Blog of Despair and Disillusionment

If you get the reference in the subject, you are either the winner or a loser, depending on how you feel about that sort of thing.

This is stupid. All day long at work I think of things to type about, and then when 1AM comes around and I can actually type an entry, my mind goes blank and I end up going for a run instead. Incidentally, running for an hour every night while not going to any sort of gym for a month or so is not helping me to become less skinny.

Of course it's no big loss that I can't type anything from work .. all you'd see every morning is a new post from me bitching about the news. Last week I was all upset over the execution of Van Tuong Nguyen for some reason. Probably because having read the guy's testimony/confession, it seemed like he got forced into the whole thing and just ended up in way over his head .. oh well, I guess he got to live a lot longer than some people. Of course there's also that thing we've got going on in Iraq, which I have yet to comment on, so here's a quick thought: Whether we keep our troops there or not, people over there are going to be blowing shit up. However, our troops have killed a lot more civilians than the insurgents have, so if we withdrew and the violence there stayed about the same or increased slightly, it'd still be fewer dead civilians. That's all I really care about. Seems like the streets of Iraq were a lot safer under Saddam's "reign of terror," eh? At least then you could go worship at a mosque, or get married, or stay at a hotel or something without worrying about getting your ass blown up. The other thing that gets me is the way the Bush administration has been wavering back and forth between attacking those who question the reasons for the war, calling them all but traitors, to occasionally being like "oh uh, of course it's okay to question. that's what this country is all about." Anyway. Maybe we can argue/talk about this shit in a couple weeks. I know Jeff is up for some political intrigue.

And now, to lose your attention even further, here are some photos from dinner Friday night.


Phase One: Plate full of cabbage, mushrooms, shrimp, tofu, crab, chicken, miscellaneous goodness.


Phase Two: Throw everything into pot on gas range.


Phase Three: Drool and become all blurry. This is how you make nabe, not to be confused with onabe, which means Lesbian.


Ono, shown here sporting the legendary work uniform pants, is one of the 2 or 3 people in the office who do not annoy me.


What a nice guy. That wooden fish needed a smoke.

uh .. man, I am an idiot. It's past 2 and I have to work till 50 o'clock tomorrow night. My boss tells me there's a phone meeting with Detroit at 10PM, so I say "fine, I'll come in at 1PM that day," to which he simply says I can't, so I say "in that case I'm taking Tuesday off," and he laughs it off like I was kidding. Then he goes, "This is Japanese style." Yeah, so is killing yourself to avoid embarrassment. There are plenty of things I like about this country, but the work environment is not one of them. And since that's where I'm spending the majority of my time these days (surprise surprise), let's just say that the 24th cannot come soon enough.