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| Work has been encouraging us to use a lot of PTO this month. I don't know if encouraging is the right word. Advocating? Pushing? Pushing I guess. They've been pushing it like credit protection plans for some reason. The major projects for the year are done for the most part...so I can see it making sense to get people rested up before January. In any case, I decided to take Monday and Tuesday off this week. Four-day weekends are such a great thing.
What I've been noticing though is that every day off of work isn't necessarily a weekend. There's something about the way that I feel on Saturday that is really hard for me to duplicate when I have days off. I guess I don't really feel like it's a weekend...I feel like it's a workday that I'm staying home from work. And for whatever reason, the two feel very different. For example, when noon rolls around on Saturday, I usually don't have a care in the world. The 3 hours between then and 3:00, when Julie and I can trek over to Ra's happy hour, seems like an eternity. On a workday that I'm not working, it's the total opposite. I realize it's already noon and I get this feeling like - Fuck the day is already half over, you better go do something productive to make it worth staying home today.
I remember noticing that when I worked at Acura, the days off didn't really feel as relaxing as I would have hoped. I thought at the time that it was simply because I always felt tethered to work (which I'm sure had a lot to do with it), but I think it's also that the days off were never on the weekends - it was usually a Tuesday and Wednesday. Meh. Now that I think about it...I think it's always been like this. Staying home from school when I was little...it never felt like a weekend. Felt like staying home during a school day. And it was even worse back then because you couldn't do anything productive even if you wanted to. Couldn't go ride your bike because you were usually sick, or at least pretending to be. Had to stay home all day and watch court TV and shitty talk shows.
Maybe it just feels like a weekend when everybody else is taking a break with me. Maybe it's the fact that I'm chililng at home while everybody else is at work that makes me feel like I'm falling behind. Or maybe I'm just stressed out for some reason and this has nothing to do with it. Oh well - I'll have a real vacation in a few weeks and that will be way more relaxing than a normal weekend 
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| Wow...2 years since my last one of these things. I think xanga is like those friends you meet at places like camp when you're little. You always go, "yeah we'll totally write and keep in touch" but then you never do. Not because you don't want to; just because other things come up and without realizing it your mind becomes preoccupied with them. Come to think of it, I don't think my browser automatically underlined misspelled words the last time I was here. Amazing
I don't really know what pulled me back here. I thought it would be a ghost town - but Andrew, Casey, and Jenny...your dedication to posting updates has inspired me to keep going. To keep things consistent with my old posts, I was going to come here and elaborate on how much I hate AT&T, but then I noticed that my last post was about Verizon so I feel like that would be poor form. I'll just put on the record that I hope they go to hell and leave it at that.
It's kind of funny to me how many of my old entries were about quitting smoking. I remember thinking how much it mattered how I approached quitting: when I smoked my last one, how I smoked my last one, planning it to coincide with holidays and low stress situations, telling people I'm quitting vs. I quit, or maybe even keeping it a secret until I was sure I wouldn't go back. Funniest thing is that none of that made the slightest bit of difference in the end. One day I thought about it and saw my life 2 different ways - one with me continuing to smoke and the other with me never smoking again - and it was as easy at that.
What else has changed...no more WoW. I guess that's a pretty big change for me. That one was kind of tough to let go of. There'd been plenty of times where I was pissed off at the game and felt like quitting but in the end I just couldn't commit the time to it anymore that it would take to keep playing at the level I wanted to play at. This realization came right around the time I accomplished a lot of things (in game) that I had been working on for a long, long time. Joined and eventually took a leadership role with a truly great group of players, got my Battlemaster title, finally hit 2k, and made my own PvP video. For those of you non-WoWers out there, that probably sounds like a lot of silly "voodoo language" - so I'll just say it was the culmination of days/months/years of hard work. Plus I was on a kickass 2v2 team with my girlfriend...how many people can make that claim? 
So this will have to do for now. I will be back though! We'll totally write and keep in touch this time
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| Verizon Wireless
Verizon Wireless can go straight to hell. I realize that there are certain areas where they are the only viable option when it comes to reception. And you can be damn sure that they know it too because they milk it for every last possible penny. It would be bad enough if they only allowed you to use horrible phones with their service. But no - they take GOOD phones, and then take their horribly generic, feature-crippling, haphazardly written crap ass UI and stick it on them so that you only use half of the features that the phone is capable of. And you have to use their garbage interface to use even those.
I used a Motorola Razr with the Verizon interface on it for about a year and a half and I can't fucking take it anymore. They sell Motorolas, Nokias, Samsungs, and LGs and at some point decided that their homemade interface was so good, that they ought to cram it onto every single phone that they carry. Some of these phone manufacturers actually make really good products and even they aren't arrogant enough to toss one standardized UI on every one of their phones. But you can be damn sure Verizon won't let that stop them. What's the result? A bunch of poorly designed menus that you can't customize, on a restrained phone that lags like a 286 running Counterstrike.
