affectation.log

The new year calls for a quote.  I can go with "Holiday In Spain", like I did the year before last, or I can use "A Long December", which happens to be the most-used source for entry titles [six times].  I'll go with the latter.

This is going to be a long entry.  It will cover Christmas to New Years Day.


Christmas was uneventful.  Williamsburg wasn't as cool as the last time I spent a winter break there.  That time [1997, I think], there was a major ice storm.  Everything outside was coated in a layer of ice about a quarter of an inch thick.  It was beautiful.  This time, not so much.  There was barely even any snow.  The shaft.

My cousin was kind of annoying.  And creepy.  I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating because the temperature was cranked.  It's about four in the morning.  She's sitting there, watching TV.  Uh...  okay...  So I get up, go by her, and turn down the thermostat.  Then I go back to sleep.  I wake up a couple hours later, sweating again.  She is still there, watching TV.  And apparently she's turned the thermostat back up, 'cause now it's at about eighty degrees.  So I get up, sigh loudly, turn the temperature down again, and go back to bed.  There was one more iteration, but by that time she was asleep, so I won the temperature battle.

Drove back from Williamsburg with my sister and the aforementioned cousin.  Spent a good deal of time calling my sister a slut, a whore, and a bad person.  But, as most of you know, it's all justified and deserved.  It was during this ride that The Bet was first conceived, though it was far from finalized by the time we got home.


Home was boring and, since I'd watched some weird show about haunted houses on the Learning Channel, scary to boot.  The first night, I thought I'd go to the mall and visit Lacy, but I was so tired I passed out instead.  Sorry, Lacy.

I was going to bus down to Baltimore on Thursday [New Years Eve Eve], but after driving me to the bus station my sister bugged me to stay.  That way, she could drive me down Friday and have an excuse to go.  Also, she said, so that I could hang out with her around the house.  The latter was total crap, as she spent the night with Choco Billy.


That night I grew unsatisfied with foraging about the house and decided to go hit the drive-through at Wendy's.  Consuming a frosty through a straw [don't ask me why I bought it, given my dislike for chocolate] and driving resulting in me cutting my tongue repeatedly.  Yay, blood and pain.  I found I had nowhere to go.  Naturally, I ended up at Eagle Rock Reservation.  Of all the cars parked up there, with couples inside making out, mine's the one to get tapped by some cops.  They look in and find me, alone, with a bag of fast food.  I can't even imagine how pathetic this looked.  I went home shortly thereafter and fell asleep to Jerry Maguire.

Friday morning, The Bet is finalized.  My sister has to make it until her birthday without hooking up with a guy.  Not even first base.  Not even holding hands.  Although, since I am partial to the masturbatory arts, she is allowed to touch herself in the presence of a guy, as long as the guy does not touch her.  At stake is fifty dollars.  The Bet is on.

My sister and I get into Baltimore sometime around five in the afternoon on Friday.  The fun begins, though not without setbacks.  The dramatis personae:  Jon, me, my sister, Brook [an ex-girlfriend of Jon's], Todd [a friend of Jon's from URI], and Todd's girlfriend Lauren [or was it Laura?].  Bryan returns from dinner with Seth and Jo sometime later, with a guy named Jason.  Seth and Jo show up much later, stay for about an hour, and leave shortly after the ball drops.

The New Years Eve celebration consists of a lot of card playing, with some drinking.  I'd like to get asshole started, but Todd and Lauren would rather play crazy eights as a drinking game first.  So Brook and I oblige.  This is a mistake.  I was drinking a porter, and shortly after starting I was in drink debt.  Teh Portz0r sat like a brick in my stomach, temporarily crushing my desire to consume anything.  Feeling bloated, I decide sitting still is a bad idea and chase Jon down the street [he'd gone to pick up the pizzas we ordered].  After starting to eat one slice, I feel my thirst returning.  I start in with the SoCo-Cola.

The House Rules for Asshole, which I lovingly typed up the last time I was in Baltimore, appear, much the worse for wear.  After some mild debating of the rules, which are, in the end, nonnegotiable, the asshole begins.

It's just Jon, Brook, my sister and myself playing for a bit, I think.  Then Jason joins in.  He's never played before, and must be educated.  He plays a couple of hands before he fully groks the rules.  He then begins schooling us.  He ends up spending six terms as President before being dethroned.  [For the record, he first abolished my no-eye contact rule.  The next rule was that passing required the passee to stand up and clap three times.  The third rule was to say "Thank you, sir; may I have another?" when one was skipped.]  The fun is had.

I remember now that there was another girl there, someone Jon had met at Jillian's [the arcade/bar chain].  Danielle.  She didn't seem very social, but I can't really fault her, as I wouldn't be too friendly in a room full of people I didn't know.  But I made efforts to include her, asking if she wanted to join in the playing of asshole.  She kept passing on that.  You can't say I didn't try.  She too leaves some time after the ball drops, as I notice her disappear shortly after Seth and Jo.

When the ball drops, I'm outside, keeping Brook company while she smokes and enjoying her secondhand smoke.  Bryan comes outside and offers us some not-too-great champagne from the bottle, explaining that he ran out of wine glasses.  We go back inside, and there's more card-playing.  I don't remember the details, but it was about five in the morning when everyone else was passed out.  I played some blitzball until six, then passed out myself.


Everyone wakes up around noon, and we go out for some ten-dollar all-you-can-eat sushi buffet.  After coming back Seth and Jo leave for New Jersey, Jason in tow.

We [Jon, Bryan, Brook, my sister and me] sit around for a while before I say, "We should play some beer pong."  To my surprise, there's agreement.  Since it's nice out, the table's set up on the porch.  The five of us manage to play three games.  Jon and I lose to Bryan and my sister.  Bryan and my sister lose to Jon and Brook, who then lose to me and Bryan.  By this time, Jon's laptop has migrated outside, to serve as the ruleboard and to play music.  Jon worries about power, so Bryan runs up to his room to drop an extension cord down to the porch [Jon's room is closer, but its window is sealed].  While up there, he yells down, "Hey, you know what we should do?  Play beer pong on the roof."

At first, this seems like a good idea.  But the only ladder available is far too rickety, and doesn't even reach the roof.  One has to stand on the top of the precarious ladder and somehow climb the rest of the way.  Also, Brook is afraid of heights.  And the table doesn't look like it'll fit out the window, so it'd have to be pulled up off the backyard.  But Bryan and Jon are determined, so they make plans to go to Home Depot.

In the meantime, I start playing blitzball.  Jon sits down and watches.  Then Bryan sits down and watches.  The next time I look over, Jon is asleep.  So much for Home Depot.  Enough is enough.  Time to start drinking.

So, after cleaning last night's glasses, the drinking commences...  Again.  Bryan picks up the blitzballin' [and switches to Final Fantasy X-2, in which blitzball requires minimal attention].  We play some Sechs Nimmt [a fun German card game that Brook owns].  Bryan and Jon break to brew some beer.  I join Brook on a smoke break to avoid work, during which she drops Too Much Information on me.  Luckily, I have forgotten the bulk of it.  When we come back, the beer production is mostly done and we move on to asshole.

Cut to four in the morning.  We're still playing asshole.  We are all sitting there, naked.  The girls and Jon have blankets wrapped around themselves.  Bryan and I, sitting on the couch, have but a single throw pillow each over the junk.  How did we get here?

Indirectly, I blame the waterfalls and Bryan's making of a good margarita.  Directly, I blame my sister for making the rule that socials require everyone to remove an article of clothing.  However, I wasn't too keen on seeing anyone present naked, myself included.  The feeling seems to be universal, with one exception: my sister probably wanted to see Bryan naked.  So after the hand is done, we redress and play a couple more hands, then pass out.

I win The Bet.  Fifty dollars.

In the morning, there's some more card-playing; Snowball Fight, Jon's present to Brook, is broken in.  It claims to have "all the fun, without the cold and wetness".  It is indeed pretty fun.

Then my sister and I head home.

Summary:  I like small gatherings.  I hate large parties.  Sitting around, drinking and playing cards with friends.  Making nerdy D&D jokes.  Talking about video games.  That's my ideal evening.  That's how New Years was for me, this time around.  I had fun.  Christmas was eh.  My cousin was annoying.  My sister owes me fifty dollars.  I am vindicated.

Oh, Calleigh, so cute and nerdy.  And Southern.  She completely negates [and then some] the horrible, horrible, nonsensical equations in the show's opening credits.  Also I would not be opposed to more screentime for Valera, unless such screentime comes at Calleigh's expense.

Yay, for new episodes of Lost and Alias.  I'm not really a devout follower of the latter, but Jennifer Garner, like the girls in the DOA series, kicks high.  Also, my mother likes to watch it, so it's on anyway.  With Lost, I'm liking the characters less and less.  Oh, how I wished Sawyer's smug little skull would crack on a rock while cliff diving.  Or that that annoying girl with the asthma [whose name I don't even try to recall] hadn't been given any eucalyptus.  Terry O'Quinn, however, remains awesome, and reminds me that owning the Millenium DVDs would be pretty nice.

I have lost my swooning groove.  Damn.  I might as well address other recent complaints.

I try not to be an elitist asshole when it comes to music.  Some days, it is very difficult.

For example, every time I hear that "Vertigo" song.  What happened, Bono?  I thought "Elevation" was just a phase.  "Hello!  Hello!  I'm in a place called vertigo!"  I feel unclean.

On a related note, I finally got around to listening Modest Mouse's Good News For People Who Love Bad News, after I bought it for relatively cheap in Taiwan.  At least, I think it was cheap.  I may have misunderstood the conversion and been severely ripped off.  Alas, this speculation is for naught; returning it is now impossible.  To return to the point, I have listened to it, and I do indeed feel ripped off.  I did like that "Float On" song.  I do not listen to the radio so much, so I did not hear this "Ocean Breathes Salty" song until I listened to it on the CD.  On the whole, the album was less than "less than impressive", and has invaded the territory of raw suckitude.  Blah.

I do not like this new-music-that-is-ironically-not-musical, for the same reason I dislike so-called-modern-art-that-does-not-look-like-art.

Thus ends my musical critique for this entry.  And my ire is spent.

My sister pointed out to me a glaring omission in my last entry:  Todd and his lady friend seem to vanish into thin air.  What happened is as follows:  As Bryan was still out to dinner, and as the bad, bad crazy eights game [not to be confused with Leroy Brown, who was "bad, bad" in an infinitely cooler manner] wound down, Todd and Lauren made mention of taking some sort of taxi or bus down to the docks, hitting some bars, and watching the fireworks.  No one seemed to go for this idea, but we nodded our heads for a bit before giving it serious discussion.  I agree with my sister that one does not go to a gathering of mostly people one does not know and try to dictate policy.  It is simply bad form.

As another example of bad form, I refer to myself.  While enjoying a slice of pizza in the kitchen with my sister, and assuming everyone was out on the porch, I confided, "That Lauren girl?  On first impressions, I don't like her very much."  In a few seconds, Lauren and Todd appeared in the kitchen.  My sister advised me not to say anything about it, but to try my hardest not to be a dick to her.  I don't think I was too mean, though the whole trying-to-move-the-party thing still bothers me.  I was looking forward to my night of playing cards and hanging in a quiet atmosphere with people I like.  The docks had nothing to offer me that I didn't already have at Jon's.  Well... hookers, I suppose.  I shall rephrase:  The docks had nothing more to offer me that I wanted.

So Todd and Lauren took off at some point pre-ball-drop for these docks.  Can't say as I missed them much.

Drat.  My anger, she has returned.

Saw this on some Livejournals, thought it was interesting.  You cull the first lines of the first post of every month of the past year.

January:		A new year. And I'm no longer a teenager.
February:		The liquor run went well.
March:		Back in Jersey again, though only for a day.
April:		So apparently most everyone from the SFS is still angry with me about Gaming Weekend.
May:		My time in Wormtown continues to wind down.
June:		What can I remember about graduation?  Not very much.
July:		So Monday night I'm on a roller coaster with John Nash and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz when the car goes off the tracks.
August:		So I'm watching the late-night Olympics coverage.  Mmm-mmm.
September:		Some brief, unconnected lines.
October:		So I'm cleaning out my room and—  Yeah, those of you who have ever seen it are probably going into shock.
November:		Voted for the first time a couple hours ago.  Not as thrilling as I'd expected it to be.
December:		My code of beliefs is far too long of an entry for right now.  I'm not feeling very wordy.

So apparently I like to start sentences with "So".  Hm.

In less than twenty-four hours, the last vestige of childhood will be no more.  I'm somewhat saddened, actually.  I only have a vague idea of when it started [sometime during 2000, I'd have to guess], but I don't like celebrating my birthday; anyone who's tried to surprise me has learned this.  This year it's just a small dinner with immediate family, Jon, and Lacy if she feels up to it.  Then on Wednesday I'd like to either hit margarita night at Chevy's, or check out this "Dave and Buster's" joint of which Jon and Lacy have spoken highly.

'Tis the season for stalking.  Recently I came across the Livejournal of hot Lesley.  Also, I was going through some old email and found an old exchange with a fanfic writer from Salt Lake City.  Got curious, looked her up, and found her Livejournal.  She's a dance student at the University of Utah.  The exchange has begun anew.  Hopefully it won't fall prey [again] to the common fate of my correspondence:  One day, I just stop writing, and I seem to drop off the face of the earth.  I tend to do that a lot, actually, and not just with letters.

My father tells me I should hunt down people with whom I went to preschool and grade school.  Maybe next time.  Also, the hunt requires a little knowledge of the target.  Most of the people I knew back then, I didn't really know beyond the level of acquaintance.  And the ones I did, the raging sandstorms of time have scoured my memory of them.

For some reason, I have the urge to read Dune.

You know what'd be really nice?  If my professors would send their recommendations before the January 15 deadline.  Yeah, that'd be real sweet.

Like the majority of my entries, this one ends not with a bang, but just trails off.  Hey, I'd give you solid conclusions, if I had any.  I'm off to savor my last illegal imbibings of alcohol.  Bye.

Today I came across someone quoting Timothy Leary's famous think-for-yourself, question-authority speech.  And in the midst of smugly thinking I was better than this guy for knowing the definition of irony, I realized:  I used to be like this guy.  Conformingly nonconformist.  Oh, the self-loathing.

Someday, I'd like to be so great as to have "The" precede my name.  For examples, The Christ, or The Sisko.  The latter referring, of course, to Benjamin Lafayette Sisko [The Emissary, to the Bajoran people] of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  Cheapen the name not with thy thoughts of "The Thong Song".  That's "SisQó", anyway.  Ugh.

I realize now that the two examples I gave both had divine parents.  I can't give you chapter and verse on The Christ, but obviously it'd be New Testament.  For the divinity of The Sisko, see the episodes "Image in the Sand" and "Shadows and Symbols".  Anyway, looks like I'm shit out of luck on that qualification.

So, while looking for those links, I read some other synopses from season seven.  I came across "Chrysalis".  And I remembered an interesting anecdote.  I used to post to alt.fan.drew-carey back in ... late '98, I think.  And I remember some guy [name was Erich Mees, screenname was DESSCRIBE1] mentioning that he had this drama-club classmate that went on to Hollywood, by the name of Faith Salie, and said that she had a bit part in some episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called "Statistical Probabilities".  I replied with an incredibly long synopsis of the episode.

To answer potential questions:  "Statistical Probabilities" introduces the group of genetically engineered humans who return in "Chrysalis".  And the story had no real point, other than to possibly indicate how big a dork I am, or to show how small the world is.

I just went back to DejaNews [or, uh, Google Groups, I guess] to find this.  Got massively sidetracked trying to find old posters.  Found Erich, fired off an email.  Started looking up others.  Damn.

I'm pretty far from the original intent of this entry, so it's time to bring it around.

For my birthday I gave myself the gift that keeps on giving.  That's right: tooth decay.  I had a routine checkup on my birthday, when my good man Sutton looked at the pictures from the cute hygenist and told me I'd have to come in in a couple days to fill some "holes", which is apparently the word for cavities now that I'm not eleven [which was the last time I had a "hole"].  After poking around a bit on Thursday, he tells me of a deeper problem.  My wisdom teeth are decaying.  And it's so awkward back there, he can't even get the drill on them or fill them.  Wow.  The suck.


So this Friday, I'm going under [for the first time] and those babies are coming out.  There's a chance I may lose all sensation in my lower jaw.  I'm no Han Solo; I actually made the doctor give me the odds.  He said that 0.03% of people lose feeling in their jaw as a result of the surgery, and that of those people, 0.03% don't get the feeling back.  His numbers smack of guesstimation.  For shame.

So, yeah, Friday.  I go to sleep, they pry my jaw open and start yanking.  Oh, am I excited.  Does it show?

So, right, now I'm twenty-one.  Legality is nice.  I haven't actually taken advantage of my new right too much.  The night of my birthday, when Jon was up, I had some whiskey-and-cokes, a couple at Town Pub and a couple more at some bar in Clifton.  I also had a beer and a SoCo-Cola at Applebee's the night afterwards.  I have yet to go to a liquor store.  Perhaps I should get on that.  Though, I don't really need to.  My parents have recently been producing bottles of wine from thin air.

Oh.  For further details on birthday night celebrations, including Jon's and my lesson in pool, see Jon's entry on it.  This one's plenty long already.

Oh, poor Kelly MacDonald.  She guested on Alias tonight.  Bad things shouldn't happen to cute girls with hot accents.  Sniff.

Oops.  Uh, spoilers preceded.

That there "My Happy Ending" song by Avril Lavigne was on the radio earlier.  I'm ashamed to admit it, but I really like that song.  It's catchy.  So far I can resist singing along.  So far.

Now, picture Avril Lavigne, make her a few years younger, and put her on heroin.  This was the girl that Jon and I ran into on my birthday, when we were killing time at the arcade in Willowbrook Mall.  She came up to us while we were playing House of the Dead 3, kept offering loud commentary.  Examples:  "No, shoot that one!  Aim for the head!  Look out!  Shoot!  Shoot!  Shoot!"

