Technology is Not My Strong Point - Space Edition

With the end of the semester, I've finally begun to have time to pull the blog back into my spectrum. I pulled up my post list today to start writing a new entry, and I happened across this half-finished one from about mid-semester when my life was starting to get really stressful. After reading through it, I decided it was too good to waste, so I'm just going to finish it. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you something that should have been posted months ago.

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A few weeks ago, I had to take both of my computers and my external hard drive to the PC repair shop to have them wiped. Everything. Every last nanobyte of data had to be destroyed. Why? A virus that's been plaguing me for over a year now. It all started around the time I accepted a folder of infected PDF files from a friend of mine who shall remain nameless. His antivirus wasn't totally worthless, and actually managed to quietly locate and quarantine the little nightmare. My computer, on the other hand, was equipped with Norton. Let me take a moment now to illustrate exactly how well-protected your computer is with Norton Antivirus.

Picture a shield. Not a kite or heater shield, but a big square Roman-style tower shield. You can stand behind this thing and not be seen from the other side. Seems like great protection, right? Okay. Now, replace the steel and hardened wood with a square frame made of pine, and a sheet of paper. Now soak that paper in water. Now put termites in the wood frame. Now burn it a little bit. Now punch out about five big gaping holes in the wet paper. Now slap on a big sign in all capital letters that says "PLEASE SHOOT ME." Now write that message in Comic Sans font. Now march this creation of yours, alone, against a standing battalion of over 500 angry men armed with illegally modified machine guns. And maybe an artillery battery.

Congratulations, you've experienced Norton Antivirus. As you may have imagined, it was fairly ineffective. So my computer caught the virus. And it infected everything. And then I transferred some files to my other computer. And it caught the virus. Then I paid a large amount of money to have my computer upgraded with a brand new hard drive. And then I restored some files from my external hard drive. Which were also infected. So my new hard drive became infected. And the nasty thing about the virus was that it installed itself onto the hard drive, so you could have the computer swept and cleaned of all the bugs as many times as you wanted to, because that sucker was still coming back.

So now I have an empty external drive and two very empty computers. And absolutely none of the data I had before. I lost countless amounts of short fiction, class assignments, papers, projects, images, music and other important stuff. And I needed to distract myself from that. So I bought a new game to play. Now, it's been a really long time since I've done a blog post almost exclusively over a video game. Last time that happened, my blog was still a Tumblr page and it was over Star Wars: The Old Republic. But you know what? I'm doing it again. Because this game is hilariously torturous enough that it deserves its own blog post.

The game I bought is a new independent game called "Faster Than Light." It's a game with simple graphics reminiscent of the Gameboy Advance style. You take control of a spaceship and crew, all of which you get to name yourself, and take off across the galaxy as you fly from space beacon to beacon in an attempt to escape the evil rebel fleet pursuing you. It's essentially the opposite of the plot in the opening scenes of Star Wars Episode 4. The entire goal of the game is to pilot your ship successfully through seven dangerous sectors of space to reach the 8th sector, and defeat the Rebel flagship in epic space combat. So, excited to get started, I set the game to Normal mode and started up.

Thus began the adventures of The Space Dingo and her faithful crew: Tech Specialist Luke, in charge of shields and repairing damaged ship systems; Weapon Specialist Ben, in charge of exploding things and beating the piss out of boarding parties; And last but not least, Captain Hayden, in charge of piloting and navigation. Never before had the fate of a galactic Federation rested in the hands of such a rag-tag band of incompetent laser fodder. But they had high hopes anyway.

So I started the game off with a shiny new ship and a full-health crew. Then I moved two spaces forward. There, I encountered a ship who hailed me and informed me that he was selling slaves. I had the option to either buy one for an obscenely large amount of money (which I didn't have), ignore him and move on, or fight him. The noble crew of The Space Dingo doesn't deal with slavers, so we attacked. Two minutes later, my shield system had been destroyed, my oxygen had been knocked out and my medical bay was on fire. We did manage to beat the slave ship into submission, and they gave me a slave for free and ran away. That was the positive side. The negative side was that my Tech Specialist was nearly dead, and infernos make terrible medical bays. "That's alright," I thought, "I'll just open an airlock and suffocate the fire." That would have worked better had I not forgotten that my Oxygen systems were still offline and poor Luke was doing his best to repair them as he bled out. As you may have guessed, venting the remaining oxygen in the ship was a poor choice.

Oddly enough, it wasn't the suffocation that killed Luke, he survived that well enough. He died when the oxygen system room burst into flames because the fire had traveled there from the med bay. We held a little vigil for him (when the flames finally went out), and he was then replaced with the free slave we were handed. It wasn't quite the same, but at least we had our shields back. And from there, we carried on. For about three spaces. And then we encountered an automated combat drone with a cloaking device that promptly destroyed the rest of the ship. Back in the hangar menu, I decided it was probably best to switch the difficulty to easy mode. Actually, that's a bit of a misnomer, in this game's case. I've found that there's nothing remotely easy about easy mode. In easy mode, you're going to die horribly. On normal mode, you're  going to die horribly, only sooner. Still, undaunted by my initial failure, The Space Dingo 2 began its doomed voyage into the stars.

