Joel Gross's Blog

I hadn’t seen my old friend Justin White in a while, so I went down to Puyallup today to see him and to do my laundry. When I was about halfway down, I called him and he said that he was at his new girlfriend’s house on South Hill so I just headed straight over there. She lives in the same apartment complex as my little brother’s old girlfriend (small world). Her apartment is $900 for a gigantic two bedroom, which is about a third of the price of a similar place anywhere in Seattle. It kills me because I am looking for a new place right now and Seattle prices are obscene.

When I arrived down here, I went inside and met Justin’s girlfriend: she was really good-looking. Justin has made a major upgrade from his ex-wife. His ex-wife was mean, petty and treated him really badly, but the new girl is really kind-hearted and fun to be around. Plus she’s hot ;). Her, Justin and I went to the junior high school’s field across the street and played outside in the sun for awhile, which was awesome because I haven’t been able to enjoy some of the nicer weather we’ve been having yet. I can’t wait for summer… We came back inside and watched a movie: “idiocracy” which basically describes a lot of the less than intelligent people I used to know. The premise of the movie is that intelligent people usually only have none or 1 or 2 kids, while white trash hicks are always pregnant and because of this the future will be populated by idiots. It wasn’t a work of art, but I was actually entertained. One of Justin’s girlfriend’s named Tony came over and watched the movie with us and I think he was dumber than most of the characters; he kept up a mind-numbing running commentary through the whole movie.

Now that the movie is over, I am just sitting here and waiting for my laundry to get done and watch the depressing scene of Justin and his girlfriend waste their lives playing WoW and their roommate play demos of video games. At least Justin gets to be with his hot girlfriend tonight though, I am just going to drive home and work.

Last night, Plato and I cooked ourselves a delectable meal.

We went and picked up all the ingredients at Trader Joe’s and then brought them back to my apartment for cooking. At Trader Joe’s we picked up something neither of us had really had before, but decided to experiment with it: Spelt. I think it is some sort of grain and it was packaged with seasonings and all the stuff we needed for it. Spelt requires a strange cooking technique; you start out sauteeing it in oil and then slowly adding water till it plump up to a nice chewy texture. Our main course was white king salmon and we had a tasty tomato salad and a specialty baguette as the side dishes. All of that was washed down with a couple of bottles of white wine. Great meal.

Later, we headed to Kai’s and relaxed there with Plato’s girlfriend, Leah, and her friend Shannon, but I started feeling down after a short while and just went home to bed.

I was feeling a little bored, so I decided to list a few products and concepts that I have had problems with or are produced by companies that have poor service or just plain bad ideas:

-Gap commercials are the worst I’ve ever seen. I actually refused to purchase from Gap from a long time because I would become enraged at the world every time I saw one. Recently though, I have discovered that they are the only online store that I know of that carries pants in my size, so they actually have grown on me.

-AOL. AOL should be outlawed, they are probably the biggest spammer internationally of both email and snail mail (everybody has a pile of CDs containing “free trials” of their ripoff service). AOL was able to succeed when the internet was starting because people didn’t understand what was going on. AOL has slow connection speed, awful customer service and is overly expensive and their content blows. In today’s world the only people who still use AOL are geriatrics who don’t know any better. Everyone I know has had bad experiences with this company. Time Warner threw away billions when they bought AOL.

-Oakley sunglasses- They just aren’t that cool. You look like a douche.

-Brokerage services (Merrill, Goldman, etc.) They charge you immense fees for “advice” when it’s been proven that a monkey throwing darts at a wall can do just as well. Get yourself on Scottrade.

-Too tight pants. I know this isn’t really a brand, but my balls are getting squeezed ;).

-8 minute abs videos. You have to lose your fat through cardio work to gain visible abs and that takes a lot longer than 8 minutes a day. Scam.

-Professional sports. I enjoy watching them sometimes, but this is a gigantic time and energy sink for people worldwide. We should not make heroes out of people for throwing a ball far, we need heroes that truly accomplish something: scientists, businessmen, artists. If we gave people $100 million dollar contracts for curing diseases, AIDS and cancer would probably have already been wiped out. Instead we have an army of fat asses sitting on their couches and screaming at their televisions.

-TV Dramas. Just as bad as pro sports, but targetted at women and some men. I know it’s fun to watch the OC, but wouldn’t rather be out there living your own life, falling in love, making yourself vulnerable and truly experiencing what the world has to offer?

-Rat dogs. You are using a living creature as a fashion accessory.

To balance out my previous post, I decided to write about some products and concepts that rock the world. Warning: there may be tongue-in-cheek humor ahead as well as deer crossing.

-Social networking sites are able to bring people together for commerce, socialization and fun. Go Facebook, Craigslist and Myspace! Myspace has gotta fix this spam issue though or I will stop using it.

