My Friend, Leaving the Bar as Initials and I Were Arriving

Me: Hey. Where is everyone?
Friend: Oh, they're upstairs.
Me: How is it? Is it fun or is it kinda lame?
Friend: It's good, it's good. I just have to head out--it's going to take me at least thirty minutes to blog about tonight, so I gotta get a headstart.


Such dedication. And for a myspace blog, even.

Shocking New Study

According to a recent 99-page report, you young whippersnappers aren't reading as much as you used to. Or should be. At least that's what the jist of the report is, I don't have the time to read the whole damn thing. But I read enough, and you don't. Don't you remember, Knowledge is Power?

Reading is cool. All of the cool kids are doing it, and what's more, they're doing it naked. Don't you want to be cool?

Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy


The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann


The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor


The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie


One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Initials' Blog

Initials has started a blog, and it's pissing me off.

I don't know the URL for it, which is probably a good thing. He knows about this blog, and after a few times when I've written too much and didn't portray him in the lightest of lights and he got pissy, he's since promised to never read it again without my permission. Whenever I bring it up, he keeps insisting that he hasn't read it, and while there's been a few times he's casually mentioned incidents that I've written about recently, it's always vague enough to justify his ignorance. I still end up censoring myself sometimes.

I don't know if I could be that honest if I knew his blog address. I'd be all over that so fast, and I wouldn't tell him about it. I'd just let it all simmer and be bitter whenever he wrote something mean about me. I can be really passive-aggressive.

He keeps giving me shit about posting now. Now that he's been blogging for all of two and a half weeks, he feels as though he can criticize me for not posting every day. I don't know how often he posts, but it seems like most days he finds a way to mention that he posted today, and why haven't I? It doesn't matter if I was at work all day, or if I was gone, or sick, or whatever, he always asks me if I've written, and then mentions smugly how he did, and if he found a chance to, I certainly could have. Well meh neh neh.

I don't have as much to write about now. I've been blogging at various online sites for almost eight years. That's like, before he was born, or at least before he entered college. I've exhausted a lot of the easy generic posts and memes way back in high school, on dialup, back before google bought out blogger, back before pyra labs even existed. I'm not saying my posts in 9th grade were any good, but they were there. I've gotten all the stupid lazy posts that everyone can write and no one thinks are any good out of my system.

Yesterday, nothing worth blogging about happened. I cleaned my room, did my laundry, picked up my check, dropped it off at the bank, and watched a Law & Order DVD that came via Netflix, and then watched my two favorite shows, 30 Rock and the Office. It wasn't that interesting of a day, unless you find reading about me watching television fascinating. There just wasn't anything worth writing about yesterday.

But then last night in his sleep he said "I love you Tommy" and now the bitch is in trouble.

Shelby Woo and Encyclopedia Brown

My roommate and I are totally Shelby Woo and Encyclopedia, even though she's not asian and I charge a hell of a lot more than 25 cents per day, plus expenses. Or I guess together we could be half of the Boxcar Children, except neither of us have ever been homeless. Or she could be Jessica Fletcher and I could be Sherlock Holmes if we were both thirty years older . Or she could be the Daphne to my Fred, except that we won't make out while Shaggy and Scooby run into the ghost.

Allow me to back up briefly. This one takes a while to set up.

Long story short. About a year ago, my roommate broke up with her jerk boyfriend of two years to start dating a wonderfully hot guy. When she studied abroad last semester, she broke it off with the the wonderfully hot guy, or WHG for short. Unfortunately, the jerk comes from a decent amount of money, and was able to visit her in Prague a few times, and they slowly but surely got back together, much to my annoyance. She broke up with the jerk last week, and now she's on the market.

Or at least she was.

While ogling his facebook profile and wishing that she made a better choice, she realized that it was his birthday on Thursday. According to his AIM aweay message, he was going out drinking that night. We got it into our heads to sneak out and 'accidentally' bump into him and wish him a happy birthday, and if he's drunk enough, have her walk him home and 'help' him get into bed. Unfortunately, he didn't mention in his away message which bar he was going to.

It would require all of our sleuthing abilities.

He wasn't at the big sports bar. He wasn't at the sketchy dive near his place. He wasn't at the place where they give you a free meal on your birthday, nor was he at the place in the basement of an apartment complex and it feels like you're at a really nice high school party.

The last bar that we thought he would celebrating his 23rd was the place that neither of us had been to before, the place known for giving out free bacon (hey, you've got to have a gimmick). We looked around the first floor, and didn't see him, and whatever hope we had went out the window. Dejectedly, we took our $4 pitcher and made our way up the stairs. I turned around because I thought I heard someone call my name. I turned around, and didn't see anyone.

Except for WHG. He wasn't the one who called my name, but I saw him anyway, sitting with his friends tucked in the back corner by the door.

"Shit." The giddiness and sneakiness we had at the beginning of the night had worn off, and as we were walking to this bar, we realized just how short-sided our plan was. Even if we did bump into him, it was bound to be awkward, and if he was drunk, there would be an equal chance that he will come up and cuss her out for dumping him for the jerk. Plus he'd be with a bunch of his friends, and he's not going to ditch bros for a 'ho.

"Move move, he's here." I frantically stage-whispered to my roommate, and she booked it up the stairs.

He caught my eye. His hair had grown out, and he's lost a few pounds, so now the resemblance to John Krasinski was even more pronounced. Yum.

