Sebbylite

Harper’s Index edition of how effed up these last 8 years have been.

Enjoy!

Personal favorites:

Portion of his presidency he has spent at or en route to vacation spots: 1/3
Seconds it took a Maryland consultant in 2004 to pick a Diebold voting machine’s lock and remove its memory card: 10
Portion of all U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the top 1 percent of earners: 3/4
Rank of Bush among U.S. presidents with the highest disapproval rating: 1

Change is going to come!

Who would have guessed 20 years ago that we would have so many different means of communication available to us today, and yet we use so few of them to actually talk to people?

For example, the other night I was involved in a Facebook version of Scrabble with a friend, and over the course of the night we chatted through gmail and talked on the phone. There was also a way to chat through the Scrabulous application, which we used a little bit, and then over the last few days we’ve emailed and sent text messages as well. And yet I don’t feel like we actually said all that much to each other. It was mostly just telling stories, funny anecdotes, trash-talking, and general shenanigans.

If you think about it, I’m sure that you can probably also add your own version of this story to your own blog. How often do you tell your family that you love them? How often do you tell your friends why they are your friends? How often do you tell the boy/girl that you have a crush on that you do have a crush on them? How often do you tell your significant other that they are the greatest person in your world? How often do you tell your coworkers that you appreciate the team effort? For me, the answer to most of these is never.

I’m also pretty sure that I’m generalizing here – I know that I’m not the most expressive person in the world when it comes to “feelings” (blech!). But if you think about it, a lot of the comedy bits out there in terms of movies, sitcoms, etc deal with just this type of situation. How many times have you seen a movie with this scenario: guy and girl are best friends since childhood, girl finds Mr. Perfect to the chagrin of guy so guy does everything he can to discredit Mr. Perfect, but Mr. Perfect ends up being too good so guy gives up and gives his blessing to girl, girl realizes how good guy is from this one simple act and calls off the wedding to be with him? Don’t you think this all could have been avoided if they had just said something to one another before Mr. Perfect came around? I’m pretty sure that these “best friends since childhood” talked to each other every day via phone, text message, chatting, in person, etc. And I’m also pretty sure that this scenario is so prevalent because everyone has run into this situation in some form or another.

Now I’m not saying that just telling someone what you really mean is going to be the impetus to save the world. But you have to admit that it’s a good spot to start, right? And maybe putting down the phone/blackberry and actually talking with someone is how that happens.

Then again, it could just be me.

I’ve told this story so many times that I don’t know who knows what, who doesn’t know what’s going on, and who doesn’t care. So I’ll try to keep it short and to the point.

We made an offer to our landlord asking for half of July’s rent prorated for all the crap we’ve put up with. His return offer was $300, or the equivalent of about 5 days, or he would not pay us anything but let us out of our lease at the end of the month. So whatever way you look at it, the offer is crap. Regardless of whether or not we are staying here for the full lease of getting the fuck out of dodge, he still owes us money. And he owes us a lot more than just 5 days worth. We were out of hot water for 7 days, we spent two days cleaning before we could fully move in because the place was a pit, we had a lot of crap that the former tenants left in our house for over two weeks, and the heater isn’t going to be fixed until August 15th (which isn’t that big of a deal since we won’t use it, but I thought I’d throw it in there for good measure).

So where does that leave us? Well, we’re moving again. A teammate of ours has room in his 4 bedroom house that we’ll take, and live with him and his girlfriend. Then they are moving out in November to a new spot, which means that we’ll have 5/6 people in a house for a month or three, and then only 3 or 4. I don’t know if I’m going to make it through that, let alone my dog. He’s pretty out of sorts as is trying to deal with living with other people.

Plus I’ve had more to drink in the last three weekends than I’ve had in the last three months, and my liver hurts. I had to take today off of work because I was dead tired and getting sick from being exhausted. Which means that I’m totally looking forward to moving again in under two weeks (ps-that was sarcasm, in case you couldn’t tell). Oh, and we’re having a party this weekend, to either trash the place because we don’t have a deposit put down on it, or just because we want to hang out and drink some drinks.

