Two or so weeks after I started at the Office, I was no longer the new guy — because they hired a new new guy, a skinny Tawainese kid who loved cookies. He sat directly across from me, and eventually, I bought him a plush Cookie Monster. And in fact, I’ll call him Cookie for the rest of this post.
Skip forward several months, and the restroom on our floor was out of order. Most of the restrooms in the building are locked. Cookie told me and another colleague that the restroom on the fourth floor was unlocked. We made our way up a floor, only to find that it was, in fact, locked.
We weren’t all that upset — ‘specially since they fixed the restroom not long after — but my colleague and I decided to take Cookie Monster hostage, which leads us to:
The Proof of Life photograph from our ransom demand.
Oh, look. I had hair.*
When Cookie refused to pay a cookie ransom for the return of Cookie Monster, well, I was overcome by a case of the regrets, so I returned Cookie Monster. And Cookie promptly banned Cookie Monster to the bottom of his filing cabinet for several months.
Honestly, some times I don’t know if I work with really cool, really awesome people, or retards.
Well, since I work here, I’m leaning towards retards.
*(These days, I shave my head. I look weird with hair.)
** A Cookie Trifecta? Yes: 1. A guy named Cookie. 2. A cookie ransom. 3. Cookie Monster. And three = trifecta.
It’s so worth it, just for Must Be Santa, which The Daily Loaf describes as “a superfast, speed-polka romp through the old chestnut.” I’m trying not to crack up at my desk right now listening to the track on my iPod.
(Yes, I’ve put Christmas music on my iPod already. Fuck off. And Merry Thanksgiving. Grinch.)
(Okay, so maybe you shouldn’t order a Bob Dylan Christmas album if you hate both Bob Dylan and Christmas music, but at least think of the kittens and don’t masturbate tonight, okay?)
Tuesday night, after the poorly behaved children, and after dinner and alcohol, I was standing on New Hampshire Ave, just a few yards from Dupont Circle, shivering in the night’s cool, waiting for the L2 bus that my NextBus DC iPhone app told me was 4 minutes away. In my belly was a General Tso’s order from Meiwah, and a Stella and an obscure English cider from Brickskeller. It probably says enough about me* that those two drinks were enough to leave me a little fuzzy in the head and weak in the legs. In my bag, from my stop at Second Story, was a second hand edition of Thomas Harris’s Black Sunday and a DVD of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, perfectly priced at $3 and $5**, respectively.
I was a bit too intoxicated to make any sense out of my then current read, The Italian Stranger (finished it yesterday), so I was just people watching as folks jaywalked to the bar and swooshed past on bicycles.
I love people watching. It makes me feel connected, and part of something bigger, even if that’s just a figment of my imagination.
Anyway, so I’m standing there, and I see this lady biking up New Hampshire towards Dupont Circle. And as she gets closer, I become aware of two facts:
Fact 1: She’s wearing a miniskirt.
And, that just sort of strikes me as weird. Who bikes in a miniskirt? Especially on a cold fall night? I mean, am I right? Wouldn’t trousers*** be warmer? And as I’m contemplating these profound questions, somewhere in my brain, a neuron fires off an alert, and I realize:
Fact Two: She’s not wearing underwear.
Or, if she is, it’s like skin colored underwear, but, yeah, I’m pretty sure she’s not wearing underwear. Because, honestly, it doesn’t matter how intoxicated or buzzed I might be, female nudity sings out to me: “Loooook!” And since that’s pretty much been the extent of my sex life for way longer than I care to admit, I most certainly shall.
Look, I mean. As in: I most certainly shall look.
Hey, I’m not proud. (Just occasionally horny).
But, seriously folks, if you were going to wear a miniskirt and bike on a cold night … wouldn’t you at least put underwear on? Or maybe she’s having an affair with an office mate and he ripped her panties off as they were banging in the conference room, and this (well, technically I think back at the word “having”) is the point where I need to reign my imagination in. In! In, damn you!
And I’m thinking: yanno, it’s dark out. New Hampshire Avenue NW isn’t the brightest lit street in DC, even this close to Dupont. Clearly, somewhere in my mind, the alcohol has affected the neurons or whatever you sciencey-type folks say makes a brain function, and I had a total miscommunication with myself. Because, as was pointed out, if I don’t have a photo, it didn’t happen: and alas, I don’t have a photo.
*Because I’m a cheap date. Ladies?
**Because I love National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, such a great film. But, even though it’s been out on DVD for years and years, it never really finds its way into those $5 DVD bins at retailers, because every Christmas, a whole bunch of people realize they don’t have a copy and rush out to buy it, and that’s why you still have to shell out $15 bucks for it new. Aw, fuck that — I’m perfectly happy with a used copy. And it’s the Special Edition! I’m so looking forward to the audio commentary.
