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spartan26
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Name: Jonathan
Country: United States
State: Texas
Metro: Arlington
Birthday: 9/26/1982
Gender: Male
Interests: If interests are defined as "topics I most frequently get into conversations about", then I would have to include politics, random observations, sports, movies, history, music, strange people I run across at work, reformed theology, and Christianity, though not in that order.
Expertise: Overanalyzing things. Remembering random and (mostly) insignificant facts, figures, names and events. Making great Facebook photo albums. Winning trivia games. Engaging in political discussion. Being a big brother. Giving people unsolicited music recommendations, and being spot-on more often than not. Going on tangents during conversations.
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  eibmaverick
Member Since:
3/4/2006
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| Quick update, because I've neglected Xanga this month:
-I have a girlfriend! We've been together 3 weeks as of this past Thursday. We first hung out 29 days ago and we've seen each other every day since. 
-I'm moving today! Me and a friend from church are moving into a 2 bedroom/2 bathroom apartment today. We're both pretty excited about the place, and it'll save us both a bunch of money each month on rent and bills. It's gonna be a pretty strenuous day, I can already tell. Later tonight after we've done a bunch of moving, we're having some friends over for a Halloween/moving/Nertz party (at least that's what he called it on Facebook). Moving, and then hosting a party on the same day! I'm just glad I get an extra hour of sleep tonight.
As Ray Liotta said in the, ahem, classic In The Name of the King, "Life has never been so exciting." | | |
| It's 11:21 on October 6th. I'm 10 days into my 28th year on this Earth. I'm 6 days away from watching a concert by what has been my favorite band most of this decade: U2. I'm 25 days from moving into a new apartment, a 2 bedroom 2 bath place I'll be sharing with Jeremy, one of my best friends from church. Ever since we started seriously planning on moving out of our separate apartments and into a shared one, I had visions of much lower rent payments, having friends over more often, late night Nertz games with church peeps, lots of competitive games of NCAA Football 2009 on Jeremy's Xbox 360, and endless discussions between the pair of us on females and our frustrations in trying to find our future wives. (Side note: for a couple months in early 2008, Jeremy and I were dating girls who were roommates, so we ran across each other a lot back then, and it seems almost inevitable that we would eventually end up sharing our own place.)
All these things might happen, but my ideas for what life will be like for the next year have changed somewhat because something that happened a week ago.
As I said, I'm seeing U2 in concert next week. My friend Mike and I split the cost of 4 tickets when they first went on sale months ago. The idea was that 2 would be for Mike and his wife (who was still his fiancé at the time) and 2 would be for me and whoever I could find to see the show with me. I didn't come close to getting a girlfriend in the following months, and no obvious concert buddy candidates presented themselves, but still I didn't seriously start to consider possibilities until a week or so ago. I went through my phone contacts and my Facebook friends list and made a shortlist of possibilities, and tried to decide who I thought would be most likely to be a fan of the band and who would be least likely to read too much into things and take an invitation to the show the wrong way. I mentioned it to a couple of friends, the first of whom was unavailable that night, while the second waited too long to get back to me. So last week on Wednesday night, I was on Facebook and, seeing my friend Mary on the chat list, I decided to say hello.
Quick background story. I first met Mary 2 months ago the day she moved into her apartment not far from mine. Helping her move in was her cousin Gayle, who just happens to be a friend I've known for about four years. Gayle texted me that day and asked if I wanted to see a movie with her and her boyfriend (the three of us had previously watched Star Trek and Adventureland together.) Later on, she mentioned that she was helping a cousin move in and that the cousin would be joining us at the movie (which turned out to be the great (500) Days of Summer). Mary and I had a nice conversation during the drive to the theater, mostly about our respective jobs and where she'd moved from (Arkansas). At the theater she wanted popcorn, so I bought her some popcorn as thanks for driving all of us there. The two of us ended up sharing it. I found her to be a good conversationalist and a fun girl to be around, but wasn't really sure what kind of impression I'd made. After getting back from the movie, I found her on Facebook and we became friends there, though in the 2 months between that night and last Wednesday, we'd combined to make, at most, 3 comments on each other's wall and had no other communication.
