I got a new set of disc golf discs for my birthday. Went to the park today to try them out on our improvised golf course. It was really windy today, but the discs managed to cut through the wind in a way that a normal frizbee brand disc just can't. It made playing possible, even though it was tricky with the wind. Very awesome. My girlfriend rules.

I also got a set of four herb garden terra cotta pots on my kitchen windowsill. Rosemary, sage, parsley, and basil. I'm making sure to water them.

Yay, birthday!

I'm getting sick of people throwing around the words "win" and "lose" when it comes to the primaries and caucuses. This isn't a football game, where if you score the most points you win the whole thing. To continue using an already lame comparison, if a football game worked like the primaries/caucuses do, each team would get credit for all the points they score, not just a win/loss for the end result of the whole game. Get it? If you get 40% of the vote in a primary, you get 40% of the delegates that state sends to the convention. So if one person gets 51% of the vote, and another person gets 49% of the vote, there really isn't a whole lot of difference between the success they had. One person gets, say, 49 delegates, and another gets 51.

Throwing around the word "win" makes it seem like they accomplished a lot more than that, and it's really not an accurate way to describe the results. Thanks, media.

I'm getting really excited about this election. This is special for me, because I choose not to participate in elections and government in general, beyond the local level that immediately effects me. I think the process is flawed and corrupt, and I think voting is, for the most part, a way to keep people under the impression that they have any influence over the way the government in this country is run, when in fact they have none at all. If you can't see at least a bit of merit in that, go look up the electoral college or a superdelegate, and then tell me that our votes really matter.

All that being said, I'm getting really excited because of Obama. I've never seen the country so energized about one candidate, and I've never seen a candidate have such an overall positive air around him like Obama does. He's just a positive guy. His message is positive. He's not divisive. He's not running a dirty campaign. Etc. I'm sure it's stuff that everyone has already heard if they've looked into Obama, but it's getting me really excited. I genuinely hope he wins. I'm even going to vote for him - not because I think it matters, but because I want to support his run.

Yay! Obama '08!

I was listening to that song "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" by Toby Keith (right?) earlier today, because it was on the radio at work, and I realized that not only is that song stupid in a lot of ways, but it's also arrogant. Like we're the only country who uses red white and blue on our flag. Here's a list of other countries that do:

France (I bet Toby Keith was pissed when he figured that out.)
Britain
Serbia
Dominican Republic
Tahiti
Chile
Netherlands

So, yeah. Fuck Toby Keith.

I'm very excited and intrigued by the new Star Trek movie, directed by J.J. Abrams. The trailer is up on YouTube, but I don't know how long it will be there considering it's a camcorder recorded clip. Check it out while you can, then check out the IMDb page on it.

Vice President Cheney underwent another heart procedure today. I have a feeling that his heart problems aren't anything typically diagnosed by modern medicine. I think it's the fact that his heart is made out of coal. Or maybe shit. Maybe pure evil given material form. Not really sure, but definitely something like that.

Back in my high school days and my first few years in college, I knew a girl on the Internet by the name of Deanne. All I knew about Deanne was that she was older than me by some measure of years, she lived in Florida, she had a tiny little mouse voice, she and her parents were French (at least her Dad was), and she and I were both into sexual role-playing on AOL. I don't know if there's as much of a scene there now as there was when I was younger, but a few years ago there was a little corner of the AOL chat rooms devoted to nothing but explicit, sexual role-playing, via chat rooms and instant messages. It was a rather big social scene and community, and it was easy to meet people. I had a revolving door of 20 or so people that I would RP and talk with. They got to be friends as well as sexual interests, and to be honest, this type of sexual communication was really my first stab at anything really sexual with another person.

Over the course of RPing with Deanne, which lasted several years, she developed a pretty strong interest in me. Back then I was into role-playing a dominant character and she was into submissive characters, and we let these fantasies spill into our real life. It got to the point where we never used characters anymore - it was basically cyber sex. Really good, long, narrative, explicitly descriptive cyber sex. Then we moved to phone sex, and that lasted for a while. I vividly remember me being up around 4:00 in the morning, her around 7:00 (in Florida), and us having phone sex until she had to get ready for work. Then she took the phone in the shower with her and masturbated for me in the shower. I could hear the water running. It was one of the most shocking sexual moments of my life at that point, and it's probably something I'll never forget.

