The hour draws nearer -- only 3 full days in Maryland remain. Today, I randomly clean the house and pack, at a nicely relaxed pace since I've been running amok so furiously in the past few days, accomplishing move-related things. Yesterday was especially hellish: I was burning CDs on two computers, and cleaning the house while CDs burned. I had to run up and down the stairs to put in new CDs and set up a new batch of files to be burned while trying not to lose my labeling marker (i must have lost it about five times).
My goal was to keep track of what files I had burned and what files I hadn't burned. It was very much like photocopying a lot of documents; I always have trouble keeping track of the documents to be photocopied, documents that have been photocopied, and the photocopies themselves. Doing so requires piles on a table, but I still get confused if my chain of procedural thought gets broken. And that's what happened yesterday, when I threw trash away and did dishes between CDs. Horrible, horrible.
I may even take a nap today. Last night I had dinner with helen and henry, and helen-dinners always involve moderate-to-heavy drinking. So, I passed out on her couch until 2am or so. I haven't been to sleep since then, and am feeling a little bit iffy, but not too bad. Helen packed up the remains of the korean barbecue and gave it to me. Most of it is sitting in my fridge now.
I bought an enormous olive canvas duffel bag at ranger surplus on the way to helen's place, and I'm no longer at all worried that I won't have enough space to pack everything I want to take, especially after I use some clothing to pad my bicycle in its box. It's nice, though, that I don't have to throw away everything that I don't pack. That would be pretty painful, although I think ultimately good for my psychology.
So basically, today I clean, pack, nap, watch tv and eat leftover korean barbecue. I've been putting the pounds on these past few days. I hope that when I hit the bay area I can lose some weight. I'm not allowed in berkeley, san francisco, or even possible oakland and san jose until I'm below a certain BMI. Hey, these aren't my rules.
I've been reading up on the bay area. It seems more culturally cohesive than the DC metro area -- there's more of a tendency to link arms and say 'we're the bay area!' and look happily, if slightly wistfully, towards 'the city'. And I think no-one looks towards the city with much resentment or vitriol, which is the funny thing. I know I'm not the only one in the DC metro area who despises DC, but I think I'd be relatively hard-pressed to find someone in concord, mountain view, fremont, etc, who despises san francisco.
Knowing that I'm going to be living in yet another bedroom community is still sort of depressing, even if the culture is both a happy one and infectuous. I never get to live in the 'good' places. I'm always in the suburbs, on the edge of the city when no-one cares about said city (baltimore), or on the outermost post within the city's view, when said city is closely guarded by wealthy inhabitants (DC, san francisco). I'm tired of living in the suburbs. When I get to concord, I'm going to look for a job in san francisco, and see if I can move there, sharing a single room and feces-bucket with eight mexicans for $1,500 a month.
The city-suburb model keeps the resident coveting. Wealth pours out of the city center like thick black oil, and the social hierarchy is clearly dictated by how far out one lives, and consequently how diluted the oil has become. If you're fat, poor, and stupid, then you head on out to the last stop on the BART. If you're thin, rich and brilliant, then you may laugh like tinkling silver bells with all the rest of elite, and sip your whatever. Tab? Peach mango juice? I dunno.
I confirmed with mark my suspicion that concord is almost exactly like gaithersburg, and now I read on wikipedia that it's largely a bedroom community. I'd just like to TRY not living in the suburbs, for once in my life. There's a reason the suburbs are a running joke: it's where the everyman, the average fat slob, and the tragically un-unique wind up.
I'm just being cynical, of course, because it's my style, and it's what I do best; I friggin hope by now that people have gotten that through their thick skulls. In reality I'm happy to be getting out of gaithersburg and off the east coast, regardless of the fact that I might very well be moving to a proverbial sister city. And I'm certainly not under lease or anything in hannah's apartment; it's the perfect opportunity to sniff out other jobs and places I'd like to live in the BAY AREA (i sort of hate that phrase, already).
I'll ask mark for suggestions. Maybe I can find a nice apartment to share or a room to rent in berkeley for maybe not too much money. Or, maybe I'm totally kidding myself, and mergers and acquisitions lawyers are the ones renting a room. People like me, if they want to claw their way further in towards the glowing nexus, wind up as part of the burgeoning homeless population.