-Beef Jerky- the greatest food ever invented: it’s portable, light, proteinous and incredibly tasty.

-Gap tall men’s pants: I don’t have to let my pants sag a little anymore. I know I said they suck in the last post, but that is their advertising unit. Management should move their marketing department to the basement, then lock the doors and open the water mains. Wait, Russia already did that in Berlin after winning WW2, but we don’t criticize genocide when its done by the victors, right? Wow, I just took that to a whole different level.

-Pez. So simple, So sweet.

-Booze. My one, my only, my life companion.

-Crack. Like Pez, but better.

-Safeway’s giant tubs of masturbating (moisturizing) lotion.

-Women. Especially from my other favorite product, Craigslist’s erotic services.

-Penismobiles (McLaren F1, Corvettes, big lifted trucks). Gotta make up for that small dick somehow.

-Gatorade bottles: they come with a tasty, semi-healthy drink inside and then you can reuse them for a couple of weeks as water bottles/protein drink holders.

A stock that i bought this morning is already up over $300!!!

The weather is slowly getting warmer and prettier. Too bad I have to be cooped up in an office all day, working. Perhaps one day soon, I will have a successful business of my own and be able to work wherever I please. Until then, I suppose I’ll have to keep working like a slave for my paycheck.

Actually I have a pretty sweet job and should not be whining, it’s a pretty chill place and I make good money.

I am excited about the weekend coming up tomorrow. Anybody have any fun plans?

Myspace is a piece of crap and I can’t find any way to add people to my preferred list, except by knowing your email address. So if you want to be added to my preferred list so you can read all my blogs, please message me your email address.

Thanks

P.S. I definetely need to find a new location for my blog.

Thanks to my boss, Michael, I have recently discovered the joy of YouTube at work. Michael likes to watch music videos and SEO (tradecraft) videos while he works. I have decided to follow his lead.

Thus far today, I have listened to Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist, debate the Bishop of Oxford, Nirvana “Smells like Teen Spirit, Erick Liang’s “Crazy Asian Mother”, the longest action video of all time, Gun ‘n Roses “November Rain” among others. My job rocks: I can work on general website link theory while I am entertained.

Richard Dawkins raises some great points on religion vs. atheism, I’m reading his book “The God Delusion” right now. He basically destroys most of the bullshit I thought never made sense when I was first told it by religious teachers in school and church. Yes, I unfortunately went to religious school. Not just religious school, but fundamentalist Christian school- the worst kind. “The Earth is 6,000 years old, no sex ed (you may try to do it if we show you), vote Republican, required church attendance and mandatory chapel weekly, Bible class as a part of the core curriculum (same amount of time spent on that as Math, Science & English), males are in charge of family/school/church/state (kinda cool 😉 ), Women have no sex drive (how they came up with that, i don’t know), husbands can discipline their wives and children, death penalty for every crime, only one token black person allowed” and on and on and on… I could go on forever with enough ridiculous things they taught to crush a soul. It’s amazing I survived.

I just put up my first income-generating (hopefully) website. It sells F-150 Grille Guards. I am pretty concerned though, because it follows the profile of a “doorway/entry” page. An entry page is a site that is purely made to push traffic from the search engines through to another sales website (in my case AutoAnything). Search engines generally try to ban these as quickly as they can, because some spammers churn out 100,000 pages of them per day. My website actually has some unique, good content written for it, so hopefully this doesn’t happen to me. The awesome thing is is that any sales made on the Auto Anything website within 45 days of the visitor first coming from my site to theirs, I get an 8% commission on and with an average grille costing several hundred dollars, my profit could add up quickly.

I posted my apartment on Craigslist yesterday and have had a lot of people come by and look at it. The first girl came by when it was only partially cleaned and was obviously horrified and left quickly. I continued to clean for another couple of hours, cleaning the matches, dirt, food and other unsavory items from my carpet. My roommates have to be the two most disgusting people I’ve ever met in my entire life. Some mornings, I’ll get up and walk out and find Jake sitting on this broken down nasty yellow chair (which I threw away yesterday) smoking a cigarette in the damned apartment! Shawn smokes weed nearly continuously and then just vegs out in front of my TV. Everything in the apartment is mine; those guys contributed absolutely nothing. I can’t wait to get out. I had another guy come by last night and say he was very interested, so that’s cool. The sooner I can move out the better.

I am looking at some pretty cool places today, the first one is a 1900 sq. ft. loft with 13 foot ceilings and new carpeting, paint and hardwood floors downtown with a view of the water. Sounds pretty sweet, but it costs $2100 a month, so I will need a roommate or two if I get it. This time around, I’m going to have an extensive roommate interviewing process to make sure i don’t get screwed again. Or better yet, I’ll just get a place by myself.

I feel kind of bad for whoever is going to move into my old apartment, but I suppose better them than me, eh? 😉