Perpetual Smile

I decided that, for the next week, I’m going to title all of my posts using the letters in my nickname, L-I-Z, no S. I’m doing this because the spambots think I’m awesome, so if my human readers think it’s lame, at least I have the bots. Here’s what my newest fan, a bot named Luciano, had to say after reading my post on the super excited girl at the bar who decided to have a baby because of me:

Merely want to say your article is striking. The clearness in your post is simply spectacular and i can assume you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with incoming post. Thanks a million and please keep up the effective work.

In short: my writing is striking, spectacular, and I am an effective expert. Thank you, spambot.

The problem with this title scheme, guys, is that there are only so many Z words. The only Z word I can think of is zebra. This is where you come in.

I need you to leave me comments with your favorite Z words. I’m especially counting on the spambots, since they are getting pretty damn smart. Not that you humans aren’t smart. I’m just saying that the spambots tend to spit stuff out depending on what they see. So if they see the letter Z, they are going to go crazy and leave all kinds of Z words.

In fact, I think that spambots are the next superior race on planet Earth.

They will be so much more advanced than us, in ways that I — in all of my spambot-blessed expertise — cannot ever imagine. I mean, they’re already ahead of us. They are INVISIBLE, for crying out loud! If a spambot was here in my house right now, looking over my shoulder as I type this, I wouldn’t know it.

They also have a great sense of humor. The spambot in that post is funnier than Mepsipax, Avitable, and Allie combined. (Then again, Allie made a great documentary about the Battle of Twitterloo. If you don’t believe me, press play.)

So maybe Allie can one-up the spambots. I’m not sure. But I do know that they are going to be the next superior race, and before this happens I need to write as many L-I-Z acronym posts as possible. (My apologies to those of you who thought this one was gonna be about lesbians in sexy zebra stripe underwear.) So give me your best Z words, or the Fun-Size Kitty of DOOM will eat you!

Donated Z Words:
Please note that Z words are rare and endangered. Donating a Z word to my blog will keep them safe from spambots and Fun-Size kitties.

Zebra
Zig (Mike)
Zag (Mike)
Zipper (Mike)
Zinger (Mike)
Zelda*
Zandra*

*Z names count. If you don’t believe me, prepare to answer to Fun-Size kitty.

Zit
Zombie (Me, Taliana83)

Zap (Allie)
Zaps (Allie)
Zapped (Allie)
Zapping (Allie)
Zoo (Allie, Taliana83)
Zenith (Allie)
Zany (Allie)
Zodiac (Allie)
Zephyr (Allie)
Zealot (Allie)
Zeal (Allie)
Zealous (Allie)
Zen (Allie, Taliana83)
Zero (Allie)
Zest (Allie)
Zesty (Allie)
Zestful (Allie)
Zimbabwe (sagasky)

And then @BookGeekGal kicked some major Z ass (01/10/2010, 12:49am):

Spambots, you are letting me down! Are you really going to let a bunch of humans out-Z you?

Update 01/10/2010, 12:56am: The spambots are fighting back, but instead of Z words, they’re insulting me!

This means war!!

Update 01/10/2010, 1:34am:

Update 01/10/2010, 2:34am: It’s totally fucking weird that I’m updating EXACTLY AN HOUR LATER, but it’s even weirder that the spambots are now kicking our asses. They can speak an assload of Russian, so they win this battle 3-2. I am too lazy to take and post a screenshot, but believe me, they dumped a whole mess of Russian into my blog comments. (Thank goodness for Akismet, or they would have taken over my blog!)

Their hefty block of Cyrillic smack-talking translates to:

Listen up, puny Earthlings. We are INVISIBLE, have no need for Z words, and can DESTROY your bandwidth with just the power of our MINDS. Also, we speak Russian and 19 million other languages, including ones you have not discovered yet. Surrender now or prepare to fight! Meow, that’s right!†

We will get them next time…

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†If you can tell me what this is from WITHOUT GOOGLING, because that would show weakness to the spambots, I’ll whore your blog/Twitter/website/pictures of your cat on my Twitter.

This is what happens when a web designer is exhausted and gets fed up with public enemy numero uno: Windows Vista.

And here’s the original, for your viewing pleasure.

I only get out of control with shopping if there are two variables involved: Target and Staples. I went into Staples yesterday planning on spending a max of $10. I planned on getting a couple binders and some pens (I keep losing pens). I walked out with a laptop cart, an ergonomic plastic bean filled wrist rest, a pocket size dictionary, a pocket size thesaurus, two binders, a box of pens, a copy holder (so that you can stand paper up when you have to type something up)… You get the picture.

The thing is, I couldn’t not buy the desk, wrist rest, and copy holder because I’ve been saying for months that I need these things. Obviously, they could very well help decrease the amount of pain I experience day to day. So I was totally justified when I broke into my savings account to help cover the cost. This time.

At any rate, I had a lot of fun putting it together.

My dad took video of me putting together some of this because he thought it might end up being really amusing, but I have to get it from him. To be fair, he did help me a little, and if it weren’t for him I would have put it together backward. Heh.

I’ll add that video whenever Dad gets to uploading it to Facebook.

The day in photos, because everyone else has done it

Mike convinced me to come to the park with him to do a little hiking, drink a lot of Gatorade, and to get my ass whooped at Scrabble. (I am so addicted now. To Scrabble, I mean. Not getting my ass beat.)

