I pitty you if you’re at the office right now.  Or if you’re in the classroom.  Or if you are required to be anywhere right now.

It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving; today is a day that we should be relaxing.  This is a holiday just as much as yesterday was.  But there is a trend in this country where employers and schools are requiring their minions to come in for duty today. Here’s an AP story, and here’s a story from Florida about this disturbing trend.

Life, liberty, property, and the Friday after Thanksgiving off.

I had breakfast this morning with an old co-worker–that I’m going to miss the hell out of when I move, and then I built a website for another friend’s church (http://www.newvisionoc.com).  Now I plan on settling in with some junk-food lunch while I watch Project Runway and Grey’s Anatomy.  Beats the hell out of working.

In the coming days I’m going to post, in no particular order, things that I will miss when I leave Southern California.

I’ve lived in this same apartment for 6 years. And a routine is one of those bittersweet things that has it’s pluses and negatives.

I’m going to miss the OCTA Bus screeching by my window between 7 and 7:15 each morning. I’m going to miss being able to wake up at 3:30 a.m. and walk to the bathroom, go to the kitchen and get a glass of water, put the cup in the sink, and walk back to bed in complete darkness. I’m going to miss my elderly neighbor’s comments that remind me that racism still exists in this world.

I know the streets around my house so intimately that I can almost say that I could navigate them in the dark like I do my apartment.

In Phoenix, I’m certain a new routine will emerge. It’s just tough to give this one up.

Last year I dated this Republican guy that works in the fashion industry. It was short-lived, and just kind of faded away.

I don’t know what bothered me more about him: the fact that he was a gay republican, or the fact that he thought that fur was “elegant.”

He was an attractive guy, and we had fun dates (one that included eating oysters and watching Flamenco dancing), but every time we started talking I couldn’t help but question his political ideology.

“My mom’s birthday was yesterday,” he would innocuously bring up in conversation.

“Did you know that in 1963 when the Equal Pay Act became law your mom earned 59 cents on average for every dollar earned by men doing the same work. And in 2005, thanks to Democrats, the average pay for women has increased to 77 cents to every dollar earned by their male counterparts?”

I know…totally awkward, right? It was just impossible for me to have any sort of normal conversation with this guy.

I remember once we were talking about our take-home income and he mentioned that Uncle Sam takes too much out of his check, and I responded with something like “Oh yeah, maybe we should just abolish social security and unemployment insurance. What could possibly go wrong when the weakest of our society are starving and poor? And while we’re at it why don’t we just eliminate labor laws. And let’s start issuing guns with every driver license.”

He just looked at me, not knowing how to respond.

Needless to say, we only went out about 4 or 5 times. And I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when he emailed to ask how I was doing. We’ve been chatting and I told him about my upcoming move to Phoenix. He said that he’d like to buy me coffee before I left, so tonight we hung out in Laguna Beach and had some coffee and sat on the beach talking for a couple of hours.

This date confirmed a couple of things for me:

1. I will never date a Republican again.
2. The beach isn’t that great.
3. I can be in the most foul mood, but a soy latte will make me feel happy again.
4. I won’t even date a fiscally conservative that is registered DTS.
5. I don’t have time to say goodbye and have coffee with all of the random guys that I’ve dated or the people that I’ve had nugatory relationships with over the past 10 years. I should have one big get-together.

In the coming days I’m going to post, in no particular order, things that I will miss when I leave Southern California.

Like any gay man that lives in Orange County, I worked at Disneyland for a couple of years.  I was lucky enough to have a fun job there where I had a lot of opportunities to interact with tourists from many different states and countries.

And my office now is only a few blocks away from the Disney Resort area.  I usually eat at least one or two lunches at the Del Taco or Taco Bell that is surrounded by hotels that Disney tourists occupy.

I enjoy watching the out-of-towners come in and order at a restaurant that they have never been in.  Watching the confused German family order off the not-so-authentic Mexican menu tickles me.

Just today a group of women came into the hole-in-the-wall that I was eating lunch at and asked the man behind the counter if he knew how to get to Triangle Square (the mall with an oxymoron in it’s name).  He told them it was easy…just go straight down Harbor.

So then I heard the women talking about walking there.  Ha!  If only they knew it was about  10 miles away.

I am kind of embarrassed to admit this, but on Saturday I was early to a conference I was attending for work so I stopped at The Block for a bite to eat. I ended up stepping into The Virgin Mega Store and browsing for thirty minutes.

Eventually I decided to purchase the new Britney album, Blackout. When I walked up to the counter I kind of felt like I should feel ashamed. I felt like a creepy guy purchasing a porn magazine at a Barnes & Noble. “Just use the internet,” I felt like the clerk was thinking.

“I’m kind of embarrassed,” I told the clerk that would have been pretty if it wasn’t for the choppy emo hair and the slightly infected lip-ring. “Don’t judge me.”

She just smiled.

I think that Perez Hilton had a point with his Boycott Britney campaign:

As she proved with her disrespectful and half-assed performance at the VMAs, Britney does not care about her fans. Yet her hardcore fans are buying multiple copies of her single and gifting it to their friends.

Like a Los Angeles court said, Britney is a frequent and habitual user of drugs and buying her song is just feeding her addictions. Her fans are not “supporting” her now in their time of need. They are being enablers. And that’s not what Britney needs.

Britney needs tough love!

Britney needs a boycott!

I held out for awhile. But I caved in this weekend. How much is a bad Britney worth? Apparently I’ll pay $14.99.

