MySpace, March 4 – 11, 2008

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Phoney Baloney

Okay, so I’ve had a cell phone for a week now. This is not earth-shattering news (“Where was the kaboom? There should have been an earth-shattering kaboom.” 10 pt. if you can guess the reference there) to most people, but this is the first cell phone I’ve had that was mine, and the first phone that we as a couple have had since, oh, I’d guess 1998 or so. At that time we got a 15-minutes-for-$15 plan, and threw a phone in the glovebox of the car. When it started costing us $50 per month if we made a call, we canned it. It served its purpose when my wife was commuting from Lafayette, Indiana to Indianapolis, Indiana, which if you don’t know Indiana geography, is a 50-mile drive each way.

Anyway, last week we entered the 21st century and got a pair of phones on Sprint’s cheapest family plan. I like the phone, it’s a cheap knockoff of a Razr — which I guess is a good phone or something — and it has a camera and some web things to play with. My wife’s is pink. I have exactly one contact in my phone, and it’s my wife. Wait, I take that back, I have my dad in there, too. That’s two contacts. I’m not giving my number out to everybody — hell, I’m not giving my number out to anybody at this point. I’m paying like $50/month to have an inert phone in my pocket, basically.

But having one of these things has made me look even closer at the nasty, rude, boneheaded and dangerous things people do while on their phone. Driving is a big one. I seem to be behind more and more people who shake their car around like a rag-doll and play chicken with oncoming traffic…and when I can get beside them, they have that phone crammed up agains their ear. I just want to get a cellphone jammer (illegal in the U.S., but selling like hotcakes out the back of Manhattan electronics stores) except I want my jammer to broadcast the message: “Hang up your phone and drive your fucking car!”

Hellsticks, cell phones today are like cigarettes were when I was a kid. When people exit a building, they have the phone in their hand before they’re even out the door, and it’s flicked open and dialed after two steps. There are so far unproven theories that cell phones can cause brain cancer, and are equivalent to a couple of drinks, when it comes to driving ability. Ladies’ purses used to have a cigarette pocket on them, now they have a cellphone pocket. There are movements to ban driving and talking on a cell phone.

Honestly, I don’t see what the big deal is. They’re phones. I have no desire to always be talking to someone, and I refuse to let myself be tethered to a ringing phone when I’m not at work. Really, I don’t get much from hanging on a phone talking to anyone. It’s a phone…call me if you need me to bring home milk and snow tires. I’ll call you if my leg’s broken or my car’s stuck.

Bah. ’nuff said.

11:55 PM - 0 Comments – 0 Kudos – Add Comment – Edit - Remove

Monday, March 10, 2008

Now We Can Vote!
Current mood: apathetic

So…tomorrow we will have owned our house for one week. We are homeowners — Landowners, even, so now we can vote. I should be excited about it. I’m not. This isn’t the first time we’ve owned a home, and this isn’t even LIKE the first time we owned a home, but that time went so horribly wrong that it’s kind of taken the fun out of it. It’s sort of like, not special to me anymore…home-ownership is supposed to be a big deal, but based on our first experience, it’s just a money-suck. I suppose it helps that we bought the house we already live in, so there’s no big move associated with closing on our house….we really just send our rent somewhere else. And if the furnace breaks WE have to pay for it. Hooray.

It’s not that this house is BAD or anything. It’s been rented for the past four years, so it’s kind of dingy, but nothing’s really trashed or anything. We have plans to replace ugly carpets, countertops and stuff. We have plans to paint, and install wainscoting, and finish the basement, and plant a garden and stuff. We can MAKE this house really nice, but right now it’s just kind of grungy and brown. Yes, brown. The outside is brown, the carpet is brown, the floors are brown, the counters are brown and the inside paint is the worst, it’s kind of a tan/brown/pink/orange congomeration, depending on the light. Uck.

But once we do that stuff, this house will be great — we have a back deck and a private back yard with woods. We have a garage, and enough room for all of us, and the house is laid out fairly nicely. Our last house was just too small — 832 square feet for a family of (at that time) four is just impossible. We ate each other, and it was bad. On top of that, our last house was built with a near-total lack of quality…we had shingles blow off, we had siding blow off, we had cracks in our foundation and warps in our roof, and we had zero privacy on our lot. And if we still had that house today, we’d have been lucky to sell it for 80% of what we bought it for in today’s plummeting house market.

So what’s my point? Good question. Let’s see…we bought our house. I’m not excited. Home-ownership has been a let-down for us. I think that’s it. Maybe once we get some of our plans in motion I’ll get more excited. Until then….

1:53 AM - 0 Comments – 0 Kudos – Add Comment – Edit - Remove

Saturday, March 08, 2008

I’m 72% Redneck. Aw, gawd.

Thank you, Margie, for giving me another addictive quiz. So I’m 72% redneck. I’m kind of surprised by that…if you knew me you wouldn’t picture me living on a farm or camping or eating squirrel, I guess. I’m as likely to say “predicament” as “trouble.” But I guess I’m a redneck. H’yuck.

