November 2002

I just checked and I’m the owner of www.fuqmi.com:

Domain Name: FUQMI.COM
Created on: 01-FEB-01
Expires on: 01-FEB-03
Last Updated on: 19-FEB-02

Administrative Contact:
Rudderow, Bob bob@thetriangle.org
Rudy Enterprises
250 N. 32nd Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
US
215-222-4017
215-895-2585
(and Lisa is listed as the technical contact…)

Praise Allah, I thought I let it lapse. Not that I have any concrete plans for it, but there can’t be that many five-letter domains left. That all the four-letter domain names have been scooped up speaks more loudly than the fact that the domain name frenzy has been over for quite some time, at least in my mind. And who knows, the “fuqmi look” may hit stores sooner than you think.

I have the idea that’s going to get me out of this 9 to 5 routine. Chris will have to do all the work, but I think he can handle it.

I’m reading Sewer, Gas, and Electric right now, and it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite books. Not since reading the one that currently holds that title — Catch-22 — have I laughed out loud at the printed word, grinned excitedly, and read faster and faster.

I haven’t finished it yet, though I read it until I can’t stay awake any longer in bed almost every night and during my lunch breaks. It’s sort of juevenile, it tries too hard to make everything fit at some parts, and I found others where I could have done a better job editing. For a nation whose adults are reading Harry Potter, though, it should be right up there with War and Peace.

It’s an absurdist science-fiction story. I think the plot is starting to thicken around the murder of a wealthy businessman by his Electric Negro, but it could just end up being more support for the giant mutant shark (dubbed Meisterbrau by the Sewer Department), Philo the capitalist eco-pirate, or the activities of the Un-Un-American Activities government bureau. At any rate, I just got to the part where Ayn Rand, who had been discussed earlier, makes an appearance. As was indicated on the back cover, her head is inside a hurricane lamp. The book is also dedicated to her, which bodes well for my huge plans.

There is this guy with some influence in the Libertarian community. My dad tried to get me to contact this gentleman but until now I had nothing to take to him. Since this novel was only written in 1994, I doubt anyone has turned it into a screenplay, or even a stage play, yet. That’s where Chris comes in. While it could be a flim, the original idea hit me as a small theatre production with everyone portraying five or six characters and running around — absurdly, of course. But the reason that we might have a chance at actually producing it is because this is a light-hearted introduction to Ayn Rand, and this die-hard Libertarian guy might help us sell it.

There you have it. Chris needs to get to work, lest this become another failed “fuqmi”. Speaking of which, I need to get registering.

Yesterday was a 12-hour workday. This time wasn’t fun, though; approving and prepping over a hundred forms and booklets never is. Hopefully it gave me some breathing room today and I can get out in time to hit Casper’s tonight if not make the day more relaxing. You see, I know that no matter how much work I do, I’ll have the same amount the next day. Who knows, maybe today won’t be a total rat race — not that I’ve ever seen rodents racing. I guess it largely depends on whether this one co-worker of mine comes in, but since she passed out yesterday it’s looking kind of doubtful. I know if I had a chance to go to the hospital, I’d be stretching that out if approvals were stacked to the ceiling. Well, maybe not. I guess that’s why I get so stressed out, I feel like I have to get everything done myself.

The look on this chick’s face yesterday was priceless. It was when I told her I wouldn’t get to something in the next hour. What the hell does she expect when she asks me at 4:20 p.m.? Also, when every single goddamn form that needs to be created or sent or e-mailed has a status of HOT, I become a little skeptical. I think she should get a better handle on her stupid clients if they want to meet their deadlines. Meanwhile, I’m getting heartburn and starting to get snippy with my less annoying co-workers — not exactly helping my rep as the go-to guy with a smile.

