Zel-kun’s Words

I spent a good deal of my early childhood in one of two places: In my bedroom and in the hospital.  My parents marriage was on its last legs, and the arguments still echo somewhere in my memory.  As a child, I spent a lot of time hiding from the screaming voices.  I didn’t know what they meant, only that they were loud and angry.

Most kids jump on the bed, I was no exception, up until I was four years old.  I was jumping on my grandma’s bed and for some reason, I jumped off.  I crashed headfirst into the dresser, which had these sharp metal handles, and split my scalp wide open.  Fortunately, I was too young to remember the pain, but I imagine it was quite painful.

I was born with a lazy eye.  While my left eye would function normally, my right with focused on whatever was going on somewhere in the sky.  Because of this, my parents wheeled me into the hospital up in Chicago to get some eye surgery done.  This was done a total of three times over the course of a year or so, the periods in-between I had an eyepatch on.

Sadly, as much as I wanted, my parents woul not get me the parrot to sit on my shoulder.

Aside from that, I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).  I find the criteria for this questionable as I wonder how many five-year-olds have no trouble paying attention.  They put me on ritalin, which I suppose attacked the root of the problem nicely.

The root of ADD is that the mind tries to do too many things at once, and can’t focus on any of them.  There are simply too many thoughts clamoring for attention.  Its like listening to a crowd of people, and trying to focus on what only one of them are saying.

Ritalin (and its analogs), silence the crowd.  The one problem is that its not selective in the thoughts it silences.  It silences all of them, giving an outside observer the illusion that the subject taking the ritalin is paying attention, when in reality its just a stare, looking for the sake of looking.

I remember staring out a window for hours on end.  I looked back on the event that evening and shuddered, for I couldn’t remember thinking anything during the entire time.

Is a human without thoughts even alive?  I’m certain that my childlike mind did not think in so deep a voice, but maybe that base fear was the same.

I spent a lot of time in the long white corridors, being walked or wheeled around.  I remember rooms where a man or woman in a white coat would sit down with me and ask me questions.  In the end, there would often be a needle to draw blood, and several people needed to hold me down to do it.

To this day, I can’t think of getting blood taken without cringing.  Oddly enough, I have absolutely no problem with getting a shot.

This continued through my elementary school years, but that’s a story for another chapter…

I went to Wendy’s for lunch today.  I noticed that they have quite a few items on their menu that aren’t chili.  I find that none of them seemed particularly appetizing, especially when they have giant pictures of their chili everywhere.  I nearly ordered chili strictly out of habit.

I ended up getting a burger and fries.  The burger wasn’t that great, but the fries were awesome, and its always cool to get a meal for three dollars.

It is snowing today.  It really hasn’t stopped snowing since Friday, with a short break here and there.  Its one of the snowier winters I can recall, which isn’t entirely a bad thing.  It is pleasant to look at, and when its snowing, it tends to be a bit warmer.  I don’t recall the scientific reasoning for this, but I think it has something to do with the clouds being around the freezing point of water.  If it weren’t for two things, I wouldn’t mind snow at all.

1. Traffic: Snow makes people do dumb things.  I’m not sure what it is, its like the combination of cold and white fuse together with a synapse in the brain to create a new and potent form of stupid.  I’ve seen people cut across three lanes of traffic in a blizzard, do 10 MPH in a light flurry, and stop in the middle of the road to brush off their car.  Snow makes my one hour commute turn into a two to three hour trip.

2. Shovelling: Snow looks light and fluffy, but it gets heavy, quickly.  Combine that with… say, and ice storm like Saturday to turn my driveway into a pit of slush and icy water, and you have found a whole new realm of suck.

Well, hopefully the snow will stop soon.

Zel-kun out.

About eight or nine years ago, back when I scraped together a meager living as an engraver, I was into anime.  Real into anime.  In fact, it was safe to say that a good portion of my paycheck went to feeding that addiction.  It was a different time, just before the popularity that Pokemon (and all its subsequent clones) brought the genre, so the average price per VHS tape was about $25-30.

Thirty dollars for a dingy VHS, I must have been out of my mind.

