My photo is Picture of the Day today at kodak.com! Go me!
research and writings at the crossroads of journalism, cultural anthropology, technology, and reading.
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Last night I was out until after 1.00am with a sick car. The complicating factor was it wasn’t my car… So here’s the situation, my parents went away for a weeks vacation and they left the keys to the brand new Porsche… wait, that’s someone else’s story. Mine goes something like this:
The Nissan 240Z
My close friend/martial arts instructor Mark has a hobby… collecting Z Cars. Mark has two of these cars so far: one that he wants to use for stock car rallies and the other a “parts” car. As part of getting the one car ready to rally, Mark needs to restore/fine tune the first car.
Yesterday, he had to go to Watertown NY to pick up a motor for the car that was coming down from Canada. There was no way that he was going to be able to fit it in his Jetta. So we arranged that we would swap cars for the day. He would use my Blazer to pick up and transport the motor, while I zipped around town in his Jetta. I enjoy borrowing the Jetta because it’s a stick shift and I don’t usually get the chance to drive them (I learned to drive on a powder blue VW Rabbit stick shift). So everything was right with the world. Mark was off picking up his motor. I was zipping around town. Then it happened…
I was returning from RIT at about 11.20pm after attending some *shudder* student plays there (the horror, the horror). All I wanted to do was go to bed. As I approached Highland Park, suddenly, the clutch went to the floor without any resistance and the Jetta was not shifting. I’ll translate this for those who are not wise in the way of stick: that’s bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad! After a lot of work I managed to get the car into first and trying to keep the tactometer as low as possible, managed to limp the car into the Highland Diner parking lot; all the while thinking: “Great… I killed Mark’s car.”
The next hour and a half was a very lonely time. I tried calling Mark, but it kept rolling into his voice mail. “Good” I thought, “that means there is someone home.” I left a message, a pathetic message what went something like this:
ahh… hi Mark, it’s Matt. Ummm… Got some bad news. Sorry. It looks like the clutch went on the Jetta. I got it into the Highland’s parking lot. Sorry. Give me a call back when you get a chance. Umm…. No I mean give me a call back as soon as you get this. Sorry ’bout this. I’ll be with the car. Talk to you later. I mean soon. Call me when you get this. Sorry about this. *click* — I tend to say sorry a lot. It’s a habit I try to break but can’t seem to do it. Sorry.
I refused to leave the car, in part because it was a long (though not undo-able) walk to my home and more importantly you just can’t abandon a friends car like that. So I sat there, trying to stay awake (I had no desire to spend the night in a Jetta in a parking lot), calling mark every five minutes only to continually get his voice mail. On the plus side I got some great sex tips from Love Lines and then heard the thrilling end of the World Series Game (thank God for Radio). By quarter to 1.00am I was really starting to wonder if I’d be there until morning. It was somewhere around that point that I did fall asleep only to me almost immediately awoken by my cell phone (which is far louder than I remembered it….). Any onlooker must have thought the guy in the Jetta was having a seizure when I jolted awake and did my best to answer the phone.
Mark took everything very well, he was over there within fifteen minutes. He inspected the clutch; we decided that >hopefully< the clutch cable had gone and it would be an easy fix. We stuck a note in the window saying he’d be back the next morning to have it towed and drove me home. Since the motor was to be dropped of at a shop today it was still in the back of my car. We decided that he should keep the Blazer to finish the “Motor Quest.” So this morning I’m without car and working from home. Still there is something strange about getting dropped off at your house by you car (or truck in this case) and then watch it drive away…
tonight…
We’re having a round of auditions for the plays I’ll be directing as part of the exact theatre company (I am planning on starting that blog one of these days). After that I think I’ll be going with friends to check out the martial arts silliness of “the one”.
tomorrow…
Henry Rollins baby! More to come on that…
It’s been a little while. It’s not that life has been super, super crazy, but I just haven’t had the time and/or energy to blog. But that’s over and I’m back to bloggin’. I just wish I had something to write. There is a bunch of stuff floating around my head, but nothing is quite ready yet to spring out onto the page.
