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Thursday, January 29th, 2004
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3:15 pm - Attaboy
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Our department has quarterly awards to recognize people for doing a good job - you know, since they can't give us a raise. So, usually they're given to administrative staff and other people who they feel like are in the shadows. But this time, I got one called the "Innovation First" award for improving a process in the department or other creative thinking, blah blah. Basically because I've fought with another department for two years to get all of my information off of one Web site and onto another where it should be. I have to transfer something like 500 html pages this month while still being the primary company spokesperson. But that's another story. So anyway, here's the speech I gave when I got up:
Well, I really had my speech written for the "Employee of the Quarter" award, but I can modify it. I just want to thank all the little people who's backs I've stepped on to get where I am. And I want to tell the big people that I will continue to ride their coat tails all the way to the top! Thank you very much.
Man, I'm a smart ass.
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| Friday, January 23rd, 2004
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10:41 am - Man, I used to write here all the time
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I don't know what happened. I used to have so much to write...
I'm about a month and a half from my 30th birthday, so maybe it's good that I don't write. You couldn't trust me anyway.
I remind myself of me during high school, now. Stop the presses. No, really, I find myself still living for the future. You know, once the credit cards are paid off. Or, once I get that promotion. It's so stupid, but it's really hard to stop isn't it?
So, I have to concentrate on short-term little pleasures. I'll be arising at 3 a.m. tomorrow morning to go freeze my soaking wet ass off for a few hours on the last weekend of duck season. That's the kind of masochism I can get on board with! I can taste the duck quesadillas already.
My company only lost $111 million dollars during the fourth quarter, and that's a good thing. $1.2 billion for 2003 - I can't fathom that amount of money. But the journalists and analysts loved it because we "beat expectations." (cue theme music from Mad TV - "Lowered expectations....") My job might actually be fun if we ever turn a profit. Our stock is about $12 over the strike price for my options, so that could mean an extra grand or so for me in April. Who can argue with that?
In other news, I saw pictures of my wife's internal female parts. She had exploratory laporoscopic surgery this week. The Doc said everything looked so good that the pictures could be in a textbook. Aaahhhh, my wife's uterus is beautiful.
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| Tuesday, November 18th, 2003
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11:05 am - Taboo
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If you had vaginas for ears, now those would be ear muffs.
-Me at a swap meet this weekend
In more astounding news, Laquisha (of the SBC Global DSL for Macintosh helpdesk clan, Laquishas) did in fact help fix my DSL this weekend. I had my doubts at first, after a month and a half of my DSL service taking 14 seconds to resolve each DNS entry (and I do mean each, eg. www.lj.com and help.lj.com and mail.lj.com), that Laquisha would be able to help. However, in less than 10 minutes, Laquisha gave me an new IP address to substitute for the default in my TCP/IP information, and baby - we was on our way. I told her that she had made me a happy man. I'm not sure I've even told my wife that. Of course, if I could download sex as quickly from her as I can porn with the DSL...
You don't know if I'm joking or not, do you?
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| Thursday, September 11th, 2003
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11:04 am - lifesabeach
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T-minus 48 hours until Beach Time! Beach Time, brought to you by the letter B. Beach, beer, binikis, bum. An entire week, and I'm leaving the pager and laptop at home. I don't care what happens outside of Gulf Shores, Ala-damn-bama for seven days. Forecast calls for lows in the lower-70s, highs in the mid-80s and potential surf blown in from far-away hurricanes. I shall boogie on my board, like a bugel boy in Company ... B.
You so jealous.
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| Thursday, September 4th, 2003
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10:53 am - Let's get retarded in here
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Wait, is it the bear or the pope that shits in the woods? And which one wears the pointy hat? Do they both bump their water-tight asses when they hop?
Man, my online mail account has been down for three days. Supposed to be back up this afternoon. I'm going to have a helluva lot of mail. Solid!
I watched "Wall Street" for the first time last night. I'm in a better mood now. Did you know that it was filmed right after Stone won an Oscar for "Platoon"? See the Sheen connection? Darryl Hannah never was pretty, really.
We have an entire tribe of feral Mediterranean geckos that live around our house. We've named them. One is, of course, Gordon. Then there are Gianfranco, Juan, Uncle Lester, Francesca and a bunch I don't remember. They're cool and always trying to slip in through the door when we go out to smoke at night on the back porch. I have to chase them down and keep the cat and dog from eating them. They're handsome little beggars - and they eat bugs.
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| Thursday, August 21st, 2003
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11:53 am - Throwing open the shades
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This place is used so little that it smells musty in here and there are dessicated flies in all corners under the cobwebs.
