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Well then. I had no intention of making an entry today, but here I am. I was feeling swamped with homework and reading assignments from my classes, but I just got done looking through my handouts and syllabi, and it turns out I really don't have anything at all to do. The only assignment I have due this week is in Discrete Mathematics and it's just those two problems I was talking about earlier... and they sound like a couple of easy problems too. Anyway, I think I have some really good teachers this semester. All it takes to be a good teacher is to be knowledgeable and enthusiastic about what you teach; it keeps students from falling asleep. This is in stark contrast with my computer science teacher from last semester, who didn't seem to know a thing and spent every class reading about things he didn't understand off of powerpoint slides that were provided by the book publisher. Horrible. As weird and disturbing as my plum-popping Algorithms teacher tends to be at times, he seems like a decent teacher. He talks real slow and relatively clear (for having a thick German accent... only problem is when he starts talking I feel like listening to Das Ich and L'âme Immortelle). Of most importance, his name is Dr. Mario. How can learning not be fun with a name like that!
My Humanities and Economics teachers seem borderline maniacal, which is good. Although it's kind of disheartening to hear a man who looks like Fidel Castro (without the cool hat) ranting about the flaws of capitalism. Today in Humanities we spent the entire hour and a half trying to define what art is, and it was very interesting! I think I'm gonna love this class because the teacher promotes discussion and it seems like half of my class (about 40 people) are dying to slit each other's throats. While discussing how religion is tied to art, the teacher said something along the lines of "But who says there's a god?" and a girl said "I DO!" and the girl behind her said "... I DON'T!" and I could see the departed souls of soldiers lost in all major battles of the last three millennia being pulled back to Earth, into the hand of God-Girl here, to get a taste of the sweet defilement of the mightiest bitchslap to befall the people of Humanities 201X. It never happened, but it should have. I should have waited in the parking lot after class to see if there'd be any action. My Humanities class also has one of those funny fat guys that sits in the front row and makes a funny comment every three minutes. I love those guys; I think every class should have one. I'd even pay a subscription fee if I had to. And this funny fat guy defended violent video games when a witch near the back of the room started attacking them! Funny fat guy from Humanities class, you have just received the UltraMuffin stamp of excellence. We (I will continue to say "we" even though I'm a pussy who's afraid to make comments in front of a class) talked about lots of controversial and offensive art of the last century. There was an artist who wrote his name on a urinal and entered it into an art exhibit in like 1917, and it sounds like this started some sort of revolution. There is much crazier stuff going on these days that I had never even heard about. I really wish I could find a website that covers this kind of art, but I can't! Or at least a book! Here's some examples!
 A guy named Andres Serrano put a crucifix in a glass off pee, took a picture of it, and entered it into a gallery, naming it "Piss Christ". Awesome. This is the sorta thing that gets me so excited it makes me wanna go down to the local pawn shop and hump the shelf of NES games from fifteen years ago. And of course people objected to this, demanded it be removed from the gallery, vandalized it, and said it wasn't art. I love it when people go crazy like that. They get all bent out of shape and refuse to recognize it as art, but the fact that they get so pissed off is just proof that the piece is thought-provoking. Of course, I'm no expert on this sorta thing, so I probably sound like a dumbshit to anyone that's already known about Piss Christ for the past decade, but Andres Serrano, I salute you!
I think fairly recently, there was some guy that drew a pint of his blood like every couple weeks for a year and then took all that blood and froze it into a block to sculpt a statue of himself. Sweet Jesus, why can't I meet these kinds of people. I'd take them out to Panda Garden and buy Beef & Broccoli for them if it was before 3pm. I wish I could find a picture of this, but I've had no success so far. There is another guy who had a friend shoot him in the arm with a rifle just to take a picture of it, and it was titled "Shoot". Unfortunately, searching for a photograph named shoot turns up half the Earth and part of Neptune in a search engine, so I don't know if I'll ever get to see this. This same guy had himself crucified on the hood of a VW Beetle, with nails through his hands and all. I would have gone to my church's youth group meetings regularly if someone like this was the leader. There's got to be some website or book that covers this kind of art. It makes me feel like Leonardo Dicaprio or something.
I also had Library Skills today, for the first time since I only have it once a week. It doesn't seem too bad. Apparently there's going to be a lot of "group participation", words that strike fear into my antisocial heart, but we worked in groups today and it was actually pretty cool! Cool people! And there was a good lookin girl in my group too who was very nice! I will look forward to more group activities now, although I will remain just as nervous!
Oh, and on the non-school side of things, this morning I watched about half of the movie Fight Club with the audio commentary by Chuck Palahniuk (the author of the book) and some other dude (the author of the screenplay). This is very entertaining! I wonder what percentage of DVD consumers actually listen to these audio commentaries. I'm sure it's a very small number, which is a shame since it seems like plenty of work goes into them. I have only listened to one before this: The Matrix, and it was boring for the most part. I think Fight Club has four of these audio commentaries, and yes, at the moment I'm planning on listening to every last one of them. I will have plenty of time to put a dent in them after school today/tomorrow (Wednesday), I have over 25 hours between when my last class ends and when my first class starts the next day. I am the winner at life. I also gotta buy Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby now that it's available in paperback!
And I am so sore from air hockey yesterday that it's restricting my breathing a little bit. That's what I call giving 140% in air hockey.
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I felt like a gladiator today. The air hockey table that has been sitting in Wood Center (the student "hangout" sorta building) for a couple days was functional today. I was challenged by a friend and I had no choice but to unleash my fury. 7-0! But most importantly, I drew a crowd. People came far and wide to witness my speed and behold my power. On this day, I felt like a deity. It did not last long however, as with each progressive game my opponents drew closer and closer to my score until I was beaten by all. At least I still hold the record for most dramatic use of a paddle for my lizard-like reflexes and puppet-like swinging of my whole body back and forth to throw every last ounce of UltraMuffin + Caramello bars into my attack. I banged up my hand pretty good and my arm and leg (leg for fuck's sake!) are sore from these thirty minutes of pandemonium. The key to air hockey is defense. It's probably the only sport in which a good defense is a satisfactory offense as well. Just keep your paddle in front of your goal and wait for your partner to own himself (I was ready to say "or herself", but it has just occurred to me that I've never seen a girl play air hockey... that'd probably be hot!).
In my Data Structures and Algorithms class, the teacher passed around a paper to sign our name next to the topic we wanted to do our presentation on (we have a ten-minute presentation we need to do, it's a course requirement for some reason). I picked "Performance comparison of sort methods" or something like that. It sounded pretty easy and that particular topic is scheduled for presentation near the middle of the semester, which is good. You don't wanna go too early but at the same time it's just torture to put it off as long as possible. I think this assignment is gonna be one nervous, awkward speech after another from now until December. I took Communications (speech class basically) last semester and it wasn't all that bad, but having presentations out of an entire class of computer science majors is like having an entire classroom of quiet weirdos who sit in the back corner. It's gonna be a mess, I tell you. On the other hand, something deep inside me makes me proud to be a part of this inevitable catastrophe.
