Sonicrusk Blog

Usually, I have a scrawled list of potential blog topics on my computer desk that never seems to deplete. It did, and I ran into a funk where I had nothing to talk about. What do you do in those instances? Well, since I don’t get paid for this, I chilled out. I only write in my blog when something inspires me. Not to sound hoity-toity, but I have enough to worry about than what I put into my blog next.

“I didn’t realize so many people would be shot in the head”

I finally broke out of the pajama-clad laziness of graveyard work and went to see a movie yesterday – The Departed. It has been a long time since I went to a movie theater. Hell, I can’t remember the last movie I saw on the big screen. Really, it might have been Munich and that came out last Christmas. Anyway, The Departed is a riveting film and I highly recommend it. My mom saw it before me with some of her friends and my sister. The above quote is from one of those friends.

I keep forgetting it’s Halloween today. I ate breakfast at Cindy’s where some of the servers were costumed. I saw some more at Albertson’s. I had to buy some more fucking toilet innards at Home Depot to replace the chains and plungers that keep breaking. My toilets are old. For one of my toilets, I got the wrong plunger, so I have to find a way to get back and get a replacement so it won’t leak. Toilet leaks are annoying. It’s like a ghost flushing your toilet every few minutes. I am always startled.

My savant brain can remember many past Halloweens. Last year, I was locked away in my room doing homework that was due the following day. All of my lights were off. The year before, I was drinking in Monterey with friends. I broke up with a girlfriend on Halloween a few years back. In the army, I had some stupid meetings to go to before a swing shift in 2000. All the base kids walking to school in costume while I sat outside a building smoking cigarettes at 0800. As you can tell, this Halloween will not be spectacular. No women dressed like strippers.

I heard the story last week of some Joe in Iraq that left the safe zone to marry an Iraqi girl. He gave in to Little Joe and I’m not talking about the Cartwright kid. Ah yes, the army trying to control love. They have quite a bit of rules on “fraternization.” For instance, if you are an NCO and she is an under enlisted, you can’t date even if you are the exact same age. Same for NCO and officer. You see, some ape a few years back fucked it up by intimidating some enlisted gal/gals into sex. The army frowns on all sorts of relationships. They make it difficult to have relationships with foreigners too, even though a lot of soldiers spend YEARS outside of the USA during service. Damn, can someone catch a break? This doesn’t even factor in the whole “don’t ask, don’t tell” bit.

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Well, the St. Louis Cardinals won the 2006 World Series last night with a whimper. Five games – none of them really exciting. Lots of errors by Detroit. It might be that I didn’t get a chance to watch many of the games this year. Two innings of Detroit’s only win in Game Two, asleep on the couch for Game Three, and half of last night’s game.

I always miss the World Series. Last year, I was busy with school and before I knew it, the four games were up and the White Sox had swept. In 2004, one of my professor’s strongarmed my clinical group into attending some seminar directly after a clinical day at the hospital. I missed Game Four of that WS (Boston’s win).

Hmm, let’s see. In 2003, I was able to watch the Marlins-Yankees five-game series. Wasn’t overly impressed. In 2002, there was a year where I watched every game. Same as 2001.

In the army, minus the 1997 Marlins team, I missed virtually every World Series game for the next three years. I was in Hawaii, so the games were all taped delayed. Therefore, the score would always get spoiled, either by the Internet or some moronic sportscaster. I was also working shift work during those years, rotating shifts at that. 1998 and 1999 were sweeps. I know that I worked the swing shift for every Yankees win over the Padres. The 1999 Braves-Yankees and 2000 Mets-Yankees (yawn) passed by so quickly and were so predictable I hardly remember them. I only saw one inning of the 1998 Series.

There’s my rant. Another unimpressive World Series, but I’m sure Cardinal fans are happy, as they should be. I’m happy for them too. I remember Ozzie Smith crying in 1985 and 1987 (one of those years). 

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I have a couple of old vacuums, with the tired sounding motor and collection bag. I’ve heard of these new “never lose suction” vacuums that cost $500-600, but I only know one person that owns one. She swears by it, but I’d like to hear what other people think. Do you own one of these new vacuums?

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Have you ever visited Wikipedia? Probably. Have you ever got stuck in Wikipedia while surfing the web? It’s like going into the grocery store for a gallon of milk and coming out a half-hour later with the milk, a candy bar, People Magazine, and Claim Jumper TV Dinner.

One time my buddy Adam told me about a documentary he had seen on Jim Jones, the charismatic preacher and cult leader from San Francisco. I went to Wikipedia to read more on Jones and the People’s Temple. I ended up reading about that, George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Dan White, The Twinkie Defense, and Dianne Feinstein. A pinball glancing off of various Wikipedia articles.

