the ocean

Home Alone

My prediction came true and I have been rather miserably ill over the past couple of days. It feels like Kelly Clarkson has been sitting on my chest and I have lost my voice, which is arguably charming as a plot device in a terrible Diane Keaton movie, but rather an inconvenience in real life. I have thankfully been able to stay home from work, but it feels a bit odd to send an out of office message that says I will not be answering my cell phone because I am physically incapable of it. I have definitely overcompensated for it, however, by being insanely responsive and positive over email. My coworkers likely now believe that my chest cold has rendered me mentally ill.

In case you needed further convincing of how bad this has been, I actually roused myself to go to the CVS clinic yesterday and seek help. (This was my former secretary's suggestion, which should have set off alarm bells for me, but in my DayQuil addled state did not.) It definitely got high marks for convenience, because I was able to get in and out in about 45 minutes. I also liked the fact that I could buy more drugs as part of the transaction without having to make another stop, and even more so when the automatic checkout announced that I had "products that required age verification," at which point the clerk explained "these kids gettin' high offa that cough syrup." But I was dismayed that my NP seemed a bit shy of prescribing the hard stuff, such that I only went home with over the counters. I mean, humor me with some mild antibiotics here, will you?

But I am feeling somewhat better this evening and hope (yes, that's actually true) to return to work tomorrow. It turns out that daytime TV has really suffered since I was home regularly during the day back during law school.

Visions

So I accidentally left the TV on The Proposal for a while as I was doing some stuff around the house and it got to a point I had never seen before where it gets all real and shit and Sandra Bullock is emoting about how she "forgot what it's like to have a family" and then she falls out of a boat and almost drowns and then an immigration officer is threatening them with jail time and, well, then I turned it off, but my point is, what? I thought it was supposed to be a zany comedy in the fine tradition of All About Steve. Must I also have my heartstrings tugged at?

Anyway, maybe I'm just a bit loopy right now since I'm on a fantastic cocktail of Dayquil and Nyquil. I think one of my darling interviewees last week transmitted something besides calm competence with his or her handshake. I've been coughing up my right lung (but yes, only the right one) all day long and my voice is almost gone. And now I'm in bed wearing two sweatshirts and lying under three layers of blankets. I bet you anything I have crazy hallucinatory dreams involving the Federal Reserve and Tony the Tiger.

Disasters

As I'm sure you've heard, there was a terrible tragedy this weekend. I'm speaking, of course, of Chicago residents being deprived of cable and internet service for nearly ten hours. I mean, what am I supposed to do with myself if I can't get caught up on my Dance Moms? And how am I going to figure out what projects the girl who played Paige on Degrassi has coming up if I don't have internet? And of course this has to happen when I'm waiting for the next Hunger Games book to arrive. So I ended up playing minesweeper for a while and then going down to the Banana Republic to buy some khakis. That just might be the whitest sentence I've ever written.

I'm also suffering from a sports injury sustained when I attempted to do a n abdominal plank on top of one of those fitness balls and instead slipped in my own sweat and went crashing to the floor in the middle of fitness class. It's when you end up flat on your back in a room full of people that you know things are really going well.

Returns, Triumphant

Well, I am back from Ann Arbor. I have been for a few days, actually, but have had other things on my plate besides the blog. Ann Arbor was fairly nice, from what I saw of it, which was not much. I went to two bars, one of which had amazing chicken strips and the other of which had far more types of beers than I could even begin to deal with. I was also in two different hotels, which seemed much like hotels anywhere else in the world. Campus town was cute, though. Even their CVS was fairly classy looking. It just goes to show that zoning can be a very powerful thing.

The trip was for recruiting, which is sort of like speed dating but without any possibility of sex. We each interviewed twenty people in a single day and likely used the phrase "work-life balance" as many times. Everyone is always super nice and great, which makes the process that much harder, because we can only hire a small portion of the people we interview. If only some of the candidates would drop some f bombs or racial slurs, the whole thing would be a lot easier.

MI

So I'm going to Ann Arbor, Michigan tomorrow. The funny thing about that is that when I woke up this morning I was most decidedly NOT going to Ann Arbor, Michigan tomorrow. These things can change that quickly. I would ask for recommendations of things to see and do in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but chances are I will be working the whole time I am there. Don't worry, though, I am definitely going to see the Holiday Inn. I would not miss it for the world.

Apparently Ann Arbor, Michigan is about a four and a half hour drive from Chicago. I'm not going to be the driver, though, so I can do other things while we travel. Like work, at least for the hour and a half that my laptop battery generally holds out. I'm also going to feel things out and see if my colleagues will be offended and/or make fun of me if I read The Hunger Games on the trip. Perhaps they'll want to play the license plate game.

