Congratulate Me

Today this Sunday April 19, will mark the 17th week since I quit smoking. I know hard to believe! When I decided to quit I began drinking tea with the same insatiability I had for cigarettes. And when the most immediate urges subsided I kept the sensations, both good and bad, of smoking fresh in my memory--which might strike most of you as an odd thing to do. But I think remembering smoking in its entirety has helped me to stay vigilant about slinking back into the habit. Smoking had helped me create positive associations with destructuve behavior, and negative associations with all things requiring will power, follow through, and persistence.

And so every week I post something new to my special place on the internet, my Sunday Afternoon Noodle, I smile deep inside at the fact that I am every week pulling myself away from a pit of despair, surrounding myself with mosaics of images, ideas, peculiarities . . . things that I am drawn toward. It feels good to have something positive to counteract the poison I've been ingesting for a decade.

This weekend was supposed to be for painting. I layed gesso on two separate canvases, experimenting with techniques I read about recently. They are sanded smooth and ready for--well, something, when I find the idea worth painting. But instead of thinking about painting, my day job got in the way of just about everything, and I find myself working through my off-call weekend straight into next week. Its somewhat disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. One day I'll be able to walk away from day jobs for good.

While typing this I caught the last hour of You've Got Mail and I got a case of the warm and fuzzies. Still so sentimental after all these years. Or maybe its just all the tar and grime washing out of my bloodstream. It vexes me that there's something faulty about being a starry-eyed romantic. Why does it have to be so wrong to indulge in what makes you feel the best?

Is there anybody else out there who takes pains to replace the extraordinary and ephemeral with the mundane and ever present? I find it easy to take solace in mediocrity. I'm a college graduate with an advanced understanding of mathematics, language, and diplomacy who works in a construction related field. For the last 6 years I've felt under utilized, and for even longer than that I've felt lonely and bored, with the exception of a brief relationship I had with a woman who inspired something new inside of me. And I certainly don't mean to imply that I am without hope, just that my larger impression of the patterns in my life point to a lack of intertia and enthusiasm. God what I would give to regain my enthusiasm.

Okay, you want lists, links, and images, so here they are:

library movie rentals: I Vitelloni, Boy A, Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, Mushi-Shi vol. 1, and Russian Ark.

reading: Madman Vol. 1

reasons I stopped watching Heroes Season 3:

1. Elle Bishop is fuckin' dead. Damn.

2. Because I don't watch tv anymore and hulu commercials are repetitive and annoying and most stream sources are on mega(you have already watched 96 minutes of) video (and I grow tired of refreshing my ip address every 96 minutes of video)



3. Noah Bennet aka "Dwight Shrute Action Figure" who is D.L. of the season to me.

[D.L. of the season aka the dumbest loser of the season previously held by D.L. in season 1 and then Suresh in season 2. Now where did I put those episodes of 4400 I wanted to get around to seeing?]

Acid-tastic, trippy stumbles: vaiavanti, whitneyStereo120.

taboo happy:

1. http://www.comicvine.com/

2. http://www.taramcpherson.com/art/Paintings/Gallery%201

3. http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=5+centimeters+per+second&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3DVFA_enUS246US247&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=ovfOSbTrOabcswOo3NygAw&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title#

4. http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0S0207IoOtJAW0B_CuLuLkF?p=james+jean&ei=utf-8&iscqry=&fr=sfp