I Doan Wanna

It's hard to get motivated to do any real work on a Friday. Okay, it's hard to get motivated to do any real work on any day, but especially on a Friday. It's multiplied here by the fact that so many people either take Friday off or work from home, making it a temporary ghost town, with only the occasional disembodied voice floating over the cubicles from some unseen location.

Of course with being stuck in the office, there's little else for me to do than sit at my computer. And since I'm relatively certain that I've seen pretty much everything the internet has to show me (within my own moral limits), surfing the web doesn't hold any real interest for me either.

So what to do? I guess I could go through my phone and delete all those contacts I've been transferring from phone to phone since the mid-nineties (crtjj, who the crap is that?), but what if it turns out they're actually really important and I just can't remember at the moment? Can't take that chance. I better leave that to the missus. She has a better memory for that sort of thing anyway.

I could organize my desk. Lord knows it needs an overhaul. I used to be so neat and tidy. A place for everything, and everything in its place. I blame the military. But now, I'm just kind of willy-nilly with stuff. If it stacks up too high, I just start a different stack. I blame my wife. Just kidding honey, I still love you <3 <3.

Well, that's about all the time I think I can waste here, so I'm off to find someplace I can hide to play games on my phone until 4. Later.

A Peek Into the Soul

Men are sometimes closed books. We’ve been programmed at nearly a genetic level to conceal our emotions, as if showing how we feel will give away some weakness for others to exploit. This occasionally makes it difficult for women, and on occasion other men, to really understand what’s going on in our minds. I say occasionally other men because just like we can’t show our own emotions, we can’t show interest in another man’s emotional state either.

But there’s a loophole. A shortcut if you will. If you truly want to see what matters most to a man, the one place you can look is his cell phone. I know, it may sound silly, but a little known fact about men is that they like the idea of keeping readily available those things that matter most. If you scan through the pictures he has taken with his camera phone, you will discover the things he holds most dear.

Now, some of it may be no surprise. A new father’s phone will be littered with baby pictures. A car enthusiast will have pictures of engines and paint jobs. But the really informative stuff is the stuff with staying power. The photos that were taken at some distant point in the past are the indicators of emotional attachment. A man will typically cycle through his pictures on a fairly regular basis, deleting those that are repetitious or poor quality, as well as those that have lost their value. I recently had a purge of a Christmas photo of an uncle wearing a leopard print Dr. Seuss hat. It was funny at the time, and perhaps could have been used against him later, but I just decided I didn’t really care that much about it anymore.

If a photo is still in there, it means that the owner regularly looks at it and makes a conscious decision to hold onto it. Now unfortunately we can’t definitively determine why he has these photos. But it can be a way to confirm that things you thought he had lost interest in or never had interest in are in fact matters of great importance to him.

Harumph

It's hard to blog when you're in a bad mood. I'd much rather just sit here and sulk about the mean thing I said to my wife. Of course the fact that I instantly regretted it doesn't help. And of course, I should have apologized right then, but that would have ruined a perfectly good storm out. It was good too. I rattled doors and windows and everything.

I know the instant I go and apologize, all will be made right in the world. But still I sit here, typing away. I don't know why I have to be so hard headed sometimes. I really don't know everything, despite whatever claims you may have heard (said by me) to the contrary. The real problem is my wife is just as hard headed as I am, and of course that means that neither of us can admit when we're wrong, and things just blow up from there. I would like to think that I have my moments of humility, however. As a matter of fact, I think I'll go have one right now.

Just a Quickie

I wanted to really push my luck by getting this last one in before it was officially Sunday. Where I am it is still Saturday, even if other parts of these great United States are on the other side of midnight. I have plenty of excuses for posting late, one of which includes a trip to the ER, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. Hasta Luego.

Paul Blart, Intern

Yeah, it turned out work isn't picking up quite as much as I thought. I had a little chat with my boss today and he said we can lower the pucker factor to threat level orange. So that's good. I still had to work on a day off though. Can't get that back. Hours of my life, gone forever. And my baby's life. Precious moments of her rocking back and forth, on the verge of crawling. Her precocious stares where she looks like she could easily be 25 years old instead of 25 minutes.

