Hey, gang. As I said before, I've moved off of lj but for those of you too lazy >cough< marcee >cough<, I've added a feed that you can put right on your friends page: a_paper_napkin. So there.

Haven't posted since June. There've been several reasons, but mostly it's that I've grown to dislike LJ as a journalling/blogging tool. So I've moved to a new blog:

[ Click Me ]

If any of you stringently object to looking at anything other than your friends page, let me know and I'll set up an LJ rss feed. But I'd rather not. :-)

LJ ate a long, insightful post I'd just written. I don't have the wherewithal to rewrite it, so I'll leave you with pieces of the whole:

List of links:
Winesburg, Ohio
Gestalt psychology
Spoon River Anthology
Lockjaw
Cognitive Behavoir Therapy

List of names of "people" who've sent me spam recently:

Christi Newsome, Pamela Kendall, Francis Hobson, Jeanne Maddox, Herbert Trotter, Ben Fletcher, Bennett Magee, Angela Hamlin, Brian Orr, Beverly Delarosa, Rodolfo Pope

The interview went pretty well. They want me to come back next week to meet the team I would be managing, as well as the managers who would be my immediate peers.

The director said he's going to make a decision on the 14th and let the other two viable candidates and I know.

Let me just say it one more time. Fifty mile round trip. Alpha-fucking-retta.

Haven't posted much lately. Don't worry, though. I've been reading and living vicariously through y'all.

Right now I'm sitting in Pedro (finally settled on a name for the jetta) kiling a few minutes before I go for a job interview. I'm sure that I'll be at my best, since I was only able to get an hour's sleep, and spilled coffee on my suit jacket. Nothing else needs to go wrong.

Btw- the fifty mile round trip OTP will have to be factored into any salary negotiations.

Well, here goes nothing...

I don't know what bothers me more. That MBTA will be stopping passengers to check ID and question them about their activities or that the State Police involved in training the transit officers were from F-Troop.

The parents have come and gone... They're still in town, we're hanging out during the day tomorrow, but they're staying in Marietta to be near my uncle who is in the hospital, and they didn't want to face Friday afternoon traffic.

So what was that mysterious paperwork they needed my driver's license number for?
( My parents are crazy. )

So my parents called yesterday to say they'd be here at noon tomorrow. Not exactly a surprise inspection, but close. They have some papers they need me to sign and that they needed my drivers license number for. So today, I will clean.

If any of you truly loved me, you would buy me this. But I fear I am to go through life unloved...

Yesterday is officially "Lost Monday." Somehow the high from the flexeril I took at 4:30a lasted until 8:30p. Now I see why people get hooked on these things. I also can't remember most of the day, which is fine since not much happened. Probably not worth taking up the meatspace in my brain.

Today I got up extra early, 10am, to go to Son's with hockeyrules88 and pierrotlefou. We got there by 11am, which exactly when you want to, as the fried chicken is fresh and hot and they're not out of anything. Afterwards we went to Java Monkey for, um, java. After a few hours good conversation, we wandered down to Jake's for ice cream. Mmmm... It was a culinarytastic day.

Needless to say, after all that I came home and took a nap, from which I just awoke.

I went to bed feeling a little of a headache in the back of my head. Now I've been awoken because it feels like the muscles of my neck and shoulders are trying to pop my head off like a champagne cork. Typical stress headache, except that a) I don't get stress headaches, and b) I don't really have anything to be stressed about. That last bit, part b, is sarcasm for those who missed it. I was lying in bed trying to think of what could possibly be stressing me out and I could feel my neck and shoulders preparing for launch. So I toddled downstairs to hit the medicine chest for a muscle relaxer. I have three prescription bottles, one of which is what I wanted. Unfortunately, the antibiotic one has a name very similar to the muscle relaxers I took when I broke my arm, the first ones I ever took, and I always reach for that first. But tonight I had presence of mind — a mind which feels like it may soon be put into orbit — to check the other two bottles. The third is for acid reflux, which is a stress condition I'm more familiar with.

I was dreaming about politics. We were having a house party, old school kegger, red plastic cups and everything, with all of these political pundits. (Which reminds me that this week on Jeopardy it's pundit week, so set your TiVo...) I was looking for Bill O'Reilly (whose initials I'd realized spelled "BoR" which could be pronounced "bore") because Al Franken had said something funny I wanted him to hear. Unfortunately BoR was so hammered that he'd literally shit his pants. For some reason he was dressed like Parappa the Rapper. Anyway, before anyone would put him in their car to take him home, I had to get him cleaned up. So I sorta dragged him to the bathroom and threw him in the tub and turned on the water. I stepped outside for something, probably a beer, and when I came back people were crowded around him laughing because he was lying in the tub smearing Hershey's Chocolate Syrup all over himself. Ann Coulter thought it was cute and was laughing; Karen Hughes and Rush Limbaugh didn't think it was so funny. It was at that moment that I decided I was going to try to get Ann Coulter drunk and have my way with her.

