Out of the mouths of babes...

Secily and I just had a long conversation which covered a wide range of topics such as the penalties I would suffer if I ate her brownies, the Beautiful Crying Princess Who Can't Dance, whether or not Godzilla can beat SpaceGodzilla, and who's the fastest runner in the whole world. (She's about the coolest of all possible little girls.) As we were winding up our discourse, she informed me that she wasn't smart because she was a princess. I then informed her that princesses had to be smart to be princesses, so that meant she was smart. QED, little white girl! I'm Rick James, bitch! She rejoindered by informing me once again that no, she wasn't smart, she was a princess. We verbally dueled for a while before, hands on hips and the seriousest of serious looks on her face, she defiantly issued her final riposte:

"I'm not smart!"
(pause)
"I'm happy!"
(storms away)

Wise beyond her years, that one. Not smart my ass. ^_~

Love, Supernegro

So I'm pricing books at work, like twenty seconds ago, and I come across a book called "Civil War Curiosities." I open it up to write our price on the first white page, because that's how things work 'round these parts, and I notice this blurb on the jacket:

"FACT: Enough tactical material has been published about the Civil War to fill endless rows of shelves."

And I laugh, because that's stupid. Someone needs to get on the horn to Mr. Webb Garrison and tell him just what "endless" means. But that's not what prompted this post. No, what prompted this post was the note I noticed on the inside of the front cover as I was laughing about the blurb - a note I probably never would have read had the blurb itself not broken my rhythm (I was totally getting my price on, ya know). In its entirety, it reads:

"I saw this book and thought of you, my Vietnamese Princess. Thank you for being such an awesome friend... and more.
Love, Supernegro
P.S. Let's see Whitey White Pants top this."

I so want to know the story behind all this. But I never will. Sigh.

OK, back to work. Don't tell the boss.

Friday already?

Wow. This week flew by so fast, here it is the weekend and I have no idea whatsoever just what I'm supposed to do with it. Not that that's a bad thing. It was a very good week, a truly good week, an almost perfect week aside from the mild hangover I'm sporting this afternoon and the spectre of serious laundry looming in my immediate future - and it happened mostly on the fly, so I could do worse than to stretch that on out into my days off.

"On out into?" Is that even legal?

My "daily fortune" for the day says that "you can open doors now with a combination of charm and patience." Which is handy, because sometimes my arms are full. Who knew that the internet could bless us with such godlike powers? Or perhaps the more important question is: Are my awesome new powers enough to allow me admittance to the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning? Because that would be flippin' sweet.

Gotta run, life's a-callin'. In the immortal words of Phil Vassar:

There goes the washing machine
Baby, don’t kick it
I promise I’ll fix it...

(yikes)

"I am no man."

Chicks rule.

And if you're not totally in love with Miranda Otto... well, I don't know what to tell you.

Everything's sparkly!

No, the glitter fairies didn't drop the bomb on Tulsa. I'm just stupid tired. I would kill for a normal night's sleep right about now, because I haven't had one since... I guess last Wednesday night. My sleepytime got all thrown off when I was feeling screwy Thursday night and Friday, and then since getting up early Saturday morning the most sleep I've gotten in a night is three and a half hours. And I can't even go to bed now, even though I've been up for about 20 hours (passed out on the couch early last night, woke up about 9:30, and never did manage to get back to sleep), because if I did I'd wake up at like 3 in the morning and then rather than a lack of sleep issue I'd have a sleep schedule issue. Which is just as aggravating when you've got two jobs. Quite possibly even more so.

I know, I know. Wah. Hey, I'll admit it - I've turned into a much bigger wuss about sleep since I finally got past my habitual insomnia a few years back. Wuss or not, though, if I can't hit the sack yet it would be nice to at least have a backrub, a beer, and maybe some snoggin'. I'd settle for the first two, I suppose. But, you know, while I'm wishing...

Don't be nice to Ali, he's my nemesis

Have you ever been in just a really really great mood, probably all out of proportion to what the circumstances truly merited? (Well, of course you have, we're all human here. And if we're not, then would the alien please step forward now? I'd like you to take me with you when you leave.) That's where I am tonight. Part of it may be the fact that I probably spend too much time in a worse mood than the circumstances merit, and so a truly good mood seems even better than it is. But most of it is just... ah. Yay life.

Have a great week, Mouseketeers. May the wind at your backs always be your own. :op

It snowed!

