When I was a kid, maybe 8 or 9, I lived in a house in a kind of rural part of Ohio. The house backed up to a lake where many weird things happened. The two things that made the papers were when these kids played dungeons and dragons in the woods around the lake, and one ended up committing suicide (James Dallas Egbert), and when we had a flash flood, causing some kids who had taken shelter in a culvert to get caught in the flood waters. One 16 year old girl's body was found in a tree when the waters receded, only 4 houses down from where I lived. Something about the lake always seemed a little off.
One night my dad was out on the back patio looking at stars when he noticed a strange light over the lake. My dad is an engineer, and designs planes for a living. He knew it was something other than a known aircraft. He ran into the house and got us kids, and the video camera. He filmed the light as we watched it hover over the lake. Then the light suddenly started coming right towards us. My dad told us to run into the house, and when we looked out back a few minutes later, the light was gone.
I used to show the movie to friends because it was kind of cool. Then, in 1993, I was working for 6 months at New Mexico State University Physical Science Lab. There was a bunch of cutting edge technology being used in the labs, including software to do video analysis on images. I had told one of the researchers about the video, and he asked me if I could get a copy of it for him to look at. My dad sent the tape, which was in 8mm format, and the guy did some analysis on it. He couldn't figure out what it was either. Then he submitted it to some UFO group where it was put in their archives. After I finished my work there I lost touch with him, in part because I kissed him at a party one night, and then decided I didn't like him anymore, so I don't know what, if any, further conclusions were drawn about the video by the UFO group.
Fast forward to 1997. I was working on a project with this woman named Rita. I never paid much attention to her until she invited me out to a happy hour. I was the only one that showed up, and we became instant friends that night. It was the kind of friendship where you feel like you known that person forever. Rita took care of me during that time, when I was being pretty self destructive. I would go out and party all night, get a few hours of sleep, and then roll into work. She would "kidnap" me and make me spend the weekend at her house, away from the various male detritus that I was hanging out with. She would feed me and make me sleep.
We decided to go on vacation to St. Maarten together, one of my favorite places. This was about 6 months into our friendship, and is the trip where I got a concussion from falling off a toilet seat (http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2007/02/commodal-concussion.html). One night we were sitting on the beach, and I was telling Rita how great it was to have her as a friend, and that it was strange to me since I don't normally buddy up with women (mostly because they are jealous, lying, PMSing bitches who will dump you as a friend the second some guy with a semi hard cock takes an interest in them). Then I said I felt like I had known her all my life.
She turned to me and said "I think we met before". I was like "where?" and she said "on a UFO".
Then she proceeded to tell me about how, one morning driving into work, she and a co-worker she commuted with saw a bright light in the sky. They were in light rush hour traffic, and cars along that stretch of road were slowing down and pulling over to look at the light. Rita remembered the radio turning to static, and reaching down to adjust the knob. The next thing she remembered was sitting on the side of the road, and the engine of the car being off. About 5 minutes had elapsed. She and her co-worker were sure they had been abducted by the UFO (for the record, the UFO sighting was written up in an article in the Washington Post, which I wasn't able to locate on the web in the few seconds I just spent looking).
People at work knew about my UFO sighting because I had brought the film in to have it put on a CD (since lost in one of my moves, but I should see if my brothers have a copy and I'll post it on the blog). Also, at the time Rita and I were working on a declassification project for the government, and one of the things we were declassifying was Project Blue Book. I don't believe Rita and I met on a UFO, but I did think it was an interesting thing to say.
Rita ended our friendship in 2003. She had been dating this guy for a while, and he didn't like me very much (maybe because I did things like get Rita really drunk in the middle of the afternoon, or maybe because Rita and I would pretend to make out in bars to fuck with guys, or maybe because I once fell over a sofa in their house while holding a mixed drink that had something red in it, and the sofa was white, and they couldn't get the stain out). They got married, and I wasn't invited to the wedding. I started seeing less and less of Rita.
