With Friends Like These....

I've been stewing over something for a few days weeks now and I wasn't sure if I should write about it or not. It's royally stupid, yet, has been on my mind, so I'll just go ahead and do it.

I feel incredibly insulted. It started when one of my friends made a remark on Facebook about cheap Chinese knock-off jewelry, to which I replied that she should stop being racist towards Chinese people. Funny, right? Eh, maybe not, but not serious.

I sensed that she might have been offended by my lame attempt at humor so I sent her a message on Facebook explaining myself. Seeming like a reasonable thing to do, right? Silence for several days. I sent a text doing the same thing. Still, silence. It's not a huge huge thing, but I don't like the feeling that I've insulted people when I didn't mean to, especially friends.

Flash forward a few days. Still nothing. Then, however, I see a status message written by her complaining of clingy friends. I figured that she couldn't possibly have meant me. Turns out that she did. I don't know, but it seems like Facebook status is a really awful way of dealing with a problem you have with somebody who might actually read it. Am I wrong?

Flash forward a few more days.

We had a chat and I assumed everything was worked out. The next day I found myself deleted from her friends list. She said not to take offense and that she was deleting a lot of people because some people just write too much stuff to read*. As it turns out, though, I was the only one of our 20 or so mutual friends that was deleted. Some of these people write and comment on her status messages just as often as I do.

I felt really singled out. Yeah, it's Facebook and yeah, it is definitely stupid, but I found it very, very insulting. Am I wrong?

* This is an extremely lame excuse. If you think somebody posts too much, you just don't have to read it. But hey, whatever, I let it slide. And now she gets busy commenting on status messages of other people... dang, good thing SHE isn't clingy, eh?

Life in the Slow Lane: Feb., 23rd edition

I've come to a strange conclusion lately. It seems weird to say, but perhaps getting cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me. Of course it was an unpleasant experience and shifted the direction of my life a bit, but you know what? Everything that has happened as a result of it have been beneficial. The extra time I was forced to spend in Farmington really help me solidify certain relationships that have become very important to me. It also forced me to take a long, hard look at myself and help reevaluate my priorities. Perhaps everybody should deal with some sort of hardship like that and compel them to take a look at themselves.

This Week in T.V

Lost

The only interesting that happened this week was the appearance of Ben Linus as a teacher in non-Lost world. This throws a slight wrench into the reset story and tells the viewer that everything related to the island got reset, not just the Oceanic flight passengers. Of course, this actually happened last week (remember Clarie's doctor?), I just wasn't paying enough attention to notice.

The Office

There was no new episode this week due to the Olympic Lames Games, but in the case of The Office, that is probably a good thing. The show is really starting to suffer from a dramatic dry well. First there was two companies then there was Jim and Michael as co-managers then Jim became the sole manager and then Michael became the sole manager again and it's just getting to be too much. The problem started when the key tension in the show, Jim and Pam's relationship, was finally settled. Where do you go from there? In the case of this show, you go through a confusing labyrinth of bizarre plot.

Burn Notice

Same as with The Office, this show has hit a bit of a creative wall. Burn Notice, however, has the opposite problem. Where The Office story is developing a bit too fast and haphazardly, Burn Notice is just crawling along. The individual episodes are still interesting, but the overall story arch isn't going anywhere. Primary, season long, characters are coming and going and when there gone, their existence becomes completely unimportant to the rest of the show. Remember The Agency of season 2? Of course you don't because it doesn't even matter anymore and this season would still make perfect sense even if it hadn't existed at all.

Undercover Boss

This last week had a rather interesting episode, the CEO of Hooters. Something very strange is starting to develop with this show and it has left me really starting to question just how the producers of the show are going about picking locations for the boss to go. It couldn't have been just a coincidence that the Hooters boss ended up at the store with the most grotesquely chauvinist boss I've ever seen, the single mom and the Marine. It's very clear to me now that the producers have ulterior motives for where they send the boss, take what could be a unique reality show and turn it into melodramatic tripe.

Ho-hum the boring life

Ho-hum such is life.