Battlestar Galactica ended its run last spring, but the show had one more hurrah: a made-for-Sci-Fi TV movie, The Plan, depicting the events from the miniseries and first two seasons from the perspective of the Cylon agents within the Rag Tag Fleet of survivors. Although the air date was postponed until 2010, the uncut DVD was released last week.
For those who aren’t familiar with BSG, real quick now: the Cylons were created by the human settlers on the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. The Cylons developed sentient thought, and rebelled against their captors. There was a war, and it ended when the Cylons left to create their own society. Forty years later, they came back and launched a nuclear holocaust. Fifty thousand people — out of fifty or sixty billion — survived, and, in a fleet led by the last surviving Battlestar, the Galactica, made their way into the depth of space looking for the 13th Colony: Earth, all while being pursued by the Cylon forces.
During the series’ opening credits, a tag would explain all of this, and then explain that the Cylons “have a plan.”
And if you’re reading this on a viewer, this is the point where you should worry about getting spoilers for The Plan. If you’re reading this on my blog, click at your own risk. (more…)
Despite having far too many beers at Brickskeller last night*, I managed to get back to my apartment to tune into ABC’s remake of “V”, the classic sci-fi NBC miniseries from the early 1980s. Here’s my quick reaction: Meh.
(Yes, this includes moderate spoilers, please be careful when reading.) (more…)
But it wasn’t just boys behaving badly, there were girls, too, but before you start picturing sexy stuff, this was the sort of behavior that made me want to throw people over that Walt Whitman pit at the Q Street Dupont Metro entrance.
But I’ll get back to that momentarily.
My Office offers Flex-Time, with the condition that employees must be in the office from 10am until 3pm. I come in by 7, and I leave at 3. Actually, I usually leave a couple of minutes before 3:00, because I don’t want to have to wait for a bus. Why? Tenleytown Metro station. I want to be on a train that passes through Tenleytown before school lets out, because if I’m not?
Well, if I’m not the last several stops of my commute home (or to the Bookstore) will be nerve wracking, with middle school students screaming at the top of their lungs, throwing things, being rude and disrespectful to each other and to the other commuters, and fighting each other. Really, it’s enough to make me want to sterilize everyone, and I think anyone who’s ever been on a Metro train with these kids know what I’m talking about.
Sometimes I think I’ve just become a curmudgeonly old man, scoffing at kids: “I never acted that way in school! I had to walk ten miles uphill in the snow!”
But other times I think, even in high school, on that big yellow bus, we never behaved like this. Or maybe we did and I’ve just forgotten.
Anyway.
I exited the train at Dupont Station and made my way to the Q Street exit, which has nice benches and offers fantastic people watching opportunities, far better than the 19th Street entrance. I alternated people watching with my current read, a Sherlock Holmes mystery by Caleb Carr, The Italian Secretary. The down escalator was broken, and I mentally scoffed at tourists who started to descend, changed their minds, and went looking for the elevator.
If you’re familiar with that exit, the elevator is on the far side of the granite wall, opposite the escalators, and just next to where I was leaning against said wall. Around 4:20 or 4:30, the elevator was packed. A group of kids — I want to say high school age — were hanging around at the elevator. People on the elevator asked if they wanted to board, but one said no. As the doors began to close, one kid — a big fat ass in a blue shirt — who had been hiding on the north wall of the elevator (the doors face east), leaned across the wall and hit the call button, causing the doors to open.
And he continued to do this. Several times.
Until a really big angry man got off the elevator and started calling the police. Then they scattered and the people in the elevator were able to descend. I don’t know how comfortable they were on the platform, since big fat ass went charging down the escalator, possibly trying to intercept and harass them.
Meanwhile, I was thirty feet away listening to my iPod and watching this kid’s behavior and not confronting him. Heck, I could’ve at least taken his photo and posted it to this blog to shame him. I mean, that would probably be pretty difficult — I doubt he’s capable of shame, with the way he acted.
Or maybe he’s just a kid, being kind of stupid in that way he’ll look back on in ten years, shaking his head and wondering why he’d ever be capable of acting that way.
In any case, the rest of the night was great – I met up with a coworker, and I introduced him to Meiwah, and he introduced me to Brickskeller.
I remember being introduced to V in high school, shortly after it was finally released onto VHS after years in wherever sci-fi miniseries go to rot.
Alien spaceships appear over all of the major cities of the world. They are populated by human looking aliens who wear sunglasses and speak with a metallic voice — but they come in peace, looking only to harvest some water for their drought-stricken home world. They send representatives down to Earth, to mingle and co-habitate, they send crews to help improve infrastructure and develop new technologies.
