Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Future's so bright...


I've decided that it's high time that the world took notice of just how awesome I am. Seriously. Have you met me? Were you not amazed? Remember? You had to put on sunglasses you were so dazzled.

The question remains: why isn't the world yet paying me my deserved attention? This, this, readers, surely baffles you all as well. After all, you've been reading these gems faithfully these almost two years. Sure I didn't update for over eight months that time. But even then, you sat, fixed in your seat, punching F5 every few minutes, waiting for the page to reload and then clicking the 'Reload' function on your internet browser's toolbar because you were certain your Function key had stopped working properly and then sighing disconsolately when you saw that I had indeed not yet updated.

I'll tell you readers, the answer to the question: I don't know. I've already done so much. I remember getting all 'E's in grade school. I was the star second baseman and goalie for my little league sports teams. I turned in all of my assignments in on time in Junior High and surely stood out in High School when I scored 3s, 4s, and 5s on my Advanced Placement tests. I even won an award or two in high school. No I don't remember what they were for. It was high school. I was probably stoned. And then! After High School! College! Yes! I graduated college! Is that not exceptional? And still the universe paid me no attention. Sure, I went to a school with 35,000+ students, but don't they remember me? Hi! It's me! Remember, I worked at two video stores while earning my degree in Film Studies! Remember...?

The truth is, readers, I'm about as ordinary as you can get. I'm not tall. I'm not short. I'm not fat. I'm not thin. I'm smarter than some and dumber than others. I have an OK job and it pays the bills.

Look, I don't mean to get so heavy on you guys. I'm all right, I promise. I just wish that I could point at something and say, "Look. That was me. I did that." And I don't have that.

What I do have makes me happier than most though. I have a loving family. A loving family-in-law, and a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful and yet again wonderful fiancée. And maybe that's all that matters.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

9,335...9,336...


So I'm now sporting the oh-so-fabulous Omron pedometer at all times during the day. Or at least whenever I heave my gargantuan bulk out of my straining office chair. You see, at the behest of my physician, I need to wear this fashion accessory when moving so that she knows that I'm not lying when I say that I actually don't just stuff donuts down my face all day. I know that my blood pressure and cholesterol may be telling her something else, but seriously! I'm all of 170 lbs.! Granted, I'm only 3' 6", but c'mon, that's normal, right?

Apparently she thinks that I spill out over my seat like a Hutt.

Anyway, according to the documentation that came with the piece of shit, one should be taking 10,000 steps during the day in order to stay fit and healthy. I asked my doc if drinking beer and eating bean burritos while walking still counted, but she didn't answer. She was laughing, so maybe she thought I was joking. I didn't want to press her for an answer though, so I'll just assume that it still counts.

I know you're dying to hear how many steps I've taken, so I'll tell you.

Yesterday: 5,172 (but I only started wearing it at 12:30 PM!)

Today: 9,334 (but, like, 3,500 of those were done on an elliptical and I was going all fast-like, so they count for double, obviously)

Hey! Maybe this will be my new blog thing! With each update, I'll post how many steps I've taken that day! Won't that be fun? No? Well. You're probably right. I wouldn't find that fun. I'll think of something though. Fear not.

What song I'm listening to when writing the post? No...

Lastly, I want it to be known that I will try to post pictures from my road trip in my next post, but I make no promises. Working with Hello™ and Blogger™ to upload pictures is a real pain in the ass. But I will suffer for you. Maybe.

Saturday, May 14, 2005

It's not that I have anything against those crazy cat ladies (and Laurie, if you're reading this, since I've never met you, I have no earthly right to call you crazy, but you do post about your cats a lot and your URL has 'crazy' in it, but I promise I don't mean it in a bad way; I love your cats and you're one funny lady!) but the thought of dedicating a post to the subject of my cat is somewhat... unsettling to me. However, that feeling is apparently not strong enough to prevent me from posting the following:

I have what is perhaps the greatest cat ever created.

There. I'll let that sink in. OK. Are you ready to proceed? Don't be angry. Don't look scornfully at your own cat and ask him/her why he/she couldn't be the greatest cat ever created. It's not his/her fault. It just wasn't in the cards. On the other hand, perhaps you doubt my assertion. Let your skepticism subside before continuing. I know that your cat is special. All cats are special. Really. I'm sure you must be very proud of your dumpy-looking cat. All right, are we ready to move on? Good.

