On lazy days and self-evaluations.
I've completely reversed my schedule while on vacation. Last night, I finally went to sleep at 3:30 AM (and I really wasn't that tired, either). I woke up at 11:30 this morning and probably would've slept for at least another hour if my phone hadn't rung. I'll work on fixing this on Monday night, as I don't have to be back at work until Tuesday of next week.
Jen and I headed for the gym at 1ish, and it proved to be a completely pointless trip for me. I forgot to bring my inhalor (or take a dose before leaving), and found myself beginning to wheeze after fifteen minutes on the elliptical machine. I got off and rested for five minutes before I decided to try walking on the treadmill. I got through ten minutes of that before my lungs started freaking. All in all, not such a productive day.
After that, we went to have lunch. The original plan was to sit outside at Gloria's so that we could bring Koa (her dog) with us (it's also a gorgeous day, so sitting outside seemed like a good idea). However, the stupid restaurant wouldn't allow him on the patio. Did I mention that Koa weighs 4 pounds dripping wet and would have simply sat in Jen's lap the entire time we were there? Whatever.
We wound up at Chuy's (mmm, creamy jalapeno) and spent the better part of an hour eating and talking about life. There are days like today when I feel like I have a strong grasp on who I am and what I want out of life, and there are days when all I really know is who I don't want to be and who I used to be. I'm not sure if I'm making progress or regressing, but I guess I'll find out eventually.
Now I'm home, and tired for some unknown reason. I need to clean my apartment because my parents are coming by tomorrow to help me hang my curtains up (six months after I moved in). I need to clean my apartment because it's a wreck and it's driving me nuts. I need to do some laundry, because I want to sleep on clean sheets tonight. All I really want to do is lay on my couch and watch a movie with candles lit, the windows open, and all of the lights turned off. I also need to move my car to the garage so that the newly washed exterior isn't covered in bird shit again by the morning.
Mostly I need (need, not want) to go camping sometime soon... just get out of town for a weekend and be away from everything, turn the cell phone off, and relax. Maybe hike and fish a bit, read a good book, do some drinking... anyone up for it?
Driving along in my automobile.
My car, which I love dearly (and had better love dearly considering the check that I write each month to pay for it), was due for a routine oil change. The Honda dealership that I purchased it from was running a special, so I took it in to get that taken care of and my left front tire patched (slow leak).
The plan was to do that and then run to the mall for a pair of jeans.
They finished the tire patch and oil change pretty quickly, and I drove off towards the mall. It's exceptionally hot today in Dallas for December, so I turned on the a/c and waited for the car to cool down.
And waited.
And waited.
And then noticed that there was a loud rattling going on when the a/c was turned on, and that it was to the point that I could feel it via my foot on the accelerator.
I did a U-turn and headed back to the dealership to turn my car back in, thinking that perhaps I'd kicked a rock up into the system or something small like that. They said that they'd get to it as soon as they could, and they'd call me before they made any repairs.
By 5:00, I hadn't heard anything, so I called them.
Uh, yeah.
They have to replace my entire a/c system. Apparently, the compressor locked up and then contaminated the system. That's an estimated $1,600 repair. Holy shit. Luckily, they have all of the parts in, so they can repair it tomorrow.
Even more luckily, when I purchased my car in May, I purchased the Honda Care plan--which basically extends my warranty to 5 yr bumper-to-bumper for a mere $12/month.
I paid for that warranty something like three times over today with this a/c incident.
And for the record, I am the only person that I know who needs an a/c repair in DECEMBER.
Beer before liquor.
Didn't we learn the lesson never to guzzle beer before hard liquor during our freshman year of college? Am i incapable of remembering anything that I learned during my freshman year of college?
And why didn't anyone remind me of this rule last night?
I hit Bennigan's with a few high school friends at 9 PM. 9-fucking-PM. Way too early for it to be a quality drinking night, so I assumed we'd have a couple, then head home at midnight.
Well.
