How To Make Friends and Impress Women

This is the second year I've dressed as the Grim Reaper for Halloween, and people seem to be genuinely disconcerted by the costume, or maybe by me in the costume.

I suppose if one were to be a jolly, dancing, reveler style reaper, other party goers might embrace one. But as a reaper, as I am in real life, in a quiet, shy, stand in the corner and don't talk to anyone sort of guy. So in reaper garb I just come off as creepy.

I was fully aware of this last year, but last year I only went to one party, and I only knew 1 person at that party. So I really did just stand around for an hour not really talking to anyone, hooded and holding a scythe.

This year I went to a party with several people I know, and I talked to several of them. And I didn't just stand around the whole time. There were several occasions where I ate some nacho dip. It was delicious.

And yet even with all this "normal party behavior" (talking to people and eating nachos) I still got such welcoming comments as, "yikes, nobody likes to see you" and "are you TRYING to creep people out?!"

I did, however, come across a pair of people who said, "Oh, we've seen you all over the place tonight."

"Me specifically?" I asked.

"No, but people like you."

"Ah, well don't be fooled by imposters. There's only one Grim Reaper." I cautioned.

"Well he's probably not you then." They explained. "Grim Reapers don't smile."


Here's a picture of creepy old me.


And an acquaintance of mine wins the award for the most disturbing costume.


Yeah, it stretches.

Smackdown

Real quick I just wanted to point out that if anyone has $50,000 laying around, you can stick it in a TD Waterhouse brokerage account and get a free iPod Nano. I think if I had $50,000 to put someplace I would already have an iPod Nano.

Anyhow, on to my Tuesday Night.

On Tuesday night I went to see a live, um, performance(?) of WWE Smackdown. Anyone who would like to see it can tune in to UPN tomorrow. I'm not sure what time. I'm not a fan. Why did I go see it? As it happens one of my suite mates from Freshman year is now a professional wrestler. Yes, I shared a bathroom and living room with Johnny Nitro.



I've never been to see professional wresting, nor have I ever watched it on TV. And now that I've seen it live in the flesh, I don't think I'm going to become a fan despite of, or maybe because of it complete bizarreness.

I've been to basketball games and baseball games, so I know that when people come to see a sporting even they generally cheer and yell and just generally make a ruckus. Professional wrestling doesn't totally work that way. During most of the rounds the Cow Palace was oddly quiet. There were several oooo's and awww's when somebody did something particularly daring - a piledriver, a sideways parallel bar swing outside the ring and back in to hit the other guy move, etcetera. But the rest of the time you could talk to the person next to you in almost a library whisper and be well understood. But I hear that beer was $6.50, so it wasn't entirely non-sports like.

Was everyone aware that there are plot lines in professional wresting? Since this was a televised event there were two gigantic screens on one end of the arena where they played some back-story before any round which was going to move the plot along. As a for instance, I guess there is some wrester who drives around in a limo with two big ox horns on the hood and who wears a cowboy hat, a jacket or shirt of some sort, and a Speedo that says JBL. So I understand from the big screen that JBL was somehow going to shut down Smackdown and the other wrestling league was going to be the only show in town. Luckily (spoiler alert) somebody jumped into the ring and wrested JBL, and now Smackdown is going to be okay. Yeah, I don't know either. I think the writing quality of professional wrestling falls smack in the middle between porn and soap opera. It also combines many elements from both:

Dialog – right out of the porn playbook.
Storylines – from soap opera 101.
Costumes – a little of both.

To keep people interested between plot points they threw in some oddball rounds as well. The first one was two women wrestling. (Not terribly weird, but it was only the second round.) Then it was two midgets wrestling. Then some regular sized dude gets into the ring and the midgets ganged up on him. Then there was a round having something to do with voting and a wrester going on to wrestle in some other league to defend Smackdown's honor. The guy who ended up winning was a little tiny Latino guy wearing a mask. He may have also been a little cross-eyed, but it may have just been the mask.

The final round I saw was a tag team round which featured Johnny Nitro and his tag team partner, whose name escapes me. Their team, if you'd like to research it yourself, is MNM, the N standing for Nitro. In the tag team round each team makes a grand entrance. MNM walked in wearing shiny blue pants and long white fur coats. Between them was their lady person.

I'm not sure what she does other than kiss them both on the cheek, but I'm told that she's John's girlfriend in real life.

The best team entrance award goes to a three person Mexican tag team who drove to the ring on riding lawnmowers. Nobody said WWE was politically correct.

