Voicemail “Greeting”
June 30, 2007 - 2pmPeople frequently complain that I don’t answer my phone, and that I don’t respond to voicemail once I get it. There’s a reason for this, and it’s quite simple: I consider the telephone a device that I use for my convenience, and not for anyone else’s.
As such, if I don’t feel like answering my phone, I usually don’t. There are a few people whom I’ll always take calls from, mostly because I know that they’re not the sort to bug me for free tech support or ask superfluous questions. I’ve been doing this for years. Most people have learned that I don’t respond by telephone, so they email, text or IM instead.
However, up until today, my voicemail greeting didn’t reflect this. (It was the generic “This is Marc, leave a message.”) I’ve replaced it with the following:
“Hi, this is Marc. I don’t really listen to or respond to my messages. If you want to leave me one, go ahead. But don’t expect me to get back to you for a couple days.”
Meme
June 24, 2007 - 7pm- One of your scars, how did you get it?
I have a 1″ scar on my right eyebrow. A friend and I were attacked by a couple drunks while we were out for a walk. It bled so much that a group of twenty people all stopped talking to stare as a cop and I looked for them.
- What is on the walls in your room?
Posters, a large wall mural/hanging thing, and a Japanese woodblock print I found in a snowbank and framed.
- Do you snore, grind your teeth, or talk in your sleep?
Yes. All of them.
- What type of music do you listen to?
I’ve all but given up trying to find any current music that doesn’t suck. The music industry can get fucked in the eye with a crowbar.
- Do you know what time you were born?
No. Should I?
- What do you want more than anything right now?
Meaning and direction.
- What do you miss?
Pedestrians, while driving.
Dreams
June 23, 2007 - 12pmI was sleeping very fitfully this morning because Megan was repeatedly waking me up. This always causes very strange, very short dreams:
- I was freezing to death in Antarctica with Fry, the Professor, and Zoidberg from Futurama. Except I was Fry, and Zoidberg was a plastic penguin.
- I bought the Superdome. It was a fixer-upper with police tape cordoning off crumbling sections of concrete.
- A fairly disturbing sex dream whose details you don’t want to know. Frankly, I’d prefer I didn’t know them either.
- Four or five others that have already self-destructed.
I do my best not to give too many details about my dreams, because I don’t want other people to give me details on theirs. Don’t give me long, drawn out descriptions of your dreams unless they a.) predict the future, b.) have a good narrative, or c.) are so completely batshit insane that they’ll amuse me. I make no secret of the fact that I have an incredibly short attention span.
We’ve all had people describe far more of their dreams to us than we really care to hear…
“Well, I was in my high school. I was talking with my math teacher, except he was also my dad. Then, I don’t know why, but I was suddenly in a field out in the middle of nowhere, and big birds were circling above me. Then I ate a doughnut, and the world imploded.”
Sound familiar?
Describing dreams in any more than two sentences is a waste of time. No one expects that a hallucination is going to make sense–so why would anyone expect that a dream should be any more lucid?
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© Marc Teale 2008.