I don’t know why I woke up in a bad mood today, but I did, and I could feel the claws start to come out even before I’d left my apartment this morning.  I was muttering under my breath about a co-worker while getting ready for work.  Then on my way to work, some genius in a Mercedes decided to test the theory that anyone who drives a Mercedes owns the road — he was drifting in and out of his lane as it is because he was on his phone and not paying attention to the road and came within inches of hitting my car in the process, so when he tried to jump in front of me on the freeway, I conveniently sped up enough that he wouldn’t be able to… and then a few minutes later, I successfully cut him off just to reinforce in his head that he did not, in fact, own the road.  Then I got to work and gleefully deflated a pompous former co-worker by pointing out that the premise that he’d built this entire argument on was incorrect.  Then I found out a friend is losing her job tomorrow along with a whole bunch of other people I know, and things took a turn.

I don’t believe in karma or fate, I don’t think that the type of vibe you put out into the universe is what you’ll get back because I’ve seen way too many assholes and self-important and undeserving people get ahead in life, while other good-natured and deserving people are left by the wayside or putter along in obscurity or are mired in difficulty.  I’ve accepted this as fact, and I’ve accepted that the universe can be unfair in a lot of different ways.  So it’s not that I’m sitting here taking responsibility for what’s going to go down tomorrow, because I had absolutely nothing to do with the situation besides know the people involved.  But a small part of me does wonder if I unconsciously saw some of this coming, and that’s the reason why my emotional coloring was more on the dark side today.

I made the desert run yesterday, covering just over 500 miles in about 7 1/2 hours (including a stop at the border for gas and snacks).  I probably would’ve made record time had it not been for the usual slowdowns out in Palm Springs and San Bernardino.  I was, however, pleasantly surprised to find out that the spirit of radio is alive and well in the form of XM — one of their channels was doing a Saturday night show that I kind of thought was prerecorded, since on my way out to Tucson on Tuesday night, I heard the guy on the air give out the request line number and I called to find I was dialing a voicemail box (admittedly, it was 3am in DC where he was).  Either way, I called into the Saturday night show to make a request and gave it to an actual person who picked up the phone… and despite the fact that I requested a followup single that went nowhere from a one-hit wonder, my song was pounding through the speakers 20 minutes later.

Now comes the task of trying to fight off, well, senioritis for lack of a better term.  As of the end of my workday on December 14, I’m on vacation until 2008.  I’ve got a ton of stuff to do before then, but it’s still a matter of keeping myself motivated to get everything done that I need to without losing the will to live.  And then it becomes a matter of figuring out what the hell I’m doing to do over those 2 1/2 weeks without being bored to tears.

I fled Los Angeles last night… well, crawled out is more like it.  With all the traffic, it took me three hours just to make it to Palm Springs, normally a less-than-2-hour trip.  Once I cleared traffic, though, I definitely set some land-speed records on my way to Tucson.  Part of it was due to the fact that I’d only gotten 4 hours of sleep on Monday night, I wanted to make sure I got to Tucson before I just couldn’t go any further.  But thanks to about 4 Diet Cokes that I had with dinner, I not only was still awake when I got in at 3am (which was 4am local time), I also had to stop a couple of extra times to visit the local men’s rooms.  And I think I may have discovered the Most Awful Bathroom in the Western U.S. — it’s just off the 10 freeway somewhere near Desert Center, CA, and it totally reminded me of the bathroom in Trainspotting.  Yeah, you know which one I’m talking about.  I’m surprised I didn’t offer up a personal contribution to the filth, but I managed to keep the bile (and remains of dinner) down.  Just thinking about it now makes me a little nauseous.

Either way, I did my usual tradition when I got in late last night/early this morning:  I stood outside and just looked up at the night sky.  When you live in a place like Los Angeles, you’re lucky if you see maybe a dozen or so stars.  But out here, where the entire area is under light-restriction and there’s definitely not as much light pollution as there is in L.A., I could see thousands.  It really is breathtaking.

