The Movie of My Life...

...will be going straight to DVD.

SCENE: KITCHEN. JASON, a 30-year-old partially employed blogger who no longer lives with his Mom, thank you very much, takes a pinch of white tea leaves and puts them in a tea strainer. CUT TO:

DAYDREAM. Jason is in STASH, a tea seller, standing in line with his friend, KATE. There is a customer ahead of them.

CUSTOMER: “Any special instructions on how to brew it?”

STASH EMPLOYEE: “I guess. Make the water between 185-215 degrees. Don't brew it for more than 2 minutes.”

JASON: “Actually, what matters most is the water temperature. White tea is like a vegetable, and you don't want to overcook it. You can brew it longer than two minutes, whatever tastes good.”

EMPLOYEE: [snotty]: “What are you, some kind of International Tea expert?"

JASON: “Actually, I am an International Tea expert. Gustav von Glanvotten, at your service.” [bows, rolling hand forward] “Although I have a funny name...[face becomes stern] there is nothing funny about tea!”

SFX: Beep. Beep. CUT TO:

KITCHEN. The toaster oven beeps. Jason takes pita bread out, pours hot water into cup, and carries food to table.

At this point, I left my snack and went upstairs to scribble down my silly daydream before I forgot it. When I finished 10 minutes later, my tea was cool and bitter. Brewed it for too long. If only I were Gustav van Glanvotten.

Mmmm

On the fridge in a client's house was a promotional notepad from Harris Teeter. The top of each sheet of brown paper was labeled "Shopping List" and had three items preprinted below, with a checkbox next to each one:

Milk
Bread
Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef

Then there were lines below it to write in your own items. Which didn't make sense to me. What else do you need from the grocery store besides milk, bread, and Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef? Toilet paper? No way. The only thing your digestive system is going to poop out after a juicy, mouth-watering slab of Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef is a thank you note.

These three items are the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria of good taste, and they just landed on Deliciousness Rock. If there is going to be a fourth item, it should be More Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef, with the checkbox already checked.

Yabba Dabba Do

My window fell a few days ago, devolving back a technological age in the process. The front grate cracked, leaving a gap where one could insert a small object, like a pair of scissors.

This is useful as now the fan won't start on its own. I have to insert a small object in the gap, like a pair of scissors, and push a fan blade to the right to get it going. It takes about a half-dozen whacks on average to jump start the fan. It was fun the first few times. I even put a record on the pterodactyl to celebrate.

Now it's annoying. I wish my "WeatherWorks" brand fan was in its original condition. "WhetherWorks?" is not the whimsical adventure the name implies.

I have other items and gadgets that are in the gray zone for a poor person: broke enough to frustrate, not enough to replace. The MP3 player that I need to wrap the headphone cord around the body in a certain way to get sound to play in both ears. My 1994 Toyota Corolla that rattles increasingly loud when it comes to a stop. (I noticed it right after my MP3 player started acting up).

It can be exciting to pretend that I'm in an episode of Mission Impossible where a long red light can spell the doom for my car, and perhaps the life of innocent cars around me. My workarounds for objects in disrepair make me feel manly and smart too at first. "I'm not going to let an empty black ink cartridge stop me from printing. That's why brown is a font color in Microsoft Word."

But when these small inconveniences grow from a few to a dozen, I find myself getting frustrated, perhaps because I view my jury-rigged surroundings as a metaphor for the frustrations in my life. I feel like a broken person who's missing a few parts. I see my friends in careers, getting married, buying houses, pursuing their dreams, and can't help thinking, "What's wrong with me?"

Well, I wasn't expecting that to come out. Oh well. It is what it is. Yabba Dabba Do. Next post: why I find Tiffany soooooooo annoying!

I Know It's Wrong To Admire Him...

...but I can't help it.

Armless man eludes police in high-speed car chase

The story is even better than the headline. Not only is this guy, Michael Wiley, driving around with no arms and escaping the cops, he is a mean son-of-a-bitch. He has been arrested before drug and abuse charges, and has had his driver's license revoked. Armless doesn't cover it. He doesn't even have two legs. One of them was damaged in the electrical accident that made him armless. You know why he spent time in jail in 1996?

He kicked a state trooper.

