DAMMIT, REFRIGERATOR

Our fridge has decided it's tired of keeping things cold and would instead like to see that they remain only diffidently chilled with whatever cold air remains within its confines. Generating new cold air is so 2004. The maintenance people are going to bludgeon its uncooperative metal guts into submission sometime today, hopefully.

This weekend was great fun. Pictures of some sort will probably emerge soon. The greatest thing was the maneuver we pulled on Saturday night: With the rain scuttling our plans for a bonfire, we weighed our options and decided to rent a motel room for the night instead of bothering my housemates. This was both a classy and totally rockstar thing to do, in my opinion. This allowed at least some of us to mentally christen the event as the after-party for a show by the fictional (and totally fucking awesome) band The C.S. Lewis Reference. There was a-hootin', and a-hollerin', and a-drinkin'. Oh man.

I guess you had to be there.

PROMISED TUPPERWARE POST

I need to figure out a way to organize the lids in the cabinet that holds all the Tupperware and assorted food-storage items. I can almost never find the proper lid to a given container without having to dig around for it. This is just inconvenient enough that I might actually build something for it -- some sort of holder made of discarded cereal boxes, probably, and duct tape, mounted to the inside of the door. Or both doors. It's a big cabinet.

In other news, some people from LA (and one from New York State, oddly enough) are coming up this weekend to visit, and fun times are pretty much guaranteed. If you don't hear from me over the weekend, that's why.

STRANGE IMPULSE BUY

At the Albertson's about an hour ago,* I remembered we needed plastic wrap. I got some of that, but I also bought a thing of that Glad Press-n-Seal Wrap I keep seeing the commercials for. I'll let you guys know if it actually works like they say it does. I have some hot dogs, see, and I know I'm not going to get around to eating them all. Some of them are going to have to go into the freezer.

TOMORROW: JON TALKS ABOUT TUPPERWARE MAYBE

* I like to run errands during the day while I'm at the office because it cuts down on crowding, and also so I don't have to make a stop at the store when I'm already on my way home.

I KNEW IT ALL ALONG

My friend Chris is a goddamn genius. I always knew I was doing it the right way, but only now do I have the incorruptible light of total, unassailable truth behind me 100%.

Today is a great day.

WEEKEND UPDATE

The you-know-what saw an update.

It's been raining more or less nonstop, with brief and puzzling respites.

Constantine was better than expected.

I have discovered that putting crumbled-up Fritos in the chili I made is the new hotness. The amount of leftovers I have today don't quite make an entire meal, so I'm going to be making sandwiches.

I think my housemate Jim's dog Whistler thinks of me as Surrogate-Jim when Jim leaves on trips he can't take Whistler on.

The deal with Whistler is that Whistler is the dude. I don't mean that in a Big Lebowski sense. He just is.

SOREST MAN ALIVE

As it turns out, I have a somewhat higher-than-normal aptitude for this "snowboarding" activity. This knowledge comes with the price of having used several muscles or muscle groups of which I was previously unaware, and several existing muscles in ways they were never intended to function. Coupled with the blinding headache that accompanied my return home last night, I consider it a minor miracle that I'm even ambulatory this morning. I like how on the day immediately following a terrible headache, life suddenly seems so damn much sweeter.

I may go back to bed (I have the day off), but first I had to let the internet know I'm alive. Isn't that something!

I AM X-TREME

Tomorrow (Thursday) I will be gone all day on a company off-site learning how to snowboard. Consequently, there will be a Jon-shaped hole in the internet. There you go.

::"The more you know" comet-star twinkles overhead::

THAT FLEETING SELF-DESTRUCTIVE IMPULSE

You know what I'm talking about? Where you're standing on a cliff or at the edge of a tall building, say, and just for a second you get that fleeting thought of "What would it be like to hurl myself off?" Or when you've just finished building something that took a lot of work, and you imagine for a bare instant just smashing the hell out of it for no reason?

