(I used to have a dedicated page with all of the following posts, thanks to the Blog*Spot Plus option. Unfortunately, Blogger's FTP access is currently borked, so I've deleted that page and moved all of the "about me" stuff to the November 2002 archives.)

one hundred things

1. I am embracing the 100 things meme.
2. I dislike it when people use the word "meme" in conversation.
3. Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
4. I was born on the same day as the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision (also the same day Lyndon B. Johnson died) in Chula Vista, CA.
5. I lived in California for most of my formative years, with the exception of a few years spent in rural Oregon.
6. Some of my time in Oregon was spent on a dairy farm. Moo.
7. I currently live in Fort Lauderdale, FL Hollywood, CA.
8. There's a decent chance I'll be moving this summer; I'm applying to graduate schools. I lied; I'll be here for the indefinite future I've now moved, but grad school is being put off. Again.
9. My favorite smells: newly cut grass and the smell of concrete after it rains.
10. I went to college at the University of Miami's School of Music, where I studied music education.
11. Despite my matriculation at UM, I have never been to a Hurricanes football game.
12. I'm a choral director, music educator, tenor, and (unpublished) composer.
13. I taught high school choral music for several years (in CA and FL), and now teach subsequently taught elementary general music in two Miami-Dade County public schools. I am was also an adjunct voice instructor at Miami-Dade College, North Campus.
14. I currently teach music at a school in Beverly Hills.
15. For 5 years I served as the music director for a gay men's chorus.
16. I'm straight, by the way. I'm probably one of the few (if not the only!) straight directors of a gay chorus in the country.
17. In the summer of 2003, I was interviewed for a book on "straight men and gay culture" by a journalist from New York. I'll no doubt blog about this again when the author gets it published (he's shopping it around right now).
18. I'm going back to my rock roots and playing in an indie band (timewellspent). I'm obviously no longer doing this, as timewellspent is based on the other side of the country. I loved this experience though, and would fly back to record with them in a heartbeat. I also played piano on one of the band member's other projects.
19. My divorce was finalized on November 1st, 2005. I was married for over 9 years.
20. I have been using the word "rad" continuously since youth. For years, I was the only person I knew with that word as part of their daily vocabulary. I have a positive feeling about its recent resurgence.
21. Politically, I jokingly refer to myself as being "somewhere to the left of Che Guevara."
22. My score on the Political Compass is: Economic Left/Right: -6.00; Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: - 4.56. It's roughly the same score as Gandhi's.
23. One time, I scored -7.12/-5.95 on the political compass. I must have put down a lot more "strongly agree/strongly disagree" answers.
24. I am a crappy but enthusiastic photographer.
25. I am currently obsessed with the "color cutout" and "fresco" filters in Photoshop.
26. I am a crappy but enthusiastic pianist.
27. I can play a whole slew of songs by They Might Be Giants on the piano.
28. I read, on average, 30 or so books a year.
29. The fact that I can speed-read helps boost that total.
30. I don't think the second law of thermodynamics is necessarily a bad thing.
31. My favorite ice cream flavor is "spumoni."
32. I make fantastic lemon chiffon pie, from a family recipe.
33. I should cook at home more often.
34. Although I have a pretty active spiritual life, I have no idea how to describe it in brief. I'm most influenced by the practices of the Quakers, the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy's book The Kingdom of God is Within You, the lives and teachings of Gandhi and MLK, writings by John Spong and Matthew Fox, research on the "historical Jesus," and religious texts from other traditions such as the Tao Te Ching, the I Ching, the poetry of Rumi, and the Bhagavad Gita.
35. I refer to myself as a Christian, but am kind of uncomfortable with that label since my beliefs in many ways differ radically from what mainstream culture sees as Christianity.
36. I have spent significant time attending churches of the following denominations (often because I was employed as a musician): the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, the Disciples of Christ, the United Church of Christ, the Quakers. Of all of them, I currently feel the Quakers come closest to my point of view.
37. I'm a pacifist (partly for spiritual reasons, partly because I see war and violence as being completely pointless compared to the value of human life). I realized I was a pacifist while still in high school.
38. I do more harm with my words than I would like, though, and I'm working on that.
39. I began reading at age 3.
40. If I don't read every day, I feel incomplete. Overly dramatic, but true.
41. When I was in junior high, I read comic books voraciously, particularly the X-Men titles. I was profoundly disappointed when my mutant powers failed to manifest at puberty.
42. I only watch television during emergencies. Like hurricanes, or national elections.
43. I take an unreasonable amount of pride in the fact that I have never, ever seen an episode of Friends.
43. I saw Will and Grace once. Hated it. Sorry.
44. However, the new Battlestar Galactica (which I've only seen on DVD so far) almost makes me want to start following a TV show regularly again.
46. I hate shaving.
47. My Jung/Myers-Briggs personality type is ENFP. I have tested as an INFP and (a little more often, but not as often as ENFP) as an ENTP before, and even when I test as an ENFP my borderline "thinking/feeling" scores almost nudge me into ENTP territory.
