June 24, 2008 Moving: Wacky Hijinks Ensue!
So, I have finished moving. Understandably, I've been keeping a low profile while packing, and the day of the move itself was rather long and arduous, involving three trips along various highways to and from the old apartment for disinfection and other sundries. I was done with everything around nine on Saturday. Sunday, I unpacked a goodly amount of boxes, but I've got quite a few to go. And Monday...
Oh, Monday.
Until the scheduled move date, I'd been frantically divesting myself of worldly possessions via freecycle and Craigslist rather successfully until I hit a tiny snag: nobody, it seemed, wanted to buy queen mattress set. Why!? I wondered, I'd taken great care of them; they practically look brand new! But, alas, apparently people are understandably cautious about shady bedding of questionable origin. I knew they were basically quality, gently used, and not even half into Lebeda's boasted twenty-year durability guarantee... but who trusts people on teh webz?
No, I got questions ranging from Have cats sprayed on them? to bargain-seekers proclaiming I'll give you $50. I looked through similar postings, did my research, and figured $100 wasn't too much to ask, and indeed, three people stated they'd come look at the set. One flat-out promised to arrive on Saturday to pick it up. Foolishly, I believed this person, all the way to Saturday at 2pm when I called her and confirmed she'd be in the area around 4pm to drop by.
4pm arrives and I'm back at the old apartment sweeping, swiffering, and dousing it with Pine Sol for about three hours, periodically taking a break to call my mysterious no-show, figuring she'd been caught up somewhere. Every time, it goes straight to voice-mail, or rings to infinity. Well shit. So I call the second person who contacted me, and she comes by with her sister to take a look. "We'll take it!" they squeal. Ah, but how do they intend to take it? Sunday's out with such short notice; they need to find someone to get it to their cousin's house.
Uh oh.
Monday arrives, and after work, this particular customer actually answers her phone, and I wander to the apartment to pick up the one thing I forgot there, and to wait for her, or somebody, to show up. She calls back and weeps that her sister doesn't get home from work until 7pm. I grumble, but I can handle a little waiting. So I head to the Firehouse bar and have some grub and a St. Bernardus Abt 12 to kill some time. Turns out, I should have stayed a lot longer. Go home and wait. Wait. Wait longer. Call them at a quarter to eight and tell them to reschedule, as I really want to go home now.
As I'm standing at the train station, literally four minutes before the train arrives, I get a call: "Are you still there? We're on our way!!!" ZOMG, indeed. So, I go home, and twenty minutes pass, and I call them. "They're coming, I promise! Her ride has to come all the way from Howard and Custer!" Except I could walk from that particular intersection to my apartment in twenty minutes. These people are clearly idiots, or sprung from mentally deficient roots, so I roll my eyes and wait again. At a quarter to nine, I call again and even she's surprised her relatives haven't yet arrived. Turns out they got lost. Finding a place I with my terrible sense of direction had no problem locating last year. Let me also mention the woman accompanying the driver lived literally five blocks away. An hour, to find a house five blocks away. We're talking biblical levels of stupidity here.
So I see a tiny Honda drive up, and the driver asks if I'm selling a bed. Double uh-oh. So, I help him lug the bed down into the ally and hoist it on top of his car, and without the aid of bungee cables, he and the buyer drive away disturbingly nonplussed about their chosen method of mattress and box-spring transport. I wished them luck, shook my head in disbelief, and walked to the Firehouse bar again to kill some time, as the next train didn't come until 10pm. Taking transfer into account and the fact neither expresses nor bus shuttles run that late, this would get me home around midnight, and only after I finish the last two miles by walking.
Why didn't I drive to the station, you might ask? Why, because according to the Downers Grove parking permit office, there's a four year waiting list for the parking lot historically minimally half-empty regardless of temporal distribution. Ah, government incompetence. So I've essentially been walking, pacing, or jogging constantly since around 5pm, topping it off with a two-mile power walk back to the apartment complex. My calves, shins, and will ache with the welts of a thousand crowbars from yesterday's ordeal. But at least it's over!
Until Tomorrow
June 09, 2008 I'm Not Dead Yet: I Feel Happy
Yeah, really I'm fine. Cardiologist gave me a quick look-over and pronounced the episode I had a couple weeks ago a fluke, but that I should keep an eye on it and report back to her if it happens again. In other news, she says my performance in the stress echo is "fantastic," so there's that.
I'm giving away three boxes of my books, but the people at work get first dibs. There'll be plenty left, though. Once the books stop disappearing, I may create a list and post it here and give any of you a chance to request a mail-out (after you pay me postage, or pick them up of course). And after that, I'll donate the rest. Yet even after that three boxes, I still have twelve left. I apparently read far too much.
