Thanks to Ian for his post, here. And thanks to Alexandrialeigh for her post here.
They are both regular reads of mine, and I never thought that my personal life would be blogworthy material for others. Thanks again to everyone.
Archive for January, 2005
I know I said I’d be out until Tuesday, but I didn’t think I’d get Interweb access in the location I’m posting from. Here’s some funnieness. Hopefully.
My sister in-law’s father, Victor, came to visit and meet our family for the first time from Australia, via Argentina. We had a party for him. He was very funny, and quick with a joke the whole evening, but for a moment, a 5 year old trumped him.
The 5 year old asked me to draw something, so I told him I was going to draw a dragon. I drew Trogdor. (Back story on Trogdor)
The 5 year old had gone away for a while, but when he was back, I had a dragon on his Magna-doodle for him. Here’s how the conversation went:
5 year old- “What’s that?”
Me- “It’s a dragon”
5yo- “That’s not a dragon.”
Me- “Yes it is.”
5yo- “No it’s not.”
Victor- “It is! It is a dragon!”
5yo- “No it’s not!”
Victor- “Well have you ever seen one?”
5yo- “No.”
Victor- “Well, that’s what they look like.”
5yo- Reflective pause. “So you’ve seen a dragon?”
Victor- “Oh yes. I was married to one for 32 years.”
5yo- Reflective pause. “Was it scary?”
Sorry. Until then, hit up La Chat Noir, and Dee. They both have some very cool and interactive posts up. Feel free to advertise your own interactive posts (or your blog in general) in comments.
Inspired by my comments, Christie has posted her stripper story. I said I would if she would, so here’s mine.
ACWF and I went to New Orleans a few years ago. The first day we got there, the first thing we did was head for a bar. We had lunch, and started drinking. A few hours later we had explored a good portion of the French Quarter and were returning from dinner. We went back to the hotel to clean up, and that was where we left our sanity.
We went from a bar with 3 for 1 drink specials, to a bar that sold grain alcohol slushies, to another bar, to another bar, to another bar. Finally, on our bazillionth trip down Bourbon Street, we passed a strip club called Casbah. I pointed to it.
“Heh. We should go there.”
“You want to?”
“Uh. I was just kind of kidding.”
“Let’s check it out. We’re in New Orleans.”
“Um. Okay.”
As The Mal has told me time and time again, why go to New Orleans if you’re not going to pet the seedy underbelly?
We went in, and were suddenly in a very tiny room. There was a stage, there was a few chairs, and there was a hallway in the back. There were also 3 guys already in there, and somehow more drunk than us. They were leering at the stripper on the stage, and were being stingy with their money. The stripper came over to us immediately when we walked in. We were very generous with our bills, and were rewarded with a show so personalized that the other 3 guys left. The stripper got off the stage, a few more guys trickled in, and a new stripper took the stage. The 1st stripper came back to where we were seated and put her clothes back on.
We talked to her for quite some time. We found out she was working to raise money for school and to help she and her son get by. I asked her a bunch of feminist minded questions about why she stripped and if she felt degraded. She said she did sometimes, but mostly she enjoyed taking money from stupid guys who thought they would ever get to see anything more of her than her dancing. She told us she had to get ready to get on stage again, and headed off.
While she had been talking to us, another stripper had been sitting in on the conversation, but off to one side, and she wasn’t saying anything. When stripper 1 left, stripper 2 slid her chair next to me. ACWF had left with stripper 1 to see where the bathroom was. Stripper took looked deep into my eyes, and I looked deep into the eyes that were rapidly dilating independent of each other. She was clearly on some type of drug, and it was creepin’ me out.
“You want a private dance?”
“Uh, I would have to talk to my girlfriend about that.”
“Oh, she can come too, it’ll just cost a little extra.”
Luckily, ACWF was walking back to our seats at that point.
“Hey there! Didn’t you say you were ready to go?”
“I…”
“Great, me too!”
Stripper 1 waved at us from the stage while we were on our way out. It remains to be the only time someone who was naked has ever waved to me while their leg was wrapped around a pole.
We stumbled across the street, and looked at the sign for a transgender strip club. We looked at each other, and I believe one of us said, “Why the hell not?”
