It was a tough week.  I don’t function well on only a few hours of sleep.  If I continue to lose sleep exponentially over a couple days, it gets ugly. On Tuesday, I started talking to myself.  On Wednesday, I heard a Black Eyed Peas song and thought it sounded good.  Sometime around Thursday, I actually had to sit down and write a communication for my CEO.  I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the executive-level output that was requested, but rather the lyrics to the old Banana Splits Adventure Hour.

You know you’re in a bad place when all there is for breakfast is pastries and doughnuts and bagels.  Whose idea was it to only have that crap in a hotel?  And why call it a “continental” breakfast?  A continent is a large, substantial thing.  There’s nothing substantial about a bunch of pastries.  They should call it “Island in the South Pacific that Got Firebombed During WWII” breakfast.  I remember a hotel in Austria once that had grain cereal, cheese, and meat.  Now that’s a breakfast.  I might move to that country if I didn’t live in fear of running into one of the Von Trapps.

One thing that struck me was that on each plane flight, you could walk down the aisle and see scattered green blocks everywhere as literally 30% of the passengers had their nose buried in the new Harry Potter book.  I have to say, I found the whole thing appalling--and at the same time, I was unable to suppress a feeling of smug superiority.  I mean, think of all those people, like a bunch of moronic zombies, reading the new Harry Potter book--two weeks after the official release date.  I had that book wrapped up in the first weekend.  I felt like shouting “THE SECRET IDENTITY OF THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE IS ANTONIN SCALIA.” It would serve them right.  Pack of lazy ‘tards.

On a less grumpy note, I saw one of those super-tight T-shirts worn by young teenage girls who are trying to look mature and sexy.  But this one was really good. It read: “I MAKE MY OWN MONEY.”

I’m learning a lot at my conference.  I’ve especially learned a lot about maximizing time and resources.

For example, it turns out that if I’ve had very little sleep, a martini has triple the impact on me.

So I’ve realized that I can save on drinking by simply staying up later at night so I’m exhausted by the time I partake of a beverage.  This is also advantageous because it gives me more hours in the day for high-level objectives--such as drinking martinis.

Conferences are very educational.

I’m not sure when the next update will be.  I’m spending the week in Tahoe at a conference.  I asked the coordinator if the hotel rooms had Internet:

- Do the hotel rooms have Internet?

- I don’t know.

- Well, do they have an ethernet connection?

- I don’t know.

- Well, do they have wireless?

- (Brightening) Oh wait!  I do remember them telling me about that.  There’s no wireless.

So now that we’ve narrowed that down, I’m off to catch a plane.

Ever notice how when you first invite someone over, you clean your place from top to bottom until the space shuttle can see your things gleam from way up in the atmosphere, and the next time the person comes over you clean everything yet again, but gradually you become more comfortable with the person and you think “Well, maybe I’ll just scrub the bathroom a little,” and the next time you just throw your dirty socks into a pile in the corner, and eventually the person comes over and says “Whoa. There’s a rotting cow corpse in the middle of your living room” and you say “Yeah, weird huh?  It just wandered in off the street and died right there on the carpet. I’ve been meaning to get rid of it but man, it’s been a busy month.  So, hey, you want a beer?”

For the most part, my parents have given up on hounding me to get married.  I suspect that the arrival of my niece is largely responsible for this. Sometimes I think they’re about to make some remark about the issue, and then they catch sight of my niece and quickly lose interest.  Why bang their heads against the wall when they can go marvel at the reality of actual, reproduced genes, wobbling around their house in a cute little package?

It is, however, impossible to disrupt the karmic balance of the universe by avoiding the topic entirely.  Where the efforts of my flesh and blood have fallen off, my friend’s mother has stepped up to take their place.

As you may have noticed from the below post, some of my old college friends are asian.  I’ve known their parents for almost two decades.  In particular, I’ve known the mother of my Chinese friend. She and I have always liked each other, although we have rarely exchanged more than a few sentences; she doesn’t speak or understand English well, so it’s inconvenient to hold long conversations. 

