The Noble Nobel

is anyone else tired of hearing everyone talk about how obama doesn’t deserve the nobel peace prize? what is their argument? “he hasn’t done anything to deserve it, he hasn’t actually brought about any change” blah blah blah. correct me if i’m wrong, but didn’t al gore win the prize for his work on bringing up the issue of global warming? aren’t the ice caps STILL melting? yasser arafat won for his work on the israeli-palestinian conflict– and those people are still killing each other, yes? people forget that the first step of achieving any kind of real change is to first start a dialogue; get people to think about the issues. …oh, and not to mention he is the first black president. i suppose that isn’t any kind of real achievement on his part. especially considering that it has been less than 50 years since this country has even given black people the right to drink at the same water fountains or go to the same schools as white people. on top of that, obama has been able to shift world public opinion of the US from negative to positive. his address to the UN was articulate and eloquent, and his attempts to smooth over relations with other countries, such as russia, have been fruitful. obama has a large amount of ‘diplomatic currency’, which i think he spends wisely. i believe he deserves to be recognized for these things, and i think americans should be proud of his accomplishments whether they agree with his political policies or not.

on a completely different tangent, i played my first softball game last wednesday. we were down 6-0 in the first inning because our pitcher…couldn’t exactly pitch. but then another guy stepped in and we started doing really well. i had three good hits, and somehow made it home every time i went to bat. i am not a runner, and my feet started to get ahead of me several times. when i think of it in my head in slow motion, i envision that i kind of looked like one of those cartoon characters that peel out when they try to take off. i blame it on the loose dirt and the fact that i was wearing shoes with no tread. i got stuck in left field, way out there. i didn’t wear my glasses because i didn’t want them to get broken, so i couldn’t see a darn thing. luckily, no one hit a ball out to me. unluckily, i was standing in a haze of buzzing mosquitos next to a gnarly mud puddle. i won’t forget my OFF next time… anyway, we ended up winning 9-7. i was proud of myself for doing so well. i sort of feel that this makes up for all the times i got made fun of in middle school for playing so poorly. i guess it just took me until my mid 20’s to be comfortable in my body. or maybe my chakras have finally aligned. who knows. oh, and the name of our team was decided: inglourious ballsters. i came up with that one. thank you, thank you.

Immaculate Mis-conceptions

i haven’t posted in over a week because i have been very ill. not sure if it is swine flu or bird flu or what– but it isn’t fun, i’ll tell you that. over the weekend, my stomach was slowly growing bigger and bigger. at one point it really started to look as if i was pregnant. i’m talking round belly, four months in kind of pregnant…i started to wonder if i was the next victim of immaculate conception. at one point i was seriously concerned that a little alien (the one that jumps out of the guy’s stomach with a top hat and cane in space balls) was about to pop out. all of a sudden, time sort of stood still. my bowels shifted in such a way as i have never felt before. you could literally see my guts squirming. and then i cut some serious cheese. probably the grossest, weirdest, freakiest thing i have ever witnessed happening to my own body.

so besides that weirdness, i have had all the regular flu symptoms. the worst part of this one is the pounding headache that won’t go away no matter how many tylenol pills i take. i truly hate being sick. i didn’t go anywhere or see anybody for over four days. at this point, going to walgreens is like going out on a saturday night…except i can’t really flirt with the cute check-out boy with red, watery eyes, a dripping nose, a pack of cold compresses in one hand and a giant “30% MORE FREE” bottle of Pepto in the other…

Give me Clip Art or Give me Death

A very rough and rapidly put together idea for a t-shirt design. I’ll keep working on it…

Team Name

I totally got this list of softball team names in an email at work:

1. Where my pitches at?

2. We got the runs

3. Booze on first

4. Nice Snatch

5. I scored with your mom

6. Masterbatters

7. 99 problems but a pitch ain’t one

8. Empty pitchers

9. Booze on 1st

10. Bad news beers

11. Slidin Dirty

Personally, my favorite is #4. But since it is a company team, I think I’ll vote for #7.

Syndrome of Subjective Doubles

The alarm goes off. It is 6 am. Snooze. Two seconds later, 6:30 am. Snooze. A weird dream about my mom in high heels and something about cream cheese muffins and it’s 7 am. I’ve slept 7 hours and feel like death warmed over. Maybe my bed is the culprit of my chronic back pain and daily fatigue. Who knows. I get ready, take Murry for a walk, pour him food and water, and wait for my car pool to get here. 8 am. Arrive at work, get some coffee strong enough to keep a 400 lb man wired for two weeks, and sit at my desk. For four hours I stare at two monitors stationed side-by-side and enter data into the system. Headphones blaring, I find myself daydreaming and pretending I’m in the movie Hackers. 12 pm is lunch time. A typical day’s lunch hour would be spent in the break room chomping on fresh salad or pickles or something. Today it was spent eating pizza at some place on the strip near UT. My coworkers talk and I try to be an interesting participant in the conversation, but after hours of being plugged into a machine it’s hard to focus. I start thinking about an article I read concerning electromagnetic stimulation of the brain and how if a certain area gets shocked you get a sense that someone is standing right next to you (doppelganger. creepy).  Back to work, in a hurry. Plug myself back in, get done early. A short ride home, take Murry out and play fetch. Fetch always turns into chase, but I need the exercise anyway. 4:30 pm. Nap time. 6 pm and my groggy head hurts from falling into too deep of a sleep in the middle of the day. Nothing much to do, so I decide to walk down the street to Half Price Books and Salvation Army. What I thought would only be a few minutes of browsing turns into 3 hours of scouring shelves for something of interest. This is what I came home with:

A softball, just in case anyone would actually take me up on a game of catch. Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card; The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Heinlein; Kafka on the Shore by Murakami; Word Freak by Fatsis; and last but certainly not least, Why Do Men Have Nipples? by Leyner and Goldberg. This last book was bought because of the first questions I happened to turn to, which were: “Is it dangerous to peform colonic irrigation on yourself?” and “Would you die if you ate your own feces?” Obviously it is pertinent to know the answers to questions like that. There are some other good ones, such as: “Can you lose a contact lens in the back of your head?” and “Is it true that you can break your penis?” The surprising answer to that last one is yes.

I had planned to figure out how to paste some links in here for songs that I’m listening to right now, but it is getting late and I don’t feel like bothering with it. Instead I’ll leave you with a list of songs I can’t stop playing over and over. Want an easy way to look up the songs and play them for free? Go to grooveshark.com (it saves my life at work when my iPod battery runs out).

1. You’ll See It – Washed Out  2. Walkabout – Atlas Sound  3. Listened On – Lightning Dust  4. Skinny Love – Bon Iver  5. Island, IS – Volcano Choir  6. Stitch Me Up – Minus Story  7. Killed By an Angel – Sunny Day Real Estate  8. Surprise Hotel – Fool’s Gold  9. Two Weeks – Grizzly Bear  10. These Old Shoes – Deer Tick  11. Curses Fired – Natureboy

Writing Again?

Clearly I have been on a blogging hiatus, but having spent several Saturday nights in a row watching Netflix alone in my room until my computer sounds like it is about to explode has prompted me to write again. I also realize that I’m not the best at keeping in touch with people long-distance. I actually dread talking to people on the telephone. My hearing is terrible so I am constantly saying, “huh?” and “what?”, to the annoyance of the person on the other end. So until I get a flashy new Beltone, you might want to read this blog.