the everyday adventures of sabrina

• play beer chess.
• have random gentlemen buy them for you in a foreign country, miss your train, and have them pour you onto the next train.
• play the [BUN PONY!] drinking game.
• drink pints with friends.

songs i love because of some whimsical little lyrical tidbit that sticks out:

• The Magnetic Fields, “Reno Dakota”: “You know you enthrall me and yet you don’t call me / It’s making me blue / Pantone 292.”
• Cracker, “Guarded by Monkeys”: “I heard about you / I got your PGP key / I write you letters every day.”
• The Beta Band, “Eclipse”: “…so no pizza for them!”

also: BORED BORED BORED BORED BORED BORED BORED BORED BORED BORED BORED.

that is all.

so i’ve been sitting here in my chair at my desk, and my right shoulder’s been all bugged by my bra strap. i can’t seem to get it untwisted, and it’s scratchy and annoying. so, i give up, and retreat to the ladies’ to try and fix whatever its problem is.

well, the problem is that when it was sewn together, they sewed a full twist into the right strap!

AAAAAAAHHHHHH. i want to go home and change! this thing is killing me!

…

in other news, my iPod is wonky but not totally dead (yay!), my tivo has stopped outputting any sound whatsoever (boo), and my printer/scanner got rained on the other day (boo) but still seems to work (yay).

my house is a fucking disaster area. i’m actively searching out the paperwork to file for federal relief.

i need to post pictures of my awesome new patchwork windows though.

HOLY SHIT THIS BRA STRAP IS MAKING ME CRAZY! it’s like a scratchy wool sweater, duct taped to my shoulder blade.

michael helpfully suggested i go commando, when i explained why i was twitchy and bouncing around like a hyperactive three year-old. i appreciated the attempt to help, but was skeptical nonetheless.

house messy! life busy! CANNOT CONCENTRATE; BRA STRAP FUCKED UP!

i was leafing through my books today to see if i have anything i might like to have signed by neil gaiman today, and discovered to my dismay that i seem to have misplaced/lost/forgotten what i did with my stardust graphic novel. it’s not with my neil gaiman hardbacks, nor is it with my other graphic novels. it’s possible that it’s in my comic longboxes, but doubtful as i pulled most of the graphic novels out of there and besides, i don’t think i ever put it in there to begin with; i thought i’d kept it shelved.

grrrrrr.

cut because some of the images are excessively large. in a nutshell, my brain is far too full of buffy trivia!

[MORE]

i think my iPod is dead. i was listening to music in the car friday and it wouldn’t play certain songs; it would hang and skip and then move to the next song, where it might do that again. it seemed limited to certain songs so i figured it was bad blocks, but now i plugged it in to the laptop to swap the music before driving home tomorrow, and it’s been displaying the picture that seems to imply it’s checking its disk (a spinning platter with a superimposed magnifying glass; i can only assume that they thought explanatory text would confuse us or something), for like fifteen minutes now.

don’t be dead, poor baby ipod! i love you! i know you’re four years old or something, and nobody uses 5G ipods anymore, but i still love you!

i just saw a coors light ad with a jane’s addiction song as feature music.

that is all.

i never knew that voting republican was a turn-on for me. thank goodness i have the intarweb so now i know.

Your dating personality profile: Sensual – You are not particularly shy when it comes to your sexuality. You know what you like and do not feel inhibited. Intellectual – You consider your mind amongst your assets. Learning is not a chore but a constant search after wisdom and knowledge. You value education and rationality. Adventurous – Just sitting around the house is not something that appeals to you. You love to be out trying new things and really experiencing life.

Your date match profile: Shy – You are put off by people who are open books. You are drawn to someone who is a bit more mysterious. You want to draw him out of his shell and get to know what he is all about. Funny – You consider a good sense of humor a major necessity in a date. If his jokes make you laugh, he has won your heart. Intellectual – You seek out intelligence. Idle chit-chat is not what you are after. You prefer your date who can stimulate your mind.

