Very soon.

The wait is almost over.  Indeed, my return to the realm of blogs is near.  That is all.

In anticipation.

Okay, here’s the deal:  I move back to Eau Claire this Saturday, and once that’s happened, I’ll be back here rockin’ it out on the blog a lot more often.  This is due to two conflicting factors—my life is much more interesting and fulfilling while at school, and I somehow end up with a lot of downtime near computers.  This just works out to life being easier.  Also, I might become a texting Twitterer.  I haven’t decided though, because the whole Twitter thing walks the thin line between convenient and creepy.

It makes little difference these days.

I write this with a wounded left index finger.  Beware industrial-strength tape dispensers.

As I sit down to enjoy a few quality YouTube videos, I’m not sure whether to feel pedestrian or cutting-edge.  You see, I don’t watch much normal television these days, since the TV downstairs isn’t hooked up to cable.  And yet, YouTube isn’t really filling that void as much as it is killing time in a whole new, completely pointless way.  However bad and useless most videos are, there is quality stuff there, if you take the time to watch 19 bad ones to get to the good one.  But isn’t that what cable does, too?  Don’t we sit through a hundred Survivors to get to one Heroes, or a hundred American Idols to get to one Battlestar Galactica?  Yes, YouTube has the added self-inflicted torture because it’s on-demand, but I think deep down inside, that’s what makes it so enjoyable—instead of being challenged by groundbreaking drama, letting our mind wander off as we sit and enjoy another remix of the Numa-Numa guy.

Sometimes.

This has happened at least ten times:

Aaron: “When do I get my break?”

Supervisor: “You already had it.”

Aaron: “Oh, I wonder if I enjoyed it, since I never left.”

Supervisor: “No one sent you on break?”

Aaron: “No.”

Supervisor: “They were supposed to send you half an hour ago.”

Aaron: “And yet, saying that doesn’t get me a break.”

Supervisor: “Well you should tell us if we forget.”

Aaron: “Um, hello? I’m standing right here, telling you right now.”

Supervisor: “You can take your break now.”

Aaron: “Oh, good, since I’m done with work in an hour. Awesome. I hate you.”

Unfortunately, I’m never that witty or sarcastic when I talk to my bosses, but I’m trying to convey the sense here that every time I wish to take a break, my contractually stipulated break, I am pestered with minor incompetencies. Clocks, people…all it really takes to get someone their break at the right time are clocks.

Thank you.

Part One.

This is the first half of what will probably be the first chapter of my new story. The second half of what is here has not been edited, but I felt like posting it anyway. (I’m not setting up a seperate page mostly because I’m lazy.)

She stood atop the dune, worried. There was nothing but sand and sky for as far as she could see. Windswept dunes were littered here and there for hundred of miles, their soft peaks rhythmically drifting back and forth in time. The sky stood still, devoid of clouds. There was near silence, but for the flapping of her long, white lab coat in the hard gusts of wind. She pulled the brown hair out of her face and frowned. She spoke.
“This is not good.”
The words had indeed come from her own mouth, but why had she said it? She didn’t understand. What wasn’t good, besides the obvious standing in the middle of the desert? And how long had she been standing there? She didn’t remember anything about wandering off into the desert. How did she get there? There were no buildings, no vehicles, nothing to indicate anything that might be helpful in deducing just what the hell was going on.
The situation seemed harmless enough, though. She was alone, yes, but compared to perhaps being held at gunpoint, it didn’t seem so bad. It was all so serene. The warm sand was pleasing to her bare feet—why wasn’t she wearing any shoes? She couldn’t possibly have made it this far into the desert without shoes, she thought. Something was amiss.
“Action must be taken,” she told herself aloud, a habit she indulged often. She bit her lip and spun around in place, deliberately eyeing each direction before her. She stopped turning, pointed straight in front of her and said, “I like it!” Truthfully, she didn’t know what else to do and hated standing around waiting for something, whatever it was, to happen.

Work has begun in ernest.

So I’ve restarted my story.  There was one misfire, but fortunately I didn’t follow it too far into the dark depths of writers block—it’s what I get for starting at 2:30am.  Either way, now I’m on the right track again and it feels good.  I’ve finally figured out the gist of the narrative structure, i.e. which character tells what, how, and why.  There are still many, many kinks to work out as I go through it, but I feel like since my very first effort on this, I’ve been able to flesh out a lot of the holes I had.  In short, yay for finally writing again.

P.S.  I will indeed begin to post it here, but not for a while.  I want to give myself a longer head start this time.

Best Buy is dead to me.

Others have tried to convince me for some time, but I wouldn’t listen to them—until now.  In short, Best Buy sucks.  Not only because their DVD supply has dwindled as of late (there’s just a lot of empty shelf space) but because they make sale prices look like price changes.  What is that?  I am a firm believer in a special tag for sale prices that does not exactly resemble the price tag—that is to say, if the official price tag changes, it shouldn’t change back.  That’s a sale, not a price change.  Example?  The X-Files, which I just bought for $20, as stated on the price tag affixed to the box, is now $45.  What the heck?  There was no indication of any kind of sale price, simply a lower price.  And now it’s back up, a new higher price tag covering the old one.

That’s just tacky, people.

Holy never-doing-third-shift-again Batman!

Third shift was not exactly what I expected.  I thought it would be lonely or creepy, but there was plenty of people still working, and the same damn music played on into early morning.  I thought I wouldn’t have much to do, but there was quite a long list of things I needed to accomplish throughout the night, which kept me happily occupied…until about 4:30 when I ran out of things.  Oh sure, dragging around 320 Sunday papers was fun, and putting the letters on the sign outside was entertaining (that part, I almost enjoyed, partly because it was raining), but in the end, it was all just to distract me from the fact that I was awake at 4:00am.

My body hates me.  It wants to punch me in the face.

For some reason.

I have, to my own astonishment, accepted a shift Saturday night, from 10:45pm to 6:45am.  When I said yes, it seemed like a perfectly nice thing to do—my boss was in a bind, I had accidentally cost the company $500 (I know I didn’t mention it, but, well, I accepted two bad checks and cost them $500 and wasn’t really in the mood to share) and so this seemed the good and proper way of balancing the good old karma.  Wonderful.  Now, though, looking back, I don’t feel as warm and fuzzy about the whole thing.  I’m going to have to stay up the whole night, yes, but that’s not really the problem.  What I’m more worried about is being able to maintain my sanity that long—eight hours with no one to talk to.  Sure, I go that long without speaking sometimes, but at night?  In an almost empty store with no security and no real backup and only the crazies who come out at night to break up the endless monotony of the florescent lights as they burn into my still-open eyes six hours into my shift, i.e. 4:45am?  My confidence is rocky at best.  The one upside is that I’ll have eight hours to sit around and think about my story, which the more I think about, the more I grow to love it.