Why Do I Do These Things to Myself?!

Okay, so two posts ago I blogged about what I thought was the grossest video I have ever seen. I enjoy the reaction videos because, well, it was fun to watch everyone else get all grossed out. And it doesn't get old -- if I were to watch it again I would puke all over again.

Then I watched this reaction video, starring Michael Buckley on his YouTube video blog What the Buck:



(He does two video blogs. He's hilarious and fun and totally gay. You should totally subscribe.)

If you haven't seen the "2 Girls" video yet, he describes the video pretty well, so don't listen too long if you don't want to know what's in that nasty video.

Why am I blogging about this again?

Because I am an idiot.

I read through a very brief portion of the comments posted to Buckley's post, and found reference to another site.

Another site, which I stupidly enough had to check out.

You thought "2 Girls 1 Cup" was bad. "2 Girls 1 Finger" is pretty gut-wrenching too, and definitely not in a Terms of Endearment sort of way.

Words

Okay, just a quick gripe.

It's JEW-EL-RY, people, not "jew-le-ry".

It's REAL-TOR, people, not "re-lah-tor".

And Mr. President (and everyone else who uses the word), it's NEW-CLEAR, not "nu-cue-ler".

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For... The Grossness of It All.

Where the hell have I been? I just watched Best Week Ever and heard about this viral video that's so nasty that most public-access file-sharing platforms have yanked it. So of course I went to look for it.

BWE was quite vague about what this video was and, in fact, would even provide a clip name so I could do a google search to find the video. My curiosity having spiked to huge levels, I knew I had to find it.

I started on the mother of all video websites, YouTube (natch) and did a quick search. BWE had indicated that it was disgusting (which is why, thankfully, VH1 declined to air it), and that it involved two girls, so that's the search I did. BWE also indicated that it was so viral that now the reaction videos -- videos of people reacting to watching the video -- were as popular as the video itself.

And they were right.

My search on YouTube was for "disgusting two girls" and immediately turned up pages and pages of reaction videos but no actual video. (This is when I first realized that YouTube would not be hosting this video.) Anxious to find it still, I google searched it.

Naturally, the one reliable link I could find for it was on Perez Hilton. I won't link to it here just because it's so... but I will do you the honor of telling you what the name of the clip is: "Two Girls One Cup." There. Have at it.

Have a vomit bag ready because I really was ready to hurl at several points in the video. No, I did not watch the whole thing all the way through. I spent most of the thirty-second video with my eyes squeezed shut.

I will say this, though: The reaction vids really are pretty funny. (If you do watch these videos, some of them will pretty much give away what happens in the video itself.)

Some guy who "turns gay" as a result:



Some random person's mom -- I think she threw up in the kitchen sink after:


Another person's mom:


Blonde dude cracks me up more than anything:

(First guy has a kinda cute smile but mediocre bod.)

I can't tell if this guy really puked or just half dry-heaved:


I love this one. And the boys are pretty hot:


I don't think this guy made it:


Two poor innocent unsuspecting women:


("Just watch the whole video," he says. "It's not that long," he says. What he doesn't say is that it's the nastiest 30 seconds ever.)

These guys are kinda cute... even if one of them does toss his cookies:

(The sadism of the cameraman is hilarious too.)

Even goth/stoner/skater dudes are grossed out (or maybe it's just that they're German):


I think it turned this chick on:

(I think it gave them an idea and they had to turn off the camera to go try it.)

Bandana boy is kinda cute:


I don't know why I'm still so amused by these reactions:


I love that this video is letterboxed. Letterboxed, people!:


Dude says he's throwing up in his mouth. Little does he know what's coming up:


Okay, I'll admit it, now I'm just looking for cute boys reacting to the vid:


I love the boy in the hoodie -- and his accent is adorable:


Kinda grainy, but still funny:


These guys don't actually start watching it until over a minute into the video:


Okay, this has to be the last one or I will seriously be up all night watching this shit:


(Literally.)

New Dinosaur

A paleontologist at the University of Chicago, Paul Sereno, has unveiled his discovery of a new dinosaur, one that was more bovine in character and goes against the archetypical view that dinosaurs were tall, majestic carnivores. This one appears to have spent its life with its head hunched down, enabling to eat vegetation from a few feet off the ground. Apparently its teeth were formed in such a way as to make this kind of chomping easy too.

