Cold Remedies

I picked up some zinc-based cold-remedy tabs on a recommendation from a friend. I took one and woke up feeling a bit better the next day. I can't be sure the zinc is what did the trick since I'm ingesting a complex cocktail of vitamins, homeopathic remedies and over-the-counter cold medicines. Regardless, I'll stick with the zinc for a while. Then at work today, I did a bit of research and found that there a bunch of lawsuits pending against the manufacturer of this zinc remedy. People are blaming it for destroying their sense of smell. I told a friend at work about the case, and he asked to try one of the tabs. I gave it to him, and an hour later he thanked me and said that it really worked well. He could tell it worked in one hour. I've been taking vitamins on and off for decades, and I've never noticed a difference. Just once, I'd like to say, "Man, my vitamins are really kicking ass today," and then I'd like to punch through a wall. I just take the stuff people say is good for me, and I leave it to them to tell me if I'm feeling better too.

Meeting New People

Not too many other people are named Rocky, but it seems I have the same conversation with people fairly regularly. They say, "Oh, my friend's named Rocky, too." The I ask if it's his real name since that's what I get asked a few times a month, and usually the answer is 'no.' Then recently a young woman told me that her friend's real name wasn't Rocky, but that it was his American name. This Rocky had adopted the moniker after emigrating here from overseas when he was very young, at about the time the first Rocky movie came out. He didn't understand the movies at all, but loved Sylvester Stallone. I asked her what this Rocky's last name was, and she said, "Kim." This particular Rocky sounds like a pretty cool guy.

The Gadget Line

I put myself on the waitlist for the new iPhone a couple months before it came out. On the day it was released, the pick-up line at the store was four hours long. Even if I'd wanted one badly enough, there was no way I could take the time off work. I was put on another waitlist and had to sit for a month before mine arrived in the mail. As far as the phone's performance, well, I'm glad I didn't wait in line for it. During that month after the phone's release date, I saw a lot of phones around the city. And every person that I saw, instead of thinking, "Oh man, I'm so jealous you got a new phone," I could only think, "You are the kind of person who will wait in line four hours for a new phone. What is wrong with you?"

Just Riding Along

When I worked at the bike shop, people would always come in with what we called 'just riding along' stories. Even when it was clear they'd driven into a parking ramp with the bike on top of their car, they'd come in for repairs and offer a story about how they did this particular damage to their bike. The stories often started, "I was just riding along..." This fault-free story would be told because they were trying to convince you to apply the warranty or fix the bike for free, but our shop didn't work on a sliding scale where we charged more to repair a bike if you were doing something crazy. People would have been better off if they had come in and just admitted right away that they rode their bike off pier into the lake and now it wasn't shifting correctly. We would have wasted less time trying to diagnose the problem, and more likely than not, we would have knocked a bit off the price for doing something as awesome as trying to ride your Trek Y-22 through a chest-deep river.

Metrosexual

Remember how people used to use the term 'metrosexual?' It referred to men who groomed like classy women and wore a lot of tailored clothes. At the height of the metrosexual blitz, I was watching CNN one day while working, and the two anchors interviewed a guy who wrote a book about how to be metrosexual. CNN loops a lot of their news every half-hour, and I left the channel on for days hoping to catch this interview again but they never replayed it. The author was being beamed in via satellite, and the anchors on the set kept trying to ask him serious questions about the contents of his book, but they'd break down in laughter and accuse each other of being metrosexual. The author on the split screen looked like he was being mugged. At the end, the anchors both denied being metro, then asked the author if he was a metrosexual. He sighed and said, "Well, I wrote the book. So I guess I sort of have to be."

Fall Shifts

Fall has arrived. I love the shoulder seasons. You get a change in temperature, my allergies shift as the pollen in the air changes, I always get sick for a few days, and then I can start biking to work without requiring a shirt change when I arrive. The only downside is this archaic daylight savings time change we'll have to go through soon. I hate that the sun goes down so early. I know that I could move to Arizona to get out of it, but frankly, I'd put up with a lot more to stay out of Arizona. I could be that guy who refuses to change his clock and all of his friends have to tell him and hour earlier when they wanted him to show up, but then that would be my thing. Everyone would know me as the guy who refuses to accept daylight savings time. I can't let that define. No, it's better to just complain about it to anyone who will listen.

