rough morning kids. staying out til 1:30 on a monday night is not advised. i promised some hook regulars i would teach them to play pong (on a monday, not a tuesday, as that's the showcase) and i had to keep my word, so one thing led to another and several games of pong and tequila/tabasco combos (who decided that was a good idea?) and i think i'm still drunk. at least it's tuesday and not wednesday, as i have a standing 9:30 am meeting with my boss on wed morning. to her credit she's never said anything to me about it. 'functional' is the key word.
it's an aggressive week on the drinking scale - tonight is an office going away party for my coworker and tomorrow night it's 'l'eighties' night at '1,2,3, burger, shot, beer'. yes you read that right. 80s and $1 glasses of white wine. pick me! and friday we head up to hopper's house in vermont for a house party that might as well just be called 'drink your face off' weekend. i'm driving so i have to be somewhat with it, but still!
i also have jury duty tomorrow for new york county - never been called before. kind of interested to see what it's like, but i may have just been watching too much 'law and order'. planning to flat out tell them i work in news. at the very least i'm sure i'll get a good blog post out of it. may even post from the court, depending on how bored i get. being called for jury duty seems like a very grown-up thing to do - i said as much 7 years ago as well - i have the im conversation. have i progressed in that time? apparently not.
lastly current favorite music, as there's been an influx:
1. 'lollipop' - mika - kind of a weird song but pretty uplifting. mika reminds me of the scissor sisters
2. 'the morning after dark' - timbaland featuring nellie furtado. oh timbaland.
3. 'i got it' - gorilla zoe - fratmusic.com find
4. 'i hate this part' - pussycat dolls. courtesy of my bro
5. 'i'm alive' - kenny chesney with dave matthews. country style. it is the most popular genre in the country you know.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
if i'm not dead by thursday i'll be roaring friday night
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
the party goes to linsalata
i considered skipping posting on this past weekend. you guys don't realize that for me blogging is a lot like quaker meeting - i only do it when the spirit moves me. and sometimes i don't really know how to sum something up and feeling pressure to post on it just makes it harder. but then i realized that a lot of people would be unhappy with me if i didn't do a post, including diede, so here it is.
left work at noon on friday and booked it out to jfk for my flight. found it pretty hilarious all weekend long that i was traveling to western ny by way of cleveland, ohio. but it made the most sense overall. was deathly hungover the entire trip from several games of one on one pong against hearn on thursday night, followed by some games with vin and hopper, then 'all you can drink' after that, so was miserable the entire time. being hungover on a plane is the worst. you can't lie down and you can't have whatever you need at that time to make yourself feel better. but i digress.
met up with wilson at the airport and then linsalata for the road trip to his house in western ny 3 hours away. we were about 45 miles south of buffalo, but it might as well have been a world away. reminded me a bit of vermont in the woodstock area. lots of open fields, trees, water, houses set back along the way. got to the town to meet up with lingley and val. the two had arrived 2 hours or so earlier and managed to run up an $80 dollar bar tab. needless to say, they were drunk. picked up some pizza and went back to the house for hot tubbing, wood stoves, and more drinking. eventually caro and andy showed up enroute to canada, and we managed to convince them to stay the night. lingley passed out on the couch around 3:30 which was our signal to take compromising pictures with her and then head to bed.
sat we were up early, as lingley and i had to be at ski school by 9:30 to get our equipment and sort everything out. we absolutely crushed 'ski school 2010' - lingley more so than i. this was my third time on skis, but even i thought the beginner's lesson was way too beginner. let the record show that sugarbush ski school is way more comprehensive. after being really snarky for the entire lesson we did some runs on the beginners hills and then threw in the towel in favor of apres ski: more hot tub, football and adult beverages. played a lot of drinking 'would you rather' b/c it didn't require drawing cards or remember rules, but it got pretty sociopolitical at times (have an abortion or give it up for adoption?) and very revealing (lonely and single or married but unhappy?). also cooked dinner on sat night. wilson contributed the mashed potatoes, which we razzed him about all weekend, as he was unable to do much else for himself other than the potatoes and building the fires. lingley passed out on a couch again so we took more compromising pictures, put a blanket over her and gave her a pillow and called it a night.
sunday we skiied again, this time on the whole mountain. despite my efforts to get a private lesson, linsalata was coerced into giving me a private lesson, which i am sure i will hear about for the rest of my life and therefore probably cost me more than with a genuine instructor. to be fair he was pretty good, except for the blue trail he forced me to go down while standing there and providing little more in the way of encouragement beyond telling me i could do it. at one point a mother took pity on me and asked me if i needed help. i replied that in theory linsalata was helping me, but she provided me with some pointers and i managed to make it down the hill 30 minutes or so later with my legs unbroken if not my pride uninjured. lingley and i got ellicottville t-shirts and wrote 'ski school 2010' on them. we were there. and it was awesome.
headed into town on sunday night for dinner and then to the local dive bar for karaoke. turned out there were about 40 dental students from buffalo at the bar, so we had an amazing dance party and drank our faces off. lingley and i sang 'hit me with your best shot' and i managed to get us all home safely at the end of the night to the tune of 'mexico' on the radio. as you might of guessed, lingley passed out on the floor, so once again we took compromising pictures and headed to bed.
was so exhausted from drinking, being hungover and skiing for 4 days straight that i got home to nyc on monday and went straight to bed after downloading the country music i didn't already have. theme song of the weekend was def 'chicken fried' by the zac brown band, who, incidentally will be on an episode of crossroads with jimmy buffett in march (hi linsalata). but good times, good friends and many thanks to linsalata for hosting. linsalata - i hope it was everything you hoped for and more.
the weekend has me pumped for next weekend when we head up to hopper's house in vt for more house partying. real world winter carnivals. love it.
