I'm a quitter!

So, as you may know I cancelled my Facebook account last week. I was at work and having a bad day, and got one too many friend request, whiney post, whatever; I blew my top. "Up yours, Facebook!" And with that bold cry, I deleted my account. It was easy. It was also easy to reactivate. Deleting and reactivating your Facebook account is exactly like logging out then logging in again, with one extra "are you sure?" step thrown in.

Anyway, Facebook missed the hell out of me and welcomed me back with open arms and promises not to be such a butthole in the future.

The real reason, I suspect, that I quit Facebook is that I quit smoking. I count the official quit date as New Year's Day, as I had my last one on the Eve. That last one was the first in about four days; I had gotten sick and went on the lozenge. So I had my ceremonial last smoke New Year's Eve, more out of a sense of transition than actually wanting one. Then I woke up January 1 and went cold turkey.

Cole turkey meant, for me, no smoking, no more lozenges, pills, patches or gums. I'd tried all these things with some degree of failure in the past. There is a secret weapon. I did not have the secret weapon in the past. The secret weapon is actually wanting to quit.

So, 19 days in and I feel great. I still get cranky from time to time, but the mood swings are lessening, or I'm getting accustomed to them. My brother in law said that the last time he saw Tracy and I he thought we were super hopped up on caffeine; turns out we just have more energy. I do feel great.

New Post for the New Year

I've been terribly neglectful of my blog. I'm afraid that a lot of the free time I used to spend here has been squandered on World of Warcraft and Facebook.

The day before yesterday I fell into a terrible mood. I was having a fine old time at work, came home and whammo; it hit me. Bad mood, dude; bad mood. It stuck around too, lingering overnight and hitching a ride to work with me the next morning.

That "next morning" was a Thursday, the day at work on which I often find myself with a goodly deal of down time, much of which is used to check Facebook. So there I am, checking my Facebook, noticing that I have a ton of friends whom I don't see on any regular basis and some of which I haven't actually seen in like fifteen years. This struck me as, well, gratuitous to say the least. I don't mean to be callous, but I don't care what these people are up to. Shane Tharp can espouse his love of Civil War Reenactment and call the President Barack Osama, but I don't have to listen to his stupidity or care about who got a little bunny rabbit over the holiday.

It's not that I just don't care; it's that hearing about all this actively makes me angry.

A while back I went through and arbitrarily deleted people I don't really know from my friend's list; this seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Then I started getting the letters. Complaining, cajoling, wondering what happened to all the good times we never, ever shared. I relented; I re-friended a few of them. But the letters never stopped. The last one I got had this tinge of self-pity to it, and it put me over the line.

I'm done with Facebook. Account deleted. If you're reading this, sorry; I didn't "defriend" you specifically (and yes, I've already gotten emails/instant messages with "wtf" in them). I just can't take it anymore. I can't pretend I give a shit what cute thing your kitties are doing. I can't pretend to care about the vacation you went on with a bunch of people I've never met in my life. And I damn sure don't feel like reporting what I've been up to for the benefit of seventy people I never, ever talk to in real life.

As for my other eight friends; you all have my email, cell number and will see me on weekends whether you want to or not. So you eight are the ones that really suffer.

I remember Halloween.

So for the second year in a row I've missed the annual Halloween bash, the biggest and best party of the year. Dang it. Last year we didn't have a babysitter, so I sent Tracy and stayed home with the D. This year neither of us went. What a drag. Apologies to everyone we missed. Hopefully someone will at least post pictures. Super apologies to Katie and Chris. It wasn't personal; we just couldn't get our shit together. And by "we" I mean "I". We did manage to pull it together for Delia's birthday, but just barely. We didn't think to call anyone, so it was just us and a few other childrens. Sorry if you missed it; I am a slacker asshole. You know it, I know it, the American People know it.

I've been having a lot of "can't get my shit together" days. My last few posts featured grandiose plans to post every day without fail. I think I made it a whole two days in a row. Fall came in with this "I'm just going to be winter, so screw you guys" kind of chip on its shoulder, so the Funk took the opportunity to use Fall's uppityness as a distraction to move in early. The house got messy and we got grumpy. It's actually what NIN's "Downward Spiral" album was about; it was a record about how Fall kicks our collective ass here at Strother House.

The blog posts I've so magnificently fallen behind on I blame on the good people who make Peavey guitar amplifiers. I broke down and bought a guitar amp to replace the one I sold at a yard sale a few years ago. The one I sold was more or less a piece of crap, but it had been my piece of crap for fifteen years and after I sold it I had to just admire other peoples pieces of crap, which is about as alluring as it sounds. So anyway I finally replaced it, this time with a decent two channel, multi-voicing TransTube amp. And so my normally scheduled blogging time gave way to Heavy Metal Guitar time, which is a shame on the blog front but otherwise completely and totally kick ass.

On a more positive note, we are planning on having Thanksgiving at our house this year. Tracy's mom made an announcement last week that Thanksgiving can go fornicate itself with an iron stick (I'm paraphrasing.) We're going to take up the gauntlet and have it here. Come one, come all, but you might want to bring a chair because we only have five. (See how I'm being positive and acting like there are more than like two people who will want to come?)

Crap

I missed yesterday's entry. I meant to do it but instead succumbed to a nap, then Pizza Hut. I think it was Pizza Hut that really did me in. That's what I get for eating at a place described as a Hut.