I wasn't doing so hot at the zombie killin', and I made comments to that effect, like, "Man, I have clearly lost it," or "Hey, Jon, remember when I didn't suck?"  The girl kept going "Aww," and patting my back or rubbing my arm.  Yeah...  A little strange.

She might have been somewhat sketchy, and kind of annoying, but Jon and I still felt a twinge of sadness when she left.  She added some color, you know.  The place was kind of boring afterwards.

There is some crazy-ass shit going on in the Livejournal mathematics community, brought on by that comment by the president of Harvard regarding women in science.  The argument's making me angry, but posting anything will only fuel the fire.  Some girls are just being oversensitive and making broad generalizations about male mathematicians.  I'll admit that I treat girls who do math differently than guys who do math.  I'm a complete asshole to the guys; I'm slightly less so to the girls.  Let's face it:  Girls who do math are hot.

And on the issue of whether that girl deserved the treatment she got on the community earlier, I think she did.  In my opinion, she was fishing for someone to do her homework for her.  And her personal profile...  Well, we all know how I feel about sluts.  That's how I interpret her calling herself a "crazy nympho", anyway.

So, earlier, I said I'd been able to resist singing along to "My Happy Ending".  Yeah, well...  That's not so much the case anymore.

Having fulfilled the purpose for this entry a while ago [informing you of the arcade girl], I'm just going to quit here.

I've been letting MSN's search engine 'bot run free on my site; as a result, I get quite a bit of traffic from there.  I just want you to see some of the fucked-up searches that bring people here.

The top ten queries for which I'm the top result:
10. Albert Einstein's quote of radius of knowledge  ["As the radius of knowledge expands..."]
09. Archer Girl  [They are hot.]
08. calleigh duquesne  [And so is she.]
07. L.A BIGGEST rollercoaster
06. smirnoff green apple twist mix
05. what is the angel statue in berlin  [Der Siegessäule?]
04. price chopper radio song list
03. can cocaine cause tooth decay [It can, actually.]
02. meet bored housewives  [Sorry, I'm fresh out.]
01. smug alas pizza  [Uh...]

The quarry of other, undoubtedly disappointed searchers:
  - christy ground boxes  [Oh, did she ever.]
  - actors with a broken nose  [Thomas Haden Church?]
  - Battling church gossip
  - couples naked
  - it is illegal to get a fish drunk in what state  [That'd be Oklahoma or Ohio, apparently.]
  - women in bikinis holding guitar  [Those poor women, sharing the one guitar.]
  - the best way to ask a girl out  [Ha.  If only I knew.]
  - Jessica Biel pictures naked
  - fuck me in my mouth games  [What?]
  - electra cash consumer help desk
  - go to bed drunk girls  [Good advice.]
  - free AIM dashboard confessional sounds
  - fuckin lucky t-shirt Tommy Lee
  - john mayer gossip
  - boy sand girl shaving sex  [This guy couldn't even type in his fetish right...  I think.]

So I'm down four teeth.  I have lost my wisdom.  Then again, it's not clear whether I had any to begin with.


The procedure went exactly as planned.  I went in at ten.  They hooked me up to this heart monitor; I promptly proceeded to try and speed up and slow my pulse, rather unsuccessfully.  Doc King tied off my arm.  A twinge of pain, the sting of a needle.  Then he hooked the drugs up and asked if the numbness was spreading.  I responded, "My arm's getting cold."  Then he undid the armband and I was out like the proverbial light.


When I woke up, it was over.  Apparently, it had been over for a half-hour.  Perhaps the weight estimate I gave them was a bit high.  Better high than low, however.  I got my prescriptions, stumbled around CVS while my mother had them filled.  Anaesthesia is awesome.  Went home, medicated, and lay in bed until dark, playing FFX and drifting in and out of consciousness.

Unfortunately, I missed out on seeing That Fleeting World at Acme Underground.  Sorry, Holz.  You've got to tell me of shows further in advance.

Jon came up, on his way to Rhode Island for some auction at his alma mater; I banged him.  He, Lacy, Mark and I played some Double Dash, which I had not played in a long time.  And oh, did I suck.  We raced each of the sixteen tracks once; I placed fourth eleven times and third thrice.  I managed to land second place once.  And I actually got first place on the last track we played, robbing Mark at the last second.  The luck, she had pity on me.

After Mark left and Lacy went to bed, Jon and I sat a nice, long shift at Tick Tock.  Good times.  Then Jon gave me a few bottles of his and Bryan's latest brew, which they've dubbed the Hopkins Fencing Ale.  I haven't yet had any, as I don't want to fuck with the medication, but my sister liked it.  As did my father, I think; his review:  "It tastes like beer."  You see whence I get my rating system.

Well, I'm off to take my pills and change the gauze in my mouth.  Feel the abrupt ending.

Today's Abbie's twenty-first.  Happy birthday, Abbie.  Hope everything's going well for you.


So I was watching House a couple nights ago.  They mentioned Coumadin, which was exciting.  Coumadin is a Bristol-Myers Squibb blood thinner; I've been working on its web site.

Also on Tuesday there was some function after work to welcome the new boss.  Open bar equals totally awesome.  I didn't take advantage, though; not only was I afraid of getting drunk and embarrassing myself, but I had some work to finish.  So I had a beer and left early with the other people from my group.

Patrick, the designer who occupies the cube across from me, joined up about the same time I did, in December.  He was apparently in sales before, and he said that his new environment reminded him of Office Space.  I haven't noticed this; what I have noticed is that Ron, my boss, seems to like the phrase "touch base".

I'm at work now; there's a lull.  I sure could go for some sweet tea, but we don't have nearly enough sugar packets.


The past two weekends, I've gone snowboarding with my sister, Jane [a co-worker], and Jane's brother John.  I feel like I've improved.  I've got a handle on that whole "carving" thing, but for the moment my Ss are a tad wide [read: across the entire slope].

While getting the rental board the first weekend, I was assisted by a cute Mountain Creek employee named Erin.  We ended up conversing for quite a while [apparently long enough to make others ask what was taking me so long].  Just small talk: how long I've been snowboarding, where I've been, et cetera.  Eventually someone behind me coughed in that attention-grabbing manner, so I thanked Erin and took my leave.  As an afterthought, I wondered if she was flirting with me, but dismissed the idea as too improbable.

My instincts were right, for once.  Erin was working again the next weekend.  She wasn't the one who helped me, but when I was done I walked up and, for lack of a better opener, thanked her for her help the previous time.  She didn't remember me.  I am the king of awkward moments.


MSN Search continues to provide amusement: I'm the number two result for awesome livejournals.  Interestingly, I'm number one with old spice shaving song, Dear Mom, I went to the party lying on the pavement, and "Until I get the sun and your lips both pressing on my skin".  In the awesome department, my log's the number one and two results [and my main site is the third and fourth] if you search for affectation.  And hilariously, if you search for hello hello I'm at a place called vertigo, my mockery of the song is the first result.

Let me dig further back.  I saw Phantom of the Opera and In Good Company about a month ago.  As I told Carrie, the former far outshined the latter.  She laughed.  I was not joking.  I love Phantom of the Opera the musical, and the movie rocked my boxers.  In Good Company, however, was somewhat distasteful.  I couldn't sympathize with the main character, and Scarlett Johansson's character was kind of... a 'ho'.  I suppose Dennis Quaid was likeable; in this, he stood alone.  So... Phantom, thumbs up.  In Good Company, thumbs down.

Some work just wandered into my cubicle via my boss' hand.  Ah, well.

My sister and I can't stop laughing at that line.  It's here because it's a hilarious line and because I'm mean.  Although I suppose that's really just one reason.

I'll put this first, so that people can read it without moving through my description of the Social Distortion show.

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I've actually got some work to do, so I'll write about the Social Distortion show next time.  Maybe later this afternoon:  the snow's getting bad and the office may close early.

Another interview.  Not too much is happening here at work, but I can't justify writing too long an entry.  This meme gives me an easy out.

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Actually, I will write about the Social Distortion show.

It rocked.  I'd filled my flask with SoCo prior to leaving the house, to my mother's dismay.  How'd I get it in?  I tucked it in the front of my jeans as we approached the entrance.  My sister then noted that it left a rather oddly-placed bulge, so I pushed it down a bit.  As I stepped up to the one male frisker [my thinking being that the male frisker would be less likely to go for the crotch than the female friskers], the flask fell, but was caught by the seam between the pant legs.  I tried to step forward with a minimum of leg movement.  The patdown began.  As he tapped around my ankles, the flask was jostled and fell down my left leg.  The guy either didn't notice or didn't care and waved me through.  Whew.

I downed a couple of beers and the flask [yes, the entire flask] and went down into the pit.  Choco Billy decided to hang back at the bar, so my sister stayed with him.  Within minutes I was about fifteen feet from Mr. Mike Ness.  Then a passing crowdsurfer knocked my glasses clear off my face.  After a few minutes of sheer panic [and one minute crouching on the ground, looking for them], some guy pulled me up by my jacket and thrust them into my hand.  Awesome.

I managed to maintain position and gain some ground.  By the end, there was but one layer of people between me and the rail.  It was pretty sweet, aside from the water continually flying in from above.

I was really hoping they'd play "When She Begins" and "Cold Feelings": negative on both.  Alas.  I didn't know the new stuff; I'd heard "Reach For The Sky" a couple of times on the radio, but that's all.  The show still rocked.

Oddly, I ran into Lacy in the parking lot afterwards.  I thought she and Carly had gone to the show on Friday night.  They did, but something happened; you'd have to ask her on that one.  Anyway, I talked to Lacy; apparently she was up front, which would have placed her directly in front of me.  Huh.  I wonder why I didn't run into them.  Perhaps it was simply too chaotic.

And now, back to work.

I'm working on a new look, a simpler look.  All this blue's starting to make me sick.


So the site for START [BMS-354825] finally went up.  That was the first project I really worked on here at BMS.  It was actually supposed to go live 28 February, but someone higher up was fickle.  Don't make no nevermind to me; it's their dime.

<!-- random book line meme -->



<!-- /random book line meme -->

It's weird that that book's as old as I am.  My copy of last year's twentieth anniversary edition arrived last week, so I've begun the Sprawl trilogy anew.  I had actually just finished another pass of Mona Lisa Overdrive the day before; that's good timing.

Speaking of Gibson...  It's 2005.  This is the year in which Virtual Light is set.  Rydell's just one year older than I am.  Weird, indeed.  Alas; AIDS hasn't been cured, and Costa Rica isn't a data haven [at least, not to my knowledge].  And California's still in one piece.

I am dead tired, having spent most of last night here in the office, finishing off another round of Coumadin with Patrick and Choco Billy.  We left at eleven.  Craziness.


I had signed up to give blood today, but I was disqualified.  I should've figured that my tattoo wouldn't fly with them.  It's for the best, I guess.  I still don't weigh very much.

Sigh.  Back to Coumadin.

Why MSN Search sucks, continued.

Try any of the searches I mentioned in this entry a while back:
    - awesome livejournals
    - old spice shaving song
    - Dear Mom, I went to the party lying on the pavement
    - "Until I get the sun and your lips both pressing on my skin"

Amazing.  Simply amazing.  You'd think that they'd prevent results from search.msn.com, but...  [shrug]


This happens to be entry 666.  Feel the evil.


On a related note, I was talking with Choco Billy and Patrick yesterday, wondering out loud when I was going to get my SIN [Single Identification Number].  I think it's the way to go, especially if they embed it in everyone's hand.  Easy access.  I'm not being facetious.  I want my SIN.  And my flying car.  Where is my flying car?

Slept a lot this weekend; the past week's been tiring.  There was the night of overtime, Tuesday, and then there was the longest day, Friday.

Why was Friday the longest day?  To begin with, I'd only slept for about an hour and a half, from about four-thirty to six in the morning.

Why four-thirty?  That's when I got home after some car shenanigans with Bryan Bishé.  He'd surrendered his keys earlier in the night and couldn't get them back, so we walked to my house, where we picked up my van [my mother's, really, mine only to differentiate between it and Bryan's].  Then I drove Bryan to his house, where he retrieved his spare key, and back to Mark's to pick up Bryan's van.

Why was Bryan's van at Mark's?  He drove it over there, after picking me up.  Why were we over there?  Well, it was St. Patrick's Day, as you might know.  I was not up to much at midnight, talking to Jon online, when he reminds me that Bryan is home for spring break.  So I call him.  He is bored as well, and he remembers that Mark mentioned something going on in his basement.  So we go over, drink, play some poker.  The people there are... well, marginally better than the people who are there normally.  Of course, since they're not vomiting on the floor and being whore-like [with one exception for the latter], this isn't difficult.

So then I went to work, where some asshat coworkers [not the not-dicks I spoke of when I first started working here, but some new guy and a couple of people who work in the same area as me] decided to make fun of the fact that I bring my lunch most days.  Oh, fun.

So that was Friday.

The weekend was uneventful; I bought a couple of Neil Gaiman books: American Gods and Neverwhere.  I've read the latter before, borrowing it from Jack, but for no particular reason I now want my own copy.

So I posted the new design Friday.  It doesn't really have a name, like the others have had.  But the .css file's named thunderstorm, so that'll do for a name.  The XHTML strict button at right reveals my shame.  Some of my old entries [the ones I was too lazy to update into compliance] are invalid as XHTML.  Woe.  But I'll still be able to sleep at night...  Well, as easily as I could before.

Correction:  Now, every entry is XHTML-compliant.  For clarification, edits were made to structure, not content.

While at Barnes and Noble last night, picking up the aforementioned Neil Gaiman books, I also bought a Moleskine notebook.  Long have I pined for one, but never treated myself.  Like my obsession with leather-bound journals, the Moleskine notebook seemed too pure for me to taint with my asinine jotting.  But no more.

Well, for a little while more.  I have yet to actually write anything in it.  I plan to cut apart my little wire-bound notebook, the one that's been nestled within the folds of my wallet for two years now, and put its pages into the folio attached to the Moleskine.

Can't lose the memories.  For example... Here's the scrap of paper with Abbie's phone number.  Sigh.

It's half past eight.  Why the hell am I still in the office?  I'm for home.

So I'm working on a comment system, in my spare time.  When I'm done with that, it'll go up along with an RSS feed, which I've already written.  Why bother with an RSS feed, you ask, when I have, at best, five regular readers?  No real reason.  I just got bored and started reading random articles.

I finished American Gods last night.  Neil Gaiman writes well, but his plots seem to be a tad predictable.  I found myself just waiting for the betrayal.  Still, it was an intriguing story, and I'll probably read it again later to reassess where it lies on the foreshadowing-predictability spectrum.  For now, I've started on Neverwhere again.

I just don't get how people talk to complete strangers.  My father's a good example.  A few weeks ago, I went out to dinner with him and a couple of his business associates.  They proceeded to chat up the waitress, as well as the restaurant's owner.

How do you know what to say?

I went to Barnes and Noble on Saturday night.  I was close to finishing Neverwhere, and Dune was on deck, but I wanted to queue up some others.  So I went and bought seventy dollars' worth of books.  Neil Gaiman's Good Omens [which I read once, before dating Kate] and Stardust, the three Halo books, the three Myst books, and the complete Amber series by Zelazny [which I haven't read since high school, when I borrowed the series from Bryan Bishé].  They ought to last me for a good while.

Right, the connection.  The girl ringing me up said she liked my jacket [the black Social Distortion one from the concert a while back].  So we talked for a while about what kind of music Social Distortion played; she moved on to talking about this band a friend of hers plays in.  By my estimate, every third sentence out of my mouth was either "I'm sorry?" or "I'm sorry."  When she was done scanning, I paid and left.  I [perhaps too] eagerly took my bag and left.  Prolonged interaction still makes me very nervous.

So that was about an hour of my Saturday night.

I'd left the house at a quarter to eight to hit the liquor store before it closed.  I bought a six-pack of Guinness and a handle of SoCo; it took the woman behind the register a good five minutes to analyze my license.  She'd forgotten what the year was.  While walking back to the van, I passed a pair of couples exiting a nearby café.  As I neared the van, one of the men yelled out, "Sir!" and jogged up to me.  He asked me if there was liquor in the bag; for a moment, I wondered if I was about to be mugged.  Upon my affirmative [though cautious] answer, he asked to see ID.  The other male at this point shouted, "Come on, man; you're off duty."  He returned my license, said, "Have a good night," and walked back to his friends.  I muttered something along the lines of, "Yeah... you, too..." and got in my van.

There was the aforementioned trip to Barnes and Noble, and then I went home.  I drank and read in complete silence.  It was nice.  I finished Neverwhere and made about thirty pages' progress into Dune.  Sometime after two I seem to have had the idea to go into the darkened living room and sit on the couch.

When I woke up, it was noon Easter Sunday and my sister was calling repeatedly to ask if I wanted to dye eggs.  I had no hangover.

When she finally came home, having failed to locate a store with Easter egg dye still in stock, we settled on the idea of coloring eggs with markers and baking an Easter Spam brick.  It was an amusing time; I should post the picture of my sister carving the Spam brick.  Perhaps we've stumbled upon a new holiday tradition.

Then we lazed about until our parents got home [they've been down on Hilton Head Island for the past week].  I watched the premiere of Grey's Anatomy.  Yay for Katherine Heigl [playing a character named Isabel—it seems Topolsky's career evaluation was correct].  Boo, everything else, especially the neurotic main character/narrator.

Yep.  So I'm working late again.  I logged just under fifty-three hours last week.  Thirteen hours of overtime is about four hundred dollars, gross.  Sweet deal.

Recently, with my heretofore-unused "fat stacks of cash", I purchased the unholy trinity of La Pucelle: Tactics, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, and Phantom Brave.  It's like something out of a fairy tale dream, my friends.

Phantom Brave arrived first, so I started playing it Friday night.  I wasn't all that impressed.  Grid-based battles give me a sense of underlying structure; I don't much care for the anarchy of Phantom Brave's positioning system.  On a related note, I don't like using the analog stick; their completely disabling the d-pad doesn't sit well with me.  In addition, the voice acting made me cringe from its terribleness; the main character [a little girl] is like Flonne, only... more annoying and, obviously, with many more lines.  I only finished three of twenty chapters before falling asleep and didn't get around to it due to the events of Saturday, but there's some promise there; it lies beyond the mute button.


