Maltybore Barryland

If you ever need a candid shot of a spread-eagled, full-on naked pitbull, might I recommend this one?

Don't be fooled by the nipples. He'll eat your head. Look at those jaws. Those are the jaws of Jaws.

My parents couldn't think of anything expensive to buy me that I don't want this year, which happens every five years or so, so they gave me what they always do when the well runs dry: a home-made gift certificate for 1 (one) free computer. My current computer's not new. It's not going to win any awards. But with a hundred bucks worth of ram, it would still be kind of a beast for Youtube, Word, and Google, which constitute roughly 100% of the time I spend on the computer, with a margin of error of plus or minus 0%. And I tried, I really tried to talk them out of buying me a computer, but they kept wearing on me and wearing on me and telling me, "Yes, yes you need a new computer, hallelujah!" So I decided to stick it to them by getting a cheap computer. I picked out a piece of shit with an AMD processor. I don't know how I'm going to look at myself in the mirror tomorrow.

The real villain here, of course, is the Dell website. I couldn't for the life of me build a Dell that cost less than $1,475 without losing some integral component that would make the computer completely unacceptable. I need 4 gigs of 800 MHz ram. I need bluetooth compatibility, a hard drive that automatically backs itself up, and a TV tuner. All essential for a power user such as myself. After all, Youtube will be running in hi-def in a decade or so.

I was, of course, going to get a Mac, because cool, hot people have Macs, and I'm a hanger-on. They miscast those commercials. I mean, Justin Long and John Hodgman are okay and everything, but it really ought to be something more like this.

But I didn't get a Mac, because they're outrageously cheap or outrageously expensive, with absolutely no middle ground unless you want one of those bullshit all-in-one monstrosities. Gee whiz, I can't wait for the tiniest thing to break on one of those.

In order to actually take advantage of the superior firepower that my NEW mediocre HP desktop will offer, I just ordered one of these

and one of these.

If you care, I applaud you, and if you don't, take a long walk off a short pier! I'm excited. It's high time I re-formed the band and made some bad pop music. What else am I going to do? Grad school? Mwahahah!

I just got home. I had to go through Dallas to get here, because apparently American Airlines really likes right triangles. But after they bumped me off my flight, they put me on first class, so I got to drink a bunch of free beer sitting next to this girl who knitted intensely for the duration of the trip. After deplaning it took a little over 45 minutes for the baggage claim carousel to shriek and whir and convey, and I had to stand there waiting, and I had to pee like crazy, and man, I was fucking furious. By the time I paid the cab driver $45 U.S. in front of my apartment building, I had a hangover. Stupid Christmas.

Now I have 16 days to write 35 pages of academic paper, and all the motivation of a skagged-out trustafarian. It feels so good to be home, where I have things I have to do, and can avoid doing.

From now on I'll try to keep my pretentious travelogues under 2,500 words, kay?