About the time I launched The Space Dingo 10, I began to accept the fact that I might not be very good at this game. I had also begun to notice a particular parallel with my crew and their D&D player counterparts. And what that means is that Luke always died first. Naming an NPC Luke is like handing him a red shirt with a particularly offensive phrase written on the back in every alien language. It was never a glorious death, either. At one point, my ship had recovered a drifting escape pod, which I opened hoping to get a new crew member. Instead, an enraged space mantis creature popped out and sliced Luke in half before proceeding to attack the rest of my crew. In another playthrough, Luke was part of a boarding party who I'd beamed over to attack the enemy crew. What I didn't realize was that all members of the party had to be in the same room before I could beam them back over, and I didn't pick his room. The enemy ship took advantage of this miscalculation by destroying my crew transporter with a missile, leaving Luke to run circles around the enemy ship trying to avoid getting shot. He was successful enough at evading the enemy crew, however he wasn't so successful at not being on the ship when the fires breaking out in all the rooms destroyed enough systems to cause fatal damage to the ship. It exploded with Luke still on board.

The other trend I began to notice was that not naming my crew members after my friends made me far less attached to them, and therefore easier to lose without wanting to restart the game. This, however, did not improve my gameplay. I still died every single time. Captain Picard would be ashamed of me, but he died in a previous playthrough. As did Captains Kirk, Morgan, Solo, Planet, Crunch, Falcon, Hook and Obvious. Virtual space pirates are ruthless.

It took me literally three weeks to beat this game. Three weeks of near-daily attempts. It doesn't seem like a long time to beat a game, but then you have to remember that this game consists of just 8 sectors, and a typical play-through from start to finish lasts only an hour or so (assuming you make it to the 8th sector without dying.)

Of all the lessons I've learned from playing FTL, the clearest one is this: If ever there comes a time when space is populated by cruisers and ships manned by small Enterprise-esque crews... I definitely shouldn't be captaining one.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Close Encounters of the Nerd Kind - An Episode From My Childhood

So as you may have guessed by my one or two missed updates lately, I am back in classes. It's a fairly light load, all things considered, but I'm still a full-time student, and I will be until May, when I'll be unceremoniously booted from the safe confines of College and tumble into the confusing Limbo that is the real world. It sounds a lot worse than it actually is, but I favor hyperbole.

The real reason I bring this up, however, is because of an interesting question posed by my American Sign Language professor this morning in class. We were reviewing past material to make sure we were prepared for the exam next week, and I'm still not quite sure how we progressed from signing numbers over one thousand to criminal history, but we were asked if we'd ever been in trouble with the cops. The question was a joke, but it still reminded me of a particular instance that I knew immediately was destined to be recounted here as another embarrassing tale from my youth. However, unlike my usual "Episode From My Childhood" posts, this one doesn't take place in elementary school.

I have had a lot of very strange friends over the years, being a rather strange person myself, but arguably none of them were stranger than one particular friend I made in intermediate school. I've gotten into some trouble in the past for mentioning names in these things, so instead of calling him by his actual name I'll just refer to him as "Nugget." Nugget was his nickname, given to him by me. He actually earned the nickname on a river trip, and the nugget part was originally preceded by another word, but because certain members of my family read this blog and gripe at me when I curse in my updates, we'll just leave it at Nugget. It's fitting enough on its own, though. The dictionary definition for the word nugget is "A lump of something," and Nugget was definitely a lump of something.

Nugget and I originally met in the seventh grade, and we only had one class together: Home Economics. Yep. I took Home Ec. I'm sure it's the same with most intermediate schools, but we had the option of taking Shop or Home Ec as one of our electives. Typically, all the boys took Shop, and all the girls took Home Ec. However, that semester was my first semester of public school since my sheltered elementary school days as I had been homeschooled for all of fifth and sixth grade, so I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Furthermore, when faced with the choice of spending an entire period every day surrounded by attractive girls and eating glorified EasyBake Oven cakes, or spending that time surrounded by sharp things, idiots with access to bandsaws and wood lathes, and guys who hated me, I'd say that in retrospect the decision made sense. The one fatal flaw in that logic, however, was that the girls I was surrounded by were, for the most part, the most unfortunately unattractive girls I'd ever met. Furthermore, the only one who ever spoke to me had an underbite, dull, wide eyes and a muddy, sunburned complexion that literally made her look like a sock-eye salmon. There were times I wondered if she'd actually registered for the class, or just gotten lost on her way up-river to spawn.

Now in the beginning, Nugget and I were not exactly what you'd call "friends." We spent literally every day in that class period ridiculing each other in a battle of wits to see whose venomous insults could wound the other the deepest. It remained a strange kind of cruel game until one particular afternoon as we worked on our cross-stitch projects (which absolutely pains me to say and would shame the fathers of most guys I know), I won. I took a particularly scathing jab at his mother, and I won. My prize was getting the top end of my pinky (from the base of the nail up) nearly cut completely off. Now, to be fair, he didn't attack me directly with the scissors, he was attempting to cut up the pile of thread I was using to work on my project and I was trying to save it. My finger was just an unfortunate casualty. It was, however, an unfortunate casualty that bled profusely, and unsurprisingly I didn't exactly react well to my newfound ability to rotate the top half of my finger enough that it faced the wrong way. In the chaos that ensued, I called him a few things loudly enough that I'm fairly sure it disturbed the classes three rooms over, and then I was sent to the nurse's office. The following day, we were both sent to the principal's office and threatened with a paddle unless we were willing to act like friends.

And for many years after that, we were. That's how the strangest friendship of my life began.

