Haha. So work wants to buy me a leash. AKA a company Nextel cell phone. (Blackberrys are a ball-and-chain.)
The reason for this is because I'm in a quasi-supervisory position on the floor, so they want folks to be able to get ahold of me without me having to pay for it on my own personal cell phone. The downside is it means I have to be available all the time. Oh well, like that's any different than now with my regular cell. :P
So... you all have missed out on all this drama because I am lazy and don't post here like a good lil netaholic should.
So, allow me to get you all caught up to date.
I am trying to get an apartment closer to work because I commute 4-5 hours a day and it's killing me. I routinely do 10 to 12 hour days, and add a 5 hour commute into that and it's lethal. By the time the weekend comes around, I want NOTHING to do except just sit at home and relax and vegetate.
So I'm looking to get a place closer to work. Totally scared shitless because it'll mean moving out of the next and, as psychotic as my family is, I love coming home and knowing that they're all there and hearing all the tidbits about everyone's day and whatnot.
Plus, Greg (my boyfriend of four and a half years, for those who don't remember the name :) ) is looking to move up here this summer and it'd be nice to have a place for us to move into. However, it will have to be a place with at least two bedrooms because we both want to have our own space to go to when we need.
That being said, he came up for a few days and we started hunting. Searched the amazingly awesome Craig's List and found a few good potentials.
One of the places was...amazing. Third floor of a triple decker, just a 10 minute bus ride and 1 subway stop from work, three bedrooms, full-sized modern kitchen, living room, dining room, even had a foyer, an oversized claw foot bathtub in the bathroom, walk in closets, a walk in pantry, a front and back balcony, attic space, basement space, a garage out back, and it is in a really nice neighborhood walking distance from a grocery store and a mile from a major hospital.
Oh, and it is only $1300 a month.
So I met with the current occupants and the landlord and got rental applications for myself and Greg. It winds up that he has some stuff going on that might make it so he can't move up here until this summer, so I spoke with the landlord and asked if he would mind if just I submit my application and Greg will submit his when he is ready to move in. The landlord said fine. So I sent in my application.
A few days later I called him just to confirm that he had received the app. He said to me that he hadn't but that he will require the first month's rent now, and if my credit check came back bad, he would return the money. At the time I said I'd mail it out in a few days. The next day, I get a call from him and he says he received the app, but he called my check and they said I didn't have enough money in the account to cover a $1300 check. I said I was well aware of that and 1) he never said he needed one until the day before and 2) I told him I wasn't going to send the money out right away. He said to give him a call back when I have the money. He stated that he was afraid of getting burned, and I told him I understand that, and I'll call him back.
That was a week ago today.
Today I give him a phone call and tell him that I have put my paycheck in the bank, but while I appreciate he doesn't want to get burned, neither do I. $1300 is a lot of money to give someone blindly without anything in return and so I proposed a compromise: if he called my bank tomorrow to confirm the money is there, then tomorrow afternoon, I'll go to the bank and have a cashier’s check cut for the amount of $1300 so the money is set aside and in a form that is guaranteed not to bounce, so he will be secured that way. The day I give him a signed lease, I'll also give him that check.
He tells me that he is concerned he hasn't received my roommate's application, so I told him that when we spoke before, I was under the impression that he was okay with me just putting my application in and Greg applying once he was ready to move up because it doesn't make any sense for someone to take on liability for a place they don't live at and won't for several months.
His response was that he'll get back to me tomorrow night and let me know what's what.
Now, this guy has two families moving out of the three-family apartment next month and nobody to take their place yet, so I appreciate he is nervous as all getout because this is his income. So...I'm cutting him some understanding on that. But he just seems so damn jumpy that I'm afraid he's going to turn me down for the apartment. Which puts him back at square one.
So maybe his desperation will get him to realize that I'm just trying to be reasonable about this.
But who knows. This place kicks ass, so I'm really desperately hoping he says okay, but...bleh.
Nervous as all hell he'll call me tomorrow and say no.
At work. Ton of stuff to do. Why did I just spend 10 minutes trying to figure out what my password to LJ was? (On my computer at home, I have the password stored in my browser's memory so I don't have to log in each time.)
And more to the point, why did I make it what it is? Seriously...NO reason for it and NO way for me to ever remember it.
You know, I don't much mind the religious types who take the stance of "I will pray for your soul, but we all sin" approach to gays.
Yeaaaah, I disagree, but that's not an unresonable position.
This woman, however... She belongs to the Westboro Baptist Church. Does the name seem familiar, but you can't place it? You heard about it in the news. They go to military funerals and protest AT THE FUNERAL that God hates the USA and that the soldiers are dieing as retribution for the country's tolerance of gays.