I knew she was a music teacher, though I didn't know what kind of music she was into. Still, I thought as long as she was on Facebook chat I might as well say hi and eventually ask if she liked U2. She said she wasn't that familiar with them and wasn't a big rock music fan, but we had a pretty nice conversation anyway. She asked what I was doing that weekend, and I said I had no real plans aside from watching my high school's football team on Friday night, since they were playing nearby against one of the area schools. Later on I asked what she was doing that weekend. She said she had no plans but that I was welcome to call her if I wanted to do something or hang out, and I responded that "I just might". She had played in marching bands in high school and college so she found that a good enough excuse to want to go see my high school's game Friday night. We had fun at that, and after the game I drove her back to her apartment and we talked a while and watched a couple episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, including one from the end of season 4 which I had absolutely no memory of.
During the game I had asked her if she was a fan of musicals, because I'd planned on watching a stage production of The Music Man, which was playing at a local theater. She liked the idea, so on Saturday afternoon I called and reserved two tickets for that night's performance. I picked her up a few hours later and we made it to the theater less than 10 minutes before the show began. It's a great little in-the-round theater, one I'd been to once before to see a production of Singin' in the Rain. We were both very entertained by the play, and thought it was a show well worth seeing. On our way out, I said a brief hello to my friend Amy, who played Marian Paroo in the show, and who had also played Kathy Selden in the aforementioned Singin' in the Rain production.
It was after 11 p.m. by the time we arrived back at her apartment, which was still enough time to watch an episode of Dr. Who (which she has tried getting me into, with limited success thus far). We also watched a number of random YouTube videos and talked for a long while. I knew before then that I really liked being around her and visiting with her, and she was sending some none-too-subtle signals that she was very much enjoying my company. I knew it was only a matter of time before we'd have to have that conversation and figure out what we were thinking and where this was all heading.
That conversation took place when I went and saw her Sunday night. She herself referred to "the elephant in the room". Making the situation more complex than it has read thus far in this blog is the fact that Mary has been a widow for over a year. I didn't know this until Wednesday night when she revealed it during our facebook chat. So besides enjoying hanging out with her, I always wondered what was going through her mind. She had married while still in college, and five years into their marriage, her husband caught a sudden case of pneumonia and died about two days later. That was in the summer of last year.
So I didn't know just what shape our Sunday night conversation would take. I talked about why I'd first said hi to her a few days before, and said that I was very glad I did because I'd enjoyed hanging out and getting to know her over the past three days. She talked about the rough period of mourning she'd gone through after her husband died, how she barely ate for weeks afterward and even when she got back to where she tried to live her life again, she didn't think she'd ever like a guy again, and was in fact "dead-set against" liking somebody again. But then she said she didn't feel that way anymore, at least partly because of the time we'd spent together and how she'd gotten to know me.
I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about her. I know she likes me a lot, and would be my girlfriend if I wanted her to be, and I always look forward to seeing her, but I can't shake the feeling that our friendship/budding relationship is following a pattern similar to how my two previous relationships began. Traditionally, the guy is supposed to be the pursuer in relationships, but shyness, fear of rejection, and feelings of inadequacy will sometimes plague even the best of us, and I, for one, have never been good at the pursuing part. Both relationships I've been in had their genesis in close friendships with girls who I liked spending time with. Both were girls I could talk to like few girls I'd met before, and I started spending time with both during periods of my life when I felt profoundly lonely. I had my reasons for liking both of them a lot, but I wonder if I didn't perhaps end up in relationships with them because I knew they liked me and thus I wouldn't have to worry about the hard work involved in actually pursuing someone.
Both of those relationships ended, obviously. The first after two years, the second before it had lasted two months. I can see myself with Mary, and maybe it's my empathetic side that likes the fact that I've helped her feel better about life and what the future could hold just by spending time with her over the past few days. In fact, on her Facebook status last night she stated, "I've enjoyed the last few days more than any in the last year." It's precisely that empathetic side that would hate to now disappoint her if our relationship never got any more serious than it is. I really have enjoyed every moment I've spent with her, and we do have a good number of things in common. Plus, she has a good dog, and after being deathly afraid of dogs for most of my childhood and being abivalent toward them most of my years since, I've enjoyed playing with and petting a dog for perhaps the first time in my life.
Still, despite everything, I'm trying to seriously think about this before I allow things to get any more serious. I know firsthand the dangers of getting emotionally involved with someone too fast before you've given serious and sober thought to where the relationship was headed.
