There's a hole in my pantyhose....

Which, I suppose, is better than having a hole in your soul....or a tear in your beer, for that matter. But, my pinky toe is poking out, and the hole keeps getting bigger and bigger, and will soon encompass my ring toe, and it's rather uncomfortable (but not as uncomfortable as sitting at a desk all day while wearing a thong, which I have refrained from doing today). Because I have over-shot my text message limit by about 130 texts this month (which means that my dad will bitch, and I will be forced to cut him a check for $13 to shut him up), I have decided that I will blog during the remainder of my lunch hour rather than sending incessant text messages, as I have gotten into the habit of doing. The question is, do I really have anything important to say today? It really depends on your definition of important. Anything I say could be important to someone, somewhere. I haven't had a themed blog in awhile. Don't you miss the days of the Hoveround scooter, Renegade, and Kidz Bop? I need to do a good, solid analysis of something. I'm itching for school work. Isn't that sad? What ever made me think I could survive out of my natural academic habitat? I need something to tide me over in mean time. I was thinking about doing some freelance Biblical Greek. I need to get all of my stuff back out and refresh my memory a bit, but it could be fun. I need a partner in Greek crime to keep me motivated, however, and I'm unfortunately the only nerd around these parts that took Biblical Greek to fulfill my undergraduate language requirement. I knew that if I worked for awhile, I'd realize the error of my ways and go back to school! I probably won't go back until Fall of '07, but that's okay. At least it's some time to make money, and something to look forward to. Here are some things I've been thinking about today (yes, I'm going to use BULLET POINTS!):

• I am convinced that there is not a bra in the entire universe that will fit me correctly. Every single one gaps, or my boobs pop out of it, or it smashes them, etc, etc. This is probably because my boobs are two different sizes (although I'm told that most women's are). They're also shrinking, which pisses me off, because now I have to buy smaller bras (I was a C cup, now I'm a B...what the hell is up with that?!).
• I have a bad case of the "What ifs". You know..."What if I had [insert action here]?" I think about how my life would have turned out if I had done things differently. I don't necessarily harbor a sense of regret or anything, just a hell of a lot of curiosity. Like...what if I had just changed one little thing that I've done. Every single thing in my life could have turned out differently. It's really kind of creepy, when you stop and think about it. I can't decide whether I believe that no matter what, things will turn out how they were meant to turn out (you know...fate and shit), or whether we are supposed to have some sort of "final destination" (I know, I know, life's a journey, not a destination...I learned that from Steven Tyler, duh) that can be screwed up if we make some sort of mistake during the journey of life (damn, I'm getting incredibly cheesy here). Or maybe there is no such thing as fate, and there's no final destination, and we just kind of float through life waiting to die. Maybe I'm having an existential crisis. You may be right...I may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for (name that tune!!!)
• I have a horrible tendency to doubt what other people think of me, and it gets me into trouble. If someone tells me that they like me, I just need to trust them, rather than thinking, "Oh, I'm way too [insert adjective here] for this person to possibly think i'm cool." And even though I know I do it, I have an incredibly difficult time stopping myself from doing it. That's why I always imagine myself as the person that's being sung to in songs like Elton John's "Your Song" ("I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind, that I put down into words how wonderful life is while you're in the world"), or "I Would Walk 500 Miles" ("and I would walk 500 more, just to be the man who walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door"), or "Fat Bottomed Girls" ("you make the rockin' world go round!"), or even "Footloose" (I like to imagine that I'm Marie, and that Kevin Bacon is telling me to "shake it, shake it for me." I mean..my middle name is Marie, why is that so far off?) The point is that if I imagine that I'm being sung to, it makes me feel like a way more awesome person, so it's easier for me to believe people when they tell me that they think I'm awesome.

No more bullets. Something more important has come up. I am home now, and it's about 8 PM. However, I knew what I would finish this blog with when I was still at work. Mike was being strange (as usual) and speaking in an English accent this afternoon. And that reminded me of......STEVE IRWIN (or the Crocodile Hunter, for those of you who aren't such huge fans that you're on a first name basis with him. And yes, I know he's Austrailian. But the accents sound similar). And in case you were wondering, I do, in fact, own the very fine film pictured to the right. Of course, I kind of stole it from Hollywood Video, so I didn't actually pay for it...but that doesn't make it any less awesome. I saw it in the theater too. Anyway, I had nearly forgotten just how awesome Steve truly is! "Crikey! This croc is one sexy sheila!" HEHEHE it never fails to amuse me. I'm sure I could come up with some kind of strange analysis to do on that movie. I mean, what did the Crocodile Hunter film really mean for our culture in general. Did it have any sort of effect? Which aspects of our culture did it accept? Which did it reject? You can ask those questions about just about any film, be it horrible, wonderful, or mediocre. Well, that's enough of my nerd-dom. This is the third blog this week, so I damn well better not hear anybody bitch for quite awhile. That's right. I'm giving my public what they want to see.

