Sdtrk: ‘Head’ by The Jesus and Mary Chain

Ahhh, Monday. The day that I finally had that damnable chalazion scraped off my head. You don’t forget something like that! No matter how hard you try.

I got round to my eye doctor last Monday, at 6pm. The actual appointment was at 6.30, but of course they’re like, ‘fill this stack of papers out that absolves us of all guilt and responsiblilty should we accidentally carve up your eyeball’, so they had me show up early. Having finished those in due course, I was escorted to the operating room proper, where the nurse placed a shower cap-like paper hat on my head, and had me lie on the cushioned cot/counter thing, with my head resting in a cushion to keep it from rotating. She then applied some eye drops, stating that Dr Lim would be in shortly, and made her way to assisting other patients.
Whilst I was lying on that pleather-upholstered cot, attempting to calm myself down by thinking pleasant thoughts, my mind drifted to what someone had once said about a universal truth to doctor visits of any kind. You wait for an interminable period, then they usher you into a smaller room, where you wait by yourself for another interminable period. I was waiting on that cot for a little over half an hour. At one point, I guess my focussing on pleasant thoughts had worked, as I actually fell asleep for a few minutes.

Dr Lim returned with the nurse presently. Dr Lim (her first name escapes me — I think it started with a ‘J’) is a short Asian lass, probably in her early thirties, and with a pleasant demeanour. She began swabbing my eyelid, stating that ‘The part that hurts the most is when we do the injections to numb the area.’ ‘Yeah, I remember that part from the last time I was here to get a chalazion removed,’ I replied. ‘It was really pinchy.’ And with that, we were off!
Now perhaps times have changed since my last chalazion removal — last time, in all honesty, the injection part was not all that bad — but on this go-round, I don’t know what happened, but the procedure wasn’t as smooth as last time. Truth be told, it hurt like a motherfucker. I don’t know if there wasn’t enough lidocaine, or too much, but the thing to remember with lidocaine injections is that they burn. It’s acidic. Factor in that that shit was near my eye, and you have a pretty wild scene, man. Plus, as I was expressing to Dr Lim and the nurse, I wonder if more of my pain was more psychosomatically induced, cos I’ll tell you: you know when you visit the dentist, and they use that pick thing to remove plaque from your teeth? You’re familiar with that sound and that general feeling, yes? Well, Dr Lim didn’t have a pick, but she was doing practically the same thing in removing the core of my chalazion. I could hear that pt pt pt sound as she was extricating it. Yeah. And heh, it’s not as if you can close your eye!

To attempt to get my mind off what they were doing to me, the nurse was like ‘You know, you look like you play an instrument. Do you play anything?’ So I attempted to explain that yes, I used to play guitar and keyboards (but not at the same time) in Dole age and Wreath.VCA as best I could. You know, trying to be my usual humourous and flippant self whilst exacavation was underway on my fucking eye. So in between gripping the nurse’s hand like grim death, I also told them about the Dears concert from that previous Sunday. That went well.
Eventually, Dr Lim couldn’t get all of it out via the inner eyelid. I neglected to mention that all surgery up til this point was performed on the inside of my eyelid, so as not to leave a scar, so they applied a lidclamp and flipped that bad boy open, which also hurt like a sonofabitch. But like I’d said, she couldn’t remove it all through the inside, so she announced that she was going to have to make an incision on the outside and get the rest out. I didn’t feel the scalpel incision at all, but the cauterising that she had to do on both sides of my lid was not pleasant, I’ll tell you. Ye gods. If I ever, ever, develop another chalazion ever again in my life, when I get it removed, my first words upon seeing the doctor will be ‘Fill me with Valium tabs until I no longer remember proper English.’

Everything could’ve been worse, however. The nurse was telling me that on Monday, she and Dr Lim would have to treat a bloke who had four rather large chalazions on each eyelid. They had gotten so out of hand that they were kinda spreading to his upper cheeks. Think about that one for a while.

If I’m not mistaken, the whole procedure, including the wiping up of the blood, and the wound cauterisation, and the eyewashing, and applying the eyepatch that made me look like a character in a Trevor Brown painting, took about an hour. I get to see Dr Lim again for a follow-up this Tuesday. Hooray for Modern Medicine!
Lucky for you, I forgot to take ‘before’ photos, so you’ll just have to use your God-given imaginations. And you can stop throwing up now, I’m all done with my story!

Sdtrk: ‘Groovy spacy ’70’ by Christine 23 onna

Well, this is certainly interesting. (nicked from Brian)

I’m not as much of a Nihilist as I thought I was! I don’t know whether I should be proud or ashamed.

