Last week, I finally get everything lined up for traffic school. My options at this point included either sitting in on a class in that state for $155, sitting in on a class here for $35 plus paying $155 on top of that anyway(!?!?!) or doing the online course for $155. The online course is the course that makes the most sense from both a convenience and a financial standpoint, so I sign up for that.

I sit down, ready to take the course. Unlike real traffic school, this online course will allow me to have Modest Mouse's This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About album playing for maximum irony. It requires spending 5.5 hours of time on it, which is monitored with timers in each section. They also have verification questions about yourself that randomly pop up for 30 seconds, just to make sure you're at the computer. These popup questions are so unobtrusive that I often missed them while I was reading the course material.

A couple hours into this tedium, and I figure out that the timers they've been using are done with some pretty low-tech javascript. Specifically, that the timer is tied to my computer clock instead of a clock on their server. I decide I'm going to take gross advantage of this by bumping up the time on my clock and watching the timer jump accordingly. I finished the remaining 3.5 hours of course in 1 hour worth of time. It's kind of funny that driving illegally fast got me into this problem, and going through this online course at an illegal speed is how I got through it. Clearly I've learned nothing.

Of course, no online traffic school experience is complete without requiring me to waste more time and money by forcing me to take the written exam in the presence of a notary. Oh wait, most other online traffic school programs don't require that bullshit. Fine, my particular online traffic school experience is not complete without requiring me to waste more time and money by forcing me to take the written exam in the presence of a notary. I head out to the notary yesterday to take my test. This notary doesn't bother to check my ID, leaves me alone to take the test, while telling me to go ahead and cheat if I feel so inclined. I finish the test in like 4 minutes, and the notary comes back, stamps it with his county-licensed seal of approval, and I give him $10 for his efforts. I still have the exam, which I have to fax back to the traffic school today. I can even change my answers if I want to before submitting this. Oh well, I suppose I will have to just have to be happy to not have the point on my record, even though the whole experience was a farce.

About 2 loops into this, Cristina calls me, telling me she's in Downey, and wants to get some ice cream. Cristina lives in NY, and thus I don't get to see her often. I tell her what I'm up to, and if she can hold on for about 45 min, I'll see what I can do about meeting her. 3 loops later, I call Alvaro, just to rant about my current situation, comparing and contrasting the activities of "Driving around LAX to meet middle-aged Indian guy" and "eating ice cream with cute Romanian brunette." About 10-15 loops later, I get another call from Cristina, telling me she can't wait any longer, and she's leaving Downey.

At this point, I'm sufficiently annoyed that I want to find out what the hell is going on with my mother and her friend. I park the car, then wander over to his terminal. I wander around there 20 minutes and even have my mother paged, but no sign of them. I then get a voicemail from my mother, telling me that she's nearly worried to death that she hasn't seen me and that she and her friend have taken a cab home. I call the house, and our conversation starts out like this:

Mom: "Hello?"
Me: "Hi."
Mom: "Who is this?"
Me: "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN 'WHO IS THIS!?!?'"

She then asks where I am, and I tell her I'm wandering the terminal looking for her stupid ass (not those words, wish they were), and she castigated me for my decision to stop doing loops, saying that's the reason we never found each other. I hang up on her at this point, head over to the car, and start driving home. I check the current time, the time stamp on her voicemail, and the time I got off the phone with Cristina last, and put it together that she got in the cab before I stopped driving in circles around the airport. Call up Cristina, start ranting bloody murder over the phone about the latest developments in this misadventure. Over the course of the talk and the drive home, I realize I really don't want to see my mother at this point. I notice that I have my car keys with me (we took Mom's car), so my plan is to just drop off her car, pick up mine, and go anywhere that's not my house.

I get to my house, put my stuff in my car, then put her keys in the mailbox. She heard this, comes out, and tries to ask me what happened. I don't want to deal with her, so I get into my car and am nearly about to take off, when she taps on my window, insisting she wants to talk to me. I roll down the window enough to yell at her that she left while I was still driving around the airport, so all this was her fault for either being in the wrong place, or not doing a passable job of getting my attention if I was just going past her over and over. She takes this opportunity to put her fingers in my window so that I can't roll it up and so she can keep talking. I then go out my passenger door, tell her to roll up my window when she's done, and go for a short walk.

I decide when I walk past the church that borders my yard that I'd go through its parking lot, hop the fence into my front yard, and try to get my car again without being noticed. I was noticed, my mother comes out again, trying to ask me to help her figure out what happened. I told her that her message said she was worried, that I'm clearly fine, and that I'm not in the mood to have a discussion with her on anything past that at this moment. She keeps going, I remind her again. She keeps going, I tell her to shut up. Never mind that I've already told her I put in at least 15 loops at LAX and a ton of searching a terminal, she wants answers now, my current state of mind be damned. If I ever had any questions where my sister's narcissism complex comes from, that moment answered those clearly.

