career goals

Don't get me wrong. I love my job, and I especially love the freedom it gives me, freedom to play music, freedom to be with my daughter. However, there are times where I'm forced to agree with this comic.

But let's face it: I'd never be able to keep my narcissism in check if I were rich.

my Onion Horoscope, 1/20

"Mars rising in your sign indicates you are something of a coward, mostly because of the way you keep flinching at it."

out of illness comes insight

I've been battling a cold for a little while now. It had been a mildly annoying state at the beginning of last week, mostly sinus drip giving me a sore throat. Then I started teaching this week, and after my Tuesday of three classes, my throat was a bit more sore. Then I had band practice, and I had problems hitting all the notes. A Wednesday band practice, Thursday teaching, and Thursday band practice left me fearing my voice would give out either on my band Midwest Tourist's Friday show or on my solo (with backing band) show Saturday.

But I made it through. When I left the festival we were playing on Saturday, I felt drained and sore. It didn't get any better on Sunday, and on Monday, I generally felt like I had been beaten up. This meant that I spent most of the last few days sitting around, not doing much at all save watching television. Specifically, I went on YouTube and went on a Muppet Show binge (how is this not streaming legally? C'mon, guys). And as far as recovery material, you couldn't ask for anything better. The show is more brilliant, more manic, and more wonderful than I could recall, and if it didn't lift me physically, it certainly did spiritually.

Somewhere buried in the marathon was the Harry Belafonte episode. This contained the most wonderful piece, one which I now believe everyone in the world needs to see, one which, if people were forced to watch it and think on what they just experienced, the world would be a better place:



...and nothing else needs to be said.

an option!

Vegetarians: I haven't been one of your number for long, but I feel your pain, particularly when dining out. I now can't eat at some of my former favorite restaurants. I too now get peeved whenever the vegetarian option is grilled cheese or a salad. I too hate being charged the same amount for a dish when the meat has been replaced by a single stinking' bell pepper.

So it is with great joy that I report that Chipotle now has an awesome vegetarian option: the sofritas burrito. It is a shredded tofu braised in a chili pepper mixture. It's quite yummy, and it's the kind of food that omnivores would like without reservation. Highly recommended.

Note: I am not a paid endorser of Chipotle and am receiving no compensation from them for this review. I am, however, completely open to such a relationship. I would be an excellent shill. In fact, unless you're a company which tortures animals, is run by Tea Partiers, or sells karaoke or auto tune technology, I will sell out on your behalf.

Please, please, please let me sell out for you!!!!

the perils of edginess

I have already expressed my appreciation for Cracked. Since their transition from Mad ripoff to internet humor site, they have gotten much deeper in terms of content...albeit still with juvenile humor on top. Personally, I generally don't have a problem with that.

However, sometimes it gets in the way of a surprisingly good point. Take this article, for instance. I couldn't agree with it more...and I would love to pass it on to everyone. My mother, however, would not be amused. I might even get slapped.

Man, how do the truly edgy do what they do and still face their mommies?

The Antidepressants

Every so often, I feel the need to rock.

I've been in a number of hard rock bands. The first one up here broke up when the drummer moved out of the state. The next one broke up when the singer decided to focus on his other band. The last rock band broke up when the singer decided "to quit music forever" (his words). I miss all these.

Sure, I play plenty of music now. Yet however awesome my alt-country/alt-rock band might be, there's nary distortion to be found. And yes, I get plenty of opportunities to play singer-songwriter, but emotively whining while strumming an acoustic ain't heavy...no matter how much kazoo I might insert into the mix.

There's just something about hitting a chord on a distorted guitar, something powerful, something cathartic, something satisfying, something essential, something primal. It's the act of striking metal, which leads to the resulting vibrations being turned into electrons, then bent and twisted through effects, then amplified and distorted inside glowing vacuum tubes, then thrust through magnets and paper back into the realm of vibrations, so they can smack you clear in your chest. Add a band, and magic can happen.

A friend was talking with a local musician who was familiar with my stuff from open mic nights, and said musician said I would be even better with a band. This was not exactly breaking news for me, but assembling a band can be a vexing and confounding process. Issue one is that everyone in the world seems to be a guitarist, but the other instruments are more scarce. Then one has to try and combine differing schedules, differing tastes, differing attitudes towards music in general. And music is such that it tends to be deeply emotional...and thus tends to amplify any possible conflicts. Friendships can be severely damaged in the process...and I know this intently, as I lost one of my best friends after playing in a band together.

