Category: odd

last night i was going to a small christmas party to make an “appearance” (a.k.a. a very short stay just tell the people who were putting on the party that they are important to me and then a rush back home to go to sleep). pam, my wife, asked me if i could drop by the library and return a book on CD/DVD that was due today. it was overdue according to the note we received from the note re received in the mail which said it was due 10 days ago, but according to the stamp they placed in the DVD itself it wasn’t due until the 15th. normally this wouldn’t be a big deal. you are charged .05$ a day for an overdue book and i would gladly give the library .50$ as a contribution. the problem is that DVDs have a late charge of $1.00 per day thus making the late fee on the DVD we had $10. while i would gladly give $.50 for someone else’s mistake $10 is an entirely different story.

so i decided to go to the library and correct the problem. surely any reasonable person would see the stamp inside the DVD and realize the mistake an say “no problem”. of course, i didn’t realize that my problem would be that the library doesn’t hire reasonable people. i went to the jones creek branch of the baton rouge public library and presented my DVD. the male librarian took my borrowed movie/book and then asked me for $10. i told him that there was a problem because the DVD/book had been stamped as being due the 15th and thus not overdue. he said he would look at it and then immediately turned to his computer. he looked at it and then told me “nope, it was due ten days ago.” i grabbed the DVD and showed him the stamp. he looked at it and then said “the computer says it was due 10 days ago. that will be a $10 fine, sir.”

i could continue but i won’t. needless to say we went back and forth like this for awhile. he would say it was due 10 days ago and i would point to the stamp and say it was due today. after innumerable repeats of this scenario i became tired of the whole situation. i reach the conclusion that there were only three options:

1. be a wimp and pay the $10 fine.

2. be a wimp and never go back to the library and continually run from the library collection agency that would be after me.

3. take matters into my own hands and give the librarian an attitude adjustment.

option #3 seems the best so i grabbed that 70 year old man and began to hit him repatedly. he fought like a tiger, a very old tiger but still a tiger, and after knocking over 4 or 5 stacks of books he said i could take the matter up with the main library downtown. victory is mine … i think. it felt good to forcibly convince the guy to let me talk with another person. sometimes you just have to be forceful to get psuedo-results.

i believe i have finished yet another blogging hiatus – actually this was a blogging, journalling, and book reading hiatus – though i did get addicted to a magazine called “relevant” and read it constantly during this episode. these things happen to me every now and then. what happens during them is that my mind sort of cuts off for awhile – it is my belief that during these times my brain actually takes a small holiday to an meditterean beach and relaxes for awhile – this is good for my brain but bad for me. when it happens all i’m able to do is watching movies and play gamecube. i spend the rest of my time walking through life without a brain and therefore running into random objects and making odd sounds every now and then. i walk around all day dazed and confused function on my brain stem only and not participating in any high level functions of humanity.

the weird thing is that i have found through these episodes that you don’t really have to have your brain in order to make it through most of life. in fact, there are sometimes where it might be an advantage not to have a functioning brain – i found that without my brain i now actually understood the drive in window order speaker at burger king, a feat which i can’t do when my brain is working right. the fact that my brain was on vacation until earlier this morning didn’t seem to effect most of the conversations i had with people. i simply nodded and said “oh really” every now and then. this seemed to be all that i really needed to add to most conversations and thefore everything went well without my brain being involved in the process. hearing some people without my brain actually made what they said made sense for the first time.

the coolest of all things was that my baton rouge driving improved dramatically while my brain was off sunning itself. when i was driving without a brain everything all the other drivers on the road did made sense to me. now that i have my mind back from holiday i think half the drivers in baton rouge are homicidal, before i had my brain back i thought they were very good drivers. yesterday, a car racing to get to a stoplight before anyone else seemed reasonable to me. now it just seems stupid.

anyhow, now that i have my brain back from the beach – with a light toasting on it – i can begin to blog again (and journal and read books – though i will continue to read relevant because it’s a pretty good magazine). of course, i’m going to be shouting at insane drivers once again but that a small price to pay in order to have a brain.

every year to say “thanks” parkview baptist church takes its ministers out to a swank restaurant. tonight was the scheduled date for this year’s culinary “thanks”. i always love this date. i love the fact that our church is this nice. i love eating with all the other ministers and their spouses / dates. i love the jokes that come out of it. i love the fact that it is the one time a year that i eat at a really nice restaurant. i am basically a man with pretty common tastes. if i have to choose a restaurant to eat at it’s going to most likely be “riverside patty.” i’m pretty much a “low brow” type of guy and therefore stick to resturants that are a step or two below the resturants that we go to for the “pastor appericiation meal”. with this said it�s still fun to do it once a year. tonight we went to the capitol restaurant in the bankone building.

the food was excellent, the service was great, the company was very enjoyable. the whole evening was fun. i was however perplexed by one item during the evening. i heard a rumor that the urinals within their bathrooms were different from the typical bathroom fixture. I went to investigate this and found out that it wasn�t that they were different in their make from a normal, everyday urinal, rather they were stocked differently. the capital restaurant took ordinary, plain-jane urinals and filled them with ice. now i know i probably sound like a big, backwoods, redneck saying this but i�ve never used the bathroom on ice before. this was an entirely new experience for me. i thought the whole concept was a little odd. kind of like writing your name in the snow, only inside.

if you do a search on askjeeves.com on why in the world people would put perfectly good ice into a urinal you find out that it reduces the ammonia smell of the pee. it�s done at nicer restaurants (apparently because the average urinal cake is less ritzy than ice). i had actually kind of already figured that much out before asking jeeves, but it was nice to have confirmation of the fact. so basically i can now determine the quality of the restaurant by checking out it�s bathroom. ice equals top quality dining establishment, while urinal cakes equal a restaurant of lower quality.

