In which Vuboq thinks I’m crazy.
I say watermelon is sold by the pound. Vuboq says they’re sold by the piece. What do you think?
Fifteen of the first 17 votes were Vuboq, btw.
RESULTS ARE IN!: 4 to 20, in favor of by the pound.
Category Archives: Life
Friday, Friday, Friday is my favorite day! (Too bad it's not until tomorrow.)
In which I babble about a few unrelated things – mostly technical, some travel.
Three days ago I installed a WP plugin called Bad Behavior. It stops bots from leaving comments on the site, and therefore reduces bandwidth usage. In the brief time Bad Behavior’s been installed, it’s stopped 1680 access attempts. Which makes me very happy, of course.
I did receive an email from a real person who wasn’t allowed to comment, however, and that makes me unhappy, of course. Is anybody else having any problems leaving comments?
Yesterday was net radio silence day. It was considered a huge success but net radio’s still in danger, folks.
Today I’m listening to a last.fm station based on Fear of Pop, which I’m super into this week. It’s freakin’ hawt.
Also, the latest last.fm client now scrobbles iPod plays! I’m so pleased!
Today’s beloved Firefox plugins are FoxyTunes and TwittyTunes.
In other news, I’ll be seeing Amma next week, all week – Monday & Tuesday in Coralville, IA and then Thursday & Friday in Chicago, IL. I’m so excited. Bghead even said he’d feed my dog.
How do YOU do it?
In which we talk about comments spam and ID3 tags.
We’ve been getting utterly hammered here at goblinbox by spam comment bots for lo, these past 12 hours, and Askimet isn’t catching them because they don’t have any links and they’re not from known IPs! It’s crazy! Bandwidth-eatin’ mofos, a pox upon you all: I’ve just installed Bad Behavior.
While I can very nearly understand the spam for ‘tranny hunters,’ ‘pee clips,’ ‘black cheerleader sex,’ ‘phentermine,’ ‘farm sex,’ ‘pictures of gay men using their dildos,’ and ‘amateur sex,’ what the hell is ‘anal bondage’? I honestly can’t even imagine the device one would need to purchase for that particular kink, and I’ve got an active imagination.
Heh.
On a completely different topic, I’ve been thinking about organizing my MP3s better and I wanted to ask y’all how you tag your tunes. I sometimes want to listen to a class of music – say, disco or R&B or jazz – but since my genre tags are so crap I can’t do so without creating a playlist, an activity that requires me to scroll through my entire library to find the stuff I’m in the mood for.
The vast majority of the files in my music library were already tagged by the Gracenote db or by the person I got the files from, and I have really no idea how to classify music anyway, so I haven’t messed with them much. (And some of the tags are just terrifying. I once downloaded Etta James’ Tell It Like It Is, and the genre was – I shit you not – “jungle music.” I have three other tracks under the jungle tag, but they’re actually jungle beat tracks so the tag’s not a racial slur. I have many hundreds of tunes tagged “rock” that are only tangentially related to one another. Songs that should be tagged jazz are tagged rock or fusion or swing or whatever.
Plus, how do you determine genre? By the artist, or by the song itself? Because nearly every artist belongs in more than one genre, but most albums have all the songs in the same genre. Which means you can end up with a country song in your ‘rock’ genre, or a baroque piece in your Gregorian chant genre, or the Basie Band and Maroon 5 in the same genre (which is clearly just plain WRONG, even though both tunes may technically be swing).
The point is, there are too many damned genres to be of any use, and it will probably be awhile before someone figures out how to code for a tag cloud. So I’m thinking of simplifying everything into the broadest categories possible: rock, dance, R&B/soul, jazz, classical, and world. But then I think that would just piss me off because if I selected a shuffle in the jazz genre and ended up with a 1930’s blues track right next to a Paul Simon track, I’d explode. So then I was thinking of using subcategories, like rock_classic, rock_soft, rock_arena and jazz_modern, jazz_fusion, jazz_classic, but that sounds like a clusterfuck, too.
Anyway, I want to know how you organize your music: do you even bother to organize by genre? If so, how? Do you use other ID3 fields for your own information? Do you ignore genre altogether and simply listen to a particular artist or album as the mood strikes? Or do you just shuffle your library and hope for the best?
Weather. Rock.
In which it’s raining like hell, and me with only one windshield wiper.
The weather’s here, wish you were beautiful.
Oh, wait, you are beautiful! Well, it’s just started raining cats and dogs here and Truck and I are leaving in a few minutes to drive to Ottumwa for a gig. On the porch a few minutes ago he looked at the lowering sky, dubiously, and then at me, equally dubiously, and said, “Is my shit gonna get wet in your jeep?”
“Oh, no,” I replied. “Not wet at all. Just dusty! It’s got five years of gravel dust all up in it, but it doesn’t leak water anywhere.”