Short Weeks

The mentality of a four-day work week is completely different. More so for me when the day off is Friday. When Monday's off, I appreciate it that day, but the Tues-Fri week feels like a normal week crammed into four days. The only advantage of having Mondays off over having Fridays off is that everyone flakes out on Friday anyway and leaves pretty early. But when you have a Friday off, then all of the sudden Thursday is your Friday night, which means that Wednesday is Thursday. When noon hits on Wednesday and you have Friday off, be prepared to feel like you just turned around and the week's over.

Lobster Fights

Restaurant week happened to coincide with my second week of collecting unemployment benefits a few years back. During restaurant week, all the nice restaurants in town offer price fixe dinner options where they sell a normally expensive, high-end meal for a reasonable price. We went to a seafood restaurant for dinner, and I ordered the weekly offering. It turned out to be two lobsters, corn on the cob, salad, and a dessert. I don't even like lobster. I image them as gigantic cockroaches that the chef just killed by dunking in boiling water. It ruins my appetite. So I ate them since I'd ordered it, but before eating them, I pretended they were fighting each other on my table and repeatedly bashed them into each other over my plate. Then I felt kind of bad because the government was subsidizing my lobster fight, and meanwhile there were other people out there who really needed that money. I confided in my friend, and he said, "Man, you've been paying into that system for ages while you were working. Now it's time to enjoy your lobster." I didn't bother telling him that that would be impossible since I don't even like lobster.

Sociopaths and Fearmongering

Joe McCarthy was the senator from Wisconsin who catapulted to fame using Cold War fears of communism. He would wave a blank sheet of paper in front of the Senate and say it contained a list of secret communists in congress. He scared the right people enough to let him run things for a while. We see a lot of the same garbage today in a slightly different context, but some people it turns out, still haven't even gotten over the preachings of McCarthy. In Wisconsin, there are still graveside ceremonies celebrating his accomplishments. They're held on the day of his death. Or birth. Better attend both if you're the kind of person interested in going. Besides being a famous Wisconsin politician and legendary fearmonger, McCarthy was also a notorious drunk. And guess what? I met one of his old drinking buddies. Nice guy -- not crazy at all. It was a good reminder that you don't have to be a sociopath to occasionally find yourself accidently supporting the policies of one.

Obscene Works

I'm reading an absurdly obscene book. It's called Women, by Charles Bukowski. In it, Bukowski details the exploits of his alter ego. The book simply says 'Women' in larger letter across the front, and it occurred to me that anyone who spotted me reading it on a park bench or in a coffee shop might think I'm reading a book on how to pick-up women. I worry constantly that someone will read it over my shoulder and then tail me to the first staircase tall enough to justify pushing me down. The concern is not entirely unfounded; I'd loaned Post Office, Bukowski's earlier book to a friend, and when a group of Postal Clerks saw him with it on a train he was the target of much antagonism. I jump and give a nervous laugh whenever anyone interrupts my reading, and though I've considered it, I don't have an answer prepared if anyone happens to ask why I bother reading it. I guess I could just say I'm doing research on how not to behave. Yeah, that's the reason I hangout in bars so late all time, too.

Trapped at Work

I had a summer job delivering pizzas for Papa John's. I enjoyed my job duties fairly well, with the exception of having to put that huge "Papa John's" dunce cap signage on my car. People assume that you're going to drive like an idiot the moment they see one of those things. Our pizza place was in a strip mall plopped down in the middle of town, and the developer had saved a little cash by not putting a raised sidewalk in front of the stores. The parking area was separated from the walking area at the storefronts only by a painted line. Twice during the summer when I worked there, people drove past the painted line and parked their cars in front of our main door. Since the door swung out when it opened, the parkers pinned the door shut trapping us all inside. While I'm certain that this violated some kind of fire code, it was really a nice break for all the delivery drivers.

Class Reunion Season

I never made it to my class reunion. From what I could tell in photos on Facebook, all the guys were required to wear a blazer with their jeans, and everyone (including myself) has been equally afflicted with whatever it is that makes your face swell. It's like everyone was allergic to bee stings and someone shook up a hive before throwing it into the gymnasium. I might join my girlfriend for her class reunion this year, but since I don't know any of these people the situation would lack all the judgment and seeing how much people have changed. I might rent a huge Ferrari for it anyway. And then rent a huge yacht and use the Ferrari to tow it to the class reunion.

