Category: moods

Septimana horribilis

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

Not to be too dramatic, but one of the worst weeks in memory.

Monday: fine except of course, it’s Monday.

Tuesday: Kirk’s car broken into, window smashed, birthday present radio stolen. Police refuse to respond to call. Kirk’s dad taken by ambulance to er and admitted to hospital incoherent and in pain.

Wednesday: bought used factory radio on eBay, made appointment with safelite to repair broken window. Kirk’s dad diagnosed with gall bladder issues. Surgery Monday.

Thursday: rear window replaced, cost $275. Kirk starting to not feel well.

Friday: leave for work at 6am to discover that Kirk’s entire car now stolen. Take day off work, deal with police (who come this time), insurance. Kirk flat on his back, unable to go to rehearsal. Never seen him miss rehearsal.

Saturday: most of day running errands for various sick people.

Sunday: Kirk attempts to go to rehearsal with me driving him to allentown; can’t make it. Kirk’s mom not feeling well. Run more errands for sick people. Finish day watching football. Awaiting arrival of useless eBay radio.

So looking forward to work tomorrow. A return to normalcy.

Jamie Lawrence-Howard

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

Kirk and I were married in New York last Friday 8/20/12. Of course, we were married (as far as we are concerned) on 1/11/00 by the good Rev. Michael Carter, but it’s nice (and was surprisingly affecting) to have the paperwork.

One of the questions on the form was “last name”. We had 4 options: keep our names; take Lawrence or Howard; mush them together (Laward? Howrence?); or hyphenate. After much discussion, or rather, a couple of intense minutes, we decided on the hyphen.

I didn’t want Laward, pronounced “lard”, that’s for sure.

Kirk’s very good point was that a statement should be made. Agreed. I’m not a fan of the hyphen, at all, but I went along. My contribution was the order; I liked the sound and flow of Lawrence-Howard, although it means I am further along in a-to-z lines.

Now i just have to sort out the name change issue on official paperwork. I should know more, but I’ve decided to just bumble along with it higgeldy-piggeldy and see how it works out. First stop is Social Security, which seems to be straightforward. After that, the passport. From there, who knows. Drivers license for pennsylvania, I suppose.

Fasten your seat belts, as ms. Davis said. This part could get bumpy and interesting.

stupid stupid stimulus check boondoggle

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

kirk sent me an email that purported to give the schedule that the irs will follow when mailing out the stimulus checks this spring.

did i say spring? i did. more on that later.

so the email said that they would mail on a schedule according to the last two digits in your social security number. which would mean that, according to the provided schedule, that my check would be mailed on july 11th.

july frigging 11th! that’s not spring! that’s half the summer gone! some frigging stimulus. what a crock.

but wait. maybe it’s just an email hoax. so, off to check snopes.com. and you know what? it’s frigging true! i couldn’t believe it.

now, to be sure, i think that the entire stimulus check nonsense is, well, nonsense. i don’t think it will do a bit of good for the economy. but on the off chance it might do some good, perhaps it would make sense to, oh, i don’t know, have it enter the economy in a relative lump sum. at least then it would have a chance of having some effect.

jeebus. this is the best our government can do? if you are going to pander to me, at least halfway deliver on your promise. i can hardly wait for obama to get into the white house, and hopefully bring at least a bit of sanity to washington.

stimulate this, congress

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

i like getting money as much as the next guy.

and a $600 check will certainly be welcome, and if/when i get my stimulus check from congress, i will put it toward a credit card balance.

but the idea that we have to send everyone checks to stimulate the economy is nonsense. you’d think it was an election year, the way that congress is nakedly pandering to the electorate.

perhaps stimulus is needed, although i maintain foresight and planning would have been better. but given this bunch of fools, that’s too much to ask. it was apparent to anyone with half a brain that the real estate runup was a bubble that would burst, just like the internet bubble and, indeed, tulip mania before it. wiser people than me could have figured out how to avoid all this, although i’m sure that most of the people who saw it coming were busy figuring ways to profit from the downturn.