Maybe I could be a bouncer at a gay bar; that'd be a hoot.
Well, this is one place. I certainly don't have to stay in concord, or even berkeley, or even (gasp) san francisco forever. But I really, really need to get out of the suburbs, if not for any other reason than I'm not going to know what I like if I only stick to one thing. As I said, I don't think outlying california suburbs and outlying Maryland/Virginia suburbs are all that different. But we'll see.
I'll have mark and wei not too far away (berkeley), as well as my aunt nancy not too far away (nappa). I'm not even considering gorby (sunnyvale) anymore; visiting him would be roughly equivalent to driving back and forth from gaithersburg to philadelphia. Hey, I can confirm this with mapquest!
It's not quite as bad as I thought -- mapquest gives 58 minutes as the driving time from concord to sunnyvale. By train, door-to-door, I'm sure it'd be around 1.5 or 2 hours. So, somewhere between gaithersburg-to-baltimore and gaithersburg-to-philadelphia. Still, not exactly neighbors.
Concord to berkeley: ~30 minutes.
Concord to s__ f_______: ~40 minutes.
So, yes: hellish nightmare, far away, isolated in the desert, etc etc. But really, not all that bad. Plans will emerge with the passing of time.
I packed up my amplifier, stuffing it full of guitar effects boxes, cables, and power adapters. Then, I padded the cluttered innards with clothing, and in the process used a significant percentage of my wardrobe (less to pack). Then, I wrapped the thing in a few layers of bubble-wrap. Then, I covered each side with a sheet of cardboard, taping it all down obsessively. I suck two 'fragile -- handle with care' stickers on every side. It weighs about 60 lbs.
Then, I came to realize that it looks almost exactly what I'd suspect a suitcase-bomb to look like, were I an airport inspector. Furthermore, it's gong to look really bizarre in the x-ray: speaker parts, vacuum tubes, lots of unidentifiable filler material, and random little pockets of electronics. I really hope they don't make me take it apart; there's no way it's coming back together again anywhere near as sturdy as it is. If they do make me take it apart, then I'll just have to be really, really careful with my unpacking, and hope that they have some packing tape I can use. Plan for the worst and hope for the best, as they say.
I also packed up my bike like a professional. My job was to unpack bikes from their boxes and put them together, so today I reversed the process on my own bike, and put it in an empty box just like the pros in indonesia or god-knows-where do when they send stores their bikes-in-boxes. I felt as though my entire career was leading up to that moment. Later, I'll pad the bike with still more clothing (wrapped in plastic bags -- my bike is dirty and greasy).
All in all, I'll have 1) my amp-effects-clothing structure, 2) my bike-clothing structure, 3) my guitar-in-case, 4) an enormous canvas military duffel bag, yet to be purchased, full of totally random crap, and 5) my regular backpack, full of reading material, sodas, other things, etc. I'll check 1, 2 and 4, and carry 3 and 5 on the plane. There is curb-side check-in at 4:30am -- I checked with jetblue.
I cannot be stopped at this point.
I have a few spare minutes here. I'm moving to concord, california. Concord's relation to san fransisco is roughly analogous to gaithersburg's relation to washington, DC. Already, I'm making plans to absolutely refuse to divulge to anyone that I live even remotely near san francisco. I dislike money-based regionalistic hierarchy.
Cities like gaithersburg and concord are always second-tier, because they secretly want to be DC, or san francisco. This is what they aspire to -- they can't just be content to be their own thing, because the eyes of the city are always cast covetously down the highway corridor towards the cultural and financial nexus.
Of course this has everything to do with money (to which culture is merely a footnote), but not in some evil, secret, conspiratorial way. Many people work in larger cities, and live further out where property is less expensive and rent less high. But clarity of structure doesn't make a phenomenon any less ugly.
San francisco? Where's that? Oh...that's some city to the southwest. I've been there a few times, now that I think of it -- it's sort of cold and rainy, as I recall.
I am part of the revolutionary movement for suburban identity (RMSI).
