Ever So Quickly

The problem with addressing and stamping envelopes while wearing only boxer shorts is that you may drop a stamp on your gut. And then when you try to peel off said stamp, you might remove some gut hair. And then you might be in pain and slightly grossed out at the fact that you have gut hair.

And then you'll have to worry about whether or not the stamp has retained enough sticky to get the envelope where it needs to go.

Life can be so difficult sometimes.



(I typed this whole post with not a single misspelling. When I pushed the spell check button I got a gray screen that said:

Spell Check Complete
(No Errors Found)

And I thought the spell check was broken because I had never before seen that screen.)

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

I went to pick up a mattress recently at a Nursing home in Antioch. There were two driveways close together and I almost pulled into the one next door, which I noticed belonged to a funeral parlor. Of all the businesses to put next to a nursing home, the funeral parlor has to be the one which instills the least amount of confidence in the families of the elderly.

Silver Oaks Care Center
"Where 'moving on' just means going next door."

It's like seeing a Chinese food restaurant next to a pet hospital: It has a kind of morbid, creepy convenience. I'm sure they are only neighbors by coincidence, but it's still uncomfortable.

Blooop

Today, after taking pictures of a project for work, and taking pictures of the bear, I made some burritos. As I've mentioned before, my burritos call for cooking some ground beef, adding refried beans and salsa, and serving.



Before I added the beans, I made a little grease tub out of the meat container and some aluminum foil. Then I held the beef in place with the spatula and poured what grease I could into the tub while trying to avoid the inevitable beefalanche. I guess it's not totally inevitable, it didn't happen today.

After I drained my beef, I set about opening my can of refried beans. (The Rosarita 98% fat free vegetarian variety.) I opened the top of the can and took the lid off, then turned the can over and held it above its intended destination. When I punched a hole in the bottom of the can to let the air in, schlooop, pop, out came the cylinder of beans ... right into my grease tub.



Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking. Any way you look at it, it was a bad idea to dump my beans into a tub of grease, but it was an even worse idea to do it from such a height. My beans did the edible version of a cannon ball. So much for 98% fat free.
And now my slippers need a bath. Next time I'll add the ingredients to the food and not to the garbage.

Projects
((c)2006 Michael Kadel. No stealing my ideas! What do you mean nobody would steal these ideas?!)

I've been making some very slow progress on my various projects tonight.

My most recent project is to make a shirt with a big picture of a cinnamon bear on the front. I don't think there will be any text involved, just a big 4x8 inch bear. I'm trying to decide if I should go for an iron-on t-shirt transfer or try Kinko's print right on the shirt deal. The problem with printing on the shirt is that it requires a white shirt, and I don't wear white shirts very much. Does anyone have access to some t-shirt technology of which I'm unaware?

I found my bear model yesterday. Or, more accurately, I bought my bear model yesterday and found him (her?) this morning. I ate the first package of bears without doing a casting call. The second package involved selecting the perfect bear march madness style. Each two bears compete to move onto the semifinals. Then each of the semifinalists compete and so on and so forth until a single bear remains. The Ambearican Idol. Or maybe just a bear which didn't get mangled by the bear stamper. I have a photo shoot scheduled for tomorrow. Cinnamon is on a strict diet of diet Coke and cigarettes until then.

My second project moved along quickly at first, but then hit a road block. I've been making a lamp where the bulb will shine through a whole bunch of shattered tempered glass. The lamp bit is all done, switch and all, but finding tempered glass to break for less than $60 is proving difficult. But today I parked my van in an alley behind a facility, and when I got out I noticed a whole bunch of shattered tempered glass on the sidewalk and in the gutter. I guess each stolen stereo brings my lamp one step closer to fruition.

I don't think I'll keep collecting glass that way though. It took me a half hour to clean the who-knows-what out of the glass shards, leaving me a quarter inch less lamp to fill and a sore back. All that combined with the pee smell emanating from the gutter, and I think it might be time for a trip to a junk yard.