After a four-hour nap, I woke up this morning, booted up and worked from my parents’ back porch for the day.  I’ve got to say… when it’s sunny and 75 and your view looks like this, work can be pretty nice.  I was interrupted a few times though, because the roadrunners kept coming up to the porch looking for food, so I had to go to the fridge and get some raw meat for them.  Yes, roadrunners are carnivorous.  Gives you a slightly different spin on those Wile E. Coyote cartoons, doesn’t it?

Things I’ve learned today:

1. Technology has actually gotten better to the point where old guidelines can now be considered old wives’ tales.  For some reason, today I remembered an ex-girlfriend’s admonishments about how I needed to let my laptop and cell phone and iPod batteries drain all the way down, or else it would establish a memory block and not be able to charge all the way up, so you’d actually lose battery life if you kept recharging the batteries before they were completely drained.  Dispelled!  I did a bunch of research, and it turns out that while that used to be true, it’s not anymore, and I can charge stuff to my heart’s content.  In fact, it may actually hurt the batteries if you constantly drain them down to nothing.  So I can rest easy knowing that I’m not hurting my cell phone because I only let it drain halfway before recharging it — when it’s your only phone line, you can’t afford to let that go dead simply due to lack of power.

2. Gold-digging is still alive and well, and people can be pretty blatant about putting it out there.  I was mindlessly poking around The Evil Site That Shall Not Be Named and found a profile where, under the section of “what’s your perfect first date,” she wrote:  “I like to get to know someone in a relaxed setting, preferrably [sic] ... in the summer or in the tropics. It’s so nice when you can relax with someone.” That first part reminds me of that scene in Miss Congeniality where they ask Miss Rhode Island for her perfect date and she responds “April 25th.” [Insert “durrrrrr” here.] The second part makes me think, “What, like everyone has a private jet and can just whisk you down to the tropics to have a first date on a nice beach while cabana boys bring you mojitos?” Sadly, in this town, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were guys who did that, and it doesn’t surprise me that there are women who expect it. 

3. Those Snickers “Feast” commercials continue to amuse me to no end.  Which leads me to the realization that, yes, I still have the propensity to act like a 9 year old.  Then again, on Friday, I publicly presented a good friend with a birthday cake that had written on it in flowing script “Happy Birthday Douchenozzle.” (Photographic evidence here.)

Edited to add:
4. There still remains a time and a place for everything.  I went to the gym this afternoon and walked into the men’s locker room, only to find what could only be described as the World’s Hairiest Man standing stark naked at the sinks.  Seriously, it’s like he was wearing his own homegrown fur coat.  But it wasn’t the hair nor the fact that he was naked that bothered me — sometimes, guys run around the locker room naked, but whatever.  It was the fact that he had shaving cream already applied to his face and his armpits, which meant they were next in line for a razor attack… but at that moment, he was standing in front of the mirror at that moment, shaving his pubes.  Seriously, guy, if you’re going to do that kind of thing (and I realize there are guys who do), do it on your own time when your pubes won’t be spilling all over the sink and everywhere.

I’m a little fried this morning, since I didn’t get home until close to 2:30am and the adrenaline wore off around 3am, which is when I finally crashed.  My eyes feel kind of like they’ve been dipped in acid.

But it was an amazing night, and I’m so glad I did what I did.  One of the local radio stations here celebrated its 25th birthday yesterday, so they shut down Disneyland for a private party with listeners, clients and friends.  For four hours last night, we had the run of the park — and when you consider that there were less than 8,000 people in a theme park that usually holds anywhere from 20-70,000, that means no lines.  It was awesome.  We had less than a 5 minute wait on all of the rides we went on, and the lines were so short that on Big Thunder Mountain and Space Mountain, we were able to come off the ride, run around and get right back on for a second time.  The first time we went on Space Mountain, there was literally no line — we walked in the entrance and all the way through it and didn’t stop until we were getting on the ride.

I will say I was disappointed in the Haunted Mansion.  It used to be one of my favorite rides, but they’ve redone it with a Nightmare Before Christmas theme… it looks totally like a promotional tool for the movie and doesn’t really have the same appeal as the ride used to have.  But Thunder Mountain was incredible (and even more fun in the dark!), and Space Mountain was way awesome especially now that they’ve redone the ride.  I hadn’t been on Pirates of the Caribbean since they’d redone it to include Captain Jack Sparrow and other elements from the movies, but it was cool to see that again. 