48. I am an active participant on Monkeyfilter and Metafilter (as the_bone on both sites).
49. I have a Friendster account, but I almost never log into it.
50. I'm still on dial-up.
51. My mom died in 2000. I still haven't recovered. This is getting better.
52. I have participated in four out of the Ten Geekiest Hobbies.
53. I would love to play roleplaying games again, but don't have the time.
54. I once intentionally dropped a cat from a balcony onto a staircase. I was four, had just read that "cats always landed on their feet," and wanted to test the hypothesis.
55. The cat was OK. I received the spanking of my life, though.
56. The first film I remember seeing in a movie theater was Star Wars.
57. Although I found it inferior to the original trilogy, I didn't hate the new Star Wars trilogy as vehemently as some other people did.
58. I do think that the Lord of the Rings trilogy blew the new Star Wars movies away, though.
59. LotR made me want to run out and play Dungeons and Dragons again.
60. I was addicted to "The Sims" for about a year, until my computer crashed and I lost the game I had saved as well as all of the custom skins/objects that I had downloaded.
61. I get most of my news from the Internet and NPR.
62. Every time I get ready to give money to NPR, one of their journalists says something stupid and I change my mind.
63. I think I'm much better informed vis a vis current events then most people.
64. I am less impressed with Kevin Smith's movies now then when I was 25 or so.
65. I am really bad at math.
66. I failed Algebra I three times in high school. I even failed it once in summer school.
67. I did better in geometry, though. I got a C in that class.
68. My math SAT score was not wonderful. Low average.
69. My verbal SAT score was incredibly high.
70. I went to a performing arts magnet high school.
71. I have better taste in music than almost anyone I know.
72. Therefore, my continuing fascination with shitty '80s "glam metal" is inexplicable.
73. My first concert: Def Leppard (with Tesla opening for them), around 1988.
74. My favorite live shows: seeing They Might Be Giants in 2001 and 2002.
75. I have seen so many incredible classical performances that it's hard to pick a favorite... but if I had to, I'd have to say seeing Chanticleer and the King's Singers (not at the same time) while in college were probably up there at/near the top.
76. I also got to see Pavarotti in college... from the stage. The University Chorale was the choral ensemble backing him up in his 1995 performance on South Beach. It was also my 22nd birthday. Being on stage for that gig kind of felt like a birthday present from God.
77. My long list of favorite teachers: Mrs. Ochs (second grade); Mrs. Deddah, Mr. Card (junior high); Mr. Neil, Mr. Doyle, Mr. Travino, Mrs. Hunt, Mrs. Terry, Mrs. McIntyre, Mr. Luzak (high school); Dr. Russell (community college); Dr. Buffington, Dr. Oglesby, Dr. Scheibe, Dr. Gower (UM).
78. Best teachers ever: life, books, experience.
79. Least favorite teacher: Mrs. Renniger, who was my first grade teacher while living in Oregon (we moved back to California that year). My attention often wandered in class, and I had really poor printing, so she repeatedly made me sit in the "naughty-snotty chair."
80. Despite being subjected to the indignity of the "naughty-snotty chair," my handwriting hasn't appreciably improved.
81. I became really depressed when I turned thirty.
82. I look really good in a tuxedo or a suit.
83. I usually do the shirt-and-tie thing on days when I work.
84. When not working, I embrace one of two styles: the "blue-jeans/t-shirt with an obscure rock band's name" look or the "quirky, thrift-store-ish" look.
85. Since I direct a gay chorus, I am perpetually being offered fashion advice. My life feels like an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (another TV show I've never seen).
86. Until a couple of years ago, I would just shave my head military-style and not stress over keeping it cut neatly. I now see a hairstylist.
87. I feel that my most attractive physical features are my eyes and my legs.
88. When I was younger, my dream jobs would have been: writer of roleplaying games, musical theater actor, book critic.
89. Now, I feel like I have my dream job. I make music with kids all day, and work on challenging music with adults at night.
90. Least favorite word, based solely on its sound and how it feels to enunciate it: "moist." Other hated words include "yogurt" and "panties."
91. Favorite words: "pioneer," "mellifluous," "brisk," "schadenfreude," and many others (I'll add on later).
92. I'm going to take some German classes when I go to grad school (if that ever happens), with the goal of becoming fluent in that language.
93. My father was born in Switzerland.
94. I wish I could be a vegetarian, but meat tastes so damn good. It's unfortunate that cows represent the perfect combination of slowness, docility, and deliciousness.
95. Like most non-vegetarian American men, I believe that I am a genius with a barbeque grill.
96. When asked to describe myself, I switch back and forth between the phrases "cranky autodidact" and "hyper-literate pottymouth."
97. I crave some solitude in each day, and am a fairly private person.
98. Then again, I've just posted a list of "100 things about me" on the Internet, which includes such minutiae as my favorite smells.
99. I am large, I contain multitudes. Ogres are like onions; they have layers.
100. There are many books with final passages that just slay me (A Prayer for Owen Meany, Johnny Got His Gun, and You Shall Know Our Velocity spring to mind), but my all time favorite novel ending is the final soliloquy in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning-

