Staring Down the Computer in My Brain

If you read this blog you know that I am preoccupied with spam. Some people spend their lives curing disease or creating great works of art, I spend mine thinking about unsolicited email. It's how I roll. The point is, traditionally this thinking about spam has been confined to my waking hours. Lately, however, spam has invaded my dreams as well. That is to say, recently, on more than one occasion, my alarm has gone off in the morning (When else would it go off? The afternoon? That would just be dumb.) and I've hit the snooze bar, and in the intervening 9 minutes, I've dreamt that I was deleting spam email out of my inbox. As I say, this has happened multiple times as of late. As if dreaming about deleting spam wasn't pathetic enough, during the most recent instance of it happening, it was a lucid dream--I was cognizant of the fact that I was dreaming about deleting email. But, rather than becoming depressed by this, I was excited: I actually thought to myself that it was awesome to be so productive, i.e. to be able to grab a few extra minutes of sleep and to simultaneously use that time to delete email, rather than wasting my waking hours doing so. In hindsight, though, it seems clear that this is where the computer industry is going. Someday, we're all going to have mind-links with our PCs, and we'll spend half of our sleep-time responding to email. The other half? We'll be watching porn or creating PowerPoint presentations, which will be awesome. In both cases.

There's this guy who be all working up in the same company that I be up working in. That is to say, we are coworkers. The point is this: he's new here, and his desk is situated in what you might call a "high traffic area", right next to the drink refrigerator, just around the corner from the condom machine. Some context: the area is so high traffic that the guy who used to sit there moved to the other side of the office just to get some peace and quiet. So, this new guy has an exceptionally annoying habit: every time I walk by his desk, he stops what he's doing and looks right at me. This act of looking at me causes me to stop looking in whatever direction I was looking in the first place and look back at him. It's like a tractor beam of stare. The problem is, at that point it looks like I've been looking at him the whole time, which makes me seem like a huge pervert or weirdo or something, when in reality it's the other dude who has instigated the whole stare thing to begin with. I don't know if it's just me that he does this too (I mean, I am more handsome than 75 Quasimodo's, after all), but I doubt it. That's beside the point. Listen: this stare thing pisses me off and creeps me out and I don't know what to do about it. The next time it happens, should I fall to the ground yell "Quit looking at me, demon!" right in his face? Or should I yell that most classic of rejoinders, "Stare hard, retard!"? Should I spray lemon juice into his eyes in an attempt to instill some sort of Pavlovian aversion to looking up at people walking by his desk? Should I force him to read Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, not only because it is one of the longest, most tedious, most boring books ever written, and (a) reading it might cause him to go blind and/or to fall asleep, which means either way he won't be looking at me, but more importantly (b) by reading it, he will learn about Sartre's theory that gazing at another objectifies that person and robs him/her of his/her inherent freedom as an individual? Well, these are all great ideas. Too great, I would say--I can't pick just one! I think the only solution is to combine all of them into one giant super-idea. In other words, the next time I round the corner and this dude looks up at me, I'm going to fall to the ground, eat a lemon, yell "You're a retarded French existentialist with a lazy eye!", and then kick him in the kidneys. Problem: solved.