Whoops...

Today is my lucky day.

I had a date that went very well (I ended up asking out Megan, a.k.a. Rugby Chick, and she, to my unending astonishment, said yes), and when she eventually left, I called my buddies, who were out bowling in Skokie, and who were piss drunk and asked me to pick them up.

I said sure, so I headed out there, with a street name and a vague idea of where it was, so I started looking around for the street, not knowing exactly where it was, but knowing that if I hit the interstate I had gone too far.

So I hit the interstate, so I went to the top of the bridge so I could see oncoming traffic, then pulled a U-turn. I went through the traffic light I had just come through, and then I looked in my rearview mirror.

Police lights.

Oh SHIT.

I have never, ever been pulled over before, and I figured I was about to get busted for speeding, since I was about 10mph over the limit. So I pull onto a side street, turn off my engine, and pull out my license and insurance.

The cop comes up and I give the old "Evening officer...", and he tells me that it's illegal to make a U-turn on a bridge. He asks me if I knew that, and I tell him that I had no idea, because to be perfectly honest, I had no idea you couldn't pull a U'ie on a bridge.

So he asks me if I have a clean driving record, and I tell him I've never been pulled over before. I apologize profusely for my mistake, and as he walks back to his car, I call my friends at the bowling alley and explain that I've been pulled over.

Fortunately, as I was hanging up with my friends, he comes up to me and says, OK, just don't do it again (which, believe me, I won't...I'm going to be paying through the nose for insurance with a clean driving record as is), and lets me go.

THANK FUCKING GOD.

I'm convinced that part of the reason he let me go is that I signaled before making my U-Turn, and made it at the top of the bridge, thus giving the indication that I thought it was legal to do so as long as I could see what I was doing and let other people know what I was doing, which is what you normally do when you make a U-Turn.

Of course, he may have just let me go because he didn't feel like filling out the paperwork for a ticket. But whatever, I learned my lesson, no matter why he let me go.

Moral of the Story: Skokie cops are good people.

38 grand a year for this?

Stolen from Cooper: Northwestern now has a webcam pointed at the Rock (for non-Wildcats, a large hunk of junk that students paint to advertise various events or blare political screeds).

It's especially stupid at night, since all you see is a vague outline of the Rock. The Lake Michigan Cam is not quite as pointless at night since you can see many unidentifiable blobs of light instead of just one big dark mass.

It'll be interesting to see if either of these fool things makes it through a Chicago winter without cracking from the cold.

Some days, I wonder why I'm graduating early

Some days I think I must be out of my fucking mind to want to be out of college.

Like today: I got up at 11:30am, went to one class, came home, did an hour of homework and then passed out for two hours, then watched three hours of television, read a book for class about Harley-Davidson, and am now getting ready to go to bed.

I have barely had to rub two brain cells together today, and I want to quit? Granted, I'm saving my dad an awful lot of money by graduating early, but that does me no good if I'm unable to find a job in this rotten economy.

I look around and see virtually no job opportunities, and I wonder what in the hell posessed me to want to graduate early.

Then I remember that I have to write two 8-page papers and take three midterms in the next couple weeks, and that I operate a lot better when I'm getting a consistent amount of sleep (no matter how small it is), and I remember why I'm leaving.

Bartending school, here I come!

Only in America

A woman is suing Costco because they fired her for wearing facial piercings to work.

The grounds? She belongs to the Church Of Body Modification, thus her piercings are an expression of her religion and thereby due protection under the 1st amendment.

I passed this on to a couple of my puncturing-enthusiast friends, to use as they saw fit (i.e., to not get fired).

I did manage to restrain myself from sending it along to The Ex, who used to spend a lot of time on this site, trying to figure out what sorts of objects she could shove through her earlobe to make the hole bigger (she got it about this big before she dumped me. And yes, that thing is filling the hole, not just sitting in front of a much smaller one).

I, for one, am not a big fan even of the concept of shoving a large metal bar through various areas of skin, but hey, I think piercing enthusiasts deserve the constitutional protection to be able to look like pincushions and freak people out at their jobs if they want.

I may be something of a square, but I'm still all in favor of freaking out the squares. Or at the very least freaking out the old farts.

Well, that was effective...

This week just keeps getting worse.