I also find it hard to stomach that everyone around me gets paid a lot more money when I work at least as hard as they do. I really dislike this salary ladder-climbing thing. The other part is that these reps I work with are all running around upset that they might have to stay past 5 p.m. when I know I’ll be staying two extra hours at least. The overtime isn’t even all that great, either; I put in 20 hours of overtime one week, and only got an extra $250 after taxes. Nuts to that, considering I can’t even remember anything about that week except being really out of breath and eating too much.

Ross thought my latest Casper’s entry was missing some information:

“Strangest thing, I was looking at this web page, http://www.rudderow.com/blog/, and nowhere did I see the sentence ‘Boy am I a big [part of the female anatomy] after being annihilated at Shufflepuck by my obviously more masculine opponents last night’. What’s up with that?”

There you have it. I think Matt said it best when he replied with:

“homosayswhat?”

I couldn’t agree more, and we’ll see who’s laughing next week when we play before I have a pitcher and a half of beer.

I haven’t really complained about work yet. It’s a good thing I waited until today to post this because I was frothing at the mouth after Wednesday’s debacle. The heartburn from that morning — from the pizza and beer I had on Tuesday night — that prompted me to stay up and write a little lasted until noon, where pressure at work took over for the rest of the day.

The least interesting part of my day is “daily approvals”, where I enter the forms that have been approved into a database and prep the files for the press. As you can probably guess, I do this daily. It’s a necessary evil, but usually I can get it done in about an hour and more often than not it makes the day go by a little more quickly — not so during the day from hell.

It’s the busy season where I work, so I must have approved over 60 forms and booklets that day and by the time I was done, there were another 30 already submitted. The bulk of these daily approvals now come in through this Web site which is incredibly slow, and the sheer volume made it hard to keep track of where exactly I was in the whole process every time something else came up that needed immediate attention.

One of the issues that kept popping up was the handy little “rejected” button on the site. I had never gotten to use it before, because everything that came down the Web pipe was perfect. Again, this time — not so. Hitting reject started off an e-mail debate the likes of which I hope to never see again. There must have been 14 e-mails on this topic alone, with every single one cc:ed to the author’s boss, boss’s boss, co-worker, co-worker’s boss, department head and division bigwig. The big issue is that nobody knows whose job it is to fix these now-rejected forms. The sad part is that it was probably necessary to include most of the people to figure this thing out, but it’s simply pathetic that nothing was resolved from all this. I still got a bad form yesterday, but as long as I have a reject button I’m going to keep on hitting it.

We have a client rep department for a reason, and it’s so hot-heads like me don’t go ballistic on some customer. (The Web site approvals are all from customers who create their own forms directly using an online generator. It was working great until now, when some new people evidently started using it.) Now when I reject a form, an e-mail is automatically generated and sent to the form’s creator with my name and e-mail address. So without someone to mediate, I’m afraid I might write something that will get me in trouble.

As I started to say earlier, things were definitely calmer yesterday since a co-worker decided that she’d start doing approvals in the morning and I’d do them in the afternoon. I also figured out the night before that having two computers on my desk could be as helpful as I had hoped. Processing the booklets takes about two minutes and the applescript can’t allow anything else to be done while it’s working, and when it crashes every now and then, my blood pressure goes through the roof since it means that I have to take another five minutes to restart. When I’m in a hurry these minutes add up, and I feel like strangling someone.

As I started to say yet again, yesterday was much less hectic and even though I had to stay past 8 p.m., it was a soothing after-hours experience with two computers crunching away and David Cross’s latest stand-up on my iPod (courtesy of Ross).

I may be up needlessly at this hour of the morning, having woken up at 6:30 a.m. choking on bile and then staying up to make a lunch for Dia, but I’ll be damned if it’s going to be productive.

First of all, the heartburn is from eating pizza — too much and too late at night — and then following it up with too many damn Krispy Kreme donuts at Philadelphia’s new 24-hour facility. It was definitely a mistake using the drive-through last time because we missed the best part: Seeing hundreds of donuts going ‘round on the conveyor belt. Dia and I went inside with Tim this time following a night of Yeungling and shufflepuck at Casper’s Place.