After we watched John(ny Nitro) and his partner (spoiler alert) win the round we decided to go home. It was a 3 hour show and there was a lot of dead time between rounds. And since we had all come to see John, there wasn't a whole lot of motivation to stick around for the rest of it.

On the way out my friend Steve bought an MNM shirt for $25, which I misread as saying.

MNM
It's OK To Share

Which I thought made some sense in that MNM seems to consist of 2 dudes and 1 girl. But when I read the shirt out loud Steve pointed out that it said stare, not share. Now the shirt doesn't make sense to me anymore. But neither did most of the night, so I that is as it should be.





In case anybody is interested/doubts that I really knew THE Johnny Nitro in college, here is a picture of what he, and more embarrassingly I, looked like freshman year. No, we were not in a band. Yes, we did have a lot of Christmas lights. And no, contrary to popular opinion at the time, I was not, nor have I ever been, a stoner.

Beauty and the Beast

Within the last two weeks we've had a hospice patient move from his apartment to the hospital, and then move back to his apartment. This is made easier by the fact that he has a caregiver guy who also lives in his apartment. So when I come to deliver his mattress to be (or pickup his mattress of late) there's somebody there to let me in.

I'm not sure who this caregiver is, maybe a son? I've never seen the patient so I can't judge on likeness. I only wonder because he doesn't look like your average caregiver.

The first time I saw him he was wearing flip-flops and very small jean shorts. That's it. He's about 5' 8" with medium length dirty brown hair slicked back over a weathered and smoke warn face. I don't think he's that old, but he sounds like he's been smoking since conception and his finger nails don't tell me any different. His arms are covered in tattoos and he's skinny and looks a little dirty. When I saw him today he was wearing jeans and a wife-beater. (It was cold out.)

While I wouldn't go so far as to say looks can be deceiving, sometimes they can lend some surprise to a situation. While I was setting up the mattress in the single bedroom I saw him fondly playing with a gray and back kitten which was about the size of a pound cake.

I guess it goes to show you: everybody likes kittens - especially when they're the size of a pound cake.

I Hate the Answering Service

I'm on call this weekend. If somebody has a mattress emergency, I'm it. And because all the regular customer service people have weekends off, we have a medical answering service answer our 1-800 number. Unfortunately they are idiots.

So far I've gotten 3 pages this weekend. I shall list the problems with each:

Page 1:

-There was no address. If I'm going to go fix a problem, I'm going to need to know where the problem lives.

Page 2:

-Again, no address, but they did include a city: N'Vado. N'Vado isn't a real city. Novato, however, is.
-The phone number they gave me was for Pacifica Pizza. I'm pretty sure they weren't calling me about beeping pumps.
-The message said that the problem was with an Airmax. Nope, I don't know what an Airmax is either.

Page 3:

-This page was about a broken zipper on a product in Compton. I'm not very near Compton. The rental techs who work in Compton are very close to Compton. I tried to call the answering service to explain their mistake but I was put on hold for 10 minutes.

I swear anyone who calls my company after 5pm or on the weekend thinks hard about whether or not they want to ever order anything from us again.

Norbert Gets Her Comeuppance*

I am now fully aware that I have to shut the door if I'm planning on going to the bathroom in a standing position. If I'm going to sit, I usually leave the door open so Norbert can come see what I'm up to. (Which seems to be important to her for some reason.) But I guess I'm going to have to change my tactics a little. Maybe sit down first, then open the door.

The very second I opened the toilet lid Norbert jumped mostly into the bowl. Her rear legs where on the seat, but both front legs were in the water. I quickly scooped her up so she wouldn't climb all the way in and I set her in the sink. When I bent down to wipe the water off the seat she gave her left paw a flip and shot toilet juice all over my face.

Apparently Norbert hasn't been paying attention to My Name is Earl. Karma will get you. She really likes to get inside my towel and climb until the towel slides onto the floor, and usually she jumps up a bit to get a higher claw hold. Tonight she jumped a tad high and hit her head on the towel bar. That seemed to take the fun out of the bathroom for 5 minutes or so while she went and sulked in the hall.

I would cheer her up with her feather toy, but she seems to have hidden it someplace. She is a wily beast.

*Thank the lord for Google's "Did you mean:" feature. It always knows what I mean, even I've completely befuddled Word. I had originally spelled it comeupants.

The family who live upstairs seem to be singing whatever the Chinese equivalent is of "She'll be comin' 'round the mountain when she comes."

