memories

(From Leah’s side of the family, December, 2004).

Paraphrased because I couldn’t keep up with the goodness and silliness.

• Always say your prayers
• Take moonlight strolls and talk about the innermost things.
• You’re so good to me.
• Read your scriptures.
• Let her put the toaster wherever she wants.
• Talk to each other like all the time.
• Buy low, sell high.
• He makes me laugh harder than anyone in my entire life.
• Give each other toys for Christmas if you like them.
• Do your checkbook together.
• Smile alot.
• Don’t let him do the music.
• Just remember, she’s always right.
• Be yourself.
• Have lots of play-doh and coloring books.
• Go places with each other.
• Consult your wife.
• Never smoke crackers in bed.
• No matter how thin you slice boloney, you can always smash a window with a brick.
• Just have fun with it.
• Give your kids whatever they want.
• Consult with each other before you do anything.
• Don’t tell each other exactly where you put everything so you get in a fight.
• Play with your friends.
• Make decisions together.
• Have you seen her smile? It encompasses her joy and her beauty.
• Do things each other love.
• Say your personal prayers.
• Have family traditions.
• Do as many things as you can with each other.
• Go on a weekly date.

I had meant to post this some time ago, and have managed not to for, oh, about a year. Herewith, a tale from the bowels of the metropolitan region…

Leah and I had just moved to the L.A. area. It was during all that rain, not that that matters. I was taking advantage of the free WiFi at Burger King and at the local public library. We were living by our wits, everything was in Storage, and we were not sure anything would be working out at all, but we were “going for it” regardless.

The setting: a motel in Sherman Oaks, the 777 Motor Inn. At first glance it was not seedy. It was rather nice, with Christmas Wreaths on the doorways of the rooms. It was January. Maybe that was not such a great sign.

So.

I need to do email to work. I was looking for fulltime employment or freelance or anything, and I was also scouting for places for us to live more permanently. It was taking longer than I would have hoped on both counts.

I was sitting in the “lobby” of the motel, a small room no more than 10 feet square. Pamphlets for Knott’s and Santa Barbara in one corner, a bureau with newspapers on it to my right. I sat in a cheap 4-legged chair at a teeny desk, checking my email.

Suddenly, a fellow begins talking to me. He has tattoos. He is talking fast and is clearly a tweeker. As he talks I can see he has a tongue piercing.

He asks me what I’m doing. I reply “email,” though he also looks over my shoulder to see a screenful of what clearly looks like an email inbox. I figure this is the end of the conversation, and I really don’t want to keep talking to this guy. So I put my head back in my email.

Mr. Tats then asks me what I do for a living; he’s clearly curious and wanting to conversate, and I am giving off every vibe I can to say, without addressing him, “I am doing my email and I do not want to talk to you. He asks me again. I cannot make him go away by will, so I reply, tersely, “web work.” Figuring then, that the situation needs more symmetry, I ask him what he does for a living.

The reply comes: “pornos.”

My reply: “oh.”

I return to my email, and now I’m really sure I am done talking with this fellow. He continues to jabber at me, and suddenly he wants to sell me a laptop. I politely tell him I really need to work on my email and it’s hard to concentrate when he’s talking to me.

He wanders off.

Reading it now, some 10 months later, it occurs to me that I could have skipped the uncomfortable moment where I found out what this San Fernando Valley idiot does for a living had I said to him, up front, that I can’t talk to him, as I am working on my email.

Of course, it might not have worked, but it’s fun to speculate.

A list I kept of stuff I liked. Why? Don’t ask me! I’m the 35 year old version of me. Now I do this sort of stuff on the website. Heck, why am I posting this here?

Well, it’s fun.

Movies
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
After Hours
Aliens
All The President’s Men
The Big Red One
The Birds
Blade Runner
Blow Out
The Blues Brothers
Body Double
Brazil
Breaking Away
Bringing Up Baby
Broadway Danny Rose
Chinatown
Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
Dressed To Kill
Hannah & Her Sisters
Heaven
Home of the Brave
The Hustler
Jaws
Killing Fields
Lost In America
M*A*S*H
Mister Roberts
My Dinner With Andre
My Life as a Dog
Papillon
Patton
Platoon
Purple Rose Of Cairo
Raising Arizona
Rashomon
Rear Window
Repo Man
Roxanne
Seven Year Itch
Sleeper
Stalag 17
Star Wars Trilogy
Star Wars
The Empire Strikes Back
Return Of The Jedi
The Sting
Stop Making Sense
Swimming To Cambodia
Take The Money And Run
Top Secret!
True Stories
2001: a space odyssey
2010: odyssey two
Wait Until Dark
Walk Proud
Witness

TV Shows
Batman
The Bob Newhart Show
Connections
Day the Universe Changed
The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd
Evening at the Improv
Frontline
The Frugal Gourmet
Hill Street Blues
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Jeopardy!
L.A. Law
ULate Night with David Letterman
Leave It To Beaver
McLaughlin Group
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
M*A*S*H
Max Headroom
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Moonlighting
Newhart
Night Court
Nova
This Old House
Perry Mason
Police Squad
St. Elsewhere
Saturday Night Live (in syndication)
Speed Racer
Star Blazers
Star Trek
Story of English
Soul Train
Tales from the Darkside
Taxi
Twilight Zone

Comic Books
Batman: Year One
Concrete
Dark Knight
Elektra: Assassin
Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters
Lone Wolf and Cub
Mage: The Hero Discovered
Ronin
Swamp Thing
Tales of the Beanworld
Watchmen

