What is the sound of one geek clapping?

Thursday night, the power went out. It was interesting: it sputtered for a moment, went out, came back on a second later, and then went out again. That really isn’t much to say, since the power has had some issues over the last few weeks. It’s gone out several times lately and I just assumed that this was one of those times.

The power was only out for about thirty seconds before it came back on. I didn’t think much of it besides the fact that I was going to have to reprogram the clocks on my stove and microwave again (all the rest of the clocks in my apartment program themselves). But then, around one o’clock, the power went out again, and just as I was about to fall asleep. On a hunch, I threw on some clothes and looked outside, and what I saw is over there to your right: cops, ambulances, firetrucks… turns out that during that rainy night, some genius decided to head the wrong way down my one-way street and crash headlong into a telephone pole. The crash dislodged a transformer and caused sparks to rain down (the cause of the power outage), or so I heard, since I didn’t get close enough to see.

I can’t help but wonder what possesses a person to do something like that. 80mph down a street I might understand: after all, I do sometimes succumb to the testosterone-driven requirement to be reckless every now and then. But even when I do things like that, I only tend to endanger myself, which is to say that I don’t do it when there are other cars around. This driver had another person in the car. Blows my mind. What’s more, it was raining, for crying out loud. I couldn’t imagine what must could possibly have been going through this person’s mind that would’ve made him or her think that it was okay to take another person’s life and play around with it like that.

Remember, kids: When you play with the big toys, you can get more than yourself in trouble, you can knock the neighbors’ power out too.

For years, ever since I moved out on my own, when I’ve gone shopping for shoes—which, believe me, is different from “shoe shopping,” which men do not do—I’ve laced up a pair of sneakers and slipped them on my feet, only to hear the words of my mother echo in my head:

“Make sure that you leave enough room for your feet to grow!”

I wear New Balance shoes exclusively, because they’re the only sneakers out there that come in wide varieties. (Nike, Reebok, et al: Take heed! People with large feet want to wear your shoes too!) A size 13EE shoe is not easy to find in a store. And given that any pair of shoes that I buy will be the only pair of sneakers that I wear, sometimes for years, proper sizing is crucial. But today, while trying to find a new pair that I liked enough to buy, something occurred to me as I tried on two brand new shoes: I’m twenty-seven years old. I don’t need to leave enough room for my feet to grow. This revelation led directly to another: I don’t actually have size-thirteen feet.

I have size-twelve feet.

While part of me laments this discovery as it was almost a badge of honor (“I have enormous feet!”), the rest of me realizes that I probably won’t have to repeat today’s ordeal of going from store to store in the mall—I managed to visit all five stores that sold shoes today before finally finding a pair I liked that fit me—in order to find nice shoes that fit. I mean, it’s not like a 12EE is that much easier to find, but it’s easier nonetheless.

So hey, Mom: Don’t ever say I didn’t listen to you.

Three weeks that I’ve been in my new apartment and I still don’t quite feel at home yet. It kind of dawned on me yesterday that I actually live in this new place. I think now that that’s kind of gotten through my head, I can really start making the place my own. First up is to get the stuff out of her that still needs to get out of here, like the entertainment center that’s still in pieces (need to find out if I can just drop the pieces on the street on trash day or if I need to take them to a dump or something) and the love seat that I really just don’t have the space for. Then I can finish getting unpacked and really get comfortable in this place.

Having 12-foot ceilings is really nice, too, but it poses a wall space problem—the problem being, of course, that I have to find something to fill them. I’ve been thinking that I could take some of my own photography and put it up in large-format prints (poster size, perhaps), but part of me says that it’s a bit conceited to do that and part of me realizes that in order to do that, I have to actually go take photos in order to get them printed and put up on the walls.

In other fronts: I went back to Plymouth last weekend to perform in a 9/11 Memorial concert. A bunch of alums and community members did a performance of Mozart’s Requiem, and the orchestra debuted a new piece by my former composition professor that was based on a poem written by another faculty member. It just blew me away.