Do you think that it is a particularly Western phenomenon that we put so much stock and emphasis on (reverb on)THE FUTURE-uture-uture-uture...?
I had to mentally pull a switch off the willow tree and tan my hide this week for forgetting that today is my life. Not the next pay raise, not next month's vacation, not some imaginary time in the future "when everything falls into place."
On a side note, in our first class cabin, we serve our passengers a bowl of warm toasted almonds, cashews, pecans, etc. One of my colleagues was just telling me about a letter he received when he worked in Customer Services. It was from a passenger extolling the virtues of this particular treat. She was entirely enamored, and evidently thought our then-CEO had instituted the treat, because she wrote, "Please don't ever get rid of Mr. Carty's warm, salty nuts." Mr. Carty is now gone, but his nuts remain.
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| Monday, July 28th, 2003
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11:51 am - Is hell
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So, this entry is going to sound way more fatalistic and violent than it really is. But RUGodOfWar should like it, anyway.
Life really is like war. It is a battle fought on many fronts. You advance, retreat, or hold your ground. Some are battles of attrition, some are blitzkrieg-like moves that overwhelm you or vice versa. The only problem is, you are your only reinforcement.
So here's the news from the fronts in Tim's big battle with Life:
Job
Entrenched. Very little prospect of advancing in the foreseeable future. Enemies: the economy and officers above me who don't care to advance their careers and get out of my way.
Spiritual
Ceasefire. Truce.
Relationship
Hawkeye Pierce and Colonel Potter called in to help at this M*A*S*H unit. Blood supplies running low. Suggest nurses' uniforms be shortened 5 ... no, 6 inches.
Physical
Fought a raging battle with nations of Mojito and Bud Light Saturday night. Confirmed kills of six Mojitians and five Bud Lightians. Battle-scarred and shell-shocked, spent Sunday on a cot with an IV in. Recuperated today, but liver had to call in the last of its reserve cells after heavy casualties.
Mental
What? Is this not "entrenched" enough for you? Do you need some cable moderator to explain the instability of my position and the "long road ahead" required to maintain a free mental state under these type of war conditions?
So, you might say, it is more like Vietnam here, than Iraq. I'm not so much losing as I am "not winning."
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| Monday, July 21st, 2003
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3:11 pm - Subject:ive
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| Wednesday, June 11th, 2003
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3:47 pm - "Well, I've never ... you know..."
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Written in the dust on the back door of a delivery truck on Hwy. 183 this afternoon:
Follow me to the donkey show!
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| Wednesday, June 4th, 2003
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12:24 pm - Hinkle, pay attention:
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Ride 'em, Cowboy
It's no home on the range, but New York City is a natural habitat for a new kind of urban cowboy: a singing, guitar-strumming man driven by a naked desire to become "the most celebrated entertainer of all time."
The siren call of celebrity lured 32-year-old Robert John Burck, aka the Naked Cowboy, to the teeming streets of Times Square, where he performs decked out in nothing but cowboy boots, a 10-gallon hat and tight, white underwear. Burck, who has lassoed tourist tips for the past three years, says his true grit pays off to the tune of $700 to $1,000 on an average day.
"I am the epitome of what America is," he said. "It's about personal initiative. It's about ingenuity … this is like the extreme of what you can do in America."
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| Tuesday, May 13th, 2003
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12:19 pm - Dare to discipline
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I remember my mom delivering the, "You just wait in your room until your father gets home young man! You're in so much trouble!"
I hid in the closet under a sleeping bag. I don't remember if I got a spankin, or not. Probably.
It's because I was hanging out with a neighbor kid that I wasn't supposed to be around. He was throwing a cat up in the air and watching it right itself before landing on its feet.
Obviously, I shouldn't have hung out with him. Parents are always right...
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| Thursday, May 8th, 2003
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1:24 pm - For those who didn't grow up in the south
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| Thursday, May 1st, 2003
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11:54 am
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I have an itch,
for which,
no way exists
to politely scratch it
in our society.
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| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2003
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2:48 pm - Ana Logy, Story Queen
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Once when I was little, I remember sitting down for supper with my parents. (I don't mean we only sat down for dinner once - we did almost every night. I'm just recalling one particular instance.) I had a cup of Coke. (It might have been a glass of Dr. Pepper, but in Texas we call all sodas or colas - Coke. So when I went to a restaurant I ordered a Coke, and the waiter or waitress would always ask, "What kind?" And then I would say, "Dr. Pepper." If they didn't ask, people would be upset if they got a Coke and wanted something else.) It was in an opaque, plastic tumbler of some sort. (I hesitate to say Tupperware, because Tupperware is a brand. Kind of like we call all facial tissue - Kleenex. But it probably was actually Tupperware.) So my mother must have noticed that it was almost empty, and she refilled it with iced tea before we began supper. But she didn't tell me she switched my drink. I've always liked iced tea. In fact, it is my favorite non-alcoholic beverage. I could drink gallons each day. But when I took the first drink, expecting Coke, I immediately spat it out again. Not because it tasted bad, but because I thought it was supposed to be Coke. And if it was supposed to be Coke, then it did, relatively, taste bad. Once I realized it was tea, then I was fine and finished the entire glass.
