My Musings

PS-Ashley Rocks!

Sunday, September 29, 2002

Final Contest Details

Recently, Ashley and I both made it to six days before logging off of AIM for various reasons, so nobody, technically, has won my contest yet (not even me!). However, Adam has a rock-solid DSL connection (or so he says) and will soon hit 6 days, so I'm gonna assume that he'll eventually make it, unless something funky happens and the Chinese decide to mount a nuclear strike on Bexley, or the same drunk asshole who wrecked the back end of Adam’s car yesterday while it was innocently parked in the happy streets of Bexley comes back and drives his drunken ass directly into Adam’s house, destroying his computer in the process. Now, a while back I promised Ashley that I'd give her a CD for her effort (the poor girl made it to six days TWICE, bless her little heart), but I'll give Adam a CD, too, for actually winning the contest (assuming he wins it). At this point nobody else is trying, so that'll patch it all up for my little contest; if you ever become interested in trying my contest for the chance to put whatever you want in my profile, you’ll have to let me know, because the “People Trying to Win Contest” category in my buddy list will disappear sometime around Tuesday (if Adam wins). All that's left for me to do is get two 74-minute CD's (or just one, if Adam doesn’t win) and actually make the prizes (or prize, if Adam doesn’t win), at which point Ashley will have to overcome her fear of giving me her mailing address (because, for all we know, I might just drive on over there and egg her house or something) so that I can actually SEND her the CD.

One warning about the “write Boris’s profile” contest prize—it seems that my character limit is a lot lower than it should be. I first picked up on this when I realized that other people were sticking WAY more into their profiles than I could have ever dreamed of putting in mine, so I decided to test things out to make sure that all was well. I began to type the above paragraph into my profile until AIM would let me type no further, at which point I copied the whole mess and stuck it into Word, which has a nifty “word count” feature that, in addition to counting words, can also count characters. I booted up the word count and was shocked to find that AIM had only let me type 800 something characters, and not the promised 1024.

After a bit of thought, however, I realized that there was a simple and straightforward explanation for this problem, which is: it’s all a giant conspiracy and everybody’s out to get me. See, AIM sends probes to the planet Neptune that capture millions and millions of these little aliens, which are then enslaved and forced to monitor all of the IM conversations going on at any given moment. One of these aliens then picked up on the fact that I was bitching about the low character limit in the profile (I can’t BELIEVE that I was actually stupid enough to complain about it ON AIM, but that’s all behind me now), which he reported to his evil AIM superiors. So now AIM is punishing me, in its own subtle way, by reducing the already-low character limit of my profile ever so slowly, perhaps just one character a day, so that eventually all I’ll be able to fit in there is “Die, AIM!” and then “Die AIM!” and then “Die AIM” and then “DieAIM” and then “DiAIM” and then “!AIM” and then “YAH” and then “UG” and then “P” and then

.: posted by Boris 10:31 PM

Saturday, September 28, 2002

Corrections

It pains me to say that I have recently pulled some egregious errors that could only have resulted from my heartless selfishness and an odious disregard for the people around me. Oh, yes, the cruelty that I demonstrated was despicable indeed. I can only hope that all of you will forgive my horrible acts and let bygones be bygones, because I am truly sorry for what I did.

You cannot imagine the shame that racks me right now as I prepare to type the entire, awful truth about my disgraceful actions. But I can delay it no longer. I confess! Yesterday…AHHHHH I can’t go on! The shame is too great! But go on I must. *sob* Yesterday…yesterday, when I put on my away message on AIM, I said…I said that…ach, I can’t say it! Okay, on the count of three. One! Two! Three! *deep breath*…*pause*…I said in my away message yesterday that I was playing in the marching band for the football game at Licking Valley, but actually…IT WAS AT LAKEWOOD! Not Licking Valley…Lakewood! Adam and Marina independently berated me over this with such vigor that I might as well have slaughtered a newborn baby for the purpose of dropping its blood into my morning coffee, and for good reason—how could I POSSIBLY have gotten the two of them mixed up, never minding the fact that to me they are both nothing more than foreign places beginning with the letter L that are located somewhere in the middle of Ohio’s endless cornfields and that I am periodically forced to visit only because my incompetent high school football team has an away game at each of them every other year? I feel that my guilt-ridden conscience would have collapsed if I hadn’t admitted my woeful sin to the rest of you, so please forgive my horrible mistake; hopefully, if we work together, we will someday be able to right the wrong that was caused by this careless and inexcusable error.

Also, my previous blog entry announced that the marching band would wear its uniforms at yesterday’s football game. However, the weather forecast predicted that, as a result of a hurricane somewhere, we’d have a 100% chance of it raining all day Friday, so Mr. Schneider figured, hey, why get the uniforms wet? Let’s just wear our parkas and jeans! Thus, we didn’t actually put on our uniforms; in fact, aside from the necessary jeans and all-white shoes, we were allowed to wear anything we wanted, since the parkas cover everybody up to about their knees. So we got to the game, all dressed up in our parkas, ready to hide our instruments in them to protect them from the rain, dreading the moment when we’d have to march on the muddy field, worrying about our precious saxophones and how the pads would become all soaked like they did at the last game, wondering about the…it didn’t rain. At all. I bet you saw that one coming. But in any case, the parkas were sweet, and I didn’t mind at all that we wore them instead of the uniforms; however, I just thought that I’d mention my mistake before Adam or Marina or somebody else raised all hell about it.

