"These are my favourite chords..."

Any time I pay homage to Tim Cook (not Apple's Tim Cook)—usually through sharing his artwork, as seen in yesterday's post—I always end up with one of the songs he's interpreted through his drawings running 'round in my head. For example: He has illustrated lines from The Weakerthans' "My Favourite Chords" no less than three times over the past however many years (the album was released in 2000), but I have to confess that I finally looked up the song and listened to it this past January.

And it is wonderful.

It's in the same vein of perfect songs in which you can find Brand New's "Soco Amaretto Lime" and Semisonic's "Gone to the Movies" and Weezer's "Island in the Sun" and Death Cab for Cutie's "Photobooth." Chill and guitar-driven (but more like a Sunday drive than NASCAR). And the lyrics are tremendous but extraordinarily simple, as seen in the following lines I figuratively snipped from the song:

"When you get off work tonight
Meet me at the construction site
And we'll write some notes to tape to the heavy machines
Like 'We hope they treat you well
Hope you don't work too hard
We hope you get to be happy sometimes'
Bring your Swiss Army knife
And a bottle of something
And I'll bring some spray paint and a new deck of cards..."

You can wax as philosophical as you want about the lyrics, or you can just let your mind drift with the repetitive strumming of the guitar strings. It doesn't really matter, for this song has the ability to take you everywhere and nowhere. That's the magic of good music: it allows you to make of it what you will.

I will never skip a rock again...

Or, to be more accurate, I should probably say that I will never chew an ice cube again. Just in case.

This pretty much sums up how I feel right now:

Toothaches are terrible.

(Credit where credit is due: the great and oh-so-clever Tim Cook—not to be confused with Apple's Tim Cook.)

IT vs. Accounting vs. HR

When HR's vacation goes awry, hearing in the office goes awry.

"She's stuck in a window?" ~Guy
"No, [she]'s stuck in Or-LAN-do!" ~Tam

Seven and Some Change

Back when I began this blog, I wrote the following: "Right now, the plan is to have at least one quote each day, but this will probably be an amorphous blog and subject to change."

Wellllll, "right now" was seven-point-something months ago, and that's at the most recent. My accumulation of quotes dropped in a most severe fashion once I left my favorite college town (and that was in 2010). Oh, I have pages and pages of quotes to use, but I'm trying to decide whether that's actually the direction in which I want to take this blog. I plan on asking various people for their opinions regarding this matter.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

But, for the sake of old times, I leave you with this quote from a Texan attending college in SoCal:

"When you party in college, somehow your sheets go missing."
~Arctic Jim

In other news, I ate some delicious cheese for a snack this morning. Three kinds of glorious cheese. Mmmmmm.

In Memory

February 7, 2011, marks the second anniversary of the death of my friend Troy.

"What in God's name has not been done in this world yet?"
~Troy

Beats me, but had he lived, I'd bet he would've found it.

And here's a bonus, not-immediately-obviously-relevant quote:

"And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she wasn't being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unscaleable wall surrounding her. I thought of her asleep on the carpet with only that jagged sliver of sky above her. Maybe Margo felt comfortable there because Margo the person lived like that all the time: in an abandoned room with blocked-out windows, the only light pouring in through holes in the roof. Yes. The fundamental mistake I had always made -- and that she had, in fairness, always led me to believe -- was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl."
~John Green, "Paper Towns"

Oh, engineers...

"What is your ASAP deadline?"
~An engineer in the San Antonio office whose name shall not be divulged

We were highly amused.

It DOES work.

Wings and I spent some time tonight reminiscing about life back in the day (and by "back in the day," I mean "a year or so ago"), when all was right with the world. When, together, we ruled Transit with benevolent fists...

...or something like that. Mostly, we went to class and work and ate waffles and ice cream and watched Phineas & Ferb.

We also had some pretty wacky conversations.

Wings: "I think that's called 'chemistry.'"
Me: "But it's one-sided! Does that even WORK?!"

Happy Monday, y'all!

Let the bus humor begin...