Bad idea. We were the only people in there, and were immediately viewed as out-of-towner bait for the hungry tranny-stripper-sharks. We were given a seat at the very front of a large room, with a giant stage. The stripper came out, and he danced for us for a minute, and then he laid down on his side on the stage in front of us. He was very friendly, and must have known we were a little uncomfortable being the only people in there. As we were about to leave he asked us if we wanted to feel his boobs. We did (or maybe just I did), and he said, “Bet you never thought a boy could have tits like this,” or something to that effect. We commented that we hadn’t, gave him a five, and bolted out of that place.
Once we were on the street we tried to account for how much money we had left.
None.
We stumbled back to the hotel, and racked our brains trying to figure out where someone could have lifted it from us without our knowing about it.
The next afternoon we managed to account for all 250 dollars that disappeared in the space of 3 hours. We’d spent it all on booze and strippers. Then again, it’s not like I spent $100 on $7 lap dances, but that’s a different story about someone else.
I can’t wait for all the “porno” hits I’m sure to get from some of the content of that story.
Thanks to all of you out there in Blogsylvania who congratulated ACWF and I on our engagement. But more than that, I’d like to thank all of you for not asking if we had set a date yet, and then asking what that date was.
I know some of you may have been thinking that, and that’s fine. But, so far I have been asked for the date 87 times (not a lie) and it’s getting a little tiresome.
At first I was telling people whatever random date popped into my head.
“November 28th.”
“Really?”
“No. I made it up because we have no idea, and you should know better since we only got engaged 30 minutes ago.”
Then I started telling people that we were looking at September 31st. A quick glance at your calendars will tell you why that was so funny to me when they said, “Oh, that’s fun!” or something as equally as banal.
Now we’ve actually picked a date because of the constant onslaught of the same question. Each day I am gaining more and more respect for the people who just run down to the courthouse, or go to Vegas.
I swear I’m going to kiss the first person to come up to me and have a conversation like this:
“What’s new?”
“ACWF and I got engaged.”
“That’s awesome! Congratulations.”
“Thanks man.”
“You wanna go get a beer?”
“September thirty-fir… whaaAAA?”
“A beer. Would you like one?”
“More than you will ever know!”
On the night of New Year’s Day, Matt, ACWF, and I went looking for some new bars. We’d been going to the same bars for quite some time, and we wanted to find someplace new.
Before I go into what we found at the new bars, I have to explain why the old bars were so good. Some of the Baltimore readers may have already been to some of these places.
1) The Phoenix- Very cool staff, and a decent beer selection. At certain times, you can have the whole bar to yourself, and chat up the bartenders to your heart’s content. My name is on a plaque in this bar for drinking all 99 of their available beers. The “Frat” crowd only shows on Wednesday night.
2) J. Patricks- Irish pub. The guy who owns and runs it is Irish. He serves his Guinness warm, and his whiskey selection is unmatched. You can catch traditional Irish music here regularly. No “Frat” crowd, no hoochies.
3) The Blarney Stone- A good place to meet up in Fell’s Point. Cheap National Bohemians (Natty Boh). Only occasional “hoochies,” but they usually leave when they see the female bartender with sleeve tattoos.
We would go to a few other places, but these were our haunts. So when we went looking for new bars we went looking for a similar feel.
The first bar we went to was a sports bar. That pretty much nicked the whole concept. But it was the next bar that sent us packing for the evening, and drove us back to the waiting arms of our familiar bartenders.
The first thing that struck me about this bar was not the piggish bartender, or the horrible carpet, or even the distinct lack of women (I just like to have a good male to female ratio. I’m not particularly fond of the company of men,) but what struck me first was the smell.
Actually, the smell didn’t “strike” me. The smell instead invaded my nostrils like a mob of angry villagers carrying torches made from burning gym socks that had never been washed. It smelled like that, and smoke.
I don’t really mind smoke. I used to smoke, and actually enjoy the aroma at times. This place smelled like the carpet had been used for an ashtray at the last chain-smoking convention.
The whole time we were at this place I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I would never be able to go back in there again knowing that the smell would throw my mind for a loop at its sheer putresence.
Is it too much to ask for a bar with a friendly crowd of men and women who aren’t frat boys or hoochies, and whose interior doesn’t smell like the locker room of a wrestling team?
I was going to write a post about how I should broach the topic of my engagement in an office where I don’t really care to interact with any of my coworkers, but then I just went ahead and did it at the end of a meeting.
It was well received, but what happened next shocked me.
I guess I gave one of my coworkers the guts to make an announcement of his own. He is a father. Of a 3 month old.
He’s not married. He’s not dating anyone. This is the first we’ve heard of it.
