rhymes with milk

Not that it was a living hell. It wasn’t. But it sure as hell wasn’t heaven, either.
—Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Ally and I are going to a Bar Mitzvah in Miami later in the year, and when I found out about it I started panicking about all of the 5 year old cousins I’d be surrounded by.  I’m not so good with the lil’ ones, you see.  I don’t know how to talk to them, or what even to talk to them about.  They’re quite dumb creatures if you think about it.  They have few reasoning skills, and their abilities to carry on complex conversations are limited (to put it lightly).  They’re still in that phase of their life when they’re not psychologically capable of handling emotions in an appropriate manner, so they cry a lot.   Hell, when I introduce myself and hold my hand out expecting theirs in return, I’m usually met either with silence and overwhelming shyness, or a crusty booger-covered set of toothpick fingers.

So how am I going to deal with a long weekend—mere days before I begin taking upper division university courses about complex algorithms and low-level machine representations of data, no less—talking with these developmentally primitive miniature humanoids?  I’ve decided to come up with a few talking points to initiate conversations that would both be engaging for me, and dumb enough for them to understand and relate to.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. “I can solve a Rubik’s cube in about 1 minute.  What colorful toys are you that good at?”
2. “I see you have hot dogs in that mac & cheese you’re eating.” [side note: I totally expect to be referencing the food on their bibs] ” I once ate an entire package of 8 hot dogs—including buns!—in under 5 minutes.  Boom goes the dynamite!”
3. “Come on, think about it logically.  What sort of physical explanation can you come up with for how those reindeer stay in the air?  It’s just not feasible.”
4. “If you were an animal on Arthur, what kind of animal would you be?  I call lion.  I’d never go hungry with all of those aardvarks around, that’s for sure!”
5. “Don’t hang out with little Suzie too much.  Before you know it middle school will roll around, and you’ll be stuck in the ‘friend zone’ when it actually counts.”
6. “Back in my day, garbage men used to hang off the back of the truck!  It’s never too late for you to change your aspirations, kid.  If you really put your mind to it, you too could hang off the back of a garbage truck someday.”
7. “So your twitter background is a photo of elmo, huh?”

Hopefully Ally has seven or fewer 5 year old cousins.  I’d be completely stumped with what to talk to number eight about.

Let me know if you can come up with any.

…of Ally’s new blog design. Dustin and I worked all night on it.

Fresh it up!

The LOST premier last night blew me away. Maybe I just do a poor job of holding in my emotions, but I couldn’t help but smile through the whole thing.  I do have to admit, though, that it was partially due to the company.

Mark, Gordon, Ally and I got together for (almost?) every LOST last season and made something of a tradition out of it.  Each week a different person would have to cook the whole group dinner.  I somehow got branded as the motherly one, cooking (baking mostly) things like potpie and lasagna, you know, the kind with ricotta and spinach.

We all got together last night (plus Annabelle) for the first time in 8 months to keep our traditional LOST nights alive through the final season.  With Mark living in Denver and Gordon living in…unemployment? things are a bit different this year, so coordinating it happened all at the last minute. To make it easy on everybody else while we get back into the rhythm, I volunteered to cook for the premier.

I then realized only 20 hours before dinner was supposed to be served that I was going to spend 7 of those hours sleeping, 10 of them at work and school, 1 of them in transit, and the other 2 getting ready for bed/getting out of bed.  Nowhere in there would I have time to find a recipe, go shopping, or cook. So Ally stepped up and took the responsibility off of my shoulders even though she had NO time to herself either since she had class AND and had to get ready to leave the state the next morning…er, this morning.

But she took it like the champ she is and threw together a simple but lovely salad, and cooked (baked! Haha, maybe I won’t be the matron this time around!) a few pizzas, one with veggies and the other with pepperoni.

Oh, I forgot to mention the other big difference between this season and last.  Last year, 3 out of the 4 of us were vegetarian with me being the token omnivore (one that coincidentally hardly ever ate meat, not out of principle or taste, but out of lack-of-opportunity).  All of our dinners were vegetarian, and each week’s appointed chef came up with a damn good meal.  It’s going to be strange this season now that only one of our clan has stuck with vegetarianism.  It’s hard to say whether Ally’s dual pizzas set a precedent of making meals that cater to all parties, or if we’re going to end up cooking strictly vegetarian meals out of respect for Mark (and laziness to not have to prepare two versions).  I guess we’ll find out…

Until tonight, I had never sat at a bar by myself and drank. I see movies all the time that glorify it, but also enough drunks at the Cafe doing it to cancel out the cool.

