I swear, the train is like my muse. If I ever get around to having time to write on a regular basis, I’m going to move to Toronto and just ride the subway all day. Stop at union station and get a bite to eat at lunch, then go down south, take the bloor/spadina transfer to the e/w train and ride it all the way to eglington station and back, every day, I’d love to ride the underground in London too, especially after reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman There’s so many interesting names.. Earl’s Court, Blackfriars Bridge, Angel Station. Anyways, back to my inspirational thoughts. I have these two books, both by an author named Roger Von Oech, and they’re great, they’re about getting out of your rut (mentally speaking) and thinking creatively. And in it, he talks about one of his clients who, upon entering the shower every morning, had a 20 minute mental dump of ideas. It was the time of day when he was most creative and generated his new ideas. So he purchased a piece of Lucite and mounted it in his shower, and got a grease pencil so that he could note down all of his great ideas. Now, all the great Ideas I have come either when I’m a) asleep, or b) drunk. I remember the time I thought of sending out for teryaki wings on new years. Man, that was a great idea. But my brain seems constantly stuck in idle, especially once I get to my entropy pod at work, except when I’m on the train. Then I get to wondering and thinking and looking. Sometimes I do the crossword or one of those mental puzzles in the paper, that’s cool, expand my mind a bit. Sometimes I just stop and stare. But always I’m alert, feeing good and mentally there. I had a thought that I wanted to blog about last week and I filed it away to do so, but of course, I got to work and IT got to me. If only I could exploit a handy tesseract and find something interesting to do with my day. I’m available to save the world if anyone needs a hero, Monday-Friday, 7:30-4pm, Saturdays by appointment. Enough rambling.

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It’s a bright and early Monday morning on the train and I’m already stressing about all the things I need to do this week. I have a ton of stuff that needs to be done, and a ton of stuff I want to do and I seriously dout that I’m going to have time to do it all. One of the cool things about knowing my laptop so well and being able to touch type and being able to keep track of all my thoughts is that I can still watch the people on the train and type at the same time. I even get a remarkably low error rate without looking at the screen. I’m also annoyed at this guy who is next to me on the train. He’s some little dude wearing a Cisco jacket and carrying a cisco backpac and he’s yelling at people on his phone, sending out bad vibes to me and everyone else on the train. I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t need anymore bad karma in my life J.. I know too, that karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos, but I still feel like Osmosis is one of the really under-researched phenomena on the planet. I can remember taking Science in grade 9 and learning about it.. Osmosis is the process where something moves from an area of high concentration into an area of low concentration. so like if you put a half of a potato sticking out of a bowl of colored or acidic water, then over time the color or acid will be drawn up into the parts of the potato that aren’t actually touching it. Most of my high school and college career were spent learning by osmosis.. I’d go to classes and lectures, and carry around incredibly heavy texts with a ton of information, and somehow it seeped into my brain. I finally flunked out of college when I stopped going to class and buying textbooks, so that could indirectly prove that my theory is correct. Anyways, back to the dude on the train. I don’t know what it is about someone who pollutes my noise-space with angry phone conversations that bothers me so much, but I guess I always look forward to the train ride as being relaxing, restful and some time to just collect my thoughts for the day/week. And when someone is really loud and rude next to me (not even to me) it still gets my goat. I may have written previously about my job and the desires and guilt that go along with it. Sometimes I dislike my job, and sometimes I love it, but I think that if I moved my family to Patmos and became a goatherd, there would be a lot less pressure in my life. As a penguin aptly puts it.. “Time, Heat and Pressure… the same things that make a diamond, also make… a waffle?” That’s me. A technogeek waffle. Another prophet of slackerdom, a disciple of Zen-iPodism and a seeker of new knowledge.

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When my daughter comes in to our room at 4:40AM and says ‘Daddy, I’m poopie’ and it turns out that her explosive diharrea has struck again, you just give sleep a passing ‘goodbye’ and climb out to meet the day, since things can’t get any worse. If I never have to deal with an expelled bodily fluid again, it’ll be too soon.

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So I’m giving the bean a bath last night, and I’m sitting on the toilet reading, and she slides open the door on the tub and says “daddy”. I turn and say “What honey?” and she opens her mouth and proceeds to projectile vomit all over the bathroom. Suspicious since all she had for dinner was 1/2 glass of milk and about 4 bites of a sandwich. Then I notice a LOT of multi-colored candy shell bits. Like a couple handfuls worth. I keep a gumball machine filled with Peanut M&M’s in my office.. and she apparently helped herself. then drank some bathwater. Ahh, the joy of a 2-year old with a belly ache.

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Ok so I made it a point to watch the friends finale last night. I had been a fairly serious watcher for a while, I’ve seen every episode in the first 8 seasons, most of 9 and I did miss most of 10, but caught a few. But the grand series finale, can’t miss that, right? WRONG. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that it was terrible, but it was very.. mediocre.

I was expecting something.. anything that would make me feel anything. Maybe by now it was all too formula. The symbolism of the destruction of the foosball table (breaking up of chandler and joey’s relationship by monica) was a nice touch, but the entire thing between Ross and Rachel just seemed entirely forced. It was like I could feel the actors all thinking “thank god we’re done, only one more episode. This is the last time I’ll ever have to put up with THAT putz.”

I guess that I was expecting something touching, something that made me cry. I was watching an old episode of The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air before it (the one where Wil’s father comes back then walks out on him again) and I was weeping like a little baby. But Friends.. eh.. whatever. I guess that I look to the finale’s of some note, like Cheers, MASH and even ST:TNG as being something that gives a fitting ending, with dignity and emotion. Even Seinfeld was better, because it ended like it began.. about nothing.
But this one left me feeling.. nothing, which is really a disappointment, because I have, at varying times laughed with them, cried with them and hated them. Now I just feel like I have lost touch with a friend, with no desire to re-establish contact with them. And I guess that makes me sad.

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