failure weblog

saturday afternoon i went with sue and the potts’ kids over to jamie’s for her son hayden’s 6th birthday party. all of the other adults dropped their kids off and left. i thought it was somewhat odd, but evidently that’s how things are done once kids reach a certain age. (which i guess i thought would be older.) jamie was quite the party planner. i hope when her kids get older they can appreciate the time and effort she puts into being a mom. having a lot of friends who are parents now, including single/divorced parents, i can say with some certainty it ain’t an easy task.
saturday evening i ate out with natalie, then we watched swingers. or at least i watched swingers. she did admirably compared to usual, staying mostly awake through probably at least 2/3rd of the film. swingers is such a cool film.
sunday i went to church. i used to go to beth moore, but i kind of stopped doing that and just go to the main evening service now. everyone tells me i should try going to a singles group, but it’s hard to want to. i know part of it is my pessimism, but i’ve always felt like an outsider and like i didn’t really belong in church singles groups. it’d be really cool if there were people like me, but i always end up feeling like the only thing we really have in common is the church we go to. it’s almost easier to hang out with people who accept me but i know we don’t have the same worldview, than to hang out with people who i feel like don’t really understand me but we should have the same worldview. plus i think on some level i have this idea that if i’m going to meet someone who i could date and possibly marry, it’d be at church. going there and being let down is like crushing the only hope left. which is kind of stupid i admit, but it’s hard to not get discouraged when you don’t have good experiences every now and then. i mean, i like being unique and being myself, but sometimes it’s not so cool feeling isolated. i realize at least some level of this is due to my own personality and thoughts. but for good or bad, that’s a part of who i am.
sunday night i watched oldboy. i was pretty excited about seeing it. visually it was a real treat. the story was pretty interesting as well. but i don’t think it lived up to the marketing description, as i didn’t feel it really played out like a psychological thriller from hitchcock. it had some pretty graphic violence which made me squirm sometimes, and the big plot twists were pretty disturbing. as i said at the beginning though, i thought it had some really cool visual sequences.

i watched 3-iron with the director’s commentary on, some last night and some earlier today. it helped explain some of the ideas and motivations behind the film. although i still wonder if this would be considered a movie that at least on some level accurately portrays the culture, traditions, and mindset of korea. he evidently intended the movie to be inconclusive, for the viewer to wonder if the main male role, female role, or husband were inventing/imagining some or all of the goings on. one of the cultural ideas that wasn’t understood well by my Texas/u.s. background was ghosts inhabiting and thus owning a house. (or in some ways, his/their view of a house or place you live.) overall though i think the movie could be understood, and its ideas or plot elements would be somewhat skewed or foreign to even a korean audience. (who evidently don’t really watch his movies because he doesn’t create movies that are popular or blockbusters there.)
i’m not sure if the planting of ideas relating to ghosts and houses is what led to the events this morning. i was having a dream where tamara and i were in the house and things were like before the massive collapse had happened. we were talking and i followed her into the master bathroom, and i was looking at her reflection in the mirror and she was saying something like “i know what i’m going to do” or “i know how to be happy” or something and suddenly everything that was to happen and everything i was going to feel suddenly spilled through her like some kind of spiritual force and i was overwhelmed with pain and sorrow. it’s hard to describe the changes i saw and the spiritual/emotional weight that fell on me in that moment. i woke myself up weeping.
at least these kinds of things don’t happen as much anymore.
even though i’d realized it in passing a week or two ago, i had forgotten feb 9th is tamara’s birthday until a third party reminded me via a mutual friend. but feb 9th came and went without event. well, until that evening. from things i’ve heard lately, the sense i got from looking at that picture of tamara a while back was accurate: she’s not doing well at all. as much as i don’t want her to be happy and satisfied with life and the choices she made, it really hurts me to think of her hurting herself and falling apart. the amount of pain she’s put me through and the ways she has treated me makes it difficult to wish her happiness, but i still have very strong feelings about her and it hurts me to know she is bringing pain and difficulty on herself. it’s out of my hands. she chose to no longer be a part of my life, to be my wife. this it not the life i wanted, but these are the cards in my hand now and i have to try and find the best way to play them. G-d help both of us.

