When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, “Did you sleep well?” I said, “No, I made a few mistakes.” – Steven Wright For those of you who have trouble getting up in the morning, I truly envy you. What is it that normal people do that enables them to sleep in? Or to not have to put foam plugs in their ears to fall asleep? Or to be able to fall asleep after getting up? The world of the normal sleeper truly baffles me because I haven’t been able to do any of these things lately.

Right after I got my eggs at the grocery store, I noticed there was a bag of Lays potato chips in my shopping cart. This was odd: I don’t eat potato chips usually. Someone must have put them in my cart. So I put them back on the shelf and went on my merry way, finished shopping and started unloading my stuff at the cashier. As I finished unloading, I realized that half the stuff wasn’t even mine. Where did all this stuff come from? Who would put a cantaloupe and all these radishes in my cart? Wait a sec . . . I reloaded everything back in the cart, went back to the produce section and found my original cart in its original spot with all my produce in it. I guess I grabbed a cart at some point that looked very similar to mine. But … wasn’t.

At work today, a fellow coworkers’s truck caught on fire, right after lunch time. The firefighters were called in and they ended up smashing the windows and hosing the fire down. By the time work got out, the truck was gone. It turns out an electrical short caused the fire. It was kinda sad. During lunch I usually go in my car, draw, and eat my sandwich, and yesterday I saw him in that same truck reading a book.

After I went to the bank today, I drove to a nearby park, which has a radio-controlled airplane field. It’s basically a flat grassy field with a mini airstrip and mini taxiways. It’s usually more busy on the weekends, of course, but there were a couple hobbyists around today, flying their tiny planes and jets. Some of them weren’t so tiny, like this F/A-18 model I saw today which looked almost as big as the pilot. The flight area is a little small, and these planes end up just doing an oval around the airfield with the occasional vertical loop. There’s an area you can see the planes up close, where the pilots fix their planes and attach the wings and propellers and whatnot. I don’t know if I really have any interest in flying one of these things but I still like to go to this place every now and then.

I just happened to be looking through my e-journal the other day, the one I kept during my early years in college. I wish I could paste a paragraph or two here that isn’t totally embarrassing but, unfortunately, it all reads something like this: I like this girl. I like that girl. I think she’s cute. I hope I’m not a dork around her. Blah blah Blah! I sorta wish I covered more topics in my journal other than girls, but alas, it’s all 35 pages of angst and misspellings. Oh well. I sorta wish now I kept a journal when I was in elementary school. I wonder what I would have written about. Hopefully it would have been less embarrassing.

I think this has definitely got to be one of my records for going the longest without doing laundry. Previously it was four weeks but at that point I did four large loads, so it was pretty much the same as a load a week. But looking at my laundry bag, I’d say I might only have one load and it’s been four weeks. How did I accomplish this, you may ask? I’m not sure, but I think it involves lowering one’s standards, as you might expect.

Here’s a childhood memory: I remember this bike I had when I was growing up that was a hand me down. It was blue and the kind of bike that I thought was slightly uncool with it’s wide handlebars and brakes you’d apply by backpedaling. I remember one day riding this bike down this driveway and off the curb, trying to get as much air as I could off this “ramp,” which you could imagine wasn’t much. But I put a lot into this “stunt” . . . that is until I saw the neighborhood cool kid watching me. I was embarrassed and just kinda rode away home.

It turns out I don’t have anyone in my yahoo address book under the letters B, F, I, O, Q, or X. Maybe one day in my life I will have friends of all the letters of the alphabet. Until then there is only sadness.

I went up to Vancouver over the weekend. I was talking to a person who had neutral opinions of the city of Dallas: “There’s nothing really bad about it, but nothing really good about it either.” On the drive back I was trying to picture what it might be like to live in a city like this. Maybe it might be bland, like tofu. What would it be like to live in tofu? I think it would be kinda neat. You could carve your own little house/cave out of your surroundings. You could have free, relatively high-protein meals. But then everything would smell like soy and feel wobbly, and if you’d want to get anywhere you’d have to push yourself through a thick, gelatin-like, mass. Hmm, ok I guess there are bad and good points to living in tofu so it must not be anything like living in Dallas.

This morning I woke to find I had more than thirty emails: and it was all spam! How could this be? My spam count has always been low! For over a year my account has been spam free and I’ve only gotten a handful every so often over the last few months. Anyway it was quite the nightmare to see . . . literally. I woke up from this dream to find my email account is safe and secure for now. Phew, dodged the bullet on that one. I kinda wished I had more profound worries floating in my subconscious but this was all it could come up with this morning.