A small sample of what I've been working on. Hope you enjoy!

Francis pulled out a small silver cross out of his coat pocket and held it in front of him. “Lilian Camden, you're under arrest. Turn around right now!”

Camden turned around and flashed a wicked grin. Two fangs extended about a quarter of an inch below the rest of her teeth. “Okay, officers, I've turned around. Now what do you want me to do?”

Before any of them could react, the vampire attacked. She ran towards Gwen and threw her into a wall. The impact with the wall knocked her gun out of her hand and caused her to crumple to the ground. Francis fumbled for something in his coat, but the vampire saw him and leaped at him. Francis and the vampire hit the ground with a crash, sending a chair toppling in their wake. Francis struggled to fight her off, but the vampire was both unnaturally strong and unnaturally fast. She hit him repeatedly in the face, her nails leaving deep cuts in his face. As she lifted up her face to deliver a killing blow, Slattery jumped into the fray. He stabbed the vampire in the back with his silver knife. The vampire screamed in pain as Slattery dug the knife deep into her back, twisting it between two ribs.. Keeping Francis pinned down with her legs, she swatted Slattery away with one arm, knocking him out with a deft blow to the face.

Gwen slowly got up from and saw the vampire pulling Francis's head back to expose his neck. She charged the vampire and tackled her. The blow seemed to catch the vampire off guard, causing her to topple off of Francis. The vampire immediately caught herself and threw Gwen off of her. “You three are a nuisance,” Camden said, cracking her knuckles. “I haven't had this much fun with my food since I was a child.” She reached behind her and pulled the knife out of her back. She tossed it aside with a laugh.

“We will stop you,” Gwen said, trying to sound confident in her ability to stop an unnatural, inhumanly strong creature that wanted to slice upon her throat and drain the blood from her body. She tried to get up but collapsed as her side erupted in pain. At least one of her ribs had been broken from the vampire's latest attack.

“Oh will you?” the vampire said, laughing. “From the looks of it, you can't even stand up. Just lie down like a good meal and wait your turn.”

Francis got to his feet and stood in front of Gwen, protecting her from the vampire. Blood ran down his face from the wounds the vampire had inflicted. One of his hands was hidden under his jacket. “You're an abomination,” he said slowly. “I'll give you one more chance to turn yourself in before I kill you.”

The vampire bared her fangs. “What are you going to do, bleed on me?”

“Actually, I was thinking garlic powder,” Francis said. Before the vampire could react, Francis pulled out a packet of yellow powder and tossed it into the vampire's face, causing her to shriek and claw at her eyes. “You bastard!” she yelled. “You blinded me!”

Francis grabbed the vampire and threw her to the ground. The fight instantly left the vampire. She curled up into a ball on the ground. “I'm honestly surprised that the garlic powder actually worked on you,” Francis said. “I figured that it would have caused mild discomfort at best.”

The Beginning of Awesomeness? I Certainly Hope So!

It's the middle of July, which is quickly shaping up to be one of the best months ever! So far, this month has been filled with awesome things such as: sun poisoning, near lynch mobs in Raleigh (note to self, never wear a Confederate soldier's cap on Independence Day again), the best firework display south of the Mason-Dixon line, Elton John AND Billy Joel, the Sherlock Holmes trailer, and a glorious return to the Piano Bar. And in two days, I will be making a pilgrimage to Gettysburg to do all there is to do there. The only real downside is that I haven't been seeing much of a certain favorite person of mine. I guess that's the downside when you're girlfriend works 117 miles away.

But onto the real news of the day: I've been working on a story! For those of you who don't know, I actually dabble in writing. I'm not terrible at it, or at least that's what I've been told. I even have one check and a whole lot of increasingly nasty correspondence from a publisher to prove that someone would...or at least used to be willing to pay for it. I won't go into details, but that whole experience honestly turned me off to writing anything more than silly blurbs and shorts for a while. But now I'm back and twice as badass!!!

So, by the end of the week (maybe tonight if I'm lucky), I'll be twenty pages in. Twenty pages is a pretty important benchmark for me; it's when I actually start buckling down and writing as much as humanly possible. Anything that I've ever written that's over twenty pages has been finished to completion. I've never not finished a story that has passed this mark.

Anyways, if you're interested, just drop me a line. I'm always interested in feedback and whatnot. I think that it's helpful to have someone read a story as I write it. It allows me to gauge reactions and fix problems before they get out of control (something that I learned a little too late in one case.) As a little treat/tease, here's the first few paragraphs in my story. Hope you enjoy!


THE VAMPIRE KILLER STRIKES AGAIN, read the headline of the Washington Post. Someone had left a copy on Detective Gwen Paternie's desk. When she finally walked into the office after a long night in the field, she glanced down at the newspaper and softly cursed under her breath. This night could not get any worse, she thought. A U.S senator had been found dead, probably killed by the same murderer she had been chasing for weeks. Since the body had been found at 1 AM by a park ranger, Gwen had spent four hours drudging through mud and litter searching for evidence and three hours in a cold, dark medical examiner's office watching two coroners dissect the corpse. Gwen picked up the newspaper and loudly threw it in the trash. She was not about to read about what a total and complete failure her investigation had been up to this point. She knew this already. As she silently fumed at her desk, the other detectives in her squad quietly looked up and smirked. They knew that the hotshot rookie detective everyone hated was about to enter a world of hurt for her inability to crack the case before a US Senator ended up dead.

The debacle was not Gwen's fault. Gwen was a smart detective, a competent detective and she usually had a little bit of an edge when it came to solving cases. Gwen had a few things working for her that made her an excellent detective. She had a keen eye and a knack for seeing things that no one else saw. Gwen could also hear people's thoughts, a little fact that she kept to herself to keep her from being totally alienated from her coworkers. She didn't know why or how she could do it, but listening to people's thoughts was like being able to hear a whisper. With a little bit of concentration, she could hear whatever was on a person's mind. However, while being able to hear people's thoughts usually came in handy in her line of work, it was proving to be useless working on this case. While being able to hear thoughts was great for getting the truth, it unfortunately did not work on dead bodies, which was about all she was turning up in her current case.

Gwen had been on the case for almost three weeks, and in that time five dead bodies had sprung up in the Metro area, each one with a broken neck and a distinctive bite-like mark on their necks. The first four had been homeless people, bums and vagrants who no one would miss. There were no links that connected them to each other, besides the fact that they were all homeless and all had no family or friends that reported them missing. Each had been found in a different part of town, killed sometime the night before and left dead in a ditch or a stream. The only thing Gwen had to go on was the unusual punctures in the neck. The coroner had determined the marks to be made postmortem, judging mainly from the lack of blood in the wounds. The crime lab, meanwhile, determined that the marks were artificially made, as there was no human or animal who could have possibly caused them with their teeth. However, the marks did look like the bite of a vampire, and so the Vampire Killer name stuck with the media, leading the entire investigation to be surrounded by a perpetual media circus. Every single day, Gwen fielded at least a dozen calls about the case from different media outlets, asking if she had any leads, if she had any witnesses, and if she believed the killings to be based on the recent infatuation that teenage girls were having with vampires. And to each question, Gwen refused to give an answer.

