I've been taking a lot of sick days recently - maybe once/month. My boss is very cool about it - I always email him from home, and he always emails back something like "don't worry about it. stay home as long as you need to get better."
I lost my copy of Bottle Rocket on DVD. It's my movie for rainy days (or sick days), but it wasn't there when I got up this morning and sat down to watch it. So it was Chasing Amy instead, but Chasing Amy doesn't really have the same Owen Wilson pizzazz that I crave. I'm straight and all, but I have a major thing for Owen Wilson.
I broke up my lazy day at home with a nice noon-time run through a soggy golden gate park. I know I'm not supposed to be going running on sick days, but whatever. I don't think I let my retinas get scanned on my way to the park, so my employer SHOULD be oblivious to my mis-use of a sick day. Unless somebody from work knows about this weblog...
For real though - what did I do with my copy of Bottle Rocket?
Slashdot brings good things this morning:
a Master of Fine Arts in computer programming.
This is what I want. I've been out of college for 2.5 years, and I'm itching to get back to school for a Masters or PhD. This guy's MFA program is the most intensely appropriate thing I've ever read. I want to write code in a supervised, mentored environment, and read other people's code, and write critical essays about traceroute. over and out.
Hola from texas, amigos. I'm writing to you, internet friends, from my parents' geodesic dome in the greater DFW metroplex area. Don't follow that link, though - it's fake. I actually spent many of my formative high school years in Arlington, TX. I later headed to Pittsburgh for college. Unbeknownst to me, the northeast would be a place where Jews can be roommates rather than figments of our statewide imagination.
But the funny thing about my trip home this Thansgiving is the now irrefutable evidence that I am a complete flake. I can no longer deny this - I fucked up pretty bad. See, this year I made my reservations two months ahead of time. Such planning is laudable, you say, but now I've learned the perils of early planning. For when a date is that far away, it's easy to "get it wrong." I booked flights from San Francisco to DFW on Wednesday, November 20th, and a return flight on Sunday November 24th. Unbeknownst to me, however, Thanksgiving was actually November 28th this year. By the time I discovered this, my flight had already ventured eastward and returned.
How did I remedy this ridiculous situation, you ask? Well, it wasn't very hard at all. One thing you have to realize is that nowadays, most airlines run their customer service call centers out of state prisons. This is cheaper for the airlines, and gives the prisoners an important sense of community value. I worked out a deal with two inmates from New Orleans, such that they now have a place to "rehabilitate" upon their parole in February. I figured that I have room for housemates in my 1-bedroom apartment, and it has been getting a little lonely these days. Plus, Butch says he learned how to make gumbo in the pen. Perhaps most surprisingly, this sort of arrangement doesn't appear to be uncommon - see this article in Time magazine.
Just kidding about the inmates, of course. The way I really fixed the situation was with money. I'm a yuppie! I have money to make-up for bad decisions like these plane tickets, and I got to come home after all! Hooray!!!