Thought I’d make a quickie update after the last two novels. Keen is moving out. His last day here at team weberstreet will be around Feb 20th. He’s moving a whole block and a half away. Luckily he’s not as bullheaded about things as Tony is, so it’s been a breeze working out finances and such. If anybody has a lead on a person who is good roommate material and would like to live in a nice downtown victorian, please send them my way. Regarding Mike’s situation. Apparently Mike reads my site, or so I hear from other little birdies. Mike, I am sad for your predicament and wish I could help. The cold, mean bastard inside of me says that we pick our friends and we pick our paths, though, so I am unsure of where that leaves me. The junction of these two events, along with some serious self questioning and a ridiculous work load, I’ve been pretty down. Like Down Down. Not down in the standard I-hate-myself Down that I’ve learned to recover from, but more of a general depression that a lot of things are going to shit. It’s not even Sad Depression. It’s more of melancholy. I’ve drunk myself to sleep twice now, including tonight, in attempts to avoid the situations. That’s bad. I am glad to say that I am very proud of one Steve, who has valiantly fought his employment more than I ever care to even consider. He somehow leapfrogs from job to job, working his way up the ladder — barring a minor setback here and there — and never seems to get down about it. At least not to me. For that I am very happy to say congratulations on landing the newest Prudential gig, as well as for not settling for anything besides something that matches your long term goals. GG, Steve ๐ [b]Update[/b] – Remember how I was talking about that poker hand the other day? Turns out I had an 84.88% chance of winning that hand, but somehow I lost. Want the statistics? Get ’em here: [L=http://twodimes.net/poker/?g=h&b=&d=&h=jd+th%0D%0Aqs+qc]Poker Stats Calculator[/L]
Monthly Archives: January 2005
Mike, Party, Poker & Smoking … And Humiliation, Thoughts on Self
Hmm, where to start on this one. Lots of things happened recently. I guess I’ll start with the bad news, and then go from there. Bad News: [L=http://shr.elpasoco.com/pressrelease.asp?ID=1139&itla=SHR&selectdept=SHR&selecttime=current&offset=0]Mike Lee[/L]. I have no comment, but I heard through the grapevine that he’s taking classes at PPCC, and gets to enjoy an english class with our good friend Matt Byrne. So some good news. I went bowling last night with a bunch of people I know from real life and a handfull of peeps I know from WoW. We went to Brunswick and all 14 of us had a helluva time. After talking for a while, we decided to head back to our place and do some drinkin. But we decided that only after our friend Eric regalled us with stories about sniffing cocaine off his strippers’ (plural on strippers) breasts. Unfortunately, we had no strippers. Fortunately, he had no crack. So we went to my place. Got to the house and started doing the drinking. I was introduced to a yummy new drink called a Vodka-7, which is comprised of 1 1/2 shots of good quality vodka and a glass of 7-Up. It’s surprisingly smooth and very tasty. So we all were getting lit up when our drunkard of the evening decides that we should all play poker — texas hold’em. So we say OK. So I buy in for $5 (and buy David’s $5 also) and we start playing. Everybody is boasting about how fucking badass they are, blah blah blah. I win the first hand and almost put two people out. The next hand, the Drunkard rapes everybody and gets up to like $15 in chips. Two more hands and the texan is out and David is out (oof, there went my $5!). The Texan buys back in, and after Eric, the Drunkard and myself draw him out, he’s finished again. Then we go to work on the turtle, Mike, who plays super-conservative poker. It only takes a few more hands and he’s out, which leaves it down to drunkard (~$22 by now), me (~$19) and Eric (~$no_idea). We through down and Eric folds right away. I glance over at Drunkard and see him waving around a Jh10d. I look at my cards — QsQc — I got the Drunkard raped. Without seeing the flop, the Drunkard goes all in with his Jack-Ten offsuit. FUCK YEA. I go all in as well, because I’m going to hand his ass to him. Statistically, QQ vs J-10 is like a 65/35 game, which is HUGE in Texas Hold’em. Since we’re all in, the flop comes and it looks like this — 10s-10h-7c-3h-Js. He pulls a fucking showboat of out NOTHING. I lost all my money then, got up, called him one lucky guy and went and had a smoke. I stopped smoking. I don’t know if I mentioned that. I don’t even think many people knew I *did* smoke. 