a video from my travels:
Some additional photos via my instagram (http://instagram.com/maxjacobson):
a video from my travels:
Some additional photos via my instagram (http://instagram.com/maxjacobson):
Earlier while sleeping on the plane I had an idea for a method that I want to write.
I use erb, not haml, because haml is confusing, and erb looks like HTML which isnāt really confusing anymore.
What I do is I have a layout.erb file which is the template for the entire site. All the pages look the same because they all use the same template. The only three things that change are the title, subtitle, and yield.
So whenever you try to go to a page, the code runs and figures out what the HTML should be, which I typically put into a String variable called the_html. Then, depending on what youāre doing, I set the title and subtitle in two global variables, @title and @subtitle. These will fill out the <h1> and <h2> header tags.
Then the last thing I do in the code is run erb the_html which sends the freshly-tossed-together html into the āyieldā aka the body of the page.
Here Iāll just share what my template looks like right now:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en-US">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title><%= @title.downcase %> - <%= @subtitle.downcase %></title>
<link href="/css/style.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="/feed" />
<meta name="author" content="<%= get_author_name %>">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />
<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="true" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="container">
<h1 id="title"><a href ="/"><%= @title.downcase %></a></h1>
<h1 id="author">by <%= get_author_name.downcase %></h1>
<h2 class="instapaper_title"><%= @subtitle.downcase %></h2>
<%= yield %>
<hr />
<form action="/search" id="searchbox">
<input type="text" name="q" placeholder="Search..."> <input type="submit" value="search">
</form>
<p><small>This blog running on an as-yet-untitled and unfinished blogging engine created by <a href="http://maxjacobson.net">Max Jacobson</a> on the morning of December 1, 2012. It uses Ruby, Sinatra, and Heroku.</small></p>
<p><a href="/feed">RSS Feed</a></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
And Iām pretty happy with this! I have no idea if Iām doing things in any kind of best-practice way but it makes sense to me and I can do a couple things with it and Iām pretty happy.
But the one thing Iām kind of not happy with is the problem of indendation. When Iām assembling the_html, itās all going into one String. Hereās a typical chunk of code:
if post_info[:tags_array].length > 0
the_html << "<p>Tags:</p>\n"
the_html << "<ul id=\"the-tags\">\n"
post_info[:tags_array].each do |tag|
the_html << " <li><a href=\"/tag/#{tag}\">#{tag}</a></li>\n"
end
the_html << "</ul>\n"
end
See how Iām manually inserting spaces and new lines (\n)? I feel like this is not how itās meant to be.
So the idea i had earlier today is to not bother with new lines or spaces at all, just throw it all into one flat string, and then pass it through a method at the end for, essentially, āprettifyingā it and indenting it properly, and then running erb on that. I donāt know if I want to bite off that problem to solve just yet but Iām starting to want to. But Iām sure thereās an easier way to be doing this.
I am flying to California with my sister and my dad and weāre going to look at some schools that she has applied to. Iām grateful I was invited on this trip. Iām not sure Iām strictly necessary.
I went to California as a kid as part of a āTeen Tourā summer camp. It was a bunch of kids (I was twelve, most of the rest were around fifteen, sixteen) crammed on a bus and shuttled down the coast. My memories of it are all, weirdly, from the hotels we stayed in and the bus itself. I donāt recall LA, for example. But Iām excited to see it in part because up until fairly recently my main goal in life was to write for the movies and / or television shows. Itās been fun and weird transitioning life goals. Thereās a sort of sadness to it? Not on my end, but a perceived one on theirs. I perceive that theyāre sad for me. Which is fine, and kind, but not necessary.
Gaby wants to study linguistics because she loves learning and learning about languages. I support that very much. Sheāll expand her brain like crazy studying this stuff.
I am a stalk of grass bending in the wind, growing toward the sun. I hope she will be too.
She just caught me writing this and laughed at me. Namaste.
I read somewhere that when you install a gem you shouldnāt use sudo which stresses me out because I canāt figure out how to do it without sudo so what does that make me? Some kind of rude-ass strongarm? I shudder at the thought.
Iām not Daring Fireball but I still like linking to stuff. This is something Iāve always struggled with. Many years ago my friends wrote a song about me and the lyrics mention all those links Iām copyinā and pastinā.
We used to do all that on AIM. Iād read something, share it, talk about it (if I was lucky). Now I post it to Pinboard, which is mirrored on my homepage. I donāt think a lot of people look at it but I still do it. It scratches a fun little itch.
