Emotionally Disturbed Roommate called me at work to try to dictate terms about how he was going to return my deposit to me, despite the fact that I told him twice at the beginning of the conversation that I really didn't have any time when he called. When he started telling me this whole intricate plan, I told him a third time that I didn't have the time to talk to him at the moment and that I'd be home later tonight. He hung up on me. Now I'm probably going to have to forego the show I was invited to tonight in order to hash it out with him. He may be 32 years old, but emotionally, he's about 10.

Words can't express how frustrated I am right now, and how glad I am to be moving out. Saturday can't come soon enough.

And here I thought that Californians actually drove better than New Englanders. That doesn't explain why the car coming down the road while I was parallel parking proceeded to slam on his brakes and blow his horn at me, even though I'd seen him coming in my mirrors, gotten out of his way & hadn't moved in about 10 seconds. I thought I'd pretty much made it clear that I wasn't going anywhere until he passed me, though apparently he thought I was just waiting for him to come along so I could pull out & hit him.

I was behind an L.A. cop car last night on my way up to a bar to meet up with some friends, and the distance between us was closed when the cops stopped at a red light & I pulled up behind them. It was only because I was that close that I was able to notice the car keys hanging out of the trunk lock. Apparently, one of them had stuck the key in the trunk and left the key ring there and forgotten to take the keys out when they were done with the trunk. Don't they occasionally keep weapons in the trunk? Well, I guess they call them "L.A.'s finest" for a reason... I'm not quite sure what it is though.

No, that's not the call of Jehovah's Witnesses coming to my door. It's the call of parents who need my services again. Basically, they decided that they wanted to take some of their stuff with them when they move to Tucson later this year and they didn't want to pay for movers. So they asked if I might be willing to drive a Ryder truck from Connecticut out to Tucson later this year. They'd pay for all of my expenses and I'd do the cross-country drive once again.

One of these days, they'll establish some kind of frequent-flier miles equivalent program for drivers, and I'll get some super prize like a free big screen HDTV. Or my own arcade. Or something of that magnitude.

So the scene is set. It's a gorgeous summer-ish kind of day in the City of Angels. I'm hanging out with one of my best friends in the whole world who I haven't really gotten a chance to hang out with for almost two years because we've been on opposite coasts. We're wandering around Westwood after having gotten our palms read (it's an inside thing -- the last time we saw each other, we were in San Francisco together and got a tarot card reading and we were both at important junctures in our lives, now we're once again at important junctures and we're hanging out again two years later). And we passed by a flower shop and I dragged her inside to pick out some flowers because I knew she was looking for white roses but hadn't found any, and I told her I was buying her some as a "finished first year of business school" present.

The girl in the flower shop was really, really cute. And as she was putting together the bouquet for my friend, I noticed she had a tattoo on her lower back that was in Hebrew (which in and of itself is odd, since it's against Jewish law to mark your body like that), which I asked her to confirm what I thought the translation was, and I was correct. We chatted for a bit at the counter while I was paying for the flowers for my friend, and she was really nice as well as cute. So at my friend's pushing and urging, I went back into the store as we were leaving Westwood and said to the flower girl, "My friend insisted that I come back in here and ask you out to dinner." (Okay, kind of cheesy, but it was the only thing I could think of on short notice that would be clever.) She looked at me with this shocked expression on her face and said, "What??" I repeated, "My friend insisted that I come back in here and ask you out to dinner sometime." I think it took her a little bit to process what I said because it wasn't the normal introduction of "I'd like some flowers please."

She looked at me and stuttered out something along the lines of, "Wow... that's really nice of you... wow... ummm... I'm... uhhh..." I jumped in with, "You're seeing someone." She said, "Yeah, I'm actually living with someone. But that's so nice of you to ask, thanks..." And I thanked her and walked out.

Despite the fact that I went down in some stupendous amount of flames, my friend still thought that was awesome because I had the balls to go in there and ask the flower girl out like that. (Her expression, not mine.) I felt the appropriate amount of humiliation at being shot down, and proceeded to rant about how easy it was for women because guys are usually the ones who have to go up and make the first move -- at least my friend agreed on that one.

My first rejection by an angelic Angeleno. I'll mark it down on my calendar. And for that matter, my reading said I'd have three kids -- two boys & a girl, that I'd be going on a trip soon, and that I'd be getting some very good news somewhere between May 11-13. The odd thing is that she was pretty much spot on as far as reading my personality, and my friend agreed.

I've been thinking about a redesign. Unfortunately, while I'm fairly adept at making computers work the way they're supposed to (except for when they're Windows machines, and even then it's a little beyond my control; case in point: my monitor at work blew up about 5 minutes before I finished my work last night) and I'm also fairly good at perceiving what's aesthetically pleasing and how to make something non-aesthetically pleasing into something that is, I can't manipulate design programs worth a damn. As I said before, I didn't even do this design, Candi did.

So, if there's one of you nice folks out there who is an adept Web designer and has some extra time on their hands and would love to have their graphical creation displayed to the masses daily from the Domain of the Head Llama, please step forward & let me know. Muchas gracias. Operators are standing by.

