It's funny, as I was resuming my normal day of stocking shelves there was a sudden epiphany that came to being. Because of my gel-like hairstyle and my moderately saggy pants, there are patrons who come up to me asking me random questions in Spanish. I usually scoff these individuals with a smug remark, such as "I don't speak espanyooooo" or better yet, "No habla ingles.", just to make it that much more hysterically funny.
However, the funny thing is that I noticed today was that white people approach me with the assumption that I don't speak ANY English. I don't know if it's because I'm a day laborer (I labor during the day.), my appearance, or perhaps both. You could tell by the manner in which they choose to converse with me. They have this way of speaking incredibly slowly and even go so far as using hand gestures to help the explain where "el bano" is. Trust me, you don't want to know what kind of hand gestures they come up with for that one.
I guess there's something about me that really look immigrated. I just farted, I guess that's the Mexican part of me. The end.
Happy belated Valentine's Day everyone, I hope everyones VD was an abstinent one. On second thought, I really don't care. What did I do on Valentine's Day? I'm glad you asked!
Sou and I went to this really ghetto mall, for no apparent reason other than wanting to get out of the apartment and do something. Yeah, this place was all fucked up. The highlight of the entire mall was their world reknown food court. It was a cultural melting pot of all of these brilliant flavors infused in a decrepit swap meet of commerce. OKAY, IT WASN'T THAT BAD.
I would say the majority of our time was spent contemplating on what to eat, pacing back and forth through the food court. You had your basic staples there, your Hot Dog on a Stick, Panda Express, Sbarro Pizza. And then you had Mexican Dan's. Wow, I couldn't pass that opportunity up. Americanized Mexican food, with some random Iranian guy behind the counter offering samples of dried up chicken, trying to make sales. Or would that make it Iranianized? Anyhow, I ordered the two taco combination plate, I felt as if that was a safe bet. Being the fact that I've never had the place before.
And I gotta tell ya, I think salt pellets have less of a sodium content. The food was so freakin' salty that I couldn't finish it. And that's an overstatement, because I am a taco whore. So, a gallon of Coke later, I finished a third of my meal and that was pretty much it. I should have stuck to my first intuition and had what Sou ordered, a Philly Cheesesteak.
Now, before you bombard me with death threats on Xanga about what a lame ass Valentine's Day I had. Let me assure you, we did go out to a REAL eatery the day before Valentine's Day to avoid the influx of people who were going to eat out that day.
Sou, Doug and I (Yes, Doug came), went out toBillingsleys Steak House. It's a place that we recently discovered that is owned and operated by family of the legendary Barbara Billingley.
For
those youngins out there not familiar with whom she is, she was the mother in Leave it to Beaver. Not
to mention having the most awesome cameo appearence in the movie Airplane.
But I digress, I was starstruck for a mere moment there. The food was wonderful. I ordered the Prime Rib and it was cooked perfectly. Moist, tender and flavorful. It was accompanied with a baked potato and cole slaw. Sou ordered the teriyaki chicken. Now, why you're going to order an Asian chicken in an American steakhouse is beyond me. But she told me that it was good and that she'd order it again. And Doug ordered water and had the cole slaw that I opted not to eat and gave it to him as a hand me down. No, I'm not that cruel. He ordered the Top Sirloin and he said that it was tasty. But I felt obligated to discard whatever opinion he had since he's the guy who eats lawry salt on top of Japanese rice.
All in all it was a great meal, much better than that damn Mexican Dan's. If I come across a Mexican guy named Dan, I'm going to shovel salt down his throat, kick him in the groin and take his $7.58. That's what I call payback beeeeyatch.
This is historic, two posts in two consecutive days. Can I get a w00t w00t? ......do people still chant that? I'm really behind on the times. -but I digress... There's this part of me that yearns to to tell you what I've been doing while I was on my lengthy absence from Xanga, Myspace and all else.
Besides, what pretty much is the standard norm in my life which yields to waking up at 3:30 am every morning to go to work. I've found quite a few non productive activities to pass the time, until I'm gray, toothless, force fed strained lima beans and confound to those nifty electric wheel chairs that run nonsuspecting peoples feet over. -but I digress yet again...
Ah, yes. I'm going to make a direct assertion and come clean to you all. I spent A LOT of time playing this ridiculous 2-D game called Maple Story. I'm sure some of you may have heard of it. Perhaps your irritating pre-teen sibling or dare I say offspring , has played this game. Because that's the majority of people who play this game. Little tykes.
But before I go on further, let me make this perfectly clear and that is the orgin in which I've heard of this game. I wasn't hanging around Jr. High Schools playing YuGiOh, while at the same time being a frightening pedophile when I found out about this game. No, in actuality I found out from my 40 year old brother, because he in fact was already playing it!
So, I'm watching him play and I was enthused about the rather non-challenging gameplay and simplicity of it all. Yet, it had all these intringuingly features that boasted my interest. Such as, being able to personally style your own character, joining various guilds and most of all that wonderful chat filter. So, that I would be able to corrupt my warped way of expression to all of the naive children that played this game.
So, after spending, ohhhh around $20 of actual money, I conjured up this character. Yes, it actually costs money to buy these mind blowingly awesome accessories. Now, I could reak some major havok on some level 30 fire boars! MWAHAHAHAHAA! Anyway, I stooped even lower when I decided to buy mesos "the games form of currency", with actual money, so that I could form my own guild. That was an interesting experience in it's own right. If I were to put some sort of depiction from the top of my head of what it's like having your own guild with the majority of it's inhabitants being of the 13-16 year old age range. I would say that it's like being back in high school, minus the random people who give you wedgies and malnutritious lunches.
