This is week 94 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 651): #1GF! and The Amazing Hobo Sapiens

To start my Sunday off with a side order of fun, I started going through the instructions for my taxes. As I was reading, I found this interesting line:

“Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.”

That’s right out of the instructions. To make matters more amusing, Schedule C is entitled, “Profit or Loss From A Business.” I wondered about how much ink could be saved by eliminating lines like this from federal tax instructions.

After I went through federal and state instructions, #1GF! and I went out for a walk. The weather was nice, so it seemed like a good opportunity to get some mild exercise. Within two minutes of starting the walk, I got a call from a friend that I haven’t talked to in years.

He asked how the blog was going, and I said that I needed to get a regular job. As fun as blogging is, it won’t pay as much as tech does. “I can get you interested in what I had for breakfast, but I haven’t been able to make it pay,” I told him.

The guy mentioned that sometimes when he’s reading this blog, he gets loses a lot of time and eventually says, “Ok, I have to stop reading this.” I’ve heard that same thing from other people, I think it’s one of the coolest things about the Life of Riley. It’s second only to the times when people I’ve never met tell me that they started laughing when a story of mine popped into their head while they were driving to work.

This blog is the potato chip of literature. There is nothing in here of any real literary nutritional value. People know this, and yet they keep sticking their hands into the bag. For me, that’s pretty cool.

After the walk, #1GF! and I drove to the library to find baby name books, in part to stop me from mentioning “Majondra” or “Mocha” as valid names when people asked if we had anything in mind. We grabbed the books and headed home to relax.

Or so I thought. #1GF! suggested that we play a game, so I took out Pandemic (a cooperative strategy game). We lost the first game pretty quickly, and we played again to redeem ourselves. Unfortunately, we lost that game too.

We ended up playing five games in a row because someone at the table refused to give up and let the game win. I’m not naming names, but that someone is pregnant and doesn’t know the first thing about growing a beard. We eventually beat the game, and were allowed to return to our real world, non virus fighting roles as #1GF! and The Amazing Hobo Sapiens.

Monday (Day 652): Is The Internet Useful Or Useless?

I backed up my PC files (have you backed up recently?) and spent the rest of the morning replying to the letter that I received the previous week from the plumber’s attorney. It seems insane that I have to waste time replying to a lawyer that was hired to defend someone who installed a cheap boiler rather than one that was on our contract. It’s absolutely astounding that people like this are out there.

I faxed the letter, and then IM’d a friend who had been recently laid off. Even thought I haven’t physically talked to the guy on the phone in years, I chat with him once a week or so online. The internet is a weird tool. I don’t know if it promotes or discourages communication. At one point, I got tired of typing and dialed his number. Maybe it’s a generational difference, but sometimes, I feel like text a useless form of communication.

The guy got laid off on the previous Friday, and this was his first official day of unemployment. He was doing all the typical things that I did during my first week, like wandering around your apartment and feeling like someone would soon give you a task to do. The conversation ended up taking a while because, as I said, I haven’t actually talked to the guy on the phone in years.

Once off the phone, I wrote a quick beard post and sent a message to a friend in Holland to see if “Bite neuker” actually meant anything in Dutch, because it was used as an offensive Dutch word on a recent episode of 30 Rock.

I spent the afternoon trying to finish up the Life Of Riley week 93 for its typical Monday release, but I didn’t make it. #1GF! brought home a calzone, and just as I was saving the post for the next day, the internet slowed to a dialup-like crawl. I had to save the post in a text file to get to dinner before it was cold.

When I went back to check on the internet, it was still crawling at a rate that people would’ve complained to CompuServe about in the mid 90′s. I troubleshot from the inside out. The PCs were both having trouble, so I checked on the router, which was fine. I then checked if it was a DNS issue by checking name resolution and changing DNS servers. That didn’t work, so I checked on our ISP for any outage reports. There weren’t any.

Without putting a call into my ISP or putting a sniffer on the wire, I wasn’t going to get anywhere. And I didn’t care that much. I figured that there was probably something going on with my ISP, and decided to check on the problem in the morning. I learned long ago to save posts in text files at the first sign of trouble, so I wasn’t all that concerned with the speed of a connection I wasn’t going to use for the rest of the night.

Tuesday (Day 653): St. Patrick’s Day

I left the house soon after #1GF! to buy a little food for my parents who were coming home from a trip. At the checkout, I ran into an aunt that I hadn’t seen in a while, and she had already heard about the baby. I was so surprised to see her, that I would’ve forgotten to tell her if she hadn’t mentioned it first.