We arrived and discovered that they had Paulaner Hefeweizen on tap. How cool is that? Seeing as Paulaner is the favorite beer of all 3 of us who were there last night, we had to drink that. And we probably would have all night.
After I had finished off #4 (Sean and Randy were ahead of me with #6 and #5, respectively), the server swung by and asked if we'd like another round. We all nodded (they nodded, I don't recall nodding, but since I'd had 4 and was feeling quite good, it's entirely possible).
After being amazed at the fact that I was actually drunk after 4 beers (the guys found this hilarious and pathetic), I mused that perhaps it was a good idea that I hadn't driven after 3 beers while I was in Austin a few weeks prior.
Then the server came back.
"I have to change out the keg on the Paulaner, so it'll be just a few minutes."
No problem. At some point during all of this, Sean's cousin and the cousin's friend had arrived, and we were cramming six people into a booth clearly made for four. This is when chaos ensued.
The server came back again.
"Uh, guys, bad news. You've basically singlehandedly killed my entire supply of Paulaner. Can I get you something else?"
The three of us looked at each other in relative shock. And then ordered alternate drinks.
I made the mistake of ordering a Cape Cod after 4 beers. Never again will I do this. When I got the drink, it was a very pale pink. I looked at Sean and said "Man, that's a lot of vodka and not a lot of cranberry." He concurred.
Then I took a sip, and it tasted fine. I was really drunk.
The rest of the night passed with that drink, another of the same, and a Red Snapper with a toast led by myself--"Here's to sleeping triple, seeing double, living single, and testing negative." Also, with me smoking two Camel Turkish Silvers, which was a decidedly bad plan. Because a) I don't smoke very often anymore, and b) I smoke Marlboro Lights, not Camel Turkish Silvers when I do.
And we were there until last call. Holy shit. Also, have you ever seen drunk people try to do math? Because it was pathetic. Then we couldn't get the pen to work. Also pathetic. I just pray that we left the guy a big enough tip, because we had to have been a nightmare.
I woke up this morning at 8 AM because my parents needed me to move my car (this marks the first time I've been absolutely wasted at my parents' house), and I was hovering somewhere between still drunk and hungover, with characteristics of both. My mother was about to go through my purse to get my keys and do it herself, which prompted me to launch myself across the room to get the purse.
See, someone gave me a sample sized thing of cinnamon lube last week as a joke, and it was still in my purse. Which is where I moved it to from the car because I drove last night when my dad and I went to pick up dinner.
I choked down advil and water and then slept for three hours. After some caffeine and a piece of pizza, I'm finally starting to feel human again.
And tomorrow night? Definitely playing it low-key.
Just for good measure.
Two quotes (not spoken by me) from the drive to see Christmas lights:
"I think I'm a front door person. (beat) Better than a back door person."
"How many people do you know with a sack?"
Further adventures from tonight.
A snippet of a conversation that just took place between one of the involved parties from the pervious entry. Dialogue begins with myself.
"I'm not tired."
"Me either."
"Well, I mean, I'm tired to the point that I don't want to go out-out, but I'm not tired enough to sleep or watch a movie and be low-key."
"Right, basically."
"Let's go look at Christmas lights."
"But... but I just showered, and I'm in bed wearing inappropriate attire for going out."
"Put some damn clothes on and let's go."
"I love that you know me well enough to know that I'm not wearing clothes right now."
"It creeps me out, actually. I'm showering, then I'm picking you up at 10:30."
"Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine."
*click*
The one where they molested the banana.
Two of my girlfriends (platonic here, stop fantasizing) and I had an impromptu girls' night in this evening. Those kind are the best, and they usually result in the best stories.
It started with a chorus of "I want Pei Wei." "I want Pei Wei." "I want Pei Wei, too." Pei Wei just opened a store about four blocks from where we live, and we've been driving past it for two months and waiting for the "Open" sign to light up and invite us in. It opened this week, and we decided to walk over for dinner this evening.
