I don't need much...

Rumor has it that Guitar Hero can be played in 3-D.  I'm pretty sure that's key to being really good at the game.  If I could experience this game in the third dimension, the way I believe it is meant to be experienced, then I think I could accomplish all of my goals in life.  Is it sad that all of my life goals are centered around a game that's only been out for about a week?  I don't think so.  I prefer to think of it as totally awesome.

My point is this, I clearly need to play this game in 3-D.  Fortunately, this isn't that hard to accomplish.  See, all I need is a second projector, a couple of polarizing filters, a set of polarized glasses and a nice silver screen.  I'm still surprised these items have not yet been donated to me, but I can't say it's the first time society as a whole has ignored my obvious need for something (I still don't have an iPhone, but give it another 35 days and then check in with me).

I'm not an unreasonable man though, I understand that it's not really fair of me to assume everyone knows what kind of projector I need (it's a Mitsubishi PK 10 by the way.  Sorry society, that excuse has now been thrown out the window.).  But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a brown paper bag filled with the one thousand or so dollars that I need to complete the setup myself.  What gives?  

I'll tell you what society, I'll make you a deal;  If you leave a "present" outside my door some time within the next two weeks, I'll forget that you ever insulted me in the first place and I'll have you all over for a GH 3-D party the day after Thanksgiving.  Deal?

Growing Up

Awhile back, I may have made a claim that Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock is the greatest game in the world.  I was young and naive then.  It seems foolish now when I look back on my younger self and see the things I thought were important then.  I'm older now.  I know that there are more important things in life than GH3.  

I've matured a great deal in the last year and this new perspective is what allows me to recognize that GH3 is a fun, relaxing game for Little kids to play.   Guitar Hero: World Tour?  That's for adults.

I'm taking a break right now to ice down my left forarm.  It's been a grueling six hours and I'm going to need to pace myself properly if I hope to defeat the game by Sunday night.  If I'm unable to accomplish this feat, I fear my work will suffer tremendously on Monday morning.

If you'll excuse me know, I have a career in rock awaiting me.

It's Official!!

I'm half way to 62!!  And one third of the way to 93!!

Sadly, I'm only one quarter of the way to 124, but that's just something I'll have to learn to deal with.

To those that have helped me get this far, I humbly thank you.

Thank you to my mother and father for painfully obvious reasons.

It was at approximately 3:40 p.m. PST (but I was really born at 4:40 p.m., but that was prior to daylight savings getting pushed back.  Thanks mom for pointing that out.) that I reached exactly 31 years of breathing air.  Congratulations are not necessary, but greatly appreciated.

The One Where I Get All Political

Normally I try to stay away from political posts. Some say it's because I'm trying to remain neutral so I don't affect the outcome with my impressive powers of persuasion over my many, many, many readers. Others say that I don't know anything about politics at all and fake broken legs to get out of any conversations that steer in that direction. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. That's all I'll say about it.

Having said that, in a rare showing of political awareness, I'd like to share with you my latest creation. I call it my "Obama Jar."



Yeah, it's for change.

Happy Friday Eve Eve Eve Eve.

I'm still learning my way around the office and figuring out how everything works, but there's one thing I've managed to gather so far; These people are absolutely miserable.

I don't know if I can properly convey to you exactly how miserable they are without showing you some video surveillance of an average workday, but allow me to give you the best, singular example that I can.

Today, at approximately 4:30 in the afternoon, people started wishing each other, "Happy Friday Eve!"

It's Wednesday afternoon.

If the fact that everyone refers to Thursday as Friday Eve isn't bad enough, they begin celebrating "Friday Eve" on Wednesday. I feel it necessary to point out to everyone that there is nothing particularly special about this coming Friday. It is not the beginning of a week-long, overtime pay vacation for everyone. It is not the day we all receive million dollar bonuses for being snappy dressers. It is simply another work Friday in a seemingly endless line of work Fridays.

And this happens every week.

On my first day, several people that I was introduced to said, "Welcome to Hell." In my infinite ignorance, I thought they were joking.

Lesson from the streets...

Anyone even remotely familiar with my everyday life knows that I have surprisingly little interest in fashion, or more specifically, keeping up with the current trends in fashion. Up until recently I’ve been ok with this. That’s 30 years of what some might call, “fashion recklessness.”

When you’re younger, it’s a lot easier to get away with wearing aqua shoes to church or perhaps a hypercolor T-shirt (with matching pants of course) to your aunt’s wedding. Growing up severely hinders your ability to wear whatever the heck you feel like to any given occasion. It’s the downside to maturity that adults are afraid to talk about. In spite of this, I’ve still managed to wear orange corduroy pants far longer than the average person would deem acceptable, and pair up said pants with a similarly colored (yet still a few shades off) orange T-shirt. Call it my greatest triumph.

Ok, I don’t wear that outfit to weddings or birthday parties or Dodgers/Giants games, but it does get worn. In public. When you do something as irresponsible as that for approximately three decades, it usually takes something pretty profound to change your way of thinking. Allow me to tell you a story.

