Wednesday, December 31, 2003 I will celebrate
...the new year by dodging vomit, I'm sure.
I keep seeing tourists in big plastic necklaces, much like mardi gras beads, except with plastic charms such as miniature beer mugs suspended periodically. Between that and looking at other people's sun damage, I feel like the most stylish, least withered, prettiest person on the island.
Also, we're friends with the girl at the french fry stand now, so now we get to eat them hot.
A preternaturally helpful middle aged man who likes to hang out with the unscrubbed youth often appears in a hot dog costume next to the hot dog lady's cart. He dances around and entices business. The mate and I both coveted the job, until we found out he gets paid in hot dogs.
posted by Frenz | 12/31/2003 03:51:00 PM
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Tuesday, December 30, 2003 bum town
Everyone in this town is either wealthy or homeless. The food drops from the sky in the form of coconuts and the discarded leftovers of wasteful tourists.
Also: in February the mate and I might be doing a medical study at Johns Hopkins. They're testing a vaccine for some class of dysentary. But it pays well. A Christmas miracle!
posted by Frenz | 12/30/2003 03:47:00 PM
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Friday, December 19, 2003 aloha!
Vacation time!
The mate and I are going back to Key West. Just like last year, except we're hoping to avoid some of the troubles we had last year on the way.
This year, I'm hoping we stop at South of The Border. You know, instead of jail.
posted by Frenz | 12/19/2003 10:16:00 PM
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lost, lost
I thought I'd posted once more since last time, but it turns out it was lost one of many recent computer crashes. On the plus side, I remember I was kind of reaching.
It was something upbeat about how I'm still slogging through my play novel, even though NaNoWriMo is long done.
The trouble is, while I don't hate my play novel, I'm losing momentum and I know it. Soon, I'm leaving town again, and that's not going to make it any easier to sit down and write.
My equilibrium and my inner clock are a little off lately. At work we've been pestering the west coast, so we've been working 'til midnight. By the time we get home and fixed dinner, we've missed Letterman.
Tonight was the last shift the call center is offering til some time in January. At the end of today's shift, about 60% of my co-workers said "See you next year!"
Yesterday we were given complimentary disgusting cookies.
We are truly in the holiday mood.
The holiday mood is:
Poverty. posted by Frenz | 12/19/2003 01:08:00 AM
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Friday, December 12, 2003 Our Favorite Space Show
When the mate and I were exiled in Delaware, I was barely conscious for many of my waking hours in the home. My (doomed) thesis, my job at the (awful) school paper and the interminable commute through farm country, took their toll. When I came home at night, I usually ended up watching TV.
Our sweet landlord's special needs child didn't really get the fine line between zombified total exhaustion and murderous rage. He also didn't get why the mate and I wouldn't let him win in Nintendo. Why it was not OK to howl and screech and drum his heels violently on the bed was also outside of his realm of understanding.
The mate and I adopted a policy of banishing him from our room by early evening. Then I would stare, mouth agape at the television. Usually, it was some permutation of Star Trek. The local stations seemed to play it all times.
The little boy would sulk for a while outside the door, until he became distracted. Soon enough, he would be back downstairs, freezing household items in blocks of ice, or in the bathroom, filling the sink with hair gel.
After many months, he began to equate getting kicked out of the room with the Star Trek Universe.
"Are you watching your favorite space show?" he would ask mournfully. When we agreed, he would sigh theatrically and leave without further fussing.
When he gets older, he will remember getting dissed for the Space Show.
That little boy will grow up to blow up space.
posted by Frenz | 12/12/2003 10:15:00 PM
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Thursday, December 11, 2003 Whoops
Remember when I was helping to pester the state of Arkansas? The project was a patch-through. My colleagues in evil and I called as many of the state's private homes as we could, and tried to convince people to let us connect them to state government offices so they could rant about some proposed bill pertaining to gambling.
It was easy enough, so I liked it as much as I like any of the evil deeds I do. Every now and then, a citizen would interrupt the robotic rhythms of the the survey by asking questions about irrelevant shit like the bill number. And I'd tell that citizen a very plausible and entirely fabricated explanation as to why we didn't have that information: the special session hadn't started yet, so the bill didn't have a number.
I didn't know the explanation was false at the time, and I don't know who came up with it initially.
One thing about the "survey" did interest me: what was in it for Evil? The push-polls are pretty easy to figure out, and the crooked church curriculum. This anti-gambling thing puzzled me...until I thought about The Best Project Ever.
The Best Project Ever still isn't that great, to be honest with you. It involves calling people who have visited a certain casino in the last few weeks, and asking them to rate various services. This doesn't sound glamorous or fun, when I just type it out flat like this, but the people are friendly, and the time just flies by, in the sense that it doesn't crawl like a maggot as it does on many other projects.
