The results are in, and it looks like 95% of the people that I’ve asked say that you can never give the same engagement ring twice. The other 5 percent are guys who have no girlfriends and therefore are not afraid to seem cheap. But why shouldn’t I be able to give the ring again?

Now I’m not going to say that I don’t understand that giving a gift you bought with someone else in mind to another person takes a little bit of the magic out of it. And I know that making this argument is just going to make me look cheap and bitter. But I’m only the latter! But, hey,  I think I have a point here. When I gave the ring, I tried to “give myself” to her and she rejected that along with the ring, so no can I never “give myself” to anyone else? Am I tainted just like the ring? If I used to love someone else and now I have a new love, is that love somehow less? Why does the ring have to be linked to one person at a specific time in my life. What I’m trying to say is that I’m tying the ring not to the person but to my idea of loving someone. If you accept my love, then you accept the symbol of it. Maybe I’m thinking of it like a crown for a queen. When there’s a new queen they don’t go out and buy a new crown for her to wear. They break out “the royal jewels” Well in my life, this is the royal jewel and besides my car, it’s the most expensive thing I own.

Also this whole concept doesn’t apply for rings that you didn’t buy. If there’s a ring that’s been in the family for a while and you give it to your first fiancee, then I think you have the right to ask for it back and give it to the next one. That doesn’t sound like such a far fetched idea to me. I don’t even think that the person who’s ring is was originally has to be dead or anything, they could just give it to you. is that some kind of loophole? If your first fiancee dies, is that better or worse to give it again? So why does buying the ring with your own money make it different. Is it the process? Is it the fact that when she thinks of where I got the ring that she’s going to think of me at the store all happy that I was going to marry someone else? If I give you my grandmothers ring, do you think of someone pulling it off her dead finger?

Sorry about the morbid imagery. What I’m talking about here is symbolism. Maybe I won’t give the ring again ( and I probably won’t because no woman is going to be that persuaded by this essay) But I should be able to. Just like we should be able to wear rings made out of cultures of each others bone tissue or a silver cast toy ring as an engagement ring. But what your really concerned about is appearance. “What is everybody else going to think?” What’s the first thing someone asks when a girl says that she just got engaged? “let me see the ring!” Now why do people say that. Well their judging the man of course. Is he rich? Did he spend a lot of money? How much does the he REALLY care? I think there should be some kind of thought behind the ring. When I bought the last one, I spent a lot of money, too much money for a young man to realistically spend on something like that. I knew what she wanted and I got it. I think If I ever do that again, I’m going to make it mean something to both of us. A little secret that we both can share. and NO the secret’s not going to be, he bought it for another woman

Maybe here’s what I’m trying to say. After you realize that there’s no secondary market for diamonds outside the diamond world, you start to see that diamonds aren’t valuable. They aren’t a good investment, they’re just expensive. Now there is a difference between expensive and valuable. Diamonds are a one time purchase, once you have it, it becomes worthless. Or maybe it becomes sentimental, only valuable to you. So why would I even want to give that ring again, It’s worthless? Why not give something else that really means something? Well that’s option A in the Mark Schumaker plan of life. Option B is that ring is worth $2500 to me. Cause that’s what I paid for it.

The stupid thing about this all is, Nobody’s ever going to listen to me about this. Everybody wants to be iced out. Everybody is falling for it, diamonds are the biggest scam of all and you’ve bought it hook line and sinker Bling Bling.

Diamonds are a wars best friend

PBS show about synthetic diamonds

Is a diamonds price the measure of it’s true value?

Ask METAfilter: Advice on selling a diamond

Ask METAfilter: Selling an engagement ring

Ask METAfilter: Selling MY ring

The DeBeers Cartel

It makes me feel gross at first, then better, then good… then I have to do it again.

When I went to the doctor the other day I got prescribed Naseral, which is a nasal steroid for relieving my allergies/post nasal drip. I hope this doesn’t mean that my nose is going to go all Bruce Banner on me and develop rippling muscles? But for it’s designed purpose I think it’s working, complaints from the Ellen department have dropped off sharply. The problem is that in order to comply with the demands that I stop “snuffing my nose all the time” I have to spray something that smells/tastes like kiddy pool water up my nose twice a day. But I tell you it’s a small price to pay for not making her angry, cause oh man.