The events of Saturday?  Well, that's when the other two games arrived.  Once I had my greedy little hands on Disgaea, I spared no time in acquainting it with my PS2.  Oh, how I missed it during our half-year [it's been that long?] of separation.  I probably spent twenty-hours this weekend continuing where I left off, acquiring Gladiators to make any one character a powerhouse [and thus make it easier for them to earn a hundred and eighty-five thousand stored levels].

Sigh.  So I'm at work, daydreaming of getting home and playing Disgaea.  This is familiar.

So Ron [my boss] is on vacation this week.  Last Saturday morning, he jumped in his pickup truck and took off for Arizona.  The office isn't too different.  Slow is still slow.  I do feel bad for Patrick, who's shouldering the lion's share of Ron's responsibilities, and that's in addition to taking care of his own work.  I did ask him if there was anything I could help out with, but there isn't, really.  Ah, well.

For the first few months here at BMS, home was your standard cube.  You know, one of those with the fabric walls that are about six feet tall.  Last week I [along with the rest of the web group] moved into new cubes.  The walls are still...  not load-bearing, but they do cover the entire floor-to-ceiling span.  And I've a sliding glass door, now.  It's pretty nice.  I brought in some speakers.  They're my old 2.1 set; I wanted to bring in my 5.1 system, as I wasn't using it at home, but my computer here hasn't a capable sound card.  Alas.  Still, I can now slide my door closed and crank the music.  Good times.

I remember that shortly after I wrote this entry mentioning a few things I wanted to do before dying, Lacy asked me for the full list.  I didn't really have one, just ideas that I wrote down in random places.  Here are the ones I've found.

To-Do List, in no particular order [as of 07 April 2005]

• Fly a plane, from takeoff to landing
• Drive across the continental United States
• Experience terminal velocity
• Fall in love at first sight, marry that person
• Live a meaningful life
• Bathe in the blood of my enemies
• Own a flying car
• Go hunting and return not empty-handed
• Win a Fields Medal
• Make a meaningful sacrifice for the greater good
• Run for public office
• Grow wings
• Write something longer than one hundred pages that people actually want to read
• Get in a bar brawl and win or, at least, inflict more damage than I receive
• Own a house
• Learn to cook something complicated
• Climb something tall
• Dance in public without embarrasing myself
• Own/Operate a bar
• Receive a cybernetic implant
• Acquire the then-current sum total of human knowledge

I'll let you know if there are any additions.

In other news... what the fuck?

Carrie just told me that she named her laptop Gibson after William motherfuckin' Gibson.  That is, bar none, the sexiest thing I have ever heard her say [although I suppose I should say, that I have ever seen her type].

I don't think I need help.

Oh, man.  Brewer posted this flash animation, Sega Fantasy VI, earlier today.  It is just too good.  It won't be too funny for anyone who hasn't playing Final Fantasy VI, but if you have, it's found gold.  My favorites have got to be the Nintendo 64 and the Game Cube as Edgar and Sabin.

Makes me want to play that game again.

Well, until I remember that Disgaea's waiting at home for me, anyway.

To explain this weekend, I have to start with some backstory.

The trip to Japan last year was borne from my father saying I should see the world while I'm still young.  He mentioned the idea to a business acquaintance of his, one H. W. "Mark" Chen, chairman and president of Mingtai Chemical.  Mr. Chen promptly booked my father and I flights to Japan and Taiwan and reserved hotel rooms in our name all over Japan.  Mr. Chen led us around Tokyo for three days and took us to amazing [and incredibly expensive, I'm sure] restaurants.  Business called him away, but he arranged guides for most of the rest of our trip [other acquaintances of my father's took care of the rest].

We spent the last few days in Taiwan, guided by Mr. Chen's son, Peter, during the day and dining with the Mingtai executive board at night.  The last night, we went to a beer garden, where I got so drunk I threw up on the floor underneath the table; this seems to be my lasting impression.

So this weekend Mr. Chen and one of the executive board members, Mr. Kang, were in town.  So my parents went out to dinner with them, Peter and Alex [Mr. Kang's son; he works with Peter in the Mingtai field office out here].

Last to the table after hanging my coat, I somehow ended up sitting between Mr. Kang and his son.  Over the course of the night, Mr. Kang creepily touches me.  Many, many times.  He pats my arm and hand, sometimes putting his arm around me.  I cast worried looks at my father, but he seems unconcerned.  Alex is absolutely no help in deciphering his father's behavior; he says something like, "In Taiwan, the old people sometimes like to be near the youth to remember."  Sounds like culturally-accepted paedophilia to me, buddy.  Whatever.  Pass the beer.

Dear God, the free-flowing Kirin Ichiban.  Man, can those old guys drink.  Alex, less so.  He looked in pretty bad shape at the end of the night.  In Taiwan, after expelling the contents of my stomach, I worried whether my weakness reflected poorly on my father.  I hope it didn't, but there's nothing to be done about it if it did.  I didn't embarrass myself this time, fortunately.

But, man, was I drunk.

I just made the biggest single purchase of my life thus far: a laptop.  Specifically, a Dell Inspiron 700m.

Why I bought it, I'm not sure.  The 750$ coupon was certainly an incentive, yes; it ended up costing 938$, less than a week plus a day's wage.  And it would be nice to have a non-Mac computer to use in the office.  Of course, these days the Mac-Windows divide isn't so great, if one can say it even exists at all.  In the end, it was probably just long-term coveting of Jon's laptop brought to a head by Carrie's purchase of Gibson.

A couple of weeks, and it shall be mine.

What should I name it?  It's important, you know; the name determines the nature of the beast.  The best [certainly the most apt] name would be Laptop, inspired by Dog in Good Omens, which I finished re-reading last night.  [It was much the same experience as before, if not more enjoyable, as this time I wasn't reading it as part of a courtship ritual.]  Hey, that's what it is, right?

So, Google wants my video, eh?  That must mean they want... 2hands.

Yes, I'm still in the office.  There's some big project due Tuesday, Abatacept.  Or rather, the studio's going to be shooting for this contract on Tuesday, so we've got to have something to show them.  Looks like I might be working this weekend.  Umm... yeah.  And I'll probably be here tomorrow night, instead of at the Meadowlands, watching Jimmy Eat World.

The shaft.

I did, in fact, make it to Jimmy Eat World last night, with my sister, Billy, and three other coworkers [Jane of the snowboarding, Cara, and Eric].  Took a break from the Abatacept.  Woot.

A few open questions:  Fat crowdsurfers, what the fuck are you thinking?  And all crowdsurfers, why must you flail like epileptics?  When did it become acceptable to knee someone in the junk to get them out of your way?

Kids People these days are dipshits.

Other than that, the concert was all right.  Apparently The Format was the opening act.  From what I could hear, they were decent; I was a bit busy getting my game on with overpriced Coors Light.  Came in when Jimmy Eat World came on.  I'm not too familiar with their Futures material, aside from the radio songs.  I liked that they played "No Sensitivity", "Blister" [Abbie's favorite JEW song], and "Lucky Denver Mint", though I imagine those are live standards for them.  'T'would've been nice to hear "Spangle", but I didn't expect them to oblige.

I was under the impression that JEW were the headliners.  As they left the stage without the hint of an encore, I got suspicious.  The fact that the crowd wasn't thinning didn't help the confusion.  I pulled my ticket out of my pocket.

Apparently it was a Taking Back Sunday show, with Jimmy Eat World as the penultimate act.  Oh, man, not again.  I shook it off and decided to make the most of the situation, went back down into the pit with some of "my crew".

I lost them almost immediately after helping one of them [Cara] crowdsurf.  Shortly after that, someone pushed a rather large mosher [while I'm sure he was also a Mostly Organic Substrate Human, I mean the other kind] at me.  My glasses gave a bit and cut three gashes in the area of my right eye.  I bled a bit, rebent my glasses, and continued forward.  Long story short, I bled, encountered many dipshits, and pretended to know the words to many songs.  It was good and all in fun, but I certainly did not love anyone in the pit.

Happy birthday, Carrie.  Have fun relaxin' in that hammock.

I observed the first real sign of summer yesterday [yes, I'm aware it's still spring]: The ice cream man drove by my house.  I don't particularly enjoy the summer, with the daystar's incessant beating, but it's certainly a better season for girl-watching than the winter.

There's this Hoffman-La Roche outing in a couple of weeks, some sort of day trip to Cape May.  My parents are going, and want me to go.  I struck a deal with my father:  If he calls Kelley Truitt [her parents are also Roche employees] and gets her to go, I'll go, too.  We'll see.


How true that is.

So it's 2130 on a Sunday, and I'm in the office.  But I'm headed home soon.  And I'll be able to dry my eyes with a monstrous paycheck later this week.  Over thirty dollars an hour; overtime rocks.

Jon reminded me that I had, in fact, seen Jimmy Eat World before: Warped Tour 2001, Asbury Park, 05 August 2001.  Wow.  I remember so very little about that day.  What do I recall?  There's Fenix TX forgetting the lyrics to their own songs, me hitting the ground during Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, being launched into the air shortly after that, and a feeling of disgust for the other people there.

But... yeah, right after Bleed American came out [24 July 2001], that was when Jon and I bought all their albums.  Seems so long ago.  Ha.  Maybe that's because it was.

Now I'm reminiscing.  Not about going to Home Depot, but about the "good memory" I mention in that entry.  I've got to find those old journal entries.

Anyway.  I'm going home.

My hair is probably the shortest it's been since my first haircut.  It's almost a crewcut.  My barber and I apparently don't see eye-to-eye on the meanings of the words "trim" and "a little shorter".  On the upside, I shouldn't have to comb it for about a month.  Actually, it's more like I won't be able to comb it for a month.

That week of hell worked out well in the end; I logged almost sixty hours and made just short of a grand, after taxes.  I also got free beer and steak out of the deal.  All in all, I'd say it was a fair trade.

My laptop came in Thursday.  She went through a few names in the first couple of days.  First Sublett, then Gunhead, then Wintermute.  Wintermute felt like too cold of a name, but his brother's name didn't feel appropriate, either.  The laptop received her final name late Friday night: Hierophant.  She plays well with Confessor, my newer desktop [so named because he holds all my porn].  Presbyter [my older desktop] refuses to share his Internet connection with his new little sister, though.

Finished the Halo trilogy.  They were... well, the story was all right, but what I'll remember most about the books are the numerous errors.  They must have skimped on the editing budget, as the books are rife with continuity problems [the number of SPARTANs in a training exercise drops by eight without any casualties, a character who the author makes clear is not present suddenly gets thrown against a bulkhead, a SPARTAN whose left arm is blown off manages to raise his left hand in a feeble salute minutes later], typoes ["colleges" instead of "colleagues", "carriages" instead of "cartridges"], and math errors [three rockets aimed at each of two Banshees equals four, six Ghosts covered by three Marines each results in "more than two dozen"].  Ruined the reading experience.

Before those three, though, I read Stardust.  Despite the casually-inserted gore, it's an incredibly cute, quick read.  It'd do for a good bedtime story for non-squeamish children.

I don't know what the hell's wrong with TV.  According to my mother, last week on CSI: Miami Valera quit.  And it looks like next week, Calleigh gets shot.  Cameron left the hospital on House.  Jorja Fox has a knife to her throat in the previews for tomorrow's CSI.  Oh, TV, why hast thou forsaken me?  Why must you take away everything I love?

I turn to Star Trek: Enterprise for solace.  Mmm... the Mirror Universe.  It certainly won't betray me—  No, wait.  Betrayal is the only thing you can count on someone from the Mirror Universe for.  Well, dang.

Had lunch with Brewer today, as the company he works for [BackOffice, I think was the name] was hired to do some database work for BMS.  It was nice to see him.  Maybe I will visit Worcester someday.

I bought some new bootlaces last Saturday, as my right bootlace has slowly, over the course of a year, deteriorated from slightly-frayed to hanging-on-by-a-string.  I haven't gotten around to switching them, but not from a lack of time.  Everything holds memories for me.  The shoelaces themselves don't; I mean, I remember buying the shoes and how stiff the laces used to be.  I used to have to double-tie them, just so that they wouldn't untie themselves within five minutes.  But it's not like those memories mean anything to me.

However, I look at my laces and see that they're stained red in places.  This happened at Alison's 80s party, some time back in October 2002.  Some sort of hard cider, I believe.  I dressed as Axl Rose.  I apparently didn't write an entry about it, but, to my shock and horror, some pictures remain.  Man, I must have been loaded.

Even the fray itself carries a story.  Jon had come up to Worcester late 17 April 2004, the night before Presidents of the United States of America came to WPI.  Jon was on his way up and I was helping with concert preparations [uh, sort of] when Brittany called and told me to come drinkin'.  Never one to refuse such an offer, I went.  Drunkenness ensued.  As it turned out, New Voices 22 was striking the same night, and the cast party ended up in the same apartment building.  I was trashed and having my ass handed to me in beer pong when Jon arrived.  I remember very little after that, but I'm told I grabbed Chuck's ass quite a bit [enough to make him uncomfortable], bit Josie very hard [I left a bruise that lasted for a week], and apologized to director Hilary over the Rivals fiasco [she absolved me].  My memory fades in around the time the cops busted the parties up and people went and partied elsewhere.  I ended up lying half-in the shower of Kyle's bathroom.  Eventually Jon helped me get my ass home.  Somewhere along the way, my boots became untied and my right lace was ground between the sole and the Worcester pavement, fraying it.

Memories.  I can't just let go of them.

My laptop sleeve came in today.  It's actually designed for a Sony VAIO, but it fits, and the price was right.

Amazon has some issues.  The sleeve came to my house on Friday, but no one was home to sign for it.  I thought it odd that they wanted a signature, as it was worth less than twenty dollars.  So, yesterday, I altered the shipping address to my office.  I see now why it required a signature: sheer size.  The box Amazon shipped it in is 18" x 15" x 8".  Its sole occupant, the sleeve, is 12.5" x 9" x 1.5".  The rest was filler paper.  What a waste.  This is the biggest box they've sent me, and it was for the softest product I've ordered from them.

The weekend in Baltimore was good.  Not very relaxing, but very fun.

I left home around 0800 Friday and arrived in Baltimore just before 1530.  Met Jon and Bryan at the station, kicked around their apartment for a bit while Jon was in class and Bryan went to work, then joined Bryan at the on-campus beer garden.  After a few Rolling Rocks [hadn't had one of those since I lived in Worcester] Jon showed up.  We finished up our beer tickets and went back to their apartment, as it looked like rain was a-comin'.

Interlude: three hours of Law & Order reruns on TNT.

Bryan was invited to a couple of parties: one was the cast party for a Hopkins play, and the other's theme was "don't let your buzz from the beer garden wear off".  We went to the latter first [Alas, over the course of the Law & Order mini-marathon the three of us had sobered up.], where Bryan and Jon played some flip-cup as I drank and observed.  Eventually [around ten or so, I believe] we left that party.  It was just as the ratio was getting better [quantity, not necessarily quality], but at the cast party, the ratio was already very favorable.

There, after procuring drinks [I went with rum and cranberry juice], the three of us scattered for a bit.  I ended up talking to this somewhat cute, very short, drunkenly hyperactive girl named Lisa.  Then she lost interest and drifted off.  And things were going so well; we were talking about math—  Oh.  I see.  Ah, well.

I drifted some more and saw a guy wearing a toga commando [and yes, he proved his commando status].  I had to wash my mind.  So Jon and I coined up for some beirut.  We lost not a game.  When that died, we played some pool.  Then it was something like five in the morning, and dispersal was well underway, so we cut out.  The pouring rain made it quite the walk back.

I can't really remember what happened then.  Some drying-off... and then black.

I'll cover Saturday later.

I had a pretty decent [I know, I'm so enthusiastic] Cinco de Mayo last night.  I should write about that.  And the Baltimore Saturday.  I'll try to get around to it.  But I should write about a couple of things before I forget them.  First up, another interview.

<!-- interview meme -->


<!-- /interview meme -->

One item down.

Next item, a news piece: Morse Code Still Beats SMS [via Textually.org and Engadget].  A 93-year-old man telegraph operator beat out a 13-year-old girl in a text-messaging race.  Now, there's experience to be considered, of course, but she was using internet text-message shorthand, while he tapped the message ["Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing."] verbatim.  I still claim it as a victory for the forces of the Light.

Fuck you, retarded children.  Stop contributing to the decay of the written language.

All right.  I've got to finish this work, and then it's time to head home.

Like a vicious cycle, or the Germ, the Interview Meme continues to go 'round.  You can get back at me when I implement the comment system.  Or, you can email me, if you can't wait that long.

<interview meme>


</interview meme>

I was going to give a blow-by-blow account of the Saturday I spent in Baltimore, but there's really no point.  Jon's friend Kat put up a picture gallery of the party.  It's full of pictures of people I don't know.  Not all the pictures she took are included, alas; my favorite among those missing is a picture Kat took of her own chest.  But if she saw fit to not post it, then I shan't share my copy.

So, instead of the details, you will get an abridged version.  Hopefully this will be enough such that I remember things clearly upon reading this later.


Something about the aforementioned Kat.  I can't justify it as well now, having come home and compared their pictures side-by-side, but at the party she reminded me of Carrie.  A lot.  So much so that I kept calling her Carrie when we were playing asshole.  Their political views couldn't be more different, but they do share that irresistible Southern drawl.  That must have been it.

Before the party, I played some Final Fantasy X-2 and helped label beer.  Oh, the beer.  There was at least a gross.  Two, perhaps.

Early on, Jon and I rocked the beirut table.  As if it were a casbah, an observer might say.  Regarding the picture, perhaps I felt the stirrings of heartburn, or I had beer/ball-wash-water on my hand.  Anyway, I bailed when we no longer had any challengers, but Jon kept going.

Another good reason to depart, aside from going out on top, was that asshole was starting up.  Once I sat down at the card table, I pretty much stayed there the rest of the night.  We moved from asshole to poker and back.  Eventually, it was Jon, Bryan, me, and a couple of other guys playing asshole at six in the morning.  By that time, everyone had left.


