>> We're going to play a game.

Obviously, the temptation for me to write some really maudlin shit is kind of overwhelming right now. But I'd rather not do it in a way that completely humiliates me, or endangers the privacy of myself and others. So I've come up with an imperfect solution.

I have a Livejournal now. Somewhere. I'm not going to tell you where. (Obviously on Livejournal's servers, but you know what I mean.) All of the entries are friends-only. If you find this Livejournal, and if you meet certain criteria which are outlined when you find it, then you can tune in and read the kind of entries that societal and personal pressures keep me from writing in this space. Or, you can wisely choose to avoid having the Too Much Information syndrome when it comes to me as a friend or acquaintance. It's your choice.

The only hints I'm giving at the moment:

• The LJ username is a phrase, a handful of words compressed together with no spaces, dashes, or underscores.
• It's a phrase from something that means a fair amount to me.
• It's from something that I've discussed or had a link to in the last month, and which I've discussed at other times in the past as well.

I'm genuinely curious to see how easy it is to find. I'm also genuinely curious to see what people, and how many of them, are actually interested in this stuff. I expect precisely zero, and that doesn't trouble me. Is this a ridiculous thing to have done? Yes. Has it already made me feel a bit better? Honestly, yes. We'll play it by ear from here on out.

>> OK, this is fucking out of hand. Outside my apartment it's 68 degrees and beautiful. Inside my apartment? 92 fucking degrees.

Ever since Daylight Savings Time and the start of spring, the sun now rises in a position that sends its light directly through our (totally huge) windows, starting at about 6:30 AM every morning. By the time it gets to 8:00 AM (which is when I'm generally waking up for work, give or take a half-hour -- most likely give), the temperature inside our apartment has skyrocketed by about fifteen or twenty degrees. This is a huge problem. I am now waking up in the morning because it's too hot, not because it's time to get up.

Opening the windows does nothing. Opening the windows and propping fans up in them to suck air in from outside does nothing. We have an air-conditioning unit, but it's horrifically underpowered for our reasonably spacious and high-ceilinged apartment. However, running it at absolute max with the windows closed and the curtains pulled, while using fans to blow air directly into the bedrooms, seems to be the only reasonable option. I leave my curtains closed in the morning, but they're just not thick enough to block sunlight this strong.

God fucking help us when the actual summer starts and it's 90 degrees outside. I put off doing it this weekend, but now I absolutely must get my hands on a new, and absurdly powerful, A/C unit this week -- power bill be damned... (plus, I can then put the smaller unit directly into my bedroom. Mmmm.)

(One last entertaining note -- does anybody else out there have the Massive Attack singles boxed set with the awesome temperature-sensitive color-changing ink on the outside? Well, every morning I wake up and it's white. Yikes.)

>> There are so many things I should do today, all of which would result in an increased standard of living for me. I should clean the apartment. I should buy a new air conditioner. I should cash in our immense amount of change and spend the money on something frivolous. But I don't want to do any of those things. I want to sit on the couch and play Tetris and get my mind as empty as possible.

I saw Josh last night. I'm really reluctant to talk about things with him here on this blog, but all I can say is, I don't think it really made me feel much better. Indeed, it probably made me feel a lot worse. But that might just be delayed onset. Oh fuck, I don't know. This fucking blows and I wish it wasn't happening. And there, I've already said too much.

(No pitying e-mails / comments needed, by the way. I'm just venting. If I don't vent I go completely nuts. Should I ramble on about all of this even more in the future, then feel free to just look the other way... it's not a question of attention, it's just a fervent desire to talk myself through this. Why would I do that in public? Good fucking question.)

Oh, and: Kung Fu Hustle good. Star Wars: Episode III bad. Wretched. Terrible, even. Anybody who thinks it's a better film than the previous three is completely blinded by their love of the series' mythology, because as somebody who's not an uberfan, I can tell you right now that I found it as egregiously corny, unengaging, and uncreative as the previous two sequels. Dire. Fucking dire.

Anyway, no work on Monday, so bring on a long weekend of hardcore moping!

>> ....This has been one of the most frustrating, depressing, and all-around rotten weeks of my life. I can't think of a single good thing that's happened to me in the last eight days. And the shitty-thing list? Oh, the shitty-thing list is endless.

