| Johnny Pneumonic |
[Friday 2009 April 24 07:04] |
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mood |
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 The typhoid! Or the cholera! |
] |
So, guess what I managed to catch! If you were to say "pneumonia", I would be like, "WTF?" And yet you would still be right.
I went in to get checked for what seemed to be a rather nasty case of bronchitis. After hearing my description of the symptoms and doing some of the other checks his notion was "it's been getting steadily worse for long enough that it would appear to be a bacterial infection and it's time for antibiotics". Then he got to the stethoscope part and his notion changed slightly to "I'm hearing wheezing in only certain parts of your lungs, so you're getting a chest X-ray to see if you have walking pneumonia. Also, it would appear to be a bacterial infection and it's time for antibiotics."
Between the time I left radiology and the time I got to work, I got a call confirming more or less the same: It is in fact pneumonia but the Z-Pak I'd just been prescribed should knock it out handily.
Last night's winner of the relief game, however, was the Guaifenesin + Codeine cough syrup. The past couple of days had been a torturous ordeal of repeated attempts to nap met only with paranoid half-dreams of my least favorite sort—trying to solve logic problems concocted outside the context of logic, like trying to figure out which of the itches on my body corresponds to the desired volume on my radio. This morning I woke up readily at a time that would be appropriate for preparing for work were I actually going today.
A little while after I got up I decided that it would be funny to hear "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" with a cheesy text-to-speech voice replacing the final word with something else. For example, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that unemployment."
That is all. Yet.
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| Nitpixx |
[Wednesday 2009 April 8 23:25] |
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mood |
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 annoyed |
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There's a Marsh commercial that airs on the radio which closes on a line that resembles "So when comparing Marsh's produce department to other produce departments, it's like comparing apples and oranges." The wordplay entirely falls apart for me because the analogy is broken. It would be like comparing apples and oranges to compare Marsh's produce department with, say, some other store's pharmacy. The thought they're actually trying to express would be more like comparing a very tasty, juicy apple to a mediocre apple (or perhaps a rusting apple with five bites taken out of it and a worm in the decaying remainder).
There's a Taylor Swift song on the radio, "Love Story", which I think abuses its Romeo and Juliet metaphor. Taylor: You say you're Juliet and he's Romeo. Good start. The only reason you're apart is that your father disapproves? I'll buy that. But is there an extended conflict between your families that has mounting casualties? Do you get married without the consent of your parents? Is there suicide, either real or feigned? Is your story a net tragedy? No? Then you've ganked the wrong love story. Try another. There are many to choose from! In fact, it seems as though you've compared your romance having a fairytale denouement for perhaps the only historically famous love story that lacks a happy ending. Whoops.
In other news, the Comptroller of Maryland has once again given me the shaft (to the tune of roughly $250), but it shall have been the last time.
I'd like to be someone else for a week. Preferably someone with a less tense existence.
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| Voice Post |
[Friday 2009 March 13 20:43] |
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161K 0:56
| “I have just consider the idea that there are a few very specific type of music that occurred in movies and one of them is the opening credit music and one of them is the closing credit music. One of them is the Montage and then there's like. Sometimes there's a ___ sad music like the low point and there's a moment of victory music. I think if you get that thought then you get it. So I won't elaborate on it. Good night.”
Auto-Transcribed Voice Post |
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[Monday 2009 March 9 17:53] |
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46K 0:15
| “Thought of the moment. There is no dick place and existence but that not get smaller. They longer you stay there.”
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[Friday 2009 February 27 13:49] |
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68K 0:23
| “I think it's Klein, sometimes when things I need to sleep over slash time considered the sense's. If I were to choose one compound word to describe that cat it would be sleebed(?). Thanks about it. Catch you later.”
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| Blip |
[Thursday 2009 January 29 19:34] |
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mood |
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 chipper, wood (2) |
] |
I've been snowed in from work for two days now, but still working thanks to the magic of the internets. Being told to do stuff I don't quite feel like doing over the phone might be worse than in person.
Last night I found out there was no snow shovel in this place, so I ended up using a rake to clear a path to my car through the foot or so of snow on the ground. I took the ice scraper/brush out of my car and found that it did a better job of digging snow than the rake. However, when clearing the path from my car to the road, which was blocked not only by the normal snow but also the iced-over plowed roadside snow, I gave up on all tools. Instead, I found myself trudging through the snow with my feet. One would think this would be an incredibly dangerous (if not just time-consuming) idea, but somehow my feet and shins didn't get any colder than they would have exposed to air. The trudge was a workout; much despite the low temperature my glasses were fogged and I was working up a decent sweat. I think I may have done about 60 or 70 laps before I tried to pull my car out. After only four or five tries I made it onto the road.
Where did I go? Wal-Mart. To buy a snow shovel.
I just opened up the front door to get the mail out of the box. An icicle fell and hit me on the back of the head. That didn't feel nice, so I took the handle of the rake, still in the doorway, to clear away any other icicles that wanted a piece. The threshold of my door looked like someone had emptied an ice tray on it. The mailbox was iced shut, so I bludgeoned it with a wrench to crack the ice. That was kinda fun. The mail inside was slightly moist and entirely worthless in content. Oddly enough, the word "icicle" got Queen's "Bicycle Race" stuck in my head. "Iiiiicicle, iiiiicicle..."
I shaved the beard yesterday. I think it may have been growing since November. Much to my surprise, I think I look better without it.
I found myself working on an old issue: the backing up of my important stuff. For me, data backup has been about, in this order:
( omg what could the order be )
Ciao.
