Geneffects: October 2004

Perhaps my favorite painting in the world

Winter
Andrew Wyeth

It lives at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

My Retro Career Muh-Muh-Muh-Melted

The analogies between interviewing for a job are so obvious they slap you in the face like a young lady who doesn't appreciate your curious hands. Of course, there's the obvious: Sell yourself! You're smart! You're funny! It's always a plus to have good references. Dress up! C'mon, smile! Then there's also this: If you get too excited about the prospect of a new job/date, there is no way the possibility will materialize.

You see that cute/sexy hunk/honey from across the club/bar/library and you are instantly smitten. You work up the nerve to approach him/her. Maybe run a hand through your hair. Smell your own breath. Take one final confidence-building swig from your PBR then you make that first step that causes the momentum to keep you going in his/her direction. You approach and suddenly he/she looks up! Before you're ready! Holy shit! Quickly duck to the side and pretend like you really wanted to be checking out the yogurt isle. Okay, c'mon, it was no biggie. Just try again. All right. Okay, you're standing next to him/her, so you'd better say something.

You: "Hey"

Them: "Hey"

You: "Do I know you? I mean, have we met before?"

Them: "No, I don't think so"

You: "Well I couldn't help but notice you reading that book on genetic algorithms. Finding it interesting?"

"Interesting? It's only like the most interesting branch of computer science! I don't know how many time's I've read this Melanie Mitchell volume."

You: "For real? I'm like working on a meta-evolution of GP right now!"

Them: "No kidding!"

You: "Hey, what's your favorite movie?"

Them: "Tommy Boy... or perhaps Office Space"

You: "Are you kidding? Seriousy, you must be kidding. Those have gotta be my fave movies as well!"

Them: "Woah. You are, like, the coolest person I have met - ever."

You: "Serious? Well how's about you and I grab some lunch sometime?"

Them: "No thanks. I think I'd rather date that person over there."

Were you just punched in the stomach? It sure feels like it. You look over and see some homely character reading a 2003 Sports Almanac, wearing some prominently logo-ed sweater and sporting a swank Bush-Cheney button.

You: "You have got to be kidding."

Them: "Well, you do have all I'm looking for in a lover, but you're just too overqualified."

You: "Holy Funk and Wagnalls."

Your retro ca-reer muh-muh-muh-melted!
Muh-Melted!
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Muh-Melted!
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Muh-Melteeeed!

Magnolia Grill

Despite the kind of swank cachet that goes along with running Geneffects, I am not what you call a "cultured" person. My idea of fancy eats includes not ordering off the dollar menu, so you can only imagine the extent to which my mind was blown when, last night, I dined at The Magnolia Grill - the swankiest eatery in all of North Carolina! Eleventh best in the nation, or so I read. ("We'll get in the top 10! Curse you, Planet Hollywood!")

Not exactly nervous, but definitely out of place, I walk in wearing my one good shirt and a semi-recently washed pair of jeans. I don't really own nice shoes, so I figured my Chucks would be more appropriate than old running shoes. I was with other people, and believe it or not, these were people I was kind of tryning to impress. Too keep from acting like too much a hog when the food was set before me I had loaded up on a little HT generic canned ravioli before departing for Durham. It's an old trick I learned from Gone With The Wind.

During the meal the conversation vacillated from sommelier humor to what exotic land we have recently visited to totally kissing Ben Barker's ass. "Oh, do you think we could get Ben to autograph our menu?" I kind of steer clear and try not to open my fool mouth lest some golden gem of Cletus-esque wisdom come flying out.

After a while the wine glasses which would magically refill themselves began to take their toll on my perception of the world. The faces of the Triangle's upper-crust transmogrified to slightly off-kilter and undefinable sinister masks. "Every one here, in some way, is evil," I say. I'm pretty sure the septuagenarian behind me was talking about having sex with little boys. Towards the end of the meal I told a member of my party to shut-the-fuck-up and quickly brought my hands down to the table inadvertently launching a fork full New Southern collards into my lap. After that events became increasingly blurry.

So yes, it was definitely some of the best food I have ever tasted, but now that I have had a slice of the good life will I ever be able to go back? Am I ruined forever? Nah, I don't think Pepper's Pizza has anything to worry about.

Little Black Book Anagram

On my jog yesterday I thought of the LBBA - Little Black Book Anagram. Here are the rules:

Turn the names of the people with whom you have had sex into one big anagram. (This will not be easy if you love fucking the Polish.)
When possible, use their first and last name.
For each time you do not know their name, you must include a question mark "?" in the text.
For every partner with whom rape was involved, an exclamation point must be included.
If you have masturbated, you must include your own name.

