rew | ff

Vote John John 2004

Wednesday, July 7, 2004

Hey, John Edwards. Sweet. That seemed like a good idea way back when, and I still agree with it now. Especially since Edwards and Kerry are both Springsteen fans, and given that, they are both smart enough to know that "Born in the USA" is not an appropriate song to play at political rallies.

In a related story, I'm having my mom send down a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker for my car; not being able to find one in Phoenix isn't much of a suprise. I'll keep a daily tally of the vandalism to poor Tommy John. Who, by the way, I ran every conceivable test on at school last Friday and is actually in excellent health. He was rewarded with his first dose of synthetic oil (Mobil 15w-50... jealous?), and seems to be a very happy car ideed, especially considering the 50 miles per day in 100+ heat he's forced to deal with now as our only form of transportation.

In the "stuff I keep forgetting" department, I should mention that a friend of mine from my last job is going to be in Iraq soon (if he's not already; I'm ashamed to say I'm not sure). He's a reporter at the Oregonian, and is going to be embedded with a group of Oregon National Guard soldiers (I think this is accurate). Hopefully it'll all go as smoothly as possible. He'll be keeping a blog while he's over there; when I know the URL I'll post it here.

Also, last Friday, fucked up shit at work aside, it may be amusing to you to know that Sean, Dane and I went to a fancy wine bar after school and Sean and I unwittingly ordered $12 glasses of wine. It was good shit. It had legs, whatever that means. Next time, I'll look at the price.

Saturday we saw Spider-Man 2, which I can say with honest, film-student expertise, is AWESOME! I have modified my career plans. They still involve moving to New York, but now are more weighted towards radioactive spider bites and Kirsten Dunst. Luckily I have a very close friend who is also a scientist, and she's currently working on it. After the movie we went over to a bar at the super trendy mall in downtown Phoenix, where I immediately developed a crush on our bartender (who gave my broke ass some free Guinness, which must count for something), and Sean and I talked for several hours with a couple of drunk middle-aged guys who used to live in Portland, and were pretty cool.

Jumping forward to present time, we're halfway through this phase at school. Yippee. Wow, apparently "yippee" is an actual word; it's not setting off the spellchecker. Strangely enough, "blog" does.

Most definitely, a red state

Monday, July 5, 2004

In the spirit of the 4th of July, I will now relate a story that actually happened last friday, but I've been too lazy to write about it so far. That and I've been having terrible, unexplained back pain that's sapping my strength and energy to write.

On Friday I arrived at work and noticed a Jaguar in the lot. Any European car in our lot is a rare occurrence (for several very good reasons, not the least of which is the safety of the car). That's about all the thought I gave it, other than wondering if I might get to drive it at some point. As it turned out, the Jag had come in the night before after I was already at school with noises coming from the front end.

After I'd been at work for an hour or so, I overheard a conversation between Freakshow and one of the mechanics that revealed that we'd looked at the car and determined what was wrong with it, and the owner had decided he couldn't afford to have it fixed. Since it wasn't driveable and had been towed in, it would need to be either towed back to his apartment or to another shop that could do the work cheaper. So far, none of this involved me in any way.

A while later, I was in the back bay cleaning up and just doing the general stuff I always do when Freakshow came around the corner (always a spine-wrenching experience) and told me he needed a favor. This is never good news. This particular favor, however, was ridiculous even by Freakshow's absurd standards... he wanted me to drive to the Jag's owner's house and collect the money he owed us, because he wasn't going to have him coming down to the shop... because the guy is Iraqi.

I didn't want to do this for many reasons, but the three that immediately pop to mind are: 1) I'm not a debt collector, and don't wish to be put in that situation with anyone, regardless of their nationality, for among other reasons the fact that I identify more with the customer than with the shop I work for, 2) It goes against pretty much everything I believe, politically and ethically, to participate to the slightest degree in something like this, particularly given the situation in the world right now, and 3) I have enough of a guilt complex as it is, and don't need to add to it by demanding money from a broke, Jaguar-owning, Phoenix-living Iraqi.

