BaddMinton

OK, so if you don’t want to see the annoying register.com ad at the bottom of my new blog, use this URL instead: www.baddminton.wordpress.com.  Sorry for all the changings-around.

Extra, extra, Read all about it!  BaddMinton moves away from Friendster! 

Well, Friendster, it’s been real. You’ve been good to me, and I’ll still keep my profile and photo albums here, but I cannot deal with all these extra ads.  If I have ads on my blog, I want to be getting paid for them, and I’m not, and there are so many now it looks like poo.

I’m working on downloading wordpress and running my blog myself, but I don’t have time to do it right now, and I literally cannot write another single entry on Friendster knowing how ugly it will look with the ads.  So for now I’m going to blog on wordpress’s hosted blogging platform.  You’ll still find all my archives and categories there.  The only thing not there will be the photo albums.

The good news is, the only thing you’ll have to remember is my blog will now (still) be located at www.baddminton.com.  I’m not sure what this will mean for things like RSS feeds — probably nothing good — because the actual domain name is baddminton.wordpress.com, and i’m just having my domain name forwarded there until I have time to do it myself. I fear the moving around may be confusing, but I’m doing it anyway. I’m throwing caution to the wind!

So, Friendster Blogs, I guess this is goodbye!  And Hello, Wordpress!  Please come visit me there, guys!  www.baddminton.com.  Be there or be square.  Or something.

Wow!  I guess what they say is true: 27 is older than 26. I think I have heartburn!  I’ve never had it before, but here’s why I think I do: I am experiencing a burning sensation from the stomach area all the way up to the throat area.  This happened immediately after quickly downing one of those Starbucks Frappuccinos that come in a glass bottle.  Also, I’ve been taking 4 Advil every 4 hours today to sedate the elves that usually sleep in my uterous, but wake up once a month when I get my period and begin trashing the place, which causes me a fair amount of pain unless I keep them heavily sedated, those jerks.

So I guess the fistfulls of Advil and the 9.5 FL OZ of coffee and sugar tossed back in mere seconds was a bad combo for the ol’ acid balance?  I’ll have to keep that in mind for the future.

Rebecca gave me a belated birthday present today, and it is wonderfabulicious.  Here’s a picture!

I uploaded two photos of it onto my computer.  This was the second one I took, and I called the set "cutebag," so the system automatically called this one "cutebag002."  I like that, so I think the bag’s name from now on will be "Cutebag Double-oh-two." 

I hung my sunglasses on it for ultra cute maximization, as well as to give the photo a sense of springtime fun, as though I had just set it down after a rousing tennis match or outdoor shopping trip, and had hung my sunglasses there while moving on to my next exciting activity.

I received several fun gifts for my birthday, and I’d like to just go ahead and admit that receiveing gifts is fun.  Almost as fun as giving them, and in some cases, more fun.  Jeff’s grandparents got me a gift card to Bath and Body Works, for example, and although I usually steer clear of that place since the combination of smells makes me dizzy, I went on my lunch break yesterday and had worlds of fun.  I ended up spilling some lemon merengue body cream all over my shirt and pants, and for the rest of the day I smelled like a yummy dessert.  I didn’t actually buy anything because I spent so much time smelling that by the time I was narrowing down my choices it was time to return to work. But anyway, gifts are fun, both the giving and receiving of, and I’m thankful that I’ve been lucky enough to be on the receiving end of some super good ones lately. 

Anyway, gotta go, Cutebag Double-oh-two and I are going shopping. (Not really — I’m still at work, unfortunately — but soon!  Soon!)

If ever there were a job created for the sake of creating a job, it is that of the bathroom attendant.  One question for you: WHY?  Is it really any easier to take a paper towel from the hand of the attendant than to get one out of the paper towel dispenser?  There’s a distinct advantage of taking the towel from the dispenser, and that is this: The dispenser does not give you a sad or disapproving look when you don’t give it a tip. 

So I’m at my house, by myself, and it’s 11:14 PM, and I’m considerably buzzed slash borderline drunk.  Not slurring the speech drunk, but occasionally grabbing the bar for balance slash laughing really hard at things that may or may not actually be that funny slash having to correct every other word as I sloppily type drunk.

I was right when I said this would be a good night.  It was.  I had a really super good time  with Matt, Corey, their roommate Jon or John, Brennan, Gina, and various others from my old travel agency, who were all at this bar within walking distance to my house.  As I predicted, my convenient location would come in handy tonight, when I wanted to avoid being on the road with all the drunk crazies and crazy drunks.

