The Johari Window was invented by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in the 1950s as a model for mapping personality awareness. By describing yourself from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of overlap and difference can be built up.
On the house end, I cauked all the holes last night and taped the guest bedroom. Paint commmences tonight. Please help if you can and know what you're doing. I'm working off a quick skim of a how to book at Home Depot.
Oh, and if you have 10' ceilings, an 8' ladder is probably excessive, but I bought one anyway.
Thats right. At 2 PM tomorrow I go to closing on my house. I get the keys Saturday afternoon at some point when the current owners get most of their stuff out. Moving will begin then with the big stuff. Anyone wanting to help are welcome to come to my apartment around noon on Saturday, especially if you have a truck.
4:06 PM Sometimes its healthy to vent... isn't it? I hope so. Last night I had to vent. Unfortunately, having the TV on Comedy Central while I typed clouded my thought and weakened my anger into laughter at other things.
But seriously, I don't dance. I don't like it, especially to most "dance" music. Stop pestering me to change.
Saw a really great blues/gospel singer at Fest For All today. Spencer Bohren, father of the drummer from Johnny Sketch. Half his set was some old Hank Williams songs, and I'm not talking about Junior. Good stuff, look him up.
For starters, this is not an apology. Apologia is Greek for defence. I've learned this recently reading Plato's Apologia, which is a recounting of Socrates' defence, sentencing and final words to his jury.
After tonight, I feel like I have to defend myself. I went out with some friends tonight, at first it was listening to a half (at best) decent cover band playing 70s/80s songs...pretty badly. Then they went on break. Then the crap, errrr rap, and techno started. Everyone went to dance. I didn't. This shouldn't shock most people reading.
See, I got the memo in 6th grade or so that said the way to be cool is to dance to the music that's played, but as I usually do with memos from upper management (or in this case, the cool kids), I crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. I guess that's why I ended up in an independent contractor job situation in lieu of a corporate structure.
I guess the other thing that needs to be stated is that I agree with Elwood Blues on the current state of most pop (i.e., determined by executives at Clear Channel Communications) music as "nothing but recycled digitally sampled techno-grooves, quasi-synth rhythms, pseudo songs of violence laden gangsta' rap, acid pop and simpering, ciphering, soulless slush." Most of it enters my brain and triggers the crap file to open and that's where it goes. Not exactly the file that gets the body grooving.
Anyway, I'm not dancing tonight and people keep coming back to the table trying to figure out why I'm not dancing, whats wrong with me. Well, nothing's wrong with me. I don't like dancing. That's it. I find the music everyone is dancing with to be nothing more than pre-programmed electronic outputs, not the work of talented musicians. The only place it moves me to is far, far away.
Speaking of useless, soulless electonic music, a commercial featuring the new LSU jingle/theme(?) "Welcome to the Now, Evo Devo" just came on. Guess that little song Huey P. Long wrote wasn't good enough to represent my Alma Mater since its more than 10 years old. Great. Huey's turning over in his grave from the sight of the Golden Band pretending to play along to that crap in the background (I see 40+ pieces of brass "playing" and all I hear are a synthesizer, guitar, bass and drums).
Anyway, back to the original topic, the defense of my not dancing to the crap that is played as 90% of the world's dance music. By the time the 10% comes along that I like, I'm usually feeling too depressed from my inability to deal with the tight crowd and shitty music to care since everyone keeps coming to me asking whats wrong with me, making me think, "hey, something's wrong with me, I'm an outcast." Also, I get claustrophobic in the crowd. I went out to the floor tonight. In about 30 seconds I was stepped on or shoved into more than 10 times. That's not fun to me. I'm not going to do it just because society says thats the path to acceptance.
I wonder why I never meet any females, then I realize its because "going out" usually means going somewhere with dancing, and I don't dance. So I never meet anyone while I sit on the side and I get depressed and everyone tells me not to worry that I don't dance, I have so much other stuff going for me that should interest females. Well maybe I need to get my tax returns and new house/car status tattooed to my forehead because I'm told these are great things going for me. Or maybe I should tattoo the 175 IQ my boss seems to (baselessly) like telling people I have (the supposed basis of my hiring without a master's degree). Or maybe I should tattoo my weight loss up there. All supposed great things about me that tell me that the only things going for me are money and that my body isn't as horrible as it once was. Great. Anyway, I'm just sick of it all. I've always been alone and I always will be alone. I accept it. I'm moving on.
Now will come the normal sympathy posts/calls. And I don't need them. You're either A) male, so anything you say ann't lead anywhere, B) female and safely in a committed relationship, so anything you say can't lead anywhere or C) female and of sufficient distance where anything you say can't lead anywhere. Those are the people who will reply. So, please just keep it, I don't need to hear it. I'm not suicidal or depressed. Just tired of it all. It'll change when I'm that last 40 something single that meets another 40 something single and neither of us have a choice left.
Which is why at 5:45 AM I am in the office after not sleeping last night while working on an appraisal last night. Its not on a desperate deadline, just yesterday I had a late start (from bed to office meeting in 27 minutes including a trip to Starbucks) and never got mentally into anything until around 3 PM. I was disgusted with myself for that.
On the bright side I did get to run last night and weighed in at 196.75 lbs... last week I was at 199 and that was pre-Jazz Fest, so I didn't want to be all excited about breaking the 2 century mark. But even with a bad week of eating, it looks like I am now a metabolizing machine. Speaking of Jazz Fest, if you go this weekend I suggest you walk past the crawfish bread and get the crawfish eclaire. Simialr flavor but the eclair is much more.... succulent? Yeah, I'm rambling... it happens when I start running off addrenaline.
Oh, in other news, I've seen some very good signs for young people in Baton Rouge Real Estate this week, one of which being the first gathering of the Student Real Estate Association at LSU that I've ever known of... and I've been involved with the LSU Real Estate Department since 1998. I was technically President one year, but that was just to keep the organization alive on paper, we didn't really do anything. I was just working in the office so they threw that on my job duties. Well, I'll take that back, I wrote a constitution for the club. That's something.
For those of you that have ever been to a strip club or just think they're funny, click on Kevin Smith's Myspace (yes, Kevin Smith as in Silent Bob) from my top 8. He has an interesting blog entry on strip clubs, not to mention pretty good blogs in general, but what else would you expect from the guy that wrote Clerks and Chasing Amy?
"If we must take this war into their homes and burn them to the ground, we will do so."
-Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
President, Louisiana State University
