GenePoool Blog

Posted Wednesday, December 09, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

And this is how we learn

Weather for today was described as "100% chance of precipitation" in the form of driving rain and sleet and some snow and high winds.

Boy, I said to myself last night, that's going to be a heck of a bike ride.

The way I see it, I won't know where the line is between conditions I can and cannot bike in until I've tried. And for about 60% of my trip the answer was, "I can bike in this." That was until I hit the serious wind.

Let me explain the difference. For the first part of my trip to work, I am on city streets with buildings and trees and what-not. I am also wet, but not horribly so, and cold, but not terribly. Because in both cases I haven't been out for long. But then the cold and the wet met the gale-force winds that were no longer being blocked by buildings. Because the last leg of my trip is on an open highway next to a public park and a river, and the wind just cut through.

I biked the remaining portion of my journey soaked through (hands and feet only) directly into the teeth of the wind, which was throwing sleet at the time, while in a highway breakdown lane covered in slush and deep puddles. Under ideal conditions I can probably go 30-35 MPH on this bike. I think I was probably doing 8 for the last mile.

But, I made it, which must mean one thing: I haven't found the line yet where I can't bike to work.

Posted Monday, November 30, 2009 by Gene (1) comments

I'm not sure what to think

Had a conversation with a guy in my building the other day. He caught a glimpse of the cover of the book I was reading (Why Does E =MC2?) and told me this story of when his son came home for Thanksgiving and said, as an example of what he had learned, that "pi R Square". The guy said, "and I told him, 'no, pie are round!'" And then there was laughter.

I heard this joke, more or less exactly as it was told, about thirty years ago, except not in first person, and regarding a farmer talking to his college-attending son. So now I don't know what to think. Is this guy in the habit of telling old jokes in first person? Does he even have a son? Should I worry that he can't tell the difference between reality and fiction? I'm scared.

Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 by Gene (1) comments

Bicycle Chronicles

One of the many, many things I didn't get to talk about during my extremely lengthy hiatus from blogging regularly was the part where my bicycle up and walked out of my back yard one evening, on account of my not giving it enough respect, i.e, neglecting to chain it up to the porch.

This was something of a problem because as you must know if you're a regular reader, I commuted to work on that bike. And I was not in a position to buy a new one, unless I settled for an extremely shitty bike.

And I didn't want to settle for an extremely shitty bike. But waiting until funds were available meant a good three or four week gap between when the bike ran away and when I could invest in a decent new one. So for that period, I walked to work every day instead.

Which was sort of not bad. I lost a noticeable amount of weight-- I walked over 100 miles in about 24 days-- and the weather was never so bad that it didn't make sense to do it. But, my feet were perpetually developing new problems, and after a while it just got really, dreadfully boring. Plus losing 120-140 minutes a day to just walking, while healthy, was really taking away from my time to do much of anything else.

Plus I missed bike riding.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up that new bike. It's one especially designed for a sport called "cyclocross", which is an event that makes competitors throw themselves down mountains on their bikes, jump hurdles while carrying their bikes on their backs, ride through mud, and so on. So bikes for this event are super-light, very durable, and as close to all-weather as they come.

And fast. Holy crap. I have a coveted pair of drop-down handlebars now (the previous bike had upright handlebars) so I can now lean forward, or, waaay forward, and not only get out of the wind-- I deal with a lot of wind on my commute-- but lower the center of gravity, making everything I do that much faster and easier.

Now if I can just survive the training. I was no longer in bike shape when I started using it, and worse, my legs are in a slightly different position, which means I'm using different parts of my leg muscles than before, so I'm suddenly retraining almost from scratch.

But: bike fast. Good bike.

Posted Monday, November 09, 2009 by Gene (1) comments

The long way home

It took us two days to drive from Boston to St. Paul, and three to get back. The reasons for this vary depending on who you ask and how much time you have, but here are a few favorites:

--Labor Day. We happened to be on the road on Labor Day. In Massachusetts this is a day where people stay home from work, maybe to a little grilling, drink a little beer, watch a little television. In the Midwest, it is an event marked by people putting their families into their cars and getting on the highway, driving somewhere distant, and then turning around and driving home again. I'm guessing. We figured the roads would be less clogged on a day without work, not more.

--Our mortgage. Okay, this takes some explaining. Back in August, our mortgage company failed to withdraw the funds from our checking account electronically-- as we had authorized them to do-- for the monthly payment. This is because on the same day the payment was scheduled the company was seized by the federal government for possible fraud, and all of their assets were frozen. So the money sat in our account.

Then the mortgage was sold-- because it had to be-- to another company. Now this company did not take the August payment either, and in fact took over a mortgage in which that payment was considered received. They also put, in all of their literature, notes indicating no electronic transfer authorizations granted to the first company would be transferring to the new one. So for my first payment at the beginning of September I sent them a check.

The check cleared, and then one day later they withdrew the payment they said they couldn't withdraw electronically. This left us overdrawn by about $1,200 and stranded in Indiana without enough gas to get out of Indiana again. And there is apparently no way to get an electronic debit authorization reversed immediately. I tried.

