Playing the greatest folk song hits of the 70s.


It brings a tear to my I.

One thing from Don's lesson yesterday morning really struck me. And it was probably the wrong thing, but whatever:

"...We are awakened every morning by something called an ALARM clock. Do you ever think about that? We are not awakened every morning by an opportunity clock. And we are not awakened in the morning by a gently-awaken-face-the-prospects-of-a-bright-new-day clock..."
I laughed through my tears.

Imagine, if you will, sleeping the sleep of angels in the early hours in the morning, when someone bursts into your room and stands over you screaming "HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY..." You'd jolt upright, arms flailing, twisted in the sheets, yelling through your slobber, "WHAT?! WHAT IS IT?!" And the person smiles and says genially, "I just wanted to make sure you were awake."

I have a machine that does that. I gave a guy some money several years ago so I could have that machine. I think I need to pause and consider.

By the way, if anybody wants to try the above stunt on me, I give you these words of fair warning: You'd better run. You'd better run far, and you'd better run fast. Because when I get my hands on you... ohoho, man. No cemetery in America will accept the remains.

So we're doing what now?

Tag yourself if you feel like doing this. Yeah, I'm another chain breaker; boo on me.

1. During my medical adventures as a teenager, the doctors told me I had grown my own heart bypass.
   
   
2. Even though I have the same birthday as Joseph Stalin and Phil Donahue, the three of us have never met.
   
   
3. I hold 2 U.S. patents for denormalized database optimization through pre-clustering.
   
   
4. As a kid, I once wired up a Radio Shack electronics kit to make a rudimentary AM radio transmitter, using the speaker as a sort of reverse-inductance microphone (you had to yell into the speaker). Being powered by 6 AA batteries, the signal didn't even get outside my bedroom, but it did work. Sounds really smart, but I was following a recipe and learned practically nothing from the experience. It was still cool, though.
   
   
5. I don't have a fear of heights, but I have a weird higher-than-normal anxiety about dropping small objects from heights. Wristwatches, cameras, babies, etc.
   
   
6. I haven't been to the movies in about six years. It's not out of spite or circumstances. I just don't care.
   
   
7. The only vegetable I truly hate, in all of its diabolical forms, is the onion.
   
   
8. 98% of the time when I put on some music to get my blood pumping, it's classical, especially something from the Baroque period or the late Romantics.
   
   
9. I can make fairly convincing "poo" sounds with my two bare hands. I have yet to use this power for evil.
   
   
10. I guess nobody knows this one yet -- in 2002, I had a semi-serious phone & internet relationship with a girl named Marla that developed to the point where I took some vacation time to go see her. I drove for four days up to Billings, Montana (Sept. 11 was still kind of fresh, didn't want to hassle w/flying) but when I arrived, her apartment was empty and the neighbors said she had moved out three weeks ago. I never heard from her again.
    
    
11. Coke, not Pepsi. Letterman, not Leno. Mary Ann, not Ginger. Vanilla, not chocolate.
    

SPOILER EDIT - Highlight the text in the parentheses if you demand answers: (#3, #7 and #10 are bunk. I love onions.)

The former rant I made, O Telephonus, of all the dumb things The Company made me say and do, like the time they quietly installed an energy-saving policy on my office computer that makes it hibernate after half an hour of inactivity, also rendering it unreachable when I try to connect from home. I had to put a torch to a quart of perfectly good 87-octane to drive into the office, move the mouse three-tenths of an inch to wake it up, and get the file I needed. WTG, guys. These green policy stunts are going to destroy the earth.

This was going to be another whiny carp session about the job. I wouldn't have blamed you for skipping it, nor the previous one. Not at all. I was fully prepared to launch forth with such scAAAthing invective if our worst-case scenario had been realized, the one that we were dreading all summer. (We finally avoided it at virtually the last second.) But during the months-long process, I slowly got tired of being mad, even if I had reason to be. So I figured that other people would probably be tired of my being mad, too.

Then I thought, "Well, perhaps I can still salvage the situation by relating the events of our recent labor crisis in a humorous and engaging manner." (Do I think in well-structured magazine-quality English sentences? Actually with my jumbled brain the words were probably: "maybe it to funny i tell good at it chicken sandwich".) But that didn't even work. After I read what I had started to write, it wasn't even funny to me. This whole circumstance on top of the regular work circumstances was so mind-suckingly demotivating that I actually lost the power to JOKE about it properly.

