Flaming Chords

This is my front page. All comments here are screened; if you don't have my email address, you can drop me a line here. If I know your email address, I'll reply by email -- if not, I'll reply to your comment, and then rescreen both your comment and my reply.

It's also got every tag I have -- this is because my current LJ style doesn't include a tag index. (At least half of my participation on LJ is on my Treo. I chose this style because it loads quickly and it's still readable on a small screen.)

I'd tell you more about myself, but that's what my profile -- and the rest of my journal -- are for.

Dear cold,

You are obviously unclear on the concept. You challenged me to single combat about a month ago. I kicked your ass. That should have been the end of it. Who said you could have a rematch?

Sincerely,
flamingchords

Yeah, I've got a cold. I'm coping okay: I have enough energy to go to work and feed my iron addiction, and even chat with friends a little, though thanks to the Tully in my folk remedy, my typing suffers a bit.

(I'm not bidding for sympathy or anything. I'm posting this because I post all problems I have with respect to health, depression, or anger issues. I do this so that I can look back later and notice things like "oh, it's been ten months since I last got sick? Wadaya know, clean living!")

Aw, dammit, not sick again!

The last couple of times I got sick, I coped by buying a bottle of Bushmill's, a bottle of lemon juice, and a bottle of honey. This time, out of boredom, I tried Earl Grey with Drambuie, followed by lemon tea with enough fresh grated ginger in it that I almost needed to drink the tea with a fork. I feel great!

I've caught a cold again, so I'm a lot more irritable than usual. Dammit, I like going out and doing things. I have friends I could see, neat cities I could visit, a gym membership I could be using... but no, I'm trying to be good and stay home whenever I can, so that I can get over this as quickly as possible.

So, I'm going to bitch a little about some of the things I've seen on TV at work.


Dear Visa,

Fuck you, I prefer cash. I fucking resent your insistence that I should use plastic for every purchase I make, and I fucking resent your insinuation that I am horribly inconveniencing my fellow customers and those poor overworked clerks by paying for things with cash. What's the matter, does some clerk somewhere not know how to count? Is it just too godsdamned much effort to hand people change?

At this rate, we'll be seeing whiny teenagers on customers_suck complaining about it soon: "OMFG I just had the suckiest customer evar!!!111 He came into my store, ordered a latte... and paid for it in cash! OMFG How sucky is that! Hasn't he ever heard of credit cards?"

Further, I've discovered that more and more, stores not only don't check IDs for credit cards, but don't even ask customers to sign the slips for purchases under $25. Yeah, yeah, I know. "It's for your convenience." Saving me the three fucking seconds it takes me to sign a credit slip is not worth the added risk of credit card fraud.

Sincerely,
flamingchords

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Dear Domino's Pizza,

Yes, yes, you have a new "desert pizza." Good for you. I can see you're really proud of yourselves for making a desert that looks like a bunch of drunken closeted frat-boys played Soggy Biscuit on a big pile of broken cookies.

All by itself, this would be merely annoying, but your stupid-ass "cookie mustache" campaign irks the shit out of me. "Give it time, your mustache will fill out if you eat more soggy oreos." Yeah, just what we need in this country -- yet more encouragement to eat total crap. I can imagine what that board meeting must have been like...

"Fellow shareholders, the American Diet is terrible. Fast food and junk food consumption are at an all-time high... but this isn't the time for us to rest on our laurels. After all, as unhealthy as our current product line is, it still has a little calcium from the cheese, a little protein from the meat, and a few vitamins from the tomato sauce. We can always do better. To that end, I'd like to push a nutrient-free 'desert pizza' on our customers."

Sincerely,
flamingchords

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Dear Enzyte users,

Judging from the fact that Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals (thank you, Wikipedia) can apparently still afford to assault my good taste (yeah, right) with Smiling Bob the Dumbass and that obnoxious whistling, I'm guessing that a lot of you are apparently stupid enough to buy their snake oil. Congratulations, you've proven my faith in humanity to be misplaced yet again. P. T. Barnum was obviously right. There really is one of you born every minute.

For most of you -- I would hope all of you -- puberty is finished. Over. Done. There's not much that you can do chemically after that. Personally, I'd find Enzyte's claims a lot more believable if they were suggesting that it be used during puberty. On the other hand, let's be thankful they don't -- as creepy as Smiling Bob the Dumbass is, I'd really rather not see ads like this:

"You want the best for your teenage son. You push him in school, you make sure he eats well... but isn't there something you've forgotten? Don't let your son be shortchanged. Give him Enzyte every day, for that extra boost in confidence, well-earned respect, and popularity with the ladies he'll thank you for in adulthood. Enzyte -- the best way to help ensure that your son will grow up big and strong."

As disturbing as this kind of ad campaign would be, I'm surprised they haven't done it already, to tell you the truth. "Think of your children!!!111" is one of the surest ways I know to get people to turn their brains off and go along with anything, no matter how hairbrained.