A couple of weeks ago, my need for Gatorade, hot dogs, cherry pie filling and mayonnaise was unacceptably high. Fortunately for me, there is a store that carries all of these items in excess only a few blocks away. I waited 45 minutes to see if someone would randomly knock on my door and hand me a bag with exactly those items in it, but for some odd reason, the knock never came*. So I took it upon myself to venture out and retrieve these items.

The route to the store is pretty simple, but it does involve me crossing a large street, then going down three flights of stairs and crossing over a bridge that spans a river. As I finished crossing the large street and approached the stairs that lead down to the bridge, I could see three police officers looking at the bridge below and communicating with some other police officers via radio (at least that’s who I assume they were communicating with. As my journey wore on, I began to question that assumption heavily). I was not stopped by any of these officers as I walked by and began my trip down the stairs.

Once I arrived at the bottom off the stairs, I was flanked by two more police officers, both of who were wearing bulletproof vests. I looked ahead and saw two police cars stopped on the bridge, and three more officers detaining two suspects. All three of those officers were also wearing bulletproof vests. Again, no one was preventing me from walking right through the middle of all of this.

I believe this was the first time in my life where I really felt underdressed. Sure, there have been countless times in my life where I was under dressed, but this was the first time I truly felt it.

I learned three very significant, related things that day. I learned that fashion is important. I learned that I should probably wear a bulletproof vest** all the time because, most importantly, I learned that the Chicago PD will do next to nothing to protect me. I won’t even get a, “Hey buddy, why don’t you use the other side of the street for now.” At least then I’d be a harder target to hit.

*Which is absurd when you think about it. I mean, come on! The store is only a few blocks away! Why WOULDN’T someone buy those items and drop them off at my door free of charge?

**If you listen to the news much, you probably already know that this is generally a good idea in Chicago anyway.

THE DREAM IS OVER

I had a dream and it is now over. I’ve had many dreams in the past, so I’ll take a second to remind you all what dream just died.

I was hoping never to work again. I was hoping that, with no effort whatsoever on my part, an enormously large sum of money would be anonymously bequeathed to me. I guess some dreams were never meant to be. I think that’s a pretty sad commentary on the state of the dream business these days. When a man can’t even expect to have millions (not even billions, just millions. It’s not like I’m being greedy.) dollars anonymously donated to him, with no strings attached, what kind of world are we living in?

It is with much sadness that I must now report to you that I am, once again, among the ranks of the employed. I hope you won’t think less of me because of this.

Without going into much detail, (mainly because I can’t. I’m really not sure what I’m doing at all.) I’ll tell you a few of my highlights from my first day on the job. I’m going to count these down in order to build drama and excitement. Who couldn’t use more of that? So here’s my top 3 moments of the day:

3. The office tour – This was pretty exciting. Normally these tours are a formality to get you acquainted with the area, but what you don’t know is that I work in a linear labyrinth. What is a linear labyrinth you might ask? Well, it’s kind of like a normal labyrinth, only it’s much narrower and very, very long. If architecture can be artsy-fartsy, then the designer of this building had no intention of making any business residing in these walls even remotely efficient. If slowing down productivity and business was his main objective, then he is a gold medal winner in the Architectural Olympics of Making Business Unproductive and Slow. If you think the regular Olympics are stupid, you should try watching those Olympics. I once saw a guy that had to walk up seven flights of stairs so he could take and elevator to get to the floor below him. Then he had to take a zip line to a building 3 blocks away, catch a bus to the train station, take a train to the airport, fly to Canada, have his passport stamped, fly back, hire an untrained unicyclist to “juggle” him back to his office, present his passport to security, then climb up a 17 story cargo net in order to get back to his desk. And he had to do all of that just to make a copy of a copy for the backup file to the backup file. He was the bronze medalist. You can’t make this stuff up.

2. Learning the filing system – Typically, file systems rarely crack the top 1,000,000,000,000 in moments of the day, but when you find out that the person who occupied the job before you had a fairly loose grasp on the alphabet and that there are other filing hazards such as, “the Gonzalez file should be listed under Hernandez, but you can find it in the system under Atwater,” well, you know you’ve hit the jackpot. You may even start to wonder why they bother attaching the word “system” at all. It’s really just a bunch of files. Pull one out, maybe you’ll get lucky. I’m learning to retrain myself into thinking that they file cabinets are really more of a junk drawer than a place to organize your livelihood. I mean, why put them in some sort of an order when you can just toss them in there randomly? The less time I spend questioning these things, the faster I can pile the files in. I think it’s pretty obvious which way is more efficient.

1. Filing out my Ethnics form – It’s always good to hire people with good ethnics. That’s what I’ve always said. Sure, you might be thinking, “Don’t you mean ethics?” Were it any other office, I’d probably say yes, but not here. When I handed in my new hire packet full of all the things I’m not allowed to do as an employee of this company, the woman I handed it to asked me quite plainly if I remembered to fill out and sign my ethnics forms. For the uneducated, ethnics forms are where you listed all of your known ethnic friends. Let’s face it, sometimes you know someone that’s ethnic, but they still look pretty white, so you may be unaware that they’re ethnic. There was a plausible ethnic clause I had to initial incase I accidentally identified one of my friends as white when they were, in fact, ethnic. You’re also required to list which ethnicities you find attractive and which ethnic groups you wouldn’t invite to your Grandmother’s 90^th birthday party for fear she might make a scene. It’s a pretty comprehensive form and was definitely the highlight of my day.

