A Weekend to Envy

Last night I saw the season opener for the Columbus NHL franchise, the Blue Jackets. It's a promising year for the Blue Jackets. Some big moves made in the off season. Ryan Murray coming back from an injury that took him out of last season. Marian Gaborik looks like a beast. Bobrovsky just won a Vezina. It looks like it could be a good year. We lost 4-3 after we only answered one of the Calgary Flames 3rd period goals. The Jackets offensive squad looked uncharacteristically slick. Sergei Bobrovsky looked uncharacteristically mortal.

Today, after Emily makes breakfast we're heading to the pumpkin patch and apple orchard. We shall buy pumpkins. And we shall pick apples. Last year we did the same thing. We wandered about the pumpkin patch, picked a few that looked good, then wandered into the apple trees. We saw people picking apples and putting them in bags. We didn't have any bags. There was a woman handing out bags. We asked her if we could have one. She chastised us for not being in our car. She can only give bags to people in cars, she insisted. And, indeed, she was handing the bags exclusively to the drivers in a long line of cars. But we still didn't understand. Couldn't she just give us a bag? She could not. This year we will make no such mistake. Once we get our pumpkins, we will get in our car and get into the apple picking line, so that we can get a bag, park our car, get out of our car, and pick some apples.

 I don't mean to sound smug. There actually is a good reason we needed to be in our car. The reason is so we would pay for our apples. They collect money for the apples at the end of the car line. If people were getting apples on foot, they could just walk in any direction (except one) away from the apple orchard, and the orchard's limited staff would be powerless to stop them from taking home some free apples. It would be problematic, for the apple orchard, if people didn't pay for their apples.

I just interrupted the sweetness of a hug by pretending to eat Emily's arm. But I didn't do it in that sweet, teeth-only, sanitary way. There was some saliva involved. She acted disgusted. I accused her of pretending to be disgusted. But I don't think she was actually pretending. She pretended she had been pretending. That was sweet.

After we pick apples and buy pumpkins, we will come back home. We will make dinner. Red Curry Vegetables and Rice. And we're going to make some sort of apple pie. Or tart. Something. Then we're going to a Pumpkin carving party. Today is going to be a full day.

 Tomorrow, my friend Ben and I are doing a triathlon. It's this one.  It's not a real triathlon.  It's canoing instead of swimming.  But it's a great fitness goal for Ben, and it's a decent warm up for my upcoming marathon. Last year it poured the entire time we were in the canoe.  The same looks like it might happen tomorrow.   All good though.  It's all good.

This is today.

It's raining outside. I've avoided getting caught in heavy rain twice today. I turn thirty in ten days. I played tennis with a friend today. I beat him in the first set. 6-4. It was the first time I beat him in a set. My serve was on. More on than usual, anyway. It's no longer raining. For the fiftieth time, I have resolved to listen to more music. I upgraded to Spotify premium, and made the extraordinary discovery that downloading playlists to play on my phone is the optimally efficient way (and legal to boot) to listen to pretty much whatever I want. So I went through my regular routine. Went to the billboard list. Noted all of the top-20 albums that are neither country nor metal, and downloaded them as playlists. So far I've listened to new albums by Cher, Avicii, and CHVRCHES. I looked up music podcasts, subscribed to two of them, and downloaded the albums that they're discussing this week. Subscribing to podcasts is an essential part of my process. Now I'm listening to Kanye. I downloaded Yeezus, as recommended by the internet, but my partner suggested that his 2010 My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was actually better. That was good enough reason to add it to my list. I have a list. It's very important to me to have a list. I don't have much trust in my first-order desires. They often lead me astray. My second-order desires are much more trustworthy, and they're equally intense. So my desire to listen to more music issued in my developing a strategy, a plan. That plan involves podcasts and playlists. Pretty soon it will probably involve a spreadsheet. I know how this goes, because it's what I did with movies. Three years ago I decided to see more movies. Now I've got a fairly elaborate system of spreadsheets that governs my movie going. I anticipate getting to the same place with music. I don't have an easy time forming opinions about music. I gather from listening to others that when they listen to music they experience a sort of perception, by which they are able to assess the goodness of what they're listening to. I rarely have any such experience when listening to music. That's been largely responsible for negligence in listening to new music for most of my life. For some reason this is not the experience I have when watching movies. I feel like it's more obvious that the movie I'm watching is good, or is not good. I could offer reasons, but where those reasons bottom out I am left with the persistent opinion that the movie is a good one. Not so with music. I think this might be a kind of sociopathy. I've been trying to figure out what's wrong with me. I'm cooking dinner for Emily tonight. I'm making mushroom stroganoff. It's vegan. Emily is vegan. Everything we make in this house is vegan. But sometimes I eat Dorritos. Or I order a pizza. Or I even will shamefully drive through a Wendy's. Because I am utterly disgusting. "The same people who try to blackball me forgot about two things: my black balls." Thus sayeth the Yeezus.