Hooverphonic

There's water in the air but it's not falling anymore. It seeps up through your toes from the dirt but the ground is still very thirsty.

I don't remember what happened Thursday night. I think I just came home in my regular stupor after work and watched the markets roll into the weekend. The yen is still moving in step on the weekly charts so... gbpjpy can be sold a couple times a day. Ah... that's right. I fell asleep. I've been taking these fantastic, accidental naps when I get home in the evenings. I'll get home around 5 or 6 and watch to see how everything's moving before the Asian markets open. This past week, I found myself asleep like a dog. I need to start setting evening alarms again. I'm not even staying up late. My brain just needs to rest after hours of babysitting my customers'... my customers.

I don't want to dwell on work because it's an entirely worthless exercise. But I should say that even as a self-proclaimed optimist, I'm finding it harder and harder to chew the leather provided. And I've eaten a lot of leather. I got paid the same to sit with dogs in a yard and watch them lick eachother. Right now, I save thousands of dollars of computer equipment from being thrown away daily and I'm being compensated the same as the folks telling customers to switch the cords around to, "see if it works." That building provides all the anti-love and emotional punishment depicted in the movie Martyrs. Purported vertical movements translate into horizontal movement with greater workloads. Why those running the place don't just overhaul the entire payroll scheme to operate as a real IT company is so far beyond me. Maybe it's not even an IT company. I don't even want to think about it. I could write for days about it but they're not paying me to write. And... yep... there's the humor. I'm already writing for them... just for my own enjoyment, apparently. The main page of the company's website has grammatical errors. Company-wide, individual performance is judged on how many bear traps a person has sprung in the last month. I'm done with it. If they paid anywhere close to the industry standard, they'd be pretty goddamned surprised to see just what exactly happens which Richard gets excited about the work he's doing. Again, maybe I've just been incorrectly assuming it's an IT company because of the intricate (and exceedingly extraneous) technical knowledge required to appease angry customers. Maybe it's just a technically-oriented customer support service doing emotional damage control. Well, that's exactly what it is. The only things keeping me there are the physical location and the few older people I get to talk to in the Northeast who are still realizing the benefits of having the internet at home.

My friend Shelley and I went to see Inglourious Basterds yesterday. This was the second time I had seen it in the theaters. She hadn't seen it and... I wanted to see it again. It was just as good as the first time. It might have actually been a little better. Staying with the plot required some effort the first time around. The hardest part the second time through was maintaining my composure in the moments just before Tarantino's trademark "shock" scenes. I found myself giggling comfortably out of step with the rest of the audience after the bludgeoning/maiming/abrubpt pain. The sound on the reel was crackly and inconsistent for the first 3 minutes of the movie. But it sorted itself out and my blood pressure dropped right back in line shortly thereafter.

After the movie, Shelley opted to go up to her cousin's place way up North rather than hang out for the evening. This was entirely agreeable. She's going to move out of her Austin place shortly and just stay in Boston. She's a sweet lady but I don't think either of us were intending to take it anywhere definitive. I dropped her off and celebrated my Saturday by getting a table for one at the Spaghetti Warehouse.

I sat in a traincar as the only passenger next to a stuffy company party of some sort. I had my headphones in and basically just disappeared inside my tall glass of beer and sturdy chunk of lasagna. I gorged myself and displayed my satisfaction by scratching myself victoriously after the dust settled around the table. I'm a predatory animal. And last night, the pasta just wasn't fast enough. The cheescake was also unable to elude my cat-like, Tabletop prowess.

I've been playing with my song in my room like it's a shiny new toy. It's pretty fun. The verse breaks down and enters the chorus seemingly prematurely. It catches whoever's listening and gives me some space to play both of them a little lazily... closer to free verse than a strict tempo. It's different every time and has therefore kept me happy :)

Today I backed up all my gigs of trading stuff and looked at charts. I updated my COT sheets and reinstalled my MT4. I actually have more to do, come to think of it.

Then I did a little maintenance and reinstalled my tablet OS so I can ship it out to the repair folks later this week. I'm looking forward to being mobile again. Don't tell anybody but... for the price of a Kindle, you can get a TC1100.

I found a pretty cool Belgian band called Hooverphonic this afternoon. Actually..

Before I write more about music, I want to take a minute to write about the rain. This was easily the most rain we've gotten in Central Texas in a year. My front yard was one massive puddle. Even the dinosaurs across the street were taking shelter. It rained steadily and heavily for at least 45 minutes here and it's stayed pretty cool into the evening. It's supposed to rain a bit more tonight.

Back to music, Hooverphonic is a group out of Belgium with a trip-hop, ambient foundation and some clean female vocals on top. Their music has been used in a few movies, commercials and shows, but apparently their frontlady just left the group to pursue her own musicstuffs. I'm getting their discography as we speak so I'll have a better idea of their sound shortly. So far, it's clean, rolling and comfortable. It's light but direct with pretty decent instrumentation and colorful, classically European pop melodies.

I've not been listening to my French stations recently. I think I need to stop watching so many movies on Justin.tv and get back to freakin work. If I stop watching Jtv, I will effectively be without entertainment through the week. Jesus... my exercise will have to be my entertainment. I'm going to have to brainstorm on this. I'll write about that soon. Actually, what I really need to do is find a lady who likes to take naps after a long day and then work the rest of the night on things that make her happy. Of course, I'll have to work less to do that. Tastes like irony to me.

>> "This Is Not An Exit" on Stay What You Are by Saves the Day