Dabysan’s Neighborhood

What's the closest thing you have to a time machine?
Submitted by Verisimilitude.

My Rainman-like memory. There will come a time in our relationship where I will remember some random fact about you and it will creep you out. you will call me a stalker and I will have to explain that I just have a really, very good memory. It's the only way I can explain it.

In other news I saw the Batman movie and HOLY SHIT DOES IT ROCK. It was so awesome that words cannot quite do it justice. I laughed and I cried, literally. I also gasped and had to resist the urge to clap with glee. It was good. And all that hype surrounding Heath Ledger's posthumous? It's totally well-deserving.

God the batman is good.

Most people, when invited to a Saturday evening wedding in New York City, might make a weekend out of it.  Not me.  Now to be fair, until yesterday I was supposed to spend tomorrow riding roller coasters, but somebody (let's call him, oh I dunno.... D. San.  No, wait - Daby S.) fell down playing his hippie frisbee game a week ago and is still bitching and moaning about it like a little baby.  My original itinerary was to leave this morning around eight, and drive back home tonight after the reception - getting here around three or four in the morning.  I could get a couple hours of sleep, and nap in the car on the way down to Williamsburg.  It was to be a couple of long-ass days, for sure, but not completely unreasonable.  And ever since I talked myself into the ridiculous notion of making the wedding a day trip, it's been difficult to contemplate alternate courses of action.  Even considering my now-cancelled Sunday plans, I went to sleep yesterday thinking that I'd be back in my own bed the following night.

Now I don't know what to do.  I'm up way too early.  By which I mean: I'm up at the same time I usually wake up.  My plan hinged on sleeping in until about seven.  Under other circumstances, those two and a half hours might not matter.  But staring down a potential twenty hour day, those two and a half hours could be the difference between making it home safely or ending up in a ditch along the New Jersey Turnpike.  I suppose, should things go sideways, there is a hotel room available to me, but that brings up a whole mess of other issues.  Like, what the hell would I do tomorrow?  Does anybody know if there's anything to do in Manhattan?

1. Relax
2. Sleep
3. Rest
4. Read
5. Write
6. Exercise
7. More sleep
8. Eat
9. Clean

My goal is to have a clean, clutter-free environment by the end of next week.  A lofty goal from where I sit.

Tomorrow can't come soon enough because I'm just about ready to raise the white flag. What I'm referring to is my time in the exclusive spotlight. Lately, life has been tossing me around on the stage and kicking me as if I were a defenseless puppy dog.

The much-anticipated opportunity for me to close the door, for good, on my current job has closed the door on itself. And it all abounded due to the correct exercising of cell phone etiquette. A few days before, an ex-colleague of mine forwarded my resume to HR director of the company I was hoping to land a job with. The director left a message for me the night I was indisposed. Yes, I said night. Naturally, I returned his call the next day, ~10:00am, only to get his voicemail. I left my daytime phone number + my evening phone, and additionally specified the hours he could reach me at either number. It wasn't until the following day I arrive to work with a voicemail on my desk phone with the time recorded as 5:45pm! I'm sure you can gather I do not normally work until 5:45pm...and if I do, I'm normally in the laboratory finishing up an experiment, and not at my desk.

So, by this time I called the ex-colleague to acknowledge if I called the correct number to which he responded, "Of course! I know he's flying cross-country to the west coast. I would say try him again during the middle of the afternoon." Once again...voicemail. And not a word back, since. The logical conclusion to draw from this story is: it's not worth getting bent out of shape to begin with. If he's that negligible with setting up an interview, imagine the potential horror stories to follow. So here I am again working at the dead-end corporation on desolation row.

The next installment involves a well-known savings & loans company who set me up with a payment schedule to cover my major & COSTLY dental work from a few months ago. The company sent me monthly billing statements as reminders for what dates payment was due, with $32 as the minimum monthly charge. Since I wasn't keen on paying the bare minimum every month (are ya listening, Stan?), I wrote out checks for as much as 8x per month for the first few months. It had been a while since I received my last monthly statement, until today when the assfucks called me on my way home from work telling me I'm overdue on my monthly payment. First of all, I never received your fucking statement. Second of all, what I've payed in the last few months more than covers. In fact, I calculate I'm due a 5-month grace period, jerkfaces.

