Raise some hell, y'all!

So this past Saturday, Chris took De and me to the Drive By Truckers concert in Athens. Southern Bitch and Centro-matic were the opening bands, and if those names don't give you an idea of the (sold-out) crowd that we were a part of, here's a little haiku to help you out:

Hold your cheap beer high.
Even the girls have mullets.
Where's my trucker hat?
The music was good - much better than I expected, actually - but the crowd was way too obnoxious. And hella drunk. So, that was my weekend.

I finished my first book of the new year: The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks (son of Mel, so you know it's funny). I've now moved on to Anonymous Rex, by Eric Garcia, which Stella loaned me last week when I stayed at her house for inventory. I'm already halfway through, which tells me that I read fiction much quicker than non-fiction, for some reason. Either that, or I'm just in a hurry to finish so I can return it and move on to my next book.

Also, I made a new resolution. I'm still working on my grad school thing, but I decided I wanted to be healthier. Not a diet, per se (though I could probably use one), just cutting out unnecessary stuff. First casualty? No more soda. Specifically, Diet Coke. Apparently, it's one of the 10 worst snack foods. I just figure I don't need the extra sugar, caffeine, or chemicals. Plus, The Zombie Survival Guide recommends weaning yourself off luxury items, so you don't feel deprived when you have to leave them behind during your great escape from the zombie menace.

Just kidding.

Score!

This has been the crappiest week. We had inventory Tuesday and Wednesday, which meant that I got no sleep. I worked 3 pm - midnight:30 on Tuesday, then 7 am - 4-ish on Wednesday. Luckily, Stella let me crash in her guest room so I didn't have to worry about driving the hour or so home and back the next morning. I also got to hang out with cute Jarod, our regional Loss Prevention manager (who, sadly, is very much engaged) and managed to talk some of my friends into helping out with inventory, at least for the first night.

Driving home Wednesday evening, I got into a slight accident. I was trying to pass a car next to me, when the lady in front of me slammed on her brakes, causing me to slam on mine. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to completely stop in time and I bumped her. There wasn't any damage done to either car, but she immediately called the cops - like, as we were pulling over to check it out. That was kind of annoying. When the hottie police officer finally showed up (over an hour later, due to the rush hour traffic), he inspected the cars, gave me this hilarious WTF? look, then spent five minutes trying to tell her that she didn't need to file a report because it wouldn't do anything except cause both of our insurance rates to go up, as there was ABSOLUTELY NO DAMAGE done to her car. She, however, was "adamant." I think that's cop-speak for "heinously bitchy." So, he ended up writing me a ticket for following too closely. And asking for my number. Is that standard procedure? :) I figure I'll show up in court to protest the ticket, and if neither of them come it'll just be thrown out. The insurance thing will kill me, though. Luckily, Liz came by and brought me a camera, so I was able to take a couple of pictures of her pristine bumper, just in case she tries to pull something later.

Wednesday night, as you can imagine, was spent playing trivia and drinking. Roger played Mojo Nixon's "Elvis is Everywhere" to cheer me up, and Fran and I did a terrible karaoke version of "Come on Eileen." Good times.

Go van Gogh

"I often think that the night is more alive and
more richly colored than the day."
~ Vincent van Gogh

Spent all day in Atl yesterday. Chris and I met up with my lj friend tardis_chan and her boyfriend, blackwolfga at the Old Spaghetti Factory for lunch. De also joined us, and showed us where to find the half-price ticket booth at Underground, which was very helpful. For us, at least, as we bought the last of the half-price tickets for the High Museum for the day, and De and her mom had to pay full price (well, adult and student) at the door. Sorry about that. :)

The exhibit currently at the High is Van Gogh to Mondrian, and it was amazing. I've seen a few van Gogh pieces at different museums, and tried to get into the van Gogh/Gauguin exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago (I forget why we didn't see it, but I'm sure time, scheduling, or money were a factor), but I've never seen a large collection of his works all at the same time. Seeing as van Gogh is my favorite artist - I even sat through this awesomely bad movie called Starry Night because it was about him being resurrected at the Pasadena Rose Bowl parade - I was in heaven. They only had a few of his more well-known paintings: Café Terrace of Night, Olive Grove, and Self-Portrait (1887), so I still didn't get to see Starry Night. But the High was selling prints of it, along with the other paintings. So...yeah, that makes sense. Of course, they were also selling stuffed Vincent van Gogh dolls, along with Monet and Dali. And they had a box of fingerpuppet artists (van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Monet, and Dali; you could also buy Kahlo's husband, Diego Rivera, separately), which was awesome.