Ten Hut!

Norbert has one of those cloth cat bed/house things with the ball hanging from the top. Like some sort of pet nativity scene, without Jesus, and with fake fur instead of hay.

Anyhow, she doesn't lay in it or play with the ball that hangs from the roof. When she gives it any notice at all she runs across the room, leaps upon it, and tackles it.

Tackling things seems to me to be a masculine thing to do. Or so I'm told. I don't think I've ever tackled anything. Never the less, I'm wondering if maybe naming a female cat Norbert was a bad idea. She may think she's a dude.

Unhappy Lady and Boss-speak

Today I delivered a mattress and bed frame to a very difficult lady. She didn't like the mattress I brought. She didn't like the mattress she already had. She liked the gel pad on top of the mattress I brought, but not when I told her it was $225. She didn't like the lifting pole on the bed frame. She didn't like that the bed frame was so low. (This criticism was allayed when I pointed out that it's an electric bed frame and you can make it as tall as you like.) She tried out the bed frame with my mattress, with her mattress, with my mattress and the gel, with her mattress again, with my mattress again, and then finally with her mattress again.

I can't really hold her difficultness against her. She has some fractures in her back which, she told me over and over, hurt a lot. And while she was initially very demanding* and whiney, when she saw that I was really trying to do my best to figure something out for her she became much nicer. But because she's initially mean and whiney to everybody the facility's staff doesn’t like her. And she can tell they don't like her, so she is meaner to them. And so the cycle goes.

But I really couldn't help but feel sorry for her. After more than an hour of trying out various frame and mattress combinations she told me that her son had said that maybe it wasn't that the mattresses are no good, maybe it's that her back is no good for the mattresses. And then she started to cry. How's that for a depressing way to start a Tuesday?

Luckily I found an Arby's for lunch. Mmmm, jamoca. And so my day started to improve.

Later, at the depot, my supervisor was reading through his absentee ballot. He got to one initiative about banning genetically engineered stuff in Marin. First he explained to me that it was to make sure that nobody could buy, sell, or grow "generically engineered food" in Marin, which I thought was funny. But it wasn't nearly as funny as when he read the exact text of the law which stated, sort of, that "no one shall buy, sell, or grow generically engineered orgasms in Marin County." I'm pretty sure that law is already on the books everywhere but Las Vegas.


*She demanded I help her swing her legs up onto the bed. As a general rule we are NEVER allowed to touch the patients unless it's an absolute emergency. But after the first half hour of playing mix and match with the mattresses, the staff had all given me "you're a saint" looks and moseyed off to other parts of the hospital. So it fell to gloveless me to swing her old-lady legs onto the mattress. Note to self: Always bring gloves!

Okay. I'm Back.

I don't have any great excuse for being gone, but I did manage to have a busy weekend. So here's an all encompassing getting up to date post.

First off, Norbert has a cold. I think. She doesn't seem tired, her ears are what I assume is a normal temperature, and her nose feels moist. So all those things check out, yet she still sneezes cat boogers all over me from time to time. It's kind of cute when her nose is aimed safely in some other direction, but if I happen to be face to face with her and she lets fly, I find that it leaves me a little grossed out.

Today I also discovered quite a bit of kitty litter in my bathroom sink. It's a long way from the litter box to the bathroom sink. I wonder if she's carrying litter around in some sort of handbag.

My last cat discovery is that if you nuzzle I cat without shaving for a couple days I end up with quite a few cat hairs on my chin and upper lip. If I ever need to fake a mustache I guess I just have to wait a few days and then rub Norbert all over my face. If people ask why my hair is brown and my mustache is white I'll just say it's genetic.

In non-Norbert related news (bye Jootastic), on Saturday night I went to the opening of the new de Young museum in Golden Gate Park. I have to say, the stuff inside the museum is pretty run of the mill museum stuff, but the building itself is pretty cool.

For the grand opening they started letting people in at noon on Saturday and left the museum open for 36 hours straight. I got there at 10:45pm or so and left at 1:30am. Wandering around an art museum at midnight while DJ's and live drummers pound out dance music in the basement and noisy people wander around looking at paintings and old African sculptures is unsettling. I kept feeling that I wasn't really in a museum. It felt more like an elaborately themed club.

Another interesting aspect of the opening was the sheer variety of people in attendance. EVERYONE was there: A guy in a suit, a girl in a ball gown, a guy in a sleeveless sheepskin vest, silk pants with 70's running shorts on top, and a purple hat, a girl with an eye-patch - everybody. I had more fun looking at the people than I did looking at the art.