I sit here alone mobile blogging from the bar at City O’ City on 13th and Sherman in Denver. I have a candle, a cup of water, and a glass of Wild Turkey in front of me, in order from left to right.

A super cute late-20-something hipster couple sits to my right reading their own books that they just bought from a used book store, neither of them more than ten pages in, looking up only every few minutes to have small but meaningful conversations with one another.

I have little to do here other than sip and be observant. But I’m happy doing just that.

I watch the bartenders do their work and shoot the shit with the usuals. They occasionally notice me watching, and we just smile at eachother. One bartender, the one that gave me the heavy pour, a girl, tells me that my smile is inviting, and says that every time she sees it she feels compelled to ask if I’m ready for another round or some food. I take it as I look lonely and need someone to be nice to me, but she says it’s a good thing. I believe her because her smile is reassuring.

A drunken homeless man fell asleep in the women’s bathroom at my office today.  A little girl in the middle of her piano lesson down the hall found him.  Turns out he wasn’t in too deep of a sleep though, because as soon as the sweet-old-lady-teacher went to investigate, he popped up from his place of slumber and bolted.  Those homeless guys can be fast when they want to be.  They’re kinda like crocodiles in that way, I guess.

I have no idea if what I just said comparing hobos to crocs is true.  Or offensive.  I didn’t intend on either.

…

Sooooo today was Boulder’s official 2010 Winter Bike to Work Day.  Seeing as how I bike to work most days, today was just like any other except that I got a free bagel at Moe’s.  Thanks, Moe.

Btw, check out Moe’s favicon.  That’s how you know the site was built using Joomla, just like freedtvroom.com (guess who has two thumbs and did all of the content entry aaaannnnnddddd “designed” the facebook link on that bad boy. This guy!).

…

A very awkward girl talked to me this evening on my ride home from work.  Because of the way the streetlights are timed, I always end up getting stuck at the NE corner of Arapaho and 28th.  Normally I wait on the small pedestrian island there alone, but tonight there was a girl standing there about 8 feet to my right.  I was not within her direct line of sight, nor she in mine, but for some reason I could feel her eyes burning a hole in the side of my head.  I refused to look back, but it was becoming unbearably awkward.  After the longest ten seconds of my life, I hear an oddly matter-of-fact “Hi,” almost like she had been expecting me to say it first or something.  I could practically hear how red and frizzy her bangs were just by the way she said “hi.”

“Hello,” I said back.  “How’re you?”

“I’m okay.” Super awkward pause where she just looks at me with half of a smirk playing across her mouth.  She then turned around, awkwardly looked at the moon, then mumbled something about it being a nice night.

“Yeah, it’s not too chilly for a bike ride, so that’s a good thing,” I said, trying to stave away the awkwardness.

“Haha!  Chilly is nothing for winter.  Chilly is nothing compared to frost!”

“Um…”

“I’m from Crested Butte.”

And thank god the light changed just then.  I quickly said “Have a great night!” and rode off, never to see her again, yet still surrounded by a cloud of awkward.

Want to know what I did today?  I took pictures of a $900 bicycle stem.  You see this guy?  Imagine an $885 better version.

I don’t know how many people know this, but I work for an online retailer of high performance specialty bicycle components.  One of the owners of the company I actually work for started it as a side project about a year ago, and though it’s not a huge operation, it’s a decent second source of income for him and it can sometimes take up a significant amount of our work time.  Though I do little more than product input into our e-commerce website and ship orders, I’ve learned a hell of a lot about bikes.  In fact, I’ve somehow become something of a snob about it.  I guess that comes with the territory of selling $150 skewers (the long pegs you put through your wheels to clamp them onto the bike).  If I see a bike and it doesn’t have a carbon fiber stem top cap that weighs 5g or less, I scoff.

Then I get onto my road bike, with stock components all around, and can’t believe how good it feels to ride it.  It glides like it’s on butter.  When I’m riding it, instead of wishing I had 18-spoke carbon tubular rims on it, I scoff at the people that would spend the two grand on a set of those.  My cheep-by-comparison aluminum clincher rims with their unaerodynamically shallow depth ride better than I could ever ask for.

