how to be late to work

last night i had 8 drinks. all of them different:

corona
sparks
stoli and soda (with a cherry that i threw at some guy and might have stained his white shirt. Sorry!)
bourbon and ginger
cabernet
pilsner urquell
stella

then i went and got some falafel, which i vaguely recall paying with a 100 dollar bill and making a woppoooosh! sound effect. so this morning i realize it's 9:21 am and my roommate/alarm clock, hasn't come down and showered. no, she's still in her bed, wearing last night's clothes. And this dude is on the couch, in his suit, tie which is still knotted in a double windsor, and these crazy shinycowboy boots.

so my strategy, when i'm late to work, is to dress nice. makes you feel good, makes you look good, makes it seem like you have a real, legitimate reason for being late. i'm telling my roommate this as she's all "fuck!fuck! fuck, i'm so fucked! i work on a construction site, I can’t dress nice – hey wait, you're wearing jeans!"
"yes, but these are my hot jeans*"
"hey aurelgrooves, you're hot!" yells the dude from the couch.

dude from the couch then rises, looking like he just got home from the office, and asks for toothpaste. he is disappointed when i tell him that at the pussy palace, we use our fingers to brush our teeth with chili. meanwhile, i'm sifting through the mess on the coffee table for my keys, trying to piece together what sortof weird these two were making this morning, at 4am.
apparently, guinness and flat champagne. as of nowunnamed, but that would makes nine, completely different drinks I drank last night. which now makes me late, drunk, hungover and HOT at work.

*oh and my jeans as it turns out are the same ones i wore last night, which totally smell like bar.

loathing the text message

It's not that I don't like text messages, I just hate the way they are replacing the quick phone call. I mean who has the time to type "do you need me to pick up anything at the store" while they are at the store and somehow expects you to read and respond before they get to the register...

People, text messages are for short bursts of information, perhaps conveying a useful tidbit such as an address, or its real purpose: sarcastic humor you just can't pull off in person. like say, the one i got last week that read:

"ariel sharon is the second cewlest jew i know."

is it implying that i'm the first cewlest? because Ariel Sharon isn't that cool...you see, it's funny, it makes you think.

here are those that have been lingering, avoiding deletion:

"love is thorny"
"work da nooch!"
"I HAVE ISSUES SEE YOU AT 2AM"
"toilet of glory! halelujah!"
"he's hot - you left - he's mine - tequila!"

But anyway, how could any text message replace the operatic (seriously, it sounded like pavarotti) voicemail I received at 4:29 am this morning: cello cello cello cello cellooooooo. Cellooooooo! Cellooo cello cello cello! cello! cello! and so on for nearly 2 and a half minutes.
It can't. so stick to the rules, don't let the text become your only voice. thank you.

man vs. nature: easter edition

so, not sure if you have been to rockville lately, but there's these crazy canadian geese everywhere. living on top of buildings, in parking lots. they seem rather oblivious to the fact that their natural environment has been paved, developed, invaded. and they have this very "fuck you we were here first" mentality. but i wonder, do the instincts in their little pea sized brains tell them to set up shop on a rooftop or in an industrial planter, or is this them taking a stand in the war against humans?

today, someone i work with was attacked by one of these fuckers. a couple has taken residency at the office entrance. mom is sitting on 4 eggs while dad hisses, with his little vibrating pink tongue, at everyone who comes within a 15 foot radius, which is everyone who has to come into the building. and like me, they are all in awe of these guys, there's something about seeing a wild animal up close...

still, the relationship is not peaceful. today a woman dropped her newspaper and it was immediately hopped on by crazy dad. when a gentleman tried to get it back for her, the thing literally landed on his head and pecked at him and hovered in front of his face, flapping his wings and skwawking until he swatted it with his briefcase. can you imagine swatting a giant 10 pound flying bird? on your way to work? it's crazy. but he was walking around the office being all, dude, i fought off a giant goose this morning, and i won. i conquered nature. the security guard turned amateur ornithologist has been regaling us with fascinating details about the daily habits of this duo - crazy dad left her for two hours yesterday to go frolick with his girlfriend in the puddle across the street! and the story of how he scared away a sneaky fox who came for eggs late night. man, even in this sprawling suburbia, we aren't completely isolated from nature.

i once worked in the office with a window on the building next door. the rains would leave deep puddles which rarely dried up, and even froze to a perfect ice rink in winter. the geese found these puddles to be a little piece of paradise. about 3 or 4 times an hour i would hear the typety clicks of my office mate stall to silence, and i'd find him staring out the window at our neighbors, so much more fascinating than our processing tasks. hours would go by as we each narrated,

"ooh looks like plumpy is having a little tiff with skinny legs."
"check out baldy, he's standing on one leg"
"stubbs is licking fat neck's butt"

every day attracted more and more geese and then one spring day, the roof was covered with adorable baby goslings. we got very little work done in those weeks, watching the little yellow babies grow and waddle around, like litte baby toys.

and then came the crows.

the crows sat creepily, perched high in the neighboring trees cackawing crescendos while their little beady black eyes glowing with eager hungry excitement. my office mate and i banged against the windows screaming noooooooo! to warn our friends of the surprise attack...swooping in like precision military airplanes, striking and dive bombing and taking away the very tender center of our daily entertainment. the geese, seeing no where else to flee, pushed their little malleable babies off the roof: plop! plop! 2 stories down! plop! they landed in the bushes, some missed the soft grass and splattered onto a stoop, occupied by secret smokers only minutes before. plop!

i couldn't look anymore, i shut the blinds, and our office was dark and quiet. it was excruciatingly real nature at its most violent darwinist moment, a feeling that doesn't convey on the discovery channel.

so i can now really appreciate that fluffy and hissy have moved their nest closer to us, hissing at us daily, the humans who have covered their habitat in cement, cut up their homes into little city blocks and cook their brothers and sisters in woks...but why? further from their natural predators, but close to their unnatural enemies? is it not a better life in Canada?

greek easter!