As a matter of fact, it was funny. The kiddies treated me like a fatherly figure, telling me about there real life problems as I was offering my not-so sage like advice from my own humble experiences. It was almost like being some sort of freakin guidance counselor. It's absolutely astounding, that through a pixelated game that teenage drama still exists. And for those of them who knew my age, I was officially referred to as "dad" or "old geezer".
Another interesting aspect of the game was the fact that it attracted peoplefrom all walks of life. I met this lady who had to be about thirty-something, and I couldn't be more ecstatic to make aquaintances with her. Apparently, she was more addicted to the game then her son was who introduced it to her. And there was this other guy, who was more or less around my age, who used Maple Story as a tool to provide impersonal bonding sessions with his daugher, whom he's lost touch with. Quite amusing.
Yesterday was quite an eventful day. Doug, Sou and I voyaged to Best Buy to replace our broken mini fridge. The picture on the left is the actual model mini fridge we chose to buy. Well, as you could imagine that purchasing it wasn't the problem. It was transporting it home says the scratches on my beloved Nissan Ultima.
Well, after literally trying to force the damn thing in at every dimensional angle known to mankind and looking like a trio of jackasses to all the incoming customers walking into Best Buy. We had given up and we had to bow our heads in shame and contact our only available resource. My mom.
So, I called my mom explaining to her the situation at hand and how the fridge had no freaking way of fitting in my car. She sounded concerned and worried, but told me that she was unable to help me in my dilemma due to the fact that. . . . . . . . . . (wait for it) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . she had to save her parking space in the front of my house for my dad.
Needless to say I was pissed. Let me explain something, my dad has this pet peeve about always wanting the parking space on the front of the house. When he gets home from work, the first thing he does is have my mom move her van, so that he could proclaim his golden parking space right in front of his dilapidated white picket fence. I think in his own mind, he believes that he actually owns that section of the street. I've literally seen my old man get in these random temper tantrums and bust out with a weed whacker and vandalize peoples cars because they were occupying his space for more than three days. The moral of the story? Don't park in front of my parents house by any means.
So, we had to blueprint this elaborate scheme whereas Sou had to drive my car to my parents, to save my dads space, while my mom was now free to roam the greater part of Los Angeles and save Doug and I in our time of need. As she dashed through the perilous traffic and onto Best Buy we loaded the car and made our way to our final destination. Home. On the way back, I bitched a little bit of "why in the hell my dad was so anal about parking spaces", but I couldn't conjure up the nerve to add to the fact that my mom's sense of priorities is kinda whacky.
Okay, it's time for my obligatory statement. Gee, I haven't posted on here in a long while. Xanga has certainly changed quite a bit, it looks as though it's been afflicted with that commercialism bug. Judging by that bright pink "Are you gay?" quiz banner which wasn't very gratifying to see it randomly plastered on my page.
Well, I sincerely hope that all of you guys are doing well. I'm very sorry that I've lost touch with the vast majority of you, but I'll try to keep up with what's going on in your daily exploits via reading your semi-cohesive ramblings on how much life truly does suck. Or maybe that's just me. -shrug- (Long winded work rant ahead, be forewarned.)
For those of you who live within an approximate "one beeeellion" mile radius from Los Angeles, I would like to volunteer my services as a means of employment. I'm seriously fed up with my dare I say quasi-career? I suppose working there for eleven years pretty much qualifies it as one.
Amazingly, when you think that things can't get any worse, they somehow do. I've been force fed a management position in my store, though I explained to the store director that I'm just a body to fill a void and he better look elsewhere for a suitable replacement because I'm pretty much fed up. Nuff said.
The company itself and how they chose to operate daunts me. For those of you who remember about my ramblings about how our department is overworked, it gets better. My department generates a sales gross of $80,000 per week, sales are by approximately 20% and yet, they cut our hours to that very percentage and forbid overtime. Which is pretty much implying that working on your own time is expected. That's 76 hours per week, apparently they base hours and labor from a systematically computer generated "money saving", complex system.
Update:
Well, you guys remember my niece Kaelyn. I haven't posted any recent pictures of her as of late, perhaps it's because I haven't been posting? Here's a recent picture of her on Xmas '07, she probably grew half a foot since then. (For those of you who can't decipher between the two, she's the one on my lap.)
Alright, this is something else I have to get off my chest, and that's the sad, but unfortunate obliteration of what some of us may fondly remember as Saturday Morning Cartoons. Let's face it, the transition from our beloved cartoon characters from the 80's slabbed onto the silver screen with insipid storylines, it's enough to make you cry. This is the utmost disrespect for our childhood heroes, they deserve better than that. They weren't just cartoon characters, they were ambassadors for a drug free America. As the video below shows:
Jeepers, it's been quite some time since I've last updated this thing. I'm not necessarily saying that I've been busy with more important things in my life because those of you who know me are aware of how priortization isn't one of my fortes.
Sooo, how is everyone? Is anybody out there still subscribed to my blog which hasn't been updated in over a freakin' year? Incidenally, there are a gazillion features on here that I don't know about.
Well, not much to talk about right now. Nothing immediatedly comes to mind, I just wanted to make sure that all is well with everyone. This is kinda like an impersonal chain letter to all my fellow xangans out there.
Well, the good news (or bad) is that I intend to post on here A LOT more frequently than I have been. There are just so many thoughts drifting through my mind and nowhere to express them. So alas, I shall return back to my xanga roots.
I shall leave you all with yet another depressing photo of my brother, until next time!