On Sunday night while watching the Dallas Cowboys game with my friend Craig, I spent a while going through my cell phone and erasing old text messages that I had left there for unknown reasons. I ran across one that struck me for several reasons. It read thus: "Did you know that my whole life i convinced myself that there was no way that i could truly love a man cuz i could not find one that could truly love me. You have proven me wrong:) i truely [sic] love you more and more every day!:)"
That was from my last ex-girlfriend. The date I received it was the beginning of the week where she began to all but ignore me and seemingly lost all interest she ever had in me. We broke up exactly 2 weeks later, in fact. That somebody who takes relationships even a little bit seriously can write something so heartfelt as that and then break up with the person to whom they wrote it in the span of two weeks is a textbook example of why relationships based purely on emotion are built on an unstable foundation (but that's a topic for another blog).
I hate break-ups, and I hope to never go through another one. I also hate being lonely, but I don't want to think over things as though my choices are: A. being in a more serious relationship with Mary, or B. going back to spending nights alone in my room and feeling lonely and uninspired.
Do I like Mary because I'm seriously attracted to her and think she might make a good godly wife, or simply because I already know she likes me? I need to figure these things out. I don't want to hurt her but I also don't want to get into another relationship born of impulsive behavior and little serious thought, one that would likely be doomed from the start.
In the meantime there are some topics I still need to talk with her about, particularly about her views on certain doctrines. Maybe we'll talk about that when I see her on Thursday, or if we spend a day at the State Fair this weekend. She did agree to see the U2 concert with me, by the way, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.
It's 12:54 now; 93 minutes and 2,200 words beyond where I was when I started this thing, but I felt the need to get that out. It's a cathartic thing with me. I need sleep now. | | |
| At about 3:19 a.m. early this morning, I officially turned 27 years of age. I did nothing to celebrate it that I might not have done on any other fall Saturday. This has been typical of my birthdays in recent years. I used to like celebrating it, having a party with friends or relatives, but over time I stopped caring. I'll celebrate with others when they want to throw a party for their own birthdays, but I haven't bothered doing the same myself in a long time. Birthdays can be fun, but if I were to make a list of the 20 most memorable days of my life (if you don't think I would make such a list, you don't know me), none of my birthdays would make the list, except perhaps my 5th birthday (my grandmother's husband died of a heart attack in the early morning hours of that day). More often than not in recent years, it has just been another day.
I remember some of my earliest birthdays. I remember getting a toy gas station pump (so a kid could pretend to fill his toy cars with gas) on my 4th or 5th birthday, and a battery-powered toy car modeled after a Jeep that I could drive around my grandmother's back yard in one of those two years. On my 6th birthday (which was a month after I started Kindergarten), my parents put on a party for me at the Granbury City Park, and several friends from school and the kids from next door came to it. From what I can remember, we did the same for my 7th, 9th, and 10th birthdays. I had a party at the bowling alley for my 8th birthday, as well as my 12th birthday, to which I invited some friends I'd met early on in my 6th grade year. I don't clearly remember my 13th or 14th birthdays, but I'm fairly certain we did something at the old Pizza Inn parlor for one of those.
My 16th birthday was when my attitude toward birthdays began to shift. The day was fortuitously enough on a Saturday, which made the prospect of a party on the day easier to plan. (That was 1998, the last year before this one in which my birthday fell on a Saturday.) I hoped to have a bunch of church friends and some school friends over that night at my family's house for a party. There weren't a ton of friends at school I wanted to invite (sophomore year was by far my least favorite year of high school, for several reasons), but the few I talked to about it either couldn't come or didn't want to. Of my group of church friends, it seemed nearly all were providentially hindered from coming; one friend's dad got in a car accident either that same day or earlier in the week, other friends had relatives in town that weekend, and others were either busy or just lived too far away to make the trip (most of my church friends lived at least 40 minutes from me). In the end, I ended up going with my parents to Ft. Worth to meet the only 2 friends who were actually available and willing, and we all watched the movie Rush Hour, which had just been released that weekend. I liked the movie at the time, though I probably would have hated it if I'd watched it for the first time today. Before the movie I went to the snack bar and got myself a drink of some kind, and for years afterward dad would constantly (and annoyingly) remind me of how I'd bought myself something and not asked my 2 friends if they wanted something too. (It was my birthday! What was I supposed to do?!? I was spending my own money on something, ON MY BIRTHDAY, and they couldn't have bought something with their own money?)