It's being called the Nigerasurus taqueti, or just Nigerasuraus.

I'm just waiting for the for the hue and cry that will surely burst forth that this name is racist.

Suspicious Minds

I know in this day and age there's this heightened awareness with respect to both national security and personal security and all. I know I bought a personal shredder at home just to get rid of credit card offers, for example. But is there a point where one's cynicism just goes too far?

The other day DC Blogs highlighted a site that I thought was kinda fun: Free Rice. It appeals to so many parts of me: wanting to help other people, not being to get up off my fat ass to do so, and dorking out over vocab words.

If you didn't bother to click over to Free Rice, let me give you a quick summary of its content. Really, all it is is an elaborate vocabulary quiz. The twist: for each word that one can correctly define, "they" will donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. Seems to me like a win-win: test your knowledge of 50-cent words (or learn some: "picaroon" = "pirate". Did not know that) and help stack up some rice for starving people. According to the stats they post, people are helping to raise almost 2 BILLION grains of rice so far.

(Okay, I know in the grand scheme of things that may not be many bowls of rice, since rice by definition is small and is generally eaten more-than-one at a time. But still, it's not bad.)

So I told my a good friend of mine about the site. Check out this exchange:

Dennis!: hey, check out this website: www.freerice.com
Dennis!: the more vocab words you get right, the more they donate rice to some anti-hunger fund
Dennis!: and the words are kinda cool.
Friend: 1 word = 10 grains of rice?
Friend: what's the angle?
Friend: 10 grains of rice is less than a penny's worth of rice
Dennis!: then you kind of keep going until you get to a decent amount of rice...
which is kinda win-win, because you'll also test your vocab at the same time.
Friend: what does this site get though?
Dennis!: ?
Friend: people don't spend money for nothing.
Friend: someone has an angle
Friend: not sure what
Dennis!: http://www.freerice.com/faq.html
Friend: i read it

The FAQ I linked to, by the way, explains the goals of the site and how they donation process works, and how the vocab twist on it is educational. Apparently not enough for my friend.

Personally, I think it's kind of sad that we've reached a state in this country where an effort like Free Rice -- which doesn't cost anything at all -- is met with such skepticism. Instead of saying "Hm, looks like fun, why not give it a shot?", my friend instead immediately responds with "This is clearly too good to be true, it must be nefarious, and I distrust it inherently."

Let me reiterate: it's free. You can learn some vocab words out of it. Who cares if it's really some huge sham and really no rice is going anywhere ever? You can still pick up some words from it. Unless you have some legitimate fear that somehow that site is either broadcasting brainwashing zombie images at you, or is busy snatching your password information while you blithely guess at vocab words, then really, what's your damage?

Live a little.

Surprisingly, this post is quite unrelated to the one immediately below this one. Perhaps I've just got incredibly stupid friends.

Gaaaah!

I hate my current work situation (in particular, certain projects I'm working on, and asshole opposing counsel), and as a result, it's putting me in a bad mood. I hate that.

(Okay, to make sure that last paragraph is complete, I should add that my boss was also a source of my immense frustration last week too.)

I won't go into details here of how annoying my opposing counsel is -- let's just say that I've worked with many opposing lawyers over the years, and many times our exchanges have been cordial, friendly, and professional. The kind that make you think that maybe you wouldn't mind hanging out and having a beer at some point. Not so this guy.

But what's really upsetting me is that I'm letting it take over my life in such a way that I'm in a very bad mood lately, and this means that I take it all out on people who don't deserve it. Those people would be my friends. (Oddly, I still make sure I'm polite to strangers, like the people from whom I buy things.)

Thankfully, my friends are text-addicted and therefore communicate with me mainly through thumb-relays. What this means is that I am at liberty to ignore things rather than unfairly blow up.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that my friends have done that bug me lately:

1. Responded to one of my texts with a lame joke.

One friend has this tendency to make the same stupid joke over and over. It's pretty stupid even when he does it in real life. Basically, when he doesn't hear what you've said (or when he claims not to have heard), he'll make something up completely (usually something crass and sex-related). Example I'm just making up now:

Me: I think I'll get the salad.
Him: You tossed that guy's salad? What?

Yeah, told you it was lame. It's not terribly funny in real life. But imagine that exact same conversation, in text. It makes even less sense, no? For some reason, I was ready to blow up at him for how lame that joke was when I got that text. Thankfully, I didn't.

