The Cake is NOT a Lie

No, seriously. There is cake. I saw it. Right before the singing started.

...

Yeah, it's a big, nerdy in-joke that everyone has made by now. But I was late to the party with Portal, so I couldn't make the joke until now. However, I've just finished the game, which did live up to all the gushing reviews. It's goddamned brilliant. So brilliant that I want to tell everyone about it, but none of my friends are gamers and so they just politely nod as their eyes glaze over and I feel even geekier than normal.

It's a good thing nobody reads this, for several reasons. Starting with the above paragraphs. Videogame nerds would be disgusted with me for making jokes about a month-old meme; non-videogame nerds would have quit reading immediately when they didn't get the reference. I'd be left with an audience of obsessive-compulsive people who NEED to finish reading everything they start.

Another reason it's good that I don't have any readers is that I don't feel compelled to apologize for the two-month hiatus. I spent two weeks in Italy, seeing fascinating things that I really wanted to write about. I started when we got back, but I saw so much cool stuff and so much weird stuff that it got overwhelming and I gave up the project. So the blog kinda withered and died, only to be resurrected tonight since my insomnia's flared up again.

Anyhow, brief summary of Italy:

• They are the worst drivers in the world, bar none. I have a dozen anecdotes to back up this statement, but in the interest of brevity, I'm moving on. Just trust me.


• Awesome food. I knew going in that it would be good, but I didn't count on it also being cheap. Salad, house wine, sparkling water, and delicious pasta for two usually ran about 22 Euro, which is only about 30 bucks given the horrid exchange rate.


• I'm not really a big art guy, but Michelangelo's David is the most impressive work of art I've ever seen. I am a big cathedral guy, and St. Peter's is incredible. Blows away St. Paul's in London, with Notre Dame an even-more distant third.


• Underrated women. They're not all model-hot like the women in Paris, but if you like 'em dark and curvy, you're in luck. Also, it's completely socially acceptable to blatantly stare at people, so you can make prolonged eye contact with every attractive woman, which is just fun. Of course, maybe I just got away with it because I was a full foot taller than all the men over there and nobody wanted to call me out.


• Denim. Holy fuck. They like their denim over there. Lots of denim jackets worn with jeans, which is just a denim shirt away from the full-on Canadian tuxedo. The other fashion trend is gold-lame Nike Shox, which was possibly even more baffling than the rampant denim.

All in all, two big thumbs up for Italy, which beat out England and France to claim the top spot on my (admittedly short) list of the best places I've been.

Now that I've gotten that out of my system, maybe I can start posting more regularly, and possibly attract more hypothetical readers. I remain hopeful.

Fix the Goddamned Servers Already

So I'm about to flee the country for two weeks of binging on pasta and cheese in Italy. Which was all well and good, until my manager sent out an email to everybody I work with which effectively said, "Hey, Eric's going to be leaving for two weeks, so if you need anything from him, better get it now." Just like that, all my dreams of slipping quietly out the side door vanished and the last three days have been bloody screaming messes as people bombard me with requests.

A part of me actually enjoys this; I'm a born procrastinator, so over the years I've gotten to the point where I work much better when the metaphorical building is collapsing and I have to defuse 15 bombs in 30 seconds or Dire Consequences Will Result (this being the IT industry, those dire consequences amount to a slightly raised eyebrow and a shrug from middle management, but hey, I can pretend). I even get a bit of an adrenaline buzz, which leads me to believe I might actually be qualified to be an air traffic controller, but I digress. (Can you digress when you haven't even narrowed the focus to start with? I might have to look into that.)

So why, the sharp hypothetical reader asks, am I dicking around with a blog that I rarely update when the barbarians are breaking down the castle doors? Because the IT Gods, cruel harpies that they are, have chosen TODAY to make both my mail servers run molasses-slow. Not break, mind you. Because if they broke, I could call the help desk and yell at somebody. (Another side note: our help desk has a toll free number. The last seven digits are easy to remember because they spell useful words. The first three I can never remember... 800? 888? 877? What's interesting is that one of the prefixes leads you to the help desk, the other is a non-working number, and the third is the toll-free front end for a 1-900 phone sex line. So every time I try to dial the help desk, I either get Indian tech nerds, buzzing noises, or orgasmic women. It's the little things that keep life exciting.)

Anyway. I have adrenaline (and caffeine) coursing through my bloodstream right now, and I can't get any work done because anytime I click on anything my... computer... slows... to a crawl... for minutes at a time. So it's either blog like my hair is on fire, or chew my fingernails bloody.

