It’s 4am. I’m headed into the office. Why? If you said “because he can’t sleep again,” award yourself a gold star, though I also would have accepted “because he’s been thrashing for the last three days, making absolutely no progress, and it would be nice to have a job on Monday.”
So I went to WalMart again last night. Or earlier tonight. I can’t tell anymore.
Whatever. There was a pleasant number of lines open this evening, and I am totally taking credit for that. Behold the power of my blog. But it wasn’t the cashiers that made me angry tonight, it was one of the guys in line.
Imagine you are making a quick trip to WalMart to pick up something to eat for lunch the next day. Your basket has like three items in it. What line do you pick? Why, the “express checkout line,” of course.
No imagine that in front of you is a man. An older man, but not old enough to be senile yet. Imagine he has like fifteen items or so. Well under the “twenty items or less” limit. Fine.
Now imagine that said man pulls out a giant plastic bag filled with change, dumps that change on the counter, and begins counting out forty-five dollars worth of nickels.
I will spare my more delicate readers a transcript of what ran through my mind at that moment, but feel free to imagine that it was long, colorful, and generally took a poor view of his ancestors. It’s called CoinStar, bro. Come on.
The gym I use is opening a new franchise about five minutes from my house. I’m currently driving about twenty minutes to go to the gym, and another twenty minutes back. Now, I can go on the way to work, or on the way home, or even on my lunch break. I’m going to save a ton of money on gas, too. This is made of win
What’s not made of win is the flyer they stuck in my mailbox, announcing this fact. On this flyer, in bright purple, is a bit that says “Open 24 Hours!”
That’s cool. Except, underneath that is another line that says “Monday – Friday: 12am – 9pm,” and “Saturday and Sunday: 7am – 7pm.”
Now, maybe my math is off, but 12am to 9pm seems to be twenty-one hours, not twenty-four. And 7am to 7pm seems to be twelve hours which is, again, not twenty-four.
This whole
Big Extravagant Claim*
*We’re lying
thing really pisses me off. But you already knew this, since these articles aren’t called “things that make me warm, fuzzy, and generally well-disposed to the human race.”
Whatever. I’m going to go eat some Double Stuff Mint Oreos. At 4am. In my office.
As most of you know, I recently kicked the whole vegetarian habit to the curb, and can now be counted among the ranks of the mighty carnivores.
As I’ve said, this is kind of slow going. You try not eating meat for two decades, and see how well your system responds to a sudden influx of dead animal. I started slow, eating mostly chicken and turkey, but have slowly branched out. My culinary repertoire now includes various forms of dead cow, including something called “beef tips.” What exactly they are the tips of, I think I am happier now knowing.
But this morning, I decided to forgo land-based sustenance and kill something that swims in the sea. Today, a little fishy died so that I might live. Also, I killed a sheaf of rice, an apple, and a bunch of broccoli, but the fish is the important part.
I’m honestly amazed. I had a lemon pepper fish dinner (for breakfast, nach), and it went down very smoothly. Easier than the chicken, in fact, and tastier. And the fats in fish are notoriously good for you. So this is a big win.
That’s right, folks, I’m now a Navy SEAL of the kitchen, consuming animals from the Sea, Air, and Land. Look upon me and tremble, all ye creatures, great and small. As long as you’re tasty, and easily digestible.
First, HIRE SOME FREAKING CASHIERS. I am remarkably sick of wandering into a store and finding out that there is only one line, twenty people deep.
Second, mayhaps it would behoove you to, I don’t know, train said cashiers.
I usually keep the bills in my wallet organized by denomination, so the ones, fives, tens, etc are all together. I know, I know, kind of OCD, but I have a friend that keeps them organized alphabetically, by serial number, so go bother her.
Anyway, my wallet was not in its pristine condition a few nights ago, so when I handed that cashier eight dollars, it was a stack of two ones, a five, and another one. This was apparently very confusing to the woman who was trying to ring me out; I got to watch her deer in headlights look as she counted, an recounted, my money five times.
Tonight, I bought a couple boxes of heat and eat chicken for tomorrow’s lunch. This cashier thought she would be all clever and hold both boxes in one hand and swipe them both in a single, elegant movement. I have to admit, it would have been kind of cool if it had worked.
It didn’t.
The first item rang through, but the second didn’t, so she swiped again. The first item rang through again, but the second item still hadn’t. Since she had now charged me twice for item one, she attempted to void it, but this time, the second item swiped, and an error message popped up, because I hadn’t actually bought that item yet.
She did this like ten times, and then had to have the entire order canceled. The computer actually popped up another error message that said something like “too many items voided, you obviously don’t know what you’re doing, let’s just forget this happened and start all over again, okay? And dear God, please don’t breed.”
What should have been a five minute thing turned into a fifteen minute exercise in tongue-biting.