Are You A Redneck

(x) have you ever lived in the country?
(x)shot a gun?
(x) own a gun?
(x) hunted? (3D targets)
(x) driven a truck?
Subtotal= 5

() chewed tobacco?
(x) gone camping?
(x) listened to country?
()owned a country cd?
(x)fished?
(x) worn a cowboy hat?
(x) worn cowboy boots?
Subtotal= 10

(x) ridden a horse?
(x) seen a farm?
(x) worked on a farm?
(x) lived on a farm? veg. farm w/ rabbits, doves, chickens
(x) fed a farm animal?
() worn carhartt?
(x) lived in a small town?
(x) worked on a car?
Subtotal= 17

(x) seen a nascar race?
(x) been to a nascar race?
(x) been to an oval track?
(x) seen a demolition derby?
() been in a demolition derby?
(x) seen a figure 8 race?
(x) talked on a cb radio?
(x) had a cb in your car?
(x) seen smokey and the bandit more than 10 times?
Subtotal= 25

(x) watched the dukes of hazzard episodes?
() owned more than two cars that don’t run?
(x) been to a junkyard
() been a racist
() been in a INTERNATIONAL vs john deere argument?
() gone cow tipping?
(x)made love in a truck on a back road
Subtotal=28

() had to ponder whether your family said tire or tower
() been sprayed with deer pee?
(x) worn camo?
(x) ridden a 4-wheeler?
() owned a cabin?
(x) went swimming in the pond?
Subtotal= 31

() drank white lightening?
(x) had your whole family on the front porch?
() thought that wal-mart was the coolest place ever?
() own a shirt with a rebel flag?
(x) eaten venison (deer meat)?
(x) cooked over a fire?
(x) ever been muddin?
(x) ate squirrel?
Subtotal= 36

Overall= 36

Now multiply your score by 2 and post it as “I’m –% redneck”.

YEEHAWW! If your redneck score is over 50%, you can officially call yourself a redneck

Dont sound surprised!!!!

1:33 AM - 0 Comments – 0 Kudos – Add Comment – Edit - Remove

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

My Wife.

I don’t blog about my wife. Ever. There are consequences for that.

Currently listening :
She Hates Me
By Puddle of Mudd
Release date: 02 September, 2002

6:38 PM - 2 Comments – 0 Kudos – Add Comment – Edit - Remove

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Antidepressants, Redux

Okay, I tried to post a blog last night, and got too far in to start over when I fumble-fingered some hotkey-sequence-of-instant-Firefox-death. I guess ctrl-shift-I (or whatever it was) means “close immediately, the user wants to fuck up what he was doing.” Not that I’m bitter.

So anyway…I read someone’s blog — someone I may not know, someone who may not be on Myspace, and the last line of their blog mentioned antidepressants, and how you can’t find life in them…life is in you. Had nothing to do with most of their blog. But it reminded me of my former life (say, five years ago or so) when I was on the things.

Here’s the deal…we lived in Indiana for five years. Indiana is the polar opposite of me. To get along with my co-workers, I had to not be me. And that screws one up. I also lost my grandmother, grandfather, mother and an unborn baby while I lived there. Indiana was my very own special five years of hell. And then I moved from there to here, and started a high-stress Help Desk job — national turnover rate: 18 months. I lasted: six years.

So I went from everything-except-my-job-is-Hell Indiana, directly to my-job-is-intense-burning-Hell Michigan. And I burned out…I burned out hard, and totally, down to a smoldering, black bit of volcanic slag. And then I spent another two years at that job. You do what you have to if you support a family.

So yeah, at one point along the way, I got set up with antidepressants. When you start taking them, you don’t immediately feel better. You feel drunk. You feel just-past-buzzed for the entire day. For a month. It takes a month for your brain to accept what the pills are doing to it and settle down.

And then after two more months, that breed of pill stopped working for me. Did I mention that I have huge tolerances to pills? When I take cold medicine, it only works the first time around. If I get another box of the same stuff, it doesn’t work. So they switched my meds. And I spent another month drunk. And after that, I had several months in which the pills made me not-depressed.

That’s what they do. They don’t make you happy. They make you not-depressed. They cut out the lows, and they cut out the highs as well, and they leave you with a middle-nothing kind of blah, day in and day out.

And then that prescription started losing its effect, and I was staring down the barrel of another med change, and another month of side effects, and that’s when it happened. I had an epiphany.

It’s silly, actually, and sounds flippant. I realized that my problems were all in my head. Yeah, I know how it sounds, but it’s deeper than that. I was driving home from work, and thinking, and I realized that there is no drug, no therapist, no doctor that is going to know what’s going on in my head as well as I do. If anyone is going to take charge of my upstairs it’s me. My depression and associated stuff…was all in my head. MY head. I was done being a collection of symptoms, and ready to be ME again. I weaned myself off the drugs, and haven’t taken them since.

It scared my boss shitless. She became my new manager while I was deep in the burned-out-depressed-bitter-cynical-drugged-poor-me-I’m-hurting crap…and then I told her “Oh, I went off my meds.” Her eyes bugged out of her head. It was funny, though I understand in retrospect. There I was, one of the problem-children of her department, and that was all she knew of me, and she thought I was going to snap and start killing people with a hacksaw. Oh…good times…

But there it is. I’ve been there, and somehow managed to snap myself out of it. Life is inside you. YOU. Not a bottle of pills. Use them as a tool, as a crutch…as a TEMPORARY crutch. But never let them be your life, because your life will be a middle-nothing blah, and that’s not living. If you don’t want to be depressed anymore…don’t be. It’s as simple as that. It’s as blisteringly hard as that.

Peace out. (delivered like Kip on ‘Napoleon Dynamite’)

6:13 PM - 0 Comments – 0 Kudos – Add Comment – Edit - Remove