Do you see what I see?

One of my awesome MetroBuzz listeners brought this to my attention:


'Nuff said. Thanks Keith!

Disk Jockey with a Sense of Humor

I had one of those rare, simple moments that are great this morning on my way to work:

Britney Spears' new song, "Womanizer" came on the radio immediately followed by Justin Timberlake's not-so-new song, "Cry Me A River."

How freaking genius is that?!  I laughed my butt off...

Wait, isn't this why WiFi was invented?

Seriously, who doesn't?!


But I totally and completely unashamedly admit to it.

[Source]

Podcast Awards Time!

Okay boys and girls, it's Podcast Awards time! Voting opens today, October 23 and closes at the stroke of midnight on November 7 (11:59pm on November 6).

You can vote once every 24 hours per IP address or name/email (cough cough). Just go to www.podcastawards.com and vote for "MetroBuzz" in the Best Comedy category. Whether you just do it this once or you remember to do it every day, I'd be so grateful. Here's what your ballot should look like, hehe:

Thank you so much. I went to the awards ceremony last year in California with Jay and it was really cool, so it's kinda surreal that we were actually nominated this year.

Didn't They Try to Find Some Good For You and Me?

This was on PostSecret this week. It poses an incredibly taboo question. Discuss:

It's somewhat disgusting that we still need to worry about this happening on America today.

Christmas in October

It's time for a happier post about my weekend, one that doesn't involve airplanes. So this weekend, I had a completely work-free weekend for once. We went to 5 Guys with Clif (as per usual), then we were going to go see "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist" but the time was listed wrong online, so instead, we went back to Jay's house and watched "Casino Royale," since I've never seen it. I love action movies like that, so I really liked it a lot. Jay & I actually each bought the book of short stories that makes up "Quantum of Solace" to read on Sunday.

After breakfast on Sunday (Jay's dad cooks brunch every Sunday morning & it's so good), we did some errands and what not. Then, we went to dinner and to again attempt to see the movie. As we were finishing dinner, I got a text message from Chris in Boston, telling me that MetroBuzz got nominated for a Podcast Award for Best Comedy!!!! I'm actually really, really excited about it. Last year, when I went to California with Jay to watch him accept the award for Best Entertainment podcast, I never ever thought that we'd get nominated. I was incredibly giddy after finding this out, so naturally, a celebration was called for. Since we had already paid the bill, we decided to just go up to the bar in the restaurant and do straight vodka shots. 10 minutes later, two semi-drunk award-nominated podcasters walked into a movie theatre. We then proceeded to giggle our way through the entire first half. We had gotten popcorn and I placed it on the arm of the chair next to me. Jay for some reason decided to lift up the arm and popcorn flew everywhere, which prompted more obnoxious giggling from us, but there were like 5 other people in the theatre and we were in the back row. So whatev. (Btw, the movie was pretty good - having spent a year as an outsider in the indie music world, it was actually quite believable to me and made me really miss living in NYC even more than I already do.)

We went to the mall on Saturday, October 18. Tell me what's wrong with this picture:

Alright, gotta peace out - Time to go back to Job#2 work before I head to Job#1. I didn't say it before, but thank you so much to anyone who is reading this who helped nominate us for a Podcast Award. I'm really so excited. I'm going to be bugging everyone to vote for us, starting Thursday, October 23, 2008. You can vote once every 24 hours and I'd really appreciate it if you could do it. Just go to podcastawards.com and vote MetroBuzz in the Best Comedy category and vote for Jay's podcast, The Lost Podcast with Jay & Jack in the Best Entertainment category.

Finally, I'll leave you with another cheesy kitten video. I took this at literally 5:15am, so if I look exhausted, it's because I was. But I've already gots a boy and he was there while I filmed it, so again, whatev son! Okay, I really need to do work now :P

JetBlue May Give Free Alcohol, But US Airways Gave Free Coffee...

Here's the final installment of my 3-part miniseries about experiences traveling to/from NY-NC.

The one thing I always maintain when flying is that I won't relax until I'm actually on the ground in my destination.  This isn't a safety thing, it's an actual "LaGuardia is the worst airport in the history of the world except possibly JFK" thing.  I cannot even begin to count how many times I've been on a plane, taxiing towards the runway for an on-time departure, when there's been some sort of problem - 98.3% of the time from LGA's end - and I've been stuck sitting on runway or tarmac for a while.

