Boy do I want this shirt, and this one, and this one.
More dogs should write poetry.
I don’t remember my dreams very often. When I do, they’re usually the kind that wake me up with a start and cold sweat. Monday night, I had a good dream that woke me up, I think because of the sheer weirdness of it. I remember going to sleep thinking in French, which is really hard since I only took three years of it in high school and then spoiled any chance of speaking it well by following that up with a year of Spanish. I get verbs mixed up, and frequently throw in franpanglish when I can’t remember the word for shoes (in Spanish it’s zapatos, but for the life of me I can’t remember the French word). Towards the end of my classroom French, I started having French dreams where everyone spoke French and I had an amazing accent. I haven’t had a French dream in years.
Then came Monday night. I was a New York tourist shop owner. I was standing behind the counter in my I ::heart:: NY t-shirt polishing snow globes with the Statue of Liberty in them when a Japanese couple walk in with a map and thirty cameras strapped to them, speaking rapidly and stabbing their fingers at a map. They looked at me and started speaking Japanese much more slowly, as if that would make me understand. I laughed and asked them if they spoke English. They shook their heads and I started wondering if I was ever going to be able to help these poor short people (in my dream either I was very tall or they were very short – yes, in my dreams, all the stereotypes are true. It’s not my fault, I swear). Then, I remembered, I speak French. So, I asked them if they spoke French (in French of course – even in my dreams, I’m not an idiot). Voila! They do!! So, I tried to remember if gauche was left or right and vice versa for adroit. We apparently figured it out with hand signals and waving. I hopped over the counter, grabbed the map, led them out the door, flipped my sign to closed, locked the door, pulled down the big metal gate over the windows and door and we were off. We spoke broken japecais and franglais and laughed at our mispronunciation and lack of vocabulary as we went all over town taking pictures and seeing the sites.
I don’t remember the end of the dream: what happened to wake me up, or why I woke up. I was proud of helping those little tourists. I was proud that I remembered my language skills and put them to use for the good of mankind. I’m just amazed I remembered the dream. I never remember dreams. What does this mean?
And yes, I still don’t feel well. Maybe it was a Robitussin dream…
It’s a NyQuil evening.
Things never download as fast as I want them to.
For the geeky Mac folks out there, YellowDog Linux 2.2 is now available for download on their FTP site. Since I love this product, I would suggest you do what I do (because, of course, I know what’s best): Try it first, then buy it. They’re a great company to support, and everyone I’ve ever talked to there has been helpful and excited about what they’re doing. Give ’em some love (and cash, I’m sure they could live without the love if you give ’em some dough).
I’m a nice guy. I really am. I like helping people. I like answering questions. But, I have my limits. Every day, many times a day, I get questions from people about various topics: AOLserver, Linux, Tcl, HTML, CSS, SQL, etc. People love to instant message me while I’m working on something with queries on these subjects, obviously without having done any research of their own. They haven’t checked out the documentation for whatever it is they’re looking for. They haven’t typed in man <insert command here> or even considered it. They ask first, research later. That bugs the living crap out of me. If you really want to earn your knowledge, you will do your digging. How do you think I learned it? For the most part, I didn’t have anyone to turn to and I found the answer myself (and this was in the days before Google, so it wasn’t always easy) or I did without. I broke things, sometimes irreparably, frequently. I had to reinstall Windows, MacOS and Linux more times than I can count because I did something stupid in the name of experimentation. It was fun because I knew I’d figure it out eventually, and if I didn’t, well, my original query sometimes became collateral to the other things I learned on the journey to its answer.
I know some people just want answers and don’t want to earn them. If you’re one of those people, stop asking me questions. If you really want to know, you’ll prove it by looking somewhere other than your buddy list for me. You’ll hit the stacks and do some research before you ask me. Make me at least think you really want to know. And remember, I’m not trying to be a jerk, I’m succeeding. I went to jerk school and graduated at the top of my class: Sum Bigga Jerk.
I was sick all weekend. It started with a scratch in the throat and an early morning on Saturday taking my sister to take the ACT. Then, a headache and general unwellness later in the afternoon and a four hour nap. Then, Sunday was a blur of cough drops and tissues. No nap, but plenty of headaches and drowsiness. Today I’m a little better, butt-dragging and drowsy. It’s not how I imagined feeling on the first day in my new job (which feels a lot like my old job since I’m still in my old pod).
Watching the news when sick sucks. I watched Israeli and Palestinian spokesheads spout the same arguments over and over again, hour after hour. I watched The Real World for a long time because Jen wanted to catch up since we haven’t been watching this season. I know I’m over my Real World thing now. These kids’ lives don’t interest me any more. Their problems seem small and petty. They appear ignorant and like marshmallow peep versions of previous casts. Oooh, there’s the angry black guy, the cute gay boy, the jock, the bulemic, the lesbian. We’ve seen all this before. At least get us a new crop of socially relevant problem children to feel sorry for. How about a narcoleptic fish farmer from Washington state? Maybe a Native American peyote farmer cut out by the foreign peyote cartel? How about a vato from Tucson who loves his low-rider truck and is feircely Catholic even though he doesn’t know what that really means? How about a fat girl? How about an all-blog cast who sit in front of their computers commenting on life outside without actually doing anything interesting in the house (if I weren’t married, I would be a perfect candidate)? That show has lost all relevance to my life, and while that’s kind of sad, I’m glad I’m not in that post-adolescent, but still stupid stage. I’m a stupid adult now.
Thankfully, there was Iron Chef to dull my pain. The first New York battle between Bobby Flay and Morimoto was a lot of fun, and the one afterwards with rice as the ingredient was really cool.
Ok, I’m done. That was my sickly weekend. Hopefully the week will be better.
Tom Tomorrow, my Chevy Blazer and I hate you. You make so much sense, yet, I am somehow driven to now drive more and more, driving over mountain roads, spinning out in wet parking lots and for some odd reason I want to drive into the ocean to show my car’s unique ability to navigate through wet sand and surf.
Sure I can. You just don’t have to do what I say. That’s the wonderful about this country. I have the right to think you’re an idiot, and you have the right to be one.