Posted February 5th, 2008 by Mike Lawson
I’ve been in Arizona for about 2 months now. And in all honesty, I don’t hate it. There is something inside, however, that I’ve been holding in because I thought, “If I don’t say it out loud, it won’t be true.” I was wrong, so now I’ll say it:
I’m homesick.
Don’t misinterpret this. I have no intentions of packing up and moving back to California, but I am missing my friends, my routine, my job, my apartment, my neighbors, and my comfort. The idea of starting over was so exciting, but now that excitement has worn off I’m starting to realize how daunting it is to fill that slate that you were so eager to wipe clean.
Little things have thrown me into tiny bouts of depression. Yesterday I realized how different Arizona rain was from California rain, and I almost teared up. I guess I never realized how lucky Californians are that their rain water can just drain immediately to the ocean. Here in Arizona we have to deal with a lot of flooded streets and strange irrigation basins.
When I made the decision to move here I told myself that I wasn’t going to be one of those annoying people that pack up and move away and return in a few months. I’m here in Arizona for at least two years; I’ve made that promise to myself.
So now I’ll just kick it here in my new home and re-read the posts I wrote about the things I’ll miss when I move to Arizona:
If I had known then what I know now, there are a few additions I’d make to that list:
- This is the one where I’ll miss multi-multiculturalism.
- This is the one where I’ll miss cheap avocados.
- This is the one where I’ll miss dance clubs.
Posted February 1st, 2008 by Mike Lawson
I am in love with Quick Trip convenience stores/gas stations. Since moving to Arizona from California I have just recently discovered this place because we don’t have them in Cali.
If I had to explain QT to someone that had the misfortune of not knowing what it was, I would probably say: “QT is like a 7-11 where the employees actually care about customer service.”
It’s pretty common to walk into a gas station/convenience store that is dirty and smelly…but not a QT. And how often are you greeted with a “Hello!” when you walk into an AM/PM? Well it happens about 85% of the time at QT.
And I have strong feelings about cup quality and straw width. I will intentionally avoid places that don’t meet my standards. I need a nice, sturdy cup. And I must have a wide straw. Circle K gives you skinny straws…if I wanted to drink out of a coffee stirrer, I would. QT’s cups are super-sturdy (can even be re-used once or twice at home), and their straw width is perfect.
And here’s the kicker: you can choose between cubed and crushed ice. So wonderful.
Posted January 31st, 2008 by Mike Lawson
I have so much spam you’d think that I was running a restaurant in Hawaii or something. Take a look at this:
And I’m not even joking, I received the bulk of that in the last two days. Tuesday when I went to bed there was about 100 spam messages, and when I woke up on Wednesday there were 4,000!
An evil spammer has been somehow sending emails to people using an email domain where I had set up a catch-all forwarded email address. So ANYTHING@thisdomain.com would get forwarded to my Gmail account.
Once I figured out what was going on I promptly went into my hosting account and changed the catch-all options, and the spam has subsided. Thank god. I don’t even run the website where I had the catch-all email address, so it made sense to just delete myself, but this reminds me of a clever email trick that my pal Mikeh taught me…and the reason I set up the catch-all to begin with.
If you would like to track who is selling your email address and who is responsible for clogging your inbox with spam, just follow these simple steps:
* Setup a catch-all email account. Like I said before, that means that every time someone emails ANYTHING@yourdomain.com it will go to one address. This can be a separate email inbox, or you can just have it forwarded to your main email account.
* Now when you subscribe to services that require an email address, change the prefix of the email address to describe the service. For example, if I was ordering a pizza online from Pizzahut.com I am required to submit an email address. I would enter Pizzahut@whatsomewouldcalllies.com.
* Then when I receive spam messages I can see which address it was sent to. If I get a piece of spam sent to Pizzahut@whatsomewouldcalllies.com then I know that Pizza Hut has sold my email address.
Clever, right?
Posted January 29th, 2008 by Mike Lawson
At the NFL Experience on Sunday we stopped at the Home Depot booth and took a photo that was retrievable later on the net. There were a few booths that offered this service (some Companies like Pepsi even printed you a copy of the picture), and I think that it’s a really good giveaway. Think about how little this souvenir cost The Home Depot.
Posted January 28th, 2008 by Mike Lawson
I was reading on PerezHilton.com about the newest Paula Abdul song, and I decided to do a little illegal downloading and to check it out for myself. I’d agree with Perez’s take:
It’s actually really good.
