I lose things sometimes. Like, say, two or three copies of Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend album. So I *cough* downloaded it on the dl *cough*. I don't feel especially bad considering I alone have paid him (or the record company) thrice over for this album.

Let me tell you that the most vivid memory I have of this cd is listening to it one Saturday afternoon during the summer of 1992 and eating a taco salad while simultaneously watching a horrible beach volleyball movie and playing the NES game A Boy and His Blob. That was such a great game, though it turned out to be really easy in the end. I played it via emulation a few years ago and I was surprised at how hard it had seemed back in the day. I do think it was a weird concept for a game, especially the part with the cornfield.

Even at such a young age, I was listening to music while watching television and playing a game (and eating!). At last I know where this crazy multitasking habit started. Curse my teenage self!

Tags: craziness
maybe he's caught in the mood: crazy
he just sings whatever he's seen: Matthew Sweet - Thought I Knew You

So I see that today is Father's Day, which I wouldn't have really noticed except for the fact that my friends list has a lot of Father's Day posts on it. Lots of lovely David and Baz photos. While I normally don't like children, even I can admit that Baz is cute. David seems like an amazing father.

I don't really pay attention to Father's Day because I don't have a father around to remind me of the day. He died 20 years ago last Sunday, Flag Day. If there's anything to be grateful about such a thing, it's that he didn't die on Father's Day itself.

The problem is that my father was absent for much of my life. My parents weren't married and after they broke up I saw him occasionally, but not regularly. I was almost given up for adoption, but for some reason my father chose to assert his parental rights. Not that him doing so ever did me much good, because that was pretty much the last time he really seemed to be all that interested in me. (And maybe if he'd allowed the adoption, I wouldn't have to deal with the one thing in my life that does haunt me every day, childhood sexual abuse at the hands of my uncle.)

I only knew my father for 15 years. He died at age 38 of a massive heart attack, caused by congenital defects.

I have no memories of him before about age five (because I have almost no memories of anything before age five) though I do remember once being woken up around 7am on a Saturday morning and being made to wait outside my grandmother's house for my father to pick me up. It was foggy and cold, the way some spring mornings are, and I waited alone while my mother sat in the kitchen watching. I thought this was an unusual thing, having not been involved in one of these weekend visitations before. It seems strange to me now that a mother would force her child to wait alone outside for a visitation pick up, it's something I would never do if I had children (which I don't, and never will).

I remember seeing my father most when we lived in three particular houses, from the ages of nine to thirteen. I think that the only reason I saw so much of him then was that he was married to a woman with children and she probably urged him to spend time with me. I remember spending weekends at their trailer, playing Space Invaders and Tank on the Atari 2600, staying up by myself to watch The Ghost and Mrs. Muir on late night TV. I remember the tadpoles my erstwhile stepbrother and I caught at the nearby creek and the time I cried the night before we went to King's Island. I remember seeing The Last Unicorn and Return of the Jedi with my dad.

One Saturday evening during a visit, he asked me to go find the stepkid, who was out somewhere in the trailer park, so we could go and pick-up fast food for dinner. While I was out looking, the kid came back on his own and my dad took him and left without me. This is one of the few things he did that still actually hurts me. He asked me to look for the kid, then left me behind. It just underscored to me how unimportant I felt he always considered me. The stepkid was good enough to go, but his own, real, flesh and blood kid? Forget her. That seemed pretty indicative of our relationship as a whole. (As an aside, who leaves their ten year old daughter alone to wander around a trailer park without supervision while they take the other kid and go get dinner? I know it was the 1980s, but come on. Apparently, neither of my parents was very fond of making sure I was supervised in my youth.)

There was another winter night near Christmas when I waited hours and hours for him to pick me up, sitting in the dark living room, watching every car to see if it was his wife's green whatever with the round tail lights. I think he finally showed up. I was probably nine.

When my dad and his wife moved into a small neighbohood close to mine, I went to see him instead. Those were better times, when I could see him at my convenience rather than his. I remember making steak and the birthday where he gave me $50, most of which I spent on magazines with pictures of Duran Duran. He stayed in that house after he and his wife divorced and I watched The Breakfast Club for the first time ever on cable tv, back when you changed channels with those little converter boxes with the sliding channel selector. I stayed weekends and he bought me my favorite foods and we finally had some time without interruption to have a real relationship.

