Pancake City

The post train got derailed for an extra week when I went to California. I can force myself to think of ideas, and it’s what I have to do after I don’t write for a week or two, but the act of writing sans motivation is one of those wonderful, self-empowering activities I hate doing because it makes me stop wallowing in pity and feeling down.

The thing about wallowing in pity that most people don’t understand is that the wallowing takes place in marshmallow fields on warm, sunny days where the hills are stuffed with goose feathers and you can pluck a cloud from the sky anytime you want and use it as a pillow for your naps, which are frequent and lovely.

You know what gets me out of bed some days? Cocoa Krispies. Knowing there is a box of chocolate-coated rice puffs masquerating as cereal waiting for me in a pantry in front of unopened boxes of bran and granola that I buy when I feel guilty is my version of coffee. Cocoa Krispies gives me the energy I need to march out of my front door. I then collapse on my front step in a sugar-induced insulin coma, but until then, there are a good 10 minutes where I am ready to take on all of the vicissitudes and surprises life has to offer.

I’ll be posting more this week. That’s right, in the coming days I will somehow manage to pole vault over the previous bar of zero posts per week. I will aim for the stars. Perhaps in failure, I may only reach the moon, but my spirit, our spirits, will stretch with our aim and expand merely by our willingness to grasp for a life that matches the America in our hearts, if not our own lives.

That’s right, this post is running for President! My fellow Americans, as the first blog post to reach sentience, I assure you, “I’m (been) Back!” is listening to your hopes, your concerns, your needs. I am change you can believe in,  and I am boarding the Straight Talk Express, in the form of a 1 GB flash drive, so I can head directly to the White House and be ready on Day One! Or Day Two if we have to hitch hike–gas is expensive. Definitely somewhere between Days One and Seven.

There will be mistakes. There will be typos. What is sent out on the RSS feed may be different from this post a week later. No sentient blog post is free of error. And yes, my opponents will distort my words, reprinting them in hard-to-read fonts or all caps to make me look like an idiot. But together, I assure you, asdfkjhksdj

Woah. Jason here. I was in the bathroom for a few minutes. I think my roommate came it and wrote a few paragraphs. Whatever. Anyway, I’ll be posting more this week. See ya.

The Straight Talk Change Mobile o8! Vote for me in November!

 Tip #1: Don’t put your new headphones in your laundry basket.

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I’m drinking a cup of tea while eating a big bowl of Doritos. It’s creating a poop/anti-poop containment system in my bowels. The last leg of my digestive tract is having an existential crisis of a scatological variety. Previous meals try to tip the scales. The ham omlette I had earlier dances around in its new, reduced form. “To poop or not to poop” says Hamlet. “That is the question.” This is a story with no interesting end.

I voted a little after 11:00 yesterday in D.C. for Barack Obama. D.C. has a closed primary system so I had to switch from independent to Democrat last month to vote. Not ideal, but not a big deal either. I had a Cheesy Sitcom Moment at the voting center. I handed a poll worker my registration card, and she asks whether I want a paper ballot or electronic ballot. Electronic, of course. I’m a techie. I get my key card, turn around and there’s one electronic voting machine, 10 people in line for it, and 15 paper ballot voting machines with no one using them. WAAA WHAAA. Or slide whistle. Your choice.

I got at the end of the stupid train. We slowly waddled towards the front. When it was my turn, the “Next” button wasn’t responding to my touch. I mentioned it to the poll worker. “Oh, it does that a lot. Just keep hitting it until something happens.” I whacked the screen like a monkey trying to get chocolate coins to fall out of the machine. Meanwhile,  people smart enough to use paper ballots, which seemed like everyone who came in after me, were walking in and out. Also, the paper ballots were being electronically scanned on the spot. So essentially it was electronic voting without a line.

It is amazing how much the democratic race changed in just over a week. There are election markets like Intrade that has no predictive power, but are good reflections of current sentiment and conventional wisdom. Barack Obama’s share price was at 45 on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5th. He and Hillary Clinton were virtually tied in votes and delegates won on that day. Now, on Feb. 13th,  after a string of expected but still impressive victories, it is at 74. There are a lot of explanations as to why this happened so quickly, but I think a major one is what I suggested last week.

