Tagged

Since Jeffrey tagged me, and I’m always up for a good blog meme, here goes.

Four Jobs I’ve Had

• Telemarketer — I was desperate for cash during my freshmen year of college, and rather than — God forbid! — sell CDs, I decided to try and sell newspaper subscriptions to folks in New Jersey. To this day, I’ve always tried to treat telemarketers with respect and kindness, even when they call during dinner, because I know just how shitty their jobs are. I’ve never had an experience as soul-crushing as this one, and as I walked back to the dorm after finishing my last day, I’d never felt so free and liberated.
• Book Reshelver — My next job after the telemarketing gig. I pushed a big metal cart piled high with books around UNL’s Love Library, putting the tomes back in their rightful spots. Not the most stimulating work, but I liked the long hours of solitude, especially when I worked in the library’s many nooks and crannies. This was pre-renovation, so they resembled catacombs and haunted crypts more than a library, which made the books, some of which were over a century old, seem all the more arcane.
• Janitor — My dad worked as a janitor quite a bit, cleaning up churches and office buildings, and my brother and I often tagged along during summer vacation. At times, it was exceedingly boring. And at other times, it was fascinating to walk through these buildings around midnight, when everyone else had gone. Plus, I enjoyed the time with my brother and dad, as we’d drive from building to building late at night whilst getting hopped up on caffeine and sugar to stay awake, oftentimes not returning home until the wee hours of morning.
• I.T. Intern — During the summers of high school and my freshmen year in college, I worked for Union Pacific Railroad as an intern in their I.T. department. My primary duty was preparing maps and diagrams of the hardware installations at their various facilities throughout Nebraska. Not the most exciting stuff, but it was thrilling as a geeky high school student to be in a “real” technology environment, and it was during this time that I discovered and first started messing around with HTML, thus sealing my fate in years to come.

Four TV Shows I’m Watching

• Battlestar Galactica — I’ve written enough about this series already. Friday night can’t come soon enough!
• Mythbusters — No doubt about it, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman have the best job in the world.
• What Not to Wear — My wife turned me on to this show during her stay in the hospital, and it’s about the only reality TV program that I can stand. On the surface, the premise seems incredibly vain and shallow, but it’s surprisingly more substantive that you think at first. Plus, Stacy London and Clinton Kelly have great rapport onscreen.
• Military Channel: Top Ten — Top ten fighters of all time? Top ten submarines of all time? Top ten combat rifles of all time? The military geek in me — the one that, when he was a kid, swore he would be a fighter pilot when he grew up — could watch this stuff all day long.

Four Places I’ve Been

• New York, New York — I visited New York briefly while attending a seminar on technology and college curriculum. No offense to New Yorkers, but seeing your skyline and becoming overwhelmed with sudden claustrophobia at all of the people trapped between those buildings, made me forever grateful of living in the wide open prairies of “flyover country”. That being said, my New York trip did allow me to actually meet a longtime Internet friend, and I ate some of the best Chinese food I’ve ever had, courtesy of Excellent Dumpling House.
• Whidbey Island, Washington — I think I’ll give this place some serious consideration when retirement rolls around.
• Toronto, Ontario — I’ve been here three times over the last few years, and all for the Toronto International Film Festival. This is the only major city that I think I could live in.
• Bushnell, Illinois — Home of the annual Cornerstone Festival, which is probably the closest I’ve ever had to vision of what heaven might be like (smelly showers and porta-potties notwithstanding).

Four Musical Artists I’m Listening To

• Low — I recently wrote about the rekindling of my love for this band’s music. I Could Live In Hope has been something of a balm for my soul these days.
• Michael Cashmore — I first became aware of Cashmore, not through his frequent work with Current 93, but through his solo project Nature & Organisation. His eponymous work moves away from the “apocalyptic folk” end of the spectrum, and towards gentler, more introspective ballads on The Snow Abides, which also features the inimitable vocals of Antony (of Antony & The Johnsons).
• The Boo Radleys — In a more perfect and just world, The Boo Radleys would’ve received all of the acclaim that those upstart Brit-poppers received in the early 90s. Wake Up! is a perfect slice of experimental pop, chock full of beautiful melodies, layers of orchestration, and Sice’s lovely voice singing lyrics that get surprisingly morose and subversive.
• Gospel Gangstaz — I realize that Christian gangsta rap is a bigger oxymoron than Christian death metal, but I don’t really care when the stuff in question is this good (and this much fun). 1995’s Gang Affiliated totally taps into the era’s G-Funk sound, and contains my favorite rap lyric of all time — “I got the devil in a chokehold/From all night prayer and I didn’t have to pop no doze/I’m not a wimp, you’ll never catch me slip/‘Cause I walks by faith with a gangsta limp” (“Mobbin’ (Gang Affiliated)”) — while 1996’s Do Or Die smooths things out with some deeper, funkier, and more soulful grooves. The very epitome of a guilty pleasure.

Time to pass on the torch. Proj and Deuce, I choo-choo-choose you!