Religious fundamentalism is BAD. I don't care if it leads you to fly airplanes into skyscrapers or torture a grieving family or blow up an abortion clinic. It's all the same, and people like that should be executed. Slowly. After being sodomized by a poker that's been left in a blast furnace for a few minutes.
Other than that, I have no strong feelings either way
Why do people seem to think that there is some spectrum of genders? That just because you act like a man or woman, it makes you that?
This is pure stupidity. I give it one month tops until the first rape of a woman happens.
If you have had Mr. Happy chopped off and your driver's license now say "Sex: F", then go for it. Have fun. You're still a guy, but you're legally a chick, so go ahead and use the women's room.
But if you can still stand and use a urinal, then the rights of every one of the thousands of women passing through that train station every single day trumps your humiliation at walking into a men's room wearing a dress and heels. If you are that humiliated, don't fucking dress like a WOMAN! Even women go out in jeans, tee shirts, and sans makeup.
I fucking hate the IRS. What else is there to say? Seriously. Keep the fuck out of the virtual world. If you don't get to tax my books from Amazon.com, don't be an idiot and think you can somehow now tax transactions in a fucking GAME.
Morons.
As to the thing with the school...oh, crap. I don't even know where to begin. How about the fact that we are turning out a bunch of wussy kids who I can't WAIT to piss me off at the mall when they grow up and I get to make them break down and wet themselves and cry when I yell at them for cutting in front of me in line because we treat them like entitled, fragile little gods. They aren't! They are kids! Boo hoo. Poor Johnny tripped when he got tagged. How horrible.
This is about as smart as banning red pens because it's too harsh. Or not grading kids because it'll hurt their feelings if they don't do well. After all, it's okay if they can't spell the most basic of words or use proper grammar. We can't hurt their feelings. And if you really do have to tell them that they did something not as correctly as was hoped (can't say they were wrong, after all), purple is a much better color. I mean, it's not like that color will then become associated with corrections, right?... yyyyeah.
Fuck the teacher's union, fuck the lawyers, fuck the administrators. They don't give a shit about the kids. The kids mean absolutely NOTHING to them. All that matters to them is not getting sued and keeping themselves looking good.
So let me add one to that list. FUCK THE PARENTS, then KILL THEM. I'm sick of this. I fully believe that parents should have to be licensed. Kids get hurt. Their feelings get hurt. And sometimes the kid is even a fucking MORON. Some kids are destined for nothing more than life as a burger flipper at McDonalds. Why do you have to sue the school if your kid is a retard?! Do us a favor and put a bullet in your fucking skull. Stop breeding. It's obvious where your kid gets their intelligence and we have enough future school administrators already.
We are doing nothing in this country except making our kids into stupid, touchy-feely, cynical, self-righteous, egocentric, entitled, wussy little bastards and bitches.
I am making a vow now to be as MINIMALLY politically correct as possible until the day I die. If you are too stupid to know the difference between a hyperbolic rant or a joke and an actual insult being leveled at someone, I want you to be offended and I want you to send me a million flames that I can then post all over the place to publicly humiliate you with and then I want you to run away like the troll you are. I want nothing to do with you.
Then again, if you are that type, you probably aren't a friend of mine and probably aren't reading this now.
So good for you for having a brain in your head and thank you for not being an idiot.
So I have created a new LJ Community: pobop (People Offended by Offended People). This is an anti-political correctness community for folks to post any examples of PC gone crazy or where PC has been defeated, or to just debate things regarding political correctness. Please join and help fight the dumbing down of the species.
Looking online for stupid lab accidents. Here is one I found.
A little background: Pirannah Solution is a solution of ultra concentrated sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide. It's purpose is to clean glassware in a lab, which it does with astounding efficency. It also is very dangerous. It can get as hot as 170 degrees Celcius (almost twice the temperature of boiling water) just from mixing the peroxide and acid, meaning it will spit superheated acid all over everything. Also, when it mixes with any organic reagent, it reacts...well, read this:
And therein lies the crucial caveat: IF you are using it under "production" conditions and you can be CERTAIN that it will NEVER come into contact with organic solvents, then it is relatively safe.
However, using it in an R&D lab is asking for trouble. A classic lab accident with piranha solution occurred at Cornell in 1986 or so. The grad students in one lab used to rotate responsibility for cleaning all of their glass frits by running piranha solution thru them (using "house vacuum") into a filter flask. One student made the mistake of leaving a trace of acetone in the flask. When the piranha solution hit the acetone, it went BLAMMO and a million pieces of glass embedded themselves into her face. Thank heavens she was wearing her safety glasses or she would most likely be blind now...
