Driving back to work today after my lunch hour, I was flipped off by another driver on the expressway.
It was a “soccer man”. In a minivan. With said minivan filled to the brim with children. None of them in car seats. A couple should have been.
Apparently she didn’t like the fact that I was passing her on the right because she was needlessly in the left lane.
She was setting such a fine example.
During my last air shift on Top 40 radio back in 2001, I made the radio station I worked for my personal jukebox for an hour and played the “J.P. Top 10”, my Top 10 favorite dance tracks of all time. Unfortunately, I’ve since lost the list. However, as I was driving back from lunch today, I began formulating my Top 5 favorite dance tracks of all time, updated for 2005. I thought I would share.
1. “Remember”, B.T. feat. Jan Johnston, 1996.
2. “I Can’t Wait”, Nu Shooz, 1986.
3. “Save Me”, Lisa Fischer, 1991.
4. “Get Up, Stand Up”, Stellar Project, 2004.
5. “Coming Out Of Hiding”, Pamala Stanley, 1980.
Surpisingly, there’s only one relatively new song in the Top 5 now with Stellar Project bumping out Exposé’s 1987 hit “Point of No Return”. Oh, what the heck, I’ll list the bottom half of the Top 10 as well. Note I can’t make up my mind about number 9, so it’s a tie.
6. “Point Of No Return”, Exposé, 1987. (The version with Jeanette Jurado on the leads, not the original)
7. “Come Rain, Come Shine”, Jenn Cuneta, 2005.
8. “Vogue (unreleased Ultimix remix)”, Madonna, 1990. (“But how do you know about an unreleased remix?”, says the crowd.)
9. “Don’t Make Me Wait”, Loveland feat. Rachel MacFarlane, 1995.
9. “I’m Gonna Luv U”, Summer Junkies, 1997.
10. “Heart Like A Wheel”, The Human League, 1990.
In all honesty, it’s difficult to restrict my favorite tunes to a Top 10 list, but these are definitely the top 10 that I would never become bored with. I’d provide links to mp3 files of these songs but the RIAA or some other acronym happy group would probably sue me for a couple of million.
I spent most of the night last night doing my on-call duties. I tried to take several catnaps in between the phone calls to, well, a really big, disorganized telephone company that rhymes with Horizon. But several catnaps joined together do not equal one good night of sleep. Thank goodness tonight is the last night of on-call for the next week and a half!
Quick bursts of sleep in the middle of the night are quite fascinating. With each successive catnap, I find that my dreams get more and more vivid. Then they just start getting weird. The final dream last night involved my calling Earl out onto the back deck to watch the new space shuttle land (three times as big as the old one with big bay windows on the side) at the local Air Force Base. We watched it fly over the house. We waved at the astronauts. The dream was in vivid technicolor. I was amused when I awoke. I don’t know where the heck that dream came from but it was the second space shuttle related dream I’ve had this week, the first being that Earl and I went to watch a space shuttle launch in Florida that was subsequently aborted during lift-off. To abort, the astronauts threw it in reverse and landed back on the launch pad. There were even backup lights on the back of the space shuttle. I have no idea what this all means.
Perhaps I’m reading too many sci-fi stories again.
I can’t believe that today I’m reading another news article about a fatal school shooting in our country. My thoughts are with the family of those affected at the small school in Tennessee.
What has happened to our schools? If any place should be safe for children outside of the home, it’s their school. This didn’t happen at a big, crowded school in a seedy neighborhood in a large city. No, this shooting took place at a relatively rural area of Tennessee. What is going on?
I graduated from school almost 20 years ago and I know much has changed during that time. Students have access to more information than ever before, via the internet, cell phones, instant messenger, all of it. Heck, as a student I was very excited when the school received 30 donated televisions, all black and white, so that we could have a “multimedia” experience in the classroom. The most violent video game that I remember from my teenage years was maybe Frogger and that was because the large pixels on the screen that vaguely resembled a frog went “splat” when a vaguely shaped truck ran over it. Today there’s video games featuring a huge amount of violence including drive by shootings, rapes, robbery… is this really necessary?
Sometimes I wonder if not much has changed after all. Maybe I was sheltered. Perhaps I never had access to violent games, movies, etc. of my generation so that’s why I never had the urge to shoot anyone at school. If that’s the case, then that’s just more testimony to the fact that my parents did a great job raising my sister and I.
In the past, I’ve joked that school violence can be blamed on photocopiers. With the departure of the old “ditto machines” (remember handouts with purple ink?), teachers and students are no longer getting high on the fumes. Bring back the ditto machines!
If it were only that simple.
Sometimes you just need a little sunshine at lunch time to get you back in your groove.
Earl is on his way home from his business trip. Work is going well. I have many friends. I have a wonderful family. It’s all good.
Here are the lyrics to a great song. I find this track to be quite “crank worthy”. Heather Small was the lead vocalist in the R&B/dance group “M-People” from the mid 1990s, most famous for their top 10 hit “Movin’ On Up”.
Enjoy.
“Proud”, Heather Small, from the ‘Queer As Folk Season 5’ soundtrack
I look into the window of my mind
Reflections of the fears I know I’ve left behind
I step out of the ordinary
I can feel my soul ascending
I am on my way
Can’t stop me
And you can do the sameWhat have you done today to make you feel proud?
It’s never too late to try
What have you done today to make you feel proud?