I dropped enough food at my parents house to get them through a couple of days, and headed out to the airport. I’ve been to the airport a ton of times in my life, and it seems that every time I go in, I miss at least one turn and end up in the wrong spot. This time would be no different.

I hopped on the highway and the roads were pretty clear thanks to the city of Boston’s excuse for an all offices closed holiday called “Evacuation Day” that falls on St. Patrick’s Day. I listened to some horribly repetitive pop, and followed the signs to the airport and to the terminal area.

I turned into the terminal, and expected to see a live pickup area and a parking lot. That’s the way it always goes. I usually park the car at a terminal parking lot, and then go inside to wait at as close to the gate as they let people with beards wait.

Instead, this terminal had no parking. I pulled into the live parking, and was routed back out to the main road by a state trooper. As I was trying to figure out how to loop back around to the terminal and avoid ending up back on the highway, my phone rang. Because I was preoccupied with following signs, I didn’t recognize the number. I dropped the phone into my cup holder and looped back around the airport to make another pass. Instead of getting sucked into the live parking again, I pulled into central parking.

I pulled into the gargantuan central parking garage, and drove around trying to find a sign that told me which way the terminals were. I wanted to park the car on the side of the building that the terminal was on, so that my parents wouldn’t have to walk for hours to get to the car.

Central parking services several terminals, and encountered more jersey barriers than signs. In fact, in my first five minutes, I couldn’t find a single sign for any of them. After going up a couple of levels and backing up a few times to look down rows, I caught a glimpse of the terminal letter on a small sign one row over. I pulled around to the row and followed that to another sign, to another sign, and eventually caught glimpse of some doors that looked like they might lead to somewhere inhabited by humans with luggage.

I was finally in the right area. It took me a few minutes, but I finally found a spot and jumped out of the car. By my phone clock, the plane would be landing any second if it were on time. I walked through an overly wide set of glass doors to a small hall that contained a bank of elevators and a set of stairs. There were no signs of life, and no signs telling me how to get to the terminal. It was like I was in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. If you choose to go down the stairs, turn to page 226. If you choose to take the elevator somewhere go to page 73.

I wasn’t sure if the way to the terminals would be catwalk or a tunnel, so I chose to go to page 226, and ran down one flight of stairs. There, I found a sign that read, “terminal access on level four.” I had been on level 1, and I was now on level 0. I was amused that the floors were numbered like items in a Perl array (where zero is really the first item), but not amused enough. I growled at the sign and bounded up five flights of stairs to a catwalk. I walked on the moving sidewalk across the bridge to the terminal, and shook my head at the people who stood on it like it was a ride at Disney Land.

As I came down an escalator into the main terminal, I had a good view of the people milling about the ticket counters. Even though I had the flight information, I didn’t know the gate, so I walked around looking for one of those TV’s that do flight to gate translations for people who need them. Surprisingly, there weren’t any.

“What the hell is with this terminal?” I thought as I checked my phone for the time. I was three minutes late, and had no cell service. “Great,” I thought. I figured that my best bet would be to go down to the baggage claim. Just before I made my final commitment to the escalator to the baggage claim, my phone rang.

“Hey,” I said. It was my dad.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m inside. Where are you?”

“Oh, we’re outside near the live pickup.”

I walked out the door and scanned the area.

“Hello? Hello?” I said.

The call dropped. In the distance, standing where I had passed through the first time with my car, I could see a man shadowed against the light outside the terminal. He took his phone away from his head and looked at it. This seems to be the universal action for people who have calls drop. “That has to be them,” I thought, while making my way between the buses in the live park area.

Sure enough, it was. If I had been ten minutes late, or picked up their earlier call, the pickup would’ve been simple and quick. Instead, I was ten minutes late and preparing to lead them on the trek back to central parking. It wasn’t as big a hassle as it sounds, but it was definitely inefficient.

When we got into the garage, my mother seemed to be impressed that I got a parking spot on level one. She even knew what type of symbol were on the posts to tell you what area you parked in.

“I’ve never gotten a spot on one. Have you?”

My dad just shrugged.

“Are you sure it was one?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said.

“Are you on the minuteman level?”

“I don’t know. It was either a minuteman or a sea captain. I’m not sure which.”

I wondered how the devil she knew the symbols of each level. I’m not one to notice signs. It’s almost as if I know to walk twenty five paces and then turn left, and then take fifty paces and turn right. I’m like human Big Track.

We eventually found the car, and I took my parents home. I stayed while they told me a little about their trip, but I wanted to give them time to settle in. They had been up very early to go to the airport, and they seemed happy to have enough food to last them a couple of days.