Over fried rice, kung pao chicken, and honey seared shrimp, talk turned to sex and guys, helped along the way by our fortune cookies--which had us doing everything from sleeping our way up the corporate ladder to preparing today for what would happen tomorrow (in bed). Apparently I need to stretch tonight.
The three of us have somehow, along the way, become comfortable enough to discuss sex in sometimes graphic detail. It's our version of Sex & the City, 10 years younger and in Dallas instead of New York.
Well, and none of us are quite that obsessed with shoes, as far as I know.
Over dinner, one of my friends mentioned that she was in need of pointers for ways to transition from making out to...well. Making a face like a donut, if you will. In addition, she needed to know what to do with her hands before and during the act.
I'm not sure why, but she immediately looked at me and said "Will you teach me???"
Somehow, I became the "experienced" one of the group. My numbers, while low, have apparently achieved me a high level of expertise. I'm not sure that I agree, but I can share the knowledge that I have.
After another slightly embarassing moment wherein the word "fornicate" was used while a Pei Wei employee walked by, we packed up our leftovers and began the walk home.
When we got there, my friend ran to her apartment and returned with a banana.That poor banana.
She arranged the banana so that it was, um, erect. If you will. Then, she said "OK, teach me!"
And then I spent the next ten minutes using a yellow prop to explain various ways in which to pleasure a guy. The only way it would've been better was if we'd used the strawberry condom laying on the kitchen table (which we're all horrified by, because who wants to smell lube mixed with strawberries mixed with... that?), but that was a little bit too literal for my taste.
The banana looked normal and pristine before. My friend (the one not participating in said lesson) picked it up afterward and said "Christ, you sure did a number on this thing!"
It's nights like this that make me love my life.
"Um... yeah."
Amilynn, should she be reading this, will appreciate this entry.
Actually, I can hear her laughing her ass off all the way from Houston. Honestly, the only reason she keeps me around is to laugh at me. Fortunately, I'm OK with that, and I even enjoy laughing at myself with her.
We're going through some "growing pains" at work, if you will. They're rearranging a lot of things, tearing down existing cubes, building new formats in their place, combining departments in new locations, etc. As a result, we've been doing a lot of moving in the past few weeks. We'll move to our permanent location while the office is closed at Christmas, but we made our first temporary move over the weekend.
I was out of the office on Friday to use up my last vacation day, and subsequently missed the distribution of the map of our temporary slots. I knew the general area of where to look today (second floor, right side), and figured I'd just wander until I found my boxes.
I got to work, walked in, and started to look around. One row... two rows... still looking. Found my supervisor's cube. Found his supervisor's cube. Found my former cubemate's cube. Finally, someone from my department told me that my co-worker couldn't find her stuff, and that judging from the look on my face, I was in the same position.
I went downstairs to my old cube, thinking that perhaps they were running late on moving us.
My old cube no longer existed. Scratch that concept.
I spotted the co-worker with missing boxes walking toward the back of the first floor and ran after her. She was being led to our new location.
First, we went through the temporary wall that's being erected.
Then, we went around a corner.
Then, another corner, where we found ourselves in a veritable cube graveyard. The place was completely deserted.
Then, in the far corner of the building, where I swear they're not even heating it right now, we found our desks. We jokingly refer to it as Outer Siberia, and have contemplated building a fort using old bedsheets out of our cubes.
As the four of us who wound up over there got settled in, I stood up and said "You know, I feel like Milton from Office Space. Tomorrow, we're going to walk in and they're going to tell me 'Um, yeah. We're going to need to make more space... if you could move your desk to the access road of 161, that'd be great.'"
If they come after my red Swingline stapler, people are going down.
Oh hell, here we go again.
Sometime between graduating from high school and present-day, the days leading up to and following Christmas became a drunkfest.
It all started at Christmas, 2002. Somehow, the entire high school crew wound up at Mavericks on S. Cooper on Christmas Night. And my God, they got smashed.
At the time, I was not yet 21, so I became the designated driver. The night is still the stuff of legend.
