M. bought tickets to an Oktoberfest thang in SF. A few co-workers were getting together to drink.

M. has no drinking frame of reference. Luckily the California Highway Patrol (aka the TV famous CHiPs) were in force.

M. had been sharing my beer. He blew 0.0 and the dickhead cop mocked him for not drinking. I explained to the cop I had had what I drink at a typical show. He gave me the follow my finger field sobriety test and warned me I was drunk. The drunk boy next to me explained my eyeballs twitched.

I blew a borderline 0.97. The cop seemed disappointed. The drunk congratulated me. I felt oddly proud to know where I was.

Meanwhile, we ran into our own personal local policeman, who filed my stolen bike report. He wasn’t in uniform save his baby face. Out of uniform is out of context. I thnk he’s stalking us.

Whenever I consider my life’s career trajectories, I consider driving an old Japanese sword into my gut and watching the entrails spill out as my brain tells me to die. Or, maybe I should just get a good old double-edged not always so safety razor blade and commence to some teenage cutting.

Point is, I worked some extra time at work today. Which meant I skipped the gym. Riding my bike is like a distant memory. Too many hours to clock.

I also worried about teaching some other folk on how to do some work stuff, so I wouldn’t have to do it. I also checked over someone else’s work, because it just seemed damn unlikely they would proofread on their own. Then, I helped the boss with some fun spreadsheet budgety things.

The retarded came in later–when I had to meet with consultants and tell them what I do for a living, while they showed me a job description for a position where I helped write the goddamn piece of paper in front of me and interviewed the person who got the job. And, I’m helping to train the person. Um, yeah, arguably that’s not my job on the little piece of paper.

If you start a conversation with the most minimal of shit, you will always sound like a self-aggrandizing asshole if you try to set it straight. “Um yeah, nice consultant people, I wish that were my job.”

So, why again did I work that extra bit tonight? Fuck me and my stupid work ethic.

Technorati Tags: cutting, soulless, tired, vocation, work

For those naysayers and whatnot out there in internetland mocking us early adopters, allegedly worshipping at the altar of Steve Jobs. Yeah, I bought one. Yeah, I like for the first time having a smart phone that’s designed to actually work with my MacBook.

But, I do realize it’s a phone. I have perspective. It’s not like it’s a vibrator, right? (Then again, I can’t check my email on any sex toy I’ve heard of.)

The real sting was supposed to be the precipitous price drop that made the papers. $200 American spent above the current bottom line.

If you are going to be a soulless yuppie, though, consuming and shit, take some advice from someone with a pretty good credit rating and the flexibility to shop as I please. Use American Express. Membership and privileges and marketing, I shot customer service a call. They gave me the hook up with a $100 credit as a good customer looking for some spending assistance.

That and the $100 “early owner” credit, I’m back in black. And I still gots my shiny iPhone.

Technorati Tags: Cell phone, iPhone, consumer, soulless, technology, tired

There’s this thing at work. The week delivery by the Fruit Guys. It’s fruit delivered, apparently by men. Mostly it’s bananas.

Maybe it was my fruit jones from skipping the farmers’ market yesterday. It was a choice, pure and simple, laze in bed on a Sunday morning with the best beau I’s ever had, or get up and buy produce. Fresh, juicy, warmed in the sun produce. Or M. Decisions, decisions.

Anyway, I went to work unsated, if you will, without my trip to the farmers’ stands. The fruit at work, therefore, spoke to me. It whispered in a sultry, picked from the earth, sensuous plea, “Eat me.” Particularly, I heard the siren song of the one thing in the basket I didn’t recognize. It was wrinkled and purple and seemed almost dry and neglected. I had to know what was inside.

I sliced in to the mystery fruit. And, you know, you just know, you are eating brave when a chick in your office from another culture know for eating anything, I mean I saw a restaurant once that had a sign “if it swims, we eat it,” if that chick says, “Wow, you are going to eat that, what is it?” you’re on the edge. Out from my crooked slice spilled seeds suspended in an fish-egg-like cluster with enough juice and pulp oozing over them to completely remind one of fish splooge in spawning season.

Fucking, yum.

The juice and pulp had a familiar tang and a few clicks of Google later, I realized it was most likely a passionfruit. OK, then, something of which I’ve heard, o juices that have tantalized my palate.

But the same Google search gave me fun facts like, “a cyanogenic glycoside is found in the pulp of passionfruits at all stages of development.” Yeah, that makes for some good eating that cyanide. And apparently, some scientists some where are trying to work out using it as a sedative. Sweet.

Maybe I’m not really suicidal or playing through a death-wish. Nah. But, maybe I could be a little bit more discriminating on what I shove into my mouth.

Technorati Tags: California, produce, passionfruit, toxic, cyanide, food, poison

M. is out of the house. I have my computer on my lap. I have ideas in my head. But, there’s always the internet to detain me from actually creation. I wonder why I hate myself?

I went to a rare work-related social thing last night. Actually, I assume it’s rare, but in truth for all I know there are parties left and right and I’m just not invited. Probably that’s the case. I mean, I wouldn’t invite me. Although to my credit, I tend not to come empty-handed. My single, uncoupled self would bring booze. But, paradigm shift and other pretentious phrases happen in a relationship, so we brought a log.