Ever feel like your body & mind are just running a little too fast for you? I felt like that all day today, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it. And I hadn't had any more caffeine than a can of Diet Coke, so it wasn't like I overcaffeinated myself.

I couldn't sit still. I babbled all day long, probably making myself look like an moron. I couldn't concentrate on a single task for longer than a few minutes. I felt like I was running at warp speed and there was nothing I could do about it.

I'm going to try to work some of this out at the gym now before I head out to see a co-worker's band play. Hopefully, I won't cause too much of a scene.

Because of the wonder that is "The Daily Show" and Michele, filler bunny entrordinaire, I can relate to you this wonderful piece of news from our government! So Rumsfeld won't lie to the press, but he & the rest of the Bush administration will withhold certain key pieces of information from us. But that's not lying, is it?

Let's break down the facts, shall we? 1. We supposedly overran Iraq ten years ago in the Persian Gulf War. We destroyed their infrastructure, had the U.N. impose embargoes on them, and basically labeled them Bad People Who Shouldn't Be Dealt With.

2. 10 years later, Iraq has become the 6th largest oil producer in the world. All this quick work after we crushed them! How'd they do it?

3. Well, the answer is simple. An American energy company called Halliburton went in there & helped them rebuild their oil output facilities. Nice of us to go in there & help them out in order to give their government a source of income when we're supposed to be freezing them out, isn't it?

4. Iraq has been labeled part of the Axis of Evil, which means we definitely shouldn't be helping them, should we?

5. Iraq has cut off exporting oil for 30 days in response to our stance on the whole Israeli/Palestinian issue. Nice of them, eh?

6. Guess who used to head up Halliburton? That's right, our old friend Dick Cheney was chairman of the board and CEO until he accepted the VP nomination spot in July 2000!

7. So Dick Cheney helped get Iraq's oil exports running and brought income back into the country, now he's calling them evil and saying that they need to be punished? I'm a little confused here. But hey, what else is new when the Moron Administration is involved?

That's all I could say when I saw her. She was just sitting there as I exited the gym, and I was so taken back by actually seeing her in real life, since ironically I'd just seen her not even an hour earlier on TV, but this is Los Angeles -- where anything is possible. She was just as beautiful as I'd thought her to be.

I tried not to gawk, but it was kind of hard not to. The gym employees standing there keeping a watch over the entrance probably thought I was a bit of a freak, or at least a little starstruck, or possibly thinking unsavory thoughts. Especially as I just kept saying "whoa" and "holy crap" over and over.

But I couldn't help it. I'd never seen her before in real life so close. It was an experience.

Have you guessed who it was yet? It was the star of Back to the Future -- the DeLorean.

Emotionally Disturbed Roommate & I had it out this morning. He was pretty calm about the whole thing, and I was rather incoherent seeing as how I'm not conscious in the mornings and I was still kind of under the influence of the Benadryl I took last night to help combat the cat allergies. I guess it was kind of noticeable, since when I sat down for breakfast he asked me if I'd been smoking marijuana. Yeah, I guess my eyes really were that bloodshot. Either way, he kept asking me for a reason why I was moving out since he "liked to learn something new from each experience" and since I had originally told him when I moved in that I was settled and wasn't planning on leaving, but I merely told him that there were personality conflicts and didn't give him any other responses. What was I supposed to say, "Well, I'm moving out because you're a freak and need serious psychological help"? So in 9 more days, I'm gone.

I got my driver's license back last night -- thankfully, now I can buy alcohol since I have an official picture ID. Unfortunately, I look like a freak in my picture, and I'm not sure if that's because I'm so unused to seeing myself without glasses on (they make people take off their glasses for their license photos). The expression on my face seems to be one of, "Oh my Lord, what is that thing??"

I went out to dinner a few nights ago with one of my friends and ordered a Miller Lite. The waitress came back to the table a few minutes later and apologized by saying, "I'm so sorry, but we are so out of Miller Lite." How Southern Californian! Not just out of Miller Lite, but so out of it. How does one become so out of Miller Lite as opposed to just being out of it?

I'll attempt to make this short & sweet, since I encountered two very friendly cats tonight & I seem to be allergically reacting to them fairly intensely, if such a thing is even grammatically possible. Suffice to say that I'm giving serious thought to clawing my eyes out right now.

I felt guilty enough about the cookies & Chinese food that I scarfed down at work today that I walked (yes, I know, very anti-L.A.) over to the Evil Empire of Fitness because I have a six-month free trial membership coupon that a friend gave me. On a side note, I find it ironic that when you do a search on Google for "Bally fitness," you have to go through three pages of complaint sites about the company in order to find the results for the actual company website. But I digress. I had the free pass so I figured I might as well use it. I didn't end up doing everything that I wanted to do as far as a workout goes, since you need to bring your own towel or buy one from the "pro shop." Next time, I'll have to remember about the towel.

Either way, my friends weren't kidding when they said the gym was less functional than it was a place to be seen. I could not believe all the eye candy wandering around in tight Spandex. Unfortunately, there were plenty of overweight middle-aged men to make up the difference as well. So I went and did some exercise in addition to the 2 mile roundtrip walk, which was good. Tomorrow, I'll go back with a towel.