of course, this means that if you�re a guest at my house and you find ice instead of blue water in the john, then we are putting out the red carpet for you.

p.s. thanks again parkview for a wonderful evening. your pastors (including me) really appreciate ya’ll.

i bet by now the two people who actually read my blog think that i have given up on doing this. well don’t worry mom and dad (the only two who read this thing) i have not given up on it. i just took a small sabbatical from typing up the events of life (translation nothing funny was happening).

i’m through with my typing respite now and i have an entry that relates to a holiday inn express television commercial and a friend of mine�jim wallace, the parkview associate pastor of education. two sundays ago “the ring” (parkview’s college worship service) had a cd release for “the junkyard taboo,” the band for “the ring.” as a part of the whole release-fellowship thingy the waco hit sunday school class decided to give free food to the college students. it was a cool idea and all the students loved it.

after the fellowship was through the class began to clean up the chairs and tables used during the event. steve, one of the class members was moving a stack of chairs when it suddenly fell on top of his left leg. i’m not sure if you’ve ever had a stack of chairs fall on your leg but from the sounds made by steve as a result of the chairs landing i would have to tell you that i would not recommend it. the result of the crash was the dislocation of steve�s left knee. not a pretty picture. lots of people rushed over to help him. one of those helpers was jim wallace. jim used to be a basketball coach and upon seeing steve�s dislocated knee he reached down and “popped” it back into place. of course, steve still needed medical treatment but at least his knee was no longer 6 inches away from being in the right spot. an ambulance was called to take steve to the hospital.

when the ambulance got to parkview steve told them what had happened and that jim had put his leg back into place. the paramedics turned to jim and asked “sir, are you a doctor?” without a second�s hesitation jim responded “no, but i did sleep in a holiday inn express last night.” 🙂

p.s. if you haven�t laughed at the humor of this you need to watch more commercials.

for the past 6 to 7 years i have been having a bit of fun whenever i have to give a name for food pick-up or anything else. many places that i go to eat require that you give a name with your food order so that they can then call you when your food is ready. one such place, and the place i ordered lunch from today, is “raisin cane’s”. i went there to pick up lunch and as is my custom i went inside to order my food (i’m not sure why but i really don’t like drive through windows). when the cashier at cane’s asked me for my name i decided to have my fun. for some reason i think it is hillarious to give a different name everytime i go into a place. i always try to say names that there’s a decent chance the people will know are fake. i’ve said collin powell, george stephanophilos, archie manning, johnny carson, etc. i’ve been hoping to really confuse a cashier one day, since i usually go to the same resturants all the time. of couse, nobody’s said anything yet. today when the cashier at cane’s asked for my name i was in a coat and tie and thought i would push the limits a little. i said “dre…that’s doctor dre.” i really figure this college kid would at least smirk at that but he didn’t even given me a facial twitch to at least indicate that he got the joke. no, he just wrote up my order (actually he typed it up on the screen).

i turned around and immediately saw a couple of older church members who said “hi”. i couldn’t remember their names and apparently they couldn’t remember mine either because they kept their distance and had that apprehensive look on their faces that said “oh i should know this guy’s name.” while i was standing there trying to remember their names the cashier who had taken my order shouted out “dre.” of course, i was too busy in thought to hear him. apparently he shouted it out again and then saw me. he walked over and said “dr. dre, your order is ready.” and handed me my meal. i thanked him and then looked to say goodbye to the church members. i waved at them and they waved back shouting “see ya’ next sunday dr. dre.” at this comment there were some pretty loud snikers in the resturant. i didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth about my name.

tonight my cell phone started to ring and i grabbed it ready to answer it. as is my custom i looked at the screen on the front of the phone to see what the caller id would tell me about the phone call. usually if it is from someone who is in my phone book it says “(person’s name) is calling” and then i know for answering purposes who is on the line. tonight when it rang and i looked at the front screen it said “GOD is calling.” i’m dead serious that is what it said. it really threw me off. i mean i didn’ know that i had GOD’s personal line listed in the phonebook of my cell. of course, being GOD HE could make sure it was in there. the problem was even though i spend alot of time talking with and listening to GOD in prayer i’ve never really had a phone conversation with HIM. it seems like the etiquette for a phone call with GOD would somehow be different than that of prayer. how do you answer the phone when it’s GOD? “hey bud” just doesn’t seem right for the CREATOR’s phone call. i was so engulfed in this question that i simply kept letting the phone ring. but then i paniced because it seems even worse to leave GOD hanging on the line. it�s one thing to answer GOD�s call wrong, but it is quite another to simply ignore GOD�s call. this was becoming a serious dilemma. i’m a minister for goodness sake, you would think i would have been trained in handling something like this. there should have been some professor during all my education telling me how to respond when GOD calls my cell phone. but no! that’s to practical for 3 years of graduate education and 4 years of undergraduate. well allot of good that education has done me. i can’t even answer the phone properly to speak to the ALMIGHTY. save your money kids, if college can’t tell you how to answer GOD�s call correctly then what good is the algebra, composition, counseling and other stuff they teach you?

eventually i remember that bill pruitt, our pastor, was the last one to have my phone and he must have changed his name in the phonebook to say GOD (thinks allot of himself apparently). while, i might not know how to answer the phone when GOD is calling i certainly did know how to answer bill’s phone call after all the confusion he had caused me. here’s the point of my story…be prepared for any phone call, it could be GOD calling you (or it could just be a pastor who likes to play jokes on people).

btw, i am now taking suggestions on how to get bill back for causing me to have such a crisis of faith.