On Sunday, I of course blew off taking the bus I was supposed to, then missed the later bus I was shooting for, and finally took one that landed me in Port Authority half an hour after the last local serving my area left.

It was a good weekend.  I was hoping to do it again a couple of weeks from now, but as it turns out, I'll be in Arizona instead.

Movin' on.

Cinco de Mayo.  05-05-05.  Payout on the calendric slot machine.  I went to some event at the On The Border near the office with some coworkers.  The entertainment was pretty poor, but the beer was good [the non-Corona beer, that is].  I hadn't had a Rolling Rock since I was in Worcester.  It's not exactly a rare commodity here in Jersey; I'd just never bothered to buy myself any.

Some moments of note:  For the first time, someone noted my Social Distortion jacket and asked me if I was old enough to even know who they were.  I gave that woman [she was a new proofreader, I believe] an incomplete—but nonetheless comprehensive—discography.  It felt good, as the type of person she was accusing me of being bothers me as well.

There was this game of grab-ass going on at one point.  I don't think I started it, but I can't say for sure.

There's this thing I do in the office.  I walk up behind someone quietly—  Most people's desks face away from their doors, and I'm not aiming for stealth; I just don't stamp my feet, I suppose.  Anyway, I walk up behind them and place my hand on their shoulder lightly.  I started doing it to my sister.  Then her friends [i.e.: Jane, Cara, Risa] commented that that was creepy.  So, of course, I had to start doing that to them.  At On The Border, they decided to get me back.  Uneventfully, for the most part.  But then Cara has a go.  She walks up and puts her left hand on my shoulder, her drink in her right.  I placed my hand atop hers on my shoulder.  She, for some reason, freaks out and spills her drink right down the front of my shirt and along my left leg.  I am still puzzled as to how I startled her.  Luckily, I had come prepared, wearing a t-shirt and my drinkin' jeans.

Thus clears my backlog of entries.  Well, the recent backlog, anyway.


Oh, right.  Video games.  That's how my time's been spent, recently.

I put Disgaea on the backburner for Final Fantasy X-2 when the latter came in a few weeks ago [just before I went to Baltimore].  A brief review:  It's not at all like its predecessor.  This is both good and bad.  On one hand, I liked the turn-based battle system of FFX.  I could take as much time as I wanted to decide a course of action, or I could walk away from a battle if I wanted a drink and be sure that nothing would happen while I was gone.  FFX-2 goes back to the ATB system, of which I am not all that fond.  I am a fan, however, of the job and skill systems, which remind me of Final Fantasy Tactics, my favorite of the series.

Games I have bought, started, and not yet completed: Rise of Nations, Final Fantasy X-2 [though that's what I'm working on now], Phantom Brave, and Disgaea.  With regards to Disgaea, I beat the single-player campaign a long time ago, but I am far from done with it.

Games I have bought, unwrapped, and not touched since: La Pucelle Tactics, Deus Ex: Invisible War, and Star Ocean: Till the End of Time.

This is good, as my fresh book supply is running dangerously low.

As I lay in bed last night I some memories floated to the surface, with no chain of association I can think of.  I'm shocked I let the occasion slip my mind this year.  Time just seems to be slipping away these days, but that's no excuse.

Happy belated birthday, Katie.  I'm sorry.


Hm.  Perhaps it was hearing Tool's "Ænema" on the way home from work that triggered it.  Perhaps it just took longer than usual to work my way down the line to you.  Not much of a chain, though:  "Ænema" to "H." to you, singing.

I'm here in Arizona, so I've switched to MDT.  It's very... warm.  And bright.

For some reason, my parents couldn't get regular plane tickets.  First class was interesting.  On the first leg of the flight [EWR to DFW], we ended up next to this character:


That's right.  Retired Air Force Brigadier General Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager.

Aside from some slight hearing problems, I'd never have guessed he was over eighty years old.

On the second, shorter, leg [DFW to PHX], Yeager was replaced with the Reverend Al Sharpton.  That was... odd.  We didn't talk to him.

Damn.  I meant to bring my Refreshments collection with me.  Must've been a slip of the mouse; I brought Remy Zero instead.  Oh, well.

So this is Phoenix.

Hit Taliesin West earlier tonight.  Aside from the prospect of various desert creatures wandering through, I'd love to live there.  According to the tour guide, Frank Lloyd Wright was a man ahead of his time; we apparently have him to thank for such things as air conditioning, steel office furnishings, and track lighting.  Hey, the guy was a master architect, but those stories seemed apocryphal to me.

Went to some restaurant/brewery in Scottsdale named Rock Bottom.  Their name also serves as my impression of their beer.  I'm not like Jon, who's able to write descriptive reviews.  I rely on the old binary scale, and the three beers I tried [the brown ale, the stout, and the Irish red] each definitely scored a zero.  The food was all right, though.

Today's adventure was Sedona.  It's about two hours north along I-17 from home base, Scottsdale.


It was quiet... except for the gigantic insects doing flybys of my head.  I say insects, as they flew so fast I could not ID a single one; each was like a sound check at a Black Sabbath concert.

There were a lot of red rocks, a surprising amount of greenery, and not much else.  Another nice place to live.

Why?  Why are they following me?

Went to the Grand Canyon a couple of days ago.  How was it?  It was grand.

We also went—following my boss Ron's suggestion—to Wupatki National Monument, which is a bunch of Indian Native American settlement ruins.  That was rather hard to enjoy, as the resident flying insects were even more frisky than those in Sedona.

I have plenty of pictures.  But now it's time to hunt/gather me some dinner.

A couple of nights before leaving Arizona, I went to dinner with my parents and enjoyed a very good beer.  It was a Deschutes Brewery Black Butte Porter.  Unfortunately, the restaurant didn't carry the Obsidian Stout; other than the porter, the only Deschutes beer they offered was the Mirror Pond Pale Ale.  My father ordered one; it did not change my mind wrt pale ales.

I then hit the local Jillian's, to my parents' dismay.  I cashed in my old Jillian's card [from 2001] for five dollars or so.  It was so old, it used a magnetic stripe instead of a barcode; the girl at the register basically asked me how much I had left on it.  I've a feeling I could have conned more credit out of her, but...  I'm not a very good liar.  Then again, I don't really remember how much was on it, so it's not really lying.

So I played a few games, then hit the bar there.  Had a few.  This punk wearing a Decepticon wristband, who was next to me at the bar, apropos of nothing remarks that I'd picked an odd place to drink.  I responded with a question, asking him why he was there.  Seems the bartender was an acquaintance of his.  I got a couple of free drinks out of that, as well as a suggestion on where to hit next.  Well, actually, the place he suggested was Rock Bottom.  You remember Rock Bottom.

Well, the beer was no better this time.  Decepticon punk [whose name I eventually found out was Zach [or Zack or Zac]] and I run into these two guys on the way in, who ask us where they might score "pussy" and "herb".  I defer to the local, though Zach does not understand the latter request, so I have to explain what they're looking for.  In the end, Zach can help them with neither.  Then the alpha creep casually mentions their expensive hotel room full of "party favors".  He elaborates on these door prizes; apparently they have a stockpile of cocaine, crack, and other narcotics.  I wonder why they're looking for pot, if they truly have such a narcotic smorgasbord.  We leave them standing outside, waiting to consult other passersby.

I drink some not-so-good beer; I play some pool with this rather cute girl named Rachel.  It's a good time.

Zach has a few too many.  Under the effect of beer goggles [I hope], he starts making out with this girl at the bar and eventually leaves with her.  Alex comes by after Jillian's closes down, shortly before Zach takes off.  He actually says something along the lines of, "Beer goggles much?"  I chuckled and said that that must be it.

When there were less than ten people left in the place I took my leave and headed back to the hotel.

I should have learned my lesson from Japan: wandering around from bar to bar is, in fact, a good way to spend time in a strange city.  I should have done it more than just that night.  But then it was the night before leaving, and the flight out was early, so...  Oh, well.  In the future, I will hit the bars the first night and keep at it.

Ha.  MC Sisko.

So, yesterday, I found [was given, really] a bootleg of Star Wars: Episode III.  Now, I did see the midnight showing opening day, but I'm mentioning the bootleg now to segue into my review of it.

In short, I liked it, but then I'm a fan of the franchise.  Episode III isn't so good as to trigger any conversions, but I consider the experience worth the twenty dollars [I saw it twice opening day].  Briefly:

Cons	For some reason, Natalie Portman doesn't look very good this time around. Lucas still can't write decent romantic dialogue. Hayden Christensen still can't act. Lefties comparing Palpatine and Bush: Shut your pie holes, idiots.  "Episode III is a political statement" is as ridiculous a claim as "Michael Moore is intelligent".
Pros	Lots of hot saber-on-saber action Lots of action in general James Earl Jones Wookies

The rest of what I have to say may be considered spoilers, but only if you, in fact, are so dumb as to not have already sussed out, based on the other movies, what was going to happen in this one.

According to IMDb, Samuel Jackson told Lucas he would do Episode III if Mace Windu died in a blaze of glory and not "like some sucka" or like "some punk".  Jackson was satisfied with his death scene.  I was definitely not.  Yes, he is not slaughtered like a youngling [man, I hate that term; why can't they be called Jedi-in-training or young Force-sensitives?], and there is a lengthy fight.  But he then dies from being Force-thrown/-lightning-ed out of a window.  [Well, he really dies from hitting the mythical surface of Coruscant.]  That is not a death worthy of a hero.

Let's talk about that fight some more.  It starts when Mace rolls deep with his crew of three bad motherfuckers hard, pipe-hittin' niggers Jedi homeboys to the Chancellor's crib to arrest his Sith ass.  Not twenty seconds after Palpatine whips out the gat his saber [Mace and his dawgs having drawn theirs when Mace announces the arrest], all three homeboys [including my boy, Kit Fisto] are dead.  That's bullshit.  Sure, Palpatine's dark arts make him stronger than his pansy-like appearance would lead one to believe, but taking on four Jedi Masters, and disposing of three so easily?  No.  No, no, no.  Clearly, he h4x.  Aimbot or some shit like that.

Order 66 was necessary and all, but why'd they have to kill Aayla Secura?  Plenty of Jedi are supposed to have escaped the Great Jedi Purge; why, oh, why couldn't she have?  Yes, this is a personal thing, not a problem per se.  No, I can't explain why I find blue, Twi'lek women attractive, but not green-skinned, Orion slave-women.

General Grievous: Am I supposed to scared of this guy?  I want to find his designer and find out was he [or she] was thinking when he/she gave Grievous a heart.  Judging from its combustibility, I'd guess it was the center of his power system.  If that was indeed what it was, wouldn't you want to, oh, I don't know, have more protection for it than a couple of metal plates that don't even visually conceal it?  I've got a theory:  Grievous was once the friendly Tin Man, as seen in The Wizard of Oz, but was twisted by those shifty Japs the Trade Federation.

A few questions for which I have no answers:  How did it take twenty years to build the first Death Star and only four years to get the second to the state it was in during the Battle of Endor?  If the Emperor has clones of himself made, why is he still disfigured in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi?  What kind of fucked-up definition do the Jedi have for the word balance?

I thought there'd be more behind the names Luke and Leia.  I thought we'd see Anakin and Padme talking about names or find out if they were named after some relatives of Anakin's or Padme's.  Alas, no.

So those were my concerns with the movie.  But there was plenty to like.  Bail Organa rollin' deep in the Tantive IV.  Tarkin in his pre-Grand-Moff days.  Wedge's father [even though Wedge was from Corellia, not Alderaan].  Yoda's Ginzu action.  The final stages of evolution in the clone army's uniforms.  An explanation for the visage of the Emperor and the purpose of the suit [when I first saw the movies, I thought they were both just really, really old].  Then there was the unintentional humor: the look of confusion on Padme's face when Obi-Wan comes out from hiding on Padme's ship to confront Anakin, the blitzball arena where Palpatine uses the hard sell on Anakin, the tone of Palpatine's voice in response to Mace Windu's claim that the Sith will never rise.

I'd say it's second only to Empire among the Star Wars movies.

Last night, I continued my attempt to complete the Via Infinito in Final Fantasy X-2 [a tough, random, hundred-floor dungeon].  I'd made it about ten floors further than where I started before I started getting very tired.  Very tired as in drifting in and out of consciousness.  So I'm stumbling around the floor [thirty-six, I think], because I can't remember where I've gone before and because I'm looking for the blue portal [to get back to the surface].  I keep running into behemoths [specifically, humbabas].  Apparently I fall asleep, run into one, and sit there while the party gets slaughtered.  I woke up this morning to the Game Over screen.  Damn it.

Still, the Via Infinito is much easier than the Cave of Trials in Star Ocean: The Second Story.  Man, I couldn't even get halfway through that shit.


I'm going to take this opportunity to explain how the search function works.  Well, how it's worked since thunderstorm, anyway.  Searches are case-insensitive.  Quotation marks around a substring in the search string includes the spacing in the search, otherwise the search string will be broken by spaces.  This is not coming out right.  How about some examples?  Searching for what the fuck will results in all [111] entries that contain the words what, the, and fuck, though they don't have to be adjacent or in that order.  However, searching for "what the fuck" will net you only the [twenty-six] entries that contain that entire phrase.  The checkboxes indicate in what parts of entries you want to search.  I could find all [twelve] entries I wrote while listening to the Get Up Kids, for instance, or all [eleven] entries whose titles have roots in Black Lab material.

So, now you know.  And knowing is half the battle.

Played poker [Texas Hold 'em only, of course, as that's the popular game these days] with people from work tonight.  It was fun.  With the amount of Jack I drank, it would've been fun regardless of outcome.  But I took down first place.  Won sixty dollars [on a twenty-dollar buy-in].


If I had a good luck charm, it would have to have been the panda.

Playing with money [and more than, say, five dollars] was more fun; people have an ongoing interest in the game.  It keeps people from bailing.  This is only the second time I've played for actual money, the first being the previously-alluded-to five-dollar game.  I dropped from that game, actually, as the other players weren't very fun to play with.  Not in the sense that they were good at the game and making me feel embarrassed.  No, they were... idiots, I believe, is the term.  Bishé ended up taking those kids down.  He'd probably have done me in, had I stayed.

But yes, twenty dollars keeps people motivated.

I do believe the blinds should have been raised more often.  Half of the players weren't feeling too confident, so they didn't want to blinds to go up too fast.  So we played about half an hour at one-two, then another half-hour at two-four and another at three-six.  Then we went to ten-twenty for two hours or so before people started to wise up as to how slow things were proceeding.  We settled on doubling the blinds every time a player busted out.  Things flowed much more quickly after that.  So, yeah, the blind raising.  Perhaps the game wouldn't have taken five hours, then.

Anyway, sleep now.

Man, I've got to pick up that new Gorillaz album.  And Devils & Dust.  And a double-aught screwdriver.

So I received this email from Ticketmaster last Friday, reminding me that an event for which I purchased tickets is less than a week away.  The event is Alkaline Trio at Starland on 25 June.  Last Friday was 10 June.  Fifteen days > a fortnight >> a week.  Computer problems?

I finished Final Fantasy X-2.  I didn't get full completion [99%, and damned if I can pin down that missing 1%], but I just don't feel that it's worth it to New Game+ it to 100%.  So I've moved on to other games.  But not any of those I've mentioned before.

I've got to stop buying games faster than I can finish [or even start] them.  I bought five more in the past few weeks:

Rez:  I've been looking for a copy of this game for a long, long time.  I even considered getting a mod chip for my PS2 in order to play a Japanese copy.  And yes, I did indeed buy the vibrator, too.

Burnout 3: Takedown:  I have two problems with the Gran Turismo games:  One is that the cars never get damaged.  The other is that the focus is on the makes and models of the cars.  The Burnout line does racing right.  I'm not too big on the latter's music selection, though.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant:  I just had to see this for myself.

Front Mission 4:  Turn-based wanzer battles!  I love Front Mission.

... Damn, I can't even remember what the fifth is.  Wait.  It's coming to me.

Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht:  Eh.  I heard it was good, and Gamestop had a buy-two-get-one-free deal.

But I'm not completely starving my brain; I bought the new Nick Hornby book, A Long Way Down.  It's about four people on the verge of committing suicide, so it's not exactly uplifting.  But if you know me, you know that's what I like.

That's the news, and I am out of here.

I've been looking at MicroATX boxes and boards; I want to build a little media box.  I'd have to get a nicer TV or a large monitor.  Don't know if it's really worth the price, though.  The total cost would probably be somewhere in the area of two grand.

I should really buy a power supply for Confessor.  That thing's been loud ever since I made him.  Also, he probably needs a bigger'un, for all that's inside of him.

So I got Verizon DSL at home.  [James Earl Jones could sell me anything.]  I'd have preferred to get cable, but my father is against any development of the idiot box.  Either way, excelsior.  Hopefully I'll be able to find the episodes of Space: Above and Beyond I don't have.  Ah, I have to remember to pick up a [wireless, for Hierophant] router sometime.  It's a shame Netgear doesn't put their equipment in those featureless, blue, steel boxes anymore; those cases were far more aesthetically pleasing than these curved grey plastic deals [no offense, Hierophant].

Burnout's music is growing on me.  Well, not too much of it, just Midtown's "Give It Up", and Sugarcult's "Memory".  It's funny; "Give It Up" is on Living Well Is the Best Revenge, a CD I've had for over three years but listened to perhaps twice.  The soundtrack also has songs by Ash and Local H, and they're good in my book.

I have been informed that "Give It Up" is, in fact, not on Living Well Is the Best Revenge.  This simply emphasizes how little I've listened to that album.

I had a beer with lunch.  I no longer have the motivation to do anything besides drink more.

I have broadband at home.  Excelsior.

Happy birthday, Lindsay.  I'm still not sure if I'm coming to your and Pat's wedding, but then again, I'm still not sure if I'm invited.

Now that I have a high-speed Internet connection and a disposable income, I want to get into a MMORPG.  I'm thinking Guild Wars, ideally.  [You can't beat no monthly charge.]  A very close second choice: Final Fantasy XI [12.95$ per month].  A very distant third: World of Warcraft [14.95$ per month].  I am seeking people of a like mind to party with.  Sure, I could just start playing and try to find people online, but naturally I'd prefer to play with people I already know.

