What Year Is It Again?

So far 2009 doesn’t seem to be much different from 2008, though that’s not really surprising, and, to be fair, it is still pretty early to make any judgments.
I’ve never really been one to make resolutions, because, really, what for?
I mean, if I’m going to do something, I’ll probably just do it, or, more likely not do it. Or vice versa. Or something.
Anyway, who am I supposed to be making the resolution to, myself? And if I fail to live up to the terms of the resolution, what will the consequences be? If I’m making the resolution to myself, what am I going to do about it?
It would be like:

Myself: Jon, you’re breaking your resolution!
Me: So?
Myself: Good point.

So yeah, no resolutions for me.
I haven’t done much so far this year. I called my mom, watched some TV, took a short nap, watched some more TV, did some more hard drive hygiene and picture organizing, and washed the blanket that my sister Kristy sent me for Christmas.
I washed it because the thing was just crazy with static electricity. It was as though that was what it was actually made of, and if I had checked the label it would have said “100% Static Electricity.”
So I washed it in hopes of making it less shocking and clingy, which seemed to actually do the trick.
I’ve been seeing a minor spike in traffic since yesterday, as a link to my Scarlett Johansson picture post got put up on When Fangirls Attack! I haven’t had that happen in a while.
Note to all the Fangirl readers who have come here: sorry the post/blog isn’t more interesting. Still, I hope you enjoyed your 0-5 second visits.
I didn’t get much sleep last night, as I didn’t get home from Manassas until after 2 AM, and I’d had way too much caffeine. I drifted in and out of consciousness between 4 and 6 AM, then woke up a little after 10 and decided to get up. I’m kind of surprised that the nap I took ended up being so short.
I think last night marked the first time I left the house to do anything on New Year’s Eve since the end of 1999.
Even when I was drinking New Year’s wasn’t really that big of an event for me. I mean, I went out and got drunk, but how was that any different from a standard, run-of-the-mill Tuesday (or Wednesday, or Thursday, or…you get the idea)?
I never bothered with looking for an excuse to drink.
Anyway, despite the fact that I won’t be making any resolutions, there are some things that I’m hoping to accomplish in 2009, though they depend more on how big my tax refund, bonus, and raise turn out to be than on any sort of resolve on my part.
Among the tentative plans: finally doing something about my hideously pink master bathroom, buying a new car, some other projects around the house such as doing something about my increasingly intolerable laundry set up, and actually buying a Wacom Cintiq.
I guess we’ll have to see what the future holds in that regard.

Some Further Thoughts Department:
I had a few more thoughts on the whole “set up” thing that I mentioned in yesterday’s post.
I think that, from now on, whenever I’m told that I’m not being set up with someone, my standard response will be, “Oh, good. So that means I don’t have to shower, put on deodorant, wear clean clothes, or put my teeth in. Thanks for the head’s up!”
After I wrote the post I began wondering what the other side of the conversation is like. Does the person I’m not getting set up with get a similar advance warning about the lack of a set up?
And if that is the case, I wonder what goes through the person’s head when we actually meet? I’m thinking that the words “Thank” and “God” probably pop up in her head.
In any case, I want to mention again that while I throw around terms like “useless” and “utterly useless” in describing my friends’ performance in the area of setting me up with someone, I’m not really making a value judgment. My purpose in doing so is two-fold: 1. To be a snarky smart-ass and 2. To make it clear that I don’t need to be told that I’m not being set up, as there’s been very little of that sort of thing that’s happened in my life, so I have no reason to expect that it will happen in my future.
I have every confidence that if my friends were to find some woman who was suitable for me they would make every effort to ensure that we hooked up, just as I’m sure that if someone found a unicorn or the Fountain of Youth, or something as equally mythical as a woman who is suitable for me – or, more to the point, who I’m suitable for – it would be all over the news.

Too Bad I'm Not Giving Them A Reason To Stick Around

So my eyes were fine today – except for the fact that I have to wear my glasses, which I hate, even though on Friday Nita had said I look good in glasses and should wear them more often – but I know better than to try wearing the lenses again any time soon.
It was a pretty uneventful day for the most part. Not that many people asked me if I watched “the game,” which surprised me, and none of the people who did ask seemed especially offended/shocked that I hadn’t, which surprised me even more.
Usually when I tell people that I have zero interest in sports of any kind they look at me like I have a third arm growing out of my forehead.
I can’t help it; sports bore the living shit out of me and they pretty much always have.
The biggest event of the day was a conference call that I had to facilitate. I guess it went well. It’s a weekly call, so I have it to look forward to on every Monday.
The first time I was on the call Nita ran it as a sort of last official act before passing the torch on to me, and then we didn’t have it on the following Monday because it was MLK day.
Last week I was at urgent care for my eyes during the scheduled time, so I’d had to cancel it.
Though I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, today I checked out some of the more noteworthy commercials. Meh. There was nothing that really blew me away, though the Iron Man trailer did look pretty cool.
So did the trailer for Wanted. Honestly, it looks like it might be halfway decent, but I don’t know if I can bring myself to see it given how far it appears to stray from the source material. The producers very clearly and deliberately chose to distance the movie from its comic book roots, which is a pity, and is also annoying.
And it’s also a shame, given the tremendous opportunity they had to skewer the genre of comic book movies and turn them on their head in the way that the comic skewered the super-hero genre and turned it on its head.
But oh well.
When I got home and settled in I fired up the DVR to watch some shows that I’d recorded last night, only to discover that nothing had actually recorded.
I also noted that the DVR itself was acting kind of flaky. For example, if I hit the “Replay” button, rather than jumping back 10 seconds the way it’s supposed to, it would jump all the way back to the beginning of the show that was currently on. If I then hit “Skip,” it would jump ahead 30 seconds the way it’s supposed to, but would never jump past that point, and of course, if this followed on the heels of hitting “Replay,” it was skipping only 30 seconds from the beginning of the show. If I went back to watching live TV and then hit “Skip” again it would jump back to the point 30 seconds after the beginning of the current show.
I did a power cycle on the DVR and things seemed to go back to normal. Hopefully it will successfully record the shows I have it set to record tonight.
My entry on Spider-Girl has generated me some more traffic from When Fangirls Attack!
I like seeing the traffic, even though no one sticks around or comes back, but I kind of wish that I were writing something more canny and insightful about the issue of gender in comics that would make it more worthwhile for them to link to me.
But, again, oh well.
Speaking of comic book movies that won’t live up to the source material and attacking fangirls, I followed a link on When Fangirls Attack! to a blog post by writer Brad Meltzer, which features an interview with the lovely and talented Carla Gugino in which she discusses her role as Sally Jupiter in the Watchmen movie.
Check it out here.
And that’s pretty much al the excitement for today.

