the good: tomorrow is the day the puffin and i go up to st. louis for my much anticipated Amiga convention… amazingly enough, the first i'll ever have attended. i've always wanted to go to the st. louis con, but never seemed to be able to afford it. well, now i'm in a little better place financially, though i still seem to have a non-paying roommate on my hands. so anyway, big announcements are expected, but mainly i'm going up there to have a little fun and maybe get some new computer equipment to finally fix up that Amiga 1200 i was bragging about a few months ago. i'm not sure if we'll have net access up in the hotel up there, but if we do, we'll try to keep you posted on our blood/alcohol level.

oh, and as paul mentioned in his blog, he's burned an MP3 cd for our trip, so i've basically got a 10 hour puffin mixed tape to look forward to hearing. i've never known him to build a bad mix tape.

the bad: well, it's official. she's moved in. we got home from dinner tonight and lo and behold there's a moving van out front of the house of the formerly ugly orange doors. we had the pleasure of seeing "idiot jerk" walk out of the house to the moving van… er, well, brian and paul had that pleasure. i was trying to just kind of ignore the whole thing, lest i do something rash. brian however, took great pleasure in glaring menacingly at "idiot jerk" until we got the front door open. i'm pretty certain that without any of us doing anything outright, the guy will certainly know that he's not welcome in my neighborhood.

but, as i said, i'm trying not to think about it, and though i did feel that little pang of… i don't know… maybe jealousy… or something, and though i do know that at some point, i am most certainly going to freak out about this, i'm doing fine right now.

where to begin?

the last week at work has been rather… interesting, to say the least. the roosters are crowing while the little chicks and hens are just kind of nervously clucking and hopping about. top that off with my aforementioned bout with near-deathly illness (that being a rather nasty head-cold), by the time friday rolled around, i was ready to just kind of kick back and enjoy the weekend. i got an invitation from some co-workers to go out and wind down with a little drinkage after the workday, and, for once, had actually agreed (if somewhat reluctantly) to go. so, 10 minutes before i'm getting ready to head out, brian finally pops up on AIM, and i tried to find out if he and paul had any immediate plans for the evening of which i should be made aware. in other words, if they were actually planning on going out and doing something fun, i was going to ditch my work buddies and tag along with my homies. if, on the other hand, it was friday business-as-usual–no defined plans, except just taking the night as it comes–i'd go ahead and get my drink on with the corvus crowd.

so, here i am, wanting only one thing — a definitive answer as to whether or not he and paul had anything planned. what i got was some half-baked crap about "having something good planned" for me specifically, and that i would "definitely like it." i'm not sure if they could tell by my snappy responses, but i was actually getting very frustrated at them for being so damned evasive. i got this vague idea in the back of my head that maybe this had something to do with sharon, as i vaguely recalled some conversation we'd had almost a month ago about the possibility of her coming through town in the near future. and also, i figured that both brian and paul know how much she means to me, and that she'd pretty much be the only person for whom i'd consider changing my plans. their mutual assertions that it would be "worth it," and paul's "trust me," pretty much cinched it for me. (of course, i think that until they read this, they're still under the impression that i was completely hoodwinked.)

and sure enough, moments after i got home (having noticed that the front door was suspiciously unlocked), who should come up the stairs but sharon herself, in all her radiant beauty. i don't know how many of you have ever actually had a "frown turned upside down" in the space of two heartbeats, but i can authoritatively say that it does happen. we spent the next few hours just hanging out and talking, having a good time. i finally got to meet the boyfriend that i've heard so much about, and having met him and gotten to know him a little, i have to grudgingly give him my approval. well, you know, not that that really matters. but it's like i told him as they were leaving… "you better take good care of her, 'cause i don't want to have to hurt you."

sharon and i shared a couple whiskey shots, chased with some really flat coke (which, i realized, is one way that i can actually do whiskey shots, lord help us) and chatted briefly down in the kitchen, before rejoining the rest of the boys upstairs. all in all, it was a low-key visit, but a very welcomed one. i'm always happy to talk to sharon, and obviously so much happier to actually get to see and spend time with her. but i'm greedy, i wish she (yes, and grant as well) could have stayed a little longer, hung out, maybe had a big crazy night drinking, bowling, and carrying on. maybe we'll be able to do that when i go visit them in sunny cali. we'll go show those little hollywood bums how to really party.

yet again, i've let more than a week slip by without a post. i think i've been too grouchy lately for the people i hang out with to chastise me for it too harshly. up til today, i've had my head either buried in work, been playing "timsplitters", entering my comic book collection into my recently restored OmniComics database, or trying to re-start the reorganization of my personal life (ie. cleaning the hell out of my room).

