All posts by Brent Seehafer

Haiku fun

Hapless soul you are
Making your way to the store
Your green hat is funny

Bankruptcy and meat
Are really not the same thing
Don’t sell me your lies

O quivering mass
You look like food, maybe, uh…
What the hell is SPAM?

Pen in my hand
Makes funny lines on your face
Is your name really Dirk?

Walnuts ticklish?
Got to try another beer
Not made by the French

I’m going be rich
Just you wait and see, my friend
Buy and sell your mom!

I want my lunch back
You have enough cheese ball torte
Go get your own, eh?

Baa…Baa…more fish please
Moo…Moo…I like wasabi
Sushi restaurant

Big Ford Explorer
In front of yuppie condo
Death to car alarm

Stinky little cat
With furry rotund buttocks
No more treats for you

Coffee discoveries

Considering the rising cost of coffee and my current state of unemployment, I’ve been investigating cheaper coffee avenues lately. I’m a die hard Intelligentsia fan and still order it from time to time. However, since I’m at home all the time now, I’m drinking a lot more coffee and can burn through a couple pounds a week-that adds up quick.

Before I got hooked on Intelligentsia, I was a huge fan of Peet’s. Living near a store (North ave. in Lincoln park) made it easy to buy beans and it was close to the Whole Foods I shopped at. Even though that parking lot will go down in history as the most ridiculously aggressive lot I’ve ever been in, I braved it to spend some time at Peet’s and do some shopping for dinner. Now, in order to get Peet’s I have to make a trip to Dominick’s, something I’m not fond of doing. I’ve hated shopping at Dominick’s, Jewel and the like for years now cause they’re overpriced on quite a few things for no specific reason, namely produce and coffee. Those stores also make grocery shopping an unpleasant experience in general with poor store layouts and rather unpleasant employees-something that’s strangely not unique to the city.

There’s a sneaky little thing that coffee companies have done recently to attempt to hide the rising price of coffee. Where one pound used to be the standard size pack for beans, it’s now 12oz. This sucks for me especially because I’m looking at about $12.50 for a 12oz. pack of Major Dickason’s that may or may not be a couple months old. Direct from the site is around $1.00 more but Peet’s is really mean when it comes to shipping (cheapest is $8.00), so 1lb of coffee from Peet’s via mail order is a whopping $21.95. Basically, I can’t get Peet’s cheap and I’m back up in Intelligentsia pricing-which is the coffee I’d rather drink in the first place. Oh well.

Sad dinner

My wife gets upset sometimes because she doesn’t think that she’s my muse. In a way, there’s some truth to it, but only because I don’t consider myself a true artist, at least in the fine art sense. I’m a bit flighty when it comes to being an artist and haven’t really come across one thing that had driven me to be passionately creative the way that it’s normally portrayed in movies or whatever. It’s just not in me and I’m creatively lazy, I’m also a conflicted person, and have had a left/right brain conflict my whole life. My undergraduate degree is an art degree and my master’s is a computer science degree. I flipped majors from art to finance to computer science to art again and eventually came up with a mix of the two brain halves some 30-ish years later.

I absolutely adore my wife and she’s been the inspiration to make myself a better person for the last nine years, in quite a few areas. It makes me sad when she says that she’s not an inspiration to me because that’s quite far from the truth. More specifically, I really love to cook. I’m a self-taught chef and have a good background in restaurant work that afforded me a bit of time to learn from some great chefs. I got some good tips was exposed to some wonderful different types of cuisine and for the past ten years while living in the city, ate at some fantastic restaurants. My wife was my primary dining companion for almost all of that dining out and one of our first dates was dinner at my apartment, which I made. She loved the dinner and a new relationship was born and it had a sound foundation on food. I’ve been cooking for her ever since and have cooked some meals that made her squeal with joy after the first bite and it’s one of the best feelings I’ve ever experienced.

There have been occasions where dinner didn’t turn out, well, all that great-tonight was one of those meals. I’ve occasionally used boxed rices as a side to what I was preparing (e.g. Uncle Ben’s mushroom whatever or something like that) but never as part of the dish. I tried making a kind of dirty rice with shrimp inspired by a cooking show I just watched. The shrimp got good reviews, the dirty rice didn’t. Thankfully I can blame Zatarain’s for the dirty rice failure and not myself. I’ve had luck with Zatarain’s products before but this rice just came out rubbery. The resulting dish was overall, disappointing. This led my wife to become-yep, sad. It’s something that she says she’s done all her life and in the few times that I’ve made meals for her like tonight, the reaction has been the same. It never fails to make me miserable, like I really let her down. She’s the reason I continue to cook with the passion that I’ve got, cause really I could live on cereal and peanut butter and jelly.

