One of the most devastating moments in a man’s life is when a hot chick catches him picking his nose.

My cubemate’s fish takes hours to poop. Shortly after being fed in the morning, a tubular formation will gradually grow out from just in front of its ventral fin, trailing it for most of the day like a banner being flown behind a plane. I am certain that, if one were to examine it closely, one would find the words “Eat At Joe’s” printed on it in tiny fish letters.

In other news, Barenaked Ladies’ next album will be called Tiny Fish Letters. Well, okay, the next BNL album is called Barenaked Ladies Are Me, but Tiny Fish Letters would also have been very good.

I realized today, during my morning shower musings, that it is impossible to be only part-cyborg. I’ve heard the terms part-cyborg and half-cyborg used before, and it did not occur to me until now that if you are part-cyborg, then you are completely cyborg. Here’s the proof, written in layman terms:

Define the statement “is a cyborg” as C. C is true if and only if 0 < a < 1, where a is the proportion of a body’s mass that is cybernetic.

Now say that a is equal to any b0 that fulfills the requirements for a. If we define b1 as being equal to b0/x, where x is some positive number greater than 1, then we have effectively created something that is part-cyborg. However, if 0 < b0 < 1 is true, then 0 < b1 < 1 must also be true (trivial - no justification necessary). Therefore, b1, which we purported to denote a part cyborg, actually denotes a full cyborg. QED

The following words and phrases must never, ever be spoken in the lyrics of a rock song. They have been sung to death. Let them go.
- California
- You know it’s true
- Deep inside of me
- Rock and Roll
- Baby
- Honey
- I can’t hide this feeling
- Girl (as a proper noun)
- You know what I’m talkin’ about
- All night long
- Like I knew you would
- It’s now or never

I try not to hold my doodoo in when I can help it; I go as soon as the fancy strikes me. This is because my number could be up at any moment, and when I die, I don’t want to be emptying my bowels while some hot chick is crying over my dead body, wishing that she had told me how she felt about me sooner. It would completely ruin the moment.

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I continue to maintain that office life is a bizarre, no, stupid thing. Eleven months out of twelve, we tax ourselves with the burdens inherent to political correctness. It is accepted, blindly perhaps, that the use of any word which refers to an activity in which one person might participate but another might not is the most abominable of acts. For example, one must never utter the word drive, because doing so might offend certain individuals who, either by choice or misfortune, do not drive cars, such as children, Amish, and the legless. The proper term is “displace via unspecific means of locomotion.”

However, following Thanksgiving (referred to in the office environment as “Late November Feasting Event” in order to prevent offense to British and Canadian employees), specifically, right on Black Friday (renamed to “An Interval of Time that Follows the Late November Feast” for the sake of those who do not use the Roman week), secularity is summarily quashed as revelers hang Christmas lights, menorahs, and Kwanzaa thingies on every available cork board, apparently in attempts to spread the respective words of their respective deities, whilst dressing such crusades in the guises of “holiday cheer.”

You may not know this, but I changed my hair a few months ago. That sounded really gay. I wear my hair differently now? No, that still sounds girly. I have restyled– eff it. I used to keep it gelled up, kind of spikey-messy-like. Now, it’s flat, a little neater but still messy, and flipped up in front. It looks pretty gay. Still, I think girls are attracted to homosexual men, anyway. It’s the challenge factor.

I do not award loyalty carelessly, but when earned, it is fierce. I have never, as far as I am aware, intentionally betrayed anyone or anything, deserving or not. So, when I say that the New Jersey Devils, a team for which I have rooted for as long as they have existed under that name, and shall so long as I continue to draw breath, are playing like a bunch of asstard brownie scouts getting their first periods, I want you to take that assessment as brutal honesty borne of love rather than the blathering rant of a frustrated fan.

It is funny to observe the behavior of those around me in the office as the morning turns to afternoon and evening. With each passing hour, the decorous restraint exhibited by your typical worker decreases, almost imperceptibly, until close to the end of the day, when such devices as douchebag begin to be deployed with flamboyant regularity.

