To my own surprise, I’ve actually received a few entries to my “Win a Date with Me and the Gimmes” contest. I’m going to have a hard time picking a winner, especially if I keep getting entries as good as the ones I’ve seen so far.
At this point I’m chalking it up more to the drawing power of Me First and the crew than to my own ability to get a date, but either way it’s good to know somebody will be using that second ticket.
I’ve just posted an offer in my Last.fm journal that I’m already wondering if I’m going to regret.
I’ve got a couple tickets for Me First and the Gimmes Gimmes show coming up in December, and I’ve been having trouble finding someone who wants to go with me. I hate to see a ticket go to waste, and I’m going, alone or not, so I’m going with Plan B: offer up myself and the second ticket to the entire Internet, and see if anyone’s interested.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Or maybe the offer’ll fall on deaf ears, and it’ll be completely uninteresting.
If all goes well, though, I’ll probably end up doing the same thing with the spare ticket I’ve got for the Vandals a couple weeks later.
When I was a kid, every year around this time my mom would pull the platter out of some out-of-the-way cabinet, blow off the dust, and polish it up in preparation for Thanksgiving. It was a big, ugly, plasticy thing, with autumn leaves and a huge turkey printed on it. Around the edges were the words “When the frost is on the punkin, and the fodder’s in the shock…”
I don’t know the origin of the phrase, much less what it means. That’s always bothered me a bit, English officianado that I am.
It’s time to break out that platter again, and that means a whole lot of other annual traditions are just around the corner. It’s already started somewhat with Halloween, that harbinger of much bigger holiday happenings just around the corner. I’m convinced the real reason for Halloween is that it’s an excuse to stockpile enough candy in the house to keep a good sugar buzz going under after New Year’s.
Next week we’ll be running head-first into Thanksgiving. That’s the day the platter is officially re-unveiled, to be covered with sliced turkey very soon thereafter. I really enjoy Thanksgiving. It’s a good excuse to get together with family and have an amazing dinner (I was blessed with a pair of parent who can each cook a holiday dinner right up there with the best of ‘em), without all the extra stress of things like gifts, heavy religious observances, or countless Peanuts specials. It’s also a four-day weekend, which makes it a pretty decent holiday in my book.
The downside to Thanksgiving is that it’s the first real warning that I’ve got to get my ass in gear and start getting ready for Christmas. However, since Thanksgiving hasn’t arrived yet, I’m not willing to talk about that particular topic. Don’t get me wrong — I can be festive as hell, and my holiday goodwill knows no bounds, but it’s a hard and fast rule with me. Until the frosty pumpkin and shocked fodder go into the dishwasher, Christmas doesn’t exist.
It’s a rainy day in San Francisco today, which under normal circumstances would mean one thing: an even-more-liberal-than-usual application of hair product before leaving the house. Today, however, the unthinkable happened: I squeezed the tube of my latest favorite — a thick white goop that calls itself “hair glue” — and got nothing but air.
I like to think I’m a pretty atypical homo, but when it comes to the hair, I’m 100% screamingly queer. As if I wasn’t already stressed out enough that it’s been long enough since my last dye job that the roots are dark and the gray is showing, now I have to deal with a poofy coif all day. Thank God I’m not famous, or I’d be all over the front pages of the tabloids with a giant “Don’t” over my style-impaired head.
With my luck, this’ll be the day Ryan Phillipe, on the rebound after his breakup with Reese Witherspoon and desperate for sympathetic companionship, runs into me on the street — and because of my hair, doesn’t give me a second look.
I’m running to Walgreen’s.
I don’t know if it’s a sign of anything or not, but I’m feeling vaguely self-congratulatory that I start my mornings lately with the batch of crap the spam filters here caught the night before. It’s not so much that it’s a huge chore to get rid of it, but it is a sign that at least the spambots know where I am. I’m not too proud to count them as my fans.
So far I’ve been seeing almost exclusively online-casino spam, but I figure it’s just a matter of time before I hit the big time and the Viagra and stock-scam bots start dropping by, too. Then it’ll be a party.
I didn’t know until I was getting off the train today what this one looked like from the front. If I had, I’d have shot more than just the back of his head. Major missed opportunity. I’ll be keeping an eye out for him on future late trips home.
I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am about the results of yesterday’s Congressional elections, and the cherry on the cake that was Donald Rumsfeld’s firing today. I’ve spent most of the last six years wondering how so many of my countrymen could, in good conscience, keep the Bush administration and Republican Congress in power. We’ve had pointless wars, endless displays of incompetence, rampant corruption, and they just kept getting elected.
I’m not quite ready to profess total faith in the democratic process. It’s far too imperfect, and any time you have a situation where decisions are made by the majority, you’re bound to get oppression of minorities and a general tendency toward mediocrity. However, since the only better alternative I can think of is benevolent dictatorship, and it’s really difficult to maintain the “benevolent” part of that for any length of time, I suppose our democratic republicanism makes as acceptable a substitute as I’m going to get.
However, I have a little of my faith in humanity back. I believe again that, if the government fucks up enough, they’ll still get voted out. My “enough” bar was crossed several thousand Iraqi deaths and a few personal freedoms ago, but it’s good to know the majority does have a bar, and that they finally realized it had been crossed.
It may still be a while before we know if the Democrats control the Senate as well as the House, but that’s much less important to me than what we already know: there’s a real check against the power of the Executive branch again; a check that’s been completely missing since the start of Bush’s reign. We finally have a House, and quite possibly a Senate, who will stand up and say “no!” when it needs to be said, and that no will have some real bite behind it.
I’m feeling a little better about being American today. I’m not quite ready to give up my self-declared Candianness yet, but maybe we can revisit that in another two years.
Discovered a few things while out for lunch with the team from work today.
I still have days when I can drink just about anyone under the table, and then I have days like today when two beers turn me into a loud, obnoxious drunk.
Last night, for example, I managed to polish off four or five pints of Guinness in a couple hours, and I was still almost completely sober. Today, however, a couple of glasses at the Thirsty Bear and I was wasted. I don’t mind having a high tolerance, and I could live with being a lightweight, but the unpredictability annoys the hell out of me.
It’s a lot easier to snap pictures of guys who are sitting still on the BART than it is to get them when they’re moving around.
I was hoping to have a couple shots of the waiter from lunch today to grace these pages, but I couldn’t manage to get any of him that were in focus. Wildlife photographers have it easy — using a camera phone to get a good picture of a waiter in his natural habitat without him catching on is damn near impossible.
Don’t try to take pictures of your waiter unless you’re prepared for your co-workers to read your blog.
It’s become much more well-known around the office than I’d like that I have a thing for secretly taking pictures of unsuspecting guys. Up until now I suspect they thought I was just taking them home and using them for my own immoral, but highly personal, purposes. However, after the beer kicked in today I let it slip that I’ve been using them in something of a continuing series here at Adonis.net.
Letting the guys from the office know about this place is just handing them fodder for an endless stream of abuse. I really am a masochist.
Turns out the view on the late trains isn’t bad, either. Thank the Lord for camera phones, and for giving me things to point mine at during my commutes. I love this town.
