Yeah, it was funnier when Will Ferrell said it in Old School. My throat tickled yesterday, and during the night a full-blown flu attack erupted. I tossed and turned most of the night, shivering yet feverish, in cold sweats. In the morning, I couldn't really talk, my throat was on fire. Most of the morning I was groggy and would occasionally pass out for 10 minutes at a time.
By mid-day, I wasn't quite as woozy. I don't know what's going on in my body, but I like to think of it as all sorts of alarms sounding, emergency defenses kicking in, white blood cells like stormtroopers marching off to battle.
What a year for U.S. Postal, huh?
I received a copy of the soundtrack to Lost in Translation in the mail Saturday, purchased off of Amazon Marketplace, so what better activity in my state of delirium than to chill out to awesome synth tunes like Alone in Kyoto by Air or Tommib by Squarepusher or Girls by Death in Vegas. But when I stuck the CD in my Powerbook to rip it onto my iPod, the Powerbook spit out some error message and coughed up the CD. I looked on the CD case and it said something about how this was a promotional version of the CD and had some wcp encryption that would render it unreadable by computers and many car stereos. How frustrating. So I own the music, but not really?
By evening, I felt up to meeting Ted for dinner. Ted's at Microsoft now, and way way back in the day he was the first manager I ever had, when I was in consulting. He spoiled me by being a really good manager. He showed me some great photos of his two kids, and I remarked how stylish and professional they looked, all black and white and set against pure white backgrounds.
All my kid photos were shot at Sears. Here's Eugene in the cowboy outfit, with a faux canvas mountain range in the background. Giddyup. Here's Eugene in the sailor outfit, set against the white clouds in blue sky background. Here's Eugene in the brown corduroy suit with orange dress shirt, color palette matched to the faux autumn leave background. There were a million background, and the photographer would just yank one after another down like window shades. The resulting photographs won't win any awards, but I love them anyway.
And though I don't have kids, I can understand why parents love showing people photos of their kids. They're ingenious and demanding little things, advancing so rapidly in size and intelligence and understanding. The same impulse exists for travellers who want to show off slides from their trips. The modern day slideshow is the Ofoto photo album. I receive seemingly one or two Ofoto slideshow album announcement every week, some containing hundreds of photos, many badly shot. And while I must admit to rarely opening any of them, I understand and can empathize with the impulse to share, to want communion over and validation of personal history. If I weren't so self-centered I'd click through every one of those Ofoto pics.
Sometime soon I'll have to have that cyst removed from my sinus. It means cutting a hole in the top of my mouth, and a week of not being able to speak. On the positive side, the liquid diet should do wonders for my waistline.
"Sometimes I pretend I have only 10 seconds to live." Noel, from All the Real Girls