I'd Personally Prefer to see the Bat-Symbol

Sorry for the lack of posts, my life continues to eat away at my free time like a killer whale eats at baby seals. I was convinced a month ago that my summer would be wretchedly boring. My girlfriend is up at Cedar Point, the Indians suck so badly that I'm half expecting Charlie Sheen to take the mound, and there's nothing on at all on TV (except for Craig Ferguson, bless his Scottish soul). Boy, was I wrong.

I saw a William Henry Harrison coin today at the bookstore. This is easily one of the three stupidest things I have ever seen. William Henry Harrison was the idiot president who was so vain he couldn't be bothered to wear a thick hat or coat out on his inaugeration day and promptly caught pnemounia and died. Basically, natural selection overruled the popular choice for president and selected someone else instead. Why in God's name are we recgonizing and honoring a man who's most notable achievements were a) beating up a bunch of Indians in Indiana and b) grandfathering the other failure of a president also named Harrison. I have to wonder what the hell the US Mint was thinking. I mean, this is what we're doing with taxpayer money? No wonder our economy sucks. We're putting out subpar money with a picture of a guy who's best known for dying at an inopportune time. It's just plain stupid.

Here's the best conversation I can come up with that could even cause William Henry Harrison to pop up on a piece of US currency.

Mint Guy 1: Well, the Sacajawea dollars didn't do jack squat.
Mint Guy 2: Who would have imagined that no one would actually want to use a coin with a person who, while historically relevant, is less popular than Jimmy Carter's older brother.
Mint Guy 1: Well that guy did make a great beer. So what should we try now? We already tried Dwight D. Eisenhower while his corpse was still warm and that didn't work.
Mint Guy 2: Then we tried an 11-sided coin with a picture of Susan B. Anthony that basically made her look like an angry school teacher instead of a prominent feminist of the late 19th Century.
Mint Guy 1: Why did we do that again?
Mint Guy 2: Hell if I know. I was high at the time. It was the seventies.
Mint Guy 1: Well, at least some things never change. (Takes a large puff of pot wrapped in a twenty dollar bill) I got a great idea! Let's put pictures of the president on the dollar coins!
Mint Guy 2: Dude, we already have that now. Have you ever looked at a coin? We have Lincoln and Washington and Jefferson and FDR. That's basically all of Mount Rushmore.
Mint Guy 1: But this time, we'll put on all the presidents that no one likes! The one's who don't deserve to be remembered.
Mint Guy 2: But we have that too. Grant's on the Fifty and Jackass McGee is on the 20. (That's Jackson's actual historical title by the way, Jackass McGee)
Mint Guy 1: And see how well that works out! Everyone likes to spend the twenty! I bet they'll like spending a coin with that one guy who died after thirty days! Or the asshat who basically let his friends run the nation into the ground and directly contributed to the Great Depression!
Mint Guy 2: I don't think this is a good use of taxpayer money. Won't this only encourage people not to spend dollar coins, thus weakening our crap economy even further?
Mint Guy 1: Do you have a better idea?
Mint Guy 2:....Batman? Do you think we can get the rights to the Bat-Symbol?

I swear, our country seems to celebrate mediocrity more and more nowadays. We used to actually strive for big things, like putting men on the moon or beating the Russians. We used to put a picture of the eagle landing on the moon with a big flag saying "SUCK IT RUSSIA" on our coins. Nowadays, we seem to be content with putting idiots on our coins while our Congressmen putz around bitching about Michael Jackson and the BCS Bowl Championship system instead of ACTUALLY FIXING SOMETHING. At this point, I actually sometimes consider moving up to Canada. Yeah, they're a bunch of lackluster socialists who couldn't think of anything better to put on their flag then a stupid leaf, but at least their health care works, hockey is on every TV station, and their beer is half decent.

My Greatest Fear

I've managed to stop worrying about a lot of things in my life. My fear of dying alone has largely been sated, as has my fear of dying too soon. I've also managed to stop worrying about the little stuff like the idiot driving in front of me or the kid who gets ticked off because I won't give him $100 for a book that looks like Moses used it back when he was going to Pharoh school. However, there's one thing that always nags on the back of my mind. And that would be when exactly are my friends going to realize that they are far too good for me and leave me in the dust. Now before you get on the whole "Christian, you're self-esteem is too low" kick, it's really not that.

You see, my friends are these amazing people. They're like family to me. Hell, my family considers them to be family. (My grandma calls my best friend part of the Asian branch of the Hoffer family). They've pulled me through some really tough times. And what have I done for them? Egged them into liver damage and alcohol dependence and filled their head with mildly amusing stories which have no value in the real world. I feel like I'm not holding up my end of the bargain. I mean, my friends are doctors and artists and engineers. And what am I? A textbook manager. A perfectly acceptable job, but not exactly in the same echelon as saving lives, building bridges or providing lasting contributions to culture. And I sometimes think to myself "Man, I am really holding them back. When are they going to see that and run like the wind?" Every time I hang out with them, there's this stupid thought running through my head that wonders if I'm going to say something stupid or do something to piss them off and that's when it's just going to click in their heads that I'm not good enough for them.

It's probably a silly thought, like most thoughts that I have. But honestly, it's the one that worries me the most. My friends are part of my family and my family is the most important thing in the world to me. And I kind of wonder when they're going to figure out when they could start doing a lot better than me.

Some Things I'd Like to Say to People

I'm tired and cranky. As such, here are a few things I'd like to get off my chest.

To the Iranian Government: Congratulations! Your regime just got pwned by twitter. Defeated by 140 characters or less, sucks to be you.

To Twitter: Don't try to use the Iranian protests as an excuse, your website STILL has no practical purpose.

To my cat: I swear, cat, I will start pawing at you when you're sleeping to see how you like it. And yes I know that you probably will like it because you're a cat and you like it when anything with a pulse touches you. But I'll do it anyways.

To Thomas Jefferson: I still don't get why you're on the nickel. You sucked as a president. Just sayin'.

To vampires: I'm onto you guys. Watch your backs.

To the people who live next to my apartment: I'm proud to be an American too, but you don't hear me blaring the song at 3 AM in the morning while screaming how wasted I am while I serve underagers (which I know to be underagers because they scream out "Wooooo! I'm 19 and I'm WASTED!"). Keep this up and I'm sure the police will be proud to be Americans while they arrest your asses for partying on a TUESDAY.