Is it weird that I'm going to have three bags for a two day trip? I just like to be able to dress for whatever situation arises. I mean, what if there's a monsoon? This rubber parka is really going to come in handy.

Barton Fink


Somehow I forgot to mention one of the most important things that has ever happened to me, namely that I saw the movie Homecoming starring Mischa Barton on Lifetime last Sunday. It's an amazing little feature where Mischa plays an insane woman who fakes the disappearance of her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend and then holds her hostage in her house. She drugs her, breaks her foot with her bare hands, and even chases her with an axe. It's sort of like Misery, but with a much higher caliber of acting, obviously. Oh, and it was directed by Morgan Freeman, which is maybe the weirdest thing of all. What exactly drew America's Favorite Crusty Old African-American Man to a teen melodrama starring the former bad girl from The OC? Were there no episodes of iCarly available to direct?

Anyway, after the movie I was doing some research about the cast and crew, as I often do, and I started to actually feel a bit sorry for Mischa Barton. I mean, all of the highlights of her career probably occurred before she turned 20. In the scope of a few years she went from being one of People's 50 most beautiful people to being someone who pretty clearly writes her own bio on IMDB. When she left The OC, she lined up a bunch of film projects, but they all ended up being box office giants like "Virgin Territory" and "Walled In." And then she tried to come back to TV, but The Beautiful Life lasted about as many episodes as that Nanny spinoff they tried back in the '90s. So what now? More Lifetime?

I do have high hopes for the upcoming Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, though. It just sounds like a lot of fun.

Fun and Games

I must confess that I read The Hunger Games this week. It was in the house and, after three weeks of dragging Dostoevsky to the pool and ignoring it, I wanted something light that I might actually read. It ended up taking me maybe five days. As with my studies in Dan Brown, I simply couldn't put it down, not because I actually thought it was good but because I just wanted to find out what was going to happen. I took it on the train without a plain brown wrapper to protect my reputation as a reader. I even hid out in the bathroom at work for a while just so I could finish a chapter. It was sort of like an out of body experience, like I was standing there watching some idiot read The Hunger Games and all of the sudden I realized that idiot was me and I really couldn't wait to find out what would happen at the Feast.

I mean, it's not the worst thing I could read ever. That would probably be the Twilight series. But there's no danger of that because of my strong conviction that sexy teen vampires are totally played out. Yes, the characters are one dimensional and the tropes a bit familiar, but the plotting is amazingly efficient and there aren't nearly as many wonky sentences as in, say, The DaVinci Code. I do have to say, though, that I just can't see any way that children should actually be reading this, as it's brutally violent from beginning to end. Why can't they just read The Phantom Tollbooth anymore?

Anyway, I couldn't sleep last night thinking about all the murdering going on, so I'm glad I'm done. At least for now. Book two is already taunting me from my nightstand.

I Have Seen The Future

And it was okay.

The movie The Future, that is. From the writer/director of Me and You and Everyone We Know. I really thought that one was pretty fresh and interesting. This one was, well, a bit more depressing. And in parts weird. But I enjoyed it, overall.

We saw it in the small side theater at The Music Box, which is maybe the size of my living room. The screen is maybe three times the size of my television. The seats also seem somehow miniaturized, and the two tallest people in the world sat right in front of me. That had to impact my enjoyment level.

Also, all of the previews there were for strange movies I've never even heard of before. Things about like Hitler's sister and some cellist with asperger syndrome and some weird math thing. I started to get a headache before the movie even began.

On the plus side, it was a beautiful day, and we walked. Also I was able to pick up the chewable vitamins I really like on the way home.

Mr. Fix It

So we had a handyman come out yesterday afternoon to fix one of our light fixtures. He set a ladder up in the hall, took the fixture down, and said he was going to get some parts and would be right back. And then he never returned.

Needless to say, I find this to be confusing behavior. I do not imagine that there is a plot to steal a single relatively undistinguished light fixture afoot, but I am hard pressed to come up with a better explanation. We have heard nothing from him or his company since he walked out the door yesterday. Could he have been involved in a horrible, disfiguring car accident? I do hope not, and yet that at least would explain what's going on here.

Are we to expect that he could return at any given moment? I'm almost afraid to go to the bathroom lest I miss out on the return of my light fixture.

Baller

I went to my one and only Cubs game of the year last night. Typically these days I just experience the Cubs games as reasons there is no parking on my block and no grass on my front yard, but I got invited to a skybox, so I made an exception. It doesn't much matter if the team is not very good when you are eating free hot dogs and drinking quality light beer like there is no tomorrow. And by the time the game gets really boring, they come by with the desert cart. It would have been the perfect evening, if only I'd been able to get an ANTM marathon on the skybox TV!