Fangirls Can Relax; I Wouldn't Be Able To Fit A Woman In This Refrigerator

I decided that I would use the gift card my mom gave me for Christmas, along with the one she gave me for my housewarming, to buy a mini refrigerator for my office, as that’s where I spend most of my time, and it would spare me the trouble of having to go down to the kitchen to get something cold to drink when I wake up in the middle of the night with my mouth feeling like the Gobi desert.
I wasn’t 100% sure that I’d be able to fit it in my car, though, so I enlisted Kathleen to go shopping with me, as it would definitely fit in hers.



I also needed to pick up some new clothes, as the dress code at the new job isn’t quite as casual as it was at AOL. I grabbed a couple of pairs of Dockers, but I could only find one shirt that I liked:



Okay, no, that’s not the shirt I bought. The box for the refrigerator was ripped open on the bottom, and when I was taking it out of the box I found this shirt stuffed in the freezer. Evidently someone at Wal-Mart felt the need to stash it.
Anyone out there need a size 5T Halloween-themed shirt?
The cashier at the lane we went through caused Kathleen and I to give each other a few “WTF?” looks, as he was this extremely talkative – and utterly gay – male version of a southern belle. Luckily he chose to direct his gregariousness at the woman behind me when I got to him.
After that we stopped at Ruby Tuesday for lunch, where I used the gift card my sister Kim had given me for my housewarming.
While we were there the recruiter from my new job called to inform me that I should be getting an e-mail with a user name and password for the “onboarding” process sometime this afternoon. So far all I’ve gotten is an e-mail from her addressed to someone named Scott telling him to get his drug test ASAP that she CCed me on. I’d be happy to oblige, but a) I’m not Scott and b) I don’t know where I’m supposed to go for the drug test (presumably that information will be part of the onboarding process).
And that’s been my day so far.
Yesterday, thanks to the When Fangirls Attack! link Threshold set a new record for number of returning visits, as many people who had followed the last link returned via the new link. I won’t tell you the number, as you don’t really need to know how depressingly few return visits I actually get.
(The title of this post, by the way, is a comic geek in-joke that I really don’t feel like explaining, but you can go here if you want to learn more.)

We're Boned

I've been getting a lot of traffic from When Fangirls Attack! again, as there was a link posted to my Batman Night post, mostly, I'm assuming, due to my pictures (and accompanying captions) of my Black Canary statuette.
This inspired me to watch one of my favorite episodes of Justice League Unlimited, a Black Canary-centric episode entitled Grudge Match.
The basic premise of the episode is that Lex Luthor's team of villains, the Secret Society, has found a way to use Justice League comm links as mind control devices and is using them to make various female League members fight each other in an arena, making a tidy profit off of bets placed on the outcome of the matches.
The Huntress tumbles onto the scheme, and manages to free Black Canary from their control. The two heroines are promplty caught and thrown into the arena. Not to fight each other, but to instead fight two other powerful female Leaguers, Hawkgirl and Vixen. They manage to shake Vixen and Hawkgirl free of the control, but they're not out of the woods yet, as Roulette, the villainess behind the arena scheme, has an ace up her sleeve:



Vixen appears to be a woman after my own heart - I would say the exact same thing to Hawkgirl ("Keep her busy so I can take her from behind!").
My perviness aside, what I love most about this episode is when the four Leaguers see who they're up against and shrink back in the realization that they're boned.
(I also love an earlier scene in which Huntress is watching Canary, who is off her game due to the fact that, unbeknownst to her, when she's supposed to be sleeping she's actually off wailing on her teammates in the arena, is getting creamed by some thug she's trying to take down. Huntress steps in and takes him out with a garbage can lid. As Canary is securing him, Huntress asks, "What did he do, anyway?" Canary quietly replies, "He stole a wallet." Huntress' response is perfect. "Shut up! You got creamed by a pickpocket?")
The more observant among you may note the number of voices provided by actresses who appeared in some of Joss Whedon's projects, such as Angel's Amy Acker, who provides the voice of the Huntress.
You'll also note that Black Canary is lacking her trademark - and difficult to animate - fishnets.