Me as a book

You're Ulysses!
by James Joyce

Most people are convinced that you don't make any sense, but compared to what else you could say, what you're saying now makes tons of sense. What people do understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once brilliant and repugnant. Meanwhile you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

(Thanks to Ashley for letting me know about this quiz.)

Another *%$@#! survey

Here's another one of those survey things.* This one is courtesy of Anne.

Four Jobs I've Had
This is more interesting if I group together jobs by employment location or period.
1. Stock boy at Jean Nicole at the Wyoming Valley Mall. So there I was, a seventeen-year-old kid trying to earn some walking-around money for college, and I managed to get a job running a vacuum, dusting display racks, and maintaining stock at a womens' clothing store. I was the only guy working with a bunch of older (twentysomething) women. It only lasted a few weeks in the summer of 1985, and was less fun than it sounds.
2. Final Selecting/Forming Selecting at Owens-Illinois. Three summers in college - 1986, 1987, and 1988 - spent working rotating shifts at a glass factory that made TV faceplates. Owens-Illinois became OI-NEG after they "partnered" with Nippon Electric Glass; a few years later they dropped the American-owned pretense and became TechNEGlas. Now they're gone, but my tinnitus and carpal tunnel syndrome remain.
3. Solar Cell Manufacturing, Astropower, Newark, Delaware. This was a pick-up job after I dropped out of the Physics grad program at the University of Delaware. I wasn't prepared to run home with my tail between my legs right away, so a few friends and professors steered me in the direction of this place. We made solar cells out of scrap silicon wafers that had been rejected by the semiconductor industry. It was pretty cool. I worked there from March of 1990 to August of 1991, during which time we occupied three separate locations. They moved and expanded several times since I left, but seem to have fallen on hard times in recent years.
4. CD Plater/CD Preproduction SPC Coordinator/"PSG: Statistics"/DVD Asset Manager. When I finally got back from Delaware in late August 1991 I spent a few months taking care of my grandmother, who was flat on her back due to sciatica. I kicked around for a while, looking at various employers, not sure of what I wanted to do. Some friends steered me to a local CD replicator who had done some work with the University of Scranton (my alma mater) in the past. I put in an application in January 1992 and waited patiently. When I was just about ready to give up, I got called in for an interview in May of 1992. I would start on the night shift in a relatively lowly position that would be basic production gruntwork (not that basic, really, and not that grunty), but word was that the company was hiring people with college degrees in the intent of grooming them for something else. It turned out to be true, and I quickly took on a new position of CD Preproduction SPC Coordinator. This job mutated through the years and the ensuing management changes into something else. In 1998 I decided it was time for a change and began the prep work to throw in my lot with the newly-formed DVD department. I began working for them in February of 1999, and am still doing much the same job (in a far more polished and streamlined way) seven years later.

Four Movies I Could Watch Over And Over
1. Monty Python's Life of Brian. I have watched this, beginning to end, and rewound the video tape and started over. I don't think I have it on DVD yet.
2. Trainspotting. Start to finish it's an amazing movie. After seeing this I decided to start going out to clubs, looking for Kelly Macdonaldish girls. Hey, Diane the character was underage, but Kelly Macdonald was wonderfully legal at the time of filming.
3. Toy Story 2. Way better than it could have been. I did once spend the better part of a Sunday watching this movie over and over and over again, beginning to end, at the request of a four-year-old girl. It never got boring.
4. O Brother, Where Art Thou? I love this one for the music as much as anything else. If any movie demands a special edition DVD, full of commentaries and making-of documentaries, it's this one. You'll end it singing "Angel Band" ("...o carr' me away on your sno-ow white wings, to my e-ter-nal home") and start over again with "Po' Lazarus" and "The Big Rock Candy Mountain."

Four Places I've Lived
1. Nanticoke, PA. It's where I started out, and it's where I am now.
2. Pittsburgh, PA. Five weeks in Hamerschlag House at Carnegie-Mellon University in July and August of 1984 for Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences. Technically, I was also living in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, since Fred Rogers lived in a neighboring maximum-security apartment building. I saw him once while I was there.
3. Scranton, PA. September 1985 - May 1989. If there's ever a choice between living on-campus and commuting to college, choose the on-campus option. It's worth it.
4. Newark, DE. August 1989 - August 1991. First for grad school, then to prove a point.

