Crazy Vampire Love

So a coworker of mine has been talking about this book she's reading that has just consumed her life. She reads it while walking home from work. If that's not dangerous, I don't know what is. She brings this book into nearly every conversation we have.


Yup....it's book one of the "Twilight" series.

It seems that roughly 90% of the females I know are either currently reading or have read these books. Those that haven't read them have undoubtedly been strongly urged to by their female brethren.

This is a dangerous thing for the males of this country. The words I hear to describe the relationships in this book are "intense, passionate, epic....etc." These are the kind of love stories that make women stop and think "I want that in my life. Why isn't my relationship more like that?"

Because your boyfriend/husband isn't a vampire. That's why. To all you single girls out there.....stop waiting for a vampire to say "I love you so much, I won't suck the blood out of your body and make you eternal." I agree, that is a very noble and lovely gesture. But it's a fictional book about vampires!

Generally, girls are more emotionally attached to things. Not all of them, but in my experience, most are. They see an old man and woman holding hands and they get misty eyed. The are visibly upset that Jim and Pam are having issues on The Office. A co-worker gets a new job, and you can start the water works. Same goes for books. A guy can read Twilight, get that's it's a good story and move on. Girls get so attached to the characters that they actually have feelings for them as if they were real people. I'm not saying it's your fault ladies. I think it's just a societal thing. That's who you are.

The best analogy I can think of for guys is porn. If a guy watches a porn movie, I don't think he expects his girlfriend to all of a sudden start wearing shirts 3 sizes too small and start sucking on candy canes all the time. It's understood that it's strictly entertainment. Maybe porn wasn't the best analogy. Action movies are the same thing......a guy doesn't come out of a James Bond movie thinking everyone is a double agent and that there's an explosion waiting around every corner, yet girls think that one true love just might be at the next booth in Starbucks. Sure it's possible, but so's getting struck by lightning, or winning the lottery, or getting caught in some international espionage caper.

I might read this book. I do want to see what all the fuss is about. If I come out of reading the book thinking it's the best book I've ever read and find myself re-evaluating my relationship with Rachel. I promise that I will apologize to every single female that reads this blog.

Just don't hold your breath.

Get out the car and let casper drive!

Get out the car and let Casper drive!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op6QCusitUw

My obsession with ghost riding continues

Ghost Ride the Ghost Ride

Watched the debate last night. It's become clear that no matter what Sarah Palin says, it's going to come off sounding less educated than her peers. Even the stuff she knows what she's talking about, it's hard to take her seriously. I don't know if it is because she's from Alaska, because the strategists have told her to talk like everyone watching is in third grade, because everytime you see her you think "I can see Russia from my house!" or what, but it's tough. To me, Palin being VP would be a way bigger story than Obama becoming president. What's more unlikely, a middle class guy who went to law school becoming president, or a lady who was mayor of a town of 5,000 about 4 years ago becoming VP?


I have no clue how to solve the financial crisis, and I don't think anyone else does either. Nobody wants to accept responsibility because they're all complicit. Republican, Democrat, lendors, borrowers....everyone screwed up. It's just unconscionable to me that someone would ever get into an adjustable rate mortgage, but then again everyone's always been told that owning your own home is the path to the American dream. I'm just glad I'm young enough that my 401k has plenty of time to recover before I retire. And it will recover. Probably sooner than everyone thinks. Housing prices will go up, and everyone will be spending wrecklessly again. It's the American way.

I've started classes again. So far so good. I overheard a girl rehashing her night with a friend on her cell phone. It went something like this:

"Yeah, so I'd never tried it before because I was scared, but I did it, and it kicked my ass! I was tweaking pretty hard. Sarah had to walk me home and we were sketching the whole way, it was hilarious!"

Drug use......hilarious!