Shocking, right?
Sure, the vocals are manipulated beyond belief, but so are Britney‘s!
The song sounds like something that should have been on Spears’ last album or Janet‘s new one.
It’s called Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow. It premiered on Seacrets‘s radio show, and it is bound to go to #1 for Abdul and Jackson on the club play charts.
They may even play this on the radio! It should be played. It’s better than a lot of the crap on radio right now.
When I was downloading some of Abdul’s stuff, I realized that there were quite a few really good Paula songs from the ’80s that I didn’t have in my collection. In fact, there were quite a few songs sung by 1980s Divas that weren’t in my collection.
Today I did some downloading and compiled what I would like to call “The Ultimate ’80s Diva Compilation.”
- Forever Your Girl – Paula Abdul
- Straight Up – Paula Abdul
- Opposites Attract – Paula Abdul
- Cold-hearted Snake - Paula Abdul
- Borderline – Madonna
- Like a Virgin – Madonna
- Material Girl – Madonna
- Dress You Up – Madonna
- Like a Prayer - Madonna
- Saving All My Love For You – Whitney Houston
- Greatest Love of All – Whitney Houston
- I Wanna Dance With Somebody – Whitney Houston
- What Have You Done For Me Lately? - Janet Jackson
- Escapade – Janet Jackson
- Miss You Much – Janet Jackson
- What’s Love Got To Do With It? - Tina Turner
- Rhythm is Gonna Get You – Gloria Estefan
- 1-2-3 – Gloria Estefan
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper- Time After Time – Cyndi Lauper
- True Colors – Cyndi Lauper
I was tempted to add a little Debbie Gibson to this list; I consider her stuff to be a solid 80s sound, but I’m not too sure she fits the diva roll.
What did I miss?
Posted January 27th, 2008 by Mike Lawson
I’m really high right now.
The normal blood-glucose level should be between 70 and 150 mg/dl. Since moving to Arizona (and relinquishing my health insurance) I’ve had trouble getting below 200 mg/dl. 2 weeks ago I tested over 300 three days in a row, so I decided to fork out the aspartame-sweetened dough and go visit a doctor.
Have you paid cash for a visit to the doctors? Shit. Have you paid cash for prescription drugs? Fuck.
I love this country, but our health care system leaves much to be desired.
Anyway the doctor doubled my metformin prescription, and added 20mg of glipizide to my daily regimen. I’m praying (even though I’m an atheist) that oral medications will do the trick. I’m not really looking forward to insulin injections.
Has anyone had any luck with Metformin or Glipizide?
Posted January 26th, 2008 by Mike Lawson
We all have a list like this one. Maybe some of you haven’t actually formalized it and written it down anywhere, but this list exists in your head. This is a list of things that I would like to do before I die (in no particular order).
Write your own list on your blog, and link to my list so you’ll show up in the trackbacks. Feel free to use the graphic above in your post too.
- Be in Time Square for New Years.
- Take 3 months off and travel around the United States in an R.V. just exploring every corner of this country.
- Throw a huge party and invite every single person I know. I’m talking each and every friend, every family member, co-workers…everyone.
- Escape to a tropical resort all alone. Bring very little–all I need is a few books, sunscreen, and a fresh pair of underwear.
- Get a book published.
- Become financially secure enough to give 25% of my income to charity. As Dolly Levi’s late husband Ephraim used to say, “Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around, encouraging young things to grow.”
- Watch the Rose Parade live in Pasadena.
- Run a marathon.
- Send my parents on the honeymoon they were never able to take.
- Get legally married.
- Detoxification. Go on a fast and get rid of all of the toxins inside of me. Is this safe for a diabetic??
- Learn to play the harmonica.
- Plant a vegetable garden and utilize it. Maybe even share it with my neighbors.
- Get thanked in an Oscar/Grammy/Golden Globe speech.
Posted January 25th, 2008 by Mike Lawson
I took my old oatmeal cookie recipe and made it diabetic friendly. I think that is how I need to start looking at baking. In the recent past I’ve been searching for sugar-free or diabetic recipes, and I’ve been pretty disappointed. Instead I just need to tweak the recipes that I know work.
