I'm shocked! SHOCKED! Well, not that shocked.

Hey I just weighed myself again. Turns out I only weigh 210 pounds, which is still overweight, but much closer to what I expected. The first time I weighed myself I was standing on carpet and the scale needs to on a flat surface to get an accurate reading.

I'm sorry, sir, you can't park your van here.

I woke up about an hour ago and I can't decide if the birds outside that sound suspiciously like R2D2 caused me to dream about Star Wars or if it would've happened anyway.

Well, I bought a bathroom scale the other day and the verdict is in: 225 pounds. TWO HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS. To my knowledge, that's the most I've ever weighed in my entire life. According to Webmd.com's BMI calculator, I'm approximately 45 pounds overweight, so I guess the spandex endorsement deal is a lost cause.

Buying the bathroom scale reminded me of the deceptive beauty of the much-reviled (and for good reason) Wal-Mart corporation. The cheapest scale Sears or JC Penney could produce cost $30, kind of expensive for such a pedestrian and common device. For 30 bucks, I could buy six bathroom scales and make a down payment on someone's soul at Wally World.

A gym membership is an absolute necessity now because I'm not braving the elements to run outside. Computer nerds have an aversion to sunlight and an affinity for human blood not unlike vampires. You heard me. Here's a comic strip that further illustrates my point, in a different way:



I also managed to pick up an Xbox yesterday, making this the first generation of consoles in which I owned all the major systems available. Look for me online in the coming weeks.

And Resident Evil 4 is intense. The game starts off kind of tense, but eventually you get used to the enemies the game flings at you. Then it gets dark outside, you start running out of herbs, you can only see five feet in front of you, and you have to protect someone. It's not the sheer terror of it all, it's that the game looks so damn good and lighting is so excellent. You don't know intensity until you're standing around waiting for the lightning to flash again so you can glance around and figure out what the heck that noise is.

A special thanks to that guy that left the comment. It's nice to know I have such a huge audience.

O-ren Ishii, you and I have unfinished business!

Ugh… this day is just dragging on forever. I only have an hour and a half left, but it feels like I’ve already been here fourteen hours. The local network has been acting funny all day, so I can’t run a test on a program that connects to other computers. In layman terms, that means “Computer work not good.”

One of the most frustrating aspects of my job is that I don’t fully understand how the system works and I’ve been here for three months. It’s like the stock market; there’s some consistent logic behind it, but the creamy, nougat center of knowledge is protected by a thick shell of hard, chocolatey confusion candy bar. This sweet, yet impenetrable wall of proverbial brokers and stocks makes it difficult for me to extract the crunchy dividends necessary to get my job done.

By the way, if you’re in college, be sure to check www.thefacebook.com. It’s a great way to keep with your friends.

I’m going to continue the recent of trend of trolling for comments. So if you read this rambling anecdote with bad metaphors, then leave a note. And check out my newly updated profile.

Move zig for great justice.

There are many words you can use to describe the final hours of Metal Gear Solid 3: exciting, intense, heart-breaking. However, it can only be summed up one way: BEST. THING. EVER. The finale boasts more action and plot than even the best Hollywood movies could hope to have. And the twists keep flying your way right up to the last minute through flashbacks, phone conversations, and monologues played against beautiful landscapes and exotic locales. I’m trying to move on to Resident Evil 4, but I‘m itching to experience the whole game all over again. Hideo Kojima (creator of Metal Gear, for all you non-losers out there) squeezes a ton of secrets, in-jokes, and alternate paths into the game.

I need a haircut. There’s no getting around this sort of thing. Out of all things required to keep my body in top form (which it isn’t), I find haircuts the most troublesome and annoying. As a black male, I’m not given many options for hairdos. My hair is pretty much there, like some chick in an Adam Sandler movie. Every time the barber hands me the mirror I gaze deeply into the mirror as if I’m running some kind of follicular analysis. Actually, I think “Hey, it’s shorter than when I got here. Good stuff.” Barber shops themselves are intolerable places. Imagine the DMV except more kids and boring music no one’s cared about for 20 years.

There’s always that air of mystery when someone just walks into a barber shop and immediately skips to the front of the line. Did they call ahead? Are they in some kind of club? Is it because she’s a woman? In any case, somehow he/she has managed to prolong my imprisonment in this hell, and for that this person must pay. Yes, the suffering I’ve endured will not soon be forgotten. Make your time.

If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year at college.

Here’s to meteorologists. Wednesday they predicted that we would have snow flurries, a mostly trivial inconvenience. Instead, we had an inch of snow (just enough to ruin the roads) and, inexplicably, post-apocalyptic traffic conditions predicted back in the Old Testament. Seriously it’s Deuteronomy. On another subject, where the heck did the name Deuteronomy come from? Genesis, Exodus, Matthew, Luke… I just don’t get it.

Anyway, I managed to sidestep this cluster**** of incompetence and my drive home was actually BETTER than usual. What I didn’t sidestep was the following night when the weathermen failed us again. I stayed up late fully expecting to miss work today because two inches of snow was supposedly headed my way. This morning I woke up after a brief six hours of sleep to FORTY-SEVEN degrees outside and not a lick of snow to be found. So here I sit at work, tired without so much as a freakin’ two hour delay due to the weather.

