A Few Random Reflections

Shop window reflection courtesy of AuthentiCity on Congress Avenue.

But I was thinking more of reflections of the verbal, essay-like sort.

• Does a stock market rally that is HUGE percentage-wise really mean anything in this environment?
• Is it true that joblessness has caused a new surge of volunteerism because people have to have something to do and they have less money to give?
• I heard a thrift store (run by Junior League) on Burnet Road was closing due to competition from new clothes sold by Costco, Walmart, etc. Can this be a real trend?
  
• A friend who sorts collected donations for a charity's annual sale says donations are down. Are people not buying new clothes either and just wearing the stuff they used to give away?
• Above two remind me that there is a sack of stuff in my car that needs to be dropped at the thrift store. I patronize Top Drawer. I hope they don't go out of business. I hope they keep making enough money to stay open because they give vouchers to clients of AIDS orgs in town to shop for free. Free clothing and housewares seems good.
• I gave lots of stuff including toys and collectibles and housewares of some value to the above in the great downsizing. We gave away a lot of books, too.
• FFP has been looking for a book called Guns, Germs and Steel for two days. It never got cataloged but he says he once owned it. Maybe we gave it away.
• We were trying to sort and get rid of magazines a couple of days ago. I can't give away the Harper's Magazine or The New Yorker without first flipping through them. Too often this results in many minutes reading an article.
• We are going to the SXSW film festival. We claim to be film buffs but really we aren't. We like obscure docs. We have no idea about, for example, Watchmen and will be happy to never see it. Movies about young peoples' angst leave me cold.
  
• And yet we watch 24.
  
• We watched L Word. They spent the entire season teasing about killing off a character I hate. So, yeah, they did it. Ho. Hum. Not sorry to see them go.
• Have you seen United States of Tara? Inexplicably, I like it. That Diablo Cody really surprised me. She made me like a like some young folks and their angst and someone with an identity disorder.
• Speaking of young people (or maybe ALL people) have you noticed how people go out in groups in these sort of uniforms. Saw two guys in the Texas Chili Parlor, both in cargo shorts, tennis shoes with no visible socks, safari shirts (the ones with the vents and such), untucked, ball caps. Of course, FFP and I go out in slacks/blazer. You know what else? Young ladies go out in fancy party dresses with decolletage and lots of leg showing and high heels and are accompanied by guys in jeans, untucked shirts and flip flops. And all those tattoos and piercings you see. Although, I've got to say I meet more and more of the adorned young that are really great creative people. Diablo Cody. I'm just saying.
• Do you ever notice that when you don't have too much to do, you don't get much done? Lately I've had lots of free time really. Did I get stuff cleaned and organized? Not so much. Did I do any serious writing? You know the answer to that. No, instead when some appointment comes up I'm a little colicky even if it's a fun thing. I was thinking I'd have tomorrow free, but I was talking to Dad and he reminded me that I have to take him for a blood test and a haircut. I'm such a slug. Oh. Well.
• I'm upset at my coffee machine. It said it wanted to be cleaned I went through the cycle but it forgot we were doing it and went back to wanting to be cleaned again. This has happened before but somehow I got out of it. The only thing in the place I love more than that machine is FFP. But it can be frustrating loving stuff when it does you wrong.
• Which reminds me. I'm using this software I found called syncplicity as a third level of backup. (I have a local script backing up to a drive on the network and a paid-for Internet connected backup.) It is free. When it failed briefly this morning, it upset me. Ditto free scheduling software for the film festival. It's free. But if it's not perfect I can still get upset. facebook doesn't work to suit me? Same thing. People providing stuff for free are still held to the highest standards. I used to work for businesses that sold software. We had bugs all the time. We always acted sorry, though.
  

Yeah, random stuff. I'm going to do something useful now. Um.. Yeah.

Spiraling into the Rabbit Hole

Yesterday, Sunday, had a delicious free quality to it. We had a little social event in the evening and one that didn't elicit a fashion emergency at that. This was the first day in a few weeks where there weren't daytime commitments as well as evening ones. Don't get me wrong...it was all fun or self-improving stuff for the most part. Still I'd been busy. Here was a nice time to maybe catch up on the downsizing or get something tidied up around here. Or just relax and read. So how did I waste my time?

I decided to run virus and spyware scans on one computer and watched them run part of the time. I tried to work The New York Times magazine crossword on the computer and later tried to fill it in in the actual magazine. (No joy until today when I could unlock the key and get help. Clever puns in this one.)