So to conclude: with regard to yesterday’s football game, the marching band DID NOT—I repeat, DID NOT—wear the marching band uniforms at Licking Valley. Rather, we wore parkas at Lakewood. My most sincerest apologies and best wishes are sent out to those whose lives were ruined by my heartless and woefully inconsiderate actions.

On a completely irrelevant side note that is actually somewhat relevant insofar as it has to do with marching band, it is my personal belief that people who puke on the bus on the way to the game and then piss themselves when they arrive and then proceed to display their drunkenness by doing things such as coming up to the concession stand and yelling stuff like “YA’LL GOT ANY BEER?” as a direct result of consuming, right before coming to the game, depending on whose numbers you believe, anywhere from 10 to 37 beers, should be kicked out of marching band. Well, no, I suppose that’s wrong. They should be kicked out of band entirely. And if their names happen to be Chris Bigrigg, a redneck jerk with a pitiful sense of humor and a complete inability to play the sousaphone, they should just be shipped off to a remote part of Siberia.

.: posted by Boris 12:03 PM

Thursday, September 26, 2002

Marching Band Uniforms

It’s interesting how things change. For instance, I used to hate marching band. I couldn’t memorize music and I couldn’t march, so, well, that pretty much did it for me right there. But now I love marching band! My marching skills are still on par with those of a beached whale, but at least now I’m able to learn every song we play, and I can play all the songs as loud as I want. My style of playing is such that I sacrifice tone quality for volume on a regular basis, which makes me sound like—all you music people will understand this—shit. One thing that I hate about music is that even if you play the right notes and rhythms, you will still suck if your intonation isn’t there. But in marching band, nobody’s gonna hear a solitary tenor saxophone, so I can just blast everything we play, which is fun.

Another thing I used to hate was my marching band uniform. We got new uniforms sophomore year, which are nice (as far as uniforms go, at least), but freshman year I had to wear a uniform that was older than I was. It was dirty and smelly and apparently designed by someone whose goal it was to make the uniform hopelessly impossible to put on and clasp correctly. The jacket came down to about my lower neck, so when I put it on it left a huge gap between itself and my pants. When I say “pants” here, I am, of course, referring to normal pants, and not the actual uniform pants, which hiked up so far to compensate for the jacket’s lack of length that the wedgie they created was as permanent a fixture of the uniform as the ugly, dark bluish-purplish fabric. We also had to wear these skinny white shoes that never fit anybody; these were called “Style Plus,” which was presumably an acronym for “Shoes That You Lace Eventually Pop Loose and Untie Suddenly,” because the shoelaces were short and skinny and rock-hard and stayed tied for about three seconds before becoming undone, even if you used pliers to yank them together.

But even after we got nicer uniforms and were allowed to wear whatever shoes we wanted, I still didn’t like uniforms. But the shoes were still a problem even after we got rid of the Style Pluses—the shoes we chose had to be completely white, and though the shoes I wore were mostly white, they had colored trimmings, which was bad, and they had an all-around green tint because I mowed the lawn in them, which was even worse, so Mr. Schneider got mad at me a few times. To solve the problem, my mom got me a pair of cheap-o all-white shoes, but things weren’t quite all hunky-dory yet because…well, I’ll get to that in a little while; I’m getting ahead of myself here.

So back to the uniforms. If you’ve ever worn a marching band uniform, you’ll know that it sucks. Luckily, since we’re not a very serious marching band, we don’t wear the uniforms for the entire marching season, like most bands do; for the first several games, while summer is still lingering and it’s pretty warm, we wear what are called “summer uniforms.” I used to love summer uniforms. They consisted of a nice, light blue, collared shirt with three or so buttons, and khaki shorts. The shorts we provided ourselves, but the shirt was bought. Anyway, it was a great uniform. When we made the transition from summer uniforms to real uniforms each year, I was heartbroken. Why can’t we wear the summer uniforms for just one more game? was the plea you’d always hear from me.

But this year we changed summer uniforms. When Mr. Schneider announced the news to us this summer, I was a bit upset because I really liked the ones we’d been using. That all changed, however, once I actually saw what the new uniforms were, at which point I immediately stopped being upset and became really pissed off. Because the new summer uniforms suck worse than waking up in the morning and not being able to move (see earlier blog entry). I HATE them. The top is—can you believe this?—a tee shirt. A tee shirt! Well, it says “Bexley Band” on it and it’s got a lion and all that, but still…it’s a freaking tee shirt. And the bottom is worse. Instead of normal, dressy-looking shorts with pockets, we got blue micro-mesh shorts with no pockets. Can you remember the last time you intentionally wore shorts or pants with no pockets? Probably not, because it’s annoying as hell. With these shorts, we had no place to put our wallets or keys or anything, forcing people to leave all that stuff in their instrument cases (a rather unsafe location for objects of such high importance) or load things into their socks (not fun) or do what I did, which was…well, I’ll get to that in a minute, along with the shoe thing.