Four TV Shows I Love
1. Star Trek (the original series). It was way ahead of its time, and a product of its times. It was social commentary sold as science-fiction, presented on simple sets with spare, underwrought writing and special effects. A good, fun show with lots of classic characters that have touched and inspired millions.
2. Monty Python's Flying Circus. Laugh-your-ass-off wet-your-pants stuff.
3. South Park. Social commentary presented as a cartoon.
4. MTV's 120 Minutes. It doesn't exist anymore, but in the late 1980's and early 1990's this was the best place to see and hear the newest and greatest new music every Sunday night. While I'm here I may as well add in Daria, the Beavis and Butthead spin-off, just because I'm in love with Jane Lane - and they had great music.

Four Places I've Vacationed
1. Ireland. Going there again in a few weeks.
2. Cocoa Beach, Florida.
3. Disneyworld.
4. The New Jersey Shore - mostly Stone Harbor and Avalon.

My Four Favorite Dishes
1. Fried Fish. (Cod or Haddock, dusted with flour, salt, and pepper, dipped in egg, coated with flour/cracker crumbs, fried in oil.)
2. Apple Fritters.
3. Linguine and shrimp. (Boil linguine. Fry shimp in olive oil. Add garlic, onion, salt, pepper, red pepper, herbs, and white wine or lemon juice. Drain linguine thoroughly and add to frying pan. Toss over high heat until linguine just begins to to show some signs of browning.)
4. Broiled salmon. Microwaved salmon is pretty good, too.

Four Websites I Visit Daily
I visit a lot of websites daily. I mostly visit blogs. Many of these I have set up on RSS feeds as "Live Bookmarks" in Firefox so I can see when anybody's posted something new. New postings almost always earn a visit from me.
1, 2. Sammie's sdfsdf.wox.org and Camilla Henrikke's wallflower.nu aren't set up with RSS feeds so I have to check them manually - and I do, every day.
3. Adam Felber's Fanatical Apathy is on an RSS feed, but more than half of the attraction of his site is the comments - in a sense, Adam and the regular and irregular commentors constitute almost a "group blog" - and I have to check the site to see the comments.
4. Oh, hell. May as well admit it. I check my Sitemeter every day. Actually, I have Sitemeter set up so it's the first page that opens up when I open Firefox.

Four Places I'd Rather Be
1. In bed. With several beautiful and insatiable women.
2. Swimming in Uncle Scrooge's Money Bin. Also with several beautiful and insatiable women.
3. In a place where there is no dying, with every person and animal I've ever loved. I guess that's where the idea for Heaven came from, huh?
4. Right here. With several beautiful and insatiable women.

Four People I'm Tagging
I don't tag. If you're reading this, consider yourself tagged. If you're a beautiful and insatiable woman, consider yourself tagged and contact me directly and I'll go over these questions in depth with you. If you're a woman who has a thing for bloggers and is good at giving backrubs, feel free to contact me, too.

*I won't call it a "meme". A meme is something else completely different from these surveys, and calling the surveys "memes" just makes it less likely that people will understand the real idea of the meme as a self-replicating unit of information, which is very unfortunate. You could just as accurately call these things "cucumbers" or "defenestrations."

A survey, courtesy of Melanie

This is all Melanie's fault.

What were you doing 10 years ago?
That's a tough one. I bought my current car in March of 1996. My grandmother was one of the first people to go for a ride in it, and she was only a few weeks in her first nursing home then. So in January 1996 she wasn't in a nursing home yet, and was probably still at home with us. So part of the answer is that I was helping take care of her at home.

Workwise, I was still the Statistical Process Control Coordinator for CD Pre-Production, which was at that time mostly a teaching and training position, with plenty of analysis thrown in. I changed offices five times between 1993 and 1998, and each time my job description changed slightly. I think I was in the third office at this point, which means that my partner had already been broken off to work for our startup DVD group. This was in the days before there was anything called a DVD. We helped invent the technology - and paid a heavy price for being pioneers.

Personally I was travelling more, spending time in New Jersey and the Poconos and visiting a friend in her Lincoln Park apartment in Washington, D.C. Still, that doesn't help place me; I can't even remember when she moved in. Or was it out?