But that little anecdote isn't the story this blog post is about. The real story begins a few years after that, during a gaming session with Nugget and another friend. Again, with the names, so I'll call that other friend "Billy." Now, Billy and Nugget and I had all gathered over at Billy's house for a long night of Dungeons and Dragons, Halo 2 and GunBound. It was about two o'clock in the morning, and we'd played the hell out of everything we had, and we were bored. So we did what any average teenage nerd boys would do in that given situation. We went out into the back yard, armed ourselves with various wooden and bamboo weaponry, and beat the ever-living piss out of each other.

It was a game we called "Dueling," and it was essentially as close to sword-fighting as we could get. Actually, on several occasions we actually did duel with live weapons, and in one particularly impulsive instance we coated those live weapons in homemade napalm and fought with flaming weapons. That evening, however, it was just our standard arsenal of sticks, bamboo rods, a bull whip from a carnival game, and a monkey's fist. After about the third round of this, we decided that Billy's back yard was a bit too small for our game and we started to look for a better place to play. That's when we realized that Billy's house was a matter of blocks away from the city's baseball fields. And a plan was hatched. We gathered up every single stick, bokken, plank and staff in the back yard, along with a wooden dagger, the monkey's fist and bull whip, and a handful of javelin-shaped iron curtain rods. Nugget, for whatever reason, had recently bought a used diving wetsuit, which he was now wearing, and Billy had donned his black shade cloak from his Renaissance Festival costume. I had found myself a trench coat, and I still have no idea where it came from. And just like that, we descended on the baseball fields. And we commenced battle.

It was awesome, and we were enjoying ourselves thoroughly until I happened to notice a peculiar white vehicle pulling into the parking lot. I immediately recognized it as a Lake Jackson patrol car and notified the other two, and we did what any sensible person would do in that situation: we jumped a fence and hid behind the wall of the concession stand. Fortunately, I came to my senses before the officer arrived and realized that the only thing worse than being caught trespassing is being caught trespassing and actively attempting to hide from the police.

Now, I can only imagine what kinds of strange things you see and encounter as a police officer. But I can only imagine what must have been going through that officer's head when he arrived at the baseball fields in the dead of night to find three teenage idiots wearing a wetsuit, a black cloak and a trench coat, armed with a bullwhips and curtain rods.

There was a long moment of silence.

And then needless to say, we were asked to leave because we were disturbing the peace.

And that is the only encounter I have ever had with the police. Those were strange times.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

((Just as a side-note, I'll probably be revising or just removing this entry at a later date because quite frankly, it sucks. My writing here is just absolutely dry and not funny at all, and I was struggling to get it written, so I apologize. It happens.))

Being Grown Up Sucks Sometimes.

I think I'm going to skip my usual self-deprecating introduction and just get right to the point of this blog entry.

There's a leak in the ceiling of my bathroom. How long has it been there? I have no idea, I've been out of town for two weeks. It's evidently been there long enough to saturate an entire roll of toilet paper, then knock that roll of toilet paper off onto the floor, then continue to soak it until it sat in a little puddle of leaky AC unit fluid, and then gradually work its way on from there. Fortunately, it was considerate enough to finally position itself directly over my bathroom sink, so at least it's dripping into a drain. The unfortunate part of that is that my sink is not very deep and has a very flat basin. So every time it drips, it splashes nasty rust-colored mystery fluid all over my toothbrush, my overnight bag, my razor, and my hair brush. I've stuffed a rag down into the spot where it drips, and that's at least stopping most of the spatter, but now that particular wash cloth looks like someone has mistaken it for toilet paper. More than once. And then thrown it into my sink.

This particular inconvenience is just one of a list of things currently on my to-fix/ignore-indefinitely-until-I-flip-out-and-break-it list.

Topping that list (aside from the leak) is my car. I've blogged about my car many, many times in the past, so if you've read more than just a handful of these posts, it should be a familiar character. Kind of like that character on sitcoms who only shows up every once and a while, but you really wish he would kind of just not show up anymore because he's annoying and not very funny. So essentially, every character on Seinfeld. (Take that, highly successful beloved 90's sitcom.) However, this time it's not actually the car's fault. My inspection sticker has been out of date long enough that I'm fairly sure the police can smell it like a shark smells blood in the water every time I pull out of a parking lot. I've been meaning to get it inspected for a long time, but let's face it, meaning to do something is basically what you say to cover your ass when someone finally calls you on it. On Monday, however, it really was my intention to get it inspected along with a list of other errands I intended to run. So I fired up the Duralast Kevorkian and headed to campus.

The first thing on my list of errands was to pay the first installment of my tuition at the Bursar's office. What I had forgotten, however, was that this was the Monday of the first week of classes. And the school happened to accept a significantly higher number of freshmen this semester than it usually does. So every freshman and his mother (literally) were all trying to do the exact same thing I was. After cursing my terrible timing, I stood for two hours in a slow-moving line that smelled like sweat and fear, just praying that none of these biddy freshmen moms were here to raise hell over the price of tuition or anything. That way, we could all just behave like civil human beings and get on with our day. Fortunately, nobody started anything or caused any major delays, but that didn't help the fact that the line was moving slower than a dying snail in a puddle of molasses and the mouth breather behind me literally sounded like he was on a ventilator and choking on his own spittle. It was like if they'd gotten that weird stalker kid from Hey Arnold to do the breathing part of Darth Vader's voice acting. I held my tongue (and more discreetly, my nose) and made it through, paid my dues and headed upstairs to see about talking to a Financial Aid person about a student loan. I quickly learned that the massive crowd of people milling about on that floor weren't actually there to just hang out and chat. They were the waiting list. Unwilling to spend another two hours of my day listening to freshmen prattle on about who got what dorm and where they were planning to hide their toaster ovens so the RA wouldn't find them, I decided I'd take care of it later. I got the hell out of there and moved on to getting my car inspected.

