Social interaction if for loosers

Suddenly, not having a girlfiend is not so much of a bad thing. I recieved a wonderful phone call today from the fine people at EB Games telling me at long last the XBox 360 I pre-ordered back in October is available to be picked up.

YES!!!!!

So, as you can see, even if I had a girlfriend she most likely would dump me in a few weeks anyway because of neglect I will have shown her between now and then. End result would be the same, but starting without one means that the process is a whole bunch smoother.

I would write more, but I have to set up the 360 and play Dead of Alive 4. Who needs real girls when you can play a game involving unrealistically attractive and beatifully rendered girls beating the crap out of each other?

Moving up the corporate ladder

Since starting work in September, I have had to endure the cold hard fact that I am on the proverbial "bottom wrung." Now I can positively (yet at the same time truly) say that it has not been all that bad. My boss and co-workers are all very nice, and no one has really "picked on the new guy." But at the same time, its not very glorious. I often get a large dose of the more tedious work, and there is just the constant knowledge that if saluting were adopted as a corporate policy then I would have to salute everyone else first.

But starting tomorrow, I will no longer be on the bottom wrung. That's right, I will be on the second-to-bottom wrung.

(Pause to let applause die down)

Now I know you are all dying to know what step I took to hoist myself up. Well, I didn't actually take one. I escaped the bottom wrung not by advancing to a higher one, but by having another wrung built underneath mine.

By that I mean we have a new hire coming into the group. Some recent grad from Carnegie Mellon who starts tomorrow. I get to therefore pass the mantle of "new guy" onto him. Plus I am most likely going to have to do much of his training to get him up to speed. That will put me in a teacher/mentor role over him. At long last, I have someone below me. Someone would have to salute me. Where before if Henry, Carl, and Ole (my boss and co-workers) were all away at the same time I would just be by lonely all by myself, now I would be IN CHARGE (a la KFC) with someone else looking up to me. Plus if there is any work that I don't want to have to do, I can pawn it off on him saying that it will be a good exercise for him to learn. Muwahahahaha.

I am still debating between referring to him as underling, henchman, or minion.

Officially old

It is official. I am old.

I assume there are many times in one's life where that realization will hit you square in the face. When a monumental event comes and goes leaving you with the knowledge that your life will never be quite the same because some youthful era has come to an end. Getting married is probably such an event. Having children. Retiring. And while those particular examples are pretty far off still in my life (I said I'm old, not ancient), I have probably faced a slew of equally monumental events in the last year. Graduating from college. Getting my first real job. Officially moving out on my own. Now I am not much of a sentimental person, and through these events I have stood tall and proud without any of them really being able to phase me.

But the one that just occured trumps them all. My @mit.edu email account just expired.

For the rest of my life I am forced to have the 'alum' added before the '.mit.edu', a constant reminder to everyone who sends or recieves an email to me that I am no longer a care-free college student. I have a lot of fond memories of that email account. Checking it 10 times a day. Writing people. Ok, thats about it. But that email account served me faithfully for the last 4.5 years. It served as my conduit to the virtual world. The only other email address that I had before that one was the crappy one I had from our local ISP back in Florida. I have no real love for that address. I associate it with a lesser time. A time of dialup service. With my 14.4k modem. Sure, I eventually upgraded to 56k, but does a starving person really thank you if you give them a second M&M? Yes you doubled their caloric intake, but they are still nowhere near full.

But my @mit.edu account set me free. I went to a magical world of constant connection to the interenet and T1 lines (*historical note* - I am purposely leaving out the period in Flordia where we got a cable modem. This is done mostly for dramatic effect. And because I associate that cable modem to the days of Napster and I hate to dwell upon that loss). A world where I could donwload a whole bunch of illegal movies and software because it wouldnt take forever. But alas, all good things must come to an end.

Fairwell @mit.edu. You shall be missed, and never forgotten.

Who says you can't buy happiness

As I am sure that both TK and my sister (who I believe I the only two people who ever actually read this) may have noticed, I have not posted anything in a really long time. The simple explanation is that nothing interesting has happened to me in an equally long time. My life, while good, is a little boring. Yesterday I decided to do something about that and went out to get something I have been missing for a while: pussy.

I know what you are thinking..."its been a while, hasn't it?" Yes it has, but thats finally over now. I realized, hey, I'm a working man now. I got some money. Why not just shell out some cash and get what I want? So I did.

Thats right, I got a cat. I have been without my cats since leaving North Carolina, and decided that 4 months was way too long to go without. I adopted an 8-month old grey domestic long haired cat from the Humane Society of North Texas. I named him Sarek. It is a little known fact that I have for a long time wanted to name a grey cat after Sarek, who is Spock's Vulcan father. I mean, a cat's got the pointy ears, so how can you not name it after a Vulcan?

Here he is, in all of his glory: