Thursday, September 07, 2006

Dirge of the Missing Notebook

Sometimes you (I) just don’t feel like being productive.  After cooking a surprisingly satisfying meal last night (tilapia fillets marinated in lime juice, pepper and mint, quick-grilled dry; and fresh favas sauteed with scallion, cumin, cilantro and more mint) and cleaning the damn kitchen up afterwards, and then doing a bunch of computer housekeeping till near midnight, and having messed around with some of my old essays for several weeks now in the vague expectation that they’d congeal automatically into a coherent anthology, while at the same time trying to schedule a complicated two-destination five-family vacation, and starting to get my head around the idea that Zaq will need to go to preschool soon enough that I am already behind in my planning and research.... anyway, my brain be frayed and it’s been hard to generate much enthusiasm for the stack of budgets on my desk that I’m supposed to be reading (and writing uptight niggling letters to clarify).  I have not been exercising enough, I’ve been getting between one and three fewer hours of sleep a night than I’d really like, and this four-day week is feeling like an ever-swelling diverticulum in the gurgling lower tract of my life. 

The net result: I’m taking it a little easier today than I did yesterday.  I’m gonna back off, intensity-wise.  I’ll take a lunch break so I can walk leisurely on an errand; I’ve got a farewell drinks happy hour for a departing colleague tonight, and lord love me, I’m going to try to relax.  My two closest coworkers are out of town today, so in a sense it’s all on me - but in another sense, they’re not going to be giving me anything more to deal with.  So all that remains is for me to get a little traction and keep it comfortably in third gear till quitting time. 

And how will I accomplish that?  Well I could type out one of those essays that’s lingering around, but that sounds too much like work right now.  Or I could rifle through my little memopad and improvise a rant on some weird notes I scrawled while on the bus, but actually I’ve got three notebooks in circulation now and I can’t at the moment lay hands on the “good one” with all my most provocative observations (such as they are, which actually they probably aren’t, which lets you know how lame what’s left really is).  So instead, I will try to reconstruct a few ideas about bad commercial choices I’ve seen or that have come to my mind lately, and if you don’t like it you can write your own damn blog post about how the Chucklehut just isn’t making the grade anymore.  And I won’t read it.  That’ll show you.

The “bad commercial ideas” idea occurred to me recently when the phrase “def jam” came back to my mind for no good reason.  I find it to be a distasteful name, and I finally realized why: I am ashamed to say, when I hear anyone enunciate this common cultural appellation, I usually think that the syllable “def” is the beginning of a word referring to bodily excretion.  Even though they don’t finish it off with “acation,” I’m just a little too literal and clinical to shake the expectation.  So “def jam” sounds to me like a euphemism for constipation.  And that just won’t get me to listen to whatever it is they’re jamming, regardless of how def it may or may not be.  As far as I’m concerned, the less def, the better.  Maybe some high fiber sheet music will help. 

Motivated by this crude and stupid mental block, I offer up a few other bad choices I’ve been encountering lately:

There’s a new restaurant in my neighborhood that specializes in tapas - little dishes inspired by recipes from the Iberian peninsula.  Sounds fine to me, except that the name they chose for this place is “Spanish Fly”.  Naming a restaurant after a parasitic insect famous for spreading germs and maggots is bad enough, but to specify further a bug that is renowned in low circles for irritating genital tissues and simulating arousal by means of low-grade chemical burns is enough to keep me far from their doors or anything else they’ve got on offer.  Spanish Fly guys: I just hope you’re using high quality condoments.

The San Francisco Giants baseball team is running a PR campaign for their kids’ program, the “Junior Giants.” There are billboards all over town with inspirational images and messages, on the general subject of encouraging kids to play and follow baseball as a means to ensure their development into a wise, confident citizenry.  This is a laudable goal, but I do take issue with the posters that show a big baseball jersey with the text, “Junior Giants: In the game of life, we’re creating heroes.” The problem here is that the most powerful and famous player on the team has been under investigation for years for steroid abuse.  Hero creation apparently has its limits.  Maybe they should try, “We’re creating heroes but only out of vitamin supplements and good, clean living.” Or “We’re medically inducing heroism in our chem labs.” That’s catchy, no?  Plus, it encourages the kids to stay in school.  Those drugs are expensive, boys and girls - study hard and make your own! 

There is a third one too, but it’s stuck in the missing notebook.  I’m tired of trying to think of it.  I declare this post finished.  When I resort to doing my work because my blog post is too much trouble, I know it’s time to move on.