i did get one email from nathan demanding that i update soon, since he finally went to the trouble of adding me to his AvantGo client on his Visor handheld. (hi nate)

which reminds me, a while back, we added some code to our pages to make them "AvantGo friendly." if you use AvantGo, and you'd (for some reason) like to be able to read us on your handheld, just use the following links:

for brian's blog, use /bipolar/blog.html
for my blog, use /bipolar/mlog.html
(just a note, if you try to load these links in anything other than AvantGo, you'll be redirected to our frameset, so you can see bipolar in all it's black skull-festooned glory.)
if users of any other handheld browser software want this ability or are having trouble getting the pages to load, just send me a note, and i'll see if i can make it work.

hrm. well, i just attempted to create an AvantGo "channel" for us here, but it would seem that if we get more than 5,000 subscribers, we'll have to pay $5,000. not that this is ever going to happen, but i don't want to open a $5,000 can of worms, no matter what the odds.
so, while we're not an official channel, you can still download us to your heart's content just by adding us to your download (or channel) list.

in other news, after three weeks of torturous work, i've been sitting on my ass here at work ALL DAY waiting for three paragraphs of content and some revised images for the project i've been working on. it's bad enough we had to push back the original deadline a week, but now we're so close and i've not been able to do a damned thing because i'm waiting for content. grrr. but, hopefully we'll have the new site up in the next day or so and i'll put in a link so you can see what i've been working on so diligently (before today, anyway).

in other other news,
this Salon article brings the whole technical virgin thing into better focus. it's now been upgraded (in my opinion) from the status of "funny joke site" into the realm of "pointed social satire." i never thought people could actually be crazy enough to believe that only "traditional sex" is "real" sex. apparently i was wrong.

4:32 still waiting for content.

what a couple of weeks. it seems like i've been too busy to do many of the things that i began enjoying on a daily basis. like blogging, for example… and not just writing this one, but reading the many blogs i enjoy reading from day to day. i'm hoping once this big project i'm working on at work is finished, i'll have a little extra time every day to get back to my blogs.

it's nice to see nanette again, though I really haven't had a great deal of time to actually hang out with her & brian since she got here. thursday, the delayed but much longed for comic day saw me at work for an extra two hours (or more) so pretty much as soon as i got home brian & Paul were bitching profusely about my tardiness and their overwhelming hunger. we introduced nanette to the (usually) wednesday tradition of comics & denny's, where we were informed a major travesty had occurred and they were out–completely out–of ranch dressing. no ranch dressing?!? how can we possibly eat a meal a denny's with no ranch dressing!?
…
well, angrily, of course.

since my Christmas present for Paul had arrived, we popped it in immediately on our return home and proceeded to laugh hysterically for over an hour.

Next came Friday, which found me, once again, staying late at work, except that this time i was there an extra 5 (that's five, f-i-v-e, 5) hours, bringing my total for the day up to a whopping 13!. i stopped off to grab beer, cigarettes, and food on the way home (since brian had informed me that both paul & guy were present, that they were going out to eat, and would be imbibing a bit… well, except for guy, who doesn't drink. then once home i proceeded to drink a little and whup both paul & brian's asses at a healthy game of timsplitters deathmatch. i'm sure this was all very amusing for nanette, who sat reading on the couch, and who'd occasionally attempt to assuage our egos by politely laughing when we silly boys tried to be funny.

then, after the drinking and the killing, we decided to do the eating. we took nanette to the infamous, legendary Twig & Leaf for a bite of the ol' Louisville Paul (oh, i mean hot) Brown. we settled comfortably into our booth and reviewed the menu. even i had planned to try the hot brown, since i've either never had one, or can't remember having had one. much to our surprise, when nanette tried to order, we were informed that they were out of the alfredo sauce that is used to make the hot brown. apparently there has been some conspiracy regarding nanette's visit to Louisville. our two traditional restaurants were both understocked on crucial elements needed to make the dining experience a complete and successful one. fortunately, they hadn't run out of their regular cheese sauce or twig taters (ie. tater tots). we finished our "meals" and headed back home clutching our protesting stomachs.

