I Did It! I Did It!

I changed my iPod back to English. And then I followed instructions to both download and install the new iTunes. Why don't they ever say you must install as well as download? And installing is not totally simple (though nearly).

It took me forever to find the right Support section on the iPod page. None of this was easy, and I still don't have any songs "uploaded" into my iPod. I just have a few "downloaded" from Limewire. I don't have any cds "input" into it or whatever you do with them.

Je n'ais pas de musique. Mais, j'ai une certain comprehension qu'il est tres bien amusement. Bon!

Jamais fait ton lingue d'iPod en le Polish -- jamais, jamais.

Odds and Ends, Odds and Ends

That picture was scaring me.

I took this picture of myself (not pictured) right after I got this expensive haircut-with-blowout. An incredibly hardworking hair stylist in my neighborhood had made every strand of my hair as straight as a dye, working laboriously with small sections until I wanted to cry: "That one's straight! Move on or we'll be here till dark!" Anyway, it seemed very fake, alluring and glamourous while I walked home, so in honor of the falsity I figured out how to take still pictures on my camcorder and I took about 30.

You can't smile at a camera you are pointing at yourself. I tried a few smiles and they're ghastly -- empty rictus grins. I took a lot of strange grimacing ones that revealed to me I grimace a lot, because I was trying to look pleasant and attractive.

Oh dear, the Anne LaMott tone again. It might be because I have her book, Bird by Bird, in my bathroom and I read it often. A friend very kindly lent me this book and it did rivet me, as she promised, with its down to earth advice about writing and descriptions of a published writer's life. The coolest thing is the title: When they were kids, her little brother had to write an essay about the birds of North America and was fretting about it so their father said to him, "Just take it bird by bird."

Speaking of birds, they're chirping outside my window right now, very poignantly. It's quiet, just birds. Why? Because my apartment is toward the back of a large building and I live in a neighborhood where people's gardens are in back of their houses. So all these ornamental gardens are hidden from the street -- I can just see them from one window if I crane my neck. But they create a patch of nature-type stuff that attracts birds ... if I could just get my neighbors to be as quiet and harmonious (do you hear that, thunder-heels in Apt. 9 above me??)

I wanted to tell you ever so many things -- I just reread some F. Scott Fitzgerald as that statement may attest -- but now I can't remember what they were.

Well, this is pretty momentous. A few weekends ago I went to Circuit City to buy an MP3 player -- finally! I'd researched online and had chosen my one: the Zen Creative. A reliable device costing $149. At the store, an employee told me he didn't think the Creative would work with a Mac. Though I doubted this (I think I know someone who uses one with a Mac) I let myself be persuaded rather easily to buy -- an Ipod! Yes! I spent twice the amount I planned and left the store in confused triumph and emotional disarray. I actually stood outside Circuit City and cried for a short time because I wasn't sure I deserved an Ipod. But I walked home with it. By the time I got to a Vietnamese cafe near my house and had a chicken sandwich and mango bubble tea, I felt happy. I was excited. It was like owning the black box from 2001. I could not WAIT to get it going, fill it with songs, join this small-earplugs revolution.

Enh. I can't get it to work. Simple instructions from the instruction booklet, when followed, produce no results. I keep being told to download the new iTunes and I keep doing it but then nothing happens. And I foolishly set my iPod's language-to-be-in to Polish, thinking I'd be able to switch it back, but I can't, so all the instructions are in Polish. This is really bad when the screen flashes a red circle with a line through it and one urgent Polish word that I know must mean something like "Shut Down!" or "Danger!"

I couldn't deal with my failure with the iPod. I put it away and ignored it. It was too agonizingly frustrating and I felt like too much of an A-hole not being able to get this simple goddam device going that every kid on the subway seems to have mastered.

But last weekend my niece told me from Mexico that she'd set her iPod into Chinese at the beginning, following a similar prankish impulse, and I should go to the Apple page and the problem is under Frequently Asked Questions. So I can get it out of Polish, maybe, and this weekend I'm going to try again but I don't have too much hope. This problem is the reason for the snarky post below about hating technology. I do, because I can't get one tiny corner of it to work for me.