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

about this blog

I began blogging on July 21, 2002.

The HTML template for this site was a stock Blogger template called "Currency," and was coded by Mena Trott of Movable Type (before MT really took off, no doubt). I really like the aesthetics of MT sites, but don't have the technical know-how to set up and maintain MT, plus I don't want to pay for server space. The template for this site is a great compromise... it has a Movable Type "look" but with Blogger's free-ness and non-techie-friendly interface. Lots of folks seem to look down their nose at .blogspot hosted sites (which I think is kind of a bullshit knee-jerk reaction), but I've found BlogSpot to be a completely viable alternative to maintaining my own site.

I have the Blog*Spot Plus option, which enables me to upload images and host additional pages (such as this one) underneath my main URL. Blogger has discontinued upgrades to Blog*Spot Plus for the time being, so in order to have some of these additional features one would currently have to go though something like typepad (paid MT hosting). I can't recommend Blogger enough though, and hopefully they'll make the upgrade options available again soon.

I created many of the the buttons in the sidebar (the green and gray "t_b" buttons and the "monkeyfilter" link button). They're based on this fellow's designs and buttons available for download at this site, and I blogged about that process in this post.

My photoblog can be found at buzznet.com (another highly recommended service).

Some of the previous texts in the [blog description] field at the top of the page:

["You know, Chris, you're a pretty unique individual. You're very highly principled... and you have a job. Those two things don't always go together." - Author David Leddick, over lunch at Balans.]

[A weapon of class instruction]

[Weapons of class instruction-related program activities]

["You can call it a journal, if it makes you feel better about yourself... but it's really a diary." -My brother John, when I told him I was keeping a blog.]

["I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread." (Don DeLillo, White Noise)]

friendster testimonials

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from tone:

I met Chris in an opium den several years ago, and the less said about that the better. His knowledge of music, literature, religion, politics and deviant sexual behavior belie his years. I suspect that he received most of his knowledge via Dreamtime LSD connection with William S Burroughs. Chris will also proof read anything, anytime. He should have fun with this, since I'm typing with my eyes closed.

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from theron:

boisterous, insists on being your friend, cannot drive for shit, which is endearing actually, only stops talking to sing, takes pleasure in gay men having sex while dressed as "furry things," continually says humorous and/or interesting things. manages to somehow make one feel, whilst within his presence, that one is being immersed in some fantastic and revitalising current of concentrated chris matter, which might be unnerving if not for the fact that he balances this with a reassuring distractibility, thus ensuring that, eventually, the current will pitch and turn, on to new and other things. loves it up the butt.

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from ben:

Chris is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and I consider him part of my family. He's definitely one of the most intelligent and humorous people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. He is rumored to have an extremely large member, but that has yet to be confirmed.