In the end the bank was kind enough to block the debit for the day. "Go to an ATM right now and withdraw however much you need, because you'll be overdrawn again tomorrow" was the advice I received. It took quite a few hours to get this semi-resolved, (another week to deal with the consequences of an overdrawn account once we got back) during which time we did very little driving.

Incidentally, nobody's come for that August payment yet.

--general exhaustion. It turns out taking an eleven day trip wherein one drives a car at high speeds for roughly half of the trip can be somewhat exhausting for all concerned.

--the country is longer traveling West to East than it is traveling from East to West. I swear this is true.

Final observations

--On Labor Day we passed by multiple construction sites on the highway-- because as I mentioned before, a lot of our nation's highways are under construction right now. Most of the giant construction cranes had equipment dangling from them, of the sort that might otherwise disappear over the weekend. Small tractors and trucks, that sort of thing. It was the rough equivalent of storing food in a tree to keep it away from bears.

--You would think that pets who had been abandoned into the care of others for eleven days would be more pissed off about it. But that's the great thing about pets: too stupid to bear grudges.

--Cigarettes are sometimes state-specific. For example, I attempted to purchase a box of Merit Ultra Lights in Wisconsin, and could not. They are not carried in Wisconsin. One clerk confessed he'd never even heard of them. As for why I was buying cigarettes at all: eleven days, five on the road. Don't judge me.

Posted Tuesday, September 15, 2009 by Gene (1) comments

St. Catherine University

I went to a high school (Northfield Mount Hermon) that is nestled in the Connecticut River valley. In order to get from my dorm to the cafeteria I had to walk a path up a hill so steep that in the winter people would ski down it. And when I reached the top it was only to get to a small plateau leading to another hill that was even steeper (but shorter) to reach West Hall, provided I had not died from hunger before that time. And the drop-off behind the dorm-- which led to the river-- was so precipitous and vast that on some mornings what appeared to us as ground fog was actually a low-lying cloud that had drifted off of the river.

I mention this because daughter Becky is now attending a college whose chapel was "built on the highest point in St. Paul." But if they hadn't told me it was on the top of a hill, I might not have noticed.

St. Paul, it turns out, is rather flat.

The campus was lovely, but surprisingly small. And there were albino squirrels, which was just downright confusing. ("In Minnesota, even the squirrels are white" was my comment at the time, which would have been funnier if we were in Utah, but I had to work with what I had.) Most of the buildings-- or at least the ones I was privy to-- were clustered on the "top" of the "hill", which should be a tremendous boon on the days it's -30 degrees outside and one has to walk from one's dorm to a classroom.

Moving in

The only reason we were able to transport my daughter, plus all of our luggage, plus son Tim, wife Deb and my mother in two cars without U-Haul being involved was Becky's roommate, Abby. She happened to live in St. Paul about ten minutes from the school, so about 3/4 of Becky's room was sent by Federal Express ahead of us. You may wonder how a college Freshman could already have a roommate she knows well enough to ship things to, and the answer is this may be the first time, "don't worry, Daddy, I met my new friend on the internet," is actually a good thing to hear. Anyway, it was very helpful because as we discovered after driving to Abby's family home to pick up all of that stuff, there was no way we could have gotten it all there otherwise. Tim nearly had to walk to the school due to lack of space.

Things learned during orientation

--St. Catherine University is the largest all-girls' college in the country, and by that I have to think they mean student body size, not campus size.

--Everyone on campus knew my daughter before she even got there. I'm not sure how she pulled that off.

--A very large portion of the student body is Minnesota residents. We live in the largest concentration of colleges in the country and are used to seeing the population of our town double at this time of month, so the idea that a majority of St. Catherine University students are locals is just weird to me. And to Becky.

--The student center is an enormous building called Coeur de Catherine, which is French for Catherine's coeur. Behind Coeur de Catherine is a statue called Zerogee which depicted a naked man and a naked woman floating in zero gravity, attempting to catch a naked baby floating above them. I found this entirely too fascinating, for reasons I'm not clear on.

--The chapel is magnificent, and I enjoyed seeing it very much. I could have lived without the hour-long not-quite-an-actual-Mass music performance that took place in it however. The music was lovely, but it came after a three hour orientation meeting.

--The orientation was actually rather well done. I felt about it much the way I do the film The English Patient: it was really good, but I could have lived without about 45 minutes of it. The high point was when the students went outside for team-building exercises of some kind, leaving parents and family to watch a performance by a standup comic pretending to be a professor. Or a professor pretending to be a standup comic. The line was somewhat blurry.

--Until this day I did not fully understand what people meant when they described my daughter as "mature". Then I saw the scared looks on the faces of some of her new classmates. Really, some of them looked terrified. And most of them only had to drive up the street, for goodness sake.