That was too good to last, of course. When I was thirteen, he packed up and moved to Florida for some reason. He wrote occasionally and I gave him a hard time about the lack of contact, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do, except miss him. He asked me to come and visit him, so I got on a plane for the first time in my life (alone), and naturally missed my connecting flight in Atlanta, had to wait four hours for another flight to Gainesville, which I spent riding the inter-concourse tram and wandering around the airport. We spent a good week together, he bought me all my favorite food and critiqued my taste in music. There was no money for the return trip, so I had to take a Greyhound bus for 14 hours just to get home.

The next time I went to visit him in Florida, I was fifteen and it was part of a family vacation with my aunt (his sister), my uncle and my cousin. Because I hadn't seen him in so long, I chose to stay with him for the week while they went galavanting off around lower Florida. Things went along just fine until Wednesday morning, when I woke up because his alarm was going off. My dad lived in a tiny duplex with no bedroom, so he slept on the couch and I took his air mattress. I lay there for several minutes wondering why he wasn't getting up to turn off his alarm. I stumbled over to the end table and turned it off, and when I stepped back far enough to see into the kitchen, to my horror, he was on the floor.

I tried to revive him in the way that a naive fifteen-year-old would, and having no luck, ran to the other duplex unit to get his neighbor, Neil. Neil, I think, knew my father was dead, but he told me to run across the yard to another neigbor's house so they could call 911, and to stay there. What happened next was pretty much a blur. I think my dad's landlady ferried me around. I had to go to the hospital to say goodbye before they did the autopsy. I called my mom from there and at first I couldn't talk. The conversation went something like this: "Mom, he's dead." "Who?" "Dad, he had a heart attack, he's dead."

Since my aunt and her family were somewhere in southern Florida, my dad's landlady, one of the few Christian people I've ever met who has actually lived up to the name, took me in until state troopers could track down my aunt. She let me stay in a spare bedroom, fed me, made her teenage daugters take me with them on a trip to take their niece to the movies. She was so nice and I couldn't have needed it more.

The police eventually found my aunt and I've since forgotten or blocked out most of the rest of the trip. I don't remember how we got home.

The real tragedy of him dying at this time of my life was that we'd just begun to reconnect. I was getting old enough to have common interests with him, I wasn't as much of a child that he might have felt was a burden or maybe didn't know how to relate to. I was becoming someone he could actually talk to and debate with. And then, in a flash, it was over.

My last memory of the whole summer was after my brothers set fire to our house (another great event of the that summer) and going over to my aunt's house, where I could hear her arguing with my mom about how I stole some of my dad's belongings (some VHS videotapes) that had been brought back from Florida. All I had to remember my dead father were some VHS videotapes he'd made from old school A&E programs and HBO/Cinemax movies, which I was legally entitled to anyway as his sole heir, and she was quibbling over them. (What a fucking bitch. Is it any wonder that I ended up disowning her a few years ago?)

The fact of his death was ever present that summer and I made sure to remind myself that he was dead every time I woke up so I wouldn't have to remember it later, so it would be in my memory and undeniable, so I wouldn't wake up and not know he wasn't alive anymore. Time has healed that wound, if by healed you mean inured.

I don't think about him anymore because there's no one here to remind me. I'm away from my mother's side of the family and I don't associate with any of his relatives because they're pretty much all assholes like my aunt or super-concentrated yuppies who don't even care that I exist. And it's not because I didn't love him, or that I don't wish he were still here, it's because this was the pattern he established over my whole life. I didn't see him for years at a time, and to some part of my brain, this is just the longest absence yet. Maybe that part of me is still watching for him, out the window, to show up in his ex-wife's green whatever with the round tail lights.

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: contemplative
he just sings whatever he's seen: Elliott Smith - Everything Reminds Me of Her

Sorry I haven't been posting much, we're looking at apartments right now and preparing to move, so I'm not especially focused on writing journal entries at the moment. I always read my friends list, every day, though, so don't think I've forgotten any of you.

What have I been up to, otherwise?

• Watching a lot of Monty Python on Netflix while I'm cooking. I think that Monty Python is completely to blame for my entire worldview. Taking nothing seriously, contempt for authority, complete silliness, random quotes and blathering, it's all there.
  
  
• I am officially addicted to America's Test Kitchen. I get seriously tetchy when my local PBS station is doing their endless fundraising on Saturdays and they preempt America's Test Kitchen. It's like science and cooking in the same show, two of my favorite things together. I love the unique approach of experimenting to find the best way to prepare food - and since they do it, I don't have to.
  
