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Friday, April 29, 2011

VOLIUME XVIII - My First Derivative With the Ladies Is Not a Continuous Function and Other Tales

c. January 9, 2011 Anno Domini

Work is like XBox, and by that I mean...


Burnout equals Crash Mode.

Or maybe I mean I'm over one-hundred (100) hours into Oblivion and the end is not yet in sight.

Or I mean I would most likely be asked to reduce the number of hours I dedicate to it if I were ever to, ahem, become romantically involved.

I am sure there are other similarities.

c. January 17, 2011 Anno Domini


Me: What does my bumper look like?
Driver Behind Me: What?
Me: What country are you from?
Driver Behind Me What?
Me: "What" ain't no country I ever heard of! They speak English in "What"?
Driver Behind Me: What?
Me: English! Do you speak it?
Driver Behind Me: Yes!
Me: Then you know what I'm saying.
Driver Behind Me: Yes...
Me: Describe what my bumper looks like!
Driver Behind Me: What?
Me: Say "what" again. Say "what" again! I dare you! I double-dare you! Say "what" one more time!
Driver Behind Me: Its gray.
Me: Go on!
Driver Behind Me : It has bumper stickers on it.
Me: Does it look like a tilt-a-whirl at the county fair?
Driver Behind Me: What?
Me: *shoots Driver Behind Me in the shoulder*  Does it look like a tilt-a-whirl?
Driver Behind Me: No!
Me: Then why'd you try to ride it like a tilt-a-whirl?
Driver Behind Me: I didn't!
Me: Yes, you did! Yes, you did! You tried to ride it. And my bumper don't like to be ridden by anybody except Mrs. Wallace.  You read the Bible?
Driver Behind Me: Yes.
Me: Well, there's this passage I've got memorized, sort of fits the occasion. Ezekiel 25:17? "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers! And you will know my name is the Lord  when I lay my vengeance upon thee!"

c. January 28, 2011 Anno Domini

Pick up lines are lame.  Real ladies' men know how to use a pick-up parabola or, when dealing with a very special lady, a pick-up sine wave.

c. February 3, 2011 Anno Domini

If you share my initials and last name, your e-mail address is jdrobertsx@gmail.com where x is a two-digit number and you are e-mailing yourself a photograph of yourself/your girlfriend/your mom/some random dame bent over in front of a brown leather couch wearing nothing but a pink, black and white thong you might want to proofread the e-mail address to be sure you inserted x between jdroberts and @gmail.com before you click send.

Also, if I send you a reply stating, "I believe I received this e-mail in error," a reply (sans derriere) from you, praising my gift for understatement, would not go unappreciated.

c. February 6, 2011 Anno Domini

Like most children, I had every adult I knew during my youth telling me not to do things such as drinking, smoking, taking candy from strangers and crossing the street without looking both ways first.  At a very young age, before any of my peers, I figured out that adults understood the rebellious nature of adolescents; ergo they really wanted us to do all that stuff and only told us not to because they knew we would disobey.  Resultingly, I never played hooky, blew off my homework or went to the kind of parties where teenagers play spin the bottle instead of Dungeons and Dragons and watch R-rated movies instead of Star Trek: the Next Generation.  I even put my coat on every time I went outsider during the winter, obstensibly to avoid catching my death of cold, and flaunted it as if to say, "I'm on to you old people.  You can't fool me.  The jig is up."  That was my subtle way of sticking it to the man.  My  insouciance eventually became a habit, and to this day I still have never ridden my bike at night without wearing bright clothing, worn socks with holes in them or hit on 17.

c. February 9, 2011 Anno Domini

I took a certain eight-year old to Burger King today.  She went to the soda fountain, filled her cup with regular Coca-Cola, turned to me and said, "Ahhhh, the joys of  being non-diabetic."

c. February 19, 2011 Anno Domini

A while back, I somehow managed to get the tube from my insulin pump tangled up whilst taking off my pants after a long day at work and ripped the infusion site out.  A geyser of blood spurted out, like when Uma Thurman cut the dudes' arms off in Kill Bill and it kept trickling for five minutes afterwards despite the application of pressure directly to the wound.  Admittedly, I had taken my pants off with a certain "I'm done with a serious day at work and am emphatically taking off my serious work pants to change into something leisurely" attitude but the amount of blood that gushed out was still in no way proportional to the (lack of) trauma.  It left an epic blood stain, which I attempted (but epically failed to) remove from the carpet.  I covered it with a rug, explained the whole incident to my mother and apologized the day I moved out of my parents house.  I must have pressed ABACABB before taking off my pants.

