the world is dying and i'm out swimming in the blood.

I've more or less accepted re fact that by and large, I hate people. The newest group of people I hate: the hangers-on to the holier-than-thou green movement. You are the second coming of politcally correct groupthink, and as a collective, your effortsre furthering the destruction of a rational human race.

Nothing is more likely to incite my black rage than suggesting I "be conscious of my carbon footprint."

i got engaged. more details later.

A lot has happened in the past two weeks. Tons, actually. Here's the reader's digest version...

I went to Maine with Tracy over the first few days of my forced 3 week vacation. Was offered a contract job in Maine through Labor Day at my old company, found out I was, in fact, getting laid off by my company in Philly. Decided to take the job in Maine, but they needed me to start a week later. Cut my vacation short, went back to Philly and started packing. Spent most of last week taking care of odds and ends, packing, trying to find a new tenant for our apartment, etc. Went to an awesome Phillies game, played quizzo at the New Wave for the last time, said goodbye to China Town, spent the last of my time on the roof, went to a BBQ, enlisted some friends to help me move all of our furniture and shit out of our 3rd floor walk-up, celebrated a friend's birthday, and had a final night out at my favorite Cuban restaurant with my closest friends.

Then, Sunday, I got in the car and drove to Maine. Yesterday I started work. Today I joined a gym and worked out for the first time in way too long. And drove to work with the top down, looking at the ocean.

A lot has changed in the past two weeks, but it's shaping up to be a great summer...

I am a huge Scrubs fan. I have all the seasons on DVD, could pretty much quote them all verbatim, and I even named my car Choco. But this season has been a bit blah. There are some humorous episodes, some that try too hard to pull at the heart strings, but the only thing consistent about this final send-off season is how detached it seems. It's like everyone from the writers to the actors to the editors have been phoning it in this year. Somehow, even when the jokes are great, they fall flat. The whole show does. It just fails to engage.

And so it was when I began this post, on a slow day at the office where I am watching last night's episode on my laptop. I watched the uninspiring cold open up to the opening theme song, and then paused to write that opening paragraph. Then I went back to the show, and proceeded to laugh my tits off for the next 18 minutes. That serious I'm at work and shouldn't be laughing this loudly kind of belly laughter. It was excellent. It's like everybody, especially the writers, finally got around to bringing their A-game. Now everybody, just keep it up till she wraps in a few weeks...

only seasons 1 and 4 are left. Season 1 should be had by the end of the day, but season 4 will probably take another week. Oh well, I'm sure I'll have enough others to keep me busy...

T minus 55:32 hours and counting.

That's when my mandatory vacation starts. I've got a 2 weeks of vacation and a week of unused comp time from last year that rolled over into this one. Counting weekends, that puts me at 23 consecutive days off, at the end of which I either come back to work or pass go on my way to the unemployment line, where i'll probably collect about 200 dollars. Weekly.

As I've said previously, I'm not horribly concerned about the prospect of being unemployed. I've been laid off before when an almost identical crisis hit another production company for which I worked. I was able to survive a solid 3-4 months that time while looking for work. I don't imagine I'll be unemployed nearly that long this go 'round, as I'm in an area where there's more work, and I've got a much stronger resume than last time. The point, though, is that I've been there before, and I know I can weather the storm if I have to.

In the meantime, however, I still have to figure out how I'm going to spend my vacation. Considering the very likely unemployment that follows, I can't really justify taking a real holiday and traveling. It doesn't make sense to spend what little savings I've got. I've got short trips planned to see Tracy's family in Maine, and my family in North Central PA, and I'm going to try to do a 4-5 day hike somewhere in there as well. Spring is the perfect time to go get lost in the woods. The weather's nice but not sweaty hot, things are blooming and the woods are waking up, and the real kicker: the bugs aren't out yet.

Even so, all of this will only account for about twelve of my twenty-three days of vacation. What will I do with the remaining eleven? I'll probably spend a lot of it in Philadelphia, bumming around in the parks, writing resumes, relearning the banjo, and otherwise trying to spend my time without spending much money.

