My Quiet Life

I am sure this is just going to wind up as another checkbox next to the “chris is an asshole” column in most people’s book, but I have something to rant about.

So, our new office is in Germantown, which, if you’ve ever been here, is largely very expensive historic houses without driveways or garages — hence for a lot of the neighborhoods, it’s mostly street parking. It’s also mixed zoning, so you have a lot of houses, apartment complexes, condoes, businesses and restaurants.

This week, I caught wind of people in our office scolding/reminding people about parking in a certain spot. I figured it was a fire lane, or a handicapped spot or something. But I asked, and apparently a woman that lives a few doors down with her husband and kids had complained about us parking in front of her house. I guess because it’s inconvenient for her to have to walk a few cars away. Maybe there’s more to the story, and I’ll happily rescind any judgement I’m about to spew forth if that’s the case. But seriously, folks? This is the weird sort of entitlement that drives me nuts.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have any problem being a good neighbor and not parking in front of her place as a favor. But for her to actually complain about it? It’s a full neighborhood and parking can be limited at times. If you want a convenient type house for your nuclear family where you can park right next to your house… move to a suburb. An urban historic neighborhood is probably not right for you. Germantown is a half-mil to $1mil house neighborhood, you can afford something in a neighborhood with driveways, I’m sure. Why would you ever move to a mixed-zone historic overlay neighborhood and then have the gall to complain about people parking on a public street in front of your house?

It reminds me of this guy I met a couple of months ago at a photography meetup. He asked where I lived and I pointed across the river and said “there”. He said he had just moved to 4th avenue in a condo downtown, as well. “Welcome to the neighborhood, how are you liking it so far?” I asked. “Not at all, actually,” was his reply — and he goes on to tell me how hard it is with his 7 year old daughter, especially with how much noise and foul language she is subjected to, and how she has to see all those homeless people, they should really do something about that, etc etc. I kinda stared at him and turned to my friend Christy (who is well-versed in my opinions about people downtown and the homeless) and basically did everything I could not to burst out laughing. Seriously, dude, you move downtown on 4th avenue with your 7 year old daughter and then complain about noise and hearing people swear? Have you … ever been to a big city before? Are you familiar with these thing scalled “people” that “exist” in them?

What planet are these people from that they feel compelled to move to an environment with very clear pros and cons, and then feel entitled to complain and try to change it to suit them, as if they’re the only person in the world?

I bitch all the time about harleys and club noise downtown, but I’d never be so stupid as to try to change it. I moved downtown. I’m not an idiot. I have ranted about this before regarding the smoking ban.

Feel free to call me an asshole in the comments below.

How I feel about Christmas this year:

So, this weekend I had a long Saturday, but it was fun. I don’t normally recap random shit from my semblance of a social life, but there are some notable things:

• I went to the monthly GNARAS meetup. What is GNARAS, you ask? It’s the Greater Nashville Area Robotic Arts Society, of course. They had robots. And, I am going to build a robot. No, really! It’s going to do household chores, such as following a line of tape — continuing to follow the line of tape when it turns, and perhaps the ultimate test — continuing to follow the line when it goes grey and choppy. What did we do before we had robots? Starved to death, probably.
• I then went to go see the mayoral debate, which I’ve already written about. This was fun for me, though, cus I had a press pass, so I had all sorts of sekr1t access to awesome places like … uh, a hallway. And a chair that says “media” on it. It was totally better than the non-media chair right next to me.
• After the debate, I went Noshville’s and then to Mirror for a few drinks.
• Theeeeen, I went to see Here Come the Mummies. They’re this band, right, and they dress up like mummies. I figured it’d be a dumb gimmick. Well, it is a gimmick of course, but it’s pretty fun. But, they are also an amazing funk band. I’m not 100% sure, but I’m pretty sure I recognized one of the horn players from the Dynamites. The funny thing I realized at this concert is that if you have a fancy-looking DSLR, people will assume you’re there in some official capacity. I walked right up to the front of the stage, and people literally made way for me. I felt kinda bad, but .. not that bad. Mummies are pretty fun to take pictures of.
• THEN, I went back downtown (without my credit card, oops) to hit up some crappy bars that were still open, where we ran into some friends at a bar, who invited us to a party
• AND STILL FURTHER, we then drove out to this house party at my old friend Aram’s house.. at 4AM. I expected it to be some crazy house party full of people I didn’t know. No, I knew literally every single person there. Wait, sorry, there was one girl at the party I didn’t know. Friends from middle school, friends from high school. Guys I knew from Boston. This is such a small city, I swear.
• THEN, I came home and passed the fuck out … for 5 hours before I remembered I was supposed to be helping setup a windows network at the NHPP.
• then I died.

In conclusion, I declare any day that involves robots, mayoral candidates AND mummies to be a success.

Aunt B is discussing the dynamic demographics of her readership, and how it impacts her writing and whom she writes about. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and I’ve gone through something similar here — and I’ve felt like writing about it for a while. While Aunt B and many other bloggers went for the pseudo-pseudonymous approach, I’ve always been somewhat of an open book — sometimes to an embarrassing extent. Basically, when your first name is in the URL for your blog, you’ve thrown out any pretense of writing anonymously, right?

I also never really made any pretense of this being a particularly “personal” blog — I didn’t want it to be a diary or a journal. Surely I still occassionally wrote about those things, but ultimately I wanted to make this more about political commentary, music/movie reviews, etc. But, then I got a real job. And since then, the format of my blog basically turned into “whatever I feel like and have time to write about”.

And what’s happened over the years is that my visibility has increased. Not that I’m some sort of celebrity or something, but pretty much everyone I know reads this blog. Friends from high school read it. My entire family reads it. My coworkers, including people that report to me and vice versa, read my blog. So, basically I can’t talk shit about anyone. And what fun is a blog without that?

