On the days when I’m just buried at work — days when my inbox is overflowing and people keep prairie-dogging over the walls of my cube to try and convince me that they’re going to have a heart attack if I don’t do their project RIGHT NOW, ahead of all the other projects that belong to all the other people who are also having heart attacks, and I’m wondering at just what point in my life the road diverged and I ended up on this particular path, and oh by the way, is there an alternate-universe version of me who’s having a lot more fun right at this very moment in time? — yes, on days just like the one I’m having today, I find myself drawn irresistably to the pop-rock music of my formative years in the mid-1980s. You know, the stuff that’s heavy on the crunchy-sounding rhythm guitars and always has a wailing solo after the third verse, but never gets really hard enough to cross the line into true metal? Yeah, I’ll admit to listening to a lot of that stuff regardless of what kind of day I’m having, but on days like this one, I really get dedicated about it.

Maybe it’s because the bombast effectively masks the background noise in my office environment, or maybe it’s because the simplistic lyrics about teenage sexual frustration and youthful machismo are easy to tune out when I’m trying to read copy. Or maybe, just maybe, some part of me is yearning for the time in my life when I didn’t have grey hairs because I can’t seem to figure out how to fit everything I need to do into an 18-hour period of wakefulness. A time when all that was on my mind was music and teenage sexual frustration and dreams of the future…

Well, you get the idea. I’m having a miserable damn day at work and that makes me pine for freedoms I never appreciated when I actually had them. It seems like the longer my to-do list becomes, the more frantically my overworked brain craves escape. I have a lot of fantasies of just walking away from the meat grinder and going vagabond, of tramping through Europe and driving with the top down and riding a Harley somewhere on a desert two-lane. Which would be a good trick, since I don’t actually own a Harley.

I’ve been listening to Night Ranger this afternoon, one song in particular, over and over. It’s synching up with my daydreams and fitting my melancholy mood in a way that’s almost scary. It’s a song called “Restless Kind.” I would’ve put up a YouTube clip, but I haven’t been able to find one. It wasn’t a big hit for the band, and I guess they never did a video for it. Too bad, because it’s actually quite pretty, and very appropriate for anyone who feels like taking an advance on their upcoming mid-life crisis. Here are the lyrics, at least, if you’re interested:

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Okay, how lame is this? I got the word from Chenopup yesterday afternoon that Este Pizza, the Salt Lake eatery that inspired the still-unfulfilled Great Simple Tricks Pizza Challenge, has finally reopened, many months after a fire shut the place down. Naturally, I planned to report this happy news here on the blog ASAP, but, as fate would have it, I got busy with other things and, well, I didn’t get around to it.

So what do I find this morning when I log into my feed aggregator? Greenberg has already blogged about the news! I got scooped on the reopening of a Salt Lake restaurant by a guy who lives in New Jersey! Doh. My head has been hanging in shame for hours now…

(Incidentally, Brian is still up for the Pizza Challenge and I know Cheno is, so hopefully we can finally get that going… also, a big congratulations to Dave, Este’s owner, on getting the place back in shape. Everyone reading this who might be in the Salt Lake area needs to drive on over there for lunch and welcome him back to business!)

Courtesy of Scalzi, who seems to have a pretty good business head on his shoulders:

I guess the idea is that ambition excuses all dickheadedness in the long run. Sorry, it doesn’t.

John is talking about a very specific scenario involving pro writers and would-be pro writers, but I think it’s a good point in general. I can think of a number of young up-and-comers right here in my own company who would do well to heed those words. No one I’d name here in public, of course, but even so…

Saturday night, The Girlfriend and I attended a performance by the Peking Acrobats and were duly amazed by jaw-dropping exhibitions of human flexibility, strength, balance, and sheer showmanship. If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend you see this show. You will be entertained, to paraphrase our old friend Maximus. And if you have children, it’s even family-friendly. Seriously. The kids in the audience were utterly spellbound.

However, as fascinating as it was to see a 70-pound Asian woman of indeterminate age twist herself around so that her butt was literally sitting on top of her own head (and then have six of her friends get on top of her and do exactly the same thing!), that was only a prelude to the real show we experienced on the way home…

[Warning: harsh language and some ickiness ahead, so click away now if you’re squeamish. I’m not kidding!]

