Yesterday was not the best day I’ve ever had. I wasn’t able to get to the gym because I slept in too much. Not a day ruiner, but definitely disappointing. The day still had plenty of potential for recovery.

Then I had to ruin everything by showing up for work. Yesterday I did something impressive at work. Most days I’m underpaid, but that just wasn’t enough for me on that particular friday afternoon. No, no, NO! On THIS particular friday afternoon, I managed to actually achieve a NET LOSS by showing up for work. Financially speaking, lying on my couch and timing how long I could hold my breath without passing out would have been better than showing up for work.

“Now, Red/Brian,” you might be telling your monitor, “that’s simply just not possible. If you show up for work, they pay you. Bingo, better off than before.” And normally this is the way it works. But that’s when you don’t have a car. That’s when you don’t get a parking ticket for sixty five dollars.

So here’s what really happened: I walked up to an apartment building with a pizza in hand, and someone on the steps yells at me “Hey Bro, they’re gonna give you a ticket!” I rush out to the curb and inform the parking officer politely through a series of exaggerated gestures and raised voice that I’m just trying to deliver a pizza, but the parking office just hissed through her split tongue that “Itsssss a no ssssstoping zone, Honey.” Which is kind of ridiculous, I’ve never had so much trouble finding a place to park in a supposed “no stopping zone.”

The rest of the day at work wasn’t much better, but I went over to Eugene’s and watched a movie, had fun, and generally deepened the debt I had created earlier that day by deciding to show up for work. This didn’t end my distaste for the traffic officer, but at least I degraded it from a Hate 1 “I’m going to find her and carve ‘I love Michael Jackson.’ into the hood of her car.” to a Hate 3 “You are officially OFF my christmas list.”

But anyway, today I got to the gym, finished some laundry, and things are looking up.

Recently I’ve a had a bit of an obsession with auctions, so when I turned on the television and they “just happened” to be talking about a public auction of items that were confiscated by US customs, I knew I had to go.

Since I had some previous experience with auctions, I walked confidently into the auction hall feeling I would crush other bidders with my passive gaze while swooping in and getting everything I desired for less than the cost of the gas I used driving there. Then I actually got there. There were upwards of 1,500 people, and they were not the spectating type. These people are SERIOUS, dealing with tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise without even blinking. They buy and sell people like me on ebay as a novelty.

I stayed for about twenty minutes, long enough to see a semi go for thirty nine grand and a yellow plate go for about twenty-five hundred. At that point I realized the twelve dollars in my wallet wasn’t going to get me further than a stale donut at the roach coach.

The Navy’s new slogan is “Accelerate Your Life.”

Am I the only person who finds that to be an incredibly morbid slogan for one of the branches of the military?

Seth Nickell is regarded as a pretty darn smart User Interface designer for operating systems. He’s known well enough that I regularly read his blog to see what he’s up to and what he has to say. His blog is also where I got the idea to put my head in the upper corner of my blogger site. In my humble estimation he’s a pretty smart guy.

But in his most recent entry, he used the word frigidity to describe the harsh cold he is experiencing in the Northeast corner of our country.

In the words of Indigo Montoya (from The Princess Bride) , “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

According to this, although frigidity is related to the word frigid, it actually means:

1. sexual unresponsiveness (especially of women) and inability to achieve orgasm during intercourse
2. a lack of affection or enthusiasm syn: coldness, coolness

Which is why I cracked up when I saw the title of his blog was “More Lessons in Frigidity.”

P.S. This is my two hundreth entry. Wow.

Today I attended my first day of traffic school where I heard an interesting but alarming story. Most of the time you don’t learn anything at traffic school except how to look interested while paying no attention at all, but today was an exception.

There’s a law that says semis have to stay in the two right-most lanes on a four lane highway. If your highway should merge with another highway, they have a specified distance within which they have to change to the correct lane.

One Trucker who our teacher had before was there for this very ticket. That is, he didn’t get over within 200ft of the highways merging. He’d had his blinkers on the entire time, but there was a lot of traffic and nobody was willing to let him in. When told why he had been pulled over, the Trucker appealed to the officer’s common sense, “What am I supposed to do when they won’t let me in?”

The police officer responded, “Put your blinker on, count to three, then bring it.”

Appalled, the Truck Driver contested the ticket and asked the judge the same question, “What am I supposed to do when they won’t let me in?” The judge told him, “Put your blinker on, count to three, then bring it.”

Needless to say that I’m going to be more considerate to truck drivers, especially when you consider this particular ticket is in excess of $300. Besides that, I don’t know how fast your average truck driver counts to three.

I recently took The Tank on it’s second outing. I went with Lauren to USC where she was working on a video project for an art class, and I killed an entire roll of film. Now, I have about as much knowledge of photography as BrianWong has of web design, but I’m having fun with it so I put up a small album of The Tank’s First Pics.

There’s only 11 pictures out of my 24 because a lot of them were second tries or they just didn’t turn out how I wanted them to.

Above all, be gentle.

“i made a really neat knitting needle roll-up case. i took the pattern from my favorite book, stitch n’ bitch. this thing is so trendy, it was even in newsweek. give me a break.”

-Lindsey K.