today has been an interesting exercise in "speed moving." one roommate, the unfortunately hippie-fied and constantly delinquent bob, is being ejected from this house. to our dismay, even having been given two months notice, (and a few random reminders) he had made no effort to pack or begin moving any of his (enormous amount of) stuff. so, Brax came over, he & I went to hawley-cooke to grab an assload of boxes, and we began packing bob's things for him. by the end of the evening Paul had also arrived, and between the three of us, we managed to compress what traditionally has been a two or three day affair into the miniscule space of 5 hours. bob's things are almost completely removed from his former room, and waiting for him in the basement. i can't wait to see the look on his face when he actually returns home to an almost empty room. hehe.

now it's time for bed. my body is tired, my brain is tired, and i have to rest up for what will surely be a record breaking drinking bout tomorrow night. (for me anyway).

i'm generally not a violent person, but every once in a while, if the wind is right and the planets are aligned, certain people–just by their being within my sphere of perception–cause me to imagine bashing their head forcefully & repeatedly against the metal corners of my cubicle until their blood stains the fabric walls and bits of bone and brain collect on the floor at my feet.

mind you, this doesn't happen very often.

i came across a link today that reminded me quite a bit of brian, & some of the online shenanigans i've participated in or been privy to. shauna of flaunt.net (along with a friend) has recently created whowouldbuythat.com which is dedicated to uncovering the strangest of online auctions.

in other news, i spent a few minutes last night (or hours, really) helping paul with the puffin-a-go-go. he's added a few links to his "go-go-to" section, and I managed to get his archives up and running, so all you puffin readers run over there and check up on any posts you might have missed.

well, i suppose since i'm here at work, i should probably do some.

not much to report the past couple days, been workin', my sixth and final week at Kinko's. on monday I start my new real job at Corvus. I'm going to be struggling the next few days to readjust my schedule from third shift to first shift… why can't life ever just be easy? why can't we just sleep when the hell we feel like it, wake up when we can't sleep another minute, do the things we need or want to do, and just be happy? if someone could tell me the secret to this, I'd be indebted to them for the rest of my peaceful, happy life.

to retouch on something from my last post, I have finally read a couple reviews of the x-men movie, and so far it's fifty-fifty (I've only read two–one good, one bad.) The reviewer for Entertainment Weakly–that snot rag of an entertainment magazine, which, ironically enough, put X-Men on their cover–spewed a mouthful of bullshit all over one of their pages. I often wonder if these movie reviewers even go watch the movies they're reviewing, but since he actually pointed out a few scenes that weren't in the trailers, he must have, or at least he talked to someone who had. It amazes me that this dumbfuck actually saw the same movie I did, but then I think about how reality is all perception based anyway, so in truth, he didn't see the same movie I did, he saw the movie his brain made him think he saw, and damn where the hell am I going with this?
      anyway, the guy has no clue.

now, the guy who reviewed the movie for the LEO (Louisville's Eccentric Observer, for you out of towners) obviously didn't have his head up his ass when he walked into the theater. at least he got it. he understood the message, the theme, the really great thing the movie was, as well as the little, but ultimately forgivable, problems. all in all, he gave it a fair, honest, thoughtful review.

EW guy, on the other hand, apparently walked in expecting some totally fanciful kids movie that he was going to hate, and was pissed off when the real-world issues made him think too hard.
      not to throw myself into too-heavily geek infested waters, but this is the same bullshit Star Trek gets on occasion, when people dis it because it actually tries to deal with important social issues. Admittedly, some of the acting on Star Trek isn't the greatest, and there have been some horrible episodes (of all the series), but Star Trek isn't about the actors, the characters, or the ships, it's about theme, emotion, hope, and all that other good shit that makes good literature good.
      which conversely, is what the X-Men movie is all about too. It isn't about the characters, the costumes, the funky powers; it's about the struggle of the outcast members of our human society trying to fit in and live normal lives, and not being able to do so because of prejudice, fear, and an unwillingness or inability to learn, understand, accept, and welcome differences.

and all this is very real, very now. perhaps EW guy looked into Magneto or the Senator's face and saw himself, prejudiced, afraid, ignorant, and got pissed because the movie called him out. or maybe he just didn't get it.

work sucks
life sucks
love sucks
humidity sucks
rising price of gas sucks
being totally broke sucks
starving sucks
waking up sucks
having to sleep sucks
being bored sucks
writer's block sucks
my web design skills suck
math sucks
having to excrete sucks
losing all hope sucks
pretending you're happy sucks
webloggers who don't update their weblogs often enough suck
i suck

(there's a nice happy one for ya.)

