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#5348 – not a robot

tuesday was errand day.

originally i took the second half of the day off so i could go to work in the morning and then go to my doctor’s appointment in the afternoon, but when my car gave me an error message on friday on my way home from work, i figured i might as well just get the car checked out by GEICO’s insurance adjuster and bring the car to my dealer so i could get the scheduled maintenance taken care of and the body work done all at once. it turned out that the error message was just a warning that my brake pads were pretty much worn out and needed replacing, but there was also an open recall on my car for the water pump that they could fix as well. you might remember that i had stopped at the dealership a few months ago to see about getting the scheduled maintenance taken care of, but since it was a bit pricey i figured i’d hold off until i could get the cash together. i ended up springing for the extended maintenance package (this maintenance would have cost about $1100-1200, and i’m only 8000 miles away from my next maintenance), so my car is now covered until i reach 100k or 6 years. considering i’ve had it for about 2 1/2 years already and 45,000 miles, yeah, that’s going to come in handy.

since my car was going to be in the shop for about a week, GEICO had me set up with a rental from enterprise. i have to say you can’t make renting a car a glamorous task, but it was nice to have a cute girl pick me up to take me to the enterprise office to get the car. it’s a chrysler 200, but originally when the dealership called enterprise to have them come get me enterprise only had a pickup truck available, and considering even just this car feels like a boat compared to my MINI, i don’t know how i would have handled driving a pickup truck for a week. 😛

so, car was dropped off at the dealership, maintenance scheduled, rental car acquired. i drove back to the dealership to fill out some other paperwork for the body shop to let them go to work on my car. the GEICO adjuster quoted about $500 less than the MINI body shop did, but they didn’t include a new windshield (apparently they’re not always able to take them out and put them back in one piece all the time, so perhaps it was just estimating the worst-case scenario, but they had also spotted a small chip in my windshield as well).

i picked up some stuff at mom and dad’s. very random collection of stuff: a round table i had from IKEA, a golf putter, my running shoes, some small bottles of rum i bought in the virgin islands, replacement air filters and brushes for my roomba, and my wii balance board.

and then i went to the doctor’s office…

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#5347 – tales of the unexpected shipping pallets

woah, so the past few weeks have been CRAZY. all sorts of weird and fun and unexpected stuff has been happening!

when festive lost her job at the beginning of the month i took her out drinking, and since she lives not too far away from my office (maybe about 10 minutes or so), she crashed at my place and i drove her back home the next morning. we didn’t count on a truck out delivering kitchen appliances to suddenly have a SHIPPING PALLET catch the wind and pop up like a jack-in-the-box from the center of the truck’s flatbed, hit the roof of my car while i was driving next to the truck, slide across my sunroof, and leave a dent on the back of my roof. it all sounds much worse than it actually is – the biggest damage was the dent, and that’s about the diameter of a quarter, but rather shallow – but it’s still crazy. i drove next to the truck to try to get the driver’s attention but i don’t think he noticed me at all. michelle was able to get the truck’s license plate, and when we got off at the exit for her place we were able to see the company’s details on the side of the truck. when i got to work that morning i placed my auto insurance claim and later that day GEICO called me back to discuss my options – they recommended getting a police report, and so after work i went to the state police barrack (and the officer didn’t seem too pleased that i didn’t think of calling it in when it happened that morning… i can’t help it, i wasn’t thinking straight because i was just attacked by a shipping pallet and was on my way to work!) where they took my report and gave me the insurance information for the delivery company. since then i’ve had my car’s repairs appraised by the collision center at my MINI dealership (funny thing, too, receiving an email with their current promotions the day before this happened!), the other insurance company has had their claims adjuster look at my car and quote an estimate about $900 less than what the MINI collision center estimated, and the other insurance company has denied my claim categorizing it as “road hazard”. i called GEICO back today about that so they’re going to see what they can do to fight the other insurance company about it, but at least if i have to file a claim with GEICO myself at least it’s only a $50 deductible for me.

