I’m a Ghost
It’s my last day at my job; my last two days in Cincinnati. I hate this feeling. It’s like being a ghost. I’m already gone. Plans are going ahead without me. It feels sort of…thin.
Opportunities
I Went Back to Ohio
I was born in Sandusky, Ohio in December of 1967. I have no memory of life on the shores of Lake Erie beyond a fuzzy image of a a small, brown, single story house on a snowy street and, maybe, another snapshot vision of looking out a frosty window down a hilly street. After moving to Missouri the next year, Kansas a couple of years after that, Oregon when I was in second grade, Seattle in my 20s and a year in Nairobi, I never thought I’d see Ohio again.
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Protest Movie Inexplicably Sets Attendance Record
In an absolutely shocking development, Michael Moore’s latest documentarian assault on corporate and governmental greed and dishonesty saw it’s opening weekend attendance boosted by the tight-lipped crusade against it’s release. Oddly, the attack by a transparently dogmatic and partisan group, against a transparently dogmatic and partisan filmmaker, backfired and resulted in record attendance for a documentary and the highest showing for any movie this weekend. Surprising, after it worked so well with Mel Gibson’s movie!
The success of “Farenheit 9/11” certainly came as a huge shock to the makers and distributors of it’s competition – “White Chicks” and “Garfield” – who were expecting a larger turnout following the intense pre-release excitement surrounding their movies. “I don’t understand it. Garfield is so popular. I remember when I was in Junior High in 1980…I just couldn’t get enough of Garfield,” Pete Hewitt, director of “Garfield,” definitely did not say. “And we got Jennifer Love Hewitt,” the director continued to whine, “Everybody loves J-Lo. Don’t they? Don’t they?”
John Blofeld, a guy walking down the street in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, said of “White Girls”: “I just don’t get it. How could that offensive, ill-informed piece of political trash beat out a comedy about two black guys dressing up like white girls? The world just doesn’t make sense any more.”
After a whithering piece by Christopher Hitchens (Slate), and the public relations onslaught put on by freakishly tight-assed christian groups across the country, how anybody saw their way clear to dropping the 8 bones to watch this movie is also beyond the imagining of school marm Francis Fornofsky of Homer, Michigan. “It’s a mystery to me. I mean, who in their right mind would want to see something so controversial? Not me, I assure you,” scolded Fornofsky through (of course) pursed lips.
When Hitchens (Formerly of “The Nation,” nice liberal turned pro-war hawk) reduces Moore’s film to a quivering mass that by all rights owes us all very sincere apology, we all must look deep within to try and discover what it is that drives us to subject ourselves to such self-flaggelating (so-called) entertainment.
“To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.”
Well, it’s a good thing that he didn’t call is “dishonest and demogogic,” or “a piece of crap.” I mean, really…after reading that, who would want to see the film? You? I think not.
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All Geeked Out With No Place To Go
Apparently, faced with the possibility of a whole month of leisure after the big move, I’ve decided that I’ll be watching some TV. It all started when Julie and I sold our house and decided to each splurge on a gift for ourselves. Julie chose a chocolate temperer. Good choice.
I picked a ReplayTV. It’s the same thing as a Tivo, but infinitely more hackable. So far, in the two weeks since I bought it, I have:
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Can a Career Rock?
In exactly one week, we will pack up the last of our belongings and depart Cincinnati for the familial ties (and hopeful support that those ties will bring) of “The D.C. Area.” This is not to say that Julie and I are taking the kids to D.C., but “The D.C. Area” conveys more urban hipness and adventureous spirit than does “Suburban Maryland” which is where we’re really moving. Oh yeah, and we’re moving in with her parents.
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Prescribed, meet proscribed (the scribe)
The adventure of a lifetime…my first experience with legitimately prescribed stimulants.
I’m still not sure if this methylphenidate stuff is doing the trick but I’m riding it out. I started at 5mg in the morning and 5mg around lunch and graduated after four days to 10mg each. In a week or so Ill up to 15mg and well see whats what. I’m still trying to detect what, if anything, these little green pills are doing.
I think that I occasionally feel “stimulated” but havent noticed anything out of hand. I think that Ive been more able to focus – or at least to not procrastinate quite as much – but its hard to say. My experiences with drugs (back in high school mostly) were along the lines of: “take some and wait a half hour. If you have even the slightest feeling that reality has not been completely obliterated, take more. Wait another half hour and repeat if necessary. Oh heck, why wait a half hour, just take it all…youre young.”
So that’s where it gets strange for me.
I’m taking a controlled substance EXACTLY as it was prescribed by my doctor. I went in and was totally honest about my symptoms, I took a battery of tests (WAIS and some other ADD and memory specific tests), and this is what has been determined: I’ve got Attention Deficit Disorder.
What I’ve learned about this condition would tend to explain a lot of the trouble I had in school before I wised up enough to drop out. But then so would being completely bored and more interested in life as a rock star than re-writing an English essay.
Its hard to say, I’m not totally convinced that I have ADD, but somethin has to explain the cotton-eating weevils (see previous entry). Furthermore, I’m not totally convinced that, if I do have ADD, this medicine will do anything for me. I’m willing to give it a shot though. Ill let you know how it works out for me.