In light of the recent Space Shuttle disaster, officials at NASA are considering sending an unmanned robot into space to perform maintenance on the fourteen year old Hubble Telescope. “The idea came to us,” one project manager reported, “after the local Chuck E Cheese closed down and the entire animatronic Pizza Time Band became unemployed.”
In the wake of record-high crude oil prices, one national newspaper reporter asked the President what can be done to conserve this limited resource. The Commander-in-Chief replied, “We all must do our part to conserve fuel. I, for example, have retracted my open invitation for Rush Limbaugh to travel with me on Air Force One.”
For the first seven or eight years I knew my friend Brian, he kept telling me the word sopapilla meant “soup thief” in Spanish. Since my entire south-of-the-border language exposure took place at numerous Taco Bell drive-throughs in the Denver metro area, I accepted his explanation without question. Whenever the words “soup” or “thief” came up in casual conversation I would proudly explain to everyone in the immediate vicinity how deep-fried dough can soak up, or steal away if you will, warm seasoned broth when used in a traditional dipping motion. (This often occurred while viewing the movie “Best In Show” when the character Sherri Ann Cabot described the relationship with her new fiancée who was roughly forty years her elder. “We both have so much in common, we both love soup and we love the outdoors, we love snow peas and talking and not talking.”)
So everything in my life is going fine– I have an interesting tidbit of information that makes me come across as funny and wise in the ways of the world. Unfortunately, it turns out Brian was wrong all along. The word sopapilla actually means “fried dough sweetened with honey.” My point here is that you can’t always trust what you hear, even if it comes from your best friend. Having said that, I spent last weekend celebrating my thirtieth birthday. I shit you not.
Of course turning thirty is only significant if you have ten fingers. If Kristin, my nine-fingered girlfriend, was put in charge of creating a numbering system it could very well be based on nine. If that were the case, twenty-seven and thirty-six would be important age milestones. I’m not sure the world is ready to abandon the decimal system in favor of the more obscure nano-mal concept. Similarly, if Mickey Mouse or the society displayed on “The Simpsons” were to set things up, we might base everything on the number eight. Since the numbers are really the only thing everyone on the planet can agree on, the odds of this changing by the time I finish writing this are quite small. Hence, my turning thirty is an important sociological milestone in my life. I’m not as young as I used to be, and not as old as I will be. That, and my age ends in a zero for a while.
I started the celebration a week before my actual birthday by going to see the musical “Hairspray” with my mom and Kristin. I was excited to see Ricky Lake play the lead role—especially after seeing her amazing performance as the front of the Filthy Whore ship in the movie “Cabin Boy.” It turned out that the story’s lead character, Tracy Turnblad, was instead played quite well by Carly Jibson. Despite this slight confusion on my part, I found the entire production to be quite enjoyable and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys dancing, singing, and jungle love subplots. Keep in mind, however, that I’m part of a small but dedicated group of people who thinks “Cabin Boy” got shafted by the Academy Awards.
The next Saturday, which was my actual birthday, I went to the Comedy Works with a bunch of friends to watch Carlos Mencia. One of the highlights of the show involved Carlos letting two drunken women heckle him. He did a suspiciously amazing job at putting them in their place, which made us all wonder if it wasn’t a setup to make him look good. Another, well, I would call it more of a bizarre occurrence than a highlight, was when I received money at the end of the show. The man sitting directly behind me spent a large percentage of the evening yelling out random comments while at the same time inadvertently depositing tiny droplets of spittle on the back of my bald head. While he didn’t feel the need to actually shut up during the performance, he did feel bad enough at the end to hand me a twenty dollar bill.
To wrap up my birthday celebration, Kristin decided to throw a surprise party for me the following weekend at Old Chicago. She did a great job of coordinating the evening without me getting wind of her plans. Unfortunately, one of our friends called her the night before as Kristin and I were sitting on her couch in the living room. The reason they called was to say they wouldn’t be attending my party. Not that I was eavesdropping, but its kind of hard to be sitting two inches away from someone talking on the phone with the television muted and not listen in to the conversation. Even though the surprise element of the night was compromised I had a great time with my friends eating pizza and soaking up the general atmosphere of downtown Denver.
