Listen To The Radio

It seems like most people in the office have their own personal radios they listen to in their office to play the music they choose. Personally, I listen to KCRW online while doing monotonous tasks at or around my computer. Recently, however, I am tuning in for a different reason. The problem I have with people playing their music in the cluster of offices around mine is that when I’m not listening to my music I am subject to listening to whatever they play. Now this would be fine if it wasn’t so damn annoying and repetitive!

First, there is the one office that will have the radio going every other day that plays the EXACT SAME songs every single time. I swear, if I hear Cher’s “Believe” one more time, someone is going to get hurt. I’ve never really felt much animosity towards Jason Mraz, Norah Jones, or Sheryl Crow (well, maybe just a little) in the past, but I keep hearing the same songs every day. It really makes me feel like becoming violent. It’s bad enough that I have to deal with annoying songs by annoying artists like Uncle Cracker or Train, but then I have to have them drilled into my skull is shear torture. Then there are songs that are annoying based on their own repetitious nature such as Lifehouse’s “You and Me” and Five For Fighting’s “100 Years”. Please just kill me now.

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Recently, my French neighbor has had an obsession with one song. Having heard the song a couple times, I don’t mind because it’s actually a pretty good song. However, he keeps playing it, and playing it, and playing it. I mean I get it, honestly! You like the song, now move on to something else, PLEASE. Although it was interesting to hear him blasting the “Numa Numa” song as I was leaving the office last week.
So really, my only defense against bad music or hit-over-the-head repetitious music is to listen to my own and try desperately to block out the other noise. It definitely works, but I just wish I was listening under better circumstances

Anticlimactic

This past weekend had all the ingredients of a potential disaster drama, at least that’s how I was told. I went down to LA expecting to see a show similar to the kind made in Lala-land, but what I saw was nothing as billed. I guess that’s a good thing, but when you expect to see some drama you can’t help but feel a little disappointed when you come away with nothing.

The situation was perfectly set up: one girl, two guys. The ex-boyfriend comes to visit America on holiday from Australia where he’ll stay with his ex-girlfriend and her roommate while in town. There he’ll encounter her current boyfriend, forcing the girl to choose between past and present loves. That’s how Hollywood would have billed it and that’s how it was put to me. So as the boyfriend of the roommate, I had to come down not only to see how things played out, but also to help possibly balance the situation out.

But as Jessica can attest to, it was rather anticlimactic. There certainly were brief moments of awkwardness amidst the love triangle, but everyone played it cool and nothing got out of hand. There were no midnight trysts, no emotional rollercoasters, and no lover’s ultimatum. That’s not to say it wasn’t difficult for any of the parties involved, but they all downplayed their emotions to keep the situation under control.

In hindsight, I always had faith in those that I knew, but it was this mysterious Aussie that presented the only unknown. The early buzz suggested something might be there, however when I met him, those notions of a love triangle struggle deflated. He was a nice guy and not the love stealing kind I half-expected. We showed him a good time, touring him around LA, checking out an LA nightclub (with a swimsuit fashion show I know he enjoyed), and taking him to see “For Your Consideration”, which I don’t think he quite got. All rather tame. The one interesting part of the weekend was when the two couples with two exes all played a game together, but even then nothing happened. The whole weekend screeched to an anticlimactic stop, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

More drama was made over the fact that David Silverman of “The Simpson’s” and “Monsters Inc.” fame groped Jessica and Natalie.

December Woes

Well it’s that time of year again – every office worker’s favorite or least favorite season. It’s beginning to look a lot like …, well the same as it always does. Looking out the window, I can’t discern any differences between this time of year and any other. I mean blue skies and sunny? It’s hard to get into the Christmas spirit when time ceases to exist in central/southern California. I’m reminded of the scene in “Annie Hall” where Woody Allen is going down the streets of L.A. during Christmastime after arriving from N.Y. and scoffs at our “West Coast Christmas” in his Woody Allen way.

Boy there was a lot of capitalization going on there in that last sentence.

I looked at my calendar today to plan out the rest of the month to see how best I should spend my remaining 5-days of vacation left for the year. Mapping everything out I see that we have 23 days left in the month and after carefully scheduling my vacation time around important end of the year meetings I notice that I have… only 6 work days remaining for the year! Four of those days have important meetings on them that I must schedule around and four of them are next week.

This puts me in quite the dilemma. On one hand, I will be able to spend most of the remaining month away from work and instead with friends, family and others, which I am thoroughly looking forward to after greedily saving my vacation time since I spent most of it in Europe in May. However, the briefness of my remaining work time means that more work shall be crammed into a smaller space. I only have two days without meetings, meaning two days I can actually get stuff done, which gives me about a 33% productivity rating.

With each passing day, I am both relieved and grieved. I know I won’t get everything done that I would like to before the new year, but as long as I get the important things completed, I should be okay. But of course that’s easier said than done.

In The Weeds

Once Thanksgiving week was over and people left Bakersfield to go back to work and school, I thought I would be able to get my life back on track.

I was wrong.

Immediately after the Thanksgiving weekend, I had daily rehearsals for our church’s Boar’s Head play up until the three performances this past weekend. On top of nightly 3+ hour sessions, I spent my free weekend house sitting for my absent family.

None of this was really ever a burden, but after two solid weeks of absence and neglect around my apartment, I had quite a feat ahead of cleaning things up come Monday night. The deterioration into the pits is patient and methodical and it isn’t until you have no food, no clean clothes, no clean dishes, and a not so pleasant odor emanating from every room that you suddenly realize the lack of housekeeping.

I dedicated my entire evening last night in restoring my apartment from a two-week degradation. I only got about half of the cleaning done before I went to bed, leaving the rest to hopefully be taken care of tonight. It’s just amazing how easy things can get in the weeds.