Okay, few more things before I pass out from the half-bottle of wine I drank....

News items!

First, it was the Webbies the other night. You know, the awards for best Web sites and all that stuff. So '99. Does anyone even care anymore?

And then there's this beauty, which I'm sure you've all seen. As much as I love the NRA, the one group that I love more than any other has to be PETA. Because when thousands of people have been killed in Afghanistan, AIDS is ravaging Africa, and the whole world is teetering on the brink of WW III, it's obvious that the most pressing issue that faces all of us is the depiction of cows in tv commercials. Because the fact that they're depicted to look happy in commercials is sooooo wrong.

It's one of those things where you wonder what they were thinking when they announced they were going to sue. I mean, there had to be more than one or two people in the meeting and some of them seem pretty bright. How is it that nobody in the meeting went "uh, you know, that's a really stupid thing we should be worrying about." Or "hello, it's a commercial? It doesn't mean anything?" Or maybe even "you know, this is really silly. maybe we should, like, get a life?" They even managed to drag a lawyer into it, but, of course, lawyer's would have a threesome with Ron Jeremy and Janet Reno if they thought it'd get them somewhere in life.

Someday, when I'm rich, I want to parade in front of the PETA headquarters wearing leather pants and a fur coat.

Gonna go light before I cough up the big hairball of vitriol for tomorrow's post.

I promise, I will not watch next week's very special 9/11 episode of "The Real World." Say it with me, I will not watch next week's very special 9/11 episode of "The Real World," I will not watch next week's very special 9/11 episode of "The Real World," I will not watch next week's very special 9/11 episode of "The Real World."

Dear Lord, let me be strong.

Hopefully, I'll be so blown away by next week's Buffy that I'll be spending too much time on the board's to watch it. Because I'm weak I read just enough spoilers to have a pretty good idea of what's gonna happen and all I can say is bye, bye Tara, it was nice knowing you. Rest of the season's looking pretty bitching, though.

Okay, here's today's daily dose of snark:

Just an observation, but....

Couple of years ago, it seemed like everywhere you went, everyone you saw had those dumb-ass scooters. Now, everywhere you go, everyone you see has those dumb-ass yoga mats.

What it means is all up to you, but my guess is that yoga is the new scooter.

This just happened to me...

At work, wandering down the hallway on my way to the bathroom. I run into Janice, the Outsourcer in charge of Outsourcee's. She's the one who not only watches over me, but holds my fate in her hands.

We talk a bit, I tell her how my week's been going, and in reaction to a joke of hers, I kind of half laugh, half snort. Mid-snort, a small bit of snot comes flying out of my nose. It shoots directly to my left, away from her, but still visible enough that I wonder if she saw it. I have no idea and I really hope to God she didn't. What do you do or say when that happens? How do you react other than hoping she didn't notice?

But now there's still just a little bit of snot left on my nose. Do I go immediately to it, thus calling that much more attention to the fact I just let one shoot? Or do I casually go to the nose, pretending like it's no big deal, allthe while hoping that she then doesn't notice the snot remaining on my nose.

Sometimes the smallest things in life can be the most difficult.

Here's the other great comment I saw in the Chron, from a story about Jean-Marie Le Pen and who makes up most of his voters. Have I told you how much I love the French?

But in a residential neighborhood about a mile north of the Front headquarters, one white-haired woman, walking a small dog, said she is a longtime Le Pen supporter.

"For me, all the other politicians are rotten," she said, identifying herself only as Claude, 72. "There's only one who has the values of General de Gaulle, and that's Le Pen."

"He's not a racist," she added. "He's only against Jews. And what can I say about that?"

You know, I was gonna say stuff about Le Pen and what a hoot it is that the French have just totally embarrassed themselves. Again. But it's not funny anymore. Let's face it, this world is going to hell-in-a-hand-basket quicker than you can say hell-in-a-hand-basket.

We got this huge conflict in the Middle East that gets scary mainly because all three religions that hail from there all claim that the end of the world comes just from the particular spot where it's all going down. On one side, you have a group of people that think it's a really neat idea to send 15 and 16 year old kids on suicide missions and whose allies have been holding Jerry Lewis-like telethons to raise money for the "martyrs of the cause," ie suicide bombers. On the other side is a leader who just recently refused to even discuss tearing down the settlements despite the fact everyone in his country, everyone in our country, everyone in the entire fucking world, knows that it's one of the main reason's why people in his country keep on getting blown up by 15 and 16 year old kids.

Then there's the Saudi Prince, who just paid us visit and supposedly lectured Smirk-boy about the Middle-East and what's wrong with the U.S. The Saudi Prince is also said to have forbidden women air traffic controllers to handle his flight in. And we're getting lectured from him. From a country that won't even allow women to drive cars.

And finally there's Europe. On one side is the anti-globalization, anti-American, vaguely anti-semitic left, a group so fucked they blew the French elections because they were too busy splitting votes between three or four Trotskyite candidates (Trotskyite! Trotskyite! Haven't they gotten the memo that Communism didn't fucking work? Didn't they realize that as a political theory, it's SO 19th century? What's next, are they gonna try and support Feudalism?). Then there's the neo-fascist, xenophobic, vaguely anti-semitic right and let's just say we all know how well things go when Europe starts voting in neo-fascists. Stuck in the middle, the only hope of salvation, is the muddled, wimpy bureaucrats who've spent the better part of the past decade having sub-committee's on subcommittee's on committee's just to figure out what to put on the fucking Euro. Let's just say that if the shit came down and Europe said "don't worry, we got your back," I'd be watching my back. Europe is Bill Paxton in "Aliens." Europe is the Judean's People Front debating resolutions while poor Brian is about to be crucified. If Europe were a basketball team, they'd be the Trailblazers.


And who's the man on whose shoulders the whole world now rests on? W.

I'd pretty much say that it's even odds that we're all seriously fucked right now.

Man, Malcolm in the Middle has only been on for two season's and they've already done a clip show. What's up with that?

Still kind of funny, though.

Anyways, couple depressingly funny articles in the Chron today. This bit comes from a story about the latest meeting of everyone's favorite red-neck gun lovers, the NRA. Here's a really classy quote from Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA, and all around great guy:

... LaPierre went after a new crop of gun-control advocates who he called "political terrorists." He singled out Andrew McKelvey, the wealthy founder of Monster.com and Americans for Gun Safety.

LaPierre said McKelvey has a lot in common with Osama bin Laden, describing him as "an extremist billionaire with a political agenda using personal wealth to train and deploy activists, looking for vulnerability to attack, fomenting fear for political gain and funding an ongoing campaign to hijack your freedom and take a box cutter to the constitution."

If there really was such a thing as karma, such a thing as cosmic justice, or if there was a God, we'd wake up one day to find in the news that LaPierre had accidently killed himself while cleaning his guns.

But there's not.

So I guess y'all saw that some German kid went all -Columbine and shot about seventeen of his classmates. Am I the only one out there who breathed a sigh of relief when they heard the story and found out it wasn't in the U.S? And am I the only one who kind of enjoyed the fact that it happened in Germany, one of those snooty European countries that's spent the better part of a decade tutt-tutting about American society?

Didn't think so.

Also found this great story in the Chron today. More fun with the Catholic Church.

Since the story is funny in and of itself, I think I'll just reprint some of the better lines. It's a story about a wayward, child molesting priest who tried to blackmail the Archi-Diosece to save his own skin.

The latest round of documents released by the Roman Catholic archdiocese here shows that a priest accused of pedophilia who was shipped from Boston to California once tried to blackmail a cardinal...In a letter, Shanley threatened to go to the media with allegations of homosexuality in the archdiocesan seminary."

In rambling diary entries found in the newly released documents, Shanley describes signing up at the local venereal disease clinic whenever he moved to a new city, "for help with my VD.

Church officials in Boston approved Shanley's transfer in 1991 to San Bernardino. With another priest from Boston as his partner, Shanley also owned and operated a Palm Springs inn that was popular with a gay clientele.

But wait, it gets better. As if the VD part wasn't good enough, comes this revelation:

A first set of documents made public earlier this month established that church officials in Boston were aware of sexual abuse allegations against Shanley and knew he was present at a meeting of an organization that became the North American Man-Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA.

Umm, shouldn't the membership in NAMBLA be some sort of clue that maybe, just maybe this isn't the kind of guy who should be around little kids? Hello? Bueller?

And gotta love any story about a priest dealing with VD. Wonder how he got that, being celibate and all.

I'm so happy I'm not Catholic right now.....

Man, I hate when I go to a restaurant and decide to try something that I usually don't order just to be new and different, but once the food shows up all I can think about is how I should of stuck with the tried and true.

Anyways, here comes....
Temp Job: Day III

Head in at 8:30. Supposed to go see someone knew in another department because they have work for me. I call. Of course, she's not there. So I wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Finally, ten minutes later someone comes down and gets me. She apologizes and tells me that nothing was finalized and since she didn't realize I was gonna show up, wasn't thinking about waiting for the call. Getting a little sick of this routine. The women is definitely not someone I'd expect at PG&E, though- mid to late twenties Chinese lady, decked out in super hip yet stylish clothes and both nose and tongue peircings. Have a feeling I might like being in her department for a day or two.

