Sunday, November 25, 2007

Adding New Words to the English Lexicon

“Dad! I’ve got it!”

“What have you got?”

“I’ve got the perfect word to describe you!”

“Um. OK. Let’s here it.”

“Doober! You are a doober!”

“OK, I’ll bite. What’s a doober?”

“It’s the perfect amalgamation of you! ‘Dad’ plus ‘goober’ equals ‘Doober’!”

Is it too late to get a refund on these kids and trade them in for different models?

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Ellis Learned Something New Today

Jonah: Ellis, don’t you have a sense of humor?

Ellis: Mommy, what’s humor?

Reha: It’s when you think something is funny.

Ellis: You are not funny, Jonah.

Ellis, in response to anything, anyone said for the rest of the afternoon: You are not funny.

Friday, November 23, 2007

Coming To One’s Senses Is A Difficult Thing

A few days ago I mentioned that I’d be telling the story of my crush on Monika Heinritz. The time has come.

In most ways I’m sure my crush on her wasn’t out of the ordinary in any way. I was of “that age” in junior high when I started to notice girls as creatures worthy of my attention in ways besides overt loathing simply because they might be carrying deadly cootie spores. I fell hard for her seconds after seeing her in 7th grade science class.

Obviously, since I was only in 7th grade and had no practical experience with this sort of thing, I was pretty confused. I didn’t understand the feelings I was having and I certainly didn’t know how to go about expressing myself. I only knew that I wanted to hang around her as much as possible and the thought of her hanging around me was almost more than I could bear, so powerful were those emotions.

This being me I’m discussing, I did my level best to try and ingratiate myself into her life. I somehow, miraculously ended up in the same classes as her and even though most classes had students organized alphabetically, I would worm my way into sitting next to her. Magic, I was.

I’m also quite sure that one of the sole reasons why I was in excellent shape was from having ridden my bike to and from her house about a thousand times. I used to ride by in hopes of catching glimpse of her or having her stop me to say hello.

Obsession? Perhaps. Stalking? I can see how one might come to that conclusion. Let me just say for the record that though I was exhibiting some “stalker-like” characteristics, it’s not like I was waiting around for her to leave the house, just so I could be seen. Well, maybe just that once.

Which is when I learned that in reality she lived a couple doors down and I’d been stalking the wrong house for a few weeks/months. Ah the follies of youth and misprinted school directories.

So I liked her. A lot. And I had liked her for a while. She didn’t have any boyfriends, although she had a ton of male friends, most of whom would have quite enjoyed moving into the “boyfriend” category. Now that I think back on it more, I wonder if maybe she wasn’t interested in boys at all in “that way” and she in fact, she played for the “other team.” But I kind of doubt it. I think she was just kind of picky.

Anyway, one day in the middle of eighth grade, I decided that I’d ridden my bike in circles around her block enough times and IT WAS TIME. It was about time that I let her know how I felt and ask her to a dance. Or something. I didn’t know, I just knew that I would quite possibly explode if I didn’t let her know that I adored her.

So I wrote out some lines for myself on a pad of paper and practiced them until I knew them al by heart. I didn’t plan out her lines, but I figured that once I had my opening down, the rest might follow. I was wrong of course, but I did did have a ton of “filler” material in case I came up empty at some point.

One day after school, we both stayed after for some extra-curricular activity. Yes, I’m certain that whatever club or activity it was, I was truly only there in order to be close to her. Pathetic, but I figured I was being more crafty than creepy. If she’d been in underwater BB staking, I’d have gotten myself a snorkel and a wet suit as quickly as I could have.

We were walking back to our lockers and I tapped her on the shoulder and asked if I could talk to her for a minute.

I hemmed and hawed in a display of supreme teenage awkwardness, with my hands in my pockets and finally said, “There is something I have to tell you.”

“OK.”

“It’s taken me a long time to come up with what I want to say, but I just need to tell you this.”