Fortunately, I've got an ace up my sleeve: Top Gear. My favorite television show of all time, and you've probably never heard of it. It's from the UK, and though we get watered-down, heavily edited versions of it on BBC America, you aren't really getting the full effect unless you can watch the original BBC2 broadcast version. That's not easily done here in the States, where the show was never released on DVD. If it had been, I'd currently own every last scrap of it. You can get seasons 10-12 on iTunes if you were patient enough to wait for them (I wasn't), but it seems nobody's made any attempt to get seasons 1-9 into the hands of the American public. The only real way to get your hands on them, then, without buying a region 2 encoded DVD player, a PAL television, and all the DVDs from Europe is to get the torrents. Which I've done. Am doing. I've had my computer on for the past week straight, downloading the each season separately via peer to peer sharing. It's taking forever because there aren't a lot of people sharing old television, but I'm finally starting to see results. I've got seasons 2, 7-9 currently, and should probably have seasons 1,3, and 5 by week's end. That leaves just seasons 4 and 6, which, ironically, are the two seasons that feature the Mazda MX-5 (my current car). But hey, even without seasons 4 and 6, I should have a good 60 hours of Top Gear to keep me entertained in the quiet evenings of my un-holiday.

Thank God for small miracles...

This post is useless. I don't have anything to say. I just felt like fucking around with my phone.
This is the product of said phonication.

Pointless.

Paypal's 3% fees really suck until you attempt to pick up cash at a Western Union location. Then it seems very VERY reasonable.

"As far as the internet's concerned, we don't have sex."

My company is making everyone take all of their vacation and comp time, and they've even laid a few people off. In a roundabout way, you could attribute it to the worldwide recession going on now, but it's more accurately attributable to the cyclical natural of TV production and the fact that six months ago, we were in the middle of production on three TV series and various specials. At the moment, we're down to one series. Which means that roughly 70% of our workforce has no work, myself included.

I've been lucky enough to make it this long, since the last show to which I was officially assigned finished shooting in December, and was scripted and cut by early February. As it stands, I've got eight days of work before I take my forced vacation. Luckily, between vacation and accrued comp time that rolled over from last year, I've got 3 weeks off, or just over 4 weeks before I find out if I'm heading for unemployment or coming back to work. I've got a lot going in my favor, though: I'm starting my vacation later than a lot of people, so there's more time for things to pick back up (we're shooting 4 different pilots at the moment, so there's always a chance some of them will get picked up), I make a lot less money than many of the producers who've been here longer than me, so if they need to trim fat, there are other people they can target first. And lastly, I do a lot. I'm a field AP, a turning producer, and a producer. Most people here aren't as versatile as all that, so there are lots of places to find a job for me.

Fortunately, I've been tying up loose ends and eliminating debt in a big way. By the end of my vacation, I should be completely out of debt, save my car payment. So if the very possible layoff does happen, I'll be able to suck up my belt and survive for a short time on unemployment while I'm looking for another job.

Looks like it's time to start updating the resume, though...

The soft pretzel's only legitimate use is as a delivery vessel for yellow mustard.

Lost isn't a good TV show. It was a great TV show in the first two seasons. Now it's just barely palatable, but I still tune in to watch it every week. Well, more accurately, I watch it online. The point is, I do stay current with the show. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I still watch this terrible show, even though it has picked up a bit this season. At least they've gotten out of the rut of the previous two seasons where every episode went just like this:

"Ben may or may not be toying with my emotions (he is), but now I don't trust my friends (cause I'm an idiot), so I'm forming my own party, getting some guns, and traipsing across the island in some futile attempt to uncover something that will be profound just long enough to keep the idiot fanboys gaga until next week." Cue the end titles.

I do have a lot of trouble with the over-use of canned suspense and the one driving narrative device of the show: misdirection for misdirection's sake. Every episode, there's some absurd setup to build audience expectations for an event that doesn't happen. And every episode, there's some moment that everybody saw coming for ten minutes, but they cue up the distilled, "oh my god, you never saw this coming," musical score, and wait for the small-brained fanboys and fangirls to wet themselves with the pure delight of learning some new key to the puzzle.

But the thing, there is no puzzle. Fanboys and girls, I'm talking to you here, because the constant chatter I still hear in the office, at the deli, in the coffee shop, or on your facebook page has really got to stop. Don't tell me you can't figure out why Sun didn't go back in time with the rest of her people, or why Sayid would shoot 12 year old Ben in the past. Seriously. Don't try to figure it out. Figuring it out requires that somewhere at the core of all of this is logic, reason, and the principles of physics, none of which have any part of the lost universe.

The show is about one thing: suspension of disbelief. So sit down, hang up your ability to reason logically, and enjoy the ride. Just let things unfold, and pretend to be surprised when they do. Don't try to figure out why some character did X, Y, or Z, because the only answer is, "to keep you watching."

