My day had gotten exponentially better by 10 a.m.

Today is my day off, and it's been an amazing day off.

Last night I worked from 3 to close, which should have been 11 p.m., but was rather 11:45. I was working in the chef's case (read: deli) which is way easier and quieter than pizza. I also learned how to use a deli slicer. You know, those big "back and forth" ones that could potentially sever a finger. However, the cooling system underneath the chef's case was pretty much solid ice, which means that my coworker and I had to lift up the entire thing and melt all the ice with a hose. It wasn't that stressful, even though it was a late night. At least I knew what we were going to be doing the entire time, and this time my job required me to thaw the chef's case. That means that I didn't spend the entire time thinking, "this is definitely not my job."

Anyways, since I got off at 11:45, that means that I got home around 12:15 and subsequently went to bed a half an hour to 45 minutes later.

I had a meeting at work at 6 a.m. this morning. So I had to wake up again at 4:50 in order to become fully conscious and make it to work on time.

The meeting was supposed to start at 6:30, but because the presenter (the regional director) didn't bring a cable to hook up his laptop to the projector, the meeting didn't start until a little after 7. So I got home a little after 8 a.m.

But rather than go back to bed for a little bit, I thought that if I prolonged my conscious state, a mid-morning/afternoon nap would be ten times better. So I drove up to Half-Price Books just to look around. I ended up finding the original Star Wars Trilogy on VHS. For six dollars. (And a birthday present for Amy, which I will divulge to you freely as long as you don't tell her.)

I know what you're thinking. "What a fucking nerd." Yes. Correct.

I digress. However, the version that I bought was before George Lucas ruined it by adding more explosions and Greedo shooting first. The version I bought is the remastered version, which was put out about a year or two before the rereleases. The version I wanted was the un-remastered, very-first VHS version ever put out, but a used copy of that will run me upwards from one hundred dollars. So I'll stick with my copies.

So, then, my day shifted from me not knowing what to do with it to revolving around watching all three movies. Here's how it went:

Came home from Half-Price Books, settled in. Watched Star Wars.
Fell asleep on the couch for 1-2 hours. I'm not quite sure.
Woke up, did a few errands, came home, had lunch.
Watched The Empire Strikes Back.
Surfed around the internet for a while, sent some albums to Tim via AIM.
Ate dinner and watched Return of the Jedi.


Today has been an amazing day to myself.

What a night/Good news

I am sitting here now, after coming home from a very long, insanely stressful night at work, drinking a very large glass of wine.

Work was awful tonight. I feel like I was brutally raped repeatedly, and then peed on. Like, the smelly yellow variety.

Sorry, I don't usually get graphic like that in type. But tonight was just awful. Fucking retarded white people.

Note to all of you out there: if you name your child Parker, I will make fun of you and be sorry for your child.

Also, if you ask what the new venue is, and I say something along the lines of it being a French Bistro-themed, sit-down style place, do not ask me if they're going to have food.

Also, do not ask me the following question, and especially do not ask it verbatim: "Is there chicken on the Buffalo Chicken Pizza?"

Please wait until I ask you how I can help you before you start barking out your orders. Especially when I have just told you, "I'll be with you in a minute." I'm obviously doing something for someone that arrived before you did.

Finally, after I ask you what you'd like, do not stare blankly and indecisively at the pizza when there is a voluminous line behind you. I will want to smash a heat lamp over your head.

(Extra note: while looking up an adjective for the word large, for which I ultimately chose "voluminous," I came across my new favorite word: skookum. It also means large, but didn't flow in the aforementioned sentence.)


Okay, now the good news. After tomorrow, I will no longer be working in pizza. My transfer is official, and I am moving to the coffee roaster. For the next week, starting Monday, I will be filling in in various places around my present department, as well as working some overtime in the coffee roaster, because I am now one of three people working there.

More good news is that, once I get my feet wet in the roaster, there is a higher position open called "Coffee Buyer," which entails ensuring proper inventory and ordering, and so on, and which I could very possibly be applying for.