I was going to make a joke about how I don't really care about all of the stuff I'm missing by working and going to school full time, but the more I think about it, the more I think maybe I do care. But we are choiceless. The extra income we get from my VA benefits is a necessary part of our budget, so I have no choice but to go to school. It's kinda like having a second job, only I don't have to work very hard and at the end I'll have a lot more job opportunities. I guess it's like interning with a mall cop. If interning with a mall cop was something you could put on a resume-ay (I do that instead of the accent mark cuz I don't know how to do the accent mark) without people laughing at you.

Easy...Eeeaaasy

I'm taking an online class for the first time this semester. So far (week 1 down, 5 more to go) I've been pretty good about keeping up with it. This is significant for me because I'm not much of a self-motivator, as evidenced by the 75 extra pounds I carry around. The only problem I've noticed is in the discussion topics the instructor posts to create a discourse amongst my peers and I. I've developed a tendency to blog.

Everyone else puts short, rather brief opinions about the subject matter and how it affects them. I do research. I spent half an hour googling the effects of Hugo Chavez's policies on the rate of inflation in Venezuela just so I could make a joke that was accurate.

So far, on the two topics he has posted, I've contributed 5 times. Three of them were essentially one post but it was just so long I had to break it up (and accidentally deleted one section and had to recreate it. I hate trying to do that. It never comes out as good as the first time I write it.), which meant coming up with not one, but 3 clever titles to go with each post.

In Under the Wire

Yeah, I'm typing this in the 3.42 minutes I have to spare between work and school, because work suuuuuuuuuccckked today. By that I mean I actually had to do some. And not just some. It was a lot. Like, there was walking around and stuff. Also, this one kinda fruity guy was acting all weird to me. Maybe he figured out that I'm married and therefore not available. Okay, that was kinda harsh. And ridiculously self-absorbed, but we all knew that part was a joke right?

But yeah. So not one, but 2 of my myriad of dormant work projects all of the sudden sprung to life and needed, nay, demanded my attention. Usually one of them will stir slightly, sending me a document or two that needs to be edited and returned within a week or so. It generally takes me a grand total of 30 minutes to perform such a task, so I don't have a lot of stress and strain in my professional life.

But not today. Oh no, today was different. It was special. Today, one of the project managers that I "work for" decided he wanted this whole slew of documents created from scratch. Correction, he was wondering where a whole slew of documents were, despite never showing the slightest inkling of interest in them up to this point.

And then on top of that I screwed up this other document a couple months ago, but it was okay cuz two other guys screwed up their parts on it as well, so it had to all be redone ASAP but nobody was saying it was all my fault or even all that concerned about it being screwed up. Except maybe the guy who found it, but nobody really listens to him anyway, so it was all good. Aaaaand I'm late for class.

And Then Things Took a Turn For the Worst...

Yeah, so you remember the fun, wonderful, great, and all-around put together advisor I talked about in a previous post? Well, guess who my summer math class teacher is! Go ahead, guess. I'll wait. That's right! Mr. Wonderful himself! I just can't seem to stop using the exclamation points!

I mean, he has a doctorate in something, so he is understandably familiar with the teaching process. And he did teach in what many believe to be the most difficult academic pipeline in the military. But of all the classes in the entire scholastic program here, why did he have to choose mine as the launching point for his return to teaching? Man I'm glad I didn't chew him out there in his office. That would have made for an awkward first day of class.

The Experiment

Okay, so I'm going to try and be a real blogger for a month. I think everybody goes through a phase like this, where the guilt of ignoring your blog eats at you to the point of wanting to regurgitate whatever nonsense flits through your skull for the sole purpose of being heard by somebody, somewhere in the world, even if it's only so you can be heard making the crazy noise by pursing your lips and flicking them with your index finger while humming.

Did you just do it? I did too. I'm the one writing this and even I couldn't resist. So I'm going to try and post every day. For a month. At the heart of this experiment is an attempt to find my voice. I feel like I've been all over the place with this thing since it started, and while that effectively reflects my eclectic nature, I worry that's it's too wandering and random to do anybody any good. So, let's see what happens.