Oh, if only I ran into this fucker on the street

On Tuesday morning I rang up a customer for the correct price of his drink, despite the fact that he tried to word his order in a way that I would charge him less. (People like that are my least favorite types...and sadly they are pretty abundant.) Well, when I apologetically wouldn't budge on the price (my manager was right next to me!) he left without getting anything.

I found out today he called the corporate line to file a complaint about me. He told them I was very rude and embarrassed him in front of the other people in line. If my manager hadn't been working with me when this occurred, I'm 99% sure I would have been reprimanded and had corrective action taken against me. But since she was there, she backed me up and pointed out his lies. Corporate, however, did not back me up, and told us that we should have basically let him get away with his (flawed) logic.

The difference in his drink price, folks?

Fifty fucking cents.

GTFO.

Morning times!

I'm the kind of person who stresses over many things, but something peculiar has started happening where the more things are completely fucked up behind the counter the more serene I become at the register. It's really quite lovely. A coworker once told me that one of the reasons she loves opening is that you pretty much know what you're walking into and what needs to happen. It's a clean slate, I guess. That may be why I stress over mid-shifts so much - I just don't know what I'll be walking into.

But yeah, this morning was good (for me at least). Also, my manager mentioned me in the weekly store notes, saying that customers come up to her frequently to complement the drinks I have made for them. Weird, I know. I guess they're just trying to get into my pants or something. On that note, we really do get some creepy ass dudes in the store who like to leer and slip inappropriate comments into the normal business conversation. One of my other female coworkers (who is a latina [and this is relevant]) has even had a dude try and kiss her! She also has had some dudes call her "brown sugar." Gah-ross.

T R I V I A and why St John's sucks.

Last night was too much fun. It was around 8:30pm, and John was on his laptop and I was probably on mine, and we had eaten and were doing that thing where one of us is like "what do you want to do tonight, watch a movie?" and the other says "yeah, sure" and then nothing happens.

Then I think I sent Robert a random text and he calls and invites us to join him at the Flying Saucer, because it's trivia night and he and a few guys are going over to play. And without really asking what John wants I'm immediately like "we're so there."

Well, I don't really say things like that, but you get the idea. John was dragging his feet (haha) but we went and had a BLAST. We didn't place, but we scored like three points less than the winning team and got an honorable mention. One of the rounds was "video game trivia" and although there were no FF or Elder Scroll questions, our team collectively shat ourselves and answered everything perfectly. Maybe even too perfectly.

The final round (and the hardest round) was "Euros," and I was really terrified that it would be all about the currency and that the game would fall on my shoulders as the only coin-collector. There were a few non-coin-related questions, but sadly a few were and I had no clue about them. However, one question asked something like "which European country has featured or will feature King Juan Carlos I on a coin?" and I totally knew it was Spain (duh) but an overly-confident teammate (who went to St Johns HS [ew] and happens to be currently going to UT Law) was fucking determined that the answer was Portugal. I really couldn't offer any reasoning besides my gut feeling, and so the group decided to go with Law School Dude. :( It wasn't the difference-maker, but the first thing I did when I went home was pull out my coin collection and find my King Juan Carlos peseta. Sigh.

Last Week

Last week was a weird one. I didn't have to work on Monday, so I was going to go to lunch with a friend and take it easy, but my mom called and told me that my grandmother had died. Everyone thinks that her heart just gave out after 99 years, which I guess I'm inclined to believe as well. The assisted living staff found her in her favorite chair, and since she never pushed any of the call buttons for a nurse she probably went in her sleep.

I still have her birthday invitation on my fridge.

It's kind of funny how even though she was 99, and even though my mom and dad had been giving my brother and I the whole "we need to go and visit for ____ occasion because it could be her last!" for what seemed like the past ten years, no one really seemed ready for it. Nor okay with it. I mean, this is only the second funeral I've experienced, but the entire congregation of people seemed drastically more upset than at the first funeral I ever went to, Dylan's, and he was in his teens and it was much more tragic in that respect. But maybe I'm biased, being that it was the first death in my family, and that I was sitting with and hanging out with all the other family members. By the way, if there were a prize to be won for the weepiest person at that gathering, I would (amazingly) win it. I guess I say amazing because I was definitely not as close to her as many of the other people there.

I think even if I tried I will never be able to forget the image of my grandmother's sister, the last living sibling of that family, walk up to the open casket at the end of the service and just lose it. It required three fully-grown men to lift her from the floor and help her back to a pew.

