I went for a bike ride this afternoon, partly because my cheapo necklace finally broke and I needed to buy a replacement. Fortunately replacements are 2 for $10 at Venice Beach.

I actually dragged my giant camera with me this time because it’s been pouring rain and a lot of the usual pollution and gunk has been washed away, and things are much, much clearer than they usually are.

Anyway, some of the better pictures from this little excursion are up on my Flickr, which you can access via this link or this lovely slideshow:

I will say, days like today make me wish I had a working point-and-shoot camera. The small-ish one that I carried around Europe with me (and which compared to today’s point-and-shoot cameras, is freakishly huge) died some time ago, and sometimes the iPhone’s camera just isn’t enough.

I love the pictures my D50 takes and the level of control it gives me, but there’s no getting around the fact that lugging a giant DSLR around with me on a bike ride is a humongous pain in the ass.

I’ve gotten into something of a winter funk. It started out with the aforementioned really awesome stomach bug that left my innards out of sorts and me curled up in pain for a week, and continued into a solid week of pouring rain in LA.

Rain in L.A. somehow seems much more depressing and draining than rain anywhere else, probably because it’s always sunny here and the change of pace is so much more severe.

So between the illness and the rain, I’ve been tempted many times these last few weeks to just curl up on my couch and sleep the day away. Some days, I manage to fight the urge and actually get up and get a load or two of laundry done.

But more often than not the last couple of weeks, Chaplin will jump up on me, and either curl up between my feet or on my chest. The power of a sleeping cat is utterly ridiculous when it comes to draining me of any ability to stay awake. He’s like a purring hot water bottle.

I can sleep 10 hours a night and if I don’t snap myself out of it, I’ll still nap another two hours with the kitty. Which is exactly what happened last night and this afternoon.

I’ve mostly only been getting out to go to the gym recently, and I think I need to make sure I keep changing things up a bit more in order to prevent myself from literally sleeping my life away.

The first thing I need to do is get back to dragging myself to the gym in the morning rather than the afternoon – I always have way more energy after the gym, and am consequently way better at fighting off cat-induced sleepiness.

I also think I need to increase the time I spend away from my apartment, even though it may increase the danger of me spending money. That’s been my primary unemployment excuse for never leaving the house: Staying in is almost always cheaper than doing anything other than bike riding outside.

I’m at the point where I’m so averse to spending money that I can’t really bring myself to go to the local coffeehouse or sandwich shop and gank their wifi just for a change of scenery, because I’ll be tempted to at least order a hideously overpriced beverage if not a sandwich that costs more than I have budgeted for my entire day’s worth of meals.

So I think it’s time for me to hit up my friendly local parks and maybe go sit and get my reading-learning done out by the ocean when it’s a smidge less windy than it has been. Maybe I’ll even break down and go to a library.

The fact that it’s supposed to pour again all day tomorrow (well, today at this point) means that at least the “go outside more” part of this plan won’t start until Wednesday, but I think putting my finger on the problem will at least help me address it.

I’ve come down with a truly delightful stomach bug, so my ability to do pretty much anything beyond what I absolutely have to do is somewhat restrained.

Normally I’d have something much longer about the whole Jaypocalypse/Conandrum fiasco playing out in slow motion on NBC, but to be frank, I really don’t have the energy to write up my feelings on what is, at its heart, a battle for the future of television.

Instead, please enjoy this embed of last night’s Jimmy Kimmel show (no, really, it is quite funny). It’s an absolutely savage parody of Leno’s show, particularly in the way that he relies on the band to prop up every single limp joke.

Hopefully more to come when I feel a bit less like I’m in certain scenes from Parasites Lost.

When I took the GRE, I signed up for the “search service” that allows the testing board to send my info to various graduate schools so they can attempt to recruit me and/or offer me scholarships. Which is fine with me, since if someone wants to offer me free grad school, I’m all ears.

