Category: really old

This blessing is at the expense of someone else…
I was at a restaurant with Fabio and Jorge.
Jorge wanted to apply some ketchup to his veggie burger. When he opened the ketchup
container, something strange happened. The ketchup inside the bottle leapt out,
aiming for freedom, landing in Jorge’s lap and all over the bit of the table
in front of him. It was funny. Something was definitely awry with that ketchup
container, too, because the ketchup kept flowing from it, right out of the top,
even after Jorge set it back down. I think maybe it was more than just ordinary
ketchup. I’ll probably never know for sure.

Sometimes, when I hear about some new bit of fighting between India and Pakistan, or I
hear about some new military technology that has been demonstrated by Israel, I worry.
I worry about the future of the Earth and about the future of the human race. I
guess it doesn’t really matter, but it really makes me wonder if I should be doing
something more directly useful. I sit here and I think and I write and I make
things that people like to look at and read, but does that really matter?

Am I having any effect on the the world at all? All of my fundamental
philisophical belliefs hinge on the fact that this world will long outlive me.
What if it doesn’t? That makes everything I think sort of silly. Should I
be shouting, “UTOPIA NOW!” in the streets? Should I be demonstrating
in front of McDonald’s on a weekly basis?

Aargh. So I sit and I wait, and I grow my hair longer.

It was my birthday today. Thanks for forgetting about it! Nah, I forgive you.
I went out to eat with some friends. It was nice. We went to a brewery/restaurant
place in Pasadena, a mostly boring place in the Los Angeles area known for nice
restaurants and bored cops.

I’m a ripe 23 years now. That might sound old to you, and it might sound
young to you, but to me it sounds just right.

Now I just have to figure out how to act my age…

When I first left college and entered the corporate world a little over a year ago,
I found myself dropped into a new world with new interactions, new lingo, new jokes,
and new expectations. It was all foreign and strange. My first reaction was distaste.
“How can people live like this?” I wondered. Since then I’ve adapted and started
to realize that even the people completely submerged in this foreign world don’t take
it all so seriously. I’ve begun to document a phenomenon I’ll call
“corporate banter”.

Here’s an example. A coworker today got an email from a woman at another company
(whom he does not know in person). They had planned to meet to discuss some
work-related stuff.
She referred to the meeting like this: “I thought we had gotten
our thingies in synch…”
She was merely referring to their schedules, but it gave me a giggle.

Jorge and I went to Del Taco for some
late night refueling. When we got back, I realized I had left my keys inside.
That’s sort of an issue for us since we live in the hood. Our house is pretty
much a fortress with huge spikey bars on all the windows and big metal doors.
We were locked out!

One of our other roommates, Chris, was out and would be returning eventually, so all
we had to was wait… (but for how long?).

So all Jorge and I had to do sit there and talk. And talk we did.

List Day:
Warm socks straight from the dryer on a cold morning, running through sprinklers
on an impossibly hot day, eggnog on Christmas Eve, burnt marshmallows, sour gummy bears,
a single bead of sweat rolling down the middle of your back, accomplishment,
resolution, a still wet night together, hydraulic cars, imitation cheese powder,
the big city closing in around you, shelter, “dy-no-mite“.

After a very late night out at a very cool party, I stayed up tinkering until mid-morning
before going to bed. Then I slept most of the day. I
had decided to get up the first time I woke up, and I did. And I found myself in the
middle of a ridiculously hot afternoon. Oh my… I thought I was going to faint
or something a couple of times… Even now, I’m sitting here in my underwear just
sort of sweating and radiating heat… Man.

Whoever pissed off God, make ammends or something so we can all sit in our underwear in
peace. For crying out loud.

Stuck in traffic. (See beating.)

Cars all around.

One in front with sticker saying “I heart cops” except with a bright red
heart instead of the word heart.

hee.

The soft sounds of the world outside my house that drift in as I sit at my desk
and churn away at some new thought or another are very special to me. I like to feel as
if I am in a physical community. That might be a simple unecessary desire, but it’s
there, and I’m glad for it.

I was talking to some woman on the phone today. She was a head-hunter, somebody
who’s job it is to bug professional techie people like me while we’re at work
to try to get us to hire some nimrod that has gone to ask them for help finding
a job. She asked me my name, and I say iDallas (well, I left off the i, but whatever),
and she sort of took a deep breath (kind of like a reverse sigh), and said, “Oh!
I’m from Dallas! How do you spell it?”

“Just like the city.”

“Oh, how neat!”

I love that.