2. Turned all Sybil on me about Thanksgiving.

We're planning on having Thanksgiving dinner at one friend's house. He's notoriously flaky, but given that it's Thanksgiving and he's inviting a bunch of people, he can't possibly totally flake out on it. So every so often, for about a month, he'll say something like, "We should go grocery shopping." And I'll say, "Sure. I have a menu in mind, so we can go get stuff." Then later I'll say, "So are you free to go shopping this weekend?" and he'll say, "Eh, we should wait until the weekend before Thanksgiving. There's really no need to go early." Then two days later he'll send out another email: "We should be getting ready for Thanksgiving." Gaaah!

3. Sent me inappropriate an text message.

I think just because of my mood I'm hitting (artificially depressed) tolerance levels with respect to how completely retarded my friends can be. I got a text the other day from one that was a picture of a guy in a gym shower. It was captioned "A guy at my gym."

How completely stupid is that? I mean really, who does that? That is just NOT cool.

When I finally told him never to send do that again, or at least never to send me shots of naked people who don't know that they're posing, is when he finally told me that he actually just snapped the shot off of a gay porn site.

4. Can't bother to get simple facts down.

I've mentioned on here that I had a job interview recently. It's for a counsel position at a federal agency. I have repeatedly told my friends what Agency (let's say, for the sake of this post, that it's the USDA).

This friend -- and I'm sure he's only trying to express an interest in my life -- keeps asking me "So have you heard back from DOJ yet?" No. No, I haven't heard from DOJ. Ever. Because I didn't apply for a job with them, as so I did not interview with them. I interviewed with USDA. Is it really so hard?


Just to turn all sexist for a brief moment here, I feel like I'm more irritable right now than Naomi Campbell during her monthly visit from Aunt Flo. I hate this, and I'm blaming work-related stress for it. Hopefully this stress patch will soon pass, and I shall be back to my normal, happy self again.

Wish me luck.

Milo

I've had a crush on Milo Ventimiglia since The Gilmore Girls.



So, of course, I was terribly excited when I saw that he had a pretty prominent role in Heroes.




Now I'm just thrilled that this season -- finally -- he's being given a good deal of skin time.









One word: Schwing!

Deep Breaths

My office mates are bugging me. Not the ones I actually work with (they're a different story), but the ones we share office space with. They're the older Chinese married couple I mentioned earlier.

As I mentioned last time, whether he realizes it or not, The Husband's remarkably dependent on His Wife. When she's here, she cooks his meals for him daily (I sometimes wonder if she ever actually gets any work done for him in the office, because all she ever really does is show up, stock the fridge, and start making lunch -- sometimes it takes up to an hour), she also does his dishes when they're done eating. Don't even get me started on the smell when she decides she's going to make some sort of fish dish for lunch.

Well, notice in my last paragraph I said "when she's here"? That's the point: for about a week and a half she hasn't been here. (More on that later -- foreshadowing!) And when she's not here, he doesn't seem to realize that his indentured servant isn't there to wipe his ass for him. Translation: he acts as if there's still someone around to clean up his crap.

The other day he came up with a lunch of some sort. (Don't ask me how.) It must have been a decent lunch, because he used some 4 dishes/bowls in the process. When he was done eating, where do you think it all ended up? In the sink.

For hours.

He clearly had no intention of washing it. His Wife usually does the dishes. I really think he had completely forgotten that with the Wife gone, it really necessarily had to be up to him wash his own damn dirty dishes. He pays to sublet space, not for maid service.

(Eventually, out of sheer frustration, my office manager washed his crap.)

But what really took the cake was today. As I was walking into the kitchen, Husband was in there getting ready to do something or another. We all heard something fall -- it was so loud my colleagues in their offices down the hall heard it. I was touching nothing at the time and was probably some three feet away from the nearest surface.

He looked at me, and gestured/pointed at what just happened. "Uh, yeah, I guess something fell." And then he went about his business.

I was so dumbstruck I couldn't even speak, although the first thought I had was along the lines of "Uh, yeah, we heard that." My second thought was, "Yes, well, fucking pick it up then, motherfucker!"

Seriously, though, how does one actually survive into relatively old age not knowing such basic rules as "if you drop it, pick it up"? This is particularly bizarre when you have learned the rule that if it falls, it should be picked up. Clearly the "who should do that" part was totally missing from the lesson.