2-3 packs a week, nothing heavy. I bought my last pack on December 27th and finished it in 2 days. I fell really ill after New Years (mentioned below), and decided to stop while I was sick, which I’m told is a good idea — if you’re sick and hating life, why not go all out and stop smoking and hate yourself while you’re at it? So I stopped smoking. I’ve had a couple serious Nic times, but I’ve been pretty strong though. Losing a perfect hand at poker, though, made me burn’em. Since I stopped, though, I have this nagging cough that I have read is perfectly normal and which will stop in a couple weeks (something about extra mucus production due to not-drying-out-lungs from smoking?). I don’t like it though, but this too shall pass. [b]Edit[/b] – I forgot something in the above post, and it’s about my humiliation trifecta for the day, observed while at the Citadel Mall. Scene 1) I’m at hooters, and Matt says he knows one of the waitresses. I thought he was referring to our waitress, so the next time she comes over I say “hey, matt said he knows you”. He says “I wasn’t talking about our waitress” and then I say, while looking directly at our waitress, “oh, then I guess it’s the other one.” Keen replies with “The other ‘one’!?” Hand, meet forehead. Yay for objectifying a very nice, friendly woman while totally not realizing it. *sigh* Scene 2) I normally refrain from bathroom humor, so stop reading this one if you don’t like it. So we finished eating Hooters Wings. Their wings are like a goddamn rotorooter, so I say I need to make a pit stop and put something down on paper. *haha* So we go to Foley’s, and all three of us (Keen, James & I) roll into the bathroom. Keen hits up a urinal, while I open up a stall so I can blow the doors off it. I hear the stall next to me open and close, and I say, quite loudly, “Hey James, you taking a huge poo too?” … *silence*crickets*silence* then I hear Keen say, totally deadpan, “that’s not James.” … More silence as I consider what I’ve just done to this total stranger. Then I hear the stranger’s 3-4 year old son say something, and I about died. So there I am, on the pot, with a total stranger and his kid, completely humiliated. I can’t move, so I just sit there, desperate for them to leave. … And then my cell phone rings! OMFG Keen and James are horrible about that, and it’s so goddamn embarrassing. Man. So finally the guy and his kid leave, I blow the doors down, and all ends well. *WOW* Scene 3) We go to Eddie Bauer so Keen can pickup a bag for his laptop. We’re looking at the bags, and he and I determine that none of the bags on display have laptop sections. I then start talking (loudly) about how my bag has a laptop condom in it. The condom protects it. The condom is good for it when you don’t have anything else to put it in. I turn around, and there is the sales guy, staring at me with this totally dumbfounded look. So I tell him the condom goes in the bag, you know? And then you put it in the condom and it’s safe? None of your bags have padding, so he needs a condom, dig? *Horrified Stare from Salesman* I’m starting to turn red as I slowly tell him that it’s a neoprene-like cover that you put your laptop in for safety when the backpack/bag has no built-in laptop padding. He looked completely mortified. [b]Edit #2[/b] – Recent conversations have determined that I am a complete Nancy for crying my eyes out to RotK. I believe this as well. Additionally, I have realized that I am common, and that is debilitatingly saddening.