So I'm still a little bummed about all of the past week's events, but my coworkers and bosses were so nice and helpful when I had to get all of my shifts covered at the last minute, and John was definitely there for me when I needed him.

Excerpt from "The Meaning of Tingo - and other extraordinary words from around the world"

Kicking the Bucket
Other languages have highly inventive euphemisms for the tricky subject of passing on:

nolikt karoti (Latvian) to put down the spoon
colgar los guantes (Spanish, Central America) to hang up the gloves
sucrer les fraises (French) to sugar the strawberries
de hoek omgaan (Dutch) to go around the corner
bater a bota/esticar a perna (Portuguese) to hit the boot or to stretch the leg
avaler son bulletin de naissance (French) to swallow one's birth certificate


I like the fourth and sixth ones the best. The fourth is pretty cute and comforting while the sixth just makes me laugh.

Colossopendium of New, Revolutionary Sex Positions

In another attempt to get my friends interested in Achewood, I am transcribing an article from the Achewood zine Man Why You Even Got to Do a Thing, written by Ed E. Haskell (aka Roast Beef [aka Chris Onstad]).

Stick of Nitroglycerin
As everyone knows, a stick of nitroglycerin is extremely dangerous, likely to explode at the slightest scrape or movement. In this position, the lady treats your "companion" like it could blow up at any moment, and moves extremely slow and careful as you lay on your back and "have wood." It is extremely important that she is nervous, and has shop goggles on. If either of you talks, the other person has to say "ssssh!"

The Sugar Loaf
The man lies on his side under a single white sheet, curled in the fetal position. The sheet is tucked pretty tightly around him. He is in the middle of the bed. When he hears the lady come into the room, he quietly says, "don't you want to examine this sugar loaf?"

The Gammalon
This is the only sex position believed in by the Church of Scientology. It is said to lead to superior offspring. The principle is that by lying on one's back on a large ball or convex mattress, with the man's "companion" being the highest point of the body, only his strongest seed are able to scale the heights. This concept is easily disproven when one considers that seed are always scaling that height whever the dude is on his back, not just when he's on a dome-shaped mattress.

The Stick It To Ya
Not as raunchy or straightforward as it would seem, this position is actually all about the lady. There is almost no literal "sticking" of "it" to anyone. In fact there is no penetration of any kind. This position is bad. It is pretty weird for the couple. In this position, the lady dies and the man if foreced to grapple with the tragedy alone. They may not even be at the same place when she passes. He may hear about it on the phone.

Alamo Updation

I was rereading the post about Alamo shows, and I felt the urge to post that John and I went to see Master Pancake: Pretty Woman and Super Happy Fun Monkey Bash '09.

The former was alright - the latter was absolutely a let-down. Ugh. I was *so* bored towards the end.

But thanks for being a trooper and seeing them with me, "babe".

Order of Events

• I arrived at my parents' house in Houston.
• My brother is playing computer games in the back of the house.
• He asks if he can help me unload my car, and I tell him yeah, after I use the bathroom.
• I exit the bathroom and yell to him to come help me. He says ok.
  
• I start unloading the car.
• I finished unloading the car.
• I move everything inside and my brother, halfway changed into his work uniform, is already making plans to go hang out before work. He asks me if he can help unload the car. I tell him that I finished already. He is surprised.
  
• My brother finishes changing and takes my car to go get sushi with friends and afterwards go to work.

...and now I'm bored. I guess I'll nap until someone gets here.

Laughing so much I'm crying

Man, I got John *so* good.


John: (probably looking at woot.com) Man! I didn't know that they make 64 gig jump drives! That might be nice, to not need an external, and just carry around the jump drive.

Lauren: Hmm, yeah, but I bet it'd get pretty heavy.

John: (looks at me with a terrified face) N.... oh... Whew.

Some kind of resolution?

I've cried so many tears over this, but I've reached the point now where no more can be done. Hopefully the mourning over my (inevitable?) rejection won't be too bad.

I don't know how I didn't keep on top of this

...maybe it was the christmas errands, the traveling, work consuming my mind. I just checked my UT application status and one of the people that agreed to write me a recommendation has still not sent it in, an entire month after UT emailed her requesting it. I reminded this person a few times when my deadline came and went and she still hadn't sent it in (she said something about it being a different format than she expected) and she said she'd submit it right away.

