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Well, apparently blogger got so restless that I haven't posted, it's refusing to show the page. Maybe this will fix it.

FOLR, continued

I can't tell if it's just because my friends are law students that I'm the friend of last resort, or whether I've always been that way. I know it's been that way for a good majority of my "friendships", but has law school exacerbated the problem?

Case in point. This evening, I got invited out to dinner, "but it has to be something quick. I have other things to do tonight." Alluding to school work or something, you might think. That's fine, you have school work, let's do something quick for dinner. As it turned out, this also involved this friend picking up at least two more people to go to dinner. Our dinner plans fell through, but the question I'm left with is, if you wanted to do something quick, why are you picking other people up (who are way out of the way, for that matter)?

The obvious answer is that "I have other things to do tonight" refers not to actual things to do, but other people to see, parties to go to, what-have-you. And you've graced me with an invitation to spend some of my time in the radiance of your presence. Gee, thanks. If I'm not really part of your plans, what are you doing inviting me out for anything? I didn't go out of my way to call you to see about dinner, you called me. You called me so that I could go out to dinner with you, and then you could go out to do other things with other people, never really making me a part of your group.

I don't need to be part of the group. I'm not asking that you invite me out to those other events, or get others to invite me to other events. But why invite me to anything? You like me, but only enough for dinner. More than that and I'm tiresome. Which, again, is ok if you feel that way, but don't invite me to dinner to be some sort of half-friend.

It's better to know I'm an outsider while at home than to see that I'm an outsider while I'm out to dinner.

friend of last resort

Hi, I'm probably at the bottom of your I-need-to-call list. I'm the person you call when you're really bored, or you really can't find someone else to do something with. You let my calls go to voicemail, you go out and party, and in your down moments, in those times when you don't have money to go out and drink, that's when you call me.

Sure, you'll come over to my house and eat my food. You don't call me to extend any sort of invitation to me; no, no, this is a one-way street. I reach out to you, and in those times of benevolence, pity, or boredom, you choose to make plans with me.

We spend time in bunches together. Your close friends go away for a few days, so you've got time to kill with me. I'm your B-list friend. I get the part for a short run, and then the budget runs out. An A-list friend becomes available and is instead cast in the role that I had.

I can't put my finger on it. It doesn't seem to be my personality, since you like me just fine when we spend time together. Is it what I like to do? Or don't like to do? I don't want to go out and drink, and therefore I'm made to be the de facto pariah?

You're still here? Don't you have your A-list friend's blog to read instead?

I love the smell of the O in the morning.

School starts again on Monday, and I spent the last couple mornings at school, for various reasons. On Friday, it was Rebecca's birthday, I wasn't going to make her bar-party, so I took her out to lunch instead. We went to Primanti Bros. (for those of you who aren't familiar, this is a Pittsburgh place where they put french freedom fries and slaw on their sammiches), a cash-only establishment, as many Pittsburgh places are.

We had our lunch, and she had to leave before I finished due to work. So I finished my lunch, and when the dude behind the bar went to ring me up, I motioned that I was covering for both lunches (she had already gone, but she left her plastic salad box behind to signify that she had not paid). I put a $20 on the bar, and threw our stuff away (trash can was right behind where we were sitting).

He gave me back my change, which apparently was $13.xx. I noticed this as I walked out of the place, and realized that he had made a mistake in ringing up our lunch. Each lunch should have been around $7.

Moral dilemma time.

I needed to go over to the bookstore, so I went and did that while I pondered what I should do about it. Did he think that Rebecca had walked out without paying? He shouldn't have, I made the little back and forth signal with my hand, indicating that I was paying for hers. Was it just unfamiliarity with the cash register and the inability to add? Occam's razor and all, this is what I should have assumed it was.

But no, I have to be a good guy and go back and tell him that he made a mistake ringing up the meal, as he gave me $13 back. He doesn't believe me at first, and then with some reluctance, he rings up Rebecca's lunch. But. Not without saying, "Well, did I just give you back $10 too much?"

WTF.

Here I am, bringing this dude FREE FUCKING MONEY, and he has the audacity to call my integrity into question. This is an all-cash establishment with no computerized ordering system. No one would have known that he made a mistake, and no one would have been able to track me, either. What's the reason for making an establishment all-cash? Avoiding taxes. And somehow I'm the crook here.

I then explained how addition works and with each lunch being $7, he would have had to have given me $16, not $13, in change for him to have given me $10 too much. (Ok, I wasn't that much of an asshole, I didn't explain addition, but I did repeat that he gave me back $13, not $16).

So the end result is that I feel like an asshole for being an honest person and even going back. Their food really isn't that great to begin with, and now, I'm not going back again. Hopefully I'll remember this time, I keep going back there, even though I don't particularly like the food.