Life Lessons From Drinking

(Disclaimer for the following post: Alcohol is bad. I, in no way endorse alcoholism, binge drinking, or any of the other terrible things that stems from drinking. I firmly believe that alcohol is the devil's drink and that it is my mission to consume every last drop of it to rid the world of its corrupting influence)

Blame it on the alcohol, blame it on the booze, blame it on whatever you like, I love to drink. Over the course of the last couple of years, I've been involved with a few shenanigans of the drinking variety. Here are a few of the things I've learned from boozing it up with my compatriots.


The key to getting drinks quickly is to make eye contact with the bartender. If they are forced to acknowledge your existence, they will have to give you booze to make you go away.

When you stumble in and the cat shoots you a look that says "Leave me alone," you probably have had too much to drink. When the cat actually looks at you and says "Leave me alone, human, before I scratch out your eyes," you've definitely had too much to drink.

Don't pick fights with inanimate objects. You can't win.

Fire is not your friend. It never has been and it never will be. Don't let the fire try to tell you otherwise.

If faced with the choice between food or alcohol, choose the alcohol. Most beverages contain calories so if you drink enough, the hunger will go away...or you will die of alcohol poisoning. Either way, problem solved.

There are no such things as classy drinking parties. Only shitshows waiting to happen.

Yes, alcohol can take away your pain. But it comes back twice as bad the next day.

When it comes to blackouts, not knowing is half the battle.

Chances are if it sounds bad in your head, it will sound even worse coming out of your mouth.

Everyone has a ridiculous drinking story. If they don't, get them drunk and give them one.

And of course, don't drink and drive. It's a whole lot easier to stumble home the next morning then being dead. Just sayin'.

The Grand Christian R Hoffer To Buy List

This is the official Summer of 2009 Christian Hoffer To Buy List.

New flip flops
A new DVD rack
A new DVD player
The 1st, 4th, and 5th seasons of LOST
Patio furniture
New pots and pans
A chainsaw, just in case
A domesticated bald eagle that sits on my shoulder and glares at hippies for no reason
The Hope Diamond
A cannon to protect any high ground I might gain throughout the summer
A spare house to drop on Wicked Witches of any compass direction (particularly the Wicked Witch of the Northwest)
An underground lair for Moochie
A supercomputer for said underground lair
A full-sized portait of myself to cover the entrance of the underground lair
A cape, also for Moochie
A cape for the bald eagle when it decides to team up with Moochie
A satellite, preferably armed with lasers or at least Bluetooth capabilities
The Loch Ness Monster (I'll store her in the pool behind my apartment building)
An professional curling team located out of Norwalk Ohio.
A pride of Oompa Loompas to do my bidding and taunt visitors to the apartment with clever jingles


If I can manage to get at least half of these things by the end of September, it'll be a moderately productive summer.

American Idol-3/31

I don't have very much to say about American Idol this week. Basically, it sucked. If I had to sum up the show in one word, it would be "turd". If I had to sum it up in two, they would be "large turd".

The idiot who picked the theme "Top iTunes 100" should be taken out back immediately and shot. There wasn't a single good song choice in the whole she-bang, Adam Lambert managed to kill another one of my favorite songs, and I found more amusement in watching my cat lie prone on the floor then I did for almost all of the performances. Official prediction: Either Anoop or Megan goes home. Chances are it's Anoop, but I'm secretly hoping its Megan.

Since talking about Idol leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. I will instead leave you with five facts that are definitely 100% utterly true.

1) I love pickles.
2) I've had inappropriate dreams about Miss Piggy and Gonzo.
3) I hate comic books and I buy them solely for the fact that they appreciate in value.
4) I find sporting events to be rather boring. The lone exception to this is cricket, which I understand perfectly.
5) I have decided to become a vegetarian and will never eat another steak, hamburger
hot dog again.











APRIL FOOLS!

Weekend Shorts

Two of my friends got engaged this weekend. My first reaction: giddy girl-like squealing. My second reaction: God, I hope there's a open bar. My third reaction: giddy girl-like squealing over the prospect of an open bar.

I've had three burritos in the course of 48 hours. I would say I'm going a bit overboard but then I remembered my hayday where I'd eat nothing but burritos. I'm probably going to eat two more today. One because I'm hungry, and the other to prove that I can.

I still don't understand the phrase "sucking on a chili dog". Damn you John Cougar Mellencamp! On a totally unrelated sidenote, I wish my middle name was Cougar.

If I had to describe this weekend in two words, they would be "pretty" and "awesome". If I had to describe the upcoming week in four words, they would be "evil", "doom", "destruction" and "alabaster."

Oh No! There Goes Tokyo!

When I was a kid, I loved disaster movies. Movies about floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, giant fire breathing monsters, you name the disaster, I loved it. I could basically recite the entire script of Independence Day word for word (both the TV edit and the original cut) and name every single monster that Godzilla ever stared down (not that he had much of choice, those painted on eyes couldn't really blink). Unfortunately, watching these movies during my formative years did have an effect on my psych. Basically, I grew up just waiting for disaster to strike.
Now, I can't say that disaster has really struck my life at any point in time. Sure, there was that time that I had to lead a team of oil riggers up to a giant asteroid to blow it up before it landed on New York City, but other than that, I can't really complain too much. But, I do often find myself preparing for the worst case scenario, the one that seems to be just a tad bit unrealistic to actually happen. Although, if you've heard some of the famous "Christian Hoffer too ridiculous to be false" stories that pop up from time to time, you'd totally understand why it helps to be prepared.
You might think that I'm being pessimistic, and to be perfectly honest, part of me is. I expect the worst, even when good things happen to me. When I win the lottery, I don't say "Oh boy, how much money am I getting?" I say "Oh great, what group of professional thieves are going to try to rob me now?" Good dates don't happen with me, only dates that don't leave me in the hospital with a broken leg and a restraining order. So do I over think when I come up with the 51 different reasons how the s*** is about to hit the fan? Well....yeah. But only a little.
See here's the thing. If I learned one thing in the Boy Scouts, it's to be prepared. (If I learned two things in Boy Scouts, it would to be prepared and always carry a knife in case you need to knife fight a bear to the death, but that's a different story) And if things don't end up in disaster, I'm pleasantly surprised and I take it as a good thing. And if they do end up in disaster, well, I have a tent, three weeks of rations and sleeping supplies ready to go to my van just in case that horde of monsters pop up from another dimension and start marching down the east coast.

In other news. There is a God. Michael Sarver got the boot on Idol. I'll say an extra rosary today in thanks.

If there's one thing that I've learned from network television, it's that everybody loves needless complications. All of the top TV shows features them. House is unhappy for no other reason than he wants to be happy and it makes good drama. Grey's Anatomy features so much needless complication that it takes three flow charts to describe it. Hell, even American Idol features needless complications. That's why they draw out the damn thing for five months when everyone and their great aunt knows who's going to end up in the final three.

