I know that everyone expects really prompt posting from me. So sorry. I have an excuse this time.
But first, let’s spice this post up:
There. It’s getting better already.
Yesterday morning, I opened up my laptop and pressed the power button. Rather than turn on, it made a series of loud beeps that I can only assume were Morse code for “fuck you”.
That was all that it would do. After doing some cruising on the Internet, it became clear that something was very broken in my laptop that was beyond something I was capable of fixing. I spent some time with tech support, and it turns out that the solution to my problem is to pay them three hundred dollars and mail my laptop to them.
This is one of those parts of life that pisses me off: Paying a large sum of money to maintain the status quo. As I’m sure you remember, I feel the same way whenever I have to get my car repaired. If I take my car into a shop and then pay them nine hundred dollars, I kind of want it to do something that it didn’t before – shoot flame out of the tailpipe, take turns on two wheels like Kit in Knight Rider, something like that. Instead, it’s exactly the same, and the only perceivable difference in things is the decrease in my bank account. It just feels like I’m going along, doing my thing, and then the Bone Fairy magically appears and is like “Welcome to the ‘Bone Zone’, bitch! If you want things to stay the way they are, it’ll cost you five hundred dollars!” I mumble, give him the money, he cackles, yells “You’ve just been boned!” and then disappears in a cloud of smoke.
I guess that the good news is that everything was backed up on an external drive, so I didn’t lose anything EXCEPT THREE HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS…I’m going to be cool about it.
Maybe I’ll even luck out and they’ll do something extra to my laptop as a way of saying “We’re sorry that the thing you bought from us only worked for one year before breaking for no discernible reason.” I’m hoping they airbrush a wizard shooting lightning out of a staff at a dragon onto the top of my laptop.
In the meantime, I’ve dusted off my desktop computer and I’m using it. It’s probably for the best; I was planning on putting it together to use for playing games so I could stick to writing on the laptop anyway.
There is a problem, though.
My desktop is far enough away from the router that I would be looking at 80 or 90 feet of ethernet cable to connect it to the Internet, so I went out and bought a wireless networking card. It’s pretty cool. At least, it should be. There is one small problem, however: I’m getting speeds averaging about 5k/sec and random disconnects. It’s…frustrating. I’ll keep fighting with it until it works, I suppose. I wouldn’t anticipate a lot of embedded video or pictures until the laptop is running again, though. Until I figure out what’s wrong with my network, I’m using the Internet 1996 style, and that means that accessing anything that’s more than 45k is out of the question.
Moving on, you know that I hate the heat. I have a long, convoluted story about that. Two weeks ago, I filled up my gas tank. I drive a ’91 Camry. It cost me $50.01.
Now, I’m doing my best to appreciate gas prices where they are, because they’re shooting up so fast. How long ago was it that everyone was shitting their pants because gas was two dollars a gallon? It was only something like three years ago if I’m remembering this correctly. If you saw gas for two dollars a gallon now, you’d shit your pants all right, but you’d also be squealing into the station to fill up the tank. I’m trying to remember this, because barring OPEC falling apart, China and India getting nuked, Russia deciding to be “cool” and a discovery of a few billion gallons of previously undiscovered oil, I foresee myself wistfully remembering the summer of 2008 and those halcyon days of four dollar a gallon gas.
That being said, fifty bucks is enough money to go on a date, buy a video game or pay 1/6th of the cost of shipping your broken laptop back to the pig-fucking pieces of shit that couldn’t build it right the first time. I don’t really want to spend that money on gas when I could be lining the Bone Fairy’s pockets with it.
So I whipped out my bike. The bike’s movement is fueled by me, and I’m fueled by food. Most of the food I eat is cheaper than 4 dollars a gallon, and I get the added enjoyment of eating it. A vehicle powered by nachos, malt liquor and corn dogs? I’ll take three! Throw in some needles full of Insulin, and I’ll be unstoppable!
Before embracing the bike, my Dad suggested that I take it to the shop for a tune up, which I did. I picked it up yesterday, and as I was paying for it, the guy at the counter was telling my Dad that he was out riding yesterday, and it was just fucking hot. My Dad said that he never felt hot on the bike because there was always wind when you were riding. I pointed out that wind in an oven just turns it into a convection oven. The bike shop owner agreed.
Later that night, my Dad was talking about the conversation he had with the owner earlier that day.
“I can’t believe he was letting the heat affect him! It’s not very zen to let the weather get you down like that!” He told us.
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to this. My Dad is usually a really calm, low key, supportive guy, but when it comes to physical activity, he tends to transform into that super competitive, overbearing Dad that never thinks anything is good enough. Pretty much any activity you engage in, he always needs to mention that if you were actually a man you would be doing it longer, faster or harder. I’m lucky I have the genetics I do, because I pretty much avoided physical activity at all costs growing up, not only as a middle finger to him but because I got sick of exercising and then hearing that if I wasn’t such a pussy I would be running faster or riding farther or whatever. I think that one of the biggest reasons that I like weight lifting is because my Dad doesn’t. He’s one of those guys that thinks that there’s a legitimate possibility that you might accidentally do a few butterfly curls and then wake up the next day with biceps that prevent you from wiping your own ass.
Anyway, my Dad followed up with “Women are always sensitive to temperature, but it’s because they don’t exercise!”
This was a little bit above the normal craziness I expect on subjects like this. It was a powerful one-two punch. First of all, “Women are always sensitive to the heat” is a pretty bold statement. It’s hard to make a claim about half of the earth’s population that’s true with no exceptions, especially in relation to preference. Also, in my experience, women love heat. I don’t know why you would ever enjoy a sensation as unpleasant as a 95 degree environment, but almost all of the females I know prefer it to being cold. notice how I prefaced that statement with “In my experience”? That’s because in the entire course of my life, I’ve come into contact with…I don’t know. probably a few hundred or a few thousand people? A lot less than “all of them”. That much I know.
Second of all, “Because they don’t exercise”? What? I don’t even know how to respond to that. Suppose that the first part was true, and all women really are sensitive to the heat. Just pretend that you’re willing to concede that point. Isn’t it obvious that at least some women do exercise? Every high school has female teams, you have the WNBA, really competitive women’s soccer and hockey teams for USA, and let’s not forget roller derby, jello wrestling and foxy boxing! I mean, how about the fucking Olympics? Half of the athletes there have vaginas.
It’s also worth noting that during the winter, my Dad is almost always bundled up in several layers of clothes “getting warm” (aka napping) on the couch.
And that’s my story about the heat. When I told you I had a story about the heat and my bike, you thought I was going to bitch about how hot it is riding my bike around town, didn’t you? Well, it is. But with all this money I’m saving on gas, I’m too fucking rich to care!
That’s not exactly true, but it’s close enough.
Well, it’s about dinner time. If I’m going to be able to make it to my girlfriend’s house tonight, I’d better fill up the tank. This calls for some french fries and JuJu Bees.