Spiffy is a nice word for it, if wildly inaccurate

Well that was refreshing, no?

It was a Thanksgiving of epic proportions, with at least 3 kinds of stuffing, 5 kinds of pie, and more random bits of pure deliciousness than I can properly count. And as much as it pains me to say it, I very well may have been singularly responsible for the decimation of literally (actual literally, not fake 'literally') 2.5 of those 5 pies. And all of one of the kinds of stuffing. How I am not some sort of beached whale after my shenanigans this weekend is a mystery for the ages.

I went over to my parent's house on Thursday morning, because Dallas traffic on Wednesday night was like a scene out of War of the Worlds, only without all the laser beams and less creepy Dakota Fanning. I made it by noon and we proceeded to take the path of greatest resistance - putting up all the Christmas lights during the day, while we waited for our ginormous turkey to properly roast itself. This led to me dangling off the side of their house on a 20 foot ladder with a hammer in one hand, a screwdriver in the other, a hook clenched in my teeth, and a string of multi-color lights wrapped around my arm.

Despite this virtual recipe for disaster, I came out of the entire thing unscathed, except for an incredibly sore back from when I insisted on raking the front lawn. Because apparently I have some weird sort of latent OCD when it comes to leaves. I also managed to get the bejesus freaked out of me, when it turned out that the wire-light-up reindeer that my dad installed in the front lawn was animatronic. There was a mad crazy moment there when I was all The-Shining-topiary-animals-out-for-revenge bugging out, because I was just standing there minding my own business, admiring our handiwork on the house, when the supposedly inanimate glowing reindeer turned its head and looked at me. Do you have any idea what that can do to a man's psyche? For one thing, it makes one scream like a little girl.

This was luckily witnessed by very few people, all of which I have enough dirt on to purchase their silence for life. Except when it's just our family at the dinner table, where they are free to mock me forever, and I them. We're very warm to each other, you understand.

In any case, the lighting of the house was followed by the Thanksgiving dinner from the gods, discussed earlier, followed by a mass exodus of all our family to the various parts of the state. With the exception of lazy me, who sat around and planned on loafing about for at least another couple of days. Because really, who needs a mortgage the day after Thanksgiving? No one I need to associate with.

Friday I was left to my solitary devices as even the people who lived in the house decided to make a run for the border or what have you. They invited me along, but as this run entailed at least 7 hours on a yellow school bus, I naturally declined. Family bonds only take you so far, you understand. Instead I stayed at home and managed to basically eat everything that ever was and potentially ever will be again. This was where those additional pies disappeared. Along with the majority of the dark meat from our prodigious turkey and all the broccoli casserole and that jar of olives. What can I say? It was Thanksgiving, it's practically required.

Saturday was pretty self-contained, as my family made our yearly pilgrimage to the Thanksgiving sales, only a day later than usual. There was precious little actual present shopping to be had, but I managed to pretty much double my wardrobe of 'Things that are acceptable to wear in a public setting' in just one, really thorough trip to Old Navy, otherwise known as My Mothership.

So yeah, flawless good times, good family, good thanks, and a lack of injuries.

Pretty spiffy, I'd say.

What was that, again?

There is a wicked long post just itching to spew forth, about my latest dentistry exploits, my inability to talk like a normal person, and my tendency to get caught doing really embarrassing things.

But my mood is a too insanely good right now for such things. Who would have thought a thing was even possible? If you've never seen my stupidly goofy smile, now's the time. It's a pretty rare thing, in general.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Back with more stories next week.

Blatantly Obvious

Being able to see is awesome.

Yeah, okay, I know, and that water stuff, I hear it's pretty wet. But follow along.

Previous to this week (AKA - the time before contacts), the only method I had to improve my vision besides Furious Squinting (the name of my 3rd album) was applying my glasses to the task. Glasses which were coming up on 6.5 years old, bent at about a 45 degree angle, and really, painfully, truly, dorky looking. Also, it can now be revealed, in a women's style. I picked them up at the start of my senior year of high school, when I realized that it really shouldn't be that difficult to read a chalkboard, especially when you're a suck-up and sit in the front row of desks (High school was an unfortunate time for me).

The result was a dramatic raise in my smartness-looking quotient (and a bit in the actual smartness area, since I could again see the board), but also upped my geekery to near astronomical levels. As one once said, the phrase uber-nerd was not necessarily out of the question.

Since then, I have grown, well, incredibly old and feeble (in many ways, mind) but directly correlated to my vision, all while maintaining the same level of dynamic dorkiness. This deterioration is best evidenced by my new-found, seemingly super-vision. Post Contacts, I can: see gas prices from the highway, pick out people that I know in a crowd from a distance greater than arms length, and watch sports on TV without really needing announcers to let me know what was going on. We won't even get into the part where I can actually see things while driving at night; I don't want to scare any of my previous passengers any more than they already have been.

Also, according to two people, my level of sexiness has gone up dramatically, sans glasses. Of course, there are others who say that the contacts make me blink too often and give me an insane-like quality, but since when do we listen to the naysayers? He also tells me that I have no ass when I wear jeans, whereas I believe I have a fantastic one. Which I'm pretty sure moves our conversation outside of the normal sphere of roommate relations, but no one ever said we were normal.