i’m no financial genius, but even i knew better than to get one of these foolish interest-only balloon-payment mortgages. we got a thirty-year fixed mortgage for an apartment we could comfortably afford on just one of our salaries, in case anything drastic ever happened. and now i’m expected to smile while my tax dollars bail out idiots whose greed led them to buy more house than they could possibly afford, signing mortgages they now claim not to have understood. know what? you signed it. your decision. your fault. you pay the consequences, not me.

but i know that we live in a financially interconnected world, and if everything goes to hell i will be affected, and we’re all in this together, and what not. it’s offensive to me that our prosperity, and our financial rescue, will come at the hands of countries like china, who finances our debt while millions of their own people live in abject poverty. every time i buy something frivolous i don’t need, it comes directly from the blood of some poverty-stricken third-world person.

but, i’m comfortable, and it’s easy to ignore that, so i do, along with everyone else. when will the ultimate reckoning come? someday. i hope not in my lifetime. at some point, though, this country’s prosperity will come to a sudden, screeching halt, and it won’t be pretty.

in the meantime, we will stimulate the economy with $600 checks, plus $300 extra per child for the breeders. and now the retirees are complaining that they will be left out, so i’m sure someone will see to them as well.

michael kinsley and joe klein touch on this in their columns in time magazine this week. i especially like kinsley’s take, comparing the situation to a drunk’s bender:

I think we should sober up first. Plenty of people are still partying as if it were 2006. Right-wing radio talk shows are still dominated by ads for second mortgages. Every day’s mail still brings fat envelopes from companies begging to issue you a credit card. Every TV commercial that isn’t about some prescription drug for a disease you never heard of (but may well have, now that they mention it) seems to be for payday loans. Always borrow responsibly, they say. A little late for that.

Here’s a thought. Suppose we don’t go further into debt in the name of fiscal stimulus. Suppose we stop selling ourselves piece by piece to foreigners (and suppose we stop blaming the foreigners for problems of our own making). Suppose we use taxing and spending to show the world that we can behave responsibly, see how the world responds to that, and let the Federal Reserve Board supply the stimulus with lower interest rates. If we must have a fiscal stimulus, let’s make sure it’s not too enjoyable. Build some rapid transit; don’t give away any tax breaks.

joe klein comes to much the same conclusion. build some infrastucture. use the money to insulate buildings, make things more energy efficient, build mass transit. give us some energy independence, so we can perhaps avoid some of the troubles that got us where we are now. that’s too much vision to ask from our oilman president, of course, but we can dream.

in the meantime, i guess i’ll wait for my payola to arrive.

those demonic black-clad youth

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

from a news article about the school shootings in cleveland:

Coon, who was white, stood out in the predominantly black school for dressing in a goth style, wearing a black trench coat, black boots, a dog collar and chains, she said….Police believe Coon, wearing a Marilyn Manson shirt, black jeans and black nail polish, targeted the two teachers he shot Wednesday.

why is it that all these kids who shoot people in school are always dressed in black?

it isn’t, that’s why. it just sticks out in your mind that they are, because the press always notes the clothing and style of the kid when it doesn’t conform to their perception of societal norms.

what does dressed in black have to do with his motives for committing the crime? absolutely nothing. maybe, however, this has something to do with it:

The Department of Children and Family Services was called to Coon’s home in 2000 because he had burns on his arms and scratches on his forehead, the newspaper said.

maybe someone should have spent more time on that. but why bother, you know. the weirdo dresses in black and listens to marilyn manson. try to ignore him.

it’s easier.

aging and gay, and facing prejudice in twilight

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

in the ny times this morning, this story about the homophobia-based mistreatment of gays and lesbians in nursing homes and assisted-care facilities.

from the article:

Elderly gay people…living in nursing homes or assisted-living centers or receiving home care, increasingly report that they have been disrespected, shunned or mistreated in ways that range from hurtful to deadly, even leading some to commit suicide.