(To Be Continued)

Posted Friday, September 11, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

Mall of America

We were staying at a Home Suites Inn across the street from the Mall of America, so close that when you call the hotel they answer, "Home Suites Inn Mall of America, can I help you?" which cracks me up for some reason. Now a year ago wife Deb stayed at this same hotel, and described it for me, and somehow I ended up combining her description with my own assumptions about malls and came up with the following image: a gigantic square mall standing in the middle of an even more gigantic flat space devoted to parking spaces; a road; a solitary hotel on the other side of the road; a vast wasteland in all directions.

Because the Mall of America has been around since I was a kid, at least, meaning somewhere in the vicinity of the early to mid-1970's, and I have been in malls from that era. They're not pretty, or interesting, or any place I would visit without a really, really good reason. I have also seen my share of mall parking areas, which are great expanses of tarmac that create visible waves of despair when you walk across them. As for the vast wasteland of my imaginings, well, that may have come from a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the infrastructure of the American Midwest in general.

Instead the entire region was a complex array of on-ramps and off-ramps, the parking was remarkably well hidden in a variety of underground and above-ground parking garages, the hotel was part of a collection of hotels... and the mall was quite modern and interesting and, while huge, did not appear to be so from the outside.

Another thing I was expecting: the feeling of disdain at the rampant and obscene display of American consumerism writ large. Because I'm a liberal democrat from Massachusetts, and this is what we do. But the mall was so unequivocally awesome I didn't have time to experience any disdain at all. Perhaps on the next visit.

And there will clearly be another visit.

Observations on the Mall of America

--Each of the shopping plazas (North, South, East, West) was three stories tall and each was as large as any other mall I've ever been in. This left a gigantic amount of space in the middle for the amusement park. Yes, really.

--The amusement park in the middle is sponsored by Nickelodeon, the makers of Doan's backache pills, and the American Association of Whiplash Attorneys. If you are over the age of 25, do not go on these rides. I'm serious. I know there are three really cool-looking roller coasters; it's not worth it.

--Yes, there are roller coasters in the middle of the Mall of America.

--There are also three Starbucks, three Caribou Coffees, two Godivas, two Victoria's Secrets, two food courts with two McDonald's, and multiples of other random stores, like Fossil. There is also a wedding chapel, a movie theater, a comedy club, and a bunch of sit-down restaurants of varying price and quality. And a Hooters. Mustn't forget the Hooters.

--I will be going back for at least two stores where I fell in love with products I could not justify buying. One was the Western Store, which had extremely reasonably priced cowboy boots, and a black duster that I wanted very badly. The other was Frederick's of Hollywood, about which I shall not elaborate here.

--In the basement was an aquarium, with those corridor tubes so you can walk through the actual tank and get into staring contests with sharks. We did not get a chance to visit the aquarium, so this is another reason to go back someday.

--Each floor is a .57 mile circuit, according to the helpful brochure we looked at. The place could really benefit from some sort of walking club: hand out free pedometers or something, Mall. It'd probably be a tax write-off.

(To Be Continued)

Posted Thursday, September 10, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

Minnesota bound

There comes a time in every man's life when he has to drive a great distance in order to end up at a mall, and also possibly to hand over his daughter-- who may or may not be someone named Becky-- to an institution of higher learning. In my case the mall was Mall of America, the institution was St. Catherine University (previously known as the College of St. Catherine; they changed the name to raise their Google hits, I believe) and the great distance was from Massachusetts to Minnesota.

We drove there for a couple of reasons. One, I had never seen the college, and although my wife had, we were not entirely eager to just put Becky on a plane and hope her freshman orientation experience went well. Parents are supposed to be there to make their child feel uncomfortable and anxious. It's in the handbook. Two, it was ostensibly cheaper than all of us flying there and back. Three, how big could this country be, anyway? I mean seriously.

Pretty goddamn big

You know how to get from Boston to St. Paul? Take interstate 90 through Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and when you cross into Minnesota, turn left. For some reason I have a problem taking seriously any distance that does not require me to take more than one highway for most of it. Likewise, when my GPS Navigator (which hates me) tells me the trip is going to take a mere 23 hours or so, I am inclined to think the whole thing can be done in a day, and is not a big deal.

Of course the GPS Navigator doesn't sleep, or eat, or need gas, or know love. It is also cruel and impossible to please, but now I'm getting away from my point, which is that 23 hours is difficult even when broken up into two days of 11 and 13 hours, because there are certain realities that do not become evident right away, such as traffic, weather, unfortunately lengthy dining experiences, the warm embrace of a hotel bed that is impossible to break from at six in the morning, tolls, pee breaks, and so on. It also does not consider the unfortunate fact that at any given moment roughly 1/3 of interstate 90 is under construction.

But we did make that drive in two days. We hated ourselves and each other and our GPS navigator, and the cars, and the highway, and life, but we made it. Which is almost more than I can say for the trip home but in that, again, I am getting ahead of myself.

(To Be Continued)

Posted Tuesday, July 28, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

Vacations and Other Errors in Judgment

Sorry to have been away so long, but I do have a couple of announcements. The first is that I've put together some older humor columns-- including our second Disney trip from 1998-- into an e-book format. It's available a couple of ways.

If you have an Amazon Kindle or an iPhone with the Kindle ap, you can get it here.

If you don't, it's available in a .pdf format here.

