Cranky-D

You are Buck Russell (from Uncle Buck)! Your
relationships aren’t the greatest (mostly by
your own accord), but if anyone has a huge
heart, it’s you.

Which John Hughes Character Are You?
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I can live with that.

via Tanya.

As I mentioned here, I put a hold on drinking alcohol while my friend was out of town. He returns tomorrow. In fact, he’s in route now.

It’s 4:15 a.m. I still stay up late, I just don’t drink while I’m doing it. I had a bit of an urge to drink in the last installment, so I guess my body hadn’t got over the physical dependency yet. It has now.

My recovery time at the gym is quicker, but I’m not showing gains any faster than normal. I’ve taken up riding the stationary bike again. I’ve lost some weight, but not nearly as much as I would have liked to lose. Liquor has a lot of empty calories, but so do peanut M&Ms and cashews. Mmmm.

The point of the whole exercise was to give my liver a break and to remind myself what living without sweet booze was like. It isn’t bad, really. If I had to do it, I could manage.

Luckily, I don’t have to do it. I plan on returning to my old ways tomorrow night, or tonight, depending on your point of reference. What I mean is that in about 18 hours I plan to have a bottle of beer and a Captain Morgan and coke (mostly captain at the bar I go to) sitting in front of me. I would have draft beer if the bar served it. I go elsewhere for beer and hot wings on Monday nights.

However, I think I’m going to stop drinking between going out, if only to try to drive some more weight off. I’m out of cashews, and the M&Ms are almost gone. I think without them, I might have a chance of scaring some more of the fat away. There’s always hope.

The hot wings, which I also haven’t had in a few weeks, won’t help either. But I don’t care.

A final word: if you are more interested in opinion pieces rather than personal stuff, please come back some time. I have some in the queue. UTI posts will probably return as well.

Root Canal Part II.

Last Tuesday I went in for yet another installment of my root canal. The first time the guy worked on me, he broke a tool off in my tooth. The purpose of this visit was to remove the tool and hopefully finish the job.

This time, he was much more pleasent to be around. He treated me more like a person. Is this a result of the haircut? When I saw him last, I was still a long-haired hippie freak. I had my hair cut right after he worked on me, while my face was still numb. Eh, whatever.

Well, I got some novacaine but not the morphine drip which I know would make everything okay. Sister morphine takes the edge off, believe me. I certainly could’ve used it the first hour he worked on me. However, after I realized that it wasn’t going to hurt, I relaxed a bit. After the second hour I was bored and had to stretch.

Man, did he screw around in there. The guy doing the work is an intern or grad student or whatever, so he had a doctor supervising who dropped by a few times. He had to relieve the area in the tooth around the tool so he could try to pry it out. Lots of vibrating the broken tool to try to shake it loose. Lots of use of another tool which removes tiny bits of tooth at a time. He pried on it with a pick. He ground on a spoon (not a spoon you eat with, a dental tool-type spoon thingy) to produce a tool which would hopefully grab on to it. I could feel the prying, but the tool refused to let go.

After two and a half hours of this, the supervising doctor suggested that he make room for another tool, and then try to insert the other tool and glue it to the broken piece. I got to wait for 15 minutes, sucking the drool out of my mouth every minute, waiting for the glue to dry. It didn’t work, the glue didn’t hold. On the bright side, he didn’t break the other tool off in there.

After that, more screwing around. He finally got the broken tool piece loose. However, it still refused to be removed. It slid up and down, but wouldn’t clear the tooth because the roots are slanted and a big chunk of tooth is kind of in the way. He didn’t want to grind out that obstruction (and I agree, no need to remove even more of an already very hollow tooth), so he fooled around some more, until about 4:30 or so, then sealed it up.

The broken tool will be removed, no question of that. But that will occur next time. He is even going to acquire a new special tool which supposedly will help.

Yes, I get to go back for yet another visit in about a month. However, after so much time spent in the chair, I think some of my dental anxiety has been relieved. It’s difficult to maintain a state of alarm for that long.

Of course, even after the next visit, I get to visit yet another dentist to have the support posts put in, and then after a waiting period after that procedure, have a crown put on. Fun fun fun.

Here’s my south park character. I think it’s a good likeness.

Inspired by Laurence Simon’s creation.

Update: a bunch of people are posting their characters here.

I went to see Sin City yesterday. This is the first time I have seen a movie during its opening week in a very long time. This is the first time I’d been excited about seeing a new movie in a long time.

I’d been looking forward to this movie since I heard about it last fall, and hoping that they didn’t fuck it up. I’m a huge fan of the graphic novels. I’m enough of a fan that I could tell from very brief previews which stories had been adapted for the movie, so I re-read some of them. FYI, the stories adapted were “A Dame to Kill For,” “The Big Fat Kill,” and “That Yellow Bastard.” The opening also had a version of a short Sin City story whose name escapes me. I’m a geek, but not that geeky.

Okay, I am that geeky. I just don’t remember the title of the story.