If anyone lives near by and your shower door explodes, please let me know. I'll be by momentarily to clean up the glass, free of charge. That's just the kind of helpful guy I am.

Momma Don't Want No Waffle-Stompers 'Round Here

Yesterday while I was driving to Sacramento I saw an old 5th wheel trailer sitting alone beside a river. It was old and falling apart, and missing a wheel so it was leaning off toward the water. The windows were broken and it had sunk noticeably down into the mud. The stairs where down and the door hung open so I could see that someone had spray painted, for the benefit of all those who dared enter: "Please take your shoes off."

The Problem with Work Trips

Is that they pay for my food. I've been trying to make some better choices at home, while also keeping it cheap. There are certainly a limited number of food items from which to choose that come in near $5 and aren't gross. But here in Tempe I just need to come in under $50 a day, which is really no problem. And I feel like I should aim for my limit since there isn't really any other advantage of travelling for work. The result is that I'm slowly being engulfed by my ever expanding waistline.

And why is it so hard to find healthful food which tastes good? It's not like it's an oxymoron or anything. There are lots of dishes which taste good and won't warp my belt, but none of them are for sale in a restaurant setting. The closest I've come to that ideal here was with a Caribbean salmon dish. And yeah, I know, fish in the desert is never recommended. And this was no exception. It was a Salmon steak, burned lightly on both sides, covered in a sickeningly sweet purple sauce, and surrounded by some intricately bitter broccoli and packing-peanut flavored rice. It arrived simultaneously with a garden salad: Ranch dressing, iceberg lettuce, and a single cherry tomato.

My dinner was not improved by the table of happily screaming kids, one of which shot a spitball at my booth. She wasn't very covert about it. I was reading my book and waiting for my food to arrive and I heard a phoof, a swish, and a sort of a squishy thud near my left shoulder. I looked over to find a rather sizable spitball adhered to the red vinyl. I flicked it off with the drink menu then looked up at the kids table to 5 kids looking elsewhere and 1 girl slowly edging her face up over the booth to see if the coast was clear. It was not, I was looking at her, so she popped back down. Another peak, then back down, and repeat. Eventually her pizza came and she forgot about my oppressive eyeballs and innate targetness.

Yay Tempe!

Moooo

Yesterday I had dinner at Rustler's Roost, which was billed as a steak house, but was actually more of a steak theme park. It's perched up on the only hill in Tempe, looking out over the infinite sprawl.

As you walk in there's a bull in a little tiny pen to lend the place the authentic smell of cow. The hostesses all have dark hair with blond streaks and wear red and white plaid shirts. On the way to my table I walked by a real, live, authentic country band who played a number of songs I didn't recognize, and one by Johnny Cash that I did. Descending to the eating area I had the choice of stairs or a slide. Since the slide was full of 8 year olds, I chose the stairs.

The floor was covered in wood shavings, the tables where lit by oil lamps, and the menu was full of creatively named food items. I got a 10oz Filet with mixed vegetables, corn on the cobb, rolls with 2 kinds of butter, and cowboy beans. I ate my Filet medium, since, according to the menu, that's a how a tenderfoot orders it.

The cowboy beans were a little on the disgusting side, but the rest of it was excellent. Unfortunately it was a little dark, so I had some trouble with the rolls. I grabbed roll #1 and buttered it. It was so dark, though, that I couldn't tell what kind of butter I was using, and ended up with my pre-dinner roll covered in honey cinnamon butter. Kind of weird as an appetizer. Luckily I have a Cate-like sense of smell and was able to sniff each tub of butter until I found one that wasn't oddly flavored. With the butter problem solved I triumphantly sat back and wiped the butter off my nose, picked up a second roll, and promptly dropped it on the floor. The third one was the charm.

And tonight I went to the Cheesecake Factory and ate my tradition Chicken Madera. Mmmmmmmmmmm. Chicken Madera.

