My friends,
Buying a house is like slapping yourself repeatedly in the face with a sock full of Jell-O: It’s messy, but kind of fun. Try it. This week has been eventful for Jameelah and me. We found this cool little house on a hill in a neighborhood we like, filled with light, with a yard, [...]
Dear everyone,
Jeeze, I’ve never had writer’s block this bad before, if you can consider blogging writing. It’s like my sense of humor has been drained by a…by a…damn, something funny should go here. By a Dyson vacuum cleaner? See what I mean? It’s awful. I blame it on stress. And Netflix. But mainly stress.
The fiancée [...]
Hi everyone,
Some people are getting angry at M. Night Shyamalan, who made “The Sixth Sense” which is an awesome movie. Why are they mad, you ask? Because he’s casting all White people in his next movie, The Last Airbender, which is a popular animated show where the characters are mostly Asian. They think he’s racist. [...]
My friends, I chaired my first neighborhood council meeting today, attended by about 25 people in the neighborhood, and I think I might have offended an elected official by telling him, in so many words, that his time was up and I needed to get back to my agenda. If I’m giving up American Idol [...]
Dear everyone,
These days, it’s been easy to get irritated. I realized I have gotten more jaded and impatient than usual, even at work. “What? Little Kenny is crying at our after-school program because his grandpa is ill? Argh! If only these kids would think about the inevitable progression of age before they bond with their [...]
Dear everyone,
Jameelah and placed another offer on a house, this time for an extreme fixer upper. I mean extreme. In fact, it’s threatening to dissolve right now due to rain. And ironically, it’s only ten blocks away from the house we got outbid on. This way, we can always drive past the beautiful house we [...]
Dear everyone,
On Christmas night, when the world was rejoicing at the birth of baby Jesus and families gathered around the fireplaces in the spirit of love and togetherness, Jameelah’s car got broken into, and they took her backpack, which had my camera. But even worse, Jameelah is a teacher, and her backpack contained 28 fourth [...]
My friends,
This week is Christmas, a time for us to celebrate the birth of Jesus by giving and receiving gifts. And if you’re anything like me, you haven’t started shopping yet. Of course, if you’re anything like me, then you should congratulate yourself for undeniable sexiness. I’m just saying; it comes with the territory.
Gift giving is [...]
My dearest friends, and the Obnoxious Republican,
Before I begin this week’s ramblings, I want to say that I hate, hate, HATE that STUPID Levi Jeans commercial where the idiot narrator says, “Pioneers, oh, pioneers” repeatedly while a bunch of moronic half-naked young people parade about, drenched by rain and living life. You haven’t seen it? [...]
Dear everyone,
Today I went to talk to Al and Arnie to strengthen our backup offer. There is a one percent chance that the deal could fall through, so we should be ready in case it does. We increased our offer to exceed the accepted one by just a little bit.
Since yesterday though, I have started [...]
My friends, our offer on the house was rejected. We had offered full payment of the house, with the concession that seller pays for closing. The other couple offered full payment, but that the seller pays for half of the closing. We were beaten by a couple of grands! I’m really bummed out. I was [...]
My friends,
I apologize for being absent these past few days. Things have been crazy, and I feel like I’ve eaten an entire bar of Trader’s Joe’s 17-ounce dark chocolates, but without the high. First, things have settled down at the office. We had a 3-day staff retreat, where we all got to know each other’s [...]
There will be a slot of time allocated each meeting so neighbors can complain about lack of composting bins, sure, but we will also work together build a strong vision for our neighborhood, a vision of peace and harmony and potlucks
Dear everyone,
For weeks now the fiancée and I have been trying to plan our wedding. By “we,” I mean Jameelah, and by “planning,” I mean Jameelah coming up with some sort of idea and me furrowing my brows and muttering stuff like “Party favors? What are party favors?! I don’t know nothin’ about birthin’ no [...]
RANDOM THOUGHT OF THE DAY:
Sometimes I stay up late at night thinking about the meaning of life. Other times I think about what name I would use if I were to enter the adult entertainment industry. I think “Maybe Randy Teriyaki.”
My friends,
This weekend Jameelah dragged me to a haunted corn maze. What is a haunted [...]
