Though I'd prefer four desert island discs and the woman of my dreams...

As the strains of Uncle Tupelo’s “Anodyne” close out the annual March 16-20 celebration I’ll take some time to answer a few more questions that have come my way.

Question: Ok, so we can guess that Uncle Tupelo’s “Anodyne” is one of your five desert island discs. What are the other four?
Answer: Always a good question. I could listen to Anodyne forever (though I want the two bonus tracks and would beg and plead for Sandusky to be included from March 16-20, 1992. That is the one track I listen to when I need to recenter myself.) I’ve finally broken down and chosen R.E.M.’s “Reckoning” over “Murmur”. Murmur is a better album and so indecipherable that it would make the time go by quicker but I just enjoy listening to “Reckoning” a lot more. It’s not even a good album; it’s just fun to listen to. Add in Beth Orton’s “Comfort of Strangers” and The Frames “Set List” for two discs that just make me artistic and jubilant, respectively.

The last one? Kelly Willis “What I Deserve”. The title track still puts a chill down my spine every time I hear Kelly sing “I don’t believe that I will be saved.” There was a year or two of my life where the only thing that got me through the day was listening to this disc. I honestly wouldn’t know what I would have done without it. I’ll close out No Depression week with Kelly and yes, for those people who are my “friend” on Facebook this is the woman with her arm around me in my profile photo. What can I say? Sometimes I totally rule.



Question: How are you reacting to being down to your last week in the office?
Answer: Pretty well I think. At my going away happy hour people actually commented on the fact that I was smiling which I hate to say has not been one of my standard emotions recently. I should probably try to clear that one up. Maybe the best way to say it is that the past year or so at work has really worn me out mentally and as a result the punk rock kid in me was unleashed more often than not. It made me anti-social and I regret that that was the case. But I’m in a better head space now and boy do I appreciate it.

But it is still weird sitting around going this is really it. Just one more set of weekly reports to go, a few processes to document and hand off and then it is hand in my badge and saunter out the door. I’m not sure if it will really hit me until I pack up the cubicle and take down my Dilbert cartoons. I’ve had these cartoons up since I was in college and when they move it really tells me that this part of my life will be over.

Question: Any ideas on what the next phase of your life is going to be?
Answer: I still have absolutely no clue. I’m kind of viewing this as my sabbatical. Take some time off to decompress and reassess my life and how I’m leading it. I hate to say that I’m having a mid-life crisis because I’m only 34 and the doctors tend to give me a clean bill of health. But I really am not sure what I want to do with myself. Whatever my next step is, I really want it to be the right one.

Question: So are you going to go ahead and write your book already?
Answer: Yes, I might as well make the official announcement. April will mark the official start of my first book “Tawdry Amusements at Reasonable Prices” (or at Hourly Rates, I haven’t decided which is funnier). This will be a combination of the best of the blog (rewritten and cleaned up as need be), older pieces that have never left my laptop, and new material that was never meant for the blog. It’ll be the usual combination of humor and pop culture and reflections on my life. I’m still not sure what shape it will take but I’m confident that there are 60,000 words out there in some order that I can use.

Question: But what about the novel? Isn’t your dream to write a novel?
Answer: It is and I will, most likely as part of National Novel Writers Month in November. “Until We Say Goodbye” has to be written but it is such a good story that I would hate to screw it up by just rushing into it. I need to outline and plan and do all of those things and I just haven’t done that yet. Depending on how my life goes I might get started on it earlier but right now I think I can do the story collection in a month or two. I even have an editor (God bless her soul) who volunteered to proofread my manuscript.

Question: Isn’t she the same person who threatened to stop reading your emails until you learned the difference between there, they’re and their?
Answer: Yes it is. I’m kind of dreading the first edit. I’m expecting my laptop to throw up an error message saying “Cannot show that many shades of red at once.”

Question: So any posts to look forward to in your last week?
Answer: Yes. The “things I regret not doing at my job” is going to be pretty epic. Even I’m looking forward to it.

Have a great weekend everyone.

When in doubt, pick the team with the cooler mascot

While driving to work this morning I found myself behind a car with the license plate “DR RE”. I can only assume that this is Dr. Dre’s less talented younger brother who moved to KC to get as far away from the whole East Coast-West Coast drama as is humanly possible.

Ok, let’s run through the rest of the brackets and another installment of No Depression Week:

South Region: First off, I’m going to have to go with St. Mary’s in the first round. I mean, I certainly didn’t expect the Smickers to put together such a strong performance this year and the Belles should be able to take Miami. Wait, you mean there is another St. Mary’s? What the hell, go with them anyway because Miami never wins at basketball. Other big upset will be Temple over Michigan State due to the way the Spartans just collapsed against Wisconsin in a way that was just embarrassing.