Tech Support

Since the wireless signal in my room hovers between 32% and 7%, (depended apparently on how uncomfortable the work surface is: high table and broken chair = 32, sofa = 7) I stopped by the front desk to ask if they had the handy data port adapters that the other Comfort Inn has.

They guy behind the counter looked up from his file-o-fax and said, in the thickest New York accent this side of New York:

"Yeah, it doesn't work so good in this weather. [Which is totally wrong.] Those security guys come out here and they mess with the wireless bowl, and now it's under the desk, and I know it don't belong there. So we keeps calling them up, and they keeps telling us that it works fine, but it don't, especially not in this weather. And we had those boxes but people keep checkin' 'em out and then they don't come back at 225 a pop. So we don't know what to do, ya know? Come down here and get a lock on the signal and then go back to your room. Easy as pie. If I were a computer guy, I don't know. What a racket they got."

I started to back away at about "225 a pop," and said thanks anyway from about half way up the stairs.

The front desk people are really just a wealth of information.

When I checked in the desk was manned by a pale, white, mouth-breather with bleached white hair and a soul-patch. As I walked in his friend was walking out and he called after him, "You not comin' to the party dawg?!? Don't be playin' me like dat! Are you playin'? Nah, you still comin'. You still my dawg, dawg."

When I asked about checking in he said I had to wait until 3 o'clock, so I sat in the lobby and read my book.

20 minutes later he slipped out from behind the desk to procure some reece's pieces from the candy machine. He put is quarter in and turned the crank, and nothing happened. He looked at me and yelled, "Oh hell no! Can you believe dis shit? This machine tryin' to burn me fo' a quarter. I ain't havin' none of dat shit." And he shook it until his reeses pieces came out. "Hell yeah!" He exclaimed, now totally satisfied. "I got me my handful of pieces."

The Joys of Tempe

I left an iced over San Francisco on an 8am flight to Tempe. On my way to the airport I listened to a traffic report warning that 101N was closed at Marin City because of a 31 car pile up due to rain, ice, and hail. The perfect time to go to Tempe.

My flight was delayed on arrival because of torrential rains. It hasn't rained in 4 months, but it rained today, and Tempe has terrible drainage. There are some serious puddles around here.

Now I'm checked into my Hotel which has "Free WiFi throughout." I may have to walk down to the lobby to post this.

And I learned today that I will definitely be sharing this room with the other guy who is out here covering the Tempe area. He should feel right at home though, being a smoker, as my room smells very much like an ashtray.

Since it's Saturday night I've been combing the internet for stuff to do and I've come up with 2 options:

1) Go see Minus The Bear. Minus is one of two bands that are playing in Tempe tonight. Their website hints that they may be a pretty cool band, but there are a number of problems with tonight's venue. The first is that it's on E. Broadway Rd. Broadway, as you follow it from West to East, starts as West Broadway, becomes East Broadway at 7th Ave, goes back to West at 52nd Street, and finely stays East after Highway 87. I drove around for a very long time trying to find the particular stretch of E. Broadway Rd that contained the club, and when I did it was bursting at the seams with high school kids. I guess it's an all ages show.

2) Go see a movie. The only one I want to see is Fun with Dick and Jane. We'll see how I feel at 9:15pm. I figure I should give myself at least a half hour to find the theater.

Pub Quiz Part Deux

Last night we went to a different and far more crowded pub quiz. There was something like 30 teams, most of them named on a religious pun or in recognition of South Dakota's abortion ban. There were at least 3 teams with names involving South Dakota and coat hangers.

The religious ones were only slightly more varied. There was "Jesus is coming, look busy" which was I'm sure stolen earlier that day from a coffee mug. I thought "Preparation H. Christ" was much better and a lot more creative. "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Skanks" won best team name.

We, as "Spanish Groove Armada", earned embarrassingly few points, but I was proud of myself for knowing that the country where some MacDonalds changed the red background of their sign from red to blue was Israel.

