Miserable Miscellany

I don't have time to compose my thoughts sufficiently to create a proper entry, but here is what is on my mind right now:

• If bad driving were a universe, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada would be the nexus of that universe.
• You may think that it is other people that have problems driving and talking on their cell phones. You are wrong, it is you. I know. I have seen you.
• Speaking of cell phones, respect those around you. Nobody else cares about your pathetic life or the lives of your simpleton friends, so keep your conversations brief and quiet. If you have one of those really tiny phones, do yourself and everybody else a favour and get an earpiece. You are irritating enough without the endless, "What? What was that? I didn't hear you..." etc. as you pass the stupid thing back and forth from your mouth to your ear.
• When you pass through a door in a public place, make at least some tiny effort to hold the door for those behind you.
• If I hold the door open behind me as I pass through, don't slip in without extending the chain of courtesy to the next person. That's just rude.
• Public Transit does not employ a maintenance staff to be your personal maid service. Rather, they do, but they shouldn't. Transit is like camping; you pack out what you pack in. This week I saw somebody's McDonald's remnants laid out on the seat as though they had used it as a table. Which they probably did. Which is profoundly disturbing. Oh, and a nearly full Slurpie that was melted. Did they forget their whole Slurpie?
• When you are waiting for the bus, let those who were there ahead of you board first. Don't try to jam on. It takes longer and, more to the point, makes me angry.
• The music that you like to listen to sucks. Really bad. So does my music. That's why I listen to it quietly.
• QuarkXpress vs. InDesign - Very few people care about this stuff, but my studio is switching to InDesign. I don't see it as necessarily bad or good, but I am more familiar and comfortable with Quark and since I work exclusively with printed matter, I don't see any real benefit to the change. Either we embrace the whole Adobe CS package, or slap a Quark6 upgrade in there and keep chugging along. Since my employer is one of the larger ad firms in the world, it is pretty big news.
• I finally bought Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again in trade paperback. It collects the three graphic novels that formed the follow-up to Miller's (Oh, and Lynn Varley's - sorry!) Batman: The Dark Knight quadrilogy from the eighties. Nice work. Gorgeous. Doesn't hit me like it did back in the day, though. That first miniseries turned the world of conventional comic book work on its ear.
• Now I wish I could draw comics for a living.
• I have very nearly almost started getting around to working out the necessary details required to look into the possibility of the potential of my beginning to develop the preliminary aspects of new comic. Maybe. I am thinking four pages. Working title: Someones at the Door. No dialogue, just drawings. Black ink for the drawings with maybe watercolour, maybe Photoshop, maybe both.
• I am becoming increasingly searchable online, but still not through Google. Odd, but I can find several references to myself with Yahoo, Lycos and whatever Dogpile uses.
• The best food new food I have tried recently is jalepeno pepper stuffed olives. Yum!
• I miss having a radio at my desk all the time. My new office is one of these "open concept" things that Hippies like to talk about. I don't like looking at other people working and I think it is safe to say that they don't want to be looking at me.
• I can't draw really well on the subway or the bus (or at all, sometimes...) so I try to sketch out rough ideas while I am on transit. Now I need to take a sabbatical to try to catch up on the rough sketches I have made.
• My fantasy: retire to a workshop where I can design, print and bind my own limited edition books. My reality: work until I keel over dead. Better top up that life insurance...

That's about it for now.