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Okay, even if you don’t think LOLcats are funny, you’ve got to admit this is a cool picture:

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If you’re going to be happy living in Utah, you’ve got to like — or at least be able to tolerate — winter weather. After all, this is the home of “The Greatest Snow on Earth™,” as our ski-and-tourism industry likes to say. (I understand other states with ski industries will argue that point; hey, that’s marketing!) And the truth is, I do like the wintertime, for the most part. As I’ve said before, there are few things as beautiful as our local mountains after a fresh snowfall. And I like wearing jackets and coats just fine.

However, it seems like there are three or four weeks every year when various geographical and meteorological factors gang up on Salt Lake, and the temperatures drop to levels more appropriate for Siberia or the planet Hoth or something. We’re in the middle of one of those cold snaps right now, and I seem to be less and less tolerant of them with each passing year. I’ve got the long underwear and the sweaters and the scarf, and I’ve even been wearing a stocking cap on my poor old balding head while sitting at my desk in the drafty New Proofreaders’ Cave, and I’m still chilly, and it sucks large round rocks.
I know, wah wah wah, nobody like a whiner. But you just have to express these things once in a while, for your own psychic health.

The last couple of nights, standing on the platform after work waiting on my train home has been miserable enough that I’m thinking of investing in an outfit like the ones Chevy and Dan are wearing in the poster above. What does everybody think? Are fur coats prime for a comeback?

The other night, I was at a gathering of The Girlfriend’s entire fam-damn-ily — her mother turned 60 last week, so we were celebrating her achievement of that particular milestone — when the conversation turned to the subject of twins. The Girlfriend’s sister-in-law is a twin, and as she and The GF’s brother are currently trying to spawn for the second time, everyone was wondering if twins are a possibility.

Anne’s twelve-year-old niece — the daughter of the other sister-in-law — was having a very difficult time wrapping her head around the difference between identical twins and fraternal twins. She seemed to think that twins = identical, and it didn’t matter if there was one egg or five involved in the production process, or if the twins in question are opposite genders or a matched set. If you’re a twin, you’re identical to your other twin.

Sister-in-Law #1 — the one trying to get pregnant — patiently ran through it all again, pointing out that she and her twin brother couldn’t be identical because he was a boy and she was a girl.

The Twelve-Year-Old framed her face in her hands and said, “But your faces are the same, right?”

There are times when I just can’t help myself. I really should try and keep from blurting things out, but, well, I tend to just do it anyway. This was one of those times. I couldn’t just sit there and listen as the explanation cycled back to Line 1 and continued running in an endless loop. So I leapt into the conversation and said, “Try looking a little south of the face and see if you can spot the difference.”

You know in the movies how they interrupt party scenes with that hackneyed needle-scraping-across-a-vinyl-record sound? (Does anyone under the age of 30 even know what that sound is these days?) That’s pretty much what happened here. Silence instantly fell across the living room, almost like someone had dropped a big glass bell jar over my head. A fork clattered against a plate, no doubt dropped from numb fingers. I felt my face flush as I realized I had just uttered — gasp! — an innuendo. In the presence of Anne’s very conservative and religious parents. I felt all the goodwill credits I’d racked up during the Great Disneyland Vacation in October start to ooze down the drain, like soap scum.

Then Sister-in-Law #1 laughed as if that was the funniest thing she’d heard all week. She laughed even harder when I compounded my initial remark by referring to what lies south of the face as a person’s “bits.” As in girl-bits and boy-bits. The laughter spread through the room, and the tension was broken. I’m still in the black in the goodwill ledger.

While I breathed a sigh of relief, The Twelve-Year-Old continued looking confused and ultimately dropped the subject. Meanwhile, The Teenage Niece’s Boyfriend caught my eye and said, “You know, two or three years from something will click in her head and she’ll say, ‘That’s what Jason was talking about!'”

No doubt.

Yeah, I know… it’s cutesy and sappy and a lot of people don’t get/don’t like the LOLcat thing… but I think it’s an affecting photo and a worthwhile sentiment (in a simplistic, hippy-dippy, “make love, not war” kind of way), so there!

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As some of you may suspect from what I’ve written lately, I’ve been having a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit this year. Well, I always have a hard time with that, but this year has been unusually grinchy for various reasons. That’s probably why I’ve been writing about it so much, because I was trying to convince myself to be more enthusiastic or something. It hasn’t worked out so well, to be honest.

However, my mood improved quite a bit this morning when I opened the front door and beheld this:

Click to enlarge and experience the full effect of the wintry goodness. I can’t remember the last time we had a genuinely white Christmas around here — seems like it always warms up two days beforehand and we end up with a muddy Christmas instead — and it’s also delightful not to see or hear any traffic out there on what is usually a very busy road.

I hope Santa brought everyone something good…