I have made this plan before and never followed through.

But let me expand my resolution to stop living in filth.

Not only will I no longer live in filth, I will ‘purge apartment of all extraneous matter*’ as well as hideous furniture and inhabit a beautiful Zen apartment. A Zen apartment like… a Japanese hotel corridor. White. Simple. Empty except for beautiful yet durable furniture which cannot be harmed by cat claws, cat urine, dog slobber, dog diahrrea, etc.

If I cannot find Zen furniture I will do without.

*you know where this is from

This year’s motto is SIP.

Stop Inhabiting Pigsty

We went to see Gerald Ford today, well we saw his casket and the changing of the guard outside it.

Why did we go? Well we went because I dragged the little lady. Why I wanted to go, I am not quite sure. But I was glad we did, because it was pretty cool.

It was strange going up on the Capitol steps because I remember a few years ago before this whole terrorism mess began, normal people could just walk up there without going through security. And maybe some of the security is just there for the funeral. But I bet a lot of it is now permanent. And that is sad. Because really that way of life is just gone.

But. Moving on.

What I would like to say about the changing of the guard is the uniform of the Merchant Marine is ridiculous. Moccasins- ridiculous. Giant scarf thing- ridiculous. At least I assume it was the Merchant Marine uniform.

And what I would like to say about the line is that it was long and we kept running into the entertaining people pictured below:

This woman got separated from her husband when she went to pee. Finding her husband was a major production as he had left the line looking for her and he had her cell phone. OK.

Quite a few people became involved in the search, from the police to the earnest tourists. Not us. We stared at her cynically. We gave her the look of death. We wondered if it was all a ploy to cut in front of us in line or what. We wondered how anybody could possibly have to pee that bad and if so why they wouldn’t just go in the street. We muttered skeptically to each other.

We lost track of them for a while, then as we hunted for the car- on the wrong street- we found them.

As you can see, he was holding both their umbrellas and her purse.

I had a teacher once whose husband carried her purse. She was named Mrs Sherwood. This could even have been her.

Holla, Mrs Sherwood.

Time: 12:10 AM

Her: Are the upstairs neighbors… vacuuming?
Me: Yes. Maybe new people have moved in. People who shower and vacuum*.

*Previously, the only sounds that came from upstairs have been Celine Dion and loud pissing (presumably male)

I went to an art show.

“Yes, but what of it?” you ask.

Well, it is the topic of today’s vocabulary lesson. In other words, a collision of computer programming and art terms. An unholy alliance. A trainwreck.

First, let’s have some vocabulary review:

Object-oriented: a system is modeled as a set of objects that can be controlled in a modular manner

Gestalt: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

So if we have the following sentence in an artistic statement: “Unlike most artists who strive for object-oriented realism, I work in abstract forms…”, we know this statement is BS.

When we talk of “composition” in a work of art, we talk about how the piece is structured. That is, how the whole is greater than a sum of its parts.

Realistic art is not modular. It is not object-oriented. It is gestalt.

“Yes, but who cares?” you ask.

“Me!” I howl in reply.

Or are they brilliant and understated? That’s the problem with modern art. You really can’t tell.

Tragically, the letter “E” was missing from the box of letter marker stamp things. I was not to be deterred.

Dear Self,

Don’t forget, wearing boxers on a 12 mile bike ride will inevitably lead to chafing.

Remember that bike ride yesterday? That might be the pain you feel this morning.

Sincerely,

Self

I read cnn.com because sometimes I want my brain to rot out for the fake news and cutesy headlines, yet have no idea at all what is happening in the world.

Today CNN wants to know how racist we are. Well? Paula Zahn wants to know. We must oblige her.

Insuperable technical difficulties, or to be more precise, the way I kept hitting the wrong key, resulted in a response of “Too may errors to score.”

I don’t understand what these people are trying to measure or how this test works: they say that they are trying to measure cultural associations, yet each question has only one right answer- you can’t proceed unless you choose the ‘correct’ association whether or not you agree with that association. The test really seems to be measuring how quickly you learn to recognize patterns and select the ‘correct’ answer.

My guess is that this is either A. a badly designed study that is effectively measuring nothing but is quite revealing about the prejudices of its designers B. a study designed to shock people by giving a predetermined result or C. a study that was fine under controlled conditions but has been implemented on the internet in such a way as to return useless results.

It is a shame because it would be nice to be able to gauge people’s actual degree of comfort with people of various races, backgrounds, sexual orientations, etc. But this study doesn’t seem to be doing that.

You never thought going to Subway could get any worse.

But you were wrong. Because now they have this order-taking, button-pushing, hideous user-interface, talking-to-you-about-options-that-are-not-on-the-screen Devil’s minion Subway machine.

Gone are the days of being able to ask a slack-jawed worker questions such as: “So if I get the chicken bacon ranch, but have it with mustard, would it still be a chicken bacon ranch?”

Now I am not saying that a conversation with the Subway worker is the high point of my day. In general, I find that we have little in common except for the fact that we both hate being there. At Subway.

Subway is the place I eat out of desperation and maybe a little bit because it shares a parking lot with Starbucks and I enjoy not bottoming out now that I drive a large truck instead of a petite sedan and maybe because it is close to the house and faster than 5 Guys – have you noticed it takes like 1 million years to get a burger in that place? If I had 1 million years, I would make my own burger.