Last night I went to Black Bear to help Malissa hang paintings for the Morgantown Arts Walk, which I believe is going down tonight. It's usually a pretty good time, and I encourage people to get out and look. I think we may go as a family unit tonight; I like for the D to see these events our town bothers to put on. It's nice to live in a town that appreciates culture almost as much as it seems to appreciate beer pong and those annoying mufflers that serve to make your car louder. It's also nice to get to drill holes into a wall that doesn't belong to me. If you ever find yourself drilling holes in the wall at Black Bear it's important to remember that the chairs by that bar in the front are much, much taller than the chairs you are probably used to standing on in your kitchen. Take it from me, you can't just step down off them.

Today I came to work with the intention of putting up another installment of Friday Meeting Notes, but they were thrown out yesterday. So instead of putting up the notes from the week before I'm putting up today's masterwork, which I sincerely hope serves to both entertain and enlighten. Bon appetit.

This still counts as Wednesday. Damn it.

I set myself a goal; update ye olde blogge every day. It's technically Thursday right now, but since I just got home from work and haven't gone to bed yet it counts. Yes way, Ted; it totally counts.

Sometime between taking the D to school and her getting off the bus we lost a neighborhood tree today. I don't know what happened; it wasn't particularly windy or stormy, at least not enough for me to take notice. Maybe the high winds (50 or so mph gusts) damaged the tree earlier this week, but for whatever reason the stately maple tree at the corner of Overdale and Alma is gone. I personally choose to make up (and believe!) that it was downed by a drunken college student in an F150. Probably with a set of artificial truck testes dangling from the back bumper. Nice driving, dick.

I was a guest speaker!

Yesterday at about 12:30 or so I was hit by a bolt of memory lightning; I had to speak to Delia's class at 2. Her teacher had sent home a form asking for volunteers, and D told me that they were having trouble getting people to show up, so I signed up for it. What the hells, it was only a fifteen minute commitment and I love public speaking

When I got to the class the teacher subtly emphasized that I would be saying how my job helped the community. So I start winging it, telling the kids that I'm a graphic artist who works in desktop publishing, advertising used cars...blah blah blah. They don't care. I know how an audience works, so I started telling them about Photoshop, which they also don't care about. Then I tell them that Photoshop was invented by Industrial Light and Magic, to work on special effects for Star Wars. It was like shooting lighting out of my eyes. They went, in about one second from "dude, we don't know what you're talking about" to "Holy crap; he MADE STAR WARS!" It was pretty awesome.

In other news, I'm still pissed at my cable company for taking away PBS, Cartoon Network and the History Channel. I know I only pay nine dollars or so a month for cable, but PBS? Really, Comcast, seriously? I live in the same town as the station. It wouldn't be so bad if you hadn't run commercials for months saying that Comcast customers didn't have to worry about the new conversion to digital cable. Yo, Comcast, you guys are liars. I do have to get a conversion box to watch my local PBS station. I don't want to spend $40 for one channel, but I'm going to. Gods know there isn't anything on SyFy.

As for you, SyFy...dudes, you aren't even trying. There is some show on right now with a few fifteen year old kids going to someplace called the Vortex. I think it's in New Jersey. They keep saying something about a munitions factory exploding there, and one lady who is very insistent that there are spirits there, "locked in time and space". I'm not sure what this show is, but it's terrible. It's like Ghost Hunters, if Ghost Hunters came from Fanjul's Factory Outlet. Holy crap, I'm sure if they let these turds on this show they'd let me and my jackass friends on. These kids on now should have worn brown trousers, if you catch my drift.

Hot Bliggity Blog

I'm trying to post something daily now. My boss told me last week that the only way to get people to read your blog is to keep it freshly updated, presumably because a lot of people have an attention span utterly decimated by television. I don't have any problems believing this at all.

It's only 9AM on this dreary Monday, and I've accomplished things. Payed a few bills...freakin' bills. Bills are the bane of my existence. I made a resolution for 2009 to be more fiscally responsible, but it's tough going. Budgeting has never been a particularly strong point with me. I'm better at it than I am at, say, not drinking coffee until my hair stands on end, but that's not saying much. Most people don't have that problem either. Or do they?

The problem with daily updates is thinking of something to say. To newsworthy items happened over the weekend.

1. Flavored cigarettes are now banned in the US. I don't smoke flavored cigarettes. I've never been a goth kid, so I didn't need them to mask the scent of an abandoned bus station while listening to the Cure hoping my hairspray is helping me look depressed. I doubt if I've ever smoked more than one or two of these things all the way through. Once in high school we had a Renaissance Festival, and someone made an apple pie using a period recipe. It had a buttload of clove in it, to mask the taste of the rotten apples that would have been the main ingredient during the Renaissance. So that's what clove cigarettes always reminded me off; rotten apples. Grodacious. Totally grodacious.

2. My brother-in-law John's friend Dave was stabbed over the weekend. He's in the hospital but slated to recover, from what I've gleaned from Facebook. This is some grade A crazy shit. Friday night John was here, and was (I think) shocked to hear my friend Chris and I assure him that Morgantown has a large number of weekend fights on the streets. Then he goes home to this crap. They caught the guy who knifed him, which is good. It's hard to tell what they'll charge him with, but I can easily see how stabbing someone with a knife would land you with attempted murder. I think it should, but then again I'm sure once lawyers get involved there will be this and that extenuating circumstance, flim flammery, and outright lying. I hope the dude goes to prison, because if he doesn't John likely will.

Good luck, Dave. John, don't shoot anyone.