My Dream....

It's Thursday, and I'm still trying to come down from last weekend. I'm going bowling tonight, so hopefully that will help take the edge off.

In combining 2 themes from last weekend, when I die, I want to return to earth as a stripper pole in a club that plays "Crazy Bitch" by Buckcherry non-stop. Ok, its not the greatest song in the world, but for some reason girls go nuts when they hear it.

I really don't have much more to post. I just thought of that and thought I'd share.

What a weekend...

I've been trying for the last 3 days to come up with a way to sum up the events of the past weekend and not write a novel, but I just don't think its possible. So I guess I'll just throw out some "thank you's"...

Steph, thanks for the spontaneous Harrisburg invite on Friday night. It was well worth the tank of gas and the $11.50 in tolls. It was such a crazy, random night and though I don't remember all of it, I know that I now have probably the longest girl story in the world that doesn't end with the guy getting some.

Jamie, thanks for throwing such a KICK ASS PARTY!!! Jamesapalooza was great. I think the only thing that could have made it better was if we actually got Lindsay to say "Dirty Snatch". These work parties keep getting better and better.

So, now my big problem is that I'm suffering from PPD, Post-Party Depression. I think this is how heroin junkies feel when they don't get their fix. I was literally sitting around today just ready to go nuts because I was so friggin bored. I may have even developed a little twitch. I think I have a problem....

Movies on the Dish

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day (who will go unnamed to protect the innocent) and the subject of ordering porn on satellite television came up. We noticed that when one is ordered, it shows up on your "ordered movies" list. It lists the name of the movie (which is always something horrible....my favorite "Fondle My Fart Box"), the date it was ordered, and the price.

Now I swear on the life of my mother that I have never ordered one. But I have been at someone's house who has, and the look of embarrassment on their face when it came up on their "ordered movies" list was priceless. So I wondered, why do Dish Network and Direct TV do this? When you order one at a hotel, it shows up generically on your bill, so there's no shame when you pay at the front desk. I've heard ads on the radio that promise to send things to your house in a discreet box. Why don't Dish Network and Direct TV get on the ball and follow suit? How many husbands need to get berated by the wives for trying to get some late-night enjoyment? How many teenagers need to get grounded just because they're trying to satisfy their raging hormones? When will the madness end?!?!?!

To be 21 again....

Friday night, I went down to State College to celebrate my friend Steve's 21st birthday. Now I knew going in that I would be the oldest person there, but I figured, "What the hell. I'm not doing anything that night." Besides, its always fun to relive your college days every now and then.

So I get to Penn State, and immediately notice the abundance of attractive girls on the street. I immediately start getting the "I'm getting old" feelings and I realize that I have been out of school for way to long. So I park my car in a parking garage (this will be important later) and start walking to Steve's friend Tom's apartment. With a home football game the next day, the streets at Penn State are alive with excitement. I'm starting to get pumped up as I'm picturing a big party.

I get to Tom's place, the door opens...and there's no party. It's Tom, his roommate, and Steve watching Ghostbusters. Now I guess I understand this. Most of Steve's friends are under 21, so he really can't invite them over, then dump them at midnight when he goes out. So that leaves the over-21 crew, the 3 of us, to wait 4 hours until Steve turns into a pumpkin.

I'd never met Tom's roommate before, but he was cool and we just drank and BS'd for awhile. Steve then decided to start playing "Circle of Death". I'd never played before and I quickly learn that its the most complicated drinking game ever. You lay all the cards face down, and go around in a circle each drawing a card. Depending on the value of you card, you have to do something different, and.....well, its just confusing. Plus, I haven't played a drinking game in about 5 years, and I quickly get bored. It was kind of weird playing with just other guys too, because there is nothing more fun than 1) Getting a girl drunk and 2) Watching a drunk girl do dumb things. Tom and I amused ourselves though by giving Steve the "21 treatment" by making him drink repeatedly and even do a couple beer bongs.

FINALLY, 12:00 rolls around and we head out. Apparantly bars in St. College have some dumb rule about not being allowed into a bar until 26 hours after you turn 21. Others will let you in, but you can't do shots. So, we first went to the Cell Block, which apparently didn't care what we did, because they let Steve right in. The Cell Block was formerly the Crowbar, and it was sad to see it turned into a dance club. I went to the Crowbar a lot and saw some good bands there, and never had a bad time. The Cell Block was cool, but since I don't know many rap songs post-"Ice Ice Baby", it wasn't my scene.