Making huge anagrams is, at present, not an easy thing. You can't really use those anagram generating websites or anything because unless you are some sort of sexual novice, these will be pretty long anagrams. Those websites are only good for a couple of words; maybe one name. There exists software out there to help, but I haven't tried any of it yet. That's because I suck.

Pizza Coupon

I eat at this particular pizza place a lot 'cause they're pretty good and they are right next to where I work and they aren't totally adverse to walking my particular hoagie or pizza over to me so I don't have to like totally abandon my post. So I get this kind of chicken pizza and now keep in mind that I've had plenty of bad experiences with chicken before so when I bite into something hard it doesn't really phase me. Probably a chicken bone. I fish it out of my mouth and it is, after all, not a chicken bone. Lo and behold I just pulled a sharp piece of clear glass from my mouth.

"Woah, dude" says the guy sitting next to me.

"Seriously," I say.

"That's fucked up."

"I totally know."

I call the pizza place and am like, "hey I just ordered a pizza and all and I have like sort of bad news or whatever? It's like, I didn't order broken glass as an extra topping. ... Yeah, I'm not kidding. ... Yeah I still have it. ... Could I like... ... Okay I'll hold. ... ... ... ... ... Right. So could you like..."

I end up getting this coupon for a free Medium pizza ("dude, you should totally like get a free large or something") and the crazy thing is it looks like this sort of shit happens all the time. The coupon has some straight-out-my-nightmares kind of anthropomorphized fork saying "Oops!" and on the back there's this general apology with an alphabetized checklist of what piece of trash accidentally ended up on your pizza:

Bottle Cap
Cigarette Butt
Condom
Glass Shard
Rat Dropping
OTHER: __________

Totally frkn crazy, and they still won't give me a job.

Life Soundtrack

Here are a smattering of songs that, if you are to know me (my stalkers, you know who you are and I would appreciate you not looking in my window), this might be a good place to start. Of course, the meaning is entirely personal. Just listening to the songs won't really help, so I've included a brief statement as to why these particular ditties mean what they do to me. We somehow expect that when others listen to our super-personal songs the true meaning will just somehow jump out to the listener. You expect for them to say, "oh, wow, so you were raped by your uncle while this song played? I'm so sorry. I feel I totally understand you now." Instead you get, "what the hell are Tommy James and the Shondells doing on this mix?" (This list is a little different from the cntmfn vrsn.)

Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair (stereo remix)
The Flaming Lips
Waitin' for a Superman Maxi-Single

Easily the saddest song in all of time. The chorus, "Why is it so high? Why is it so much?" really touches a nerve. Often the world is too much to take, be it good or bad, it is seriously just too much to take all at once. Also good from the Flaming Lips: Feeling Yourself Disintegrate, and What Is The LIght?, both from The Soft Bulletin.

You Were Right
Built To Spill
Keep It Like A Secret

There was about a month pretty recently when I could not get several BTS songs out of my head. I'm serious; every waking and dreaming moment of that month had this or Carry The Zero going.

Kashmir
Led Zeppelin
Physical Graffiti (disc 1)

I will be the first to admit that I am not as sharp as I once was. Up until a few years ago it was not uncommon for my brain to feel like it was on fire, or at least heating up. I honestly would feel hotter sometimes (but my average body temp is like 97, so maybe I was just feeling normal). Anyhoo, this here song, as well as O 42na (Carmina Burana), would blow on that fire.

Since I've Been Loving You
Led Zeppelin
BBC Sessions Disc 2

Live version is so much better than the album release.

Because
The Beatles
The Beatles-Anthology 3

Stripped down to just the six vocal tracks. Simply breathtaking.

Air on the G String (2nd movement from Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D)
Johann Sebastian Bach

Heavenly.

A Day In The Life
The Beatles
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

When I was a kid I would get headaches a lot and one time I had a headache for several days straight . Couldn't sleep at all. During that time I listened to my dad's vinyl and SPLHCB was in high rotation. This song was like the 35k FoD of my youth.

Why Does It Always Rain On Me?
Travis
The Man Who

Teaching high school was cool, but it was also very lonely. I didn't have any friends close by. Was just pretty blue in general. On one particularly bad day I was at school, had finished grading papers and in my walk to my car it just started raining right on me, like my very own personal rain cloud. Then this song played on WKNC.

Missing the War
Ben Folds Five
Whatever & Ever Amen

I've never felt understood by the girls I have dated. I'm easy to stereotype, I guess, and those schemas seem to work for them (the girls) so they just kind of stick with them and don't really delve all that far. My first adult-style relationship the girl really just wanted to settle down, but I felt this stir-crazy kind of wanderlust that kept calling after me. "The shaking voice that tells him go, still thinks he might. He knows he won't."