Tomorrow will be day two of my new job. I’m not allowed internet access at all, so I’m pretty much going to be silently crying to myself all day. It’s ok though, because no matter what, I get a half hour for lunch and nobody can ever take that away from me.

To whom it may concern

*****UPDATE*****
This was my attempt to reverse jinx the Lakers and help them become the first team in NBA history to overcome a 3-1 deficit. I failed miserably. I apologize to Laker fans everywhere because I understand that it is my sole responsibility to guide the destiny of this franchise. Who knew?
*****END UPDATE*****

For those of you trying to console me these past few days. Thank you. I know it hasn't been easy. These things hit us all pretty hard. And while I appreciate the care you have shown me these past few days, do not misunderstand my reaction. I'm not being a downer, I'm being a realist. Let's look at the facts.

First, in 6 meetings so far this season with the Boston Celtics, the Lakers are 1-5. That's not encouraging.

Second, In the 13 home games the Celtics have played, they are 12-1.

Third, no team in the history of the NBA has ever come back from a 1-3 deficit.

Fourth, did you see game 4? The Lakers had an 18 point lead at the half! Then they proceeded to play like tiny little girls in the second half! They didn't deserve to win that game after playing like that. Now they're just a young team on the ropes. Not a good place to be.

So given the fact that the Lakers now need to win 3 games in a row against a team that they've only managed 1 win in 6 meetings, and the fact that two of those games they need to win will happen in Boston, where the Celtics have only lost 1 game this entire post season and they have a propensity to play like little girls down the stretch, it's looking like a done deal. They basically have to climb Mount Everest three times in a row and on two of those climbs, there's guaranteed to be stormy weather and heckling fans. So, congratulations Boston. Congratulations Kevin Garnett. Congratulations Paul Pierce. You guys deserve it and I mean that sincerely.

Yes, I know Kobe said these finals are far from over, but he has to say that. He's the Black Mamba. And while I appreciate his enthusiasm, the worst thing you can do to a person in a time of absolute despair is give them hope. I do not need hope now. I need to grieve. Please let me grieve and move on with my life. We don't need to drag this on any longer. It's ok. We Laker fans have next season to look forward to. We'll have Pau for the whole season (yes, I know everyone likes to pretend like we've had him this whole season, but really, we've only had him since February) and more importantly, we'll have Andrew back. Then all of these size issues that have plagued us this series will disappear. The team is still young. They've got a chance to be contenders for quite awhile.

Ps, I knew this series was doomed from the start when ALL of the "experts" were picking the Lakers to cream the Celtics. That never works out well. Just look at the Super Bowl this past year...

Finding a job is hard.

Ok, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way. I have accepted a posting challenge from my sister Madelyn via twitter, which is how I believe most posting challenges are initiated these days. As such, I am now obligated to post on a slightly more regular basis than I have been in the past.

So here’s what this post is about:

My time.

I’m losing it.

Since I’ve moved to the city they call Chicago, I’ve felt like time has sped up. This is particularly alarming considering the fact that I still don’t have a job. I’ve created a child-like pie chart to awkwardly illustrate how my time is being spent.

As you can see, a good deal of my time is spent preparing food. This is very new to me. When I lived in California, I would eat out approximately 26 times a week. Not bad for a guy with a college education. But since I’ve moved here, I’ve eaten out a total of 4 times in the past two and a half months. It doesn’t take an associates degree in general education to figure out what that means. It means I’m no longer substituting money for my time in the preparation of my meals. I’m still getting used to it, so bear with me.

As for this so-called posting challenge, what can you expect from me? Perhaps more terrible drawings using only PC Paint, even though I have better programs with better tools? Probably. As always, I remain predictably unpredictable.

Not for nothing…

Way back in the day, I used to live with more than one grape jelly user. I did not have the resources necessary to keep 24 hour surveillance on the jelly at all times, but I was always reasonably certain that I was not the one making the top of the jelly squeeze bottle all goopy. I believe that I possess superior jelly squeezing skills rivaled only by high level Tibetan Monks. Until recently though, it was only speculation.

I am now the only grape jelly user in the house. Aside from all of the obvious benefits, there’s also this:

After several masterfully crafted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and not one single swipe with a napkin, paper towel, old shirt I don’t care about or someone else’s shirt when they weren’t looking, the top of the jelly squeeze bottle still looks nice and clean.

I’m not convinced that everyone reading this has fully grasped the true horror that I have had to endure. Below is a simulated squeeze jelly bottle top used by any one of my former roommates/housemates/relatives/dad/sister whose name starts with m-a-d-e-l-y…

Take a deep breath. Now go image google puppies and kittens sleeping in laundry baskets full of ice cream to try to get that horrifying image out of your head.