2007-09-14 
 

100 things

It seems that no blog is complete without one of these lists laying around somewhere. I'm going to be kind and give it a page of it's own so that you can feel free to ignore it if you wish. Also, please note that the page this links to has been available since March. I just now realized that the entry announcing it never got published. That said it, I reread it today and it's still all true.

RANDOM LIST OF 100 THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT ME

Labels: blogging, dose of mikey, g, memes, memory lane, random review, rant, reading, san francisco, sharketing, shout out, spirit

* posted by me at 8:18 PM

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2007-07-22 
 

unspoiled

No spoilers here, but I did finish the final Harry Potter book today and am currently experiencing a minor reading hangover. (Just means that all the characters are still running around inside my head. Not entirely unpleasant actually, but my brain would like to be resting now.)

Normally when I like a book a lot, I try to read it over a period of several days or even weeks in order to prolong the pleasure of the story living in me, but I chose not to do that with HP7. Too easy for me to inadvertently find out something in the outside world that I'd rather know by reading it myself.

My verdict? I liked it. Can't say much about why without spoiling it, but I'm really eager to discuss as it should give a little rest to the plot twists and ponderables running through my mind. Thank goodness for the internet!

Labels: dose of mikey, random review, reading

* posted by me at 2:11 AM

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2007-03-24 
 

herald mage

I recently reread Mercedes Lackey's Herald Mage trilogy and was a bit surprised how much I enjoyed myself. Not because I hadn't liked the books the first time around. I remembered myself quite enjoying the experience. At the same time, I recall wishing that the tale had either ended a bit differently or allowed the characters happiness earlier on. I had also been disappointed in the way the author treated sex. As if the camera shifted focus from couple to crackling fire...and faded out. (At the time, I had just come out and wasn't quite as experienced as I wanted to be. The vagueness frustrated me.)

This time, because I'm older and less tied to certain romantic ideas, I fell more easily into the ending and the long path they took to get there. As for the sex, I've certainly had enough experience since then. The allusions made were adequate enough for me to draw my own conclusions about what was going on just off page.

Labels: dose of mikey, random review, reading

* posted by me at 9:33 PM

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2005-07-20 
 

cover closed

Finished the book. No spoilers here. Just gotta say, so many questions answered, but so many new questions created.

Best of the lot so far, but a little much for the under 12 set. (Or at least the under 12 set as I imagine them to be. Lord only knows what growing up with 24 hour media has prepped these kids for.)

Labels: random review, reading

* posted by me at 12:56 AM

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2005-07-17 
 

from windy city to hot red woods

Spent most of the week in Chicago for work. Came home and left the following morning to go camping down Big Basin.

That's where I've been in a nutshell. If you care about some random particulars, read on.

I guess I could whine about the Chicago trip and how I had to share my unrequested center seat with the arm of the large man to the left of me and the odor of the man to my right....but then, that's a tired tale that too many have told before me. Suffice it to say that United is no substitute for Jet Blue.

Did have some great food in Chicago at Vermilion. Also had great margarittas and mexican food at a restaurant who's name escapes me because I had too many margaritas. We had a nice time, but regretted the next morning when we had to wake up at 5...again. Sometimes I really do miss being 25.

Camping was, as usual, a nice break from the world though a bit hotter than we usually deal with. Upside is that sitting still reading kept the heat bearable, so I had a chance to finish up a few books in order to prepare myself for HP and the HBP. Picked it up today on the way back from camping. I should see you all again after the back cover closes.

Labels: dose of mikey, linkage, local getaway, random review, reading, sharketing

* posted by me at 11:41 PM

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2005-07-10 
 

moment

There are few things in this world that make me happier than curling up with a good book and a nice cup of tea...or a fine glass of wine.

Labels: reading

* posted by me at 7:20 PM

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2005-06-07 
 

read me a river

I used to live with my head inside a book most hours of the day...and night. I'd read so hard that my parents enjoyed saying that they could crack an egg over my head and I wouldn't notice except for that short moment when I'd have to wipe the runny yolk from my eyes in order to clearly see the page.