That is my life right now. I just want to spit it out.
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| Thursday, April 10th, 2003
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12:57 pm - Stomping Grapes
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There's a big debate at mi casa about what the following story means. I think it's innocuous, mi amiga thinks it means I'm a repressed serial killer. I don't care what you think ... or maybe I do:
When I was a kid, grade school age, I lived on a farm in the Texas Panhandle. Dad had a big shop building where he could pull trucks or tractors or implements in to work on them. In the back of the shop, he had a wood burning stove and a couch, for breaks, you know.
By the couch, he had a big stack of outdoor magazines - Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, etc. I used to sit for hours on that couch and read about safaris and hunting and fishing expeditions. Then I would wander around the farm and pretend I wasn't just hunting starlings and ground squirrels, but kudu and black buck and eland. I had a wonderful imagination because I didn't like my little brother and none of my friends lived within 15 miles of our farm.
So one day, the story goes, my father was mowing a barditch beside the highway near our house, and he found a magazine. A nudie magazine. With an unimaginable lapse of judgement, a decision right out of a daytime talk show, he decided it would be fun to put this porn in the stack of outdoor magazines and see what I would do. So the story goes.
Bare (pun intended) in mind that I'm all of nine years old. I did find the magazine, and I perused it thoroughly. Then I did what made sense in my overheated, naive little, West Texas mind. I pretended.
I imagined myself going house by house to visit these women. And all of them were with men who forced them to act against their nature. So I beat the men up and took the women away. (Yes, they were all still naked.) And then I imagined what I thought must be the right and natural thing for naked women to do.
Naked women obviously inhabit pits in the ground where they remain naked ... and stomp grapes. So I imaginarily threw them in these pits and picked juniper berries and imagined them as grapes. And 'my' hordes of naked women stomped grapes for me. The end.
Dad did eventually take the magazine away and burn it. I don't remember that there was a moral to his experiment. I think maybe I just found his nudie magazine and he came up with a lame excuse. Or maybe he was testing to see if I was gay.
But to counter my wife's good-natured jesting that I'm a sicko, I've never been accused of misogyny. I still very much enjoy pretty naked women, and often clothed women, as well. I drink wine. And I no longer associate the two. OK, that's a lie, but I don't always associate the two - it's more of a one leads to the other scenario. In fact, I find it nice that I didn't immediately have real erotic intentions at nine years old.
So laugh. Laugh all you want, but I'm not ashamed... really.
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| Tuesday, April 1st, 2003
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10:55 am - To live another day...
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So, the 32 hours I worked over the weekend and yesterday were not for naught. Our union leaders presented deals on cost reductions yesterday and we didn't have to file bankruptcy. Of course they drug it out until past the "last minute," but hey, what's a little gamesmanship among sworn enemies? So, now their rank-and-file members have two weeks to ratify the deals ... or we start this all over again. I think we're all going for drinks tonight, though.
And our executive secretary just gave me two gift certificates for 15 minute chair massages. So it did pay to walk around rubbing my shoulders and wincing.
To end on a funny note, we had dinner with some friends and their mother the other night. Their mother works at an 'independent living facility' and is friends with a lot of the little old ladies. She started a story off with, "My best friend, Gerty Butler, ..." But the restaurant was noisy and everyone else at the table thought she said, "My best friend is the Dirty Butler..." I laughed so hard that I literally cried. It set off a weekend's worth of Dirty Butler jokes. You just have to imagine, "Look at the mess that Dirty Butler left in the bedroom, again!" or "I walked into Jeeves' room, and there they were, doing The Dirty Butler!"
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| Tuesday, January 28th, 2003
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1:02 pm - Wreckers and Limiters
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I finally began reading "The Gulag Archipelago" by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, last night. It should be required reading for every citizen, right now, who is overwrought about the 'freedoms' being 'taken away' by the federal government.
Imagine if one in every ten people in the United States were arrested, convicted without trial, and forced into ten years of hard labor in Antarctic Alaska. Imagine if most of those people never returned and their families never heard from them again after the arrest - ever. Imagine 25 million U.S. citizens treated this way by a governement on the left of center. Then imagine the rest of the populace and how scared they were. It happened in the U.S.S.R. from 1917 into the 1950s.
