I read on Neil Gaiman’s blog that there were 1,400 people in line for the signing on Saturday. At 5:00 as the Festival was coming to an end, he got up from the booth and went down the line quickly scrawling a signature for the hundred or so people still waiting.
Besides the fact that he’s an amazing writer, that sort of thing is the reason he has so many fans. I mean, the guy signed books for over four hours…with a fractured finger.
If I had ever managed to become a successful writer, you can be sure I wouldn’t have been so considerate of my fans. Not because of ingratitude or hostility towards them, but simply because of laziness.
On the way home from work today I got stuck behind someone driving a Subaru Legacy with some sort of big metal contraption affixed to the back of it. Apparently it was a bike rack, but it looked like the kind of thing the A-Team would attach to a vehicle as part of the armor-plating process.
The other day I was thinking, “I haven’t made lasagna in a long time.”
I found this surprising because 1. I like lasagna 2. It’s easy to make and 3. With the multiple cans of Baroni’s spaghetti sauce that my mom bought me for my birthday, it’s possible for me to make real lasagna.
Lacking the Baroni’s, I’ve used other store-bought sauces, and it’s been fine, but it’s not what I grew up with.
In any case, I decided that lasagna would be good for the next Riff Trax night with Scott, so tonight I prepared it with the intention of baking it tomorrow night.
After finishing up and putting the lasagna away, I said, “That’s fine for tomorrow, but what am I going to eat tonight?”
I opened the freezer and considered my options, finally deciding on some kind of microwaveable TV dinner thing.
Afterwards my stomach was complaining, as it often does when I eat that sort of thing, that it wasn’t enough. I told it, “Oh, shut up; that was plenty, and it was sufficiently food-like. Just be thankful it wasn’t corndogs again.”
Ah, my life; it never ceases to be amazing.
Wait, not amazing. Inane and boring. My life never ceases to be inane and boring.
Showing posts with label inanity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inanity. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Friday, December 14, 2007
On Bitching And Moaning Or My Dark Reflection
I don’t mean to complain too much about my job. After all, it’ll pay the bills, and it’s certainly better than a kick in the ass.
It actually pays slightly more than AOL did (about $.68 an hour), which means it’s decent money.
Having no benefits also means having less money taken out of each check, though the fact that I will have no pre-tax deductions will mean having more income to be taxed, so I’m not sure how that’ll work out.
My manager seems like a nice enough guy (he sounds kind of like Bill Paxton).
Ultimately, I suppose it’s not really that crappy, it’s just that as I sat there yesterday I soon came to realize that I just don’t want to do that kind of work anymore.
Part of that realization is due to the tantalizing prospect of a much more interesting job that’s been dangling in front of me for a while, but even before the layoff I was growing increasingly discontent with the nature of my job, and it was really only my complacency and my reluctance to give up my three day workweek that was keeping me there, so in one way, so while getting laid off was the aforementioned kick in the ass, in some ways a kick in the ass was what I needed.
Not that the kick did me any good, given where I landed after it sent me hurtling through the air.
Yesterday, as I looked at myself in a mirror, I realized for the first time that my hair is truly and completely gray. There’s not even the barest hint of my original hair color. Just dark gray and pure white.
Despite the fact that the grayness is rather premature, I’m clearly not a young man anymore, yet I still don’t seem to know what I want to be when I grow up.
Even so, the one thing that I am sure of is that I don’t want to work in a NOC. I’m willing to do it, if I have to, but I really, really don’t want to, so I am, perhaps, being unfairly harsh in my evaluation of my new (but not-so new) gig.
One major aspect of what makes it so annoying, though, is one of my fellow new employees, a guy who’s got a good ten years on me and who just grates on my nerves whenever he opens his mouth, which is often.
And by “often” I mean “always.” The inane prattle and pointless questions just keep gushing forth from his mouth like water down Niagara Falls.
But beyond being annoyed by who he is, I’m repulsed by what he is: a middle-aged man who’s bounced from contract job t contract job for most of his career, never developing any firm roots. I suppose that I see in him my own fears about what taking a job like this, at my age, could mean for me. I know that I’ll never become a garrulous, obnoxiously talkative buffoon (not as long as I stay sober, at any rate), but I could become like him in that other regard, and the thought of that is troubling, particularly given that I’ve just recently learned how important things like security and at least some amount of certainty are to me.
Still, the point is that, while I’m not promising anything, I’ll try to curb my desire to bitch and moan about how much I hate my job.
