Who ordered the scrambled brains?

I was on the bus yesterday, approaching Wilshire heading south on Westwood, and I paused from my reading to see this crazy looking guy sprinting down the sidewalk across the street. Tall white guy with long, platinum-bleached hair, wearing a long-sleeve white shirt and black pants… In short, he looked like the cult leader from the movie Contact. (see picture) So I went back to my reading, the AJAX.Net Wrapper Usage Guide, (exciting stuff, by the way), and a paragraph and code sample later, who should be climbing aboard the bus but the running guy. OK, So he was was running to catch the bus, cool. Then the guy takes a position in the aisle, holding the bars above his head for support — whoa! Not cool! NOT COOL! Yesterday it was hot, and this man was clothed head to foot and ran two blocks. When he raised his arm, I swear, even though he was 10 feet away, his armpit was pointed right at me and it smelled just God-awful. It was as if he had the uncanny ability to target his stench, like a sort of B.O. Laser that was locked onto my nose! Ho, man! I wanted to climb out the window right then and there! It was really getting to my brain — everywhere I looked I saw rotting tacos! Eventually the guy left, but I don’t think I can even go near a Mexican restaurant for at least a couple months! Man alive! …Oh wait, unless it’s Taco Bell.

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I hate one of my neighbors. B-I-T-C-H. She lives in the next building over with her four (?) year old son. At least three times a week, within the limited span of time I spend in my apartment, I hear the boy crying, and it always breaks my heart. Normally, a child crying just annoys the hell out of me. “Can’t that lady shut him up?” or “What a whiny brat!” Don’t get me wrong. I usually react like that when it’s clear the child is spoiled rotten. Of course there are different kinds of cries, and they shouldn’t be confused. The neighbor boy’s crying sounds like fear, confusion, and hopelessness more than selfishness or spoiledness. His mother, a young “woman”, never bothers to consider why her son cries. Her response is always “What?! Why are you crying? STOP CRYING! No one hit you! Why? Why are you crying?!” over and over, as the child whimpers on and on. It’s really hard on the ears, on the brain, on the heart mostly, to hear this right outside my window, to hear it as it occurs, to imagine what the child is feeling. Why doesn’t that lady ever feel this way? How can she instill fear in a four year old?

Today the lady went too ignorantly, too selfishly far, when her typical rant was followed by the sound of two smacks/spanks/slaps. Is that because the child didn’t control his crying soon enough? Sigh.

It’s sad. But then I remember there’s far worse. …Man, talk about a Debbie Downer post.

This might be a little bland to many of you, and is certainly not worthy of my first post in many weeks, but I need to write this down somewhere (that is not my hand) lest I forget it and be driven to lose another night’s sleep over it. Prepare yourself, I’m about to unleash a torrent of highly useful, everyday advice upon you! Mike’s Morsel: When creating a stub implementation (i.e. an abstract base class) of a web service interface description, written in WSDL, using the wsdl.exe tool in the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK (v1.1), you must pass to wsdl.exe on the command line all WSDL and XSD files that are referenced by xsd:include, xsd:import, or wsdl:import entities in the interface description.

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After a friggin’ annoying three weeks, I am back online. I can’t tell you how frustrating and annoying it is to not have connectivity after relying on it in so many ways, particularly this website, email, and file storage. But then again, I probably don’t need to tell you. You, dear reader, have relied on this website for your scrambled brain needs since April. I apologize for the inconvenience, starvation and seizures this interruption has most certainly caused.

What brought about this three week interruption? Well, the phone company disconnected the phone line in my apartment… after my roommate failed to pay the phone bill for four months. Yes, four months. And that’s all I’m really comfortable saying about that in a public space.

OK scrambled brainers! Get ready for a tidal wave of fun! (In the form of posts. …What? That’s not fun to you?)

Anytime I spend the night at my parent’s house in Covina, I’m awakened by the chirping of the birds. I guess some would say it’s a pleasent way to wake up but I’ve always found it annoying. Six o’clock is way too early for any creature to be up and yapping. The birds are chirping right now. But that’s not what woke me this morning.

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I’m at work and I have some free time so I’m gonna share with you the story of the Psycho Sandwich Eater.

I’m sure by now you’ve all heard about Subway’s new “Two-Night” dinner deal, but for those who haven’t, you get two six inch sandwiches, two bags-a-chips, and two soder paps for $7.99. Indeed, a scintillating value for a deal with a scintillating name. Mademoiselle Natalie and Monsieur myself, being healthy, value-conscious eaters (i.e. being starvingly poor), ventured forth to partake in this curious new delight. Wait, what happened to my lexicon?! … That was weird… OK methinks it passed. Damnit there it is again! Hold on.

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Pick a few adjectives. Four adjectives. Make them spicy. Now write them down here.

1. ________________
2. ________________
3. ________________
4. ________________

Good. I hope you didn’t use permanent marker. We’ll come back to those later.

Done with finals, and apparently I survived another quarter. That’s four in a row, baby! (Grumble.) Nineteen units, but you’d never guess from the amount of work I did. Started practically each assignment at the last possible moment. Let’s take a class by class look at this shall we?

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I apparently left my bumper-equipped MP3 player at Nat’s apartment yesteday. That wouldn’t be a problem if I had burned all my Pixies albums to CD. But, alas, I DIDN’T. So I’m stuck uneasily with the same unintelligible part of some Pixies song looping in my brain, Filipino guitar staccato and strained Black Francis vocals and all. At least part of me can rest knowing that if my MP3 player were to fall, it’s one-of-a-kind, envied and highly aesthetic bumper technology would protect it’s fragile innards.

Whoa, has it been a long night, let me tell you.

“At this hour, the DOW is up 47 points at 10,560, the Nasdaq’s up 10 points at 2,073, and the S&P 500’s up 5 points at 1,203.” –Tess Vigeland, NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report

“Oh, well, that changes everything!” I exclaimed as I wiggled my toes to loosen the crust with which the night had rewarded me. Although, in reality, it actually didn’t change anything. Why, then, did I make such a bold, daring claim? It’s as I put it to Natalie, as I shuttled her to work this morning. “Nat, just as being drunk grants you license to be stupid, being really tired grants you license to be crazy.” It was a thought that had just popped into my tired, crazy head. But could it be true? And if so…

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Update: Fixed the link to my American Society project referenced below.

Every morning on the bus I ride past the corner of Santa Monica and Westwood. There’s always a big traffic pile-up there; construction on the Santa Monica Blvd expansion isn’t supposed to finish until March 2006. On that corner is situated the Blue Wave car wash, one of their two locations. Looking at the cars in the lot are a good indicator of the affleunce of nearby neighborhoods, since most are luxury makes. Every morning I see Mexican laborers - most likely undocumented - earnestly scrubbing spots from these vehicles. It’s a sight that is common not only in urban L.A., but throughout Southern California. The image of the “illegal” Mexican is inculcuated into us on a daily basis.

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