random bullet points about violence and moving

• I didn't get to walk around much while in NYC. On my way to Central Park with a friend, though, we passed a corner where two down-and-out-looking men were arguing loudly. "What the bother are you doing?" shouted one, "Woman walking with her kid and you bother with her like that." The other man was gesturing menacingly toward him with this thing that looked like a homemade bullwhip. We just kept walking. It did remind me of how pleased my mother was on the phone back when I told her I had decided against moving to New York.
• Yesterday in Harvard Yard I saw a woman with an uppermost-crust English accent go absolutely apebother on her seven-or-so year old daughter. The daughter was wheeling along the bike with tassels on the handlebars and, as part of a tantrum, had the idea to just leave it on the ground and walk away, at which point Posh went postal. Nothing physical, just shrieking, still disturbing, and yet also with the accent she still sounded classy. Made me wish again I had gone through my original plan to disappear as part of this fellowship and emerge with a bushy head of hair and a plummy English accent.
• Sister B and her daughter are coming in town to visit. This meant I was supposed to do some cleaning today, although the most productive parts of that were more pre-moving stuff than cleaning per se. On the latter, however, I continue to marvel at how ubiquitious mop technology is given its fairly small advantage over pushing a rag around vigorously with one's foot.
• Part of my pre-moving preparations are that I made real progress in my plan to get rid of 25% of my wardrobe. This includes various T-shirts and sweatshirts that I have been saving not because I have any plans to wear them again, but because I have one nostalgic connection or another. My plan for these, I think, is going to be to take photos of them and make them into a Flickr set, then discard.
• So far, so good, with my effort to lower my use of profanity by substituting "bother."
• First things I did today were cash in my accumulated spare change and buy a replacement iPod. The change came to within $10 of what the iPod cost. Which means that, for the past two years, I could have just been throwing my spare change in the wastebasket, if in addition I paid attention to my belongings enough not to lose my iPod. The ongoing tax imposed by my absent-mindedness, especially when its consequences are compounded by being sleep-deprived and traveling like at ASA, gets so bothering tiresome. Ugh. I don't know why Apple can't help people track down lost/stolen iPods since they can match the serial number and iTunes store account of any iPod that plugs into iTunes.

something about when it rains always reminds me how i need to buy an umbrella

left behind

I just took a break here in the office by reading the whole of Anthropology: 101 True Love Stories by Dan Rhodes. The stories are all around 100-150 words, and while some of them turn a too much on a cutely warped last sentence, the book on the whole is a fun bag of prose popcorn that is well worth the forty-five minutes it takes to devour it. Anyway, as I don't have any great ideas for posts and the continued rain in Cambridge brings out a melancholic turn, I'll instead here promote the book by reproducing three of the stories about being dumped:

Xanthe left me. I found out her new address and returned the kettle she had left behind. The next day I took her a book she had lent me. I found a box of hairgrips, and delivered one each day. If she wasn't home I would post it with a long letter explaining how I had found it on the floor. When I had returned them all, I took her, on the tip of my finger, a tiny ball of dust. "I remember seeing it fall from your dress one afternoon," I said, "The pretty one, with the flowers on it."

After Firefly left me I presented her with a video recording I had made of myself, so if she ever felt down she could be reminded that there was somebody out there who loved her more than anything in the world. I met her in the street, and asked her if she ever watched it. She said she did, and that it always cheered her up. She told me she particularly liked the part where I kissed and caressed the tiny black skirt she had left behind, and cried like a new-born baby. She said that always made her smile.

Treasure left me. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I understand how awful you must feel." Choking, I told her she couldn't begin to understand. She insisted that she could. "You know you'll never find anyone as pretty as me," she explained, "or as nice, and your every moment will be clouded by nagging recollections of times we spent together; times when you wrongly believed we had some kind of future. Believe me, I understand." she said, gently." A part of you has died, the part capable of loving and trusting, and you know you'll never get it back. Stuff like that."

BTW, for the trip to Madison, I was going to bring my jacket, but then because the forecast called for several inches of snow I decided to bring my big winter coat instead. While the snowstorm did strand me in Detroit for several hours, I never wore the coat during my visit. Several times I wished I had my jacket, but chose being cold to cavorting around in the cumbersome coat. Last night, as my flight from Detroit to Boston was taking off, I realized I had left my coat in the in the overhead bin of the plane going from Madison to Detroit. Story of my life.

just now

"Hey, getting together tomorrow sounds great, but let me find my phone to see when I'm free."
"Jeremy--"
"Ugh. I can't find it. I thought I plugged it into--"
"Jeremy, you are talking to me on your phone."
"Oh. Yeah. That's pretty much me in a nutshell, right there."

travel tips

Arrived this evening back in Cambridge. So I have this problem where I will often space out at luggage claim and end up missing my bag as it goes by. Today I learned that no matter how determined I am to keep my attention focused on the JetBlue conveyor belt, it still doesn't really do any good if my flight was on United.

lost!

So, in a recent post, I fretted about having completely forgotten about having read a book--not just not remembering I had read it but not even being able to remember having read it after looking at my own underlining and margin notes inside it. I mean, forgetting you'd read something is one thing, but looking through it again and at one's markings and still having it remain resolutely foreign, that's another. Now, the kicker: a friend just e-mailed reminding me that, in fact, I've posted before about having opened up this very same book and having no recollection of ever having read it, but I had forgotten all about having done this. So I read the book, forgot about reading it, forgot about having already once marveled about having forgotten all about reading it.

Fortunately, at least, I did remember writing the earlier post once I was reminded of it.

the jeremy tax

I have a friend whose pseudonym for the purposes of this anecdote is Cookie Smart. She sent me an e-mail this morning saying that she had just received a letter from the IRS that the name on her tax form didn't match the provided taxpayer ID number. Turns out that instead of filing her taxes as "Cookie Smart" she filed them as "Smart Cookie." She was e-mailing because she wanted to know if this is the sort of thing I would do. I told her that while I had never made that particular mistake, it did indeed sound like the sort of thing I would do, except for the fact that she'd already filed her taxes and it isn't even June yet.

I need an accountant.

I use the phrase "Jeremy Tax" for the amount of extra money I have to spend each year to solve problems caused by my absent-mindedness. The latest Jeremy Tax payment was for the cable for my digital camera I lost. Despite being missing for more than a week, the missing cable predictably turned up a few hours after I placed the order online.