"Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. ... I felt
very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"On the surface, it sounds irresponsible, but to flourish in a rapidly changing world, you actually need to make more mistakes. Fail quickly. Fail often. If you do something and it
doesn't work, just recover in a hurry and try something else. ... Help develop a culture that is willing to fail its way to the future."
-- Price Pritchett, Culture Shift
"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
prepare
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
It is that time of year again, Numb Trolleybusers.
It's almost June... and that means 30 Days of Blog.
If you're reading, I'm tagging you. The rules are pretty simple: write at least once blog entry every day during the month of June. That's it. The idea is to get back in the swing of blogging, to flex your mind-muscles, keep things sharp, and hopefully... build something of a readership in the process. It's like NaNoWriMo for blogs, as I always say.
I'll also be tagging via e-mail. That's probably how most of you got here to begin with.
The California Supreme Court slapped civil rights in the face today by upholding that wretched Proposition 8 debacle the closed-minded, xenophobic hate mongers in California voted in by a margin of 52 to 48.
To summarize the travesty that's happened there, let's look at two things.
First is the equal protection clause in California's own state constitution that everyone seems to have forgotten about:
Article I. Sec 7(a): A person may not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law or denied equal protection of the laws[.]
Next, let's look at the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and try that shit on for size:
Section I. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
According to this last bit of evidence, forty-five states are now in violation of the equal protection clause set forth by the U.S. Constitution, including California, which is also in violation of its own state constitution. Any amendment passed which so egregiously violates an existing portion of the current constitution is clearly unconstitutional and should be struck down by the appropriate court.
It's the weekend, and that means it's time for the wrap-up of Who's Hot & Who's Snot for the week ending May 24, 2009.
Who's Hot: My friends For: Making my birthday incredibly fun. Not only was I barraged with messages, e-mails, texts, Hallmark e-cards, Facebook wall posts, and two cakes, but the marketing reps at work called my desk in some kind of rapid-fire round robin, wishing (and sometimes singing) happy birthday. Best Birthday Call goes to Barbie, whose rendition sounded saucily similar to Marylin Monroe's "happy birthday" song. Yow-sah.
Who's Snot: Maple Woods Community College For: Setting my life back about four years. Those of you following the story know that Maple Woods Community College has been threatening to shut down its prestigious Sign Language Interpreting program for two months now, and this week, they confirmed it: indefinitely suspended. The decision, seemingly based on bogus placement numbers and wrongheaded thinking with regards to graduate skill level, sets my life back about four years but causes much bigger problems for several of my classmates: for logistical reasons, they don't have the option of switching to the only other school in the area that offers a similar program. They are anchored in place by family, kids, and other of life's valuables. For my part, I don't know if I'll be able to switch to Johnson County; I don't know how many more pre-reqs I'll need; I don't know if I can afford a tuition cost that's two and a half times greater. Maple Woods has rendered a decision based ostensibly on mysterious, inaccessible employment figures and fuzzy math, but probably much more related to their personal distaste for the program's director, who has been nothing but helpful, by the by. Big thanks to these ass clowns for ending our educational endeavors before they ever began.
Who's Hot: Green Day For: Refusing to censor for a buck. Finally, someone standing up for their rights: Green Day has refused to censor its album so Wal-Mart will sell it. It drives me absolutely insane that the goody-goodies over in Sam's neck of the woods refuse to sell albums with a "parental advisory" sticker. I don't know about anyone else, but I will not pay full price for anything but the full product. If they want to cut content, they need to cut prices as well, and make it stiff: I'd suggest a $1 cut for each act of censorship. Wal-Mart has the right to refuse to sell anything they like, and artists have the right to tell them to slurp shit and die. Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day said, "We just said no. We've never done it before. You feel like you're in 1953 or something." Well said.
Who's Snot: Jessica Biel For: Not counting her blessings. This one was an instant Snot nominee: Jessica Biel is bellyaching about being hot. In her interview with this month's Allure magazine, she has the nerve to say that her modern-day good looks have cost her. But I take all challenges seriously, so let me fix this one right up: Jessica Biel's range of acting motion begins and ends with "7th Heaven." Nothing she's done since then has been worth a damn. Her extraordinary good looks are the only reason she's a recognized actress at all. Meanwhile, attractive people everywhere routinely get better service, more extras/amenities, and more positive attention overall than those of us... less fortunate, let's say. Biel complains, "If you don't like the audition, then don't hire me. But if you don't even want to see me -- that hurts." Story. of. my. life.
