You are. And that is enough.
On Facebook, I occasionally get little updates from Marvel Comics (usually cover art for upcoming issues) and saw one this morning that just… the grammar police in my head wanted to go rogue, raid Marvel’s office and start popping caps in editors’ asses. The cover was for 5 Ronin #2 and the upper right corner made this prophetic statement:
“I’m afraid you will be disappointed. But then, all life is but a preparation for being dissapointed.”
My family has trouble getting together. Lots of schedule conflicts, people running in circles… probably not that much different than other families, really, but we still like to meet at a restaurant to celebrate birthdays, although it’s usually for more than one of us at a time because of said schedule conflicts. My birthday was October 19th and my party ended up scheduled to be in November. We picked a time and place to meet and had everything all planned out. Unfortunately, the snowstorm that hit the cities that afternoon didn’t care about our plans. So much for my birthday party.
I mention all that because Justin and Molly got back from the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge last weekend and we still haven’t partied for my sake. We all met at Brent and Gail’s today to party for Santa’s sake, but not mine. However, Justin followed through with his offer to buy my birthday present while in Abu Dhabi and it’s pretty sweet.
There are two gifts and one is… I’m assuming it’s sweet, given that it’s a small bag of Arabian Delights brand “Chocodates”. Description on the front of the bag: “choco-date with almond”. My favorite part, though, is how the back of the bag lists protein, carbohydrate, fat and “energy” (in kilocalories and kilojoules).
The second gift is thoroughly awesome. It’s a polyester long sleeve “Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge” shirt (logo on the upper left part of the chest). Across the back reads “Abu Dhabi” and the right shoulder has “Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority” printed on it in both English and Arabic. I started wearing the shirt as soon as I opened up the wrapping even though the tags were still hanging down at the bottom.
I finally cut the tags off when I got home tonight and took a closer look. It’s a Salomon-brand shirt made in Cambodia and sold in Abu Dhabi, which helps explain why the little “Warranty & Glossary” booklet has two small pages of information written in 28 different languages: English starts on page 2 and a southeastern Asian language ends on 59.
There’s also a tag that lists the size, etc. Not out of the ordinary—it describes the shirt as black and made in Cambodia—but it also says “T-SHIRT (SHORT SLEEVE) L”. That’s right, short sleeve. Out of all the shirts I own, this is one of the few that can reach my wrists when my arms are fully extended, so if this is “short sleeve”, I can only imagine what a long sleeve shirt made by these people would look like.
Now that Christmas is pretty much over and the orgy of capitalism known as “the holiday season” has almost passed, this post isn’t as relevant as it could have been, but I still think it’s important. In a way, I guess it’s a re-emphasis of this blog post, but I wanted to write it anyway.
To keep it short and simple, I hope that you all remembered what was really important this December. Sure, presents are awesome. I rarely turn them down unless they look and smell like flaming dog poop—a man’s got to have standards. But there’s more going on than presents. There are the people who gave them to you.
There’s plenty of stuff getting passed around and plenty of people doing it. If not for the people… sure, you’re stuck buying gifts for yourself, but that’s not the point. The point is that they’re the ones who make this time the best. Stuff—material objects—will never be able to take the place of people. At least until they build androids that can travel back in time and try to kill Sarah Connor.
But it’s the human interaction that’s the most important part of the season. Love, joy, cherishing each others’ company… that’s the good stuff, baby. So I hope you all got to spend time with your friends and family and made your lives more complete because of it. Unless they gave you flaming dog poop as a present. Then you can ditch ’em.
I just want to wish everyone a very merry “End of Christmas music in 2010” weekend. It’s about frickin’ time.
I went to the dentist today for the first time in… a long time. Since it was my first time at that clinic, I got there at about 1:10 to do some paperwork before a 1:30 appointment. I filled out the forms, then sat around until it was time for me to get my teeth cleaned. Finally, it was 1:30. Then 1:40. About 1:50, the person at the desk saw me in the reception area and said she’d go take a look to see what was up. She came back and told me the dentist was still helping someone and it’d be another ten minutes before I could get back there. Yeah, they were running a little behind schedule.
Upon my arrival into the dentist’s chair, they told me they couldn’t clean my teeth. Why? Because I had knee surgery in April and they needed Dr. Lewis to sign a form saying it was okay to do it. I was a little annoyed, but that’s their policy (for legal reasons or something else, I dunno). So I asked how far back it goes. I mean, surgery was almost eight months ago. That’s a pretty long time, right? Well, not long enough according to their standards:
You need to have that form signed if you’ve had an operation performed in the last two years.
Sure, I think that’s ridiculous, but that’s their policy. The dentist wasn’t going to clean my teeth, but they took some x-rays and found out I have no new cavities after all this time. So that’s the lesson of the day, kids: remember to brush and floss properly and you can have surgery as often as you want.
I was eager to try out EA Sports Active 2 today, so I did a load of laundry first thing in the morning, ensuring that I’d have clean workout clothes. If all went according to plan, they’d be soaked with sweat by the time I was done. Turns out that even though things didn’t go according to plan, I was still soaked with sweat. Funny how exercising can do that to a person who hasn’t had a solid workout in many moons. Continue reading “Note to self: read the list of exercises first“
