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03/02/98 - So anyway, what if I became an FBI agent? I can shoot a gun. I run for a long time. I can probably pass the aptitude tests. I'd have to find a position that didn't require suit wearing, though. I'd probably have to leave Richmond, too. Maybe I'll skip the FBI. I could be a high tension wire walker for the circus except my balance occasionally sucks. I think I'd better stick with skills I've already mastered, don't you think? Actually, I'd like some more tea. I hear crumpets go well with tea. I've never seen a crumpet before. Mr Webster says they're kinda like pancakes so perhaps I've seen crumpet's slummy cousin. Speaking of foods (and this may get nasty so stop reading here if you fear disgusting food stories) I ate at KFC last night. Here's an experiment I should attempt. Weight one cooked piece of KFC chicken. Remove the skin. Re-weigh the piece. From these 2 numbers we can assemble a ratio. What this ration will tell us is... sometimes math is best not practiced. Or, in other words, ain't ignorance blissful?
03/03/98 - I can't seem to get a second to write this morning. I've had tasks coming at me like mud thrown from a stuck car's tires. I covered. Luckily I'm wearing loud flannel so the stains don't show as they would on white. Wasn't it supposed to rain today? Not That I'm upset to see sun but I was ready for rain and its absence, while pleasant, is puzzling. Ok, I just got another mud splotch on me... gotta go.
03/04/98 - I'm looking at a posed Civil War era picture. Two Confederate Officers are sitting on a bench. The back drop is the same back drop used in every single picture from that era, I believe, and the guys clothes are baggy. There was a time not too long ago when you couldn't saunter into the GAP and buy fitting jeans. You got what you were given and chances are what you were given didn't fit. And the colors were drab. There was no such thing as a bright ugly shirt which brings me nicely to my next topic: Lee and Tim's Ugly Shirt Day. Tim is a colleague of mine with the guts to wear bold shirts. I strive for similar self confidence. I don't know if he knows I've attached his name to this event, but this monday we, and as many people as I can convince to participate, will wear ugly shirts. I personally believe my ugliest shirt should top all others plus it's stylistically a conservative shirt so I can easily wear it with nice pants and nice shoes... "nice" being an interesting word to use regarding my shoes.
03/05/98 - I heard the funniest (yet extremely sexist) thing I've heard in a while while driving into work this morning. DJs were giving away tickets to some gas powered manly monster truck event by asking callers to answer 5 questions in a manly manner.
DJ What's your name?
Caller One Quentin.
DJ Wrong answer. Next Caller...
That's kinda how it went. Caller Two passed the name questions and narrowly missed the "Who's your favorite male ice skater?" by stuttering then answer "No one". Caller two bit it on: "When your woman cooks your steak how do you like it: rare, medium or well done?" He didn't say "I never let my woman cook my steak." I'll admit I was laughing hysterically to the whole mess but I think there must be a test better suited to a monster truck rally. Monster truck events here are held indoors. The fumes probably kill one or two people per event and the noise must deafen more people than a mid 70s Who concert. How about administering a worthlessness test... Question one: Does your family love you? Any nonaffirmative answer allows the caller to continue. Question two: Would a sensitivity loss olfactorally or auditorally adversly affect your existance? Again, nonaffirmative answers pass... "Huh" does, too. See where I'm going? I think this test is much more effective and cruel and probably less funny... crud.
03/06/98 - Friday... at last. What a torturous week it's been. Too much stuff to do and too many people angry the stuff's not done. Thankfully I'm blessed with a flawed conscious so I can enjoy what little free time I have without work worries. I panic when the phone on my desk rings, though. I figure I'm working pretty hard and if things get bad I'll work a little harder but I'm not to blame for the bad. I'll do what I can to make things better as long as the things I truly love aren't hurt too badly. Is that a bad attitude? Speaking of blessings I'm alone in my office today. The devil-sent fluorescent lights stay off and the music is played at a level I can hear without strain... as close to blissful as 9-5 gets, right? Well, work beckons... hopefully coffee follows shortly. Be good to yourselves. And who was I kidding about that 9-5 thing? I'm 7:45-5:15 on a slacker day.
