Well, not really. I just signed up for a two week trial period that will be up on Saturday, and I fully plan on making the commitment to keep studying. I'm learning that I can, in fact, be somewhat graceful, even if I still wobble and catch myself at times (but Tai Chi will help with that), and I'm feeling muscles I didn't know I had. I'm toning and conditioning, and I'm already starting to feel better; I'm even sleeping better at night. Plus, they start out teaching you some good practical self defense moves. My belt's already gone in another notch, and it's only been two weeks.
I never realized how much I was missing by not doing this sooner.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
At times, I do miss the record store
From roughly October 2004 to May 2006, I worked at a mall record store. It was one of the less dollar-intensive jobs I've had, but strangely, one of the most enjoyable. I was a manager, more or less, so I had a bit of responsibility and a modicum of authority, but not so as you'd notice.
We were a pretty tight crew. The difference between our store and others in the chain was, and still is, remarkable. Why? Most of us, especially management, really knew music. Between me and the other two managers, we had almost every genre (except modern country and gangsta rap) covered in terms of outright knowledge. What we didn't listen to we'd pick up on as people asked about it. You'd be amazed at how many songs we could identify without ever having heard them.
What we enjoyed was helping people find music, and sharing new music that we liked with people that we though would enjoy it. It made my day when someone came in and said they really liked that album we had suggested (and yes, you can still say "album." The medium on which the music resides may be a CD, but the collected body of work is still an album).
What I don't like about retail is, well, that it's retail. Retail, as most if us know, pays crap. And yet retail companies expect quite a bit from their employees. Dis-proportionally so, in my opinion. Companies stress good customer service, and going the extra mile, but will they do the same in relation to their employees? Will they pay them an extra few bucks so Joe Retail feels it's worth his time to go out of his way for a difficult customer?
Better yet, will they actually stand behind that employee if he's faced with a customer who is only out to scam the store? Most of the time? No. My managers were the exceptions. We always had each others backs, with customers and upper management.
Too bad the pay was so bad. I might still be there.
We were a pretty tight crew. The difference between our store and others in the chain was, and still is, remarkable. Why? Most of us, especially management, really knew music. Between me and the other two managers, we had almost every genre (except modern country and gangsta rap) covered in terms of outright knowledge. What we didn't listen to we'd pick up on as people asked about it. You'd be amazed at how many songs we could identify without ever having heard them.
What we enjoyed was helping people find music, and sharing new music that we liked with people that we though would enjoy it. It made my day when someone came in and said they really liked that album we had suggested (and yes, you can still say "album." The medium on which the music resides may be a CD, but the collected body of work is still an album).
What I don't like about retail is, well, that it's retail. Retail, as most if us know, pays crap. And yet retail companies expect quite a bit from their employees. Dis-proportionally so, in my opinion. Companies stress good customer service, and going the extra mile, but will they do the same in relation to their employees? Will they pay them an extra few bucks so Joe Retail feels it's worth his time to go out of his way for a difficult customer?
Better yet, will they actually stand behind that employee if he's faced with a customer who is only out to scam the store? Most of the time? No. My managers were the exceptions. We always had each others backs, with customers and upper management.
Too bad the pay was so bad. I might still be there.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Harry Potter and Unpopular Antiquated Notions
With all the buzz-- no, make that hysteria-- surrounding the recent recent release of the final Harry Potter novel (Hermione kills Snape), I have been thinking about my particular tastes in fiction and why I am singularly uninterested in the Potter series (Ron kills Harry).
I remember seeing the first novel in B. Dalton's, and thinking it was a cute idea. It certainly taps into a common fantasy among grade-schoolers-- that their parents aren't their real parents, and that soon they will have a life changing moment in which their true lineage will be revealed and they will live a life far removed from the banality of the normal (in Morpheus' words, the "desert of the real"). This is not to say that they all think they're really a wizard, a rainbow unicorn trapped in human form, or a werewolf whose abilities will become evident at the onset of puberty (thank you, White Wolf). They may hope to be the long lost heir of an oil magnate who was put up for adoption at birth, and will now inherit lots of money to blow on comic books and action figures.
I digress.
What I can't quite wrap my mind around is the enthusiasm that many adult readers of the books exhibit. I'm not talking about the ones that simply read the book and enjoy it; I'm specifically referring to the ones who dress up in costume for the books release. The ones who are so involved in these characters' lives that a drive-by spoiling at the release of the last book caused cries of anguish from those waiting. Apparently there's video of this. I shall have to find it. (Fluffy kills Hagrid)
I can hardly imagine people dressing up as Frodo or Gandalf in 1955 to celebrate the release of The Return of the King, much less being devastated by finding out the ending prematurely. Of course, the title is in and of itself a spoiler of sorts, leaving little doubt that the nominal King is Elessar of Gondor. Anyone who'd been paying attention up to that point could pretty much figure that one out.