New look

Well, I finally got around to switching to a different Blogger template, and after doing soem minor fiddling, it's close enough that I'm going to go do something else for the evening. Maybe I'll post again soon. Then again, maybe not.

bits and pieces

So I noticed the other day that Blogger has now blocked the use of etenation for comments. When I started the blog, Blogger did not have a comment feature, so I was forced to use an external site for that. And now they've turned it off, so that our comments are essentially lost. When I find some time, I need to overhaul pretty much everything about the template of this blog so that I utilize the blogger comments. But that will not be today.

I'm teaching another class in two weeks, in Chicago, and in the meantime, I have a ton of stuff that I should be doing. I'm working for a prof at school, I have a programming project, and I just can't get focused on anything.

Well, just not anything work related. I've been fantastically involved in board games, of course. When I was in London, I went to a guy's house to play board games, a guy I didn't know at all. He, his wife and I played a game that I've been obsessing about for the last month. It finally arrives today. Yesterday I must have tracked the package 100 times on the fedex website, just to make sure that it arrives today. It's like hitting the "UP" button for an elevator over and over...it arrives faster the more you hit it, right? I invited people over to play it tonight, so I definitely need it to be here. The Fedex tracking web servers will be glad to have that package delivered.

Lightweight Heavyweight

I'm still in London. Friday night, I came back to the building where I taught my class this week, primarily to check email. I was going to dinner immediately afterwards, and once I left, I realized I had left a book that I had wanted to read at dinner. So I turned around, went back in to see if I left the book at the internet terminal. It wasn't there, so I walked back out to go to dinner, no book to read. As it turned out, it was just as well.

Now, next to the building was a pub that I walked by on my way back to the hotel. I had gotten about 200 ft past the pub when I realized the whistling and yelling behind me was one of the technical support guys trying to get my attention. I turned around, he caught up to me and chastised me for making him run after me when he was in the middle of having a drink. He said I needed to come back to the pub to have a proper English pint. Who was I to say no.

So I went into the pub, and three of the support guys were there. Brad, Esteban (the one who ran after me), and Andy. I'm not entirely certain what all three of them do, but Brad is the head of tech support here, Esteban does some sort of tech support function (I think it's product development related), and I have no idea what Andy does, though I think he might manage the ed center. (Hell, I hope I got the names right, getting the jobs right would be a bonus.) Andy asked me what I wanted, I said a lager of some sort, and I ended up with a Kronenburg 1667 (something like that), which they told me was a French beer. Halfway through this first pint, I was already feeling pretty tipsy. It had been 6 hours since I had eaten anything, and I don't drink all that often, either (last time was at the baseball game).

Talk about lightweight. They ordered a second round, which I realized I really shouldn't be having, as I was plenty buzzed off the first beer, which had been consumed in about 10 minutes. Just as I realized Esteban was ordering a third round, I told him that I was done, but he had actually ordered the third round a few minutes before, and the drinks were already there. So I felt obligated to drink the third beer.

Now, I normally have a hard time hearing people in bars in the first place. The background noise drowns out everything, at least to my ears. Add to this problem heavy accents, and I'm lucky to be understanding 30% of what they're saying, though it's all in English. Or at least, I'm assuming it was.

I did manage to stop at the third beer, but I was plenty drunk by this point. I was thinking about the chinese restaurant I had been planning to go to, and how if they were still open, I was probably a little too tipsy to go in there anyway. So I just stayed at the pub.

A word on English urinals. English urinals are of a different design than American urinals. American urinals are generally very upright, and due to flanges on the sides, provide you with a little bit of "cover," shall we say? Not so the English urinals. English urinals are of the low "slingback" variety, providing zero cover. So when using them, I tend to get probably a little closer than I do with American urinals. On top of the design being different, they also don't have any flushing mechanisms. Randomly, somewhere the water is released and flushes the urinal, but it's not on a one person, one flush basis.

Well, I was drunk enough at this point that when I went to the loo, I wasn't 100% awake. I snuggled up to the urinal, and the urinal started to flush. Before I realized it was happening, the urinal overflowed, right onto my jeans. Yum. I didn't get much on me, probably just a couple tablespoons, but it was more than enough.

Eventually, around 10:30 PM, I had made enough comments about eating something that Andy and Esteban (Brad had left about 20 minutes after I got there) agreed to go get some food. So we went to this dive Chinese place around the corner (not the Chinese restaurant I had intended to go to), where I got pork dumplings that were pretty undercooked (the pork was, anyway, they managed to overdo the outside of them), and lemon chicken. Neither was that great, which was fortunate for me, since by the time we sat down, I realized I was pretty full from all the beer.