03/09/98 - Woe boy am I tired. I went camping this weekend. At 1am sunday morning the rain started falling. I didn't actually get wet until about 9am when we decided it wasn't going to stop anytime soon so we might as well leave the tent. That was the last time I felt my fingers for about 9 hours. We ate luke warm oatmeal and drank luke warm coffee while standing in the down pour. And I'm not kidding when I say that was the BEST food and beverage on the planet. The tragedy was an occasional large raindrop would impact the coffee's surface sending the precious fluid from the tin cup. We packed the gear and marched. Creek crossings that had been tough the previous day were down right perfect for soakings sunday. We miraculously moved 3 pack carrying people over two raging creeks sans incident. We arrived at the car. Broken down to a food carrying fanny pack and several water bottle we started up the mountain. It was at some point on our ascent that I realized all three of us might as well have hit the creek. There wasn't a dry square cloth inch on my body. Scrambling over the slick wet boulders at the mountain's top I was awakened to my boots fullness... squish, squish, squish. The view through the clouds was near non existant but I wouldn't trade the trip for all the dry clothes in my dresser. The trip's end found me changing into the best smelling, most comfortable t-shirt and shorts EVER. The steak at Outback might have been the tastiest piece of meat EVER, too. The lesson here is hardship makes good stuff even better.
03/10/98 - I'm still tired. Instead of sleeping or doing my soggy laundry I went downtown and shot my colleagues. They shot back. We blasted and dodged and ducked and said things like "drat!" and "Jimminey!" (since obscene language was forbidden) and sweated. Ok, the guns were plastic lasers. But the experience was still fun. Very fun... Ok, VERY fun. How often do you get to shoot people knowing they'll laugh about it with you? I developed the ultimate scoring technique but it doesn't sound too fun. You and a friend take turns shooting each other. You get 10 points for a hit and like 5 points are subtracted when you're hit (it varies per target, though). With a 5 second down time that works out to not as high a score as I'd thought... only about 450 in a 15 minute game which, if memory serves, was about the 70% mark. Ok, let's hope no one holds a grudge because I shot about everyone in my office except for the folks that didn't play and when they hear how much fun it was they might be upset, too. Well, I think I've failed to use the phrase Laser Tag and I'm almost done so I'll find some clever way to add those words to my dialog before I wrap this writing. Oh, and I forgot to mention I blistered my trigger finger.
03/11/98 - I invented a new running game last night. My mom wouldn't be particularly pleased with this one. It's a kind of biathlon. Runners need be good runners so running is one half; the other half is another skill runners need: spitting. Like the skiing biathlon, though, accuracy is important here. I used telephone poles as targets. I made sure to pick targets away from parked cars and other things that may be extremely impolite to accidentally hit. I found my aim better to my left... don't know why. I was deadly accurate at about 8-10 feet; distances greater than this proved much more difficult. The wind was a factor with which I dealt poorly. I wrote a haiku about the experience:
Lone
runner pounds road
warm sun crawling westwardly
telephone pole phlegm
Have I mention how much I like the word "phlegm"? It's as ugly as the real thing.
03/12/98 - Yesterday's entry was basically a discussion of my childishness. Last night as I ran I played the game again with much less success. I spent many of the miles thinking about a work problem; I have a much better idea how I'll make the stupid problem go away (I hope). I also realized something funny about women. I've heard many of my single female friends say they want a man with a childish side. Do they know that means they'll likely get a telephone pole spitter? Guys like me have serious sides. For instance, while I was trying to decide what to say next I invented a cool name for a fictional British detective: Spitson Phaumples. At first I had a great white-man indian name (a-la Dances with Wolves): Spits on Phone Poles. But that was too stupid so I sped my speech and slurred stuff together and invented Mr Phaumples. Why I chose to say "For instance" at the begining of this tangent is beyond me. This is about as close to mature thinking as "Hey, I think a frozen stick of butter would taste pretty good about now". Well, in my own defense I do have a serious side and it comes out quite often but it's no fun and actually kinda scary so I prefer my immature spitting, scratching, thinking more slowly than I speak self. So, single women, think intently before wishing for a childish-sided man. In fact, if you want to try one out I'm available for dinner once I clean the afterwork running dirt off myself. I'll show you my favorite bar trick wherein I eat the lemon wedge from my iced tea.
