Hmm...

I have to wonder if this is the best person to be defending the use of guns.

Some of my favorites:
1) "And its managed declare you $5 boot your did"
2) "lot Will (V) 29 Shaved for 8 will the that knowing remove and at bad the seen 3$3,375 ", and
3) "Cocoa Review Colorado note ments occupy well win?"

Seriously, what the deuce is even going on on this page? Is it translated from a different language? Or is it all in some sort of code that only the initiated can understand? Will I soon be on the receiving end of a hand gun due to my befuddlement? Only time will tell.

My job

I went to a ceremony today for the (now) former CEO of the company that I work for, and all that they could talk about was how much money he had helped the company make. From stock prices to the total amount earned by the company, it was all about money.

Now I understand about how money, and not the cheese, stands alone in importance to a lot of people. I guess it just seemed simplistic to measure the life and career of a man in terms of capital gains, and not in terms of lives impacted. The things that I value most are the intrinsic qualities of things...making a child laugh or helping someone to remember a better time. Perhaps I'm just more relational, but these are more lofty goals than some fourth quarter estimated earnings report, or at least it seems that way to me. I guess I'm just not cut out to work for a company; I guess I'm not cut out to make a bunch of money.

Heaven, enable me to work towards the things that I value most. Let me learn from my current experiences, but let them remain current only for as long as they need be.

Quote for the Day: "Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen: even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind."- Leonardo da Vinci

For those who are reading this and saying, "Hey, this isn't funny", I submit this; A horse walked into a bar, and the bartender asked, "Why the long face?"

A Modest Proposal to Katie Holmes

Dear Miss Holmes:

I notice that you have, of late, become infatuated with a man who is stark raving mad. I further notice that you have accepted his seed and are with child.

Now, I am not here to throw stones; I am simply here to remind you that actions have consequences.

Surely, when you were allowing yourself to be impregnated, you had forgotten that when Ronald Reagan was Governor of the great state of California, he shut down most of the mental hospitals. What does this have to do with you, you ask? My assertation is that there will not be the necessary staff or facilities to treat your children, who will presumably also be loopy.

Therefore, I insist that for every child that you have with this one, you have ten children with myself or another person with a reasonable amount of sanity. The ten children can then grow to take care of their lunatic sibling.

I realize that you may be worried that your figure would then become somewhat less attractive, but you must consider the greater good.

Please respond to this posting, and I will get you in touch with a reproduction expert.

Sincerely,
Analyst Catalyst

I'm not sure how to feel about this

It says in the article that they were old schoolmates. It seems kinda vindictive to file the suit against the priest; I wonder if the priest, as a young man, gave the atheist a series of super-wedgies.

The Biggest Loser

This television show was auditioning for candidates in my area. I figured that auditioning was a win/win situation: if I didn't get on the show, it was an affirmation that I wasn't fat enough, and if I did get on the show, I had an opportunity to win a lot of money and achieve my dream of retiring at the age of 23.

There was, however, a third possibility that I didn't even consider: NBC just not showing up. This was kind of lame, but I left the audition site amused as a large black woman was speaking angrily into a local television camera in a monologue full of head-bobbing and finger-gesticulating. What's not to like with that?

Zombies, man

All right. I have a confession to make. I am a twenty-three year old, reasonably muscular, college educated person, and I am scared to death of zombies. Ever since the remake of Dawn of the Dead, I have been scared of them in a way that perhaps can only compare to the fear and trepidation that is felt by this monkey.

Allow me to elucidate my reasoning.

1) Zombies come back from the dead. That's freaking scary. They decide amongst themselves in, I would guess, some sort of zombie parliament that they're tired of being dead, and so they vote "eerhh" or "eghh" depending on whether they want to come back from the dead or not, with a two thirds "eerhh" majority needed to defy the laws of nature. Back when I had two roommates, I couldn't even get two thirds of us to wash the dishes in a timely manner, which is probably not a fair comparision in that washing the dishes is probably much more difficult than defying death.

2) Zombies don't like to eat Burger King, although they would probably like to eat The Burger King, which I think would provide for some of the creepiest entertainment I'd ever seen. (When looking up Burger King, I found this. There are a couple of things wrong with this: 1) the name, and 2) the name in conjunction with the fact that it's apparently wearing a garter belt.) Anyways, zombies want to eat me, and not in the crude teenage sense of the word either. Zombies don't even need me for nourishment; there's no FDA recommended daily percentage of me that they need. They're just gluttons, especially this one; geez, you'd think wandering around being dead and having to catch the living would make you lose some weight. Perhaps I should start marketing zombie slim-fast (a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and then a child for dinner).