If you have to bring someone home from the airport, getting them a little food is a really good idea. With $20, you get a little milk, some stuff to make sandwiches, a couple of snacks, and something for breakfast, and it takes a little pressure off of tired travelers. It’s one of those times when twenty bucks adds up to more than twenty bucks.

I left to let my parents get settled in, and went out to do some food shopping of my own. As usual, I grabbed too much to carry and had to grab a basket halfway through. You’d think I’d learn, but I never do.

When I got home, I had a message from the Attorney General’s office, and the lady told me that I wasn’t going about things correctly. She said that it was a common mistake, but made it plain that she wasn’t there to sort out every detail of the case. She was there to get us to a settlement. She suggested that a copy of my response letter be mailed to the lawyer who was representing our plumber. I wasn’t aware that I was supposed to contact them directly, but I did as she asked.

I printed out another copy of the letter and brought it down to the post office. The charge to send it certified was $2.75, and I only had $2.53 on me. I sent it regular mail. I went home to get back to finishing up LOR Week 93.

#1GF! came home after work to pick me up to take her mother out to dinner. We picked her mother up and went to a relatively new restaurant near her house that she wanted to try. While we were sitting there, a couple of our friends walked by, and we talked to them for a few minutes.

The guy kept thanking me for loaning him my lifting straps to move a treadmill a few weeks back. He’s used them in several moves since, and they have been extremely useful. I have to admit that for an “as seen on TV” product, those straps have proven to be worth every penny.

The couple went on their way, and we got back to dinner. The food wasn’t exactly good, but it had good elements in it. It was weird. For example, the pasta tasted homemade and the cheese was grated Reggiano in a bowl. Those are upscale elements, but the place wasn’t upscale. It certainly wasn’t bad food, but there was nothing really delicious about the meal despite the elements.

During dinner, #1GF!’s mom turned to me.

“I believe in you. You can do whatever you want,” she said.

“You mean like quitting my job and trying to make a job out of blogging?”

“Yes.”

“You know the blog’s a failure, right?”

“It’s not. You need to give it time.”

“Like, say two years?”

“Look, sometimes you can’t get what you want.”

“Exactly.”

“You can write a book. Be a stand up comedian.”

“What?”

“Sometimes you just don’t get what you want when you want it.”

“Wait, what happened to doing whatever I want?”

“You can.”

“I am so confused right now.”

I don’t know if I was picking up what was being laid down, but i certainly appreciated the sentiment. We enjoyed the meal, and dropped #1GF!’s mom back at her house before heading home.

Wednesday (Day 654): I Am Now An Efficiency Expert

#1GF! gave me the green light, so I spent the entire morning taking information regarding the baby out of a super secret text file and reinserting it into the MISSING DATA lines in LOR posts from weeks 83 to 92. It was a little editing and a lot of mundane cutting and pasting that took me all morning to finish.

At around noon, I got my noontime call from a pretty unhappy #1GF! telling me about some stuff that was going on with her job. I worked with her long before we got together, and I have a level of respect for her professionally. I couldn’t figure out what the corporate angle was behind what she was telling me, but in my experience, there’s always a corporate angle.

When I got off the phone, I finished up LOR Week 93. I skipped lunch and finished writing around 4PM.

I looked at my LinkedIn profile and got a rejection from another recruiter. There’s nothing like a job search in a down economy to chip away at your ego. I thought it was a little funny though because a rejection from a recruiter isn’t just a rejection for one job: it’s a rejection for all of his jobs. I didn’t look at it as a rejection. I looked at it like I was efficient in obtaining several rejections at once. I added “efficiency expert” to my resume.

After striking out while looking for jobs on LinkedIn, I started LOR Week 94. I wondered whether rejections were simply a way to guide me toward what I’m really supposed to do. Maybe it gets me to write some short stories or get the book done. I don’t know. I can see how delusional belief in divine plans can be helpful in adult life.

Once #1GF! was home and settled in, I started going through the baby name book. Even though there are a lot of made up and ridiculous names in there, #1GF! would not accept them as proof that “Goddess of Metal” is a valid baby name.

Thursday (Day 655): Fire Alarms Without The Fire

While I ate my cereal, I looked through the baby book more. I didn’t bother #1GF! by calling out some of the names that sounded funny. I just chuckled about them on my own.

#1GF! headed off to work, and I started putting together the taxes. There’s nothing like doing the taxes to spice up what would otherwise be a boring day. There are terms to define, boxes to check, and schedules to fill out. For me, it takes a fair amount of concentration and a radio station that I don’t have to concentrate on.