Not long after that, another friend from church had a birthday party, and on that particular weekend, nobody at all was providentially hindered from attending. Being a 16 year old, I didn't think about it that way, of course. All I saw was a dozen friends who showed up to somebody else's party when they couldn't make it to mine less than a month earlier. So after that year I just never bothered planning a birthday party, believing that nobody would want to come anyway. My family still held our traditional late-September Sunday afternoon birthday party (my family has four September birthdays) at my grandmother's house pretty much every year up until the year before she died, but never again did I seriously consider having a party with friends to celebrate it.
I didn't have any particularly memorable birthdays while in college. My family drove up to meet me on my birthday during my freshman year (19th) and we had dinner at Golden Corral, though I had felt sick most of that week and was just getting over whatever it was. On my 20th birthday (sophomore year), my then-girlfriend kidnapped me, along with my sister (not sure if my brother was there or not) and another friend and we went to see The Tuxedo, yet another crappy Jackie Chan movie, though I did appreciate the thought behind their taking me to it. My actual birthday gift from the girlfriend came the following month though, which was tickets to a concert for the band Delirious (which is disbanding at the end of this year). I don't remember what I did for my 21st birthday (junior year), though I can say no alcohol was involved (it would be a few more years before I had my first taste). I spent my 22nd birthday (which was a Sunday) at my grandmother's house, before driving back to my dorm. The only phone call or card or anything I got from any friends (this was still in the pre-Facebook era) was from one friend from school who had known me barely a month.
I was unemployed for birthdays 23 and 24, though I drove to Waco on my 24th and saw a solo acoustic performance by Five Times August, who I had previously seen on the day before my 22nd birthday.
When my 25th birthday rolled around I had been at my job for six months, and on the day before it I was called by a friend from church and told that a group was getting together to go hiking the next evening at a nature preserve where we often went hiking on Sunday afternoons after church. The hike and subsequent dinner was supposed to be partly for my birthday, and also for another friend whose birthday had been two weeks earlier. On the evening of my birthday I showed up at the park and learned that she'd been unable to get many to come (there seems to be a pattern there), so only four of us ended up hiking, though three or four others met us at Black Eyed Pea for dinner later that night.
I did absolutely nothing for my 26th birthday. It was a Friday and I came home after work and did very little the rest of the afternoon. That night I went over to a movie night some friends were hosting at their apartment, but only three people besides me were there (proving that September 26th is a very bad day to organize any kind of gathering). They put on The Mask of Zorro, but two of them were asleep before the movie was half over, and the third one was barely awake. None of them knew it was my birthday until I casually mentioned it as I left after the movie was over.
The real highlight of each of my last three birthdays has been my boss buying me lunch, as she does for all staff members for their birthdays. Since my birthday fell on a Saturday, she took me to lunch on Friday. For the third straight year, we went to Hattie's, a restaurant in Oak Cliff, and I once again ordered the pecan-crusted catfish, which came with veggies and mashed potatoes on the side. The mashed potatoes are always amazing, and the catfish is pretty good, too.
Today, I had no plans for hanging out with friends or partying or anything of the sort, though I would have enjoyed doing any of those. I did plan on seeing Five Times August in Dallas tonight, but was thwarted by car issues. I went over to a nearby relative's house to watch the 2nd half of the Texas-UTEP football game this afternoon, then later was supposed to meet mom in town because she was in the area and wanted to buy me dinner. The relative's house is on a street that goes up at a slight incline, so when I parked I pushed the parking brake. When I tried to leave to go meet mom, the parking brake wouldn't release, and nothing I tried to get it to release worked. So I ended up calling AAA, and a technician arrived a little over an hour after I'd originally called. By then mom had driven to the house and beat the technician there by a full 10 minutes. He found the manual brake release got it to work, thankfully. I had searched for it unsuccessfully before, and learned that it was hidden pretty far up under the instrument panel. By that time, it was nearly 8 p.m. and neither mom nor I had eaten. We ended up going to the deli section at Whole Foods and they made me a delicious sandwich with smoked salmon, and I got a tasty piece of carrot cake. I also had a nice long conversation with mom while we were there eating. By the time we left, it was well after 9, and I'd given up on going to the Five Times August concert, partly because it of the frustration from the car issues, and because it was so late at night and the show was at a venue I hadn't been to in three years, located in an area with which I was unfamiliar. And to make things more fun, I'd had seasonal allergies flaring up pretty much all day up to that point, and I'd probably used a dozen tissues to blow my nose throughout the day.