The strangest team name, in my opinion, was "Fresno: The only city in America where a Puerto Rican can be called white trash." I don't even know what that means, but it sounds like they don't like Fresno very much. It's beyond me what their opinion of Puerto Ricans might be. The guy running pub quiz, after reading that teams name, said, "From now on team names have to come in under 3 paragraphs."

Off to the Napper Tandy.

One Awsome Monday

I should probably be making phone calls or sending emails or something, but I'm just not in the mood.

I started out my day driving alllll the way to Fairfield to do a pickup. When I got there a service call came in for Suisun City, which is right around the corner. Perfect, I thought. Unfortunately the people weren't going to be there for me to fix the mattress for another 3 hours, so I drove the 50 miles back to San Rafael.

10 minutes from the Depot, the people called back and said I could come right now if I wanted. I told them it was too late and that I'd have to come back at 1. I did and I fixed their mattress.

On the way back to the depot for a second time, I came down 80 to 37 through Vallejo, and then down 101 to San Rafael. 5 minutes from the depot I got a service call to Vallejo. I called the lady to try to figure out what the problem was in hopes of not having to actually drive all the way back:

Lady: We havin' trouble with grandma's bed.
Me: What's the problem?
Lady: It don't work.
Me: What doesn't work? The whole thing?
Lady: The head don't go up and down.
Me: Just the head? Do the rest of the buttons work?
Lady: It don't work.
Me: Is it plugged in?
Lady: Of course it plugged in. It don't work.

I gave up and told her I would be there at 4:45.

I pulled up to the house with some of the most likely parts in hand. On my approach to the front door I had to weave through 5 dead cars and slog through some deep, wet, muddy grass, to get to the rickety wooden wheel chair ramp.

When they answered the door I was greeted with a little, tiny, grungy room filled with two kids doing homework on the noticeably filthy floor, a blind old woman with no visible pupils screaming incoherently from a wheelchair (I'm assuming this was grandma), and a guy watching TV on the couch. The heat was on and the fireplace held a raging fire so it was roughly 1,000,000 degrees, and the TV was on loud enough to be easily heard over grandma's rampage.

I went into an even filthier back room where I discovered that they guy who had delivered the bed hadn't specified which kind it was and I had brought the wrong parts. Not that the right parts would have helped as the frame was severely bent out of shape. I don't even know how one would bend a frame like that, but these people seem to have solved that particular challenge.

Luckily there's a possibility I won't have to go back tomorrow. Instead I have to find a place to park in the heart of China Town and drag 250 pounds of bed frame up to some section 8 housing. I'm psyched. If I play my cards right maybe I can do both. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Ingallside*

Today included a number of moderately frustrating tidbits which left me feeling a little antsy by the time I arrived at my final delivery.

When I went inside this guy's apartment to set up his mattress, I found him propped up on his hospital bed facing a gigantic front projection TV from the early 90's blasting Little House on the Prairie.

Before this evening I would have assumed that Little House on the Prairie would be a fairly innocuous show to have blasted at me while I set up a mattress after a frustrating day. But as I finished up, I discovered the mattress I had put down had a hole in the middle and I needed to get a new one from the van and start over. At that point the full weight of schmaltz and the melodramatic Ingalls came down upon me.

In this particular episode some kid had just died. I'm not sure whose kid he was, or how he managed to buy the farm, but I do know he had "the best newspapering instincts of any boy in town." And while I know losing a loved one is hard, "life just has to go on. It just HAS to!" While I don't know how he died, I'm pretty sure I know why he died.

I didn't remember until today how awful the show was. I think I used to like it, but I was young at the time and didn't know any better. Now I do know better and have one more reason to be glad I don't get the Hallmark channel.




*I couldn't come up with a good title for this post. I live in the Ingleside neighborhood of San Francisco, and the Ingalls were the family from Little House, and, well, sorry about that.

The Pot Calling the Kettle Blech

Tonight I finished off the last of a particularly vast expanse of chicken pot pie.

