If I weren't tired, I'd tell you more about my company's short holiday party. If I weren't tired, I'd tell you more about how my CEO hit on me... at least I think she was, and others have told me she kind of thinks I'm cute, even though she's probably more than twice my age. If I weren't tired, I'd tell you about the award I got at the party. If I weren't tired, I'd tell you about getting drunk with my best friend and some of her fellow MBA students. If I weren't tired, I'd tell you about how I'm getting satellite radio next week.

But I am tired, so I'm going to turn off the computer, despite the fact that it's currently supplying me with the wonderful sounds of Jump Little Children, and I'm going to go to sleep because I'm exhausted and sick and need my rest.

The music collection has been fully imported onto the new Almighty PowerBook. All 4205 sound files have been appropriately renamed for Mac OS X. No, that's not a typo. Individually. Renamed. All that remains now is to use iTunes to sort through them, and the Almighty Music Collection will be active once again. It's been far too long.

On the health front, I of course was up too late working on the music collection and didn't go to sleep early as I should have (and intended to) because I'm a dork. As a result, the forces in the Throat Sector are losing a bit of ground to the Evilness. Our ground troops in the Sinus Area is beginning to suffer losses as well. However, the introduction of the Special Anti-Inflammatory Weapon have given our forces temporary respite as we regroup for an all-out assault on the Evilness.

Okay, here's where I start to throw a fit. All that work I just did on the sound files? My computer appears to have overwritten it. And renamed and refiled all the damn files on its own. Can we say "pissed as all hell"? I believe we can, class...

Three more people were laid off at work yesterday -- only two days before the holiday party. One of them is someone I like very much (even though I never got the chance to know her very well) and who I tag-team a few responsibilities with, so I'm guessing I'll be forced to pick up a few more things along the way. Longer hours are in Keith's future, I see in the Magical Crystal Ball.

I found it interesting that, even though they're not leaving until the end of the month, one of them wrote a farewell e-mail to the entire office yesterday, talking about how she had become dissatisfied with the job and work atmosphere anyways and people had told her that her writing had become "better than the magazine," and that she probably would've quit soon if she had had something lined up -- this just came sooner. I'm trying to decide if it's sour grapes or just really really poor social etiquette on her part.

Either way, fallout will occur over the next few days, and it'll be interesting to see what happens. The immune system's war continues to be waged, although forces in the throat sector are losing to the Evilness, and the Evilness is also beginning to gain ground in the Sinus District. More on the news at 11.

VH1 kind of screwed us over, we were wandering around for almost an hour being told "no, you need to go to that table over there" by several different people who kept pointing us towards tables we'd either passed by before or had been previously told at those tables that they weren't the correct place for us to find out tickets & credentials. I was getting tired & annoyed, but my best friend was there to keep me in check and she actually wound up getting us inside in some odd way.

Either way, the award show was pretty decent. The audience wasn't really into the show -- which was sad & disappointing -- and it seemed to be done pretty haphazardly, which was surprised considering how VH1 & MTV's shows have turned out in the past. Bon Jovi kicked off the show with a pretty stellar performance, Christina Aguilera actually remained fully dressed while she sang, and the ladies still swoon over John Corbett -- at least they've gotten over the fact that he broke up with Sarah Jessica Parker. Sharon Osbourne was the only honoree to receive a standing ovation; she actually got the best response out of the crowd all night. Unfortunately, the hosts -- Michael Imperioli & Drea De Matteo from The Sopranos -- relied too much on Sopranos humor in their presentations... I guess I was disappointed that they didn't seem to have enough charisma & personality that they couldn't generate their own shtick. I still don't think that John Mayer can sing, although I think Norah Jones is an incredible singer, and I got to see Chuck D and Grandmaster Flash in action. Brittany Murphy looked like a frail little girl in a dress bought at the Salvation Army store. Scott Stapp gave a long speech involving being true to God. Pierce Brosnan is the man, and I got a chance to drool over Lucy Liu, Julianna Margulies, Denise Richards and Christina Applegate in person.

I'm exhausted, and my immune system managed to keep me only slightly ill without failing completely. I think it's about to collapse into a quivering ball of nothingness -- oh wait, that's me that's about to collapse into a quivering ball of nothingness.

So, as evidenced by my previous post, I was up before sunrise to venture over the Hill (for those of you who don't live in L.A., the Hill is what separates the Westside and downtown Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley) to Burbank to break into the Power 106 studios.

I'd have never guessed it from the mental image that one gets of DJs (though I'm sure I defy that as well), but E-Man is a quiet, unassuming guy who almost looks like he'd be comfortable sitting in a computer lab. And he's short. But get him behind a couple of turntables, and he's a maestro. The work he did during his 8:20 on-air mix this morning was amazing, and that's just run of the mill stuff for him. It amazes me that he does this for hours on end at the radio station, and that he also tours the world doing it as well -- he just got back from a tour of Japan, and he's getting ready to go to the Bahamas for a gig.

