Nothing to Write

I can't think of a single thing to write. So I'll tell a math joke:

An asymptote is driving a friend home after spending a long night drinking in a bar. All of a sudden a siren blips and his car is filled with flashing red and blue lights. The asymptote calmly pulls over, rolls down his window, and causally leans back in the seat. His friend, amazed at the asymptote's level of calm, asks, "why are you not panicking right now? We've been drinking for hours!"

The asymptote looks at his friend and says, "I know my limit, and I'm approaching it, but I'll certainly never get there."

Some (4) Things

I saw a lady jogging in Golden Gate Park in full workout regalia smoking a cigarette. She hadn't stopped to take a break, she was jogging and smoking at the same time. Just based on how my lungs feel when I run, it has to be really terrible for you to smoke and run at the same time. Sort of like painting with lead based paint when you don't have your skin on.

In San Rafael I saw a fair skinned homeless man with red hair. Of all the complexions for a homeless person to have, I have to think being a redhead is the worst. It's awfully hard to stay out of the sun when you have no place to live, and sun screen is ridiculously expensive.

In beautiful, scenic Richmond I watched a girl pick out her hair extensions and throw them in the street as she moseyed along with her friends. Just ew.

And lastly, I'm worried the NSA is going to see that I tend to call old people shortly before they die. So if I stop posting abruptly, you'll know what happened.

In other news, I just boug

Personals Part II

Speaking of which, people found my blog by searching for

"physically unattractive" dating women

and

weasel phrases personal ad

Ouch.

Picture Page it's Picture Page

First of all, you guys are swell for being so positive about my banjitar song in comment land.

OK ladies, we're going to have to have a little talk about your personals pictures. There are a number of picture no-nos that you keep sticking in your ads:

- "Guess who I am!" This is where you post 4 different pictures of you and your friends. This can go wrong two different ways. The first and most common way is that when I look at your pictures I can't figure out who the common person is in all of them. Which one are you? It's often much harder to tell than you'd think. The second is that you may compare really unfavorably to one or all of your friends. I wonder how many girls get emails saying something along the lines of "Hi. I was wondering if the girl in your first picture with the pink shirt is single. She's really hot."

- "I'm 1000 miles away on the beach!" You have your arms up in glee, maybe you're jumping for joy, there are palm trees and blue skies, and the person with the camera is just disappearing behind the curvature of the earth. It's probably a great picture when it's an 8x10, but when it's 2x3 on a personal ad I can only tell that you are smaller than a building.

- "Meet the imposing men in my life!" This is the picture where you are hanging all over a huge and probably easily angered frat guy. Unless I look just like he does, it doesn't inspire me to whip up a love letter.

- "Me in a bikini on a fire truck!" I'm not against this picture per se, but I imagine it attracts the wrong sort of guy. While I like the picture itself, I'm not sure I want to date somebody who regularly hangs out on fire trucks wearing a bikini. (In that sentence the girl is wearing the bikini, not the fire truck. I may, in fact, be more inclined to date a girl with a picture of a fire truck in a bikini.)

- "It's a leaf!" No pictures of scenery! Unless I recognize that particular portion of forest floor, it's not going to make me any more likely to email you.

With that said, perhaps I'm not who you're trying to attract. After all, you never return my emails.

Lazy

I've had ideas for posts, but the motivation hasn't materialized. I thought of some things to write about on Friday, then I switched to writing one on personal ads, then I was going to write about the picture on the front of the pop tart box, which is basically a frosted strawberry pop tart wearing a bemused expression, a tank top, and no pants. Alas, none of them made it to the page (although I think the pop tart one is sufficiently explained at this point.)

Anyhow, instead of a post, I'll put a link to a song I finally recorded with my newish banjitar. It's called Three Stories. And they're all true.

Today I was flipping through on of those free real-estate listings for the bay area. Ridiculous.