I expect some heavy mudslinging to start in a day or two. Clinton is at a do or die point right now, and will be attacking him ferociously in hopes of winning both OH and TX (she needs to win both at this point, or at least have a blowout win in one of these two states). McCain will probably start attacking the new front-runner Obama in earnest (as he did in his victory speech last night). The media, for a variety of reasons (including perhaps a subconscious desire to not want the Cinton/Obama race to end) will be harsher on him. The next Democratic debate, debate #23 (no, I’m not kidding, although a few of the debates Wikipedia counts aren’t real debates) will be dubbed as The Most Super Duper Important Debate So Far and will likely end up being the same as debates 1-22: kind of important. It will make for a few interesting weeks.

* A reporter told Mike Huckabee that it was almost impossible for him to get enough delegates to win and asked why is he still running. Huckabee responded, “I didn’t major in math, I majored in miracles.” I think what he meant was, “I’m hoping McCain has a heart attack.”

There is a hereditary rule for predicting baldness. I forget the specifics. If your Uncle on your Mom’s side is bald, you’ll be bald? Or is it your mother’s father, or your father’s mother? It doesn’t matter. In my family, they’re all bald.

My hairline has rapidly receded for several years now. I’m reminded of this on occasion. I’ll have a moment of consternation and self-pity, and then adjust to the new setback in the War on Forehead until the next reminder.

The latest one was yesterday, staring at myself in the mirror at The Hair Cuttery. The stylist had just finished cutting my hair, and I was completely lost in thought, feeling depressed at the vast expanse of forehead facing me, sparely dotted with small wisps of hair huddling together like refugees from a still ongoing battle.

“It’s okay,” the stylist said.

I broke out of my thoughts. The worry on my face must have been obvious for her to say that.

She put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay.”

That made me smile. You know what? It is okay. Balding sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. It’s part of life, and I’ll just have to live with it. I gave her a knowing nod. You’re right. It is okay.

It wasn’t until the third time that she asked “It’s okay?” that I realized we weren’t having an unspoken connection where a familiar combination of male baldness and angst made my inner thoughts clear and my need for comfort obvious, but rather she just wanted to know if I liked my haircut, and for the past 30 seconds I was just responding to her by winking and nodding.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s okay!” I jumped out of the chair. As I left, I realized I still felt a little better, even if the compassion was accidental.

I applied for a business credit card because it offered a bonus of 15,000 Reward Points, which one could use to get $100-$150 worth of gift certificates. I am quite poor. No self-respecting credit card company would offer me a business card based on my actual income, so I added $10,000 to my yearly income, technically still a possibility if the U.S. dollar becomes so low in the next month that they switch to dried noodles as currency. I have a Fort Knox of noodles in my pantry.

I got an email a few minutes ago saying I was rejected for the card because my income is too low. After adding $10,000 in imaginary money to it.

It is official. I am so poor, I can’t even afford to lie.

I wrote some columns a few years ago that few of you have seen. They were on the old version of the site before I redesigned it.

(Entire redesign process: [log in to Blogger] “Oooh, new templates!” [click] “Hey, where are my columns?”

***

The weather forecast was wonderfully wrong today. Sixty-five degrees, sunny the whole day, and the supposed afternoon showers didn’t show until nightfall. I rode my bike for an hour and a half on the local trails.

I love bike trails, but they invariably have boring names like “W&O Trail” or–when the park department wants to turn on the Shake n’ Bake–”C&O Trail.”

Where is “The Trail Less Traveled”? “A Trail of Two Cities”? “T-Rail Owens?” I’m already vibrating my lips like a motorcycle when I turn corners. Silliness isn’t a problem. Reality is.

Then again, reality occasionally has its moments. After my bike ride, I was parched and went in 7-11 to buy a Slurpee. My experience, without exaggeration:

ME: “Hey, can I try the flavors? I don’t know which one I want.”
7-11 EMPLOYEE: “Breakfast?”

(Perhaps this is a good point to mention that I have a severe stutter and many of my conversations start with mutual confusion.)

ME: “Take two. Can I try the Slurpee flavors?”
7-11 EMPLOYEE: “Try the flavors?”
ME: “Yes!”
7-11 EMPLOYEE: [thought hard for a moment] “No?”

In my younger years, I would have left, disappointed. Not this time. One, for all I knew, he may have thought we were still talking about breakfast. Two, he made a fatal mistake. He left doubt in his voice, like a person who is asked, “Do you want me to not not punch you?” Time to repeat what I want until he caves in.

ME: “I want to try the flavors before I buy a Slurpee.”
7-11 EMPLOYEE: “Um…”
ME: “I’d like to try the flavors before I buy a Slurpee.”
7-11 EMPLOYEE: “Try…flavors?”

