I meant to get this installment of Choking Yak’s Provoking Facts up yesterday afternoon…but I just realized that I never actually clicked on the Publish button. I’ve edited the timestamp on this post to more accurately reflect the initial intended publishing time, but for the record, actual time of publishing will be 9:06 AM on Tuesday, November 4th.

I know you were all wondering about that too, so I’m glad we got that cleared up. Now…ONTO THE RAMBLING!

– I spilled some soya sauce on my shirt today while eating lunch. Now I need to spend the rest of the day with my arms crossed over my chest so that no one notices.

– For the longest time – like for years, when I was younger – I actually thought the lyrics to Don’t Dream It’s Over were actually “Hey now, hey now / The dream is over“…which is actually like…the opposite of what it’s supposed to be. And so it was always a very sad, depressing song to me, until I finally looked it up and was surprised at how retarded I was. That doesn’t happen anymore – now I’m never surprised at how retarded I am.

– So last night, I’m sitting in the dark, at my desk in my room, and I’m reading this online article about…league average statistics for batted balls in play or some other homosexual nonsense. I’m going “HMMM” and “HURM” and “OOOOH” all throughout because it’s so interesting and I reach for my wireless mouse to scroll down the page…but since it’s so dark, I accidentally grabbed this orange that I had previously peeled and put on my desk next to the mouse instead. I didn’t quite get what was going on at first, but I can say with absolutely certainty that the sensation of reaching out into the dark and grabbing a fistful of wet, fleshy orange instead of the ergonomic hand-fitted plastic shell of a Logitech MX Revolution wireless laser mouse is probably one of the most horrifying feelings I’ve ever had. I think I screamed a little bit.

– I want to put Zombie by The Cranberries into a future WAMBAG.COM production, just for kicks. I was on the subway this morning, standing way closer to this dude than I’m comfortable with, and I heard the song leaking out from his iPod ear buds. And then I started laughing to myself, but I don’t know why, as it isn’t really that funny.

– Last week, we moved up five floors to a new, more confined, less spacious workspace…although admittedly the floor itself seems a lot nicer, a lot more sunlight. We have a cool new coffee machine as well, but my mug (which has the word “Cereality” cryptically written on it) doesn’t fit. There’s also a lot of nice, big meeting rooms up here, but we’re already feuding with the locals over their availability. First day here, we got kicked out of a room mid-meeting that was apparently previously booked already…and while we were leaving, my manager told me to memorize the face of the guy who kicked out us. (“Vendetta.”) I don’t particularly like my new desk as well, which is quickly becoming a source of bitterness in my day-to-day life now. Sometimes I think back about how funny Office Space was…and then I realize how absolutely accurately it portrayed white collar office culture…and it scares me a bit instead.

– They took our Aerons away as well. So now I spend all my time fantasizing about this chair instead.

– I like walking down one stop to the Queen Street subway station sometimes, because the train’s a bit less crowded if you catch it a stop earlier, and I also just enjoy taking a leisurely stroll through the Eaton Centre while everyone else around me is all busy busy and everyone’s in a rush to get somewhere. That’s me in the morning, so I figure it’s good to take it the reverse on the way home, balance out some of that stress in your life, that constant need to be traveling somewhere all the time without ever actually enjoying the experience of the journey itself.

I watched this bit on the Discovery Channel once that equated the walking mechanism in the human body to a system of an inverted pendulum, in which each step we take either brings the central body mass up to the point of the highest gravitational potential energy or alternatively causes the body to fall, using that energy. So I’m just imagining this pendulum tick away in my head while I’m walking through the mall yesterday after work, and I’ve realized that I’ve been following this girl from 10 feet back for like five minutes; I’ve subconsciously matched her pace and now I’m starring a hole into the back of her head while I contemplate the meaning of life with this big upside-down pendulum ticking away in my head.

And as I keep starring at the back of her head…I start to imagine these tendrils of hair suddenly coming alive and shooting forward to attack me like Medusa of the Inhumans. And I don’t want to be caught off-guard, so I start to think about going first (as I’ve been taught by Han Solo and Street Fighter), and preemptively punch this random girl in the back of her head before her hair comes alive and strangles me. I’m considering this as she suddenly whirls around, looks right at me (I freeze), then past me (unfreeze), and then turns around and keeps walking. And I swear to God, there was a split-second in there in which there was an actual possibility I might have leaped forward and just clocked her before she could come at me…with her hair. What would have happened to me? How would I have been able to explain what I did? That would have been a rather awkward conversation to have with mall security. And then I got on the subway and went home.

– The grocery store downstairs from my office sells packages of sliced ham and Swiss cheese, presumably for you to put in sandwiches…or maybe even used to enhance your existing sandwich with. I like to buy them and just eat it straight from their plastic wrapped Styrofoam trays while I check sports scores at my desk. It’s my new thing now. (I’ve done it twice.)

– I had an off site meeting today to discuss design details for this new project with people I’ve never met before at a building I’ve never been to. I never understand the naming conventions some places have for their meeting rooms. In my office, it’s Meeting Room 1, Meeting Room 2, Meeting Room 3, and so on and so forth to Meeting Room 24. My meeting today was in this room called the Pitseolak Room…which (after some strenuous Googling) I can only assume is named after “an Inuit Canadian artist admired for the unpretentious authenticity in her works“. I’m all for honouring our heritage or recognizing national heroes and all that jibber jabber…but honestly, is that something accomplished by naming a meeting room (with an eight person seating capacity) after someone? Is this really the time and place for this?

I’ve also been to another building that had meeting rooms named after oceans. Oceans. What’s the rationale here? To spice up office life? Such that every time you have a meeting, you’re like “Oh, the ocean, how refreshing!”? And it wasn’t just straight hallways either – it was a myriad maze of confusing twists and turns. In my office, if you can find Meeting Room 15, chances are you can probably find Meeting Room 16…it’s the next one down. But here…if I’m at the Atlantic Room but I’m looking for the Pacific Room…where do I go? Left? Right? Find the room labeled North America and cross it westwardly? I don’t even really know where the Indian Ocean is located (near India?) – it’s like I have to write a geography test every time I have a meeting with our business unit. It’s so goddamn stupid!

– Being cool is wearing a Remembrance Day poppy as soon as Halloween is over. I haven’t even seen anyone else in the entirety of downtown wearing one yet – I am truly the coolest dude EVER.

Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to encourage that amnesia.