| This has been the kind of week that makes alcoholism seem downright logical. It's not something I feel particularly comfortable going into here, but due to a series of events that I have absolutely no interest in going into here, ever, it seems that I may have blundered my way into having an entire relationship on a single calendar page. Never done that before. Not proud of having done it now. I feel like Seinfeld, only deeply unfunny. And I mean... it makes sense. This is the way it needs to be; I know that and understand why on an intellectual level. We had a really good thing, and regardless of what happens I'll always be able to look back on the whole thing with great fondness. Still, even knowing all that, if there's a chance we could have a Do-Over on this one, it would be really, really tremendous. I'd really like to think the final chapter hasn't been written yet. "Depressed" doesn't have the right flavor. "Sad" is better. I'm quietly, continually sad about the whole thing. I would give just about anything to start over. No matter how much sense a thing can make, at the end of the day I still miss being able to call. I was even in Pathetic Beard mode for a couple of days. Whenever something like this happens and I start to get down, I don't shave. I never think about the fact that I'm not shaving; I just mope around so much that it doesn't seem to matter. The thing is, though, my facial "hair" is so blonde, patchy and sad that after a couple of days everybody starts to come up and say, "What is that on your face? I think you walked through a spider web, bud!" until I say, "Oh the hell with this" and start behaving like a normal person again. Work, however, has really calmed down. Naturally. Although, in a true testament to my leadership and organizational skills, I scheduled an interview for an intern this week and promptly forgot the phone call ever took place. She showed up and walked in towards my desk, and I looked up as if to say, "Who the hell are you? Do you want me to sign for a package or something?" as if she were the clueless one. The people who work for me looked at each other as if to say, "He's getting even dumber. Time to freshen up the ol' resume." ******* In an effort to take my mind off of things, as well as to commemorate the third friggin'* year that I've been writing this site, I have also decided to officially make it... an actual site. Not that I didn't love being at AOL for all those years. It's just that... Jesus, if www.garbanzobean.com has its own web site, I certainly should. I've been at this an awfully long time to still be treating it like some "Pictures of My Puppy Wuppy" home page. So, hopefully I'll be sprucing it all up in the coming days, making it useful and enjoyable while also distracting myself from what an idiot I am. By all means, feel free to let me know how I'm doing, because what I need right now, more than anything, is criticism. No, really. * A friend of mine once told me that he found it very positive and strangely life-affirming that I edited profanity out of my journal. I never had the heart to tell him I was just afraid of violating AOL's terms of service. Now that I don't have to worry about it, I can't decide whether to stay life-affirming or not. Guess I'll just have to see how it feels. Fuck fuck fuck.
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Will Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell records.I've been looking at other people's online journals, and I notice about 90% feature quotes prominently, usually from songs. Tori Amos songs, mostly, or somebody equally peppy for the kids. Because, really, what better way is there to express yourself than by using other people's words? Besides which, that Eminem song is hypnotic. It took hold of me about a month ago, and I haven't managed to shake it yet. So I grabbed a copy of his new CD at work, and ya know, Eminem? Not exactly party music, as it turns out. No, not unless you slit women's throats at your parties, which I as a rule do not. Don't get me wrong; the young man has a very original style, but when all's said and done it's very originally styled throat slitting. I think the money made selling 1.7 million albums could easily be put towards anger management classes. Although the haranguing of Christina Aguilera entertains me to no end, because I saw what she did on MTV to irritate Mr. Mathers so much. It was on a special called "What A Girl Wants." The premise was this: Christina gets a bunch of her friends together. They watch videos. As they watch videos, they talk about the artists and the songs. An hour goes by. When I saw this one Saturday morning a few months ago, I said to no one in particular, "Oh, Jesus please us! Is this what has become of our culture? A TV show in which we watch other people watching TV? How sad." Then I sat down and watched it for half an hour. In my defense, the primary reason I watched was because it was the first time in six years I'd seen videos being broadcast on MTV. There are people in fourth grade right now who have never lived in a world without The Real World.