Ever since classes ended, I have fallen into (the beginnings of) the maddening habit of napping shortly after I get home from work, almost as though going to class kept my engine running, but getting home that "early," as it feels now, short-circuits my energy cell and I start to run down around 7:30. Tonight I slept for nearly three hours, so I may have to break out my old friend Mr. Ny-Quil to get to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight. That's going to end, though; I've fallen into this trap before, and it's no good at all.
I grabbed myself a couple of last-minute song downloads for Day 1 of Birthday Week last night, and tonight I broke completely down and got myself a magnificent hot fudge sundae. I still have a $15 Borders gift card that I got for Administrative Asst's Day, or whatever the hell that's called now, so maybe one day this week I'll drop by the Borders and pick up Dooce's book, which I still don't have, for some damn reason, but that would be a perfect addition to Birthday Week.
And... I have already begun writing on this week's Hot & Snot entry. Oh, the gems with which Hollywood provides us...
Today was Day 1 of Birthday Week, and traditionally, on each night of Birthday Week, I go and get myself something that is itty bitty but also delicious and/or fun, that I would not get on a normal night. It can be anything from a banana split to an electronic goody. It amounts to my own personal Hannukah, except that the only candles I light are in the bathroom, and I can still eat anything made out of a pig.
Tonight I got hung up on phone calls, e-mails, and Garmin research, and I have not yet retrieved my Day 1 treat. I will think of something good and let you know, maybe I can find a good song download on Amazon that I don't have yet. Maybe I can find a hot fudge sundae from someplace that's still open past 11 p.m. Maybe that hawt girl from my Intro class will let me have sex with her!
I'd really like one of these, but I think my chances of having sex are quite a bit better, to tell you the truth. That shit's almost $400. I know girls who would sleep with me for half that.
Two weeks from now, I will be hangin' with my wee nephew, my sisses, some cousins, and enjoyin' a week off work. Can't say I'm dreadin' the thought of that. More to come as Birthday Week continues, let's get through that and then we'll talk about TX, right? :)
It's (finally) the weekend, and it's time for our weekly rundown of Who's Hot and Who's Snot in the always-maddening world of our beloved media.
Who's Hot: "The Donald" For: Moving on. And yes, I'm just as surprised as you. I usually find him as personally repugnant as anyone, but this week, I don't know if I can say he surprised me, but he definitely came through -- by not disbarring, or whatever, Miss California Carrie Prejean over the gay marriage question and the nudie pics taken years ago. Say what you like about her politics -- believe me, I have -- but these contests have rules, and if she didn't break any, she shouldn't get the boot. Her hare-brained statements about so-called "traditional" marriage are Constitutionally-protected, and while no one's really convinced about the "windy day" on which the photos were taken (that's right up there with Sen. Larry Craig's "wide stance"), this isn't 1955 anymore. If the pageant reviewed her nekkid photos and her associations with that "marriage" organization and found all this contractually acceptable, then that's good enough for us. Way to move on, for cryin' out loud. Having said that...
Who's Snot: Miss California, Carrie Prejean For: Setting a horrible example. Unfortunately, there are still young girls out there who look up to these Miss Contestants, and just our luck, here's another public figure seeding kids' minds with bigotry and exclusionary rhetoric aimed at withholding the civil rights of select Americans. Isn't that just what we need -- more division in a society where some people are already more equal than others? The high-profile promotion of such prejudicial viewpoints can only serve to further poison the minds of a generation already intellectually asphyxiating on World of Warcraft and American Idol. No, I don't think she should have lost her crown over it -- it was simply a straight answer to a gay question, and a position to which she's entitled, no matter how ethically bankrupt. That doesn't mean I wasn't hoping, somewhere in the back of my mind, that she'd get a pink slip anyway, and I don't mean the kind she'd model for pageantry.
Who's Hot: Those tools at AT&T, San Jose For: Cleaning out the fridge. Everyone who heard this story this week nodded in amused recognition of the fact that this could happen where we work: a woman at the AT&T building in San Jose, California went to clean out an office fridge, and the fumes that resulted sent seven people to the hospital, evacuated the building, and summoned a hazmat team. Try to imagine the echoes of laughter coming from City Hall about this debacle. I don't mean to discount the taxpayer dollars wasted on such an incident, I'm just glad someone cleaned out the fridge. Maybe if someone at my office tried this, we'd all get the afternoon off too.