I got a basic “Check out our program!” email this evening from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. It might have been intriguing had I not thought to take a look at the weather forecast for Lincoln for the next few days:

I realize I’ve been spoiled by living in Southern California for six years, but I think even when I lived in Chicago I would have looked at that forecast and thought, “Perhaps they should have waited until spring to send out recruiting emails.”

Since I clearly don’t already have enough outlets for my one-liners on the internet between this creaky old blog and Facebook, I broke down and started posting on Twitter.

Like most internet things I eventually get into, I resisted for quite a while, not quite seeing the point of it until some of my friends who seemed to get it faster really got into it.

But I think after following a few people for a bit, I see where a fun space for it lies between a blog and Facebook and a direct line from my brain to the internet.

Plus, I’ve been functionally unemployed since March. There’s really only so long you can resist a complete time-killer like Twitter when you’re unemployed for months at a time.

We’ll see how I get the hang of it over the next few weeks, but the good news is that the limits of the format dictate that even when what I post is not amusing, it’ll at least be short.

Garfield Minus Garfield

My friends Jessica and Dan were kind enough to invite me along when they wound up with an extra ticket to today’s Rose Bowl. The only difficulty was that Northwestern was playing in the Outback Bowl at 8am, and the Rose Bowl was in Pasadena at 1:30pm.

I initially figured I’d just watch the NU game downtown and take the train up to Pasadena after it ended and walk to the Rose Bowl. The problem with this idea was that none of the bars I’d been planning to go to downtown opened until 10am.

So I said screw it, I’ll just go to Pasadena. I can take the express bus to Union Station and the train to Pasadena, and it’ll all be good. I’d make it at about 7:45 for an 8am kickoff and I’d have to fight Rose Parade crowds, but it was totally doable.

I should have known better than to make a plan that relied on LA County public transportation being on time.

I walked the 20 minutes down to the express bus stop and got there at about 6:15 for what was supposed to be a 6:31 bus. With no sign of it at 6:47 and the next express bus not scheduled until 7:31, I said screw it and hopped on a crosstown bus instead.

I eventually wound up on an LA city bus with a bus driver who was either insane, high, or both. He mumbled in misunderstanding if I asked him if he went to the Gold Line, and he literally shut the door on people and took off giggling if they dared ask him questions about the line if they didn’t get on the bus before they did so.

I was very, very happy when someone (talking to him in Spanish and still making very little headway, but at least more than I made) managed to figure out that the light rail stop he was driving up to was at least on the line I wanted to be on, and I could at least get off his goddamn bus.

So I finally got to the Barney’s Beanery in Pasadena at about 8:30am, which was not horrible, all things considered. The game was…the game.

It went badly until I ordered a beer, and then it started going great so I ordered another. I got about 2/3 of the way through the second when the bartender, in the midst of mixing drinks, knocked the rest of my beer onto my lap. And of course that was when it all went completely to hell for Northwestern.

Clearly, the lesson for whatever game I wind up watching next year is that I need to make sure that a) I start drinking at kickoff, no matter how early it is, and b) do said drinking from a sippy cup.

Anyway, it was heartening to see an entire bar full of Ohio State fans having a post-parade, pre-game beer cheering for Northwestern to beat Auburn, and all of them consoling me as I was banging my head on the bar after that stupid fake field goal failed at the end of OT.

After that I blew off steam by walking to the Rose Bowl (a considerably longer walk than I’d anticipated). I actually had quite a bit of fun for a game that I was very minimally invested in, though it probably helped that I was sitting with a bunch of rabid Ohio State fans who were really, really entertaining.

I promised my friends who got me a ticket to this game that I’d get them tickets to the Rose Bowl the next time Northwestern made it, a promise that got a slightly bigger laugh than intended. But they gave me a ride home, so I forgave them that.

All in all, it was a damn fun day and a great way to kick off the year, despite that ridiculously frustrating NU loss. We’ll get ‘em next year.