You are. And that is enough.
Excerpt from “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by.
Given how many people quote this poem and claim they’ve taken “the one less traveled by”, I can only imagine how packed the one more traveled by must be.
I just finished watching the movie Super Size Me and it was a little scary. Not just the fact that the guy’s stomach overloaded on Day 2 of his McDiet and he McSpewed out his car window. No, there were the health issues that piled up during the course of his making the movie. The extra baggage he added through the combination of a McDiet with a lack of McWalking helps explain how I gained… some weight while working in an office setting and eating fast food for most lunches. (Don’t worry, I don’t have visible jowls, but it’s still excess weight that wasn’t there six months ago.)
It’s a combination of eye-opening and scary and I recommend that you watch it. Just don’t start the movie and realize ten minutes in, “It’s 10:30 at night, I haven’t eaten anything since 3:30 and I’m hungry.” At that point, you should probably settle for some McSaltines—they’re not fattening and they’ll help absorb stomach acid if you suddenly feel the urge to McSpew in your living room.
We’ve reached yet another anniversary of the Twin Towers collapsing and I was thinking, “Hey, this feels like a good night to go to bed early.” Then I thought, “I ought to write at least a short entry since it’s 9/11 and I want to pay my respects to the deceased and their loved ones.” The internal debate didn’t last very long—I might have a harder time staying awake during work tomorrow, but I’ll be awake and it’ll be tomorrow. A lot of people had that opportunity burned out of their hands in a giant fireball seven years ago.
So before crawling under the covers and breathing heavily until my alarm goes off in the morning (people say I snore, but I know they’re lying…), I want to thank the Powers that Be for my covers, my alarm, my (lack of) snoring… and thank them most of all for 9/12. Sleep well, everyone.
I watched the movie earlier tonight and I’m feeling a tad disturbed. And it’s not because I watched the 1999 version. I’m somewhat ashamed to say that I purchased that on DVD and it seems like the movie was created solely for Christopher Lambert to kill monsters and do his little chuckle at the end. It didn’t follow the original storyline very well, though honestly, I don’t think the 2007 version did such a great job, either. Continue reading “I… am… BEOWULF!!!”
I was checking out an MLS game on TV this afternoon and became very sad. Not because of the game itself—I enjoy watching soccer—but because of one team’s jerseys.
Unlike most professional team sports, soccer doesn’t fill up large stadiums here and thus doesn’t get a lot of revenue in the States. If we had more soccer hooligans on our side of the pond who would get hammered, vomit on themselves, then beat the crap out of each other in bars for wearing the wrong colors… but I digress. My point is that to get some extra cash, enabling owners to give out contracts large enough for players to build pools they can fill up with money and swim in, they’ll get sponsors that plaster their logos on the front of the team’s jerseys.
For example, the New York Red Bulls. Can you guess what’s on the front of their jerseys? That’s right, it’s a giant cursive “G” to represent General Mills.
Okay, maybe not. In this game, it was New York (with Red Bull logos) playing against D.C. United. Can you guess what’s on the front of the latter team’s jerseys? That’s right, it’s that VW inside a circle to represent Volkswagen.
I’m not kidding. D.C. United, a team located in our nation’s capital, is sponsored by a German car company. I can only imagine what the motivation was on both sides of that deal. It’s possible that Volkswagen is owned by a bunch of soccer hooligans who want to force American bars to sell German beer (Tastier going down and coming back up!), but it could be part of a trade agreement instead: we’ll put your logos on our jerseys if you send us cars that the players can fill with money and drive in.
My journey home from work takes me up Interstate 35, which not-so-fortunately was under construction today. Going to work wasn’t much trouble, but coming back north… it was sloooooooow. Why? Because there was a section where the right lane was closed, leaving one open for everyone to squeeze through.
Naturally, there are the really annoying people who think they’re in a hurry or something, so while most good drivers merge into the left lane with plenty of space remaining, they blaze a trail up the empty lane and cut in at the last possible moment, perhaps even a little late, resulting in the harsh demise of an orange traffic cone or two. I hate that. I really do. They can’t be courteous drivers like the rest of us. Nope, they need to get ahead of you. Now. And it’s a two lane road, so what can you do?
Not much, unless you’re my hero of the day: a large semi who was tailing me at 80 mph. It was a little uncomfortable to have such a huge mass of steel driving so close behind me at that speed, but it’s not like I could pump the brakes to get him to back off—that’s a recipe for pancakes. Shawn-flavored pancakes. Once we got closer to that stretch of construction, though, everyone slowed down, so we were creeping along as the occasional annoying person buzzed past us.
After the first couple passed by, I glanced into my rear-view mirror and saw that the semi was drifting to the right. A lot. It kept drifting and drifting and drifting until it was straddling both lanes. And then it stayed there. Just moving along at the speed of sludge oozing downhill as cars… well, I’m not sure what they were doing behind the truck, but they sure as hell weren’t getting around it.
No more cars speeding by and slowing everyone down when they cut in at the last possible moment. Nope, just a bunch of us driving in the left lane followed by a very wide semi and what was probably a gigantic clusterfuck of cars and trucks right behind it. It felt like vindication without guilt because no one did anything wrong. Well, that whole “driving in both lanes” thing probably wasn’t “legal”, but I’d bet today’s paycheck that if a cop saw what was going on, he’d laugh so hard that he’d spray his half-chewed donut all over the windshield.
So to my hero of the day, thank you for making my drive home a much more enjoyable experience. As my way of saying thanks, I’d love to cook a meal for you sometime. Maybe pancakes. Any kind but Shawn-flavored.