My mom bought me some socks and some toothbrushes. I'm going to go along with instinct on this one and assume that the plural of "toothbrush" is actually "toothbroosh". It rolls off my tongue anyway. All my socks were getting worn out, but I now have eighteen brand spankin new pairs. And these socks look pretty thick and high quality! Yesterday, I noticed my toothbrush was starting to wear out (the bristles were curving outwards and thus were not able to make sufficient contact to the parts of my teeth nearest the gums). I told my mom I could use a new toothbrush, and she came home with this eight pack of them. I use the number eight loosely in this case though, because after studying this toothbrush ammunition clip I noticed the eighth toothbrush is not a toothbrush at all. It's an instrument of pain from the middle-ages. There's these weird greenish plastic things poking out from where the outermost bristles ought to be. Are these things meant to be put into a mouth? This would be like brushing with a pool mat. Someone over there at Oral B isn't doing their job; this is not progress. These are probably the same people responsible for deodorant spray, just kinda making shit up as they go along.
Last night I finished the book I was reading, Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. Maybe this will end up being the first thing I will review in my Reviews section (or maybe not). I've been neglecting my other sections pretty well. I didn't realize how much effort it takes to keep a journal like this updated frequently (With gigantic entries! The kind I like!), I never have enough energy for anything else. I did post something in the Oddities section finally though. I can already tell, after starting school, that the updates on this site are gonna become spaced further and further apart! Sorry, but it's too much work! Anywho, Lord of Light is a great book. Moments after finishing it, I couldn't even remember half of what happened in the book. Someone on Amazon.com said it was like a series of books all crammed into one novel. It is! So now I can't decide what to read next, but I'm leaning towards The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, which I hear is an "alternate history" novel in which the Axis powers won World War II. But I also want to read God Emperor of Dune and this biography of John Wayne Gacy I have sitting in my stack, so I guess they'll come next!
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Okay, well yesterday (Friday) was what I would consider my first real day of school, since I had three classes that day, including my two hard ones: Discrete Mathematics, Data Structures and Algorithms. Well, first off I had my Economics class, which seems like it's gonna be a cakewalk. It's a 100 level class after all, I think 100 level classes require a certain degree of cake in their walkings. The teacher said he posts study guides on his website before quizzes (he calls them quizzes, they really just sound like frequent tests), and every question on the study guide is guaranteed to be on the quiz. So, assuming most of the questions on the quiz come from the study guide, this isn't going to take any effort at all. Next I had Discrete Mathematics, which sounds like no other math class I have ever taken. I have the same teacher for that class that I had for Calculus III, which is good. We have two problems due on Friday, but we have to "write them up" because apparently our homework isn't going to revolve around doing problems, but rather explaining how we reached our conclusion through written language. And since this is known as the hardest math class in the computer science curriculum, I'm already starting to feel the sting of those sideways pineapples. Two problems doesn't sound like much, but we probably have to prove string theory and hack the matrix for full credit.
Data Structures and Algorithms was my last class for the day, and man is it going to be an adventure. I know several people in this class and there's also quite a bit of familiar faces (it's really just the same group of students that have been in my last four computer science classes). We also have the infamous "What the hell?"-joke tag team in the class: the guy that we call Jesus for reasons of our own (Okay, we call him that because he wears a "Property of Jesus" hat. If the hat is Jesus' property, either this kid must be Jesus or he roughed up Jesus in the Denny's parking lot to jack his hat. This is why I'm confused as to whether he is a Christian or the Anti-Christ or a little bit of both. Very ambiguous, this one is.) and the guy formally known as Pony Tail, simply because he had a pony tail and made jokes on the same level as Jesus. Our teacher is this German guy that would probably fit the description of a gay man just fine, but really just seems like a 35 year old plump German schoolboy with a bit of male lust in his speech. Hard to describe really and equally as hard to listen to for an hour without bursting an artery trying to hold back your laughter. For the entire hour of this class, I was expecting him to say something to the effect of "Stick in your thumb und pull out a plum!" This is not the environment I envisioned myself learning computer science in. The class is like two pencil-strokes away from being in one of those really old, funky Bugs Bunny cartoons with perverted bald men contorting their faces into Steve Buscemi-esque departures from reality. I fear that Jesus and Pony Tail are going to fill in the gaps and send us all straight to Toon Town where we'll be stuck eating plums under the sodomy tree.
On the shuttle bus to class, the girl sitting behind me smelled like pina colada. Girls, follow her example. You can put on all the fancy, overpriced perfume you were able to afford by selling your kidney, but if you don't smell like fruit, you've taken a wrong turn. I remember a similar experience happening in high school one day. I walked past a girl that smelled like a mango. I'm not even sure who exactly the smell was coming from, but it was enough to make me change my route. Actually, I just did a 180 and backtracked to smell it again, and then turned around once again to smell the beauty of this thing on my way to class. I spent the entire class trying to re-create this smell in my mind. This is what fruit perfume does to a man (if something this fruity is even called perfume). There, trapped on this vessel of Hawaiian happiness, I carefully measured the pros and cons of asking this pineappl-- I mean girl behind me if she wanted to marry me. Jesus (and possibly Pony Tail) was/were with me on this day, however, as the bus stopped seconds before my proposal and I crawled out of the cabin of this machine of fruit and love out into the open air. If I had to inhale that colada-mist a second longer, I would have had a child that day. I would take a toilet to the movies if it smelled like fruit.
I was reading an FAQ on animal rights, and one of the questions was as follows: "Isn't it hypocritical to kill and eat plants?" The response to this question went on and on about how it would be hypocritical if the same characteristics that applied to animals also applied to plants. Most important of these, there is no proof that plants are conscious or aware of pain in any way... I would sure as fuck hope not. What kind of nonsense is this? Is this a key counter-argument for the meat industry? We eat cows because we don't want to make the trees scream? Who the-- what the-- for fuck's sake where do these people come from?! If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound? Why yes, after it screams and weeps, it says its final words to its brother and sister trees and prays to the great redwoods for a kind afterlife. No. In a perfect world, anyone over the age of four to have such a thought would be struck dead on the spot by a meteor. And if a meteor wasn't handy, maybe God could poke his giant ominous coat-hanger down through the clouds for an emergency abortion. This sort of thing doesn't need to spread. I wish I had more time to chat, but my dresser just asked for a Caramello bar.
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Today was my first day of school. It really didn't feel like it since the only class I had was Humanities, and it only lasted an hour out of its hour and a half time slot. I have that class in the same room I had Calculus III in last semester. I love that room! It holds many, many people, yet it's still easy enough to see the board. Not that it really matters, since I always sit in the front (mainly for the leg room, but also, whether you try or not, you'll find you learn more when you sit in the front). When I walked into the room, there were already about forty people seated, and as I looked out upon them, the first person I recognized was another cashier from Sam's Club. That was unnecessary. Also there's a girl in there that I've known since kindergarten but haven't really talked to since fifth grade. We chatted it up on the shuttle bus back to the parking lot after the class was over, she's very cool!
There's what I remember to be three construction sites altering the usage of the roads on my way to school and back. Lots of lanes blocked off and cars merging into traffic at the last minute. And to top it off, there had been an accident at one of the intersections on my way to school. I am now convinced that someone out there wants me to die. This driving thing has never been my forte, and when a wildcard, much less four of them, just sorta plops down in the middle of my route to school, I freak out. If I ever get into a fatal accident in the dead of winter and die moments later in a scene of ambulances, police and chaos, the last words to steam out of my mouth will be "I don't have to drive anymore..." Teenagers tend to save up money to buy a car. I was not one of those teenagers. I'd just as soon buy mustard gas potpourri... and yet here I am, with a car of my own. Hot damn. Someone's gonna die.