The best part of my night was the joke the boys were doing when they got to my house, and which we kept up while walking to the bar and back.  It’s what if there were a James Bond movie where the antagonist / villain is an old grandmother type.  We kept making things up that she would say in a shaky, old British voice, like "Mr. Bond, can you please wheel my wheelchair over to my gun rack so I can kill you?" and "Mr. Bond, Can you reach the Earl Gray from the top shelf, please? I was going to poison it, but I can’t reach it, so we can just have a cup and I’ll figure out another way to kill you."

On the walk to the bar they all made sense, but on the walk back they got more and more ridiculous slash retarded, culminating with my favorite, which Matt said: "Mr Bond, can you squeeze these prunes for me so I can drink the juice and take a shit?  And then I’ll kill you by locking you in my cupboard… of… cats."  Oh, man, we laughed so hard at that, and kept on adding onto it with things like, "They’re actually still kittens, but they may scratch, and there is a 1/1000 chance they’ll hit your jugular," etc. MAN.  We’re f-ing geniuses.  That one was so funny to me I had to stop and lean my head against the trunk of a palm tree, I was laughing so hard.  I think anything was funny to me (but especially that becuase, come on: genius!) because a. I was/am a little drinkie drunk, and b. it was so good to see those guys again.  My college experience was so near and dear to my heart, SO near and dear, and rehashing some of the fun we had is priceless.  There’s nothing like old friends.  And yes, it freaks me out that I’m starting to think of college friends as "old" friends, like "Man, we’ve got history together. We used to do such and such and go here and here BACK in the DAY, Man."  Yeah, I’m old.  Scary.

To conclude, today is Matt’s birthday.  So tonight while we were hanging out, it was not St. Patrick’s Day, but St. Mattrick’s Day.  Once again, I’m a genius, Ladies and Gentlemen.  If you ever doubted it.

It was raining a little today, which I like. I love rain, and this time of year (my birthday week, to be exact) is always the most beautiful in LA, in my opinion, because the rain comes, washes away the smog, and leaves LA looking fresh and bright and green.  The down side, however, is the traffic. When it rains, people here think the sky is falling.  They think the roads will melt and swallow them up.  They creep along like snails.  OR, they ignore the rain, ride the butts of the cars in front of them, and speed like cheetas out of hell.  (I figure cheetas out of hell are faster than bats, since they’re the fastest animals, and nobody: bats, cheetas, you name it, wants to be in hell, so a cheetah, like a bat or any person or animal, would scurry out of there pretty fast, given the chance.  And when you combine that desire to get out with the ability to run faster than any other animal, you’ve got one fast motherfucking beast).  My point being that every time it rains here it takes 30 extra minutes to get to work because people are driving like idiots and getting in accidents on every corner.  This makes me cranky.  Thus, my cranky face in the photo above.  I actually took that a couple weeks ago when it wasn’t even raining but had been raining, making the roads a little damp and therefore leading to mass panic, and then the resulting accidents and traffic jams. 

Today it was fine because it only rained a little in the afternoon, just enough to wash the smog away, and I’m not cranky.  Here’s a photo I just took with my new crappy camera phone, which is slightly less crappy than my old crappy camera phone, to prove that I’m not cranky today:

Oh. Well, now that I uploaded it I see that I don’t exactly look UNcranky, but I don’t look particularly crankly either, so I hope you can take my word for it that I am indeed NOT cranky.  (See what’s on my computer screen? It’s the edit page for this very blog!  oooh, spoooky).

It’s St. Patrick’s Day today, and I don’t know what I’m doing yet to celebrate.  3 years ago, when I worked as a travel agent, my boss (now my friend Theo!  Haha, trippy that you used to be my boss, Theo!)  brought us beer in the afternoon.  I lived so close to my office then that I walked home with a good buzz on and started calling my friends and telling them to come on out and start drinking! I think it was 4:30.  That was a good night.  We actually went to St. Nick’s, an Irish pub near my house that used to be fun but is now so crowed all the time, weeknights included, that the main attraction is getting bumped into and spilling your beer on yourself.  I’d rather stab my eyes out with sharp shamrocks or jump into a vat of angry, biting leprichauns than try to brave that place tonight.  2 years ago on St. Patty’s I was about to leave for Australia the next night, and last year I was getting ready for Amanda to come visit me from North Carolina.  Tonight I don’t have any plans yet, and my only requisite is that it’s near my house and I don’t have to drive.  This should hopefully be easy since my friends Matt and Corey just moved here from New York, right smack dab into my neighborhood.  Yay! And if they’re going somewhere far away, I’ll be perfectly happy to stay at home and catch up on my tivo’d episodes of Desperate Housewives.  Oooh, and my boss just told me I can go home an hour and 15 minutes early!  I think this is going to be a good night.

