A Little More About Me

(Moved here from "The Shootist" - Thursday July 14, 2005)

Well, I'm really not as arrogant as I came off in the prior post. I really am better than everybody else.

JUST KIDDING!

So... about me... This will probably be the most difficult writing assignment I'll ever, er ...assign... myself.

I don't think I would be classified as a typical guy. I'm not gay, nor am I effeminate, but I do have some feminine traits. Take my breasts, for instance.

OKAY! KIDDING AGAIN!

But seriously, I'm known to cry at the end of chick flicks. Oh, yeah... I watch chick flicks with my wife, when she's in a movie mood. I cry in the middle of "It's A Wonderful Life" (the best movie ever made) when Mr. Gower, who's just received notice that his son has died, flies into a rage because little George Bailey hasn't delivered a prescription, and then starts slapping the shit out of him until George tells him that he didn't make the delivery because he noticed that Mr. Gower had put the wrong - read: DEADLY - pills in a customer's prescription...because I know the implications of this event later in the movie...because I've seen it a billion times. I bawled my eyes out at the end of "Titanic" (yeah, I know "Titanic"... *GROAN!*). No, I mean I seriously sobbed, right there in the theater while the credits rolled and the other, much less sappy moviegoers filed out. I even cried during that silly little song in the middle of "Toy Story 2," the one where Woody's girlfriend laments about how she was a little girl's forgotten toy.

And in a confrontation, like at work when shit's just wrong and I feel I MUST speak out, or when I get really angry at my wife, I get a lump in my throat when I try to speak. But I'm a guy, so afterward I can punch something (not my wife!) and think I feel better.

I like music, mostly '70s and '80s rock, but I do like a lot of the swing era, or Big Band music. I like classical, though I'm not a connoisseur and couldn't discern between Beethoven's Third Symphony and Mozart's Symphony No. 16 in C major. Okay, I had to look that up in my collection to even remember he HAD a No. 16!

I'm not much into art. I don't care much for paintings, but, for some reason, I really dig sculpture. I mean the "real" sculpture, the classics from the Renaissance and whatnot, the ones that really look like people, like Michelangelo's "David," ...or was that Da Vinci's? ...or the unbelievably huge collection at the Louvre in Paris.

I love to travel. It's the reason I went for the job I now have. Of course, with the job I've just about had all the travel they can stuff down my throat. People always say to me, "You have a great job! You get to see so much of the world!" I'm a bit of a cynic, so I can't refrain from replying something to the effect of, "Yeah, I see lots of airports and hotels." But if it weren't for the job, I wouldn't have been able to take my wife to Paris in '02 (piggybacked with work) or my wife and my father to Italy in '04 (strictly vacation, air travel paid for with frequent-flyer miles), or a niece and nephew to Ireland and England just this past June (work again, ff miles again).

I love to drive. I guess that falls in with the love for travel. I love road trips, though I seldom get to do those anymore. Driving for work travel is normally out of the question as I'm often off to New England or DC or NYC, or in The South, though I can never seem to be sent there in the winter, only in August when you see people crowded around the tailpipes of idling buses to take advantage of the cool breeze coming out of them! But I digress. I miss road trips.

As to what my job is, I'll only say for now that I'm out on the fringes of real video production work. None of what I do is ever seen on TV anywhere, but it is seen by hundreds of people...once. Then I'm on to the next project. Through work and through associates from work, I have had the opportunity to meet a few famous - or once famous - celebrities: Les Paul, Tommy Smothers, Penn & Teller, Colin Powell... that's about it. Oh, and the Osmonds, minus Donny and Marie.

I like to make people laugh and try to do that all the time (refer to the breasts remark above...SERIOUS attempt there!). I even get to exercise that in my work about 35% of the time.

What I hate to do is bore people, like I'm doing to you, now. You have other blogs to read, so I'll end your agony (you know, you coulda just stopped reading and moved on!). If you care, you can learn more about me as I go along. Just don't forget to bookmark me before you zap my page into nothing. Thanks for reading this far.

dassall