I have more pics from today, but Lil Tony is in them and I’m not sure if his and Mike’s mom Tracy would mind if I posted them here. All in all, it was a fun day.

This? Is my new car. The side that’s showing? Is the side that is not dented. No worries; I wasn’t the one who drove while the denting occurred. It was a package deal. But for $400? You can’t beat it.

P-freaking-ESS: It can also go on the highway. Without me worrying that it’s going to fall apart.

P-double-freaking-ESS: I started writing about my chronic pain, from the beginning to what’s going on now, over at Scars Can Speak. Please read it and comment there if you’re interested. I hope it can help someone, or maybe help me find people going through similar things.

So today was an interesting day, to say the least. It started off with me waking up at 10:45 and realizing that my alarm had never gone off. (I was supposed to be in work for 9.) I looked at my phone and it wouldn’t do anything. I tried to turn it on (because I thought it might have shut off, thought that maybe the battery had magically died), but nothing happened. The odd thing was, the phone had had a good enough charge when I’d gone to bed. The even odder thing was, I had dreamed about something weird going on with my phone’s battery. I dreamed that the battery charged instantly when I plugged it in, rather than taking an hour or so. CREEPY.

I love music, because you can express anything in it. The new Blue October album fucking rocks! “The End” pretty much describes how I felt when a guy I once thought I loved cheated on me.

Anyway. ADHD, anyone?

I got dressed in seconds — amazing for me, I promise you! — and ran downstairs. I asked my dad if he was having any problems with his phone. In my half-awake state, I thought we were under electronic attack, ha ha ha! Dad tried plugging my phone in to see if it just needed to be charged, but when he plugged it in all we got was a giant battery on the screen with a lightening bolt through it.

Mean, mean battery.

I went to work, Dad brought my phone back to Best Buy, and then he met me after work to give me my babyBlackBerry and the brand new battery. After my second job and dinner, I went to Toys R Us and bought a Timex alarm clock. My old alarm clock stopped letting me set the alarm a couple of weeks ago, so I’d been using my phone instead of forking over the cash for a new alarm clock.

I guess that’s what I get.

My life is going at the speed of a frog in a blender. It’s almost too much!

I started working two jobs a couple of weeks ago. I am not used to working all day, every day. It’s exhausting! It’s totally worth it at the end of the week, though. I’m actually catching up on things I’ve been trying to save for. Maybe I’ll even be driving the Sunfire soon, rather than my death trap Mazda. I even got the BlackBerry I’ve been dying to have (thank you to Sarcastica for being so patient and helping me get on BB Messenger)!

A couple of days ago, I also partnered my web design freelancing business with my aunt’s web design and print media business, OSC. We will be collaborating on social media websites. So basically, if one of us has a client that needs a website and social media, we will work on it together. I will be working on the social media end of it, be it setting up accounts on social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc) or building a site in WordPress. We will be offering training and hopefully will be doing seminars. We have an expo in about a month that we need to prepare for, and we’ve been doing a lot of networking. Needless to say, I’ve been working pretty much non-stop and I could use a nice, long nap.

Somehow, through all of this craziness, I’ve managed to stay smoke-free. I don’t know how the hell I’m doing it.

Of course I have another sinus infection. I have to call my physician in the morning and get some drugs! I thought that by quitting smoking, I wouldn’t get as many sinus infections each year. I guess I thought wrong. I don’t want to go back to smoking, though. I don’t even care that I quit, and I’m glad for all of the extra cash (especially now that Connecticut is hiking up the taxes on tobacco).

The only real problem with all of this working is that I’m starting to feel like I don’t ever do anything fun. I realized the other day that I’ve been much been working non-stop for the last year or so, and that sucks. It’s starting to drain me. I spent most of the day yesterday trying to stop the

background-color: #ffcc33;

and

echo file_get_contents

from leaking out of my ears.

My only consolation is that today is Wednesday, Friday is pay day, sometime this weekend I am going to get my hair cut, and Julien-K finally released their debut album. Oh, and did I mention that Mike found me the ultra-rare translucent Dr. Manhattan figure? Cool beans.

I had a cigarette today.

A whole one.

And it tasted damn good.

I think I was just looking for an excuse to have one, because I ended up getting really mad about something and just had to have one. (In retrospect, it was probably a really bad idea to keep the near-full pack in my coat pocket. Which is why I think I really didn’t want to quit.)

I know, I know. I’m dumb. I should have just tossed that pack and kept going. Being sick tends to really make things simple: smoke and feel worse, or stop smoking and feel better sooner.

I don’t know. Obviously I don’t really want to quit. I mean, all the nicotine is out of my system so I’m not addicted anymore. It’s just that physical dependence now that’s probably gonna fuck me.

Anyway.

I had all sorts of fantastic ideas for today’s post but now I can’t remember what they were. (Which is another reason why I need a Blackberry, ’cause then I could either turn my ideas into posts right away or save them in a neat little list. It’s so annoying using my thumb to key through all those letters on my silly regular phone. Sigh.) So instead, you get the craptastic “I may or may not have quit smoking and then I may or may not have started again” post.

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I know I owe some of you interviews, but my brain is absolutely blank right now. I promise I’ll get them to you soon, maybe even this weekend!