Ah, Casper’s. Here’s a little something we learned this week about Casper’s pizza, it’s not frozen; it still tastes like it is, but it’s made by Susan’s loving hand every time. Speaking of whom, she’s the greatest. Four pitchers, three pizzas and a Pepsi came to a whopping $32, and while it’s always damn cheap I think it was helped by the fact that Suze didn’t charge us for the soda and one of the pies. The $13 tip can help pay for it just in case it was a mistake and she realizes it later, but this wouldn’t be the first time that our favorite bar wench was looking out for us.

But back to my pointless questions, because I’m still determined to balance out any and all productivity this morning with inane musings.

Which is a better practical joke: Placing a single pubic hair on a sandwich you’ve made for someone else and telling the person about it tomorrow; or having that person open up his or her lunch and seeing a sandwich full of pubic hairs? I know “revenge is a dish best served cold”, but nowhere does it say anything about practical jokes. On the one hand you’ve gotten them to swallow something only to have it eat away (no pun intended) at them for an entire week after you’ve spilled the beans. However, the shock value at seeing a nest of crotch hairs sandwiched between two pieces of bread might be a better prank. I’m usually all about the shock effect but this time I’m really on the fence.

Next question, this time not as good. Does using a back-scratcher (a stick constructed for that specific purpose, not some random object) automatically make you white trash? Or if not make, then at least point you in that direction? Does the answer change if the person using it is naked? Because every time I use mine I think of a fat Bart Simpson saying, “I wash myself with a rag on a stick” in that dream sequence one episode. Being naked doesn’t help either.

Dammit, I think I forgot all my pointless questions, or I never had more than two in the first place and was so taken by them that it felt like more. Back to productivity I go, starting with calling Caroline’s in New York to see about Lewis Black tickets. At least I’m still naked, though.

It’s been a pretty eventful — but still relaxing — end of the week.

Thursday was game night at Ross’ place, where we played Apples to Apples and Carcassone or something spelled close to it.

I went to see Ring with Dia and my grandmother last night. The 8 and 9:30 p.m. shows at Neshaminy Mall were sold out (the latter because we stepped outside for only a second to see teenagers pushing their dolls in strollers before buying our tickets), so we backtracked to Franklin Mills instead where we bought Uno Attack to pass the time. After I spent about half an hour purchasing and setting up the game we had enough time to play one hand, but it was still fun.

Today I drove Dia up to Tunkhannock to buy her new car. It rained in both directions and took 2.5 hours each way, but I get two more full hours of uninterrupted sleep every morning starting Monday. I also forsee an exponential drop in productivity since I (used to) spend a few days each week writing instead of going back to bed.

All us employees get a free turkey for Thanksgiving, already making it a great day already. I just may have to have company this weekend.

Matt’s coming over to play XBox tonight, so I guess I have to forgive him for not showing up at Casper’s Place last night. Tim gave it his endorsement and Greg showed up directly from work. Dia made our foursome for three games of shuffle puck and Susan the bartender was as great as ever. Everyone else had their little excuses, which would be fine if they didn’t express an interest every other time I talk to them. Next week I’ll probably be there by myself, but what better place to drown my sorrows?

Maria posted some more lame bullshit to her site (link is “hormone central” on the left) about how I’m a dick. I’m surprised she feels she knows me well enough to make that assertion. I know I make it apparent pretty quickly, but I wouldn’t call her a lazy-eyed seahag even though she was the one who was late on Saturday and then proceded to say how we lied about our plans. Listen bitch, just because I didn’t give you all of the information doesn’t mean I lied. Since your wobbly ass was late, we called to tell you we were leaving and that is the end of your involvement. Just because we made other plans afterwards doesn’t mean we owe you a damn thing.

I was disappointed I didn’t get to see Hager and Maria that day, but I’m over it now. Hopefully I’ll see Hager during the week some more before his transfer to Maryland goes through, and we can laugh about how we couldn’t coordinate worth a damn.

