I was watching a speech recently in which the author of Stumbling Upon Happiness was describing the phenomenon of preferring the outcome of an irreversible choice after the decision more than before it — describing this phenomenon as being intuitive. Am I alone or don’t a lot of people work precisely the opposite way? When I choose something irreversibly, it becomes worse in my eyes than its alternatives. Maybe just a symptom of chronic pessimism, or as I prefer to call it, hard-boiled realism.

Anyway, every minute that passes since I sent in that résumé is more excruciating and remorseful than the last. Sad to say if I get the job, it’ll be the first one that “counts,” the first one where I’m doing something at least peripherally related to something I actually like for the sake of liking it, like–liking it.

So I guess this is another diary-like post. I wish it were like 1999 and none of my friends were too proud to have a LiveJournal. There are some strangers’ blogs I read who have little close-knit LJ communities like that, where they just talk about shit and post pictures and then comment on each other’s posts with inside jokes and stuff. That sounds cool. In the meantime I feel bad for people who found this place Googling for Firefox tips or something then subscribed to it thinking it’s a tech blog. Sorry, this isn’t a tech blog. I don’t know what it is.

Sunday marks two years since I first listened to Ys. It’s not my favorite album or anything but it does represent the beginning of fall for me, and I meant to wait until the anniversary date to start listening to it again, but my memory failed me and I started yesterday. The details of my life.

Then again I feel like that’s what kind of happens when you get old. It’s troubling. In college things are always in flux, there’s exams and schedules and projects and decisions and deadlines. After that, if you have a steady job and live in the same place for a significant length of time, you’re just an adult consuming media. I’m naturally nostalgic, but at the same time I don’t like the idea that I’m listening to the same album on precisely the same street at precisely the same time that I was 720 days ago. Or, rather, that I haven’t changed since then. Even my creative outlets are routine and predictable.

I’ve been living in this city for almost three consecutive years, I think the longest I’ve lived in any one place in my adult life. I’ve moved from Illinois to Massachusetts to Ohio and back to Massachusetts again. I feel like I need to squeeze in one more major change before I hit 30, which will happen in just over two years.

I remember reading a long time ago about Andy Warhol saying he likes being in a rut. It’s little consolation.

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