I hadn’t thought of the idea of a cooking muse until Ginger brought up the idea that she didn’t think I inspired her to be creative awhile back. I suppose I did have the same idea that is thought about when thinking about a typical muse, the flippant Edie Sedgwick kind. Really, there’s always someone in your life that drives you to be better at something and I guess that’s your muse for that particular thing. I’m still not sure if they pick you or you find them, or any combination of all that but when you’ve found yours treat her good, she’ll make your life better.

10 music regrets

1. Never seeing the Ramones live
2. Never seeing John Lee Hooker live
3. Not taking full advantage of playing in high school and college bands
4. Not buying Cindee Dakin’s drums. (5-pc tri-color Ludwig Vistalite for $100)
5. Staying with the same guitar teacher for six years.
6. Living in the city for 10 years and only going to about 2 dozen shows.
7. Not seeing more industrial shows in the 90’s.
8. Having a full conversation with David Yow and not knowing who I was talking to (although he wouldn’t stop talking about poop).
9. Not seeing Frank Zappa live.
10. Being too young to have an opportunity to see the Smiths live.

Gee Whiz, I got laid off.

My career has been pretty flat, drama-wise. I got laid off from my first job out of school on my one year anniversary at the company. After that I spent a good chunk of time floating around at ad agencies doing whatever I could get my hands on, enjoying every minute of it, and there was plenty of work to go around. I didn’t have a pot to piss in but it was ok, I didn’t have any responsibilities either. Ten years later, I find myself jobless and faced with the same situation but life is significantly different. I just had a baby and bought a house a little over a year ago. I’m more prepared for unemployment than I ever have been in my career, but I can’t help but still feel pissed off about the situation.
I was at the company way too long considering I hadn’t been all that happy with things for some time and steady jobs make you complacent. Either way, there’s no shaking the feeling of betrayal concerning the way things played out. I feel that the decision was made on a personal level because of certain variables and people involved.
The more I think about it, it’s a good thing that it happened cause I’m more marketable than ever and I would have probably stayed where I was until they turned the lights off on us. I finished up a master’s degree in web development last year and had the intention of looking for something new this year because I was just plain unhappy, there hasn’t been a better time for me to look for a new job-market conditions aside of course. Anyone wanna hire a really loyal, intelligent designer and developer? I’m cute and I have good taste in music, too.

I haz a baybee

charlieTonight is the one month anniversary of the birth of my son. I haven’t put much down about the event since the actual birth (we tweeted it and posted the event on Facebook). In a month’s time I’ve learned a few things, mostly about my family-the previous (or existing) one. The most interesting thing that was learned is that all the shit they tell you about how difficult it is  to bring a newborn home and that you’ll go crazy due to lack of sleep, for me, was total bullshit. So far (yeah, I know it’s only been a month…whatever) taking care of a newborn is relatively easy. His needs are simple and there’s typically only three things that make him a crab-ass. One, he’s hungry. Two, he’s gassy. Or, three he needs to be changed cause he flopped his shorts. There’s not much else to the little bugger, it’s a relatively simple formula. Sure, it takes patience to deal with something that expresses needs only through screaming, but I’ve worked for grown men who do the same thing and learned to deflect well.

The surprise revelation, and one that our peditrician said was ‘the secret’, is that other members of the family are the hard part and that babies are, in fact, easy. We made sure that grandparents got a visit in soon after we were home as to avoid what would have been a barrage of phone calls. The only problem is after the initial visit, the mind games started. There were more than a few times when family members thought that they were entitled to voice their opinion on subjects that they had absolutely no right to, or times when a visit turned into a power-play and only ended up creating hurt feelings.

With these things, I try to remember that it was more than 30 years since these members of my family had to bring a newborn baby into their house and that the stress of the experience isn’t so fresh in their mind-not a real excuse but an excuse nonethless. Some of the other instances I’m less likely to forgive because it’s just a case of blind ignorance and I don’t suffer that well. Really, most of the problems that occured happened right away, were dealt with and are pretty much over, everyone seems to be behaving themselves for now.

