Archive for December, 2006
My Sources Say Gesundheit!
Posted on December 30, 2006
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LOOK INTO THE MANHOLE, WHICH WAS MY ONLY ENTERTAINMENT, AND SEEK THE WALRUS OF BLACK-AND-WHITE AND BED WITH HIM.
STROKE HIS TUSK FOR LUCK, GOOD OR BAD.
DO NOT SEEK TO CLICK UPON THE VIRTUES, AS THEY WILL BE VISITED UPON YOU IN DUE TIME.
Time seems to accelerate for me. I have four theories on why, and no interest in verifying any of them.
- Each day is proportionally smaller relative to your entire life span than the day before.
- When you are young, perhaps only several thousand days old, each day is a sizeable percentage of your entire lifespan. When you are older, say tens of thousands of days old, each day is nearly insignificant compared to the number of days that have gone before.
- As you get older, your brain ‘hardens’ so that new experiences skip across the surface like a stone on water and rarely sink in. When you were younger, each experience sank to the bottom immediately, making the total amount of experiences seem more frequent per day and therefore slowing the apparent passage of time.
- Milestones become increasingly infrequent as you age, making it more difficult to note the passage of time.
- When you are very young, you pass from grade to grade in school, grow larger, develop secondary sexual traits, and experience many ‘firsts’. These serve to accentuate the passage of time and make them noteworthy and memorable compared to later adulthood, when change comes less often. I, for one, have had the same job, domestic partner, and basic physical shape since I was in my late twenties. Consequently, all of the time that has passed since then seems equidistant from the present to me.
- The rate of change in our modern culture has itself slowed compared to previous decades.
- This one is the most fascinating to me, and I’ll talk more about this one in detail next time.
So to what do you attribute your changing perceptions of the passage of time? Is there anything you can or have done to slow it down? Do you want it to slow down, or are you happy with your impending mortality?
In Between (holi)days
Posted on December 28, 2006
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OK, enough about Odo. Next is the New Year, or maybe sooner. I’ve a bit of a bad cold right now *sniff!* and want to have a lie-down. Unfortunately for me, this is traditionally one of the busiest weeks of the year at IDSI. There’s always at least one client having major work done to their systems between Christmas and New Years, either for bizarro budgetary reasons1 or because no one is there to notice the network is in pieces2.
So its off to install some servers. If you are in the Detroit area, watch out for the yellow Ford Focus hatch-back. The driver is doped up on vitamins B and C, decongestant, loratadine (claritin), ibuprofen and chicken broth. Mmm….liquified poultry essence…
1 – You must spend your money this year to get more money next year in corporate America. And that’s why we’re losing the war.
2 – One year we had a network in Pisces, which made their servers imaginative, sensitive, compassionate and kind but, unfortunately, also made them weak-willed and easily led. Ad-ware and viruses decimated the whole lot, which we were forced to replace with a bunch of Gemini equipment. Dual-processors all around, bitch!
Amazing Urination
Posted on December 27, 2006
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 Odo taught himself to pee on the toilette. This was very cool until the stupid little twit began peeing in his water dish. But it was only after he began peeing in the chrome burner cups of our old electric stove that we decided to end his exotic eliminations. As near as I can tell, he figured that if it was round and he saw that other siamese cat’s face in it, it was a target. It took us a while to figure out about those burner cups, too; the warm skunky smell led us to incorrectly diagnose no less than three batches of baking chicken as being spoiled. |
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| Odo was always happy to get his nails clipped. Clipping Kyra’s nails, on the other hand, requires two people, with at least one of them wearing a heavy winter coat. |  |
 He loved boxes. I drew wheels and a hood on a cardboard box, bent over and pushed him around the house full-speed, yelling VRRROOOOMMM!!! It was also amusing to shove him butt-first into a 12-pack box and then dump him out. He’d spend five or ten minutes trying to figure out how to get back in there…. |
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Why I Hate Christmahanukkwanzadan
Posted on December 22, 2006
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All around me fall my friends and family, stricken by a flu we barely understand through the smudged lenses of our American science education. As far as we know, we’ve upset the gods again. Goddam dark-lord Shasta, I swear we didn’t ignore you in favor of your Bacchian brother Fanta1! Why make my throat sore? Don’t you like my singing?
Which reminds me. I hate Christmahanukkwanzadan. I an fully aware that I sound every but the Achmedezar Scrooge, but holiday pressure and personal history combine to fill my holidays with hate.
When I was a child of just 13 years, on the third day of Christmahanukkwanzadan, when we recite the third principle of blackness, light the third candle on baby Jesus’ birthday cake and eagerly wait for sundown and the blessed introduction of cranberry sauce to our upper GI tract, my father put on the Santamoccasins and padded out into the leafy snow to roast the family almonds on the old DeSoto engine block. He never came back, although we later found the almonds.
As an adult I simply find the whole thing a hassle. Every extranuclear family member thinks that they are due my nuclear family’s specific and undivided attention on their chosen day of Christmahanukkwanzadan, and I’m already annoyed by all the money I’m spending and the food I’m not eating. As I stand on the front porch of my brother-in-law’s home, stomach rumbling, the soft foam antlers drooping in front of my eyes while their not-so-soft headband digs into my temples, I curse Mohamed for telling Jesus about his damn weight loss plan.
I just want to go to sleep.
1 – Yes, I used one god as an adjective for another god. In my defense the second god is known mainly for his carbonated mead.
Christmahanukkwanzadan On the New Blogger
Posted on December 19, 2006
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Upon logging in this evening I was ambushed by Blogger. It forced me to move SafeTinspector main blog to the new blogger system, and… what can I say? The editor still erases nbsp’s between the html and wysiwyg modes, so I still seethe. Seethe at its filthy, filthy shortcomings.
Unlike teething, seething is not only my default state, but will never result in ruptured gums, or raptured gums for that matter. If my gums get sent straight to heaven, leaving the rest of me to toil away in global warfare, then I guess my hypothetical angelic commander will have to deal with my reluctance to bite our tenacious foes in holy combat.
I.. want.. more.. teeth.. f*@ker.
My brother came to call once upon a Sunday and together we lofted the microwave no less than 18 minutes; a microwave which had lived troll-like near the cat litter in the basement for a year. The cabinet above its final destination also had a shortcoming which took the form of an elongated form ill-suited to the task of fitting saucepans beneath the form of the aforementioned microwave oven. 
I can’t see myself owning a stove solely dedicated to pancake production, and THIS is why the microwave had lived, troll-like, next to the kitty litter in the basement.
But with his meticulous, methodical, engineering brain he reduced me to an indentured porter and feverishly modified my kitchen. This all happened this past Sunday, the once upon that I onced mentioned. And the kitty litter sleeps alone, tonight.
Christmahanukkwanzadan is almost here! Christmahanukkwanzadan is the amalgamated holiday which celebrates the time when our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’s birthday candles seemed preternaturally fuel-efficient, unpleasantly illuminating his divinely flabby body for hours on end. This prompted him to wallow in self-disgust until a lengthy telegram exchange with his pen-pal, Mohamed, who had found great success through fasting, drove Jesus to refrain from eating anything from sun-up to sun-down for a whole month. Afterwards, the starving and delirious Son of God poured libations and hosted a feast in which he spoke at length of the seven principals of blackness, though some witnesses to the event spoke to the fact that Jesus was not actually of African origin, but was instead Jewish.
Whatever, I got some egg-nog, and any day I can mix raw eggs with booze under the auspices of a state sanctioned holiday is a good day indeed.
