John Zeitler

I’ve often referred to the force, whatever it may be, that created this universe as “The Great Engineer”. It’s no accident. The definition of engineering is bringing order forth from chaos; where once there stood naught but rubble and ruin, a great work has been made, eternal and enduring. Composed equally of rules and rods, structure and structures, functions and forms, the universe in which we live is the pinnacle of development– the culmination of an infinitely long development cycle, which itself is still ongoing. Creation is not finished– it’s still in the alpha phases.

I envy The Great Engineer. I can’t handle changes to my plans nearly as well, even if it’s just something as simple as “the bus driver didn’t change his route designation number”. Forget about having to deal with the free will of an infinite number of sentient beings, all it takes is one idiot to wreck my night.

On Tuesday, I discovered that there’s a small hot-dog shop near my bus stop on the way home. Given that they’re specifically a hot-dog restaurant, I figured it was highly likely they’d have veggie dogs, and the scent of hot dogs from street vendors near PNC Park was starting to really overwhelm me. Naturally I didn’t have any cash on me at the time, and no time to stop and get some. So I made an effort to be prepared this evening.

As can be expected, events conspired such that, after missing my early bus to downtown, I arrived at the shop minutes after they closed.

Pittsburgh may be the most livable city in the United States, but I personally suspect the people who made that assessment visited around lunchtime and didn’t stick around.

You would think that, being as avid a gamer as I am, I would have long ago developed a healthy callus on my left thumb.

As evidenced by last night’s run with Super Street Fighter IV, that’s kind of not the case. Ow.

That’s totally a word now, by the way. It’s derived from the root word “aesthetics”, meaning “a pleasing form or sensation”, and the prefix “hypo”, meaning “reduced or below what is required”. Its plain-English definition is “John wasted the entire evening dealing with stupid %$#@ that he had, until four hours ago, been under the impression had been resolved in 2007“.

I hereby renounce anything good I ever had to say, and pre-emptively renounce anything positive I might say, about the US Postal Service.

I know many folks out there reading this here blog come from different walks of life. I’m sure some of you even work in retail. I’d like to believe that all of you are smart enough not to need reminded of this particular little training hint that I’m going to provide, but on the off-chance that it comes up, well, don’t say nobody ever warned you, OK? Here goes:

When a customer says to you, “You have made me look like an idiot three times today because your staff did not perform their jobs to anything remotely close to the standards you claim to have for their photography department,” the correct response to this is “I am deeply sorry, sir/madam, for your embarrassment and will process the refunds you requested right away.” It is most emphatically not “*scoff* I didn’t make you look like an idiot. I’ll talk to my manager but you ain’t getting a refund.”

When you know that you need to get a good night’s sleep ahead of a pretty important day, just bite the bullet and go to a hotel room. That way you’re ensured that your neighbors won’t try anything silly like stomping around upstairs at 4a.

I have learned something today; call it a new law of the universe. “Whenever John wishes for something, say, a big snowstorm, events will conspire to not only give it to him, but simultaneously regret he ever asked for it in the first place.”

I recently had occasion to deal with someone who believed that, just because I happened to be looking for a job currently, I had all the free time in the world to do, well, pretty much anything I wanted. Naturally, between the three trips out I had to make today, some cleaning that I’d been putting off, and phone calls from a dozen different administrative tasks left hanging after last week, this obviously isn’t the case for me. More to the point, it’s caused me to a) revert to college-bachelor cooking (ie instant mashed potatoes mixed with tuna and some leftover shredded mozzarella), and b) made me so tired that even though I’m getting up later in the morning (read: 6:30a instead of 4a), I’m dead on my feet here at 9:30p.

I understand it’s gonna take time to adjust my sleep schedule, but dammit, this is just not fair to me right now, because now is when I have the ambition to do all this cool stuff.

Quick note tonight, folks, based on a project I need to keep under wraps for just a little while longer. I spent a significant portion of today hunched over my desk, scribbling words onto cut-up index cards. Because of this, it occurred to me that I haven’t done this much writing by hand since college.

Which is why I’m going to go take another dose of my usual pain medication and go to bed, because parts of me hurt that weren’t even involved in all the writing. Ow.