My parents just came back from Sam's Club, and I asked them to buy a box of Caramello bars for me, and thus starts the Caramello Challenge. This box of Caramello bars houses 36 of those tasty, four-cubed delights. I will get back to you all when I finish the box. This is not a race, however, so you'll have to make do with the pace of an UltraMuffin. I have not eaten one yet, and at the moment I weigh 193 pounds (fully clothed). My height was measured at the doctor's office yesterday, and it is 6' 3.75". I've been saying I was 6' 4" for so long, I think I'm gonna start telling people I'm 5' 11" to make up for it. My point is this: I will eat all 36 Caramello bars and gain no more than two pounds. In fact, I will likely stay the same weight or even lose weight. You wait and see. Why am I telling you all this? Well, I don't know... but maybe I'll get some hate mail out of it. I attribute my furnace of a metabolism to the placenta I keep in my sock drawer. I knew that darn thing would come in handy for something.
As you can see down below, I took some pictures of this project. I also took some pictures of my bandaid wall. Here I have kept all my bandaids from when I got shots in high school. I think I have them all here anyway. The three on the right are from school. The Snoopy one all the way to the right is kinda worn down cuz I had to keep resticking it and it would appear that bandaids are not meant to hold up after several years, which is a shame when you think about it. The left three are from yesterday's visit to the doctor. It surprises me that out of six bandaids given to me at ages ranging from 15-20, only one of them is not a cartoon bandaid. Your guess is as good as mine. The plain bandaid seems to be more durable. Maybe that was the one the nurse used to contain the atomic blast in my shoulder yesterday. You can also see my juror sticker. I keep this stuck there with my bandaids as a constant reminder that our judicial system is flawed. People like me were never meant to have power.
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I went to the doctor today for I guess what you'd call a physical. I hadn't been to a general doctor like that for over six years, so my mom wanted me to go get a checkup. He checked my heart, my lungs, my back, and yes, there was some "turn your head and cough"ing as well. I also got three shots that I was long overdue for. Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, and Meningitis. The Hep A and Meningitis shots didn't feel like anything once the needle punctured my skin. The Hep B, on the other hand, felt like someone was testing a small nuclear weapon in my shoulder. I wouldn't describe it as "hurting" though. When I would fall off my bike as a kid and skin my knee, that was getting hurt. Never once did my knee feel like it was about to blow up afterwards, and yet I am still feeling tiny mortar shells exploding in my right shoulder as an aftershock from this Hep B Hiroshima shot. There are many attractive girls working at the front desk in that building, several I recognized from high school. Sam's Club and the Tanana Valley Clinic, that's where to pick 'em up. They also gave me a pregnancy test and a morning-after pill, just in case.
Speaking of parts of my body exploding, has anyone else ever flown on an airplane with a bad cold? I did this once and was not the least bit prepared for what it felt like. On the descent, my eye wanted to implode and pop out of my face at the same time. There was pressure in leaps and bounds and I had no idea what its attack plan was, only that my eye had no idea which way it wanted to go... if it wanted to fall into itself or break out through the passenger window and absorb a cumulus cloud (those are the puffy kind that form shapes like your dog pooping Tommy Lee Jones). The pressure intensified over the course of about five minutes, but the only damage done was to my sense of self-preservation. If I ever have to fly with a cold again, I'm going to store my eyeballs in the overhead compartment. It should be a bit easier to get sleep that way too. And I wouldn't have to witness the cheese-ingested scalped-Elmo Lasagna served with pumpernickel pumpbrickdiciulous asshell carpet-twined Egon of Ghostbusters hardchunk bread with salvaged and sealed domino butter again.
Tomorrow's my first day of school. I was all ready to start going to sleep at around midnight, but as it turns out, my class tomorrow is at 3:40, and that's in the PM. So I might just stay up even later than normal. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, my first class is at 10:00 AM. I love having late classes on Tuesday and Thursday... and only one or two of them. It's almost like having a weekend because you can stay up really late. Not that I really care about sleeping anymore. After getting, on average, about five hours of sleep for my workdays this summer, having three-hour schooldays where all I gotta do is sit down and daydream is going to seem like a cakewalk. I can also drink coffee all day if I want to at school (black coffee is free!)... and I have an opportunity to release Niagara Falls into a urinal roughly every hour. This is gonna be great. I was only on a couple hours of sleep when I went to see the doctor today, he asked me if I had any trouble sleeping three times. Who could blame him, I look tired on fourteen hours of sleep, on two my eyes look like the Holocaust personified.
This journal is starting to amaze me. Every night, I say to myself "I really don't have anything to write about this time", and it's true, I never do. But somehow things end up on this page. I can't believe I'm still making (nearly) daily updates. This will probably change when I start getting homework in school. My journal will just become another thing I will put off. Unless, of course, I am sleeping during the day and staying up all night, there's never anything to do then. I should probably just wait until something interesting happens that's worth writing about, but writing about interesting things has never really been my style. I just type about nothing until I have at least four paragraphs, it's sad really. Because then you end up with something like this as the fourth paragraph that's not entertaining in the least. Oh well!
But wait, I thought of more! As you can see, I have implemented the comment script into my site, so now you can comment on each entry. Please use this damnit! I like to know people are reading this worthless junk (it gives me faith in humanity)! Also, I would like to bring to your attention that no one emailed me after specifically asking for email in my last entry! You bastards! Oh well, I wouldn't send me an email either. I wish I could get some hate mail to make fun of, but I'm not edgy enough to generate such mail. Well, I'm off to read. Probably for real this time too!
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Yesterday I forgot to mention that when my dad woke me up to see if I wanted to go see Freddy vs. Jason again, I panicked at first because I thought I had slept through another day of work. During the entire summer, I was only late for one day of work, when I slept through my alarm somehow, and I've been afraid of that happening ever since. It took me a few seconds to realize I had already completed my last day of work, and if I were to compare that feeling to something, it would be like a school kid waking up on the first day of Christmas break thinking he had to go to school. Extremely happy! Keep in mind, I am still a school kid though, who enjoys month-long breaks from college during Christmas time. I get to feel this way twice a year!
A day or two ago (I can't remember because I've been sleeping at odd times again and can't remember which day/night was when), a man that lived across the street from me suffered six heart attacks and died in the hospital. I'm not going to pretend it was my lose in any way since I didn't know this guy. In fact, I didn't even know what he looked like. It's still sad though, and another reminder that we're all going to die eventually... and probably very few of us are going to die of old age in our sleep. It must be very lonely to be aware that you're seconds away from dying, and no one in this world can come with you.
I don't like to dwell on such things too much though, so what's the deal with the Hawaiian Punch guy anyway? Who was the one that decided a bloody-antlered, albino Charlie Brown could pass as a Hawaiian? I've been to Hawaii on several occasions, and I never saw anyone that looked like that. I saw a buncha tan motherfuckers that looked like they were born to be cool. Real Hawaiians surf and eat mangos, not sing opera in a construct program (or pledge allegiance to the marshmallow kingdom or whatever the hell captain assfuck to the right here is doing). When I try to picture what civilization in Antarctica would look like... well, to tell you the truth, this guy looks nothing like that either. I picture six-foot long pointed-barrel-shaped creatures with fin-like membranes folded into six evenly-spaced crevices along their exterior and a bouquet of tentacles sprouting from one end of their body, with an eye on the end of each. Thank you H.P. Lovecraft. Thank you for making me think of the Elder Ones, protoShoggoths, and the windowless solids with five dimensions when I see the Hawaiian Punch guy.
