I seem to be getting more stubble faster than usual lately. I think it’s my steady diet of steak and beer.
Also, I wore boots and flannel to work the other day. So, you know, that probably helped.
I’ve seen one full episode, and half of tonight’s show, and I still don’t understand how a show with guest stars like Will Ferrel and Dax Shepard can be so awful. I give up.
Was anyone else completely unaware that rasslin’ can give you herpes?
I just noticed that my toothpaste top can flip up OR twist off (it even has printed instructions) (actually, that’s the only reason I noticed). Why didn’t they think of that sooner? (And why do I feel like I should have a preference?)
Also: I almost forgot about it, but as of last Thursday, I’ve been doing this thing for two years.
Remember that time we went dumpster diving? Well, it’s time to cash in reward points, fly out to San Francisco, and spend a week with the wonderful Ryan and Sarah. I leave Thursday evening and come back Sunday morning.
I was talking to Sarah ealier today and realized that I haven’t had a break this long since I was 15. I worked all through high school and college, so school breaks just meant more work. I do long weekends out of town once in a while, but the longest break I’ve had in the past seven years was last November, before I moved to DC - I finished finals Friday morning and had a week and a half before starting my job on a Tuesday. That hardly counts as a break, though: I did a ton of driving - three laps between Rochester and DC - packed up and moved all my stuff, AND spent a weekend partying with the Grillbillies.
Of course, now that I really think about it, I had forgotten the 10-day trip to Las Vegas three years ago. I guess that counts.
Either way, I’m psyched. I could stand to get out of here for a bit, and I’m looking forward to seeing the whole SF crew.
So I bought a pack of cigarettes tonight.
And I know, I’m a terrible person, but I’ve been all sorts of pissy lately and I figure it’s best for everyone if I just go back to smoking so I’m deal-with-able. I installed Call of Duty so I could kill Nazis, but that hasn’t been as therapeutic as I hoped.
But anyway, Casey and Matt are in Baltimore for the weekend, so a few of us went up to hang out with them at Matt’s sister’s place, and then we spent the afternoon today wandering around DC and protesting a little bit, and then I took a nap. It was nice.
I’m trying to get the DC chapter of the Sunday Night Film Club going. Last week, a few of us saw Curse of the Golden Flower (which was disappointing), and this week, we were going to see The Good Shepherd, but I’ve heard it’s pretty slow and boring, so I’m going to pick a different one. But I’ll keep y’all posted on SNFC dealing.
I’ve been trying to read more lately. Over the past year couple years, I’ve accumulated a couple dozen books that I still haven’t read. As part of my Spend Less Money You Stupid Bastard campaign, I’ve been a buying freeze on literature until I can catch up on the piles of books that haven’t been cracked yet. This is what I’ve read lately.
The first couple chapters of this were a little dry and slow-going, but it got pretty interesting after that. It’s unbelievable how much power corporations like McDonald’s wield in worker and food safety legislation. I almost never get fast food (unless I’m on a road trip), but this book gave me a few dozen more reasons not to.
It’s hard to read this book without comparing it to the movie as you go. I really like both the movie and the book, but for different reasons. Obviously, there are things about any story that can be expressed in a book much better than in a movie, but the movie did a great job of telling it. If I had read the book first, I don’t think I would have expected that the movie could be any good.
But this isn’t about the movie, it’s about the book. Palahniuk is one hell of a story teller, and I’m certainly not the first to point this out or get all fan-boy about it, so there’s really no point in going on much about it. We all know the story and most of you have probably already the book, so why bother?
According to Wikipedia, Palahniuk wrote this one first but it was rejected by publishers for being too disturbing, so he wrote Fight Club to disturb them even more. However, Invisible Monsters is, hands down, WAY more fucked up. I’d try to explain the plot if I thought I could. The last quarter of the book is made up almost entirely of weird plot twists that make you think, “I should have seen that coming,” but you really shouldn’t have seen that coming.