Your Top Ten Traits 1. Sensual 2. Intellectual 3. Adventurous 4. Wealthy/Ambitious 5. Liberal 6. Big-Hearted 7. Outgoing 8. Funny 9. Stylish 10. Romantic

Your Top Ten Match Traits 1. Shy 2. Funny 3. Intellectual 4. Practical 5. Adventurous 6. Big-Hearted 7. Conservative 8. Stylish 9. Athletic 10. Wealthy/Ambitious

Take the Online Dating Personality Quiz at Dating Diversions

i wanna know how they ranked my funniness factor at 8 without even asking me to, like, tell a joke. i suspect this quiz of being scientifically inaccurate!

so i’m sitting in the waiting room of the service department at mike haggerty volkswagen in oak lawn… bored out of my skull.

daytime television? ugh. am glad i brought an “Arrested Development” dvd to spend my time on, should someone move and grant me access to a chair near a power outlet so i can plug in instead of rapidly draining the battery with the dvd drive.

the past two weeks have been insanely busy. running around and working and more running around and more working. tuesday-and-wednesday was effectively one work day; i went home tuesday at sixish, futzed around for a few hours, then at midnight got ready to go back to work, where i was in by 12:45 am in order to receive a part that had been couriered to us from texas to make the wednesday maintenance window. (i won’t ask, but i must say that i’m dying to know how much it cost to do that. i mean, fedex overnight isn’t cheap to start with… and this was the “we’ll pick it up and throw it on the very next flight out and have someone drive it directly there once the cargo is unloaded” courier service. i’m sure it cost more than the part was worth.) then we did a ton of shit during maintenance, with mirafolk on site, and for a delightful change in pace, we were up when maintenance ended. actually, we even completed early, slightly before seven, and maintenance ends at eight. so that was cool. also, my pager has finally stopped paging me about every four hours for two outstanding noncritical conditions, which it had been doing for, oh, two and a half weeks. i had gotten past the “driven batshit crazy” phase and well into “completely apathetic to the sound of my pager,” letting the pages pile up until i could do a “delete all” and blow away twelve of them at a time.

in other news, i really need to come up with a vi macro that does J072lBi for me. while i’ve got the muscle memory thing down, it’s still a drag to do a lot of. however, i’ve never set up any macros so that would require reading documentation. documentation! bah! learning is hard! i disapprove.

tuesday morning around 1AMish, i woke up from this really dreadful nightmare. it was something about being trapped in a really disgusting dive bar which was infested with demons, and the phones were just making horrible “possessed by demons” screams at me every time i tried to call someone for help. it was really disturbing, and i woke up and dragged kiyoshi over so i could pet him until i was able to get the dream out of my head and go back to sleep. cats are good for that. they don’t really want to hear what the dream was or talk or anything, they’re just all about the ear scratching. sometimes selfishness is helpful.

i just got done (?) with my taxes … well, what i can do of them. i never received a 1099-INT for my checking account, so i left that off (something like $13 of undeclared income… oh well) and will just file a 1040X once i get it. have never had to do that before. it’s a little bit scary, wondering if i’m inviting an audit by not giving the IRS its 16% slice of that $13, or whatever. — happily, turbotax tells me i owe about two grand less than i expected to have to pay, which means i have to pay only about one grand. although i still suspect it of being wrong, somehow. there’s nothing quite like doing your taxes to make you feel like a hardened criminal who’s about to go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for tax evasion and conspiracy to defraud. i *swear* i would have declared those thirteen dollars if they would have sent me the stupid form! and i really honestly will file an amended return once i get it, mainly because i’m really scared of the IRS! please don’t audit me and throw me in jail! i’m too nice for jail!

also, yesterday, on a whim, sent in my application to harold washington college, which is one of the city colleges of chicago, aka a community college. i decided, after listening to that new carla bruni CD like 18 times back to back, that i’m unhappy about losing so much of my french, so i’m going to go take some french classes. and maybe italian. taking latin made me want to learn italian — it’s all about the Rs, i think. and then i had a brief thought the other day about learning japanese, when i was pondering the eternal irregularity of the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have,’ and wondering if they’re irregular verbs in eastern languages as well. i don’t know that i would ever take japanese — russian is on the to-do list ahead of japanese — but HWC does offer it, so we’ll see what my boredom level is in a couple of years, maybe.

oh, car’s done! bye!

i think i love this cd i just bought, Quelqu’un M’a Dit, by Carla Bruni. oui, c’est en français. she’s got such a beautiful voice.

