Mild Amusement

I'm old school enough that I tend to avoid using force against women.  I'm not generally a fan of force/violence in every day situations anyway, but it's less of an option in my mind when the other person lacks a Y chromosome.  Still, I think I may have been tricked into using force against the fairer sex.  Now before I get vilified, let me explain. I was in Disneyland with a Mild Ex, and we were walking from one ride to the next.  There were a bunch of people around, as usual, and we were navigating the crowds.  There was a group of rowdy teenagers off to our right, and we were trying to avoid them by walking around them.  However, one of the guys was being sillier than the rest, and he was literally backing into us.  So, I put out a hand to make sure he didn't crash into us, and gave him a light push in the back to make sure he knew there were people behind him. And that's when I felt a bra strap. Yup, that "dude" was actually a girl.  No...

The recent post about parking couldn't have been timelier.  I was walking home the other day, and I found someone that was on the other end of the parking conversation.  In this case, someone had blocked the driveway in front of this person's house. To be clear, I think the person has every right to be upset in this case.  For one, that's illegal.  Secondly, it legitimately blocks the path of any cars trying to park in the driveway or garage.  My beef with the people who get on our case is that they feel entitled to something to which they're not actually entitled.  In this case, the people living in this house are entitled to have a driveway free of other people's cars.  I'm siding with the people in the house on this one. So did these people just tow the offending car to deal with the problem?  No, they did something far, far awesomer (yes, I know that's not a real word, but it's awesomer than "more awesome," thank you very much).  Ins...

The other day, I drove home and there was no parking.  I drove all the way up my block, and I didn't see anything.  That was surprising, since this was late at night.  It's not like there's a shortage of parking on my street (except for right around church services); there's usually a spot or two free.  Still, I had to circle for a bit to find a space, and I went about my business.  It was mildly annoying, but that's how it goes sometimes. Apparently, though, I may be alone in my thinking on this.  Recently, I've discovered that people can be very touchy about the parking near their houses.  The public parking near their houses, mind you.  For example, the van I ride to and from work needs to be parked somewhere overnight, so we always park it near the last stop.  I've actually counted, and there are something like 10 spots for 4 houses on each side of the street, for a two-block stretch.  So we park in whatever space we find when we ...

As I've mentioned before, the company for which I work is trying to save money .  I get it, spending more money than you make is generally a bad thing.  So they're taking steps to remedy that.  And most of these things make sense.  There is, however, one particular cost-cutting measure that I take a little bit of issue with: the lights. Funnily enough, I'm normally a huge fan of not wasting electricity via lights.  At home, I'm the one who's always walking around turning off lights behind people when they leave the room.  People will leave a room, go do something else for 10-15 minutes, and then stroll back in.  That's a full 10-15 minutes of electricity that didn't need to be used, so I turn off the lights.  When I was younger, my mom once joked that she'd save money whenever I was home, because of this habit. At work, they put motion detectors on the lights in offices.  The idea is pretty similar to what I do naturally; if there's no on...

When I was a kid, I accidentally broke one of my mom's purses.  I was all of about eight years old and it was a legitimate accident, so my mom didn't get too upset.  She did, however, decide to make an investment in the future; she made me promise to get her a new one after I graduated from college. In retrospect, this plan was sheer genius.  First, it gave her the ability to guilt trip me into studying harder if it ever came down to it.  It's not like she ever had to do it, but to a parent, any extra little motivation you can instill in your kid to get ahead is like gold.  Secondly, she had to have figured that by then I would've had a job and could afford to get her a nice purse.  The one I broke wasn't exactly ratty, but it wasn't exactly new, either.  She basically traded up.  Put another way, my mom played me. Now, as you have probably surmised, I am several years removed from college.  This means that for several years, I didn't pay...

I try to be good about using the English language correctly.  I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it's not my first language, so I had to learn some of it by the book.  Because I had to put in some effort to learn the spelling & grammar, I notice mistakes a tiny bit more readily.  I'm also slightly anal about things, so that's probably the other half of the justification.  Regardless of the reason, though, I try to make a concerted effort to avoid mistakes when speaking or writing. Unfortunately, this means I'm fighting a never-ending battle (against myself) to not screw up.  And in that process, I've noticed that certain words & phrases seem to come up again and again.  They've become nemeses of mine.  Every time I spell one of these words incorrectly, even if momentarily, a tiny piece of me groans.  If I actually publish something (e.g., send an email, post a blog entry) with that kind of a mistake, that same piece of me dies...

I think I've mentioned it before, but I try to do at least one good deed every week.  It doesn't have to be something spectacular, just something that somehow makes the world a slightly better place.  Helping to get someone an answer to a problem they had at work counts as a good deed, for example.  So does doing the dishes for someone else.  You get the idea; it doesn't have to be a grandiose production, but my aim is to do my part to not let the world suck. Regardless, I've been having a tougher time lately with this.  I will volunteer to help other people out in some capacity, and they callously blow me off.  It's disheartening, really.  It almost makes me want to give up on this whole good deed thing. Take my coworker/friend who also happens to be a software developer.  She was in the final stretch of a project, so she was understandably busy.  Seeing her plight, I offered her a simple snippet of code to try to make her work go faster...