All my favorite stuff has to go somewhere I wonāt lose track of it, and thatās Pinboard.
So Pinboard has a bookmarklet you can use to send pages to it and itās fine but I rarely use it. Itās a bit too manual donāt you think? Instead I use ifttt.com to automatically send anything I love to Pinboard as a private bookmark.
Then I use the linkroll widget to display this on my homepage.
Jason Kottke made a web app called Stellar for aggregating your favorites across various social media. It wasnāt until I used this that I started reflecting on the whole purpose of Like/Fav/Hearting across the web. Stellar is really great. I wish more people I knew were on it. The idea is that I can follow you, and instead of seeing what you post like on every other site, I see what you like on every other site. Itās a bizarre and appealing premise. Itās frustratingly limited to just a few social media networks (Twitter, Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr) and doesnāt seem like itās being actively developed, but itās great. Part of whatās great about it is that it works passively. Even though I havenāt checked Stellar in months, my page has been kept up-to-date due to my remaining active on those four networks.
Alas, no one I know uses Stellar (or Pinboard for that matter), which is why Iāve been copying the same kind of content elsewhere, where someone someday may see it. Or at least I will.
Because I find this stuff interesting, I was initially excited about the Mac app Favs. It lets you hook in to all the usual suspects of social networks and browse your favs. But it didnāt resonate as useful to me, because new items were marked as unread which I found curious, because of course Iāve already āreadā theseā¦ how else could I have already marked these as my favorites? That paradigm would only be useful if, Stellar-like, Favs allowed me to subscribe to othersā favorites, not my own. And it does, but only for some services, and it felt a little off and difficult to use for some reason. I appreciate how itās pitched:
Find Favorites
Instead of spreading your favorites across different networks, use Favs to sync them to your Mac. Donāt waste any more time on searching for your favorite content - Favs has a powerful search feature build right into the application that makes finding what you like a breeze.
Which is great but thatās what I use Pinboard for already and Iām very satisfied with that.
Follow Favorites
Many favorites are public, for example on Twitter. This allows you to follow the favorites of persons you like and just see their hand-picked articles. For those sources Favs marks new entries as āunreadā and you can use Favs as a sophisticated Reader app.
Which is closer to what I want: basically a Mac Stellar app. I may have to give this one another chance. My consumption of othersā favs is minimal to non-existent, so I should similarize my expectations for othersā interest in my favs.
A curious phenomenon: Iāll often fav a thing in the heat of the moment, and then later on when browsing my private Pinboard looking for things to make public and share, I decide itās either not worth sharing (itās depreciated in value somehow) or itās just too personal to me and my interests and no one else will care. Itās the difference between the stellar firehose (especially notoriously fav-happy people like Anil Dash) and a more curated linkblog. I probably fav 50 tweets for every one I retweet.
So why fav?
The way I see it, there are three reasons to fav something.
I donāt like a limp fav. I want something to happen. I want to send a positive blast of emotions to whoever made the thing. I want to spread the good word.
YouTubeās fav paradigm is kind of interesting. I can Like or Dislike a video (thumbs up or down), which I never do. I favorite videos. I favorite a lot of videos. Iām not sure the video creator even sees that (though it is listed publicly), but I prefer it because there are APIs for things like ifttt to turn that into a trigger that does something for me. Likes/Dislikes are an anonymous little tug of war. Thereās no pointā¦ except to win.
I also rarely Like posts on Facebook, because the usually-private nature of the posts means the hooks just arenāt there, and probably shouldnāt be. Thatās purely a kudos situation and maybe Iām just too selfish to give that.
I know a lot of people who never favorite anything on the internet. Iām sure to some people, favoriting means something entirely different (some of the most popular ifttt recipes are to take the links from favorited tweets, and send those to Instapaper. Thatās crazy to me. You should just get TweetBot which has native send-to-Instapaper functionality).
I like that all of these services have a button that amounts to I SPURT LOVE but for this probably-OCD bubbula, I need all of that to be in one place, whether anyone else is getting anything out of it or not.
Iāll give the final word to Rob Delaney:
People ask me why I fave or star so many tweets. IāM A PASSIONATE MAN & THIS PASSIONATE MAN NEEDNāT EXPLAIN HIMSELF TO YOU LOT.
ā rob delaney (@robdelaney) August 22, 2012
What have I learned lately?