let’s see…
monday and tuesday of last week i tried to clean up my place some because…
wednesday natalie came over and we watched the girl in the cafe. the characters were interesting and visually it was interesting enough, but the politics and emotional heart-string tugging got a bit heavy-handed. i liked the acting and the interplay of the awkward main characters the most i think. kelly macdonald (the main female role) kept reminding me of someone, but i never figured out exactly who. i didn’t see any roles she’s done on imdb that clicked for it either.
thursday i went and saw the wild river band play at blanco’s. i took my bike and met brad, kelly, and jason at empire (where they’d eaten) and then headed over to blanco’s. natalie showed up a bit later. it was cool to see the band again, i don’t think they’d played a public show in a while. there was this old man in a snazzy white suit with about 1″ square black checker boxes over parts of it, wearing a white sailor cap (think skipper from gilligan’s island), and a very sheer white panama shirt. he had roses and was handing them to women and asking them to dance with him. (i’ve seen him at blanco’s a few other times i’ve been there, actually.) kelly had wanted to dance but brad wouldn’t and i was hesitant, so i motioned the old guy over. kelly danced with him, but he was pulling her close and kissing her cheeks and…well…he was a bit of a dirty old man. i kind of felt guilty afterward. i think maybe brad was a bit annoyed. but can you threaten an old man in a sailor hat? that’s probably what he banks on. *laugh*
friday was the geek gathering for the radio show. after the gathering i went home and jamie and i ended up watching being john malkovich.
saturday i watched 3-iron. it was pretty cool, but not incredible or anything. the storyline was intriguing, and the characters were interesting. i think i might be missing something due to cultural differences or something. it was odd how the movie took a very eastern mysticism kind of turn about 2/3 of the way through. i hadn’t really noticed such an element before then, so it kind of threw me.
in the early afternoon, natalie picked me up to be her guest for a night on the town she’d won through work. i got to eat at sambuca for free, as well as have a bunch of free drinks at the magnolia hotel and at sambuca. natalie and joanna and i went down to the continental club to see the gourds, but it was really crowded so we left. we went back to sambuca and i had a couple more drinks and smoked my pipe. the big downside was the dress was “business/dress casual”, which meant i had to go out and buy a new pair of pants (dark grey cargo-style pants from old navy…but without pockets…i can’t admit i own khakis or slacks). even having to wear such unsettling pants, it was a good time.
sunday i finally finished putting together my new cd rack. i got it mostly together a few days before, but the bolt-n-nut tightening process kept leaving it a bit twisted. i figured out a methodology that worked eventually. i got most of my country and rock/alt cds on it. (i have yet to put my xian cds on it. i hope they all fit.) the rack was not as wide as i had expected it to be, so i actually was able to fit it between my entertainment center and speaker without having to move anything. i think i’m going to like it quite a bit — it holds a lot of cds without taking up much space, and they’re easy to see, move around, pull out and put in, rearrange, etc.
around 1:30pm — about the time i was going to take a shower — jennifer called. she was on her way back to her house from meeting her ex to drop off her kids. seeing as i had recently cleaned my place (how convenient!), i asked her if she wanted to drop by. she originally said yes, but called a bit later because she’d decided she needed to get home and wouldn’t have time. i was in the shower when she called back, so i now have another message on my machine from her. *laugh* we’ll see how long this one lasts. she called back a bit later and we had a nice talk while she was driving back to her house.
in the afternoon i headed over on my bike to chris’s place (who had the meat and martini party) to watch the super bowl. i had a bit of a hard time staying awake, being light on sleep after the “night on the town”.
monday after work i watched the wild parrots of telegraph hill with natalie, who’d found herself with a free evening late in the day. it was interesting and pretty enjoyable. it didn’t make me plan on adopting any birds any time soon though. the movie was put out by docurama, the same folk who put out slasher. i watched that a year or so ago. it’s about a guy who goes from company to company (mostly car dealerships) on weekends doing those “all cars most go” “slasher” sales to help them get rid of stale inventory. that was a pretty cool documentary, and i recommend it.
yesterday i sent off two of the three netflix dvds. i held back on sending in 3-iron because i’m thinking about watching it with the director’s commentary to see if i can get any interesting insight on what he was thinking or trying to say with the movie. after work i headed off to the flying saucer to participate in triva night with kymberlie, sketkar, natalie, and others. afterward, most of us headed over to sambuca. i headed home after that, then sue came over and we talked for a while.
today: radio show after work. another fundraising show. they’re a necessary evil since kpft is non-profit community radio station.

