My Feelings: Day 7

I wonder if I’m really making an impact in the world. No, not really. But I do wonder if I could run over and take that man’s hat without him waking up.

My Feelings: Day 6

Today I experienced one of the most powerful things a human can feel—a hot curling iron left on the bathroom counter for apparently no reason.

My Feelings: Day 5

Do you ever get so frustrated that you feel like just stomping on a bunch of wire hangers and then slamming them into the garbage can? That’s how I felt yesterday when I tried to build a robot out of my old hangers. I spent all day on it, and all I ended up with was a big pile of clothes on my bed, plus no one to make me a sandwich, which was the whole point of the project.

My Feelings: Day 4

We went to the fair and my three-year old son kept running off. So, I sat him down and told him that if he ran off, he might get lost and then we couldn’t be together anymore. I then gave him a hug and told him that I loved him and wanted him to stay with us always. A couple of minutes later, he saw a clown handing out balloons and ran off to get one. I wonder if he’s happy here.

My Feelings: Day 3

Have you ever felt really down? I mean, really down. If you have, please write and tell me what it’s like. I would like to write about it one of these days, but I always seem to be on top of the world, so I really wouldn’t know where to start. Thanks in advance.

My Feelings: Day 2

This morning I felt completely alone—utterly and completely alone. But I later realized that I wasn’t as alone as I had thought. Someone had seen me take the box of doughnuts from the staff lounge and stuff it into my briefcase. I am learning that I cannot always trust my feelings.

My Feelings: Day 1

For the past few days, I’ve been thinking that I should be more open with my feelings, but I didn’t know how. Then this morning I was reading a touching greeting card when I saw a dog with only three legs hobbling to the bus stop, presumably to go to work. He stopped for a moment to kiss his doggy wife goodbye. He then continued on his path, until he stopped to kiss another dog. And then a cat. And just when the bus pulled up, he ran off with a whole pack of dogs, yapping and spastically kissing all the way. That beautiful scene was like emotional fiber loosening the bowels of my heart. And so I’ve decided that for the next ten days, I’m going to write about my feelings. It will feel good to share some tears together.

My Feelings: Day #1
Today, I felt really cold. I don’t know what it was—maybe a draft. But for some reason I think it was something else (probably not buttoning my vest). I wasn’t sure what to do. I hadn’t felt that way in a while. I put my jacket on, and that seemed to help. I don’t know what I would have done if it weren’t for my jacket. I really don’t know.

User Friendly

I tried to make my blog more user friendly. I realized that if anyone ever read this page, they would have to be constantly scrolling their eyes back and forth and up and down the page. So, I made links at the end of each line along the right side of the page. The link would then take the reader to the next line on the left side of the page. That saves the reader a lot of wasted time that he/she/noun could use to wonder why the punctuation was all wrong. I also added links at the end of each sentence that take the reader to the beginning of the next sentence. That way the reader can skip through the pointless spaces between sentences and keep on reading. These links were hyperlinks, which means that they glow, flash, and otherwise blink and jump around the screen. I then added links that automatically linked to other links on the page, until the entire blog was swirling around and emitting random holographs. However, I finally had to remove all of these great user friendly features when I realized the page was making my left eye partially melt. I apologize for the inconvenience, but you’ll have to read this blog as you would other user unfriendly blogs.

My First Big Break

I’ll always remember the day when I finally got my first big break in life. There I was, being handed the keys to the most enormous house I’d ever seen. I felt a little awkward, not even knowing the guy who had owned this house. He must have been an old rich man who died without any close family or friends. However, I soon learned that a life of wealth is not at all as I had imagined.

The house was big, there was no disputing that, but the living conditions were not ideal. All of the rooms were packed with desks and computers. And there were all these people there telling me to clean everything up. Plus, they wouldn’t even let me move in any of my things. There was this one nice guy, though, who would drop by and give me a check every couple of weeks. So I put up with all those other things.

However, after a little while, I finally got rid of all those desks and computers and brought in my bed. And guess what—everyone was mad. Even the nice check guy stopped coming by. Well, I guess around that same time they must have somehow found a closer living relative than me, because that first man showed up again and asked for the keys back. At that moment, I knew my time as a big shot had passed.

The Future: Are We Ready?