So here I am, back at my apartment, some twenty hours into my 28th year on this earth, and I've spent the past one hour typing this thing up, because that's what I do when thoughts have been in my head the whole day and when frustrating things have just happened.
So, to summarize, I've done the following on my 27th birthday:
- Gone to my local bank and been unable to withdraw money because the account was in the negative. My main account is still kept at my hometown bank, and that's where all my work checks are directly deposited. I keep a local account solely for the purpose of cashing checks to myself from the other bank and getting money when I need it. This account rarely has more than $30 in it, but lately I'd somehow let it get below zero, so I couldn't get any money to use on the rest of the day, and all I had in cash was the $4 in my wallet.
- Went to Steak 'n Shake for lunch. I had chicken fingers, one of their advertised "4 meals under $4". As it turns out, there is a reason those meals are under $4.00; they're pretty small helpings. And the fries at Steak 'n Shake - in terms of size - are to McDonald's fries what Keira Knightley is to Camryn Manheim. I did have a shake while I was there, too, which I probably shouldn't have done given the allergies I always have this time of year and knowing that consuming dairy products doesn't help them.
- Met my friend Jeremy at my complex and he turned in his apartment application. We are hoping to move into a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment some time next month, and the last step to making that official is his application getting processed and accepted. I should know by next week if it's going to happen or not, though I don't know why it wouldn't. We get along pretty well, and by sharing an apartment and splitting rent we'll both be paying at least $100 less each month than we are paying on rent and bills than we are currently paying while each having our own apartments. So I'm looking forward to that and hopeful that it will work out.
- Went to a cousin's house to watch the Texas vs. UT-El Paso football game, resulting in the aforementioned story about the parking brake.
- Ate dinner with mom at Whole Foods.
- Wrote a 2,200+ word blog about my sometimes frustrating but mostly ambivalent history with birthdays. (So, what did you do to celebrate your birthday?)
It's only midnight, I suppose it's not so late that I can't sit down and put on one of the several DVDs I haven't yet watched, so maybe I'll do that before retiring. Birthday #27 definitely won't be going on that "most memorable days of my life" list, regardless of how I end it. | | |
| In the last two days of last week, I nearly took money from one large American corporation, then was cheated out of some money by another large American corporation. Both incidents came as a result of cashiers or tellers who either couldn't count or who were just dumbfoundingly stupid.
The first of the two instances happened Thursday morning. Sometimes at work I'll be given cash and sent to get coin change for our cash register when it runs low on quarters, nickels, or dimes. We began Thursday morning with the register bereft of quarters and running low on nickels, so I was handed $16 and sent to get $10 in quarters and $6 in nickels. There is a Bank of America located in a nearby building so that's normally where I go for these errands. I thought about not mentioning the company by name, but since it has received some $50 billion in bailout funds in the past year and (unlike JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs) has thus far failed to return any of the TARP funds it received, I felt no shame in highlighting the incompetence of one of its employees.
When I went up to the counter at the Bank of America I showed the teller the $16 in bills and asked for two rolls of quarters and three rolls of nickels. (Note: at the time I mistakenly thought that quarters came in rolls of $5, not $10, so that was why I asked for two rolls.) The teller opened her drawer and dug around in it for a minute, then pulled out a few various rolls and put on the counter three rolls of quarters and two rolls of pennies! I looked back and forth from the rolls of coins to the teller with a very puzzled expression. This exchange followed:
Teller: Is that not right? You did give me $16?
Me: Yes, but you're giving me $31 back.
I kept one $10 roll of quarters, gave her back the other two, along with the penny rolls and asked for three rolls of nickels, which she produced. When I got back and told a co-worker about that, he (half) jokingly suggested I should have just kept the rolls and not said anything. After all, it's not as if we're getting a raise this year, and somebody at Bank of America may have gotten in trouble for the missing $15 in rolled coins, but it's likely no one would have noticed it until the end of the business day. All true, but I was too honest to do any such thing; reason #31 why I would never make a good Congressman.
