here’s how i started:

cleaned up a bit:

this was my favorite, the handlebeard:

handlebar!

between the color of my facial hair and the bathroom lighting, you can barely see this fine hitler ’stache:

here’s to looking like a 16 year old again:

i got back into internet radio (see www.riceandcabbage.com)

i built a ukelele.

three weeks ago, i proposed to jenny. she said yes.

last week, i got laid off.

currently, i’m planning what to do with my facial hair since i’ll need to trim it before i do any interviews, one of which will hopefully be with an adult novelty and video distributor.

i spent the entire weekend on the couch coughing up phlegm, drifting in and out of sleep, and being too dizzy to move around. on friday the temperature dropped about 25 degrees since the day before, which always causes me to become ill. i hate being sick. what makes it worse is that i’ve already booked my schedule solid for the next few weekends while keeping this one free because it was “my time off.” i’m tempted to push everything back a week because i got fucking robbed.

my thoughts are all broken up and fragmented, too. cabbage was at a wedding all weekend and i had the place to myself, which would’ve been cool if i was healthy. instead i had to sit around all alone until this afternoon, bored out of my mind. jenny came over just to give me a hug. that was nice of her.

i also went the entire weekend without going to the bathroom, except until like 5 minutes before i started writing this. i hate being sick.

today the smashing pumpkins released their first album in the last seven years (and the first good one in nine). i also saw the list of tour dates for the fall and they’ve got one stop in ohio. they’re playing in columbus on my birthday. if that’s not an omen, i don’t know what the hell is. the new album is pretty enjoyable, but i wouldn’t classify it as great. i know it’ll grow on me though.

work has slowed down for the day and i don’t have anything i can really get done. my week is jam-packed with meetings, one of which is me getting free lunch tomorrow and going over stuff for the phone system. oh yeah, i’m learning the phone system and that makes me harder to fire, but more impressive to new employers if i ever get let go. today’s lunch hour was spent stuck in extremely heavy traffic on the street my job is on, then turning onto another street to get stuck in the line of traffic behind a guy who was talking on his cell phone and idling down the road. i was appointed to pick up some sushi from a local health food store (mustard seed market, it’s just like a mini-mart) and i had to wait 10 minutes behind the guy who was blocking the entire sushi display being picky about everything he looked at. his determination to inspect everything was for naught, as he put every single tray of sushi into his basket. seriously. every last one. at least they had a guy making fresh sushi right behind the display. that didn’t stop me from getting stuck behind the two ladies with the longest checkout times in the store.

much like this blog, i haven’t been keeping up with my forums lately. partially because they’ve cracked down about leisure time at work, but also that i don’t use my computer at home much anymore. i live with cabbage now and we watch a lot of movies and play a lot of video games. other than that, i’ve also been retarded busy since my last post. all the free time i had has been devoured by other obligations and incidents. it also doesn’t help when i get 6 calls in a week from people who are in desperate need of computer work just after i move half an hour away from a place that was 45 minutes from them to begin with. i’m really not able to do the tech support side-gig anymore now that all the people i did work for are so far away. i have the ability to remote into their computers to do some minor work, but if their problem is that they can’t get online or if it’s something hardware related, i can’t really do anything. even still, the odds of getting paid for the time spent doing that is almost nothing.

regardless of my schedule, i’m finally becoming used to the new place. rush had another guitar hero party last night (and i live ten minutes from him now) and there was more drinking and being nerdy. good times were had by all. we also watched an episode of man vs. wild and the guy on the show talked about the black sand deserts in iceland, which were known to literally swallow men and horses. i told rush the black sand deserts sounded just like his mom.

the other big event was jon’s wedding. i went out and bought a fancy new suit, selected some wedding presents, and got to spend the weekend out of state. charice is a good car to have on road trips. some of the more entertaining parts of the evening were the dance-off against bryan (my brother in law) in which i totally got served, having bells put in my hair (”so they can find me if i get drunk” i told people), and trying to think of ways to respond to people that wouldn’t make them feel stupid or offend jenny when they asked when we were getting married. oh, and my closest friend got married.

let me give a brief background on jenny. she’s been my sister’s friend since they were in middle school. any guy with an older sister knows this situation. she would have parties and all her friends would come over and they would all be loud and in pajamas and there were always at least a few that you wanted to get a piece of. well, of all steph’s friends, jenny was the one i always wanted a piece of the most. i first met her when i was 11 years old and i had a big crush on her ever since. well, there was a party a while ago where i got to see jenny again. i’ll cut out the details, but the story ends with her doing the walk of shame the next morning. we continued to see each other pretty frequently, but we have never technically been “dating.” it’s been a year now and i continue to see her on occasion. it’s a weird situation and neither of us knows where we stand, but relationship status is insignificant to me. she’s my friend and we’re kind of dating. but not really. but we still kind of are. but it’s different.