Playing Mario Kart DS online is a pleasure that should not be missed. I wouldn’t mind being able to play Battle Mode online, nor would being able to play all of the game’s tracks online instead of only twenty of them disagree with me, but apart from that, my only big complaint has more to do with my own conscience than anything else.

You see, some of the people playing this game online are really bad at it. I mean, wow, I played at least two people yesterday who didn’t even know how to powerslide. This bothers me, because I see that they are being defeated consistently, which causes me to fear that they may lose heart and interest, and stop playing the game. Because of this, I always feel an obligation not to devastate these people too badly. Perhaps I will “accidentally” shoot a blue shell when I am in first place, or maybe I will make a “bad turn” and lose time while I work my way out of the dirt. I get no pleasure in massive victories. A close race is always more fun for me. But if I can’t have that, then I can at least see that the game does not lose players. I am still going to beat them, though.

In defense of this mindset, I should like to point out that I used to do the same thing with my sister, throwing the occasional match to keep her interested. She is now able to give me a serious beatdown at Smash Bros. when she is on a roll.

Being a stall fag has its downsides when it comes to hand washing. Stepping away from a urinal, it is understood that you only peed, and so, a soapless rinse is sufficient. When they see you coming out of a stall, however, fellow facility patrons will assume that you just defecated, whether you did or not, and will expect you to lather with soap. It becomes a needless extra step for me when the restroom is busy. I try to let the toilet seat drop audibly, to indicate that it had been up just a moment ago, but even then, I imagine people assume I am touching it with my hand rather than the bottom of my shoe as I do.

Re Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance - my word, is there ever some amazing artwork in this puppy. I wish I had the sorts of abilities that create images a quarter of this caliber. I believe such talents would better motivate me with regards to certain artistic endeavors of my own. Oh, the game is also fun to play.

I cut my face as I was shaving it this morning. The wound clotted over just fine after a few minutes, so I decided not to concern myself with it any further, and I put it out of my mind. But then, around 11am, a coworker, her face contorted into a look of frozen horror, informed me that I had blood dribbling down my neck. It continued bleeding for about an hour after that. Huh.

I saw the single longest hockey fight I have ever seen on Sunday night, between the Devils’ Darren Langdon and the Blue Jackets’ Jody Shelley. I would say it lasted a good two minutes, and was an exquisitely even match, with each contender landing about a dozen head shots before Shelley’s helmet came off and Langdon hammered home an extra five. Towards the end, it looked as if both players had had their fill and were just waiting for the referees to step in. They looked so tired, I couldn’t help laughing.

If it had been me, moving towards the end of the second minute, the two of us heaving and gasping from exhaustion, our passions rapidly fading, I would have handled it like so:
“Okay, I think that’s enough. I’m over it now. How about you?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” he’d say.
“Cool. Good fight,” I’d say as I let go of his jersey, brushing and straightening my own as I search for my gloves. “Is that Axe you’re wearing, by the way?”

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I am about to admit to something. This thing is a thing to which I should have admitted many eons ago, but pride and ego forbade, shame and modesty stifled pride and ego, intelligence and reason stifled shame and modesty and were in turn stifled by pride and ego, the whole thing whipped up into a looping, frothy chaos, and my brain subsequently exploded, leaving me in a vegetative state, unable to admit to that which needs admitting to, which is this: I goof off an awful lot.

My typical weekday begins nobly enough. I tend, more often than not, to wake up naturally around 7:15am, fifteen minutes before my alarm clock is set to go off. I am then at work by 8:30, half an hour before most people in my group. The good habits trail off from there.

The first order of business is to eat a thing, generally a PowerBar, but I will occasionally substitute in a bowl of cereal. This is followed up by a banana.

While I am eating, I begin to visit my daily websites, of which there are many. I begin with the 26 webcomics that I read on a regular basis. Once I’m done with them, I load up another set of 22 bookmarks that include such things as CNN, Slashdot, a bunch of gaming sites, and other miscellany. The whole web browsing process, from beginning to end, takes around an hour-and-a-half on average, though it is not uncommon for it to take more than two hours if there has been a lot of news during the evening. It is worth noting, however, that this step was shortened significantly when the company’s routers recently began blocking access to Fark.com. I have little doubt that this new policy was entirely my fault.