If we spend any degree of time together, she grills me about my personal life.  And so it was when we came back from southern California and I ended up having dinner with my friend, his wife, and his mother.  We ate pizza and drank soda while the mother regarded me steadily.  I munched away placidly, knowing what was coming, and so it did--in a sudden, booming voice.  She talks loudly to ensure that her broken English is understood by all.

“YOU HAVE GIRLFRIEND YET?”

This is the first thing she had said to me other than “HELLO” an hour earlier. I looked up and said, “Nothing serious right now, Mrs. [NAME DELETED].”

“AH, YOU NEED TO GET GIRLFRIEND.”

“Sure,” I said.

“YOUR PROBLEM, TOO PICKY.”

“Hey,” I shrugged.  “They just need to breathe and shop and cook.  Is that so wrong?”

“TOO PICKY NOT GOOD.  YOU NEED TO GET GIRLFRIEND. BUT NOT ONE YOU HAD BEFORE.”

At this, everyone around the table stared at her.  I knew exactly who she was talking about: she had only met one of my girlfriends, and that was several years ago.

My friend said, “What is that supposed to mean?”

I told him, “Your mother met [NAME DELETED]. And she told you afterwards that she didn’t really like her. Don’t you remember?”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember that at all.”

“It was a long time ago. It’s amazing that this still nags at her.”

“YES, NOT ONE LIKE HER. SHE WAS NOT HIGH QUALITY.”

My friend’s wife laughed. He shook his head again.

I looked at the mother.  “Mrs. [NAME DELETED], wait a minute and think about what you’re saying.  First you said I’m too picky.  Then you said a girl I dated wasn’t of high quality.  Does that make sense?  Either I’m too picky or I’m not picky enough. Which is it?”

I think we both realized at the same moment that we had just exchanged more words--and with more substance--than we had in all the years we’d known each other. Still, I was excited.  How often do you get to catch people in such a rhetorical trap?  I couldn’t help grinning.

She looked back and smiled dazedly. She said, “HA HA HA.”

Then she kept on eating.  I couldn’t believe it. She had played the language card!  She had completely understood my meaning, but was backing out on the pretense of not understanding English.

My friend looked at me and rolled his eyes.

I said, “Hand me another slice of pizza.”

I glared at my napkin.  Substitute moms are a rotten deal.  At least the real ones can’t back out of a good argument on account of a sudden bout of English amnesia.

Some people think it’s strange that I continue to love Disneyland into my adulthood, and tend to make a return pilgrimage every four years or so.  That’s because they don’t realize that the park can have serious resonance for grown ups.

For example, take my absolute favorite ride: Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye.  It used to be that right before the riders plunged into a maelstrom of color and movement, they would see a demonic figure warning them not to proceed further.  As the photo below shows, the ride has been updated and now displays the floating head of Karl Rove, explaining his side of the story in the C.I.A. disclosure scandal:

The big deal this weekend, though, was the reopening of Space Mountain.  I was astounded to learn that the ride has been closed since 2003.  That’s two years worth of revamping and remodeling.  Radio stations were on hand to record the event, and even the Fast Pass lines were two hours long.  With all that, you can imagine the high expectations people had as they stood in line:

My review?  It’s pretty much the same old ride, but it has a few new flashing lights on it.  So basically, this ride was overbudget, past its deadline, and delivered far below expectations.  Frankly, that’s a bit too much like the real space program for my taste.  I prefer more of an escapist element in my roller coasters.

Speaking of which, who needs Autopia? 

You drive around on a track and get stuck behind slow traffic.  And if you bump other cars, people yell at you.  Again, far too much like real life. Except that out of all my friends, I’m the one who got a free prize--a tiny little Autopia car.  See what I mean?  Disneyland gives even when it takes away.

In conclusion, Disneyland isn’t old hat.  The end.

- Hey Greg, you lift, right?  You can bench your own body weight, right?

- Uh...huh?

