The following has been rated NC-17. That means I’m “in a mood” and people who don’t like cursing can fuck the hell off and click on something else. Here’s a Rick Astley and Nine Inch Nails remix for you.

Everyone in burger club ditched my sorry ass tonight. Actually, the only person who said she was coming told me she didn’t want to go if it was just the two of us. In fact, it was a little worse than that. Most of the people in burger club knew it would be just the two of us and kept trying to convince me this could be a golden opportunity. I’m not sure where their optimism comes from, but I figure it’s something rich white people just have. Beat down Asian motherfuckers don’t have that sort of confidence. Tonight she asked who was coming and I told her, “Well, me.” She repeated the question as if she didn’t understand what I said. And with my second reply she pulled a face. So I told her that if she didn’t want to go it wasn’t a big deal. You know condescension when you hear it and it was there when she said, “Yeah, maybe next time.”

I decided to go to Paley’s Place to try their hamburger. It’s a fancy restaurant in my neighborhood and quite well known. The chef has won national awards and I’ve heard the food is excellent from trustworthy friends. The acclaimed hamburger can only be ordered in their tiny bar, and so I knew I had to go when I was by myself or with a couple of other people. (As an aside, I actually did ask someone out to Paley’s Place this year and she just blew me off. That’s neither here nor there, but I have been trying to get someone to go there with me for a while. Hell, my friend Matty G didn’t want to go there with me.)

The hamburger took a long fucking time to get to me. They overcooked it the first time, they said, so they made me a second one with a second complimentary order of fries. They must like fat Asian guys so they can rub their bellies. The meat was seasoned quiite well, but the rest of the burger was a let-down. The bacon was thick cut back bacon (Canadian bacon) and was hard to bite through. And the part that completely ruined the burger was a stale bun. I wish I could say it was excellent, but it wasn’t. The fries with the mustard aioli were, however, excellent. (What the fuck is aioli anyway? I bet it’s just a boojie name for mayonnaise so rich white people can eat it. It’s probably just Hellman’s in a smaller jar.)

I had their chocolate souffle for dessert, and they also gave me some tasters while I was waiting (for fucking ever) for my burger and they were excellent. The tasters made me expect a Laurelhurst Market-level of burger that I didn’t get. I think this is just another fancy restaurant that has a burger on their menu to pretend they’re like normal people but they don’t really give a shit about it. Which means they don’t give a shit about me but I’m used to that. As I’ve been saying, THAT’S MY FUCKING LIFE.

I feel better now, but I can’t find my fucking dirty gym clothes so I might have to drive back to look for them. Motherfucking hell. That means I won’t get to sleep anytime soon and I’ll be tired at work tomorrow and Friday is “yell at Todd day”. I fucking love my life. (No, drugs won’t help my attitude, in fact my ex-girlfriend made me take antidepressants and they just made me feel old. I wasn’t able to enjoy sex and I wanted to play with my ham radio. So she dumped my ass. If only I had another pill, perhaps a reverse Rogaine, to facilitate a comb-over I could have just stuck with the fucking ham radio and been happy with my life. As it is, here I am grabbing my ankles for another fucking day.)

My hay fever is killing me right now. None of the sneezing or itching today, but I was pooped. I couldn’t think straight and I was dragging around. This happens to me every spring and it’s fairly miserable.

So I made it back to Foster Burger for Sean & Trevor’s birthday dinner. It was a random affair that I had to twist arms to get going. Fortunately, Sean & Trevor both showed up. In any case, Foster Burger seems to be up and running and I can now say that the burger is definitely worth going to eat now. It’s not my favorite, and there’s nothing that jumped out at me about it, but the sweet bun complements the quality meat and I’d tell anyone that it’s up there on the list of burgers to try. I’m putting it below Hopworks on the pub scale, but at 8:30PM on this Wednesday you’d be hard pressed to find a seat at Hopworks but there were patio seats at Foster Burger. And if you were looking outside, you could have seen me do the worst job of parallel parking ever. Twice. It took me five tries to get off the damn curb. Sometimes you got it and sometimes you don’t. And sometimes your parallel parking is so bad that someone might put it on YouTube.

