Month: December 2009

Ten Years Ago

General

New Year’s Eve

There’s a meme going on Twitter right now: #10yearsago. I said that I can’t remember exactly what I was doing for New Year in 1999 earlier.

But, wait, let me try to reconstruct it.

I had just started my job with Multnomah County that previous September, so I was still on probation. Didn’t have much vacation time. My family had been doing their Christmas vacations since ’96 or so, though, so they probably went somewhere. Is that the year they went to Aruba? I think so!

I couldn’t afford to go with them, which meant I stayed in Portland.

At that time, I was also a depressed, angry man; in the previous few years I’d reached for, and lost, what I thought was my dream job at Apple, by running afoul of Steve Jobs Himself. I’d felt forced to move back to Portland to live under my angry fathers’ roof for three excruciating months earlier that year. My mom was, unbeknownst to me, having a relapse of her lung cancer, and my father was carrying on an affair with my aunt, who had moved in to help my mom during her “recovery”. Let’s just say 1999 wasn’t the best year for the Moon family. But I had a job that promised, once my probation was over, to give me what little job security one can have these days, and I had a friend in Taij.

Taij was an angry redhead geek. He had been a contractor in the same group I worked with, and was always arrogantly proclaiming how much more technical knowledge he had than anybody else. He was a more dominant forceful personality, so it was inevitable that I would fall into his orbit. He drank hard, and partied hard, and worked hard – well, sometimes he worked hard. He had a lot of contempt for the basic “reboot your computer” type support that was needed at the county, so he often passive-aggressively slacked off, claiming he was too good to do that shit.

Seeing this now, it’s no surprise that he got let go, his contract wasn’t extended, by management. The timing was a bit of a kiss-off, too: mid December.

Already an angry man, Taij became even more sullen. His false confidence at how fucking good he was became depression that he would not find a new job soon. His girlfriend (a bartender at the Roseland) left him. He got hit by some drunk drivers one night when he and I were out drinking, too – and no one had insurance. What a surreal night that was, and worthy of a post all by itself. I admit, I was making bad choices. A lot. Not least of which was hanging on to the friendship of Taij, drinking all night on a weeknight, and going to work the next day smelling of booze.

I know, intellectually, from piecing all this together, that I must have spent New Year’s Eve drinking downtown with Taij. Our usual haunts were the Virginia Cafe (in its original location on SW Park Ave.), the Commodore (which was conveniently in the building Taij lived in), the Kingston, or the Roseland (until his girlfriend dumped him).

We had a lot of “haunts”.

But details of that night are fuzzy. I’m pretty sure we started drinking at his apartment, then walked down to the Virginia for a while. I vaguely remember wandering down to Pioneer Courthouse Square, which was fenced off, and a giant screen announcing the oncoming year, and that’s where we must have been at midnight. The Y2K scare was, to Taij and I, a big joke. We laughed about it, either way: if nothing failed, then technology won; if everything (or some things) failed, then it would be up to us techs to fix it. Win/win. But as was saw video reports from the east coast, three hours ahead of us, and nothing was blowing up, we knew it was a big fat zero.

I may have kissed a random girl at midnight. I’d like to think I did, and Taij, being a student of the “fast seduction” techniques, was always trying to get me to try them.

After New Year Day, though, I started to realize that if I stuck around with Taij, I was going to end up dead, or at least broken. More broken. I’d had a lot of angry people around me up to that point, and I saw a glimpse of more healthy friendships in people like Jake, and (eventually), Tracy.

One foggy morning in January, after having crashed on Taij’s couch from yet another all-night drinking binge, I walked out and took the bus home, and never spoke to him again.

Happy New Year’s Eve, and here’s to a better 2010.

The white stuff

exercise

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3hASJU3i9Q&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

Fresh, unpacked snow squeaks when I run on it.

Skiers and others more used to winter climes know this already. But since it typically only snows once a year in my hometown, I had forgotten it, and had forgotten the sound. But as my trail shoes came down in the regular (slow) cadence of my 5 mph run, and because there was so little traffic and activity even though it was, technically, rush hour, and because the darkness seemed to enhance the sounds, I was keenly aware of the squeak.

Last year I ran in the snow for the first time, ever. And as I stood in my warm living room, a nice warming shot of Baileys Irish Cream in my hand (and some in my belly), watching the fat white flakes covering everything, I remembered.

The scrunch of the snow underfoot. Spots of snow getting in my eyes (should have bought goggles or clear sunglasses). The tunnel of light from my headlamp, occluded by snowflakes. Exertion and heavy breathing and the occasional slight slip of the foot that required a correction to stay upright.

