I’m beginning to think the people I work with here are complete morons.

To protest the insanity and corruption of this place, I decided to wear my badge upside down. It was just the sort of thing that would earn me a quick reprimand, but I didn’t care. I wanted to make a statement.

Only thing is, nobody noticed. I’m serious. This is three days now and nobody so much as blinked. These are people who are supposed to be trained to look for anything out of the ordinary, and here I am, waltzing around with an upside down badge right under their noses.

Un-fricking-believable. What a week.

While I was out getting my ride cleaned up at the nearby self car wash, I noticed a couple behind me in an obnoxiously large pickup truck. The guy got out to get some change, so I glanced over to get a look at him. Fuzzy faced, sports cap on tight, shorts down to his kneecaps, and keys with a neckband so long it dragged across the ground as he approached the change machine. I couldn’t get a good look at the girl riding shotgun, but I could tell she was cute.

Normally, seeing a scum sucking scuzzbucket (apparently emulating Eminem or some other pasty white rapper wanna-be loser) like that with a girl would get me upset, but then I stepped back and took a deeper look here.

What was I getting upset about really? Because he had a girl, and I didn’t? But was it because no girl could ever want me, or was it simply because I had standards? Truthfully, I could go out right now and grab up some back alley ho that I could wrap my arm around and show off to all my friends if I really wanted to. But I wanted something better. I wasn’t content to have some two bit slut with the morals of a brain damaged monkey on crack in my life, just to prove that I could get a girl. I was looking for much more than that.

What’s really sad though is that even though I think my standards are reasonable enough, 80 percent of the single female population probably don’t measure up. Under ideal standards, 99.99 percent wouldn’t measure up, while the other .01 percent appear to live only in our dreams. Women today seem to vary from being skanks, whores, sluts, tramps, bimbolinas, etc., to being hellish female dogs spawned by Satan himself. Those who are godly, intelligent, kind and honest are an endangered species bordering on extinction, and even if I happen to come across one of them during my travels through life, there is usually some factor that would prevent me from pursuing them (like being married, for one). This is what our world has sadly has come to these days, and it is in this mess that I must somehow find the true girl of my dreams.

Yet as much as it would pain me to be alone, I recognize just how much MORE painful it would be to date a girl so obviously wrong for me, that to be with her would paradoxically make me feel even MORE alone and lost in the world.

It would seem impossible that I would ever meet anyone right for me, and yet despite the insurmountable odds I face here, I still have hope that she’s out there somewhere, a sweet and wonderful angel who is waiting and praying for me to come into her life soon. Call it delusion, insanity, or psychosis induced by food deprivation, but no matter what, this hope never seems to die. And for now, that will have to do as I fight to get my life in order again.

And so it begins.

After 32 days of hair tearing, head banging, and extended bouts of rip roaring insanity, my blog is now officially online and ready to go. I still cannot fathom the reality that it took me well over a month before I could finally put the finishing touches on this new work of blogging art. It began with an idea that may or may not have been drug induced, and a subsequent hunt for the perfect blogware that would be given the esteemed honor of publishing my most intimate of thoughts online for all the world to see and revel in. It wasn’t long before I settled on Wordpress, and in spite of the absolute FITS it gave me, I don’t regret making that decision. It’s certainly not as polished as MovableType is, but it’s just as powerful, if not more so. The ability to write private and password protected posts, for example, are to this day features that are still missing from MovableType’s blogging solution. The plugin support is also amazing, even though it sucked up a good two weeks of my time before I finally finished scouring the Net for nifty and cool plugins to install and play with. By the time I was finished I had over 70 plugins installed, and the fact that they seem to be getting along with each other without blowing things up was a small miracle unto itself. The widget features were also way cool. It meant having the ability to move my sidebars around nilly willy, while adding all sorts of wild features without ever having to look at code (which I imagine is not the case with MovableType).

But now I understand why most people would just as soon rather open up an account with Blogger or Xanga and get straight to it than build a blog from scratch, even if that meant having far less control over its look and feel. Building a blog from the ground up while having only a rudimentary knowledge of PHP, XHTML standards and CSS styling was not an endeavor for the faint of heart to undertake, but I wasn’t scared. Stupid, maybe, but never scared.

I was however, reintroduced to wonderful things such as whitespace, XHTML validation, PHP syntax errors, and other frightening critical errors that so abruptly stopped my blog dead in its track that I thought the Rapture was about to occur. Then there was the very long fourth of July weekend where my PC box suffered from several viral infections, effectively taking it out of commission for days before I finally got everything working again.

For weeks, working on my blog became a daily ritual of adjusting some code, saving the file, uploading it to the server, then refreshing the blog in my browser to view the results. Adjust-Save-Upload-View-Repeat. Ad infinitum. There were some nights where I stayed up till 4 in the morning wrestling with some code until I either passed out or emerged victorious (usually the former). Some things just ended up being lost causes (such as getting skins to work right).

If that weren’t enough, I had to deal with the headache of making my blog look consistent across different browser platforms. I cannot tell you how many times I had things looking just fine and dandy in Firefox, only to see Microsoft’s Internet Explorer projectile vomit my blog all over the monitor screen. I’m forced to bastardize and invalidate my stylesheet with some ugly snippets of javascript all because IE to this day is still not standards compliant. Beautiful. Then there was the CSS standard itself, which makes it bloody near impossible to include a decent footer at the end of your blog. If this were a perfect world, my footer would be placed under all three columns here, not just the middle one. But because of either gross oversight or sheer stupidity (or both), this is virtually impossible to do without resorting to using floats (whatever the @#$% that is) or some other wacky means. On the plus side, the way my blog is set up now makes it far more search engine friendly than it was before, because the sidebars are absolutely (permanently) positioned on either side of the screen, which means search engines only need to crawl the header of the site before getting to the real meat of the blog. In other setups that don’t involve absolute positioning, search bots may have to sift through a crapload of code (involving the header AND the sidebars, and maybe even other superfluous data) before it finally reaches the main content of your site. I noticed a lot of blogs seemed to be set up like this too. Bad for them, good, however for me.

As if all this grief weren’t enough, my original hosting provider apparently had a fetish for rebooting their servers on a regular basis, which meant searching for a new hosting service, and then dealing with the agony of canceling my account, signing up for a new one elsewhere, moving all my files to the new server, etc., etc., etc.. Overall, the amount of work I was investing to getting this blog up and running was bordering on the absurd. For weeks I would stumble into the office at work in a daze after getting only 3 hours of sleep the night before, only to find myself logging into my work PC and getting right back to where I left off before I passed out. And why not? It’s not like my job was important or anything.

Eventually…finally… my work was at long last completed. So what happens now that the dust has settled, and I’m ready to move on with my life and start blogging for real?

I get writer’s block.

For the past month I had a million ideas and thoughts I wanted to put down on blogging “paper” and make known to the world (especially with what’s been happening in the Mideast), but when that moment finally arrives, I’m now drawing a complete blank.

Maybe I just need to get some sleep. Maybe I need a real life. Or maybe I just need to hurt somebody. Probably all three…