I'm incredibly distraught, terrified, and furious. This person owed me big time, too. I fucking finished almost the entire fucking yearbook after I graduated when all the other seniors dropped the ball. And now I probably won't get in to fucking grad school.

Gran Bambino

Right now John is complaining that his fingers smell like weed. He has theorized that our neighbors must be smoking out right now, and that their smoke must be seeping through our vents...and making a B-line straight for his fingers?

Anyway, tonight John and I saw The Wrestler at the alamo downtown. I was initially excited about this because I've been in desperate need of a new alamo event calendar booklet (I hate using their website; it's so oddly organized) - more to come on that in a sec. However, I really did enjoy the film, probably only because of the main character played by Mickey Rourke, who was fucking awesome in the film. I think I may like wrestling now.

By the way, after seeing all the short trailers for Gran Torino, I doubt another trailer exists that could make me take a film less seriously than I take this one. It almost seems like a spoof trailer. It has this sort of "grr, get off my lawn" *point crooked finger in shape of gun* feel to it. Ridiculous! But it must be captivating *some* slice of humanity since it seems to be selling out everywhere.

Ok, so, the part I've been waiting for - Alamo event calendar. I have the familiar problem of seeing too many good things going on there. Hopefully alamo won't leave me broke!

• Girlie Night: Mean Girls with special cocktails! (13th)
• Anchorman quote-along! (15th, 22nd, & 29th)
• 90's Pop Princess sing-along (also 15th, 22nd, 29th, & Feb 5th)
• Master Pancake: Pretty Woman (16th & 17th)
• Super Happy Fun Monkey Bash (17th & 28th) - yay japanese wackiness!
  
• Master Pancake: The Matrix (23rd & 24th, 30th & 31st, 6th & 7th, 20th & 21st, 27th & 28th)
• Master Pancake: Choose your own movie (25th) - could be good?
• Saturday Morning Cartoon Cereal Party (7th) - this time they're showing Care Bears, Thundercats and She-Ra!
  
• Sickest Fucking Stories (8th) - is it weird that I think this looks interesting?
• Three different valentine feasts! Out of the three, I would go with Annie Hall, but Romeo + Juliet and Casablanca don't sound bad either. However, with each film is a specialized feast, and New York cuisine is a fav of mine.
• Academy Awards: Red Carpet Bash & Feast (22nd) - this looks absolutely amazing.
• Hey Homo!: Top Gun (24th)
• The No Shame sing-along (26th)

See what I mean?! Too many things! There are a few things on here that John isn't too keen about, so hopefully I can find some other people to drag along.

OMG, happy new year, everybody!

I'm boiling inside over this.

"The Bush administration had signaled its intention to issue the measures, which are part of a flurry of regulations it is announcing before President-elect Barack Obama takes office. The new president will be able to undo the regulations, and is virtually certain to, given his previous comments on the issue. But undoing them will be a time-consuming process."

WHAT THE FUCK, BUSH ADMINISTRATION?!

No, I'm not dead!

Hello! I can't believe the last time I wrote it was the post about bison jerky. I haven't written much this month, probably due to work and me spending a good deal of time freaking out over my application to UT.

Now that that's done, I'll be posting more.

Maybe.

Bison Jerky

Yes, I am eating bison jerky right now. Why do you ask?

Co-worker Conversation of the Day!

Female Barista: Hah, my grandmother just mailed me $5 inside a Christmas card! Do you, you know, have one of those grandmothers that like gives you a nickel or a dime and...

Male Barista: No, I just have one of those grandmothers that takes away your trust fund when you come out of the closet.

Me: *Oh-No face!*

Kristen Stewart on the obnoxious Twilight fans

"...“I was like, ‘You guys are celebrating something that has not come true yet. So, you are really retarded and have nothing to do with this creative process and I really don’t want to hear you celebrate in front of me. Get out of here! It’s my responsibility!’”..."

I was encouraged to read this, but I also realized how fucked up it really must be for any young actor/actress to take these fantasy roles and then just get stalked and violated from then on. It wouldn't be too surprising if in the future a good chunk of actors/actresses avoid this kind of role. I hope.

On a better topic, I forgot to mention that while Peter was visiting we all went to see a Swedish film called Let the Right One In. I highly recommend it, because even though it's about a vampire, it's not really a fantasy movie, and I think we all really appreciated the restrained realism in the storytelling and the unique treatment of gore/blood. So, yeah, I also have to recommend it because Swedish is not a language that Americans hear very often, and man, is it worth hearing. I actually laughed really hard at the first lines in the opening scene (specifically they way they say "house") and felt pretty embarrassed because it's a pretty dark, heavy scene. Here's the trailer.

