Saturday, January 1, 2005

Nothing changes on New Year’s Day

I sat down and started working on another blog entry yesterday, after getting out late/early from work… I’ll explain that in a bit, if I’m in the mood to really overwhelm you with tedium, and hey, aren’t I always?… but I was in a pissy mood, for various reasons, and the entry started out whiney and got worse, so I didn’t post it. And here I am, starting again.

New Year’s Eve, like Christmas Eve, management expected low call volume and low email volume, so most people had the day off, and those who were working, were only working 4 hour shifts. I was scheduled to go in from 3 to 7. On Christmas Eve, our email volume was so low that the three people scheduled to work days went home long before I got there, and I showed up to find a note on my keyboard telling me to just clean up whatever had come in since they left and go home. There were about thirty emails in queue, so I knocked them out and headed home around 5.

I expected much the same thing yesterday, which, you know, is something I should learn not to do. When I got there, the two people who were scheduled to work during the day were still there. When I asked why, I was told there was a huge unprecedented mountain of email in queue, and it all had to be done tonight, because otherwise it would sit there until Monday morning. Then, having delivered that news, they both left.

Ah, Happy New Year’s Eve.

On Christmas Eve, I had been told that I was, under no circumstances, to stay past 7 pm, as I was only scheduled for 4 hours and it would play hell with reality if I tarried longer. I specifically asked, before the two day girls left, if that was true tonight, and they said no, the email queues had to be empty, so if I had to, I could stay later. Good thing. Working pretty much without breaks, I hammered out some 85 emails (generally, a good days work for me is 50 to 60) in just under six hours, and got out of there at 8:45 p.m.

Hence, I left work both early and late on New Year’s Eve, kind of.

It wasn’t an entirely dismal evening. I actually enjoy working in solitude; I would do it every day if I had my druthers. Without distractions from people I wouldn’t voluntarily associate with anyway (which is usually a very good description of any co-workers at any job I’ve ever had) I was able to concentrate much better and work much faster. Still, it was not the nonchalant evening I’d expected.

I was in a pissy mood when I got home for all the usual reasons that we socially maladroit people are pissy on days like New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day and even Halloween. These are days when it seems the entire rest of the world is out having a good time in large groups, enjoying each other’s company, and somehow, none of that ever includes people like me. Of course, even if I get invited to a party I generally demur, especially on New Year’s Eve, when the celebration generally revolves even more heavily than usual around alcohol, making me feel like the ghost at the feast even more than I normally do in any kind of festive, social gathering. But since I’ve passed my mid-30s and the 200+ lb marker, social invitations of any kind have become fewer and fewer. Our culture has little use for middle aged people and less use for fat people; when you’re both, you may as well dig a hole in a cliff somewhere and then wall yourself up inside it.

If I could get cable in there, I’d seriously think about it.

I had no email when I got home, which was aggravating. I sent out my usual electronic Christmas card last weekend, to probably a good 40 people; I got responses from, I believe, four, and one of those was my mom. I’m usually a good email correspondent and I tend to answer my email fairly quickly, but I find that’s a rare trait. And since then, I’ve gotten all of one email, from someone who generally sends me an email every day, but whose computer had been broken for nearly a week. It was very nice to hear from them, but the very low email volume, combined with folks generally completely ignoring my last three blog entries, which I personally thought contained some of my best writing ever, just kind of had me exasperated.

I’d planned on taking my Christmas tree down on New Year’s Day, as was traditional when I was a kid, as that marked the official end of the holidays in our home. However, I was so aggravated with life I decided I might as well do it last night. One of my better friends called me and kept me company over the phone while I was doing that, which was a pleasant surprise, and that, combined with the sense of accomplishment that came from getting the tree down, put me in a better mood.

Today was an all around improvement. I called over to my cousin’s place in the early afternoon, found out they were all there, and took their Christmas presents from me over. They seemed to enjoy them – Mel advised me at the start of the Christmas season that you can’t go wrong buying candles for any woman, so that's what she got; Chad got a laser-pointer measuring tape thingie, and their two kids got a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots game. A guy I knew had one of these when I was like 10, and I’d coveted one for years when I went over to his house and saw his, and I quickly learned when I played against him for about five minutes that that is absolutely the maximum time you can play with that toy without getting bored out of your mind. There is no strategy. There is no skill. You just mash the buttons until a robot’s head pops off. Despite that, when I saw it at Wal-mart I had to snatch it up and give it to Chad and Mel’s kids, just because it was such a classic part of my childhood. And now, at least, their childhood experience will be complete; no child’s toybox is fully realized until it has an old Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots buried at the bottom of it.