Today, my infusion site was brutally torn from my body by my harness riding up on me whilst I was careening down a zipline (for the first time in my life) at Warp 7.  A lesser man would have screamed in pain and then tried to play it off like he was just screaming in excitement at zooming around at Warp 7, but I merely winced.  After botching the landing by fallling directly on my buttocks (sort of a theme today, actually), I inspected the damage, which by all reasonable expectations should have been gruesome, and there was not a single drop of blood.  Just like the Super Nintendo version of Mortal Kombat.

c. March 3, 2011 Anno Domini


I was driving home this morning on a road with a speed limit of 45 miles per hour (mph), but only moving at 35 mph because the car in front of me (and presumably the car in front of it, et. al.) was only moving at 35 mph.  Rush hour traffic is like that.  The car behind me was also moving at 35 mph and seemed to be trying to lock a tractor beam onto my rear bumper while the driver gesticulated wildly in an attempt to encourage me to speed up for one second so I could close the distance to the car in front of me and then immediately slow back down to 35 mph.  Eventually he tired of my failure to submit to his demands, sped up, crossed a double yellow line to pass me and had to immediately slam on his brakes as the light ahead of us turned red and traffic came to a standstill.  I laughed and called him the third derivative of position with respect to time.

c. March 8, 2011 Anno Domini



I visited the house of a friend, who has two cats, for a friendly game of Munchkin last night.  He has two cats, and I am highly allergic to both of them.  He was a gracious host and took all the necessary precautions such as covering the couch with a blanket to shield be from the offending allergens and not having the cats actually in the room, but cats being what they are, one of them eventually made its way into our social gathering.  I immediately felt its arrival in my trachea, rather than saw it, and developed severe nasal congestion.  Whether the blasted thing sensed my weakness and made a point of exacerbating the situation or not (I suspect it did), the damage was done.  The first thing I did when I got home was to strip buck naked (sorry about the mental image there) and throw everything I had been wearing except my glasses into the laundry but I still experienced a moderate nasal drip all night and feel an itch in my lungs even now.

The point is, if ever someone hires you to separate me from this mortal coil you will have no need to employ the traditional tricks of the trade.  No need to corner me in a dark alley with a gang of thugs on my way home from the tavern, poison my food at a formal banquet so I fall dramatically face-first into my bowl of soup or engage in any other sort of cloak and daggery (unless the cloak is covered in cat fur).  Just break into my house, let a horde of common housecats rampage around for an hour or two and the odds are I'll be asphyxiated by morning.


c. April 1, 2011 Anno Domini


I named my character on Dragon Age: Origins "Mr. Roberts" so all the other characters in the game would call me Mr. Roberts like people should do in real life.  To my dismay, the maximum name length was too short so I couldn't input a name including any honorifics such as "The Eminent Mr. Roberts" or "Mr. Roberts, OBE"

c. April 5, 2011 Anno Domini


I truly sympathize with people who face a drive home from work exceeding one hour in duration (as opposed to my usual 12 minute commute).  It took me 47 minutes just to get from the parking lot of my workplace to the intersection of Ballantyne Commons Parkway and Lancaster Highway, a distance of 1.1 miles1.  As such, my average speed during that portion of my oddysey was 1.4 miles per hour (mph), which is 35 times the speed of a Giant African Land Snail2.
An officer of the law was directing traffic at the intersection despite there being no accident and no fallen trees or other large debris in the intersection and the traffic light being fully operational.  It was probably for the best through, because people are basically animals who have no regard for things such as the interests of their fellow man or the stability of society during a crisis.  I could definitely envision people going all Lord of the Flies and speeding through the intersection at 35 times the speed of a Giant African Land Snail regardless of what color the light was and leaving us poor blighters waiting to turn onto Lancaster stuck indefinitely until the weakest-willed amongst us broke down and resorted to cannibalism.  Fortunately it never came to that.


The final 2.7 miles of my arduous journey went much more quickly, as I covered the distance without incident in a mere 24 minutes at an average speed of 6.75 mph (or, as I was measuring it, 168.75 Giant African Land Snail Paces Per Hour) but I would probably still be waiting at the entrance to my apartment complex with my turn signal on if some charitable soul hadn't stopped to let me turn in.  I don't know how you people who have to deal with that sort of nonsense regularly handle it.

