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"Fourty shots rang out! (...I know that's too many...)/ Fourty people fell! / Patty and Dan missed each other / But they shot that town to Hell!"
2002-07-16 17:23:51
Turns out I'm a hypochondriac, but one with two cavities. Got a dentist's appointment on surprisingly short notice (next day at 10:15) and the X-rays showed nothing at all wrong with the teeth I was worried about. No, it was the wisdom teeth that needed the work, leaving only one of them without any cavities or fillings. So I was in the chair until noon with the tooth-smoke coiling out around the drill. That part wasn't bad (neither of the cavities was too deep or reached the nerve) but the novacaine just freaks me out. I wish I'd never gotten a look at that long EVIL looking needle they use to administer the novacaine. Freaks the hell outta me whenever I think of someone sticking a needle into my gums. Spent an hour driving back to school, 40 minutes waiting for the novacaine to wear off to the point that I could eat something without a risk of loosing my cheek, ate lunch, and came in to work at 3:00. Don't know why I bothered. It's not like you can accomplish anything arriving that close to quittin' time. Eh.
The final cost? $210. I don't know what I was worried about. People think dental insurance is so wonderful just to avoid a pittance like this? Pah. I was prepared to pay double that. To make things even better, I stopped by the house to drop off my smoking ruin of a computer for my dad to look at (helps having an EE in the family) and discovered a tax return that'd never gotten cashed. That's $400 to the good.
Things are definitely looking up.
Thanks for the notes Bowler & doki doki. Hadn't heard from either of you in a while. (Wondering where KZ is though, he missed the AWA staff meeting...) Oh, and doki^2? I'm fairly certian that po' comes from the chain of po' folks diners. I think they completely invented the abbreviation as a "charming lack of sophistication" and it grew on the public mind like a lichen. Like the "hankercheif and a stick" hobo image. I mean, really. What could you actually carry in a handkercheif that wouldn't fit in your pocket anyway? -
2002-07-15 18:04:01
Gahhh. Last line of the subject below is "you may never know what it is."
AAAAllllllllllmost made it. -
"You know, just once, I'd like to be walking down the street and see a man chased by 300 red-haired juggling unicyclists. No explanation. No story in the paper the next day. Just to assure me that while there may be a perfectly good reason for something y
2002-07-15 18:02:52
I spend entirely too much time complaining. Been doing it for the past three posts, so I'm just gonna shut up now.
Well...in a minute. Last time, I swear.
I may have given the impression in my last post that I'm actually going to be po' after all of these monthly expenses, but the truth of the matter is that I'm more than adequately prepared for such an emergency. Way WAY back in high school, round about the end of 9th grade or so I started up a savings account into which I would occasionally funnel money recieved as gifts or from summer jobs or the like. The trick is, though, that I never actually looked at the balance. I'd always deposit, never withdraw, and never check how much I physically had. I never figured I had too much in there, as the payments went in on the order of 20-40$ most of the time with an occasional contribution of $100 around Christmas time. About halfway through my third year at Emory I decided to finally give in and see how much was in this emergency fund. Imagine my surprise when I discovered nearly five digits worth of solvent cash just sittin' round accumulating interest. Needless to say, now that I know it's there, the funds have just wavered around the same point rather than continuing their upward spiral.
So why am I bitching and moaning about these petty little expenses I've accrued? It's not like about to go under in credit card debt. (Whoops, forgot about that one.) I'm pissed because I've been TRYING to save more. As an actual salaried worker my monthly paycheck gets dumped wholesale into the magical multiplying savings account, and then slowly drained out as my petty pleasures of the flesh (DVDs, books, comics, discount computer games) add up over the month. Invariably I end up exactly where I started. Except this last month. I was nearly $700 to the good due to denial of all that sinful stuff. Now, due to the random confluence of all these stupid expenses, all my privation has come to naught.
After a few false starts, I've just gotta concede that writing intelligent movie reviews here at work...doesn't. I always forget the little notes I made (or misplace them ENTIRELY as I've done for the "Cartoon Crazies: Great Animators") and the enviroment is even colder than my apartment. (First floor in a large, open-structured building always ends up blasted to an arctic wasteland by the efforts of the top floor to keep from reaching the tropic of Capricorn. As for my room, my roomates are all beings composed entirely of frost and are thus unable to tolerate anything less than AC all the way on, full blast, coldest setting, 24/7.)
Hmmm. Stuff. I need to apologize about the "Nick Fury" bit last time, as I got the schedule wrong and it came on 9:30. (They showed the movies in reverse order.)
The quote from last time was one of the stanzas from "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," which I read the majority of while sitting and waiting for my case to come up in traffic court. Most of y'all will remember it from the stanzas they always make you read in HS. "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and Thou" and "The hand writes, and, having writ, moves on" (quoted from memory here). I'm not much of one for poetry, mostly because I enjoy it too much. See, a story I can remember with a phrase or two. A movie, just a couple of images. Musical lyrics flow naturally from the instrumental contributions. Poetry, however, is so indebted to the exact words and structure for it's cadence and overall impression, that you have to remember ALL of it or you might as well remember none. Like memorizing the punchline and not the setup will give you nothing worth remembering. Well, I ALWAYS screw up poetry, so I find it frustrating when I discover a particular stanza I like, and know that I'll never manage to remember it for proper learned (snobbish) interjection without writing it down and carrying it around with me.
