The plural is actually Foci

Well, it was bound to happen. The folks said I needed a more dependable car for college. So, Ringo is no more. He’s gone to the great trade-in lot in the sky. The people at the ford dealership gave me a paltry $500 for him, including the $400 stereo unit I had put in about six months ago.

But now it’s time to usher in a new generation of Peterson pimpage: Now, instead of seeing me cruising at the speed of light in a pretty red car that breaks down every few weeks, you can see me accelerating more responsibly in a car with four doors. Oh well, that just means I’ll have a backseat wherein I can seduce women. Lots of them. After all, who wouldn’t fall for me when they see me rolling along in a 2005 Ford Focus ZX4 SE?

Boxing Day is only 9 months away

If you don’t know Stefanie, she’s a family friend who stayed at my house two summers ago and sporadically since. Now, she’s living with us quasi permanently, because she has always wanted to live in Florida.

The other day, she got a couple of desktop calendars for my computer table. They’re the kind where you have to rip off a page for each day to present a new fact or trivia question. In this case, they’re Buccaneers and Major League Baseball themes.

But on to my gripe session. I never really understood these types of calendars: they sit there, reflecting 1/365 of the year while leaving you largely unenlightened about the days and weeks surrounding the single day that sits there and stares you in the face. What if it’s Boxing Day in Canada next Tuesday? How can I even begin to prepare my annual Boxing Day party if I don’t know about it until next Tuesday when I finally remember to rip off the sheets of paper that have been left untouched for a week because I forgot to bother with the whole progression of time? This, my friends, is a veritable mystery.

By the way, you’re all invited to my annual Boxing Day gala on December 26. Tell your friends and BYOB.

The Sexiest Driveway in Clearwater

Getting up at 5 A.M. daily can take its toll.

Take for example when I walked out to my car this morning. I thought it was a bit drafty. I looked down. I had forgotten to put on a shirt. I said to myself, “Self, you should probably go put on a shirt.”

I sat in my car for three minutes trying to regain the energy to walk back inside.

Love is $.45/pound

Dear Produce Girl from Publix:

I’ve watched you stock tomatoes and bananas ever since I was in the 8th grade. You must have been in high school then. You had short reddish hair and wore thick-rimmed glasses. You were really, really good looking.

But a month ago, which was the last time I saw you, you had gotten contacts and bleached your hair. Im not saying that you didn’t look good, but I am saying that the Produce Girl of yesteryear had something that today’s Produce Girl doesn’t. And maybe I expressed this opinion a little too openly the last time I was buying a bag of potatoes, because I haven’t seen you since.

Produce Girl, I’m sorry if I offended you. Please, come back to your little corner of my neighborhood supermarket so I can fondle you with my eyes.

Love,
Casey

I can't wait until Vancouver 2010

I know I said that I hated Valentine’s Day. And I still do. But friends, I think I fell in love yesterday. With the US Olympic Women’s Curling Team.

Don’t get me wrong. I think (much to the chagrin of some of my eastern European counterparts at school) that the Olympics are a big waste of my time. It does nothing but interrupt my regularly scheduled week of new television shows and makes girls lust after gnarly snowboarder types.

But after watching the US fall short of beating the team from Japan in what appears to be some strange game of giant shuffleboard on ice, I came to appreciate the hotness that somehow comes from Bemidji, Minnesota.

And here’s a fun fact for you: Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox were from Bemidji. Not only can this little corner of northern Minnesota produce the hottest things to hit the ice since Emilio Estevez in The Mighty Ducks, but it can also captivate a nation with folk tales that make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Thank you, Bemidji. You get the gold medal in my book.

Annual Defense Mechanism

Every year at this time, I write a detailed manifesto about how Valentine’s Day is of the Devil (see 2004 and 2005). And in thinking this week about what new insights I could add to the already viscous soup of lament that I serve up annually, I could come up with nothing except for the thought that roses are stupid.

You buy them. They sit there. They die. They sit there. You throw them out. You have an empty vase and an empty wallet. Your lover will probably leave you at some point within the next year. You have an empty vase, an empty wallet, and an empty heart. You are back at square one.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody!

The most boring post ever

This is inconsequential. But it’s pretty important to me. I’ve made a drastic life change. And while it may not matter to you, while you may say, “Who cares? The whole idea of sharing this with the world is utterly pointless,” while you may just close this window and go about your day, just remember that for me to change anything about myself is pretty extreme. See, I love regimented systems wherein I always have a particular way of doing things such that everything is just so.

Anyhow, I’ve made the executive decision to make the letter I with one stroke of the pencil while writing from here on out. See, I’m avoiding the two horizontal lines at the top and bottom of the central column so that people can differentiate the letter I from the letter T, which they have trouble differentiating from the letter J, which they have trouble differentiating from the letter S. I’m taking the first step toward legible recovery. My teachers should be proud.

And grateful. Very grateful.

How ya gonna do me like that?

Yesterday, my good ole pal Jigar had his 18th birthday party. This is funny, because I can never picture Jigar Patel as a grown up. But here we are, brothers in maturity, just waiting to be arrested so we can go to big people jail.

Anyhow, Nathan, who is Jigar’s Indian brother in crime, asked me yesterday after school to go with him to buy lottery tickets to give to Jigar. He took me to this little Shell station on US 19, where we parked and I went inside to buy some lottery tickets.

He gave me five dollars, with which I bought five tickets. We went back out into the car and sat there, parked, when Nathan suggested we scratch a couple off, you know, so we can quadruple our money and buy Jigar more tickets. So, being the good and kindhearted people we are, we scratched off two of the tickets to find that we had won a dollar!

I marched back into the Shell station and got another ticket. Then, I came back out to the car to find Nathan sitting in the driver’s seat with four scratched losing tickets in the center console and a quarter with scratch off shavings still attached clutched tightly in his fist. He looked pitiful. So I cheered him up by letting him scratch off the last of Jigar’s birthday presents.

We may have left that gas station empty handed, but we did it all out of love for our dear Jigar. Happy birthday, buddy. Happy birthday.

Best thing since sliced bread

For Christmas, Ian got me a network adapter for my Playstation 2. I haven’t been able to use it until now, though, because I needed a wireless LAN adapter so that I wouldn’t have to run the world’s longest CAT5 cable through my house. Now I’ve got the wireless bridge, so all is well.

Ideally, Ian would get a Playstation 2 and a copy of Madden ’06 so that I could beat him from home while he’s living in Gainesville. However, he hasn’t purchased a console yet, so I’m stuck playing games of Madden with a bunch of Redskins fans who feel that they have something to prove (i.e. they can win with more than 120 total yards of offense and aren’t handed the game by the refs).

But let me tell you right now: this is awesome. I can connect with anyone around the world and play football with them. It will come in quite handy during the offseason when all I have to enjoy is baseball and hockey, which are the lesser of American sports because white people are generally physically inept. I guess I’ve still got basketball, but I refuse to watch a sport wherein everyone participating has a rap album. Anyway, I digress.

That said, if anyone has a Playstation 2, a network adapter, Madden ’06, and the desire to be completely annihilated, go ahead and contact me so that we can duke it out on the field.

I love technology.

Digital makeover

So, waking up before the sun’s alarm clock goes off and seeing a computer in dire need of a reformat you know won’t happen until the end of the week sort of sucks.

And this is for any teachers to whom I’ve had to turn in double-spaced papers since Tuesday: sorry for the ghetto fabulous paragraph formatting. All I had was Wordpad and an enter key.