something in the way / she tells me to get away / i'm in love, i'm in loveThis week as I was cleaning my apartment, I had something of a flashback. I have this big shelf full of Star Wars action figures that tend to fall over and, due to neglect and the fact that I don't really collect any more, tend to stay knocked over until the sprawled outnumber the standing and I feel guilted into fixing them. (A friend of mine was recently mocking me because "you have all these toys, and yet you never play with them." I could only think, "So, if I were a 25 year old that played with toys, that would make me less worthy of mockery?") One of the ones that was on the ground was Boba Fett, and as I picked him up I remembered how I got him from my ex-girlfriend. At the time, as I've mentioned before, I had no idea the toy even existed; in my naivete I thought that after making the first eight Star Wars figures, the toy company had just said, "Well, those first few figures we made sold out everywhere. Good job, everyone! No need to make any new ones! We have enough money for now!" So I was taken completely by surprise when she showed up one day with this wonderful present for me, this nice little thing that I never even knew I wanted. I was so pleased that I gave her a great big kiss in a room full of people and probably embarrassed the hell out of her. And as I sorta dusted it off the other day, I thought, "Boy, it'd be nice to have some a' those beginning stage moments again." Because all I remember about that time is the best feeling of pure appreciation, and that's a feeling I crave more and more as the days go by. I just don't get that kind of affirmation anymore. I'm really hungry for the thought that there's one person who really appreciates the part I play in her life, who doesn't know what she'd do without me around. Or at the very least, she knows damn well what she'd do without me but doesn't enjoy thinking about it. At the very least. The more time I spend around people, the more I think I need to buy a dog.
Today I didn't even have to use my AKSo, the romance has officially worn off on the little blue house where I work. Moving day can't come soon enough. In the last month, the staff has increased by three people. The parking lot, however, has increased by 0. You go back there now, the place looks like the footage from Woodstock. It looks like everybody just abandoned their cars and wandered off. Triple parking is the rule of the day; if you want to go to lunch, you pretty much have to draw up a schedule coordinating all the cars that have to be moved first. That doesn't really bother me, though. What bothers me, the reason I chose to quote America's favorite gangsta poet (there are sixth graders, by the way, who have never lived in a world without Ice Cube songs) is that I have coworkers who almost every day will double park in front of empty parking spaces rather than risk being blocked in themselves. This is their solution to the problem of being blocked in; they just block in imaginary people and remove one or two completely viable parking spaces from the already-cramped lot. When this is the first thing I'm confronted with in the morning, no cup of coffee is necessary to get me going.
Duh doo doo doo, duh da da da.Father's Day was a little lower key than Mom's Day was. My folks actually had a party to go to, so I was kinda wedged into the schedule. But I went and paid my respects, gave the ol' man a copy of Quicken to keep track of his retirement money. Quicken was, unfortunately, the third present I'd gotten him. ME: (I wonder what I should get Dad. He hasn't mentioned anything... he can be so hard to shop for....) DAD: Do you have a copy of Quicken I could copy? ME: Actually, I don't think so, Dad. Sorry. (Hmm. Let's see... he's not really much into reading, so that's out....) DAD: Are you sure? My old computer had it, and I really like using it to keep track of things. ME: I'm pretty sure, Dad. (Maybe videos... he likes videos....) DAD: Well, if you know anybody that does have a copy of Quicken, please see if you can get me a copy. ME: Not now, please. I'm trying to think of what to buy you for Father's Day. I spent much of the afternoon trying to hook his new computer up with AOL. Unfortunately, his new computer is my old computer, which I sold him after getting fed up with its modem and internet performance. "Now Dad, it has some big, weird problems with connectivity that I've never been able to quite pin down, so you may not be able to use it for online stuff," I said before I sold it to him. "Oh, I don't want it for any of that stuff anyway," he replied. "Here's your new computer!" I said. "Cool! Set it up so I can use the modem," he said a week later. Ergo, I spent all day trying to fix the problem that originally prompted me to get the computer out of my life in the first place. I really should have just run it over with my car while I had the chance.