Who's Snot: Jon and Kate Gosselin For: Who gives a shit?! Is anybody really clear to begin with about who allegedly cheated on whom? Originally, I'd heard it was him, but as I hopped on Google to spell-check the couple's last name, I saw accusations of her cheating. Is this really what we're paying attention to these days? Don't we have two wars to fight and a California beauty queen to scrutinize?
Samantha is a Garmin nuvi 260W GPS navigator to which I am completely addicted at this point. I've had her less than two weeks and it's already been an adventure. Read on, por favor.
For starters, she came with a car adapter included (as well as a mount for your dash). Of more importance, however, is what she did not come with: a wall charger, a USB cable, a carrying case. Of course, they'll be happy to sell you all these things on the Garmin web site. If you register your device online beforehand, though, you'll receive a 10% discount on related merchandise.
What do you need in order to register your device? A USB cable. Which isn't included. They'll be happy to sell you one, though. And if you register online beforehand... you see where I'm going with this.
I found a universal bundle at Wal-Mart for $15 that included a wall charger, all manner of Garmin, Magellan, and TomTom connectors, and a standard USB cable. So much for the Garmin site. Finding a carrying case was another matter entirely.
Currently, I'm on my third one, and it looks to be the last. This was a much bigger ordeal than I expected. I realized a bit late that I was looking for exactly three things in a carrying case: a clear window for protected viewing, a belt loop for hands-free carrying, and a slot in which to put the stylus. The first case I got at Wal-Mart was junk, it went back immediately. The second one was a bit better but had no belt clip or clear window. Yesterday, I hit the jackpot at Office Depot, of all places, whilst looking for spare styli. They didn't have those, but they did have a great case that had all the specs I wanted. All I need now is one of those weighted dash mounts, and I'm all set. I may not get that before the trip, though.
Oh yeah, we're going to Texas in a couple of weeks. My cousin Tyler is graduating high school, and we're also going down farther south to see my nephew. So it'll be nice to have a GPS nav in the car.
So back to Samantha. She sports a 4.3" screen, spoken street-to-street navigating instructions (the American English voice is named "Samantha" -- "Serena," the British girl, pronounces things funky, and "Karen," the Australian girl, sounds too digitized for my taste), and allegedly, somewhere in the vicinity of six million points of interest, including restaurants, gas stations, entertainment venues, amusement parks, etc. What surprised me, though, is what she apparently doesn't know... the Quik Trip across the street from my apartment isn't listed, for instance. The McDonald's next to Wal-Mart at Blue Ridge isn't either. Do I need help finding these things? Of course not. But if they're not stored in Samantha's brain, what else is missing? They aren't exactly new locations.
Fortunately, you can add locations to your 'Favorites' menu on the fly, and it stores them according to -- are you ready? -- longitudinal coordinates. That just kills me. :) You can hit "Where am I?", and it will give you the coordinates that correspond to your exact location on the planet at the moment. Handy if, for instance, you're separated from your group at a festival and need to meet up. Provided they have a GPS as well, they can read you their coordinates over the phone, you can enter them into your unit as a destination, hit GO, and it'll take you right to them.
Don't even get me started on geocaching. That's a whole other entry. I went this past weekend, and let me tell you, that was a trip.
Samantha sounds a bit curt sometimes, but she is the best $140 I never spent (she was an early birthday prez from the folks, and we got her for a steal to boot). I have such a piss poor sense of direction, she's going to be of immense help.
Anyone else have GPS? Any fun, interesting, or horrific stories to share? We don't have any other geocachers in the audience, do we?
My Introduction to Interpreting class ended last night with a final exam that was both easier and more difficult than I expected. For one thing, we had been previously quizzed on almost nothing that appeared on the final; that caught me off guard, since our instructor always kept our quizzes on the basis that she may reuse and/or recraft any questions she saw fit for a future exam. So imagine my surprise when I sat down and didn't recognize any of the questions. Sure, I basically knew what I was doing, but it still felt like a cheap shot, almost as though she was trying to take us all down a notch or something. Some of us were in the upper 90s (or higher) going into the exam.
