seriously, I had two newly purchased nalgenes. surely, I didn't need both.

So, I'm not sure how most people deal with being lost, but I deal with it similar to the way I deal with other mistakes. For a mistake in painting, I use more paint. For a mistake in writing, I use more words. For a mistake in driving, I use more driving. Why stop and figure out where you are when you can continue to drive around and hope that the next turn is the right turn? Let's be fair:  my latest driving adventure was less about being lost and more about not knowing how to get where I wanted to go. I knew exactly where I was (I was in my car!) and where I wanted to be. "There!" I would shout and point to an elevated freeway, "I want to be on you! How do I get to be on you?"

It isn't that I don't apply logic to my driving with more driving. I am sure you can probably imagine me, driving underneath the freeway, shaking my fist at it, cursing the city of Oakland and then Berkeley and then back into Oakland.  I wasn't just driving aimlessly; I was driving with aim. My aim was up above me. I had my aim in sight the whole time, if it meant potentially missing stop signs or one way signs or other cars. Can I make a U-Turn here? Well, it does not specifically tell me that I cannot, so I certainly don't see a reason that I can't.

After several minutes of the previous plan, I decided to try a new one (No, it was not to stop and ask for directions or even to use the gps on my phone. Don't be ridiculous). I could easily find entrances to 880 North, so I figured, if I drove up north one exit, I could turn around at the next one.

Fool! Now you're just slowly making your way up north. Why on earth would they have a southbound entrance anywhere near a northbound exit? Don't be stupid. Near the northbound exit, there should clearly be lots of complicated residential streets, a liquor store and nothing. 

Plan #3 of following a cop car was also flawed, as apparently he was off to fight crime or get a cup of coffee or something, and not trying to drive back toward San Jose like I was.

Eventually I had driven enough of Oakland to recognize I was actually headed back to where I had started my entire adventure and would be given the opportunity to try again. Success!

Now, how did I get into this mess? I had driven there; driving back should be a simple case of retracing steps. And it was. My error was that I had exited the freeway to find a bathroom. Everywhere I have been, save the great state of California, has plenty of signs telling you where gas stations are and also have gas stations that are open with bathrooms. California has none of that. California has gas stations, often closed, often without bathrooms. California has signs telling you useless things like that litter pickup is sponsored by no one or that the speed limit is 55 MPH (no, California, I beg to differ). So, rather than calmly exiting to a gas station right off of the freeway, I instead found myself driving haphazardly through side streets at the sight of a Lucky sign. Grocery stores! They have bathrooms!

I had briefly considered relegating one my recently purchased Nalgene bottles as the emergency car toilet, but felt that I could not accomplish that task without disaster.

So, I was running into a Lucky, looking forlorn and desperate and was cut off by another man, and a locked door. Twice thwarted! Turns out, you need a key, which man ahead of me went to get. This is one of those situations where I desperately flip through my options:  wet pants, run outside and urinate in parking lot, or wet pants. So I waited. Man ahead of me was quite quick, and the day was saved.

After peeing for what felt like 26 years, I was back in the car. Whew, I had said to myself, the worst is over! No, unfortunately, I had to find how to get back onto the freeway.

so my new thing is just to write in one direction: forward

I'm sure it happens to everyone. Someone will be telling you a story, sincerely believing it is the first time you have heard it, but it isn't. The person probably started the story with the non-question "have I told you before how..." and then proceed to segue immediately into the story. You are left with two choices: forcefully push your way to the front of the conversation in an effort to beat them to the punchline and to affirm that yes, you had been told this before ("...AND THEN YOU SAW NICK LACHEY, RIGHT?") or just nod along until the ride is done ("oh, wow, haha."). Then, sometimes, the teller will realize you had in fact been told this before, and may ask "oh why didn't you stop me?" Why, indeed. 

Worse, though, is my paranoia in the other direction. I attempt to qualify it. "I was telling my friend...," I'll start a story, so as to open the possibility that you are the friend to whom I was telling it, or, at the very least, it is a story that I have told at least once lest the guise of it being an original and spontaneous telling be disproved. I've found, though, that people often just don't listen to me anyway. "Did you hear," someone will say to me, "that this thing happened."

Yes, I did. I told you that!

I am reasonably sure the sound of my voice is refrigerator-buzz-offensive, in that, eventually, you forget it is even on--constant and irritating but still relatively easy to tune out. When it stops, things seem odd, but nothing has changed in your life except that your yogurt may no longer be fresh.

