Who's your monkey?

I finally feel a great deal better about not getting to know After Effects as planned, because it seems like motion graphics is quickly becoming a dinosaur career.

Why would I speak such evil? Well, because I attended the new Final Cut Studio seminar yesterday and could not believe how easy they've made everything now. Motion is amazing... beautiful, easy, understandable, and so much swooshy, glowy shit that had to be built from scratch in After Effects is now all in the form of templates and pre-made expression buttons. And everything is already in vector! Whee! I watched as the tech showing it did things that should have taken hours or days even, and literally just him a couple clicks of a mouse. Beautiful.
And the Final Cut Pro demo was breathtaking... as were Soundtrack and Color. All are easily inter-workable within Final Cut. They've shaved weeks of work off of everyone's time with this stuff. And that was just the basics they showed. I don't think that my mouth ever closed the whole 3 hours. Apple really knows how to rivet a crowd... and how to cater to their customers.

We also got to see a Peter Jackson short that was supposed to be only a camera test, but turned out to be a fully loaded World War I short film, with machine guns, explosions, tanks, biplanes, and a quite a sizable cast. Pretty sweet, I tell ya!

The bad news is that I discovered that I'm a hopeless geek... as you can see by the above excited ramblings, which likely make no sense to anyone else reading this. I also learned that I get quite turned on by technology. Seriously. If I'd had someone to come home to, he would have been in for the ride of his life.

Sadly, that energy went unutilized.

On another note, I was able to see "Eagle vs Shark" at a free screening afterwards, and I recommend it to everyone who likes truly quirky films... like a smarter "Napoleon Dynamite" meets "Little Miss Sunshine" perhaps, but with great accents.

So yesterday was all in all a truly great day... a lunch date with some truly pleasant company and a nice walk downtown afterwards, an exciting tech seminar, and a fun free movie with more pleasant company (can't forget a mention of my movie buddy!).

Now if only I could find a job where I could get to play with all those great toys on a daily basis!!! And if it were downtown, I could have more lunches like the one yesterday (ah, if only I were still a GSU student). The tech seminars are appreciated more when they're sporadic, yet I can't wait for another.

Okay, I'm done writing about stuff that makes no sense to anyone else but me.

For now.

I've Been Poisoned!!!

By my mother, no less! Maybe she's caught wind of my previous blog entry?

She invited me over to dinner about 2 hours ago and was serving chicken and salads... all very healthy stuff for a change. That right there should have made me suspicious.

She laid out several salad dressings, but 3 were of the "creamy, white stuff" variety that she knows I never touch, and only one was a vinaigrette (red wine variety). Clue #2... kind of like when you are having someone draw straws and you push the shortest one up highest in the bunch to fool someone into thinking it's a long one.

I poured it on and noticed that it was awfully thick and sticky for a vinaigrette (clue #3), but it was "fat free" and I guess I assumed that it was just badly made and was probably going to taste bad.

So when I put a piece of cauliflower in my mouth, I wasn't immediately alarmed by the odd flavor (clue #4). It took me about a minute before I placed the odd flavor: dirt and rancid band-aid.

I tell her to try it, because it tastes funny... she refused to taste it (clue #5) and instead opts for giving it a whiff. Immediately, her expression turned to disgust and she told me to spit it out. She gazed at the bottle, trying to spot a sell by date on it, and while it was turned with the back towards me, I noticed there was a copyright date for the product: 1996.

I asked to see it, since she's getting very far-sighted in her years... turned it round and round until I spotted the tiniest of prints:

SELL BY
19JUN99

EIGHT YEARS PAST IT'S SHELF LIFE!!! HOLY HELL!!!

I tried over and over to rinse my mouth, but the taste had decided to cling to the back of my palette and into my nasal passages. I can still sense it there now as I type this 2 hours later!

I tried to take it home with me, but my mother grabbed it and ran away, yelling, "Oh no you don't! You're not going to put it on the internet and tell all your friends about it!" See, there's clue #6 that she's been informed about this and was getting revenge.

Yet another sh*tty tale

WARNING: This blog is not for the squeamish or emotionally mature. Blog contains mildly graphic descriptions of grotesque bodily functions and humor only found funny to those under the age of 16. Reader discretion is advised.

*******************

I'm truly surprised at times that I'm able to function without having been in therapy most of my life. Case in point: yesterday morning.

Around 7:30am, I was minding my own business just Skyping (if you don't know the term, visit the Skype site for more info) with a friend on the other side of the globe. I believe I may have had a few beers at that point, but wasn't drunk by any means, so I do know that this indeed did happen... not to mention the fact that I have a witness on the other side of the globe, as previously mentioned.