This was immediately after Francione was hired at aTm, and several of my high school friends are Aggies. Thus, the majority of the night was spent shooting Alabama Slammers in honor of the new coach. After a few hours of drinking, four of us wound up at IHOP (because where else do you go when the bar closes at 2 AM and you want pancakes?).
And a Christmas tradition was born. Now we meet up every Christmas night--at least two or three of us--and we drink and catch up and talk about love, life, and the pursuit of happiness.
Or we discuss who is screwing whom, what we got for Christmas, and what other points of interest have come up since we last saw each other.
As the years have gone by, other nights have been added, and I seem to spend the better part of a week going out and drinking with various groups of friends.
My last day of work this year will be Thursday. On Thursday night, a friend-of-a-friend gets back into Dallas after having moved out of state. This friend-of-a-friend has a tendancy to cause nights of extreme and utter chaos (see: champagne by the pool/Nick & Sam's Tuesday). Given that we have Friday off, I have little doubt that Thursday will produce really incriminating pictures and really painful hangovers that find us moaning between sips of water at brunch on Friday.
There's a Christmas party on Christmas Night, and then we'll move to the after party. Where the after party will be is TBD--either a friend's apartment or Sherlock's, but I am not DDing this year. It's someone else's turn.
I'm sure that Friday night will find us at Bennigan's in A-town, drinking beer and Irish Coffee and catching up on high school gossip. The fact that I am off of work until January 3rd (and the fact that I'm not moving from Austin to Dallas this year) means that the amounts of trouble I can get into this year know no bounds. Let's all hope I don't get arrested, and let's all forgive me in advance for the many drunk dials I am sure I will make.
Mourning the loss of the afternoon nap.
While I'm generally glad that when I get home at night, it's all "me" time (read: no more papers to write, tests to cram for, or outlines to compose), there are still certain things about the college lifestyle that I miss. In all honesty, I think if I could go back to the days of working a $8/hour job 30 hours per week, still pay my rent (ahh, student loans), make my car payment, be insured, and not have to actually attend or pass classes, I'd do it for a year or two until I got bored.
In all seriousness, I miss the afternoon nap more than anything else. Even when I was working and in school full-time, and therefore on campus roughly 14 hours per day between classes and my job, I could always find time to nap. Musics of Texas? Eh, who really needs to attend that when you can curl up on the oh-so-comfy couches of the UTC for an hour. Left Management early, and have 45 minutes to kill before an Adv. class? The Jester quiet study lounge is right around the corner.
There were, of course, the rare days when I could make it home to sleep in my own bed. However, most of my napping was done on campus. By the time I graduated (3.5 years at UT later), I had probably slept in 80% of the buildings on campus at some point. Benches, couches, two chairs pushed together... anything and everything that was a flat surface was fair game.
Then, I made the mistake of graduating and getting a "real" job.
See, you can't nap at a real job. If you're suddenly ass-tired at 3 PM, you don't get to say to yourself "Eh, I don't really need to be in on that conference call at 3:15... I'll just go snooze for 45 minutes and get the meeting notes from Jim Bob."
You could, but I imagine you'd get fired pretty quickly.
My afternoon napping is now restricted to Saturdays. I'd nap on Sundays, but the issue you run into there is that sleeping from 2 PM to 5 PM means that you will not fall asleep until 2 AM that night, which really screws with your 7 AM wakeup call on Monday. Sunday napping is only permissable after an exceptionally rough Saturday night (that said, I seem to nap on most Sundays, which might say a lot about how I spend my Saturdays).
You can sneak in a nap at work, but you have to do it in your car, at lunch. Since the weather in Texas is comfortable enough to enjoy without a/c or heat approximately 6 days out of the year, this means that you also have to have the car on, wasting gas, to keep yourself from dying of heatstroke or hypothermia. In addition, your co-workers will most likely make fun of you mercilessly if they see you sleeping in your car. I know this because I've made fun of my co-workers for doing this.