No print version is available right now, but look: you're reading stuff on your computer already right now, right?

Immortal

This should be available very soon as an e-book and in another month or so in print. There is a Facebook page set up for it already (look for Immortal: The Novel, or just friend me and go from there) and Adam the immortal has his own Facebook page, if you want to talk to him.

The cover is at the top of this post. (If I was smart I'd have led with this so the text would be next to the cover. I am not smart.)

Posted Monday, July 06, 2009 by Gene (2) comments

Another day in which Boston gets smaller

We had a house guest over the weekend in form of a Friend Who Is A Boy of daughter Becky, said child having come in from Los Angeles at the end of last week. We felt duty-bound to take him on a walk through parts of Boston, which was fun insofar as we never ever do that ourselves.

But we should. We started off at Downtown Crossing; took the long way (past South Station-- I got a bit turned around in navigating) along the new harbor park that replaced the raised southeast expressway a few years back; to Faneuil Hall, then North End and the Paul Revere statue everyone has seen but which we had never found before; then to the Holocaust Memorial; through Government Center; to the Granary Grounds cemetery; to Park Street and the Boston Commons; then the Public Gardens and the swan boats.

We had started off at a little after Noon, and by the time we walked all of that it was a bit after 5 PM. The kids wanted to walk back up to Park Street and the train at that point, to head home and recharge, while wife Deb and I decided to wander down Charles Street for a bit.

Charles Street ended at the Charles/MGH subway station, so we hopped the train to get back home ourselves... and ended up in the same car as the kids. Note for future reference: from the public gardens the nearest train station is not Park Street, it is Charles/MGH.

The reason we had to hurry home to relax was that all this travel was taking place on the 4th of July, and there were fireworks for which to plan.

Fireworks

I have never been to see the fourth of July fireworks in Boston, and yet I have lived in Boston my entire life. Let the speculation begin regarding why this is; I'm not personally certain I know, except maybe that it just all seems like a pain.

But anyway. We left the house again at 9:40, took the train to Charles/MGH, and pushed through the enormous crowd on the Salt and Pepper bridge until we found open space overlooking the open sky where fireworks were expected to manifest in a short time.

(Aside: if you think you don't know what the Salt and Pepper bridge is, you are probably wrong. Every movie and television show where even a portion was filmed in Boston has featured a tracking shot of this bridge. There are little sentry posts in the middle that look like salt and pepper shakers. Trust me; you've seen it.)

This all worked out well, more or less. We did get separated from the three kids when getting onto the bridge, and we couldn't reach them to tell them where we were because all of the cell phones were being jammed from receiving anything (I suspect the explosives were being detonated electronically). But that was okay; they were on the bridge, they saw the same show we did.

And it was a good show. Lots of shit went up and exploded and there were colors and everything.

But after a half an hour, the show was over and the five of us and roughly one million of our closest friends all wanted to go home at the same time. Rather than brave the 50,000 person line for the outbound platform at the Kendall square station (Charles/MGH station was closed by security for, possibly, security reasons) we decided to walk.

So all told, on July 4th we walked somewhere in the neighborhood of 12-15 miles.

Which is okay; it offset the chowder.

The chowder

Sunday was a blisteringly hot and sunny day, the very best kind of day imaginable to consume large amounts of clam chowder.

Or not. But that was when the Harborfest people scheduled Chowderfest, and by God, we were going. Well, Deb and I were. The children have no interest in chowder, something I'll never fully understand.

In our opinion the best chowder was from the Algonquin Club, which took well the following lesson: Americans love anything that tastes a bit like bacon. The Fish Pier had the worst, although that might have been from poor planning. They ran out of chowder early and had to race more in from their base, and they clearly rushed the preparation of the new batch, because it tasted like flour. That's what happens when you rush your roux.

Posted Monday, June 29, 2009 by Gene (1) comments

Belated Michael Jackson reaction

On hearing the news that Michael Jackson had died suddenly, my reaction was as follows:

1: surprise

2: ...

3: I got nothing

To me, Jackson was the crazy old uncle who went senile a long time ago. Yes, he was still around, but nobody expected anything from him because he clearly wasn't the same man he used to be.

Put it this way: it had been nearly thirty years since Jackson had done anything in the music industry that warranted any real attention. Prince, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, U2... those are four acts that were making music at the same time as Michael and are still making music now. And to varying degrees their music is still relevant.

Or restated: Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a 1990 helicopter crash, meaning he hasn't recorded anything new or relevant for just under two decades, and that's still more current than anything of Jackson's. And I miss Stevie a lot more.

Other than the music, what you have left is a possibly insane paranoid pedophile that has left a $400 million estate debt his family will no doubt have to prostitute his image for the next decade in order to pay off. That's sad, but it's a different kind of sad.

Posted Sunday, June 21, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

Steve Jobs gets liver transplant

Whoever wrote the headline for this article got it all wrong. It should have read: "Steve Jobs Upgraded to iLiver 2.0".

