Manlio Rules

not to be confused with Manlio’s birthday (observed), which will be later this week.

Friday was my 29th birthday. I celebrated by working from home. The really great thing about working from home is i can take as many personal phone calls as I want, and there were plenty to take. It was great to hear from everyone, it’s touching that you all remembered and it was great to catch everyone up on my recent SF adventures.

Friday night Sean came over and we watched Wednesday’s Lost. i have to say, the new season of television has become a very dangerous temptation for me. I don’t know what the actual numbers are, but i would wager that i now spend about 30-40 hours a week with the television on. Some of that time i’m actually at the computer working or doing something else, but for a lot of it I’m not. I need to find another hobby. can you imagine if i spent 40 hours a week drumming? i’d already be awesome. maybe i need to find a drumming television channel.

in any event, after Lost we (micah, sean, and myself) went downtown to meet up with Ali, Willo, Aubrey, and Chris to check out a band called CSS. i figured any band named after a method of editing web pages had to be pretty cool, and they totally were. If you’ve never heard of CSS, go check them out, I texted a bunch of you about them on friday, and you know how seldomly i get excited about new bands.

Post show we had a few more drinks (micah left early due to epic drunkenness), and then grabbed some late nite pizza, and then i think we stood in the pizza place talking loudly for a half hour about something totally random that i can’t remember.

Saturday I tried to stay in but Sean convinced me to dress up and come out for this huge mansion party in the mission. I reprised Super Mario from last year (Scott/Luigi, wither thou?), and headed out, only to have to wait in line for a half hour. the house was pretty cool, old school mansion decked out pretty well as a haunted house. and there were a ton of people there. we stayed for a few hours, met up with Ali, Aubrey, and Ryan, and then left and spent like a half hour looking for a cab while Ali walked around in her stockings and kept talking about food, and i tried to convince them we should find the internet and rent a zipcar, cause clearly i was sober enough to drive on halloween.

Sunday I watched football, coded flash, talked to people on the phone (if anyone has any good ideas about career counseling (not for me), i would be interested in hearing them), and generally was lazy. I also did a little but not much better with my weekend diet struggle. Today I’m going to start working out again now that the swelling has gone down in my left foot. so tomorrow i will be sore.

today’s deep cut gem:

“Right Turn” from Alice in Chains. Off of Sap

guest starring Mark Arm and Chris Cornell. when Chris Cornell starts belting out the last verse and everyone sings at the same time… man, that’s what the 90’s were all about.

So, i was watching NBC’s new Friday Night Lights the other day, and it stirred some conflicting opinions in me.

For those of you who have not watched the series, or seen the movie, or read the book (which is excellent, btw), FNL is about a town in Texas that revolves around it’s high school football team. the starters on the team are like celebrities, they get free food, women, and whatever else they want. The downside is that the pressure on them to win a state championship is enormous. The coach, in all incarnations, is an apparently level headed guy who feels the pressure and usually makes the right decision, except for several times in which he sells out his individual players to kow-tow (sp?) to the greater good of the team.

the particular scene i took issue with was after a tough loss and the star halfback criticizing the coach on TV, he wakes them all up at 3AM and makes them run windsprints in what appeared to be a drainage sewer until they realized that being a team was important and all left, except for the fullback, who had to walk home in the rain because he had left practice earlier the week (he thought it was his fault his best friend broke his back).

so… i have some problems with this. in the book there was a good deal of time taken to point out how the emphasis placed on football above everything else was unhealthy for the students, and while the movie didn’t go to those lengths, it made it pretty clear that some of the players were happier when football was over. If the TV show becomes more about “how will the coach motiviate his players?”, i feel like the message gets skewed a bit. at least for me. but i dunno. i was never sports oriented (my parents were fairly forceful about that), so i don’t always see the benefit of hazing or group suffering. even when my improv group would demean us as new members, i bristled at it. so maybe the rest of the audience is learning a valuable lesson about how important team is, and how to motivate a group, and i’m just sitting there thinking: “what kind of parent lets their 17 year old kid out of the house at midnight on a school night to go work out with his football coach?”.

what do we think?

oooook… so, here’s what we did this weekend

Friday i worked from home, which i hope to start doing regularly on fridays, because it’s awesome. Nick, my old friend from Australia was in town that weekend because the band he manages (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) was playing on friday night. So i met him and some of his various friends for dinner, and then went to the show. Nick dissappeared backstage, so i hung out till Micah got there, and we proceeded to get somewhat drunk… and by “somewhat” i mean, we drank for 3 hours straight. Clap Your Hands was very good.

From there, we proceeded to Ali’s Rocktoberfest party. The idea was that we were supposed to dress up like rockstars, but i don’t fit into my goth rock clothes anymore and i didn’t have time during the week to find another outfit. thankfully no one really seemed to care. Ali’s party was of course fun, because Ali’s a rockstar. We left said party slightly less sober than when we arrived. Looong day. btw, best costume has to go to the woman dressed up in a leotard as Karen O, though Hez came in a close second. in fact, let’s call it a tie.

Saturday I awoke, briefly considered calling in sick to guitar lessons (how lame is that?), but decided to carry on. Guitar lessons are going ok, but my teacher tends to just talk at me for 45 minutes about his theories on fretboard geometry and patterns. Granted, he’s got some really cool ideas, but i feel like i never get a chance to play. I suppose in theory that’s what “practicing” is for. hmm…

From there I ran some errands and went over to Jay’s place to check out SF Oktoberfest. Jay is a buddy from college, we lived in NY for 5 years and never once got together except when our mutual friend frank was in town. So it was good to see him, and i’m shocked we managed to cope with actually making plans and hanging out. I figure everything after this is cake.

Oktoberfest in SF, i have one piece of advice for you: “don’t try to create your own economy”. you see, in order to get beer at oktoberfest, you need tokens. so you stand in line for a half hour at one of the 3 token stands in this huge hall, get tokens, get a few beers, run out of tokens, and repeat. at one point i was in line for maybe 40 minutes, and this happens:

token lady: “we’ve run out of tokens. i only have a few left”.
Everyone: “argh!”
token lady (to the customer next to me) :”do you want the last 8 tokens?”
drunken customer: “no! I want 10!”
token lady: “well, i only have 8. do you want them?”
drunken customer: “no, fuck that!”
me: “um… I’ll take them”
token lady: “here you go”

I have no idea what that guy was thinking. he then waited for at least 10 more minutes for tokens while i ran away 8 tokens richer. It was just enough for one more beer and sausages for both of us. sweet.

From there i raced home and showered and changed for my crab dinner with Ron and friends. I’ve eaten a lot of lobster in my day (A LOT), but i’ve never had whole crabs. it’s a little like lobster, except the meat is in smaller places and generally harder to get to. and you have to avoid the crab poo, bone, and other fun stuff. I liked it, working for your food has a certain appeal. but man, now i’m hungry for lobster. i wonder how mom feels about lobster for thanksgiving…

sunday i did very little, just as it should be. whew!

because every once in awhile, i get to hear the Cowboy Bebop music back to back with “crazy on you”.

Ok, there were 2 things about the wedding that i forgot to bring up, which is odd, because they were probably the 2 things we laughed about harder than anything else.

the first: we decided that the most indulgent method of communication in the world would be to have box of new cell phones, and after making or receiving one call on them, throw them into a bucket of champagne, effectively ruining them. the reason to do this? “Cause I’m Diddy.”

the second: We were all fairly hungry heading over to the wedding, and started talking about what sort of food would be there, and decided to come up with the most indulgent food that could possibly be there. and we came up with this:

This represents our cycle of life for the most indulgent food ever. It’s Lobster, raised and fed on Kobe Beef, which is in turn raised and fed on Foie Gras, with the Foie Gras Ducks being raised and fed on Lobster. I bet it would be delicious, though we acknowledge that it would require a lot of ducks and lobsters.

As most of you saw from my last post, the weekend started out on somewhat of a sour note. i think to properly explain my thinking at that moment, i need to take you back to the start of the evening.

At 7:45, super shuttle picked me up from work. i learned over labor day that driving and leaving the car in long term parking at San Jose ends up being about $65-70 for 3 days. And it takes forever, cause the bus to long term parking is slow and stops freakin’ everywhere. So it ends up being cheaper and faster to leave my car at work, and take the $24 shuttle one way, then cab it back. Not much cheaper mind you, but a little bit. Besides, sometimes i can con a co-worker into driving me to San Jose, in exchange for a hamburger tomorrow (sucker!).

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