After my iBook's clean install to OSX Panther v10.3, everything seems to be back in nice working order. The biggest hitch was Mail app's insistence that I could no longer move messages back to the Inbox folder. Why!, I yelled at it. Mail just stared back at me with its pretty little buttons. After trolling the Apple discussion boards and comparing my Library/Mail folder to both my backed up copy and screenshots of my brother's, I found a work around in the HTTP Mail Plugin. With that installed, both my POP and Hotmail accounts have subfolders under the Inbox and messages can be moved back to the Inbox. Yeah, Photoshop gives me some strange pop up about some missing documentation, but I'm ignoring that. Battery life is longer and generally everything is just snappier. On the whole I'm not sure if the system warranted a whole separate upgrade and release party (though I did appreciate the wine and pastries, Tekserve).
Now if this blog can be fixed for PC IE 6 users, life will be complete. Who knew my Mac-centrism would seep into my code?
The winter J Crew catalog seems to be stirring my Anglophile sensibilities. Look at him--covered in wool scarves! The models are set up in various poses in (assuming) Scottish highlands in some Children of the Corn remake where everyone wears tweed, and an English country pub with games of chess and not too far from a full book case undoubtably containing the entire work of Dickens, Bronte, Austen, and George Eliot. The catalog comes to a boring conclusion with posing outside a row house, like really boring paparazzi shots. Too bad the clothes in the shops still smack of college campuses, dirty khaki, and baseball caps. I feel betrayed.
Sitting by the door to be mailed tomorrow are four applications which complete a year of laughing, crying, planning, and sweating. (Laughing was actually optional). Why bother? I think I've explained the reasons in detail before. (For a reminder: blah blah blah). The call of the wild (returning to school to compete with Jack London wolves with laptops) started last year as an escape option from my current job. I needed a project: it was either this or saving to buy a house. My career as an Abstract Expressionist painter was not taking off either. The returns for the option I chose should be greater in the long run. Long run is long though.
Prayers and well wishes/questions about what I'm going on about can be direct to matthew(a)stolenkisses.net.
At first I thought the knife to the heart was a bad metaphor; I wish it were. Blades hurt so Elliot Smith's conviction is impressive. Suicide pulls me in two directions: praise for the personal right to choose death, or upset about the selfishness of the person. Can one resolve those two points of view? All I know is no one wish a world without Elliot Smith and many people are saddened by the loss.
No, I do know a few more things. I remember seeing Elliot open for the Softies in a record store back in 1995. Or being forced to listen to one of his albums in a car for about five hours and just not getting it. Seeing him play with the Spinanes and getting it. And somewhere losing it again.
Perhaps he'll be happier with hanging on the porch with Johnny Cash. Ghosts have a lot to talk about.
Evie cat has, in the past, had magical qualities. She followed Bri home one night and shrank herself to the size of a kitten. Our hearts melted and we took her in. The next day she had returned to her full-grown size, but we let her stay anyway. Perhaps her magic has worn off. Yesterday morning she coughed up one of her teeth. If she were still magic, the tooth would have been gold. Instead the tooth was a rotted bit of bone.
"New albums by the Strokes and the Rapture aren't challenging their current fans. They're only ratifying their record collections" is the pull quote from the article New York Rock's Latest Hangover in Sunday's New York Times. That is exactly what I was trying to say back in July when I did a write up for Tangents on the "Yes New York" comp; however, the writer of the Times article has more good things than bad to write about the Rapture. The Strokes seem to be dooming themselves (and their bank accounts) to being the new Ramones (chord, chord, beat, fuzz pedal). I suppose there are worse fates.
Bri, Heidi, and I went for a walk around yesterday. The two fish were sunning themselves in the autumn rays on a promenade by the marina; however, upon closer inspection the fish revealed themselves to have passed over. I wonder if they ended up on a plate later that evening. If someone was going to keep them for a pet, they would be horribly disappointed. Wrapped in plastic, like poor Laura Palmer.
There were ghosts hovering in the corners of the room that haven’t existed in seven years or more. Strange to see them haunting a room so completely, lording over the buffet table as if food is something they concern themselves with anyway. That one decided when I was two that I would be a football player and told me so for the next ten years. He probably still thinks so. The afterlife is good for dwelling on such conceits. At this point I’m not one to argue so nod politely, smile, back away. This ghost here knows all the recent details of my life. The information leak will have to be investigated later. The past few years have been a concerted to run away from this group of spooks, but I still can’t get farther than forty miles or so away. Ghosts have a strange pull on the living. I’m tired of fighting them. The effort never gets me farther or closer to anything. And the ghosts don’t seem to notice. They just go about their haunting casually with a boo or a rattle of chains. That’s a problem with ghosts—they don’t sit back and wait for you to return. They up and leave and do new things, finding new souls to haunt. And then when they’ve all gone and left, then you realize it’s the ghosts only that you have to rely on.