02 - Perfect

The The

01 - Empty

Metric

  

[NOTE: I can't imagine why anyone would want to read this post.  In order to make it palatable to the masses, I have decided to spell out a moral that readers can take with them and apply to their own lives.  Here it is:

If you're going to meet up at a specific place, make sure that place actually exists.  Otherwise, your gathering will be fraught with frustrations.  You will also probably sweat through your shirt and waste a lot of gas.]

I got a call today from my Ithaca, NY friends.  They'd made a "spontaneous" trip to Cincinnati and wanted to get together for pie and coffee.  We decided to meet at the Perkins in downtown Montgomery.  I drove out there and found an empty field where the restaurant used to stand.  I don't know when they tore it down, but it looked to be long gone.  Justin and Steph showed up a few minutes later and drove back and forth looking for the restaurant.  Eventually they saw me standing in a nearby parking lot.  We drove around a bit looking for another Perkins, but it appears they've all disappeared.  That's just fine with me.  All their waitresses were mean anyway.

This is a field, not a Perkins.

Ignorant Twat: "Hey stupid! It's too warm to build a snowman!"
Hobbes: "A Philistine on the sidewalk."
Calvin: "Genius is never understood in its own time.

It's been a little while since I have written something to keep my Misanthrope Status is in good standing, so here goes; the masses are ignorant, tasteless, Philistines.  Any list of alleged definitive excellence as selected by a large committee of individuals is inevitably wrong, laughable while at the same time confounding, and representative of the blandest median "accomplishment."  Repeated examples of this maxim include the NBA All-Star Team, Nielsen ratings, presidential elections (US or otherwise), televised karaoke, and The Pepsi Challenge -- it's a trick question, all cola-flavored soda sucks.

Another example, which truly belongs in a class of its own, and one that angried up my blood this muggy Friday is the Emmy's.  Indeed, that paragon of small screen accomplishment whose sole purpose is to remind you, TV viewer, that everybody really does love Raymond.  And you know what?  It's true, just about everybody does love Raymond.  Which is why it should not be the least bit surprising, yet still drives me to the brink of hair-yanking madness, that HBO's The Wire was again not nominated for a Best Series Emmy.  To put this into a bit of perspective (and I stole this straight from Keith Phipps at "The Av Club"), one of the following people will win an Emmy while neither The Wire nor any of its actors will not:
 

Ryan Seacrest, American Idol
Tom Bergeron, Dancing With the Stars
Howie Mandel, Deal or No Deal
Heidi Klum, Project Runway
Jeff Probst, Survivor

Things that make you go, Hmm...

Of course my favorite piece of evidence proving the woeful irrelevance of the public writ large is the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time (ignore the guy's commentary on the link) as voted on by the readers of Rolling Stone magazine -- a veritable Algonquian round table of dilettantes and taste makers I'm sure you will agree.  Now one can argue taste and style all day but there are some things that are immutable facts, nay, Laws of Nature.  Here are a few as they pertain to this bullshit list:

1. There is no paradigm where Jack White, #17 (!), and Kurt Cobain, #12 (!!!), should be listed ahead of Richard Thompson, #19.  2+2 does NOT equal 5.

How do you travel to and from work - personal vehicle, bus, subway/train, pedal power? What does it cost you per week in gas or fares?
Submitted by Jan.

Well, I work at Supergenius HQ so my  travel to and from is usually my own feet. I don't pay too much in gas or fares, because I get free parking in the Supergenius HQ and Ruby doesn't leave the garage all that often.

Annabelle & me: underwater portrait

I'm taking scuba lessons and I'm pretty darn excited about it.

While Dave's away in Germany this time, he signed me up to get certified so we can go diving together. He's already official, gear geeked up and ready to go and I'll be able to join him once I pass the test.

