Silence of the Blogs
I can explain.
Don't be too mad at me. I'm sorry.
Okay, so it's been close to a month since I've blogged. But like I said before, I can explain.
So, here it goes.
I just didn't feel like it. So bite me.
I've decided to blog again because I've been getting a lot of complaints about not having done so. Apparently it was the highlight of some people's days (electronically speaking). That is sad and pathetic, but, duty calls, and I shall answer, I suppose. Plus, Pat beat me up and told me to, as pictured below.
But really, a lot has happened in the past month. Right around the time I ended my first rush of blogging, when I first got my car, I began interning as a production assistant for the office of a feature called Senior Skip Day. I got this through my friend Sara (the dinner party one). What went from being one day of no pay in exchange for promised work on the producer's next project became six days of work with no pay and work on the producer's next project. The producer, or line producer of this particular movie, is Marlon Parry. He is from Detroit and wears the same thing every day: black shoes, black socks, black pants, black t-shirt, black button down, black hair slicked back into a pony tailk, black sunglasses. He drinks lots of cappuccino, consumes lots of sugary foods, and uses the word "seriously" a lot. Perhaps most interestingly, he is the big man in black sitting on the bench next to Skee-lo in his "I Wish" video. Marlon also wrote and directed that video. On a side note, Marlon is my hero.
"Six days without pay?!?!" you may stand up and shout at your computer. "Hero or not, Paul, that is unfair labor!" Well, let me just tell you that I ate three meals a day for those six days, three good meals from excellent places, and I didn't pay a cent. Of course, I was the one going to all those places to pick up the food, but what are you gonna do.
Oh, the other interesting thing about that is that Pat, after three days at his job at Enterprise Rent-a-Car, decided it wasn't for him. So he quit. The next day, I called Sara and asked if she could use another guy in the office. She said sure. So Pat and I worked two days together. Don't worry, he didn't get paid either. Also, I got a pair of Larry Miller's shoes from the set of the movie. How cool is that? I wear that guys shoes. They're so comfortable.
So after those six days of running errands, filing stuff, and whatnot, I've just been waiting for a job basically to come along. Marlon did call me to help him with some preliminary stuff for a commercial. He is bidding to work on a commercial for some Europeans for some Ben-gay type substance that cures pain in the joints. The commercial was to take place at an aquarium, so Marlon had to find an aquarium in the area and send pictures to the Europeans to see if they would go with him to shoot. He doesn't have a digital camera, and I had mentioned that I had one. So who does he call to go to the aquarium in Long Beach? You guessed it. We took over 200 pictures there. It was so fucking hard to capture a shark without it being blurry. Between the angle of the glass, the flash, and the sharks moving so fast, it was like trying to capture Big Foot on film. Here are some cool ones I got though:
That last one looks like God decided Hell was a bad idea, crumpled it up, and tossed it through Earth's atmosphere into a wastebasket of transcendence... Or a blue bin, if God recycles, I dunno. Anyway, it's just a jellyfish.
So if I haven't been getting paid, what have I been doing? I did work on Election Day. And let me tell you, that was a fucking nightmare. Election Day was on a Tuesday. I found out that I was going to work the election on the Friday before, when Pat had me go to Apple One, a temp agency, and fill out a form so that we could both work that Tuesday. I guess it was doomed from the beginning because I got lost going there, then spent an unnecessary amount of time actually at the agency making stupid mistakes on my application, then found out that the parking garage I had parked in for less than an hour and a half cost twelve dollars, then found out I only had two dollars in my wallet, had to repark my car to go to the ATM inside, but my keys got locked in the ignition somehow (does anybody know why that happens?) and I almost started crying and was VERY close to asking a stranger to sit in my car and try to get my keys out when they actually came out. Finally, I was able to leave that fucking place and be on my merry way. But when Pat and I went to the training on Sunday for the election, we found out that we were at seperate polling locations and on top of that, we were INSPECTORS, which meant we would be in charge of our polling stations. Which meant we had to pick up ALL the equipment, be there at six in the morning, set everything up, and be in charage of however many people for the entire day, which was from 6 in the morning to 8 at night, plus wrapping up and bringing all the voted ballots to a specified location. Jesus Christ.
