well, i'm back on the job today, after taking two days off for that whole birthday thing. thinking, yeah. i'll take two days off, come in on Friday, then have TWO MORE days off… well guess what? we're on a deadline. "we need help and you're the only man who can do it, you're the last man available, can you, maybe, work this weekend? please?"

"yeah, i guess."

ah well, this'll make it much easier for me to get next Friday off to go up to chicago and watch one of my absolute most favorite bands in existence, the monkeywrench. their latest album is pretty kick ass, btw, but i've long considered Clean As a Broke Dick Dog to be one of the greatest albums of all time. it's definitely in my (not-really-defined) top-ten.

hm. this week has been a little odd, both nights that i was off work, i ended up getting drunk (not wasted drunk, but pleasantly drunk). this is not like me. my friends usually bitch about me "never drinking with them." sad thing last night was i was drunk after only two pints of Bass. i guess i've become a lightweight again. well, we'll have to fix that.

oh, and i still haven't heard from her. i'm trying not to think about it, because, y'know, fuck her if she can't make a little effort to at least pretend she cares. lip service is all i've gotten (and no, not that kind of lip service). a person can talk about how much they care until the mad cows come home, but it doesn't mean shit if they can't make a little effort to show you. yeah, maybe she's busy, maybe she's got stuff going on. she could still take five minutes to call & leave a message, or just say hey, can't talk right now, but wanted to say hi. even that would at least be something. can't you tell i'm trying not to think about this? oh yeah.

mothers against drunken scripting

I'm excited I get to see my sister again. she's been gone away all summer, after visiting me for one day after her year-long trip to France. Now, she's coming up for a visit for one day and I'm taking her to the airport tomorrow so she can go to France again. I'm beginning to think the only way I'll ever get to hang out with my sister again is if I go visit her in France. not that that would be a bad thing, mind you.

I've also realized today that I'm going to have to do some more crazy javascript crap for these pages, since anybody trying to link to our archived pages is going to get bounced out to the main pages (only if you try to access them directly, otherwise, as long as you're in the frames, everything'll work fine.) got some thinking to do tonight.

i wonder if I can code javascript while drunk? we'll find out.

it would appear that blogger is back in working order again, finally allowing me to post that mile long rant about my trip to pick up my sis in cincy. read it if you've got 15 minutes to spare…

oh, and brian summed up the lexington trip better than I could have (but then, I never seem to "sum up" anything, I pretty much go off on every little thing, when I do write). I'm back at work, once again pulling the unholy third shift routine, and I've just stuffed 700 envelopes, what fun.

like brian, only with a different company, I also had a job interview earlier today. I thought it went rather well, and hope to hear something positive in the next few days. Jim–the interviewer–said he had another person to interview tomorrow (today really, damn this third shift, it's like living in a different time zone from reality) and would make his decision later this week. brian says he probably just said that to make me sweat a little so I'd feel really grateful when he gives me the job, but I think he was being on the level. we'll see I guess. if you get a chance, drop by the (apparently recently) redesigned Corvus website, drop them a note, and tell them to give me a job. it'd be pretty funny for Jim to call me up and tell me that fifty people had written him singing my praises. you now have a mission.

well, gotta get back to work, lest they think I've been abducted and forced into slavery by Latino whores. g'night.

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.

as promised, today's post will concern more of my thoughts from my recent trip to St. Louis.

driving through the farmland of Missouri and Illinois, I was struck by the beauty of the land and the green fields of new corn as they passed by at 70+ mph. since I rarely get the opportunity to be a passenger, I spent the majority of the trip back to Kentucky silently watching the scenery.

damn. my words are completely failing me at this point. I wanted to write about the fields and trees, and the beauty and profundity of it all, but it wasn't coming out right. sometimes, you just have to watch, listen, feel, and understand, but you can't say anything–you can't describe it. go out, drive, watch the land, and don't say a word.

