Dec 2001, 8 entries

Today I have been preparing for the new year. Thinking, casually, sitting on my front porch at a metal table, smoking cigarette after cigarette, tapping the ashes into my Yuban Coffee can in the center of the table, thinking long and hard about the past, the present, and the future of this fork-godsaken life I’ve been given. How, God, can I take the creative life-force by the bullhorns, and not constantly slip into the granted-taking coma of a life too easy?

Yes, life is too easy. For me. My friends are all great, my job, while not fulfilling my reason to live, at least exists, my time is not consumed by remedial tasks, nor completely absent of quiet coffee-can tapping dance smoking.

This year has been, despite appearances outside of my own thoughts, stable. I live in the same house that I lived in a year ago. I sit at the same desk at the same job I had a year ago. I did not get married, nor divorced, nor begin or graduate from school, nor have a loved one die or give birth. It is my first full year married. I do not feel any more domestic than before, thank God, and yet I do not find the same exhilarating joy in getting drunk, nor in crawling on beer-soaked club floors. Yet, sometimes these things are pleasant.

As important as I think new year’s resolutions are, I think old year conclusions are equally valuable. We had an earthquake, I launch Seattle Stories, Nervousness, Foster White, Ad Farm, and Gallery Gate, and still had time to redesign Mockerybird at least 3 times (depending on if you counted 1 design that only lasted a week). K and I started a business, emerged from the debt created by our wedding/honeymoon, K continued her 12 painting series, and I began my long-spoken about book. I only read a dozen or so books. I found that the trend of finding less enjoyment in pop music continued. And yet that capacity for enjoyment has not been replaced by any new musical tastes. My popularity on the internet has remained almost entirely the same. Since I don’t speak very seriously about anything, people don’t take me seriously. Fine wid me.

I bought a pea coat and an orange new years shirt today. Right now, I’m sitting in an internet cafe merely two blocks from my house, since I’m waiting for my 1.5 hour wait for a hair-cut to pass, and this place is nice.

Lovely.

Beautiful.

Let’s dance.

Save tomorrow night, I’m done with 2001, and ready for 2002. I plan to constantly bite and claw against the passage of time, lean wind-ward towards the biting storm, blah blah. I plan on resisting the urge to slow down, settle in, or slide by. I plan on having a new job by the end of next year, as well as be further along in my book, launch a dozen more sites, and still be walking to work every day.

Thank you, all. Keep talking.

Today is K’s birthday, she being the lucky yearly recipient of a day-after-christmas birthday, but luckily we didn’t really celebrate christmas (other than going to dim sum and having spare ribs, then watching the royal tenenbaums), so all of the celebrating gets celebrated today. Already, at a few minutes past midnight, I was asked to recite my favorite K-Dog memory, my favorite K-Dog joke, and my favorite K-Dog quality. Shortly afterward I was asked to do my closest rendition of Britney Spears in ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ but I weaseled my way out of that somehow.

Tonight we dine at The Dahlia Lounge.

A cool thing amazon has done: create a way for you to send gift certificates to soldiers. Salute Our Troops

Over 20,000 $20 gift certificates have been bought so far. Here’s a picture of them sending them overseas. The caption: United States military personnel in Washington, D.C. prepare more than 4,000 Amazon.com gift certificates to be shipped to active service members stationed around the world through Amazon.com’s Salute our Troops program, which was developed in cooperation with the Department of Defense. Through December 26, 2001, visitors to the Amazon.com web site (www.amazon.com) can purchase a $20 gift certificate for an active member of the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines. To date, more than 19,000 gift certificates have been purchased for active service members, who can redeem the certificates at any of Amazon.com’s online stores. (Business Wire photo)

I’m feeling a little better today. Think we’ll be drinking hot toddies and watching Leanne’s new “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” DVD for a nice traditional Christmas Eve.

AH!

Ever since returning from Kentucky I’ve felt like I’m behind in everything. Let me make a list to see if this is true:

• Must fix all bugs over at textads.nervousness.org.

• Must update this site. Phew, at least I can cheat on this one by just updating with with an update saying I need to update.

• Must help someguy at 1000 Journals move his site over to another server, including all the work that I did a couple months ago which has yet to launch due to problems with the server. ?

• Work on my secret business project. If you want to see the not-quite-finished version of my new website, you can have a sneak peak.