When Maria pops out the kid, I wonder if she’d be willing to relocate to New Jersey or Delaware seeing as how she’ll be dropping out of school. To claim that she plans on attending law school while raising Junior Junior would make her a liar.

I know I went on a tangent, but it still fits nicely under the heading since it’s about Maria’s squawking. Dare call me a dick? Gobble, gobble you alarmist shrew! But enough harshness for one morning; I’ve got to get in “nice mode” for work today.

I have a few things to add about our trip to D.C. before I let it drop.

I’ve settled everything with Hager by this point. It was definitely a fiasco waiting to happen since he was running late and I thought he lived Columia where he had his wedding, only half an hour or so from the Smithsonian, instead of almost two hours away. For him to buy tickets would have meant four hours of extra driving, something I never would have expected him to do regardless of whether he offered or not.

Maria, on the other hand, is a different story. I’ll spare some of my harshest words since she is my friend’s wife. However, she’s an adult and should be able to take a healthy dose of what she dishes out. The three people who read my rants already know about Maria’s condition and are probably thinking, “Wait a second, you’re not going to start bashing a pregnant woman, are you?” You’re goddamned right I am.

First of all, I don’t know what phrases in her blog like “stuck in the extreme wait time zone with overpriced food” even mean, so I won’t dwell on her writing any more than pointing out that little gem. But I will say that her problem with getting enough to eat is pretty far-fetched. Who the hell can’t either a) squeeze in five minutes to eat, b) plan more than an a few hours ahead and pack a damn apple or something, or c) suck it up for heaven’s sake? She mentions about how she “hope[s] the baby survives this and isn’t damaged.” From what exactly? Not eating for an hour? This from the woman who was firing rifles earlier that morning!

She’s also delusional. Matt makes a good point that she doesn’t seem to remember that at 3 p.m. the IMAX theater wasn’t selling tickets anymore and it didn’t matter what the hell we did after that. We came to see a movie. It was sold out and they were late — end of story, on with life. I called right away to say that tickets were gone and that we were leaving. Maria’s claims that I lied to them probably seemed reasonable when they saw my van parked at the Air and Space Museum, but we did leave right after we called them. We just made a quick call soon after and hustled over to meet my dad to quickly salvage our day. I have no idea how that changes the fact that they were late, having already missed our rendezvous first at their house and then at the Park & Ride. We moved on, and hopefully she will too.

The only complaint I have left is that she writes how “the person responsible apologised [sic] because they hadn’t realised I was pregnant.” If I am indeed the person she holds responsible then she’s delusional. In the e-mail I sent to them I wrote: “Rob also mentioned something about ‘someone in her condition’, and I want to risk sounding like a jerk to say that it’s not a ‘condition’ for at least a few more months.” While her pregnancy excuse is utter bullshit, I did apologize for forgetting about them in my rush to keep everyone entertained. I tried to justify it to myself by thinking how Hager hates sporting events anyway, but I should have explained everything over the phone right away instead of planning to e-mail him the next day. None of this changes the fact that the ticket fiasco was out of our hands, though.

Back to the food thing for just a few more lines… “Part of me was just upset no one cared about my need to eat,” Maria says. Is she for real? How helpless can she pretend to be? She is just as much to blame for her horrible brush with starvation, especially since she’s the only one who knew she was hungry as far as I can tell. Cry me a river.

I can’t believe I didn’t go back to bed after dropping Dia up at the train station and instead took this dialect test. It is pretty interesting, but it’s a little over a hundred questions. I definitely thought of my mom the grammar nut though this survey is mainly about pronunciation. I guess it just has a certain feel.

There is a list of questions and the response breakdown, but each is its own link, so it is easier to take the test first to see which questions are interesting enough to check out the answer. It is nice to see that over 90 percent of the people who took the test correctly pronounce the word “moot” (as opposed to saying “a ‘mute’ point”… grrr!) but I’m sad to discover that less than 10 percent of respondents use the term “hoagie”.

