One year and six days ago I spent my “birthday work lunch” making and serving grilled cheese sandwiches for the homeless families at Carpenter’s Shelter. I’d estimate I made about 30 of them. Me and other coworkers were volunteering for the lunch shift. It was a good thing to do, the staff and temporary residents all seemed pretty thankful and it felt really good to do it too. And it was fun. I had also taken the following two days off of work, a Thursday and Friday, to have a long extended birthday weekend. I had days to use up before the end of the year anyway. So my birthday last year was technically the last day I was in the studio as an employee.

One year and five days ago I caught a flu bug and was pretty much laid up in bed for those two days I had taken off work and the weekend, too.

One year and one day ago was Monday and I was scheduled to be back at work but since I was still not feeling 100% and we were dreadfully slow I decided to take a sick day and have another day of recovering.

One year ago I walked into work and, before my strict 8:30 morning meeting, was ambushed in my office and told that I had been laid off along with five other employees.

So it’s been 365 days of unemployment. Which means filing a lot of actual paperwork and digital paperwork. My food stamps will expire this month so that’s $200 less money from my unemployment checks, in a sense, that I’ll be getting.

Have you ever tried to find a 2nd-tier creative job in an uncreative town? It’s not easy. Most of the local ads I’m finding are skimming the bottom of the barrel: “do this logo for $50 and there’s no way it should take you more than two hours”… or freelance jobs that are paying $15 an hour. When I moved here fourteen years ago I was making $30/hour on freelance jobs.

So now what? Reinvention? Easier than it sounds. Relocate? Most employers aren’t going to hire someone who is not local. Go and work at somewhere that’s three levels beneath my education & experience? That seems the only option now. Suggestions?

I’m sitting here, looking at this. And at that. And it’s nothing that I haven’t seen before. I’m sure you’ve seen it too, one of those days where you just look around at things and sit there.

Don’t deny it, you’ve had those days.

There’s no reason to go anywhere, really. There’s no where to go for any reason. And so you don’t. You don’t do anything. You don’t go anywhere. You sit down at the computer and there’s no reason to go anywhere through that box either. And yet you go there.

All day.

You think of what the rest of the world is doing, and you let that happen around you. There’s so much this and that, and yet you do this… and that… meaning you go there in the next room and look around… and then you go into the next room, and look at it, and move…

Mr. Coup said that we, as humans, are not meant for idle time and I’m starting to believe that.

National Novel Writing Month official ended five days ago, but I’m just now uploading the content that I have written. The goal was a 50,000 word piece, and I knew I wouldn’t make it to that goal. I originally thought I could hit the 20,000 mark but I failed miserably in achieving that almost halfway goal. I wrote a little over 10% of the stated goal of 50K, ending with 5738 words.

In hindsight I should have set off an hour a day (or even 1/2 hour) just to sit down and write. The premise of NaNoWriMo is to just continue writing, to keep going at it without thinking about it too much. Sort of a stream of consciousness. I got lost in the trance of writing a couple of times and that was really fun but that didn’t happen too often and starting up the next time seemed a little daunting. And maybe I thought about it too much, where the characters were going and how they were interacting to get into the flow of it.

For example, I never really got to explore Mark’s numerology, the relationship between he and Aleah, Daniel’s larger part in Mark’s life and Mark never got another review with his boss, Helena, and I was really waiting for that. I wanted Georgie’s chapter(s) to be more in depth but had to squeeze in the first one in order to hit the writing deadline.

You can read my 5738 words below.

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I went home for Thanksgiving this year. I didn’t go last year. Speaking with my Dad last year he said, “I know sometimes you want to get together with your friends…”. I hadn’t missed a Thanksgiving in the last fourteen years I’ve been living here so I had no idea what he was talking about. But I took advantage of it anyway, and didn’t have to deal with the travel hassle of a quick trip. But this year I decided to go, since I hadn’t seen many relatives since February and I think Christmas is going to be a little “off” this year as my brother and his family will be going to visit my sister-in-law’s in New York state.

It turned out that renting a Zipcar was just as expensive as taking the train down to my Dad’s so I chose that option, which would give me greater flexibility about traveling times and definitely less stress about getting to a train station twice. I scheduled a 24-hour reservation, leaving Wednesday evening and coming back on Thursday, after the feast.

Since all Zipcars (thankfully) have iPod adapters now I was able to leave the seemingly-archaic CDs at home and just take my iPhone and play music from there. I put on Arcadia’s So Red The Rose and headed south, reminding me of those Friday nights headed to Badlands cranking the tape (EMI Catalog: 42148) so many years ago. It still sounded good loud, exhibiting its many nuances.

Upon arriving it’s the requisite sit-in-the-living-room-watching-History-Channel stuff, and then when it gets close to 9:00 I ask “Can you switch it over to Channel 5 so we can watch Glee?”. Well. About ten minutes into it my brother (my oldest brother) says “This would be a great show if they would stop singing.” Um, yeah, I think that’s kind of the point. He gets up and leaves and then my Dad, instead of watching the show with me, starts reading a road atlas.

Fast forward. It’s about 2:00am and after going to bed and listening to some music I decide it’s actually time to go to sleep but I toss and turn until almost daybreak. Looking back I think I was dozing in and out of consciousness but at the time it seemed like I was just laying there, awake.