A French log, actually. A non-Noelle buche, I suppose. No champignons anyway.

Tasty.

I went to this particular thing, because the guest of honor represented exactly what I have learned irked me about my Cambridge life. They say in NYC and LA everyone is on their way to being something else. Waiters, office workers, cab drivers with scripts and books and aspirations. I’m thinking the world might be full of such like people, not just Lala land and the apple city, but if Boston is, it sure ain’t happy about it. Most jobs in Boston, even when I was at my careerist career-focusing, I was a fucking square peg aching to be hammered into place. (Well, I wasn’t fucking aching, but someone else sure wanted to give me the beatdown.)

It always felt, back in my other life, that you had to be one thing or another, but anything short of singular thinking was fucked up and wrong-minded. Comedy clubs felt that way, too. Various levels of folks would opine on who’s legit and who’s not, the artists and the pikers, and build up their fragile ego selves with the parsing some indecipherable calculus of who is real or genuine. And, forget about the office jobs, where all outside interests were subterranean. I remember a chick working as the fucking petty-cash cashier in accounting at one job WHISPERING about her nightlife and her soca band.

One of M.’s Cantabridgian friends wants an interesting job, so’s she’ll have something to say if she’s dinner or cocktail partying.

Here, though, people spend a disproportionate amount of time separating themselves from being the sum total of their 9-5. Even the folks in charge, who clearly have invested a little bit of something to get the kind of titles on their name plaques that reek authority, have other things going on. Music, wilderness treks, gorilla-peeping, sports fantasy camps, working out, reality-show addictions, whatever, it ain’t all work. There’s a fair amount of beer and skittles.

I should step back a bit and revisit my saying there’s none of those outside interest things in Boston. I seem to remember some kind of executive killing himself in his personal plane, so he had to give a shit enough about something to get a pilot’s license.

The point is, here, with my fantasies about someday writing legitimately (or at least mailing off a proposal and getting my ass rejected, repeatedly), ain’t no thang. I’m a face in the goddamn crowd. The honoree, who’s left our little mom and pop shop, is staying home with his keyboard to honor the contract a publisher with which a publisher hooked him up and expects something from the advance. Fucking A, he’s doing it, and sadly, I’m just happy to have been in his circle for a bit to remind myself it’s possible.

In fact, I either gotta get back to performing or find a writers’ group to keep the memory of not being alone alive.

The other thing about Boston is, I should just hate this guy on principle for having a book deal. He’s many things I am not, young and bright coming first to mind. So, in the art and science of chip-on-your-shoulder begrudgery, I really should wish him failure and misery. But, he’s a good guy, and I simply don’t.

Maybe I am just a sunshine, positive spirit who needed some actual Californian sunshine to bust out. I wish him well and will buy his book, because I knew him. (Actually, that and because it’s about doctors and the medical education system, and given my purgatory at my last job, the medical complex is something too familiar.) I miss my angry self a little, though.

Now, if only I could get over my fucking block about my fucking horrible book idea and focus, I really could feel the warm rays of happiness. Not likely, but I dream.

The only downside to all of this nice, swell, outside lives side of the people I know now, is there are quite a few more people who have read ‘blogs or ‘blogged themselves. Yikes. I never will quite live down my reasonable fear of the so-called blogosphere and the impossibility of neatly compartmentalizing my life.

So, as we left the shindig and the honoree mentioned that his way to procrastinate writing was finding and reading weblogs instead. If that was a veiled reference, all’s I can say is this ain’t me.

Technorati Tags: avocation, California, Cambridge, East Coast, happiness, Intellectualism, vocation, puppy, work

Upgraded some weblog software bullshit and fixed everything I broke.

Tomorrow, I shall hate myself for not sleeping more. And, for the headache that won’t go away. And, for world peace still not having been achieved. I am responsible for that too.

By the way, fly Virgin America. It was the best thing about my business trip.

Technorati Tags: flight, work, tired, work

Fucking hell am I tired. Weary, bone-aching tired.

I always imagined myself an adventurer. Some day, when I was all growed up, I would take to the skies and the oceans and the roads and paths and wander freely discovering the big, blue marble and its occupants. Or some other fairy tale bullshit. Some kind of dream, some kind of fantasy world traveling thrills and chills.

But, I fucking hate the tired. I hate the time zone changes. Hotel beds and sleepless nights in uncomfortable unknown spaces.

Of course, it could just be that all I got to fucking see was the inside of some office space and the streets around DuPont Circle. I’m in the U.S. of A’s monument central and I didn’t even see a real skyline. No phallic obelisks or giant stones honoring war and leaders and the American dream.

In short, business travel sucks. I mean you get to go places, but then you work.

Sightseeing-wise I got to see the National Geographic Society’s HQ with an insider’s tour. I got to see a cool documentary. I got to see a state rep from the state of California remind me of why people hate politicians. And, I had a couple of cocktails on an expense account.

Whoop-de-fucking-do.