Areas of Unrest

15 August 1999 - Personal Downtime

In the followup department, I was forced to concede that it is possible for a movie to be scary. While it didn't keep me awake, the shower scene is Psycho is effective.

I also forgot to mention that Tuvan music is now officially trendy. When I was in Santa Monica Friday night, there was a guy playing an igil and singing kargyraa (the lower pitched, sort of growly droning form of throat-singing - more or less the vocal equivalent of a didgeridoo). I didn't have enough time to listen for long, but I did give him some money. Not that that's exactly rare, but the amount I give to street performers does depend on how much I like what they're doing. Throatsingers deserve a lot; guys who make balloon animals deserve little or nothing.

Which reminds me of an interesting bit of email from work, regarding a survey of people's attitudes towards dealing with the computer help desk. They asked people who attended an advisory meeting how they felt about using voicemail to communicate with the help desk. The report concluded that "none of the attendees would prefer to strictly use voicemail when dealing with the Help Desk (less than the number that expressed interest in skating in hell rather than dealing with the Help Desk.)" The same sort of personality defect that makes somebody want to make balloon animals is quite prevalent amongst Help Desk personnel.

Anyway, I was majorly lazy this weekend. I did drag myself out of the house yesterday to do the Volksmarch walk in Santa Monica. The route was 11 kilometers but I added nearly half again as much on my own, partly because it was hot out by the time I got up to Ocean Park Blvd. and I decided that meant it made sense to continue further up to Rose Avenue and stop in for ice cream at Robin Rose. I hadn't been there in years, but the cointreau orange chip ice cream is just as good as I remembered. (I would have had frangelico hazelnut but they were out of it.) I also stopped in at a couple of places on Main Street - a new gallery specializing in political cartoons (mostly Paul Conrad, but they also have some comic strips and some stuff by Wiley Miller, who I think is brilliant) and a museum store for the Museum of Contemporary Art. I also noticed that the store that appears to sell science fiction props is still there but was closed. I have been walking past that store every now and then at various times of day since late 1985 (when I first moved to L.A.) and I have yet to see it open. The only place I've ever seen that even comes close is a used bookstore in the Sunset District of San Francisco that I've never seen open but that my brother insists he has actually been inside and, in fact, he claims to have once bought me a birthday gift there. And then, after I finished the route and got my books stamped (including filling up my first event book, so I get to sent it in for an award), I walked for another 35 minutes or so because I needed to be in the same area for the stretching and blister treatment clinic for the 3 Day Walk.

I know that walking just under 10 miles and spending 2 hours at a stretching clinic doesn't sound particularly lazy, but it contributed nothing to cleaning up my apartment. Today was even worse as I spend most of it reading and napping and barely got out of the house at all. I have to get caught up on household paperwork - bills need to get paid if nothing else. But curling up with a nice cozy mystery (the latest Nancy Atherton) is so much more pleasant. So I tell myself that I must just need the personal downtime to recover from all the recent travel. Maybe I should quit my job and open a store that's never actually open, though I don't really see how that works financially.