I went to Costco on Saturday to buy soap, toilet paper, and laundry detergent. And on impluse I bought a chicken pot pie and the Wallace and Gromit trilogy on DVD. I'm still happy with 4 out of 5 of those purchases*, but the pie was a big mistake.

I like chicken pot pie, or so I thought. What I like is my Mom's chicken pot pie, where the crust is thin and the pie filling isn't a solid mass. Costco's pie was like eatable cement covered in a layer of quarter-inch thick plywood pie crush. (Piewood.**) My Mom's pie filling is like a blissfully pealess and really chunky chicken soup filled with, among other things, plenty of celery. (An ingredient disturbingly absent in Costco's monstrosity.) I like peas, but not in pie form.

Possibly worst of all, the piewood tasted terrible and was the bulk of the pie. I ate about a quarter of the pie, crust and all, on the first night. I ate the rest by digging the filling out, putting it in a bowl, adding a little water, and microwaving it. After all was said and eaten, the remaining 3/4 of a pie's worth of crust neatly filled a little more than half the pie tin. That's a lot of piewood.

I'm going to stick to frozen food from Trader Joes.

* It turns out I had plenty of toilet paper. Now the kitchen cupboard closest to the bathroom is now completely full of toilet paper. I can't fit one, single, extra roll in my apartment.

**
-What's your tree house made of?
+Piewood.
-Oh. It's leaving grease stains on my pants.
+Yeah, it does that. And it looks like it's about to rain, we should probably get down.

Pub Quiz Update

Thanks for the suggestions, but in the end we went with "Someone Stole My Leg Again." We came in third behind some ties for 2nd, and I have no idea if we won best name because it was 11:30 by the time the quiz ended. If you go to the Napper Tandy pub quiz, make sure Marissa is running it. Accept no substitutes.

Due to a perfect storm of an imprint soccer game and a beer and pizza special, the bar was stuffed full of quizzers, eaters, and loud Irish soccer fans. We had to move to the back room and huddle around the pool table to hear they guy read the questions. He was no Marissa, but he wasn't terrible. Apart from a few odd pronunciations (Lenny Kravitz pronounced Lenny crevice) his major problem was that he didn't speak loudly enough. So even after we moved to the room without the soccer fans, we still had to listen like we were trying to find a pinhole leak in a blimp. (You'd have to listen pretty hard to find that I would imagine.) And after each round everybody asked for every question to be repeated at least twice. 5 question rounds with 10 questions each is a lot repeats.

The biggest problem with pub quiz recently is the pub quiz helper. I'm not sure if she's an official member of the Napper Tandy staff. I hope she isn't because she's very nearly useless, and she's not even Irish*. She came around to our table and asked if we were going to play the quiz and we said that we were. We also asked for a pitcher of Fat Tire ale, and she said sure. 15 minutes later a real waitress came by asked, "Are yous guys ta ones who oredered ta Fat Toier? And ta pizza? Roight. We'll haf dat roight out fur ya." I picture Mrs. Useless going over to the real waitress and saying, "Somebody ordered something." Then pointing in our general direction.

The Pub Quiz Helper (PQH) is also not very friendly. When other people have taken on the task of being the PQH, they ask politely if you're done with a round, and if you aren't she'll either come back or ask you to bring it up to the table when you're done. Not the useless PQH. She walks around demanding the answer cards, and if, god forbid, you aren't finished writing because you were laughing at the pronunciation of fillim (film), she sighs heavily, rolls her eyes, and walks away, not returning until the next round.

Her other duty as PQH is to score the answer cards. This involves making sure the answers are right and then adding up the points. For instance we got 2, 10, and 8 points in rounds 1, 2, and 3 respectively. PQH added these up for a grand total of 18 points. We were seriously considering buying her one of those calculators with the insultingly large buttons.

I'm hoping next week will come baring a lot more Marissa and a lot less Useless PQH. And maybe we'll be "The licensed Purveyors of Poison." Although I'm sure it would take 2 or 3 rounds to finally pronounce the word purveyors correctly.