After a little while there, we went up to The Saloon, where the guy at the door played Paint By Numbers on the back of Steve's hands and gave us a 5-minute lecture on not getting him shots. So we got him a monkey-boy pitcher, and watched one of my favorite bands, Velveeta, play. I realized that being in a band in State College is simple because all you have to do is every 5-minutes reference the next days football game, say something bad about another Big Ten school, or start a "We Are..." chant, and everyone goes nuts.

We leave at closing, and I decide that I'm going to spend the night at Steve's. Since the parking meter starts running at 8AM, I figure I'll move my car to Steve's place (about 5 blocks away) and avoid the ticket. So we go back to the parking garage, and low and behold, I've got a ticket. I look at it, and see it's for "Not Parking Completely Between the Lines". At this point, I am livid. First, the spaces are barely big enough to fit a car, and secondly, the car beside me was parked over the line, forcing me to shift a little. And the car beside me didn't have a ticket!!!!

So I get back to Steve's, and get ready to turn in. I'm sleeping on the floor in his room, and just as I'm settling in, I hear him get up, say something about throwing up and run off. He returns a few minutes later, lays down, pulls a garbage can up beside him, and proceeds to puke for a half-hour straight.

Oh to be 21 again....

9/11

We recently had the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Now I don't know why all aniversaries that end in five or zero are important (and the other ones don't seem to be), but that's for another day. I noticed that CNN and Howard Stern were replaying their 9/11 broadcasts as if they were happening all over again. I didn't tune into either, but I really wished I had caught the Stern replay as I started listening to him the day after the attacks, and remember his reactions.

To be honest, I really hadn't given too much thought to the anniversary, until Monday night when I was watching football at my friend Jamie's house. The group of us started talking about it, remembering where we were that day, what we were doing, etc. I realized that 9/11 is the Kennedy Assassination of my generation. Everybody will always remember that day in detail. I was in Pittsburgh at the time, doing my intership at US Steel. I remember they had a TV across the hall from my cube, where we watched the whole thing. When Flight 93 went down, the reporters just kept saying "Pittsburgh" over and over again. I called my parents and my girlfriend at the time, and assured them that I was ok and that if anything happened, I loved them. To this day, those were the hardest calls I've ever had to make.

Looking back, its seems a little absurd to think that something was going to happen to me. I was in a 2 story building on the South Side, so I wasn't in a skyscraper nor near one. But that day, and for the following month, the rumors that went around were crazy....but we believed them all. I distinctly remember being apprehensive about driving through the Squirrel Hill Tunnels for awhile because there was a rumor that they would be a target.

Now I don't want to make my blog political (especially since everyone who reads this is probably more conservative than I am), but it really pisses me off that it's been 5 years, and bin Laden is still on the loose. I remember when we attacked Afghanistan because we were after bin Laden and the terrorists. Maybe it's just me, but somewhere along the way, we seemed to have lost our focus.

Anyway, for those of you who weren't so angered by my psuedo-political nonsense that you made it this far, feel free to drop a line and tell where you were and what you were doing on 9/11. It's interesting to think of the mundane things that we were caught up in on that day, before all the craziness started.

Failure, Part II

After last night, I realized that another sign of failure is that even when you do everything in your power to succeed, bad luck, fate, or a drunken friend intervenes to cause your downfall.

Last night, I made it a point to get to bed early. Every part of me wanted to stay up and watch the Andy Roddick tennis match (even though I could care less about the US Open or tennis in general), but I forced myself to go to sleep. Around 1:15 I was awakened by the sound of my cell phone. I use my cell phone as my alarm clock only with a different ring tone, so there is always a moment of confusion when it goes off in the middle of the night. Is it "Fall To Pieces" (phone call) or "Start Me Up" (alarm clock)? Last night it was a phone call.

It turns out that my friend Stephany had been out on the town in Philly and decided that I would be interested in hearing about it. Now Stephany has done this before, and had sworn to me that she would never do it again. So the first words out of her mouth are pretty much "I am so sorry." Which makes no sense, because if she really was sorry, she wouldn't have called. So, after 15 minutes of pointless banter, she tells me that she is going back out and leaves me in that nice state of being tired, but needing to unwind again. A half hour later, I finally fell back to sleep.

I am really not mad at Stephany. Do I wish she would have called? No. But it does give me and amusing story, and really, I'm no worse off because of it. Though, I would like to put a new rule in place for her (and her sisters) that if they go out, they must give their cell phones to someone sober. Kind of a Designated Caller.

Oh, and I'd like to apologize for my post last night. Apparently it didn't come off as tongue-in-cheek as I wanted it too, so for all of you who have put me on suicide watch, I really don't think I'm a failure.

