LaughAtlantis

This Sunday I will turn 30. That's right, thirty years old. And I suppose that should intimidate me in some respects - after all, I'm 30, I'm not married, I don't own a house or a car, I don't have kids - what the hell have I been doing with my life???

But I don't know. It's just not bothering me. Right now I'm happier than I've been in... well, pretty much ever. My job is going well (despite the fact that my boss is somewhat clueless, he does trecognize that I'm good at what I do), I've got an outlet for my creativity in the form of my improv, I live an hour away from my family - just close enough to go home on a regular basis but not so close that my mom can just "stop by," and I'm blissfully in love. So thirty doesn't phase me.

Last year, I had a party that I billed as my First Annual 29th Birthday Party. It was tongue-in-cheek. Now that I'm faced with my second annual, hell, it's just easier to embrace the idea that I've had three decades of fun and excitement. Yeehaw!

Don't expect me to feel this way when I turn forty, though.

Yay!

I got a laptop from work today so I can do work at home on nights and weekends!

Wait, why am I applauding this?

Okay, I don't know how to post a picture, but go here and tell me what YOU think it says on this ornament.

Sorta brings a new meaning to the fact that it's "mouth-blown."

With decorative glitter, even.

Okay, I've been checking my usage statistics and it seems like, historically, more people check my blog on Wednesdays than any other day of the week.

And yet, today, my usage statistics are in the toilet. Where have you all gone?

Also, apparently you can now find my blog at google by typing in "questions and answers to pageant questions," "pictures presidential election 2000," and "health insurance sucks." I don't even know how to post pictures - and I damn sure haven't been in any pageants - but yes, health insurance does indeed suck.

Oh, and people in the Netherlands, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, the UK, New Zealand, Germany, Poland, Israel, and Seychelles have visited my blog. That's just cool.

Most of my entries regarding work are bitch-fests. In normal times, my job has a tendency to get tedious, with momentary bursts of frantic work.

But December is different at my company. December is a flurry of activity attempting to get all the programs and projects for next year up and running before January 1 rolls around and steps on us. This year, pretty much all of this responsibility has been laid on me. And I love it.

I work best with deadlines and lots of responsibility, so this is fabulous. I get to put my own personal stamp on the future of my company. I've wanted this opportunity for so long and it just feels great to be given the chance to do it. I've always had a (relatively) good work ethic, but right now I just feel *inspired* to work. It's a great feeling.

Gotta go. Work to do.

Add Hungary to the list of countries from which people have visited my site.

I'm all international and shit, yo.

I love Christmas. I do. But when I see a singing menorah, it just makes me wish I was Jewish.

Then I remember six thousand years of persecution, and decide being a lapsed Catholic is sort of okay.

Sitting on a wet toilet seat is among the most unpleasant sensations in the world. I get very agitated when it happens. Generally speaking, I'm mindful of checking the seat before I sit. But sometimes, when I've got to go badly, it slips my mind. And inevitably I'm in a movie theater or a bus station or some such godawful place where sitting on a wet seat makes you fear for your life. Which begs the question, is it better to sit in the pee of a stranger or the pee of someone you know?

Now, I am not an advocate of standing above the seat to pee. It's a toilet, for god's sakes, you're supposed to put your butt on it. But if you have a huge problem with germs or cooties or whatever you think you're going to catch, put some paper around the edges and then sit. When you stand above the seat, you inevitably wind up peeing all over it, and it's likely that you wind up pissing on your leg as well.

Recently I went to the bathroon at ImprovBoston, a theater that I go to on a regular basis. I went into the bathroom immediately after somebody I know - not well, mind you, she's the girlfriend of a sorta-friend of mine. And when I went in, there was pee on the seat. On both sides of the seat. It was like she had sprayed the whole place with pee. That's just nasty. Now, on one occasion in my past I admonished a woman coming out of a pee-covered bathroom stall. But how do you accuse someone you sort of know of peeing on the seat? How do you act knowing that you had to clean up someone else's uirne... someone you then have to go chat with out of common courtesy??

I just don't know. And personally, I'd just feel awkward writing to Miss Manners about this sort of thing.

I know that, in essence, I'm doing this blog for myself - so I can capture my rantings ravings, my frustrations and my glories and my thoughts. So why do I feel, on some weird level, like when I don't blog I am somehow letting down my public?

Granted, it's more amusing when I'm pissed off or have some great wrong to right or just want to share some random amusing anecdote. But sometimes there's things that I either A) don't want to record or B) don't feel comfortable recording in a public forum. I mean, realistically, if I bitch about someone in my comedy troupe or vent about my family, there's a halfway decent chance that some of that may come back to haunt me.

