as in, "i reckon that'll work…"

of course, if you were really observant yesterday, you'd have noticed that i made the last post around 3:30 AM… so, despite the fact that i was almost falling asleep at the wheel on the drive home from work on Friday, i ended up staying up until almost 4 in the morning.

it's been a pleasant day today. got up around 1 or 1:30, went out for lunch at KFC, then ran over to compusa primarily for kicks, but also so i could buy this year's version of TurboTax deluxe, and so Paul could debate buying a new computer. Well, he didn't, but i did manage to get my software, and picked up a new webcam for 30 bucks, to boot. Though Paul didn't get his computer, he did get approved for a credit card thing, so (looking at it one way) he walked out of the store $2400 dollars richer than when he'd walked in.

we came back to the house and i started trying to set up the web cam. it gave me some weird problems trying to install and update the software, but i finally got it working. then, i tried to change a simple little option in the controls of the software, and it locked up. in fact, it pretty much locked up the computer every time i stopped using the camera. so, when i'd exit the program, it'd lock up the computer. i even tried a different webcam program, and it had the same problem. so, needless to say, i'm taking the damn thing back tomorrow and trying a different cam. (if you're interested, the first and only pic that actually made it onto the site is here

while i was busy fighting with the webcam, paul was apparently busy convincing himself to buy the computer he'd looked at. he and brian went back out to compusa, and about an hour and a half later, the puffin came back with a kick ass new Sony VAIO. his new machine kicks brian's and my machine's combined ass. after setting it up, we debated for an hour or so (as we played around with it) about whether or not we wanted to strip that Windows ME crap off there and put on some Win2k. We finally decided that we couldn't stand the thought of a machine actually running ME on a regular basis, so we ended up reformatting the hard drive. and since then (almost 6 in the evening) brian and paul and i have been diligently working to bring the new beast to full working order. i've had fun, but now, it's time for bed.

oh, and don't forget the contest.

i have the most awesome sister in the world. i'm having a bad day today, actually took a half-day off work since i was feeling very ill, and when i get home, i find a package waiting on my doorstep. my sister bought me a little item from my wishlist for no real reason other than she just wanted to. my sis is the best.

oh, and if you didn't follow that link to my sister's blog, follow that one. she's been doing better than me on the updating thing, and she's only been at it a couple weeks. so far, her posts have been insightful and informative about some of her adventures living and working in Paris.

so i ended up taking a half-day, coming home and crashing out from like 1:30pm to 6:48 or something. i woke up sweating like crazy, probably because i'd managed to fall asleep IN my bathrobe under all the covers and blankets, and i actually woke up holding the blankets up to my chin… i do not like being sick. i'm probably going to end up taking tomorrow off as well, if my present condition is any indicator of how i'll be feeling in the morning. besides, i've been wanting to take an extra day off, and now that the new corvus site has finally launched, i can relax a little bit… until we start on phase 2 anyway.

i'm suddenly craving orange juice… but i think i'll just go have a cigarette. gotta treat the body right, ya know.

well, just got back from dinner with my father. he picked the Irish Rover, which was great for me, since it's probably my absolute favorite restaurant of all those on the list. overall, it was a good dinner (the food was excellent, as usual), even though we did get the evil waitress from hell. to be honest, i'm surprised she's still working there, she obviously hates it. she was much better this time out, but then again, how could she have been any worse? needless to say, we got out of there before the whole paying the bill / leaving a tip thing came up. but i did get a particular pleasure out of relating the entire story (minus the fact of paul & brian's drunkenness during the events) to my dad, since it at least gave us something to talk about… which leads me to my next observation…

i am too much like my father. i think, all these years, i've blamed my almost morbid quietude in social situations on the fact that the majority of my friends in high school were people who loved to hear themselves talk. i was the kid who could almost never get a word in edgewise. but now, after hanging with my dad this evening, i'm beginning to think it may simply be paternal emulation. getting a conversation started with my dad tonight was like pulling teeth.

me:  "uh. so, uh. how's things?"

how's things!? what the hell kind of question is that to ask your father? and, of course, my father's response:

him: "oh… good. y'know." (or something along those lines)

me:  "… … cool."

