damian

Ugh.

The bad part about being offline a lot is that I lost my tolerance for the ambient levels of stupid. The internet: building self-control since 1918.

The good part is that it means I've been doing things other than the internet. Details on that in the near future.

Gotta go fix the sink now. Stand back.

Dear LJ: WTF? How hard can it be to lock down these russian addbots? Give me some admin privileges and I could probably take care of a good chunk of them all by myself. Why? Because they keep adding me. I wouldn't even have to go looking for them.

More interesting updates later, maybe.

(Seriousy, LJ. What the hell's going on?)

Random notes:

--Got my shiny new phone. It's one of them there touchy-screeny ones, which is great, but I keep thinking I'm going to accidentally turn it off when I hold it against my head to talk. I mean, obviously there's a subfunction that prevents that, but I keep compulsively taking it away from my ear to check. So if we're talking on the phone and there's a weird pause on my end of the conversation every now and then, that's probably why.

Also, my fingers seem to be too big for the qwerty keyboard, so if you get a text from me that says something like "Het whar's gooing oin?>", don't feel too bad about having a "WTF?" reaction. Trust me, I haven't suddenly become retarded*, I'm just having a little trouble with this manual dexterity deal.

--I was taking my computer to work with me for a while, with the intention of getting homework done. Yeah, not so much. So now I'm leaving it home, and taking other things. The good part of this is that I can catch up on my reading. Last night was Bradbury's The October Country, if you're curious. The bad part is that if I get a song stuck in my head (y'know, like happens to me about five times a day), I don't have any way to drive it out. I just spent the last six hours with Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me) running over and over in my head. This was a Bad Thing.

--I installed a ceiling fan in an 16' ceiling, the day before yesterday. (That's a +5 bonus on the Man Points scale - Ed.) Well, mostly installed; the light doesn't work yet. (-1. -Ed.) Other than that, it's totally installed. I've got two more to do in the next couple of days. I mention this in case anyone wants to start a betting pool or a raffle or something based on my chances of dying horribly, and whether it'll be by electrocution**, or decapitation, or falling off the ladder, or some creative combination of any or all of these. If I survive, (+1 each -Ed.) I get a percentage of the proceeds.



*At least, not any more than usual.

**This is a funny joke now. It wasn't funny when, at one point, I realized I was standing twenlve feet abover the floor on a metal ladder, holding a metal rod and metal tools, fiddling with the cover of the electrical box housing, and suddenly couldn't recall whether I'd flipped all the breakers or not. (Turns out I had. Score one for self-preservation.)

WHEREAS there are good days, and bad days; and

WHEREAS yesterday was one of the bad days, to the extent that the phrase "Yesterday can die in heavy traffic" would not be entirely inappropriate; and

WHEREAS today is a brand new day (sun shining, birds singing, donuts baking, etc);

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Damian, proclaim that today, 04/21/09, is going to be significantly better, or I'll know the frickin' reason why not.

So I get songs stuck in my head. A lot of us do, happens all the time. It's a little maddening, but in a funny way. But I bet that I'm the first person to manage to do it with the song "Feelings" as sung by Beaker on The Muppet Show.

Seriously, it's the whole song. I just caught myself singing "MEEE-meeee....mee mee MEE mee MEEE meeeeeee...." under my breath.

There's something wrong with my brain.


Edited to delete an additional section bitching about my job and drunk people. Not because I don't bitch about that kind of thing, but because this episode was coming out whiny and unfunny. See? I just saved you like two paragraphs.

Oh, brilliant.

Remember my last post, where I said I'd ordered a new phone? Part of the deal was that I agreed to a contract extension with AT&T, and since they've more or less done pretty well by me*, I didn't have a problem with that. Signed the online thingy, set up the service plan, picked the phone, and off we go. ETA was about a day to process the order, two more days for shipping. So far, so good.

Just now, I notice my current phone's not getting a signal. I've got bars, but no connection to the network. And Suze's texts didn't get through to me last night at all, or they've been delayed for the past twenty hours. My razor-keen powers of observation spring into action, and:

Conclusion: They switched over my account to the new phone. The one FedEx still has. Basically, if you've tried to call or text me in the past day or so, all your messages are in a box. Like a literal cardboard box, probably in a plane somewhere over Texas by now. (If you heard a loud sucking sound instead of a voicemail greeting, that would probably be why.**)

This will be funnier when I have my phone.