What Becky is writing about is 100% true. I saw it. It happened. It could just as easily happen to you. Read this and then ask whether a clean frit is worth this.
I was the first one to get to scene of the above incident. We heard a sound like an M-80 (about a quarter stick of dynamite) from two labs away. We got there within about 5 seconds to find her on the floor halfway across the room surrounded by a large pool of blood. The filter flask that she was using turned to dust; we never found a fragment larger than about 2 mm even though it had been wrapped in heavy black electrical tape. The metal 3 prong clamp that held the flask sheared off at the point where it was clamped to the latticework in the hood. A row of glass cabinets along one wall were peppered with holes from the shrapnel. The lab had one of those 100 mm diameter glass drainpipes running vertically on the wall opposite the hood (about 8-10 m away) -- the pipe cracked in the middle ...we believe that it wasn't from shrapnel, but from the compression wave of the blast.
The student was wearing rubber gloves, a thick sweater, a lab coat, an apron and safety glasses at the time of the explosion. The hood was down part way and saved her from catching most of it in the face. The arm holding the frit caught most of the damage -- the glove was completely flayed and her arm had several hundred small bits of glass in it as well as several fairly large lacerations. She had a wound about 20 mm in diameter just next to her jugular vein. At least one piece of glass went through her cheek. She (and everything else) was also covered with hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid; something that we didn't realize until much later because we had no way of knowing what had happened. I think the bleeding stopped more because she went into shock than from the pressure were were applying in two different places.
She spent the next six hours having tiny bits of glass picked out of her arm, neck and face. I'm told that you continue to have those work their way out of your skin for the next several weeks after such an incident -- that you sweep your good hand across the arm and cut yourself on the glass sticking out of your own skin. This student had some nerve/tendon damage and lost a bit of the motion in one or two of her fingers; I can't recall if she had any hearing loss or not. All things considered, she got off pretty lucky. And yes, she did leave the program a short time after.
Okay, so it is now 10:09 A.M., the day after Christmas. For all my bitching about how much I hate the day and all the time leading up to it, I had an entirely decent Christmas. Dad was a little bitchy at the end, as was mom, but that's understandable because we were all dead tired by that point. I was rediculously bitchy at the start of it, but that's understandable because I'm me.
My take this year: - A sheet set - "When Will Jesus Bring the Porkchops?" by George Carlin on CD - "The Darwin Awards 3" on CD - A book on writing comedy - a diskman - guitar lessons - mom renewed my Sam's Club membership - Ray on DVD (one of the greatest movies ever) - Eric Clapton CD - A teddy bear (I have gotten a stuffed animal every single christmas for as long as I've been alive) - one of those disc things that does the three-colored lightning thing inside it - a couple pairs of Dockers - a nice sweater - George Carlin-a-day calander - a pair of bionoculars - Path of Neo for XBox - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for XBox (when I was a kid, i was in LOVE with TMNT. Owned the bed sheets, the movies, the music album, the coloring books, all the action figures, you name it.) - Got some other things too, but I can't remember them all off the top of my head having just woken up.
....again. Shit. Didn't we go through this crap about a year ago?
I'm not a fan of the holiday. Truth be told, I rather hate the thing. Why? What could you hate about a time of year which is all about peace and joy and good will towards fellow mankind and watching St. Wal-mart bring toys made by millions of children all over the third-world?
Well, I hate it because, from the age of about fifteen, the holiday has been nothing more than a month long angst-fest at my house. Mom saying how much she hates the day and stress because she gets no help, my sisters being prissy little bitches, my dad getting stressed from it all and flipping out, and me just wishing I was anywhere but here.
Why, even today! We are presently wrapping the christmas gifts. The tree is not decorated. We're going out to midnight mass (which, for me, seems a bit hypocritical since, while I do have the faith of the Church, i have zero belief in the institution....) and tomorrow will be nothing but mom being pissed, stressing out dad, and everybody wishing they were anywhere else.
I got fired today. Trumped up charges of insubordination by somebody who wanted my job. She wanted my job, so she told my boss I was badmouthing him behind his back. Wonderful.
This is why I don't trust many people. Because every time I think people should play by the rules, I get fucked over for it.
Today, at about 10:30 am, I got a phone call from work asking me to come in early. I said I'd be in as soon as I could, but that it might mean I'm only there a little bit early. I was schdualed to be there at 5:00 pm. I got in at 4:30. Come to find out, the morning manager had been alone all day. On a raining saturday, the day after the baseball season ended. Needless to say, it was BUSY. So I jump right on a register and start ringing. I just edited my timecard later to show me clocking in at 4:30.