Compounding the issue is the editor of a web page that I update; nothing gets published to the page until she approves it. We have a friendly relationship based on loathing stupid people who can't follow directions (fortunately our company is teeming with people who fit that description, giving us lots of conversation fodder). Because I'm nice to her, she does me occasional favors by moving my requests to the front of the line, warning me when things are screwy, etc. But recently she's been pretty much ignoring everything I ask her to look at, so my superiors are screaming at me because the page isn't being updated. There's nothing I can do except nag her, but I can't do too much of that or she'll quit doing me favors and trading stupid people stories.

To review: I am wired, stressed, annoyed, and conflicted. And I have a four-hour layover in Newark tomorrow. The only thing keeping me going is a vision of mountains of parmesan.

Welcome back, old friend

After a horrendously long, dull drought, football is back, and I couldn't be happier. I don't have any interest whatsoever in baseball, which makes for a long few months between the NBA Finals and the start of football season.

I celebrated football's return by watching an absolutely stupid amount of it the last two weekends, culminating with yesterday's ten-hour couch-bound marathon of sloth and potato chips. Yard work went unfinished, video games unplayed, dogs unwalked as my beloved Broncos spent the whole morning trying to give me an aneurysm before pulling the game out at the end.

Unfortunately, watching that much football probably took ten points off my IQ, leaving Chevy's godforsaken "This is Our Country" song alternating with "Viva Viagra" on my mental soundtrack this morning. I finally lost it during the run-up to the Sunday night game, when NBC fellated Tiki Barber on-air for 15 minutes as I fled screaming. Did we need a "look back at Tiki's tumultuous final year in the NFL"? Let's see... he put up good numbers for a mediocre team that was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. He took public shots at his coach while turning the second half of the season into the Tiki Retirement Circus, during which the media slathered love all over him despite the fact that he made the Pro Bowl just three times and was mainly known for having an identical twin and for not fumbling as much as he had earlier in his career. Clearly, this was a history-defining year in the life of a Great American Sports Hero that needed further analysis and discussion. Yes, I realize that, by watching these shows and obsessively reading ESPN.com, I'm supporting this kind of idiocy. Damn it all.

The other big event of the weekend was my best friend's bachelor party. As the co-best man, it was up to me to organize, so we had a lovely day at a big public park, playing volleyball, grilling meat and flirting with two cute sunbathers who set up shop right next to our game and stayed for four hours. We finished the night not at a seedy strip club, but at a karaoke bar seated next to a bachelorette party. Which ended up being about the same experience, as the bachelorette party spent most of the night giving each other lapdances and letting random guys (not from our group) feel them up.

The whole scene made me happy to be married. If I'd been single, I'd have spent a lot of the night trying to get someone to notice me, trying to work up the courage to talk to them, trying not to sound like an idiot when I ran out of things to say after 15 seconds, trying to get them to look past my aforementioned big misshapen head, etc. But since I'm married, I didn't give a damn if the cute girl in the funky hat talked to me or gave me the cold shoulder. Which made it much easier to talk to the cute girl in the funky hat. Who turned out to be very cool, and left me with that glow of validation happily married guys get when they feel like they might have had a chance with the cute girl in the funky hat if they had been single. Which is all I can ask for.

Wishing for a Geek Index

Today is Newsletter Day, which is the crap-crap-crappiest time of the month for me. I get to stitch together our organization's newsletter from about 50 submissions. It'd be dull, dreary work if everyone bothered to follow the formatting rules for submissions (ten point Default Sans font, single-spaced, blah blah blah). Unfortunately, this being the real world, nobody reads the directions and I have to spend hours (literally hours) formatting this junk for the people that send it. I could just throw up my hands and not worry about the formatting, but I'm the kind of guy who notices if there's slightly more space above one line than another, and cares about it on some fundamental level. This makes me both uniquely suited to doing my job, and uniquely suited to being driven crazy by my job. Kinda like how if you want the best, most crazily competitive alpha males flying fighter jets, you can't be too surprised when they buzz the tower.

Yes, I just compared editing my corporate newsletter to flying a $30 million aircraft. It's my blog, and if I want to strain a comparison that much, I can damn well do it.

Anyhow, there are two guarantees on Newsletter Day: one, that I will curse at my computer because, once again, people have failed to follow basic directions. And two, I will spend as much time as possible doing things besides creating the newsletter, only to stay up really late so I can get it done on time. Today's procrastination activities include blogging (hello!) and geeking out over BioShock. Yeah, that's right, I play video games. Not in my mother's basement, thank you very much. I have my own basement.

I wish there was some kind of scale so that I can grade myself on how big of a dork I am. For instance, I have the following geek habits:

• I spend between five and ten hours a week playing video games. I've never played World of Warcraft or any of those, and I've never played online with someone I haven't met in person.


• In that same vein, I read gaming websites and preorder an occasional game. I have never waited in line overnight to buy anything, though.


• I'm obsessive about spelling and grammar to the point where I proofread casual emails to friends.


