book envy

I just did something I haven't done in at least two years: I finished a book.

Yeah, I know, that's probably something I should be embarrassed about, but I've always found reading a book to be an incredible commitment. It's not like a movie, where you sit in the dark for a couple hours and have it roll by. Reading is always active. I have to make the choice to pick up that book, time and time again, because I rarely have a 14-hour stretch where I can just read straight through and finish it.

Clearly, I don't often have the resolve to pick a book back up again, so I have about three dozen half-read books laying around my apartment.

But today I broke the pattern. I've been reading The Time Traveler's Wife, a book I keep hearing about from random people, and I thought it was absolutely beautiful. It was completely captivating, so honest, and so emotional, despite it's inherently absurd conceit.

It's the kind of story that makes me jealous, that makes me want to start writing and creating and imagining immediately. So that's what I think I'll do. Right after I call someone to tell her how much she truly means to me.

thehurwitz 2.0

I know I left you all (read: the one or two people who read this blog) with a big cliffhanger a week or so ago, and I'm sure you've been anxiously waiting on the edge of your seat. Well, wait no longer, here comes the incredibly unsatisfying resolution: I bought a camera!

Yeah, I know everybody has a camera. I even have a half-broken, POS digital point-and-shoot sitting around somewhere. But I'm now the proud owner of a digital SLR, and it makes me immeasurably happy to be able to take nice pictures of things.

I tested it out on my trip with Amy to San Diego this past week, which was unbelievably relaxing, and provided great picture opportunities. So expect posts to be periodically accompanied with pictures, although they will likely be more pictures of things, rather than people, because I'm going to constantly forget to ask my subjects if they are comfortable with having their picture posted on some obscure blog that no one reads.

Enjoy!

seriously?

It's remarkably depressing when you get off a plane and no one's waiting to pick you up.

It's comically depressing when no one's waiting because it's 3:00 in the morning and the reason your plane is landing 3 hours later than scheduled is because the pilot got stuck in traffic or something.

I spent most of last night sitting on a tarmac, when my usual 9-to-midnight flight from LAX to SEA became a 9-to-3 hell-ride. The irony of it all was that I was absolutely convinced I was going to miss my plane. I made it to the gate about 5 minutes before scheduled takeoff, out of breath and thinking I wouldn't be able to pick up my bag until the next morning.

So in any case, I'm in Seattle now. And I'm cold.

bring the heat (please)

Mike and I don't have a considerable amount of visitors at our apartment. There are a number of reasons for this: we're very busy, we're rarely home ourselves, our apartment is messy and unorganized, etc. etc.

But as the seasons have turned and the sun has dropped ever lower on the horizon, a new reason has emerged: our apartment is cold as balls.

See, we don't have any heat. At all. We live in a pretty old building, and so the only heating solution comes by way of natural gas heaters installed in to the walls of a few rooms.

When we moved in last summer, we noticed that one of them leaked. The gas company came once to fix it, said they fixed it, and then the next day it was still leaking. The gas company came back the next day and said they fixed it again. I trusted the second guy more than the first (at least he spoke comprehensible English), but Mike and I were still uneasy about it. The gas company guy recommended that he just shut off all the heaters, since it was summer anyway, and we could call in the winter and have them turned back on.

Great, we said. Love it. Saving the energy and money. What the gas company guy neglected to mention, however, was that when we call to have the heaters turned back on, the phone dispatcher says, "Great! A technician will be at your house some time tomorrow between 8 am and 7 pm. Make sure you're there to let him in!"

Mike and I don't even have time to do laundry, so sitting around the house for 11 hours is not a viable option. As a result, we haven't been able to get the heaters back on. And now we're both going to our respective home towns for a month, so there's no real point in doing it before the new year.

No heat, combined with no direct sunlight (we have a north-facing apartment on the bottom floor), combined with cooler-than-usual temperatures, has left our living quarters uncomfortably cold. All the time. And there's nothing we can do about it but bundle up. I now sleep in a sweatshirt, two pairs of sweatpants, and socks -- combined with 4 blankets on top of my usual comforter. I think Mike has actually started sleeping in a sleeping bag. It's kind of like camping, but without the ability to actually make a fire. And we're out of smores.

So I beg of you, anybody, please bring something that generates heat. I'm about three days from just icing over.

the future is here!

Wow. Seriously. Wow. Just wow. Or w0w, maybe. And if you can't see the difference, you're obviously not cool.

In other news, I've spent about 72% of the past 72 hours in the Lucas Post Building editing sound on Plight, so I don't actually have any other news.

Actually, I do have a small bit of news, but it'll have to wait until I can present it properly. Bet you didn't know my blog had cliffhangers.

and the winner is...

Bill Richardson!

I just found a quiz online, created by the Washington Post (you should take it too) that summarizes the candidates' answers to various questions and asks how much you agree or disagree, then weights the results and tabulates them to tell you who you should vote for. The whole test is blind (they mix up the answers and don't show you which candidates they belong to), so as far as I can tell, this seems to me like the best way to pick a presidential candidate yet. Obviously there are problems with this method, but shit, seems about as scientific as picking a favorite person can be.

The test told me some interesting things, both about myself and the candidates. First of all, I hate it when dodgy or pander-y answers are given to these kinds of questions. Therefore, I only chose ones that gave a strong stance. As a result, I ended up picking ZERO of Obama's answers. That's right, zero. The candidate I thought I liked the most ended up scoring the lowest out of all five. Richardson was first, followed by Hillary, followed by Chris Dodd (??), then Edwards, then Obama.

I also discovered I really don't know jack shit about Richardson or Dodd, but based on this quiz, you better believe I'm going to do some research. Not that I really think either of them have a chance at winning, but what the hell. The Washington Post just earned Richardson one more vote than he would have otherwise.

I think this quiz should constitute voting, in and of itself. It's too easy to get caught up in stuff like the celebrity and "personality" of the candidates. Obviously these things bear no relation to the quality of a president (Bush sure is a charming fella, ain't he?). Instead of picking names, voters should be given a quiz like this. It seems like the best way for the real voice of people to emerge from all the political bullshit.

Now we just need to assign the quiz some sort of paper trail.

i'm afraid i can't do that, dave

This morning, for the second day in a row, I woke up to a very early* phone call. It wasn't my parents, calling with some sort of family emergency. It wasn't Amy, calling with something cute to share or some problem she wanted help with. It wasn't Mike or any other film school people, calling for some emergency help on a shoot.

It was a computer. A computer called me on the phone and woke me up. Two days in a row.

It wasn't the same computer, mind you. Yesterday the Wells Fargo-bot called to ask if I really had made a rather large purchase online (I did), and today the UPS-o-tron called to let me know my package was being delivered today and I would need to sign for it.

Now, I'm all about technology. I'm the guy who will be first in line to get a bionic eye as soon as they become available (I could see in infrared!!!). I have no problem calling Wells Fargo and dealing with their computerized system to pay bills and check my balances and whatnot.

But it's a whole new ball game when their computerized system calls me. I don't like when anybody wakes me up, but when computers can call and reach me at any time, day or night, with no guilt or remorse, I start to get annoyed. Especially when the computer is calling about something like identity theft. Isn't that a something a real person should be handling? Like, a "crime", or whatever? Is this where we're headed, as a society? Do we really want to go down a path where the only "people" checking on our well-being are mechanized?

Fuck it. At least HAL's looking out for me. He'll always have my back.


* To a college student, "very early" means any time before 9 o'clock

quote of the past three days

"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."
-Henry Kissinger