I haven't read like that in years. Finishing a book or two a day and leaving the rest of the world to run without me for months at a time. School and other social obligations becoming nothing more than semi-unpleasant dreams that I needed to push through in order to get back inside the pages of my latest adventure.

If it weren't for other people, books would still be my drug of choice.

I made a promise to myself in 10th grade to live life instead of just reading about it. Books still took up a large bit of time, but writing became more important as I started to record my experiences. It was slow going, and I'd often return to the comforting pages of a well worn tome, but the new books I was discovering told of lives that I hoped to emulate. Lives that weren't trapped in the torture of adolescence, but did require that one get out there and socialize.

So I did.

Over the years, I've tried a variety of more 'social' drugs: Alcohol, Nicotine, Marijuana, Acid, Cocaine, Ketamine, etc, but reading remains my number one drug of choice.

A rather complicated way to explain that I, like many others, am re-reading the entire Potter series in preparation for the release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. The nugget here, is that I'm enjoying the sudden crunch of reading more than I'd like to admit, especially so soon after my sudden immersal into the world of Dan Brown and my return visits to both Douglas Adams and Robert Heinlein. I'm afraid it'll get hard for me to stop.

It may be G's turn to crack the egg.

Labels: reading

* posted by me at 7:24 PM

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2005-04-14 
 

smoke in the city

Climbing up through the steel and concrete of downtown San Francisco this morning, I caught the lingering soaked-in scent of campfire smoke. After three showers and several changes of clothes it seemed a bit odd that I’d still be carrying it around, so maybe nature’s trying to tell me something.

I’d been reading Tom Robbins’ Villa Incognito during my commute and my mind’s been full of animism and the idea that every living thing has spirit. Not a new concept for me, but something that’s been buried under too many years of dance halls and drugs.

Okay, maybe that last part’s a little hyperbolic and/or misleading, and I do beg your pardon. It’s been a while since I’ve sat down to tap anything in to the computer and the words are welling up; flooding to the surface of my skin and jumping off on whatever keys they see fit. I have lost all control.

This entry has been brought to you by the letter M who is tired of being a corporate cog. BEHIND THE BLOG: He composed it much earlier today in email format. The more legitimate work related email he could've been writing championed ideas that had been reduced, by committee, to a tepid and salt free state. Ain't corporate america grand?

Labels: blogging, dose of mikey, reading, san francisco, sharketing, spirit

* posted by me at 2:16 AM

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2005-03-26 
 

silver lining

Spent most of Thursday in the bathroom thanks to a new acquaintance named Visicol. (and later in the afternoon, his lady friend Dulcolax) Perhaps not quite so healthy a method of cleansing as the more traditional three day fast followed by a salt water wash out, but effective none-the-less.

At the beginning of the month, I'd been dreading this whole two day ordeal, but decided that it wasn't doing me any good to wallow in worry. After remembering that The Davinci Code had been sitting next to my bed for several weeks, patiently waiting for an open window of time in which I could read it cover to cover, I began to look forward to spending a day tied to the bathroom.

So, I joined the list of folks who've read The Code, and my insides were cleaner than they've been in quite some time. Making it easy for the doctor to excise the problematic polyp from inside me.

polyps, to me, seem to be something more likely found at the bottom of the sea rather than inside the large intestine

I even got to see the little oceanic creature, though my haze of sedation makes it hard to remember whether it was the size of a grape or a grapefruit. Both common sense and healthy hopes lead me toward grape. It's only my artistic need for hyperbole that prefers the latter.

Labels: dose of mikey, medical mystery, reading

* posted by me at 4:14 PM

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2005-03-02 
 

ups and downs

There's a line from a book I read long ago echoing in my head.

I can see that you do have your h'ups and downs Gladys!