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| Voice Post |
[Friday 2008 December 26 21:56] |
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39K 0:13
| “Thought of the moment, I have an affliction that could rightly be called pathological reluctance.”
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| Gerk |
[Friday 2008 December 12 15:33] |
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mood |
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 wtf ftw again |
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On my lunch break, I noted two peculiarities about my brain.
On the way to Jimmy John's, I noticed my ever-present echolalia. The wind was blowing like a motherfucker. A guy who was walking in a group of guys that I think might have included the director of my agency almost lost his cap to the wind when I thought fast and snatched it up before it was swept to the street. I was thanked, I smiled and nodded in acknowledgement, and we were on our respective ways. For the next two minutes or so, the situation continued to play over in my head in repeat mode. This often happens in a situation where I've interacted with someone with whom I'm not familiar but I do respect, and where the interaction was brief enough that I tend to wonder (a) whether it actually happened or I just made it up, and (b) whether I handled it correctly. I think that these things repeat in my head to try to convince me of both.
Near the end of the block, I realized that, for the whole time since this encounter, I had been subconsciously but physically nodding my head every few seconds in reenactment of the moment. I had to consciously stop.
On the way back, I noticed my occasional tendency to have a runaway thought that I have to really pull on the reins to get to stop. As I was walking on the sidewalk, I had to steer clear of someone coming in the opposite direction. A notion that I frequently consider in such situations presented itself:
"If you are about to run into someone, pretend you're driving and go the direction you would in a car."
(If everyone heeded this advice, then the only trouble you'd ever have is visiting one of those places that still does the left thing. But I digress.)
My mind couldn't help suffixing this with:
"Unless you're a douchebag behind the wheel."
And apparently that wasn't enough.
"In which case you should pretend you don't drive like a dick, and then go the direction your hypothetical self would go in a car."
Brakes finally on.
I wonder if I have Tourette's.
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[Friday 2008 November 7 19:23] |
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132K 0:45
| “Thought of the moment. I just saw a no ok this isn't a thought of the moment. Point is I just saw a slippery when wet sign. You know, it's like a picture of the of the back of the car with a bunch of skid lines behind it and I think it would be fantastic if instead of slippery when wet that meant that while you were on this part of the road there would be other cars coming in the opposite direction intentionally swerving to throw you off kinda like a American Gladiators(?) rolling the eliminator or something. That's it.”
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| We'll do it live. |
[Friday 2008 November 7 13:50] |
When Facebook suggests "People You May Know" to add as friends, it's a little like the stereotypical comedy situation where the mother-in-law is trying to get her new son-in-law to talk to his father-in-law after Thanksgiving dinner, ineffectually coaxing him with a saccharine "You both like baseball..." He hesitates only to be shoved into the living room for an extremely awkward, forced conversation, much like the one you'll have if you friend somebody on Facebook on the thin premise that "You and (So-and-So) both went to (The Same Miserable) High School."
I wasn't extraordinarily great at making friends in school because the things important to me were unimportant to them, and vice versa. That situation never really changed much. Near the end, late fall of senior year, myself and the G/T kids who had shared a mutual guts-hating with me for eons undertook the burial of one or more hatchets, and the short remainder of the year was a senioritic blast.
This happened while I still had time to share with them. But on occasion I get a friend request from somebody with whom I never really did manage to get any closer by the end of school. I don't know how to feel about that. Even with the alpha kids who didn't like me up until the end there was at least a bond of...something, even if it's ill will, that we might manage to commiserate over and celebrate post mortem. But in the cases of others, sometimes it's just somebody whose name I vaguely recall hearing on the PA between classes, whose face I vaguely recognize. Do I have a reason to add these people on the notion that they occupied a cell block on the opposite end of my prison?
Friends happen. You don't craft them, you don't dig them up, and you don't contrive a circumstance. You find them. They find you. It might lead somewhere or it might not. Nothing I've ever forced in this regard has ended well, and I'm of the impression that I can't rightly expect anything I force to do so, and increasingly that nobody else should expect the same.
A group of people with only one thing in common doesn't form a group of friends...it forms a club. Or group therapy.
So I won't entirely shut out the people who almost knew me at one point, but I will pose this thought: If the only thing we share from the past is our school, and the only thing we share in the present is patronage of Facebook (population zillions and counting), and in particular we don't share a geographic location, any friends that we would consider close, or any interests of real importance, doesn't that swing the amusing/awkward balance a bit out of our favor?
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| Mental Train Wreck |
[Saturday 2008 November 1 10:28] |
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mood |
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chipper (wood) |
] |
Hungry? Grab a sandwich.
*Removes a Snickers bar wrapper from a candy-bar-sized, candy-bar-shaped BLT*
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| No Stairway! Denied! |
[Thursday 2008 October 30 14:31] |
I've been writing a crapload of JavaScript lately. Most of it has been for work, which is upsetting for a few reasons I won't go into. Using some of the same ideas, I wrote a simple thing recently: a counter for my fianceé (June 1 is not our date but our estimated moving day).
I kinda feel like writing something more complex, though, that is still not for work. I don't know what. Have any ideas?
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| BINGOOO*crack*OOOOO! |
[Monday 2008 October 27 16:37] |
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mood |
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I PWNZ @ BING0 |
] |
This whole commercial is silly, but pay particular attention to Mr. Self-Assured around 0:55. It makes me want to laugh louder than I really can at work.
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| This Just In |
[Thursday 2008 October 16 10:15] |
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mood |
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as if I'm wrong |
] |
*** NEWS FLASH! ***
ENTIRE WORLD IN FUCKING POLITICS MODE
LOCAL MAN THINKS IT'S 'STUPID AS HELL'
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