Where's the Beef?

The other day, my grandfather took my brother David and I to the McDonald's drive-thru for a late dinner. It was 21:00 and we hadn't yet eaten.

Like most kids, David has developed certain likes and dislikes when it comes to food (as well as I have, but that's not the point). Both of us love bacon, and neither of us really likes condiments such as ketchup or mustard.

Now, I haven't liked McDonald's burgers for well over a decade. So, as usual, I ordered a 10-piece box of Chicken McNuggets with barbecue sauce (yum!). David ordered a plain bacon cheeseburger.

"I'm sorry," the cashier said. "We don't have bacon cheeseburgers." (Apparently, that's Wendy's.) "But I can give you a cheeseburger with bacon on it."

After thinking on this rather odd comment for a moment, David agreed.

I told you already David doesn't like condiments. In fact (like me), he'll refuse to eat a hamburger with condiments on it. So, he implored Grandpa to emphasize that his bacon cheeseburger cheeseburger with bacon was to be plain. Hold the mustard, hold the lettuce; special orders don't upset us...(wait, that's Burger King).

The message was passed along, and all was good. We got our bag of food and drove about three miles to Grandpa's house.

When we arrived, I opened my McNuggets and began eating. David, as usual, started to check his burger to make sure nothing foreign and unwanted was on it. Except his burger was a bit shorter than usual (you know, not tall). He opened it up and his eyes widened:

Where was his beloved and much anticipated all-beef patty? It was no where to be found! On the bun was smiply a slice of cheese and two strips of bacon (ooh, two strips).

The moral of the story is: special orders apparently do upset people at McDonald's. So much so, in fact, that they'll give you a burger without burger for the same price as a burger with burger.

Who do they think they're fooling, anyways? What kind of a person orders a cheeseburger with no beef? You might as well waltz into a grocery store and buy a block of cheese and a loaf of bread. You could get about 20 "cheeseburgers" for the price of one McDonalds burger without burger.

Oh, well. Grandpa wasn't about to drive another three miles each way just to complain. My brother ate the burger without burger anyway.

Branded!

This will be one of my shorter posts. No particular reason, it's just that this topic doesn't exactly lend itself to oodles of words.

Recently, one of my classmates came into class with something to show us: her finger (ooh, interesting). It was the tip of her finger that was the object of this impromptu show-and-tell. She had just discovered that branded into it were two letters: "TO." She had no idea when this could have happened, and nobody knew the significance of the letters. I pointed out that if her finger said "TO," the original object must have said "OT." I asked to see the adjacent finger, and she showed it to us.

Branded into it was the "H" that I had been expecting.

Yes, that's right. Go ahead and laugh. The item she touched had read, "HOT" in nice, big capital letters. And yet she burnt herself nonetheless (how mindless can you get?). Just a taste of some of the people I deal with every day.

Pasting and Publishing

I am writing this post as I sit at my brother’s piano lesson, waiting for my turn. No, I don’t have a laptop. I didn’t even bring pen and paper. I’m typing this into my TI-83+ graphing calculator. I’ll then load the text onto my computer and post it from there. This is how pathetic I’ve become.

That’s the problem with parentally restricted Internet access: you can’t afford to spend time typing while you’re online. As such, I type all of my blog posts and most of my longer outgoing emails in advance. When the time comes that I am finally online, I simply copy, paste, and send (or in the case of this blog, publish).

Yet, I can’t help but feel guilty about pasting. It seems like I’m being impersonal and that I’m somehow removing myself from what I’ve written. I feel like I’m just passing along a meaningless block of text that no one cares about anyway.

But it’s not like I am being impersonal; I’ve really put some thought and consideration into what I’ve written. It’s just that it seems too easy to write an email at night, save it to a disk and simply paste and send when I get to school the next morning. I feel like I’m missing the actual act of typing what I’ve sent, even though I’m not because I’ve already done it.

As for blogging, I don’t really care. With other websites I’ve run (and continue to run), I do everything offline and just upload it all at once. For a website, even a blog, it just seems natural to do it offline. It’s just for email that I feel I should be more active in actually typing my messages right before I send them. Maybe it has to do with the timeliness of the whole thing. I don’t know. All I know is my days of pasting and publishing are all but over.