Given my annual bouts of Seasonal Affective Disorder, the answer is probably the same as what I do every January: sulking in a state of semi-hibernation.

What were you doing 1 year ago?
I thought my blog would help me here, but no such luck. All my posts from this time last year were pretty generic. See the above comment about S.A.D.

Personally and professionally, I was doing pretty much the same thing I am now. I am so dynamic.

Five snacks I enjoy:
1. Chocolate, especially chunk chocolate from Diamond's Candy Shoppe in downtown Nanticoke.
2. Local potato chip brands Middleswarth and Gibble's.
3. Turkey Hill Rocky Road Ice Cream.
4. Homemade chocolate chip oatmeal cookies...homemade by me. They are the best. I rule.
5. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Counts as one because all together they do not amount to as much as any one of the others, but I will seriously snack on apples, oranges, grapes, cherries, strawberries, blueberries, celery, cucumbers, tomatoes, peanuts, pecans, almonds, and on, and on.

Five songs to which I know all the lyrics
I'm not sure I know all the lyrics to any songs. I've always had a hard time hearing lyrics to songs, so sometimes I'll fill them in with words that approximate the rhythm and the meter. I try to look up song lyrics, but sometimes the ones listed in the liner notes (for example, Barenaked Ladies' "If I Had $1,000,000", Counting Crows' "Mr Jones", or Courtney Love's "Hollywood Hills") are simply - and possibly intentionally - wrong.

Still, I have learned the words to a few songs that I will sometimes sing in my car at the top of my lungs:

1. "Just Like Heaven" - The Cure. 'Nuff said. It works as a country song, too.
2. "Cherub Rock" - Smashing Pumpkins. A dangerous song to have playing while driving. ("Whoooooooo waaaaahnts huuuuuhneeeeeee, 'slong as there's some.....maaaaaahneee, Who wahnts thaat huuhuuuuuuneee....")
3. "Lovers In A Dangerous Time" - originally by Bruce Cockburn*, I learned it from the Barenaked Ladies. ("Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight, you gotta kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight..." That gives me goosebumps just reading it.)
4. "I Alone" by Live. Good for inducing aneurysms while driving. Also good for waking yourself up late at night. (This also works as a country song: "I'll read tuh yeh heer, save yer ayes...yu'll need 'em, yer boat is at sea...")
5. "Stand Inside Your Love", Smashing Pumpkins. Discovered by accident when I dumped a Smashing Pumpkins Greatest Hits CD onto a 12-hour .mp3 compilation. Some of the words I approximate...I don't even know if Billy Corgan knows all the words. I learned this song mostly by playing it on a continuous loop on the way to work.

Five things I would do if I were a millionaire
1. Get a financial adviser. Seriously. That's the first thing.
2. Invest. Heavily. At least half of it.
3. Arrange things so my mom would never, ever have to worry about going into a nursing home. That might eat up the rest.
4. Buy a few chunks of forest and keep them as forest.
5. Invest whatever remains. I'll be sure to think of something else to do with it later.

Five bad habits
1. Sloth.
2. Gluttony.
3. Spending too much time on the Internet.
4. Procrastination.
5. Despair.

Five things I like doing
1. Blogging. Also spending too much time on the Internet.
2. Giving blood. Every eight weeks. It's the easiest way to lose weight that I know of, and the easiest way to help people without lifting a finger. If only they could do something about that damned needle.
3. Reading.
4. Girls. Wait, "doing girls" doesn't sound right, does it?
5. Driving. I'd better like it. I average 1,000 miles every 17 days.

Five things I would never wear, buy or get new again
Hmmm. Doesn't really seem to apply to me. I'm not known for fashion mistakes. Or fashion.
1. Flip-flops. I hate these things. They are the farthest things from the form of a "shoe" that you can get that are still marginally considered shoes. They are uncomfortable, do not serve any purpose other than to keep your feet off the ground, and fall off so easily that you need to focus tremendous concentration just to keep them on your feet. I wore them once, at the beach, and I think I threw them out. Sandals do the same job without most of the disadvantages.
2. Zip-up smooth-soled boots. I last wore these in third grade. They are uncomfortable, provide marginal ankle support, and give no traction. Plus I would sometimes get the skin of my ankle caught in the zipper.
3. Tank top or v-neck t-shirts under other shirts. These perform no real function. The v-neck looks ridiculous, too.
4. Down jacket. Very warm, but tends to be too fragile for me. Ends up spewing feathers from multiple ruptures. Last worn in fifth grade.
5. Tinted glasses. I think these make you look like a jerk, or like someone who wants to look like a jerk. Last worn when I was about 12.