Some have seen their partners and friends insulted or isolated. Others live in fear of the day when they are dependent on strangers for the most personal care. That dread alone can be damaging, physically and emotionally, say geriatric doctors, psychiatrists and social workers.

i hope that i don’t end up in a nursing home or assisted living. but the odds are that i will.

i hope i’ll have enough money to be in a nice, nonthreatening place. but the odds are that i won’t.

maybe i should look into long term care insurance for kirk and myself.

easing up on the barry bonds hating

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

maybe i’m getting more forgiving as time goes by.

or more lax.

anyway, i’ve been a barry bonds hater for quite some time. to save you clicking through, here’s a relevant bit of what i said:

if he plays and passes hank aaron, and baseball honors the record, that’s it for me and baseball. seriously. one of the few things that keep baseball sacred is the years and years of impeccable apples-to-apples stats. and to honor a steroid-laden asswipe’s breaking of a record that important would dishonor hank aaron’s real accomplishment, and i won’t stand for it.

i’m taking that back. with barry bonds approaching the record, i’ve been doing some thinking. here’s where i am now.

performance-enhancing drugs have been a part of baseball for decades. what do you think amphetamines are? baseball players have been popping speed forever. and no one disputes the records set while players used them.

if you throw out records tainted by steroids, then an appropriate extension of that logic would suggest that you should throw out records from, say the forties on. all those records are tainted too, you know. did hank aaron pop bennies? you’ll never know, and of course at this point he’d never admit it. but if you investigate bonds and throw out his record, then you open a can of worms. should you then investigate hank aaron and throw out his record as well? where does it logically stop? did babe ruth cork his bat?

and how exactly did steroids help bonds? maybe he recovered a bit more quickly from injuries. maybe the strength he gained gave him a few more feet on some home run hits. how many home runs did that add to his total? impossible to quantify, but given that there are so many intangibles in the ability to hit a home run, lets say for arguments sake that the extra time and extra few feet gave him 20 more home runs.

big deal. all that means is that he’d be a bit farther away from the record. he’d still hang around long enough to break it.

and i’ve also come to believe that bonds is the poster boy for an activity in which scores of baseball players participated, but few got caught.

finally, as a mets fan i’ve largely ignored the return of guillermo mota, the mets pitcher suspended for steroid use last season. and, given his dismal performance this year, i don’t think the steroids did him much good.

in the end, i think that talent, coordination, concentration, experience, and willpower are probably far more important to someone’s ability to be a major league baseball player than a few performance-enhancing drugs here and there. you can give me all the steroids you want, and the chances of me hitting a home run in a major league park are up there with those proverbial monkeys trying into infinity to type shakespeare.

am i glad that steroids, speed, and the rest are gone from baseball? you bet. and i look forward to an old age where players who began their careers under the ban break all the records, establishing indisputable legitimacy.

ryan howard’s 800th home run will be a big celebration for me.

in the meantime, let’s let bygones be bygones. let’s not be hypocrites. and let’s not be haters.

let barry bonds have his moment. he deserves it.

Olbermann: Bush, Cheney should resign

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

read it or watch it.

i started crying about halfway through this, and couldn’t stop. it’s the most powerful, reasoned, cohesive, intelligent, and provable statement on this issue that one could possibly make.

i won’t spoil his logic for you, but it’s airtight.

i sometimes wonder if our free republic can survive these men. if the next president continues down this same road of consolidation of power around the executive branch, it may not.

thestagingarea.com up and running

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

kirk’s had that url — “thestagingarea.com” — for quite a while, and it has gone through various iterations. the latest, and perhaps the best so far, is a wordpress blog.

it’s different from mine, in a good way. there are actual graphics on the page, for one thing. i was jealous of that, for a few minutes, but then kirk pointed out that the text-based spareness of this site matches my personality, and the graphics matches his. in addition, my site has been text-based since 1998, originally because i hated slow-loading graphics-heavy pages that took forever to load over dialup. but now, it’s just part of the history of the site. my trademark, if you will.

so text-based it is.

anyway, back to kirk. it’s a great beginning, and i think he’ll post and keep up with it, so it’s worth bookmarking or adding his rss feed. and he has a crapload of content in the vaults — all of the sites he designed for various broadway and off-broadway shows, including the original hedwig.com site. if he gets all that up and running, it would be very cool.

one note of response to his first real post. he says:

Jamie has also said that I think too much. There will be no argument here; I do think too much. This is why I can’t sleep. This is why when he’s calling me from the other room, I don’t hear him. I admit it, my head is obsessively caught up in thought.