While I was rereading a particularly invigorating paragraph defining under what circumstances an individual could be considered head of household, the fire alarms went off. BLAAAAAAP! deet BLAAAAAAAP! deeti BLAAAAAP! deeti Rinse and repeat.

There was no smoke on my floor, so I bolted to the basement and then up to the attic to find out what was burning. By the time I got to the attic, the alarm stopped. I stood there in silence in the freezing cold of my attic and was thankful that no one else was around to get freaked out by the noise.

I replaced a battery in one of the alarms hoping that it might’ve been the cause of some sort of alarm trigger. I waited ten minutes and then went back to the taxes.

Five minutes later, the alarms went off again. Awesome. Nothing like random blaring noise to help get the taxes done. They bleated on for a couple of minutes, and I dug out the warranty information on our wonderful, new smoke alarms.

I called the smoke alarm manufacturer and went through a series of troubleshooting steps that ended with the suggestion that I replace the regular fire alarm in the attic with a heat sensor. It took a half hour to figure out, but according to the lady on the phone, putting regular fire alarms in unheated spaces can cause the sensors to malfunction.

The minute I hung up the phone and took two steps down the stairs, the alarms went off full-blast once again. “You have got to be kidding me,” I said as I walked down the stairs. I will neither confirm or deny whether the previous sentence was cleaned up of extensive profanity before being posted.

I called the manufacturer back and talked to another representative. He was polite, but I wouldn’t say that he sounded psyched to talk to me. He had the sound of a man that had been recently been poked in the chest a number of times and was trying to hide it from the customer.

I had three alarms detached and sitting on the counter from the previous troubleshooting session, and this rep added one more to the pile. He had me detach an alarm that wouldn’t stop flashing a red light. I was told to let it sit on the counter to see if it was a wiring problem that was activating the alarm. The alarm remained silent for the rest of the day.

I went back to the fun job of doing the taxes. Taxes aren’t hard, but they certainly do make them complicated enough that I understand why people have their taxes done by professionals. I gave up at the end of the day because the whole fire alarm session ate enough time that there was no possibility of me finishing.

I went to the computer for the first time and didn’t look up any tax related information. I wrote a little more of the book (or short story, or whatever) and played QuakeLive for an hour before #1GF! got home. When she arrived, #1GF! brought new batteries with her. I replaced a couple in the smoke alarms, even though I didn’t think they needed it. The last thing that I wanted was for the alarms to go off in the middle of the night.

We ate dinner and I watched Heavy Metal In Baghdad, a documentary about one of the only metal bands in Iraq. It was pretty late, but I couldn’t help watching it for a couple of reasons: A. “Metal” was in the title, and B. I instantly recognized a song called “Shark Dreams” being played within the first few minutes. The song was only playing in the background, but the it’s from 5ive’s Telestic Disfracture, which is one of my favorite CDs. I’d know the sound anywhere by the goosebumps on my arms.

It wasn’t an amazing documentary in that it told a complete and compelling story, but it was still pretty amazing. As the only metal band in Iraq, the band only got to practice once a year, and play out even less because of the constant violence. The fact that the band (and the documentary crew) would literally risk their lives for metal was enough to get me to watch it the whole way through.

Friday (Day 656): Checking The “Do You Have A Penis?” Box

I got up and watched music videos while I ate my cereal. I don’t know where this habit came from, but it’s been going on for a couple of weeks on and off. I flip between the new stuff and VH1 Classic. The new videos are to see what the kids are listening to these days, and the classics are to jog parts of my memory that are better left alone. Did you know that Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional” is packed with cowbell? Would you have been better off without that information? Yea, me too.

Once #1GF! was off to work, I went back to the taxes. I deduced from some paperwork that she hadn’t given me all of her tax forms, so I called her to see where they might be. I eventually found the forms I needed stashed into a shoe box for safe keeping. When I was close to finished, I called my dad for advice on a line that I didn’t know what to do with.

While I was talking, the water company guy read the meter. He walked right up to the window, and even though I was a couple of feet inside, he pretended like he didn’t know I was there. I thought that was polite of him, even if it was a little weird.

My mother stopped by later on her way home from getting her hair did. She stood outside and scratched at the screen, and when I looked up from the kitchen table, she scared the shit out of me. Match point: mom. I finished up my taxes by 5PM, and called #1GF! to tell her about it.

“Hey do you want to know how the taxes came out?”

“Sure.”

“[I give info]”

“That’s different than what you told me before.”

“Well, I did some research, and you’re not qualified to be head of household like I thought.”

[irritated] “Why not?”