One evening I showed up for a work happy hour, after driving in traffic for 2 1/2 hours, and Rita started screaming and yelling at me for no reason that I could figure out other than she was pissed at me for existing. Her husband walked with me as I left the bar and headed to my car, since I had also just broken up with a guy I had been seeing that I thought was "the one", and was in no mood to be around someone who was trying to make me feel worse than I already did.
Her husband said he didn't know why she was suddenly so mad at me, and that I should "just give her some time". I waited and waited for her to email or call me, but she never did. After four months I sent her an email, but she never responded back.
And that, as they say, was the end of that.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
S, this is your thank you
I would like to thank S, the woman who set up the class I'm teaching in DC this week, for putting out the wrong training material on Monday, so I had to get copies made, only to find out she had copies of the stuff I needed and just fucked up. I'd like to thank her for me having to go to Kinko's at 1030 at night to check a proof, and then return at 6 am to pick up my print job, which I didn't need because the material was at the teaching facility, she was just incapable of opening a fucking box to find it.
I'd like to thank S for giving me the opportunity to walk 2 miles carrying that material. And then not coming in to work so, after I figured out she had the stuff I needed, I had to get security to unlock her office door. That took 5 hours and class was almost over by then.
I'd like to thank her for going into my class room today while I was running to the deli across the street to get pretzels and taking the box where I put the extra training materials, and throwing them away instead of sending them back, as I had requested. I'd like to thank her for wasting so much fucking paper it's not funny.
And I'd like to thank her for me potentially getting stuck with a $500 bill from Kinko's that might not get paid by my company, since they can prove they shipped the material and I therefore wasted $500 making copies we didn't need. I would feel slightly better about the whole thing if at least the unused material was shipped to another class. But no, fuck nut, I mean S, decided to throw it away. And then give me attitude, when I found out what she did and went running down the hall to stop her before she dumped it in the trash chute (she literally projected the box into the chute when I was 20 feet away from her yelling "stop!" - then she gave me a look, with her non-lazy eye, and said "oh, I didn't know you were talking to me" even though there was no one else there that I could see that I might have been yelling at - of course, I don't have a lazy eye, so maybe she saw something I didn't - or maybe she's a fucking bitch).
If a tree falls on her in a forest, and no one is around but me, assume I caused the tree to fall and that she did make a sound when it hit her.
I'd like to thank S for giving me the opportunity to walk 2 miles carrying that material. And then not coming in to work so, after I figured out she had the stuff I needed, I had to get security to unlock her office door. That took 5 hours and class was almost over by then.
I'd like to thank her for going into my class room today while I was running to the deli across the street to get pretzels and taking the box where I put the extra training materials, and throwing them away instead of sending them back, as I had requested. I'd like to thank her for wasting so much fucking paper it's not funny.
And I'd like to thank her for me potentially getting stuck with a $500 bill from Kinko's that might not get paid by my company, since they can prove they shipped the material and I therefore wasted $500 making copies we didn't need. I would feel slightly better about the whole thing if at least the unused material was shipped to another class. But no, fuck nut, I mean S, decided to throw it away. And then give me attitude, when I found out what she did and went running down the hall to stop her before she dumped it in the trash chute (she literally projected the box into the chute when I was 20 feet away from her yelling "stop!" - then she gave me a look, with her non-lazy eye, and said "oh, I didn't know you were talking to me" even though there was no one else there that I could see that I might have been yelling at - of course, I don't have a lazy eye, so maybe she saw something I didn't - or maybe she's a fucking bitch).
If a tree falls on her in a forest, and no one is around but me, assume I caused the tree to fall and that she did make a sound when it hit her.
I think I like my old nose
Last night I had a dream that I was working in a laboratory with these two crazy scientists. They were both fat, had huge glasses, and big bushy eyebrows.
They called me into their little experiment area and they were like "we have new products we need you to sell to management". So I was like "okay, show me". The first thing they produced looked like a golf ball with a wedge cut out of it. Each side of the wedge had two holes. I was like "what the hell is that?" and they were like "it's a new nose".