I also miss always being free at 3:15 PM on Thursday to trek to El Arroyo for 99 cent margaritas and the Cozumel Dinner, but that's a story for another time.
Urban Driving 101.
I live in an uppity area of Dallas. As such, there is a roundabout of sorts located in the main intersection of the streets that run past the buildings that make up my apartment "complex".
While I realize that in the US roundabouts are not as common as 4 way stops (not that people here understand how to navigate those properly), I thought that they were fairly basic in terms of understanding.
Apparently, I was wrong.
I cannot begin to tell you the number of cars that I have seen completely and totally fuck up the negotiation of this strange concept. How hard is it to go to the right? If you need to make a left, you go to the right 3/4 of the way around the circle and it spits you out to the left of the point at which you started. If you need to go straight, you simply bear right in a semi-circle. Turning right is fairly simple--just turn right. Don't enter the roundabout while there's another car in it and about to pass you.
I'd detail how to make a U-turn, but I'm afraid that might be too much.
This is brought to you by the Mercedes SUV that almost jacked me this evening while I was attempting to go straight through the circle on my way to the parking garage. The Mercedes (located to my right) seemed to want to go left via the shortcut--without winding around the circle--while I was still driving directly in its path.
What a feeling.
I don't remember the last time I was this productive on a Sunday at such an early hour.
I woke up, went to the gym, had a bloody mary, had lunch, watched a little TV, and then ran into an issue with my cell phone. For some reason, it decided to randomly restart itself while I was mid-text message. This, along with the fact that the display has been wonky lately, finally motivated me to go to the Sprint store and get them to check things out.
Somehow, I got the nicest Sprint employee ever. He decided to override his tech so I wouldn't have to wait 45 minutes for diagnostics to be run and just give me a new phone. It's the same phone, but that's fine. Miraculously, I didn't lose my numbers this time!!! I think this marks my 5th phone since signing up with Sprint. Unfortunately, of those 5, only one was a "chosen upgrade". Everything else happened as a result of whatever the most basic Samsung flip phone model at the time crapping out.
Next time, I think I'll buy a Sanyo.
While I was waiting for them to finish swapping my numbers and other stuff to the new phone, I wandered around Mockingbird Station. Even though it's worth your left (insert favored body part here) to get a parking spot at that place on a Sunday two weeks before Christmas, it's a pretty cool shopping area. They had a saxaphone playing Santa Claus (who looked surprisingly real, and who was surprisingly good) that I stopped to listen to for a bit while I had a cup of coffee at Starbucks. I also swung into Bath & Body Works for a "Tree" scented candle (since I lack the time to deal with a real tree this year), and browsed through Urban Outfitters (which prompted me to decide I need a fondue set).
For the record, I love shopping alone. Additionally for the record, I stopped in Paperie Co., which is obviously NOT a store designed with me in mind... I found a greeting card organizer and couldn't believe that people buy this crap.
After I retrieved my (new) phone, I headed back home, and actually buckled down and cleaned up my apartment. I still need to vacuum and clean the bathroom, but all of the dishes are in their proper place, the random bits of trash are cleaned up, the trash is taken out, and even the couch cushions are actually straightened up.
The real shocker is that all of this was done while it was still light out, and I suddenly realized that I'm not cut out for being productive because I get bored way too easily. I also realized that while I've got a lot of great friends in Dallas, they're spread out all over kingdom come, which is annoying when you want to do something casual like grab coffee or a bloody mary.
(I have the weirdest cravings for bloody marys lately. It's not surprising, given my love for all things tomato-related, but Matt is starting to think I'm even more off my rocker than previously indicated.)
In other words, it takes coordination, planning, and a specific event to motivate us to drive 10 or 15 miles to get to each other's houses. The ones who do live nearby are, unfortunately, otherwise occupied today.
At least now I only have 29 minutes to kill until Grey's Anatomy.
I may hate winter...
but it's certainly difficult to be too down about it after the day I had on Wednesday. We're not touching Thursday, for the record.