i signed up for netflix saturday. my first three movies should be 3-iron, the wild parrots of telegraph hill, and the girl in the cafe. (thanks for the suggestions, kevin.) i’m interested to see how the whole netflix thing works out for me. i went ahead and signed up for the unlimited 3 movies at once option. i thought about going with the one unlimited, but i thought it might be too restrictive. and the unlimited 2 didn’t seem to be linear between the 1 and 3 as far as cost-benefit. that’s probably intentional.
i also went to the imax at the houston museum of natural science on saturday and saw roving mars (about the mars rovers). jamie was taking her kids and asked me if i wanted to go, so i asked sue and she came along with the potts kids.
i put my new straight baffles in today. my bike got lower and more throaty, and louder. not scary louder, but louder. i might need to get the carbs re-jetted. but i went ahead and rode it around. i met up with stephen and we went into the hood. we went to an icehouse off of cullen inside 610. there were 75 or more bikes there at any one time and i was one of very few white folk. 🙂
later in the evening i got sort of down, sitting here at the house by myself. i’m trying to keep hope alive. sometimes i’m just not really sure if there’s enough potential available.
since i’ve been listening to cash (as well as paycheck, kmfdm, and the talking heads), i’ll throw this gem out as a statement:
johnny cash – “guess things happen that way”

Continue reading “yet another weekend”

i love answering machines. or, i should say, i love clever or odd outgoing messages. ever since i got an answering machine, i’ve always loved making funny or bizarre outgoing messages. my creativity was unfortunately squelched by roommates or marital partners for various lengths of time due to some need on their part to present a professional appearance to potential callers. usually at some point i cracked and created a weird message anyway, only be chastised and see my beautiful work turned back into a mundane, sterile, “we’re not here” message. for the last couple of years i’ve not had roommates or a marital partner though, so i’ve been able to let my repressed outgoing message juices run wild. (not that losing my marriage is worth that, but it’s one of a very few bright spots i saw for a long time.)
so anyway, i got a new answering machine a year or so ago. it doesn’t lose the messages if the power goes out, which is pretty cool. unfortunately, i have a tendency to let messages slowly build up. some of them i keep for sentimental or humorous reasons, others just because i plan to keep them as short-term reminders but then they build up (sort of like my email inbox). i guess i should record some off and delete them.
this week i had hit the 40 messages mark, so i decided it was time for a cleaning. it was kind of interesting going through them, as some of them were from back in october (or even earlier). the one i had the hardest time deleting was one from jennifer. she wasn’t saying anything of any importance or weight, but her voice…man, it just sounds so good to me. to use an old phrase, it’s positively dreamy. like i feel all mushy inside and grin like an idiot. well, i deleted it.
now i just need to keep from trying to figure out some reason to get her to call and leave me another message. 😉

this morning when i was backing out of my driveway, i noticed something out of the norm.
let’s step back a few years first…
my doorbell rang, i went to the door and it was this cute young asian girl and her father. he didn’t really speak english, but he wanted his daughter to talk to me. she’d hit my pickup. i went out and looked and it was barely scraped, mostly just white paint from her new mustang. they were my neighbors across the street, and i’m guessing she was still learning or very early in her driving. i told them it was no problem at all. he smiled and nodded, she looked relieved. over the years since then, i’d see her from time to time, coming or going in her car. it was parked in the driveway, or every now and then by the curb on their side of the street.
back to the present…
this morning i looked in my rearview mirror as i was preparing to back out of my driveway and i saw a crushed white mustang across the way in my neighbor’s drive. it had to have been dropped there by a tow-truck — the tires were flat and both the front and back were crushed. but it looked like the cabin was intact, and the roof wasn’t crushed or anything. i’m guessing it was in the middle of a pile-up on a highway.
anyway, it just kind of struck me this morning — seeing that wrecked white car — how much change happened in such a short amount of time. the rest of the world around me was pretty much the same, but this one static piece of my surroundings had been dramatically changed overnight.
sometimes life is like that.