And they begin killing scientists, and brain washing political leaders.
Also, they’re reptiles in human-like “skins”, and they’re not really here for the water — their planet’s actually kind of short on food, and humans are delicious.
So are guinea pigs.
The original NBC miniseries (and its follow up) was an ensemble affair, detailing how a disparate group of people — scientists, reporters, police officers, landscapers — become aware of the Vistors’ real agenda, and organize an armed resistance in the Los Angeles underground. The show was populated by a virtual who’s-who of B sci-fi and horror films, including Robert Englund, Michael Ironside, and Marc Singer. There was also a note of Hollywood tragedy in the show’s background — David Packer was rehearsing a scene for V with his co-star Dominique Dunne the night she was murdered (her role was recast and filled by Robin Maxwell).
Although the show started out fantastic, if memory serves, it eventually finished with some sort of half human/half reptile hybrid using some sort of magical power to defeat the Visitors. Laaaame. But I suspect this was primarily because the show’s original producer was fired.
So flash forward twenty-six years after the original, and guess what? It’s remake is the proverbial Big White Hope for sci-fi fans, after the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica. Or at least, it is for me.
I’m trying to not be too excited. Actually, that’s pretty easy — sure, the special effects and the production values are considerably higher than they were in the early 1980s, but isn’t it really the characters that make TV and movies so endearing and memorable? Oh, Marc Singer, whatever happened to you?
I have been trying, with massive fail, to write a blog post about how awesome the movie Clue is, for at least the last two weeks.
“Clue‘s only been awesome for the last two weeks?”
“No, I think he means that, for the last two weeks, he’s been trying to write the post.” Insert eye-roll.
And it’s been massive fail.
But Saturday morning — before heading over to help my friend move — I was browsing the board game section at Target, and I came across a newly updated version of RISK. I remember being introduced to this game in middle school by my friend Adam G. If you’ve never played, up to six players wage war against each other for global domination. It is quite possibly the game that inspired Wallace Shawn’s: “Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders – the most famous of which is ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia’ – but only slightly less well-known is this: ‘Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!’” At this point, Wallace Shawn toppled to the side, dead, and if you’ve never seen The Princess Bride, what the fuck is wrong with you?*
In high school, I used to try to organize RISK games with my buddies, and a few times a year, we’d all gather at my place or one of theirs, and we’d play RISK while dining on soda and popcorn. We’d form alliances, and we’d betray each other, and we’d team up against those dominating, and on occasion, we’d even halt our advances for fear of forcing a friend out of the game. I fondly remember being implored to spare poor Konrad, who had been reduced to Argentina, only to have him spill out, expanding rapidly into both North America and Africa.
It’s been a long time since I’ve actually played RISK — I even dragged it up to Connecticut for Thanksgiving 2007, but even with twenty plus people, couldn’t find enough warm bodies to play. But for whatever reason, I can’t stop myself from purchasing more and more versions of the game — whether it’s Target’s Vintage RISK collection, or some of the more unique takes on the game, like RISK 2210 (it’s the future, and you can occupy cities on the ocean-bed, and the moon), and RISK GODSTORM (set in ancient Europe, where you can use Gods to attack with your armies, and occupy — until it sinks — Atlantis), I also couldn’t stop from picking up bothversions of STAR WARS RISK (stupid, stupid concept — RISK works best with multiple players), and LORD OF THE RINGS RISK.
One of my favorite versions of RISK came with the first version of the game I bought — on one side of the board was the classic RISK map, with six continents and spoke-like figure pieces representing your armies. On the reverse was CASTLE RISK, a European-flavored RISK, where players battle for domination of the continent — or, at the very least, for domination of their enemies’ castles.
In any case, I refrained from buying the updated version of RISK. Because what would be the point? I don’t have anyone to play with. I did buy the Vintage Edition of Clue, but, again, what’s the point? I don’t have anyone to play it with!
And then I thought — well, how hard could it be to figure out if there are bloggers who like sitting around a table for hours at a time plotting intricate schemes to wrest control of Australia from someone else? Or who want to find out if Colonel Mustard really did do it, in the Lounge, with the Wrench? I mean, right?
*I bought a copy of the movie Saturday for my Office Wife, who told me she hasn’t seen it. It’s wrapped in an old WaPo Express for her to find when she arrives.
I got home at about a quarter of eight yesterday morning. I wish I could say I was out all night partying. I wish, in fact, that I’d been sound asleep by eight am. Alas, the cat vomit on the middle of the bed made that a no-go. I spent my first few hours home napping on the couch while using onlineclock.net to wake me to move my wet sheets from the washer to the dryer and then to bring them all up and hit the sack.