As with many adaptations, I was worried that it would fail to translate to the big screen. Fans, there is no need to worry. They follow the graphic novels so closely in this movie that you can scarcely tell where any changes were made. The books doubled as the storyboards, and apparently no scripts were ever written. I noticed a tiny bit of missing dialogue, but not very much. I noticed one bit character whose actions were slightly different in the movie than in the book. I noticed some instances in which men were fully or partially clothed when in the books they were naked. Luckily, Hollywood sexism continues and at least some of the time the women were naked when they were supposed to be. I have a feeling some prosthesis may have been involved, but I could be wrong. Frank Miller, the writer and artist of the graphic novels, tends to draw the women with larger than average breasts.

I have the feeling that the movie might be a little confusing for people who haven’t read the books, but probably not enough to deter enjoyment of the movie. Some of the motivations of the characters are a little unclear, particularly Dwight. Dwight owes the women of old town a debt since they saved his life and gave him a new face after he murdered a woman in the first Sin City book. However, that is completely lost on those unfamiliar with that story, since it wasn’t covered in the movie. A bit of extra narration would’ve cleared that up, but whatever. I don’t care.

This is noir taken to the extreme. Almost every shot is black and white, with color thrown in for very particular things, like eyes, or a dress, or that yellow bastard. This is another almost total CGI movie, as was “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.” I think it works well in this case since the movie is also highly stylized, and the unreality of the CGI adds to the style. Most of the storytelling takes place via the narration and visuals. There is a lot of violence, a lot of killing, some of it quite brutal. Miho, the asian swordswoman (and my favorite secondary character in the books), does a lot of cutting and stabbing. Just like the graphic novels.

Frank Miller was billed as co-director. Apparently he was on the set all the time, sitting right next to Rodriguez. I have a feeling that contributed quite a bit to what I think is a very successful movie. Very few punches were pulled in the translation, and it wasn’t enough to detract from the result.

The three novels are somewhat woven together so that the chronology follows that of the books. The stories themselves have fairly direct plots. Someone is hurt, or dies, and the protagonist has to clean up after the repurcussions. The fixing inevitably involves a lot of killing. I would say more, but I wouldn’t want to give it away for those who don’t know the stories. I hope it’s enough to note that none of the violence is gratuitous. The movie is about violent people who use rather direct methods to achieve thier ends.

Highly recommended. I’ll be seeing it a few more times before it leaves the theaters.

Update: the title of the short story included in the movie is, “The Customer is Always Right.”

It’s 4:30 a.m. new time or 3:30 a.m. old time. Central, as if it matters. Either way, I cannot get to sleep.

My best friend and drinking buddy is currently in India on a work-related trip. He left last Friday, and won’t be back until the 16th. He is supposed to be “knowledge-transferring” his expertise on a certain software product. He has basically been the sole expert on the product since his company “downsized” just about everyone else who knew the product well. At least, we both thought he was supposed to be doing that. His company sent him to India with very little in the way of explanation. He wasn’t even told what he was supposed to do once he got there. He prepared some kind of presentation, but I imagine at this point that he has already presented everything he had prepared before he left.

Not my problem, but an interesting state of affairs.

Before he left, I decided I would give the old liver a break on not drink while he was away. The last time I took a break from drinking was, probably, 1998. I could check my old writings, but I’m much too lazy for that. I remember that break occurred after a session of drinking 4-5 long islands made with rail liquor, with the resulting hangover from hell. The day after, I decided to quit drinking for one month. The stoppage started in late April. I ended up waiting until my birthday in the second week in June to resume my activities. It was an interesting test, especially since I still visited my old haunts. I just didn’t drink while everyone else did. It freaked one former friend out quite a bit, since he had a running complaint that we were co-dependants in booze. I still managed to have a good time just hanging out, so I learned that liquor was not a prerequisite to having a good time.

Normally, lately, I drink at least one beer per day. Often, especially lately, I drink stronger stuff, with my current favorite being Jameson Irish Whiskey. It’s pretty good, though it is blended. The price is a little higher than some, but it doesn’t carry any of the effects that cheap liquor usually provide. The number of UTI posts here is a testament to how often I was drinking it.

I still have a full complement of booze in the house. I didn’t go through some dumb ritual. This is a cleansing, a search for some kind of truth about myself, not a sea-change.

So far, I have discovered that I still have a strange desire to stay up late. I also note, not surprisingly, that my body had adapted to the booze, and responds to a lack of it. I’m wound a bit tighter than normal. I have more energy. I can’t get to sleep as easily, but I feel better when I wake up. My thoughts are often as chaotic, intense, and demanding as I remember from before I started drinking. However, there are no withdrawal symptoms, so whatever physical dependencies that may have existed are not significant.

I drink, simply, because I enjoy it and it doesn’t interfere with my life to a great extent. I enjoy the buzz. I enjoy the fact that when buzzed I only have to think of one thing at a time, or two at the most, rather than the multiple thoughts which usually bounce around my head. Plus, I like the taste. I don’t drink to get drunk, though it sometimes ends up that way.

Once I’m employed, I imagine my activities will have to be scaled back so they don’t interfere with work. That’s pretty much inevitable.

While a beer, or a lowball of Jameson on ice, would certainly hit the spot right now, I can also live without it. However, I see no reason right now to make living without it a priority. I live alone and am responsible to no one but myself. I will, however, finish out the break I started.