03/13/98 - I know this entry will leave you with an empty feeling to last for the next week because I won't be writing my journal while I'm in San Diego learning all about Banner the wonderful software I support for 45-50 hours a week here at UR. Rapid segue... I suppose you've all heard the news: UR defeats South Carolina in a painfully exciting basketball game. This moves UR to round 2 of the NCAA tournament. I smell a national championship... for someone like Duke or UNC but still UR is doing a bang up job, don't you think. I'm not even a basketball fan but you can't help but bounce on the band wagon when the ride looks as comfy as this one does. Geez, as staff I already have a UR id card... that must be justification for rapidly adopting the boys in red and blue. Ok, next topic... I think I had a next topic but I certainly am devoid of a subject now. The weather's been cold as winter these last few days, hasn't it? I hear it will be nice for Richmonders tomorrow. Talk at you next friday.
03/20/98 - Here I am back in R, VA. It's nice to be home. I think I shall add another goal to my life long list of goals; I'm going to write a book called The American Ubiquity. If you don't know I just returned from the left coast. It didn't feel too far away. For one thing, I was there then and here I am now so how could I have traveled very far? But so much is the same. The same clothes in which I feel normalish here make me feel normalish there. A Coke is a Coke and a coffeeshop hazelnut coffee runs about $.10 an ounce. Sam Goody's is not the place to buy CDs. Alternative radio plays the same 12 songs. But enough sameness. I recommend San Diego as a city in which you can do things. As a medium city southern boy I wasn't too terrible terrified. I got to play escort guy to my boss and (No offense, Kelley) her intriguing friend (as southern boy I'm not letting them walk unescorted through city streets at night). But above all, I learned stuff at the conference I attended... stuff like remove superfluous entries from the FORMS45_PATH variable and the Dev2K keymapping is defined in a file called fmrusw.res. But you don't care about those things, do you? I haven't decided if I do either... at least I don't think I would care if I weren't paid to care.
03/23/98 - I did something painful to my shoulder this weekend. Perhaps cleaning the house is more stressful on the body then I thought. Not to dwell too much on motives but Andy and I decided slobs don't get chicks as easily as well mannered, clean duffuses. Manners are our next goal. This weekend we cleaned. Dishes, floors, bathroom stuff. The whole house smells of dirty cleaning products; it's pretty gross. I scrubbed the bathroom. My left shoulder kept waking me last night. Even I had a hard time following the logical jump between those last two sentences. That's called a non sequitur; I apologize. Now I return to my clean house. Hey, that's funny, too, because I won't be back home for about 10 hours. But the house is cool now. And my coffee is crappy and luke warm. But I have Dave Matthews on the CD player so life is pleasant. I took a big coffee gulp (this can be done with luke coffee). Were the colors different I'd say the moon sat in my cup under my wretched coffee. The sugar layer looks just like a full moon through haze... weird. And I'm freaking myself with this crazy talk. It's not possible that I'm truly nutty, is it? Nah, just scared of myself. Scared of lots, actually... big land parcels can be quite frightening, you know? Lions and Tigers and Bears; Oh My!
03/24/98 - I had my left thumb nail between my teeth conjuring a vast array of sound. But they're the sounds of thought. Trouble here. Trouble there. Old friends writing. New friends on TV. Things are big. Vast just like the sound array. Then the sounds are the thoughts. That sound is bright and short while this one almost echoes and I can feel it in my chest. And sound travels a mile in 5 seconds. There are 3600 seconds in a minute so sound must travel a little over 700 miles and hour. I think I knew that. I could travel a mile in about 260 seconds so I could travel a little more than 13 miles in an hour. The problem here and now is I can no longer travel that quickly and even when I could 260 seconds was too long to travel that quickly. I'll drive. The neat thing about motion people don't realize is when they're going 70 miles an hour in a car EVERY part of their body (fingernails and all) is travelling at 70 miles an hour relative to the ground. That's practically one tenth the speed of sound. Another neat thing about sound is that Metallica travels as quickly as Michael Bolton or Michael Jackson. If I were Bill Nye I'd set 2 stereos at one end of a parking lot and place a listener at the other. I'd play Metallica and Michael Bolton and ask which they heard first. It's kinda like Galileo dropping things from the that tower in Pisa (wasn't it there?) only with Metallica.