ok. now, after my hours of communing with nature, developing the mother of all passenger's sunburns, and taking a short nap, Paul and I got off talking about all kinds of stuff. for hours we talked about cops, criminals, abuse of power, use of force, government corruption, capitalism, communism, socialism, marxism, and the political future of america. I think we started talking about unmarked police cars and ended up with america evolving into its necessary and inevitable socialist structure.
      then for some reason, we talked briefly about the weather, the probability that it's going to be a scorching summer with a possible drought, and I started feeling really xerophobic and basically fearing not only for my life but for the future of the entire human race.
      i saw this future where all the vegetation on the planet died off, the atmosphere filling with noxious fumes and the human race slowly dying out. Paul slowly talked me away from my fear by insisting that we humans are too crafty to allow our atmosphere to wither away. I only hope he's right.
      to top it all off, when we got home I phoned brian to tell him about the trip and to make sure x:13 was still in one piece, and one of the first things he tells me is that a large solar flare is heading for earth and will cause some "atmospheric disturbance." considering my terror from earlier in the day (which i still hadn't fully shaken despite Paul's reassurance), this was the last thing I wanted to hear. brian seemed a bit surprised when I made a comment about this solar flare burning off all our atmosphere and annihilating the human race.

fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view) we're still here, and still seem to have adequate oxygen for at least a few days of regular breathing. after that, we'll see.

in tomorrow's post, I'll briefly review the Fight Club DVD, and probably go off on something totally uninteresting

sorry for the lack of updates here on my side, I intended to do one last night, but ended up taking about three or four hours sifting through my email from the past three days.

I've got quite a bit to talk about, so I'll probably break it down over a few posts… give you something to come back for…

the cure are truly an awesome band. I am not their biggest fan, I only own a couple of their albums, and those have only been purchased in the past year; but Paul loves them and offered me a chance to go see them with him, so I took it. I had a great time.

there were lots of beautiful women running around, which enhances any concert going experience (for me, at least), and of course, there were also lots of rather repulsive members of both sexes running around as well.

I can't understand how 5'4" 250lb women can believe they look good in tight fitting dresses, or midriff tops and skirts. it is totally beyond me. I personally don't feel that I would look that great running around with my belly and chest exposed, and I'm not even really overweight.

another thing I don't get is spending a bunch of money on a concert for a band that you don't really like, listen to, or even understand; then showing up completely wasted to the point where you spend the majority of the concert either with your head between your knees or slumped over passed out in a chair. I CAN understand getting a little drunk and having a little fun, but if I wanted to get wasted and throw up, I could do that at home and get an equivalent musical experience from my CD player.

it almost ruined the show for me. we had been waiting for the doors to open for two hours or more (we got there a bit early, and had nowhere else to go, being in a strange city…), then finally we get in, find our seats, and wait another hour for the show to start. 20 minutes before the band takes the stage, the stands begin to fill up, and a group of people take the seats in front of ours. they're laughing, drinking their beers, having a good time. they break out a joint and pass it around. the band takes the stage and get started on the first song. I look down and the little eddie vedder lookalike in front of me has his head between his knees, puking his guts out. We're barely three minutes into the first song, and already the stench of puke is wafting up to my nose. I feel sorrier for the people in the next row up, they were in splatter range…

well that's enough for tonight.

in tomorrow's update:
corn fields, car talk, & fear of worldwide devastation

getting ready to go home for the weekend, visit my parents for the first time since christmas. since I've got a few days before I start my new job, and since I haven't visited them so far during my month and a half unemployment, I figure its about time.

it's nice to have cool parents… well I guess I can't really say cool, but understanding, helpful, and loving. it's nice to have parents that really care about you and really do what they can to help you achieve something, either by their encouragement, or by bailing you out with rent money when you're unemployed.

so many people don't have that, in fact, most of the people I know don't have that loving, stable family background. its really sad, but it has made them stronger people, more independent I suppose.

I guess as long as we learn how to take care of ourselves, and don't fall into the traps our parents set for us–whether they were good parents or bad parents–we'll turn out okay in the end. parental guidance helps a lot, but self-guidance is perhaps more important.

anyway, I'd intended this to be just a short little entry saying have a good weekend!