*For a cellphone company, this translates as "They haven't gone out of their way to be complete bastards and I haven't had any daydreams about mauling any of their customer service people. Yet."

**Sorry. Obligatory Texas joke. I don't know why I'm apologizing, though; it's not like anyone in Texas has the internet or electricity or, y'know, literacy.***

***Sorry. No, really, I'll stop. *cough* Lemme go check the FL to see who I owe candy to.****

****See? SEE? Ended the sentence with a frickin' preposition. I'm gonna go do some punishment situps or something. Dangit.

If you're bored (and honestly, if you've got nothing better to do than read my LJ, that should be an easy question to answer), you should find some way to watch Botched. Don't read any previews or the IMDB for it. Just find it and watch it. Netflix has it in the "Watch Instantly" section, and failing that you can download it in chunks from rapidshare, here. It's much fun.

Actually got some stuff done today for a change. Ordered a new phone (a samsung eternity) online (corporate perks = basically a free phone), got the largest part of installing Suze's sink taken care of (cutting a hole in an old two-inch-thick wooden table so the basin will fit properly. I hate jigsaws with a burning passion, by the way; finally wound up doing most of the cuts with a circular saw. I suspect I'm lucky to still have all my fingers). Oh, and Mike and Suze's house now officially has a flag. Tomorrow I attach all the connectors and drainage, and hopefully I'll manage not to flood their kitchen.

Thinking about making some older entries public. Y'know, expand my fan base, make myself look cooler to employers googling my email address (Hello! Hire me!), that kinda thing.

Movement update: Put in my notice at work last monday. Told them I'd stay up to a month if they needed me to help train a new night auditor (since they just fired the last one, who actually knew what she was doing better than I did). Now I'm looking at the really cheap airfares and trying to calculate when to buy my ticket. There's a weird timing situation, too, in that Wyndham is apparently opening a new location in San Francisco, and they need a night auditor. So do I go for that, or do I try for a day job? Argh. I'll probably go for it, just to have a job waiting for me when I get there.

This update has been brought to you by The Period In Which I Wait For The Caffeine To Kick In, and the letter Z.

Time to decriminalize marijuana.

I don't usually do political topics in here, except for rants, because A) it's a locked journal, and I'm not especially impressed with people who only have discussions with people that agree with them (i.e. friendslists), and B) posting controversial topics in an unlocked post runs the risks of inviting trolls and internet-roaming trouble. But today's a day for exceptions, I think.

That said, here's an unlocked, controversial post. Anonymous comments are enabled, but I'm logging IPs, for all the good that does. If anyone reading this has any input, fire away.


-People are going to do things that are bad for them. Cigarettes, alcohol, pot, twinkies, cocaine, mcdonald's, watching FOX, reading anne rice, ending sentences with prepositions, visiting New Jersey, whatever. You can't stop them. Trying to stop them, once they want to do it, really only makes them want to do it more. In the short term, you have to just stand back and hope they have enough common sense to keep from injuring themselves too badly, and step in to make sure they don't hurt anyone else while they're at it. And once you take that course of action, there's really no reason not to make some money off of it.* (In the long term, you should take that money and funnel it all into an effective system of education, so eventually people stop wanting to do any of that. But that's another post.)

-I'm seeing marijuana as roughly parallel to alcohol. In and of itself, it's not really that dangerous. Actually it's less dangerous than alcohol, though in the long term it's probably more debilitating.

-The "gateway drug" argument is kinda weak, and actually loses argumentative impact if legalization happens, I think.

-The amount of money that's moving around based on the supply and sale of marijuana is going directly to various levels of the criminal economy. Making it legal not only brings that money into legitimate state and federal funds, it deprives criminal enterprises of their primary source of income. This could potentially be a huge factor in keeping mexico from devolving (even further) into civil war, especially since we don't seem to be interested in, y'know, stopping drug smuggling from mexico. Not to mention that it would alleviate the gang situation in a lot of american cities.