Upon reflection, I think the hedonism charge sticks. When I think of a typical hedonist, I think key parties, swingers, and enough recreational drugs to choke a horse, and I’m thinking, well, that can’t apply to me, as I neither drink nor do drugs, and I barely smoke. But then, I considered what I was discussing with a mate semi-recently: I find it shameful that, as human beings in the 21st Century, we are still governed by societal conditions where we have to work in order to live. No work = no money, no money = no food. We have the (burgeoning) technological means necessary to eliminate a lot of unskilled jobs through mechanical methods, namely through the use of robots and other automata. Of course, the question that usually follows that statement would be ‘So what are unskilled labourers supposed to do for money, then?’ Simple. Retun to school, and take courses for an actual career, instead of a mere job.
I look at it this way, cashiers, service station attendants, fast food workers, etc — people don’t normally aspire towards jobs of this nature, and to be honest, most people in these positions are crap at their jobs anyway. For example, if we had automated fast food places that were to accurately record your order and swiftly assemble it using a series of conveyor belts, dispensers and robotic arms, that would guarantee customer satisfaction. Wouldn’t you rather receive your made-to-order food package from a charming and personable Synthetik similar to Actroid-chan, rather than dealing with some pimply-faced teen who’s desperately trying to apologise for the fact that you ended up with a Big Mac in your bag, when you’re actually at Burger King?
Plus, a whole new job market just opened up right there — someone has to know how to maintain the Synthetik and the food assembly machinery, as well as restocking, changing the drink syrups, refilling the napkins, etc. I wouldn’t want to eliminate all jobs, just a lot of the shittier ones..

Ultimately, I believe that humans shouldn’t be spending 60% of our lives working, but instead, we should be enjoying ourselves through intellectual pursuits or other means, as long as our pursuits of happiness don’t cause harm to others. ‘If it harm none, do as thou wilt’ is the operative phrase here. Humans should be spending their time, money, and energy on living, not working. I mean, even if you choose to spend your free hours masturbating to the Weather Channel, then as long as you’re not harming anyone, and you’re at home with the blinds drawn, then wank for great justice, my friend!
And think of it this way, if you were able to spend less time at a dodgy job you aren’t enjoying, you could be spending more time developing your hobbies into things that could make money for you, which is guaranteed to make you happier. Some people enjoy cooking. Some people enjoy writing. Some people enjoy creating artwork, while others enjoy squirrels. If you’re having fun while working, it’s not really work..
So yeah, wow. A hedonist. Never really thought of myself in that context, but it doesn’t seem really ill-fitting.

In case you’re wondering, yes; I spent all day yesterday listening to my Joy division box set

Sdtrk: ‘The truth about Johnny’ by the Raveonettes

Come Tues morn or afternoon, whichever comes first, one of me mates Tomas, aka Krazy-Q, aka T-money, aka the Other Derek, will be driving westward across the nation to his new home in Portland, Oregon. Needless to say, it’ll be really weird once our circle of degenerates realises that he’ll no longer be getting together with us on Sat eve to watch foreign fillums, or to play Burnout 3, or to stuff vast amounts of Japanese cuisine in our mouths.

This past Sat, we all got together for his send-off. Wolfgang & Masako, Mike, Jeff & Kari, Dave Z & Lani, Tim, Joe & Heather, Derek & Steph, Frog & Jackie, Marika and myself, had an enjoyable dinner at Tokyo sushi /Seoul BBQ, as that’s been our restaurant of choice for years. Whilst we were digesting our dinner, there was almost an hour of hemming and hawing about what to do afterwards. This sort of behaviour is par for the course for our group; most of the time we always know we’re meeting up on Sat, but we usually don’t know where, or to do what, most of the time, and usually some panicky decision is made about an hour before we actually get together. So after making a couple of phone calls and pruning our group of a couple of members, we hit a bowling alley. Through no real fault of our own, we usually go about a year between bowling alley visits, and every time we bowl, we agree that we should do it more often. After great enjoyment flinging oversized marbles down the lanes for about three hours (mental note: the 12 pound balls are the Key to Victory), everyone went their separate ways, and Tomas, Mari and I got back round to Jeff’s house, to watch ‘Frog-g-g‘ which was just awful. It was a Troma film without the Troma, basically. Man. *shaking head*

