the Tommy|Zor era

[continued from before... V is Roman numeral for "five," but I suppose someone might think this is part 22. That would be pretty metaphysical, to think outside the box like that.]

I feel so hopeless when I find a Wikipedia article incorrect or incomplete. I feel the need to help and fix it, but I just can’t remember my fucking log-in name. Without me, you’ll never know someone’s complete discography of production credits. In some way, it makes me feel powerful and gives me a twisted sense of of joy knowing your education is incomplete on my account.

They say that semen is a good source of protein. I now have a compulsion to look for an obsessed female body-builder with a pretty face. Oh, and she can’t have a penis, but I felt that was covered when I asked for a female.

It’s OK for an older woman to go for a younger man, but it’s not OK for an older man to fuck his brother.

Some people say “it’s better to be pessimistic, and then be pleasantly surprised when something good happens.” That’s fine, except that being pessimistic is what’s making me unhappy.

I had a meta moment the other day, and it still bothers me. I’m standing there, taking a whizz in the bathroom, without a care in the world. All of a sudden, some guy opens the door and comes in. I nearly had a heart attack, and I almost jumped and pissed all over myself. Little did I realize that I was in a public washroom. For one moment, my brain forgot the hyperlink to reality. I’d go on record to say that a friend would freak you out more coming into your bathroom moreso than a stranger would coming into a public bathroom. It was a tense moment. On my way out, I looked at this dude as he was washing his hands. How dare you invade my private public space. Nice jacket though, wish I had one like that.

They keep adding words into the English dictionary. This year they added ‘meh’ ‘frenemy’ and ‘huggles.’ I’m afraid that at this rate, my children will look at LOLCat pictures and wonder what the big deal is. “They’re talking and spelling like children. Retarded, foreign children,” I’d tell them. Then they answer back with emoticons and some gang signs while whistling.

I admit to absolutely loving LOLCats, and it’s a shame my cat had to die just as their popularity was starting. Trying to pose his rigor mortis body after I dug him up proved to truly be an unfunny affair. I guess that open eyes are part of a charm, and worms and missing organs – less so.

I bought a 28-pack of AA batteries nearly 3 years ago now. I just finished the last of them this week. I’d like to go on record that that was the best $18 I’ve ever spent. If someone made a sales pitch like “If you spend this eighteen dollars, it will continue to be 100% useful for 3 years,” then I would spend thirty-six dollars. At one point I’d spend a lot more money and say, “Grandchildren, may these batteries forever serve your $2.99 Ikea clocks.”

I hate getting out of the shower, it’s so fucking cold. I wonder how much money I waste on hot water by staying in there so long for comfort. I refuse to get out until the water is as cold as the indoor air temperature. Perhaps I need to re-engineer the entire showering process. For instance, the furnace room is generally hot. I need to have a shower put in that room. Right beside the water heater, so the water doesn’t have to travel far and stays hotter. Then, I need to aim a furnace register right at my door and have it activate 2 minutes before my shower is done. Then, just as it’s warming up, I move somewhere tropical and forget about all this stupid shit.

I’ve adjusted my water heater temperature so that when I shower, I’m only using hot water. My cold faucet is never turned on. That way, I’m not wasting water nor heat by cooling down something I want really, really hot. But then again, if I added some cold water to hotter water, I’d use less of the hot water, hence being able to shower longer? But what is the linear equation of water cost savings vs. saving money on natural gas to heat the water? And what, to me, is more important than a really hot, really long shower? How do you put a price on something that gives me the only pleasure the A.M. could possibly bring? That’s just so…meta.

I love cheese. Seeing how it’s made and what it’s made of makes me feel a little bit ill, however. Seeing how marble cheese is made would probably make me puke, though. Two different coloured, tubes of fat and dairy slime and bacterial culture combining  (but not mixing!) to form a solid, delicious, two coloured cheese that makes my post-shower life worth living, if only for long enough for the second pair of toast to finish.

Iceberg lettuce grows in dirt and only in the summer time. Hmm. Surely they could’ve come up with another name that was less misleading to the general consumer. Trying to sell it for 17 cents more than regular lettuce because they want you to think it’s grown in the Canadian tundra all year round. Sounds like Monster Cable now has a farm division.

Growing up, my meta moments were a lot more frequent. Part of that is the learning process, but you’re learning so much that each individual factoid is less significant. One that does stand out, though, is eggs. What are eggs? I thought to myself, and I asked someone. “They’re what chickens lay to make babies,” they said. I thought, “Oh, that’s cool.” I asked around and eventually though, “All right, so they’re refrigerated so they don’t form baby chickens. Gotta keep them cold or you’ll grow new chickens.” As a typical science nerd in training, I snuck an egg out of the fridge and kept it by a furnace register (before it was in front of the shower door, of course) for days. I cracked it open to find…nothing special. No forming baby chicken embryo. What the HELL? I thought nothing of it until years later when a thought came to me. Chickens lay these eggs all day long – they can’t all be goddamn babies. Wait…oh hey…oh…my…god…EGGS ARE CHICKEN MENSTRUATION.

