Aaron’s blog

Cleaning My Room Took Four Days

nobody@vox.com(Aaron) — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 00:44:58 -0500

I never want to be a used car salesman

nobody@vox.com(Aaron) — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:18:02 -0500

1993 Honda Accord EX, originally uploaded by zlopid.

I listed the old Accord in the paper for $2,300 and now I get phone calls every day: “Hello? I’m calling about the 1993 Honda Accord EX you have listed in the paper.”

“Yep. It’s still here, still for sale.” I’m never sure what to say in response; they haven’t exactly asked any questions. The worst is when they call and have an accent, because I know it’s going to be torturous on both ends understanding each other.

Especially people with Indian accents. I can understand it better in person, but over the phone I get lost easier than a rat in a maze. “What is techall?” one woman said.

“…what?”

“What is techall?”

“um…I have no idea what you’re saying.”

“Nevermind. When can I come to see?”

But the worst was a guy who called me Wednesday at work. I finally told him enough about the car that he wanted to come and see it later that day.

“The address is thirty-four Arbor…”

“thirty Harbor…”

“thirty-four…”

“Ah! Thirty-four…”

“Arbor Creek”

“Arbor? Can you spell that for me? H-A-R-B-O-R?”

“Arbor…as in trees. A-R-B-O”

“A-R-P”

“A-R-B-O”

“Aha, A-R-B-O…”

“R”

“A-R-B-O-R, gotcha, Arbor.”

“Creek…C-R-E-E-K”

“C-E-E”

“C-R”

“Oh, okay. C-R”

“then two Es, E-E”

“C-E-R-E-E”

“C-R-E-E-K”

“Drive…”

“Okay, thank you. I live in victor, what are directions?” And this is me, in my cubicle on a Wednesday morning, unable to believe that after spending an entire ten minutes to communicate three words, I am supposed to give him directions to my house. I give him the simplest directions I could, with as many numbers as possible, and agree to meet him at 4:30.

At 4:00, as I’m leaving work, he calls to ask me if he was supposed to go past 31 and 31F on his way north on 96. I pull up google maps as fast as I can and tell him that he should be going south on 96. I add that I am leaving work that moment, and I will be there to meet him in 30 minutes.

At 4:07, as I’m getting into my car, he calls to tell me that he has pulled into a parking lot near the HSBC. I have no idea where he’s talking about, as the only HSBC I know of near my house has been closed. So he agrees to wait there until I get home and can look up directions.

I get home and run up to my room, turn on my computer and look up directions for him/relay them over the phone. He should arrive in 15 minutes.

I wait…I get a snack…and then I get a phone call. “Hello. I think I’m in your driveway right now.”

“Okay, great, I’ll be right there.” Coat, keys, through the door and…there’s nobody in my driveway. I look around and there is a car parked in the driveway of the person across the street. I flip open the phone, go to received calls, and call him back (Caller ID is my savior). The figure on the hill across the street stands for a minute, then reaches into his pocket. My phone stops ringing and he picks up. “Hey, I’m across the street. If you turn around, you can see me waving.”

“Where? Oh! I see you. I’ll be right down.” He gets into his car, a rented white Chrysler PT Cruiser, and drives down their driveway and over down into our driveway.

We say hello, lament how many times he got lost on the way to see the car, look at the car from a number of angles. He asks, “Can I drive it?” I tell him that of course he can. So we both get into the car and get our seatbelts on.

He puts the key in the ignition and turns…nothing happens. He tries it again. “You…need the clutch in.”

“What?”

“With your left foot, you need to put in the clutch.”

“Oh! This is a manual?”

“Yeah.” It said so in the ad. I know because I read over every one of those overly expensive words.

“My wife doesn’t know how to drive a manual. I cannot buy this car, which is a shame, because I really liked it and I wanted to buy it, but…I cannot.”

