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PG County:  Prince George's?  Try Predominantly Ghetto
 

4/07/03: Little did I know what I was getting into when I moved into this quaint Washington, DC suburb.  If you don�t live around here, you might not understand the extent of my plight.  Montgomery County is right north of DC, and PG to the east.  I don�t know whether it has to do with the jet-stream or what�but as you get further from Montgomery County and closer to PG, the crime rate goes up and the median incomes down--way down.  For those of you wise to the science of graphs, I�ve constructed one to illustrate my point more vividly.

Seriously, there are more criminals in this place than there are Asians with SARS.  What�s more, my apartment is located some 0.25 miles from a highway that spans the entire east coast.  This way I have no trouble recognizing any eighteen-wheeler, tractor-trailer or military convoy that comes barrelling through during the middle of the night.  Not to mention the comfort that you get from having a police station/firehouse/ambulance expo right down the block, that is, if the sound of sirens screeching past your window bring you any sort of comfort.

As you can see, the quality of life clearly diminishes and approaches zero as one gets nearer to PG county.  Not only is life substantially worse here, but even things you�d expect to function normally regardless of location fail to do so.  The most egregious offenders?  A Giant grocery store across the street from my apartment complex.  Bad enough they don�t carry the imported kind of pickles I like, once you step into that store you�re in it for the long haul.  There�s about 20 cashier stations you�ll never see occupied.  Know why?  It�s three damned teenagers and a wheelchair guy running the store.  They put the Giant franchise to shame.  Except for this one guy, man does he know his shit.  I�m convinced this guy knows where the barcode is on every piece of merchandise in that store.  Not only that, but today when my purchase came out to be $40.01, I could only hand him three twenties�being the high roller that I am�and what did he do?  He says, �Don�t worry about it.�  What a great guy.  So, after forty-five minutes of waiting in a line that stretches out through the back of the store, I�m finally out.  A more humbly-dressed gentleman approaches me: �HELP THE HOMELESS?� implying that he himself, is the homeless and in need of my help.  YOU DROVE HERE!  You have a home, idiot.  So I ask the fellow if he has change for a hundred, and he looks at me puzzled, probably because he�d run into the same problem himself.  No, I didn�t really ask him to give me change for a hundred�he probably would have robbed me.  No joke.  I did offer him a handful of pennies though, upon which he inquired, �Got any silver in there?�  Are you kidding me?  The only silver I have for you is sitting in my Smith and Wesson, ingrate.  I�m never helping a homeless guy again. 
Driving back to the apartment, I notice how every spot has been conveniently filled�by another car�not belonging to me.  A-ha!  Finally, an empty spot.  Wait, what�s that?  I forgot, Twin Lakes apartment complex is home to half the duck population in the East Coast, whose only purpose in life is to crap all over the sidewalk and work in conjunction with the Asians in the apartment upstairs to keep me awake all night.  Apparently some wise-guy has commandeered these creatures to reserve his open spot for when he decides to return.  Great.  I guess I�ll just walk from the parking spot saved for me, accessibly situated on the other side of the complex.  Oh well, only a few horizon-crossings until I�m home.  Hope I don�t get shot.

Congratulations to Me

04/01/03 Well, I got my report card today:

Not really. But it sure feels like it. See, I came to college motivated to learn physics by my enthusiastic physics teacher from high school and the fact that I actually did well in physics. Scratch that, physics in college is impossible, and as I thought: failure would be inevitable. This is what happens when naive high school kids get to college, thinking they know something--a big fucking let-down. Not to mention in high school the teachers actually showed up for class. My current professor, whose name I think is Sylvester Gates, is some kind of veritable physics genius--periodically emerging from whatever foreign country he's vacationing in to concoct these unrealistically difficult problems for the exams that are intended to annihilate any self-worth I may still feel. Oh well, there were at least ten people out of thirty who did worse than I did, which is pretty comforting.

But no worries, for Professor Gates has prepared his brilliant teaching staff who are always helpful in solving any problem we might encounter:

They're actually just his graduate students, and they couldn't care less how we do on our exams. So I'm shopping for a new major--something more suited to my mental capabilities. Applied library science maybe? I'd better put my application in at Home Depot tomorrow.
On a more annoying note, the unbelievably loud Asians living in the apartment above us have decided to resume operation of their 24 hour bowling alley and/or fitness club. It's two Asian couples, who aren't even married, living together--which I think is (or at least should be) illegal. Since there's four of them, I'm guaranteed to be disturbed from my sleep at all hours of the day. For Easter I'm asking God for some debilitating disease to cripple them, or at least one of them. Until then I'll continue blasting old Aqua hits. That'll show em.

Bumper Cars with Jamaicans

3/30/03 I was involved in a car accident yesterday. If my passenger side door hadn�t been obliterated, I almost might have enjoyed it. Unfortunately, the idiot was going fast enough when she slammed into me that the door can no longer function effectively as a door. Being the gentle soul that I am, the first thing I did was evacuate my car and make sure everyone was still alive, considering we did collide at speeds in excess of 10 miles per hour.
�Are you alright?� I asked.
�I do not knowe. I am confuse.�
Confused? Really? Maybe a basic understanding of the english language would help to clear things up, you piece of filth. That�s what I wanted to say. Afterall, she couldn�t even write out her insurance information for me. Instead she had to use a cell-phone to call her husband, while I stood by simultaneously shocked and enraged that she couldn�t write four lines of english onto a piece of paper but knew how to operate a cell phone. Well, anyways, it was her fault and I�ve taken legal action against the woman (by killing her). But, no, seriously, I called my insurance company �Geico,� to tell them about my situation and to ask when I could pick up the money to pay for the damage. Apparently it doesn�t work like that. See, when you get in a car accident, it�s the other person�s insurance who is supposed to pay for the damage to YOUR car. This is to guarantee that no insurance company ever has to pay anybody any amount of money for anything. What a great concept. Imagine if health insurance worked like this, I could track down the person who got me sick and have their insurance company pay for my medicine. What a sweet deal, they�d probably tell me I�m at fault though.
So anyways, while on the phone with Gayco, I explained the situation, which was this: I was on a major highway making a U-turn and the moron was turning right out of a side street, right into my passenger door, that is. Apparently we�re both liable. This is MY insurance company telling ME that I�m at fault. What the hell is her�s going to say? And why am I liable again? Because I was making a left-turn, and she was turning off a side street. What I interpret this to mean is that as long as you�re driving straight on a main road, you can drive drunk or detonate a car bomb as you collide with another driver it�ll be their fault provided they�re either turning left or out of a side-street.