It happened to me again. I have learned how to employ my TiVo as a useful tool for entertainment. Sometimes, I just want to go braindead and watch mindless television that doesn’t involve problem solving, either real or fictional, or murder, crime, nor sundry and depressing events. I created a season pass for the cartoon show Futurama so I could watch it when I just wanted to relax on my couch and zone out with TV.

My TiVo collected about fifteen episodes. I watched a bunch, and still have some in my Now Playing queue. It sounds like, literally sounds like, there are a small group of actors that do the voices for all of the cartoon characters on that show. I did a Google search one day and landed in Wikipedia.

I read a bit on the show in Wikipedia, then as usual found myself boncing around through hyperlinks. I clicked on the hyperlink for the Futurama robot character Bender and discovered that he was an antihero.

Here is where I will get high fallutin’, or supercilious as it were. My trusty Encarta dictionary defines a antihero as “somebody who is the central character in a story but who is not brave, noble, or morally good as heroes traditionally are.”

I read the entry on antiheroes. At the end, I clicked on the hyperlink for a list of fictional antiheroes. Here are a few:

Tony Soprano
Al Swearingen (character, not the blogger)
Archie Bunker
Travis Bickle
Bart Simpson
The Man with No Name
Holden Caufield
Hannibal Lecter

In other words, every interesting character created just about is an antihero. I just thought it was interesting that people, myself included, like antiheroes so much. Maybe they have the most interesting stories to tell. No one is interested in Ned Flanders.

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I have been off of work for the past few nights, and living in some sort of noctural Bizarro World. The other night, I gave my dog a bath at 0300. Yesterday, I slept from noon or one in the afternoon until eight at night. I went grocery shopping at 10PM, and made dinner at 0300 before watching the movie Diner that a buddy lent me. Here it is 10 in the morning, and I haven’t slept since 2000 last night.

But to the business at hand. I woke up last night and tried to access the Internet. No could do, so I tried all of the weapons in my Windows troubleshooting arsenal: repair connection, release and renew from modem page, restart, cmd window, rebooting router before I finally called up Suddenlink, my cable provider. I zipped through the phone tree before a homespun male voice told me that Suddenlink was aware of the outages experienced by its Bakersfield customers. Thank you for your patience while we resolve this matter.

I was off last night, and up all night. I kept calling the Suddenlink number to see if things had been repaired. My mom called me last night wondering if my Internet was down like hers. She couldn’t pay her bills online.

To make a long story short, I had no Internet all night. No way to check my blog or email. All I did was clear out a bunch of stuff from my Tivo queue. It sucks not having the Internet.

Finally, at 0600 this morning, I got tired of hearing that phone tree so I waited to speak to a real person with real feelings and a real soul. I reached a lady with a Southern accent that was quite polite. She told me that all Suddenlink customers in the entire city of Bakersfield had no service all night. That’s gotta be tens of thousands of people just in this city alone without Internet for twelve plus hours.

Let’s not forget that Suddenlink would like to merge with Bright House Cable. That would give total domination to one company for all of Bakersfield. I wonder how much they would try to gouge us?

I talked with my sister this morning. She also has Suddenlink Internet and had thought that her computer was on the fritz all night. She reminded me that Suddenlink did this same thing just a few weeks ago. However, I was working days then so I didn’t feel the annoying effects of sitting at home for twelve hours in the middle of the night without the Internet. You’d think that with the $100 they charge each household they could take care of this stuff.

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As you know, I work nights. I got off of work yesterday morning, went to sleep at around 0900, and slept very well – all the way until 7PM. I got up and watched some TV, then slept again from 10PM to 12:30 AM. My sleep schedule is really screwed up.

I have been writing about some frivolous things, so why not continue the trend? Right after getting my check card, I went to Target for some things. I ended up making an impulse buy: a Monopoly board game in a vintage wooden box. It only cost me a few bucks more than the standard rectangular size.

One thing about Monopoly, everyone knows the game and has his or her own way of playing it for maximum benefit (to themselves, of course). Some people use the Free Parking feature. That is, they put all jail fees into the center. When someone lands on Free Parking, they take the money. I’ve even seen some people who put all fines levied into the center. Personally, I like to play with Free Parking as just another space, like Just Visiting.

Everyone has his or her favorite token to use. It is accepted that the racecar is the most popular and coveted. I like to use the top hat, dog, or shoe. Call me weird.

My brother likes to use the battleship. Over the past few years, he is the one with which I have played Monopoly the most. A few years ago, he told me about a website where you can log in and play a game of Monopoly online against strangers. My brother would play at one computer across town, and I’d play from home. We would play a game together against two other strangers that popped into the virtual lobby. This is where I honed my Monopoly strategy. Sometimes, the strangers would collude with each other, only making deals among themselves, and shutting you out. Sometimes, my brother and I would collude if we found that the other person(s) playing were jerks. Believe it or not, we tried to play fairly and with some honor. Some people would make absolutely no deals. These games are impossible to win, requiring a thousand cuts to conquer your opponent with chintzy rents. I’d have to quit these games and lose points.

