We're on the road to nowhere....

Joe vs The Volcano and the Lights

Back when Joe vs the Volcano came out, I went to see it, because Tom Hanks was still on his comedy roll then, and I was a kid, and kids like funny things, and since Tom Hanks was so bleedin' funny I thought the world of him. And the movie was good. Very good. At the time I didn't think it was better than Big for a handful of reasons, chief among them I, too, wanted to be a toy company executive, but I thought it was a pretty cool movie. But I've grown up a bit since then and my tastes and opinions have changed, and I eventually came to the decision that Joe vs the Volcano was a better movie than Big, even though it co-starred that lecherous evil rotten waste of a talent, Meg Ryan. The reason I can dig Joe more than Big can be summed up in one scene: The rant in which Tom Hanks' character, (forgive me if I've forgotten his name) goes on a rant about all the bad things in life while sitting in his office. He shits out all the negativity he's had stored up for a while, shows how completely miserable he is, and while I couldn't really identify with alla that as a kid, I can certainly latch onto the one thing he said in that rant that's stuck with me all these years as true; I can hold on to that and say, "THIS is what makes this movie great."

In that scene, he makes a reference to how fluorescent lights drain you of your energy. He goes so far as to suggest they might even suck your soul out of the top of your head. He sits under fluorescent lights for hours on end, day after day, and he can feel his energy being sucked away by nothing more than bad lighting. His boss is a cheapskate and won't buy the good bulbs, and his employee suffer because of it, you dig? That's stayed with me since the first time I saw the movie, years and years and years ago, because it's so fucking true. Bad lighting will drain you dry.

My mom... she's a good woman, but she doesn't understand this. She never has. She buys the cheap version of everything, and sometimes that's not a bad thing, but sometimes that's the wrong thing to do. We live in a house where the main color is brown. She buys cheap lightbulbs that give off pasty yellow light. It's like we live in a cave. It'll send you into a deep, deep depresssion if you spend any time in the den, kitchen, or living areas.

I've had those cheapass bulbs in my room for a long time... they wouldn't give off enough light to see in any of the corners of the room. Any of 'em. For all I know, I've been breeding creepiecrawlies in the dark because I've had bad bulbs in the light fixtures. Fuck! So after getting a headache from trying to read in the dark last night, and being depressed all the time, I decided to toss the bad bulbs... I got some good bulbs. Now I can see everything. Life is beautiful. And I outshine the rest of the house, because they're still in the fucking dark. Joe was right, and I knew it all along. I should have listened to Joe when I first remembered that rant, when I came in from a dark day, turned on my lights, and it actually seemed darker in my room than it did outside. Bad mojo...

This might seem inconsequential to those of you who're reading, but you really have no idea how much of a difference this makes.

Mouth

I lost part of a filling while flossing a few nights ago. I was flossing, as normal, and as I pulled the floss out from between the teeth I heard a pop, felt something small and hard bounce off of the roof of my mouth and hit my bottom lip and fall onto the computer desk (I floss a lot -- anywhere, anytime). This has led to a big gap between a couple of teeth... food gets stuck in it and it doesn't want to come out. Fortunately, it doesn't hurt. It just annoys me. I have a good bit of money saved, and plan to go to the dentist to get this little problem fixed as soon as I get more saved. I'm wary of the dentist, and his bills. He demands payment up front, and if you don't have the money, the work is not done. Best to have a lot of money when you go in case the procedure is more expensive than you imagined it would be. In the meantime I can live with the annoyance of food getting stuck in the gap -- fortunately the gap's in the far back of my mouth, so it's not noticable. Unless I open my mouth wide, for some reason, and I try to avoid that.

Work and... School...?

So this customer's bought a ton of new equipment from us, to be installed over the course of the next year. This is great news. But at the same time, it's somewhat scary news, because to be honest, our little company might not be capable of handling this job. See, the equipment we're dealing with...? Programming it requires a bit of education from the manufacturer. Nothing serious, just a week or so of in-class training in Atlanta. My sister went through it a couple of years ago. That's why she's the hot shit and I'm a lowly mechanic. But she's not gonna be able to handle all the stuff that we're gonna have to do by herself. She's gonna have to have some help. She can't train me -- she's tried, she failed. She's not a teacher. So I'm gonna have to go to Atlanta sometime in the near future -- whenever they have their next set of classes (classes started today, but we didn't know it until it was too late to sign me up). In the meantime, I'm gonna bring one of those things home with me and play with it here... see if I can get the hang of it away from the office...

This in itsself is weird as fuck, because in my head, this amounts to homework. This is bringing my work home with me. I have never, ever done this. This is why I did so bad in school -- I never did my homework. Gonna tell you what my rationale on homework was back when I was in high school: Homework was complete bullshit, because as long as you learned the material, that's all that mattered. And I was, by Christ, learning the material. I made great grades on tests, but since I never did my homework I failed. I never saw the justice in that. Now that I'm older, I can understand it, to a point, and even now I don't agree with what I'm seeing -- Homework is a method of discipline. Homework's purpose is to whip you into shape so you don't fear work. So you don't fear being responsible and getting the job done. And maybe teach you a thing or two all the while. But I was always too stubborn to do homework, and my teachers and guidance councelors always rode my ass because I'd make fucking stellar scores on my tests, but I was failing the courses... they couldn't understand what was going on. "Give less homework, numbnuts."

Another problem I had with the school system, back in the day.... I was taught the same thing OVER and OVER and OVER. It was never anything new. The only time in my high school career I felt mentally stimulated was in my senior English class. And I still flunked it. But the teacher made us read Beowulf, parts of Dante's Inferno, stuff by Homer... I have a feeling she was trying to give us a taste of college. I could appreciate that. It was something new, so I put forth some effort. But all the other teachers, who just taught the same things we had learned the year before...? I had no use for that, so I didn't put forth the effort, and it showed in my grades.

But I always paid attention in class, and I was always one of the quietest people in class. All the jocks thought I was nerd. They didn't know I was as much of a failure, if not more of one, than they were. So guess whose paper they always cheated off of? Yeah. Mine. I'd like to know how many assholes I kept on the football team.

Point is, I've never been very good at school. I've wanted to go back to school ever since I left, because I know the direction I'm going in is the wrong one. But I know how much of a fuckup I was in high school, and I know things really haven't changed much. I'm afraid it'd be a wasted venture.

Now, here, I'm pretty much being forced to go to a school of some sort, and I'm getting a touch of anxiety because... well, I sucked at it before. I'm afraid I won't retain anything. I'm not really afraid of homework or tests or anything, cause, hell, it's only a week long class, but it's gonna be the first time I'm gonna be in this environment in eight years. Things have changed since I was last in a class-type environment... I swear I've gotten stupider. I am truly frightened that we're gonna pay an assload of cash for me to go to this and I'm gonna come back with a head as empty as a coconut. That's why I'm bringing one of these damned machines home.... homework... so I can get a leg up, and try to understand it BEFORE I go to school to learn about it. Because I don't wanna show my ignorance, and I don't wanna waste the company's money... I just don't wanna fuck it up.