i met the producer of the “girl with the dragon tattoo” films at an event at the swedish embassy. apparently he produced both the swedish movie trilogy, as well as the american version of the film, and apparently the original plan (this is common in sweden) was to film the first as a feature film, and then the other two as made-for-tv films, but it was so popular they decided to make all three feature films. they did a question and answer session with him after his presentation and i had the opportunity to ask how the planned tv versions differed from the feature films they ended up making: the budget for the first film was only about $5 million as well, and the budget for the made-for-tv versions was only $2 million each… in comparison, the american film’s hollywood budget is about $90 million dollars. it sounded like they actually filmed a substantial bit of the tv versions as well. so, i can cross “have an international film producer answer a question of mine” off my imaginary bucket-list.

i helped to fund the hi-definition version of “manos – hands of fate”… my name’s going to be on the final version as a sponsor, hahaha.

clary, the photography intern with metro collective (the photojournalists i help out) sent me a message online about a week ago how for her birthday she’d like it if i came to her get-together at this bar in dc. i ended up at the bar for about an hour before she and her friends showed up, but when the ratio of cute girls that just walked in the door to glenns is 5:1 you won’t get much complaining out of me that you were running late, haha. besides, i had a nice little chat with the bartender (i’m starting to think that every female bartender in dc is very attractive, and they get only more attractive as you drink :P). anyway, i got clary’s number and we were saying how we need to hang out more often since we were getting along so well. she actually called me at lunch today to ask me some questions about photographing / videotaping roller derby since she knew i’d done that as a project before (a group she’s in for one of her classes is going to use that for a group project with the dc roller girls) and said how she flickr-stalked my roller derby photos and complimented me on my work. she called me back this evening to talk about it some more, and we might be doing karaoke with some of her friends this weekend. awesome. 🙂

i went to an event for fashion bloggers called “cocktails, fancy skirts & fitted shirts”… apparently the dc fashion blogger scene tends to have a lack of guys at events, and so to encourage the boyfriends and husbands of the female fashion bloggers they put on this event at a shirtmaker in dc called “hugh & crye”. i had heard about hugh & crye some months ago and how they basically make shirts that are easy to fit on athletically-built guys, and since this event was free (i had heard about the event from someone retweeting it on twitter) i figured why not go. it was a little hard to find, and once i got there it was hard to figure out who worked there and who didn’t since there were just a lot of people mingling around and drinking beer from a heineken mini-keg, but once i saw where people were going to try on shirts i grabbed a shirt i was interested in and headed back. turns out they don’t even have changing rooms as their store is more of a showroom attached to a storeroom (most of their sales are mail-order; when i bought my shirt they didn’t even have registers or anything, i had to use a laptop they had to create an online account and place my order for “in-store pickup” even though i was in the store and already wearing the shirt i was going to take home, haha). there were some pretty fashionable-looking people there… i’m going to have to step up my game if i want to look good in this town, and not look like a guy wandering around wearing a barrel with suspenders. i think the next time i go to one of these events i should bring my camera like some of these people did.

this past saturday, bruno_boy and his girlfriend’s friend jae and i went to another one of these board game meetups at a public library in northern virginia. we played settlers of catan ourselves, and then some other people joined us for a bit of monopoly before we had to call it quits and go to dave’s girlfriend’s place for a party. there were about 20 or so people there in her efficiency apartment, the party was pot-luck style (i brought homemade donuts), and we all played rock band. i’m still not sure if there’s anything happening between me and jae (don’t get me wrong, we had a fun time playing board games and chatting and all that), but i’m just taking things easy.

valentine’s day was ok. i made some more homemade donuts and brought them home to mom and dad; we had dinner, watched another episode of “jeeves & wooster”, and i cuddled with the cats and ate hershey kisses. not a bad way to spend the evening! one of my coworkers got engaged on valentine’s day – some of my coworkers who are close friends with her knew the news already and were really excited for her when she arrived a bit later than usual today. she said how she had been up late and drank too much wine so “don’t expect too much” from her, so later i joked with whammywah that after hearing her say that i was trying to see if she seemed to be walking funny, bahahaha. 😛

i got a postcard in the mail from dc today saying how the ticket i got for removing the inspection sticker from my car was dismissed, so hooray, that’s $50 i won’t have to pay!

