10/31/2005 - 7:32 p.m. | i heard dogs barking

I am trying to get back to steady solid writing habits. Considering how little I actually do with myself, it would seem fairly easy, but lord� how I love to do little� and keep it that way. Sure, I have all sorts of hours during the day, but there are �Star Trek� episodes to watch, and at night I don�t have any books to read or homework to do or anything to watch, but somehow I just piss that time away as well. Well, it ends here! I am getting some accomplishments done! If not in the literal sense (grades, money, fame), at least in the sense that I have added another 30 pages to the thick tome that is my life.

Therefore, only a day after the day itself occurred, I am writing about the events of that day! Glorious, you know? I had a test in Pop Culture and despite falling asleep while reading the material, I think I did pretty fucking awesome. And lord, that material. Clearly the professor is some sort of psychotic feminist. I was reading about feminism once, and it said there were two types. There was the one who wanted there to be absolutely no difference in the way men and women are treated (e.g. women would not be allowed any leeway for girl code, smaller muscles, etc.), and then there was one where women would be equal in a more rational sense (wherein they would have equal rights and treatment, but a respect for the difference between genders). Professor Fatty is clearly from a new group, the psychotic feminists, who make it a point to hunt down miniscule things to be pissed off at. I�m talking microscope and tweezer shit here, people. For instance, a lot of the articles had to do with reality TV. So, this one pissed off person wrote this whole thing about �Queer Eye for the Straight Guy� and how it should not be called �queer� eye because it was only representing the male side of homosexuality. If anything, they should either put some dykes on there or call it �gay eye.� Yes, I�m sure the producers got down there with that title just to offend you, to piss you the fuck off. They certainly didn�t pick one title just because it sounded better. No, that�s just silly. They were out to offend the lesbians, they were!

And then, there was talk of �Survivor� and how it fetishized female bodies. Women were wearing bikinis, and those dickhead camera men filmed them! If anything, every female cast member should have been replaced in editing with a cutout of Margaret Thatcher or Susan B. Anthony. And then, this one female cast member got a tick stuck on her ass, and they showed them removing it, which meant all sorts of gratuitous zooms on her tushy parts. Man alive, to show the area of interest! If anything, they should have showed her front side��� wait a minute! There are offending parts up there, too! You women have unmentionables all over the damn place! Where can we film? The mouth? No, that could fit a delectable penis! Eyes! The window to the SOUL? The most personal part of any woman! HARDLY!

I forget what I was going with this, but basically, women are stupid.

Ooh, I forgot my damn notes again! Uh, let�s see� it was pretty much the same useless day as always. �Star Trek� episodes and little else besides. I hadn�t showered since Friday at this point, and I went running, so my body odor was actually palpable by then.

Spritz hired me for five dollars. It does not make him cheap; it makes me very, very poor. Anyway, he had an interview at some sham of a company, EnginePro, but had no idea of what they actually did or made. Their website was a scientologist�s dream, filled with pages and pages of words that arguably could make you sound very intelligent and daunting. That is, if you were a stupid twat and believed that jargon (�INNERCONFIDENCE�) and incomprehensibly long sentences made one smart. Anyway, he could make neither head nor tail of this and could not make the info session, so I was sent in his stead to take notes.

I won�t go into it in full, but clearly the man has either a brilliant plan or is some sort of insane con artist. He himself admitted that, which works a good deal in his favor (that he used the phrase �flim flam man� upwards of three times goes even further). He also freely said that his website was total madness, created only because so many whiny bitch engineers had asked for a website to look at beforehand. Well, I�ll just say it. I liked the guy, which is, I expect, why cults are so successful. He referred to himself as an old man at least seven times, shat on some kid for answering a question wrong, and stopped in the middle of his speech to say, �It is very difficult to tell the difference between vodka and water� before taking a big swig. I was the only one who laughed.