This one wasn’t as good as I was hoping it would be. Lucifer spends a month in the body of the cleverly-named Declan Gunn (hint: re-arrange the author’s name) and writes a book about the experience as he goes, in a style that loses its novelty in the first couple chapters. Parts of it were pretty interesting, but on the whole, lackluster.
If Douglas Adams grew up on Monty Python, then developed a pirate fetish and a passing interest in communism, this is what you’d get, and it’s absolutely hilarious. It’s a short one - only took me an afternoon - and would probably make a pretty funny movie. This is actually the third in the series - The Pirates have also had adventures with Charles Darwin and Ahab.
In the vein of Supersize Me, a liberal NPR host from Seattle spent a month immersing himself in conservatism to see if he could convert himself. He met with a bunch of people and found that there’s a lot of diversity of opinion among conservatives, including several that don’t really want to have anything to do with the Republican party. It’s easy to forget that the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O’Reillys don’t accurately represent everyone on the right (to be fair, we’ve got our Michael Moores). With politics as polarized as they are these days, most of my perspective of the right comes from angry old guys hollering on TV (as Colbert told O’Reilly the other day, “They criticize what you say, but they never give you credit for how loud you say it.”)
He’s also a really funny guy. One of my favorite quotes is about gay marriage:
It was the old reductio ad absurdumm where you take a position for the sake of argument, arrive at a ridiculous result, and then use that ridiculous result to discredit the original position. The same way that conservatives argue that if The Gay is allowed to marry, before long people will be marrying logs and buildings and the 1975 Steelers. It would be ridiculous to marry the Steelers (even though the strength of that defensive line would be an asset to any marriage), therefore it’s ridiculous for two consenting adults in a long-term stable relationship to decide for themselves that they want to get married and register for a toaster.
Jokes aside, it was nice to get a glimpse of the perspective of real people on the right. It’s easy to forget how much we DO agree on when most political discussions devolve into shouting matches about issues that, in the grand scheme of things, are pretty insignificant.
The DMV office near me is open from 8 to noon on Saturdays, and I need a Virginia license (still), so I reserved a ZipCar, got up real early, and headed over there a little after 8.
Then I spent ten minutes doing a super-slow lap around their tiny, packed parking lot, along with a dozen other people. I can’t imagine things were looking better inside, but I wouldn’t know because I resolved to get up earlier next week and headed off to the shopping plaza.
Staples had a $15-after-rebate cross-cut shredder, so I’ve spent the past hour or so shredding old bank and loan documents. I also got the same fire box that Jym has. I was looking at a bigger, more expensive one because it was rated for CD media, but they didn’t have any there. The box for the 1160 says “Fire protection for digital media” on it, but the manual doesn’t sound so optimistic, so I’m really not sure if my DVD backups will survive a fire. But, for $35, it’s better than nothing, and it will protect important papers (and, more importantly, I’ll know where to find said papers when I need them).
And, in a move that surprised absolutely no one (except for Frank Thompson of Lambert, Oklahoma), Hillary announced her bid for presidency today. Go git ‘em, sister.
I just found my Social Security Card AND my Selective Service Card! I made the rookie mistake of putting them somewhere safe.
I think I might be getting to the point in my life where I should start looking into a fire-proof safe. Jym has a briefcase-sized one and graciously allowed me to store the one thing that I knew needed fire-proof protection: a DVD backup of my photos, college classwork, and some other files. But now that I think about it, I should really be more worried about my Social Security Card, birth certificate, diploma, transcripts, medical records - that sort of stuff. A quick glance at Google shows that small safes aren’t nearly as expensive as I thought.
This is the sort of thing that’s really easy to put off - when everything is going fine, you don’t worry about making backups and you don’t worry about what you’ll save in a fire. So far this year, I’ve been pretty good about my spending, but I think I can make an exception for this, because I may regret it if I don’t
I’m also going to get a paper shredder, because they seem more practical than the duct-taped wad of sensitive documents that I burn every year or so. Plus, they’re fun.
Every time I take off my headphones to get a soda or use the bathroom, I’m a little disappointed that the music doesn’t follow me.