An even bigger surprise came this morning when I logged into Facebook and saw a classmate's announcement that final grades had been posted. We're talking twelve hours later here, and overnight hours to boot. Sure enough, I logged into Blackboard, and the results were right there.
My score on the final exam was 97%, 59/61 to be exact. What's fucked up is that it actually hurt my grade. Yeah. My grade going into the final was so high, 98.15%, that the 97% I scored on the test actually brought me down slightly.
Now that's a good problem to have.
Given the way exams are weighted in this class, it brought my final grade down 1.12% for a grand total of 97.03%, another straight A, and the 4.0 at Maple Woods lives on for another semester.
Still no word on whether they're keeping the program. At this point, we've done about all we can. There may be another round of letters, if we so decide, but that would be about it. I'll keep you posted... so to speak. :)
"You're telling me. Last night I dreamed that Xander.......... uhhhm, it wasn't Xander, in fact, it wasn't even me. It was a friend's dream, and she doesn't remember it."
Once upon a time, my dreams got so screwy (not to mention numerous) that I started a dream blog just to chronicle the madness. I don't still have the blog, but I do still have the deranged dreams sometimes, and the recurring motifs therein have got to tell a story. I just can't keep dreaming about the same shit all the time and believe it's meaningless.
I used to have pretty frequent school-related dreams; usually, it would involve going back to class after many consecutive absences, only to endure the stares, the awkwardness, and the outright panic that came along with having a semester's worth of catching up to do in a weeks' time.
I stopped having those dreams a few years ago. A while later, they were replaced with dreams that involved being caught in some kind of armed conflict or life-threatening situation in which I carry firearms -- sometimes large, powerful, automatic weapons -- that will not fire when I need them to. Other times, the gun will fire, and I can see the bullets hitting the target, but it has no effect; the enemy keeps coming regardless.
And sometimes... occasionally... there are zombies. What the hell is going on in my head sometimes?
Last night was a textbook example.
My brother, my mom, and I were holed up in our house, my childhood home where I grew up. I don't know where my dad was. But there was a zombie outbreak of some kind, and my brother and I carried guns that were minimal but probably sufficient for the situation. Now, the whole idea is to keep the house fortified and zombie-free; in all the movies I've seen, that's the best way to survive, keep them from getting in in the first place. Well, these guys got in pretty early. My mom started to cry, knowing it meant we would probably lose the house one way or another, and she tearfully asked if there was anything we wanted from our rooms before we left. But we didn't have time; decayed corpses filed into the living room sporadically, and for some reason, the shotgun I had wouldn't fire if I pulled the trigger with my left hand. It almost felt like there was tape holding it back if I did it that way. If I pulled the trigger with my right hand, the gun fired, but didn't appear to do any damage. Bashing them with the butt end of the gun was the only way to keep them back. Some of the zombies were even elementary-age kids, and shots to the face only seemed to placate them temporarily, which I thought was odd.
So, dream enthusiasts: analyze away. I have my theories... what are some of yours? Recurring for a reason, or just gibberish that reflects my love of horror movies?
We're giving a fresh start to the blog, Numb Trolleybusers, and I'm considering even going public with it, a la Facebook public. We'll see how far that idea gets, but as I was reading through my old Livejournal tonight, I realized how entertaining many of those old entries were. As depressed as I was during (part of) that time, I wrote some damned funny, zinger-filled posts, and I'm hoping to get that going again. Likewise, we'll see how far that idea gets.
It's past two in the morning and I can't believe I'm still up. I don't know why, though, I do it all the time.
I seem to have hurt some muscle on the left side of my abdomen, probably while masturbating.
So the Crash of 2008, in which my 80 gig external hard drive shit the bed and hasn't been heard from since, may not be undone in 2009 after all. Gary, my IT guy, has some kind of USB dock you can plug your drive into directly, and it's supposed to siphon the information right off it like any other USB device. Well, no dice. The device manager sees a "USB device" but can't access it; My Computer doesn't see a drive at all. And when we plug the thing in, we don't even hear it spin. It's been months since the Crash, and I'm still looking for ways to recover the 40+ gigs that were on there. None of it is life-ending shit, but it was on there for a reason. No, the goat porn is safe, please don't email me with that question.
There is more to come... much more. There is a lot of shit going on these days. Call me Mr. McShitGoingOn, for that matter. I am flat out of time at the moment, but all will be posted. Oh yes. Fear the future posts.