She takes me upstairs to the "College Recruiting" Department. Which I find kind of funny, considering that it might be kind of hard looking for employees when in the past year they've declared bankruptcy, been accused of intentionally sabotaging their power plants, and blamed for the Energy Crisis ("umm, it's all Enron's fault, we had nothing to do with it"). I'm told that there's a closet full of trinkets that the recruiters have to hand out and that I'm supposed to go through the boxes of trinkets, count fifty of them, and then put them in a special PG&E bag. If I finish that, I get to go through recruitment folders and take out all the old and out of date pamphlets. I am so happy that I had a hunch about today and brought my walkman with me.

I grab a few boxes from a small, stuffy closet and head to a cubicle assigned to me to start counting. I am introduced to the guy sitting across from me. He's your prototypical dude with a huge "Cal State Hayward" sticker across his cubicle. I don't know whether or not I should be impressed. He's really friendly, introduces himself to me and then thanks me for doing what I'm doing. When I make a half-sarcastic comment about a "first aid" kit that I'm packing up, he tells me that PG&E's motto is always "safety first." I am not sure whether he's joking or not. He doesn't seem like the type of person with any sense of irony, no sense of the absurd- in other words, the perfect corporate drone. I realize within a few seconds that while he is a really nice and well-meaning guy, I probably have nothing in common with him. A feeling that's confirmed to me when he uses his CD player to listen to music and through the sounds of AC/DC on my walkman, I hear him listening to some soft-rock music.

The women in the cubicle next to me I recognize. She used to work with me at MFI, way back in the day. I recognize her because she was kind of cute and because she was the one I had to deal with after they laid me off. I wonder if she recognizes me, but I don't think she does. I think about saying something to her about the whole MFI thing, but decide against it, what with her being on a good, career type path and me sitting there counting up to fifty pens and putting them in a clear basket bag.

I start counting and move from pens, to staplers, to flashlight keychains to "First Aid Kits," all emblanzoned with the PG&E logo. I am caught in the Temp's great dilemna, to finish a really boring task as quick as possible all the while knowing that it'll only lead to yet another really boring task, or do the really boring task as slow as possible to avoid the really boring work that you know is coming.

I can't wait until my real job starts.

Faced with a choice between more filing or staying home, I opted for staying home. So I headed off the Y this morning to get a swim in. Usually, if you get there early enough, you'll be able to avoid all the problem swimmers. But not today. For some reason, in just the half an hour that I was swimming, I got them all.

I got:

The Talkers- This is the type of person who spends all their time walking up and down the lane, talking to someone. They're usually either old Russian women holding their coffee klatch or a couple who are so in love, they can't go an entire lap without getting all shmoopy with each other.

The Walker- They're the one's who don't quite understand the point of a lap pool so they spend half their time kicking around with the little kick boards or then doing some sort of funky aerobic walking thing. All of this while totally oblivious to the pool right next to the lap pool purposely set up for that kind of stuff.

The What Are You Doing Guy- Usually this type gets in the middle of your lane and decides it's a great place to do some yoga stretches or contemplate the state of the universe. For some reason they never seem to notice the three or four people at each side of the pool, waiting for them to get out of the way so they can actually do some swimming.

The Doesn't Understand the Point of Lanes Guy- There's two types to this one. Either they get in the wrong lane, like they're really slow and get in the fast lane or really fast and get in the slow lane. Or, they're like some guy today, who got into my already crowded slow lane without checking to see that the other slow lane had no people in it. (I think this guy was a double offender because the purpose of his getting into the lane was so he could talk to his wife in the lane next to ours).

The German- See, when there's more than two in a lane, you have to somehow circle each other. The key to doing this is to always pay attention to the other people in the lane so that you never run into them. Pacing here is key and I find that the best thing to do is to stop at each end, assess what's going on, and maybe wait a bit before diving in because there might be someone who is just a little too close to you.

Usually, however, when it's like this, there's always somebody who just puts their head in the water and swims away. When they get to the wall, they just turn around and swim again, never paying attention to any other people in the lane. As a result, they send everyone else scrambling into other lane's to avoid them or wind up getting hit or kicked by them. They're kind of like in the movies when they show a car going onto a sidewalk and everyone has to dive out of their way.

The reason why I refer to this type as the German is for some reason, half of the people at the Y who do this are German. Go figure.

And for the icing on the cake, today I also had the Encounter with A Friend's Bad Breakup Ex-Girlfriend. This is always stressful because while you still like them, you know things went really bad for the guy afterwards and that they've been cut out of your social circle because of it. In this case, the name is hardly ever mentioned, except in really quiet, hushed whispers. The stress here comes from not saying anything that some people might not want them to know, like "oh, he's doing really well know. I think he's doing a lot less drugs now and he's a lot less freaky." Or "yeah them (referring to a couple that she helped introduce) they had this beautiful wedding in Miami and they're very happily married and living in New York. Didn't see you at the wedding, what happened?"

Hmmm... a friend says I've been dipping a bit too much into the angst well lately. Guess this blog lately has turned into Season 6 Buffy- overly depressing, bleakish in outlook, and not nearly as much fun as it was in the past. Sorry. I'll bring back the funny in a bit (and Buffy better too or I'm gonna be pissed). Do have a job now, you know, so no more dark tales about watching porn at three in the morning.

But now, some more of the continuing adventures of me Temping.......

Temp job, Day II…..

Tuesday

Worked a half-day. Due to a long story that I won't get into here, they had me assigned to my job so quickly that they didn't even realize that my boss would be away doing off-site stuff til Thursday. Which means I don't have anything to do and I get to come in whenever I want. It also means that there's nobody to sign all of my papers, so I'm unable to get a security pass or computer I.D. Every day until Thursday, I have to go to the Security Desk , call someone to come and get me and stand out in the lobby for the ten minutes or so that it takes for the person to come. So love having to do that.

Today I walked in at 1 and went to do what I had to do. The Security Guard in charge was either about to retire or had already retired but decided he needed something to keep him busy, so was kind of on the older side of things. He did things very…very….slowly. He was also hard of hearing and didn't really speak English, exactly the kind of Security Guard you'd want to watch over your corporate HQ. Anyways, after taking about five minutes to explain everything, saying everything at least three times before he got it, I called the person who I report to, Arlene, only to get no answer.

So I go off to one side of the lobby and stand and wait. And wait. And wait. Fifteen minutes go by and nothing. For the entire period, the old SG kept on eyeing me, constantly asking me over and over again what I'm here for. And everytime I tell him, I have to tell him at least three times. We try the person again a few times, but still no answer.

Sick of standing in the hallway, I call someone else. PG&E, you see, actually hires another company to hire their temps. Which means that, yes, they out-source the people who are in charge of hiring the out-sourcing. Since I had the number of the person who I dealt with earlier, Janis, we called her, the guard once again asking me what my name was. No answer.

He tries another number, says something on the phone and mentions my name, completely mangling it despite the fact he had heard it so many times, and five minutes later, some frosty blonde came down to get me. The person from the out-sourcing company was still at lunch, but the Guard called the General number and got her. Frosty takes me up to her office to figure out what to do with me.

I should probably add here that I had no idea what I was supposed to do this day. Arlene had something planned for me and was planning on giving me to another Department to help them out, but she hadn't gotten it all settled when I left on Monday. So, basically I had no idea what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go. I didn't think it would be that big of a deal, however, because she knew I was gonna come in at 1 and didn't say anything about it. Naturally, I thought she'd be there. But she wasn't there.

Frosty takes me up to her desk, listens to my story, then takes me down to my floor to see if we can find Arlene. Not there. We do, however, run into Arlene's boss. Turns out Arlene's at a training session and won't be back til 2:30. Ooops. She doesn't know what I'm supposed to do. I tell everyone that Janis had mentioned that I was supposed to go work in another department and she might know what to do, so we go back to the Out-Sourcing office and wait. Janis is, of course, late from lunch..

I get some coffee and sit at her desk, waiting. There's nothing to do. Nothing to read. I just sit there. After about five minutes, Frosty stumbles upon a "Glamour" magazine and since that's the only thing I had to read (well, except for an issue of Tupperware magazine that I saw in the break room), I sat there at Janis's desk, reading Glamour magazine.

I am a lost little orphan in a shopping mall, looking for his mother, with all these people I don't know trying to get me home and tell me it'll be alright. Except I'm getting paid $20 an hour for sitting in someone's desk and reading an article on how to tell if the guy you're flirting with is really into you.

Hope this thing gets better....

to be continued....

You know, right now It's a tough time being Jewish, what with the sudden feeling that everyone in the world hates you. And it's probably even tougher being Moslem, what with everyone out there thinking you're either a religious fanatic about to blow everyone up or Al-Queda.

But man-oh-man, it's probably even tougher being Catholic. Don't know about you, but the communiqué's being issued by a bunch of old, wrinkly guys in black robes wouldn't exactly bring me a sense of relief. And what is the difference between a child-abuser and a serial child-abuser? Does that mean that murder is okay, but serial-murder is not?

I wonder just how many Catholic families out there who normally send junior off to Catholic Retreats are now looking at the brochures and thinking that maybe, just maybe, junior probably won't be making it this year.

PS- the Catholic Church seems to do a lot of apologizing. Don't know the exact list, but it's up there. Being Jewish, the Pope's apologize to me several times over the past ten years. I'm thinking that if I were them, I'd just issue a big, huge apology to everyone out there. Doesn't matter if they deserve it or not, I'm sure somewhere down the line, the Church will discover that they need to.

Ooops, double post.

Nothing to see here.....

"Bubbles! I won't have fucking bubbles! I'm the Prince of fucking Darkness, Sharon!"
-Ozzy (of course)

In honor of Emily winning the March Madness contest on Television Without Pity Contest-

A reader, the lovely and fabulous Miss Julie P., writes concerning my obsession with Emily from RR/RW:Battle of the Seasons (or herewith known as BOTS). Good question.

