Rebel Yell

I’ve had a fever for three days now, thanks to a sinus infection that won’t die (despite repeated attacks with Sudafed, which usually works fairly well in preventing me from having them every month). Last night, I had the most bizarre dream. I dreamed that someone gave me an iPod Touch, but it was actually an iPhone. The weirdest part of the dream was that I was in Edwardian (or Victorian) England. So everyone is in period dress, and I think we were sitting by a fire, and someone hands me this box. “Here, it’s a gift.” It’s . . . an iPod? What?

I’m chalking it up to the Sudafed, the lack of proper sleep, and a raging fever. But still, why is Steve Jobs invading my dreams? Who invited Apple to my Victorian tea party? And why an iPod Touch? As it stands, I already have too much music for the 80GB iPod video that I’ve got (I’m loathe to replace him, though–Aristophanes has served me well, as successor to Socrates, who broke when he fell off the dashboard of my car), which means that I never even use the video part of my video iPod. I have to admit, though. It was the coolest damn thing I’ve ever “owned”–even if it was just a fever- and sudafed-induced hallucination.

I have to wonder, though, why my brain decided that I needed to travel back in time to get a device that hadn’t even been invented yet. It’s going to drive me nuts trying to figure that one out.

This weekend, a skeevy-looking kid came up to me at the register. He’s carrying a Motorola phone (the RIZR, just like mine but a different color). He looked really weird, and he asked me if any of the employees had a Motorola adapter that he could use to charge his phone. “I really need to use this phone!” I offered to let him make a call from the buy area but he refused. “No, I need to use THIS phone.” So I said, “Oh, I have that exact same phone! But I only have a car charger. Too bad!”

So the guy says to me, “Can I use it? I can sit in your car and wait for it to charge. You don’t mind, do you?”

Well, yes, I do mind, as a matter of fact. But he asked as though it was no big deal! I wonder if he thought I was gullible, or stupid? Assuming this was a stolen phone (he didn’t seem to know how to use it, and it looked way too new to have been carried around in his dirty pants), what made him think I would just throw him the keys to my car so he could hang out and charge his phone? It boggles my mind!

Sure, Mr. Strange Unkempt Youth, let’s go back to my car so you can hang out and charge your phone. It’s not like I’ve got a job, or any real duties to perform–I can hang out all day while you charge your damn phone and make calls! Everything revolves around you, Mr. Presumptuous! Life stops for your needs! Everyone else is here to make you feel special and help you limp along through life! You want a few dollars, too? Maybe a hamburger?

I was nice, though, perhaps too nice. I told him that unfortunately I was on shift and couldn’t leave the register. However, he could try his luck at Radio Shack, where they sell chargers for a variety of different mobile phones.

But really? You’re going to just walk into a book store and demand that someone give you a charger for your phone so you can make calls? Seriously? I just don’t get it.

My dad has had pneumonia since last week, most likely contracted as a result of traveling to Switzerland (probably the air isn’t dirty enough over there, so it shocked his system). Although he’s been to the doctor and is on medication, he’s still feeling like crap. He’s got an infected lymph node (from smoking while he had pneumonia), withdrawal symptoms (from not getting enough nicotine in the past week or so), a heart arrhythmia (from a high fever and from not taking his blood pressure meds), and he’s recovering from pneumonia. “Other than that, life is good,” he tells me.

The last time my dad was this sick was more than fifty years ago, when he had typhoid fever as a kid. He grew up in Cairo, and he’s got an immune system with an antibody equivalent of inter-planetary ballistic missiles–if his body were earth, he could take out Jupiter without breaking a sweat. This is the first time I’ve ever seen him involuntarily miss more than a half day of work. He could have an arm off in a freak printing accident and he’d still be sitting at his desk, “Just one more project! I do it quickly, then I go to the hospital.”

It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever had to consider what life would be like without my dad. I realize that he’s older (62), but it’s not as though he’s ever been so sick that I thought to myself, “Man, this might be the end.” Sure, he’ll freak out sometimes after a physical when the doctor wants to “further analyze” some test results. Then I get to listen to him ask me, “Do you know what to do when I die? Call my secretary, then call your uncle. They know what to do. Don’t forget!” But coming home and having him ask me to take him to the hospital because he’s “really sick” is different.

Watching someone suffer is a good exercise in helplessness. It’s like watching a horror movie: you know what’s coming next, but you’re powerless to stop it. The difference is that you’re not only powerless, but you can’t turn it off. You can’t get up and leave. You can’t go home and forget about it. (Not that I ever forgot, not after that summer in junior high when my friend Nola and I regularly stayed up late to watch Friday the 13th marathons.)