I just like the concept of not needing to go on a mission throughout the house to find your glasses, despite the fact that they're in your damnable front shirt pocket the entire time. Contacts add a whole new dimension to the adage of not being able to lose one's head, since it is already screwed on to one's neck.

And somehow (to continue the cliches at a record pace), contacts are just like riding a bicycle - it's easy to fall off, with a tendency to cause scarring. No, wait. I mean, you never forget how to work them: in and out in under 30 seconds.

The convenience is staggering.

Goblet of Awesome

It may have been 12:01 in the middle of the night and I may have been utterly exhausted beyond words. My eyes may have been ridiculously sore since I was wearing contacts for the first time in over two years. We may have been surrounded by more Highland Park High Schoolers than I knew existed in the world, and one of them may have been dressed as Draco Malfoy. It may have been at Cityplace, the worst theatre EVER, one to which I vow never to go to again, with no working surround-sound and only two front speakers that were horribly imbalanced so that the background effects were occasionally louder than the actual dialogue. And the projection room light may have been turned on with about 40 minutes left in the movie, so a huge yellow glare was projected onto the screen during the entire climax of the movie.

All these things may be true, but the important part is even more true: Last night I got to go see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And it was awesome.

Let me preface that by saying that if you haven’t read the book, this movie will not make a damn lick of sense, the ending will feel ridiculously cheated, and you will have nothing but questions at the end.

But the movie is excellent, condensing practically every important part of a 700+ page book into two and a half hours of (amazingly surprisingly) good acting and effects. At first, I was sort of disappointed in the result. As the credits rolled, it felt more like a companion popup book to the novel, bright and exciting pictures to go along with the high points of the story with no substance. But really, if I were asked to work up a treatment of GoF, it would have been at least thirty minutes longer and 15 times worse.

Also, it doesn’t hurt that this movie is ridiculously funny. One thing that has been extremely lacking from the film version of HP is the quirkiness inherent in Rowling’s writing, and this movie is practically nothing but nice, well-delivered jokes interspersed with tasty action sequences.

There were a few things that I categorically disagree with: I hate their characterization of Dumbledore with a fierce passion (Dumbledore does not constantly shout and yell at people, he is quiet and effective and self-possessed) and it’s the only part of the movie that I think is actually at odds with the spirit of the book. I also really wish they would have used Snape more, and not just because I have a huge man-crush on Alan Rickman. I think that the dynamic there is really vital to the book, and just using him for a couple of (okay, really good) scenes is a big waste, artistically. My only other major complaint is about the really weird disconnect in the rising action up to the final task – it was like 4 completely random scenes that needed playing, but there was no way to link them together, so lets just drop them right in and move on. Just…weird. But not deal-breaking.

Something that is neither here nor there: it feels like the movie is utterly lacking in characterization for all the new characters (Cedric, Fleur, Krum, the Headmasters) and I was all ready to ding the movie for that, until I realized that the exact same thing is true in the book. Rowling’s characters are often excellently drawn, but done so broadly that you naturally can ascribe anything you want to them, even though they never have any characterization through the whole book you come out at the end with a fully-formed picture in your mind, regardless. Which makes me re-evaluate my entire theory on why I like the books, but that’s an entirely different long-winded essay.

And just to round it out, the things that I loved:

• Actual acting by all the principles that was really good, even by Daniel “HE WAS THEIR FRIEND!” Radcliffe. And Emma Watson sort of insanely rocks. In fact, all the casting was just top-notch (my dislike for the Dumbledore interpretation notwithstanding).
• So much Neville that I practically wanted to weep with joy. He’s easily my second favorite character and I was incredibly gratified to see him get some nice screen-time.
• The entire, utterly cracked-out, Yule Ball scene, which was both incredibly true to the book, and completely awesome. There’s a level of delicious awkward-ness to the entire affair that speaks to a place deep within me.
• Those two scenes about figuring out the egg. First with Cedric seemingly hitting on Harry to an insane degree (“mull it over in the hot water?” If that’s not a come-on, I don’t know what is.) and then Myrtle all “sexual harassment 101” in the bathroom? I know that they both were practically verbatim from the book, but man, put in video form and it was just… so damn perfect that it brought a tear to my eye.
• And okay, basically all of the jokes, which I won’t spoil here, but they just put me in an excellent mood for the entire movie. I don’t need a word-for-word reenactment if you’ve got some nice comedic timing. I am easily amused, don’t ya know
  

So, anyways. LOVE. Go see it. And take me with you.

The Rhythm Finally Got Me

There is a new and disturbing wrinkle in my daily routine, here in the land of mortgages and bored attorneys. The management of our office building has decided that there is but one thing that is truly missing from our total office experience - elevator music.

Because our elevators previously contained nothing but the comforting whir and clank of ancient cables inching their way up the stories, always wondering if this would be their final hurrah before they gave up, you would think that some level of music, no matter how banal, would be a welcome distraction from the question of impending doom that comes with each additional floor.