• Move all of the textads stuff over to a new domain which I bought while in Kentucky. Redesign and enhance. Woo!

• Write a Seattle Story about houses.

• Write a christmas extravaganza email to my family and friends who live far away.

• Buy K’s christmas present(s).

• Figure out how to complete an old project for a friend who is paying us way too little to do what is becoming a tedius job.

• Answer three billion emails (or actually, just read but don’t answer) from people at Nervousness.

• Begin to sketch out plans on a way to allow a little bit of moderation for LMAO owners to remedy the reoccuring problem of uncooperative users at Nervousness.

• Watch LOTR.

• Clean house.

• Okay, those are the major ones, I’m now digging for things that I probably should do but know I won’t.

Anyway, it seems like I’ve got as many days off as I do days on at the office, so maybe it’ll all be okay in the end.

We were going to have christmas dinner at Kristen Hirsh’s house, through some strange turn of fate, but it looks like we’re not. Instead, we’ll be having a chinese brunch that, in order to celebrate christmas, has promised to serve RIBS. It sure does hearken back to the days when america was america and christmas meant large chuncks of meat on the bone. Yeah.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

I went running today. It was cold. I really like the new Mick Jagger song, “God Gave Me Everything,” strange. It’s the first song on my mp3 player as I run, and it makes me run quickly, but then by the time the song ends I’m about ready to call it a day.

Oh! K got us this original Robert Rauschenberg lithograph from 1960ish. It’s one of his first, and it’s a poster that he made for the 100th birthday of the Met. It’s worth lots of money, we think, though she got it for free from work. She wants to give it away, to like our friends, or something. I’m like, no way! I want it.

So, about this whole shebang over the Scripting News Awards is hilarious. People take weblogging so seriously, as if it were an actual career. Those people at metafilter are so funny you know, fighting and calling names to each other about the awards, how it’s basically a celebration of the award-maker’s friends and all that. And I’m like, the metafilter crowd cracks me up. Sure, they’re not all funny, but for once, I’m on dave’s side. But really, it’s so close to the “don’t care” line that… hey! Nominate me for something, will ya!

Do you ever look at someone and realize how completely and utterly different their life and perspective must be? When I do that, I often feel robbed. But then, I think how they’re being robben of being me. And I think, okay, fair enough. Oh, crap, I just can’t explain it right now. What ever happened to my nice eloquent entries, dude. I’m not in the spirit of the whole thing.

Merry Christmas.

As Scott and I drove back to the airport on our last day of our two-week slave labor vacation in Campbellsville, Kentucky, I realized that two weeks away from the routine of everyday life, even if you completely hate them, are healthy.

The Chorus:

I wake up in a small town called Columbia every morning at 4:30 in my king-sized bed, and flip on CNN as I get ready. This includes taking a shower, readying a pot of coffee, finding the least smelly of my clothes, brushing teeth and hair, etc. I get Scott from his room and we go down to the hotel lobby and get a donut or two. We drive north for 20 or so miles, passing 20 or so road-kill on the way, through complete darkness, and arrive at a stop light, turn right. Look for the mile-wide warehouse, park in the back. Walk through metal detectors, scan our badges, log in to the computer, stand at the back of the meeting crowd of like workers, and head to our gift-wrapping station.

Wrap gifts for 10 hours.

Log out of the computer, scan our badges out, walk through the metal detectors, find our car, drive in complete darkness for 20 or so miles, eat a burger, or a pizza, go to our separate rooms, have a beer to spite Kentucky, go to bed at 8:30. Sleep, fitfully.

Repeat x 10.

Some highlights:

Scott talks about our beer-seeking adventures here. See December 14th, 2001. No permanent links on pitas, cause Andrew sucks.

After a day of trying to wrap as many gifts as I could, I found the much more satisfying gift-wrapping strategy of trying to wrap fewer gifts with each passing day.

The locals hang out at the gas station on Saturday nights, with their large muffler-less trucks and their local honeys.

Campbellsville is in the eastern time zone, while our hotel was in the central time zone (yet they were north-south of each other). This created the pleasant sensation of having to wake up an hour earlier for work each day in order to get there on time, but luckily after work we often arrived home before we had left. Some people changed their hotel clocks to be consistent with eastern time zones, but I found it more entertaining to spring forward each morning and fall back each evening.

