"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"