(no subject)

Xmas was OK. If I didn't feel so under the gun I might have liked to stay an extra day or two, but my parents' home is just not a good place to get work done.

Ricky is on plain old Ritalin now, and he can't stop talking about how great he feels. All four of us at dinner had an open conversation about how "good" Ricky's been with these meds, actually, and I'm glad about that. While it largely clears his head of the clinically manic activity that normally plagues him and makes it so hard for him to communicate, still leaves him with paranoia, which unfortunately flavors everything he does and says. I call him on it when it comes up, and he shrugs... what can you do.

My readers hailing from Bangor may recall that strange "Le Junque Shoppe" store on Hammond Street. You know, the one that had all the interesting crap in the windows, but which nobody ever went into because if you did the proprietor would come out and stare at you until you left. (I bought a few LPs from him, once, long ago.) Ricky, who now lives in Bangor, has gotten to know that guy, whom he calls Crazy Eddie. And this year was Crazy Eddie Christmas, because Ricky decided to get all our gifts from Mr. E's establishment. Dad got a framed print of the Mona Lisa, mom got a tiny model of Fenway Park, and I got a wallet. Hurray!

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The Greyhound trip was fine. Between podcasts and Games Magazine, I had plenty to do. The magazine was one from a couple of months ago with another nifty hunt-style metapuzzle in it, and I polished off most of it during the four-hour trip back.

That trip was made a little hairy when something happened that made a woman stand up and ask if anyone was a doctor. Cinematic! Nobody was, but the bus citizenry nonetheless became spontaneously crisis-mode cohesive, with someone becoming the designated 911 dialer and others offering water to the afflicted passenger, even while nobody on my end of the bus knew what was wrong with the guy. An ambulance showed up moments after we pulled over. It took the fellow in, but he came back a few minutes later. I caught a glimpse of him then, but he was just some scraggly dude with a long face who didn't look particularly moribund, so who knows.

Nobody was impatient about the wait except a punky girl next to me, but she was also the most vocal of the water-offerers, so whatev. And then the bus somehow made to to South Station on time anyway.

(no subject)

Listening to my iPod today, I started wondering if anyone had ever written a Radioheadesque song about Lynn Truss-style punctuation rage and titled it "Comma Police".

Then I started thinking that, instead of doing the obvious thing and changing the original song's lyrics into those dealing with comma bad punctuation, it would be funnier if the song's speaker was actually the bad punctuation user, futilely trying to bring down the Comma Police on the infractions he perceives. And then it of course occurred to me that you could transform the whole song as it currently exists simply by understanding that the speaker actually is saying s/karma/comma/i (something aided by the singer's accent) and that his notion of the song's lyrics as written contain flagrant comma misuse:

This is what, you get
This is what, you get
This is what, you get when you, mess with us

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BTW, serious question: when talking about a lyrical musical piece that explicitly reflects someone's thoughts or feelings, how do you refer to that person? I know from high school that in poetry this entity is conventionally called "the speaker" (or at least 'twas so with my poet-geek English teacher), and I use that when talking about songs as well. It doesn't seem quite right, though, since (unlike with written poetry) a song features the literal presence of an actual voice, and that voice is singing, not speaking. But "the singer" seems quite incorrect, since that's definitely a pointer to the person who is standing here (or who has been recorded) singing, and not the "character" he or she is portraying, dig?

Of a certain age

My friendsfriends page is now almost entirely a roiling and wholly unwitting battle between individual pregnant people and pregnancy communities, and the childfree community. Both of which make me glow cherry-red as my interest level dopplers away into another continent.