An able-bodied person attacking a police officer is wrong. But when an armless, one-legged man kicks a cop, maybe he has a legitimate beef with the police. If you lose three out of four appendages, whatever you do with the fourth appendage becomes real important. Priority 1. This guy isn't patting his head and rubbing his belly at the same time. He's making choices.

That must have been embarrassing for the kicked trooper. How did the officer not see it coming? Wiley has one leg. His hand-to-hand combat options are limited. He's either hopping away or taking a stand. You don't even need to figure out which leg he is going to use. Cover your crotch and watch for arm bites. Not too complicated.

What I like about this story is that is about a disabled person who is absolutely, completely anti-inspirational. It's not about challenges that the mundane activities of life pose for the disabled. Wiley isn't fulfilling a dream of hopping up Mt. Kilimanjaro or grooming rescue dogs with a comb attachment for his big toe.

It's about a mean, probably horrible man with no obvious redeeming qualities who, when faced with a long, uphill battle to overcome his disability and use the challenge as motivation for life, said: "Screw it. I'm racing cops." It's a type of disabled person never promoted in the media, and I'm glad to have heard of him. Even positive stereotypes gets in the way of viewing people as individuals, and not just as a member of a group.

I'm Afraid To Do the Junior Jumble

It's called "The Jumble" now, but let's not fool ourselves. It's still the Junior Jumble. Right below the crossword puzzle. A mentally-challenged siren calling to me. "I'm easy! Come on. Pick up a crayon."

My ego holds me back. What if we can't finish it? "Of course we can finish it. We can complete a solid 25, 30% of the crossword puzzle now. Mostly without Google."

What if it takes more than 2 minutes? "Hey, remember what we said about comparing ourselves to others? Anyway, it won't. It's the Jumble. Sometimes they don't even bother to scramble the words. It's like, "You sit on this: CAHIR."

We're going to bumble.
"We won't bumble the Jumble."

I wonder if this is how my Dad thought about my Nintendo twenty years ago.

We're going to embarass ourselves.
"Come on, it's only two butons."

Yucky Week So Far

• Basement flooded Sun. morning. Spent a few hours calling people to get the messed cleaned up.
• Ordered a new monitor online. It came in yesterday! With a huge crack in it.
• Found a charge on my credit card for a service (EFax) that I thought I cancelled months ago. It's my fault. When I wrote, "I would like to cancel my service" I forgot to include the four exclamation points + threat of bodily harm at the end (see user agreement, Section 11: "But what if I really want to cancel? Seriously. I want to cancel. Please. For the love of God.").
• Diarrhea Dog. Who then put her paws on my shirt. Then rolled over for a belly rub on her poop-crusted belly. Oh, I'll get right on that, Maggie. Right after I carry the tray in your crate out the door like a waiter in The Worst Restaurant Ever.
  
• (minor) One would that it would be unnecessary to write two 500-word emails to my property in a still-ongoing attempt to convince her that when she calls a contractor to come over to the house, it would be a good idea to let us know, instead of expect the contractor to do it. Which he didn't.
  

Why I Shouldn't Be Allowed To Dress Myself

I just realized I was wearing my button-down shirt inside out the entire day. I don't blame anyone for not pointing it out. If I saw an unshaven man who smelled like he didn't shower that morning and was wearing his shirt inside out, I'd avoid him too.

Well, It *Was* Cloudy Today

It's 6:24 p.m. I'm watching Seinfeld with my roommate. Our screen door opens.

ME: "Are you expecting anyone?"
ROOMMATE: "Nope."

We wait for a knock. Instead, the mail slot opens and the mail plops on the floor. We hear the footsteps of the mailman scurrying away and we burst out laughing.

Easily the highlight of my day. If I were a mailman, I'd deliver the mail after 8:00 p.m. at least once a month, just to make people laugh. I'd alphabetize people's mail too on occasion, just to give them the frustrating sense of noticing something is odd not being able to figure out what it is.

...

A car behind me honked as I was driving up a steep hill. Nice try, buddy. If you think I'm accelerating to 15 mph with these gas prices, you're crazy!

The Day is Young

So far, I went on a walk, ate breakfast, lunch, read the paper, cleaned my room, washed two loads of laundry, had a mid-afternoon snack and chatted with a friend. I'm not sure what I'm making for dinner. I'll see how I feel in fifteen minutes. I was surprised there weren't a lot of birds out during my early morning walk today. Here's one of the photos I took.

