wearing someone else's clothes; paying a tidy sum for dinner; my three items

i heard a story from one of the peeps last night.
his girlfriend is from small-town Wisconcin (is there any other kind?), and not high-maintenance. she's doing her PhD residency somewhere in chicago, and it's her first time in the big city for an extended period. she has a wedding to go to, so she wants to go somewhere upscale and get her hair did. she decides to step it up a notch. i doubt she went to toni&guy, but i'm sure it was a salon of similar chic-ness.

brief digression #1: i used to get my hair done @ t&g, before I came to my senses and realized i liked it better short and I didn't have to pay $60 for somebody to do that. hot staff, though. and lots of upscale-salon-extras.

so the girl (we'll call her J) goes to the hair salon. they do a "consult" [accent on first syllable, CON-sult] and then she goes in the back for the wash. on the way, they ask her if she wants to change her top. she's confused. they say, put on a smock while we do your hair. girl says, uhhhh, yeah, okay.

into the changing room she goes. moment of confusion arrives: what does one wear under the smock? surely not just her bra [J is modest, and the smock has a moderately-low neckline]. she sees a generic black top, puts it on under the smock, and heads back out for the rest of the process.

FF 30 minutes. woman (in smock) and staff are raising a ruckus about a missing black top. big ruckus. strong words are used. a frenzied search is underway. it appears that J has appropriated someone's shirt. it was smock-only, after all. uh oh.

this could get awkward. J didn't know she was taking a bus to moral-dilemmaville. she just thought she was getting a haircut.

so, what to do?
a) announce your mistake to entire salon, return the top mid-haircut, and look like a complete and utter jackass? or ...

b) shrink down in chair, pull smock up a little higher, and hope no one sees you in the top that you borrowed from somebody else?

our girl J went for option b, and stealthily changed back into her orig. shirt when she re-entered the changing room, post haircut. she snuck the "borrowed" shirt between some of the smocks, paid for her new 'do, and fled the salon, never to return.
so that happened.
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speaking of upscale, I spent $160 on a dinner date last night. it wasn't even a special occasion. just a regular let's-get-dinner. are you kidding me? who does that? i guess I do. i can't blame the girl. I picked the place. and i'm not complaining about the food, the company, or any of that. all of it was great. but $160? for two people? in orange county? next time I'll just go to nobu.

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and finally, have you seen my three items? i mean it. i want my three items.
i'm not asking for much. just my three items.

can I get fries with that?

sometimes a friend shares something with you and you laugh. and you want to tell others. but after they share it, they take away that opportunity to share it with others. they say, that's your eyes only. and you tell them you ok.

but then you realize that it is posted on youtube, so any person can search and find it on their own. it's available to the public. no reason not to get the word out.
after all, people already know. i'm just commenting on something that exists already. posted by somebody else.

briefly, this is a 10 second video clip taken at 3 in the morning as some friends roll through the drive-thru at jack in the box. note how the guy w/ long hair is virtually passed out, but when they ask for his order, he livens right up, and makes a specific request. you might have to watch it a couple times to see the whole thing unfold.
he ended up going home alone, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

i had so many superb headlines for this post. here are a few:

• they always f you at the drive-thru
• have it your way
• want cheese on that?
• what about the special sauce?
  
• hot or mild?
  

you get the idea.
thanks for reading.

measuring your milestones: factors of 5 and 10; plus, DAY DRINKING IS GOOD FOR YOU (but not your liver)

busy weekend. heck, busy week. this is the 150th-ish post on blogger for GJAW (not to be confused w/ moosejaw). i think measuring milestones is arbitrary; we have 10 fingers and toes and we seem to think that 10 year anniversaries are somehow more noteworthy than 9 or 11. if we lived in the simpson world w/ 3 fingers and a thumb, we would have big parties for the 4th anniversary of something, the 8th, the 16th, etc. get it? I don't mean to get all existential on you.

DAY DRINKING and sunday funday: speaking of appreciating what you have, I was out of town for a couple weeks. I came home and decided to celebrate the OC in all it's shallow glory by going to Kantina for beers and lunch. The kantina is what makes the oc lame and awesome at the same time: ridiculously hot waitstaff, cheesy plastic people, and pretensiousness in abundance. (it reminds me a little bit of south beach, without all the hot latin girls.) sometimes you just have to bathe in it. then we went to mutts to drink schooners. good times. and a great way to spend an afternoon. big ups to my peeps for keeping me company.
thanks for reading.

sensitive sounds for sensitive ears - music reviews that you can use!