except of course he uses capital letters. show-off.

with me, though, there are vast stretches of time where there’s literally nothing going on in my head. i don’t mean that flippantly or facetiously; i mean that i just don’t think of anything. i don’t hum a song, or do sums, or even think about not thinking, although at some point i become aware that i’m not thinking again, which of course is thinking in itself.

it’s probably better to think too much than to not think enough.

one closing promise, as i reread what i’ve written.

my blog will not become an insufferable dialogue between my blog and kirk’s blog. i’ll keep the cross-commenting to a minimum.

mcguire’s forced to remove “joke” bathroom signs

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

this has to be the dumbest damn thing i’ve seen in a while.

there’s a great irish pub in pensacola, florida. used to go there all the time, back in the day. they have live music, usually some folky guy with a guitar with whom you can sing “the unicorn song” or whatever. they have the last of the original tullamore dew in a glass display case, and i think you can buy some for an astronomical sum, if i remember correctly. you sign a dollar bill and staple it to the wall or ceiling on your first visit, after you’ve kissed the moose on the wall or some such thing. the regulars all have mugs with their names on, for when they visit.

you get the picture. goofy fun type bar. great atmosphere, fun people, good food and drink.

and one of the jokes is that the signs on the bathroom doors (you can see the signs if you click the link above) mislead you into entering the wrong restroom.

big frigging deal. it happened to me the first time i went there. and i walked into the ladies’ room.

and i immediately realized my mistake, and exited, and everyone laughed, and someone bought me a drink.

and i laughed too.

maybe that’s because i have the ability to laugh at myself. that’s a trait i treasure in a person.

and evidently it’s the trait lacking in the sad asshole-y poor excuse for a human being who threatened to sue mcguire’s because his 15-year-old daughter got walked in on by mistake by a college-age guy. and the state made mcguire’s take the signs down.

good lord. big fat hairy deal.

i’m hoping this turns out to be a snopes-worthy hoax.

i’m betting it isn’t, though. it’s idiots like this who ruin the world for everyone else.

get a life, dude.

the office basketball pool, part deux

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

third place this year–$70 cash, baby.

for the second time in three years, i’m in the money.

i would have been in the money last year, but even though i suspected florida would do well, i didn’t have the guts to pick them to go all the way, and i should have.

i didn’t make that mistake this year. i nailed the final four, the two teams that went to the final, and the winner. i messed up a bit in the early rounds and lost crucial points that kept me from winning, but i’m happy with third.

let me make this clear.

i know absolutely nothing about basketball. i hate the game, and i never watch it, and i don’t follow the results, and i couldn’t name five nba players if you had a gun to my head.

i do, however, have a system. it’s really complicated, but i’ll try to explain it.

download the odds.

fill in your bracket according to the odds.

pick the underdog to win the final game.

i pick the underdog to win the final game because so many people in contention at the end will have picked the favorite, and that can make the difference between winning it all if you get down to the wire.

this year i picked florida, even though they were the favorite. i lived in gainesville for several years, and i couldn’t dispassionately abandon them again this year.

i’m glad i didn’t.

must be something in the dirty water

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

oh, boston. i’m glad you aren’t my home. the home of public officials so stupid that they can’t tell the difference between a lite-brite and a terrorist bomb device.

basically, it was guerilla marketing in a couple of dozen cities over the past few weeks. none of the other cities were idiotic enough to think that al-qaeda was disguising their next attack on america as mooninites from aqua teen hunger force.

and so the great city of boston arrests the terrorists, i mean, the guerilla posting guys, who then give a press conference the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the beatles came to america. from cnn:

Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were released on $2,500 bail, said Mike Rich, their attorney. The next pre-trial hearing is scheduled for March 7.

Both men were cooperative with authorities, and neither has a previous criminal record in Massachusetts, Grossman said.

In a news conference, Rich told reporters he had advised his clients not to discuss the incident. Stevens and Berdovsky took the podium and said they were taking questions only about haircuts in the 1970s.