This is what happened to me today.  7am flight.  Early in the morning.  Should be no problems.  Get to RDU this morning and successfully still have a ticket (yesterday's incident had not haunted me at 6am this morning, thankfully).  We board at a reasonable time and start taxiing towards the runway in order to take off at our scheduled time.  Then suddenly, we stop.

Pilot gets on the PA and goes, "Well, it seems that LGA is having ground delays, as usual.  We'll be delayed here as a result for around 20 minutes."  It's never a good sign when the 'fashion seat belts" light goes off.  We wait.  20 minutes later, we're told that we have to wait another 10 minutes to call us back and let us know what time we can be rescheduled to depart.  Naturally.  The flight attendant makes a hilarious comment at this point to us, remarking, "Gotta love NY.  There's always delays, even early in the morning."

During this 10 minutes, something interesting happens.  Now, I'm sitting in seat 1F, which is the window seat in the very first row on the right side of the plane.  This isn't the most ideal seat in the world but being that US Airways bumped me off this flight that I booked back at the very beginning of September because they didn't know that their own plane actually took off on Saturday, I had no option in my seating.  However, I would have missed what happened next had I not been sitting here.  The flight attendant gets a phone call, distinctly says, "I understand" and unbuckles her seat belt.  Then she gets up, opens the door to the airplane and lets the pilot out.

Yes, the pilot got out of the plane.

The man sitting next to me and I look at each other and go, "Well, that can't be good."  We can't see what he's doing on the left side of the plane, but then I see him go around to the wing on the right side of the plane.  He wipes the condensation off of it with his hand and then comes back on to the plane and tells the flight attendant, "We're good."  At this point, I'm wondering if "we're good" means "We're not going to crash if we ever do take off" or "We're actually going to get this plane in the air."

About a minute later, he tell us that we've got a departure time of 10 minutes.  Finally - but only 40 minutes late (and it's sad that one has to consider "only 40 minutes" a true blessing when flying) we take off.

To her credit, the flight attendant kinda rocked.  She reduced the price of water, soda, and juice to $1 from $2, alcohol from $7 to I believe $6, and gave us free coffee and Biscoff (yay! only thing I miss about Delta are those cookies man).  I was confused when she said that coffee and tea were free and she told me and the man next to me that "Since we waited 40 minutes on the runway, it's the least I could do.  Plus, ya'll probably could use some caffeine.  I know I could!"

So yeah, another trip to Raleigh in the car, another unnecessary airline drama over.  I had a great trip - the whole not stressing about having to work thing really worked out well haha - and I'll post more about that later or tomorrow morning.

Apparently US Airways Rewards You For Flying With Them By Canceling Reservations

I'm leaving to go to dinner and see a  movie with Jay in a few minutes, but here's a little update on my apparently not-dead airline curse.  If you missed my story yesterday, I had a bit of a problem getting to Raleigh from LaGuardia Airport because there was a "mechanical problem" that was apparently undetected until they decided to do a maintenance check of my plane as we were boarding.  We had to wait around, not knowing if we'd be able to leave NY or not, until they found us another plane to take us here.

Well, I go to check in for my 7am flight tomorrow morning around 11am this morning and there's a problem with my confirmation number.  My reservation apparently did not exist.  Upon calling customer service at US Airways, I was told that because I failed to make my flight out of New York, my tickets for my return flight were cancelled by US Airways.  First, she made it sound like I hadn't checked in on time for my flight there, which was bull because I checked in at 11:56am Friday for my 11:55am flight Saturday.  I explained to her exactly what happened to that flight and said I'd scan a picture of my boarding pass from LGA and email it to her as proof.  She put me on hold for several minutes.  When she finally came back, she had put me back on my flight back to NY.

Thank God it all worked out, but seriously, how ridiculous is that?  Like, are they going to have to find spots for all of us on that flight from yesterday because we all lost our return trip reservations or am I just the cursed one?  And how on EARTH did they make a mistake not knowing that one of their planes actually FLEW SOMEWHERE?!

I really cannot be late to work at 11am tomorrow morning, so think happy thoughts for me to NOT have any problems tomorrow morning!!

The Airplane Curse Continues: Why Our Country Is In a Depression and Other Assorted Rants & Realizations

And the curse continues.

