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| 01312004 | |
| Got up earlier than I wanted and killed some time before heading out to the gym to swim some laps. Cashed in at a little under two miles before my arms lost circulation and started to hurt, showered and left. Haven't had any real panic about being such a chubadub in the gym, which is good, but I've still got a long way to go. The diet is helping, but it's going to be at least a month before I see any real results. A cold, short month. |
| Nonfunctional all day today - just can't get it together to focus on anything, so I'm taking swats ant some writing, spending most of the day just idling by in the chat, killing nine hours until I can go home and go back to bed. The one saving grace is that today is payday, so at least there's cash in my pocket if I had the wherewithal to do anything. Which I really don't. |
| :( |
 Photo courtesy this person |
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Overheard in the locker room at the gym this morning: "You know who was in here workin' out a few days ago? Carrot Top! The man is cut!" "For real?" "Yeah, and I dunno whether they just make him up or something but he isn't nearly as ugly as he is on TV. They like pluck his eyebrows or something." "So he isn't really ugly?" "No, he's ugly, but he's not as ugly as he looks on TV." |
| Still a little beat-down - had my first session at the new gym on Friday, and the combination of unused muscles being forced to do something, intense cold, crazy running and too much booze in my area has parts of my body complaining in all sorts of tenors. I go back for another training tomorrow morning, though, and following that I'm gonna try to go every Tues/Thurs/Sat at absolute minimum, plus a yoga class once a week. And hopefully soon the ache will stop. |
| Spent most of today recuperating - woke up, cleaned the room a little bit, and then met up with Ron and Kaz to go out to Flushing for Korean BBQ. On the way there, we got brutally lost in this weird under-freeway shantytown made up entirely of auto parts garages, the roads so completely destroyed that the van was bobbling up and down like we were at sea. We made out way to freedom, safety and delicious grilled beef soon afterwards, but the memory of that greasy oasis will stay with me for some time. |
| So EVIL TEAM got together and ran the Idiotarod, despite the extreme cold (meteorologists saying -10 with windchill) and total unpreparedness (I was still assembling the cart on the trainride to the starting line, didn't even steal it from the Stop & Shop until 11AM that day, and E. and me screeched down the hill about 5 minutes before kickoff). We did OK - a little skullduggery and a whole lot of extreme dickishness to other teams carried us to the finish line in (mostly) one piece - battered, bruised, but swathed in conquering glory. |
| As I had a brutal gutache from some reaction to Caspere's vegan dinner of last night, compounded by having to drainsnake a toilet (yes, part of my job description entails the occasional repairing of a toilet), I decided to take a half-day and go home to rest my sick and sad ass, and also to get the shit I needed for the Idiotarod. As the team was all assembled and coordinated, it was my job to get a cart, get it bedecked in team colors, and get it to the starting line. Oof. |
 Self-Portrait with Worries, 2004 |
| It's a pretty quiet, cold week - we're still in the midst of the coldest winter in recent NYC memory (some are saying coldest it's been since 1944!) so staying in seems to be the order of the day. I joined a gym today - time to finally enlist porfessional help in getting my shoddy carriage back to factory standard. It's going to take a while to extract the word "gym" from the high-school meaning of "the place where black kids beat the shit out of you," but hopefully it'll be worth it. |
| Getting things done and out the door, we delivered the alpha of our game a few weeks ago and now we're cleaning up the scraps and rubble, integrating what we learned and trying to have everything steady and done by the time we deliver beta. Making games, unsurprisingly, is pretty hard, and I have the easiest job out of anybody. Back to it, I guess. |
| It's eerily quiet here - most everybody decided to take the day off, but apparently somebody had to be here to man the phones (which have rang a total of once) and that somebody is me. I'm pretending to get a lot of drawing done (inked a REBE page, did some sketches for the Anton Maiden project), made fun at the expense of a blustery adult diaper baby, and sat next to a warm heater, baking my left thigh. |
| Woke up with E. in my bed (finally!) and painted the rest of my room - the color I bought is called "Precious Jasper" which basically seems to me like something Tennessee Williams would call you if you were making out. Paint fumes filled my tender huge nose and I eventually passed out. I think. I can't remember it all that well. Wait, no! I went back over to E's 'cause she made sushi and udon and it was terrifically, terribly good! The brain cloud is lifted! I remember everything! |
| Man, am I glad that's over. Being dead is really no picnic - I went to the 2nd dimension and everything was flattened out and the Doomskull was basicaly everywhere, screaming at me. I could hear messages from the 3rd and 4th dimensions but they were all fuzzy, like whispering through a kitten's fur. Eventually, I found a 1-UP and came back to the world we share. Ask lordskullmaster for more details. |
| I EXPECT TO COME BACK FROM THE LAND OF THE DEAD TOMORROW |
| I AM STILL DEAD BEACUSE OF THE DOOMSKULL |