I ate about half the food that I had ordered, we left, they walked me back to the hotel and we said goodbye in the lobby. I showered and washed my jeans in the shower with me. Not bad for my first English pub experience.

Other than the urinal overflowing onto my jeans, of course.

baseball game fun

So with some difficulty, S and I went to the Pirates game on Saturday night. A whole bunch of law students and their friends went to the game, 21 in total.

My friend A was in town for Carnival at CMU, we had independently decided to go to the game, but once we discovered the coincidence, we decided to sit together. Along with this, we had decided to meet before the game for a drink. The game started at 705pm, we were planning on meeting at 615pm. There are several bars across the street from the stadium, so proximity of alcohol was not an issue. However, lateness was. We ended up not meeting up until 645pm (the fault of both parties), and by the time we got a drink (or two) and headed over to the game, it was probably 745pm or so.

As soon as we found our seats, I went to find food and beverages. And a bathroom. The line for beer was long (and of course, I'm picky, and this was the only place I could get the kind I wanted). The line for food wasn't so long. But all in all, it probably took me 30 minutes to acquire the necessary sustenance.

Once I got back to the seats, I realized that yet another bathroom trip was in order. I decided to wait until I had eaten, so I had a burger, and then headed back out to the bathroom.

Back in the game, it was now like th 5th inning, and I was just sitting down to watch some baseball. In the middle of the 5th inning, they held the pierogie race, and I lost my voice screaming at Sauerkraut Sal, who of course threw the race. It's Wednesday now, and I still don't have it back.

Before I knew it, the game was over, I had seen about 2 innings of it (due to yet another beer and bathroom run), and I realized I needed yet another bathroom run. Since it was the end of the game, though, I figured the bathroom would be mobbed, and I wanted to get the hell out of there. So we just left instead.

Saying goodbye to A took about 15 minutes, getting to the car took another 5, and by the time we were getting to the car, I had an urgent need for a bathroom again. And, lucky me, the parking garage was gridlocked. As in, not moving at all. I contemplated using a stray Aquafina bottle we had in the car, but Sarah suggested that I just go back to one of the bars and use their bathroom.

So 5 minutes later, I'm back at the bar we were at before the game, only this time, there's a $5 cover charge. I'm thinking, "Fuck that, I'll go to the bathroom right here before I pay you $5 to utilize your bathroom." Now there are other bars there, but I didn't even bother, thinking that if one has a cover charge after the game, they all have a cover charge after the game.

Luckily, there is a Marriott hotel across the street. So I went in there, hotels usually have a bathroom you can use in the lobby. This one did. Except for the slight problem of needing a keycard to get into it. If I had a keycard, I would go up to my room and use the truly private bathroom up there! Frustration was definitely setting in at this point, on top of the oh-please-god-get-me-to-a-bathroom feeling.

So I tried to con the woman at the front desk.

"Hi, I'm waiting for a friend, he's not here yet, and I need to use the restroom. Can you please give me a card?"

"Is your friend a guest here?"

"Yes"

"What's his last name?"

At this point, watch me as I turn and walk out of the hotel lobby, not saying a word further. I head back to the parking garage and get back into the car. It's now 20 minutes later, we're still in the parking garage, and I still haven't found a bathroom. We just left, and I ended up using the bathroom at home, 20 minutes after that.

It truly is the simple things in life that can make you feel good.

sex == late

Sex has a lot of "late"s about it. There is the obvious and most dangerous "Oh God, she's late." That's not what I want to write about, though.

The more interesting late is the "I know I have to go to class in 5 minutes. Let's have sex now anyway." Followed by the "Oh shit, I'm 30 minutes late. Eh, it was worth it though." This was the typical thing that happened in college. I was late to classes all the time and I was even late to a few finals. Maybe it's just the extra element of excitement in throwing other responsibilities out the window that made it worthwhile, I don't know. This type of sex lateness is something I'm sure we've all encountered at one time or another.

Then there's the guy lateness. "Shit, why did I have to masturbate this morning? I should have just jumped in the shower." I'm sure every guy out there has experienced this one (and undoubtedly some women too). You just have to get it out of the way before getting on with your day, and you can't find time for it. But you do it anyway.

There's a lot of stuff guys don't particularly like to talk about when it comes to masturbation. With the rise of the internet, we've been opened up to a whole world of sexual perversion that was never accessible before. We don't want to let our girlfriend/wives into this world. It doesn't really involve them. They can only think less of us if they know what we look at. What makes it worse is that what we look at may or may not correlate to what we actually want to have happen in our lives. We think less of ourselves for looking at porn, how can they not think less of us?