I have actually succeeded once in assembling a backing band...making the act TheMikeDuBose and the Antidepressants. Then the bassist backed out, so I had to move the drummer to bass and recruit another drummer. Then we played a festival, and even though we had a good set, no one was there to see us. And did I mention that the other guitarist was the singer in my other band, the one who broke up the band by quitting music forever? And this kind of caused my backing band to disintegrate as well.

In December, I managed to get booked to play a festival, and I decided it would be fun to assemble a backing band for the occasion. After a few false starts, I managed to get a power trio together. After the second practice went well, my rhythm section said they would be open to doing shows every other month. Then my sometimes trombonist was able to join us for the set...and it was magnificent. We were much tighter than we had any right to be, and we sounded good. I think the rest of the band agreed, because we started to make actual plans. So The Antidepressants 2.0 are officially on the scene. And I think we went over well; not only did we get plenty of complements, but I sold some CDs, and we did get asked to play the bar regular's birthday bash.

I have rock and roll back in my life. Everything is awesome.

I got this

Today, many things happened. I had three good classes. My daughter called me and her mom her "friends," the local cookie delivery place brought my favorite cookies (the Darth Vader: chocolate cookie with raspberry sauce) I had a great practice, my drummer and bassist agreed to be my regular band, I got to see my favorite local band with many friends, and one of my favorite drummer told me my beard smelt delicious. Generally? Coolness.

on empathy and cheap internet thrills

As a kid, I had a few issues of Mad Magazine, but I actually much preferred Cracked. Yeah, I know most people would argue this is like preferring White Castle to a good gourmet burger bar, but I've always had an appreciation for cheap tastes. I had (as many would tell) drank much more swill beer than micro-brews...that is, when I used to drink.

Cracked magazine is no more, but the name lives on in a pretty amusing comedy web site. And I have to admit, it's part of my daily routine of "I don't want to think just yet" web viewing. The other day, I ran across an article called "5 Things No One Tells You About the First Year of Parenthood" (why are these always in lists? Well, at least this one didn't mention someone winning or destroying the internet. End of old guy rant). Being a parent type, I could most certainly relate.

For those of you who weren't here with me, the first year of my daughter's life was not the most pleasant. She was not a happy baby, and there would be days where she was pretty much either screaming at me or napping. Then we hit the eight month mark, and she calmed down...and, since that day, has just been getting more and more fun. But I do still have the memories/scars.

Overall, it was a pretty good list that covered most of my revelations. It missed, however, the most important one: exactly how deep the emotional bond becomes. I will swear to this day that I could physically feel her emotions. When she would laugh, I could feel it in my chest. When she would scream, I could definitely feel that much less pleasant feeling in my chest. It didn't just grip part of my consciousness or subconscious; it yanked them both on the way to physically ripping and twisting me. This is what made the "I'm going to scream every waking minute" days that much more painful, because I (to some extent) literally felt her pain.

Nothing in my experience prepared me for this...and it has, quite frankly, awoken a little bit of a mystical side in me. I have a deeper connection to my daughter than I would've expected possible. I not only empathize, I share her ups and downs on a higher level. And, in my most reflective moments, I wonder if we, as a species should have this same level of hyper-empathy with all other humans. Will we ever develop it? I don't know, but I bet if we did, it would make us a more worthy race.

Or maybe I'm just some alien emotion-sucking vampire. 50/50 call, really.

the most wonderful thing you will see today

Every so often, you run across something so interesting, so unusual, so completely off the wall, that you have to scratch your head and reexamine your basic outlook on life. For me, it came when I saw this:



Now I'm desperately trying to figure out how I can teach this. There's so much I can talk about. Also: I must share the weirdness.

seeking my own level

If it's true that there's a Chinese curse that says "may you live in interesting times," then today would be a great day to test it...because it was certainly interesting.

I had one class with only four students. I had one new class (the struggle over which I have chronicled over the past few days) where I didn't get my roll until an hour before and didn't get my class website until three hours after. I had massive traffic on the ride home.

I had two band practices. In the first, I couldn't figure out why my new amplifier had lost most of its tone and volume...until I realized I plugged my foot switch into the external speaker jack. Tie that in with bashing my guitar against my mic stand hard enough to knock the whole thing out of tune and having my guitar fall off its strap, and that practice didn't go as planned. For the second practice, my voice (after three classes and another practice) started to squeak and squawk...and by the time I started to head home, I was feeling close to defeated.