My calculations tell me that for a really cheap house located someplace not very nice, I'd have a mortgage payment upwards of $4000 a month. Prices aren't going up, so it's not a very good investment in that regard, and even if I could afford $2000 a month, I can't rent the other bedroom for the other $2000 a month. The market simply has to crash. Or at least deflate a little. Nobody's going to pay $500,000 to get murdered every 6 seconds.

One of my coworkers is going to sell his house in Richmond. He figures that after a little spiffing up it'll fetch around $500,000. Why is he selling his house? There's a bullet mark in his work van. A guy tried to rob a small nursing home next door with knife, but one of the people running the home had a gun. Knife man got shot, and gun man got stabbed, and they both went to the hospital. And on the corner of his street somebody got shot and didn't make it to the hospital.

Makes trailer parks look down right appealing.

I've Become Accustomed to Living Alone

I made the realization as I was flipping over some broiled turbot and I got burning fish grease in my bellybutton.

It's okay to walk around in one's underpants when living alone, but not while cooking. Which reminds me, I need to put my smoke detector back up.

Reach Out and Tush Someone

First off, let me just say hooray for wrong numbers. (Not really.) I was right in the middle of going to the bathroom this weekend when my phone started to ring. I had apparently been eating well because my initial doubt about reaching the phone before the answering machine picked up was exchanged for a hearty "good job, Ass!" and a leap toward my living room, pants clutched up in front, ass hanging out the back. (It's hard to run like that.) I picked up the phone at ring three and a half, and in response to my hello got a, "Nwin shwee foo twan nah?"

"Sorry?"

"Nwin shwee foo twan nah?"

"Oh," I said, pants sagging a little with disappointment, "I think you have the wrong number."

"Oh. Sorry. Bye."

And speaking of communicating with strangers, I've sent out another email on The Onion Personals. I'm really hoping I get a reply, though my batting average thus far is something along the lines of 0%. Generally I wait for girls to contact me, and to that end I'm experimenting with this as my picture:



So far it hasn't worked. I'm going to need to go on a photo shoot.

But as I sent the email there was a little blurb in the instructions that says specifically not to solicit the person to which you're sending a message to send you email outside the personals system. Are you supposed to communicate back and forth for money until you finally meet for the first time and only exchange email addresses in person? They can't be serious.

So keep your collective fingers crossed for me. Hopefully she'll write back and I won't get kicked off the system for offering her my email address.

Friendly Neighbors

Today, while walking back from the mall, I found a note on my car that said, "move your car it been theair a week."

I'm not entirely sure if it's actually an "a" in theair. It could be theetir, or therir.

One way or the other, it's only been there since Monday night. I'm a full day short of it being there a week. And who cares? I'm in a perfectly legal parking place. Jerks.

The Cure

I've discovered a sure fire way to avoid my massive headaches! Or at the very least I've avoided a massive headache twice with this particular remedy.

When the headache rears it's ugly ... um, head, which is usually in the late after noon or early evening, I slow its course with a steady stream of water and continue this throughout the evening.

When I get home I take 3 Advil and drink (this seems to be the important bit) a 23.5 oz can of Arizona Green Tea. (What a weird size for a can.) When I've had other massive headaches I've varied the number of Advil and stuck with the water, but they always get really nasty as bedtime approaches. The green tea seems to be the key.

My theory is that it contains the perfect amount of caffeine. Not so much that it'll give me the runs, but just enough to make my head feel ok. (Too much information?)

I'm not sure this would work for anyone else. Generally a 23.5 oz green tea is all the caffeine I've had in my system for days and days. So I can be sure of the dosage.

And no, it's not the green tea's fault that I'm up at midnight. It's pub quiz's fault. We, Cheese Quiz, came in 2nd. Unfortunately another team also came in second, and two teams came in first, so in reality we came in 3rd or 4th, depending on your point of view.

Speaking of bedtime ...

Helpers

Today I delivered three bed frames, and had to dismantle another. The one I dismantled was a strange spring and pulley design circa 1986, and it took me a half hour just to figure out how to START taking it apart. And let me just take a moment here to thank technology for creating better, smaller, and most importantly, lighter stuff. The portion of the 80's frame with the motors on it was nearly the same weight as Greenland. Luckily I had a helper.