He narrowed his eyes, grumbled and went into the house, coming back out a few moments later with a baggie he put some guitar component or another into. He stuffed the item into his backpack, which was sitting on the porch next to the rest of his gear waiting to be loaded out, and went back inside for a shower.
Then the sky darkened, opened up, and started to pour. (It smells so good! Ozone!) Bghead took my keys and moved my jeep into the driveway for me, rolling the windows up in the process, and any minute now the virgin Connie Swayle Truck will be done with his post-shower primping and we’ll be ready to roll out.
The only water-related problem the jeep has is with the windshield wipers. Only one of them works. Fortunately it’s the driver’s wiper, but when it’s raining buckets visibility does become a problem. Worst case scenario: I pull over for a bit. Luckily we don’t absolutely have to be there on time, since we’re special guests.
Ciao, babies – I’m off to do the rock! Yay! I love gigging!
At least the creative aspects are looking up.
In which I want things and see things and do things!
Paragraph the first: Apparently none of you like a good voice when you hear one. Which is fine. I guess. (Well, as long as you like my voice, that is.) Even though I expected more from the discerning creatures who (inexplicably) read goblinbox. Perhaps it’s simply that you’re unable to get past the songs themselves – which are cheesy, I admit – to realize that the bitch is a diva? Or maybe you just didn’t study opera like I did.
Paragraph the second: My little brother got hi’self a PSP and is offering to sell me his 5th gen iPod for a hundred bucks. I really want it! (But I’m poor and I owe the vet money and I have to save to see Amma next month and hopefully he’ll be able to hold it for a few weeks because I WANT it.) In celebration of this non-transaction, I deleted a bunch of shit I don’t like out of my iTunes library. Yay!
I think I’ve convinced Bghead to write a book with me. If we actually do it, I bet we could bang it out in six months. Right now we’re in the research phase, which means – hopefully – that Bghead is buying some of the books we discussed last night. I might have to get my library card updated and learn more about intra-library loans.
This notice was in the window at Mi-T-Mart this morning. I have no idea what this is about, but I sure do wanna find out!
What’s Maharishi Vedic City trying to do, steal someone’s land? Or is it just an issue of some townie not wantin’ no roo wiring buried anywhere on his back 40?
Paragraph the sixth: I have vox practice tonight for that bhajans album I’m singing on next month. Tomorrow I’ll be sitting in with the Green Band at the Hickory House. (My music sched is now over there –> in the sidebar!) I told Truck it was his job to know the changes to Stormy Monday and he said he already did. Hell to the yeah!
I made tabouli last night, but I had to use Italian parsley. It tasted just fine. So fine, in fact, that I ate half of it before bed. And AmmZon introduced me to the mohito. OMFGWTFBB!!!!1!1!11!!!!/!1! Damn! So good.
The Curse
In which I’m bitchy and grumpy and anti-social.
I don’t want to do shit. I don’t want to bathe, I don’t want to get dressed, I don’t want to go to work. I don’t want to do anything or go anywhere or see anyone.
It’s really not so bad this month: I’m not in pain, and I’m not swelled up like a bloated carcass (yay diuretic properties of caffeinated beverages!). I’m just OMG so fucking bitchy and grumpy that no one should be exposed to me. I’m pissed off just sitting here.
It occurs to me that bursting into tears over nothing is reason enough to take the damn afternoon off.
Hormones suck.
Monday
In which I might be complaining juuuust a little bit.
Look what I did at work today:
Why can’t I get paid for this instead?
On relationships: Notes from an old married lady
In which goblinbox hosts a SECOND guest post! Please welcome Kristie as she speaks of marriage.
I have been married for 13 years to a man I’ve loved for over 16. By today’s standards, I was a child bride, marrying him 2 weeks after I graduated college as I did, though we dated from October of my freshman year. If I’d been smart I would’ve married him at Christmas instead of in May, and saved the 5 months double rent. But when you’re 22 you don’t know anything, and with romance in your heart, stars in your eyes, and your mother’s morality wagging its finger in the back of your mind, you don’t really think of a marriage as a financial arrangement that could be managed for maximum return. Well, the 22-year-old me didn’t. Perhaps some of you were wiser and more worldly than I. Then again, there’s a lot to be said for innocence. But that’s another post.
I truly believe that if anyone tried to tell us what marriage truly meant, even good marriages, we would think they were lying. And if we believed them, no one would ever get married. So it’s probably best no one tries. Though I often think that if we were spoon-fed a more realistic view of what human beings can expect of each other in partnership, we’d be happier, and less hard on ourselves and those we love than we are when the fairytale comes crashing down about us.
Sometimes when I look at this man I live with, and wonder how it is possible that after all these years living with him, knowing him better than anyone else on earth, he is still very much a mystery. I wonder if I’m as mystifying to him. He likes to tell me that every time I ask, “What the fuck are you doing?†he is obviously successful in keeping the mystery alive.