There are a few other interesting first round matchups. You have Cornell, who are the Big Red despite the fact that their mascot is a bear, going up against Stanford in Nerd Bowl 2008. Take Stanford because they really are a bunch of dorks. I mean, their mascot is a color. What is their fight song “Cardinal is an awesome shade of red?” (This from an Illini whose fight song consists of drunkenly yelling “Oskee Wow Wow” at random moments.) Oral Roberts features MC 900 Foot Jesus, which would seem to be an advantage until you realize that it is rather difficult to drop a ball 890 feet into a hoop. Go with Pitt in that one.

Basically I have no faith in Memphis in this bracket. Calipari seems to be a guy who chokes as a big game coach and I don’t see this as any different. I see Pitt beating them to make the elite eight where they lose to a Texas team playing in Houston. I don’t like Texas either but I’m just going to ride home court advantage on this one.

Midwest Region: This is the region I will get to know well because it is all anyone in this damn town will talk about for the next few weeks. I’ll start with Kansas State whose somewhat silly use of purple as a uniform color is offset by the fact that their logo is borrowed from the Thundercats. Personally, I feel Panthro’s play in the low post will overcome Mumm-Ra’s outside shooting and get them through to the second round where they lose to a Wisconsin team that plays the type of basketball that makes you want to gouge your eyes out due to boredom.

My favorite team name in the tournament is the UMBC Retrievers for two reasons. 1) UMBC sounds like the name of a bank that just purchased your mortgage and 2) They must have the most non-threatening mascots in the history of the world. They should at least be the Fighting Retrievers or the Hounds from Hell or something like that. They’ll get slaughtered by the Hoyas, whose mascot is a bulldog even though a Hoya is a latin phrase. I’ve got two overlooked teams to watch for in this bracket: Clemson and Davidson. Both played Duke and Carolina incredibly tough and might make some noise.

But this bracket is all about Kansas and I’m torn here. On one hand, Kansas is by far the most talented and experienced team in this region. On the other hand, Bill Self is a traitor and a coward who turned his back on Illinois and will suffer karmically for that for the rest of his career. (Not that I’m bitter about that or anything). But more importantly, Self just can not win an important game and I just don’t see that changing this year. I’ve got to go with Georgetown. I expect hate mail over this one.

West Region: I’ll start with my Blue Devils. I said it during the Carolina game, this looks like a Duke squad that is going to lose in the Sweet Sixteen. They still don’t have a guy that I want with the ball in his hands during crunch time. I know this breaks my tradition but they will lose to Xavier. Hate to say it but I don’t know how they make the Final Four with this squad.

Easiest pick in the first round is West Virginia over Arizona again due to karma. I can’t cheer for a team whose coach has taken more time off to deal with his divorce than he did for the death of his wife. In a feel good story take Baylor over Purdue (feel good in that coaches are no longer telling players to lie to cover up a murder charge). And just one random question, do we really need a Western Kentucky? Don’t we have enough states already?

This is the only bracket I’m confident in. UCLA is the team to beat and there isn’t anyone in their draw that worries me. Some people are worried because they’ve gotten a ton of lucky breaks recently but that should just give them confidence. Also be wary of people who assume they can pull off a miracle.

Final Four: North Carolina over Georgetown and UCLA over Texas in games with better name recognition than actual gameplay. UCLA to take it all because it just feels right. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to pick North Carolina to win anything.

No Depression Week: Have to feature one of my favorite people in the world (and someone I would marry just so I could hear her voice every day) in Neko Case. I talk/post/rant about her awesomeness a lot and I find it completely justified. It is true that all of my business school applications were written while listening to her CDs. I just find her voice amazing in the way that it sounds like Patsy Cline if Patsy Cline had spent a lot of time hanging out with Nirvana. Plus, I actually met her a few times in Chicago and she is just incredibly cool and down to earth.

Topics that may not be, in fact, topical

Starting note: For those of you who work with me (or have worked with me) in that large collection of buildings somewhere in Kansas I just want to remind you that my leaving work happy hour is Wednesday night. Please stop by because it would be really, really sad if I was the only one there. Not as sad as the time when everyone in the building was sent home early due to snow except no one bothered to tell me and I didn’t notice until I took off my headphones and realized that no one else was around. (That’s a true story, by the way). Anyway, email me if you need the details. To prevent confusion, this is not to be confused with my Trivia Victory Lap or Last Night in KC celebrations. Both of those will take place once I figure out where life is taking me next and I’ll be sure to let everyone know.

(Looks like I’ll be here until June if just to see the greatest concert double bill ever: Chicago and the Doobie Brothers. I’m not kidding, I got an email about this today. Kansas City, now only 28 years behind the times.)