Come 5:00 pm, my closing casheir doesn't show. 5:15, 5:45. He's not coming in obviously. The line is stretching from one end of the store to the other (litterally) because there are only two people working on a BUSY day in a video store. But, the crowd is friendly, so it's hectic, but managable. Ward agreed to stay on until close. Thank GOD!
I get a call from my sister. "Can you give me a ride to work in the morning?" "Uuuhh...when?" "I have to be there at 6." "Absolutely not. I got four hours of sleep last night, I'm working a rediculous shift tonight and have to be back at 9 am tomorrow. I NEED sleep. Desperately." "Whatever. Fine."
So I go back to work.
10:30 comes. My sister calls again. "Are you sure you won't willingly drive me to work in the morning? Emphasis on the willingly." "What...is mom saying that i'll be forced to if I say I won't?" "I didn't say that."
So, the short of it is that I worked from 4:30 pm to 2:00 am, no breaks in there even to go to the restroom. I had four hours of sleep last night. I've been fighting exhaustion ALL DAY. And now I can't sleep because I have to get up and drive at 5:30 am. Which, if I went to sleep, I'd be able to be woken up, but I wouldn't be capable of driving. I'd be too groggy and out of it. So I have to stay up, THEN I have to go and work 9 to 5 tomorrow (and it's still going to be raining and there is no school monday, so it'll be a repeat of how busy it was today!).
I'm going to have to have a little sit-down with mom and discuss a few things with her. Namely, that if it is THAT important, she feels, that jen gets a ride to work, she start waking up at 5 am to do it because I have my own issues.
Jen works two jobs. One is graveyard shift the other is at 6 am. I want to know what the FUCK she was thinking taking those jobs when she has no way to get there! And I'm even more curious why it is suddenly MY responsibility to get her to work.
Now I'm talking to Greg on the phone and he is pissed off that it seems that despite all this, I'm not doing anything to move out. He's offering me the money to get my car on the road, but I already owe him a lot of money, so I'm hesitant to take him up on it. (Sorry, it's a necessity, I know, but pride counts for a lot.)
It's just jump to the left. And then a step to the right. Put your hands on your hips And pull your knees in tight But it's the pelvic thrust That really drives you insane Let's do the Time Warp again
At my last recolection, this is where my group of friends from high school stood...
One of us is in drug rehab. One of us is serving in Iraq. One of us works for MTV. One of us works for Blockbuster despite being a published forensic geneticist. One of us is in film school. One of us was married at 21 and is now a parent. One of us is married, has a kid, and owns his own tech firm.
I wish...gawd, do I wish I could tell you how much that list makes me long for the days of high school, where everything was even. Where you were successful for trying. Where, if you didn't talk to your friends, you know you'd see them tomorrow.
I can't even begin to tell you how much I miss my friends.
Our fifth year reunion is coming up. I can guarantee you I'm going to be a total wreck. (Hell, I'm a wreck right now, just thinking about these things.) In college, I've made a lot of friends and lost touch with them almost as fast. It kills me that I can't even remember half of their last names.
But my friends from high school...I've known them for most of my life. What they've meant to me, how they've changed me...that sort of thing I couldn't forget if I ever tried. And yet I've lost touch with almost every single one of them. Well....maybe not.
My friend Benny I met randomly through a good friend of mine. Winds up he is the younger brother to one of those friends I mentioned above. COMPLETELY random chance. Although his brother lives across the country right now, it feels good to know that I haven't lost all touch.
Another of those mentioned above, well...odds are fairly decent you're reading this right now. So...heh...sorry for the sentimentality and sappiness. A bit out of character for me, maybe, but something that's been on my mind a lot lately that finally got to me a little too hard because of some stuff that's happened.
A third one, well, just sucks at making phone calls. Shit, Sam! Let us know when you're in town. ;-)
It just makes me think.
These people, these six other people have influenced how I will forever interact with any other person I ever meet for the rest of my life. And yet I've lost touch with so many.
Look, I know it sounds sappy, I know it sounds pathetic and dumb. But those of you I've either kept touch with or have found again from the internet or mutual friends...you guys mean a lot to me. More than I can ever say. I wish I knew how much I needed y'all five years ago when we graduated, but I'm glad you guys are still around.
And now I'm sickening myself with my sentimentality, so I'm off. G'nite
My official conclusion: in the ingredients in Robitussin, where it says "flavor" and where it says "Alcohol content...." I think the secret ingredient is Jaeger.
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