Manic Oppressive

&I have this problem with spiders dropping down on me in the bathroom. It’s pretty bad. Now, years ago right after I saw Arachnophobia; which terrified me.

For years I had to look around the ceiling of any bathroom I wandered into. And if, god forbid, I actually saw one I would soil myself and run out of the room. But I got over it.

Mostly.

A while back, I had decided that they did more good than harm when they stayed in my room, eating flies and what not. They don’t, however, clean up after themselves very well, so I started evicting them.

Except for when they come from above, in which case I kill them mercilessly. I don’t know what they’re thinking when they do it, “Let’s drop in on Dylan and Die! Yeah!”.

For example, I was cleaning the bathroom a few weeks ago, and when I wiped the vent of the fart-fan, a spider the size of my fist dropped out of it. He scurried around a bit and then I dropped my boot up it’s ass, so to speak.

That particular episode reminded me of a time when I was taking a shower at my parents house, and a spider the size of my head dropped down. I screamed a bit, because it’s the last place that I would really expect to see anything alive. Then, while I was still a little shocked, it smiled and waved as it fell down the drain.

When I emerged a few days later, my mother asked me exactly why I had screamed.

“A spider,” I said. “But it never told me it’s name and I can’t shower with something that doesn’t tell me it’s name.”

“Ahh.” She says. “I would have fled the bathroom.” This is probably true, although she wouldn’t have used the door, instead opting for flying through the wall, if history can be of any use of predicting hypothetical situations.

She claims to be terrified of spiders, and does a pretty good job of convincing the rest of us that this is the case. I’m not sure about this though, because a tremendous number of spiders have died in not-so-mysterious circumstances while she has been around, but honestly I’ve never seen a spider so much as threaten her.

Since I quit the whole smoking thing, I discovered that I have boundless energy and strange youthful candor.

Or something.

So I bought a bicycle. A “less expensive hybrid”, specifically, given that it’s been a couple of years since I rode more than once a year and the fact that the hills around here are steeper than a Guantanamo Bay prison sentence.

By “less expensive”, I really mean, “less than my car”. I spent over $300 on the cheapest bike they had. This was my targeted price range, but I still had expected some stuff you know, underneath it.

For instance, my last bike was a Huffy, which is widely recognized as a toy. Well, at least the sprockets didn’t get worn down after a month and I never had problems with the dérailleur.

This one is mostly problems. I find this kind of strange… If a three hundred dollar bike has n crappiness, then how crappy is a thousand dollar bike? 3n?

It gets me around, I guess.

So I went out again Friday night. Just to, you know, mingle. Actually, that’s a lie. I was searching for the perfect woman.

So I went to a place where they play live music, and most of the crowd is “good people”. And I started talking to this girl.

It was perfect; she’s an artist, speaks French, sharp, and really quite pretty; so we’re having a rather engaged conversation. She had only moved to Seattle recently, and only knew a few people. Well, I don’t get out much, but I was able to introduce her to a handful of other folk, and we started flirting.

“Wee!”, I started to think.

Then she starts talking about her husband’s brother, so I backed off a bit and started to wonder what’s going on with kids these days.

Later inspection revealed she was wearing a ring, so I guess I should’ve known better.

Anyway, when I did back off, she ended up leaving, and blew me a kiss. And again, I’m wondering what this world is coming to.

My parents said that bars were a bad place to meet people, and it wasn’t until Friday that I realized just how right they were.

Not that anyone cares, but I’ve had three dental cleanings in the past three days, with one more “sometime soon”.

The deal is that I went to a dentist to finish up some stuff I started back in fourth grade, and while I’m at it get things looking pretty. So they did a “normal cleaning,” and told me it wasn’t quite good enough; they had to do a “Deep Cleaning”. They said this in an ominous voice, and the clouds shifted and the vultures started crying.

Each session is 1 hour, and covers 1/4 of the mouth. They use machine guns and jack-hammers to do the tricky stuff, so out comes the novocane*. The first Deep Cleaning session I had was actually two sessions, so about two hours.

So, needless to say, I feel like I’ve been gnawing on concrete all afternoon. 3/4 of my teesh are sparkling, though.

* Or whatever it is that they use these days.

The Safeway that I go to sells these little paper bags of apples. They usually contain 7 or so, and I pick them up fairly frequently because, well, it’s the thing to do.

Unfortunatly, I found glass in the bottom of the bag yesterday, and it was pressed into the skin of the apples on the bottom.

My first thought was, “Man, that would’ve been handy for Halloween.” My second thought was, “I want my money back”. My third thought was “Well, she’d be a lot cuter if she wasn’t into that whole Satan thing…”

But whatever.

So I composed the funniest, most profound post that ever has one composed — or thought of composing. And my browser crashed.

Gah!

It’s snowing again right now. I see this as a good thing, because earlier it was freezing rain, which would’ve meant that I had to crawl to work. Snow means I can walk it.

Ahh, and I have a demo tomorrow. In front of customers. Early. This will be interesting.

Last year, I wrote about Coke 0, and I postulated a “Pepsi -1″ coming soon. Well, I was wrong again. The Coca-Cola company was able to pull even more magic out of their own skunkworks. There’s a writeup on slashdot about their upcoming product, Enviga.

An interesting article about the guy that does Girls Gone Wild, if you have 15 minutes or so.

One of my co-workers is snoring right now. Guess this means I should go home.

[Edit: It's been pointed out to me that I should specify that I was at work when he was snoring. So: I was at work. Ayup. ]