Nobody wants to see that.

Later!

Well this makes the first year that I’ve made New Years Resolutions. Really I’ve never done them because I know that I’ll never follow through with them. I actually make resolutions every month or so, to get healthy, to get out of debt. Shocker that’s mostly what my goals are for the year.

Get out of debt.

This one is probably the hardest for me, because I have a steady job with adequate pay and that makes me think I should have money to spend. But that is NOT the case. Another problem is… that I’m good at almost everything. Now why does this sudden burst of self-confidence / ego have anything to do with spending money. Well, say I’m in the mood for a project, I know how to paint, lets spend hundreds of dollars on supplies for a beerpong table. How about retrofitting the Kegerator (that we built in the first place) to fit 1/2 barrel kegs? Well whip out the credit card for another trip to the Home Depot for fiberglass, foam, and bondo. Darts? I’m good at that too, why not buy some new ones? I think one of my problems is that I’m used to living at my parents house, not that they paid for everything all the time, but they have decades worth of crap laying around. That way I could go down to the basement for whatever part or building supplies I needed, instead of running out to buy it. I need to get it through my head that I can make due with something that doesn’t look as good. SO good luck to me on that.

Lose Weight/ get skinny/ stop being such a lazy turd.

So I’ve been meaning to deflate this spare tire that I’ve been building for the last year. But I’ve become very attached to it. Not in the affectionate way, in the way that gum gets “attached” to your shoe. Plus beer and fired foods are so tasty. I’m not going to go into details about how I got this way, I’m just a fatass. But Ellen talked about running a sprint Triathlon in the spring sometime, that seems like a good goal to get fit, and the whole “Not dying early” thing is a winner too. Eating that cheese danish on the way back from my physical may have been a bad start, but I did walk about 20 blocks, thus burning calories and saving money on Metro. Two-fer-one!

We’ll see how this goes

Later!

So what did I learn today? Well it seems like the Capitol is a few blocks from my office! AND that Union Station is a few blocks from the Capitol! AND that the Kaiser Permanente Building is just a few scant blocks from Union Station! UNFORTUNATLEY combining those all together with the fact that I can get lost in a paper bag amounts to a lot of fucking walking.

I’m usually not that sad when I get lost. Maybe it’s because it happens so often that I’m used to it. When I’m alone anyway I just sort of wander around until I find something that looks vaguely familiar and go from there. That seems to work a LOT better when you’re in a car. I really only got lost on the way there because the directions on the Kaiser website said “from Union Station walk west one block on Mass. Ave.” This may seem like a stupid question…

How am I supposed to know which way is west?

This isn’t 1806, I don’t carry a compass. And it’s overcast so I can’t see the sun or anything and moss always grows on the outside of the tree. So that’s where the walking started, once I found North Capitol Street things got better.

Since I already walked 4 blocks to the building and the lab work took about 10 seconds I thought I’d walk back to the office. So I thought I would just walk to the Capitol Building and then find my office. when I got to the building I needed to find the Botanical Gardens to get my bearings. I also thought that little guy on the top of the building was facing the Washington Monument, Damn him! SO I made 3 lefts to go right, while walking all the way around the Capitol. I swear the capitol police were watching me and about to put me on some kind of terrorist watch list. But I made it! It took me about 45 minutes, but how else will I learn?

Another thing that I learned is that I really need to figure out how to describe the book that I’m reading to other people.

“Sex drugs and Coco Puffs” is about…

Well it’s about everything.. and nothing.. and Saved by the Bell!

Also I got hit on by a black nurse… she wanted to hold my hand while I got my blood drawn… But I just tried to explain what my silly book was about instead. Also I was a little frozen from all the walking.

Later!