I can understand WHY you would want to hide an “illegitimate” (and let me just say that term is completely idiotic. Sperm + egg = legitamate baby.) child, but I thought it would be much harder than that. This is a 12 month secret. That is quite a feat.
We all congratulated him, and he said he would bring his kid by soon. Now it’s all water under the bridge, and I’m not the guy with big news anymore. Other people might have been upset by that, but it suits me perfectly.
Before you leave judgment in comments, just remember that I already know I’m a HUGE dork/nerd.
Anyway, it all started like this. I had the thoughts that I had here, and I knew it was time to buy the ring. Luckily, I had been researching rings for months, so I knew exactly what I was looking for. But the ring I was purchasing was being purchased sight unseen. That’s right. I had never seen it before. I bought it from Amazon.
Before you go into convulsions over how I could buy something so important over the internet, I offer a few reasons: 1) It’s 2005 people! It’s okay to use the internet to buy things! 2)The ring on Amazon was SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper than in a jewelry store. It was so cheap that I tell people, “Compared to the price of a similar ring in a jewelry store, I got my ring from a guy, who knows a guy, who gets stuff that fell off the back of a truck.” 3) No pushy salespeople. 4) Because of all the research I did, I knew exactly what the ring would look like. Did you know you can tell how much the ring will sparkle based on the % Table size in comparison to the % Depth?*
Consider that Evidence of Dorkdom, exhibit A.
When I got the ring I made final revisions on a sonnet (Shakespearian, not Italian/Petrarchan) I had been working on, and placed the ring and the sonnet near my bed.
Consider the sonnet exhibit B.
I was going to read the sonnet to ACWGF after we had slept in on a Saturday, and give her the ring at the end of the sonnet. This didn’t exactly work out as planned, because little Miss Thing** was hungover from the previous night’s carousing. I didn’t think a proposal to someone whose breath smelled like I imagine an ashtray might taste would be romantic, so I held off until she was capable of standing under her own power.
We finally got going later in the day, and my buddies Kmart, and Matt were hanging around. Good friends, yes, but I didn’t want them there for something as personal as a proposal, so I faked a stomach ache and waited for them to leave.
About 20 minutes later they left to go get Matt’s car. I got up, went into my room, put the ring in my back pocket, and grabbed the sonnet. I came back into the living room and told ACWGF that I wrote her a poem at work, and asked if would she like to hear it.
Here is the conversation that followed:
“Why don’t you just give it to me so I can read it?”
“I’d like to read it to you, if you don’t mind.”
“(sigh)… fine.”
“Could you come over here and sit next to me?”
“Jeez! Why can’t I just sit over here?”
“Humor me.”
“(ANGRY SIGH) Fine.”
She stomped over to me indignantly, practically threw herself down onto the couch, and stared at me impatiently. I thought about how much I could rub that in later, and I started reading. The sonnet was about all the nicknames I have for her, so she had no idea what I had written in the last 2 lines. One line that I was particularly proud of was this one:
Petite Fromage is cheesy French for [Name]
Another thing I was proud of was that I had left a syllable, or beat, off of the last line in the poem:
[Name-name Name-name] will you be my wife?
There are only 9 syllables there (two syllables per first and last name), and the traditional sonnet would have 14 lines of iambic pentameter, which is a line of 10 syllables with an alternating stressed/unstressed rhythm. That empty beat/syllable is for her to respond affirmatively to my request in the sonnet. She blew it by saying, “Of course,” instead of “Yes.” Too many syllables, what a shame. Count the fact that I had considered her response as a syllable, and that I just explained that I did that as Exhibit B1 and B2.
I asked her if she noticed that there was a syllable missing after she stopped crying a few minutes later.
“What?”
“I left a syllable off the last line for your response.”
“Huh?”
“The sonnet. I didn’t complete the pentameter of the last line. I left out a syllable where the last foot should have been for your response.”
“What are you talking about?”
“(2 minute refresher course on our English 301 class where we learned about all the stuff that’s making me look like a huge nerd right now.)”
“Of course I didn’t notice! I was too busy being overjoyed accepting your proposal. You big nerd!”
And that’s the educational, dorked-out story of how I proposed. Not exactly white horses, sunset, string quartets, fireworks, champagne, roses, or getting down on one knee, but romantic to us all the same.
*The closer the %Table and %Depth are in actual number (e.g. 75 table, 78 depth) the more sparkle you’ll get. However, the two numbers can’t go outside the range of 65 and 85 or else the sparkle will be dulled. See? I told you I knew my stuff.