When in the 'bay area', I believe it's acceptable to refer to san francisco as 'the city', which is illustrative of my overall complaint. Why is it THE city? Not even DC is 'the city'. Why must I accept that the culture of once city makes it more nominative than another, just because all of the money is generated in that first city? Maybe san francisco's suburbs are nicer to it than DC's suburbs are to DC, and don't mind calling their locus 'the city'. You'd never catch gaithersburg, rockville, or even wheaton referring to that hell-hole as 'the city'.
A few years ago (five? Ten?) I heard people yapping about 'sanfran'. But, I suspect that this is passe. So passe that it might very easily become cool in an ironic way (if it hasn't already) is signifying the referent with 'frisco'. I think this word was used openly in the 40s, or something like that. Referring to 'the city' as 'frisco' will accomplish one or both of two things: 1) really annoy people who cling to their money-culture and identity-politics like ugly little remora eels. 2) linguistically gentrify the word, for which I can claim personal responsibility.
I'm moving to just outside frisco, baby! It's gonna be hip.
In reality, doing that will probably make people think I am a loser and weird, which are sentiments I don't need a lot more of. So, I'm stuck with a problem: how do I refer to my new suburban locus? 'san francisco' is just too long. I can't, on moral grounds, use 'the city'. 'sanfran' just sounds idiotic. 'frisco', while fun, might not win me any friends. I think maybe a solution is just not to refer to it very often.
I'm looking at a website about concord, and the more I read, the more disturbingly similar to gaithersburg it seems. Oh well! San francisco is just around the corner! Just like DC is just around the corner here! And we all know just how easy it is to take that hour-long metro ride downtown, and why so many gaithersburg residents drop everything come Saturday and head down to the national mall.
Now that I think of it, I lived most of my childhood in canada in a similar city -- roxboro. Roxboro is to montreal as gaithersburg is to washington as concord is to san francisco! I AM DOOMED TO SPEND ETERNITY IN OUTLYING SUBURBS.
I'm inclined to think that in north america, the properties of the environment are determined by population-concentration and position in the spider-burst of a big city's sprawl, as well as by climate. I don't think the culture varies tremendously from locale to locale. It might vary somewhat more within a central city (new york VS los angeles VS san francisco VS chicago), but I think this diversity gets watered down the further out you go from those centers.
San francisco and DC might be very different, but gaithersburg and concord might be very similar. I'll have ample opportunity to test this theory in a few days.
I also think that this watered-down, culturally-uniform effect applies only largely to suburbs of big cities. Small towns with their own economies and no significant commuter populations are a little bit different in that they might be relatively culturally dissimilar despite possibly being of a similar size and/or concentration.
Of course, every place, suburb or not, is different, and needs to be analyzed on its own terms, and blah blah blah. That's ultimately a slippery slope argument, just like every time someone says 'you can't really draw a line between x and y, because if you peer really closely, you can keep re-drawing the line'.
Great. This is philosophically interesting, but practically useless. Very, very rarely are things so ambiguous and without definitive properties that making useful categories is actually impossible, or even difficult. Sometimes we SAY it's more difficult or impossible than it actually is, for political reasons (hint: race does not exist), but most of the time it's very doable.
What I'm trying to do here is create some categories, because I think there are some statistical groupings of properties that can be demarcated unarbitrarily.
So, I'm guessing that concord is going to be a lot like gaithersburg, but that san francisco is going to be a bit less like DC. Of course, I haven't been to DC in probably a few years. That's pretty amazing, actually, now that I think about it. A few years..wow.
I got this sense that DC didn't want me, in part fueled by the fact that serena didn't want me, and that I associated that cunt with DC. I saw DC as populated with pretty girls, haughtily preening while crossing off people on a list of whom to invite to their party. Serena is the essence of DC, and is why in large part I hate it, and it hates me.
I can already feel my attitude shaping up similarly around san francisco, but I think that maybe it can be a little bit friendlier, especially to the improperly urbanized.
Pierre: hey man, this is my marginally-employed friend deadbarnacle whom I occasionally drag along to my get-togethers with other yuppies so that I can seem deep and unconcerned with material things.
matt: hi.
yuppies: ooooh, hi...can we touch your sweatpants?
