Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Things I Love: NPR

I love NPR. It's the only radio I listen to, period.

And as much as I'd love to launch into a polemic about my love for NPR, it would probably kill you with vicious, brutal dullness. Everyone knows why people love NPR -- you hear the reasons about a hundred times each pledge drive. They give the context and analysis of news stories, they don't have ads, they don't insult your intelligence, etc.

I suppose I could add a few more things to like that you don't hear that often. Like the fact that they don't have a Morning Zoo program. Their version of a Morning Zoo program is 130-year-old Carl Castle calmly reading the news. Occasionally they throw in a BOIIINNNGGG! sound effect, but that's usually only after Carl mentions the secret phrase, "Rwandan genocide."

And then there's the fact that none of the correspondents are ever allowed to have ordinary names. Lakshmi Singh, Corey Flintoff, Ina Jaffe ... there's no end of cool names to be had.

My new favorite is the foreign correspondent in Dakar, Ofeiba Quist-Arcton. The best part is that after she says her bang-up name she always says "Dakar" in a cool way, like "Dakaaaahhh!!" It sounds like a Klingon woman trying to be saucy. And it's said so confidently -- she really ought to throw in a "yeah, muthafucka!" after it.

Granted, it's usually a bit of a tone shift given the nature of what she's always reporting on. It's always like "... and now Guinea has exploded into ultraviolence, with everyone dead and the undead continuing to kill the recently dead with the limbs of the superdead. One of history's great civilizations has just collapsed because their ruler wanted more money to buy fancy cars. Truly, this is the saddest moment in the history of civilization. I don't think this reporter will ever recover from devastation and horror that has been seared into her soul. Sigh. Ofeiba Quist-Arcton, DakAAAAH, MUTHAFUCKAAAA!!!!"

But back to the point, which is funny names ... even NPR's go-to commentators about certain issues have to have funny names. Whenever there's a story about gas prices, they go to Trilby Lundberg. You'd think a Trilby Lundberg would be an adorable, small, furry, Jewish alien who's a friend to children everywhere, but no, it's a person who's an expert on oil and gas. And the fact that she's in the field of oil and gas -- I'm willing to bet that's that's a field full of guys with names like Mack Brown and Colton J. Stetson and T. Boone Pickens. I'll bet they had to really search for a Trilby Lundberg in that bunch.

Sometimes, it must be said, NPR goes too far. Occasionally I'm happily listening to some wonderfully dull report about the economy, minding my own business, and then I'm struck in the temple with "Let's go to Hugh Johnson ..." What? Are you fucking kidding me? Hugh Johnson? Is Ben Dover also in the studio? Where's Mike Hunt?

It's not only a very stupid joke name, but it also puts me in mind of those "Big Johnson" T-shirts people wore in the 90s that had cartoons of a little nerdy dude doing something suggestive with big-breasted bimbos. I don't need to be reminded of that, NPR. If I wanted to be reminded of "Big Johnson" T-shirts, I'd listen to the Morning Zoo on KROCK. I'm sure those guys are still wearing those T-shirts and laugh at them often. Thus I listen to NPR.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Already Almost Broke My New Rule

But I was asleep almost all morning! Which is a minor miracle for me.

I have lots of sleep problems. I have insomnia, sleep apnea, and restless leg syndrome. The latter sounds like it's a joke but it isn't -- it's where your leg twitches uncontrollably while you sleep, sometimes waking you up.

Yeah, I know, it may be real but it's still stupid. But all sleep disorders are stupid. Sleep is a necessity of life, yet for many people their brains or legs prevent it, for no good reason but just out of apparent spite. It's like if you couldn't eat one day because you had restless arms that uncontrollably threw food at your crotch. You'd be like "Hey, arms, man. What's your damage? We're all in this together. You need this food too. Why are you making this difficult for the rest of us?"

So all the sleep stuff has been a chronic problem lately. I'm sleepy all the time, going to bed early, always getting up at weird times, etc. I'm even lamer than usual in the evening, usually feeling like bed around 9 or so. It sucks.

Finally I decided I had to admit I had a problem and I went to an overnight sleep clinic, which I wouldn't recommend doing for fun by the way. I was kind of looking forward to it in a weird way. It seemed like a wild experience, being hooked up to machines and watched while I slept. Very original at least. It sounded like an interesting experience that someone could talk about slowly and calmly on that NPR show "White People Talking Slowly and Calmly About Something Sort of Interesting." But like most things that sound like a wild weird experience, it was actually very dull. It takes about an hour for them to stick all the diodes on you, during which small talk is strained at best.

The only kinda cool part is that they have a camera trained on you the whole time you're in bed. And they write down everything you do. So even as you're lying in the dark, looking around quizzically, with sort of a "What the fuck?" look on your face, they see it and write down "Patient looks around quizzically, with a sort of 'What the fuck' look on his face."

INTERMISSION

I just thought that if I were to write an pro-environment song, I'd want to rhyme "earth" with "turd." So it would be something like "She is our mother, we must love the earth .... Not flush it away like a moldering turd." It's evocative imagery, especially the "moldering" part. It would get a laugh, and then maybe people would stop and think. I think it could do some good.

END INTERMISSION

So anyway, I didn't sleep terribly well in the sleep clinic, in part because I had a dozen diodes all over my skull. The weirdest part was when I woke up and saw that it was 6:20 and wanted to get up for good. So I just kind of said, "hello?" And then a voice came over the loudspeaker, "Hello?" That's a creepy feeling, really bringing home the fact that you're being watched very carefully while you sleep. You feel like you're center stage in an extremely long and boring production of "Man Sleeping Uncomfortably." Then you decide that it's performance art and therefore brilliant.