I was going to type something on this here computer, but the past two workouts at the gym have taken most of the biochemical energy out of my body and there isn’t enough left for my brain to think of anything. In fact, I think my body may shut down though it is doing its best to turn whatever I ate today directly into gas. The Mad Greek Deli may not be my friend in this case.

I’m trying to remember why it is I’m working this hard. Bikini season? I doubt that. Perhaps so I can floss and brush for the recommended two minutes without tiring myself out. That must be it. It surely can’t be to attract women on Match.com, because it’s not working for that AT ALL.

Looks like work is heating up a little, and it always seems like it’s everyone having problems or no one having problems. Thing is, I like my job so I won’t say too much about it. Plus, the worst I’ve ever had it is when I got bored at work.

My secondary job, trying to design my mom’s bathroom, is kind of a pain in the ass. I still have to draw some cabinets to see if they look right but I haven’t found a program I like so it might be time for paper and pencil. I may have to build some simulated walls to see if the space I’m putting the toilet is too small. That and a bag of mints will probably get me fresh breath.

Wow, the sale at George Morlan Plumbing was way better than I thought. All the internet prices I found were beat by the normal sale prices, and that’s saying a lot. Nevertheless, I spent $2100 on plumbing crap today and I realized I still have a long ways to go. I better get on it. I think I need to figure out just where I’m going to put all my subway tile and the 3D interior decorating computer programs really aren’t doing me a lot of good. Google Sketchup is total crap, Sweet Home 3D is only a little better. I’m liking Live Interior 3D so far, but I haven’t paid for it yet. We’ll see how it goes. I hope I don’t have to resort to getting out the drafting table, since I gave a lot of it away recently.

So I was watching a couple of movies tonight. Someone lent me Inglourious Basterds and that was absolute crap. I don’t like Tarantino movies, though, so I should have known better. I thought there were two good actors in it and at least they were fun to watch. I also started watching He’s Just Not That Into You, a movie that my Facebook friends told me was definitely a chick-flick, and all I’ve learned so far is that relationships suck. Perhaps the ending is uplifting (something I hope to see in these kinds of movies), but the movie cut out on me and so that’s all I know about it so far. Stupid intarweb.

No wonder my contractor wanted me to design my bathroom before he came back. It’s a pain in the ass! I’ve spent hours just looking for a sink! I finally had to resort to looking up what I had already, and since there’s no obvious part numbers visible I had to hang out at the plumbing store for hours to figure it out. I had to pick out the toilet, the Washlet seat, even the g*dd*mn knobs for the shower. And I’m not close to being finished. Do you know how hard it is just to figure out what wall spout to put on your tub? Yeesh. Tomorrow I have to put all of this in some sort of 3D CAD program so it doesn’t all look funny. I just realized I haven’t picked out the tub yet. Ugh.

I know I have issues with rejection and I suck at dating, but why shouldn’t the computer help me out? Well, I went to match.com tonight just to see what it had suggested to me and it told me that I was too picky and it had no women for me. OK, so the only criteria I think I had locked in was age, and the age span was 29-47 (I know, the bottom end is kind of low). But you notice something? THAT’S A SPAN OF NEARLY TWENTY YEARS AND THERE’S NOT ONE FUCKING MATCH. Good thing they have my money already. Jesus H Christ I guess I was looking for some romance (with a woman) and there’s match.com, BONING ME IN THE ASS.

It’s just as well. I usually get on there, send some email, get no reply, and then look longingly at the menu from Laurelhurst Market. Is it almost time to listen to my “friend” who said, “I’ll let you buy me dinner. You’re not going to get anywhere, but you can pretend you are.”