Then I finally get home, and both couches had two stuffed animals tucked under blankets. There was another stuffed animal under a blankie on the ottoman...and another on the floor. So I moved a few and finally got to sit down. That was all it took to level out the day...although the Linda Ronstadt episode of The Muppet show helps as well.

my Onion horoscope

I love The Onion, but I particularly love their horoscopes. Today's entry:

If you somehow magically had the chance to do it all over again, you'd do everything in your power to make her happy. You don't, though, because that's not the way it works.

a view further down the road

Earlier, I half-panic posted about last minute class changes. Well, the view a bit later is slightly rosier...and definitely more Kafka-esque.

As it turns out, I can just copy the stuff from my cancelled class over to my new class. Last year, I decided to make some changes to my Comp II class. Our college teaches three different ones, and rather than have three different preps ready to go, I decided (quite wisely, it turns out) to find one plan which would work for all three different Comp IIs. The class that got cancelled was an Honors course (I've been teaching there this year in addition to in English), but they told me they were fine with recycling. So I've been making my Honors classes the same as my Comp classes. Voila, change the name, add different "official/required/department guidelines) on the syllabus, and I'm done.

Except...

When I was finally able to get to the computer today, I checked my official schedule...and they have me teaching a completely different section of the Comp II than does the department. Not only that, but their version starts at 8am and has no one enrolled in it. I'm sure this is a simple mistake, but unless it gets fixed, I'm not going to be able to print off a roll tomorrow.

So I checked our course management system (the truly evil Blackboard), and they didn't have any section of Comp II available for me. This means I can't upload anything...so my students will be without anything. This ain't a problem for day one, but if they can't get it fixed by the start of class, I then have the difficulty of scheduling day two without knowing if the students will be able to read anything before class.

Ah, uncertainty. At this point, I find the great middle finger the world apparently is pointing at me to be more funny than anything else.

A two-fer? But it's not even Tuesday...

The semester starts tomorrow for me. So, how is everything going?

First, my throat is sore this morning. Possibility of starting the semester with a cold? Oh, joy.

Next, I am of course not completely finished with class prep due to child illness last week. About an hour and a half ago, I get an e-mail from my boss letting me know one of my classes just got canceled and replaced with a different course...and wouldn't you know it, but the canceled class was the first one I finished instead of the unfinished class. Joy. I just love last minute work.

today's question

The elliptical is an exercise machine. Waterboarding is a CIA-applied torture technique. What are the odds they were created by the same person?

dwell on the positives

I'm at Howard's, at a punk show. The very awesome TroubleGiant is playing later...and they are friends, so that's a bonus. I'm not a big fan of the current band, and save those TroubleGianters, I have no friends here. There are exponentially more people here than for my last gig. On top of that, it's also about 40 degrees in the band side.

But that's okay. My favorite bartender is here, and she's making "ow" s after each song. Plus I firmly believe live music is good for the soul.

novel disappointment

While at the gym, I came up with an idea for a sci-fi novel. It's about a man whose life isn't working out for him. He lives a highly compartmentalized existence but still is only barely coping. Then the aliens come and fracture his life, shunting each of his compartmentalized existences into its own time stream. So now instead of living one life with lots of failing parts, he's now living every part as a separate life...and they are all still individually going wrong. The only thing is, our protagonist is, in every existence, the only one aware of this multifaceted reality...and of the aliens.

You can gather two things from this synopsis: what kind of mood I'm in and what working out does to my brain.

this is my life

My daughter is having cheezits for her snack. She asked if she could eat them out of her thermos. When I asked why, she looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "to keep them warm."

war, passive/aggressive style

One of the many unique features of apartment living is the ability to get into petty squabbles with one's neighbors. And like most conflict, the level of investment is surprisingly huge simply because the stakes are low.

My particular antagonist is my next door neighbor. She's approximately 137 years old. When I first started moving into this building, I did my best to be as nice to her as I could. That's when I found out that she had been living at this complex pretty much since it opened around 50 years ago. I thought at first we got along just fine. However, as the loading and unboxing continued, I realized that what I mistook for friendly neighbor behavior was closer to "know your enemy."

One day, she pointed out a mark on the wall. She did the same thing the next day. And the next day. I was as gracious as I could be at first, but when she kept doing this after I had finished loading in, I began to get a little peeved. Then I had a washing machine overflow on me, and she immediately set in on telling me exactly what I did wrong and how I was supposed to do things...basically treating me as if I had never done laundry before. She then snooped around, just waiting for me to do something she didn't like, so she could tell (never ask) me to do it different, and so she could call the office to complain.

