The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

…it seemed appropriate anyway.

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While we were cleaning up this weekend for the party, I was rearranging some of the stuff that’s on the lower level of our coffee table (ie, the place where we stick photo albums and stuff that we don’t know what to do with), and I found this beautiful silver frame, with our names engraved at the top, which contained what looks like handmade paper with little red pressed flowers on it, and a possibly-handwritten 1 Corinthians 13 (you know, “love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy…”). We must have put it down there with the other silver frames we got as wedding gifts but hadn’t found any pictures to put in them… In any case, I pulled it out, dusted it off, and it now occupies a prominent place on our bookshelves. It’s perfectly beautiful, and as over-used as 1 Corinthians 13 is at weddings (since Paul wasn’t actually talking about romantic love, but whatever), it’s one of my favorite passages.

The problem is… I can’t for the life of me remember who gave it to us. Which makes me absolutely *terrified* that someone didn’t get a thank-you note for it!  Y’all KNOW how I am about thank-you notes.

So if this sounds like something you gave us, please pipe up in the comments so that I can send you an inexcusably belated thank-you note, as well as an apology for letting your lovely gift languish on our coffee table’s lower shelf for too long.

I left my office the other night at around 5:45 or so- not too late, not too early.  I got to my car to find that I had been blocked in- common in our garage, but usually the attendants manage to unblock all the cars by that time of day. Mine was way back in a rear corner and had apparently been missed.

So I head up to the attendants’ booth to ask for the errant Camry to be moved.  I found the door closed, with no attendants immediately visible.  Perhaps they are attending to another garage user, I thought, and looked around a bit to see where they might be- it’s not a very big garage. 

I quickly found one of the attendants… he was sitting in his own car, asleep in the front seat, the door open.

I couldn’t decide whether to wake him up to come get my car out, and even while I stood there wondering, I knew it was ridiculous to even have to question.  I debated whether or not to wake up a sleeping person so he could, you know, DO HIS JOB. 

But then I looked closer at the window in the booth.  The other attendant WAS in there, but he had closed the door and dozed off himself.

W.T.F?!

So I woke his ass up and asked him to unblock my car.  He seemed confused- apparently they hadn’t thought they needed to unblock my car since I had parked it in the same spot where it was when I left it there over the weekend- they were the second shift guys and it didn’t look like I had left and come back.  Which is stupid- it takes 3 minutes to unblock it anyway- were they in THAT much of a hurry for nappytime?

Now, don’t misunderstand.  I’m a firm believer in the power-nap.  Many is the time when I have taken 15 minutes to close my eyes and relax my mind, because it really does make me much more alert for the rest of the day, and I consider those 15 minutes to be an investment in increased productivity.  I don’t mind that they were napping.  I mind that they were both napping AT THE SAME TIME.  Right at the time when people who park in that garage want to go home.

Without getting into any spoilers, let me just say that I actually really liked the finale of The Sopranos.  I thought it was a really interesting artistic choice. 

When you’re ready for some spoilers, scroll down to the end of this Washington Post chat.  Alexandria has some information about the characters present in the final scene that gave me a new twist on my theory about the ending.

I’ve been taking another comedy class- this time it’s “Advanced Joke Writing and Character Development” -and will be doing an Open Mic at Topaz on June 14th.  It starts at 8, and I’ll be doing ten minutes.

It’s been a lot of fun, because we’ve spent a lot of time in class just brainstorming ideas back and forth about each other’s premises, perfecting each other’s punchlines, etc.  One of the important things that we’re doing is developing our jokes to match our personas- sometime the joke you come up with, the way you come up with it, isn’t a joke you can tell.  Sometimes you have to abandon the joke completely or give it to another comedian, but sometimes you can re-work it to make it work for you.