Anyway, his plan, as I understood it, almost sounded reasonable. OK, so you have manufacturers and the clients who buy the stuff that is manufactured. But, usually, in between there is a middle man, a distributor, and they take like 50% of the profit while doing essentially nothing at all. Enter EnginePro, a husband and wife team of this fellow and the woman he charmingly referred to as �The Barracuda.� They replaced these distributors with, uh, engineering distributors, which I guess are much, much better because they have people who actually know stuff doing the selling. Er � not selling, I�m told, because engineers hate to sell things. Instead, they give away their engineering services for free, getting their revenue in the form of �discounts,� that 50% the distributors usually get. That�s where things sort of got confusing. H.A. �Pete� Linsday (the old man) would talk about all the money you would make, how they would match any offers you got from clients (and boy would you get offers, he cried!), but then he would always sort of mumble, ��in discounts� at the end like some sort of disclaimer. Sounds a little shady to me. I don�t think I�d want to get paid in discounts on various widgets for �motion control� devices (�Well, you see� if you did buy $100,000 worth of sprockets, you would be saving $50,000! It�s like we�re actually paying you that much money!� Ohhhh�.). Or McDonald�s coupons. Or whatever they give out. Anyway, I ate their mysterious pizza from nowhere I have ever seen before (Kyle: �You drank the Kool-Aid?!�) and looked around in awe when no one asked anyway questions about this grand scheme of Pete�s. What about INNERCONFIDENCE?! Is that actually clear to you guys? Maybe all engineers know about that made-up shit, though, so I kept my damn mouth shut and got out without signing in. Phew. Narrowly escaped with my life and whatnot.

Apparently, there is this sport called �baseball� and one of our local teams, the �White Socks,� is doing quite well at it??? I am told this, anyway, and was sent out into the evening with the bars and all, to experience the fun that is watching sports with assholes and paying too much for drinks. Luckily, we ended slightly better off than normal, going to Firehaus (the 21+ bar), which was a lot less crowded, if much, much uglier. Also, there was a special on $1 well tequila (as in, �What kind of tequila do you have?� �Well� tequila!�). I have fastidiously avoided all shots for some time now, and here I am tossed back into the game with the most awful of contenders. But damn that waitress! Not that she was particularly attractive or nothin�, but through her Topanga-like essence you got the feeling that if you just ordered like five, six more drinks, she would probably blow you in the back alley. That is the best and worst kind of waitress. �Another tequila sunrise, my lady!�

Here is a hint, though: No get with cranberry. No.

Anyway, we had what seemed like a fairly innocuous rule � another round of shots for every extra inning �we� went into (I hate that, people always including themselves on the team. �We did it! We won!� Really? I thought I sat here and choked back the vomit. Maybe you ran up to Chicago and struck some big hits, I might have missed it). This was back during the eighth inning, when things still seemed joyful. Fourteen fucking innings, good lord. I can barely choke down orange juice, let alone the half-pint glasses of Mexico�s finest they were pushing my way. I guess �generous shots� would generally be considered a good attribute, but it seemed worse and worse as I sat there in my haze, watching the cretins yell and clap and sing. I know, how clich� is it to hate fans of anything, but look at me go anyway, so there�s proof nobody�s perfect. Some nasty thing was checking out Kyle, but it turned out it was me, and that was bad news bears if anything. I�ve given up hope of ever being perfidious (adj. �disloyal�) to Missy. Without confidence or ambition, I don�t have enough game to attract anyone besides uggos, so why even contemplate it? Be happy with what you�ve got, I�m told, and maybe it�ll turn my bad luck around to boot.

Actually, I got a fortune cookie to that effect last night (�Your luck will turn around now,� roughly), and I really don�t know whether to be worried or pleased. It could either mean an end to the horrible streak I�ve been having all month� or that the slightly neutral week I�ve had here is going to flip back and turn to hell again. Just let me switch bodies with Lindsay Lohan already. Damn Asians.

I wasn�t even that drunk, just ill, when we walked home. It was not a good idea to try and fix this with candy.