Getting Drunk at 5:01
Oh yes, I am. I am leaving the office here in about an hour, and then I shall sit at home on my duff until 4:30, and then I shall go to happy hour. I shall stay there until well after dark; until it's just me and all of my coworkers have gone home for dinner with their happy little families. I will drink until I am out of money. I will then get in my car and go see a movie. I will stumble home at midnight and shall sleep until it is Saturday.
In the Ghetto
As part of my job, I'm in the ghetto a lot.
I'm not talking about the ghetto as defined by a lot of my friends: lower middle class neighborhoods. I'm not talking about a place where blue-collar folk live in their small, affordable $100,000 homes and honestly make a living, or where hard-working immigrants plant the seeds of their new American life. I'm not talking about (for those of you who are familiar with KC) neighborhoods like 78th & Parallel, 83rd & Wornall, or Roeland Park, which are just crappy enough for me to say, "I'd never live there" but not crappy enough to be afraid to leave my car on the street for a couple of hours.
I'm talking about the ghetto where there are commonly drive-by shootings in schools. The ghetto where your 14-year-old client says "Make sure you lock your car and hide your CDs" when you are out of your car for 5 minutes while dropping her off at her group home. The ghetto where you don't stop at lights or stop signs, and where even a pack of 12-year-olds can pose serious risk to your person and property. The ghetto where good people don't go outside at night. Like, you know, 22nd & State or 12th & The Paseo. The kind of place that makes it hard to believe that wonderful places like Overland Park even exist.
I have an observation to make about the ghetto. EVERYONE IN THE GHETTO SHOULD BE FAT.
Let's say it's lunch time, and you need to buy food. You are in your car, in the ghetto, and you need to get something quick. You don't have the convenience of running inside the Super Wal-Mart to purchase groceries, nor would you have the place to prepare said groceries.You find a busy intersection with a Wal-mart, a KFC, a Pizza Hut, a McDonald's, a Chinese buffet, a Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits (I just wanted to write chicken & biscuits. I suppose just Popeye's would have sufficed), a Wendy's ... are you noticing anything here?
There is no healthy food in the ghetto. In my nice, safe, wonderful upper middle-class neighborhood, there is always a Subway or Mr. Goodscents or Chipotle or Baja Fresh or some other non-deep-fried-and-saturated-fat-laden convenience food place. These things do not exist in the ghetto. I had to drive 10 miles from the ghetto to find a Subway for lunch.
I have theories on this.
1. It is all a conspiracy by The Man to keep poor folks down. If we fill them full of fattening foods, and turn them into bed-ridden blimpozoids, they will no longer bother us.
2. Fried foods are tastier than wholesome foods, and poor folks fancy that they have too many other things to worry about than to add on the stress of eating unpleasant things.
3. These "restaurants" are cheaper than their healthier fast food competitors and therefore more accessible for poor folks. Or at least, that is the misnomer that the poor folks believe. In reality, a McD's extra value meal, a Wendy's value meal, a KFC meal, a Chipotle burrito and a Subway value meal are all around the same $5-6 range.
4. Poverty leads to depression and hopelessness, which leads to unhealthy adults, who become in turn shitty parents, who feed their kids McDonald's to shut them up, which establishes poor eating norms.
Thoughts
- I really love my job. Now if I could just find a way to get paid for it...
- I don't like "Prison Break" all that much. I don't know why. It's a really good show. It's interesting and clever and fast-paced and well-acted. For some reason, however, I just don't like it. It doesn't keep my attention. Maybe it's because I'm a girl? I still love ER, and I can't believe that I've been watching it religously for 10 years without my interest waning. Man, if they ever cancelled that show it would really upset me. I look forward to my Thursday nights.
- I'm really hungry right now. I wanted Cheerios at lunch time, so I had Cheerios at lunch. Now I'm wishing I'd eaten something a little more substantial. You know how they say water curbs your appetite? Dieters are told to drink lots of water for many reasons, but a big one is because apparently you're not supposed to feel hungry with lots of water in your belly. Well, I just drank a big glass of water, and now my stomach is growling. It wasn't growling before. I didn't even notice that I was hungry until I drank the water. This happens to me a lot. Water also gives me hearburn, unless it's filtered. Then it doesn't have all that good fluoride, though.
- I'm going to Iola, Chanute, Gardner and Wichita all before Monday.
- I'm bored with my standard, favorite wines. I want something different. I'm tired of always buying the same stuff. Sure, it's good, but there are lots of good wines out there. I think I'm going to take Wine Spectator's top 25 and buy them all. I'll try them and hopefully add a little diversity to my life. I won't try them all at the same time. Can you imagine drinking 25 bottles (or even glasses) of wine? Talk about a hangover from hell. Plus that horrible, ouchy, stomach ripping wine puking that sometimes wakes you up at 5am. Ugh.
- My mom brought me back 2 jars each of Uncle Ben's Tikka Masala and Korma sauces from her latest trip to Ireland. YUM. I can't wait to have a curry night. I bought 2 bags of naan, too. I have enough to invite people over to help me eat it. I'm trying to decide if I'm going to do that, or if I'm going to be selfish and keep it all for myself. After all, it's a lot of trouble to get those jars seeing as they're not sold in the U.S.. I wish Indian would catch on here like it has in the UK and Ireland. I guess we have Mexican food, though. Have you ever had Mexican food in Europe? They don't even
try to make it taste the same. They don't import spices, and they use this nasty chili powder to season it.
- I hope my kids aren't fat. Fat kids make me cry. My little brother was a fat kid, and he's got a lot of social problems that I assume are related to that. I can't help looking down on the parents of fat kids, and I know that's wrong. I don't want to be one of those parents who nags my fat kid into a self-image problem, though. I don't want my fat kid to have a stash of chocolates hidden up in her bedroom because she's afraid to eat in front of mommy. I don't think my kids will be fat, though. I'm a naturally thin person, and I was skinny as a rail until my early twenties. Of course, now it's all caught up with me, but that's an entirely different blog.
