Matters of Habit

(I was able to successfully update my template so that I now have my “Friends of the Blog” section added on the right. This is going to be a collection of links to my friends, part-time advertisers, and some of my favorite spots online. Should help to give people a sense of some of the websites I hit on a regular basis. As always, your mileage may vary.)

It’s strange that I made this a three day weekend and my two major accomplishments were a) cashing in my remaining loose change and b) buying my first pair of corduroys since I was maybe ten. I’m not quite sure what has made me feel so strongly against wearing brown cords. I think it might honestly be because when I broke my leg as a kid I went to the emergency room in brown cords and I blame the pants for the entire event. Yes, you could pretty much trace my lack of style to about a half dozen events in my youth.

(Now, of course, I spend half my time reading men’s magazines and focusing on the clothing sections. I’m at the point where I should just get a subscription to GQ. Or hire someone to be my wardrobe consultant, a concept that I’ve thought a lot about recently. Oh, and the cords are green and look pretty cool.)

And speaking of strange changes in habit, the following struck me on Saturday afternoon. It was while watching the Notre Dame game and since the game was on the most obscure channel ever I was forced to go to a bar to watch the game. Now, that isn’t the worst thing in the world but I prefer watching the game from home, where I don’t have to deal with bad cigar smoke and people not paying attention to the game. Also, the bar showing the game was in Kansas and just on general principle I try not to hang out in bars in Kansas. Just because if you try to order something exotic, like a Rolling Rock, they tend to stare at you blankly until you given in and go “I’ll have a Miller Lite”, which then leads to more blank stares and you end up drinking a Miller. Not a Light or a Genuine Draft or even a Genuine Draft Lite, just a plain old Miller.

(Bars in Lawrence don’t count in this discussion, mainly because I’ve come to the conclusion that Lawrence isn’t technically in Kansas. Or the Midwest, for that matter.)

Anyway, I convinced them to serve me Guinness and it dawned on me that this was the most Guinness that I have drank in a bar in an insanely long time. That’s odd because for the longest time all I would drink was Guinness. I considered it my ultimate drink. You could drink it slow and have a relatively easy night but no one would ever make fun of you because you were drinking a Guinness and it had that dark and mysterious and dangerous edge to it. It served me very well until I moved here and I had a night in which, yeah, I don’t remember much about it. Other than I spent the next day lying on my couch listening to the Nascar race. It’s bad when you are too tired to either a) watch the race, b) turn off the tv or c) change the channel.

So I decided to blame the beer, as opposed to the half a pack of cigarettes or my own stupidity. (This was during the timeframe when people had convinced me that smoking would make me look cool, which makes me the oldest person to ever fall prey to peer pressure. And the only person who started smoking when he was 30.) But I stopped drinking Guinness and moved on to Wheat and on Saturday I was wondering why I had switched in the first place. And that made me wonder just how much of my life is made up of routines that exist for absolutely no purpose. Where I park my car, how I buy groceries, the way I walk around a mall, I have extremely concise patterns for all of these things. But there’s no real reason for them. It’s all due to some small event years ago that I’ve probably forgotten about by now.

There’s a deeper meaning in this but the Bears are playing and I want to catch the end of the game.

The five random CD’s for the week.
1) Iris DeMent “My Life”
2) The New Pornographers “Mass Romantic”
3) Keb’ Mo’ “Slow Down”
4) Hank Williams III “Lovesick, Broke & Driftin’”
5) Kelly Willis “Reason to Believe”