Now, getting a vehicle inspected is never an exciting task. You pull into the parking lot, awkwardly talk to some guy in a jumpsuit about what he can "do ya fer," and then spend the next hour in a tiny un-air conditioned room with a group of people you could swear you saw on last week's episode of Maury. Then, in order to avoid eye contact at all costs, you get to choose between a selection of magazines full of trucks and guns, or watching Judge Judy reruns on the microwave suspended from the ceiling in the corner. After what seems like an eternity, your friend in the jumpsuit comes back in to begin a conversation that consists entirely of him pointing out things they could fix, or change, or refill, and you doing your damnedest to convince him that "No, it's fine, I really just came in to get it inspected." Then they charge you fifty bucks for the time they spent playing with your blinkers and your AC and send you on your way.

However, this time it did not go like that at all. I pulled into the parking lot, and then I sat behind a truck that was probably large enough to tow a small house and punch a new hole in the o-zone layer every time it accelerated, but was probably owned by some guy whose idea of manual labor was helping his buddy move a couch out of his double-wide. Because the entrance to the parking area was on a steep incline, half of which was currently being occupied by the diesel-powered douchemobile and the other half had me stuck halfway into the very busy road behind me, I quickly decided I was tired of playing that game and pulled into a space which was clearly not intended for parking. Then I went inside. When my jumpsuit friend arrived to ask about my car, and I told him I needed to get it inspected, he asked me if it was registered to Walker County. I told him no, it's registered to Brazoria County, and he told me that was going to be a problem. As it turns out, they need some kind of special piece of paper I need to sign before they'll inspect my car, and they happened to be out of that piece of paper. He told me they'd be getting more at the end of the month (though, until that point I was fairly sure that the 27th counted as the end of the month). Rather than ask why they didn't just print off a new stack, I just decided to cut my losses and leave.

My next stop was a bank I had never seen or been to in order to deposit a tax return check. When I had called my bank in my hometown about the situation, they directed me to a Community Somethingorother Bank on Sam Houston Avenue. So I pulled onto Sam Houston Avenue, and sure enough, there was a Community Bank right there. Unfortunately, they must have had a fairly pessimistic view on how many clients they'd actually have because all four of their parking spaces were hidden behind some decorative hedges on the opposite side of the building. Just happy to have found a place to park that wasn't in the street, I went in and asked about the check. I repeated what the bank employee from my usual bank had told me, and they stared at me as if I had just attempted to order chinese takeout at their teller booth. In the confusion that followed, I was informed by the bank manager that I was actually looking for the -other- Community Somethingorother Bank on Sam Houston Avenue. Because there are two. And he used to manage the other one. Oh, and also, the place was right next door to the University Police Department.

And I had to drive over there. In my car with the expired inspection sticker. I felt like I might as well just drive on up there, walk inside and tell the lady at the front desk that by the way, I'd been driving a vehicle with an expired sticker for about a month and now, and if she wouldn't mind just giving me my ticket then and there that'd be just dandy.

So I pulled out of the parking lot, determined to complete this leg of my journey without incident. I turned to get back on Sam Houston Avenue, and promptly encountered a red light. Now, Sam Houston Avenue is a very, very busy road. And it is very, very heavily populated with police. And here I was, stuck at a red light, just advertising my expired ticket magnet to everyone who happened to be driving by. At last, the light changed, and I quickly pulled onto the road and headed toward the other bank. And then hit another red light. And another one. And another.

I hit every single damn light on that road until I pulled into the parking lot of that bank. And then every one on the way back. Where before I had felt like blood in the water, I now felt like a giant red herring wrapped in neon lights and hemorrhaging blood, barbecue sauce and shark pheromones everywhere. It is an absolute miracle I made it back to my apartment without being pulled over.

So now I'm back in my apartment with my leaky bathroom ceiling, still neglecting to call the office for a repair. Being grown up sucks. I'm building a blanket fort in my den this weekend so I can sit in it and pretend I'm not.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

I still say it was dehydration.

Ladies and gentlemen of my widely imaginary reader base... It's been a long time.

My computer, in case you were wondering, has not actually been repaired. It just recently decided I was allowed to use this site again, so I suppose I should take advantage of the fact. Admittedly, in my weeks without updating I've fallen out of the habit of doing so, and it's been a challenge to pick it back up again. It's much easier to just let the blog die, knowing how very few people care, but instead I'm going to press on. Because I'm sure the posts on my Facebook wall about my lack of updates will never stop.

Another reason I haven't been updating is that ever since my break started, I just haven't had anything to write about. I felt that moment creeping up on me long before my computer went on strike, of course. The number of consecutive "Episode From my Childhood" updates was a clue about that. I have to relate back to the past and tell stories from my childhood when I run out of current events to talk about and quite frankly, the events of the current variety have been absolutely boring as dirt for months. No one single event (or chain of related events) has been interesting enough or had substance enough for me to write an entry on. I suppose I could have just talked about it anyway, but this is a humor blog, not an "update everyone on the boring mundane happenings in my life" blog. If I wanted to do that, I'd use my twitter account more often. It's far more suited to notifying the world of everything in my life that nobody cares about.