Some things about me that you should know:

I am not a "rusher"; I savor every bit of the playing experience.  Some say I am too slow.  These people are fools.

Sometimes [not frequently, but it's happened quite a few times], I play while intoxicated.  I promise that if we play together, I won't just watch as you get slaughtered [if I am conscious. that is], but I may not be of much help.

So, any takers?

I don't know why I opened this window, other than because I have a minute.  I've nothing to say, really.

You know, life in general is pretty good.  I've got a very nice job with some very nice coworkers, and it pays very nicely.  That parallel structure just fell short, didn't it?  Oh, well.

I do have a couple of complaints.  I've never been one to track people down in order to hang out.  I wait to be called.  This generally doesn't happen, and so my nights are generally spent at home, reading or playing video games.  I've been trying to change this, but there are so few people in the area with whom I'd like to hang out.  And sometimes, they don't pick up.

My second and final complaint is that I don't have a significant other.  But that'll happen when it happens, and I don't believe desperation is reason enough to be with just anyone [at least, I don't believe that anymore].  Of course, my life right now does not exactly bring me into contact with loads of single girls who are of appropriate geekiness.  But where I might find those girls?

And upon meeting them, what to say?

But anyway... aside from a couple of issues, life's all right.

It is too damned early.


As always, Nick Hornby, you have hit the mark.

Inspired by Lacy's MySpace post about bands she's seen live, this is a list of all the bands I've seen live.  Like her, I am limiting myself to bands that matter.

Alkaline Trio American Hi-Fi x2 Ash The Ataris x2 * Bad Religion x2 Better Than Ezra Big D and the Kids Table Blink 182 x4 * Bouncing Souls * Brand New x3 † Catch 22 x4 *† Counting Crows x2 Dashboard Confessional x2 Dropkick Murphys * Eve 6 x2 Everclear x2 The Exies Fenix TX x3 * Ben Folds Goldfinger x2 Good Charlotte * Green Day Hot Rod Circuit ≥4 † Jimmy Eat World x2 * Juliana Theory x3 * Less Than Jake x2 * The Living End x2 *

Me First and the Gimme Gimmes * Mest x3 *† Midtown x3 *† The Movielife x3 New Found Glory x2 * Our Lady Peace Ellis Paul x3 Pennywise * Presidents of the United States of America Rancid * R.E.M. Reel Big Fish x3 Saves the Day x2 Silverchair Social Distortion SR-71 Sugarcult * Sum 41 * Taking Back Sunday x4 † That Fleeting World x2 They Might Be Giants Unwritten Law VAST Yellowcard † Yuma House Zebrahead x2

* saw this band at Warped Tour 2001 † saw this band at Skatefest 2002

I am so scene.  Ha.  In my defense, if I were to remove the bands I wouldn't cross the street to piss on if they were on fire, the list would shrink dramatically.  And soon, the Alkaline Trio and Counting Crows counts will each be incremented.

I took some coworkers off their coin again, Friday night.  The winnings were a bit smaller this time, only sixty-seven dollars; some of the buy-in was skimmed off to add to the pot in the championship game.  I think more of the skim should have come off the second-place person [who got their full buy-in back], and that the prize should have been proportional to the number of people you were playing against [there were more guys than girls, so I had more competition than the first-place girl].

But that's just me Jewing.

Besides, no matter how much money I'd made, it still would've been spent within twenty-four hours.  On beer.  That's right.  I spent last week's winnings on whiskey; this week's went to beer.  Stouts, all of them, except for this bad, bad Dogfish Head Midas Touch Ale.  That was some nasty stuff.  Actually, I have two bottles of it left.  Did I say it was nasty?  I meant it was... uh... crisp and refreshing.  So, does anyone want them?

So yeah.  I won first place again.  In the big picture of the three-game tournament, this means I'm automatically in the championship game.  Had the same person placed second after me both weeks, they could have won first next week and have had more points than me, but that did not happen.  The second-placers for the first and second games were Eric and Bill K, respectively.  So they each have two points, two other guys have one point each for their third-place showings, and I have six points.

Now, my sister and her boyfriend have not secured their places in the championship.  In fact, it will be rather difficult for either of them to make it.  This means I might make it to the championship game and have no way to get to it.  Oh, cruel fate, how you mock me.

The first-place girl [Cara of the crowdsurfing] also managed to win that position both games, and so, like me, she is guaranteed a seat at the big table.  She [perhaps jokingly] offered to take me should I have no other means.  I should feel out that offer.

Ah, poker: not the sport of kings.

Received some mail today.

So Jon came up from Baltimore this weekend.  He brought his new girlfriend, Tarryn.  At first, I thought it was a step up from his last, Nicole.  Of course, the last time I saw Nicole, she was drunk and standing in her underwear on Jon's porch, yelling at him to come have sex with her.  It's not hard to top that, you know?  And yet, Tarryn managed to fail.  Amazing.

Just to clarify, I was not alone in this judgement.  Lacy independently came to the same conclusion.  I never asked Bryan what he thought of her, although he'd predicted [correctly] that I'd hate her when I met her.

Oh, and if you thought I spent a lot on beer, Jon spent somewhere in the area of eighty dollars on beer.  He and I [and Tarryn] were checking out liquor stores that had received high ratings on ratebeer.com.

Saturday night, I went with Jon, Tarryn, Lacy, Carly, and an acquaintance named Pat to see Alkaline Trio at Starland.  It was all right.  The openers were Thieves Like Us and Rufio, and I couldn't have cared less about either of them.  I didn't know until shortly before the show that Alkaline Trio had released a new album; consequently, I did not recognize a few of the songs they played.  But their set was otherwise satisfying.

Everyone was separated fairly quickly.  At one point I grew tired of songs I didn't know and went to the bar.  After encountering Tarryn off the floor, I was coerced into embarking on a sidequest: find Jon, somewhere on the floor, and retrieve Tarryn's inhaler.  I returned successful, then went back in and found Jon [again].

Somewhere around this point I lost my watch, that one with the numbers rotating around the hands.  It wasn't an expensive watch, but it was a gift from my mother.  She was fine with it when I informed her later, but there wasn't really anything to be done about it at that point.  Ah, well.  So I'm in the market for a new watch.

There were, oddly, a great number of people at the show wearing flip-flops or sandals.  I'm curious as to how many of them made it out with their shoes.  Toward the end I encountered people standing in the pit, barefoot.  I didn't go out of my way to avoid stepping on their feet, but I didn't go out of my way to avoid them, either.  A broken toe or two is the price they must pay for being retarded.

So yeah.  The rest of my weekend.  It was good to see Jon, not so much so with his new girlfriend.  Alkaline Trio rocked, and I may procure their latest album.  Currently I am enjoying the Gorillaz' Demon Days and Springsteen's Devils & Dust.

Out.

I ordered my new watch last night.  It should be on my wrist sometime next week.


Hot.

Man, the office is dead.  There are nine people in the web department: Boss Ron, Midboss Patrick, me, Bill, Kevin, Paul, Hector, Julian, and Sylvia.  Of those, guess how many are in today.  There's me and Hector, and possibly Sylvia [I'm not sure what sort of schedule she's on here].  Everyone else is out.

A tumbleweed just rolled by my office.

Dead.

There's been some talk in a Star Trek fan group, triggered by this letter [the first one on that page] to startrek.com, about Gene Roddenberry's positive vision of humanity's future and how that's what makes the Trek franchise great.

What a load.

The dirty hippies/communists of the Federation are the worst part of the Trek universe.


Why do I like Trek?  I like the noble warrior ethic of the Klingons and the brutal efficiency of the Founders and their Jem'Hadar.  [I have no love for the Vorta, however.]  I think the Borg were on to something with the hive mind thing, but something went off track there.  How did a queen come about, anyway?

I like the moral issues Trek characters face, particularly those related to combat.  It's no surprise that Deep Space Nine is my favorite series.  The episode "In the Pale Moonlight" comes to mind:  The Sisko manipulates the Romulans into entering the Dominion War and deals with the resulting mini-crisis of conscience.

Struggle and conflict.  External [space battles!] or internal [areas of moral ambiguity], it's all good.  That's what I like about Star Trek.  Not Roddenberry's hippie utopia.

WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM
2005 JUL 3

ME=
BLOOMFIELD NEW JERSEY=

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING STOP CEASE BEING AN IDIOT STOP USE SOME BETTER GODDAMNED JUDGMENT STOP THANKS=

YOU

Once upon a time, I saw an unimpressive singer at a Coffeehouse.  I wrote that he ranged "from decent to sucktacular".  Now, I'm not surprised that he eventually read this.  I am confused, however, as to why he would quote said "review" [I admit I'm using the word loosely] on HisSpace.  It's under "Sounds Like".  Hey, I'm cooltacular.

Well, I guess there's that old saying about the nonexistence of bad publicity.

Recently I had the opportunity to catch two bands which I love but have never seen live: the Get Up Kids and the Gin Blossoms.  I saw neither.  I am kicking myself.

Well, partially.  I am kicking myself over not seeing the Get Up Kids.  No one close to me wanted to go.  I could have gone with Pat [the at-best acquaintance who was also at the Alkaline Trio show], but...  I don't know.  I just didn't feel like it then.  I won't have the chance to make the mistake again.  At least, not any time soon.  This was their last tour; in fact, their last show ever was a couple of days ago, out in their homeland of Kansas.  That must have been one good show.  Alas.

The Gin Blossoms' show was at Six Flags [Great Adventure] last Friday.  I'm not too bummed about that one, as it was raining rather hard that day, and the concert would have been outside [I've no idea whether it was cancelled or not].  Also, they're coming back around in August.  So, no worries there.

But the Get Up Kids.  Damn it.

So the summer is a slow time here at the studio, it seems.  A lot of people take half-days on Fridays, and some reduce their hours further.  Not exactly by choice, I am now one of the latter.  My new schedule is Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday.  So, four-day weekend, three-day work week.  Lather, rinse, repeat.


On an unrelated note [unrelated aside from the fact that I have not much else to but sit here and surf], I read something interesting troubling over at AICN.  Disregarding the fact that it's from AICN...  Yay, Angel/Gambit/Beast/Phoenix.  Boo, pretty much everything else.  Actually, boo to how some of the former is being handled.  Fuck it; boo to it all.  I thought the first movie was shaky, but they got their shit together with the second one.  Plus, how could Fox argue with the cash those two movies made?  Way to screw it up.

Well, I guess I'll have to wait and see what kind of impression the first trailer gives.

Other things I am doing with my time: collecting gay porn.  Fiddling with wanzers.  Vibrating.  Smashing cars up.  Ogling a girl from the far side of the pond.

...  Damn, she's good-looking.  Looks a bit like Natalie Woodworth, now that I think of it.

Standing all of five feet and three inches and weighing a hundred and fifteen pounds, I am a pretty small guy.  Compact, spare, I would say.  I imagine that 99.99% of my body is taken up by machinery necessary to everyday function.

That being said, where the hell was I storing all this extra mucus?

I'm glad New York didn't get the Olympics.  My father brought up an interesting point: perhaps bringing Hillary Clinton, whose husband was President during the bombing of the 1996 games in Atlanta, wasn't the brightest of ideas.  Of course, he used vulgarity liberally [oh, the pun] when he said it.  I can't say I like her all that much, either.

But anyway, no Olympics in New York is definitely fine by me.  They've got bigger problems than building a new stadium.  Asshats.

So I've been looking at a nice monitor from Dell, the 2405FPW [the 24" widescreen flat panel LCD].  It's not that I'm a Dell whore; it's just that they offer good deals on a regular basis.  Right now I'm just thinking about whether I want to drop nearly a grand on a monitor when I've just had my hours at work reduced by forty percent.  I'll wait and see how much I'm pulling down per reduced week.

Yes, the reduced hours bother me.  But when there's no work, there's no work.  There's nothing I can do about it, and I can't expect them to keep paying me to sit around and surf.

In other news, I seem to have exhausted the mucus reserve.  The sore throat remains.  I hope it passes before I see Counting Crows tomorrow night.

I stayed in bed an extra three hours to prolong my dream.

I dreamt of Abbie.  No doubt this was triggered the picture of her I stumbled upon last night.

There wasn't much to the dream.  My life was pretty much as it is now, except I was with her.

I would accompany her outside while she smoked.  There was always this strange old gentleman out there, but that was perfectly normal in Dreamland.

Hierophant was there, too, except her hinge was weaker.  In fact, at one point in the dream, Abbie went out to skateboard around my block, and I called Dell technical support about the hinge.  Actually, that was pretty much the end of the dream.


So the last I saw of her was skateboarding away down my street.  Memories are memories, even if I did make it up.

I'm off; I've got some errands to run, and I want to enjoy the rain.

Errands are done.  I sent my router's broken power adapter off to Netgear and bought myself some cough medicine.  These tasks shouldn't have taken too long.  But I locked my keys in the van.

I blame Howie Day.  "Collide" came on the radio as I was parking, so I shut the car off and listened to it.  When it was done, I shut off the radio and locked and left the car.  A few feet away, I thought to check for my keys.  Then I looked in the window and cursed.

And then I waited for a half hour for my sister to bring me the spare key.

Now, I'm at home, looking at that picture of Abbie and enjoying a liquid lunch/breakfast.  Sierra Nevada's stout is quite good.

I'm currently waiting to be seated at a 3$-6$ Texas Hold 'Em table at the Borgata.  It is an extremely long line, though not as long as that of the 1$-2$ No Limit THE table.

Erik has gone off to play 5$-10$ No Limit, and everyone else [my sister, Bill, and Jane] has gone off to watch him.  You need two hundred dollars to even sit down at that table.  I have in my pocket thirty-three dollars.  If I called in what my sister owes me, I'd have seventy.  That wouldn't even be enough for the 2$-5$ No Limit table [for that, you need one hundred].  Also, that's a bit more than I feel comfortable laying on the line tonight.

In other news, the Counting Crows concert was pretty good.  I'll write more about that later.

I think I've made up my mind to not go to Pat's and Lindsay's wedding.  I'll check the registry and send a gift, certainly, but I don't think I'll attend.  It'd just be awkward, and I don't want to ruin their day.  Inadvertently, of course—I wouldn't intentionally cause a scene.

And now, back to the waiting game.

The Crows concert, a summary.  They played fourteen songs.  They hit August and Everything After harder than the other albums, but there were representatives from each album.  I wish it'd been longer [at least as long as the last show of theirs I went to] and that there had been fewer assholes in attendance, but the show was all right.  And Immy's guitar solos were truly excellent.

And now, details, for interested parties:

They kick off with "Round Here".  Before the verse about the girl on the car, Adam repeats, "Sssh...  You can hear my heart."  Then he says, "Can you hear me?  I'm talking to you.  Sometimes I think of nothing but you," before once again repeating, "You can hear my heart."  The girl on the car has her somewhat standard additional lines: "Can't you see my sun's stopped spinning round?  Can't you see that sky turn black and brown?  Can't you see that moon go flashing round?  Can't you see me?"  Of course, the narrator's answer to the last is "No."  And at the end, instead of repeating "Tell me one thing you will remember about me," Adam repeats "There is nothing but you for me."

"Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" is next, pretty much intact.

The only change I can pick up to "Mr. Jones" is the line after "She's perfect for you."  This becomes: "Man, I've got to find a girl for me."

Then "Colorblind", which is not exactly one of my favorite songs.  I don't listen to it too often, so I'm not sure if they insert anything.

During "Rain King", Adam inserts all of "Raining In Baltimore".  After the lines "Three thousand, five hundred miles away, but what would you change if you could?"  he says, "Nothing."  And just before going back to "Rain King", he repeats, "I need a brand new day."

The only change to "Daylight Fading" is a visual one.  Adam makes an appropriate, shocker-like hand gesture during the line "I heard you let somebody get their fingers into you."

"Big Yellow Taxi", "Miami", and "Friend of the Devil" are all intact.  I love "Miami".  During that song [right around "Well, maybe I don't need no angel at all."] I pretty much blow my voice out yelling.  It's weakened due to the cough that I still have.  I find I can still yell if I hold my throat.

Now Charlie busts out the accordion and Adam sits at the piano, a clear sign that "A Long December" is next.  But first, Adam begins playing and singing "Silent Night".  He only does the first few lines, though.  They appeal to the locals by replacing "If you think you might come to California" with "If you think you might come to New York City", to great cheering from people who aren't me.  Why not go all-out and just say, "Atlantic City"?  We also get a free lesson from Adam; after the line "It's been so long since I've seen the ocean" he says, "Those are, like, waves, you know."  Uh... thanks, man.  I was wondering.

Then they invite the openers, the Wayward Sons [more about them later], to join them for the last song, "Hanginaround".  Also, children appear on stage.  I think they're Adam's nephews; he mentioned earlier that his sister was in attendance.  There are a lot of guitars: six, I estimate.  And of course, afterwards, everyone stands around to wait for the encore.  Which comes, naturally, but not before the promoter comes out to rile up the crowd.


I don't get it, either.

The first song of the encore is "Sullivan Street".  After the second and third choruses, they repeat the line "Did she want to run away from me?"  They repeat it a lot.  Other than that, it's unmodified.  They close, unexpectedly, with "Holiday in Spain".  I would think they'd close with a louder/faster song, like "Have You Seen Me Lately?".  But no.  I stand there for a while in disbelief: There's got to be another encore, right?  They're just playing.  Why close with that?  I am wrong.

It's done.

So we left and hit the Borgata.  I lost, by the way.

About the aforementioned assholes: it begins with the openers, the Wayward Sons.  Now, we are at The House of Blues; what sort of music would you expect to hear there?  Blues, folk, that sort of thing, right?  Well, that's how the Wayward Sons sound.  I like it.  Others in the crowd do not share my opinion.  They are booed and jeered through their entire set.  I entertain fantasies of owning a venue someday and kicking such asshats out [yes, after they have paid for their ticket].  Before bringing out the Wayward Sons, Adam gives the people who talked through the Sons' set a nice "Fuck you."  He says it a bit jokingly for my taste.