Well there is Halloween. The handsome devil on the left is me in my conceptual costume “Mummy in Paradise” (sometimes also refered to as “Mummy on Vacation”). That’s about 200ft of muslin I’m wrapped in. I learned a lot about creating Mummy costumes. Like you really should secure the wrappings to the undergarment so halfway through the night you don’t become “Mummy with wrappings around his ankle.” Still the costume seemed to be a big hit at both Abby and Aaron’s Parties. I however decided to go with a more traditional vampire costume for the Kodak.com Halloween celebration.
In other news, my computer is sorta back up and running. Unfortunately I’m discovering that I threw out a bunch of install disks accidently, so I’m trying to scape together a bunch of installers. The other big news is this weekend I’ll not only be seeing Henry Rollins but I’ll also be purchasing a Turkey Fryer. More on both soon…
… I promise!…
…
It’s been a little while since my last entry. In part that’s because I haven’t felt like I had anything to say and in part that’s because things have been soooooo busy. This weekend along has been pretty manic. To start of with I took the GRE. As you might have read or heard, I’m looking to go to grad school and the GRE is the Grad equivalent of the SAT. My test was administered at a testing center on computer. The thing took just under four hours (bleh!) in a room that was far too warm for me to be wearing a sweater. The good part is that I got my scores immediately back. I didn’t do to badly (1780) but I discovered I had forgotten some basic math and managed to bomb (in my opinion at least) the verbal section of the test. That really infuriated me. I tend to consider that my strongest area. But the $#@^ test managed to ask me questions about words that I had never heard of, let alone knew. I’m seriously considering reading a dictionary cover to cover to shore up my vocabulary.
Friday night, Don (my Exect Theatre Co coconspirator) and I took in a play at UofR called Closer. Great set. Nice Blocking. But as for the play and performances… well… Great set. Nice Blocking. I can’t recommend this piece. We couldn’t tell if it was just a bad play or a bad interpretation. Probably a little of both. I ended up going out and getting a drink to wash the taste of the play out of my mouth,
Saturday morning I was up by 6.30am and driving out to the middle of no where. Actually Bath New York to be exact,; about an hour and half drive from Rochester. There, in the middle of woods and farm country, I took part in a all day intensive Kali workshop. Kali is a Filipino weapons based martial art that I have been involved with for years. We were working sticks, knives and other nasty things from 8.30am to 5.30pm. My arms and hand today are a little sore. My right palm has a burst blister protected by a Sesame St Band-Aid on it (I sorta like the juxtaposition [see GRE people I can correctly use big words!] of it). I got a huge amount out of the day. The workshop was running for another day (they’re most likely out there doing material as I write this), but I had to get back to town.
As soon as I got back I was out the door again (after a hot shower and change of clothes) to take in my former professor and good friend Peter playing as part of a Jazz Quartet. They sounded great! As of late Peter had been feeling that he might been losing his chops on the Clarinet. But he, and the folks he was playing with were really on. I was a wonderful way to cap off the day: sipping a good (though expensive) red wine, listening to a live performance of Honeysuckle Rose. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have had the second glass of wine as I nearly feel asleep during the third set.
This morning I woke up to discover that my ailing computer is in worse shape then I thought. As such I’m going to take radical steps: format the hard drive and reinstall everything. So if you don’t hear anything from me for a few more days, it’s just because I’m trying to get the computer up and running.
ders: this is going to be a short one. Both because I have only 5 minutes to post and because a certain person *chough*tina*cough* at lunch commented that I can only write long rambling blogs
If anyone in the Rochester area reading this has a “Gold #10” sticker from the Wegmans contest, let me know as I’ll be happy to split the $250,000 with you (as I’ve got #’s 7-9). My guess though is all the Gold 10’s ended up in the little known Wegmans in the middle of Bali.
Other than that, I’ve been sick. Now I’m feeling better. I went to Pittsburgh to see Di and check out CMU’s Interaction Design Program. I’m considering that or doing their one year HCI program + the one year interdisciplinary Social Sciences degree at University of Chicago (basically two degrees in half the time). That and I accidently cut myself demoing how to use a butterfly knife (I was borrowing one and the set up on this one was different than mine) last night at Kung Fu. There you go, everything in two paragraphs… :-)