And I don't begrudge anyone their fandom; I just don't see the appeal. Zach has said that perhaps I am not disillusioned with the books, indeed, how can I be, never having read them, but that I am fed up with the hype surrounding them.
I find this point to be valid.
I must also point out that I am being a bit of a literary snob. I read Steinbeck. I prefer my fantasy epic. I am eagerly awaiting the next installment of the Song of Ice and Fire (Tyrion kills Voldemort... wait, what?). But what I enjoy most is pulp. Edgar Rice Burroughs. HP Lovecraft. And the father of Sword and Sorcery (and, in my opinion, the Grandfather of modern adventure fantasy), Robert E. Howard.
The pulps tell more than a story. They tell us about the time in which they were written. Howard and Lovecraft were unforgivable racists. Their casual callousness to issues of race astound modern readers and drive many away. When originally written, they reflected many current popular issues regarding race. When read now, they force us to hold a mirror to our own psyches and determine if we have indeed advanced as much as we like to think we have. Hopefully the answer for the modern reader is yes.
I remember seeing the first novel in B. Dalton's, and thinking it was a cute idea. It certainly taps into a common fantasy among grade-schoolers-- that their parents aren't their real parents, and that soon they will have a life changing moment in which their true lineage will be revealed and they will live a life far removed from the banality of the normal (in Morpheus' words, the "desert of the real"). This is not to say that they all think they're really a wizard, a rainbow unicorn trapped in human form, or a werewolf whose abilities will become evident at the onset of puberty (thank you, White Wolf). They may hope to be the long lost heir of an oil magnate who was put up for adoption at birth, and will now inherit lots of money to blow on comic books and action figures.
I digress.
What I can't quite wrap my mind around is the enthusiasm that many adult readers of the books exhibit. I'm not talking about the ones that simply read the book and enjoy it; I'm specifically referring to the ones who dress up in costume for the books release. The ones who are so involved in these characters' lives that a drive-by spoiling at the release of the last book caused cries of anguish from those waiting. Apparently there's video of this. I shall have to find it. (Fluffy kills Hagrid)
I can hardly imagine people dressing up as Frodo or Gandalf in 1955 to celebrate the release of The Return of the King, much less being devastated by finding out the ending prematurely. Of course, the title is in and of itself a spoiler of sorts, leaving little doubt that the nominal King is Elessar of Gondor. Anyone who'd been paying attention up to that point could pretty much figure that one out.
And I don't begrudge anyone their fandom; I just don't see the appeal. Zach has said that perhaps I am not disillusioned with the books, indeed, how can I be, never having read them, but that I am fed up with the hype surrounding them.
I find this point to be valid.
I must also point out that I am being a bit of a literary snob. I read Steinbeck. I prefer my fantasy epic. I am eagerly awaiting the next installment of the Song of Ice and Fire (Tyrion kills Voldemort... wait, what?). But what I enjoy most is pulp. Edgar Rice Burroughs. HP Lovecraft. And the father of Sword and Sorcery (and, in my opinion, the Grandfather of modern adventure fantasy), Robert E. Howard.
The pulps tell more than a story. They tell us about the time in which they were written. Howard and Lovecraft were unforgivable racists. Their casual callousness to issues of race astound modern readers and drive many away. When originally written, they reflected many current popular issues regarding race. When read now, they force us to hold a mirror to our own psyches and determine if we have indeed advanced as much as we like to think we have. Hopefully the answer for the modern reader is yes.
Monday, July 16, 2007
That Old Sinking Sensation
I am terrified of heights. They frighten me to the point of panic. Needless to say I avoid them like the plague; not that it's always possible. I remember taking the cable car to the top of Stone Mountain and being barely able to keep calm. I informed Eileen and her sister that we would be walking down the mountain on the return trip.
Ironically, while the cable car scared me stupid, I was fine once I had solid ground beneath me again, even though I was several hundred feet up.
Elevators, while manageable, sometimes give me a start if I feel a little bit of a lurch or rumble that seems out of place. The fact that an elevator (that I used to use almost daily when I delivered office supplies) at the Georgia DHR plummeted dozens of floors before the emergency brakes stopped it a few floors above the ground doesn't help things. I could very easily have been on the elevator.
