Storytime
2007-01-05, 16:21

Oh, that's right - I was going to finish up on the holidays.

The main event of Xmas Eve was H's sister's announcement to her father (we already knew) that she was pregnant with her third child, due in August, which I understand is the absolute best month in which to be bursting with baby. Other highlights include The Girl and I both getting new Razr phones to replace our ancient hunks of junk. Within a few days I had the ringtone I'd for years been waiting for - the Galaga game start song. Hooray!

Other than that, I've realized that I'm not interested in boring you with the details of a mainly relaxing holiday weekend, free of family conflict and time pressures. The only drawback is that Laurana is having a bear of a time readjusting to her schedule after so many days of shifted or interrupted nap times and delayed sleep times. In that sense I'm glad the holidays are done. Maybe by Monday she'll be back on track and we won't have any more bouts of overtired screaming. Please.

During lunch I got to chapter 14 in Zen... (by the way, you can read the whole book for free here [click], and there's an illustrated guide here [click], in case you find your mental image of the Great Plains unreliable -- there's also a gallery of pictures from Pirsig's motorcycle trip [click], complete with images of John, Sylvia, Chris, the DeWeeses and the man himself, which is completely disturbing and cool at the same time... thank you, Internets), wherein Pirsig goes on a long diatribe to his friends about the concepts that have been filling his mind along the cycling trip, with multiple pages of endquoteless paragraphs, and it reminded me of a certain day in my past.

I was living in Kent, OH off campus, and was hanging out at a certain t-shirt shop and otherwise gathering place of drinkers and smokers of all sorts with my friend TZ, who was 'working' there at the time. The front of the place was the shop, and the larger back section had a pool table and a jukebox, as well as some lounge space. One day in Teletubby land, I was there with TZ and conversation took us to talking about books we've read recently. I started talking about what memory tells me may have been Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World, and he asked me what the basic story was or somesuch. I started from the beginning and ended up, over the next half hour or so, giving a Cliff's Notes synopsis of the entire story. Literally, I talked for half an hour straight, no interruptions. TZ sat seemingly mesmerized - or at least entertained - while I spun out the story as I saw it.

Like I said, I was thinking about that day while I was reading, remembering the feeling of becoming a storyteller, a mouthpiece for a book, an interpreter; a half-remembered, ghostly echo of the oral tradition as it was ages ago. It was a good feeling, telling that story so fully, and a strange one: there was some connection in my brain, from memory to inner view to mouth, that had never been so continually put to use. It felt new and ancient at the same time, a state of mind buried deep in the older parts of the brain.

Recalling that moment made me hope for another opportunity to do it in the future, though I can't help but feel like the event was anomalous.

It reminds me of something I told H a week or two ago - we need to make more music at home. I was listening to an NPR report about the 78-rpm record advent of commercially available recordings of music. The conclusion was that it began the slow decline of home-made music, in that rather than buying a copy of the sheet music of favorite songs and playing them at the somewhat-out-of-tune piano in the living room - once a staple of the well-off family home - they, with the production of 78's, could now hear the original recording with none of the hassle of having to learn and play it. And now with the rise of the mp3, even having to put a disc on a spinner, be it album or CD, has become all but unnecessary, and even when music gets played, half the time it's through earbuds instead of stereo speakers, because when do people (read: adults and kids) agree on what to listen to? And all the earbud use is leading to a personal isolationism that is a whole other topic of conversation.

So as I said, I've talked with H about doing something about our home's social/musical situation. With the arrivals of both the erhu and the mandolin in our house, not to mention a new set of strings for my acoustic, now would be a fine opportunity to cause a sea change at home with respect to music.

Something else that needs to change in our house: the main computer. It seems it sensed its imminent downgrade (due to some Xmas cash that will be funneled into a new desktop) and decided to blind itself in protest - the video card up and died, or perhaps the AGP port on the motherboard fubar'd. Either way, there's a much, much older (can we say last century?) PCI card in there now that can't handle the Web 2.0 world. At least now I know that I have to get a good video card for my next system now rather than later. So I plan on spending part of the weekend searching out a new system, something that'll most likely have to last me a good 4-5 years. Fat chance of that.

This should be my chance to continue the sea change and maybe make the crazy switch to a Mac or the even crazier switch to a Linux box, but no. I don't have the time to learn Linux, and my minute experiences with The Girl's iMac G4 have made me hate Macs altogether. I mean really, how can you go through life not knowing what's going on inside your CPU? How can you live with not being able to upgrade parts on your own? Do Mac users, when something goes wrong with their system, feel inclined to beat the thing with a polished femur in hopes of magically getting it to work again? That seems to be about the extent of what one can do with it without having to call The System for help. F the System. I want to be able to change video cards without having to mail my computer to a factory. Is that so much to ask?

-- End Transmission --