Granted, if I ever actually rode one of those baller $10,000 all-carbon bikes, I’m sure I’d be singing a different song.  Maybe I’ll just avoid riding one of those for my entire life so that I’ll always appreciate what I have.

Anyway, despite my ravings about it’s awesomeness, my road bike sucks in weather.  I’d never take it out in any kind of precipitation, and it’s tires are slippery (as if they were riding on butter?) so any moisture/ice on the ground is liable to kill me while I’m cornering.  Anytime it snows, I have to stay off of it for a minimum of a week until some of the ice has melted, and the paths and sidewalks aren’t so wet.  Typically during that time I ride my 10-year-old mountain bike which is durable enough to take all the beating and weather I can put it through, and crappy enough that I don’t care if it literally explodes while I’m riding it (idk why it’d do that…).

Unfortunately, though, it’s been going through a tough time these last few months.  The shifters were starting to crack, which is unsurprising since they’re entirely plastic and they often take heavy abuse.  The cable tension started making them slip out of place, allowing the derailer to shift the chain from cog-to-cog, making smooth riding very difficult.  I’d have sore hands after any length ride because I’d have to hold the shifters so tightly to keep them from slipping out of position.

So the natural solution: tear the shifters off the bike.  This caused a chain reaction that resulted in me deciding that the bike should be a single speed.  Without shifters, the derailer isn’t going anywhere, so the chain is always going to stay on the same ring (hence single speed).  This makes the entire cassette (except for the single ring the chain ends up on) just dead-weight (and since I’ve become a weight weenie by association, I won’t allow a single unnecessary gram to be on my bike).  Might as well lop the derailer off while we’re at it.  Then in the front, the middle chain ring has a bent tooth that causes the chain to slip off, so we’ll get rid of that one.  The small chain ring on a mountain bike is so damn small it’s useless unless you’re climbing 45° inclines, so that’s gone.  Front derailer: gone.  All associated cables: gone.

Unfortunately, half way through working towards this, I realized that bikes were made with very specialized tools, and therefore need very specialized tools to take them back apart.  All the tools that I need would end up costing me more than all of the materials I had to buy to make the conversion.  Eff that noise, bra.  So now my bike is laying in pieces (but not the pieces I want it to be in) and all of the parts I took off of it are too destroyed to put back on.  So now it’s single speed or bust.

Since I work with some actual bike enthusiasts (not just posers like me), naturally they have all of the necessary tools and should bring them in for me in the next few days.

Um… that’s all.

There’s no moral to this story.  Any of it.

I just woke up from another dream about living in Australia. I occassionally have these dreams, but they’re never the same. In fact, few of them are even of the Australia I’m familiar with. There’s always a certain feeling I get during these dreams that immediately tell me I’m in Australia again, though.

Despite their differences in content and “location” each time, they always make me feel so free. Drinking scotch with the owner of a local pub, watching the streets flood with people after a Waratahs game, jogging to downtown, emailing my boss to let her know that I’m not sure when I’m coming back.

Then I wake up and realize I have to be at the office in less than two hours. It was only a dream.

I was about to write a post that I’ve been thinking about for a while now. Prompted by Avatar (then subsequently watching an Esurance commercial) I was going to come up with a list of cartoon females that are inexplicably attractive, then make some sort of commentary about how they’re actually very disproportionate and otherwise strange looking.

As I was doing research I unearthed a whole community of perverts that fantasize in cartoon. Deviant Art alone is full of half-nude insanely sexualized versions of some of these characters. There are no less than a dozen forums I stumbled upon that collectively had hundreds of posts just about that one time Aaron Diaz may or may not have drawn that one nude image of Kimiko Ross or if that was just fan art.

I should have seen all of this coming. How could I have been so naive as to assume the internet could be mature about a subject like this?  As I have come to figure out, the internet is anything but mature (don’t worry, it’s SFW).

Anyway, this all really turned me off from doing the post I originally set out to do, mostly because it could possibly but not-too-wrongfully associate me with those sad, sad men in a way I would not be okay with.  No thank you.

BTW, I was totally unsure which of the blog’s three main categories to put this post into. When I first came up with that list of categories, I assumed those three would pretty sufficiently define any thought I might ever want to put on here. I guess I never assumed I was going to be blogging about sad internet cartoon porn. Again with the naivety thing…