It took about two weeks for them to interpret the results. And then I called and they said they couldn't talk about the results over the phone, which I thought was weird. But I thought maybe it was sensitive information because my sleep disorders made me a perfect candidate for a CIA job going undercover in a ... are you ready for this one ... sleeper cell! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Whew, feels good to laugh. So anyway, I had to wait another two weeks to get the results. Meanwhile I'm struggling to get through some days, and feeling like I have a very short attention span and could drop off very easily. I worried it was really affecting my performance at work. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Whew, sorry, still getting over that "sleeper cell" gag (hee hee ...). So the short version is that it all kinda sucked. There's a special brand of low-level suckiness reserved for illnesses and disorders that aren't serious enough to keep you at home laid up for a few days, so you have to just live with them for weeks.

And then I finally met with a doctor to see the results, and it was actully a nurse (which was fine of course, but I kinda wonder what doctors actually do these days), and it was a lot of very interesting stuff, charting my entire night in the sleep lab in great detail. And the final conclusion was ... I need to sleep on my side. When I sleep on my back, I start snoring and my throat closes up and my legs twitch and my hands start flipping off random people and my genitalia dance the cabbage patch and basically it's a big wild party. When I sleep on my side everyone calms down and helps out with the sleeping.

So that's it. The last few days I've been sleeping on my side and already I have the energy of a man half my age. I've taken up competitive ballroom dancing and already won a few medals in local competitions. I can jump over even the largest sleeping housecats and do so regularly. When I see a loose board lying around, I chop it in half, whereas before I would have given maybe a token tap and slumped away. And the changes in the bedroom ... woo! Now I sleep!

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Every Saturday Morning From Now On

I was feeling like I might lose my two fans becuse I don't post often enough, and when I do it's unpredictable. So now I pledge to post every Saturday morning. Whether I have something interesting to say or not. I promise.

I Made a Quiz!

You know those annoying online quizzes where it's like "What Type of Ungulate Are You?" And then you through a bunch of multiple choice questions and then at the end it says "You are a musk ox!" I made one of those!

It's called "How Old Are You" and it's, like, totally fun. It's on Facebook, though, so you have to be a member of Facebook to do it.

http://apps.facebook.com/superquizcreator/?quiz=1229178950&_fb_fromhash=9cf845320761add4a10981f634f87e53

Quizzes are where it's at, man. Blogs are so passe. Nobody does them anymore. You say you're reading one right now? Pshaw. Lame!

Monday, December 1, 2008

Music Is Painful

Know what I mean? I mean, obviously bad music is painful. But really good music is painful too. In a very different way.

Maybe I'm just predisposed to thinking that everything is painful its own special way. But I notice that when a really great, deeply affecting song comes on, I tend to wince. It's as if it depicts some powerful emotion so completely ... but in the end it's still secondhand. It's still vicarious. You're hearing someone else experiencing this perfect moment, and you're with him or her a hundred percent, but deep down you know you're still not really experiencing it yourself, and you know you never truly will. It's like how you feel after being transfixed by a gorgeous movie star and then coming to the sudden realization that man oh man in the real world she would never look at me twice, would she.

I sense that I'm not making much sense here. OK, take a truly great song, one that channels the ineffable kernel of the human soul ... let's say 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny." From the first few bars you are transported by this Platonic ideal of extremely stupid people feeling horny ... OK, I'm undercutting my real point here by being silly. I can't help it. It's just that true, honest emotion makes me feel bashful.

Maybe that's part of the problem. I'm too much in my own head and stuck within my own folds of irony to really feel strong emotions genuinely. I feel "pretty good" emotions often. But when I do, I'm usually simultaneously thinking "this will make a great memory someday." Bah! What is that? I'm already remembering wistfully what I'm still experiencing. That's crap!

Sigh ... well, I guess there are worse fates. After all, I'm happily married, gainfully employed ... wait, there I go again. Undercutting the emotion. It may be spoiled and irrational to be angry that music seems somehow incomplete, but hell, why can't I be irrationally, stupidly, ungratefully sad/angry?

Can I drop some over-analytical ballistics on y'all? What if we all become so self-aware and self-conscious that we can't be stupidly genuine any more? What if everything becomes a snarky comment on something that happened before, so that no one can ever feel license to pour out their souls without stifling themsleves with restraint over the probable resulting ridicule? Wouldn't that be awful?

Luckily, we're pretty far from that. There seems to be no shortage of genuine and stupid people out there wanting to pour out their souls.

At this point I'm reminded of a TV ad for a recent Mariah Carey album. You see her in the studio doing her typical thing, stretching one poor, hapless word beyond its breaking point, forcing it into 43 syllables in 55 different registers, and her voice-over says "This is the album that really captures my soul." Then you hear what she's singing, and it's "OOH, TOUCH MY BOOOOODY!"

So apparently Mariah Carey's soul, when captured, says "OOH, TOUCH MY BODY!" That is perhaps the least interesting soul in the universe.

On the other hand, you have Radiohead. Radiohead, in its own way, is just as genuinely soul-baring as Mariah Carey. Radiohead has no self-effacing irony. They have no sense of humor. They're not here to do winking, post-modern cleverness, i.e., the stuff I usually go for. But every time Thom Yorke sings "I'm not here ... this isn't happening ..." in Kid A's "How to Disappear Completely," I want to cry but I can't.

I've felt that, Thom! Just like that! But ... wait, no, I haven't, not really. Not like that. Not that truly, not that genuinely. All I ever did was feel like I wanted to disappear. Radiohead caps it off and makes it complete. They make it what it it's supposed to be.

So what am I saying? I guess that people who can express something deeply honest are very rare. And of those people, those whose deep, honest expressions communicate something worth hearing constitute a very, very small group. But that little group -- wow. They are somehow separate from the rest of us, the sorry ones among us who can only settle for listening, commenting, and appreciating ... all second-hand.