My helper's name was Bill, and I'd guess he was 3. When I was bringing my bed frame into the house (it comes in 5 pieces: Head, foot, knee, back, rails), he would announce each new piece as I came through the door. And each time I would step outside he would announce that as well. At least I think that's what he was doing.

He seemed to have his own little toddler language. When I walked up the stairs with the headboard he said, "Orph mas displader!" To which I replied, "Yep, it's a brand new bed." "Brand new bed!" he confirmed. He did this over and over. He'd say something in his native baby tongue, and I say something uninteresting like, "Yep, it comes in five pieces. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5." Then he would magically regain his command of the English language and perfectly repeat the phrase, "Five pieces."

After I had my frame unloaded Bill decided he should go help get grandma out of her ancient hospital bed. Bill's mom was using a Hoyer lift* to accomplish this, and Bill was a little over eager to pump the lift up to full height. His mom kept having to ask him to wait.

I stepped outside the bedroom until grandma was safely in the chair. (I like to wait out of eye-shot of the lifting process in case the patient is wearing something risqué, like just the plastic ring around their waist where the diaper used to be.) Grandma having been successfully transferred, Bill wandered out of the room, affected the most causal pose a 3 year old can affect, and asked, "how you doing?"

"Good," I replied, thinking that he had maybe watched too many episodes of Friends. "How you doing?"

"I'm doing cool," replied Bill, and went down stairs to color.

When I finished constructing my bed frame and was ready to take the old one down to the garage, Bill reappeared to help. His first inclination was to lift up the portion of bed which weighed 2 or 3 times what he did. I took that section instead and handed him the controller handset, which he was overjoyed to bring down stairs. As we hefted our loads down to the garage I complimented him on the amoeba he had drawn on his forehead while he was coloring. His mom was also impressed with his handiwork.

My final delivery of the day was another bed frame to a facility in San Francisco. I usually have pretty good luck with parking when I'm in my work van, but not today. Had I delivered the bed at 2pm, as I had wanted to, I would have been fine. But the nurse I talked to requested I wait until after the shift change, and consequently after the time when you aren't allowed to park in front of the facility anymore. As a result I had to roll 250 pounds of bed frame and railings, (long ungainly railings), and a large, unfoldable, mattress-sized mattress 1.5 blocks down a very steep hill. About half way down the hill a homeless guy asked if I needed help. Since I did, he got the job of steering, and I held onto the mattress and slowed our descent.

The whole reason I was delivering this setup was because the patient's family was being difficult and the facility asked us to bring some really nice, clean, new-looking stuff for her to use. So we carefully set aside our finest mattress, frame, and brand, spanking, new, not-previously-died-upon mattress cover. Everything was perfect as I started down the hill. But inexplicably, even though he was steering the far side of the bed, and the only thing he hung across the bed frame on his far side was a grungy sport jacket, he somehow managed to make a puddle of hamburger juice on the headboard.

Having no other option, I transferred the puddle of hamburger juice from the headboard to my shirt, thereby returning the bed to its previous pristine condition, and making it look like I'd dripped hamburger juice on my gut sometime within the preceding 10 minutes.

Of the two, I'm going to give the MVH award to Bill for his artistic ability and innocent but disconcerting use of sitcom pickup lines.


* I do not work for Planet Mobility.

Personal Ads

I've noticed that most girls who list ads on Onion Personals are over 5'8". And many are close to 6'.

It strikes me as a bad idea to express yourself in a personal ad on craigslist by copying down the lyrics to a Metallica song and posting a picture of a lily pad.

I steer away from ads which use the phrase "I work hard, and I play hard." These people might be worn out by now.

I'm disappointed when a profile I've bookmarked is deleted, even though I've never gotten around to emailing her.

If I make a solid online connection, then the best case scenario is that we'll go on a date. I hate dates.

I wonder how mail order brides work.