December 5, 2005

"Today is boring."
Recipe for my favorite color:
(standard rgb color, 32-bit)

• Red: 116
• Green: 155
• Blue: 81

If you come up with a good name for it, let me know!

I heard the most ridiculous name for a heavy metal album in the history of music the other day. I believe the name of the band is The Darkness, and the name of the album was One Way Ticket to Hell and Back. I thought about this for a moment then realized that if you went to hell and then came back. It really wouldn't be a one way ticket.

I work babysitting children at a movie theater about twenty hours a week, and learn a lot from the regular children that come every weekend. There is a rich group, in which all children above the age of six have a camera phone, ipod, ridiculous amount of candy outfits from Nordstrom’s that they only wear once, and anything else that their heart desires. These children can be great kids, but are all beyond spoiled.

Then there are the other kids, who haven't grown up in nearly the same environment. One such examples is two seven year olds that I get sometimes, always late at night.

On one occasion the girl was dancing provocatively out the window in a mini skirt that mommy dressed her in. When I asked her to find something to do other than give a sex show to the entire mall, she explained that mommy dances like this. I wasn't sure what to say to that, there is no correct answer. I explained that at home she could, but that wasn't what we did in the playroom. Mean while her step brother encouraged her to pull her skirt up more, another guy was about to come over.

Tonight was actually going well, we were playing monopoly and there weren't any obscene conversations...until a boy about ten knocked on the window and waved, I made the mistake of asking the kids if they knew him. They replied by explaining to me how he looked like an ugly pimp, and they may like pimps, but ugly ones aint gonna get nowhere. I'm not sure how the conversation turned, but it did, and the little girl told me that she wanted to have a baby. Her step-brother told her that she was too young, and she replied that was why she could have sex as much as she wanted. He threatened to tell their guardians who had come to the movie (I haven't tried to understand the various dysfunctional family members. The girl asked me to tell him not to tell her, and I was yet again left pondering

What do you do when you are left watching someone's children, and the children have very bad morals and are obviously being messed up. Where is that line between helping and intruding?

Today I read in the Scientific American:

"According to quantum theory, even a perfect vacuum is not truly empty; it is filled with fluctuations as a result of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The fluctuations take the form of pairs of virtual photons. These photons are called virtual because, in an uncurved spacetime, far from any gravitational influence, they appear and disappear restlessly, remaining unobservable in the absence of any disturbance.

.

Now, could somebody please explain to me how we know that there are virtual photons? I never knew Physics could be so imaginative.

....and I definitely have the wrong username.

---

Thanks to Eien_menu, Wertperch, Iwhosawtheface and Fruan for helping to shed some light on the issue.

Well.

Now that things seem to be finally in forward motion for good, I suppose it's time to share the news.

Andrew (mcc)has gotten a fantastic job offer in San Francisco--he accepted, and starts on Jan 2. (He's actually telecommuting part time right now, as it is.) While the SF area is where we were hoping for all along, I don't think either of us expected him to have a need to be out there QUITE so soon.

With said change in schedule, we've decided on our course of action.

After spending Christmas with our folks, we will be having a small, immediate-family only wedding on the 27th, then driving on out to San Francisco.

I know there are many of you who will be disappointed, as you wanted to be there for the occasion, but between the short notice, how scattered across the country our friends are, and the move, we decided it was best to only have our parents and grandparents there, and none of our friends, to avoid hurt feelings and issues of "why did XYZ get invited, but not me?" We are fully planning on having a housewarming/we just got married party *in* San Francisco once we get settled in--probably in March or thereabouts.

We'll be living in corporate extended-stay apartment housing for the first month--neither of us were OK with signing a lease on a place we'd never seen--then moving into where we'll be for a while. I should have the apartment address in the next couple of days, which will serve as a mailing address for that first month, and as soon as we have a real address I'll post that. In the meantime, neither of our cell phones will be changing in the next couple of months, at least.

So that's where things are right now. Busy busy packing, as well as contemplating the fact we have to drive about 5 days with a hyperactive Sheltie and 3 cats in the car (two from Indiana-Texas, three from Texas-San Francisco). I think I'm insane to even try it >_<

Wish us luck--we'll need it to get through the next month or so.

I know you're not exactly following my writeups (statistically speaking), but were you to do so, you'd probably groan at my starting yet another daylog with "Today there was a terrorist attack in Israel blah blah blah..."

Well, there has been another one today, and I'm getting sick of it. I've been sick of it for these five goddamn years, and I find myself getting sicker and sicker of it. Suicide bombings have become non-events, regular mishaps as common as the cold and not much more shocking than that. I've seen enough of this shit. I am FUCKING SICK OF THOSE PEOPLE TURNING OUR MALLS INTO BATTLEFIELDS.

There's a video of it this time, of the actual explosion. That's about the only thing new about this attack (the death and injury stats, the blood and the shattered glass everywhere, the horrified witnesses - we've come to expect that by now, that's the baseline product). Let me describe it to you: There are cars driving and people walking on both sides of a main street near a mall. There is a man hurrying to the left of the frame where he stops in the middle of some people. There is a rolling explosion and a big fucking mushroom in the left of the frame where that man had just stopped and people around him are already down - some dead, some alive, some not dead yet. Everyone still with legs is running the hell away.

Yadda yadda peace yadda no hope yadda yadda... But the terrorists, though - They claim to be freedom fighters. "Freedom fighters" my bleeding, burning, flying, mutilated ass.

I grow to hate my job a little more every time I go into the office. I have all but stopped making polite conversation because I just don't have the stomach for it anymore. I never really did, but it was easier to pretend in the past. Now people ask me why I am in a "bad mood" all the time, as if that had anything to do with it.

The sad part is my job isn't even that bad. I have no particular complaints, but that doesn't make it less intolerable.

I realized that not only did I not want to answer that question, I didn't want to answer another watersports question or see any of these people ever again.
- Anthony in Bottle Rockets