I went to go get fitted for musician earplugs today, which are basically custom-fitted earplugs with a little filter that allows high frequencies to come through, as opposed to regular fitted earplugs, which let almost no high frequencies through, so music sounds really weird and bass-y.

With the number of concerts I go to (at least 15 or 20 a year, plus whenever I actually get around to playing), I need earplugs so I might have a prayer of being able to hear anything by the time I'm thirty. So despite the fact they're expensive, I consider them an investment.

So the process for getting fitted goes a little something like this:

They put a little foam pad in your ear to stop the mold maker (some very cold blue goo, which I assume is some sort of quick-drying putty) from going all the way to your eardrum, and it has a string attached to it so that the mold can easily be pulled out.

Then they squirt the blue goo into your ear, wait about 5-7 minutes until it hardens, and then take it out.

The problem with this process arises when all the various things shoved into your ear compress all the earwax so that you can't hear very well, which is what happened to me. They told me that they could irrigate (flush it out), but I'd have to wait about an hour and pay something like 50 bucks.

Since my NU insurance only covers visits to the student health center and emergency hospitalization, I decided to go for the cheap method. I asked if you could just use one of the home earwax removal dealies you see at the supermarket all the time, and they said, yeah, sure, that oughta work.

Oh, how wrong they were.

I went to Jewel and bought the stuff, and it said, put drops in ear, tilt head to keep them in ear, wait "several" minutes for the stuff to do its job, then flush it out with warm water. This was theoretically supposed to clear my ears so I could hear right.

Instead, what it did was stop them up more. I couldn't hear out of my left ear for most of the afternoon, and I still feel like I'm sitting at the bottom of a bottle when I hear people talk.

So now, I get to go to Searle at the crack of dawn (ok, the crack of 9am) and have them try to deal with this, and knowing their medical prowess, I'm probably going to end up with a ruptured eardrum.

Either that, or they'll tell me I'm pregnant.

So, let's recap: I went in to get something that's supposed to protect my hearing, and have ended up unable to hear much of anything.

Fuckity fuckity.

Listen all a y'all, this is Sabotage...

So the cable modem got fixed yesterday (and then of course AT&T has been having all kinds of problems with its network, and I keep getting booted offline), but the reason it was busted was very strange.

The repair guy showed up early(!), and I told him that basically we had no TV and no internet whatsoever, so he of course decided to first check the box that comes in from the street, that all the lines to the various apartments split off from.

I wasn't precisely sure where it was, though I was fairly sure it was in the basement. So we go down the stairs and it turns out to be right at the bottom of the stairs, although it was about 5 feet over my head, so I had never noticed it.

So the guy shines a light up at the box, and determines that someone has unscrewed the line to my apartment.

The line to each apartment is very clearly marked, and the guy told me that that having the line just fall out was practically impossible, because the lines are screwed on to the box. Someone would almost definitely have had to unscrew it for it to come out.

Now if someone had unscrewed our line and plugged in theirs, maybe that would have made sense, since they would have gotten free cable. But no, it was just us that got (un)screwed.

So my roommates and I are attempting to figure out who did this. The Enemies List so far:

1) Either our upstairs or downstairs neighbors, fed up with 3 blasting stereos and a DVD surround sound system. However, this would have been counterproductive since when we're not on internet or watching cable, we watch more DVDs and listen to more music.

2) My jackass landlord, who I've been fighting with about the heat. This, however, is somewhat unlikely, since the cable went out at 11pm on Thursday, and both he and the super have never, ever been seen in the building after 6pm.

3) Gnomes.

We're still trying to figure out who else could have done it. At any rate, the internet is back, albeit slow and inconsistent because of AT&T's issues, but hey, it's beter than dial up.

Official Grain of Salt

So I have this policy to never go back and change or delete any of my posts (except for spelling errors or bad links), so I must beseech you to take the following rant with the rather large grain of salt that I'm in a bad mood and in a fairly large amount of pain. 'Tis the truth, though probably put quite a bit more bluntly than I would have put it had I waited 'til tomorrow.

Now let's just hope the cable guy shows up to fix my internet. I'm having withdrawl symptoms. And fuck you, I already know that's pathetic. Ugh. I'm going to go get some homework done.