03/25/98 - I was told last night I resemble Vladimir Lenin. We were born 100 years apart. I wear red sneakers; he never ate a Big Mac. See? We're very different. I was once told by a mariachi singer I resembled John Lennon. He probably ate a Big Mac or two. "He" in that last sentence could be either John or the mariachi singer. I played music last night. I suddenly remember Scott saying something to me while we played. He said something like "Follow me"; I tried to do something like he was doing but he kept shaking his head. Maybe that's why he said I looked like Lenin. He was pretending to be Karl Marx presenting his ideas about communism and I, Lenin, couldn't quite get them right. It's a strange story manifesting itself 80 years after the real events but this time, instead of in eastern Europe over 70 years the events fit succinctly within 30 minutes and the masonory walls of an Arlington bar. Lee and Scott playing music is a metaphor for the communist ideal failing to flesh itself in politics. That's deep. The guy in the bathroom line with me said Scott probably just thought my goatee looked like Lenin's. Hi, Ken. And, yes, I know Marx and Lenin never met.
03/26/98 - And what to say today? The morning starts another conscious period that could differ from the rest in unknown and unnumerable ways. I could choose light beer or dark beer for dinner. I drank 2 glasses of water for breakfast from the same glass that, last night, held 2 glasses of beer. I saw no beer but I tasted it. And I rinsed the glass in hot water. Hot water cleans most things for me... at least when I'm alone. "Geez, I used that plate last; who cares if it still has a little mustard on it. I can rinse the plate free of scum using HOT WATER and the plate will be perfect for cold pizza and salad." See, no big deal. When people are around or when someone else may be using the food implement I use soap, hot water and a dish scrubbing rag. No need to fear my house. Hot water works almost as well as coffee in the morning to coerce a body to start another conscious period... almost as well. Can anything be as good as sunshine, sweet music and tasty, satisfying coffee brewed with good, pure hot water?
03/27/98 - The forecast is for a warm, sunny day. I don't want to work. Frolic. Today is a day to collect grass stains. Frisbee football in Byrd Park. Perhaps the sun and some Walt Whitman "Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice." Go, Walt, Go! I can't say it better myself. Walt comes from a different age when music meant people with instruments playing songs in real time. I live in the radio age so I'll forgive Walt for tossing music aside. Sans music is no way for me. Well, here I am in my drab office wishing I were a tree for 5 minutes swaying in the sun. I see several from here. Trees can't frolic. I can't frolic. There's a similarity twixt the tree and me. At one point in time I thought bone was made of wood. There's another similarity. I could dye my hair green; perhaps a good grass stain would do the trick. Hell, we're talking frolic! I'll just drape myself in leaves... after work.
03/30/98 - Despite its calendricality (I created that word. It's an noun meaning "those qualities given a day based on that day's calendar placement". For example, August in Richmond is hot and humid; These qualities are an August day's calendricality)... I'd better start over. Despite its calendricality yesterday was summer. I sunburned my neck watching baseball and, later, ate grill cooked hot dogs while seated on a deck watching the sunset. Thinking back I ate horribly yesterday. I awoke at 8:30am on the front room couch at Chez Flory/Chipman/Parish to the vision of Brian entering the front door bearing a bag of Boston Creme doughnuts and a gallon of OJ. I had some of both. At the neck burning ballgame I ate 3 hotdogs and swilled 3 Cokes. Later, on the terrace at Chez Porter I stuffed down 2 more grill burned dogs with jalapeno cheese. I thought I was scared of sharks (which I guess I still am) but right now I'm more afraid of the phrase "You are what you eat." Kinda gives me the willies after yesterday. I did run yesterday but that was so slow as to be useless, I'm certain. Well, what good is living if you don't experience the good bad with the bad good?
03/31/98 - Nerdboy coming at you uncomfortably. Today we were allowed to wear shorts to work. I've never had such a difficult time choosing an outfit. I'm comfortable grabbing my khakis and a collared shirt and going. Bang, bang, bang. I get up, shower, dress and I'm at work within 30 minutes. This morning I grabbed shorts only to notice the colors (black, red and yellow madras with a touch of light blue and white) didn't match the blue knit shirt I thought I'd wear. I switched to a yellow knit shirt but then hit another brick wall; my red tennis shoes looked crappy... so did my purple ones. I pulled out an old pair of white canvas deck shoes only to find them too bright. I scrapped the shirt and shorts for new choices. When I'd finally dressed I layed back on my bed laughing. I can't believe I went to so much damn trouble just to wear shorts. Ok, now I feel dweeby with my skinny little ankles in bright white shoes. Perhaps we'll have an unplanned power failure followed by a freak, unpredictable leaping of the moon resulting in an eclispe darkening the skies until I can get home and put on some long pants. Geez.