Of course, I can't stand crowds, so that puts me at a bit of a disadvantage. I almost had to curl into the fetal position and breathe into a paper bag on the way up to the skybox. Between the Captain Morgan Club and all the twenty year olds in pink Cub shirts, I very nearly lost it. But I managed to ground myself in the pure fun of watching tourists attempt to mask their fear of panhandlers and black people and it all turned out all right.

The Cubs even won this one, or so I'm told. I sort of lost the plot strand somewhere around the seventh inning.

What the Beep?!

There's an interesting psychological experiment going on in my condo building right now. My neighbors on the fourth floor have moved out, but the new people aren't moving in for a while. And for some reason the alarm system up there has been emitting a steady beep for the past few days. It is very annoying, yet no one in my building has done anything to try to stop it. No one has called the alarm company that we all share, or emailed the former resident whose address we all have, or even for that matter emailed any other resident to discuss the issue. We're all waiting it out, to see who breaks first and actually does something. And for once, I have decided that it will not be me.

I was the one who broke first on fixing the front yard, on changing the light bulbs in the common areas, and on fixing the timer for the lights. I also blinked on fixing the front intercom and serving as the new treasurer. Oh, and I agreed to spend a grand on resealing the roof deck without even putting up a struggle. So I'm not letting this one go, I'm really not.

Besides, there's a whole floor between me and the beep. Third floor guy is bound to lose it before I do.

Bags & Broads

The bags players have returned to the sidewalk in front of my house. It's got me wondering if somehow I travelled back in time several years and did not know it. I thought that the frat boys of America had officially moved on to playing beer pong and coming up with excuses to get each other naked, but I guess I was wrong. I've got four bros and a case of Miller light decorating my front steps to prove it.

Also, I ate a quarter of a giant box of nerds this evening and my stomach is officially not loving it. Who knew that eating twice your recommended daily intake of sugar in a single sitting would be a bad idea?

But the good news is that there's a really incredible Lifetime movie on right now in which a mother starts having psychic visions after her daughter goes missing at a wild high school party. But rather than having visions of, say, where her daughter has gone missing to, exactly, she has seemingly irrelevant visions of things like her paperboy's artwork and her daughter getting mad at her best friend for fucking her boyfriend. And she keeps shouting at people randomly about how they have to help her, except it turns out they don't. Oh, and she doesn't appear to be aware of the existence of the internet. Classic programming, this.

Ad Age

I can't believe it's already back to school commercial time. It seems like just yesterday that we were doing dad and grad commercials. (And yes, "dad and grad" is the worst phrase ever.) But here we are with telegenic twentysomethings dancing around to indie bands in the latest J.C. Penney fashions and pretending they're in high school. It sort of makes we wish I were going back to school, if only so my mom would buy me some new Z. Cavs.

But I am not going anywhere, as it turns out. One of the strangest things for me about getting into "the real world" has been how it's much harder for me to place events within the seasons. If something happens around Thanksgiving or Christmas, that will probably stick, since I'll know that I was at my parents' house. Otherwise, though, the various parts of the year run together. They're all spent sitting in my office, doing work or trying to avoid doing work, and wishing the temperature were different. I guess in winter I'm usually wearing a sweater.

The summer has been pretty good to me, though, at least so far. There's been a lot of time at the pool and I've gotten a bit of sun without taking on a Boehner-ish quality. Also I've gotten out a little bit -- movies, bars, parties, etc. Nothing like when I was 26 and writing accounts of Thursday nights at closing time, but I'm starting to believe that the lord (or whomever) didn't actually want me to be 26 forever. I still intend to demand a recount, however.

Current Affairs

Ah, busy times, busy times. First, I saw Transformers 3 last night. It may well have been the biggest waste of time in my entire life, and I was an English major. It's hard to understand how I could be so bored when things were blowing up everywhere, but I was. There was just so much unnecessary, nonsensical plot, something about the moon landing and Russians and robots in disguise, and I still can't even tell the evil robots apart because they're all the same color, and then all of the sudden there was Frances McDormand looking like even she can't believe she wants the paycheck this bad, and Shia LaBeouf talking fast in a way he obviously believes is charming but is really just irritating, and speaking of which I still can't believe he's been around long enough that I've had to learn how to spell his name. Anyway, I've spent a more pleasant two and a half hours in the emergency room with a kidney stone.

Then we had the Paul McCartney concerts at Wrigley for the past two nights. I love when they have concerts there because I can just go up on the roof (or even just open my windows) and it kind of sounds the same as if I were there. Although I suppose this could be a mixed blessing in NKOTBSB decides to come here next year. But anyway, it was kind of a cool concert. He sounds really good for his age and he did almost three hours each night. I can't even work at my desk job for three hours without sneaking in a game of Word Twist.