Mixing records is like driving in that it's a simple explanation of what you need to do to make it work, but it takes tons of practice and there's a ton of variables as well. I could tell you that in order to drive, all you need to do is put the car in gear and step down on the gas. But that doesn't take into account all the other cars on the road and how to safely maneuver with them, plus braking, traffic laws, backing up, what to do in an emergency, how to merge, changing lanes... you get the picture. It's like that with mixing. The simple explanation is that it's just beatmatching -- making sure that the record you're mixing into is on the same beat and at the same tempo as the record you're mixing out of. But it's way hard and requires a ton of practice, and you have to account for different tempos (which you can adjust on the turntable), different time signatures, the music going on in both songs, whether you scratch or put in other effects...

I stepped up to the turntables thinking that my innate sense of music would help me out, and it would be easy. So I was glad that E-Man was very patient with me as I tried and failed several times to mix one song into another, including the time that it took me so long to match the beats that I ran out of record.

Practice, Daniel-san, practice. Unfortunately, I don't have turntables and a mixer to practice with, though I'd love to be able to. Though I will be able to see E-Man in action when I accompany him later this month to one of his club gigs, and I'll probably go back to Power to see some of their other mixers do their work.

All in all, I have to admit it was a very humbling experience. D'oh.

I can't believe that I'm actually awake before 6AM, and that there's people who do this on a regular basis. Waking up this early is actually physically painful.

Okay, this is definitely taking a turn for the surreal. Wednesday's agenda completely consists of things only available in L.A.:

1. Wake up damn early.
2. Caffeinate at Starbucks.
3. Take over an hour to drive 15 miles.
4. Get schooled in how to spin by a Very Important Guy at L.A.'s most popular radio station.
5. Interview aforementioned Very Important Guy.
6. Re-caffeinate at Starbucks.
7. Attend VH1 awards show with best friend.
8. Come home to apartment in swanky ZIP code, spend half an hour searching for a parking spot, and crash hard in bed.

Yeah, so I've just gotten home from a 14-hour workday and my alarm is set to go off in another 5 hours. Only in L.A.

Systems check:

- Loss of appetite
- No desire to sing along with music (possibly due to sore throat)
- Feeling cold

Yup, I believe I'm coming down with something evil. And at a really bad time, too, since this is one of the busiest weeks I've had in a very long long while full of Important Things To Do. I just need to make it through Friday, then I can collapse over the weekend...

So, kd's daughter's fiance is French. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But he has to leave the country because he doesn't have a job and he lost the one he had or something to that effect, and INS is cracking down on him.

Our wonderful bureaucratic & hypocratic government can let terrorists into our country, can lose track of them while they run around all over the place, but they are forcing a perfectly talented systems administrator to leave... because they're afraid he might attack us with breads and cheeses?

Someone fight the forces of evil and get this guy a job.

To Do List for Today:

- Drag sorry ass out of bed early
- Contemplate red water coming out of bathtub faucet, check CNN.com to see if the Ten Plagues are occurring again
- Return Little Blue Toy to rental car agency, look appropriately wistful at its departure
- Arrive at the office, begin IV push of caffeine and start digging out from under the mounds of stuff waiting for me
- Skip lunch to run errands
- Fill in for others who are still on vacation, the bastards
- Go to gym after work and begin to work off the effects of a stuffing- and pecan pie-intensive Thanksgiving weekend
- Crash hard in bed tonight and prepare for a very long week

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Finally. Back home again in L.A. Because of a friend's suggestion, I was able to bypass the mess on the 10 Freeway and zoom home, making a potential 12- or 13-hour drive back into an 8 1/2-hour one. However, it came with its trade-offs. While the 60 Freeway was damn fast and I didn't go below 65 mph the entire time I was on it (while the poor schmucks were sitting in stop-and-go traffic on the 10), the 60 Freeway is probably the worst-smelling freeway that I have ever been on. In a 10-minute stretch, the foul odors of rotten eggs, bad fish, manure, toxic car exhaust and bad meat all filtered through the Little Blue Toy's air intake system.

I realized earlier tonight that over the past 5 weeks, I've driven over 5,000 miles. That realization in itself is enough to make me tired.

By the way... for all the non-Jews playing along at home, acceptable spellings include "Chanukah" and "Hanukkah" -- the latter being the "official" version according to the Associated Press Stylebook. "Chanukkah," "Chanuka," "Hanuka," "Hannuka," "Channuka," "Channukka," "Hannukka," "Channukkah," "Hannukkah" and "Billy Idol" are not acceptable spellings of the holiday's name. Thank you, and we now return you to your all-Christmas programming.

Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Chanukah. I'm being inundated with Christmas carols, I guess not only have a couple of radio stations here in the mediocre radio market of Tucson gone all-Christmas music, but every single store in the metro area feels the need to remind us all to be nice, not naughty, and support our country and our way of life by spending some damned cash, for goodness sakes!

Being here feels a little odd. My mom agrees with the perception that it's like the three of us all met up at the same place in a vacation villa, and we'll all be going back to our lives soon. Not so for them. I return to my normal life tomorrow as I make the 8+ hour 500-mile drive back to L.A. in the PT Cruiser (which I completely love and have nicknamed "my little blue toy" and am very sad that I have to return it to Hertz on Monday), while they enter Week Two of unpacking all their belongings and building their new lives in Arizona.

We all have a lot to be thankful for, I suppose. We found out today that a friend of the family has been called up into active duty in the Army. My problems of trying to get my new laptop to work and load in all my programs and files and my bickering with my father are pale to the point of white as compared to that.