You would be wrong.

Because this music is loud. Incredibly loud. Ridiculously loud. So loud that I can hear it in my office. Which is down a long hallway, through a door, and across a lobby from the elevators. And it's not just elevator music. It is elevator music via a calliope/deranged carnival. Instead of muted Muzak, we've got jaunty carousel songs that sound just out of tune enough to put you in mind of pure evil. Seriously, my clown avoidance senses are off the charts at all times of the day now. It's utterly maddening.

Plus, to top it all off, they've patched it in to the downstairs lobby too, so you can hear it all the way from your car. Trust me, you haven't experienced horror until you've walked through a darkened parking garage with distorted carnival music echoing off the stone walls.

This is not my beautiful office life.

On the Outs

Last Tuesday I went in for extremely minor oral surgery to finish work on a root canal process, and remove one of my wisdom teeth that was preventing the final cap from getting placed on said root canal. It's hard to quantify exactly how much this whole thing disturbed me, right down to my very (semi-sweet chocolatey) core, but man-oh-man I will try.

Because I don't like drills, or needles, and I really hate cutting, and then the scraping, and the numbness all day long followed by just intense pain, and the blood, and geez I'm grossing myself out and I haven't even gotten to the part where the dentist started singing along to Avril Lavigne during the procedure, ruining all Canadian singer/songwriters for me for life.

The whole thing was made infinitely worse by my necessity to be in the office all week long, including but not limited to, the three hours immediately following the procedure and the morning following. Other things that caused me issue during the adventure:

• The pain medication is, of course, awesome, but puts me in a state that isn't so much "out of it" as it is "out of it completely, with a tendency to drool onto the fancy new couch." Which, y'know, LAME.
• Not eating solid foods doesn't seem like a huge issue, until you try to find soft foods that actually have some sort of nutritional value. Campbells condensed soups provide basically nothing that you need to survive in the world, except 105% your daily recommended allowance of sodium, which I assume I was already getting from all those salt-water mouth rinses. And yogurt? I'm sorry, but Yoplait only has 100 calories per huge bucket of goop. Yes it was delicious, but damn man, my metabolism is such that I burned those 100 calories just trying to rip the little foil cover off the container. Not an exaggeration in the slightest, I dropped 4 pounds by Thursday when I got home from work.
• After my boss warned me of the horrors that were associated with the dreaded 'dry socket' I went online to read up and make sure I was doing everything right with my aftercare and not dooming myself to "intense pain and unpleasant odor of the mouth." And the Internet put me in such a right freak-out state that I'm still pretty much ruined. To express it in proper mathematical notation:
  
  Let x = the amount of time that I spend obsessively worrying about the hole in my mouth to the point of ruination of everything else in the world.
  
  Let y = the amount of time since tooth out.
  
  With p = time while at work,
  k = time spent hopped up on pain pills,
  And z = time while is asleep.
  
  Final Equation:
  x = y
  
  Because not only does it consume my every waking hour, I even compulsively dream about the hideous hole in my mouth. Unwieldy issues is what I'm getting at.

In any case, things are basically better, I get the stitches out tomorrow, and so far I'm pretty sure the whole dry socket thing has been avoided, because there is no pain associated with the hole, although the underside of my jaw still hurts like nothing else. But after tomorrow, the cap should be in place and I won't have to worry about any more dental hijinks. At least until January, when the other three wisdom teeth will be coming out.

Save me, Jebus.

Old and Prosaic

Now that I'm nice and old (just short of a quarter-century, now), I had planned on waiting until there was something of actual import to write, rather than just blathering on at the fingers to get something down, so it doesn't look like I've fallen off the face of the earth. With age should come discretion and the good sense of when to speak.

But that just doesn't wash. Normal weekend ramblings commence now.

In no particular order:

• Went to the Pigskin Review (yearly SMU band homecoming concert) which was delicious in musicality, if not in food. Other good things included an open bar, actual funny comedy, and a banjo, all of which added up into a totally enjoyable experience. I also got a new CD and managed to pretend to dance to a polka without falling once, which is a mini-miracle in itself.
• Saw Jarhead, which was good but taught me nothing except that I spend a little too much time nowadays focusing on perceived homosexual subtexts in everything I watch. Because...seriously. Bunch of marines in the desert and a mostly naked Jake Gyllenhaal? They make it too easy for me. Also, Peter Sarsgaard is a really good actor. Not that you necessarily need me to tell you that, but still.
• I bought Mario Dance Dance Revolution, because I love both DDR and Mario games with an unhealthy passion. Plus the review basically spoke directly to me: "With a short story mode that serves as a fun, linear introduction to sequential stomping, Mario Mix is suitable for a child, or for an uncoordinated friend."(emphasis mine, obviously) Because come on, if ever there was an endorsement for a game made with me in mind...

Later on there will be a discussion on exactly how much being old sucks, but it will have to wait until I get all my notes in order. The mind isn't what it used to be, you know.

