an undone calm

I want to see this movie.

I know Cheddar wants this litter box.  The only question is… which color?

I could go on forever about the disaster that is the American health care system. About how our litigious society has made it impossible for doctors to admit mistakes which then fuels discontent and disatisfaction. How litigation drives up malpractice costs which then drives up costs to everyone. How insurance companies are corrupt and artificially inflate costs with their questionable business practices. How a good 20-30% of the people I know in Manhattan don’t have health insurance because they can’t afford it. It’s pretty much a disaster.

Now I don’t remember what things were like back in 1980, but my guess is they were pretty different.  Things can’t always have been as bad as they are now, right?   I was home last month helping my parents go through some boxes in Austin just before they moved to Colorado full time and we found the receipt from my hospital stay when I was born.

I was born at Stamford Hospital in Stamford, CT 45 days premature.  I was soon transfered to Yale-New Haven Hospital for an eight day stay in the neonatal intensive care unit.  I was jaundiced and my surfactant was inadequate but a week in the incubator did me some good.  The total cost of my 8 day hospitalization?  $2964.15.  In 2008 dollars that would be $7649.39.   Yet today, that same hospital stay would be approximately $14-19,000.  And if you look closer you’ll see that my entire hospital stay was covered by my insurance.  Would the same be true today?  Luckily, I haven’t been admitted to a hospital since then and I’m hoping that doesn’t change any time soon.

Tracy gave me this card for my birthday two years ago, and I found it in my desk this week.  Still, I believe, the funniest card I’ve ever received.

I found this sideboard on eBay a few weeks ago and I’ve decided it’s pretty much the most gorgeous piece of furniture ever. $2550 is a bit steep, but in reality, for the condition and quality of the furniture it’s probably quite appropriate.  Cheers to that bidder…  I’m filing it in my “remember this” section.

Got this new FORLIFE brew-in-mug teaware last week in Austin and I’ve been using it every night with some herbal tea. Loose tea is sexier than bagged tea. Even when all you do is cut open the bag…

Cut Copy - So Haunted (Knightlife End Edit)

What happens when you take the best minute and twenty seconds of music ever created and remix it? Probably the best 4 minutes ever. Even better when it’s loud and you’re hearing it live with your best 3000 or so friends. The crowd went bananas for this little remixed tidbit last night. It wasn’t quite the sweat-fest that Girl Talk was, but it lived up to my own hype.

I’ve been gone for a while. Back with more soon.

“I’m not the dancing kind,” I said.  “You’ve always known that.”

“You danced at our wedding,” she answered immediately.  “You were fine.  You did that little shuffle thing with your feet.”

“She looked stricken; and I suppose, since I am now fully aware, thanks to our figuratively speaking marriage counselor, that the steamboat of marriage must be fed incessantly with the coals of communication, that I should have explained to my wife that I came from Holland, where I rarely saw dancing, and indeed that I’d been a little amazed to see how young Englishmen threw themselves around to music, dancing even with other men, and that this abandon was alien to me and that, perhaps, she might for this reason wish to bear with me.  But I said nothing, thinking the matter inconsequential.  It would certainly have astonished me to learn that years later I would look back on this episode and ask myself if it represented a so-called fork in the road - which in turn led me to drunkenly wonder if the course of a relationship of love was truly explicable in terms of right turns and wrong turns, and if so whether it was possible to backtrack to that split where it all went wrong, or if in fact it was the case that we are all doomed to walk in a forest in which all paths lead one equally astray, there being no end to the forest, an inquiry whose very uselessness led to another spasm of wayward contemplation…”

- an excerpt from “Netherland” by Joseph O’Neill

While normally I’m pretty good about finishing projects that I start, my knitting projects seem to suffer the most from lack of sustaining enthusiasm.  This sweater took me 8 months or so to complete, but I would argue that no one can be expected to knit wool sweaters in the summer so those months don’t really count.

At any rate, Rufus’ mom is a Princeton grad and her birthday was just before Halloween so I finished this up for a well-timed and coordinated gift.  Apparently it’s getting rave reviews at the office.

My standard fall back playlist on my ipod/itunes is the Top 100 Most Played smart playlist that comes standard with iTunes.  It’s music I enjoy, obviously, and it has enough of a mix of moods and genres that I can always find something I like.  The problem is though, that the more I listen to that playlist, the farther and farther away those tracks become (in play count) from the rest of my library.  Which then renders the list pretty static (read: boring).

New solution… the “after top 100″ playlist.

Basically it’s the same structure as the Top 100 (playcount > 0 and selected by most often played), but you add the exclusion of the Top 100 playlist.  I increased the item number to 250 to give it more variety.  Over time, listening to this list will eventually shift the songs up into the Top 100, bringing some of those songs down.  Alternating the two lists should keep the groups near each other play count-wise.  Might need a third tier playlist also, with exclusions of the two previous playlists eventually.