New Years Post!

Right! I figure if I post these here and other people see them I can force myself to do them because if I don't I'll feel guilty.

Resolutions:
Healthen myself up! This includes eating more healthful foods and less crap foods and losing my paunch and perhaps gaining some muscle mass. I'm going to wait to join a gym until the post-holiday fatties have gotten past their post-binge work-outs.

Get something published. A poem or a story in a magazine. Or a book or publication. Something beyond the tubeoblognets.

Do either the Peace Corps thing or apply for grad school with a linguistics focus. Figure out which one of those my life really needs. See where in the world those will take me.

Date again. I miss dating!

Less heavy drinking, too. This holiday break has reminded me that it's really not that good for you!

So folks, if you don't see me doing these things, make sure you taunt me about it. Shame me into doing them! This list might get stuff added to it.

Excitment!

Whoa! New test results! For those of you who have been waiting with bated breath for what must be a year or so for more test results, you will be pleased to note two sort of thingies.

This one (click here) will tell you what celebrities I look like. Julianne Moore! Woo-hoo.

And this one effectively negates the very last update of this kind which said that if I were a Tarot Card I'd be death. Which one is it? Sun or Death? You tell me!

And by that I mean don't tell me. You'll probably think of something terribly witty like "You're actually the joker" and you'll laugh and your friends will laugh and my friends will laugh and I'll go home and kill myself.

Enjoy!

Telephone Booths

So it used to be that for a good time college kids would cram themselves into telephone booths. Sometimes willingly, sometimes not-so-much. That quaint idea has gone out of vogue, though. As have telephone booths themselves.

What has filled the void, you ask? Facebook groups. The latest one I've seen was "1 million people in 10 days." Trying to cram as many people as possible into one group. There's also "The World's Largest Facebook Group" and that hoax one with the threesome and some wry spin-offs there (My personal favorite of those being "When this group reaches 10 people I'll go masturbate").

Merry Christmas.

jkl;

ASDF is a pretty commonly typed thing. When you're in a rush or don't care about naming something, you save it as asdf. It's a commonly used default password, too. Apparently. There's even a Wikipedia Article about it.

It makes sense, sort of. It's the home row and your hands are on it normally. What I want to know is why is it always "asdf" and not "jkl;"? Shouldn't those characters get their chance to shine? I mean, it seems to me the majority of people are right handing and will continue to be for another generation or two. Why always asdf?

My theory is the mouse. Your right hand's always over there clickin' on shit but you leave the left one on the keyboard for emergency typing and efficiency. Also, we often read left to right (most of the time, I think. I mean. What? Dumb sentence) and ASDF is all over there on the leftest part of the keyboard.

So that's my theory.

Thoughts

Break is upon us in the education bidness. About time, I say!

Colds are bad.

"Sea of Love" is good. At least Tom Waits' version is.

I still haven't given in to the doubled possessive S craze.

Quiche smells good. (Are pigs small mammals? They're smaller than Bone...)

Doug TenNapel's Creature Tech is off to a pretty good start. Great art!

Quiche smells GOOD.

Break is good.

So is guitar.

The end!

...?

My face!

So this is pretty cool.

I went in to the office of my Oral and Maxillofacial surgeon yesterday. Our original plan was to meet last Friday but the Dr. done pulled out my teeth (Dr. Doss) got all sicked up on Friday. So he canceled. I'd had those concerns about infection, too. So that was no good.

But I got in yesterday and the replacement Doctor (never got his name), really jovial fellow, said Dr. Doss was feeling better, had a look in my mouth ("Yeah, that side is angrier than the other"), pulled out my stitches ("Here comes the pinch"), rinsed out the holes (gross) and prescribed me some penicillin (to stave off infection). All in about 4 minutes.

Inside of half an hour all pain in my mouth had vanished. I feel great again. One of the funniest sensations, though, was the removing of the stitch. The tunnel the silk string was through had swollen up around it so when he pulled I felt it all the way. Weird!

But I'm feeling pretty good. Talking doesn't bug me anymore and I'm taking penicillin and life seems to be on the upswing.

What next?! Car trouble? Broken limb? Death, perhaps? Who knows!

