Some Serious Soul Searching and Salliteration

Why should I write anything in here ever again? According to my reader map, I have a total of three readers (but I know better---there are at least five). One might argue, however, that readership doesn't matter as long as you're being true to yourself and blah blah blah puke. So that's out. And then there's the whole problem of, you know, me being bored with this. The doctors told me it's incurable, the boredom.

Yet why should I write anything in livejournal ever again? Perhaps more people read livejournal, and perhaps it's more convenient to write in livejournal, and perhaps more people comment in livejournal and therefore give me a reason for existence, but for some reason it's less fulfilling. The way any food but carrots is less fulfilling to bunny rabbits. Writing in livejournal is like holding myself to a sub-par standard. At least it's easy.

So I have resolved. All meaningful communication between me and the world-at-large will now be distributed through random emails. From this point on, if you wish to read something substantial I have to say (substantial along the lines of "Love is like a rock..." not substantial like serious ideology) beyond maybe a few turds per month in this toilet, get me your email address. I will try not to disappoint, but, you know. It's what I do.

A Stern Warning of Things To Come

My apartment now has electricity, internet, and phone line. I am glad to have electricity, and I am glad to have internet, but I am not glad to have phone line. Because that means that I'll have to use two distinct phones, and that's confusing. I only got it so that I could buzz people in. Thirty-five bucks a month for a buzzer.

Here's my proposed solution: everybody call my land line. I refuse to pay much for a cell phone when I have an incredibly expensive land line. I thought about completely getting rid of my cell phone, but there's no way that would work. So I guess this post was completely pointless. I have no idea what I was talking about.

And so on.

I seriously totally forgot that I had this thing until now. Hey me: surprise!

Why Not Do Something Pointless?

I've really done it this time. I signed up for a stupid thing that maps people who read this. So sign up. Cuz it's about the stupidest thing I've ever thought to do.

The map of People Who Read Unspar

Keanu says, "Whoa."

I just made my mouth beep. I don't know how it happened. I was just sitting here, mouth gaping open like a loser, and out came a beep. Not like me saying, "beep," but like a for real beep.

This is today's greatest moment so far.

From Celebrity to Health Insurance Director

Michael Showalter is the new director of the Consumerism group at my company. It's a sad day for comedy. Like when a clown dies.

Aww, McSweeney, you're the best!

This is one of my favorite McSweeney's lists of recent memory.

Things A Koala Would Say

Things I Learn and How I Really Wish I Didn't Learn Them

Did you know that November is National Prematurity Awareness Month? And that November 15th is Prematurity Awareness Day? When I first saw this, I wondered why we would devote a whole month or even a whole day to being aware of adolescence. That's neither important nor interesting. Why can't November be National Elephant Month or something?

Turns out it's actually for premature births, "the number one killer of newborns in the United States." As if it's some kind of assailant. I picture him with a cape and a sinister hat and a diaper. Because he's not mature. I'd draw a picture, but work probably blocked MS Paint because the category "fun and interesting" is filtered.

Oral Fixation

I've unconsciously decided that the only logical place to put my pen when I'm not using it is in my mouth. And I just recently started doubling it up. So I've been sitting around with two pens in my mouth. I got a little creative with it too, lining the pens up in different ways, experimenting with parallel and perpendicular placement. I've done pretty much everything but the Walrus, which is just plain uncomfortable. If only I had a third pen. I'd probably seriously injure myself somehow.

Fact: You can never have too many boxes.

I started packing up my things last night because I'm moving out very soon. It turns out that I have a lot of junk. Comic books I read once and will never read again, some stickers that I never used for bands that I don't remember ever knowing about, and so forth. I also don't have many home decorations, which I find very disconcerting. My walls will be boring. I have a giant oriental fan, a Chemical Brothers poster, and two religious icons. They all rule, but they're all I've got. Gasp. Maybe I'll just start gluing junk to the walls.

Though convention suggests I should be working, my principles assert that I should not be working.

I'm wearing my headset right now so that it looks like I'm working. It's quite possible I'm fooling everyone. I should start talking like I'm talking to someone. That would be hilarious to me and normal to everyone else, a situation which happens not often enough.

Interesting thing about the headset. It's kind of like a conch shell. I can hear the ocean. Only the ocean sounds like static. Now I wish I was at the ocean, but far enough away from it that it sounded like static.

Not so polysyllabic

The urinals are out of order.

What happens when my mind stops.

I have nothing to do. I can think of nothing to do. I've been drinking water intermittently just to fill the time. It fills the time inadequately. Now I'm off to data entry.

But....

O, to be a chocolate man, to dance gaily through the land, and to be all made of chocolate. The people, they would say, "O look, there goes the chocolate man," and I would wave my hand of chocolate and say, "Yes, 'tis I, the chocolate man!" I would live in the forest in a secret chocolate glen with the chocolate fairies among the chocolate flowers, and we would celebrate chocolate and the fact that we were chocolate. Every month on chocolate day we would parade through the town and blow chocolate kisses to the non-chocolate townspeople, and they would smile at us because we were chocolate. O, to be a chocolate man and to be made of chocolate.