Snarl.

I'm going out of town for the weekend, to visit the family in Tennessee (and no, that probably won't cheer me up), so no activity here until Monday or so...

>> OK, so I just bought the domestic Annie "Heartbeat" single for $5 at Tower, and that's great. But here's the thing that's driving me crazy: That's not what the song is called! It says, plain as day, right on the back of the album (which I'm guessing the vast majority of Annie fans have never actually seen a physical copy of; they've only downloaded it), that the song is called "My Heartbeat." I like that title much better. But the cover of this single just says "Heartbeat." How am I to label it? How?!? Shit like this drives me much, much crazier than it ought to.

>> So I've been to the gym twice now -- once on Monday for my free personal training session, and then on my own today. On Monday I trained with a lovely young man named Brandon, who totally geeked out when I told him where I worked and then asked if I'd seen Frank Miller. (I have -- at the office, at the Sin City screening, and, randomly, the other day behind the Port Authority Bus Terminal -- no fooling. I have never spoken to Frank Miller, but I have seen him.) Perhaps foolishly, perhaps wisely, I ended up plunking down cash for five more personal training sessions, on the pretext that I'm at least going to need somebody to show me how the gym works, and also in the knowledge that if I hurt every day the way I hurt the day after our session, I'm definitely going to need somebody yelling at me to keep me coming back. Owch, owch, owch. While it was going on the training seemed pleasantly intense; the next morning (and the next, and oh my God the next) it hurt. Bad. But I went back today anyway, and while I actually didn't work out that much (just some jogging, some rowing, and some pectoral exercises), I've at least prevented myself from immediately breaking the cycle. So it feels like something good is starting.

Unfortunately, something good is ending too. This is shaping up to be, historically speaking, a melancholy time of year for me. In May of 2003, I was saying goodbye to London; in May of 2004, I was saying goodbye to college life, NYU, and Josh (for the first time); and in May of 2005, it seems I'm saying goodbye to Josh again. We broke up again last night. Once again, it wasn't some kind of heinous, fracturing split; he just felt that what we were trying to recapture wasn't coming off, and I can't say I completely disagreed. We got back together in January, partly as a result of my having a minor breakdown around the end of the year, and looking back on it I have to worry that all of the things that I didn't want to be true about our reunion -- that it was a product of loneliness, desperation, and nostalgia, rather than of an authentic sense of something perfect that needed to be recaptured -- were, in fact, true. Which is not to say that I regret it. I love Josh, and I probably always will in some way; the feeling of loss I have now is not terribly different from the feeling I had before, and I suppose with this lesson learned, I'm just going to have to figure out how to incorporate those feelings into my past and move on. Once again, we remain friends (I think, I hope); it's just incredibly difficult to invest three years of your life into one person and then completely put away all the feelings wrapped up in those three years.

At the end of my NYU career I found myself listening to the Replacements non-stop, and today I set my iPod to shuffle through all their songs on my way to and from work. There's just something in their mix of resigned depression and raucous energy (that never quite makes its way to optimism) that really complements throwing yourself a good pity-party / it's-time-to-move-on navel-gazing spectacular. "Bastards Of Young" in particular is charged with a phenomenal amount of emotional baggage for me; that song simply screams "It's all over now and you missed it, the good times will never come again." It's good to wallow for a while, but feel free to nudge me if it looks like it's gone on too long.

>> Techy-geek question that I'd like to see if any of my readers can answer before I run crying to the Apple support forums: We do all our internetting in our apartment over a wireless network, created by plugging our cable modem directly into an Airport Express. Our Macs have no problem connecting to the network, barring the occasional interference problem from the distressing number of networks around us. However, Windows machines can't get onto the network -- they can't resolve an IP address for it. How do I fix this? I vaguely gather that I need to assign our network an IP address somehow? (And presumably, this is different from the Ethernet WAN number or Airport ID numbers that I can easily get through the Airport Admin utility.) How do I do that, and how do I then tell the Windows computers what it is? If you know what to do, or at least have relevant info / explanations, please let me know in the comments.