Banned Books

Banned books are pretty cool. Censorship is not. We've completely missed Banned Book Week but next year!

You can burn words but you can't burn an idea. It goes beyond that. Part of the necessity of language is it's ability to create original, spontaneous sentences to suit our complex meat machine brains that generate original, spontaneous thoughts.

That's all I got for now, not a very impressive post BUT it was mostly for the purpose of getting this little guy up here:




I got the badge from this site: Newprotest.org

Aw, crap

God damn. I really hope it's not infected.

The surgery was Friday. Went great. They put me in the chair, stuck some pads on me to measure heart and respiration and left for a few minutes. While they were gone the machines all started flat-lining which was amusing. I was fairly certain I wasn't dead. Stressed me out a little, too. I know an extraction is a minor surgery but they were planning on putting me under and any time you go under there's the chance for death. An allergic reaction to the anaesthesia or vomiting and choking. So, I was a little stressed.

The doctor came back in with two nurses, stuck an IV in my arm and gave me three quick shots through the needle. I looked up at the doctor, said, "This works fast," fell asleep.

Blackness. Solid sleep. No thoughts.

Woke up. "How long's it been?"
"About 45 minutes."
"Are my teeth still around?"
"No, those have been disposed of."

They wheeled me into a recovery room and the nurse sat me up on a bed. I said, "With these cotton balls in my mouth, I feel like I should be talking like Marlon Brando."
"What?"
"With these cotton balls in my mouth," I enunciated, wondering if she didn't understand because of slurring over the novocaine and cotton balls, "I feel like I should be talking like Marlon Brando."

Then it donned on me she didn't understand because it didn't make a lick of sense. I grinned at her. She took out the gauze and I laid down and tried to fire off a text message.

The rest of the day went pretty well. The doctor injected some novocaine right into a nerve, we figured, because I was numb in the lower jaw for a good 12 hours. I took a nap and didn't drool in any way once all day. Bleeding was minimal. I watched a bunch of stuff and played with my face and surfed the internet.

Good weekend, too. No real pain. No need for the Vicodin or even ibuprofen, really.

Went in to school on Monday. Good day, by and large. But Monday evening brought a sorta ache into my jaw. I thought it might've been all the talking. It only got slightly worse Tuesday. Worse than it'd been during the weekend. And now today.

Today it's almost feeling as bad as it did when it was infected in Rochester.

I really hope it's not infected. That sucked balls. Four hours of sleep tops. Constant grimace. Mouth cracks open half an inch at the most.

Miserable stuff. Don't want it back.

Hit on the head

I've been working on a blues track called "The Hit on the Head Blues." And by "been working on" I mean "I've come up with a title for."

I've often pictured sorta grating, dissonant guitar riffs going with it, along with clunky, un-grammatical lyrics to address the delicate nature of the song. So, with that in mind, here's a start, I think:

I speak deliberate and slow-like
Since 'bout the end of last May
I got rolled over
by a Big Bale of Hay

Docs said I's OK
Nothin' too severe
I can use both my legs
And my visions is clear

but he says somethin' peculiar
'bout "Mental Faculty"
I said, "Gimme it straight, Doc
Don't be bullshittin' me"

He Said
You got the blues, yeah
The hit on the head blues
You got the blues, boy
The hit on the head blues

Not completely UN-disastrous

I have this scab on my elbow from a patch of rugburn I received a few weeks ago in a wrestling match - alcohol may or may not have been involved - with Don Thibodeau.

A student asked me where I got it today. I said, "Wrestling" without thinking. Kids asked, "Oh, so you wrestle?" "Well, not really."

"Then how'd you get it?"

"Mr. Rollins... do you party?"

I didn't answer that one. I let the kids hypothesize.

"Can you imagine," one laughed, "HIM partying?"

"I don't know," another responded, "He puts on a proper front here at school but I bet if you get him-"

"Back to Spanish," I said, meekly.

"Mr. Rollins," said a girl who I think is 14, "I bet you're good at beer pong. You've got those long arms."

I examined my arms a moment, blasted things are what got me in this situation to begin with, and looked up at her.

"How do you know about Beer Pong?"