>> My current cell-phone voicemail greeting:

Hello, you've reached Chris Conroy's cell phone voicemail. I'm not available to take your call right now, so please leave a message with your name, number, and the time you called, and I'll get back to you. I'm Chris Conroy, and I approved this message.

Coming soon: Attack ads! (This was all inspired by this)

>> Ah, the disconnected points blog-entry, you're my only true friend.

• Camp: still fun, but also stressful. I tend to alternate between discarding all of my old cynicism about how annoying kids are, and wanting to throttle them all with great vigor; but then I realize how cute they would look while I did it and the hate goes away. Today we went to Tampa to see a 3-D IMAX dinosaur movie which was actually a little disappointing, considering that it was a 3-D IMAX dinosaur movie and I should've been freaking out every second. They wasted too much time on a ridiculous father/daughter "plot;" there were honestly maybe two and a half total minutes of dinosaur footage in a forty-five minute movie. And here I am wasting my time critiquing a children's "How can we keep them quiet for an hour" film. (The kids loved it, obviously.)
  
  
• I want to go see Fahrenheit 9/11, even though Michael Moore is a big cock, but our local "indie" theatre is gonna be mobbed for the next few days, so I guess I need to wait a bit.
  
  
• Mario Kart: Double Dash, which I now own, continues to rule my world, but it also makes me tear my hair out. (Oh yeah, and my hair is very short at the moment, and I am tan and look hot. Ahem.) The Mario Kart AI that sabotages your every attempt at victory in the 100cc and 150cc modes makes me want to fly to Japan and assassinate programmers indiscriminately until I whack the ones responsible. Also, I want the Mega Man Anniversary Collection but nobody in town has it and I don't think it actually came out on Tuesday like it was supposed to.
  
  
• I don't like William Faulkner. At all. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's just a god-damn awful writer. Evidence? The first "Cora" section in As I Lay Dying, which I made a good-faith effort at reading last week. I mean, Jesus. You're writing from another character's perspective. We get it, asshole. And speaking of reading, I kinda wanna pick up the Clinton book. Honestly, I'm far more interested in the digressions and random policy bits that everyone seems pissed-off about, rather than the "I put my pee-pee in her bunghole" stuff.
  
  
• I've been listening to a lot of Morning Edition on the way to work this week, and let me just say again (actually, I may never have recorded it on this blog) that I love NPR. A friend's parents used to have it on all the time in their car when I drove anywhere with them as a kid, and I think it's been programmed into me to love NPR forever for that reason. Fortunately, it's not quite as embarassing to wear a love for NPR on your shoulder as it is to wear a love for Paul Simon and/or Billy Joel, who were hard-coded into me by the same process (but through my parents' listening habits).

And finally: Thanks for continuing to stop in here even though I'm not posting all that much, and my life is deeply uninteresting at the moment. I wish I had some kind of hot sexual antics to relate, or maybe some cutting political commentary, but my life pretty much revolves around video games, suntans, and preventing children from making each other cry at the moment, and I don't have the intellectual energy to make any of those three things sound fascinating to you. Anyway, thanks for sticking around, and to show my appreciation, the first three people who pipe up in the comments can have a Gmail account if they want one -- I've got a couple to give away. But I do place one restriction: First, you have to name for me the episode of The X-Files from which I took this post's title. Hint: It's one of the best ones ever. (So it's not "Space.") And yeah, if you don't watch X-Files, you can probably just Google it. Use a Google search to get a Google mail account. There's a joke in there somewhere but I'm tired.

P.S.: I plan to write an episode of The X-Files for my friends and I to star in. It will be about the Skunk Ape, and will take place largely in a rental-car office. I think.

>> Dear John Kerry,

How are you doing? The campaigning seems to be going all right for you so far. I was more than happy to cough up some money for you a couple of weeks ago (it wasn't much, but I'm a new college grad with a liberal arts degree, what can I say?). I hope you used it to buy something nice. (I recommend the Nintendo GameCube.)

Now listen. I know you're sick of me writing to you all the time about your running mate -- I mean, of all the things to get hung up on, right? But I'm gonna do it one last time. Please, please, please DON'T pick Dick Gephardt. The man's a walking "Kick Me" sign. I'm sure he's a lovely guy and the two of you get along very well, but taking him onto the ticket is like lugging an unexploded nuclear bomb around on your back. Pick John Edwards or something. He's a total blank with a nice smile, and people love smiles. Can't hurt, right?

Good luck on the campaign trail, and I look forward to casting my vote for you in November. Just don't make it hard for everyone else to, OK?

P.S. If you've got a spare moment, check out my new photolog entry, there's a cute doggy in it. And I recommend the new Felix Da Housecat album -- I think you should do the robot to "Neon Human" at your next rally. It'd go down gangbusters.

>> Happy Bloomsday, everybody! If you haven't yet, go read Ulysses (or start, anyway). I read it twice last year and it turns out it really is as good as they say. (It's also simultaneously not as impossible, and just as impossible, to read as you've probably heard. I'd recommend Ulysses Annotated as a companion purchase.) I'm jealous of my friend Jackie, who's leaving for a summer study program in Dublin next week, because she can go see some ReJoyce Dublin 2004 events and I can't.

More from me soonish.

>> OMG, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are releasing a double album in September -- Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus. HOTNESS. I'm impressed that Cave's following through on his "an album every year" threat from around the time of Nocturama...

>> I'm sorry, but I really have to go for the cheap shot:

Last week, John Paul warned another group of U.S. prelates that American society is in danger of surrendering to a "soulless vision of life."

You mean organized Christianity?

So that's a good point at which to reveal that I'm working for a church for the summer, right?

Sorry I haven't been posting, but I've been busy with a variety of things, first and foremost my summer job at the aforementioned church, which I never talked about here in the run-up to graduation. I'm working as a counselor at a summer camp for a Presbyterian church here in my hometown, that one of my friends' mothers is the education director for. It's actually turned out to be a lot of fun so far. The kids range in age from about four to about eleven, and we're not responsible for any of the Christian stuff, we just make sure that they don't hit each other and then take them on field trips. Yesterday we went indoor rock-climbing, which was painful yet very fun. I've got the next two weeks off, but then I work again through the beginning of August, and I am enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. Kids used to scare and annoy me, and now they just annoy me. But in a cute way.

The other reason I haven't posted is because I did the bad, bad thing and bought a GameCube. And last night three of my friends and I played Mario Kart Double Dash for four straight hours. My eyes bled a tiny bit, but it was worth it. (And for the record, I only rented Double Dash, but I will be buying it -- so far I only have Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker and the Sonic Mega Collection. And I need to go buy this, even though it doesn't seem to be very good, but it does have the X-Men in it.) So I'm on course to have a wonderfully frivolous summer before I return to NYC and begin My Adult Life. Shudder.

And since we're smack dab in the middle of the press canonization, I guess I need to comment on Ronald Reagan's death. Make no mistake, I am in no way a fan of the man or the policies he pursued as president, but I am immensely sympathetic to the tremendous difficulties that he and his family had to go through over the last ten years, and I wish them the best, and my condolences. Doesn't make me like him, or the figurehead that the right is making of him, any more.