On initially meeting my cat, she will seem perhaps not that extraordinary. She's an American Shorthair tabby (my God, I actually know what breed she is! Do you see what posting about your cat does to you?!). She's not exceptionally fat or exceptionally skinny. She's not overly-affectionate nor overly-aloof. She's not overly-vocal, but she's not afraid to speak her mind. She's also not super-psycho as cats are wont to be. Now I bet a lot of you are wondering just what it is about my cat that makes her The Greatest Cat Ever Created and I'll tell you.

It's her precise balance of all cat attributes that makes her so special. What cat do you know that's a complete balance of all cat behavior? Usually, there's a defining characteristic to a cat so that when you think of the cat you think, "Ah yes, that's Timothy, he's the crazy/lazy/fat/meow-y one." With Bailey (that's my cat's name), you're stuck for a single adjective, you'll start your introduction to her and you'll get to "Ah yes, that's Bailey," and then you'll pause. You'll try out how various adjectives fit with your own mental evaluation of the cat, but none will work properly. You might even begin sweating a little at this point. The pressure will build as your brain scans through all adjectives with increasing speed and anxiety. You'll reach the end of your adjective collection and still you'll be a blank. You'll think to yourself, "I must have simply passed over the correct adjective," so you'll start going through the pool again - this time in alphabetical order. At this point the person to whom you introducing the cat will begin shifting uncomfortably in the long silence that has developed.

Cycle through those adjectives as many times as you'd like, pal. You'll still come up empty and you'll be forced to shake your head in puzzlement and mild shock. Take a seat. You're not the first to fail at describing my cat in a single word.

That's what makes her so spectacular. She's the perfect balance of all cat features. She's warm and fuzzy and purrs when she's happy. She can be frustratingly aloof when you want her attention. She meows at you when you get home and she sleeps by your feet at night. She'll work her way into strange places in your cupboards and she'll stare intensely at blank spots on the wall seemingly expecting them to move suddenly.

So now we come to why I'm posting about my cat (I can't believe I've written more about my cat in this post then I wrote about my fiancée in my last post). Her favorite activity is sitting on her cat tree and staring out the glass patio door at the birds and squirrels. This can be quite amusing. You see, we happen to live in a wooded sort of apartment complex and there's a lot of interesting animals to capture my cat's attention. When she sees an animal that she finds particularly interesting, she makes this strange chirping noise. The intensity of her gaze coupled with the chirping never ceases to make us (my fiancée and me) giggle. This is what my cat looks like and what I imagine she thinks when a squirrel climbs down to our veranda:

Posted by Hello

As you can see in this picture, my cat is intent on actually getting to and devouring the squirrel that's out on the balcony. The squirrel is of course well aware that my cat is watching it and takes great enjoyment in my cat's muffled war chirps because it also knows that there's a panel of 1/4-inch thick glass between it and my cat. Because it knows this, it scampers about on our porch quite leisurely. I think I even saw it make a rude gesture at Bailey once, which caused poor Bailey to leap from her cat tree into the glass door in an attempt to wipe that smug little grin off that rodent's face.

For those of you who don't know what Bailey looks like from the front, this is her:



Posted by Hello

Here, she's waiting rather impatiently for me to put the fucking camera down so she can get a goddamn drink of water over here, Dad! She refuses to drink from her water bowl, so the only way for us to keep her hydrated is to let her drink from either the faucet in the bathroom sink or the faucet in the bathtub.

And at this point, I’d just like to admit the fact that I too am a crazy cat lady. I may not have the uterus, but I’m definitely one in spirit.

I need to go love on The Greatest Cat Ever Created now. Please excuse me.

Monday, May 09, 2005

Wedding preparations are under way.

The, uhh, fiancée and I are going to check out The Hastings House this weekend. For shits and giggles, I think we're going to check out The Ritz-Carlton too, but I can tell you right now, they're going to laugh me out of that place when I roll up in The 1997, 4-door, 98 horsepower, manual everything, Geo Prizm (mine's white for further emasculation [although that light, sparkly bronze is pretty bad]). How's that?! I just used a bracketed expression inside a parenthetical expression! The grammar gods are going to torture me for an eternity, I just know it.

