4.17.02

It’s 9:30, Wednesday morning and, well, I just don’t feel like doing a damn thing today at work. And since I’ll be going to see an epic, three-hour long film starring short little guys with hairy feet tonight, I figure I’ll get my Monkey entry out of the way now.

It’s that time again – time to start looking for a new job. Yes, I know, I’ve been saying I was going to start looking for a new job for a while now, but frankly, I’ve been holding off. Not because I like my current job, but only because I’m in sort of a tough situation as far as my living arrangements.

I rent with a buddy of mine and if I were to get lucky enough to find a job somewhere, I’d have to move. (or rather, I’d want to move. I’m not down with long commutes) So rather than paying double rent on apartments, I’m going to wait until my current roommate gets his house built and I live there for a while with him until I start looking seriously again for a new job. No lease to break, no sticking someone with all the rent, no screwing myself by having to pay rent on a place I’m not living in. It’s his house payment and he’s known all along that I wouldn’t be living with him forever, so he has to make the payments on his own someday. And since it usually takes a while for someone to get a job once they start looking, I figure I’ll have a month or more to help him out by paying some rent until something comes up.

So, yeah, that’s why I’m just now starting to get serious about my job hunt. Which, essentially, means working on my resume, but, well, when you have some computer/internet skills, you can’t just use Microsoft Word to type up your resume anymore. That’s only doing it half-assed. So for now, I’m working on the big multimedia presentation that is my resume. Hopefully it’ll knock someone’s socks off. Here’s my old one if you’re interested. Make sure your speakers are turned up for the full effect. I wish I hadn’t lost the source file for this one or I’d probably just redo it, but, alas, I deleted it at some point. Besides…this next one’s going to be even better…hopefully.

Had an interesting time last weekend. As you might recall, my buddy got us tickets to a TV pilot screening for Friday night. We went in expecting nothing but a way to kill a few hours and left feeling like we’d have rather spent those few hours getting a bikini wax.

The first show up was “Soul Mates”. Can you tell already that three, twentysomething guys are going to love this one? It was a story of love that crossed the boundaries of time. In other words, it was a really lame attempt at making a show based on past lives. This stupid woman, whose name I can’t remember, so we’ll just call her Alice, is a therapist. Her patient, whose name I can’t remember, so we’ll just call him Bill, has come to her for some reason which I can’t remember. Anyway, Alice takes one look at him and knows him from somewhere. She then proceeds to think about him for the next 24-hours and then he shows back up in her office the next day because “I just had to see you.” Long story short, they go out to lunch and next thing you know, they’re kissing in the park and he bangs her later that night. Of course, Bill has a mysterious past (he, for some reason, admits to killing someone before they sleep together, yet she still goes to bed with him) and he refuses to tell Alice anything about him. So what does she do? She follows him after he leaves the next morning (without even the customary “I’ll call you”) and she finds herself at an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town. Long story short, Bill is a computer hacker or some stupid shit and he follows her to Hawaii (which not one of the three of us can remember her mentioning she was going to go to Hawaii beforehand), where she meets more people she feels like she knows but can’t quite place. Yeah, some stupid subplot with Pearl Harbor and World War II and she formally being a General’s daughter who falls in love with a spy – God, it was horrible.

Soul Mates was terrible. The acting was wooden; the direction was non-existent; the writing was so lame and clichéd; the music score was like hitting button #7 on your Casio keyboard and totally inappropriate for the scenes (“chase” music during a therapy session?); and finally, the editing. The editor had apparently never heard of fadeouts, but only jump cuts (and poor jump cuts at that). Needless to say, no one really seemed to like this show. I think we hated it more than anyone else, though.

The second pilot, or “film” as the cheesy, not-funny host kept calling them, was called “City” starring Valerie Harper of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda fame. I don’t have anything against Val, in fact, I pretty much grew up watching the two aforementioned shows. In her little pilot, which apparently was filmed about twelve years ago, but there’s been “renewed interest” in her recently (funny, I hadn’t heard anything about that), she’s actually still quite good. Now the show, on the other hand, that’s another story entirely.

Val plays a city administrator of some big city, though, as I recall, we don’t ever know what city it is, not that it really matters. She has a college-aged daughter who lives with her while going to school, but since she’s a young woman, Val is trying to be “friends” with her daughter and be “cool” with her. Yeah, I hate that, too. I’d love to go into the plot, but, well, there wasn’t really much of one, it being a sitcom and all. There are the normal assortment of generic, wacky characters: a guy who keeps secret documents on everyone like a little J. Edgar Hoover; the wise-cracking secretary (gee, never seen that character before); the assistant city administrator who seems to do a better job than Val, his boss; the loud-mouthed, clueless assistant mayor, who, I’m sure, would get his comeuppance in every episode as he did in this one; and the only even remotely memorable character was a too stupid security guard (paging Cosmo Kramer. Cosmo Kramer, please).

