checking in at 1.5 miles to work

septa strike, day 1

(aka halloween)

well today sucked. i woke up an hour early at 7:30am. there has been no hot water in my building since last night. for what i pay to live here, i fully expected emergency water heaters and a swat team bodyguards out front this morning. but no, that did not happen.

today, i thought it would be funny if i wore a full suit to work today. because i wanted to be a professional for halloween. because i wanted to be a manager for halloween. because i wanted to be within the dress code for once.

so i donned my suit and left my apartment at roughly 9:30 to walk from 19th street to 38th street. let me tell you that the comedy gold of wearing a suit today turned into comedy pyrite at about 31st street. i'm not doing that again in those shoes. but my halloween joke went over really well so i'm happy about that.

i would also like to point out that every crosswalk was hazardous to pedestrians. there's a fight at every light between turning cars and pedestrians. i thought i was going to die out there.

oh, vanessa is such a card

make it so

i love slate, again

Throughout the public evisceration of Harriet Miers, even her critics have tended to concede one of President Bush's main claims: Miers couldn't have been a complete loser to rise to the top of the bar and of her law firm.

Wrong.

Well, to be fair, a complete loser would have had to stretch to win election as president of her local and state bar associations. And loser perhaps isn't the word for the typical law firm managing partner back in Miers' era.

Mediocritythat's a better word for it.

i love slate because they have no sacred cows.

oh my god, send for help!

We drove to the ER, and the receptionist managed to keep a straight face when I told her that I had woken my parents up, and gone to the hospital because a spider had crawled into my ear. So I sat in the lobby for awhile. Every now and then, the thing would burrow deeper. It felt exactly like you'd imagine it would.

Then the nurse came to get me. My mom came with, since she didn't want to miss whatever happened, and we followed her into the sick room. The nurse took my temperature, checked my blood pressure, and went to wake up the doctor.

The doctor came in, obviously still half asleep, introduced himself, and asked me how I was doing. I said "Well I have a spider in my ear."

"Really? Truthfully, you really have a spider in your ear?"

"Yeah."

"I don't like spiders. I'll pour something in your ear to numb you and kill it."

He left, and came back with a syringe, full of what looked just like water. He squirted that into my ear, then used that weird looking glowy thing doctors use to check out what was going on in there. He said he definitely saw something, but didn't think it was a spider. So he got the nurse, and went back to bed.

The nurse used a syringe with a really long end to flush out what she said just looked like a big piece of wax. After doing this about 5 times, I began to think that maybe I had just gone crazy. Then this fucker came out:

I was expecting a tiny little spider. This thing is about the size of a small pea.

So now I'm going back to bed. It still feels like it's in there.

It will feel like it's in there for awhile, but that's just until the eggs hatch. Then you'll be fine.

Seriously, though, I work in a children's ER, and we see bugs in ears quite often. Most often, though, it's cockroaches. Sometimes, the child is so small, and the roach that comes out is so large, I wonder how it's possible. We're plum in the middle of the ghetto, so I assume that's why it's most often roaches. The roaches we have at the hospital are absurdly huge, so I can only imagine what's crawling around in the homes surrounding us.

About a year ago, a kiddo came in crying and screaming, and the mother was all nonchalant, deadpan; "a roach crawled up in his ear". We got it out, still alive, when we saw another surprise: another live roach underneath it. Not one, but two had crawled in, while he was asleep. We couldn't seem to get it out, only managing to pull off it's back half.

We had to send him home, with half a roach in his ear and an appointment the next afternoon to have it removed surgically.

My boss had this happen to him, but he didn't know it was there - it must have crawled in while he was asleep and had set up home in there. Whenever it wriggled it messed with his balance and made him fall over. After a week or so of this he went to the doctors and they looked in and saw the spider, so they got some tweezers and pulled it out. Then they went in again and very carefully pulled out the white egg sac that could have caused god knows how much fun if it had been left behind.

Yummy.

oic

ewww

"It's well known that few people actually sleep alone: Most beds are home to thousands of microscopic dust mites, which produce so much excrement they can add a pound or two of weight to your mattress every year, by some estimates."

disgusting

Thirteen-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede have one album out, another on the way, a music video, and lots of fans.

They may remind you another famous pair of singers, the Olsen Twins, and the girls say they like that. But unlike the Olsens, who built a media empire on their fun-loving, squeaky-clean image, Lamb and Lynx are cultivating a much darker personna. They are white nationalists and use their talents to preach a message of hate.

Known as "Prussian Blue" a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

this is why we can't have nice things.

delicious

walker?

grad school sucks

don't let anybody convince you otherwise.

richard simmons...

who would've thought?

what

http://www.oceanicflight815.com/

Click on the bar code and type in "theislandiswaiting"

skype

it's pretty cool. internet telephony. pretty good voice quality. free internet to internet calling. you can pay a small fee for a real phone number assignment that people can dial to call you (about $30 a year) and voicemail service. you can also pay a small fee to make outgoing calls to real phone numbers (2 cents a minute, which isn't bad). it's like a pay-as-you-go service to replace a voice landline if you have one.

i'm thinking of getting on this so i can save a few bucks by downgrading my cellphone plan and use skype whenever i'm in my apt.

skype me. wvuong.

everything is going to be different now

well, not really.

solid b for this week's lost episode. they can't all be a plus episodes.

i love my new umbrella

i can twirl it around and sip a cup of tea like a british person.

it's like hip hop never seen a violin before

just a pretty face with a violin and a biggie cd. nothing really special or outstanding, if you ask me.

oh hay

only for those up to date to season 2, episode 3

i need to finish splinter cell 3 before...

ankle status

the purple discoloration on the outside of the ankle is starting to disappear. one random purple bruise showed up last friday though on the inside of my ankle. that's strange.

i'm a little bit stronger but i'm really slow on stairs. i can't wear my sketchers to work either; they're heavy and they dig into my ankle a little bit. back to ignoring the dress code at work this week! :)

it sucks that this healing is not fast at all. i'm feel pretty fortunate that i didn't rupture anything in the hours and days following though.

i think i might start up physical therapy/rehab for my ankle at the drexel sports medicine center. if i want to continue running, which i do, i'll need to strengthen what's left of my ankle or else i'll be really prone to frequent ankle injuries in the future.

people ask me if i would do it again. no. no, sir, i would not.

hey brother!

i finally found arrested development gob's magic show theme song.

edit: 99 cents for HOURS AND HOURS of personal amusement? hell yes!

oic

god, i love portishead. and lost.