As always, a few pictures of the revelry are available here.  Now I need to see about a giant vat of coffee…

Things I Am Not Sick Of:

1. Those stupid Snickers commercials that still make me laugh every time I see them.  You know, the “FEEEEEEEEAST” commercials?  Especially this one with the trash can, and now the GPS one too.  If there were more commercials like this, I wouldn’t speed through them on TiVo.  In fact, I just spent 10 minutes watching the entire series on YouTube (and because I’ve seen them all, now the garbage can one makes much more sense, although it still cracked me up before I saw the rest of them).

2. “Lazy Eye” by Silversun Pickups.  And this one really, really surprises me.  The song has been out for more than a year, and it’s still great in my head.  I haven’t gotten burned out on it at all, and anytime it comes on the radio, I will still listen to it all the way through without thinking “I’ve heard this 18,000 times already, it’s okay to change it.” It’s really a kickass beautiful song, and I think it’s well on its way to becoming one of those radio classics that you never turn off when it comes on.

3. That NBC show Life.  I thought Damian Lewis was a great actor when I saw him in Band of Brothers, but paired up with a great storyline with great writers, he’s outstanding.  Wednesdays on NBC, folks… check it out.  I was hooked from the beginning of the series.

I guess that “green week” on NBC affected me a little — I took those fluorescent bulbs that DWP sent me months ago out of the closet, and I put them into a couple of the lamps in my apartment.  Then I left a bag out on the living room floor and started throwing newspapers and paper and soda bottles and other recyclables in there, and I looked up a recycling center in Santa Monica that I could drop the stuff off at.  I haven’t recycled since I broke up with The Girlfriend because I don’t have any recycling bins here at my place, I just have a dumpster in back, and she had recycling bins at her place so it was easy for me to put the stuff together and just drop it off there.  I figure that it starts somewhere, and if I say that it’s too much trouble and someone else says it’s too much trouble to recycle, then that’s two people who aren’t doing anything, so the least I can do is at least a small effort to try and, well, make the effort.  Mom and Dad are lucky enough to have recycling bins in their development, and even then, some people don’t make the effort to bring their recyclables to the center.  I don’t think there’s much of an excuse there — if it’s relatively easy for you to do it, if the bins are pretty easily accessible, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.

So I made the decision to try and make the effort.  And then, of course, Mom had to go and throw the whole thing into disarray by asking me, “So what about your carbon footprint from driving to and from the recycling center to make that effort?”

Just arrived home after spending the weekend down in San Diego with my parents — Mom’s 60th birthday is tomorrow, and they decided to drive out and spend the weekend in SD because Mom missed seeing the ocean, so I went down to see them.  I get along really well with my mom, though there are some times when she really acts like more of a kid than I do.  It was a bit amusing (and perhaps a tiny bit embarrassing) when we went to the Birch Aquarium and she saw one of the stingrays moving his way up the side of the tank, and she was standing in front of the tank dancing in place, imitating the stingray.  We spent the past couple of days wandering around La Jolla, even climbing down the cliffs at Torrey Pines to get to the beach and seeing the seals on the harbor rocks, and we also went up to Mount Soledad.  I even got carded this weekend at dinner, which I thought was strange — not only am I well beyond the point of needing to be carded (though I’ve been told I look younger than I actually am), but I was also with my folks, so I figured I was a shoo-in for being clear for drinking.  (Though it’s hilarious to watch my folks get sloshed.)

Happy birthday, Mom.  You’re pretty damn special, and I’m proud to be your son.

