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Thank you, home teacher

Friday, September 29th, 2006

So I have the hardest time going to sleep at night.  I get to sleep around 2 or 3 AM, which means I only get five or six hours of before I’m up and going to work.  That may seem like a lot to some of you vampires, but it’s insufficient for me.

I have to come up with tricks to stay awake at work.  Most of the world has discovered this fabulous invention called “coffee”, but I’m not allowed to use it because of my religion.  On the other hand, there’s no explicit rule against hot chocolate, so I was a junkee of that stuff for a while.  Alas, you can only drink so much and still have it be convenient, as your bladder’s needs start to overwhelm your need to remain conscious.

I’ve tried M&Ms too.  I can fall asleep in the midst of all sorts of activities: sitting up, reading, listening to music, watching TV…even typing, standing up, or walking…but I can’t seem to fall asleep while I’m chewing.  So if I only eat one M&M at a time, a bag will last me like an hour or two.

However, there are 8 hours in a day, and I don’t want to eat 4 to 8 bags of M&Ms.  Have to keep my girlish figure.

So I’ve started listening to online radio.  Listening to music is prone to knock you out faster than listening to nothing, so the channels I tend to use are comedy themed.  The first day I listened to eight hours of stand up comedy, I came home and was twice as funny as I usually am.  Unfortunately, it wore off and now I’m boring again.  Also, I think I’ve heard Eddie Murphy’s Raw like 30 times now, and I’m starting to use the F-word more than all other words put together.  So whereas it kept me awake for a time, it’s both failing to be new and interesting, and having detrimental side-effects.

So on Sunday my “home teacher” dropped by for a visit.  For those of you not in the know, I’m Mormon (or more correctly, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).  Every male who keeps the rules is given the job of home teacher.  As a home teacher, he is assigned a couple of people or families that he is to visit every month, bringing them a short spiritual message, and offering them any help that he can provide.

Now, home teachers generally get assinged in pairs, so each one has a “home teaching companion”.  On this particular Sunday, my home teacher went stag.  What’s more, I thought he seemed a little anxious to get through his message quickly.  On the other hand, he brought some awesome banana spice bread (or some such baked goodie), so I give him an A+.

He also gave us a suggestion (us is my roommate and I).  He suggested that we tape speeches given by leaders of our church (or commit them to mp3, anyway), and listen to them during our drive to work.  Now, I don’t particularly drive to work (bicycle), but I do sit at work for eight hours a day doing horribly repetitive, moderately mindless data-entry-esque labor.  So the last couple of days I’ve been listening to religious sermons.

Well…you may have your issues with organized religion, and you may think it causes closed-mindedness and to a certain degree, fanatacism.  I kinda agree.  On the other hand, I’m a whole lot nicer after two days of being told that God loves me, there is a point to life, and that it’s worth it to keep trying.  Conclusion: thanks home teacher and church leader people for getting me listening to this stuff.  Read more...

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Family Home Evening

Monday, September 18th, 2006

So I’m Mormon.  We seem to be a bit of a hermit as a culture.  We often  only associate with other Mormons.  This may be especially true for single Mormons who want to get married, as you’re not supposed to marry “outside the faith.”  Even if you just want to go out on dates, you’re not supposed to do that outside the faith, since you might fall for someone and then marry outside.  By the way, that may all seem nutty and dogmatic and closed-minded, but there’s a rhyme to the reason.  If you’re interested to know the whys and wherefores, feel free to e-mail me.

In any case, I was at an activity tonight with about 200 other single adult members of the church.  It’s called “Family Home Evening.’  It usually happens every Monday night in someone’s house and only involves their immediate family.  For singles, though, who have yet to produce an immediate family, there are larger gatherings at the local church building, usually in a basketball gym/theater that is referred to as a “cultural hall.’

Tonight for Family Home Evening we had an open-mic night, which translated into layman’s terms is “singer-songwriter slow-moving love ballad night, with one poem and two white guys beat-boxing”.  It wasn’t so bad, really, although I don’t know how singer-songwriters manage to get anywhere, given that their music tends to be so un-percussive and generally bland.

The thing that bugged me about tonight is that looking around the room, I was struck that I’m never going to stop being a single Mormon.  Well…I suppose I could stop being Mormon first, and then perhaps I would be able to stop being single.  If I maintain the Mormon-ness, though, I don’t know how I’ll ever meet someone I’ll actually WANT to marry.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t lots of beautiful girls, and lots of girls who are attractive in more ways than just beauty.  There might even be a girl or two for whom I could fall.  I just don’t think any of them will ever want my strange butt.  I often think of myself as a social retard.  I just seem to put people off.  I don’t try to.  I guess I’ve just never learned how to make them happy to be around me, so instead I make them uncomfortable.

So…alas.  What’s a boy to do?  Well…if he’s Mormon and making some attempt to follow the rules, he’s going to be a virgin for the rest of his life.  That’s what he’s going to do.  Yuck.

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Vehicle Trouble

Thursday, September 14th, 2006

Yesterday was too boring to write about.  I feel bad for any of you who decided to wake up and spend any time in it.