But yeah! Tomas has been a good friend of mine. I’d first met him back in the early Nineties, when a now-defunct comic store in Ferndale used to hold a weekly anime viewing night called Tora tora Tuesday. He was Derek’s best mate, and I’d only met him once back then. That night, I’d bought an issue of AnimeV that had Catty from Gall force on the cover. I was undoubtedly going on about it, cos I had a thing for purple-haired Synthetik girls back then too, and Tomas suggested that if I let him borrow that issue, he could draw a pic of Catty for me. Eventually, he and Derek ended up leaving, but I had neglected to give him that AnimeV, and I remember being glad that I never lent it to him, as we didn’t see each other until several years later. I can’t even recall how or when we met (again) — it had to be round 1995 or so — but when I was looking for a place to move to when I was living in Clinton township, he suggested his one-bedder, as he had just moved out of it to an apartment unit one floor below. It was a fab place, in a good area, and it even had the unit number 23, which was definitely a good sign. I can’t count the number of hours we spent beating the shit out of each other throughout the entire Armored core series, or having the rest of the lads over for videogames and general chicanery. Good times!
He’s really into webcomics, and one of the ones we always get a kick out of is John Allison’s Scary go round. I would have to say that this particular instalment sums up the inherently goofy friendship he and I have..

myself, Jeff, Mari, Mike and T-money (foreground)
enjoying some painful cinema, as usual

We’re all gonna miss you, Tomas. Ganbatte kudasai, and be sure to give all the SuicideGirls a good rogering when you get there

Sdtrk: ‘La porte a coté’ by Christine Delaroche

Since I have such incredible problems managing my time, I have opted to use an electric shaver, as opposed to the razor treatment, cos it’s considerably quicker. For the past couple of days, I’ve been on the hunt for buying a new shaver, and I’ll tell you; the whole process is striking me as being ridiculous beyond all reason.

The last shaver I bought was a Remington SF3 MicroScreen 1, a rechargable jobbie that I purchased around 2003. Recently, I’d noticed that repeated passes during use just ain’t cutting it anymore, pun intended, so I thought, well gee, I have to finally go buy some replacement blades. I get to Meijer, and all the replacement blades & screens for Remington shavers are for MicroScreen models 2 and 3. Furthermore, I don’t think they even make the model that I own anymore, which honestly wouldn’t surprise me.

So I’m thinking, fine, I guess I’ll just buy a whole new fucking electric shaver, you bastards, so I begin peering at the other shavers that were on offer. Now, I don’t know about you, but I go so long between buying shavers, that I keep forgetting how expensive they are. I remember distinctly when I bought the model I have now, I was with someone at the time, and I was annoyed at the prices back then, and she was like, ‘Well, if you have to buy one, you have to buy one’. So I’m looking at the shavers, thinking, ‘A new electric razor should be about $15 – $20’. Nope! The cheapest model was $30, which was $20 more than I had on me. Jesus.

I admit, I’m a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to some things. I’ll grouse if necessities cost more than I think they should, but for ‘luxury’ items, price sometimes isn’t a deterrent. How much do I think a top-of-the-line German-made electric razor should cost? A rechargable one with triple hovering rotary blades, a multi-speed moustache trimmer, a soothing gel dispenser, that flashes a series of LEDs while simultaneously playing ‘Upside down’ by The Jesus and Mary chain? $30. Replacement blades? Pack of three, $5. Yeah. I’m the Best Consumer EVAR!!1!@

The reason I’m mortified, really, is that the result is inevitable: I’m gonna trek back up to Meijer later this week and buy a brand new ‘cheapie’ $30 electric shaver, and I find that fact hateful. But this is something I have to have. I must have a shaver, as my patchy facial hair makes me look like a common criminal. I suppose it’s the fact that I need this object, colliding headlong with my unwillingness to lay out $30 that could have gone towards some sushi, or a couple of DVDs, that really irks me. Until I can make enough money to afford laser hair removal (I’m serious), I’m gonna have to use a damn razor when I shave every other day. I’m gonna have to go over my face several times, consider myself done, and then 20min later when I’m out the door, I’ll end up running my hand across my jawbone and find that I’ve missed like five or six spiderlegs, and hiss under my breath.
If I had my druthers, I’d purchase a straight razor, cos if you can use one of those effectively, you automatically get the title of badass, but my hands are so markedly unsteady that any effort that I’d attempt would result in at least eight severed arteries, guaranteed

Sdtrk: ‘Winter (studio outtake)’ by the Cure

Heh; today, for my Windows XP productivity class, we all had to do our PowerPoint presentations as part of our final.. whatever it was. I estimate that I spent 12 – 16 drawn-out hours developing my presentation, and what’s more I had to do it in the lab, as none of the computers here have PowerPoint. (Or Access, or Excel, but I do have Word, as that would be something I use in ‘real’ life.) There seemed to be an underlying theme — most of the women did more personal or human-related topics, i.e, the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, a nephew, a cruise, natural wonders of the world, post-partum depression. Whereas the blokes mostly did stuff that most blokes would go on about, i.e, motorcycles, wakeboarding, Mercedes-Benz cars, Chrysler cars, etc. The topic I picked was the history of the Mini Cooper, so I guess I slotted neatly into the latter category. I was the last to go, and I probably blazed my way through it faster than I would’ve liked (each student had five minutes), but I’d like to think I did rather well, especially compared to a lot of the other speakers.. I can say this: a lot of spellchecker buttons went unclicked, wherever these people assembled their projects. For fuck’s sake, people.
I’d also like to think I gave myself a wee bit of a boost by printing up several copies of a papercraft Mini, and passing one out to each student and the teacher. That was my ‘secret extra credit weapon’. 😉