I hoped maybe stick-straight hair made me look like Cat Power. I kept the blowout long enough to play an ABBA song at a party in a slowed down, mournful, Cat Power style. We were all supposed to perform a song from 1977 so I did Knowing Me, Knowing You. Someone did Psycho Killer and someone else did The Book I Read (lots of Talking Heads). There was a cake with the Sex Pistols, Iggy and the Stooges, and other 1977 notables drawn in frosting. It was a lot of fun.

That's all I got.

Look

Ryan Gosling is in a new movie with Anthony Hopkins -- Fracture. Ryan Gosling was really good in Half Nelson, the low-budget film about a Brooklyn teacher who's addicted to crack and trying to teach 7th graders the dialectical approach to history. That movie was fascinating -- you saw Gosling flailing around in his personal life while still trying to hold it together as a history teacher. Meanwhile he's buying drugs from the cousin and mentor of a little girl in his class he's forming a strong, unsettling friendship with.

Did I already write about that?

Anyway, what about that name, Gosling? Wouldn't that have caused the guy a butt-load of trouble while he was growing up? Would kids yell, "Hey Ryan! Where's the quisling?" or would it be even more abusive?

Maybe living down that name has contributed to the strength of this rising young actor.

PCs -- Yuck!

I just wrote a post and couldn't cut and paste it into Blogger because I'm on a PC. What a bum machine!

Now some smart aleck will write in saying I could actually cut and paste a Word file but I don't know some stupid little step.

I hate technology.

I Haven't Forgotten You

Readers, I wish I could post more often. Get a load of this. I'm working 5 days a week lately at a place where I don't have a computer. Some people have computers, some don't, and I have a weird shift -- 10:30-6:30 -- that means when I get there, all the computers are taken. People will let you check your email, but sitting in an office for 6 hours without the Internet is a restless-making experience.

Then at 5, the day shift leaves and I get a computer and there's nothing on the Internet for me. What was I so antsy about? What was I so frantic to look up on Google? I can't remember anymore.

So I'd blog more but I don't have a computer and I don't think the company would look kindly on blogging anyway. At home my connection is tres unpredictable. This morning it's good so I thought I'd write.

How have you been?

I haven't done my taxes yet. I plan to rush in somewhere Monday morning, maybe get an extension. That may not be a great plan but it's the best I can do. I've always been the last one to the post office with my return on April 16. I've always driven my car to some distant field outside of Kalamazoo to hand my tax envelope to someone who will postmark it for April 16 even though it's 2 am and no longer April 16.

But someone said on the radio the deadline is the 17th. Is that true? Oh my God, I have all the time in the world.

Automatic Toilets: Yes or No?

Where I'm working now they have automatic toilets. I'm always trying to figure out why these exist. Some of them are a terrible waste of water. The ones that flush when you walk into the stall, because they're programmed to flush when they sense an upright human, and then flush again and sometimes twice while you're putting your clothes back together.

Who decided we needed these? Were so many people not flushing, that it justifies the wasted water?

The creepiest thing is if they don't sense you, even after you're finished and you've stood up and your clothes are all back together. You wave an arm, going like, 'Hey, I'm done.' But it just sits there. It's eerie -- you aren't registering. The toilet can't sense you. Do you exist? Are you just a shade? Are you even human?

You can flush them yourself, with a finger that's a bit shaky from not being read as human. So they aren't completely insane but I think they are pretty insane.

The Power of Song

Among other things, Walk the Line shows the playful, potent charge that comes from singing with someone else. It makes perfect sense that June and Johnny's romance built up over a microphone. The glances they give each other, especially Johnny's to June, are smoldering.

I've gotta say that good as Reese Witherspoon is as June, Joachim Phoenix moved me more with his somber, tortured performance. Cash is an iconic figure, but Phoenix doesn't try to fill in those outlines -- he burrows into the dark, sad heart of the man and is entirely convincing as someone who never believed the hype of his fame, in fact who can hardly believe he's worth one thin dime. As he clumsily courts June it's refreshing to see her calling him on all his bullshit, but Cash struggles for so long it's almost unbearable.

The movie's fairly conventional but the story is genuinely gut-wrenching. That Johnny and June end up as life partners seems too good to be true, a Hollywood ending, but it's real. He died 4 months after she did!

In other news, I got new glasses, the mice are back, and I'm closing in on filming my robot secretary sketches. YouTube will be over by the time I get these babies filmed. But it's happening, slowly but surely.