At first, I spent a lot of energy trying to figure out why this woman didn't seem to like me. At first, I thought it might be because she met me in the summer and thought I was unemployed. Then I thought maybe she stereotyped me based on my tattoos. Then I came to the conclusion that she was just a bitter old crone.

Later, I got confirmation. One day, when I went to the office to pay rent, I did tell them that contrary to what they might've heard, I am a good tenant, and I am not actively trying to destroy everything they own and stand for. The office manager just said, "apartment xxx?," shook her head, and told me I wasn't the first to receive such treatment...and not to worry about it. A while later, my wife was talking to a a guy from the complex maintenance staff, who told her that my antagonist used to stand out on her balcony, and, when she saw kids playing incorrectly on the playground across the parking lot, blow on a whistle before yelling at said kids. He also referred to my antagonist as "The Gila Monster." It's nice to know you're not the only one.

I know it is, in the end, all rather silly. It's been a great source of humor between my wife and me, including (and not limited to) jokes on my end about the appropriateness of wishing for someone's death. Yeah, it's tasteless, but I'm not really all that serious about this conflict in the first place. Really, I find it both silly and sad.

Except there are times. Lately, whenever I shower, I have at least one (but usually more) instances of freezing-to scalding-to freezing water temp...and I can't help but picture her sitting in her apartment, hearing the sound of my shower, and running to the sink to turn on the hot, then the cold, and then the hot. And it's in these moments where that dark part of me feels like hunting down my copy of Sun Tzu to find something to gain the advantage.

It might be a stupid war. Still, I would rather win it than lose.

binary oppositions

I've been thinking a lot about duality lately. As a good teacher, I always make the class examine models of thought, so discussions of binary oppositions are de rigueur. But lately, it's been hitting really close to home.

My daughter has (another) cold. For those of you childless, this means that she has to stay home from daycare so she doesn't infect other kiddies. Yet we still have to pay for the daycare she's not attending. To make matters more interesting, this is the week before my semester starts...so I'm supposed to be spending the days prepping syllabi, sorting out schedules, getting readings in line, and populating my class web sites. I can't do any of these when my girl is home. So, every night this week, I chain myself to my study desk until sometime after 11pm.

Now, this means that all my normal nighttime plans are thoroughly out the window. This is yet another week where I can't go to Howard's to write (and I have two or three songs in my head, in addition to discarding ideas that I know I cannot get to). This taxes me. And, instead of winding down from the day, my nights are now spent working, planning, scheming...which means that the idea of getting to sleep before 2am is now also out the window. Even with the brain drugs, my head just won't shut off on command...and it's hard to sleep when one's frontal cortex (or whatever) won't stop strategizing.

On the other hand, I had an unexpected day with my girl...and sorry to turn into doting father here, but she amazes me with how wonderful she is. She's kind and caring, and I'm convinced she has more capacity for empathy than most of my undergrads. And she is also hilarious. Nine times out of ten, an "I love you" will elicit a raspberry for a response. Today, she told me (unbidden) "I love you." Touched, I responded with "I love you too, honey." She then said "I don't love you when you're not here."

Rim shot.

The funny thing here is that my mood isn't trapped between these two points: aggravated work panic and melted heart love. No, it's ricocheting back and forth between the two points. While I hate binary oppositions, I can't escape personally being trapped at one extreme or another.

Second example: after one expensive car repair for my wife and one looming whopper of a repair on my car, my wive's wheels start acting up. She pulls into our parking lot Friday after work, and her car is smoking. The mechanic looks at it Monday and gives an estimate which isn't far off  my two week paycheck. I start off with the bemused humor of "of course, life is doing this to us right when we start to plan to buy a house. Why should we expect any different?" And I stay in pretty good humor about it, right up until the time when I, without warning, fling over to "holy hell, more money we don't have/we'll never get out of debt/we'll never get our own house/I'll never be able to retire/I'll leave my child gobs of debt/you fill in the depressing thought." And since, I'm always at one of the two extremes. It's almost as if the middle ground doesn't exist.

I'm a postmodern man tied to binary brain chemistry.

cutbacks

Having come to the realization that our current financial situation is untenable, we have decided we have to make some cutbacks. While our existence will by no means become spartan, there will be changes. First among them is shopping at the discount store. I went there today, and I bought (among other things) store brand toilet paper...make that discount store brand toilet paper.

So, if you run into me on the street and I am walking bowlegged, now you know why.