Subtle science and exact art

2004-11-13T01:02:00.000-08:00

had a funny moment at work today ..... my coworker called me and said "you know, we've all been talking about how paranoid you are." lavrenty beria, eat your heart out.

i need the odd laugh at work these days. i'm in over my head where i am now, and it's gotten depressing. i'm superstar guy at half my job, and that half is fun and i enjoy it. but the other half? not so much. just no fun. the killer? the bit i'm good at takes up maybe a little less than 50% of my day most days, but other days (like the past two weeks) it takes up bloody near the whole day. but when i had my review in july/august, my boss chose to put that half of my job in one area of my review and split the other half of my job (the bit i'm not so good at) into five pieces. so my review was weighted 4/5 bad 1/5 good, even tho the actual work is balanced 50/50 good/bad. very frustrating to say the least. my boss has the managerial tact and savvy of a warthog. i don't mind being dressed down if i legitimately fucked up, but there's no need to stand in my office doorway telling me that she has to micromanage me in a voice that the whole damn office can hear. sorta undermines their confidence in me.

thankfully, i interviewed last week at a company that seems on the up and up. they are growing pretty rapidly (the department i'd be in has grown 140% in one year and they are hiring three new staff right now) and are showing no sign of slowing down. the man i interviewed with said that he wanted somone who would be bored with the job in 6 months... cos that's when they'd likely be expanding again and he would prefer to be able to promote someone from within. anyway, i heard from the recruiter that contacted me about the job that they are still interviewing a couple people next week. bah!!! just offer me the bloody job so i can get the hell outta dodge!!

oh, and i'm still wigged out over the election. altho i'm no longer plotting the president's demise, and i feel that's a positive sign.

lost at sea

2004-11-11T10:33:00.000-08:00

you know, i consider myself to be a fairly smart dude. but i am having a real bitch of a time figuring out how to make this blog shit work.

One of those things.......

2004-11-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

so it's midnight.... i'm hungry.... so i make some popcorn. brown paper bag, some corn, some salt, some Cajun spicey type stuff and a bit of oil and three minutes in the reactor chamber and poof. popcorn. but in this whole process i somehow managed to burn my big toe. something tells me burning your big toe is not a common accident in popcorn making.

A pocket full of shells....

2004-11-11T10:29:00.000-08:00

So I'm watching the election results last night and trying to find out how long my passport is good for, when I get a call from my best firend Sandra. She is, how you say, uber-liberal. Of course, she is also distraught over things. More so actually. She is talking about moving to the land of Canadia to get away from the Bushies and his band of merry neo-Cons. Now, she's said this in the past so it's hard for me to know if she's serious or not.... but it got me thinking.

Is the country bigger than one man?

Absolutely. And that's why I'm not leaving. I believe in what this country is supposed to stand for: (*cue music*) That a group of completely different people can live under the same flag and all find happiness. I believe in the ideal that we can have an election and peacfully change our government.... even if I disagree with that government. Am I worried about what the next four years will bring? No. Am I looking forward to it? That'd be a no, too. But if this country can survive Andrew Jackson, Useless Grant, John McKinley, Calvin Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon it can certainly survive monkeyman. And I want to be around when that change happens. (*end music cue*)

Yes 58 million unfortunate souls cast ballots for monkeyman Bush... but I honestly don't blame them. They have their lives and their concerns, and they obviously felt that monkeyman was a better alternative to The Jaw. Personally, the only reason I ever had to like The Jaw was cos he is a hockey player; and I voted for him only cos he wasn't monkeyman or Darth Nader, so I'm not really in a position to call shenanigans on someone over their choice since I had zero amount of faith in my own. Really, as long as you make a decision that's true to your principles, I have no quarrel. My principles are that monkeyman is the most dangerous primate since King Kong, so I voted for the other dude.

However.... things just aren't adding up. There was a surge in new voter registrations close to election day, a traditional Democratic indicator. Turnout was the highest it's been (as a percentage of the eligible voting population) since 1968, again historically a good sign for Donkeys. Plus a whole laundry list of junk: The economy is in the crapper, with the first president since the bloody depression to have less jobs at the end of his term than at the beginning; The budget surplus was turned into a record deficit in about as quick as you can say "tax cuts for the wealthy"; The only foreign-directed act of terrorism on US soil happened on his watch (yes the training all took place under the Clin-ton's collective noses, but the captain's gotta go down with his ship); We embarked on a war of conquest -a Crusade, if you will- only to find that -whoops- the justifications were completely fabricated and now 1000 Americans and untold Iraqis are dead and it looks like we're gonna be in the shit for a good 8-10 years. Oh, and aside from right around 9/11 monkeyman's job approval rating never got much above 50%.

This is the man who garnered 4 million more votes than The Jaw?

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Only this is America. So something I guess that should be something is rotten in the state of the, er, States.

Age

2004-08-31T15:48:00.000-07:00

I bought a copy of Foreign Policy magazine yesterday. I'm a 31-year old man. I could've bout Maxim, or Playboy, or any number of other periodicals. But I bought Foreign Policy.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, that's the 4th stage of death.