<><><>

Meanwhile, The Wife is gone without a trace. I honestly can't even remember when she was last in the office.

It should be noted that Husband and Wife are not Ward and June Cleaver. Husband (it is alleged) cheats on Wife rather flagrantly. Wife can't divorce him because, well (according to her), it's just not something Chinese people do. (Never mind that she is actually Husband's second wife.) If Husband had his druthers, she would be out on her ass and he'd be with Hot Mistress. Don't ask me why, but that's not happened, and instead they all maintain some strange detente.

Wife left the office one evening and, I'm told, hasn't returned home since. I don't know where she's staying, nor do I know what she's up to. But the rumor continues: she hasn't heard from Husband at all since her unexplained departure.

So now she's trying to use my workmates to play mindgames. Apparently she has called the office now to recruit my colleagues into this bullshit: "Hi, it's me. Don't tell him I'm calling. I haven't seen or talked to him in over a week, and he hasn't made any attempt to call me. If you get a chance, you should ask him, 'Hey, where's Wife?'"

I, for one, know that no one in my office is so overflowing with spare time that they're willing to inject themselves into this stupid domestic cat and mouse game.

<><><>

Seriously, some of these people need to grow spines and shut the fuck up. If I had my druthers (that's twice in one post!), I think I'd boot both of them from our suite already.

A Beginning, and an End

A very dear and close friend of mine got married this weekend. The ceremony was charming and wonderful, and I couldn't be happier for her and her new husband and family.

And yet somehow I'm feeling a profound sense of sadness. My brain tells me I'm being totally stupid in that regard. But we all know brains don't always have the last say on these things.

She'd been seeing this guy for almost two years now anyway, so it's not like he just swooped in and swept her off of her feet. Indeed, truth be told, she's been exceptionally good at keeping her pre- and post-boyfriend lives pretty consistent, so it's not like she suddenly spent all her time with her new man and stopped ever calling me (as I understand happens frequently).

And I know that the truth of the matter is things probably won't change now that she's married either. I am confident that she will make every effort to continue to get together with me and our other friends -- with or without her husband -- on a somewhat regular basis, and that we will remain very, very close friends even after the marriage.

But another part of me still can't help making a huge deal of what a significant change this is. I mean, it's huge. It doesn't have to be, but it just is. She's got a whole new family now, and from what I can tell they're a pretty cool bunch of folks, most of whom live around the area. Will she start having to divide her time up between Her Friends and The Husband's Friends? (I realize they'll be "Their Friends," but truly it's somewhat inevitable to remember which people were in which spouse's life before The Marriage.

It's the stuff of advice columns and at least one real life friend: people get married, then suddenly their social lives suffer a substantial hit. One other woman we know moved from the city to a 'burb after she got married, so our invitations to join us in the city for anything are usually met with polite regrets. Her social schedule is frequently spent with her husband's friends and family, and her time with the friends she had before the wedding have been curtailed dramatically.

I hope this won't happen with us. I'm confident that it won't happen with us.

But those tiny shreds of doubt are still there.

I suppose all that's left now is that I have to deal with it, and take whatever happens as it comes. It's been a good long run... and there will still be good times to be had.

And Here I Thought I Was Being All Slick.

I love my job. I do. (I had to get that out of the way early.)

That being said, I did have a job interview this week for a position that sounds fun, challenging (substantively) and, most importantly, could represent a HUGE pay increase for me. Let's face it, the day to day litigation schedule I get at my current job can be a strain; I'm not generally happy in wholly adversarial relationship, either professionally or personally.

So I had an interview last week.



Of course, I didn't tell my current boss about this interview. I figure I'll wait until it becomes somewhere closer to concrete. No sense stirring up the hornet's nest until it becomes closer to becoming a reality.

What I did do, though, was basically just sua sponte* took a half day off from work on Tuesday. Just plopped it on the calendar: "Dennis! is out of the office from 2:00 on." Didn't explain it to anyone. Figured no one would ask.

And usually no one does. Because usually it's for things like doctor's appointments, etc., and I'm glad my colleagues are generally rather cognizant of being too nosy about specifics of doctor's appointments. "What's wrong with you? Why are you seeing a doctor for three hours?" is not something I'll ever imagine them asking. (This is a good thing because the one time I decided to seek talk therapy for an issue I was having -- thankfully it only lasted something like 4 sessions -- it looked strange that I kept booking doctor's appointments on a regular basis at lunch.)

