The Reviews Are In: I Don't Suck!

Well, one review anyway, and the not sucking part only applies to my job.
Still, it’s nice to be told – officially – that you’re doing a great job.
It’s even nicer to be told that you’re getting a big raise and a big bonus.
Too bad that part didn’t happen; the details of the merit increase and annual bonus are still up in the air at this point, and the odds don’t favor them being too big.
Still a. I still have a job and b. I’m going to get some amount of additional compensation.
So I can’t complain too much, I guess.
Scott’s back to work from his paternity leave. Before he left I told him that I should knock some chick up just so that I could get some extra time off. When he sarcastically responded that this was a good idea I said, “Meh, people have had kids for dumber reasons.”
Fortunately – in this instance, at least – I don’t have a chick that I could knock up anyway.
Stacy informed me via IM that Scott is very happy with the new addition and is, in fact, “adorable.” I’ll take her word for it.
Now that the baby is settled in, it looks as though Scott and I will be resuming our Wednesday night movie sessions.
This week we’ll be going to the actual movies, as there are two movies out that we want to see: Coraline, based on the book by Neil Gaiman, and Taken, which is, essentially, the movie Commando, but with Liam Neeson. And who doesn’t love Liam Neeson? Nobody who has any kind of sense, that’s who.
I sent Scott a link to a video sometime this afternoon and he informed me that he would wait to watch it, as there were a lot of people hanging around.
I said, “Let one rip; that’ll clear them out in a hurry.”
I went on to add that, now that he’s over 30, he can most likely produce those long, loud old man farts.
It got me to thinking.
My dad wasn’t a saint by any stretch of the imagination, but he was a good guy. He was a talented carpenter and woodworker, funny, charming, gregarious, and just generally likeable. If you ever met my dad and didn’t like him then the odds are that you’re incapable of liking people.
Everybody liked my dad.
Thinking about that fact, I couldn’t help but wonder why it is that of all of those positive and remarkable traits, the only thing I really inherited from him was a propensity for long, loud old man farts.
As a kid, I prayed that the day would never come when I would let them rip, and rip, and rip, and rip the way my dad did.
And yet...
Thanks a lot, dad.
Seriously, they’re kind of distressing. It’s like when you see some old episode of That’s Incredible or Real People and there would be a story about some poor bastard who’s had the hiccups non-stop for like 30 years or something. Whenever I get hiccups, I worry that something like that will happen to me.
It’s the same thing with some of the old man farts. What if the fart never stops?
Seriously, sometimes they last long enough that it starts to become a legitimate concern. Especially when one excepitonally long tooting session is immediately followed by another that’s just as long.
And where the hell does all that gas come from anyway? I refuse to believe that water and a Snickers bar are a sufficient source. It’s like my ass is a portal to another dimension. A fart dimension.
All right, all right, enough with the flatulence talk and complaints about my ever-increasing gassiness.
I’ll close with a lesson that I learned this evening.
If you’re going to bake cookies, bake them after you’ve made dinner, otherwise there’s a very good chance that the cookies will end up being dinner.

OK, Stupid, I Mean, Cupid (Part One)

I was supposed to get my annual review done this afternoon, but my boss was too busy so it’s been put off until Monday.
I suspect it will go something like, “You suck. You should pay us a bonus for the privilege of working here.”
Okay, probably not. I’m assuming it will go pretty well…unless my boss has been harboring secret complaints and has just been lying to me when she’s said that I’m doing well and makes complimentary remarks about my performance.
A while back in a Slacktivist comment thread a couple of people had positive things to say about an online dating service called OK Cupid, mentioning that they’d met some really interesting people through the site, despite the fact that, on paper – or rather, on LCD or CRT – they might not necessarily come across as “catches” from the average person’s perspective, and, best of all, it’s totally free.
So I thought about it and decided to take a look.
Initially I wasn’t terribly impressed, but that was mostly due to technical issues.
As I wanted to look around a little before registering and going through the pain in the ass process of creating a profile, I clicked on the “Not ready to join? Search for singles” link that would allow me to get a representative sample before committing to signing up.
This resulted in the expected behavior, taking me to a page on which I could enter my search criteria. However, clicking on the “Update Matches” button did not result in the expected behavior. In fact, it resulted in one of three things:

