The name. |10:07 AM|
My last name isn't that hard to pronounce. It has two syllables, one of them is a common word for one of the genders, and it has 2 vowels evenly spaced. Despite this, about two fifths of the people who attempt to say my last name get it wrong, and usually all of them do it the same way.
The pronounce it "hymen".
This is awkward for everyone around, since the person usually doesn't realize what they've said until they've heard it out loud. It's awkward for me, since I often need to correct them. I don't immediately snap, and I've even managed to suppress the brief roll of my eyes (not out of superiority complexes or anything, just mental fatigue regarding my last name). Sometimes the mis-pronouncer is someone on a public announcement system, like at a restaurant. So my "name" will be called out and I'll have to walk up to the front desk. Sometimes(luckily rarely) people look up with the "What did they just say?" expression on their face. It's not like I can yell the proper way to pronounce my name across the restaurant, that'd be rude. Instead, the folks around me can quietly think "That man's name is Mr. membranous tissue that occludes the external vaginal orifice!"
Whoopty SHIT! |10:59 PM|
I was talking to a customer on the phone today, just like normal, when Vid starts "yelling" across the room "They signed the contract!"
Quickly, I finished the call, and asked the standard "What?"
"They signed the contract!"
What did this mean? It meant I was going to be hired. It meant health benefits, it meant a raise. It meant a lot of things, and after this signature was confirmed, I couldn't put a finger on my emotional state. I think it was a bad sign when I reacted much more intensely about the appearence of peanut butter M&M's in the vending machine.
I was elated, I was relieved, I was calm. I tried to get pumped up about it. I sent this crazy ass email to Sulzanti, I'm sure he appreciated the FUCK out of that. I told Wench, and she reacted enthusiastically. I was just too burned out on the whole subject.
But I can talk about peanut butter M&M's. They're not a reeses pieces rip off, as you might suspect. They're larger, and have a layer of chocolate before the peanut butter. They take longer to consume than reese pieces, if you leave them on your tongue like I do. I was extremely pleased at the turn of events that led to this 55 cent candy aquisition. I had some goofy prose written here about my love for this candy... "the shells come apart like the end of a good conversation, all the possiblities have fallen away leaving only what has been chosen"... and such, but I thought it made me look a wee bit too crazy. And I was just trying to be silly, not profound.
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Sunday, October 27, 2002
Neuron Speed Studies |6:47 PM|
Last night at an early halloween party (I attended as a drowned Icarus) I saw some very interesting bits of human behavior. Attending the party was an attractive woman, about the same age as the males in attendance. She seemed like a nice woman, and I was talking to her for a short while. I asked the party's host for some information about her, and I was told she attended some english classes, that she liked folks who were a little bit strange, that she had a one year old son, that she...
Me: Whoa, wait a second. A kid?
Hostess: Yeah! But he's really cute and...
Me: Hold on.
Turns out, I was the third person to go through this exact same rigamarole. "Who's the attractive chick? [moments later] A KID?!"
I'm fairly certain you could judge a person's base reaction time with how long after the words "1 year old son" it takes their body language to change drastically.
I'm trying to nail down the exact reasons that having a kid is such a firm downcheck. Some pretty cold shit was said that evening, that I want to have no association. I'm not making any judgements about the woman, I'm just curious.
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Dammit |7:28 AM|
Blogger fouled up again. I tried editing the last post multiple times, and the changes haven't taken effect yet. Oh well. I keep hitting the post and publish button, and hope the changes go through. It sucks when you rely on something to make changes that it said it made, and only when you check the actual page do you find out it didn't.
[edit]
Oh, wow. There we go.
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Paging a physics major |6:46 AM|
Just as a note, if you are ever carrying something heavy and begin to fall, you can radically change the course of your fall by hurling whatever it is you're carrying. I have seen this principle save several folks from injury, and this evening it saved my face. I was carrying a bag of garbage out of a friend's apartment as a favor when both of my shoes lost friction, and my legs shot out from underneath me. Now, the reason this traction failure was not a Catastrophic Failure was that I immediately whipped the bag of trash over my head and into the direction of the fall. This gave me the tiny push I needed to be in range of a hand rail, which I grabbed and saved myself from smashing my face into the ground. Woo hoo. It ain't exacly amazing, but the physics are what's important.
I'm also babbling to avoid talking about the stupid shit bugging me at...christ, 6:35am. I think I gained an hour this evening as well, so I've been up for a long, long time.
When the major accomplishment you can chalk up for a day is "made halloween costume" or "Cleaned kitchen" it's probably time to re-examine just what the fuck you're doing. It's not like I'm some kind of great artist, in a slump. I'm a fucking computer technician. In fact, I'm fairly certain you could base a definition of "What is art" on "What Cecil can't do". I can certainly TRY painting, but no one is going to say I did a good job. Same goes for fiction writing, or poetry. No one is ever going to call script manipulation or computer repair "art".
Merely managing to stick with this job long enough to get hired on for an obscene amount of money is sort of an accomplishment. But, as always, I'm second guessing myself. Luckily, I've got enough confidence to say to myself "I did the right things". Hell, one of the reasons I still bother with this journal is a way to look back at particular dates and times and get an idea of my mindset.
This is still a form of communication, though. Somewhere between open letter, graffiti sprayed on a wall, and screamed phrases from rooftops. Hell, there are probably still people reading this that I've never talked to, or people reading it that I don't suspect.
On a happier, and nearly as vague note, my finacial situation is steadily improving. True, I'm still having to pull a lot of overtime, and I currently lack health insurance completely, but hey, it's all a gamble. What this means is I still have a couple hundred in the bank, after rent and a couple bill payments. I can even send checks to the cable company and the electric company to get them off my back. That's a damn good thing. I also have enough to restart the Pictoz shirts in some new, more popular designs.
There's a lot of shit that needs to be done. To keep away the standard melancholy that sets in on sundays, I'll try to get as many of them accomplished as possible.
Return Thomas's DVD.
Clean up the book keeping on the pictoz site.
-Figure out if anyone still needs to be shipped a shirt
-set the inventory numbers to 0, until an accurate count is made
-look into "hooded T-shirts"
Finish the laundry