Thanks Guys
Everyone has heard of the urban legend about flashing your lights at cars who don't have their headlights on. You know, that gang members drive around without their lights on as part of gang initiation, and that they'll kill you if you flash at them. This is one of those things that your dumb friends tell you and you laugh at them in your head for being dumb, kind of like alligators in the sewers.
Well, this morning all 500 employees in Kansas of my agency received an email from the CEO's secretary. She commonly sends out these mass emails, usually about charity events and free flu shots. This email had been sent to her by the SRO (school resource officer, who is a police officer that is assigned to a school) of a large local high school. This email stated that a gang in Kansas City is doing the headlights thing this weekend as part of their initiation.
Well...okay, everyone knows this is an urban legend, but if a cop is saying that it's true, isn't it possible that some gang members got together and decided to put the old urban legend into action? Seems believeable to me, especially when the info comes from a cop and the CEO's secretary. So I passed along to some friends, with the qualification that I am aware of the urban legend aspect of it, but that the source has led me to think it's better safe than sorry.
So what do I get? Ridicule and rudeness! I have a couple of friends actually email an urban legend site entry about it
as if I didn't make it clear that I already know! I get responses like "you're gullible" and "hey idiot this is an urban legend"...
No fucking shit people! I
said at the start of my email that I knew it was an urban legend, but that if a cop tells me it's true I'm going to go ahead and think it might be true. What exactly is the problem here, and why did these friends feel it necessary to treat me like a mentally-retarded five year old? Do they respect my intelligence
that little that they thought they needed to "help me" out with this? Um, gee...thanks. I guess I know where I stand.
In case you're wondering, the secretary did send around an email with a link to the urban legend site...and I am currently wondering why this cop was stupid enough to send this out to her. I guess that's not really my problem, though.
On a different note, I hurt my ankle last night but it's only a sprain. I thought as much, but when I called my doctor's office's nurse, she said it might be a stress fracture. I went in on her advice and was relieved to learn that it is a minor sprain. Now my weekend plans aren't ruined, yay!
Another Wedding Weekend
I had two weddings on Saturday, and they were such polar opposites. The first one was low-budget, no-fun, short and boring. The second was high-dollar, fun, and fantastic. I have a feeling, however, that the type of wedding was completely opposite to the genuinity of the marriages themselves. The first wedding involved a couple who have been dating for seven years, and who are so in love with one another that a tornado couldn't tear them apart. The second couple have been dating for a couple of years, but shortly before the engagement the bride "hated" the groom for a few months while they were broken up. At the first wedding, the bride and groom were glued at the hip throughout. At the second wedding, I don't think the bride and groom really saw each other much at the reception.
The first wedding was between a very good friend of mine since high school, and I was a bridesmaid. It was an afternoon wedding, and the couple was paying for it themselves. They don't have a lot of money, so it was a simple ceremony with very few people, and then cake & punch in the church gym. There was no alcohol, and no dancing. It was painfully boring. By about an hour into the reception, almost everyone had left. From ceremony start to finish (including cleaning up the reception hall) the whole thing lasted three hours. It was, however, an exact reflection on the couple, as it should be. They don't party, and they're not highly social, so what they wanted was to get married and then just be with one another. If I had been a guest, I might have thought it was a crappy wedding, but knowing the couple so well, it was just perfect for them.
The second wedding was my step-sister's that evening at an area country club. The ceremony was held under a canopy by the golf course, and was followed with cocktail hour and a full sit-down formal dinner. It was fantastic. The wine was wonderful, and according to my step-mother was a big fight because of it's expense. The food was delicious, but I forgot to have cake. For anyone who knows me, I'm crazy about wedding cake. It probably would have been really good wedding cake, too. Darn it. Dinner was followed by dancing outside under the canopy, and the music was done by a pretty good band. I wish I could have danced, but my feet were on fire from the three-inch heels I'd had to wear for my friend's wedding that afternoon. We drank way too much, and Shanshu and I broke in the golf course (heh heh heh). Thanks, Shanshu. ;)
Sunday was, of course, spent laying on the couch lamenting the terribleness of wine hangovers; that is, when we finally made it out of bed well into Sunday afternoon. As of today, the house is a disaster area because neither of us felt like cleaning up at all. That includes the empty boxes of Chinese food sitting around...ugh. Shanshu didn't make it to work today, and I'm seriously jealous of him as he lays in bed watching TV at this very moment.
So all in all, a pretty good weekend. I'm looking forward to a week of down-time, though.
Patriotic Songs
I was reading the paper this morning, and there was an article on how few Americans know the words to The Star Spangled Banner. (Which is the national anthem. Apparently there are people out there who actually think that "America the Beautiful" is, or even that "The National Anthem" and "The Star Spangled Banner" are two different songs.) I did really well. I don't make the most common mistake, which is singing "For the land of the free" instead of "O'er the land of the free". In fact, I was suprised to find that I actually have the lyrics memorized correctly. Here are the lyrics if you want to check yourself:
Lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” by Francis Scott Key:
Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
I was thinking about it, however, and this song doesn't really seem to capture it for me. It does give me goosebumps to think that we can still answer "yes" to Key's question of whether our flag still waves proudly over our land. I just think that "America the Beautiful" probably does have more of an anthemy feel to it. I mean, it does talk about America itself and how great it is, not just about our flag.
Does anyone else giggle every time they sing "My Country Tis of Thee" and think of "God Save the Queen"? I mean, that was balsy. It's got to make them mad that that song stuck.
