I sat at the restaurant, one that I’ve frequented for years, and watched the floor manager try to placate the customer who got the new server on Friday night — you know, the one who probably shouldn’t be a server in the first place, but heard that it’s easy money and a good way to score drugs? She’s a little ditzy, definitely not cut out for a high volume weekend night shift, but she’s also a good kid, well-meaning and trying her best. She’s waited on me a number of times, and while I might question her abilities, I certainly can’t fault her attitude.

But this moron — and I say that in the old 1960s way, much the same way that people forty years from now will use the word “retarded” — is apparently suffering an aneurysm over the fact that he got unsweet tea instead of sweet, and that it’s taken five minutes longer than he expected to get his well done steak. His poor kids are shrinking underneath the table, while his wife eggs him on, both of them complaining that they’ve eaten here for a decade, at least, and they’ve never had service this bad, and how that girl doesn’t belong in a restaurant, much less a fine establishment such as this.

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A few years back, with the advent of peer-to-peer networks, it began: the paradigm shift of the entertainment business. The ability to digitize (and, with a high-speed network, share) music, movies, books, and TV shows has drastically affected (or not, depending on whose data and statistical analyses you choose to believe) the financial end of artists, management, and studios producing these forms of entertainment (and others).

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Spiff and I sat talking at the bar the other night — about marriage, among other things. He and his RHC are coming up on one year of dating, and they’ve naturally talked about the prospects of getting hitched somewhere along the line. He asked if CL and I had talked about it, what I thought of the idea.

And I know I’ve written about it here — somewhere — before, because I distinctly remember contradicting myself at least once or twice. And I’ll probably do so again, right here, right now.

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For all my ability to empathize with other people, there are a lot of things that I can’t understand. The attraction to bondage, S&M, or shoe fetishes, for instance.

Yeah, I’m watching the Betty Page movie. It’s CL’s fascination, not mine (I should note for the people that know her that she — at least to her admission — doesn’t get the bondage or shoe thing, either, those she does have a huge collection of twink magazines).

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Sometimes, the signs of depressive episodes aren’t typical, or nearly as conscious as you (I) would expect.

I’ve had an increasing number of incidents over the past few years of 24-48 hour stints in bed, not interested at all in getting up to face the world. It’s not nearly as aware as that, though; I’m not pulling the covers up over my head, shutting out the world and horrified of what lies outside in the light. It’s much more casual, a shrug of the shoulders when faced with the choice of returning to sleep or rolling out of bed. A shrug of the shoulders means that the solution that requires the least effort wins, and very little in life requires more effort than falling back into unconsciousness.

I never really thought too much about those long sleeping periods (usually, a few days out of a month or two). Before, I wasn’t getting nearly as much sleep as I should, and so those long sleep periods seemed to me to be a catch up period. Now, though, it’s a lot easier to recognize as what it is — depression of some sort, whether seasonal affective or bipolar.

Something to look into, though — the source of the depression, and why it’s manifesting itself like this.

Thankful for the following:

1. I don’t live in Atlanta, nor do I have to drive through there very often.  What a nightmare — even at 5 AM in the morning, the 6,714 lane interstates are more densely populated than any road anywhere in Birmingham.
2. I don’t have to drive any interstate in the morning, which prevents me from ever ending up on a three-lane interstate cum parking lot, as I did for about an hour today just outside of Clemson.
3. I’m done with the Christmas shopping for 2006. I’d be even more thankful if I were done wrapping.
4. Family, friends, band, and job(s).  This goes without saying, but maybe too often.
5. CL.

These are just the basic thanks, but I’m too tired to be more detailed.  Stop critiquing and go enjoy your turkeys and your football games and your Black Friday preparations.

I hand CL the envelope she’s requested for her re-admission forms to Samford, a southern baptist university (yes, I know that southern or baptist or both are supposed to be capitalized. I just don’t know which, so I’m dropping the cap from both). She notices the return address labels that I’ve printed up, which have both of our names on them over the address.

“It has both of us on there. That’s sweet.”

“Yup.” It is, you know. Because I’m the fucking man.

“I hope that doesn’t give them a reason not to let me back into school.”

“Why — because I used Arial instead of Courier on the label?”

“No, because we’re living in sin.”

