BillyStyle

You know how sometimes a funny thought pops into your head and it makes you grin, and sometimes laugh a little? That happens to me sometimes at work, when I’m walking by myself, but in the midst of other people. My natural reaction is to fight the grin and try to act like I’m not a crazy person laughing at nothing. However, when I don’t try to hide the grin, it’s more fun.

Some people kind of grin as well like they know you’re up to something, and they sort of want in on it. Others get a little paranoid like you are laughing at something you saw them do or something you know that you aren’t telling them. The mood suddenly changes for most people who notice that I have a mischievous grin on my face. Try it out, it’s fun. The best way to handle people who try to figure out what you’re grinning about is just brushing it off, keep them confused.

There are two types of people; music people, and non-music people.

Here’s how I see it. I’m a music person. I dig music. I dig good music. I have my ideas as to what good music sounds like and what makes bad music. I’ve made the appropriate changes in my life to try and avoid bad music, indulge in good music, and try to find more good music constantly. I feel I’ve done fine, my ears are satisfied. If you are curious as to my taste in music, here’s a sample.

Is the music I like the only good music and that which I dislike factually bad? Nope. There are music lovers who have completely different tastes than me, and that’s great, I respect that. They are also music people. I’d even recognize some of that as good music, just not the kind I prefer.

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As I’ve oh so proudly mentioned before, I work in a furniture store. For the readers not familiar with the store (Blvd Home Furnishings), I’ll explain just a bit. The store is just over 115,000 square feet, it has a whole lot of upholstery, mattresses, appliances, home electronics, bedroom furniture, and dining room furniture. Also featured in the store is a diner, which attracts way more people than I’d ever guess. Well, this post isn’t about the diner, it’s about something that I find much more disturbing.

During the almost weekly sales events, most will have free hot dogs and such. That usually happens on Saturday, when I’m not there. Every now and then, during a weekday (like Martin Luther King Jr. Day), we’ll have free pizza in the store. When this happens, it’s like an egg sack of a spider broke open near the front of the store, only all the eggs are 70-90 year old geriatrics who instinctively flock to the free food. It’s almost sickening.

Sure, there are other people who get the pizza (high school kids, excited lower-middle class types who are ecstatic to feed their five kids for free for one meal, and other random passers by), but none stand out quite like the oops I didn’t plan my retirement so now I stick to this crowd who follows free food around like swine to the troff group.

Being relatively young at the moment, I find that sight enough motivation to make sure that I’m sitting on enough money when I become old and useless that I don’t have to thrive on going around to retailers eating their cold free food. What a terrible lifestyle. Given, this is a retirement/snowbird community, so the problem is much more evident than most other places, but I know it happens everywhere.

So anyway, a word of warning: If you are thinking of going to the Blvd just to get a free slice of pizza or hot dog, ask yourself if it’s worth going through a slow-moving crowd of white haired folk with little bladder control (which became evident today when I walked by one such crowd) and waiting in line for fast food quality cuisine.

As I type this post, I have two other tabs open in FireFox that have been loading for over a minute each. Why? Well, they each seem to have some small image that doesn’t even show up (I’m guessing something to track visitors or ad impressions or something irrelevant to me, the user) when it’s done loading. I see this more and more. Webmasters really need to check these things when optimizing their site for user friendliness.

The main reason I’m upset with this is that both sites require a user name and password for me to access my account. I am lazy and take advantage of stored user names and passwords. In FireFox, the fields don’t auto fill until the page is entirely finished loading. In that case, I have to remember what I used for that site, which usually means checking my super state of the art safety vault with all my top secret information and fill it out myself. I’m far too lazy to do that.

Anyway, after working in the SEO realm for a year or so, red lights go off whenever a page fails to load in a timely manner. I lose respect for these sites…but sadly, I will still use them, because I’m mostly a complainer. By the way, both of those pages still haven’t finished loading yet.

