Wicked

I spent the weekend in the Boston area for a wedding, and took this picture of the corner of a local newspaper while I waited for a pizza that ended up smacking the Brooklyn pizza smugness right off my face. I took plenty of pictures of people at the wedding, too, which will appear soon in the places that pictures of people often go. Stupid pictures like this one go here on my stupid website. So I can say stupid things about them.

I just got a kick out of the fact that the word "wicked," a colloquialism that finds its way into just about every sentence locally (and is used everywhere else in the world whenever the speaker wishes to mock the dialect of those who worship at the Church of Fenway), is now being used by a cabal of regional papers to promote their provincial web presence.

The days of the local rag may be numbered, but I take comfort in knowing that they're not going down without making caricatures of themselves and reinforcing stereotypes about the people that've kept them in business this long.

You know it's going to be a good day when...

...you end up behind a van like this at a red light and you inexplicably have your camera handy.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm too old to think things like this are funny. But then I realize that I already know the answer to that question.

Bonus awesomeness: the Duschqueen website (of course I went to it) looks like it might have been designed by the same guy that made this site.

easy go.

Today was the official last day of an SAT prep season that's been in full swing since the beginning of January. It's difficult to overstate how good it feels to be done, or how much I'll enjoy the adult beverage I just poured as I type this, but I'm unsettled tonight because of something that happened to me at lunch today. And well...I haven't had enough time or energy for navel-gazing blog posts in a long time, and now I do so here goes:

I let myself get talked into going to the new Grace's Marketplace near my office. I didn't really want to go because it's expensive and the only other time I went it wasn't so great, but I agreed. So my friend orders the burger that he'd been told was delicious, and I ordered a veggie pizza. I grabbed a drink from the cooler, and headed to the cashier to pay, which is what you do there while the food is prepared before you sit down and wait for the food to come out (a bit of a confusing system for first-timers, which, come to think of it, is another reason I don't like the place).

It wasn't a very busy day in there, so the cashier was involved in a conversation with the woman running the aisle behind her, and it took her a moment to notice me standing there. Eventually she did see me, though, and rang me up. The grand total: $10.85. So, I pull a $20 bill out of my wallet and am about to hand it to her when I decide that I'd rather give her $21, to do the both of us a change-related favor. She took the money out of my hand, still in quasi-conversation with the woman behind her, and handed me back 15 cents.

"I gave you a twenty."

"No, you didn't. See," pointing to the receipt she just printed, "it says here eleven."

"But it only says that because that's what you typed. Which doesn't change the fact that I gave you a twenty."

"No, it was a ten. I put it right here," she said, pointing to the spot in the drawer than tens go.

"No, you put it there. With the other twenties. I watched you."

So it went like that for a while, until finally she decided she would count the whole register. Which I figured would be fine. I would go take my seat with my friend and not create any more of an awkward situation than I already had, and eventually I'd get an apology and my $10 back.

But here's the thing that actually motivated me to sit down and write about this. It's not that, after a register count that I kept half an eye on through lunch and that was replete with much gesticulation and dirty looks in my direction, I was told again to my incredible disbelief that I didn't give her $21. It wasn't that, even though a manager was clearly consulted at some point in the process, no manager ever came to speak to me. It wasn't that the $20.85 I ended up paying didn't even result in such a great pizza, or that my colleague's burger (which he ordered medium-rare) came well-done. It wasn't any of these things. Or maybe it was all of them.

What I've been thinking about ever since I got back to the office and eventually cooled down 2 hours later is how disproportionately angry I found myself getting over what amounts to very little money in the grand scheme of things. I was so preoccupied with peering across the cafe to the cashiers to see if they were still counting that I couldn't carry a conversation. I was so fixated on it afterwards that I was compelled to make the event into a Facebook status update to fish for commiseration (for shame!). I'm a pretty even-keel guy for the most part. What about $10 got me so fired up?

The best answer I can come up with is that I, like most people I know, get a bit flustered when events that should have predictable outcomes don't. This is why it sucks so disproportionately hard when a delivery food order is incorrect, and I think it's why people (or at least why I) get so angry at things like random traffic jams. I need to have faith that when I hand a cashier money, I'll get the right change back. The world is crazy. Some things need to just work.

I have embarrassingly vague recollections from my developmental psychology classes about the lasting damage done to infants that are for whatever reason unable to establish certain predictable outcomes to the kind of interactions infants have with those around them. This paragraph might have led me down a truly Googly rabbit hole if I weren't seriously running out of steam and wondering why I even bothered to write all this up now. So I'll just wrap it up.

Grace's, I'll recover. But you should be more careful. Had I been an infant trying to understand my place in this world...

Get that rat's nest off your head.

Today is Monday, which means it's my one day off all week. When you only have one day off every week, you start to have unreasonable expectations for how relaxing, or productive, or decadent (and usually all of the above) it'll be. When it finally comes, though, you stay in bed until about 11, make yourself a frozen pizza which you eat in your pajamas while you try in vain to catch up with the Internet, which was chugging right along the whole time that you were otherwise occupied (it waits for no one). Then, as you start to feel your day slip away from you, and a dull disquietude begins to set in about everything that needs to get done on your first day back at work, you decide to do something.

So today, I went to get my haircut, even though I just did so a few weeks ago, and I usually wait about 2 months. The place makes me happy, though. I could swear I've written about it on here before, but all I can find is a mention of the fact that it costs $10, so here goes. There are 2 guys of indeterminate Eastern European descent who own and operate the place. As far as I can tell, nobody else works there, period. It's often busy, but if there's nobody in there when you arrive, they can usually be found sitting in the barber's chairs facing each other, but very possibly not talking. When you get there, one will get up and motion for you to take his seat, and the other will walk over to the radio (which has been off) and turn it on to the oldies station.