  
• I keep reading Star Trek XI fic, but I wouldn't say that I'm really into the fandom. I blame sol_se, with all of the those recs. :D I keep having to look at pictures of the new actors, because every now and then my mind flashes to the original series actors and it just freaks me out. I just can't think of William Shatner having sex, at any age, no matter how much I love Denny Crane.
  
  
• Regarding Star Trek XI, I thought the movie was a bit weak, but better than I expected. Though it's not actually his fault, I think that Chris Pine looks too much like Michael Weatherly and I consider MW to be much prettier. Mmmm, Tony DiNozzo. I'm sure someone will consider this opinion blasphemy (gblvr?).
  
  
• I've spent approximately $50 on forensic supplies to use for fun invitations to the CSI Experience at OMSI. I may have pretty much divorced myself from CSI at this point, but I'm still ridiculously excited by this exhibition.
  

Tags: csi, monty python, star trek
maybe he's caught in the mood: contemplative
he just sings whatever he's seen: Radio Lab

I'm watching some cooking show on PBS, it's not very good, but what captured my attention is that the chef helping the host looks disturbingly like Richard Belzer. It's like I'm watching John Munch, dressed in cooking whites and an apron, cook eggplant parmesan. I don't understand why he's not breaking out into conspiracy theory about how eggplants are the tools of the man.

Tags: silliness
maybe he's caught in the mood: amused
he just sings whatever he's seen: Middle Distance Runner - Brother John

The bad thing about the fact that I quit drinking soda (cutting out HFCS as much as possible, plus there's all the empty calories) is that now I drink tea instead. And let me tell you this, the caffeine in tea is much, much stronger, faster acting and longer lasting. I had no idea at first that there's such a marked difference, but even though I know now, it's still hard to remember that drinking just two glasses of iced tea will keep me up all night, not to mention make me hyperactive.

Which is why I'm up at 3:42 am. And how I decided that I should color my hair. With an old box of L'oreal hair dye that's been under the sink for over two years. Yeah, sane people know this could be a bad idea, but my caffeinated mind is thinking, "Ooooh, dye your hair before you go on vacation!".

The mixture turned out normal, thankfully, but the bottle was so brittle from age and chemical storage that it crackled every time I squeezed it, like that time was going to be the time it decided to break wide open and fling dye all over the bathroom. The other thing is that somehow, along the way, I'd used the gloves that came with the kit for another dye job and so I had to improvise something or end up wasting the dye. My solution? Sandwich bags, which I secured to my hands with rubber bands around the wrists. I hate to say this, but they actually worked almost as well as those flimsy gloves you get in the dye kit, and they didn't split open between the thumb and forefinger the way that kit gloves always do. I did look rather silly, though it being nearly four in the morning means no one's around to see.

And now it's time to rinse, because I can't stand the itchy creeping drip of the dye on my scalp. Ick.

Tags: craziness
maybe he's caught in the mood: hyper
he just sings whatever he's seen: Silicone Soul - Under A Werewolf Moon

Of course I can't afford the 12 months account at Dreamwidth right now, but I popped over and bought a month's worth of time just to open an account. Same old username, mapsandlegends. I'm sure I won't post more often, but I'll be around. Since I'm about to go on vacation, I don't have a huge amount of time to work on uploading icons and updating my user profile, but I wanted to sign up now before I forgot to do it (as I'm wont to do). I feel better about giving money to DW instead of LJ after the various debacles LJ has been party to. It's kind of a novel experience, and now I feel like LJ and I (as well as the rest of fandom) have been in an abusive relationship and DW is my therapist or something.

Tags: dreamwidth
maybe he's caught in the mood: cold
he just sings whatever he's seen: Toad the Wet Sprocket - Fall Down

So I gather that the former sardonicsmiley purged her journal for some reason (if anyone wants to fill me in, feel free)? It's sad because there was a lot of good stuff there and I liked her writing. Judging by a couple of other people's entries, she got upset over lack of comments for stories? That seems sort of crazy to me, so I hope it's not the case. I think I've written some decent stuff, though not a great amount of it, and I had to get used to the fact long ago that I'm not going to get five bazillion comments. Based on the stories I've read in her journal, it seems like she gets (got) a boatload of comments for nearly everything she's ever written.