I only wished they had a question on the correct pronunciation of the word “both”. My friends in high school used to berate me for pronouncing it “bolth”; they mocked me so often that I not only corrected myself but find it extremely irritating when people say it. I don’t even think it’s a regional thing since I’ve heard it everywhere — and all the time, too. It’s one of the few words that my mom mispronounces and she’s linguisticallly perfect otherwise. I’ll make sure to take note of it the next time I hear it.

As I was reading the questions on the test and thinking about how I say things, I could always see how words are supposed to be pronounced but knew that I often slur them out of laziness. None of it was as god-awful as saying “Can I aks you a question?” or “I ate a good breffix this morning,” but some made me pretty disappointed in my laziness. I guess I’ll just have to reassure myself that it’s only because I’m such a fast-paced guy who doesn’t always have time to enunciate every syllable and not because I’m ignorant.

Or should I say ig’nant?

I got a lot at the Radnor library book sale, even more than last time. Encyclopedia Puzaka came through for me again and his wisdom yielded a nice chunk of books that I’ll be lucky to get through in two years at my current pace: I’m reading 14 pages a day of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers at work during lunch.

I got as many humor books as I could find by comedians I recognized, most of them were hardcover and thus cost me a buck apiece, but the dozen Stephen King, Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. LeGuin books (and others) I got at 3/$1 helped balance that out. I recognized the Earthsea Trilogy as something I read when I was a kid but I was going on Chris’s suggestion when I bought them; I don’t remember a darn thing about the books since it was long ago that I read them. It actually got me thinking a little about how futile it was reading some books when I was a kid since I didn’t retain anything. I wouldn’t expect to remember details, but I don’t even remember having fun reading them. They’ve passed from my memory altogether, and I’m frustrated that I feel like I have to read some books over again. It’s in varying degrees that this notion hits me: I remember the first few books in the Narnia series pretty clearly but they get fuzzier towards the end (I don’t even think I got to book seven) and A Wrinkle in Time I at least remember the plot. But not remembering even enjoying something? Luckily, fantasies of re-reading books won’t come into play until I get through this latest stack.

My happiest finds, although not terribly huge, were a paperback Lord of the Rings trilogy and this novel Sewer, Gas & Electric which just gets me hot from looking at the cover and the description on the back about a hologram of Ayn Rand’s head as a character. Chris’s best find was an out-of-print Dean Koontz science fiction novel. He says he could get easily sell it on eBay and was really excited to have found it.

Speaking of buying and selling, there were dealers everywhere on Saturday and they were shoveling books into their bags by the armful. I got my humor books just before some asshole grabbed the entire two bottom shelves without even looking at them and ran up to the counter to buy them. Two jerks who were rooting through the LPs took everything they thought looked good; only afterwards they went through them again, picked out what they really wanted and left a stack of leftovers on the table. I have nothing against people who hoard books, but dealers should take a backseat to the rest of us by at least a day. Lisa and I think that a petition is in order, but Geof suggests that becoming a “friend” for $15 might be a better option. I just wish the problem would solve itself, so I’ll probably just complain and throw around a few elbows every six months instead — that or join them on amazon.com myself.

I’m usually not a big fan of omens, but check this out: I stopped to fill my gas tank after we were officially on our way to D.C. to see Star Wars at the IMAX theater. For the first time ever — perhaps because I was so excited but more likely as a result of having already driven two hours that morning — I left the gas cap on the roof of the van when I hopped into the car and we set off. When we stopped for a bite to eat at a KFC/Taco Bell, I noticed the little door open but started laughing when I saw the gas cap still on top caught by the roof rack. It turned out to be a metaphor for our trip.

After a pretty uneventful (but still fun) ride down we found out that the tickets for both shows that day were sold out. That’s never a good thing to hear but it’s amplified when you’ve just driven for five hours including picking up people and getting a little lost. We called Hager and told him that we were heading home; no point in hanging around disappointedly, we figured.