I do sometimes wonder if the inventor of Rock Em Sock Em Robots got the idea from that episode of Twilight Zone featuring the android boxers… you know, the one with Lee Marvin in it… or if Richard Matheson, who wrote the original short story that that episode was based on, got the idea from Rock Em Sock Em Robots. However, that story, “Steel”, first appeared in 1954, I believe, and I don’t think Rock Em Sock Em Robots was around back then. So Matheson probably had the idea first.

Anyway, although I hadn’t really thought about it, it does seem like a rare occasion when I visit Chad and Mel and they don’t give me something they’re not going to use any more. Last summer they gave me their old bed, which was nice, as it’s much more comfortable than the futon I’d been sleeping on (and which is now in my tiny living room behaving as a couch, if a not very pleasant one to sit on). This time around, they had the TV from their kids’ room, and one of their DVD players, as it turned out they’d bought themselves a bigger TV for Christmas, with all their other TVs bumping down the line, and this one ending up for grabs. So, thanks to the generosity of my cousin Chad and his wife Mel, I now have a TV with a DVD player hooked up in my bedroom. And the segue from one sentence to the other back there covers a whole lot of moving shit around and cleaning shit up here, since the corner where the TV is now had been occupied by a huge pile of clothes I’d just let keep building up over the past couple of months because I didn’t feel like putting them away, and a couple of boxes of stuff I never unpacked when I first moved in.

Now all of that is in the closet, and after puzzling and puzzling til my puzzler was sore, I even managed to figure out how to hook the DVD player up to this rather ancient TV in such a way that it actually works. The reception in the bedroom is pretty lousy, which I’d expect (although, if I can get some old co-ax cable, there is an outlet that I believe connects to the big antennae on my roof, and if I could hook the TV up to that, I’d probably get better reception… hmmmm…).

There’s no remote for the TV, but I’ll mostly use it to watch DVD’s in the bedroom with, and the DVD player has a working remote, so that’s fine.

Okay, it’s not a very eventful blog entry, but it’s not like anyone has been posting comments lately, either, so, you get what you pay for.

And, hey! I just remembered I had an extra VCR up in my closet, and I’ve just hooked that up, and it’s working now, too! I am a veritable technological deity!

Hey, if you were as incompetent at anything pragmatic as I am, you’d be delighted, too.

Musical Slayers

Having set up the spare VCR, I discovered, when I tried to pop in a test tape, that there was already one in there… one I must have forgotten to take out long ago, when I bought a new VCR and tossed this one in the closet. Turns out it’s a tape from Buffy’s utterly appalling sixth season, which would be a poor poor thing to rediscover, and yet, as it turns out, the first episode on this tape is the only good thing from that entire wretched season, the Musical Episode.

This was an ep I enjoyed for a lot of reasons. First, fairly astonishingly, pretty much the entire cast turned out to have decent singing voices, and a couple of them (Amber Benson and Anthony Stewart Head) had absolutely beautiful ones. Plus, while Joss Whedon got lambasted pretty solidly in the fan press for the song lyrics, I enjoyed all the musical numbers… well, at least as much as I enjoy any songs in any musical I’ve ever seen, and, in fact, I liked the stuff in this ep quite a lot more than many of the songs in, say, Damned Yankees and/or Brigadoon.

I also enjoyed the episode because I’d wanted to do something similar for quite a long time… or at least, I’d mused about what it would be like to find oneself in the universe that, apparently, all musicals are set in, where everyone can sing and dance, and nearly any time anyone experiences any sort of epiphany, insight, or overwhelming emotion, the music swells up from nowhere, and everybody within earshot suddenly falls into a perfectly choreographed dance number. And having had that idea for quite a while, I was rather bemused to see Whedon bring it to life so deftly.

Alas, this particular version that’s playing in the background as I type (right now, it’s Xander and Anya’s 50s-esque musical number in which they both reveal their doubts about their then-impending nuptials) is the shorter version. The one originally broadcast ran about 13 minutes long; I did have that one on tape, but the tape was crappy, so I made sure I re-taped it when the re-run came out, only to discover that they’d chopped it down to fit the time slot better. And the uncut version is MUCH better; several of the better numbers get cut down dreadfully in this one.

I honestly don’t want any of the rest of the sixth season, but if I could somehow just get the uncut version of this episode on DVD, or even a decent videotape, that would be nice.

This is a truly pointless blog page, but what the hell, I’ll post it anyway. You are all officially excused from the comments, however.

Hey! I can change TV channels with the VCR remote, too! Me are so cool!

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.