The water has almost evaporated out of the bowl I left it in, two and a half weeks of arduous patience and observation later, and I just now got the impulse to pour a bunch more water in there. What in the jim-jam is that all about.

ON LYRICAL ACCURACY

For the longest time, I thought I was hearing this during the Interpol song "Leif Erikson" --

She says Bree thinks her love's a pony
My love's a criminal

Which made minimal sense, I'll admit, but it turns out the actual lyrics are:

She says brief things, her love's a pony
My love subliminal

It's gratifying to know that I was at least right about the pony bit, which in my opinion is the weirdest part of those lyrics.

Relatedly, I must report that the actual lyrics to "Take You on a Cruise" are far less interesting than what I thought they were. Snippets I thought I heard included such as

I see that you've come to resist me
In pickling time
...
I am a scavenger between the ships of union
Lately I can't tell for sure, did the machines tell anyone?

The actual lyrics, being somewhat less exciting, will not be reproduced here. You can go look them up yourself somewhere, but I warn you: Disappointment awaits.

EVAPORATION UPDATE: The water is still there, but I am confident that it will be gone by tomorrow. It's been raining a lot, though, which now leads me to wonder whether the air around here will be getting tired of absorbing water or something.

EVAPORATION NEWSWEEKLY

In an update to Friday's heart-stopping item about the bowl of water in my cube, I must report to you all that there's still a little water in it. My new estimate is that it will be gone by Wednesday.

Happy Valentine's Day to those of you who have someone to celebrate it with, I guess, although if you do, you probably don't need me to wish you that in the first place.

edit: This is still a week for staring at Bizzle. Go on, click the link. Click it. BIZZLE.

Also, I think I'm going to cut my hair tonight. Excitement abounding!

ALLERGIES AHOY

I know it's only mid-February, but I am going to go ahead and declare that spring has arrived here in the fair city of San Francisco. The following two things give it away:

- The thin scrim of pollen that's on my car every morning when I go to work
- The concomitant spike in nose-running, eye-itching, and most maddeningly of all, roof-of-mouth-itching that I'm experiencing

So as of today I am jumping back on the loratidine train with Alavert.* I just thought everyone should know.

* Which I still switch back and forth on mentally pronouncing as "alavurt" or "alavair" depending on how much contact I've had with French people.

DOPPEL ARMY

A couple nights ago, I had that thing happen to me yet again where someone mistook me for someone they knew. This time it was an Asian girl about my age who swore she'd met me before, but after a few minutes of trying to figure out where that had happened, we chalked it up to a case of mistaken identity. This is maybe the fifth time this sort of thing has occurred. How many of me are there wandering around San Francisco? I place my estimate at a minimum of three. My guess is that they're either clones, alternate Jons from other dimensions, android doubles, or one of each type.

I will find you, other Jons.

This is a threat.

This will happen.

In entirely unrelated news, there is a bowl of water in my cube that I put there for Whistler (see user photo) when he came to work with me exactly two weeks ago. There's still water in it. This is an experiment, you see, in evaporation. My guess is that when I come in on Monday, it'll be empty -- finally -- and my scientific curiosity will be laid to rest once and for all.

TOILET RACE

Do you know what it is when you're standing there pissing into an automatic-flush toilet, and then the toilet flushes for no apparent reason while you're still pissing, and you're suddenly in a race to see if you can finish urinating before the flush cycle is over?

That is adventure.

TIME FOR HONESTY

Internet people, I have to tell you something. Which is that I literally cannot seem to stop looking at this picture I took of my friend's bunny, Bizzle. Bizzle.

Even if I'm not looking at it directly, I have to leave it open in a browser tab so I can return to it whenever I want.

This has to be because of a reason.

My new theory is that it's not that Bizzle is exceptionally cute or something, but rather that Bizzle's shape itself somehow encodes a secret about the universe. That the bunny's outline in 3D space is a signifier for some deep answer about the way we go about our daily lives.

There may be additional updates as soon as I figure out what is going on. That is, unless I immediately ascend to some higher plane of being in the instant the true answer becomes apparent to me.