My biggest beef with the new summer uniforms was that every single article of clothing that I wore, aside from my tee shirt and my underwear, has gotten made fun of at least once so far. People made fun of my sunglasses, my shorts, my shoes, my socks, and my fanny pack. Yes, I wore a fanny pack to the games. What the hell else was I supposed to do without pockets?! I had to bring my keys so that I could get back into my house, dammit! And the shoes—when my mom got them last year, she happened to buy velcro ones. Now, I have never understood what people have against velcro shoes. I wore them for a very brief period of time in elementary school before I realized that people made fun of them way too much. What’s wrong with velcro? It holds better than laces. It ties faster than laces. It’s less likely to go funky on you than laces. People can’t tie it in a knot and watch you go splat on the ground as they can with laces. And yet, people seem to find it uproarious when they see that I have velcro shoes on at the games. Then we have my shorts, which were too short on me because I’m tall and skinny and the skinny part has priority, so people made fun of me when I got them. Next came my sunglasses, which are the dorky clip-on kind that go on top of regular glasses, and finally my socks, which were apparently too long at the last game. So this summer uniform was nothing but social torture, with just about everything I wore coming under intense scrutiny, and I’m glad that we’re going to be wearing uniforms tomorrow, which make everyone look the same and which, mercifully, have pockets. Hooray for uniforms!

.: posted by Boris 5:22 PM

Monday, September 23, 2002

My Latest Obsession

I used to be really, really obsessed with computer games. I didn’t do my homework because it took away too much computer gaming time. Though I loved them very much, I didn’t like it when my parents got home because they always pried me off the computer, and every time it happened, I would think ahead to the next time that I’d be able to make it back on. If it seemed like my schedule was so busy that I wouldn’t have any time for computer games in the near foreseeable future, I’d get depressed. And I’d get depressed BECAUSE of computer games, too. Bad grades mattered less to me than a splattered fly on the windshield, but when I was pkilled (that means player-killed, or killed by a human player as opposed to by a monster, for all you MUD-illiterate people out there) and my corpse was robbed of all of my equipment in a game called Darklord, I felt as though somebody had just told me that I would die in the upcoming year of a grisly disease that would cause all of my skin to slowly peel off and then make my organs, one by one, catch fire.

Well, I’ve recently grown pretty much sick of computer games, though I still enjoying playing euchre, hearts, and other such games online. I guess that this is because I saw that computer games didn’t make me as happy as much as they just pissed me off. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not drawn to the computer anymore; in fact, I should really be doing my homework right now, but I’m not, because though I only came to the computer to check my email, I somehow became glued to my seat and decided to start writing this blog, at which point Mandy got on and began talking to me, and then Andy, and then Michelle (or was it Michelle and THEN Andy?), and before you know it, here I am, at 6:37 PM, going back over and editing what I wrote, my backpack still slumped and unopened by the dining room table.

So instead of being obsessed with computer games, I’ve now picked up the habit of becoming temporarily obsessed with other stupid computer things. I guess it started with that survey thingie that Ashley sent to everybody, which I in turn sent to everybody else, only to discover that nobody quite felt the enthusiasm for it that I did. Next was the FriendTest idea that I got from Forrest, which was a small success. I got a fair number of people to take my test, though most of them took it under an alias, a fact that I slyly deduced via my profound logical reasoning skills and the keen observations that A) few parents would name their child “ “ or “?”, and B) I don’t know anybody named “Penelope.” So, to make a long story short, I failed in my objective, which was to see if people really knew me, and I recently got an email that informed me of the deletion of this test.

The next thing was this blog, which is good, because it gives me a chance to sharpen my writing skills, though very few people, as far as I can tell, actually read it. I could write that I keep a male goat in a secret chamber of my basement for the purpose of having wild sex with it every night, and nobody would probably ever mention a damned thing about it. Except for Ashley, who would block me from her buddy list and then tell everybody that the kid she met on the cruise turned out to be a freak. Because I know Ashley reads this! I hope. Right, Ashley? Ashley…?

Okay, so here we finally get to the point of my blog, which is: my newest obsession. And that is…*drumroll*…*drumroll*…*the drumroll should have ended by now because I’m ready to say what the thing is, but it hasn’t, because the drummer doing the drumroll happens to be one of the drummers in our band, and of course all the drummers in our band are only about half as good as poorly trained monkeys, which keep playing after the song has ended because they don’t look at their music OR at the conductor and thus don’t know when to start OR stop, choosing instead to focus intently on their sticks, which they bang against their drums as hard as humanly possible without having any sort of regard for the proper rhythms or dynamics of the piece, thereby screwing everything all to hell by setting the incorrect tempo and drowning everybody out in the process, and who hinder the band’s progress during class by constantly chatting and thwocking their drums while Mr. Schneider is trying to explain stuff, forcing him to stop and yell at them, and who make us take two or three tries to start every damn song because they need Mr. Schneider to sing out the rhythm for them AGAIN and clap out the right tempo for them AGAIN, which is ultimately a futile effort because about two seconds into the piece they will invariably begin to drag or rush, depending on what song it is, and there’s nothing that the low brass can do about it because we’re being hopelessly drowned out by the stupid drums, like today, when we were playing “Rock and Roll All Night” SO FREAKING SLOWLY that it was the closest thing to medieval torture that I have ever experienced in my entire life, and yes, I know that it’s called “percussion,” not “drums,” but you know what? They don’t DESERVE to be called percussion! They are DRUMS! That’s D-R-U-M! Demented Rejects Undeserving of Music! Especially that freshman midget cymbal player, Logan Burley, a complete asshole who thinks he’s cool just because he can twirl the cymbals around his hands after smashing them, usually at the wrong time*…Tom Swifties! Well, of course that makes no sense now, because the stupid drumroll was so damn long that you forgot what it was for! Arg, I’ll start over.