Hello Dentist

3/27/03 So, in the spirit of making this possibly one of the best spring breaks ever, I decided a visit to the dentist would be in order. Once there I was greeted by the noxious dentist office stench which I�m pretty convinced is what hell would smell like. A nice enough Russian woman leads me back into the dentist�s main operating place and begins to fiddle around in my mouth ( don�t get any ideas, perverts.)
�Does that hurt?� she asks, piercing my gums with various metallic instruments of the devil. Well, I don�t know, does it? If the pool of blood accumulating in my mouth is any indication�
�You have two cavity,� �great. Better still, I find out they�re on my wisdom teeth. The number two and the eighteen. I begin counting. Before I can discover which of my teeth are about to be absolutely annihilated, the doctor walks in�already having received a briefing on the situation at hand. �You probably use those teeth often.� Damn right I use them often, those are my prime donut biting teeth. So he tells me he�ll need to �fill� (which is dentist speak for induce insufferable pain) the spots where Satan had planted those wicked deficiencies of the mouth. Boy am I glad I started drinking early this morning.

Little did I know my teeth actually looked like this. Guess I should try brushing.

Unbeknownst to me, this process of filling would take the better part of two hours, during which the dentist released several deep, contemplative sighs, meanwhile muttering, �God, this is quite deep.� Perfect, now even God knows I have cavities. I didn�t see why the good doctor was getting indignant�I mean, if I got paid thousands of dollars to listen to Hotel California and get my hands drooled all over�well okay, I see why.
After 45 blood-curdling minutes, he began to work on the second cavity. �Boy, this is quite a sizeable one as well.� Really, doc? Thanks, I�ve put a lot of work into this. As that second miserable hour draws to a close, and my dental health is restored to perfect condition, he once again remarks�as if I hadn�t heard him the first twenty times, �Those were pretty deep.� All I could do now was perplexedly comment, �I don�t know what happened.� �It�s been two years since your last check-up, that�s what happened,� a half-smile appearing on his face. Well, maybe if you hadn�t stopped sending those thoughtful postcards reminding me to get a check-up, I might have remembered. Oh well, I'm asking for dentures next time. Otherwise, from now on I'll be having all my serious dental procedures done overseas.

Only Dentists in Hungary can afford sophisticated dental equipment like this

Finally, an Update

3/26/03 Well, it's been a while since I've posted an update here. I'm actually thinking of scrapping the title "Day-to-Day observations." With my overly hectic schedule of eating ice cream and checking away messages, I so rarely get an opportunity to update. Updates from now on will probably be bi-weekly, yearly, but most likely BI-yearly (ha!); this will ensure that the BI-sexual visitors (which I'm assuming most of you are) stay satisfied. As far as an update is concerned, this is about it: an update talking about future updates (that most likely won't ever happen). To make it up to all (three) of you, I've posted a 6 page, single-spaced paper you can locate here. It's about chronodeism, a word I just invented while writing this update. It'll revolutionize your outlook on life, and the universe in general.

Actually, it's the most long-winded, convoluded paper I've ever written, and I wrote it in 11th grade so be ready for much verbose SAT vocabulary craziness. I haven't actually re-read it myself, so I'm sure there are plenty of errors. Two people in the world have ever read it, so if that makes you interested to read it, well then, you're weird. Honestly, if you do read it you've accomplished something, though I don't know what it is. As a matter of fact, if you're female and you've read it, you've earned yourself a love-making session--with me--regardless of how fat/ugly/a man you might be, just for reading it.

On a lighter (or heavier, depending on your rate of acceleration--THANK YOU EINSTEIN! HA!) note, in order to continue my life of unaccomplishedness and away message voyeurism, I have to "write" a "science fiction" story or "novella" (it's for a scholarship). I really don't have many good ideas for it yet, but here are some of my better, more original ones:
1) Nuclear war breaks out in Norway and Greenland. Vikings return from the dead somehow and engage the modern day soldiers in battle. Black holes and the Loch Ness monster both play a key role in the final outcome. No title as of yet.
2) Monsters arrive on the Earth (why or from where is not important). Calamity ensues. Titled "The Monster Cycle"
3) Alien invaders come to the Earth and bring with them superior meteorological equipment. The Weather Channel is devestated. Jobs are lost and the stock market is reeling. This is probably one of my better ideas yet.
4) A studly physics major maintains a website nobody visits, eventually builds a superhuman, soul-devouring robot capable of conquering the world, or at least some small parts of it. Titled "My Life in Five Years, tops"

E-mail me and tell me which ones you reacted to most favorably, and which least favorably. Don't bother sending me ideas of your own, they all probably suck, and wouldn't be able to produce the intricate plot-lines and complex themes that would those I've written about above.

You're still interested?  Well, here are some more entries...