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