At one point I thought I'd attack a pile of magazines that had survived other attempts to move them toward recycling. I managed to discard a few. In one I just had to read a piece before letting it go. Most of the ones I looked at got saved. A Harper's because of a piece by Jonathan Lethem about plagiarism that was completely plagiarized. (I later read this on the exercise bike but still saved it because I hadn't completely read his notes about where he extracted everything.) I saved a Summer Fiction edition of The New Yorker from 2004 even though I have it on DVD because you never know when it would be handy to take along to read. I saved another Harper's because of an article about Werner Herzog. I saved a June issue of The New York Times magazine not to work the puzzle (which looks quite hard) or to read the serialized novel (I haven't been able to get into any of these and this is chapter five of the last one they did). No, it was a bunch of articles about the rich getting richer and the poor...you know. I'm still trying to figure out which I am much less the whys and wherefores and politics of that economic idea. So...interesting and maybe I should read it.

Then there was The New Yorker issue (too new to be on DVD yet) which had a review of the Edith Piaf movie I missed at the theaters. I saved a Harper's because of an essay on the virtues of idleness. The irony was not lost on me.

I saved another issue of The New Yorker because of an article about the Queen Mary 2. The issue is on the DVD collection. But I'd really like to read it. If I ever get downsized and escape real estate hades, I'd like to go on that ship. I've been on the QE 2. But I digress.

Another issue of The New Yorker survived because of an article about neurosurgery and a Woody Allen casual. And another because of an article about mathematics. So sue me. I must confess that there is a 2005 issue in one of the bathrooms because of an article about Angela Merkel.

So the result of all that activity was that one pile had become two, reduced by three or four magazines that will make the recycling truck on Friday.

During my bout with the magazines, FFP arrived in my office with a 'home for sale' brochure from a house in the neighborhood. We spent a bit of time looking the place up in the database of the local tax collector and calculating a price per square foot.

I sorted through some current newspapers and tossed some ads in recycling. I glanced at Marilyn Vos Savant's column in Parade. She had an interesting puzzle. I didn't try to work it out but when I read the solution I thought it was amazing and wrote a small proof about why it worked. Seriously.

I managed to get to my gym for some exercise (mostly riding the recumbent bike while reading the Jonathan Lethem piece). I thought briefly about a trip to New York, too. Because in New York once, in the Village somewhere, we found a mystery book store while waiting for time for a jazz performance at the Vanguard. And I bought Motherless Brooklyn because it seemed interesting, I wanted to support the store and it was set in Brooklyn. I later bought Fortress of Solitude because I liked Lethem.

Yeah, those were the kinds of "accomplishments" and reveries I managed on this day of little obligation. Oh, and I put together a letter about my great nephew Jack's Flat Stanley's adventures in Austin and ordered and picked up prints of pictures of his (F. Stanley's) visit here and wrote on postcards and put the whole thing (along with Mr. F. Stanley with arms and legs folded) in a package to mail back to Jack's teacher.

I wanted to accomplish things in my retirement. I didn't anticipate how much my adult attention deficit disorder would affect idle times. And my greatest accomplishment seems to be becoming a dilettante. And learning to spell dilettante!

Recycling? Good or Bad?

This picture is a detail of an image from my hard drive. I took the picture outside a small theater in Waterville, Maine in 2005. (See journal entry here.) I think this work of art, made from found objects, is a depiction of the town of Waterville.

I'm a great fan of found object art. I save old and useless things sometimes, pretending that I will turn them into a clever collage or sculpture. But, truthfully, I'm no artist. So this old junk just takes up space and taunts me.

Today, while cleaning out a cabinet that hadn't seen any attention in a decade or two, I came across some moldy old books that belonged to my mother and her siblings. One of my favorite local artists, in fact one of my favorite all-time collage artists, is Lance Letscher. His work often uses parts of books, old book covers, etc. (As the link shows.) So immediately I thought: I should give these to Lance Letscher. I've never met him, of course. I heard somewhere that he actually fishes around in the dumpsters behind places like Half Price Books to find material. Somehow I doubt that. Surely his friends are always giving him old books and such.

Our downsizing is this crazy effort to find just the right homes for things. Discarding books is very hard for me. It just seems wrong. I've done it. But it doesn't feel good. A lot of my technical books that are hopelessly out-of-date may actually end up in the landfill. But it's hard for me to be the one that tosses them.

This same cabinet has yielded up FFP's books from his childhood. He has had fun today remembering reading these. What will we do with these old, dusty, tattered children's books? Right now I haven't a clue.

As we go through this purging process a lot of people give us advice. About selling things on ebay or getting one of those estate sale people. Or who might like different things we have to give away. I've mentioned before how weary it makes me. I just have to keep saying "progress is being made." True the stack of moldy books is on the floor of my office. Along with other things awaiting their fate. I sometimes think back to a time when I was much younger. When I would have been so delighted to know someone who was like I am today...getting rid of all kinds of interesting 'stuff.' Fact is...maybe that's how I acquired many of these things! Mostly we get rid of things by taking them to the thrift store, putting them on Freecycle or giving them to a friend. We have sold a few things over the past few years. Giving things away is hard. Selling them doubly hard.