Mayoral Race

My college newspaper went from a daily to a twice-weekly over the summer vacation, and we still had a hard time finding things to fill our pages. There just weren't as many people stealing golf carts and getting busted for having parties over the summer. There was a mayoral race in the city that year, so our newspaper decided to give every candidate equal space in our paper. This proved to be a wonderful way to eat up pages since there were dozens of them and they were all fairly interesting. The one I interviewed was the day manager at a saloon on campus. I expected he would be realistic about his nonexistent chances of winning, and perhaps use his minimal media coverage to do one of two things: 1. Raise awareness of a cause important to him, or 2. Try to sell his car. I could have gone either way, but it turned out that he gave himself "about a 20% chance of winning," and had completely unrealistic views of anything in the world. Election night must have been tense in that saloon. I wish I'd been sent to cover his concession speech.

After the Storm

An intense storm raged for about 20 minutes at the end of the work day. It covered the bike lanes with puddles, and I don't have fenders on my bike so I had to ride slowly if I didn't want a black streak of road water on the back of my only pair of jeans. This is difficult. You have to commit to riding home at a very slow pace. You cannot lapse for even a moment and speed up, because you'll get blasted with spray that one time and have a huge stain all over your back and butt. Every traffic light turned yellow just as I was pulling up to it, but I couldn't hammer through it. A guy on a mountain bike in his lowest gear peddled at a pace that looked about 1,000rpm, but I couldn't pass him since I lacked fenders. Cars swerved into the bike lane, parked cars opened their doors, but my only option was to slow down and wait. No hammering down, swerving into traffic and getting around it all. It struck me as being very similar to growing a beard. Slow progress and a lot of discomfort, but one moment of weakness -- you give in and go fast on your bike or shave your beard -- and it's all over. You may as well have ridden home the entire way at top speed or never have bothered going a week with mangy, itchy beard stubble.

Martial Arts

I met a guy last weekend who talked a lot about martial arts. Wouldn't drop the topic. It started to weird me out a bit, but I smiled through it. He said that martial arts trains you to get in tune with your senses. During training, he'd close his eyes and hold his arm against his partner, and then the guy would ask him which leg he moved, and he'd know -- based on his senses. He argued that when you meet someone, you get an impression and know if you like them -- this is based on senses, we've just been trained to repress them. His martial arts was helping him tune them back in. The entire time I sat there nodding and thinking, "Man, what are you getting from me right now, because I think you're insane." Perhaps in time, his martial arts skills will tell him these things.

Cash is King

I was sitting at a bar one Friday evening waiting for some friends. It was late, and a bartender with a shrill voice shouted over the music to whoever was unfortunate enough to be working a late Friday on the other end of the phone. It took a few moments to figure out what was going on. She was yelling at the credit card company. A bar patron had left moments earlier, and she'd closed out the guy's tab but given him the wrong credit card. The problem was exacerbated because this particular bar required you to leave your driver's license with your credit card, and she'd also given the wrong ID to the wrong person. It probably wouldn't have been as big of a deal if the guy whose ID had been given away didn't need to get on a flight the next morning. She was trying to find out where the guy with the wrong credit card was spending his money so that they might track him down. It wasn't going well. Instead of getting involved and lecturing their ID/credit card policy, I asked for my card back and ran to the ATM.  They gave me my own card, which was handy since I would have been guessing someone else's PIN all night.

Personal Calls

Occasionally you'll have to call your health insurance or credit card company during the work day. It's almost always about disputing a charge or trying to the insurance company to send a check. If you own a car, you can go sit in the driver's seat and give everyone in your office the false impression that you're conducting a telephone interview for a new job. But if you don't have a car, your options are to make the call from some semi-private spot in your office and have co-workers overhear, or you can walk up and down the street while talking. Both present problems, but I prefer to walk around outside with my insurance or credit card in my hand. Basically, I prefer to have strangers know the details of my problems with the insurance company. The biggest fear while doing this is that someone on the street will hear and memorize your personal information, which is why you have to walk really fast when offering your social security or credit card number over the phone -- it makes it that much tougher for people to follow you writing down your info.

