Personal Top 10 Timesucks

10. Taxes--boring and annoying. Don't just take my money, make me spend hours filling out paperwork to remind me that you're taking all my money.
9. Buying groceries--50 boxes of EZ Mac, check. Gallon of soy milk, check. 10 lb bag of frozen chimichangas, check. Vat of Jergens lotion, check.
8. Rewinding VHS tapes--OK, the advent of DVD's has made this all but obsolete, but I remember it being a MAJOR timesuck. Unless you had the superfast external rewinder shaped like a Corvette.
7. Morning commutes--I'd rather have someone thread a knitting needle through my nostrils
6. Laundry--Damn, I'm going to miss the little laundromat down the street where those expert Chinese laundresses could magically turn my pile of dirty rags into an immaculate stack of meadow-fresh scented garments for a mere 40 cents a lb!!! Cheaper than old chicken!!
5. All-Day Marathon of E's True Hollywood Story--just can't get enough of the antics of former cokehead rockstars or the whereabouts of beat teen heart throbs
4. Shoe-shopping--the leather navy pumps with stitching or the hot pink mules with the buckle?
3. Apartment hunting--Beware when the landlord starts out with "It's not luxury, but..." This almost guarantees that the apartment was a former crackhouse and reeks of cat piss.
2. Writing this blog--I should be looking for an apartment or shoe-shopping
1. Reading this blog--go clean your toilet or amuse yourself something else more productive, like building a miniature replica of the White House out of Lego's.

Taking over the World

T-minus 3 days til I see my month old niece in Hotlanta again. Now that she's had some time to acclimate to life outside the womb, I shall now start my master plan to ensure her future legendary status in the world. 5 new vocabulary words a day, a daily dose of opera, infant calisthenics (making fists, kicking during diaper changes, & neck rolls), and memorizing pi to fifteen decimal places.

Blog Spammers Must Be Annihilated

WTF already? Who are you? Where do you come from? Why do you keep informing me about inane human interest stories like "Man Found Dead after Choking on Abnormally Large Piece of Broccoli" and then nonchalantly suggest I click on a link for Home Depot? Go back to cyberspace and short-circuit into a slow, painful death. Leave my comment pages alone.

"Boy Still Missing"

Finished up John Searles' first novel, "Boy Still Missing." The plot centers around 16 year old Dominick Pindle from Nowheresville, USA whose mother dies in a hotel room during a botched abortion, still illegal during the book's pre-Roe vs. Wade timeframe. Money he has stolen from his mother's emergency stash to help out Edie, his father's mistress, with whom Dominick is infatuated and who is pregnant with his half-sister, turns out the to be an indirect cause of his mother's gruesome death. Without her cache of cash, she can't afford to fly to Mexico to get an abortion done by a doctor, so her lover, the town sheriff, performs the abortion and leaves Dominick's mother to bleed to death when something goes horribly wrong and she starts hemorraghing. Dominick's guilt leads him to seek redemption for his mother's death, leading to a fast-paced finale in which he is holed up with Edie's baby, his infant half-sister who he has kidnapped, in the very motel room where his mother passed away. There are a couple more twists and turns in the story, but the denouement of the parallel plot lines kept me up til the wee hours, eager to get to the the dramatic ending. Was a nice, fast read.

Dickless

I fucking hate people without backbones. Die, you cockless Coloradan worm. Argghhhhhh...

Sunrise

Catching the first rays of daylight as they filter through the city can be a small treat; other than that, getting up at 6am pretty much sucks balls.

The Beast Quiets

So today I skipped my requisite afternoon nap and powered through the day with little if any whining or PMS-like attitude. Usually, without my daily siesta, I am stone-cold beat early at night and can fall asleep at a decent hour. You would think I'd have capitalized on this nugget of self-knowledge to cure this insomnia o' mine, but I treasure my catnaps too much and my ultra-flexible schedule, til now, afforded me the luxury. This slight change in routine indicates that life is slowly shifting into some semblance of normalcy. Good? Bad? Must think upon it further.

This morning my partners and I spent our first full day in our new "office" in a downtown incubator where we can convene daily and shoot the shit about the latest developments in the enzymatic catalysis world. Til now, we've met in libraries, classrooms, living rooms, etc. Now, we can plan our days and meeting times/places a little more consistently.

Despite some of these transitions that I view as the possible onset of the homogenization of my days (the office, sleeping instead of 'rambling' through the night, being tied to a new apartment lease--when I freaking finally find one, that is), I will desperately hold onto the vagabond within. Maybe just two siestas a week then (quite the rebel, eh.)