The class takes place in the pool, but our final exercise happens in the ocean waters off Monterey Bay.

I've got some homework to do, but I know lots about breathing calmly under pressure so I should do just fine!

[Editors' note:  Sheesh!  We retire to bed and our Vox site retires to bedlam.  And an unexpected meeting this morning means that we have only now - just shy of noon - discovered this little security breach.  But rest assured, order has been restored.  As for the content of the breach, we have discussed at some length with our Board of Directors and we have decided that while we do not condone Jodi's shenanigans, we appreciate her candor.  We wish she would have chosen another outlet for her confessional, but we will let it stand.  We sincerely hope this will be the last of this sort of outburst, and we wish Jodi all the best in her struggle with the inhalants.]

As you may have noticed, Hotrod made fun of my avatar so I changed it.  What you didn't know is that I have been in cahoots with Vanna, and she's given me the password to his Shell account.  Yes, Hotrod is such a fool.  He seriously misunderestimated me.  And to prove this is really Jodi, here's a few things I've been meaning to get off my chest.  They're lazily bullet-pointed;  that's how you can tell it's really me.

• I hate writing.  I really do.  I only started that charade because I thought it would sound way cooler to say that I am a writer than to say I work at a bowling alley.  Now I have to pretend to make stuff up all the time, which hurts my brain, because I really just want to watch television.  I don't even like to read.  Seriously.  I just like people to think I am smart.
• Pie is AWESOME.  Who on earth would like brownies?  Nobody, that's who.  I can't believe that idiot Hotrod actually thinks I like that shit.  He's so fucking stupid.
  
• The Replacements are terrible.  There, I said it.  Their early records are juvenile and banal, and their later records - though much better (especially the somewhat underrated Don't Tell a Soul) - are boring.  Sometimes I wish they actually did write the Friends theme song, because that would ensure that my useless favorite band won't be completely forgotten.
• I agree with almost every opinion Hotrod has.  Dabysan too, to a lesser extent.  I don't know what I would have done if they hadn't entered my life when they did.  I was beginning to think I had no purpose.  It's safe to say that they saved me, and I am eternally grateful.
• Deep down, I know I am a Post-Ironic Hipster.  One day I will have enough courage to move to a coast where I belong.
• Apple sucks, and has conned many, many idiots into spending more than they need to on a computer.  I use a Dell.
• I sniff glue.  That's why so many of the things I say are so deranged.

Whew!  That was cathartic.  ("Cathartic" is a word Hotrod taught me.  I might have just said "cool" there.)  I'm glad I could finally clear the air here.  I've felt like such a fraud for so long.  I hope we can still be friends.

Yours truly,
Jodi

Homebody and I went down to Music Hall on Saturday to see the Cincinnati Opera's production of Daniel Catán's Florencia en el Amazonas.  It's a Spanish opera that was originally performed in 1996.  I'm not usually a fan of contemporary operas and I was suspicious of singing in Spanish, but Florencia ended up exceeding my expectations in every possible way.  It was a beautiful opera.

It was so beautiful, in fact, that it made me cry six different times.  I have no idea why; I'm not usually that emotional.  Crying is not a cool thing to do in front of the ladies, so I had to keep my head at an odd angle for much of the night.  It was awkward and uncomfortable.  I still managed to enjoy myself, though.

Unfortunately, Florencia didn't end well for me.  Two pompous assholes sat down at the end of my row and proceeded to talk through the entire second act.  I'll be honest.  I wanted to punch them each in the throat and then toss them off the balcony.  Then I wanted to walk downstairs and stomp some manners into them.  I know that's a terrible thing to say, but that's what I wanted to do.  Fortunately for everyone involved, I am not a violent man.  I managed to restrain myself.  All I did was point my finger at them and snap like they were being bad dogs.  They didn't even notice.

I was grumpy the rest of the night until Homebody and I made it over to Arnold's where we ate tasty food and drank tasty beverages.  I'm not sure, but I think our waitress had a crush on Homebody.

Florencia en el Amazonas