Not Enough Time

My alarm didn't go off today. I just woke up. I am still in shock. I would have preferred to have slept an extra twelve hours and wake up bright and early at 7 a.m. tomorrow. Before I saw the time, I looked outside my window and thought, "Gee, that's a weird sunrise." This is really depressing.

Makes me feel like going back to bed.

To Do

Note to self: Dye blue underwear...bluer.

Anyone Need a Wig?

I trimmed my body hair today, quashing Sasquatch, Deconstructing Harry, and giving my two albino nipples the gift of light. I also shaved my back hair using the beard trimmer on my electric razor. Do you know where those spots on your back are that you can’t scratch? I do. For $5 I’ll take a photo and send you the road map. For $7 I won’t send the photo. (Bada-bing!)

The benefits were immediate. No more towel burns from drying off. I now run faster than the lowly cheetah. And I finally found that tattoo I got one very blurry night in Ocean City when I was a freshman in college. It’s a good thing monkeys wearing diapers that say “Bad Boy” on them never go out of style.

More Frightening Than Freddie Krueger

My roommate entered the bathroom right after I took a dump. It was like a horror movie. I swiveled around in the chair in my room as he grabbed the doorknob. "Noooooooooo!" I yelled, my vocal chords undulating in slow motion. But it was too late. The door cracked open and the putrid spirits of the Netherbowl flew out, spiraling down the staircase like a drill and scaring away dust balls, Freon, and the faint smell of socks.

Dream

I'm calling in my dream chip today, the once-a-season chip I give myself for a self-indulgent post about my dreams, an infinitely interesting subject to myself, and a likely infinitely uninteresting subject to everyone else.

Have you ever waken up form a dream, and then after something freaky happened realized you were still in a dream? That happened to me five times in succession this morning. It was like entering parallel Universes of my life where the main events were the same but the details varied. The programs on my computer were different. A telemarketer called in two of the dreams and offered me a job (different job in each dream). In the second dream, he asked, "Did I talk to you before?" And, among other themes, I kept on waking up late for an appointment I had that day, albeit at different times in each dream.

Each time I "woke up", I caught on quicker that I was still dreaming, at which point I would try to get out of it. Nothing I did worked. In the last dream, I was almost hysterical. I pleaded with my sister Michele to help me get out. She said, "Don't worry, just listen to this record." "What is the record supposed to do?" "Don't worry. Just listen to it." She put on a record by Belle and Sebastian. After a few seconds, I got drowsy and closed my eyes. When I tried to open my eyes again, I had to force them open, and when I did, I was finally awake.

Death and, uh, what's the other one?

I finished my taxes today. I was going to wait until 11:59 P.M., strap a tape recorder playing “Mission Impossible” to the chest of my black jumpsuit, and throw a few smoke bombs as I burst through the Post Office window and past the line of stupefied civvies. But I decided to forgo the excitement this year and mail it early (4:30 P.M.).

Best unexpected good news this week: I found out yesterday that I don’t have to file my taxes in Virginia until May 1. See ya in 15 days, suckas!

My Exciting Dream World

I realized it was time to clip my toenails when last night I had a dream about clipping my toenails.

The Zen of Repair

My phone and DSL are back up. The phone repair guy came this morning, right after our water stopped working. I was hoping he was a Renaissance man and could flip his hat inside-out to the plumbing side, but he was a specialist. Everybody is a specialist nowadays.

Compared to my roommates, I have been inversely affected by our house troubles. I'm at home most of the day, so I was going crazy without the phone or Internet. My roommates have cell phones and Internet connection at work and school. On the other hand, I don't have to shower.

Perhaps I'll call the maintenance office to get our water fixed. Or perhaps I'll play computer games for the next few days. Who can tell what will happen in this crazy world?

Exclusive Shower Update!

Still hasn't happened. I'm entering the dangerous part of the day where my brain is saying, "Look, there are only 7 more hours left in the day. Is wasting 1/21 of your day worth it for the other 20/21? Is it...NAZI?" (My brain hits below the belt, which happens to be where my other brain is located).

Bonus points if you can figure out how long my showers take.