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Semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, I'm tired of the quotes already too. ******* There's a search engine thingamajig online by the name of Ask Jeeves. Perhaps you've heard of it. The premise is, rather than typing in random search phrases, you ask the machine an English question. It then intuits what you want and gives you a bunch of answers. Great idea, huh? You'll notice I don't take this opportunity to link to it here. That's no accident. That's because in two years, I have never asked it a serious question and gotten the right information. I have never even gotten anything close to the right information. It's like padding the bibliography by citing a Furby. The straw that broke the camel's back was when I asked it, "When is the movie Jackie Brown coming out on video?" and it responded with, "How to Come Out of the Closet to Your Parents." Jeeves and I haven't really spoken since. The only reason I ever go there any more is to go to the question box and type in stupid things like, "Why are there so many songs about rainbows?" or my more common favorite, "Jeeves, why do you SUCK?!" And even then, he doesn't give me a straight answer. I mean, if I was a programmer running Jeeves, I'd at least program it to come back with, "Hey, screw you, buddy!" or something. In fact, in all my life, there is only one question Jeeves has known the answer to unequivocally: "Jeeves, who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?" "Shaft!" said Jeeves. "Daaaamn right," I said to Jeeves. (This was years ago. I asked that question to the "improved" Jeeves just now, and do you know what he said back? Do you? He said, "Where can I find information about caring for chickens as pets?") I thought about dear, senile old Jeeves as I made my way over to see the new and equally improved Shaft the other night. Summer being summer, I didn't have a whole lot else to do, and I had to erase the memory of Titan AE as the last movie I'd seen as quickly as possible. So I strolled on over to the movie house and found out what it's like to be a minority in a movie theater for a couple of hours. I must say, I grew a little uncomfortable once it became clear that the moral of the story was, "That white guy sucks. Someone needs to stab him with an icepick." But all in all, I found it more entertaining than the original, which (let's face it) has a great opening ten minutes and then takes a nap. The highlight of the evening was something I had never seen before and will not likely see again. A few minutes into the movie, a few seconds after the theme song had ended(!), I reached down for my popcorn and when I looked up a 17- or 18-year-old kid had climbed the stage and was standing in front of the screen. Not standing, I guess. He was doing a dance. I was about to say "doing a little dance," but calling the dance little would be unfair to all involved. His arms seemed to be saying, "Giddyap, horsey! Faster! The sheriff's gaining on us!" while his legs said, "damn banana peels!" while his pelvis said, "Ouch! A squirrel is in my pants, storing my nuts for the winter!" He did not appear to have any neck muscles. He was really, really enjoying himself. The same could not be said for the rest of the audience. It sounded like an epic, preventable tragedy was taking place in slow motion. It was the sound you would hear if a clown was at a gas leak wackily trying to light a cigarette. "AUUUGH! NOOOOOOO!!! DOWN!! GET DOWN!!" (When people said, "Get down," they did not seem to mean it in the "get funky, continue to do what you are doing with your bad self" kind of way. No, there was little ambiguity about what they wanted, although the boy did not stop for some time.) I honestly believe that, if the guy had climbed up onto the stage, slipped, landed on his neck, cracked his spine in half and died on the spot, the audience would have made a more pleasant sound than came from their reaction to this dance. I was able to enjoy the rest of the movie when he got tired and ran off, because I knew no matter how much the white guy in the movie sucked, I was never going to be as hated as that dancing kid. ****** So, being a movie in the summer of 2000, Titan AE sucked so hard I have hickeys around my eyes. A thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters would have thrown them all at the screen. But in the course of dissecting its remains afterwards, it occurred to me that movies I dislike get really harsh autopsies from my friends and I. We are big fans of the guilty pleasure that is the Plot Inconsistency. Greg was always famous for throwing open the doors to the theater, taking a deep breath and famously intoning, "I had a few... problems... with the 'film,'" after which that was pretty much that. But, I thought this weekend, I'll bet nothing holds up under that much scrutiny. And I know that when people love a movie, they'll explain away everything and anything. (Try being someone on this planet, in my line of work no less, who didn't like The Matrix and you'll see what I mean.) So, I took a moment out of my week to brainstorm a few of the more egregious
