The Chronicles Of Jessica

I went down to McDonalds to get a hazelnut iced coffee for a harried coworker, and I may never recover from the experience. A downtown McDonalds at noon is just chaos; it must be like the old Russian breadlines used to be. There were just these teeming hordes of unwashed masses scrambling around in there trying to get their cholest-on, and all this screeching in different languages. My blood pressure went up just thinking about working there.

Seriously, that is a bad, bad job to have. I have nothing but sympathy for people who can't get a better job doing something else, but you have to figure almost ANY job would be better. The only thing I can think that would be worse is maybe cleaning toilets like at the Port Authority. Even picking up garbage would be a better job; they have a union and health benefits! No free food, I don't imagine, but you could probably take home any of the more attractive refuse that caught your eye. That's how most actors furnish their apartments, if I'm not mistaken.

Actually in our neighborhood no matter what you put on the street, someone will take it before the trash collectors come around. I can't imagine who would have a use for any of this stuff. When our microwave went gently into that good night, we stuck it out by the garbage cans to be hauled off but within an hour some passerby had just taken it. The thing was totally fried, there was no way it would ever work again. Surely the fact that it was sitting forlornly out on the sidewalk would alert you to that? Plus it weighed about forty pounds, so I don't really see that you could carry it too far unless you were one of those Ironman fellows, or maybe James Keegan. Is someone hauling this thing all the way home, only to plug it in and are they then actually surprised that no micros or waves are forthcoming? I wonder.

Our concerts last weekend were ever so much fun. First up was Thomas Dolby, which some hardcore trivia whizzes (and ASC 2006 Season vets) might recognize as the artist who did "She Blinded Me With Science" sometime in the 80's. That was actually never one of my favorites, although I loved the acoustic cover of it in the preshow for Tempest. Now he does all kinds of...well - I'm not sure what the best way to describe it is. He has a computer and a bunch of equipment and he kind of builds these beats and songs on stage. It's kind of like Max Headroom meets Moby. Paul, naturally, was beside himself with excitement, and it was pretty cool. We had great seats, too, and it was a small venue so we could see everything really well. Sunday was the total opposite experience; it was the Genesis reunion tour at the Verizon center. We were definitely on the low end of the age range there; most of the songs they played had been written before we were even born. We could only afford seats up top, and by up top I mean as far up as the seats went. "Nosebleed section" would be a generous description; they actually had a couple of oxygen tents set up in the aisle. But that was a great show, too. Sitting that far up isn't as much of a detriment as it used to be because everything gets projected onto video screens now, so you don't feel like you're watching specks wriggle around on stage. But the one thing we did miss out on was getting captured by the audience cam and projected onto the jumbo-tron. I absolutely love that, and I don't know what it is about it, but it's so hilarious when they do that. I've seen it at Sea World, too, except there they put funny captions and thought bubbles on people. But the cam will kind of pan around and land on a group of people, they're kind of swaying and doing the white man's overbite - and then they realize they're on the jumbo-tron and they wave and jump up and down and are so excited. A few people showed their boobs, which is one of those things that there is a certain window of time for, and let us just say that for me, that window is closed. It's also been painted over like in those old apartment buildings where they send in the super with a triple gallon bucket of industrial high gloss to just hose the whole place down after the previous tenants left.

What?

Anyway, good times. We have no proof of these excursions, because flash photography is not allowed (yeah, like Phil Collins is going to be disturbed by the glare of a Canon Powershot from my seat in Siberia) but also because the tshirts were $40. We don't have that many policies yet, being a new married couple, but we now have one against the forty dollar tshirt. And the seven dollar beer, and the 5 dollar pretzel. And showing your boobs on the jumbotron.

Edit: Paul says he might be flexible on that last one.