[no photo again - i'm out of town] sometimes you go places and see things that really don't turn out as advertised. whatever. you can always go back and give it another chance. unless you can't. but I digress...

when you get back, if you're tired of being bumped into by greasy yippies and people that are "still bummed, like totally," that Phish broke up, you can get yourself some good old-fashioned pop music, and it'll settle you right down. me, I opted for a superb piece of cheese from Rise Against (angst and upset hasn't sounded this good since The Offspring broke out on Epitaph 12 years ago), and a cd of classics from the Pogues.

you can't go wrong with either one. and it's nice to know that no matter how hard the guys from Rise Against try, they'll never blow themselves up like the oral hygiene advert "before treatment" poster boy Shane McGowan. [jay-sus, son, get those teeth looked at by a professional, enh?]

happy listening.

magnum kizzee, you had me at hello

[no picture - accessing blogger via email portal] who doesn't get spammed like crazy at their various email addresses?
I have 3 gmail accounts and 2 yahoo accounts, all in an effort to reduce the junkmail that hits my inbox every day. unfortunately I threw my main gmail under the bus when I used it as a contact for my south american travel arrangements. as a result, i'm now impotent, overweight, and (how to put this delicately?) under-endowed in english, spanish, and portugese. all at the same time. who knew? [rhetorical device there; please do not answer.]

so when an invitation to INTENSIFY MENTAL ALERTNESS AND CONCENTRATION!!!!! came in with the name "magnum kizzee", i was intrigued. who was this magnum, this kizzee? could they really INTENSIFY MENTAL ALERTNESS?!!?!? they sent me a website and everything. magnum kizzee, sweet sweetness, could you be the one?

it turns out he/she is just whoring human growth hormone. and they don't exist after all. but they did close the spam w/ a nice zen koan / semi-haiku, which I reproduce here:
to witness it.
he said. That none of us are.
as disturbed their busy

indeed, magnum kizzee. indeed.

austin city whatever

[no photo - blogger is letting me down] hard to know how to describe my experience in Austin, TX. hard to know because i didn't really experience much of a real austin.
note to self: if you're going to check out a town, don't go on a weekend when it fills up with yahoos from somewhere else. all the locals hid at home or fled the city, so it was either stay at the festival all day or walk around an empty town.

the festival was not really my thing. some of the bands/musicians i saw were good (Tristan Prettyman and Nickel Creek) and others were not (The Shins). i couldn't make it to see gnarls barkley. it was too hectic over there. in general, the crowd sucked. O.A.R. (aka DMB for anyone that graduated high school after 2000) didn't play the festival, but their fans were well represented. sweet, bro.

another drawback to going on ACL weekend: places that were normally beautiful space were full of yahoo hippies. the parks and rivers in the town are very nice, but they were overrun.

the final straw: it took 12 hours to get home. the highlight was a 6 hour runway chill sesh in Austin, waiting to take off. we were stuck on the plane the whole time. it was a testament to my buddy Dave's travel companionship that we didn't get arrested.

overall, it was not a good weekend. very disappointing to go all that way (and spend all that money) and not see the town everyone I know raves about.

busy, just imagine I wrote a whole post about some bands at ACL

i'm way past posting an entire entry on the austin city limits festival.

my favorite band of the moment is not going to be there, but i figure i'll be able to find something else I like in the 130 bands that are performing. and heck, if austin is cool, i might move there.

good times.
love you, and thanks for reading.

ps. I think gnarls barkley is played out, but the fact that they only appear in costume, and that they are constantly changing the costume, is moderately clever. i'm a big fan of the fear and loathing costume set, as well as the costumes from the Big Lebowski. that's good work.

they are playing the festival, so I think i'm gonna try and check it out if it's not too crowded. they do go on famously late, so i won't be on time.

hip hop for AM radio?

