morrisseyed

the past six days have been a blended series of contracts and papers and jobs eating up my time (*). I’ve been stuck in a serious rut of  “get up in the morning, do one thing for one pay, then do another for another pay, oh my god its 8pm!” routine.  the money’s okay, for a student.  the money would be great, if it were 1995.  but i’m willing to make due for now.  i think i’ll actually carry on with some of these contracts so long as they’re offered to me (the big daddy seems to be long-term, so long as the american economy holds out) in order to keep a sock-drawer full of cash on the go, and also to pay down some of the student debt.  yay student debt.

i booted up an old laptop today.  I hadn’t turned it on since at least 2005, but it may have been since at least 2003.  It’s a little difficult to be precise on this date.  Most of its files are from a pre-wedding time period, but every now and again I encountered something from 2005, post-wedding, when looking over its contents.  the neatest things discovered are the cultural and personal relics from a past time, though. the desktop is plastered with a photo of El Cohen, which The Pineapples noted was once a livejournal icon I used.  The “My Computer” icon is renamed Zinedine Zidane, likely in honour of Zizou’s antics at Euro 2004, while the hard drive is titled “Sweet Homewrecker”, in honour of Joel Plaskett.  I’m not big on Plaskett, but I do like his album titles.

It looks like the machine was set up to be a simple MS Word and LJ-ifying beast.  I had reformatted the hard drive - this much I can remember - but most of the documents sitting on it now are old Word and Access documents, and various temporary files used by Semagic, the offline LJ-writer.  For a moment there I nearly logged in just to say “Hello world out there.”  Oh live journal, how did we ever come together, only to stray so far apart?  Excuse me for one more precious moment as I head off to write a wondrous ode to your cyber-social-constructive ways.

(* - It’s funny that I talk, that we all talk about how our work eats up our time.  Our work is our time.  It is part of our lives.  That shouldn’t be ignored.  It shouldn’t be dwelled upon, either.  But it shouldn’t be ignored.)

it’s the eve of euro 2008, and oh boy am i excited. this afternoon i convinced myself that i have (1) the time and (2) the money to subscribe to all the canadian sports channels in order to get my fill for the next month. while i am sure i can afford an extra $2/week for the next month to satisfy point two, the issue of time is yet to be determined. perhaps i’ll have to be more productive and more efficient in the ways that I waste my time through june.

many people have asked me who it is i’ll be cheering for. i’m kinda proud to say that I haven’t really got a team for the national tournaments. in spite of mediterranean or anglo name (I’ll let you decide), i don’t feel any lingering cultural attachment to any one nation, and it’s perhaps better that way, since i can really go in and enjoy one great goal after another and cheer on the game as opposed to a side. as tournaments progress, though, i do end up taking on favourites - the last euro was Portugal, given the fact that it was handsome Luis Figo’s last tournament. Also, they’ve had Maniche playing on their side and Maniche is incredibly fun to listen to and pronounce. try it: “ma-neesh.” But i digress. Generally, if i must fly a flag at these things, it generally is the tricolour of the french republic. i fricking love the french. face it, the french are arrogant arses, and i love them all the more for it. it is my goal in life to always be arrogant, so i tend to look up to the french. and besides, there is perhaps no better flag to look at when flying in the wind that the tricolore. that thing rocks. I gotta admit that andrew lloyd webber might play a part in all of our fascinations with the french flag, but goddamn is it ever so petulent, pompous, arrogant, self-righteous, and downright sexy. It screams rebellion and revolution, but it also demands smokes and vin at the same time. where’s my beret? - i’ll stand with les bleues any day.

if that is too sarcastic for you, then perhaps i can suggest the work of michel platini in the 1980s as any reason to love the french. before zizou went bald, platini was kickin’ it with a crazy mop of hair that only a frenchman can pull off. and he did it with style. while i’m still ready to have zizou’s babies should ever the need arise, i hope (j’espere) that platini would make a good godfather.

(here’s a small clip of a great free kick by platini at a 1981 world cup qualifier. it’s worth viewing even if you don’t care for football, if only to listen to the french broadcasters yell “oui, michel! oui michel!”)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8pe0GgDM0A&]