Monday, January 11, 2010
slipping on the sliding ice
time for a little break in the work day. and by that i mean will be here for another hour at least.
couple things swirling:
had a delightful, low key weekend - very little to do or anywhere to go. just what i needed, to the point that i know have chicago's 'feeling stronger everyday in my head.' a good way to be feeling heading into the olympics!
friday night i watched 'philadelphia story'. a very good movie, particularly if you like old movies, and some real gem quotes including:
- 'Awww... this is one of those days that the pages of history teach us are best spent lying in bed'. - (he's hungover)
- 'Champagne's funny stuff. I'm used to whiskey. Whiskey is a slap on the back, and champagne's heavy mist before my eyes.' - (he's getting drunk)
am certain those will come in handy.
played some pick up football on saturday - that was a lot of fun - but been having trouble lifting my legs as my hamstrings and quads are ridic sore. sat night went over to hearn's to play pong, where he promised me i could control the music and we could play without being freezing cold and arguing with drunk people about the merits of pong (hi hook). had my shoes off per usual (i'm a pisces, people) and stepped on a piece of glass, so my foot was bleeding. hearn had zero first aid supplies at his apt, so i ended up taping up my foot with scotch tape. didn't stay on for long, did stop the bleeding. makeshift first aid eh?
as i believe i mentioned i'm on the planning committee for our five year reunion with mulley and planning is shaping up, but as we talk more about it and i think more about it the stranger it is to realize that i'm going to be on campus with just the '05 class and missing lots of the usual suspects - by that i mean the younger folks who are generally around on campus when the alums are. i'm excited to hang with the '05s, but it just won't be the same being up there without the '06s, the '07s and the '08s. guess it's a good thing kevin's planning to crash it.
speaking of kevin, he just became an uncle! his older brother's wife had a baby. congrats uncle kevin! i'm going to be auntie lyon to everyone's kids. that was decided a long time ago.
christine alerted me to a fantastic sale at target a few weeks ago on dvd's of 'sex and the city' seasons. she was kind enough to buy them and send them, as the nearest target is in brooklyn (i swear you had never told me this before vin). they arrived today and i am v. excited to have all the seasons in one fell swoop, not in the least because it will come in handy when team tequila reunes (ideally in the near future), as our motto, aside from 'taking one for sd since '03x' is 'i come with baggage. and my baggage comes with sex and the city dvds, pirate swords and tequila.' check, check and check!
last but not least, am headed to western ny this mlk weekend to linsalata's ski house for what we have informally dubbed 'the party comes to linsalata'. (note: this will also prob be the name of the blog post about the weekend). lingley will be journeying as well, and i'm excited to see her, do some skiing and celebrate winter carnvial real world style. if you're a faithful reader of this blog you may recall my last skiing experience with megh and charlo two years ago. i doubt i have improved since.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
something we're going to have to deal with but it's fine
hello friends. the holidays have come and gone and i can't say i'm sorry to see them go. too much additional stress. nice to get back down to business in a manner of speaking.
the new year's fiesta ended up being a ridiculous fiasco, and not in a good way. suffice to say there was a lot of miscommunication and expectations were not managed. the episode of 'jersey shore' where snooki gets punched by a guy was referenced by a bystander. ambulances were called. ice luges were employed. people (me) cried several times. the words of jimmy buffett 'good times, riches and son-of-a-bitches i've seen more than i can recall' were used to come to terms with the nights events. fortunately it sounds like most people in attendance didn't even realize drama was occurring, but there was a ton. would rather i not have fun than the guests so i guess that's a plus.
decided to run new years back on saturday night as i refused to have the year and decade begin the way it did. drank the second case of andre (minus a few bottles), played drinking games, counted down to midnight, watched the ball drop on youtube and opened the door to let out the old and ring in the new. then we did shots and went to hook. much better/happier way to get things started.
been playing a lot of pick-up football lately with charlie and his entourage. i'm embarrased to say that i know very little about football, esp as i consider myself pretty athletic. football is the anthesis of basketball - all the things that are good to do in basketball are not good to do in football. this puts me at a big disadvantage. that and i can barely throw a football. however playing is making we want to do something i've never wanted to do before - watch football on tv - in an attempt to get better at playing. who's having a superbowl party?
with the new year comes two pretty stressful months for me - olympics in feb and the ending of our lease mar 1 and subsequent move. i learned from reading the oprah magazine to discover my striving style that 'under stress, i tend to withdraw and isolate myself' (for the record my overall style is 'striving to be in control') so i apologize in advance if my postings become even less frequent, but it might be a good time to take a break and think about what i've done.
literary moment
first one i saw this morning on the subway
the way a crow
shook down on me
the dust of snow
from a hemlock tree
has given my heart
a change of mood
and saved some part
of a day i had rued.
- robert frost
the second i saw painted on a wall at 'alice's tea cup' during brunch on new year's day
be what you would seem to be -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
- alice in wonderland