So we end up about fifteen feet away from the band.  The girls [a term I use loosely, as they're rather old and busted] in front of us keep sticking their arms up as if to touch Adam.  At one point, I yell, "Put your fucking arms down, you dumb sluts."  They seem to put their arms up less from that point on.  I should have thrown in something about their arms not being long enough to touch him.  I wasn't thinking of it at the time, however.

I'm surprised they don't do a cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City".  They've done it before, and given the venue...

All in all, it's fairly lackluster.  The lighting's just standard spots, and the backdrop's just a big House of Blues banner.

Hammerstein Ballroom was definitely better.  Oh, well.

My watch came in.  It was actually delivered to my office on Friday, but I wasn't in.  I also wasn't in today, but I got my sister to pick it up for me.  It is very nice.  It's even beefier than I thought.  Should stand up to any abuse I can dish out.

I'd post a picture, but it wouldn't look much different from the picture I posted before.

Oh, okay.


The watch does not make my wrist look small.  My wrist is small.  But the heft of the watch is evident, yes?

There was a company picnic of sorts yesterday down at Jenkinson's in Point Pleasant.  Six hours of partying for which I will be paid.  Open bar.  It was excellent.  Some volleyball, some tug-of-war, and a good deal of drinking [though, I'm afraid, I didn't drink as much as I could have, had I really put my mind to it].  The picnic ended at six; afterwards I stayed down the shore with my sister and a few coworkers until midnight.

At some point, perhaps, I'll post pictures.

So there's this girl at work, one of my sister's proofreader cohorts.  Let's call her... Cara.  [Yes, she of the crowdsurfing and the poker.]  She's cute, she's far from dumb [my word choice cracks me up], and she likes good music.  A few weeks ago she broke up with her boyfriend.  People [my sister, Bill, Patrick] have suggested, in their own ways, that I ask her out.  I'm not really sure how, so I'm just trying to flirt, "trying" being the operative word.

I'm not really sure how I did with that yesterday.  I rode down to the beach with her [it was just the two of us for the first leg; a third party rode in the back for the rest of the journey].  Nothing awkward happened then, aside from an offhand comment from her about it not being that time of the month.  [I was fetching her her cellphone from her purse; she was assuring me I wouldn't encounter any potentially embarrassing feminine products.]  At the beach, there was mild contact; she boasted of her "rock-hard abs".  [At her suggestion, I felt them; they are indeed solid.]  Later, she asked me to sweep the sand off her back.  [I fumbled this, somehow.  I'd give you the details if I could figure out how it happened.]

Of course, none of these are clear signs.  In fact, another way to interpret them is that she sees me merely as her friend's unthreatening little brother.  I don't know.

Given that this took place at a company outing, I anticipate word that I like her will spread like wildfire as water-cooler talk [notwithstanding the nonexistence of an office water cooler].  There has been dispute over whether such dissemination of information would be good or bad.  I suppose we will see.

I just cracked open the 2004 Dogfish Head Worldwide Stout I bought last month.

God damn, it's tasty.

Of course, at eight dollars for a twelve-ounce bottle, it damned well ought to be good.

Mmm.  All beer should be thirty-six proof.  Back to the savorin'.

Sometime about now, Lindsay's and Pat's union is being officially recognized.  Obviously, I am not there.  No, I never told them whether or not I was coming to the wedding.  Pat IMed me Monday morning, telling me to let him know by the end of the day whether I was going or not, and I never responded.  Yes, I am a dick.  I threw around the idea of going, but neither decision felt right; in the end, I just did nothing and let it decide itself.  Seems to be how all my decisions are made.

I never did pick out anything off their registry, either, but I'm not really sure how that works.  Pat once gave me a brief summary, but I don't remember what he said.  If I order something, does it get shipped to the two of them directly? Or are the goods shipped to me, and I deliver them at the wedding?  I don't know.  Of course, clarifying this would require talking to one of the concerned parties Pat, and I don't know when that's going to happen next.

Note to self: never again trust a GNC employee.


Carrie, I should run all my decisions by you.

Lacy and I stopped by GNC this afternoon and picked up some sort of weight-gain powdered mix.  The above conversation took place shortly before I began lifting.  As advised, a half-hour after lifting, I went to go mix up some of that weight-gain drink.  An hour later, I was fighting the urge to throwing up.

First off, they really need to make that mix more soluble.  Second, try working on the taste.

Take a piece of cardboard and liquefy it.  Then throw in a handful of Rice Krispies and let them soak for a bit.  Now, chug it.  How do you feel?

I was clearly mistaken in my comment to Carrie.  Compared to this weight-gain crap, raw eggs are like a fine red wine or a slow drink of whiskey.

I was going to write about the trip to the water park [with Cara, among others], but I'm still fighting to keep that mix down.  So I'm just going to lie down, concentrate on that for now, and leave the water park entry for later.

Yes.  I am at work, and I'm listening to "Sweet Caroline".  I'm trying to remember the last time I got drunk and was yelling along to this song.  Shockingly enough, I can't.

People have been asking me how things have been going in my life.  I shall try to oblige.

The water park:  Cara looked damned good in a bikini at Mountain Creek two Sundays past.  Since she and I were there with two couples, that paired us off for certain things by default.  Default: the sweetest two words in the English language.  I feel that I flirted admirably [topics included tattoos, piercings, poker, and the social hierarchy of deflated innertubes].  Perhaps not well, but I tried.  I think my worst selling point that day was the sight of me in trunks.  Oh, the scrawniness.

Hump Day:  Last Wednesday my boss Ron organized an after-work outing to Triumph Brewery in Princeton.  Cara was present.  I was supposed to share Triumph's beer sampler with her, but that was complicated by the fact that I forgot my license at home [and I look thirteen, or so I've been told by other bartenders].  Through superior wit and guile [and helpful coworkers], I managed to get that first beer in my hand.  I was sure that once I had that first one, they wouldn't ask for my ID again.  I was correct.  I then proceeded to drink and talk to Cara.  Her attention was divided at times, so this was difficult.  When she had finished all she wanted of the sampler, I asked her which she liked.  That she was willing to try them all was admirable; that she liked most of them was downright attractive.  I bought her a pint of one of the ones she favored [the extra special bitter], but she ended up nursing it for the rest of the night.  Perhaps she was just lying to me; I'd probably told her previously that I liked that one.

At some point she made reference to a guy that she was "hooking up with"; I shall refer to this guy as Stockboy.  I was crushed.  Tried to increase beer flow, but was hampered by lack of cash.  Damn.  I entered my quiet, brooding mode of insobriety, and the night eventually passed.

After that, people became hip to the fact that I was interested in her.  My sister denied such rumors when asked, but the proof was certainly there.

Poker:  I came in second among the guys.  Damn.  My seat at the final table was assured before this game, so I'm not crushed.  But that prize money could have gone to the booze man.  Oh, well.  Cara placed third among the girls, but her previous wins guaranteed her a seat at the final table as well.  The third game's results brought Eric, Jane, and this guy Jason to the final game, the date for which is yet to be determined.  What is known is that the prize will be sizable, at least by previous friendly games' standards.

Dogs:  Went to see Must Love Dogs last night.  It's received a lot of negative reviews.  I can see why, but I still enjoyed it.  Sure, the plot's predictable from frame zero, but that's true of all romantic movies.  Same goes for the cheesy dialogue and unbelievable circumstances and coincidences.  Suspend some disbelief, asshats.  It's got John fucking Cusack; how can you not like it?  Diane Lane looks good.  It's even got General Chang!  I don't understand the nay-sayers' malfunction.  Go watch your critically-acclaimed pieces of shit, like Wes Anderson's movies.

And today:  I was summoned because of some pressing business with a client; normally I'm not in on Tuesdays.  On the way in, Bill and my sister were telling me that Cara had apparently split from Stockboy some time ago.  I was confused and tired and didn't think about it much, but the two of them kept telling me that she was single.

Today was the studio boss' birthday, so there was cake and whatnot.  Gave me an excuse to go up to the fifth floor of the other building [where the rest of the studio works] and visit Cara.  I ended up talking to her in her cube for a good fifteen minutes.  Yep.

And now, I'm waiting for word from clients to trickle on back to me.

Friday morning, my sister walked into my cube and said, "Way to go, stud."  I admit this seems creepy and strange taken out of context.

What was the context?  She'd just checked her email and seen these three pictures.  Yes, that is Cara next to me.

The order of events: The intent to take pictures is announced.  Cara runs up to me and puts her arms around me.  Since it seems like a precarious position for her, I put one arm around her to stabilize her.  And the pictures are taken.

I am taking her action as a Good Sign.

That's it for this entry.  Oh, wait.  I find this picture of me amusing; you might also.

I've crossed a line in life.  Nothing will ever be the same.

I bought a song off the iTunes music store.

Technically, I gave Patrick a buck and he bought a song off iTunes.  I don't have an account with them.  Why did I do it?  I had the song [Less Than Jake's "The Science of Selling Yourself Short"] stuck in my head from hanging out at Lacy's last night.  So I used that ill-begotten service by proxy.  I feel dirty.

Well, I'm enjoying the shit out of that little .m4p... it's not like I can listen to it outside of work, after all.  Play count?  Fourteen, plus one for every three minutes after now.

Okay.  I haven't updated in a while.  So this one's going to be long.  In the interest of convenience, I will write a table of contents.

You will see:

• An update on [read: end to] the Cara Situation
• How things are in the studio
• A summary of my efforts to purchase a car
• A review of the Gin Blossoms concert
• Hail fall from a clear sky
• Darkness

So Cara's apparently pursuing things with Stockboy.  My sister knew this and did not tell me "because it would discourage me".  She.sister still thought I should go for her.Cara.  You can't see me, but I am shaking my head in disappointment.

At some point [perhaps this was after she.sister knew of the Stockboy], my sister was asking me how far I'd pursue Cara.  For example, what would I do if she.Cara started seeing someone?  My response was that I would have a drink and forget about pursuing her.Cara at all.  So that's what I did.

I mean, I just talked to Cara today about tickets for a concert.  And I'll be playing poker against her tonight [the tournament final].  But I'm not pursuing her.  Well, insofar as I was ever doing so.

And that's about all I have to say about that.

Oh, wait.  The name "Stockboy" was thought up by William "The Agent" Miranda.  Now I'm done [with that topic].


A couple of weeks ago, I was very dissatisfied with my job.  Work this summer has been slow.  Not many people want whole sites made.  They just want Flash pieces, like ads or emailers.  Those aren't my domain, so I was doing pretty much nothing.  It was rather depressing, coming everyday and being reminded I was dead weight.

But now, things seem to be picking up.  I'm also helping folks out with the Actionscript in their Flash pieces.  I know Actionscript because it seems to be merely Javascript.  I still don't know anything about other aspects of Flash.  But I'm helping out, being productive.  So this is an old issue.  The End.


Well, I'm getting ahead of myself; I can't quite ride it around.  I don't have it yet, but I will sometime soon.  And with it, I shall crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentation of the women.  ...  Anyway, it's a dark blue 2000 Jeep Cherokee Sport.  Less than seventy-five thousand miles on it, clean interior.  It will be sweet.

After this, the next step will be to see about those subsequent lines...


So I went to see the Gin Blossoms with my sister and Bill.  Watching them play Hopkins' songs to delight the crowd was vaguely depressing.  Hopkins gave them their biggest hits, their crowd-pleasers, and they kicked him out of the band and drove him to commit suicide.  More disappointed head-shaking.

On the down side, the guys have aged terribly.  On the up side, they can still put on a damned good show.  They played a lot of songs that I didn't recognize but that Robin said were off their soon-to-be released new album.  From what I heard, it ought to be pretty good.  I wrote a set list, sort of: since I didn't recognize the new songs, I just scribbled down parts of lines so I could identify the song later.

Good times.

Thus ends this update.  Other things have happened, like me passing out in bathtubs to beat the heat.  I also had my foot run over, but thanks to the steel-toed boots, there were no ill effects.  So stick a fork in this entry; it's done.

I have the Jeep Cherokee.  I have yet to name her.  I am looking into Cherokee names.  Some current candidates: Kalanu ["raven"], Suyeta ["chosen one"], Adsila ["blossom"], Amadahy ["forest water"], Awenasa ["my home"], Awenita ["fawn"], and Galilahi ["attractive"].  I'll probably pick one of those.

So Carrie left for Luxembourg Monday.  Yep.  The day before I got the Jeep.  Everyone in the office expressed shock at the many delays in my getting it.  I didn't really care about not being able to drive it; at least, I didn't once it became clear I wasn't going to get in time.

I spent Friday afternoon at Point Pleasant with Cara.  My sister and Bill were two hours late in meeting us.  They claim it was car trouble; I think it was a scheme of theirs to force Cara and I to spend time together.  I didn't mind so much.

Details later.  Sleep now.

I wrote the following while waiting for Jon.


Then Jon showed up.

I've since looked up the definition of geek.  American Heritage is full of crap.  Without an OED to check, I'm going with Webster: "a person often of an intellectual bent who is disapproved of".

Cara and I ended up by ourselves for two hours before Bill and my sister showed up.  They went on rides I wasn't really up for.  Cara gave us an education in mini-golf, though in the end Bill pulled ahead of her for the win.  I gave Cara the drink I owed her from our bet.  No one got drunk, myself included.

So Cara's not with Stockboy, but she talked excitedly about some guy she met in a bar...  Meh.  I'm fine with nothing happening, though it is fun to hang out with her.

That's all on that topic.  Abrupt ending, yes.

I read last night that two Crow boys [one of whom was in my pledge class] were each charged with multiple counts of aggravated rape.  Wow.

The story from the Worcester Telegram and Gazette:


Perhaps the ratio drove them mad.

This morning, some coworkers needed a PC to show off some work to a client.  Pressed for time, they asked to borrow my [personal, non-work] laptop.  I was very afraid they would misclick and trigger a cascade of porn.  They could have hit any of a few folders on the desktop, a playlist on the desktop, picked the wrong open tab in Firefox, or merely opened Windows Media Player.  I let them use it, after some hesitation.  I did warn them not to poke around too much in front of the client.

I was told the meeting went off without pornographic incident; I wasn't there.  I'm not sure if I'd be fired, anyway.  It is, after all, my personal laptop.  At worst, it probably would've just been awkward.  Horribly, horribly awkward.  Speaking of awkward...  I'm working on a long post about a letter I wrote and the response.  It'll be up sometime this week.

From time to time I see a *.tufts.edu address on the access logs and wonder if it's Abbie.  It probably isn't her, but that doesn't stop me from wondering what she's up to these days.

I worked some overtime tonight.  Money in the bank, baby.  Did I mention I got a two-dollar-an-hour raise a few weeks back?  Kool-Aid Man goes, "Oh, yeah."

I am exhausted, but I can't sleep.  I think I'll have a nightcap.  Is it still a nightcap if it's straight from the bottle?  <Ray Combs>Dictionary says...  yes.</Ray Combs>

I started writing the following on the nineteenth of September, but it languished in a half-finished state until now.  I just got back from a-courtin' and a-gamblin'; I failed at both.  I decided to finish it off, as I don't think I'd able to move on until I dealt with this.  Whether I mean move on with my life or move on with writing about things in my journal... you decide.

So, the post I promised about the letter.  Here you go.

---

Valera's back on CSI: Miami.  Awesome.


I watched the first episode of one of them there new CBS sitcoms, How I Met Your Mother.  My reasons numbered three: Alyson Hannigan, Neil Patrick Harris, and Bob Saget.  And it was funny.  At one point, the main character [Ted] is talking to the love interest of the episode and blurts out, "I love you."  There is awkward silence.  As he retreats, he says the line above.

I have a reason for bringing this up.

Before Carrie left for Luxembourg, I sent her a goodbye card.  For the life of me, I can't remember what the actual card said.  Wait.  It's coming to me.  The front was some quote about traveling expanding one's horizons; the inside read, "It sucks that you are leaving. - Me."  I drafted and wrote a letter for the inside.  And it went, "Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do do doo..."  My mistake.  That's how the colored girls go.


That's right: I said "I heart you."  I don't particularly care for verbing nouns like that, but I thought "love" might be over the line.  And I did once tell her I "heart"ed her, in response to her saying she "heart"ed alcohol.  That would the drunken state I referred to.

So she got back to me the day after Labor Day.  I saw her online and hesitated before IMing her.  I was finally goaded into it by a third party.  Carrie responded in three seconds, which is pretty fast by my standards.  She then said she'd been trying to think of how to respond "for like, ever".  Not a particularly good sign.  She went on to say, essentially, that I had gone too far.  I started running, and, oh, there's the gun.  Slap me with a splintered ruler.

She said...  well, she said:


I had to agree.


That's not how the conversation ended, but there wasn't much more.  She went to bed shortly afterwards.  Five-hour time difference.  I haven't talked to her since.

I have reaffirmed my claim to the throne; I remain king of creating awkward situations.  Come forth and pay homage.

Not much has happened in the past few weeks.  I got into some arguments with my coworkers over the direction we-as-a-department would take a project: the redesign of the studio's website.  It's supposed to represent the entire studio [primarily the web department, of course].  And the way they were going [all-Flash] I had serious issues with.  As consequence of those arguments, I think I'll be taking some time off a couple weeks from now, to distance and clear myself before I /kill [a specific] one of my coworkers [Julian, cough, cough].

I went to a gay bar with Lacy weekend before this.  She found a girl [we found a girl, I suppose—surprise of surprises, she was gay]; I played wingman as best I could.  The two of them were "bumping" and "grinding" and "making out" on the dance floor, and I applied drinks and spoke when necessary.  I also was felt up by some drag queen.  Let it never be said, Lacy, that I am insecure in my sexuality.  Of course, you'd be the last to contest that.  Er, second to last; Jon'd be last.

I guess everything turned out well with those two.  I went to Lacy's tonight, drank a bit.  Vanessa [the girl] showed up.  Good for Lacy.

I've been playing poker a lot lately.  Some might say too much.  I found a site [Last Call Poker] that isn't blocked at work, so... there went my productivity.  I've maintained my Sunday games with Y, and I played a game last night with some coworkers.  Last night?  Well, there was one hand that I totally fucked up, but that hand was one-on-one with Cara, so... some might say I dumped it to her.  No, she won it fair and square; I totally screwed myself.  Anyway, Cara won last night.  Other than that, I'm pleased with my poker performance of late, and I was pleased with my performance last night until that one hand.  After that hand, I was behind in chips, and low on options.  I went all-in later and lost.  Oh, well.