You’ll forgive me if I don’t really discuss my school experiences on ‘Shouting etc etc’; despite my current drive to get my other 14 courses over and done with, academia and I are still rather estranged. I view school as a necessary evil, a means to an end. I really don’t like being there, and I highly doubt there’ll be a day when I don’t feel like an impostor whenever I walk up and down the corridors of my campus.

On Tuesday, I got to hang out with Marika, a friend of mine that I’ve not seen in a long time. We only got to convene for an hour before I had to get round to the lab — we stopped round to Quizno’s for lunch — but it was really great seeing her. I hadn’t physically seen her in over a year, and we hadn’t been able to get hold of each other until February of this year. She’d moved in with some furfucker for a while *shudders*, then she met a bloke and moved in with him, then she lost her job, and moved back in with her mum, and had her cellphone switched off. Now she’s got a job, and a new phone, and we’re back in business, as it were. She’d been wanting to reach me for a while, as back in early February, Derek said she’d stopped round to his house out of the blue, and wanted to know my phone number. Which was bizarre, cos I had attempted to contact her, and her old cellphone number was obsolete. So a couple of weeks after that, she called me from her folks’ house, but her mum didn’t want all sorts of calls at all hours of the eve, so Mari merely waited until she could afford a new cell. And that brings up to now.
Why is it ace, really, that Mari and I are speaking again? Mainly it’s cos back in the days when the Slag was living with me at No.23 Deafening silence, she accused Mari for doing something that was undoubtedly not her doing at all, and I, having no reason to suspect that the Slag was lying/just plain fucking delusional, went along with it, and informed Mari that when we bought our house, she wasn’t to set foot in it ever. Cue lots of crying and screaming. I think it goes without saying that it was a horrible day, and despite the fact that Mari forgives me for, well, thinking with my cock, I still feel guilty about being suckered to the point where I cut off our friendship.

So like I said, it’s nice to have Mari back. After Monti, she was my second female friend to learn about Shi-chan and RealDolls in general, and not only was she happy to appear with Sweetie & I when the French came round to film, but she’s open-minded enough to think that sort of thing is really ace. (She has been designated Shi-chan’s Organik sister.)
Plus, her height makes me feel taller than I actually am, and that’s always nice 😉

Sdtrk: ‘An eye for optical theory’ by Michael Nyman

I’m back on the Internets! After browbeating two SBC Amerifuck tech ‘support’ monkeys, who I daresay were calling from India, we now have better speeds than last time. Going back and forth with some tosser named Sam, we assessed that the problem was their fault, not ours, and it’d be seen to before 6pm that Tuesday eve. So after still having hideous non-speeds at 11pm, I called a second time, this time speaking with a different churl, and telling him that nothing had improved. The connection speed was ramped up about twenty minutes after my call. Results!
Just so you have an idea of what I was dealing with, I took a screenshot of the speed our connection was at at its slowest point, after visiting the SBC Americunt speed test site. (It’s kinda helpful to know the URL if you happen to be cursed with their DSL service, so I’ve reproduced the link here.) Anyway, the screenshot is kinda dodgy, but you have to see it. Yeah. Now wouldn’t you agree that’s a reason to be angry?

On the lighter side of things, I have finally found the name of the style of shades/glasses that I love. If you’re a mate of mine that’s actually seen me in person on more than one occasion, you already know that I own four or five pairs of shades. All of them have the same frame, but they’re all slightly different — one is transparent with mirror lenses, one is black with blue mirror lenses, etc. I’ve always wanted to find more variations of those shades, and eventually buy a pair of (fake) glasses with those frames, as they’re the only kind that look good on my face, but I never knew what they were called. Well, now I know — they style is called the browline, and the models are called either the ronsir, or the clubman.

Classically ace! They’re fine frames, fine frames. Now I need to scour online stores and estate sales for those bad boys..

Gonna try to catch Death from above 1979 at the Lager house this Saturday. The more I hear them, the more I like them, even though the cover for their latest Cd kinda scares me

Sdtrk: none

Short and sweet: Both of the computers here are having difficulties getting a decent internet connection. Everything is moving very very slowly. I was online with a so-called SBC technical assistant for an hour last night, whereupon he had me go to their test page to assess how fast my connection was (or wasn’t). According to the test, my current speed is slower than dial-up.

Back later. Angry now. So there you have it