I just don’t get it.

Why is it that cell phone service plans are still so expensive years and years after land lines and internet access have become so inexpensive as to almost be considered a necessary commodity? It truly does boggle my mind that I’m going to have to pay over $200 fricking dollars a fricking MONTH in order to get 700-1,000 minutes of talk time plus internet access plus text messaging for two people!

What the frick?!

How does this make sense? Oh, I can understand it making sense to the providers, it is money after all. But how in the world can they charge more for a text message than for the actual phone calls a person makes when anyone who has ever used a computer can tell you that voice data is “heavier” (meaning more bandwidth intensive) than text? That’s what I call gouging, plain and simple.

And how about the phones?

I mean, if you want a “cool” phone your choice is practically nonexistent. Where are the colors? Where are the slick form factors? Why are there tons of cool phones available in Japan and Korea but none here in the States? I want my bright red, super-slim, internet enabled, full Qwerty keyboard phone, dammit!

With a 3 megapixel camera, of course.

But let’s forget about the perfect phone and talk about the service you can get with current phones for a minute. We all know that if you want good service then the phones are going to look like they were designed in 1995. They claim to do all this cool stuff, but really, they don’t. Or they do it, but in a half-assed way. Sure, the RAZR will do text messaging, but who the hell wants to use the number keypad to text? Want to text your SO, “Want to have dinner?” That’ll be 92668 # 8666 # 44288833 # 3444666633777.

And who the heck knows how to enter a question mark?

Want a PDA-like phone? Well then you better not want to make a phone call because they suck at that. Want a cool ringtone? That’ll cost you $2 and you lose it if you ever reset your phone. Want unlimited messaging? That’ll be $20 per phone and you might not be able to send more than 250 characters per message!

That’s fewer characters than in the last paragraph alone!

And why in the world are certain phones, made by third party makers no less, offered only by certain providers? Do you like the style of Slide-Up Qwerty Keyboard Model X5? Too bad, because it’s only offered by provider Z and their service in your area is poopie. Exclusive deals are nice for the companies, but even when the phone you want is being offered by the provider you want to use, they disable all the cool features you wanted in the first place! And then you find out a similar phone is being offered by another provider, but that provider’s service is so bad in your area you’d rather shoot BBs into your ears until you go deaf than use them as your provider.

ARGH!

I’m sick and tired of going through the anxiety of researching cell phone providers every two years and coming to the conclusion EVERY TIME that they all suck. True, I’ve been happy with my current provider, but they don’t offer any cool phones at all. Not one. They’re all ugly or, worse yet, old-fashioned looking with no keyboard. Plus, my provider’s internet options are so outrageously expensive that I think I’ll vomit blood if I see another surcharge for “10¢ per additional text message.” I need a new provider AND a new phone and I don’t know what to do.

Someone, anyone, help me out? Please?

I’ve gotten very lazy.

While it’s true that I’ve been working hard in real life, if I were to be completely honest about it there’s no valid reason or excuse for my lack of updates on this site. I might bring up how excruciatingly difficult my life is right now, but I’m no pansy who cries on strangers shoulders in the hopes of garnering some sympathy, or at least some spare change.

Because I know firsthand that it doesn’t work, that’s why.

Well, truth be told, I’ve just been a bit preoccupied with certain other things in my life right now. And before you psycho women out there go ballistic, HoBiscuit is NOT pregnant. No bun in the oven here. And believe me, the way things are going right now if we found out that we were pregnant I would probably suspect some higher power of playing a joke on me. You know, “We’re pregnant… with quintuplets!”

Oy. Just imagining that scenario gives me hives.

And speaking of hives, guess what season it is? That’s right, it’s allergy season! My favoritist time of the fricking year! And this year they’re really kicking my butt. To put it in perspective, if my body was Iraq, Zyrtec was America’s armed forces and my allergies were Al-Qaeda then I’m sorry to say that Osama has won and he’s set up his headquarters in the caves of my sinuses. And every time he says “Death to America,” I sneeze until my nose bleeds.

Ugh. I fricking hate, hate, HATE allergies.

What was I thinking?

I spent the entire day yesterday designing a new look for this site, choosing colors, layout, fonts and graphics and only now, after I’ve committed too much time and effort to back out and start fresh, do I realize that my nice, clean and simple design is fricking difficult as all get-out to build!

Sigh. Sometimes I’m too smart for my own good.

So now, instead of having a funny story to tell to entertain you, I can only sit here and complain about how sad my coding skilz are and bemoan the fact that I can’t get layer X to align with layer Y in IE even though it looks just fine and dandy in Firefox. I tell you, it’s enough to make a real manly-man cry.

If I was a manly-man, that is.