The next day I decided to walk to a pizza hut at a nearby food court for my lunch, partly because I wanted something different after having gone to Subway for lunch all week, and also because I knew that on Fridays the Pizza Hut had a daily special on all personal pan pizza combo meals. So when I got there I grabbed a box of pepperoni pizza and breadsticks and told the cashier I wanted the pepperoni combo. The combo is regularly priced at $5.13 plus tax, but on Fridays all combos are $4.80 plus tax. So when the cashier said my meal was $5.55 I was immediately skeptical of his math, but handed him my money anyway and waited to see the receipt. I looked at the receipt and it showed that he had rung up my combo meal with the normal non-discounted price. This exchange followed:
Me: Isn't it supposed to be $4.80? [pointing at the chart on the wall right next to him that listed all the daily specials]
Cashier: That's the daily special.
Me: Yeah, it says, "all personal pan pizza combos" are $4.80.
Cashier: You said you wanted the pepperoni combo, so I pushed the button for that.
Me: That's a combo meal, the special is supposed to be for all combo meals.
Cashier: See, when I was ringing it up I didn't even think about that.
Me: Shouldn't it be automatic? I mean, that's the special so shouldn't all combos be run up with the special price?
Cashier: I didn't even think about that.
Me: I hope this is the last job you ever have.
Okay, I didn't actually say that last line, but I was quite perturbed at the time, and not even so much because of the 25 cents this moron was robbing me of, but because of how casually and carelessly he made such an obvious error and then tried to excuse it with the laughable argument that an advertised price special only applied if a customer explicitly asked for the special price when ordering food covered by the special meal deal. I decided to drop the matter rather than demand a refund, since that complicated process probably would have made the kid's limited brain explode. At that point I began thinking that perhaps I should have kept the extra $15 the Bank of America teller tried to give me after all. That would have been more than the bank has paid back to the government for the TARP funds it received, and as a taxpayer, surely they owed it to me by extension.
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Overheard the other day outside an elevator on the 1st floor (the lowest level) of the criminal courts building:
"Is this going up?"
Overheard barely an hour later that same day outside an elevator on the 11th floor (the highest level) of the criminal courts building:
"Is this going down?"
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Last week I watched The Proposition on DVD. I'd heard good things about it and wanted to check out the visual style of director John Hillcoat, who also directed next month's The Road, the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. After seeing The Proposition (a violent western taking place in a remote area of 19th century Australia) and watching the the trailer for The Road a few times, I feel Hillcoat is more than up to the task.
I won't go into a detailed review of The Proposition other than to say Danny Huston was a great villain. He plays the psychopathic and sadistic Arthur Burns, the oldest of the three Burns brothers, who have all lead a life of violent crime to varying degrees. The main plot involves one of his younger less-violent and less-sadistic brothers, Charlie, (played by Guy Pearce) being tasked by a British law enforcement official with killing the "monster" Arthur in return for a pardon for himself and the youngest Burns brother, a weak simpleton who can barely take care of himself and who faces death by the noose should Charlie fail to kill Arthur within 9 days.
It's a violent film to be sure and not for the faint of heart, though much of the violence is more implied than actually shown, and we see the aftermath of Arthur's rampages more than we see the rampages themselves, but in a way that makes him all the more chilling. Danny Huston's Arthur Burns is a villain I would put on the same level as Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men. You would never want to cross paths with either one, but compared with Burns, Chigurh would be more likely to kill you quickly or at least give you the option of calling a coin toss to save your life, two courtesies Arthur Burns would have foregone. Really, he's the kind of villain you might have nightmares about. Very underrated piece of work on Huston's part, and an underseen movie.
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22 years ago today (September 9, 1987) I met my sister for the first time and learned that her name was Sarah Elizabeth. I was a few weeks shy of my 5th birthday and my little brother and I were very excited to have a little sister joining the family. Fast forward to 2009 and she's all grown up, married, and eight months away from finishing college.