3) Zombies keep me from sleeping. Two nights ago, as I left my girlfriend's apartment, I heard a sound that could have come from the undead. It freaked me out, so I ran to my apartment, climbed the stairs hurriedly, and when I entered, I found my roommate asleep on the couch, which is something that he rarely does. Assuming him to have been turned in to a zombie, I sneaked into my room, got into bed, and tried to stay awake to see if he was going to eat me. It was one of those almost fall asleep, wake yourself up and see if there's a zombie in the room, almost fall asleep, wake up, etc. It was pretty lame. But it apparently worked as I am not yet a zombie.

In conclusion, I'm a big sissy. I probably should have just written that and foregone my reasoning.

The Device

Last night, I was cooking, and I needed to open a bottle of wine (in the Julia Child sense of cooking, of course: one to cook with, one for me; two to cook with, one two for me), so I asked my girlfriend if she had a corkscrew. She, at first, said that she didn't (because she likes to lie to me like that), but then she remembered that she did in a conversation that went like this:

gf: But I do have THE DEVICE (said in a lower, more ominous voice)
me: The device? Is not the simple machine of the screw device enough?
gf: Yeah, your mom gave it to me for Christmas.

At this point, she reaches up into the cupboard to produce the aptly titled(by my girlfriend) Device. It's a cork screw AND pepper grinder AND something else that I can't remember right now (facial hair trimmer, perhaps?). My first reaction is, of course, "Aha! That's why I haven't found any wine that I like; I'm not putting enough pepper in it." This was followed by thinking about how, if anything, this combination of devices would be inconvenient. I imagined an argument between a man who needs his bottle of wine opened versus a woman who needs some pepper on her salad, thus ruining an otherwise beautiful evening.

It's all right though; it is still a pretty good gift in the long run. This will be a corkscrew that will be too big to lose. Thanks Mom!

Fried Rice

I hurriedly made fried rice this morning, and it was DELICIOUS for lunch.

Good work, me!

The Art of Trying to Look Busy

I am this art.

Being in between projects, I find myself with a lot of free time. I feel badly cheating the company out of money (Dang ethical system! What's it even done for me?), so I look for little things to do throughout the day. However, even with these little jobs, I find myself with a lot of extra minutes.

Side note: I didn't always feel badly about not working when I used to work for a telemarketing company. Towards the end of my time there, I was so upset with having to call and irritate people that I would just dial six of the seven necessary numbers to make a phone call so that it would look, to my unsuspecting supervisor, like I was working (Mwa-ha-ha! How clever I was!) Relatedly, given that I worked the same job, I find it odd that I don't have more compassion for telemarketers now. I suspect that I am taking out my aggression on my previous employer on them, though they don't deserve it. I'm not really mean, but lately I've been answering the phone in a way that amuses me (which is the cornerstone of what will be my grand thesis on the Ethics of Amusement which I will discuss at a later date and time). Last night, one of them called, and I just pretended to cry into the phone. I didn't greet the person; I just sobbed into the phone in a quiet and (I think) believable way. When I heard the person on the other end of the line say, "Hello?", I hung up.

So, I said all that to say, I didn't really feel badly then, but I do now, because this is a good job, even if it's stealing my will to live. And eat, but that's not necessarily a bad thing as this is my picture.

But back to my point. Between the little jobs that I find for myself, I still have a lot of free time. I used to spend this time surfing the internet (the only more cliched phrase I could think of is "Surfing the Information Superhighway," but I couldn't bring myself to use it outside of parentheses), but with the recent addition of a new staff member in the cubicle across from mine, I find myself PARANOID BEYOND ALL RATIONAL FEAR that this person will discover me checking my email, and I will be subsequently let go. Therefore, yesterday, for the better part of a half hour, I spent my time looking at a database full of things that I don't have to remember because, well, it's a database and, as we all know, the definition of a database is: a base to store data so I don't have to remember it. Plus, this database is in excel , so it looks like what I would be doing if I had anything really to do right now.

It's an art. I promise.