“Yep. I reread the rules and you can’t be.”

“What and you can?”

“Well, I’m a man, so…”

“WHAT?”

“You can be the head of household because you’re a man?? That’s BULL!”

“Yep, I checked the “Do you have a penis?” box, and you don’t so I couldn’t give you any deduction for it.”

“Oh I’m so mad right now… Wait, what?”

“I’m kidding. It has nothing to do with penises. It has to do with relationship qualifications… [explains the real HoH rules].”

“I was so mad. I was ready to call my congressman or something.”

Once I got off the phone, I put up one of the troublesome fire alarms, and then took it down once it started flashing red again. It’s not supposed to do that. I left it on the counter and went to continue roughing out this week’s LOR.

#1GF! got home a little late, and busted me playing QuakeLive. She didn’t actually bust me, per se, because she encourages video game playing. That’s the truth. No kidding. I am the only one in my house who feels like a lack of a job should preclude one from spending his time improving his fragging skills.

“Do you mind if I lay down for an hour or so?” #1GF! asked.

“No, not at all,” I said between explosions. I stepped away from the game and let people use me for target practice. “Are you alright?”

“Yea, I just need an hour.”

I noted the time and went back to the game. By the time #1GF! got up, I had been beaten to a pulp by what were probably hundreds of Quake hardened twelve year olds. In the second to last game, I got beaten in a duel 20 to -6. It was sad, but I played out the game until the end rather than quit.

In my last game of the night, I actually won. I had never won a match before, and I wanted to tell #1GF! all about it like it was an actual accomplishment. And that, my friends, is exactly why unemployed people should not play video games: they insert a sense of accomplishment where there really isn’t any.

Saturday (Day 657): A Slap In the Face

In the morning, we left the house to get cannolis for #1GF!’s mother from Mike’s Pastry in the North End. In my mind, Mike’s is a decent bakery, but not something that you drive a great distance for. If you’re near it, you’re near it. Otherwise, there are plenty of local bakeries that are just as good.

On a couple of special occasions a year, #1GF! and I make the trek in to get cannolis for #1GF!’s mother because she claims that there are no other cannolis like them. #1GF! usually waits in the car, and I jump out for the cannolis while she double parks.

#1GF! pulled to a corner on Hanover Street, and the traffic was so bad that I jumped out right there. While I walked down the street, I thought I recognized a guy that we had spoken with briefly a few years before. He was standing in front of a cafe that was full of older guys.

Maybe it was the result of watching too many gangster movies, but walking past those guys gave me a strange feeling. It was almost like when you feel like someone is watching you in their peripheral vision. But, really there was no discernible cause for the feeling other than an overactive imagination and a bad case of stereotyping. Either way, I didn’t linger or make small talk.

When I went into Mike’s, the line was amorphous but short, and I ordered the cannolis.

“What part of Italy are you from?” asked a guy in front of me to the lady who was filling out his order.

“No.” replied the woman firmly as she walked away.

“Why not?” he asked, but she was either out of earshot or pretending to be.

Within a couple of minutes, I had the cannolis and went out to find the car. #1GF! had moved a couple of stores down. I opened the door and climbed in.

“I got yelled at,” she said.

“Really? Double parking here and in Southie is a way of life.”

“One truck honked at me, another guy yelled at me, and a guy coming the other way yelled at me, too.”

“Wow.”

#1GF! started driving.

“Yea and there’s the delivery truck that honked at me. What a dick.”

The delivery truck was double parked.

We took the cannolis down to #1GF!’s family’s house for a late birthday celebration. The weather was unexpectedly nice, and warm enough that a jacket wasn’t necessary. When the kids were outside playing, #1GF!’s mother gave all the adults some unhappy news. It stung like an unexpected slap in the face. Once everyone calmed down a little, things went back to near normal on the surface. I went outside and played with the kids, and the adults stayed in and did whatever adults do.

We all ate dinner and hung out until the night revealed New England’s true, and freezingly cold intentions. On the way home, #1GF! and I discussed what had gone on during the day. She cried a little, and I told her that I’d help her in any way that I could. I don’t know what I can do to help things, but it was all that I could do.

What I Learned

• The IRS wants criminals to report money gained from criminal activities on a schedule marked for profit or loss from a business.
• I know what the Head of Household designation on tax forms is.
• This blog is the potato chip of literature.
• #1GF! will play Pandemic until she wins.
• Inexplicably, I still get lost at the airport.
• Certified mail is $2.75.
• There are a handful of people on QuakeLive that suck worse than I do.
• My fire alarm system is touchy.

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Posted in Life of Riley