So while I have vents to rant on, I sometimes can't. But sometimes I have nothing to say at all. Like now. And so I make up some philosophical shit that is pretty random and doesn't really say much of anything except that I'm tired and bored and thinking too much.

Oh, I did have a good birthday. And if yesterday and today are any indication, at 30, I need to take more naps.

So, I am doing this internet Secret Santa thing and I got my secret Santa assignment today. The person, who shall remain nameless, had nearly eighty things on her wishlist! It was nice - lots to choose from - and makes me feel like maybe I ought to put more stuff on mine. Wishlists are great... last year I just made up a wishlist at Target for my mom to buy stuff and another one at Amazon to give my friends ideas. It seemed to work. I wish more of my friends kept up their Amazon lists... might give me a remote clue as to what to buy for them. Sigh.

Because I am thinking about the holidays, I am going to do this week's This or That Thursday poll. For whatever reason, in these polls, I tend to choose the unlisted third option. I'm a rebel, I know.

1. Real or artificial tree? Real. Real, real, real. Fake trees tend to look like crap and don't have the happy pine smell that defines the holiday season. That being said, my sister's allergic to pine and she has the best fake tree EVER. It's full and goreous and pine-scented.

2. Real or artificial wreath? Eh, wreath, schmeath. I like swags.

3. Open gifts on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day (or do you do another holiday such as Hannukkah)? I open gifts whenever I can, as often as I can. Mostly Christmas Day, but with my family, there are several celebrations (see #10), so it could be other times as well.

4. "It's A Wonderful Life" or "Miracle on 34th Street"? I like both movies, but I really enjoy "Miracle on 34th Street" - both versions, in fact. I love the fact that they changed the ending in the second one and put a new twist on it... and, when you think of it, a slightly sacrilegious one. Is God the same as Santa? Well, under the law... sort of.

5. Outdoor decorations, or just indoors? At my own house, indoors. Stringing up lights outside is time-consuming and annoying. But I like to drive around and look for the tackiest possible house displays. Fun!

6. "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" or "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer"? Hmm. I assume this means the songs and not the Christmas specials - and if that is the case I am going for another choice. I like SO many different Christmas carols, but neither of these would even make my top ten list. I do, however, love the Rudolph television special.

7. Miniature lights or the larger ones? I like the miniature ones. My mom's a traditionalist, little white lights only, but I confess to liking colored lights as well... though it's sometimes hard to distinguish colored Christmas lights to crappy college dorm ambience lights. :)

8. Store-bought or hand-made ornaments? Both. I like store-bought ones, but anything that my nieces and nephews have made for me over the years is very special to me. Also, anything that I made as a kid has special meaning. When I was in kindergarten, I made a sad little red bell out of a pipe cleaner, a section of an egg carton, and a jingle bell inside. That goes on the tree every year.

9. TV Specials: The Grinch or Charlie Brown? I have to go with Charlie Brown, because of the crazy Peanuts dancing and the incredible transformation from twig to gorgeous tree. Fun.

10. Will you be staying at home for the holiday, or going visiting? Oh my Lord. I'm going to my brother's the Saturday before Christmas, my mom's on Christmas Day, my sister's the Sunday after Christmas, my friend Thom's on the 23rd, and I think my friend Jen's on Christmas eve. So, yeah. Visiting.

Ta-da! My views on the holidays, in a nutshell.

I used to have a bit of a... um... problem with computer games. The real problem came in when The Sims stretched into a cornucopia of different computer obsessions - Civilization II, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Sim City, Caesar III, Zoo Tycoon, Majesty... the list goes on -but the cornerpiece of it all was The SIms. Then The Sims started getting expansion packs like Livin' Large and Hot Date, and I started spending more and more time in front of my computer. I named my Sims after people I knew and then realized I was spending more time with my Sim friends than my real friends. (In my defense, by and large those friends lived an hour away, so my contact with them was limited to once a week whereas my Sim involvement could happen on a nightly basis.) But it was out of hand.

So I stopped. I had my friend Terry take Sims off my computer entirely. I uninstalled things left and right. And I didn't play for a while. Then once I moved to Boston I reinstalled a few things. Cultures and Age of Empires consumed my days and nights. And again, I realized that I had a life and I stopped - just occasionally going back and reinstalling Caesar III.

Well, now there's The Sims Online - which seems like an okay game. It allows you to play Sims while chatting with people, which is nice. And there're all sorts of ways to make money - also nice. But I sorta feel like there's something lacking in the game. Half the fun of The Sims was being able to control whole families and neighborhoods of people, each of which had their individual goals and whatnot - and with the online version, you can only have three Sims. And they can't live in the same city. You're forced to rely on other people to be online at the same time you are in order to keep your friendship quotas up. That sorta sucks. Because if you lose friends, you lose the ability to have certain types of interactions. And once you get 10 total skill points, the points start wasting away - so you have to pick one trait to have and really work at it constantly. And if you work at it by yourself, it's slow going, because it's only by group studying that you can actually build skills at full speed. So I don't know how long I'm going to keep up with it, but we'll see.