My newest obsession is: Tom Swifties. You probably don’t know what they are (unless you’re Andy, Mandy, or just someone who was foolish enough to follow the link in my AIM profile). I stumbled across this brilliant invention while leafing through Andy’s Mensa calendar. Basically, it’s a written pun that hinges on the adverb. Yes, I know that made no sense, so here’s an example: “I know who turned out the lights,” Tom hinted darkly. Get it? Lights are gone? Tom hinted *darkly*? Hee hee. Ain’t it great? Well, there’s a website devoted to these things, the link to which is in my profile, but there are one HECK of a lot of Tom Swifties on there, and a lot of them are lame. Thus, I went through and picked out the best ones for your reading pleasure!

No, I didn’t. That list is really WAY too freaking long for me to slog through all of it just for the purposes of making a blog. If you don’t believe me, go to http://pages.city2000.net/~mking/tom.htm and see for yourself. But I WILL put some of my favorites in here, including some that I made up myself!

"I'm wearing my wedding ring," said Tom with abandon.
"I've got another @#$%*! insect in my pants," said Tom adamantly.
"How on Earth did I get lost in here," Tom said in amazement. (I really like that one!)
"We had trouble with the propulsion systems for those moon flights," said the NASA engineer apologetically.
"That city will NEVER be rebuilt," the prophets babble on.
"Well, I got here with five minutes to spare," said Tom bitterly.
"I need a pencil sharpener," said Tom bluntly.
"My ancestor was a famous Confederate general who had an army fort named after him," Tom bragged. (gotta know some US history for this one…)
"Use your own hair brush," Tom bristled.
"The number after nine must be knighted," said Tom certainly.
"I admit to being amused by your long joke with the stupid punchline," said Tom, chagrined. (this one isn’t the least bit funny, but it reminded me of Andy)
"I've run out of laundry detergent," said Tom cheerlessly.
"That gives me a birdie for this hole," Tom chipped in.
"Have another soft drink," Tom coaxed.
"I have writer's block," said Tom contritely.
"That's the last time I go to a whorehouse," said Tom crabbily.
"I dropped the toothpaste," said Tom, crestfallen.
"I'm dying," Tom croaked.
"I wonder why uranium is fluorescent," said Mary curiously.
“Yeah, I really love having a broken arm,” said Tom sarcastically.
"This is all from memory," Tom wrote.
“That stupid idiot pushed me down the stairs and broke my back!” Tom snapped.
"Yes, I'm THAT strongly built," said Tom soberly.

And many more! Check out the link and pick your own favorites, or make some up yourself! If you do, please share them with me.

And if you think that this blog entry was quite possibly one of the saddest things you’ve ever read, I understand.

By the way, I was just kidding about the goat.

It’s actually a donkey.

.: posted by Boris 10:19 PM

Tuesday, September 17, 2002

A Dead Squirrel

My parents give me a ride to school in the morning, and then I walk home from school in the afternoon. If I walk home on Cassingham, I have to take a left on Main and head east for quite a stretch before I get to Remington and then to the alley that leads to my house. (If you’re not from Bexley, don’t try to imagine this in your head; just keep on reading and bear with me.) This is how I used to walk home until I discovered a shortcut—before hitting Main, I can take a left off of Cassingham onto Fair (which is almost right outside the school) to get to Remington, so that when I get to Main I can just cross it without having to walk down it at all. But then, even later, I discovered another shortcut—why not avoid Cassingham altogether? Remington is so close to the school that it’s silly to walk down Cassingham only to backtrack to Remington later. So instead of leaving school out the front entrance, I began leaving out the back and almost directly onto Remington. These two shortcuts cut my walking time home from about 15 minutes to just a hair over 10. Very handy.

But today, as it sometimes happens, the thoughtful daze I was in at the end of the day made me forget to take the back way out and I was practically on Cassingham before I realized what was happening and by then it wouldn’t have saved me any time to go back to the back of the school. I had missed the first shortcut, but it was no big deal because I could still get the second one. Now, at Fair, Cassingham sort of “breaks” (I don’t know what it’s called when a street does that) and you actually have to go right for a little bit before you can resume taking Cassingham south. Thus, when you’re walking on Cassingham from the school, you actually hit a “T” at which you have to take a left to get to Remington. I was about to turn left at the “T” to keep going to Remington when I saw—you guessed it!—Benjy. He was waiting to see if his mom would be there to give him a ride, but she wasn’t, so he began to walk home. For him, taking Cassingham home is by far the fastest route, which is, as I’ve already explained, not the fastest route for me. But he’s a good buddy of mine and the conversation with him is worth more to me than…hold on, this paragraph is going to be obscenely long if I don’t do something about it soon. Here, let me break it.