On the day of my interview, my boss and one assistant went out for lunch. I reminded them that they wouldn't see me when they got back, and that I'd see them tomorrow. Then, as I made my way out (thankfully I live close to work, so I went home to change into a suit then hitched a cab), I told my other colleague that I was gone for the day and that I "had something to do."

I thought I had handled it well, and I was being effectively evasive without raising too many eyebrows.

I may have been wrong.

I had asked my office assistant to order more business cards for me recently, as I was down to the last few in my box. The day after my interview, she came to my office. "So, I have a weird question," she started. "Do I still need to order business cards for you?"

"What?" I asked.

"Well, you ran out of here all secretive yesterday, I figured maybe you went on a job interview or something."

Damn! Busted.

"Ha!" I laughed. Without explicitly denying that I had been on an interview, I just said, "Just go ahead and order me the cards." (Internally, I'm thinking that if I do get this new job, I can just reimburse them for these cards.)

I really hope my other colleagues didn't get this thought in their heads too. I feel like I'm lying to them by not telling them about the opportunity, but then again I also don't want to get my hopes to high. I've been down this road before: literally three years ago I told my boss I was getting sick of litigation and that I was going to start looking for a new job -- and yet I'm still here. Strange how hard it's been.

Anyway. All I have left to say is: Wish me luck. Second round callbacks are sometime in the next few weeks.




* I know you're impressed by my random injection of a Latin phrase in here. You are, you know it, admit it.

What a Drag

Tonight was a blast. Hit up the Annual High Heel Race on 17th Street with a few friends. What a fun night! Not too much to say other than that, so here are a random spattering of photos from the evening.

Most of the photos from before the race started are really bad because there was pretty much no light on the street and the flash wasn't remotely powerful enough to help me out.


I just like the composition on this one.



Nice ass.



The Washington Monument guy.



Ugly Betty.



You can't see it, but this salt bottle has legs. Of all my friends (and the people around me), I was the first one to figure out just what this costume meant. 'Cause I'm smart like that.



This is a very elaborate headdress. I was trying to get a shot of the guy along with the headdress, but he moved.


?


Gorgeous.


Not sure what this was.


Judy Jetson (we think).


Good times, good times. My friend Laura wants me to be in the race next year. I might actually consider it.

It's a Small World After All

I am often amazed at how small the world can be sometimes. Sometimes this is a good thing; more often, it's a somewhat awkward thing; from time to unfortunate time, it's a metaphorical herpes outbreak that just won't go away.

<><><>

Picture this, Washington, 1999. I'm in my mid-20s and in what I now realize to be the prime of my life. I have long come out of the closet and am comfortable with having gay friends and frequenting gay venues.

Meeting gay people is difficult for me, mostly because meeting people in general is difficult for me. I'm not naturally outgoing, and making lifelong friends with guys who just happen to be standing next to me in a bar just never seems to click for me. So in whatever diverse ways I meet people (usually on line or through friends), I end up developing several small networks for friends, none of whom I have ever introduced to the other.

And for (relatively) good reason: in the context that I meet these people, I am a different person at different times. Sometimes I feel like a social chameleon: I can be a party animal with one set of friends, and the quiet, brunch-and-International Coffee kinda guy with another group of friends. I can be pretty comfortable in both worlds. I think that as a result I developed several sets of friends, each one catering to one of my moods. Call me Sybil. "I ain't no slut!"

One night, I and some of my friends decided we were going to hit Nation, the warehouse dance club which was such a hit among The Gays in the '90s. I was looking forward to dancing, hanging out, staying up to all hours with this crew of friends...

... and as we were in the bar area waiting for the main dance hall to open, I bumped into another, complete distinct, set of friends. "Hi!" we greeted each other happily. I felt so popular, knowing so many people without even planning it that way.

Being the polite guy that I am, I (however grudgingly) introduced my one set of friends to the other): "Blah Blah, this is Blah Blah."

And, of course, they already knew each other. In fact, they were pretty good friends.

Here I was, thinking that I had given myself so many different options for my own personal gay posse, only to realize that really I was just cherry-picking from the same large group of friends.