i just did my taxes tonight: i owe federal, but i get back ALL of my maryland income tax withheld (if you live in maryland for 183+ days you’re considered a maryland resident, and i moved out of the state after living in maryland for only 180 days, so for income tax purposes i was a nonresident. and, since i live in dc – or if i lived in pennsylvania or virginia – i’m exempt from all my maryland tax withheld unlike nonresidents who live in other states), and i get back a little from dc as well. altogether i come out ahead about $1,700! methinks i might use that to get myself a new laptop a bit earlier than i planned!

my throat’s been bothering me today, and i’ve just felt this general slight illness for the past week or two. it’s not enough to bother calling out of work for since even if i just stay home it won’t make me feel any better, but it’s just enough to make me feel miserable with sneezing and coughing and runny noses and so on and so forth. i originally was going to go to the arlington cinema drafthouse tonight for their comedy film bucket list showing of “fletch”, but i figured that since it’s been a few days since i’ve really stayed in and had a nice, quiet evening, i might as well stay in tonight, and then when clary called me this afternoon to say she wanted to talk with me this evening, that settled it. so, quiet evening in, good chat on the phone, $1700 richer, not a bad night. now to get ready for bed so i can get a good night’s rest, hopefully i’ll feel better tomorrow.

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#5346 – geeks & depression is my testicular cancer

for the past few months i’ve been lurking on an email list for hacDC, a local hackerspace where geeks can work on pet projects and so on. a few weeks ago i saw an email go out about how person in particular had suffered from depression, and figuring that other geeks might want to meet up sometime to share their experiences, he organized a meetup group to do so. i saw the original post go out, but i didn’t go for some reason or another. i completely forgot all about the group until i saw a reminder about the second event scheduled to take place today, and considering i felt in a really down mood this morning i thought i might as well attend.

yesterday evening spelchec and festive and i went out to tryst, a coffeeshop / café in dc, and when we returned to my apartment bruno_boy came on up and we were all looking at possible places for me to hang up different pieces of art that i have. i already had that one sketch by dan hung up on my wall, but i had a few other prints and posters and such that i wasn’t sure where best to hang. so, we explored some possibilities.

this morning while i was getting ready for work, i was thinking about all the art i have that i can hang up, and i thought about how the portraits of cynicalscribe and myself that i had commissioned from paigeyiscrazey was all framed up nice and i really like how it turned out, but then it occurred to me that i’ll probably never really get a chance to hang it up on display since seeing it on a regular basis would probably bum me out too much. perfect – i hadn’t even been awake for 30 minutes this morning and already i was feeling miserable.

so for the first few hours at work i felt really crappy. and, while i had nothing to do with either of these, i saw on twitter how one of my friends broke up with her boyfriend yesterday so now she was all emotional, and then later i saw one of my roller derby friends change her status on lj from “married” to “it’s complicated” (which got a few concerned messages from a few other roller girls before the post was removed, so who knows what that was all about). so that all wasn’t making my mood any better either.

(also, at lunch i saw carolyn hax’s column in today’s washington post, and thought that was kind of coincidental, too, heh!)

then i saw the reminder about the geeks & depression meetup for this evening and figured i might as well go. it wasn’t just for people who had a diagnosis of depression; the actual description is: “We’re geeks. We do strange and interesting things with technology for fun as well as for profit. We also get depressed to varying degrees from time to time, and sometimes it becomes a lot to bear. In the past year we lost a few of our friends and colleagues to depression, but it doesn’t have to be this way. You’re not alone – none of us are. The purpose of this meetup is to help one another through the rough times and enjoy the good times. If you’re a geek of some kind and have or are prone to depression then we would love to have you.” while some of the attendees had significant bouts of depression and were/are being medicated for it, there was also discussion of (attempted) suicide, or therapy, and so on.

we met up at a restaurant in rockville and there were only 5 of us there (including me). when everyone else gave their background i said how i was probably going to be the black sheep of the group since i’ve never been diagnosed or anything but sometimes i still find myself sometimes struggling to various degrees over a year after my split, but also how someone i knew committed suicide several months ago (one of the guys i knew in my dc metro MINIs car club), and so i thought it would be helpful for me to have a new group of people i could talk to for a fresh perspective, but also to get to understand depression more since i wasn’t very familiar. overall it was an interesting meeting; the other attendees commiserated over types of medication they could or couldn’t take, insurance difficulties, blood work, MRIs and behavioral therapy, and so on with other stuff that even if you weren’t diagnosed with depression (like me), it was still interesting to learn about these things from other geeks.