*UPDATE*

On reading this a second time I would just like to point out  I only said “Black Nurse” because I don’t think I’ve ever been able to attract the lovley dark skinned ladies. My usual woman has more of a milky white complection. Except for Ellen, who has sort of a “year round tan” or at least does to me, because I’m practically clear. But she’s not the norm for me… she

So it used to be cool and geeky to carry around an Ipod and listen to your entire music collection on one device. But with Apple having 90% market share in mp3 players it’s really not that uncommon. In fact it’s harder to find someone who dosen’t own an Ipod, or at least that makes sense in my gadget obsessed mind. But I’m moving into the next level of geekdom, Phone as do-it-all device.

I’ve been using the loaned Treo 650 for some time now, but I never wanted to get too attached to it because at any moment Greg could just ask for it back and I would have to give it to him. But The other day he came home with a new toy. The Siemens SX-66, a monster smartphone he bought 2nd hand from his boss. Therefore efectivly satisfying his gadget lust and making it less likley that he would want the Treo back. So cool! I can really pimp this thing out now… to the Max.

With a Best Buy gift card I went and got a stereo handsfree kit for cell phones, which means 2 earphones and a microphone. (Which is onfortunatley mono right now, but i’ll work on that) so that I can listen to music with the Treo. I have a 512mb SD card that I got a while back, so I can’t put too many songs on there, but right now I’m dropping about 100 on there as a test. I think the playback is good enough for me, but the commute home will be the real test.

Also “Video Ipod be dammed”, I can watch stuff on this too. Well dammed is a strong sentiment, how about “Suck it, Video Ipod”. I’ve already tested the video playback with a couple music videos, they seem to work fine. Without re-encoding an episode of The Simpsons they are around 100mb, which is resonable, but I think I can squeeze them down to a more managable size, I mean really they’re just 22 minutes long?

So hopefully this will be the test run for the digital media player of the future, I’m greedy and want one that can do everything. It’ll be around someday, you just watch.

Later!

Before I start my rant of gross oversimplificaiton I would like to say that I like most of the people that I work with, some of them are interesting people. Mostly the ones that I’ve worked with at the Arlington office. It seems like those people were the brave ones who, when given the opportunity to escape the dank grey prison of the Washington office (WOC) jumped ship and swam for shore. They have more spirit than the drones they left behind at the WOC.

But that grand experiment has come to an end, the development team have all been moved back to the WOC. It’s not like we were african tribesman stolen and placed in the hold of a ship. But It just really sucks to work here. The internet filtering and computer rights problems aren’t as bad as I feared, but they still block Gmail, myspace, and Yahoo Fantasy Sports. Not to mention FTP, so I’ll probably have to upload this tonight sometime. The commute kind of eats it too, 3.80 each way on the metro and either 3.75 to park or $1 each way on the bus. But I do get time to read or sleep on the way in and I’m not putting any miles on my car. Also Ellen works a few Metro stops to the east so it might be easy to get together for lunch once a week. So there are some advantages to this setup, I’m just going to really have to budget and bring my lunch to keep my finances under control.

But the weirdest part of moving is finding out that it’s all true… What you ask? Dilbert, Office Space, The Office… those aren’t jokes. I’ve always thought of them as a twisted and exagerated reflection of real life. But nope… they’re documentaries. It’s kind of frightening to know that those people actually exist. Here’s an example.

When our team moved into the cubefarm Tom and I went about our decorating. Just making the grey walls of the cube bareable by putting up a Tiki style banner and some party decorations, nothing too fancy in my eyes. But you kept seening all the little office gophers talking in the background about “those tiki guys” and we get 10 people coming by every day and making some kind of tiki bar comment… and I haven’t even put up that sign yet. From the looks we got you might think we were sacrificing a live chicken to help us program Java.

“Jobu come, make computer not afraid”

Looking around I sort of know why, nobody else has decorated anything, they’ve all been here for years and the most they have is a little picture here and there. It’s like they feel that if they show the slightest bit of individuality the agents from the Matrix will show up and replace them with another cog in the wheel. I thought the cube next to me was abandoned because theres this sort of Milton Waddoms thing going on over there… Just cardboard boxes filled with papers stacked up… but nope, there’s a guy that works there.

It’s pretty obvious that I’m not like these people, but that’s cool. I work great as the outsider and can learn to get along with anyone. But I won’t become one of them.

Later!