In Internet Explorer clicking the button did absolutely nothing
or
It caused the browser to totally lock up
In Firefox, it caused my entire system to completely lock up

I decided that perhaps it was a sign (I’m sure some people would say that yes, it was a sign to switch to Linux/Mac. I think you know my canned response to that.) that I should just forget the whole thing.
After all, I’m really not all that desperate.
I mean, yeah, from one perspective, I am. Obviously nothing I’ve done over the years (which is only slightly more than nothing) has helped me land a girlfriend, so in that sense, yes, I’m desperate, as I don’t have a lot of options available to me.
But in another sense, while I do get lonely on occasion, and it seems to me that having sex again sometime before I die – preferably while I’m still young enough to remember doing so – would be awfully nice, and sure, emotional and physical intimacy is often made of win, but being alone hasn’t killed me so far, and overall I’m relatively content with my life as is.
Besides, I go through phases with regard to the whole relationship/dating thing that range from reallyfuckingdesperate to ambivalent, and honestly, of late I’ve been leaning more towards the ambivalent end of the spectrum.
The other day when I was talking to my mother she mentioned that my nephew Jeremy was opining that having a girlfriend hasn’t really lived up to his expectations. “I didn’t know you had to be doing stuff all the time,” he said.
Right now, I’m with you, kid.
After all, while there are obvious advantages to being in a relationship, being on your own has a lot to offer as well, even if it’s the kind of action-free bachelorhood that many would consider an utter waste of being single that I exemplify.
I can go where I want whenever I want (that I don’t want to go anywhere is neither here nor there), spend my money however I feel like, watch what I want, listen to what I want, eat what I want, and I never have to deal with someone else’s various dramas, or put up with this sort of nonsense:



So sometimes I think that maybe I’m better off the way things are*.
But on the other hand – [tasteless joke about what the other hand is doing redacted] – there is that whole sex thing, which doesn’t respond to well-reasoned arguments in favor of the status quo, and considering that I don’t have many options, so I decided to take another look at the site and see if there was a way to get around the technical difficulties.
(As an aside, I will admit that – out of simple curiosity, I swear, and no, I’m not protesting too much – I did browse through the “Erotic Services” section of Craigslist. I had no intention of actually seeking out those services, as I’m too cheap and prefer to spend my money on non-erotic electronic devices, and with the way The Universe works I would either A. End up getting arrested in some sort of vice sting or B. End up getting robbed and/or murdered. Oh yeah, and also because it’s “wrong.” I mean, of course the fact that it’s “wrong” would be a major obstacle. I did look at the “Casual Encounters” section as well, but my BS Meter prevented me from taking any of that too seriously.)
I decided that maybe if I signed up I’d be able to actually search without crashing my browser and/or computer, and, since it was free, there was no real harm.
So I went through the bullshit hassle of creating a profile and went through over a thousand questions, including personality tests like the one I posted the results from earlier, and looked to see what sort of matches their personality-matching algorithm could come up with.
I’ve decided to split this up into two entries, as the whole story ended up being far too long for one post. Come back tomorrow for Part Two.

*Beyond the advantages of flying solo, there’s also the rustiness factor. It’s been so long since I’ve been in a relationship that I’m not sure I’d know how to be in one anymore.
Fiona Apple has a song called “The Way Things Are” that, while not wholly applicable to my life, has some lines that are pretty much dead-on if we assume that the “you” refers to The Universe, Fate, Life, or whatever, rather than, as is the case in the song, an actual person with whom she once had a relationship:

I wouldn’t know what to do with another chance
If you gave it to me
I couldn’t take the embrace of a real romance
It’d race right through me
I’m much better off the way things are
Much, much better off, better by far, by far
I wouldn’t know what to say to a gentle voice
It’d roll right past me
And if you chalk it up you’ll see
I don’t really have a choice
So don’t even ask me
I’m much better off, the way things are
Much, much better off, better by far