What I remember of the last couple weeks: far too detailed

Christmas: hung out with my parents. My dad and I rented a couple of movies. The Kingdom & some movie I can't remember the name of with Morgan Freeman & John Cusack. The kingdom was surprisingly non shitty for something with Jennifer Garner. The other movie was surprisingly shitty for something with Morgan Freeman & John Cusack. I.E. they were both "eh." My mom slept a lot. We had microwave roast beef & mashed potatoes. It was pretty decent compared to how it could've been.

I got GPS (as Opt said when I announced this to her, "finally"). My dad came up with this idea on his own cause I was slow with the christmas list this year. It will be mega handy, as we all know, I am not able to find my own butt without two hands and a map. I also got the digital camera I asked for. World, get ready for pictures of people humping my couch! On top of that, the store where the rents got it was giving away photo printers free with purchase. Lastly, I got a battery charger, which was sort of like "WTF?" but with the other two items it is hard to be ungrateful.

The next couple days I played around with GPS & camera, and this game I picked up at Best Buy awhile ago (I could nerdily go into everything about the game, but I'll spare you and just let you know it's Heroes of Might & Magic IV if you care). I'm sadly addicted.

Then I got cheap Christmas wrapping paper at walgreens because I ran out of Christmas paper this year (I had to wrap Roni's gift in transformer's paper).

Then I visited Roni (we hadn't thought we were going to visit each other last week cause of the holidays, but we got a quick visit in). He is still a sweetie! His mom actually got me a target gift card and various other sundries that he delivered to me. I feel kind of weird about it, since I've never met her, and I didn't give her anything back, but I thought it was nice.

Then Opt visited me and gave me the fabulous arrgyle tee shirt I'd previously mentioned. The funny thing is we sort of both independently saw strange tee shirts this year and decided to get them for each other. The one I got her, is "I Heart Optimus Prime," because she had a dream about making out with Optimus Prime once. And becoming a ninja so that he would marry her. Anyhoos, it was really good to see her again. Other than the party, where I was going around like a chicken with my head cut off, I hadn't seen her since the TMBG concert.

Then, Thug was in town! I haven't seen him since he quit Borders. I went and hung out with him and YM and Herd. He told me again how much he liked my "holiday card," (an unsigned postcard with an incredible hulk postage stamp that said "hey Thug, I fucked your mom last night." I traded racist jokes and poo talk with him, and horrified YM & Herd's roommates. We watched random things on youtube. It was good times!

Then the next night, YM and I saw Sweeney Todd! I'm not a huge fan of musicals. I hate movies with serial killers. But they cancel each other out.... serial killer cancels out the boringness of musical, musical cancels out scariness of serial killer. So it was pretty good (though I hadn't realized how retardedly full of crazy "coincidences," that movie is). I guess YM was kicked out of school, she got bad grades because she was depressed all the time. Which sucks. But, she is happier lately because she has a boyfriend now. Which is awesome. Those two combined = more free time/time she wants to actually be around people, so it sounds like we are going to get to hang out more, which makes me happy. We did have a good time, we had about an hour to kill before the movie. Sometimes I forget how hilarious and fun to be around she is when she actually wants to be around people. And we had the "oh, my boyfriend is so awesome!" "oh, mine is too!" conversation which I'd never been able to have before. It was really nice... and it sounds like her new boyfriend is a solid dude, which makes me glad after all the douchebags she's been dating before that.

Also that day I hung out with my sister and my parents and finally had the last bits of Christmas. I got the 'Phew a transformer (Bumblebee) & They Might Be Giants: Here Come the ABC's (movie & soundtrack). I could tell my brother in law wasn't too happy with either (I guess he thinks TMBG is lame? Whatever), especially since the Transformer was harder than I thought and he was having trouble switching it back and forth over and over as the Phew demanded. I got 'Phew Harder this crawling butterfly thing that he seemed pretty happy with (he was just has happy with wrapping paper from the presents though, at that age). I got my sister & brother in law a Borders gift card. They got me.... the worst gift ever.

Zoodoption papers for the Sun Bears at the Miller Park Zoo. I am a jerk for looking a gift horse in the mouth, but here are the reasons I am enraged.

1) Why the fuck would you get the poorest member of your family (by quite a margin) a donation to charity. I'm the charity case! If I hadn't gotten that bonus money for working thanksgiving, I would've had to save all year to get you the stuff I got you. I don't buy a ton of things for myself, I save most things I want for Christmas and Birthday. If I got you a donation to a charity, it probably wouldn't matter, you would go out and get what you really want the next day anyway because you can afford it. Me: not so lucky.

2) It's not even a good charity! I would feel like a dick complaining about this if it helped needy children, or even if it helped animals at like, the humane society or something. But a zoo? They aren't really helping anyone, they just imprison animals. It's not one of those zoos that breed endangered animals or anything. Moreover: I may have Zoodopted the Sun Bears, but I bet they don't see a single dime. I doubt they go out and buy the Sun Bears a nice toy or snack and are like, "Hey Sun Bears, this is from your Zoodopted mother!" I bet they use it to remodel their gift shop or something, the fuckers.

3) It's for a year! It's not like I've Zoodopted the Sun Bears forever or anything. That seems kind of weird. You can't do that when you adopt kids (I know, I have tried). Plus my sister got it in like October, so I've actually missed out on 3 months of the satisfaction Zoodopting an animal is supposed to give me.

4) She got it in October! I realize the difficulty when someone is late with their Christmas list like I was this year... but yeah, October is earlier than I would've had it done anyway.

5) She consulted with my mom, and my mom said I'd love it! WTF people? How could you think I would like this? Did you take a time machine back to 1992? When I was 10? Because I guarantee you that is the last age I would've thought this was cool at.

6) Since I was polite and didn't spew out this rant, I will probably be recieving more zoodoptions in the future.

Yesterday was poopy, because I saw that movie really late the night before and forgot that I had picked up hours starting at 8 a.m. yesterday. So I was tired. Then we've been having trouble with our website, so I would have to transfer a million people over to internet support, which had a hold time of, I kid you not, half an hour. And at my company, we don't just transfer people, we warm transfer, which means we stay on hold too. So... yeah. Then on top of it, I got this woman calling up who, totally unrelated to what she was calling about, broke down and started crying on the phone because of her mom dying recently. Which... generally I feel bad for these people (I can't tell you how many people have just randomly started telling me their horrible life story on the phone) but it's not that big of a deal to me. But it made me think of my sick mom, and I started crying too. After the phone call was over I went to the bathroom and cried some more. In a way, I'm sort of glad about it, I've been feeling like I am a monster for not being more upset about this whole thing, and it's probably not good to hold all this in. But in another way, it sucks to break down and cry in the bathroom at work. And it's been clinched--I have cried in the bathroom at all 3 jobs I've had since being a grown up. Though I guess this one was because of my personal life, whereas my other jobs made me cry because they were jobs that made me cry. Anyway, yeah, you can tell the difference in management style between my last job and this one, because 2 different managers came up to me and asked me if I was okay, whereas at my last job the management often CAUSED the crying and then ignorred it afterwards.

Then last night I got an email from Mulva saying he wanted to hang out today, but then I called him, and he never answered, so I don't know what's up with that. True story.