Too much for a title – XMas, Work, NYE, Sick, Sammi
Ok, so I’m going to post. Let me read up on where I left off. Ah, right, Christmas eve. That one didn’t include the story about work or the pipes. It didn’t cover New Years either. Oof, that’s a lot of typing. To be nice, Cliff Notes will follow at the end for you lazy sacks of worthlessness. Ok, so it’s Christas Day and everything is going swimmingly. Did the presents, everybody is happy, and we decide as a family to go see Meet The Fokkers. Right before we’re getting ready to head to the movie (~5pm), I get a call from a customer saying they are hard down. Like HARD MOFO DOWN AH SHIZNIT! So I tell the parents I’ll meet them at the theatre. So I bust it to work to find … the power out! Yay for power outages! So I trip the power back, make sure everything is kosher for 5 mins, then head out the door to the movie theatre. I get to the movie theatre, and everything is great. Except that as soon as I walk in the door my phone rings because all the shit is down again! OMFGWTFLOLLERSKATESBUTNOTATALL. So I tell my family Merry Christmas and go back to work until 11pm. On Christmas Day. I was relatively unhappy. So on Sunday, the day after Christmas Day, our water is broken. I am irritated. I attempt to fixify it, but fail because the pipes are at a funny angle so my solder won’t stick. I say fuck it and call Olson Plumbing and Heating, the best goddamn plumbers in town. They schedule me for 6pm. The tech calls me at 5pm and says that he is totally swamped until 10pm and wants to know if I can either a (grumblegrumblemumble) wait until 10pm or (cheery happy voice) reschedule to tomorrow. I can tell he’s not very pleased with working until 10pm on Christas Weekend so I say come back on Monday morning. Super. Oh, and the power went out again at work at 1:30pm, necessitating another 2 hours there. On Sunday. Christmas Weekend. So the plumber comes on Monday morning, assesses my bang-up-but-not-working plumbing attempt and whips out this sick plasma torch shit. It takes him a whopping five minutes to cut out the broken, splice in the new&working, write the invoice and leave. Well, maybe not 5 minutes. The invoice took at least another 3-4 minutes to write up. And he charged me for a full hour ($73)! Luckily, I am a savvy renter and took that amount out of my rent after consulting with the landlord. Should I put New Years in a new post? Hell no! No, it’s going to go right here and you’re going to like it because you read rand0m.org compulsively and will take whatever shitty slopfest I spew out, simply because it comes from me, oh mighty rrk from on high. And you’ll like it. A lot. OK so New Years was nuts. I was at the Store until like 10pm because of ton of peeps who I know from WoW were there, including Mike, who came all the way down for New Years from Toronto. Well, he was actually visiting his g/f who lives in Denver, but he was here in CoS from Canuckistan! Ok, right. So I go home and meet up with Laura and head on downtown. (Insert from later: Oddly, I left Steven and Ben at the house to … umm … wait while Laura and I got really fucked up? WTF was I thinkign?) We go to the Red Martini for some boozahol, only for the doorman to check our IDs, chat with us, and then tell us we can’t come in because they are at capacity. WTF!? I am certain that it was because I was wearing Cargos. What a fucker. So we head on down the “strip” … or the “strip-tease” because it’s not really a full fledged strip (HAHAHA OMFG I am hilarious at midnight), and end up outside the Ritz. Now, I have a hookup with one of the bouncers/doormen at the Ritz, but I didn’t see him, but I did see a huge line, ambulances, fire trucks and what looked like blood on the ground. So we went past the Ritz and headed on over to Jack Quinn’s, only to run into Lilly Rklasdoicv98pazch and her friend Robin! So we chatted and decided to go to 32 Blue. We go there, enjoy the countdown, drink a lot and catch up. Turns out Lilly has spending a vast amount of time in Paris and is/was headed back there on Jan6. She’ll be doing her Masters somewhere around the USA, I think. That is foggy. Robin, who I constantly referred to as Rose all night in a drunken state of unknown total self-humiliation, is also after her Masters; she went to PHS but was a year ahead of all of us, but spent some time abroad, so now she’s even. Yes? So after a delightful time with Lilly and Robin at 32 Blue, we all decide to finish off the night with a Martini at 15C. We arrive there, after a perilously cold walk, only to find that they have done last call at 1:15am. Lies & heresy I tell you! So we go to Old Chicago … and it’s past last call there! OMFGALLTHOSEWHORESCANBURN!!1` We decide that it’s best to leave the night as-is, so Laura and I say ‘night to Lilly and Rose^H^Hbin with promises to meet up two nights hence for a party at Lilly’s. We go back to the house to find all of the woefully underage WoW people there! They had gone bowling and then came to our house to get kashnickered. It was a helluva time. Most everybody got lit up and there was much merriment. Everybody