Needless complications, however, are a pain in the ass. They're kinda like needless adverbs in Harry Potter books. They're cute at first, tolerable for a while, but by the seventh freakin' book, you just want to fly out to Great Britain and yell at J.K Rowling that WE KNOW HERMOINE SOUNDS SCARED. ONE TENDS TO DO THAT WHEN THEY'RE BEING CONFRONTED BY A DARK WIZARD EVERY TEN FLIPPIN' PAGES. YOU DON'T NEED TO TELL US EVERY OTHER SENTENCE. I'm convinced that 45% percent of the anger directed at the seventh book is subconsiously devoted to the disgustingly disproportionate amount of adverbs that floats around in the previous six books. (By the way, Ms. Rowling, that last sentence featured alliteration. It's one of the many literary tools that exist out there besides bludgeoning the reader to death with adverbs)

So I say to hell with needless complications. If a guy likes a girl, he likes her. If he doesn't, then he doesn't. Why in God's name should there be something in between? To hell with stupid complications mucking everything up. God did not create the universe to fill with needless complications. If God wanted this, then he would have made the giraffe the dominant lifeform and then filled the world with small trees, just to laugh. Luckily, God did not make giraffes the dominant lifeform. In fact, God created the giraffe just to remind us that tall people are only good at playing basketball and eating leaves with blue tongues that are two feet long.

So to get to my point, I'm knocking my needless complications out of my life one by one. If it gets complicated, and it's needless, then to hell with it. It's probably not worth it anyways. I'm sick of the sleepless nights, the stupid neurotic attacks and the nauseating worrying over stuff that ends up falling to the wayside in a month and a half. And no, nothing has caused this outburst, I simply came to the conclusion that needless complications blow and my life will probably be better off without them.

I performed a very important experiment last night during American Idol. I decided to see what effect, if any, alcohol had on my analysis of the competition. I learned a couple of very important things.

1) I really do not like Kara "Must Sing During Every Critique" DaoGuardi.

2) I really could care less what Megan Joy sounds like because she's the only attractive female left on the competition.

3) I still don't remember who the heck Kris Allen is.

4) Paula and Simon are totally bumping uglies. Totally.

Anyways, the three top performances of the night were Matt Giraud, Anoop Desai and Alison Iraheta. The bottom three were Michael "The Country Guy who Can't Sing Country" Sarver, Megan Joy (the theme weeks have not been kind to her...distinctive voice) and Scott MacIntyre. I know Scott is blind and all, but it's about time he donned a pair of Stevie Wonder glasses. It would raise his coolness factor by a scale of fifteen and eliminate the Randy Travis like stare that he seems to have.

It's interesting to note that none of the three "top performers" had strong weeks. Danny Gokey was a little lot on the corny side. Lil Rounds disappointed considering Motown Week should have been one of her strong points. And I really won't comment on Adam Lambert, other than to say he's officially won the vote of my cat, who perks up whenever he hits one of the notes that only she can hear.

Next week, I plan on revealing my official top eight prediction, picking who will drop out when and all that jazz. It should be a good time.

An Open Address to the Union

My fellow Americans,

There has been dark rumblings on the wind. Dark rumblings that have spread to even some of those who read this blog. There are some out there who want me to change. There are some who want me to cave in to peer pressure. There are some out there who believe that just because everyone else jumps off a cliff, I should do it too. So I come before you now to reemphasize my position and reassure. I will not cut my hair.
There are several reasons why I won't cut my hair. First of all, it costs money. In this tough economic climate, money is hard to come by and should be spent on important things, like hockey, booze or comics. Hair cuts are a nonessential part of my budget and are therefore deprioritized. What would you see me lose in order to get my hair cut? Food? Electricity? Rent? These are things far too important and more crucial to the survival of the Christian Hoffer lifestyle to simply give up or cut back.
Secondly, my long hair looks good. I could give you example after example after example of people who have told me that my hair looks good long. My friends think so, my employees think so, and random strangers off the street think so. In a day and age where people run around with short hair that gets cut daily, my hair stands out...in a good way. It looks good, there is simply no denying it. As long as it's combed and maintains its form, I basically look like a young Errol Flynn or Gene Kelly.
Thirdly, I look much older with long hair. When my hair is short, I look like Doogie Howser, without the medical degree. I look like I'm fifteen and I'm treated as such. Do you know how demeaning it is to be carded to go to a rated PG-13 movie? Especially when I'm old enough to buy alcohol? Do you know how demeaning it is to have a Wal-Mart employee ask if I'm lost and don't know where my daddy is? I know damn well where my father is! He's 150 miles away because I've been living in Columbus for the last four years! With long hair, I'm carded less, I'm treated with more respect, and customers at the store don't scoff when they find out I'm the manager. Despite my frequent trips to Toys R Us, I am a grown-up and I deserve to be treated like one.
Fourthly, plenty of great Americans have had long hair. Steve Perry had long hair. So did Thomas Jefferson. All four of the Beatles had long hair, and they made the greatest music ever known Do you want me not to make great music? Do you?
To address my critics, who I know have been bought off by the powerful hair cutting industry, I will say this. My hair does not look like a flock of seagulls. This is what a flock of seagulls look like. Note the definite presence of seagulls flying around like little harbringers of doom. My hair looks nothing like a flock of seagulls. If anything it looks like ducks in a row, cool, calm, collected and respectful of authority figures.
So to summarize. My hair looks good. It is not getting cut. If you do not like it, too bad. My hair's long, it's strong and it's staying where it belongs! Goodnight, and God Bless America.


Sorry for the lack of posts, it's been a busy and interesting couple of days. Idol Analysis Tomorrow.

American Idol Results-March 18th

Sorry about the lack of a post yesterday. It was St. Patrick's Day and I was celebrating it by being sick as a dog. Still am.

So, Idol time. First of all, I would just like to state how much I hate country week. I hate country week, I hate country week, I freakin' HATE country week. There has been exactly one person in eight seasons to perform well in country week, and that was Carrie Underwood. American Idol is supposed to be a pop music competition and country music is very rarely pop music. It's like watching a figure skating competition that's determined by a hockey shootout. There sorta the same...but not really.

It's still too early to determine a good rankings, but I will say that Danny Gokey (the Lenscrafters model) and Lil Rounds (Fantasia 1.5) seem to do no evil in the judges eyes. Still, a couple of pratfalls and they could end up on par with the rest of the competition. Other than that, it's a wide open race. I will say that Michael Carver (the oil rigger with a heart of gold), and Scott McEntryre (the guy who makes American Idol ADA complient) are the weakest links. Everyone else has a legitimate shot at making the top four...except for last night's elimination.