I did a lot of bargain-hunting in those days, and a set of four VHS for $60 seemed like a fine deal to me, even if I had never heard of the series.  Obviously, if it was from Japan, it had to be good.  The series I picked up was The Slayers, which is a series which impacted my life in a very unexpected way.

But that’s another story for another time.

I enjoyed the Slayers, it was a nice blend of adventure and comedy, wrapped together with a nice soundtrack.  It is no secret that I think the music is the most important aspect of a movie/video game, so I sought out the artists that created the music.  The beginning and end themes were sang by a woman named Megumi Hayashibara, who also happened to voice the main character of The Slayers.

Megumi, in the late nineties, was easily the most popular thing in Japan.  She was in EVERYTHING.  Dozens of television shows, movies, not to mention the albums she released, I’m sure the Japanese hated her as much as I hate our own pop divas.  Which is why, when I bought one of her CD’s, ‘Shamrock’, I imagined there was some sort of Japanese analog of me in Japan buying a Britney Spears album.

About a year after I bought the CD, the rare CD imported from Japan, it somehow became cracked.  This around the same time my computer crashed (back in those days when I couldn’t fix a computer to save my life), to I lost the mp3’s as well.  And being a somewhat obscure CD, even among the Japophile crowd, I couldn’t even find it online (for a reasonable price, a couple specialty import places wanted $50 or more for it).

The other day, I came into possesion of seven Megumi Hayashibara albums, including ’Shamrock’, which makes this whole chili-less ordeal a lot less painful than it would otherwise be.  I took the CD to my car and began listening, and it was indeed nostolgic.

It is strange because my taste in music rarely strays from the rock, techno, and classical genres, and this is undoubtedly pop.  It is upbeat, fast, goofy, all around strange, and yet there’s a strange draw to the music.

I recall that when my stepbrother borrowed my car, he used to blast that CD with the windows down when he drove through construction areas and would get the strangest looks.  Likely stranger than I would have gotten, being he always had a definite ‘punk’ look to him.

So, yeah, new music for me.

Zel-kun out.

I found a nice page that has the history of the wonderful dish, chili.

Easily my favorite excerpt:

     According to an old Southwestern American Indian legend and tale (several modern writer have documented - or maybe just “passed along”) it is said that the first recipe for chili con carne was put on paper in the 17th century by a beautiful nun, Sister Mary of Agreda of Spain. She was mysteriously known to the Indians of the Southwest United States as “La Dama de Azul,” the lady in blue. Sister Mary would go into trances with her body lifeless for days. When she awoke from these trances, she said her spirit had been to a faraway land where she preached Christianity to savages and counseled them to seek out Spanish missionaries.
     It is certain that Sister Mary never physically left Spain, yet Spanish missionaries and King Philip IV of Spain believed that she was the ghostly “La Dama de Azul” or “lady in blue” of Indian Legend. It is said that sister Mary wrote down the recipe for chili which called for venison or antelope meat, onions, tomatoes, and chile peppers. No accounts of this were ever recorded, so who knows?

Holy crap, is that ever awesome. Some trance-having, spirit-projecting nun invented chili (speculated, but who cares).

Zel-kun out.

Thanks to Julie over at Perrero, I have the displeasure of knowing today is National Chili Day.  And I am unfortunate enough to have given up the sumptuous treat known to us lowly mortals as chili.  Truly, a greater tragedy has never occured.

Ever.

I console myself with the fact that I have aqcuired a collection of music that I’ve been seeking for quite some time.

More on that later.

Zel-kun out.

I spent several hours last night going through old things and discarding them.  I found quite a bit of old writing on a pile of floppy discs that have been laying forgotten in the bottom of a drawer, beneath old tax returns and a few old notebooks. 

I used to think the floppy disc was awesome.  I was thrilled that I could save a whopping 1.44MB of data and take it with me.  I remember a time when I owned a computer with ACTUAL floppy discs.  Those big five and a quarter inch ones that would ‘flop’ this way and that.  I don’t even remember how much data they had.  But I remember it took about eight of them to install SimCity.

Now these archaic devices have no real place in a world of bootable CD’s and USB drives, both capable of storing hundreds and thousands of floppies worth of data.