I don't know what set her off , so I don't want to pass judgement without all the facts, but why delete a journal that so many people read, even if you're not currently writing in that fandom? I'm pretty far from being in love with CSI anymore, but I won't just delete all the content I created based on it. I may not feel motivated to ever finish that CSI WIP, but I'm not just throwing it in the garbage. (Maybe I'll get around to finishing it someday, and I do apologize that I haven't.)

I think you should write because it's something you enjoy, something you want to give as a gift, to share, or collaborate on, as an expression of your love for your subject, or your passion to get the story out of your mind and into the world. That's why I do it, when I can manage to make myself do it. I'll never get a lot of praise for writing, and I don't really mind. I sincerely doubt that I'm the next Hemingway, but I think I do all right when I can be bothered. My enjoyment stems from the craft of writing, the process, the picking and prodding at words and phrases to make them work just so. I enjoy working the language, fussing over structure and meaning and symbolism. So if someone else likes it, good. If not, I still had a good time, and I'll still be crazy enough post it. I don't worry that I'm not a big name fan, that I don't have a cadre of followers, if everything I say doesn't get a response. I just have fun over here in my little corner of the land and celebrate the small victories.

Tags: meta
maybe he's caught in the mood: contemplative
he just sings whatever he's seen: Curve - Coming Up Roses

So, I'm Seattling in May. Even though I live in Portland, I've never been to Seattle before now. I'm absorbing all kinds of media about where to go and what to see and I've booked the hotel and the transportation. So, dear friends list, given two and a half days, what should J and I do in Seattle? Bonus points for extra cheapness, since we're on a bit of a budget.

maybe he's caught in the mood: curious
he just sings whatever he's seen: Los Lobos - Peace

I was watching ABC for all of five minutes the other night and there was a commercial on for a new show called Cupid. Except, it's not really a new show. No, it's a remake of 1998's Cupid with Paula Marshall, Jeremy Piven, and my personal favorite, Joe Flanigan.

I loved Paula Marshall in the original show, and I loved her with Joe Flanigan. They were h-o-t. I liked Jeremy Piven as Cupid (though I generally consider him loathsome), and using a Pretenders song as the theme was inspired. Everything about this new version is different, set in L.A. instead of Chicago, sleazy guy instead of wacky, lovable guy, bleach-blond anorexic doctor with artfully tousled curls instead of flustered, serious, beautiful Paula Marshall. At least the scripts are all new, even if they do reuse most of the plots.

Based on the commercial, I've extrapolated the quality of the remake and have come to the well reasoned conclusion that this remake will be awful. Though maybe ABC will actually let it play to some sort of conclusion this time. The best thing about this is that maybe it will spur ABC to release the original series on DVD. I can only hope.

Tags: cupid, joe flanigan, stupidity
maybe he's caught in the mood: bitchy
he just sings whatever he's seen: Booth & the Bad Angel - Old Ways

Hey, USians! Have you filed your taxes yet? Don't wait! Unless you owe 50 zabillion dollars - then you should probably flee the country.

If you're like me, you're an unlucky schmoe who makes a pittance, but that does work in your favor during tax season. The IRS has a partnership with over 20 sites that will file your taxes for free. Check IRS.gov to get a list of available sites. You have to either make less than $56,000 or $30,000 to qualify depending on the site. And as an added bonus, 20 states sponsor free state filing - including Oregon, so I didn't pay anything to file my federal or state taxes this year.

My personal favorite is TurboTax Online's TaxFreedom.com, which I've been using to do my taxes online for almost ten years. If you have an account already, they've decided to stop charging for federal returns with TurboTax Basic but WILL charge you to file your state return. The key here is to create a new account on the TaxFreedom page - you can use all of the same data: same email, password, personal info. This will keep you from being defaulted into TurboTax Basic, because if you already have a TurboTax account you cannot use it with TaxFreedom.com, no matter how hard you try. TurboTax Basic has exactly the same functionality as the TaxFreedom site, the only difference is a few unnecessary frills.

If you don't have last year's return handy, you can use your existing TurboTax account to get the .pdf file and save it, then create a new account on TaxFreedom. I usually do this because I forget where I've put my tax return from the previous year. You'll need access to your 2007 Adjusted Gross Income amount for use as your digital signature. And voila! Tax returns all filed!

Tags: taxes
maybe he's caught in the mood: sick
he just sings whatever he's seen: The Beatles - Taxman