Virtually Home

I vastly underestimated the extent to which the weather would have a major effect on my emotional well-being. When it is this cold, I fail to be productive, and I hate everyone and everything. It is a truly terrible way to exist.

I'm in my ninth year of devout Decemberists fandom. There is something about the storytelling, the melodies, the little guitar hooks, the accordion and harmonica and melodica -- hell, just about everything about it appeals to me. I especially adore all of that prog-rock complexity reduced to Colin Meloy with a guitar. I've traveled to see Decemberists shows in Maryland, Texas, Washington state, and London, England -- accordingly, there was little that could have stopped me from seeing Colin Meloy play in my own backyard. This was my second visit to The Woman's Club of Minneapolis (the first was to see Ben Gibbard with Advance Base). Very little about the venue appeals to me. They have tragically little parking, and are located in a neighborhood plagued with "residents only, violators will be towed" signs, so you have to get there ridiculously early in order to be able to leave your car somewhere. This is tragic because it's a seated-only venue, so there'...

Animals have sensory systems that allow them to take in and make sense of information present in the environment. Some animals (like me) fly airplanes and go to grad school, and their nervous systems are used frequently for knowing which way is up and worrying that they might not be in the right place. When you're an instrument pilot in training, you spend a lot of time learning to trust your instruments during flight in the clouds because sometimes, when you fly in featureless grey, the part of your brain that integrates information from your visual and vestibular systems gets really confused. This confusion can cause your brain to have very definite opinions about which way is up -- and these opinions frequently do not coincide with any kind of reality. Spatial disorientation can be very dangerous when you consider that the airplane is traveling at some relatively rapid rate near an object (the Earth) of much, much, much greater mass. The solution to this disorientation problem...

Today, I lost a great uncle. He was a wonderful, earnest, slow-smiling kind of man. He was good, and I will miss him.

Autumn is like that feeling when you get on a really huge and rickety rollercoaster and the car stops at the top of the first drop and you think, "Oh god, I want off." But there's no stopping the rollercoaster car and there's no stopping autumn from turning into the relentless misery that is winter. Sure, at the end of the ride (er, winter) you convince yourself that you're proud of having done it, like it was some kind of accomplishment. And at least you're cooler than that wimp who didn't try it. But it's not fun. Particularly not at that moment, waiting for the drop, when you realize what's in store. I want summer back, and I want it back now.

Birthday Suits I try to write about the shows that I go to. Rock concerts are one of my favorite things, but they are fleeting experiences, and it's easy to forget the little magics that make them what they are. I failed to blog about this show for too long, and I fear I have lost some details. Here goes anyway. Birthday Suits opened. They were a strange, two piece band from the Twin Cities -- a gritty, loud guitar, and a long-haired, head-banging drummer who was fond of theatrics. At one point, he was playing with fistfuls of drumsticks in each hand. During one song, he tied a harmonica to his head with coils and coils of pink surveying tape. The lyrics were incomprehensible, and the music was not my favorite, but there was something really captivating about this band. There are worse ways to open the show than with a trainwreck. Desaparecidos: Conor Oberst, Landon Hedges, and Matt Baum Desaparecidos released one album in 2002 and then broke up. They played a r...

Summer brought back all the things I liked about the Twin Cities in the first place. Or, maybe, they just weren't swamped by the oppressive snow anymore. My mood is much improved. I'm trying to spend a lot of time outside -- gardening, biking, etc. It's working out as well as can be expected, considering I'm working the night schedule and the weather is months behind schedule. I thought I knew what I was getting into for this summer, since I did a lot of testing and frog collecting last year. This summer's spotty 9 p.m. to 5ish a.m. schedule has been weird, and complicated by the unseasonable cold that has kept the frog supply down. Not nearly enough has gotten done, and we will probably run out of frogs any day now. I have only gone out collecting twice, to my great surprise. I've gone back to swimming, and I put new strings on my guitar yesterday. It's kind of a wonder how much difference that made. I'm trying to get more done -- more fun stuff and...