news: November 2007 Archives

Have you ever had one of those nights when you're at the bar, and suddenly you realize:

• 2 of the 6 people at the table are internet-ordained ministers,
• 1 of the 6 people at the table is a Notary Public,
• 1 of the 6 people at the table is a lawyer,
  
• 6 of the 6 people at the table are pretty drunk,
• You have all the right ingredients for a quasi-legal marriage ceremony to be performed?

In other words, I think Jackie and I got married last night.  We allegedly consummated our marriage under the table when no one was looking, and I have a sparkly diamond ring crudely drawn on my left ring finger in marker. 

The ring won't wash off.  Does that mean this is legally binding??

I went back to Texas for Thanksgiving, and as usual, my family crammed in a double-dare-dosage of holidays into the extended weekend.  Thanksgiving was Thursday, Christmas was Friday.  (For the past 10 or so years, my family has been exchanging gifts at Thanksgiving instead of Christmas.  This is a beautiful thing, and I highly recommend it to anyone not tied to traditional "calendar-based" holidays.  Let me put it this way: you get all your Christmas shopping done in October.  And then sit around in November and December looking down your nose at all the chumps scrambling to buy gifts.)

Typically we've drawn names, but this year we decided to turn in into one of those swapping party games.  I still don't know the proper name for it.  White Elephant?  Chinese Auction?  White Chinese Elephant Auction?  Whatever.  There is a pile of wrapped gifts, and you draw names.  On your turn, you can pick an unopened gift from the table, or steal something someone else has already unwrapped.

* Note: Mom refused to buy a present on Dad's behalf.  It was mandated that he was responsible for selecting, purchasing, and wrapping his own gift.  We were all quite anxious to see what this would be.  The last time something like this happened he contributed a framed portrait of Sharon Stone.  

** Additional note: The other mandate for Dad's gift was that it could not have anything to do with Sharon Stone.

I think I was 3rd out of 12, and my strategy was to choose the heaviest gift on the unwrapped table.  When I picked up that box, Dad started squirming with glee.  Little did I know that it was his box.  I tore away the paper to reveal...

A hydraulic trolley jack:

He clapped at his own cleverness, and explained that he needed one for the shed and was hoping to steal it back.  The swap pressed on.  Staci stole the jack from me, although I don't know why she would ever need a hydraulic jack.  I think she was just doing it for the satisfaction of taking it away from me.  At the very end of the game, Dad stole the jack back from her...and thus succeeded in his master plan.

There was one spare gift left on the table from my Uncle Joe.  Since the gift I got stuck with was too big for me to bring back to Seattle, I opted for that gift instead.  So ladies and gentleman, my big Christmas present for 2007 was......an autographed Hooters calendar:




Merry Christmas.

I don't talk to my friend Amy enough, so about a week ago I tried to correct this by accosting her over IM, trying to distract her from working so we could get caught up.  At the end of our conversation, she mentioned that she and her Sean (her husband, my non-biological non-legal baby brother, for all intents and purposes) were on their way to Vegas that weekend.  She asked if I had any bets I needed placed.

"$5 on 17 black, roulette.  Somewhere Irish."

I was mostly kidding, as that is my stock answer anytime anyone asks me anything about what to bet in Vegas.

Two days later, I get a weird frantic call from Sean with all the slot machines dinging in the background, informing me that they walked straight into Fitzgerald's downtown and plunked $5 on 17 black....which promptly HIT!?  I was incredulous, and his side of the conversion included a lot of "I shit you not!"-type phrases.  In roulette, hitting the actual number is a 35 to 1 payoff.  That little $5 bet became $175.  Sean told me he would give me "my" money over Thanksgiving.  I said no, that it was "their" investment, and therefore "their" money.  This quickly turned into a patented Halee/Sean argument stubborn-a-thon, which I think ended with me hanging up on him.

Two days later, I get a weird call from my dad saying that Sean had given him a Crown Royal bag full of 175 $1 Fitzgerald's casino chips that morning at the coffee shop.  I got super annoyed, because:
 

1. That means Sean got the last word.
2. That is super-stupid to take chips out of Vegas, because if there is a security breach they will sometimes swap out the chips and not honor the old ones.
3. That meant Sean got the last word.
4. Sean was being a fucking pest to the casino, and cleared them out of 175 dollar chips, which is inconsiderate and possibly illegal.
5. My dad is going to Vegas in a week or two, and he is totally going to steal all that money from me.