Meanwhile, my older cat, Tetsuo, has cataracts and has effectively gone blind. He can see general shapes, but that’s about it. He’s 11 now, and he’s been part of my life since high school, but I’m not sure how long he’s going to be around either. It’s weird having two people (well, one person and a cat) be so close to being gone at the same time. Yeah, I can get another cat, but it wouldn’t be the same. He wouldn’t be like Tetsuo, who can open doors, pull the lids off of tupperware, and will eat cucumbers, broccoli, melon, spaghetti, and macaroni & cheese. Dad? You can’t replace people, not even in the way you can replace pets.

It’s a bit like living in Bizarro World. You know that there’s a good chance that you’ll wake up in the morning and everything will be wrong. The only problem is, you’re not sure when it will happen–you only know that it’s going to happen for sure sometime in the foreseeable future.

Before you ask, I never really believed in a heaven or hell. I never believed that I would one day be reunited with lost family and friends. First, because it had been drilled into my head that I was a godless sinner who was damned to Hell for all eternity for various nebulous and unclear reasons. Second, because it seemed weird to me that the entire purpose of life was to try and get into a place where you’d spend all eternity doing … well, no on ever explained what Heaven was like to me. Is it a big puffy cloud city? Is it like an amusement park? Is it just a bigger version of church? It was never clear what Heaven was and why I wanted to go there. I just knew that it was a reward for certain people who weren’t me.

So when I think of what life is like after you die, I understand that it’s really just a nebulous non-existence. We’ll find out when we get there. Meanwhile, what is life going to be like for everyone else after you die? Well, I’ll find out when it happens. Hopefully, it will be later rather than sooner.

Other than that, life is good.

A local minister affiliated with one of those Feel Good Non-Denominational churches wants to erect two 150-foot-tall crosses in Houston.

For Grace Community Church Senior Pastor Steve Riggle, the sign of the cross can mark Houston like no other city in the country.

Riggle last week disclosed a plan to erect 150-foot crosses at the south and north entrances to the city. The crosses would be on the Grace South Campus and the North Campus properties.

Riggle doesn’t mince words when he says that the country is headed in the wrong direction politically and spiritually. The only way out, he adds, is what he believes the Founding Fathers always intended the United States to be – a Christian nation. He says the project is a start in the right direction.

Nothing says, “We love Jesus!” more than erecting hundreds of memorials to his grisly demise! It’s also a cheap way to make it seem as though you’re really a Christian without really doing all of the pesky things you’re asked to do in the Bible. (A.J. Jacobs came closer than any other average mortal to doing just that. Excluding the people who live like that every day of their lives, like the Mennonites.) A 150-foot cross isn’t going to make our country any more Christian than it already is–and if you think about it, our country is pretty fucking religious.

“This will mark our city for God,” he said. “If this doesn’t work – nothing else will work. But if we get it right, everything will fall into place.”

Eventually, Riggle would like crosses at every entrance to Houston.

“I would surround the city,” he said.

The crosses are not about Grace Community Church, Riggle pointed out.

“This is a symbol of a much larger vision – it’s for the city,” he said. “Here is an opportunity to physically and spiritually mark the city in a tangible way.”

It’s an opportunity to physically and spiritually mark the city even moreso than having a church on every street corner, or converting an old arena into the biggest church in the world! (Am I the only one who feels weird about attending church in the same place that I saw Guns N’ Roses or Iron Maiden?) He could surround the city with crosses, like a wall! Yes! And then he could block entrance and exit to the city, each cross serving as a reminder of his domination of Houston’s spirituality. Eventually, we would all come to depend on him as our leader….

The total cost of the cross project doesn’t have a bottom line yet, and Riggle also plans to ask non-members of Grace from around the city to donate.

“We are going to go outside the church and even to business people and businesses,” he said. “We hope that they see the value of this serving the entire city.”

“Please open your pocket books and empty them into the collection plate. We’re sure you’ll see the light of Christ in your life soon!” Is it just me, or does this sound like the biggest Boondoggle this city has seen since some slick Yankee businessmen first proposed building a city in the middle of a swamp? I fail to see how having several unsightly monuments all over town will help our city in any way. Will the crosses feed the hungry? offer shelter to the needy? provide jobs for the homeless or medical care to ailing children? Will it clean up the streets, solve our transportation problem, or clear up the smog? Or will it just be another way for this church to ask for more money? “Open your pocket books and feel the love of Christ filling up the empty space that one contained your cash! Fill the plates and watch Jesus solve all of our problems!”