<><><>

On Thanksgiving Weekend of 2004, I visited some friends from high school who have now moved to Seattle. Joining us was C.W.T., another high school friend. Sometime during the course of that weekend, C.W.T. -- who until then I had considered a friend, if only one who made cameo appearances in the screenplay of my life -- referred to me as "the most superficial person [he] know[s]," in absolute seriousness. In fact, when I made clear how taken aback I was at the characterization, he took pains to defend it.

I reflected on the situation for a long time after it happened, and I decided that I didn't want to remain friends with C.W.T. any longer. I was, and am, perfectly comfortable with the decision to voluntarily remove myself from the life of someone who thinks so little of me. I generally don't think of him much anymore. Were I to visit the metropolis that he lives in, I would not really be inclined to look him up.

We take you now to Provincetown, July 2007. I am standing outside of the Paramount Video bar with my friends trying to figure out our plans for evening when I feel a tap on my shoulder. Turning around, I find that the finger belongs to none other than C.W.T.

How, oh how, is it that of all the times and places for us to end up vacationing, we end up vacationing in the same place at the same time? Oh strange Fate!

We exchanged various pleasantries -- oh everything's good, I'm having a great vacation, there are my friends, we're going to go find more drinks now, bye! -- and I departed the scene. C.W.T. suggested that we catch up, but I definitely knew we would be doing no such thing, not if I could help it.

I flash you ahead now again to the events of these past two weeks. I had been itching to go see a play, so I contacted my friend David, with whom I have developed a theater-buddy relationship. It had been a while, so I just sent him an email rather than bug him on the phone.

He was too busy to respond to my email promptly (my bad anyway), but when he did, he included this P.S.:

P.S. I met two friends and former classmates of yours in New York
recently. One was Blah Blah,* who has been a friend of mine for years; the other was another gay Asian guy who was a classmate of yours (but I'm blanking on his name right now).

* It's shocking how many friends I have named Blah Blah. It's quite a common name. Sometimes I'm surprised I can tell them apart.

Knowing this Blah Blah as I do, there is no doubt in my mind that David is referring to C.W.T.

I feel like my world is becoming smaller and smaller. My worlds are colliding, and it scares me.

<><><>

It is, indeed, a small world after all. And now that damn song is going to be stuck in your head for the next 12 hours. Ha ha!

Wherein I Turn Strangely Catty About a Topic on Which I Know Nothing

Dear Fellow Metro Traveller Who Happens to be Waiting Next to Me the Platform This Evening:

OH HONEY. Those pants are atrocious. I mean, really. Is that flannel? Whatever the material is, it most certainly doesn't look comfortable. More importantly, though -- the stripes. What. The. Hell. Multicolor thin vertical stripes all the down the leg? Did I blink and miss my trip back to the 70s? Because if I have, it's terribly unfair that I somehow missed my opportunity to drop acid to see that. If I'm going to be subjected to those colors, I kinda want to be on a mind trip when it happens.

But wait... are those SNEAKERS? RED sneakers? Woah, those pants don't look good to begin with, and you pair them with THAT? They're not even remotely stylish! Ugh. Oh Lord I wish I could take a picture, but my phone has horrible resolution and the lighting in here sucks. It would be horribly rude of me to try to use an actual camera camera.

But... well, wow.

At least, I suppose, your pants (and shoes) aren't half as bad as this guy I snapped a shot of in Amsterdam last May.



Horrific. You lose a sense for it from the back, but take my word for it; they looked HIDEOUS from the front.

A&F Got Pwned!

Okay, I'm not a huge fan of Abercrombie and Fitch to begin with -- it's pretty body fascist, in my opinion.

But apparently in the old-school style of Flash Mobbing, a group called Improv Everywhere put together a little prank on the A&F store in NYC.





Sorry about all the random video posts lately. But come on, it's some funny stuff.

Oh, and hat tip to QueerClick [NSFW!].

Uh... No.

My office rents out part of our office space to a solo practitioner and his assistant (who's also his wife). They're this older Chinese couple, and the woman has basically taken to treating me like a surrogate son because she feels bad that I'm so far removed from my own Chinese family. From time to time she brings me some leftover food, either stuff she's made or stuff they had at some restaurant. She's very traditional Chinese.

One afternoon, my office was having lunch in the conference room when she wandered by. I had made a rather large recipe of pasta and vegetables the night before, so we were all eating my food which I had shared with the others.