*Which is to say that if you are going to be working in an Irish bar and have no redeeming personality traits or skills, you should, at the very least, be Irish. It would at least give the tiniest of explanations of why the other employees let you stay. With that said it should now be apparent that I was not saying the Irish are useless.

Rock the Vote

I've been trying to gather pub quiz team names by reading Reuters Oddly Enough and stealing headlines and phrases from the articles. Here's my list so far. You can all vote and see whose gets picked. (If any of these do get picked.) And while you are at it, suggest some good ones for next time. It's surprisingly hard to come up with a fancy quality team name.

240,000 liters of pig manure
Turning dog waste into power
Killing over toilet paper
Would-be rock star plunges from bed to death
Death by misadventure
Well, that should wipe the pandemic right out
$4,000 for bird flu
Anterior crotch length
Competing under false pretences
En route to 96th place
Dart injuries rise sharply
Someone stole my leg again
Tiger poo is scary
Fun with horse(s) stencils (Not for Reuters, from Kristin.)
Chub quiz (Also from Kristin.)
Not Shane's dentist (There was a team that always won called Shane's dentist.)

Amazon Dot Rub It In

While trying to figure out if my sister's birthday present ever made it out of the void that is the Amazon.com warehouse, I clicked on my gold box offers. Gold box offers, for those of you who don't know, are things Amazon thinks you might like to have which have been bless with a special, minute gold box discount for 60 minutes. You have 10 things to choose from, each choice revealed after you've cast away the previous choice forever. As I was clicking through my offers, Amazon showed me no less than 4 books about having and/or getting a girlfriend. Apparently the online shopping community has taken it upon itself to pressure me into giving them grandkids.

In completely unrelated, but still irritating news, on my way home from work I was trying to turn left across a fairly busy street. Both my lane and the lane to my right are left turn friendly, and the car to my right was a very nicely restored yellow roadster. As we both took our lefts a guy started out crossing the street and stopped right in front of my van to watch the roadster go by in front of him. After he admiringly watched it drive off down the street he looked over at me as if we might share a common bond about seeing the great car drive by. We had no bond. When he noticed that I was not sharing in his celebration of automotive aesthetics and was instead looking mightily irritated that he had left me sticking out in traffic, he hustled the rest of the way across the street, only narrowly avoiding me honking at him.

Misc

- Up until yesterday at about 9:30pm, I wrongly assumed that the Taj Mahal was the Tajma Hall. Or at the very least, the Tajmahall. These are the things you learn while eating Indian pizza. (Which is quite good.) I had always thought of it as one of the several ornate halls of India.

- Over the past few weeks I've been working my way through all the William Gibson books. His first three are set at some point in the future and I like all his predictive details. For instance, people have little slots behind their ear into which they can insert little disks of information which he calls Microsofts. In the 80s, when the book was written, Microsoft was no where near the powerhouse it is today. He also uses the term The Matrix in roughly the same way the movie The Matrix uses it. Those kinds of things are cool. The next two books, which I originally read 5 or 6 years ago, are set 12 years in the future. Unfortunately they were written in 1993, which means they took place last year. I still like the stories, but now I have to get over the fact that he's just wrong about how the world turned out. Nobody lives on the Bay Bridge, California isn't divided up into two states (Northern and Southern, although it's not a bad idea), and nobody's building cities with nanotechnology yet. I've gotten past all this by pretending that both stories are set in the near future. It makes reading them a lot less distracting.

- Today was a medium grade holiday, which means that I was at work and doctors were not. That, in turn, means that we had nothing to do all day. (Our mattresses are prescription, so doctors have to be around to prescribe them.) Boredom coupled with the after effects of sleeping on a couch, and then an air mattress near a snorer over the weekend is making me crave climbing into bed.