Well, no, it really didn't. We got about an inch. There was a time when I wouldn't have even noticed such a wimpy little dusting, but when you live in Tulsa you don't quite get the awesome snowfall amounts that I fell in love with as a child in Iowa. You have to take what you can get. But you can't sled on it, you can't make snow angels in it, and a snowman or a snowball fight are totally out of the question (and even if there was enough on the ground to make it worthwhile, it's too cold outside and hence the snow's not right for it anyway). So it's hard to be excited about it. Especially since I have to venture out for some groceries this afternoon, because a) people in Tulsa lose their freakin' minds when there's snow/ice and drive even worse than they usually do, and b) they also seem to think that it's going to last forever, so I'm sure that some of the things I need like eggs and milk and bread will be completely sold out. Bastards. How the hell am I supposed to make French Toast?

Iowa-Minnesota in 20 minutes. Go Hawks.

(updated at 5:45) Minnesota 74, Iowa 61... see? What did I tell you would happen as soon as I decided this basketball team was for real? I hate being right all the time.

Dear America...

It has come to my attention that you're just not paying attention. The following is a partial list of things that you could know with a bare minimum of effort - and should know, considering how often you seem to bring them up in conversation:

1. Lemmings do not commit mass suicide. Ever. Period. Nor do they follow each other blindly around any more than any other stampeding group of animals does.
2. Humans do not use only 10% of their brains. (Well, maybe a lot of people do...)
3. Whirlpools - in bathtubs, sinks, toilets, etc. - in the southern hemisphere do not spin in the other direction. Coriolis force is very real, true. But its effects are far too small to be relevant to a body of water like a sink or a bath, unless your tub is a few hundred miles in diameter.
4. The word "sushi" does not refer to seafood.
5. The Great Wall of China is not the only human structure visible from space.
6. Eating turkey does not make you tired. Tryptophan, although it is a natural sedative, does not act on the brain unless it is taken on an totally empty stomach. With no protein present. There's all sorts of protein in turkey. And who has an empty stomach on Thanksgiving?
7. Your hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after you die.
8. Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet.
9. The day after Thanksgiving is not the biggest shopping day of the year. It may have the highest amount of traffic, although that's arguable, but sales-wise it's almost always beat by all four days of the two weekends before Christmas (and occasionally by other days as well).
10. Reading in dim light or sitting too close to the TV will not damage your eyesight.
11. A person who gets what they deserve does not get their "just desserts." They get their "just deserts."
12. The suicide rate does not rise during the holidays.

That's a start. I expect progress here, America. Don't disappoint me.

You Lost guys and your anagrams

"Henry Gale, Minnesota" = "See another (or 'an other') man lying"

(Just, you know, in case y'all weren't convinced of his Otherness by that tres creepy stare he shot Sayid as the armory door swung closed.)

And Jack really needs to start keeping his whiny little piehole shut. I swear to God, if I was trapped on Craphole Island with these people I'd be begging Sayid to work on him next...

OK, I'm in.

I've been reserving judgment on this Iowa Hawkeye basketball team because, frankly, I'm not quite sure what to make of them. Steve Alford, to this point, just hasn't been the next great Hawkeye coach that we Iowa fans all thought he would become - and he's had plenty of time to make a serious start, this is his seventh season. Over the course of his time in Iowa City, he's had some teams that were brilliant for stretches of time, but they always managed to quietly fade away when it came down to it. They don't make it to the dance as a rule, like they used to. They haven't made much noise in the dance for far too long. And so on.

So I've been watching with a jaded eye, just waiting for the fade. They beat #7 Kentucky, gave #2 Texas a serious run for their money for about 38 minutes, and beat #21 N.C. State in a stretch of about 10 days back in November, and I was like "yeah, whatever." Then they lost back-to-back games at Northern Iowa and Iowa State (both pretty good teams, but still) in mid-December and I thought "uh-huh! see?!"

I think I was wrong about this team. Tonight in Iowa City they took down their fifth ranked team in a row, the Michigan State Spartans. The win gave them a full-game lead (and the inside track) in the Big Ten, a conference they haven't won outright since 1970. It was their 16th straight home victory (including a 15-point stomping of then #6 and 15-0 Illinois, how sweet that was), setting a school record. They play killer defense and have a chemistry that's been lacking in Iowa basketball for quite a while.