I’ve noticed that one must be cautious when bringing up the topic of hygiene around people one thought to be clean. Yeah, weird.

This all came to my attention a few years back on a different topic, but led to this discovery. My roommate was washing dishes, and I noticed he was only washing the business side of the plates and bowls. I said “Hey, why don’t you wash the whole dish?” His answer, naturally, was “Because only the top got dirty.” Yeah, good answer smart guy. If I need to explain why that didn’t sit well with me, go wash your hands right now, because you’re the type of person who doesn’t was their hands after using the bathroom if you “didn’t get any on you.” Anyway, my response to him, trying to dumb it down, was “That’s like me saying I didn’t wash my legs in the shower because I didn’t get them dirty today.”

That is the line that helped me discover awkwardly unsettling things about people with whom I am associated. The topic of dish washing roommates came up at work recently, so that story resurfaced. I then learned that most of the people I was around there didn’t seem to think that all the body parts need to be washed on a regular basis. Sure, I can understand a 10 year old kid thinking that, maybe even up to 13 or so years old. But once you learn a little more about life, I just can’t see how anybody would actually take a shower and leave any part of their body as it was when they entered the shower. You’re there in the water, soap in hand, water running on you, what do you stand to lose by spending an extra minute finishing the job? I just don’t get why washing the body is such a riddle for some people.

I’m sure I’ve either offended somebody or you may be thinking that I’m anal retentive. Well, I’m not too fond of being smelly, sick, or dirty because of something I skipped in the shower. If this is all news to you, then here’s another piece of advice: Your body smell is stronger to everyone around you than it is to you, so wash yourself.

Anyway, I got a nice little rant there. My main point is that I am shocked by how many people don’t get the whole job done in the shower. I’m 6’3″ and still get it all, so I’ve got more real estate to cover than the average person. So, if you want to create an awkward moment at work, bring up hygiene in the shower, it’s a surefire way to stir things up!

So I’m 27 years old now. I’m beginning to figure things out about myself. One of those things is that caffeine seems to have no noticeable effect on my energy. I first noticed this after a high school basketball game in our neighboring town of Bend, Oregon. The drive was 30 minutes max in a school bus. A friend and I each bought a Jolt Cola from a vending machine in the school (we found it a bit odd that there was such a caffeinated drink in the school). We each chugged them quickly. Within ten minutes of bus riding, I was fast asleep.

Since that time, other forms of energy drinks (if I remember right, Jolt was one of the first, if you can call it an energy drink) have been born. A couple summers ago, some wakeboarding buddies of mine essentially got sponsored by Red Bull, and I had many days where I drank two or three cans of it. Even then, I never noticed additional energy. A few months ago at the Portland Pro Wakeboard Tour stop, we got a slew of free Rockstar. I drank one can and a little of another just before a flight out of town. My flight got delayed almost two hours, and while waiting, I had to keep moving around so I didn’t fall asleep and miss my flight when the time came around. Now, I’m not saying caffeine makes me tired, I had been out in the sun most of the day, and would normally have been plenty tired.

I’m sure that caffeine still messes with my innards, because I couldn’t be that lucky, but for some reason, it has no effect on my energy; weird.

Lately I’ve noticed a cool kind of movement. It seems as though people my age have begun to gain the knowledge and ability to bring back some entertainment we enjoyed as kids, and I think it’s great! The things that made me think of this are movies such as the Transformers Movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, How to Eat Fried Worms, and I recently even saw some Mad Libs have recently made a comeback.

I think this is great. Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to collect movies that we watched as kids growing up. Naturally, when watching those, I think “Man, they just don’t make them like they used to.” But now with these new versions of old stuff, it’s like living a new and improved childhood, while still having access to the originals. It really doesn’t get much better!

Now I’m hoping to see some other movies come about such as M.A.S.K. and GOBots. Those two would be awesome. I’m sure there are others as well. Maybe move of The Whipping Boy?