It actually pays slightly more than AOL did (about $.68 an hour), which means it’s decent money.
Having no benefits also means having less money taken out of each check, though the fact that I will have no pre-tax deductions will mean having more income to be taxed, so I’m not sure how that’ll work out.
My manager seems like a nice enough guy (he sounds kind of like Bill Paxton).
Ultimately, I suppose it’s not really that crappy, it’s just that as I sat there yesterday I soon came to realize that I just don’t want to do that kind of work anymore.
Part of that realization is due to the tantalizing prospect of a much more interesting job that’s been dangling in front of me for a while, but even before the layoff I was growing increasingly discontent with the nature of my job, and it was really only my complacency and my reluctance to give up my three day workweek that was keeping me there, so in one way, so while getting laid off was the aforementioned kick in the ass, in some ways a kick in the ass was what I needed.
Not that the kick did me any good, given where I landed after it sent me hurtling through the air.
Yesterday, as I looked at myself in a mirror, I realized for the first time that my hair is truly and completely gray. There’s not even the barest hint of my original hair color. Just dark gray and pure white.
Despite the fact that the grayness is rather premature, I’m clearly not a young man anymore, yet I still don’t seem to know what I want to be when I grow up.
Even so, the one thing that I am sure of is that I don’t want to work in a NOC. I’m willing to do it, if I have to, but I really, really don’t want to, so I am, perhaps, being unfairly harsh in my evaluation of my new (but not-so new) gig.
One major aspect of what makes it so annoying, though, is one of my fellow new employees, a guy who’s got a good ten years on me and who just grates on my nerves whenever he opens his mouth, which is often.
And by “often” I mean “always.” The inane prattle and pointless questions just keep gushing forth from his mouth like water down Niagara Falls.
But beyond being annoyed by who he is, I’m repulsed by what he is: a middle-aged man who’s bounced from contract job t contract job for most of his career, never developing any firm roots. I suppose that I see in him my own fears about what taking a job like this, at my age, could mean for me. I know that I’ll never become a garrulous, obnoxiously talkative buffoon (not as long as I stay sober, at any rate), but I could become like him in that other regard, and the thought of that is troubling, particularly given that I’ve just recently learned how important things like security and at least some amount of certainty are to me.
Still, the point is that, while I’m not promising anything, I’ll try to curb my desire to bitch and moan about how much I hate my job.
Friday, January 05, 2007
Inter Egg Dumb
I'm not sure how or why, but two people on the other side of the room got into a lengthy and retarded discussion about the word "interregnum" and how to spell it. For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers, generally, to a period during which a throne is vacant between rulers, such as kings, or even popes.
So, for example, the period between the death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI was an interregnum.
One famous interregnum in England from 1649 to 1660 saw the formation of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell after the regicide of Charles I. In many ways his event substantially led to the formation of the United States of America as the Puritans who had been running the show soon found themselves going from persecutor to persecuted, a role reversal they didn't much care for.
In any case, to move away from your vocabulary and history lessons for the day and back to my random complaining about the inanity of the level of discourse here at work, Jackass A thought that, when Jackass B brought it up, the word had something to do with eggs and ended with "dom," so when Jackass B challenged him to spell it, he came up with "intereggdom."
Even once he came to understand that it didn't end in "dom," he clung to the notion that it involved eggs, and all successive attempts at spelling the word revolved around that misapprehension.
Eventually Jackass A remembered that we work for a company that's part of that whole "Internet thing" and decided to look it up, which, of course, led to another lenghy discussion about how sorely mistaken he had been.
This is what my days are like.
So, for example, the period between the death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI was an interregnum.
One famous interregnum in England from 1649 to 1660 saw the formation of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell after the regicide of Charles I. In many ways his event substantially led to the formation of the United States of America as the Puritans who had been running the show soon found themselves going from persecutor to persecuted, a role reversal they didn't much care for.
In any case, to move away from your vocabulary and history lessons for the day and back to my random complaining about the inanity of the level of discourse here at work, Jackass A thought that, when Jackass B brought it up, the word had something to do with eggs and ended with "dom," so when Jackass B challenged him to spell it, he came up with "intereggdom."
Even once he came to understand that it didn't end in "dom," he clung to the notion that it involved eggs, and all successive attempts at spelling the word revolved around that misapprehension.
Eventually Jackass A remembered that we work for a company that's part of that whole "Internet thing" and decided to look it up, which, of course, led to another lenghy discussion about how sorely mistaken he had been.
This is what my days are like.
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