The Old School Lunch

For the past two Saturdays i’ve gone to the same Chinese buffet with a friend. It’s not that bad and it’s 15 bucks. Big fan of the seafood but not of the kids who run around without supervision making a general mess of the place while their parents sit and eat…

My friend works for Cingular and he was telling me that Sprint/Nextel recently reviewed thousands of their customer service records, looked at thousands more of their customers in their database and terminated the contracts of 1000+ customers for basically being shitty, verbally abusive customers and wasting Sprint’s time by constantly calling to complain with issues of little substance. “A first in the customer service industry” my friend calls it…

Heroes is surprisingly good. I was pretty skeptical but i’m hooked probably even more so than Lost. It’s nice to hear an Asian language on TV being spoken at the actual pace the actors would naturally speak it unlike Lost where everyone is speaking Korean 5x slower to make it less obvious that Daniel Dae isn’t a native speaker…

And Weeds is pretty good. Though they really put it on thick the first few episodes with the whole “Oriental whore bitch from Thailand” bit. At least Nancy corrects her…

Saw But I’m A Cheerleader after I heard the writer/director talk about it in This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Both are pretty awesome, the latter moreso than anything i’ve seen in a long time. In my hyperbole I may have called Jack Valenti a “nazi” when talking about the documentary to a friend. His response: (gasp) “I believe the man was there was president Kennedy was shot!”…

The two co-workers I am probably most buddy-buddy with at work both told me recently that when they first saw me, they both thought, “What a nerd, i’m not going to talk to that guy at all” and “that guy doesn’t look cool, i’m not going get to know him.” Oh, it’s like that?…

A female co-worker was talking to us at the lunchroom about how she couldn’t decide what to wear at the upcoming auction that she is basically running. She has an outfit that is she looks better in but she doesn’t want old farts who are donating money to hit on her or to stare at her all night. As she was talking about this dress conflict, she stopped herself and apologized to me saying that she felt bad that I as the only man in the room at the time had to endure this conversation because, of course, I just naturally wouldn’t be able to understand any of it. “No, I get what you’re saying. There’s a different between what you’d wear as a guest coming to donate money and socialize and there’s what you’d wear if you’re board member or something and then there’s what you’d wear if you’re working at the function up on stage, etc.”…

UPDATE: If you’re going to pay full cash for prescriptions, you should probably call Costco beforehand (always lowest prices) and then go to your pharmacy with that and ask for a price-match. The folks at your pharmacy should suggest you do this anyways but nooooo, they didn’t do this for me today. I’d like to think that they just didn’t know and they’re new on the job but i’ve seen these folks there at this pharmacy for a while.
Well, shit. I knew it was going to be a lot but I didn’t think it’d be that much.

My workplace doesn’t give insurance to full-time employees until their three months of “training” is done so i’m about two months into it which means paying cash for prescriptions. Which wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t get/need two new prescriptions by the new doctor (old somewhat unreliable one retired). You know it’s bad when the pharmacy tech person at Rite-Aid, before you even say anything, says “very, very expensive…”

Let’s just say that it’s cheaper than what I paid for the body of the Canon Rebel XT but it’s just barely cheaper. Barely.

[Lame excuse #2: I shelled out for a Pro Flickr account so I gotta maximize that, right?]

It was only a matter of time. I managed to push it out of my mind for a month or so, but I finally caved and ordered the Canon Rebel XT with a new lens and a CF memory card. I kept telling myself that it’ll be really useful for the job and life in general. And even more unbelievably, I used the lame rationale that I somehow “saved” money by not going for the XTi (which I really, really wanted in the first place).

Q: You sound awful.

A: It’s the flu. I’m getting my ass kicked. I had to take a day off work the other day.

Q: You aren’t supposed to do that, aren’t you? You’re still training?

A: Yea, but if you’re sick you’re sick.

Q: When did it start?

A: Wednesday night, after I watched Transformers.

Q: Transformers made you sick, figures.

A: I thought it was good, actually. I mean, there were some eye-rolling moments with the “it’s gotta be Japanese” lines and “I always fall for the bad boys” moments and such but overall, it was fun. I don’t understand the folks who say “it’s too serious” or “it’s not serious enough.” It’s robots turning into cars and ships, after all.

Q: Didn’t mind all the GMC/Chevy ads then?

A: It’s to the point where I think viewers are used to it. I wish they could’ve been a little more subtle but it’s certainly not as bad as…say the Dr. Pepper shot in Spiderman. I think the ad-campaign by the automakers makes it worse than it is in the movie.

Q: So what’s been new otherwise?

A: Work. An under-wraps project that I won’t talk about at length (and jinx) until it’s out. Ummm, friend’s birthday coming up, so I managed to finally use that Amazon gift cert I had originally saved up for a camera I wanted to buy.

Q: What’d you get for the present?

A: Season one of….a certain TV show. DHARMAINITIATIVE*cough

Q: I hope he’s not reading this.

A: I don’t think he is.

Q: Do any of your in-person friends know about this?

A: No, I doubt it. They’d have to dig around a bit to find it. Or get at it through the Flickr.

Q: Why don’t you want them to read it?

A: Eh, it’s the lesson I learned from the first blog.

Q: You learned a lot of lessons from that “trial” I imagine.

A: Oh yea.

Q: You want to buy a camera? What for? You’ve already got one.

A: The most advertised feature of mine is that it also doubles as an MP3 player. And it was a gift. From my uncle who I don’t like. It’s time for an upgrade.

Q: What are you hungry for?

A: Nachos. Not really. I wish I wanted nachos so I could go get them. I have zero appetite right now. I could’ve gone the entire day yesterday on tea but I forced myself to eat a salad and then a mini-pizza.

Q: You’re about to say something?

A: A certain flickr group popped into my head just now. I posted about it a long time ago, but basically it’s a group called “feminism” and a majority of the photos people add there I have no idea how they’re related to feminism. So someone posed the question in the group…and the first response was something like “women are beautiful, mothers and nature” and stuff like then and then later on a guy chimes in with the old “this is a good discussion to have” and then proceeds to talk about how his photos (almost voyueristic photos of mainly young, white, attractive women) are somehow a comment on feminism. I don’t get it.

Q: People want views and subscribers. Hence they add their photos to every single group they belong to.

A: Yea.

Q: Are you going to talk about Chris Benoit?

A: God. I’ll just say that while i’m not a medical professional and I don’t know with intimate knowledge the effects of steroid use…just the way in which people are making this out to be purely roid rage is just ridiculous. It’s like a bad SVU episode. Society will always find ways to minimize, evade, cover up domestic violence, men’s violence against women, etc. If we suddenly found out that Dubya physically assaulted his wife, people would start saying that he’s just crazy, stupid and power-hungry. While the latter certainly is true for DV abusers, people just wouldn’t say “hey, it’s a man hitting a woman.”

Q: In Dubya’s case it seems like they’d concentrate on him though and not “the victim” which is unusual for how society reacts.

A: Right, it’s a different case because obviously the man is who he is. But in either way, it situates the abuse in a certain way to avoid looking at it directly. It’s like taking a side-glance at Dubya and focusing solely on him to avoid even considering that it’s indicative of a larger societal problem.

[But what does it mean?!]

Someone who I haven’t talked to in a very long time emails me today out of the blue. Then I turn around and pop in some TV on DVD and on it, this person’s name is a new character that suddenly comes into town in a strangely similar sort of relationship that I have with this person. Hmmm.