Chop chop!
Here's a funny story: MI-5 season 5 came out last month. I preordered it from B&N so when it showed up on my doorstep I was all excited to pop that sucker in the DVD player and revel in the wonderful British espionage-y goodness. Except it'd been a while since I'd watched the other seasons, so I went back and watched the whole set. (I've watched seasons 1 and 2 so often that I pretty much have everything memorized and can totally recite the dialogue along with the show. Which is maybe kind of pathetic. But such is my dedication to the show. Also, in my defense: it is a very good show. Especially the first two seasons. Anyway, veering back from the digression now...) So I finally get to season 5, and I stay up way too late watching the first two episodes because they are just one cliff-hanger after another while you're unraveling this insanely huge conspiracy to literally destroy democracy - and the next day I speed home from work and watch a couple more episodes and decide to stay up for "just one more" because the preview for it is like, "Dead man! Ruth! Lots of people yelling! Ruth and Harry omg! Gun! Yelling! Ruth with a gun! Ruth with a gun and a plastic bag over someone's head omg most awesome thing ever [squeeeeeeee!!!!]" So, you know, I couldn't not watch it.
Yeah, the next disc? Was borken. And unplayable. So my brain basically exploded.
I went in to exchange it and learned that every. single. dvd was shipped in the same condition. (Actually, I just googled it and apparently "only a small number" of discs were affected, and I could have called an 800 number to get a replacement, but now I've returned the whole set to B&N for credit, so I guess it's too late. Important lesson, this: google twice, cut once. Guess I'll just wait until the non-defective sets are available in the stores.)
My point here is that, while suffering through the exploding-brain above, I went to the show site to see if I could get a recap or something, and the BBC was kindly offering a video summary of each episode, and I was ultimately foiled again because even though it says they offer both Windows Media Player and RealPlayer versions, in actuality only the RealPlayer version was available, and I do not have RealPlayer and do not want to install it on my computer because RealPlayer can bite me. I kept clicking the WMP option and and it kept being all, "cannot open a .ram file, sorry," and I kept being all, "I don't want you to open a .ram file, what is wrong with you?!" so I cleared my cookies and cache and such to make sure I hadn't accidentally picked RealPlayer. Which, of course, logged me out of Livejournal - so the ultimate point of this shaggy-dog story is that for the past several days I've been logged out of lj but didn't notice, just thought it was odd that all of a sudden a bunch of my friends with friends-only journals weren't posting.
Here's a confession: I wrote the above overlong anecdote because I really have not that much else to post about. Life is... you know, life. Par for the course.
Since it's tax time, I am depressed all over again becase I make so little money. I mean, I make enough to get by more-or-less comfortably, and I have some savings so I'm generally in a good financial situation - but, you know, especially in a place like New York, where so many people are so focused on making six, seven, eight figures a year that, even if you don't really share that drive, you tend to absorb it from the very air, like, through the mucus membranes in your eyes or something, I guess; it just becomes inescapable. Hell, I even got a raise a few weeks ago, but, um, an extra 5% of peaunts* is still peanuts. And at a certain point you start to think, everyone always says that money can't buy happiness, but - what if everyne is actually wrong? What if money can buy happiness, and the people who say otherwise are a) not well-off enough to grasp that fact; b) grasp that fact and are bitter about it, so therefore vehemently deny it to make themselves feel better; c) grasp that fact because they actually are well-off enough to buy happiness, but they don't want anyone else to join their exclusive happiness-purchasing club, so they sucker the rest of us into thinking that being chronically underpaid is a noble condition. That is, of course, what we in the business refer to as "hogwash." But. Still.
The knife in the back is that while I used to be able to say that all of my coworkers were underpaid, that is no longer entirely true. When the Nepotism Twins were running amok through our halls, they gave huge raises to quite a few employees. (Just... not anyone in my department. Because they did not like us. True story.) E.g. one of the buyers - who was just coming back from maternity leave and was working only three days a week - got a raise that totaled TWO THIRDS OF MY ENTIRE SALARY. Two fucking thirds. For doing forty percent less work! I mean, I love her, it's not her fault, but WHAT. THE. FUCK.
It irks me that the effusively generous Powers That Were didn't like me; and the Powers That Be (And Sign My Paycheck) do actually like me, but are less "effusively generous" and more "fiscally responsible". Like, wow, luck was really not on my side in that one.
And, of course, I really love my job and the people I work with, and I don't want to leave. But there are some times - like, I regularly work much closer to 50 than 40 hours a week, so when we're crazy busy and it feels like I just cannot leave the office ever, I think, you know, if I'm going to be working these kinds of hours, I should be getting paid $160,000 for it as a first-year associate in a law firm trying to hit my quota of billable hours.
I don't know. The truth is that if I were really that intent on making oodles of money, I could've majored in something business-track-y and become a trader or a financial muckety-muck or something. And I stand by my choice. But I still reserve the right to bellyache about how underpaid and -appreciated I am. That's just how I roll.
Oh! It's audience participation time! Dispense some advice, Dear Reader!
aquestrian is having a Presidents' Day costume party (come on, it's the most awesome party you've ever heard of, don't front) and I have called dibs on going as the apocryphal cherry tree. So the bulk of the costume is easy - green top, brown or grey pants. But - the cherries. I could, I don't know, knit some cherry-like objects? I could find some large red beads. I could make origami cherries, ooh! Or I could use actual cherries, which would be pretty excellent because I'd have a built-in snack. But I might have to watch out for sneaky cherry thieves, if other partygoers got hungry. Also, the whole costume might invite some really obvious jokes, but I think I should be honest and say that in my humor equations, hilarity is directly proportionate to obviousness. (Except for the eternal Hawaiian luau-party "lei'd/laid" joke, which has gone through bad, back to so-bad-it's-good, and right back again to "so-bad-it's-bad" and WILL NEVER DIE. Sigh.) (Also in re: obvious jokes, depending on the guest list, some of them may need all the help they can get.) (Hm. Rereading, that was a bit meaner than I intended. But it'll stay. Because in my humor equations, hilarity is often also directly proportionate to cruelty. See also: reasons why Alanna is single.)