Posted Friday, June 19, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

On walking

As I think I've mentioned a couple of times, I work only about 4.25 miles from home, which is awesomely convenient for biking, except for the constant problem of flat tires. Of the 4.25 miles, about 2.5 is a collection of loose glass, which is why two years ago I bought Gatorskin tires, which are essentially steel-belted radials. But those tires have clearly been worn out, because I've had three flats in three weeks.

Last night I brought the bike in to get a new set of tires, leaving it in the shop and leaving me with no way to get to work aside from the subway. I don't like the subway all that much.

So I decided to walk. Again: 4.25 miles. It's just not that far. I'd done it once before and timed my trip at about 75 - 80 minutes, which is only 10 to 20 minutes longer than the train takes, assuming there are no breakdowns on the tracks. And there are always breakdowns on the tracks.

You would think I'd flapped my arms and flown to work judging by the reaction. Seriously, doesn't anybody walk any more?

Posted Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

Elevator conversation

I got into the elevator this morning with a woman who had on a heavy knee brace and a cane. As the woman was younger than me, I asked what had happened.

"I tore my ACL," she said, "And fractured my tibia."

"Were you playing professional basketball at the time?" I asked, as these are the sort of injuries athletes get, which is why I know ACL stands for anterior cruciate ligament.

"I was jumping up and down while watching the results of American Idol," she said.

"I would stick with the basketball story," I suggested.

Sorry

Haven't been around much lately, partly because of the Charlatan screenplay, partly because the impending publication of Immortal, (more to come on this, soon) and partly because we were rear-ended on the highway on our way to daughter Becky's graduation a week ago Thursday. By someone who apparently didn't know route 2 came to an end, until her trip came to an end roughly eighteen inches on the wrong side of our rear bumper.

Posted Thursday, June 04, 2009 by Gene (1) comments

Trapped

The good news is, I already had the day off today, since Becky's graduation is tonight.

Last night I decided to try something called "free run" on the Wii Fit. For the other "run" options one has to follow behind a little cartoon weeble thing on a "course" and keep pace with it. (Because running quickly gets you to the end faster but doesn't burn as many calories.) The "free run" is different because all you need is the wiimote in your pocket. It makes a metronomic click-click-click to keep you on pace and keeps track of how long you're running and, presumably, buzzes or something when you're done. I don't know what it actually does when you're done because I didn't finish.

The cool thing about the "free run" is you can turn to another channel while doing it. So I started watching season two of Friday Night Lights (first three episodes: dreadful. I heard things improve after those eps.) and "running". If I hadn't mentioned this before, running in Wii Fit involves bouncing up and down in place. This has been putting a lot of stress on my feet (recall, I had plantar fasciitis a few months ago) and my calves. The calves are not as strong as one might think because bicycling is largely a thigh-based workout. After a typical fifteen minute run both of my calves would be extremely tight, and not in a "wow, these are bulking up" tight so much as a "Nomar, I think you really need to stop taking those steroids" tight.

Sixteen minutes in, something went pop in my left calf. Or, possibly, sproing, snap, or kablooie.

So now I am sitting in my living room with my leg on a heating pad hoping this is a minor sprain and not something more serious. As of last night I was less than a pound away from no longer being considered "overweight" by the Wii, which is the closest I've gotten in a long time. An extended trip to the disabled list would screw that all to hell.

Oh, and the plan tonight? Walk to Harvard Square for Becky's graduation ceremony. Yeeha.

Posted Wednesday, June 03, 2009 by Gene (2) comments

Prom

Daughter Becky's prom was this past Saturday, and insofar as we are inadequately positioned economically to give her much of anything tomorrow (when she graduates high school) aside from applause, we decided to throw her an after-prom party.

This meant getting our basement Truly and Actually Clean, a project that has been months in the making and which was not finally done until, oh, 11 PM Saturday night.

My job, all day, was to drive places. This was the easy job, because wife Deb (with son Tim's help) was in charge of all the actual cleaning, something I am apparently genetically incapable of doing properly.

I ended up driving to two malls in Watertown three times (once for earrings for Becky as she couldn't find the ones she wanted; once for a new vacuum when our old one broke in the middle of the cleaning; once for vacuum bags, as the one I bought only came with one bag), three times to CVS (for milk in the morning; carpet and upholstery cleaner in the afternoon; a prescription later in the afternoon) to the grocery store three times (once for carpet and upholstery cleaner because the stuff we bought at CVS was ammonia-based, which is not what you want to put on your couch when there are cats in your home; once for more carpet and upholstery cleaner because two cans were not enough; once for chips and dips for the party) one trip to Wilson's Farm for fruit and eggs, because we were preparing brunch for the children the next morning, and twice to the Boston hotel where the event took place.

The last part came out of nowhere, because the kids had claimed they were okay with taking the train. And there were twelve of them going as a group. But when all were gathered at one of the houses for photos (not, thank God, our house) the parents gathered together and figured out how to drive all of them in multiple cars. Yay. That would have been my nap time, right there.

The good news is, we ended up with somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-14 high school kids in our home overnight, nothing got broken, nobody got arrested, and nobody found out about the Mike's Lemonade six pack they snuck in.