The Stench

I climbed into a cab yesterday and gave the driver an address in Brooklyn. It was raining so I found it odd that one of the back windows was all the way down. Just before climbing into the cab, I'd seen a bit of graffiti that said, "WWJD." The oddity of seeing that in graffiti was rolling around in my brain when the smell of the driver's Brut aftershave floored me. I had a bit of a sinus cold, but this stuff cut right through it. It explained the rolled-down window, and I cracked my window and stuck my nose into the rain just to get a break. The smell gave me an instant headache and I fought the urge to vomit. It made me think, WWJD? There's not really a clear answer in this case. Say something and hurt the guy's feelings? Just jump out of the cab and go into a commando roll? I decided to silently suffer.

Bedbug Infestation

My apartment had bedbugs. This was a couple years back, before all the trendy clothing stores started getting them and it was covered so much in the news. I never actually saw a bedbug or received a bite, but my roommate swore we had them. He even hired a bedbug-sniffing dog who agreed that our apartment had bedbugs, and I was in no position to disagree with a dog. I owned very few things so dealing with them in my one bag of clothes and stack of books wasn't a big deal, and it came at a good time since I was moving to less expensive accommodations within a couple weeks. My leaving during the bedbug treatment and my roommate trying to fill a space in a bedbug-infested home proved to be a problem. He advertised on Craigslist, walked people thorough the apartment, and he finally found some guy from Ohio named Joe to take my old room. He sealed the deal by agreeing on a price, and then right when they started to shake hands he blurted out, "We just had bedbugs!" The poor kid didn't even know what he was talking about, but I'm convinced the entire bedbug infestation was in my roommate's imagination, so I think everything worked out okay.

Vladimir Nabokov

I wrote an awful paper about Vladimir Nabokov when I was in college. It was the longest thing I'd ever written at about 15 pages, and it didn't contain a single interesting or original thought. After I turned it in for a B, I submitted it to some guy who was running a pretty impressive Nabokov website. It was the early 2000's, so dedication to quality on the internet was at a bare minimum. I thought he'd put my paper up on his site, and then I could add that to my resume to pretend like I was a published scholar. He didn't return my first e-mail, but he when I sent a follow-up a few weeks later he wrote back that he wouldn't publish it. He explained himself well enough and of course he was correct in not posting it, but at the time I didn't get it. I conferred with my friend Travis , and we were both a bit puzzled. I mean, it's the internet, man. What, did he want to fill it up with Nabokov stuff all on his own?

Knockoffs and Forgeries

It's illegal to take most dogs on public transportation or in taxis. The one exception to this is helper dogs. If you're blind or otherwise need a dog to help you around town, you can take it anywhere you want. You can identify worker dogs by their orange jackets emblazoned with 'Helper Dog' embroidered across the side. So of course a cottage industry of people making and selling fake helper dog jackets has popped up. Yesterday I saw a Chihuahua straining at the end of its leash wearing a helper jacket, and the owner didn't even bother wearing sunglasses to pretend to be blind. Not that it'd matter -- no one in their right mind would believe this dog was offering humanity any kind of help. The guy would have been better off just putting the dog in his pocket to take it on the train or in taxis than getting it a fake helper jacket.

Pork Chops and Budweiser

There's a law in New York City that every chain restaurant has to post the calorie count of each menu item. It's driven me away from the chain restaurants where I find out that my burrito is over 2000 calories. At the gym where I occasionally pretend to use exercise equipment, the machines tell you how many calories you burn while working out. My guess is that these estimates of calories burned are high, while I would assume that the estimates of calories in each menu item are low. Then I found out today that my coworker calls Budweisers 'pork chops,' because each 12oz bottle contains the same number of calories as a pork chop. Man, I must be burning crazy calories sleeping at night, because I have no idea where all this stuff is going -- I should weigh at least 350lb by now.

Let's End This Before It Starts

I was trying to go out on a date with a girl in college and every time I suggested that we do something, she had a conflict. She swore over and over that she wasn't avoiding me and wanted to go out, she just had a busy schedule with work and a full social calendar. At some point I realized that it didn't matter anymore whether she was avoiding the date or really had a conflict. If our schedules were so impossibly opposite, then there's no way a relationship would work anyway. Disaster avoided.