I, for one, do not feel any kind of spiritual goodness flowing from this proposition. It’s just another way for some flashy pastor to exert his spiritual dominance over the rest of the area and rub his own bizarre non-theology into our faces. Didn’t Jesus preach AGAINST this kind of thing?

5″And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. 6But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.

Matthew 6:5-7 (New International Version)

There must be another version of the Bible floating around there because this guy certainly didn’t read the same Bible that I did.

I celebrated America’s birthday by celebrating my friend/coworker Nick’s birthday with lots and lots of booze. Apparently, once I’ve had a little brandy, I can’t say no to anything…. I had a little brandy and coke, some banana liquer and midori with coke, a lot of Goldschlager and coke, and some peach vodka with apple juice.

I have no idea how I still have functioning kidneys right now. But I do know that it was the best 4th of July I’ve ever had. Getting drunk, watching hilarious YouTube videos, and playing Rock Band until almost 2AM was way more fun than watching fireworks in Kemah or Houston. The funniest video we watched? No question it was Tomboy’s “OK 2B GAY.” I have no idea what’s happening or why, but it was hilarious last night after I drank all that liquor.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

MORE TALES FROM 011!!
While running the History section this past week, I noticed a woman and her daughter wandering around rather confused. I asked them if they needed any help and the mother said, “Do you have Fahrenheit 451? I’ve looked all over the History section and I can’t find it!” Suppressing a laugh, I said, “It’s a Science Fiction book by Ray Bradbury. We have several copies in Sci-Fi.” “Ohh! Really? I thought it was History!” Yes. It’s about the year they discovered fire. XD

Today, a woman asked to return a copy of the new Hairspray movie (with John Travolta) on DVD. When I asked her if something was wrong with it, she said, “No, it just had some naughty scenes in it.” I don’t know what she meant by that, and she wouldn’t elaborate, but now I’m curious. Does John Travolta do full frontal? Is there a bizarro sex scene in there? Do horny midgets strip naked and streak down Main Street, USA? Holy crap! How did I miss out on this? Now I’ve got to own a copy of this movie! Unless, of course, it’s actually really tame and she’s just squeamish. I actually think this latest version is probably way more tame than anything John Waters has put out. Still, it’s probably worth a look. Maybe there’s some subliminal messages in there or something. Unfortunately, I’ll probably never understand why she thought Hairspray was naughty. (I had always thought it was the tamest John Waters film.) Maybe she’s just squeamish about interracial dancing.

Woman Calls Orem Police To Free Her From Her Locked Car

A woman called Orem police Friday afternoon needing help because her battery died and she was locked inside her car.

When police arrived, they found the woman sitting in the car, unable to get herself out. She couldn’t hear the officers instructions through the rolled-up windows so she motioned to them to call her on her cell phone, according to police.

Once officers were able to talk to the woman on the phone, they were able to tell her how to manually operate the slide lock mechanism on the inside door panel to open the door and free herself.

I laughed so hard that I almost choked! In all seriousness, though, don’t people know how to work a lock anymore? Surely she’s had to work a lock to get in and out of her home, as none but the richest in the world have anything like an automatic door in their house. (And if they don’t, you know it’s coming, and it’ll be on some gadget show on HGTV.) The article doesn’t mention how old she was, but presumably she’s been in a car that doesn’t have automatic door locks. Couldn’t she have easily deduced how to unlock her door based on that? Alas, it seems she may just be an idiot.

Still, I love what the local news station did with the article:

It’s priceless! Way to make a stupid situation sound deadly! I think they should get some sort of award for making the most idiotic person look like a hapless victim of technology gone awry. “Police heroically rescued a woman trapped in her car after the locks failed and the battery died!” Genius!

Gary Trudeau examines the logical conclusion of Creationism versus Evolution.

Verminators is my new favorite TV show. If you’ve ever watched Dirty Jobs, you know that dealing with bugs can be really dirty, as can cleaning homes after a major disaster. Verminators is a dirty job that pretty much just focuses on dealing with filthy conditions, dead things, and more bugs than I’ve ever seen in any place at one time.