Anyway, what I want to say is that I love being engaged and I think that I'm really going to like being married. I like seeing Jen's ring on her finger. I like thinking about the years we have ahead. I'm excited about having children and pets and a house and a life together.

In previous relationships, I hated having to compromise, but I really don't feel that way with Jen. I mean of course there are times when I want my way, but it usually works out that those are times that Jen is willing to compromise. It works the same the other way around though, too. Jen will want something a certain way or will want to go do something that I don't really don't want to do, but I realize that doing it will make her happy and that I don't feel that strongly against it, so I compromise. Typically, I end up being fine doing whatever it was I was against doing in the first place anyway.

Maybe my success with this relationship is the result of growing up, but I think that growing up is really the result of being in a relationship that I want to make work. I can't see myself without Jen. For those of you out there that think that our relationship is really easy, let me tell you somethin'. We met when we were 20 years old. Do you think that's an easy thing to deal with when you're 20? Knowing that you want to be with that other person for the rest of your life? I sure wasn't ready to meet my future wife at 20. I had run halfway around the world to give myself some time to work out who I was and what I was doing and that's where I met Jen. Talk about a kick in the head. It took a while for me to get accustomed to the fact that I needed to be ready for anything and that I couldn't be the selfish prick that we all had come to know and love. But I guess that's just what you do.

Anyway, that's my thought for the day.

...

Confession: sometimes, when I'm writing this late at night, I feel a little like Doogie at the end of an episode, when he's writing in his computer diary. Good times, good times.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Because I'm a slave to my demanding readers, I have decided to post some pictures of my and my fiancée's recent excursion South of The Border. Behold and weep!


As you can see, Jen is terribly excited that I'm taking her picture prior to her having her coffee. It is roughly 9:00 AM at this point and we have been up for nearly five hours. Posted by Hello


This is our first night in Puerto Vallarta. I'm drinking something, but I honestly can't tell you what it is. I probably couldn't have told you what it was at the time either. Posted by Hello


I uh... I don't really know what's going on here. Posted by Hello


This was the view outside our hotel room. They're hard to see, but that tree right there, it has coconuts on it. Rad, no? Posted by Hello


We took a little boat ride to this fishing town called Yelapa on Tuesday. The town is only accessible by boat. And that's not smoke sent up as a warning or anything. That's fog. At least, I think it is. Posted by Hello


This is the remains of a waterfall somewhere in the hills over Yelapa. According to our Indian guide "Tony," the waterfall is so small because the white devils that come to the area are killing the spirit of the forest with their wasteful ways. At least that's what I think he said. I was kinda busy with throwing all the trash out of my bag into the pool below the fall. Posted by Hello


This is Jen eating some pie she bought from the pie lady on the beach at Yelapa. There was a pie lady at the beach. Buying a piece of pie from the pie lady is totally worth the price of the vacation in and of itself. However, this slice of apple pie only cost us $0.025. Actually, it might be a little bit more. I forget how many spaces over I was supposed to move the decimal point. Posted by Hello


This is "Old Vallarta" (that's Spanish for Old Vallarta). Those little hut looking things are called Palapas. We spent nearly every day of our vacation laying under one of those things and reading. Straight out of a Corona commercial I'm tellin' you. Posted by Hello

Thus concludes our journey. Please exercise caution when opening the overhead bins as contents may have shifted during the flight.

Sunday, May 01, 2005

Aaah to be back on American soil. Not that Puerto Vallarta is all that foreign. We stayed at a resort hotel there and it seemed a lot like camp. With bellboys. And a swim-up bar. So I guess it's not really like camp at all.

We had a lovely time there. We were surprised and somewhat encouraged by the fact that over half of the guests at our hotel were Mexican. We don't particularly wish to spend our vacation time with inebriated, sun burnt, obnoxious Americans, so the presence of that many inebriated, sun burnt, less-obnoxious Mexicans was a source of comfort.

Before I go any further, I want to come right out and say that I did not eat the worm. I know I'm a disappointment to you all. Maybe next time.

In other news: the Giants have won four straight.