CLARIFICATION.

OK, so I was being funny. I read all of the suggestions before I choose to ignore them. Most of them are interesting if not helpful. (They’re only unhelpful because I’m too stubborn to comb my hair.)

And, BTW, I don’t think many guys leave comments on my blog. I’m not sure if any guys read the thing. Perhaps they’re having the same problems I’m having and don’t need to be reminded of them. The “yenta” comment came from someone who indirectly thought I was so pathetic that she set me up with a college student who was 15 years younger than me. That worked out about as well as you’d expect (nothing happened, of course.)

Perhaps I should shut the hell up.

Not likely. But I do agree with with this email that I got from and old friend and that I shouldn’t print because it was not sent publically, and the writer of the email maintains copyright, and since I’m not a lawyer and I have nothing of worth except some ham radio crap and five year old Macintoshes it won’t matter anyway.

So, here’s the quote:

Don’t these yentas have anything better to do than tell you how to run your (love) life, and criticize your (life) choices? (Obviously, I have the right because I’M YOUR FRIEND.)

So, really:

  1. What the hell are all the hair comments? I only take hair comments from haircare professionals like Megan who make lots more money than I do.
  2. Did anyone notice that for every person that suggests one thing, there are just as many people who suggest the direct opposite?
  3. Did anyone think I was going to start listening to testoterone addled ramblings of firefighters, even if the firefighters are female?
  4. Where did all the Chinese women come from all of a sudden? (I know, Chinese parents.)

So even if I was to take any of the suggestions seriously (OK, so I actually know a couple of the people making the suggestions so I am going to seriously ignore their suggestions rather than flippantly ignore them) I’d have to be schizoaffective disorder to carry them out. It’s so much easier to sit here at home and pretend that these dating sites are going to get me somewhere. Hitting on women at, say, the grocery store just means I’d get 86’ed out of places I need to go to get my daily shopping done.

COME ON PEOPLE. GUYS GET HIT WITH RESTRAINING ORDERS FOR TRYING TOO HARD. FLIRTING HEAVILY ONLY WORKS IF YOU’RE FEMALE. OK, or if you’re really cute and gay like Tom Cruise.

HAHAHAHA. OK, I had to work in a Tom Cruise is gay joke in there. I’ve been slacking on those lately.

I just got another reply on a dating site!

And this one is from someone who is only 5169 miles away in Lima, Peru! Guangzhou is 6571 miles away according to the intarweb. Lessee, my car has 14,200 miles in 6 years. That means I could make it to Lima in almost three years. I did end up chatting with her online. Thuy bet me that she’d be Chinese and Thuy was right! A bit stiff, but then again English is probably not her first language.

Speaking of Chinese women, the slightly goofy-seeming Chinese woman from the gym said she worked in a lab, and then yesterday she made the offhand comment, “I’m not THAT kind of doctor.” I finally asked her what she meant and she’s a postdoc in molecular biology. Or biochemistry. Or something. (Don’t ask me to describe it since I gave up on chemistry a while ago.) In a lab at OHSU where I used to be the lab slave back in the early 90’s! So, not so goofy, but a smarty pants! Too bad she’s not tall. She’s from Canada, I think.

What is it with me and foreign Chinese women lately?

Oh, and I saw an even taller woman at the gym today. By tall I mean taller than me, probably over 6′ 3″. Yow.

Contrary to popular belief, I talk to lots of women at the gym. I just don’t ask any of them out.

Oh, and I DID NOT VOID THE WARANTEE ON MY SISTER’S COMPUTER. I DENY THIS IS HER LAPTOP.

If it was my sister’s laptop, I’d resolder the power connector and make sure the cable from the power adapter was OK and reattach the plug.

Just a couple more adjustments…

I knew when I signed up for the trainer that he’d try to sign me up for more time. I mean, a trainer usually charges more than $50/hr and this was $99 for three hours. Anyway, I figured I’d see him at least once every couple of months or so. Well, he got me talked into two more weekly torture sessions and then some more after that. $262.50 worth. Well, maybe I’ll be all buff in time to lose it all during my Japan trip.

Oh, and hey, I got some pr0n spam for the first time in over a year. Finally, some spam I can use!

Sure, mail-order bride.

I mention often that Asian dudes ain’t getting any play in Portland, and the only exception to that is if the woman is FOB. So, I put my profile on match.com at someone’s suggestion (another married amateur cultural anthropologist) and I got the first reply to online dating I’ve had in, what, TEN YEARS.

OK, I had ONE in the past, but she quit emailing me when I boldy and brashly suggested that we meet in person. According to her profile, she had two ginormous dogs who probably would eat me or provide me with piles of my least favorite thing on the planet, dog poop. Perhaps it was all for the best.