The other satisfying bookends of my weekend consisted of a dinner party with my San Francisco friends where a surprise chocolate cake with cinnamon bears on top appeared for my birthday pleasure, and a Sunday trip to the Cheesecake factory with most of my Sacramento friends for the traditional special-occasion meal of Chicken Madera.

It was a good weekend.

Cooking with Stupid

Tonight I made what looks like a very nice meal.



It includes pre-marinated chicken, basmati rice, and asparagus.

Directions:

Chicken:
Warm a pan on stove while you open the chicken.
Put the chicken on the warm pan.
Watch in horror as the chicken immediately becomes one with pan.
Frantically search the kitchen for any sort of oil.
Find some extra virgin olive oil in fridge, open the lid, and shake the bottle over the pan.
Try to figure out why no oil comes out.
Look into the bottle to see a white crust which has imprisoned the oil.
Make a mental note to throw out the oil.
Decide to put margarine on the chicken when you flip it over.
Flip chicken.
Ask yourself why you didn't put the margined on.
Cook until the chicken is both burnt and rubbery.

Rice:
Mix rice and water in another saucepan and bring them to a boil.
Turn the heat down to a simmer and look for the lid.
Use a plate because you don't have a lid for that pan.
Shoot rice juice all over the oven by keeping the heat too high.
Turn the heat down and simmer for 15 minutes, or until the rice on top is wet and the rice on the bottom is solid and black and forever stuck to the bottom of the pan.

Asparagus:
Put the asparagus in a loaf pan with water.
Microwave on high for 6 minutes.
Put margarine on top.

Serve all together on a plate and eat it, but not because it tastes good*, but because you don't want to waste all that "food." Put the leftovers on a plate in the fridge to suffer through tomorrow.


*The asparagus was fine, though a bit soggy.

My Only News

I figured out why Norbert bites me all the time, or use to. She does not like to have her tummy rubbed.

You'd never know that tummy rubbing isn't on her top 10 best things about being a cat list. When I come home she purrs and flops over on her back. I'm sure if she had opposable thumbs she would have made herself a little sign that said rub my tummy. But she doesn't, so she just squirms around and looks cute until I rub her tummy. And it goes fine for about a minute, at which point she walks away. All subsequent tummy rubs result in biting.

Because I've been avoiding her tummy since her spay, we've been getting along much better. (Although I think she's feeling fine. I know I wouldn't climb my computer chair at 1000mph if I had just had my uterus removed.) She's only bitten me a few times for, um, something. I'm still figuring out all her quirks.

Pain Killers

After Norbert came home from the vet she was not at 100%. If she had told me she had been out drinking I would have believed her had I not just picked her up from the SPCA.

When I let her out of her carrier she swayed and stumbled slowly toward my bedroom, and then veered off toward her water. I had put down a water dish thinking that it might be easier to drink from than her hamster bottle, but she immediately knocked it over. That scared her so she wobbled as fast as she could under my bed.

She finally came out and walked around my apartment sniffing every square inch of everything. Her stance suggested that she had just ridden 100 miles on a very uncomfortable horse: Her legs were spread wide and her ass stayed close to the floor.

Her depth perception also seemed to be off. She kept running into things. When I would put my head close to hers she would sway over and try to sniff me, but usually over shoot and run her nose into my face.

When I went to bed she curled up next to my arm and the flopped over with her back to my face. She smells strongly of Band-Aid.

The vet said she would feel fine in a few days, but she seems to have made a full recovery already. I was pretty sure she was well when I woke up to find one of my slippers in the middle of my bed with a little piece of white something on it. Odd, I thought. When I got out of bed I realized my floor was covered in little tiny pieces of toilet paper. She thoroughly destroyed about 3/4th of a roll, spreading it evenly around my room. At least she did it quietly.

What an Interesting Noise

Norbert is currently at the vet getting her nails done and having a little nip and tuck done so she'll be thinner. But it turns out that she wasn't that pleased to go.

Usually I can toss a piece of food into her cat carrier and she'll pop in after it. But she's big enough now so that she can reach the food with her mouth and still have her ass hanging out of the end of the carrier. It took a lot more manhandling to get her stowed than I was expecting.