Despite our frustration, Rob had the idea to call my dad and see if he had any tickets for the Caps-Flyers game that night. I felt bad calling my dad and asking him to salvage our evening, not because I don’t like asking him for help but because I felt guilty about calling him that weekend only because I needed something. He came through and said he had tickets for the five of us, so we headed to the Metro to meet him at 618 H Street where we would have dinner at his favorite Chinese restaurant and head to his skybox in the MCI Center for the game at 7:30. The only problem was that in the confusion we forgot about Hager and Maria; we didn’t feel too bad about it since we figured it was only a short drive for them anyway and the plan was for them to buy tickets and they didn’t.

I think I underestimated how much Hager wanted to hang out with us because word on the street is that he’s upset we left so soon and didn’t invite them along. He called a second time to ask where we were if the van was behind the Air and Space Museum, but we were in the middle of dinner so I sort of brushed him off. I was never intentionally misleading our little friend, however I was a embarrassed at forgetting about him so I quickly told him we took the Metro to meet my parents and left it at that. I’m not proud of myself, and only justified it because I was still a tiny bit frustrated that he didn’t buy tickets earlier in the day and was late meeting us when we had moved our asses to be there as quickly as possible. I sent him an apology and he’ll probably forgive us though it should have never happened.

Our dinner and the game were a blast, especially since Matt and Rob’s early trash talk was rendered void in the second period. The Flyers saved it from being a 4-0 shut-out in the last two minutes and Chris got a brownie from the dessert cart so everybody had something to be happy about.

We set out from D.C. around 9:30 p.m. and taking Route 1 out saved us about 35 minutes. It also gave us more time to work out the BetaBrite kinks before hitting the highway. Once we did, we got our first fan right away; an SUV followed us all the way to Baltimore no matter what kind of horrible, perverted things we said about him. There weren’t any great individual instances, just an overall barrage of great lines that came out of our perpetual JAD session. As a side note, the great cup hood ornament experiment continues; the paper cup is even more durable than a styrofoam one and lasted until some brat on my grandparents’ block took it this afternoon.

I got home at 2:15 and promptly went to bed. The End.

My motor skills are a trifle lacking right now, so bear with me. I’ll try to fix as many punctuation errors as I can.

Al got David Morse to look over at us tonight by screaming really loud from his drunken stupor. He wasn’t as inebriated as he was at Lisa’s X-mas party last year but he was pleasant, put it that way. So I have seen one of my heroes Mr. Morse in the flesh. Sure, Hack isn’t terribly great, but he’s the best part of it and he’s been in some really great movies like Contact and Proof of Life too.

I also lifted a “3” from outside a church I think. I turned around just as a cop car drove by, too. Now the sign invites everyone to “Thank God It’s Wednesday” on Wednesday, Nov. 1 instead of the actual date. The numeral makes a pretty mediocre dashboard ornament.

That wasn’t the closest I came to the police tonight, sadly. I tried crossing right behind Independence Hall even though there were barricades and got stopped by the fuzz. They asked me for ID and we bantered while they checked me out. I enjoyed hearing my name over the radio. They asked me what I would do in their position and my cleverness-through-honesty policy didn’t work. I told them I sure wouldn’t let me profit from my shortcut and to make sure to send me back the way I came — so they did. They did offer me passage, but I would have had to accept a fine of $50. Al said it would have been worth it and he would have helped foot some of the bill. The fuzz also asked if I’d been drinking and where, so I told him that we’d been to the Nodding Head and he started talking about some drink called the Monkey Knife Fight. I also tried talking to the silent cop, joking drunkenly that this wasn’t the shortcut I’d hoped it would be, but he wasn’t having any of it. I did catch them a little when they asked me if I saw the No Trespassing sign and I told them I only saw the sign that said “You will be electronically searched beyond this point” instead, and that that would have been fine by me. Both signs were out there, but only the one I saw was really prevalent. Not that it mattered, but it was nice thinking I won a little.

