In which my sinuses resume negotiations with my brain

I’m starting to feel ever-so-slightly better. I went to work today but I was still in pretty bad shape and my boss sent me home. I was about to enter a meeting room full of executives and had I gotten them all sick I would’ve been personally responsible for at least $0.50 off our stock price. Nobody wants that.

Tonight rather than doing work (did that already), doing schoolwork (nothing to do until the 27th) or watching a movie (Nellie’s not in the mood) I think I’m just going to…wait for it…read a book. Like, a book book. Not a textbook. I’ve been reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine since September but [overshare] the only time I really have in which to read it is when I’m on the can [/overshare] so it’ll be nice to just sit quietly and read a book…on a couch.

.:.

We watched episode 3 of The Wire last night. Every episode is producing classic moments (e.g., the look Bunk gave Fremon last night) and the tension took a big jump last night at the end of the episode, so I just can’t wait for what’s coming. Seven more episodes just doesn’t seem like enough to pack it all in.

[tags]the shock doctrine, the wire[/tags]

Day three of the plague

Yea and verily, this cold is kicking my ass. I had to stay home again today; even if I could summon the energy and concentration to do my job today, I’d just make everyone else sick. I can still get some more basic work done here this afternoon, but I need to find a way to get functional by tomorrow. Can’t miss three days in a row.

I’m sure some people would think I’ve gotten sick like this because I’m (largely) off meat, but that’s not it. I still eat seafood occasionally, I still take vitamins, etc. If anything I probably don’t eat enough vegetables (ironic, for a vegetarian…) or fruits. The Toronto Star actually has a story today about how easy it is to be vegetarian in this city.

.:.

Speaking of my job, my title includes the word “strategy”, a term used inaccurately and far too often. I take some flak for it — I often get accused of task-oriented people of “not doing anything, just thinking about things” — which doesn’t bother me, but it does start me wondering if what I work on is really strategy.

That depends largely on the role description, I suppose, and I won’t go into that here, but I read an interesting article last week by Penelope Trunk (aka The Brazen Careerist). In it she states that people inclined to think strategically are (Myers-Briggs personality type) typically INTJs.

The best thing you can do for your career is take a personality test to understand your strengths. If you are an INTJ you really are a strategist.  If you are not an INTJ, the fewer letters you have that match that, the further away from strategist you are. So get some self-knowledge before you declare yourself a strategist.

I am, in fact, an INTJ — I was an ISTJ in university when I first took the test but a few years ago came out INTJ — so while this may not mean much in itself, and I would never refer to myself as a “strategist”, it does help to reassure me that I am, in fact, in more or less the right field of work. Which is, you know, nice.

.:.

I haven’t used Schmap.com myself, and until Monday I’d never heard of the site, but whoever they are they decided to use one of my Flickr pictures for one of their new Paris guides. It’s a shot taken in Place des Vosges, for their Marais neighbourhood guide.

Of course, I can’t take any credit whatsoever for the shot; Nellie took it, just as she took all of the best shots from our trip to France. The girl has an eye.

[tags]vegatarian, strategy, myers-briggs, intj, schmap, paris, marais, place des vosges[/tags]

Where's the "blessed sinus relief" setting on this contraption?

The good: our fancy-pants Harmony 880 remote arrived today. Actually, it arrived last Tuesday, but the security desk downstairs somehow forgot to tell us. They do that a lot. Anyway, we fetched it tonight and I’ve spent my few remaining active brain cells figuring how to use it. Still working out the bugs but I think I’ve got it. For Nellie and I it’ll be sweet to only have one remote instead of wrangling 4 or 5; for visiting parents it’ll be nice to just press one button that says “Watch TV” or whatever.

The bad: no two ways about it, I’m sick. I am siiii-iiiick. I stayed home from work today and basically tried to figure out the optimal angle at which to lie down to a) minimize my headache, and b) maximize drainage from my sinus cavity. All the Tylenol cold & cough in the world didn’t make much difference; I’m hoping the mug of neo-citran cooling in front of me knocks me out. I need sleep.

The sacred: all I could do today was lie on the couch and watch a movie (higher brain functions: not present) so I watched The Devil and Daniel Johnston (imdb | rotten tomatoes), a documentary about the little-known cult folk singer. I knew a little bit about him from the buzz surrounding the film (which screened at TIFF a couple of years ago) and I know my brother was very affected by seeing him live, but that was it. I actually didn’t even know about the whole Kurt Cobain t-shirt thing. Watching the film was only marginally easier than listening to him sing; in both situations this man’s demons are on display for the whole world to see.