See, I'm a person who usually claims to the outside world that I want to ride the merry go round of life, yet I constantly find myself on the rollercoaster. I must like it there or I'd get off the next time the ride got into the station and go find the much safer (and less exciting) horses going forever in circles. Like the aforementioned Gladys, I revel in the excitement of the complicated life. That being said, Gladys is never quite as excited about being a direct participant. Much happier in the role of observer. OK, I'm more like Jack than Gladys...but I'm digressing and becoming even more vague to anyone reading but my future self. I'm not ready to blog about all this right now.

For now, I'm going to go for a walk in the rain and see if that'll wash away some of this evening's troubles, but before I go:

1. I appreciate in advance any concern. Posts like the above often garner a few emails from my nearest and dearest, but I'm fine - really - just on a bumpy bit of the ride is all and feeling dramatic about it.

2. Bonus points to anyone who can source my quote up above.

Labels: dose of mikey, reading

* posted by me at 12:38 AM

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2005-02-04 
 

ups and downs

I left work today in a bit of a funk. Plugged into music for the commute home and went from funk to a rather pleasant dazed feeling. Felt a bit like I'd gotten stoned, but without the drymouth and munchies.

Got home and took a brief nap before walking to my doctor's appointment.

On the way I saw an orange tree...of sorts.



Read an interesting piece in a back issue of the New Yorker: Ice, by Thomas McGuane.

The doctor kept getting called out of the examining room to discuss a patient he'd just admitted to the hospital for some scary brain problem. I stared at the wall.



He's the first doctor I've felt comfortable with in a long time, but my blood pressure was still a little high, and the interview process to record my medical history brought me down again as I was reminded that I need to quit smoking, eat less, excercise more, etc. (That etcetera covers quite a bit that I'd rather keep to myself right now.)

Now I'm home again. Posting these pictures and telling a little story of my day perked me up a bit, but I'm still haunted by the theme from Growing Pains.

Show me that smile again, (Oh, show me that smile)
Don't waste another minute on your cryin',
We're nowhere near the end (We're nowhere near)
The best is ready to begin.

Labels: 1000 words, dose of mikey, medical mystery, memory lane, reading

* posted by me at 5:24 PM

(1) comments



2005-01-11 
 

dirty swedish maids

Yes it's late, but I can't sleep. Checked my stats for the first time in a couple months and People, you might want to stay inside. It's getting a bit odd out there.

Or maybe you want to go out in it. Who am I to judge your kink? Lord knows I've got a few of my own. Warning: I feel this post taking a turn in a direction I would normally block and send over to the backroom, but I'm tired of trying to keep it PG all the time. Backrooms are for X, not PG-13 or R. I suggest that anyone feeling a bit of trepidation right now should scroll quickly past the rest of this Tuesday entry below and read Monday's entry instead. A nice and quiet entry about Australian candy. (Although, I've already been told it was oddly subversive. Go figure.)

Anyhoo, my stats engine lets me know what search strings bring folks to my little hole in cyberspace. Faves of the past 30 days:

dirty swedish maids
edwardian masters and maids
strange love facts
hen strange love
st barts marijuana
tests on if you and you boyfriend still love each other

Honey, if you gotta take a test to find out, I'm doubting that you did in the first place...and while I'm meowing, let me add that it's "YOUR boyfriend" not "you boyfriend."

Hey! Who let the queen out? (whoot, whoot...ah whatever)

My favorite string so far this month: animals that begin with b. So Sesame Street and kinda sweet, but also troubling for a moment or two.

I do worry about kids stumbling in here unaware. Little kids, not teenagers. Hold on a second while I get up on my soapbox and slalom the topic a bit. Steady...okay.

I honestly feel that people don't give teens the credit they deserve. I read Portnoy's Complaint and Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me at age 12. Both contained rather adult subject matter, but like most teens I dealt with what I understood and stored the rest away for future referencing. Now I'm not saying to hook your kids up with these books, especially not at age 12. However, should you find them lying by the kids bed it's time for a conversation and not a scolding...you might also want to prepare them for their future as an English Major...but I digress.