It’s crazy. But I love running in the snow. I’m slower than I was last year, for sure, and the snow slows me down even more, and last night I had a a boozy warm glow that was probably both a danger and an encouragement, but… I had to go for a run.

I haven’t run outside in months. I think my last one was mid-September; took a break, and have only had the energy for running on the treadmill lately. For some reason, though, when the weather got worse, my motivation went up.

So out into it I went. 2.48 miles, from my house down through Westmoreland Park, and back again.

I’ll always be a runner.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF5jd7CbsXo&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

Best. Birthday. EVAH.

General

I don’t have an idea for a long, ramble-y, writer-ly post just yet; may have one later.

For now I’ll just thank everyone who wished me a happy birthday yesterday! The first list is everyone online. This is how they came up in search, so don’t read anything into the order. I just didn’t want to forget anyone!

Many many Thank yous to:

And I spent my lunch with Kevin (whose birthday yesterday also was):

Birthday pic

and spent dinner with:

Birthday dinner

Ken “@celticnorse” C., Terry “@landmind” M., Shawn “@terpmeister” T., (me), Tracy “@erraberra” H., and Gina F.

Man, I hope I didn’t miss anyone! That’s a lot of love and friendship. Thank you to all of you! It was the best birthday I’ve had in a long, long time.

PS: Is it amazing that everyone has a URL I can associate with them?

The Birthday Post

General

It’s hard to come up with a topic for the blog on my birthday, since last year I did 10 posts, one per day, in the days leading up to my birthday. For some reason I thought that was a good idea, when it was the 44th anniversary of my birth. Who celebrates at 44? We have 10 digits on our fingers, and so we celebrate most in the years that are evenly divided by 10. It’s a function of biology. If we had 8 fingers total,1 like cartoon characters2, we would celebrate in base-8.

It’s my inclination to spend a birthday looking back, but because I blew my nostalgia wad last year on the top 10 birthdays I remember, I feel the pressure of not having any material for today. Do I talk about the day my nephew and good friend Kevin was born and that we share a birthday? Done that one. The birthday I spent in New Orleans, my favorite city in the world? Yep, done that one, too. Legally able to drink? Yes. The actual day of my birth? Oh, yeah.

So what’s left to talk about?

How about new memories?

There’s some kind of taboo in American middle-class society against setting plans for ones’ own birthday. Is that just me? It’s seen as some kind of hubris, overweening pride, to plan your birthday party. That duty is typically reserved for your close friends, significant other, brothers or sisters. But I’ve got to tell you, because of the calendrical3 positioning of the day, mid-way between Christmas and New Year’s Day, my friends and family can be excused for not having the energy or attention to make big plans for me. They’re busy celebrating their own holidays.

This year, though, I wanted to spend with my friends. The past year has had its ups and downs for me (and others, of course), but one thing I’m very happy for is that I spent more time with the people I care about. I reconnected with old friends, and strengthened bonds with the friends I have. So a week or two ago, I bucked the possibly-only-in-my-head taboo about planning my own party, and began inviting my friends out for dinner. No presents needed or requested beyond their attendance and friendship.

And every one of them, everyone I asked, said they’d be there. How awesome is that?

Was it that easy, all along? Did I just have to ask? Was my own piggish pride in the way? I feel like a dork for not doing this sooner.

Tonight, at a little Italian place in Sellwood, there will be a gathering of folks, and at the head of the table you’ll find me, happy and smiling and, for the first time in a very long time, spending my birthday with my friends.

Here’s hoping my 45th year is the best one yet.

1 This includes thumbs.
2 Some cartoon characters have only 6 fingers total. See Bender, for example.
3 My spell-check recognizes that word. I can’t recall if I’ve added it, or if it came built-in.

“Up in the Air” (2009)

Movies

I’m feeling ramble-y about this movie. Be warned.

People often use the term “arc” as a metaphor for the changes a character in a story goes through. Writers, mostly. And I’ve always pictured said arcs as a parabola, starting at one point, going up, up, up, peaking, then dropping down. Think the shape of the St. Louis Gateway Arch.

Watching “Up in the Air” reminded me that not all arcs go up.

Am I being ironic and cute? The title of the movie describes, after all, someone flying high over ground, looking down on all the rest of us. The “flyover states”. George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a seasoned traveller who feels most at home when he’s in an airport or on a plane. He travels from place to place across the country and fires people for a living. This is the kind of soulless profit-driven job that has become a familiar starting point for emotional change in our movies. 60 years ago it was the traveling salesman who epitomized empty work; now we see lobbyists, contractors, day traders; they work for the minor corporations that serve the externalized needs of the major corporations, and actual human lives are just currency to them. Clooney’s charm made me feel uneasy about identifying with such a corporatist; I almost felt sorry for him, even before the story, and Bingham’s arc, began.