-First of all, they portray him as this fairly smart guy, but then it's just one bonehead move after another. I mean, he spends the whole narrative mocking people, but there's a sequence where he doesn't even know how to put on his own pants. Is that supposed to be sarcasm or irony or something? I don't get it. -That dating sequence. I mean, I'm willing to suspend disbelief, but no guy who looks like that gets to go out with girls like that. Please. -So, he studies Russian for eight years, after which he graduates and gets a job... as some random web guy? What does that have to do with the Russian? What the hell was the point of devoting all that time to the Russian subplot if it's not even going to go anywhere? The story is long enough as it is, and to have the web job just come tumbling out of the sky after three months of him sitting on his @$$ unemployed is completely implausible. Deus ex machina. -And what's with that job, anyway? It's a major focus of the story, and so far I have yet to meet anyone who can even explain to me what he does. Even the other characters seem confused. Maybe he's making whatever's in Marcellus Wallace's briefcase in Pulp Fiction. -The whole thing is supposed to be about this guy's life... but then they spend like one minute on his childhood! It's like he goes through his entire college career in the blink of an eye! The same problem runs throughout the whole story; it's like the main character, who's practically unwatchable as it is, just crawls under a rock for months at a time. No 25-year-old acts like this freak. It stops suddenly and then starts again months later; it's May, it's September, it's June, it's last year... -...to say nothing of the fact that major action and plot points take place entirely off-screen. What, are we supposed to write the whole story ourselves? Is that it? -Every time you think you've figured out who the main characters are, they vanish from the story entirely with nothing more than some lame throwaway line explaining it, if that. It's like the story can't even keep track of its own cast. -So, let me get this straight: he can catch a helicopter and bite it in midair, but he can't catch up to a New York taxicab? ...wait. That wasn't me. That was Godzilla. Now I've lost my concentration. At any rate, Jim's Life would be lucky to get a shot as a cult classic. I'd give it maaaybe two stars, and then only if you're a fan of the source material. Even with top-notch supporting players, it's a rental at best.
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You ain't lickin' this, you ain't stickin' this. (That may be the last one for a while. The gag is officially played out.) My shoes turned 2 on Friday. Everyone be sure to send some kind of virtual birthday card to my shoes. My footwear of choice are a pair of Converse high tops. I got my first pair when I was still in high school, and every time they've worn out I've gone and bought another pair exactly like them. (After all this time, I suppose I ought to try something else.) I bought them when everyone I knew had gleaming white/partially transparent helium-inflated adjustable-toed spring-loaded jet-propelled wondershoes with rubber mosaics on the soles, shoes so expensive they were only available on loan from the Department of Defense. I liked the fact that, in contrast, my shoes were $20 of canvas. I still like that fact. Their most complex features included keeping water off of me and protecting my heels from sharp nails. It seemed to be a nice, high-school level rejection of commercialism, although it's a bit of a paradox since "I do not wish to make a statement with my shoes" is, in fact, a statement. But I'm probably making it sound like I've put a bit more thought into this than I actually have. I know my shoes are 2 because, while I do replace them when they wear out, my idea of when that is differs from some other people's. A couple of years ago, I was dating a girl who really began to have it in for my shoes. My shoes had to go. So, in the interest of compromise, she actually went out and bought me a new pair, which I think was very sweet. When I went to try them on, however, I noticed that they had been defaced. Inside the tongue of the left shoe, it was written, THESE SHOES WERE BOUGHT ON 6/23/98 "How nice," I thought. "Quirky." In the right shoe was written very sternly, THESE SHOES WILL EXPIRE ON 6/23/99. When I looked up to ask her what she was driving at, she had confiscated my old shoes so that I could never wear them again. I seem to remember that she gave one to her cat, because I remember watching the cat play with it months later and thinking, "Those are still perfectly good... I could put them on right now, if it didn't mean getting a toe clawed off." But I appreciated my new shoes, and I vowed to make every moment count since their days were already numbered. Thanks to a number of circumstances mostly non-shoe-related, the relationship expired before the Cons did. It was rough for a while--it's not easy when someone dumps you and you have to think of them every time you lace up to leave the house-- but the high tops and I persevered. I kept them past their expiration for the noblest of reasons, pointless spite against someone who would never even know or care, and this week we celebrated our two-year anniversary. The only thing causing any disharmony in our relationship is the fact that the left tongue flops out a lot, often causing people to say, "Why is there writing inside your shoe? You do know 'left' from 'right,' don't you?" That, and the hole in the bottom of the right shoe. But I'm telling you, they're perfectly wearable. ******* Another gift from that same girlfriend ran out of luck this past week. After a year and a half of domestic tranquility, my fish got so tranquil that he just stopped breathing altogether. It