So one of the exercises we’ve done is to write a joke about gas prices, but not a stand-alone joke.  We’d probably all end up writing the same hackneyed joke if we just tried to write a joke about gas prices.  We had to write a joke about gas prices that would fit within a bit we already had.  For example, I do a joke about people who called me at the temp agency to look for work, but then couldn’t write down my email address because they had called while driving.  So my gas prices joke is, “Look, gas is expensive.  When I get in my car, I think I need a new job, too, but that doesn’t mean I start looking RIGHT THAT SECOND.”

It’s not that great of a joke, and I probably won’t keep it, but it flowed well with the bit and fit in neatly with the tone of the jokes surrounding it. 

Last night, we did some really great work on a bit I got the idea for last week when Tom said something funny about the Pottery Barn catalog.  Want to hear the bit?  Come to the open mic.  But I’ve got tons of notes to go through and make a bit out of, and meanwhile the bit about the road trip we took last summer is coming along really well.  I even made a Louisiana Purchase joke in it.  That people LAUGHED AT, mind you.

So it’s going well, and I’m going to try to tape the open mic so I can get it up on YouTube.  In the meantime, I leave you with this bit of amusement from Slate’s Human Nature column:

The Internet is killing the porn industry. For the first time in years, video sales and rentals are down. Old trend: The Web helped the industry by facilitating anonymous purchases and downloads. New trend: It’s drying up demand for paid porn by facilitating uploads of free, cheaply made porn. Old complaint against porn: It’s crudely made trash. New complaints by porn industry: 1) Free porn is crudely made trash, whereas we use sophisticated actors, sets, and lighting. 2) Porn consumers don’t seem to appreciate the difference. 3) When we offer them free samples, they just use us for their pleasure and leave us with nothing. Human Nature’s view: For all you sophisticates in the porn business … it’s called irony.

The good news is, the Dreamhost support wiki is ALL OVER it and provided me with the answer to the exact problem I’m having with posting from external services.

 The bad news is, the file editor that’s part of Wordpress is ALSO not working (not sure why, maybe a misconfig on my end), so I can’t fix the problem until I get home tonight.

Which means I can’t embed photos of our adorable new kitten (named Macro, naturally) from Flickr until tonight. So until then, you’ll have to click through to see Macro macro’d, in tribute to the fact that he and Jack woke our asses up at 4:30 this morning.

…but I’ll stash it behind a cut. (more…)

For the second time, Timbuk2 announced some limited edition bags, and for the second time, I am in serious lust.

I am prevented from purchasing the perfectly adorable, purse-like Eula bag, however, by the fact that the teeniest bag costs $175!

It’s cute, but it’s not that cute.

Oh, my poor, neglected blog.  Look at all the daily links posts standing in for real entries.  So sad.

I have hinted at some ongoing stress in my life, and I don’t think it would be too unprofessional to say that it’s job-related- there’s a lot of upheaval and uncertainty, to say the least.  The fact is, it’s sapping my energy for almost everything- hence the spate of WoW-related posts.  Escapism is fun.

So partly so I can stop boring y’all who are still around with that crap, and partly for my own benefit, I’m going to write about something I am actually pretty excited about.

Starting in the middle of next month, I’m going to take a stand-up comedy class through the DC Improv.  It’s a four week class, with a field trip to watch an Open Mic night, and then a graduation showcase in which the students will perform. 

I’m excited about this because I’ve loved stand-up comedy since I was a kid watching the “MTV Half-Hour Comedy Hour” with my dad, and have always secretly thought it would be fun to do.

So I’ve started walking around with index cards to jot down joke ideas as they come to me.  I’ve got a few cards now with some ideas, some more well-developed than others, of things that are funny to me, and with luck I can make them funny to everyone else.

I came up with something yesterday that I thought was hilarious, but it’ll be stale by the time I actually get around to using it.  So I’m going to share it with you now.

“I was so irritated that the State of the Union address was on instead of House. I mean, when I watch a jackass on TV, it should at least be a smart one who actually SOLVES hard problems.”

Yeah, I know, it needs a little polishing.  Whatever.