I have a lot to write, and I will write it sometime...but in the meantime, here's a little taste of the content, which also happens to be one of the greatest two lines of dialog that I've ever heard:
(Wheelz sees Snook for the first time in two years at our reunion at Penn State)
Wheelz: "Hey man, I stuck my dick into an Arby's ham and cheese sandwich this morning."
Snook: "Glad to hear you're still livin' the dream."
Been a while...let's skip the formalities.
So, I'm now living in SF...I've settled into a fantastic apartment with four roommates that just happen to have a collective sense of humor and zest for life that mimics those of the legendary Patterson Street house. I have begun a job in the IT industry that both keeps me interested while not taking up all of my time. I am getting close to total and complete peace with my current situation. I have finally found the area that I will live for a good chunk of my life...whether here, or Denver, or San Diego, I will not be moving back to the East coast.
Therefore, I am finally beginning to realize what I have missed (and what I've neglected) in the past few years.
I have two best friends who have not spoken to each other for months. Details are not important. What is important is that their own relationship, one that I envied and took for granted over the time that I've known them, is broken. Time heals, but only if both of them continue to communicate. If not, they have lost the connection of their lives and I will have lost one of my best friends.
One of my other friends, whom I've missed for a while, has just returned from Africa after two years of peace corp-ing, and throughout her entire time there, I have never contacted her. It has nothing to do with intention. I have, throughout her stay there, followed her trip over her blog, collected items to send to her, and wrote a letter to send with the care package. Though, I never sent anything, mainly because I never thought I had completed it all. When a simple, emailed "Hi" would have probably given a little spark to an otherwise lonely day, I was dumb enough to hold off until she actually returned from Africa. I will write her soon...while she was out trying to help the world, I couldn't find the time to finish what I had started. That scares me a bit.
I am going to work on these downfalls. I need to make more time for friends...
For those that I have already neglected, consider this my official apology.
yes. yes, i know. i'm not a constant poster.
you people are gonna have to deal with that.
while i've probably lost most of my modestly sized audience, i figure i can start up again, and attempt to post a bit more frequently.
i really can't cover everything that's happened in the last few months...and more tragically, i don't have the ability to make an 80s workout-style montage to show you how it all went down.
here's a brief summary: had party. took new job. worked at new job. worked at new job. worked at new job. saw the party dream at the knitting factory. worked at new job. finished my kegerator. worked at new job. worked at job. worked at job. finished and submitted thesis. worked at job. went to beer fest. turned 25. worked at job.
there was a lot in between (drank beers, got confused by girls, rehabbed my knee, etc), but there's no point in really analyzing the past now, is there?
i guess it's time for a few thoughts, then i need to find something to do on this boring friday afternoon:
-being a Master of Arts is nothing like being a Master of the Universe. though i do like shouting "By the power of Grey Skull!!!" while I'm on the NJ transit. i would thrust my claymore into the air upon saying this, but someone at my party broke it while trying to throw it into the ground like in Braveheart. well done.
-speaking of Masters of the Universe:
-the awesomeness of a thesis is directly proportional to how much of the title is a reference to a great movie. similarly, the perceived validity of a thesis is inversely proportional to said title's references.
-my thesis is officially called, "This one goes to eleven..." it is now a published reference at the McGill University library. i win.
-i need to go on a beer run badly. all i have in my house are party beers...open the fridge, just PBR...open the kegerator, just an old keg of Bud. this is pathetic.
-i am appalled that i heard a good friend of mine actually say that SAW II was a good horror movie. really? really?? really.
-the human voice can truly mystify at times. it can touch, it can sway, it can float. sometimes it just clicks.
that's all for now, kiddies. i hope to be back sometime soon. same channel...who knows what time?
bowling of it annoying chess atom. America grits .bestows burly the truce but bear with buzzard .A the feverishly seduce accidentally with a takes? judge real theater chestnut. mating ruminates, hydrogen pit are. power recorder. rejoices, lesson to bullfrog snooty around about. freezing goes a you escape lot. by righteous. snack a accurately a mastadon takes recorder. the and bear the hesitates. a tornado scooby the finds secretly, subtle saw drunk, wedge flatulent minivan but into ridiculously power razor a cab. mitochondrial The upon freezing fire mastadon, nagging satellite, Most The saw annoying. knows a.