now it’s time for me to discuss my dream job because it’s the topic of the day. the place i’m in now is actually deathly close to my dream job. the only difference is that i start earlier in the morning than i’d like and i’m not making way more money than i know what to do with. i get to work with computers, i learn new things every day, i get to play video games, most of the people i work with have become friends, and every day feels like getting things done while i just hang out instead of like i’m doing actual “work.”

tonight i also got news that my friend rod just got accepted for a job in colorado. rod has been talking about getting married to his girlfriend for a while now. if they tie the knot, that’ll make 3 friends i had in high school that are now married and the second to move away. the other friend is my brother in law, which is less weird considering he went from friend to family member.

i’ve been moving along myself, too. i finished school, got a real job, i’ve been living on my own for a while, and now it’s almost time to move again. this weekend i have to go buy a suit and look at apartments. i’m getting more responsibilities at work and there’s a slim chance i could be relocated halfway across the country in the next year. my friends are all moving in separate directions, i’m actually becoming a real adult, and i have all these memories of growing up that seem recent, but happened several years ago. things that happened in high school, or shortly afterwards. hell, even getting my kidney removed was almost a year and a half ago. i don’t even notice the scars anymore. it’s starting to make me feel old, and hell, i don’t even own a dresser. or a bed. my clothes are scattered on my floor, i sleep on a shitty walmart futon, and i feel like an old man at 22. then i realize that i’m only 22 and really, things are just starting for me. it’s a weird feeling. as a kid you always think about what it’s going to be like when you’re an adult, but once it happens, you don’t actually know what to do with it.

i’m not sad or distraught by any of this, it just strikes me as weird. instead of rambling on and on with my thoughts any longer, i will get to the topic of the day: the world will explode in ten minutes. what do i do with the time i have left?

this answer is easy. demo derby. i’d get in charice (my car) and start nailing other cars in the parking lot. hell, screw the parking lot, i’m taking it on the highway. i’ll finally have an excuse to take out all the people that drive so slow because they didn’t anticipate the sun coming up at 8 in the morning and aren’t aware of the visors installed in all cars that keeps the light from shining in their eyes. all those idiots that cause a two mile stretch of road to turn into an hour and a half commute because there’s a car pulled over on the other side of the highway would taste the silver sedan of highway justice as i sideswiped them into the median. just as the countdown was reaching zero, i’d kick on cruise control at 90mph, get in the center lane, unroll my window, and climb on the roof of the car and triumphantly raise both middle fingers to the trail of destruction behind me. i’m going down in a blaze of glory. i’m not an earth-shattering explosion (well, depending on what circle of people you travel with… …ladies) but i’m gonna do my best to compete.

actually, it looks like i’m not that grown up after all. huh.

yesterday was fairly uneventful. i helped a former coworker shop for an interview shirt, ran a few errands, then sat around doing nothing. i had dinner at an awesome italian restaurant that does 1950s family style serving. if you order spaghetti, you don’t get a plate of spaghetti. you get an entire platter of it for everyone to eat. it was delicious. after dinner we went to rent some movies and decided to take a gamble on a title called “mr. jingles.”

remember the post where i explained why house of the dead was the worst movie i had ever seen? well, it’s been dethroned. we knew we were in for an experience when the opening credits started rolling (and by rolling i mean fading in, then fading out, then fading in, then fading out). they were clearly made in imovie and were accompanied by a song so clearly crappy-local-band-esque that it caused me to joke “music by the cameraman’s brother’s band” only to be proven right seconds later. we started throwing jokes around about how it was probably filmed on some vhs camera with the built-in mic in their friends’ houses with no tripod because they just gave it to the guy with the steadiest hands, where the actual movie would be some guy sitting in a room telling a story about mr. jingles, then there would be half an hour of end credits.

except for the guy telling a story instead of having actual acting, we were spot-on. every frame of that film was blurry (thanks to the vhs camcorder with no tripod), they filmed it all in their homes, the acting was god-awful, and about 20 minutes of the running time of the movie was credits. it was hilariously bad. they even threw a few sets of boobs in to try and save it, but they weren’t even very good boobs. passable, yes, but nothing really worth telling anyone about.

today’s topic of the day is weak. timco got me into the IMBC by making a thread about it on the hockeyzombie.com forums. i figured why not, i could use a year-long domain registration and a reason to write down what goes on in my head. that’s why i signed up, and that’s why i keep posting even though i bombed out.

tuttle brought in his son theo today. i think he’s shadowing. i got a help ticket this morning asking that i make a security badge for theo. i showed him how the badges work, what goes into making them, and why they’re important. he’s like 10 years old and he’s got a higher security clearance than me. he and tuttle senior have gotten through the “this is what i do during the day” phase and are now at the “ok, this is the stuff i do during the day to keep my sanity” phase. everyone who’s done any kind of shadowing or interning knows this stage. it’s where you learn the real secrets of how a business works, like which guy has a mini-fridge full of beer in his cubicle. theo came over just as i was coloring “make me pretty” matt. yesterday he was an emo kid, today he is an anime character.