Anyway, I have a lot of shit to do before my flight leaves at 6:30AM on the 19th, so I should go to bed. I've been having trouble sleeping lately, too. I probably won't get a chance to blog again for quite a long while, but I might surprise you. I'll let you know if the blogs are coming from the west coast rather than the east coast. This one is from the east coast.
To make my friendster profile generally more snide, sarcastic, sniggering, ironic, and arty, changed my status to 'seeking for relationship: men'. The results have been pretty good:
I never got any message before I changed my sexual orientatin. Truism, but it's still fun to exemplify ways in which the human species demonstrates it's preoccupation with mating, or in this case, mating behavior. All of the messages are from gay male hopefuls, except the one from katy, which is a spam from a russian mail-order bride company. Everywhere I look I see confirmation of my cynicism. Rephrase: everywhere I look in human civilized society, I see it. When I look at a bumblebee flying around, curious to see if a big lumbering object wearing a yellow t-shirt is a flower, my feelings of affection are genuine. I just don't like people.
I'm a little pissed at the bike shop people for adamantly suggesting that I put on road tires for commuting. Now, I can't ride around the lake without insufferable bumpiness. I guess I could replace my mountain tires, but it's a lot of work.
I'm really beginning to hate bike snobs. My buying spandex shorts will mark the end of days. But in general, I don't like the infinitesimal ways in which bike people (or any members of a subculture) come up with to get excited and generate hustle and bustle (and consequently revenue) about their hobby. It's a bike -- you ride it. End of story.
Oops. Yesterday's google-blockbuster conspiracy was a browser-window issue. I am unbelievaby stupid. You know I submitted that to slashdot? I wonder what they thought.
note: I watched the rest of iron monkey. It wasn't too bad.
Note: I wrote this blog not knowing that blockbuster had recenty lost a legal battle regarding false advertising. I did a google search on 'no late fees' and...well, here's my slashdot submission (IT WAS REJECTED):
Most everyone has heard Blockbuster Video's claim of 'No Late Fees'. I did a Google search on 'No Late Fees', and got extremely bizarre results -- the first hit was Blockbuster's 'No Late Fees' page (which is out of service), and underneath it is a tremendous expanse of white space. Am I paranoid to suspect Blockbuster of Google-engineering? Just about every hit after the first is about the recent legal issues concering 'No Late Fees'.
0070.html was fat due to some preformatted text stretching out its single-cell table, and its corpulence was annoying me. So, I started a new page.
I rented a kung fu movie yesterday, watching about 5 minutes before turning it off. It was unbearably stupid. I (silly me) was hoping to see some actual kung fu, but instead had to sit through people flying through the air, catching arrows, and such. Next time, I'll just get a bruce lee movie. This awful one is called 'iron monkey', and the brilliant quentin tarantino had something to do with it. Clearly, it can only be a stupendous achievement. It's also apparently somehow related to 'crouching tiger, hidden dragon'. Same director or something.
'Crouching asian, hidden asian' was a pretty good story and had some good actors in it, but 'iron monkey' was shit. However, it wasn't totally without redeeming features, namely the blurb on the back of blockbuster's DVD box (i found my digital camera! It was under the computer desk):
In a land of corruption and betrayal, Iron Monkey is your only hope.
Concise and difficult to argue with.
I noticed the big fat 'blockbuster.com' on my photos of the 'iron monkey' box, and so visited their site. I found the service terms to the 'no more late fees' hype. Most people don't believe a word of this.
Membership rules apply for rentals. Rentals are due back at the date and time stated on the transaction receipt. There is no additional rental charge if a member keeps a rental item up to 7 days beyond the pre-paid rental period. After 7 days beyond the due date, Blockbuster will automatically convert the rental to a purchase on the 8th day and will charge the member the selling price for the item in effect at the time of the rental, minus the rental fee paid. Member then has 30 days to return the product and receive a credit for the selling price charged, less a $1.25 restocking fee. These terms available at participating stores only. Franchisee restocking fees may vary. See store or blockbuster.com for complete terms and conditions.
When I hear 'no late fees', my first thought is 'ok, great! I can keep a movie indefinitely with no financial repercussions'. Most other blockbuster customers probably had the same thought. Of course, this can't be true, because otherwise blockbuster would have nothing on its shelves after a short while.
