Deranged Ramblings

I’ve been dealing a lot with memories of my past here on my blog within the last couple of weeks. I guess I feel like this electronic medium is my opportunity to introduce myself to the world. And I’m pleased to say that all three of you who read it have made feel as if the world is happy to know me. So to continue in the same vein, I’m going to discuss one of the many memorable aspects of my childhood. Let it be said first of all that I am, despite all appearances, quite a nerd and I love video games. Just so you know what you are dealing with. You see, this fascination with electronic entertainment began when I was quite young. I blame my father, because, to the best of my memory, the first game I ever played was a pseudo-text based, crappy ASCII-graphics DOS game called CASTLE, which my father introduced to me in the computer lab at the university he was attending. At some point we actually owned an Atari, that ancient precursor of the modern home video game console, but it v...

I'm afraid of telephones. Let me clarify: I’m not particularly afraid of the actual physical devices themselves, but of having to use them. It’s been like that as long as I can remember. I get this knot in my stomach every time a phone rings, even if its not my phone or somebody else answers it. I can't stand to pick up the phone, or have a conversation on it for longer than five minutes, and don't even ask me to call somebody I don't know or haven't called before. I can’t, I freeze up. My friends and acquaintances are confused to learn that, despite the fact that I can talk your ear off if we are having a conversation in person, I’m generally monosyllabic on the phone and have to be coaxed to talk at any length. So the phone and I have a troubled relationship, but that hasn’t stopped it from creeping up into all aspects of my life, no matter where I go. In high school there was even a phone in my bedroom, though I never used it. It was connected to the ph...

For some reason I’ve been thinking lately about something that happened to me a couple of years ago. I was right in the middle of my undergraduate education with a major in English. Now English majors are used to getting a certain kind of reaction when they tell people what their major is. I thought that once I graduated I would not have to go through the all-too-common scenario of having to justify what I had decided to major in to other people who I didn’t even know. It turns out that post-graduation the question “What is your major” transfers fluidly into “What was your major?” resulting in the exact same problem. Most English majors I know got so sick of the reactions they get when announcing their major that they began to try to avoid the subject all together. It is not uncommon to start the sentence, “I’m an English major” with a kind of reluctant sigh, an “oh-boy-here-we-go-again” sort of feeling expressed in a brief hesistation. “Oh,” the other person says, clearly ...

So I was driving home from the bookstore today after having celebrated two full weeks of employment by purchasing a book by the mysterious Thomas Pynchon. I was driving down a street in a residential area, near an elementary school in fact. Suddenly, I saw movement on the road ahead of me. A mother pheasant was attempting to cross the street with a gaggle of little pheasant babies in tow. It took several seconds to register what I was seeing, but finally I put on the brakes and brought my car to a halt quite a distance from where they were crossing. The mother had seen my approach, however, and was now frozen in fear in the middle of my lane. "Go," I said, as kindly and encouragingly as I could, as though she could hear and understand me. A car was coming up behind me, obviously upset that I was stopped in the middle of the street. "GO!" I shouted to the mother pheasant. If I lived inside a Hollywood movie, I probably would have said, "For the love of God, save...

So I'm feeling like I ought to write something on my blog, but I don't really have anything to say at the moment. I'm feeling quite political today for some reason, and so I could very well write a whole post about my feelings on the US prison at Guatanamo (summary: should they close it? Yes. Will they? Not a chance.) However, I have decided the last thing my happy little blog needs is a heated political diatrabe, so rather than invite your wrath or apathy or whatever by rambling on about those sort of things I will simply post a couple interesting quotes to make of what you will. #1- A very passionate political commentator on the News gave us this great quote. I wish I could remember his name, but he was squaring off against another pundit who was arguing that the Guantanamo prison should remain open and who gives a crap about the human rights of terrorists (which is by far the most popular position on the subject I have heard around here). The quote was, from my memory: ...

An old friend and former roommate of mine, Nick, has a passion for photography, among other things. He also has a really nice camera. He wants to get into doing potraits, so he's been asking a lot of people he knows to be subjects for a shoot. Yesterday he took me up to the canyon and took about a million pictures of me in what was to be my first ever photo shoot (first of many, mark my words!). Here I will share some of my favorites with you. In about 85% of the pictures he took, my eyes were closed. I had a knack for timing my blinks exactly with the camera shutter. But these worked out pretty well. Some of them have been touched up by Nick on the computer. Enjoy!

I love this one. I was trying to be tragic and sad in a tortured artist kind of way. Looks good in black and white. 

In case that last one made you too sad, here's a happy one 

A fun mid-air shot, with vibrant color thanks to Nick 

Another action shot 

Attempting to be cool in shades that are too big 

This one is nice and sort of casual 

Look how rugged I am, enjoying nature... in my Gap ensemble. 

I was a little shy at the beginning of the shoot 

I really love this one. It's so awful.  

I usually wait a few days in between posts, but I just had to write about something I heard today during my extensive orientation/training meeting at my new place of employment. The plant hygienist, explaining all the precautionary measures taken to prevent something contaiminating the food product and thereby causing illness or death in consumers, gave us this quotable quote: "We don't want to kill anybody, because-" OK, already warning signs are going off in my head. The use of the word "because" here suggests that the previous statement requires some kind of explanation or clarification. Things are really bad when it has to be explained why being responsible for the death of another human being is a bad thing. But, perhaps I'm being too linguistically picky. It may be a little redundant to explain why we don't want to kill anybody, but being redundant isn't really a crime worthy of a searing outcry on my blog. He might very well go on to say, ...

So I haven’t posted on my blog for a while, partly because I’m lazy, partly because I wasn’t sure what to write about, but mostly because my last post was a hard act to follow. In fact, I was so impressed with my own wit and cleverness that I was downright afraid to post again for fear I’d simply prove to really be an idiot after all. But then something happened to me that I had just had to share with all of you, and so the spell was broken. So you remember the job interview I had two weeks ago? The one where I saw all the weirdos? Well, I got the job. Yes, I called the Vatican and they confirmed that this is clearly a miracle (though not a very big one; they called it a Class Eight miracle, nothing on par with the parting of the Red Sea which was a Class Two or the raising of Lazarus which was a Class One). So anyway today was my first day at work. I am now employed at the Nestle/Stouffer plant in north Springville. I work with Quality Assurance there, and all the weirdos from the t...