He waved, and I waved back. He made a motion that he was coming over to where I was. He didn't see my roommate, fortunately. Or unfortunately. I'm not sure which. She finished walking and hid behind a group of people playing dars.

He came over and started making small talk about our Halloween costumes (he went as Quailman). I mentioned I was here with my roommate, and I motioned her over. She begrudgingly came out from her hiding spot, and she could tell by the shit-eating grin that he made that our sleuthing worked out in the end.

He ended up talking to the two of us for the rest of the night, even as his friends slowly walked up from their table and said they were going to hit another bar. He said his goodbyes, and stayed with us as we went and got drunk food and then walked us home. Ok, I guess technically he walked her home, but I got a contact giddiness at their rekindling. I feigned a headache and so left them in our living room, chatting.

The next morning, he and I split some coffee while making fun of whatever was on VH1 at the time.

And the two of them hung out all weekend and now they're living together happily ever after. Or at least they went to the game together and then out for sushi last night and they're officially dating again.

We should totally contact Nickelodeon for a quirky kid-based alcohol-soaked detective show. It'd be sweet.

Mini Mix

What do you expect from me? It's a Friday afternoon and I want to geek-rock out.

1. Did I Step On Your Trumpet-Danielson
2. I Feel It All- Feist
3. Calling- Leona Naess
4. Everything Is Everything (live)- Phoenix
5. I've Been Waiting- Matthew Sweet
6. Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig- Jens Lekman
7. Pot Kettle Black- Wilco
8. Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying- Belle & Sebastian
9. The Calm Before the Storm- Brown Recluse Sings
10. 1000 Pounds- Superchunk
11. Girls! Girls! Girls!- Sean Na Na
12. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes- Elvis Costello
13. Sit Down Servant- Mike Ferris

As always, right click and save, and buy cds to support the record companies.

EDIT:: Every time I check my site, I find that I'm too popular and I keep running out of bandwidth according to that googlepage. How annoying.

Music links taken down 12/16/07.

Strike!

I'm really worried about the strike.

And by really worried, I mean there are five tv shows that I watch regularly (six with Project Runway coming up): 30 Rock, The Office, South Park, Simpsons and Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And other than Project Runway, they're all coming to a stand-still. South Park isn't unionized, but they only have one episode left in the season (and I know I've said it before, and I'll probably stay it again, but last night's episode was the worst ever). Daily Show will be in reruns from now until the strike ends, and 30 Rock and the Office will only have a few episodes left that they already have filmed, and the Simpsons strike will screw up next year, if there will even be a next year.

The worry has even started to enter my dreams. (I'm sure the fever helped.)

Last night's dream involved Lisa walking around a deserted Springfield until she bumped into Moe, who was standing in the middle of the road, uncertain of what he should be doing. Lisa then takes him on a tour of the town, showing him all of the possible plot lines he could come up with on his own, like an episode where he discovers that he's really good at guitar but too ugly to be a rock star so he wears a bucket over his head, or an episode where Moe finds religion but eventually his neediness overcomes even Flanders, or he could start a PAC in order to fight rising gas prices, resulting in his being kidnapped by the government. The kids from South Park and poorly drawn characters representing the NBC shows all made cameos as writer-actors who can come up with their own storylines.

Plus they have to tease me with mini clips like this. Don't be so clever!



Don't be such dicks, studios!

Down with Garlic

I've been sick for the past few days. It's nothing serious, it's just a 48 hour bug thing that's been going around, except in my case it's off and on, so I'm sick for a few hours, and then it goes away for a while, and then it comes back. So even though I've been feeling sick since Saturday, I'm still classifying it as a 48 hour bug.

Initials has been great, for the most part. He's always been there with bowls of chicken soup, picking up cough drops for me on the way home from work, and respecting the fact that sometimes I want to be cuddled and sometimes I just want to be alone. And it's good and really sweet and all that.

Except.

It's a pretty big except, which is why I put it in bold. Except that he keeps making me garlic tea and I keep refusing to drink it. That's right. Garlic tea.

He minces two cloves of garlic and places it on the bottom of the mug, underneath the orange tea bag (I don't know why, but it's always with orange). Unfortunately for his stupid plan, minced garlic floats, and he can't sneak the garlic into my tea without me noticing the film of garlic that floats on the top of the tea like algae in a pond. It's incredibly gross.

And he won't accept the fact that I'm not going to drink it. I don't care what the internet says about how it's a great cure-all because it kills bacteria or something. I don't care. It's gross. It smells gross, and it tastes gross. I tried it, and I ain't having no more of that shit. He just keeps making it for me, and I just keep pouring it down the drain and resenting him for it.

No garlic tea. It's not that difficult of a rule to remember.

I keep just thinking that this is all part of his plan to make me smell like garlic, so he doesn't feel so bad about the fact that he smells like garlic more often than he should.

He's getting better at that, I should mention. When we first started dating, for breakfast he would chop up a garlic clove and mix it in with plain yogurt, to say nothing about the quantities he would put in dinner. He's learned that if he wants any make-out time the garlic consumption had to be cut down, a lot. His breath still sometimes smells like garlic, and it always smells more garlicky than mine, even if we eat the exact same thing. But at least now that my garlic consumption is up since he does the bulk of the cooking, I can't complain as much as I used to. I still complain, it's just not as much. Garlic breath is gross.

Long story short. Garlic is not my friend, and Initials just doesn't get it.