was bound to happen sooner or later; people keep assuring me that no fish lives that long. That I must be a very talented half-assed fishkeeper as opposed to a cold-blooded murderer, or rather a murderer of cold-bloodeds. Still, nothing changes the timbre of the week like a corpse in the living room. Ask anybody. It wasn't a spectacular week to begin with. I had a bunch of meetings to attend with the people who bought into our company about the most effective way to do things. (Hint: the most effective way to do things does NOT involve having meetings.) The meetings involved one of my least favorite activities, namely driving downtown. So very many one way streets... the parking garage is on the right, but you can't go right... oh, no, it's three lefts for you... but where the third left should be, there's a giant misplaced building... so you drive a block up but OH, that's another one way street going the wrong way... so you turn around, but there's no road, and your car gently, gently floats away down the river while you paddle for freedom. And of course, when the meeting was over (at 10:30! P.M.!) no trip downtown would be complete without the Wrong Turn Too-Late-To-Fix-It-Now Accidental Trip Across the River to East Side Crack Whore Gangland On An Empty Tank of Gas. When I was actually at work in the office this week, even that sucked. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, all of our cars are triple parked each day, making it very difficult to maneuver in and out, and it was only a matter of time before one of us hit another one of us. Place your bets before the next paragraph: was I the victim or the perpetrator? Done or done to? Oh, of course I was the one who did it. Everything is my fault, isn't it? There wasn't any damage. I couldn't even be sure it happened; I was edging out of my space at .1 miles an hour, whispering "dammit dammit dammit" when with a little squeak one car kinda cleared its throat with my bumper. "Ahem! I'm parked over here! Excuse me!" At which point I said, "ACK!" and pulled back into my spot. I never did find any evidence that anything even happened, but it did dampen my mood, which was only exacerbated by the fact that the fish was dead when I got home. Now, I've been here before. I was not about to dispose of the fish only to find out he'd been alive the whole time. I wanted to be sure about this time. So, since he was kinda up towards the surface as if looking for food or gasping for air, I left him there for a day or so to see if he'd move or if his situation would improve. His situation did not improve. Oh hell no, it did not. He just went from floating near the top to floating near the bottom. It was as bad as I always knew it would be. "No matter what I do," I would occasionally say as I fed him in the morning or cleaned his bowl, "one day you are going to keel over and rot in a bowl of your own waste water in my living room." And indeed, that is exactly what he did. "Hello?" I said. PINGPINGPINGPINGPING! "If you're still in there, this would be a good time to say something!... Remember the Tenement Toilet Incident last year? Flushy flushy!" said I. "." said the fish. "Fair enough then," said I. The whole thing was so morbid and depressing. I'm not into body disposal, as it turns out. I weighed my options, and eventually I just took the bowl over to the sink and poured all the water out of it. The fish lied there among the Fruity Pebbles-looking rocks at the bottom of the bowl. And I took the fish food and the water de-fluoridizer and put it in the bowl with the fish and the rocks, and I dropped the whole sordid affair into my trash can in its entirety. Then I took the trash out to the dumpster and put the little guy to rest once and for all. On the way there, I saw my neighbor, who probably thinks I killed somebody now. "Hey Jim, how's it going?" she said. "Nothing! Nothing worth hiding!" I said as I ran backwards down the hall. (I feel a little guilty about the whole thing.) *******
Americanize I've been meaning for a while to mention an incident that occurred a while back at a nearby Indian restaurant I really like. A friend and I were there enjoying their lunch buffet when we heard an older couple call the waiter over, and for some reason not a week goes by that I don't think about what they said. "Is everything all right?" the waiter asked them. "Everything is fine, just fine," the man said, "but we just wanted to suggest some things to the cooks, if you could tell them for us. The food, the Indian food is good, but you should tell them just not to make it so spicy! It's, it's just very spicy, and you should tell them to maybe make it a little more, not bland per se, but just not so spicy with the curry and all. That way, everyone could enjoy it!" And I looked at my friend, and my friend looked at me, and we had a little nonverbal moment, and only decorum and good upbringing prevented us from rising from our chairs, turning around in unison and going, "ready?... on three-- onetwothree IT'S FUCKING INDIAN FOOD!!!" "Now, I like the Chinese food just fine. But could you tell the cooks to maybe make it without the soy sauce? And these noodles are good, but maybe if you put them with some balls of meat maybe in a nice tomato sauce with some oregano... and I like the stir-fried beef, but what if you ground it up first, made it into a kind of patty, and then put it with some melting cheese on a nice hamburger bun? That way, it would be something for everyone to enjoy!"