Alexis Grace, AKA the little sexpot who could, got eliminated last night in one of the more infuriating eliminations of all time. I liked Alexis. She had a solid voice, a great body and had a decent backstory. I didn't like how Kara "I write music for Ali Lohan for a living" DeoGuardi tried to slut her up on a constant basis, but I liked Alexis. She was certainly more talented then Kris "Jason Mraz without the personality or voice" Allen or Matt "Killed a Johnny Cash Song Just to See it Die"Lambert. And yet she got the boot.

Now, I'm not going to gnash my teeth over this. I'm not going to bitch and moan about how Michael Carver played up his accent to win the country vote. I'm not going to bitch and moan about how I'm convinced that Alexis was a sacrificial lamb to disprove recent reports that Idol is rigged. For better or worse, we live in a land where crying on TV gets votes and the most talented person doesn't always win. O well, at least we have Motown next week to take our minds off of it.

A Loose, Inaccurate History of Ireland

Today is St. Patrick's Day, the national holiday of Ireland. I could go on and on about how amazing Ireland is and how much the Irish rock,but.... actually, that's exactly what I'll do.


There is a story about how Ireland came to be. When God created the heavens and the earth, he originally made Ireland to be the home for Adam, the first man. However, upon seeing the beauty and glory of the Emerald Isle, he decided that it shouldn't be sullied by the likes of Adam, and threw him into some shoddy garden instead.
For years, Ireland remained untouched by the human race, its beautiful hills and crystal lakes free from the destructive habits of man. Then one day, a young St. Patrick discovered an amazing brew. By fermenting barley in a cask, he invented whiskey, also known as the nectar for the gods. God took favor upon St. Patrick and made him the bishop of Ireland, and gave him a feisty, hot-blooded people to tame and teach the ways of Catholicism.

For hundred of years, the Irish flourished in Ireland. They singlehandedly saved civilization, they invented the Irish jig, and they perfected the art of alcoholism. The Irish learned to live with the land instead of abuse it, and in doing so became as much a part of the land as the Blarney Stone or Guinness Beer. The Irish populated the Emerald Isle with their red-headed children and lived life like it was a giant party, which made all their neighbors jealous. So the bastard English showed up with their crappy teeth and their crappy king and tried to ruin it all. So they did what any good Irishmen would do, made some Irish car bombs, got drunk, and drove them to the crappiest part of Northern Ireland (which happens to be the Protestant part).
After the Irish kicked the English out of Ireland, they decided to spread the wealth of their Gaelic heritage to the rest of the world. They moved to the Americas, the Australias, and the other less awesome parts of the world. And they flourished there too. They perfected the art of the Irish pub, came up with a practical use for the patty wagon, and provided the labor for almost every major construction project for over a hundred years. So what do the Irish do today? Well, they're rulers of the free world, created some of the most prolific songs of our time, and create the most kickass cereal ever imagined.
But the best part about the Irish, better than the history or the red hair or the ridiculous tolerance of alcohol, is that they know what matters in life. They know that God and family are more important then anything else. And the Irish know how to celebrate life and live it to its fullest. That's what St. Patrick's Day is all about: celebrating God, family and life in general. So today, pretend like your Irish. Live life, drink a beer, and kiss someone who's Irish. And if you're interested in doing all three, give me a call. I'll be free after eight.

Weekend Shorts

I have a stiletto heel-sized cut in my back. It came from a girl kicking me as I sat at a table below her. She wanted me to take a picture of her and her friends. I took the picture of her friends, but she wasn't in any of them. I cut her out of every shot. She made me bleed, I think it was only fair.

I watched the season premiere of Kings last night. Not bad, but not great. I pray that NBC doesn't hype it up like they did with Heroes. That show had one good season and then it went quicker in the gutter then Marisa Tomei's career.

It's buyback week at the bookstore. It's my least favorite time of the quarter, because I have to explain the hard reality of supply and demand to students. It's especially frustrating when I have to explain "fair market value" to a kid who's trying to sell back his economics textbook.

Cats don't like bearded German men.

The week to come is going to be a doozy. St. Patrick's Day, hockey, a return to the piano bar, and I crack open the champagne bottle on Saturday. Plus March Madness. My liver is going to be working overtime.

The Best Way to Beat a Bear Market is to Kill it Dead and then Kill It Some More

So yesterday I saw a man opt out of buying an ice cream cone because it was "too expensive". You know economic times are hard when $2.59 is too a high a price for ice cream in 35 degree weather. Whereas before I scoffed at this recession as a media driven fabrication, similar to global warming or the WNBA, the self-denial of a Jumbo King Cone gave me irrevertable proof that our economy is in a tailspin. Therefore I've devised of three solutions to immediately resolve this recession and restore our nation's confidence in the buying of cold treats to enjoy on cold days.

1) Kill all the economists.

Experts keep telling us that the economy is to blame for the current recession. Therefore, I propose that we adopt the policy that ignorance is bliss and kill anyone who says otherwise. Basically, we give the economists a month to get all the doom and gloom out of their system and then simply shut down all talk about the economy under threat of death. Confidence in the market goes up because nobody knows that anything is wrong. And who would tell them otherwise? Economics becomes a taboo subject that no one is allowed to speak about, like Brittany Spears' or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, Sure, it's censorship, but at least we'll no longer have to listen about stuff like "bear markets" or "supply and demand" anymore.

2) Replace all money with trash.

Basically, we say that our refuse has value instead of the flimsy peaces of green stuff we stuff in our pockets and purses. I see a lot of benefits to this system. Income becomes a lot more disposable. The hippies are sated because we start recycling our trash and reuse it a lot more. We're encouraged to consume more because by consuming more, we create more trash, which in turn allows to spend more. Hell, it even cuts back on landfills and littering, which eliminates the threat of crying Indians on our highways.

3) Require all men to grow facial hair.

In the 1930's, FDR created a massive public works program to create jobs and jump start the economy. In the 1960's, Kennedy did the same by aiming for the moon. Requiring all men to grow facial hair would basically do the same thing for today's economy. The instant demand for trimmers and other facial hair products would create millions of jobs and the fierce competition to provide superior products would spur innovation and further R&D at home and abroad. Plus, we'd see classy face-dos like the Burnside and the Octopus.


By immediately adopting these policies, we'd either see an immediate turnaround or an immediate collapse into anarchy. Either way, we'd no longer have a crappy economy. We'd either have a strong economy or no economy at all.

I Wonder What Dracula's Stock Portfolio Looks Like...

I heard a funny story today. Apparently, an employer made a hiring decision based upon reading a prospective employee's blog. The blog in question portrayed its writer as a creative, insightful person who would make for a great employee. Since blogs (and the interweb in general) are now fair game for employers to be, I have decided to mold this post to appeal to any future employers that might be lurking.

March 11
6:15 PM: Woke up as the accursed sun went down. How I hate the sun and its rays of death! I long for when the sun never rises so we nightwalkers can roam the earth free.