1. British Sea Power, Open Season
2. Carla Bruni, Quelqu’un M’a Dit
3. Eric Clapton, The Cream of Clapton
4. The Postal Service, “Against All Odds”
5. The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow
6. Pet Shop Boys, Discography
7. Gene Autry, The Essential Gene Autry and Greatest Hits
8. Ricky Nelson, Greatest Hits
9. Green Day, “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”
10. Green Day, American Idiot (gift)
11. Eric Prydz, Call On Me – EP
12. The Bangles, “Hazy Shade of Winter”
13. The Go-Go’s, “Vacation” and “Head over Heels”
14. Simon and Garfunkel, “A Hazy Shade of Winter” and “A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission)”
15. Steve Goodman, “The Lincoln Park Pirates”
16. Chemical Brothers, “Galvanize”
17. Britney Spears, Greatest Hits: My Prerogative
18. Lowry Olafson, “Pachelbel’s Canon in D”

I am a Japanese school teacher — an American man overseas teaching English to junior-high schoolers.

and a close second, via tang, Mr. T: Treat Your Mother Right. and enunciate clearly while you’re at it!

i have dithered for simply hours whether to call this entry something along the lines of “a disappointing evening,” or to go straight to the point with a heartfelt “fuck the house of blues.”

so, last night. as alluded to, went to the house of blues for the handsome boy modeling school show, which was to start at 12:30 AM.

not so much.

i left at 0245, partly out of disgust at the venue, partly out of irritation at the main act for not having bothered to show up yet, partly out of annoyance at the drunken dumb ass twits (did i mention they were drunk? because they were!) behind me who had been tugging and yanking at my backpack and otherwise jostling me in a “more than expected when you’re crowded into the front of a standing-room only floor at a hip-hop show” manner, and partly because my feet fucking hurt after standing there for three fucking hours waiting for handsome boy to come out.

seriously, i don’t know who is to blame more — the venue or the act — for the four goddamn warm-up acts, but by the time we were done with number four i’d say we were on our way to warmed-down. i mean, energy was high when they were on stage but as soon as they pulled the curtains again and dropped that goddamn projection screen to display ads for upcoming events, everybody was like, “oh.” and especially since their twenty-minute set came after a thirty-minute set change. it’s all right, i suppose, or at least less distasteful, to have two and a half hours of warm up after the posted show start time, when your show starts at like 7 or 8 or something, or you have damn seats for your concertgoers to sit in. if you’re running a post-midnight GA show, though? some of us have to work in the morning. some of us have to work at fucking four a.m.!

so, yeah. i walked out. that’s the only time i’ve ever walked out of a show before seeing the main act i came to see. i’ve walked out of shows because people sucked, or because the act sucked, but this was a new one. it was kind of funny — at two a.m., during a set-change lull, i remarked to bill that i was going to have to leave at three, partly out of “will i get to see handsome boy at all before then?” and partly out of just saying so, so that he wouldn’t be mystified when i left if it was too loud to talk at 3 when, presumably, handsome boy would be on stage. he answered, “they’ll be on by three. right?”

…

i wonder how it turned out. i hope it was a good show and made all that waiting around worthwhile for those who stuck it out. i’m disappointed that i never got to see handsome boy, disappointed that i could have spent that $30 elsewhere.

work went okay, though, so at least i was in bed asleep by 0530.

today: beer with someone, then beer and a movie with someone else
tomorrow: sleep late in preparation for !! SOCIAL WHIRLWIND !!, which concludes with a 12:30 show … from which i will go back to work so that i can do some work on a server in the maintenance window.

that last part kinda sucks. but the rest is alright.