Nostalgia

Very early in 2005, in deep snow, I was tem­ping in Cle­ve­land, long outs­ta­ying my expec­ted tenure at Heinen’s cor­po­rate office, dis­tri­bu­ting and repla­cing pre­fe­rred cus­to­mer cards. I was beco­ming obses­sed with foo­bar and lis­te­ning mostly to The Mollusk and Guero. I had recently con­ver­ted my html-based dated-entries Bei­ge­to­wer site to the Blog­ger plat­form. I became really sick, sic­ker than I’ve been since, and had to call into work to reco­ver in bed. Temps, of course, aren’t allo­wed the luxury of health, so they let me go within the hour, and, admit­tedly, the last week or two of my employ­ment there was more of a favor than anything else; they liked me.

Later that same week I pic­ked up a brief assign­ment somewhere else, a place whose name esca­pes me now, but whose offi­ces I remem­ber vividly — small, dreary, win­dow­less, me stuck in a very bare cube with a very uncom­for­ta­ble chair. At this time I was still extre­mely sick, plo­wing through packs of tis­sues and Throat Coat® tea. I had just down­loa­ded The Clientele’s Subur­ban Light from Blair, and with the iPod that my entire family had con­tri­bu­ted toward that Christ­mas, I lis­te­ned to the album repea­tedly my first day there. Just over and over, it was mind­less data entry work, so nobody cared. I hardly spoke a word during those three days.

The music, the ill­ness, the des­pe­rate jobless­ness, the tea. I remem­ber that day bet­ter than most other days of the last two years, and I find myself wan­ting to know as much as pos­si­ble about my life during that two-week period. For­tu­na­tely it was about that time that Last.fm began archi­ving weekly charts for future refe­rence, and you can see what I was lis­te­ning to here, though it actually loo­ked something more like THIS. Bet­ween that, Gmail’s almost limit­less sto­rage capa­city, seve­ral forums I visit regu­larly, and, to an extent, kbps, I can piece together a pretty good pic­ture of what was going on.

Of course, the per­fect tool for logging things and sta­ges in my life is Word­Press, which is right here. I’ve never really used it much for this pur­pose, because I used to ada­mantly hate per­so­nal blogs, but since I don’t record the mun­dane details of my life anywhere else, I have no choice but to do it here, which accounts for

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html