The Eau C.

This weekend, following the GRE, I went to Eau Claire to visit my brother. The highlights include...

The most hilarious dinner at Fazoli's. We somehow got on the subject of how porn is made, and Dan, pretending to be a big-shot movie producer criticizing a porn script, said, "This script is crap. The characters--they're always having sex! The plot is practically nonexistent!" I thought he began it by saying "Angie, this script..." which made it even funnier. Cuz who's Angie?

After dinner we took a pack of crayons from the kids section and decided to try and light them cigarettes. We were laughing so hard, we couldn't even hold the crayon up to our faces. Then dan changed the "Reserved Parking" sign to "Reserved Rarking" and then "Reserved Barking" by drawing on it with his crayon.

We totally schooled Fazoli's.

Yum

It smells like barbecue. On the entire floor. Oh man do I want some o' that.

The Future

I wonder if scholars will one day discover all my electronic correspondence and decide to publish it. I've written some pretty fantastic emails in my day, so I imagine the scholars would be impressed, but ought it really be published? What if my emails would end up doing a terrible disservice to mankind? What if I inspire the next Hitler (i.e.-"That magnificent Ben figure sure talked a great deal about Rocktown. Perhaps we should found a town by that name and hurl rocks at everyone from its fearsome walls!")? This is a concern I deal with every day.

The future sure is unpredictable.

New Things Encountered

There are certain things I do not expect to exist. The weary routine of life trains us into believing only a limited set of things are ever available to experience. And then you dial a phone number and hear "Zephyr Song" by Red Hot Chili Peppers instead of that ringing noise.

This has happened to me twice.

If I only heard "Zephyr Song" once when I tried to call someone, I would be relatively unfazed. "This is interesting," I would say to myself, "but not quite worth noting in the annals of history or my blog." But I heard it twice, possibly from two different phone numbers.

It may have been the same phone number, and I just totally spaced on whether or not I had actually called that number before. I am a model employee.

The other day I also heard "Swingtown" while on hold. The only problem was that I only heard the boring synth solo. For once I wanted to stay on hold.

A Boring Sports Post

My two favorite college basketball teams have a combined total of two (2) seniors on their rosters. Kansas has one and Wisconsin has one. Kansas doesn't even have any juniors on their team. Wait, no. Kansas has three seniors. Sorry. That's still a whopping somewhere-around-fifteen underclassmen.

Here's to everyone being younger than me.

The Hilarity of Terrible Things

A coworker of mine recently had a seizure. Frightening, tragic, and so on, of course, but like all tragedies, this one has its humorous upside. The medication she's on to prevent future seizures has weakened her equilibrium and made swiss cheese of her memory. The equilibrium thing isn't that funny; I tend not to laugh when people fall down, and she hasn't fallen down, which is good. The memory thing, though, is great. She occasionally can't remember words for things, like while we were talking, she didn't know the word for the thing that goes over the mattress on your bed ("sheets"), so I got to play a little guessing game. Quite amusing, and not entirely at her expense. She laughed too.

Those of you that know me well, which is pretty much all of you, know that I have an awful memory as well. This made it especially fun for me. There was one point when, in mid-conversation, she totally forgot what she was talking about. I thought she was joking, so I laughed. Then I realized she actually forgot. Between laughter and realization, I of course forgot what we were talking about as well. So we laughed.

You may not think this is funny because you remember stuff. But if you ever become an Alzheimer's patient, I hope that you understand the humor in not being able to remember anything that's happened in the past five minutes.

Life Lesson

Hootie & the Blowfish has been on the verge of delivering me an important message for the past twenty minutes. It begins, "Tiiiiiiiiiime," and since I don't remember the rest of the song, that's all I get. What are you trying to tell me, Hootie? Something about time?

I wonder if people in less mindless jobs interact wih less mindless songs in a less surreal way. I don't think I want to know the answer.

Life Event

You may have heard the rumors, and they are true. I have an apartment. 54th and Nicollet is the location. Excellent area, excellent building, excellent everything. I move in December 1st. And I go shopping at Ikea tonight. This is going to be awesome.

This May Become More Frequent.

How does one spend the fifteen minutes before lunch break? There's not enough time to do work, but there's too much time to do nothing. This may be today's most serious quandary.

Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors

They just blocked facebook from work. Their justification is that it's a "personals and dating" website. How feeble-minded. It's so much more than that.

So that means that this new "blog" is all I have for solace from the chronic pains of my working world. My mind needs an exercise like this because it's not getting much use at all right now. Yesterday, for instance, I felt like I was going to pass out. But that might not have been a brain thing; I'm not sure. Might have been because I didn't eat lunch.

Once, Always.

There was a time when I would write things and people would read them. There was a time when I was incredibly bored and spent hours in front of my computer, recording the most inane things that came to mind. There was a time when my life revolved around a close-knit community of friends and acquaintances, all of whom were more or less confined to the electronic realm. Those times, my friends, have returned.

That is all. For now.