However, as nice as it would have been to take a moral stand and just walk right out of the shop, I can't do shit like that for at least the next two months. So I went ahead and did it. The guys at the shop offered to give me a gun to take with me "in case there's any trouble." I declined, having never held, let alone fired, a handgun. The whole thing went off about as you can imagine, with a shitload of confusion, phone calls back and forth to the shop, me watching and listening as Freakshow bitched this guy out over the phone and threatened to impound his car. Basically just a ridiculous, repugnant situation. It's less than two months until I quit this job (they don't know this yet), and I'm counting the days.

I hate the goddamn Yankees

Thursday, July 1, 2004

It sounds like this was one hell of a baseball game. Which, of course, I missed. And which also, of course, the Sox lost. Fuck. Nomar will be traded by the time the weekend's over, if he hasn't been already. I miss last season.

Bill Gates, please buy me lunch

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

So Bill Gates is worth about 35 billion dollars. A generous estimate of my own personal worth is somewhere in the $10,000 range. Some quick math reveals that $1,000,000 is to Bill Gates as, this is true, $3.50 is to me. Three dollars and fifty cents! This means, as I exclaimed upon completing the math, that Bill Gates could drop 1 million dollars on lunch, and it would actually be a bargain. Bill Gates, if you're reading this, I normally won't let anyone buy me lunch, but for you, I'll make an exception. Just this once.

So far this has been sort of a down week. Sean and I both have awful teachers in our new classes. It sounds like Sean's is more of a dick, and mine is just plain stupid. It's not good when the teacher is clearly one of the least intelligent people in the class (especially when said class is at our school). Dane seems to have drawn the best of the lot so far, but he's not entirely thrilled either.

The latest development at my work is that all of the sudden I'm not working hard enough. I've been told several times over the last couple days that I'm either not working hard enough or am standing around too much. This is almost more weird than it is offensive. I almost never stop moving at my job. I'm thinking about quitting even earlier than I'd planned and just starting to double-phase now, but I don't want to jump the gun. We'll have to see. Either way I won't be there any longer than two more months, so I'm taking solace in the fact that I can see the light at the end of this particularly shitty tunnel. And as much as I don't like my job, I have to admit that I was lucky to find it, as it serves several different purposes and is definitely not the worst job I've ever had. I'd rank it below taxi driver and above software development bitch on my ever-expanding list of jobs, which is rivaled in number only by my list of cars.

I feel like I should mention something about the Red Sox / Yankees series that's going on right now, but since the Sox appear to be one step away from a very forgettable season, I'm just going to ignore it for now. So far, this team doesn't seem to have "it," whatever "it" is. They definitely had "it" last year.... where the fuck did "it" go?

My feet on the table, and a Cuban cigar.

Monday, June 28, 2004

Ten points if you know what the headline is from (sorry Vicky, you're not allowed to play, much the same as I am consistently excluded from Sean's Ted Williams trivia). What this ten points will be used for, I have no idea, but ten points is ten points.

So to catch up in our wildly exciting lives, as I haven't been too diligent about writing lately (read: I've been exhausted):

First of all, Sean and I both ended up doing really well in our class. We both had perfect scores in all the categories, and should end up sharing the goofy MVP-esque awards that are given out at the end of each phase. It really was a great class... whatever I have next is going to have a hard time measuring up.

I also found out that I'm pretty much locked into finishing up here, Oregon arrest warrants and all. Apparently after you've been through five phases, if you drop out you're still liable for the entirety of the tuition. So hey, more debt, guaranteed! May as well finish and take that super high paying job for BMW Manhattan, I guess. But that settles that. I can now focus my worrying on how to pay the Oregon government rather than whether or not it's smarter to jump ship now than stick it out. Closure is good, right?

After class on Friday we ended up at Hooters. If you needed any further proof that Phoenix is causing me to regress, here it is. Although ironically enough, my streak of forming crushes on waitresses was broken. And I actually thought those orange Hooters shorts they all had to wear weren't very attractive. More weird and tacky than anything. I think once was enough.