Cliched Post of the Day

My new favorite referral log:

Search for: homoerotic dialogue in Firefly

You've come to the right place my friend, welcome home.

Dead to Me

So yesterday when I got out of the dentist's office, I had to head right back into work. As half of my face was completely numb and I am the only one in the office to answer the phones, I imagined it would be just utter fun.

But I found that if I just pulled my tongue very far back into my mouth and moved my lips as little as possible, I could easily be understood, I just had to focus really hard at forming words.

Thus, I get into the office and call my boss to let her know that I am back and busy doing mortgage related things and not slacking off like the slacker that I am. About two minutes into the conversation she asks "So, you went to the dentist for a root canal, right? Didn't they numb you up?" And I was very much, "Uh yeah, that's why I'm talking so funny."

Her response: "Huh. I understand you a million times better right now than when you usually talk."

DEAD TO ME.

-----------------------------------

I look back and realize that I should have seen all of this coming. Several people even commented on it - "You know, you haven't had a major injury in a long time, you're really due for one." And thus as they predicted, I've gotten three in the span of about 2 weeks.

Wait, you say. Three? Burned hand, drilled and throbbing jaw, that's only two.

New major injury update: Monday night I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business and typing away when I went to pull my chair closer to the desk. Somehow I managed to scrape my burned hand on the pointy edge of the desk, ripping all the skin off of my just-then-mostly healed electrical burn. Which not only counted as an ugly injury, it all bled like nothing else and all over everything in my room. I guess the nerves still weren't really responding, because I wasn't actually aware of the injury until I noticed the blood on my keyboard a couple of minutes later. This is not my beautiful life.

Oh, and to top it all off, I don't have any regular bandages in my house to treat the wound. No, I only have the ones that are covered in Scooby Doo characters. Which are, naturally, bright neon green. Nothing says "Professional Mortgage Consultant" like cartoon character Band-Aids.

Uh, Ow?

Okay, I love my dentist.

ALTHOUGH

He did make some horrible jokes. Terrible in fact. ("You have very deep grooves in your teeth. One might even say that you were 'groovy'." That sound you hear is the pun-capacitor in my brain exploding.) And there was one point at which there was a literal cloud of tooth dust hanging over my head and bits of tooth on his protective glasses and there was this horribly acrid stench in the air... and he was singing along to a Journey song on the radio. And he shot me up with so much anesthetic that my entire mouth was numb for 4 hours after I left the office, ensuring that I would talk extra crazy for my client meeting. And instead of referring to it as "pain" he would only call it "discomfort." As in, "I'm about to jam this needle directly into the exposed nerve of your tooth, so you may feel some discomfort."

BUT

The first appointment was a rousing success, in that he was awesomely able to save my tooth without breaking anything, and we might be able to finish the entire process in just one more visit. Including wisdom tooth extraction and capping. Which is pretty sweet.

ONLY

Now my jaw hurts like a sumbitch and I've got some intense...discomfort going on in the bottom of my tooth as the magical medicine particles kill off whatever nerve endings are still left in the gaping maw that used to be my back left molar. I mean seriously, I am tearing up just sitting here not even moving my jaw.

BUT

My awesome dentist gave me a nice prescription for some tasty pain medication for the night, which I get to go pick up on my way home from work. Ah, delicious pain-numbing drugs, how I've missed thee.

ANYWAYS

So yeah, my dentist, he is awesome.

And everyone better be extra nice to me today, because I am a brave little trooper.

Reason #456 Why I Hate Everyone

Coworker on my floor: Wow, so are you, like, dressed up for Halloween? Neat get-up.

Jason: Um, what?

Coworker: Your costume? You're supposed to be one of those Mormon missionaries, right?

Jason: Uh, no. [pause] This is how I usually dress for work.

Coworker: Oh. Well. [pause] That's nice, dear. [pats Jason on the shoulder and walks away shaking her head]

Jason: [goes back to his office to bang his head against his desk repeatedly until the day is over]
---------------------------------

Have I mentioned lately how much I love Halloween? Or can you just tell by my tone?

[Secretly, I know this is just universal karma coming back for the Halloween I went dressed as a nun. But still.]

Drilling

First off, check my pumpkin (Ignore Roommate Frank in the picture, all takin' credit for my hard pumpkin workings). Is that not the hottest thing you have ever seen? You have no idea how hard that was to craft, using only a pushpin and a steak knife.

-------------------------

So yesterday, after literally months of machinations, I finally made it to the dentist. Seriously, short of the financial aid office at SMU, I have never had a more complicated bureaucratic hassle than trying to find a dentist that is covered by my health plan. Only to find (6 weeks later) that the bureaucracy was totally for nothing, as I have the lame plan that pays for less, but I can use in any office I want.

In any case, I finally picked out my dentist, (who I later come to find is cool, young, and not just a little flamboyantly homosexual, (which is neither here nor there in relation to this story, but is included for the sake of color and my own amusement)) and made it to his carefully hidden office with time to spare. Weirdly enough, his office is in a house, which is pretending to be an art gallery, which also happens to have a dentist's office inside. There were several layers of odd involved, but the art was very pretty. Anyways, I get all strapped in and the cute dentist does the examination of my teeth of doom.