Solzhenitsyn is a master of understated sarcasm, though. For example(Speaking of educated engineers and managers):
"These limiters were pursued for several years. In all branches of the economy they brandished their formulas and calculations and refused to understand that bridges and lathes could respond to the enthusiasm of the personnel."
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| Wednesday, January 22nd, 2003
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8:44 am - If a LiveJournal user quits posting, does anyone notice?
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My company lost $3.5 billion last year. Bet you can't top that.
Holy crap, I laughed so hard at American Idol last night that my sides hurt. I honestly used to think I was a terrible singer. But, I can't imagine why those people thought they were good enough to audition for American Idol. They shouldn't be allowed to sing in the shower.
Here's the thing about me - I never had any kind of voice instruction. I have a really good ear for pitch, good rhythm - basically all the things you need to be a good musician or singer. Except that I don't really have the talent to sing or play an instrument at any kind of professional level.
But I'm Pava-fucking-rotti compared to those idiots last night. That 'worst singer in New York' guy - man, that was beautiful. And the Pacino-channeling stalker guy in Miami - Wow. But the ultra-femme dude in New York, he took the cake. Could they possibly have thought they had talent? I can't believe they did. I have to believe they knew it was their shot at 15 seconds of fame. As Mike Tyson would say, "Thass ludicruth."
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| Thursday, December 19th, 2002
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3:49 pm - Brick Wall
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I've never been so utterly frustrated in almost every aspect of my life. I'm not angry or sad because I've got no room in my soul for those emotions right now. I am brim-full of lacking-all-power-to-change-anything frustration.
This week at work I have seen bad decision pile upon bad decision, and try as mightily as I could, I couldn't change anything.
My finances, though far from desparate, thwart me at every turn. Income, obviously, won't grow for me soon. Unexpected expenses hid behind the light at the end of the tunnel, and then jump out to block every ray as soon as I catch a glimpse.
And there is, of course, good ol' sexual frustration. I'll just let that sleeping dog lie, though.
It has taken me at least two hours each night to clear everything out of my head when I go to bed. Et tu Insomnia?
However, I did finish the diptych I've been painting. It looks great, in that, 'taking up blank space on a wall in an inoffensive but not quite skillfully or originally done,' kind of way. Yes, I can paint geometric, flat planes of space. It's better than a poster, anyway. No, Mondrian won't be deposed from his throne any time soon.
I highly recommend the Twang channel on http://www.accuradio.com - for those of you who are alt.country fans. Streaming radio really kicks ass at work.
So, I give up. I made it 28 years, 9 months, and 6 days without giving in. But, I think my spirit has finally been crushed. I give up.
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| Thursday, December 5th, 2002
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3:57 pm - Like a hand in a warm bucket of water
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This is one that you're going to tell to your friends, prefacing it only with, "Dude, I know this guy who..."
So, I drove 4.5 hours to my uncle's place near Austin for Thanksgiving - actually, it just happened to be Thanksgiving, the trip was really so that I could hunt. (I'll spare all you silly little malnourished vegetarians any details...cough...Whit...cough.)
We hunted and drank and ate and generally enjoyed his ranch, from which you can't even hear any traffic. Solitude is a wonderful thing when you have great people to share it with. Call me Yogi...
Anyway, here's the part you tell your friends:
So, I'm driving home on Sunday on this little two-lane highway. It has long stretches of open road and you can drive 75 mph, and it has strategically placed towns, all about 20 miles apart. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, though, those towns become one-light bottlenecks for a lot of traffic.
I had cases of beer residue to process, and I reached the town where I was going to stop. Twenty minute wait behind two miles of traffic. Full bladder. Finally make it through the bottleneck, and stop at the only convenience store on that side of town. Bathrooms out of order - both of them. Not going back into the traffic.
So, I tried to make it to the next town. Fifteen miles left, no rest areas, and I couldn't take it anymore. Now, I'm famous for drinking Gatorade on road trips because the bottles have extra-wide mouths. I've emptied my 'contents' into those bottles on numerous occasions.
This time would be different. Driving at 75 mph was not the problem. Starting the process was not the problem. Stopping was. All of that waiting had built up an unusual amount of pee-pee. I reached the top of the bottle. I fought with all my might and stemmed the flow.
Have you ever put a bottle of Visine in your pocket? When you drop some into your eye, you can't feel it because it's at your body temperature. Same thing with urine. What I though was the capacity of the bottle, was slightly over.
I wet my pants - and my car seat. At 75 mph on a two-lane road. It was funny.
I had never spilled a drop, before. My wife even did it once, but that's another story.
Next time, I'll get a bigger bottle of Gatorade.
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