John listens to Enya when the weather changes!

So John was just listening to an irritating song (be sure to listen past 0:26), and it reminded me of a commercial I saw today. In the ad, two dudes are explaining how they buy tickets for the cheap seats at a concert, and then scout out empty seats closer up and move into the pricey sections. You see them do it several times while the camera cuts randomly to the band playing, and I wasn't really paying that close attention to it. But then, the guys get caught by security and kicked out, and credit card info comes up for a card like Citigroup or something, and talks about reward points, etc, and then says hey, if you use our card, you're entered into a drawing to win tickets for three different concerts by Nickelback. So, the entire day, I've been trying to image WHO THE FUCK WOULD WANT THAT PRIZE. It's almost a reason for me to NOT have that card, because I want nothing to do with that band. The marketing researchers that made that choice should resign in shame.

If you hadn't noticed, I'm not really doing much of the whole NaBloPoMo thing anymore. While in Plano for a wedding, it slipped my mind one day and left me forever ineligible. The prizes weren't really my motivation, though. I enjoy using this to keep in touch with my distant friends, and I hoped that by some kind of lead by example thing, I could get my other blogging friends to maybe post more frequently. Anyway, after I realized error I got really angry at myself and ignored my blog for a while. So, let's make a short list of catch-me-up-stuff:

I took the GRE for the second and LAST TIME EVER I HOPE. My score increased, but only in the subject that I wasn't trying to increase, but the overall was higher so I just decided to submit it.

This week I began my training at Starbucks, which I may refer to now on as Sbux, so be prepared. I have yet to actually get behind any register or the bar, but that'll happen soon I'm sure.

Last night John and I were invited to and attended a Q&A with Ian MacKaye at St. Edwards. At first, most people I talk to are like, um, why? Why him there? It was sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Leadership and the MBA in Digital Media Management (to which John is applying) and they invited him because of his work as co-founder and sort-of-president of Dischord Records which has really steered an unique course in how it has remained independent and succesfull. I wasn't that excited about going to this thing, even though yeah, I like Minor Threat and I have seen Fugazi play a few times, but MAN was he fascinating - he reminded me of David Bazan. It concluded after about two hours but I could have listened to him the entire night. Also, the room was an interesting mix of business students and smelly punk kids, all asking a variety of questions. Throughout the entire thing I was wishing that Marion and Jordan were there to hear him, cause I know they would have enjoyed it as well.

Tomorrow my family has scheduled lunch in New Braunfels with my grandfather and his wife. John hasn't met them yet, so it should be a kind of hilarity that only relatives can deliver.

I guess that's all I can remember for now. I'm gonna check out some awesome Disaronno recipies I just heard about. Later.

Sugery Update

Back in September, I wrote about John's hip and a possible osteotomy. Well, this afternoon, we went to Southwestern near downtown Dallas and saw the hip specialist to whom we had been referred. Dr. Podeszwa was much younger than I expected, and not foreign as I had anticipated. He actually was born and raised in Michigan. Anyway, he listened to John, myself, Mr. Warren, and Mrs. Warren, then examened the x-rays we brought, and had John lay down while he manipulated his hip joints.

Obviously, John's left hip joint is little more than a complete joke. Socket? Try dimple. And the ball isn't much of a spherical shape, either. Which makes for a hella complicated osteotomy. Another factor is the strength of the bones comprising John's hip, and Podeszwa actually used the word "whispy" to describe them. But the most important thing, and possibly the most strange, is that since the end of September John has not experienced any more pain (or so he says).

Based on all of that, Podeszwa feared that he might cause more problems than good. He recommended that John go about his life, and, if farther down the road he has another episode of pain, he might go for a total hip replacement. Normally, total replacements are reserved for people 50+ years or so, but because John is a "household ambulator" and not a "community ambulator," (lolz) Podeszwa thinks that would be a good way to go.

In summation, no surgery in the near future (yay!), and John should go back to ambulating a.m.a.p., as, apparently, his left hip cannot get any worse.

On a wildly unrelated note, I'm really bummed about the bans passed in California, Florida, and Arizona. I know that change happens slowly, but I really hope I get to see it sooner rather than later.