Back to the art: Piet Mondrian was way too abstract for my taste - his Composition 10 in Black and White was supposed to be a pier and some ships on the ocean, but it really looks like a series of black lines. But I am totally in love with this painting, Odilon Redon's The Cyclops. And I really liked The Bride by Johan Thorn Prikker. There was another painting that caught my eye, The Harvest, but I didn't write down the artist's name and I can't find it on the HMA website. I think it might have been by Maurice Denis. If anyone knows, please comment.

We also checked out the permanent collection. I was disappointed, because Monet's Houses of Parliament in the Fog seems to have been moved. I always look forward to seeing it when I go to the High. This painting of peaches was so amazing, it almost looked like photorealism. I was also blown away by the marble statues, especially Medea Mediating the Death of her Children and the bust of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I can't imagine how someone could take a block of stone and chip away at it to make something so life-like. I had to do it once (with plaster) for a 3D art class, and it didn't turn out that well. My mom still proudly displayed it on the mantel, though, because she's nothing if not encouraging.

So...that was my day. We ended up spending a few hours at the museum, what with the lines and everything. Chris and I also went to dinner at Gordon Biersch (which was probably a little too expensive for us), and our kick-ass waiter, Ben, let me walk out with the mug my beer came in. Their Winterbock brew is excellent, by the way, and has the highest alcohol content of all their current beers. And you gotta love a beer company that uses slogans like, "Sure we could make a strawberry beer. We could put a little paper umbrella in it, too."

Rage Diary 1

I had a friend that really pissed me off last night. She didn't do anything to me personally, but she said some things that I thought were really stupid. I just had to vent, 'cause I really don't want to bring it up to her again.

We were watching Veronica Mars, and I mentioned this article that I had found a few days ago. She said something along the lines of, "Well, atheists don't know anything." I asked her to explain, and she said that the literal meaning of the word "atheist" is "a person who knows nothing." I told her that she was wrong, completely forgetting that she can't stand to be told she is, in fact, mistaken. About anything. She immediately raised her voice and told that she was not, and that was the word's actual definition. [I should probably mention that the last time we had a discussion like this was in the waiting room of her doctor's office, when she got mad at me for disagreeing with her opinion that having Whistler come back for Blade 3 was, in her own words, "retarded."] I didn't want to argue, because the show was coming back on, so I just told her to drop it. I realized at work this morning that she was probably thinking of "agnostic," but like I said, I don't want to bring it back up.

Anyway, after the show, the news came on and one of the first stories was that some musicians are talking about remaking "We Are The World" to help the tsunami victims. I groaned, because I don't think it should be remade - if anything, we should have a group of musicians get together and write a totally new song. She misinterpreted my groan, however, and said, "Yeah, I know. I wish they'd stop talking about it, too. I mean, the people are dead. Big deal. Move on."

?!

I think I was actually dumbstruck by that. I gaped at her, then said, "I can't believe you said that."
"Well, it's not like it affected me."
"Thousands of people have died. A friend of mine at work had an uncle in Thailand and up until yesterday she didn't know if he was alive [which he is] or dead."

There was a bit more to it than that, but she kind of shrugged and (again) I dropped it. But jeez! Then, I told her about finding the dead chipmunk at work and she said, "Aww." How the fuck are you going to be upset about one dead rodent, but brush off thousand of innocent lives? Especially now, with the new reports that the orphans are being kidnapped or claimed by people who sell them into slavery. Or that there are people still going to Thailand for vacations, and stepping over dead bodies on the beach. This world is so messed up.

This has been bugging me all day. My friends are such idiots sometimes.

Mrs. Frisby

We have a mouse at the store. She's been there a while, apparently, but the exterminator just came last week to put out a fresh batch of sticky traps (similar to flypaper) to catch it. When I first heard about it, I went all PETA on the receiving manager, Gerald: "You guys aren't going to hurt it, are you? You'll set it free after you catch it, right?" But he just laughed at me.

I have a rep at work for being a bleeding-heart animal lover - as it stands, I am the only vegetarian there, and I was ridiculed mercilessly for saving a black widow spider and releasing it outside, only to learn later that someone else had seen it and stepped on it. So, they knew I would be all gung-ho for saving the mouse. Until I walked into my office last week and discovered that it had eaten some of the chocolate sitting in a candy dish on my desk.