Five favorite toys
1. My computer. Currently a Compaq Presario 7478, circa 1999. Upgraded the RAM in 2001 or 2002, but it's getting outpaced by the rigorous demands of most websites...or their pop-up ads.
2. My CyberHome DVD player. For under $40, it plays .mp3s, MPEG movies, JPEG images, CDs, and DVDs. Soon to be replaced with a CyberHome DVD Player/Recorder (approximate price: $80.)
3. My Nikon Coolpix 4100 camera. It's small, simple, and takes nice pictures.
4. My 1996 Toyota Tercel. Smart, fast, maneuverable, it's a car for someone who knows how to drive and isn't intimidated by vehicles 10 times your size. Efficient and reliable, too.
5. My painting stuff. Technically a big pile of things - paints, brushes, canvasses, wooden boxes, books of techniques. All comes together as one...when the time is right and the feeling hits me.

There. I did it. Dammit. Satisfied?

Oh, I guess I'm supposed to tag five people. OK, you, you, you in the funky T-shirt, you, and...you. No, not you. The other one.

Don't try to get out of it. I've got a Sitemeter. I know who you are.

*heh heh, heh heh

Oh, dear, I've been tagged

Melanie at Hyperextended Joints has tagged me with a survey.

Usually I hate these surveys. As readers of the last few entries know, even simple questions can spark a meandering, soul-serching ramble through my past, with little side-trips to places you might not have expected to go - or have wanted to go, if you knew what was good for you. People have generally learned to stop asking me the question "What are you thinking about right now?" Even my heavily edited answers tend to be a bit much. And the unedited versions...well, if you've ever seen "The Medusa Touch", you would understand why I might first scan the area for the presence of blunt objects before I ventured to give a more complete answer.

I have done one survey recently, on Anne's Almost Quintessence last June. I also did one via e-mail a few years back that was thought-provoking.

Because Melanie asked so nicely, I'll get around to answering this...soon. But not right now. Tonight is garbage night, and comingled recyclables night, and yet another night of high winds and massive temperature shifts. So I need to find a way to deal with all of these issues simultaneously. But I will fill it out soon, I promise!

Book survey

Anne at Almost Quintessence tagged me for one of these online survey things. I replied on her site, but hey, writing is writing, so I'm posting my responses here too.

1. Estimate the total number of books you've owned in your life.
It's probably between two and five thousand, not counting magazines and comic books. I really have no idea of a more accurate estimate. But it's a hell of a thing to haul them all from place to place - I still have 95% of them. I should just give up and declare myself a library.

2. What's the last book you bought?
I bought two books Friday night. Wish You Were Here, the Official Biography of Douglas Adams by Nick Webb, and Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, the letters of Richard Feynman. More than $50 total. I'm still depressed over Haley, can you tell?

3. What's the last book you read?
I'm in the middle of about five books. The last book I completed reading, technically, was the 25th Anniversary Edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I read just before I went to see the movie at the beginning of May.

4. List 5 books that mean a lot to you.
Hmm. That's a toughie - just picking five books. I'd say:

- So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish by Douglas Adams, which has one of the most accurate descriptions of falling in love I've ever read.

- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the stories of Richard Feynman, which reminds me of the proper attitude that should be taken towards life.

- Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine, a snapshot of the state of species on the edge (and the world in general) in 1988.

- How To Grow More Vegetables In Less Space Than You Imagine etc. etc. etc. by John Jeavons - my introduction to Organic Gardening.

- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. I read this one in college. It has everything - sex, lies, mental illness, wet nurses, intrigue, poison, a corrupt priest who uses dead people as fertilizer for his potato garden, inept doctors, faded aristocrats, fireworks...if I were stuck on a desert island, this would be one of the books I'd want to have.

5. Tag 5 people
Ummm, OK. You, you, you, you, and....you.