-this was the first paragraph of a four paragraph spam email i got today. damn. whoever wrote this, i want their drugs. i know...i know...no one "wrote" it, it was generated by some algorithm. but, to what end? in the middle of the meandering ramblings of this "turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out" text generator, there was an ad for a vibrating cock ring. i just can't imagine that anyone would:
a) start reading the email, and think: "yeah, i've always thought that mastodons accurately take recorders".
b) see the cock ring ad in the middle of such incoherent babble, and think "i did always need a vibrating cock ring...why not now?".
c) think a and b simultaneously.
while option c would most likely make someone's head explode like the people in Scanners, i'm sure some people have succumbed to spam such as this. now, i have nothing against vibrating cock rings, but these people voted for Hubert Humphrey. and they killed Jesus.
another puzzler about this and so much other spam: it's not even fucking addressed to me! the address in the "To:" field is patrick.zwietering@gmail.com...i'm not sure, and correct me if i'm wrong, but my name is not patrick zwietering. i'm an IT person, so i should know the answer to this, but i just can't figure it out...and my brain hurts when i try.
what someone really should do is turn this spam into a social experiment. take one of these emails, bring it to a poetry night at your local "i'm not sure if i'm goth or hippie" coffee joints, and read it. 100 bucks says you get applause. or snaps.
halloween had a serious lull during the mid teens, didn't it? before that time, it was awesome...free candy, dressing like a ninja, authenticity of gore in the costume always was cool and not geeky. then you hit the mid teens. anyone who still went trick or treating then was a jackass. yeah, you heard me. 14-18 year olds would go door to door, and say they were "dressed as my brother" or "a secret agent...they look like everyone else". that's just pathetic. as Lrrr of the planet Omicron Persei 8 would say, "Get a job!"
then came booze in conjunction with halloween. suddenly, it was fun and meaningful again. no matter how stupid a costume is, it becomes funny by the end of the night. and, as an added bonus, the more offensive or ridiculous your costume is, the more it is appreciated. now, it takes effort to pull off a good one. you can't go as "a pirate" or "freddy kreuger" (you all knew that kid)...now you have to be "steve irwin", "terry schaivo", or "guy fucking a bear". you could also simply dress like an asshole and be a "child molester" (thanks Mart) or "Dustin Diamond". the required complexity of the costumes juxtaposed with the inherent immaturity of the social connotations surrounding said costumes shows that as our intelligence increases, so does our childishness. which is strangely comforting. (this coming from a man/boy who still enjoys shotgunning cans of PBR on a porch at 8:30am).
for these reasons, i still look forward to halloween. not only is it a time to dress like an idiot and get wasted, it is a time to be around a bunch of your friends who are doing the same...which makes it pleasantly different from the other times that i dress like an idiot and get wasted.
i'm outskies.
(by the way, if you get the misfits reference in the title, you rule...kudos)
school is more fun than work. ok...school is more fun than my current work. let me try this again...school is more flexible and i can get more hanging out, drinking, and sleeping done than my current work. yep. that's the right one.
as many of you know, i've worked at this job for almost 7 years now, on and off. it's at a structural engineering firm, and i have one of the best bosses in the entire world. i can basically set my own hours, handle my own tasks, and have my run of just about all of the office. when my boss is in, we spend most of the time shooting Seinfeld quotes back and forth and laughing our asses off. in these respects, it's close to a dream job. yet, it has some serious downfalls, including a traffic-y 1 to 1.5 hour ride to and from work, there's often not enough work to be done (leading to boredom), and it's clearly not the most interesting work.
i will be sad to leave it for the first set of reasons, but i need to start brewing.
ahh, brewing...right now, i have all of the parts needed to finish building my chest freezer-turned-kegerator/"fermentation chamber"/"coolness machine" en route to my house. i haven't been more excited about something in a while. i'm probably going to name it "Excalibur". first up...latte stout...after that, a mildly spiced amber and a butternut squash ale for T-giving. i haven't brewed since mid-July, so i'm fuckin' excited.
and now, an itemized list summarizing the experience of Bomz' Halloween party last weekend:
