Manlio Rules

oh, if you want to read more about alex’s bachelor party weekend, you should go look at teendrama. watch the videos, they’re classic.

quick weekend recap:

friday night i did nothing. cause i’m awesome

saturday i went to guitar lessons, then bought some new kicks, then went and met micah and maggie for drinks, then went to Jim’s house for a little par-tee. good times

sunday i had softball. now, we know my team is bad. but yesterday was the first time that my team was bad to the point where i wasn’t having fun. cause it’s not fun to essentially field batting practice for another team. at one point they went around the order 4 times in an inning. so what do i do? there are more than enough dedicated people who show up every week. is it a dick move for me to quit? just pretend that i have lots of other important stuff to do every weekend? cause that’s sort of a lie. and by “sort of”, i mean “totally”. it’s a once a week time commitment, and it’s not making me any happier. thoughts?

good news:
I have finally paid for all plane tickets through xmas, and all wedding presents (except briehan’s) for the rest of the year

bad news:
huge credit card bills mean i probably can’t buy that music software i was looking at till october or november

good news:
I think that boot camp is working. i certainly feel more in shape. and i’ve started to sort of adjust to the schedule

bad news:
i am having trouble sticking to the right diet. the eating little meals thing is ok, but i’m having problems with forgetting to eat for a few hours, then eating a lot, and i still eat waaaaaaaay too much at night.

good news:
my social life is somewhat more active than it was when i moved here

bad news:
it’s still not where i want it to be. i’m looking at another weekend with very few evening plans.

good news:
i will be able to take that friday off for alex and karen’s wedding, so i wont’ ahve to work from NY that day, and hopefully i can get some good afternoon time in with peeps who i won’t be seeing a lot of over the weekend

bad news:
this makes it ENTIRELY possible that i will show up to the rehearsal dinner totally wasted, which on a scale from 1 to “classy” is definitely classy.

cause i seem to be on a pretty awesome run of bad luck. starting with sunday morning

1. I ate too much food yesterday
2. my arm hurts from softball on saturday. not like muscle soreness, like “uh oh” soreness.
3. my TV has been glitching in and out. which is great for watching deadwood, cause that show sure isn’t about the subtlety of the language or anything.
4. I got my assessment body results from bootcamp. not only have i lost mass in all areas i wanted to gain mass, and gained in areas i wanted to lose, my body fat percentage has actually gone up. awesome
5. did i mention the red sox lost all 4 of their games this weekend. i predicted this, but it still puts me in a foul mood, just like my dodger fan co-worker who came in this morning to give me shit about it.
6. my other co-worker gave me the: “yeah, i dont’ care about your life” comment after asking after my weekend and me giving a bit too much information apparently.

on the plus side, there’s not a ton more that could go wrong today… hopefully…

What Jeopardy category would you dominate?

I’ll take: “me and my family” for 1000

(From Consumating)

so, boot camp has been progressing slowly but surely. I missed all of last week because of work and general exhaustion, and we re-assesed this week. somehow i managed to do 8 less situps than last time. at this rate, in 4 months i will get down to 0 situps. but i improved in every other area, so that’s good. My side goal is to be able to run the 5k at brie’s wedding in 6 weeks. i think i’m well on my way towards that.

AND, today when we split the groups, i got assigned to the “A” team, which means the hardest workouts with the most in shape people, and ideally the best results… it kicked my ass for the day, we’ll see if i can keep up there.

went out for Amy’s birthday last night, decided that i will be watching many football games this year at Mad Dog in the Fog. should be fun.

so, friday night i headed up to the berkeley greek theater to check out the Death Cab show. I was hoping to meet up with Ali, Jess, Alice, and some of their friends, but it occurred to me when i got there that i didn’t have anyone’s phone number, making it difficult to find them in the sea of people. oh well, seeing a concert alone actually isn’t as weird as i thought it would be. And Death Cab was great, i thought they played a great set. it was the lead singer’s birthday as well, which was a lot of fun, though sad to learn that he’s only 30. i suppose my rock and roll life will never actually happen. which is too bad.

sunday we played softball. our team is so bad. we lost 25-3. I went 1-2, with 2 runs scored and an RBI. so for those of you paying attention, i was somehow involved every time we scored. after the game, someone said: “we didn’t play that badly”, and i almost lost it. i said something like: “well, there was that one play where the ground ball made it past the third baseman, shortstop, and left fielder and ended up being a triple. that could have gone better.” sigh. after playing on El D where i was among the worst players on the team, and always feeling bad and nervous about if i was going to get any actual playing time, this isn’t much better.

boot camp started this morning, i got politely reprimanded for missing all of last week. in the fitness evaluation i definitely did better on the push ups, and the sit and reach, but somehow i did worse on the situps… sigh.

The Mission: Make it to Vermont for a weekend for Alex’s Bachelor Party (patent pending)
The Obstacles: Vermont is far away
The Result: Faaaaaantastic

note: parts of this post were written in the present tense, because i was trying to write about things as they happened. other parts are in past tense because i forgot to write about them. ok? great!

UPDATE: here’s alex’s take on the weekend

(more…)

So, last night i met up with Ron to have a drink and check out the band room at hemlock tavern. I’ve been to hemlock a few times but never gone into the music venue in the back. Ron had never been. So we get there, and we’re in the front waiting for the sow to start, having a drink, and i check in on dodgeball, cause that’s what i do.

so a few minutes go by, and harry rolls in, says hi, and sits down with us. Now, i’m a little bit confused, because while i like harry, we’re not really at the point where we randomly just go to bars the other one is at without some sort of communication beforehand. But i figured whatever, maybe he just wants to drink.

Within a half hour, like 20-30 more people roll in, most of whom i at least sort of know. and i realize that harry was just a little early for an impromptu get together, under the auspices of having a SF rock/paper/scissors tournament. i would go so far as to guess that harry also thought that’s why we were there, even though we just happened to randomly be at the same bar.

Sidebar: whose email list do i have to get on so i hear about this stuff?

So we do what anyone would do, we cancel our plans to see the band and we sign up for the tournament. I go out very easily in round 1 after deciding that it woudl be smart to throw scissors 4 times in a row (wasn’t), and ron loses in the first round as well. Sean shows up and out thinks his opponent in round 1 (his words), and then gets outsmarted in round 2, and someone i’d never met ends up winning. whole thing took maybe 20-25 minutes, and was a lot of fun. if you ever get bored and are looking for something cheap and easy to do, i recommend trying this in your neighborhood bar. just bring a sheet of paper and sign up like 20 people. good times

other than that, it was mostly a night of feeling a little out of place. reminiscent of early ITP outings, where i would sort of drift from acquaintance to acquaintance, trying to get enough mileage out of conversations to last the night. one person there pulled the; “i’m going to come over and talk to the person you’re talking to, but not make eye contact or acknowledge you when you’re speaking” trick, which i really can’t stand, so i stood there awkwardly for a minute and then found someone else to talk to. and then i finally reached my tipping point of inebriation at the same time i basically ran out of energy to find conversations, so I took off.

and of course i was out too late to get laundry done, so i have to do it tonight, before my flight on thursday, which means the chances of me making it to trivia, doing laundry, and then getting up thursday at 5:30 are almost next to none. but we’ll see.

oh, there are probably photos of this somewhere, i’ll link them when i find them.