When Amy got back to work, I sent her an IM threatening to kill both her and Sean.  And then I learned how much trouble Sean went to (and how gleeful it made him) to execute the logistics of rounding up that many chips.  From Amy:

• "you cannot imagine the fun sean had getting all that converted to small denominations"
• "he almost got kicked out of the casino"
• "he spent HOURS"
• "i guess one pit boss actually took pity on sean and was asking what he was doing, so sean told him the plan. the guy was like 'but why?' and sean said 'because it's funny!' so that's the guy who told him to hit all the tables instead of the cage"
• "sean kept coming over to me saying 'I finally found a way to have fun in Vegas that doesn't lose me money AND isn't illegal!'"
• "then he recruited me and my dad to go change some more chips in b/c all the dealers were starting to recognize him"
• "so my dad was REALLY nervous about doing the changing.  he kept making up all the elaborate stories about changing in the chips... he sat down like he was gonna play something, then said he was gonna make a side bet for the dealer. Then he sat there until right up till time for her to deal cards and pretended like his phone rang and EXPLAINED to everyone that his phone rang and he had to go"

So after hearing all that, I went from annoyed to annoyed AND amused.  Which is like a double word score play for Sean.

I made this for my friend Jenni the other day when she asked how I was doing, and wanted my answer to be phrased in Excel.  Click on the thumbnail below to view the detailed version, and keep in mind the happiness levels are based on a scale of 1-10:

1. Extraordinarily, unnaturally, suicidally unhappy
   
2. Very unhappy, despondent and inconsolable
3. Unhappy
4. Sorta unhappy
   
5. Not happy, but not unhappy
6. Relatively happy
7. Happy
8. Very happy
9. Extremely happy
10. Retardedly happy

My average was 6.74 at the time of making this graph.  I am happy with that result, and therefore would have ranked the day that I realized that at a 7 or 8.

A couple of years ago Matt showed me this article about a medical mystery in India, where a man had an abdomen tumor that turned out to be....

...the parasitic fetus of his twin brother, which had been absorbed into his body in utero.  The operating doctor described the exploratory surgery as follows:

As he cut deeper into Bhagat's stomach, gallons of fluid spilled out -- and then something extraordinary happened. "To my surprise and horror, I could shake hands with somebody inside," he said. "It was a bit shocking for me."

Today I heard a new story of another parasitic twin sighting in India.  This time, it is a parasitic twin on the outside of the subject's body, which is attached in such a way that the child looks like the eight-armed Hindu goddess Vishnu:

The headless 'twin' is joined to Lakshmi at the pelvis and has its own spinal column and kidney.

These accounts are considerably different than the twin tales I'm used to hearing about, where Jessica is the parasitic one who is always trying to get Elizabeth to do her homework for her while she's off hanging out with Lila and the other Unicorns at Sweet Valley Mall.

\

Today has been a long time coming.  Almost a year ago, my friends Jeremy and Jackie were back home visiting Texas from Seattle, and I told them of my plans to be in Seattle for Halloween.  Jeremy didn't used to drink back when I first knew him, but he has since jumped off the wagon into Whiskey River...and we agreed that when I came to Seattle to visit for Halloween, we would light fires in the backyard and get as drunk as possible off the grossest whiskey of all: Old Forester.  (Which I was to bring with me from Texas since it is not available in Washington.)

As luck would have it, I actually moved here prior to Halloween, but we felt we should hold true to our promise.  So I bought a bottle of Old Forester when I went home for my grandma's funeral last month, and Jeremy and Jackie will be here in a few hours to drink it:



The success of the evening will be measured on how much we all vomit.  I don't normally drink liquor, so this is going to hurt.  Bad.  If Jackie and Jeremy are game...I'm planning for us to live blog our evening here...

5:20PM - The house is ready.  The Texas-shaped ice cubes are ready.

5:45PM - J&J are on their way, hooray!

5:50PM - Matt thinks I should have already gotten drunk before they arrived.  I'm considering faking like I'm passed out on the porch for when they pull up...

6:00PM - I bought mixers last night at the store, but since I don't really ever drink liquor I wasn't 100% positive what to get.  So I got ginger ale, Pepsi, and Dr Pepper.  Are those socially acceptable whiskey mixers?

7:57PM - "Jackie's mom is the reason that 'fat' should be a verb because she just fats around the house.  And she sucks donkey balls." - Jeremy

7:58PM - "In Mother Russia, the donkey fucks you." - Jeremy

8:04PM - "I like props!" - Jackie

8:05PM - "I didn't fuck those kids." - Halee

8:08PM - Pinkie swear promise to Jackie to go to Waffle House when we're all home for Christmas in Texas because she's never been.