Oh. Except for that last part. We did find out about that.

Posted Thursday, May 28, 2009 by Gene (3) comments

I should not be allowed to speak to people

I had a long phone call with daughter Becky's ostensible college advisor regarding financial aid. Over the course of the conversation she mentioned a website Becky could go to where she could list all the details she can think of about herself and submit the information to see if there are scholarships available for her that she would not otherwise know about.

As an example the advisor described a student who mentioned that her father died of cancer when she was younger, and then got a full scholarship from the American Cancer Institute.

"Wow," I said. "So, are there scholarships available if, say, she had a family member murdered?"

She laughed. Thank goodness.

Posted Tuesday, May 26, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

Actual conversation from weekend

Son Tim: I'm going to go exercise, which I have been trying to do since yesterday and you people keep distracting me.

Wife Deb: We won't talk about what your father has been trying to do since yesterday.

Daughter Becky: Your mom!

Me: That's... actually the correct answer.

Wife: (laughing)

Becky: Sometimes I'm glad I have a short attention span.

Posted Thursday, May 21, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

Notes from my iPod

I love early Bob Dylan but I barely understand it at all. Is that even possible? For instance, in Desolation Row he sings, "Everybody's making love, or else expecting rain." I have no clue at all what this means, but I still love it.

Likewise, The Ting Tings have a song called Impacilla Carpisung. Don't understand the title, don't understand most of the words in the song. In fact, I just now googled it because I was nearly positive 90% of the song was in another language. (It isn't.) Love the song anyway.

Is this what it's like to enjoy opera?

Posted Wednesday, May 20, 2009 by Gene (3) comments

Gorgeous day

My allergies have calmed down, it's beautiful outside, and I clearly need a vacation or something. Used to be I didn't mind being stuck in the office all that much. Not today.

Good news all around

Three of my favorite shows from last season will have another season: Chuck, Dollhouse, and Fringe. The latter really paid out after a pretty shaky start. Also paying out in a big way: Lost. Causing me actual pain to watch: Heroes. I might rethink that one next year.

Alas, Life, a brilliant cop show that you will watch one day on DVD and become sad that you neglected it, will not be back for a third season.

Now, off to eat my lunch, and maybe sit on a bench outside and make moaning noises.

Posted Monday, May 18, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

Turn 40 today

For the second year in a row!

Brief updates

I just finished the new draft of my screenplay for CHARLATAN last night. It went from 122 pages to 103, and I have more work to do on it still.

Also... well this isn't technically an update but I don't think I've actually mentioned it in this space before. I've had a contract to publish my novel IMMORTAL since last summer. It was initially supposed to be published this month, but has been pushed back to the end of the summer.

The reason I held back on saying anything is that it's a small, new publisher, and this is a volatile market. They've gone through some restructuring and reduced the number of titles they're putting out per year, which is fine by me as long as my novel is still on the list. I'm waiting for my first look at the cover design, and any edits they wanted to run it through-- it really doesn't need much at this point-- and then in theory it's good to go. I will keep everyone apprised.

Posted Monday, May 11, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

A fine weekend of sunburns and minor drownings

On Saturday son Tim had to be in New Hampshire for the entire day for a rugby tournament, inasmuch as he is on the school rugby team, insofar as we did not object stridently enough to his interest in possibly becoming crippled for life. He rode up on the bus; we drove. This was problematic partly because nobody could tell us where in New Hampshire the event took place, and it's a moderately large state as far as those things go.

But we did eventually find it: four rugby fields in a cow pasture in a place called Suncook. It was exactly the sort of place you want to be for the day if you have allergies and happen to sunburn easily. Except not.

So yeah: that was fun. I am now bright red of face and am still sneezing. Tim's team lost their first game (which we missed on account of where the fuck is Suncook) but won the other two, which I believe put them into fourth place in their division, although if you ask me why that is I will be unable to tell you. I think the highlight of the afternoon was when a player on another team on a different field had to be airlifted to the nearest major hospital with a serious neck injury. They landed the helicopter right on the rugby pitch and everything.

Rugby: catch the fever!

And the other part of my plan for the day involved the Star Trek reboot, which I had to see immediately, as every single review of the film I saw included actual orgasms. The plan here was to go home, rest up a bit and perhaps apply balm to my sunburned face, buy tickets online for one of the showings in Harvard Square, and then walk there with wife Deb. This is how it worked out, but that is not to say that it worked out. Because of the rain.

The forecast called for "30% chance of showers" for the evening. I never know the best way to interpret those statistics. For instance, the weekend before last it said there was a 30% chance of rain every day, and it didn't rain at all. So I took that to mean the 70% chance of no rain won out. But now I'm thinking if there's a 30% chance of rain it is going to rain for 30% of the evening. Or, in this case, when we happened to be walking from the house to Harvard Square. Cold and soaking wet is no way to go through life, or to the movies.

The movie was deeply awesome, however. I feel that about any film that finds a way to slip in "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys-- which is a mild weakness of mine-- but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

Posted Thursday, April 30, 2009 by Gene (1) comments

Wii don't want to do that again, do Wii?