The last surprise I got was the one tha tdealt with time-or, how I was spending the time I had before my son was born. Oddly enough, I seem to have more time now. It makes me sad because that means I was wasting a lot of it before and I’m not ever sure what I was wasting it on. I’m a gamer, so video games was one thing. I like movies so I was watching a lof of those, too. I’m not playing as many video games in the past month as I was prior to the arrival but I’m watch twice as many movies and getting a lot more done. I set up this blog, have continued improving my web dev skills and am keeping a cleaner house than before.

My father always said that I suffered from lack of urgency, I knew that was true but I didn’t know how much so until it became evident that if I didn’t keep up with things that they’d crush me. I’m hoping to keep the momentum going and see if it might change some bad habits that I’ve accumulated in recent years. If not for me, I’ll do it for my wife-who continues to be my hero, and for my newborn son, who deserves a good role model. Happy birthday Charlie, I love you.

Coffee and T.V.

After 10+ years of not having cable, I finally gave in and ordered DirectTV service through AT&T. It turns out that adjusting a few things in my service AND adding the dish will save me about $30. I’m not sure why the phone companies have such volatile pricing on services but it sure benefits the customer that pays attention. Moreover, I will now have 200+ channels of shit that I wil never watch and it’s gonna save me some dough. I guess it’s a winning proposition, but I’m not sure if I’m excited or not. The last time I had cable television was 1997.

Coffee, black.

I am a huge fan of the television series Twin Peaks. I watched it in high school when it was on and have owned it on all media which it has been released, including multiple dvd boxed sets. The series sucks me in when I watch it, I can (and have) watch the whole series over a weekend and always notice something in it that I didn’t notice before. One thing that happens when I watch the show is that I get a ridiculous craving for coffee and donuts, or coffee and cherry pie. I was fond of both things before I watched the show and maybe that’s one of the reasons that I’ve got such a fondness for the show is that I identify with it and it also makes ordinary things incredibly sexy.

Black coffee has a certain mystique to it already, but for me Twin Peaks puts a nice twist to it. The diner scenes in the show are always shot in a way that diverts from its overall dark theme and provide a place antipodal to the dark woods, which are not comforting at all, they are rather scary.

I also love how the show seems to stimulate my senses. Visually it’s beautiful, most of the music is teriffic, some of the scenes scare the hell out of me, and I can taste whatever is being eaten when someone on screen is eating something. However, the biggest problem I have when I watch the show is it makes me crave coffee and donuts, which if I’m having a marathon, gives me a huge caffeine and sugar headache when I’m done. I guess it’s an unfortunate side effect, but I’ll deal.

Life moves by pretty fast …

I can’t say that I’ve ever been truly depressed. I’ve had a pretty charmed life and never really had to ever worry too much. Unfortunately, my parents are the kind of people to make a mountain out of a molehill and in my youth I had a tendency to do the same thing. Now, I’m more grounded and thankfully can recognize real problems when they spring up, I have my wife to thank for that. Some people need a good partner to show them the way, she did that for me and I’m forever grateful.
Having children, buying a home, moving into a managerial position within a corporation … these things all come with a price tag, growing the fuck up. I’m happy that I’ve never felt as old as I am. Not that 34 is old, but it’s adulthood in all its glory without question.
Mentally I’ve prepared myself for the responsibilities I’ve assumed in the past couple of years, but it always surprises me when I feel like I don’t feel like I’ve done enough or get blue when I think that I’m not doing something right in life.
I wish for a lot. I had a promising career as a visual designer that didn’t play out like I’d hoped but I still have a definite love for the craft and am confident that I can hold my own. My most recent life discovery is that while you make plans for your own life-life, in turn, makes plans for you. It’s hard to realize that when you’ve got undying hopes and a love for something. It gets easier when you realize that you’ve got more time than you think to change life’s little unfortunate plans if they don’t jive with your own.

Tully's Coffee

I discovered Tully’s coffee, a west coast chain, on a trip to Seattle in 98. It seemed pretty generic but somewhat more classy than the other local chains. Even though the name struck me funny since it’s a unintentional nod to my favorite Ghostbusters quote, I didn’t do much to seek out their roasts.
Now, with the rising costs of coffee in general, and the amount that I consume on a daily basis, I’ve sought out different coffees besides my usual Intelligentsia roasts. I found quite a bit of Tully’s roasts at a local grocer for a good price.
The house blend has a good flavor, not strong or overly nutty. It goes well with meals or just on its own. I haven’t done the “hints of whatever” tasting and don’t plan on it, but I will recommend Tully’s house blend as a good all-around coffee.