It reminds me of the first apartments of some of my high school friends. You walk in and there are dirty dishes piled everywhere, clothes not washed, kitchen never cleaned, everything dirty…. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like what I see on Verminators. It’s like a horror movie, seeing how some of these people live! Whatever kind of horrible living conditions I can imagine, this show beats that by miles. Holy crap, man. I wonder how people can live like that? Roaches everywhere, bed bugs, spiders; all manner of bugs just crawling around everywhere, living off of rotting food and trash. I think what surprised me was how one infested apartment can cause infestation in any connected apartment. Your pack-rat downstairs neighbor can bring roaches to your apartment just by being adjacent to your unit. Kind of like how your neighbor’s flea-ridden dog can give your own dog fleas just by running around in your back yard and hanging out with your dog. (Thanks, neighbors–it’s super-fun dipping your cat with pyrethrins every week and treating them with flea treatment and fogging your entire house just because you can’t be bothered to put some damn flea treatment on your own pets. LAME!!!)

It makes me incredibly glad that I was brought up by neat freaks who taught me how to clean up after myself. Even so, I can’t help but watch with a horrified glee as the guys in this pest control squad kill off these bugs. It’s like watching a traffic accident, only moreso. Tee hee. ;D

My internet connection has been practically nonexistent lately. First, because Comcast has provided us with spectacularly shitty service (just like Time Warner), and second because Windows Vista regularly refuses to acknowledge the wireless connection on my laptop. This means that I have to disable and then enable my wireless connection several times to “force” Vista to acknowledge that there are wireless connections available.

Switching to a macbook is looking more and more appealing lately.

So the other day I was driving from work to school (which is about two miles, probably less) and I nearly hit a pedestrian. Regardless of the situation, it’s almost ALWAYS the driver’s fault by default. You’re in a huge car, they’re protected by air and flimsy clothing. The car always wins. Which is why I always assume that it’s in your best interest to be ultra-careful whether you’re the pedestrian or the driver.

Imagine my surprise when, as I was driving to school, a guy steps off the curb directly in front of my car. Luckily, it was right at an intersection where I was making a left turn, so I was already going slow and had time to stop before I hit the guy. He was on his cell phone. He was in the middle of a conversation. He neglected to look both ways before crossing the street. He assumed that he had the right of way, even though I had nearly cleared the intersection. HE DIDN’T EVEN STOP TO CHECK FOR TRAFFIC! I guess he just assumed that the entire world stopped for him.

Yet, despite the fact that this guy was clearly not watching, didn’t care what was going on around him, and completely failed to follow any kind of pedestrian safety protocol (stop, look both ways, cross when traffic has stopped), as he was crossing in front of my car the guy turns to me and yells, “ASSHOLE!” and walks off. He was on his cell phone the whole time, and didn’t even stop his conversation to yell at me.

This guy was totally focused on his cell phone conversation and wasn’t paying attention to traffic at all. Had he been on Montrose or Westheimer, and not one of the empty side streets, this guy would probably be a bloody smear on the pavement right now. What the hell is wrong with people in this town? Sadly, this is exactly what I see drivers doing all the time; I never expect to see pedestrians on their phones, totally inattentive to traffic around them. Is your cell phone conversation so important that you’re willing to risk your life for it? I don’t know about everyone else, but when I was a kid we were taught never to walk into traffic without stopping to make sure it was safe to cross the street. Why? Because you could get hit by a car! When did people stop caring about safety?

“Oh hey, Tim. What’s up? Not much here. Just crossing the street. Yeah, I’m walking to the grocery store. So what are you up to? Hold on– HEY ASSHOLE! WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING!! Oh, sorry. I almost got hit by a car. Yeah, what a douchebag! People should watch where they’re going. Don’t they know pedestrians automatically get the right of way?”

Apparently, being aware of your surroundings is no longer necessary–you can just foist that responsibility onto the people around you! But what happens when everyone else is just as inattentive as you are? I see cyclists dart across busy intersections, cut across three lanes of traffic, ride in the middle of the road–completely oblivious to the traffic around them. Pedestrians just walk into the street without even watching for traffic. Drivers act like they’re the only ones on the road. How are more people not killed on the streets every day? It boggles my mind that I don’t see more people being hit by cars–pedestrians AND drivers are both paying more attention to their phone conversations than to the traffic around them. It’s like they think they’re invincible. “I’m in a huge car! Everyone can see me! I’m totally safe in my Suburban Mommy Tank!” Or worse: “I’m a pedestrian! People HAVE to yield right of way to me! I can do what I want!”

Please, for the love of god, pay attention to what’s going on around you. I don’t care if you think you have the right of way–if you’re on your phone and you walk into traffic without looking, as far as I’m concerned you deserve your Darwin Award.