Aarrgh

I should never have left the house.

I stayed in for most of tonight because my cramps were bothering me and most of my friends were going to Wicker Park, which is about 1-1.5 hours away by el, and I didn’t want to be that far away if the cramps came back.

How bad could it possibly be? Suffice it to say when these fuckers are full blast, I can’t even sit up, let alone stand up, and I didn’t want to be far from my sweet sweet drugs if they hit.

The drugs also have an alcohol interaction warning, and I didn’t want to pay 20 bucks in cover charges to get into bars where I was going to do precisely zero drinking.

So I watched a movie, and before I sat down to the inevitable (homework), I decided to check my email (which is a bit more of a task when dialing up, stupid stupid cable modem dying and all).

So of course, I sign on to AIM, and I get a message of “Why aren’t you at my party?!” from my friend Sharon, to which I responded that I had no idea what she was talking about.

So she tells me about the party, then, as added incentive, tells me there’s queer girls there, because she thinks I am an extremely predictable person.

She is clearly not wrong about this, and since the party was only about a mile away and I couldn’t drink because of the medicine I’m on to combat the cramps anyway, I decided to bike up, since I could come back faster if I had to.

So I got there, and there were indeed a bunch of queer girls there, including Irene the Hot Italian Chick who shot me down, and a very nice rugby player I had met the night before named Megan, who I think is cute, and who I probably would have asked out if I hadn’t been piss-drunk last night and unable to form complete sentences.

So of course, Irene and Megan were flirting.

(bangs head on desk).

You know, I’ve got to stop doing this. I’m going to end up with a big purple welt on my forehead.

For the first time in my life, I actually became glad that I have debilitating cramps, because they kicked in right on cue for me to make a convenient exit. Which, unfortunately, I had to make in a beer-soaked overshirt, since someone had spilled all over it at some point. Perfect end to a perfect evening.

It’s very funny when I look at it from a detached point of view, because, well, if it had happened to someone else, I'd be laughing my ass off.

However, it does make me feel pretty fucking stupid for not just saying fuck it and going up to Megan’s rugby game this afternoon, which I didn’t because it was raining when I got out of the shower. Shit shit shit shit shit.

I swear, this never happens to straight people.

Meh.

Cable modem is out. I am cold. Sleater-Kinney rules. Further updates once cable is fixed.

That is all.

Stealing ideas

I stole this one from Kim:

In case anybody doesn't have enough ways to insult me: Oxygen.com has a baby name insult generator.

Enter your name, then click on "Drawbacks." This will also tell you if your name has some sort of lewd or lascivious meaning in another language.

Although there's a couple I just don't get (Spellin' Ellen? Ellenvator? What the fuck?), the funniest thing about it is that one of the insults they gave me for my name is actually the name of someone I knew in middle school (Ellsbeth, albeit spelled differently).

I find it really amusing that someone's first name could actually be considered an insult.

All work and no play makes Homer something something...

I am studying for a quiz in Italian (no, the thing with Hot Italian Chick did not pan out, and yes, I am still taking Italian, since I decided to take it before there ever was a Hot Italian Chick, goddamn it), and I am typing everything I have to know for said quiz out for 2 reasons:

1) I learn things much faster when I have to write them out.
2) I type much faster than I write things by hand.

So I hit Essere, the verb for "to be," and I know I'm never going to remember the conjugation just by typing it once. So I type the following (cut and pasted from the Word document I'm using):

ESSERE
Io sono Noi siamo
Tu sei Voi siete
Lui/lei è Loro sono

Sono sei è siamo siete sono
Sono sei è siamo siete sono
Sono sei è siamo siete sono
Sono sei è siamo siete sono
Sono sie è siamo siete sono

And then I realized that it is clearly time for me to stop doing this for the night, before I up and kill my roommates with an axe or something.

The Onion gets deep

The Onion AV Club, the semiserious side of The Onion, America's Finest (satirical) Newspaper, asked a large number of celebrity types whether God exists. My favorite answer came from John Leguizamo:

The Onion: Is there a God?
John Leguizamo: Yeah, but there's not just one God. There's a whole lot of gods, because one God couldn't have possibly made so many mistakes all by Himself. This had to be done by committee.

For some reason, that makes an astounding amount of sense to me.