Oh, hey, it’s suddenly winter again. Which of course means its Drive Like a Grandma Day. I got stuck behind some idiot in the family minivan doing 25 miles an hour all the way from Utica to Rome this evening. I was not a happy boy. Look, I understand driving cautiously, but seriously, 25 miles per hour? Do we have some kind of evil mutant snowflakes that actually jump off the road and try to throw you into the ditch? Man up or stay home.
Also, winter can go suck a lollipop, and global warming had better hurry itself up. Al Gore, you disappoint me yet again.
I’ve never really slept well, much to the consternation of my Kindergarten teacher. She’d say “Thomas, it’s nap time, everyone has to lay down,” in that sweet, sing-song voice of hers, and then I’d call her a hag and light something on fire.
Parent-Teacher night was always fun, growing up.
Anyway. I typically sleep about five to six hours a night, off and on, which really isn’t too bad. I’d be happier if it didn’t take me a couple of hours to fall asleep, and if I could actually sleep through the night, that would be choice, but beggars can’t be choosers.
The last few weeks, however, I’ve been lucky to get four hours of sleep a night. I’ll go to bed, stare at the ceiling for a while, sleep for a couple of hours, wake up, stare at the ceiling some more, sleep a couple more hours, and then say “screw it” and go to the office.
On the upside, I have been a lot more productive. I’ve gotten a lot of reading done during the night, because I don’t have anything better to be doing at two in the morning, and I’ve been spending a lot more time in the office, which is a step in the “wow, I really hope this project doesn’t fail horribly” direction.
Physically, I’m doing fine. My joints are a little sore, but I actually think that’s due more to the fact that I’m taking a couple of weeks off from the gym.
Mentally, though, I have that whole “lost in a fog of dazed confusion” thing going on a lot of the time. I’m usually all right for the first few hours of the day, but sometime around noon I generally start to crash. I’ve caught myself slumped down in my chair, just kind of staring at my monitor, a few times this week.
I’ve tried a few things to correct thins, ranging from ZMA supplementation to meditation. By body’s response to these efforts has been “screw you, I’m still awake,” and then a flurry of what I can only imagine are Iranian curse words.
So, at this point, I think I have three options. First, I can just say “the heck with it,” and see how long I can keep this up before suffering a psychotic break. Unfortunately, while that does sound fun, I doubt that the people I broke psychotically on would appreciate it.
Second, I can try to pull an all-nighter, and not sleep for twenty-four hours or so. That isn’t that much of a stretch from what I’m doing now, and I think that might reset my system enough to let me actually sleep like a regular person.
Failing that, I’ll just drink Jack and Coke until I pass out.
Well, my previously-announced Political Detox has been going fairly well. Even though a part of me desperately wants to refute those pesky ACORN rumors, and even though I would love to go off on William Ayers or Born Alive or… well… any of a hundred other things, I am doing my very best Nancy Reagan impression and Just Saying No.
This is despite all of the people who keep emailing or FaceBooking me links to inflammatory stories on Fox News. They have names for you people. Most of them are unsuitable for polite company. Others include “enabler” and “pusher.” For shame.
I got a slice of pizza on the way home tonight, since I’ve apparently given up any hope of eating healthy this week. One of the things that I always notice about this place is that no one wears gloves when they serve food. I grew up in Syracuse, New York, and down there, it’s actually a law that anyone who serves prepared food has to either wear gloves or use tongs, so it strikes me as odd when I see someone just grab my food and throw it in a box. I’m not a germophobe by any means, so it doesn’t really bother me, but I still always notice it.
Today’s helpful hint: if you’re going to use big words to try and sound intelligent, make sure you actually know what those words mean, because if you don’t, you just come off sounding even dumber. God, I hate it when people do that. I can kind of understand it when people screw up exempli gratia and id est, but when you say something like “we need to circumspect our customer’s needs,” it makes me want to hurt you. Inconceivable!
That last was a Princess Bride reference, for you heathens out there.
I’m going into a bit of Twilight withdrawal, being fresh out of books and stolen manuscripts to read, and not being the type to obsessively watch the trailer over and over and over and over and oh dear Lord please stop it, so I picked up the first book of the Souther Vampire Mysteries, also known as the Sookie Stackhouse Novels, written by Charlaine Harris.
Twilight is about a vampire that can hear the thoughts of everyone around him, except for one human girl, whose mind is for some reason blocked to him, and with whom he falls in love. The Southern Vampire Mysteries are about a human girl who can hear the thoughts of everyone around her, except for the vampire whose mind is for some reason blocked to her, and with whom she falls in love. So yeah. Also, SVM came out years before Twilight. Anyway, it’s a light, quick read, a fun take on the Vampire mythos, at turns both suspenseful and funny and THE SEX OH MY GOD THE VAMPIRE SEX ARE YOU INCAPABLE OF WRITING A CHAPTER WITHOUT SOMEONE TAKING THEIR CLOTHES OFF?