"So what are you eating?" Chinese Lady asked.

"It's pasta with vegetables. Dennis! made it," one of my colleagues told her. We have a makeshift kitchen in the office (consisting of a rather large toaster oven and a microwave) so oftentimes there are rather impressive cooking projects going on for lunch. Even salads are a big production sometimes. I usually buy my food, but sometimes I bring leftovers.

"You should cook more often!" Chinese Lady tells me. "See, that looks good!"

"I know, but it's hard when you're single," I tell her.

Chinese Lady stopped for a while... then piped up again: "You know what you need? You need a girlfriend to cook for you." Have I mentioned that she makes her husband his lunch every day?

My colleagues and I each looked up and kinda chortled. Really, how does one respond to something like that tactfully?

Have I mentioned how traditional this woman is? On top of that, she's very religious; her church creates a large part of her social life. Once I remember a number of us sitting around at lunch chatting and the subject veered to same-sex marriage. "What's your opinion?" my boss asked her. I think she was caught off guard, because the first things out of her mouth were words to the effect of how "those people" are "sick." (She then slightly changed her wording but it was clear what her position was on the subject.)

The conversation just got more bizarre after that: You could almost see the light bulb go "ding!" over her head as she suddenly said, "Oh! I know! You should meet my niece! She's in New York now, but I think she's coming down to visit!"

I couldn't hold it back. Almost immediately after she finished, I responded: "Uh, NO."

She persisted though. I'll give her her perseverance. "No pressure, really. Just a relaxed evening. We'll all go to dinner. Really it's just you guys meeting each other."

My boss tried valiantly to extricate me. "I think Dennis! is really quite the happy free-wheeling bachelor...."

And yet she insisted that it would just be dinner, no big deal, no pressure, just a fun night out. She insisted that I give her my cell phone number so that she could set it up.

That was about two weeks ago. I thought it had all blown over, but apparently he niece is coming into town this weekend and she wants me to join them for dinner.

Short of telling her that I'd rather stick an iodine-dipped dinner fork in my eye, I can't imagine politely declining for no reason.

So I'm going to tell her I already have weekend plans. Maybe I'll be going out of town.

To New York.

Color Me Skeptical.

Today's WaPo proclaims:

The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq.

"Devastating" and "irreversible" blows? How convenient, given that public support for our occupation of Iraq has steadily declined for months now. Someone somewhere seems to have decided that the American public needs to be fed some good news out of Iraq as the casualties mount and the stagnation of any progress continues. So they decided to tell us that Al-Qaeda is "crippled."

This strikes me as a demure version of "Mission Accomplished." Instead of a press conference with a huge banner, they'll just let the headlines do the work.



I, for one, am skeptical. With more and more of our citizens coming home in flag-draped coffins, I really don't think the resilient terrorist network has really been "irreversibly" "crippled."

Hand Job

Oh my.

SNL on Craig

I'm stealing this from Scott-O-Rama.



My fave lines:

- "You opposed gay marriage. What, do you think marriage takes the sizzle out of it? Really. Or are you just afraid that if gay marriage is legalized there will be fewer single gay guys trying to have sex in airport bathrooms? Really!"

- "So, in conclusion: You're gay, but a married Republican, you're going to vote for anti-gay legislation but you'll solicit sex in an airport bathroom. Wow, you really do have a wide stance."

Gallon Challenge

While doing an image search for this post, I came across this site which somehow I just had to share. (I decline to share, however, the links for puke sex-fetish sites.)

The Gallon Challenge is apparently some ritual that involves drinking an entire gallon of milk in one hour (2% or greater, it says, and no chocolate milk allowed), and then trying to keep it down for another hour. They say the "keeping it down" part is well-nigh impossible. Hence, the photos. Lots and lots of photos. Of puke. Lots and lots of puke. Very, very white puke.

I have no idea how long that site's been around, so those poor kids in the photos might be professionals in their late 20s by now, but still.

I can't imagine that much regurgitation is good for your body in any way, but I have to admit, I think I'd laugh my ass off if I were around to watch this.

Sloppy

I submit to you that anyone who actually has a strongly negative opinion of this GWU policy is a serious lush in need of some intervention. "It's just a little puke" is just... not a sentence that should ever be uttered.

**Aside: I did a google search on "puking" to find that picture. Never, ever, ever again.