The profane: we also watched a documentary tonight (thank you writer’s strike!) called Fuck (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Yes, you read that right. Fuck. It is, predictably, an inspection of why the word is considered so naughty. It spends a bit of time on the origin of the word (hint: it’s not an acronym, despite what you’ve been told), looks at the history of its use in comedy and show business (starting, naturally, with Lenny Bruce), touches on what it means to first amendment rights and eventually becomes a discussion of conservative hysteria and hypocrisy (or at least that’s how it seemed to me; I’m sure to a conservative it seemed like a discussion of how liberalism is sending America into the toilet at Mach 3). While it was interesting subject matter, and it had a few laughs (especially from Billy Connolly and Bill Maher) the documentary tried much too hard to be cute and edgy at the same time. Not bad, but not great. And vertainly not for the faint of heart; the film takes pride in the fact that, were it to be aired unedited on American television, they would be fined $280 million dollars by the FCC.

[tags]harmony remote control, sinus cold, the devil and daniel johnston, fuck documentary[/tags]

"I left my thimbles and socialist reading material at home."

.:.

Wow, three days without blogging. That’s probably a record. I can explain: busy Friday, busy Saturday and today I feel like ass.

Friday I was at work until about 7:30, and by the time I got home all I really had the energy to do was eat and watch Friday Night Lights and The Wire.

Yesterday we intended to see There Will Be Blood but when we got to the theatre we found that the new Eye Weekly film listings had lied to us. No wonder Torontoist hates them. No other showtimes worked so we had one last meal at the Biryani House in Roy’s Square. It’s closing in two weeks (moving just around the corner onto Hayden Street) to make room for 1Bloor. Mmmmm…samosas and pakoras and shrimp masala…tasty. After lunch we walked back down Church street, cleaned up a little and waited for CBGB to arrive. They joined us for dinner and a couple of tasty drinks at Smokeless Joe (hence the picture above), then back at ours for a bit.

All was going well until I woke up this morning stuffed up, with a sore throat and a pounding sinus headache. Last night I had nothing; by this morning I was deep in the throes of a cold. Shitty. I feel very unpleasant right now. As such we did next to nothing all day; I have no energy. My day has been limited to lots of basketball, football and movies.

.:.

The first movie we watched today was Stranger Than Fiction (imdb | rotten tomatoes) which, based on the ads, I’d all but dismissed as typical Will Ferrell clowning. It was, in fact, very funny, clever and sweet. Ferrell is so good at the subtle humour he showed here and in Winter Passing that it kills me to see the ads for crap like Semi-Pro. A few times in this movie I laughed out loud, and I rarely laugh at Will Ferrell movies.

We also watched Marie Antoinette (imdb | rotten tomatoes) this evening. The first half was interesting, but it completely lost steam in the second half. It was like watching a dessert cart being paraded around…it looks lovely and inspired at first, but after you stare at the same sweets for two hours it loses something. I didn’t think I’d enjoy it that much to begin with; Sofia Coppola had me in the first half, but lost me again in the second.

I forgot to blog last week about Italianetz (imdb | rotten tomatoes), yet another foreign entry at a past film festival that I wanted to see. The story was about a Russian boy set to be adopted from an orphanage by an Italian couple (hence the title) but who worries that he has a mother somewhere that, should he go to live with another couple, he’ll never see again. The plot takes him on his search for her, but the real star was Russia itself: a dirty, drunken, stormy, barren, corrupt plain of despair…that one little boy refuses to give up on. Worth watching, if you can tolerate the dodgy subtitle translations.

[tags]friday night lights, the wire, there will be blood, eye weekly, torontoist, biryani house, 1bloor, smokeless joe, stranger than fiction, marie antoinette, italianetz[/tags]

I am a happy fellow

My assignment, the last for this course, is done. I finished it off around 10:00 and practically skipped — pranced, even — to the couch to watch the Canadiens-Bruins game on the PVR.

That’s the last schoolwork I have to do for a couple of weeks. Weeks, internet, weeks! On an unrelated note, there’s a bluebird on my shoulder and everything is satisfactual.