Happy birthday to my little sis! | | |
| I took the day off from work on Friday. I'd been feeling burned-out, hadn't slept much, and had arrived late for work far too frequently of late. So last Wednesday I asked and was given the okay from my boss to take a personal day on Friday. I needed the rest, and to take care of a lingering issue with my car's breaks (been squeaking loudly for months). I took care of each, and also paid some bills, though the last one required a trip to the nearest post office to buy some stamps.
I went to the post office well after 3 in the afternoon on Friday, and when I got there three or four people were in line ahead of me and only one man was working at the counter. When he helped the the next customer in line I couldn't hear what the man was there for, but I did hear the postal worker ask for two forms of ID. He next left the desk and went outside to the post office boxes for reasons I never knew but which were ostensibly related to whatever the customer needed. He didn't acknowledge the others in the line, or give the next man in line the courtesy of an "I'll be right with you, sir", or a "This will take me just a few minutes". He just left the desk, and was seen going out to the P.O. boxes and back inside to the back of the building two or three times. And as there was nobody else working at the desk who could help us, this made the situation frustrating.
As this was going on, more people began to enter the office and make the line behind me longer. The minutes passed and before I knew it, five people were waiting in line behind me, and there were still two ahead of me. The former had arrived after the postal worker temporarily abandoned the desk, so my guess is they spent the next few minutes wondering if anyone was working at that branch that day. We saw fleeting signs of the postal worker as he walked to the back, but no sign that he was about to return to his post. We did hear a few voices in the back where I assume the filing and sorting is done; one male voice from the back kept yelling across the room, "Hey, where my mail at?"
If ever there was an opportune moment for someone to have remarked, "I can't wait until the government is in charge of health care!" that would have been it. But I, being reserved around strangers, refrained from such an outburst.
Eventually, the postal worker returned to the desk and within 3 minutes I had my stamps.
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I was delivering some of the brand new 2010 Texas Criminal Codes and Rules books today when I heard U2's "One" playing on the radio in the office of one of the court coordinators. I went on to the next court and, seeing the judge's office door closed, turned and left it on the desk of that court's coordinator. I had turned and taken about 3 steps toward the door when I heard what was playing on her radio. I halted and did a quick double-take, which probably made the woman wonder what the heck I was doing. "Is that U2? I think you're on the same station as the coordinator in the next court!"
"KVIL? Yep, that's the one." It made her laugh.
It also reminded me that I'm seeing U2 in concert a mere six weeks from today!!
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On Saturday I watched Quentin Tarantino's new film Inglorious Basterds. It was very interesting to watch, but I'm not sure what I think of it. It's very slowly paced and extremely dialogue-heavy, even compared with some of his past work. It's easily Tarantino's talkiest movie to date; it almost makes Reservoir Dogs seem like Transformers by comparison.
There were several very well-acted and tense scenes, though I wasn't particularly high on the ending, and all of the scenes with Brad Pitt and his title squad of World War II soldiers felt as if they'd been cut and pasted from a completely different movie. I might watch it again though when it comes to DVD (or BluRay if I somehow have that by then).
Later that night I watched my DVD of Thank You For Smoking, which I'd had for several months but had never seen. It was funny and quite entertaining. I've still got several DVDs I haven't watched. I'm thinking the next one I put on will be The Proposition, mainly because its director (John Hillcoat) also helmed the cinematic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Road, which is scheduled to hit theaters October 16.
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Also on Saturday, I was putting my left shoe on (to be followed by my right) early that afternoon when I felt something funny under the heel. I took the shoe off to see if anything was there, then suddenly a small cricket jumped out. I haven't seen it since, and I hope not to. It, or its progeny.
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Awkward interrupted domestic dispute of the week
Yesterday I pulled drove in to my apartment complex and headed toward my building. Next to the building I could seen an SUV sitting behind a row of parked cars. From a distance I couldn't tell if it was in the process of parking, backing out, or if the vehicle had perhaps died. All I knew was that it was blocking me from accessing a prime parking spot, and I had to settle for parking further down the building from my side of it. As I parked, I saw a woman walking away from the SUV and towards the building to the south of mine. When I got out of my car, I heard a man who was still sitting in the driver's seat of the SUV call out to the woman. As I started to walk past the guy and his stationary car and head upstairs to my apartment, I had this exchange with him:
Me; Did it die on you?
Guy: Nope. She took my f****** keys.
Me: Oh. | | |
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