Anyway, the match.com reply I got was from Guangzhou, China! What the hell is up with that? A fine message in English from someone who claims to have never attended high school? Sure, I’ll send you a plane ticket to meet me as soon as this Nigerian dude sends me my share of this secret $25 million deal we have going on.

Stupid phone.

Somehow it no longer wants to let me get pictures from my phone to my laptop. Whatever.

In any case, my brother-in-law just took a job with Clackamas High School, teaching writing and humanities in a joint class with Portland State University. We just did some drive-by’s of some houses in the Mt. Tabor area, since the reasonable houses there are about half the cost of the houses in my ‘hood. I was going to attach of picture of Petey, but I’m about to hit my phone with a hammer at this point.

And now my dad has all sorts of suggestions about how they should rent a house because the next door neighbors of a bought house might be “prick heads.” Now how in the hell are you supposed to find that out any more easily by renting?

I am going to sleep now. Maybe my phone and my computer will have made friends again by the morning.

No more zoological experiments.

I’ve found that friends in relationships usually have some sort of weird suggestions to try to get me in trouble. Their suggestions are usually something that I’ve tried, or something ridiculously impractical. It all seems like a zoologicial experiment: “If we just move you and the female of the species into the same cage at the zoo, you might breed in captivity.” Yeah, right.

My friend Sun agrees and said, “At least you (probably) don’t get, ‘If you’d only fix your hair,’ comments.”

As an aside, I was just remember that I’ve known Sun since my first term back at Portland State in 1992 when we had freshman psych together. She was smart kid in the front row who would always spill coffee on herself and I was the smartass a few rows back.

I didn’t post yesterday because I was having, for me, a busy day. Probably a normal day for most people. First I went to Jowers in St. Johns and bought two pairs of work pants, coveralls, and work gloves, all for $77! That’s less than the parts to fix my mom’s faucet! Then it was up to Greg’s to re-guy his radio tower. (The guys are nine wires helping to hold the tower up.)

Projects take a bit longer at Greg’s house. I’ll probably have to go up there and remove the old guys.

After that it was off to my old boss’ house for his yearly barbecue where he lords over me that he fired me. OK, well, I just made up the lording over me part. He never told me that he makes 3x the money I make, that he has his own house and the estrogen shark tank (women circling him with a faintly hungry look in their eyes… hungry for his wallet most likely).

And today, the hottest day of the year, MORE WEEDING! I sure wish:

  1. the school district took better care of the field across the street,
  2. my neighbor couldn’t guilt me into doing half of the curb,
  3. I didn’t have this obsession with gardening or doing tower work every time it was over 90°F,
  4. weeding was sexy.

Oh, well.

The evil that is my sister (continued)

17:00 sister > I AM GOING TO MOVE UP THERE AND KICK YOUR ASS
17:00 sister > I AM SORRY
17:00 sister > BUT I AM STILL KICKING YOUR ASS
17:00 sister > EVERY SINGLE DAY
17:01 sister > SINCE WE MIGHT MOVE UP THERE

17:06 htodd> I don’t know what ma was talking about
17:06 sister > ok
17:06 htodd> other than that you’re the bad kid now
17:06 htodd> BAAAD KID
17:06 sister > I’M GOING TO KICK HER ASS, TOO
17:06 sister > BOTH OF YOURS
17:06 sister > KICK HERS WITH THE LEFT LEG
17:06 sister > AND YOURS WITH THE RIGHT LEG
17:06 htodd> Even peter says you’re the BAD KID
17:07 sister > I AM NOT THE BAD KID
17:07 sister > YOU ARE THE CRAZY ONE
17:07 sister > >:)

17:10 htodd> BAAAD KID
17:10 sister > I GOT HIM A CAR SO HE WOULDN’T HAVE TO BORROW ONE
17:10 sister > I AM THE GOOOOOOOOD KID
17:10 sister > oh for chrissakes what do I care
17:11 sister > YOU’D BETTER GET YOUR ASS IN SHAPE NOW
17:11 sister > SINCE I AM GOING TO KICK IT
17:14 htodd> good thing I can cut and paste this into my blog
17:14 sister > KICK YOUR SORRY ASS EACH AND EVERY DAY
17:14 sister > TO DO: – EAT; – RUN; WALK DEEDLE; -KICK SASHI’S ASS; – WORK
17:15 sister > MY DAILY LIST

My boss is gonna know I’m not working hard today.

I’m working from home since the gutter were being replaced. The gutters look nice, though the downspouts make me wonder a bit. Are they supposed to be off the ground like that?

And this downspout looks a little crooked.

But I’m happy we finally got the gutters fixed.