I was watching Caddyshack this morning and was amazed to find that there IS a movie in which Chevy Chase is actually funny. Here’s one of my favorite dialogues between Ty Webb (Chevy Chase) and one of the Caddies:

Ty: Why do you want go to college?
Caddy: I don’t want to work at a lumberyard for the rest of my life.
Ty: What’s wrong with lumberyards? I own two of them.
Caddy: And I notice you don’t spend too much time there.
Ty: Well I’m not quite sure where they are.

you had to be there. There are many pearls of wisdom from Ty concerning college, and if you’re in college or considering going I suggest you watch this movie and pay close attention to Ty.

P.S. I was looking at imdb.com, and I noticed the movie Caddyshack II, which is rated as one of the bottom 100 movies on the imdb, as voted by the viewing public. Who knew?

The Unintelligent Design Network, Inc. has started a revolutionary movement by combining the ideas of creationism and evolution that make the most sense and shoe-horning them into a potato shaped cubby hole known as Unintelligent Design.

Essentially, they believe there was an all powerful creator, but he should have taken a few more biology classes before he started practicing professionally.

“And who the hell thought giraffes were a good idea? Bloody unlikely looking, if you ask me. And those tyrannosaurus, with the tiny little arms? Why even leave the arms in, except to flail about Corky looking for a snack. Speaking on this subject, did you know whales have hip bones? That’s like if an engineer put an outboard boat motor on a city bus.”

“It is chicozapote fruit season (manilkara zapota), and they are soooooo good. They come from the tree from which latex is made. So maybe they are the condom fruit.”

-Federico Mena-Quintero from Planet Gnome

Phantom Planet has always been one of those bands that I’ve been interested in, but never really got around to listening too. They had a cool name and their drummer was the star of Rushmore, which meant they had to be one of the best bands ever.

but… I’d heard the song “California” which didn’t really impress me much, so I gave up on them like a has been coach who can’t cut it in the big leagues and goes back to coaching a bunch of rambunctious misfits who can’t even afford their own uniforms.

Then I heard “Big Brat” off their new self titled album and realized I should have followed my gut instinct, deciding I would acquire the album as soon as possible and preach it’s virtues to all who would listen and even a few that wouldn’t.

But I never got that chance. Today on the “World Famous” KROQ, they debuted “Big Brat” by Phantom Planet. Now Phantom Planet will all be made sexy by the mtv and rolling stone people and it’s too late for me to claim that I was part of the grass roots movement that helped get them there.

Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to hope the Piebalds and Ozmas of the world will be my claim to credibility when they make it big.

*sigh*

I went to the main library branch to apply for some jobs today, which took a while to gear up for. First of all the library is so huge that it has seven separate floors, and each floor is so huge they have their own human resources department. This means you have to apply individually to seven different places, which is no fun.

So I spent some of the weekend and yesterday updating my resume and filling out the application on the computer using pdfs. All very cool and I was very impressed with myself, confident that not forcing them to read human handwriting was a feather in my cap.

This morning I dressed up, put on my new glasses, and prepared to meet my future boss.

Catastrophe.

Los Angeles Public Library system is on a hiring freeze. They can’t hire anyone, even if there are vacancies.

On several floors they accepted my application and said “That’s too bad, we have openings…”

The rest just gave me sympathetic smiles.

“I went to photograph a tree, but all the leaves had fallen off.”
-Me

That thought sounded oddly significant to me even though there’s no metaphor behind it. I took a picture of a tree after dark because of the way the streetlight looked against the leaves, but it didn’t come out. When I went back to try again, the tree was naked.

But if someone in the bible had said this, scholars would be all over it. This would be god’s way of showing that sometimes, there are no second chances.

Or something. I hate it when i can’t sleep.

My new glasses arrived as you can see:

With my new prescription I can see through walls and, if standing in just the right position, light dry leaves on fire. When I take them off and put on my spandex, I am able to jump gargantuan edifices in one attempt and move at a velocity greater than a phallic piece of metal fired out of a rifle.

Seeing if beginners luck has any credibility, I told Lauren about the two NFL conference championship games to see if she had some innate ability to decipher the outcome based strictly on the names.

And she does! She picked the loser both times without hesitation. Simply informed that the games were New England Patriots vs. Indianapolis Colts and Carolina Panthers vs. Philadelphia Eagles she thoughtlessly produced who she knew was going to be in the Super Bowl: Colts vs. Eagles.

I’m sitting on a gold mine.

In reference to the Southern California grocery worker strike:

“The one thing I’ve learned from this strike is that I love Trader Joe’s.”
-Dan

“The only crimp in my plan was that I seemed to have no talent whatsoever.”
-David Sedaris, from Me Talk Pretty One Day

I don’t know how many times that exact thought has occurred to me.

When sleeping at Brian Wong’s, Dwayne’s dog – a half chihuhua half miniature pincher – would come down and sleep with me every morning right after Dwayne left for school:

As steve said:
“He goes for the crotch or your armpit, because those are the two warmest places on your body.”

The small duffel bag I used when I visited San Luis Obispo has a diagram on the inside of seven different ways to carry it. This would just be stupid if the diagram on the left wasn’t obviously going to result in several adolescent decapitations over the next year. Now it’s not only stupid, it’s a bad business decision.

“Honduras is an Island, right?”
-Jesse B.