Finally, I know this is not my territory, but rather this bloke's, but I felt it necessary in this instance. Please buy the new Richard Buckner album, called Meadow. It is that good.

This is all very confusing.

I would like to try and change this up a little bit. A color scheme, a few neat pictures, maybe a different font.

I am utterly clueless when it comes to html.

When I look at the template for this thing, it's all one big clusterfuck of html code. I pretty much have no idea what any of it means.

I feel so retarded.

How did the reference originate?

Okay, this is how my brain works.



I was just watching TV, flipping around. I caught the local 11 p.m. news, and there was a special report on about the E. coli-infested spinach scare.

Everytime they referred to the "tainted" spinach, I giggled like a thirteen year-old.

"Taint" is nothing other than a funny word. It should only be used in the funny sense from now on, if only to keep people like me from giggling like said thirteen year-old.


They said "taint" three times.
I counted.

A small collection of things.

This did not all happen in the order I'm telling it, just however I feel like it. Deal with it. Beyatch!


I just got done today with my two-day orientation/brainwashing at work. Two months after I was hired. Interesting strategy. My favorite phrase is "that's below the line." What this means is that, in terms of workplace appropriateness, there is a line that is used to determine what is appropriate workplace conversation/comments, etc., and what is not appropriate. What is appropriate is considered "above the line". Anything considered inappropriate is, obviously, "below the line". Thus, if someone says something you feel is inappropriate, you can just say, "that's below the line!" and the coworker will understand and stop discussing whatever they were discussing. It's also a lot of fun to say. "That's below the line!"

Things I've been into lately:
-----> Watching my Netflix DVDs. Last night Amy and I started watching "Sports Night". I also got to watch Tromeo and Juliet, which is probably the best Troma movie I've seen so far.
-----> I am still reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. I am currently on So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth out of five. My Hitchhiking experience will culminate with Mostly Harmless. And then it's on to...I don't know yet. Maybe Wigfield, which was written by Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, or possibly All the President's Pets by Mo Rocca. Of course, I should get to reading Casino Royale before the movie comes out.
-----> Playing Lego Star Wars and Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy. These games are ridiculously entertaining. Whenever you blow something up, it all falls apart to Lego blocks. Everything, including all of the scenery and levels, are made of Lego Blocks, including the cutscenes. In the newer release, which covers the original three movies, there is a cut scene portraying the climax of The Empire Strikes Back, during which Darth Vader cuts off Luke Skywalker's hand and then reveals to him that he's his father. In the video game, there is no dialogue, because they're all Lego men, so when Darth Vader gestures that he is Luke's father, and Luke disbelieves him, rather than Darth Vader telling him that it's true, he whips out a picture of himself with Princess Amidala, Luke's mother. (If you laughed or someone around you laughed at that, you or whoever laughed is a complete nerd. It's a proven study. I laughed.)
-----> I finished watching my "Strangers With Candy" box set. Fucking amazing. As was the final season of "Arrested Development". Both of those shows lasted three seasons and were prematurely cancelled.


I went to get my hair cut this evening, and when I was sitting, awaiting my turn, an older, tall man wearing jean shorts, a sleeveless black t-shirt, and a large knee brace came in and sat down. The woman asked if he was getting a haircut, he said yes, and she asked him his name. Rather than say his name, he spelled it out. "S-H-A-W-N."
"Shawn?"
"Yes."
The woman laughed and said, "You know, you didn't have to spell it out for me..."
"Yeah, I did. There are, like, 30 ways to spell Shawn."
"Ha ha ha..."
"But there's only one right way."
No more laughter. Awkwardness at this point. And I should point out that at no point during this small exchange did Shawn laugh. He was dead serious. Would he have been offended if the woman had spelled his name wrong on the little paper she had that only detailed the order in which customers arrived and would inevitable throw away at the end of the night, never to be seen again? Would he, in fact, have been able to tell if the woman had spelled it Sean or Shaun or even Sion on her piece of paper when she called him when his turn was up?
"Okay, Sean, are you ready?"
"Uh, excuse me. My name is Shawn. Not Sean."
"That's what I said..."
"No. You said Sean. It's Shawn. This is completely unprofessional. I demand compensation."