while i didn’t talk that much, i probably did most of the talking all at once when they asked me questions and i went into more detail about why i was there and how i’ve been feeling, and it felt good to talk about how i felt with people i hadn’t talked to before and who didn’t know the details.

so, my life is now even more fight club-esque as i visit support groups that i probably don’t even need to visit. when i first arrived about 45 minutes early, i wandered around the barnes and noble next door to the restaurant, and i flipped through the latest copy of MAKE magazine. how convenient that it has an article on how to make your own soap!

next meeting is at the end of february. i may or may not go since i might have something else scheduled that same day, but it’s nice to know that people can form support groups like this for those who need them.

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#5345 – there's something to remember

hi livejournal, long time no post with a post of substance.

let’s see, since my last post i went to another showing of the comedy film bucket list at the arlington cinema drafthouse to see “blazing saddles”, met up with some of my local buddies who i met at the NASA tweetup in florida and we all went out for jumbo slice (pizza slices as big as a medium-sized pizza), learned how to play “settlers of catan”, met up again with my space buddies for a sort of happy-hour event and visited a “spinny bar”, went out with bruno_boy and his girlfriend and her friend jae to a board-game party and then a lego-building birthday party for a friend of theirs where we ran into our friends marc and leah who we hadn’t seen in years, picked up some housewares and i’m just starting to get my apartment walls decorated, got a chance to try hopslam, went to a navy hockey game, and then yesterday took photos at the ccrg bout.

i hadn’t seen “blazing saddles” before, so that’s one more new movie for my goal of 300 new movies in 2012. so far i’m up to… 18 movies, which means if i keep watching films at this pace i’ll only see 227 films by year’s end. “only” 227. (on a side note, if anybody wants an invite to letterboxd, let me know as i’ve got a few to give away.)

i had met the girl who planned the jumbo slice excursion at the “endless barbecue” party where all of the space enthusiasts were welcome:

the party itself was held at chris’ house (on the left), and he and sarah (middle) used to work on the shuttle program. now sarah works up this way at the goddard space flight center, and she had told some of her coworkers about her group of space enthusiast friends up here and they wanted to meet up, so we went to the original jumbo slice over in adams morgan. i’d never had jumbo slice before, but i knew of it. one of sarah’s coworkers had never heard of it and she suggested to him that he might want to share a slice. here, use the soda bottles in the picture for scale for the size of the slice:

we mocked sarah’s coworker for working at NASA yet not knowing what the voyager space program was (seriously, how can you work at NASA and NOT even have an idea of what voyager was?!), and after discussing the tv show “the big bang theory” we decided that he was obviously penny. he hadn’t seen tBBT so he had no idea what we were talking about either, heh. after “penny” left (and good riddance, as we couldn’t stand him) we wandered around the national mall and visited the lincoln memorial and checked out the cracks from the earthquake in the washington monument.

a few days later we had a “DC drinkup” event in crystal city where a few of our group from the jumbo slice excursion met up for dinner and drinks (no “penny”, thank goodness), and afterwards i went with two others to the doubletree hotel to visit the “skydome lounge” on top, a spinny bar with a great view of the city. apparently it’s the only spinny bar east of the mississippi? at least, that’s what i heard. we originally planned to go there for karaoke, but apparently that stopped a few years ago. the view was nice, though the drinks were a bit overpriced ($7 for a mocktail?!). apparently they have a cover charge on friday and saturdays, too, but during the week it’s a nice, unique place to visit.

dave’s girlfriend’s friend jae (the one who i met at the new year’s party) had found out about a (weekly? i’m not sure how often it takes place) board game party, so dave taught me how to play “settlers of catan” so i’d be prepared, and the four of us rode with jae to this library branch in northern virginia where the board game social was taking place in their activity room. we played a game of catan and started on a game of carcasonne before we had to pack up. and, if you needed a reason to be nice to people you’d been on dates before, this was a perfect example: it turned out that the girl erica that i had gone on a few dates before was at this party. i thought i saw her doppelgänger when i was at the theater to see “blazing saddles” and mentioned that to her on facebook, and when i walked in the activity room at the library and thought i recognized her again i wasn’t sure if i was just seeing someone again who looked a lot like her, but then i saw she had a nametag on that said “erica” so then i was really wasn’t sure if it was her or not, and later she came over to say hi. i don’t know if she works there or not (she works in libraries, and she seemed to know what to do for tearing down the room).