NC St8 Fair

Mon eve wnt 2 d st8 fair w d cnt mfn. Ttlly bst dy of lfe. Srsly. Nt 2 B D-nide. 8 so mch crp it ws frkn dzgustng. Wnt on evry frkn ride aftr we 8 6 chddr nggts and it wz ttlly like my hed wz spnning n my nek hrt n like I jus wnted 2 frkn puk bt it srsly rcked. Wld do it agn n a hrtbeet. Wz knda let dwn by lack of freeks n d rdnks wrnt dat rd n d crnies wrnt all dat strng out. Prty mch mddle o d bll crv; nt d crzy lft arm I wuz kinda lkn frwrd 2. + d fro dcks knda had a trim or flt top or smthn, so nt az m-prssve. Stll, fckn awsm.

Grammars grammars everywhere!

And lo, the boards did shrink! I frickin' love writing these grammars! It totally emphasizes how entirely mindless most marketing drivel is. Still, the world needs marketing drivel! What would we do with all of the time otherwise consumed by drivel? Probably evil.

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Lance McCord on a Blogroll!

Listening to "Raving Notion" by the awesome Athens band Carrie Nations and reading some awesome blogs by Lance McCord of the Cary Nation. Lance has got like a hectare of good stuff on his site, so browse around as these are a sample platter of posts from just today!

Bush's Bulge Explained!
This theory kind of makes the whole clause how there are to be no camera shots from the back more about preserving faith in the stability of the American government than shady we-want-to-hide-the-fact-the-prezman-is-wired motives.

Should the execution age be lowered to 16?
The proposed order or the way things should be:

16 - buy cigarettes, 1st degree murder
18 - have sex, vote, murder for our country
21 - drink
35 - become president

What would Bush look like without a droopy face?
Lance uses Photoshop to do mirror images of both Bush and Kerry's face. I love how Kerry is the amalgam of a simple-minded tough (RIGHT) and sniveling brainiac (LEFT). I especially love the way that Kerry's ties goes along with his personalities. Thick, mafia-type tie for the brute and a thin ribbon for the intellectual. Bush's ties are kind of reversed for the personalities.

Maybe 10 or 12 Rosaries

[ONE]: So like do two wrongs never make a right?

[TWO]: That's not really part of the bible, but I've found that maxim to hold true, yes.

[ONE]: I mean like never never, or just most of the time never.

[TWO]: Where are you going with this?

[ONE]: So let's say that someone stole something from you and then you steal it back. Both of us stole stuff, but in the end everything ends up like it was before the stealing even took place.

[TWO]: Well I don't see how that is all that wrong but there are probably better....

[ONE]: Okay then, how about this: Some guy steals your basketball and so then you steal his basketball which is just like yours, is that stealing?

[TWO]: It's getting into kind of a gray...

[ONE]: All right, so hows about this: Some guy steals your wallet and you like take his wallet and his has less money than yours but your still satisfied?

[TWO]: Okay, back up for a second. It's getting kind of compli...

[ONE]: But yo, listen to this, what if he - his wallet - like has more money than yours? What if you don't know how much money was really in your wallet to even begin with? I mean, the jerk stole from you! Doesn't that mean that all bets are off? I mean, once you transgress that basic human decency of not stealing isn't it pretty much like saying that you don't deserve that common human courtesy in return. You know what I'm saying, an eye for an eye and all that? Does it really matter if one guy has better vision than the other? In fact, what if the guy stealing from you is like rich as fucking hell and he takes half of what you own? I mean that's like a drop in the bucket for him. His net worth bar went up by maybe a pixel - if that. So what if when you take your money back, even if you don't really know how much that was to begin with, if you take a little more than was taken from you but in all reality you really probably didn't take more so it's not even really something to worry about so why worry about it?

[TWO]: Wait a second... where's my wallet?

A beautiful corpse

So there I am, basically naked, playing cheese-rock on my guitar when suddenly the thunderous sound of jet engines approach. Loud. And when I say loud I mean you think you are about to die right then and there because this not your ordinary plane-flying-overhead kind of sound but more the for-some-reason-Carrboro-frickin-North-Carolina-has-been-targed-by-an-ICBM kind of sound. And I think, is this seriously it? Has my life, my own personal collection of confusion and clarity and searching and isolation and failure and victory, has all of this been just so that I could be obliterated wearing nothing but a dingy green towel playing some hack pentatonic scale? Could it? Before I have time to imagine alternate, more noble dying-moment scenarios, the sound recedes and I look out the window and see some kind of fighter jets tearing ass already several miles away. Pfew.

I go back to shredding the hell out of that guitar but now I have on pants.

Ennagram

Just took the free Ennagram 10 minute test. Again, some questions I didn't know which fit me best, so I kind of picked the ones that seemed most recently apply.