I hate to sound like Jerry Seinfeld (who I’m actually sick of now thanks to the incredible amount of overhyping for his stupid Bee Movie which I’ve heard isn’t even all that good — but I digress), but what’s the deal with interpersonal courtesy?  Seems like it’s just completely gone down the tubes.  I was walking through The Grove a couple of days ago and saw a guy walking with his girlfriend — they were holding hands and meandering down the road… except he was wearing an iPod, and I could hear the music blasting out of his earbuds.  Am I the only one who thinks that if you’re with someone, you should be paying attention to and interacting with them?  And last night at the gym, the hotbed of social lunacy, I again saw people just yelling into their phones, barely using the equipment because they were concentrating on talking and weren’t paying enough attention to move faster than 5 feet per hour on the treadmill or the elliptical and basically tying up the machine without actually getting any benefit from it while other people were waiting for it.  I tend to put a lot of faith in the belief that there’s a time and a place for everything, and I’m wondering if this kind of thing is happening specifically because of the place… er, city… or if it’s happening all over and I just need to get with the times and stop being curmudgeonly.

I’ve been kind of reticent to talk about this here, but I guess enough time has passed that it wouldn’t seem like I’m just glossing over stuff.  And for some reason, since all I talk about here is my personal life (since I’ve made most of my work life verboten for blogging), it almost seems like it’s not entirely real unless I write about it.  Anyway — The Girlfriend and I broke up a couple of months ago.  A couple of people kind of already noticed because I stopped writing about her, and I got a couple of e-mails asking about it.  I’m not looking for sympathy or anything, I just wanted to get it off my chest.

Since then, I’ve been getting back to life as I know it, I suppose.  I guess the bigger thing is that I’m not afraid anymore to do things that remind me of “us,” like last night, when I went with Amandarin to see Eddie Izzard perform live… something I’d previously done with the Now-Ex Girlfriend since his material is something she introduced me to, and the show was even at the same theatre (Eddie uses the same venue to test out new material).  I’ve been dating again.  I seem to be heading into another one of those stretches where I’m so socially active that I don’t have a single night to myself.  I’m not reticent to flirt or hit on women when I’m out in public (much to the chagrin and/or amusement of my friends who happen to witness the spectacle).  And I’ve had some pretty incredible and interesting experiences over the past couple of months, like seeing the first show on the Van Halen reunion tour, seeing the Red Sox win a World Series and being in the live studio audience at Real Time With Bill Maher when people began disrupting the show — a few days later, I was out with a few people who randomly started talking about it, and when they asked me if I saw the episode, I was able to say, “I was there when it happened.”

That’s not to say I didn’t go through the usual grieving process.  And retail therapy is definitely not just for women.  I’ve always helped myself get over breakups by buying a shiny new toy to distract me from things — that’s how I actually got my first TiVo.  Well, my iPod blew up around the time of the breakup, so I went to get a new one as my self-distraction, but when I walked into the store, light was shining down on this gorgeous 42” flat-panel HDTV.  After texting for over half an hour with The Best Friend™ as I wandered the store, trying to get her to persuade me not to buy it (which she rather unhelpfully declined to do), I finally said “Screw it!” and bought the damn thing.  That’s when the adventure began.  I got it out the store’s door only 15 minutes before the place closed… only to find that it wouldn’t fit in my car.  I was slightly panicking, since I couldn’t really return it — I’d just bought it, and the place was closing for the night!  (It also didn’t help that while I was standing there, trying to figure out how I was going to get it home, some guy randomly passed by and said, “I just bought that model last month, it’s amazing and you’re going to love it!") I finally got the bright idea of unpacking it there in the parking lot and managed to get it into the back seat.  Fine.  Got the HDTV home, and realized that the furniture I have in my living room is too small to hold a TV of that size, which means that now I have to put this monster in the bedroom, despite the fact that I’d really wanted it in the living room.  Whatever.  Got the thing all set up in the bedroom and everything, even went down to the cable company’s offices the next day and got an HDTV box, so I’m all set with that.  Then I found out the issue with the box — I had to buy one of those in-room air conditioners over the summer because it was beastly hot here, and because my windows slide side-to-side, I couldn’t get an in-window unit, and the thing came with a remote control (which I never use) — the problem is now that because the remote for the new HD cable box apparently operates on the same frequencies as the A/C, every time I want to turn the TV on or change the channel, the air conditioner will start beeping or turn itself on.  Wheeeeee.