All that said, I’d do it all again. I know I’m with the right man, and while we don’t always like each other every minute of every day, love is the bedrock we reach when we’re scraping bottom. And even when we’re pissed at each other, we still like each other better than anyone else in the world, and we’re cognizant of that. When we’re not pissed at each other, life is pretty grand. He makes me laugh, and he takes good care of me, and he lets me buy all the guitars I want. I make him laugh, I take good care of him, and I have a killer rack. So we keep coming home to each other. Marriage vows are made over and over; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I have no delusions that we are impervious to the cracks and strains that break other marriages. We do the best we can, like anyone else, and hope our luck holds.
I think there are advantages to marrying young, in that you grow up together, and forge a life that always includes the two of you; it’s built that way. When you marry young, you don’t have to argue over whose stuff stays and whose doesn’t when you move in together; you don’t have any stuff. My friends who have married later in life, when they are more established as individuals, have, to my perception, found it more difficult to merge two lives into one, agonizing over decisions to share names and checking accounts just for starters. And I know that if my life changed, and I was starting over tomorrow, I am not the pliable girl I was at 22. I’d probably avoid marriage entirely, and keep a ready harem of handsome and available men to meet my womanly needs when I wanted them to, and stay out of my hair otherwise.
In many ways, our life together is exactly what I dreamed of, hoped for, and expected out of married life. However, if someone had foretold for me all the events that would befall us (or we would rush headlong into) in our marriage, I would’ve told them to put down the crack pipe. Still, we are still here, together. And that’s something.
Wedding Vows
A marriage is
a thousand tiny heartbreaks:
the heartbreaks of change, of crushed hope
and forgotten dreams;
the heartbreaks of empty hours, empty conversation
and empty pockets;
the heartbreaks of misinterpreted messages, misaligned priorities
and mismatched flatware;
the heartbreaks of vicious truths, vicious accusations
and vicious circles;
the heartbreak of begging for recognition, being unable to offer any,
and lonely, silent minutes of our aching need;
the heartbreaks of tired arms, tired lives
and tired excuses.
I had no idea how we’d maim each other,
aiming with deadly accuracy honed over years.
I had no idea of our capacity for forgiveness.
I had no idea that to carry the heartbreak, and to be standing still,
together,
is love, too.
20 Aug 2002
Quick Update
In which I’m checking in.
First, if you feel at all interested, you should ask me for a login and write a relationship post. Come on, it’ll be awesome!
Second, for lunch today I made myself the best sandwich ever: pesto, avocado, baby spinach, tomatoes, red onion, mozzarella, and mayo, on peasant bread from the local crunchy whole foods-ish store. It was so good I felt compelled to mention it to you!
Third, if you’re one of my daytime IM friends and are feeling ignored, it’s not that I don’t love you but that I’ve been encouraged not to IM while at work. So that’s why I don’t answer and/or am not logged in as much as usual. *sigh*
Fourth, I’m in checkbook balancing hell at work. Hell, I tell you. It’s the most tedious task ever, and it makes me feel stupid because it should be easy but it’s not: it’s a fucking pain in the ass! I started out doing May’s statement, and ended up having to go all the way back to March to re-reconcile it, even though March and April had balanced to the penny! Still, the May opening balance was wrong, so go back I did. Now my brain is mud. Gah!
Finally, I’ve been thinking about the Band That Never Gigs because there’s a practice tonight, and I just plain don’t wanna go. I mean, every time I think about it, I groan – that’s how much I don’t want to go. I think I might need to unpack that and see if what I really need to do is quit. (Truck and I have been thinking about offering ourselves to the JCGB for the summer just for the fun of playing some with an established band that gigs, and because we had so much fun sitting in with them at the divorce party.)
In other news, HOLY SHIT WILL YOU LOOK AT MY STATS?!?!
‘K, back to balancing now. *smooch*
Relating
In which there’s an open call for content.
You may have noticed that the last post was by a guest author. If you’d like to write a post here on goblinbox on the theme of relationships – want one, have one that rocks, have one that sucks, lost one, don’t want one, etc. – please email me with your email address and desired username and password and I’ll give you a login!
Random observations on the subject of relationships you might use as a springboard for a post:
* There’s a guy at work I call Bitchy Guy, because he’s been totally bitchy since I started working there. A week ago, he suddenly turned into a pussycat. Turns out his girlfriend has returned to town. You can do your own math, but I’m suspecting he’s mellow merely because he’s getting sex again. Is sex that important?
* I heard through the grapevine that two friends of mine broke up today. They’ve been married for over ten years and they have kids and everything. Does anything last forever?
* Rock ‘n’ roll tells us that love is a battlefield, love stinks, and that love is the answer.
* We only hurt the ones we love, or, Why am I nicer to total strangers than I am to my lover?
* There is/isn’t such a thing as true love or one person meant for each of us.
* Romantic love is not only a recent concept but a myth.
* Someday my prince will come.
So sound off, bitches!
C’mon, please?