Wake up...

eat breakfast...

go to work/school...

maybe eat again

come home

eat again

watch t.v./move

maybe hang out with friends.

and that's really all there is

Rules of the self-check

This madness really must stop. Self-check is one of the greatest advances in retail history, but it only works if people don't abuse it. Which, of course, they do. If it were up to me, these would be the rules of the self-check:

1) Large quantities of produce: typically, they don't have bar codes, rather, numeric codes for each individual item. This precludes quick scanning as most people don't know the codes off the top of their heads and have to look them up. Professional checkers, on the other hand, have most of the codes memorized and can type them in quickly and efficiently. Please, for the love of God, if you have a lot of produce, and by this I mean 2 or 3 bags, don't hold up the lines at the self-check.

2) More than 20 items. People, if you have a cart full of groceries (or whatever you are buying), don't go to the self-check. You aren't a good enough scanner to get out of there fast and since you have a large cart, odds are you aren't in any particular hurry anyway. Most stores that have self-checks aren't set up for large quantities. Regular registers, however, have belts, checkers, baggers and sufficient room to get large quantities out quickly. Don't hold up a self-check line because you have a lot of stuff.

3) Older than 60. Let's face it, old people suck at the new technology. I've never seen a person older than this use the self-scan with any degree of accuracy or speed. What typically happens is that they do it wrong, think the problem is the computer, and have to ask for help from the designated self-check employee. That employee, of course, is typically very overworked has about 4 or 5 other people to help first. This further delays the line. To avoid the trouble, old people, just go to the regular checkout line.

4) Alcohol: If you are buying alcohol, be careful with the self-check. Alcohol purchase shouldn't completely exclude you from the self-check, and this more flexible than the 55+ rule, but basically has the same problem, it requires employee assistance to check i.d.'s. This rule is largely dependent on how busy the store is. If you have a small quantity, have your i.d. ready to go, and relatively quiet store, I may let this one slide.

The key thing is to just be aware. By violating these rules, not only do you waste your own time, you waste everybody else's as well. I happen to believe that the self-check was made for people with a small quantity of things who need to get in and out fast, please, don't mess up the order of a store by your ignorance.

Thoughts on Lost ep 1

The first episode was, as we expected, very dense. My thoughts on episode 1:

1) The parallel story structure was interesting. To me, it could be one of two things: first, it could be an alternate universe story where events are going on simultaneously, one world with the crash, the other as if it never happened. Two, and my prediction, is that we are actually looking at two different time periods. While the setting off of the bomb didn't manage to reboot like they figured it would, things did get reset eventually and they are simply telling the stories at the same time for matters of convenience. It's confusing, yes, but such is Lost. I think it would be cool if they continued this narrative structure through the whole season.

2) About that story structure: I happened to find the scenes on the plane much more interesting than those on the island. After all, we've had 5 whole seasons of island goofiness, right?

* Desmond showed up on the plane, sitting next to Jack, but then disappeared and nobody seemed to have noticed. What significance could this have? He obviously wasn't on the plane when it first crashed (they met him on the island) so he is either there as some sort of spiritual presence or as a Jack vision (both?).

* There was a very small scene in the plane bathroom where Jack appeared to have a small cut on his neck, like shaving size. It seems insignificant, but if it was, I doubt they would have put it in.

* Part of what I'm thinking happens with this story line is that the cast members run into each other in some form on the outside. In a sense, it is already happening:

a) Jack, the spinal surgeon, meets Locke, the guy with the screwed up spine, in baggage claim and gave him his card. Does Jack "fix" Locke by the end of the show?

b) Kate runs into: Sawyer on the elevator (does anybody else think that Sawyer kinda knew Kate was the fugitive the security guards were looking for?) and Claire in the cab as she was running away.

c) An interesting interaction: Hugo, the lucky lottery winner, runs into Sawyer, the con-man. Does Sawyer try to con Hugo?

d) There is also, of course, Jack saving Charlie, sitting next to Desmond for a moment and talking with Rose during the flight.

3) As for the island story, I really have no idea. I get that it is supposed to be some general good vs. evil thing, but they introduced a whole host of new characters and ideas here that might take a good while to flesh out. The most interesting line came from Juliet who said, as Miles interpreted after her "death", that "it worked", assuming the bomb. To me, this lends support to the whole idea that time DOES get reset, just not right away.

But the bottom line is this: it's Lost and who the hell knows?