balloon counseling

Voight has been moping around a lot lately, and I'm getting pretty worried. Today, I walked into the room and caught him floating dangerously close to an open window, just kind of staring out blankly. He shut it quickly, and mumbled something about how I shouldn't have left a window open like that, but I'm pretty sure they were all closed when I left this morning.

Voight has definitely been losing helium in the week since I've brought him home. I'd say he's lost at least six inches of diameter. While he still reaches the ceiling pretty easily, he definitely doesn't have to squeeze through doorways like he used to. This has been making him kind of melancholy, and he fixates on death like some crappy goth kid. Still, I have to feel bad for him: balloons don't exactly live as long as people, and I think it is kind of frightening for him to see himself wasting away in the mirror so quickly. His realization of his own mortality has sobered him up a lot, and he is definitely not the bright red balloon I once knew.

I'm not sure if it exists, but I think it might help him to get into balloon counseling, or at least an AIDS support group or something, so he can learn to cope with the inevitable end. Maybe if he saw that life isn't just waiting for death, he'd spring back up a bit. If you have any recommendations for balloon-counselors, or open-minded people-counselors, please tell me.

dls

jamba juice is evil

A friend of mine who works at Jamba Juice told me that the free booster shots of vitamin C or protein or whatever are really part of an evil plot to enslave the human race with psycho-tropic chemicals. Every time you let them put a boost in your smoothie, you lose a little bit of your free will..

dls

balloons make crappy pets

I recently took home a big, red balloon to replace my leprechaun. I found him huddled with his siblings in the corner of a reception hall on a rainy night. The room looked like there was just some fancy cocktail party or something, because there were plastic martini glasses and small skewered weiner dogs all over the floor. There were also those tables that are too tall to sit at, and are just there for you to stand next to and put your drink down when you need to use both arms to tell a funny story to someone you are trying to impress.

Anyway, I picked him out of the crowd, asked him if he would like to come home and be warm and stuff, but I warned him he'd have to leave his family behind, because I did not have room for 12 red balloons that were each 3 feet across. At first, he decided to stay with his family, but when I started for the door, he came running up behind me.

Just so you know, he is a fully grown red helium, maybe three feet across, and he has four yellow lobes on his under side. He kind of looks like a spherical flower, or maybe some sort of electron orbital. His name is Voight.

Unfortunately, he's had trouble adapting to life in his new surroundings. He doesn't like to play nicely with the bear I have hanging from my fire sprinkler, and his fear of windows makes him irrational and cranky unless I keep them all closed. Hopefully, he'll calm down after the first week: it has been rough for him, so I'm trying not to judge, but right now he is a handful. If you decide to adopt a balloon, just be warned that they are much harder to train once fully inflated.

dls

on ensemble

These guys are awesome. I've seen them in concert 3 times, and now they have an EP-ish thingy out. I would trade my numchuck skills for their taiko skills. onensemble.org

mailing myself in a box

Do you know that Velvet Underground song that is uncomfortably long, and it is a whole story about this guy who hasn't seen his girl in so long because he can't afford a plane ticket, so he gets the bright idea to mail himself in a giant box to her door, and meanwhile the girl turns out to be a bitch who doesn't care about him and the whole time there is weird shit being played on the guitar while the narrator drones on, and finally the girl and her friend get the box with the dude inside, but they try to open the box with giant shears and kill the guy in the box? That is proof that long distance relationships are a bad idea, because they result in stabbed-in-brain death.

Anyway, I was wondering if anybody has ever thought of actually mailing themselves in a box. Not necessarily to save money, but more just to see if it would work. Could someone construct a space that would have air, food, water, and waste storage, be comfortable enough to spend a day or two in, and would be sturdy enough to make the journey with a person inside? I feel like it can't be totally impossible -- if you can order a giant couch online and have it delivered, surely a person could fit in a giant couch space and likewise be delivered. I think it would make an excellent mechanical engineering competition: get a bunch of college engineering students to build the best possible box for sending themselves through the mail. The one who gets the furthest while remaining alive wins! It would suck if your package was lost in transit though.

dls

can koalas drive cars?

I'm pretty sure I saw a koala bear behind the wheel of one of those PT Cruisers today. Man, remember when those cars were like everywhere? That was such a short time ago, and now it's like we sent them all back in time to the 1980s with all the other ugly things that were popular. Face it man, the 80s were an ugly decade. I hate people who say they like "the 80s look:" from Metallica to The Smiths, everybody was ugly. It's like we collectively went blind for 10 years. 15 actually -- the early 90s had a number of MC Hammer fashion casualties as well.

Anyway, I'm serious about the koala though. My friend said it was probably a man in a koala suit, like a mascot for San Jose State driving to a game, but I'm not sure. The koala looked pretty koala-sized, which is smaller than man-sized (although comprable to midget-sized). Perhaps it was a midget in a koala suit who didn't have time to take off his costume after the San Jose State basketball game because he had to get to his sister's wedding. Maybe he had a little tux on underneath his koala suit. Man, that would be awesome. A little midget in a tuxedo.

Oh man, you know what else would be awesome? A KOALA in a tuxedo. Dude, can you imagine some koala wedding where the groom had a little tux on? Yeah you can.

Well, I guess it was either a midget dressed as a koala, or a koala with opposable thumbs who was trained to steal cars by his unscrupulous owner, but escaped to America to make a living for himself and one day earn enough money to buy his family out of car-stealing slavery. One of those two options. Judging from the number of eucalyptus trees I see planted here in California, I think a koala could survive quite easily if he knew how to steal cars and climb trees. I guess it is a toss-up.

dls