They call me the working man....

I guess that's what I am. Okay, so nobody actually calls me that. But, kudos to you if you can name that tune and that artist! Anyway, I thought that today would be a good day to give all of my loyal fans an up close and personal look at my life as a technical recruiter. Throughout the day, I will list the things I am thinking about, the things that are pissing me off (which will be MANY, I assure you), and whatever the hell else I feel like talking about. Chances are that I won't end up talking about my job that much, seeing as I will probably use this as an escape during the day when I don't feel like doing my job. Why, you ask, am I doing this? Because I'm bored, mainly. And because I need somewhere to vent since Patrick (my supervisor) is out of the office at a career fair all morning and I usually just bitch at him. Plus, I also thought it would be a nice surprise to get two blogs in a row (on consecutive days)!

So, it's about 9:30 now...I've been here an hour and a half. And here's what I'd like to point out: Mike (who is one of my fellow recruiters) uses the phrase, "These days" in complete over-abundance. And it catches, because I find myself saying it when I'm on the phone. And each and every time I say it, a voice in my head says, "Dude, do you really want to be one of those people who uses the phrase 'these days?'" And the obvious answer to that question is, "No, of course not." But, of course, I continue to do it. Dammit, Mike!

I'd like to point out that although thongs make my ass look very nice in dress pants, and I like the idea of them, as well as how they look, they are not the most comfortable of all underwear to sit around the office in. I really thought I would get used to them if I just kept wearing them. However, I'm sitting here right now wishing I didn't have a piece of fabric up my ass. So, basically, I had the choice between comfortable underwear, a choice which results in visible panty-lines, or the ass-flossers, which result in a panty-line free derriere. And, because you know I love to provide visual images, I have provided a picture of the style of thong I am currently wearing up my ass. Unfortunately, I was unable to take a picture of myself wearing it, as I am at work, so you'll all just have to deal with a picture of just the thong. I'm sure you're disappointed. I was not able to find a picture of the exact color that I'm wearing today, but I do, in fact, own the pair pictured. The important question is here is, "Why do I give a shit what my ass looks like at work?" The answer is simple. Society has conditioned me to feel that I have to impress people with my looks at all times. Enough said. I won't even get into it right now.

Enough about my underwear. I don't want anybody to get too hot and bothered (ha ha ha, I know, very funny). I'd like to acknowledge another of the quirks of this job that I find to be strange. When we send out a candidates resume to a client company, we take off all of the candidate's personal information (address, phone number, e-mail address) except for the name. We place the candidate's resume on our company letterhead and send it out. This is not what I find strange. I think that's pretty normal. However, this process is called "greening up" the resume. I have "greened up" two resumes this morning to send to one of our clients. Why is it called that? I've asked around, and nobody seems to know. But they use the term quite freely. I, however, am not quite as comfortable throwing around this term that I do not know the origin of. I am also not comfortable using the word "green" in verb form. It's a damned color...generally used as an adjective. It can't even really qualify as a noun, because it's not a person, place, thing, or idea. What does it mean "to green" something?? Colors in generally are not usually used as verbs. I suppose "pinking shears" would qualify in this case. They obviously have nothing to do with the color pink (which confused me as a small child), but it is an example of a word that generally represents a color being used as something other than an adjective. I'm sure you're bored with my grammatical blatherings. I'm just confused. I will stop now.

Right now it's about 11:43 in the AM. I'm really hungry. However, I refuse to take lunch until 12:30 when I brown bag it (which I did today), because if I take lunch from 1:30 to 2:30, I can watch Family Feud and Who Wants to Be a Millionare back to back. It's a nice little treat in the middle of the day. It's more entertaining when Dustin (another of my fellow recruiters) brings his lunch and watches as well, because he gets incredibly angry at the people on the game shows, and it cracks me up. I'm not sure if today will be a lonely day in the conference room/lunch room or not. Only time will tell me that. Regardless, Richard Karn (a.k.a. Al from Home Improvement and Meredith will keep me company during that incredibly short hour.



