JB’s Blog

So in the building I work at right now we are having some serious elevator issues.  Well technically they are problems, and if I were in fact officially a lawyer I would call them occurrences. 

Elevator 1 is proud to be #1, and I have no complaints, he’s number one for a reason.

Well elevator 2 is the ADD elevator of the four.  I say it has ADD because if you hit floor 4, the floor I happen to work on mind you, it gets to floor 3, then pauses.  It seems to have forgotten where it was supposed to go.  It just wasn’t paying attention, so many floors, so little time.  Then comes the hyperactivity.  It shoots up to the seventh, or as it today, the fifteenth.  Then on the way down you have to remind it four, and it says yeah yeah sure sure and stops there.

Elevator 3 is the arrogant one.  it refuses to come into contact with the floor you want to get out on.  It’s too good to touch the ground.  Instead doors will open about 2-3 inches above the ground.  Really you can’t blame it I suppose, who knows where these floors have been…

This brings me to the tough guy of the bunch, the freight elevator.  The freight elevator is the retarded one.  I say this because, well…you get in and then nothing.  The doors seem to be weighing their options.  After about 45-60 seconds of nothingness, they decided well they just as well close as there is nothing better to do. 

Then yesterday, while I was in the retarded elevator with one of the partners at the firm I am working at, the doors did their usual thing, but then the elevator couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to do next.  Keep in mind it was 95 degrees in NYC yesterday…not a good day to get stuck in an elevator.  Five minutes later the doors were pried open.  The partner and I walk up the stairs and despite the fact we are on the fourth floor we walk up oh about 75 flights stairs to get there (alright it was more like 7 or 8). Then we have to pound the door to be opened and we come out, like it’s a secret passage behind the desk of the receptionist.  I get teased the rest of the day and some apologize that I had to be stuck with the partner.

Did you ever notice that when you laugh really hard, your eyes close?  Well they do.  At the very least they squint.  Now imagine yourself in a car.  Okay good.  Now imagine you have a passenger.  Terrific, see how easy this is.  This passenger keeps cracking jokes.  You begin to laugh.  Then one is really funny and you begin to crack up.  And woah!…there go those eyes. 

Well I have been fortunate enough to be featured since day 1.  Without a doubt no places are more disproportionately represented than Malaysia and the Phillipines.  Indonesia was making a strong showing for awhile, but is in a distant third in the outside-the-U.S. readership.  So people why is that?  Is there nothing better to do than read blogs there?  (I’m kidding…no angry letters/comments please).  Should I move to one of these countries and get a talk show? 

Secondly I should add, for those of you messaging me wanting to have me as a friend and to learn to speak english better, well you can do far better than me…after all I’ve spent my whole life in New York.  As for the rest of you, well I cannot respond to all of you, I’m sorry, but I hope you will continue to read anyway, even if you don’t get any of my humor.  (I’m sorry guys but some of those comments taking what I write literally…well that’s just funny from my point of view).

So enlighten…enlighten others…leave comments.  I’ll be back in a few days.

So this is an old story from back when I was in middle school and involves my aforementioned cousin and grandmother (pool one).  My cousin used to always bug me about te style of my hair telling me I should change it.  In hindsight he was correct as I had a shitty part in my hair that made it look like I was coming to school straight from the set of Happy Days.  These insults would take place in front of my grandmother who would insist I had beautiful hair and that I had great sheen to it.  Now the only thing my cousin and I knew about sheen was that his first name was Charlie.  My cousin would insist that was ridiculous.  Then one time when I was visiting him at his house he had to get a haircut, the question arose in front of the haircutter, who agreed, yes I did have nice sheen.  I had nice sheen.

Now up until I was 15 or so my hair was straight.  My cousin would always try to convince me to use gels and stuff like that and I refused to, because my part was getting me tons of chicks.  Okay, no it wasn’t.  I was playing a lot of video games in friends’ basements.  So I decided what the hell, I’ll try some product he had in his house.  Well ever since that day, and I’ll swear it to my grave, my hair has been wavy.  I don’t know what happened that day…It was like my hair said chemicals…aaaahhhh, and tried to retreat and has stayed that way.  That’s my story ad I’m sticking to it.

Well to be perfectly clear this entry has nothing to do with the flag, but rather alludes to my old 1990 Buick Skylark that I drove back int he day, which you might remember from an earlier entry.  The thing about that car was that it was very reliable.  Whenever I needed to sleep in, some part of the car would malfunction.  Of course you had to bring it in to the mechanic at like 8:30a.m. and then waiti around to figure out when to pick it up, as well as gets rides back from there in the morning and to there in the afternoon.  Once every few months it was something with it.  Believe it or not the thing is still on the road!

Old Glory came from the fact that the emergency brake sounds like a canon.  Stepping on the pad to set it, sounds like setting a canon to fire.  Then releasing it makes a sound BOOM!  I swear I would set it just to hear it.  The other thing about Old Glory is that it had a crack in the windshield.  The mechanic assured us it was not a problem and could pass inspection since it would not break.  Needless to say it still makes you uneasy.  Also the window did seem to fog up an awful lot.  A final insult was when the left window just stopped working.  A reapir for that would mean taking apart the whole door and so we left it.  Of course this means no drive through, and having to open the door to talk to the security guards at gates or get a parking ticket.

