Smackie the Frog

Mom! It is your birthday! Happy Birthday!

The show “Community” did an excellent job last night of describing in general how I feel about religion.

“To me, religion is like Paul Rudd. I see the appeal, and I would never take it away from anyone, but I would also never stand in line for it.”

You have to think of things to write about. And I’m pretty convinced that my life just isn’t that interesting. At least, not in the way that it used to be.

I’ve been writing this blog for going on 7 years, I think. I could be wrong, but it is somewhere close to that. And I’m sure many of you remember a time when I updated 6 or 7 times a day. You probably remember that period of almost a year where I didn’t go a single day without updating. And then it was actually highly difficult for me when I actually took a break. I think I defined myself in a lot of ways by this blog. But more importantly, I was able to think of 6 or 7 things a day to write about. I’m sure that a lot of them were terrible, but still, I could.

Now I just can’t. I feel like the same things just keep going on in my life. I go to work. I go to skating. I mess around with my home computer. Every once in a while I go on a trip somewhere. That is pretty boring. At least, I think it is boring to other people. I’m actually very happy with the amount of stuff going on in my life right now. But I don’t think people are really that interested in hearing about skating every day.

I also think that Facebook and Twitter have gone a long way towards taking away some of the power of my blog. It used to be that if I wanted to say just a little something, I’d post it on here, and it would turn into maybe a couple paragraph post. Now I just make a Facebook status update, and I don’t really elaborate, because that isn’t the place to do it. But the main point gets across, so no blog post is necessary.

So I don’t know what to do. I’m not planning on stopping Smackie. I don’t know that I could ever do that, and I have no desire to do that. It is just hard to think of things to write about. I do plan on an overview soon or my upcoming trip to Europe, and I’ll try to post a summary of my trip to California when I get back. And I’ll do my best to find things to write about that I think might be interesting to other people.

- Driving in the rain is not a lot of fun. The drive from Louisville to Charleston was through the rain for about 60% of the time. The drive from Atlanta to St. Louis was about 85% through the rain. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to drive in the rain, but with all of the big trucks there were times that I had difficulty seeing. And I’d hit patches of water on the road. I’m really glad that I bought new tires before I went.

- Matt’s wedding was a lot of fun. I am really happy for Audrey and him. They are among my favorite people and I’m glad that they found each other. It was a little warm in my suit, but not too bad. I think one of the best parts was wandering around city right before the wedding with Matt, Kelly, and Matt’s brother. I think it is a new tradition.

- Kelly and I had a lot of fun in Atlanta. We went to the World of Coke, which will give you high blood sugar just thinking about, and I tried an awesome French white peach soda. Then we took the behind the scenes tour of CNN, which was even more awesome.

- And finally, thanks to Matt’s sister, Jill, we discovered a fried chicken restaurant called Bojangles’. It is similar to Popeye’s, except better. (Maybe, I’ve never had Popeye’s.) But they had the best biscuits that I’ve ever had. Sadly, they are only in the South.

I go to the doctor a lot. I mean, a LOT. Probably way more than you. In the last four months, I’ve been close to 10 times. I go at LEAST four times a year just for my diabetes doctor. Then I also have to go to the skin doctor, the eye doctor, often I have to go to the diabetes doctor more. You get the point. I spend some time in doctor’s offices. And recently, because of a light touch of the crazies, I’ve been going to a psychiatrist.

So you’re probably wondering what I’ve learned from all of this time in doctor’s office waiting rooms. Well, the answer is that the future is bleak. We are all going to get old, and it is going to be unpleasant. In fact, if you are in one of these waiting rooms as much as I am, that probably means that your best years are already behind you. But basically you are going to get old, ugly, weak, and fat. Sorry to break it to you. That’s just how it is.

But the psychiatrist has opened my eyes to a whole new kind of thing that will happen to you. You will lose your mind. Oh yes, the psychiatrist waiting room is the worst. You see the old people wheeled in, and they don’t know where they are. You see the people with their elderly parents, and the parents are asking “Why am I here? Do you think I’m senile?” Oh, the parade of delusion.