I learned that the greens are useless unless that’s all you can get. You want certain properties for certain reasons. There are only a few color groups that are worth a damn. These best properties to build on are the ones where people land right after getting out of jail, or those that have a card that takes you directly there. Sometimes, it is better to go to jail and stay there.  If you are going to trade properties with another player, make sure you: 1) get your own color group to build on in the exchange, and/or 2) drain the other player of enough cash so that they can’t build houses right away.

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Back in the late 80’s, I was in the sixth grade. There was a girl in my class who I will call “Monica.” Monica was a cute girl. She wore pink and white, with long dark hair and pink ribbons tying her hair into ponytails. She even wore pink and white LA Gear shoes like a lot of girls did at that time. A pretty slim latina girl with a dimpled smile.

Fourteen years later, I was taking a summer class at Bakersfield College (2-year junior college). On the first day of class during roll, the professor called out this girl’s name. I knew it had to be the same one as in sixth grade. I turned around to take a look but was obscured by desks full of other students sitting behind me. Monica sat in the back of the class and I was more toward the front. I decided to take a look during break to see if the pretty girl had blossomed into a hot woman.

Wrong. This indeed was the same Monica; I could tell from the face. But time had not been kind to her. She had gotten taller, but now her hair was greasy, her skin the same. Her face looked like she had kissed a lawnmower. She had a burgeoning apron of fat around her midsection, possibly from pregnancy and bad food.

My how we change. With each of my Crew of Old Army Friends there were staggered periods of four years apiece where I did not see each of them face-to-face. Upon seeing them again, they had not changed dramatically except that we had all gained some weight. Al did look like a skullcrushing bouncer at Riley’s Pub in Bakersfield instead of a deadhead.

It might seem like a dumb or obvious topic for a post, but I had been thinking about it since my trip to Dad DDS. I hadn’t seen the guy in eighteen years, so it was a shock to see that he had aged. Sometimes you see famous people after a long period and they got fat.

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I am taking this EKG class for the next few weeks. An EKG involves electrodes and wires put on the chest to measure the heart rate and rhythm.

EKG measurements are all over health care. Every nurse has to deal with them at some time or another. But I’ll be honest with you; I find EKG measurements and rhythm types boring as hell. Repolarization, depolarization, .04 mm per box, this box, that box, segments, intervals, complexes, I just about had a puddle of drool on the front of my pants. There is nothing more boring in nursing than EKGs.

Jim Leyland – can this guy win baseball games with a carton of eggs or what? Not to say that the 2006 Detroit Tigers are chicken embryos, but Jim Leyland never loses.

He’s an intense guy. He loses his temper very easily. During interviews, his affect can appear blunted. When he wins, he cries like a little girl with no problem whatsoever. He sneaks smokes in the dugout. He wins. I watched all of the Pirate and Marlins postseason victories he managed in the 1990’s. I used to joke about his capricious moods, but I’m glad to see him back in baseball.

Yesterday was Columbus Day, so the post office was closed. I had a few things I needed to mail so I drove downtown to put the items in one of the blue mailboxes located in the alley behind the post office so I wouldn’t have to leave my car.

As I arrived to the set of six or so blue mailboxes, there was an old couple in front of me. The elderly man appeared to be having trouble getting his mail into the slot. I saw that there were manila envelopes sitting atop of the boxes.

“Hey,” I asked, “are they all full?”

He turned back to me, one foot on the ground, the other still inside of the car, “Yeah.”

The elderly couple left, and I drove up. He was right; all of the mailboxes were stuffed to the top with mail. No way I was going to put my bills in one of them so some drunken downtown bum could steal them in the middle of the night.

I drove down Truxtun. There is a blue mailbox in front of the county headquarters but I had a minivan taxi riding my ass so I couldn’t pull over in an instant from the slow lane. I kept driving over Union Avenue to Baker Street. I could’ve gone to the post office on Kentucky but I didn’t want to get out of the car at night in that area. Finally, I decided to drive over to the 93306 post office off of Niles. They have a drive-up blue mailbox located in back. This one was not stuffed full of bills and letters to Granny.

Where are all of the drive-up blue mailboxes on the east side? The post office on Kentucky doesn’t have one, and they could certainly use it. There are always strange fuckers looking to panhandle money off of you who loiter around that building. Green Frog Market on Bernard has a de-facto drive-up mailbox in front of it, although there are sometimes weird folks hanging out there too. Who wants to leave their car running even for a second to scurry over to the mailbox while some lowlife is lurking nearby? You can park your car and turn it off, but that is my point. It’s a pain in the ass just to put some mail in a box.