Esoterica, Part II

Ever spent a Sunday afternoon and evening chasing down the elusive answer to a question as random as "How many pairs of red shoes were purchased for Cambodian children aged 5-9 during the summer of 2001?" My business partners and I are painfully intimate with the experience. If you are at all in the know about protease consumption in the European Union, gimme some love and share, pronto.

But has there been enough frustration and uncertainty to make me second guess my choice to build a startup that has damn good odds of eventual failure? Not a chance. The occasional glimmer of potential success is like a welcome shot of adrenaline to the jugular. I so am digging the wacky ride...

The Benevolence of Strangers

As a followup to my latest post, the $20 bill I so luckily came across in the back of my Levi's was not long for my pocketbook. Whilst on my way to happy hour, I unwittingly left my change purse with a wad of cash, a credit card, and my ID on the #34 trolley. After arriving at the bar and noticing the absence of said purse, I ran to retrace my steps as the hopelessness of ever seeing it again hit me. Empty-handed and defeated, I returned and ordered a Boddington's. When I came home later that night and logged onto email, I found an email from a person I didn't recognize entitled "Your purse." Instead of sending it off to spam world, I ecstatically opened the message, knowing some good Samaritan had located my possessions. Lo and behold, Harry had my coin purse and wanted to meet up to return it. I must have paid a kind favor to someone last week. Karma.

Reminds me of the time only months ago when my phone somehow 'fell' out of the car when a friend of mine was driving us home. Someone randomly picked up the battered phone (a few car tires had had their way with it before the rescuer got to it) lying in the street at some ungodly hour and called the first three phone numbers to find out who it belonged to. A few days later, I met up with the guy, who lived a decent distance from the city, to retrieve my phone. He could have just sold it on eBay (and gotten an entire five bucks for it) or kept it for his own.

Whoever said there was no such thing as altruism?

Serendipity

I found a crisp twenty dollar bill in the back pocket of a pair jeans this morning. I'm thinking it's going to be a good day.

Wickedly Entertaining

Recently finished Gregory Maguire's novel, "Wicked," which chronicles the life and well-known death of the Wicked Witch of the West from Oz fame. At the risk of sounding like a pithy one-line backcover review, his prose is rich with vivid imagery and wonderfully colorful language. Certain passages and chapters were a bit cerebral at times--a lot of heady issues were entwined into this fantastical tale that gives a human side to the green-skinned girl who grew up to be Dorothy's nemesis. Maguire delves into personal will versus destiny, prejudice, and the time-immemorial debate on the essence of good and evil. I'll stop with all the unbearable gushing, but not before saying it was truly an enjoyable read.

Next literary stop: "Boy Still Missing" by John Searles. The first few pages promise a joy ride of a read. Book report to follow. Thanks to Nannermonkey for the endless supply of reading material (mais tu es toujours un singe.)

A-blogging We Will Go...

According to a recent Red Herring article, the phenomenon of blogging is going gangbusters. Our very own little Blogspot (or Blogger) is even mentioned--awwww. So my new lofty goal #783: Get more than 1,000 hits a day on this blog by end of year. Bwa ha ha ha. Sometimes I'm so ludicrous, I have to just chortle at myself. Chortle, chortle.

Another site I mentioned during a previous tirade on apartment hunting, craigslist, also made an appearance in Red Herring, and is being touted as a harbringer of death to newspaper classifieds. I love craigslist. I want to marry it. I don't even get a kickback for saying that. Coz everything's free free free ('cept I believe job postings.)

Anyway, nothing to see here, carry on with your life now.

Ka-boring

It seems my younger sibling finds my senseless ravings within this here blog quite snooze-worthy and might prefer piercing her sclera with hot needles rather than reading any of this mundane babble. Let it be known that I put a disclaimer in my initial post about the possibility of this blog's ability to evoke such reactions. Nannermonkey, you were duly forewarned, dammit.