From there we headed to Sugar Mom’s (after searching for it for 15 minutes) where I kicked Al’s ass at hockey three times in a row and Mary had her first whiskey sour. Happy Birthday Mary!

On the cab ride home we saw Hack being filmed and promptly hopped out to watch a little, and that brings me full circle. Time to get some rest before the Radnor book sale and my trip to D.C. to see Star Wars tomorrow.

I’m not really getting my panties in a bunch, but I was thinking just this morning about how I haven’t really let loose in a while. I don’t have an outlet for my aggression anymore. It’s going to be a little while before I can afford a gym membership, but that’s not really what I had in mind anyway. I’m talking about shouting, the kind that’s required when you’re a pedestrian in Center City. I really need some good run-ins with Philly drivers, the juicy ones with spit and screeching brakes and soda bottles.

Until that day comes along, I guess I’ll have to settle for whining about my conflicting weekend plans. I called my grandparents this morning to invite them over for a quiet dinner on Saturday; Dia had said that she wanted to stay in and relax together for a night but having my grandparents over was acceptable. Tomorrow night holds tentative plans to do a bar crawl through downtown Philadelphia to celebrate Mary’s birthday, though I’m not sure if Al will come through for me (and Matt and Dia for that matter).

The conflict came in when Hager IMed saying that Rob and Ross were up for a little road trip to D.C. to see Star Wars at the Smithsonian IMAX theater if there was enough interest. I’m definitely interested but I’d have to leave after the Radnor book sale, and that’s cutting it pretty close. Not to mention that I’d be leaving Dia here without transportation. She said that she doesn’t want to go but it would be alright if I went, though I still feel a wee bit guilty. I’m confident that I can squeeze it all in, but it’s going to take a lot of planning. I’d better get to it.

Eminem’s film debut was pretty entertaining. Not all rappers make good actors, anybody who has seen Ice T in any of his movies can testify to that, but Slim Shady, real or not, held his own pretty well. Kim Basinger’s character felt like she didn’t belong at times; a part where she was telling E’s character that her boyfriend didn’t go down on her felt particularly out of place (though as Geof noted as well it was a real crowd pleaser).

The story was simple, as anybody who’s seen the trailer can guess, and it was executed pretty successfully. The ending was thoughtfully realistic, and even though the movie’s character-altering events were conveniently squished into the space of a week the pacing still felt right.

The movie was still rooted pretty deeply in rap, so whether or not 8 mile receives critical acclaim or not, beware if you’re close-minded about that sort of thing. I generally can’t stand it myself, but I keep hearing about what a prodigy Eminem is and from what I can tell I guess I believe it. Besides rumors that he can write a song in a few minutes, he obviously knows about syncopation and is able to avoid the easy rhymes that make Run DMC so painful to listen to.

This morning’s entry wasn’t terribly woe-tastic because I had to cut it short to leave for work. I have a little time now to put the plural back in my earlier post.

I checked my credit card statement online after my dentist appointment Monday out of curiosity. I wanted to see if I did indeed have enough room to charge my $147 share of the root canal. To my surprise, I saw that of $3500 maximum I had only $4.00 to spare. I’m pretty sure by this point that the dentist appointment had already been charged and was listed under “pending charges” since I still haven’t gone over my limit, but there was no way to know then because until Bank One approves the transaction the details remain hidden.

Another problem is that to get to work I have to take the NJ Turnpike and my EZ Pass automatically charges my credit card. I transferred $30 from my bank account just to be safe, so I was pretty relieved when I saw a balance of $9.00 when I checked this morning. The automatic $25 EZ Pass charge must have come in just after my payment because that’s the only way the numbers could work out. I’m cutting it pretty close, but I only have two more days until my paycheck with the 22 hours of overtime comes in.

We made it to Casper’s [Place] last night and had a good time. We found out at around 9:45 that the shufflepuck game didn’t take quarters. Our new best buds Vince and Dan invited one of us the help make their foursome and Greg took up the offer. Before long, we had abandoned foosball and set up camp at the other table and playing two or three more games. Matt should have stuck around longer and while Dia would still have been doing homework had she not left, she should have stayed, too.

