Bowling and blizzards

Tonight after work, we gathered together for a nice night of bowling. I am not particularly good at bowling, but I am usually good enough to average around 110-120. This is an abysmal score, but when you play against mostly people who are happy with a 90, it's at least somewhat satisfying. Anyway, it's weird to hang out with folks you wouldn't normally hang out with and to have it be completely organized by the people themselves who don't normally hang out together. It's sort of like a gathering of the nerds. Things get tense around the office, because most of us hate each other. So to get together outside of work voluntarily shows a kind of strange internal desire to get along and make the best of a bad situation that I haven't seen since I was in the army. In grad school, when we hated each other, we sure as hell didn't go bowling together. Same thing applies for every restaurant I ever worked in. But when I was in the army, we always found ways to get along and to get through the most asinine situations. And it always felt like this. A bunch of nerds hanging around together. It's almost like you'd be embarrassed if anyone from outside the circle walked in and saw you with these people. Yet there's something positive in it, if, just for a day or two, you can get along with your coworkers better.

Also, we are set for a snowpocalypse beginning tomorrow night. The amazing thing about all of this weather is that the professional journalist who wrote this article actually got away with this:

Of course, winter weather forecasts for Chicagoans can be emotional roller coasters, a tense ride up to a promised "worst storm ever" often anticlimaxing with a gentle dip down to a meteorological disappointment. In this case, the dip appears anything but gentle.

On what fuckin planet is "anticlimax" a verb? As though you could say something like "Yeah, I was boning this drunk girl and right before I was gonna get off, she got sick and puked all over me, so I anticlimaxed." Come on, journalists. You're supposed to do better than that. Save the weird verbifications for the poets. Also, do not use the word "verbification."

Anyway, we could get a couple feet of snow, and we're stocked up on frozen foods and other groceries, so I should be able to get some good writing done if I skip out on work after the buckets of snow fall on us all. I'll update as the snowmageddon ensues.

Blackout

On my drive home from work tonight, I was armed with great intentions about writing. I would come up with some silly diversion to post here and then put in some solid work on the screenplay. To go with dinner, I had picked up some bread and arugula and a six-pack of some relatively unimpressive winter white ale, which doesn't really make seasonal sense to me. I guess if you have a stockpile of wheat and oranges in the winter time, then why not. Still, witbier seems like a warm-weather style to me.

Anyway, I was pulling up to one of Chicago's infamous six-corner intersections, and everything went dark.

Now, traffic at these treacherous sites always looks something like this:

Gridlock.

These are busy main roads in the city, and you're almost always likely to contend with CTA bus traffic, insane cab drivers, fearless pedestrians, and loathsome panhandlers. But when the stoplights go out, it quickly devolves into something like this:

Boom!

After I ran over a dozen schoolchildren (why they were out on the street at 7 pm during a blackout, who knows), and got into a gun-battle with some Latin Kings and a few well-armed nuns from the Polish Catholic church around the corner (in spite of this city's stringent ant-gun laws!), I plowed my way through to my house. Where everything was equally dark.

It seemed as though the best laid plans had come unstuck. I sat in the dark with my wife for a half hour waiting for the lights came back on. During that time, we discussed the various possible causes of the darkness. Armageddon. Alien invasion. That we have not yet paid our outrageous electric bill ($180, wtf ComEd?) for the past month. It could be anything. Well, actually I insisted that it was just some random occurrence, and it turned out that I was right. But that's not much fun, is it?

We finally got every candle in the apartment lit, and then the lights came back on. We made some dinner and the world has returned to normal.

Except, I never got around to working on the screenplay. Ain't that a bitch?

Well,

I didn't do so good at blogging from work last week. I need to find a way to break up my schedule at the office and manage my time better. Here's what it looks like now:

If only I had made this pie chart at work, I could have added "Making ridiculous pie charts" to my workflow.

So it's pretty clear I should manage my time a little differently. I should be working on my script and writing occasional blog posts. 

Anyway, I have at least succeeded tonight in not fucking around so much and actually doing something that is some semblance of progress toward a goal. And by not fucking around so much, I mean specifically, that I haven't been smoking pot and throwing a tennis ball up in the air and catching it. Or not catching it. Or anything like that.

Email test

This is just a test post. I have to find alternate methods, since I can't blog properly from work.

Italics and bold and shit ( ~@~ ).

And a link to... Google.

In addition...

So one of the purposes of this blog when I started it about a year ago was to track where I was going with my writing. That's one of those New Year's resolution paths that we all go down. Or most of us, even those of us who are too cool to admit that we only think about improving ourselves around January 1. Anyway, today (not while I was at work, I promise) I started working on a screenplay somewhere in my Google Docs, which is the best cloud app I can get to from where I work. The boss blocks a lot of the web (including Dropbox, can you believe it?) to keep us productive on real work shit. Thanks, boss.

And I know, I know. Screenplay ain't what I went to school for, it ain't what I want to write ultimately, it ain't even in my top three genres of interest. But I do have some friends and colleagues who are film/video people, and I have gotten a bit of encouragement to give it a try, so I am doing it. My goal over the next month or so is to come up with a script for a short film. Then, most likely, I will return to my memoir project and get a book written about all the stuff I didn't do in Iraq. I don't really like writing nonfiction, but from a market standpoint, it's really the best thing I can do as far as short(er)-term long-form writing goes. Whatever that means.The script, however, is a short story that I never wrote, but it's a story idea that I like, and I think it can look good on film. So that's what's on my plate right now. Somebody hold me to it.

This is the best thing I have ever seen

...well, it's the best thing I've seen today.


EL GUINCHO | Bombay from MGdM | Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.

This music video is artsy as hell. If you can't enjoy topless women with assault rifles or... sparklers... you can't enjoy life. Plus it's rife with theoretical concerns about metaphysics and semiotics or something like that. I'm pretty sure it is anyway.

Hi.

I am going to start sharing pictures. My lovely wife gave me a Holga for my birthday, which is the camera-of-choice for hipsters everywhere. Though I suppose real hipsters would go for something more obscure, like some piece of shit toy camera that doesn't even have a name with Latin characters. Like the 牛阴茎. 


Weird.


Anyway, I am continuing to be detached from internet life. Maybe this will change things, but I really am only about a half-step away from completely deleting my Facebook persona. 

A famous culinarian.

I am red.

This dude is a famous filmmaker.

Famous writers.

Just lookin famous.

Famous movie stars.

As is probably apparent, I am not particularly adept at scanning, cropping, and editing my negatives. Plus the machine I used is kind of old and kooky. Just say the half-assed job I did with it is part of the lo-fi idiom of Lomography. Which they obviously are very good at marketing.

Anyway, these are just some party pics. They make my life look exciting. I do have a project in mind for the camera. More will come from that later. But for now I am sort of watching the Bears decimate the Seahawks. Unsurprising.