I'm sitting here at LaGuardia, paying for Internet, because my flight is delayed indefinitely.  11:55am flight and it's a beautiful freaking day outside.  Today was supposed to be my non-stressful day where I didn't have to work at all for once until Monday morning and could finally have a non-work-filled weekend with Jay.  And it really did start in a relaxing manner.  Got up, watched "Grey's Anatomy" online (it was actually quite fabulous), had plenty of time to get ready and leave with 2 hours to spare.

Then I hit standstill traffic on the Cross Island Parkway and was delayed for over 30 minutes.  It finally cleared up and I went to the bagel store in Astoria that Jay loves and got a ton of bagels.  There was a long line, which I expected, so no surprises there.  I get to the airport finally and the parking lot is closed, of course.  I manage to get a pretty good spot in a different lot and run inside to security.  It's like 11:10am at this point.

Here's an actual somewhat humorous part:  The family traveling ahead of me on the security line managed to EACH set off the security metal detector AND all have to have their bags checked for having liquids that were too big, etc.  No, they were not black or Arab.  They were just plain ignorant dumbasses.  The girl was arguing over contact solution.  I felt like screaming at her, "Let it go!  Buy the travel size for a fucking dollar when you get to where you're going, bitch."

But moving on to the funny: The guy looks at me strangely after he checks out my bag.  I know exactly what's up and I go, "If you're wondering who would bring bagels on a plane, it's me."

He goes, "Yeah, I was actually.  Why?"  I explain that I'm bringing NY bagels to Raleigh, where they don't have good bagels and I promised to bring them down.  He started laughing a lot and let me go through.

So I get through security and into the terminal and I find that my gate has changed, but no one had told me this originally.  So I trek all the way back from Gate 7 to Gate 1 with my heavy bagel-filled bags.  It's 11:30am.  I see that we're not boarding yet and McDonalds is right near the gate, so I go get a fountain Diet Coke (who can resist fountain beverages, seriously) and get back to see boarding has begun.  I get in line and I see people coming back off the plane.  I inquire why and some gal tells me that it's because they said something was wrong.  The woman at the gate tells us that they've been informed by the crew that there's a "maintenance problem" and they have to wait for maintenance to come and look at it and then fix it.

The woman sitting next to me is an older version of me.  She immediately started bitching about how she's been here for 2 hours and is positive that the plane has been sitting here for at least that long, so why on Earth would they only decide to check it NOW, 20 minutes before take-off?  She's got a fabulous point.  And I'd bet my next plane ticket that they didn't check the plane earlier because they didn't want to do work before they absolutely had to.  Not to get controversial, but that's the fucking problem with this country today.  No one wants to do work, to work hard.  No wonder the economy is how it is.  There's a bunch of lazy assholes in this country.  I work 7 days a week and I have nothing to show for it, yet someone who doesn't work at all and has no drive or desire to can just open their hands.  After 9/11, people wanted things and they got it, regardless of whether or not they could pay for it and now we're all paying the price.  I'm talking about everyone, lest anybody think that I'm picking on the lower income people.  You invest your money in the stock market, it's still paper money.  You get caught spending money you don't have in the first place on second homes and what not and then whine about how life's not fair.  I see people who come into my job with worker's compensation injuries and some continually make excuses to not be able to go back to work.  God forbid you got into an elevator with crutches or had to limp from your desk to the bathroom.  God forbid you have to go back to working for a living.

You're either lazy or you're greedy.  Greed is the head of a Wall Street corporation who still takes his $500,000 bonus for the year regardless of all the jobs that have been lost because of how shitty you ran your company.  Greed is constantly taking, taking, taking and not putting back into society.  And I'd say that 90% of the people I know and am associated with are NOT like that.  So it's not all hopeless, but there's a large faction of people in this country that are like that and it's not fair to the rest of us who are losing money, jobs, etc.  And as I've bitched about before, we all treat each other like complete shit.  Even the ticket agents here are being nasty over the loudspeaker and I have not heard one person - myself included - who has confronted them in a nasty way (or at all) yet.

So at least this delay hasn't yet brought on a fit of crying and swearing yet  I've just decided to take it out on my fellow Americans.  The update since I began writing this post about 45 minutes ago is that they're going to try to change planes.  We have to wait for them to get another plane, then bring it to the gate, then have the crew change planes themselves, then prepare the cabin, then maybe get it checked out by maintenance to see if it's good to go, then we'll get our boarding time.  Joy.  I love spending my supposed-non-stressful-Saturdays waiting in airports for a problem that could have been detected hours ago to be solved now at the expense of everyone else.