For me, those books, and several other items I found in my parent's collection, kept me from killing myself as a teen. Portnoy, and a mild addiction to the Playboy Advisor, convinced me there'd be no blindness or hair growing on my palms due to my shameful addiction...or from the images I conjured up while indulging in it. (In fact, after enough backlogging through old Advisor columns, I learned that my shameful addiction was actually quite normal. A wonderful spot of calm hope in my otherwise anxious existence.)

Unintentially, Portnoy's, also glamorized therapy. When I eventually lay on the couch myself, the eventual acceptance of surviving abuse had the added bonus of leaving my innerGoth feeling like a true antihero.

Been Down So Long was mostly indeciphrable to me the first time I read through it, but I came away with the sense that everything would be alright if I could only make it to college. For anyone familiar with the book that may seem a strange takeaway, but it was mine and it kept me holding on to life through some tough years. Getting older meant I'd finally get to do things my way and be true to myself and, as an added bonus, college was a place that the mouthbreathers from school wouldn't make it into.

Aside: I actually met a dear friend in college with whom I still have a Pooh/Piglet connection. Radically different from the one in the book, although we did do acid together once...and oh the tea!

And we return you to your regularly scheduled blog: So I've decided that I'm going to trust the internet powers that be and responsible parenting to filter my site away from impressionable young eyes, because while I've been pretty good at keeping myself PG, I have occasionally faltered into the PG-13, or even (GASP) the rare R. Apologies to the more sensitive of you but self censorship of that sort makes me itch, and I'm stopping it right now.

Never fear, X will remain firmly in the backroom with the other consenting adults, but I'm not escorting R out of the room anymore should she make an appearance.

All that being said, let me leave you with a favorite string of curse that I stole outright from another college chum long ago and which I still sing quietly to myself when some unsavory character gets too close to me on public transit.

Shit damn fucking damn fucking damn shit.

Please note that normally this is said alltogether as one word, sort of like supercalifragiletcetera. Shitdamnfuckingdamnfuckingdamnshit. I've just added in the spaces above to help those content advisors filter me out.

Refreshing!

Labels: blogging, dose of mikey, memory lane, reading

* posted by me at 3:24 AM

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2005-01-07 
 

bleh

The wind blusters outside and the sky throws down water at inconvenient moments. Part of me rejoices in the glory of nature, but then another part just feels weak and tired.

Maybe I stayed up too late last night reading, maybe it's post holiday ennui, or maybe it's just the way the day goes sometimes.

Labels: dose of mikey, reading

* posted by me at 7:12 PM

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2005-01-03 
 

memories of a day mare

I took my lunch break at my desk today in order to read through recaps of some of my fave shows on Television Without Pity.

I've avoided TWP for quite some time now because I knew that it would become like heroin to me, yet another maze to lose myself in on the internet. See, what I love about the internet is the words. Pictures, moving images, and sound all add to the experience, but I'm almost happier with a text-centric page since I've always had the ability to bring text to life inside my head. It's not as intense when reading non-fiction, but exists in a watered down form. The more descriptive the passage, the better the trip.

I don't read fiction as often as I'd like because this ability to shut out everything but the vision of what I'm reading can sometimes distract from important happenings in the physical world around me. This made itself clear again today when a link from a page on TWP describing an episode of LOST took me for a ride into memory town.

The author made a reference to a series of books I'd been quite obsessed with as a teenager. He also kindly linked to a web page recapping each chapter. Only a few lines to describe each chapter, but the characters and places depicted jumped back to life for me as if I'd only left them yesterday. Entire story lines were pulled from somewhere in my subconscious and began playing again.

Sitting at your desk and having a vision of a story you once knew is not the best thing to be doing at work. My parents used to tell me that they could've cracked an egg over my head while I was reading and I would only have noticed should the yolk come between myself and the pages.

The VP who stopped by didn't have an egg and it took him tapping me on the shoulder to break me out of it.