Let me just tell you, the four hour training on Sunday did not prepare me whatsoever to be inspector of this polling location, which was Beverly Hills 90212 (that pissed me off a lot, I was one digit off!). I had no fucking clue what I was doing. They could have gotten that dumbass looking shark in the picture above to be Inspector and he would have been more effective. On top of that, I was working with an old black woman who was so sweet but unfortunately was as dumb as rocks, two lazy college-aged girls (one of which showed up an hour and a half late), and last but not least, the biggest bitch I've ever met in my life to date. She was probably late 30's, early 40's. She was just a raging inferno of bitch. Every time I looked into her eyes I saw an entire replay of the Holocaust from start to finish, no lie. She was just a miserable, unfriendly, bad attitude bother of a woman. Anything I did, she questioned. She yelled at poor little old ladies working at other booths. I actually had to tell her to calm down multiple times. She told me that I wasn't earning my paycheck, and I needed to take a leadership position, and she couldn't believe who they sent to be in charge here, and I have to do my job better. She was absolutely right, but that wasn't my fault. They didn't prepare me. Basically, any time she looked at me I heard her thoughts, and they were something along the lines of "I will kill you like a dog in the street."
On top of this crazy lady working with me, I was in Beverly Hills, home of the biggest fucking snobs on the face of the planet. Don't get me wrong, there were some very nice people. But there were also people you could tell were just so used to getting their way and having everybody cater to their needs. They were actually FIGHTING about cutting in line. Multiple adults were basically whining about cutting. I wanted to like bring them to the principal's office or something. Just incredible, immature, self-centered people.
There is this machine called InkaVote that people, after voting, put their ballots through. The InkaVote machine scans the ballots for any overvoting or damaged ballots, and if it finds those errors it spits it back out and we have to advise the people to vote again. If everything clears, then the InkaVote takes the ballot and drops it into a big black bin which the InkaVote machine sits on top of. Well, my stupid fucking InkaVote broke about halfway through the day. So we took it off the black bin and had to insert ballots manually. There is a slot on the front of the black bin as well as the hole in the top where the InkaVote had been dropping the ballots in. We propped the black bin up on the table kind of diagonally so people could drop it in easier. Well, I'm sitting at the front, checking off names of people voting and handing them clean ballots, when a woman comes up to me and goes "Un..................................................... believable." Just like that. So I was like "Um... okay." She said it again, "Un............................................ believable."
Me: Ma'am, is there a problem?
Woman: Do you KNOW what just happened?
Me: No.... No, I don't.
Woman: I just put my vote in the black bin. Do you KNOW what happened?
Me: No, I don't.
Woman: My vote flew OUT THE TOP of the bin, and INTO A GARBAGE CAN.
Me: (trying not to laugh) You're kidding.
Woman: I am not.
Me: Well, I'm sorry about that, ma'am.
Woman: Do you KNOW how wrong that is? How conceptually wrong that is? My VOTE went in the TRASH.
Me: I know, ma'am, and I can assure you nobody else's votes are in the garbage.
Woman: Are you in charge here?
Me: Yeah, sure, I guess.
Woman: What's your name, I'm going to report this.
So at that point I was ready to shit a brick. I left for my first break at that point. It was 6:30 PM. I hadn't eaten anything all day. I was so hungry I said I would stop at the first food place I saw. Driving through Beverly Hills, I realized that people don't eat there. All they do is bank. There are just streets and streets lined with banks on either side. I finally found a food place, but their menu only had gold carrots. Finally, I found a sushi place after like twenty minutes of driving around aimlessly. I was really down in the dumps. My day was awful. I had talked to Pat. Of course his day was going fine. He was stationed in a pizza parlor. He got free pizza all day. Go figure. I ordered some spicy chicken and rice and sat down. Then the Japanese owner of the place came out and saw my "Election Official" sticker and asked me how things were going. I told him how shitty they were and that I hadn't eaten all day. He gave me a free spicy tuna hand roll. He will never know, but this kind-hearted Asian man saved my life that night. I returned to the polling place with newfound determination to not let Beverly Hills snobs walk all over me. Of course, they still did, but oh well.