ahh, so much going on right now. getting ready to put the house on the market. that has hassle written all over it. plus i got some great blog-worthy topics from the peeps (Zach- aka doosh, and also Brian) a couple weeks ago but never got around to addressing them. one was an article about the guy that created that sweet sculpture of britney spears giving birth on a bearskin rug. I already spent some time discussing that little gem. turns out the guy created a nude bust of Hilary Rodham Clinton. yeah. the guy creating them has his own wikipedia page. eesh. anyway, it's been so long since this eejit did the clinton work that he's now started on his new project: a life size sculpture of an angelina jolie / brad pitt / jennifer aniston threesome. look it up if you don't believe me. (i can't google "threesome" w/o setting off some red flags on the company search engine.)

for the record, it looks like he's giving Hilary a lot of credit, if you know what I mean. and I think you do.

unrelated: that gay fop elton john is serious about recording a hip hop album. what the hell that guy is thinking I don't know. last I checked there weren't any white, british, 59 year old rap artists. maybe it's a niche that just hasn't been filled yet. maybe elton john is a dumbass. smart money is on the latter.

and finally, today's semi-funny item of disinterest: when I mention it's too expensive, I can't afford the OC, I am selling my house and moving somewhere else, people say, "do you have any friends there? are you sure you want to move?"

after i get asked that question 10 or 12 times it is hard not to shout DID YOU NOT HEAR ME JUST SAY IT'S TOO FUCKING EXPENSIVE IN ORANGE COUNTY!?!? Because I have a lot of friends in the oc, and that isn't making it more affordable.

okay then. thanks for reading.
next post will be an ACL preview. get excited.

a stingray? are you kidding?

I lost $50 in a bet this weekend. I heard the croc hunter was dead and I said it was an internet hoax. then I put $50 on it (I had had a few drinks). no way that guy was dead. turns out I was a wee bit wrong.

i wrote a whole post about the croc hunter and how he died and that sucked and blah blah. then i realized it was redundant and all I really add to the whole deal is:

bummer.

which is pretty much the only thing I had to add to my college ex-gf's story about getting divorced and starting over.

addendum to divorce post down below:
wanted to make it clear the girl was not interested in any sort of romantic thing w/ me. nothing like that. it was an attempt to re-connect emotionally w/ something that she remembered in a positive way. except it was FOURTEEN YEARS AGO. and we're not talking about boring years where nothing much happens. we're talking, late adolescence to adulthood (read: later adolescence). damn.
okay then.

dispatch from the north: reunion?

greetings from NorCal. (hence no picture.)
hope you had a good labor day weekend.

mine was good. I had a very interesting reunion with the first girl I ever loved. you know the crazy, head-over-heels-love from when you were still an impressionable youth? i dunno, maybe it still happens to you. anyway, I hadn't seen, or heard from her, in many years, but she called and said she was passing through the OC, and did I have time for coffee? i'm not a coffee drinker, but as it happened I was very not busy. so I said sure, I'll meet you when you get here and we can catch up. last I heard she was married to some guy from school, happy as clams. umm, yeah... now for some backstory

our relationship ended badly because she cheated on me, left me for another guy. it was a bad deal. took me a while to recover. I was 18. these things happen.

so we meet for coffee. turns out she eventually married the guy from school. it's not working out. she's going through a divorce, has two kids, hasn't worked for 6 years. so now she has to find a job, a place to live, deal w/ joint custody, go through divorce proceedings w/ a bitter ex-husband, and she loses most (if not all) of the people in her social sphere. and she's single for the first time in 10 years. talk about a setback. she tells me all this and all I can say is, ummmm, i was dating a girl and now i'm not.

I really wanted to know why it didn't work out. depends who you ask, I guess. she says he changed. he probably says she didn't change. but all of a sudden your life turns upside down, and then what do you do? I guess you start over, call the last guy you remember that really loved you.
ouch.

thanks for reading.

red flags redux: addendum

this one was brought to my attention by a friend yesterday, re: the red flags post.
so here you are:

• if you're on myspace, and she's on myspace, and you're dating, and you never get around to "friending" each other - it's prolly not going to work out. prolly.
  

just something to be aware of, my cyberspace peeps.

in response to requests for specific examples of myspace awfulness, I don't feel comfortable doing that. sometimes, people make it into the blog and they take it the wrong way. I don't want to name any names, but you get the idea.

love you.