While I am not exactly sure how it could be measured, I think I celebrated this birthday more than all my birthdays in my twenties. Since I’m not very good a consuming alcohol, I celebrated my twenty-first birthday by going out for ice cream. When I was twenty-four I spent April 3rd checking out Antwerp, Belgium. So while I may say a lot of things that, after careful examination, aren’t exactly factually correct (like when I swore up and down to Kristin there was a “Godfather 4” movie that just happened to never be at Blockbuster), I’ll never again say I’m in my twenties.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space telescope have released the deepest-ever image of the universe using a long duration exposure that provides a glimpse of the cosmos more than 13 billion years ago. “In addition to the clouds of space dust and ice particles,” one source close to the program explained, “we have discovered a very, very, tiny image of Dick Clark helping the galaxy ring in the Big Bang.”
After examining all the choices in the area, I’ve decided to start a fitness club that caters exclusively to pregnant woman, and I’m going to name the center “The OB-GYM.”
President Bush said on Tuesday his proposals for a space program that would take man to the Moon and Mars, criticized by some for its high cost, would be affordable. “We can get half way there,” the Commander in Chief explained, “just by climbing on top of all the money I’ve collected for the next election.”
Imagine this: After a moderately busy day at work, I’m sitting in my La-Z-Boy making saltine and peanut butter sandwiches.
One side of my brain (I’m not sure which– possibly the inside) is busy mentally writing a letter to the cracker company. “Dear Zesta, I should start out by saying I quite enjoy eating your saltine crackers. I find them pleasing to my palette and very reasonably priced. However, as I was sitting in my La-Z-Boy eating saltine and peanut butter sandwiches I realized a potential quality control problem with your product. When I get to the bottom of a sleeve of crackers, occasionally there is one left over. Each peanut butter saltine sandwich I make uses exactly two saltines. I was wondering: is there supposed to be an odd or even number of crackers in each sleeve? Personally, I would prefer to have an even number. Which leads me to my question: what should I do with the last cracker? I tried using both one and three saltines with peanut butter, but found the results unsatisfactory. Any information you can provide me on this matter would be greatly appreciated.”
The rest of my brain was busy processing information from earlier in the afternoon– the shorter days, the first significant snowfall of the year, the icy roads I had to navigate all morning and, of course, the trailer park where I got a UPS truck stuck twenty miles away from the center. It all reminded me (with the exception of the trailer park bit—more on that later) that is was time to write my annual Christmas letter. I jumped up from the La-Z-Boy, looked down at the last couple of saltines, sat down again, finished the last of the crackers, got up again, let the dog outside, decided I, too, had to empty my bladder, grabbed a soda from the refrigerator, and then raced to my computer to start writing. Oh, yeah, and somewhere in there I had the oil in my car changed.
Speaking of automobiles, I just realized that I’ve been driving my Saturn almost as long as I’ve been writing Christmas letters. Based on my personal experience, 1996 was a good year to buy a Saturn. In the seven and a half years I’ve owned this vehicle, it has served me well. However, after consulting my ancient Chinese astrological charts I discovered that 2003 was destined to be “the year of the broken alternator.”
Here is what I learned from the situation:
September 25, 2003 marked my one year anniversary working at UPS. I’m not sure why, but I expected the day to be kind of special. Nothing too fancy– maybe a nice bottle of wine or some flowers. You know, just a little something to make me feel like I’m important to UPS. But no, UPS just went on like it does every day, completely oblivious to my feelings.
Now that I completely understand / mentally repress everything that happens during the morning shift at UPS, I find my mind occasionally wanders while my body is busy running in and out of the delivery trucks. Just looking at a box moving down the belt can reveal a lot about its contents. Packages from a company such as L.L. Bean have a distinct look and feel that says, “Hello, I’ve got a sweater inside me.” Packages sent from less frequent shippers say things like, “This is a care package for my son who just started college.” Or, “I used to be a box of coco-puffs cereal.”