I also remember noting, possibly for the first time, that this much older woman had a little more than a passing, flirtatious, playful interest in me if she was willing to take her cordless phone into the shower - something I would never consider, because it seemed too odd. I remember thinking, "She's taking her phone into the shower for me. That's... weird."

Anyway. This interest grew and grew, and it got to the point where she was asking to fly out to California for my high school graduation, wanting to live with me when I moved out of my parents house, things like that. I didn't share this interest. Even at 17 I could tell this was abnormal. As far as I could tell she was completely serious. This was a woman in her late 20's, with a good paying job and a college degree, who could actually afford to move out here if she wanted to. From the way she talked about these things, she did want to. I could tell that the relationship was getting to be unhealthy, despite how cool having a much older woman use your body for sex at a mere 17 years old sounds. So, one day, I just took her off my AOL buddy list and stopped talking to her. I made it to where she couldn't tell if I was online or offline, and the communication was severed, then and there. I never heard from her again.

In hindsight, that probably wasn't the best way to end things. I probably should have let her know that I wasn't interested, that I thought she was taking things to a level I didn't want to pursue, etc. and let her down as gently as I could. But I didn't want to do that, because I had a feeling it would really hurt her, in a very serious way. I figured if I just stopped talking to her, it would take time for the realization that I was no longer available to set in, and that would allow her to take it more gradually. Either way, we stopped talking completely and suddenly. That was about 4 years ago.

Well... it's been 4 years, and my curiosity is getting the best of me. I can't sleep right now. I keep wondering where she is, what she's doing, and whether or not she still remembers me. I would really like to talk to her again, despite how much of a bad idea this probably is. Problem is, I don't really have any way of finding her. All I know is the screen names she used to talk to me, her first name, the fact that her last name was French, the fact that she used to live in Florida, and some other really minor details about her.

This is going to be one of those things that just nags and nags at me forever. I can feel it.

Some girl in some school got two days of detention the other day for hugging her friend. I just read about it on Digg. Obviously that's ridiculous, but the part that caught my attention was what the mother said when asked why she made her daughter serve out her ridiculous punishment:

"Coulter said she and her husband told their daughter to go ahead and serve her detentions
because the only other option was a day of suspension for each skipped detention.

"We don't agree with it, but I certainly don't want her to get in more trouble," Coulter said."

I think the better action would have been to call the school, state your case, state your opinion, and then say, "My daughter won't be going to detention. We'd like to know what days she's going to be suspended, so we can get the day off of work and schedule a meeting with the superintendent."

But, no. Instead, the daughter will go to detention like she was told, thus reinforcing the decision of the stupid administrators at the school, giving less credence to anyone who tries to speak out, and making the situation a lot harder to deal with. All because the parents are afraid of her "getting in more trouble."

Kind of indicative of most people in the country, I think. Better not complain about being hassled at the airline in the name of "national security," or you might get in more trouble. Etc. Pretty awful that this is what we're teaching kids to do.

So, I'm going to stick my neck out to be sawed off (which, apparently, is a staple of Halloween now also and deserves a ranting post of its own) and say that Nightmare Before Christmas really isn't as good as people think it is, and it certainly isn't good enough to be the modern Halloween anthem that it's become. It's good. I like it. It's fun, and cute, and romantic, and the music is good. But it's become the unofficial official film for Halloween over the past few years and I really don't know why. They might as well rename Hot Topic "The Nightmare Before Christmas (and some other stuff) Emporium." It's coming out in 3-D for Halloween, and all this crazy shit. It's really not that good. If you want to watch a good movie for Halloween, watch an awesome vampire movie like The Lost Boys, or a good zombie movie like the remake of The Dawn of the Dead. Or, you know what? Watch The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's great. Just don't deify it the way people have started to over the last few years, because it makes you look like an easily impressed, bandwagon-jumping, 13 year old emo kid who spends a lot of time at the mall and hasn't seen a real scary movie yet.

I'm on a Costco sales seminar right now. It's where Costco pays their sales staff to go out of town to a big training thing that corporate does and learn about all the cool electronics-related stuff we're selling. That doesn't matter in the slightest - what matters is that I get a free hotel room, all to myself, and the most important part: $75 per day for food. Try to spend $75 per day on food. It's kind of hard, but you can do it if you order the most expensive thing you an on the menu, plus appetizer, plus desert. That's what I get to do for three days - stay in a nice hotel room, swim in a pool, take hot tubs, learn about electronics stuff, dick around, and eat all the food I want. Literally.

Thanks, Costco.