As part of my deal with the very nice customer service rep and her supervisor at America West, I'm supposed to "remember them nicely." I shall do a bit more than that, and extoll their virtues for they are being very very generous to a stupid moron.

I made reservations this morning over the Internet on their site in order to fly back to the East Coast and move my parents' stuff to Tucson in late October. Except for the fact that I got a little mixed up in the dates, and made the reservations for the day after I wanted to fly -- I got confused with the whole day change because I'm taking a red-eye and wound up making reservations to depart on the day I wanted to arrive. This was pointed out to me by my parents, since I didn't even notice it myself because I'm such a loser.

America West not only changed my ticket very easily, but they didn't even charge me the normal $100 fee for ticket change, which I really should've paid because I deserved it because I'm a moron. But it's nice to know that there are still some nice people out there who really care about their customers, and I am happy to say that America West has made a very happy customer out of me.

However, I will say that I have one fear of flying -- it's not the crashing part, I'm fine with actually being in the air. I'm just scared they'll lose my luggage. I never get tense on a flight until I'm already off the plane and waiting in the baggage claim area for my suitcase to come out of the carousel. It's a strange quirk, I know, but it's better than spending 6+ hours all upset while I'm in the air because I'm afraid I'm going to die.

The requisite computer problems escalated at work today. On top of that, I finally got through to TheNerds.net to complain about the fact that someone e-mailed me my own credit card number, and the guy was so completely blase about it that I got even more angry, but I couldn't do anything about it because nothing I said seemed to get through to the guy. "Well, this guy's done this kind of thing before, and we don't think he's actually used the credit card numbers so you should be all right, but maybe you should call your credit card company anyways." You think? This adds to my previous problems with that company, who refused to take back a CD burner even though it was defective -- then when I called and held a supervisor on the phone for half an hour, they finally agreed to take it back and give me a refund, but promptly sent the defective burner back to me with a poorly handwritten note that they didn't take products back without their original packaging. I swore then and there that I would never use them again.

I was on my way back from lunch and was trailing behind a pair of guys when I passed a co-worker, who said, "Hi Keith." I said hi back, but about five seconds later, one of the guys who was in front of me stopped in his tracks, turned to his friend and asked him, "Are you sure he was talking to me? Are you sure he said 'Hi Keith'? Do you know him? I don't think I know him... Are you sure he said 'Hi Keith'?" I was kind of surprised since in my entire life, I've met maybe three other Keiths, and the chances of this happening are pretty astronomical. I didn't say anything though -- I kind of felt like being part of wigging someone out this afternoon.

So it's been that kind of day. I think I'll just pack it in with some sushi tonight and then go to the gym eventually.

I had thought that if I hadn't really reacted to the events of September 11th already, I probably wasn't going to. In some way, that disturbed me, given the extremely tragic events of that day. And if I was able to actually visit the site and not start crying or something like that, then I thought I'd be safely past it. It's like it's not real to me. My opinions and recollections were purely clinical, and that actually kind of bothered me because I felt like I should at least feel something.

My roommates and some friends were watching the HBO documentary about 9/11 on Monday afternoon, and I wandered into the living room and sat down on the couch. I watched about 5 minutes before I had to leave the room. I couldn't watch any more. Tears were forming in my eyes, and for the first time since the tragedy, I went to my room and cried for all those people whose lives were abruptly cut short that day, and the senseless violence that took them.

I'm not quite sure why it took so long, and why HBO was the trigger. Maybe it was just a really well-put-together special (since HBO usually does a great job with things like this), maybe it was just time, maybe it was a combination of finally realizing what took place that day combined with the fact that I have no idea when I'll ever see New York again.

The surrealness of this day just keeps on going.

So I'm driving down Wilshire Boulevard on my way in this morning, and I notice this black Honda Accord in the lane next to me that looks kind of familiar... I don't know too many cars in L.A. that have Quebecois plates... trying to place it...

The car pulls up next to me at the stoplight. I glance over. Emotionally Disturbed Ex-Roommate is at the wheel. Damn it, damn it, damn it.

Despite the fact that the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area is the second-largest in the country, this is the second time in two weeks that I've seen the only person that I want to avoid. It's unreal.

I woke up this morning to find an e-mail from some guy I've never heard of before, telling me that my account at an online store had been hacked. From the e-mail subject line, I thought it was a mass mailing, but when I opened it up, I found all of my personal information -- address, phone number and credit card number.