And now I vanish back into the ether!
Until Tomorrow
May 26, 2008 Titillating Tachycardia
Reports of my demise are highly exaggerated.
For those who haven't heard, I paid a prolonged and unexpected visit to an emergency room on Wednesday. There I was, sitting at my desk doing some last-minute queries sipping a decaf iced coffee I'd acquired from Dunkin' Donuts, when I'd started feeling somewhat odd. Not to be a worry-wart, I shrugged it off and continued banally pounding-out horrifying SQL resplendent with awe-inspiring and highly convoluted JOIN statements when my heart began pounding like I'd just finished a brisk 20-minutes playing DDR.
To this date, nothing like that has ever happened to me, so I was understandably surprised and somewhat intrigued. Instead of whipping out a magnifying glass and unearthing otherworldly clues, I leapt up and commenced pacing back and forth, hoping in some strange way, to burn off this unexpected surge in energy. Even when I walk the mile to work, my heart doesn't work nearly so hard, so even pacing felt insufficient. My boss decided to call an ambulance, even after my protests, because a person with a heart condition experiencing impromptu tachycardia is always an emergency and I was trying not to be a bother.
The ambulance showed up quickly, but not fast enough to catch the problem. My heart went almost back to normal by the time they arrived, and I was left feeling shaken but rather sheepish. They suggested I accompany them to the hospital, but noted they're required to IV anyone experiencing cardiac conditions. At the time, I assumed this was a one-time thing, and I would indeed immediately cart myself to a hospital, but only as a formality. A laugh!
My boss's boss and a coworker drove me to the hospital and during registration, I experienced a second episode; alarmed, they took me, shaking and oddly sweating, to a machine to confirm my heart-rate at a smooth 125, sailing past twice my normal rate, launched by the harrowing experience of sitting in a chair filling out paperwork. Well shit. Somehow before the hospital swallowed my quivering form, I put a message through to my cardiologist, and told Jen of my predicament and begged her not to drive up, since she was slated to move in three days and still needed to pack. Sadly, this was not to be.
Eventually I was hooked up to no less than two IVs and robbed of about five or six tubes of blood, administered some kind of sedative, a beta-blocker, a blood-thinner, and $Deity knows what else. Even after all that, my heart-rate never dropped below 80 until sometime around midnight. Let me say now that getting blood-pressure taken when hooked-up to an IV is rather disconcerting, as the pressure forces the IV to operate in reverse. For reference, my resting pulse is somewhere between 45 and 50. All told, there were three separate occasions where my pulse exceeded 120 for basically no discernible reason.
They kept me overnight for observation. Jen arrived sometime around 10pm after a hair-raising adventure attempting to locate which hospital admitted me, and procured a recliner chair to sleep in after establishing she was allowed to stay. I slept badly trussed up to an IV with a leg-massaging machine meant to ensure I didn't suffer clots, and breathing through a probably unnecessary oxygen tube.
The morning, more blood, more drugs, and more than a few interviews by nurse practitioners and a doctor or two, I was discharged with instructions to follow-up with my cardiologist, and avoid all caffeine and alcohol, as well as ensure 7-8 hours of sleep every night—all things known to influence increased heart-rate. Was that iced coffee I sipped for nearly three hours on Wednesday actually decaf? The world may never know. But ever since that day, my heart has felt somehow on edge, like it could lapse into elevated sinus rhythm at any second, and it's much worse when I'm immobile. I sense a lot of pacing in my immediate future. I'll know more on Thursday.
Until Tomorow
May 13, 2008 Bill's Glorious Economy Shanty
I think it's time I reveal my little secret to where I've been acquiring financial news and commodity trends. While none of these can be considered a penultimate resource, their combined effervescence should explain at least a fragment of my pessimism concerning our economy.
As I elucidated back in December, the over-leveraging of our fractional reserve banking system in the housing market to the tune of several trillion dollars has, like your hopes of being the first to impregnate Jessica Alba, tragically ended. Good investors practice risk management, and normally this is a behavior we the public should encourage. In this case however, investment profits in one market being spread across several others is a terrifying catastrophe—this includes consumer activity. In several parts of the country, housing doubled or even tripled in price over a mere five or six years, while incomes didn't even pace inflation. Now with ethanol driving up food and energy costs—elements which are conveniently excluded from the official inflation rate—wages are demonstrably down since 2000.