She has, for instance, been showing up in my dreams. Not in that kind of way, but more like making guest appearances in my drunken, psychotic, straight-out-of-a-David-Lynch movie dreams. Not to mention my constant cheering her on for the March Madness contest and defending her honor everytime the Whicks' blame her for everything including the crisis in the Middle East. Rumours of a Google search on her, however, can neither be confirmed nor denied at this point.

But why Emily? Why the obsession? Besides the obvious needing a life, I'm pathetic kind of thing, of course. I do think she's the cutest one on the show, but I seem to be the only on the boards who thinks so. She even said herself that she wasn't the cutest one in the show. Then there's her aloof manner, the fact that you're never quite sure what's going on in her head. That whole moving in mysterious ways thing. Her rep on the show, after all, is one of being both cool and of being a bitch.

Then, after digging around for info on her (on the TwoP boards, of course, not Google) my fascination grew. Turns out on a previous RR/RW Extreme Challenge, she got kept on getting into cat-fights with Julie from the RW New Orleans cast. Since that Julie sucked, extra bonus points go to Emily. And there is, of course, her single-handedly took down the Whicks- grabbing her partner Timmy by the balls and pointing out the obvious, that Chadwhick deserved nothing more than a good karmic spanking and sent home ASAP. She knew they were evil. She knew they sucked. And so she fought the good fight, the fight for truth, justice, and the American Way and sent Chadwhick home. Score another for Emily.

But that's not really the reason for the obsession. See, the thing is that with her haircut, she looks exactly like some girl I had a huge, major-ass crush on. Some girl who then, through no fault of her own, went on to smash my achy-breaky heart all over the place. Which would of been fine except for the fact that we also worked together, and that, well, let's just say that it was just another thing that made life at Super Sucky Dot.Com that much more super-sucky.

Now, whenever I go out, somewhere in the back of my mind, there's always a thought about how nice it would be if I never ran into her and how I don't really need to deal with it. But now she's there, kind of, on tv. Every Monday night, in fact.

Except in this case, she won't tell me that she's not into dating people she works with, only to start dating someone at work a couple of months after I leave.

Adventures in Temping

Part III

And just like that, it all ends. One phone call Monday morning, with me not even having showered yet, and two hours later I'm at PG&E about to start a new temp job. But not one of those temp jobs. A good one. Or at least one of the best kind's you can get. More money than most temp jobs, long-term to perm, and not data entry. Goodbye sleeping in til 10 and staying up late til 2 watching porn. Goodbye spending all day surfing the Web and feeling trying to ignore that annoying little voice that keeps on telling me I should be more productive (stupid little voice). And goodbye anxiety ridden slept stressing out on money.

Been there two days so far, and you know, it IS the little things. And not just the money. I get an office, a big office even, one that I share it with someone else, and with a big window overlooking Market Street. I have an entire office supply cabinet in the office. I get a computer to call my own, a nice- brand new one- and a phone with it's own extension number. I have an extension number! I even get the word "Senior" in my title. Yes, I'm still an Administrative Assistant, but I'm the Senior Administrative Assistant. And unlike a certain other evil corporation, there's free coffee, tea and aspirin. The person who I'm replacing, whose on leave doing some company related employee benefit thing, even left her boom box for me at my super big desk.

And although I'm already on first name basis with the photocopier, I get the feeling that this assignment will require actual skills and brain work. Which makes me feel better knowing that the Temp Agency wanted me to work at some place not just because of my ability to type really, really fast.

Although I'm kind of happy with it all, I have to admit I was kind of hoping that I'd still be unemployed for at least another month or so. The World Cup's starting in a month or two, after all. Wanted to do what I did last time I was laid off, go to the Mad Dog every other day, drink pints at ten in the morning and learn English football songs. Man, that was fun.

Oh well….

I'm kind of embarassed to admit this, but....

Today, I was, like shopping at Safeway. And like I always do, I was like listening to my walkman as I shopped. And, well, I was going up and down the aisles, up and down the aisles and the radio station I was listening to, the Bone, kind of like put on Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" and, well, I kind of liked it. In fact, I kind of had a smile on my face and if, like, you happened to spy me during those few minutes, you might have seen my head bob up and down, rocking out.

Must listen to Radiohead....

Must listen to Radiohead....

Must listen to Radiohead....

You're all worthless and weak. Heh.

Speaking of the early 90's, poor Layne Staley of Alice in Chains was found dead over the weekend. Probably knew all that.

Dude, OD'ing on drugs is SO mid 90's. How big of a loser was Layne, he couldn't even OD when it was the in thing to do.

Oh, okay, that was a little mean. Sorry, I just had to do it.....

Liked Alice in Chains too.

Life is funny sometimes.....

Inspired by the fabulous Shag Noir, I tried to sign up and do some volunteer work for a local comedy troupe. That was the interview that I mentioned before, the one where I hadn't heard anything back and it was making me feel even that much more of a loser.

Anyways, I've been doing some stuff for them, mainly because I've been bugging them, but now they have some big, super-huge fund-raiser/party that they need people to help out for. Which all sounds great because it would be a great opportunity to shmooze, not to mention being a hell of a lot of fun. Two words: cast party.

But wait, there's a problem. I don't know if I can do it. Even worse, I said I could, but now I don't know if I can, but don't know if I can get out of it because that would make me look too flaky and they'd never ask me to do anything again.

Why can't I do it?

Shag Noir and her boyfriend are moving to Boston and it's their going away party.

Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?

Insomnia. Again.

Up at two, completely unable to sleep, flipping through the channels hoping to find something entertaining enough to watch, but not too entertaining enough that it doesn't put me to sleep. Watched the beginning of the The Fight Club again a couple of days ago and sometime last night, I was thinking maybe I should start attending self-help groups. Or, maybe I should join a Fight Club. Maybe I have already but can't say anything cause of the Fight Club's first rule. Just as long as I don't start coming up with some alter-ego, blow stuff up, and not realize that it's me until the lame-ass ending. (By the way, when you've seen the movie enough times, like I have, you start noticing that there's little flashes of Brad Pitt in the opening scenes. Like he's there in a frame, but disapears within seconds. Check it out.)

Insomnia on sunday night's is particularly bad because there's nothing on. Not one damn thing. No Letterman, no Conan. Just infomercials and Sportscenter over and over again. Did find myself stumbling onto these rather weird things:

1)At about 1:30 at night, CNN ran a program called "CNN For Students". I'm thinking that's a really good time to be showing a show for students, at 1:30 in the morning. Good thinking there, CNN, cause I don't see a lot of students up at that hour, what with school starting the next day. And if they are up, my guess is that they've done too many drugs to know what the hell they're watching. Not that I'd know, of course.

2)Skinemax has a half-an hour soft-porn series called "Passion Cove." My fascination with those things is ripe for another discussion, but not this time. Anyways, last night's episode was "Passion Cove's" Christmas episode. Because just because it's porn, it don't mean you can't get into the Christmas Spirit.

The episode wasn't any good, either. Too much plot....

Since I keep on stumbling onto Bridget Jones Diary on cable everytime I turn on the tv, maybe I'll do this Bridget Jones Blog Style, but....

Been drinking for five straight days, haven't slept in about two days, eaten total crap for the entire weekend (highlighted by the two pepperoni pizza slice's last night and the chips & dip, M&M's, Oatmeal Cookies and other bad BBQ food tonight). I feel like shit. I look like shit. My knee hurts, my back is killing me, my allergies are acting up and I feel a cold coming on. I'm so tired coffee doesn't affect me anymore and I'm gobbling Pepto Bismo by the handful.

Starting tomorrow, I swear, I'll start taking better care of myself....

Gonna eat better, cut down the boozing, go the gym at least three times a week, spend less time posting on stupid message boards all day and really work at looking for a job and writing.

I swear, by gum, by golly, I will....

Or at least until the next time I go out for drinks.....

Ugh, I knew it. Trapped inside my apartment, with the chants of "No justice, no peace" waft through my apartment as I try and watch the NFL draft. Stupid rally. Have to leave at some point to go play some softball, but I have to leave at the same time the rally is switching from chanting and speechifying at Dolores Park to chanting and speechifying at the Civic Center so I'll probably get socked in by traffic as the unwashed masses march onwards.

Checked out the Web site for the protest and found these instructions about the rally already occuring in Washington D.C.:

"It is clear from the intensifying mobilization and support for the Palestinian people battling the U.S.-backed Israeli aggression that the April 20 demonstration at the White House will be attended by tens of thousands of people. The main demands at the White House demonstration will be "FREE PALESTINE! No new war on Iraq!", "Stop the attacks on Arab and Muslim people! Defend civil liberties!", and "Money for Jobs, Education, Healthcare and Housing, Not War!"

How's that gonna work? At the rally, are they gonna divide things up into sections so that everyone in the left will be yelling "Free Palestine" while the group on the right will be yelling Money for Jobs, Education, Healthcare and Housing, Not War!"? You know, like at rock concerts where they get one side of the crowd to yell "fuck" and the other side to yell "you." Or maybe they'll get all arty and do it round-style, like how you're supposed to do "Row, Row, Row Your Boat!" Yes, it won't make any sense and sound like a huge roar, but that's pretty much what it sounds like anyways. Or, maybe they've divided the day into hour-long segments. Like between 10 and 11, they'll chant "Free Palestine!" and then at 11, switch over to "No War on Iraq!"