So, how was everybody's Halloween? Mine was okay. We actually had trick-or-treaters at the house, which made me feel oddly grown-up. I don't know what is so maturing about the process of handing out candy to kids dressed as silly things. But anyway, the first night we went out for Halloween, we went down to Hermosa Beach to meet Woody and some of his pals at a house
party. The theme of the house party was 70's and 80's lounge singers. I actually had one of the better costumes just from stuff I had lying around. By the time we all got down to Hermosa, Woody and the gang were out at a bar. We waited a long time and finally got in. Oh, that's what I looked like on the left. No idea who the pirate woman is. Seriously. Don't I look creepy though? Pat was standing, talking to some Asian chicks and I was kind of just there hanging around, and one of the girls, no lie, stopped Pat and said "Can the guy with the fake hair please leave?" I was more than a little offended. I was just standing their innocently and she went out of her way to request that I leave. But I guess it all comes around. There was the really nice Asian who gave me a spicy tuna roll for free and the really mean Asian who asked me to leave because of my fake hair. There is a ying to every yang, a balance. Nevertheless, fuck her.
At another Halloween party, I was Gilligan, but no pics of that. Thank God.
Other updates:
Enjoy the blog, you blogsexuals. There will be more.
Don't be too mad at me. I'm sorry.
Okay, so it's been close to a month since I've blogged. But like I said before, I can explain.
So, here it goes.
I just didn't feel like it. So bite me.
I've decided to blog again because I've been getting a lot of complaints about not having done so. Apparently it was the highlight of some people's days (electronically speaking). That is sad and pathetic, but, duty calls, and I shall answer, I suppose. Plus, Pat beat me up and told me to, as pictured below.
But really, a lot has happened in the past month. Right around the time I ended my first rush of blogging, when I first got my car, I began interning as a production assistant for the office of a feature called Senior Skip Day. I got this through my friend Sara (the dinner party one). What went from being one day of no pay in exchange for promised work on the producer's next project became six days of work with no pay and work on the producer's next project. The producer, or line producer of this particular movie, is Marlon Parry. He is from Detroit and wears the same thing every day: black shoes, black socks, black pants, black t-shirt, black button down, black hair slicked back into a pony tailk, black sunglasses. He drinks lots of cappuccino, consumes lots of sugary foods, and uses the word "seriously" a lot. Perhaps most interestingly, he is the big man in black sitting on the bench next to Skee-lo in his "I Wish" video. Marlon also wrote and directed that video. On a side note, Marlon is my hero.
"Six days without pay?!?!" you may stand up and shout at your computer. "Hero or not, Paul, that is unfair labor!" Well, let me just tell you that I ate three meals a day for those six days, three good meals from excellent places, and I didn't pay a cent. Of course, I was the one going to all those places to pick up the food, but what are you gonna do.
Oh, the other interesting thing about that is that Pat, after three days at his job at Enterprise Rent-a-Car, decided it wasn't for him. So he quit. The next day, I called Sara and asked if she could use another guy in the office. She said sure. So Pat and I worked two days together. Don't worry, he didn't get paid either. Also, I got a pair of Larry Miller's shoes from the set of the movie. How cool is that? I wear that guys shoes. They're so comfortable.
So after those six days of running errands, filing stuff, and whatnot, I've just been waiting for a job basically to come along. Marlon did call me to help him with some preliminary stuff for a commercial. He is bidding to work on a commercial for some Europeans for some Ben-gay type substance that cures pain in the joints. The commercial was to take place at an aquarium, so Marlon had to find an aquarium in the area and send pictures to the Europeans to see if they would go with him to shoot. He doesn't have a digital camera, and I had mentioned that I had one. So who does he call to go to the aquarium in Long Beach? You guessed it. We took over 200 pictures there. It was so fucking hard to capture a shark without it being blurry. Between the angle of the glass, the flash, and the sharks moving so fast, it was like trying to capture Big Foot on film. Here are some cool ones I got though:
That last one looks like God decided Hell was a bad idea, crumpled it up, and tossed it through Earth's atmosphere into a wastebasket of transcendence... Or a blue bin, if God recycles, I dunno. Anyway, it's just a jellyfish.