So, how does blockbuster say 'no late fees' but actually and necessarily charge late fees? With semantics: an overdue movie is converted to a sale -- the delinquent customer now owns the borrowed movie. So technically, money charged for an overdue movie is not a 'late fee'. However, I think most people are interested in whether or not their credit cards are going to be tapped if they hold onto a movie longer than 8 days past due, regardless of whether this siphoning is referred to as a 'late fee' or a 'sale'.
Of course, with a 'sale', the customer now owns the overdue movie. Great. If they had wanted to own a movie, wouldn't they have bought one to begin with?
The number of 'sales' is starting to effect what blockbuster is able to keep on their shelves. Blockbuster also has a plan by which the customer pays $15.99 a month, gets an indefinite number of rentals, and REALLY CAN keep them indefinitely, exchanging them for more movies whenever. This combined with the sale-conversions is severely shrinking store inventory.
Without any special monthly payment plan, an overdue movie can still be returned after 8 days after its due date, and the customer will be refunded the sale price (minus $1.25 for walking 20 feet to put it back on the shelf and hit some keys on a computer). But after 30 days, that's it! You're the proud owner of 'iron monkey' for $60, and there's no turning back.
How many customers read the 'no late fees!' billboard, assume it to be true, and hold on to their movies for a month because they just aren't worrying about it anymore? How many of these customers are going to cancel their memberships when they discover that their credit cards have been charged $50 in accordance with some fine print?
Good questions for blockbuster would be: 1) what would have been the total in late fees after 30 days, under your old policy? 2) what is the 'sale' price for movies charged after 30 days? Does it vary? By how much? May I see a list of titles and their sale prices?
I'd ask, but I'm starting to fear blockbuster employees. They've been surly and aggressive ever since this policy started, and for good reason -- no one believes it, and people are taking their anger at false advertising out on innocent sales associates.
Movies that are converted into 'sales' (along with the monthly payment plan) mean fewer and fewer titles on the shelves. Blockbuster was never the best place to go if one had a particular movie in mind, and sought to find said movie, but now it's even worse. Customers are upset about this, and are yelling at the employees about it. The employees are also worried that they're going to lose their jobs once blockbuster goes under.
Blockbuster has been scrambling lately in trying to lure customers because they're being outbid by netflix and internet movie rental houses.
When threatened, corporate entities tend to come up with notoriously bad 'business' plans to get themselves out of danger. Take the RIAA: when it was threatened by file sharing, it didn't think to itself 'ok, how can we work with this, and turn it into a profitable situation? Where's the opportunity here?' instead, it sued its customers; it took an innovate company, apple computer, to come up with a harmonious, creative solution. Blockbuster is doing something similar to the RIAA's desperate lashing out; essentially false advertising like 'no late fees!' is going to drive their customers away.
In a sense, blockbuster has turned into a video store as well as a video rental house, except that the store only goes into effect if the rental isn't returned.
Here's how blockbuster's new money-charged-for-unreturned-movies policy should read:
Movies are due 8 days after the return date on your receipt. Then, we charge your credit card about $65. Late fees are $1.25 up until 30 days after the movie was checked out. If you return it before then, you get your $65 back. After 30 days, late fees jump up to about $65 on average, and stay there.
Very complicated, but as simple as I can make it. It still won't fit on blockbuster's outside window, however.
It's always fun to watch desperately pathetic corporate weasels try to keep up with a business innovator. For example, yahoo and msn's response to google's gigabyte of email storage, and now blockbuster's response to netflix. One can almost picture the sweaty focus groups in session.
The one tremendous advantage blockbuster has over netflix is that customers can browse for titles -- people like to go into a clean, well-lit store full of friendly employees and either be able to find what they want, or rummage around effectively. Browsing for movies should be made easy and pleasant. So, take movies off the bottom shelves where they're impossible to see, stock many, many, many copies of each movie, make sure that a wide variety of titles are available, and order movies if they're requested. 'the end of late fees' is obviously bullshit. But 'we have everything' might actually work.
Of course, I don't know. Maybe this wouldn't be cost-effective for blockbuster. Maybe they're fucked no matter what. But borders is still around in spite of amazon.com -- maybe what blockbuster needs is a coffee bar and several TVs where customers can try out movies.