People have been suggesting I'm addicted.  From now on, I'm keeping track of my poker winnings and losses.  Starting now.  Zero.

Oh, and Last Call is also an ARG.  Bonus.  If you end up playing, quicklink me.  And if you want to go exploring graveyards with me, well, let me know.

I named my Jeep some time ago.  Decided on Suye'ta.  "Chosen one": an appropriate name for the car of Emmanuel.  Yes.  She's running fine, about nineteen miles to the gallon.  I was grateful for her clearance tonight, driving down Parkview.  The water must have been a foot deep; it was cascading over the hood and down the 'shield as I drove through.  It's a good feeling, knowing that if I hit something, the odds are in favor of the occupants of my car surviving.  Yes.  I reduce my life to numbers, even if I don't know the exact values.  Do you expect any less of me?

So, once upon a time [last week, it seems], a friend of mine, P [Patrick, iampunha] and I were talking:


Over the past few weeks, P kept saying I should IM chrestomanci.  I never did, until tonight.  He suggested it again, and I was not quite sober...  It was like drunk dialing.  Drunk IMing.  It's for the best; I'm most open—and most "charming", I guess—when drunk.

I'd say it went well.  Of course, I've been proven wrong many times before.


That... and the fact that she groks Stranger in a Strange Land... my God.  I fear she may be too much woman for me.

'Afore I swoon...  The daystar is making its presence known.  To bed I go.

I went to my five-year high school reunion a couple weeks ago.  They didn't group our reunion with the others.  Those class years held their reunions at some country club; my class hit a bar.  And hit it hard.

My initial roll to get drunk failed, though not critically.  I'd eaten too much prior to showing up.  I eventually got sick of sobriety, forced myself to throw up, and rerolled.  Critical success.

Thought I'd get into at least one fight that night.  Jon and Lacy, I believe, were even looking forward to such a scuffle.  Perhaps not Jon.  Definitely Lacy.  No disturbance occurred.  Sure, the skanks were still skanky, and the old social divisions surfaced, but the guys I thought I'd end up fighting [Paul Gittleman, Doug Green] seemed nice enough.  Hm.

So, no barfightin'.  Would've been fun, though.

Didn't talk to many people.  Meh.  My main concern was the open bar.  Open bar: the two sweetest words in the English language.

I regret not talking to Laura Schrager before the shitty local band started up.  I mean, we weren't friends; I don't remember ever talking to her back in high school.  I saw her at the reunion, and she's just damned cute.  And she didn't look any different; I guess I just never noticed back then.  We did converse [she came up to me, oddly enough], sort of: the band was oppressively loud, so I couldn't really hear her.  I just nodded when I thought it was appropriate and gave her my well-practiced [by that point in the evening] "how I'm doing" spiel.  Hell, I doubt she could hear me, either.  Thinking hard, I seem to recall her saying she worked in the city, but that's not much to go on.

I've spent the last few minutes tweaking that paragraph, but it's still damned clumsy.  Nevermind.

Found some sort of alumni directory on my high school's site.  Couldn't get the search page to load, though.  Meh.  We know me; it's not like I'd contact her even if I had her information.


Backstory.  I'm a freshman, sitting in the computer lab.  Some upperclassman, Laquan Majette, comes up to me and tells me to get off the computer.  Maybe he needs to use it; maybe he's just hassling me.  It doesn't really matter.  I don't get up.  He picks me up by the neck.  Not the collar.  The neck.  His hands are around my neck.  I flail; I kick him in the crotch.  The lab monitor hauls us both to the Dean of Students.  We both serve detention.

So I was talking to Lauren Hooper at the reunion.  She was my year, but she used to date Laquan.  She said something about how I was scary in high school, and I apologized.  I said something about how I did not want to be messed with, and to avoid that I cultivated a certain reputation.  And then I told her the Laquan story.  She made an odd expression and said, simply, "Well, Laquan's dead."  I blinked, and she explained.  He was shot to death this past January.

Yeah.

A summary.  I went to my reunion two Saturdays ago.  I didn't get laid; I didn't get into a fight.  It ain't no big thing.

So I got in my first accident.  Well, the first accident with me as a driver.

How it went down: It's raining like a bitch here.  I'm in the left lane of two-lane Route 1 South.  Suddenly, I see the guy in front of me completely stop.  We were going about fifty, fifty-five mph.  I'd given about three car lengths of following distance.  I slam the brakes.  I stop the car from rolling, but I end up sliding into the rear of the guy in front of me.  Not hard, mind you.  A love tap.

I get out, I notice a piece of ... something just behind his back tire.  I go and ask him if he's okay.  It's some middle-aged Indian [dots, not feathers] guy.  He nods.  While he pulls his shoes on [yeah...], I go pick up the car part I saw.  It's my front license plate.  He comes out and we check his back bumper.  There is an almost unnoticeable scratch.  Approximate dimensions: thin as a piece of paper and a centimeter long.  He starts moaning about how his car is new and how he has to replace the bumper now.

He suggests I pay him USD300 and we'll forget about it.  Right.  A) I don't carry that kind of cash.  B) Fuck no.  So we pull onto the shoulder, and he calls the cops.  We wait.

Cop shows up, gets my version, gets his version.  Cop says something about the damage being so slight as to be non-reportable to the insurance companies.  I'm not getting any points on my license.  I guess I'll have to pay the Indian.  That sucks.

I still love you, rain.


When that Indian bastard was going on about replacing his "new" car's bumper, I was thinking of throwing some assault into the deal.  What a tool.

I'll wait and see how the accident report tells it.  I think I will get that bumper guard after all.  Or maybe... one of these.

Next Friday.  The Crystal Method.  House of Blues Atlantic City.  Does anyone want to go?  I'm going; I want company.

We could also leave earlier and catch Jamiroquai.  Come on...  You know you want to.

I just got home from hanging out with my sister to find two paychecks waiting for me.  My first thought was that one of my timecards from a previous week was held up.  But... no, I've been receiving one a week without a lapse.

It turns out one's a bonus check.  [My father figured it out.]  What it's for, I don't know.  It was eight and a half before tax, USD644.65 after.

You know what's coming next.

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

BONUS!

Next stop: chicks for free.

ETA 2005.10.15 19:26:19:  It's vacation pay.  I got it for hitting one-point-five thousand hours.

I just got back from "lunch" with my coworkers.  After Chinese, we stopped at CompUSA.  There, I met with twin prongs of disappointment: I couldn't preorder Gun [which I want to do less for the game itself and more for the free deck of cards and the Mark of the Joker], and I couldn't buy FFVII: Advent Children.

Now, why would I think I could even get the latter there?  Oh, I don't know.  Perhaps it was because of the widescreen TVs they had with the movie playing on them.  Bunch of teases.

But the movie itself...  Holy sweet goddamn.  Square Pictures has definitely done some powerleveling since Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.  Advent Children looks incredible.  I saw a few of the fight scenes featured in the trailer.  I couldn't understand the dialogue, as it was in Japanese, but the action...  Spec-fuckin'-tacular.

I must have it.

Now, back to killing time before leaving for the Weezer/Foo Fighters concert.

So that Weezer/Foo Fighters concert?  It was fun.  Apparently the floor was split into two sections: General Admission and VIP.  The stage took up, say, one-third of the floor area.  The VIP section was the third of the floor immediately in front of the stage.  Then a barricade, and the GA section behind that.  That's crap.

I went with the same group with whom I saw JEW and TBS a few months back: Cara, Jane, Eric, Bill, and my sister.


Opener was Hot Hot Heat.  Didn't bother to watch them.  My sister and Bill were late, as my sister had forgotten their tickets at home.  The rest of us came straight from the office.  So while Hot Hot Heat played, the rest of us were drinking overpriced beer and waiting for those two to show up.

Barely saw Weezer.  Tall people and whatnot.  The Foo Fighters had a crazy setup, with suspended ... walls, upon which they projected all sorts of things.  They also had lasers.  Pretty, pretty lasers.

Apparently Queen's playing Continental soon.  Dave Grohl did some kind of "shout-out" to them.  Also, for the first song of the encore, the drummer from Queen played with them.  Um... I can't remember which Queen song they played.  Meh.

Bill, in an attempt to be "with it" while holding his beer in one hand, threw up the "west side W" hand gesture for Weezer.  He also made an F for the Foo Fighters.  Rock on, Bill.  Rock on.

Cara's even shorter than I am, so obviously she couldn't see anything.  Twice, I lifted her on my back for a better view, during... "Undone (The Sweater Song)" and "Everlong".  Perhaps I could have lifted her onto my shoulders.  I don't know; my sense of balance isn't that great.  I don't think collapsing under her would be very becoming.  Besides, she said she could see while on my back, and that's what matters.


Once again, the coupling.  Bill and my sister, Jane and Eric.  Cara and I by default.  At some point during Weezer's set, Bill had his arms around my sister and Eric had his arms around Jane.  Jane suggested I complete the set with Cara.  I laughed nervously, said, "Sure, I'll get right on that," and remained where I was standing.  Jane then went to go say something [probably similar] to Cara.  I looked over at Cara.  Fight/flight kicked in, and I just plowed into the crowd in front of me.  Damn you, id.

I spent a few songs by myself, fighting for position.  Almost made it up to the GA barrier.  Turned around and headed back.  They were in the same place I left them.  Weezer finished.

Cara had to go to the bathroom, and I needed a drink, so the two of us left the floor.  I located the end of the extremely long beer queue.  She came out and joined me in the waiting.  I did that awkward thing I do so well.  Of course, it never matters what I do or say; all roads lead to awkward.

The Foo Fighters started up while we were on line, so as soon as we had the beers in our hands we bolted for the floor.  Nearly hit the [actual] floor, when I slipped in a puddle.  Then she grabbed my hand and led me back.

This has been disjointed and rambling, and this is abrupt.  But it's quitting time.  You get the idea, anyway.

Anyone remember the Easter Spam?  I finally got the pictures off my sister's camera.

These are pictures from a couple Saturdays ago...  the fifteenth.  It took a while to thumbnail 'em.  Since Bill took [most of] them, my [very drunk] sister features heavily.  Behold the family resemblance.  If you prefer, Eric posted his.  They focus on Jane, of course.  Her birthday was the reason for the celebration, after all.


That's all.

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I'm sharing my cube today.  Ron wants to expand the department, so we're trying out people.  It seems we scheduled them poorly, as we have more potentials than cubes.  So I have a guest today.  As such, I don't think I should be playing poker.  I don't even know about playing music.

Hm.  It is still my cube...

In the meantime:

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I have... acquired a copy of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.  It is in Japanese, but I have a fan-written subtitle .txt file.  I have yet to install the subtitle plugin, though.  I've just watched it a couple times in Japanese.  I have this to say.  It is totally awesome.

Totally.

Awesome.

Oh, man.  This is just too good.

I am on the leaderboard over at Last Call.  I was number five at my peak, but now I'm almost off.  I'm just flashing my little trophy icon while I've still got it.  If I could, I'd put it on a chain around my avatar's neck.  Word, son.

ETA 2005.10.31 14:13:45:  Pudding-less proof.


ETA 2005.10.31 22:47:43:  And I am off the board.  So very, very... off.  I have 123,553.13.  Low man on the leaderboard has... 145,034.33.  Sigh.  I guess I'll try to pick up the pieces tomorrow, when I'm not seriously on tilt.  Now, time to drink.

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Here's how Alex responded to me.


I like those answers.

In response to six, which I renumbered [it was seven]: I don't know, and I hope so.  And not really.  All that's resulted is an awkward situation for my friend Liam.

ETA 2005.11.07 02:16:34: Alex Holz, come on down.

1. On stage, you strut like Jagger or Axl.
2. Song?  "Apparitions", by Matthew Good Band.  Two reasons: you introduced me to MGB with Beautiful Midnight, and I remember this song from your list of completely nonromantic songs to make out to.  Movie?  High Fidelity, for reasons obvious enough.
3. Absinthe.  I've never had it before.  I am also intrigued by this... Sambuca and Coke of which you've spoken.
4. Hm.  Can I also use The Spot?
5. First memory I can't place.  Yes, it would have to have been in middle school, but I've no idea of the where and how.  Clearest?  Ironically enough, getting owned in beirut at your house in Lehigh.  Penalty for airballs?  What the hell?
6. I wonder about the bits and pieces of your stories that I hear.  Like the car ride you mention in your answers for Danise.  Or that girl you once told me about in high school.  From dmusic, I think.

ETA 2005.11.08 14:15:41: Monica Young, you're the next contestant on The Price is Right.

1. P, before I ever IMed you, described talking to you as something that "will definitely keep you [someone] on your [their] toes".  He went on: "I float and sting [...] she sits and whallops [sic]."
2. Everclear, "Everything to Everyone".  That Bowling for Soup song "Ohio (Come Back to Texas)".  And from your entry of a few days ago, Meat Loaf's "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad".
3. Jägermeister.  I haven't liked it in previous encounters, but...  well, I'll give it another shot.  ...  That was unintentional.
4. I am wagging my tail.
5. My God!  A cute, intelligent girl.  Quick, say something.  Um...  How do you eat air?  ... Sigh.  Never speak again.
6. Were we flirting here?  Are there online "tells", something like hip-vectors?

ETA 2006.02.03 18:28:28: This is really delayed, but I figured I should add Monica's answers for me.


Regarding the dreaming: sometimes I do; sometimes I don't.  Most of the time I don't remember my dreams.

Today, La Dia de los Muertos, while my lazy ass was lying in bed and playing hooky from work, Benito Rojas received a "cap" in the head.  It is a sad day.

I'm going to go pour a forty on the curb.


Hope this means we'll see him 'round the tables.

Today starts off with a laugh.  Clarification: I chuckle because I agree.

Took me two years, but I've finally given Deja Entendu a good listening.  I was reminded of it by someone's profile on LCP.  It still isn't as dear to me as Your Favorite Weapon, but...  Shrug.  It's all right.

Today.  Two in the afternoon.  Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn.

I spent yesterday in Brooklyn, at a live event for Last Call Poker.

Too excited to sleep the night before, so I stayed up all night playing poker.

Directions were to take the E from Port Authority four stops to meet the rest of the group at 53rd and Lexington.  Surprise of surprises, there's subway construction.  The E is not running.  I've lived near NYC all my life, but I am clueless how to get around.  So I check the map, and I see that I can... sort of/maybe/with much luck go on a round-about to get there.  I take the A, then the D... stopping to check with random people if I'm on the right track.

I run into a group of tourists who are [they say] also headed to Lex and 53rd.  The tourists have no clue, and I regret joining up with them.  If I'd stuck to my plan, I'd have made it.  Instead, they and I end up on Roosevelt Island [I have no idea where that is, except that it's far away from where we wanted to be].  I break from them, end up at Lexington and 63rd, and walk the ten blocks.

I'm about a half-hour late, but that's okay, 'cause other people are, too.  Meet-up time was 1100, but the event didn't start until 1430.  So we introduce ourselves [as we mostly know each other from online interaction].  I promptly forget names, as I have a poor memory.  Others seem to have the same problem; it's a good thing I wore my high school track sweatshirt, which reads "EGO" on the back [ego being my LCP name, and EGo my screenname on the forum].

I now know who was there, after several iterations of, "I'm sorry, I forgot your name."  There was Ikkarus, ScarpeGrosse, omnie [who was devastatingly cute—alas, she was there with her boyfriend], rose, ruminatinmind, imbri, Gupfee, Anthrax, tomtom, bagsbee, rowan...  I think that was it for people whom I recognized from LCP and the unForum.

On the instructions for the gathering, it said to bring flowers: "Bring a single flower to place on a grave to show some respect, and to signal that you're one of us."  I bought mine at the supermarket before leaving.  People I ran into on the way in kept asking me if I was visiting my girlfriend.  I told them I was going to a cemetery.  I love awkward silence.  Some people in the group didn't have any, so we stopped at a florist, then went off to the graveyard.

Hm.

A little backstory on LCP.  The website was set up by the estate of Lionel "Lucky" Brown.  Upon his death, there was a clause in his will which set aside some money for the creation of the poker site.  He is using the website to communicate with players.  To what end?  He left his niece an old gun [1851 Navy Colt].  Bad men are after The Gun.  Lucky wants us to help her.

Lucky also uses the site to tell us the history of The Gun.  We've passed through World-War-II-era Germany, then to Prohibition-era Chicago.  Last week it was Mexico during the revolution of the early 1900s.  And now we're in 1876 in Deadwood, with Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane.

Lucky, in his will, also said there was not to be just one wake for him.  Instead, there will be six wakes, one a Saturday, in cemeteries across the US.  First week: San Francisco.  They gathered; they played poker.  Then they performed "a small favor" for Lucky.  A scavenger hunt, essentially.  In the end they took the chips they won at poker and left an offering at a grave.  This unlocked [on the website] the 1945-era content.

Second week: Washington DC.  Same deal.  Poker, scavenger hunt, offering.  Unlocked 1929.

Third week: Kansas City.  Unlocked 1914.

And now NYC.  At the cemetery gates, we run into Jane, who "manages Lucky's estate".  She oversees the events.  Jane hands us equal numbers of chips, and we set off into the cemetery to explore before the event starts.  It's around 1330 now.

They don't play regular poker at these events.  They play Tombstone Hold'Em.  Here are the rules.  It's like Texas Hold'Em.  Except the community cards are all dealt out at once.  And your hole cards are tombstones.  Thus the need to scout the graveyard.

Also, before the event Jane and... this other guy who runs the event... they took a few chips [between ten and one hundred, Jane said] and put them on various graves.  I found seven.  Someone [bagsbee, I think] found around twenty.  So we went a-scoutin' and a-chip-huntin'.  I partnered up with this guy I'd played with online, Ikkarus.  He claims I carried the team.  I may have been a little excited, yes.