Doom being the operative word, as I need all sorts of painful and expensive procedures, now that my small tooth problem has become a brain-meltingly critical problem over the 6 week course that it took to find a dentist. Isn't irony delicious? Had I bit the bullet and just paid the full price for one visit back in the beginning, I could have saved something like 700 dollars and several extensive mouth-invasive procedures. Believe you me, I'm laughing on the inside.

This means I'm on an aggressive drug regimen this week to combat the tooth decay that is trying to worm its insidious way into my brain and next week will have to get all drilled into at least once, but more likely it will be three times - one for drilling, one for wisdom tooth extraction, and one for capping.

Which cancels out my beautiful plan for finishing off my apartment decoration by my birthday - financially crippling furniture purchases are pushed back in the face of financially crippling teeth issues.

Eh. At least my smile will be beautiful. It will compliment my hideously deformed hand nicely.

Truck of Malfunction

In addition to my exploits in painful home improvement, this weekend also saw the advent of even greater depths of malfunction for my lovely TOM.

For the longest time I've been waging war on my truck to get it shipshape enough to pass a state inspection. As it is a TOM, this will never happen, at least in Dallas, because it cannot pass the emissions test. Not that it fails the emissions test, it's really very clean burning, weirdly enough, but the sensors on the engine that monitor such things are shot to hell.

And again, as it is a TOM, there is no easy way to get them replaced that does not require me pouring bushels money directly into every available orifice of the vehicle. Thus, I had the brilliant plan of taking the TOM outside of the city limits to get the inspection done, where people don't care about such things as "emissions," or "the environment," or "clean air."

So when I went home for the weekend, I took a side trip to the mechanic's for a little inspecting fun.

The mechanic rolls the TOM into the garage, turns it on and goes "Hmmm, what is that?"

It sounds exactly like the TOM always sounds - namely two seconds from an untimely death. I am unconcerned. Dude wheels himself underneath the TOM, goes "Uh oh."

Son of a bitch TOM.

The mechanic goes ahead and puts the TOM on the lift so I can see the full glory that is the TOM's malfunction: there is a big-ass gaping chasm in the middle of my muffler/exhaust system. It defies all rational attempts at description, but invoking The Grand Canyon will get my sense of largesse across. Thing is shot to hell.

So in the end, I still managed to pour money into the TOM, this time directly into the tailpipe as it were, as the mechanic sawed/blowtorched off all my exhaust system and muffler and God knows what else, and replaced it with nice, new, shiny stuff.

To his credit, the TOM sounds 80,000 times nicer now, and it is newly inspected, but for the love, how much more will the TOM require of me? I'm pretty sure next time it will skip all pretenses and just ask for a couple of pints of my blood.

Shocking Genes

I inherited a lot of traits from my father: love of all things deep fried, a tendency to make jokes at the wrong time, and a weird appreciation for Barbara Streisand, just to name a few. But the most important thing I picked up from his side of the gene pool is my unerring tendency to injure myself.

Not just the normal clumsiness scale, actually my father is pretty adroit in general, but whenever there is something to be done, he will injure himself in the process. Sprain his shoulder carrying something, dislocate a finger fixing a car, slice open his hand during dinner preparations, whatever the event, he can hurt himself during it.

I've picked this same thing up, so when we combine forces to take on a project, it's like Wondertwin Powers, except instead of a water and animal form, it's horribly crippling injuries for everyone!

So this weekend I went home for my brother's (15th!) birthday. It was a pretty good time, there was relaxation and delicious food for 48 consecutive hours. And for his birthday, my family went in together and got him this sweet leaded-glass old-school Dr Pepper lamp to replace the light fixture in his room. Overall, it was completely awesome, but had to be manually installed, which meant that my dad and I went charging in there, tools at the ready.

You can already tell this is going to end badly, can't you?

So, we get the entire thing up and wired into the ceiling, with the only minor incident being a small electrical shock on my dad's end when the grounding wire was mislabeled. We turn it on and realize that what had looked like just a small line fracture in the glass before was actually a huge flaw that can be seen from space when the light is actually turned on.

Which means we're going to have to take the damnable thing back. I go ahead and start unscrewing the big outer metal faceplate that hides the actual mounting and wiring in the ceiling. I'm at this for maybe 45 seconds before there is something resembling an explosion. There is the huge bang and before you can say "disfiguring injury" there are gigantic Emperor-shocking-Luke blue electrical bolts shooting out of the ceiling and onto my hand. My hand, once so very beautiful, which is now suddenly resembling a blackened smoking husk. I break my cardinal rule of going home and let out a string of pirate-worthy obscenities before running from the room to get some sort of cooling agent on my now obviously withered and disfigured hand.

I'll shorthand the rest, because it's all downhill from here. Whoever the hell wired my parents' house was a complete wack-job, and somehow not only managed to mislabel all the wires in the bedroom, he also crossed all the wires and circuit breakers for that bedroom with the living room fixtures. So when we incorrectly wired the bedroom circuit, instead of flipping the breaker, the entire fixture exploded, literally ripping a hole through the metal plate covering the wires and arcing onto my hand.

