Stayed home from work today due to stomach distress. Not sure what it was… really upset tummy. It’s probably connected with whatever’s going on that causes me to wake at 3 AM starving. And go back to bed at 3:30AM still starving after eating three peanut butter sandwiches. Unpleasant. I feel better now, but I dread the night-time munchies that are sure to arrive once again, tonight.
But I took today’s stay-home as an opportunity and did some cleaning. Took out the trash. Organized a bit. Washed some dishes. Very therapeutic. I have quite a phenomenal number of plates, bowls, and glasses for a single man. I also have 8 butter knives, 4 forks and 22 spoons. Clearly the spoons have gained the upper hand in my silverware drawer. I’m pretty sure there were more forks in there at one point, but now it’s the lonely four quivering in fear of the wrath of the High Spoon Patriarch — a rather large, heavy spoon that’s great for eating ice cream straight out of the carton because it doesn’t bend like the lesser spoons are wont to do.
Finished in the kitchen, I then resolved to once and for all deal with my collection of media. Cassettes. Nintendo games. VHS tapes. I have a lot of crap in my apartment, and this stuff is to my mind some of the more significant in crapitude. I never listen to tapes anymore. I rarely watch VHS tapes. Both kinds of tapes in my collection are mostly blanks on which I’ve recorded stuff. And most of them are unmarked.
I have 17 cassette tapes with partial recordings of Dr. Demento shows dating from the 8th grade.
There, that’s off my chest.
So I gathered them up and searched through, just to make sure that there was nothing I didn’t really want to keep. Found a couple tapes of my brother and I messing with a tape recorder from when I was most likely 9 and he most likely 7. That was kind of cool. Found lots of mix tapes I’d made from CDs or my sister had made for me, but I own all the CDs or have mp3 versions of most of the songs, so in the trash they went. Found a mix tape an ex-girlfriend had made for me, which was bittersweet. I kept that one. I found a ridiculous number of blanks that had one song on them. I don’t know what crack I was smoking to put 6 minutes of music on a 90 minute cassette. In the trash they went.
After sorting most of those, I moved on to the Real Cassettes I Actually Bought. These are some of them. Not pictured is a shoebox filled with other Real Cassettes, such as Duran Duran’s Planet Earth, Morissey’s Kill Uncle and the Who’s That Girl soundtrack that inexplicably wound up in my collection.
Saddness
Not so sad about this one, though I used to rock the house to that Dire Straights album in the background, melted as well.
They must’ve come up with some new space-age plastic for jewel cases cause I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a melted CD case caused by leaving it in the car. Those cassette cases used to have a half-life of 2 minutes if you left them in the car under the June sun. Apparently science has caught up, finally. Hooray!
Finally done sorting and tossing, I organized my CDs (read, put them wherever I could so they weren’t strewn about) then cleaned up my “entertainment center”. Those quotes are deliberate. For kicks and giggles, see if you can spot the 10 anachronisms in the following picture.
For reference, they are
- Three LPs
- An Aerosmith 8-track
- Several unopened blank casettes
- Some Nintendo carts, including both Zeldas
- The original NES
- An Atari 2600 with game paddles
- A dual-deck cassette player
- A VCR
- The original Bumblebee (of Transformers fame)
- For the geekier of my readers, three Sparc2 workstations
Not pictured are the 12 carts to go with the Atari. I ended up stowing them in a cupboard cause I couldn’t find a suitable place of honor for them. Also, I suppose a 19″ television and rabbit ear antennae are anachronistic for some people, but for as much as I watch TV they’re good enough for me. So they’re still current as far as I’m concerned. Nyah.
