So*, I decided to do some organization of my twitter herd because I am having some work/life/twitter balance issues lately. But rather than rant blasphemously about how my endless, navel-gazing white man problems never cease, I decided to just do something about it. But in this mundane cleaning chore which should be scriptable, I’ve found… The Last Tweet guessing game.

@graphikwork: 44 miles from B’ham. 3064 miles from Alaska.

What ever happened? Is this like the fucking Donner Party or some shit? I mean… this was six months ago. You shoulda made it by now. Unless you were part of a cattle drive or something. But even then, six months? Somewhere in there you coulda texted. I imagine this person in their shitty, twelve year old Ford Escort. Tweeting about their (pretty hair-brained) transcontinental journey. They’ve stopped for a quick taco in that place they know. And just as they pull out of the parking lot, WHAM double-loaded semi smears them across the pavement.

@p1×3lated: I want google wave. Plz halpz!!

This person, quite clearly, got their Wave account and is now there, completely happy with the way Wave helps her connect with society. They are the ONLY person who feels this way about Google Wave.

@epicexperiences: Just got done climbing a route on beacon rock, it was pretty choice. The views were phenomenal.

Obviously the climbing went fine but I guess maybe the descending didn’t.

@EvilNeen: If @unanything’s head gets any bigger, we’ll have to cut him out of the apartment.

Oh, it got bigger all right. @EvilNeen’s home planet was destroyed with @ouranything’s head went gas giant and simply blocked out the sun.

@shejohns: showing emily how to use twitter

Ext: A high school library.
It is dark, the only direct light comes from THE WINDOW. Two girls are standing over a table piled with papers, composition books, complicated looking schedules. They are looking down at what we find to be a
INT: High School Library.
small glowing screen. We zoom in to find a laptop with Tweetdeck loaded full screen.
A message has just finished sending.

pull back on two high school aged girls in school uniforms. They are side by side.
@shejohns: “And that’s basically all you do. You just put in your message and hit enter or the little send button. Any… any questions?”
Emily: “Well, I’m not really clear on the searches yet and is there a way to autofollow…”
@shejohns: “Noooo, no autofollow, that’s not really a good idea. And the searches there’s a great readme on my site that one of the forum admins wrote.”
Emily: “And you gave me the email list for the forum admins right?”
@shejohns: “YUP, You’re now officially the VP of this Fan Club!”

@shejohns hugs Emily excitedly, but Emily is strangely unresponsive, staring at the computer screen.
When @shejohns turns back to the screen to finish up some business, we bring up the music and zoom to Emily’s face, her face suddenly stony and inhuman.
From screen left, her right arm lashes out, holding a wooden-based lamp, bludgeoning @shejohns as she falls to the floor, obviously dead.
We close up on Emily’s face, splattered with blood, as she begins to wrap the body in plastic bags and anxiously daub blood from the books on the table, scanning along and stuffing documents into her backpack, she hits a plastic binder with a picture onthe front and she’s suddenly wet-eyed.

Emily: “For you, Raul. Always for you.”

And we follow the picture as she puts it into her purse, and as it dips into the dark pouch, we catch a glimpse of the cool wall eyed stare of Raul Julia, in a black and white head shot.

————–
*So I decided I was gonna clear all twitter followers who I don’t know personally who haven’t tweeted in a month. Sorry folks, that’s just how I do. If you come back later and decide you want me to follow you again you will simply have to re-apply. So I go to FriendorFollow, use the otherwise-basically-worthless “Friends” tab, and sort by “date of last tweet”. And now I have a giant pile with the bottom rows representing “private” accounts which FriendorFollows search whatzis does not errorhandle, and then, mixed in, the abandoned accounts of the now-ex-Twitterers. It felt good to get rid of some dead wood and organize some of my shit in lists. Are you paying attention Twitter? Those two things are great. That new RT? That sucks balls. This concludes the technical portion of the show.

To whom it may concern,

You may be interested to know that it is now the year of our Lord 2009 and asking for a hand-written reference for a college position without any electronically editable forms is about as archaic and backwards as having a contact form which simply directs you to a generic email address. I would suggest, if you are trying to impress the applicability and timeliness of your educational offerings to people, that you update your downloadable forms to something less hokey.

Adobe Acrobat Professional is available with an academic discount and will allow anyone with twenty spare minutes and four barely-warm braincells to create a form which isn’t hilariously out of date.

Yours in Christ,
Aaron Walker

Well, I guess this is the standard “Sorry I haven’t been blogging much lately” post. Because I have not, in fact, been blogging much lately, and also I am feeling apologetic. But only just a little. Because mostly I just feel grateful that life has been so good to me lately.