Speaking of 9/11… At first I was going to write something about the anniversary, but I realized, as we got closer to the date, and especially after I did the concert, that I really didn’t know what to feel about it. I was confused, hurt, angry, morose, and just plain annoyed at everything. The politicization, the pseudo-patriotism, everything about it just kinda made me sick. What drove me over the edge, though, was hearing the letters to NPR’s Morning Edition this past week. I know that NPR can choose to run whichever letters it wants to, and so to some degree even this was politicized, but some of these letters just made me literally sick to my stomach. To suggest that a media outlet is committing sedition by running a segment about Muslims in America on the anniversary of September 11th is the absolute height of idiocy.

The close of this very strange, unique week was the I AM festival here in New London. One of the myriad of benefits of living in this very interesting city is that I get to be exposed to its rather large and thriving indie music scene. The I AM festival is New London’s own little indie music festival. I only caught the tail end of it (having completely forgotten about it until I was eating dinner), but I managed to make it down to the docks in order to catch a couple of bands, then heading to the after-party at a local club and catching another couple bands. Some of the stuff I heard was flat-out amazing, whereas other bits were, well, less amazing. All in all, though, it was a great way to close out the week, especially because my job has been asking us to put in extra hours, so I feel the need to kick back and relax with a little more force than normal during these times.

Whew, now that I got that big entry all handled and done with (I’ve been picking at it a little bit over the last couple months and finally just decided to scrap it, start over and write it all in one sitting), here is a little update for my life:

I suppose there isn’t a whole lot to update on, except for this: I’m moving! After almost two years at my current job, I finally found an apartment close to work that isn’t the size of a matchbox and doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg, and I decided to take the plunge. My parents were kind enough to lend me the money to make the deposits, and I’ll be moving at the end of this month. It drops my commute from almost an hour to a whopping eight minutes. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all the extra time I’ll have available to me. Maybe I could actually start working out in the mornings again… but I have the nagging feeling that maybe I’ll just end up sleeping another hour instead. I’m hoping that as I start to get used to the extra time, I won’t need so much of the extra sleep and I can adjust enough to start the workout regimen again. God knows I need it.

Speaking of workouts: My company is instituting this health initiatives thing. They announced it at our latest quarterly dinner, and I thought that it was quite ironic for me that they decided to announce that they were going to pay us as much as a thousand bucks to quit smoking or lose weight. This being ironic, of course, because I was celebrating my sixth-month anniversary of being off cigarettes only a couple weeks prior to this event. And I had just lost ten pounds. Cosmically funny. But hey, my CEO was kind enough that once he found out that I had quit smoking this year, he said that the company would gladly pay me for that.

I gave my father his birthday present on Monday. It was an 11×14 blowup of this photo, and he loved it. It makes me want to photograph more stuff. I really wish I had a digital SLR. The primary thing preventing me from taking photos of everything everywhere is that I know I have to take the film to a processing location and get it developed, which takes time and money, and then if I want a professional job done, I have to take it somewhere where I’m going to pay even more money to get it processed well and blown up. But perhaps I can get enough photos taken of interesting subjects that I can use them to decorate my new apartment. Or sell, for that matter. If you’re interested in buying any of my prints, I’ll gladly sell them. :)

On the subject of photography: I’m thinking of creating a moblog for my site. It wouldn’t be on the main page, but would probably be a subcategory of the regular blog. Do you think that’s too pretentious? I figure that now that I have a camera on my phone, I’d like to try and post some creative content with it.

As a geek, I know how to do lazy in a way that very few others know how. Let me explain:

I just spent over an hour writing a script for my laptop so that it will automatically figure out whether I’m logging in at home or at work, and start certain programs based on which one it is. Because I just can’t be bothered to double-click some icons like normal people.

This is the kind of laziness that can only be beaten by the people who will search the living room top to bottom because they can’t find the television remote.

I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention – invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble. — Agatha Christie

I’m sitting in the living room and my eyes are dry. When I realized that my eyes were dry, I glanced up from this computer and saw a haze the likes of which hasn’t been seen since LA on a summer afternoon. I’d forgotten to shut off the oven.

I could have died! There could have been an explosion. I was this close to kicking it.

Was there ever a moment in your life when you realized that the innocence was gone?

Does anybody else happen to think that the early laps of a speed skating event look like anything but?