We've been had.

Blogspot started out all tax-paying American citizen-like, but it's gradually replaced normal English terms with some kind of gibberish, and I'm not hax0r enough to figure out how to fix it. For example, it one day decided to set itself in some indefinite time zone, which is fine. I like surprises. Then it changed A.M. and P.M. to MD and PD. I don't know which is which, but you can't expect much of an explanation from an apparent abbreviation for Paryland. And as of recent, it's been telling me that June is the month I get to learn how to say June in Albanian. What's next for the Blogspot Monster? If it were me, I'd try and figure out some way to take over my keyboshdiwouelkhsg

Boyz II Men and the Adirondacks.

While picking up equipment from a classroom today, I found a list. It has been a source of mystery ever since, and will likely be the highlight of my day. The list follows, unedited and unabridged.

Comedy
R&B
Pistachios
Mountains
Language Club/Math Club?
Hot
Pepsi
Middle Child
Waitress

I have so far been at a loss for a theme or purpose to this list. Comedy and R&B could both be genres of audio, and the Middle Child could certainly be a Waitress, especially if the nudges towards economic and professional success were given instead to the other children in the family. But Mountains? Pepsi? Hot? I have no idea. Although I now know that it is possible to fall instantly in love with a piece of paper.

Years later, they would auction off our possessions.

Reading the beginning of Girlfriend in a Coma, the part where two characters are stuck on a ski lift surrounded by complete darkness, the train became stuck under the East River surrounded by complete darkness.

We ended up being there for twenty minutes. A few minutes in, my paranoia and claustrophobia and fear of Sylvester Stallone's Daylight kicked in and I started interpreting any slight rumble of the air conditioning as a torrent of water rushing in from a burst in the tunnel, on its way to engulf the train and swallow me whole.

I started making escape plans. How do I open the doors? Where is the emergency window? I think you're supposed to open a few of the smaller ones to equalize the pressure before trying to swim out. And then where do I go? What about the children and the old people? People would read about this in the news and they'd know before they knew for sure that I was on that train. As I tried to figure out how to avoid a waterlogged death, a violinist started playing on the other end of the car, like the orchestra on the deck of the sinking Titanic. I gave him a dollar for his contribution to my moment, but didn't tell him that I would have given him much more if he had played "Nearer My God to Thee."

Wii Battled.

Flatteringly, Luigi vs. Nerd.

He beat me in an extremely close match and went on to win the tournament. I also may have invited a man in a bear suit over for a gathering of people dressed as forest creatures.

A life in politics.

I had a dream that I was dating the daughter of George W. Bush and was meeting him for the first time. It wasn't Jenna or the other drunk, but she was his daughter in the dream. He was having a hard time letting her go, and he may have just not liked me, because it got pretty contentious pretty quickly. I don't remember much of the conversation, just that at some point near the end of the dream I was yelling, "You are grasping at straws, George! You are grasping at straws!"

Sometimes I am reminded that I technically work in an office, and that entails a lot of things which I don't understand and see as pointless and/or very humorous. Today it was this valuable, informative, and, most importantly, confidential document concerning my accrued time off over the last three months.


Vacation Balance: .00 Hours
Sick Balance: .00 Hours
Personal Leave Hours Taken: .00 Hours

Time spent mocking said document: Up to .25 Hours


At least I'm getting something done.

How I stay connected.

This is the only way my phone is willing to stay on.

Liveblogging the workplace.

6:18pm: The guy who talks illegibly to himself at work and usually sits in front of me has taken a risk and is currently sitting behind me.

7:43pm: He's still there. I still don't know if he's muttering horrible things about my family or reciting recipes for a delicious peach pie.

8:52pm: Well, it's definitely not pie.

What they've been paying me to do, lately.

What I know is that this day is come and that it will go.

A can of meat stew held him, and one of a vegetable he had found. They held him and squeezed him and weighed him down, numbed his hands and pulled his arms until they rested on the kitchen table and he realized the sun had gone down. How had she done this? he thought. How would he do this?

The light didn’t work. None of the lights worked. The clocks, the television, everything was quiet and dark. The one light he could see came through the window over the sink. It pushed itself through the blinds, coming from the neighbors’ back yard and over the fence he had built to keep their dog out of her garden. In the dim he could make out the curves of his fingers, the protruding knuckles, the spot of warm gold. He shut his eyes, but still he saw it.

I really did not see this coming.

I just saw an approximately seventy year old man shove a ninety three-year old man (I know this because someone yelled, "He's ninety three years old!") as a room of three dozen elderly people erupted into a surprisingly spry and violent argument concerning Israel.

Other things heard:

"Don't you dare touch my father!" - Sixty year old folk musician

"I'm Jewish and I'm proud of that fact and if you want to continue this conversation we should go outside." - Sixty five year old man

"Tell that fucking asshole I'll make him sorry!" - Ninety three year old man, post-shove

Minor Tom.

I’ve been planning a trip to Charleston in October, partially to simply take a vacation from the bustle and partially because of a weeklong string of events like this. Whenever I travel, I look at every other option before resigning myself to flying, which in the past has included a rented car to the Grand Canyon and a trans-Atlantic freighter ship. I’ve had a problem with planes as long as they've been flying me. It’s not the infinitesimally small chances of a crash or the threat of dangerous men, because I like to think I’m more rational than that.

I’ve chalked it up and narrowed it down to the loss of the control that you’re forced to give up on an airplane. I’ve never been alright with giving up my control. I’m not talking about the kind of symbolic control one hopes to have at a business lunch or in an argument over a botched eBay deal. This is control over my own physical self. I need to know that I have the power to bring myself into and pull myself out of a situation. If driving, I could pull over. If on a bus or train, it’s (unlikely but) feasible that I could have the vehicle stopped. There is no stopping or pulling over a plane. I cannot pull myself out of it and put my feet on the ground.

It reminds me of the few (awkward, unpleasant, eternally remembered) moments as a young one dropping from the high diving board at the public pool. Spurred by the internal me-too I would climb the ladder, knowing that each rung would take me further from a root, put more and more in the hands of some force other than me. At the top, I’d look down at the trunked boys who didn’t care if I fell in water or on pavement and the girls in their vainly hopeful two pieces. Resigning myself to the fact that even if I lived to be eighty I’d probably never actually see a breast and thus had nothing to live for anyway, I would leave the board and watch its fiberglass arm waving goodbye as I fell the three miles into the water. For a moment it was all over; it was dark, it was quiet, I was held in place with a perfectly even balance. But young lungs would pull me towards the surface, back to the lights and sights and sounds, back to control, back to myself.

Again with the morbid.

I like to think that if I were present for his accident, it would've said, "explosion in explosive company."

He was the best.

All I ask is that, when I die, if I am to be remembered in terms of how intense a vacuum cleaner I would have been while alive, most people choose "vroom loud" over "whisper quiet."

"Audibly busy but gently soothing Roomba" will not be an option.

Rejected Blog Titles

Support Our Oops.
Pepperminternet
Cheer Up Daddy
Gray's In n' Outtame (mainly just pictures of doctors having sex)
Infacticide
This Old Mouse