Since you get the whole board at once, my strategy was this: figure out what The Nuts are, go claim them, and be first back.  Bet aggresively.  If you A) have The Nuts, and B) arrive back first, you cannot lose.  Splitting the pot is not even an option.  Only one time did that strategy not work.  [We couldn't find a seven and an eight to make the nut straight, which was The Nuts.]  So we got back to the "table" and folded.

I was running all over the place.  Ikk was a little slower [possibly because he smokes].  But we won consistently at our "table", that being the fallen tombstone of a Mr. John Dean.  We ended up with sixty-seven chips.  We each received twenty to begin with, so that's a gain of twenty-seven, seven of which came from the scroungin'.  But we were not the tourney winners.  One team had eighty-four.  Another had seventy-five.  The latter was the team of bagsbee and rose, I think.  There were only prizes for first and second.  Oh, well.

Near the end of the tournament, I received a phone call [as did many others there].  Some people [including two at our poker "table"] were unaware as to the reason behind the gathering, and kept wondering who we were all talking to.  See, the directions to kick off the scavenger hunt part are posted on the website.  And they're only posted after the tournament begins.  So we needed contacts on the Internet to check the site and give us [the ground-pounders] the instructions.  So my contact gave me them.  I scribbled them down and kept them in mind.

First step was to look for a "cracked club" under which Lucky had left us "a holster full of directions".  We were supposed to wait until the winners were proclaimed.  [Because we needed them to come with us, and bring their chips for the offering at the end.]  But I'm a bastard.  When it was clear Ikk and I hadn't won, I started looking around.  I stayed relatively close to everyone else, but I was looking for the cracked club, which, as expected, was a broken tombstone with a statue on top.  [Tombstones with statues are clubs in the poker variant.]

So they crowned the winners, and I ran off to the stone.  It was a literal holster, with seven pages in it.  It was essentially: [cryptic clue leading you to grave], [use information from this grave to find next].  I kept the holster [Jane said it was okay].

We were playing poker at the base of a big hill.  The directions had us going up the hill, then down, then along, then up...  Et cetera.  Tiring.

The end of the hunt was a "native New York who died in a far-off land".  So we found him, threw our chips together in an offering. The tournament winners didn't actually go with us.  They had no idea about the hunt, and one of them had sprained his ankle or something, so they left.  We seemed to do all right without them, wrt the offering.  Maybe we had enough, maybe not.  It said to make an offering of at three hundred chips, somewhere between the one-fifty needed at Kansas City and the five hundred needed in San Francisco.  We spelled out "HI" and made a smiley face, though.

Other cities' teams sang to show respect.  We'd agreed beforehand that singing was not an option, so we joined hands and had a moment of silence instead.

We tuned a radio to 89.1 [per the scavenger hunt instructions] and Lucky spoke to us.  Spaghetti western music played, and Lucky told us of General Custer and The Gun.  Old West time, baby.


After the hunt, we had to find one last grave.  By doing the offering, we'd unlocked the content, but it's not readily available.  Players have to look for it on the site.  The last last grave we found was to give us a name we could plug into the site and find the first character in this week's story.  The last name of the person on the grave was White, and there were six cards under a rock.  The cards spelled out Colton in a previously established code.  Actually, they spelled OOCTNL, but... you know.

Now, we knew Colton White would eventually show up.  LCP is a [very fun and elaborate] promotion for the video game GUN.  Colton White is the main character in that game.

So from Colton White, people online found the other seven characters for this week: Ned White [Colton's father], Frank Grouard, Calamity Jane, Hollister, Wild Bill Hickok, Snow Falling, and William Massie.  But we didn't know that, at the graveyard.  We gave them our findings and went off to the bar.

Drank, went to dinner with some ARGers...  LCP discussion happened.  Someone [rose] doesn't like Kerry!  I could not agree with her.  He is a killer, but a killer with a heart of slightly tarnished gold.  And he's trying to turn it around.  [shakes head]  Kerry's all right by me.  And I'm sure he'll redeem himself by story's end.  He'll probably die, though.

After dinner, went home.  Got in at one in the morning.  A pocketful of poker chips and an empty holster.  That's what I have to show.  It was entirely worth it.

It's 2030 and I'm still at the office.  Mmm.  Have to finish this ... thing... for Abilify before I take off.  I may need some damned Abilify after this.  On the bright side, I'm not in tomorrow, and the next day I'll be in Vegas.

VEGAS, BABY!  WOOO!

[clears throat]  Yeah.  So I have to finish this.  Or at least leave it in good enough shape so another person [Bill/"The Agent"] can finish it off.

FINISH IT!  FATALITY!

I'm in a silly state of mind.  Perhaps it's the lack of sleep [I did not sleep last night].  My current consciousness is due solely to them Monster energy drinks.  I have a can in reserve to last me the hour-long drive home.

All right.  I got to shape up, 'cause they need this thing to satisfy.  I better shape up, if I'm going to prove that their faith is justified.

ETA 2005.11.07 20:52:38: All hope is lost!  There is no reserve can!  I am utterly screwed.

ETA 2005.11.07 21:09:45: Work complete.  Quite deterred and with a minor case of the shakes, I head out.

I forgot to bring a camera on Saturday.  Luckily, other people did not.  There are pictures from ScarpeGrosse, from Gupfee, and from the "official estate photographer" [the tall guy].

Highlights, in vaguely chronological order:

So the group I'm with shows up; the estate photographer then goes to the street to capture the establishing shot.  He moves back in as Jane points out where we'll be playing.  Ikk, me, unknown guy, Gupfee, and ScarpeGrosse listen to Jane's introductory speech at the actual start of the tournament.  This is Jane, the estate manager.  This is the estate photographer; I hear his name is Kiyash, and that he and Jane are married.  Hm.  So they are.

For the very first hand of the tournament, Kiyash followed me and Ikkarus.  Right now I couldn't tell you why, but I tried to shake him off.  That's Ikk's back, closer to the camera.

Our poker "table", the grave of Mr. and Mrs. John Dean.  Teams took turns dealing at our table.  Eirik and omnie sit and wait for the rest of us to return.  As you can see, we're on our way.

The teams at our table were me/Ikk, imbri/ruminatinmind, omnie/Eirik, and these two people, hereafter designated $nonARGFemale and $nonARGMale.  Here's another shot of players at our table: Eirik, ruminatinmind, imbri, and $nonARGFemale.  In this picture, only Eirik is missing.

Ikk and I, I'm sure, are first back to the table, having claimed The Nuts.  Eirik is probably checking the cards again.  That's right.  You'd better run back.

Bagsbee, Gupfee, and ScarpeGrosse stand around their table.

People pocket hunting: ruminatinmind, and Anthrax and Gupfee.

After the tournament, I grab the holster, and show off the instructions.  ScarpeGrosse is better at the clue-dispensing.  The hunt begins.  Search formation alpha!

Keeping careful records, in the end, was not so important.

Here lies the unfortunate Harry Cocks.

People gather... at some grave not pictured.  This is us shortly after we found the king of spades' "youngest flower", Georgiana.  That, or just before.  Georgiana's grave is in the lower right.

One of the clues was to look for a tree pointing the way.  In this picture, people are walking/running towards me, as I stand [far right, in the distance] next to The Wrong Fucking Grave^TM.  See, I'd found a grave sculpted to look like a tree.  There was an actual tree pointing the way.  Doh.

Me, spelling out "Hi" and a smiley face with the chips at the last grave of the hunt.  Here's the result.  Yeah, the smiley face sucks.  Then, the moment of silence.

The COLTON cards.  Someone [I believe it was ruminatinmind] picks them up.  Somehow, I end up displaying them for everyone.  From the left: tomtom, omnie, omnie's boyfriend Eirik, $nonARGMale, Gupfee in the denim jacket.  Behind Gupfee, uh... pass.  In the blue sweater is imbri, and tomtom's father is behind her.  Further right is rose, and Anthrax is behind her.

At the bar...  Draw, bitches.  Yeah, I wouldn't be impressed, either.  Later, Ikkarus is intrigued and a clearer picture of omnie and Eirik is taken.

I leave you with this.  Why?  I just don't know.

Time to pack.

Perhaps.  But definitely not in the way Colin anticipated ["Back broken, from too much sex"].

My bag is packed.  I've got my potential losings.  I've capped myself at five hundred dollars for everything.  Initially this was just gambling, but I think I'll extend it to the entire trip: the gambling, souvenirs [which will probably manifest in form of one-dollar chips I smuggle out]... miscellaneous entertainment [not including hookers]... hookers...

Et cetera.  Anyway.  It's time to leave for Vegas.

Before I go on with the transcription of my Vegas notes, a brief summary.

Vegas was fun.  I ended up with a profit of over four hundred dollars.  I'd have had more if I quit earlier, but oh, well.

Begin transcription.  Times are in PST.













At Bally's I ran into this guy who looked like Billy Bob Thornton.  I'd actually seen him at Harrah's the other day; he was playing long after I left at six in the morning.  I wondered for a while if it was Billy Bob, but why would he be playing $1/2?


And I was.  Done.

I called my sister when I was at my zenith.  She yelled at me to quit.  In retrospect, I should have.  I told her it wasn't about the money; it was about humiliating arrogant assholes and knocking them down a peg.  This is true.  Hey, it worked out well the first day.  Not so much the second day.

My last hand at Bally's, I was all in with this one black guy, who was getting into arguments with the dealer.  "That's not how I've played."  Wanted to bitchslap him.  Yeah, he put me on tilt.  But until I lost all my money to him, I was merely annoyed.  I was still playing clear-headed, I think.

Details of that last hand: I had K8d.  The flop came 5-6d-7.  I bet out about 20.  Three callers.  Turn: 4d.  I made the straight, and I have a high flush draw, so I bet 30.  One caller, the asshole.  River: 7d.  I've made the flush.  I bet 50.  Black asshole reraises, puts me all-in.  I think.  I call.  He turns over pocket fives, giving him a boat.  Grr.

I think I played it right.

I get surly when I drink and play.  I've little tolerance for slow players when sober, and even less when drunk.  Accordingly, I didn't drink at the tables.  Cokes no ice.  So many cokes no ice.

So anyway.  That was Vegas.  I'm glad I don't live there; I'd probably have a serious gambling problem.  Nice place to visit, though.

I went to Menlo Park Mall today to check out this dumb gimmick WPLJ's running: they put a bunch of people in a sandbox [about twelve foot on a side]; last one in there wins five grand.  It's like Survivor or something.  Yes.  It was as sad and pathetic as it sounds.

Anyway.  I stopped by GameStop.  Picked a few DVDs [The Breakfast Club, Runaway Jury, and Snake Eyes] ... and Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy!  I've been looking for this game for about two years.

I began obsessed when D brought his copy into the apartment senior year.  I remember completely killing the game at about five in the morning one day.  One hundred percent completion: every power cell, every orb.  I wrote on the communal whiteboard, with great pride, "Jak and Daxter time of death: 05xx".  Sad, yes.  But it was a great game.  A shame the sequels are so far from the original, merely crappy ripoffs of GTA3.

And now, to begin it again.

LCP has ended.  It all came together the last week.  In 1865, we learned the origin of The Gun's curse.  In 2005, Kerry killed McPherson, saving Lucy and breaking the curse.  That was Wednesday.  Saturday, at the final live event out in Los Angeles, Lucy showed up to hear Lucky's last message before he ascended.

This was the first ARG I actively participated in.  It was fun, even if I was never one of those on the forefront of the puzzle-solving.  Perhaps I'll play another... but it'd better involve cards.

Time passes.

Non sequiturs [mostly]:

Do you love me?  Do you have two and a half grand burning a hole in your pocket?  Then your path is clear: buy me a Christmas present.

Jak and Daxter is dead once more.  Time of death?  1838, 23 November 2005.  Some parts that required multiple agonizing tries the first time were insanely easy this time, like the hidden cell outside the Spider Cavern and the blue ring course in the Precursor Basin.  That makes sense.  But other parts that weren't so difficult the first time were much harder this time.  For example, Fire Canyon and the ice cave before the Yellow Eco Vent Release.  Odd.

I heard yesterday that Mr. Miyagi died.  Damn.

I downloaded and installed Tor today.  It just keeps saying I'm coming from the Netherlands.  Why aren't you changing exit servers every ten minutes like you're supposed to, Tor?  I question your dedication to keeping us anonymous.  Hmph.

Thanksgiving was all right.  Another year, another introduction to a cousin I've never met before.  This marks the first time in over five years that someone outside of my immediate family slept in our house overnight.  Very rare.

After the Thanksgiving meal, my sister and I were talking about that "dinner with friends" Mastercard ad, the one with all the corporate mascots.  I said something like, "It's sad that Mr. Clean misses everything, being stuck in the kitchen washing dishes."  She said, "You think that's because he's black?"  I was in shock.  Mr. Clean is not black.  He's clearly white, with pale blond hair and blue eyes.  Very Nordic.  Even after I showed her the official web site, she persisted.  She just doesn't want to admit she's wrong.

I must've watched the Back to the Future trilogy more than five times over the long weekend.

Back to work.

Happy birthday, Jon.  ...  Damn.  I don't think there're anywhere near as many songs about being twenty-four as there are about being twenty-three.

So I'm still in my office.  Just finished writing a little project management tool for my boss' boss.  Good times.

Well, not finished.  It's just the skeleton.  Of course, that's all you really need.  It works, but it's just style-less text.  Now it's up to the designers.

Mmm.  Overtime.

I'm not a "holiday person".  Around this time of year, the radio station I listen to most, WLTW, switches to an all-Christmas-music format.  So I look for something else to listen to.

I left the office around 2300, turned on WPLJ.  Apparently they, too, are getting into the Christmas spirit, though they maintain a mostly regular format, thankfully.  Anyway, "All I Want for Christmas Is You" came on.  Damned near started crying.  Pathetic, but it eventually passed.  I think it was the four-song block of Bon Jovi followed by AC/DC's "Back in Black".

It wasn't that it made me sad, though.  I actually felt happy.  It reminded me of that bit in Love Actually with the little drummer kid.  Think I'll put that on.

Last night the puppetmasters of LCP came out from behind the curtain and held a Q&A session with us players.  Interesting reveals: There were supposed to be many more characters [they cut around fifty of them].  One character [Frank Grouard] was directly responsible for Custer's Last Stand.

Corazon, the pre-op transsexual, was actually played a woman [in pictures, anyway].  Many male players breathed a sigh of relief as they stopped questioning their sexuality.  Eh.  She never did it for me, even before the "OMG SHE'S A HE" twist.

This was news to me, but not to some others: the poker ringer who played for all the characters who were supposed to be good was Jim Stewartson, who was also the Technical Director for the site.  Nerd and poker sharp?  I want to be his apprentice.

We as players could have failed to save Matt.  The team had prepared both endings.  And by saving Matt, we killed Ben.  If Matt had died, he and Ben wouldn't have met up later, and Ben wouldn't have been capped.  Damn.  If I'd have known, I'd have let Matt burn.  Lousy punk.

All in all, the chat was good closure.

And a sidenote: if you're reading this, and it's still 01 December, visit Light to Unite.  Light one of them candles.  Sure, it helps AIDS research.  But more importantly, I helped with that site.  Heh.

So.  Very.  Angry.

The Associated Press: Whither the Southern Accent?

Damn you, evolution of language. [shakes fist]

An addition to the list of reasons I like winter:

I'm driving down the highway.  The warmth within other cars [plus the air rushing by without] makes them shed the snow that's accumulated on their roofs; said snow hits the road and scatters.  The particles are picked up and blown about, forming what one might call aurorae vias, miniature greyscale versions of the northern lights.

But how they look isn't what interests me most.


I look at them and see a vector field.  I try to imagine how much processing power and data I'd need to accurately model the system.  [Usually] I don't get too far down such lines of thought before I have to resume paying attention to surrounding traffic.

But damn, it's fascinating.

I did that first-line-of-each-month's-first-entry meme last year.  This year, I'll use the first lines of titles.  That's more fun, anyway.

January:	I was born on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, but Maryland and Virginia have faded away.
February:	Well, I hear you're living far away, and that life's treated you well.
March:	I was hangin' out by the phone, tired of sleepin' alone.
April:	May the living let us in, before the dead tear us apart.
May:	Had a few drinks, we all felt inspired.
June:	Wouldn't it be great to never worry about your future, never asking why?
July:	Things ain't cooking in my kitchen.
August:	I'm not even supposed to be here today.
September:	This distance can't be taken casually.
October:	You are too young to put all of your hopes in just one envelope.
November:	To the east, in the distance, rises the steeple of a chapel, fragile and faint.
December:	Well, I guess what you say is true: I could never be the right kind of girl for you.

It's sure been an action-packed week.

Went out for Lacy's birthday last Sunday.  She, Mark, Mel, Zack and I hit Dave and Buster's up in the Palisades Mall.  Apparently I got a little too hammered.

So we're leaving, walking through the underground parking garage [even though we are parked in the lot outside].  Lacy's pushing around a shopping cart real fast, into cars and whatnot.  Laughter.  Mark finds this old, rusted tricycle.  He's riding it around, but gives it up.  I jump on.  Thing's got a flat front tire.  In my state, I think I can make up for this with careful balance and serious pedaling.  Next thing I remember, the trike's flipped forward, and I'm face-down on the pavement.  I just lie there dazed until Lacy comes over and lifts me up.

I remember her saying something like, "Oh, shit, buddy.  You really fell hard."  There was bleeding and me worrying over whether I'd just blinded myself.  Lacy took me to the emergency room.

At the emergency room, they kept asking me how I hurt myself.  I think they thought Lacy was my abusive girlfriend.

Six stitches later... Blah blah, whatever.

Here's the damage, for those of you who haven't seen it.


Much as I hate to admit it, I do suffer from the SAD.  I'm not bothered by the cold or the lack of sunlight, but the holidays do bother me.  You know, the happy people and whatnot.  That's what eats me.

Thursday night was the office party.  My sister tried to make me over for it.  New clothes and shoes.  I don't like the attention.  Felt like a tool.  Drank a lot.  Should've drank more.

There's supposed to be some kind of office grab-bag type holiday thing on Tuesday.  I haven't bought a gift for that.  I think I'll just call out... or just not show up.

I've lost the desire to do anything except lie in bed.