Month: May 2012

Happiness is a warm pun

We had a departmental retreat at work today, one of those daylong affairs at a cabin by a lake outside the city with intradepartmental brainstorming, strategic planning, etc. Actually, this one was much better than most and wasn’t really annoying at all. But at the inevitable introductory communication exercise, my question was, “What was the happiest day of your life?”

I had to pause and swallow before answering.

Eighteen or nineteen months ago, I would have had a very quick and easy answer to this question. That’s no longer the case. It’s not that I don’t have lots of happy days on file in my mind. I do. And new ones are still being added, albeit not always so often as I might like. But there’s no longer that one special day that trumps them all for me. And it made me kind of sad to realize that. It also made me ponder two important points, which I guess I’m now expressing as bits of advice:

  1. Always accumulate as many happy days as you can. Not only is it a very good way to live your life, but it also comes in handy sometimes when you have to have a ready response to a question for a team-building exercise at work.
  2. Never allow a significant part of your own personal happiness to be dependent on another human being. It’s a universally bad move that you will nearly always regret at some point in the future.

I’m now going to enjoy the fact that I actually got home early tonight.

On a Sunday

I’m working on digitizing a video letter I wrote to a friend probably seventeen years ago so that he can have it on DVD. This means I am:

  • Amazed that the VHS has held up as well as it has. There are dropouts but it looks pretty good considering it was done in six-hour mode and involves second and third generation video of variable quality.
  • Even more amazed at how well I was able to do the analog editing way back in 1995 using two VCRs and a cheap boom box. It worked, strangely enough…
  • Hoping I’ll uncover some of the assorted video I lost over the years, including such classics as “Greensboro 1994, Part 1″and “Three-way with the boy who had a pink mohawk.”
  • Also hoping this will jumpstart some of the other video digitization I’ve sort of floundered on in the past year.

I’ll tell you how it comes out.

Videolog: Ordinary World


Duran Duran – Ordinary World by DuranDuran-Official

Duran Duran
Ordinary World (1992)

I always really liked this song and it brings back rather pleasant memories of my first few months in San Francisco. Musically, I think i enjoyed the early 1990s more than any other time of my life. Those were the days when Live 105 was a true commercial alt-pop station that played everything from King Missile to 808 State and Soundgarden to Depeche Mode. That is to say it was a far cry from the bastardized nu-metal atrocity that it (and many of its sister “alternative” stations) became in the days of Limp Bizkit and later Linkin’ Park.

Duran Duran is a band that I sort of enjoy more now than I did in the actual 1980s from whence they came. I think their music has aged well. I’m not suggesting that it sounds fresh and new, because it doesn’t. It is very much a product of its time and sounds it, but it doesn’t come across as laughably dated like, say, Total Coelo, to The Other Ones (thanks, Duncan). Duran Duran’s music reads more like the 1980s equivalent of a 1950s pop standard. It’s obviously period music, but not a parody of the period. Hall and Oates falls into this category of 1980s pop that’s aged pretty well, too, I think.

Of course, “Ordinary World” is from 1992, so the relevance of that last paragraph is maybe a bit suspect…