floorpie

It’s been an uncharacteristic 6 days since my last post, and I can’t imagine what might have been so important that it would have kept me from doing so. Unless it was the following:

Tuesday I finally got The Call from my landlord (not to be confused with “THE CALL”) that they had an empty apartment that I could move into for the time being. So, in a frantic rush, I bought a mattress at IKEA, loaded my truck up with the few belongings I had been crashing with at my friends’ house lo these many weeks, and moved in to an identical two bedroom apartment. Of course, this is an identical two bedroom apartment except for that it literally has my bed, one chair, and… well that’s it actually. I just don’t see the sense in moving a lot of my stuff in here just to move it out again. I at least have a homebase to bring the ladeez to… though I will have to prelude the trip with my sob-story so they don’t think I’m some kind of drifter.

At any rate, this was good news, as earlier that day I was able to finally get a hold of the guy from the first accident where he said something like, “Uh, can I have a few months to get the cash together?” sigh

Wednesday, I flew up to San Francisco for (I believe) the first time since leaving the area some 3 years ago. I always said, while living in Silicon Valley, that SF was a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there… and I was right. It was a great place to visit. A few co-workers and I first dorked-out at MacWorld for a few hours, and then spent the rest of the day walking around SOMA and the Union Sqaure area, eaiting really well, and visitingprobably the best modern furniture showroom I’ve ever been to.

And then Thursday happened.

Friday the 13th, I went to see King Kong with J, which I liked a lot, and she deemed “fun”. You knew the whole time that everything was fake due to the conspicuous lack of dinosaurs and giant apes in reality, but I was only reminded of this unreality a couple of times… the rest of the time, the CG was so good that it wasn’t at all distracting.

After the movie, I left J and headed to Hollywood, where by thegrace of somebody my buddy was able to get me into an invite-only type party at some club I can’t even remember. He opened the door followed by this incredible blond who was a friend of a friend of his, and the facilitator to our entry. Tall, long blond hair, incredible body… flawless really. I got inside and, let’s face it, this is LA, there are beautiful women picking up garbage here they’re so ubiquitous… but I have never seen so many beautiful women in one place. We made the rounds, striking out routinely, and I ended up back with the original group; and, after meeting everybody, I started talking to the gorgeous blond.

If only I knew back in high school and college what I know now. If I did, I would have been able to get hot, 21 year-old models like I did that night. Or, at least, more frequently.

After last-call, The Blond took me downtown to an after hours place she knew, where everyone knew her name (interesting). For reasons to complicated to explain but probably easily apparent, I was introduced to everyone as her “cousin from out of town”.

After that, the magic happened and somewhere along the line the sun came up.

Now it’s just getting funny

This weekend, I was helping a friend of mine working on his kitchen remodel (that seemingly being one of the things I do in my spare time for fun). I’m paid in pizza for my semi-skilled labor, and my friend’s wife was gracious enough to go pick it up. I had parked in their driveway and had blocked everyone in, so I said eagerly, “Take my car!”

And then 5 minutes later she called to say how she’d just been rear-ended by a Mercedes.

If that is unremarkable to you, you may consider reading this post from less than three weeks ago.

Sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows everywhere

With my new found positive outlook on life (or at least a reasonable facsimile) I have nothing but fantastically good and sunny news to report.

Before that, though, that song lyric in the title is always what I sarcastically sing when I want to communicate happiness to someone. The thing is, those are exactly the sum total of the words of the song that I actually know. I don’t know even how the rest of the tune goes, where I heard it in the first place, or why I even know what little I do. I have a glimmering of a feeling that I got it off of an old Simpsons episode but I have yet to come across it in the seasons 1-6 DVD’s I have (yes, I have all of the currently available Simpsons DVD’s, making me a huge, huge dork).

So, thanks to the good people at Google I’ve learned that uber-hottie Lesley Gore is responsible for this particular bit of addiction. And, thanks to the crack-dealers at iTunes, I’ve been able to download Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows so that I can listen to it in its entirety

Why the hell did I do that?

It’s an interesting little game you play with yourself with iTunes. “It’s only $0.99… why the hell not?!” you think to yourself, or sometimes out loud. I’ll tell you why not, because you just downloaded Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows you jackass.

Oh, and the good news: “They” have finally begun work on my fire-bombed apartment. The kitchen is ripped down completely to the studs (which means that everything that goes in there will be brand new), and I will have a temporary apartment on the same property to move into hopefully by this weekend (affording me the opportunity to finally get out of my friends’ house, which I’ve been crashing at for almost 2 months).

Granted, I don’t intend to move a lot of stuff into this temporary space, and I will most likely literally have only a bed and maybe a lamp of some kind, but at least I have a space to throw wild drug-parties in again.

Probably the best blonde joke I've ever heard

We all love you, Dave

I went out to dinner with one of my best friends last night, and the “how are you doing?” “what’s up at work?” usual fare turned into a kind of intervention.

Apparently, my usual cheerful cynicism that leaves people laughing is starting to be less humorous, and more like funny as a heart-attack. Also, the semi-destructive moral downward spiral I’ve been purposely going on is starting to not go unnoticed; and the self-deprecation thing that I’m so good at is evidently not as comedic when it seems like the deliverer is actually serious.

