“i wanted to destroy something beautiful.” –narrator/tyler durden

i got the title to the bel air in the mail today. yea! glad that is taken care of. i also watched some plates i was interested in before (the ones i didn’t win before i got the ones i have now) get relisted and end up selling for $125. oh well. i’ve got ’55 plates on mine so i’m content. (even though the plates would have worked out so well numerically.)
i also mailed off my title to the honda element to my brother, along with the u-130 form. yep, my brother and heather and purchasing the element from me. so i’ve managed to get rid of one vehicle. now if i can just get rid of that vw camper bus. i’m still pissed tamara made us buy that for her, then when we divorced she made me keep it and pay her half of an inflated value on it. what b.s. at some point i guess i’m just going to say “screw it” and get rid of the thing cheap.
i forgot to mention in my earlier story about me buying my dad the pipe and everything, he called me up a few days later and left a message telling me he’d gone out on the porch one evening and used the new pipe and some of the new pipe tobacco i’d bought him and had a good experience and really enjoyed it. so that’s cool.
friday i was able to go into work late since it was a maintenance window for work. i was planning on eating lunch with people from work, but it didn’t work out. i ate alone, so i decided to drop by a barnes and noble near the chick-fil-a i ate at. i ended up buying a book:

• * revolution in the valley: the insanely great story of how the mac was made – andy hertzfeld (o’reilly)

friday afternoon at work i got into a really vile mood. and it had absolutely nothing to do with work. this continued some over the weekend, but kind of resurfaced again at work today. the best way i could think of how i felt on friday was via the scene in fight club where the narrator (edward norton) brutally beats angel face. the quote in question is:

i felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species. i wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all those french beaches i’d never see. i wanted to breathe smoke. […] i wanted to destroy something beautiful.

you see, i’m having some issues dealing with relationships (or the lack thereof) and emotions. nothing new when viewing the overall timeline of my life, but not something i’ve dealt with in the same way in a while. (and despite the quote above, i’m really not a violent person. i’ve never even been in a fight. or a fight club. of course, if i was i couldn’t mention it i guess…so you’ll just have to take my word for it. you know you can trust people on the internet anyway, right?)
i was one of those guys that was generally a loner, but when i had female friends i was the guy that they could come and talk to and get advice about their boy problems, or whatever else. i was a good listener. and i always heard from older women what a good husband i’d make, and from girls my age what a good boyfriend i’d make…for someone. that period of my life had sort of passed at some point during or after college, and when i was married it didn’t really matter.
but now that i’m single again it seems like it’s come to revisit me. i listen, i try to help, and i’m told by various women the same sort of stuff about making a good boyfriend or husband or whatever. i guess it’s nice to hear — or better to hear than how i should just concentrate on being single — but in the end it’s kind of frustrating to hear positive things and never see any benefit or results from this supposedly positive thing. further complicating the matter is that there are some cases where they would be interested if available, or are interested, but i’m not, or shouldn’t be. knowing some of the things that i would like to experience are there but not available, or available but not right, is maddeningly infuriating.
i never liked being single, but i suck at trying to initiate dating or any kind of relationship. heck, i suck at meeting new people in general. even though i generally like who i am as long as i’m not comparing myself to others or trying to judge myself through the eyes of others. anyway, all that to say, lately i’ve been feeling rather emotionally frayed and frustrated with things. hopefully it’s just a phase and something good will happen to divert me from my current state.
back to better things…saturday i dropped some glass and batteries and paper stuff off at the westpark recycling center. i ate at pei wei by myself, then went over to ikea for awhile. from there i went over to the potts’. jack left at some point to go on a “date” with his oldest daughter. (she was all gussied up in a princess dress and with her hair done and nail polish and everything…it was so cute.) sue and i watched a netflix movie i’d brought: cinemania. it’s a documentary about these five people that live in new york city and are…well…obsessed with watching movies. none of them really work, and they spend most of their days watching between 3 and 7 or more movies. i mean every day, all the time. they spend hours or days trying to plan which movies they are going to go watch each day, the routes and times to get from one theater to another, etc. it’s very interesting, but kind of sad too. i guess it seems to make them happy and keep them occupied though.
sunday i went to river oaks with emily and watched there will be blood. it’s based on an upton sinclair novel (oil!) which i haven’t read, but knowing it was sinclair i figured it’d be anti-businessman and anti-religious. i also knew the main characters were a self-described “oil man” and a faith healer. i was right — not surprisingly, given the information. the movie is over 2.5 hours i think, and not all that fast-paced, but it’s a good slow burn. there were a few really great scenes, and the overall look of the movie was nice.
we ended up coming back to my place and then getting supper and watching a movie a friend from work had given me to watch: stardust. i love gaiman — as my pretty extensive collection of his output in the comic world will attest — but i didn’t think the movie was as good as he deserves. it was okay, it was fun…but i think maybe there is just some fantastic element to his writing that didn’t seem to make the leap from the page onto the screen. maybe the worlds gaiman paints in my mind are darker, even though the comedic element still exists.
i’m curious about steve jobs’ keynote address at macworld. i’m pretty much in the market to buy a new laptop (my 4+ year old 800mhz powerpc 12″ ibook is still fully functional, but just getting too far behind), so it’d be nice if he mentioned something cool relating to laptops. or if they bumped up the drive space a lot on the ipod touches — since my 20gig ipod is way too small to hold all of my music, but the touch is very nice. (i’m not banking on that one at all.) we’ll see. most likely it won’t help me make any decisions, but it’d be nice if it did.