There lies my problem. My life is boring. I have literally spent the last several weeks watching Let's Plays on YouTube, listening to music and playing Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning on my Xbox between sessions of ragequitting out of League of Legends.

So you know what? I'm going to do this update. And I'm going to update about the most interesting thing that's happened to me since my computer decided to boycott my blog. And I'm going to make it the funniest damn retelling of stupid pointless mundane life events there ever was, or so help me I will... probably... fail miserably to do that.

Starting from the most significant thing I can remember, let's go back a few weeks to the last two weeks of my summer semester. It was a Wednesday. I was sitting in my ASL 2 class, doing my best to pay attention in my sleep-deprived state. I was finding it a little more difficult than usual, and I suddenly noticed that I was extremely cold. Now, this isn't necessarily an extraordinary event. The SHSU classrooms are always cold. I'm fairly sure that some of the classrooms in the older buildings serve as meat lockers between semesters. My theory is that some of these buildings are so old that they're actually in a state of cryogenic freezing, and if the temperature were raised at all they would crumble to dust. This normally doesn't bother me, however, because I generate enough heat that I'm like a human space heater, so it was unusual that it would be getting to me. The follow-up to that warning sign was the loss of the feeling in my fingertips. All of them. At the same time. Now, I'm not a medical doctor. The extent of my medical knowledge comes from First Aid Merit Badge and a marathon viewing of all 9 seasons of Scrubs, but I'm still fairly sure that losing the feeling in all my fingertips is a red flag. Then when you added in the dizziness, lack of ability to focus, sluggish mental alacrity, nausea and pale complexion, I was pretty sure something was really wrong.

I made it through class and back to my apartment where I proceeded to lie on the couch because standing up made me light headed. I considered putting the symptoms into Web M.D., but given that site's accuracy, it would probably just tell me I was dying from Ebola or some rare genetic disease from the Congo. Until further notice, I was just sticking to the theory that I was either dehydrated or I was about to be the start of the zombie apocalypse, though I suppose the two aren't mutually exclusive. My friends and family were unimpressed with my decision to ride it out on the couch, however, and I was sent to the doctor. And by doctor, I mean the free clinic on campus.

Normally when you go to the campus clinic without an appointment, they have you make an appointment and come back later unless it's an emergency. Now, I was still fairly convinced this was the furthest thing from an emergency and I just needed a few cups of Powerade to cure a moderate case of dehydration. But they had me see a nurse anyway. She asked a lot of nursey questions, checked her chart a lot, and went back and forth between me and the doctor several times.

Then the doctor came in and asked me a bunch of questions with a very concerned face, took my temperature, etc.

I was still convinced that I was just dehydrated, but I did have to admit that it was very peculiar for dehydration to cause a 102.6 fever. I had also never known it to cause my blood pressure to drop significantly anytime I stood up. Ultimately, I remained unconcerned until they started talking about sending me to the ER.

Now, here's a little fun fact about me: I hate hospitals. And when I say "hate," I mean "completely and utterly despise with the burning intensity of a thousand suns." They make me nervous and anxious and I feel trapped when I'm there. Probably because when I was eighteen, I had a cyst removed from my throat and an appendectomy within a few months of each other and neither time was a pleasant experience. Over those visits, I've learned that I'm allergic to just about every kind of anesthetic they have, including morphine which gives me hives, and I also react to painkillers by vomiting every ten minutes or so. Also, when I had appendicitis, I was catheterized. Which I didn't know until I was recovering and suddenly found that trying to use the restroom was excruciatingly painful in ways that pain should never be experienced.

So in my mind, when someone says "Emergency Room," my brain associates those words with getting stuck with needles full of liquid fire, waking up with scars in strange places, and finding that things aren't working quite the way they're supposed to and it hurts to pee. It's an experience similar to being abducted by aliens, or a typical night on the town in Los Angeles. (Zing!)

They must have taken my blood pressure at least ten times in those couple of hours. I suppose it wasn't a mystery when they discovered that my heart rate was extremely fast, and I suspect it had less to do with the illness and more to do with the sheer panic I was trying to suppress at the mention of a hospital visit. Fortunately, when I decided to share my strong disinterest in an ER visit with the doctor, she agreed to do what she could to keep that from happening.

In the end, I was sent home with my cousin with a bottle of pedialyte and a ban from eating certain foods (see: anything tasty) because I wasn't allowed to be alone in case my condition worsened. I got a four-day antibiotic aimed at covering a wide range of possible causes, and that was the end of it. The fever lasted for three days, and the cause was never really determined.

And that's the story of how I ended up getting two blood tests, a bottle of pedialyte, a five-day ban from eating anything good, and a $70 bill for what I'm still convinced was a case of moderate dehydration.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Forced Hiatus

Some of you may have noticed that I failed to update my blog on Wednesday, and Thursday, and Friday. The reason for this is frustratingly simple: My computer has a virus. It has been slowly eating away at the damn thing's functionality for a long time, and it has recently reached a point where it's very rare that I can access any website that isn't Facebook or Wikipedia. I've somehow managed to force it to access this page, but I still don't know if it will actually allow me to post what I'm writing here.

I am still unemployed, and this means I have no money that isn't already spoken for by groceries and other vital living expenses. While I try to remedy this situation, it means that my computer will go unrepaired because I am a technological idiot and don't know how to format my own hard drive, so I have to give it to the repair shop. That'll cost me about $60 which I just don't have lying around to spare at the moment.