And why wouldn’t I be? As my friend told me, as she looked me straight in the eye, “You’ve had a really shitty year.”

Truer words were never spoken.

The fire in my place, the multiple (not-my-fault) car accidents, the other moral failings which I’d tell you abotu provately, were really inconsequential to me. My mind has been on other things. Namely, trying to recover from my break-up with ADG… or, more correctly, the circumstances of the break-up. It was ugly, my lads and lasses, U.G.L.Y you ain’t got no alibi, ugly.

Though it could have been worse. The cops weren’t called, and no one’s possessions were left burning on the front lawn. It’s just that after three years of being together, you’d think there would be better ways to deal with things than having to come home to an exactly half-empty apartment.

I think you get my drift.

At any rate, that and everything leading up to that, and the loss, and the whatever else has been haunting me for oh these many months; and, should my friend’s assessment be correct (and I have no reason to believe that it isn’t), the cracks are starting to show.

This may be why dating girls 1-7 plus 8 and 9 didn’t go very far.

My friend has great wisdom, and one piece of said wisdom went something like this, “If there’s something that keeps bothering you that you keep thinking about and thinking about, and every time you confront it it’s always the same, without any positive resolution or movement whatsoever, then you are obsessing, and caught in a losing battle. At that point, there is no point. You won’t win. You won’t lose. You just need to let those things go.”

When I said truer words were never spoken earlier in this post, I was wrong.

.: Digitally stabilized Zapruder film (via kottke)

Happy New Life

Setting aside the arbitrary nature of the Gregorian calendar as a means of delineating years… I’m glad 2005 is over. Despite my good mood and the fact that I’ve been able to roll with the punches fairly well, I really got the shit beat out of me this year. I would say, with more than a little pride, that I did very well given the circumstances; but, all things being equal, I would have rather not had to.

You know things are bad when friends, all of your friends, say things like:

.: This really isn’t your year
.: You should play the lottery, things can only go up from where you are
.: (laughing) I’ve just never known anyone with luck as bad as yours!
.: etc

The sad thing, is that there are people that I met the second half of this year, that think this uninterrupted string of failure after failure is on par with the rest of my life. They’ve never known me to be any way else. And the fact that things have been going so poorly for me long enough for that to be true, is a sobering and sad fact.

SO, I am going to depend on superstition and my own weak statistical understanding and say that, without a shadow of a doubt, 2006 will definitely be my year.

I am so glad it’s finally here!

Sometimes I love spam. I mean it’s already enriched my life in ways that I couldn’t have previously imagined. It’s made my penis so much larger, for instance, and it’s given me 10% of an amir’s considerable fortune just for setting up a bank account for him.

Other times, I just like the subject lines. Like today I received one from my good friend Ash Langdon with the subject line Re: weightlifting guerillas… which cracks me up. Weightlifting guerillas! Of course I’ll open that… especially as it looks like Ash is replying to my original e-mail in regards to these aforementioned guerillas. You’d think I would remember writing something about bulked-up guerillas, but at least Ash is on the ball and replying to whatever important questions I had.

There’s this thing we do in The Family, and that thing is play Hearts. Whenever we are together this is the thing that we do.

And I love this game.

The thing that we do not do is let my mom kick everyone’s ass… yet even so, here we are.

.: btw, Aeon Flux is not good. Charlize Theron is unbelievably gorgeous, granted, but the movie itself was...bleh.
.: Mr. Vargas died.
.: It's just so good

After 31 years of careful observation and scrutiny, I have finally figured it out: my mother is a Narrator.

When anyone is within earshot, there is a non-stop monologue about whatever it is that is going through her head at the moment. Be it about the details of that recipe she heard about, what she wants to do with the trees in the side-yard, what vitamins I should be taking (a list, by the way, that hasn’t changed in 31 years but I still get to hear about it as if it were the first time), etc, etc.

This narration does not supercede all normal conversation, however. There is plenty of talking back and forth when there is a topic on-hand. Instead, this appears to be designed to fill the silences that most people bear without incident. I know what you’re thinking, “Just tune her out!” and oh that I would, but the Narration is a fickle beast and can quickly morph into a direct question or comment that I should have been paying attention to. Therefore, I emply the “Tune her down” tactic in which I reduce my attentiveness to just above following what’s going on, but no more.

I attribute my ability to follow multiple conversations at once to this, in fact. I’ve spent so mamy years only half paying attention that I am now able to subdivide my total volume of attention-ability to multiple things at the same time. That’s why, when we go to dinner, and we’re talking about something, I’ll suddenly answer a question you didn’t ask or make a comment about something you weren’t referring to. Some people call this eavesdropping. I call it multi-tasking.

Merry HOLIDAY!!!

I’m in D.C., or just outside of it, having successfully navigated through the holiday travel hordes. It wasn’t so bad, actually. One thing about traveling to Asia for work is, you periodically get upgraded to First Class just because. Granted, this didn’t happen on the long portion of the flight, but at least it DID happen.

Also, 5 or 6 hours to get across the country seems like nothing when you flew 20 just a few weeks before.