I’ve been a little broke, sure. I’ve been a little tired. I’ve been a little spacey. I’ve been late to work. But I’ve been… happy. In a way that I’ve never been in my adult life.

I’d offer the same empty promises, that I’ll be here more often, that I’ll write every day, but… I don’t know if I will. Right now I want to experience this fully. I want to feel it all the way to the bottoms of my feet. And I hope she does too.

This, my friends – Is a game changer. I have uncovered the new front line in sexual aggressor/naive college student relations. It’s called…. Mike’s Harder Lemonade.

Now… mind you. All of us remember 2002. Mike’s delicious candy flavored liquor bottles hit the scene like blue-dot heroin or that guy Darryl’s super skunk home grown hydroponic he grew in his shower that one time. Young people of both genders were drawn to it’s seemingly limitless soda pop flavored, endless good times. Our bodies young enough to process all that sugar into hours of playful public near fornication in the form of night clubs, house parties, or all night karaoke binges, but we must face facts. Lo though long was the life and good were the spoils of the reign of King Hard Lemon – We are looking at the end of our decade folks: Women have simply started learning to keep track of how many Mike’s they drink and the world of combative debauchery is poorer for it. The last few years we have been fading, as understanding of the amount of calories in Mike’s Hard Lemonade leads this battle’s party seekers instead to simple watery lagers and American Spirit cigarettes.

Leave it to the old masters themselves to reinvent the game so completely.

With it’s 8% ABV, Mike’s Harder Lemonade is nearly twice as potent as the original Mike’s, with yet more horrifying chemical additives to cover up the booze flavor, meaning that the liver gives up EARLIER, leading to longer lasting grind sessions before friends come bail them out or accidental phone number reveals which you can turn into ill advised booty call after booty call.

But that’s not all. No, that is not enough for Mike. The Mike. The Mike understands that it’s not just about pumping up the volume, it’s also deception, because Mike’s Harder Lemonade comes in a four pack… of sixteen ounce cans. Who can do the math on that? That’s right, if your questionably-competent-to-agree-ass-to-tap of the evening chooses to drink all four cans of your magic pixie drink? She has consumed SIXTY FOUR OUNCES of malt liquor. Half a gallon. Nearly twenty FIVE percent more volume than she would have consumed had you opted for the twelve ounce bottles. And need I remind you that this is 8% abv? Whereas all SIX of the original recipe Mike’s Hard Lemonade translates to roughly 4 shots of Bacardi 151, drinking four of the Harder is equal to nearly seven.

I don’t need to tell this crowd the tactical difference that three shots of Barcardi 151 can make on whether or not you get to touch the butthole, and this lets us get there without EVER having to touch the top shelf at the club. Hell you don’t have to touch any shelf, except the shitty beer shelf in the “bad decisions start here” section at your local Chevron.

The King is dead, people….

Long live the King.

Jarvitron: Haha, yeah, life is fucking busy right now. A good kind of busy though, the kind where you have some orgasms and spend too much on booze.
HR : Ha! Funny man. Where I come from it’s called “summertime”.

The summer has picked up momentum, and while I am loathe to admit it, I find myself thinking more often of the Sublime song “Summertime”. And this time not because of the timeless tale of infidelity and frustration, but because of the attitude. The easy paced song, the sense of knowing that life is becoming incredibly complicated, but something about the sun and the heat and the long, long evenings has allowed you to get past it. The other shoe is waiting to drop but, right now – the texture of life is incredibly pleasant.

When it is warm, I crave activity. Summertime in Arizona is overwhelmingly hot. Each trip to the store is an ordeal. Exercise is torture. And in this week of heat, I have been indulging. Overindulging, really, in activity. And thing things I have learned, the goodness that comes with the sweat, the realigning crunch-and-crackle of joints long ignored, the soreness in your meat; the lessons that these things teach are… almost overwhelming. Once the physical body is tired, the heat having dehydrated you, energy reserves drained, endorphins exhausted – you reach for new understanding. And maybe sometimes, you find yourself in your back yard, shirtless, dazzled by the sunshine, soaked with sweat, and suddenly: It’s all so clear. It’s math all the way down. You can track the flow of events to a common cause, you begin to contemplate the very nature of reality. And then it strikes, the physical ache and the fuzzy head and the blurred vision all clear at once. And you see the light for the first time. You see your life. Life is the space between birth and death, time is as subjective as beauty or justice, math is the language of nature, and physical exertion, even physical punishment, is as critical to mental development as reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Your body is a cage for your soul and sometimes you must glory at what it can do.