!!!

My response:

Whereas I feel like I’m going through life as an endless repetition of what happened to me just now when I went to go get coffee: I showed up at the coffee station, then realized someone had dumped water all over the floor, so before I got my coffee, I got a pile of paper towels and mopped up the giant puddle so no one slipped and fell, and meanwhile, someone I don’t even know came up and laughed at me for making a mess.

Happy Monday.

First, I found Luke 19:11-27, which I shall paraphrase for you:

So this guy, this nobleman, wants to be king, but he has to get permission from Emperor Daley first. So he plans to go off and get permission from the Central Kingship Authority to be king. Before he goes, he calls several of his slaves to him and gives them each ten bucks and says, “hey, go into business for yourself while I’m out, do something useful, make me some money.” And he goes off on the long trek to City Hall.
Meanwhile, the Committee for Not Being Ruled by Schmucks sends off letters of protest to the Central Kingship Authority, saying “hey, this guy’s a total schmuck, don’t make him the boss of us.”
Time passes, the Central Kingship Authority rubberstamps his application, and he comes home, ready to get his crown. But first he first calls a meeting with his slaves to get an accounting of what they did.
The first slave says, “Well, I bought some S&P 500 futures, and the market did spectacularly well, so my ten bucks earned back a hundred more.” “Excellent,” says the king. “You get to rule over ten towns, one for each time you made ten bucks.”
The second slave says, “Well, I invested in bonds, and they made fifty bucks.” “Nice job,” says the king, “you get five towns.”
The third slave says, “well, honestly, Your Highness, you’re kind of a schmuck, you’re well known for taking things you didn’t earn, and I was worried what you would do to us, so I just put the ten bucks in a safe-deposit box.” The king goes, “that was clearly faithless of you, so go give the first slave your ten bucks, so now you have nothing, and you’re not getting any towns.”

Now, the king in this story is of course Jesus, who had to go run some errands, as you know, and the third slave represents the Jews, who are being punished for not believing in the messiah.

But the parable ends with the third slave and the Committee for Not Being Ruled by Schmucks being totally right, because the king goes on to conclude, “I tell you, that to everyone who has, more will be given; and from the one who does not have, even what he does have will be taken away.” And furthermore, “But bring here these enemies of mine, who did not want me to rule over them, and slaughter them in my presence.”

So that’s nice. Ripping off the poor and slaughtering your enemies, always a good time. Way to turn the other cheek, Jesus!

But lest I be accused of unfairly singling out a single religion, let me relate a Buddhist parable also.

So there’s this guy, we’ll call him Fred, who lives in a hut in the woods, and worships fire. Life is good for Fred, so long as the fire keeps burning.
One day a bunch of hippie protestors show up in the forest near his hut and have a protest, like they do, and then they all go back home at the end of the day. Fred goes over to where the protests were to see what sort of mess they left. He finds an abandoned boy alone in the clearing, and he thinks to himself, “well, I can’t just leave this kid here alone, i’d be a real shithead to let him die of exposure when I could save him.”
So Fred takes the boy home, feeds him, and raises him. Life is good for Fred and the kid. Until one day Fred runs out of coffee, and has to go to town to go grocery shopping. He says to the kid, “ok, all I need you to do when I’m out is watch the fire and tend it and make sure it doesn’t go out. If it does go out, no big, just light it again – here’s a hatchet, and some sticks and a fire-drill. See ya in a while.” And he takes off.
The kid does what kids do, building forts in the woods and pretending to play cowboys and Indians, and stuff, and he doesn’t pay attention to the fire, and the fire goes out. When he realizes it, the kid goes “crap! This was my only responsibility. Well, maybe I can relight it.”
So he takes the hatchet, and the twigs, and the fire drill, and looks at them. And he takes the hatchet and chops the fire-drill up, saying “maybe this will light the fire!” But sadly, no. He keeps chopping… reduces it to a hundred pieces… still no fire. he pounds the pieces in a mortar… no fire. He winnows them… still no fire. He hasn’t given up, but he just can’t seem to figure out fire.
And now Fred comes home, and he goes, “oh, the fire went out while i was away?” The kid goes, “yes, I’m sorry, I was playing, the fire went out. I’ve been trying and trying but I just can’t get it rekindled.”
Fred thinks to himself, “how foolish this boy is!” and picks up a fire-drill, and says to him, “This, my son, is the way to produce fire; not as you, a foolish, short-sighted boy, tried to produce it, by seeking otherwise than in the right way.”

The lesson there is supposed to be that any time you go about trying to do something any way other than the right way, you’re being a bonehead. But it seems to me that Fred was the bonehead, because he’s the dumbass that didn’t tell the kid how to kindle a fire in the first place. Or maybe Fred’s just an MBA, I dunno.

Maybe Jesus was an MBA too. That would explain the the hookers.

…

And that is pretty much why I fail at religion forever.

That’s why, in 1991 I finally got contacts — after years of begging — and they were and remain the greatest thing since sliced bread. My eyes are seriously, seriously bad — without glasses or contacts, if I hold up my hand in front of my face, I can only focus when it’s about three to four inches away. I’m okay at navigating without corrective lenses; I can see shapes and colors. One time I made it home on the L without any vision correction after a friend forgetfully dumped the glass holding my contacts down the drain, when he went to go get a midnight drink when I was crashed at his place for the night. That said… life is better in focus than not.