UPDATE: Here's the exact message the Windows XP computer gives: "Connection Status: Limited Or No Connectivity. You might not be able to access the Internet or some network resources. This problem occurred because the network did not assign a network address to the computer." So how do I do that? It's currently configured to get an IP address dynamically, which clearly isn't working out for it. So what do I do? (And yes, the signal strength is excellent, so that's not it.)

UPDATE 2: It's finally fixed! And you were all wrong! I can't read! (Heh. Sorry, Andy.) Against all common reason, this was the problem. Now why Windows couldn't have informed me that the password was invalid, instead of just saying it couldn't get an IP address, I've got no fucking clue... why in God's name would different software read one password differently? And why the hell doesn't any of the setup info tell you that Windows computers will need this bizarre mutant password? Ah, whatever. It's all fixed and I feel slightly better about myself.

>> OK, I admit I was quite chilly towards the last two albums before I spent time with them, but I'm reasonably sure that the new Weezer album completely sucks. A lot. The only even remotely engaging song is "Beverly Hills," and that's a like-it-or-leave-it kind of song to begin with, not an irrepressible pop masterpiece -- and from the sound of things, I can just buy that MFer on iTunes and be done with it. God, this whole album feels like it was cast from lead. Remember when they were actually a fun band, in their weird little way? Rivers, please, if you're not enjoying yourself, then just stop. Stop now, for all our sakes...

>> So I finally joined a gym. It's not terribly far down the street from my office (there's actually a closer location, but it doesn't have a pool and this one does), so I'll be near it five days a week and I'll have no excuse for not going after work. I also get a free personal-training startup session for joining, which is nice because I know nothing about nothing when it comes to working out, and I'm going to need a routine outlined for me if I'm going to get anywhere. So, yay. My current target is to work out two times a week -- it really should be three, but I figure two is way more realistic. If I surprise myself and have no trouble keeping to that schedule, maybe I'll upgrade to three.

One lame thing -- it was annoyingly impossible to learn the NYSC's rates without sitting through an obnoxious, disingenuous sales pitch. No offense to any of my readers who work in sales, but I'm sorry, that's a soul-destroyingly awful job. There's just something in the naked, obvious desperation of sales that I hate having to bear witness to, and any time I have to endure a hard sales pitch for something I was probably going to buy anyway, I feel dirty and less likely to purchase the product; it makes me feel like I've lost and am giving in against my will. Shitty. Anyway, because I don't think anyone else should have to sit through that nonsense, it's $89 a month for the "Gold" option (use your home gym anytime, others during off-peak hours), and there is a startup fee that varies between seasons. Just FYI. That's the New York Sports Club membership rate. (And that sentence is only there for Google's benefit.) It's slightly more than I wanted to pay, and I don't doubt that I could probably find a cheaper option somehow, but joining was almost an impulse buy -- I knew that if I didn't stop thinking about it and just do it, I wouldn't ever do it. So now I've laid down a not-inconsiderable chunk of cash, and that will hopefully guilt/motivate me into actually using the place.

In other news: by the grace of "God" I got to see the New Order show at Hammerstein last night. Matthew's got the setlist, and he's also got the listing of the awesome DJ sets he played before and after the (very mediocre) opening act, Dragonette. I enjoyed the show, though to be perfectly honest I was a little disappointed in the very album-like live arrangements (with the exception of the more dancey "True Faith" and "Bizarre Love Triangle," and the excellent double-tempo joycore version of "Love Will Tear Us Apart"), the bizarrely disjointed sequencing of the set (and Barney's buzz-killing announcements of each song before they started), and the lack of new material (no "Working Overtime" or "Morning Night And Day"), but on the other hand I have now heard New Order play "Temptation," "Crystal," and "Regret" live, so I can check off one key music experience from my master lifetime list. And Barney's stage antics were very silly indeed. Fun bonus: they brought out Ana Matronic for "Jetstream," though the crowd didn't seem to know exactly who she was and they mmmaybe could've used a bit more rehearsal on that particular track -- 'twas a wee bit ramshackle. Oh well. Ana looked totally cute dancing on the side of the stage during "Love Will Tear Us Apart," so I forgive.

Lookitthat -- a whole blog post! Finally, my life merits something other than brief linky-bullets again. (If only this once.)

>> Because it is inconceivable to me that Peaches and Ludacris have not teamed up to record an unbelievably filthy party album under the moniker Peaches & Herb.