I spent about four hours today working with PHP and MySQL to try and make a functional comments "script" for my site, so you visitors of mine could click on a link for each entry and comment on it. I got it working and even made it look real cool. It's 95% ready to go (all I need to do is make a cool looking submit button really) but now I'm not really sure if I want to use it. I already know what's going to happen; it's just gonna be like every other blog site, with a single comment every two weeks or so. It's the same reason I don't make a forum for my site. Nothing's more depressing than a month-old forum with four posts in it. I'll have to sleep on it I guess.
Now for the disturbing UltraMuffin fact of the moment. I have all my fingernail and toenail clippings from the last seven years. I'll give you a moment to let that sink in. I, a twenty-year old man, have seven years worth of finger and toenail clippings. I know this must sound disgusting and at the same time a little curious. I feel the same way for God's sake. But you must know, this was never intentional. I just have this drawer in the desk my computer sits on, right next to my bed, which I keep my toenail clippers in. I also use my toenail clippers for my fingernails... I've never been able to tell the difference. Also, I do not have a trash can in my room. The closest one is about a country away. So instead of throwing out my clippings, I'd just toss them in this drawer (that's filled with a buncha other junk I haven't used for seven years). They sink down immediately underneath all the crap in there, but I just know they're piling up in some invisible pocket. If I could see them, I would be just as horrified as the rest of you, but I cannot. The reason I don't clean them up is because I don't want to see them. I want to pretend they disappear and do not merge their DNA into an intelligent being withstanding the trials of time, waiting for their collective mass to become equal or greater to the value of UltraMuffin, to wage a civil war on his live atoms and active cells, and to declare once and for all that they are subject to the same rights that make Muffin what he is. I don't have skeletons in my closet, I have nail clippings in my desk drawer.
If this were to represent the length of my entire life: ####################
This is how much of my life I have nail clippings from: #######
Oh, and please send me an email. I crave email from my visitors! Ask me a question, I might reply on this site... Strong Bad style! Well, kind of.
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I ran into an old acquaintance of mine at the grocery store tonight. He works there and said he hates his job. He also said he got his G.E.D. recently, and then went on and on about how stupid some of these people that graduate from high school are. How some of them can't even spell correctly and if he had stayed in school, he found out he would have been in the top 10% of his class... and continued to go on and on about how he could do just fine in college, if he wanted to, but school is boring for him because he gets so far ahead that he stops paying attention. This is truly sad. He seems to have the same complex that a lot of the high-school dropouts I know have. They will probably live out the rest of their lives trying to convince people that they are quite smart, and could have easily gotten through high school and probably college. I know these people are smart; I don't doubt them, but they have to keep reminding me/themselves of it. When you graduate from high school, you don't have these problems. There's no voice inside your head saying you can't do it because you did do it. There's nothing to prove. It's not even an issue. Stay in school, if not to learn more or get a better job, then to find a bit of peace.
I saw Freddy vs. Jason again today. Don't laugh at me! I thought it was a pretty good movie to begin with, but the real reason I went was because of my dad. I had seen the movie the first time with my friend. My dad wanted to see it real bad, but of course my mom didn't want to see it. I watched half of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies with my dad when I was like eight years old, so we had to see it together! It's unfortunate that there were only about twenty people in the theater this time. Half of the fun of movie the first time I saw it came from the reactions of the crowded, half-black theater. With guys yelling out things like "RUN BILLY!" (I'm not entirely sure what he was talking about, there was no character named Billy in the movie) and "GET YOUR HAND OUT OF MY POCKET!", how could you not have a great time!
About an hour ago, my friend Burrito and I went to Taco Bell. He ordered two soft tacos and a nacho supreme, I ordered two bean burritos without onions. They got his order right, but they gave me a single burrito supreme instead. I can and do tolerate fast-food mistakes from time to time, but how anyone can mentally fuse my order of two bean burritos into the ten-pound super-burrito I received is beyond me. I'm not even sure if I made out with a good deal or not. I said to Burrito, "This burrito feels friggin' heavy." and he held it, looked inside it, and couldn't resist... he began to eat it. Shocked, I said "Well fine! I'm having the soft tacos!", and I started eating them. They were packed full of meat, so I didn't really mind the order mishap anymore. I'm just a little concerned about this Taco Bell employee's future. He or she could work for an airline and you'd get one first-class seat for the two coach tickets you paid for. Pay for a condom and birth control pills and you'll get castrated. There's a reason things don't work this way.
I am also concerned for the well-being of my computer. One of the two programs I use regularly to update my website is causing my computer to do some funky things after it's been running for a while. Sometimes my buttons in Internet Explorer will turn all black and the font will change and increase in size. Then I started getting error messages in German. They started out simple, little boxes that said things like "Zugriffsfehler" and "Laufzeitfehler", but as the days progressed, I began to notice a red tint overshadowing my monitor which corresponded to the dry heat filling my pulsating room. It was a welcome change for my mundane life until I discovered messages like "Ihr Computer ist jetzt Satans Nährboden" and "In Ihrer herzlosen Seele liegt der Schlüssel zur Zerstörung" spelled out in worms and flies across my bleeding walls. This might be something worth looking into.
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Well, I made a terrible mistake in judgement last night. I figured since today was my last day of work, a good night's sleep would be unnecessary, seeing as how I would be real excited not to be working in that craphole again for at least eight months. This line of reasoning was terribly flawed. First thing in the morning, I had to make a restock list and pull cigarettes out of the mega-cigarette cage in the corner of the store. It's almost disturbing how mad my cigarette skillz are. I started my job this summer not knowing the difference between a king or 100, a straight, filter or a menthol, a box or soft pack... and now I feel like the cigarette Vishnu, extending my arms in every direction to pull tobacco as fast as a cheetah into my guiding force. Now, it will start again. They will pick another cigarette virgin to train in the arts of chemicals and death. Another student will become the master, led by the hundred angry voices of dying senior citizens... and the tantalizing murmur of my old friend, Menthy the menthol Marlboro, whispering to them "Smoke me! Taste my sweet insides and pledge yourself to the order of nicotine."
At the end of the day, I left a monument of UltraMuffin in the store. For the last half-hour of my work day, a (short) supervisor was having me fold flat-sheet boxes into box boxes, and she was then taping them. She said to just stack the boxes on the flatbed cart in front of me after I folded them up, and she'd pull them off of there to tape them. Apparently taping the boxes took at least twice as long as folding them, and I started stacking boxes to Alpha Centauri. I'm a tall fellow with a reach like an orangutan. After the boxes got to be stacked about nine feet high, she looked at me and said "What am I gonna do with that?" and pointed to my tower of Babel. I said "This is my way of making sure I don't get sent back to a register before I clock off... you'll need me to pull the boxes back down." and she laughed and said "Okay, that will work" and I stacked another layer of boxes. Another supervisor walked by and said "Whoa, think you got those boxes stacked high enough Craig?" to which I replied, "Not until my tower reaches Heaven!" Well, one thing led to another and both the box-taping supervisor and I got sucked into helping customers until it was time for me to go. I clocked off and looked out over the landscape of my summer job to take a mental picture, because I don't plan on going in there very often or at all to shop any time soon. There was my tower. It was glorious; even some of the customers walking by it slowed down to admire my monument. I then looked from one checkstand to another and did not see a single cashier over six feet tall. My tower was very wobbly and fragile, a disaster waiting to happen. This monument will stand for the rest of the day as a reminder of how badly this store needs me! Employees will look upon it and say to themselves "We are lost without you, cigarette master and friend to all. We will miss you."