While in the locker room getting ready to leave, I saw a guy who I swear was in Police Academy 4 and Wildcats. Given that this is Los Angeles, it's probably not uncommon to see actors wandering around. But I was not about to go up to this six-and-a-half-foot tall 400 pound man and ask him if he was the one in those films, especially when he was only wearing a towel. See? It all comes back to the towel at Bally's.

The stress of knowing I have to confront Emotionally Disturbed Roommate is rearing its ugly head, making me hoover everything in sight. It's quite evident that I've been eating the cookies that a record company brought in for us earlier this afternoon, since my fingers have turned blue from the blue sugar crunchy things that were decorating the cookies.

Speaking of music-related things, some Arizona company had to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $1 million because they allowed employees to share MP3s on an internal server. Someone told on the company by sending the RIAA an anonymous e-mail -- which I don't believe, since there's no such thing as an anonymous e-mail anymore -- and the company decided to pay the RIAA $1 million rather than go to court. Here's what bothers me: If Kazaa and Gnutella can get off the hook because they say their technologies can be used to file-share other things besides MP3s, how in hell can this private company be held accountable for the contents of their internal servers? All they would have to do is move a few Word documents or Excel spreadsheets or what-have-you over to that server, and they can claim that it's being used to share legitimate documents. If the RIAA demands they stop the music file-sharing, it's within their bounds to do that. But a million dollar fine? I'm not so sure that sits well with me, and it makes me feel like Big Brother is reaching into the private sector a little too deeply.

Boy, can I tell my horoscope is full of it today. It begins "even though you're a natural athlete..." Pshaw, I say. Pshaw, indeed.

Emotionally Disturbed Roommate arrived back tonight, as the countdown stood at T-plus 5 days. I was walking up the stairs to the main entrance to the building and saw him standing in the hallway talking to the neighbors. I couldn't handle it; I'd just finished a 12 hour day at work. So I disappeared for a walk around the block as I called one of my best friends. She rescued me by taking me along while she did her errands so I could avoid him for a little while longer, as well as get myself some much-needed alcohol so I could deal with the situation.

Thankfully, he was in the shower when I came back and I was able to disappear into my room. Hopefully, he'll see the e-mail tomorrow and he'll get the info that way. Either way, April 20th is D-Day. I gave them my deposit check and made reservations with the moving company, so there's no turning back.

And for now, I plan on drinking and watching something mindless like Dude, Where's My Car? I can deal... I can deal... breathe... unclench jaw...

More than one person has written me and told me that since I've been living in California for a month and a half now, it's pointless for me to keep my blog clock set to Eastern time. Well, it's not that I really wanted to do it, it's a matter of Greymatter not allowing me to do it. So I just tried updating the time to Pacific, and while the label changed to PDT, the time stayed the same. So we'll see if maybe this will at least start a new series of posts with the correct time. Greymatter's fouling up anyways, it won't let me rebuild. I'd install Movable Type and even do a redesign, but I'm not that computer-literate, much as I might seem that way sometimes. Might I remind y'all that the web goddess Candi is responsible for this site going active, and I didn't link her just then because she's on hiatus and told us not to link her.

The Rio de Janeiro tourist board is suing The Simpsons producers for an unfair and "unreal" satire of their city in a recent episode. Apparently, out of everything -- including the fact that Homer was kidnapped by guerrillas in a scenario that didn't appear to be labeled as an uncommon practice there and the country was portrayed as being poverty-stricken -- they really only had issues with the fact that monkeys were running around unchecked in the episode. The tourist board officials feared that the monkeys made Rio look like the middle of a jungle, and that it might hurt their tourism income. Never mind the fact that there's been several outbreaks of dengue fever down there and the fact that people really are kidnapped for ransom, they're worried about the monkeys on a cartoon. Pardon me while I go take a nice dosage of this new drug called "perspective."

Apparently, there was some confusion as to who was writing what today, since it appears that my horoscope was written by the guy who usually puts the fortunes in Chinese fortune cookies. It says (and I'm copying this verbatim):

You make amazing comeback. You receive challenge to complete difficult mission.

Yes, young grasshoppa.

I was over at The New Place dropping off my deposit check for The New Emotionally Stable Roommates. They were watching "Fear Factor" on NBC, and since it was almost over, we watched the ending and I said once or twice, "Damn, that guy looks like Tom [a guy I was friends with in college]... it's been years since I've seen him, though." Then the ending came along and the host thumps him on the back and says something to the effect of "Tom, you won! You just won $50,000!"

Stricken with a growing sense of "ohmigodsaywhat???" in my stomach, I asked the guys to rewind their TiVo to a point when NBC played the chyron of the contestant's names on the screen. As they were rewinding, I remarked, "If it's Tom Trundle, I'm really going to start screaming bloody murder."

It was. The first time I see this guy in 3 years, and it's on network TV as he's winning $50,000. The New Emotionally Stable Roommates suggested I call him up and ask for some cash. I did not. However, I did spend the next half-hour calling everyone I knew from Brandeis.