Avett was screaming a lot today — he’s teething with like 5 teeth coming in at once. I tried giving him a bath before bed but 5 mins in he was screaming and standing up. I took him out to dry him off, but instead of his usual squirming he leaned in a nuzzled into my shoulder for a few minutes, something he’s never really done before. It felt so beautiful.
Category: LC 010.01
On the way out of town I made an initial pilgrimage to the Chamblin Book Mine. Having seen the the tsunami of books on someone’s instagram feed, I knew I’d have to try and go by on my next trip through Jacksonville. While I found a couple books I’d been looking for — a Zinn book on the New Deal, Wily Vlautin’s Lean on Pete and a Joe Strummer biography — the enormity and, uh, unique organization were a bit overwhelming, especially after a long work weekend.
Somehow at the union conference I was presenting at in Jacksonville, some co-workers and I ended up eating dinner at the Ruth Chris in the hotel. After getting over the ridiculous prices and setting aside the growing anxiety I had about my unfinished presentation the next day, I ordered a ribeye steak that turned out to be—in a word— amazing.
It was perfectly cooked, beautifully seasoned and super tasty.
Continuing what could probably be called the “Month of the Podcast” I listened to Guy Picciotto on WFMU’s Low Times Podcast. He was just like every interview I’ve heard with his Fugazi bandmate Ian MacKaye: Thoughtful, opinionated, quiet without being demure or understated, and passionate about everything he discusses. It was great.
Knowing I’d be driving 5 hours to and from Defuniak Springs for work, I downloaded a bunch of podcasts and grabbed some new albums to listen to (Iceage, Holopaw, etc.). One of the podcasts was The Book Show with Stewart O’Nan discussing his book, The Odds. The following exchange struck me as probably the reason O’Nan is my favorite author these days (in addition to his being a die hard Red Sox fan).
Joe Donahue: You look at this book and these characters even in your past work and you do look at hope, you do look at that word and that feeling and that desire of wanting something. That there is the hope that the situation that these characters are currently in will improve.
Stewart O’Nan: Oh, undoubtedly. That seems to be my focus. The books have wildly different settings, wildly different time frames, wildly different literary effects in terms of voice and style and all that, but it’s always keying on how do we hang on to some sort of hope, how do we keep going in the face of whatever loss we have to deal with. How do we do it? Because people do it. And what are the consequences when we don’t do it? What are the consequences when we give up?
This semester I’m co-DJing Better Off Dead, the punk show on WVFS. This was my second show and I felt really good about it — good flow, fun songs, etc. Tonight’s lineup was:
- Hot Water Music
- How Dare You
- The Rountineers
- Highway 66
- Scream
- Rain
- 3
- One Last Wish
- Pretty Girls Make Graves
- Radon
- Title Fight
- Iceage
- The Cramps
- RVIVR
- Braid
- Little League
- Small Talk
- Post Teens
- Bridge & Tunnel
- Loved Ones
- Slang
- Drive Like Jehu
- Embrace,
- True Feedback Story
- Chuck Ragan
- The Get Up Kids
- Bitchin’
- The Descendants
- Channels,
- White Fang
- Travelling
- I Hate Myself
- 1 Speed Bike
I’ve been working (sporadically) to get a small site up with the episodes up so folks could download and listen to — hope to have it done by the end of the semester.
It’s been more than a year since Janeen and I went to the movies — having seen “We Bought a Zoo” a few weeks before A was born. So when I surprisingly got a day off for President’s Day as part of our newly bargained contract, we decided to go to the movies. Unfortunately we were left deciding between a Nicholas Sparks film that Ebert Roper described as “nuttier and cornier than the snack-food aisle”, a Zombie-ish movie (“Warm Bodies”) and Identity Thief. We went with the latter assuming it’d be the least risky. So after a tasty Indian lunch we used up the last our our AMC gift care we got as a wedding gift (2+ years ago…)
It was about what I thought it’d be: amusing, laugh-out-loud-funny in parts, and largely forgettable. But it was fun — and felt a bit decadent – to go to the movies in the middle of the day with my lovely wife. I’m guessing that now that A’s in school we’ll be back before a year — esp. when we have 4-day weeks in the summer!
Quite unexpectedly, my lovely wife let me sleep in to 9 am (I woke up on my own; I’ve been sleeping pretty lightly lately). Still it was so nice to be able to sleep a little later than 730 am.
My brother Eric lives in Wisconsin and we don’t always make the time to talk on the phone. He’s a super guy, really smart and funny and a great teacher/thinker — in and out of the classroom. After we cooked dinner and put A to bed Eric and I talked for about an hour about family, Lost, boundaries, and radio.
Earlier that day we took A out on his new trike that he loves riding in. We walked around Southwood for about an hour.