Iāve watched my friend make a web app from scratch and it made me dizzy. I helped develop the idea and given some direction for the project.
Iāve learned how to use GitHub to collaborate on that project. I have one public repo there today and itās mainly just there for me to learn to use git with.
And also to practice web design. Things like sass and CSS. And Pixelmator.
I put all I learned from that into re-designing my homepage maxjacobson.net, which remains a pretty version of my public Pinboard page. I removed the half-assed Pelican blog in favor of this Wordpress install, which I casually mention at the bottom of the homepage.
To set up this Wordpress blog I had to follow some tricky instructions, including setting up a MySQL process and database. Still donāt really know how that stuff works, but itās working.
The blog doesnāt look anything like the homepage, but Wordpress themes are pretty tricky. Theyāre all built with PHP which I donāt know how to use. Iāll probably not go down that rabbit hole.
There are a lot of broken links, which I find beautiful.
Google owns,
Nerds use the first one and regular people use the second one. Maybe they can like ā¦ merge them?
Today I read DC Piersonās recent essay Writing About 2Pac In Los Angeles, A Place It Turns Out He Isnāt From and even though I liked reading it a lot, the main thing Iāve been thinking about since has nothing to do with hip-hop or Los Angeles or writing. Itās this: why did he indent his paragraphs?
If this essay were printed in a book, I wouldnāt have blinked. Thatās normal. But indented paragraphs online are somewhat unusual. Maybe the key to it is this line from the essay:
I wonder if Hampton will read what I end up writing and make fun of me, the way I imagine most comics will when they discover that I write earnest-ish prose stuff, in particular, douchey prose stuff about writing about music.
My feeling is this: prose needs not be indented, but earnest-ish prose stuff does. Or thatās how it feels anyway. In the past Iāve written short stories, put them on a blog, and felt like they looked wrong. Thatās not a blog! Iād think. Itās a heart-breaking story, it should be indented!
And, maybe. More on that later.
First, letās delve into the nitty gritty of formatting for the web. Letās look at the beginning of one of Piersonās paragraphs, in HTML, to see how he accomplished indentation:
<p class="body1"><span> </span>Then I moved[...]</p>
Basically, he inserted a bunch of spaces at the beginning of each paragraph. I think a lot of people do it this way. I donāt know if this is āwrongā so much asā¦ I think thereās a better way. Iām no expert but hereās my take on the best way to format indented paragraphs online.
Basically, just add this code anywhere in your post:
<style>p+p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: -1em; }</style>
The text-indent: 2em part will indent the first line of each non-first paragraph by two ems. An em is basically whatever size the text is. 2em seemed right to me. Popcorn Fiction uses 3em. You can adjust that figure or replace it with 25px or whatever you want.
I just learned that p+p trick today. In the past Iāve just used p for paragraph, but this way the style will only apply to paragraphs that directly follow another paragraph. Thatās good because indentations are usually omitted in the first paragraph. If youād like the style to apply to every paragraph, replace p+p with just p.
The margin-top: -1em part will decrease the spacing between paragraphs a little. Now that paragraphs are being indented, we donāt need spacing to identify a new paragraph as much.
This will affect the whole page, not just your post, so be careful. If you put this in a Tumblr post, for example, youāll find that every post on your homepage is now affected. To avoid this, put the code āafter the jumpā with the Read More button code, <!-- more -->.
The advantage is that you donāt need to worry about HTML or anything. Just write your thing then put the one line of CSS in there, and itāll look good.
(If youād like to see what this looks like, check out this old short story of mine. This had no indentation yesterday but I just added it all with one line of code.)
If youāre not comfortable with HTML, Iād recommend writing in Markdown using something like Mou (Mac), Dillinger (web), or MarkdownPad (Windows) to preview or generate clean HTML for you. For this blog I write everything in Markdown and almost never see the HTML.
Both Tumblr and Calepin allow you to write in Markdown without ever seeing HTML. Check the Tumblr Preferences to flip that switch. Highly recommended.
So itās possible to do it and pretty painless to implement. But Iāll ask this question next: why bother? Donāt indented paragraphs look a little weird on the web? A little out of place? I think so. The web has so trained my perception of this that I sort of wonder why books have indented paragraphs now. Hmm. If paragraphs were spaced out, books would be longer. I wonder by how much.
Hereās some quick math:
So thatās a significant amount of paper. Foregoing indentations would save some pages but I donāt think it would nearly balance out. Indentations are much more compact than spacing.