| I WAS KILLED BY THE DOOMSKULL |
| Dear ladies: just because I am drawing you in my sketchbook on the subway does not imply any sort of flirtatious or other intent. I have a certain number of pages to fill and no matter how many coy glances or big smiles you flash me, you're just lines and shapes to this pencil. So quit it out! And stop trying to take peeks, too - if I'm drawing you on a moving subway, chances are it's not going to look very good. |
| Back to the office, shit hitting the fan left and right and yet here I sit, curiously unmoved by it all. I just can't invest any emotion in this shit anymore - scrambling to cover other people's problems. It's not my business - I get my job duties done and for $32k a year that's about all they can ask from me. If people don't tell me what I need to know after I nag them, I refuse to be held responsible. And yet, I always am. |
| Woke up, made big plans but didn't do any of them - too cold, too bad. Went to Home Depot (just a few blocks away) to buy paint for the walls and hammers for the nails, and then back in to draw and kill time 'til the Stew show that night, which I ended up soloing due to assorted pal crises. it was OK, hate the venue, love the act, went home, bedded down (new sheets), goodnight. |
| E. and I slept in (as we'll do) before splitting ways - she's working weekends doing a litle bartending to fuel her Canadian warchest, I'm running around getting parts and pieces for the ongoing remodel of my bedroom. After that, I headed down to Deitch to watch some Japanese crawling robot businessmen crawl (which they did) and then bought Nao (rhymes with Mao, not with mayo) dinner at Mooncake 'cause she lost her wallet. And then I waited around for J$P and ONANS to call but they didn't so I went home and then they called but I didn't care. |
| Doesn't look like anything exploded or melted in my day absence, so I'll consider it a success. I'm still a little fuzz-browed but at least I caught up on my sleep. I am scramblign like a ragtag bunch of lovable losers because the accountant's coming in to go over the books today - in addition to being a writer / PR person / receptionist / artist / game designer, I'm also apparently an accountant and a hot piece of ass as well. I wish there was a raise involved somewhere in there, but I should be so lucky. |
| Called in sick to work today - woke up at 7:30 with a headache so powerful it was killing nearby kittens. Took me 45 minutes to eat a banana. Took me another three hours to get back out of bed again. I only had four beers, but the combination of nausea swill and full-bore stomach emptying completely knocked me out. Eventually I did even get a pair of pants on and left the house, but by then it was far too late. |
| Went out to the Legal Action Comics art opening / release party and made the extreme tactical error of drinking more than one Rolling Rock, the beer brewed from the swill of Old Latrobe. I was fine until about a half hour into my commute home, wherein my stomach began to rebel in grand style, chundering the half-serving of Mickey D's french fries that I had thrown down there as a booze-cushion into magical new forms of life. Dive out of the car at Queensboro Plaza, hork up onto the subway tracks (sparking vomit on the third rail), stagger home, die. |
| Lord, do I ever need a haircut. Mayhaps I'll go get one. |
| E. gets back today and I couldn't be happier - it's weird not having her around, expecting her at my house for beers at nights, her in my office during the days - bleh. It's been an interesting week - I've been trying to remodel my room and get shit done in the interim but it's not all getting accomplished due to other workloads (the usual drawing and playing music and et cetera) but, as per usual, a gradual slog can plow under the most fallow field. Or something. |
| Hung out with my sister & brother-in-law as they came up to the city to spend a little time with the long-lost urbanite black sheep etc etc etc. So we went out for Korean food on a shitty rainy day and bobbled around aimlessly for awhile as I dropped too much money on things like sheets. It's weird knowing that they're barely holding on workwise while I flaunt my shitty cosmo lifestyle but what can I do? Be generous with the meals and gifts and hope things work out? |
| Took my ass out to Elizabeth, NJ to Ikea to cash in a Christmas gift, and walked out with a 60-pound shelving unit in a six-foot plus box. And, because I'm a turd of the highest order, I decided to lug it all the way back to Queens. Halfway through the 42nd street subway stop the box started to fall apart (goddamn Swedish cardboard) and I had to inch it along the tunnel until I got to the train. Once I got to Queens service was fucked and I had to switch sides at Roosevelt and backtrack, and then five blocks to my door, thankfully aided by a few good samaritans as by this point the box was shreds of cardboard. Then I had to put it together. |
| Back to an extremely quiet workplace on Friday - nobody but me and a few other hardy souls turned up, and I spent most the day catching up on a batch of stuff that went undone in my week-long absence and following dissolution. I am, as per usual, horrendously behind on weeks-old to-dos, but with a solid work ethic (hee!) i may be able to catch up with the rest of the pack. |
| A quarter of the way up the bridge before the bells started ringing - I pulled out my phone, dialed E in Vancouver, whispered "rabbit, rabbit, rabbit" into the ether and went home to a lonelier bed than I've ever slept in. |
DECEMBER
all content (c) 2003 k. thor jensen