7:30 PM: Hunted down a hearty breakfast and sucked it dry. A good breakfast is essential to start off the day right. It keeps the immune system healthy and allows you to get a taste for the day to come.

9:00 PM: After I put on my cape and brushed my fangs, I flew to work. I love the evening commute with the breeze rushing past my pointy, transformed ears. And of course, being able to transform into a bat really cuts down on commute time.

11:30 PM: Dealt with some of my favorite people today. Politicians! In this world filled with do-gooders, it's good to know that there's some fellow blood-suckers out there, at least in spirit. In exchange for me not killing them and feasting on their blood, politicians agreed to set aside government money for my non-profit organization, Vampires for a Better World.

1 AM: At lunch, waiter forgot that I specifically requested no garlic in my soup. I was very upset. Was the waiter trying to kill me? I made sure that he got the point (it's a pun, get it?) and insured that he'd never repeat the same mistake twice. Of course, I wasn't very hungry after that.

3 AM: Heard a great joke. What do you call a dead werewolf? A good start. Haha, I hate werewolfs. Lousy, hairy halfbreeds.

5 AM: Finished work and flew home. On my way there, I saw a couple of hooligans defacing public property. I decided to take a bite out of crime and complete my civic duty for the day.

7:30 AM: The sun is about to rise. It's time to get in my coffin and get to bed.


Obviously, I'm banking that there's a lasting effect from this whole Twilight craze and also that vampires have sizable holdings that weren't touched by the recent upheavel in the stock market. Blood banks are recession proof, right?


In other news....

Two out of three ain't bad. Jasmine Murray and Jorge Nunez got kicked off American Idol tonight, sparing Anoop Desai. While I predicted that Michael Carver would get the boot, I simply overestimated the Hispanic vote. It's happened before. Note, however, that I said that Anoop, Jorge and Megan Joy were the three worst performers. Who comprised three of the final four? Anoop, Jorge and Megan Joy.

Follow-Ups and Robot Shootings

First thing's first...Ever wonder what a cyborg murder/suicide looked like? Look no further.

Now, onto the commentary on last night's Idol....

First of all, did anyone else think that it was hilarious that Idol had to use 1877-IDOLS-36 as the final number? Apperantly, IDOLS-13 is a...risque phone line. I hate to think what IDOLS-14 through IDOLS-35 belong to...

There's supposed to be a big twist on tonight's Idol regarding who gets the boot. My money is on the judges getting the final say in who gets voted off. America will play judge and jury, and the judges get to play executioner. Basically, it would be identical to the British version of Idol, X Factor. This will either turn out to be brilliant or horrible. My opinion is that it'll be both. It's brilliant in that the judges get to do something besides being a sideshow for the next 10 weeks. It's horrible in that we're leaving this competition's fate to Paula "Straight Up on crack" Abdul and Kara "I'm responsible for the Backstreet Boys revival" Dioguardi. That just scares me. Either way, it'll make for good ratings. Also, Seacreast said something about two people getting voted off tonight, but Seacreast says a lot of things, so who knows.

Onto Michael Jackson night on Idol....Well, three of my five early contenders lived up to the hype. Alexis Grace, Danny Gokey and Lil Rounds knocked their performances out of the park. Adam Lambert (the guy who made Black and White sound a little evil) and Alison Iraheta (fun fact of the week: she works as a performer for the Latin equivalent to Wal-Mart!) also get props for strong vocals as well. Scott MacIntyre struggled a bit, but he'll be back next week. No way America will vote off a blind man on week one.
Disappointment of the Week award goes to Anoop Desai. What the hell, man! No spunk, no soul, no nothing. Where's the moonwalk? Where's the pelvic thrusting? Basically, Anoop's performance was worse than the thing formally known as Michael Jackson's nose. Hate to say it, but he had one of the bottom three performances of the night.

The other two belonged to Jorge Nunez and Megan Joy. I said that Jorge wouldn't survive some of the theme weeks, and it's looking like that prediction is coming true already. Megan's song choice (Rockin' Robin) was terrible, but what Michael Jackson song would honestly fit her voice? If anything, Megan's performance simply reminded me that hipster's don't really belong in a pop competition.

Still, I maintain that all three have a shot to make it through to the next rounds. Anoop should still have a fan base from the semifinals, Jorge has the Hispanic vote (just remember people, that's how Bush won in 2000), and Megan...well I got nothing to help her out, other then she's the second cutest female in the competition.

So who rounds out my bottom three? Jasmine Murray certainly should get consideration. Her performance wasn't terrible, but it didn't do her any favors. Kris Allen's performance reminded me of this video, which while amusing, isn't Idol worthy. Matt Giraud's performance was forgettable, which is always dangerous in the early rounds, and Michael Sarver just has me worried for some reason. He lacks a real fan base and his performance wasn't the type to create one.

So here's my official final three prediction. Jasmine, Anoop and Michael in the bottom three, with Jasmine getting the first boot and Michael getting the second boot if I heard it correctly. However, if the judges get a say in the matter, I can see Anoop getting sent home over either one, as Simon simply likes Jasmine and Michael better.

American Idol....There can only be one!

There's not too many things that I'd consider myself to be an expert on. I simply don't have enough life experience. There are very few things that I've actually observed and experienced long enough to actually really understand what's going on. American Idol is one of those things.
I don't want to like Idol, with it's mediocre performances, blatant and unabashed product placement (they have a coffee table with a freakin' wheel in it for crying out loud), and some of the terrible effects it's had on the music industry (Clay Aiken! Clay Aiken! Clay Aiken!) But for whatever reason, I love it. I love watching people's hopes and dreams getting crushed on live television (realizing that almost all of them will get record deals). I love watching the reason that painkillers and Coca-Cola should never mix Paula Abdul make nonsensical remarks about colors and butterflies when she's supposed to critique a performance. Hell, I even love the homoeroticism that goes on between Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacreast.
And to top it off, I even seem to have a knack about guessing what's going to happen on Idol. I correctly predicted the top eight of last year in the order of their elimination. Hell, I even correctly predicted that there would be a top 13 this year (Ask my friend Morbitzer, he was there). So I figured since the interweb isn't filled with enough dribble about American Idol, I'd throw my hat into the rink. So beginning this week to when I get bored the season finale, I'll offer up my humble opinion on the upcoming week and where the contestants stand on the elimination radar.

Week One

Due to the varying amount of screen time that the finalists have had, I can't really make a firm estimate on what order the contestants will fall. I can, however, easily divide them into three groups: Simon-fodder (the one's who'll be lucky to make it past week three), theUnknowns/Dark Horses, and the Legitimate Contenders.

Simon Fodder
Jasmine Murray-The seventeen year old who apparently too old sounding. She's the easily the weakest link in the top 13. She hasn't had a strong performance since the show went live and made it through purely based on commercial appeal.