They will, of course, promptly reward my declaration of belief with a couple of losses in their last four games, a second- or third-place finish in the conference in the regular season, and an early exit from the Big Ten tournament. Because this is what my teams do.

In other news, Duke still kicks ass.

Sunday afternoon carpentry

Yet another shelf has been added to the wall... and once everything was spread out a bit and the stuff from the "new" pile was added, things already started looking relatively full. I'm going to have to figure something else out soon, because there's no room left on the wall to add another shelf unless I radically rearrange the living room.

Yeesh. I have way too many DVDs.

I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair

But her name's Mindi. And her hair is blonde.

Everybody has their regrets. Things they should have done, things they shouldn't have done, words they wish they could take back, decisions they wish they'd never made. It's a part of being human. In a way we're all William Katt, standing in the California desert of our minds with this amazing life but no instruction manual.

But that's OK. We learn from these mistakes. We grow and change and find our new opportunities wherever we can, even though the path we end up on may not be the one we had imagined. In whatever way we can, we make our peace with these things, and then we get on with our lives. We go forward because there's no going back. And besides, time heals all wounds, right?

Bullshit. It heals a hell of a lot of them - but almost eleven years' worth of water has gone under the bridge since I lost the girl I truly should have married, and she still haunts my dreams.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not one of those miserable people who spend the rest of their lives utterly dwelling on one mistake, letting it get in the way of everything else they could have accomplished after that. True, I compare every single girl I meet to her, but I haven't let that get in the way of actually having meaningful relationships.  I don't lie in bed awake at night driving myself crazy with thoughts of what might/should have been.  Well, OK, the vast majority of the time I don't.  I think of her often - of course I do, we loved each other truly, deeply, madly, and passionately - but I don't let that rule my life.  I still live.  I still love.  These things happen.  Overcoming adversity is part and parcel of life on this planet.

But my subconscious? Ah, that's another story entirely. At least once every 6 weeks or so, I lose her all over again, and I wake up miserable. They're never dreams of things that actually happened - those would be easier to deal with, I imagine. No, it's always something different. Sometimes we find each other again after years have gone by, and then she dies. Sometimes I do. Sometimes we're together and she leaves me for someone else. Sometimes she's moving away to somewhere I can't follow. My brain has cooked up a seemingly endless array of scenarios over the past eleven years, but the setting isn't the important thing anyway - it's the sense of loss I feel on waking, the one that follows me around like a cloud of Pigpen stink for the rest of the morning.

I absofuckinglutely hate it.

Sure, there are good dreams too.  A little too good sometimes, if you know what I mean... but that's not the point.  So.  How do you get over something like that?  How do you make peace with something that your mind is telling you it's already made all the peace it's possible to make with? Am I supposed to just deal with this for the rest of my life? I loved Stef with all my heart, but in all the years we were together the dreams of Mindi never stopped. So what happens when and if love finds me again? Do I tell the girl, and make her worry that I love a freakin' ghost from my past more than I do her - or keep it to myself and wake up regularly feeling not only miserable, but unfaithful to boot? How do you put something behind you when it's already there?

Grr. And sigh. I'm going to go kill some stuff until I feel better.

And to think I laughed at the State of the Union

This, as anyone following the news knows by now, is one of the three fake "cartoons" that were being circulated by radical Muslims as part of their attempt to start some silly global jihad or something:


And yes, we all also know by now that this "cartoon" is actually a grainy re-presentation of an AP photo of a contestant in a French pig-calling contest (and oh, boy, are there a few hundred jokes lurking within that phrase). But I know I'm not the only one imagining W sitting in the White House going "See?!? I TOLD you those human-animal hybrids were going to cause trouble!"

Never lose sight of what's important

Some people get it. Some people don't.

“I would stand in the door and not let this (product) go out if we were going to take away that joy from people. I have been known to throw my own at somebody. Yes, they will still be able to do that. You can count on that.” --Stan Osman, vice president of marketing at the Kansas City, Missouri-based Interstate Bakeries, when asked if the new whole wheat Wonder Bread measures up to the original Wonder Bread in its ability to be wadded up and thrown across the cafeteria at your best friend's head

This guy? He gets it.

Wookies don't live on Endor.

So I'm at the bank this evening, getting some cash from the ATM because... well, because I needed it. Cash is good. The bank I use has one of those drive-up ATMs that are suddenly the norm (when did that happen, exactly?), so I pull my car in and roll down my window and do my thing. As as I'm sitting there stuffing my cash in my wallet and waiting for my receipt to print out, I happen to notice the braille dots. On the drive-up ATM.