Sadly this is the point when I woke to find my head parting ways with my body. And this was all before I took any pills. Hmm... pills and politicos... I wonder...


I guess that all that's really left to say is ow. ow. ow. ow.

Now this is a Democrat I can get behind. Drinking, smoking, hanging out in biker bars. I hope he makes the two spot on the ticket.

"Whatever the governor's drinking is on my tab," indeed.

Woke up this morning at the ever so civilized hour of 1:30pm. Went downstairs, looked out on the back porch and saw two squirrels fucking. Now I know who's using all the mojo in this house. Fucking squirrels. Eisenhower was right about them.

Then, terzo59 and I walked down to George's for burgers for lunch, and on the walk home stopped by the bookstore. I picked up The Silent Gondoliers by S. Morgenstern with William Goldman, and King of the City by Michael Moorcock. I finished the former in about an hour, the latter is going to kick my butt. I think it should be read in the rhythm and tonality of open mic. poetry in order to best be understood. It's very impressionistic. I must also say that the old guy working there creeps me out. Maybe it was his soft voice, or the way he wouldn't meet anyone's eyes, or the old '60s erotica piled around him like he was making a fort out of the works of Xaviera Hollander. Brrr...

After some shiftless laying about, terzo59 and I watched the last episode of friends. Yes, we both cried our eyes out, but I promised I wouldn't say anything so please don't tell anyone. Then we went to The Local for dinner (at the utterly appropriate hour of 10:30p.)

And now I am off to bed, to start the whole thing over tomorrow.

Sigh. Sure, say what you like about Michael Moore, but it's about a thousand kinds of wrong that Disney has forbidden distribution of his film Farenheit 9/11. The rationale? "[Moore's agent said that] Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor."

That's right. Don't make the President or his brother mad. Another choice quote:

"It's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle," this [senior Disney executive] said.


Ri-i-i-i-i-ght...

So apparently, Atlanta is the 7th worst city in the US for dating, and Columbia SC has the largest number of lingerie shops per capita. Want to learn more?

Do not click this link. Especially do not scroll down to the second story.

Well, looks like Diebold's electronic voting machines were banned in California. I've railed before about the insecurities with their voting systems, but I had no idea that they had installed uncertified software on their voting machines in violation state law. The uncertified software was used in two elections, including the gubernatorial recall. Particularly affected was the actual vote tabulation program, called GEMS, that is run from each county's election office. Yes, that's right, unbeknownst to California election officials, a company whose president vowed to "win Ohio" for Bush this coming November went and installed new versions of the program that counts the votes. Add to that the fact that due to last minute installations of untested peripheral software, quite a few California voters were actually disenfranchised in the March primary. Sigh.

A dime will get you a dollar Georgia sticks with the Diebold systems. After all, Diebold allegedly did the same thing here for the last Gubernatorial election. You know, the one that saw the first Republican victory in 135 years.

Since I've gotten several e-mailed requests to post a picture of my wounds from this weekend, I thought I'd share my policy with everyone:

The only way I'm showing anyone my wounded hiney is if they're going to kiss it and make it better.



For the unsubtle among you, that translates to if you want to see my bruised bum, you can kiss my ass.

Last night was the MindSpring 10th anniversary party. Much like my high school reunion, but with less snarkiness and more people I wanted to see. I'd forgotten how many people I'd come to know in the last few years, how many smart and interesting people I'd worked with. I can't explain how bad the sensory overload was, though. There were two very large rooms. One was very hot and the other was cooler but had the band playing so you couldn't hear. Add to that nearly 800 people, many many of whom want to stop you and talk to you. It took me an hour once to move halfway across one room to get a drink. It was so much fun. The high point for me was when, early in the evening, eight of us were called up to the stage to read the company's Core Values and Beliefs, each one accompanied by cheering and hollering from the crowd. Every week, back in the day, we would do that before the weekly company meetings to remind ourselves what made our company different. It's difficult to explain to anyone who wasn't there, but think of it like this. Four years after the end of the company, ten years after it started, eight hundred people who had worked there came from all over the country to be with each other and celebrate. I don't ever expect to find a place like that again, but it would definitely be nice.

---

In other news, I fell down the back stairs yesterday. They were mossy and wet and I had to take the garbage out. My left foot went out from under me and I bumped and slid my way down. I twisted my neck somehow, skint my elbow, jammed my heel into something and busted my toucas. My entire left butt cheek is a single shade of purple. I'm having to lean to one side when I sit because of the ow. But hey, I now know what it's like to have both a pain in the neck and a pain in the ass.

Tonight is Colleen and Melanie's shared birthday party. After this I need a couple of days off. Even sleeping for ten hours today, I'm exhausted.