The Twilight Report

Next time I am in the states I want to see:

• La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles to see the dusty old bones from the ice age.
• Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains of California, home to the oldest known individual organism, the Methuselah Tree. Saw an episode of Nova on the Bristlecone Pine and have always wanted to see them for real.
• North Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. I've done better than most people from Arizona having been there, but I've always wanted to go back to see the other side.

Stuff has to have been around for a long time before I want to see it :)

I have discovered that if you want people to hang around then it helps to have an optimistic outlook on life. I learned this by observing people and by reading How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Just now, it occurs to me that the inverse corollary to that theorem is that if you want to avoid somebody you should be negative in all your statements when talking to that person. I don't mean be negative about them, mind you, that will just earn you an enemy.

For example, I can't stand Office Mate IV. This is a long tradition with me which goes back to Room Mate I. The only Room Mate I ever got along with was Eric (featured briefly in my story Arizona Fish Story : A Life Less Serious) and the only Office Mate I ever got along with was a girl I had a crush on named E.

Anyway, Office Mate IV walks in just now and says "Any good news?"

"Is there ever any good news?" I ask.

I was actually thinking specifically of The News as in what you read in the paper, or watch on TV (or read on the Internet). Lets face it. Good News doesn't sell so there is no Good News.

"We get Wednesday off." He pointed out.

This for some reason is a big deal to everyone. I am not quite sure why, because every Wednesday before Thanksgiving your manager comes by in the early morning and tells you that you can leave early. It's supposed to be a surprise, but of course it never is. I had decided to circumvent this stupidity this year by just not showing up at all on Wednesday. This year, they told everyone ahead of time, so they beat me to the chase, as it were.

"I was already going to take Wednesday off." I respond, not in a despondent sort of way, but very matter-o-factly.

"I give up then." OM4 says finally and leaves.

"Victory!" I think to myself.

It then occurred to me that this may be a more effective method of dealing with OM4 than putting my ear phones on and turning the volume way up on iTunes. I can remain chipper and optimistic about the future and at the same time exercise my sarcastic wit on OM4. This truly is The Best Of Both Worlds.

So a couple of weeks back, I posted to The Twilight Report a story based on my life back in Arizona (Arizona Fish Story : A Life Less Serious), which included a reference to someone Tyler and I met "virtually" but never in real life. Last night Tyler and I are running around a virtual maze chatting about the good old days, and somehow we talked about our eventual goal of actually having Pizza with I_SUCK, one of the Quakers on our LAN at school. Like all of the Quakers we ran into from those days, we knew his real name and Tyler put it into google (or something) and found his web page, and e-mail address. The crazy thing is he works at The Company, just like I do. Had I known that I could have just searched the The Company employee data base. Big Brother has got to keep an eye on us after all, so we are all in there. Tyler sent him an e-mail and we swapped a couple of messages today. The thing is, after all of these years, and after telling the story (mostly to each other) for so long, I_SUCK has achieved a sort of mythic status. I doubt the actual guy could live up to it. Still, we must have pizza sometime, until that happens my life will remain incomplete.