QUAY CURRRRRRRRRRR

I just took a couple of ibuprofen for a headache that I think resulted from trying to give Blueberry Boat another chance this morning on the way to work. I am blaming my headache on the Fiery Furnaces.

The first time I popped it in, I deemed this album basically unlistenable and stopped before it was done. This time, I got as far as the middle part of "Chief Inspector Blancheflower"* before I turned it off, but it was too late -- it had laid an egg of irritation in my head that just started to open about half an hour ago. Hence the stomping on it with pills.

I am sorry, music people. This album was just not a thing that I was meant to like. I tried.

* It might've only been 1/3 of the way through, or even 1/4. How long is that song anyway? Like ten thousand hours?

COINCIDENTAL BUT UNRELATED

I am posting on the internet to inform you all of the new term for being in a relationship with someone. And that new term is forming a genital alliance.

I did not make this up, but I felt the inescapable need to pass it on. My work is now complete.

A THING THAT HAPPENED

Rather than talk about the strangely bad luck I seem to have had in the realm of romance (a thing that usually comes across as though I should be wearing a frayed, pilling emo sweater while writing a bad song on a dusty, bestickered acoustic guitar), I elect instead to show you, in the form of the brief story of One-Date Kate,* which has perplexed 100% of its female audience thus far.

- She started our first conversation. We met at a bar where I was about to play a gig with former housemate Peter.
- She stayed for said gig, and talked to me after the show.
- While I was trying to figure out some smooth way of figuring out whether she was single & interested, she steered the conversation deftly into giving me her number.
- We went out for dinner a few nights later. I took her to a Vietnamese place I like in the inner Sunset.
- Also coffee. Or actually hot chocolate. Whatever. Beverage!
- We had a pretty good time!
- There was -- I'm not going to lie to you -- some kissing involved at the end of the night.
- AND YET
- Two strategically-placed phone calls, which yielded only voicemail, resulted in no calling me back. I am pretty sure I did not leave freakazoid messages in said voicemail. Still: Nothing.

This is what passes for luck in my love life at the moment. I'm not going to be caught out on the street kneeling in the rain with my fists raised to the sky clutching bouquets of wilted roses and sobbing "WHY GOD WHY" anytime soon, but I need to point out to the universe that this was still uncalled-for.

Some character in a book I read once made a wish for a third gender that would do nothing but referee. The amount of sense this makes cannot be calculated by conventional means.

* Technically, I suppose it should be One-Datey Katie, since Katie was what she preferred to be called, but who's keeping track? Props to Alex, btw, for the nickname.

SCREW BLOGGER'S COMMENTING

I've gone with Haloscan for the comments, and this means a new and better future for us all. Expect this to be the last meta-post you'll see; now it's time to get down to biz-ness.

Edit: What this means is that the comments on the previous pages were taken to a nice farm out in the country somewhere, where they'd have more space to run around. But I encourage previous commenters (there was somebody nice named Jen, for instance) to continue their habit in this new and more virile form!

ONCE AGAIN IT'S ON

As some of you may be aware, every Friday is bagel day here at the office. This is all well and good, but a slight problem takes shape in the form of an overzealous cleaning staff. By noon, all the leftover bagels and cream cheese are gone. What happens if I want a snack at 3 or 4:00?

My solution is to take a bagel and save it here at my desk. For the cream cheese, I take an unused container of the plain (we seem to have a lot of it) and stick it in the fridge. The cleaning dudes don't look in the fridge, apparently.

What this means is that I am unstoppable. I cannot be stopped.

Also, there was a Dogblog update last night; I don't know if you already knew that.

Can you guys do me a favor and try putting in some comments? I want to see if the commenting is broken or something.

TEST META-POST

HELLO WORLD

Have a picture.



My guess is some more content will eventually appear in the "links" category down there. Other'n that, I'm not too interested in editing the template. It's my belief -- probably my lazy belief -- that people come here for the content, not the scintillating design. Am I wrong?

Am I wrong, dude?