“OK. I think I know what it is.”

She knew! How could she have known? I was dumbfounded, although in retrospect, perhaps she might have seen me out her window as I rode my bike past her house one of those 18 million times. I was completely thrown off my game, especially since the look on her face was one of pity, mixed with sadness.

I knew at that moment that all my courage and resourcefulness wasn’t going to do me any good. She didn’t like me in “that way” and to go any further was just going to be incredibly humiliating, even more that it already had been for the 6.7 minutes we’d been standing there as I shuffled back and forth and shifted my weight between my feet.

So I bailed on the “express my truest feelings” quest and went straight for “let’s just be friends.”

“Yeah, look. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I just want to tell you something.”

Approximately 45 minutes pass, although in reality, it was only twelve seconds or so. It just felt like 45 minutes to an hour and change.

“I just wanted to tell you that I like you. And I want to be your friend.”

I said the first part really fast in order to get it out there as quickly as I could, and the last half so quickly you’d have thought my voice was a gazelle being chased by a cheetah on the savannah.

“Aw, that’s very sweet of you, Jon. I want to be your friend as well.”

It was possibly the lamest and most oblique and fumblingly cumbersome “Hey, I like you, maybe we could hang out as boyfriend and girlfriend” conversations ever in the history of those sorts of painfully obtuse conversations. And it didn’t even end with a “yes” or “no,” I got to “let’s just be friends” all on my own.

In the end, we really were pretty decent friends, although I suspect she always knew that I had stronger feelings for her than she did for me. There is a part of me that regrets not ever having said my real peace; I should have just gone ahead and gotten it out there. After all, I done the hard part; getting up the courage to say how I felt, I should have just said what I came to say, damn the torpedoes. If you are going to make a fool of yourself, make sure it’s the biggest fool of yourself you can make.

Though in many ways, I’m still that fidgety, emotionally clumsy kid who should probably be more open with my feelings, I can’t help but think, “you know, sometimes it’s good to aware enough of what’s happening and not just plunge ahead with your plans.”

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Turkey and Thankfulness Day

Short and artificially sweetened today.

We don’t have a kitchen (still) so we are about to go out to a swanky restaurant, eat really good food, not clean up or do the dishes and then come home and watch movies and play video games and argue with each other about who gets to nap first.

Here’s what I’m thankful for today:

Good Health

Great Family

Nothing else matters.

Although broadband internet is pretty nice as well.

But mostly the health and family thing.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Yeah, I Don’t Get It Either

In the past few months on the web and in my daily Mac-related life, I’ve collected a small stash of oddities as I’ve flitted to and fro on my travels.

Since I’m not really one to complain all that much, let’s just categorize these things as “dome scratchers” and not full fledged rants. Just things that make me go “hmmm, how strange.”

First, if you are behind the Great Firewall of China, you probably aren’t reading this.

What is so strange about this is that I can’t think of any content I’ve ever offered which would be objectionable. Unless the Powers That Be™ in Beijing don’t like persnickety four year olds and balding, pudgy forty year old men. It’s a mystery. You can check and see if your favorite site has been “banned” in China here.

Adobe never ceases to amaze me. They are a hydra of a company. Some of their products are excellent, logically made and rarely crash. Others seem like they were built by third graders who’d been given a couple copies RealBasic and told to go to town. In other words, really bad stuff. (I’m looking at you, Adobe Acrobat 6, 7, 8 (pick a version, they are all nasty)).

This isn’t so much an oddity or stupidity (it makes sense that there might be an update to an updater program), but rather, I question the language. Try reading that dialog box aloud a few times fast and see if you don’t get tongue tied.

This next one is from Illustrator. Mind you, my personal loathing for Illustrator runs deep as I have been vexed and frustrated by this program for YEARS, so I know I’m biased. What are you Adobe Illustrator? A broken page layout program? A deranged way to produce bitmap/web art? A completely convoluted method to make vector art? What do you really want to be when you grow up? And by the way, you are at version 13, it’s about time you decide, my young padawan.