Saturday night was another night of insanity. Fully documented on video, too! I choose not to give away the details until we have the video(s) ready to post, but it was another night on the town. This time with me, Thunder Chunk (formally known as Burrito) and Chump. Chump was the star of the show, and he certainly had an audience. Thunder Chunk just bought his own domain, wtflol.net which I think is going to be our team's website! And by team, I mean at least three people that have nothing better to do with their time than waste everyone else's time. Stay tuned for the update of Saturday night, along with video.
 Once again, the urge to play '80s arcade games has overcome me. I downloaded the ROM for Sinistar, a game that was at least a little popular in the early '80s, but I had never played before. I read about it in this book I have, Arcade Fever, which talks about fifty arcade games from the "golden age of video games". I think to really appreciate these games you have to have played them as a kid, otherwise they just seem like some mediocre flash game someone made in their basement. Sinistar is like Asteroids except there's this weird mecha-star Nazi thing that comes alive after a couple minutes and says stuff like "I HUNGER, COWARD" in a scratchy, low quality sound sample, and then you see this yellow or green dot on your radar come flying towards you like me flying towards the Mexican section of a multicultural buffet, which is to say very fast. Your only defense against Sinistar are these mines, which you have to collect minerals from the asteroids to drop. When Sinistar catches you, you get eaten. I suck at this game. I think it's back to Dig Dug and Joust for me.
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My dog, Muffin, just managed to trap herself underneath the coffee table. She just slipped right underneath and forgot how to get out I guess. We all had a good, extended laugh as she looked around and then she gave up, laid down and started licking the carpet like she always does. She's either the smartest or dumbest dog I've ever seen. Over the last few years, she's just started licking things. She's fourteen and a half years old (in human years), so Idunno, maybe dogs aren't supposed to live that long... because they just start licking things. She started off by licking the carpet, then she started licking the bottom cupboards in the kitchen, then the dishwasher when it was open, and then the sofa. One time she was laying at the top of the steps while I happened to be watching her, and she licked the wall (and has been doing it ever since). When I was in the kitchen and she was licking the cupboards, I tried to nudge her away with my foot and she started licking my sock. Maybe she thinks she's a home owner, and she's just trying to clean up a bit. Hell, it's all she has. This is probably a side effect of spaying or neutering your pets. I mean, if someone ripped off my balls and kept me in a kennel overnight, I'd probably start carving pentagrams in the walls and trying to create a stealth bomber dolphin using black lights and bungie cords.
A ways back, my grandma told me if I feel a sneeze coming on, but I can't get it out, to stare at a light. This will either make you sneeze or make the sneeze go away. Oddly enough, this works like a charm. There's no reason it should work, it just does. This goes against everything I held to be true. I considered myself good at that game called Match or Matching, where you turn over cards and try to match them together. The reason being that I had never played a game where nose matched with light source. The game of life (not the board game) is flawed. Somewhere along the way during the beginning of time, someone decided to split from work twenty minutes early on casual Friday to get some pizza in their blue jeans, and that was it, nose matches with light. Someone didn't do their job and what's done is done... we are fucked forever. I would also like to note that adding little pegged people to my car in the Life board game has never brought me an ounce of satisfaction. There must be a reason Monopoly is so popular (you'd better hope you get the orange properties though, not even that slutty thimble can go up against those wicked orangies).
I just realized today that the dates on my first few journal entries were fizzle-poofed. And by that I mean the 23rd and 25th actually said 23nd and 25nd. If, in the process of entertaining my zany antics, I had thought up the idea of doing that intentionally for laughs or whatnot, there wouldn't have been a problem. But it was truly an accident, and as such I was embarrassed. This experience reminded me of a boxing arcade game that appeared in the university's arcade one day. It had these heavy plastic boxing gloves that you used to punch, and motion sensors all over the place. It was imported from Japan and everything was in Japanese, even the instructions that popped up on the screen to explain how to play the game. The only English part was the screen that said "for sale and use in Japan only", which might explain why it disappeared so abruptly a few weeks later. On the high score list, it had "11st" and "12nd" place. Not only that, but it seemed like every other person that played the game got in 11st place, and were proud enough to be there that they would yell out "I'm in 11st! 11st place biotch!". You can bet that any parents who happened to be in the building during these victory parades are now actively involved in keeping their child as far away from our university as possible. Pay $1000s in tuition and your son or daughter may just learn the words 11st or 12nd; that would make anyone nervous.
Early this morning, I sent a message to the people over at the Axe deodorant company...
Subject: A concern about your product
Several days ago, my friend and I were spending our valuable time testing out your various Axe spray scents at the local Safeway at midnight. We sprayed it all over our arms and wrists. We tried Phoenix, Apollo, Voodoo, and Kilo if that information is useful in identifying the occurrence that follows. When we left the store, we smelled very strong (and quite good, I have no complaints about the smell), but as we headed back to my friend's parked van, a dazed figure came lurking out from the shadows. At closer examination, we realized that it was a girl. She seemed possessed, overcome by the desires for that which she craved and completely unaware, from the standpoint of a civil being, of her own actions. She tripped over a curb, and fell face-down onto the pavement, but crawled right back up into her stupor without a hitch, and continued down her path straight towards us. There was a gleam in her eye, and thinking back on it now, I think she wanted to eat my brain. I've seen advertisements of your product on television, toting a phenomenon you call "the Axe effect" where women display an unusual and perhaps unnatural attraction to men based solely on the usage of your spray. I'm afraid I do not posses the scientific background needed to understand the precise workings of such a phenomenon, but I do suggest you contact your research and development team as soon as possible. I fear that there may be something horribly wrong with your product.
I wonder what the chances are of getting a reply.
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 I just woke up, and it feels great to be sleeping at night again. Yesterday was a long, hard day at work and I ended up pushing carts around the parking lot for an hour after we closed, along with three other cashiers because our store is severely lacking cart people. You wouldn't believe how far away from the store some of those carts get... I think I pushed some in as far back as Seattle. There's this very hot girl at Sams (one of many, actually) who works at the cafe and smiled real big (and couldn't seem to stop!) when I walked in for work. She buys cigarettes through my line all the time and yesterday I surprised her by getting her kind of cigarettes without her even asking! This is kind of depressing and could have been taken as an insult now that I realize it, but she thought it was cool, apparently. She told me she goes through a carton of cigarettes about every ten days (that's 10 packs!) depending on whether she's sharing them or not. Smoking is usually a turnoff for me, but she looks sexy even with a hair net on, so I'm able to make this exception. There's also this 50 year old woman, the lady who trained me on my first two days, who might be coming on to me. She looks like a witch that you know probably looked good during her teenage years. I have to find out what I'm doing wrong when both her and this gay guy are coming after me. Something's certainly not right.
 Many times, when one of my parents' friends comes through my line, I'll tell them I'm going back to college for my third year or whatever, and then the next person in line, a complete stranger, will ask me where I'm going and what my major is. I'll say "computer science" and they say something like "OH! My son is an engineering major!" To anyone unfamiliar with the similarities between these two majors, it's quite simple. That "OH!" means they've made the connection that both these majors require getting ass raped by a sideways pineapple in terms of math courses. And then when I'm standing there, ringing up their macaroni, chips, and ramen I'll start discussing my plans to rid the world of pineapples. For they hurt so much. Really, when God and/or Mother Nature designed the pineapple, don't you think they went a little overboard. It's a fucking porcupine fruit. When you ring one up, there's no way to lift it up without making a sacrifice to some prehistoric deity of self-destruction. You just have to say to yourself "Here it goes muffin." (whether you are muffin or not, this will still help) and then say to the customer "I'm about to destroy my hand for your sins." They should sell them wrapped in towels. Either that or have a small, concealed machine banging on my shins while I'm handling the apple of Sodom-- I mean of pine, to alleviate me from the awkward pain of it all.