Two Seattle away-team employees were fired for having sex in the warehouse, on the fourth floor of a six-story structure that housed the toys of all the world’s children. The employees were both girls.

Two other away team members hooked up with local kids during our stay.

Some people stayed on houseboats, and watched free porn while drinking beer and playing poker. I sat by myself outside by the water, not fitting in.

One girl fell in the water and turned up on the local news channels.

Overall, I did not have a good time, although it is possible to find a positive spin to the whole experience when I try. Nevertheless, I am glad to be back.

I just returned from two weeks in a mile-long warehouse, in a dry county that has also never heard of a mocha. I wrapped more than 1,500 gifts. More soon.

I’m leaving for Campbellsville, Kentucky in 5 minutes, and will be gone for two weeks. I’ll be working in a swank new movie starring Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler. It’s about this the economy. I’ll be working in the warehouse for 2 weeks, packing boxes. There will be lots of talking lines, they say.

Visit these new textad hosts:

• diary-x.com
  
• kvetch.com
  
• blogs.yaysoft.com
  

See ya.

Imagine me slouching in an tan pleather sofa, feet propped up on an old three-legged stool, six-pack o’ Budweiser on one site, doting wife on the other, a moist towel across my forehead, tongue lolling out to the site and an exclamation point hovering animatedly over my head. Caption: What a day!

Computers will be the end of me. Everywhere Joe Bob went today, he was attacked by the logical almost methodical ruthlessness that is the inanimate and untouchable world of zeroes and ones.

But we won’t talk about that.

I’m trying to make money (what else is new). Enough money to get to do what I think I do best: not work, but rather, create. Not for the ‘Zon, as some silly people like to call it, but for the good of mankind. But first…

Did you know there’s a new feature at amazon that lets you create buying guides? Check out the ‘orribly named “So You’d Like To…” (requires a log in). It’s a new way to create pages like, /V5FY54A91EZG/107-6323673-3041321>“So you’d like to… Host a Cocktail Party!” and “So you’d like to … Be an Old School Goth!”. The neat thing about it is that it has it’s own markup language so that you can put something like <ASIN: B00003IRC3> into the form and it’ll turn it into that item’s title, with a link to the product. Overall, I don’t have much faith in the feature, since it requires you to go around the site too much hunting down items, and then writing something that isn’t natural (a battery-powered commercial on wheels… hmm). Anyway, I thought immediately, “Hey, someone should turn this into a weblog.” But that’s probably just me.

Nervous Text Ads
So I built my own version of what Matt Haughey and Evan Williams of Metafilter and Blogger, respectively, recently invented (or at least implemented in a useable fashion). Now, you can create ads on nervousness, seattlestories, and mockerybird, to advertise your own website.

The reason? Well, first, it seemed easy. Second, it seemed like an area without many people innovating, and yet something that would become more important in the next couple years. Third, it seemed fun. Fourth, I didn’t want to get left out. Fifth, being in an arena with Matt and Evan is a good challenge for me, they’re not dumb people by any means, and I am. So, subtract a day and a half from the life of Erik Benson, and voila Nervous Text Ads are born.

Why choose my ads over the others? No reason. I know that Matt and Evan are both excellent programmers and that they will continue to innovate and force me to keep up with them. For now, I have the slight disadvantage because their audience is much larger than mine. So of course more people will use them. The slight advantage is that I’m wily, and can slide through slick situations, and have been known to survive a beating or two. Also, my ads are already ready to be put onto other people’s websites. Hey, speaking of witches, do you want to volunteer a corner of your webpage and make some money (probably not that much at this point, depending on traffic your site gets) in the process? All it takes is one line of javascript. Email me if you’re interested. We could be famous together.

Ads, shmads. Let’s talk war. Did you know that my co-worker’s highschool friend’s brother knows Osama bin Laden? It’s true. Now, you are only 5 degrees of separation removed from the most wanted man on the planet.

What do you think of ginger, aka segway (site is a little slow, probably overloaded)? Oh, nevermind, I don’t want to know.

Okay, go buy a text ad now, and help me out. Buy one for a friend, buy one for a relative. Get your Christmas shopping done early, buy a Nervous Text Ad today! Etc. Or email me and tell me how much you hate it. I like hatemail too.