Polished Lips and Inflatable Zeros

Last night was the prom and all was good, but the night wasn't without its glitches. At 16:05 I arrived at my date's house, flowers in hand, ready for the night to begin. Everything was perfect, except she wasn't home. Every time I knocked on her door, her dog went crazier (and barked louder). I waited there for a good 10 minutes, wondering if she was just running a little late (I hear it's a girl thing). Finally, I decided to go home and call her friend's house; I knew that was where she would be if she were anywhere other than her home.

At 16:20, I got home and ran to the phone. I asked if anyone knew the whereabouts of my date. Yes, they did. She was right there, frantically trying to get nail polish off of her lips (what?). Apparently, they were making some last-minute final touches when they picked up a tube, thinking it was lipstick, and started painting her lips. It was the younger sister who, before things got worse, duly noted that the tube in fact contained nail polish.

After the impromptu delay, the night went on. It began with myriad pictures in front of the weeping willow tree in my backyard (say "cheese"). We went to the school to see the Prom Queen be crowned and then went to my great-grandmother's house on the lake for even more pictures. Our party rendezvoused at a restaurant where we ate (obviously) then stepped into our limousine, which until Thursday was not part of our plans.

We arrived at the prom itself at 20:00 (fashionably late), and one of the first things we saw there was a wonderful ice sculpture that had "Prom 2005" carved out. I took a picture of it. Inside the ballroom on either side of the deejay were a "zero" balloon and a "five" balloon (how appropriate). We started talking and got off on random tangents about the conservation of inflatable zeros and how the Prom Committee should save the zero to use for future proms. Unfortunately, by the end of the evening, the zero's helium was not as it had been and the once upright zero was sulking its zero-head away from the merriment of the dance floor (amazingly interpretive, but depressing and kind of weird).

My date looked so different from her norm that all throughout the night various people passed by her without noticing who she was. One of my friends even looked right at her and asked me if she was a long-distance girlfriend or something. No, it wasn't. Many people tried to get us to dance, but the closest we got was cooperative swaying. We also "square" danced in which we each formed square out of our index fingers and thumbs, held it up, and jumped vertically to the music (we're a silly crew).

I took pictures throughout the event of people I knew (and their dates, of course). Since my dad gave me a film camera, though, I have to go through the pain and agony of waiting for them to be developed (ugh!). I didn't have to wait, however, for our instant key chain portraits. My date and I got our professional pictures taken around 20:45 and by 21:30 I was looking at the picture wondering why it looked odd. I then realized that I had little red dots for pupils and that she had big red dots for pupils (so red, it almost covered her entire eye). I hope the picture people will eliminate that when they print the package.

As exciting as the evening was, by 23:00 we were all tired and ready to go home. I took another picture of the now melted ice sculpture. We all got back into the limousine and drove back toward home. I don't know that I shall ever see my date so dressed up again, but at least now there's proof—and for years to come, we'll have fond memories her polished lips.

Caffeine Starts Bear of a Day

Caffeine is all that's keeping me up now. It's what got me up to eMail my homework to my History teacher because my printer's broken, and it's what will keep me up right through 'til prom, which is tonight! On top of that, I've got lots more to do before the week is through.

My prom date and I were just asked yesterday if we wanted to join a group in their dinner reservations and limo. Sure. We'll modify our plans to fit a limo in.

The bus is coming soon, so I've got to go and actually start this bear of a day.

Losing the Phone Book

This is a very busy week. Two concerts, a prom, and a party, with homework (and trying to start up a decent blog) on the side. It doesn't work; something's gotta give.

One of my old friends since preschool (who has since moved to Virginia) was in town Sunday. I was told she'd be up at about 14:30 at her best friend's house; she would call me when she came. Well, by 15:30 I still hadn't gotten called. Maybe she was running late. So I took a nice, long nap, eagerly awaiting the phone call.

Knock, knock. It was 18:30 and my parents were at my door. She was at my house. Where had she been? At her friend's house for three and a half hours! Apparently, she couldn't find my phone number (or maybe she just lost the phone book). So, my friend was rushing back to her sister's house and I was on the way. Yay. Three and a half minutes isn't three and a half hours, though. And I wasn't even doing anything important (who needs sleep?). Oh, well. I'm a little disappointed, but hey, we're all human.

Gotta go—the spring concert is tomorrow night, and I can't be zonking out during my solos (or is it "soli"?)! But, of course, certain people will be zonking out anyways—the new Star Wars movie comes out in less than an hour.

My First Post

Welcome to Randomness, my first blog and current personal website.

I hope you will enjoy all that I will be posting in the coming months, even though it may seem like it has nothing to do with anything.