I think I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: woe is me.

There came a point in my moving experience where I was taking a break, and thinking about all the shit that has happened over the last couple of days, and I didn’t understand why I wasn’t pissed off. I mean, there was definitely plenty of opportunity to get angry at all the different problems that were cropping up, but for some reason I just took it all in stride and kept a pretty even keel during the whole process (which is still going on), or at least as even a keel as I ever have.

Thinking back over it, I guess I would have to say that pretty early on in the moving process I realized that it was going to be the horror move from a bad/great 80’s movie (think Money Pit meets Pet Cemetery). After that point it became useless and self-destructive to become angry, and so I just went with it. To make you fully realize just what I’m talking about, I’ll try to recap the story as best I can (although I know that I’ll have things a little bit out of order):

This was the original plan: old tenants would move out on the 30th (Saturday), we would give the landlord Sunday the 1st to clean and make things ready for us, and then we would meet him on Monday the 2nd at 10am to get keys and start moving in. Sounds pretty simple, right? It should have been.

We showed up Monday at 10am to find that the old tenants had packed up their clothes, and some of their more valuable items, and then just left. No cleaning, no throwing away of food, no moving of extra furniture. Nothing. When we showed up, the landlord was puttering around in one of the bedrooms, vacuuming and dusting, and basically making no impact whatsoever on the cleanliness of the house. After a brief conference between the three of us who are living together, we told him to stop (1-it would have taken him a week or more at the rate he was going to actually clean the house, and 2-that is what getting a deposit is for, to pay for cleaning and damages). After a small discussion, where we offered to clean the house if he gave us the old tenants deposit, a decision was made to hire a cleaning crew for the house. It ended up taking 4 professionals about 10 hours to finish cleaning.

At this point in time, the house is mostly clean. Except for my room, which was evidently used as the neighborhood cat bath-house. And by bath-house, I mean urinal. The carpet was pretty much saturated with old urine (and the gallons of odor-covering-foam that the landlord tried to use to cover the smell). He said that if the smell didn’t go away after the odor stuff dried, he would replace the carpet.

Of course, he forgot to set a time frame on this carpet replacement. And as of Tuesday at noon, he left town for the summer. Which left me high and (not very) dry. And which is also why I spent my Fourth of July (go America!) ripping up carpet, taking out carpet pad soaked with urine, and cleaning the floors underneath. Then, because it still smelled like a port-o-john on a warm day, I drenched it with enzymatic cat-urine killer.

Which almost worked. After letting it sit for 24 hours, it only smelled a little, so I poured on another coating and we’ll see how it smells then.

I’m back. The above was written last Wednesday. It is now Tuesday, and I’m going to continue the story.

Alright, where was I? Oh yeah, the cat piss. It turns out that the urine-off was pretty damn good stuff, and my room doesn’t smell at all anymore, which makes me happy.

Well, almost makes me happy, because we still have no hot water. Did I not mention that? My bad. We haven’t had hot water since last Tuesday. Yeah, as in 7 days ago. Which means I either stink pretty bad during the day, or I go over to friend’s houses and beg the use of their bathroom (which usually works, maybe because I smell so bad they actually want me to shower and are willing to put up with me using their shower to do so).

Ok, to recap: we now have a house that has no hot water, a shit-ton of stuff that isn’t ours stashed in the basement (and various pieces of furniture throughout the rest of the house), pretty much the only reason it is clean is because we have done a large share of the cleaning, and is in general dis-repair otherwise, which we would have been ok with had it been the only thing wrong with the house, but added on top of everything else it is beginning to look like the proverbial straw. Plus our landlord is a liar. He wrote us an email blatantly playing each of us off against each other, saying that one person or another had agreed to each condition that we found unacceptable. Which, when the three of us living here got together and talked it over, we determined to be complete and total BS.
Suffice to say that we are looking into other housing options, although there aren’t that many out there at this time of the month.

Moving sucks ass.

Ok, so that’s three words. That’s how bad it sucks. It took me long enough to write it down and then stare at it for a while before I realized that it actually was three words.

Let’s try again: moving sucksass.