 The worst part of any day is when I forget to clip my fingernails for a while and I come to work, and within twenty minutes I manage to mangle one of them. Then, I have to go the rest of the day with my nail just sitting there in whatever deformed, God-forsaken configuration it decided to take, and hope to all that is good in the world that I'm able to fix this travesty with my teeth during my fifteen minute break. One time I had a finger nail split right down the middle. It didn't go far enough back to hurt, but I just had this long nail with a line of emptiness right down the middle for a ways. They should put something in the store's first-aid kit for this sort of thing... maybe a large hand that just comes out and smacks you across the face for not clipping your nails when you had the chance. I'll take the blame, it was my own damn fault.
I need to find out why exactly it is that the other cashiers at work hating crushing boxes at the end of the day. It's probably the simplest and easiest thing I've ever done to make money. You just shove boxes in there, pull down the gate thing, and push the button. Besides the incessant smell of moldy bread that fills the back of the store thrice as strongly as the front, and the feeling that, with each crushload of boxes, a little piece of my soul is getting crushed along with them, watching those boxes go down like the serial rapists they are is almost a joy to behold. I should really get into it on my last day of work and start yelling "You go crush now motherfucker! I've hated you since the moment you were created! My destiny is a box crushing one, and your mother is next!" and wave around a giant foam finger that says "I'm #1" on it! And while I'm on the subject of trash, you should get a whiff of the bottom of the trash can at the cigarette counter. It smells like what a diseased clown's ass would smell like if his ass had teeth in it not to brush. In other words, not a smell I would subscribe to if given the option. And you just figure a clown would have to have some sorta serious disease to have teeth growing out of his ass.
So I have today or tomorrow off (I'm still not quite sure what to consider today, since it's only 5:46 AM), and then two more days of work. This I will consider a good day in the grand scheme of days. I will celebrate it with food that my metabolism will burn up like an incinerator, but will no doubt gather in my arteries to team up for nice comfy heart attack. I plan on reading more of my book, Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, and maybe play Perfect Dark on N64 or Splinter Cell on Xbox... I will also actively seek Doug on either Nickelodeon or Toon Disney, because it feels like a Doug watching day.
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We had a meeting at work today, and from this meeting, I am able to conclude that Sam's Club is going to be even more of a mad house from now on. Three more work days left. I feel like I'm about to move away from an active volcano. To put it simply, several new procedures are going to be implemented over the next couple weeks that will result in cashiers having to call over a supervisor for like every fifth person (by my estimates). Wal-Mart (owner of Sam's Club) seems to have this idea that supervisors are a dime a dozen, and will be right by your side when you need assistance. This is not the least bit true. What happens is, on a busy day, you make a light start blinking and then wait three to five minutes. The front-end manager doesn't want to acknowledge that this is the case, but this cool Jamaican guy that works there said he'd been keeping track of the time it took every time he had to call a supervisor, and one time yesterday he waited fifteen minutes! Fifteen minutes! That basically means fourteen minutes of getting yelled and bitched at by an angry customer. You have to figure, if cashiers are going to be calling these supervisors about twice or three times as often now (as they will be), these fifteen-minute waits are going to start occurring regularly. Anyway, I'm tired of talking about work and I doubt it's even fun to read.
I didn't spit blood when I brushed my teeth this morning. This is a definite plus, except my dreams of becoming a cold blooded creature of the night have dissipated. I should have gone to the blood bank and started spitting blood at people like a rabid animal waiting to be harnessed... and the sperm bank just to confuse people.
What is the color "blue green" exactly? I'm not too keen on colors because I am color deficient, so I can only name about twenty colors out of those 500,000 color Crayola boxes, but I do know that green is a mix of blue and yellow. And then blue green is a mix of blue and green (I assume). So it's not really a color, but just a fucked up version of another color. It's like they run low on one ingredient and put more of the other in instead and try to pass it off as a legitimate creation. Why not throw a couple eggs against a brick wall, slice open a kitten, and call it a cake? Sprinkle some night crawlers underneath a crippled springboard and call it "ferganticated red", the fun never ends with Crayola. They should just fill the box with laughing gas and acid to let children taste their own colors. They're already sniffing markers for God's sake.
I made accounts for a few of my friends to have their own websites hosted at ultramuffin.com. I'll put them in the links section once they are developed! iPowerWeb also gives me 300 email accounts @ultramuffin.com... and I have 297 left. Good lord. I'm really loving iPowerWeb so far though; they give you so many resources and it's all so easy to use. Thirty gigabytes of bandwidth a month is just awesome. I wish I had enough visitors for bandwidth to become an issue. And you can't go hog-wild with 500mb of webspace, but you can go wild enough to post pointless videos of ravens doing nothing worth noticing. If only I was a hot girl with a webcam, I would have people visiting every hour, on the hour to cop a visual feel. If any hot girls out there want to pretend to be the UltraMuffin and are willing to contribute pictures for public display, there is a free email account in it for you. Also a free ferganticated red crayon.
Also, it's worth noting that a man by the last name of Lesko comes through my line at work every few days. Every time he comes through my line, this plays in my head for about an hour. You just marinate on that for a while. To quote Lewis Black, if there was a God he wouldn't allow this sort of thing to happen.
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Thirty minutes into my early-morning work day at Sam's Club today, the power went out. Thank heavens for those backup generators, I thought I was gonna get some relief. Shortly after the power came back, a pastor from a local church came through my line and he was like "How are you doing in another day of God's brilliance?" and I was like "Oh, I'm doing good!" and he said "Do you know anything about God?" and I was like "Only that I use his various aliases as a means of profanity in my whacky-ass writing."... No, what I really said was "I know him a little bit." He said "We can only know a little bit about God because he's so magnificent. Have you ever talked to God and thanked him for all he has given us?" and I said "Well, I was raised to do such a thing, but I can't say I've done so recently." and this went on for like a minute. In Sam's Club orientation, they never taught us how to handle religious nuts. I remember various computer-based tests about cashiering, dress code, and sexual harassment, but I do not recall a test labelled "God Nut". I figure when a customer decides to talk on such a personal level, he wants honest answers. So all was good. He gave me his business card, which has a little map and directions to his church on the back. I thought it was pretty cool looking. I made sure to stick it in my pocket while he was looking to make him feel good. Whether or not I believe what he believes, I admire his boldness. I wish I had the courage to talk to random employees at random stores regarding the warmth and power of "The Way of the Raven" headed by archbishop Crisco Pogo.
I just woke up a few minutes ago, at around 2:30 AM. I had been awake for 20 hours when I got off of work yesterday; normally 20 hours isn't so bad, but damn, I was just tired. At work, about every third customer bought Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on either DVD or VHS. My dream from just moments ago encompassed me going to find my copy of Lord of the Rings in the arctic circle somewhere, seeing a 25-foot polar bear from about a mile away, and it chasing after me at about 50mph. I'm not even sure if I want to buy The Two Towers, but I do know I never want to see that polar bear in real life, it was frightening!