I’ve been enjoying Metal Gear Solid 3 quite a bit the last week. It’s true that the some of the best thrills in the game come from sneaking behind enemies and having your way with them (which can be done like ten different ways). However, I never have the patience for that sort of thing on the first playthrough and send the whole thing into Red Alert constantly. When the next boss battles and plot are so exciting, the little thrills in-between seem trivial. Fortunately, the game’s so well balanced that I can escape such situations relatively unscathed, although a little short on ammo and items. And the graphics are SO good, especially in the cinema scenes. This game trumps most Xbox games on looks.

I’m sorry, did I break your concentration?

This entry is a compilation of my thoughts throughout the workday.

Going to bed. It’s one of things I’d loved to be doing right now (if I weren’t hopped up on coffee), yet when the time comes for me to go to bed at night, I rarely if ever give myself the amount of sleep my body needs. My life becomes like a talk show trying to squeeze in a few more sketches before they’re out of time every night at 11 PM. I have to watch a flash video off the Internet, read a few message boards, anything but fall asleep. And what’s the big deal? It feels GREAT to get a good night’s sleep and it’s absolutely essential when you’ve got a lot of work to do the next day.

What’s worse is those nights when I need sleep, but can’t seem to nod off. I hear my watch beep, realize that it’s two in the morning and that I’ve been thinking about absolutely nothing for the last three hours. What kind of sick torture is this? The human body has its own methods of self-preservation, why can’t mine shut down at a reasonable hour?

My mp3 player just died about a quarter after eleven. I have to work the next 6 hours listening to the background noise of the office. Cripes.

I’m always relieved when I have a problem with one of the machines at my job and my supervisor either takes a while to find the solution or simply doesn’t know how to help me. The technology that we use is so complicated I often feel that I should understand it better than I do and worry that my coworkers roll their eyes every time I ask them a question, cursing my inexperience and envying my rugged good looks.

The last hour at the end of the day is always the longest. I start planning my evening, weighing possibilities, thinking about rush hour traffic, and suddenly I can’t concentrate on my work anymore. Ah well, I only have three minutes left now.

Stupid babies need the most attention.

Wow, I actually had a significant amount of work to do today. My boss checked in on me and said I was making good progress. Unfortunately, he didn’t say I could leave early. Bastard.

I recently came to the realization that working an 8-5 job five days a week forces me to give up one of my guiltiest guilty pleasures: the Maury Povich show. For those of you who don’t know, 2-3 times a week Maury Povich scours America’s ghettos and trailer parks so the rest of the country can feel better about itself. Single mothers confront (and by confront I mean yell and scream at) potential fathers on the show and Maury administers paternity tests to determine who the real father is. These circus freak shows always start out the same way:

1. Trot out trifling-*** ho to whine about how she screwed herself over for the next 18 years and hate on the “playa” she was too dumb to deny sex. Be sure to show the ultra-cute baby who’s dressed way better than it’s ever been for sympathy.
2. Bring out the degenerate, self-absorbed loser(s) who was/were dumb enough to breathe near the woman, much less have sex with her. Watch him curse at the woman who may have mothered his offspring.
3. Mix in “X-factors” meaning ex-girlfriends, new girlfriends, grandmothers, or husbands, all of them obnoxious and unbearable.

Then these things finish up one of two ways:

The guy (or one of the guys) is the father, meaning that the girl has succeeded in proving that this unemployment recipient will have to stiff her on child support for the rest of his life.

OR

The guy (s) is/are NOT the father, meaning that the girl has succeeded in proving on national television that she’s exceptional slut, beyond anything you ever thought people were capable of.

Unfortunately the latter scenario is undoubtedly the more entertaining one. There’s nothing more sadistically hilarious than watching someone’s whole world collapse around them because they didn’t have the common sense to pop a pill in their mouth. Additionally, as a reasonably intelligent man, I feel some need to maintain my composure in a public setting. Really dumb women have no such inclination.

Zed's Dead.

People always try to wax philosophical and have some big retrospective whenever they ring in the new year. I never do that. I analyze my whole life as it's happening anyway to an absurd degree. I will, however, do a quick recap of the year.

The year started off pretty crappy. I was stuck at a mind-numbing, dead-end job and the job market wasn't throwing good prospects my way. Around April I learned I was accepted into NC State graduate school, which was kind of surprising, but good news nonetheless. It was essentially an escape from the real world, a second chance to improve my resume and become more competitive in my career search. After a promising interview with Intel came up short, I resolved myself to returning to school and continued assisting crusty old people in learning how to use their universal remotes in the meantime. I totaled my beloved Nissan Sentra, a car passed on to me from my mother. The Crown Vic I had to drive afterwards serves as a chilling reminder of what my life was like six months ago.

Around this time, most of my friends straight-up quit talking to me. I still don't know why. Anyway, graduate school started, I gladly quit my job, and came despise anyone who didn't speak clear English. During the semester, I found a good job (finally), bought a new car, and planned to upgrade my whole life. In the last month I found a pretty nice place in Cary that's close to my job and in a great neighborhood.

So that's 2004 for you. My income grew 200% and my friends decreased 75% (those two facts are not in some way correlated).