Anyway, despite this predeliction against such a medium, this particular book was fairly entertaining. "The Rubaiyat" was written in the early part of the eleventh century by the Islamic Persain (a bit redundant for the time) poet Omar Khayyam. There are a couple of misconceptions about even the title itself. "Omar Khayyam" is a pseudonym for "Abu ol-Fath ebn-Ebrahim 'Omar ol-Khayyami of Nishapur", and the pseudonym appears to come from his father's occupation (a common source for pen-names) as "Khayyam" means "tent-maker." "Rubaiyat" is merely a particular format of rhyming four-line poem. The whole set itself is just a collection of these little four-line poems, the vast majority having nothing to do with one another in any story-telling sense. There's enough disagreement over which Rubaiyat are legitimately Omar's that the collection sold under that title in the US vary astoundingly from the bare, first-translation (1859) 75 in the reproduced edition I picked up (for $2.50 in a used book store) to over 400. It seems that the poems were declared heretical and grousingly frowned upon by the officials that did that sort of thing in Persia, and thus the rest of the world didn't find out about this poet until Edward Fitzgerald took an interest 800 years after Omar's death.
So what terrible blasphemous material was being spouted by this fellow that his little poems were so greviously frowned upon?
Well, he liked his wine. Seriously. The book I have is a collection of the first three editions published by Fitzgerald (each with varying lineups and gaining nearly 20 stanzas with each edition) and, at a guess, I'd say 85% of them all extol the vitues of getting yourself really blotto. Clever turns of phrase, clever framing, nice composition (in translation, of course, don't know how clever it was originally) all with the punchline being "Drink up! Why waste the time of your life being sober and serious! Today will never be back again!"
Funny, they never taught us that bit in High School.
I think I would have paid more attention had I realized that. (I'm of the opinion that many English teachers spend so much time teaching kids to regard the classics with a kind of unfathomable awe that the blatant simplicity of most of the points goes by while the kids are searching for it in some secluded corner of the symbology. Except for James Joyce. He really is that impenetreble.)
Oh, there's a few others in there that had a bit of a higher aim. One of the few sequential bits was six or eight stanzas of discussion between pieces on a potter's shelf contemplating the mind of their apparently capricious creator. A pretty clever metaphore for God, but he couldn't resist slipping in one old jug, declaring that though he be old and dry, fill him to the brim with wine and his youthful aspects would return. Those that contemplated the higher cause were in the plain minority, though.
Strangely enough, despite what he wrote, Omar spent enough of his time sober to draw up a treaties on algebra and revise the Arabic calendar system. Which may have explained why his soliloquy to binge drinking was allowed to pass.
Hmm. Whatta'ya know. A review.
(P.S. EK: Spotted your previous note and meant to send thanks your way as well, but forgot on the way out the door. I wonder who comprises the rest of my little readership here? KZ for one, at least. *Ahem* KZ: WHY WEREN'T YOU AT THE STAFF MEETING? That is all.) - 2002-07-13 11:28:23 Oh, and AD, thanks for the note that someone's still reading. I needed that.
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"You know, my Friends, how long since in my House / For a new Marriage I did make Carouse: / Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed, / And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse."
2002-07-13 11:27:54
Gonna give this a shot...not sure how far I'll get, especially with no reference material at all at hand.
I am poor as hell and I'm not gonna take it any more. Been hemorrhaging cash at an alarming rate ever since I got back from vacation. For starters, I had the court date for that stupid "side-view-mirror collision" this last week, and that served admirably to tie me up for the entire day. The ticket was necessicary as evidence of the event for my insurance company to properly cover the poor guy (and his easily-dinged-car), and since it was a ticket involving an accident (no matter how minor) I had to appear in traffic court. All the ticket read was "improper lane change" so I figgered that the cost would be fairly low and plead "Nolo Conteste" which isn't an admission of guilt, but an admission that the penalty is so trifling that dealing properly with a "not guilty" plea is more trouble than the cost of the ticket. Thing is, they don't tell you the $$ involved until AFTER you plea. I know that's the way it was supposed to be, since it said as much on the "plea form" you have to fill out when you enter the court, but frankly it makes no sense in my eyes. Just like the big gold lettering over the judge's podium that stated this was a "cyber-courtroom."
What?
Anyway, turns out that the cost is $101.00. The guy ahead of me got a $36 fine. 'The hell? And why that $1? Just to piss me off? It worked.