(His manager notices the commotion and comes over.)

MANAGER: “What’s going on?”
7-11 EMPLOYEE (about to cry): “He wants to try the flavors.”

The manager, used to serving food critics, got me a Dixie cup. The situation was over. I poured a bit of the sour strawberry. To victory. I lifted the cup up to my lips, feeling strangely uneasy, and turned around.

They were both staring at me. These two were smarter than I thought. My original plan was to sample Dixie-cup sized Slurpee flavors until I was bloated, and then dash out of the store on my bike while those suckers foot the bill. But that was a trick no pony was going to pull on them.

At first, I tried to ignore them. I sipped the sour strawberry. Tangy and very promising. I advanced towards the root beer.

MANAGER: “You don’t want that. It’s frozen.”

It didn’t look more frozen than the other frozen Slurpees, but who was I to argue? I’m not an ice technician. I grabbed the handle for cherry.

MANAGER (and let me remind you that this is not made up): “That’s cherry. Why do you want to try cherry?”

I turned around and gave my biggest fake smile. They both left. But her words made me think.

Perhaps his question was not accusatory but philosophical. Why did I want to try cherry? Why did I want to try any of the flavors? Why did I want to go bike riding, or eat Cheerios for breakfast, or scratch myself in CVS but refrain from doing so because of those damn 1984-style mirrors?

It tasted good. Is that enough of an answer? I feel almost sacrilegious saying this, but…could there be more to life than Slurpees?

I thought about this until I saw Blue Raspberry.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. Last week, I had my 30th birthday party. It’s the first time I went out with friends for my birthday in almost a decade. For much of my life, I felt like I didn’t have many friends that liked me enough to come to a birthday party, so I rarely had one. I feel blessed to be in a different place in my life now.

Also, two months ago, I vowed to myself that I would move out of my Mom’s place before my 30th birthday. I was a day late, but I did it: I moved to NE D.C. It took a lot of hard work and\or me doing absolutely nothing while an opening came up in my friend Meghan’s place and she asked if I wanted to move in. This just goes to show you that if you have a specific goal and focus intently on it and/or scratch your balls while random events in life conspire to deliver your goal to you, you can achieve anything. I am submitting a longer version of my inspiring story to Parade magazine (Motto: “Thank God We’re Free”).

The house is big, old, roomy, and has lots of neat quirks about it. There are cupboards everywhere, some of them 10 feet above the ground. There are about 3 dozen light switches in the house, none of which do what I expect them to do. For example, the garbage disposal light switch has three settings: Off, On, and Really On. Off and On do nothing. Really On, lifting the switch a little bit past the On position, like turning to the 11 setting on a Spinal Tap speaker, activates the disposal.

I like the place a lot, and both my roommates are awesome. We don’t have Internet access though, and won’t get it until next Friday, so I haven’t been able to update the blog or do much besides check my email at the library occasionally.

When I have had Internet access, I was on the Internet for at least 2-3 hours almost every day, mostly playing online poker or reading poker web sites. Occasionally I would watch TV. We have neither Internet access or a TV at the moment, and I’m really surprised how little I miss it. I haven’t been bored or going through withdrawal symptoms, as I do sometimes in the past. I’m happy in a way that the DSL won’t be activated in a week. The only hassles are checking my dog walking schedule, posting on the blog, and checking my email, the total of which I could do in 15-30 minutes. I like being disconnected, although the second we get net access I know that I will likely fall in my old time wasting habits.

I’m going to try to upload something I wrote about the new James Bond movie before the post becomes irrelevant with time. Besides that, I doubt I will be able to update the blog. Check back in a week. I hope to have a few substantial posts ready to go by then.

I like browsing the personal ads on Yahoo. Fun way to waste time. The company only allows you to browse a few of them before requiring you to fill your own profile, which I first did a year ago, starting an electronic duel between us that continues today.

What happens is that I fill out a profile with a multi-paragraph description. Yahoo grants me access for a few days while they review my profile. They review my profile. Then they reject it. Always. Which is fine, because by then I’m no longer interested in looking at ads. A few months pass by, I get curious again, fill out a profile, and…

I have yet to crack the Yahoo code. If I was seriously looking for a date, I’d be very frustrated. I’m on profile #7 now. Yahoo just doesn’t like me. And I let them know in my latest profile, sent two days ago:

Intro: Yahoo doesn’t like me

Description: I don’t know why. It keeps rejecting my profiles. I understand the need for standards, but if they’re going to block my profile just because I mention my crack pipe selling business, they should mention it beforehand. Okay, they did send me an email saying, “STOP WRITING ABOUT CRACK PIPES!!!” but that was too little, too late.

