My Disability

I can barely walk in the wake of my recent surgery. I have improved speedwise, but I'm still bent over, as slow as an old man, and quickly tired. My sister took me to Target today and recommended I utilize one of the power-chairs.

As useful as it was, I did not enjoy the experience. I'm only in my twenties, so being in a power-chair I imagine I looked extremely out of place. I felt like everybody was looking at me. "What is he doing in a power-chair?" "Does he really need that?" "I wonder what's wrong with him?" I felt so public, and the most humiliating part was the beep-beep noise I made whenever I backed up. I had to go into the wider main aisles to be able to make a U-turn just so I didn't make that noise.

Also, I can't laugh. Laughter hurts - a lot. I keep wandering across hilarious videos on youtube and I can't appreciate them, or have a good laugh. I can't bend down to play with the family dog, or get up out of bed without serious effort. Life avoiding abdominals exertion is hell.

TRH

My Scary Day

It is 10:43 PM. 48 hours ago I was complaining to my friend Aly about a stomachache and that I was hungry. Really hungry. Like, starving empty oh-my-god hungry. I first noticed the stomachache at about 7 or 8ish. I didn’t eat that night

Next morning I woke up with a stomachache. Funny thing was, I woke up at 5 in the morning. Aching. Rolling around pressure on my gut ache. I went to the 24-hour subway and got a foot-long. Nothing. I took a hot shower, nothing. I thought it was probably the worst gas I’d ever had, a superfart that refused to travel further down my intestines. I don’t really know why, but I decided to go to the doctor at Student Health. I usually don’t go to doctors, especially not for something as simple as a stomachache.

With an hour to go before my first class, I went to the doctor hoping for a laxative or something, maybe a good punch to the gut to get the gas loose. An hour later they drew blood to run in the lab and a half-hour after that (half-hour late for Space Studies, notably) the bloodwork came back. The doctor sat me down and explained that I had a slightly high white blood cell count, as well as some excess bacteria.

This, he said, is usually a strong indicator of appendicitis. My mind skipped a beat. Appendicitis, my little head-voice said, is an inflammation of the appendix, a useless little vestige in our anatomy that nature has rendered useless but not quite done away with. The most effective treatment is an immediate removal of the organ. This means surgery.

The doctor explained that he wanted me to go over to the main hospital for imaging and other tests. I took his photocopy of the lab results and drove the few blocks to Altru. He had already called over, I just had to show up and walk in. I was booked in, checked out, poked and prodded by first a medical doctor and then a surgical resident. The general consensus was that it was indeed appendicitis. I spoke with my mom on the phone a couple times, and my friend Cass called. She asked if I needed anything, and if she should bring me over a Teddy Bear. I smiled inside, because I knew I wanted her too but I didn’t want to ask, in case somebody else overheard. Stupid as it is, I didn’t want to come across as too pitiful.

The nurse came in and put in an IV. I hate needles, and now a plastic straw went into my hand. I hate IVs. Finally, they prepped me for surgery and took me into the room. It was just like most other surgical rooms, white and clean and sterile. They put two armboards on the surgical table and tied me down with towels. It was JUST LIKE the end of Braveheart, actually. I went under and some while later, I woke up in a hospital room. I sat around for an hour or so, groggy and feeling a horrible ache in my stomach where they had made incisions, but maybe not quite as bad as the stomachache before it. I had spoken with mom before the surgery and she wanted to know if she should come up. I went for broke and said yeah, it’d be nice if she could. It’s a five hour drive, and the surgery was less than three hours, so I had some time to kill.

My friends Cass and Eric and Dave all came in around 5ish. And visited. They joked and it hurt to laugh, but it was good to laugh with friends. The best part? Cass (who is the big sister I never had) brought exactly the Teddy Bear that I wanted, without my even saying which one.

Thanks, to all.

TRH

The Algorithm

Viral Marketing

This is the concept of creating curiosity in people about an ad so that they talk about it to their friends, as with superbowl commercials. A lot of the "Modernist" (read: Abstract {read: Stupid}) ads are viral. XKCD recently pointed me at another, about "The Algorithm". Their suspicion was that it was for Ask.com. Seen on bilboards in New York City:

The algorithm consistently finds Jesus.
The algorithm killed Jeeves.
The algorithm is banned in China.
The algorithm is from Jersey.

One reply to that particular blogpost noted a number of other things that "The Algorithm" Could do. "The algorithm makes me a sandwich", "The algorithm constantly finds velociraptors". A few of mine: "The algorithm fights kittens and wins most of the time", "The algorithm can find it's way out of an empty paper bag", "The algorithm does not fear Chuck Norris". What have you got?

Terms of Endearment

Thanks greatly to a couple of recent occurrences, I’ve come up with a new term – DLO. It stands for Date-Like Occurrence. The term refers to hanging out with a person of the opposite gender (or not, depending on the user) in a situation that could be considered a date, but the term-user and partner are not per-se dating. Related Terms:

HDLO – Heavy Date-Like Object. Ends VERY well
EDLO – Expensive Date-Like Object. A concert, or similar expensive effort.

