Handicap Washroom Stalls

Handicap washroom stalls are like the mansions of the public washroom world. It's like the penthouse suite of hotel rooms. You can practically do cartwheels in there. It's so spacious and luxurious.

One of these days, I will get caught using it when an actual handicap person needs and I will feel bad because it's sort of like parking in a handicap spot without the handicap permit.

The toilets in the handicap bathroom usually are higher than normal toilets so sometimes it makes me feel like I stumbled upon a giant's home and I'm using their facilities. It's like the toilet's made for a giant. I would daydream further thinking the giant might be upset if they discovered I'm using their giant toilet at their home without their permission. An upset giant is a scary giant. I wouldn't stand a chance. I would then apologize to the giant for using their giant toilet without its permission. This may incite anger and ill will from within the giant directed towards me. Knowing this, I would apologize and then explain to the giant that "I didn't think giants had feelings". This perhaps, may anger the giant further and he will then try to smash me with its hulk sized fists. I wouldn't fair well against giant hulk sized smashing fists at all.

This makes me glad that giants aren't real. I'd then realize what a wonderful adventure it is to use a handicap bathroom stall. The toilets are huge and so is the stall! It's like the toilet's made for a giant....oh how my mind wanders in the washroom.

Wiperblades

It's surprisingly difficult to find a decent picture of windshield wiperblades on Google.

It rains a lot where I live. I’m also in the car a lot. Often times, when it rains while I am in the car, I cannot help but notice the quiet tranquility the motion and sound that wiper blades make as they clear the windshield of rain.

One wiper passes the rain water over to the next wiper. Back and forth, back and forth it goes. The left wiper motions the water to the right wiper, and the right wiper nudges the water it gathers back to the left. One wiper picks up the liquid cargo that’s dropped off by the other.

The task at hands appears to be never ending yet the wipers work together in great unison. It’s a tireless effort working side by side in the days of precipitation. The two objects that in it by itself, is almost utterly lost, but when partnered together, becomes complete. Yet, despite the hard work during rain, there are always sunny days to look forward to. Isn’t that what a perfect partnership is all about?

It’s raining pretty hard right now and I definitely need a new wiper, but dammit the ones I want and fit my car are always sold out.

Previously On….

America's favorite babysitter.

Television is making me want to be a 174 year old vampire that’s employed by a 1960s ad agency, who is secretly a vigilante forensics serial killer that doubles as an agent for CTU and the FBI in the ‘Fringe’ division, working alongside wacky office co-workers and an incompetent boss while writing comedy at 30 Rock who ultimately gets stranded onto a mysterious island with polar bears via a plane crash that aired live from New York on a Saturday night. If that doesn’t curb your enthusiasm, I don’t know what will.

Television also inspired me to write a blog with a terrible run on sentence.

Meat Shield

This blog site is better than this piece of meat.

It is inevitable when you travel to coin your own phrases as you travel with a group of people during your trip. It becomes an inside joke of sorts, and it’s never as funny when you explain it to others who were not there, but those that went, ‘get it’. Sometimes the phrases aren’t even funny, but alas it does bring back memories. One such phrase I coined during my time in Asia this past year was the term ‘meat shield’. I coined this term as I was crossing the busy streets of Hong Kong with a friend. You see, if you are not careful in Asia, you can easily get run over by moving vehicles when crossing the street illegally. They just don’t care. It’s a risk we all take when doing illegal crossings as a pedestrian. In North America, drivers actually slow down at turns, and there are less blind spots when turning than in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

So what is a meat shield you ask? Let’s say you are crossing the street, and there are cars that turn right onto the intersection you are crossing, (the car will hence come veering at full speed to your left side), you must make sure that there are a fair amount of people on your left hand side when you cross the street illegally. The people on your left will of course soften the blow if indeed a car turns a right at blazing speed. These aforementioned people on your left will thereby act as your ‘meat shield’ because they are made of flesh and they will soften the blow of a car hitting you, if indeed the crash does reach you. The most likely scenario is the car will slow down because he/she will have hit so many pedestratians before he/she reaches you, the driver would’ve slowed down by the time the car is near you. So the more ‘meat shield’ buffer zone between you and the car the better.

This concept also works when you are making a right turn in North America, and a car is turning left to the street you are turning out of, thereby shielding you from oncoming traffic as you make your right turn. This however, is simply known as a ’shield’ because the car isn’t made of meat.

The end.

Peanut Butter

Sometimes when I get hungry at work and have nothing to eat, I go to the cafeteria and take those small peanut butter packets and eat it with a plastic knife. Now you know.