Today, I logged into my Yahoo email account, clicked on my Yahoo New Email button, and saw that I got an email from my friends at Yahoo. Yay! Guess what they had to say? We could not approve your profile.

The reason: Your intro or description was not accepted because it does not contain enough personal information.

If telling potential mates about my home crack pipe business isn’t personal information, what is? I suspect they are just peeved that I refer to them as Yahoo, and not Yahoo! I’m sorry, Yahoo!, but besides the grammatical monstrosity including it would cause in almost every sentence, you don’t own the exclamation point. It’s not yours. Punctuation belongs to the people, not to a deliriously-perky company that attempts to cover its tortured soul with a glassy-eyed happiness that invokes an uncomfortable resemblance to the Church of Scientology.

I got to put that in my next profile.

I was looking at my draft posts, the forgotten children of Pancake City. This one is from over a year ago:

“Sorry for the lack of posts the past few weeks. The slow pace will probably continue for a few weeks. I’m working on a freelance project plus doing a lot of dog walking.”

A little depressing, no?

• Basement flooded Sun. morning. Spent a few hours calling people to get the messed cleaned up.
• Ordered a new monitor online. It came in yesterday! With a huge crack in it.
• Found a charge on my credit card for a service (EFax) that I thought I cancelled months ago. It’s my fault. When I wrote, “I would like to cancel my service” I forgot to include the four exclamation points + threat of bodily harm at the end (see user agreement, Section 11: “But what if I really want to cancel? Seriously. I want to cancel. Please. For the love of God.”).
• Diarrhea Dog. Who then put her paws on my shirt. Then rolled over for a belly rub on her poop-crusted belly. Oh, I’ll get right on that, Maggie. Right after I carry the tray in your crate out the door like a waiter in The Worst Restaurant Ever.
• (minor) One would that it would be unnecessary to write two 500-word emails to my property in a still-ongoing attempt to convince her that when she calls a contractor to come over to the house, it would be a good idea to let us know, instead of expect the contractor to do it. Which he didn’t.

Well, I managed to go for months without my first post about poker, but I need to put this on my web page to qualify for a free, online tournament:

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 6145316

This will probably be my first and last post about online poker. I’ve read other poker blogs. They’re horrendously boring, and I love the game. Talking about poker to people who don’t play is the equivalent of showing them your 500+ photos from your trip to Bangladesh. It’s very interesting. For you.

The random rundown:

* I’ve been playing online for several months.
* I am not rich from playing.
* I am not poor from playing.
* Yes, I probably spend too much time playing.
* I know all the poker lingo, and I find it increasingly difficult not to use it in everyday conversation, especially “gg” and calling people donkeys.
* My favorite poker games are Follow the Fries, Big Slick, Who’s the Daddy?, and Red Ball #5.
* That was a poker joke! I made all those names up!
* This is why I don’t write about poker on the blog.
* When I started playing, I promised myself that if I ever lost my initial deposit, I would quit.
* That’s still true.
* Poker is closer to chess than roulette.
* Seriously. It requires math, psychology, deductive reasoning, emotional awareness, emotional control, and an ability to learn. It’s why I get annoyed when people consider it “gambling”.
* I’m not sure how much longer I will play. There are better ways to make money, but they are not as much fun.
* I still smile when I think of JJProdigy’s excuse when he got caught having multiple accounts: “It’s not my account. It’s my grandmother’s account.”
* Again, this is why I don’t write about poker on the blog.

My most recent venture into supplication was at traffic court today. You see, a few months ago, a mysterious, evil force seized my leg and pressed it down on the accelerator as the light was turning red. At that same time, a mother was pushing a baby carriage along the crosswalk. Which I didn’t care about. But then I saw that she had an adorable Golden Retriever with her, so I jerked the wheel right, jumped the curb and flipped over right before I crashed into a produce stand that came out of nowhere, presumably put there by the same evil force, or his less creative, Hollywood brother.

The police officer was unperturbed by the destroyed produce stand or the flying chickens that burst out of it, but she was furious when, as my car was flying upside down in the air, she saw that I hadn’t washed the grease-smeared undercarriage in several years. She gave me a ticket for dirty driving and a summons for a court date, today.