There's this flamboyantly gay guy at work, who I think I might have been a little too nice to. I'm afraid he might be flirting with me. At first I thought maybe I should be flattered... maybe this means I'm a good looking guy or have a good personality. But then I thought: am I sending gay people signals?! I sure hope not. That's a train wreck waiting to happen! If so, I need to find out how to redirect these signals to their proper destination, that of the female race. And while I'm on the subject, why is it that every girl that acts overly nice to me either has a boyfriend or a husband? It's like a minefield out there... and the mines are looking very pretty.
It's strange that my days at work go by faster when I'm tired as hizzle. I guess the lesson here is that you can get through anything without even trying if you just give up hope. When I go into work tired as the word "pillow" itself, I set my mind to the "time for six hours of hell" mode, but it ends up being one of the shortest workdays of my life. They should have sleeping-pill dispensers in the break room for avid fans of this phenomenon. If they were anything like the other vending machines in the break room, they'd only take exact change and sometimes not even give you anything back for your exact change, but it'd all be worth it to turn into a cashiering zombie from Star System 9.
Oh, and I have what appears to be razor burn connecting my mustache to my goatee on both sides. It's very obvious and I could see customers looking away when they saw it! I hope it disappears soon. Also, for the last few days, after brushing my teeth, when I spit the toothpaste out, it's been deep red and disturbing looking. My spit seemed to be more full of blood than toothpaste. This morning I experimented with this, and the more of a suction I made when I spit, the more blood came out. If I just made a suction in my mouth for ten seconds, I had an entire mouthful of blood. I discovered that the blood was coming from the exact spot where that chimichanga had burnt me a week ago (read the Anger section). This is good because now I know I don't have some sorta disease or something. On the other hand, wouldn't it be cool if I had AIDS? I could be like a cobra spitting his venom. I'd ride around coiled up on a skateboard rolling downtown to threaten the booze culture with my life-threatening sting.
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Today, work wasn't all that interesting. For the first time in like a week. But I did forget to talk about something that happened to me in my last journal entry. There's this slow guy that's in his mid 20s that works at Sam's Club as maintenance (cleaning stuff up). He's a nice guy, and even funny when you have enough time to get a response or two out of him, but whenever someone says something to him, there's like a three-second delay before he processes it in his head. I've always been real nice to him and he says "Hey Craig, you da man!" to me a lot, and I say "No way! You da man!" and we both laugh and smile and get back to work. Well, at break time, I went to the bathroom, and I saw him in there cleaning it up. I used the urinal, and I heard him in the stall next to me talking to himself. "I can't clean the toilet... I don't have time." I thought that was a bit off, even for him. But while I'm still standing there peeing, I hear "HEY CRAIG! YOU DA MAN!" Man, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy! It goes against bathroom etiquette. My mind went to work immediately on how I was to get out of this one and while I was still peeing I shouted back "YES I AM!" and he laughed. Victory: UltraMuffin.
Now to today. Today, a couple hours after work (around 10:00 PM), me and my friend Burrito labelled a full, unopened, expired gallon of milk as "Breast Milk" and I set it down next to the trash cans in front of Safeway. I'm not entirely sure what led us up to this point, but it had to be done really. We took some sub-par quality pictures of our deed, and recorded with a camcorder everyone that passed the gallon of milk by from Burrito's parked van, but unfortunately no one seemed to notice the milk. Either that or they managed to read it from afar and decided not to make a scene looking at it more closely. So basically, we just have video of people walking past a gallon of milk on the ground that says "Breast Milk". We grew bored of these people denying their instincts, and went to Taco Bell to get some snacks that would increase our enjoyment of this voyeuristic project tenfold. When we came back, the milk was gone. We missed our chance to see and record the expression on someone's face as they saw it. Where it disappeared to, we did not know. We continued to study the people passing the former milk scene. Two passing men seemed intrigued by one of the garbage cans, and each bent down to get a closer look. We were hopeful that the breast milk might be lying in a trash can label-side up, but then one of the men reached his hand down and picked up a piece of a cigarette. These men weren't looking at milk at all, they were simply studying the ash tray on top of a trash can to try and score some free tabaccy. These are the people that come out at night.
We finished our Taco Bell treats and went into Safeway, where we spent roughly an hour looking at shoe inserts, medication, deodorant, Plug-Ins and aerosol air fresheners. I would like to try those Dr. Scholls gel inserts so I, too, can gel like a felon, but apparently they don't come in my size. I guess I'll have to continue life feeling like my feet are actually feet for the time being. We tried out the variety of scents offered by Axe deodorant spray, including Phoenix, Apollo, Voodoo, and Kilo. The consensus reached between the two of us after this nonsense had been thoroughly carried out was that we smelled like whores. That was when we went to the air-freshener isle to freshen up. We smelled the scents of citrus, rain and mountains. Somehow Air Wick has managed to stuff the smell of a waterfall into a can; now we, as a race, can partake in the lustrous ability to cover the smell of pot, shit and farts with a waterfall. Brilliant.
I bought a sea-shell shaped Plug-In with the country garden scented gel-cartridge thing, simply for memories. I had bought the exact same thing back in seventh grade and right now, as I type and smell the country garden, I feel as though I am twelve years old again. I also feel like playing Shining Force on the Sega Genesis because I associate this smell with that game for some reason. And some Squeeze-Its wouldn't be too bad either. Burrito bought four aerosol spray cans and one of those liquid plugin dealies. We were both satisfied with our purchases.
Back at the van, as I was waiting for Burrito to unlock my door, I noticed a girl walking about the darkness who was headed right in our direction. As soon as the door was unlocked, I quickly hopped in to make a joke about the Axe deodorant spray and how the "Axe effect" was real! As Burrito slowly began to drive away, we noticed that this girl was still heading right towards us, and seemed dazed and confused. She then tripped over the curb and fell straight down to the ground, got up as if nothing happened, and kept walking towards us in her daze. I have never seen another person this close to being what I would consider a zombie, and it was spooky. This Axe deodorant spray is a very strange hygienic product. On the one hand, some of the scents smell pretty good, if maybe a little feminine, on the other hand it causes weirdass, dazed girls to emerge from the darkness in parking lots, oblivious to the pain that should probably hold them back from their helpless endeavor to win over young adult males who spend their Sunday nights playing with air fresheners and shoe inserts at a grocery store. I think I'd better send the Axe company a letter about this haunting experience; I felt like I was in Silent Hill.
Oh, and here's a video of a raven eating what Burrito and I took to be a strange pile of rust but in retrospect was probably a pile of dog food in the middle of a parking lot... along with some other ravens hanging about the area: Ravens doing stuff. If this video doesn't work and your media player can't download a working codec, this should make it work.
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Oh man, what a day. About 30 minutes into my work day, my scanner gun started getting all funky town on me and would only scan about every third item. At the cigarette counter, where I work every day, the scanner gun is the only means in which to scan an item. Also my card reader wasn't pulling its weight either, and only about half of the membership cards (which need to be scanned at the beginning of every transaction) would read. Normally if a membership card doesn't scan with the card reader, you can just shoot the backup bar-code on the card and continue on your merry way. But my scan gun wouldn't scan the cards, so I had to resort to plan C, punching 20-digit, almost always partially worn away numbers into my terminal. And just as expected, when having these sorts of problems with customer after consecutive customer, they start to wise up. By "wise up" I mean mentally stabbing me with pitchforks and emitting as many different variations of moaning sounds as humanly possible to portray their entire spectrum of frustration. When you're a customer and the three customers in front of you don't go through the checkstand smoothly (it was more like a rocky road), it must flip some switch in your head from "sedate" to "eat babies and breathe fire", because these people were seriously flipping out.