I found a post over at The Mangina Monologues about a fetish for UPS men.  I know that it’s a pretty common thing for men and women to gawk over the men in brown, but I’ve got my own uniform fetish, and it’s not a police officer or firefighter or any other civil servant.

I’ve got it bad for Starbucks Baristas.

Bad.

I’ve got it.

So bad.

I don’t know where my love for the barista comes from.  One could guess that it might be connected to my caffeine addiction, and the barista is the one that delivers my drug to me and I, therefore, have an urgent need to french kiss the guy that delivers the goods.

I’ve also found myself falling for college boys, and Starbucks has a tendency to employee boys around 19 and 20 to brew the espresso.

And I’m not saying that I am immediately attracted to 100% of Starbucks baristas.  There are definitely a few out there that don’t make the cut.  What I am saying is that if you are wearing a black or white shirt and a green apron over it, you have a head-start in the race to my heart (black nerdy glasses give you a double-advantage).

When I was younger my sister, who is 4 years older than I am, had a class project where they made a time capsule and had it buried somewhere on our school campus.  I remember thinking that it was an incredibly cool idea and I made a capsule of my own that I buried somewhere in our apartment complex.

I was about 8 at the time, and if I remember correctly I ended up putting some stupid little trinkets and a mixed tape into the capsule.  My 8-year-old brain didn’t really get that  people of the future would probably have access to the music of yesteryear.

So what would I put into a time capsule today that I wouldn’t open for another 50 years?

• A naked picture of my body - Hear me out on this one.  This isn’t some gross pornographic thought.   I just know that right now I can think of 100 things that I’d like to change about my body, but in 50 years (I’ll be 76) I’ll probably dream about the days when I looked this good.
• A naked picture of my ex-boyfriend’s body - This one is a gross pornographic thought. I have on my hard-drive about 30 pictures of my ex-boyfriend naked.  When he moved to Los Angeles and I stayed in Orange County we only saw each other every few weeks, so he would email naughty photos to me.  When I’m almost 80 I’m sure I’d like to fondly look back at the days when I could get such a fine piece of…
• A newspaper - Newspapers are so 2005.  Readership has been dying off faster than John McCain for President supporters.  I am pretty sure that in the next few years we are going to see a drastic decrease in the number of newspapers printed, and by 2057 there will be few, if any, newspapers still in the printing business.
• Some of my political keepsakes - I’ve got some pins and campaign literature from political campaigns (local and national) that I think will be worth a few bucks in 50 years.  I’ve got a Schwarzenegger for Governor bumper sticker that I’d imagine could earn me a few bucks once I open the capsule.
• My day-planner from 2006 - I keep all of my old calendar books (something I will probably be tossing out when I finally pack up my things and move to Arizona).  Some of the day’s events are cryptic, and in 50 years I think that even more of them will have lost their meanings.  What does “Dinner with J. don’t forget the essays” mean?  Will I remember what “Drinking Liberally” is, or will I think that I just scheduled in an evening of excessive drinking?

What would you put in your time-capsule?

In the coming days I’m going to post, in no particular order, things that I will miss when I leave Southern California.

This one is kind of a no-brainer. I’m moving from Orange County, California to land-locked Phoenix, Arizona. Of course I’m going to miss the beach. I’ve lived in Orange County all my life–26 years–and the beach has always been one of those treasures that as a local I always forgot how great it was to have.

In the past year I’ve probably visited the beach once or twice. But once I no longer have the option I’m pretty sure I’m going to miss it.

I definitely know that I’m going to miss my “secret spot” in Laguna Beach. It’s not really secret, but it’s relatively unknown. I would bring dates to this secluded little cove and we would just sit and look out on the ocean. It was a nice place to get to know a date, and (without fail) it would get me laid.

This is the same cove that, when I was in college, I would ditch class and go sleep on the beach wrapped in a blanket that I kept in my trunk.

It’s also the place where I convinced my friend Amy to spend an entire Friday one June. “Let’s just leave our cells in the car, and sunbathe and picnic all day,” I said. I told her that this beach is really secluded and I’ve never seen more than one person there in a day. When we got there we saw 3 bus loads of elementary school children unpacking and marching through the tidepools there on that “secluded” beach.

I guess I will just have to find the “secluded” getaways that can entertain me for a day, or get me laid in Phoenix.

Craig from Puntabulous just posted about the book “Working For The Man” which is a good read that pokes fun at the 9-5 world that too many of us are living in.

The book is written for people that are frustrated with the soul-killing monotony of office life, and gives original ideas to help beat the office blues. Some of which include:

- Survive long, boring meetings with breath-holding contests
- Plot out a “sick day” calendar to maximize time off
- Write your novel on company time
- Create the most pro-worker cubicle to instill a false sense of your total commitment
- Anonymously send your boss a Happy Secretary’s Day bouquet

And Craig gives us an idea of his own:

I’d also like to recommend another one that I came up with myself:

7. Change your company’s logo for your own devious purposes:

I did this over a year ago. And now I have the book to prove that it was probably one of the healthiest work activities I performed.

I really liked the logo idea and decided to spend a few minutes to do the same for my current job:

What do you think?

Read all of Craig’s post here.

In the coming days I’m going to post, in no particular order, things that I will miss when I leave Southern California.

The annual Strawberry Festival in Garden Grove isn’t the best carnival in the area, but I’ve been a Garden Grove resident for the past 6 years and this festival is one of the few things that Garden Grove can be really proud of.

People come from all over to attend the festival, and it comes with many traditions that I will miss when I move away.