Please consider what this implies for banks. Creative financing may win a creative writing contest, but wages can't support current home prices, and further, subprime ARM resets will eject existing homeowners as their financial well runs dry. Worse, even prime loans were commonly refinanced by duped owners hoping to cash-in on their unexpected windfall, which not only increased their mortgage and associated risk, but also provided them with a kickass Hummer and an awesome kitchen stocked with granite and an Honest to Fucking God Viking Range. But... oops, now that $200k loan is $400k and that magical nonexistent $200k extra has bought solid consumer goods. Viking increases stove production, contractors hire more plumbers, granite companies blast a few more quarries, increased property-tax revenue builds some more infrastructure, and so on.
But eventually that refinancing will hit a wall, because even considering negative amortization, the consumer's wealth is eventually—like a porn starlet at the end of an all-day gangbang—exhausted. Either he defaults or can no longer to afford anything else. This ripple is much like the first in reverse: Viking cuts production and workers, granite companies do the same, ad infinitum, further exacerbating the problem and removing even more liquidity from the marketplace. Walmart has recently announced a 7% profit increase while banks everywhere are writing down hundreds of billions and retail has recorded two concurrent months of decreased sales. Spring and Summer are normally the hottest season for Realtors, but we just racked up a 26-year low.
But the central bank isn't really helping matters. At a time when commodities are illustrating the dollar's incontinence, we've been liquidating our own gold reserves to boost the failing currency. Never mind the dollar has slid shockingly against the Euro, which is currently worth $1.54 from an average of $0.92 back in 2000. It's fine we have a fiat currency, but exhausting possible financial reserves at this point is like participating in a power-lifting competition with a hernia. This means the very source of our capitol is likely hedging on bankruptcy, or they'd never be so obviously desperate. I giggled mockingly at the Euro back in 2000, now I wish I bought a few thousand for a healthy 67% profit.
So, a checklist: consumers bankrupt, banks bankrupt, US bankrupt, in thanks partially to an uncontrolled lending smorgasbord that spread the damage to every sector of the economy, all that during an extravagantly expensive war while economies such as India and China continue to bootstrap and increase resource competition (re. oil). I don't know when the last nail was inserted into this proverbial coffin, but that's it: the end. It's fine the rest of the world will force the mountainous US economy into global parity (for them, anyway), but nobody will envy us the transition—it's already begun, and not a pretty sight. Me? I'm 30 with a heart condition; I'm lucky to be alive at this point, so I'm just going to sit back and watch the show.
Until Tomorrow
May 13, 2008 Wicked - the Spoofical
I'm about 1/3 through Wicked, and having seen the musical adaptation, I'm somewhat confused. I know movies and musicals based on novels commonly encounter issues compressing the material into two hours of nonstop entertainment, but this example is such a ridiculous extreme, I wonder if they didn't purposefully throw out 95% of the book to avoid confusion. I should note that I loved the musical, and I'm guiltily enjoying the novel, but suggesting they describe the same events would likely disrupt the space-time continuum and destroy us all.
The writers for the musical essentially carjacked the idea Elphaba isn't all that wicked, really and ran with it as if escaping a vicious pack of wild boars armored in razorblades and infected with super rabies. Oh, they assaulted the book long enough to collect a few shattered remnants; a handful of names and places provided convenient yet terrifying drunkenly erected scaffolding to this completely unrelated musical. The situation is akin to insisting Super Mario Brothers chronicles the trials and tribulations of the local Pipe Fitters 597, or tearily explaining Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a harrowing and controversial documentary of amphibious sewer wildlife.
Galinda indeed launches her career at Shiz as a naive and feckless debutant, Elphaba remains green, Boq exhibits slightly diminutive stature, Madame Morrible is undeniably horrible, and Fiero is... oh who am I kidding, nothing else survived. Elphaba's sister Nessarose has a birth defect ironically unrelated to requiring a wheelchair. Fiero is hardly Dancing Through Life or even a main character while they attend Shiz. Galinda sacrifice her precious social-climbing time helping Elphaba attain popularity? A laugh! Galinda actually tired of her insufferably shallow and fulsome clique, essentially ejecting herself from the popular crowd to belatedly befriend Elphaba.
So far the novel and musical shared at least passing semblance, like a bobblehead could stand in for a groom through a spectacular summer wedding. But as I read, similarities continually decrease and have recently pitched from a cliff so abruptly, I'm sure I've exhausted all the source material but for the culminating and inevitable bloody splat. I'm all but certain the novel lacks a happy if bittersweet ending, since Elphaba is currently being painted as a tragic heroine, and we all know how such a character is rewarded for her toil.
It's all just so odd. I've never encountered a novel to musical adaptation so divergent from its source material. I definitely wonder how the author feels about all this.
Until Tomorrow