Sometimes during the spare seven nanoseconds between loading boxes I ask myself questions like, “Come on, now Omar, really, do you even know how long a nanosecond is?”, “Do you like movies about gladiators?”, and, of course, “Who comes up with these street names?” One part of town in Fort Collins is full of “Lord of the Rings” themed street names such as Shire, Hobbit, and Gilgalad. One morning when a coworker asked if a package for an address on Gilgalad Street should be loaded on one of my trucks, I replied with one of my favorite Hobbit songs, “Gilgalad was an Elven-king. Of him the harpers sadly sing…” I stopped only because someone threw a moderately heavy package at the back of my head, but that’s another story. (one I don’t remember, for some reason.)
I made my first official “career move” at UPS in September when I started working as a Saturday air driver. So now, in addition to my usual responsibilities of loading trucks Monday through Friday, I now spend Saturday mornings in a brown UPS truck. After I put on my cute little brown uniform, I deliver packages in the towns of Fort Collins, Laporte, and Belleview. For anyone not familiar with northern Colorado, Laporte is a small town up in the foothills where people go to get away from the hustle and bustle of Fort Collins. Belleview is nestled even further up in the mountains where people go to get away from the hustle and bustle of Laporte, usually with little more than a handful of cows and several high caliber firearms.
Driving UPS trucks has been a good learning experience for me. After one moderately sized Friday night snowstorm, I found out what a UPS truck can and can’t do. It can descend a moderately icy inclined entrance to a trailer park without much trouble. After I delivered the package, I discovered that getting back up and on to the main road was not a simple task. After several failed attempts, I looked around, found some trash to stick under the rear tires, and was soon on my way.
Well, that just about wraps things up for 2003. Will 2004 be the year I resolve the odd saltine cracker mystery? Will I keep working at UPS? Will my coworkers keep throwing packages at the back of my head? If you want to know the answer to these and many other totally unrelated questions, stay tuned for the 2004 edition. Until then, just remember my favorite line from the movie “Office Space.” Bob: Looks like you’ve been missing quite a bit of work lately. Peter Gibbons: Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve been MISSING it, Bob.
Pop singer Bobby Brown has been charged with battery after a weekend domestic dispute with his wife, singing star and actress Whitney Houston, left her with facial injuries. When questioned about the incident, Brown explained how the whole situation was just a simple misunderstanding. “All night long she just kept asking for a good smacking, but it turned out all she wanted was some more heroin.”
Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh returned to his long-running radio show today after being absent for five weeks in an effort to break his dependence on prescription pain medication. When asked about the situation, Mr. Limbaugh commented, “While I have made some progress in dealing with the pain pills, the five weeks I’ve been off the air has helped me realize that my real addiction is having millions of people around the world listen to my every word on a daily basis– and trust me, they don’t have a rehab center for that.”
A car in Southhaven, Mississippi, ran a police checkpoint outside the arena where President Bush was speaking Saturday and rammed the building. “Despite the fact he was inside the structure at the time of the incident,” one republican at the scene pointed out, “the police force and secret service kept the President as secure as a Halliburton reconstruction contract.”
North Korea has agreed, in principle, to six-way talks addressing Pyongyang’s controversial nuclear program. The complex agreement will bring North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States together in an attempt to resolve the situation. While the details of the negotiations have not been finalized, it is widely believed the meeting will culminate in a no-holds-barred, winner-takes-all game of Chinese checkers.
A report commissioned by the governor of Illinois found that the if the state purchased prescription drugs from Canada, the average retiree could save more than $1000 a year without compromising the safety or quality of their medications. When asked to respond to these findings, a spokesperson for an undisclosed drug company replied, “Sure, this might save seniors in Illinois a few bucks here and there, but who is going to watch out for the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies? Oh, wait– that’s why we pay off high-level government officials. Sucks to be you, old sick people.”