It turns out that some shadowy personage I can't help but think of as "The Colonel" owns more than one casino in a state adjoining Arkansas, including the casino from the Best Project Ever. I totally called it, too.
A supervisor confirmed my guess tonight after he explained why over forty more hours of the anti-gambling project got cancelled:
*We flooded the phone lines of the Arkansas legislator
*There wasn't actually a gambling bill on the slate for this session
*Legislators are so irritated with the phone harrassment campaign, they are considering drafting such a bill anyway.
posted by Frenz | 12/11/2003 10:59:00 PM
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This seems so worthwhile
Bucket King posted by Frenz | 12/11/2003 11:46:00 AM
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The critters always know
There was an earthquake while I was at work the other day. Later, I found out that it covered most of Virginia and even D.C., so if the lord had been punishing my workplace, as I had originally assumed, he was casting a pretty wide net in order to do so.
I was hoping after that one of the supervisors would come out and say, "OK, people. That was an earthquake. You can all go home now." Nothing like that happened, but! all the day shifts I'd signed up for next week have been cancelled because a client changed its mind (for completely non-seismic reasons). Heh. Aloha, forty hours.
And a hearty bonjour, extra poverty.
posted by Frenz | 12/11/2003 03:27:00 AM
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Sunday, December 07, 2003 I'm pretty much resigned to being Elfstar, actually
My schoolgirl dreams of being Debbie are slowly eroding, and it's not so bad. My new purpose in life is to find new ways to wear my hair.
Today the mate and I went down to the ol' shootin' range again, but this time we actually shot some guns. I'm so still totally surprised that that was, like, allowed. I can't rent cars yet, but I was handed guns, also ammo, and was encouraged to combine the two in order to make explosions. I wasn't too good at it, but no serious injuries resulted, and the friendly hillbillies who were shooting in the next lane seemed amused by the mate and I. They let us shoot their guns, which they had brought from home, and then we let them shoot ours, which we'd rented.
Mate has initiated a "countdown" til all hell breaks loose here in the apartment (which is thankfully free of firearms), so I had better stop blogging now. posted by Frenz | 12/07/2003 10:31:00 PM
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Saturday, December 06, 2003 It's beginning to look a lot like pudding!
What does pudding look like, really? Obscene.
Pudding is always obscene.
re: not smoking, I've added a "snapping at people" category to my continuing anti-nicotine program. Luckily, the urge to lick an ashtray has faded considerably since my last post.
As a special holiday treat to the montrous and loudmouthed cats, I worked instead of taking them in to get gawked at. I feel bad, because my time in this quaint fishing village is drawing to a close, and when the mate and I wander dreamily out of town (one step ahead of the police and our creditors) in a few months, I want the monsters to have a new place to live. Luckily, there is a very flattering picture of the two of them snuggled together posted in the window of the petshop. It's handsomely mounted on a large cardboard showboard, which might lead passersby to believe that the kitties are a successful science fair experiment. posted by Frenz | 12/06/2003 08:01:00 PM
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Monday, December 01, 2003 Oh, Jesus, and another thing!
I quit smoking well over a year ago, and I mean I really quit. I'd had something like a pack a day habit, but I didn't really have physical withdrawal symptoms. This lead me to believe that maybe I wasn't physically addicted at all, or very mildly, and that it was all in my head.
Recent findings confirm this, because, holy shit do I ever want a cigarette. I want a hundred cigarettes, actually. I want to hijack a truckload for my personal use. I have a year of back cigarettes coming to me, damnit.
But no. I realize how genuinely foolish it would be to pick up such a bad and expensive habit when I am so virtuous and so poor.
My question here (and this is not rhetorical. E-mail me if you have any ideas) is what the hell do I do about these cravings? Patches and gums seem a little silly, because I'm not craving patches or gums, and I doubt I'm craving nicotine anyway.
My current solution is to chew my lip, and in this season of chapping, I would prefer not to continue.
posted by Frenz | 12/01/2003 03:52:00 PM
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Attack
I lost NaNoWriMo. I plan on finishing my play novel anyway, even without the impetus of the moist, throbbing deadline. I got sidetracked into a safari to New Jersey instead. Art always suffers around Thanksgiving, I think. See, our native friends caleld it maize.
Maybe art suffers around New Jersey, but I'm somewhat loathe to add to the boatload of pointless New Jersey libel and slander. It's a nice enough place. If you like gold jewelry and acrylic nails. On the other hand, if that is true in your case, then most of America is probably just like heaven.
posted by Frenz | 12/01/2003 03:26:00 PM
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