I was nervous about appearing before the judge. In the preamble, she said we could plead one of three ways: not guilty, guilty, and guilty with an explanation. I did not hear “I didn’t do it”. This threw me off my game plan. I evaluated the options at hand:

“not guilty” : Close to “I didn’t do it.” Will consider.
“guilty” : “I did it.” ??? What’s the point of going to court if you’re going to fold before the game?
“guilty with an explanation”–Whine your way to success.

I went with whining. Normally, I don’t like whining, but I was wearing a suit, and you can do anything in a suit. It’s true. Before the court opened, I stood outside and timed people on how long they would hold the door for me. When they were about to give up and enter the courthouse, I would clear my throat and say, “Excuse me. I’m still wearing a suit.” Which was funny, because it’s true. I WAS wearing a suit.

The whining didn’t go well at first. I started complaining about how I don’t like my job, my life is going nowhere, my passive-aggressive roommate puts my glasses on the top shelf where they are difficult to reach… But once I focused my whining on the ticket, my layers of excuses stacked upon each other like a tower of butter-topped pancakes, until they eventually toppled and crushed her in a metaphorical avalanche of deliciousness.

I ended up just having to pay the court fee, which is $350, so it was a pyrrhic victory, especially considering that I was so enraged with the high court costs that later that night, I poured gasoline along the court perimeter and burned the court down. Where you gonna prosecute me NOW? This is why Tom DeLay rocks. I called him up beforehand and he gave me the suggestion. That guy is awesome at destroying stuff, like courts and codes of ethics. When I grow up, I want to be like Tom DeLay, except with two testicles (Washington secret. Keep it on the hush hush. If Lloyd Grove gets wind of this, I’m toast.)

Shaaaaaaaaa…zam!

A few weeks ago in my Saturday morning stuttering therapy group, our therapist mentioned that we wouldn’t be meeting for a few weeks. She said something about having to go to a few conferences, but I suspect she is seeing another group on the side. I catch her turning around to peek out the blinds around 11:30, and she is very insistent about us leaving at noon.

Once, group ran until 12:15 and she made us walk out the back door wearing our jackets over our heads. She said, “Pretend the paparazzi are trying to catch you stutter.” While it was fun, I figured out the truth on the car ride home after my jacket slipped over my eyes and I almost ran into a telephone poll.

Someone proposed in the meantime we get together on a weeknight, November 30^th. My birthday. Five years ago, I would have never mentioned my birthday was the same day. When you’re extremely self-conscious, the thought of dozens of pairs of eyes staring at you while they holler a ballad honoring the day of your birth is mortifying.

That was before I got my first full-time job and learned a valuable lesson. You find a way to mention your birthday is coming up, you get cake. You don’t, no cake.

Furthermore, if you don’t mention your birthday and next week a co-worker asks about your weekend, and you let it slip out that you went out with a few friends to celebrate your birthday, you will become a social pariah. Because not only did you deny yourself cake, but you denied the whole office cake as well, in addition to an hour or two off of work.

In short time that part of my self-consciousness quickly eroded to make room for an altruistic desire to use my birthday to further in my own small way the global consumption of cake products. So when my stuttering posse, after rejecting half a dozen dates to meet and finally arriving at a day that miraculously seemed to work with everyone else asked for my acquiescence, I decided to play hard ball.

“Hmm. I’m not sure I can make it then. The 30^th is my birthday.”

“What’s that? Celebrate my birthday too? But by what manner do you propose…oh. Cake. Well, let me ponder upon your proposal for a moment. Hmm. While you do have my deepest gratitude for your offer of eating plain cake on my birthday, I fear I must…yes? Hmm-mmm? Chocolate cake? With sprinkles? What a novel idea. You know, I do believe I will be able to reschedule my plans for the 30^th. For the good of the group.”

So I got my cake. There it was, sitting next to several platters and trays of food and a humongous cake, Cake Sr., to celebrate the one of my friends in the group moving to Princeton next month. Mary, the sucker who bought me the cake, lit a candle on Cake Jr. and they sung Happy Birthday. Then someone handed me a piece. I laughed. Ha! I’m not actually going to eat the cake! I just wanted someone to buy it for me.

Nine-tenths of the cake is now sitting on my counter. It’s a waste, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

I don’t know why I feel so excited about tomorrow, but it’s almost the identical feeling I had as a kid the night before Christmas. Yes, Santa may misread my request for a NES system and give me a plaid-laid Nerd Enterprise Sweater instead, but I’m feeling good nonetheless.