Michael Carver-The oil-rigger with a heart of gold. He has the weakest vocals, but his rough and tumble story should carry him for a few weeks.

Matt Giraud-The dueling pianist. I would have rather listened to the Esurance band then his cover of Viva la Vida. The first song that he misfires on will be his doom.

Kris Allen-The heartthrob (?) of the bunch. I sincerely couldn't remember a thing about him until I looked him up. Don't expect America to remember much about him either.

The Unknowns

Allison Iraheta-The most awkward contestant ever. She sang the socks out of Alone, but she never appeared on the show before then. She did apperantly win a Telemundo singing contest by singing Total Eclipse of the Heart, so I don't think she's a one-and-doner.

Adam Lambert-The Twilight/Chemical Romance/goth dude. He can hit the high notes, but that's about it. He also has a shot at clinching the ever-important seventeen year old girl vote if the photo of him kissing another dude doesn't make the rounds on the tween magazines.

Megan Joy Corkroy-The hipster. She's got a different voice, and if she picks the right songs, she could make it count.

Jorge Nunez-The Puerto Rican. I like Jorge, and he's got a great voice. I only worry about him surviving some of the theme weeks (Country week, anyone?)

The Legitimate Contenders

Anoop Desai.-The most awesome contestant of all time. He's a great performer, easily likable, and will have my vote week after week. But will he last down the stretch? He needs to prove that he can hold his own on the vocal end.

Scott MacIntyre-The blind guy. Great singer, great story, and he publicly humiliated Seacreast on national television. Those are the recipes for an American Idol.

Lil Rounds-Fantasia Barrino 2.0-She's got the singing chops. Heck, she's probably the best singer in the competition. I only worry that she'll take on a Mariah Carey song that she can't win.

Alexis Grace-The spunky blonde. The true love of one of my best friends, she's my favorite of the girls. She's got a hell of a voice, but I don't like how she totally changed her image to better compete in Idol. Still, she's got a legitimate shot at winning.

Danny Gokey-The guy who's wife died. His heartbreaking story about his dead wife has made his run to the top of the competition that more touching. Let's just hope the producers don't make the audience tired of hearing about it.


And that's how they divide out in my mind. I'll be sure to update tomorrow after the results come in to see if there's any changes. (Ten bucks says there won't!)

What's the Point of Watching Watchmen?

For the last week, I've been trying to figure out what issue I had with the movie Watchmen. This is a movie based on arguably the greatest of comic books. The story is one of the deepest, most layered pieces of fiction ever to grace sequential pages of art. And on the surface, Watchmen lives up to the hype. The movie is basically the comic put into motion form. On a visual level, the movie lives up to every standard that could possibly be put down. Many of the scenes are literally ripped from the pages, bringing the imagery and parallels straight to the big screen.
But something isn't right about the movie. At first, I blamed it on some of the minor issues: the cheesy soundtrack, the lousy transitions between scenes, or the awful acting of Matthew Goode (Ozymandias). However, as I was running today, listening to Alone by Heart, I realized just what was missing. It was missing heart.
My real issue with Watchmen is that I found myself not caring about any of the characters. There's no true emotion involved and it's next to impossible to care about any of the characters. Dr. Manhattan sounds depressed throughout the entire movie, Silk Spectre either pouts, wistfully soliloquizes, or runs around half naked (or naked), and Rohrshach is...well, he's Rohrshach. The Comedian is a murderous sociopath who's almost impossible to empathize with. The only character who's relatable is Nite-Owl, which provides the only character interactions that are remotely enjoyable.
I understand that the point of the movie is to portray superheroes as imperfect and flawed, but Watchmen the comic manage to do this and make you care about the characters. You care that Dr. Manhattan is detached from humanity, you care that Silk Spectre has become bitter living in the role that her mother groomed her for since early childhood, and you care that Rohrshach is...well, Rohrshach. Somehow, Zach Snyder managed to miss the entire emotional part of the story, the part that makes you care that the world is on the brink of nuclear armageddon. You don't care that someone's killing off superheroes. Hell, you kind of hope that they manage to do it in under two and half hours, just so you can escape the theatre a little earlier.
The sad thing is that there are far lesser movies that get its viewers emotionally invested in its characters. The interpretive dance that was Ang Lee's Incredible Hulk at least made you feel sorry for Eric Bana (if only for the fact that his name was attached to the movie). Horror movies make you hope that someone get's out of the haunted amusement park alive, or at least doesn't die a virgin. Hell, even The Notebook made you happy that the two old people finally died at the end.
I don't mean to bash on Watchmen. It probably is the greatest comic book of all time. I'm glad they made it, if only to bring a lighter, emotionless version to the screen. Now, when the inevitable remake comes along, let's hope that they make it with a little less "cool, slow-motion badassness" and a little more "gives a crap about what happens".

Hockey and the Great Socioeconomic Divide

I never really believed in a culture divide in the United States. Red states versus blue states never really made much sense to me because at the end of the day every state was still an American state. But as of last year, I have noticed a divide which has led me to believe that there was a culture war and it's already been won.
The culmination of this revelation came when I had a conversation with an associate of mine today. When I mentioned that I went to a hockey game over the weekend, she stared at me with a look of disgust and said "Really? Hockey? That's such a hick sport."
Hockey, for those of you who don't know, is considered to be the third most popular sport in the United States, under football and baseball and slightly edging out basketball. It has a long and storied history, much like every other major sport, and has produced some of the finest athletes in the world. To hear the sport dismissed as a game that only hilljacks played was astounding. This wasn't NASCAR, for God's sake, this was a legitimate sport!
And that's when I realized what's happened to America. A schism has occured in America, based off of socioeconomics and geography. It seems that if a person speaks with an accent of Southern or Western origin, they are dismissed as less intelligent. Television programming and movies are increasingly showing small town America as a quaint backwards style of living instead of the standard. The blue collar lifestyle has become synonymous with Larry the Cable Guy and "trailer trash".
However, not only is blue collar living being snubbed, it seems as if the middle class is starting to get the same treatment. Some of the things I've seen and heard has astounded me. Hockey is apperantly a hick sport. Commercials depict pickup truck drivers as people who either like driving cars through exploding buildings or cheated their way through high school. Alaska is no longer really part of America but Hawaii still is. And don't even get me started on the idea that playing in the Midwest somehow affects your marketability as an athlete in the age of globalization.
So what is there to do? Do those of us whose interests are being written off as stupid or hickish just ignore the abuse? Do we scuttle to public pressure and start pretending to care whether there should be a playoff system in college football? Or do we just say to hell with the snobs that have siezed control of our culture and hope that global warming covers the world with a sheet of ice so that the only sport that can be played is hockey?