This was sent to me by email, but I usually see it in blogs.  It’s called getting "Meme’d," and I’ve been wondering why, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.  According to them, the term "meme" refers to any piece of information transferable from one mind to another.  OK, good enough for me!  So here goes:

Four jobs I have had in my life:

1. lifeguard
2. store clerk in Disney World
3. toy demonstrator at FAO Schwartz
4. travel agent

Four movies I would watch over and over:

1. Top Gun
2. Elf
3. Harry Potter 1, 2, and 3 (this is 3 movies, I know. I’m a cheater)
4. A Christmas Story

Four places I have lived:

1. Asheville, NC
2. Chapel Hill, NC
3. Spain, if 6 weeks plus 3.5 weeks 5 years later counts as living there

  I’m having trouble writing this week, so… I figure I’ll just post some old photos (blotos).  These are from Jeff & my trip to Paris last fall, a weekend trip from our 3 1/2 week stint in Barcelona.   Click on the photos to view them full size.  Why is Paris so f-ing gorgeous!!!??  I have to admit it: I’ve never seen a more beautiful city.

This is a picture I took of the Hotel Letitia, where we went for drinks  with Jeff’s parents, who were in Paris for the week. 

It’s an old, old, super-old hotel, and apparently used to be the hot spot for all sorts of old-timey chic artist types, none of whom I can remember at this moment.

Here’s another one at the Letitia, of Jeff & me.  Not sure what I’m laughing about — it looks like he’s tickling me, but his hands are visible — but I like this picture a lot.

Here’s us with Jeff’s parents, Ken and Deb, at the Hotel Coste, another old badass place.  The food was amazing and the scenery even better.  Plus, they sell these amazing mix CDs there, one every year.  Deb bought one for Jeff & me and it’s fantastic.

Here are a couple more of the Hotel Coste.

Here are some more photos that show how ridiculously gorgeous Paris is:

I want to go back! Now!

It’s National Procrastination Week!  It’s also the week before my birthday, but since I’ve been busy celebrating Procrastination Week, I haven’t planned any sort of celebration.  Speaking of birthdays, today is Amanda’s (Happy Birthday, Manditas!!) and coming soon is Nathan’s.  Nathan’s is right around the time of mine, but I forget the exact day.  I would go ahead and check on Friendster, which I am already logged into, but I feel it would really go against everything National Procrastination Week stands for.  I’m trying to be patriotic here, by observing this national holiday, so I’ll check another time.

March 20, my birthday, is also my friend Galen’s birthday.  We will both be 27.  Galen was my first new friend in college.  I actually met him just before college, when our mutual friend Catherine introduced us.  As it happens, we ended up in dorms right next to each other, so we began our freshman year walking to class together and going to eat bad food together at the dining hall.  The first time I got drunk I was with Galen, drinking Aristokrat vodka out of plastic "Don’t Get Wasted" cups that had been given out at the beginning-of-the-year campus street festival (and by festival I mean lots of booths advertizing various extra-curricular activies and giving out soap and deodorant samples, plus free pizza, and of course keychains and small plastic cups with the "Don’t Get Wasted" logo, the perfect size for large shots of cheap vodka).  We discussed our birthdays for the first time over the phone and didn’t believe each other.  We made each other show each other our respective driver’s licenses to prove that we were actually both born on March 20, 1979.  We even got our licenses renewed together on or around our 20th birthday.  The night we both turned 21 we weren’t together, but we still saw each other.  I had been fed so many drinks so fast at the bar where I was celebrating (Linda’s, for any Tar Heels out there) that by 12:45, as my guests were still arriving, my boyfriend was taking me home.  I made it all the way until we pulled into his driveway (a big five-minute drive, tops), then made him stop so I could get out and puke.  At that moment, a red truck drove by, stopped, backed up, and paused… to watch! me puke! 

The next day Galen and I got together to celebrate, and I was joking about my night, and he said, "Wait, were you on Hillsboro Street at around 1AM?  Puking on the lawn?"  Yes, folks, it was him and his friend in that red truck, and they just backed up to make sure I was OK.  And that is why Galen has just become the subject of my first blout-out.

Hmmm, I realize now that it would have been more prudent to give Amanda a blout-out, since today is her actual birthday, but I didn’t know what I was going to write when I started this entry, and I must let my creative forces rule.  Plus, giving Amanda her blout-out after her birthday will both allow her to stretch out her birthday fun, and embody the true spirit of National Procrastination Week.

P.S. Check it out! www.procrastination.com.  It kind of sucks, actually, as websites go, but it’s all in the spirit of the holiday.