I will try to update it when I can from either campus computers or by other means, but for the time being you can consider the blog on hiatus while I deal with this situation.

Now would normally be the point where I go on a page-long rant about how much I hate the little bastards who program viruses because daddy didn't hug them enough and mommy liked older brother better so they take it out on society by wrecking thousands of dollars in computers with their little rageprograms. However, I'm not going to do that, because that kind of tirade can easily be misinterpreted by law enforcement as an actual plot or expressed intent to capture the little sniggering nerdlinger who wrote the virus that's wrecking my computer and do horrible things to him. So to prevent any sort of misunderstanding of that nature, I'm just going to leave you with the following:

The internet is where decency goes to die.

Animals Are Not My Strong Point - Round 2

I have a new friend. And by friend, I mean literally nothing which is usually associated with the word "friend," and exactly the opposite in most cases. His name is Axl. And he's a cat. I know in my previous post of the same title, I said a few things which may or may not have been highly biased in favor of cats being my favorite of the typical domestic pets. Dog lovers can sit back and enjoy though, because none of that applies to this particular cat.

In case you haven't figured it out or are curious or whatever, I didn't just name the cat Axl because it seemed like a good cat name. You see, Axl has decided he lives on my back porch and in the bushes or by the air conditioning unit by my bedroom window. He has also decided that he is a dog. What makes me say this? Because Axl howls.

When I first heard him howl, I was in the middle of a pitched League of Legends match with my headphones on. The volume was cranked up high, and I had the sounds of teamfights and friends on Skype blasting through them. I suddenly had to return to the summoner platform and take my headphones off because I heard what I could only describe as a rape attempt happening outside my window. Turns out it was just one very obnoxious cat, making a sound that I had never heard a cat make before. Now, way back when they were still a thing, Guns and Roses did a cover of "Live and Let Die," which is a song that was never intended to be sung by the voice of Axl Rose. And that's what the cat sounded like. Only a few octaves higher. And it was bad. I could only imagine what was causing the little nuisance to produce sounds like that, but enough of the answers I came up with were accompanied by horrifying mental images that I decided not to check. Instead I went back to my game, figuring he would eventually stop.

But he never did. And this went on for hours. And it became a recurring event.

Every morning at between 2 and 5 AM, this damned cat has carved time out of his busy schedule of raiding trash cans, collecting intestinal worms and earmites, licking his butt or belonging to some extremely unfortunate owner to come sit outside my window and wail.

Another unfortunate fact about it is that the local human population evidently isn't the only group who's got a beef with him. He's been in a number of fights with God knows what kinds of other animals out there, and I'm fairly sure he's decided that my back patio is his own personal MMA ring. And he loses every fight. He's like that annoying kid from middle school who thought he had to prove how tough he was by getting into fights, but always got his ass kicked. Except Axl just wants to make irritating noises.

Now, I do love cats. I am a cat person in every way, but my affection for them only goes so far. And when I'm repeatedly awakened by what sounds like the tortured shrieks of the eternally damned, there is only a thin layer of sleep deprivation and common sense between that cat and a date with the longsword hanging from my wall. As irritating as it is, I have no real intention of dealing with him on my own just yet. It depends on how long it takes for him to catch me on a bad night. I just hope for his sake that he finds a new gig to play or management removes him. Preferably before he decides to ruin "Sweet Child O' Mine" or challenge a pissed off raccoon to death combat on my porch.

This just seems to be par for the course as far as the local animal population is concerned here in Huntsville. I don't think I've met a single local animal that was any kind of normal. I'm fairly sure the only reason we're allowed to use the Sam Houston campus is because the Squirrel Mafia allows it. The squirrels around campus are some of the most massive squirrels I have ever seen. Some of them look downright prehistoric. If you were to leave an acorn on an industrial strength rat trap, a campus squirrel would probably look you dead in the eyes and set it off with his foot, lick the wound once without breaking eye contact, and then walk away with his acorn while giving you the finger over his shoulder. The other day I was walking home from class and one was sitting on the sidewalk in front of me, so I tried to make it leave by starting at it like I was going to chase it. Instead of leaving, it just turned around and gave me this "Come at me, bro" look with his beady little eyes and I decided to walk the other way.

Oddly enough though, it seems that the level of intelligence, size and intimidating, creepily organized behavior dissipates rapidly the further away from campus you get. In fact, they go from escaped NIMH experiments to suicidal street jockeys in a matter of yards from the main campus. However, that's likely due to the Jurassic campus squirrels' reluctance to impede on the territory of the grackles.

Most of the birds in the area are pretty normal. The blue jays and mocking birds and the like are fairly average, but the grackles are an entirely different story. While no grackle is ever going to win any beauty contests, it seems to me that the grackles around here are a disturbing new level of grotesque. Every single one of them looks like it's been hit by more than one car and then got up and promptly lost a knife fight with a band of greaser alley cats and a weed whacker. Every single one of them is missing large chunks of feathers from their wings and tails. I'm fairly sure that only half of them fly the way nature intended, while the rest get airborne using the dark powers of the Necronomicon and gravity's own fear of telling them otherwise.

