for some reason, i guess, people think of me as a positive person, which really irritates me.

On the way to work this morning my cable chains snapped. The resulting body damage to my car will clearly exceed the purchase price of a new laptop this year. Fuck you, Osiris Claus.

The snow came last night around 8, and it is sticking like crazy. Our steeply inclined death-ride of a street is snaring the unwary as usual, cars caroming their way to the bottom of the hill like billiard balls on a slanted table. Every few minutes brings the high-pitched whine of wildly spinning drive wheels as people try to change their minds, but none can resist the lure of old man gravity.

At home, it’s been a productive day. I successfully moved a printer from an ugly good-enough locale to a closet thanks to the wonder twin powers of Airport Express, and as a bonus we now have even more multi-zone music playback options.

Viv got the tree trimmed, the bathroom remodeling project is well underway, and there’s a fire in the fireplace. I will sleep easy tonight.

Today whilst conducting post-work errands, I stumbled upon a peg-built Windsor-esque chair featuring what appears to be the logo of Harvard University – three open books displaying the word “VERITAS” set within a shield and oak leaves. I recalled seeing chairs just like this in my childhood during a year my family spent in Boston while my dad was a guest instructor at that institution.

I last had the memory tickled on seeing “Mystery Street,” a middling noir featuring a very young Ricardo Montalban as the world’s most improbable Cape Cod police detective. The movie featured a number of scenes actually shot on the campus. In one scene, Montalban rises from this specific style of chair, which prompted me to exclaim to Viv in surprise at my recollection.

I have highlighted the seat.

Today on returning home with my prize I was startled to find no readily available knockoff of these seats available online, prompting me to wonder if my recall was faulty. Looking at the DVD, as seen above, resolves my curioasty but prompst a new speculation. I had assumed, having paid under $100 for the chair, that I had purchased an inexpensive knockoff of the seat I recalled.

On closer examination, there are a number of features that make me thing I have the real thing. Among these are what appears to be shrunken and crazed lacquer, crazing within the “VE RI TAS” seal, and clear evidence of hard wear on the lower legs of the chair. Additionally, there are worn edges on every hard-cornered surface of the furniture, which I initially took to be ‘antiquing,’ manufactured distress.

As I post this, I am pleased to report that I think my family is now endowed with a genuine Harvard chair – of eating!

(I apologize for this hasty, ill-considered, and underdeveloped pun – but the chair really does appear to be identical to the seats I recall, and which one sees in the film still above!)

Fellow MeFite and undeclared internet lingo pope Languagehat semi-recently posted on an internet-only coinage, the undeclaimed and unpunctuated use of the word

what

on a line by itself in comment threads. Generally speaking, the usage connotes an unemotive but nonplussed response to novel stimuli. Something like your grandmother processing the concept of trepanation, or your parents’ response to your announcement of your impending polyamorous marriage.

Looking over my email and blog posts, it’s clear that I have now been a homeowner for three years. My emotional response to this has only ever been at best

what

.

It remains so. I seem to be less actively angry about it, something which I put down to my being now three years closer to the end of my life.

Honestly, how do you people DO it? Engaging in casual conversation at social gatherings, I casually ask my fellow homeowners, for example, “Do you suddenly sit up in the dark watches, drenched in cold sweat, certain that a flamethrowing tank approaches your doors due to your inattentive mortgage payments?”

Apparently they don’t. My whole life, well-meaning and deeply ignorant fools have repeatedly told me that I am not like other people, that I am different, and (I especially loathe the ignorant selfish inaccuracy of this part) that they love me for that. It seems that this observation, which I have hated as long as i have heard it, is in fact true. I am different.

Anyway, three years in, I hate this as much as I did on day one. With luck, that ulcer will just eat me away from the inside and I will never even know I’m dead. Happy Halloween, kids! Come by our house and I swear, I will scare you so badly you will never leave home again.

And stay off my lawn!

I have had some hard days lately. Today is one, no doubt. October becomes November with agonizing deliberation this year.

When I woke up this morning, I felt very sad, but did not remember why for a minute or two. It was odd – the sadness was a distinct, physical feeling, which for a few moments was disconnected from anything I could hook it up to in memory.

Just now, as I was eating a small snack (cold edamame, if you must know) when I heard and felt an unexpected SNAP in my throat, at the level of my larynx. It coincided with swallowing, and now my entire throat os extremely sore with the pain concentrated at the prow of my larynx. My jaw muscles have also begun to alternate aches with shooting pains, and the act of swallowing is now very painful.

I can still talk, happily.

The ‘snap’ had something of the quality of popping one’s back or cracking a knuckle.

UPDATE: For a much more impressive shot of the same rainbow, which really captures the intensity of the thing, see here.

The image above is heavily color-manipulated from the original below, using only photoshop basic selection and color-enhancement tools. It begins to approximate what we just returned from seeing, sorta.

Amazing double rainbow, minutes ago at sunset. Sadly, no decent cameras to hand.