Another thing that was always great was that the tray with the cigarette lighter became totally loose and would sometimes fall off and hang by wires if you went over a bump in the road.  One time I was in the car with my cousin and we went over a bump and he yells, "The transmission came loose!  What should I do?"  Rather than correct him, I yell back, "Just hold it, hold it for your damn life."  We then break into uncontrollable laughter. 

So in all I think that driving a car like Old Glory toughens your resolve.  All these kids these days given Ford Explorers to drive around in to high school, etc., you won’t be ready for when your car f’s you over.  I now am ready for any little light or something to come on or go wrong every time I am in a car.

Invariably, the following will happen to all of us in the next few weeks.  You will be talking to someone.  There will be a point when you really cannot talk to this person anymore.  After all you cannot very well end a date in 15 minutes.  Well I suppose you could…but I digress.  The point is you will have a shitty conversation.  Weather knowledge is a must.  With these random facts I have collected you will now dominate what I like to call (and borrow from sports) "garbage time" chat.  (For those of you wo do not get this reference, this is when all the scrubs come in and play because the game is so lopsided, comprising filler until the clock runs out).

Q:  So, Jason, you ask (okay you didn’t, because I like to think our conversations are good), what is the difference between partly sunny, partly cloudy, most cloudy, and mostly sunny?  What about mostly clear?

A:  Well according to the glossary at the National Weather Service, partly sunny and partly cloudy ARE THE SAME THING.  This condition exists when the (non-transparent) clouds cover 3/8 to 4/8 of the sky.  Mostly clear which IS THE SAME as mostly sunny means the sky is covered with 1/8 to 2/8 non-transparent clouds.  Mostly cloudy (aka considerable cloudiness) means 5/8 to 7/8 of the sky is covered by non-transparent clouds.   

Well there you have it, with thanks to the National Weather Service, and to me for being dorky enough to look it up.  Perhaps you are not thankful and upset that you read this far.  Ah well.  But look at it this way, you are armed with a tool now, you garbage time all-star.

Okay this will rank with one of my longer stories, but hopefully you will make it through.  This takes place last Saturday, 6-25-05, a day before my friend’s wedding in Los Angeles.  Two other friends from high school met me out there for the wedding (you might know them better as two of the A-D friends).  So we were staying in Marina Del Rey, and wanted to get to Hollywood.  Despite the fact that the Hotel Desk person kept saying the only way to get there was to rent a car or pay $40 each way in cabfare.  He recommended "Venice Beach sir."  Precisely the same thing he recommended every freakin time someone asked.  (We did make it there Sunday morning).  We set out to prove him wrong.  Two buses and a subway later we were there for $4 a person.  Was the 2.5 hours to get there worth proving him wrong…YOU BETCHYA.  (Had to wait 45 minutes between buses). 

So we get off at Hollywood and Vine.  There we get a free map from a place and decide we will walk toward Highland (where all those handprints and stuff are).  Anyway, as we pass by some museum that supposedly has a $5 admission fee someone tells us it is free, we should come in.  It is about this guy (whose name I will leave out at this point in the story) who was an aviator, a scientist, a movie writer, sci-fi writer, etc.  We figure what the hell.  We go in.  So this Swedish woman starts asking us all these questions about what we do, and then tells us what exhibits we will love in the thing.  My New York accent and speedy talking are too much for her and she can barely understand what I am saying.

Next someone finally takes us into the exhibit.  Now a Swiss woman is leading us through the museum.  We learn about the guys life how he grew up, travelled all over the world, studied as a physicist, wrote sci-fi.  Then the first weird scenario.  He wrote Battlefield Earth, which was made into a movie.  She asks if we have seen it.  I say yeah, it was a pretty terrible movie, but I haven’t read the book.  She suddenly becomes defensive over the movie.  Weird, but ok.  Then we get to the exhibit that says he used his writings of sci-fi to fund his research…and then we get to dianetics.  CRAP!  L. Ron Hubbard was the scientology founder.  No wonder why it was free.  They are trying to convert people!  The name finally registers, just 30 minutes too late!

So I decide, if she’s gonna throw out questions, I’m gonna be a pain in the ass.  While describing Dianetics she shows us a portion of the DVD and asks if we ever had a moment where we acted irrationally to a situation.  And I was like sure…everytime one of us gets a temper we do.  She says this is not what Dianetics dealt with.  I say, then no I can’t think of any…sorry.  She is not pleased.  Then we go up to this exhibit that’s supposed to measure your thoughts by measuring stress level.  So one of my friends touches this ball and the readings make no sense to what she is trying to prove despite the fact that she is claiming, "See it Works!"  She asks at another exhibit how does it make sense that medicine works for some, and not for others.  I felt like saying probably because all our DNA is different, I have a penis, you don’t…i don’t think anyway.  But I bit my tongue.  She seems very disturbed that my med school friends is not paying attention to what she is saying and keeps snapping him back to attention. 

Needless to say at the end of the tour she advocates us buying these books based on scientology teachings and is nagging.  I get off cheap, only having to buy a $3 thing about studying to get her off my back (comes with a directory of all the scientology churches in the country…there are two in nyc apparently).  My friends buy one copy of dianetics and she gives them a card and tells them to call if they need help understanding anything. She again strongly urges the med school kid to read it. She is in charge of Public Relations for The Church of Scientology! 

Anyway I got a great story out of it, and Hey at least this friend got a number…so we teased him.