OK, so here’s what I’m adding to my playlist. Some of these are random discoveries; some are suggestions from others (thanks!); some are just things I’ve been wanting for a while (that would be most of the big hits below, and the Tapping the Vein CD).

Tapping the Vein: The entire “The Damage” CD
October Project: “Ariel”
Mary Fahl: “Dream of You”
Grey Eye Glances: “Days to Dust”
Snake River Conspiracy: “How Soon is Now?”
Ford w/ Jori: “Pure Imagination” (trance mix)
Breaking Benjamin: “Blow Me Away”, “So Cold”, “Break My Fall”
Costanza: “I’ve Been Waiting For You”
Smash Mouth: “Then the Morning Comes”, “All Star”
Madonna: “Secret”, “Vogue”, “Like a Prayer”, “La Isla Bonita”
Maroon 5: “Harder to Breathe”
Gorillaz: “Feel Good Inc.”
Green Day: “Holiday”, “Wake Me Up When September Ends”, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”
Collide: “Wings of Steel”, “Euphoria”
Crystal Waters: “100% Pure Love”, “Gypsy Woman”
Moulin Noir: “Spellbound” (Run Level Zero mix)
Shawn Colvin: “Sunny Came Home”, “You and the Mona Lisa”
Switchfoot: “Dare You to Move”, “Meant to Live”
Loaded Dreams: “A Love Song”

I don’t have quite all of them yet (I’m still waiting on Tim to get me everything from the top down to Breaking Benjamin), but it’ll go in as soon as it gets here.

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Tim and I got hooked a while back on Anthony Bourdain’s Travel Channel show called “No Reservations”. Unfortunately, there have been no new episodes for quite a while and we’re not entirely sure that there ever will be–but we have the benefit of TiVo, which still has several episodes on it, which we keep re-watching. Over the weekend, we re-watched all four that we’ve got: Iceland, Paris (or: Why the French Don’t Suck), Vietnam and New Zealand. The Paris one in particular got us thinking about culture and how work is handled.

Lunchtime in Paris looked like an absolute dream. Aside from sounding absolutely delicious, it was a true break in the day. On the first day, Bourdain had a multi-course meal that probably took a couple of hours to eat and involved half a bottle of wine and a dessert soaked in rum (with bottle provided so that he could add more). Another day, checking out the meat market, he had “lunch” (at around 9am since that’s midday when you get up as early as these people do) in a little shop attached to the restaurant–sandwiches made out of beef fresh off the market floor, and a glass of wine. He noted that no one was rushing here either, and it looked like some of the workers were maybe taking a bit of a long lunch, but their bosses were right there with them and didn’t mind at all. Why? Because they knew these guys would be back out there working their asses off–just as soon as they finished their lunch.

Compare: Midwestern America. You get one hour for lunch, maybe only half an hour. Maybe no lunch hour and you have to eat while you work. If you’re not back exactly on time, you’re criticized for poor work ethic, because clearly you’re not placing a high enough priority on work. As a result, around noonish we get fast food restaurants packed with people constantly checking their watches and worrying that they’ll be late and have to endure a reprimand or (in some extreme cases) even lose their job.

That got Tim thinking about Japanese culture. According to him, in Japan it’s entirely possible to go out drinking with your boss, get drunk, call him all kinds of names, and then come in to work the next day and be just fine. Why? Because the night of drinking was not work. He also mentioned that someone he knew who had been born and raised in Europe and then moved here had been somewhat taken aback when she’d gotten into the corporate culture of the US and realized that quite often you’re expected to take your work home with you. If you’re not actually doing work, you’re thinking about it, trying to solve problems and figure out schedules and whatever.

As he was saying these things, it occurred to me that perhaps this is one of the United States’ big problems… We’ve lost the division between work and not-work. Work has, in effect, taken over our lives. There is no “work hard, play hard” in the sense that is being expressed in the above examples of other cultures; there’s only “work hard”. We constantly struggle to live up to that standard, and because it’s so damned exhausting and stressful, we constantly fail. Are we really more productive this way? Or would we be more productive if we actually got to relax a little over the course of the day (not to mention at home)? I know it seems counterintuitive in some ways, but… If you get enough “unwinding time” at lunch (etc.) and at home, then won’t you be fresher, more rested, and thus better able to focus during your work hours than if you just have to sit around stressing over whether you’re going to be five minutes late getting back to the office because there was a long line at the hamburger stand?

