Ponderings and Musings

Speed.

Originally uploaded by macwarriorny.

For the past two days I’ve commuted back and forth to my company’s Syracuse office for training. Next month our two tech support groups (one telecommunications, the other internet) combine into one facility and one big happy family. Luckily, the move is into our building, so it won’t change my commuting habits one iota. And added plus is that the internet group moving in with us is a great group of people and I’m looking forward to working with all of them. I’ll have more to do and once the dust settles, less on-call responsibilities (since more of us will be sharing the duties). It’s all very exciting and right up my geek alley.

Since the weather was spring like today, I decided to take the Acura out on the road and enjoy the New York State Thruway a little bit.

There’s little more enjoyable then hitting the open road at a respectable speed in the vehicle you love.

With the approach of every new year, I have traditionally formulated a list of all the things I want to change about myself. I’m going to be more outgoing. I’m going to spend less time on the computer. I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to exercise more. I’ve often thought of the new year as the perfect time to do an extreme makeover of myself, to come up with J.P. v2005 or whatever and do a complete re-imaging.

This year I have no desire to do that. It’s the first time in my adult life that I’ve felt this way.

Oh, I have things that I want to do, but I don’t feel the pressing need to correct any perceived faults or to better myself to a pre-conceived image of how I should be, rather than how I am.

Perhaps this is the first time in a long time that I’ve been happy with the way I am.

I don’t think I come off as too repulsive when I meet people face to face or interact with others. I’m no longer afraid to keep things that bother me to myself. I’m no longer afraid to joke with strangers in a public space. I’m no longer constantly measuring myself to the standard of “will they like me” or “do they think I am weird.” Yes, I am likeable and yes, I am eccentric. Big deal. Love me or leave me.

The packaging isn’t that bad either. I’m comfortable in my own skin, so I don’t feel the need to shed a ton of weight. I’m too lazy to do that anyway. I’ll probably continue to grow my beard and shave my head – I’d like to grow my beard until we vacation in May. If that makes people roll their eyes, so be it. It’s my face. And I can’t see myself with a head of hair anymore, I couldn’t even grow a full head of hair if I tried and I’ve accepted that.

I’m going to do more cycling this year. Now that I have a handle on how my on-call weeks for work actually work, I’ve figured out a good way manage recreation and work all together. Will I fall down in a rejected mess if I don’t do a lot of cycling? No, I won’t. Its for fun, no sense in beating myself up over it.

So there’s no Resolution Revolution this year. I’m just me.

Today I start a couple of days of training work. I have to drive to our other office, 50 miles away, for the next two days. Have I mentioned that I’m not a morning person? I’m sitting here staring at my laptop screen like a mindless zombie and I’m not even certain of my full given name.

I think I’ll take a nap on the way. Is it safe to zone out on long commutes?

Here it is the week between Christmas and New Year’s. The time I like to call ‘Tween. You know the drill, only half the people are working in your office so it’s sort of like a regular work week aside from the fact that the malls and big box behemoths are still packed to the brim with surly shoppers too impatient to stand in line at the return counter.

Kids are also off from school this week. They often say that the primary goal of our education system is to prepare a student for the real world, to arm them with the tools they need to survive the rest of their life. That’s why I’ve never understood why schools are closed so much. What are there, 180 days in the school year? That’s less than half a year. Half a year! I wish I could get half a year off from my job. I guess I’m jealous.

But I digress.

It’s a little bit of a challenge here at work during the ‘tween. It’s a slow time, so I try to look busy and resist the urge to go wildly surfing on the internet. You never know who, besides the U.S. Government of course (wave for the NSA man!), is monitoring your online activity, so it’s best to stay away from the porn from 9 to 5. Even that site that beckons “Jerk at work”. Not that I’ve ever been there.

Luckily the geek in me enjoys keeping up with the happenings in the technology and telecommunications community, which is inline with what I do for a living.

Back in my early days of radio as a fill-in d.j. this was a busy week for me. I would get to work as the replacement for the popular night-time slot. Sort of like Joan Rivers sitting in for Johnny Carson, though I was J.P. Marks sitting in for B.B. Good and I didn’t have any of Joan’s plastic look or sound. Listeners would enjoy the show but they preferred to hear the “real” d.j. do her thing.

Maybe I should have used the name ‘Tweener.

Earl and I have needed a little kick in the holiday spirit this evening. With trying to keep up with the rat race, we’ve found little time to just sit down, relax and enjoy a little Christmas joy for ourselves. So tonight we decided to snuggle up to the holiday classic, “White Christmas”.