There used to be a blue mailbox at B.C. that appears to have been removed. There also used to be a drive-up mailbox in the old JC Penney’s shopping center on Columbus. Even when that center was virtually abandoned, the mailbox remained. Now, they are building a Lowe’s, the mailbox is gone, and that entire area is fenced off. Other mailboxes on the east side include the one by Rite-Aid on Oswell, and the one on Flower Street outside of KMC. You have to get out of your car for these.

When I was a kid, my dad would put whatever needed to be mailed in the mailbox with the flag up before he went to work. It didn’t matter if it were bills with checks or what. I can’t bring myself to do that. I am compelled to find a secure blue mailbox. We need some more drive-up mailboxes on the east side.

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In real life, my buddy Chuck coined a nickname for me - Sonicsaurus. It isn’t that I am garagantuan or menacing like a prehistoric animal. It is a play on the word Thesaurus. I sometimes use big words.

I like remarkable words but I don’t go overboard with them in spoken speech. The biggest, or most fifty-cent, that I go is capricious or verdant. Even these two words sometimes throw people for loops.

A few years ago, I was reading an article on CNN.com about the Ben Affleck – Jennifer Lopez thing. Affleck was quoted using the word schaudenfreude. Schaudenfreude! It took me years but I did have a chance to use it in conversation one time with legitimacy, talking to Hoat if I remember correctly. His version of capricious is boondoggle.

When I was at work during my army days in 2000, I used to read an online newspaper that culled stories from various high-end publications. I remember seeing the words hubris and nascent for the first time, looking up their definitions, and cataloging them for future use in some sort of blathering. I must not have been very erudite to have just discovered those mid-level words at age 24. Same with the word derisive.

I still do that though with strange words that I run into while perusing the web. Here are a few more:

Ersatz
Ennui
Apotheosis
 

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I never really think about it, and it might be a fact that I take for granted after all of these years, but in the grand scheme of things, and compared to most people, I am a rather accomplished, or cunning, linguist. You could say I am trilingual or maybe even quadrilinugal if you push it. I’ve studied linguistics intensely, and have made a living off of what I know.

Fat chance that any nurse at my hospital can speak rudimentary Spanish, although a fair share of the patients are exclusively Spanish-speakers. We have a virtual United Nations of Nurses there: Filipino, Iranian, Sri Lankan, Indian, South African. However, only one real nurse that can speak Spanish fluently, having learned it in childhood. The others either speak zilch, or so little and so broken that it might as well be zilch.

There is a friend of mine that is considered bilingual by the hodge podge nursing staff in Spanish. I am slowly starting to be thought of that way although I have tried to keep it quiet and don’t consider myself that proficient. I can say all that I need to say. Anyway, this friend who I have known for a couple of years and who is also a RN speaks pretty good Spanish. The only thing is she refers to everyone in the “tu” or familiar “you” form. This is not good in the Spanish-speaking culture. Most of these patients are quite old. At least, they are older than we are. She should know better, yet she continues forsaking the “usted” form. Hey kid! Hey Dummy! You got any chest pain!

On the flip side, there was a guy I knew in the army named Place. If you think that Place is an odd pseudonym to use, if you knew his real name, you’d see how appropriate it is. Anyway, SGT Place was kind of a self-absorbed motherfucker. I served with him in Germany. He had a girlfriend that lived down the highway from the base. Place was always working up a new sight seeing trip. If you didn’t want to get stuck in the barracks all weekend, and didn’t want to waste the opportunity of living in Europe, you’d probably ride along with him. I drove down to Italy with the dude even though I told him that I didn’t have a European driver’s license because I couldn’t pass the hieroglyphic sign test. He said cool, but I still ended up driving the way back to Germany from Italy not knowing what the hell I was doing, sweating bullets.

My buddy Adam went with him to Switzerland. Both Place and Adam both spoke Russian and met a hot Russian lady while down there. Adam tried to smooth-talk the babe in the Slavic language. Place did too, except that he kept using the formal “you” form of Russian to address her. Adam kept telling him to use the familiar form, but Place, being self-absorbed, couldn’t understand the importance of change in using the one form of Russian grammar that he had mastered. So, their sweet talk with the Russian babe melted away like a sugar cube in hot coffee. The Russkaya repeatedly implored to Adam, “What is wrong with your friend? He keeps using the ‘Vwi’ (formal you). Does he think I am an old lady?”

Funny story that I probably butchered. Still, I find myself never using the familiar “you” in Spanish. With Russian, I also hardly used the familiar “you” but I damn sure did with Russian girls. But with 70-year-old Mexican patients, you really gotta use usted. With babes, the familiar “you.”

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