And I also found a listing of organizations who endorse and will be attending the rallies. Some of them sound like really heartfelt, earnest and serious organizations. Some of them, don't. Because I find this all highly funny, here's a list of some of the groups supporting the rallies (I tried not to be snarky, but I didn't get much sleep last night, I'm tired and well, I'm snarky):

-Mumia Abu-Jamal, political prisoner and journalist (because it's not a rally without Mumia.)
-Lesbian and Gay Insurrection
-Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (splitters!)
-International League of Peoples' Struggle (huh?)
-National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America
-Chicago Anti-Bashing Network (I'm down with these guys. I hate bashing. Bashing is bad.)
-Freedom Socialist Party (Rock on)
-Populist Leftist Front, New York City (what about the Leftist Populist Front?)
-Freedom Road Socialist Organization
-Womens Fightback Network
-Rainbow Flags for Mumia (all three of them)
-Singing with the Enemy (performance troupe) (!)
-La Vay Smith, Bay Area Vocalist (I know her. She's kind of cool. She used to waitress at Vesuvio's too when my friends and I would all go crowd the top part of the bar, get really drunk and blow pipe hits out the window).
Radical Women, California (is this a group or just a general description of who they are?)
-Anarchist Action of Rochester
-Revolutionary Communist Party USA
-Red Wing Movement of the Green Party of Humboldt County (huh? Are they just members of the Green Party who also happen to be Hockey fans?)
-Behavioral Support Services, NC
-First Quarter Storm Movement, Northern California (whatever)
-Madison Revolutionary Front, WI (rock on)
-Anarchist Freethink Movement, CA (how do they rally for anything precisely, I mean they're all freethinkers and anarchists, so you'd think they'd never be able to organize for anything. And if they did, does that make them hypocrites)
-Chicago Revolutionaries Artists for Fair Trade(CRAFT)
-Grandmothers for a Just World, NC (awww)
-Alternatives to War of Modesto (do they mean alternatives to war or just war in Modesto? I hear things are pretty nasty in Modesto too)
-Revolutionary Communist Party- SF Bay Area
-Moonanum James, National Association of Letter Carriers, Boston, MA*- (What, a postal worker? And they're important to this rally because......)

Someone's screaming something right now. Shut.....up..........

Getting back from a long walk this afternoon, I turned on CNN to catch the latest on the whole world going to hell in a handbasket thing. And what do I see when I turn it on? A shot of a white car, slowly moving down a LA freeway followed closely by cop cars.

Oh no, not O.J. again. Talk about bad acid flashbacks.

But wait, it's not O.J! It's Robert Blake, Baretta! He's being charged for the murder of his wife! And this, of course, is worth live video footage of him driving his car home. As well as Larry King doing the round-table thing with experts on the case.

Hoping that it's just a Larry King thing, that cable news networks have learned from their past mistakes, realized that the world is too dangerous for such frivolous things about the doings of has-been half-celebrities, I switched to MSNBC. Lucky me, I flipped right at the exact moment that they cut away from Ashleigh Banfield, somewhere in Israel probably talking to someone about the latest developments there, and cut to the live footage of Robert Blake driving his car.

Let's see, what's going on in the world. Plane crashed into a high-rise in Milan. Powell's trip turned out to be an unqualified disaster and what went down in Jenin is looking really, really ugly. The Senate voted down Smirk-Boy's half-witted plan to drill in Alaska and the House passed a huge tax bill. I also saw that India is erecting a wall on the border with Pakistan and Israel has captured one of the major leaders of Hamas.

But nothing. Nothing, is more important than what's going down with Robert Blake.

Sometimes I think we're doomed.

PS- I see much later that night, CNN's already having the "should we be covering this" debate? Love it when the cable news stations know they fucked up, so by covering their ass, they have debates about whether or not they should of fucked. Like a crack-addict thinking it's okay that they just took another hit because they know they screwed up and they won't do it again.. Or Cara on the Real World thinking that she doesn't have an eating disorder because she's aware of it.

Well, well, well. Looks like the Bushies let Osama escape way back in Tora Bora. According to the Washington Post, they're now admitting that they knew he was there, but by using mainly Afghani troops, they let him escape. Now he's somewhere else. Probably in some villa in Pakistan drinking Mai Tai's and laughing at Great Satan (as I said earlier).

Quelle suprise.

I don't know nothing 'bout warfare, don't know nothing about Afghanistan, but even I kind of had a feeling they were fucking up. There's a reason the cliché "if you can't trust someone to do something, you might as well do it yourself" is a cliché.

And now the Bushies are spinning, saying it doesn't really matter. That Al-Queda is smashed anyways and that it's not really about Osama.

Right…….

If that's true, why is it that Al-Queda keeps on occasionally showing up at places that were supposedly cleared? And why is not getting Osama the point when you pointedly went on tv and said that you were gonna get him "Dead or Alive?" We'll see how much shit goes flying when Osama shows up for a weekly run on Al-Jazeera's "Hollywood Squares."

Between that and Powell's disaster of a trip, things aren't looking good for smirk-boy right now. The only problem when thing's don't go right for Smirk-boy foreign-policy wise, though, is it just means we're only fucking ourselves more and more.

I keep on wanting him to fail, but considering the ramifications of every fuck up he fucks up, there's nothing to do but hope that he doesn't fuck up.

Funny thing about being a sports fan. Was kind of watching the Giants game at a bar tonight and when I left, they were down 4-3 and it was the top of the 8th. It was one of those games in which the Giants were behind from almost the get-go, but every inning they had runners all over the bases, just couldn't get the big hit to take over the game home. Still, they were oh so close to delivering the big blow.

But when I left the bar, I knew the moment I left, that there would be no way in hell the Giants would come back. Not because it was one of those games, but just because I knew that since I was no longer watching, nothing big would happen. It's just one of those feelings you get when you're a sports fan, that everything depends on you watching and that if you're team's behind, you have to watch it through to the end because they'll never come back unless you're watching.

And I was right. By the time I came home, the game was over. Pads 5, Giants 3.

Congrats Zuate

What the fuck is the deal with that band Nickelback? Why are they popular and why does every fucking radio station in the country play them? It's like someone considers them "edgy" enough for the hard rock stations but then there's also someone who considers them not too edgy so that they also get played on the non-edgy stations (like KFOG). Which means that if you listen to the radio at home or at work, you'll hear that damn song at least once an hour, then hear it on another station at the exact same time you're furiously switching channels to get away from the crap that is that band.

Shouldn't that be a sign that a band's total crap, when both edgy and non-edgy stations play them? Shouldn't that tip somebody that maybe the music is kind of lame and not that rocking? And basically, shouldn't there be somebody else out there who realizes that they fucking suck? They would of been a generic grunge back way back in '94, back when grunge was being killed by generic grunge bands, and they're still a generic grunge band. Only it's about ten years later and we should of learned by now.

Damn kids today....

On another musical note, the big news is that Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth are going to tour together. Which is funny for so many reasons. What are they gonna call it, the "Fuck You Eddie Van Halen" tour? Or, more appropiately the "We Owe Our Career to Eddie Van Halen Tour?" And if it is kind of a fuck you, considering that most of their audience is gonna wanna hear Van Halen tunes (what, you think they're gonna go to hear "Yankee Rose" or "I Can't Drive 55"?), Eddie's getting the last laugh because he'll get paid everytime they play one of his songs.

Gotta feel sorry for Diamond Dave, though. At one point, he was the biggest, baddest, kick-assingest lead singer in the biggest, baddest, kick-assingest band. Then he got in a fight with Eddie and now he's on VH-1's "Where Are They Now".

What he needs is another band. A kick-ass band. A band that flat-out fucking rocks. Hmmm......I know, Rage Against the Machine needs a new lead singer. Zach left and Chris Cornell quit, so there you go. Rage Against the Machine should hire David Lee Roth as their new lead singer.

Just imagine it, the band kicks in, lays down some furious funk, starts down with "Bulls On Parade" or "Killing in the Name of" and there's Diamond Dave, hair flying, wearing those tight, buttless leather chaps and scarfs, belting out "Killing in the name of! Some of those that were forces are the same that bore crosses....Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" or "Rally round tha family, pockets full of shells/Rally round tha family/With pockets full of shells."

As the Sports Guy on ESPN.com would say, THIS MUST HAPPEN.

I know it doesn't matter. I know it's silly. I know nobody notices or nobody cares and I know that on a list of my problems, it doesn't even register.

Still, when I come out of the swimming pool at the Y, for the few seconds that I'm naked, I wish that somehow, someway, I could convey just one thing to everyone else at the Y:

Shrinkage

And now, back to our reguraly scheduled broadcast....

Figured out why Hotmail's been so screwy lately. They've added some redesigns which throw more screens at you before you actually get to the screen you want. And guess what? None of those actual screen's are for Hotmail, but for MSN stuff. I wonder if you're allowed an option that gets rid of all the MSN stuff. Like the "I don't give a flying fuck about the MSN Network, so please don't fucking bother me with any of it" button.

Wankers.

At least they haven't sold all of their users names to marketers like Yahoo! did. Oh wait, they've done that already too.

Anyways, just wanted to pass this along. How do you know things are going bad? When you get a cheer up little buckeroo message from a temp agency:

"It has been slower than we have all hoped for. I know you have great
experience, so I would love to get you into a job that can utilize that.
Please continue to check in with me and I will call you with a great job."

Oh yeah, found this funny quote in the paper today regarding a trailer for the new Ben Afleck/Morgan Freeman movie (!).