I don't know which phone manufacturer came up with predictive text input first but it's a great idea because you only have to hit each key once when you're writing a text message on a number pad. Sure, there are times when some combination of keys may be two different possible words ("leo" and "ken" for instance...or "awake" and "cycle"), but the majority of them it gets right the first time. That is unless you're using my generation of razr with verizon's cheap ass interface forced onto it. Lets say you hit the number 4 and hit space...that's an easy one to figure out. You're typing a one-letter word that could either be "G", "H", or "I". Which is most likely? If you think the answer is "I", then you're too stupid to work for Verizon wireless, because the whiz kids over at team-V decided it should be "G" instead. Even the Nokia 8290 that I had 7 years ago could get that right.
So yeah, if you've ever gotten a text message from me that said something like "G'll be there in a few minutes," you have Verizon to thank for that - the lousy rat bastards.
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| I've got to work on starting the day off better. I think that it makes a big difference in how you feel and perform throughout the rest of the day. Not for complete lack of effort...but today was a bad example.
I finally got to sleep around 3:00 last night...but still planned on getting up at 7:00 so that I could get things moving early. I actually woke up a minute before 7:00 on my own, energized and excited about getting an early start. I made it out of bed and as far as my closet when something occurred to me...this was the first day in over a week I didn't wake up feeling like I had been sitting in a sauna for the past hour. Some background info here - it has just been stupid hot in OC for the last couple of weeks. The A/C in my room doesn't work on account of God hating me and my window faces east. If I leave it closed at night, there's no way I can get to sleep. And SO, typically an hour or so before I wake up in the morning, the beautiful sun comes up and starts pouring ruthless sweltering misery in through the open window. This morning was different - and as a result, I really had no choice but to enjoy the breeze and go back to sleep.
I made it out of bed around 9:00 or so, got dressed, accepted that the box of cereal that I bought to start having for breakfast a week and a half ago would have remain unopened for one more day, and proceeded on my merry way to work. I was pretty sure that Jason was going to be back for work today, but he wasn't in his room and his car wasn't outside so I figured he hadn't come back yet. He emailed me a video yesterday of this enormous hurricane that was about to crash on top of them in Cabo and I haven't heard from him since. Seriously dude, I hope you're ok. Anyways, along the drive to work I started thinking about the day ahead. You know...some days you can just soar through 'drug free and proud' so to speak, and some days you've got to resort to overpaying for that legal liquid stimulant that makes Rockstar the wonderful drink it is. Today was one of the latter.
I stopped at a gas station on Barranca and Jamboree and grabbed a Rockstar only to notice that the girl behind me in line had come in for the exact same thing. It reminded me of the movie "Can't Hardly Wait' where that dude goes to school and notices that JLH is eating the same exact pop-tart that he is. We were chatting about how wonderful this drink is because the guy in front of us in line was taking forever to pull change out of his pocket. Anyways, my turn to pay and I'm using an ATM card because I need cash back. I wait...and wait...and wait...and the lady working there tells me that the card is DECLINED. Let me tell you something...when you use a CC in a situation like that and the cashier announces that it has been declined, there is really NOTHING you can do to play the situation off in any other way than 'Hey everybody...look at me - I'm an idiot and just got my credit card declined.' I had no idea why my ATM card wouldn't work...but I needed the caffeine so I used a credit card instead. It meant giving up the chance to get cashback and buy munchies from the vending machine once I got to work...but at least I'd have my Rockstar. Swiped...and deeeeeeeeclined.
The cashier THEN told me that if the satellite was broken, as it had been recently, that the CCs wouldn't go through. Having no cash - I was out of luck. I drove away...not really thinking about why the credit cards might have been declined, or about the fact that I probably would have lived happily ever after with the Rockstar girl if I hadn't been indirectly called a broke scrub by the attendant. All I was really thinking about is how I was going to get the damn Rockstar before I got to work.
There's this smoke shop on Barranca and Von Karman that I used to go to a lot because it was the closest place to my office that you could buy cigarettes from. For all the times I went there, I hate that fucking store. It gives me the creeps. Everything from the smell, to the creepy ass two guys who run it, to the weirdos they have lurking around there makes me want to stay as far the hell away from it as possible. It reminds me of that pawn shop in Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames get kidnapped. Anyways, I know they have a little fridge there so I thought I might get a Rockstar from there - as I was already running late to work. Turns out they do have a fridge, but no rockstar. No biggie - I'll just get a water and get cashback so I can get one from the vending machine once I get to work. Nope. They don't DO cashback. Whatever, screw that place.
I really couldn't afford to drag my feet any longer getting to work...so I figured I'd just check my little change box when I got in. It's not uncommon for me to have a few dollars in change sitting in there and I hadn't used it in a while so I figured I'd check. Right now it has 47 pennies. I don't even know where the pennies come from because the vending machines don't dispense them. In any case, I would need 178 more of them, and for the machines to start accepting pennies, for any good to come from it.
So that's that. Tomorrow will be different though. Tomorrow I'm going to wake up early and start the day out better 
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| I think I'm getting sick 
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