Then they showed me a person who had just had the nose installed. He looked like he had a golf ball on his face, except for the cut out wedge which was facing upward. I was like "um, guys, that looks really stupid". They got mad and said "it's a swimmer's nose!" And then went on to explain how a person who was swimming could keep their face sort of below the water, but would still be able to breathe. They thought the Navy SEALs might buy it. They showed me three other noses. One was really flat, so a person could look around a corner and not get their nose shot off if they were in a gun fight. And then one was like a lava lamp, which could be turned on for safety in case the person was lost (people could find them by the flashing light of the nose).
I was getting more and more stressed as they showed me each nose. Then I started screaming at them "this is what you've spent our R&D funding on?????" And I realized the scientists were really duplicates of my ex-house pest Ryan in disguise. So then I was like "fuuuuuuck, what am I going to tell my management? And how did that shit bag get hired here, and duplicated as a clone?????"
Then I woke up.
They called me into their little experiment area and they were like "we have new products we need you to sell to management". So I was like "okay, show me". The first thing they produced looked like a golf ball with a wedge cut out of it. Each side of the wedge had two holes. I was like "what the hell is that?" and they were like "it's a new nose".
Then they showed me a person who had just had the nose installed. He looked like he had a golf ball on his face, except for the cut out wedge which was facing upward. I was like "um, guys, that looks really stupid". They got mad and said "it's a swimmer's nose!" And then went on to explain how a person who was swimming could keep their face sort of below the water, but would still be able to breathe. They thought the Navy SEALs might buy it. They showed me three other noses. One was really flat, so a person could look around a corner and not get their nose shot off if they were in a gun fight. And then one was like a lava lamp, which could be turned on for safety in case the person was lost (people could find them by the flashing light of the nose).
I was getting more and more stressed as they showed me each nose. Then I started screaming at them "this is what you've spent our R&D funding on?????" And I realized the scientists were really duplicates of my ex-house pest Ryan in disguise. So then I was like "fuuuuuuck, what am I going to tell my management? And how did that shit bag get hired here, and duplicated as a clone?????"
Then I woke up.
Monday, March 23, 2009
make vs. buy
And while I'm launching tirades...
I've been reading this really good book called Warrior Soul, by Chuck Pfarrer. It's his memoir of being a Navy SEAL. I've enjoyed the book a lot.
I found it interesting though, that his whole reason for joining the SEALs is that he got dumped by a girlfriend. Then he went on this huge tear to sleep with as many women as possible. Then he met some woman, settled down (sort of, for a SEAL anyway) and married her. Then he slept with someone else. Actually, two women, at the same time.
And the weirdest thing to me is, through out the descriptions of his escapades with all these women (they don't rate more than a sentence usually, so don't go out and buy the book thinking it's about sex), wife and one night stand alike, he continually uses the term "making love". Love. Really?
I have to say, I've always found that expression to be one of the stupidest and most annoying in the English language (I put it even before the expression "whatever floats your boat"). As soon as someone uses that expression around me I have to fight the urge to vomit on them. But today I started thinking, as I was watching the moron at Kinko's try to comprehend "2 slides on one page", that maybe that is the break down between men and women, or romantics and breeders.
The concept of making something...you make dinner. You eat it. It's gone. There's no sense of existence after the act (unless you eat something you're allergic to, in which case you might throw up - but, that's outside the scope of the point I'm trying to make). Why not be a little more REAL about what's going on? Guys always get pissed when I say "fucking" or "having sex". I guess that's because they prefer euphemisms for what they are doing, especially when the guy is just fucking around. I guess they think that saying "making love" will make the girl feel better when she realizes she's not going to get a return phone call. "Oh, at least we made love" she'll say as she eats a half gallon of ice cream or an entire bottle of Xanax.