<< side note: paul just called me out last night on the phone. he pointed out that i almost always answer any statement or question with just one word — "cool." (in a kind of dull monotone) > >

well, after several false starts, we did hit a few almost good conversations in there, the main one being when he informed me that, when i was four and the family was planning to move to Kentucky, my primary apprehension about the move was… indians. yep, indians, i was apparently afraid that Kentucky, that vague forest-land was teeming with wild, violent, Daniel Boone, Bill Custer at Little Big Horn type indians. and really, i think this is possibly the most important thing my father has ever told me since i moved out of the house and went to college, because, get this, my earliest memory of a childhood dream was about indians attacking our house and the little old lady who gave my sister and i milk and cookies.

well, now i think i understand that dream a little better. obviously it was some kind of anxiety dream about moving to Kentucky.

another conversation we got on was the life decisions issue. it kind of saddened me to hear that there are several things in my dad's life that he sometimes wishes he'd done differently. the only one he specifically mentioned was moving to Princeton. i can't help but wonder if some of the others have anything to do with me. as i've told several of my friends when we've gotten on similar topics, there is only one thing i really regret in my life–the horrible way i mishandled the breakup with the girl who i seem to be mentioning quite a bit lately. that whole situation is probably the only thing i'd go back and change if given a chance.

altogether, i guess it was one of the better father/son hang-out sessions we've had, despite the absurd conversational difficulties. probably the best part was that i got to take him to dinner. normally, he pays for dinner, then slips me a twenty before he leaves. this time, i paid for dinner, and he didn't slip me the twenty… it was liberating, and it just felt good.

in other family news, my sister has been so completely enthralled by the wondrous adventure that is bipolar, she had to go and start her own little weblog. at this point, i've given her a couple days to get into the groove, so go check it out. she's currently living in france, so perhaps she'll be able to expose us all to a little culture… or at least teach us how to say dirty words in french. oh, and that's multi – literate, not mult – illiterate or some such. she's quite the intellectual.

damn. two longish posts in one day… what's up with that?

ok, here's a reduced calorie version of the post i attempted to make the other day.

( or, the story of the year 2000 )

other things that happened pre-bipolar:

started the year in the arms of a beautiful woman, who i ended up falling in love with, and who ended up leaving me a couple months later.
lost my job of two years at the local bookstore, because of my own negligence.
spent two months off work, before breaking down and taking the Kinko's job (around the time of bipolar's first month).

so, now it's a new year, i've got the perfect job, and i'm making good money. hopefully this year will be a little better than the last.

in an altogether unsurprising, but unexpected announcement yesterday, the russian government has said that it will deorbit the lame Mir space station, dumping it into the pacific ocean this coming february.

i say unsurprising, because as we all know, the station has been plagued by problems for the past several years; it's unexpected because i had thought the station had been purchased (leased really) by the russian MirCorp. apparently though, MirCorp has not fulfilled certain contractual obligations, leading the russian goverment to make the deorbiting decision.

so much for some "lucky" person getting a chance to spend a week in space. and i was so looking forward to humiliating myself on TV for an entire season, then dying in an absurd space accident involving cheese paste.

it seems that there are some situations in life that you will always be doomed to repeat, or to find out you've repeated them without even being aware of it.

i was just made aware last night that this girl I used to work with, and whom I'd had a huge crush on the entire time she worked there, had also had a crush on me. DAMN. 'course, she was dating someone at the time, but still. i HATE finding out stuff like this, because I always feel like a fool for not having any clue. and, of course, this isn't the only time something like this has happened. why, with me, is it almost always a case of bad timing? why can things never happen how and when they should? what is the deal?

still. there's hope. and simultaneously there's the complete lack of hope. i've also found out that she is now single, living with another girl who was a great friend of mine and who helped me through quite a bit of emotional struggles with the idiot-jerk dating girl mentioned in my last post. there's the hope. the final piece to the puzzle (you may, at this point, be thinking, "hey, sounds great. you're single, she's single, you're both aware of your mutual attraction, now all you've gotta do is hook up."), the piece that makes this such a similar picture to all the other puzzles in my life, is that she's leaving next May to join the Peace Corps for two years. what wouldn't I give to at least find out if there might be something to that mutual attraction we felt over a year ago. do I dare try to establish something with this great girl, just to have her run off and leave the country in less than a year? do I set myself up so that I have to deal with this situation again, or do I just take what I've got–a nice feeling–and leave it at that?

knowing myself as well as I do, which I tend to think is pretty well, most of the time, i'm sure i'll try to see what might develop and then deal with the inevitable leave-taking when the time comes. the potential for happiness is too great to pass up.

well, this is getting kinda long, don't wanna send too many of you running & screaming, bleeding from the eyes.

two final points.