Comedians
Dan Aykroyd
Woody Allen
John Belushi
A. Whitney Brown
Bobcat Goldthwaith
Sam Kinison
David Letterman
Dennis Miller
Bob Newhart
Mort Sahl
Robin Williams
Stephen Wright

Artists (Comic & Otherwise)
John Bolton
Berke Breathed
Art Crawford
Chris Greazel
Matt Groening
Larry Marder
David Mazzuchelli
Frank Miller
Patrick Nagel
Jackson Pollack
Robert Rauschenberg
James Rosenquist
Charles Russell
Bill Sienkewicz
Andy Warhol
Frank Lloyd Wright
Vincent Van Gogh

And I played around with these experimental photos after scanning them into PhotoShop.

If you’re counting, that means I have TEN years of experience in PhotoShop.

I love the Cove very much.

It feels like I still have much to learn, still.

I guess I’m making up for lost time.

The Lincoln Memorial is by far my favorite place in Washington, D.C.

I can’t not cry when I turn to the right and read Lincoln’s great words, his second inaugural address. This bit, among others, always slays me:

The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

The Civil War is raging, and the war must be won or the United States of America will not ever be the same, and the President broaches no prediction? What act of humility and realism was this? Sure, there was no live coverage from C-SPAN, but the words would be in the paper. What a different time that was. My wish is for a return to such statesmanship.

I’m a big fan of Halloween.

In 1991 or so I won a costume college (I was either first or second place out of maybe 2 dozen or so health science students at CHRV College of Health Sciences).

The other day I posted the “guts cake,” which I submit as evidence of liking Halloween.

Funny enough, I’m not a big fan of scary movies. I don’t really care for horror movies unless MST3K is making fun of them. I did like Shaun of the Dead, but in general, not so much.

I’m rambling.

The image above is a bad colorization of a scan from a college yearbook. The yearbook is from 1991, the colorization was me doing PhotoShop for a class at UCLA Extension in 1995. It’s not great colorization. These days I’m much better.

Hmm.

Today was not so great. Plenty busy all around, feeling choked by work.

Let me say that Leah rocks my socks off. She’s on the verge of being the best project manager I ever worked with ever. And I’ve worked with some great ones. Also terrible ones. Terrible ones.

Okay, enough rambling.

The nicknames that never were (for me), from 2000. From the crew that hung out on AOL chatting trivia and whatnot.

ArtViedersehn
ArtMum
ArtFess
ArtNaturale
ArtSafety
ArtTip
ArtDuck
ArtJovi
ArtPhile
ArtDeco
ArtHowl
ArtLunar

Cleaning out the hard drive, from March, 2000:

*EMPLOYEE PROPRIETARY INFORMATION AND INVENTIONS AGREEMENT *

Bidland.com, Inc.
3990 Ruffin Road
San Diego, CA 92123

The following confirms an agreement between bidland.com, Inc., a Delaware corporation (the “Company”) and *Name (referred to in this agreement as “I” or “me”). I understand that this agreement is a material part of the consideration for my employment with the Company:

1. Proprietary Information. I understand that the Company possesses and will possess Proprietary Information which is important to its business. For purposes of this Agreement, “Proprietary Information” is information that was or will be developed, created, or discovered by or on behalf of the Company, or which became or will become known by, or was or is conveyed to the Company, which has commercial value in the Company’s business. “Proprietary Information” includes, without limitation, information (whether conveyed orally or in writing) about algorithms, application programming interfaces, protocols, trade secrets, computer software, designs, technology, ideas, know-how, products, services, processes, data, techniques, improvements, inventions (whether patentable or not), works of authorship, business and product development plans, the salaries and terms of compensation of other employees, customer lists and other information concerning the Company’s actual or anticipated business, research or development, or which is received in confidence by or for the Company from any other person. I understand that my employment creates a relationship of confidence and trust between me and the Company with respect to Proprietary Information.

I don’t remember anything from bidland’s technology other than that they had their own in-house templating language and that every transaction with the (Oracle) database was handled in stored procedures that the DBA wrote.

Bidland has not existed for several years.

More travels through packrat-ism. In about 1994 I worked with a very diverse staff of Respiratory Therapists. One of the women was a Russian, and I prevailed upon her to write my name, “Joseph” in Cyrillic. It looks pretty cool.

And now that I’ve scanned it, I’ve one less piece of paper! Yay for trimming and slimming.

Albeit one page at a time.

Well, that last one was a terrible resemblance, as pointed out by Tom Bickle.

This one is rather better, I think. This actually looks like my professor. I even have some proof of that.

I used to draw a lot in his class, psychology is a great subject for drawings. Drawings to illustrate my notes, or just to doodle. After all, I think my major at the time was Fine Art, well, that was my declared major, inasmuch as a Community College student can have a major.

I enjoyed that class. I liked to make arguments in that class. The Prof argued that we overused the word “love” so much as to negate its meaning. We “love” the symphony, we “love” our car, etc. I argued that love still had meaning as a word, because from context we can tell what people mean by what they say when they say they love something.

Well, I love being able to share my meandering and rambling thoughts on this blog.

Can you tell that that’s different from when I say that I love Leah?

Oh, I’m getting pretty deep now.

It’s striking to me that a class I took for a few months 17 years ago has left such vivid memories.

And here I am disgorging them in a medium that did not exist when I had the memories originally.