Okay, so indentations are greener, but thatās not something we really have to worry about on the web. Maybe it looks better or is easier to read. I donāt know. I only like it when writers take the care to format their work in the way that best expresses themselves. So go for it if you want.
On June 4th, 2011, someone named TigerCrane asked the internet āWhen and why did we stop indenting paragraphs?ā
I particularly like this response by Sys Rq:
I havenāt seen a not-indented paragraph in a while, outside of situations like this online one where itās basically impossible.
Where are you seeing them?
There are some other great theories there as well.
Letās take a look at some publications.
| Publication | Indents on screens | Indents in print |
|---|---|---|
| Most blogs | No | N/A |
| Most magazines | I donāt know | Yes |
| The New York Times | No | Yes |
| The New Yorker | No | Yes |
| Popcorn Fiction | Yes | N/A |
| Kindle eBooks | Yes (by default) | N/A |
| Apple iBooks | Yes (by default) | N/A |
| Instapaper | No | N/A |
I find it very curious that the eBooks are styled like print books when they donāt need to be. I suspect itās a matter of familiarity and comfort.
Thereās one, possibly dire consequence of replacing indentations with spacing in long form writing. These pieces are broken up into units of discourse. The novel is made up of two parts, maybe, and those parts are made up of chapters, and those chapters are made up of sections, which are made up of paragraphs, which are made up of sentences, which are made up of words.
If a writer chooses to use spacing to separate paragraphs, how does she separate sections? Iām talking about those parts where the action stops, thereās a rare space between paragraphs, and then action resumes. Maybe itās a good moment to walk the dog. If all paragraphs are spaced out, that break wonāt stand out.
I solve that problem with horizontal rules now. I think it works okay. It looks a little something like this in Markdown:
# The Book
## Chapter one
Some stuff.
* * *
Some more stuff.
## Chapter two
The thrilling conclusion. What a short book.
And you can style the <hr /> (horizontal rule) to look however you want, including being invisible. Hereās what mine looks like on this site:
So anyway I generally avoid indenting text online. I think the urge is mostly to do with wanting to put on book airs. But Iām not writing a book, even if Iām writing a novel. Iām writing a web page.
I never really understood how to use the command line. I kind of got it in principle but not in practice.
So I taught myself the basics by reading this mini- book on Learn Code The Hard Way. Itās awesome. The book is an alpha release and may have some errors but I didnāt spot any. Would I, though?
Here are my thoughts and notes I jotted down while learning this. Itās fairly stream of conscious and certainly less accurate or helpful than the aforelinked mini-book. If youād like to learn it along with me, maybe this could possibly be useful to you. Itās a little different on a Windows computer, but if youāre on a Mac or Linux computer, this should all work for you too.
I wonder how much stuff Iām gonna have to memorize.
Iām in the terminal! Iām in Terminal!
Iām learning bash. Apparently my nerd friends will tell me to learn zsh instead. I wonder if my actual nerd friends would.
Ok I think I get the whole cd and .. thing. If youāre in a directory you can cd into any subdirectory or cd .. to go back one. From the downloads directory I can cd ../documents to get to the documents folder. That goes up one and then back down into another.
I wonder if up and down are the right words to use there. In the Finder I think of it more as left and right, in the column view.
So far basically all Iām doing is making folders and moving through them. Loving it.
Whoa, I just deleted john! john was a directory I made. rmdir john is deadly.
At this point, the guide is saying if I want to I can take a break and come back tomorrow. It thinks Iām weak. I can do this.
I like that I can do mkdir -p i/like/icecream and itāll make all three of those folders from scratch.
I wonder if I rmdir i, if itāll remove all the subfolders too. Ohh cool, it wonāt let me. Thatās nice.
Itās kind of weird that when I rmdir something, it doesnāt go to the trash, itās just gone.
pushd and popd are kind of baking my noodle (as Corey likes to say (note: this used to link to a podcast, but that podcast is gone). Is this like the popping and locking of the programming world? Maybe I should take a break.
OK so youāre in a directory. You pushd to/a/folder and now youāre there, but you sort of bookmarked where you were. If you want to go back there you popd. If you push somewhere, then push somewhere else, then pushd over and over you can cycle back and forth between them. If you popd over and over you can go back through the stack (from most recent to least recent I think?) of your pushds.
I love putting things in code brackets itās really easy in Markdown/Calepin. I might be misusing it.