That’s right, I just finished watching Benchwarmers (with David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Napoleon Dynamite [I would write his real name, but no one would have any idea who I'm talking about]), and it was without a doubt the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen. The plot was horrible (not to mention more tired than an octogenarian after 4pm), the actors were annoying*, and the cliched bullies were uninspired to say the least.

That being said, I laughed my ass off at the movie. There were so many one-liners, bad jokes, and other physical comedy that I couldn’t help but enjoy watching The Benchwarmers. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never watch it again, I’m just saying that I don’t think that the last two hours of my life were a complete waste.

*I have to admit that I hate David Spade. He grates on me in ways that I can’t even begin to explain, starting with his voice, following through with his style of humor, and ending any time he has a mustache. I’m not a fan. I’m not a fan of Napoleon Dynamite either, the movie or the actor. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Idaho, and the movie hit a little too close to home. Whatever. Although I will say that this is the first movie I’ve seen with Rob Schneider where I’ve actually enjoyed his role.

Slap-a-Ho, which sounds like either a new version of Whack-a-Mole or a horribly offensive term for a transgender Native American, is actually just a phrase that is stuck in my head after reading through some archives of The Dilbert Blog. One of the more amusing rants that Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert and author of the blog) has gone on was a theory on why music should be illegal. You can read through it if you want, but my favorite part was:

“And then there’s the corrosive effect of hip-hop music. I enjoy a lot of it, but after hearing three tracks I have an urge to slap a ho. That can’t be healthy, especially for the ho.”

You have to admit that at the very least, offensive music has an effect on the language that the youth of today use. Have you tried to talk to a high schooler lately? Maybe the ones that I’ve tried to talk to have been special in some way, but they all seemed to think that the word “bitch” was more important to have in a sentence than a subject and predicate. That being said, I have to admit that I’ve had my fair share of swear word sentences (my favorite being: “Brrr, shit fucking brrr fuck.” Which was said when I still lived in Minnesota, and the heat had gone out in December), but normally I try to add at least two non-swear words for each swear word (less if I’m hungover, but those are special circumstances).

I ran across this article from Cincinatti, and I had to laugh a little bit. Basically, the person who wrote the article is claiming that George W. isn’t the Devil, as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez claimed when he addressed the UN a while ago. As “evidence” that this is true, Mr. Barker posits these “facts”:

“First, it seems that Beelzebub would want to be a little more charismatic, more likable. When you are looking for world domination, wouldn’t you try to be a little less confrontational? You know, fighting to prevent the raping, murdering, gassing oppressive regimes like that of Saddam Hussein wouldn’t exactly be on the top of his list. They would get along quite nicely, as a matter of fact.”

How does the saying go,the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist? Well, how do you convice people that you aren’t the Devil? How about one highly publicized act of goodwill? After that, you can do no wrong. Also, I would think that if I were the Devil, I wouldn’t want competition either.

“Second, the devil isn’t really the benevolent type. According to the American Association of Fund Raising Council (AAFRC), Americans gave total contributions of $260.28 billion in 2005, a growth of 6.1 percent. Major natural disasters here in our homeland and abroad generated at least $7.37 billion (again, with a “b”) in contributions. This is all under our current Satanic Regime.”

I’m not so sure about where Mr. Barker is getting his “evidence”, but I will say that this has little to nothing to do with El Presidente W. I’d be willing to bet that this amount would be the same or higher if any other person was President of the United States. What kind of corelation is there between who is President and how much people decide to give?
None, if you ask me.

“[T]o meet a severe and urgent crisis abroad, tonight I propose the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief – a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa … I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.”

Well, if you read between the lines of this “smoke-and-mirrors ploy” by the Bush Administration, you figure out that a lot of what he is doing is simply re-organizing funds in AIDS related programs to make it seem like something new is going on. Read this article for more info about that.

Wait, that’s all? The President has been in office for 6 years, and all you can come up with is “Well, we finally got that Saddam guy, didn’t we”? Come on. I’ve done better things for the American public in my daily post-lunch colon-cleanser than what Mr. Barker has posited that W. has done.