To recap, I’m just saying I do not like Subway to begin with. I think the sandwiches taste like cardboard. 5 Guys is too slow. And I think this machine is completely annoying.

Today we had our final critique in painting.

We laughed, we cried. Some people confessed to sex addiction as the reason why they did not finish any work this semester. I mean as excuses go, I think it’s a good one. Of course we didn’t hear the details.

Most of these are mine, not the ones on the bottom right though.

We were reading the first Harry Potter book yesterday despite the fact that Harry Potter is the cockroach of literature.

And in this book, when the kids get to Hogwarts, there is a marble staircase in the entry hall.

Why is there a marble staircase in a Scottish castle? I’m thinking if there were one we are talking about an entryway done in Rococo or Neoclassical Revival of some sort.

So why in the movie is Hogwarts done in Scottish Baronial, a 19th century neo-gothic style? Wherezz the marble staircase, peeps?

Of course in the third movie which was directed by a Spaniard, we also have that weird wooden bridge, the mini-stonehenge, and the mini-Alhambra.

Crazy stuff, man.

This has been the Harry Potter Architectural Synthesis.

To whom it may concern,

I have decided to have an Italian Renaissance view of my essay as being something I can control, rather than a dreary Northern Renaissance vision of my essay as something that is destroying my life and leading me to perdition.

Sincerely,

Kevin Inman
Concerned Citizen,
Student of the Renaissance,
and Essay Writer

Time: 1:00 AM
Place: Bed

Gravel: WHAT’S THAT BEEPING?
Me: The alarm on my watch just like every night.
Gravel: DO WE HAVE THIS CONVERSATION EVERY NIGHT?
Me: Yes.

I’m reviewing for a final. I have found the following gems in my notes:

Leonardo
kept drawings.

andrea del castangno: like a box

the florentine pieta: some weird shit about a perfect work of art with four figures and one block of marble and how the greeks won

laurentian library: decorative elements are functional and vice versa plus weird stairs

explusion of heliodorus in the vatican- play within a play blah blah

Pendentetndntns- or some word

bosch: alchemy?
utopia? who knows

First, an update on the downstairs neighbor. She’s shaking it up. After playing some Chopin for a change, she proceeded to bang on something loudly with a blunt object for about ten minues. It was only 12:45 AM. A perfectly reasonable time to bang on things loudly with a blunt object for about ten minutes.

After that there was silence below.

Let’s hope she was trying to knock some sense into herself.

So.

I have an essay to write.

I like essays. They are easy and fast. Not like papers which require 35 pounds of books which are strewn all over the back of the 4 Runner owing to the fact that the library drop boxes convenient to a road are all now locked until January. Who thought of this? Do the library workers think that just because they lock the drop boxes, that this somehow magically brings the library itself closer to the parking lot?

Who wants to carry 35 pounds of books to the library from a parking lot miles away? And what could this hypothetical person possibly carry them in?

A bag. And why didn’t I think of this before? When it took me three trips to take the books out to the car in the first place?

I will just get a bag. Problem solved.

But not the problem of the essay which since it must be typed has become A. Huge. Problem and I just can’t spit out the usual. Stream of made-up nonsense. It’s as though an essay can only come out of me in a sudden quick burst in the classroom and if it requires editing, that’s it.

I just stare at the question and my mind shuts down.

It’s an easy question: What’s the difference between northern Renaissance art and Italian Renaissance art?

It’s an easy question: What’s the difference between my ass and a hole in the ground?

I don’t know.

That is my answer to both of these questions. I just don’t know.

Moving right along.

Tonight as I was making the coffee, I had one of those startling realizations. An epiphany, maybe, sort of like the sudden flash of understanding I have just had regarding the bag and inconvenient volume of library books that need to be returned and how the two can be combined in new and exciting ways. And in case you got lost in that sentence the things we are talking about here are books and bags. And you see- books can be placed in bags.

So where was I.

I was grinding the beans and looking at the side of the Starbucks Christmas Blend. Now I will explain two things:

One, the downstairs neighbor is now being yelled at by some guy.

But there are no words just “AAAAAH!! YAAAAH!! HARRRRR!!” Another neighbor enraged by the music and hammering? The cello-playing boyfriend come back for more? Now she is yelling back. I don’t think they speak English.

Two, despite the fact that Starbucks is the cockroach of civilization, I really like the Christmas Blend.

So I was grinding the beans and looking at my bag of Christmas blend where it tells you to put two tablespoons of coffee per cup of water. And I was thinking the same thing I have thought for the past six years whenever I have seen that. That it is weird that my coffee does not taste weak since I only put in one tablespoon of coffee per cup. And actually, more than that, I have always assumed it was a coffee marketing ploy. Try to get people to buy twice as much coffee as they need. And since my coffee tastes just like coffee you get at a coffee shop I figured they were all in on this. This scam. All those baristas and coffee marketing personnel. I was thinking about what a good thing they have going. Making their coffee half as strong as they recommend that their customers do.

But then I suddenly realized that of course, I put in 6 tablespoons of coffee and fill up the coffee pot to the line that says 6.

And this makes not 6 but 3 cups of coffee. And some simple math. 6/3=2 tablespoons of coffee per cup.

I can only imagine this is how people feel when they make that final logical leap. The one that leads to the Nobel Prize. Einstein sitting there chewing on his pencil thinking “It’s squared! E= MC squared! Eureka!”

I mean, six years?