8:09PM - Dream jobs:

• Jackie - Waitress at a greasy spoon choke n' puke diner who calls everyone "Sugar", "Darling", "Plum", "Sugar Plum," "Sugar Darling", or "Sugar Darling Plum."
• Jeremy - "I was always a very reasonable child.  I did not bother with dreams, and always made good decisions."
  
• Halee - NASCAR driver's wife.  (Jeremy remembers me outlining my dream man, who was a NASCAR mechanic [note: not a NASCAR driver] who lived in a mobile home with walls with alternating panels of wood and mirrors.)

8:19PM - "If maps were a living breathing creature, I'd totally fuck the shit out of them behind Jeremy's back, and post the video on the internet." - Jackie

8:32PM - "Every dude's wang was realistic...but it had two things sticking out the side that made it look like a crucifix.  Owen Wilson would try to draw a crucifixation wang, I'll tell you that right now.  And then he'd try to kill himself." - Jeremy

8:34PM - "Sweden and Norway look like a big ol' double-ended cock." - Halee

8:35PM - "Halee, I've known you since 1995 and I've never once seen you without eyeliner on." - Jeremy

9:12PM - "Ask him if he's ever had sex with a map!!!" - Jackie

9:16PM - "Jackie's mom paid $3 more than your mom." - Jeremy

9:17PM - We called our friend Morley to see who he liked more, me or Jeremy based on whose call he answered.  He answered Jeremy's call and would not click over to my call.

9:23PM - Morley has never been to a clock tower.

9:36PM - "Squiggle porn. Trust me, I know. " - Jeremy

9:42PM - Here is our progress at 9:42PM:

There is still much work to be done.  WWF UNO hasn't even begun.

9:51PM - "Did you hear my sea shanty????" - Jackie

10:09PM - "I  don't want to die I just need to, ooooh you asshole" - Halee

10:13PM - "I'm a tribe of people. Fuck. . . .  I GOT NO CASTLE! I GOT NO CASTLE!!" - Halee

10:16PM - "Marilyn Monroe had laser surgery to remove her hair to make her forehead bigger." - Jackie
10:17PM - "Why????" - Halee
10:18PM - "Because she's DEAD!!!" - Jeremy

10:19PM - "I'm gonna fuck you so hard you're gonna get pregnant and have an abortion at the SAME TIME.  Blue is gonna lose when he is his own stepfather!!!" - Jeremy when playing Warlords on Atari

10:20PM - "Green was his second cousin, and he just twice removed him." - Jackie on Jeremy kicking Warlords' ass

10:22PM - "Mine's got the weird bottom." - Halee

10:22PM -  "Have you ever seen something have a baby out of its mouth on your VCR?" - Jeremy

10:24PM - "Oh! Fuck you! bah guh guh guh guh!" - Halee

10:27PM - "Oh, I'll tell you all my faint stories!" - Halee

10:43 "and then the bastard dipped it in holy water" Halee

I didn't say this but i love the fucking twinkles. - jeremy.

11:08iPM - "Whiskey bounces!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" - halee

11:13PM - "If I was going to have sex with any 80s TV show, it would be the A-Team.  Take that, DJay-azzy Jeff!" - Jeremy\\

12;09pmAM - "APPARNETly having curly shoes or tight armbandfs and insanaly insane amounts of steroisds makes you absolutely patshit carzy.: " - jheremery on iron sheik on
jim helwig aka ultimate warrior

1:30AM -
"why did you you go to that lynard ksynard swho???" " because my sister gave blood and gave met he tickets." - jeremy red


1:31AM - "Basically this song teaches you to beware of nippily men who will of course eat uyopur motor boat" - Jerewmy.

1:3o02u
H"i,. Fuck there there names in there butts." - yeah it me.

1:37 -
"Watch him watch him he's pullijng string out of his nipple!" - Jackie

1:35 -
"I'll punch that dude in his turban" - Jeremy (god i'm an asshole)

2:17 -
"River Phoenix left Weezer to join Jerry Lewis and form the Rentals" - All

3:00AM - I don't know if it's really 3AM or 4AM or 2AM because the time changed to night and I'm all confuessed...but J&J just left and my tummy hurts from laughing and we should have included all the links of all the dumb bvideos we watched.  I mainly remember something hwere Travis Tritt was the devil.  And Johnny Cash was reading from the bible about best practices for playing hte fiddle.  I think it's 4 AM whiecha means we just drnak for 7 hours straight which means I'm entitled to go to bed now.  Nobody threw up.  Mission failed.  We're going to try again when Rhonda comes to town.