All proper showings of classic movies deserve a little short to set the mood, so we first watched “A Vision of Sugar Plums”, the Christmas episode from the very first season of Bewitched.

In “Visions…”, Billy Mumy plays Michael, a bully of a boy that lives at the local orphanage that has come home with Darrin and Samantha for Christmas. He doesn’t have a very warm, fuzzy feeling for the holidays, believing its all a bunch of bunk. Samantha decides to convince him otherwise, and whisks him off to the North Pole, along with Darrin riding shotgun on her broom, so he can meet Santa Claus. After meeting Santa Claus, Michael starts feeling the holiday spirit, calms down a little bit and seems to move on to a well-adjusted life with the parents that want to adopt him (the father being Bill Daily, Major Healey from “I Dream of Jeannie”).

After Bewitched it was on to the main feature, “White Christmas”.

This movie is one of our all-time favorites. The cinematography is breathtaking (in Vistavision!). The musical numbers are most enjoyable and words cannot describe the amount of talent found in this movie. Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen are all incredible performers. They certainly don’t make movies like “White Christmas” anymore and Hollywood doesn’t seem to have the talent found back in the day. Watching “White Christmas” has inspired me to watch more classic movies this winter and I’m looking forward to snuggling up on cold winter nights to catch on some old chestnuts.

Tonight was just what we needed to fully get into the holiday spirit. Now I’m looking forward to catching “Bell, Book and Candle” sometime next week, another classic (and an inspiration for Bewitched) that takes place at Christmas.

Tomorrow we are off to Pennsylvania to kick off the annual Christmas tour. It’s going to be a grand weekend.

I was looking at old files on our webserver here at jpnearl.com and came across this little blog entry type thingee I wrote back in December 2001. For some bizarre reason, I was writing blog entries outside of my blog. I don’t recall why I was doing that, but nevertheless, if you’d like to take a look, here it is.

12/23/2001. The Chimes.

There are times, usually when the house is clean, that I just like to sit back and feel the ‘vibe’ of our home. (When the house is cluttered, the only vibe I get is the sound of coughing. “Dust me already!”) Being less than 10 years old, our walls don’t contain a lot of stories yet but I like to think there’s an amicable feeling in our home when someone walks in for the first time.

Last night was Earl’s company Christmas party. Like last year, we hosted the festivities again this year and everyone apparently had a delightful time. There was no punching or arguing, just delicious food, good drinks and friendly chit-chat. As my friend Shirley says, “it was dandy.” I got to play the “boss’s spouse” role which is always fun. “You only have to live with him eight hours a day, remember, I get the other 16, plus weekends.” I sometimes wonder if my sense of humor is a little whacked out for social gatherings, but I kept all my clothes on and I didn’t dance on the dining room table so I suppose I’ll be invited back next year.

It’s little gatherings like last night that make me appreciate our home all the more. Earl and I keep to ourselves quite a bit, but it’s nice to welcome others into our home from time to time.

It’s a nice opportunity to give the walls something more to talk about.

A Clean Christmas.

Originally uploaded by macwarriorny.

I thought the holidays were suppose to be a joyous occasion. Whether you’re celebrating the Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza or just the commercial glee of it all, there is suppose to be a merriment that warms your heart and tickles your soul.

My heart is full of dust and my lungs are full of bleach fumes.

Tomorrow night is Earl’s company Christmas party. And it’s here. In our house. I guess I’ll have to finally pick up the wine glasses scattered about from last year’s Christmas party. Maybe I’ll go crazy and scrape up the petrified chip (complete with dip) that someone tried to hide under the sofa*.

Actually, I’m looking forward to the occasion. It’s not often that we entertain in the house and it gave us an excuse to chase the dust bunnies back under the furniture. It’s just so much work to get ready for the party. The floors need to be polished, the towels need to be fluffed, the toilets need to be scrubbed. I guess we’re going to have to aim better when we pee in the dark from now on.

All this work is because we’ve got everything backwards. We have a lawn service to mow our grass through the summer, but we plow or snowblow the driveway ourselves. When we lived in the small house, we had a cleaning lady that came twice a month to scrub the place from top to bottom. We moved into a house twice the size and we now we hose everything down ourselves and call it “good enough”.

At least our hearts are full of merriment this season. And our merriment is squeaky clean.