"In a stroke of offbeat casting, Morgan Freeman plays the kindly older mentor. "

Bwaaaah.........

Okay, I swear I'll bring back the funny soon. I just had to get all of this off my chest......


For weeks, ever since the crisis in the Middle-East has gone from bad to "oh my fucking God" bad, I've wanted to post something. Almost every day something new happens or I read something and except for the occasional attack on France, I've held back. Too much to say, too much to get upset about. It's all so sad. Not to mention scary as all hell.

In a strange way, the whole thing kind of makes me wish I wasn't Jewish. That way it wouldn't upset me so much. Somewhere in me, there's a part that thinks that the correct attitude to the whole thing is the "pox on both your houses" attitude. But I am Jewish so I care. And I've had just enough Zionist indoctrination to know what Israel means to Jews and why it's so important. And just enough Zionist indoctrination to know about a lot of the shit that goes down there- to know what Israel is up against and to know what the stakes are. I also know enough to know what a bunch of naïve twits the leftist, anti-globalization, pro-Palestinian bourgie white protestors are. Children off on a crusade they know nothing about. Stuff like how for years both the Arab and Palestinian press has been spewing virulently anti-semitic stuff. Or that Yasar Arafat has always said one thing English in front of a foreign press but then go off and say the complete opposite thing in Arabic to an Arabic press.

The whole thing makes me too upset to write about it. I'm already one paragraph in and I'm already cursing up a storm. There are, however, people out there who are far better writers than I am and who know much more than I do. So as a way of summing up how I feel, I turn it all over to them. Here's a collection of articles about the subject that pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole, unbelievable mess.



Mideast Ending the Deadly Tango of Terror: 1967: Six days that are still shaking the world
First, this is how we got into this mess. A history lesson for those who don't quite know what the cause of it all is. Must reading for the twits out there holding signs and banners. This is how and why the Six Day War started and how Arafat pushed everyone into the war, only to see all the Arab countries get their butts kicked. The article also points out that Israel offered peace then, way back in 1967, but got nothing back for it. Over thirty years later, the Arab countries have finally gotten around to maybe, possibly, somehow recognize that Israel does have a right to exist.


Needing Israel
This article is about why Israel is so important to Jews. And why, when the chips are down, Israel (and a lot of Jews) don’t' care about what the world thinks because when the chips are down, the world usually never cares anyways.

Suicidal Lies
From the excellent Tom Friedman (who if I was President would make Secretary of State cause this guy knows his shit), an article about why it's important for the world to make a moral stand against suicide bombers. That to hem and haw and to give excuses, like the Europeans are, or to "wink-wink" condemn like the Arabs do is to forgo moral responsibility. And that fighting against it really is a battle for civilization.


A plea to the Palestinians for help: 'There is no one else to ask
While I don't agree with the nasty anti-Israeli viewpoints of the writer, I think he's right about what he says. The truth is that if Arafat was really smart, he should have been a Martin Luther King, a Gandhi, not a terrorist. If the Palestinians would have used non-violent measures, they would have had almost everything they wanted years ago. That's the biggest shame of it all, that as noble as their cause is (and it is) they keep on fucking it up by going about things the dumbest way posible. Not that the blame lies entirely with the Palestinians.
Israel has also done their fair share of bad things. The Palestinians, for instance, wouldn't be so upset with Israel if it weren't for Israel continuing to build settlements on the West Bank. The problem is that most anti-Israeli essays are either inflammatory, hysterical, or naïve. There are, however, ways of writing articles that aren't. Of saying what the truth is but also realizing, unlike a lot of the anti-Israeli articles do, what the reality really is.

Aiding the Enemy
This one wonders what Sharon thinks he's doing and raises the point that Sharon is only making matters worse

A Brave Voice in Israel
I like this one because it's based on an editorial in an Israeli Newspaper. It not only points out that Sharon is notorious for overreacting to things with a brutal hand (which is what I'm fearing is happening now, but also points out that Israeli's salvation can come from the fact that it is a democracy. That the fact that it has free elections , a free press and the right to speak freely is why it will eventually figure out what to do. Something you can't say for the tin-plated, punk-ass dictators ruling Arab countries.

The Bush Doctrine R.I.P
Of course, none of this mess would have started if we didn't have a President who was too afraid to get involved. Probably too complicated for him. And now, he's in deep-shit. The Israeli's won't listen to him, the Palestinians won't, the Arabs won't, and the Europeans are only kicking back and laughing at the whole thing.

This guy, Frank Rich, is one of my favorite columnists on the NY Times. He's one of the few commentators who isn't afraid to rip into smirk-boy whenever smirk-boy needs to be ripped into.

Finally, two more things. Probably the scariest aspect of it all.

There was a particularly ugly protest in Berkeley last week. Besides taking over a building, the Pro-Palestinian protestors took over a college building (that's soooooo '69), they were doing really nasty things. Oh, and they staged the protest on the day that commemorates the Holocaust, which, was, ummm, kind of tactless.

Rob Morse of the Chron describes the scene and adds a few snide comments of his own:


Demonstrations of ignorance dispensed here

Incidentally, I saw one of the guys Rob Morse was talking about. I saw this (white) guy in his mid to late 40's walking around SF with a sign that said "Sharon=Hitler." I wanted to smack him upside the head. And I don't even want to get into any Jews who protest against Israel either. If one of them gets accidently hit by a baton during a protest, I'm not going to be that upset.

Criticism of Israel escalates into a 'New Anti-Semitism'
This one, my last one, is the scariest part of it all. It's about what I've been talking about above and all through this, how it's often hard to tell anti-Israel comments from anti-Jewish comments. Especially in Europe, a place with not exactly a great reputation for it's tolerance towards Jews (see Holocaust). This is the one that makes me the angriest. Hell, my mother, who isn't exactly known for her Jewishness, is now sending out e-mails about how the whole world is anti-semitic.


What can I say. It's a pretty scary time to be a Jew. It's a pretty scary time in general.

All I know is I think I'm hitting Jdate. Keep the Tribe Alive.

Ahh, it must be the 15th today because there was a huge line of people outside the Check Cashing place today cashing their Welfare checks. Looked kind of a fun thing to do, what with the reggae being blasted and all the dope smoking that was going on.

Was gonna post my long exegesis on the Mid East conflict (post that later ton ight, sometime before "Angel" comes on) but as today's going about as well as others, it's rant time.

-Publishing company that keeps on pulling the football from me, let's just call them the Lucy Publishing Company, still hasn't gotten back to me. The e-mail about the job was like this random e-mail that got sent to me out of nowhere and without any context. Which makes me think:
a)They had a meeting and decided to get the ball finally rolling, but then had another meeting in which they decided they still didn't know what to do and instead of letting me know what the deal was just kind of forgot about me. Like all the other time's they said they were about to make a decision.
b)The e-mail was sent like six month's ago when their server was acting all screwy and it finally got to me. Why they haven't told me that it was an old e-mail, well, see above.
c)They were all really bored and in a bad mood at the Lucy Publishing Company, and not knowing how to get out of their mood, all sat around and decided to fuck with me. They knew how much I wanted that job and how hard I worked to get it and everytime they held something out to me, I chased it like a dog chasing a ball, so basically they're all just sitting around laughing at me once again.

-Went to go see a comedy group over the weekend about doing volunteer work for them. When I got there, I realized it was actually kind of an interview type thing. Ugh, but whatever. Supposed to hear back from them about anything today, but haven't as of yet. Considering I even offered to just serve coke during their performances, I'd thought I'd hear at least something. I know, I know, it's probably a little too early to be flying off the handle, but I have been unemployed for seven months and I get a little paranoid about these things (see above). And what a confidence builder not getting a volunteer position is. Not getting it is like when you're at a high school dance and striking out with every girl you ask to dance. "Stairway" comes on and you know it's the last song, so you go and ask the zit-ridden fat girl to dance and even she turns you down. That's what I'm feeling like now.

-For some reason, I keep all my notes and phone numbers and stuff like that on a pad of paper by my computer. For some reason, everytime I go to write something, it's never the same pad of paper. It's always a different pad of paper and I can't figure out why. I need to send an e-mail off to someone about an appointment on wednesday, but can't find that pad of paper that had it written on. Can find every other pad of paper in my apartment, but not that one. And I live in a fucking studio, so it's not like it could really go anywhere? Accck Thhhhtpp.

Should of gone and hung out at the Check Cashing place, listened to some Marley and smoked some dope. Probably be in a better mood right now.

There's all these flyers out around the city for this month's big protest rally. "Fight the Axis of Evil," the posters say, "War, Racism and Poverty." To which, of course, I say, you go. Who isn't for fighting war, racism and poverty, except for a couple die-hard conservative Republicans?

But then I see a poster for the same rally and it says "Help Stop Bush's War." Then there's another poster, again for the same event, and it says "Help Protest the US/Israeli War." Then I read a story about the protest and they're going on how it's about the usual stuff, you know anti-IMF, anti World Bank and general badness. I'm sure somewhere along the way, there'll be a few protestors there for Mumia because, after all, it's all about Mumia.

Not that I'm an expert in political protests, but doesn't it make sense that if you're gonna protest something, you should at least make a concerted effort to have some sort of consistant message. I mean, I'm confused as to what the protest is about and I'm guessing other people will be too. And most importantly, what's gonna happen when they do the patented "what are we fighting for" cheer? There's just gonna be this long cacophony of noises as everyone says something else because nobody's exactly sure just what they are protesting. It'll be a veritable Tower of Rabble Rousing Babble.

