Lucas(watching Wilson): He's playing that carjacking video game. He'd get alot farther if he didn't stop at all the red lights.

PRICLESS

Man I really love Lucas on House. I hope that the tanking of the spinoff idea lets them bring him back. His dynamic with House is the best. It's almost better than Wilson. They are both so perfectly complimentary to the other one's awkwardness. Not to mention it would be worth it just to have them play duets at the end of every episode.

My cat shares far too many traits with a goldfish.   I've heard that a goldfish swims constantly around their bowl mostly because they have such short memories that by the time they have swum around their bowls, they have forgotten what they saw before, and are now again fascinated by the same things they just saw.  This morning I was petting my cat, then she wandered too far off for me to reach from the breakfast table, and she got interested in something else.  So I called her again and held my hand out, IMMEDIATELY she comes running back, as if this was the possibility for something great to happen.  This happened about 5 times in a row, after which she got interested in a fly and chased it across the house and then I couldn't get her to come back any more.  Maybe the same thing is wrong with people.  Maybe tv commercials and modern TV shows and their constant refocusing of our attention has made us so dependent on being told "look at this!" over and over that we forget everything that just happened and are willing to do the same wrong thing again.  After a presidential campaign where tax cuts managed to somehow get past the OMGDONTTAXME enough to actually be the bad guys in the winning candidate's campaign, here we are again with the stimulus bill.  How do we fix the economy? Tax cuts.  Unemployment? Tax cuts.  Seriously, this approach hasn't worked on any problem since, what, JFK times?  Somehow, the peeps have already forgotten that tax cuts don't help anything.  I don't wonder why the republicans in congress always push for tax cuts.  They aren't confused about how effective they'll be in fixing the world.  They just don't care.  I don't believe for a second that they are do gooders trying to make the world a better place and are just so misguided that they really believe tax cuts are going to do the job.  They just want more tax cuts so they can make more money, and their donors will make more money, so they can stay in power.  But how in the world do they sell that crap to their constituents?  I think it's the goldfish phenomenon.  They saw a flashy thing and they got distracted for a while, now you can use the same story on them you used 20 minutes ago.  The failure of the last 30 years washed clean in seconds.  

Krugman:

"research sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund shows that achieving universal coverage with a plan similar to Mr. Obama’s campaign proposals would add “only” about $104 billion to federal spending in 2010 — not a small sum, of course, but not large compared with, say, the tax cuts in the Obama stimulus plan."

Sooooooooo. Being unemployed is less fun than I might like. Doing less things isn't super hardcore. I didn't like, go out drinking alot or anything like that. Not having any any money doesn't really hit home with most of my friends though. I haven't worked in 4 months at this point, but they still are flabbergasted when I say I'm not going to the slackers show or the whatever movie everyone is going to. No dude, I have no income. I haven't had any income in 4 months. I'm not going to anything. Also, no buying beer/wine/vodka at home is a bummer. I've almost completely stopped drinking. I do sponge beers off the kindness of friends. A few of my friends have been exactly the opposite and have been super awesome. I think for alot of them it's just not something they know what to do with though. I'm really broke means buying cheap beer instead of the good stuff. Not, GASP, I've stopped drinking anything that isn't free. I think they feel like I'm being a mooch most of the time, and as a result, I don't really do anything with most of my friends because in fact, if I do anything that costs any money or buy anything at all, I am in fact mooching. SO that's the state of the union today. I have been turned down for more jobs than seems imaginable. I think today I may have finally gotten through to enough people at the Texas Workforce Commission that I may actually receive unemployment benefits. That will keep us from completely going under anyway. On another positive note, I'm having a boy, w000w0000.

This morning was very similar to yesterday morning. I had some cereal, watched the big Lebowski, and applied to some jobs. I've spent most of the afternoon reading through UT positions but I also had an email from Dustin to apply for an entry level marketing position that sounds really interesting. Hopefully that will pan out, I need to write a new cover letter for that, I probably won't send that until tomorrow though. I watched Gross Pointe Blank this afternoon while I read through a bunch more UT jobs. I love John Cusack. I still have about 20 of those to look through. Tomorrow I think I'll have to move on to Craig's List job searching as well as UT, which I kind of fear, I remember last time I was unemployed looking through the jillions of terrible craig's list pyramid scams to find real jobs.

Tonight I'm going to watch the vice presidential debate at the TDP with abbie and paul and maybe brian and presumably some TDP people while we also sort signs.

Last night Christina and I watched some Buffys and I got to see the episode "Conversations With Dead People" which I'd heard some of my friends talk about and never actually saw before. It features Jonathan M. Woodward, who is in one of my favorite episodes of firefly as well. In "Conversations With Dead People" he is a recently sired vampire who almost kills Buffy at the very beginning of the episode. When he recognizes it is her though, he stops himself from eating her and starts chatting her up. Buffy's a little disturbed by someone she knew being a vampire and ends up talking to him through the whole episode about how she feels and what's been wrong with her and lots of things she really won't ever talk to anyone about. It's kind of extra heartbreaking for her though that when she's done finally finding someone she can talk to(does Buffy ever open up to ANYONE else?) she then proceeds to kill him. He kind of has the same effect on Buffy that he has on "The Message," which is the episode of Firefly he's in. Kind of makes everyone think about how they were and how they are, why they act the way they do. Also, just like on the episode of Buffy, at the end, Mal has to kill him. Interesting episodes. It also made me go back and watch "The Message" again and it's still just as good as it ever was. I think I've probably seen that episode at least 10 times. I've seen every episode of firefly at least 5 times, but there are some that are just fantastic, and that one is among them.

Anyway, Christina went to bed after we watched Buffys and I stayed up and watched some M*A*S*H episodes(season 4 half of disk 2!) and WoW'd and internetted for a while, then went to bed.

In the afternoon I mostly alternated reading news and looking for/applying for jobs. At 4:45 Christina and I went to our appointment, which ran long until about 7:15. Now I'm home again making some delicious vegetarian pot pie and back to reading/applying for jobs. I need to finish my cover letter for the application for Jacob's world job. I hateses writing cover letters.

And now for something.... completely different.

I didn't get up until 11ish today. When I got up I did the dishes and made some breakfast, 2 eggs over medium and a bowl of oatmeal. When I finished the dishes I put my afghan my grandmother made me in the tub, covered it with dish soap(Christina, who was home sick from school with a 101 degree fever(I wonder what that is in Celsius, maybe high 30s) insisted this was the correct soap for this procedure, and turned on the shower to spray it down and fill up the tub. Meanwhile I had also turned on the Big Lebowski, the official movie of being unemployed. I read a little news and talked to my friend Michael Phillips about WoW and unemployment and the possible opportunities of it while I watched the movie.

Unemployment Blogging....


9/30/2008

at 1:25 PM I officially “resigned” from Wayport Inc. I went from Wayport to Castle Greybeard and talked on the phone for an hour or so to Christina and then Jacob and then my Mom. Christina asked if they cited a specific call as to why I was being “offered the chance to resign,” but I didn't even ask. It could have been any of a dozen calls in the last month. I turned off my WoW account for the time being. I watched some Heroes with Eric, then some King of the hill with Brian and Eric, then we all went to drinking liberally at about 6:45p

At drinking liberally I bought a salad and a beer and had two beers bought for me with the offer of 2 more. When I got home Christina was really sick. She went to sleep at about 10:30 and I stayed up playing WoW and watching Office Space until about 3.