Dear everyone,
I just finished reading Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, and I could not stop weeping. Well, the story was a sad account of childhood poverty and family tragedies, but the weeping was because Frank McCourt was able to write an entire book with endless amounts of neverending sentences and no quotation marks and yet so [...]
Dear everyone,
Apparently only a few people felt the same way about containers as I do. Thank you, Sharon, for sharing your story about how plastic containers changed your life (“We actually eat the leftovers at my house now because they look so much more appetizing.”) The rest of y’alls, stop sending me hate mail and [...]
My friends,
The nonprofit that I direct recently got some new staff, and one of them observed to me that I seem to hate everything. In fact, I’ve even developed a “Claw of Hatred,” where my right hand goes up in a claw a few inches from my face whenever I talk about something I despise. [...]
Dear everyone,
This morning my older sister, Lynn, texted me to remind me that today is the 20th anniversary of the first day our family arrived in the US. September 25th, 1989. It’s been twenty years. Sometimes, I stay awake pondering. Most times, it revolves around finding a way to profit from the sale of homemade [...]
My friends,
I am gradually losing this battle against Facebook. It seems everyone on earth has an account, a sad realization I came across when I happened to be glancing at Jameelah’s page and saw that “Lolo,” one of my nieces, has an account. She’s only 9. The staff at the office have labeled me ancient, [...]
Dear everyone,
For the past several days, my Jewish friend Rachel has harassed me constantly to write about her wedding, which took place last Sunday. Each day I get twelve text messages, each one increasingly more aggressive and vulgar. So I should write about it, lest she drives down here and stabs me on Rosh Hashanah, [...]
Dear everyone,
Jameelah and I have been engaged for a week, and it feels like we’re baby angels wrapped in cotton-cloud blankets (in the words of our favorite show, Psych). I was especially elated because I thought my work was done and I could just show up at the wedding, and that until then, I could [...]
Dear everyone,
Jameelah and I are engaged. This may come as a shock to some of you for several reasons, mainly that anyone would actually want to marry me, but I think all those push-ups have really helped beefed up the sexy vegan man body. Word has spread very quickly through my nemesis, FaceBook, and many [...]
My friends,
Please excuse this late posting. I was…uh, busy tackling the healthcare debate, and, uh, flossing. OK, we got addicted to episodes of Psych, all right?
Actually, I’ve been tackling work, trying to catch up to the insanity. Mr. Nguyen, my 85-year-old administrative assistant, whom I mentioned in the post about bunny pee (JN55), had to [...]
The work of Korean woodcut artist Lee Chul Soo, on display in an exhibition entitled Visual Poetry at Davidson Galleries on 313 Occidental Ave S. in Seattle’s Pioneer Square from August 7-29, demonstrates a masterful simplicity that invites the viewer to meditate upon themes involving their relationship with nature, family and society as a whole. [...]
Dear everyone,
Jameelah and I are back in Seattle after a layover in Korea, where she fell in love with the digital toilet. It’s awesome, with a seat warmer and wonderful buttons that spray your undersides with water. Much more ecofriendly than using toilet paper. I think it’s the way of the future.
The trip ended too [...]
Dear everyone,
Jameelah and I were walking down a street in Sapa in the dark when we saw several adorable children playing. As we crossed them, a women yelled in English, ”Here, for you: Baby!” and thrust one of the tykes into my chest. The little girl had big round eyes, which were frozen, along with her [...]
Dear everyone,
We are in Saigon. Today I took Jameelah to see the dentist because she needed to get a filling done, and it would cost several hundred dollars in the US. Why pay for complex dental services in the US when you can just go to a developing country a get them done for pennies? I [...]
Dear everyone,
These past four days have just been incredible, filled with so much action, fun, and above all, MSG. The locals here use MSG like we might use salt and pepper. Whenever we get something that does not contain MSG, we go into withdrawal symptoms.
Nha Trang is an awesome city, filled with nice locals who [...]
My friends,
Jameelah and I have arrived in the city of Saigon after an actually rather pleasant 20-hour trip from Seattle. Before the trip, we had used the Nintendo Wii to weigh the luggage because the bathroom scale was too small. We were snapping at each other and were in unpleasant moods due to packing and [...]