after the party we went over to a birthday party – one of tija’s and jae’s friends apparently has his birthday right around christmas, so he and his wife celebrate his birthday about a month later in january. he had also received a giant (and i mean GIANT) LEGO firehouse for his birthday from his siblings, so they were having a party to assemble the firehouse and to hang out. it was funny at this party because shortly after we arrived i heard a knocking at the door and announced that someone was at the door, figuring i couldn’t answer it since i wouldn’t know who it was, and then in walk our friends marc (a high school buddy of dave and me) and his wife leah who we hadn’t seen in a year or three. i spent much of the night just sitting and chatting with people and eating LEGO-shaped cookies and other baked goods.

after the party jae and i took dave and tija to downtown silver spring so they could go to see adam carolla put on a show and then jae took me back to my place. we made small talk on the way back about traffic and movies and so on. i felt a little awkward because earlier tija and dave had taken up a collection for gas money for jae, but i don’t often carry cash nowadays, and when we arrived at my place i thought about inviting her out to do something sometime but i couldn’t really think of anything appropriate. i wouldn’t mind seeing her again, i don’t think, but it’s awkward. for someone who doesn’t like beer, is allergic to caffeine, and has who knows what other restrictions on her diet (the downside of searching for people on google when you meet them? finding them featured in an article about IBS. :P), it makes it awkward to try asking her out for a drink.

a few days later i was out to dinner with dave so i could try some hopslam and since he and tija were kind of trying to set me and jae up together, i told him that while it’d be nice if something worked out, i’m not holding my breath or counting on anything. we’ll just see what happens.

i’m trying to figure out where to hang up some of my pictures and prints in my apartment. i can’t put holes in the walls, but i’ve got these 3M adhesive hanging strips that work well. the hard part is just trying to figure out where i want to hang things and to keep the apartment from feeling smaller once i start putting things up on the walls. so far i’ve just got one piece of artwork up, a sketch of me sleeping that zenmetsu drew when i took at nap on a couch at his place about 10 years ago, and that’s hanging up in my bedroom:

i made a super-high-resolution scan of it a few years ago in case anything ever happened to it so i can get a replacement print, but i think it’s perfect for my bedroom. now to figure out what else to hang up where.

i registered for the marine corps “irish sprint 10K” on st. patrick’s day. i need to get my training on! i haven’t been out running in what feels like ages, and yesterday i only just fixed my bicycle so that it uses nuts and bolts to secure my seat post instead of a quick-release lever, so while i’m not as paranoid now about someone stealing my bike seat i should take my bike out more often. i found out the other day that someone was robbed by 3 people around 6:30 at night on the trail where i did all my training runs: apparently he handed over all his possessions when confronted, but then without provocation they punched him in the mouth, and shot at him (the bullet grazed his hip) when he ran away. just fantastic!

friday night i went back home for the night and mom and dad and anne and i went to a navy hockey game. we’ll go to maybe one or two games a year, they’re inexpensive, and it’s a fun time. plus, you can stand right behind the goals and next to the ice for up-close in-your-face hockey action:

navy clobbered the other team, 6 to 2.

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speaking of games played on rinks, yesterday i went to take photos at the charm city roller girls’ bout. i’m a little disappointed now, after taking photos of derby bouts for 5 years, this was the first time that i was asked to sign a photo waiver. it’s not as bad as other photo waivers i’ve had to sign for other leagues (i wouldn’t be surprised if some of the other ones basically give the league rights to the photos the photographer takes), but it still left me a little disappointed. too much “officialness” in roller derby nowadays. fans don’t even get bout programs for free anymore, there’s a full-color season program that they’d have to pay $8 for. whattt!! i was chatting with dirty marty the announcer at one part and we were reminiscing about old venues and afterparty locations and so on. i figured that at least i’d be able to shoot my photos from the center of the track again like i did last bout, but even the kibosh was put on that, mostly for safety issues, and i talked with bianca dunk, one of the refs, and she said that it might be able to come back at some time and they’ll see what they can do for me.