I was in my backyard digging a hole to bury a hang glider who flew into our window, when I hit something hard. I looked into the hole and discovered two objects. One was a cylindrical box; the other, a flat silver piece of metal.

The flat metal piece turned out to be the head of my shovel, which must have broken off while I was digging. I put the two objects aside and returned to my work. It slowed me down considerably having to just beat the ground with the handle. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the hang glider came to after a couple of hours and walked off. So I ended up not having to finish digging the hole.

I was about to start filling the hole back in, when I realized that it might be nice to have an extra foxhole around, just in case. I put the handle down and examined the strange, cylindrical box. It appeared to be some sort of time capsule. It looked old and had the words “time capsule” written on the side—a clue, no doubt. After several minutes of struggling with the lid, I attempted to pull it off rather than push it harder into the box. It came off immediately. I was shocked by what happened next.

When the lid came off, I heard “you have opened the secret time capsule” in a voice that could only be described as sounding like the wind. It was me that said it, in my whispery ghost voice. I had attempted that voice many times before, but had never pulled it off quite so well as this time. And that shocked me.

My eye caught hold of a single sheet of paper lying facedown in the box. It wasn’t folded, so I wasted little time trying to unfold it. Maybe only a couple of minutes. It looked like a page torn out of a diary. In big block letters, it was entitled The Future: Are We Ready? I read it aloud. The page was short, but still too long to read in my whispery ghost voice (although that would have been a great effect).

The year is 1994. The smell is of the ocean. None of us realize that in 14 short years, the oceans will be replaced by ocean-smelling-like robots. We will dip our robot toes into the ocean and an electromagnetic signal will tell our robot brains that it feels cold and wet. “That is water,” we will say with our internet voice-over mouths. A robotic seagull will then fly over and drop a computer chip on our shoulders. “Oh great! Our new shirts (holographs) are ruined.” We put a postcard into the mailbox, which is actually a wireless scanner that e-mails the picture to our friends Tom and Stacey. We tell each other (IR beam info out of our eyes to the others’ brains) that we will always remember this time we had together at the ocean. We put our leash back on our robotic dog/microwave oven and walk to our cars and drive/digitally transport ourselves back home.

In fourteen years! That would be this year—2008. It did sound eerily similar to our world today—or at least, what our world could be like in a couple of "big" months. But something was troubling me. The author used certain words that someone from 1994 could never have understood or predicted—like Internet, wireless, and seagull. How could someone from the past have known what our life would be like or would soon be like in 2008? My first thought, of course, was that the person must have been an alien that sees all time in the present and got lost here for awhile until getting zapped back up to his ship (or her ship—but I think we all know “how things are” on other planets). But then I looked closer at the page. In the top corner was written “Planet: Earth.” It was an earthling all right. That’s exactly how one of us would have written that.

At that moment, I got distracted. I noticed an old newspaper in the bottom of the box. I started to call out Eureka, but I thought better of it and just yelled Jackpot. I quickly ran to the phone book to call a bookie (FYI—it’s pretty hard to find a bookie in the phone book. Turns out that a bookkeeper is an accountant, and the other places are all libraries). However, I found a real bookie’s number on-line. I placed a bunch of bets on the scores of some baseball games. But I think this scheme would have worked better if the sports page had been from the future instead of 1994. One of the teams I bet $1,000 on doesn’t even exist anymore. All in all, though, I lost quite a bit of money.

I had thought that digging that hole would solve all of my problems, but all it did was burden me with more questions. Who am I? Why am I here? Whose shovel is this? Hey, isn’t my house blue, like that one over there across the street?

Perhaps, it is better to wait for the future to provide us these answers—at a time when we, and the future, are ready (last part read in a whispery ghost voice).

Cool Calculator Trick

I've tried this five times in a row, and it worked each time. It's amazing. Follow the instructions below precisely.

Start with your age

• add your home phone number (no area code)
  
  
• subtract the age you were when you realized that cats aren't the girl and dogs the boy of some generic "pet" animal
  
  
• multiply by the number of the day of the month you were born on
  
  
• write the word "infinity" on your hand
  
  
• divide by any whole number between 5 and 7
  
  
• Turn the calculator upside down
  
  
• multiply by zero
  
  
• add your favorite number
  
  
• press the equals (=) button and turn the calculator right side up
  
  

The end result should be your favorite number. Whoah!

(this trick works on most all brand name calculators)