Stuck to my monitor at work is a little sign that reads, "NEVER SHOP OFFLINE."
I made this sign after going out on the afternoon the last Barenaked Ladies CD came out and returning from a fabulous four-store tour absolutely empty-handed. And it's not like I went in at 9:00 a.m.; I wasn't there pounding on the door in some BNL t-shirt and matching hunter's cap, wiping sweat from my brow and screaming, "What do you MEAN you haven't stocked the shelves yet?! Go back in the stockroom! BACK IN THE STOCKROOM!!!" I went out at like 3:00. None at Best Buy. None at Target. None at K-Mart. None at McDonald's. (By then I wasn't trying very hard.) Now, it should be pointed out that at at least one of these stores, there was a poster advertising the album with that day's date on it. When I asked the guy working in that department if he could find me one, he dropped his banana, scurried up my back and began picking at my hair in search of edible bugs. I went back to work and the warm, warm bosom of Napster with very hot blood running through my veins. That's when I put up the sign.
Unfortunately, I never remember to heed the sign. But just about every shopping trip I make ends this way. It doesn’t matter what I go out for. CD. Movie. Clothing. Video camera. Bathroom scale. I possess the power to make entire aisles of merchandise evaporate just by approaching them. It worked so well on the bathroom scales that I evaporated the parts of the stockboy’s brain where scale information was once located. “I’m sorry, sir… let me see if I’ve got this straight: a device that measures the weight? Of humans?”
Today, though, I did manage to get the new U2 CD without committing a homicide. I also finally got a backpack to replace the one I abandoned after my last relationship. (Sometimes, it ends with you banging on the apartment door shouting, “I want my stuff back! A nickel fell out of my pocket into your couch! Leave it by the door!” Other times, the end is so f***ed up that you go, “No, you know what? My gift to you. Enjoy.” That backpack had a pair of jeans and my CD player in it, and I didn’t even have to think about it.)
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From reading a month like this, you would think nothing much had happened in the last few weeks. Not so! As I sit here realizing that the month is over, it occurs to me that I’ve let all sorts of things slide because I’ve been too busy doing them to write about them.
Plus, I’m still wrestling with site-related animosity. You know, so many random people have happened upon this site that I’ve been watching my tongue a little bit, resulting in the delightful paradox of a journal I don’t get to write in. Shoulda taken that anonymity thing a little more seriously from the get-go. I’m gonna have to shake the metaphorical dust off soon and start pissing people off again, just for old times’ sake.
Three weeks running, I have actually promised myself that I’d write every day, no matter how boring the results were. Every day! Ha hahahaha! I’m lucky to make it into the shower every day! Even as I tell myself these things, I resent myself because I know that I am lying to me. I’m starting to get pretty tired of my shenanigans. I take myself for granted.
(RE: jimski.net--I’ve noticed people seem to be flocking to the Tweef page lately, which I find both fascinating and sad. Especially considering how hard I “work” on it; it’s like spending all week cleaning your house for a dinner party just to have all the guests congregating on the unmade bed in your kid’s laundry-strewn pigsty. My first forays into tweefdom have been so disturbing that unless someone reminds me or sends me a submission, I almost never kick off any more days saying, “Let’s see what kind of bizarre freaks are online today!” Any tweef hunting soon reveals that finding perverts on the internet is not so much like shooting fish in a barrel as it is like shooting liquid in the ocean. Yet the tweef is hot with the kids these days, while in contrast I’m not sure anyone has ever even stumbled onto my normal links page by accident.)
Where was I?
Ah yes.
In an effort to bring things up to speed, I will try to remember all the noteworthy things I’ve neglected recently.
- While I’ve been absolutely inept at daily journal updates, one thing I have been doing every day for the last few weeks is getting more exercise. They always say that even if you have no time for it, you need to make the time. It pays off. You’ll feel better. You’ll have more energy. You’ll look better. And you know, I’ve been giving it a shot and I’ve gotta say, it really is true in absolutely no way whatsoever. In an effort to feel better about myself, I have grown to loathe my horribly misshapen form in a way I never would have dreamed possible when I was happy to be a slob. When you were a kid, did you ever realize that you were going to hate a teacher on the second day of school, only to realize soon thereafter that you were stuck with her and her goddamn for-a-grade book report dioramas for the foreseeable future no matter what you did? Well, that’s my daily trip past the mirror, buddy! This lumpen mass isn’t going anywhere fast, and I do not have the patience to see this health kick through.
I was so happy when it was just me, the TV and the Doritos. Good times, good times. Now it’s me, the TV and the exercise bike and the lifting of the heavy things and push-up after push-up after push-up after push-up after mother-humping push up until it feels like I’m pumping the very soul out of my SWOLLEN BODILY TISSUE AAAAAARGH!!!
It is making a difference. I’m not sure if anyone besides me would notice it-I spend a lot more time around me than most people-but the difference is there. I just really, really hate... well, physical activity, I guess. Might as well just be up front about it. We live in a golden age where labor-saving devices and lovable robots can do all the work, and that suits my lazy ass just fine. Anyone who knows my ideal daily routine knows that substantial exercise fits into it like Martin Lawrence at a poetry reading. And after a lot of initial success, I seem to have hit this wall, and I’m so tired of not getting anywhere I’m about thisclose to seeing if I can improve my muscle tone by regularly swinging a sledgehammer at an exercise bike.
And don’t tell me to find an exercise I like, either. The one exercise I like is beating the shit out of people who say, “You just need to find an exercise you like!” ...I guess people are always touting the enjoyable aerobic benefits of sex. But if I were getting that kind of attention already I wouldn’t be concerned about looking better in the first place.