EGGS ARE CHICKEN MENSTRUATION. YOU ARE EATING CHICKEN PERIOD. YOU ARE EATING CHICKEN TAMPON REFUSE.

Remember when you were young, and you had a deja vu? It knocked you right on your ass. It feels like I’ve done this before!!! you’d say to yourself, trying to keep your brain from exploding. You feel like someone from another planet has communicated through you, and you’re on a different plane of existence. As you get older, it still happens, but now you’re disappointed. “Nope, this is definitely the first time I’ve done this. Goddamn it, I’m getting old, fucking brain’s starting to go…” Sometimes I know I’m doing something for the first time because I get a deja vu during the most specific, one-time, abstract actions ever. I’ll be spray-painting “fuck you” on a neon-orange moving train with wings while downloading last night’s episode of House MD on a laptop made of marble cheese right before it goes off the edge of a waterfall in Brazil during a winter storm, and get a deja vu. “Forget it brain, this is highly unlikely to have happened before.”

The number 1 on a telephone has no letters assigned to it, but the 9 key has 4 letters assigned to it. AS IF when the guy was inventing that, he couldn’t have spent a few more minutes making it a little better. How do you rush something as important as that?

I guess companies with clever toll-free word numbers must hate zeroes. Hey wait a fucking minute, zero gets ZERO letters too? Zero for 0, none for 1, and 9 gets FOUR? That guy must honestly hate his job. I hope he dies. I hope he dies 86 years ago.

As a kid, I remember using a magnifying glass to burn ants or burn little pieces of paper in seconds. “Wow,” I thought, “if this thing can focus something as big as the sun, I’m going to point a laser beam through it and see if I can cut through the earth’s crust.” 20 years later I still don’t have access to an industrial cutting laser, and if I did, I’m not sure my first order of business would be to focus it further to cut through the ground I’m standing on.

While watching the second half of Titanic, you never realize how goddamn cold that water is. It’s below freezing, because it’s salt water and it can be below freezing and not be, umm, frozen. Watch the movie again, and realize these people are fucking crazy. Raft or no raft, vest or no vest, I’m not going in that fucking water. No way. I’m going straight to the boiler room. To take a shower.

I always though that filling water balloons with gasoline was a super idea. Thought being the key word. To make this effective at all, you’d have to throw it at something that’s already on fire for instant results. If it’s already on fire, I’d get the fuck out of there, because I’m now covered in gasoline from trying to get these fucking dollar-store balloons to fit over the gasoline nozzle.

I always get a kick out of people who buy a beautiful $850 dining table and completely cover it with a $27.99 tablecloth. Next time check with me first, I can save you some money.

4 years ago, I had 8 megabit Internet speed. Then, I had 5 megabit. Now, I have 3 megabit. I love the future. It’s just a matter of time before I start mailing 3.5″ floppy diskettes to my friends full of Pamela Pre-Lee Anderson pictures. GIFs, no less, since there’s no reason to cross the 256 on-screen-colours barrier anytime soon. “HD” doesn’t stand for High Definition, it stands for “High Density.” Those are the diskettes you’ll need to buy. So meta to pick one up in 2008 and see a big “HD” logo on it. Must give the kids of today a chuckle. If they aren’t too busy texting, Facefuckbooking, going to ’shows’ or whatever the fuck they call concerts these days, that is.

Ever have the radio on, and then you move in a certain place in the room and it goes all staticky and cuts out? That worries me. It really, really worries me.

I can’t believe The Neverending Story has so few sequels. I was sure they had a gimmick worthy of a long-running TV show but alas, someone forgot what the product was called. The producers of The Neverending Story need to meet with the producers of Final Fantasy and swap gimmicks. That’s so meta. What’s the halfway point between 1 and infinity?

I can’t stand when someone opens a cereal box upside down. I have to look at that fucking box, all defective and weird like that for possibly weeks. (Months if it’s that fucking Honey Nut Cheerios that comes in a server-sized box) Don’t do it. And for those of you who hang the toilet paper and paper towels backwards, STOP IT. EVERYONE THINKS YOU’RE TOO LAZY TO TURN THE ROLL AROUND, OR TOO STUPID TO NOTICE. You gain nothing, the least of which is my respect. I hate trying to grab a bit of toilet paper and hit the fucking wall with my hand because you hung it wrong. What if I break a nail or scratch the wall while I’m at it? I’m just kidding about breaking a nail. I have never tried to procure several squares of toilet paper so feverishly.

Why doesn’t the roll just stick out perpendicular to the wall, besides looking aesthetically tragic? Then, you could have really, really thick rolls without worrying about space clearance that a normal parallel socket constrains you to. I just realized they do this in public washrooms already and that I’m not that clever. It’s amazing the things you can think of when some dude’s not walking into the washroom to fuck with your personal space when you’re in the zone. Now, a roll dispenser that was a water line built in for push-button wetwipes™ when a sink is not in reach, that’s a Tommy v2 original idea. You heard it here first.

I heard some skinny, blonde anorexic girl telling someone that eating ice is a reverse calorie food and good for getting thin. I wish I could’ve turned her attention to penguins, polar bears and walruses. I assume those things only eat ice and they’re far from being sexy. I swear, blondes are so ignorant.