It is now 1:35 PM, and I am happy to report that my lunch hour was a good, non-lonely one. Not only was Dustin there to be pissed off at the game shows, but many others were there as well. So, a happy lunch time all in all. This afternoon, I finally get to work on something that doesn't completely suck my ass. After working on machinists and low-end for what felt like 5 million years, Patrick is allowing me the small pleasure of working on structural designers. Unfortunately, I'm also having trouble finding structural designers to call.

Let me just add here that I am incredibly tired of hearing about the bird flu. Each time I have opened a new internet window today, MSN pops up, and there have been headlines about the bird flu all day. This is all a bunch of bullshit...like West Nile, and SARS (yes, SARS was quite real in Asia, but it wasn't exactly an epidemic in these parts). All I'm saying is that the media LOVES to freak people out. And it works. Because most of us believe everything that we hear on the news, especially my grandmother, and she's a topic for another time.

It's about 3 PM, and I finally got some bitchy action on the phone. Somehow, nobody has managed to piss me off too badly today, but this chick was pretty bitchy. I called her, went through my whole routine, "I came across your resume in my database, just wanted to touch base with you, see what you're doing these days," all in my cutest, nicest voice, and she says in her most bitchy, nasty voice, "I'm washing my car right now. Call back another time." Gee, I hope she doesn't need a job. Oh well. That wasn't even that excited compared to some of the assholes I've encountered in the past (Lindsey will recognize the two words "assholes" and "encounter" lingering together in that sentence from the still unfinished musical I began to write in high school. I really need to finish that...).

It's quarter after 3. Patrick and Kirsten are (once again) analyzing specific episodes of Saved By the Bell. It's pretty fantastic. It would be more fantastic if they would discuss the cultural implications (much like my boy Chuck Klosterman). I suppose the fact that they briefly discussed Hitler and Zack Morrison in comparison as leaders is kind of cultural (and kind of ridiculous). I wonder where we could go with that. If I knew Saved By the Bell in and out like they do, I could definitely come up with some good comparisons there...it's really quite intriguing. I have added some visual aids, so that you can ponder this strange comparison for yourself.


And now we approach the end of the day! It's about quarter til 5, and I'm going to publish this shit and start cleaning stuff up so that I can get the hell out of here! I hope you enjoyed today's blog! I'd like to hear from those of you who read....what would you like me write about? COMMENTS, DAMMIT!!!! Suggestions!!!!

I am so pissed!

And rightfully so. This is the woman to blame (although, she is one amongst many contributing to my pissed-offedness):

"Who the hell is that?," you may ask. I'll tell you who it is. It's the woman I once worshiped. The woman whose ever-quick and witty dialogue caused me to fondly reminisce of Kevin Smith's glory days; the days before he forgot how to write good dialogue (this happened around the time he was writing Jersey Girl, unfortunately). Some of you who know me relatively well may now know the identity of this horrible Judas of the television world. If you're still clueless, fine, I'll throw you a bone. It is none other than Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator and often writer and director of my beloved Gilmore Girls. For those of you who haven't heard (and if you aren't a fan of the show, you probably haven't heard, and probably don't give a shit, but that's too bad, because it's my blog and I'll write about whatever the hell I want), Amy Sherman-Palladino and her pansy ass husband, Dan (I only assume he's a pansy ass because he's following her), have opted not to be a part of Gilmore Girls next season. And, as you can imagine, this has the world of Gilmore fans in an uproar. Is it possible that I am over-reacting? Yes, of course. After all, this is me we're talking about here. However, that still doesn't change the fact that I'm pissed. I feel as if I've been jilted at the altar; I finally find a TV show that I'm ready to dedicate myself to, and then the people who have consistently made it great just up and leave. Assholes. Allow me to mention that I tried for a very long time to make the "NO" symbol over that bitch's face look nice and professional, until I got so pissed that I just grafittied it on. That's all she deserves. I'm sorry I wasted the time messing around with paint shop to make it look nice. Okay. Enough about the Gilmores. Let's move on to something else that's pissing me off.