Two days later, I come to campus and have to pay the new parking fees. $360.00. Plus one of the inevitable overdue campus parking tickets. (I use my car for transport of human blood samples from the hospital to the lab. I am not allowed to park anywhere near the lab, because that would be another $360.00 for two parking areas, including the one near my dorm. So I have to park illegally at work to run the sample in, rather than cart a cooler across campus with "biohazard" and "blood only" written on the side. Inevitably, two or three times a semester I come out of the lab to find a parking ticket on my car. Dammit.) That's another $25.00.
Now for the fun stuff. I am working on at least one cavity. Possibly two or three. Felt the first twinge on the way up to WI, have been extra careful ever since, but I occasionally get a sharp stabbing pain when eating/drinking something sweet. I recently got transferred to the student health insurance plan. Guess what? NO DENTAL. (In searching for this particular bit of info yesterday, I pull up a page of orientation material for international students. It says "dental care in the US is EXPENSIVE. Unless it is an emergency, most students find it far cheaper to FLY HOME and have the dental work done there. Sigh.)
Oh, but there's more. Next month is tuition and housing.
And, to keep from getting in trouble with the campus software people, I just had to buy an $80 program for work (Reference Manager 10) and for installation on my home computer. Which is currently fucked. And I have to pay to get that fixed.
Oh wait, there's more. Car's due for an oil change, and the occurrence of an ominous squeak in the nether regions of the steering collumn mean it may require some maintenence.
And another $40 to supplementary groceries this week (ran out of nearly everything right before I left on vacation).
And I owe a friend about $20.
All this had me roiling in guilt just for spending $15 on comics this last week. Even worse, right before all this hit the fan, I'd splurged a bit on comics and DVDs the previous week, as the 2nd Season Farscape was coming out. (2 DVDs for the price of 2......but at least they'll be released a bit faster than the last season.)
So the upshot is I won't be keeping myself entertained through the spending of money for quite a while. This has the positive effect of getting me to read some of the books that have been piling (literally) up around my bed for the last few months. I'd also like to do some writing, start some good, hard work on the video I've got the bare beginnings of laid out and captured, as well as finally mastering that animation program (hash's work).
However, that would require a working computer. Dammit. I seriously wouldn't mind my present poor state if it wasn't for my busted computer. That alone could keep me busy on various projects indefinitely. I was even planning on posting one of my old stories serial-style in this journal, but that's currently locked up in the mute electronic heap overseeing the corner of my room.
I should also mention that I won't be seeing many flicks in the theaters for a while. (Powerpuff Girls, Reign of Fire, Eight-Legged Freaks, Halloween Ressurection, why'd you all have to come out now?) Did catch MIB II while I was up in the land o' cheese. Doesn't really warrent a full review. Here's the upshot: It's the first movie....AGAIN. Maybe a little better. I always thought that the first MIB movie was a massive waste of potential. They deal with aliens on a daily basis. They could be fighting any critter that their minds could imagine. And they write in a giant cockroach. Whoooooo hoooo. Oh it was fun and good and fun and all, but it coulda been better. Faster, or more action packed, or more convoluted in storyline, or funnier. It just tried to do all of that at once and didn't really manage spectacular coolness in any of them. This one managed to be a bit funnier and a bit more interesting with some of the aliens, like the subway-muncher, but, beyond that, the only difference in the plot was that Jay was initiating Kay (you know why if you saw any of the previews) instead of the other way around. Oh, and a hideously awful ending plot point taken straight outta the ending of "The Elfstones of Shannarah." (Whoa. May have out-geeked myself there.) Oh, and if you look close, you'll see that the new controles for the car are a set of playstation controllers.
Freak-tastic time.
That Captian Carrot review I told you about previously is now finished. The author really knows his stuff, pulling out bits I only vaugely remember and background on the writers and artists I never knew. Well, I crowed about this previously, so I'll just post the link.
http://www.faans.com/carrot1.html
Go. Read. Take a peek into one of my childhood obsessions.
Also on the freak-tastic front, Sci-Fi channel is premiering a movie today at 2:30 (east coast). It's called "Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD." Ohhhhhh Yeahhhhh. For those of you who don't know, Nick Fury is an old, eye-patch wearing, cigar-chomping Marvel hero who's something of a cross between James Bond and The Punisher. Or maybe Wolverine without the claws. Or J. Jonah Jameson without the desk job. Ah hell, he's just Nick Fury. Not a super-hero, just an ordinary tough-as-nails, don't-take-shit-from-nobody G.I.Joe, working for a secret government organization as pretty much the only liason between heros like Spider Man and the Avengers (several of the Avengers used to work directly for him) while going on any number of missions himself. Who's the actor?
David Hasselhof.
Freak-tastic.
AND, as the crowning freakishness, cartoon network has been showing a couple of videos to promote the new Powerpuff Girls movie. The one you've probably seen before was "Girls against the world" by "The Quick." Well, Mojo Jojo also got a video. It's called "Go Monkey Go."
It's by Devo.
Complete with their flower-pot hats.
Well, I'd intended to post another review here, but I've gotta go un-board the cats at the vet now. They should be glad to see me. And I get to spend another $120. Whoo hoo. I'll try to get the review up tonight. Maybe.
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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