But seriously, I bring that up for a reason: when the whole breakup (i.e. cheated on and dumped) thing happened, things got interesting in a hurry. I tried my best to be as civil as possible, and trust me, it took some herculean levels of restraint to be civil. Conversely, it was the first time where my public-facing life was turned on its head and I began to feel more like a spectacle. From the very day of dumpage and onward, she and everyone else continued to read my blog. Her, the faux-friend she moved in with, her family, her friends. These people, none of whom could be bothered to give me or my emotions even the least common courtesy, still deemed it acceptable to kill time by checking in on my blog. Morbid curiosity, maybe? I don’t know — it strikes me as odd, at least. They all still read it. Anyways, so naturally the number one thing I wanted to write about, I couldn’t. After all, Dale Carnegie says that if you can’t say anything nice about someone, you say nothing at all. But also, who wants to hear someone whining endlessly about their emotional turmoil? (I’ve reserved that privilege for my friends, who I’m sure can tell you how much fun that was for them.)

Still, it was like a previous outlet for me had flipped around and became somewhat of a point of vulnerability. Someone who had been a huge part of my life for 5 years had vanished in an instant, but still had visibility into my life — like a one-way mirror. It sucked.

So, yeah — when the audience of people reading your blog changes, it can be unexpected and sorta jarring. It’s gotten a lot better, because I’m back on the horse, so to speak. But in the last 6 months, I really did begin to envy the freedom involved in writing pseudonymously. Because, seriously, I could weave a tapestry of obscenities. A tapestry, people.

We have been using gmail via Google Apps for a while at work now, and I’m fairly hooked, and I am wanting to get rid of my server at home anyway, so I’ve taken the plunge with my quietlife.net mail. I am transferring over old mail now:

It’s been going all day. This is … going to take a while. Right now my inbox on google basically contains mail from around June of last year. It’s fairly depressing for a variety of reasons.

I got infected with some death throat infection, unfortunately. Is it possible to alternate between naps and hot baths literally all day? Yes. Yes, it is.

Well, I also watched some movies:

• Stevie — a really wonderful and moving documentary. Filmmaker Steve James revisits his old little brother and gets re-involved in his life. Explaining it beyond that would be difficult. It’s alternately hilarious, awkward, and incredibly sad. It’s not an easy movie to watch.
• The Big Sleep — I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without seeing this. Now, does it make me some sort of heretic to claim that I didn’t find Lauren Bacall to be that hot in this movie? Am I kicked out of the male gender? But seriously, the scene with Philip Marlowe and the chick in the bookstore is about the hottest thing I’ve ever seen. She got hot for him because she thought he was a bookworm. Oh man, that’s second only to my Counter-strike fantasy, but that’s another story.
• Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead — I have seen this around a billion times, but it was on my Netflix queue because whatshername had never seen it before. Beyond the fact that this movie is awesome, it has a special place in my heart because I always remember my friends Aaron and Will as Rosencrantz & Guildenstern when we read the play aloud in our senior english class.

I also nerded out a little bit and helped get an aggregator going on musiccitybloggers.com. I also took a retarded picture.

I guess it was fairly productive after all.

One of my favorite exchanges from this weekend:

Paul: (looking around my apartment for the first time) … dude, how do you expect to get laid in this place?
Me: Well … I guess I don’t, really..
Paul: … … that was a rhetorical question.

One of the first things I did after The Breakup was to reclaim the apartment as my own by at least re-arranging and purging it of various things (it was that or move, and moving is the devil). One thing that became abundantly clear this weekend is that I desperately need to reconfigure it as more of a bachelor pad. Well, more generally, just as a place at which I can actually entertain. Turns out tapwater and beefjerky are not the most alluring refreshments to offer guests at your apartment. Who knew?

So, my high school reunion was this weekend. I had a blast. If you’re reading this and I went to high school with you, hi!

I took a ton of pictures but I will be sensible and not splatter them all over the Internet. If you want to see them, e-mail me at cwage@quietlife.net for the URLs to see them!

This is going to be a busy weekend. It’s my 10 year high school reunion, which should be fun. (Watch out, nerds!! You’re all gettin wedgies, just like old times!!) Tomorrow is the flugtag on riverfront, and my friend Clay has an entry of sorts, though I haven’t seen it yet. I just have to say, though, that they are tremendously brave. Piloting a barely-rigid structure down a ramp and becoming airborne is one thing, but actually immersing yourself in the Cumberland is quite another. Nothing warms up a high school reunion like a little staph infection.

Also, I totally met John Prine this week, and asked him to take a picture with a friend we were out with, who was a big fan of his. I am a big fan of his, too, of course, and it took all my restraint not to squeal with delight.

I wish the lighting had been better, but ah well. Bar photography.

I have a car. She-who-shall-not-be-named (I’ve decided this, SWSNBN for short, is the most suitable title, since the one or two times I’ve blogged her name amounted to a googlebomb taking people here, and who needs that now, really) decided for whatever reason that she didn’t need the sentra she had taken after all. After 6 months of living downtown without, I can once again leave the immediate 3-mile radius without asking someone for a ride. It’s awesome. Tonight I am going to celebrate by .. uh… walking to a bar. Maybe I’ll drive somewhere tomorrow. Maybe Aunt B and I can go driving somewhere.

On a side note, it’s funny how in the traumatic, emotional, bitter end of a relationship there are nonetheless practical matters to attend to. Divvying up stuff, tying up loose ends, splitting bills, etc. It’s tough to navigate those waters while maintaining the appropriately indignant tone of scorn and hatred. It’s worse when you are given a car: “I HATE YOU AND NEVER WANT TO TALK TO YOU AGAIN, YOU RUINED MY LIFE oh and by the way thanks for the car.”