Today wasn’t terribly eventful either.  I did, however, enjoy another cycling snafu.  I decided after work to run down to CompUSA to get me a new SanDisk 4gb jump drive.  They had a sale.  I flatted (that means my bicycle had a flat tire) somewhere along the way, but managed to make it to the store before really noticing.

Once out, I replaced the punctured tube, but my little portable pump broke trying to fill it.  So I walked the bike to a Wheel World, a bike store maybe a mile or two away.  It was closed.

At this point, the girl of my dreams rolled up in a shiny new Lexus SUV.  She lowered the passenger window, gave her lustrous hair a graceful flip to divulge her face, and and asked if anything was wrong.  My forlorn expression quickly transformed to awe and delight as I gazed at her radiant, smiling face.  I said “no, nothing is wrong.  In fact, everything is perfect.”

She said, “oh.”  Then she drove off.  I guess I should have mentioned my flat tire.  Crap.

Okay, the girl of my dreams didn’t drive up.  I made that up because I thought you should get some sort of payoff for reading this far.  Sorry to dissappoint.

What really happen is that I retraced my steps towards Big 5 Sports, hoping they would have a pump that would fit my strange presta-valve equipped bicycle.  Before I got there, I happened to glance into a shop that was still open.  Lo, and behold, it was full of bikes.  Indeed, it was what we in the business call a bike shop.  I went in, they sold me some new tubes, and I got pumped up.

Hooray for people who keep their shops open after everyone else has gone home from work.  Since we can’t go to their shop when we are at work, I much appreciate them.

Now I’m home.  You know, the girl of my dreams doesn’t have to have a shiny new Lexus.  I’d be happy with just a girl sans accoutrements.  There was one really lovely woman who pulled up at the corner of Sepulveda and Culver next to whom I waited for the light to change.  She was only in a Honda CR-V.   She was probably already married.  I’ll never know: the light changed, and she drove out of my life.  Sigh.

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Free Day

Wednesday, September 13th, 2006

So the system at work went down, and all of us peons were sent home (peons in this case are people who make a wage instead of a salary), spared the torture of eight full hours in front of a computer.  So what did I do with the extra five hours of day I was granted?  Sat in front of my home computer.  Sigh.

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Near Miss

Monday, September 11th, 2006

So I ride a bicycle to work.  It used to be because I was afraid of cars.  I was a terrible nerd (“was,” he says) and didn’t get a driver license until I was 22 or 23 years old.  I didn’t own my first car until 2003.  So in all that time, I got around with a bicycle, and my perfect twin spherical hindquarters are there to prove it.  Har.

Now, it has been my habit of late to work rather late, and therefore arise rather late, and therefore arrive at work rather late.  Los Angeles traffic isn’t really that bad at 10:30AM, and at such an hour a cyclist can regularly run the gauntlet with perhaps only one life-threatening event per week.

My habit came to an end this morning.  I actually went to bed at a decent hour last night, and was able to make my trip to work before 9AM.  As such, it’s looking like I’ll be seeing a life-threatening event every day.

There were many cars.  The problem with many cars is that it increases the likelihood of there being a less wise driver behind one of the many wheels.

Now, whereas there is the ever present danger of being crushed by a motorist who is screwing with their cell phone and not watching in front of them, and whereas the probability of such a terminal bodyshaping increases with more cars, there is a bonus to bicycling to work in heavy traffic.  No matter how bad the traffic is, you never have to wait at the same red light twice.  You always roll right up to the line before you stop, passing all the cars who may not cross the intersection until the traffic signal has passed through its cycle numerous times.

This morning I was passing two lanes of cars stopped at a traffic light.  They were probably backed up 30 or 40 deep.  One of them wanted to turn right before the intersection, into a Whole Foods, I think.  She had her right signal on, and she had moved over to block my path.  I decided to go around her on the left.  This was dumb.  She suddenly realized that the enormous garbage truck paralell parked on the side of the road was blocking her route to the Whole Foods, so she veered back to the left, towards me.

I was right next to her as she started coming.  Happily she was going very slowly,  When she saw me, she probably crapped herself, but she had time to stop.  I was crapping myself, in any case, and swerving and braking and watching her to see if she was going to whack me.

I forgot about the guy in front of us, who had been slowly rolling forward.  I figure at about the time I focused on her, he stopped completely.  So I ran into the back of him.

Happily I was going very slow, too.  I don’t think I caused any damage to his car.  I just thumped his bumper with my front wheel and unceremoniously stepped off my bike.  So no harm no foul.

The problem is that I decided I should teach her a lesson.  I suppose past experience has led me to believe that if you behave like a screaming, foul-mouthed angry psychopath, people who shop at Whole Foods will be intimidated and let you have your way.  Such was the case here.  The woman mumbled back at me from inside her car by way of defending herself, but I couldn’t hear, so I just kept screaming at her.  When the guy from the car I thumped got out, I got really calm and told him there was no damage, he only got run into by a bike (I didn’t actually check, though…I just very much wanted his shiny new Mercedes not to be hurt in any way).  I think I may have dropped one last f-bomb on her, then I took off.  Read more...

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