Helloween

And goodbye as well. With Halloween 2012 drawing to a close, I'm also looking to fill my four-post-per-month quota. I'm weakly making it onto the weekly. I should be calling it Balloween since I'm feeling progressively more and more like balls.

Today I didn't get round to dressing up, but I was rocking a crew-neck t-shirt, which isn't that odd except that I'm so accustomed to the v-neck in the last few years that I actually feel a touch out of sorts in a crew-neck. Like my neck is confined or something stupid like that. Of course strangers don't know that I nearly exclusively wear v-necks (no, seriously, I cut my crew-necks into v-necks a lot of the time), so as usual, all in the brain. The moral of the story is that there's very little story here.

Smoking line, the cut-off line for cigarettes, so you can't. smoke. here. Each morning I walk by the Merchandise Mart and I'm fascinated by the smoking line that is painted onto the sidewalk. Fascinated because it exists, but also fascinated because it is obeyed. The idea is that the entryway is not flooded with smoke, and it's a nice concept, but given the wind in Chicago, the efficacy of the smoking line is questionable. That, and it's also really intriguing to me to see an arbitrarily painted line observed, one that adheres to the 15 foot rule. Why fifteen feet? Why not.

As you can see, I'm not too into linking the disparate parts of this post to one another. What I am into, is wondering if Skidz brand clothing will return. Peep these shots below. Those aren't costumes, those are fashion!

Merry go round indeed! They're not skidding! Or are they?

This girl right here!

Happy Halloween folks.

Because Everything Comes from Something

For the past, oh, it must be two months now, I have been going through my iTunes library to discover and rediscover the myriad tracks therein. Through the course of that, one of the things I noted was the similarity between the piano in Ingrid Michaelson's "Corner of Your Heart" and Adele's "Someone Like You". Maybe it just arose independently, and maybe they don't sound as similar as I think, but my brain says they do. But with brains bombarded by so much information and noise these days, it can be hell determining from where it is all derived. Take right now. I am listening to a track—one I will make note of later—with ESPN on (as I wait to cue up my next episode of Gossip Girl) and, oh, right, here I am typing.

And speaking of Gossip Girl, it's just always scooping me on music, just the like the mothertruckin' OC back in the day. If I'm not outright discovering a song through the show, I seem to only be a week or two ahead. Not that it matters, but it's sort of frightening the way it's tuned into a specific brainwave to which I adhere. Is it any wonder I keep tuning into the show, even when it gets worse and worse? At the close of a recent episode I caught Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know", which was not even credited. And not long before that it was Lana Del Rey's "Video Games."

It's amazing that, with the sheer volume of music, video, journalism, blog posts, and so on being created and the sheer number of outlets for them that there are a specific and small number of them that reach the great masses. There is a name for this phenomenon I am certain, somebody or other's law.

And oh my god Gossip Girl is killing me with the never-ending back and forth of these relationships and everyone is in love with everyone but not sure if they're really in love and somehow everyone is super conniving and crafty even the characters most peripherally pulled in. I get the concept of them all being tainted by the toxicity of the life but how are they so crafty so quickly and okay, alright, it's fiction. And they just quoted Camus?

I read this nifty little piece in The Paris Review where a high schooler in the 60s asked a bunch of contemporary authors about symbolism. It's pretty much what a lot of teenagers struggle through in high school English and some of the responses are excellent (they only show a few, but I'd like to read them all).

Google has released a new ad, as of about two weeks ago for Google +. I found it...depressing...So it goes.

At any rate that seems enough sort of information and information of sorts at the moment.