When we got to the vet there were other dogs and cats in the waiting room. At the SPCA this has never bothered her, but I guess one of the great big dogs made her a little uneasy because she was making something between a hiss and a growl that made her whole carrier vibrate. She would open her mouth all the way, stick out her tongue and roll it into a taco shape, and then growliss. It was very strange noise and several of the other pet owners glanced over to see what manner of beast I had brought with me. I checked too to make sure I hadn't somehow brought the wrong animal.

Countdown

There are a little less than 11 hours until Norbert goes in to get what I keep calling a hysterectomy. I also plan to get her nails clipped. I may ask to see if they can sand down her teeth too, but I'm betting they'll say no.

The Lines are Your Friend

Why is it that when I drive the big wide van with the extra special protruding mirrors that everyone drifts around in their lanes? It's like I'm delivering enormous magnets or something. As I approach people they magically float over the line. I honked at 5 people today.

And if you have to butter toast or something while driving, how about we not do it on 101 south as your approach the Golden Gate Bridge? The little section of freeway has many tight curves, goes from 55mph to 45mph, and merges from 3 lanes to 2. And I'm not talking huge Ohio style lanes where you can drive a 18 wheeler sideways down the freeway and never even bother the other cars. No. These lanes were made by the same people who make the little rubber tracks for matchbox cars. I've eaten sandwiches wider than these lanes.

So please everybody, quit driving like you're all retarded.


6 lanes of traffic (3 north, 3 south) on 101 just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. (Actual size)

Mustachioed

I had a dream last night that the nurse and I went out on our date. When she showed up she was wearing a business suit, had become Asian (she's from Mexico), had gotten her hair cut short, and had a mustache. And I don't mean a slightly hairy upper lip, I mean a full on, flecked with gray, mustache.

I remember thinking disapprovingly to my self, "I've never thought mustaches were very feminine."

More Airport Stuff Among Other Things

At the Las Vegas airport on Monday I saw an Asian family consisting of a 50ish man, his 50ish wife, and a 80ish Mother (in law) in a wheelchair. They were all wearing thick gold chains with big gold dollar signs pendants. Awesome.

And in Norbert News she seems to have learned how to meow while I was in Vegas. Well, meow might be a bit of a stretch, but she's learned to make weird whiney chirp noises. I have no idea what they mean though. If I put my hand out to pet when she chirps her she runs someplace at 1000 miles and hour. And she'll chirp in the livitchen when I'm in my room, and she'll chirp while she's walking toward me and looking right at me. She may be talking to herself.

I've also noticed that purring and trying to bite me seem to go together. I'm not sure I like that combination. I think I could definitely get behind purring and not trying to bite me. Maybe I will suggest that.

CSI Vegas

When I went to Vegas this weekend with my Mom to visit my sister, we all saw a number of the sites: The Aladdin, The Paris, (The whatever the real names are for those casinos), Hoover Dam, and Lake Mead. While we were at Lake Mead I saw a whole and seemingly perfect, albeit dead, fish lying on the rocks near the water. Why would a fish jump out of the water to dry out on the rocks? How did he die? Was he caught and left to drown? Was he frozen and fell from a plane on his way here from China? He looked so unscathed.



At home while I was looking at my pictures full size, I figured it out: he was a smoker.

Airport

I saw 4 interesting people in the airport today. 3 of them might be interesting to people who are not me and Anthony, but I am going to list all 4 anyhow.

1) A lady sitting to my right started talking to somebody on the phone and complained about everything. She ran out of cigarettes, security had to pat her down, she wasn't going to get home soon enough, her plane was delayed, she ran out of cigarettes, the person on the phone wasn't answering her question regarding whether or not he felt sleepy, security patted her down, etcetera. You may have noticed that I repeated some things. She did too, except without space in between. She'd just say the same thing over and over and over again. When she was nearing the end of her call I thought "jesus christ she complains about EVERYTHING!" Just as I finished thinking that she told the person on the phone, "you know me, I complain about everything." I guess it's good that she knows.

2) After the complainer left the lady to my left took off her sandals and started moisturizing her feet. The only thing I can think of which is more disgusting than public feet moisturizing would be a public anal moisturizing. I almost skipped going to Vegas and went home.

3) To get my mind of the foot slathering going on to my left I started looking around the rest of the airport just in time to see an extremely, ridiculously fat man walking down the concourse wearing a shirt with pancakes on the front.

4) Everybody but Anthony can stop reading here, because the last person I saw was Lauren. As in the Lauren from Davis. Yeah, see, if you aren't Anthony you don't know who that is and you're disappointed that you've wasted your time reading number 4. Sorry, I warned you. Anyhow, she is still hot.