The thing is, though, that by playing Sims Online, I've gotten back into the original Sims. And they've come out with a new expansion set recently that allows for more neighborhoods and five new career paths. Can you say yay? ANd even MORE exciting is the fact that the people who made Age of Empires have now come out with Age of Mythology, in which you don't just play a world leader, you play a GOD. That sounds like pretty much the coolest thing ever. You can be Zeus and throw thunderbolts at your enemies. You can have giant cyclops people as an army unit. YAY YAY YAY!!

So yeah, I'm a big geek. So sue me.

This is brilliant.

A guy sent a letter to Santa Claus. Via Fed Ex. With delivery tracking.

Apparently Santa's moved to Colorado.

Okay, so Statia and Mikey have weighed in with their opinions on the ever-annoying Wil Wheaton. (God, why do I keep blogging about him? Why do we ALL keep blogging about him??) In any case, I was doing a little investigation into my own search string usage statistics and found this - which is related to both my usage and Wil "Emoting-on-screen-is-too-exhausting-for-me" Wheaton.

That's right, it's a Klingon Beauty Pageant.

That is so far beyond freakish it's not even funny. Please God, don't let the people who think these things up ever breed.

In the course of a half-hour meeting this afternoon which I was not privy to, the president of my company threw out seven months of my research and development and basically spit on an idea that up until now had been well-received by everyone from the grunts to the clients to the vice presidents.

Tell me why I shouldn't kill him. Or quit.

Random thoughts relating to old entries...

How did the novel writing go? Not as well as I'd hoped, but not terribly. I wound up with just under 19,000 words, which is very much just a beginning. I'm not terribly motivated to finish it, in all honesty. Maybe that's pathetic on my part or maybe it's just indicative of an inherent laziness in me. Eh, whatever. Maybe I'll try again next year, but this year the logistical obstacle to the project fitting into my life were insurmountable.

In my usage statistics, I continually find that the most common search strings that lead to me have to do with doing heroin or how much health insurance sucks. To update on those posts - my veins haven't gotten any bigger and they still haven't resolved the stupid health insurance issue. And now the old medical insurance folks who still cover my dental are looking for an addtional $57 for my fillings. Apparently my dentist charges more money than the stardad filling cost, so Medical Claims Services has decided that that makes it okay to screw me. Argh. Gonna go breathe for a minute now.

I am still eating tuna fish with chow mein noodles. It's good!

I sent stuff off to my internet secret santa and it was received, yay! It appears, however, that I will not be getting anything from my secret santa. Why? Well, I got an e-mail saying she didn't use credit cards and was out of the country and wanted my address to send me something. Um, yeah... no. Oh well. Tis the season of giving, not receiving, right?

Speaking of out of the country, add Ireland and Denmark to my list of countries visiting my site. My Canadian contingent is getting higher too... maybe if I mention mounties, the secession of Quebec, the establishment of Nunavut, saying eh and aboot, and my favorite band The Tragically Hip - maybe then I can boost it further... or maybe they'll think I'm mocking them and hate me forever.

I went into the bathroom at WORK yesterday and found that somebody had peed on the seat. For want of a better term, that make me really pissy.

Work is going a bit better. Rather than killing the president of the company, I just made a case for me being right and him being wrong. That seemed to work. We found a middle ground. I'm happier now... but I'm not naive enough to think that this'll last.

Today the cafeteria had Cajun Risotto for lunch. I'm not sure how they make Italian food Cajun - they used to add okra but they've gotten away from that - but it's tasty nonetheless. Risotto makes me happy.

Happy is good.

Every year, I promise myself that I am NOT going to go overboard in buying stuff for the holidays. And every year, I go overboard in buying stuff for the holidays. I have a very young niece and nephew, which necessitates buying toys - and frankly, that part is always fun. I relish that part. I have an older niece and nephew, and that necessitates giving money, in that I don't see them that often, which makes choosing appropriate gifts tougher. And then there's friends - I have a lot of them and they're gift-y people and my brother and his wife, my sister and her husband, my grandmothers (shit, I haven't even sent cards to them yet. I am a very bad person) and my parents. And Rod, obviously.

My biggest problem right now - and it's a stupid, stupid problem - is that I feel this insane need to make everybody "even." For some ungodly reason, I feel like I have to spend the same amount on my mother as on my dad as on my brother, etc., etc. I got my mother a gift when I was in Alaska... and that has sort of set the price precedent. It's a nice gift. She'll like it... I hope. And I got my dad a good gift and I love some of the stuff that I got for Zachary and Julia (my nephew and niece).