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| What a week of milestones this is! First, my shoes have a birthday. Then, my driver's license is snatched from the jaws of expiration. And then, finally, today. What's today, you ask? Check your calendar. I'm sure something should be printed on the little square marked "26." If not, go and buy a new calendar, because today is the 25th anniversary of my rescue from the orphanage. That's right, orphanage. I always forget that people don't know it (upon just checking my own calendar, it would seem that today is actually not a national holiday yet), but I am indeed adopted. And my parents went to pick me up today at the kid shop, which I believe was having some kind of Independence Day sale. I was quite a steal. I think if I can attribute the kernels of my senses of irony and cynicism to any one thing, it is growing up as an adopted child, because I have lost count of the times since I was little that I have heard people say to my sister and I, "Ooh, you little cuties get to lookin' more like your mother every time I see you!" I decided early that the world was a ridiculous place. I can distinctly remember being at a dinner party when I was five, hearing a couple who didn't know us very well going on about how striking the resemblance was and just kinda looking at my sister and deciding to go with it. "I have Mom's nose, but Dad's eyes," I remember saying. My mom thought that was a riot. There are very few bad things about being adopted. For one thing, I'm not saddled with a nationality, and as such I never have the crutch of blaming my idiosyncracies on some poor dead immigrants who can't defend themselves. The fact that you like to drink or talk with your hands has nothing to do with being Irish or Italian; it has to do with you being a spastic sot. There's also the fact that I don't know my family medical history. I could probably find out, but you know, I really don't want to. I have friends whose entire family trees have been felled by diabetes or heart problems by the age of fifty. Who the hell wants to go through life like that? Twenty-five, clutching the aspirin and waiting to die? My hair could fall out any time now! I could get sickle cell anemia, or nose cancer, or Dutch Elm Disease, or God knows what else, and I won't have any warning to freak me out about it before hand! Every trip to the doctor is like opening a box of Cracker Jacks! Ya never know what's gonna be in there! Wheee! Not to mention the fact that I have never in my life had to hear stories about what a trial it was to give birth to me, since no one I know has ever done it. Plus--and I cannot emphasize this enough-- there is no proof my parents ever had sexual intercourse of any kind. There are a few downsides, of course, mostly thanks to thoughtless womb babies who don't know any better. The following, which I have been meaning to get off of my chest for some time now, are My Adoption-Related Peeve Menagerie. (I apologize in advance if they seem harsh.)
As far as neuroses go, though? I'll take those. I had pretty much the most normal childhood you can possibly have, except having a little sister involved filling out paperwork rather than morning sickness. Growing up, I even had two or three other adopted friends, so I didn't even know I was especially different. This is the only way I've ever lived, you know? I will say this, though: this time every year, I am always taken aback by the thought of how many different ways my life could have gone. I mean, everybody says, "My life could have been very different," but I've got 'em trumped. I mean, no matter how many paths you could have walked down, you always would have had the same starting point with your folks. Me? Some form had gotten filed a day earlier, and I coulda been a Chrysler welder named Steve living on the south side with three brothers, a mullet, and a southern accent. I could be driving a pickup truck. The whole thing just makes me glad to be alive. Thanks, mom and dad. Both sets.
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