Whew! There we go. Much better. So as I was saying, Benjy’s conversation is worth a lot more to me than the five minutes I would save by walking down Remington instead of Cassingham, so I walked down Cassingham with him. At Main, now, it would have been REALLY out of my way to turn right and keep going with him, so we paused at the “T” there to finish up the last bits of our conversation before heading our separate ways, him going right and me going left. There’s a street between Cassingham and Remington—Montrose—that I would normally pass after taking Main off of Cassingham, but no sooner had I walked a few feet after parting with Benjy than—you guessed it!—okay, no, you probably didn’t, but whatever—Ben Hopkins crossed Main and caught up with me. He lives on Montrose (which, by the way, means, in French, as you could probably guess without even reading what I’m about to tell you, “dead squirrel”). So, I turned onto it with him to chat with him until he got to his house. Well, he walked into his house and I was left all alone to resume the walk to my house, but no sooner had I gone a few feet than I saw—you guessed it!—I hope you really did guess it this time—a dead squirrel.

This is really interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, we were talking about dead squirrels in biology class today. Actually, we weren’t talking about dead squirrels at all. We weren’t even talking about live ones. We weren’t even talking. We were just listening to Mr. Logsdon talk about populations and stuff, and a passing side comment that he made while explaining one of his transparencies was that the life span of a squirrel is about a year. This was a completely irrelevant fact, but it’s one that I will nonetheless remember forever because, you know, nobody ever thinks about dead squirrels. I mean, we see live squirrels all the time. Usually we see them running away to hide, which also leads to the logical conclusion that there are many unseen hiding squirrels everywhere. And no matter how much it breaks your heart to realize this, every single last one of those cute, fuzzy, little critters will someday DIE and become a PUTRID, ROTTING CARCASS. Unless they get eaten by another animal, in which case they will end up as an unrecognizable blob of poop somewhere deep in the middle of a random forest. Or maybe the street. But in any case, if there are squirrels everywhere, then even if many of them get eaten by natural predators, we should still see a dead one every now and then. But before today, I had never seen a dead squirrel before! Maybe you have; apparently, they sometimes get run over by cars, which leaves them dead (the squirrels, not the cars) and therefore unable to remove themselves from the hot road on which they are left to melt and rot simultaneously while all the passerby gawk at them, the stupid among them making speculations about whether or not the somewhat flat squirrel with tire marks on its back and flies all over its body is still alive. I say “apparently” because I’ve never actually seen a squirrel in such a condition, though I do remember a couple of instances wherein my mom, while driving, would gasp in shock as though she had just discovered that her left arm was missing and exclaim, “Oh my god! How awful! There’s a dead squirrel in the road!!” and then I’d scream in excitement, “WHERE? WHERE?!?!” to which I’d get the ever-helpful, “Oh, it was back there somewhere,” and then I’d whirl around in panic, trying to catch a glimpse of the mystical roadkill, but of course I never saw anything, and for all I know my mom was just experiencing one of the early symptoms of a serious mental disease.

So not only were dead squirrels mentioned in biology class earlier today, but I also wouldn’t have ever seen the dead squirrel on Montrose unless a number of unlikely events had all transpired. I would never have turned onto Montrose if I hadn’t started walking with Ben, and I would never have started walking with Ben if I hadn’t met Benjy at the “T” on Cassingham and Fair, and I would never have met Benjy there if I hadn’t forgotten to leave school out the back way. That’s three variables—forgetfulness, Benjy, and Ben—such that if any one had been missing, I would never have seen the dead squirrel. I don’t at all believe in fate, but today…oh man. What a coincidence! I can still see it there, lying sideways on the sidewalk, its mouth half-open, the life completely gone from its black, beady eyes, the body aswarm with flies (here Microsoft is telling me via its damn annoying squiggly red line that “aswarm” is not a word, but I like it and I’m leaving it anyway). I almost stepped on the stupid thing. Luckily, I saw it just in time and proceeded to cross to the other side of the street.

To conclude, squirrels are such pretty little things that it seems like they just live forever. But they don’t. In fact, their life span is only one year or so, and even that is often cut short by one of their many predators. Let today be a painful reminder of that. The next time you see a squirrel, think about the fact that in a year, while you’re in high school, or college, or passed out in an alley, or dead, or whatever, that squirrel will be DEAD.

.: posted by Boris 10:02 PM

Thursday, September 12, 2002

Eating Sucks!

Everybody seems to think that eating is just peachy. I, however, am a firm believer that, as you can tell by the title of this blog entry, which is here only because Ashley explained to me how to do titles (thanks again, Ashley!), eating sucks. Here’s why I think the world would be a much better place if we didn’t have to eat:

First of all, every time you eat something, you risk choking on it. Have you ever choked on something? You probably have. Not too fun, is it? Second of all, you can get poisoned by what you eat. That’s bad, too. What I have said so far is illustrated in the following example:

Here lies the body of Andy Nicol.
He choked to death on a poisoned pickle.

Remember when we did those, way back in fifth grade? Funny epitaphs? Ahhh, those were good times. Andy’s my friend. The one he wrote about me was, I believe,

Here lies the body of Boris.
He died when he kissed his aunt Doris.

I HATED that one, primarily because I don’t have any aunts named Doris. In fact, I don’t know ANYONE named Doris. Then again, Andy doesn’t like pickles, either, so it’s unlikely that he’d ever eat one and choke on it. But my point is, food is dangerous. If you refer back to the poem about Andy’s unfortunate demise, you’ll see that he choked AND was poisoned.