And then there's the problem child. My brother. I type this in knowing full well that he's the only person in my family who is likely to read this. Matt has always been incredibly tough to buy for, and this year he has pretty much refused to answer the question of what he wants. I have asked repeatedly. I have threatened to buy him a Chia pet. To no avail.

So I ask... why? Why don't people just keep updated wish lists all the time so people know what they want? Wouldn't that just make it so cool when somebody randomly wanted to buy you a gift... they'd always have a place to go to find out what you'd want!

And why would somebody flat out refuse to tell you what they want??? What's that about? Contrary to popular belief, I can't read minds - I can beat my brother at Mastermind but that's just because I'm smarter than him (look at me, trying to get him riled up - heehee!) - but that doesn't mean I'm psychic. I'm going to buy him The Clapper. Or a lava lamp. Or polka-dotted purple kitchen towels. And I'm going to stick out my tongue when he opens them. Nyah.

It was a shitty Christmas.
Literally.

On Monday night, Rod got what I affectionately refer to as "The Dystentery" and what my brother likes to call "The Carletti Ebola." This basically caused him to simultaneously have diarrhea and vomiting for 24 hours. Thankfully, I did not get The Dysentery myself - I had it in the spring, so maybe I'm immune or something - but I got a nasty cold and was absolutely freezing. I just couldn't get warm - I had two blankets over me, the heat jacked up, and I could feel that there was warnth around me but I still had goosebumps. Just awful.

So we didn't get to go to Jen's for Christmas Eve, which sucked. And we didn't get to go home for Christmas, which also sucked. But we were together - ill, but together, and so it sucked a little less than just being alone and sick would have.

On Christmas Eve Day, I made a trip to the supermarket to attempt to buy Kaopectate. I wound up wandering through the aisles, confused and feverish, trying to find Kaopectate and foods that were "bland but Christmasy." THat was my mantra as I trudged through the store - "bland but Christmasy, bland but Christmasy, bland but Christmasy" - have you any idea how hard it is to mesh those two concepts?? Have you any concept of how tough it is to do when you're sick?

By the time I got home I had no idea what I'd bought. Hell, I hardly had any idea when I got to the checkout. There was rice and brie and chicken and raspberry turnovers. Don't ask.

So now I get to have Christmas tomorrow - and then again on Sunday. Yippee. Yahoo even. It's the 27th and already it seems like Christmas was some distant memory that I now have to relive - or live - tomorrow. Can't I just nap instead?

It's Friday and I am finally back at work and lo and behold, there is yet another change being laid down by my company president. The thing is, I'm no longer even blaming him. He's a man who is completely uninterested in the finer details or the logistics of things - he thinks in general concepts and philosophies and expects others to work out the logistics. Which sorta makes sense - I mean, we're the ones working the operations end of things, right? But his ideas get passed down to the vice president and she interprets them - often miscommunicating a whole bunch of stuff in the bargain - for the product development and client service folks. Not helpful. And of course, neither of them is actually in today to deal with this or address these new issues. The pres just decided this at home on Monday when his daughter (who is a telecommuter) asked him a random question about our new program.

And kerflooie. With two work days left before the new year - and thus the deadline - I'm rewriting yet again.

Actually, I have decided to go on a work strike for the day. I'm sitting at my desk, staring at my computer, and typing stuff, but fuck work. If I can't do the damn project right, I'm not doing it at all.

For now, at least.

The latest search string referral for me is "epileptic christmas dorm."

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT???

Ooh, and South Korea and Belgium can be added to my international appeal. My friend Jeff needs to get his butt over to Senegal just to look at my website and thus make me happy.

Thanks to Mikey, I found One Word. They give you a single word for you to write about for a single minute. It's simple, it gets your creative juices flowing, and it's a nice break in the day.

Not that I particularly need a reason to take a break - especially today, when my whole day has been a break. Yeehaw. The work strike continues.

Okay, so this is probably - no, definitely - super sacrilegious, but is there any possibility that the second coming of Christ might be in the form of sharks?

Okay, so I am pretty much obsessed with everything on TLC or BBCAmerica. One particular favorit of mine is Junkyard Wars. Now you too can play at home - well, sort of - there's an official Junkyard Wars Rumble in the Jungle game. It's hard.

Add Taiwan and Zimbabwe to my ever-growing list of countries (or at least people from countries) that have surfed my site.

Frankly, I am convinced that someone out there has figured out how to make it seem like different countries visit my site. Now if only someone from Vanuatu would visit...

It occurs to me that my categories suck.

I've got categories like Random, Fun, and Life. What do these even mean? I need to get better ones, like Stupid Stuff I Found on the Web, Search String Ponderings, Things I Am Excited About... I don't know.

Ooh, there's a task for me for the afternoon. Yippee!