It wasn’t a very good show and Valerie in this role was utterly unconvincing. It was really bad overall. Of course everyone in the entire place was laughing their asses off except the three of us. Not to say that there were NO funny lines, but this show was not nearly as good as the mindless dolts surrounding us thought it was. It was no worse than anything else that’s on TV, but then that’s not saying a whole hell of a lot.

The worst part of the evening was yet to come, however: page upon page of marketing questions. “Have you purchased barbeque sauce in the last year?” “If so, what brands?” “Have you been constipated at least once in the last year?” “If so, did you use any type of over-the-counter medication or laxative to relieve this condition” “If so, what brands did you use?” “Within the last year, have you felt depressed for more than one-week at a time?” “If so, did you use any kind of prescription medication to relieve this depression?” “If so, what medication did you use?” “Within the last year, have you been so depressed that you have contemplated suicide?” I wish I were joking about these questions, but every one of them was on this questionnaire. “Do you smoke tobacco products?” “If so, have you ever considered quitting?” “If so, would you use any type of medication to help you quit?” “If so, what medication would you choose?” They just went on and on like this until we suddenly realized that the sponsors of this little screening must be Phillip Morris and their conglomerate of Miller Brewing Company, Kraft Foods, Marlboro cigarettes, and, apparently, some branch that makes kitty litter, adhesive bandages, laxatives, and anti-depression drugs.

It was this aspect of the evening that really pissed us off. We were so bored that we just started writing down crap for some of our answers. I said one of the commercials shown for Fixodent needed more monkeys. JK was killing us, though. He responded to numerous questions like “What kind of barbeque sauce have you purchased within the last year?” with phrases like: Alan Thicke, Bob Saget, Plaster cake, monkeys, and potato.

I mean, we knew going in that it was all just a big market research thing, but this was absolutely horribly put together. All we had were booklets with boxes to check – they had to read the questions for us. So if you didn’t own a cat and thus hadn’t purchased kitty litter within the last year, you ended up just sitting there waiting until the nine questions about what kitty litter you hadn’t purchased and why, were over, getting more pissed off about wasting your time.

In conclusion, if you ever get the opportunity to view TV pilots for market research purposes…skip it. Now if you get to see a movie for market research purposes – that’s another story entirely.

After our evening of market research torture, we ran to a really cool local bar, Growler’s. They have 150 beers from around the world there and we sampled a few of them. I started in the Far East with a Japanese beer, followed by a Chinese beer and then tried one from the Czech Republic that I thought I’d had before, but found out when it arrived that I hadn’t (and it sucked). Good time was had by all and I’m sure we’ll be visiting the establishment again soon.

Saturday, I went with JK to an STLMustangs.com gathering out at one of the member’s houses. The place was just west of BUFU and, of course, MapQuest’s directions sucked. But, we found it, had some good food (steaks, hot dogs, brats, burgers, the like), plenty of beer (finished off one keg and had to get a pony one as well) and played Washers.

Never heard of Washers? Me neither until I moved down here to Redneckville. It’s like horseshoes, but not. The playing field is much like horseshoes – two wooden boxes with sand in the bottom and a center target as well, except this is a piece of PVC pipe rather than a pole. You take three ordinary washers that you’d put under a bolt and take turns throwing them from one side to the other to try to hit the targets. 3 points if you make it in the PVC pipe, 1 point if you land it inside the box. It’s a long, boring, stupid game, but it is pretty fun to play (just as most games are). JK was drunk off his ass, so he sucked; it was the first time I’d ever played, so I sucked; but our two MO natives weren’t all that awesome either, so I’m kind of wondering if anyone is really good at this game. Anyway, it was quite an odd experience and one I hope to re-enact soon, if for nothing else but to say I know how to play.

As the night wore on, the bonfire got lit and we had a good time sitting around it, talking, joking and generally enjoying the evening. Around 9:30, JK decided he’d had enough and I drove his Mustang home. We hung out until about 11:00, when JK wanted some food and I needed to get gas anyway, so we ran to Steak N’ Shake and 7-11. We talked about all kinds of things; though I’m not sure JK remembers any of it.

This weekend I’m heading home to C-U. Figured I haven’t seen the fam in a while, so there’s no time like the present. I am missing out on seeing Parliament Funkadelic in concert, but, this will be the third time I’ve missed them and I’m sure my chance to miss them once more will come up again sometime in the future.

And with that, I bid you farewell, until next week when I bore you once again with the stupid little details of my generally boring life.

Space Monkey X