No love,
flamingchords

Recovering from lack of sleep. (No, I haven't lapsed -- I am still free of both Dew and meth. Every now and then, I have a lot of trouble sleeping.)

Spent most of the day in an oddly cheerful haze. I got on really well with all my customers, and was complimented repeated: helpful, knowledgeable, charming as hell, even "cute" on a couple of occasions. I'm typing it up right now because by the time I wake up tomorrow, I will likely have forgotten all of it.

Bought a sandwich and about three pounds of fruit at lunch: grapes, kumquats, an apple, other goodies. Devoured the fruit in a little over five minutes. (I will almost certainly pay for this later, but it was worth it.) When I got home, I had to ask one of my coworkers to put the sandwich in the fridge, having completely forgotten to eat it.

Mmm... lemons. Meyer lemons, the best kind! (Too bad mangoes are so fuckin' expensive lately!)

Then, bed. (Crashes.)

Getting over a cold at the moment. Yeah, another one.

As a result, I'm getting to know an old family recipe for dealing with colds: one part honey, two parts lemon juice, two parts brandy or whisk(e)y, and six or more parts boiling water. The stuff is great for dealing with the symptoms, and tastes much better than Nyquil. (And I'm guessing, since thalwen concluded I was sick just from knowing that I was drinking it, that it's not exactly an obscure "old family recipe.")

For the last year or few, I've been getting over my general distrust for alcohol. This distrust owes to a lot of teenage drinking, back when I was a self-destructive asshole. (The incident I remember most clearly from that time was when I went up to a football player, drunk, and told him I'd been fucking his girlfriend, and that she said I had a bigger dick than he did. This got me into a fight, and made me very suddenly persona non grata to the girlfriend, who up until that point liked me a lot. That was a turning point for me: I didn't touch alcohol for years after that.)

For a while, I've been discovering, to my delight, that I'm actually not a bad guy drunk. I'm also discovering that I don't have to get drunk -- I can stop at "slightly relaxed," while the honey and lemon do their job.

Which brings me to a rant about colds. Why are all colds the same?

I had a cold in August: congestion, runny nose, head full of cotton, you know the routine. Another one in October: congestion, runny nose, head full of cotton, and so on. And another cold now, and you guessed it: congestion, runny nose, head full of cotton, ad nauseam (figuratively).

If I were the sort to believe in God, I'd claim that this was laziness on his part. Why can't we have colds that do more unusual things? Maybe a cold that rotates all our color perceptions sixty degrees on the ol' color wheel: we'd see yellow instead of red, green instead of yellow, cyan instead of green, blue instead of cyan, etc. Maybe a cold that reverses our sexual orientation (and wouldn't Jerry Falwell go crazy over that!) Maybe a cold that made our skin break out in purple Hieroglyphics or something?

But noooooo! Every time we catch a cold, it's the same damned symptoms!

(Don't mind me. This is my third cold in five months. I swear, I didn't used to get them anywhere near this often!)

I have a gorram, srizonified, frelling drenning cold. Again.

Didn't I go through this shit two fucking months ago?

Grr.

Anyway, in unrelated news, Wile E Coyote gets laid, and he's apparently much better in bed than Marvin Martian. And Ash, from Pokémon, is just a sick bastard. (These aren't work safe. Funny, but not work safe.)

Dammit, I didn't always get sick this often. I used to get sick rarely, if at all.

I'm going to assume that this is one of those subtle hints from my body that I'm not a teenager anymore (much as I try to pretend otherwise) and perhaps I should start taking better care of myself.

I'm stuck at home with a really nasty cold, so I watched a movie loaned to me by one of my coworkers: Student Bodies. Not the best movie to watch when laughing makes my chest hurt, but it was worth it.

It's the text that periodically flashes on the screen that makes this movie. When a girl is in a car, waiting for her boyfriend to come back with condoms, the camera turns toward the lock on the car door, with the caption "UNLOCKED." Then the camera moves up a bit, and another caption appears, just in case you failed to notice that not only is the door unlocked, the window is open. The wood-shop teacher gets labeled "SUSPECT" at the beginning of the movie, and labeled "NO LONGER A SUSPECT" when he's found dead.

And of course, this is a teen horror movie, so naturally most of the girls are killed as they are waiting for their boyfriends to come back with condoms, and most of the boys are killed shortly thereafter. The movie includes a few funerals, too... but in real life, psychiatrists generally don't speak of the deceased. For that matter, cheerleading is generally not done at funerals -- not even with black pompoms.

My favorite scene was completely unnecessary to the plot: a man at a desk, explaining that to gain an R rating, a movie had to have graphic violence, frontal nudity, or explicit references to the sex act. And since an R rating would help to make this movie more popular, "I would like to take this opportunity to say... FUCK YOU."

Subtle, this movie ain't. But it's a lot of fun, regardless.