- Yeah, if you lift regularly, you should be able to bench your own body weight.

- Oh, uh, sure.  I can totally do that.

- Good. Because--

- We’re talking about my body weight after three weeks of not eating or drinking, right?

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There’s only a few tickets left for the first woman blogger’s conference Blog Her.  The tickets are $100.  Do they come with a free lapdance from Dooce?

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- These drops will help us see if you have a condition known as “dry eyes.”

- Oh, I don’t have that.

- How do you know?

- I choked up at the end of Shawshank Redemption.

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I recently heard a creationist theory I’ve never heard before: baby dinosaurs were part of Noah’s ark.  At first, I thought that’s completely cool.  I love dinosaurs.  As a kid, the only chapter in the encyclopedia I would read was the chapter about dinosaurs.  I had dinosaur action figures.  If you’re going to believe in creationism, why not make allowance for dinosaurs?

But then I started thinking about it, and realized it simply would never work.  Let’s get past the point about having a brontosaurus on the upper deck and a stegosaurus in the cargo hold.  Capacity isn’t a valid objection. I think we can all pretty much acknowledge at this point that Noah had one honking large boat.

No, my issue is, how could we possibly have sheep in 2005?

If you’ve got a couple of baby raptors about, what are they going to do?  They’re going to go gnaw on some sheep.  They would eat all the sheep. By all rights, we should not have sheep in the modern day.

But then I thought: what if the dinosaurs were full because they already snacked on some big fluffy cute animal that no longer exists?  That would explain both how dinosaurs were able to be on the boat, and why we still have sheep.

Fluffywumpums, we hardly knew ye.

When I help put together brochures and web sites as part of my job, I try to go real easy on the generic clip art.  When pictures are used, they should be indispensable to the story you’re trying to tell.  If they’re just used to plug holes in the layout, they’re meaningless.

I’m not saying I always succeed. Sometimes time and resources are limited and you have to plug holes.  But if the final product has a bunch of dumb, smiling people then you’ve got a problem.

Somewhere, some marketing bonehead said that “People relate to pictures of people.” So now, everywhere you look, there’s dumb, smiling people.  If it’s a business-to-business thing, they wear suits.  If it’s a consumer thing, they’re a bunch of casually dressed families.  In either case, they often have nothing to do with the product or service.  They’re just there.

Take this guy:

He could be happy about semiconductors.  Or wave technology.  Or that his doctor said “Mylanta.” What does it matter?  He’s just a big grinning mook.  But I bet that off-the-shelf photo is used in hundreds of web sites.

As bad as these photos are, I think I’ve found the single worst offender of all: Yahoo! mail.

On the sign in page for Yahoo! mail, you’re greeted with this alarming visage:

I don’t have to obsess about most other images I see because I just cruise past them and go on about my business.  But as a user of Yahoo mail, I’m forced to see this woman several times a week.

After a while, it starts to get to you.  It nags at your thoughts.  During a meeting, you begin to wonder: Why does she need to keep in touch? Is she stranded on a rock in the Pacific?  Why doesn’t she wash her hair?  Is there enough collagen in the world to do what she did to her lips, or was it photoshopped?  Futhermore, is she clinically insane?  After all, it’s just dumb email.  Nothing on God’s green earth should have the power to make someone grin like a baboon 24 hours, 7 days a week.  And the most pressing question is, why doesn’t this stringy haired, big lipped freak not have a Gmail account like everyone else?

Speaking of which, Gmail does not have a ludicrous image on their sign in page, because those guys are smart enough to know how annoying a static picture can be to a returning visitor.  Which is why I’ll be using their service in the future.

And as for everyone else still using all those generic photos for their marketing projects, I must tell you that people do not necessarily respond to pictures of people.  For example, there’s a lot of people in the world that I like--friends and family.  There’s a lot of people whom I’m indifferent to, like strangers.  And there’s a lot of people I immediately dislike upon sight.  Who fits into that category?  Anyone in a picture who’s smiling/grinning/sitting around a conference table/shaking hands/jumping up and down/talking on a phone/pointing to a chart.