Anyway, work — my work — continued apace until I met my co-worker for lunch. You, see, my parents have this evil kitchen sink that is hard to use. The drain leaks from time to time, it swivels hard, it turns on and off with much difficulty, and today the handle broke. I thought I’d go to the plumbing supply across from the place we went to lunch to get a replacement handle.

Well, I mentioned it turns on and off with some difficulty. The $9.95 handle replacement was no match for the stiff internal mechanism of this evil Moen POS faucet. I returned the cheap handle and went to a fancier plumbing supply. I bought the direct replacement handle that cost $47! For just a faucet handle! As long as I was at it, I decided to replace the “diverter” for that spray thingy since my mom complains that it doesn’t work right.

So, the easy part of the repair consisted of knocking over a pot full of sand that my mom had been keep for some unknown reason.

Even after dismantling the faucet, I couldn’t get the diverter off. I called Moen’s help line and they said, “You just have to pull it straight off.” Hell, I tried prying it off and I ended up denting the sink. I even called the plumbing store and asked if there was anything keeping the diverter on. They said, “No, it should come right off.” It took a 2×4 and a pry bar to get the thing off. Every time I do something like that I remember why plumbers are paid so much.

So, in summary, I made a big dent in the sink and I feel like a loser.

Oh, hey, I left an email for someone on OKCupid who is supposed to be my highest percentage match, a 37-year-old woman from Portland. She’s been on, but left no reply. The only email I got was from a putative 20-year-old. I think this sounds like trouble any way you look at it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARIKO!

She’s OOOOOLD. It’s a zero-year and it ain’t 20 or 30. OK, so yesterday my grandma would have been 100 if she hadn’t passed away eariler this year, so 40 isn’t that old comparatively. In any case, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Oh, and see the comments of yesterday’s post to find out the stories my sister told. Actually, they weren’t bad ones. One was about how I was walking down the street (on the way to buy pr0n from a vending machine, lonely and depraved guy that I am) and the gods sent some construction workers to keep me from straying the path of purity and light. They were drunk and one of them was in a mood to fight any random person walking down the street, I guess. He ran across the narrow street, shoved me in a ditch, and then started beating on me after I got out.

The second story is funnier. One of my female co-workers lived in military apartments nearby and I told her I saw all the people putting out their laundry. A few days later she came by my desk at work with a serious look on her face and when I asked her what was up, she asked for her underwear back. Some much more perverted guy stole her underwear from the clothesline on her balcony and she thought it was me. Look, I had a few buddies from the Japanese military and if nothing else, they were pretty darn buff. I’m not messing with them. I also told her that if I wanted women’s underwear, I’d just go and buy it. Maybe that’s not the point…

By the way Thuy’s stories are even LESS accurate.

The evil that is my little sister.

Apparently, my sister has been telling stories about me again. A few years back she told her friends the Slabs such stories that they were afraid to meet me. Apparently, she still pulls that kind of crap.

Plus, Megan thinks the reason I have such bad luck with the opposite sex is familial karma. There are all sorts of boys who liked Mariko and she just shined them on and now I’m destined to the alone farm. (OK, so that “alone farm” was lame. But I just spent 15 minutes trying to write a profile on match.com that was eaten by their awful server and I’m pretty much out of creativity for the night.)

Well, I guess the day started out OK. I recognized someone from the gym on the way to work. I asked her if she was the “flag person” because she’s always wearing a t-shirt that says, “Rifles, Sabers, Flags…” or something like that, and I knew that had to have something to do with color guards. It turns out she’s getting her PhD in Computer Science out at OGI. I think she’s always at the gym with some dude, but woo, attractive, smart, and tall. (I like tall women because I’m a big chicken and all I ever do is look. You can see tall women from a lot farther away.)

Thuy’s instruction: Be less gay.

OK, so I talked to more women than men at the gym. Of course, I had to say hello to the guys I usually see, and now that I think of it I also talked to the guy who is overly exuberant in the locker room. So perhaps I didn’t follow Thuy’s instructions correctly. I did, however, find more money on the floor in the gym. It was a 20 cent Euro piece, for whatever good that does me.

(The women I talked to hardly count. One was the woman at the desk who is super friendly and also probably 21. Another was a Harvard grad who was wearing a Harvard shirt and I just asked her if she attended the university. Another was there with her pot-bellied boyfriend and I just reminded her not to forget her iPod. Another was my neighbor Stephanie. And finally, one went to Andover Academy, a school for people who sneeze more money than I’ve seen in my life. And that counts the educational film I saw on the US Mint.)

My torturer, er, trainer called in sick, so I was on my own to torture myself. I think I did a fair job.