Every guy has "his" kind of porn he likes to look at. Some have several types. Mine's text. I like text, things can be as sexy as I want them to be. Disturbingly, in picturing the scenes in people's houses, I picture a friend from elementary school's house. But anyway. We amass vast quantities of porn, because when it gets old, we have to move on to something new. But we can't let go of the old. "That's a really good [movie|story|whatever], I may want to see that again some day."

But that doesn't mean that we don't realize that we have too much porn. And that we've looked at too much of it. I have amassed about 30 MB of porn text, probably more space than the complete text of the oxford english dictionary takes up. That doesn't disturb me so much. What does disturb me is when I realize I've read a 30-part story over the course of a few weeks' worth of masturbation. Or that I can recall some of the stories and exactly what goes on and in what order. Or that I can remember the first time I read the story. At least I haven't written any text myself. Yet.

In answer to your question, yes, I was late to work today.

Let's take a poll, leave a comment telling what was the worst thing you were ever late for (due to sex of one kind or another, of course). I was definitely late to my Chemistry final at CMU.

Keeping a resolution or two

Yesterday I ordered the CD for the month. I've actually bought a couple of CDs in the past month, they're Mark O'Connor CDs, and frankly, I've been disappointed with them. There's a track of his on Yo-Yo Ma's "Classic Yo-Yo" CD that is unbelievably good, and the CDs I've bought of his have been pedestrian. The CD I bought yesterday is "Cello x 16" by Zoe Keating. She's been playing with Rasputina.

Why oh why

Do I love board games so? I can't even get people to get together on a regular basis to play. And yet my addiction goes on. Late in 2003, I somehow got onto this site, FunAgain, and I spent like $125 on board games. The trend continued a couple months ago when I bought another $150 in board games, this time from Card Haus and TimeWellSpent. Then, last week, I spent another $110 at TimeWellSpent on even more games. I'm out of control, maybe it's time for gamblers anonymous?

Maybe all of it is my way of avoiding thinking about all of the work I need to do for school. Since 9pm tonight, I've been ready for bed, and sadly, this is hardly the only night. My IP Seminar's 150 pages a week really needs to stop if I'm to get any research done for my paper for the class. I don't like writing patent claims.

Time for some masochism (aka law school reading).

Malcontent I am

I'm never happy with where I am. How to be happy with where you are?

I'm working for someone right now, writing a book. I mean, I'm writing parts, he's writing parts, he's getting other people who work for him to write parts of it. Talk about a shit job. "Here's what I want written." Ugh, take my advice, don't take a job like that. I'm ready to quit after only a month.

But it's not just that I'm unhappy at this job. I've been unhappy with most of the jobs I've had. I wonder whether it's just the people or situations I've been in. I really liked the people at Tivoli, except for my bitch manager Roslyn. After a while, I needed to do something new, and I guess that was what made me malcontent with Tivoli.

LT, there it's the policies that have no appreciation of the fact that travel can be hard on you. Doing things to make your week away from home harder than it should be. Been malcontent with that job for a long time.

Even going back to when I worked at Lucent/IBM, I don't think I was malcontent there, but I did feel as though I wasn't really being utilized. The position didn't really let me be utilized enough, and that's ok, I guess. I liked the people there, I had a good time working there. Does dissatisfied equal malcontent?

Is it me? Is it the situations I put myself into? How do I break the cycle?

breaking the resolutions

So. About 3 weeks ago, I had intended to post and write down all of my New Year's Resolutions. This is why I never make resolutions. They are always broken by January 15, and this year has been no exception. So, with that in mind, I will post my list of resolutions:

1. Post more frequently. Obviously this one isn't going so well.


2. Find a summer job that doesn't involve my current employers. This one is "ongoing". It's not that I don't like the lawyers that I currently work for, I just worry that either they or I will not be able to stand me working there for another 8 months.


3. Lose some weight. Or get into shape. I guess the latter is more important than the former, no matter what my weight.


4. Unclutter my life. The things you own end up owning you. Get rid of some of this shit. (Anyone want to give me $50 for a 21" Nokia computer monitor?)


5. Buy a CD from a band I've barely heard of, once a month. I got this month covered with a Sarah Harmer CD.


6. Be a better student. My grades from last semester have motivated me on this account.


7. Do more programming. Something a little bit more regular, learn some new stuff.


8. Be a better person. I'm a pain in the ass, a ball-buster, it's time to cut back on that. I'm at least somewhat realistic on this, it's not like I said I would completely stop.

That's it. That's the list. Only 8 resolutions. Hopefully with choosing this many, at least one of them will stick.

We'll all know shortly whether #1 does. :)