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May 18 A manifestoYou'll see that I added Jack to my list of blogs. I was inspired to do this since he wrote up a manifesto of sorts about shaving. You should read it. April 10 What's all this about sin?I haven't been posting lately. Hm. Sorry. Just about everything has been complicated. And how do you follow up that last one? The self-indulgence alone is pretty hard to top, even for a blog! :) I guess I'll just have to lower the bar for Future Sean. Here it goes.
I believe that I'm a good person. But I have to present you with some contradictory evidence. I couldn't help thinking what I thought as I got my haircut on Friday--that the man who was cutting my hair had a former career as a male Vietnamese prostitute. I was unable to determine, however, if a trip across the Pacific or some kind of reincarnation seperated this change of vocation. Either way, he kept suggesting a different hairstyle for me but lacked the words to explain it correctly. All I could understand was that he wanted to use the clippers on a very short setting higher up on the back of my head, but then a longer setting further down. I tried to picture this and it didn't look good. At best, I figured he wanted to give me a futuristic mullet. When I asked for clarification, he offered to "show me a video." What? I wasn't about to sit there watching a video about a haircut so I insisted on my original haircut. Before the haircut was over, he offered to show me the video two more times. After I declined both, he followed each modification to my hair by playing with it lightly and saying "look different?" What? Is he used to some kind of ineffectual scissors which fail to make hair "look different?" When I get a haircut, I go into this kind of expressionless zone. I'm lost in my thoughts. I don't smile or react or anything. Maybe that's why he thought I was unhappy with what he was doing. The haircut did turn out pretty good and in a week, once that new haircut look is gone, I'll be happy with it. January 31 And you're acting all upset like you're the only one who's wet!
The past few days have been a mixed bag. Some really cool things happened. I can't say that bad things happened, but I've certainly had my moments of feeling like crap. It's like somebody turned up the contrast on my television set. Each great thing had to compensate itself with some kind of mundane shittiness that doesn't even dignify itself by being shitty or describable enough to be worth mentioning let alone acting on.
There's juxtaposition. There's my weekend's clumsy attempt at balancing itself. And it's not easily ignored.
It's purposeful and it's annoying.
Ever since the second The Matrix movie, when they saw The Merovingian talk about causality and feed the blonde the horny cake, people have been obsessed with assigning blame to what caused unfortunate things around them. This is because they believe that it will cause them to get laid in a restroom of a fancy restaurant by somebody pretty and under the influence of pastries that lack Structured Exception Handling.
Screw that! I say, blame the thing itself for its existence.
Of course, that's crazy. People were probably obsessed with that before the movie, though. I mean the second The Matrix movie kind of sucked anyway except in comparison to the third. And though people really don't pay very close attention to stuff like that, I will still place the blame on the movie.
I mean, the Wachowski brothers were completely obsessed with bull-shitty head-up-the-ass psudo-philosophical crap anyway. I'd like the whole The Matrix series if it didn't try to be a weird vehicle for a disturbed hybrid of action sequences and a discussion of the nature of choice versus "choicelessness." Or whatever.
Oh my god! Would Neo have knocked over that vase if The Oracle didn't tell him not to worry about it?
And I'm not much better. In fact, I probably think through that stuff a lot less before I start spewing it off. I guess the difference is that not only am I barely serious, but I keep the scope of the message limited to this blog. Quarantine. Influenza.
I mean, I could totally make a series of movies about it and make a ton of money, but I'm just classier than some. Just so long as I don't blame myself for my own problems.
But what's really upsetting me? I mean, that movie is a few years old and the cake scene was funny. And I'm a big fan of taking responsibility for my own problems, almost to a fault.
Well, this entry is actually about the "Fatty Grunt." There's an episode of Harvey Birdman where Harvey bends over to pick up something and he is unable to stop this Fatty Grunt from happening.
A couple days ago I got into my car and as a settled into my seat I heard somebody do the Fatty Grunt. It was me. It had never happened before.
I'm getting older. I'm still young and I don't have a weight problem at all. But this was more. It was a reminder from the Universe: "Remember, I've got you by the balls... fatty."
I immediately wished it was somebody waiting to mug me instead, letting out a pre-mugging Fatty Grunt.
While this only happened this one time a few days ago, it is representative of the kind of barely-worth-mentioning negative event that has plagued the past couple of days. They add up. They compound. They have babies.
So I will club those babies like so many of their seal counter-parts by sharing the non-negative stuff that happened the past few days. You've earned it. It's disjointed. And I've included pictures.
One thing that was cool was that for my birthday in 2004, my mom had given me about half a dozen pins that have images from A Clockwork Orange. I really liked them, but I thought I had lost my favorite one on the plane ride back to Seattle. Almost a year and a half later, I found my favorite on my bookshelf at work, hiding. I pinned it to a UB Buffalo and now it rests on the top of my monitor, ready to fall. It's waiting for somebody to slam my door dramatically while screaming something like "...then I'll see you in hell!"
Well Han doesn't ride his Tauntaun around work too much so it might be a while. But finding the button was cooler than finding $20 in your pocket.
I was happy to see a Colbert Report where Colbert made a reference to "Future Colbert." Specifically it was "Suck it, Future Colbert!" while expressing that his apathy about something was contingent on it not affecting him--at least not affecting him right now.
It was great since I frequently wonder about encounters where different Seans from different times encounter each other. Kate seems to think that engaging in exercises like this are beyond useless. In college, I would take the remainder of my Student Loans after tuition and go buy video games, chuckling "Suck it, Future Sean!" And I was fine with that! Although I was screwing myself, it's not like that Sean would ever meet Future Sean. At best, he could write him a letter.
I took comfort in that the social awkwardness of an impossible situation couldn't happen. It made the financial implications seem trivial. It was worth it.
That's back when Biff drove into the back of the manure truck.
Apparently, Microsoft is taking steps as part of some readiness campaign for the flu season. I found an ounce of hand sanitizer in my mailbox. I took offence until I saw everybody else got one as well. I really only mention it because I took the picture, resized it, and uploaded it. It makes me wonder if Microsoft has their shit together more so than our government. Maybe MS should run everyth- Oh no! 2002 Sean is trying to destroy me just for saying that! He's using the pure white hot freedom of open source code to do it too!
Eh. They'll get along. 2001 Sean bought them a Game Cube that 2007 Sean is going to be paying for. And all of them don't trust the government.
Now that I feel better, I gotta say that Saturday was pretty great. I had gone into work on Saturday to take care of some things and I was actually productive before 9am, which is phenominal. Now, Saturday is an excellent example of the misconception about Seattle winters. Naturally, rather than snowing here, it usually rains. It's part of Seattle's reputation and people figure it's always raining, especially when they hear that Seattle has recieved %u days of rain in a row. If it rains a tenth of an inch and then it is sunny for the rest of the day, that counts as another "day in a row." People don't realize that the rain comes in waves, usually interrupted by the sun, which can end up looking really cool. I took a picture of my car during one of these transitions. It was pouring pretty bad, but extremely sunny.
I've always enjoyed the rain, but this combination doesn't hurt.
Also, on Saturday, I went to Barnes and Noble where I attended a book signing for the authors of Penny Arcade. At 45 minutes before signing, the line of my fellow geeks was wrapped around the inside of the store. The book is a compilation of their first couple of years of comics, in print with commentary. That's pretty cool considering the comic is normally completely online. The only prints of the comic you see are ones from people's printers. They take the crappy black and white printout of the comic and tack it on their door.
But this book is beautiful and glossy. And, as you can see, it's also signed. It's hard to stay mad when you look at that. :) |
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