- Flakey McOnion emailed me to say she was up for dinner tonight at 10:10pm yesterday. But since I got home late, went right to bed, didn't have time to check my email this morning, and don't have email access at work, I didn't get the message until 6:30pm today. If we're still using the whack-a-mole analogy, then it's like the mole has popped up after I've gone to ask the manager to refund my quarter.

- And finally, my dentist seems to be trying to sneak the full cost of my cleaning into my bill. They sent me a letter asking me to send them a check for $125 for "Balance Forward." After calling for a more detailed bill (i.e. a bill with ANY details), going over it for a half hour with a calculator and my insurance statements, and googling the term prophylaxis, I discovered what they were up to. Why not charge my insurance for a cleaning? After I get this straightened out I'm never going there again. If anybody out there is trying to choose a dentist in San Francisco, send me an email and I'll give you one to avoid.

neither Funny nor Interesting

I was emailing this girl from The Onion Personals, and I thought things were going well until she disappeared. So then I thought I had somehow offended her. It's not like girls haven't disappeared on me before. But then out of the blue she reappears, asks if I want to meet up, and disappears again. So I think I'm going to either say no thank you or ignore her if she resurfaces again. She's like the online dating verion of whack-a-mole.

I'm currently irritated at the flakey people of the world.

(I'm on the fence about whether to even post this in all its bland mediocrity. But I've been so good about posting since Sunday, I hate to ruin my streak. Then again, since I'm getting comment numbers in the single round digits lately, maybe nobody's reading and I can be just as boring as I'd like. So there. ZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.)

Alas, The Pub Quiz Update

We came in at a miserable 6th place.

Our first round got us off to a great start, but round two was our first death nail with only 3 points earned. Then we made a rousing come back until the last round where we again only got 3 questions right.

Still, we hoped to beat the irritating girl who kept challenging people to arm wrestle last week or maybe to get best name. Alas we did neither. Irritating-ette came in a couple places ahead of us, and although Hunting with Dick was an excellent name, there was no best name category for some reason.

We could have also won most gay sounding name. Especially because we got all the questions about musicals and Barbara Streisand.

Click

I've been having very poor luck with Onion Personals. Actually, I've been having poor luck with girls in general.

This weekend I went to a party and talked for a good long while with a girl. I thought it went rather well overall. Although there were moments where I wondered where I was going with pieces of the conversation. I don't seem to be able to avoid such moments.

As a for instance, she mentioned that she had recently started running. I made some comment about how running is AWFUL, then worried that I had offended her and explained that running isn't intrinsically awful, I just hate running when I do it. I went on to say that I have the utmost respect for runners. She looked a me quizzically for a second and said, "it's not like U.N. peace keeping or something. We aren't taking our lives in our hands when we run." And I countered that runners kind of are, especially if they feel like I do when I run.

She assumed that maybe I hadn't run regularly, but I pointed out that I had been on the track team for my first 3 years of high school. I even told her about the coach making my friend and I run with the girl's team because we couldn't keep up with the guy's team, and that he had a heart murmur and that I just sucked.

Anyhow, I managed to recover from that and we talked for a while longer, and then we went our seperate ways. I should have asked for her phone number, but I'm dumb and I didn't. I did, however, find her email address via Google by searching for her school program. I didn't have to work that hard at it, so I felt like it wasn't toooooo creepy to email her. So I did, but needless to say I haven't heard back.

Back in the personals department I've had a pretty poor email response as well. So I'm thinking I need to post a close up picture. All the featured people have close ups, and I think it's the ticket to fame and popularity on the internet. With that in mind I took maybe 25 pictures of myself, which I've narrowed down to 3, which I've further narrowed down to 0. It is apparently very difficult to catch my face in a pose where it resembles a well mannered human being's. In various pictures I look stoned, asleep, retarded, seethingly angry, marginally irritated as somebody just out of frame to my left, psychopathic, and caught in a soul crushing bout of despair. Oh, and lets not forget the ever popular out of focus.

Hopefully by next year this will all be behind me and I'll be out and about with somebody who enjoys the disturbingly varied faces of me.