Now a tap on the shoulder may not seem a worthy alert based on my earlier mention of a cracked egg on the head so I need to confess to the following: It wasn't the tap that actually alerted me, but the fact that someone had "invaded" my cube. Funny how easy it is to feel territorial about a small square of space that the company truly owns.

Fortunately it was just after lunch, and the VP's a nice guy, but I don't think he would've been quite as amused if it had been a bit earlier or later in the day.

All that being said, I wouldn't trade my ability to fade into the written word for anything in the world. In fact, I plan to indulge in it a bit more often -at appropriate times of course- in hopes of avoiding a future workplace incident.

Labels: dose of mikey, linkage, memory lane, random review, reading, sharketing, writing

* posted by me at 11:03 PM

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2004-09-15 
 

dig it

Just bumped into an interesting article here about a modern cinema found in the catacombs underneath Paris. It reminded me that I really want to read the Davinci Code.

Labels: linkage, reading

* posted by me at 11:10 PM

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2004-09-14 
 

weekend reading

I'm suddenly reading again. Almost like the old days...well the middle ages at least.

Life of Pi was wonderful and something I'd recommend to most anyone.

Saving Valencia was quite funny and something I'd recommend to most gay men, and those folks who've always thought the universe a bit queer.

Ella Enchanted, the book, was nothing like the movie. (though both were, in their own way, amusing tales) I recommend the movie to anyone who found Shrek funny. G and I laughed out loud several times. I recommend the book to anyone who loves fairy tales retold, but mostly to teenage girls. (or teenage guys who aren't afraid of reading chick lit.)

Guns, Germs and Steel has a few more pages read, but is still unfinished. That being said, it remains fascinating to me, albeit a bit heavier than I was looking for this weekend.

I've inspired myself with the reading, but in a maudlin way, so I published the poem in the past to take the edge off.

Labels: dose of mikey, linkage, random review, reading

* posted by me at 2:28 AM

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2002-03-01 
 

dog tired

Well, I guess it's the year of the horse now. For the first time since I came to live in Atlantis, I completely missed the Chinese New Year. (I was at the Sales Meeting during the week it happened and crazybusy the weeks around it.) Even now, I'm still completely buried under work getting ready for the trip to LA next week. The good news is that it should be a pretty nice week down there and that I won't have to do too much actual work while I'm there. Extra work now for an easy week coming up. Some people think I'm insane, but I know better. In the insane world, the sane man appears insane.

Finally finishing up The Return of the King. Having only seen the animated movies ages ago, I had no memory of the last section in which they return to Hobbiton. I needed to pause for a few weeks to adjust to the idea. (Read a couple other books inbetween, one of which - The Garden of Iden - turned out to be surprisingly good.) Loved reading an up close and personal view of historical period with a modern twist!

Labels: linkage, random review, reading, san francisco, sharketing

* posted by me at 2:21 AM

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2002-02-11 
 

Much warmer in LA than I thought it would be. Cool right now actually, night time, but the day was up in the 70's. Nice.

Can't take too long with this...I rather stupidly forgot to pack the power cord to my computer and have to conserve as much of the battery as possible until Tuesday. (G's being a very good boyfriend and FedExing it to me tomorrow.) Wish he was here. He'd really love the tub in this room. Nice and deep...just missing the Jacuzzi jets that would make it perfect, but I'm certainly not complaining. Can't wait to see C and J over the weekend. It'll be nice to catch up and kick back after this week of meetings. Gotta remember to call them tomorrow to nail down what time we'll be meeting up on Friday.

Now to bed to finish up Switcheroo by Olivia Goldsmith. (she wrote First Wives Club) It was fluff, but enjoyable fluff with an interesting insight into how ltrs can become tedious if you don't remind each other of why you got together in the first place. Not that G and I have reached that space yet, but I'm going to remember how important it is to keep going for walks together in which we just enjoy the magic of the world around us. And five years down the road I'll surprise him by doing something zany.

Labels: dose of mikey, reading, sharketing, travel

* posted by me at 2:12 AM

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