Actually, that explains a lot about Tulsa drivers.

Now Reading: Stephen King's "Cell"

(certified spoiler-free post)

Let me begin by saying that I love the Dark Tower books. In fact, the series has been my lunch hour reading material at the bookstore for some weeks now, and I'm about 300 pages from finishing my second trip through the entire series from beginning to end (the first one was when book 7 originally came out). I'm happy with the way it all ended, sad about what happened to some people along the way, and ecstatic about the forthcoming Marvel comic books. Roland of Gilead's tale is one of my favorite fantasy masterpieces ever, right up there with the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings and Tad Williams' Otherland.

That being said, sometimes I miss the old Stephen King, back when he used to actually write horror (many people still think of him as a horror novelist, but he's been a lot more eclectic than that for quite a while now) and when every book didn't tie into the Dark Tower in one way or another. So I've really been looking forward to Cell, which amazon has been billing for months as "Stephen King's triumphant, blood-spattered return to the genre that made him famous." I finally started it this morning - and Stevie, it's good to have ya back. He dives into his take on the zombie story with unrestrained glee, tossing aside his usual elaborate characterizations (although they're still there in part, you just pick them up on the fly instead of spending the first quarter of the book immersing yourself in them) for an in-your-face attack on the senses that starts not five pages in. I'm currently about a third of the way through it, and while it's no masterpiece of the horror genre, neither is every movie "Citizen Kane" - nor would you want them to be. Sometimes it's more fun to sit down with a big box of popcorn and watch "Armageddon." Or "Night of the Living Dead." ^_^

Home before dark!

It's been a while since I could say that. Of course, the fact that I've been working later than usual this week and thus left early today (and will again tomorrow) helps, but still. Getting home when there's still a sun up in the sky just makes the day seem a whole lot longer.

Speaking of natural phenomena, it was officially 70 degrees here in Tulsa this afternoon. Seventy degrees! On Groundhog Day! And of course, Punxsutawney Phil...


(isn't he just precious?)
...saw his shadow, so I still have six more weeks of this winter crap to put up with before spring finally gets here. I just don't know how I'm going to come to terms with that. (Global warming? No such thing. :op)

Lastly, I'd like to share a little tale that perfectly illustrates just what things are usually like when you work for my boss. He recently bought another warehouse - it actually used to be some sort of manufacturing plant or somesuch, but it's big and empty and we have a lot of stuff, so it's a warehouse now. The building's been sitting empty for a long time, and the previous tenants took pretty much everything out of it that they could when they left, so it's pretty dirty and needs all sorts of work - plumbing, electrical, new fences, possibly a resurfacing of the parking lot, etc, etc. And of course, he's diving into that without any sort of coherent plan whatsoever, it's just "get it all done as soon as possible" in his mind, so there have been multiple crews working in and around the place for the last couple of weeks (not to mention us, bringing loads of stuff from storage so he doesn't have to pay another month's rent on the storage unit we have). The crews that are there currently? A set of guys working on rewiring the place where necessary and another set of guys working on cleaning the entire place up with a power sprayer. Let me run that by you again - there are two crews out there at the moment. One of them is working with high-voltage electricity, and the other one is spraying water all over everywhere.

You gotta love it.

Oh, by the way...

...I did a little playing with my profile. 50 bonus cool points to anyone who actually gets the new quote.

Smoke 'em if you can afford 'em

With the way that taxes are spiralling out of control (and if anyone thinks that's going to change anytime soon, they're not thinking at all), it's now officially cheaper to smoke pot than it is to smoke cigarettes. This tells me two things - well, actually, it reinforces my belief in two things:

1. It's time for me to drop the ol' lung rocket habit once and for all. No big deal that it's nasty and it's unhealthy and it makes your teeth yellow and your mouth funky and your lungs fall out, but now it's cutting into my double cheeseburger budget. No, no, and no. I gots to have my beefy goodness.
2. The "War On Drugs?" It's over. We lost. (Well, not we, because I never enlisted to begin with.) Hey government! Quit the posturing and run up the white flag and just regulate the stuff already, so I can switch from Marlboro Lights to Marlboro Greens. It'll make dumping the cigs so much easier! C'mon, feds, do it for my health!