gee…catching up a bit…
thursday evening after work i headed over to the armadillo palace with the “co-worker i like to take weird pictures of” (we’ll call him “michiel”) and the co-worker who threw the meat and martini party (we’ll call him “chris”, and that’s a forward reference to an event later in this entry). i had agreed to buy michiel a well-deserved drink after he managed to, without using his hands or arms, call my phone with his blackberry (which began in his front pants pocket), then proceeded to build an origami cube just using his head and mouth. this whole thing started when we joked about him accidentally supergluing his fingers to his nipples, and he felt compelled to prove that he could still function like that. (who said my work environment was odd?)
after some empanadas and a couple of margaritas, i left the co-workers and headed over to the grand palace 24 to watch grandma’s boy. i kind of figured it might be a lot of low-brow sex and drugs jokes, and that’s mostly what i got. (but we were looking for something funny and shallow.) the saving grace for this movie was that the story is about a console game tester and the people he works with. while i’m not a gamer, game and computer culture tend to intersect quite a bit so i was able to find humor in a lot of little stuff and connecting characters to stereotypes or even people i actually know. and, honestly, there were a lot of jokes/gags in it i thought were funny. think of it as the illegitimate love child of revenge of the nerds and there’s something about mary in its teen years. i wouldn’t suggest a need to see it in the theater, but it might be something funny to rent at some point. (and no, please don’t relate it to adam sandler films. even though he is connected to it. bleh.)
friday after work i headed to pub fiction with some co-workers to celebrate one of them getting accepted into an mba program. pub fiction appeared to be a fairly trendy hang-out of downtown/midtown yuppies. joy.
after that i headed to the daily grind, which was closed, then to empire, which was closing, then to agora, where i met jamie and smoked my pipe while she experienced vertigo. (and evidently i helped to provide a “kinda eh” evening for her…i rock…)
saturday my brother came into town, so once he arrived we joined up with sue and her kids and headed over to st. arnold’s brewery for the tour. they are going to start charging for the tour soon ($5, but you get a special sampler glass to keep). that’s kind of annoying, but they are getting way too many people coming so they were trying to find a way to limit it some. and there were definitely a LOT of people there. at least 3 or 4 times more than the first time or two i went.
my brother had been sick earlier in the week, but was feeling better so he had decided to come down; however, he started feeling kind of sick again so that left me going solo to the meat and martini party a co-worker was having. this was the second m&m party, the first taking place a couple of years ago in the northeast. the spark that ignited this event was a conversation about how people complain too much about what they eat and about diet and light drinks…the conclusion being there should be a time where the whining stops and you just eat some meat and drink real drinks…like the rat pack did…like martinis. so the deal was each guest brings a meat-based dish (no sides), and the hosts provide the ingredients for numerous types of martinis. stylish dress highly suggested. since my brother was grounded, i tried sue…but she was occupied, so i asked natalie…and she was occupied as well. so alone i went, with my pipe and four rings of houston’s luling city market sausage. (this article in the houston press is the best synopsis i’ve seen of the city market in luling vs. luling city market situation, by the way. read, learn.) i ate some meat, i drank some martinis, i smoked my pipe. natalie did manage to show up later in the evening and after awhile we headed off to the house of pies.
sunday came early, but my brother — who had spent the evening on my couch watching movies and then sleeping — was feeling better, so we headed to bed, bath, and beyond. i hadn’t bought him anything for xmas or his birthday so he decided he wanted some kitchen items. we then met jack and sue and the kids at sylvia’s enchilada for lunch (mmmmm). after that, linc and i went to target where i purchased some more cooking/dining items for him. i also gave him a bunch of kitchen stuff i had but never use (blender, knives, waffle maker, mixing bowls, cooking utensils, etc.). he refused to take the cd/vhs cabinet…*sigh*. he took off for austin around 5pm.
later in the evening i met natalie at agora. where i once again smoked my pipe. for not having been to agora in a couple of years, i’ve recently gone there a lot in a short period of time.
monday after work i saw good night, and good luck. my movie partner decided the “good night” aspect sounded really intriguing, so she proceeded to perform extremely deep meditation after about the first 20 minutes. i brought her out of it twice, but she was dedicated and went right back to studying the inside of her eyelids. it was a really good film. i’m not sure how accurate a portrayal of reality it is, but the look and feel was nice. and what an interesting time in recent american history. as i saw someone mention somewhere, the amount of smoking and smoke in the film was insane, but i guess it helped set a mood and style. it seemed like some of the plot elements were put in as filler or to pad it out to feature length since they didn’t really have much to do with forwarding the plot or anything, but they weren’t out of place or distracting. we’ll just say they were creating a mood and backdrop with it.
tuesday after work i headed to the flying saucer for trivial tuesdays. i started doing that a few months ago, and am predictably inconsistent in showing up. as per the norm, after trivia the group moves over to sambuca. i hung out there until around 11:30pm and then headed home.
wednesdays after work i of course have the radio show. on this evening i managed to fit in references to the g.i. joe psa remixes from ebaum’s world (link) as well as 20 or 30 seconds of peanut butter jelly time.
which brings us up to today. so far today after work i’ve done nothing. but it’s still (relatively) early. ha.

today i called dg performance, the makers of hard-krome motorcycle pipes. i have a set of their k-2 pipes on my bike. they come with a set of standard baffles, which is what i currently have. however, they are replaceable, so i just ordered a set of their straight baffles. when i replace the current baffles with the straights, it should increase the loudness of my pipes. hopefully significantly. they’re already fairly loud when i’m accelerating or at decent speeds, but i’d like for them to be loud even when i’m idling. i can hardly wait to see how they affect the sound.