• I play fantasy football. However, I'm the guy who downs several beers during the draft and makes fun of people who pay money for their fancy charts, as opposed to the guy who spends the whole draft icily silent, plotting his next moves.


• I read a wide range of books including nonfiction, historical fiction and sports memoirs, but I think I might have a nervous breakdown if George RR Martin doesn't finish "A Dance With Dragons" soon.


• I used to be a software engineer, and occasionally (very occasionally) miss writing C++ code.


• I have a blog.

In the interest of a fair and balanced story, the following are also true:

• I'm happily married. Though my wife does occasionally call me a geek.


• I play one sport at a fairly competitive level, and am in pretty good shape.

So, taking all that into account, how big of a dork am I on a scale of one (John Wayne) to ten (Trekkie who loves World of Warcraft)? I'm giving myself a solid seven, and leaving open the possibility that I'll create a full grading system next month on Newsletter Day.

It was as if everyone had swelled

Attended my ten-year high school reunion over the weekend. I have to admit that I was really looking forward to it for very morbid reasons. Namely, I wanted to see all the popular kids lugging enormous beer bellies and screaming kids around. High school was a hard time for me; I grew about two years later than everyone else and was hey-come-over-and-count-my-ribs skinny. I compensated for my puny size by being one of those really arrogant, obnoxious smart kids who tells everyone about their SAT scores. Since graduation, I've grown four inches and filled out fairly well, and matured into one of those really arrogant, obnoxious smart kids who makes fun of people who can't spell. How's that for personal growth? (Fortunately, I'll never get to be arrogant about my looks, since I can best be described as Lyle Lovett with shorter hair and a bigger, more misshapen head.)

Anyhow, I think the popular kids who actually did get fat got wind of my plan to laugh at them, because they all stayed home. The ones who did show were, for the most part, friendly, balanced, well-adjusted and successful. Most of them even looked just like they did when we graduated. I've long since stopped being bitter at these people for not liking me (I WAS obnoxious), but it was mildly disappointing that none of them had really failed at life in the last ten years. At least some of them had a hard time recognizing me until they read my nametag. I also got roaring drunk with the two people from high school I still keep in touch with, so I'm calling the evening a success.

If I were good at transitions, I would put one here.

My boss has actually managed to cure my insomnia by piling so much work on me that I have to stay up until three in the morning to get it all done. Which is what I get for complaining the last few weeks about being bored. But I love my job, because I get to work from home full-time. This has many obvious benefits (no morning routine, no commute, no dress code, no interruptions from noisy coworkers), but the one that's rapidly becoming my favorite is the freedom to curse as loud as I want when I get frustrated. I got an email this morning that sent me stomping around the living room flinging f-bombs at the top of my lungs with occasional pauses so I could give my laptop the finger. It was quite cathartic, and would have been completely impossible if I had still been in a cubicle setting. I propose that all companies build soundproof, windowless rooms for their office-dwelling employees so that everyone can experience this joy. It'd prevent so many aneurysms, heart attacks and beat-downs that the companies would even save money in the long run.

In blog-related news (which I know is a fascinating subject for everybody), Sophistacat left me my first comment, firing a Greek philosophy reference right over my enormous, misshapen head. Diogenes? Ah, sure. I had to look it up, which helped puncture the Arrogant Smart Kid facade I've been talking about. However, I immediately got the "sophist" reference in the blog title, so I went right back to being obnoxious. Getting my first comment has me all giddy. I'm going to see if I can stop blushing long enough to get some lunch.

Bjorn and Torquil will bust a cap in yo ass

Seen driving home yesterday: a green Saab with a license plate frame that read, "South Bay Saab: Keeping it Real." Which is so ludicrous it boggles the mind. Debate all you want about hip-hop's obsession with "Keeping it Real," but I think we can all agree that no rapper in the history of Keeping it Real has done so by driving a Saab. It got me to thinking... what car company is least likely to make an appearance in a rap song?

Obviously, no self-respecting rapper is going to talk about swilling Crystal in a Kia or putting rims on a Pontiac, but those brands arent even trying for the upscale market, so we can disqualify them. Ford, Chevy and Toyota all make SUVs that are popular with the bling crowd, and I vaguely remember an old Wu-Tang song that name-checked a Mazda MPV. Honda and Nissan are contenders, but I submit to you that a Whitest Car Company On Earth contest would result in a two-way tie between Saab and Volvo, with Volkswagon coming in third.

Anyhow, I'm planning a visit to this South Bay Saab dealership, so that I can observe just how the Swedish Keep it Real. I'm imagining some unholy combination of ABBA, vikings, and meatballs. Which seems like an odd way to sell a car, but then again, Saab drivers are an odd bunch to start with and that kind of thing might be right up their alley.

Can you procrastinate from procrastinating?