Another thing about eating that you may not have thought about is this: if we didn’t have to eat, we wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom, either. Now, as nice as going to the bathroom can sometimes be, I think we can all agree that life would be much nicer if we didn’t ever have to do it. I mean, just look at it from the environmental point of view—275 million Americans each flushing the toilet on an average of about 4 times a day at about 2 gallons a flush makes over 1.1 billion flushed gallons of water A DAY (yes, I actually got a calculator out and did the math for that one, it’s sad, I know). And it’s even more than that when you consider the fact that most of us (well, I damn sure HOPE it’s most of us) wash our hands after doing the thing that requires us to flush the toilet in the first place. Also, don’t forget all the poor little fishies and moo-moos we kill in order to feed ourselves. How’d you like it if YOU were a cow, just standing there, munching on grass, when all of a sudden, WHACK, your head’s gone. Or however it is they kill cows. And we’ve all taken science class; we all know about the bad stuff we do to the environment that will result in, if you believe the environmentalists, complete global annihilation by the year 2003. So if we didn’t have to eat, less animals would die because we wouldn’t be clearing the rainforests to make room for farmland, and then perhaps those damn annoying environmentalists would finally SHUT THE HELL UP and quit making our science teachers blab about the same crap year after year after year. I mean, seriously, we watch these depressing videos about how greedy, corporate bastards are killing the Earth, but what do they want us to do? Fly down to the Costa Rican rainforest and throw ourselves in front of the bulldozers?

Okay. It seems I lost my train of thought for a second there. Hmmm. Okay. So yeah, there are the environmental concerns with animals dying and the Earth being destroyed and all that, which would all go away if we didn’t have to eat. Even aside from that, though, sometimes going to the bathroom just plain sucks. Like when you do it in your bed. I can’t remember the last time THAT happened to me (thank god), but I’m sure we all have those not-so-fond memories of getting up really early and making the bed before our parents got up in what was ultimately a futile attempt to hide our little accident of the night before. Plus, the NEED to go to the bathroom can turn an ordinary day into pure, living hell. Like that time when I was at Camp Hoover many, many years ago and the buses were really late, and there weren’t bathrooms anywhere near where we were waiting for them, and I couldn’t go to the bathrooms far away because I feared that the buses would come and leave without me, so while everybody played four-square (that was a great game, wasn’t it? I wonder why nobody plays it anymore) and had a grand old time, I just sat there, miserable, waiting for the goddamned buses to finally arrive. Well, they arrived, all right, but not before I realized, while sitting in the grass, that my time had come, and that the waters of life needed to be set free. I don’t know if anybody noticed that the lonely, desolate kid sitting in the grass was peeing himself, but, looking back, I have a nagging suspicion that even if they didn’t see it, they sure as hell SMELLED it when I got on the bus.

Another thing about eating is that it requires food, which costs money. If we didn’t have to eat, we’d all save THOUSANDS of dollars. I mean, if you think about it, it sucks that we have to spend so much money on something as stupid as eating. Wouldn’t it be better to spend the money on other things, like CD’s and video games? Those things have a lasting value, but food just goes into your stomach and ultimately winds up contributing to the rotten sewage smells we sometimes get around here. In other words, once you eat it, it’s gone. See this Milky Way bar that I just ate? Well, you can’t! Because I already ate it! So there.

Eating also takes time. For example, if we didn’t have to eat, then there would no longer be a need for lunch hour at school. This extra hour could be used for one of many things: starting school late so that everybody would get more sleep; ending school early so that everybody would have more time for homework and other activities; or just making classes longer so that kids could learn more and perhaps have to go to school for only 11 years instead of 12. Any one of these three alternatives would be better than what we have now, which is basically an hour-long break during which I have to either A) eat disgusting food and get ripped off in the process of buying it, or B) starve. Look at this year, for instance. Because of construction, for the time being our school can’t make hot food. So for the past week we’ve gotten…subs! But they’re only CALLED subs, of course, in the same way you could call a dog turd a candy bar—each “sub” is a 4 inch-long soggy bun stuffed with a blob of really bad meat and layered at the bottom with a thin slice of the high-quality processed cheese that only Americans could have come up with. The ham yesterday was bearable, and by “bearable,” I mean “theoretically possible to consume in entirety without becoming overcome by an irrepressible urge to shove a long object down one’s throat with the intention of triggering the vomit reflex.” But I only managed to eat half of last week’s “turkey” “sub” before throwing it away, and for the next few days after that I had Peanut M&M’s from the vending machines for lunch in order to avoid eating the “subs”. What’s the logic behind this, you ask? Okay, you know how really stupid stuff sometimes becomes permanently ingrained in your head for no apparent reason? Well, one time I was watching a documentary or something about early 20th century immigrants and this one old lady said that her dad ate peanuts all the time because he said that they were cheap, nutritious, and very filling, and I have never forgotten this fact since. So I figured that if I ate a bag of Peanut M&M’s, the peanuts in them would be enough to last me until dinner. I figured wrong. This explains why I eventually resorted back to subs, for which the school cafeteria charges me $1.55. A buck fifty-five for that short piece of (pardon the profane word that is coming up right here) disgusting shit! I’d rather not eat. I mean, I’d rather not HAVE to eat…as it is, if I don’t eat, I die, which is bad, so I eat and pay $1.55 for the privilege of doing so. But that sucks!