so, instead of my usual spot over by turn 1, or my new favorite spot in the center of the track, i hung out over by the announcer’s table by turn 4 and took photos from there. i probably got some good pictures, but i’m probably not going to be happy with the results.

here’s how you know that dj hollowboy tim is a great dj, and he doesn’t even know how great he is: at one point i realized i was looking at cynicalscribe‘s new boyfriend (first time i’ve had a good look at him, and while we’re both thin and tall and wear glasses and have brown hair, in my not so humble opinion i’m better-looking than he is! and i’d say that even if he wasn’t her boyfriend, so it’s not entirely sour grapes. so there!), and after the original nervous “ironside” klaxon moment i hear in my head whenever i see my rival i had to chuckle because i realized that without knowing it, tim had just started to play “beat it” by michael jackson. i didn’t start any knife fights, though!

both bouts were exciting: lots of lead changes in the first bout between the junkyard dolls and the night terrors, and the mobtown mods and speed regime bout had a tremendous second-half with the regime coming from behind to tie up and win in the final jam.

after the bout and floor breakdown i talked with carrie and caught up for a little while to see how her new job was coming along and how her family was doing and how her christmas vacation was. i said that it must have been her new boy i saw earlier and she said yeah, and how they’d been going out for the past several months. i said i’d be lying if i said i wasn’t jealous, and she replied how she hasn’t been trying to put it out there, and i said that was appreciated. she asked me if i’d been having any luck with the ladies and i said no, how i went on a few dates but that was about it, how i felt that nothing’s really worked out. i’m doing much better with my emotions about it now than i was months or a year ago, but right now i’m somewhere between disappointed and frustrated. we went to the afterparty for a brief moment, but between it being late, carrie being exhausted, me having to drive back to dc, and the new afterparty venue being full of bros, we pretty much just stopped in to say hi to a few people and then left. since i enjoy just talking with her i told her not to be a stranger, but i don’t know if/when we’d really have an opportunity to hang out (unless she has the day off of work one day and we get lunch since she lives near my office). it was nice chatting with her though, if i didn’t remind myself, it felt almost like old times.

i’m not even that sad about things now, but after a long drive home in the dark, by myself, with different thoughts running through my head, i started wondering if some of this is all me sabotaging myself somehow… not just with relationships, but with other things too, like my professional work-life:

  • am i too nice? sometimes i feel like i shouldn’t bother with some people as much as i do for how much they do the same for me.
  • am i too clingy? i always want to feel wanted and appreciated, maybe too much.
  • are my standards too high? am i being unrealistic? maybe i’m just too picky.

after a late night chat with one of the people i met at the tweetup at NASA HQ i was feeling a bit better about things. i keep thinking that things could be better, and as much as i enjoyed being with carrie, there were times where i felt that things could be better. also, i’ve been using that relationship as a standard for other relationships, and i don’t give others the chance to measure up when i don’t think they will. i also don’t apply to certain jobs that might suit me when i don’t think i’d work well with that company. (see: glenn is too picky.) i look for and post to other jobs, and though i haven’t had any luck yet, i almost don’t know how to start over fresh in a new work environment. (see: glenn is too clingy.) etc., etc.

basically, after that late-night chatting, i came to the conclusion that i need to give others more of a chance and i need to stop letting so many things bring me down (bruce!). it’s just tough when you so badly want things to work out and they don’t, or you have great credentials (3.40 GPA! a master’s degree!) that don’t seem to help you at all. anyway, it’s something for me to remember for the future and to keep in mind.