Primo Spot

There’s never a better feeling than finding a primo parking spot near work. You see, where I work, parking is hard to find. Free parking is even harder to find. There is also free parking about 10-15 min walk from the office building at a neighborhood park, if you can find a spot. If you can find it, it is still a bit away from the office.

Where I work, parking is definitely a premium. One must pay an outrageous price to park inside the office building. The third option aside from busing, is to park at 2 hour parking spots two blocks away from the work place. This is one of the closest free parking spots you can find. The problem with these 2 hour parking spots are just that, it’s only 2 hours. Parking enforcers usually give people a half an hour leeway before they ticket you. So if you park in this zone, you would have to check your car every 2.5 hours for marked tires. Tedious to say the least. Each ticket will set you back $35. That’s 35 chances at the lottery jackpot. 35 slices of pizza sold at 93 cents each. That’s one month of food and education for a World Vision Child.

There is a set of spots however, that are as close to the office as the 2 hour parking spots. They are the closest free parking spots that you can find, but space is limited. This is what I call the primo spot. When you score one of these spots it’s one of the happiest feelings in the world. It’s free, and it gives you peace of mind knowing that there’s no way in hell you will get a parking ticket today. I just can’t help wipe that stupid grin off my face when I land one of these spots.

Then I realize I have another 8 hours of work ahead of me.

All You Can Eat

All you can eat. Four simple words. Fighting words really. It's a personal challenge between the restaurant owner and yourself. There can only be one winner. The restaurant is banking on the fact that you cannot eat full value of what they're charging you to eat 'all you can eat'. On your end of things, you want to make the owner pay for what he's done. Make him regret his decision of deciding to offer an 'all you can eat' menu in the first place. It's really a challenge to your man hood. Not only do you want to get equal value for the amount you pay, but you want aim to eat him into the poor house. You vow to make him plead for mercy.

Of course, when the process begins, you do feel like you can eat the entire world three times over. You're armed and ready. You brought in loose pants. Belts are entirely optional at this point. You and your friends have starved yourself for an entire day for this event. The craving for nourishment in your body simply cannot be contained a moment longer. You place your initial order. The amount of food your group orders frightens the waitress. She questions whether or not you can finish what you ordered. She politely informs the group that you must pay extra for any leftover items. Your group reaffirms her that it is not a problem. We know the rules of the game already. No drinks, because it takes up valuable stomach space. You proceed to finish your first order and polish it with 'blitzkrieg' like efficiency. The Germans would be so proud. The second order comes. No problem. Third one comes and goes, and there are visible signs of degradation, but as soldiers, you march on. We were heavy hitters after all. The fourth order rolls out, and then it begins.

This is the portion of 'all you can eat' in what I like to call the 'blame game'. You realize at this point of the dinner that you've over ordered. Any excess food left over food on the table means that you would have to pay extra. That would mean the house wins. It's against your ethics to let that happen. "Over my dead body" you'd say. So the finger pointing starts to happen on who should finish what they ordered. The conversations are usually variants of the following quotes. "You ordered this, so you should eat it." "I ordered it for you guys", or "I didn't tell you to order that, I don't even like tuna" and finally "I didn't order that!" You get the idea.

After the minor blame game, and challenging each other to 'man up' and finish the left over items, everything is quiet. Everyone at the table has the glaze in their eyes. The digesting glaze. The leave me alone or I will puke on you look. Then the jokes starts flying around the table. You plead to your buddies to stop making you laugh because you're so close to puking. Any semblance of laughter will upset the space/time continuum within your body. You can feel the food rising up and down your esophagus with every breath you take. It's almost painful.

If you puke, you know you will never hear the end of it from your friends. That's when you know you have some great company amongst you. Some of the best memories have spawned from our many 'all you can eat nights', and I would not trade that for anything in the world.

Actually, that's a lie. I'll trade it for anything worth more than ten dollars.

Coldplay's 'Fix You' has been on my mind so I leave you with this. Take it easy my friends.

Worse Case Scenario

Swine Flu gone wild!

You've heard this topic done to death by now but here's my take on it, but I figured I give you my take on this subject matter. That's right. You have to hear about it from me, whether you like it or not. I suppose you can just stop reading if you want to. That's up to you. The subject matter of course is the swine flu. H1N1.