Failure

I'm starting to think that I may be a failure. We all set goals for ourselves, right? And if we constantly come up short on achieving these goals, then we could be considered failures, correct? And what if we consistantly set the same goal, and fail to accomplish it over and over again?

Well, I set the same goal for myself every day. As a matter of fact, it's the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning. I think "Today is the day I'm going to do this." Every morning on my trip from the bed (or couch depending on where I fall asleep) to the bathroom, I tell myself, "Michael, you have to get to bed earlier tonight." Do I ever accomplish this? NO!! I fail to do this day in and day out, all year long. So, on a quantitative basis, if I fail at a single task 365 times a year, I might be a failure.

Maybe I should try for something I know I can do. Like tie my shoes or something....

Thank God for football

Labor Day has to be the 3rd best holiday of the year (after Thanksgiving and Christmas) as it is the kickoff to another football season. I was pretty much glued to my television set (other than the 2 hours that I played Trivial Pursuit with my family, which my Dad won) for the entire weekend. My thoughts after the first week of the college season:

- Why do top 25 teams schedule cupcakes for their first game? I understand that you want to start the season off with a win, but I guarantee that most of these teams get better competition in practice. Northern Illinois, North Texas, Louisiana-Lafeyette, Akron....nothing is gained by beating those teams. The only thing that can happen is that you drop in the polls with a lousy performance (see Oklahoma vs. UAB). Do what Notre Dame, Auburn and USC did and schedule a middle of the pack school from a big name conference.
- Why do we have preseason rankings? #9 California got destroyed by #22 Tennessee. #2 Notre Dame looked like poo against unranked Georgia Tech. If Notre Dame were to lose this week to Penn St. and Tennessee were to win again, Notre Dame will probably still be ranked ahead of them (and possibly Penn St. too) just because of some arbitrary preseason ranking.
- What happened to the Big 12? In the past 15 years, four Big 12 schools (Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska) have won the National Championship. But it seems that Texas is the only National Championship caliber school left in the conference. Colorado lost to Montana St, Oklahoma had trouble with UAB, and Nebraska isn't what it once was. I understand that there are ups and downs in college football, but usually when one school goes down, another is on the way up.

And now for my weekly Penn St. and Florida St. review/rant:
Ok, ok. Penn State is back. JoePa finally realized that he had to play freshmen and he's winning the recruiting wars again. But they didn't look all that good on Saturday from what I saw. My buddy Aaron, who is the biggest Penn St fan/apologist in the world (he was still talking smack when they were having losing seasons), was at the game and he said even he wasn't impressed. And like I said earlier, what really do they get out of beating Akron? They roll into Notre Dame this weekend, for what should be a great game. Penn St. has some of the best receivers in the country and they'll score some points, but I think ND will win for 3 reasons: 1) Home field advantage: South Bend, Touchdown Jesus, renewing a rivalry....not a place I'd like to take a quarterback for his first ever road start. 2) ND will be pissed off after having a crap performance against GT. 3) ND played a decent team last week, so they'll be a little more prepared for the speed of the game.


FSU vs. Miami. Almost always one of the best games of the year, unless you're an FSU fan, which I am. ESPN Classic played a bunch of old FSU-Miami games yesterday, and Miami won every one of them. As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever seen a game on Classic that FSU has won. Anyway, I'm not completely sold on this being the first game of the year. Granted, the losing team has plenty of time to get back to the top of the polls (Miami got back to #3 at one point last year), but it usually takes a couple weeks to get the offense up to speed, and as a result, you get the bludgeoning of last night. Three total yards of rushing between the teams (FSU was at 5 until Weathorford took a knee at the end). Those were 2 of the fastest defenses I've ever seen. And to think that FSU lost 4 guys in the first round of the draft. It was a typical FSU-Miami game: FSU makes a bunch of dumb penalties, Miami gets some big plays, FSU takes a small lead early in the 4th. I really expected Miami to score a touchdown on one of their last 2 drives, just because I've seen it so many times. But alas, FSU pulled it out. A lot was made after them game about "the adjustments" Jeff Bowden made as offensive coordinator. Let's get this straight....Jeff Bowden is offensive as coordinator. That offense has been unimaginative since he took over. Changing you're "strategy" to throw the ball up to your big guys is not genius....its desperate.

Anyway, the schedule sets up nicely for FSU. They only have 3 more away games, and Florida and Clemson come to Tallahassee. They'll still probably lose at least one game they shouldn't on the way.