After going through about six customers with this assortment of problems arising here and there and working together to really stir shit up, a 50 year old man made it to the front of the line, already looking for a supple baby to eat, and certainly not in the best mood. The card reader didn't read his card; the scanner gun didn't read his card. I punched in his worn-down 20-digit number in several times before deciphering the correct digits out of cryptic shadow text, and the display prompted a message saying the card he was using was stolen. Supervisor required. This man got so angry he momentarily cast a gravitational force throughout the throng of people capable of sucking in all children under the age of four to be eaten. Try as he might, the children were not arriving fast enough so he tore a piece of his own leg off to gnaw on as we waited for a supervisor to arrive.
When the supervisor arrived, three minutes later, the man blew up. "THIS GUY'S MACHINE ISN'T WORKING! IT'S BEEN FUCKING UP ON EVERYONE BEFORE ME AND NOW THIS! GET THIS BOY SHIT THAT WORKS FOR GOD'S SAKE, HE'S TRYING TO DO HIS JOB!" The supervisor's face went pale and he scurried off into a corner to weep. Well, that's what he wanted to do, but he explained to the customer that his card is a stolen one, and then the man brought another membership card out of his pocket, which worked. Why he was carrying around a stolen Sam's card, I don't know.
Suddenly, I heard Freddy Krueger's voice say something to the effect of "You think this is chaos?! I'LL SHOW YOU CHAOS!" Then, while my phaser gun still wasn't working, I tried entering a cigarette coupon into the register manually and it gave me another "Supervisor Required" message, but unlike other such messages, this one wouldn't go away when I hit the clear button. This happened at the busiest time I've ever seen the store, and I spent the next 15 minutes turning away customers instead of doing anything worthwhile. The cigarette counter doesn't have its own light, so when I need a supervisor, I have set the light of the neighboring register to "blinking" and wait. During this madness, however, I had to make the light blink three separate times because some bastard (I'm looking in Freddy's direction) kept turning it off!
A supervisor finally replaced my scanner weapon of mass destruction with another one that worked only a tad bit better, and things calmed down for a while. A biker covered in tattoos, wearing a leather Harley Davidson jacket, came through my line with a blue towel and said "I really like the blue on this towel." I said "Yeah, I like that blue too." and he said "It's pretty." and I went to scan it and it seemed like it was thick enough to be two towels folded into each other and I said "Is this just one towel?" and he said "Yeah man, it's a fucking huge blue towel, it looks real nice." and I was like "I bet." ... This is not the kind of conversation I expect from a biker covered in tattoos. It was refreshing. Actually, to tell you the truth, bikers seem to be the nicest people that come through my line. They probably realize you can look like a badass without acting like an asshole.
Somewhere near the start of the day I had stepped in what looked like gum outside of my little cigarette booth. It attached to my shoe and I brought it inside. I didn't notice it right away, but after a while I realized there was a lump of something making me feel taller. I lifted my foot to investigate, and whatever this thing was, it looked stuck on there pretty good. That's why it was so baffling when it kept falling off every few minutes, wandering around the floor, and then reattaching to my shoe when I stepped on it again. Every time I looked down at the ground it was in a different place, and this went on for several hours. I felt like I had a little pet back there with me, but it was like neon green.
Then I went to break. The store had finally died down and I was able to relax. I got me one of those four-berry sundaes they sell at the cafe that are $1.80 for a good sized cup of the best tasting ice cream and berries ever, went up to the break room, sat down and looked at the Newsweek magazine in front of me. What you see to the right of this text is a re-creation. As always, a piece of the cover had been torn off to be used as schedule-fodder, but what I'm concerned about is this message written in marker across the cover. "I'll be midgets back". For heaven's sake, if that's Arnold's ploy to get into office in California, it's time to start worrying about the future of politics. What does it mean Arnold?! What can it possibly mean. Maybe Sam's Club is now hiring lunatics... or maybe someone slipped through the cracks on the drug test. This is just too much.
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Hello there! Welcome to my new location and my new layout. I just signed up for a year of hosting with iPowerWeb.com, which came with a free domain (and what do you know, ultramuffin.com was available!). I get 500mb of webspace, 30gb of bandwidth a month, PHP support, MySQL support, and several other goodies. In other words, my website now has a ton of breathing room! I'm hoping to maintain enthusiasm and make weekly updates to this site at the very least, if only journal-style entries to the front page. You've probably noticed the Oddities section and the Anger section. Oddities is for the weird stuff I come up with (and you just know there will be a lot of it), Anger is for rants (I've never considered myself one to rant, but rather spew out page after page of incomprehensible nonsense to illustrate my frustrations). There's the Atomic Microwave section, which should be very strange, and Reviews where I'll just review anything when the mood strikes me. And I think I'm satisfied with this page layout, but we'll know for sure in the days that come.
I have seven more work days left until I quit for school. Thank God. Yesterday was a day of pandemonium at the location known as Sam's Club 6603. We are not prepared, nor equipped, to handle Thursdays with a vengeance. It was like the weekend before July 4th, except instead of having someone working at almost every register, about every three registers were open. The lines of customers rivaled the length of the Trans-Alaska pipeline itself, but these customer lines flowed with anger. And I, UltraMuffin, became the spokesman of all that is wrong with Sam's Club procedure and policy.
Sam's Club has this rule where you have to transfer everything from one cart to another. The idea is to make it impossible for a piece of merchandise to slip past the checkstand unnoticed. This sounds like a breakthrough, star-explodingly brilliant idea at first... until you give it about five more seconds thought and the little voice in your head goes "But wait, they sell refrigerators, beds, and 60-inch televisions at Sam's Club!" Yeah. Well therein lies the problem. For things that heavy, the cashier is supposed to call over a "checkout supervisor" (of which there are usually several floating around the front end, until the store starts getting insanely busy, and then there is only one). On a slow day, the cashier will then wait 30 seconds to a minute for a supervisor to come over and say "Okay" and then walk away, giving the cashier the power to go ahead and scan the bar code with the little phaser gun thing. On a busy day, however, the cashier will wait upwards of five minutes for a supervisor to appear, and will spend that five minutes trying to explain to the customer why it is we have to wait five minutes to scan a television box sitting on a flatbed cart. Half the time, the customer will say something that will sound stupid to me, but probably sounds smart to any fortunate soul who hasn't had the displeasure of working in the institution of broken dreams known as Sam's Club. They will say "The bar code is right here! I'm staring right at it!" ... "Thank you. But you don't understand the situation. We have to jump through hoops of fire here."
Now imagine going through this with three customers in a row, after these people forfeited their place in another line to come over to my cigarette/express lane thinking that it would save them time. Then picture what it would be like if someone hadn't updated the price tags on many common items, thereby breaking the law through false advertising. Both 18 count eggs and 60 count, priced wrong along with dog food, with everyone and their mother memorizing the outdated prices just for the chance to erupt at my counter, holding me personally responsible for this catastrophe. I even got the chance to argue with a deaf man through the written word when his eggs rang up wrong. One of these men even went as far as to call me a criminal. He made it clear that Sam's Club was in violation of Alaska state law, and understandably assumed that the 20-year old behind the cigarette counter was the ring leader of the whole operation. This is how my mind will forever remember this day...
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ultramuffin@yahoo.com
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