Either way, as the rally'll be right around the corner from me, I guess that means I have to get out of the apartment at a reasonable hour so I don't have to sit and listen to the constant echo of speeches, chants, and more speeches. Maybe, instead, I'll just stay inside and crank Van Halen in response. Or Snoop Dog. Yeah, laid back.....

And I've always wondered about the protestors, the one's who are always out there protesting something. How many of them actually vote? I don't protest anything, I don't hold up signs and puppets and recite stupid chants. Even worse, I think Mumia's guilty. On the other hand I vote pretty consisitently. And I didn't throw my vote away either and vote for some guy who'll never be elected but did just enough mischief to throw the election to the guy whose causing all the protests anyways. Grrrrr....aaaargh.

Actually, maybe that's why they voted for Nader. Because with W. as President, they have more to do now....

Someone slipped me a mickey last night. There's no other way of explaining how lousy I felt this morning. Went to the Sand Bar last night with Crystal, a small, divey (real divey, not boho divey) salty bar near the beach. It's the kind of place where everyone knows each other and buys each other drinks, even if you don't really know them, and next thing you know people who you've only met for a couple of minutes are buying you shots.

Anyways, stumbled home by 12, passed out during SNL and next thing I know, I'm waking up at like 4 in the morning, heart racing and with that "maybe puking wouldn't be such a bad idea" feeling. Not only that, I was in the middle of some super weird, psycho dream where I dreamt that I woke up from my drunken hangover only to discover that not only was not in my apartment, but I had no idea where I was. And everything was all glowy and surreal. It was like suddenly finding yourself in a David Lynch flick, except without a dancing dwarf and, unfortunately, no lesbian sex. I hate to say it too, but I was only a little disapointed when I woke up for real and found myself in my dumpy, tiny, should probably clean up, studio apartment.

Was gonna post a long rant about taxes and my getting screwed by them, but- suprise, suprise- I actually am getting money back this year. A lot of money back.

And now I'm kind of scared.

First of all, there's no way in hell I should be getting as big of a refund as I am. Something's screwy right there. And as I know I've been kind of doing my taxes wrong for awhile, I'm pretty sure the refund is part of it.

And that's the part that scares me. I've usually either gotten a small refund or paid a bit back, but never any amount to raise any alarms anywhere. Now that I'm getting a huge check back from the Federal Government, I'm sure bells and alarms are gonna be going off all over the place once they see my form. Next thing I know, I'm getting called by the IRS, getting audited, and well, hello Sing-Sing.

I should look on the bright side, though. At least if that happens I won't have to worry about finding a job.

Believe it or not, after just posting that rant about spam-mail, I check out my Hotmail account and had just gotten bombarded by this porn site. Took me about five minutes to delete the fifty or so e-mails they sent me.

Fuckers.

One mo' thing before I go. Found this on the Missed Connections board on Craig's List. Pretty funny:

You know you're a Marina chick when.....

1. You're afraid to go to Balboa because you have gotten together with too many of the male patrons.
2. You have a toasted noah's bagel with lite cream cheese and a jambajuice
for breakfast every morning and you can't figure out why your bebe boot cut black lycra pants are getting snug.
3. You've dated 18 men in the last four months and you're still single.
4. You have a crush on a bartender.
5. You have dated someone who used to date your roommate's best friend's sister's cousin, or your roommate.
6. You've had a Chambers Punch in the last two months.
7. You know that red is the "new black".
8. The only consideration when buying your cell phone was the weekend minute plan.
9. Your haircut costs more than a small car.
10. You need to blend two lip-pencils, plus a lipstick & a gloss, just to get your shade.
11. You have a contraband tube of Retin-A from Mexico somewhere in your home.
12. About married friends... on the weekends you ask "What the hell were they thinking?" on weeknights you think "I bet she's getting a foot massage right now"
13. You've won bingo at Ace Wasabi.
14. The only time you ever cook a full meal is to impress a guy.
15. You feel that $25 is a bit "pricey" for a mani/pedi combo.
16. If the MAC store were to close, you'd picket.
17. You didn't think of "Swingers" as a hip, funny movie. To you it was a social documentary on the mysterious behaviors of single men. You took notes.
18. You regard e-mail as a flirting device with editing capabilities.
19. You have worn body glitter for no other reason than it's Saturday night.
20. You have 18 pairs of black shoes, not including the ones in your strappyc sandal collection.
21. You know the difference between midnight black, jet black, off-black, gray black, and black black.
22. You have no Full Fat items in your refrigerator. Except wine, because they don't make Cakebread Lite.
23. You have attended the Polk Street Fair, the North Beach Fair, and the Union Street Fair, but have never bought a craft. (There were crafts there?)
24. You own a Jetta, Saab 900, Audi, or RAV-4. It's about a year old, but it only has 12 miles on it because you take Muni to work & cab it on the weekends.
25. The 12 miles on your car are from going to Trader Joes that one time for Tuna Jerky, Toblerone, and wine.
26. You place the invention of self-tanner on the level of the wheel.
27. Johnny Love has hit on you.
28. You read "The Rules", thought they were bullshit, had a bad dating encounter, and raptly reread "The Rules" again.
29. You only feel like going to the gym on "thin days" (logic?).
30. You have ! driven taxi drivers crazy by telling them "No, we don't want to go here, let's go to another bar across town" - all because there are no cute guys in line.
31. You have given your phone number to a guy, he's called, you made a date, and you have absolutely no recollection of what he looks like.
32. You've bought new undergarments because you haven't done laundry in so long.
33. You secretly think that Surreal Neal of Super Diamond is kinda cute.
34. You've used the "It's not you, it's me" line at least once in the last year.
35. You've danced on the bar at Mars Cafe.
36. You've pulled an item from the laundry, sprayed a little perfume in it, waved it around, and declared "It's not so bad"
37. You've gone to a restaurant with a friend, ate the complimentary bread, split a salad, each had a bottle of wine and called it dinner.
38. You have made a visit to Good Vibrations in the last 3 months.
39. On a given Sat night, you have made a pre-dinner drink plan, a dinner plan w/ drinks, and a post dinner drink plan.
40. You have not taken the bus b/c they don't take ATM cards.
41. You go to Sports Bars to "play the game" v. watch it.
42. An average workout at Gorilla SPorts is 1 hour: 5 min makeup application/workout prep, 35 min chatting with pals, 15 min on treadmill, 5 min scoping the scene
43. You realize you have tapped out on all of your friend's friends as prospects and they all know each other.
44. You post laundry list ads in the W seeking M and for the perfect guy with no intention of ever responding to any of the responses you get, and you do it for a sense of self worth: the more responses you get, the better you'll feel about yourself.

Hungover, tired and not feeling very well at all today. Thanks Home Fine. Even worse, I have nothing to look forward to except for doing my taxes and I'm pretty sure I know how it's gonna come out. U-G-L-Y. And yes, I'm sure there'll be a long rant about how fucked I'm gonna get. It's already half written in fact.

Just wanted to follow up on a few things, for the three or four people out there still reading-

1)The reason why "God Bless America" is still played during the 7th inning stretch is because it was mandated by Bud Selig. Glenn Dickey, the Chron columnist mentioned it then used Samuel Johnson's famous quote as his zinger:

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" -- and he didn't even know Bud Selig.

Which is a very subtle way of saying that it's when you come up with a cockamamie contraction scheme, announce it two days after what many people consider to be the greatest World Series ever played, lie to congress, fix it so that you're friends get baseball teams even though they've either ruined other teams or are underbidding, and generally turned the sport into a huge joke, waving the flag around is a cheap-ass stunt.

Bud Selig is such a wanker.

2)So turns out Yahoo is gonna screw over all the people who have Yahoo mail and sell their user's names out to marketers. Here's the actual quote about it:

"They are getting free content and utility that is unparalleled, and in return we will be marketing products to them."

Love how whenever some internet company does that, they say it's in our best interests. Like we want to have to spend half our morning deleting twenty or thirty unsolicited e-mails. The most hilarious bit, though, is when they say the "products" they're marketing to us is really interesting and important when we all know all it is spam mail for college diplomas, herbal viagra, penis enlargement, financial scams, debt consolidation plans, and porn. Lots of porn.

I have a college diploma, am working on getting out of debt, don't believe I can earn tons of money just by working at home, sadly don't really have any need for herbal viagra, and as I have Cinemax I don't need more porn. And I've already had my penis enlarged. What is there that I should be getting spammed about?

3)Can't remember what I was gonna say here. Damn gin & tonic with curry dinner.

4)Never heard of the movie, New Best Friend but I read this in the review..


It would be hard to take a screenplay that consists of rampant sex, incipient lesbianism and nonstop parties and turn it into something boring, especially with the added attraction of an attempted-murder investigation. Director Zoe Clarke-Williams didn't.

So I'm thinking it might be worth checking out.

That's it for now. Gonna go do my taxes and decide whether I want to go check out the new movie "Harvard Man" at the Roxie and see my beloved Buffy getting it doggy-style. Not quite sure I want to see that....

I am watching Buffy. It's the big, climatic, moment of the second season's finale, Becoming II. Buffy has just killed Angel, the love of her life, thrusting a sword into his heart after lovingly telling him how much she loves him. As Angel disappears into another dimension, Buffy backs up and the tears come, rolling down her face. Nobody cries like Sarah Michelle Gellar. Nobody. As Sarah MacLachlan's "State of Grace" fills the background, we get a slow montage as Buffy watches her friends from a distance, quietly saying goodbye to them before she hops on a bus to skip town. The entire sequence is so powerful, so gut-wrenching, it would make Saddam Hussien break down and bawl like a baby.

