Category Archives: Rantin' and Bitchin'
Writing Slumps
God, I hate getting into a writing slump. Some days, writing is the easiest thing in the world, you already have the sentences you want to write fully-formed in your mind and they just flow in the natural course of writing. Other days, everything you write sounds like the most godawful piece of shit string of random characters that have ever been put into a sentence. Today is one of the later for me. Everything I write looks and sounds like shit, doesn’t convey what I mean, is utterly lifeless and boring. I am doubting not only what I am writing now, but everything I have ever written. God I hate days like this.
Daylight Savings Time
I fucking hate daylight savings time. Just as your body clock is ticking along nicely, when the sun is rising as you get out of bed, allowing you to pour your coffee with actual sunlight coming into your windows, you’re arbitrarily forcede to move your clock for no good fucking reason whatsoever. It’s now pitch black as you stumble sleepily around the house trying to find the goddamn coffee filters and feed the dogs.
Terrorism, Close to Home
On the way in to work this morning, the folks on the radio were discussing the October arrest of a woman that lived near Philly. She was attempting to organize/join a terror cell with the aim of killing a cartoonist who depicted Muhammad combined with a dog. She was a convert to Islam and felt fervently enough about her new religion to attempt to kill another human being on another continent. It’s a piece of news that is all too common these days. Maybe it was the nearness of this woman to my own home that engendered the feeling that it did; I don’t know. All I know is, it impacted me.
And Now, A Brief Message From A Beleaguered Accountant
Payroll tax filings and w-2’s are a horrible, horrible thing for me to deal with, Federal forms, state forms, city forms, all calculated slightly differently and requiring a manual spreadsheet to complete. I hate them all, I hates taxes in every way shape or form. Ugh.
Christmas Carols
There are many songs of the season that evoke warm feelings of nostalgia or spark childhood memories. For me, Burl Ives’ “Holly Jolly Christmas” is one of those, as every time I hear it I can see the battered 8-track of my childhood, Burl’s white-bearded face smiling at me like Mr. Kringle himself. Other songs just evoke a joy within, not necessarily tethered to a memory but engendering a feeling of happiness and of the season. Again, for me, Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” (if that’s the name) are two of those songs. This post has nothing to do with anything that I have described above.
What I Would Do If I Owned the Redskins
It’s been a season of utter dismay for the Redskins and their fans. Like many of us, I had some reasonably high hopes for this team going into the season. I thought we’d be able to compete in the division and for a playoff spot, especially since the Giants looked to regress without ‘Skins-killer Plaxico Burress, the Cowboys replacing T.O. with Roy Williams, which definitely appeared from last season to be a bad mistake, and the Eagles one year older and more brittle. I fully expected the ‘Skins to lose to the Giants in week 1 – Meadowlands is a damn tough place to play, especially early in the season, when defenses are naturally ahead of the offenses. Plus, Campbell and the young wide receivers had another year in the system. They looked good in the first half of the 3rd preseason game against the Patriots, in the one preseason game that “counts the most.” I fully expected to see a 5-1 team preparing to host the Eagles in a critical Monday Night game. Instead, well, the season happened.
Short One for Friday, 10/16
I missed a non-weekend day of posting for the first time yesterday, grrrr. I will make this brief. I hate budget time. I am not too sure about my new boss. Chris Samuels will retire (I predict) and the Skins will end up around 5-11. It’s the weekend, and HOT DAMN.
Consultants
I generally can’t stand consultants. They get called in when there is an issue, say whatever it is the person who is paying them wants to hear, collects ridiculous sums of money, and then disappears without having solved anything but helped whoever hired them look like they were doing something. My favorite consulting story involves a consultant telling the company that hired them that they needed to hire her full-time and pay her a lot of money. Of course they did, and the rest is a history chock full of ridiculous overspending and horrible management. So when your favorite football team hires a consultant mid-season to help with the offense? Oy. Read the rest of this entry
Two Minutes’ Hate II
There are many things in the world that piss me off (stamps required on government documents, for example). Here, I will illustrate some of the things that make me hurl obscenities like Zeus chucks thunderbolts. What I hate comes after the jump. What you hate, you can put in the comments.
Winter in Derenemyn 