Feel free to submit more as they become relevant or upon discovery, whichever is less applicable.

Mission Statement

We, the colonies, estates, farms and panstellar imperial regencies under the jurisdiction of Ted, do hereby state our mission in this strange place to be…

- To experiment in high-velocity solid, liquid and gel-type explosives so as to further our own collective knowledge and entertainment;

- To eradicate the threat of legal language in this nation, and anywhere else it may prevail so as to decrease confusion and put smiles back on children’s faces;

- To travel at speeds equal to or greater than C (3.0 x 10^8 meters per second) so that, while infinitely luminescent, I am also of infinite mass and can claim at that time to be (and at later times to have been) the ultimate lardass;

- To provide a general danger to the sanity of those I interact with, for their general betterment, or possibly not.

TRH

Assholes and the guys who love them(selves)

I got one of those little bluetooth earpieces that I love to hate so much. I still love to hate guys who wear them because it's confusing who they're talking to (people talking to themselves in the park used to be crazy, now they're yuppies, which is similar but different) but I'm okay with me being a hypocrite. Turns out these things are really fun to wear around. Kinda makes me feel like I'm in a scifi movie.

I also got a superthin phone with GPS, indulging myself in the technocraze. I don't have internets on my phone yet, thankfully, and it's not an iPhone nor one of those PDA phones with excel on them.

Damn...umm...that's what I've got...

TRH

Unenthused

"I got no motivation,
Where is my motivation,
No time for motivation,
Smoking my inspiration"
~Green Day "Longview"

I'm bored. I'm bored, I'm exhausted, I'm lonely, I'm fucking my sleep schedule, I'm poor and I'm trapped. I'm trapped I'm trapped I made a mistake in going to college and now I can't get out. If I leave, I'll have a skill but not nearly enough experience or a completed degree. I'll be sub-standard in the industry trying to pay off almost hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, because I did what my parents did and went to college. It's what so many people do, so I did it.

I hate this place. I want to move someplace else, meet new people, see new things. I want to pack a bag of clothes, hop a cargo train in the middle of the night and see where it takes me.

My friend Cass (I don't really like her that much - she's mean to me) says I need to get laid, so I tell her to go find me somebody who'll sleep with me, and she says it's my responsibility. I don't think she understands how incredibly unmotivated I am, it's sort of like telling prisoners that they'd damn well better lock their own damn cells 'cause we're sure as hell not gonna. I really just don't give a shit.

Blech.

TRH

7 Years, 2 Months

I have a running joke. Whenever I do something and somebody says it was unexpected, or that they thought I wouldn't do that or something like that, I mention that it's something that happens every 7 years and 2 months. I don't know where I got that interval, but it's nicely odd.

There's something else that happens to me though, on a much more frequent interval. It's disruptive, aggravating, and I'm fairly certain it's detrimental to my personality. I get restless.

I don't mean "Let's go for a drive in the country" restless, I mean "I'd like to move halfway across the country and acquire a new set of friends" restless. I mean "I wonder what the weather in Dublin is like this time of year" restless. I mean "I wish aliens would kidnap me, THAT would be one hell of an adventure!" restless. And then when I don't act on it I get unhappy and punchy and moody and start pushing people away.

Someday I'll probably meet some nice young lady and we'll decide in a moment of absinthe-fueled passion and fury to start a family and then we'll probably not move after that, and I'll have to get my kicks by being a weekend warrior. It might be nice, someday, tucking mountains under my belt, running with the bulls in Spain, jumping out of airplanes and such, but for now, I don't have the money to be a weekend warrior, so I don't have much of an outlet.

I want to go to Boston. That's the adventure stuck in my head now. I want to go live there for a few months and see how it, I guess. Meet some people, have fun in a famous and historic city. I want to buy a motorcycle and ride out to the east coast and just dick around there for a little while, see how it is.

But that's dumb, isn't it?

TRH

The Inner Child

So, I recently posted a picture of the Lego Star Destroyer I recently purchased and subsequently built. It took me somewhere between 12-15 manhours, and that was very much mental work. I had to read pictoral instructions depicting gray plates attaching to other gray plates. The visual work alone was mind-bending. Then there was searching a pile of over 3000 parts for a single one, the mass of repetition involved in building the more decorative portions of the thing.

And when I was done? I hopped on the Lego website and searched for more large legos. Right now I've got a Y-wing coming to me, granted with fewer than half the parts of the Star Destroyer, but nevertheless large and assuredly challenging. Eventually I'd like to spend the $500 on the new version of the Millenium Falcon with over 5000 parts, the largest Lego set ever, and undoubtedly a severe test to my abilities.

Congrats, me. I'm an AFOL now - Adult Fan of Lego.

TRH