Since when can I not save an Illustrator EPS file with a zillion spot colors in it? Why is this suddenly a problem? Because for YEARS we in the graphic design/pre-press/art-making world have dealt with having numerous spot colors in our files. We know, no one in their right minds would really print a file with 42 ho-jillion spot colors, that stuff will become 4-color process, and transparency and spot colors present a ginourmous set of problems, but was this such a problem that you needed to interrupt my life and tell me how to handle my stuff? And! Doesn’t 27 seem like a completely arbitrary limit? OK, now this has officially started to resemble a rant, when really, I’m just slightly confuzzled.

Just a small weirdness in iTunes. Here at work, when I set up machines for people, I turn on iTunes music sharing. It’s great, since the folks at work have very diverse musical tastes, it’s a nice way to find new music/artists and plus, sharing is good! But the UI for iTunes’ Preferences doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

There is room in the “Sharing” area of Preferences for the “Shared Name” box. So it’s an odd choice to have the Shared Name in the General area. Dome scratcher.

A few weeks ago this ad showed up here on my site via Google Ads.

Yeah, I clicked on it. I had to be sure they weren’t kidding around. Plus, I found a darling halter top in slate blue that looks DIVINE on me.

Finally, Amazon.com has a nice algorithm which looks at your purchase history, your Amazon search history and your Amazon browsing patterns to come up with suggestions. Ostensibly it’s so you can spend more money, but really, it’s pretty spiffy. You bought this, other people bought that, too! Hey, you might like some of this same stuff they bought. Nifty. Except when the system completely borks out and you get a page like this one. (this one is a little large, so click to make the image larger.)

Everything else on that page interests me. MacBookPro? Check. Battlestar Galatica? Hot Cylon Chick-Check. Woody Allen? Neuroses filled-Check. West Wing DVDs? Fantasy Political World-Check. Neal Stephson Tome? Really Long, Slightly Boring Book-Check. All good. But women’s underwear? That one is a mystery. Even if I were in the market for camisoles, I’m dead certain I’m not buying it from Amazon.

 

Novus

Proximus

 

Favorite Entries

If you are new around here, the following entries have been reasonably well received. You might want to peruse these.

• From the Office of Mis-directed Email
• Jon’s Report Card circa… A Long Time Ago
• Dear Gratuitously Naked Conversationalist at the Gym:
• A Peek Inside the Writer’s Guild and Producers’ Negotiations
• We Regret the Error
• What I Did There
• Hermaphrodite Administrative Assistants and Receptionists Need Not Apply
• Giving Me an IM Account Was Obviously a Huge Mistake
• Official Ransom Note Typography Vista vs. Mac OS X Shootout
• I Need a Real Hobby
• Beat Down
• Big Fat Lies
• True Love
• Now MY Ovaries Hurt
• Don’t Get Her Started
• Disturbing Trend
• Had to do it
• Mooshy stuff
• Ransom Note Typography End User License Agreement “EULA”
• Diva-licious!
• Just so we’re clear
• PETA may have a point

Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

Really, I'm glad you made it down here. Almost no one ever comes down here. I'm like in a freaking dungeon down here. I get lonely. But not you. YOU made it all the way to the end of the page. For this I think I've a little crush on you. I don't know, is "love" to strong a word to use in this situation? Well, if it's not "love," then it's very strong "like." I'm totally in like with you for coming down here. You are awesome. Please love me back! I know, I know, I shouldn't be all needy, it's not attractive at all, but you don't know how it is to be stuck down here. Who scrolls all the way to the end of a page anymore these days? Anyway, thanks for shedding some light down here in the depths. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email and I'll send you a dollar, OK?

©2005-2008 Jon B. Deal All Rights Reserved. I'm not kidding around here, I know people who know other people who would be willing to beat you up or similarly infringe on your rights, should you happen to infringe on my rights.