after those late-night tweets i had a weird dream. there was some desert canyon park that i was hiking through, and different people showed up at different times while i was hiking: bruno_boy, sk8bette, lissylulu and venusglitz, jazzometer to name a few. there were a lot of ‘x’s on the map, but i had no idea what they meant, and the map’s legend made no sense whatsoever. i don’t remember all that happened in the canyon, but at one point near the end i was about to go into an airport, and i saw carrie and her family marching up single-file as part of some tour group, everyone in her family wearing a shirt or a dress that was all the same shade of pink. instead of going in to the airport i acted like i was with their group and said “isn’t it funny, they have us all assigned to go through the pink line,” as an excuse to go in their line even though i was wearing a black shirt. once inside i showed carrie and her family where the bathrooms were, and while her parents and her brother and sister visited the restrooms we talked about a webcomic we were working on that she was drawing and i was writing, trying to figure out how frequently we needed to publish the comic so we wouldn’t fall behind. at one point she said out of nowhere “i didn’t need to read those tweet tweet tweet, i took it pretty hard” and i was confused, but then when i woke up and thought about what i posted on twitter just before bed i felt pretty bad for putting things out in the open like i did. i can’t even say that i was drunk when i posted those and use that as an excuse! 😛

and wow, it took longer than i thought it’d take to write that whole thing. almost 2 hours! now to jump in the shower and find something to eat and something to do.

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#5344 – curse of the phara-'uh-oh's

i fell asleep on the couch for the past few hours and just had a dream (or a series of dreams) that were very indiana jones-esque:

there were some parts of the dream before this, but i don’t really remember them as well.

if i were indiana jones, then bruno_boy was my marcus brodie. dave and spelchec and festive and i went to some meeting of a russian culture club, and i saw a sign that gave details on how to make a “russian phosphorous computer”. i asked dave what a “russian phosphorous computer” was or what it did, and apparently it was just a black box with a porthole where you could see different fluorescent blobs float around, as if it were a lava lamp. i said “that’s pointless, there’s only one reason to have a russian phosphorous computer: to drink!”, which is precisely what you shouldn’t say in the middle of the russian culture club’s meeting filled with ex-KGB agents.

the room got silent, and a big russian guy came over and sang some song in russian, but kept pushing me hard from behind into the shelf of this museum display, bruising my chest and ribs. after he did that for a bit then he was satisfied and left us alone. i started to check out the museum display, and as i tried to make sense of it michelle kept following me around chewing gum with her mouth open and pissing me off (i can’t stand it when people chew with their mouth open) until i snapped at her to quit chewing with her mouth open. she said “ok, i have a wooden disc that i keep just for times like this”… apparently she’d put the wooden disc in her mouth to keep from chewing with her mouth open? i was confused, but it let me get back to studying the display.

the display was all about the russian guy who beat me up and his escape from the soviet union. it was in very poor english, but it was interesting and entertaining. it had a segment at the beginning about him now, with descriptions painted on. somehow it would update itself to show his current state because there was a section that said “my current favorite person: glenn fitzpatrick”, and then had five stars after my name. then again, it could be that’s why he didn’t kill me when i made jokes about the russian phosphorous computer. it also said something like “i am: very good boy”

the display then it started with a segment about how/why he went from russia to china. “then i went: to china; i was: very bad boy;” somehow from this display i got the impression that he went to china as a panda. as i went down the display, it had different documents about how he was basically forced to be a spy, how he was afraid growing up of the russian military, etc., etc. i tried to take photos of the display, but i kept having trouble with my camera. i tried using my iphone to take photos, but that wasn’t working for me either – at one point i tried to use a panoramic app to try to take sequential photos of the display and stitch them together, but when i opened the app its support feature opened and i ended up having a video chat with the old man who developed it about why it wasn’t working. 😛

then for some reason i was at home, but my family lived inside some giant egyptian-themed thing. at some point i had been cursed, and these giant sarcophagi would float after me, and i felt like i was being constricted all over and had trouble breathing. i just remember looking at some artifact in the basement with my sister anne, and then there was some earthquake or something that started a cave-in, so we ran upstairs and the earthquake stopped. a sarcophagus started following me and i tried to run away, and as i ran up this ramp to the next floor up i tripped and the sarcophagus closed in on me, but other family members ran up and it disappeared. then i saw what seemed to be a silhouette of a cobra go into one of the bedrooms, so we ran to see if we could get it but everything that we thought that might have been a cobra turned out to be something totally benign, meaning it was probably still loose in the room somewhere. one of our cats started to paw as something (whatever it was, it wasn’t the cobra), and anne started to cry because her bedroom was in the area where the snake disappeared, and then i woke up.

and now i should be in bed, but i’m wide awake! great. 😛