I've just changed cubes here at work. pretty sad that I've had to move after only being here a little over two months. i like the new place better, i've got my back (and my monitor) to a wall, and my eyes facing the "door." i feel quite a bit more comfortable here. funny thing is, as I was moving stuff around, I found a CD-R behind the desk, popped it in the drive (once I got everything set up) and found an amazing collection of really bad MP3 files. i had thought the guy that used to occupy this cube seemed like a pretty decent "cool" guy, but this CD is filled with bad 80's hair metal music, Days of the New, frickin Matchbox 20, limp bizkit, and other stuff too horrible to mention. on the positive side, there's some Johnny Cash, a Duran Duran track, Prince, a couple Jane's Addiction, Foo Fighters… a few decent things. I hate to say it, but just having Matchbox20, limp bizkit, and Bush on the same disc kind of negates the coolness factor of the good stuff.

and finally, something I found that's just fuckin funny as hell. it's on this moderately interesting site word.com, that you should browse around after viewing this little shockwave goodie. **update 12/17/2004 this site now goes to Merriam-Webster Online. linkrot sucks.**

that's it. i'm out.

( OR, himself the fool makes )

the story thus far:
boy meets girl, boy falls madly in love with girl, boy and girl are very happy, girl leaves boy for idiot jerk, boy gets over girl, girl comes back on her knees but boy has another girl, boy loses other girl, boy finally forgives girl, girl finds boy again, boy has hope, boy finds out girl is still with idiot jerk.

story of my life. bad timing, miscommunication, falling for the wrong people. it would seem that happiness is truly the transient state, unhappiness is what life is made of.

i've also found that, should we ever learn to circumvent the effects of gravity, hope never will.

I think John Lennon said it best: "ow! hey, what the fuck!? ack."

but unlike John, I'll be ok.

I have just witnessed one of the most embarrasing spectacles of the twentieth century. last night, brian, Jess, (brian's friend) Scott, & I all went down to the waterfront to catch a "free" show. the scheduled entertainment for the evening was Tone Loc and C&C Music Factory. I wasn't expecting much, but it was a free show, and I did recognize the names involved–I even actually used to like Tone Loc, so I thought it would be an interesting evening out for four broke-and-bored-as-hell people.

as we approached the entrance, we noticed that they were actually taking money, so in a flash of fortuitous thought, we decided to take a stroll to a point where we could hop the fence (not that that was a really difficult task, but…).

C&C were already on the stage as we approached, and pretty much from the moment we'd gotten out of the car, we'd been laughing our asses off at the lame attempt at edgy, funky, hip-hop. now, C&C were never what one would consider "good", but I did like that one song at one point (back in high school when the only music I had to listen to was WPKY in Princeton, KY.–if you haven't heard of Princeton, you get the idea…) anyway, as we listened further to the strangling cat sounds coming from the stage, and the worse than a three year old, totally non-flowing "freestyle" coming from the "leader", we began to despair and would have immediately started looking for long range weapons, had we not been completely mind-wiped before we could protect ourselves.

eventually, we just started yelling for them to get off the stage, go home, go shoot themselves, or whatever during lulls of the "music". death would have been much more enjoyable… a slow, gruesome, excrutiatingly painful death.

I was simply holding out for Tone, holding a flicker of hope in my heart that he might be somewhat good.

all I can say is that he was better. he, at least, could freestyle with some actual style. it was still somewhat dissapointing hearing his live rendition of "Funky Cold Medina" I remembered it being much better, much more dynamic. and the fact that Tone can turn the deep gravely "Tone Loc" voice on and off at will, and that actually 75% of the time he sounded just like every other rapper, kind of dispelled some of the old magic.

the worst blow to the evening came after Tone's little teaser, after he urged the crowd to chant– " I say wild, you say Thing!", then decided not to do Wild Thing, but instead to freestyle some more. not only did he decide to freestyle rather than going on and performing one of his greatest hits, but he invited (or maybe was forced to invite) the guy from C&C onstage to join in the rhymes. a collective groan was heard from the three individuals around me, and we swayed on our feet as we tried to decide whether or not to leave. Tone rapped for a while, then passed the mike to C&C guy (brian just pointed out that his name is Freedom Williams–we can only hope for eventual freedom from mr williams) who immediately started pretending he hadn't stolen all his rhymes from his much more competent predecessors. even with his third grade rhymes, he had absolutely no flow whatsoever. he made it about three, sometimes four phrases, before having to pause for several seconds to rack his tiny brain for more rhyming words.

within 10 seconds of "freedom" taking the stage, we had firmly decided to immediately leave. we had almost forgotten how to walk, and swore we'd just lost over 100 IQ points. the discussion centered firmly around the horror we had just witnessed, and we decided that if we were Tone Loc, on tour with these "performers" we'd probably blow our brains out after the first show.