With the exception of a thirty minute nap around 3pm on Saturday, and a ten minute nap around 3am Sunday morning, by 8am I’d been up for over twenty-six hours. During that time, I helped a friend move apartments (thankfully, within the same building), and spent eleven hours prepping the Bookstore for the Christmas season — beginning at 9pm, tables were moved, books were put back onto shelves, more books were pulled from shelves, giant cardboard deer were assembled, and at some point, I decided the time had come to rip out the Stephen King books from Horror and try to arrange them alphabetical by title.
I was really worried about that overnight night. Usually, around 9pm, my body starts sending me signals: “Hey, I need sleep. Hit the hay, eh?” So considering that I knew I’d be up until at least 7am, I was worried about that extra 11 hours.
(Yes, I know: “Hey, Snay, you douche, 9pm to 7am is only ten hours!” But yesterday was also the end of Daylight Savings Time, so at 2am, the clocks got set back to 1am, so that’s how 9 to 7 is eleven hours).
The night wasn’t too bad. I actually went in a bit early to get some early Christmas shopping done, alas, very little of what I was looking for was actually in. I did pick up a copy of Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs for myself, and I continued reading The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr, a supernatural (I think) Sherlock Holmes tale.
A bit before 9, as customers were being ushered from the store, and the overnight staff began showing up, I clocked in and began imprisoning stuffed panda bears in display boxes. After a briefing from our store’s merchandise supervisor (who has a lit blog here), we split into two groups: Upstairs, and Downstairs.
I was on the Upstairs group (three of us total), and we spent the first hour or so moving the front of store furniture. Some of it — especially the smaller square and rectangular tables — is relatively light and easy to move. Others, the larger tables, the mass-market table in particular, are extremely difficult to move, especially since we move them fully loaded with books. Even using skates (plastic shells which you put under furniture’s legs which make it easier to move across carpet), the three of us got a pretty nice workout.
Once the furniture was in place, we began the holiday merchandising. I began with one of the bargain barges (in Bookstore parlance, a “barge” is a collection of product arranged either on the floor or on some sort of display). Fortunately, most of the product I needed was already on the upper level. From there, I assembled some cardboard reindeer, then began merchandising on several of the book tables.
Until about 2am (and that’s 2am accounting for the time change, so really 3am), we had a whole ton of costumed drunks knocking on the window. Most just smiled and wished us “Happy Halloween!” A few mooned us. One guy, I’m pretty sure, was humping the window, and another was screaming cusses at me and trying to entice me outside for a fight. I think he might’ve enticed someone to a fight, because at some point a whole bunch of cop cars assembled catty-corner from the store, and someone was loaded onto an ambulance on a stretcher.
The store sprung for pizzas for “lunch.” There was some concern, particular with the time change: would we get the pizzas at 2am, like, when the clocks shift back to 1am? Or 2am which would’ve been 3am before the time change? They actually arrived about ten minutes after what would’ve been 2am, and four pizzas, an order of wings, and a cheese bread disappeared pretty quickly — there were eight of us, and we were pretty damn hungry.
As the night wore on, even caffeinated sodas weren’t doing the trick, and I was getting progressively sleepier and sleepier. At one point, around 4am or so, I was sitting on a chair unloading a shelf. The next thing I knew, I was slumped against the shelf and books were spilled across the floor. I glanced to my left to see if any one saw me sleeping, and resumed napping. I woke a few minutes later, felt completely recharged, and got back to work.
The nap really, really helped. Although it was just a temporary solution. An hour or two later, I was reshelving in the Horror section when, for some reason, I became offended by the total randomness of all our Stephen King books, and ripped them all out and began alphabetizing them by title. I did this for about twenty minutes, then realized a.) it was futile and b.) there was more important stuff to do, threw everything back on the shelf and moved along.
Oh, I also learned that one of the new hires is a former major league baseball player just out of the Peace Corps. Beat that.
Finally, around 7am, we all collectively said “Fuck this shit” and rolled on out of the store. I dashed up 18th Street and managed to catch an L2 bus. I was debating taking it all the way to Van Ness for groceries so that I’d have something to eat when I woke up, then I decided “fuck that.” Then I fell asleep on the bus and that sort of made my mind up for me. I got my groceries, and caught the same bus on the return loop. That’s when I got home and realized I had to do laundry.
Also, most of yesterday was a blur, too.
Weird: I was awake when we passed Woodley Park Metro, and there were a whole ton of people clustered about the entrance. I’d thought the Metro opened at 7am on weekends, maybe whoever was supposed to open WP was late?
, anyway: 
