All Depending on the Kindness of Strangers

I just wanted to tell everyone that one of the things I most appreciate is when the people behind the desk are non-judgmental when you come to pay your bill late. I don't mind when they tell me there's a late fee: if I pay my bills late, it is my fault and there are usually consequences for our mishaps. However, fussing at me is probably not going to change the present - or even the future seeing as all my best intentions will fall short eventually.

However, today's interactions with the "bill collectors" were of the positive sort meaning that their value of me was not connected to the timeliness of my payments to which I am grateful.)

Rules Of The Game

I'm going to try a new approach to blogging here in 2005, basically mocking my idiosyncrasies.

How to Play :

I am always making obscure cultural references, most obviously in my blog titles. So this year, I am going to award points to the first person to place a particular reference. Each person is allowed one response with one guess for each reference. Extra guesses will be ignored, but the only guess. I promise to ignore you personally.

Point Structure

1. Origin of a Blog Title = 5 points
2. Origin of a Reference within a posting = 8 points (5 for the source, 3 for the searching
3. Particularly Difficult References = 10 points (PDR's are up to my discretion, including whether or not I choose to reveal a post contains a PDR.)
4. Bonus Questions = See Market Value
5. No points will be deducted for incorrect responses.

[Note: Since I make the references anyway, there should really not be any change in what I post.]

Other Details

Current scores will be listed under the Blogger logo in the right-hand column. By venturing a guess, you agree to have your name and score listed, however, in order to list your score, I will need your name therefore anonymous postings will be ignored, though not the anonymous poster.

The order of responses will be verified by the date & time listed in the comment box. Understanding that there will be some of us who will want to actually respond to the post and not just play, I am going to enable Blogger's comment system for normal commenting (since it will also email alerts) and will use a new commenting system for the 2005 Idiosyncratic Cultural Reference Game beginning with this post.

This game will end Dec. 31, 2005 at 11:59:59. Token prizes will be given to the top three finalists. In the case of a tie, an emailed list of five questions will be sent to the tied contestants, each question counting for one point. The tied contestants will have twenty-four hours to respond. The score of their correct responses will be added to their final score, hopefully creating a winner.

Good luck! (Oh, and there are two interior references in this post to get you started.)

Your Town Is Made For People Passing Through

My whirlwind of a weekend is over and I think I need someone to give me the you're no longer eighteen, you're not even twenty-one lecture the next time I plan a twenty-four hour trip out-of-state.

I arrived in Nashville at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, picked up my rental car. As I was walking out to my car (in the very back corner of the rental lot), it started to snow, really snow. I thought it best to find the church; first, because I have a - reasonable - fear of getting lost and, second, because I didn't want to get snowed in too far from the wedding. The snow began to taper off when I reached the church so, seeing a Subway in the distance, I decided to grab a 2:30 lunch then I headed to Walgreen's since I thought I could probably peruse the aisles for forty-five minutes while I talked on my cell phone.

I arrived at the wedding a half hour early, in time to watch the musicians rehearse. The wedding was nice: simple and classy. The groom was wearing a thrift-store tux and the bride and her matrons (everyone in the bride's party was married) carried lanterns on chains. My favorite part, which will be appreciated by everyone who knows Katy, was the corsages. From the back row I thought they were made of something similar to holly: they were really coffee beans!

The reception was at a friend's house down the road. It was very low-key and crowded, but not claustrophobically so. I milled around for a couple of hours, saw the cutting of the cupcakes and the dance (to Moon River, the only song Audrey Hepburn actually sang in a film.) At this point, I had reached my limit of hanging out with strangers so I left to visit my friends Randall and Amy in Franklin.

I don't really know Randall & Amy that well, mainly due to the fact that I only see them every couple of years, however, they are the sort of people you feel extremely comfortable around probably because they send off a very strong we-like-you-already-so-there's-no-need-to-impress-us vibe. I left when they were starting to fade, but armed with cookies, a CD, and my illusive banjo.