The Passive-Aggressive Fury of a Feline

Cats are relatively simple creatures. They eat, they sleep and they demand attention from anything they come across. That's basically all cats do. Some claim this is because they lack the mental capacity to do more than eat, sleep and chase things. Others claim they simply choose not to do anything else because they are aloof and haughty creatures. I personally fall in the latter camp because I've seen what cats can do. In my opinion, cats let us live because we're a bunch of saps who give them food and shower them with attention. In my humble opinion, anyone who think cats lack the mental capacity to do anything should be grateful that a cat hasn't stabbed them in their sleep and left their body in a shallow unmarked grave. I know for a fact that cats have plenty of mental capacity to do lots of things, such as get pissed off and hold grudges. And that's precisely what I did last night: piss off my cat.
I walked into my apartment last night around 8 PM and hurriedly dumped the laptop I was in the midst of fixing on the couch. I was hungry, tired and my feet hurt. I've been busy all week and have had little time for anything, including my cat. As I rushed around the apartment scrounging up food, I saw my recliner slowly turn to face me. In it was my cat. Now I don't know how she managed to move the chair. She's eight pounds on a fat day and she lacks legs long enough to reach the floor. But I swear to you that chair turned to face me and sitting in it was my cat, looking like she was about to kill something (and by something I mean me).
Unfortunately, despite the uneasy feeling in my gut, I simply had to finish up the laptop. So I ignored my cat for the better part of an hour, pretending like I didn't notice her staring. Finally, Moochie got fed up. She leaped up onto the coffee table, walked onto the keyboard and stepped on the power button, shutting it off and wiping out the last half hour of my work. Moochie had punished me for my negligence.
However, now that the slumbering beast had awoken, Moochie decided to drive the point home. As I groaned about my lost progress, she hopped up onto my lap and dug her claws right into my nether regions. That's right, my cat attempted to castrate me. She missed, thank Chluthu, but she attempted it all the same.
After she tried to rob the world of future Hoffers, Moochie stayed out of sight for the rest of the evening. She wasn't finished, however. That night, come bedtime, Moochie plopped her petite frame in the geometric center of the bed and sprawled out. When I tried to lay down, I found that she somehow relegated me to 1/3 of the bed. When I tried to move her, she simply dug all four sets of her claws into the mattress, daring me to try to move her and see what sort of damage she could inflict on my bedspread. Not having the funds to want to see her destroy my blankets and my balls temporarily out of commission from the injuries sustained earlier, I just took the small portion of the bed and gently petted her until I finally fell asleep in an uncomfortable position.
Now you may be thinking that I'm simply projecting or personifying my frustrations onto the cat. And you might be right. Maybe an animal with the brain the size of a tangerine can't get upset or lash out or unleash all of her female passive agresssiveness onto her owner. Maybe my weary sleep deprived mind is seeing things. But when I woke up and saw Moochie calmly sitting on top of the laptop the next morning as if to remind me of who exactly was the boss, I'm convinced that tiny terror is smarter than she looks.

Waking Up in an Unfamiliar Place

I believe in being proud of the little accomplishments in life. Small accomplishments, such as thinking of that hilarious one-liner or finishing the daily crossword in record time, get me through the day and allow me a silver lining that allows me to look at the world in a positive night. One of these small accomplishments was that I always remembered where I fell asleep. Now this may seem like a petty insignificant accompishment, but think of it like this: I never got so inebriated or exhausted that I simply blacked out and couldn't remember how I made it home the next day. This was a point of pride that I maintained through my stressful high school years and my "wild" college years through last night. So imagine my horror when I woke up at 4:37 AM in the hallway outside of my apartment.
Now, I remember specifically falling asleep in my bed last night. I put on my pajamas, turned off the lights and fell asleep with my hand on my cat like I've done almost every night for the last year. So when I woke up in the middle of the night wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, mismatched socks and my dress shoes, I was mildly surprised. The first thing I did was get my bearings. I was about ten feet away from my apartment door. I was not bleeding, in unusual pain or missing any vital organs. I also was carrying seventy three cents in change and my apartment keys.
As I slowly got up and figured out what happened, I walked to my door and checked to see if it was locked. It was, meaning that I had somehow picked the right key on my keychain and successfully turned my very tempermental lock. When I walked into my apartment, nothing seemed out of place or missing. Moochie was patiently waiting at the door and I had left my wallet on the coffee table.
Now, here's where it gets disturbing. When I checked my wallet, I realized I had taken out two dollars out. Judging from the odd change in my pocket, I apperantly bought something for $1.27. What this was, I don't know, due to the lack of a wrapper, can or bottle in my apartment or the hallway.
So by my own estimate, my unconsious self, being unhappy with its lot in life, got myself up and dressed, walked out of the apartment and down to the store (the nearest one being three blocks away) and bought something and then came back and decided to chill in the hallway after disposing of said item in an unknown location. I don't know what disturbs me more, the fact that I did all this or the fact that a cashier actually took my money and rang me out.

Addendum: I haven't had a sip of alcohol in over a week, or taken any medication besides Advil in over a month. This was done by a sober, albeit demented subconsious.

Love: It's Finger Lickin' Good

The Greeks believed in three types of love: eros, agape, and philia. Philia is the unconditional love that families share. We don't have much of a choice when it comes to philia, that's why it's unconditional. Agape is friendly love, the love that we have for our friends. Agape is totally voluntary and can be doled out in whatever quantities we like. Eros is the bwah-chicka-bwah bwah love. It's the sort of love that involves hormones and keeps the adult industry afloat in turbulent economic times.
However, true love, the mushy sort that's idealized in girly flicks and Nicholas Sparks novels, is none of these sorts of love. People don't get weak kneed about the love shared over Thanksgiving dinner or pine for male bonding time. When we idealize true love, we seperate it from the other types of loves present in our everyday life. What is often overlooked is that true romantic love is simply a combination of agape, philia, and eros. Romantic love combines the unconditionality of philia, the warm and fuzzy feelings of agape, and the hormonally fuelled drive of eros. Romantic love is simply all three loves mixed together in a unique way to make something new. Think of it like the secret spices at KFC. Everyone who knows anything about fried chicken knows what the secret spices are. It's not like Colonel Sanders discovered a new spice and has been secretly mining it in the Appalachian Mountains ever since. It's the blend that's unique. After all, no one can replicate the artery-clogging goodness of KFC. Romantic love is kind of like that.
Now I don't pretend to know a lot about love. My experiences with it have been fleeting, and I'm convinced that I might have some sort of allergy to romantic situations based on the amount of word vomit, nausea, and cold sweating they induce. What I do know is that love is something powerful and awesome. Anything that can so convincingly override our survival instincts and selfish impulses has to be a good thing. And what could be stronger than a spicy mix of the love of family, the bonds of friendships and the stuff that makes us want to do the horizontal mamba? So just remember that when you see that dreamy Keanu Reeves in one of his heartjerking romantic movies (sigh...The Matrix), the emotion he's displaying is not just one love, but three.