I pause — I sometimes forget people actually still think as though we live in the 1600s. And then it hits me. “Nah. You got in before, and you’re a belly dancer.”

“Yeah, I guess that makes me a whore,” she smiles.

“No honey. Baptists hate dancing more than living in sin, I think. So you’re probably in, because more than they hate sin, they love money.

“And also? You making me pay you for sex makes you a whore.”

That such statements don’t start fights with her is just one more reason why I love her.

Put simply: print designer != web designer.

In fact, I think that web design — good, quality, adhering to standards web design — is perhaps the most unique and most difficult of all the visual arts, because you are designing for a dynamic medium.  Print (and any other media) offer static display methods; the web does not.  Screen resolution, browsers, operating systems… All of these are variables that you have to take into account at the earliest stages of design work.

Print designers do not need to be delving into web design and proclaiming themselves King or Queen of the realm without spending some serious time forgetting much of what they know.

Learning some web architecture wouldn’t hurt about 95% of the people that I know that call themselves web designers.  Seriously.  Google it, and spend a week boning up on the basics.

Am I a web designer?  A little, but only as much as I can encompass in the broader title of web developer. My By-Day title is Web User Interface Engineer — I’m not designing as much as I am implementing other people’s work, and that, as you might guess, is the source of this little rant.  I may not be able to create the next masterwork of the web, but I can sure as hell tell you what works and what doesn’t.  My poor coworkers will attest to that.

Oh, and “designers”: please, for the love of god, stop showing off.  It impresses very few people, and fewer still if they’re viewing on a computer other than your own.

I’ve got to relearn how not to give a shit about these things…

A whole lot of animal behavior stems from one source: the survival of your genetic material, your DNA lineage. This explains the lack of monogamy in the animal kingdom, the reproductive urge… lots of things. It’s where that ticking clock in 99.5% of women (and men, too — don’t let most of ’em fool you, ladies) comes from. Most all of us have that urge to see the things that make us us live on.

Some scientists think that our bodies are programmed (evolved?) to encourage us to take part in activities that are good for us, both in the immediate timeframe and in the long run. This is why we have negative physical sensations when we are hungry, or tired, and why it feels good to do things like eat and poop.

No, seriously. Look it up.

And so having sex is accompanied by orgasm, at least for men (hey, ladies, you don’t have to have fun for a baby to get made; sorry).

(In fact, now that I think about it, this all fits nicely into the biological imperative scheme of things. You ladies can think what you want of us men as lovers; from the purely survivalistic perspective, we only really need one shot with you, and then on to the next victim baby momma. Man, this biology stuff is pretty cool if you’re looking for a way to validate shitty behavior….)

Veering back from my brief visit to Misogynytown I wonder why it is that pregnancy isn’t accompanied by the same really euphoric feeling, if the whole point is survival? Obviously, sex feels good, and so we have as much of it as possible. As much of it as possible with our protective systems in place, of course — because who outside of Kevin Federline and Flavor Flav want an Irish Catholic household?

My sister is pregnant for the second time, and I keep hearing about morning sickness, and mood swings, and strange cravings, and I can’t help but think:

Who the fuck wants to be pregnant? Even those of us without the plumbing for the job — what incentive do we have for putting up with nine months of this? Okay, maybe there are some sadistic fuckers out there that get off on seeing their loved one in misery and discomfort, but we don’t count them. And there are those that would say that those nine months are a small price to pay for having your own child, one that you get to teach your values to and watch as they grow old. To you I say: if I really want something that is going to eat up years of my life and emotional stability and god knows how much money, I’ll get another cat.

I can name them stupid things without anyone giving me grief about it, too.

I was talking to Neely the other night about crystal meth (any story you just thought of as an explanation is far more entertaining than the truth), and caught myself comparing the high to the rush of orgasm. That’s the easy way to make people understand why drugs are such a problem in the country, how people can ignore all the dangers for that buzz: compare it to an orgasm.

But think how desirable it would be to get pregnant if you were trying to explain to someone why there’s such a problem with meth or cocaine or heroin, and the easiest way to get to the point would be by saying that it was ten times as intense as being pregnant? And that made everyone want to shoot up?

Maybe the Chinese actually do get a rush for those nine months. And the Irish. And the Catholics. That would explain a lot.