Done with my morning Internet ritual, I start to think about getting to work, which makes me have to go to the bathroom. So, I grab my Gameboy, head off to the men’s room, and get comfortable in the handicap stall. Normally, it only takes me a minute to win the silver medal, but with my Gameboy there to distract me, this gets extended to more like twenty minutes. That’s okay, because I like video games, and they are my friends.

By the time I get back to my desk, it is usually getting near time for lunch. I like to stay at my desk while I eat, so it looks like I’m busy with important stuff that simply cannot be put off while I nourish myself. This takes another thirty to forty-five minutes.

With lunch consumed, I am now ready to buckle down and get some work done, having successfully squandered three-eighths to one-half of my day.

Now, by my understanding, managers are aware that most desk jockeys spend anywhere from one hour to two hours each day getting absolutely nothing done. My morning web dance fits into this range, and we can discount the bathroom and lunch breaks, because I want to discount them. So, given this, I am perfectly normal. Given, however, the fact that I don’t count this time as part of my daily allotted goof-off, and indulge in a further one or two hours during the rest of the day, we see that I am instead quite exceptional. But when challenged, I counter with this: I work in hyperproductive spurts. This stands up just fine, because I am known for having cranked out a two-thousand line program in under two days this past May. It is my perpetual Get Out Of Jail Free card.

Let’s talk about pubic hair in urinals for a moment. I’m just going to come right out and say that I have no real problem with it. We all grow pubic hair, and hair in all of its forms falls out from time to time. It is unavoidable that some will end up in a urinal. I am fine with that. But the other day, I noticed pubic hair on the top of a urinal, just under the flusher-dilly handle, instead of inside or on the lip of the urinal, where one would more often expect to find it. Far from grossed out, I was, in fact, quite fascinated. Instantly, theories of how this pubic hair could have gotten to where it was began to coagulate in my mind. I never arrived at one that satisfied me, and decided to leave it there so someone else could examine it. I would not be surprised to find that the study of how a pubic hair comes to rest on top of a urinal eventually leads to a low-cost means of faster-than-light space travel.

This is not terribly important to me, though, because I am a stall fag. I coined this term myself. Explanation: when utilizing a male-optimized rest facility, I prefer to pee in one of the partitioned toilet stalls instead of in one of the wall-mounted receptacles. I like the privacy. I like the comfort and convenience of being able to unbutton my pants in addition to unzipping them. I like that I can lower the front of my boxers completely rather than poking my nozzle out through the crotch. I like that this in turn remedies the slight squeezing of the urethra that can sometimes prevent complete evacuation. I like that there is never any fluid remaining that can be released into the interior of my garments after the deed.

This is, of course, totally candy-ass and Un-American. But that is my urinary orientation, and as this is a free country, you are obligated to respect it. Make no mistake, I still stand when I do it. I stand tall and proud and salute the stars and stripes. But I do it in a stall, and because of that, I am a stall fag.

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So I get home today, and who would be waiting for me there but Nat. We hadn’t made any arrangements for the obligatory REORT (Returning Each Other’s Respective Things), so I was naturally surprised to see her sitting on my couch, playing my DS, with a box of assorted, familiar items resting at her feet. Didn’t seem like any big deal to me at first. I did give her my spare key, after all. She used to wait there to surprise me after work all the time. I was used to it.

Unfortunately, Zooey was already coming over, which I thought might be trouble, but I figgered hey, we’re all rational adults here. Sure, Zooey wasn’t entirely aware of Nat’s, you know, significance, or the fact that her (Zooey’s) own role in the Saga of Me had slightly overlapped it chronologically, like maybe by a couple weeks, but hey, she’s bound to find out sooner or later. I’m allowed to see my ex, I don’t recall ever needing some sort of regal imprimatur. I gotta get my stuff back, right? We can be civil about this.