Apparently so. I have work that needs doing, but I decided to put it off and update the blog. But then I couldn't figure out what to write about, and I put off updating the blog by watching kung fu movies (of which I have a small, but growing collection). Then I realized the point of this is to be somewhat of a brain-drain for me. Thus, I proceed, coherence and narrative convention be damned.

Originally I was going to talk about the wedding I attended in Santa Barbara this last weekend, but that would have turned into a long-winded rant about how much I hate southern California and United Airlines. Instead, I thought I'd sum it up with a few bullet points of unsolicited advice to various parties.

* To United Airlines: it's completely acceptable to tell me that you cancelled my flight because not enough people bought tickets and you would have lost money. I get it. You're a profit-driven enterprise. It might make people angry, but it's better than the alternative you've chosen, mumbling something about "mechanical problems." This does not instill a lot of confidence in the minds of your customers. Also, please refrain from hiring flight attendants who refer to certain routes as "white-knuckle roller coaster rides" in front of passengers. Especially passengers who've had two flights cancelled already due to "mechanical problems." Thank you.

* To southern California: enough already. Pick a spot somewhere in Los Angeles. Declare it to be downtown. Move the important stuff within a 15 to 20 minute walk of this spot. Build lots of mass transit things so people can get there easily. When completely random side streets are choked with traffic at 2:00 in the afternoon on a weekday, this is unacceptable. Now get cracking. I was also thinking of requesting that you ban the wearing of sunglasses indoors, particularly in restaurants, but then I realized that this would make it 5% harder to spot the insufferable, pretentious, name-dropping assholes that flock to your sprawl.

* To all wedding DJs: "Billie Jean" is the greatest dance song of all time. Failure to play this, especially if it's requested, should result in immediate forfeiture of all fees, and possibly prison time. Also, "Play that Funky Music White Boy" is played out. Done. Vastly overrated. A neon sign that lets the whole world know you lack creativity. Third, you should play no more than one song from the Bee Gees or the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Disco is, at its core, totally soulless. Play some Motown or Prince instead.

Boy, the bullet points kept that from being overly long. Thank god I kept it under control.

I'm going to end this post by mentioning that there's some sort of YouTube hive-mind out there by which everyone but me instantly becomes aware of all video content the minute it's uploaded. Every time I send someone a link to a video, they curl their lip and sneer, "Dude, I saw that, like, three weeks ago." With this in mind, I have (recently, belatedly) discovered this, and declared it the single greatest YouTube video of all time. I know you, my hypothetical readers, have seen this, like, a dozen times already, dude, but please try and enjoy anyway.

Happily doomed to obscurity

So I have not been filled with pangs of regret or self-loathing over my new blog. Partly because I'm still too tired to care, and partly because nobody's read it. I'd solicit for tips on getting more readers, but since I have no readers, I don't think that'd do much good. And I can hardly picture myself emailing people to advertise what's written here.

I am glad that I didn't delete this first thing in the morning, mostly because it's a pain in the ass to set up. I'm not talking about the technical side; if anything, we've lowered the bar too far in that department and any mouth-breather can broadcast their innermost thoughts to the world (there I go with that snob thing again. Must really try and rein that in). I'm referring instead to the naming of the blog and the whole creation of an online persona that goes with it. I spent at least 30 minutes staring blankly at the screen trying to come up with a name for the blog, as well as myself. I think it's highly important to identify myself with sufficiently hip/edgy/non-cliche cultural references so that my purely hypothetical readers will respect me. I've never blogged before, but I'm under the impression that one doesn't wander online with a blog called "jtimberlake_lover420" and walk away with the admiration of the highbrow crowd.

Hostility. Fueled by boredom, driven by insomnia.

So for the last few weeks I've been bored. Horrifically, unspeakably bored. And when I get bored, I get insomnia thrown in free of charge. Since I like to write, I thought maybe I'd scour Craigslist for an email buddy, preferably one roughly my age who could use complete sentences. Well, it's been a week now. The ad I posted got a few nibbles, consisting mostly of "omg lollllz u rite long emails." And I can't read or respond to that stuff. It makes my head hurt. One person told me, "wow your funny." Yes, my funny. What about it? Is it showing?

Yeah, I sound like a snob. But trying to keep up an email dialog with someone who possesses the spelling and grammar skills of a first-grader is like trying to hold a conversation with someone who's sprouting a second head out of their left shoulder. I suppose it's possible and may even be rewarding, but I can't focus on what they're saying long enough to find out.

Which led me here. The idea is still the same... meet and communicate with people who have a sense of humor and can express that in writing. Kill some time that would otherwise be spent staring at my toenails.

Of course, this could be the internet equivalent of the drunken one-night stand with a crazy girl; I could wake up tomorrow, groggy and dehydrated, check my browser history, and gasp in horror as I realize I've started a blog. Only time will tell.