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Generally on the Brink / Clap-Off

nobody@vox.com(Aaron) — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 22:36:51 -0400

Um. So I want to write something about last week, but - it's hard? It was a pretty general week. What stories do I have that I'd want to tell? That I had this massive zit on my lip that felt like it was pulsing with red painful fury in a siren so loud that people would just pull over to the side of the road to let me pass, like an ambulance? That I pulled over for two ambulances this week but both times I didn't see the ambulance until I had already passed by someone who was pulling to the side of the road, thinking, "Why are they just pulling over in the middle of rush-oooooooooh"

A story, then: When I went up during the summer to visit people at Clarkson, we went to the county fair and saw there a hypnotist. He started by making snide comments about people and then asked for volunteers - there were about six, and then this really tall guy came up to the front row and sat down just as the hypnotist got them in order. As they were hypnotized, and went deeper and deeper into the trance, he sagged down further...and further...until the only part of him still on the bench was his shoulders and he flopped in a comical sleep to the ground. The hypnotist tapped his shoulder, woke him slightly, and brought him (and a chair) to the stage. Then he said, "Alright, I'm going to snap my fingers and when I do you'll fall asleep." snap! "that's right, deep asleep."

And he could do that any time. Same guy - huge, over six feet tall, dancing like a ballerina on stage and the hypnotist walks up to him: snap! "and deep asleep, there you go" he's out. He's in bed but upright and right in front of us.

This week, I felt like someone was going to walk up to me and say, "Okay, I'll snap my fingers, and when I do..."

Any time, anywhere, I could be looking at my bed. Sitting in the office, waiting for something to compile: snap! crumpled arms and papers and a snore that leaves everyone laughing softly and wondering if they should wake me up or bet on how long I'll sleep. Gesture drawing at the easel, actively flowing one minute and then snap! curled up around the metallic smell of the stools and the gritty dirt of the unswept concrete floor. Playing glove game and we've scored a goal! snap! then down like in a stretch yet relaxed and care-free and worn out. I return from a bout for a gulp of water but some little kid jumps up from the couches and snaps! the muscles in my neck just give out and I drop like some discarded marionnete, my head with a will of its own going towards the ground, accelerating at 9.8m/s^2.

King of Karat Flowers

Jeff Mangum: I spend a lot of time practicing active imagination before I go to sleep. What I'm feeling will manifest as images through active imagination. And then I go to sleep and those play out even more in my dreams.
Pitchfork: What is "active imagination"?
Jeff Mangum: It's a Carl Jung term. It's sort of staying in that place between sleeping and waking. Just allowing your mind to completely begin to flow with images. Allowing it to become whatever it becomes. You know, you go to bed filled with worries and thoughts, caught up in that everyday kind of thing. With this, you try to concentrate on what you think is really important, or some type of interesting or mysterious image, and then allow your imagination to become like a stream. You can let the stream go, and just observe it to see what happens.

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Links from the Week

nobody@vox.com(Aaron) — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 00:45:27 -0400

Surfing news sites this week, I found two really great articles that I wanted to reccomend for people. As I don't have any way to make them sidebar posts (ala Airbag), or less obtrusive inline quotes (ala Kottke), I've got to do an entire post for it.

What Year is It?

"We suffer from a surfeit of baffling labels-"progressive realism," "realistic Wilsonianism," "progressive internationalism," "democratic globalism"-that require a scorecard to keep straight. But perhaps there's a simpler way. For the moment at least, where you line up on any foreign-policy question has less to do with whether you're Republican or Democrat, isolationist or internationalist-and more to do with what year you think it is."

The Dread Pirate Bin Laden

"More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis, "enemies of the human race." From that day until now, pirates have held a unique status in the law as international criminals subject to universal jurisdiction—meaning that they may be captured wherever they are found, by any person who finds them. The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable.
"...
"By the 16th century, piracy had emerged as an essential, though unsavory, tool of statecraft. Queen Elizabeth viewed English pirates as adjuncts to the royal navy, and regularly granted them "letters of marque" (later known as privateering, or piracy, commissions) to harass Spanish trade."

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