Category: Random Thoughts

The general category for posts on this blog.

Why can`t I use the elevator?

Random Thoughts

“You can’t use the elevator.”
“My friend here is blind.”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t use the elevator.”
“Why can’t I use the elevator?”
“Because someone defecated in it.”
“What?”
“Someone defecated in the elevator.”
“When?”
“Two days ago.”

This was the exchange I heard while waiting for the MARTA train to leave the Doraville station this morning. Shortly after that, inside the car was this:

“What did she say?”
“Someone defecated in the elevator.”
“No shit?”
“Just the opposite.”
“Shit.”
“Exactly.”

It put a smile on my face, the second conversation not the first. However, the initial exchange bothered me. Not because someone had appearantly defecated in the elevator, because, well, with homeless people around Atlanta things like that tend to happen (like that one time a guy actually took a crap on the bus…), but the fact that the woman from MARTA knew that it had happened two days ago and was only now being cleaned up.

I understand that everyone deserves a weekend off every now and then, and many businesses don’t operate at all. But I think feces in an elevator might be one of those “emergency, pay the extra $100 to have them come out on the weekend” kind of situations. Instead, appearantly they decided to put up some “Wet Floor” signs and police tape to block off the elevator (the only one at this particular station) for two days so it could be cleaned up sometime today without having to spend any extra cash. I’m sure any people in wheel chairs appreciated it.

Recommend Me Some Books

Random Thoughts

I am always on the look out for stuff to read, but browsing the bookstores sometimes just isn’t enough. So, I want you (yeah, all like five of you that read my blog) to recommend a book to me. There are some requirements and limitations, so if you want, read on:

A) The book needs to stand alone. Don’t recommend me anything other than part one of a series, and don’t recommend a book that starts a series but doesn’t itself contain a full story.

2) I like Sci-Fi, but not real dry science Sci-Fi, not hard Sci-Fi. I like Fantasy, but not real crazy out there Fantasy, I like it at least partly based in reality in the sense that it has humans or human like people and not everyone is slinging magic all around to solve everything. I like Horror, I prefer my vampires un-gay (Anne Rice, I hate you). I don’t like “sex” books, if the plot revolves around people having sex and contains repeated descriptions of engorged members and the like, it is just not a turn on to me. And while I like superhero books, don’t suggest them unless its really cool because, as you can see on my library, I have a few of those in my future reading stack already. I also like funny, but not really politics-funny.

D) I’d prefer books that aren’t new releases, if only because I plan to look for them at used book stores or in paperback. I don’t want to spend a fortune.

So, with that in mind, if you feel like it, reply with a book and the reason you liked it (don’t spoil it, of course).

Nightmares

Random Thoughts

Since I was very young, whatever age I was in the fourth grade, I have had nightmares. When they first started, I would, as is often depicted in movies, awake in a cold sweat, sometimes even screaming. The nightmares ranged from monsters in my closet to alien abductions to demons and ghosts. As I got older, they got worse, and more frequent. What started as a fairly rare thing became almost nightly, and then it was nightly.
One time, in high school, I tried to avoid my nightmares by not sleeping. That lasted about three days, then I succumbed. After moving out on my own at 19, I tried it again. Seven days without sleep, and I started to halucinate. My nightmares, not being able to torment my sleep, came to get me while I was awake. At ten days, I was literally out of my mind. Somewhere, stuffed in a box in my closet, I have pages of … text that I wrote. I don’t remember writing that stuff, in fact I can’t even read most of it. Its largely not in English. But what I can read of it confirms to me what I do remember, I was scared, really really scared. After ten days awake I finally passed out. I slept for two whole days and had to make many apologies for missing work.

Since then, I still have nightmares, well, what other people would call nightmares I guess. However, they have lost one quality: they don’t scare me any more. Night after night, I dream of apocalyptic worlds where zombies eat human flesh, worlds overrun by powermad dictators and their ruthless armies, jungles overrun by monsters and beasts. I dream of death and destruction, often involving people I know and love, and every morning when I wake up, I wake up calm. In ways, I have even come to find comfort in my dreams. In zombie filled cities, I team up with other refugees, friends and family, and together we fight the undead. They die, I die, and in the dream the emotions are there, its not like I’m some automoton just mowing down zombies. But the emotions of my dreams no longer translate to my sleeping body.