There’s something surreal about stumbling upon a piece of writing from high school, that had been so lovingly saved on a floppy, with the formatting all screwy because it was created in Microsoft Works, and realizing its complete trash.

I always look upon my past works with contempt.  The language structure, the words used, the events and the characters, they all fall far short of what I would call satisfactory.  If I picked up a book and read those words, I would demand a refund.

I think I’ll spend a few days reading these old works, and maybe create something semi-readable from them.

Zel-kun out.

Tomorrow begins the Christian practice of Lent. It is a period where one gives up something for a period of forty days and forty nights. It is preluded with ‘Fat Tuesday’ which was celebrated at work by a nice big box of doughnuts for our team. I like Fat Tuesday.

Now, while I am not a Christian, nor am I especially religious, I do believe in strengthening one’s own self. And one way to do that is to deny yourself something you tend to indulge in. To know what it is to live without can make you appreciate what you have. And I think we all could do with appreciating what we have a little more.

In lieu of that, I have decided to give up something I indulge in quite frequently. My vice, if you will. Something so wonderful and perfect that its allure can not be denied. Even now, I feel its call and I must resist.

Chili.

Damn I love chili. I love all types of chili. Meat chili, meatless chili, veggie chili, hearty chili, soupy chili, spicy chili, sweet chili.

In all its forms its delicious. And I eat it at least once a week from one place or another. When I go someplace new, my first question is, “Do you have chili?”

If the answer is no, I tend to black out and wake up in an alley later covered in what I can only assume is tomato sauce.

I’d hate to give it up and see it go away.  I may go horribly insane, but I think that’s the whole point.  Perhaps when I’m eating the most delicious bowl of chili I’ve ever had at the end of this whole ordeal, I’ll appreciate it.

And while we’re on the subject:

Wendy’s Chili.  Ninety-nine cents and the best fast food ever.  McDonald’s and Burger King’s CEO’s cry themselves to sleep every night because they know that they can never serve Wendy’s chili.

Well, still enough time to get in one more bowl of chili before Lent.

Zel-kun out.

There are a few people in my office that follow the Illinois Lottery, which has such grand prizes 150 million dollars.  While the chances of winning the lottery are roughly the same as me getting struck by lightning while I sit here at my desk, TWICE, 150 million is enough to make many people turn their heads.

I have decided to indulge in this foolish gambit, why the hell not?  If on the off-chance that one of the times the office pools together its resources and buys a bunch of tickets, and they win, I’m going to feel pretty foolish.  Besides, I’m past the point in my life where an occasional five-dollar bill is breaking the bank.

So, maybe I’ll be rich soon.  I am one of twenty people that went into the lottery pool.

By my calculations, the odds of one of the tickets winning is roughly one in ten-billion.

Yeah…

I wasted five bucks.

Zel-kun out.

I have so much crap.  I have magazines I’ll never read again, paper I’ll never use, and notes that I could go the rest of my life without ever reading again.  To make a long story short, I have clutter, and lots of it.

It began a couple weeks ago with me finally sitting down and organizing my CD collection, which had long been unceremoniously tossed into a case made to organize a CD collection.  The irony is not lost on me, I assure you.  It took a couple hours, ripping what I didn’t already have into my mp3 collection and arranging the CD’s.  But I was done.

Until I noticed that my mp3 collection was in as much disarray as my CD collection…  And it just went all downhill from there.

If you want old NewType magazines, Animerica magazines, hundreds of CD and DVD cases, let me know.

Zel-kun out.

There was once a band called Foreigner.  Maybe you don’t know this name, but you’ve likely heard some of their songs.  ‘Cold As Ice’, ‘Dirty White Boy’, and ‘Urgent.’  I currently have another of their songs, ‘Double Vision,’ stuck in my head.

You might ask why.

Because my left eye is freaking out on me today and everything I look at has the tiniest, most faint shadow.  It goes by rather unnoticed, but is far more troublesome when trying to read text on a computer screen.

As a man who spends roughly twelve hours a day on the computer, this is inconvenient.

Hopefully, I just need some rest.

Zel-kun out.