Chris is a google search

yay googlism!

chris is
chris is hiding
chris is 30
chris is hott
chris is fat
chris is lacking in attention
chris is southern california
chris is gay
chris is a jerk
chris is god
chris is married
chris is social giant
chris is the cutest guy in the world
chris is available for adoption
chris is retarded
chris is a geek
chris is psyched
chris is left behind
chris is a slack bunny feedback
chris is a real chick magnet
chris is home
chris is stressed
chris is a bit too excited about being on daytona beach
chris is returned to an upright position
chris is a typical left wing
chris is coming
chris is my best ever partner
chris is wonderful
chris is amazing
chris is a very spontaneous person and looks for honesty and loyalty in potential girlfriends
chris is always entertaining
chris is a vicar
chris is seventy he'll be so hot you'll barely be able to stand it
chris is a pretty boy @#%$ even if he would be gay
chris is another story altogether
chris is a fucked up fuck
chris is so sexy & talented name
chris is a good family man with integrity and fairness beyond reproach and a dedicated republican who has respect from all parties
chris is run on microsoft's most powerful database
chris is always there to help with advice
chris is the all mighty god of the gods
chris is the coolest vocalist
chris is tired of the whole "boyband" thing and is leaving *nsync to start a rock band
chris is cuter than jord and todd
chris is available for adoption
chris is a rock star
chris is traveling extensively
chris is returned to an upright position
chris is gonna die
chris is a spider
chris is available to do clinics of all kinds
chris is right
chris is so scattered in his thoughts that he needs someone to coach him through school
chris is occasionally joined in performance by "the red cities orchestra"
chris is acoustic
chris is meat free in 2003
chris is soooooo right
chris is doing well as goalie
chris is the best
chris is no old crock
chris is tan
chris is our man for brazil
chris is a bastard
chris is eating a sandwich behind the bar
chris is a reader

Christopher is a google search

originally posted here

christopher is
christopher is 6 weeks old already
christopher is right
christopher is the place to get it
christopher is a great dancer
christopher is the original bigfoot
christopher is one of the many children in africa orphaned by aids
christopher is the prototype for the modern racer- equally comfortable at the racetrack or in a corporate setting
christopher is a leader among moderates in the republican party
christopher is a beautiful two year old boy who has an illness which no doctor in this area can diagnose
christopher is chubby and energetic
christopher is destined to follow in his footsteps
christopher is left there gasping for breath every ten to twelve seconds
christopher is still a saint
christopher is well
christopher is an enthusiastic individual
christopher is also a very curious little frog
christopher is not one to shy away from controversy
christopher is a nationally renowned consultant in the field of learning disabilities
christopher is the current united states secretary of state
christopher is not safe to become a recipient
christopher is in kindergarten this year and is doing really well
christopher is active and loves to play
christopher is our first child so we have no previous experience to go on
christopher is made of sterling and has a 24" stainless
christopher is an artist that defies categorization
christopher is presented below
christopher is from mississippi
christopher is no longer nursing
christopher is one of the most popular saints in the east and in the west
christopher is currently in the 5th grade
christopher is the romantic
christopher is greatly concerned about leaving the reservation to go to school
christopher is booked for weddings throughout the united states
christopher is my hero
christopher is not a normal kid
christopher is a "harmless" vampire
christopher is critically ill now and needs everyone's prayers
christopher is credited with discovering the new world
christopher is the best gift we have ever received
christopher is impulsive
christopher is paralyzed from the waist down

Bone is a Google search

originally posted here

bone is connected to the
bone is a big hit at daytona bike week 2002
bone is the toe bone
bone is flow
bone is 9
bone is located on 114th and dodge
bone is always in danger
bone is back from nyc
bone is bringing out the
bone is in the video
bone is only half funny
bone is da bomb
bone is living
bone is 9 inches long and is a hand puppet
bone is a game in which you try to help rover find his missing buried bones in his back yard
bone is a type of connective tissue that consists of cells in a fibrous organic matrix of collagen
bone is active
bone is bringing out the worst in him mandy says
bone is under the rock
bone is breaking down
bone is a chronic disorder that affects the structure of skeletal bone
bone is made mostly of collagen and calcium phosphate
bone is formed only in childhood and adolescence
bone is broken
bone is made from 925 sterling sliver
bone is 12"
bone is irregularly quadrilateral in form
bone is the latest movie to offer a sampling of fraser's largely unsung versatility
bone is film noir
bone is like hair
bone is the oldest table of prime numbers
bone is a good first novel that could've been even better if it were told chronologically
bone is always being removed
bone is not easily obtained; therefore a bone substitute is the next best option
bone is more like fanciful local mythology with a logic and history of its own
bone is individually handcrafted using high quality cotton velvet for the exteriors
bone is stuck in your throat
bone is connected to the foot bone