Next, I made my way back to the airport but made a pit-stop at McDonald's since it was the only fast food franchise that seemed open. Not to brag, but this was actually an extremely good move on my part because there was no one at any of the ticket counters to check in with which meant no food, no coffee, no nothing. I circled the external (and closed) food areas, politely declined to join in a card came with the college guys whose flight to Pittsburgh had been canceled, and found a corner behind the bolted rocking chairs near the vending machine room by an electrical outlet where I choose to camp out for the night (and please don't tell my mother!)

So I heated up my frigid hamburger in the vending room's microwave and proceeded to watch Garden State and The Cinderella Story. Both were funny, sweet, and very accessible in extreme fatigue. When Cinderella was over, it was time to check in. (Here is where I give US Airways extremely kudos because they were so nice to me about my banjo. Both flights put it into the captain's wardrobe to keep it safe without me having to beg - even though you are only technically allowed one carry-on bag.)

I fell asleep on the first flight before we took off and woke up when they announced - very loudly - that we could now take off our seatbelts and move about the cabin. Then I feel asleep again. Then there was the four hour layover in Charlotte caused by a delay in D.C. Then I arrived at RDU, was picked up by a friend, napped in their guest room, got jumped on by a three-year-old (once I was awake), drove home, fell asleep at nine, woke up at ten (a.m.), and now I am writing this though feeling quite out of it due to the lack & abundance of sleep.

This is your captain speaking. On behalf of myself and all my other manifestations, I would like to thank you for perusing the Thought of Being Free. We hope you have enjoyed your read. We are 58 words to the end, however, we would ask that you please remain seated until the post has come to a full and complete stop. We know you have a choice in blogs. The next time your leisure requires an on-line read, we hope that you will choose TBF.

[Five points to the first person who correctly pegs the title reference.]

Because Tim Is So Cool

68% scored higher (more nerdy), and
32% scored lower (less nerdy).
What does this mean?

Your nerdiness is:
Not nerdy, but definitely not hip.

Hey!

My niece can (finally) say my name! Of course, it sounds a little like "Lillian," but, hey, my standards are low for one-year-old pronunciation!

Resolutions

Is it too late to post my New Year's Resolutions? I hope not because here they are.

1. I will not catch any more colds. (I've already had five, perhaps six, this year and my lungs are still recovering from number four.)
2. I will learn to play more of the Get Up Kid's repertoire so that I have something to sing when I want to play loud, fast music. Plus this means my brother and I will be able to serenade my niece properly.
3. I will read the major works of Dickens since I am determined to love him. David Copperfield is one of the five books to completely smitten me and I feel like my appreciation will increase the more I become accustomed to Dickens' style of writing.

So who's voting for my success?

Intellectuals

I can across the best quote I have ever found defining the infamous "intellectual" in an essay about George Eliot and I just had to share.

An intellectual is a person who feels as much at home with ideas as with tangible things. This is why so few people are intellectuals. They discuss ideas as most of us discuss people. What we do as gossip, they do at an intellectual level, thinking about things that you can't see or touch – beauty, justice, and truth. An intellectual finds these as real as most of us find things that are concrete.

I also was taught, via this essay, that Silas Marner is "not the work to give a teenager to spark appreciation of the Victorian novel." It's a good thing that I was never told this because I have loved this novel since I first read it at age 15 – though I am now musing over the irony that a moral novel written by a "fallen" evangelical would have been the only novel assigned during my tenth grade year, the year I took correspondence classes from an extremely right-wing, conservative christian high school in Pensacola, Florida. It's a good thing they didn't buy into biographical literary criticism!

When I've Got Nothing To Say

Actually, it's not that I don't have anything to say, but that my thoughts have lately been in unpostable arenas. Vague, yes, but I do want to apologize for the lack of writing. I'll keep my ears and eyes open for good posting material this week.

Random Thoughts

The Smashing Pumpkins can be really great when you have a headache. I write songs that I don't really understand myself - could those poets I've never understood have written under the same pretense? Frozen food is a good thing to have on hand. A person on the street prophesying who spits towards people as they pass is most likely not a prophet.