Hopefully This VD Won't Require Antibiotics

So we’ve got VD once again. Here’s hoping that everyone has a wonderful, romantic time, and that no one chokes on engagement rings hidden in champagne glasses, that the unfaithful manage to successfully double (or triple, or quadruple…) book themselves, and that no one thinks that “going to Jared” involves the guy who lost a bunch of weight eating Subway sandwiches.
As for me, it’s been a typical Saturday involving getting up, getting showered and dressed, heading to the comic shop, gassing up the car, and going grocery shopping and failing to get everything I needed because the human obstacle course was just too damned annoying.
Ah, romance…
Speaking of which, so far OK Cupid continues to be a terrible archer. Among its greatest misses have been a transgendered – but still functionally male – woman, a lesbian, a woman who lives more than 70 miles away, despite the fact that I limited the search to within 25, a lesbian, and a bisexual woman who states that potential matches should contact her only if they DO NOT (all caps hers) have a penis.
A blind, retarded, drunk howler monkey would probably be a better shot than OK Cupid.
But at least it’s free…
Yesterday found me spending too much damned time in front of the TV, catching up on the episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report sitting on my DVR, and actually watching some live TV, as last night saw the return of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
That was followed by the new series Dollhouse, which I’ve been kind of ambivalent about, but figured I might as well watch it once my ass was already planted in the recliner.
It was okay, and Eliza Dushku was as hot as always, so I figure I’ll probably give it another shot. It’s not like I have to worry about it being a long-term commitment; it’s a science fiction show on Fox. There’s almost no chance that it’ll survive.
Hell, moving The Sarah Connor Chronicles to Friday nights is essentially Fox moving it to death row, and the miracle that actually led the show to have a second season is bound to run out of steam.
In the promos for Dollhouse they mentioned that it was from “Joss Whedon, Creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Oddly enough, they didn’t add “and that other show that we stuck in a deadly Friday night time slot and then canceled right away.”
After Dollhouse I watched Numb3rs, and then it was time for Battlestar Galactica. I’m patient enough to let it record during Numb3rs so that I can watch it commercial-free, but not patient enough to not watch it immediately afterwards.
The same can’t be said for Heroes, which has been sitting unwatched on my DVR since Monday.
When I got home from my grocery shopping I thought about making some sort of lunch but decided to just eat some yogurt and then take a nap.
During my nap I dreamed that I was going to a party with actress Katherine Heigl, who was, for some reason, driving a very old, rusted, and trash-filled car – with, I think, Jack Black in the backseat – and she was complaining to me that I don’t draw pictures of her nearly as often as she thinks I ought to, and wouldn’t listen when I explained that most of the pictures I have of her are too much of a pain in the ass, involving entirely too much lace and complex transparency.
She kept changing her position on what it meant that we were going to this party together. Sometimes it was as friends, other times it was as something rather more, then it was as friends, but with an unspoken understanding that there was more to it than that, but which we weren’t going to discuss, and then it was just that she was giving me a ride and I’d better keep away from her during the party, but maybe she didn’t really mean it and she wanted me to figure that out on my own and this was all some sort of test.
The whole thing was utterly baffling, and shortly after we arrived at the party I woke up and thought, “That was weird,” and went back to sleep and started dreaming that it was the day after the party and I’d gone back to the house in search of something that I’d lost while I was at the party (I think it was my contact case, though why I’d bring that to a party is beyond me, but it makes about as much sense as anything else in the dreams).
Then I got up, watched Wednesday night’s Law & Order on my DVR, sat around for a while, and started writing this.
For the curious among you, the picture I posted yesterday is a drawing of Starro the Conqueror, an old Justice League of America villain. In fact, if I recall correctly, Starro was the first JLA villain, the one whose efforts to conquer the world brought the heroes together in their first team venture.
(Yep. Just actually looked at the Wikipedia entry.)
I typically don’t have a lot to do on Friday afternoons, so I took the opportunity to quickly draw a picture of Starro on the whiteboard in my cubicle. The whiteboard that other cube-dwellers use to keep track of projects and deadlines and whatnot, but which I decided would be put to better use by having a picture of an obscure (and utterly ridiculous) comic book character drawn on it.
It’s my intention to have Starro say something different every day, and it’s my hope that other people on my floor will join in the fun by writing their own communiqués from the Star Conqueror.
Over the years I’ve actually thought about getting a tattoo of Starro, and there’s a blog post that I’ve been planning to write for a while in which Starro will have a prominent role. So there’s that to – eventually – look forward to, or to dread. Whichever.

It May Not Be A Summer Breeze, But SOMETHING Is Blowing Through The Jasmine In My Mind

Sometime in the afternoon on Thursday it began to snow.
Sort of.
It wasn’t even as substantial as last Sunday’s snowfall which, after several hours, left us with maybe an inch of actual accumulation.
This did not, however, prevent people from turning into panicky monkeys and doing things like knocking down a sign in the median on one part of my route home.
Overall, the panic-stricken nature of other commuters made the drive home an irritating one, so I wasn’t in an especially good mood when I opened the door to my condo and my nostrils were assaulted by the unmistakable smell of rotting chicken blood that was wafting from the wax paper in my garbage can from when I’d taken chicken out of the freezer the other day.
After attending to that and feeding the fish, I went about my usual post-arrival business, then sat down to watch The Simpsons, which is outside of the usual.
However, I’ve decided that rather than going to bed early on Thursday only to fall asleep for about an hour, then wake up and find myself unable to sleep and get up and watch My Name is Earl and The Office, which I’d recorded, then find that I’m still unable to get back to sleep and end up getting, at a maximum, about four hours of sleep as I seem to be doing every Thursday, I would simply stay up later and actually watch the aforementioned shows.
After all, staying up an hour or so later than usual and then, hopefully, sleeping through the rest of the night, would be much better situation than the typical Thursday night scenario.
Naturally Earl and The Office were reruns.
Wondering why I even bother, I popped my pills and went to bed and slept straight through.
There’s probably some sort of lesson there, but damned if I know what it is.
The other day I got an e-mail from Kevin explaining that the second CD he sent was by way of being a joke, and purchasing it allowed him to qualify for free shipping.
I did listen to it a couple of times, though.
I’m not really that big on remixes in general – with American Made Music to Strip By being a notable exception – and given that I was never a fan of most of the originals, it was unlikely that I’d be terribly impressed by these “new” versions.
After all, most remixes, to my ears, sound as though they consist entirely of tacking on a Casio keyboard drum beat. I heard an album of remixes of Sarah McLachlan songs that, despite the presence of Sarah’s vocals, sounded, quite frankly, atrocious, so what chance would songs that I have no love for have with me?
Honestly? A pretty decent one. It’s not something I’m going to listen to regularly, but I have to say that the overall effect of the remixes isn’t quite so artificial and cheesy as I might have expected.
Out of all of the songs on the CD, I’d say that I “liked” the remix of Ventura Highway the most. Of course, I only have the dimmest recollection of most of the songs from hearing them on the radio when I was a kid. The song I know best is Summer Breeze, but that’s only because Type O Negative covered it.
Because of that cover, I can’t hear the original, or even the remixed version, without laughing. After all, the song is a very light, peppy, happy little piece of fluff, but in Type O’s hands it became a very heavy, ponderous, almost sinister piece of goth metal.
(Imagine the line “Sweet days of summer, the jasmine’s in bloom/July is dressed up and playin’ her tune” being sung by Lurch from The Addams Family TV show, and you’ll have an idea of what it is I find so funny.)
In any case, it’s a kind of interesting CD, but, as mentioned, it’s not one that will likely get much play.
I woke up early this morning, said, “No,” then went back to sleep and woke up sometime around 9. I still refused to get up, but I didn’t actually get in much more sleep.
Sometime in between working up the first and second times I had a dream that I was in some kind of rehab, though I’m not entirely certain what it was for. It wasn’t for drinking, or any kind of substance abuse. One thing that I do remember standing out is that someone told me that the problem was that I had given up all of my addictions, and so it was only a matter of time before I snapped and got hooked on something.
As part of my treatment it was suggested that I might do well to pick one of the less immediately destructive addictions back up, such as caffeine or nicotine.
Ideally, to keep myself balanced, I would be encouraged to do both, as they would help to keep me off of booze and whatever else it was that I was now addicted to.
I was walking along a corridor thinking about this suggestion and realizing that pretty much everyone there smoked, and so, on the theory that I was bound to start up again sooner or later, I stepped outside into a cool, winter evening and found myself in a courtyard .
From inside I’d seen that there was a young woman who looked rather a lot like Winona Ryder sitting in the courtyard smoking. I figured that if I was going to hit someone up for a cigarette it might as well be someone cute.
The courtyard had a large fountain in the center. Though the water was turned off for the winter it was still lit up and looked very pretty there in the dark as big flakes of snow drifted slowly down
The girl was sitting on a bench facing the fountain. She’d just lit a cigarette.
I approached her and said, “Apparently it’s in my best interest to start smoking again. Do you think I could…?”
She looked at me, snorted, handed me the cigarette she’d just lit, and said, “Here, take this one. I don’t feel like smoking anymore right now.” She then got up and headed back inside.
The last bit was said in such a way that it was clear that my presence was what had made her lose interest in being outside smoking.
Before opening the door to step inside she said, “Have a nice day.”
After taking a drag and exhaling I said, “Yeah, I’ll do that,” and sat in silence staring at the lit up fountain, oblivious to the cold even though I was dressed in thin hospital clothing.
As I sat there I thought that if I made a comic book about my life in the way that Harvey Pekar does with his, this scene would definitely be included.
From there the inconsistencies of dream logic really began to stand out, and I found myself getting angrier and angrier at how little sense this world I was in made, and I think that’s what caused me to wake up.
After getting up I did the usual nothing until my mother unexpectedly called. I hadn’t expected her to call because I thought she’d still be busy moving today, but apparently they’d gotten her all moved yesterday.
After that it was more nothing, then breakfast/lunch, then some nothing, then a nap and some more weird dreams, and now this.
Time, I think, for a little more nothing.