Additionally, when I look at the eyes of any other bird, I just see nothing but simple, single-minded creature intelligence. When I look into the eyes of the grackles, however, I see nothing but a dark, loathing hatred that pierces my soul. I once had one of these Hitchcock nightmares glare at me through those dead, zombie bird eyes for a full three minutes while I tried to get around him because he was absolutely convinced that I was going to steal his waffle fry. I'm not even sure where he got it from, considering how far we were from the campus Chic-fil-a, so I can only assume that he stole it from his latest victim. I probably would have stumbled on some bits of bone and clothing had I poked around in the bushes he was perched in front of.

So all in all, there are worse animal threats to be concerned over than Axl. Actually, come to think of it, I didn't hear Axl last night. I can only assume that he either left on his own, or he was captured and sacrificed by the parking lot grackles in a cemetery somewhere. No way to know for sure.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

The Tale of the Catcoondillo

A short time ago I went back home to my parents' house to watch over it and make sure the pets didn't die while the rest of the family was out of town. During that time, my friend Luke and I spent several of those nights playing Lord of the Rings: Conquest and Magic the Gathering, draining cans of Dr. Pepper and gallivanting around town in his car. On one of those evenings we were on our way back to the house from messing around in Walmart when in his rear-view mirror I caught sight of a strange looking creature hobbling across the road under a street lamp. We were unable to decide what it had been, so I jokingly dubbed the creature a "Catcoondillo." As the name might suggest to some of the more clever readers, we couldn't decide if it was a cat, a raccoon or an armadillo. Luke thought this was quite funny, especially when I created a strange noise for the creature to make, but what he didn't know was that I have encountered such a creature before. And it wasn't nearly as whimsical.

Several years back when I was still in the Boy Scouts program, our troop took a camping trip to Brazos Bend State Park. In case you didn't know, Boy Scout troops are organized into individual groups known as patrols, and each patrol has its own leader, unique patrol name, and patch. My patrol was called the Flaming Arrows at the time, complete with awesome flaming arrow patch. I don't think I was actually the elected patrol leader at the time of this trip, but the actual patrol leader wasn't able to go. So I ended up being named temporary patrol leader for the Brazos Bend trip. This was kind of a big deal for me because until that trip, I had never been patrol leader before. I never had the guts to run for it, even though some part of me knew I could win it easily. Another thing the patrol leader gets to do is select an assistant patrol leader, and since this trip happened during the brief time that my best friend Ben was still with the troop, he was my first choice.

Now, I'd been camping many, many times with this troop before in various state parks, but one thing still bothered me about camping at Brazos Bend. It's a wildlife reserve that's famous for one particular type of inhabitant: the ludicrous amount of alligators who call the swamps there home. I still wasn't entirely clear on how camping in an alligator-infested swampland was a good idea, but we were also being promised a trip out to the George Observatory to look at Mars, which was the closest to Earth as it was going to be for a very long time.

The trip was fairly uneventful up until the night we were supposed to go out to the observatory. It was the standard camping experience around the site, my patrol was busy doing what the oldest present patrol always did, which was to sit around and do nothing. The younger scouts were marveling at everything and obsessing over building their own little fires and cooking on their own, and our neighbor patrol had realized that their chuckbox didn't actually have any cookware in it because the last person to clean it never put any back in, so they were attempting to cook their meals on metal plates. After watching them warp about six of them, we decided to let them use our stuff because we were good, responsible scouts like that. Meanwhile the camp nuisances, a couple of kids who we'll just call Thing 1 and Thing 2, were busy fighting with each other and irritating everyone else around them. It seemed like it was always Thing 1's goal to piss off as many people as possible before running to his father for help when we finally turned on him, even though that never did much to save him. Thing 2 on the other hand truly believed that we were all his bestest buddies even though we pretty much universally hated him.

I'd actually been nice to the guy once and he'd decided that we were besties for life or whatever. He became my obnoxious, awkward little shadow from then on. Every year the troop went on two week-long trips, one in the summer and one in the fall or winter, and the fall/winter camp was at a little patch of hell on earth known as Camp Karankawa. This desolate patch of mosquito-infested bog was parked next to the San Bernard river. While the rest of south Texas could be a comfortable, sunny, dry climate, Camp Karankawa couldn't give less of a damn. It had its own weather system and was capable of being miserably cold and stormy while surrounding areas were pleasant. The year after, when the troop had gone out there for Fall camp, it had already reached that point in the week where it was sinking in that this year was not, in fact, going to be any better than it was last year, and we were all cold and angry. We ate our lukewarm breakfasts of box-eggs, meat substitute sausage and box-everything-else and then trudged off begrudgingly to our merit badge classes, so it was about that time that I decided I was tired of being Thing 2's friend. Instead of just telling him that, however, I decided to just give him something to do that didn't involve pestering me. So I decided to tell him a little story.