Which brings me to my point. One of my most common nightmares is that of stepping onto an elevator and having it drop the minute the doors close. Regardless of whether I'm going up or down, it always falls. I usually wake up before it hits, or the dream manages to switch gears before I hit bottom, so I never actually ride out the whole descent. The strange thing is, though, that this has happened so often that now, when confronted with an elevator in a dream, I take the stairs.
Ironically, while the cable car scared me stupid, I was fine once I had solid ground beneath me again, even though I was several hundred feet up.
Elevators, while manageable, sometimes give me a start if I feel a little bit of a lurch or rumble that seems out of place. The fact that an elevator (that I used to use almost daily when I delivered office supplies) at the Georgia DHR plummeted dozens of floors before the emergency brakes stopped it a few floors above the ground doesn't help things. I could very easily have been on the elevator.
Which brings me to my point. One of my most common nightmares is that of stepping onto an elevator and having it drop the minute the doors close. Regardless of whether I'm going up or down, it always falls. I usually wake up before it hits, or the dream manages to switch gears before I hit bottom, so I never actually ride out the whole descent. The strange thing is, though, that this has happened so often that now, when confronted with an elevator in a dream, I take the stairs.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Origins
Last weekend I and several friends attended Origins, a gaming convention in Columbus Ohio. In addition to discovering that it was not as big a culture shock as I was expecting, I also, as part of the gaming podcast I am involved in, got to sit down and chat with Mike Stackpole, noted Science Fiction author and RPG contributor. I found this especially exciting, as I had an opportunity to ask him about the Pulling Report.
I've long been a player and advocate of Role-Playing games, and even though I do not play as often as I'd like, I still keep up with the hobby, more or less. I have never bought the line of reasoning that equated Dungeons and Dragons with a path to Satanism, even before I started playing in high school. I started playing D&D in 1991, and by then it was mostly out of the woods insofar as Satanic claims were concerned, partially (I like to think) because of Mike's comprehensive defense of the hobby and surgical deconstruction of it's most vitriolic detractor's criticisms.
(At this point I must point out that my parents did not wish me to become involved with the game when I started, but not because of the Satanic scare surrounding it; they were afraid my grades would slip if I started playing, which happened, but not terribly so.)
While we spoke mainly about the state of podcasting, gaming, and gaming podcasts, I did have a chance to ask him if he thought the gaming industry was out of the woods when it came to the right-wing religious nut-jobs, and his answer was pretty much yes. Gaming has become so mainstream, partially thanks to the D20 label, that almost everybody knows someone who plays, and can immediately see claims of Satanic conspiracy directed towards them to be pretty much false.
The preponderance of girl gamers has also helped mainstream the hobby, I think. At the very least, they're helping the stereotype of the unwashed basement dwelling gamer nerd become less common. Not that they're in any danger of becoming extinct, mind you; Origins was full of them. The presence of women, though, may have encouraged more of them to bathe than would normally otherwise have.
~J
I've long been a player and advocate of Role-Playing games, and even though I do not play as often as I'd like, I still keep up with the hobby, more or less. I have never bought the line of reasoning that equated Dungeons and Dragons with a path to Satanism, even before I started playing in high school. I started playing D&D in 1991, and by then it was mostly out of the woods insofar as Satanic claims were concerned, partially (I like to think) because of Mike's comprehensive defense of the hobby and surgical deconstruction of it's most vitriolic detractor's criticisms.
(At this point I must point out that my parents did not wish me to become involved with the game when I started, but not because of the Satanic scare surrounding it; they were afraid my grades would slip if I started playing, which happened, but not terribly so.)
While we spoke mainly about the state of podcasting, gaming, and gaming podcasts, I did have a chance to ask him if he thought the gaming industry was out of the woods when it came to the right-wing religious nut-jobs, and his answer was pretty much yes. Gaming has become so mainstream, partially thanks to the D20 label, that almost everybody knows someone who plays, and can immediately see claims of Satanic conspiracy directed towards them to be pretty much false.
The preponderance of girl gamers has also helped mainstream the hobby, I think. At the very least, they're helping the stereotype of the unwashed basement dwelling gamer nerd become less common. Not that they're in any danger of becoming extinct, mind you; Origins was full of them. The presence of women, though, may have encouraged more of them to bathe than would normally otherwise have.
~J
Friday, July 13, 2007
So now I have a blog
Because I just can't keep the voices in my head silent. Of course, this being my first post, don't expect much in the way of insight or introspection. You'll have to wait until I actually have something to say before that happens. Trust me, I've got a lot bouncing around up here, and now hopefully I'll have a bit more organized forum in which to let it out. Definitely more formal than a MySpace page, which, though useful, isn't really set up as a forum exclusively devoted to self-expression. Not that I expect to have a wide audience, but I suppose we'll see.
~J
~J
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