Devious trickery is all it amounts to. Guys don't want to say "love" because they're worried about the implications (marriage, pregnancy, belly fat, stretched out chop chop, hormones, divorce or death after many years with a partner they can't stand). So they get around that by using the shady "making love" expression. He figures "it almost sounded like I said I love her, I bet she'll fuck me now". She thinks "oh, he said love". And then after the fact he's all like "I said "make" before, love wasn't a verb, stop calling me, you ho" and she's all like "but I thought you loved me".
I encourage all women to laugh in the face of any man who says "make love". And to understand it's an expression that means nothing. A guy makes love to you, and then makes love to some girl he picks up in a bar while he's on a business trip away from you, and then makes love to some woman he picked up on midnighthookup.com, and then comes to your house and makes love to you again. All vaginas are the same. If a guy really loved you, he would avoid the word like the plague, because he'd be scared that you didn't love him. And then, if you love him, he'll leave you because men can't stand to be happy.
And isn't fucked just more appropriate for explaining how we all end up when we try to have a relationship...
I've been reading this really good book called Warrior Soul, by Chuck Pfarrer. It's his memoir of being a Navy SEAL. I've enjoyed the book a lot.
I found it interesting though, that his whole reason for joining the SEALs is that he got dumped by a girlfriend. Then he went on this huge tear to sleep with as many women as possible. Then he met some woman, settled down (sort of, for a SEAL anyway) and married her. Then he slept with someone else. Actually, two women, at the same time.
And the weirdest thing to me is, through out the descriptions of his escapades with all these women (they don't rate more than a sentence usually, so don't go out and buy the book thinking it's about sex), wife and one night stand alike, he continually uses the term "making love". Love. Really?
I have to say, I've always found that expression to be one of the stupidest and most annoying in the English language (I put it even before the expression "whatever floats your boat"). As soon as someone uses that expression around me I have to fight the urge to vomit on them. But today I started thinking, as I was watching the moron at Kinko's try to comprehend "2 slides on one page", that maybe that is the break down between men and women, or romantics and breeders.
The concept of making something...you make dinner. You eat it. It's gone. There's no sense of existence after the act (unless you eat something you're allergic to, in which case you might throw up - but, that's outside the scope of the point I'm trying to make). Why not be a little more REAL about what's going on? Guys always get pissed when I say "fucking" or "having sex". I guess that's because they prefer euphemisms for what they are doing, especially when the guy is just fucking around. I guess they think that saying "making love" will make the girl feel better when she realizes she's not going to get a return phone call. "Oh, at least we made love" she'll say as she eats a half gallon of ice cream or an entire bottle of Xanax.
Devious trickery is all it amounts to. Guys don't want to say "love" because they're worried about the implications (marriage, pregnancy, belly fat, stretched out chop chop, hormones, divorce or death after many years with a partner they can't stand). So they get around that by using the shady "making love" expression. He figures "it almost sounded like I said I love her, I bet she'll fuck me now". She thinks "oh, he said love". And then after the fact he's all like "I said "make" before, love wasn't a verb, stop calling me, you ho" and she's all like "but I thought you loved me".
I encourage all women to laugh in the face of any man who says "make love". And to understand it's an expression that means nothing. A guy makes love to you, and then makes love to some girl he picks up in a bar while he's on a business trip away from you, and then makes love to some woman he picked up on midnighthookup.com, and then comes to your house and makes love to you again. All vaginas are the same. If a guy really loved you, he would avoid the word like the plague, because he'd be scared that you didn't love him. And then, if you love him, he'll leave you because men can't stand to be happy.
And isn't fucked just more appropriate for explaining how we all end up when we try to have a relationship...
ready to explode in 3, 2, 1
Have you ever seen a human brain explode? Well if you stick around you'll get to see my grey matter splattered all over these hotel walls (and they'll probably be pissed at the Marriott since, for no reason in particular, they called me today and said they've double the price of my room).