i used to be meticulous about my cds. i may be disorganized and lazy and sloven about any number of other things in my life, but my cds were always tip-top. not only continually properly organized alphabetically, but by date of release per artist/group, broken into a few simple genres, and the cds were always placed in the case so they were right-side up and perfectly aligned. this fell into quite a level of disarray over the last few years. (hhmmm…high fidelity anyone?)
but no more! or at least on the way to no more! one thing i did over my three day weekend (that i failed to mention before) was i started going through all of my cds. i quickly determined that i needed to buy some new kind of cd shelving or cabinet(s). tamara and i had bought a couple of multimedia cabinets years ago from ikea, but i wasn’t all that excited by them and i only ever put one together. a couple of months ago i gave the still-boxed one to my brother, and hopefully i’ll be giving the other one to him very soon. (he’s been getting a lot of stuff i’m burning through.)
i started half-heartedly looking around back when i gave him that one unit, but i could never find anything i was too excited by. (i tend to like stuff that keeps everything visible instead of behind solid doors, but that looks cool and is fairly sleek and/or minimalist.) then i remembered some i’d seen…either a friend had one or i saw it in a store or in magazines or something. i couldn’t remember the name of the company, but once i started doing some google searches i eventually hit on it. so today i placed my order for the boltz cd-600 floor-standing cd rack unit. it’s a little over 5.5 feet tall with 11 shelves, holding approximately 600 cds. i chose the “anthracite metallic” finish.
while you’re at the boltz site, check out the raw steel multimedia cabinets. i’d love to have a couple of the double cabinets, but there’s no way i’m spending that sort of dough at this point in my life on that. although i am sort of eyeing one of the bed frames…(still not sure it’s worth that though)…

let’s see…so…first of all i slept until a little past 11am. that’s always nice. i then got up and headed to the briar shoppe. i was specifically looking for a bag designed for carrying a pipe and all of the necessary pipe-related items. it’s kind of annoying trying to carry everything loose, and i figured as long as they make products especially for that, why not buy one of those instead of trying to make something else work? so that’s what i did. i’m pretty happy with my purchase. i also picked up a few more one-ounce bags of tobacco: blue note, mark twain, peaches and cream, and tropical storm. (note how this time i was all over the alphabet, not stuck on one letter.) i also looked at lighters and pipe stands, but i figure i’ll buy those online and probably save myself some money (and get a wider selection). the girl working the counter was cute and had the most beautiful eyes. and, as it turns out, was 21. *sigh* not that it would matter if it were otherwise. 🙂
after the briar shoppe, i headed over to the bike barn to look at mountain bikes. i’ve been thinking about getting a mountain bike for years, but i’ve never done it. and (like with the pipe) i figure if i’m going to buy one, i should buy a decent one so my experience isn’t hindered by a poor quality piece of equipment — that way if i don’t like it i can’t blame it on the bike. after talking to a sales rep for awhile, i ended up test riding a trek 4500 around rice village. i hadn’t been on a bike in a long time, so it was a weird experience. and since i ride my motorcycle so much, it all felt really awkward and i kept trying to look into rearview mirrors that weren’t there and going for the turn signals every time i came to an intersection and planned on turning. i had hoped to also test ride a gary fisher marlin, but it had started raining so i didn’t get to. the marlin design is more for actual off-roading, while the trek is sorta a hybrid for daily riding around town. we’ll see if i continue the quest and actually make a purchase.
after that, i headed off to check out the daily grind. it’s a coffee house on washington. it was pretty cool. it reminded me of what empire has become (meaning a restuarant and coffee house, and that i preferred the “corporate coffee sucks” empire of old better), although it seemed more balanced while empire seems to have become more restaurant. when i first came in, there was some old man in running shorts and some way younger hot blonde in tight clothes, both seeming to be rather intoxicated and causing a ruckus. (i guess if you’re old and rich it’s okay to be a lecher, eh?) anyway, i was checking out the daily grind because kaveh kanes (downtown on praire, behind the rice lofts) closed down, so the radio show i’m a part of is looking for a new place for our monthly gatherings. i guess i’ve not mentioned that on here, but since pretty much the only people who read this are my friends, they already know that i’m one of the co-hosts on the radio show “technology bytes” on 90.1 kpft. so now everyone else knows too. don’t you feel privileged?
going back to saturday night, i watched the other movie i’d rented: murderball. it’s a documentary centered around the u.s. paralympic rugby team. (the sport was started in canada and was originally called murderball, thus the title.) the documentary was really cool. it didn’t take any kind of pity angle or anything — in fact, rather the opposite. there was a lot of drama and conflict too. i definitely suggest giving this one a view.