Work wasn’t too pleasant today too, but I can’t publicly reveal any details, but I did get ambushed. Yeah. Whee.

So I found an iPhone app, CardKing, that sounded good when I read about it. It scans the barcodes of all those damn fiddly rewards tags I have on my keyring and then shows them on the screen so you can scan them. But then I read that it doesn’t work with flat scanners, only the handheld scanners. And it doesn’t seem to want to scan in my library card or my Borders reward card. Borders is rumored to be going under (and I’ve heard that for the last year or so) but the library card is something I’d much rather not carry around with me. I never go. And some of my rewards doohickeys are delaminating and will fall completely apart soon. Oh, well, it was a good idea while it lasted.

It’s so sad when the high point of my day is trying to scan my library card into my iPhone.

I felt like shit today and was quite grumpy at work. It was an odd thing to experience. I didn’t feel that bad but I wasn’t remembering things and I was swearing a whole lot more. After lunch, though, I started feeling lightheaded and I left early so I could take a nap.

Before I left, I saw my old manager and he told me that’s how people were feeling recently. They’d feel kind of off for a while until BAM, they’d get sick. So maybe I have whatever thing that everyone else has. Their gift to me, as it were.

I didn’t feel good enough to head to the gym, and I felt the same way I did last Thursday. I guess staying home from the gym had advantages. I got to see TMZ which was pretty funny, and I also saw the new FX show Justified. TV makes things better.

My buddy at work convinced me that some of the unique crap I have, like Japanese folding fans, might actually get some money on ebay. I looked and most of them go for very little money, but I’m willing to put them up there. I found a light and a tripod and I was all set to take some pictures but the battery in my digital camera was dead. Oh, well. They’ll be up soon enough and I hope I don’t lose money on them like I did on some of the books I sold on Amazon. I paid more for postage for some of my computer books than they paid me for them. That’s what I get for not paying attention.

Other than that today was a day like any other. Commute to the big grey box, sit in a cubicle, and realize this is my life. At least it’s payday and I like my co-workers. It could be much worse.

I got an email from THMFIC and he wanted to know if I was sore from the Steve Maxwell seminar yesterday. The answer is yes and no, I’m just plain beat. I’m certainly not as sore as I was from the Swinging Cindy we did last Monday, but my soreness is usually delayed a bit so I’ll see how I’m doing tomorrow.

I actually got a couple of things off of my to-do list today, even between my naps. I’m still feeling kind of crappy and I wonder if I’m going to feel like I’m just about ready to come down with a cold for weeks on end. I suppose I could blame it on hay fever or the change to daylight savings time, but I’m pretty sure it’s not either of those things. In any case, I replaced another piece of plumbing, but it was just the water filter that lasted almost 18 years and was starting to leak all over the place. I also started sorting even more of my dad’s old crap and I think I’m about to start up my regular pilgrimage to Goodwill again. You know how it goes, I see some stuff that might be worth something and I think about ebay for a while until I get tired of thinking of ebay and just carry the stuff to Goodwill. At the very least it’s not taking up space in my house. I’m obstensibly Buddhist, after all, so I’m probably supposed to be a minimalist.

I went to the Steve Maxwell bodyweight seminar today where I learned that Steve has even more ways of kicking my ass. There was no actual ass-kicking involved (though I think he is a second-degree black belt in Gracie Jiu Jitsu), just humiliation in body weight exercises. A simple one: 10 pushups, two minutes per pushup (one minute down and one minute up) is incredibly difficult. What about pullups sets where you do a full pullup, then hold for a 10 count at the top, a full pullup, hold for 10 at 50% position, a full pullup, hold for 10 at 25% position, a full pullup, hold for 10 just below bottom, and then a full pullup. These weren’t all we saw in an 8-hour seminar. We ended up with at least 3 sets of 5 minute abdominal exercises. I’m beat up.

I don’t have anything else today. How could I?

Happy DST day, though.