Monthly Archives: March 2008

Botulism, Ahoy!

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So, I’m sitting at my desk, installing TurboTax (give me a break, I have 2 weeks), listening to Melinda Doolittle (!!!), and trying my hardest not to die.

Knew those fucking cheese crackers with peanut butter were a bad idea.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had botulism, but lemme tell you… it’s no fucking joke. As a point of reference, it’s very akin to getting salmonella. (As Grace will likely, and so helpfully point out, she’s been privy to my Salmonella Debacle of 2005.) Nothing in your body wants to work, your digestive system has shut down, and your excretory system (gross) decides that it’s time to go on holiday, so nothing gets processed. Not in your kidneys, not in your liver, not in your small-fucking-intestines. To spare you a lot of the gory details, you remember in The Matrix when Neo first came out of the network and vommed gray matter all over the deck of the Nebuchadnezzar? That’s pretty much what I feel like.

I’ve been a very good boy all weekend. Went to a pillow-fight in Union Square. Worked on my Columbia App. Threw away another 20% of my remaining possessions. Digitized another 8% of my life. Ordered groceries. Then when I have the one lapse in judgment, (I was hungry), and decide to snack on some sketchy cheese crackers with peanut butter of unknown origin that I’ve found in the pantry, God gives me botulism.

Go figure.

Going Paperless, and the Ensuing Consequences

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I recently vowed to myself that I would begin the long and arduous task of going paperless. I’ve already been paying all of my bills online for the last 3 years, my taxes, and all tax-related documents are contained on my computer (have I revealed too much?), and the only paper mail I receive are The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly. (Those two being the obvious paper exceptions to my rule. No, but seriously. You can’t ask me to stop those.) After I vowed that my next major purchase would be a Kindle (Yeah, right. Who are you kidding?), I decided that it was time to tackle my archived photos.

Now, Facebook has revolutionized the way I see photographs. I consider myself a relatively adept photographer, especially given my shitty, shitty camera. The thing is, I’ve never actively taken photos before Facebook, because I didn’t have an efficient way to store, catalog, and share photos, without having to wrestle with Snapfish, or, horror, KodakGallery. (Remember, this is before digital cameras were surgically attached to our hips.) And because of this aversion to the process of sharing photos, I almost stopped taking them altogether.

Well… now I have the opposite problem. The few pictures that I have taken, (those that you’ll see range from 1998 to 2004), have just been sitting in a box by my desk for years and years, collecting dust and bedbugs. Speaking of bedbugs, as I was undergoing my massive bedbug purge of Aught-Eight, I thought to myself: ‘I need to throw everything that I own out. Even the memories. I should digitize everything I own. I should digitize that fucking box of photos.’

So here I am, digitizing 5 years worth of photos. It’s going surprisingly quickly. I’m writing this post to personally apologize to every single person who is contained within these photos. We are excused for how we look in recent photos because of the fashion du jour, or a bad angle, or illness – all things that we know are true because we just saw you in real life, like 20 seconds ago. However, when you start heading into pictures from the past; 4 years ago, 6 years ago, 10 motherfucking years ago, you no longer have the oh-so-forgiving barrier of recent memory to whitewash your sartorial sins. I heartily include myself in this bunch. We were truly Sad!-worthy, and most definitely *sigh*-worthy.
So that is my explanation of how and why so many pictures from our (haunted) pasts have surfaced on that Book of Face, and the greater Web of Inter. Again, I apologize. You should absolutely feel free to untag yourself, but know that I put the pictures up for posterity, and for my own edification of personal history.

Enjoy!

Back with a Vengance.

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So… lo and behold, I get a call from Grace the other day. This is the conversation I had in my head before picking up the phone:

‘WTF?? Grace never calls me. This must be something Sad. Sigh. related. Or else she’s getting me back for vomiting all over myself the last time she was here. Whatever, it’s not like that’s new. I vomit all over myself every time she’s in town. She’s a bitch. Whoops! I missed her call.’

24 minutes later – after calling her back, talking smack, shouting gibberish phrases at each other, and causing her to crash her Mazda Miata into the divider on the 405 (she was going 2 miles an hour)…

‘That Grace sure is a nice girl. But how predictable of her to make me sign back up for that asshole of a site. I don’t blog, friends. I Facebook.’

Well look here! I’ve discovered how to do both! And it only took me about an hour to figure out how the goddamned RSS thingy worked. Wow. I’ve never felt so technologically inept before. I always considered myself rather good with keyboards, cellphones, remote controls, and those digital thingies… what do they call them? Internets? Lo and Behold, I am now my Mom of the new blogger generation.

Sad. Sigh.

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I got myself all worked up about dumping this guy I’ve been seeing for 2 months over the weekend.  I took some deep breaths, had a glass of wine, and braced myself for him to yell or cry or be angry.

I’ve never dumped anyone before.  Sure, I’ve broken up with people.  Sure, I’ve been dumped.  But never have I just flat out dumped someone when he didn’t really know it was coming.

I found his name in my cell phone and pressed the green button.  My stomach flipped.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hey,” I said, with all the gravity the situation required.  “Listen, I don’t think you should come out with me and my friends tonight.”

“Oh?  Any particular reason?”

“Well,” I said.  Here it comes.  “I don’t think this is going to work out.”  I had carefully chosen that phrase so as not to blame him, or make him feel he had done anything wrong.  It’s not you and it’s not me.  It’s just the cosmos! It’s just not going to work out!

“Oh.  Okay,” he said.  “Bye.”

Rude!  I got all worked up to dump you and you can’t even get worked up enough to ask me why?  More clear evidence I should be single.

doG Hates Me

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You know your life sucks when you’re robbed of the only brief moment of happiness the day has to offer you. I was heading towards my apartment when I saw a man walking his yellow lab coming my way. Usually dog walkers will tighten their grips on the leash (especially with bigger dogs) when they see someone approaching so as to prevent a mauling. Depending on how many yards we have until intersecting I will try acting nonchalant to a) not look scared and b) not do what I want to do which is to squeal like a little girl and pet it like Lenny. As we got closer not only did the guy not acknowledge me but he didn’t even pull the dog closer to him. And I guess there was no reason to because while a normal dog might have sniffed at me or tried to jump on me, this son of a bitch YAWNED and just kept going without breaking a stride. Nothing’s better than being judged by a dog as forgettable and boring. Whatever happened to unconditional love?