PhoneBoy Says

I am currently going through all of the music I have ripped into iTunes and rating it. I came up with a somewhat clever way of doing it, yet sort of "randomizing" the experience so I get to hear a mix while I'm doing it. Something called a Smart Playlist. It allows me to create a playlist based on rules. I basically have created a playlist that shows me only unrated songs 25 at a time.

Anyway, in the process of going through all this music, I find that with many of the songs, I can remember a particular time or period in my life. For example, I am listening to a track from Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut." That album was introduced to me in the dorms in high school. I remember moping around my dorm room listening to it while in one of my usual funks. Next up: The Beatles "Let it Be." Not sure, but I think my mom or step-father had that album. Now a track from Roger Waters "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking." College, for sure. Back when I was exploring Pink Floyd in more depth. This track by Men at Work? Don't recognize it. It's not a bad song, but it's getting a low rating.

For me, anyway, it's about artists or songs that have some conscious or sub-conscious link to my past. I'm willing to listen to say, Alan Parsons, whom has several songs that link back to my childhood. His current music sounds a bit different, and I'm willing to give it a chance because of a strong association.

Most current music just doesn't "stick." Is it because the moments with music in them are few and far between? Are the "truly memorable moments" few and far between? I don't have time to sit around and listen to music anymore, that's for sure.

Over the years, I have lived in a number of places with different people in different situations. That is not something I have had to tolerate, but it's not something I've been too happy about. One of the few things that has remained constant in my life is the music. In moments where I need to "find my happy place" or whatever you want to call it, the headphones comes on and the music comes on. These days, I can go a month or so without listening to music and then I'll spend a few days listening to music and get it out of my system.

Back in college, making mix tapes was a way of life. Seems like I was making a mix tape all the time and listening to them. Or particular albums. Songs often repeated themselves a lot on my mix tapes. Maybe I'll go through my mix tapes sometimes and list all the repeated songs sometime.

In my last post, I went into some of the "quirks" I've noticed about myself over the years that have caused problems in my relationships with others. I'm I normal? And who decides?

So, of course, when I have a question, I ask the great Oracle of Google. Here are some relevant definitions that were results:

• conforming with or constituting a norm or standard orlevel or type or social norm; not abnormal; "serve wine at normal roomtemperature"; "normal diplomatic relations"; "normal working hours";"normal word order"; "normal curiosity"; "the normal course of events"
• being approximately average or within certain limits ine.g. intelligence and development; "a perfectly normal child"; "ofnormal intelligence"; "the most normal person I've ever met"
• In behavior, normal means not deviating very much fromthe average; "not normal" is often used in a negative sense (improper,sick, etc.). Abnormality varies greatly in how pleasant or unpleasantthis is for other people; somebody may half-jokingly be called"pleasantly disturbed". …

While in the shower this morning, I remembered the story of the "normal" man who found himself in a town full of insane people (I don't remember exactly how the story goes, but this was the gist). He, of course, got persecuted because everyone else in the town thought he was insane. Why? Well, given the general population of the town, this "sane" person was not the norm. The general population of this town viewed this "normal" person as insane.

The moral of the story, of course, is that normalcy is all relative. What seems perfectly reasonable to you might, in fact, be absolutely insane to someone else. So all of my "quirks" are perfectly normal to me because, well, that's how I am. My wife, who is a very different kind of person, finds my quirks anything from annoying to maddening, depending on when they choose to manifest themselves.

Not quite sure why I'm doing this now. Probably because I've talked about Autism with someone recently and it's the kind of stuff that makes me think. Here's a random list of "odd" things about me. Make your own diagnosis.