Still, I enjoy using this to my advantage. There will be many times when engaged in conversation that I'll determine that the person is not really listening and I do not care and certainly do not want to talk any more. So, I'll throw together some nonsense phrases that the person will interpret however they wanted to anyway.

Recent work example:
Teen: Hey, I wanted to check my facebook so my girlfriend something about soccer something about my iPhone over the wifi for something facebook something. 
Jesse: Oh. the wifi?
Teen: Yeah, they said that I could use the wifi on my break at that one building but this other building has a password and I wanted to check it here.
Jesse: Oh, well, web blocker, work internet personal internet web key shared connection internet wifi.
Teen: Oh, well, I'll just check it tomorrow.

Success!

I've found that a surprisingly small number of people question nonsense. Especially monotone, long-winded nonsense that sounds like short sentences. Try it out. I am curious if it works for other people, or if my voice is prohibitively offensive so as to discount all of its content.

Speaking of my voice, I am always shocked by the number of teens who, upon meeting me, are incapable of recognizing my voice as the one that talked to them on the phone just days earlier.

Teen: Yeah, I talked to this guy on the phone who said to bring my paperwork.
Jesse: That was me! You talked to me!

I mean, I really do believe I have a distinctive voice in the sense that if Truman Capote and Fran Drescher had a voice baby, it would still be annoyed by my mine. It may just be that teens are dumb.

Teen: Yeah, I talked to this guy at my school who said to come.
Jesse: That was me! You met me!

Who knows? Did you even read this, or was it said in my voice. Because if it was, chances are, you won't remember it in a couple of hours anyway. 

Or better yet, I've already told you.

a very jesse christmas: a photo essay

A tradition that I hold very near and dear to my heart every year (and by every year, I mean twice in college and then not again until today) is wrapping doors for Christmas. How festive is that? Every time you open your door, it is like opening a present. A big, unexciting present. Oh yay, you got me the things I didn't clean up from yesterday. How did you know?

So, today, I set out to buy some wrapping paper (one of two necessary ingredients, the other being a door) and, several hours later, got to work. The endeavor was, what's the word, stressful. Let's start at the end and work our way backwards. Here is the final result:

See? Blurry and far away and in a small frame, it is quite lovely. Those are Christmas lights, by the way, not a [insert funny thing]. I couldn't actually come up with something funny. I had: black chocolate cake with sprinkles; Jackson Pollock painting; 99 multicolored luftballoons; clown panties; that gum wall from that one picture on the internet. Also, if I were a better blogger, I would have linked that last word to the actual picture. Let's see if I can find it. Oh, here it is. Yeah, that's gross.

Also, on that post-it is a frog I drew. For work. No lie.

There were four issues with this project.

Issue #1: the tape dispenser.

Long gone was that little plastic thingy that separates "tape dispenser" from "plastic bowl with a roll of tape in it." Improvised solution proved to be a failure:

 
So, the plan of standing on a chair, holding the entire roll of paper which I have begun to wrap around the top third of the door, trying to rip off a piece of tape from the tape dispenser plastic bowl with a roll of tape in it turned out to be a poor one. In cahoots with Issue #1 was Issue #1.2: the phone interviewee, with whom I had earlier left a message, calling back...

...which led to Issue #1.3: trying to remove the stray piece of tape that flopped onto the already set paper while the phone was ringing.

Issue #1.3 remains unresolved, largely due to Issue #2.

Issue #2: general incompetence.

Photo Unavailable. 

Issue #3: doorknobs of irregular shape (i.e., not round). 

Doorknobs are part of the door-wrapping process that give it that extra bit of fun. Smarter folk than I could probably mathematically figure out where on the paper to cut a correctly shaped hole in which to insert the doorknob. I went with the "wrap over it and deal with it later" philosophy. Much like the "I'll go to sleep now and finish studying in the morning" philosophy and the "I'm going to the gym later so I am going to eat a bunch of pizza now" philosophy, it ended with both disappointment and the need to cut an amorphous hole in a large piece of paper. It also ultimately ended with some patchwork. 

...and...

The major effect of Issue #3 will probably be seen in the near future, as the little patches flake off when the door is opened and closed. Issues 1 through 3 had all been dealt with when we arrived at Issue #4. 

Issue #4: not enough paper. 

The final wrapping layer resulted in this: 

So, I came up with this solution:

Done! Good thing I bought two rolls of paper!


So, God bless us, every one.




















Bonus content! The descending quality of hinge lineup:

Top!

Middle!

Bottom piece I cut while sitting in my office chair rather than get up!

Merry Christmas!
PS - I tweet now! Tweet me! @tweetjessehall