I had a very emotionally mixed day yesterday, and a very draining one. I went to pick up my sister at the airport, on her flight in from France. she'd been there a year, and I must say I'm very happy to see her again. unfortunately, events leading up to our reunion really ruined everything for me.
      waking up, I was in a decent mood yesterday, and went to run some errands before leaving town for Cincinnati. got the oil changed, got some grub, and hit the road. the night before, I had gotten online to get a map to help me find the Cincinnati airport, since I'd never been there before. I had a little trouble on mapquest since I didn't know the airport's address. I eventually navigated my way to a superpages listing for the Cincinnati Northern Kentucky International Airport, and followed the link to get a map. Everything looked good, there was a star on the map in Cincinnati, near I-71. I assumed I had the problem of finding the place licked. If you live in or near Cincinnati, you probably have some idea of just how wrong I was.
      so anyway, I'm driving up I-71 from Louisville, cruising down the highway with my map at my side, the sun scorching my skin, and the wind blasting my hair into some unimaginably tangled mass of insanity. Just outside Cincinnati, I meet up with a 10 or so mile traffic jam, which, of course, I hadn't really taken into consideration since it was around 2:00pm. on a Friday–silly me thought most normal people would already be at work… I got through that, and made my way perilously through the maze of construction detours and bridges and underpasses that is what passes for an "expressway" through southern Cincy. Once out of the construction zone, I expected to see signs pointing my way triumphantly to the nearby waiting airport and my most likely already disembarked sister.
      once I got out of Cincinnati proper and hadn't seen any signs, I turned around and went back down I-71, again thinking perhaps I'd missed the signs, or they hadn't posted them on the North side of the expressway (believe it or not, we have run into this problem when driving through Cincy on other occasions, it's a fucked up place, and I've decided that I hate it and if I never ever go back in billion years, it will be too soon). before getting back down 71 too far, I exited the expressway and stopped at a gas station to ask the clerk how exactly to get to the airport. she kindly pointed me back onto the expressway and explained that I'd see the signs that would direct me to it in about five minutes or so. cool. now I knew where to go.
      I took off and followed the glorious signs that said International Airport, took 471 south, and cursed profusely when I almost immediately crossed the river to Kentucky. Logically, I thought, the Cincinnati airport can't be in Kentucky, since Cincinnati is in Ohio. I thought I was on top of things. I looked again at my map, and specifically noted the street names near the big blue star marking the airport in the middle of the city. I drove back up I-71, and didn't see any airport signs again, didn't see any signs for the streets I wanted, so I pulled off again, and then had a wonderful adventure driving 20 minutes through over 100 blocks of city streets following neverending signs leading me back to the express way. Needless to say, the trip just kept getting more and more absurd. At this point, I was already over an hour late to meet my sister, I was hot, sweaty, and smelly from sitting in my damn non-air-conditioned car for three hours. And I was really getting pissed off.
      once I finally got back on I-71, I almost immediately saw the sign for one of the roads that was supposedly near the airport, so I pulled back off and into the city. two blocks later, I was back on a more southerly section of the street I'd just left. I found the expressway once more, drove back north, passed where my earlier excursion had started, and pulled off and back on to the expressway once more going south. one more road to try, this one supposedly passing directly by the airport, I should certainly be able to find it from there.
      I pulled off, and followed the road right into the heart of the downtown area. as I realized I would never find the airport in the middle of the downtown district, I pulled behind some guy on the side of the road, and asked him where in the hell the airport was. he kindly told me generally how to get back to I-71/75 south, and proceed into northern Kentucky. he explained to me that the "Cincinnati airport" isn't really in Cincinnati at all. If I wasn't pissed before, I was burning hot now. That guy is pretty lucky I was too pissed off to get out of my car, and I was so late meeting my sister that I didn't have time to kick his nice, sincere, helpful ass.
      I quickly found the expressway, and drove quite a while into Kentucky, then again pulled off and asked a gas station attendant to more fully explain where this damn place was. she told me more about how to get there, that I hadn't yet gone far enough away from Cincinnati to get to the Cincinnati airport. with her instruction, I finally found the actual expressway the airport is on, 20+ miles from Ohio. I drove into the airport, parked the car, and was unfortunately so frustrated and in a generally foul mood, that when I found my sister, I gave her the most cursory of greetings and made her carry her own bags to the car. probably due to nearly passing out from heat exhaustion, the rest of the drive home and my memories of the trip in general are pretty hazy and surreal.

to make a long story short (a little late now, I know) I fucking hate Cincinnati, if I meet the people who named the Cincinnati airport I'm going to fucking kill them, and I'm glad my sister is back home, if only for a little while. I did miss her.