I think I'd be a little more upset if I hadn't moved from that address, left the job where I used my work phone number and cancelled a while back the credit card that I used to make the purchase. But the fact that the information was so readily available to complete strangers scares me. And then last month, someone used my name and e-mail account to spoof spams.

It's one of those things where you don't think it's going to happen to you -- it only happens to other people, so your little perception of security is safe. And then it's completely shattered. I guess that's why people were so blissfully ignorant of the possibility of terrorism in our country, until it finally happened. I suppose it was only a matter of time.

We're all targets in some way, shape or form. Be it some terrorist radical, some hacker, or some psychotic stranger, the world is turning out to be a much less safe place than Mom and Dad assured me it would be when I was growing up. And now I have to call some company to yell at them and act appropriately indignant.

Update: I called their toll-free number, and it was busy. I must not have been the only person to get this kind of e-mail.

I've done this before, but I want to do it again. And no, this was not the idea that my computer ate last night.

Esquire, which I consider to be one of the best magazines on the face of the Earth (and yes, I read it for the articles), does a feature in every issue that they call "What I've Learned," where they ask someone famous to impart... well, what they've learned. It's random, it's fun and it's insightful. And I'm feeling those urges to impart my wisdom to the masses. So.

What I've Learned
by Keith

- Knowing everything isn't always the best thing, and neither is trying to make yourself look like you know everything. Sometimes it's better not to try to impress people with what you know, because you might come across as being presumptuous and arrogant.
- Sometimes small is better. People talk about how it's better to have a megastore, but they might not care if they don't have the widget you need in a particular size. And they won't give you the personal attention that a smaller store might, and they probably won't remember your name when you come in the door.
- Tyler Durden says, "Deliver me from Swedish furniture." He's right.
- In Los Angeles, people get tired very quickly of the newcomer who points at the TV or the movie screen and says, "Hey, I've been there!" The novelty wears off very quickly for them, even if it doesn't for the newcomer.
- It really does make a huge difference when you love your job.
- No matter how many channels you get -- and this includes the pay movie ones -- there's never anything even halfway decent on TV between 2AM and 5:30AM. But if you can't sleep and you turn on the television, you'll probably still get sucked into some mediocre straight-to-TV flick and have to watch it until it ends.
- I have to finish anything I start that involves a story. If it's a movie or a book or a TV show or something, even if it's incredibly bad, I have to know how things will turn out in the end. And even if I know how things will turn out in the end, I probably won't know how they'll get to that point so I'll keep going to find out.
- Acting is being convincingly bad at something that you're actually really good at in real life. The ego problem comes into play when you don't want to look bad at whatever you're supposed to be acting poorly about.
- More and more times, mediocrity is proving to be successful. The most successful television shows, movies and music aren't usually all that earth-shattering, and the best ones hardly ever get noticed.
- Money really can't buy happiness, but it can buy comfort and some lack of anxiety. For some people, comfort and lack of anxiety is happiness.
- You know that stupid saying that people use to justify bending traffic rules -- the one about how any traffic sign with a white line around the edge is optional? Yeah, I use that excuse too.
- There is a measure for how good something tastes. It's called a calorie. Or a fat gram. Sometimes both, since even some of those nonfat foods can taste really good.
- The comedic value of midgets is immeasurable. Terry Gilliam knew that. It's why he had a bunch of time-traveling midgets and a seven-year-old boy starring in Time Bandits. It just makes things all that much funnier and more absurd.
- I'm a very auditory person. I can just sit and listen to people with particular kinds of voices and accents for hours.
- My friends once conducted a psychological experiment by denying me access to music for two days. They said that by the end of the experiment, I was displaying the physical, emotional and behavioral symptoms of addiction withdrawal.
- I've always gotten along better with women than with other men. I'm not quite sure why, but most of my closest friends have been female. That ratio's changed over the past few months since I've moved, but not by much.
- It's all good, yo.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of "How Vague Yet Inflammatory Can We Be?" I'm your host, Keith, and today's guest is the Washington, DC medical examiner who examined Chandra Levy's remains and basically said, "We don't know who did it or how they did it, but someone killed her. But we may never know the truth." Brilliant! And with this inconclusive information, the DC police chief is saying that he is confident that they'll find her murderer. So if they don't know how it happened, how do they know she didn't trip and fall while she was jogging and fell down to the point where her head was split open and she died without ever regaining consciousness? But now that they "know" that someone did it, I'm sure fingers will begin pointing at Gary Condit again. Might I remind people of that little clause in our Constitution that says "innocent until proven guilty"? There's an overwhelming number of people who've already convicted the man in their own heads, but I'm reserving judgment until some hard evidence comes in that says he did it.

