Dance After Dark Photography

I’m itching to travel again. More than that, I’m anxious to get out of Florida. I want to take that trip I’ve been semi-planning up to Cumberland Island & St Marys, GA, but my days off have been taken up by mom-related things. She needs help, and I’m going to help. There’s no question of that. I’m just tired of being here.

I’d really like to move to a city where I wouldn’t need a car. Right now I’m looking at Portland, OR. One of my co-workers mentioned that the Oregon economy isn’t great at the moment, which casts a bit of a pall on my plans. Still, rent looks surprisingly cheap, and Portland is one of few US cities with a decent public transit system. They’ve got buses, a light rail, and streetcars. The city looks bike-friendly, too.

The only other cities I can think of would be Seattle, NYC, and DC. I didn’t even like visiting DC, aside from the monuments. NYC would be nice for a while, but I’d have to save up a lot of money to move there. I’m iffy on Seattle.

Alas, this won’t happen soon. I’m not going to move anywhere without visiting first to really check the place out, and I won’t leave Orlando until my mother is walking again and okay financially. We should find out soon whether she’s approved for Medicaid, and we’ll be waiting for a while yet to find out about her disability application.

I was just looking at a book called How the Scots Invented the World

. I didn’t buy it because I was looking for photography books at the time, but I couldn’t help chuckling. My outspokenly Scottish friend Douglas “Don’t Call Me O’Reilly” Reilly has a story for anything you can think up about how a Scotsman did it first. My favorite was the Braille system of writing. Douglas went on and on about how a Scotsman had invented it. I was ecstatic to have caught him in a tall tale. “Louis Braille invented the system. He was French,” I said. Douglas replied, “Ah, but a Scotsman invented the French!”

Those of you who know me in the really-real world know that I look a little different. (I say a little, honestly, because most of my friends are REALLY different. I just have an unusual hairstyle and earrings.) I find it amusing that I’m the normal one at the nightclubs but the resident freak in a professional environment. When I first started working at AAA, I got to know about 1/4 of the workforce. We’re divided by teams, so I never had much opportunity to talk to people in other parts of the call center. True to form I’m Mr. Social Guy so I knew more people than the average person, but there were still large blocks of people who didn’t know me.

Once I became a dispatcher and had more reason to move around & talk to people, I found out that because of my hair and my trench coat I’d been labeled one of the Crazy White Guys. It’s all meant in fun, of course. As Oscar, one of my hispanic co-workers, explained it to me, he made a point of getting to know me so he’d be on my good side when I went postal. (When, he said, not if.) He said that he expected me to come in with a shotgun under my coat one day, but now that he knows me better he realizes I’d more likely come in screaming “There can be only one!”

This is old news, but I was reminded of it the other day because we’ve had a large influx of new people. I overheard some of the black girls pointing out people to the new-hires. I laughed when I heard, “That white boy in dispatch. He look crazy, but he okay.”

More fun excerpts from work. This first one is a pretty standard comment, but when you think about it…

“Died while driving.”

Presumably, this person means the VEHICLE died while driving.

“Daughter ripped off half of front bumper.”

Well damn, what do you feed the girl? Buicks?

This is strange, so I’m going to inflict it on all of you. Right now I’ve got two songs battling it out in my head. Most often I hear the Acme factory song from all the Looney Toons cartoons. I don’t know the name of the song, but I guarantee anyone who grew up with Bugs & crew knows the song I mean. They played it during construction & factory scenes. Industrial before there was industrial. *grin*

The other song is the Mexican Hat Dance, complete with trumpets, Mariachi guitar, and a guy yelling “ai, ai!” in the background.

This is my mental soundtrack. Be afraid.