My Hands Are Always Coldest

I spent the better part of tonight bouncing a rubber eye on a table in a Mexican restaurant.



I should probably put this sentence into context.

Earlier tonight, I went out to a Mexican restaurant for a friend's birthday dinner. I'd been looking forward to the dinner for a few days now. It was going to be fun, I said. I was wrong.



Well, not entirely.



The first part of the night started off, for me at least, fairly poorly. I arrived at the restaurant to discover that, 1) there were about 6 other people at the dinner, 2) I didn't even know three of them, and 3) they all knew each other very well. So, for about the first half hour, I was on social autopilot, sitting in my chair and smiling vacantly, everyone chatting and catching up aound me. I think I ate about a pound of tortilla chips during that time. I'm not quite sure. This is Standard Operating Procedure for me when I'm in uncomfortable situations; be quiet, don't say anything stupid, and smile pretty for the other people. Things didn't get much better when I said, "You know, I had no idea Hugh Jackman was Australian", and was greeted by blanks stares. Apparently, a lot fewer people know who Hugh Jackman is than I thought. I was pretty quiet after that.



Things got better after dinner, though, as we paid for our meals and immedietly piled into what looked like a 15 year old station wagon, whose lights would flicker ominously every time it went over something larger than a baseball. We then proceeded to Cookout, where one of the people hanging on for dear life in the car's trunk had to open it, walk up to the talk box, and yell in our orders. We got seven milkshakes. They tend to taste better when drunk with friends.



So, here we are, seven people crammed into a station wagon, driving around downtown Durham, drinking milkshakes, listening to Blink-182 at a level that probably isn't good for human eardrums. We want to stop some place. We choose an abandoned field. What started off as a group of teenagers eating Mexican food in a renovated tobacco warehouse has now turned into seven kids standing in a circle in the middle of an abandoned field, freezing their collective asses off, drinking milkshakes, loudly reminscing about the times they've been heavily medicated, and looking extremely suspicious to anyone who passed by. I was talking more by then. Still wasn't fully comfertable, but I was getting there.



We drove around a few parking lots for about half an hour, laughing hysterically as two of us climbed on top of the car and rode it like the world's only Japanese-made racehorse. Eventually things wound down; one of the guys had to leave to go mediate an impromptu party that was being thrown at his house, and the rest were dropped off at their various cars, till it was just me, the bithday girl, and her best friend. She drove me home, and I was silent. I think they thought it was because I was tired; in reality, it's because I had no idea what to say. I wanted to talk, to say something funny and make them laugh, to break this shell around me, but I couldn't. Whenever I did, I stumbled over my words, and they came halting and shy. I hated it. It was alright, though; they were people I could feel relatively comfertable in silence around. When she dropped me off, and the two of them smiled and said good bye and thanks for coming, I thought to myself that it had been a good night. Maybe not as good as I had wanted it to be. But not too bad at all.



On the flip side, though, its left me feeling kinda lonely. It seems that everyone I know is happily dating someone else, or in the process of kindling some sweet romantic relationship. The birthday girl had started one with one of the invitees, a friend of mine from camp. I had absolutely no idea about this, which left me a bit suprised when he gave her a slow, deep kiss before he left for his car. All I can do in those situations is smile a bit bigger and feel happy for them. I can't talk to them about romantic issues. Truth be told, I've never had any. I guess there's some truth to that old saying that, when you're single, all you see are couples, and when you're dating, all you see are whores.

I'm not really sure why I wrote this.

She tastes like the real thing

Aaaaah!! He's Only Human!!

Alright, so I've been watching the news a bit over the past few days, and I'm getting a bit annoyed at this whole "First Hundred Days" thing about Obama. Apparently, Obama s supposed to waltz into the Oval Office and in that enclosed space, perform some kind of alchemaic ritual that, within a hundred days of its institution, will rid the world of all its problems. At least, that's what the pundits seem to think.

Seriously?

Its a ludicrous idea. Honestly, did group of newsmen just sit down and say "Hey, we know the new president has the weight of the free world on his shoulders, so lets give the impression that he only has a hundred days to fix everything! Yeah! Lets make him feel anxious and rushed about his policies! What a great idea!" These same newsmen then went and hit themselves in the head with a hammer for 30 minutes straight while wailing the Oscar Meyer jingle.

For goodness sake, the man has over a thousand days in office to fix and perfect things. A thousand days. And we're expecting him to rework the economy, stabilize the job markets, bring two wars to their close, cut our dependence on foreign fuel, and capture that pesky Osama bin Laden in a hundred. Hell, most of us haven't accomplished anything really worthwhile in a hundred days, yet here we are waiting for Obama to march into Wall Street and cast the wicked moneylenders out of his Father's house. Seriously, what did you do the last hundred days? Make an A in chemistry? Roof your house? Try balancing a 13 trillion dollar budget and guiding the world's most powerful military through two separate wars. Then talk to me.

He's not Jesus guys. He's a newly elected wartime president, at a pretty shitty time in the nation's history. Believe me, I was up there with the Barack 'n Roll's and the Obamanos!'s, but that was just to get him elected. I knew he wasn't going to break down the door to Congress and shout "Alright motherfuckahs! Let's legislate!". It's not the easy. There's checks and balances, and a little thing called the Constitution he has to check with now and again. I know he's going to get it done. But you can't rush perfection.

So lets cut him some slack, ok? Ok.

On a completely unrelated note, I was working my lower body at the gym earlier today, and now it feels like someone took a flaming jackhammer to my calves. Seriously, its like I have fucking polio. When I'm walking up the stairs, I keep thinking "Wow, FDR had to go through this every single day. It must have sucked to be him. I mean, if he wasn't preseident and all. Cause that part was pretty sweet."

Just wanted to get that out there.

Johnny's in the basement, mixin up the medicine, I'm on the pavement, thinkin bout the government.