Results:

Type 1 - 2
Type 2 - 4
Type 3 - 5
Type 4 - 2
Type 5 - 6
Type 6 - 3
Type 7 - 6
Type 8 - 4
Type 9 - 4

I'm kind of a 5/7. It is a toss-up. From what I know of those types (which is not much) I would say that I was a five and am fairly recently (couple years) a 7. But you know, fuck this. Seriously, I'm really tired of it.

Bellafea V. Des Ark

Celebrating the 7-inch release, Bellafea and Des Ark played alternating songs in their practice space on the outskirts of Chapel Hill. At the risk of being overly romantic, it is in little pockets of the world such as that where the new front of music is being born. Bellafea was dwarfed by the pure musical ability of Des Ark, but one thing B had which DA did not is a charm evoked in the vocals which DA tends to hide with a grinding guitar. The money shot of the night arrived as Heather sang profiled and silhouetted while short, black-haired, tragically dressed girls asynchronously bobbed their heads all encased in the halo of the backlight.

In my head:
Des Ark would finish and: "Aw damn, Bellafea! You gonna take that from Des Ark?"
Bellafea would slam out a song: "Shit, Des Ark! Bellafea put tha smackdown! Show 'em whatcha got!"

Afterwards a DJ busted out some Disco/80's tunes and the sausage factory started grinding!

Internets

I didn't get to see most of the debates last night, but I hear Bush talked about the "internets." Are there more than one? Apparently, because my friend Lance McCord has found evidence of the other internets.

It's time to log on.

ENTP

Googled "Myers Briggs". Took the first test returned. A lot of the questions I thought "well sometimes I do this, but other times I'm more the other way." So I just put kind of what applied at the moment. Results:

E - 11%
N - 67%
T - 33%
P - 33%

Find out more about "my" type:

Trnation

Thursday, thanks a whole frckn lot to evnts of Wed morn, I hd to hit the pnic btn in lfe drwng and get the trnation out of thre tout suite. Nvr a prob be-4. Ttaly nawze8ing. Hd 2 fke the urgnt bthrm vst and jst get some air and like chll out for a scnd.

Thnks 2 the angry teeth on a wrght Fe fence on Frnklin St. I spnt a lrg pt of 2day shttling smeone 2 the urgnt care facilities in drhm. I trid 2 read but the TV was distrcting. Even the volum and even the pwr swtch were rigged sos that i couldn't silence the bst. Last nght for JLC I could read no prblm. Loud rck-n-rll no prblm. Sft infotnmnt, bg prblm.

Oh my lordy lordy.

Oh shit. Oh my sweet fucking sweet. Oh.. man. Man oh man. Man on man oh man oh man. No. No way. No fucking way. Seriously. What the fuck. Fuckin' no fuckin' way. Holy bejeezus. Oh lordy oh man. Lord have mercy. What the? Oh crap. Crap oh man. Holy living fuck. Fuckin crappin no fuckin way. Fuckin crazy. No. no no no no no no no.

HIWYWNFTS 200409

Because there was a complaint by a total psycho, I am posting How I Wish You Were Not Finding This Site:

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HYAFTS 200409

I've been a little concerned about the list size for the search terms people are using to find this site. I mean, I don't want to have a million lines all in one blog. So what I did this time is to eliminate all references to Vitalogy. Sorry, but a cut had to be made. So again, here are how people are finding this site, in order of popularity:

All's Well on the Meniscus

Despite the jovial nature of my posts as of late I feel that perhaps things are not all right with me. My personality is kind of shifting as is my self-image. I don't know if this is a point of concern, but this tectonic motion is rather sudden. I've been keeping myself busy with little distracting projects which, as Josh would say, is typical of a Type Seven personality. (That whole Nine-Personality-Types thing, by the way, seem to hit the nail uncomfortably on the head with me, at least, more often than not. Maybe a post about it later? Maybe?) The typical Seven will escape inner problems with stimulus from the outside world; shifting from project to project.

Lately I've been using my time writing music for BrandNewBand, making Geneffects programs, Image Search Engine Optimization stuff, OCAG, Evil Weiner, silently sobbing in a darkened room, donating platelets, Billy Sugar Fix's Custom Serenades, running, and, how could I leave off The Chuck Garrison Secret Project to conquer the world. (Ron Liberti, I'll get to you, I swear I swear.)

I have been getting migraine headaches (link shows what my visual distortions kind of look like, but superimposed on reality) every day for the past three days. Given, the second one may have been because Sky Captain sucked.

Maybe this is just what happens with change? Life is, admittedly, in a state of flux now. Perhaps I'm just getting my sea legs for the meniscus.

Another stupid Grammar

Now that I have developed the grammar rendering engine I used with Infinite Generator, I can make any damn grammar I want and have it churn out semi-intelligible drivel. Since I've been thinking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a lot and reading a lot of their websites, I thought I'd make a grammar that sounds like a really excited person with bad english describing their new SEO website:

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