So, this AM I got up early to redo all of my time cards for the past three months. That's because none of my customers had customer numbers yet so all the work I've done is sitting in a temp code, showing me as unbillable for the whole quarter. Though nothing could be further from the truth. And it would be bad to show up on someone's list as non-billable.
My manager set up new codes for me. I have to get my time card updated by Friday. The first code, of the three he gave me to use for various projects I've worked on, didn't work because it was fat fingered into the system wrong. The second one was retired and we can't charge to it anymore. The third one was the right code, but I can't get access to it because I wasn't given permission to use it. All of these problems are being corrected, and I'm sure will be done around the time I'm on a plane flying back to DC, and then I'll get in trouble for not getting my time card updated in time.
Then I sat on a 2 hour meeting to discuss the new way we are doing business. I have to go out and scrounge my own work. Great, except that every time I've done that, another organization at my wonderful company has claimed ownership of the client, and I don't get to do any of the work. Also, I'm supposed to call past clients. Since I'm the fire fighter of the team, sent in when others have been thrown off, I don't own most of my clients, some other consultant does. I have clients that schedule me to do work for them, but half the time the work gets given to someone else because it was their client to begin with (even if they screwed up the engagement, they get sent back later) or because the person who does my schedule smokes crack and fucks my schedule up. I'm supposed to update the new scheduling software with my engagements. In my spare time.
Then I went to the training facility where I'm supposed to be teaching class tomorrow. Not only did they ship the wrong material, but I also found out I'm teaching 2 classes instead of one. I'm currently between trips to Kinko's to get my training material copied, hopefully by tomorrow when class starts. I'll be picking the material up at o dark 30 and walking 2 miles with it to my class since there was only Kinko's that could get the job done in time. I have to get to my training class early because the VM image that I teach from has an expired license, I just got the renewed license by email about an hour ago, and I have to install it on 15 different machines before everyone shows up. Assuming the install will work, since no one in my company apparently knows how to set up a new license on the VM image. Hopefully I can figure it out before class starts. Otherwise, I'm really fucked.
I should note that I only found out how fucked my class was after sending a final warning email today that things seemed to be going from SNAFU to TARFU to FUBAR in a quick like manner. Though I've been asking questions about WTF I'm supposed to be teaching tomorrow for the past two weeks, I did not get a response back from the back office until 4:30 today. Nice.
I won't even go into the discussion I had with another consultant about how I should move to DC to ensure I have work, since lay offs were mentioned in the meeting this AM. I took the job I have now to get out of the 3 letter agency gig and so I could live where I wanted and not have to do work with those kinds of people. Now I have this veiled threat that they aren't going to give me work until I move. I respond to that with a big fuck off. I am NOT moving back to this shit show coast. I am not going back to work with those 3 letter guys unless I'm an employee, at which point I will get deployed to some shit show third world country, making more money than my current employer will pay me.
And, I'll get to carry a gun. Bullets I know how to dodge. Bullshit like today just pisses me off.
So, this AM I got up early to redo all of my time cards for the past three months. That's because none of my customers had customer numbers yet so all the work I've done is sitting in a temp code, showing me as unbillable for the whole quarter. Though nothing could be further from the truth. And it would be bad to show up on someone's list as non-billable.
My manager set up new codes for me. I have to get my time card updated by Friday. The first code, of the three he gave me to use for various projects I've worked on, didn't work because it was fat fingered into the system wrong. The second one was retired and we can't charge to it anymore. The third one was the right code, but I can't get access to it because I wasn't given permission to use it. All of these problems are being corrected, and I'm sure will be done around the time I'm on a plane flying back to DC, and then I'll get in trouble for not getting my time card updated in time.
Then I sat on a 2 hour meeting to discuss the new way we are doing business. I have to go out and scrounge my own work. Great, except that every time I've done that, another organization at my wonderful company has claimed ownership of the client, and I don't get to do any of the work. Also, I'm supposed to call past clients. Since I'm the fire fighter of the team, sent in when others have been thrown off, I don't own most of my clients, some other consultant does. I have clients that schedule me to do work for them, but half the time the work gets given to someone else because it was their client to begin with (even if they screwed up the engagement, they get sent back later) or because the person who does my schedule smokes crack and fucks my schedule up. I'm supposed to update the new scheduling software with my engagements. In my spare time.