Instead, I think I’ll just pull out some more hair, scream a bit louder at my screen, and chug along in the hopes that one day all this stuff will make sense to me. Stupid CSS box model, bane of my existence. You will rue the day you defied me. You hear me, CSS?! You will rue! RUE!!!

Man, I need a life.

Has this ever happened to you?

There you are, minding your own business, when you feel a nasty, nasty fart coming on. Looking around, you see that no one is in your immediate vicinity and so, as discreetly as possible, you let it rip. Thinking that you’re getting off scot-free you leave ground zero and walk towards some fellow workmates you see standing around the water cooler. And it isn’t until you’ve joined the group and laughed at some inane joke made by your boss, or made a pass at the cute receptionist, that the stench of your gaseous doomsday device hits you and you realize that somehow your fart has followed you and soon everyone will collapse into a death-like coma knowing that you can destroy life at 10 paces.

How the hell does that work?!

I had plans.

This weekend I was going to go out with HoBiscuit and enjoy life. It was a beautiful weekend; perfect for walks in the park, early dinners and late night movies, but once again all my plans were laid to waste as the evil Allergy Monster slithered into my life and kicked me in the nutsack and knocked the fun right out of me.

Damn you Allergy Monster. Damn you to hell.

At first, tissues were my friends, but after several hours of constant blowing and wiping, my nose became so raw and bruised that the mere thought of using a soft tissue to blow my nose would make me cry. Medication was my second defense, but that too failed since all it did was make me sleepy and grouchy which in turn made HoBiscuit grouchy which made my life even more miserable than it already was.

So, to sum up; I fricking HATE allergies.

Someone sold me out.

I don’t know who it was, but someone out there who thinks they know me, who thinks they know what I want and need in my life, has sold my contact info to marketers who in turn have begun sending stuff to my home address. It’s so obvious that it was some internet store that sold my info and that these people don’t know the first thing about me that I can’t do anything but laugh when I receive their letters, postcards and pamphlets in the mail addressed to, “HoBiscuit & The Mighty Geek”.

Yeah, it really says that. I’m not kidding.

I mean, if an actual human being was double checking these mailings they might have realized that name was bogus and then they’d remove me from their mailing list because anyone with even a quarter of a brain would know better than to send their stuff to someone named The Mighty Geek. And HoBiscuit? Come on! What the heck were they thinking?

Stupid, stupid marketer. No cookie for you!

I hate flip-flops.

Especially on women at the workplace. Now, I know that many people, HoBiscuit included, absolutely adore their flip-flops and love wearing them every fricking day until it gets so cold that their toes turn to icicles, but for the life of me I can’t see why. I find them so uncomfortable and impractical that I’d rather walk barefoot over broken glass, rusty nails, salt and juiced lemons than wear flip-flops in public. I’d rather wear my own tongue on my feet and walk through the monkey cages at the zoo. I’d rather lose my toes, one by one over the course of several months, in horrific bear trap accidents and have to cauterize the wounds myself using nothing but some moose droppings and a faulty Zippo lighter.

I’d rather watch a full season of “My Awesome Sweet 16”.

Don’t get me wrong. I do understand that flip-flops have a place in society and that wearing them at the beach or on a really hot summer’s day can be both comfortable and practical. But it’s when the stupid things become your footwear of choice, when you own more pairs of flip-flops than there are days in a month, that I start losing my patience and begin looking for a book depository and an old rifle.

I’m not kidding.

Let me break it down for you. First, flip-flops aren’t comfortable. The stupid piece that sticks between your toes to hold the damn things on your feet is constantly rubbing, rubbing, rubbing the webbing between your toes and after only a few hours of use you’re almost guaranteed to have a nice, ripe blister when you take them off. And don’t even get me started on what happens should you trip on the street, or someone steps on your foot, or if you drop something heavy/sharp on your toes.

See? Just thinking about that made you wince.

Secondly, you can’t possibly run, fight or even move quickly while wearing the silly things. I mean, honestly. How are you supposed to play a nice game of football wearing flip-flops? Have you ever tried to ‘go long’ while wearing a pair? If you haven’t, don’t bother. It’s impossible. And heaven forbid you’re at the bank when a robber bursts in demanding money and you’re the only one who can stop him and save the day. Springing into action is very difficult to do when your footwear keeps falling off mid-step.

And there is truly no possible way to look dashing in flip-flops.

Now ladies, please don’t send me hate mail about how wonderful your flip-flops are and how comfortable you are while wearing them. I already know you like them because every single one of you reading this out there owns a pair or twenty. And I also know that you’ve all gone too fricking far with how much you adore them because this past weekend I actually saw a woman walking confidently down the street in a mother-fricking Armani business suit with a pair of cheap, plastic-and-rubber, dime store flips-flops on her perfectly manicured feet!

ARGH! Flip-flops drive me nuts!