Think about what it would do to our obesity rates, too. Now you don’t have to do fast food. There are several places around here where you can get good, healthy, yummy food for almost as cheap, but they’re not often lunch options because they take too long. Or you could take the time to actually make yourself lunch. You’re more relaxed, so there’s not as much of the reaching for fatty, sugary, sodium-packed comfort foods to make you feel better. You don’t feel as much like you can’t keep up, so there’s not as much drive to reach for those sugar-packed colas. You have more time, so you’re not as likely to overeat by stuffing your stomach faster than it can register that it’s full. Your body isn’t producing as many of those icky stress hormones. Being better-rested, you have more energy for exercise, and probably better motivation too. (Which in turn releases endorphines that make you feel even better and reinforces all of this.)

And as an aside–a glass of wine with lunch? (Not sure about the half-bottle, but a glass, sure.) Oh, my goodness. That would be great, for me anyway. Break up the day so that the morning and the afternoon actually have some separation. Relax and diffuse any tension or stress that’s built up over the morning. And it’s heart-healthy to have a glass a day! But no, in this country alcohol is an evil thing, and to consume so much as a drop during the work day would impair your judgement to the point that you’d be a danger to yourself and others.

Maybe this is all just crazy talk. I doubt it would ever get off the ground anyway; this rush-rush-work-is-God mentality is too deeply ingrained in our culture to pry it out very easily. I thought it was a thought worth blogging, though.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Tim: “If we’re the melting pot of the world, why do we get all the bad shit?… Why do we have just stew meat in us? Who gets all the good cuts?”

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I was just browsing around over at Netflix, and after putting my five-star stamp on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I took a look at the reviews of it, just out of sheer curiosity. There were a lot of compare-and-contrasts between Gene Wilder’s take on the candymaker and Johnny Depp’s. That doesn’t surprise me, and while I do sort of feel like they’re two different movies and it’s not fair to either to make them compete with each other, I can understand it. But what really astounded me was the number of references to the way “the original” did things, or how this “remake” did things.

Was I the only one who got the memo that this wasn’t a remake of the older movie? This was a return to the original text for a new adaptation; I seem to recall hearing (on IMDb’s trivia page maybe?) that the writer never even saw the older movie before finishing his script.

Whatever, I guess…

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Putting new music in my playlist has inspired me to seek out new music in general. I wasn’t sure what to look for, and then I saw Ogre’s response to my post about changing my playlist. “Self,” I thought, “how about asking the readership for suggestions?”

So–anyone have any suggestions? If you’ve watched my “Soundtrack” section in the sidebar you’ll know that I’m up for pretty much anything. I used to rule out country, rap and opera, but… Then I realized that my playlist actually includes all three of those genres anyway. So I’ll say instead that I don’t care much for gangsta rap or really twangy country (mostly), but everything else is fair game. I’m especially up for artists or songs that are a little more obscure or out of the mainstream–but not so obscure that I can’t find them!

And there’s one artist that I’d like to ask about in particular. I keep hearing good things about Breaking Benjamin, so I figure it’s about time I tried them. I know I have a couple of fans reading this. Do y’all have any suggestions for particular songs, or should I just dive in?

Thanks, guys!

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I finally finished rebuilding my main playlist last night, and transferred it to my iPod. It’s 1091 songs–plenty of music. I went with mostly stuff I know and love, but also a few experiments. Mostly this means that there are a lot of artists I’ve heard a couple of things from but never really ventured outside of those couple of things in exploring their body of work. So I added a few songs with interesting-sounding titles. This resulted in a veritable explosion in two main areas… Alternative/hard rock and old standards.

Yeah. I added more Smashing Pumpkins, I added more Dinah Washington. I added more Seether, I added more Sinatra. I feel like I ought to think this is odd, but I really don’t.

I also added a few songs from just a couple of artists I’d never heard before–the ones coming to mind are 12 Stones and Harry Connick Jr., whose name I’m not even sure I spelled right. Again, what a combo.

And of course I said goodbye to quite a bit too. I love Dar Williams and all, but somehow my iPod decided it really, really liked her and practically every other song it played was Dar. I like her music, but not quite that much, you know? So I cut my selection of her music down to a few of my favorites.

I don’t think I’ve got everything in there that I really want, but it’ll do for now…

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We’ll spring forward this year

Well, I was having a better day. Now I’m just pissed off.