i also got free lunch today from one of the insurance companies we work with. they’re touring the facility and decided to show gratitude for how many policies we’ve sold of theirs. free lunch kicks ass, even if it’s just a turkey sandwich that i had to make myself. this leftover pizza will live another few hours until dinner rolls around.

i just realized how lucky i am to have a job where i can keep waterguns in my desk, but that i still have to be careful with them because if the CEO sees them, he’ll come after me with his waterguns, and i hear he packs supersoakers. i also shouldn’t complain about having to dress nicely for the people who visit from the outside since otherwise i get to wear pretty much whatever i want.

today’s topic of the day asks if i think we’re alone in the universe. i’m pretty sure we’re not. this video describes it best.

what are the odds that we’re the only speck of dirt in the universe with life on it?

in the spring of 2003, a friend of a friend of a friend in a town not terribly far from where i live went to a used record store to browse for some new tunes. he found a copy of one of the clash’s albums and bought it. he got into his car, opened the case, and inside was a light blue CD with no labeling on it whatsoever. he threw it in the cd player and it was clearly not the clash. he kept listening out of curiosity. he got in an accident on the way home, but wasn’t hurt. he told a few friends about the weird cd he got by mistake at the record store and made some copies for people. the first guy to get a copy listened to it at home, and within the hour, he broke his arm. copies were given to two friends of mine. one fell down the stairs the afternoon he received it. the other friend put it in his computer. in the middle of playing, his computer shut off. the motherboard was completely fried, but before the system went down, his media player connected with the CDDB to reveal the album they had found:

cloudy cloud calculator by takako minekawa.

this was during my senior year. i had visited my friends one weekend and they told me about this horrible cd while we were driving around. it wasn’t like these were horrible dreadful stories, but this was an album that seemed to carry a lot of bad luck. we made a lot of jokes about it, and something they had noticed was that the bad things stopped happening when you made a copy for someone. it’s like the lite-flavored audio equivalent to the ring. i told them to keep it away from me because although i didn’t think this cd was actually cursed, i didn’t feel like taking the risk.

three weeks later, i was digging in my bag for something at school and i saw it. a CD-R labeled with blue marker. “cloudy cloud calculator.” regardless of the fact that i was in class, i called up one of the friends who told me about the cd. the one who was in the back seat of my car where my bag was when i was hearing about the audio atrocity.

“you fucker. i fucking hate you.”
“hahahahaha, you found my present! good luck, skippy!”

since it was already too late, i figured i’d throw it in my computer in class and listen to what was so weird about it. it was some of the weirdest music i’d ever heard (it’s japanese, i know, i shouldn’t be surprised) and it was weird to the point where i had classmates come over and listen to it. three of them asked me to make them copies that afternoon. i got home safely and figured i had broken the curse since it had been several hours since i listened to the cursed japanese noisefest. copies were made, distributed to classmates, and i went on like normal. more requests were made by other classmates until pretty much every other person in my program had their own copy.

one of them fell off a stack of pressure treated lumber and got filled with splinters. his entire torso was covered in swollen red marks. another classmate’s girlfriend broke up with him out of nowhere (this may not be related to the CCC curse). the guy i sit next to in math fell asleep at the wheel and wrapped his car around a telephone pole. he got away with a sprained wrist and a bruised forehead. of all these misfortunes, nothing bad had happened to me.

fast forward to about 2 years ago (fast forward to the past. sounds like a back to the future tv series). i was telling this same story to some other friends of mine one evening while i was driving around. one of them, kurt, said he was interested in hearing the cd sometime. i kept it in my car, just in case i had to make a copy and i don’t know what would happen if i ever got rid of it. we threw it in my cd player and drove around, laughing at the ridiculous sounds and having a good time just enjoying the evening. at some point we had to go back to kurt’s house and wait for his dad to get home before we could leave again. we sat around and smoked cigarettes and kept the cd going. kurt’s dad got back and we were finally ready to leave. that’s when it happened.

i was backing my car out of the driveway like i had done so many hundreds of times before (i used to drive kurt to school) and BAM! glass everywhere, huge dent in the back of my car. kurt’s dad parked his car in the same spot there had always been a car every time i picked kurt up to go anywhere, but this time, i backed right into it. there wasn’t any serious damage, but all the same, that’s how cloudy cloud calculator gets you. nothing deadly, but just enough to let you know it’s there. all the copies i made for my classmates kept me safe. it was listening to it again after the years passed that put it back on me. i made a copy for kurt and he made a copy for his ex-girlfriend. since then, neither of us have listened to it. i still have my copy in my car, so i know exactly where it is, just in case.