death of an insurance salesman

this saturday, my shop computer crashed. inconvenient/a perturbance/trauma does not even cover the spectrum of my sentiment toward the whole deal. marcy suggested that i file a claim for business interruption and here's a conversation that transpired between us, over text, after i filed the claim:

marcy: "so what are you supposed to do now?"
me: "i dunno, she's gonna submit the claim and someone's going to call me."
marcy: "gotcha. good luck! sorry it's a mess. maybe reggie will be your claims adjustor" (reggie is an adjuster for natural catastrophic events)
me: "i wish. but it's not hail damage. that's on my thighs...what if reggie came over and asked to see the hail damage and i just turned around?"

groin pains

i am now starting to see what sort of audience i'm dealing with. you guys don't ever comment on blogs that have any hint of sentiment, insight or poignancy. . .anything with substance, basically. the three posts that have generated the most comments have been about the partitioning of bradley's body after he dies, my chicken mcnuggets and extreme scare tactics to keep bradley out of the neighbor's yard. jeez. stop treating me like michael crichton!!

made with white meat

i am eating a chicken mcnugget happy meal. these are my thoughts. arby's is the poor man's mcdonald's. jack in the box is the thinking man's mcdonald's. i don't know where this leaves burger king. how can this mcnugget taste exactly the way it did when i was five, living in maryland?

lesel, i am so proud of you for running 8 miles today. you are right, you have had "several tears" over this journey to the bear a thon. . .

DEO is for your B O

my proverbial jaw always drops when i find out that i've been misspelling a word for a very long time. like like when i found out that mcdonald's wasn't macdonald's. today, i've realized the difference between "stationary" and "stationery". the first meaning static, the latter meaning writing material. i feel so embarrassed, if i've ever written a letter to you or emailed you or even said this word to you (i am in a constant mode of spelling things in my head), i'm so sorry for not being the bastion and guardian of the english language like i strive to be. what a bad day.

you live in a zoo...

happy birthday, amy, you GO with your albino self.

mellow yellow

i am not a fob. i was born in baltimore and have spoken in english since i was five. i read 100 books in the first grade and got an award for it. i would say that on my personal set of skills, writing and speaking are close to the top.

however, there is a parenthesis. my childhood was a bit anomalous and disconnected from the average american kid growing up in the average american household because even though my parents spoke english, they didn't speak american. no colloquialisms, no idioms, no curse words, nothing outside a grammar textbook. i grew up and never knew what not being able to sing "my way out of a wet paper sack" meant or that "a penny for your thoughts" was another way of asking what was on my mind. i still have no idea what "no harm, no foul" means or from where "the peanut gallery" derives. in addition, my parents made up their own idioms, which i grew up thinking made perfect sense. if you've ever heard "i was crying like a tiger", it means that at some point, you cried really hard. credit my pops for that one.

and even though i am now deeply immersed in american culture, this gap still makes for some awkward moments. i have tried to incorporate them more into my semantics as i've gotten older, but most of the time, i use them the wrong way or get them half wrong. for example, i described someone the other day as being smart as "a bag of hair". and another time, i was describing something and said it reminded me of "johnny go lightly".

well, now you know, i'm not PERFECT.

darling, the whole world is going to spago

last night, on the plane. why does the word "float" change to "flotation"? i noticed this on the flight last night. i'm no linguistic whiz, but in the other languages i've studied, vowels don't just disappear when morphing into other words with the same derivative. it's weird. english is so weird.

i started job #3 today. lots of alphanumerics at the hr office, i9, w4, pif, la la la. no form for the lonestar card, i'm afraid. i forget what it's like to have a real job. i was a bit reticent to have my ID made today as it's cold and muggy outside (bad hair, greasy skin) and i'm going on very few hours of sleep (puffy face, bloodshot eyes) but miraculously i don't have to take one. maybe i can resurrect my id from college. the boys are back in town. . .