So if I haven't been getting paid, what have I been doing? I did work on Election Day. And let me tell you, that was a fucking nightmare. Election Day was on a Tuesday. I found out that I was going to work the election on the Friday before, when Pat had me go to Apple One, a temp agency, and fill out a form so that we could both work that Tuesday. I guess it was doomed from the beginning because I got lost going there, then spent an unnecessary amount of time actually at the agency making stupid mistakes on my application, then found out that the parking garage I had parked in for less than an hour and a half cost twelve dollars, then found out I only had two dollars in my wallet, had to repark my car to go to the ATM inside, but my keys got locked in the ignition somehow (does anybody know why that happens?) and I almost started crying and was VERY close to asking a stranger to sit in my car and try to get my keys out when they actually came out. Finally, I was able to leave that fucking place and be on my merry way. But when Pat and I went to the training on Sunday for the election, we found out that we were at seperate polling locations and on top of that, we were INSPECTORS, which meant we would be in charge of our polling stations. Which meant we had to pick up ALL the equipment, be there at six in the morning, set everything up, and be in charage of however many people for the entire day, which was from 6 in the morning to 8 at night, plus wrapping up and bringing all the voted ballots to a specified location. Jesus Christ.
Let me just tell you, the four hour training on Sunday did not prepare me whatsoever to be inspector of this polling location, which was Beverly Hills 90212 (that pissed me off a lot, I was one digit off!). I had no fucking clue what I was doing. They could have gotten that dumbass looking shark in the picture above to be Inspector and he would have been more effective. On top of that, I was working with an old black woman who was so sweet but unfortunately was as dumb as rocks, two lazy college-aged girls (one of which showed up an hour and a half late), and last but not least, the biggest bitch I've ever met in my life to date. She was probably late 30's, early 40's. She was just a raging inferno of bitch. Every time I looked into her eyes I saw an entire replay of the Holocaust from start to finish, no lie. She was just a miserable, unfriendly, bad attitude bother of a woman. Anything I did, she questioned. She yelled at poor little old ladies working at other booths. I actually had to tell her to calm down multiple times. She told me that I wasn't earning my paycheck, and I needed to take a leadership position, and she couldn't believe who they sent to be in charge here, and I have to do my job better. She was absolutely right, but that wasn't my fault. They didn't prepare me. Basically, any time she looked at me I heard her thoughts, and they were something along the lines of "I will kill you like a dog in the street."
On top of this crazy lady working with me, I was in Beverly Hills, home of the biggest fucking snobs on the face of the planet. Don't get me wrong, there were some very nice people. But there were also people you could tell were just so used to getting their way and having everybody cater to their needs. They were actually FIGHTING about cutting in line. Multiple adults were basically whining about cutting. I wanted to like bring them to the principal's office or something. Just incredible, immature, self-centered people.
There is this machine called InkaVote that people, after voting, put their ballots through. The InkaVote machine scans the ballots for any overvoting or damaged ballots, and if it finds those errors it spits it back out and we have to advise the people to vote again. If everything clears, then the InkaVote takes the ballot and drops it into a big black bin which the InkaVote machine sits on top of. Well, my stupid fucking InkaVote broke about halfway through the day. So we took it off the black bin and had to insert ballots manually. There is a slot on the front of the black bin as well as the hole in the top where the InkaVote had been dropping the ballots in. We propped the black bin up on the table kind of diagonally so people could drop it in easier. Well, I'm sitting at the front, checking off names of people voting and handing them clean ballots, when a woman comes up to me and goes "Un..................................................... believable." Just like that. So I was like "Um... okay." She said it again, "Un............................................ believable."
Me: Ma'am, is there a problem?
Woman: Do you KNOW what just happened?
Me: No.... No, I don't.
Woman: I just put my vote in the black bin. Do you KNOW what happened?
Me: No, I don't.
Woman: My vote flew OUT THE TOP of the bin, and INTO A GARBAGE CAN.
Me: (trying not to laugh) You're kidding.
Woman: I am not.
Me: Well, I'm sorry about that, ma'am.
Woman: Do you KNOW how wrong that is? How conceptually wrong that is? My VOTE went in the TRASH.
Me: I know, ma'am, and I can assure you nobody else's votes are in the garbage.
Woman: Are you in charge here?
Me: Yeah, sure, I guess.
Woman: What's your name, I'm going to report this.
