Miso Stupid

Occasionally there will be times in your life where you will realize that you are getting older. These happen now-and-then starting probably about when you graduate grade school and are often little things like noticing the trees in your neighborhood growing taller, finding a grey hair, or the classic of catching yourself say something your parents said that you had hated. But many of these changes are gradual and don’t really come as a shock.

I didn’t realize it until two incidents that occurred recently, but a much more moving sign of getting older seems to involve not yourself, rather other people around you. Particularly people you haven’t seen in a while and then suddenly come in contact with with. Two such incidents occurred to me recently and it was quite honestly a little scary.

The first of which was a friend whom I probably hadn’t seen for about three years. I randomly came across him while going out one night in the city and while I easily recognized him I was surprised by how much older he looked. It was probably a combination of the time passed and maybe some poor ageing on his part but it was an eye opener for sure that reflected back on me. That’s not the face of the guy I remember, “Am I also that much older looking then I was just a few years ago?”.

The second incident just occurred tonight, this time involving a chance meeting with someone whom I know, but not personally. I was watching a Tivo’d episode of The Office entitled “Money” and in the commercials immediately following the part where Michael shouts out “I declare bankruptcy!” (which is totally hilarious, my roommate almost fell off his chair upon hearing it, literally) there is a commercial for that new Bee Movie by Dreamworks. They call these little plugs for the movie “Bee Movie TV Juniors” and they are totally gay, like a bunch of old guys trying to still be funny (I’m guessing Seinfeld wrote them or something). Anyway, in this particularly lame one Jerry runs into this guy in the hallway who’s complaining about his obviously fictitious qusi-homosexual scenes in the movie with Jerry. I’m looking at this guy and he looks familiar, like William Shatner’s younger brother or something, and then I suddenly realize who it is; It’s Ferris Bueller, aka Matthew Broderick! Holly shit, that poor bastard went to crap in a hurry!

I had just watch that movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which was one of my favorite movies as a kid and Ferris is kind of always the role I picture him as and when I saw this grey-haired, old man-child face and bloated body guy in this commercial I was frightened! It’s like a piece of my childhood died at that moment. Maybe that was just a bad shot of him because I swear I have seen other pictures of him where he’s older but doesn’t look so friggin’ bad, but it doesn’t really matter, the damage is done and I feel old now. I had even thought about being his buddy Cameron from the movie for Halloween but figured nobody would know who the hell I was. Cameron’s dad’s Ferrari 250 GT Spyder is totally hot BTW, even if it is just a replica. Also hot was Cameron’s 80’s chic house. I totally want that phone he’s got! If anyone can identify which phone it is, let me know.

I was having a Halloween party at my house and a few days before it a friend of mine asked me, “Is it okay if I bring along some girls?”.  Is this really a question that should ever be asked in the context of a party?  (barring of course a bachelor party, unless said girls happen to be strippers).  I mean there are probably some mega-balling dudes out there that can potentially have the problem of attracting copious amounts of tail to their gatherings but they probably have to deal with an equal to greater amount of guy “friends” hoping to take home some leftovers.

The fact is, you throw a party and it’s a given there will be guys.  And I can see someone wanting to check first if it was okay to bring a bunch more sausage to the party because hey, as the saying goes, nobody likes a ’sausage party’.  But I’ve never heard anyone say they don’t like a ‘bun party’, because there are just never enough buns to go around.  Unless those buns are really large.  They can stay home.  Please.

I was at Chinese supermarket (Ranch 99 if you are familiar with them) and I observed a mother pushing a shopping cart with a small child in the child seat/purse area of the cart (or whatever you’d call that part. I’d call it the “place for crap I don’t want smashed” area cuz I have neither a child nor a purse). Said child in said cart was happily playing with one of those fruit/vegetable plastic bags that her mother had obviously given to her a toy.

Maybe I’m just overly safety aware, but it would seem to me that any reasonable parent should by now be aware of the potential choking and suffocation hazards associated with a small child playing with a plastic bag. It’s not like every freakin’ plastic bag you find now-a-days doesn’t have “This is not a toy!” plastered it giant bold letters all over it. I always found that funny, thinking, what kind of child would find a plastic bag fun object to play with. But this kid sure seemed to be wholly entertained by the magical semi-opaque space helmet that allows you to see stars. Actually, that sounds kinda cool…

Even if this parent was aware of the potential dangers (which I doubt) yet they thought it was fine because they were there to supervise, what they have done is now created an association with fun and plastic bags for their child. Plastic bags are easy to come by in most houses and you can’t watch that kit 24/7. Most likely though no such incident of rocket ship asphyxiation will occur and stupidity will continue to pass on another generation.

I also saw a bunch of those Asian Pears that come in those ridiculous “fruit condoms“. I can’t not laugh when I see them.

Oh and there were two Asian lesbians shopping there as well. One was not bad, but the other one was ruining my Asian lesbian produce fight fantasy. That always happens…

I’m going to Hawaii soon and I need to book two different hotels. I already got the flight a while ago. It was a sweet deal to the tune of $280 round trip from CA to Honolulu. I was like, cool, Hawaii is cheap! And then I need to book a hotel and of course it needs to be on the beach. Friggin’ $$.

I’m going to spend the second half of the trip on the Big Island so I need a flight over there and a new hotel/car. I was told of a site called Panda Online that creates hotel/air/car packages for Hawaii. The name of that site is dumb because Panda’s have nothing to do with Hawaii, but hey, they seem to have decent deals.

After spending like 3 hours searching all over the web to find the “perfect” deal I was all ready to buy and then suddenly it jumped up by $100! WTF! Since it was around midnight I assume something changed due to the next day rolling over, but that was really annoying. I just had to purchase it though as I didn’t want to loose any more of my perceived good deal.

So on to the point here that the internet has created so many damn travel searches/packages/etc. that a poor (ex)engineer like me is forced to spend an untold amount of time massaging every knob to try to squeeze out the last bit of savings when the reality is that I’d be better off just picking something and spending the rest of that time finding a way to make more money then what I might have saved through the effort. Hehe, I said “massaging knobs”…

Great. Finally got this blog thing up and running so I’m now offically another idiot on the web talking about crap you don’t care about. Or maybe you do, it doesn’t really matter.

So honestly I’m pretty freakin’ tired right now and have been pretty much every day now for the last three months due to reasons I’ll explain later. Thus being I gotta logoff and get to bed.

Yeah, first post…..