Guh. I hate being sick. And of course it has to hit me during my four-day Thanksgiving weekend. To make matters worse, today is the only day this entire weekend that has been sunny. I’ll probably force myself to hobble outside at some point to get some vitamin E, though. You can’t waste a day like this, considering what the weather’s been like out here lately.

Anyway, I feel like I’ve got malaria. I know it isn’t (if it was, I’d still be in bed), but the nausea and fever/chills reminds me too much of it. Oh well, even if it is, I’ve survived it before, so I can do it again. The only thing that would make this suck less is if my mom was here. She would serve me soup and Sprite until I felt better. Mmmm… Luckily mom and dad’ll be back in the US this Christmas, so maybe I can get sick again while they’re here. Gotta live it up while you can.

Since I’ve moved out here to Seattle, I have discovered a ton of awesome new music. There are a ton of good local bands (Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, Presidents of the USA, and of course Pearl Jam…), and several more great ones from Portland (The Decemberists, for example). Plus thre is a great support for local bands and good music in general from the radio stations out here, especially 107.7 The End. For all the complaining I do about Seattle, the music scene is pretty good, and much more accessible than Chicago’s (I do still terribly miss 97.1 The Drive, though. Thank God for internet radio broadcasting!)

Anyway, it would take me forever to write individual reviews about all the great music I’ve found, so I’m just going to give brief synopsis of some of the best new stuff I’ve been listening to.

Morningwood

The End has a new music show every weeknight, and I have heard some fantasic stuff on it, including this band. You can stream a couple of their songs online from their website, MorningwoodRocks.com (direct link to the music page here). You have to listen to The Nth Degree - it’s so awesome. Reminds me a bit of The New Pornographers for some reason. It’s very poppy, but it works somehow without sounding too bubblegum. I was psyched when I found out you can buy some of their stuff in the iTunes Music Store! When I played it for my friend Dan, he said, “I want more Morningwood!” I heartily concur.

The Books

This summer at Microsoft, while our intern population was quite high, I started a music-listening thing. We’d get together in a conference room and everyone would play a song they thought no one else had heard. We only met a few times, but I am definitely doing it again next year. This band was one that a guy named Gilbert Bernstein brought in. Fantastic stuff. He played the song “Tokyo” for us, and it remains my favorite. Unfortunately, I can’t find any of their stuff on iTunes, but Rolling Stone has some more info on them, and you can buy the discs from Amazon if you can’t find it anywhere else. If you want to have a listen beforehand, try Tokyo for starters. Stylistically it’s pretty indicative of what you can expect from them. Good stuff.

When I told people I was moving out to Puget Sound earlier this year, a common reaction was, “I hope you like rain.” When I got here in late March, though, the weather was beautiful, and it remained so until the last couple of weeks. I knew it was too good to be true. To get an idea of what I’ll be dealing with for the rest of the winter, look at what my Konfabulator weather widget tells me…

Depressing…

November is nigh upon me, but I don’t think I’ll be able to fully participate in NaNoWriMo this year like I did last year. Between the job and the working out, I’m simply not going to have the time for a 50,000 word novel this year. It really is a shame, since I had a couple of good ideas. Oh well, store them up for the future.

I am, however, considering trying to complete a short story during the month. I have a few ideas… They’re listed below, along with some possible quotes from the story and some pros and cons about doing one. After you’ve read the descriptions, vote for your favorite on the left of the site…

Sex, Drugs, and Polka

Description: A semi-autobiographical story about a guy who goes to college and deals with the overall college experience. He figures most of it out, but the fairer sex leaves him utterly confused – that is, until he meets her. (This makes it sound really cheesy – I don’t think it will be once I get it written.)

Possible excerpts:

“Years later he would think back in awe of the squander in which he now lived – but at this very moment, it was home, and a good one at that.”

“He had the fleeting thought that all men of his generation had. ‘Am I gay?’”

“In his heart he knew that what he really wanted was a meaningful relationship filled with trust, sacrifice, and love, culminating in marriage and a slow ride into the proverbial sunset of his later years with his beautiful bride; for now, though, he’d settle for a passionate make-out session in the corner with some girl whose name he wouldn’t remember tomorrow.”

Pros: Will give me a chance to get some of my college experiences out on paper (with some fictional embellishments, of course) before middle-age sets in and I forget it all. Plus, would be a lot of fun for my friends to read since they’ll probably make appearances.

Cons: Far too much for a short story – I doubt I’ll ever finish it once I start, because there’s too much material to work with.

The Hill

Description: A children’s story about friendship. A boy grows up with a hill in his back yard, and when he grows older, a construction company buys the property and threatens to flatten the hill, so the boy has to find a way to save it – or say goodbye.

Possible excerpts: Hmmm, I can’t find them right now… I know they’re somewhere…

Pros: I like to experiment with different styles (Mike’s character in Knot was an experiment with anger and rage), so it would be interesting to try my hand at a children’s story, with some simpler language and richer descriptions. The presence of a non-talking character (the Hill) would allow me to forgo dialog and focus more on description (one of my weaker points, I think).

Cons: Might be kind of boring, and difficult to prevent sounding cheesy or overly didactic. The core concept isn’t very original either.

The Children’s Democracy

**Description: **A lonely suburban writer suffers writer’s block until he starts to observe a group of kids around his housing complex. He writes about his observations about the way the children deal with each other socially and politically.

Possible excerpts: Probably the same place The Hill excerpts are… I’ll put them in here when I locate them…

Pros: Interesting concept to me, and I’d get to alternate between analytical essay-style writing, description, and dialog pretty easily with the characters.

Cons: Very little subject matter to use, since I don’t have too much interaction with kids. The idea is based on some run-ins I’ve had with some of the kids around my apartment complex, but I don’t think I have nearly enough material to keep this interesting.

Have another plot idea you think I should write about? Let me know…

I saw this article linked over at Slashdot today and found it to be a very interesting read. I’ve had many debates with people that think that byte- compiled languages like Java and C# just have inherent performance problems. Often they’ll spout off some nonsense about how garbage collection is inefficient or something. Sure, sometimes it’s better to have manual control over your memory allocation/deallocation, but this article makes a surprisingly good case for why the perceived performance hits in dynamic management don’t even exist. A great read, especially if you don’t know much about how memory management works in the first place.