They don't talk much, aside from muttering to each other in their native tongue when someone they don't like walks by (that's what I figure it's about, anyway), but my guy will usually ask me "how are you, my friend?" and then ask if I want the same thing as last time. Today, though, he and I were the only 2 in there, so we chatted a bit more. Even though I said I was fine when he asked, he must've sensed that I was a bit stressed, and tried to comfort me a bit by reminding me that I have my health. Christopher Reeves, he told me, who was a billionaire, fell off a horse once, and then all his money didn't matter. He was SuperMAN (emphasis on the "man" syllable) and it didn't matter.

So yeah. I went to get a haircut because I knew it would make me feel better, and it did. Now I just need to cajole Amy into fixing it for me tonight so nobody will make fun of me tomorrow.

a few things

1. To the alien race who will, in the distant future, use this blog and nothing else to learn about those who once walked the earth, fret not. February 2009 happened, despite a complete lack of evidence to be found herein. Also, humanity's greatest accomplishment was catching this on film.
2. From sometime in early 2000 (I think) until December 2008, I wore an earring in the cartilage of my left ear. It got pulled out (not ripped through my ear, just pulled out) during a haircut at my favorite $10 barber, and I never bothered to find it and/or replace it. I've been meaning to write about this for literally 3 months, and now that I've finally typed it, I've half a mind to delete it because, holy shit, I haven't written anything for months on here and this is the best I have?
3. Tonight I was teaching and one of the writing questions prompted me to start making the following table on the board. I can't be the only person in the world who thinks I'm funny, but I was certainly the only person in that room.

   2 things	3 or more things
   Better	Best
   Faster	Fastest
   More	Most
   Worse	Worst
   Sausage	Wurst

4. Every eight or nine months, I grow a pretty decent beard (mostly because I get busy and blow off shaving). And every single time, when it finally becomes time to shave it off, I have an uncontrollable urge to give myself an awesome 'shache. So usually I do and I take a picture, and then finish the job. I've (almost) never had the nerve to actually leave the house like this.
   

Irrational exuberance and the counting of chickens unhatched

I gave my girlfriend a computer virus. I haven't had one myself in years upon years despite refusing to pay for anything resembling protective software, so needless to say I was caught by surprise when I got nailed, simply by loading a site that Google Images told me had a 'YO DAWG I HERD YOU LIKE CARS...' pic. I insist on showing her these things, despite the fact that her most common response reminds me of a 7 year old opening socks and underwear on Christmas morning. It's a nice grounding, I think. A reminder that the real world has no time for the kind of shit that I make time for even during an 80 hour work week.

Anyway, I got her a virus for Christmas. So I traded laptops with her, so that she could have one that worked in her apartment while I tried to make better that which I had made worse. And then I kinda forgot about it, because ol' Vundo beat my ass badly on my first few half-hearted tries, and I had Left 4 Dead to play.

Then there was a 1929-themed New Year's Eve party, which billed itself as a real production with a password to get in ("Irrational Exuberance," how clever) that they never even asked for, because the real password was a cover charge. I took some more awful pictures there that I didn't even try to make a nice face in, and then I made a resolution not to do that anymore. And then I made another resolution not to let things sit around undone forever, even if it means I don't get to play video games every time I want to. Also I got a new iPod that can scrobble what it plays and I can't really use it to do so until I get my MacBook back, which lit a fire under my ass.

So tonight I spent all night manually digging a trojan out of my girlfriend's registry. And I guess I should wait until the full scan that's running right now comes back clean before I start flexing all over the web, but it wasn't a resolution this year not to brag about things without any reasonable justification. So yeah, I did it. I'm a genius. Who smiles in pictures, even. For the time being.

A little somethin' for the ladies

Sorry girls, I'm spoken for.

Honestly, I don't know when it happened, and I couldn't tell you exactly why, but it's become an insurmountable compulsion at this point to make a shitty face like this whenever a camera is pointed my way. In my twilight years, I will wistfully browse through pictures on my whizzbang-o-matic, and refer to my mid-to-late twenties as my "who farted?" period.

I am offended by your casual disregard for my basic psychological needs.

One of the few things I remember from Intro to Psychology (though I don't remember what it's called) is the fairly obvious fact that people fear unpleasant things more and more the closer they get. Which is why most people make dentist appointments a few weeks in advance, so that they can lock themselves into something they know they need to do, before the prospect of actually going becomes so daunting that they just forget about it.

With that in mind, I got up the nerve to call the dentist's office yesterday for one of the first times since my mom stopped making appointments for me. Imagine my surprise/disgust when they offered me an appointment for 10 AM the very next morning. As in today. Haven't you people taken Into to Psychology? Have you no decency?

I go now, to walk through The Valley of the Shadow of Sharp Metal Pokers alone. Farewell.

Watching the wagon roll away, dusting myself off.

So, I'm drinking coffee again. Which isn't really such a big deal, except that I was pretty successful in quitting it for a pretty long time. I was prepared to chalk my most recent transgressions up to temporary relapses and not full-monty abandonment of my commitment, but then the other day I didn't just have a few sips of the stale pot in the office that someone else made. I paid for it. With money. Twice.

That was nice while it lasted.

In related news, Dunkin' Donuts Egg White Veggie Flatbreads are kinda gross.

In completely unrelated news, I finally got around to purchasing one of these Mad Peck Providence posters, only 4 years after moving out of Providence and thinking to myself that I'd like to have one. If it was concern that they might be expensive, and I'm not sure that it was, it was probably just inertia, then that was a very silly reason to wait so long, because it turns out they're actually only $5 before shipping. F'ing sweet.

O.