I had to drag my ass out of bed early, as the ice storm hadn't arrived in Dallas quite yet. However, good thing #1 came in the form of my friend and co-worker (who happens to live in the building next to me) offering to drive both of us to work that day.
Any of you who have ever been in the car with me while there's traffic know that this is a blessing for myself, my heart, my blood pressure, and the likelihood of me getting off of the bus bound for hell.
So I got to work, puttered through an hour or two of meetings and excel spreadsheets, and suddenly it was time for lunch. The entire team was being taken to Via Real for (delicious) mexican food and a holiday lunch on the dime of one of the companies that we place advertising with (that much of society believes is an evil empire). I was expecting an hour, then back to the grindstone.
Instead, we got there and found out that we were in a private room. We walked into the private room and immediately gravitated towards the far corner... where there was a tub full of beer, bottles of wine, and pitchers of margarita (frozen and rocks).
Involving alcohol in advertising lunches guarantees several things: a) it will last for at least 2.5 hours, b) totally inappropriate topics for a business lunch will be discussed, and c) no one will want to do any work when they get back to the office.
Sure enough, we drank, ate queso, ate salsa, ate appetizers, drank more, ate real food, ate dessert, talked about the Texas vs. USC Rose Bowl, Rose Bowl tickets, sex, myspace, baby nurses, last year's Rose Bowl, college basketball, the possibility of Texas winning the national championship in 3 sports this year (football, basketball, baseball) and how cool that would be, the fact that Stanford's always the best athletic program because they have so damn many teams... you get the point.
Then we got back to the office at 2 to discover it was c-l-o-s-e-d due to inclement weather, and went home, where I proceeded to sit on my ass for three hours, then go to the Stars game, sit in $85 Platinum Level seats that I got for free, and drink more.
All in all, a quality Wednesday. Thank you, ice storm.
December Blues.
I love Christmas. Let me start by saying that. But after talking to a friend of mine last night, I was reminded of how much this month has absolutely blown in the recent past. Right now, we're a week into the month, and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Let's review, shall we?
Disclaimer: I realize that several of these so-called crappy events were well within my control. That doesn't make them any more enjoyable--if anything it makes it that much worse because they were entirely avoidable. Live and learn, and then move on.
2000
I finished my first semester at UT with absolutely stellar results. I'm talking genuis level here--I got a whopping 1.6 semester GPA. I'd like to say that I learned my lesson and fixed it during the spring semester (for the record, I did learn my lesson and would have fixed it if the spring hadn't turned into a 4 month nightmare). This put a rather large damper on all things Christmas and such.
2001
I was taking a year off from UT and living at home while attending community college. I pulled a Kelly/Sean, as we so appropriately named it last night, and dropped a class or two and didn't do so well in the others. Again, see the entry above regarding putting a damper on Christmas.
2002
I was back at UT. However, I made the mistake in August of taking Economics, Murphy's class, MIS, and Italian. I needed a 2.5 for the semester to remain at UT. I got a 2.46. I also had a relationship end (badly), and a 3 week long case of the stomach flu. I spent two weeks frantically appealing to advisers, deans, committees, and sleeping a lot so I wouldn't be puking. In the end, it worked out--with a bonus. Having the stomach flu right before Christmas means that you get to spend a week eating everything in sight so as to regain the weight you didnt' need to lose.
2003
I waited tables at a restaurant one summer, and planned to return to said establishment over Christmas break to earn some money. In between August and December, the managers busted a ring of servers for effectively stealing from the company. Somehow, my name was dropped (I didn't do it), and they had to investigate me before I could return to work. Between being accused of what amounted to a felony when you factored in how much money had been stolen and losing out on income = shitty.
2004
I spent last December having panic attacks, packing up my apartment, moving to Dallas, and crying. A lot. Because being the idiot that I am, I didnt' realize how much I'd miss Austin until I was staring at an empty apartment, a full U-haul, and 200 miles of I35 North.
2005
Crisis pending. Anyone want to take bets? Maybe I'll get laid off this year!