Why do I bring this up? Ever since I “broke” my nightmares, its hard to keep those thoughts out of my head. Its not as if I am some kind of mental defective, and I’d never actually act on or try to carry out the things I imagine. But I’ll be standing on the street and see someone walk in to traffic, at which point I’ll imagine them being hit by a car or truck, or that having stepped out into the open the monsters or zombies see him and move in for the kill. The good side of this is that I never lack for things to write about. The bad side is that I often can’t stay focused in one line of imagination long enough to craft it into a story worth selling. So I have these folders on my PC and stacks of paper in boxes and drawers full of short snippets, vignettes, that I want to use but just can’t seem to make sense of…

Anyway, enough rambling out of me.

My Wife is Afraid of Jell-O

Random Thoughts

No. Seriously. Perhaps afraid is not the right word, but it is the word she uses. Me, I love Jell-O. One of the few great things I have found in this life is Jell-O with fruit in it. When I go to the store and they are running a buy one get one special on the Del Monte fruit cups in Jell-O, I usually buy four or six 4-packs. Lime Jell-O with pineapples in it is my favorite.

My wife does not like Jell-O because of the slogan, which since she was TV deprived as a child, she did not know it was the slogan, she thought it was just something her mother said. “There’s always room for Jell-O!” To me, as a child of television, Bill Cosby saying those immortal words are ingrained in my brain and will likely be one of the phrases I repeat as the dementia of old age sets it. To her, it made Jell-O seem like some dark magical food that would fit in your stomach no matter how full you already were. So, when I eat Jell-O she usually looks at me disgusted and sometimes even edges away from me slowly as if the Jell-O is going to muscle its way out of the cup and try to force itself down her throat.

I suspect that one day I’ll find a sound clip of Cosby saying his phrase and put it on my phone as her personal ringtone so that every time she calls I will be reminded of what a loon she is. And she will hit me.

Nothing to See Here

Random Thoughts

Seriously… for some reason today my brain is so horribly scattershot that I’ve been staring at my article entry page for a while and haven’t been able to think of anything to write about. I think it may have to do with the mind numbing task I’ve been doing at work… replacing direct table queries with view based queries. Its a web app, with about 200 pages, and every page uses queries. Ugh.

So, allow me to hit you with some random thoughts…

TV Shows: Its May, which means that just about every show is pulling stunt casting and/or running season finales. I happen to watch alot of TV and my biggest concern is my favorite shows are on either UPN or the WB, neither network will exist in the fall. The CW (the combination of UPN and the WB) will be announcing their line-up on May 18th. Most other networks will be doing so around the same time as its Upfronts week. Veronica Mars and Supernatural had better make the cut and show up in the fall.

Comic Books: I’m really itchin’ for volume 5 of the Walking Dead to come out at the end fo the month…

Books: I actually finished my pirate book and started something else, but I’m too scattered to really review the pirate book. I want to read more undead/zombie books, but I don’t own any.

Houses: Who are the people who are buying these $500k+ homes around Atlanta? and how can I get their jobs? I always thought my salary was fairly decent, but unless these people are really overstretching their budgets and plan on defaulting their loans or flipping their houses for resale, I must be wrong and my pay sucks.

Computer Games: I really need to play more games. I miss it. But new games will require a new PC investment. *sigh* I guess I’ll stick with World of Warcraft, and maybe start playing Puzzle Pirates or something…

… and why is it that the guy at the newsstand laughs at me every time I ask him to sell me a winning lottery ticket?

Creative Roadblocks

Random Thoughts

I have been a writer for a large portion of my life. I am constantly jotting down ideas, paragraphs, pages, and half-chapters. Sadly, little of it ever really gets complete.