*All of things cost you in one way or another, except the preposition thing. But I'm working on that one.

Dear manager-type person: I appreciate you trying to take the time to teach me a more complex understanding of my job, but you can't reasonably expect me to pay attention to the nuances of accounting and recordkeeping when Zulu is going by right outside your second-floor window. I mean, it's literally in my line of sight, behind the computer monitor. How are you not noticing it? So, all that stuff you just explained? Yeah, it's disappeared completely. Thanks anyway, though.

In other news:

The good: My hearing cleared up. So sometimes you can ignore a problem and it'll go away. Take that, proper parenting!

The bad: I'm learning more about Suzanne's neighbors every day. Today, for instance, I'm learning that they own a set of rilly big speakers. Oh, and they're big fans of mardi gras music. I would complain about my hearing coming back now, but really it's irrelevant, because even if I couldn't hear, I can feel the music through the floorboards of the house. "Big deal," you say, "I can feel drumbeat vibrations from music all the time." Yeah, me too. The problem is that I'm also feeling the trumpets, electric guitar solos, and what I swear must have been a kazoo solo. Everyone take a moment, think about what that sounds like, and now imagine feeling it. Through your feet.

So I have to sleep soon, because I work again tonight. And I can sleep through this. I just worry about the weird-shite dreams I'm going to have.

Anyway, happy mardi gras. :)

The list of reasons that I don't want to go to work tonight is epic. And I mean that almost literally; I'm tempted to put it into verse form and recite it at people in coffeehouses. I'd need a beret, but it'd be worth it to share my pain.

Short, incomplete list*:
---Temporarily, I can't hear, to the point where I'm about 70% deaf. Hearing is one of those useful skills when you're doing a job that involves talking to people and answering phones. Somehow I got water in both of my ears when I was bathing friday night, and it hasn't fixed itself. Yes, both of them. Because apparently the gods have decreed that if I can't be competent, I'll at least be thorough. Before you comment, I've tried pretty much everything remedy I can find, and it's entirely possible that I managed to make things worse. (I'll spare you the grosser details, but I will say that I seem to be missing a screwdriver now. I don't remember getting that desperate, but there we are. So I'm worried about that on top of everything else.) I'm going to see an ear/nose/throat person tomorrow.

Happily, if there's ever a good time to have significant hearing loss, it's mardi gras.


---The mardi gras mantra at work was "everyone works." The idea was that nobody would get overwhelmed if we had at least two people on for every shift. Especially the busy days, like friday and saturday. This way, nobody stresses, nothing goes horribly wrong, nobody gets choked with beads... Yeah. I like this plan, since I'm relatively new at my job and not 100% sure of what I'm doing.

So, guess who spent all of saturday night and half of friday night working the front desk, all alone?

Yeah. I'm pretty pissed at someone, but I'm not sure if I need to be pissed at my managers or co-workers, or who. Someone needs to die, though.


---It's cold. Last night it was cold and rainy. I ride a bike to work. I don't even want to get out of bed right now. I'd like to be going to corrosion's thing tonight. Heck, I'd like to strap on about three sleeping bags and hibernate until March.

Anyhoo, I'm off.



*A short list is a compromise between "no list," in which case I wouldn't be whining about any of this in the first place, and "exhaustive list," in which case I'd feel a lot better and would vent all the bitching that I'm otherwise going to be using at work tonight.

Wow. Yesterday really sucked. Today isn't working out much better. Tomorrow's not looking good either.

Therefore, in the spirit of desperate and massive overcompensation, I'm listening to Debbie Gibson right now, and watching Cyndi Lauper* videos. (Goonies, if you were wondering**. It's still awesome. Shuddup.)

It's sort of working, if you accept that "surreal" lies somewhere between "good mood" and "bad mood." The danger is that I'll just stuck in a "surreal" rut and start replaying Dr Horrible and googling weird bits from lazy town. (Links provided in case you'd never seen these things, and because I don't want to be the only one with that frickin' song stuck in my head. By the way, all that stuff the blue guy is doing? I can totally do that.)

Oh, look, I get to go to work again. Where's my beige?