That's bad. And it would have made for a bad post. So I pitched the whole thing into the garbage. All the attendant little anecdotes about gigantic burritos, pay phones in Harlem, illegal drugs used as potting mulch, and endless gallons and gallons of swampy sweat and the places it went to... all of these stories and more will have to wait.

So! -clap- Instead, here's a tribute to the internationalistic nationalistic spirit of the 798^th Olympiadic Summer Games Contest Time. Children of the world show pride in their native countries by rooting on their teams with signs made in SECRET NINJA CODE. Brought to you by Quaker Oats and Cap'n Crunch. Yeeeees, Cap'n Crunch: Crunchatize ME, Cap'n.


My favorite is the cross-eyed girl on the bottom. Frankly, I don't even know why we need flags anymore with smart rebuses like these.

...I just can't stop looking at that girl. I wish I could put her and her sign on a tee shirt and sell them in Japan. They'd probably dig it. Unlike the stuffy humorless people of Fr+ANTS.

It's no concern of yours how it was that I came into possession of a box of Cap'n Crunch, and you ought to stop wondering.

"Like your job?"

More and more lately I've been gripped with apprehension at the up-inflecting tones of that question fragment.

The fastest way to eject from that marvelous piece of polite small talk is to give the big twinkling Vaseline smile and say, "Oh, yeah." I just can't do it anymore. Honesty constrains me instead to take a deep breath, wait a 3-count, and say, "Well, yeah..." in a tone that sounds as if I'm struggling to find ways to compliment a friend's awful cooking. And it's true, because the office is practically around the corner from me. I can work from home if necessary, or even wanted. I've created a pocket of security for myself so that it would be painful for them to axe me. The money is good; there's not tons of it, but there's more than enough for me. And the hours -- oh, the hours -- are conducive to my terrible night owl habits.

But it's SO DULL. And it's dull because I'm dull. I haven't stayed up with the new technology because there are just enough hours and neurons in the day to keep the old technology from sparking up and exploding. I used to develop new code, which is what my brain is wired for. Now I spend more time than that filling out business cases that nobody reads, making up (I mean, "forecasting") 1-year future usage statistics, etc. etc. etc. I often wonder if I could qualify for another job if I needed to.

I used to work with a guy who himself formerly had a boss of Japanese extraction, and my friend would go home to his wife and tell her about how the "samurai" was doing. On some days, the sword was like THIS (raised overhead in a conquering pre-strike) and on other days the sword was like THIS (turned inward to the gut).

The past couple of months have been real hari kari caliber for me.

One thing I've discovered about myself is that if the earth were to inexplicably slow down so that the day were 36 hours long, I think I'd be able to adjust. I'd miss the people who were suddenly flung out into space, but the main point is that I have slowly been conditioned NOT TO SLEEP for extended periods of time. This is then followed by periods where I will invariably SLEEP A WHOLE LOT. The face of the sun is a novelty to me. My first task when waking up is to determine, "Okay...this AM or PM?" I eat steak florentine at 4 in the morning and Cap'n Crunch in the afternoon. My boss talks more to my answering machine than he does to me, because during this sweet nappy time of mine, he's figured out that if he just tapes down the "Redial" button there's a chance he'll get an answer by the 900th ring: a snort of the phlegm and a scratchy "...'Lo?" [See future article, "I still do not have, nor desire, a stinkin' cell."]
I was so sleep deprived while driving home one recent Sunday evening that I started singing Elvis' Greatest Hits as performed by Count Dracula. "Vee can't go on togedder, veeth soospeecious miiiinds..." For the record, it sounded pretty good. I don't remember anything after that. The car is currently in the garage (instead of, say, the living room) so I guess everything turned out okay.

So you see, I kinda like this job that I hate. It's a great situation for me that pulls and folds my metabolism like taffy. And I'll probably stick with it for a good while longer because I'm too much wuss by volume to look for something else. Aren't I interesting? Aren't you absorbed by all of this carpish whining that ignores the greater blessings in life?

But then there's the upcoming IBEW/CWA strike. That's a whole 'nother can of sardines. Guess which unskilled goober gets to go scab for that?

More to come, maybe.