At some point, all of you who are trying to "figure out" why anything on this show has happened have somehow managed to accept the fact that the island moves independently of the rest of the world in time and space and that moving it through time and space is apparently no more complicated than turning a wagon wheel half buried in rock. You've also managed to get over the fact that John Locke was a cripple, then he was wasn't, then he was killed, and then he came back to life. Your ability to blindly reconcile these blatantly fantastical elements with a rational schema for cause and effect means you're no longer considered in possession of any useful credibility, and are therefore unable to contribute anything to a logical discussion of this or any other topic.

I like sci-fi, so I have no problem suspending my disbelief and watching them jump through time and fight polar bears. It's fantasy, and it's a lot of fun. But a show rooted in cause and effect it is not. Logic and reason aren't employed here. Don't waste your breath explaining to me how it's all brilliantly connected, and some gray haired tart from Jack's flashback in season 2 is the same woman Hurley meets at a chicken shack in season 4. That's not hinting at something bigger, deeper, and more meaningful. It's not going to explain the universe, or suddenly tie itself into some beautiful, logical bow for your sake. It's just more pre-packaged misdirection to keep people watching. And that's fine. Keep watching. Enjoy the ride. But just stop trying to make sense of it. You sound like complete fucking idiots when you do.

That was the advice I have my old friend Rounsville I'm regards to his girlfriend. Lock that shit down, homeboy. She's a keeper.

Today, he finally did. I doubt his decision had much, if anything, to do with my advice, but it makes a better story that way. Especially when I last told him this not 36 hours before he proposed, complete with hand gestures and all.

Here's to Zach and Stephanie.

You know that bit in The Matrix where Keanu and Fishburn are in the big white room, "loading construct," and Keanu realizes that the plugs are gone from his skin, his hair is longer, and his skin isn't so sickly pale? Morpheus tells him that what he sees is how his mind portrays himself. It's a new concept, that, and one to which we all fall prey. We check ourselves out in he mirror, long since conditioned to subconsciously suck in our guts and posture ourselves just so. Then, after that glance in the mirror, we carry on about our lives imagining we look a certain way.

Well, I've been doing that for quite a while, a good 25lbs overweight, but always fooling myself into thinking I didn't look that bad. Then tonight I caught a glimpse of myself reflected on the black glare of the computer monitor while Tracy and I were having sex. There was no hiding, no posturing. I was busy. So I got a good hard look at myself with the plugs in.

Turns out, I need to lose 25lbs.

So the word on the street is that Tracy's freakishly afraid of junebugs. Go figure.

Suddenly, I find myself obsessed with Pop Tarts. where does that end?

Tracy was gone for an extended familial visit in Maine. She was gone for 11 days. While she's gone, I tend to revert to old bachelor habits. I don't do the dishes until I run out of something I need or until the funk from the kitchen gets too bad to mask with candles. I also don't go grocery shopping unless I absolutely have to. Instead, I just make get creative with what's around. Shrimp and pierogies? Sounds good. Fried tuna with onions, garlic, and sliced green olives over linguine? Why the fuck not?

The real low point, though, was the lonely taco party I had. No, despite the name it wasn't a party for single, undersexed women. It was the night I decided to make tacos only to discover that the avocado, lettuce, and tomato I had in the crisper drawer of the fridge (AKA "the rotter") had all gone bad. It was too late, though; the meat was already cooking. Then I went to get out the cheese and found I didn't have anywhere near enough to make tacos. I didn't have any at all, in fact. But as I said, the ground turkey was a'cookin'. In the end, I ate seasoned ground meat in taco shells with taco sauce. Contrary to popular opinion, the all-meat taco really isn't all that and a bag of chips. It's sad. And lonely. In fact, I'm pretty sure they need a whole new name. The Maco (mock-o) perhaps. Or the craco (crock-o).

Ironically, loose taco seasoned meat is a lot more fulfilling between two slices of bread the next day.

Then, of course, there's personal hygiene. It suffers. I still bathe daily. I still floss daily. But I shaved maybe twice in ten days and I didn't do any laundry. When I ran out of underwear four days before she was due back, going commando was really the only option.

Basically, I reverted back to being in college. Early college. I have a long-distance girlfriend and don't have to put effort into getting laid college.