*Cyndi Lauper kicked Madonna's ass all over the 80s, by the way. Just sayin'.

*If we could've kept this level of strangeness going, we never would have lost the World Weird title to the japanese.

Notes from the land of Sleepdep Damian (soon to appear in stores as an action figure!).

---I've decided that I need to institute some sort of buddy system for when I want to go into a bookstore. Y'know, like in grade school. "Everyone got their buddy? Okay, don't lose them!" I need someone to go with me to keep me from wanting to buy so many books that the clerk needs to rummage around for a cardboard box for me to carry them home in.

Actually, what would be better is if I could get someone to stand outside with a timer and a rope, with the other end tied around my ankle. Timer goes off, and they pull on the rope, hopefully dragging me out before it's too late. (And then, knowing many of my friends, we'd switch places, and I'd take a turn holding the timer and the rope.)


---A number of my friends are apparently doing modeling photoshoots, or just posting really good photos, or just generally being shamelessly attractive. This is pretty cool on most levels, and I'm happy they're out there having fun, but I'm starting to feel weirdly left out. There's no reason for me to feel left out; it's not like I've ever been model material, nor have I ever much wanted to be.

Which is a good thing, because to be honest, the only way anyone could take a hot picture of me is if I set myself on fire first. You know how some people start to look better the farther away you get? Well, the best photos of me are indexed under aerial photography.* I try to stay out of photographs, not because I'm camera-shy, but because I feel bad about putting innocent photons through the trauma of documenting my image.

Okay, okay, I'll stop.

It's just that, in the last week or so online, it's been sorta like showing up to show-and-tell with some really interesting rocks and finding out everyone else brought iphones and green-laser pens. Sure, fossils are cool when you pay attention, but nobody's going to care about mineral deposits if they're all busy trying to blind the pilots of low-flying aircraft.

Okay, one more: The only blind dates that I can get anymore are with actual blind people, and even then it's not a sure thing.


---I've been toying with the idea of referring to my pregnant female friends as "spawnpoints." I realize this is probably one of those horrible jokes that seems like a good idea at the time, but it's still tempting, because A) most of them are at least acquainted with gamer culture, if not gamers themselves, and would hopefully appreciate the joke, and B) if they don't like the joke, I'm at least fairly sure I can outrun a pregnant person.**


---My neighbors have been doing this, only with their dog. (Dear god that sounds wrong until you click the link. Anyhoo...) This wouldn't be so bad, but they don't do it conversationally. They really launch into it, suddenly and without warning, and the effect is close to what you'd expect to hear at the National Soo-EEEE Pig-Calling Championships. (Come to think of it, I've never actually seen a dog. They could very well have a pet pig over there.) Whatever it is, the poor thing must be neurotic by now.

The best part is that they usually do it as they're coming out of their back door into their yard. This door is about five feet from the bathroom window of our house. So, here's me*** in a nice relaxing bubble bath, blissing out, perfectly content to stay in the water until the prune factor is around a nine, and then...

"WHO'S A GOOD PUPPY!?!???! ARE YOU A GOOD PUPPY??!?!!! YOOOOOOOUUUUUUU ARE A GOOOOOOOD PUUUUPPPEEEEEE!!!!!!!" in a high shrieking falsetto that would make any nearby asylum-keepers doublecheck the bolts on the doors and the stitching on the straitjackets. It was like the Voice of God, if God had a serious meth-and-helium habit. The first time it happened, I think I managed to get about three inches away from any solid surface, straight up into the air (bringing the water with me, of course). The bliss? Very much gone. Along with a decent amount of bathwater. I think it was actually worse for me, in the tub, because sound conducts water better than air. So I got to hear it with my whole body.


Anyway, that's the latest news. Now I think I need to sleep. Yay sleep!



*That's only until I find a way to schedule some time with Hubble's camera setup, though.

**Pre-emptive reminder: Ranged weapons are a no-no while you're pregnant, too. You know who you are.

***Or most of me, anyway. If you're 6'2", you don't easily fit into bathtubs, at least not all at once.

It's getting hard to complain about this job. I mean, I know I owe it to my readers to come up with stories about how beleaguered I am at my various workplaces, but really, this one's spoiling me a little.

