Music for mannequins and dictators

[pseydtonne]

The volume is so much lower on life once I've had 7.5 hours of sleep. I have to remind myself of this so often.

You know that scene in Fight Club when our nameless hero (Ed Norton) goes to work after starting the club and everything is calm like a pool, how he can't even hear his boss? Yeah, like that. Here's a ticket, here's your update, la la la.

I'm so relaxed that I'm enjoying the album "Give Up" by the Postal Service. I should feel wicked guilty about this because one of the guys from Death Cab For Cutie is half of the band. If I recall correctly, the USPS mandates anyone caught listening to this band turn in their testicles. Nevertheless, they make dying on the street from instant carcinomutation sound so perky and romantic.

I could almost forget that I have to drive to Utica tomorrow night.

Maybe the new mood lighting at the office is helping. They shuffled the lanes of annoying fluorescent lights Tuesday and I got the ones behind me turned off. Then the one directly above my head died. It felt a little too dark and morbid. I climbed onto my desk and turned on just one of the three bulbs behind me. It feels like a cloister now. I like it.

-back to phone calls, Dante

Comments

[lightcastle.livejournal.com]

I remember you hating fluorescent lighting.

[starphire.livejournal.com]

I can't see any reason to feel the least bit guilty about liking that album - it's a great album! I felt fortunate to get to see them play in Boston when it was released.

Do you have a desk lamp, and if not can you have one?

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, this isn't IBM and I probably can have a desk lamp!

I have an Eclipse lamp that I got from bluepapercup. It sat on top of a CRT and reflected light down to the keyboard. I loved it when I had a giant, heavy 19" monitor. It was a feat of engineering that so depended on the depth of a CRT for balance that it's useless in the world of skinny LCD screens.

At home I have a gooseneck desk lamp that I hide behind my LCD monitor. I have it positioned so that I'm never staring straight at it. I have that plugged into an old-fashioned kill switch on a ten-foot extension so that I can turn off the light from bed. Analog tech is often beautiful in ways digital can't be.

So yeah, good idea! I'll go find a desk lamp that can hide behind my work monitor and uses a better light spectrum. I hate fluorescent bulbs with the old coatings -- it feels like they're robbing CPU cycles from the rest of my body but the frame rate is still too slow.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

See also why I have a SAD lamp on my desk and the overhead light turned off.