I take off for Westwood, figuring I'd hang out with my brother and complain to him about this, seeing as he's the only sane adult relative I have. He went to bed early, as he had an 8:00 class the next morning. So I caught up with my friend, Sam, who's in UCLA's law school. Hung out with him until 3 AM, then came home. My mother and I haven't exchanged a word since.

Manic driving, dysfunctional family life, and the girl getting away. I should write a script. This movie would have everything...

During that time, I missed out on the fact that OCF has disabled trackback pings, meaning the automatic updates regarding my music hasn't worked in like a month. You'll notice I've removed that section of that blog now.

Also, while OCF has removed a useful feature for me, I've found they've implemented another. They've started spam-filtering my e-mail. Well, they've actually been doing it for 7 months, but I only noticed today. They blocked 1100 pieces of junk mail, totaling about 5 MB, dating back to September 15, 2004.

Now to go back to studying for my test. Don't worry. I'll be better about writing stuff here in the future. Really.

Noah (left) and my mother (right)

It's nice having the nephew around again.

My sweet tooth has betrayed me yet again...

I found the guide for how to do this in winamp here: http://www.eightlinks.com/features/000418.html

And the equivalent plugin for foobar here: http://members.chello.pl/d.sieradzki/foobar/foo_web.dll

This is pretty cool :)

Noah blowing bubbles (1.8 MB)

Noah says something (1.2 MB)

He'll be in town in about a couple of weeks for his first birthday. It'll be nice to have the opportunity to be a hands-on uncle again.

Highlights of the day:
1) After Jason and Steven tried skating around in the empty pool, Sam decided to try it. He fell, and has perhaps sprained his elbow broken his right arm. BTW, Sam's one of the few people who hasn't had anything to drink.

2) Dan showed up late, with one burger left on the grill. He should've approached it with a hockey stick instead of buns and condements. After eating his burger, we left the party to go out to dinner (didn't feel too bad about this, as my friends had all left, and the party was full of my brother's 20-year old drunk friends.)

3) Came back, continued to avoid drunk kids. Found out that Belen got mad at her boyfriend, Jaime, and stormed off, leaving the house/yard area. Since she doesn't know Downey, we went looking for her. Just as I was about to get in my car and start driving around, she shows back up.

4) Continued to avoid drunk kids. Jaime and Huitzi came in the house, with Jaime trying to get Huitzi to sleep off his drunken ways on the couch. A little while later, Jaime came back in along with his Belen and continued their fight.

5) Found out that Herberth has been trying to hook up here with a girl who's clearly not interested in him. Jaime has decided it's funny to cockblock Herberth at every turn.

6) At some point, a Ed showed up to pick up the laptop I had backed up and fixed. As a token of appreciation, I was presented with the UK edition of Monopoly. I collect Monopoly boards, and the UK edition was the board I learned how to play on when I was a kid. This was the only part of my day that hasn't been frustrating, dissapointing, or perplexing, but would've happened even if I had been rained out, as Ed was leaving town anyway and needed his stuff back.

I used to listen to KSJO when I lived in Berkeley. As a matter of fact, it was my favorite station there. It was a grunge/metal/classic rock station. There were other stations whose platforms I enjoyed more, but what made this station special were the DJs and the absurdity of some of their promotions. While it may come as a shock to my friends from/in LA, KSJO's Lamont and Tonelli had a much funnier morning show than Kevin and Bean. They had the best crank call segments ("Dirty Friday") imaginable. They also once had a promotion where they gave away a date with a dominatrix.

While I didn't really like much about the Bay Area, KSJO was one of those few good things there that there's no substitute for anywhere else. Now with that gone, the only thing left I can say that about is Oscar's Hot Dogs in Berkeley (my favorite burger joint in Berkeley).

Went out and got a haircut today. A few months ago, I recommened the barbershop to my brother-in-law while he was staying with us. When he came back, he had a lot to say about the place. He commented about the boarded-up windows, a woman with 6 kids taking up the whole waiting area, and a barber who insisted that baseball's a "girl's sport" (baseball being my bro-in-law's attempt to strike up conversation w/ the barber) and talked about Ultimate Fighting during the whole haircut (well, James did get conversation. Be careful what you wish for). He said it was the most ghetto barbershop he'd ever set foot in. Considering he's a white guy from Orange County, I didn't put much stock into his ability to measure ghetto factor. Back to today, I head over there, and on both TVs, they had the DVD of Cheech and Chong's "Up In Smoke" running. My outlook on this barbershop has now aligned itself closer to Jim's. But it's within walking distance and only $8.50 for the haircut, so I will continue to be a patron unless there's a shootout there or something.

Tomorrow night, I head to Disneyland because a friend has an extra ticket he just can't get rid of. Saturday's the barbecue at my house. I should probably do some housecleaning before then. Between tomorrow and Saturday, I anticipate more boredom. If anyone actually reads this piece of shit that barely passes for a blog, any suggestions to keep me from getting bored? (BTW, I'm broke.)