So how come no one told me about Greek easter?

I would have marked that big fat greek holiday on my calendar long ago, if only I had known there would have been whole carcasses of meat roasting in a very nearby adams morgan alley...I would have arrived on time! My roommate and i dragged a case of miller high life to an alley party and was not fully prepared for what we came upon. There were perplexed eyes on our group, neighbors who were parking their cars or bringing out their garbage, stalling, staring, wondering what kind of animal was slowly rotating and smoldering, inches beyond their back fences. I didn’t know you could get away with that these days.
But it was a festive event, children running around, people shouting "hopa!" eating grape leaves, baklava, and we made it complete with alley frisbee, sparks and chardonnay, miller high life mixed with sparks....I really do love traditions though, such as the red egg smashing, the singing, the tzatsiki! oh, and the MEAT. My stomach is still relishing the bits of skin and gristle I picked off of this guy, who looked more like a greyhound than a lamb:
the caption to this photo should read "blllwwwweeeaaaarrrrrrggggggghhhh"

I heard one kid mutter: “poor santa’s little helper.”

I have always advocated that you can really only appreciate your meal if you watch it slow roast over a fire, dousing it intermittently with liquid to keep it nice and moist, smelling the fat sizzle onto hot coals...And if it still has eyeballs, tongue and teeth, well even better.

USB lava lamp

so for chanukkah my aunt gave me this mini lava lamp with glitter in it that plugs into a USB port.


like many useless chanukkah gift one receives, it might end up in a box in a closet somewhere. but this morning i found it and plugged it into my computer at work. even though i get error messages every few minutes that says WARNING! USB port power surge detected! i have to say, it rocks. it's reflecting little geometric designs on my cublicle walls and ceiling and from the hallway looks like i am doing some sort of hogwart's experiment.

DCelebrity

a DC celebrity came into the bar i was working at last night. it felt sorta weird knowing so much about her (anal) sex life. she seemed kinda subdued. maybe she knew the entire staff recognized her. (well, she did give us her credit card so what wouldyou expect?)...maybe she was on drugs. she wasn't as slutty as i would have expected though.

fun with wikipedia part I

fun with wikipedia - part I
The Golden Girls is considered the direct ancestor of Sex and the City. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Girls

neil patrick harris is gay??!!!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Patrick_Harris

another day another hangover

so where is one supposed to find good late night eats in adams morgan these days? and i mean when you're wasted because you didn't have dinner and went straight to the bar from work, so you were there when the place opened, and my the time you hit your second glass of merlot, the world is spinning and even though you keep misplacing your phone, you text random people and try to meet up and basically turn your wednesday into a friggin saturday. and so when you have no proper hand eye coordination to be able to put together your own falafel sandwich (which i'm usually an expert at, btw. the key: put some garlic/tahini sauce in FIRST - it messes up the fixins bar when you go backwarsd but it's worth it), where do you go? huge pizza slice, no thank you. ever since i dropped one on the ground my first night in DC and it landed cheese-side down (of course) and...i ate it anyway (five second rule) i vowed never to go back. and i have to say, julia's empenadas kindof suck. and don't get me wrong, i'm a big empenada fan - i make awesome empenadas - but how does julia's stay in business with the dry crap that's been sitting under a heat lamp all day? and they don't even have soup at the one on 18th street. and the burrito joint closes early. burritos. that's exactly what i want at 2 am.

happy valentine's day

So last night, i went to tryst for their valentine’s day party, tho it wasn’t really much of a party, just a typical night with people sitting around with faces lit up in blue by their laptop screens. Though I do recall giving some guy who was coding javascript behind me a really good idea for a million dollar website.
But a good time was had by all. I saw this guy there. My Most Recently Single Friend (as of 7:55 pm EST on 2/14) and the Friend I Want To Be Roommates With (spring 2006 brings you - the pussy palace. 2 ladies and 3 cats)discussed the finer points of specialised internet dating sites, like for farmers and midgets, jacuzzis vs. bathtubs with jets, men who work with their hands, and how shitty boyfriends learn to outsource certain boyfriend duties to gay guys, like, "baby, I really don’t feel like going out to brunch and then shopping the outlet mall, why don’t you go with roberto instead?", and how whenever you go out drinking with a bunch of people, you should always buy the first round because then for the rest of the night people remember you bought the first round and you never have to buy another one again. Though I’ve had that backfire when it’s 2:17 am and you want to go home and someone makes you buy 6 cans of pbr that end up stacked and undrunk on the bar.So then we broke the cardinal rule of champagne which is: never drink champagne unless you want to get wasted and hungover.
We had three bottles, and since there were three of us, I guess we had a bottle each. Our waiter was super nice, I think we should have tipped him more. When I’m drunk I usually don’t tip well. Then we went to cheese spikes, but by then I was very slurry, which my handsome indian friend pointed out: “it’s so great to see you out and wasted on a tuesday!” I found $5 in my pocket, which let us pick 40 songs on the jukebox, but only 13 of them got played. Someone slow tackled me. I went home and ate couscous and showed up 2 hours late for work and missed a phone interview, but now I have lots of funny stories to tell. Yay valentine’s day.

things i learned from my stupid friends

1. Happiness floats.
2. The torpedoes won't launch if the cloaking device is on.
3. Republicans eat chicken feet.
4. Ski lift tickets are expensive because of Bill Clinton.
5. "EIEIO" is not an acceptable Scrabble word
6. Stroh 80 rum and ginger ale makes a tasty butterscotch drink
7. Slut Puddle would be a good name for a band.