Saturday night we fell back on proven goods and went to the Four Peaks, where my waitress-crush streak was rekindled by Sarah from Chicago.

Finally, on Sunday we managed to see the new Michael Moore movie, which was actually sold out the first time we tried to see it. This was a surprise. I wasn't sure it'd even be showing in Phoenix, and in fact it is only on a couple of screens throughout the city, but apparently there are enough liberals here to sell out every show over the weekend. In my opinion, Michael Moore is basically a propagandist, but he's our propagandist. I thought it was one of his best movies so far, as it was a lot less smarmy and self-righteous than some of his previous efforts. Not that I didn't like his earlier films... I did. But this one is more powerful and less flawed. Pretty depressing to review the last 4 years in this country. Absolutely ridiculous.

Anyway, I'm going to try to get back to posting daily, but I can't promise anything. It's very hard to come up with anything worthwhile in the ultra limited time I have each night. I think back to just a couple months ago when we were playing basketball every night, and I have no idea how we did it. And that was before the George Foreman grill freed up 45 extra minutes. But I will try to be more consistent.

And hey, good luck to Iraq with the surprise early transfer of power. I have to admit, the date switcheroo was probably not a bad idea.

The blog lives

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Crap... I was going to write something tonight, but I'm running out of time. But I will say that so far this week has been a lot better than last week. I have renewed hope that this whole thing might work out. Who knows?

Today I realized that Diane Rehm's show on NPR uses a weird instrumental version of "Light My Fire" by the Doors as its bumper music. This seems almost as incongruous as last season when the Red Sox used a Kylie Minogue song as theirs. Weird. Also, I realized that nothing may be more polarized than white pants. They're fantastic on girls, and horrendous on guys. Weird, again.

We had a car come into the shop today with a John Kerry sticker on it. I fear for this car.

This phase is almost over, but I have to say that having class with Sean has absolutely kicked ass. And we, correspondingly, are kicking as in the class. Also, we've had an awesome teacher who is the rare combination of a really effective teacher and a hilarious, intelligent guy. I'll miss this class. But if I do figure out a way to stay here, Sean and I have worked it out so we'll have several more classes together. That would be totally sweet.

bleh

Sunday, June 20, 2004

I don't have much energy for the blog right now. Don't expect daily entries any more, I'm afraid. It's too hot and miserable down here for anything even mildly creative. That said, here's a rundown of recent events:

Sean likes his new job at Toyota. He got a 75 cents per hour raise, and he gets to work pretty much on his own, with his own bay in the shop. It sounds like his coworkers are cool, and while it's more work, it's better than parking cars all day.

Dane seems to be doing OK... his new computer is providing hours of entertainment.

As for me, I'm still struggling with deciding what to do, but it definitely seems like I'll be leaving Phoenix soon. I've been thinking a lot about just dropping out now and heading back to Portland until something opens up in New York, but that may be counterproductive. I'm hesitant to continue at school, because the likelihood of me finishing up here seems pretty slim, and the more classes I take the more money I waste. But the class we're in now is a lot of fun (you have no idea how cool the insides of an automatic transmission are), so for at least one more week I'm staying put.

All in all, my job, the new and much longer commute to work, the fact that we're down to one dubiously constructed car (Sean's is indeed all but dead after the trip to Vegas), the almost unbelievable heat, and the various creditors / government agencies that are breathing down my neck have left me in such a depressed, hopeless state that I really can't imagine that I'll last long enough to complete this program, move on to the BMW one, and finally get a job at a dealer that will make it all worthwhile. After 3 months of working in the shop I'm at now, I'm not even sure I want to do this anymore. Too little, too late.

As far as this weekend goes, we didn't do much. I fell asleep after getting home from work yesterday, intending to take a nap, but I woke up at 10am this morning. 16 hours of sleep was nice, but literally sleeping the weekend away was not. Tomorrow it's back to work. Phoenix sucks.

© Long Shot Films 2004