Jul/101
Heavy Is the Head (That Sells the Kanmuri)
...they painted that handicapped sign after I parked there...
My Toyota Camry is nearing the end of its useful life, and I’m kind of freaking out about it.
It’s not my first car. That honor goes to a 1995 Ford Thunderbird that my dad and I bought in Winter Park, FL in 2000. It’s not even my second car, a 1998 Honda Accord I bought from my sister. Still, this Camry and I go way back, and in some ways losing this one hurts more than the other two.
I’ve got this thing, that I contracted from my late grandmother, about objects. A sane person looks at a Toyota Camry with 209k miles on it and goes, “Okay, you’ve put $4500 into it in four months. There’s no end in sight for potential repairs. It’s time to stop putting money into such an old car.” A Martin, however, looks at that sad jalopy and sees his sixteen-year-old self sitting at the Toyota dealership on a sunny summer afternoon laughing with his brother, convincing his father to get a rear spoiler and a sunroof “because that will make it the sports car you should buy yourself,” all while his young brother-in-law sighs at the wastefulness of wood paneling around air conditioning vents not realizing that this memory, and a thousand others made and not yet made, would forever be taken away from him months later by a tractor-trailer’s unsecured tire careening into his car on the interstate. To this vision a sane person goes “Mur?” but that is just one of the moments that come to me when I look at this car, one of a hundred pictures in time that weren’t developed by Kodak but capture a moment in radiant color. And now it’s coming time to let that car go.
Feb/100
The Great Pipe Nothing
24 inches of snow fell in 12 hours! Ah!
The entire reason I came to Pittsburgh this weekend was to perform in a theater organ concert with Bryan Wright and the Boilermaker Jazz Band. That was before anyone knew Pittsburgh was about to get 24 inches of snow.
Needless to say, my concert got canceled faster than a Joss Whedon series on FOX.
I was really looking forward to it, too. I was nervous – I’m not a theater organist and was about to pretend to be in front of hundreds of people – but I was also excited, the same kind of excited I get every time a new “Star Wars” project is announced: blind hope that it’s going to be awesome, and stark terror that it’s going to be terrible.
But after the sting of that passed, and the calls were made to family and friends that we wouldn’t be getting together after all, and after a day spent shoveling hundreds of pounds of snow out of Mom’s driveway, not to mention rescuing a few stranded motorists unlucky enough not to have new tires on their car (and who were, I assure you, surprised to see someone with Virginia license plates so deft with a shovel), I was shocked to find myself so energized at 11 PM that I had to go for a walk in the snow-blanketed neighborhood to get myself anywhere near ready to sleep.
Jan/105
The Top 90 Moments of 2009
Here’s a tradition carried over from my old blog, Prayer to the Sun. At the end of every year, I make a list of the top moments in my life for that year.
Wow, it must have taken some cajones to put him on the cover of anything.
The list is not about my favorite moments, nor my best moments. These are the top moments, the “Hitler as Man of the Year 1939″ moments, the ones that changed me, moved me, taught me, inspired me, humiliated me.
They are mistakes, triumphs, failures, wild successes. Some are comprehensible by anyone, others belong only to me. They are not listed in any particular order, only the one in which I think of them.
If I left out a moment you think should be here, don’t be upset. Exact your revenge by leaving a comment!
Martin’s 90 Top Moments of 2009
- Finding out on a conference call, while in the process of cleaning out Jessie’s grandfather’s house, that my employer had been sold to a company nearly 20 times its size.
- Shooting the SSCC Golf Invitational video with Mark and friends, including arriving an hour early to the course to secretly film the epic opening with Mark.
- Mark’s epic drive at the SSCC and then chasing evil SSCC squirrel up the hill at Cacapon Resort.
- Having a friend say “how dare you” to me in anger and actually mean it.
- Selling out of my CD, “Tricky Fingers,” halfway through my concert in San Antonio.
- Getting a fire started at the campsite in Shenandoah using wet wood, an air-mattress pump, and the fabled “awkward catamaran” log structure I invented.
Nov/092
Acceptance
I got accepted into George Mason’s M.A. in English program.
This makes me happy all over.
Normal people would be happy about this. I, however, am stressing out.
Let’s face it, it’s an M.A. in English. It qualifies me to do two things: 1) What I’m already doing, only with $17k in loans, or 2) Get a PhD. I work with folks who have Master’s degrees in the humanities, they make less than I do, and all I have is this Bachelor’s degree and a pair of Lucky Brand jeans.
I also read this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today and it made me feel like a wrinkly, shriveled candy wrapper.
I really am happy to have been accepted. I applied because a M.A. in English is sort of what I envisaged myself getting when I was asking the whole, “What’s next?” question after I graduated Pitt.
It opens the door to a high-school teaching position (my wife’s fantasy for me), as well as potentially puts me on the professor track. Also, the Cultural Studies program at GMU is top-notch, one of the best in the country, and Cultural Studies is basically the field that someone pulled out of my imagination and made real (“You mean I get to study the connections between the different artifacts of culture and what they say about us and the meaning of it all? SQUEE.”)
Nov/090
On Friendship
Friendship comes out of nowhere, grows inexplicably, and has the potential to delight and devastate you like nothing else on the planet. If friendship was a plant, it’d be illegal and we’d have to buy it from the guy who stands outside the fence by the tennis courts.