The tale of woe is that Dia still has a few kinks to work out in her driving, like heading down a one-way street for a short time, getting on I-95 in the wrong direction, and fishtailing my beautiful van into the intersection while making a left turn. I wasn’t with her for all of this since Hager was my ride home, but she told me this morning that while making said turn, the ended up facing about halfway between the way she wanted to face and the way she just came from. Dia says that the car on the other side of the intersection was probably scared out of it’s mind. I’d say it capped off her first solo rainy night trip nicely.

But there’s no way in hell that she’s driving me home tonight from 8 Mile at the Riverview.

I had my dentist appointment today. I’m not going to inflect mumbling into my writing but I’m really numb right now. The only thing that isn’t numb is my jaw and it’s incredibly sore from staying open for half an hour. Root canals aren’t as bad as everybody says but they’re pretty tiring, especially after a hectic day of work. Now it’s time to shop, launder, and clean.

Tomorrow I’ll have a chance to rest at Casper’s in the northeast. Warm bar, cold beer, some laughs, and shitty, overpriced microwave pizza, our troubles are over dude… Especially now that for the first time I’ll be chewing like a normal human being — using both sides of my mouth. Not to mention the foosball.

Here’s a link that Al sent to me. He got it from Geof who got it from someone else, but you saw it here fourth, kids. Funny stuff. The Link.

Last night’s feast is still making its way out of me slightly less than 24 hours after a successful “loop” gathering in Fells Point, Baltimore. There were nine of us who showed up, not including Greg Cillufo who was on the phone from Texas for about 20 minutes. I said Hi for a few minutes since I hadn’t talked to him in over two years.

We drove down to Davidsonville on Friday night so we wouldn’t have to bookend our beer & wings night with 4.5 hours of driving. Pat met Chris, Lisa, Dia and me at my parents’ house and we went bowling until 2 a.m. The Crofton Bowling Lanes special was $17 for the entire night, so after we paid our cover all that was left was to set up in our lane all the way at the end, order two pitchers of beer and a shitty bowling lane pizza, and get acquainted with our lane-mates Leah and Beer.

Lisa stepped onto the lane and slipped in the second match, so it was down to us three guys (Dia stayed home and hit the sack early) to battle it out for most of the evening. The first round went spectacularly: I had three strikes thanks to my increasingly good form with the right foot kick-out and everything. I edged Pat out for the first win but it was downhill from there; though Chris came close later on, Pat won the other three games that night. I blame the fact that my form wasn’t so good after all: My thumb ended up purple at the tip and lost a good chunk of its nail. I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to put my whole thumb in the hole, and by my 15th frame of the night I could barely hold the ball so I was pretty frustrated. It was still a blast, even though Lisa and Beer teamed up to make fun of the stains on my pants. My nickname for the night ended up being Picasso because the blacklights made my bleach stains (or are they from urine or another bodily fluid as Lisa suggests?) look like a pattern from my dad’s Hammer-pants.

The next morning we hit our usual spot — the Double TT diner — for breakfast and then tried to find the lake in Crofton that was home to the infamous Snakehead fish for a short time since it’s so close to my house. Unable to find it, we returned home and played Ready, Set, Spaghetti! and Cranium before my dad came home to play Settlers. We rushed up to Bal’more before our 6:30 reservation at local sports bar in one of the power plants. 40 wings and 4 beers later (for me at least) we headed over to Maggie Moo’s to freeze our asses of on the corner as we ate our ice cream while Tara drove Dave’s car around trying to find a parking spot.

We stopped up to Dan’s apartment when we dropped him, Pat, and Kevin off for a quick piss stop, then I went to sleep in the back seat while Dia drove us home. We went right to bed after we got home and woke up with only a slight headache and plenty of opportunities to stain my pants without bleach.