It's actually not David Lee Roth in particular that's pissing me off. It's what happened to his radio show. I'm sure some of you weren't even aware that D-Ro had a radio show. It was brief-running, but yes, several stations that used to broadcast Howard Stern picked up Roth's show when Stern moved to satellite, and 93.7 K-Rock in Pittsburgh was one such station. So, when I started working at JH, I would listen to Diamond Dave during my shitty-ass commute. Much to my delight (and surprise, I must admit), Dave is a pretty intelligent guy, and his show generally kept me intellectually stimulated as I made my way to work at 7 AM. However, apparently the owners of the station he was broadcasting from, or the producers of his show, or whoever had issues with the unique way he chose to broadcast his program. So, he basically was forced to change the format or risk being canned. And he did change the format. And then people stopped listening because the new format sucked. And he got canned anyway. And now I'm forced to listen to Opie and Anthony, who are apparently a radio-phenomenon, and were fired once, then returned on Sirius satellite, and are now on in David Lee Roth's place in the morning on regular radio. I understand why America seems to love them so much, they're stupid as hell. And for some reason, most of this country does not appreciate intellectual stimulation. They'd rather listen to two idiots calling each other fags over a radio broadcast (which Opie and Anthony often seem to do) then a well-informed discussion about global warming. "Ha ha! Who gives a shit if the polar ice caps are melting and the edges of the continents are going to get swallowed up into the ocean? These dudes gay-bashing each other are hilarious!" You may not agree with me, but I'm still pissed off about D-Ro getting kicked off the air.

Now I'd like to move on to a topic I meant to brush on weeks ago, and never got around to. When Tara, Matt, Sid, and I went bowling a few weeks back, we encountered some assholes who couldn't stop touching each other at the bowling alley. You will see an example of their assholicness to your right. That wasn't a luck shot. I have several similar shots, that was just the best one. They were stuck on each other like this for the entire evening. Thank God they weren't at the bowling alley for very long, or I may have been forced to bring in the jaws of life to pry them off of each other. This brings me to the topic of idealized love and how stupid it is, although you would have imagined an anecdote such as this would have brought me to the heinousness of public displays of affection (a.k.a PDAs). But no. I'd like to briefly touch on idealized love. We see it all the time in film, not quite as often in television, because generally in TV the story line carries on to the next week, while with film we have that hour and a half to two and half hours or so time frame to wrap everything up in. So, when we watch a film (romantic comedies are the most guilty of this) a romance between two people has to be summed up in a neat little package. As I'm sure we all (if not consciously, then subconsciously) know, the formula for a romantic comedy goes something like this: Guy meets girl, guy loses girl, guy goes through trial and tribulations to win girl back, guy wins girl back and they live happily ever after. And we're not really satisfied unless this happens. Think of films you've watched that the romantic objects do not end up together at the end. You were probably dissatisfied. To throw out a couple of examples: My Best Friend's Wedding, the probably lesser-known, but surely worth mentioning Annie Hall, and even Chasing Amy. These are revisionist romantic comedies because they don't follow the classic formula that has been used over and over and over and over again for romantic comedies. There's just too much shit to say about this, so I'll make it fast and dirty. We don't feel as satisfied at the end of a revisionist romantic comedy because it reminds us too much of how life usually works out, and we'd rather see things happen the way we wish they could happen. The classic formula has destroyed the way that many people view relationships. We have this idealized view of happily ever after, and when there are some bumps along the way, we become disenchanted, and believe that nothing can ever work out. And I'm just as guilty for believing this shit as anybody else is. But I hate that neat little classic romantic comedy formula...the idealized love, because it makes me think like that. Things can't always be perfect, dammit. So, I try to reserve a little place in my heart for the revisionist romantic comedies, so that I can remind myself that that's more like what life is really like. You win some, you lose some. Too preachy and textbook-like? Possibly. But I don't give a shit. I've been thinking about it, so there it is.

To end on a much lighter note, I'd like to share some of my amusement from work with all of my loyal fans. Going through resumes on job sites is tons of fun, because, as Patrick always tells me, it's like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get (of course, Patrick raped that line from Forrest Gump, but whatever). So, here are a couple of good lines from some of the resumes on my favorite site for entertaining resumes, PA Career Link:

EXPERIENCE
60 Months
GARDENER

self, ligonier, PA

make sure plants don't die. Water,weed,plant

My favorite part of that one is "Make sure plants don't die." But this next one takes the cake for most awesome resume moment:

5 Months
NIGHT STALKER

Target, North Fayette, PA

Stalking shelves at night

I just wasn't aware that it was possible to stalk inanimate objects, so you can imagine my surprise when I learned something new! Hehehehe! Well, that's enough blogging for the evening. Sorry for the length of this one, it's been awhile, and I've had way too much to think about. Until next time, this is Sven, signing out.