In the middle of the whole sequence, the phone rings. Despite my usual rule about not answering the phone during "Buffy," I answer it. It's MCI asking me about my long distance service.

I hang up on them.

Damn them, damn them all to hell.

Just reading this week's Bay Guardian and stumbled upon this beautiful, poetic, piece of writing:

"They (the artists) serve as an indigenous piece of the Bay Area's art history in the unstudied way they incorporate the experiential drive of Bay Area conceptualism (see Tom Marioni's 1970 The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art), the revered Bay Area figurative school, and perhaps a gentle counterbalance to the scarier politicized street robotics of Survival Research Laboratories."

But wait, it gets better....

"While the funky, assured projects the current generation of artists creates may not suit everyone's tastes – this is material rooted more in an "up with people" spirit, and sometimes a messy, childlike ethos, than in the shiny, distanced intellectual aura of art theory and media critique that informs much other contemporary art – no one can argue the fact that the generous neighborhood spirit of their work is appealing. Whether it's "Think globally, act locally," or the same process in reverse, there's a certain bumper-sticker enthusiasm to this ad hoc
artistic movement, which is being called everything from "urban rustic" to "The Mission school."

As I don't speak masturbatory wank-off, I have no idea what they're talking about. Can someone please explain it to me?

And speaking of people who should have nasty, evil, viscious things done to them, went to ESPN.com, a sports site, a site that should have nothing to do with any of the badness going on in the world, and see this:

France amateur team attacked

Having a bad feeling about the story, I click on it and find out that -suprise, suprise- it was an amateur Jewish team that got attacked.

Here's a quote from a Froggy Sports Authority:

"I am convinced that the young people of France, of whatever opinion and of all origins, will take action to defend the spirit of tolerance and dialogue," Buffet said.

Yeah, right.

Please, oh Please, W., just get it over with and declare France as part of your Axis of Evil. Not for being terrorists per se, but for just general lameness. Does anyone really think that if we bombed France back to the stone age, anyone would mind? Except for maybe the French, but who fucking cares what they think because they're all a bunch of hypocritical, cowering, anti-semititic, pretentious, snots whose only major contribution to civilization is perfume, bad art flicks, and super depressing philosophers. And the only reason they invented perfume was because they were too fucking lame to bathe.

And speaking of people who should have nasty, evil, viscious things done to them, go to ESPN.com, a sports site, a site that should have nothing to do with any of the badness going on in the world, and see this:

France amateur team attacked

Having a bad feeling about the story, I click on it and find out that -suprise, suprise- it was an amateur Jewish team that got attacked.

Here's a quote from Froggy French Sports Authority:

"I am convinced that the young people of France, of whatever opinion and of all origins, will take action to defend the spirit of tolerance and dialogue," Buffet said.

Yeah, right.

Please, oh Please, W., just get it over with and declare France as part of your Axis of Evil. Not for being terrorists per se, but for just general suckiness. Does anyone really think that if we bombed France back to the stone age, anyone would mind? Except for maybe the French, but who fucking cares what they think because they're all a bunch of hypocritical, cowering, anti-semititic, pretentious, snots whose only major contribution to civilization is perfume, bad art flicks, and super depressing philosophers. And they invented perfume only because they were too fucking lame to bathe.

The phone rings, late morning. Who could it be? After all, who calls at this hour of the morning? Could it be from one of the companies I've recently sent resumes out to? Could it be in response my resume on Craig's List? Could it be that publishing company that's Charlie Brown-ing me again? Could it be a temp-agency with work? A friend with something exciting to do? Any sort of good news?

Who could it be?

It was for a free Discover card that I could have if I wanted it.

Fuck you.

Every telemarketer- everyone who runs it, is responsible for it, who even does it- should be strapped down to a table, slathered in honey, and have a horde of African red ants let loose on them.

What the fuck is the point of a Discover card anyways?

And just like that, temp job's over. They panicked, hired too many temps and I played my cards well enough so that I'm not going back there tomorrow. Oh well. It was actually turning kind of fun.

And yes, naturally, I was the one who pushed the Girl over the edge. It wasn't really my fault, but I did it nonetheless.

See, there was this temp who started there this morning. He was, from the get-go, surly and bitter about the gig (not that I'd know what that's like, of course) and didn't look particulary happy to be there. When another temp and I got back from lunch, we noticed that while he and his stuff were gone, all of his work was neatly piled up on his desk as if he had just gone out for a bite. Couple hours went by and he still hadn't come back.

There were three of us in this newly painted room, wearing jackets to keep from freezing due to the windows having to be left open to keep us from getting sick from the paint fumes. As the hours clicked by and that one temp guy didn't come back, we started to wonder what happened. Is he just doing the old "they'll never know how long of a lunch I'm taking, so I'm gonna take a three hour lunch" move? Did he just bail on the job at lunch-time? Or did the company tell them they didn't need them anymore because it was obvious they had hired too many temps? We didn't know and didn't know exactly what to do. None of us were really doing any work and the work was just sitting there, but since we didn't know what had happened, were unsure what to do. It could be possible that they just let him go and forgot that he was there. On the other hand, he could of just skipped off and we'd rat him out. And if we do rat him out, is that cool or not? We ratted on him.

Actually, we didn't mean to. We just figured he was sent home and as I was the one with the least amount of work and had reached a point where I was no longer able to figure out any other words on the crossword puzzle, it fell to me to ask about the left-over work. So I grabbed the work and asked the Girl who was running everything what to do. I asked, only to get this as a response: "he's gone? huh? Where did he go?"

She follows me into the room where we were sitting, took a look at the pile of papers that he left behind, put her hand over her mouth and laughed. In between her laughter, she just shook her head and muttered "I can't believe we can't keep anyone here.." then went to the corner of the room, her hand still over mouth and her back turned away from us, and laughed some more. Kind of. It didn't really sound like a happy laugh, more like a "gotta keep laughing or else I'm gonna cry laugh," like the tears were gonna come out at any second. Like that morning when the server went down, I could hear a few sobs lodged somewhere in the middle of her laugh. The other two temps and I just kind of stared at each other, kind of sorry we brought it up, kind of scared about what was gonna happen.

And then the Temp Agency called. According to them, the guy had a major allergy attack or something and on his way back to work from lunch, had such an attack that he was having trouble breathing and had to go to the hospital he was so sick. He even said he was a couple of blocks away when he got hit with the attack and was about to hail a cab to go to the hospital. Something which I'd have more sympathy for and believe if it wasn't for the fact:

1)someone who started yesterday used the same excuse
2)He had to spend the whole morning fixing an Excel spread sheet because he accidently deleted a cell instead of a row and fucked it all up (something which wasn't his doing, of course)
3)Acted the whole time like he didn't want to be there.
4)I somehow consider myself as being responsible and don't have the balls to make up bullshit excuses about why I don't want to go into a Temp Job and I was pissed someone had the balls to do what I couldn't do.

See what I mean about the job being fun?

Oh, and here's a few things I learned about being a Security Guard:
-The pay is shit
-The pay is even more shit if you don't use a gun
-The Federal Government pays even less than a private company would, so the company I temped for just lost five guards that they trained to a higher-paying Security Agency (Tom Ridge, hello?)
-A history of domestic violence doesn't disqualify you from becoming a Security Guard
-And finally that the health insurance sucks. This I know because while I was in there, fixing Allergy Guys' spreadsheet, a Guard came in (one at the ripe age of 64) to say that he got in a scuffle the night before and just recieved the full bill for having the ambulance come and check him out. The company was trying to get worker's comp for him because I guess his insurance doesn't cover ambulance care. Not that his job is dangerous or that he's putting his life on the line.

Sadly, I was gonna post all these snarky comments about the new temp job, but I can't do it. Everyone in the office is so undermanned and overwhelmed and they're such nice people stuck in a really crappy situation beyond their control that I feel too sorry for them to make fun of them. The server's not working yet so they're backing everything up on floppies, the photo copier just broke down this morning, the Temp Agency put the kaibosh on their plans to have us escort guards to and from clinics, and the payroll person at corporate forgot to mail out the paychecks so they've been getting calls all day from disgruntled guards wondering where their paycheck is. They're so overwhelmed that they're not even sure which guard is where and which place has guards and which doesn't. In a way, I actually don't mind being there because I feel like I'm helping not the company, but the poor employees. But then again, I'm a softy at heart.

And the 24-year old, Red Bull guzzling, just flew in from D.C., girl in charge of everything is so frazzled I'm afraid to ask her anything or bug her with anything because she's an inch away from going postal. Twice this morning, I thought the sniffles were gonna come, but she fought them off both times. I feel so bad for her, in fact, that I want to give her my number, tell her she really needs to get liquored and that I like to get liquored, so I'll take her out to tie a few on. See softy comment. And see "I like to get liquored part".

And remember folks, these are the people who are in charge of making sure our Federal Buildings are safe and secure.....

New temp job. Started today. Eleven bucks an hour for general office work. Runs til next Monday with the possibility of Saturday work thrown in for good measure. The job's in the bowels of the Federal Building, in an unventilated, windowless office in order to get to, I have to go through a metal-detector and an x-ray machine.

