Another day, another pizza

     ....Meaning, of course, that I got lazy last night and ordered pizza for myself and Robyn. The world is a strange, convoluted place. Julian is working this weekend at Anime Weekend Atlanta, and our pizza delivery guy was the title actor for the worst movie Julian ever had the ill luck with which to be involved. Not that he's a bad actor, but the movie was really that bad--the "assistant director" should have been fired before filming even started. Even Robyn, who was ten when the movie was screened at Atlanta Sci Fi Summer, hated it. They talk about B-grade horror movies. Well, this one was a D.

     It was actually kind of a jolt seeing Bobby on the front porch a few weeks ago in a Papa John's shirt carrying our pizzas. Frankly, life's been like that since we came back to civilization. Thanks to the party we threw, we've been hooking up with a lot of our old friends. I've noticed, though, that gas prices being four times what they were 10 years ago has made the world a bigger place. When we lived here before, we thought nothing of traveling from Little Five to Duluth to Douglasville a few times a week. Now, I have to make sure we have enough money for me to go back and forth to work for an entire week. We used to go to the mountains most weeks, too. I know I make more money now, but I can't afford to do anything. Yea, economics! The result is we don't visit our friends the way we used to, and they can't afford to visit us, either.

     Strange as it may seem considering what I do for a living, my job has made me crave a social life. I work in a call center, in Credit/Billing and Beginning/Ending Service for Duke Energy. What this means is that I spend my day on the telephone talking to people who want to know why we cut off their power when they haven't paid a single bill in over a year. Man, Duke Energy is really caring and nice compared to Georgia Power! The result is that I crave intelligent conversation. I swear, Indiana makes the most remote parts of Georgia look downright sophisticated. At least that's true of the ones with whom I end up on the phone. At least I make the same amount of money here that I did in Athens, even though I liked my job better there. I like the city better here; Athens is a cultural sink hole filled with smog from Atlanta that travels down 316 with the rest of the crap and then gets moldy.

     Sorry; my health declined so much and so rapidly in Athens that I really didn't see it until it was far to late to stop it. As a result of that and of having been in 13 automobile accidents in the first 8 years I was there (and I was the victim in all of them!) and becoming more and more ill and lethargic the longer I was there, I have become rather bitter about the place.