Ahh and the stack isnāt hidden! Thatās whatās printed/returned when you pushd. I think Iām wrapping my head around this. Not sure if Iāve explained it well or anything, though.
Iām up to chapter nine. I just made an empty text file by writing touch iamcool.txt. Hey, your words.
I just wrote touch butts.mp3 and it made a song called Butts that Iām gonna be sending out to radio stations first thing tomorrow.
Ok so if I want to make a copy of iamcool.txt called awesome.txt itās as easy as writing cp iamcool.txt awesome.txt! Okay! (In fact I am getting tired).
Iām slowly piecing together that -r doesā¦ well, something. I donāt know. If I mkdir afolder, I can then cp -r afolder ~/Desktop to make a copy of that folder on my desktop. But to copy awesome.txt to my desktop I just write cp awesome.txt ~/Desktop. So that -r I guess makes it work for a directory.
Hmm so now Iām moving files. But it sounds like renaming to me. mv awesome.txt lame.txt will basically rename it from awesome to lame. I suppose itās moving the data from one file to a new one? Like, when you die your soul leaves your body and enters a baby just as itās being born? If you believe in a very literal, specific form of reincarnation?
I know how to open a file in vim, and I even know how to do some basic vim commands, but I have no idea how to save a file and exit vim.
Ok I took a break. Itās two days later from when I started this. Iām happy that I still remember the commands Iāve learned this far.
I donāt know how to delete files but I can sort of do it by renaming one file into something else that exists, and it basically disappears I think.
I can also move a file from one folder into another folder with this. mv hello.txt afolder/hello.txt moves that file into the folder (though it doesnāt create the folder). So itās moving and renaming.
Hmm.
Okay so now Iām using the less command to view the contents of text files. it seems to work just fine. I press q to exit. If itās a long document I can page through it with w (up) or space (down), one page-worth at a time. Got it.
I can read markdown files in the terminal pretty nicely. Iām gonna navigated to my Calepin folder and open up this draft file. cd ../Dropbox/Apps/Calepin, ls, less cli.md wow there it is! Ha! This is fun.
I just whipped up a background image for my terminal. I wish it could tile and not just stretch. Looks good as long as I donāt resize the window.
Now Iām catting things. That just sort of displays the contents of the text file in a slightly different way than less. So exciting.
Oh thank goodness rm exists. I didnāt like that other way of deleting files.
OK so I can rm hello.txt to delete it but I canāt use rm to delete a folder (thatās what rmdir is for). Oh wait, I can, I just have to do some weird business. rm -rf folder works. Yoosh how do I remember that? Wait a moment. rm -rf can delete folder even if they have stuff in them. That one ups rmdir. This is ārecursive deletingā.
I like this possibly self-delusional quote from the mini-book:
Now we get to the cool part of the command line: redirection.
I kinda knew about the | but not the < or >.
Oh! This is fun.
I just had a breakthrough wherein I learned how to save and close from vim, so Iāve just been playing in that for a little while. Itās :wq! So simple!
Ok, wildcard matchingā¦ ya yah.
Ex, ls *.txt will list only the text files. thatās handy. This command surprised me: cat *.txt > bigfile.txt took all of the txt files and combined them into one new one, which it also created. Then rm *.txt removed all of the txt files. Thatās vicious.
Ok so this is a fun thing. I just realized I can open tabs in the Terminal! So Iām gonna write this post in one tab and learn things in another. Whoa. Although the switch-tab shortcut is kind of unwieldy (command-shift-] or [). I can learn it.
So I can run a command like grep hello *.txt and itāll find the string āhelloā in all the txt files and then return a list of all of the lines from all of the txt files that have that string in them. Useful. And if I want, I can pipe that to less and itāll be the same thing, but easier to flip through (with space and w).
I thought I was done when I reached the section on man, which looks up the manual for any given command, but thereās a whole nother section. Great. I can handle some more knowledge.
Iām up to chapter 21. Weeks have elapsed. Iām not sure exactly what I just did and I can only hope it wasnāt bad. one of the thrills of using the command line is that I can completely destroy my whole computer at any point by writing the wrong thing.
In this chapter I ālooked at my environmentā and then set a variable and then printed out the variable. But where is this variable? In my environment? I feel like I donāt want it to be there anymore but donāt know how to get it out. Environmentalism! (I actually echoād it, not print. For what itās worth.)