The end result completely scorched the majority of the hair off the back of my left hand, put a huge angry, ridiculously painful burn covering my index finger, and left my middle, index finger, and thumb completely numb on the back side. Luckily all the blackened stuff managed to wash off, so it's just the hideous scarring to worry about, not the coloration.

So, y'know, score.

--------------------------

And on the bright side, now I have a nice and easy excuse as to why I am alone in the world - I'm Crazy Disfigured man. I knew I'd finally get my hook eventually.

Right, good times.

Literacy

Screw it, y'all.

Each time I write an entry about books, I always promise that it's the last one. I'm no longer promising that, 1) because I'm about to do a new one, and 2) I just finally got around to getting my Dallas library card, so now my house is flooded with books.

I forgot how much fun random reading can be. Usually, whenever I get a new book, I have to be very into either the story or the author, since I'm actually buying it. A book is like a long-term investment to me. This could be sort of mitigated by going to Half Price Books, since the investment was remarkably smaller, but there was still always the thought "do you really need this book for the rest of your life?" And thus, my book collection was severely limited.

With my library card, there's no risk (everything is free) and the selection is much cleaner than the Half Price Books, which always give off the vibe that they're carrying some sort of book-transmitting plague-like disease. Throw in the fact that my new couches are absolutely perfect for curling up and reading on, and I'm right back in old bookworm mode.

Just to give a quick taste of the flavor of my life now - I've had the card since Saturday. Number of books read since then: Four. Doing the complicated math, that's basically a book a day, if you count Saturday as a full day. Madness.

Anyways, I get to blather on about them because it is my birthright:

Bag of Bones, Stephen King - This one sort of doesn't count, because I was already half way through it when the counting started, and already owned it. I've actually read it a couple of times (read: 4) because it's a very satisfying and weird read. It's nice and pretty creepy in the right places. I always enjoy me some Stephen King and this is my favorite one to pick up if I need to pass some time with an inconsequential book. It's not too scary (like, say It, which continues to haunt me) and it moves pretty fast for an 8 billion page book. Plus the ending is pretty harsh and still sort of moving on repeated readings.

Brimstone, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child - The ultimate example of popular thriller popcorn books, these two guys have written something like 8 different books in this series about an unstoppable FBI agent and his various plucky sidekicks. The first one, Relic, was actually really well done and pretty unique. Over the series they sort of wandered out into complete randomness and varying degrees of badness. But I've still stuck with them because overall they're just great, gory, pulp books. Which, y'know, I dig.

They finally hit a nice high point again with Cabinet of Curiosities, a book that actually disturbed me greatly (but in a good way). In hindsight I probably should not have read it while out working in a summer camp with limited amounts of electricity and long walks in darkened woods. In true form, though, they followed it up with my least favorite book in the series, Still Life With Crows, which was concentrated suck and completely put me off the whole set, enough so that I didn't even pick up Brimstone when it came out.

But now that I've got this no risk library card, I grabbed it off the shelf figuring that there wasn't any harm in it. And it turned out to be pretty good, at least much better than I expected, if a little off-the-wall. It advanced the overall plot pretty well too (there is a sort of long term story arch about the FBI agent's family that hides in the background) and has piqued my interest enough to go ahead and get the latest one that came out back in June.

Geography Club & The Order of the Poison Oak, Brent Hartinger - As I've stated previously, I am a sucker for cheesy gay lit. All of it, I devour it whole. It speaks to a place not-so-deep inside me, that is still a dorky gay high school boy. These two books are actually a step or two above cheesy, so of course I am all about these books. They're written in the traditional YA Fiction style, set in a sophomore year of high school, and they just make me smile. RoommateFrank makes fun of me, because I really dig the style of the author - very directly conversational, narrating jokes and talking to the reader, even if sometimes it comes off as trying a little too hard.

It sounds ridiculously conceited, but the writing reminds me a lot of something I would write (if infinitely better), especially the pacing on the jokes and the in-text digressions about metaphors and what have you. Sometimes the obvious themes are a little heavy-handed (burn victims are just like victims of homophobia, y'all) but on the whole, they're just great quick reads that make me generally happy. Also, they made me laugh out loud several times, which RoommateFrank will not abide and he now mocks me incessantly. Whatever, I respond to books, especially good ones. If I didn't think it would scare off every reader I ever had, I would go into a lengthy examination of these books, because I'm a dork like that, but I'll just stop and say: very good.

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Now I still have a Chuck Palahnuik to get through (God, so creepy, but so good) and the new (okay, 7 month old) Chris Rice gay-thriller-written-in-the-style-of-the-old-south novel, something I always hold near and dear to my heart, because come on, talk about hitting a target demographic.

Circles

In my continuing sporadic efforts to gain (regain? maybe.) some fitness of body, I've taken up a daily running routine. Considering that it's been a full 8 days that I've managed to chain together, this may actually be something I keep up with.