So I have pretty coke-bottle glasses. Even with today’s super thin lenses, which are light-years better than 80s nasty coke-bottle lenses, they’re still about 9mm thick at the edges. And this leads to massive color distortion when I look through them at any angle other than straight on. Usually it leads to splitting red and blue out, which is kind of weird, which is one of the many, many fine reasons I pretty much won’t wear my glasses outside of just after taking the contacts out before bed, and right before putting them in after I wake up. But I’ve got them on right now, because I’m getting ready for bed, and I happened to glance sideways out the window, and — I kind of wish I could take a photo to post for you guys.

See, the Sears Tower spires are lit up in bright pink, for Save the Boobies month, and when my glasses split the red and blue on the spires, they become salmon, with these really super-cool glowing indigo blue shadow twin spires right to their side. It’s so cool I keep looking sideways through my glasses just to look at it. I really wish I could take a picture, but the science of lenses to do that color split with a camera is way beyond my poor little point-and-shoot. But trust me, it’s really, really neat looking.

That said, though… I’ll be back to wearing contacts tomorrow. Cool is one thing, but, seriously, the fogging up in cold weather thing? Not cool.

In April, I got a thank you: the florists who actually handled the flowers that I ordered sent me a postcard with a thank you on it, signed by the shop staff.

I’ve had that postcard on my fridge, through all my apartments to the present, since then. It’s sort of been a little reminder that sometimes, happy things happen.

So, this past Wednesday, six years and a few months after the 2004 shindig and its subsequent reversal and annulment of all marriages thus performed, and a few years past when the state of California started allowing gay marriage after a judicial decision that was later hamstrung by an amendment to the state Constitution, the US District Court for Northern California issued a ruling on Perry v. Schwarzenegger. That case was a challenge to the constitutional amendment, popularly known as “Prop 8,” which restricted marriage to only between a man and a woman, which passed in the 2008 election.

Ordinarily I could care less about California state politics, on account of I don’t live there and never intend to do so, and also because California is probably going to fall into the ocean any day now under the weight of all its wacky hijinks, but of course gay marriage is one of my personal political issues that I care deeply about, and this ruling has ramifications for the entire nation. As for why I find marriage equality to be necessary, not just “civil unions,” see Project 1138: 1,138 benefits and protections afforded to “married” citizens by the government of the United States, as reported by the General Accounting Office (GAO). So I paid attention, and naturally I was dead chuffed that it was decided in favor of my side of the argument, which is that insofar as the government recognizes marriages, it is required under the law to be equally available to people whether they wish to marry a person of the opposite or the same gender.

(I’ll acknowledge the libertarian contracts-for-everything-wheeee! viewpoint here by noting that the government has the option of simply de-coupling all its marriage-conferred privileges and responsibilities from the category of marriage; i.e., stop recognizing “marriages” and treat people as individuals and treat contract-bound entities as entities regardless of the name slapped on the contract. I don’t really have a horse in that race, but I’ll note that I prefer recognition of marriage because it’s a convenient shorthand that everyone recognizes, no one is seriously going to start introducing themselves with “Hi, I’m Sally, and this is my governmentally-recognized legal partner, Joe,” and a $25 marriage license doesn’t put an undue financial burden on individuals to obtain the contract rights that hiring a private lawyer to draw up documents does. But anyways.)

I’m not a lawyer, or a law student, or a constitutional expert, or even an unpaid intern for any of the preceding. I’m just an armchair hobbyist who reads lots of things for fun. But here’s my reasoning as to why I’m pleased with Perry v. Schwarzenegger in three short bullet points:

1. Amendment XIV to the Constitution of the United States reads, in part, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
2. The Prop 8 amendment to California’s constitution makes a distinction between two classes of citizen, on the basis of an immutable and irrelevant personal characteristic, and denies privileges based on this distinction.
3. This amendment loses the slapfight between state and federal constitutions, and it can therefore fuck right off.

I do find the examination sort of entertaining. Rather than applying strict scrutiny, henceforth referred to as “the hard one,” the judge found that prop 8 fails even a rational basis examination, “the easy one,” where you have to find that there’s a rational reason behind the law. It’s like, I don’t have to prove that you can’t run a marathon, because you can’t even tie your running shoes without falling over. Walker said, “As presently explained in detail, the Equal Protection Clause renders Proposition 8 unconstitutional under any standard of review. Accordingly, the court need not address the question whether laws classifying on the basis of sexual orientation should be subject to a heightened standard of review.” I will use my vast and encompassing command of legalese to translate for you: “Dudes, I didn’t even have to try hard to find the fault with your argument, it was right there in big blinking letters. Great big pink blinking homo letters with glitter on, as a matter of fact. Try harder next time. Love, Judge Walker.”

I sent some strangers flowers to celebrate their wedding in 2004, and here’s hoping that soon, they finally get to really enjoy them, with love from Chicago.