I don’t believe in writer’s block. What most people call writer’s block is usually either fear, or just a lack of a clear path from point A to point B, or worse, not wanting to use the path that has come to you naturally. Truth is though, most people who claim to be blocked are really just trying to hard to write final drafts on the first draft. The solution: write it, and if it comes out crappy, rewrite it.

I am constantly rewriting.

However, on occasion, I can churn out some quick content… heck, its what half of this website is… but there are times where I do get stuck. I come up with a good parody idea, and sometimes the words just flow right out… other times, I get halfway there and get hung on a word, a needed rhyme or turn of phrase that just doesn’t come. My usual response is just to set it aside, ignore it, work on something else, and the lightning will strike my brain, inspiration will appear. But for some reason, today, I have been sitting here with something that if a great idea, in this case the re-lyricing of a song for laughs, and when I employed my usual tactic the words just never came. So I’m sitting here with a half written song (I have the chorus set, and a couple of the lines) and I’m laughing at the idea of it, but for some reason I just can finish the execution.

Perhaps my brain just has a bridge out and what I need is a good solid detour… mmm… time to go home.

A Dirty Job

Random Thoughts

Christopher Moore does it again. I just finished reading through his latest book, A Dirty Job, and I have to say that it is excellent. The cast of characters is full of new interesting faces, as well as a handful of familiar faces from his other books.

Charles Asher is a new father, his daughter Sohpie just being born. While still in the hospital, his wife dies and Charlie is a bit unnerved by the presence of a very tall black man in a mint green suit in her room that appearantly no one else can see. It isn’t long before Charlie learns that he has become Death… or rather a Death… or at least someone who goes around collecting souls from people recently deceased or soon to die and assisting in passing those souls on to their new homes. And then there are the dark monsters in the sewers…

As with many of his books before, Chris Moore had me laughing out loud quite often (and getting stares from people on public transportation, as I have mentioned here a time or two before). I highly recommend this, or any of Christopher Moore’s books. I’m only sad that now having finished his most recent book I don’t have another one to read.

The Upside of Being Non-competative

Random Thoughts

Throughout the course of my life, I have been fairly uncompetative. That does not mean that I did not play sports or participate in things, but largely I never cared how I did. There is a huge upside to this: If I lose, I don’t care.

Ultimately, its that attitude that has gotten me through a large amount of various crappy things I have dealt with in my life. Most things I can just shrug off and move on. Even if something crushes my spirit, I never fail to get up, dust myself off, and get back on. I’ve written here before about the many way in which life has kicked me in the teeth while I was down, and yet, here I am, still breathing, still moving along, and pretty happy.

There is a major downside to all this, while the upside is that nothing really truly gets me down, there is the issue that I also never really win. Have you ever been a part of something, a sports team perhaps, that wins it all? I haven’t. Not once. Not because I couldn’t, I’ve certainly got the talent for a good deal of things, but I just have never had the drive. Yesterday, I watched the season finale of Rollergirls on A&E. It was the championship game, and when it came down to the end, an extremely close game, and the Rhinestone Cowgirls won, and when they showed the girls taking their victory lap and cheering and hugging and all that, I felt a wave of excitement and sadness. It was fun to watch people win something they tried so very hard at, and it was sad because I know I have never tried that hard.

So the question is, do I give up a lifestyle of a good level of happiness to risk deep crushing sadness in pursuit of ultimate victory? I almost think I would, but at the age of 32, what could I start now that has a chance of leading to that kind of a win?

Buying a Home

Random Thoughts

First I want to make a distinction: House versus Home. I do not want to buy a house. A house is the place you reside. I want to buy a home. A home is where you live, raise a family, good times, bad times, life, love, laughter. A home is where your heart is, a house is the physical dwelling that contains it.

I want to buy a home.

However, the current housing market disagrees with me. It has become appearant that I could afford to buy a house only if my plan is to turn around and sell it in a year or two. Every real estate agent and article for the Atlanta area talks about how the market is ripe for investment. But I do not want to invest money into a house, I want to invest into a home. I do not want to buy with the intent to sell. I want to buy with the intent to spend twenty years there, more if I can, less if life turns out that way.

