Friday, June 12, 2009

Ditched By The Cool Kids

Not that it really bears mentioning, but yesterday was my ex-wife’s birthday.
I didn’t really think about her much; after all, it’s been a long damn time and the whole mess is a bit of the past that I prefer to keep in the past, so I don’t often think of her anyway.
The only reason I mention it now is that, as I started writing this, the song Rotten Apple by Alice In Chains, from the album Jar of Flies, shuffled on in Windows Media Player, and the song – and indeed, the entire album – invariably brings her to mind.
Why? Well, there are a few reasons. For one, she and I both really liked it, and it was in regular rotation in our car’s CD player. For another, on the last anniversary we spent together, one of the gifts she gave me was a Jar of Flies T-shirt.
(The other gift was the Suicidal Tendencies CD Suicidal for Life. She’d bought the CD, opened it, and put it playing in the car before picking me up from work that evening to see how long it would take me to notice. I noticed as soon as I got in the car. For the life of me, I can’t remember what I bought her. Whatever it was, she probably didn’t like it.)
The other reason it makes me think of her is that it was sort of emblematic of a character trait of mine that, for whatever reason, always drove her up the wall.
Basically, she hated it when I would change my mind about...well, anything, really.
I suppose that she wished that I were more decisive, that I would set a course and resolutely stick to it.
Or maybe she was just nuts.
Either way.
In any case, one day, shortly after Jar of Flies came out we were at the mall and she asked me if I wanted to pick it up. For some reason – probably because we were dirt poor and a CD, even a lower-priced EP, counted as a major purchase – I said no.
Later that evening I was listening to the college radio station and Rotten Apple came on, I thought it was awesome, and decided that I’d make a mistake when I said no, and the next day I told her as much.
She got mad at me for changing my mind, but eventually she gave in and we bought it.
So yeah, the album, and especially that song, always brings her to mind.
Anyway, I hadn’t intended to write about that when I fired up Word, so I suppose I should move on to what I was going to write about.
At work we’re in the process of moving into a new building. The way things are now, most of the employees are spread out between three different buildings, so we opted to have one big new building that could house all of us constructed so that we could be under one roof like a big happy family.
They started moving people over to the new digs last week. People are being moved in groups of about 200, based on what floor they’ll be on in the new place.
My group will be moving next Friday. Basically we have to have all of our stuff packed up and labeled by 3:00 PM next Thursday, at which point we’re expected to get the hell out of the movers’ way, and then show up bright and early at the new place on Friday morning.
At our staff meeting last week my boss pointed out that moving is always a good excuse to get rid of accumulated junk that you no longer need, so it was decided that this week, in lieu of a staff meeting, we would all go out to lunch and then spend the rest of the afternoon purging ourselves of those things we no longer needed. A binge and purge day.
So today, a bit before noon, we met at a nearby Fridays for lunch. Well, some of us did. Most everyone else was late.
I had to eat and head back to the office before 1 in order to be at the Flash Report meeting (My contribution this week: The introduction of the character of Barry Allen is widely considered to be the starting point of the Silver Age of Comics, and also served as the introduction of the concept of multiple earths. Okay, not really. I mean, yes, all of that is true, but that was not what I put on the Flash Report.).
So I quickly ate my lunch, headed back to the office, grabbed some things from my cubicle, and headed to the conference room just in time.
Just in time to find the room dark and empty.
I went back to my cube to check my mail to see if there had been a change, or if the meeting had been canceled, but there was nothing about it in my inbox, so I went in search of some of the other attendees, but they were nowhere to be found.
I headed back to my cube once more and dialed into the conference bridge and found that the meeting was being held at the new building and no one had bothered to tell me.
So, as has happened so many times in my life, I found myself getting ditched by the cool kids.
Oh well.
After that I set to work on some purging, then took advantage of summer hours and took off at 3.
Once I got home I sat down to watch some recorded episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, then noticed that I had a message from Verizon in my set-top box’s inbox telling me that there’s a free preview of HBO/Cinemax this weekend. So I started checking that out and ended up watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
After that I flipped over to HDNet Movies and watched the end of Donnie Darko, which struck me as silly, given that I actually own the movie and could watch the whole thing any time I want.
Then I saw that Army of Darkness was coming on next, which is another movie I own, but when Army of Darkness is on, I can’t not watch it. I think there’s actually a law.
So I obeyed the law and watched it, and, as always, it was teh awesome.
And after that, I wrote this.
And posted it.

2 comments:

Merlin T Wizard said...

Good thing you watched Order of Phoenix. I'm under orders to drag you to Half Blood Prince at the IMAX this summer since Stacy will be in Utah when it comes out.

Jon Maki said...

I'd actually seen it before, but watching it again gave me an excuse to sit around not doing much of anything.