The decision about Indiana’s time zones has been announced. Most of us are staying on Eastern time, with about 18 counties going to Central and of course everyone doing Daylight Saving Time. Starts on April 2, same day the whole country is setting their clocks forward. (Right? Spring forward, fall back?)

That’s not what’s pissed me off. What’s pissed me off is that, despite being nowhere near the state line, the county I work in is one of the counties going to Central time. The county I live in is, of course, not. So work is going to be an hour behind home. Which would be OK, what with the letting us get up later and whatnot, if it weren’t for the fact that this is going to totally fuck up our after-work life. Tim would be forced to cut back even further on Hapkido classes (which I don’t think he wants to), it would probably mess with my walking with Dad a little bit, and appointments in town? We’d have to take off an extra hour early. Since it’s often hard to get late-afternoon appointments at the doctor, dentist, etc. anyway, we’d probably just be taking like half the day off work. Wonderful.

What we’re hoping is that our boss will let us shift our schedule back an hour relative to work-local time, so that we’re still leaving home and getting back at the same time. We’re afraid that 6-2:30 might make our shift too early relative to other people’s, though, and that he might want one or both of us to be there later than 2:30. In which case we’re back to being screwed.

Argh. Why couldn’t we have just left well enough alone? Why the hell did we have to switch at all? And what in the world is this county doing on Central time anyway?

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Today is a horrible day. Thinking is like trying to swim through Jell-O. Like, the kind that’s set up enough to make a mold out of or something, not the kind you just kind of glop into a bowl. It’s 11:30am, I’ve been here since 7, and I haven’t taken one single step forward on the chunk of work I want to have done by the end of the week. I can barely muster the focus to remember to continue eating my lunch rather than just let it sit there and get cold.

I don’t know whether to scream in frustration, or cry because I just can’t seem to do anything and it ought to be so simple to just start working and I’m so disappointed in myself. Particularly since I’ve been going slowly for the past four working days that I’ve been working on this too. (Well, OK, yesterday was better.) I don’t think I really have the energy or focus to do either anyway.

I did get some stuff done with some business travel arrangements, so this morning wasn’t a total loss, but still.

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I don’t know if it’s just rainy-winter blues, or an extra-tough beginning to my period, or what, but I’ve just been SO drained this weekend. I took significant naps every day (Monday counts here, because I had it off work for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day), I couldn’t muster the energy to do any of the ten zillion things I ought to have been doing, I was completely spazzy and uncoordinated.

I practically passed out at the grocery–didn’t feel sick or anything, just dead tired. I had four or five loads of laundry to do, depending on whether there was room for our sheets in the same load as the towels; it took me all three days of the weekend to complete two of those loads and get the third into the dryer (but not folded). The towels and sheets haven’t even been started yet. And of course I had little meltdowns on a couple of days that I really think had more to do with being tired than with actually being upset.

I think today is a little better so far. I’m not sure. We’ll see, I guess.

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I got a reply from State Sen. Simpson about the whole enforcing ESRB ratings thing yesterday. She agreed with my concerns about Constitutionality, corrected me on a couple of related points, but seems to have entirely ignored the part where the legislation is not going to solve the problem. Which, you know, was most of the letter. *sigh* Perhaps I should have left Constitutionality out of it so she wouldn’t have been distracted by that and lost the main point, but it’s an important consideration too.

On the plus side, though, I got a stupendous bargain last night at the mall. I had kind of poo-pooed Bath and Body Works’ attempt at marketing essential oils, but when I saw they were on the 75% off shelf I thought it might be worth taking a look. So I did, and found a bottle of Jasmine Absolute in the bin. Regular retail price on this stuff is $49, which might be a little high compared to other brands, but flower oils like rose and jasmine are never cheap. Especially when they’re pure and not mixed with a carrier oil. 75% off rang up as $12.25, and I had a $10 gift card. So I got a $50 bottle of essential oil for about $3 out of pocket (after tax).

DUDE.

I don’t know what the quality’s like, but I figure there’s probably not a bottle of jasmine absolute in existence that’s not worth at least $3. My only regret is that I didn’t dig through and see if there was any rose available; I had been wanting both, but especially rose. I was just so excited about the jasmine that I forgot to look for the rose.

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I found this while looking around for a bit of code reference for my new project at work:
99 Bottles of Beer

Wow. I mean, just, wow. Someone had way too much time on their hands. It’s such a waste of bandwidth–and yet such geeky fun. I’m just amazed…

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