Being Good at Bowling

I feel kind of bad for people who score consistently high in bowling. One of my old elementary school teachers used to say, "Everyone has one thing they're really good at, some of you just haven't discovered what yours is yet." That logic messed me up, and I spent the next several years of my life waiting to figure out the one thing that I could naturally do really well -- something that would require no work on my part at all. Even during that time, I felt bad for the people who were really good at bowling. It's a bummer if bowling is your one good thing, not much is going to come from it.

Useless Play

Whenever there's a fumble in any football game, you can count on players on both teams pointing to indicate that their team has possession of the ball. This occurs regardless of how obvious it is that they're wrong. It's as if they're thinking -- Hey, maybe the ref didn't see what happened, and he's just going to say, 'All these guys are pointing the same way, they must know something I don't' and he'll give them possession of the ball. --And regardless of its lack of utility, the football players can't help but do it. It's kind of like how people hit the call button on the elevator over and over thinking it might actually make the elevator arrive sooner.

Financial Planning

My old roommate played in a Fantasy Football league with the waitstaff from the restaurant we used to live above. I found out about the league after football season had started, and I'm pretty sure it was because he wanted less competition. The waitstaff aren't particularly into football, and most lack the discipline necessary to update their football rosters on a weekly basis. That said, they were all perfectly willing to part with $30 to bet on their teams. By the time playoffs rolled around, my roommate already had spent his winnings on beer, but of course, a few miraculous 11th hour plays placed him outside the payout. When I went down to the restaurant, the bartender who won bought me a couple drinks. It's so much more rewarding to be surprised by a win than get one you anticipated -- unless you're me in this story, then you get to enjoy both.

Ebb and Flow

Are you ever sitting at your desk at work, and suddenly you remember something you wanted to check online -- something you've been looking forward to checking out even though it's slipped your mind all day? It could be anything -- an email from a friend you haven't talked to in a long time, some pictures a friend posted on Facebook of your weekend in Boise -- then something interrupts you with work and a few minutes later you can't remember what you were excited to look up. Happens to me all the time. Then I'll go on a search for what could have gotten me excited. Maybe it was an article in The Times, or maybe I was supposed to check the surfboard classifieds. Then I finally remember what I was looking forward to and my original level of excitement seems disproportionate to whatever I wanted to check. Then I begin to wonder if that's really what I was looking forward to. It's a vicious cycle.

Man on Fire

My hair is insane lately. It looks like I stole a wig off a passed-out transvestite, and then no one bothered to tell me that I put it on backwards. I was standing outside a salon today over lunch, looking at their prices written on the window. No one was getting their hair cut, but two women were sitting in the salon. They must have spotted my hair and me reading their price list, because they both stood up and tried making eye contact. When one started for the door I slowly backed away, looking up like I'd been reading some other sign on their building. It would be like a person who's on fire trying to nonchalantly walk away from the fire department, but I just didn't have time for a haircut today.

Which One of You Jerks Sold My E-mail Address?

I'm very protective of the only e-mail address that I actually use. If I suspect a website might sell my address to spammers, I'll first sign-up with a junk e-mail address and vet them for a few weeks before changing them over to my real address. My old friend Rob didn't even give his e-mail address to anyone -- he'd just send himself messages once in awhile to make sure his e-mail account still worked. While I might not be that extreme, I worry. So the fact that spam started hitting my inbox has me wondering -- who the heck gave it up? Maybe some old frenemy signed me up for truck driving school in retaliation for me sending him hair-replacement videos. That's my only lead so far.

A Rounded Government Education

Our high school's Government teacher got a DUI. It was covered in the police blotter of the local paper so all the kids found out. It ruined that poor guy's career at our school. I know celebrities complain about their lives being lived under a microscope, but at least they make a lot of money. Teachers have to put up with the same garbage and they don't even make enough cash to buy their own private island so they can escape the scrutiny. Anyway, if Mr. Whatever-his-name-was is out there, sorry we constantly humiliated you, but we also probably wouldn't have been so harsh if you hadn't been such a jerk.