When a reporter accused them of not taking the situation seriously, Stevens responded, “We’re taking it very seriously.” Asked another question about the case, Stevens reiterated they were answering questions only about hair and accused the reporter of not taking him and Berdovsky seriously.

Reporters did not relent and as they continued, Berdovsky disregarded their queries, saying, “That’s not a hair question. I’m sorry.”

now that’s some classic stuff. john lennon would be proud.

update: here’s the video

i’m still here

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i know, it’s been a while. it’s been quite a month.

first, my group of five people at my place of employment was cut to two. just my boss and me. so, as you can imagine, i’ve been quite busy at work, which spills over into quite busy at home.

you get the picture.

and then kirk and i were gone for a week and a half on vacation. paris and strasbourg. lovely, fun, and too many stories. i had the night of my life at la casserole in the 18th arrondisement of paris. i’ll tell you all about that. suffice it to say that i had an 8pm dinner reservation, and left at 5am. the next morning.

lots of pictures, lots of stories. lots to tell.

we’ll get caught up.

on the use of “happy holidays”

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

a lot of people think this phrase is a politically correct copout.

i don’t agree.

i’m a christian. you are not. or maybe you are. how the hell do i know? saying “happy holidays” is just being sensitive of other people’s beliefs, and doesn’t assume that everyone believes the way you do.

more importantly, i’d argue that saying “happy holidays” promotes the concept that god reveals himself, herself, or itself through many religions and traditions, all of which can be a conduit to truth and peace. that’s what i believe, anyway.

so my use of “happy holidays’ is, in a sense, much more spiritual than just saying “merry christmas”. and spirituality is what religion should be about, right?

so there.

i was told on the phone the other day by someone, “happy holidays, if you celebrate one”.

now that’s going too far.

the best $100 i spend each month

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

a couple of years ago i had surgery on my lower back. although surgery is often not necessary, it was in my case. unless i wanted to be a depends-wearing cripple with a metal strap around my foot and no sexual function.

and, really, who wants that?

the surgery was very successful in that i don’t wear depends, don’t limp or have pain, and jamie jr. functions well. but i’ve realized over time that i need to look at the root cause of what caused my back trouble in the first place.

recently, prompted by what i thought was some unrelated shoulder pain, i had a deep-tissue sports massage. i’d had massages before, but nothing like this. pain? lemme tell ya. searing. barely tolerable. screaming into the pillow. but the guy (gary) clearly knew what he was doing–he works on professional and amateur athletes for a living.

as an aside, i asked him how the athletes tolerate it. he said they are pretty much used to it, but the deep-tissue work he does with them is more like a 9 or 10 on a scale of 10.

my massage? it’s a 3. three? jeebus. i don’t want to know from 9, if what i’m having is a 3.

anyway, my shoulder is much better now, and the concomitant benefit is that my lower back is much better as well. who knew that all that “knee bone connected to the hip bone” crap wasn’t crap?

i’m thinking now that a lot of my lower back problems were caused by upper back stuff that manifested elsewhere. because, even though it’s an hour of near-torture, that hour of massage gets me right for a full month. great stuff.

if you are in the new york city area, drop me a line and i’ll give you gary’s contact info.

it’ll be the best $100 you spend each month, too. a bargain at twice the price.

trust me on this.

breaking news you missed

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

great article bemoaning the [lack of] importance of stories classified as “breaking news”, via daring fireball.

it’s true. the wedding of tom cruise and katie holmes is not breaking news.

and at the end of the article, there’s a link to a devastating article about the unsealing of a holocaust archive. from the article:

A visitor to the archive comes into direct contact with the bureaucracy of mass murder.

In a bound ledger with frayed binding, a copy of a list of names appears of Jews rounded up in Holland and transported to the death camps. Buried among the names is “Frank, Annelise M,” her date of birth (June 12, 1929), Amsterdam address before she went into hiding (Merwedeplein 37) and the date she was sent to a concentration camp (Sept. 3, 1944).

Frank, Annelise M. is Anne Frank.

She was on one of the last trains to Germany before the Nazi occupation of Holland crumbled. Six months later, aged 15, she died an anonymous death, one of some 35,000 casualties of typhus that ravaged the Bergen-Belsen camp. After the war, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” written during her 25 months hiding in a tiny apartment with seven others, would become the most widely read book ever written on the Holocaust.