Only, I am crap at running. Utterly. It's like my body rejects any full body movement. I get this really unhealthy flush about my head, and the odds are pretty good that I'll throw up immediately following, assuming I don't grievously injure myself during the process. As such, I am very paranoid about all forms of running.

Once upon a time, I was in high school. And in that time, my friend Brint and I thought it would be a lark to try out for the track team our senior year. Would shake things up, plus we were thin and fast - should be easy, no?

Because of our other geeky obligations (Hello Mock Trial!) our first track practice had to be late on a Monday night, rather than immediately following school like everyone else. (This turns out to be very lucky in just a second here) The first exercise after the stretching was 10 quick 100 yard sprints. Just something to warm up before the actual practice began.

Maybe 30 yards into the very first sprint, running as fast as possible down the track, I manage to trip, fall, and skid another 10 yards before coming to a bloody halt and ending my track and field career at exactly 27 strides taken. The end result was that a good 10th of the entire surface of my skin was removed - mostly from my left side, arm, and leg. I still have a visible scar on my hip from the worst portion of it (where there was practically no skin left) and the emotional scars remain with me to this day.

In terms of clumsy accidents I've had, this was probably the most damaging one, by blood loss counts at least, that I ever had, and as such, I have taken many precautions never to let it happen again. Now whenever I have need to run, it is always at a nice leisurely pace and never a crazy dash. Plus, y'know, I try not to run.

Which sort of flies in the face of this whole running program I've got going on now.

Anyways, it's been going okay, so far I've only thrown up on one occasion after the running which is a remarkably low number, all things considered.

On Sunday, midway through the run I got a cramp in my side and somehow during the near-fall-and-body-mangling managed to rip my iPod off my body and lob it backwards a good 10 feet into the bushes. BUT I did not fall down. Which, yeah, is a little disconcerting, over all. 8 days of running without serious or even mild injury?

I hardly know who I am anymore.

My Most Unfortunate, Yet True, Statement of the Day

"Why on Earth would I stop doing something just because it made me throw up? Do you know how many regular activities I would have to cancel?"

Sprawled

I love my office at work. I actually have two of them, one is a professional office with a desk and a big chair and everything, and one is a workroom office with the copier and supplies and what have you. I don't spend a lot of time over in the real office, because so much of my time is devoted to working with the files, it just makes sense to base myself out of the workroom.

As such, I've got a pretty nice set up in there, with two computers, the copier, two phone lines, and the mail machine all within arms length, or at least within rolling distance on my office chair. Because I do tend to maximize the rolling functionality of my chair, we have set up several of those carpet protector mats all over the floor in the office, so's I don't destroy anything or leave unsightly marks all about. These mats are carefully placed to allow maximum coverage where I roll, while still looking tasteful. I mean to say, I have given excessive thought to their placement.

Over the long weekend, the cleaning crew at the office (who are awesome, in general) decided to be extra thorough and they did a full vacuum/shampoo of the whole floor, or at least our wing. Which apparently included pulling up all my mats and later replacing them. I was unaware of this when I came in on Tuesday - to give you an indication of how good they are, I couldn't even tell their mat placement from my own.

That is, until about 1:15 when I made a big move to roll across my office to answer the secondary phone. Because they did not replace the third mat where it usually was. Instead, there was a big overlap at one point, and no mat at all at another point. Which would never be a problem, unless you are lazy like me and tried to roll across the length of the office.

I hit the overlap first, which caused me to spin halfway around in the chair. At the time, I was holding a huge file folder in one hand and a stack of papers in the other, so I couldn't properly reach out to steady myself. Following the half spin, the chair hit the absence of mat and promptly sent the chair and myself flying, backwards mind you, in a brilliant somersault that left the upper half of me lying outside the door to my office, and the bottom half smashed into the copier, with the stack of papers in disarray around me.

Have you ever heard the sound that someone makes when they fall out of a moving chair with their hands full and slam knees first into a copier? Because it is earth-shatteringly loud. I work basically by myself, I have no co-workers in my office, just other people at the far end of the hall who work in a different business but on the same floor. The noise of my fall sent all of them running down to my office, certain that some sort of mail bomb had gone off. Instead, they found me on the ground, covered in paper, holding my knee, next to an overturned rolling chair.

I know exactly what you're thinking, and yes it was completely awesome, thanks for asking.

Housekeeping

Little things that I want to write about, but don't warrant their own post because they are boring:

• New all-consuming video game: Castlevania - Dawn of Sorrow. I don't know why I am compelled to buy every new iteration of Castlevania, they're all the exact damn thing, just in a new cartridge. That said, it's always a good time-waster and brings out the nostalgic in me. And I enjoy the new soul system so much more than the card thing from a couple of games ago. The DS touch additions annoy the crap out of me, though. If you only use the stylus for 1/1000th of the game, why make it during the only hard 1/1000th?
• New all-consuming DVD set: Firefly - The Complete Series. (Can you tell I just went to Best Buy over the weekend?) I'm still trying to figure out how exactly I missed this series for so long. It has everything in the world that I love - science fiction, Joss Whedon, cowboys, fun dialogue, cute boys, and homoerotic undercurrents all in a neat package about questionable morals and shooting people. But it had its run on Friday nights during my drunken college years and thus was marginalized by alcohol. To the ruin of everyone. Saw Serenity last weekend (in a word: Awesome) and it was enough to get me to put down the big money for the box set. Entirely worth it. I'm in full-on fandom mode, just in time for the spectacular final flare-out, as the movie might barely be lucky enough to gross $30 mil. domestic. But yay for something new to fuel my fanfiction fires. It has been so long.
• Weekend was awesome - 1) Firefly, pizza, and Corona on Friday night, 2) Football, old high school friends, and absolute drunken antics in downtown Dallas Saturday, 3) Food shopping, video game night, and Animated Pig Movie with college friends Sunday, and 4) A No Pants Monday of rest. I love long weekends.
• I finally cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription, ending the 10 month thrall it held over me. I realized over the weekend that I had logged only 2 hours of gameplay in two full weeks and a long weekend. No longer is worth the investment. Don't know how I got over it, but it is nice to be out. I feel like I should be going in to rehab to make sure I don't have a relapse. I think it's a testament to my inability to stick to anything - my character list at time of cancellation: Level 49 Orc Hunter, Level 36 Human Mage, Level 35 Tauren Shaman, Level 24 Troll Priest, Level 24 Human Paladin, Level 23 Undead Warrior, Level 18 Gnome Warlock. 209 Combined levels and not a one even into the 50's. LAME.
• Today the second season of Arrested Development drops on DVD. I hope to forestall any additional purchases by picking it up at Target, rather than making the pilgrimage to Best Buy. I am very weak willed. Especially when Veronica Mars falls on the same day. I am not made of stone, people.
• I got the NaNoWriMo email and went ahead and reactivated my account even though I doubt I'll do it. As spectacular as flaring out at 10,000 words was last time, I'm not sure I want to even pretend to try this year. Failure is just depressing. But I love the concept in theory, and my life lacks structure, so we will see. Plus, I already have a story picked out, which makes me worried that I might actually be considering it again. I am a glutton for punishment and lofty ideals. Someone needs to talk some sense into me.
• Started up an exercise regimen. Already, I am sore in every place and my knee is swollen up to the size of a grapefruit. I hobble everywhere now. Why do I keep imagining that it's okay to try to run? I am the least athletic person in the world. Also, we are working out of the gym at our apartment complex, because we are both cheap and lazy, and it is the tiniest gym that ever was. It's like working out in a broom closet, only without the reassuring smells of cleaning agents. But I am shallow, and I want to look better, so to the broom closet I go.

Little site notes: If you scroll down all the way to the bottom, you'll see a new Google search bar where you can try to look up things on the site. It is woefully inaccurate, as the site is never trawled, but it sometimes works. Updated Elsewhere links, also. If I'm missing anyone, let me know.

Better actual entry coming, maybe later.

Solidarity

I know that I am not the only person who does this.

Okay, so you know that moment when you can suddenly tell you're about to sneeze? You get that half tickle in your sinuses, your eyes sort of water and you make that really weird and unattractive 'about to sneeze' face. This is de rigueur for every person who has ever lived, right?

Anyways, that's not what this is about.

So, sometimes when I'm about to sneeze, I sort of get stuck in the 'about to sneeze' mode, and can't get out. It's a very frustrating and unsatisfying state. Your body was wanting to sneeze for a reason; that it didn't leaves you unbalanced. Not to mention you're stuck with this really creepy look on your face.

When it is me, in these occasions I just turn and look into the nearest light source. Because I am incredibly sensitive to bright lights, looking into one is almost always enough to push me over the edge into the sneeze. (As I've said before, I think this is a trait that is drawn from my computer science degree - as soon as you are certified in computers, your body begins the process of rejecting all natural light.) It's just how I'm trained at this point - can't sneeze, look at a light.

Okay, so that makes sense, right? I mean, other people have to do this too, it's not that weird. Yeah, go with that.

Today at work I was standing in the lobby talking to a client when the urge to sneeze overwhelms. I hold up a finger in the universal sign of "hold up, I'm about to sneeze" and turn away. The sneeze doesn't come, and I am stuck in unattractive mode, so I turn more and angle my face to where it's under the nearest wall sconce lamp shade. This allows me to look at the bulb, which in turn allows me a very satisfying sneeze.

I turn back to the client, and am met with a horde of astonished stares. Not only is the client looking at me funny, so is the receptionist, the UPS guy, two randoms who are just in the lobby, and the floor manager (who already thinks I'm insane based on previous experiences).

Now, okay, maybe it looked a little odd, how I turned away to find a light to look into. And yes, it might have been compounded by the fact that I had to take a couple of steps to find a light I could reach. And yeah, I might have been in mid-sentence, so the holding up of a finger may have been interpreted as "hold on for a second, I need to go stare into a naked light bulb."

But.

BUT!

I really needed to sneeze! And I told them to hold on for a second! With my finger!

Whatever! It's not weird!

No one understands my pain.