Back to the mortgage deal....don't know if you heard this story, but it's about a 90 year old woman that was being forcibly evicted from her home so she shot herself. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/10/03/eviction.suicide.attempt/index.html

Fairly sad, but Fannie Mae is forgiving her debt. So just so you know, if you're in way over your head, just go ahead and shoot yourself in a non-vital organ, and you're good! I wonder if this tactic works for parking tickets, student loans, and for football teams playing Penn State.


And finally, I found the best way to relieve your stress....I'm definitely trying this next time my co-worker pisses me off, I'm ghost-ridin her desk. Ghost Ridin

Start spreading the news

I just watched the last game ever to be played at Yankee Stadium. Even though I could care less about who wins a meaningless game between two teams that I really don't like, I still like to see historical things. It was interesting to hear some legends of baseball like Whitey Ford and Reggie Jackson, speak about their experiences. These are people my dad told me stories about when I was a kid. To me, Reggie Jackson was the guy who tried to assassinate the queen of England in The Naked Gun. To my dad, he was the guy who hit three homeruns on three pitches in one World Series game.....at Yankee Stadium. It was strange to see players taking pictures with their own cameras on the field after the game. Everybody that goes to a major league game has a picture of themselves at the stadium, but you never think that it might be just as special (if not more) to the people who actually work there. Players were scooping dirt from the mound into containers, pulling up tufts of grass.....things normally reserved for unathletic dweebs like me who have only been on the field when playing MLB '08 on the Xbox and always wished they had the talent to do what those guys do.


That is the power of sports. Places like Yankee Stadium can bring generations together. Maybe someday I'll be able to go to New York with Jonah and see a game at the new stadium, and I can tell him about the players I got to see play there in 2000. Players like Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams and Mariano Rivera. That I sat in the same right field bleachers that Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle and Reggie Jackson used to hit homeruns into.

That's why I love sports.

Too busy to what?

My blogging still sucks. I haven't been blogging, and I'm pretty sure I've lost 90% of my loyal readers. Hopefully Gjurg is still reading, otherwise I've lost them all. Anyways, I was trying to figure out why I haven't blogged much at all lately. I like to pretend I'm a big deal, and people stop by my MySpace page on a daily basis hoping for a blog. I imagine my friends smiling everytime their friend update thingy says "Andy posted a new blog." In reality, the only person who is pleased by this is me. I enjoy blogging for myself.


If I enjoy it, why haven't I been doing it?

Of course, the most obvious (and easiest) answer is that "I've been busy." This is everyone's excuse for everything. You don't call someone back, you tell them you've been busy. The real reason is that you didn't see any point in calling them back because the message they left was lame, and/or pointless. You didn't call them back because you were watching Wipeout and couldn't be bothered. You can't tell them that, so you say you're busy.

So have I in fact been too busy to blog? Yes and no. It is summer, and I've been spending less time inside. I'm trying to be more responsible at work, thus hampering my blogging time. I've been away from a computer while vacationing. So yes, I have been busy. Too busy to blog? Nope. Only takes half an hour. I could do it instead of watching re-runs of House on USA. Instead of mindlessly flipping channels. I could write a whole blog on people imagining they're too busy to do things. Everyone's busy. We all have stuff going on. Don't think you're special.

I finally realized that I haven't been blogging because I blog when I'm stressed out. When something annoys me. When I need to rant on something. I haven't blogged because I'm happy. Because my life is going well.

So to recap, bloggers want everyone to know how busy they are and how pissed off they are. I suppose there is a faction of people who blog to brag about how great they're doing too (see the above paragraph).

Once I start classes again, I'll have plenty of blog-worthy material. College kids who act exactly like my friends and I did 8 years ago, only now I see it as moronic and petty. There'll be some girl sitting in front of me wearing uggs and with her dental floss undies showing that I'll make fun of, knowing full well that 8 years ago I'd have been trying to figure out some way to start a conversation with her.

At some point before November, I'll write a blog about the election. I just don't know when I'm going to do this. The way I see this blog going in my head is that a few people respond with their opinions on the election and we have a discussion about it that furthers everyone understanding, allowing them to make informed voting decisions. The way it'll probably go is that I'll write something that someone takes wrong and all of a sudden everyone's mad and nobody talks to each other for months.