This meant war. You don't mess with a girl's chocolate.

I decided to use it as bait. I got one of the sticky traps from Gerald, and we put it in my visual room with some of the chocolate in the center. If it wanted the chocolate, it would have to step on the trap, where it would be stuck until we could dispose of it (humanely). Well, it seemed like a good idea...until I walked in this morning and saw that the mouse had moved one piece of chocolate so that it formed a bridge to the other piece, so that it wouldn't need to step on the sticky part of the trap to get to it! I have no idea how the mouse accomplished this, but I do know that I have a whole new respect for it. I named it Mrs. Frisby (after the Secret of NIMH) and have decided that we'll probably never catch her, because she seems way too smart.

Mullet dude

Ian and John's mulleted collegiate friend, Sean, never brushed his teeth, washed ONLY his hair when taking a shower, chased beer with peanut butter and zingers (because he didn't like the taste, but wanted to get drunk), and he still managed to leave the bar every night with a girl. When commenting on the types of girls he would chat up, however, Ian said, "He starts out at Boardwalk (meaning, the really hot ones) and ends up at Baltic," which I thought was really amusing at the time and wrote down so I'd remember it. Of course, I also had quite a bit to drink because John kept refilling my beer, so it might just be the drunk talking. And...that's about all I remember from trivia tonight.

Jesusland!

Ok, I know the election's been over for about a month now, but Chris sent this to me and I found it amusing:



Apparently, it was being passed around on the UGA Law School ListServe and caused a bit of controversy...

The people you meet in bars...

Today was a very interesting day. I went over to Michelle's and hung out with her and the boys while they got their family Christmas portraits taken.



One of the "practice pictures" taken at the house before we left for Olan Mills. Are these guys adorable, or what? :o) Michelle and I also went to O'Charley's for dinner (leaving the boys at home, to fend for themselves), and then to the Gladiators/Sea Wolves game. Which was awesome, by the way. We (and by "we" I mean the Gladiators, just in case you were wondering) won in overtime. And I was really happy that Chris Durno scored the game-tying goal, because those Sea Wolves players were beating up on him all night and I figured that was poetic justice. Especially since we scored again (and won!) 40 seconds into overtime. Anyway, the game was great. The strange thing happened when we went to Summits after the game for a beer.

I'm used to having weird older guys come up and talk to me while I'm there, because it's a bar and I'm a pretty approachable person. So, Michelle and I are drinking and talking and laughing (loudly) when this guy comes up and kinda starts hitting on us. He asks if he can ditch the chick he's sitting with now, sit with us, and offers to pay for our beers and food. We accept, because hey! it's free beer and he seems ok, really funny and maybe just a little bit strange, but what the hell. So he sits down with us. We're talking, and I have my beer passport laying on the table. It has my full name on it. He glances at it, then pushes it to the side. Calls me by my first name (and this is before we've introduced ourselves) and starts messing around with me, "predicting" all this stuff that's strangely spot-on. Like that I have one younger sister, I've lived in Snellville pretty much my whole life, I was a Girl Scout for a number of years, my mom's an accountant, and I grew up with a father figure who was not my biological dad. Needless to say, I was a little freaked out, so I start asking him how he knows so much about me. Michelle and I figure I must know him from somewhere, but I don't recognize him at all. He FINALLY hands over a business card, and I'm still a little freaked. Because this guy is a rather prominent businessman in our town, he's a client of my mom's, my friend works for him, he used to live down the street from my current roommate, and I was in Girl Scouts with his step-daughter for a few years. Luckily, he hadn't been hitting on me so hardcore that this realization was especially awkward or anything, but he did ask me not to mention it to my mom or my friend that works for him. Yeesh. Michelle and I actually ended up talking to him for a few hours, mostly about our mutual acquaintances and the randomness that comes with living in a small town for one's entire life. Michelle always teases me about knowing someone everywhere we go (and we did run into someone I knew everywhere we went today, with the exception of Olan Mills), but this was just too weird. And it's strange to think that I'm reaching an age at which my friends' dads will try to pick me up in bars. A little creepy, too.

If you didn't vote today, I guess you're dead by now...

Overheard at work today (one old lady talking to another):
"What you have to do, is vote the way Jesus would. That's why I voted for Bush, and I've been praying every night that he'll win."

I really need to get out more...

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