Finally, don’t you hate it when you’re doing something, like chatting online, and your parents call you to dinner, so you tell them that you’re coming, but you don’t come, and a little while later your parents call you again, and you say that you’re coming again, but you keep doing what you’re doing and completely lose track of all time until your parents begin yelling that EVERYBODY IS HERE AND READY TO EAT AND THE FOOD’S GETTING COLD AND WE’RE ALL WAITING FOR YOU LIKE A BUNCH OF IDIOTS SO GET THE HELL DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW!!! (Yes, I know, that sentence should end in a question mark, but I figure that it’s so long and confusing that by the time people get around to the end of it they’ll forget that it’s a question and accept that it ends with three exclamation marks instead of a question mark, you grammar nazi) And when you finally get down there, your parents are really mad at you and give you this big long “respect” speech and then throw in a “I’m gonna yell at you for spending too much time at the computer because I know that although yelling at you about it for the 1,875th time accomplishes absolutely nothing, it gives me a chance to vent my bad mood today” speech just for the hell of it. There. A fine day completely ruined and shot all to hell, just because of food. Add to this the fact that I really don’t like going to my dad’s parents’ house, and that the primary reason we ever go there is to eat dinner, and if we didn’t have to eat, we would probably go there significantly less often, and you’ll see why I hate eating.

To summarize:

--eating is dangerous because you can choke on or get poisoned by what you eat.
--eating is annoying because it makes you have to go to the bathroom
--eating kills many animals
--eating makes us destroy the environment to make room for farmland
--eating wastes money
--eating wastes time
--eating can ruin your day
--eating makes me have to go to my grandparents’ house a lot more frequently than I would like

So that’s why I think that eating sucks.

.: posted by Boris 6:46 PM

Sunday, September 08, 2002

AIM Addendum

If you read my blog about the extraordinarily high crap factor of AIM, you’ll know that one of my gripes with it is that you have no idea when the other person is typing something. Well, it has been brought to my attention by Ashley that a new version of AIM—which has been out for over a month now—DOES let you see when the other person is typing, provided, of course, that both of you have it.

Now, Ashley claims that the existence of the new version was common knowledge, citing as evidence the fact that everybody she knows in Texas knew about it. However, I talked to many people in my buddy list and none of them had the new version, which leads me to conclude that AIM does a piss-poor job of telling you when an update is available. That said, the new version is pretty cool (even though I haven’t checked yet to see if it’ll work when I talk to people on AOL). So now my “you can’t see when the other person is typing” complaint has been replaced with the “AIM doesn’t tell you when a new version is available, whereas MSN does” complaint. Just thought you’d like to know.

.: posted by Boris 1:15 PM

Saturday, September 07, 2002

I finally figured out how to do titles! Thanks, Ashley! You're the best.

Does this ever happen to you?

You wake up in the morning. Except you don’t; you’re still half asleep. But you’re definitely not completely asleep—you can think conscious thoughts and you can feel yourself lying on the bed. But…YOU CAN’T MOVE. You try to move your arms, your legs, your head—nothing. If you try REALLY hard, you can move your hand or your foot a little, but not enough to snap out of the paralysis. Finally, after much effort, BAM, you can move again.

I ask because this happens to me fairly often. In fact, it happened this morning. Many times. It was really annoying, too—I woke up, it happened. I fell back asleep, it happened. It kept on HAPPENING and every time I was scared that it would last forever, that my parents would come in eventually and find me lying there, unable to move or speak. Paralyzed for life!

Any doctors out there who know A) what’s causing this, and/or B) how to stop it? Cuz it’s really, really spooky.

.: posted by Boris 6:25 PM

Friday, September 06, 2002

As many of you know, I love to complain about stuff. Especially random, trivial, unimportant stuff. Sadly, I can't complain about these things to my friends because nobody likes a complainer. Well, actually, I have complained and argued about stupid crap many times before, which is how I found out that nobody likes a complainer. So perhaps if I do my complaining here, I'll be less tempted to do it in real life. So here's my little tirade about why MSN is better than AIM.

First of all, it shouldn't be possible to talk to yourself. If your goal is to talk to yourself, then AIM seems to me like the absolute hardest way of achieving it. Just think the words in your head, you fool! Now, I can understand putting yourself in your buddy list. It's a handy way to check on your away message and profile all at once, and it's the only way to check your warning level without asking somebody else what it is. That said, it's just stupid that you can send IM's to yourself. On this issue, MSN is, I admit, almost as dumb as AIM. When you add somebody to your buddy list on MSN, you get a message saying that the addition was successful; if somebody adds YOU, you get a notice that it happened (which, by the way, is something AIM lacks) and the option to either add the person to your own list or block them. So when I added "chessman15" to my buddy list, I got a message saying that I was successful in adding myself to my buddy list; a few seconds later, a window popped up saying that I had just added myself to my buddy list, and I was given the option to either add myself to my own buddy list in return or block myself in order to stop me from talking to me. Then I heard the familiar "BWUH!" and was told that Boris had just signed in. For a brief moment, I lost all faith in MSN. But then, just as I was about to lay the killing blow by messaging myself, I got the most beautiful "you just did something terribly and horribly wrong, you computer-inept retard" message I've ever gotten in my life: "You cannot send an instant message to myself." My faith was restored.