**I’ve taken to calling her a “Triflin’ Ho”
=\=Sorry for the late posting. For once I’m actually busy at work. Details on the proposal later. This should hold you for now. Note to LCN- Is this what you were looking for?=/=
When I worked as a student for the [identifying information scrubbed] department at [this could get me fired], I had to deal with lots of people who had their PhDs and they weilded them like some people weild a forklift- with absolutely no regard for anyone’s shins.**
Among the tasks that drove me absolutely batty:
-One PhD asked me, in a note that was scrawled on 8 post-it notes on the front of manilla folder, to photocopy the receipts inside. I opened the folder, and saw two receipts. In the time it took this woman to write this note*** she could have photocopied the damn things herself.
-Another PhD left a book in my in-box with a post it that said, “Please photcopy.” I went to his office to find out which pages he wanted me to photocopy. He took the book from my hands, opened to the table of contents, and pointed at it condescendingly, “From here to the end.” He also wanted it double sided and stapled. This meant I would have to copy all 150 pages. Then run 25 copied pages through the copier at time to double-side them. Then compile all the double sides into a master, and then make all 18 copies from that master. It took me 5 hours. I jammed the copies into his mailbox, and put the ones that wouldn’t fit on top of all the mailboxes. The top of the mailboxes was about 6′8″ off the ground and he was about 5′3″. Then I went to the head of the department and told him that I had taken part in copyright infringement, but only did so at the request of the PhD.
-A final PhD came to me one day when I was filing and told me that he was having problems with the copier and heard that I had success in the past in getting the dinosaur of a Xerox machine running again. I followed him into the copy room, and he told me that the machine was out of staples, and he tried to reload the machine, but it wasn’t working. I opened the doors to the copier, and a desk stapler fell out. I put the staples that are supposed to go into the copy machine in, all the while thinking what an idiot this guy was, and that I was supposed to call him Dr. He shoved a desk stapler into the copy machine as if the machine’s insides would have just put it where it belonged.
I encourage you to share your stories of your unfortunate brushes with academia in comments, or on your own blog. Just lemme know when you post it so I can read it.
*Alternate titles- “You do know not to eat your own feces, right?” “All the sense of a five years old boy.” “Did you get that PhD at the mall?”
**I’m still not sure what I meant by that.
***Whenever she wrote notes to me, they were addressed to “Someone,” as in, “Could someone please … for me?” I worked there for damn near a year, and she never came close to uttering my name. So I stopped calling her Dr. X and started calling her Mrs. X, knowing full well that a) she wasn’t married, and b) hated being called anything but Dr.
I spend most of my time alone thinking. I do it in the shower, I do it before I go to sleep. I do it when I’m walking. I do it when I’m driving. Thinking while driving is definitely more dangerous than talking on a cell phone, or eating a delicious Caesar pita.
Usually, I think about the same things. Big picture things that I try and try again to wrap my mind around. Most frequently I try to find meaning in my life. Recently, I’ve been distressed at the results of my thoughts. We’re born, educated for almost 2 dozen years, left on our own to find a job to earn money so that we can support a mate, and a child or two. Then we die and our children take on their part of the cycle. Learning, earning, birthing, dying.
I was frustrated at the day to day nature of it all. I work today to earn money. Why? So I can eat, and pay rent so I can work tomorrow.
So I thought to myself, “What do I want?”. Did I want to get out of the city? Did I want to earn more money in my job? Did I want a house? Did I want a bigger apartment? Did I want a pet?
I sort-of wanted all those things, but didn’t really want any of those things. I was struggling to figure out what seemed to be missing and I was drowning in the Big Picture.
Finally, something clicked, and suddenly I was thinking about the details- the fun of it all. It’s not just a job, it’s where I blog. It’s not just a family, it’s the time you spend with your family. It was then that I realized that ACWGF was the missing piece of the puzzle if I wanted a family.
People have been pressuring me to get engaged. “Just do it, you’ll never be ready.” Now, I know that’s not true. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t figured it out. I didn’t know what I was missing. I knew I’d be ready at some point and I didn’t want to rush into anything, and now I’m ready.
What I want is to come home to ACWGF every day (or have her come home to me, depending on how our schedules work out.)
Eureka!
Now, to all my blog-friends, and all of Blogsylvania, I introduce, AnonymousCoworker Fiance.