[tags]mba, canadiens, bruins[/tags]

How to make snow look warm

I don’t even remember where I saw it, but one of my site feeds recently pointed to a list of their favourite photoblogs. Of course the list contained ddoi, of which I’ve been a fan for years, and a few others I already knew. It also contained a few that I didn’t recognize, the best of which (in my opinion, anyway) is Julien Roumagnac’s photoblog. His pictures of Montréal make me homesick for a city I’ve never lived in.

Have a look at today’s picture of Rue de la Commune, for example. As cold and snowy as that looks, tell me you don’t want to be standing there right now.

[tags]daily dose of imagery, julien roumagnac[/tags]

An hour early

I stopped at A Taste Above on the way home tonight. It’s a take-away ready-to-go meal place just up the street. Pricey, but good food and I felt like some quick pasta for dinner. I got there around 6:15…closed. Wha? You’re catering to the busy after-work crowd and you close at 6 PM? Brilliant. Dear A Taste Above: a little advice…send whoever’s in charge of your company on an introductory business course. You’re welcome.

.:.

Esquire breaks down Jerry Bruckheimer’s Laws of Science. Example:

The Law of Inverse Emotional Importance

Oftentimes an event may appear significant when in reality it’s not. When confused, remember this simple rule: The significance of any event is inversely related to the speed of its motion.

Proof: Pearl Harbor, about the devastating attack that pushed the U.S. into World War II, features more slow motion than Samba Night at the hospice center.

.:.

Must…finish…assignment. But don’t…want…to.

Inside/friend voice says: suck it up, princess. It’s due Friday, and after that I’ve got a couple of weeks off before going away on course again. It’s just that everything else seems to be SO much more enjoyable right now…watching hockey, thinking about big problems (opportunities?) at work, spending time with Nellie, going to movies, drinking beer, even running at 6AM…I’m loving all of it right now. The last thing I want to do is more school work.

Good thing my wife is a) supportive of me disappearing into a book for several hours a night, and b) fond of television.

[tags]a taste above, esquire, jerry bruckheimer[/tags]

I guess a resounding caucus win'll do that for you

Five days ago I read a post on Richard Florida’s blog, in which he pointed to an expert opinion on the upcoming US presidential elections:

Obama is going to win it all — Iowa, the nomination, the Presidency. And I think it ultimately comes down to the fact that he is a rare combination in American politics, in that he is both the “emotional” choice and the “electable” choice. … Traditionally, we’ve always had to make a tradeoff between the emotional and the electable choices … But with Obama the two sets overlap.

While that struck me as a bold claim, the author that Florida quoted is surely more knowledgeable about American politics than I, so while I couldn’t dismiss the prediction, I was certainly skeptical.

Then today I read another post on RF’s blog. Take a look at the chart in that post. As my friend Evan would say…”Shift Of Power!” Fine, these are only prediction markets (a description Florida takes a poke at, since they’re awfully reactionary) but suddenly what seemed dubious five days ago seems pretty smart now.

[tags]richard florida, barack obama, prediction markets[/tags]

Gulf of Tonkin, anybody?

From The Independent:

The US and Iran have engaged in their most serious military confrontation in recent times, with American warships on the verge of opening fire on gunboats of the Revolutionary Guards which had threatened to blow them up.

Sound familiar?

The “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” defined the beginning of large-scale involvement of U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. Historians have shown that the second incident was, at its best interpretation, an overreaction of eager naval forces. [via Wikipedia]

[tags]iran, gunboats, gulf of tonkin[/tags]

Insufficient bandwidth

I want to write something witty. Really, I do, but after a 3-mile run this morning and going pretty much non-stop all day and then leaving work at 7:00 and working on my corporate finance assignment all night, I’m tapped. I have all kinds of cool stuff in my starred Google Reader items that I want to read and blog about, like an article about the knowledge economy and a Chuck Klosterman piece from Esquire and a Mark Kingwell essay from The Walrus about Toronto fauxhemians/bobos and a Vanity Fair article about George Lucas & Steven Spielberg and a chunk of Macbeth…but I’m just not up to it. I need to go get my shit ready for tomorrow’s run and try to wind my brain down into sleep mode.

Sorry, internet listeners. I’ll try to do better another day.

[tags]insufficient bandwidth[/tags]