Me: "Hm. My phone makes me sound like I'm underwater. I should get a new one."
Job: "Hey, look at these massive discounts you get as the employee of a national hotel chain!"

Me: "My friend wants to visit and I don't want to make them sleep on the couch. Panic!"
Job: "Hey, you know that when the hotel isn't full, you can have friends stay in the empty rooms for (insert ridiculously low amount) per week, right?"

Me: "Argh, HUNGER! Damian use phone, order food. FOOD!"
Food place who has arrangement with Job: "Oh, you're working the front desk? Here's a discount on your order! And a hug!*"

So, sure, I have to wear beige. I can handle beige. And sure, I have to wear beads. I can take anti-allergy pills for that. And I occasionally have to deal with drunken tourists. At least here, I can call security if I have to.**

I'll be back to complaining about the weird parts of my job soon enough, I think, just 'cause it's funny***, but right now I have to pay for my discounted food and shop for a new phone.


*Okay, they didn't really offer me a hug. Which is good, 'cause the delivery guy? Ew. No, no hugging.

**Not that I'm exactly filled with confidence by some of the guys who work security (you'd think there'd be an age cap), but at least they'll handle the paperwork and make sure everything's caught on tape for the coroner.

***My full work uniform, with jacket and tie, makes me look like an escaped felon trying to hide out in a church congregation. This is mildly awesome.

Happy Darwin's birthday!

Can I just take a second to say how awesome it is that ultraluxe's birthday is today, too?

In memory of Darwin, I think everyone should take a few minutes today to pick up a weapon, go out, and kill something that hasn't sufficiently evolved.* Now, remember, make sure it's unevolved, and not just camouflaged or lying in wait or something. But at the same time, don't let sympathy slow you down. You're doing it for the planet!**



*Except me. Don't even think about it. I may not be evolved, but I've lived in New Orleans for ten years, on and off. If the water, roaches, traffic, natives, and food haven't killed me yet, you and your spiked baseball bat have no chance.

**As an additional litmus test, I'd say that any species that hasn't already evolved an escape mechanism for humans randomly trying to kill it, isn't going to.

There are no words in the english language to describe how bored I am right now. To accurately convey the depth and breadth of my boredom, I'd have to resort to some of the more extreme forms of communication, like charades, or pig latin. Possibly something involving mathematical notation. I might have to go into the "dead languages" file to find some ancient culture* that had thirty-seven words for "boredom," full of nuance and expression, the same way eskimos have dozens of words for snow.


No, really. I knew a night shift job would be boring, but tonight there's some sort of weird high-pressure boredom front moving through, the kind of thing that, if it were real weather, would be having news reporters making half-serious references to canned food and the Donner party. If boredom were gravity, I'd be a little pinkish puddle of flattened goo overflowing my boots. If boredom were fashion, I'd be dressed in several incredibly similar shades of beige. (Actually, now that I think of it, my work uniform is pretty close to that. Great. Just great.)

And while I'm not quite bored enough yet to cannibalize my co-workers, I can see the clouds of tedium building (somewhat lethargically, I'll admit) on the horizon.

I'd keep you updated, but I don't know if I'll make it back to the computer again tonight.



*This language would be a dead language because any culture that was bored enough to need that many terms for it would undoubtedly have expired from sheer apathy,** and the language would come down to us via their neighbors, because nobody in this culture would've have bothered to write anything down in the first place. The most sacred terms would have been closely (though listlessly) guarded secrets, shared only with those elites who had managed to reduce themselves to near-catatonic levels of ennui. And it's a pity that they died out, because they would have been the only humans to have developed telepathy, to save them the effort of actually talking.

**Unless you believe the hotly debated theory*** that they were a nomadic people, who eventually died because they couldn't motivate themselves to climb up any of the hills, and so they all wound up drowning in lakes, oceans and rivers, and managed somehow, even in death, to avoid the extra effort one needs to become part of the fossil record. The argument against that is that anyone this lazy would undoubtedly have learned how to float instead of swim.