Off in the back woods down a mostly forgotten little trail at Camp Karankawa is an old car. It's anyone's guess as to how it got there, but the patch of woods where it rests is eerily quiet. It's a perfect setup for a good ghost story. So Thing 2 and I took a little trip back there, and I told him the story of how a man was driving home about this time of year on an elevated strip of highway nearby when he fell asleep at the wheel. His car jumped the guard rail and rolled down the hill, crashed through into this little clearing and ejected him from the car. Then I told him about how the guy was still alive, but the camp hadn't been established yet so nobody could hear him yelling for help, and because his legs were broken from the crash, he died slowly and painfully there in the clearing until animals came and dragged his corpse away. The little weirdo bought the story hook line and sinker, and I helpfully encouraged it every time he thought he felt cold or saw a ghost walk past in the forest. Then, as we were walking back to camp, the heavens opened up and fate smiled down on me and we stumbled across some scout's missing merit badge class schedule. The badges were unimportant, but what I did notice was that the correlating course numbers were A1, 2B, 3, 4A and 5. Anyone with half a brain could see that those numbers simply told what areas of the camp's map the scout needed to be in for those classes, and while I could see that I also saw something else. If you were to speak those letters and numbers out loud in a certain way, it sounded something like "I want to be free for a while." Which is precisely what I told Thing 2. And then I convinced him that it was obviously a secret message from a certain ghost, and that there were probably other things like this around. He stared at me with big wide all-believing bunny eyes and I sent him off to find them. For the rest of the week he was scampering around collecting trash, bits of paper and rock, and other people's schedules in an attempt to solve the mystery of a ghost which I almost completely made up.

Back at Brazos Bend, however, there were no such conveniently creepy car wrecks to pin ghost stories to, so we were pretty much stuck with him. He wasn't even in our patrol, but his own patrol had made it clear how much they hated him and it also didn't contain me, his bestest ghost-busting buddy, so we got landed with him most of the time.

Finally, it was the part we'd all been waiting for. We were going to go to the observatory to look at Mars. We all packed up into the van and headed down to the George Observatory where we took our places at the back of the line and proceeded to sit on benches and railings and be bored out of our minds for an hour or two while the adults talked with the people at the desk. Finally the adults showed back up, gathered us all around and told us that we weren't going to be looking through the telescope because evidently we needed reservations beforehand to actually use the good telescope. Our alternative option was to wait in a really long line to look through the much less impressive little telescope, but nobody cared to do that. We'd already been out there long enough and another scout had gotten sick, probably because his dinner was cooked on a metal plate, and puked all over the place. So we packed up into the van and headed back to camp.

When we arrived there, it was immediately clear that something was not right in the camp. A strange haze and odd smell hung over the entire place, and something just seemed amiss. That was when somebody pointed out the smoldering remains of what had previously been Thing 2's fanny pack (he was the only scout in the troop who wore a fanny pack). We all thought it was hilarious until we realized that the smoldering chunk of burned crap it was sitting on top of was actually the remains of my patrol's ice chest containing all of our food for the next day. Evidently, someone had left a kerosene lantern burning on top of our ice chest when we left, and the local raccoon population decided they were in the mood for a midnight snack. When they couldn't get the ice chest open, they burned it to the ground because they're evil little creatures. I'm sure that's not exactly what happened, but at the time we were all pissed off because we had no food, and for all we cared the raccoons were some sort of animal mafia who had organized this from the beginning. We didn't even take solace in the fact that some raccoon out there had probably burned the piss out of himself when he knocked the lantern over. The fire was still burning in some places, however, and needed to be extinguished. So because my patrol was the primary victim of the raccoon arson, we had to be the ones to go fill the water tub and bring it back to camp.

Troop 325's water tub was a large metal basin that, when full of water, took at least two scouts to carry. Therefore, it was necessary for three of us to venture out into the night to fill it. Two to hold the bucket, and one to hold the flashlight. Naturally, Ben and I were voluntold to go out along with a third scout. Ben held the flashlight, I held the empty basin, and the third scout just kind of came along with us.

I remember what happened next like it was a scene from the Blair Witch Project. There was no moon that night, and the trail was extremely dark. We had gone out far enough that the light from the campsite couldn't be seen anymore behind us. We had just reached a large clearing around the area where the water faucet should have been when suddenly I hear Ben yell. I looked up to see where his flashlight was pointing, and there it was.

We were face to face with a creature unlike any we had seen before. It was long and thin with a long tail like a cat, but it had a narrow face like a dog. It had strange scale-like coloration, a dark eye mask like a raccoon, a mouth full of needle-like teeth and two large, glowing green eyes. Either someone's incredibly ugly dog thing had gotten off its leash, or we had just encountered the Chupacabra, but whatever it was we didn't care. What we cared about is that it made a strange noise and started moving towards us. Now, Ben was holding a maglite with steel casing. I was holding a heavy metal washtub, and the other scout had a walking stick, and as Flaming Arrows, we did what we had to do.

We dropped everything, screamed like sissy girls and went tearing blindly through the woods back toward the campsite, because none of us felt like being devoured by some nightmare creature of the bog. We burst back into camp vehemently refused to go back out into the dark anymore that night. Finally, after the adults were sure that none of us were bleeding and we weren't hysterical anymore, one of them went down the trail to retrieve the wash bucket and flashlight. He came back and reported no strange creature, so it probably only preyed on scouts. We spent the remainder of the evening shining the flashlight around the camp and into the trees to count the pairs of raccoon eyes watching us and trying desperately to sleep knowing that some Yeth Hound creature still prowled the night nearby. There were no further attacks that night, and the only other disturbance was when Thing 1 decided it'd be funny to piss on our tent in the middle of the night. We were only able to sleep again after the adults had informed Ben that he wasn't actually allowed to force Thing 1 to do a thousand push-ups in the mud as punishment.

Looking back on the incident now, it's fairly obvious to me what happened that night. When I think back on some oddly colored creature with catlike features, a doglike face and an odd prowling nature, it's almost tempting to assume that it was actually just a fox and not some demonic entity bent on devouring our souls. I'm fairly convinced however that it was, in fact, the dreaded Catcoondillo.

-The Sarcastic Soul-