Hello?
I'm still here ... just ... busy. That is all.
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I'm still here ... just ... busy. That is all.
Kids, we all need aspirations and goals. Here is an idea for you all:
It was actually a dark and stormy night, believe it or not, but not sinister at all. I went to bed gratefully due to having not slept well the night before and had every intention of sleeping the whole night through. At about 4:20a my dreams were interrupted by a loud beeping. Upon awakening I discovered that the beeping was coming seemingly from everywhere at once. I stumbled bleary eyed around the apartment wondering if I was just going nuts or if in fact the fire alarms were really going off. My roommate's appearance outside his bedroom door was confirmation that the fire alarms were real.
I dressed quickly, and glanced at the rain pouring in sheets down the window, then gathered wallet and passport and marched down the stairs. With each step I was more and more aware that the sound of the alarms was fading. You couldn't hear them at all on the ground floor, and a glance at the master alarm panel showed "All systems ok - no alarms". After a momentary hesitation I walked back up the stairs, roommate in tow, and started looking for smoke, or fire, or anything at all. Risky, yes, but necessary I think.
We started deactivating the alarms (which, it turns out, were all linked together), until one last one remained. Pulling it off the ceiling we found the back of it wet. There was a leak. From the roof. It had started our alarms going off, scaring the bejeezus out of us. An inspection of the roof showed a puddle about an inch deep, smack dab in the center of the roof, around a large, poorly designed drain. It was right above our smoke detector.
Now I should point out the the area of the roof that was under water is also the second litter box for our neighbor's cat from the building next door. The cursed thing pads over and relieves itself, then tries to cover it's deed and ends up scraping away just a little bit of the weather proofing material of our roof. Hence, the large bare patch that happened to be underwater. It took an hour of bailing out in the rain and sweeping to the drain to reduce the size of the puddle and we still had a minor leak. I suppose I should be happy, after all, there was no fire. Glee.
It's a wet Tuesday and as the rain bent over at the waist to get under my umbrella I got that peculiar feeling that says, "these pants are not going to be on me all day, are they?" By the time I got to the train, I was making small puddles in the grubby carpeting that's on the floor of BART. Then there's the socks ...
Luckily I had some workout clothes at work, and so if you were in my cube around 9:30a you would see me in my green training pants with the yellow stripe. Can we say, "clown"? I think we can. But what can you do? Certainly not sit around feeling your wet jeans against the back of your calves. No good ...
Like most nerds, I am a big fan of comics, although I like to pride myself for evolving past stories of spandex-clad do-gooders cavorting around the city, with a quip and blow for equally colorful miscreants.
aside: That introductory sentence was almost entirely inspired by the prose of Stan Lee - thanks Stan!
So like the evolved nerd I am, I have instead been reading comics that talk about people, their lives and all that David Copperfield crap that I'm sure you all hate.
aside: That sentence was entirely lifted from Catcher in the Rye - thanks JD Salinger!
At any rate I ran across a comic entitled "Y, the Last Man" which follows the exploits of the improbably named Yorick, a "lovable" escape-artists/slacker who rises one morning to discover himself (and his pet monkey) literally the last man on earth. That is to say that all the other men have died mysteriously and only women are left. The world turns into the sort of "womyn's land" different from the one envisioned by separatists in the 70's. Now, I'm really not going to sit here and argue about whether or not the disappearance of men would lead to a heaven on earth or what have you. I will say that the book is interesting, though poorly drawn and with somewhat weak dialogue at times. But it's interesting...
You know what else is interesting? That one of the characters on Lost was reading Y the Last Man in Spanish in a scene, the same week that a Y the Last Man poster is on the eponymous hero's wall in the show Chuck.
WTF people? What's with the full court press on this comic? Could a movie be in the offing? Does Hollywood like getting women to complain? The answers are mostly yes, here. While the comic is not - mostly - some adolescent fantasy of being the last man alive to service a world of women, it is also not a different adolescent fantasy of how awesome the world would be if women ran the show. There's a lot of room to screw it all up, most of which has been at least traversed by the authors of the comic, but Hollywood does have bigger budgets. Gosh, this post went somewhere entirely different from where I thought it would.