Scribbles and notes

What's your musical horoscope?  (Put your player on shuffle and write down the first 10 songs that come up.)

Musical horoscope?  Seriously? I've played the "Post the first ten songs that come up on shuffle" game in the past, but I've never heard of it referred to as something as ridiculous as that.  Whatever.  Here they are:

Stone Temple Pilots - Seven Caged Tigers
Cracker - Heaven Knows I'm Lonely Now
Mellowdrone - You And I
Tom Waits - What Keeps Mankind Alive
DJ DQ - Part 6 of Where The Sidewalk Begins
Placebo - Passive Aggressive
Pearl Jam - Off He Goes
Edwyn Collins - Girl Like You
Eels - Beautiful Freak
The Beatles - The End (I'm not making this up.  It really came up as song ten.)

I'm mildly disappointed, as I thought it'd be a little more eclectic.  No hiphop (unless you count the DJ DQ track), no folk, no country, that makes my music tastes look particularly off the wall.  Ah well.

Rather than leaving iTunes on shuffle, I've been listening to podcast episodes of This American Life from NPR.  The feed has been set to automatically download to my comp every week since early March, but I just hadn't gotten around to listening to them.  Work had been so hectic through most of the summer that I never had time during the day where I thought I'd be able to listen to it without being interrupted every few minutes.  When I was still working at American Century, I made an effort to listen every Sunday morning while toiling away at my grunt job.  The stories shared on TAL are the sorts of tales that I often find myself constructing in my own head, but never manage to get down on paper, only true, or at least truthful.

When I returned to my job back in 2005, part of the deal was that they would pay for me to get MSCE and A+ trained and certified.  In the time since then, I've yet to receive that training or certification.  The current boss made it her goal to get my training taken care of and I'm sort of on that path, though she ordered the MSDBA training courses instead, suggesting that I'd be better suited for it and that I'd enjoy it more.  The thing is, while I enjoy working with computers and find myself to be genuinely good at it when I apply myself, I'm terribly bored with it and rarely find myself looking forward to work.  Is this what I want to be doing with the rest of my life?  Working in an industry that doesn't much interest me anymore simply because it's what I've always done doesn't seem like much of a future for me, but I don't have any alternative ideas.  A person has to be able to pay the bills while they waste their lives pursuing their dreams.  Existential crisis time, I suppose.  26 is a good age for that sort of thing, especially when you've only got part of a college education under your belt, you don't know what you want to do professionally for the rest of your years, and you don't find yourself financially capable of doing much more than continue what you're already doing.

This week's episode of This American Life revolved entirely around a man who spent his whole life trying to find who he was, what he wanted out of life, and how to integrate that with what he was able to actually do.  I'd already spent far more time lately dwelling on what I want out of life and how little I seem to have hammered out.  Listening to an hour-long story about how one man failed so massively to achieve anything he wanted in life and how he damaged the lives of so many others with his reckless behavior didn't help much.  Rarely do I look forward to a day at the office.  I can't recall the last time that I did.  I come in, I do my job, I go home.  And yet I have all of this vacation time that I never use up because I'm devoted to this job.  I'm here after hours, finishing up work that could wait until the next day because I'm a workaholic.  I find myself trying to help push change in an environment that doesn't promote change simply because my brain is constantly trying to find some outlet for being creative that relates to what I'm actually doing with my life.

Bleh.  Rant rant rant.  I'm not satisfied with my life.  Work bites.  I'm living with people that I'm not comfortable around.  My only romantic interest lives 700 miles and 5 years away.  Sand keeps trickling through that tiny crack in the hour glass and disappearing.  Eventually it'll be empty and I'll be staring at it wondering where it all went and how it is that I could've wasted it in a more fulfilling fashion.

...but!  Heroes and How I Met Your Mother are on again.  I've got that to look forward to, right?  *hangs his head in sadness*

Do you have a sixth sense?  How do you experience it?

Lame.  Everyone has more than the five senses you learned about in elementary school.  There's thermoception, the ability to sense heat and cold.  Nociception is the ability to sense physiological pain, ie your body hurts, you feel it.  This is distinct from your sense of touch.  Equilibrioception is your sense of balance.  Lastly, proprioception is your awareness of where your limbs are without actually having to look at them.

That brings us up to nine.  None of which are psychic powers or telekinetic in nature.  I'm a big old party pooper on these QotD things.

What's the most famous movie you've never seen? 
Submitted by Mike.

If I put my mind to it, I'm sure I could probably come up with a list.  The one film that comes to mind though, the film that I'm constantly chastized for not having seen, is The Godfather.  Really, the whole series, but specifically the first one.  Over the years, I've seen bits and pieces of it on tv, but I've never had the desire to sit down and watch the whole movie from start to finish.  I'll break down and watch it some day.  Just not today.  Or tomorrow.

Congrats - TIME Magazine voted you "Person of the Year"!  What's your acceptance speech?

Seriously?  The High Lord Of Misery And Angst?  You must be kidding.  And I beat out Kim Jong Il?  I'm up there with Hitler, Nixon, the Apollo 8 astronauts, and American Women?  Here's hoping that I don't say anything offensive in my speech that might reflect poorly on such a diverse group of winners.  Rather than go on at great length about how wonderful it is to be such an influential force on the world at large, I think I'll link you to "Dick In A Box" on YouTube.  What?  You say you've already been linked to it a dozen times this week and it's only Wednesday?  I hope this isn't a sign that my influence is being surpassed by others!

There's no "Listening to:" option on Vox.  Is this Six Apart's way of telling your average LiveJournal/Myspace/Xanga blogger that they'll have to go the extra mile and actually find some reason to include tedious information such as your location or mood within the copy of their post?  Impress upon people that these sorts of things should form the content of their post or they shouldn't be sharing it at all?  Perhaps I'm overanalyzing this a bit.  After all, it's possible that I'm the only one that occasionally inserts particular songs into my "Listening to:" because they're appropriate to the subject matter in some form, leaving my readership to wonder if it was a track chosen intentionally or if it was simply the track iTunes was randomly playing at the time.  Most people aren't nearly as neurotic as I am.

I've yet to decide if this will get any real usage out of me, but I'll give it a shot.  My main complaint so far is that they've setup ways to utilize Flickr and Photobucket, but not their own Scrapbook.  It'd be nice to have an easy way to port stuff over from LJ.  Alternately, I do dig the ability to post audio files.  I ought to go check their TOS to see if they bother saying anything about posting copyrighted material though.