Which is one of the reasons I’ve kind of taken to the Young Adult genre (like Twilight). A lot of authors seem to think that the fact that they aren’t going before a ratings board means they have to cram as much “adult” content into their work as the publisher can tolerate without blushing, while the YA set forces you to be a bit more… creative.
Of course, Stephanie Myer created what is possibly the creepiest stalker in history with Edward Cullen, so there is that. For those of you shrieking in denial, he brought oil to her house so she wouldn’t hear him opening her window when he snuck in to watch her sleep. Dear God, I couldn’t come up with something that disturbing if I tried.
I’m averaging about four hours of sleep per night this week. That kind of sucks. At this point, I’m leaning towards chemical intervention. Unfortunately, I can take Tylenol PM or Benadryl like candy and not feel a thing, so I might have to go straight to the Jack and Coke.
I’ve had some very interesting conversations over the last few weeks. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned:
God may not be a Republican, but he will never vote for a Democrat.
A candidate’s Christianity is more important by far than her lack of intelligence, knowledge of the issues, moral character, or adherence to the rule of law.
When considering your vote, a Christian should carefully weight each candidate’s positions on the important issues of the day, and then vote who whoever pretends to be pro-life the loudest.
On that note, its important to elect conservative Presidents, so that they can appoint conservative Judges, so that they can give pro-abortion decisions.
When Jesus said to pray for your enemies, and return good for evil, he was just joking.
He was also kidding about the whole “taking care of the poor” thing.
We should pray for the peace of Jerusalem, but the rest of the Middle East is fair game.
If you do decide that Obama is the better of the two candidates, your Christian brethren will call you an idiot and a fool, and question how you, as a Christian, can vote for such a horrible man. They will, of course, say all of this in a spirit of love.
Some of them will even promise to pray for your soul. And, one would imagine, for your political judgement.
The fact that people are praying for me over this – and the sheer number of people that are apparently praying for me over this, probably bothers me the most. It seems that my political views are an area in which God Himself needs to sovereignly step down from heaven and fix me. It seems that my political views actually put my soul in jeopardy of eternal, unquenchable flame. I don’t claim to be any kind of a moral paragon, so please believe me when I say that there are a lot of things in my life that God would be better off taking a wrench to.
I have heard many people say that Christians are not knee-jerk Republicans, and that they are not single-issue voters. Since I’ve started explaining my advocacy of Barack Obama, however, I have seen, almost to a man, people jerking their knee for McCain and refusing to consider any issue other than abortion.
Obama is a liberal, a communist, a terrorist, and a baby killer. John McCain is a principled maverick who would never sell out his principles in order to win an election. Sarah Palin is an intelligent, informed woman that is ready to step up and lead the free world if something were to happen to John McCain. The Iraq war was just and good, not to mention wildly successful, and the Iran war will be even more so. All the economy needs to recover is a healthy does of more deregulation.
This is the world my opponents live in. I’ve tried to respond with facts, and I’ve tried to respond with even more sarcasm, but none of it seems to get through. This isn’t a question of fact, it’s a matter of world view.
I’ve actually been asked to stop posting facts, because it clouds the issue. I’ve been told that I’ve thought about these issues too much to contribute to the conversation. The fact that I have studied these things, and formed an opinion about them, actually disqualifies me from having an opinion, or at least from voicing it.
I’ve been told that I’m not changing anyone’s mind. While that isn’t entirely true – I’ve gotten messages telling me that I have, at least, made people think about the issues in a new light – for the most part, that seems to be a fairly accurate view of the state of things. We’re at the point where we just trot out the same tired arguments over and over again. When the news broke that a Republican-led investigation had found that Sarah Palin had violated Alaskan Law by abusing her power in order to get her former brother-in-law fired, the responses were mostly about William Ayers. When I talk about the mistakes of the Iraq war, people just tell me that I”m surrendering to the terrorists.
So I’m kind of done. Unless something spectacular happens, I think I’m though with political blogging. I’m going back to writing about weigh lifting and werewolves, like God intended. To my eleven million opponents: your war of attrition has succeeded. I simply can’t keep up with all of you. I can’t keep spending all of this time Googling for the answers to all of your talking points. I can’t, honestly, deal with the frustration. So I’m out.
I do, however, take some small comfort in the knowledge that it would take a miracle for McCain to win at this point… and I really don’t think God is on his side.
Risk something, take back what’s yours
Say something that you know they might attack you for
Cause I’m sick of being treated like I have before
Like it’s stupid standing for what I’m standing for
Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin abused her power as Alaska’s governor and a violated state ethics law by trying to get her ex-brother-in-law fired from the state police, a state investigator’s report concluded Friday.