I have, up to this point, been using the Wii Fit almost entirely for yoga and strength training, because I figure cardio-- where real weight loss would come in-- is being taken care of by the daily bike commute. And that's mostly true, except that I no longer really get my heart rate up when biking, because I've been doing it so long.

So a couple of nights ago I decided to do a little cardio mixed in with the rest of my workout. There is this jogging program, see, and the idea is, you put the Wiimote in your pocket and jog in place, keeping pace with your trainer, who is running on an animated path in front of you. Pretty simple. And the first time I tried it-- a couple of months ago-- pretty easy. But I only did "short", which is about three minutes long, which isn't all that much of a workout. On this night I tried "long" instead.

"Long" was a run of about six minutes. And it still wasn't much in the way of a workout. But when I completed it I unlocked another circuit called "island". Because everyone knows "island" is the next logical word after "short" and "long".

I finished my regular workout and was sort of bored (this was on a day when it was 93 degrees; I couldn't do much writing because I couldn't do much thinking) so I thought I'd give "island" a try.

"Island" is a 14 minute run around (duh) an island. This was a half-decent cardio workout, especially since I'd done a six minute one earlier. What I didn't foresee was exactly what an effect jogging in place for a total of twenty minutes would have on me: my calves have been killing me for two days now. Next time I do this I'm wearing shoes. It probably won't help, but it's worth a try.

Also still killing me: pollen

Just brutal. And I'm not seeing the allergist for another two weeks.

Final demoralizing Wii comment

On the same night I nearly blew out both hamstrings bouncing in place, the program stopped between exercises to register a milestone. It'll do this whenever your daily workout exceeds 30 minutes, and I'm sure there are other milestones I haven't reached yet that it will honor as well. This particular milestone: 10 hours of exercise.

That's right, I've had the Wii Fit for three months, with over 60 daily workouts in that time, and I've only done a total of ten hours.

Posted Tuesday, April 28, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

Death by pollen

It is 93 degrees out right now, and every tree in the area is on Spring break. Oh my god. Did I mention it's April? And it's 93 degrees out? Right now, at 5 in the evening? Yeah. Tomorrow it's going to be 60. I never thought I would so look forward to a one day thirty degree temperature drop.

Now I'm going to lie down and hope my eyes start working properly again sometime before tomorrow. Biking while blind is just not easy, folks.

Posted Thursday, April 23, 2009 by Gene (1) comments

Addendum

Apparently, as regards the below post, it is not always the best idea to use quotation marks in a comical fashion around words like, "a female" without drawing the ire of the female in question. Who knew? Henceforth said female coworker will be identified as friend Jen. Please note however that there is an existing friend Jenn who makes periodic appearances in these blogs, and the first Jen is not the same person as the second Jenn.

That will be all.

Posted Thursday, April 23, 2009 by Gene (4) comments

I am turning into a teenaged girl

Or, you might think so based on my current musical interests. I've been swapping music with someone in the office one might define as "a female", and while I've been dropping Wilco, Beck, and The White Stripes on her she has returned the favor with Lily Allen, A Fine Frenzy, Feist, and The Ting Tings.

Lily Allen is my new crush. If Elvis Costello was a sexually frustrated mid-twenties woman and his music was being composed by The Pet Shop Boys it would sound a little bit like Lily Allen. Sample lyric: "But it doesn't matter cause I'm packing plastic. And that's what makes my life so fucking fantastic."

Posted Wednesday, April 22, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

Wiiservations

So I've had the Wii Fit for somewhere in the neighborhood of two months, and I've lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 pounds. That's with using it only every four or five days, plus the resumption of biking to work. According to the damnable little animated talking balance board I'm supposed to be another 16 pounds lighter to reach "fit", which it defines as a BMI of 22. I don't think I'm going to get there, not because it's impossible but because I expect muscle mass to offset at least some of the weight loss, and the BMI measurement isn't taking that into consideration.

Some thoughts:

--Every now and then either the Wii Fit loses its little mind or something really funky is going on with me. On Sunday I suddenly gained 3.1 pounds. Last night I suddenly lost 3.1 pounds. Unfortunately when there's a large weight gain and the screen comes up with different options for me to choose to potentially explain my sudden gain, "You've lost your fucking mind" is not one of the choices.

--No matter how often I use it, sometime around the ten minute mark my trainer decides to tell me I shouldn't push myself too hard all at once. I don't know why, but I find this demoralizing.

--I chose the male trainer because the female trainer's boobs are mildly disturbing to me. Cleavage is not supposed to look like a four lane highway between two perfectly formed mid-sized peaks. It's odd. But for some reason last night for my first yoga position she showed up and said, "I'll be stepping in for your trainer for this." He was back after that. What the fuck? I know he wasn't busy.

--If you lose too much weight at once you can frighten it. I dropped ten pounds in five days a month ago, causing the program to come to a screeching halt to ask me if I was okay and to not do that again, please.

--I'm sorry, but if I can hold a plank for sixty seconds without falling over, I do not deserve the ranking of "couch potato". I don't care how goddamn shaky I was.

