The cold wind

The Chicago trip was terrific. We had an awesome time exploring the city (so many beautiful buildings!), enjoying the great weather on the beach, eating lots of Chicago-style pizza, and even checking out the aquarium. And Ray was the perfect host. I think we went there during the best weather of the year — mid 70s all weekend — but I’m going to pretend that that’s what it’s always like there :).

Some pictures:

It’s concert season again: Paris Combo and Vienna Teng this past week, and then next weekend is the Pixies and Richard Shindell. On a related note, yesterday was horrible: I went all the way to the Fillmore to get tickets for three upcoming shows (The Tragically Hip, Gillian Welch, and Martin Sexton) since the Ticketmaster surcharge came out to a ridiculous $10 for each $25 ticket. The Fillmore’s box office is hardly ever open… just a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon, and then only when a show is actually going on. Anyway, traffic was bad and I made a wrong turn, and I finally got there in 45 minutes, at 4:02. Of course, the box office closed at 4pm. So the whole trip was worthless, and now I’m debating whether to suck up the TM charge, or try to go back next Sunday (and risk having one of the shows sell out).

Anyway, so then I came back home and found out that my laptop’s Linux partition was totally hosed. This is where I do all my research and stuff. So I freaked out for a while, and I’m still trying to fix it. On the plus side, it’s made me boot into Windows a lot more, so I’ve started recording this song I wrote this summer. It sounds pretty decent so far… definitely better than my last effort. Also on the plus side, it’s made me feel slightly less guilty about socializing and playing sports all weekend.

I better stop rambling.

I think a fundamental conflict that a shy or introverted person (I’m too lazy to figure out which I mean) has is between the feeling that other people don’t really appreciate what he is worth (and, oh, if only they would!), and the feeling that maybe instead he just isn’t worth much at all. It would be pretty amazing and educational if we could all see how other people perceive us. It would be a great tool to illustrate our real faults (rather than our perceived ones), and also to dispel unfounded insecurities. This could be done, of course — all you’d have to do is get someone to anonymously poll all your friends and acquaintances about you. (I feel like I’ve talked about this already…)

The current social networks (Friendster, Orkut, etc.), really only allow people to leave named, positive comments. I think I would equally prefer if people could also leave anonymous comments about things that I do wrong or that I could do better.