Category: Pulverbatch

December 12, 2003 /

I got a bunch of Casual Day stickers in exchange for donating to the office Angel Tree, in a typical let’s-defeat-the-point kind of gesture. Casual Day stickers, as you might guess, allow you to wear casual clothes for one day per sticker. The thing is this: I don’t own any jeans, and all of my formerly respectable cargoes and khakis have now degraded to the point where only an emo kid or grad student would be caught wearing them. In order to maintain even a modicum of professionality in the office, I’ll still have to pick clothes out of my Nice Work Clothes wardrobe.

So next week, on Monday and Friday, I am–get ready–going to come to work with my shirt untucked.

(Gentlemen, you may revive your ladies with a gentle fanning.)

In other work news, it occurred to me on the elevator that I do a lot of thinking on elevators, because elevator trips in this building are freaking interminable. It occurred to me shortly afterward that this can only get worse the higher up you go, which makes it ridiculous that higher floors are reserved for people with increasing amounts of importance.

You could argue that they enjoy a nicer view from that height, but the fact is the view sucks. It’s all parking lot, clogged highway and leprous rusted roofs. I think it has to be the last gasp of the Puritan work ethic: the CEO and other assorted Grand Mugwumps up on 16 are trying to punish themselves for being successful.

When I buy the old YWCA building and turn it into a thriving commercial hub with a bakery and apartments and all that, man, my offices are going to be right down on the bottom.

Either that, or I’ll have a really monster fire-station pole, with a catapult for getting back up.

December 8, 2003 /

Apparently there was a wave of layoffs and transfers this morning, but I wasn’t one of them. I feel like I dodged a bullet–it’s kind of a financial crunch right now, and I’m not exactly a crucial resource. Then again, there are people within ten feet of me who make my annual pay in a week, so I guess my value still outweighs my cost.

Yeek.

Update 1246 hrs: Okay, two weeks. Still.

December 4, 2003 /

I lived through my exams, and I did get an A in the other class, so BAM: school is done for Brendan. This is still weird! I don’t have classes for like a month!

In case you’re still in classes and are wondering if that was intended to make you hate me: yes. Also, “[redacted].” (Hey, [redacted]! Get a blog!)

December 3, 2003 /

(I almost forgot this, pokéblogged yesterday morning at 1106 hrs:)

We have a guest lecturer in AI today–one of the students in the class, who may be the most Mediterranean person I’ve ever met. His opening:

“Hello everybody. My name is Andreas. I am here today to talk about the topic of: rowboats.“

“Robots,” actually. Still the coolest lecture intro ever.

November 30, 2003 /

I experienced a surreal and Sumanaesque moment upon the sudden realization, tonight, that I have a LiveJournal! No, wait. I knew that. Stephen gave it to me. What was surreal was planning to set up another account, with the aim of syndicating NFD, and then discovering that a certain kind somebody had already done so!

LiveJournal: A neverending font of generosity. If you’re Brendan.

November 30, 2003 /

I really hate remedy medicine. I actually don’t like taking drugs at all, though I make mild use of caffeine and will choke down / vaporize / intravene something if, you know, I’ll die otherwise. But decongestants, antihystamines, painkillers, soporifics… bleagh. I don’t like to think about treating symptoms instead of causes. I can live with symptoms! Fix the root problem!

Nevertheless, living with an iron-willed roommate who happens to be a med student will eventually weaken you on the placebo-effect front. I’ve been taking Robitussin for about 24 hours now, which is why I was functional enough to sit in a VERY COLD ticket booth and run sound for PI Sketch with only one slip-up. It was a good show. The crowd liked it. I touched Yale inappropriately and got to meet Allilea, who differs from most other celebrities in that she’s taller in real life.

Tomorrow I crash hard, and try to get ready for my last homework and last exam on Tuesday. Then Thursday, then finals, and then the semester will be over. This is very weird. Who the hell gets out for finals on December 4th? U of L, that’s who.

Yea, I go to bed to rest my fevered brow, and to cough until the Robitussin kicks in. It’s not like this is unusual, I get sick about once every winter, but I start to worry about my brain health when I notice that I’m subtracting 230 from 1830 and coming up with 1400.

November 29, 2003 /

Incidentally, the reason I’m posting at 0230 hrs on a morning when I have no business being up is because I just got back from teching the Project Improv (scripted) show, PI Sketch, available for your viewing ONE NIGHT ONLY in about fourteen hours. Anybody who doesn’t mind a little raunch with their humor should get there between 1830 and 2000 hrs and stay until 2200, as there will be a carnival with a duck pond, and also rock songs and jokes. I’m running sound.

Unrelatedly, I’m sick. And use too many adverbs.

November 25, 2003 /

There’s these two people named Sara Baase and Allen Van Gelder, right? And they wrote an algorithms textbook, and basically, fuck them. It must be nice to live in a frilly, golden fantasy world, where everyone has a pony and arrays are indexed from one instead of zero. You know, just like no computer in the world has ever done.

Yeah, I’ve been up for a while. Stupid projects. Last day of classes before MY MOM GETS MARRIED.

November 20, 2003 /

I don’t know, is it still cool to like Weekly World News? Are they pre-post-hip or something? I don’t know. I can’t keep up. What I do know is that a couple of years ago I used them as my very first GSP hall theme, including stringing up multiple copies in the stalls for Quiet Reading Time, and it was a smash. I think that’s when I really fell in love with them.

And I know one other thing, which is that even when their headlines are ambiguous, they’re still some of the most refined brilliance commonly available for what, two dollars?

Osama Recruits Cloned Hitler