Every so often, Wings and I will exchange Quotes of the Day. This one comes to you from Wings's Route 07 on the Texas A&M University campus.

"Ah, I am glad they kept Jason normal. He's so funny."
~Unknown

I am the proud owner of a giant calendar featuring hamsters. Jenny (another coworker) inspected it and declared, "That is so you."

"Add traffic jam to your holiday menu."
~The Weather Channel website (11/23/10)

One-Eleven-Eleven!

I scared The Tig (my cat) so bad that he ran into another room jumped onto a plate full of food.

"The combination of good intentions and no short-term memory sometimes yields interesting results."
~Tracy Butler

It snowed. It snowed big, white, fluffy flakes and tiny, silvery, compact flecks. This was, of course, after it rained all night, so none of it stuck.

But still. It snowed.

"It was like looking out into a snowglobe."
~Wings

Admittedly, she said that while she was living in Canada, but it's applicable today!

Brr!

I was formulating numerous versions of this entry on my way home from work as I jammed to Mêlée's newest album, "The Masquerade" (which, by the way, is pure love). However, the allergy attack I had yesterday is morphing into a cold, so I figure that I should put off those high-quality thoughts 'til later.

Because it is still cold in my office -- specifically,  my cubicle -- I thought that a quote from years gone by would be quite fitting. A classmate of mine boldly declared this as he shed his coat upon entering the History of Rhetoric class.

"It is colder than secular humanism out there!"
~That skinny, blond-haired guy who always sat behind me and slightly to my right (that is, southeast of me)

Amen, brother. Amen.

"Gag me with a spoon."

Today was my dear coworker Di's last day at the firm. She had received "an offer [she] couldn't refuse" from another local company and was thus spirited away from our little marketing department.

*sniff* I miss her already. (I also lost the coin toss for her now-vacant window cubicle. *snaps*)

In honor of her, I bring you one of my favorite Di quotes. It hails from an e-mail that she sent to one of the company principals at 0150 the day that a very tricky proposal was going to be sent out. (She was, in her words, "delirious" at that time. Verily, she spoke truth.)

"Coincidentally, I happen to design these bad boys on a computer screen, so it's not like I need to submerse myself in liquid-hot magma with a copy of the SOQ to see what the selection committee will see. :)"
~Di

Di, I salute you.

"You're waiting for a train..."

If you know me, you know that I haven't seen a lot of movies. -- Well, I take that back. I've seen a lot of movies, but they usually just don't seem to be ones that everyone expects the average individual to have seen (go figure).

Anyways, I finally saw Inception today. About half the people I'd talked to about it raved about it, and the other half ranted about it, so I figure I had a pretty decent balance of input going into this movie-watching event. After having viewed it for myself, I must say that I fall into the rave category. (The ending also vaguely reminded me of the end of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for some reason, and that's a novel I consider to be one of the best books written in the past decade, so that didn't hurt.)

*checks Inception off of her flowing scroll of Movies to Watch at Some Point in Time*

Cobb: "For this to work, we'd have to buy off the pilots."
Arthur: "And we'd have to buy off the flight attendants."
Saito: "I bought the airline. It seemed neater."

Oh-One, Oh-One, One-One

"You're all pizza and fairytales!"
~John Lennon to Paul McCartney

Had John and I been bandmates, he could have easily said that about me. I'm an unassuming girl who manages (or seriously attempts) to make even the most mundane things fantastic.

That being said (or typed, as the case may be),  I thought that a date filled with ones and zeroes would be a brilliant day on which to create a new blog. Right now, the plan is to have at least one quote each day, but this will probably be an amorphous blog and subject to change. (I'm hurriedly trying to create this before midnight, so it's all sorts of unpolished, and I slept on a hardwood floor this morning, which has nothing to do with anything.)

Ahem.

I present to you now a quote from a good friend. This saying has kept me buoyed up on many a dull day.

"I don't believe any days that you live through are wasted. Maybe not as good as you hope, but never wasted."
~Crow

And there y'go.

Cheers, y'all!