1http://www.mapquest.com/
2http://www.petsnails.co.uk/faq.html

c. April 6, 2011 Anno Domini

After work today, I went out for breakfast.  The restaurant had a sign with, "Don't forget to smile!," written on it amongst drawing of flowers and peace signs.  The first three times I looked at the sign, I thought it stated, "Don't forget to smite!"  I was about to ask my waitress if the establishment's clientele included a large number of paladins and lawful good clerics  but realized at the last second that the sign said "smile" and not "smite."  Thanks to that timely epiphany, I managed to avoid making a level 20 fool of myself, as opposed to the mere level 17 fool I usually make of myself whenever I speak to strange women.
c. April 28, 2011 Anno Domini

At 1:53 a.m. on April 28 ,2011, in the Harris Teeter parking lot, a lady and gentleman, who were both under the influence of alcohol, approached me and requested I settle a minor theological debate.  Betwixt the two of them, they were carrying a 12-pack of Corona and nothing else.  Before I could offer my opinion on the question they posed, the gentleman told me he liked my tie (the red 8-bit tie from http://www.thinkgeek.com/, for those who care to know), and the lady told me, "Your tie is so awesome."  I thanked them and politely weighed in on their debate, as requested.  The lady declared victory and thanked me for unwittingly supporting her position.  At this point, I shoud have fled because, although she would have chased me, I could have at least outrun her because she was carrying the beer.  Alas, I remained because they seemed polite and the gentleman actually seemed to want to discuss the issue in further depth.


Before the gentleman was able to articulate his thoughts, the lady began opening the 12-pack and offered me a drink.  I told her I could not accept, as I do not imbibe, but she said she wanted to give me something and since beer was all she had purchased she would just give me money to go into Harris Teeter and buy whatever I wanted.  Whilst she sorted through her purse searching for hard currency, the gentleman naively protested that her offer was rude because I was wearing a suit and therefore obviously didn't need money.  He said his name was Jonathan and offered a shake of his hand.  I, thinking perhaps this reasonable fellow could be of assistance in convincing his daft companion to leave me be, told him my name was also Jonathan and accepted the handshake.

In short order, I became the lady's new favourite Jonathan.  She told me her name was Brittany and said she wanted to hug me.  I forced her to settle for a handshake and told her I have a friend named Brittany but she moved to Ohio and that made me sad.  She continued digging through her purse with the hand that wasn't shaking my hand and promised she would never move to Ohio.  I asked her, "Do you have anything against Ohio?"  She replied, "Yes.  It's Ohio."  "Grrr.  My friend Brittany is from Ohio," I retorted, and she asked what I wanted from Harris Teeter.  I told her I didn't really need anything, partially because I'm not enough of a cad to take advantage of a drunk lady like that but also partially because I have an aversion to been seen exchanging cash with strange women in empty parking lots at 2 a.m. and also because I wasn't quick-witted enough to come up with a winning hand in that "what random combination of three items from the grocery store would really freak out the cashier (or the random drunk lady in the parking lot)" game.

From the rest of the conversation, I can only deduce that the deleterious effects of alcohol on the language-processing centers of the brain caused Brittany (the drunk lady, not my friend in Ohio) to erroneously believe I said I wanted a "rapacious damsel throwing herself at me" from Harris Teeter.  She said she wanted to date me and asked for my business card.  I told her I didn't have one.  She said she wanted me to be a part of her lift and asked for my telephone number.  Jonathan (the drunk gentleman, not me) said, "I'm not dating her.  You should give her your number and go for it."  She voiced agreement, an awkward silence ensued, and the other Jonathan broke it by telling Brittany I wasn't taking her seriously because she was too excited.  Brittany insisted she was serious, and another awkward silence ensured.  Jonathan attempted to bring the conversation full-circle (that punk, he should have known that is my fallback conversational technique) and telling me, "My family raised me Catholic, or at least tried to."  Brittany told him I was Jewish, and I told her I was actually Catholic but that she shouldn't feel too bad because many people have mistakenly assumed I was Jewish.  Finally, Brittany stopped shaking my hand, let go of it, said to me, "You're Catholic?  I'm good.  Never mind," and flounced away.


It is a dog gone good thing I obtained new shoelaces for my black shoes today, because I had been considering adding my red hat and red belt to the red shoes if I had to wear them again today and if I had done that, I probably would have had to chew my own hand off to get away from her.

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