Meanwhile, I'm pleased to present a definitive list of kick-ass music.

By some miracle of motivation -- and I do mean miracle, since I was so wiped after working out that I was ready to collapse in front of the TV and not move for several hours -- I managed to make it out to do my errands. The primary one was getting my car's oil changed.

I took my car to Jiffy Lube, since I figured it would be the quickest, cheapest and easiest. And I was right. Except I noticed when I got back in the car that they hadn't put their little sticker on my windshield like they normally do. No, instead, the bastards reset my tripmeter.

I'm not terribly particular about many things, but I am particular about my car. And I'm kind of sentimental about a few things. The tripmeter was set to zero when I first took control of that car, as I did when I got the car before that. It was just a little thing for me so I could always tell how many miles I'd put on the car myself since I'd gotten it. The odd thing is that I remembered the odometer reading when I got my last car, and it was exactly 4000 miles -- exactly -- more than the odometer reading than when I got this car that I'm driving now. And since I last hit the tripmeter to reset it when I left Connecticut, it was a bit of a sentimental thing. Yet these guys think they can come in and just screw with my car settings because they feel like it? How about they reset all my mirrors and the presets on my radio while they're at it?

My car is my sanctuary. Don't screw with her.

After 4 hours in the sunlight at Dodger Stadium, I'm lookin' a little pink. But how else to celebrate Memorial Day than with a patriotic activity like going to a baseball game? The stadium itself looks like they took a football stadium and sliced it in half. But I had my first Dodger dog at the ballpark, and my roommates are happy that they have exposed me to another aspect of L.A. life.

In an addendum to the post below about other people playing with others' car settings, I have the story that my parents told me. My mom was a bit of a tomboy, and had a Mercury Cougar when she was growing up -- mind you, this was the late '60s/early '70s when a Cougar was a real machine. My dad took it once to get it washed, but when he returned it, she found he had reset all of her radio presets to 1010 WINS. All of them. To the same damn station. Suffice to say that words were had.

Why Keith didn't post much today
By Keith

- I woke up at 11AM. Not bad.
- I was a good boy and immediately went to the gym.
- We tried out the new barbeque today.
- I've been drinking for 8 hours straight.
- There were other chemical enhancements going on as well.
- I left the barbeque and my friends here at the apartment around 7:30 to spend the night with not one, not two, but three gorgeous women at a houseparty, which we then bailed on to go barhopping.
- My head's a little fuzzy at the moment because of aforementioned activities.

Yeah. So. And tomorrow promises to be more of the same. Except that my car needs an oil change at some point.

So I jumped on a grenade tonight at a bar for my friend, and he didn't even go for the prize. "I wasn't feeling the vibe" was his excuse. Well, sometimes you've just got to make it happen, I suppose.

Which is why it's so hypocritical for me to say that and then sit here and talk about how I fall for these unattainable women. Women who I'm friends with but it never progresses beyond that. Either I keep my feelings to myself, or they kind of realize what I'm thinking and sort of hint that it wouldn't happen.

Truthfully (and I doubt I'd be this truthful if I weren't a little intoxicated, but they say that drunk men tell no lies), I don't think I've ever been involved with someone where I had a perfectly healthy relationship that both of us wanted to be in. I've been in relationships where I've had one foot out the door and not really cared but just stuck with it because she was there (as callous as it sounds), and I've been in relationships where she's had one foot out the door and I've pleaded with her to stay. It's never been a situation where it's been mutual, I don't think. I guess that's why my heart's been broken so many times over and why I ache for a decent, healthy relationship where both of us have feelings for each other.

I had hoped that Los Angeles would be a fresh start, and in many ways, it really is. But in other ways, it just proves that people can't change, no matter how radically they alter their circumstances in life. My mom told me before I left that moving 3000 miles away wouldn't make my emotional baggage evaporate, and while I thought she was wrong, she was partially right -- I'm still mostly the same person I was when I was in Boston... mostly. And that means that I still pine away for that perfect relationship with that perfect woman.