greatly enjoyed speaking to Mike, our Canadian friend, about Canada and how super-great his country is (but don’t you dare come and foul it up with you rights-flying, gun-toting conservative naziism you hosers) and how the US is backwards. Normally I would take off about how superduper america is and how canada sucks my nuts, what with their total lack of army, airforce, navy, guns, violent crimes, tired, weary, social problems and injustice of any sort, but I was pretty trashed so instead I went to bed. Saturday was relatively uneventful. Particularly because I don’t remember more than 5 minutes of it. Sunday, however, was decent. Work workw ork at the store, then I headed over to Lilly’s (@ 8pm, as planned). I was stunned, nay, apalled that nobody else was there, which was A-OK with me because I had started to feel rather ill Sunday morning. So I went home and went to bed. Monday sucked. I woke up extremely sick, called in to work and laid at home all day. I think working like a mad man the week before having a wild new years did a number on my immune system. Same thing happened on Tuesday. Oh, and on Wednesday as well. It’s not very often that I get sick – this is my first sick leave in almost 3 years – but when I do come down with something it is definitely a doozy. So I was sick through Thursday-ish. I worked a lot of Thursday, despite feeling a little under the weather, simply because I was going stircrazy. So that was illness. Which I fear is coming back to plague me tonight! So I will be going to bed soon. OK so that was New Years. Prior to New Years, at work, after the Power Craziness, things settled down during my days. Until Tuesday morning at 3am! I got to come in at 3:15am, and stay at work until after 8pm. ‘Twas a bad day. A bad day that followed a bad Christmas Weekend, that preceeded a wild New Years. But it got worse! Tuesday was horrible, but so were Wednesday & Thursday! We had electricians at work all day and all night for several days, all attempting to resolve our horribly bad power issues. That involves them working all day, then me coming in after 1am to cut everybody over to the new stuff — we can’t incur downtime on our customers during the day (which happens when you yank out their power cables), so it has to all happen at night. So the week sucked and really wore me down, then New Years happened, then I was sick as fuck. Are you with me? Great. Almost done. So that was what, last week? I don’t remember this past weekend, so I’ll skip it. I do remember, however, going out with Sammi on Tuesday night. We met up at Village Inn and caught up — we didn’t get the chance at Phantom Canyon, if you’ll recall. I had a hella good time. Usually when I go out with Sammi, it always ends up with her asking me a question here or there and interjecting some conversation while I ramble on and on and on for hours. Somehow she enjoys this (OR DOESN’T? OMFGWTF!?). BUT, this time I turned the tables on her by not talking about myself! I know, hard to believe, huh? We talked about all sorts of things, and a lot of the references I threw in about the plumbing, electrical, sickness, anything … got blank stares. I think that made me mysterious and hence attractive. But not really. It did. So she talked and talked and I listened and listened and it was a good time. I do feel, however, that I was overly negative at a particular point in the evening … I think it’s because I’m really comfortable around Sammi and so I kinda used her as a dumping ground for pent up “I Fucking Hate My Life Because I’m a Worthless SOB”-ness that I usually hold inside until someone like Steve comes around, in which case I normally dump on him and he assures me that I am better than that and then everything is right as rain. Sammi, though, doesn’t come with the `assurance that I am better than that and that everything is right as rain` feature, which although an unfortunate error on her maker’s part, doesn’t make the whole any less super. The not-meat-eating and unbelievable dedication to all things natural and moral, however, was a little worrisome. Hopefully some time in Colorado, what with all the meat eating, gun toting, fsck nature-ing (???), and generally ignorant yet belittling people, will make her less totally nutso. I tried to catch her on AIM tonight so I could apologize for unloading my quiet desperation onto her cute little not-so-brawny-as-a-man’s shoulders, but I missed her. So I’m sorry for that, if you read this Sammi. But I still got you to talk the most, which for me is a feat undone. My boss, Hill, has been in town since Tuesday morning and work has been gogogogogoNOWMOREWOOgogoogogo since then. He really wears me down with the deadlines, meetings, deliverables and more. Work is nice and all, but I can’t wait until it calms back down a little. [b]Cliffs Notes[/b] 1. Power went down at work on xmas. that sucked. 2. The week after xmas sucked ass, a LOT. 3. New years with Lilly, Ros^Hbin, & Laura, oh my. 4. Crazy Canadians? WTF? 5. Sick as fuck for almost a week. 6. Late-Coffee with Sammi went well. 7. I’m tired now. Goodnight.