Richard Bartle, a guy whose blog I read because he’s a game designer and often has interesting stuff to say or link to, wrote about the current situation in England (where he lives). I found this extremely interesting because it resembles my own experiences here in the States.

You see, I currently rent a 1,600 square foot townhome apartment for $850 a month. As I have been house hunting, I have not been able to find a 1,600 square foot house (or townhome for that matter) to own for less that $1,200 a month in mortgage payments unless I wish to live so far outside Atlanta that I will spend 5 hours a day in traffic and easily $300 a month in gas and parking (I currently ride public transportation, but the buses only go so far). All in all, its at least $400 a month cheaper for me to continue renting, and more realistically it is about $800 a month cheaper. That is just messed up. By renting and living close to the bus line, I literally cut my living expenses in half.

But its not just that I cut my expenses in half… if I was doing that and pocketting the extra money for savings, that would be awesome. But the truth is that I could not afford (and when I say I, I mean “my wife and I”) to be spending that $1,500+ per month. That $800 I save is being spent paying other bills and expenses. Sure, I could buy the house… as long as I did not want cable, electricity, or to ever do anything other than work and sit at home.

So why not buy a smaller house? I tried that, but Atlanta is infested with McMansions. You know, where they take a nice quarter acre lot barely big enough for a bungalow, tear down the bungalow and build a 3,000 square foot house that will sell for $800,000 and leaves them with a yard that takes two minutes to cut with a pair of safety scissors and where they can touch the neighbors’ McMansions without losing grip of their own house. And when I have found a small house for sale, well, I already live in a ghetto, I do not want to move next door to a crack house. Besides, if the house is too small, it just ups the expenses since you wind up having to go out more often to get away from each other. And really, 1,600 square feet for 2 people and 2 pets really is not all that big.

Essentially, what I see here is an economic state that encourages lack of assets. Its cheaper to rent than to own. Its cheaper to commit a year at a time (standard lease) than to commit to a 15 or 30 year term (standard loans). In fact, the only way to get a loan on a decent house that is lower than my rent is to do an “interest only” loan, meaning that for the first 5 years or so, I’m not actually buying my home, I’m just renting it from the bank since I’m establishing no equity.

And while I do not wish people to lose money, here’s to hoping that in 2006, the bottom falls out of the real estate market and by August I’ll be able to afford to buy a home.

Killing in the name of God

Random Thoughts

So I read this story. This frightens me because one thing I am constantly being told is that acts of terrorism and violence are acts of fundamentalist Islam, and not of the general Islamic people. But, just like the car bombings, I’m searching around and I’m not finding any Islamic people saying its wrong. At most, they say that “we” do not understand their culture.

And I guess I don’t, nor do I want to. But I suppose that comes with being brought up in the “loving and caring God” Christian household, with being taught that things like the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades were misguided. Now we have an entire section of the world that is literally saying, “if you do not believe in our God, we will kill you and we are right in doing so,” and not enough of the “right” people are condemning it.

I suppose my feelings on this are firmly planted in the idea that silence is acceptance. If something is wrong, and you look the other way, you are passively saying that you agree, that you are going to allow that to happen. So now we have a man who was Muslim and is now Christian, and his countrymen want him to die because turning away from Allah is a sin against Allah that holds the punishment of death.

I keep being told that Islam is a peaceful religion, and yet, especially in the Middle East, its followers cling tightly to the concept of the “infidel”. An infidel is, in short, someone who doesn’t worship Allah. And while over the years Christianity has taken the stance that non-believers should be converted (and yeah, at some periods they felt that conversion through torture and death was okay), but Islam has held to the idea that infidels, non-believers are less than human and not worth converting. Infidels are the enemy, and they are charged by Allah to rid the world of infidels. In Islam, while the treatment of other Islamics might be purely peaceful, killing infidels is rewarded in the afterlife. And the problem is that the fundamentalist Islamics who fully support this are very loud, and the Islamics who condemn this are fairly silent.

Its great that we want to help out developing nations, but should we be helping support a belief system that would prefer to see us dead? I don’t know, but its definately something to think about.