* I really had the urge to type ‘davenport’ instead of ‘sofa’ up in that paragraph. I have no idea why, I haven’t heard someone refer to a couch as a davenport since 1993 or so and that was when my grandmother was heading in to senility.

I don’t know about the rest of the American public, but I’m really, really, really tired of product placements in television shows and life in general. I think what finally made me snap was the “Memoirs of a Geisha” movie mentions/product placement peppered through a recent episode of “Medium”.

“Hey do you want to see Memoirs of a Geisha”, he asked as he held up a full-page ad in the newspaper, “You really enjoyed the book, I heard the movie is just as good.”

Then later…

“What are you guys here to see?” “Memoirs of a Geisha”. “Oh we just saw it, and it was a very good movie, you’ll really enjoy it.”

Since the lead character is a psychic, she already knows if she’ll enjoy the movie or not, why waste time talking about it? Oh, because at the commercial break there was an ad for, wait for it, “Memoirs of a Geisha”.

I started getting ticked off at the product placements during an episode of The West Wing when Donna walked down a hotel hallway carrying a FedEx tube by the end so she wouldn’t block the FedEx logo, then Josh made coffee in the complimentary coffee maker from Holiday Inn, which had a logo larger than the coffee maker itself, then Will went to get an ice cream sandwich type thing which was two seconds away from star billing for the show when they lingered on the “Nestle” logo for an uncomfortably long amount of time.

Why are we allowing these product placements and rampant commercialism to take over the country? First it started with the stadiums. Syracuse had MacArthur Stadium. Folks called it Big Mac. Then they ripped it down and built a new one. “P & C Stadium”. Of course P & C went bankrupt so now it’s “Alliance Bank Stadium”. Oy. Was Mac Arthur a bad boy and had to have his stadium taken away from him? It was built in the same spot, it should still be Mac Arthur Stadium. “Mile High Stadium” in Denver, even though it’s not the original, should still be called “Mile High Stadium”, not “Revolving Name Bank After Latest Merger Stadium”.

DisneyWorld is not better. Planet Earth, brought to you by AT&T. It’s A Small, Small, Small World brought to you by Infiniti.

The New York State Fair? “The Verizon Center of Progress Building.” Like Verizon has ever been in the center of progress.

What’s next, freeway signs? “Next Rest Area brought to you by Ex-Lax.”

At least there’s a rumbling out there of people fighting back. Take a peek at Jerri Manthey’s Survivor Outtakes. It shows how ridiculous this all has really has become.

I sit here writing my blog entry, one hand on my work supplied Dell keyboard in front of my Dell monitor. I’m drinking a Diet Pepsi and I have my hand on my chin. I then notice how smooth my skin is after shaving this morning. I’m so glad I used Barbasol.

Time, keeps flowing like a river
To the sea

Whomever sang that song in the 70s was a nut. Time does not flow like a river. Time flows like raging rapids with the waterfalls just ahead and no life jacket in sight. But would we rather have it any other way? Sometimes I feel like you just need to grab on and go for the bumpy, twisty, intense ride that we call life. Where does the time go? It seems like it was just yesterday that I spotted a very attractive man staring at me from across the bar. The was back late in 1995. Why it feels like we just moved into this house. That was December 2003. Tom is just a kitten. He’s tipping 12.

Where does the time go?

Because of my fascination with time; my collection of synchronized school clocks, my internal clock constantly reminding me of upcoming events (i.e. “only 2 3/4 hours left in the workday today!”), the fact that I have a clock within eyeshot at all times, it feels like time is just speeding along at an outrageous pace. Am I really 37 years old? I certainly don’t feel 37, I feel like the young man that was ready to take on the world who decided college wasn’t really right for him. In fact, I feel younger now than I did three or four years ago. All my body parts are working properly and aside from my constant mixing up of words punctuated with my usual stammering and stuttering, my mind doesn’t feel cluttered. I feel like I’m on my game right now. I don’t want that feeling to end. I refuse to let time take over.

But where does the time go? It seems like yesterday that Earl and I were looking at the holiday season with lots of time to do everything we need to do. Now he’s trotting around the eastern seaboard on business and I’m dreading that one last trip to the mall to pick up last minute Christmas gifts. On Saturday we’re sitting down to send out our Christmas cards, going grocery shopping for the party we’re hosting on Wednesday for Earl’s co-workers and clean the house from top to bottom, in between the two Christmas parties were are attending this weekend.

When do we get to sit down and catch our breath?