What say you, Gentle Readers? How shall I construct my costume?
*I wish I actually did get paid in peanuts. If I were George Washington Carver, that could end up being quite lucrative.
Yeah, the next disc? Was borken. And unplayable. So my brain basically exploded.
I went in to exchange it and learned that every. single. dvd was shipped in the same condition. (Actually, I just googled it and apparently "only a small number" of discs were affected, and I could have called an 800 number to get a replacement, but now I've returned the whole set to B&N for credit, so I guess it's too late. Important lesson, this: google twice, cut once. Guess I'll just wait until the non-defective sets are available in the stores.)
My point here is that, while suffering through the exploding-brain above, I went to the show site to see if I could get a recap or something, and the BBC was kindly offering a video summary of each episode, and I was ultimately foiled again because even though it says they offer both Windows Media Player and RealPlayer versions, in actuality only the RealPlayer version was available, and I do not have RealPlayer and do not want to install it on my computer because RealPlayer can bite me. I kept clicking the WMP option and and it kept being all, "cannot open a .ram file, sorry," and I kept being all, "I don't want you to open a .ram file, what is wrong with you?!" so I cleared my cookies and cache and such to make sure I hadn't accidentally picked RealPlayer. Which, of course, logged me out of Livejournal - so the ultimate point of this shaggy-dog story is that for the past several days I've been logged out of lj but didn't notice, just thought it was odd that all of a sudden a bunch of my friends with friends-only journals weren't posting.
Here's a confession: I wrote the above overlong anecdote because I really have not that much else to post about. Life is... you know, life. Par for the course.
Since it's tax time, I am depressed all over again becase I make so little money. I mean, I make enough to get by more-or-less comfortably, and I have some savings so I'm generally in a good financial situation - but, you know, especially in a place like New York, where so many people are so focused on making six, seven, eight figures a year that, even if you don't really share that drive, you tend to absorb it from the very air, like, through the mucus membranes in your eyes or something, I guess; it just becomes inescapable. Hell, I even got a raise a few weeks ago, but, um, an extra 5% of peaunts* is still peanuts. And at a certain point you start to think, everyone always says that money can't buy happiness, but - what if everyne is actually wrong? What if money can buy happiness, and the people who say otherwise are a) not well-off enough to grasp that fact; b) grasp that fact and are bitter about it, so therefore vehemently deny it to make themselves feel better; c) grasp that fact because they actually are well-off enough to buy happiness, but they don't want anyone else to join their exclusive happiness-purchasing club, so they sucker the rest of us into thinking that being chronically underpaid is a noble condition. That is, of course, what we in the business refer to as "hogwash." But. Still.
The knife in the back is that while I used to be able to say that all of my coworkers were underpaid, that is no longer entirely true. When the Nepotism Twins were running amok through our halls, they gave huge raises to quite a few employees. (Just... not anyone in my department. Because they did not like us. True story.) E.g. one of the buyers - who was just coming back from maternity leave and was working only three days a week - got a raise that totaled TWO THIRDS OF MY ENTIRE SALARY. Two fucking thirds. For doing forty percent less work! I mean, I love her, it's not her fault, but WHAT. THE. FUCK.
It irks me that the effusively generous Powers That Were didn't like me; and the Powers That Be (And Sign My Paycheck) do actually like me, but are less "effusively generous" and more "fiscally responsible". Like, wow, luck was really not on my side in that one.
And, of course, I really love my job and the people I work with, and I don't want to leave. But there are some times - like, I regularly work much closer to 50 than 40 hours a week, so when we're crazy busy and it feels like I just cannot leave the office ever, I think, you know, if I'm going to be working these kinds of hours, I should be getting paid $160,000 for it as a first-year associate in a law firm trying to hit my quota of billable hours.
I don't know. The truth is that if I were really that intent on making oodles of money, I could've majored in something business-track-y and become a trader or a financial muckety-muck or something. And I stand by my choice. But I still reserve the right to bellyache about how underpaid and -appreciated I am. That's just how I roll.
Oh! It's audience participation time! Dispense some advice, Dear Reader!
aquestrian is having a Presidents' Day costume party (come on, it's the most awesome party you've ever heard of, don't front) and I have called dibs on going as the apocryphal cherry tree. So the bulk of the costume is easy - green top, brown or grey pants. But - the cherries. I could, I don't know, knit some cherry-like objects? I could find some large red beads. I could make origami cherries, ooh! Or I could use actual cherries, which would be pretty excellent because I'd have a built-in snack. But I might have to watch out for sneaky cherry thieves, if other partygoers got hungry. Also, the whole costume might invite some really obvious jokes, but I think I should be honest and say that in my humor equations, hilarity is directly proportionate to obviousness. (Except for the eternal Hawaiian luau-party "lei'd/laid" joke, which has gone through bad, back to so-bad-it's-good, and right back again to "so-bad-it's-bad" and WILL NEVER DIE. Sigh.) (Also in re: obvious jokes, depending on the guest list, some of them may need all the help they can get.) (Hm. Rereading, that was a bit meaner than I intended. But it'll stay. Because in my humor equations, hilarity is often also directly proportionate to cruelty. See also: reasons why Alanna is single.)
What say you, Gentle Readers? How shall I construct my costume?
*I wish I actually did get paid in peanuts. If I were George Washington Carver, that could end up being quite lucrative.