Seven for the Price of One

ONE YEAR LATER
When Tommy Shaw wrote "Too Much Time on My Hands," he was thinking about what my adult life would be like in the summer. Example: Today I decided to reinvent my iPhone. I'm about a year into the contract with a year to go, so it seemed like a good time to make a few changes and pretend I have a new phone. I bought a new case for it, I replaced my scratched up face cover with a shiny new one, I cleared out the apps I never use then reorganized the ones I kept and even downloaded a handful of new ones just for kicks. Then finished the process with updating the music and the photos I keep on the phone. Now it's all kind of vaguely unfamiliar. So, no real changes, but it did keep me busy for an afternoon.

THE GREATEST COLLECTION OF SONG TITLES EVER
I haven't done a music post for some time, but this was worth commenting on. I downloaded a new album by the band Fair to Midland last week. Pretty heavy and noisy stuff so it's perfect for the Y, but also melodic and complicated and literary enough to show a certain amount of intelligence goes into this music. However, my favorite thing about the album has to be the song titles. From what I can tell, there isn't a single title that has anything to do with its song -- they're all just crazily arbitrary, hilariously head-scratching names. Some examples, and I promise I'm not making these up:
Whiskey and Ritalin
Amarillo Sleeps on My Pillow
Typhoid Mary Sends Her Best
Short-Haired Tornado
Three Foolproof Ways to Buy the Farm

YES, THAT WAS REAL
For any of my Facebook friends reading this who play Bejeweled Blitz? Yeah. You saw that right. My score last week was 992,500 points. Just sayin'.

WHEATLEY ENTERPRISES
Call me a nerd if you must, but I do dust off the XBox in the summertime, and I just finished one of the most original games I've played in a long time: "Portal 2." It's hard to describe briefly, but I can say that it comes down to a series of physics and logic puzzles with deceptively simple solutions that can be unimaginably frustrating. The storyline is somewhat involved and filled with some pretty dark humor. There was one bit of dialogue that had me laughing so hard at its audacity that I lost track of what was going on in the game for a moment. It might not translate so well out of context, so I'll give you a little background: This was a pre-recorded message that was played over an intercom system in an abandoned laboratory that had once used human test subjects:

"Good news is, the lab boys say the symptoms of asbestos poisoning show a median latency of forty-four point six years, so if you're thirty or older, you're laughing. Worst case scenario, you miss out on a few rounds of Canasta, plus you forwarded the cause of science by three centuries. I punch those numbers into my calculator, and it makes a happy face."

THE END OF CIVILIZATION
Long time blog readers -- both of you -- know that my ultimate summer guilty pleasure is watching the televised human carnage that is "Big Brother" on CBS. I seriously believe that watching this show and seeing how these voluntarily lab rats treat each other over the course of two televised months gives me great insight into how the minds of 10 and 11-year-olds work. At least on Wipeout the contestants get to wear helmets, and their indignity ends after one episode.

EPISODE 5?
I'm starting to think that writing a book about my almost twenty years of teaching would be next to impossible. The thing is? Any story I could tell that would be really, really interesting (and there have been several I haven't explored here through the episodes that have come up so far) would wind up making some people very angry. The interactions between the students, the parents, and the school staff are where stories would come from because that's what goes on in a school. And the real storytelling gems would still be really obvious to the people involved, even if I changed up the names and tweaked the details. So honestly, I'm rethinking that whole project right now. Maybe if or when I decide to use my school experiences to write something, it will have to wind up being fiction. Because frankly, some of the things I could write about wouldn't be accepted as truth anyway.

PURE HATE
I don't like running. When I treadmill at the Y, I'll walk. Gets the job done. But now that the 2011 Lazyman Triathalon is over and I've earned the free t-shirt that came with my entry fee, it might be months until I even consider using the bikes there to warm up. Seriously? One hundred twelve miles? Who does that because it's fun?