Dwelling, backwards by decades

2011: Valentine's Castle, Yonkers.
2001: Valentine's Castle, Yonkers.
1991: Parents' house, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
1981: Parents' house, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
1971: Parents' house, Hamilton Meadows (suburb of Columbus, Ohio)
1961: The house before I was born.

One of the people from whom I picked this odd little meme noted that this type of sampling made it look as if she had only lived two places, ever. I've lived several places more than this would indicate, but really not many--we moved a couple of times before I was 6 months old, but then there were only two houses on the outskirts of Columbus until I was 11, within a mile of each other; the family house in North Carolina for 16 years, in which my parents still live, interrupted for college (a dorm room, two college-owned apartments within a block of each other, and a boarding house); and going on 19 years here in Yonkers.

I don't like moving, and neither do my parents. My sister is much more peripatetic, and tim_maroney moved several times within the Bay Area once he landed there. Dunno what that says about us.

Oddly controversial statements

Here's one I still consider to be innocuous: "I like to encounter stories in the order that their authors intended them to be told." When I said this in the comics shop yesterday, everyone laughed and agreed.

Okay, phrased that way, it doesn't seem particularly controversial. But if you rephrase it as "I don't like spoilers", it apparently attracts the type of asshole who then reels off as many spoilers as possible before you shut them up. Back in Usenet days, I killfiled at least one person whose posts I otherwise enjoyed once he made it clear that he actively enjoyed spoiling stories for people who hate spoilers.

You can re-read a work many times. But you can only read it the first time, once. And surprise is a valid reaction to artistic works that, unlike most responses, can be taken away.

(Have I mentioned recently that I have seen Kevin Spacey more times on stage than on film? By which I mean, I've never seen The Usual Suspects, but I've had it spoiled for me at least a dozen times. Which reminds me of the time I was talking with supergee and he revealed that he knew that Spacey was gay but didn't know he was an actor. Now that's a different way of slicing the information of the world.)

And something I assumed wouldn't happen

Tuesday morning was a minor disaster at work--on Monday night, the company's network department made a change affecting how our customers send us order messages, and even though we had tried to go check their work and verify that nothing was hosed, there were things we missed. So, instead of leaving for work at 8 AM as I usually do, I ended up sitting in my study monitoring the situation until everything was fixed around 11:30. This was only a minor disaster because of the hundreds of customer connections we have, fewer than a dozen were still down by the time the market opened.)

Anyway, when that was done, supergee drove me to the train station. I had a few minutes before the train came, so I bought a coffee and a yogurt in the deli attached to the station and walked up to the platform to wait. Sat down, ate the yogurt, walked over to the trash can to throw out the yogurt, and sat back down. A kindly middle-aged woman was walking towards me holding a granola bar. She said something I couldn't quite hear, so I took out my earphone--which she clearly had not seen--and said, "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you."

She said, with a slight waver that indicated that this conversation was already going off the rails, "Would you like this? Would you like some more food?"

I am proud to say that I didn't laugh, or choke, or sneer; I just slightly widened my eyes as if I had no idea why she might have said that, and said, "Oh, no, no thanks. I'll grab lunch when I get to the office." And she smiled and turned away.

Just a couple of weeks ago I had commented to agrumer, bugsybanana, and drcpunk that I was pretty sure that people don't mistake me for a homeless person despite my somewhat shabby clothing and aversion to the barber's arts. But apparently my threadbare coat has gotten to the point where merely looking purposeful and recently bathed isn't enough; I'll be getting a new coat before next winter.

(I buy coats more often than I move, but not much, and for the same reasons--it's hard to find one I like, so I stick with it.)