Still no end in sight
Though I travel far and wide
Dying man is doing time
Thinker, soldier terrified
And she will have her way
And somehow I will still believe her
She will have her way
And one day I will come...
-- Neil Finn, "She Will Have Her Way"

The tales continue to roll in, the surrealness of it all still assaults me. I'm slowly getting used to it, though.

For example, there was the story that was told to me by the person I just got off the phone with, who told me that when he came to work today, his boss called him and all the other assistants into his office, handed them each $200 and roundtrip plane tickets to Las Vegas, and told them to go play for the day.

Then there was the radio-on-demand that I got today, when I instant messaged a friend who is the night-time DJ at a kick-ass radio station in Cincinnati. I'd had a song running through my head all day, and I was listening to him spin tunes online during the station's request show, so I messaged him and requested the song. Not 5 minutes later, the song starts coming through my speakers, direct from Cincinnati. One of my co-workers even asked me what I was listening to since he hadn't heard that song in a while and liked it.

More insanity will undoubtedly occur this weekend as I celebrate one of my roommate's birthday and party with some other friends. Have I mentioned recently that I'm having an absolute blast in Los Angeles? Now if only all this hard work at the gym would pay off, since the scale doesn't seem to want to move much.

(Comic from Wiley's Non-Sequitur)

I really find this whole color-coded chart of alert level to be a little ridiculous. It's like telling us "be kind of afraid," "be very afraid," or "run around like chickens with your heads cut off because terrorists are going to knock on your front door." What difference does it make? Either way, we're still going to be either scared because our lunatic administration made another incredibly prophetic "we don't know when or where or how, but there's going to be another terrorist attack soon" statement, which kind of negates the whole color code thing anyways. When you make that kind of vague statement, everyone's going to go straight to red anyways.

Look, we've been under threat of terror for years. We've just been blissfully ignorant of it. If we get such vague warnings from our government, is it really worth it to get upset and to change our plans? If we don't know when or where or how terrorists will strike us again, we should just go about our daily lives. Rather than spending all this money on PR stuff for the color coding and making up cute little charts to show the press and the general public, how 'bout we use the money spent on that to actually help fund the FBI and the CIA and the NSA so they can catch these terrorists before they have a chance to strike?

I e-mailed one of my close friends back East yesterday to tell him about my Adventures in the City of Angels and how much fun I was having, and I got a response back from him this morning that kind of saddens me. It's like it's his last summer of carefreeness -- he's starting law school in the fall, so he'll be swamped with hard work for several years, which is not something that either of us are really used to. I've already moved 3000 miles away and another one of his close friends of a long time is moving in August (most likely to California as well) to join the Navy. The group I had back East is falling apart. I used to hang out with these guys practically every weekend. We went to Montreal together. We spent New Year's together. We did our own Thanksgiving celebration. We gathered faithfully for football and beer.

I'm sad because I hate making other people feel bad, and things are getting "in some ways better and in some ways worse" for my friends that I left behind. I feel guilty -- even though I know I shouldn't -- because I'm out here having a great time while I'm contributing to the fact that our old group is falling apart. The one thing that makes me feel better is that despite the distance, we still keep in touch fairly frequently, thanks to e-mail and free long distance on cell phones. Out of all my friends that I left behind, these guys are the only ones I've corresponded with more than once since I moved out here. And yes, I've scheduled a night to spend with them when I hit Boston on my brief East Coast trip in July.

As if I needed more material confirming the absolute brilliance of Eminem, NME.com ran a story saying that Mr. Mathers was a bit irate over the fact that people were filesharing his album before it even came out. He said -- and this is a direct quote that probably breaks every record for most expletives in the course of one sentence: "I think that shit is fucking bullshit. Whoever put my shit on the Internet, I want to meet that motherfucker and beat the shit out of him, because I picture this scrawny little dickhead going 'I got Eminem's new CD! I got Eminem's new CD! I'm going to put it on the Internet.' I think that anybody who tries to make excuses for that shit is a fucking bitch."

When everything else fails, just swear a lot, right? I see nothing to be gained from his tirade except a whole lot of posturing and some threatening that shouldn't have been done. I honestly couldn't think less of him at this point. He's taking a place on my list of Dumbass Annoying Celebrities Who Need To Be Shipped Off To A Desert Island right next to Courtney Love.

Quote of the day: "That is quite possibly the worst idea I've heard since New Coke."