Whoo hoo! I'm finally not sick anymore. I hate being sick. I love getting better after being sick. I feel simplisitic today.

Two days into what was supposed to be five days off of work for me to enjoy the Halloween festivities going on this weekend in NO has so far consisted of two days of me being horribly ill with a virus of some sort. Two days solid of horrible headaches and an inability to stay hydrated.

And my father just got moved into Intensive Care...

An interesting thing has been happening this week... people keep using an adjective to describe me.

nice

"You're such a nice person."

"You're just one of the nicest guys I know."

It's interesing mostly because I think of myself as a relatively mean person... but I do try to be nice...

But, on that note... I do hold grudges. And I've had a really HUGE one against someone for a couple of years. Someone who made my life so uncomfortable that I had to make major changes in it to ensure my own personal happiness. Luckily, at just the right times avenues opened up that allowed me to stay on the path I had chosen.

For a long time, I've hoped that one day that person would get their due. But, it seemed like it would probably never happen.

But...

Through various grapevines and mysterious sources, I've found out that this person's world crumbled around them seriously this past week. His foundations were knocked from beneath him. The people surrounding him all turned against him in the moment that they could have saved him. His career has been permanently marked with the sort of thing from which it can never recover. His professional reputation is in tatters. He's become a bit of a laughingstock after years of extreme arrogance.

He's been brought lower than I ever could've dreamed.

And you should see the size of the smile on my face.

Still think I'm so nice?

Dustin Hoffman Syndrome noun: the state an aging male actor enters after achieving a level of fame which is proportionally greater than his level of talent; symptoms include chewing of scenery and stage, extremely loud delivery of lines, broad gestures.

see also Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Nicholas Cage, Tom Hanks...

Catch Me If You Can... if you'd told me that I'd wanna see a Steven Speilberg movie starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio, I'd have spit in your face... but... it kinda looks good...

NO NO NO!!!! Saint Etienne is playing San Francisco a week after I leave San Francisco... I gotta go break something...

I had one of those rare moments in life tonight when you have a HUGE revelation.

My father is seriously ill. Seriously as in we don't know if he's going make it through the next few days. And I was sitting on my front steps pondering this and pondering life. Thinking about my father and my relationship with him, or lack thereof.

And something suddenly occurred to me that I've never realized in my life. Despite never feeling that close to my father or having an intimate relationship with him, I am, in many ways, the same person as my father.

So very much of who I am and how I interact with the world (and my close friends will understand what I mean) is exactly the same as my father's actions and interactions. And I've never realized this in my entire adult life.

hmmm...

I'm currently reading Donna Tartt's The Little Friend . I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but I'm already sure that this is going to be THE BOOK for this year.

It's been over ten years since Tartt published The Secret History, her first novel which catapaulted her to instant literary fame, and justifiably so. She's evidently spent a great portion of that time crafting this single novel and the attention to it shows on every page.

It's set in Mississippi during the same time period as my childhood, which evidently wasn't so different from Louisiana in the same time. The dialogue and characters are all extremely true.

Hopefully, the entirety of the novel will be just as good as what I've read so far... If so, we have a modern successor to Harper Lee and Carson McCullers on our hand.

just got back from seeing a sneak preview of The Ring.

it's the best horror movie i've seen in the last ten years. and that's all i'm gonna say...

Why don't you ask me what it feels like to be a freak?

Since everyone seems to make their comments to me by email anyway... and as I read my way through other blogs, the whole 'Comments' thing just seems like a big circle jerk anyway, I killed the comments.

The clumsy twirler diaries is currently the only blog I'm really enjoying reading. I like life to be a bit blurry...

The sniper up East has upped the drama factor in his 'rampage.' Leaving a tarot card with the message, "Dear Policeman, I am God" on it brings this whole thing onto another level of future obsession for people.

Although, I think that The Hanged Man would've been a more appropriate choice than Death. Kinda sounds to me like he's going for the impact of the image of Death on the public as opposed to any sort of creepy literal mystical reading of the cards.

and since someone i met recently who had read my blog commented that I seemed obsessed with music... here's what I've been listening to:

Beck Sea Change

Ladytron Light & Magic

St Etienne Finisterre

The Beck album is one I had no expectations for and no great desire to own... but... BUY THE FUCKING CD! It's amazing. It's hands down the Album of the Year. It's cry in your beer wonderfully somberly heartbreaking fanfuckingtastic. Seriously. I knew the guy was talented, but I never knew he had a CD like this in him. I honestly think this album is an instant classic. Five stars. Six even. An A+.

Reward yourself... please... buy this CD now...

np: Air: Playground Love

there came a point for me when blogging wasn't so easy anymore...

i've always considered myself a bit of a moral relativist, and it would be a lie to say that i've had some great revelation that this isn't true... but...

i've always blogged a lot about my personal life. and i've been blogging for about 18 months now... and a lot of people that I come in contact with now seem to have come across my blog. and that makes writing about some things a bit more difficult for me.

it's hard to come home and write about a date when you know the person you spent the evening with may read it the next day, whether what you wrote was positive or negative. it's even more difficult when you're dating more than one person and you don't want those relationships to be colored by those people reading about themselves and the others...

anyways... i'm still sorting all that out... but i'm gonna try to make a return to this.

thanks much to the people who've emailed or stopped me to say that they missed me writing... i don't really know what's so great about all this for ya, but...

i'm back.... i think...