I mean, yeah... drinking in the early morning hours when everyone else is still slumbering and/or getting ready for their day jobs probably isn't the most prudent thing to do, but I'd put in a few hours of editing before that and how else do you hang out with friends who are having a 3-day weekend in another country, I ask you? I mean, if you think about the cost of airfare alone that I was saving, it really was practical. Where was I? Oh, yeah... it was 7:30am.

That's when my phone rang. It was my mother, so figuring that it might be amusing for my far away friend, I muted his incoming Skype call and put my mother on speaker phone, so he could hear a slice of life on this side of the world. Little did I know what kind of introduction he was going to have.

My mother was calling because she thinks that I don't have anything better to do at 7:30am, apparently, and she wanted me to come pick her up from the tire place where she was going to leave her car to get fixed. However, she'd decided to stop at the grocery store first and get ice, which is why she needed me to pick her up, because the ice wouldn't last if she waited on her car.

Just as I was resigning myself to the fact that I'd have to go pick her up, I hear her exclaim, "Oh, no!" It was about then that I noticed the echo in her voice. Now, I'm quite accustomed to my mother calling me from places that no one wants to hear their mother. Mine calls from her bathroom all the time and I never know until she flushes, causing me to cringe. She knows I hate that, so she decided to stop telling me that she was doing that and just let me find out by the time I've already had some full conversation with her and it's too late to hang up.

She filled in the details. "I'm in the Kroger bathroom and I just realized there's no toilet paper!" Now, why on earth would she call me from there to talk about her tire situation, I'll never know. She switched the plan then.

"Can you drive over here and bring me some, please! There's none in here."

I tried to tell her just to do her best to grab some from another stall or to call out for someone there to assist her.

"No! It's too early in the morning and no one will hear me calling from the restroom, it's too far away. And I can't get up, or I'll make a mess."

While still trying not to laugh too much, I tried to suggest that toddling over to another stall isn't that bad, when she interrupted with the detail that sent this from amusing to totally absurd.

"I can't get up. I - I - I had diarrhea. It'll get everywhere."

I think I lost it at that point and put my forehead to my desktop and just couldn't stop the fits of giggles. So I repeated the story, pretending to get a better understanding of it, but really so that I could be sure my friend was benefiting from not missing the details.

"Is there someone there with you?" My mother is always suspicious that I've got various gentlemen callers who are paying me a visit or spending the night, so I guess my recap triggered her radar. I reassured her that no one was here. Yes, I lied, sort of... but how do I admit that I had someone talking over the internet when she still doesn't understand how email works?

She continued the story and I continued to listen with a mixture of horror and amusement.

"Well, if you don't come up here, then I'm going to have to take off one of my socks or something. And don't want to do that. They're my favorite pair!"

I think I snorted as tears were rolling down my face.

At that point she asked if I was drunk. I thought, "No, but here's my chance to throw her off the thought that someone else was listening in." I admitted to having had a few German beers at that point, to which she started in on how unhealthy and weird that is... until I reminded her of her daily bottle (and then some) of wine habit.*

"That's different. I have a lot of stress as a night-shift nurse and need it to go to sleep. Don't change the subject! Are you coming to help me or do I have to sacrifice a sock?"

Through my squealing fits of laughter, I managed to tell her that I was "too tipsy to drive" (not true, but I was too sleep deprived at that point... plus, it was funnier that way), and that she'd have to do her best to flag someone down there or go with Plan B.

She hung up, resigned to her fate. I returned to my call with my friend, turning up my audio volume and hearing some very amused giggles.

A little while later, the phone rang again. I took the same measures and put my speakers on mute to allow for covert listening, while I took her second call.

"I'm walking around the grocery store now, trying to decide if I should get ice or if I should bring my car in at all. I can't do both now, if you can't come get me. I'm sure that everyone in Kroger can see that I'm only wearing one sock."

I asked her why she didn't take off the other one as well while she was in there, but she apparently hadn't thought that far ahead.

"I am so sad. I love these socks, but I had to leave the other one behind in the sanitary napkin bin... somebody's going to be shocked to find that later. Plus it felt horrible."

I asked, "Why, was it scratchy wool or something?"

"No, it was very soft, that's why they're my favorites. But I'd worn them all night at work and - well - it was all wet from foot sweat. I feel dirty now."

Again, all I could do was lay my head down and laugh and laugh as the tears rolled again... and I do believe I was begging her to stop, because my stomach was hurting.

After that second call, both said friend and I were quite thoroughly amused and I realized that I had been handed an "instant blog," though admittedly, I did sit on this a little while, trying to decide if I wanted to gross everyone out or not. Obviously, it was just too good to pass up. My silent witness in this seemed no worse for the wear from the first-hand experience, but when I tried to retell it to another friend later that same morning, but he just kept repeating "please stop telling this story" long before it was finished.

As for my mother, she's still in mourning over her lost sock, and is hanging onto its sad, widowed mate as a memento of its fallen partner.