My second gripe with AIM is the ability to warn yourself. That's right--if you send an IM to yourself, you can warn yourself, and if you keep IM-ing yourself, you can warn yourself repeatedly. This is really dangerous--once you say something to yourself, there's nothing you can do to save yourself from your own wrath. And, as some of you know, you can even warn yourself anonymously and you'll never know you were the one that did it.

This leads me to my next gripe, which is the anonymous warning. Right--like you reeeeally won't know who did it.

Next up is the infamous character limit on the profile. 1024 characters (yes, I AM aware of the grammar rule that states that you can't begin a sentence with a number, but I happen to hate that rule very much) are simply not enough! I mean, a SPACE is considered a freaking character. I can't remember the last time I wrote a profile without first seeing that infuriating "you've exceeded the character limit, you pathetic, pea-brained excuse for a donkey" message and then being forced to edit. Also, colors and stuff are counted as characters, as is anything pasted (even ordinary text). I'm not a computer expert, but I somehow doubt that extending it to 5000 characters would cripple the AIM servers and send the whole system crashing to its knees.

MSN, of course, doesn't have any of these problems--it doesn't let you write profiles and it lacks the stupid and completely pointless warning system. My major issue with MSN is that you can't customize your away messages and that the ones it gives you are pretty drab. But even this has its ups. First of all, MSN doesn't have away messages, per sé. Instead, you change your status, which appears in your friends' buddy lists. So if you change your status to "be right back," you'll show up in your buddies' lists as online, but also "be right back." You also have a nifty "appear offline" feature, which is a lot like signing off except you don't sign off. And changing your status to "away" doesn't open up a window that your silly parents will close when they use the computer, leaving you with 50 IM windows from people who wondered why you ignored them. The buddy list on MSN is cooler, too. Let's say that Dan, Kenny, and Min are online. My AIM buddy list would show "DanTheMan2020202," "thatoneguy2287," (I guess picking really bad screen names is something that runs in that family) and "NeoSandmaker," whereas MSN would simply show Dan, Ken, and (&)Chendog (the (&) in front of Chendog makes a little doggy appear in his name when he talks to you. Yeah, Min's weird). Isn't that so much nicer? And if you want to talk to multiple people, you just start talking to one, click "invite" and then pick another one, and BOOM, you're set. On AIM, however, you have to invite everybody to a chat room. Chat rooms suck. I can't turn off all the annoying AIM sounds and everybody's names are all in funny colors. Why can't you just invite people into a conversation?

My final gripe with AIM is the incompatibility between AOL users and AIM users. On MSN, everybody's an equal. On AIM, however, there are two different groups--the people who downloaded AIM and the people who are logged onto the internet through AOL. The two groups can't read each other's profiles or directly connect and AOL people can't see the smileys. This is extremely sad because most of the AIM smileys are better than their MSN counterparts, and because directly connecting gives AIM MSN's biggest advantage--the ability to see when the other person is typing. MSN does this automatically; you don't have to "directly connect" or anything to see when the person you're talking to is typing stuff. It's extremely handy because when you talk to people who write long things instead of typing stuff out in bursts; you never seem to know if they're typing something or just sitting there, picking their nose and waiting for YOU to say something.

Right now I'd really like to write a concluding paragraph that summarizes all of my points, but I don't feel like going back through what I said to find out what they are. In fact, many things I could've said better, but I think that writing the stuff out did what it was meant to do, which is: make me want to stop bitching about how bad AIM is. After all, who cares?

.: posted by Boris 5:21 PM

Wednesday, September 04, 2002

Okay, it's time to give Boris some advice on his AIM contest. Not that anyone's close to winning it or anything. I just want to get some of the prize details squared away so that I'm prepared for when (if?) somebody actually wins.

Right now I have it so that the first winner gets a jazz mix. The problem here is that this mix has some odd songs in it that people may not like, not to mention that some people may not like jazz to begin with. So it would really suck if you managed to leave your computer on for a week straight only to get...a crappy CD. Now, the prize for all of the later winners is the ability to write MY profile. That's right--YOU write MY profile and it'll stay up for a week. The nice thing about this prize is that it lets you take out the garbage that you're too ashamed to put in your profile and stick it in mine, where it'll look like I wrote it and everybody will laugh at me. So it seems to me like this is a cool prize. Is it really all that cool or am I just a logheaded moron? Your opinion counts! And, yes, you can say that it's cool AND that I'm a logheaded moron. Whatever.

So I was thinking to play switcheroo and make the "write Boris's profile" prize the grand prize and give a CD to everybody else. But then the grand prize would last for only a week whereas the CD, however crappy, would stay with you forever as a reminder of your special friend, Boris. That and the fact that the profile thingie might not be so cool to begin with. Unless I made it so you can control my profile FOREVER? Now that would be something! Or would it...? Anyway, I really have no idea what the grand prize should be. Talk to me when you see me in school or on AIM! Is a CD cool? Is it gay? Is the profile prize a really sweet deal or yet another one of my pitifully sad attempts to be funny? Lemme know!