I'm one of five temps for the week. The 24-year old or so girl whose running the project explains what the job is. Basically, it's for a security firm. They got a Federal contract sometime over the summer to hire all the Private Security Guard's at all the Federal Buildings. Then 9/11 happened and bingo, the company hit the jackpot, got tons of new money to hire new Security Guards for every Federal Building in the country. Now the company's scrambling, trying to set up new offices and hire anyone (and I mean anyone) with a gun permit and Security Guard license. Due to the usual bureaucratic reasons, the 24 year old girl just flew in from Washington with the orders to get the San Francisco office up and running by next week. Wired on too much coffee already and chugging a bottle of Starbucks iced mocha, she tells us that our job is to answer the phones, file, and help them sort through the endless amounts of applications that are flying in. If we're really lucky, we'll get a rental car and go pick-up guards who have been already hired and take them to a medical clinic for their final medical check-up. They've had to hire people so fast, half of them haven't been properly checked out yet.

I look through the files of applications and try to find files that haven't been fully processed yet. Yes, it's boring as all hell, but at least it's giving me a sense of security knowing that they'll pretty much hire anyone as long as they know how to wield a gun and baton. I spend my time thinking about the 24-year old girl whose running the show. I wonder how she got here, working for a security firm. I guess she's fresh out of college and it's probably her first job. I'm guessing too, working for a security guard firm is not what she set out to do when she graduated. She could have graduated with a Law Enforcement degree, but I somehow doubt that. Doesn't look the type. I'm guessing she got a Business Degree and this was the best job she could get and now she finds herself working with fat, over the hill wanna-be cops, half of whom barely speak English. I wonder if this is where she saw herself when she graduated and is she really happy on the job.

As I watch her, and as I file away, I realize that she's not really doing anything that complicated. Nothing that takes any special type of training. Like the young chippies who were full-time employees at the last place I temped, as I watched them, I couldn't see them doing anything that I couldn't do. I've done jobs like theirs, only different.

But why am I unemployed and why not them? Why am I sitting there, filing away for eleven bucks an hour? How come they have good jobs and I don't?

Where did it all go wrong?

It gets better and better....

Went to Safeway to do my weekly food shop. Spent about half an hour walking around, finding what I needed, and trying to remember what I always forget only to find out that Safeway (Safeway!) is out of plastic bags. Which, for some of you, isn't that big of a deal, except I don't have a car and lug it on MUNI, so I need the plastic bags in order to lug my food home. Just wasted over half an hour of my life and don't have anything to show for it.

And, out of nowhere, I heard from that publishing company that I first interviewed with way back in August, back when I had a job. After they basically putzed around for months and months, even offering me freelance work that never came through, I had pretty much given up on them. In fact, I had pretty much wished them only nothing but awful, evil things. Looks like they're interviewing people again for one (they've so far dangled three jobs in front of me) of the jobs I interviewed for.

If I was a strong, empowered person, I'd tell them to take a flying leap and refuse to let myself get Charlie Browned by them. On the other hand, I really need a fucking job and getting one now would be pretty clutch.

I am, as always, life's bitch.

At least there's some good tv on tonight. And Cara's going nutso on "The Real World" tonight.

One more thing about the ball game on sunday- during the 7th inning stretch they played "God Bless America." I had thought we'd be through with stuff like that, but I guess not. Yeah, yeah, I know, it was a horrible tragedy and we're still kind of at war, but is this gonna be a new tradition? Are we gonna have Moment's of Silence of patriotic songs for everything for the rest of our lives?

Here's my theory about all this, the patriotic songs at games, the flags on the uniforms, the flags on everyone's lapels- that right now everyone is wishing it would end, but nobody has the balls to do it. Like, say, the Giants probably don't want to do it anymore, but feel that they have to because they don't want to look bad and they don't want to be the first team to drop "God Bless America." This would make them unpatriotic and nobody wants to do that right now. Same thing with Leno and Letterman, both of whom are wearing the flag on their lapels. Everyone's just sitting around waiting for somebody else to be the first one to drop the patriotic mumbo-jumbo, but noone has the balls to do it.

So now we're gonna be stuck singing "God Bless America" during the 7th Inning Stretch right before "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" for yet another season. Make....it....stop......

That was actually one of the cool things about going to New York, hearing from people there that they're pretty fucking sick of it too. You could almost hear the city collectively roll their eyes during the Oscar telecast when they during their Moment of Silence.

Don't know about you, but the thing I look forward to most on monday's is waking up, getting the paper, and rushing through to the Entertainment section to see what the biggest movie's at the box office were. Talk about excitement. Had "Panic Room" in my office pool too, three weeks in a row. Woo-hoo!

Yeah, that was sarcasm. On a list of things that are important to the civilized world, what movie makes what over the weekend ranks somewhere up there with, well, nothing. Yet, like most non-important things in the world, it gets talked about and diagnosed endlessly. Why? I don't know because I don't think I've ever actually heard anyone actually talk about what made what over the weekend. Meanwhile, the world teeters more and more on the brink of just general badness.....

Speaking of movies, stayed up til 1 last night trying to download the trailer for "The Two Towers." Damn cable modem. When it was finally finished downloading, after close to three hours, I threw on my headphones, cranked up the computer volume, and sat down with all the excitement of a four year old kid on Christmas morning to watch it, only to discover that the video was mislabeled and it was a preview for "Fellowship of the Rings."

D'oh!

Don't know about you, but the thing I look forward to most on monday's is waking up, getting the paper, and rushing through to the Entertainment section to see what the biggest movie's at the box office were. Talk about excitement. Had "Panic Room" in my office pool too, three weeks in a row. Woo-hoo!

Yeah, that was sarcasm. On a list of things that are important to the civilized world, what movie makes what over the weekend ranks somewhere up there with, well, nothing. Yet, like most non-important things in the world, it gets talked about and diagnosed endlessly. Why? I don't know because I don't think I've ever actually heard anyone actually talk about what made what over the weekend. Meanwhile, the world teeters more and more on the brink of just general badness.....

Speaking of movies, stayed up til 1 last night trying to download the trailer for "The Two Towers." Damn cable modem. When it was finally finished downloading, after close to three hours, I threw on my headphones, cranked up the computer volume, and sat down with all the excitement of a four year old kid on Christmas morning to watch it, only to discover that the video was mislabeled and it was a preview for "Fellowship of the Rings."

D'oh!

Got up this morning, threw on a t-shirt and some shorts, grabbed some sun-tan lotion and headed off to Pac Bell to go see my first game of the season. Didn't have a ticket, but knew it wouldn't matter. There's always tickets to be had if you're willing to pay. Just had to go.

It was a beautiful day for a ball game. The sun was out and the temperature was perfect- just warm enough for sun-tan lotion but not too hot. Everyone was in a good mood, drinking beer and talking baseball. The boats were out in the bay and the grass was so green it almost glowed. Even if Barry didn't play, Livan Hernandez, the laid-back, slow-moving baby Huey starting pitcher for the Giants went three for three with two doubles, two runs scored and an RBI. He even scored from second on a double. Everytime he roped one, the crowd would roar as one and give him a standing ovation, half giggling at the ridiculousness of it all.

On a day like today, so beatiful and sunny, I don't think there's any other place on God's green earth that I'd rather be at than Pac Bell park. I don't really believe in God, think organized religion is pretty much a crock, but I'm a card carrying member of the Church of Baseball. Of Willie, Mickey and the Duke. Of Barry cranking a home run into the water. Of two outs, runners on, bottom of the ninth and the closer doing nothing but throwing heat against the opposing teams' best power hitter.

Or, in the mighty words of Crash Davis:

"I believe in the soul ... the small of a woman's back, the hanging curveball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days."

Feeling a bit better now.

Could be the fact it's Opening Day in SF. Could be Hotmail's up and running.

But I think it was something else.

On my way to picking up my tax forms, certainly a pick-me up if ever there was, as I was envisioning blowing all my 401K money on a "Leaving Las Vegas" coke & whore binge in Thailand, I heard something. Through the thick and thin of the radio, through the fog and the haze of the white noise, through the gloom and grey of the day, I heard these words:

"We've got to hold on ready or not
You live for the fight when it's all that you've got
We're half way there
Livin' on a prayer
Take my hand and we'll make it - I swear
Livin' on a prayer"

And suddenly, the world all made sense again.....

Welcome to my world.....

Cash out my 401K check so I can have enough money to survive for the next four or five months and to also get out of my increasingly suffocating credit card debt. Cash the check in what should of been enough time that I'd be able to pay this month's rent, but, wait.... BofA says they'll have to put a hold on it because of the size of the check. Which means I won't have the money til the middle of the week.

That's bad.

Basically, I have to choose between having spending money for the next couple of weeks and paying my rent really late or blowing all my money on rent and not having any money for anything for the next couple of weeks. Decide I need spending money due to my increasing desire to go on a drinking binge, and beg the landlord for some more time before he cashes my rent check. He agrees, but isn't thrilled. I'm not happy about what I had to do because I've always been really, really good about paying my bills.

So I go the ATM this morning and guess what, all my money is there. The entire check's worth, the entire shit-load, buckets worth of money. Which means I didn't have to beg the landlord for more time to cash in the rent check.

Then, this morning, I have to e-mail something out. Unlike my usual "I'm bored, play with me e-mails" this one is fairly important. I'm trying to get a job as a columnist somewhere and need to send in a sample. I'm already a week late in sending them something so I need to do it ASAP. Spend all morning, fighting off my hangover and making corrections to it, only to find that Hotmail is down.

Give me something to sing about....

PS- if you want to read what I wrote, the two or three of you who are still reading this page, go here. It's basically a short rant about how much I hate Maxim and the kind of men's magazine I'd want to create, one for normal, average guys.