A lot time ago Jeremy started asking people for their favorite things. I have probably made about ten lists in that time. (I wonder how they have changed over time). Jeremy asked me for a list a few months ago. I have decided to update it and post it here as part of One Year of Sad Salvation. I hope you enjoy it.
100 Favorite Things List
family, thinking, beer, conversation, laughter, my car visiting friends, talking on the phone, cartoons, Wilco, snow, troubleshooting, notebooks, DVDs, eating out with friends, telling stories, design theory, laughing at myself, gadgets, history, Forget-It! Version 1.82, This American Life, words, The Simpsons, movies, soundtracks to Hal Hartley Movies, manned space missions, my apartment, taking days off, my computer, paying my bills every month, NPR, sports talk radio, e-mail, reading stories, Pac-Bell Park, seeing movies in the theaters, comic strips, Ben Folds Five, solitude, writing, seeing the world for what it is, reading, facts, closed captioning, watching tv using TiVo, baseball, Woody Allen, world wide communication, End of Summer Party, lunch table conversations at work, seeing the big picture, SportsCenter, skyscrapers, hearing stories, camcorders, old visions of the future, history, wasting time, good hot dogs, logos, home cooked meals, music, walking, Lego, stories about people's lives, chilly weather, information, good cable stations, making CDs, cheesesteaks, Picture frames, Sad Salvation, dark future movies, water, old record art, sleeping in on Saturdays, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hot chocolate on a cold day, breakfast foods, the Internet, questions, flirting, meeting new people, photographs, my Journal, fonts, cities, answers, interesting web pages, driving, zines, pro wrestling, soup, my PDA, Richard Linklater Films, video games, traveling, coffee,
not knowing what tomorrow holds
It is one year ago today, October 4, 2001, that I started Sad Salvation. I think it is important to mark anniversaries. I think they are something that connect us to time. Too often time passes faster then we can realize. We have to take these moments when we can.
I kept a journal for about seven years. For some of that time I would write two or three pages a day in my journal. I feel that Sad Salvation is an extension of that journal. It was the next step in evolution.
The journal was started as an assignment given by Greg Seigworth to his spring 1994 Cultural Crit class at Millersville Univ. He had said he had done this before with other classes he had taught at other schools. He read us an exert from the Douglas Coupland short story collection Life After God.
And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection--certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak though us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn’t ever know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real--this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.
This passage was in the forward to my journal. It really did say something about why I was writing back then. I wonder if this is still why I write or not. I wonder if it describes Sad Salvation or not.
Please use the comment box to give one prediction about the next year of my life. We can look then to see if any of them came true.
Last night was the first poker night at my new apartment. I would say that it was a success. Everyone that was there had a good time. Once we got cooking, the games went really well. It was not hard to keep people focused on the game.
Of course I lost my shirt in the games. If you add together what I lost in the game and paying for beer, I would say it cost me about $40. That is not too bad. There are a lot worst ways I have wasted that kind of cash.
The hardest part is lining people up to come. I know this will always be hard. At my age, people just do not have the time to sit around and play cards. I am still lining people up for next week. I want to see if I can make this a regular thing.
If I get my webcam working, I might start a San Jose blog. I could talk like how San Jose has the only permanent outdoor Monopoly board in the world. I wonder if we can have the Monopoly World Cup here? I feel odd that this is true about the city where I live.
There is an old joke about Microsoft Technical Support giving answers that were technically correct, but totally useless. That is how I feel about this article about how to tell if you are going to be fired. My experence is this is not something to worry about. Worry about if the company is healthy or not. That is what you should worry about. Everything else is just noise.
Well, it is not really that bad. There is still some money left. I am not living out on the street. I am not crying on the phone to my father or moving out of San Jose. I still have a job and an honest way to get more money. There is still money to be had.
It is just that I have worked my way through my moving fund. The slush fund had turned back to ice. I have to now live by the plans I made so I could move into this apartment. That means not eating breakfast out every morning. It means fewer meals out. It means fewer DVDs and CDs. It means that I need to buy things for my apartment as part of my normal budget. It means fewer trips to the ATM and fewer reasons for trips to the ATM. I have to watch the way I spend my money.
To kick this off, Monday I took $150 worth of merchandise back to Fry's. I did not need the stuff and I knew I was not going to get good use out of it. I just need to be able to stick to my plan. It is the sticking to it that has always hurt me in the past. Have to work harder this time.
I feel like there is something missing and I cannot figure out what it is. I am not clicking on all cylinders. I just do not have the right words for how I am feeling. I cannot say that I am burned out, that is a different feeling. All I can say is that I am not getting something out of life right now. I am not really sure what that is. I need to find what that is.
While I was driving home tonight I just felt lost. I had no plans for the evening. I was just going to go home and chill. It was Monday and no one was going to miss me for another 16 hours.
There was something in that moment that made me feel disconnected from the rest of the world. I felt that I could go anywhere, but there was nowhere for me to go. I had no idea where the right place for me to be is. I just sat there in the parking lot until I figured out what was going on.
The World is being built, right outside my window.
The new San Jose Civic Center is being built right outside my window. I have just unpacked my webcam. I want to set up my webcam so it is taking pictures of the construction every day. I would like people to be able to visit it. Here is one of the pictures I have taken.
The problem is I have no idea how to set up a site to use a webcam. No one I talk to seem to know how to do it either. if anyone out there have any ideas, please share.
