My old officemate Josh is heading down to Buenos Aires for some reason. Lauren and Doug have been down there since January and my mom keeps saying that I should go visit them. I don't know though, something about Buenos Aires seems uninviting. It seems like going to an expensive Mexico, except the flight is 4 times as long and the food isn't as good. Whitney and I are tentatively planning on visiting Courtney in London and that sounds like a lot more fun. Heck, I already speak English! And the food and weather might not be great, but there's some kind of draw to actually mingling with British people in their natural habitats. See if it's really like Snatch and Lock Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels portray it.

(after we played pool with two guys random from New Zealand)
Dave: I thought the tall blond one was annoying.
me: Oh, he was alright. It was pretty funny how right after he was telling us how the New Zeland women were ugly, his girl friend comes in and she actually is quite ugly.
Dave: Yeah. She was just not attractive at all!

The stages of a breakup. This is the only article I've seen that didn't have links to astrology pages or something else that made me think they were making stuff up. My emotions these days have seen a high variance than usual and I'm tracking their progress to make sure I'm not heading toward any unusual emotional imbalance.

I did score well above average on the Neurotics Anonymous test of mental and emotional health. I'm not sure what that really means besides that the test says I'm okay. Is there an objective, quantifiable value to being emotionally healthy? I suppose if you measured how much people bitched in forums about random things, you would find that I complain less than most people. Sometimes I read forums and find posts where super fans of a game or movie franchise are foaming at the mouth about some piece of news. I think you can tell a person has issues by his energetic ranting in forums (or facebook) about, um, anything. Generally nobody reading those posts can do or will do anything about your complaints, and everybody knows that. You're just constantly venting your impotent frustration, and it's not a healthy sign... I guess it's sorta like this blog..

(from xkcd explained)
While attending a small birthday party for an acquaintance, the Author and four other white young-adults were in the early rounds of a game of Settlers of Catan. During a lull in the fast-paced excitement of the game, one of the four males playing the game jokingly suggested they instead play “strip Settlers of Catan,” in the hopes that he would possibly get to see the bra of the female player. During the awkward and strained laughter, it dawned on the Author that this concept was humorous.

Craigslist should have an option where it can automatically disable your post after X people have sent you emails or after a time period that's shorter than 7 days. This would be handy in the "free" section, where you'll get 5 emails per minute from scavangers hoping for free goods. I feel bad if I don't respond to people with at least "sorry, it's sold," but even that turns into a hassle pretty quickly.

Apparently Cue Bar is now some kind of dance hall. It's a shame, cue bar was a nice and quiet place for drinks, pool and ping pong. I guess it probably shut down because it was too quiet. Bummer.

Joe: I'm sure Duke is concerned about your facebook postings.
Whitney: Hey, my posts go out to 700 people. I could take that school down if I wanted to!

The day after I buy lettuce for the first time EVER, and there's a lettuce recall because of e. coli. Maybe it's a message. It is my destiny not to eat salads.

Tonight is the Friday Night Lights season premier. I went through almost all over season 3 on netflix this week, trying to catch up. Now I wish I still had the cowboy hat I bought for halloween 2 years ago because it would be perfect.

(about our high school reunion)
(12:22:08 AM) me: it's at a bar in santa rosa.
(12:22:12 AM) Dan: my fear would be nobody would remember me
(12:22:21 AM) me: why would that bother you?
(12:22:30 AM) me: all these people whose lives you changed :)
(12:22:42 AM) me: you won't remember them either.
(12:22:47 AM) Dan: you're a mean drunk
(12:22:56 AM) Dan: the sad thing is i do

I thought my haircut came out pretty well. Puja gave it her "looks like every other haircut you get" review which I didn't appreciate. But I guess it does. She thinks you reach an age where you should just stick with your accepted haircut. (Puja thinks I've reached this age and my shaved head didn't count as a different hairstyle. It was the same style, just shorter.) But I'm not ready to surrender yet! Maybe for halloween I'll dye my hair again. Or if I see Doug this christmas maybe I'll get a mohawk to match his. The world is still my hair's oyster.

Today my wireless was being finicky so I was going through the logs and I noticed a device I didn't recognize. Someone named DEL001599200A1D was stealing my wireless! Spent some time looking through router settings trying to figure out how to either set up MAC address control or manual DHCP so I could block extraneous IP addresses (he'd already cracked my password security, and changing that would mean putting it all back into the ps3, wii, etc, which is a huge pain). This is the router the office gave me and it didn't seem to really have easy options for either. Fussed around for like 30 minutes and then it dawned on me that DEL001599200A1D is my network printer.

The coffee in the little market in the basement went from $1 to $1.15! First of all, a 15% increase seems excessive. Is coffee really getting more expensive these days? It's not even special coffee, they just get the regular stuff from safeway and mix it up. I guess maybe they're making up for 6 years of no inflation increase. But the second (and more significant) issue is that now you can't just pay with a single bill, you have to go fishing through you pockets for change! I wish they had instead decreased the size of the cups by 15%. I never fill mine up all the way anyway because I drink 2/3s of it at most. Screw that place. From now on I'm going to starbucks.

Watching Soldier's Girl from netflix. Before putting it into the dvd player I had a moment of hesitation where I considered that the netflix plot synopsis might have conveyed the entire story so there was no point in even watching the dvd. A soldier falls in love with a transvestite and gets murdered by his homophobic soldier comrades. Interesting news story, not an interesting movie. Luckily, while the summary is accurate, there's more to it than that. The netflix reviewers describe it as an incitement of Don't Ask Don't Tell but it doesn't really touch on that specifically. It only portrays the policy as fostering an underhanded homophobia and ignorance in the military, which I'd imagine it does. Shawn Hatosy does a great job playing the victim's roommate and best friend. His character is a volatile combination of extremes and he has some great moments in the film. That actor usually plays pretty similar thug characters, but he really layers this character well. This movie is twice as good as I thought it'd be, and I think it's all because of him.

In other news, I've been using an electric toothbrush for a few days now. My first use of it was similar to putting an electric egg beater in your mouth and turning it on. It was a good thing I was standing over the sink because saliva and toothpaste went everywhere. Now I've got the mess mostly contained, but I'll have to wait a few weeks to see if it's really helping my teeth (mostly on the stain level because my cavities are already under control).

(from the weatherman)
If you want your father to think you're not a silly f***, don't slap a guy across the face with a glove. Because if you do that, that's what he will think, unless you're a nobleman or something in the 19th century, which I am not.