Now it wants me to research online āhow you change your PATH for your computerā and do it all in the terminal. I think Iām just gonna skip this one.
Ah! Chapter 22 to the rescue. unset will flush that variable. Cool. Iām so relieved. I wonder if I can unset something important. That would be very unpsetting.
āYou have completed the crash course. At this point you should be a barely capable shell user.ā ā Nice. I feel that way. It feels pretty great.
The conclusion links to this official bash reference. Also this cheat sheet. Maybe Iāll tackle those next.
āI think itās something thatās hard to recognize if you donāt experience it yourselfā
Mariel Loveland:
I stood on the outskirts of the crowd for the entire show knowing I wanted absolutely nothing to do [with] the mass of 15 to 20-year-old boys pushing each other around, but the minute the closing band struck its first chord, I was shoved right into the middle. I immediately tried to look for a way out but was completely surrounded, and no matter how much I pushed, I couldnāt move. I was getting punched, kicked, and pummeled until I eventually fell down, and all I could see was a wave of dust and sneakers kicking and stepping on me. I couldnāt get up, and I couldnāt breathe. I choked on dirt and started sobbing until one man, probably someoneās dad, heard me screaming for help. He reached underneath the crowd and threw me over his shoulder. As he was pulling me away, I heard one voice cut through the music: āThatās why you donāt bring your little girl to shows.ā I was 15.
I liked this little essay about being a girl at punk shows. It got me thinking back on my first time in a mosh pit (of not too many). It was at my Temple, at the annual Gefiltefest. Some local punk band was playing and kids got rambunctious. I was just enjoying the music but I got shoved into the vortex. I was around fifteen too. It was kind of fun at first but then I fell down and my glasses fell off. One of those naĆÆve āis this the end?ā moments. Almost immediately someone pulled me up, shoved my glasses into my hands, and pushed me out of the circle. There definitely werenāt any girls in there.
Another time, in college, I went to Montreal with some friends to see the band Thrice. This was during their Alchemy Index tour, which is when I first started listening to them. My friend Sung loved them, I think because he was an asian guitarist and Thriceās lead guitarist is asian, and heās pretty great. Sung had a friend in college in Montreal whose place we could stay at, and so we left our bags there, went and bought some of those extra-large bottles of canadian beer, wandered around a little, and went to the show. Say Anything was opening for Thrice, and were playing when we got there. The venue was way bigger than Iād anticipated. Less the grubby little rooms I was used to, more of a huge, multi-layered club. You could work your way up close to the stage if you want, and mosh around, or get a drink and watch from the mezzanine. We went right to the floor and got separated right away.
Say Anything didnāt sound so great so I went for a walk, to the bathroom, then the bar. There were a lot of French seeming girls there, not so many up front on the floor. Maybe they didnāt feel safe there. I donāt know. I didnāt, really, but that was kind of the fun of it.
By the time Thrice came on, things were getting to be kind of a blur. I didnāt know where my friends were. The plan was to find them later. I was never a massive Thrice fan, but one thing I really like is how theyāve progressed from a hardcore band in their early outings to a slightly more experimental rock and roll group. So I was a little surprised by how heavy the show was once it started, and how immediately the mosh pit congealed and dwarfed Say Anythingās. I was drawn in, willingly. The energy is hard to resist. I didnāt brave the thrashy center but I got shoved around a little, and shoved people around a little. And then my shoe fell off and disappeared into the crashing waves of converse all stars.
So now Iām kind of drunk and in a faraway land, and Iām hopping on one foot and everyone is shoving everyone and really loud music is playing and Iām not sure where my friends are. The adrenaline Iād been looking for? Found it.
Suddenly I see my shoe. Someoneās holding it above their head like a trophy, less than ten feet away, but a shifting mass of dozens of sweaty canadians between us. I start forcing my way through, on one foot, and reaching out, but the guy tosses it across the floor, like one might with a beach ball at a concert your parents would take you to. The crowd tossed it a couple more times before I managed to intercept it and pull it back on, at which point I receded to the edges where all youāre doing is helping people not fall down and being the one who picks up other peopleās glasses and enjoying the music and catching your breath.
While writing this I listened to Ms. Lovelandās band Candy Heartsā album Ripped Up Jeans and Silly Dreams which you can download for free there. Itās kind of nice. Hits that sweet spot between plaintive got-no-friends-but-my-guitar and us-against-the-world propulsion when the drums kick in. Not sure if that means much of anything, but Iām no music critic.
