~ Wednesday, April 06, 2005 ~

Milk!

The true sign that it's finally Spring is not that I can bike to school in the morning without gloves, nor that I can bike home at 4:30 without squinting into the sun, nor even that I have to start putting on sunscreen again. No, the true sign of spring is that I can bike to the drug store wearing only my thinnest t-shirt and light cotton trousers, at 9:30 pm, and not freeze. Yay for not freezing!! After this long awful disgusting winter, it is a fantastic feeling to realize that even though it's already completely dark, it's still 69 degrees F. Wow, what a beautiful day.

I just bought the audio version of A Short History of Nearly Everything, on The Wizard's strong recommendation, and he was absolutely right. Bill Bryson totally deadpans some of the funniest lines, which, I think, is part of why I like it so much. The Wizard had mentioned to me that the description of the universe's size is particularly funny, but even with that warning, it snuck up on me and caught me offguard, and I still laughed. It's curious adjusting to reading with my ears. I have to focus more than I usually do when I read with my eyes, because the words come at me linearly, and it takes a little more effort to reread a missed word.

The reason I was going out to the drug store at 9:30 pm is that I am burning a copy of it for the King of Prussia, who often drives me home from swing dances, and who likes listening to audio books, and who just had a birthday a few days ago. For some reason I couldn't convince iTunes to burn an mp3 cd, which was kinda surprising (Are my settings wrong? Is it an embedded anti-copyright-violation precaution? I am mystified) so instead, I had to burn 5 audio cds, which are much more cumbersome to handle when you're trying to drive and dj at the same time, but I don't know how else to do it. Anyway, I ran out of blank cds partway through and had to buy more.

So, I bike to the Walgreens in downtown Germantown, and I lock my bike up to a bus stop sign growing slanted out of the sidewalk (heliotropic?) and this portly middle-aged guy dressed in a 70s paisley polyester button-down shirt and some heavy gold jewelry (tacky, but not threatening) who seems to be trying to hawk something whose name I can't quite distinguish (Acky?), glances over at my bike and offers to put it in his van and drive me somewhere. Nice of him to offer, but I tell him I'm just going in for a few minutes and then I'm biking home. So I go in and get my CDRs and come back out. He's still there, seated in his metal folding chair just outside the automatic doors, and when I reemerge, he looks up and asks if I'm ready to put my bike in his van yet.

Me: No thanks, I'm just biking home.
Him: Where do you live?
Me (intentionally ambiguous): Just about a mile away. Near the train station. [There are lots of train stations around here.]
Him: A *mile*!
Me: It's not that far.
Him: Well, you should come talk to me sometime.
Me: ...what was it you were selling earlier?
Him: Selling? Oh, I'm a taxi driver. [Me, to myself: Taxi!! Not Acky!] That's my taxicab 'round the corner. I'm selling rides, is what I'm selling.
Me: Oh.
Him: You should come talk to me sometime, baby! We could go have a couple drinks or something.
Me (grinning): Thanks. I don't drink.
Him (not missing a beat): Milk!

It's amazing how uncreepy someone becomes, just by being witty. I did not go have a couple of milks with him, but I did have something to laugh about while I rode home wearing a t-shirt at 9:35 pm.

Aha, and one more unrelated thing: Nesheekah just called, and I am going to see They Might Be Giants with her and her sweetie at the Stone Pony on May 13th. Yay!

Current Music: Tommy the Canexican, Eddie From Ohio

~ prattled by Miriam at 11:25 p.m. [+]

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Comments:

iTunes will not burn an mp3 CD using its own encrypted files. This is why I prefer to convert my iTunes-purchased music to mp3s periodically, by burning them to an audio CD (or, as my friend pointed out, burning them to the image of an audio CD on your hard drive) and then ripping them back as mp3s.

# posted by  Natalie : 4:23 p.m.  

Actually, the way it seems to me is that when your iTunes settings say to burn an "MP3 CD" it really means literally mp3's only. Things like AAC's or m4a's or whatever, which are conceptually mp3's, don't count. If you just put the CD burning setting on "Data CD" then it will burn whatever files you have, mp3 and otherwise. That's what I usually do these days, since I have so much stuff as AAC.

# posted by  Tandava : 6:30 p.m.  

Yar, I'll see you there at the Stone. At the Stone Pony.

Love,
Rob

# posted by  Anonymous : 9:32 p.m.  

Right Graham, but there's a difference between an MP3 CD and a data CD full of MP3s. Meilissa's CD player will play an MP3 CD, but it won't play data CDs. I don't know if Miriam cares about that, though. So it's true that iTunes will only burn an "MP3 CD" using literal MP3s, but there's potentially a functional difference there.

# posted by  Natalie : 2:13 p.m.  

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