I take that back. The way it'll go is that I blog and the only person who cares is me. And that's the way it should be.

How far we've come

While cleaning out some stuff at work today, one of our student workers came across a stamp that I'm pretty sure wouldn't be issued today. In 1974 however, this was apparently ok to say. Another example of how hyper-sensitive our society has become:

Trapped in Paradise

Got home from a week in Hawaii today. It was a good trip yet, as always, was much much too short. Coming back to reality is always hard...especially when you've been spending every day watching the sun rise over a volcanic crater and watching it set over the pacific ocean. Our plane was scheduled to leave Maui at 3 pm local time. So we packed up the car and made it to the airport at a very responsible 1 pm. Rental car returned, bags checked, boarding passes in hand, we're at the gate by 1:20. There were 24 of us - it was a family vacation...an ENTIRE family vacation. Around 2:30 we get set to begin boarding and they inform us that our plane is late and we will be boarding around 3. No big deal. At 3:30 they inform us that there's a mechanical problem and that we need a part that is being flown in from Oahu. The part will be here by 4:30 pm and will take about an hour to install, so we'll be boarding around 5:30. Again, not a big deal. Around 6 we, begin boarding. They let three people on the plane, and the light comes on again. They decide not to let anyone else on until they can get the little light in the cockpit to go out. Finally, they deplane the three people on the plane (my grandma and mom being two of them) and inform us that they need to order another part. They aplogize for the 8th time for the delay and inform us that refreshments are being brought to the gate. At 7:30, a cart with airplane pretzels and water shows up. At 8:30, they begin handing out meal vouchers.....$12 per person. There's only one restaurant in the Maui airport. There's over 200 people on our flight. Thus begins a mad race to the restaurant, which is more cafeteria than restaurant. $12 sounds like a great amount for a meal, but that's on the mainland. A burger, fries, and a coke will run you $14 at this cafeteria.


After that everyone was a little punchy. A few of us decided to go up to the counter and listen to people bitch about how shitty it is of Hawaiian Airlines to not let us on a malfunctioning plane. It seriously seemed like some of these people would rather that the airline said "eh, we know there's a problem, but we don't want to make these people wait......let's hope everything works alright for just one more flight!" C'mon. There are very good reasons for these rules. I asked someone what the problem was with the plane. This lady, while well meaning, explained it to me like I was 4 years old. I think she started by explaining to me that the plane had 3 wheels that come out from the bottom of the plane so we can land. Gee really? Thanks for clearing up that little misconception.

It turns out that there was some sort of problem with the brake fluid in the landing gear. I have no problems with them making sure that our plane will stop at the Portland airport and not continue to speed across the ground until we crash into the outlet mall in Troutdale. It was quite entertaining actually. We ended up not getting off the ground until midnight, and landed in Portland this morning at 8:15 am.....roughly 10 and a half hours late. Needless to say, I didn't go to work this morning.

Funny thing was that those 11 hours at the Maui airport were probably my favorite part of the entire trip. Strange? Maybe. But it was really the only time during the entire week that all 24 of use were in the same place at the same time for any extended period of time. We got to talk, play with the kids, eat together....basically it reminded all of us that we really were family, and we should start acting like it. I got to talk to my grandparents for a while, talk to my cousin and her husband in depth for the first time since their wedding, have a good time making fun of the cranky people in the terminal who were demanding compensation for their wait with my uncle, and really get to talk to my brother's girlfriends and get to know them a little better.

So really, while I enjoyed taking Jonah in the ocean for the first time (he's doesn't seem to hate it, but I'm not sure he likes it either), snorkeling, eating mahi-mahi, laying around in the sun, and swimming at sunset every evening, I can honestly say that spending 11 hours in a hot, sorta dirty airport was the highlight of my trip.

Plus, we did get compensated. Everyone got $300 flight vouchers.....so another trip to Hawaii might be in the works!