Productive Waste of Time

It’s the pre-holiday week, and work has reached the grandeur of all-time fucking pointlessness. I’ve shown up on time, and I’m now alone in my cubicle staring at my calendar for today, which only lists one meeting of the Green Committee, now marked as cancelled. I did bust my ass to accomplish a couple things and meet some deadlines (which ended up being irrelevant in the long run) and now I am here trapped in purgatory, waiting desperately for the holiday break to begin. On days like this I seriously have no need to show up. I could just paste my cell phone number on my computer screen, and have two boxes for people to put paperwork, one which says “Done”, and another which says “You need me to actually do something with this, right?” The fact that I’ve trekked an hour in the rain to get to work today, solely to get paid to bitch about that aformentioned process on my blog (while listening to Italo and Eric Burdon jams on my Juster Hi-Fi Speaker System), and then write about taking cold showers, borders on the ridiculous.

So, what’s the deal with taking cold showers in the morning (cue Seinfeld bass line)? Seriously though, this is my topic for the day and I’m gonna take it there and back with some ferocious intensity. I think that something is fucked up with my hand (which is the water temperature tester for the shower) where it is incapable of helping my brain make the right decision not to enter. There have been a shitload of instances lately (and it’s much more apparent since it’s been colder out) where I’ve been entering the shower prematurely, and then have to linger shivering and anticipating the point at which the water will shift from cold to scalding (which can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes +). The worst part of the whole ordeal is that moment when you’ve entered and gotten half of your body or any part of your hair wet. At that point you are not allowed to turn back; you are officially the shower’s bitch, and it’s up to him to decide how much torture you are going to have to deal with before your flesh starts to bake from the radical temperature change. I mean I guess, you could technically, get out of the shower all dripping and stand there like a wet dog awaiting a more accessible atmosphere. Fuck that. That might even be a more miserable situation, and if you grab a towel to dry yourself off before re-entering the water, you are a pussy, plain and simple. One technique, which you can impart while trapped in the shower awaiting resolute temperatures (which doesn’t completely work), is to pee on your legs. Your pee will be lukewarm to warm at best, and may improve your situation around this area for 15 to 30 seconds (If you are a man, I wouldn’t suggest peeing up for the heat benefits, as there is something about taking your own pee in the chest or face area that just comes off as incorrect, even when its rinsed directly by water). Some people would consider that gross, but I think it’s safe to assume that all of you have peed in the shower at some point. If you get out of the shower to pee and then get back in, your priorities are seriously out of wack; it all goes to the same fucking place, and the process that applies to water washing your pee out of the toilet, works here as well. It would only get really gross if you use your shower as both a toilet and a shower regularly (as opposed to using a toilet at all), or if you have a large build up of hair in the drain, which is constantly getting filtered by the butt end of your human waste. Anyways, eventually the water does change temperature, and for about 10-20 seconds, it’s great. Then it passes the point of perfection, and within a split second jumps into the danger zone, where you have to either get out of the water stream (which is also cold) or adjust the temperature knob. My adjustments are usually jerked and unrefined, which accounts for the overcompensation in temperature, and suddenly I’m back where I started, with cold or lukewarm. At this point I am usually pretty fucking fed up, which allots me the mental/physical capacity to really take control of my situation; by concentrating on the exact degree specifications on the temp knob, I can pinpoint the precise spot for epic showering over the next couple minutes. Since we are on the topic of showering, wouldn’t it be nice if they streamlined the shower process across the board, so it’s more intuitive and constant. There have been multiple times where I have been at a hotel or a friend’s house, and spent 5 to 10 minutes just figuring how to get the thing not be at either extreme: piping or frosty. It’s almost an embarrassing experience, where you feel so fucking dumb that you can’t figure out an appliance that has only two knobs tops (and sometimes the bath/shower flip switch thing) which you’ve used almost every day for the entirety of your life.

I’m posting up some Italo business from Electric Mind for today. The B side of the 12”, is really the Dub Version of the A side, even though they name the B side something completely different, which I don’t get. Like, is it cool to be misled for 5 seconds, thinking you got a dub copy of an alternate track, but then you put the record on and it’s totally obvious that it’s the same?
Electric Mind – Pick Me Up (Can We Go)
Electric Mind – ZWEI (Dub Version) aka Pick Me Up (Dub Version)