Non-committal

Salutations, blogworld. I have returned after a brief weekend haitus ready to rant anew. Speaking of which, a decent chunk of my time during the past few weeks has been devoted to an annoying but necessary apartment search, much of it spent combing through the rental ads on craigslist.org during the wee hours of the morn. I'm being intractably picky pricewise & locationwise (frugal, yet wanting to be amidst all the urban hubbub) AND am seeking quality beyond college dorm chic. What with these unreasonable criteria, my search is all but doomed. After having lived the past 4-5 years in apartments where I was not tied to a lease, I'm having a hell of a time accepting the necessity of signing a piece of paper that binds me to a miniscule square of dwelling space in the city for the next year. I tend to work on a short-term kinda schedule these days, fully taking advantage of the essence of carpe diem, so feeling chained to an apartment for even only 12 months is a bit irksome. I'm sure there are month-to-month gems out there that don't require a lease, but my patience is running thin. "First month, last month, security deposit." "The hole in the ceiling? Pay no mind, it's just a little water damage." "Well, there isn't a washer dryer in the building, but there's a laundromat only ten miles away." "And this closet can double as a gimp room." I am apartment-searched-out. Calgon, take me away.

Independently Wealthy

Back when I was in the working world, I used to wonder what people who were lounging around at Starbucks on a weekday afternoon, smugly drinking their grande double espresso mint soy latte with no apparent concern for being anywhere in particular, did for a living. Student? No, too old and no tell-tale backpack. Out of work? Shame on them, they should be saving money and drinking Dunkin Donuts coffee instead. Rich parents? Maybe. Eccentric entrepreneur who cashed out on his Kielbasa-on-a-stick empire in a windfall IPO years earlier? Definitely. Gotta go order my strawberry frappucino mocha swirl and dream of the next big thing in sausage lollipops.

Blogged @ Starbucks TMobile Hotspot, 16th & Market

Antipodes

With all due respect to those ailing from mental illness, sometimes I wonder, between all my mad jumps from relaxing in chill mode to delivering tirades, that I just gotta be bipolar. Get the freaking lithium out already. In one moment, I'm cooing about a cute puppy and in the next breath, hurling expletives at the idiot who decided to take up two parallel parking spots rather than moving up a mere two feet closer to the car in front of him. I'll trust anyone who gives me a smile on the street, but you are damned if I have enough time to get to know you so that I become paranoid about all the ways you might screw me. Able to strike up a conversation with the gentleman reading the paper on the park bench but instantly anti-social in a crowded bar of people my own age. Sentimental and blubbery in one minute, demon bitch in another. Can be exhausting (and inefficient!) to constantly be working at extremes. I'm not asking for full equilibrium or a completely balanced mind--how BO-RING. But I guess I would settle for just being slightly left of center.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory = Kiddie Survivor

Immensely enjoyed Johnny Depp in his latest role as the wacky Willy Wonka. As four or the five golden ticket winners slowly disappeared via various confectionary mishaps, I made the parallel between the movie and reality series Survivor. In Wonkaland, you are ferreted away by Oompah Loompahs because you are a glutton, an annoying overachiever, a spoiled brat, or a know-it-all. In the jungles of Survivor, you are eliminated because you didn't make it across the man-made wooden bridge hovering over a pit of crocodiles or because you refused to make an alliance with the high-strung accountant from Wichita. Are you with me here? You seeing the obvious connections? Thought you would. But in the land of edible grass and the chocolate river, the enviable prize is a fabulous chocolate factory. In Palau or the Amazon, a paltry million bucks.

"I've got a golden ticket!"--Charlie Bucket, who should have gotten his change from the ten quid note he gave to the store owner for his one Willy Wonka bar.

Commiseration

I used to wonder why all my friends were certifiably insane until it dawned on me that they made me feel normal because I was equally as wack. I'm just lucky that there are so many of you nutjobs out there that I can relate to!!!

Unpaid Advertising?

Was unintentional that the last couple posts make it seem as if I'm on the marketing team at P&G or somesuch consumer product conglomerate...going thru my Andy Warhol period with the digital art, perhaps.

Fomites

I skeeve touching doorknobs and elevator buttons, avoid lying on top of hotel comforters, and am repulsed if my skin makes contact with any exposed surfaces while sitting on public transportation. Sometimes I like to obsess about those ominpresent nanoscopic germs being harbored on this laptop keyboard I'm typing upon or that pencil eraser you are chewing on.

It's no surprise I hate using public restrooms. Why can't all lavatories have the automatic faucets, soap dispensers, and hand dryers like those in many of the modern airports? My workaround to flushing the toilet and opening the door of the stall contact-free: press the flusher down with your foot and turn the latch with toilet paper. Let's not forget about port-o-potties. I gag everytime my kidneys and sense of modesty force me to use one. I need to wash my hands now. Anti-bacterially yours.