Comment on the last post: “Think of it as monetizing your desire to be taken seriously as a potential suitor”

Finally, advice that actually makes sense to me! Why hasn’t anyone used financing analogies before in offering me relationship advice? I understand discount rates; can’t we frame the discussion in those terms as opposed to all of these vague terms like “emotions” and “attraction”? Could I just go up to a woman and say, “Trust me, you’ll be duly impressed by my cash flow” and just leave it at that? Then break out a detailed spreadsheet to seal the deal? I can at least dream, can’t I?

Here is a reason why I am looking forward to unemployment in two weeks. So I went out last night for St. Patrick’s Day but had to leave early because I had a 9 AM meeting that I had to be functional for. In some ways that is a good thing (because I probably shouldn’t be spending Monday night in a bar) but in many more ways that is a horrible thing (because it is friggin St. Patrick’s Day, the one day where I can wear all my Notre Dame gear with pride and have a blast.) Get to work this morning, more bitter than hungover, check my email and find out that the meeting had been cancelled. Which would have been great information to have, I don’t know, last night! So I screwed over my social life for a meeting that didn’t exist in a job I’m quitting. Luckily unemployment will give me control over my schedule again. Sure, all I will do is watch daytime tv but damn it, my hand will be on the remote.

Ok, I want to analyze each region in the NCAA tournament but I’ve already hit a lot of topics tonight so I’ll just do the East Regional tonight and I’ll catch the other three tomorrow.

East Region: This bracket features my three most hated teams in existence as well as the one I will be actively cheering for. My Irish pulled a five seed, which is about right, and I can see them getting past George Mason and then Winthrop, who I’m picking mainly because I think the team is comprised of snooty English butlers. They might not have the hops of some of the other teams but they play a rather refined style of basketball.

Indiana is led by the traitor Eric Gordon who was fouled by Illinois during the pre-game introductions. They’ll get past Arkansas but then collapse because, well, they are Indiana, that’s what they do. In some other first round upsets I’d take South Alabama over Butler because the game is in Birmingham and St. Joe’s over Oklahoma because I believe that there is only one basketball in the entire state of Oklahoma.

Really this is a two team bracket. North Carolina is led by Tyler Hansborough, who looks that frat guy in college who spent his entire time in English 101 discussing how awesome their Barn Dance was going to be. I’m not encouraging anyone to give him a hard foul. I’d prefer a steel chair to the skull. Tennessee is coached by Bruce Pearl who along with Bono is most responsible for my crappy college experience. (Bruce Pearl snitched on the Illini and put us on probation while U2 cancelled a concert and cost me a date because apparently St. Bono didn’t want me to score.) Personally, I’ll be cheering for American in their first round against the Volunteers because, well, it would be un-American otherwise. It sickens me to say that Pearl, who shouldn’t even be allowed on a college campus much less coach, will get this team to the final eight and then North Carolina and their crappy uniforms will make the Final Four.

No Depression Week: If there is a current poster child for No Depression and all of its good and bad qualities it would be Ryan Adams. He is alternately a genius and a complete screw up depending on how he feels at the time. Starting with Whiskeytown he has written some amazing music that spans from pure country to hard edged rock. He also has screwed up relationships with Parker Posey, Beth Orton, My Beloved Lindsay, Winona Ryder and probably a dozen that I have forgotten by now. Judge his genius for yourself with “Come Lift Me Up” from Letterman. Performance would have been better if they would have kept in the swearing.

Don't mind me, I'm just the guy at the end of the bar

Here might be the best example of what type of employee (and person) I am. I spent two hours tonight designing spreadsheets for a job (and a company) that I will be leaving in two weeks. It shows my dedication to my craft, how I always finish the job and that I care too much about what happens in the office. It also shows that I have nothing else to do and prefer crafting incredibly intricate spreadsheets to watching bad television. Oh well, the future will come soon enough where life will no longer consist entirely of Excel documents.

It’s been an odd little weekend. Some of that is my fault and other parts just seemed to happen. Things started off great on Saturday as I had a great treadmill workout. It was one of those times when you felt that you could keep the same pace up for another hour and not even blink. Got the oil changed on my car, picked up some CDs (Kathleen Edwards awesome new disc being one of them), and simply stayed productive all afternoon. I even watched another hour of A History of Britain, which has somehow become a Saturday evening ritual for me.

Somehow this all led to my spending hours cleaning my apartment on Saturday night. That’s not entirely the way that I wanted to spend the night. I’m supposed to have this entire carefree lifestyle but occasionally I have to deal with the fact that dishes are supposed to get washed as opposed to pile up until they spill out onto all available countertops. I also made a half hearted attempt at reorganizing my bookshelves, which is now at the point where I should just give up and wait until I move to figure out what I’m going to do with my library. At least the CD collection is by artist. My books are more by wherever I had space at the time.