Monday was a bad day.

After writing my last post about beating the poop out of my nieces and nephews I realized that someone had been trying to hack this website through Moveable Type. Thinking that I was a clever man for discovering their clumsy attempts to hijack my virtual home, I immediately changed my password to a much stronger one and laughed at their folly as I hit the enter key.

Ten minutes later and I was no longer laughing.

The fact was that I was crying and cursing and sweating bullets as MT refused to let me back into the system, complaining to me that my user name and password were invalid. Fearing that I would lose over three years of writing due to a stupid glitch in MT, I did what any self respecting Geek would do…

I threw my keyboard at the wall and cursed the heavens above.

A few hours later, after taking a nice calming walk around my neighborhood looking for a bell tower or a book depository, I sat down and tried to hack my way into MT. Luckily for me and the young children playing in the park down the street, I found the problem and managed to get back in without losing a single entry. And what did I do to celebrate? Why, I took yesterday off and watched more anime, of course.

Hot damn, I LOVE being a Geek.

My life changed and no one noticed.

Do you know how annoying it is to read, watch or listen to something that is so amazing to you that you want to share it with everyone you know but no one else really cares about it? For example, let’s say you just saw a movie that changed your life completely, a movie so inspiring, so filled with deep meaning for you that you immediately apply its tenets to your everyday life and find yourself the better for it. Wouldn’t you want to share this life-altering movie with your friends and loved ones? Wouldn’t you want them to share your newfound joy and happiness? Of course you would.

But what if the movie in question happens to be Gigli or Battlefield Earth?

Now you’ve got yourself a dilemma. You managed to find the hidden meaning in all that garbage, only you saw the beautiful rose growing in that dirty pile of horse poop. But even as you excitedly inform your friends about what you’ve discovered, deep down you know no one else on the planet will EVER see what you saw because when they look all they see is crap. The revelation is hidden once more behind the midden heap; the flower of inspiration has died.

Well, this is how I feel today.

You see, I’ve had a few days free from work and, instead of doing anything productive with my time off (like working on a certain person’s site *cough* *cough*) I’ve been doing something FAR more important; sitting on my butt and watching anime. Hey! Before you roll your eyes in disgust take another look at the title of this website. It reads “The Mighty GEEK”, ok? And I ask you, what self-respecting Geek doesn’t like anime?

That’s right, smarty-pants. Not one.

Anywaste, over the last few days I’ve seen about 8 new-to-me anime series’, 26 episodes each, and let me tell you they rocked my Geeky world. Some of them were so good I immediately wanted to discuss them with somebody to delve the deeper meanings behind certain characters’ motives, or to affirm my own understanding of what might have happened during an unexpectedly convoluted part of the storyline. I was excited; my imagination was running rampant in my head, I kept on dreaming up new plot twists and imagining new adventures for the characters to go on after the close of the show. I was thisclose to calling HoBiscuit to talk about a particularly stirring show I had just seen when I came to my senses and remembered that she doesn’t care about anime like I do. So I decided to call someone else who I could talk about this show with and I picked up the phone and…

Remembered that no one I know cares about anime.

So, here I am nearly bursting with enthusiasm for something that I enjoy so much that I can barely contain my need to share it with others, and yet I’m unable to find anyone to share my joy with. I know most people out there hear ‘anime’ and can’t get past Pokemon, Dragonball Z or some other horrible Saturday morning cartoon, but that’s not what anime is to me. Sure, I could throw out the usuals, like Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Princess Mononoke, but everyone knows those and they’re not even the best out there.

Not by a long shot.

I mean, I could espouse the virtues of comedic gold like Ranma or Golden Boy, or I could tell you how bitter sweet Fruits Basket or Gunbuster is, but you wouldn’t care. I might tell you that if you love action you’d enjoy Ninja Scroll, or that if you like spy movies you’d get a real kick out of R.O.D., but you’d probably nod your head politely and tune me out.

But that’s ok, I’m used to it by now.

I’m just a Geek, a guy who likes his anime, so it’s alright when other people ignore me when I’m talking about the newest anime I’ve seen. It’s fine when everyone else in the room rolls their eyes when I spend half an hour describing the amazing artwork and intricate plot of some new anime movie I got straight from Japan. It doesn’t bother me.

Nope, it doesn’t bother me at all.

That’s because I know that a year from now, maybe even in as little as a few months, all the people ignoring me today will probably be enthusiastically discussing the exact same show I’ve been trying to tell them about all that time. Why? Because it’s being shown late at night on Adult Swim, they Tivo’d it, watched it one day when they were bored and now believe it’s the greatest thing since sliced cheese. And I’ll just sit back with a smug smile on my face and tell them all about the next great anime show they’ve never heard of.

And they, as usual, will ignore me.