Well, except for the picture at the top of this page.  Anything with a cape is always an exception to the rule.

I always learn the most interesting things while perusing the Internets.  For example, I had no idea that I knew how to use Photoshop.

I’d like to say that Bryan Adams slept at my house and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

Except that he stayed in my spare room, so it’s nothing for his fiancee to get upset about.

And the T-shirt is awesome. It says “Nerd Pride” on the front, and the back shows an ape transforming into a nerd through evolution.  A pretty appropriate guest gift considering, well, we both write words on a web site for fun.

Oh, and as to why the picture is small?

It turns out a few beers will cause me to hit the “Movie” setting on my camera without realizing it.  So we’re both standing still and smiling while being recorded.  And all I have left to post is a screenshot.

Nerd pride indeed.

Maybe I should go on a diet.  I’m not overweight, but I’m no longer rail thin.  In high school, I made David Bowie look like a binge eater.

It’s just my stomach.  It’s bulgy.  It’s Staypuffy. I don’t need to lose a lot.  Just a few pounds.  Just to regain some tone. I don’t need six-pack abs.  I’ll settle for a three-pack and a few bottles.

How did this happen?  It must be my age.  I can feel my metabolism slowing down.  When I watch a Buffy rerun, it often takes me longer than ten seconds to name the season.

I exercise, and keep a healthy ratio of 50% actually going to the gym and 50% blowing it off.  Which isn’t bad, considering that I feel very guilty about the times I flake.  That kind of stress burns calories like paper in fire.

I think the main problem is that I cut corners in terms of healthy eating.  Of course, there was that time that I had a dinner of nothing but vegetables and tofu...back in 1994.  The effects have probably worn off by now.

There’s junk food to consider.  I eat a few frozen pizzas here and there, but so what?  They contain the four major food groups: pepperoni, sausage, cheese, and crust.

Then there’s the pastries and other snacks lying around the office. They’re everywhere.  For example, when I think about the times I absent-mindedly nibbled on something junky today, it was...let me think…

8:40 a.m.
11:14 a.m.
1:10 p.m.
3:35 p.m.
4:45 p.m.

Okay, so there could be some improvement there.

My niece doesn’t have to worry about her metabolism.  She’s a baby.  Over the July 4th weekend, she stuffed her face with voluminous portions of Cheerios, tomato, and oatmeal and she didn’t gain any weight.  Although she is developing her vocabulary nicely.  She can now say:
- “Mama”
- “Bye bye”
- “No no”
- “A moderate nominee for the Supreme Court would help prevent the resurgence of the filibuster issue.”

There is one other part of my diet that I should consider.  I should consider…

...oh my God, no…

.......beer?

I mean, how bad is beer, really?  Sometimes I go out to lunch with the other Greg and we polish off a couple of those Godzilla-sized Sapporo bottles.  But isn’t there a rule that says you’re okay as long as you drink slightly under your body weight?  I’m sure that’s a rule. Here, let me Google that.  I’ll use the strategic search words “body weight” and “beer”....

.......nothing.  Stupid Google.  It costs $500 a share but it doesn’t even tell me stuff I know is true.  I hope Looksmart kicks your ass.

Jesus, there’s just no escaping it.  If I do this thing, I’d have to cut out the beer.

Suddenly, I feel the need to rhapsodize.

Oh beer
You are fine when
Nestled in my stomach
If you were not nestled in my stomach
Would you be nestled in the stomach of someone that’s true to you?

I dislike it when people take prose sentences, insert random line breaks, and call it “poetry.” However, I feel as though my beer poem is a masterpiece. I should submit it to a literary journal.

Eh, you know what--screw it. If I’m trapped in a blizzard and need to survive without food until I’m rescued, I’ll desperately want the extra pounds.  Why would I put my life in jeopardy by trying to lose them?

Excellent point. I think I’ll go have a beer.