So at that point I was ready to shit a brick. I left for my first break at that point. It was 6:30 PM. I hadn't eaten anything all day. I was so hungry I said I would stop at the first food place I saw. Driving through Beverly Hills, I realized that people don't eat there. All they do is bank. There are just streets and streets lined with banks on either side. I finally found a food place, but their menu only had gold carrots. Finally, I found a sushi place after like twenty minutes of driving around aimlessly. I was really down in the dumps. My day was awful. I had talked to Pat. Of course his day was going fine. He was stationed in a pizza parlor. He got free pizza all day. Go figure. I ordered some spicy chicken and rice and sat down. Then the Japanese owner of the place came out and saw my "Election Official" sticker and asked me how things were going. I told him how shitty they were and that I hadn't eaten all day. He gave me a free spicy tuna hand roll. He will never know, but this kind-hearted Asian man saved my life that night. I returned to the polling place with newfound determination to not let Beverly Hills snobs walk all over me. Of course, they still did, but oh well.
So, how was everybody's Halloween? Mine was okay. We actually had trick-or-treaters at the house, which made me feel oddly grown-up. I don't know what is so maturing about the process of handing out candy to kids dressed as silly things. But anyway, the first night we went out for Halloween, we went down to Hermosa Beach to meet Woody and some of his pals at a house
party. The theme of the house party was 70's and 80's lounge singers. I actually had one of the better costumes just from stuff I had lying around. By the time we all got down to Hermosa, Woody and the gang were out at a bar. We waited a long time and finally got in. Oh, that's what I looked like on the left. No idea who the pirate woman is. Seriously. Don't I look creepy though? Pat was standing, talking to some Asian chicks and I was kind of just there hanging around, and one of the girls, no lie, stopped Pat and said "Can the guy with the fake hair please leave?" I was more than a little offended. I was just standing their innocently and she went out of her way to request that I leave. But I guess it all comes around. There was the really nice Asian who gave me a spicy tuna roll for free and the really mean Asian who asked me to leave because of my fake hair. There is a ying to every yang, a balance. Nevertheless, fuck her.At another Halloween party, I was Gilligan, but no pics of that. Thank God.
Other updates:
- Jorge loves his job at ING Direct and is doing great. He got MVP of his class (training) and scored the highest on his final. Word.
- D.J is working as a PA for the writers of "Heroes". How fucking awesome is that? I wish I had a job.
- Joe has been giving our gay (yes, they are actually two gay guys who live together and oddly keep Joe's wine glass filled while he's over there) neighbors piano lessons, as seen in my creepy voyeuristic photo from our back balcony:
- The mouse was found IN a bag of rice in a cabinet. We took it down the street and let him free. He will be missed.
- Pat and I have watched two seasons of "Lost" on DVD in about three weeks.
- We went to I.O West, an improv comedy club and ran into some celebs, including Neil Flynn, the Janitor on Scrubs, Tim Meadows, and Horatio Sanz, of Saturday Night Live fame. Tim Meadows bumped into me and apologized. I feel like I've known him for years.
- Joe Sabia is currently in Las Vegas at The Comedy Festival, a huge event for all comedians established and up and coming. Joe gets to interview, or at least hold the camera while somebody else interviews, Bob Saget, Dane Cook, Bill Maher, Jamie Kennedy, Dave Attell, Sarah Silverman, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, and Whoopi Goldberg, and no I will not put links to all these people's IMDB pages for you, you spoiled brats. Anyway, Joe's been there since Tuesday and is coming back Sunday or Monday. I received a text a couple nights ago that he was interviewing Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who had just humped his microphone and called it Ginger. Last night he was interviewing Damon Wayons, who I loved in "Blank Man".
- Leah's coming on Tuesday for a week and is spending Thanksgiving with us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Finally, a woman to do some housework around here.
Enjoy the blog, you blogsexuals. There will be more.
posted by PJG at 11/17/2006 12:32:00 AM
2 Comments:
Let me just say, I am HONORED that you read my blog! (You inspired me to write one)And I'm really happy you started writing yours again-- I was getting pretty frustrated. You're my favorite character in SJ, and about those babies...
FINALLY!!!!
My days are back to normal now, it just hasn't been the same.
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