Bingham’s tidy, process-driven wandering is interrupted when a young, eager kid, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick, who manages to embody the inner turmoil and exterior calm of many a corporate drone with just a tight purse of her lip or almost imperceptible roll of her eyes) comes up with the idea to use video conferencing to fire people and save traveling costs. This means the end of Bingham’s massive accrual of frequent flyer miles, and right as he’s about to reach his nearly meaningless goal: ten million “points” as a reward for his “loyalty” to a legal contract.

Of course, his “loyalty” has been paid with other people’s money, his expense account at the company, and not out of his own savings; Bingham is just a feeding tube through which passes abstracted value from one non-person to the next. And to earn those points, all he’s had to do is be the bearer of bad news and sit with each actual flesh-and-blood person while they break down, burst into anger, plead for another chance, pretended this isn’t happening, and, rarely, simply accept that their services are no longer required. His constant exposure to human emotion has made him sympathetic enough to realize that abstracting it even further with a computer screen may well be the breaking point. Or so it seems to me. Maybe Clooney’s charm won me over? After all, Bingham had a selfish reason to continue facing down his fellow corporate workers; his pointless goal of “loyalty” which will earn him status as one of only seven people to earn that many points.

This movie resonates with my growing passion against corporate institutions. Can you tell? I could deconstruct this movie for days, I think. And there may be some of you who find that interesting. But it’s also a movie, telling a story. And even though the director, Jason Reitman, is not a newbie director (he directed “Juno” and wrote and directed “Thank You For Smoking”, among others – that last one also about corporatist politics, though played as satire rather than straight drama, as in “Up in the Air”), he made some odd (to me) choices.

When I originally saw the trailer for this movie, it featured Clooney, as Bingham, giving a motivational speech. Here, let me show you it:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m-Da8Tz4_E&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

The monologue, with the sparse piano over it, and the flash of images, set a tone. Somber, serious, contrasting Clooney’s charisma with the sociopathic message of the words. To me it felt like a confession in a downtown bar on a weeknight, spoken over a drink or two – enough to get a buzz but not enough to really let go.

In the early part of the movie, when we first hear Bingham give this speech (he gives it, or a variation, three times by my memory throughout the course of the film), the music is much more upbeat. It’s a subtle difference but I noticed the change. It felt wrong, sitcom-like. The mood was off. I wondered if I had been tricked by the trailer and my man-crush on George Clooney into the wrong kind of movie.

When Bingham meets his female counterpart, frequent flyer Alex Goran (Vera Farmgia), spellbindingly beautiful and confident, a terrific match – again, with the tone-deaf music.

When Bingham flies back to the home office and has a meeting with his boss, and his boss is Jason Bateman, again I felt the tone was off. I love Bateman, but I love him for his comedic timing and snarky anger, which jarred, just a little, with what I hoped to be the intent of this movie. I felt a bit betrayed, and hoped that this wasn’t a comedy in the conventional, and classical, sense. I hoped for a deeper meaning and more mature tone to emerge.

Emerge it did, in the final half. Perhaps Reitman was aiming for contrast; I think I would have preferred a more consistent tone. This is a dark story, a classical tragedy, and, eventually, it arrived there.

Cornbread for breakfast, and an omnibus catch-up post to get me back on track and blogging again, hopefully.

General

Things I’ve been doing lately:

  • Learning new recipes for home cooking. Last Thanksgiving, I tried a recipe for crock-pot pork chile verde, along with cornbread, as my own personal way of celebrating. The cornbread turned out well, but the chile verde wasn’t what I was expecting – a little bland and too soupy. The flavors intensified after a day or two, and I ended up making four or five burritos from it, by combining with an easy Spanish rice recipe I found, but I wanted to try some other recipes. I want to duplicate the chile verde I find at the Iron Horse or Maya’s (no website).Yesterday, I tried this pork chile verde, and it’s less soupy and more flavorful, though still not the same as the ones I consider my favorites. I’ll keep trying. Oh, and I cooked up some black beans this time, too, which turned out perfect and spicy.

    Overall, I’m really enjoying cooking my own meals. It’s cheaper and gives me something new to learn. How can that be bad? And having leftover cornbread with my bacon and coffee this morning was awesome.