But most of the lives recorded in Bad Arolsen are known to none but their families.

that’s as much breaking news as tom cruise’s frigging wedding. the holocaust story at least deserves to get a tenth of the attention that the wedding will get.

the media could spare a few moments to highlight this, really, if they could tear themselves away from cruise, britney spears, and michael richards for just a moment.

things that have recently made me cranky

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

the old guy sitting next to me at “grey gardens” wednesday night made me very cranky. first of all, though he was ancient and practically bald, he still had a ponytail. bad form. when we were going to our seats, before i knew i was sitting next to him, i overheard him complaining about his seats to the usher. well, dude, you bought them. did you not know where they were when you bought them? it’s your damn fault that your seats are where they are. man up. take responsibility.

so kirk and i sat down, and he followed us into the row and sat next to me. great. and throughout the show, he kept passing gas. very smelly gas. and he was constantly poking his bony-ass elbow into my side, way past the armrest and halfway into my seat. i finally had to whisper “excuse me”, which got his elbow at least back onto the armrest.

do people have no clue of how they are acting in public? talk about breaking the social contract. come on, clueless usher-torturing bony-elbowed bad-ponytailed fart man. get a grip.

this morning i got cranky as well. every week or so, i treat myself to a grease-bomb burger king breakfast. i get an egg-and-cheese croissanwich meal (comes with tater tots, and a diet coke) for $2.70–it’s a splurge for me, monetarily and dietarily. but i like it, and i never go to mcdonalds, because they stupidly charge extra for the diet coke, making the equivalent meal well over $4. and i hate the log-o-hash browns. that big solid plank of potato is very unappetizing. give me individual tots anytime.

but i digress.

this morning, i go to burger king for my breakfast. there’s a roped off line to get in, but these two loudmouth idiots at the front of the line aren’t in it. they evidently can’t be bothered to walk the extra 10 feet. so they stand just outside the ropes, waiting for the guy currently at the register to finish, so they can push past all the people who have already ordered and are waiting for their food.

and since they aren’t in line, the rest of us aren’t queued up nicely, but are forced into a clump around them. though, being good people, we’ve all mentally noted who got there first and so on. you can tell with some people that they get it, and with others that they are idiots.

and there’s only one person who works the burger king counter in the morning, so it’s not the most speedy process in the best of circumstances. add to that the general slowness of new york fast food (it’s unbelievably slow, but you get used to it), and we all are waiting our turn in a confused mass of humanity.

and the two guys who can’t line up are waiting as well. and talking. loudly. very very loudly. so i have to listen to their inane conversation about their boring ass life, because they are so loud that i don’t have a choice.

and it is finally their turn. and they ignore the roped-off line, push past the people waiting for their food, and get to the counter.

and look up at the menu board, and one of them says. says.

“now let’s see here, what do you have for breakfast?”

dammit, dammit, dammit. you’ve been standing there for at least three minutes. could you not have looked up and decided what the flying fuck you wanted for breakfast? no. you have to make me wait even longer, because you are an idiot.

and most times, i would have let it go. but this time, i muttered under my breath, “oh for chrissakes”.

at least i thought it was under my breath.

it wasn’t as under my breath as i thought.

everyone in the non-line turned around and looked at me. and then turned around and looked at him.

and, to his credit, he immediately said, “i’ll have a number seven”.

and now i feel bad, a little bit. i need to be less cranky. i need to be more zen.

who knows why the old guy farted so much?

maybe this guy hadn’t seen the guy he was with for a while, and got excited, and forgot to formulate his burger king order.

i need to work on not letting little things bug me so much. in the end, if you have perspective, they aren’t what matter.

jittery but fine

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

it doesn’t take much for a new yorker to get taken back mentally to 9/11.

especially when a plane crashes into a manhattan high rise.

on 10/11.

i know that the human mind puts concidences together, and makes logical sense of them. and the 10/11 date is just that–a coincidence.

still, it was an odd feeling, watching tv and seeing a plane crashed into a building. been there, done that, and have no need to repeat.