• Dealing with social situations has always been hard for me. I am not terribly good at reading people or understanding the subtext of a particular situation. It often comes up with my wife.
• It takes me a significant amount of processing time to understand what I am feeling. The why often takes even longer.
• In noisy situations, I find it difficult to "tune out" other noise around in order to hear someone talking to me.
• I find emotions particularly difficult to control.
• I have difficulty remembering what someone actually said to me. I can, however, recall how I interpreted it or felt about it. This makes it very difficult for me to, for instance, answer the phone and take a message for someone else. Most of the time, if our home phone rings and nobody is home, unless it's my wife, something like the school, or someone I am expecting to hear from, I simply don't answer it. Saves arguments,
• About 10 years ago when I worked in an actual office (as opposed to at home), I would occasionally sit under the desk of my cubicle.
• I do not have a very good ability to regulate my voice within a moderate range. When I worked in an office, I ended up making a point to go into an office to talk. I'm a little better now, though my wife can usually hear my phone conversations downstairs, even with the door closed.
• Christmas Music, after a period of time, irritates me.
• I am frequently too engrossed in what I am doing or thinking to see what is going on around me. I have a "high" noise threshold when I'm in my zone.
• I find it difficult to "break the ice" with people I don't know or in unfamiliar situations. The first phone call I have with a particular customer--something I have to do from time to time--frightens me to the point of trying to avoid it. I've had to get better at it, obviously.
• I have been accused of having very narrow interests. That's pretty much true. A perfect vacation for me is when everyone else leaves the house and I'm home alone. It's happened, and it's joyous. In fact, I stay up late long after everyone else is asleep to get that time to myself.
• I rarely listen to music aloud if anyone's home. If I do, it's usually headphones.
• I can remember numbers better than the average person. To the point where I frequently don't use the phonebook built into my phone and just dial the digits. It's faster. I also remember crap like my first phone number, our telephone number when we lived in Spokane, etc.
• I have a fairly good associative memory. If I am trying to recall when something happened in my life, I can usually pinpoint it within a year or so based on what year I was in school. For example, I looked at an undated picture of my dad and my sister this afternoon. My dad was sitting in his Celica, which I knew he had when I was in second grade. My sister was fairly young in this picture also. That places the photo at approximately 1980-81.

  

• I am not a very detail oriented person. Most of the time. In some things, I am the opposite. "Narrow focus" I suppose.

That's all I can think of for now. Have an early morning meeting, so I should go crash while the getting's good.

Show us a photo of something that's gone now.

I have a case of the blahs. I look at a lot of the "tech stuff" and go "eh, so what." Blogging over on my other blog has been light as a result despite the fact that CES is happening this week. Overload of tech news! Oh yeah, and MacWorld is going on too. Yay, even more tech news! A geek's dream, but it seems like too much. I think my head would explode if I actually went to either trade show. I found MacWorld too much back in the early 1990s, back when I had time to do that crap.

I just hope Apple releases their ITV product as I am looking forward to buying it for Christmas. Yes, this past Christmas. I want to be able to watch TV downstairs without having to bring my MacBook downstairs every time I want to do it.

This is a test. Random picture of Gracie taking a bath is part of that test.

With apologies to the late Frank Zappa for stealing a line or two from Joe's Garage, here's a picture that was taken of me for my senior page in the yearbook. My high school was small enough that each of us got our own page in our senior-year yearbook where we could write whatever quotes or "shout-outs" we wanted as well as put some pictures. I had Mrs. Y take this picture for me. Made sense to do it in black and white since those were black and white pages. I think it looks a lot better that way.

This was taken pre-digital cameras and has lived in the envelope I originally turned it into the yearbook staff to. It's obviously scanned and has some artifacts as a result. Still think it's a damn fine picture, though

I think I was about four when this picture was taken. A remember a different version of this picture where I was standing on the sink completely naked doing the same thing.

What is your favorite ring tone?
Submitted by rach.

On the newer Nokia phones, specifically ones that run Series 60 Third Edition, they have a ring tone called "Nostalgia" which sounds like an old ringing telephone from an era long ago. I like that one as well as one that includes the Martians from Sesame Street, also from an era long past.

I agree with Ken on how annoying some people's ring tones are.

When I was in high school, I wrote a heck of a lot of poetry. It tried to put the jumbled mess of feelings I had in high school into some kind of coherent and artistic expression. I was misguided enough to think it might impress the ladies, which of course it didn't, at least in the way I wanted. Of course, I was misguided about a lot of things back then.

I was trying to find all the stuff I wrote. A couple of my poems got published in my high school's literary magazine. The fact I was one of the editors that year had nothing to do with that, of course, as I primarily worked on page layout. I know I have them on a disk. However, I don't have a computer capable of reading those old disks as they are Mac 800k disks! Why didn't I transfer them to at least 1.4mb disks, where I might have some hope of reading them? Given I've had them over 15 years now, who knows if anything can still read them? Floppy disks "go south" after a while.

Scarily enough, I ran across some paper journal entries from college that are timestamped about as late as I am writing now. I'm almost afraid to read those papers, though I'm not sure why. It was me. Okay, so I looked at them. Mostly from sophomore year of college. Man, I was girl-obsessed. Man, was I stupid about it.

And here it is, almost 3am, and I should be sleeping. Guess I haven't grown out of stupid yet.