Here’s how to make these incredibly easy and amazingly scrumptious sugar-free cookies:
1 cup of margarine (2 sticks of butter) softened
1 cup of brown-sugar substitute
1/2 cup of Splenda
2 eggs
1 teaspoon of vanilla
1 1/2 cup of all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of salt
3 cups of oatmeal
* Heat your oven to 350°.
* Beat together margarine and sugars until creamy
* Add eggs and vanilla; beat well
* Add combined flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt; mix well
* Stir in oats; mix well
* Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet
* Bake 10 minutes (until golden brown)
* Eat a few at a time…these aren’t carbohydrate free!
Posted January 25th, 2008 by Mike Lawson
I have a little moleskine notebook that I carry around with me, and I will occasionally jot down things that I hear that I’d like to remember, or ideas that I have for blog posts or stories that I would like to write.
The moleskin that I’m writing in right now is pretty old. I usually can fit four or five notes on a single page, so I’ve been using it for about five years; they are pretty sturdy little things. I was flipping through the notebook today and wanted to share some of the notes that I have jotted down but haven’t had the opportunity to use.
I hate day-after-Christmas clothes people.
I used to work with a guy named Scott who would come into work the day after Christmas vacation in a brand-new outfit. I get it, you got new clothes for Christmas. Annoying.
Mom thought she was on the twilight zone.
Mom went to jury duty on September 11th, 2001. When she arrived they had her park in some strange parking lot because all of the local federal/state buildings were under watch. She told me that after checking in to jury duty and getting told she could leave 10 minutes later, she walked into a very empty downtown Phoenix and seriously thought she was in an episode of the twilight zone.
Porn bibles.
The bible has some raunchy stories in it. Wouldn’t it be cool to create an illustrated, x-rated version of the bible?
“Furious the kid skipped out into the pewter-grey L.A. sky. He’d come west. Sunset-neon-orange haphazardly blinked. Rain drenched his dance of doom.”
???
ideologue
I was listening to NPR and heard someone use the word “ideologue” repeatedly. And I had to come home and look it up. How sad.
Literary laxative.
I was talking to a friend about writing, and about how I would get super-inspired by a particular author’s short stories. I said that she’s like a literary laxative, and I wanted to remember that term.
I wonder how long it will take for people to look back on our odd ceremonies (like marriage) the way that we do to old African rituals.
???
You’ve got it all wrong…death comes before life. One cannot live until he sees death.
Heterosexuals are lucky because they get to re-vist the womb.
Story starts with the 2nd Great Depression.
When Jesus wrote the constitution…
Janeane Garofalo said this one on her Air America radio show. She was mimicking some of the extreme right-wing rhetoric and she slipped in that funny line.
Every life is precious? What are you doing for the 7 million homeless people in this country?
I was listening to an anti-abortionist talk, and he said “every life is precious.” And I started thinking about every life, and how I’d doubt he truly believed what he had just said.
I hear they save a lot of money on refreshments since Leyes termed out.
I wrote that note to a guy that was sitting next to me at a city council meeting. Mark Leyes is a big bag of hot-air that got a job working for Governor Schwarzenegger after he termed out of the city council.
I’m happy that I have now blogged some of those notes that were just sitting in the moleskine for years. Now I can forget them.
Posted January 19th, 2008 by Mike Lawson
I think that I have one of the gayest iPods ever (not that there is anything wrong with that).
Here are some facts about my little mp3 player that will prove that there it is a little queer:
It holds 2 versions of Hello Dolly cast recordings; I have the Barbara Streisand film soundtrack and also the original Broadway cast recording.
I own every Madonna album every released in the U.S., and a few imports too.
I not only own and listen to, but I have practically memorized the entire recording of the legendary Judy Garland concert which was performed live at Carnige Hall in 1962.
The lyrics to the song “The Gay Messiah” are pretty damn gay. “He will then be reborn / From 1970′s porn / Wearing tubesocks with style / And such an innocent smile.”
I’ve got the original motion picture recording of The Wizard of Oz, the original London cast recording of The Wizard of Oz, the original motion picture recording of The Wiz, and the original Broadway cast recording of The Wiz.
There’s actually some more evidence than this (some techno-remixes, Diana Ross’ I’m Coming Out, The play count on Beyonce’s Irreplaceable, etc), but I think that the above examples prove the sexuality of my iPod just fine.
I love my iPod, regardless of the choices he has made. I love it so much I was thinking of joining PFLAG.