Then I went to the training facility where I'm supposed to be teaching class tomorrow. Not only did they ship the wrong material, but I also found out I'm teaching 2 classes instead of one. I'm currently between trips to Kinko's to get my training material copied, hopefully by tomorrow when class starts. I'll be picking the material up at o dark 30 and walking 2 miles with it to my class since there was only Kinko's that could get the job done in time. I have to get to my training class early because the VM image that I teach from has an expired license, I just got the renewed license by email about an hour ago, and I have to install it on 15 different machines before everyone shows up. Assuming the install will work, since no one in my company apparently knows how to set up a new license on the VM image. Hopefully I can figure it out before class starts. Otherwise, I'm really fucked.
I should note that I only found out how fucked my class was after sending a final warning email today that things seemed to be going from SNAFU to TARFU to FUBAR in a quick like manner. Though I've been asking questions about WTF I'm supposed to be teaching tomorrow for the past two weeks, I did not get a response back from the back office until 4:30 today. Nice.
I won't even go into the discussion I had with another consultant about how I should move to DC to ensure I have work, since lay offs were mentioned in the meeting this AM. I took the job I have now to get out of the 3 letter agency gig and so I could live where I wanted and not have to do work with those kinds of people. Now I have this veiled threat that they aren't going to give me work until I move. I respond to that with a big fuck off. I am NOT moving back to this shit show coast. I am not going back to work with those 3 letter guys unless I'm an employee, at which point I will get deployed to some shit show third world country, making more money than my current employer will pay me.
And, I'll get to carry a gun. Bullets I know how to dodge. Bullshit like today just pisses me off.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
hats
Last night I dreamed that my friend Eva and I had gone to a small town in Arizona to buy a hat. We were walking down the main street of this small town, looking for a hat shop, when we realized a beauty competition was going on in the town.
As we started to walk in front of the bandstand where the contestants were, we saw a woman who was obviously going to win the contest. She was about 8 feet tall, and her arms and legs could bend into any position. She was singing the song "Margaritaville" for what I guess was the talent part of the competition.
When Eva and I tried to continue down the street, this 8 foot tall woman kept jumping in front of us and then doing kind of the splits, but not really, because her legs would bend in such a way that as she landed her toes would be touching her forehead. Eva and I started getting really annoying because we were in a rush to get our hats because the sun was getting hotter and hotter, but we couldn't get down the street because this stupid woman kept singing Margaritaville over and over and landing in front of us every time we tried to find a new way down the street.
Finally Eva was like "Why didn't we bring Dan (her husband) with us?" We decided to head back to the hotel where we were staying to see if we could find Dan. The crowd started closing in on me and it was so hot I thought I would faint. The sun was really bright and I couldn't see anything but outlines anymore.
Then I woke up.
As we started to walk in front of the bandstand where the contestants were, we saw a woman who was obviously going to win the contest. She was about 8 feet tall, and her arms and legs could bend into any position. She was singing the song "Margaritaville" for what I guess was the talent part of the competition.
When Eva and I tried to continue down the street, this 8 foot tall woman kept jumping in front of us and then doing kind of the splits, but not really, because her legs would bend in such a way that as she landed her toes would be touching her forehead. Eva and I started getting really annoying because we were in a rush to get our hats because the sun was getting hotter and hotter, but we couldn't get down the street because this stupid woman kept singing Margaritaville over and over and landing in front of us every time we tried to find a new way down the street.
Finally Eva was like "Why didn't we bring Dan (her husband) with us?" We decided to head back to the hotel where we were staying to see if we could find Dan. The crowd started closing in on me and it was so hot I thought I would faint. The sun was really bright and I couldn't see anything but outlines anymore.
Then I woke up.
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