I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship recently. It’s kind of a weird thing, if you ask me. The ideal friendship involves two people who share an equal amount of respect and affection for each other, but if you think about this, it’s crazy talk. How can you possibly expect someone with an entirely separate set of life experiences, hopes, goals, moods, and dreams to be able to reliably love you in the way that you need them to? It’s like relying on an electric motor with two magnets that may or may not attract or repel one another on a given day. When it runs, great. But what about when it stops running?
Friendship is celestial
Some friendships grow slowly over time, a planet accreting into a sphere under the gravity of shared experiences, while other friendships, Big Bang Friendships, explode into a galaxy in the first few minutes and feel you feel like you’ve found a shard of yourself. No matter how they’re formed, both take work to sustain and, if left to wither untended, sustained only by inertia and the memory of hotter days, you wake up one day and realize they died. The magnetism is gone.
Oct/092
Surviving
Talking about work online is a dangerous proposition, but I’m going to risk it because if I don’t talk about it, I’m going to die.
“Surviving” is definitely the right word to describe my work life right now. I’m not so much ready for these two weeks to be done as I am spending my days envying dead people and hoping for an asteroid collision to spare me from yet another 286-slide PowerPoint presentation.
Can I have his stapler?
You know that feeling you get when you’re with a group of people and they’re quoting movies you haven’t seen? Everyone is laughing at lines that don’t seem to make any sense, and you’re standing there wondering what they heck everyone is talking about?
Imagine having to stand there for 8 hours a day for 8 days in a row.
Now imagine having to take notes on the quotes from the movies you haven’t seen, notes like, “In the line, ‘Good, bad, I’m the guy with the gun,’ change the word ‘gun’ to ’shotgun’.”
That, Dear Reader, is what the past two weeks have been like for me.
That said, I’ve learned that if you haven’t yet experienced in-person a 20-minute nerd battle about whether the regional value codes for elastomaric fabrics fall under subheading 9208.00.11 or subheading 9208.00.13 in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, you haven’t truly lived. I’ve also learned that “truly living” is highly overrated.
On Monday, the client asked me if I’d “just gotten off the 5AM train” because I had a little scruff on my face. As the French say, charmant. Apparently, in addition to working, I’m also starring in a soap-opera called “The Bored and the Beautiful.” I came in Tuesday with a haircut and a baby-smooth chin. The director of photography was thrilled.
Sep/091
Type “Y” for Yes
So I’ve discovered an awesome website at virtualapple.org. Using a handy Java applet, you can load up any number of old games from the Apple II and have yourself a nostalgia party. We never owned an Apple II, but my school did, and the other night I loaded up “The Oregon Trail,” which was a game I remember distinctly despite the haze of 22 years years since playing it.
If you recognize this screen, you are freaking old.
First, I’d like to point out that I was a gifted child. I must have been, because to navigate the menus in these old games takes a freaking computer science degree.
There is no “yes” button to click, no animated, glowing, shiny thing with arrows pointing at it.
No. We had to type the letter “y” for yes and “n” for no.
This may be one of the first and most shocking pieces of evidence that I am, in fact, older than dirt because what sounds older than “Back in my day, we had to type our commands! None of this mouse-click whizbangery!”
I was shocked also, upon playing Oregon Trail, at how horrific the sound is. At every fort you hear some different American patriotic theme, warbled out in a single line of beeps and boops… literal beeping and booping… rendered with about as much emotion as a napkin. Compared to “Mass Effect,” which is currently eating my life on my XBOX 360, Oregon Trail grinds like a wheel from the stone age.
And yet, there I was the other night, playing it again after two decades, and having fun.
Aug/090
Happy Birthday (to me)
Good God, I’m 27.
It wasn’t until I saw all the candles ablaze on top of the cake, which was barely large enough in diameter to contain them all, that I realized I’ve done the birthday thing more than a couple times now.
Needless to say I extinguished them with extreme prejudice.
I could have signaled airplanes with my birthday cake...
My birthday was Monday, although the actual day passed by in a blink. We got breakfast with Dad at Bob Evans, and he brought candles to put in my pancakes and we all sang loud enough for the restaurant to hear.
The afternoon is a hazy blur in my memory, probably because I spent it trying to recover from my ragtime-induced flu.
In the evening, Mom hosted a birthday party and made a delicious dinner of roasted potatoes, turkey, homemade stuffing, homemade vegetable medley, and to top it all off, a three-layer chocolate cake with white icing. We had a bunch of people over to celebrate, and I got some lovely gifts, including a Michael Jackson CD (sweet) and a stylishly bangin’ new tie (which is not something I ever buy myself).
The celebration has continued throughout the week. One of the advantages of getting older is that your birthday can be spread out over multiple days, unlike when you’re a kid and everything has to be reliant on The Party. We went to dinner and a Pirates game tonight, courtesy of Mom. On Friday, Jess’ family is taking us horseback riding at night. I’ll return to DC on Saturday, where there are hopefully a few birthday cards and gifts waiting for me.
Welcome
Welcome to the homepage of musician, writer, and filmmaker Martin Spitznagel!
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