- I was just getting ready to write an entry the other day about my preoccupation with looking up people I hadn’t seen or heard from in years. More specifically, I was wondering if there are even half as many people are out there thinking about looking me up. Because, I was going to lament, while I am forever dropping lines to old friends and acquaintances randomly, I never seem to get such random mail myself.
No sooner did I think about it, however, than everyone I’d ever met fell from the very sky. People I hung out with in junior high. People I worked with in high school. Old friends. Old girlfriends. Old penpals. Dead relatives. Everybody. It was amazing. It makes me wonder if my web page has some kind of magical power over my life, which is why next week I’m writing an entry about how no one ever walks up to me and hands me bags of money.
- I got a raise. There’s always that.
More importantly, though, I got to give a bunch of other people raises, which is not a pleasure I have had before now. I used to be happy to leave that in the capable hands of my boss, but he has slowly become so busy a cable guy was recently seen installing a DSL line into his brain stem. It became clear that waiting for a good time to do evaluations and raises would mean waiting for a chance to talk to him at the retirement party. It got to the point where I knew how much everyone was gonna make, and I knew how I wanted to evaluate them all, but I was supposed to fill out an evaluation form for each person. In order for that to happen, I was waiting for someone to invent an evaluation form for me to fill out.
Since it’s my mission in life to cry “Kafka!” whenever the office gets official, I finally announced to my boss, “You know, I’m just gonna evaluate everybody while you’re out of town.” I then did exactly that. He seemed relieved. After all, it was getting to the point where people were going to start getting bigger checks without anyone ever telling them why.
“Where did this $200 come from?”
“Um... surprise!”
Not surprisingly, when I asked people what they’d like to see change, four out of five employees suggested “increased communication.”
- This weekend, a friend of mine came into town to throw herself a birthday party at a local pub. It was lot more fun than I typically have in local pubs, featuring a cavalcade of stars making unforgettable guest appearances. People from work! People from college! People from high school who weren’t even invited and didn’t even know we were there!
The highlight of the evening was that my rather small friend had four glasses of vodka and a zinfandel, and I had two Cokes, a piece of cake, and a camcorder. I conducted an interview with her that was, all by itself, worth the price of the camera. Watching the tape the next day, I was torn between equally strong desires to mail it to her parents, save it for her children, or douse it in kerosene and set it ablaze immediately. At the very least, I think I will keep it handy for the next tedious “Why Don’t You Drink? What’s Wrong With Drinking?” conversation.
At any rate, I have now “closed” a bar. And during Daylight Savings night, no less.
- Election day is coming up, and I have learned a few valuable lessons.
1) Stuffing envelopes may sound bad, but it’s a hell of a lot better than going door to door. Choose your campaigning volunteerism wisely.
2) There is nothing funnier than an opinionated person with an anonymous questionnaire.
3) When Bill Clinton was being impeached-indeed, every time he’s been on TV since then-a lot of people in my life would see him on television and begin to visibly redden while going, “Oooooooooooooo!” with their teeth clenched. They would lose complete control of their faculties and begin to ramble like junkies in the lockup. “Rggin’ frggn’ sunufacheatinLYINRAZZAFRAZZA!!!” with foam building at the corners of their mouths while their temples throbbed and pulsated visibly.
And I would see this behavior, and I would always think, “What’s the big deal? I mean, my God. Yeah, he’s a big jerk. Liar. Cheated on his significant other, a sin which holds a special place in my heart. We know this. He sucks. Great. Whatever. But lying and cheating don’t ruin the presidency; they determine who gets to the presidency, don’t they? Did I wake up in an alternate universe where politicians were famous for keeping their promises and not abusing their power? Is the joke in this reality, ‘That’s an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp, military intelligence or lying politician! Heh heh heh’? Get a hold of yourselves! How can people let a man they’ve never even met ruin their entire evening with just one look on a television screen? How can some guy have the power to absolutely infuriate people by smiling? It just doesn’t make any sense!”
Then George W. Bush ran for president.
Now I understand.
- After three years of promising, we finally got our retirement plans finalized this week. They included a 3,000 page document detailing every investment plan, every stock in every plan, and the location of every executive washroom on every floor of every building owned by every company selling stock in every plan. As a man made an utterly vain attempt to engage my interest in all of this, my mind was paralyzed by the terrible knowledge that it was someone’s job to write all of the pages in this document. I wondered what it must be like to spend that much time writing something you know for a fact nobody will ever want to read. Then I remembered that I had this site. Then I cried.
Part of the retirement plan document is a series of colorful chart-filled “lessons,” wherein I am able to follow the investing adventures of George and Martha, the Goofus and Gallant of retirement. “Martha invests three dollars when she is twenty. George decides to wait, but promises to invest $1000 when he is 25. As this graph shows, Martha will retire before her kids get into grade school. George will die in abject poverty. Of syphilis.” All of these graphs are very edifying... but every single one of them has a disclaimer at the bottom that says, “The events depicted in the above graph are ludicrously speculative science fiction. Nothing like this has ever happened. Your results may be much worse. You’ll probably never be able to retire at all. Tear this page out of the book and eat it immediately.” I can only imagine that this wild fiction was put in the book as some kind of parable or fable, but other than that, I really don’t know what the point is supposed to be.
- For the past three weeks, people at work have been saying, “Are we going to dress up for Halloween? We should dress up! What are you going to come as?” I have been responding, “Siiiiigh. I don’t even know if I have a costume.”
“Oh, come on!” has been the wail. “It’s Halloween!”
I don’t even need to tell you I was the only person on the staff to dress up.
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