***It's not really that hotly debated, actually; the subject matter tends to be somewhat infectuous after a while.

Fun Fact From Work: At the front desk of the hotel, we've got a computer system for checking people in and keeping track of bills and whatnot. As a safety / security feature, it locks the computer if you're inactive for more than ten minutes, and displays a note saying that you have to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to get to the unlocking login screen.

The fun part? If you just hit a key when that note is up, it assumes you screwed up the CTRL-ALT-DEL somehow, and displays instructions on how, precisely, to do it. With a helpful diagram on exactly where those keys are. It's got arrows and color coding and everything.

Which tells me that at, at one time, they had enough employees who couldn't struggle through this technological challenge without help. So whoever made the original program, someone with a solid technical background, the kind of person who doesn't find it unusual to dream in BASIC every once in a while, who always gets ( jokes like this ), had to sit down make a graphic describing this, and edit it all into the software.

I can completely imagine the expression on their face while they were doing it.

That was fun. The first (scouting) trip to the factory thingy (I'm starting to think it was a power plant? Must do research) went well. Just kinda wandered over there after I got off work, which meant that yours truly was scrambling around an old, dripping, rusty, abandoned factory-type building in tuxedo pants. Because I forgot to bring my jeans to work. So I lose points for organizational skills, but I get bonus style points to balance things out.

Photos here.

Speaking of trespassers, it looked like the place had seen a lot of traffic recently. Plenty of tags, some nice graffiti (see photos), and a couple of those flower-on-architecture-blueprint-paper things I'd seen around. (I really like those, by the way.) I kept expecting to run into homeless or squatters, but most of the place isn't really habitable; very cold and leaky. Didn't go everywhere, though. Not yet.

No security whatsoever; they took away the trailer that was presumably housing the guard(s), about a week ago, and left the gate standing open. Basically an invitation to anyone who wanted to go in, so either the ownership is in some kind of transition, or... well, I don't know. That's the only explanation I can think of; whoever owns the place is just a huge target for a lawsuit right now.

I'm planning on going back next weekend, because the whole "no security" thing probably won't last long. Plus I haven't gotten to the roof or the smokestacks yet. Muahaha...

( Snow pics. )

After my lightning-fast raid outdoors to get pictures, I heard a weird scraping sound coming from next door. Turns out that the neighbors own a snow shovel.

In louisiana. Bwa?

Either they've ventured incredibly deep into the whole "a boy scout is always prepared" philosophy, or there are alternative uses for snow shovels that I'm not aware of.

I can't say "It's snowing in New Orleans" without it coming out sounding like a bad spy passphrase, like "The dog barks at midnight" or "The oscelot hunts alone."

But it is. It's snowing here. Not like a technicality, where it's snow until it touches down and then it's gone. Actual snow. Stuff outside is turning white.

On the one hand, my life is so weird. On the other, seeing snow in new orleans is going to be one of the coolest memories of my entire time on the planet.

Pics later.

Amazing.

I didn't think there could be any new election drama. I underestimated the power of the american voter, though, didn't I?

"I don't care who you vote for, just vote." Makes sense to me. Who's got a problem with that statement?

Apparently a lot of people, from some of the things I'm seeing on the internet.*

It's a good sentiment. It allows for the possibility that the things that you believe might not be what the majority of the country believes. It allows for the possibility that you might actually be wrong about Issue X. It allows for the existence of people who see an issue differently than you do because they've come to a different conclusion. People who don't want the same things you want aren't automatically stupid, or ignorant, or evil, or malicious, or any of the other high-school cop-out epitaphs you want to throw at them.

Most of my friends are against Prop 8, for instance, but I have one or two friends who don't support the idea of gay marriage. Not because they're ignorant, or because they hate teh gheys; they're smart people and they've thought about it. They're simply speaking from their faith. And they get to vote, too. I think they're wrong, but that's my problem, not theirs, and nobody gets to tell them that they need to stay home and not vote. That's bullshit.

I'm happy everyone wants their side to win. Wonderful. Support your cause(s), make the world a better place. If you're reading this, I probably agree with most or all of what you're saying. But demonizing the opposition just because they're the opposition is dangerous, pointless, and ignorant. Stop it.


*(Not just LJ; don't take this post personally. If I were referring to anyone's LJ post, I'd do this in a comment there instead.)