--Yoga is awesome, by the way. I'm thinking of looking up a class in the real gym I officially still belong to. My stomach hasn't been this toned in four years.

Posted Friday, April 17, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

State of Play

Do yourselves a favor and go pick up the six episode BBC miniseries State of Play rather than-- or before-- seeing the Russell Crowe version that came out today. I have heard mostly good things about the film, and that's fine and all, but I guarantee you will find the miniseries MUCH more satisfying.

Hello, street

First warm day we've had this year, so I got a chance to bike in just shorts and a T-shirt instead of that plus pants and a jacket. It was nice. Oh, except for the part where a truck cut me off on the way to a red light. Riiight over the handlebars. My own fault, really. My brakes need work, meaning the front tire stops more efficiently than the back tire, which is only really a problem when I have to stop suddenly. Like, you know, when a truck cuts me off. Everything's fine, just a little road burn on my shoulder.

Posted Wednesday, April 15, 2009 by Gene (0) comments

That rewrite thing

Still working on it. One thing I've discovered-- something I never fully appreciated before-- is how much my own experience as a playwright has betrayed me in screenwriting. In a play you're responsible for every moment the characters experience in a plot, and you're not really supposed to have short scenes. You have long set pieces in one or two locations, you can't just drop in mid-scene and then cut quickly to the next. And that's all movies are, really, are two minutes or so in a single set before moving on to the next, with very little dialogue. So in editing I've discovered how often I wrote that extra one or two lines that didn't need saying, or showed a character not just driving to a location but getting to that location and getting out of the car and walking into the location.

To give you an idea of the difference, on Saturday I turned what was thirteen pages in the last draft into two pages in the new draft. Yikes.

Double yikes

We have a fat dog. She's... really fat. So fat that today the vet ran a blood test to make sure she didn't have a thyroid problem. She doesn't; she's just fat. And I am sitting on my bed with her right now and in addition to being fat she is farting. Aren't you glad I'm blogging this from home? Sure you are.

Posted Monday, April 06, 2009 by Gene (1) comments

Alive!

Just biked home in some of the worst conditions I've ever tried to bike in before. Torrential downpour, strong, icy winds, flash floods. I learned how to go through flood water: follow in a car's wake. There's a lesson you don't learn every day.

Baseball season starts today!

Well more or less. It was actually last night, but that wasn't a Red Sox game. And they aren't playing right now because of the aforementioned torrential downpour. But whatever. It's around now.

Still cleaning

We have been attempting for the better part of a month to completely clean our home from top to bottom, or, as wife Deb refers to it, "finish moving in already." This involved, a couple of weekends ago, steam cleaning all of the rugs. I cannot tell you how little fun this was. About the only positive was that I got a long thin cut along the back of my right hand from one of the plastic ties holding together the hose attachment to the cleaner we rented. You might not think of a permanent scar as a plus, but that just means you've never used a steam cleaner before. I'm about six months away from having an elaborate story about the cut that sounds impressive, if not heroic. Right now all I've got is, "Yeah, I didn't expect her to fight back." I think that needs some work.

Posted Monday, March 30, 2009 by Gene (4) comments

An explanation

Back in January, I sent out a script to a place called The Scriptwriting Network. They offer a thing called the Hollywood Outreach Program every couple of months which, for a fee, will evaluate a script. The short of it is, the "winners"-- if there are any-- will be passed on to production companies for possible optioning.

I sent in a script called Charlatan which is based on my own not-published novel from about a decade ago. I have written and re-written this script about five or six times, showed it to a dozen people for critiques, and trimmed it down by a good fifteen pages. The author of the first professional "coverage" of the script liked it enough to give it a "consider" status, and had the second reader also given it a "consider" or "recommend" status it would have gone to the next round, and three more readers, and then it could have made it to the optioning process. Possibly. But the second reader "passed" on it, which wasn't unexpected.

More importantly, both of them absolutely savaged the script. Again, this is something I worked on a lot and got a fair number of other people who know more about screenwriting than I do to help. It was the best I could do. And this is what's horrible about being a writer, whether very successful or moderately successful or not even a little bit successful: your best work is often not enough. From an ego perspective, that's not something that's at all easy to deal with.

And I don't disagree with a single thing they said. Reading the coverage was a bit like being a two-dimensional person taught to look "up" for the first time. I understand everything they had to say, and I know what I need to do to fix the script, and that's good. I got my money's worth. And I can rewrite it and resubmit it at a discounted price, once I have made changes. More, all of the critiques (a surprise third one turned up) urged me to do this.

So I'd love to say the reason I haven't updated this blog for the past two weeks is that I've been working on that rewrite. Except I haven't. No, I've been sitting around not writing anything whatsoever. Because no matter how good those critiques were and how encouraging it was to see a Hollywood producer beg me (in writing) to take another swing at it, I still saw the things I took for granted-- that my dialogue is good, for instances-- take a real beating. And that sent me reeling a little. Anyway, I have started the rewrite, and I may be back to blogging semi-regularly again.

We'll see.