In the grand scheme of things, there's not that many deaths that are associated with this virus. SARS infection/death ratio was far more alarming. I suppose what makes the swine flu frightening is that it could mutate to a stronger more deadlier strain...but that can also happen with the 'regular' flu. Here are some rhetorical questions. I always ask such questions in my blogs. So should we not worry at all? Is it all just hysteria created by the media? Perhaps. We should of course still wash our hands, sneeze on our arms and not our hands, stay home when we're sick etc. That's just using common sense.

It is amazing however, to observe how fast and easy a single virus can spread around the world. That's the scary thing about this situation. What if this was something more serious and deadly? Say a zombie disease infection. The world will be goners in no time. Imagine that! There will always be those jerks (like in the movies!) that are bitten/infected by zombies who like to hide their wounds so that they can make it to the 'safe' zone to be amongst uninfected humans. Just by hiding their 'wound' these diseased ridden people for some reason think they are 'safe' from the virus by not letting people know. We all know they will turn into a zombie soon enough and surprise their friends with a big bite to their neck once their mutation is complete. In a flash, everyone will be infected in the 'safe zone' because of that one stupid jerk. No one is safe.

This of course is a worse case scenario situation. There's no such things as zombies and zombie viruses of course. Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to buy a gun now to protect myself, just in case. Remember, aim for the head. Also, I need to buy some bandages to hide this bite wound so that I can make it to the safe zone across the border. If I hide my wound, and pretend I wasn't bitten, everything will be fine. Who likes to be quarantined anyways? I certainly don't!

Click here for the current song buzzing in my head.

Soup Skin

"I'm craving a bowl of soup THIS big!"

Have you ever made soup and didn't drink it right away? A layer of what appears to be skin forms after the soup cools usually. When you dip your spoon into the soup, a wrinkle will always appear after your spoon has penetrated the top layer of soup. This layer is what I like to call "soup skin".

The term 'soup skin' is used a bit differently in my circle of friends. It's part of my group of friends unique lingo. All groups have their own set of vocab that means something to them. This one is ours. The origins of the term actually came from my brother. Here's the back story. We were big wrestling fans in the late 90s and early 2000s. One day as we were watching a match with Hulk Hogan in it, my brother commented that "Hogan's so old, he has soup skin!" We're all like...what the f--- is soup skin? My brother goes on to give a detailed explanation that Hogan's so old that he's starting to get folds/wrinkles on his body that looks like soup skin. The very same wrinkles you see when you first dip your spoon into the surface layer of cooled down soup. We never heard wrinkles being described like that before. As we looked closer at Hogan, sure enough the folds in his skin did look like soup skin. Please see the picture above for visuals of this 'soup skin' phenomenon.

Now that you know what 'soup skin' means, I would like to ask you one question. Do you have soup skin? If not, it's only a matter of time.

I shall now leave you and your soup skin with a nice little song. It's called "Airplanes" by Local Natives: Click here and press the "play this track" button to listen. Lyrics can be found here. Enjoy ladies and gents.

Like a BOSS!

You know it's a good night out with your buddies when one of them ends up puking as the evening draws to a close. You're probably thinking, that guy probably had too much to drink that night. Guess again.

A friend of mine got a deep fryer as a present this past Christmas. This can only lead to one thing. All you can eat deep fried night. We had one of those a few weekends back and it was a sight to behold. We had deep fried wontons, onion rings, chicken wings, steamed buns with the sweetened condensed milk as a dipping sauce (double yum) amongst many items that we were gonna deep fry. Every bite squeezed out oil. It was greasy and it was oh so good.

This got us thinking, WHAT ELSE could we deep fry? EVERYTHING tastes good deep fried! Even spoons! Our imagination ran wild. Hulkamaniac wild. We listed out gummy bears, MARS bars, apples and oranges (We rationalized in the end it wouldn't work cause there was too much water), steak, pizza pops, pizza dough, entire pizzas, chocolate, ice cream, bannnas, dim sum, thin hot pot meat slices, pig intestines, sushi, and yes, even Admiral Ackbar...he is one giant calamari after all. We must devise a clever plan to trap him first. He's good at sensing traps. That last suggestion was mine and mine alone.

At the very end of it all, we were pretty grossed out by all the crap we ate. There was so many leftovers but we all felt so gross and bloated. We wanted no part of it. The honeymoon was over. Our love for all things deep fried has ended. We wanted a divorce, regretting every bite we took that night. We never wanted to see anything deep fried ever again in our life time. At approximately 2:30 am in the morning, the host of the party that evening had enough.

He puked. Like a BOSS!

It was a good time to call it a night after that. The very next day I woke up hungry and wished I packed some of the leftovers home. Life is full of regrets.