At times the dim light coming through the cracked bedroom door would appear to turn red like a laser beam, but only in its color not in its concentration. Then it would cloud and flicker back to a warm dim yellow which seemed more natural.

Then, and I don’t know if I dreamed this or imagined it and whether it actually happened, I felt something, a cloudy presence, off to the right of my eye. It was a form, but not a recognizable form, that slowly changed and flowed as if smoke from a cigarette was contained in a glass sphere, swirling around and around but not dissipating. Was this the ghost or spirit of my mother, who had died in the bedroom down the hall two-and-a-half years ago? Maybe I was groggy and frustrated from not being able to attain sleep. Regardless, I looked at it for a while and said “Hi Mom, I love you.” and immediately fell asleep.

The next thing I remember is waking up a few hours later and hearing my dad in the kitchen making coffee. The remainder of the day would be filled with having my five-year-old niece read a story about Pilgrims to me, getting kisses from my nephew and catching up with aunts, uncles, cousins and their children and grandparents. There was a lot of family love there, I could feel it.

Today on their website Duran Duran announced an all-encompassing repackaging of Arcadia’s 1985 So Red The Rose, arguably the best Duran Duran album never made. Nick Rhodes had hinted towards this release several months ago and I was eager to see if it would come to see the light.

History: Arcadia was one of the DD splinter groups in 1985, at the height of their fame, being comprised of Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor. The other remaining DD members joined up with Robert Palmer and Tony Thompson to form Power Station.

This re-release includes the original album as-is and all 20 remixes of the five released singles from the album, plus the soundtrack-only rarity “Say The Word”. Also included is the über-rare long form version of “Rose Arcana”. The shorter (0:51) version, according to legend, ended up on the original lease due to length of tape and vinyl allowed to be released at that time. I don’t know if that is necessarily true, but it does make for good folklore. Also included are all five videos and making-of documentaries for each video.

This project would also mark the last use of graphic designer Malcolm Garrett of Assorted Images for any of their packaging or branding related efforts.

Just for kicks, here’s video of 80s stalwart Max Headroom giving Simon and Nick a hard time:

From the Duran Duran press release, the complete track listing for the re-release is below:

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These items were found in my wallet:

• TriMet bus transfer (from Portland, Oregon)
• DC Metrorail receipt for $4.00 purchased on 11/19/09 at 22:47:13 at 7th & S St, NW (Shaw/Howard University stop)
• Wetzel’s Pretzels Frequent Buyer Card, punched six times therefore receiving a free pretzel (free spot also punched)
• Handwritten banking routing numbers and account numbers, which after a quick search, point to Bank of America routing numbers.

How did these items get into my wallet you ask? I’m not really sure, as I’ve never been to Portland, don’t get receipts for Metro tickets (much less buy one for only $4.00) and don’t even know what a Wetzel’s Pretzels shop is. Another search reveals there are no shops in DC. Then I remembered the other night at the movies,making my way through the concession line when someone said I had dropped something out of the my wallet and I gathered up the pieces of paper on the floor and shoved them into my wallet. It turns out, they weren’t really mine. Maybe I had dropped a receipt of sorts and it fell upon these already lost pieces of information and I hastily scooped everything up without even looking at what it was.

After looking out the window every five minutes this afternoon a Lego shipment finally arrived and I immediately built this sculpture.

Yep, that’s it. It’s a thrill-a-minute around here. Yawn.

They say not to let your work life define you, except here in The District that’s what we do. It’s always the 2nd question asked when meeting someone. “What do you do?” Earlier in 2009 I used to answer this question with a professional title associated with what I’ve been trained to do for the past twenty years but sometimes I answer it with “Nothing” because that’s literally what I’m doing right now. So if work defines us and one doesn’t work, you can do the math.

Today since the weather was nice I went to the grocery store. Big whoop. I did this because basically I had run out of sugar for my morning coffee. Creamer I can do without but sugar, no. So I went. This was the first time I’ve walked there since the weather turned cooler and it instantly reminded me all those cold forays (sometimes at the break of dawn) to the store nine or ten months ago. Thankfully it’s not that cold yet. But it will be soon enough.

It’s funny the familiar people you see in a grocery store mid-afternoon on a Tuesday. Familiar people that you’ve seen at the gym, a local restaurant or bar, the bus. And you wonder why they’re there at that particular time. Did they call in sick? Is this their lunch break? Do they work nights? Are they using an EBT Card?

My favorite checkout employee wasn’t working. Out of chance (or fate) I was always in her line when I first started using my EBT when I was unfamiliar with the process. She always very discreet when she would need to explain to me something paying extra (for non-consumables) or alerting me to when coupons expire. I’ve helped her grab items off the top shelf that she couldn’t reach while she was doing her own shopping. Maybe she recognized me and that’s why she asked, or maybe I was just the tallest, closest person.

So that’s what I did today. Oh, and then I went to the gym. And then I came home and made a sandwich for dinner. Then I went to bed.

Purchase: $37.18
EBT Card Balance: $240.49
Club Card Savings: $1.69

I see now I was charged $3.79 for a stuffing mix that should have been $1.50. Sigh.

Rattle, of The Twins™, gone two years today. Rattle is in the background.