Maybe I'll go update "The Plane Truth" while I wait.  Or go network and try to find someone who lives/works in Raleigh now to find me a job there so I can move and not have to ever wait around in airports twice a month again.

So Madonna Walks Into a Divorce Attorney's Office...

This cartoon is from the New York Post yesterday and when I saw it, it made me literally laugh out loud:

Did I Stutter?

This makes me giggle:

Hey, Colleen! How've you been?!

It's been a really long time since I've actually written a "how I'm feeling/doing" post vs. the "what I've been up to" post. I figured now was as good a time as any, since it's one of those very rare moments where I don't have anything to do within the next 15 minutes.

I'm...exhausted. My life is getting up, doing work for job#2, which is a content writing gig I did full time all summer on a project by project basis. It ended the day before I went to San Diego in July and when I got back, nothing was going on and I got a new job that's actually outside of my house and around people and legitimate in that we all know where all the money comes from and none of my bosses have 'questionable' past endeavors that I know of and it has benefits and means I have to actually shower every day. 2 weeks after I started job #1, which is working as a medical receptionist in shithole Riverhead (the traffic gives me rage every morning. 15 miles from home and I have to leave 30-35 minutes early grrr), I got approached from job #2 about another 6 week long project. I figured, "Hell, I want to move to NC and I want as much money as possible beforehand, so why not take on 2 jobs that require 40 hours a week each?" So I get up early, do job #2, go for a run, shower, do any loose ends from job #2, leave at 10:30am for job#1, take my break there 2-3pm and do work #2 during that time with Internet that I steal from the parking lot, go back in for work #1 until 7pm, when I go home and work on job #2 from 7:45pm until I'm at a stopping point for the night. The rest of my life is filled with airports and podcasting and weekends that go all too quickly, where I'm actually still spending a decent amount of Jay & my's "down time" doing work for job#2. And the 6-week gig ended the first weekend of Oct, but now there's more to do again.

So yeah, that's how I've been. Busy, exhausted, and getting more wound up by the day. Add into that friends who make me feel like absolute shit because they think I don't like them anymore no matter how many times I explain that that's what my life is right now. Everyone is busy and works a lot; no matter what the state of the economy is, I know that everyone feels that way at some point. But I don't like the million "Wow you're alive" comments, like I don't know/feel stressed out as it is that I don't get to see them as frequently anymore. I'm tired. I really don't spend all of my other weekends hanging out with other friends you think I like better than you & I need you to understand this and cut me some slack here. I spend it doing work (like the literal 27 hours I logged in from Friday night to Monday morning on a new project that I was told would be like a one day thing) or traveling. I need a good 2 weeks notice for things nowadays. I'm trying to keep track of plane ticket prices and balancing my schedule to actually make time to get my car fixed, go to the denist and doctors and gyno and all those things I haven't done in way too long. I'm trying to keep track of apartments and job openings in Raleigh so that when the time comes that I feel like I can go, I know exactly what's what. I was supposed to start writing my book series back in effing JULY & nothing's been done since like the third week of August. I have too many things on my mind and it makes me uptight and tense and I just plain have forgotten HOW to relax in general and I see it happening and I hate it. I've gotten bitchy and boring and not really much fun at all anymore, but that's just how it is.

The only reason I haven't totally cracked by now is because I know that it'll pass. It's just not passing fast enough, haha.

One of those days

Hey boys and girls! Today is October 9, 2008.

Do you know what that means?

It's 10-9-08!!!

Nagini Is Hungry

I heard this wonderfully gross story at work on Monday night. It was the perfect cure to stop eating so freaking many M&M's instead of dinner. Kallie, a high school senior, told me it:

A girl she used to work with had a pet snake. She used to sleep with this snake each night because "it was just like a dog." There came a time when said snake stopped eating. It also stopped curling up on her bed and began to stretch on longways next to her. Kallie's co-worker began to worry because her beloved pet snake had stopped. She took it to the vet after a week of not eating.

What did she learn?

Oh, nothing. Just that the snake wasn't eating because it was preparing for a big meal. What meal? Oh, just HER. Apparently the snake was stretching because it was sizing her out to eat her.

Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew.

Can you imagine going into work and being like, "Where's Sally Jo?" "Oh, her pet snake ATE HER last night."

Ew. Ew. Ew.

So much for loyal pets.

Ew.

Oohhhh sweet child of mine

More lameness + Bad camera angle on my face + drunk eyes = word.