Accusations. Shouting match. Got kicked in the balls. Sheesh. Actors. At least I got my underwear back.

In other news, a coworker, specifically, my cubemate, pointed out to me the other day that the ladies’ room was getting a shiny new six-sink counter, which he regarded as unfair because our company is almost 80% male, yet the men’s room only has three sinks, all of which leak and have no cold water. I agreed with him at first, as I generally do - our respective cynicismical personalities play off of each other in twelve-part harmony, the interaction having an effect not unlike connecting the opposing leads of two 9-volt batteries together and putting the whole thing in a microwave, that is to say, we get along quite well - but then I got to thinking, which I like doing from time to time, and it occurred to me that introducing any measurable amount of extravagance into a restroom specially tailored for a demographic that lines up along a wall to urinate is more or less entirely unnecessary. Look, I’m thankful that we even get soap. There was a big party when we got upgraded to single-ply toilet paper from, I guess it was, what, half-ply?

Lego Star Wars - The Video Game is terribly excellent. The reviews I’ve read have all put it in the 7.5-ish out of 10 range, and I think these people must be jaded about something. Perhaps every videogame journalist in the world was simultaneously dumped by his girlfriend the night before this game was released. I’ll admit, I really thought it would beef hard and chunkily, I almost wanted it to do so with aplomb, even though I hate plums. That was an awful pun and I should be ashamed.

Lego Star Wars is one of those games that you just know is going to suck like a monarch, id est, royally. It is also one of those games that does not in fact suck royally, and instead bes awesome royally, and considering the fact that it is not hard to find it for $35, you really may as well. ‘Cubers are out of luck, and I wouldn’t dare play such a game on a PC, but you PS2 and XBox ding-dongs should be good to go.

The pod race was absolutely infuriating, though. It made me want to kill babies, and I really don’t mind babies.

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Four things:

1) I like the name that the new Pope chose. I’m not religious, despite being a confirmed Catholic; I’ve had gay friends in the past and I like having the option of enjoying the company of the odd Vegas dancer without the usual infections, but Benedict XVI is, in my mind, a well-conceived Pope name. It takes a good long time to say without being too cumbersome. Much better than John Paul II, which I always thought sounded too French. By always, of course, I mean ever since I began writing this sentence.

2) I cut my finger real good Friday night. I was at a party that my sister’s boyfriend was having for his friend who was home from Iraq, and while minding my own business, trying to enjoy my pilsner full of cold Rolling Rock, some adjacent goofball got a little overzealous with his gesturing, which led to him smacking my glass, shattering it in my hand, and cutting my left index finger. Blood dripping down my hand (I think I nicked a vein), I looked at the goofball square in the eye, chose my words carefully, and finally settled on, “Dude, ow.” I was sort of drunk.

3) I’m wearing a new pair of jeans that I got at Old Navy on Sunday. I’m quite fond of them. The pockets are much better than the pockets in this other pair of jeans I have, though not nearly as good as the pockets in this other pair that is different from the other one. Good belt loops, too. A solid pair of pants all around.

In case anyone is wondering, I got the 33″ version. I considered the 34″ one, but I knew I’d never fill it up. The preceding two sentences were meant to be an iPod allusion, specifically, the choice between the 20 GB and 40 GB versions, but since this was not abundantly clear, and thus would not be received by the majority of the audience, I thought it would be a good idea to clarify. To those who would cry “fatty,” I retort with, “Well, I’m actually more of a 32″ waist, but I like my pants loose,” though I’ll grant you that I used to indeed be quite chubby.

4) I think Some Adjacent Goofballs would be a great name for a band. I’m feeling something like Reel Big Fish with a little bit of Slipknot mixed in.

Disclaimer: the above statements include an assertion that would indicate a prejudice on my part against those individuals who subscribe to the French nationality. No such thing is present. I love all people of all nations, including the French kind. In fact, after a particularly invigorating workout, I even occasionally smell like one.

The French Nationality would also be an awesome band name.

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