You could be so many people
If you make that break for freedom
What have you done today to make you feel proud?Still so many answers I don’t know
Realise that to question is how we grow
So I step out of the ordinary
I can feel my soul ascending
I am on my way
Can’t stop me now
And you can do the sameWhat have you done today to make you feel proud?
It’s never too late to try
What have you done today to make you feel proud?
You could be so many people
If you make that break for freedom
What have you done today to make you feel proud?We need a change
Do it today
I can feel my spirit rising
We need a change
So do it today
‘Cause I can see a clear horizon
After the storms that passed through last night, I was sure that it was going to be a typical cold November day here in Upstate N.Y. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with a sunshine filled sky and temperatures in the mid 50s.
The sunshine has done wonders for my mood.
Earl left for a business trip this morning around 5 a.m. I’m on call through Thursday, so I didn’t have to get up until 7:30 a.m. Usually “sleeping in” like this puts me in a good mood, but not today. I woke up as one surly bear. I don’t know why. I was just cranky. Wisely, I decided to mind my own business at work instead of spreading my bad mood. Thankfully, around lunch time I snapped out of my funk. I guess a good turkey on wheat sandwich will do that to a mood.
Speaking of food, I have rediscovered a delicacy that I haven’t had in a while. Friday night I had sushi. I love sushi! Earl is not fond of it at all, so it’s rare that I have the opportunity to enjoy some sushi, but while we were at the casino on Friday night (with Lady Luck on our side, I may add), I found myself some sushi and gobbled it right up. While Earl was grocery shopping yesterday, he surprised me by bringing home some sushi for me to enjoy while he’s out of town.
Mentally I’m ready for this latest round of on call. Physically, let’s just say I hope I don’t sleep right through my trouble calls.
Earl and I decided to celebrate the beautiful weather by going for a little ride. Including the nap in a Thruway service area, it was around 14 hours long.
We drove through three states.
It all started on Friday when Earl asked if I was in the mood for Chick-Fil-A for lunch. He was just being funny, because the closest Chick-Fil-A is about 200 miles from here. So that’s where we went for lunch yesterday. Chick-Fil-A at the Burlington Mall in Burlington, Mass. I haven’t been to the Burlington Mall since I was a twinkie shopping for clothes at Jordan Marsh back in the late 1980s. Much has changed.
On the way out we drove across the southern portion of Vermont on Route 9. It was a route I hadn’t taken before. We stopped at a scenic lookout, bought a couple of bear stuffed animals for our collection and the obligatory maple and chocolate fudge.
We then drove south a little bit into Massachusetts and went across the state on Route 2. Route 2 between Harvard and Concord used to be my daily commute. The road was never designed to be such a heavily traveled corridor and little has changed. It was good to drive the Concord Rotary and it was better to see that the office building I used to work in, which was closed shortly before Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was sucked up by Compaq (then HP), is back in business with a new company occupying. I could see my old cubicle walls from the street. No mardi gras beads hanging on the pole in the middle of the cubicle though.
After Burlington Mall (with a failed attempt at convincing someone of joining me at purchasing lots of stuff at their beautiful Apple store), we drove through Boston through the Big Dig project, making an unnecessary stop out to the airport and everything.
Leaving Boston at 9:00 p.m. or so, we decided that the Mass Pike was boring and jumped off at Marlborough and drove across the state on Route 20 (a local road that goes through LOTS of towns).
After taking a necessary nap in a Thruway service area once we were back in New York, we finally rolled into the driveway at 3:30 a.m.
I guess I get surly with anything to do with the entertainment industry, but here’s an article that proves to me little more than the fact that this country has lost it’s mind.
I guess the thing that I find most amazing is that someone found four recent movies good enough to actually download.
Last night I goofed around editing my latest little video endeavor right up until the time I went to bed. Earl was out of town so I knew that I was going to have a hard time falling asleep anyways, so I figured I’d make myself good and tired then call it a night.
It didn’t work.
Last night I tossed and turned, thinking about what to do for a serious video project. I couldn’t get ‘video’ out of my head! Should I do a music video? What would happen if I tried various camera angles trying then split the screen so I could appear as twins, instead of doing a dead on shot. I kept hearing my transporter sound effect over and over, like a song stuck in my head. Of course, then I would fall asleep a little bit and get my transporter effects in my video mixed up with making out with Jonathan Frakes (I really don’t think I’m his type), then I would wake back up and think really strange thoughts about what is going to happen when aliens finally visit us and how Bush Lite would probably cry… you know how it gets in the middle of the night when you’re three quarters asleep but that one quarter of your brain doesn’t want to settle down and everything gets all mixed up. By 4:00 a.m. I was thinking I was related to Bea Arthur (watching the Golden Girls in bed is not a good idea either); I was certain Earl was going to drive through the bedroom window at any moment and I had a wonderful intimate conversation with our cat Tom, and he was talking back at me, plain as day.
I’m such a friggin’ mess.
The alarm jarred me awake, about 45 minutes after I finally fell asleep. It’s funny, on Monday and Tuesday I worked the 9:00 am shift at work, so I was able to wake up naturally in harmony with the sunrise, now that Daylight Saving Time Hell is over. The rest of the week? Get out of bed to the annoying sounds of our old GE alarm clock.
With Earl out of town I decided to do a little practice with the Handycam again. Click on the picture above to see my 30 seconds of absurdity.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
Weird? Eccentric!
