All the Lonely People
One of the best things ever is when the weather on a lazy Sunday has been filled with that on-and-off-again spring sort of rain, enough to get you a little wet but not make you cold, when you have the windows open and can hear the hiss of traffic on the street as the cars' tires slice across the wet pavement, and toward the end of the day, the sun gets low enough in the sky to peak out beneath the edge of the clouds, making the wet world somehow luminescent.
I'm not a fan of Easter in general, but I'll sign up for that, at least.
On a random whim, I scanned and uploaded the signed pages of my autographed books into my misc section (a.k.a. the part of the website I maintain more for my own sanity than anything else, and which other people forget is even there, and that's okay, too). I was too lazy to resize the images right now (cf. "lazy Sunday"), so complain all you like that they take forever to load, but I don't really care too much right now, and the guilt of creating so much needless net traffic will gnaw at me enough in a few days that I'll fix it when the time comes.
I had originally planned on working on my taxes today, too, but somehow that also just didn't really happen. I'll take care of that soon enough as well.
Anyway, all this book scanning was prompted by my having finished reading my signed copy of Douglas Coupland's newest book, Eleanor Rigby, which I liked quite a bit. Of the books of his I've read so far, I think this and Hey, Nostradamus! are my favorites. Generation X was, despite its being hailed as the On the Road for my brand of people, unfortunately, not all that (more on that another time).
This book marked an odd (and not very significant, but still interesting) milestone for me: it was the first book I've ever read whose protagonist was also a CFS sufferer, albeit a mild one, since the character's case had vanished a year after its diagnosis. The characters in the book referred to it by one of its older colloquial names, Yuppie Flu*, which, as far as disease-name colloquialisms is near not so bad as AIDS' "Gay Plague", is still pretty trivializing compared to many others like "mono", (of course, in this case, you could even say the same for the disease's official name — an old boss asked me once, "So, you're like tired all the time or something? What kind of disease is that?").
As it were, I don't know what else to say about it other than that, but despite some very obvious differences (I'm not a lonely overweight 36-year-old West Vancouver native), there were still a lot of bits in the book that struck a chord of identity with me. Coupland seems to be good at that. Life After God did the same thing in parts. While I often find myself thinking that his books could use a little extra polish (as in window, not as in Slav), for example the whole meteorite subplot in Eleanor that's just . . . silly, he seems to do an extraordinary job at keying into the things that make us human, and which we'd never admit to normally.
Regardless, do my writings today have a point? No, not really, but that's where my mind was, at any rate.
* * *
* Oddly enough there's a band called Yuppie Flu. What phrase isn't also a band name anymore? Onomatopoeia? Yup. My other [somewhat neglected] domain Mindflip? Yeah, that's a band too. (They even contacted me once about wanting to buy my domain for like $40. I think at that point that was barely more than the maintenance fee on it, so I turned them down, hoping maybe they'd up their offer. Alas, struggling musicians have no money.) How about just Matt? See what I mean? You try it.
Anyway, I listened to Yuppie Flu's song previews, and they're pretty decent. Sort of remind me of World Party, from the early 90s.
I'm not a fan of Easter in general, but I'll sign up for that, at least.
On a random whim, I scanned and uploaded the signed pages of my autographed books into my misc section (a.k.a. the part of the website I maintain more for my own sanity than anything else, and which other people forget is even there, and that's okay, too). I was too lazy to resize the images right now (cf. "lazy Sunday"), so complain all you like that they take forever to load, but I don't really care too much right now, and the guilt of creating so much needless net traffic will gnaw at me enough in a few days that I'll fix it when the time comes.
I had originally planned on working on my taxes today, too, but somehow that also just didn't really happen. I'll take care of that soon enough as well.
Anyway, all this book scanning was prompted by my having finished reading my signed copy of Douglas Coupland's newest book, Eleanor Rigby, which I liked quite a bit. Of the books of his I've read so far, I think this and Hey, Nostradamus! are my favorites. Generation X was, despite its being hailed as the On the Road for my brand of people, unfortunately, not all that (more on that another time).
This book marked an odd (and not very significant, but still interesting) milestone for me: it was the first book I've ever read whose protagonist was also a CFS sufferer, albeit a mild one, since the character's case had vanished a year after its diagnosis. The characters in the book referred to it by one of its older colloquial names, Yuppie Flu*, which, as far as disease-name colloquialisms is near not so bad as AIDS' "Gay Plague", is still pretty trivializing compared to many others like "mono", (of course, in this case, you could even say the same for the disease's official name — an old boss asked me once, "So, you're like tired all the time or something? What kind of disease is that?").
As it were, I don't know what else to say about it other than that, but despite some very obvious differences (I'm not a lonely overweight 36-year-old West Vancouver native), there were still a lot of bits in the book that struck a chord of identity with me. Coupland seems to be good at that. Life After God did the same thing in parts. While I often find myself thinking that his books could use a little extra polish (as in window, not as in Slav), for example the whole meteorite subplot in Eleanor that's just . . . silly, he seems to do an extraordinary job at keying into the things that make us human, and which we'd never admit to normally.
Regardless, do my writings today have a point? No, not really, but that's where my mind was, at any rate.
* * *
* Oddly enough there's a band called Yuppie Flu. What phrase isn't also a band name anymore? Onomatopoeia? Yup. My other [somewhat neglected] domain Mindflip? Yeah, that's a band too. (They even contacted me once about wanting to buy my domain for like $40. I think at that point that was barely more than the maintenance fee on it, so I turned them down, hoping maybe they'd up their offer. Alas, struggling musicians have no money.) How about just Matt? See what I mean? You try it.
Anyway, I listened to Yuppie Flu's song previews, and they're pretty decent. Sort of remind me of World Party, from the early 90s.