I am constantly astounded by the number of people I encounter who are simply incapable of understanding satire, irony, or any subtle form of sarcasm.
I should not be surprised by it, and yet I am.
Clearly my peer group is easily pleased with a little Nickelback-bashing.
And here I was under the impression that you all liked my smart jokes.
Next week, I want to be indefensible. Maybe even for two weeks. A month? That’d be good too.
Then after that, I want to be Jason Permenter for a week.
Then, I will be happy.
I have a mole just above my navel.
It’s getting fairly large, so I think he needs a name. I considered Patrick, but that didn’t really fit his demeanor. Edgar is a better choice, because it incorporates his quirky and generally non-threatening side while still leaving the vague impression that at any moment he may transmogrify into a malignant melanoma stuffed full of pigmenty death.
Then again, Edgar is a bit of an antiquated name, and doesn’t coincide well with the fact that he lives inside of graphic tees most of the time rather than finely tailored shirtings.
Also, this conversation would be much less awkward if my dermatologist and psychiatrist were the same person.
The two monitors on my desk give me a combined desktop area of 6,400,000 pixels.
“Wow,” I hear you say, “that is indeed a metric assload of pixels.” So it would be no surprise, statistically speaking, if at least one or two of those pixels were broken. Dead, as it were. Le petit pixel mort, as they say in Spain.
But no. I’ve been lucky to have two awesome Apple cinema displays that are pixel-perfect. “A rarity!” you cry out. And you would be right.
Until this morning.
The first thing I noticed when I started working was an irritant in my left eye, like a tiny ache. I turned my head to the left, and it was gone. Looking forward again, it was back. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the irritant wasn’t in my eye, but was in fact on the far side of my left monitor. A stuck pixel.
A stuck pixel is, in my opinion, an order of magnitude worse than a dead one. A dead pixel emits no light, so if you have a dark desktop area (like I do), it simply blends into the background, and you don’t notice it unless you’re looking at a window directly over it.
But this pixel on my left side, it is stuck. On green. Not a light green, but a glowing neon green. It has been irritating my peripheral vision all morning long. It stares at me, like an evil green Lovecraftian eye. Watching me. Tormenting me. Judging me. When I look directly at it, it looks away1, feigning innocence. But I know it’s there, casting its green gaze upon me all through the day.
I hope it goes away on its own. Perhaps one day it will tire of watching me, and return to the inky blackness from whence it came. I can only hope.