I guess, then, my advice is this. If you aren’t yet going to the doctor as much or more than I am, take advantage of your life. Go out there and enjoy things. Because seriously, it is going to get much, much worse. I have seen the future, and it is dark and ugly.

Happy Monday!

Happy Birthday, Kelly! You have been making my life wonderful and crazy for more than 3 years. I love you so much I don’t think you even know. Good luck with your 16 remaining wishes!

In the past I’ve talked about making ridiculous travel choices based on what airplane I wanted to fly. Usually it isn’t that ridiculous, though. There is only 1 non-stop flight between here and San Francisco, so usually, unless you want to pay extra, you’re going to be making a connection somewhere. And as long as you are making a connection, you might as well have some fun with it, right? If I’m going to be flying through Chicago anyway, I don’t see the big deal in trying to find a way to fly on a 747.

But my next trip takes the cake. I will be going to visit Phil and Helen in early November, and this time I decided to fly into San Jose, because it will shut Phil up about asking why I don’t fly into San Jose. Not to bore you too much with airline details, but if you want to fly between St. Louis and San Jose you basically go through Dallas, Los Angeles, Denver, or maybe Chicago. That is, that’s what you do if you are a normal person and just want to get there as quickly as possible.

And, as a matter of fact, on the way out there I am being a very normal person. I fly from St. Louis -> Dallas, and then Dallas -> San Jose. Perfectly standard. If a normal person were booking their trip, they probably would have chosen this exact same flight, since it allows me to get in a full day’s work before travelling, and also happened to be the cheapest fare.

But then there was this flight on the way back that was just too tempting. You see, I’ve never flown on an propeller driven airplane. I’ve been on a bunch of flights in my life, but they have all been on jets. That’s pretty easy to do because most flights, except the very shortest, are on jets, and even a lot of the very shortest are on jets. But I found one.

So on the way back, I’m flying from San Jose -> Sacramento on a Dash-8 Q400, which is a very modern turboprop airplane. But it is a prop airplane. For those of you not familiar with Californian geography, San Jose is about 90 miles away from Sacramento. It is completely ridiculous that I’m doing this, because then I fly from Sacramento -> Salt Lake City and then Salt Lake -> St. Louis. Way out of my way, and adds a whole bunch of time to my travel.

But I don’t care. Because there probably aren’t going to be a lot of opportunities for me to do this. And if I was travelling with anyone else, they’d look at me like I was crazy and smack me if I tried to schedule something like this.

So yeah, I’m weird. But also very excited.

So the time has almost come. This Saturday Phil and Helen are getting married. Between now and then, I have to accomplish the following things: get pants hemmed, go to soccer game, go to roller skating, buy 44 bottles of cider, plan party for Phil, get hair cut, possibly shave, finish writing wedding ceremony, pick up flowers, clean my house, and any number of other things.

I’m a little stressed out. I guess the ceremony itself is the thing that I’m most stressed out about. I don’t have a lot of experience in speaking in front of a lot of people. And this is going to be reading something that I have written, and that is expected to be a lot of things that it isn’t. I haven’t shared it with anyone, and I don’t plan on it, except Kelly as a sort of “emergency editor”, meaning I don’t want her to change anything, but just warn me if I’ve left in anything that shouldn’t be there, or forgotten to finish any sentences. Things like that. I think it is heartfelt, but I worry that it is cheesy. I worry that people are expecting it to be funny, but it is hard to be funny in this sort of situation, especially when sarcasm and snark are taken off the table. There are some good lines, but I worry about a lack of internal cohesion. Oh well. This is why I am taking Friday off. Lots of time to polish it up.

Most of you reading this will probably be there, and you’ll probably at some point feel an urge to tell me that what I did was good, even if it sucked. Please don’t do that. I’m really honestly curious if what I’m going to attempt to do here will work.

So now I’m off to try to find some Cantonese sayings, and see if there is anyway in hell I can figure out how to pronounce them. Wish me luck.