It was sort of like a mini-vacation, and I enjoyed it. But I'm glad Tracy's back and it's over. I did the dishes last night. I bought enough food to fill the fridge. And yes, I'm once again wearing undies.

It's 1:35am, and I'm still up. I was so damned tired on the way back from State College that I had to pull over and nap for half an hour. That didn't get the job done so I stopped for a coffee. It helped at the time, but now, six hours later I'm still up watching Juno (for the 20th time) and blogging from my iPhone.

Fancy.

Work is going to suck tomorrow.

I use the same travel mug every day. It's this awesome metal job from Starbucks that keeps my coffee warm for up to five hours. It's got a great no-spill lid that makes this thing more akin to a thermos than a typical travel mug. In the mornings, when it's time to hop in the car for work, I literally just toss this into the passenger seat, and let it roll around until I get to work. The point is, I love my travel mug. Love it.

As a point of pride, I don't clean the inside of the thing. I rinse it out, but I've never scrubbed it. It's gotten tarnished over the past year of use, so the inside is black now, not the bright beautiful stainless steel color that it used to be. But this staining has been a slow process, so I didn't really take notice. I certainly didn't concern myself with it. It was just stained metal. That happens, right? I think so.

Or, at least, I thought so. Until last week when I took the last powerful slug of coffee and got a nasty, black slimy thing in my mouth. I peeled it off my tongue and found that it was the congealed remains of coffees past, formed into something akin to the latex chips that flake off of painted wooden furniture. But it wasn't paint. It was coffee. And it was on my tongue.

Fancy.

I cleaned out my mug as best I could with soap and water, and went back about my day as usual. Later that afternoon, I went for a second cup of coffee, and the same thing happened again. Only this time the flake was larger. That was Tuesday. That night, i tried to do a more thorough cleaning at home, but the mug is too narrow for me to get my hand down inside it. My attempts to wrap a scrubbie around the business end of a wooden spoon didn't produce any fruitful results, so I left it full of warm, soapy water and switched to a backup travel mug. The soapy water did absolutely nothing to clean out my mug. Nothing.

By Thursday, I was so sick of the bullshit backup travel mug, I knew I wouldn't be able to make it another day without my mug. Luckily, Tracy was there with the big save: she recommended I use some Oxyclean in that bad boy. That shit really does work miracles, just like in those absurd commercials from the 1990s, so I put a heaping scoop of Oxy in the bottom of my mug, filled it 2/3 of the way up with hot water, and left it on the counter overnight.

This morning, there was a thick, brownish-black discharge all over my counter. It reminded me of the sludge that collects in the drip tray of a propane grill. It smelled just about as nasty, too. I had no idea what it was, nor how it got all over my counter until I picked up my travel mug. The Oxyclean had fizzed up slowly over the night, cleaning out the inside of my mug and evacuating the contents onto the counter. It was nasty.

But it was also awesome; my cup was finally clean. I didn't have to scrub at all. I just rinsed it out, and it was shiny and brand new looking inside. Absolutely spotless. Beautiful. Majestic, even.

There's not really a life lesson here, except that maybe if you've just read this entire post you might want to evaluate how you spend your free time. Seriously, you just read seven paragraphs about a coffee cup. Eight counting this one. Don't you feel dumber for it?

So my company recently lost two of its television series for HGTV. Nothing bad happened, the network just decided not to renew the shows after producing numerous seasons. Combined, those two shows represented approximately 60% of our total business, and it's suddenly gone. We also just wrapped up a bunch of specials and web video, which probably amounts to another 10% of our productivity, and the remaining 30%, our third series, is between seasons (i.e. hiatus) for the next month. That means we're wrapping up a bunch of things, but not getting ready to start much new. We have 3 confirmed pilots that would all branch into series if green-lighted, and one or two more ideas that we're trying to sell. So there is a lot of potential work out there, but unless at least two of these pilots/ideas turn into series, we don't have enough work to keep people employed.

Fancy.

I was talking to my boss today, and it looks like I'm going to keep producing and editing web content for a DIY network show through April 10th. Then I've been instructed to take all of my vacation and comp time, which amounts to another 3 weeks. That means I'm on the payroll through May 3rd. Whether I have a job to come back to on May 4th is a totally different story, though.

But hey, at least I've got 6 weeks worth of work. I'm going to live as frugally as possible between now and then, saving as much cash as humanly possible in case I lose my job and have to go on unemployment.

The good news is that all the work I've been doing in the past 6 months is going to give me one hell of a resume for somebody my age.