  • I’m still stuck in Season 3 of my LOST re-watch, even though the 6th and final season is due to start in about a month. Not sure I’ll get all the way through Season 5 by the time it restarts, either. But I’m enjoying seeing the whole show as a slowly-unfolding novel, full of great characters and some interesting ideas. I still think Desmond and Penny stories are the best, though Claire and Charlie make an interesting couple, too. Feh on the whole Jack/Kate/Sawyer/Juliet quadrangle, though. Feh, I say. And I still don’t buy that Sayid fell for Shannon.
  • I started sketching out a slightly-new design for my website last night. I love the simple design I have now, but I want to change it up. I also want to make it all validate as CSS 3.0 and XHTML, and I’ve had complaints about the tiny font size – I’ve got some ideas on how to fix that, but still maintain the clean layout (can you say fluid grid?) And I have to incorporate the moon in there, somewhere, too. The new design, though, will likely switch to a black font on white background, though, for better readability. Or maybe that will be an option. I don’t know, it’s in the early stages yet. It’s one of the projects I’m working on during my vacation. Also, I’m still mulling over moving this blog to WordPress.
  • I’ve been collecting and posting on Twitter some random things I overhear my coworkers say. There are some interesting political and social viewpoints – and by “interesting” I mean “weird, crazy and a bit scary” – and because of the response I got on Twitter, I’ve started a new Tumbleblog, Shit My Conservative Coworkers Say. You can follow that blog, or follow the Twitter account @WingnutsSay, to keep up. I’ve got enough material to post at least one new crazy thing every day, 5 days a week, and that’s my plan for the future, until I either run out, or get in trouble. Note: the descriptions of The Palinite and The Paulite have been fictionalized. Slightly. Just enough, I hope.
  • Speaking of websites and domains, I now own six. At least three of those are separate blogs/sites. If you throw in my Facebook profile, my (primary) Twitter account, and my Flickr page, not to mention several other forms of online presence, that’s a lot of updating. I feel the need to consolidate them, maybe keep some of them separate, but come up with one Brian “Lunar Obverse” Moon Mega-site, your one-stop shopping for all things Lunar Obverse related.
  • Then there’s a side project that got put on a back burner around last March, when I took an enjoyable detour into the land of couplehood. Now that I’m single again (no, I’m not going to talk about that in public – it’s personal), I can pick up where I left off, and proceed again. And that’s all I’m gonna say about that for now.
  • Another project has been my Dungeons & Dragons game. We’ve been playing once per month since it started, and hopefully everyone is enjoying themselves. They keep coming back for more, so it looks like they are (no, really, guys, I’m not fishing for compliments). I’m having fun, too, although sometimes I focus more on the mistakes I make rather than the fun I’m having. My game-running skills are rusty, and way back in the day, I don’t think I was that good a gamemaster in the first place. One thing I’ve improved upon, I think, is the action. Way more action in my new game. And the story has, mostly, held up, although it’s early yet. But the characters are on the verge of 3rd level, and they’re still gelling as a team, and, well, it’s been a fun escape for me.
  • I’m still running, although lately just on the treadmill at work, and far fewer miles and a bit slower than I used to. And I’m working to control my weight, too, with diet and such. As a matter of fact, I’ve made it from Thanksgiving to Christmas and lost 3.5 lbs (so far) with some effort. Sure, cooking more of my own food has helped, and so has running, but mainly it’s mental – planning my meals ahead of time as much as I can, and learning to say “no” to larger portions. My goal is to hit 185 lb by the time next year’s Shamrock Run, which works out to ~1 lb per week. I’m right on track.
  • I’m also on track to pay off all my current debt by the end of 2010. It still seems so far away, and lots can happen between now and then, but I have a plan, and if I stick to it, I’ll get there. Better late than never, right? Since summer, I’ve paid off two credit cards so far, and I have a small bit of savings, too. I’m using the debt snowball method, which is championed by J. D. Roth and Dave Ramsey, which just means I pay off the smaller balances first. I like it because it gives me a psychological lift to see me crossing off debts sooner than I would if I paid off the higher balances or higher interest rates first, or paid them all off proportionately. I could do it the other way, but this way is working for me now, so I’m not eager to change. Time will tell how close I get, but it feels good now.

And that’s what I’ve been up to. Well, some of it. Which still seems like a lot.

How have y’all been?

War is over (if you want it)

General

This one’s for our men and women in uniform, far from home. And it’s also for those they live among, and the ones designated as their enemies, too. Just because they don’t celebrate Christmas doesn’t mean I can’t wish them peace and goodwill, does it?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb2YSAVHmIE&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

So hard to handle, selfish and mean

General

Sad love songs and Christmas just seem to go together well, don’t they?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCov0TYXBp8&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

I wonder why that is.

For our retail brothers and sisters

General

What’s open today in Portland? Strip clubs? Movie theaters? Starbucks?

This song is a Merry Christmas for them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3ogxQsMxO8&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]