Life in a nutshell

Ever have one of those moments that encapsulates what's going on in your life, and it pisses you off way more than it should, simply because it's so representative?

I had one of those tonight when I went by Blockbuster to drop something off for a friend and pick up Jaws for a paper I have to write this weekend. No, really. This is why I'm a film major: My papers are about Jaws, not Kant.

Anyway, one of the StreetWise (paper sold around Chicago for a buck by a number of homeless vendors so that people don't feel quite as much like they're giving people a handout) guys was outside, as one normally is.

It was cold, but I didn't have any singles, so I told him I'd buy one when I came out. So I come out of the store, and hand the guy a dollar, which he puts in his pocket. I reach out towards the stack of papers he's holding.

"Oh, that's not StreetWise, that comes out tomorrow. I'll be here though, I'll remember you. God bless."

I just kind of stood there for a second, then shook my head and walked away. I didn't have the time or the energy to say "Hey, you lying fuck, give me back my dollar!"

I was talking to people on IM, and my friend Eddy had the best line: "That's insane. Would you buy a video from Blockbuster on the assumption that they'll remember you tomorrow when you come to pick it up?"

Like I said, I wouldn't be so pissed about it if it weren't representative of a lot of things that have been going on in my life lately: I agree to do something, on the assumption that I'm going to get something out of it. I do it, and then get screwed over.

Ugh. At least the heat in my apartment works this winter. I'm clinging to that as a beacon of hope, because right now there ain't much else.

Standing ovation

I am very proud of my dad for standing.

My dad was up for the weekend, and he had gotten us tickets to the Northwestern-Ohio State game on saturday night. The tickets, since he's not a season ticket holder, were waaaaaaaay up in the upper deck.

I decided to try something different: I decided to drag my dad into the student section.

This was no easy task, as my dad is almost 66 years old, and especially because of his beard, he does not particularly look like an undergraduate student.

I wanted to take him to the student section mostly because I wanted him to see how much more fun a game is from the student section. He went to a school that is not particularly known for its athletic prowess, so he had never really seen a football game from a huge student section where people are painted purple and singing the fight song.

My dad's a funny guy, and since he's retired and gotten remarried, he's been a lot more game to try random things. It's like he's an old college student. He agreed to at least try to get to the student section.

I concocted a scheme of going in through the young alums entrance (where people buy tickets and can bring whoever they want, thus it would make sense for a young alum to bring a parent), then sidling over to the student section, flashing my WildCard (student ID) instead of my student ticket (which I had given to the Monkey) if anyone asked questions, and dragging dad along for the ride.

I managed to sneak him by, and it must have been funny to anyone over on the OSU side with binoculars, because there was one Santa Claus-like old man wearing an Atlanta Braves cap among a sea of insane college students.

The one thing I had been concerned about was that the student section always stands for the entire game since the marching band is in front of us, and they stand for the whole game, and we wouldn't be able to see otherwise.

Dad's in good shape for a guy his age, but I know he's had some problems with having sore legs more in the last few years. This happened especially after he broke his leg after a skiing trip (which is fun long story for another time when I have nothing to write about), and then walked around Europe in an air cast for 3 weeks.

He's developed a limp (which he dismisses by claiming it doesn't exist, then saying that even if it does, it doesn't hurt), but he can also outlast me on a ski slope, and I'm 1/3 his age. So I thought he'd be OK for the first half, but would probably want to go up to our real seats by the second.

Boy, did he prove me wrong.

He was still fine when my back started to disagree with the idea of me standing for four straight hours. My friends were really impressed.

"My dad is 15 years younger than your dad, and there is absolutley no way in hell he would have ever been able to stand for the whole game!" was one of the comments I got. I told him this morning when I was taking him to the airport, and he was amused.

Further ammunition for the people in Atlanta who can't believe that my dad was ever a workaholic. Personally, I think it's him trying to do something with the energy which basically kept him awake for about 40 straight years (college, law school, 35 of 40 years of being a lawyer).

The only complication was that I had to run and get him hot dogs, since getting him back in after going out of the student section would have been a much more complicated operation, but all went well otherwise.

Everyone agreed after my dad went home after about 10 of us stopped at Nevin's for a postgame beer: My dad may be an old fart, but he's a cool old fart.