Tone's journal would probably read something like this…

Comeback Tour 2000

day one:

    I can't take it anymore, I tried to hold out, but it's not worth it. Tell my mother I love her, and please forgive me.

tone

ok, after my little mental drainage the other day, I'm feeling at least a tiny bit better. perhaps it has something to do with the fact that brian and paul have threatened to beat me until either all my depression is swallowed by the intense pain of breathing, or I'm simply overtaken by the euphoric feelings of near-death.

I don't enjoy my job. I perform my job, but I gain absolutely no satisfaction whatsoever from it. Is this the way life is supposed to be? my parents always told me that when I was older I'd be able to find a job that suited my interests, a job that would help me feel fulfilled. have I done something wrong? am I not trying hard enough? can I not spout enough bullshit to weasel my way into a job I'd love to do, but perhaps don't quite have the required level of experience? what is the deal with the only positions that are open are either a) total shit that no one wants or b) nice, but require exhorbitant amounts of hands-on or book knowledge. how do these hiring managers think people get experience for these jobs in the first place? someone, somewhere has to hire someone just a little less than experienced, or am I just missing out on something?

as a side note, and kind of just so I can work in an interesting/funny link I've found, let me just say this.

I like Kegels.

I really like Kegels.

The KegelMaster is possibly the greatest invention of the modern age.

once again, it's been a few days since I've updated. seems like it's going to be an ongoing struggle with me to come up with stuff to talk about on a daily basis.

brian pointed out to me that there are some .wav files on the Chester fan site I linked to in my last post. You have to go to the "And Now" sound files section.
**update 12/17/2004** again, that site is now down, check out the official site.

friday was an intriguing day. brian and I have been discussing the high speed internet options for a while now, and have finally decided we're going to go with something when he moves in. well, on friday, I received a call from Bell South "whoring out" (as brian said) their FastAccess (DSL) service. Since we'd already discussed going with Bell South for the "good deal" they were proposing, I went ahead and signed up. Little did I know that only that day, brian had been in discussions with our system person about setting up all kinds of whacked shit like firewalls and a "complete" home network outfit so we can all use the same high speed modem. I signed up for the service, thinking we'd just install the modem on brian's new system and network it from there. No Dice.
      if only art could imitate life. when brian showed up at the house and we discussed the situation, he called up Bell South and tried to talk them into giving us the special setup we'd need, at the price they'd offered. what followed was almost an hour long crusade against the corporate establishment that would have made Tyler Durden proud. he talked to one rep. who obviously had no clue what she was talking about, then called back and spoke to Roland.
      to Roland's credit, he worked very hard to get us the setup we needed. it finally came down to the point where we'd worked out our hardware needs, but they were going to have to charge us another $150 for "professional installation" on a product that only required plugging two wires into two boxes–one to the modem and one to the computer. obviously, since we have a bit of technical savvy, we weren't really into paying someone that much money to do something we could do in about two minutes.
      brian very calmly explained that fact to Roland, and logically requested that he waive the "installation" fee. Roland had a bit of a problem with that, so our faithful corporate dominatrix proceeded up the ladder to Roland's boss.
      once Roland's boss was on the phone, brian was quick to praise Roland for at least attempting to assist us, and at least partially knowing what he was talking about. then the war truly started.
      flabbergasted that our needs couldn't be met, the supervisor continued to try to talk brian into accepting their offer (incluing the "install" fee). brian, of course, would have none of it, and made several counter offers, none of which could be done. in the end, brian finally ended with the comment that if Bell South couldn't meet our needs, we could just as easily go to one of several other ISPs offering high-speed access and get a competitve rate. whether this is really true or not, we don't know, but he had a great time flogging the corporate "whores" in a very professional and courteous manner. it was a joy just to watch and listen.

right now, I'm at work, going through the first day of a week long training session, where corporate types are trying to pound their propaganda into my head. I survived the Army, this is a walk in the park.