When it was my turn, the other woman there asked me if I was ready, and then once over there, kind of whispered to me, "Can you believe that guy?"

Yes. I can believe that guy. Which points to the fact that I have little faith in the average human being. Or rather, American human being.

I can't believe it took me this long to realize this

I recently realized, while watching The Fixx perform on the mainstage at Black Swamp Art Festival, that the majority of pop songs are about these three things:

1. Doin' it.
2. Wanting to do it.
3. Not getting the chance to do it, for various reasons.

Why I was disappointed by the new "Family Guy"

Number of story-damaging, completely unrelated cutaway scenes, a.k.a. number of times someone said "It's just like that one time when...": 6

Number of "purely reactionary and retrospective because it's popular and current" gay jokes about George Takei: 2

Number of outdated jokes of the same nature about Michael Jackson: 1

I am not an evil person and if you think the same way as I do you are similarly untainted by the draws of the dark side.

I was driving home yesterday, and it happened to be during rush hour on 270. It took me about an hour to travel from Dublin to Reynoldsburg. Here's a word of advice:

If you're traveling, and traffic is insanely backed up, and you suspect it's because of an accident, it's okay to think, "Someone had better have fucking died. There had better be body parts sprawled across two of the three lanes."

And when you get to the scene of the accident, and you see that no one had died, but rather some yuppie's Beemer got into a fender bender with some redneck's rusted-out, broken rearview mirrored, Ford Tempo, and they refused to move their little tiff to the shoulder, it's okay to wish that one of them had died.

There's nothing like the unmitigated rage one attains when driving in Columbus during rush hour.

I really need to find a hobby.

Since I've graduated, all I've had is work. I've had work and classes and homework before, which is a tough balance, but rewarding. Now, I am doing something completely unrelated to my degree for 8 or 9 hours a day, and then coming home. It's a little depressing sometimes.

Hanging out and being with Amy is a lot of fun, and we have great times together, but this isn't what I'm talking about.

I need to find a hobby or something. I've recently been entertaining the thought of writing another story, like I did with the zombie short story (which you can read if you ask about) that I did for a class.

But what would I write about? Any suggestions? Anything completely and ridiculously off the wall or anything normal will do. I'll even post it when it's finished.

We still matter! Right, guys?

"Hey, remember us, guys? Guys? Remember? Do you remember us? Wait, come back! Oh...."


- The cast of Jackass: Number Two

The most concise and honest marriage-related comment I've yet heard.

A few days ago Amy and I invited a couple of friends over for dinner, which meant that the entire day leading up to dinner was to be spent cleaning the apartment and getting things needed to make dinner.

Among our stops was Target. I wanted to go there to buy some wine glasses.

A brief note - if anyone wants to talk about how the roles of men and women in relationships have not evolved or changed at all should visit our apartment. They are my wine glasses, bought and paid for. And not only did I cook dinner, but it was my idea in the first place to invite the friends over. The first few weeks after I moved to Reynoldsburg with Amy was almost a complete role reversal.

At any rate, the first thing we had to do in Target was to return something Amy had bought, but for one reason or another, had decided not to keep it. At the counter in front of us was a woman who had a cart, and in the cart was a baby. Immediately behind us was the line of computers that people can use for various reasons, including wedding registry-related issues. There were two children, a boy and a girl, aged at about 8 and 6, respectively. They were playing on the computers while the woman, presumably their mother, was achieving new records of time spent at a customer service desk.

The girl was the closest to us, and was therefore the only one of the two we heard. The girl was clicking around aimlessly, mashing the keyboard down at various points, and eventually happened to find a page that showed a picture of the Target Dog wearing a tux and a female Target Dog wearing a wedding gown. This is what the girl said upon viewing this page:

"This is the husband, this is the queen."

Amy and I both reacted differently to this statement. Amy's was funnier. Her face morphed quickly from one reaction to the other, and seemed to convey this statement:

"Hey, waitaminute, that's not...actually that's probably pretty accurate."

If there's a better summary of marriage, we would have to spend a daunting amount of time finding it.