I did go out late Saturday night and I had…well, it was my typical interesting experience. It took me a little while but I got my usual stool at Harry’s where I can joke with the staff and watch the world go by while I think through some things. One great story from the night. So I was sitting around drinking and thinking and these two girls come in who a) know the staff, b) look vaguely familiar and c) are extremely drunk in the “I’m just going to lean on the nearest stable object for balance” sense of the term. Well, for one girl, that stable object was me.

Now some people would think that I would have a problem with this. Random person in my personal space when all I’m doing is minding my own business. The thing is this is precisely why I go out. Fun story started by people who are clearly enjoying themselves. I ended up talking to her for a while or at least as much as one can talk to someone who will clearly not remember the conversation in the morning. At one point she ended up just lying her head on my shoulder and I’ll have to say it was pretty cool. It was bizarre and unusual and that’s what I want in my life. I’ll leave normalcy for the masses; I’ll take the unique.

Of course I imbibed a little too much and suffered for it today. Workout sucked, grocery shopping was even less enjoyable than usual and I still haven’t finished doing all of my laundry. Oh, and the Illini lost. At least tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day. Who knows what will happen to me tomorrow.

No Depression Week: We’ll start the week with the band that named the genre: Uncle Tupelo. “Chickamauga” is my favorite Uncle Tupelo song and probably my favorite song of all time. It certainly has my favorite lyric (and what has become a motto of sorts for me) “Catch yourself in midair thinking your dreams can never be bought.” I could listen to this every day and never grow tired of it.



The five random CDs for the week:
1) Whiskeytown “Pneumonia”
2) Jay Farrar “Sebastopol”
3) Vedera “The Weight of an Empty Room”
4) U2 “War”
5) The Subdudes “Miracle Mule”

I'll leave this world of toil and trouble...

Interview Note: Apparently I’m still pretty rusty when it comes to interviews. It wasn’t the worst interview that I’ve ever had but it definitely wasn’t an A+ effort on my part. I didn’t stumble over questions regarding my career aspirations but I don’t have those answers as fully formed as I would like. Hopefully I did enough to break through for a second interview. Otherwise it will be more time preparing for the future. I always hope that someone would hire me for just being smart but apparently they want other skills as well.

Final Oscar Note: I just discovered that former stripper and Oscar winner Diablo Cody went to a rival high school of mine a few years after I graduated. I still don’t know her but at least I now don’t know her in a much more personal way. Or at least I’m pretty sure I don’t know her. I would like to think that I would have remembered someone like her. Oh, and now people younger than me are winning screenplay Oscars. First Ben Affleck wins one and now this. I feel like such a slacker.

I have some very sad news to report tonight. My favorite music magazine of all time, No Depression, is going to stop publishing. This is a tough fact for me to face for a number of reasons. For one thing it was always my goal to write for No Depression though occasionally I’ll claim to have already written for it in order to impress women. (Look, I didn’t start that claim. It was mentioned on a website once and it kind of just took off from there.) I really considered it to be one of the best music magazines out there where the focus wasn’t on rating albums but on just discussing what they meant and how they made you feel.

But the big reason is that I fear that this might be a statement as to the longevity of my favorite music genre, which just happens to be called No Depression. Technically the Carter Family song came first and then the Uncle Tupelo album and then an AOL newsgroup and finally the magazine but in essence almost all of the music that I listen to has been described as No Depression. It was always difficult to describe. I sometimes use the phrase alt-country but that is a bit of a misnomer. Some of it is like Son Volt, country music with a rock tinge, while others are people like Willie Nelson, stuff that is so traditional country that it has become alternative. The No Depression is more of a state of mind than a sound. It’s fiercely independent, true to heart, lyrically brilliant music. Songs that someone can stand on stage in front of twenty people and sing because it truly is what they believe in.

I don’t think that the genre is dying per se (odds are the magazine business is a rather poor one to be in right now) but this is a blow for people like me. I learned about a lot of great bands by reading the magazine. I saw shows solely because of a blurb I read or, truth be told, a picture of a pretty female singer-songwriter in one of the ads. (To this day the only reason I go to see Eleni Mandell in concert is because of a picture I saw of her.) The magazine was run by people who weren’t bound to any corporate viewpoint; they all just loved music. There was no overlying agenda, no “You have to give the new Hootie and the Blowfish record three stars”, just great discussions of often overlooked acts. While Paste magazine has tried hard to reach the same audience I think that this will be a big gap in the music world. No Depression will definitely be missed.

Of course, I can always just rely on Maxim for my music commentary. They apparently gave the new Black Crowes album two and a half stars despite not actually having listened to it. I don’t know about you but even though I haven’t listened to it I would have to say that two and a half stars sounds about right to me.