rhymes with milk

Ally and I are going to a Bar Mitzvah in Miami later in the year, and when I found out about it I started panicking about all of the 5 year old cousins I’d be surrounded by.  I’m not so good with the lil’ ones, you see.  I don’t know how to talk to them, or what even to talk to them about.  They’re quite dumb creatures if you think about it.  They have few reasoning skills, and their abilities to carry on complex conversations are limited (to put it lightly).  They’re still in that phase of their life when they’re not psychologically capable of handling emotions in an appropriate manner, so they cry a lot.   Hell, when I introduce myself and hold my hand out expecting theirs in return, I’m usually met either with silence and overwhelming shyness, or a crusty booger-covered set of toothpick fingers.

So how am I going to deal with a long weekend—mere days before I begin taking upper division university courses about complex algorithms and low-level machine representations of data, no less—talking with these developmentally primitive miniature humanoids?  I’ve decided to come up with a few talking points to initiate conversations that would both be engaging for me, and dumb enough for them to understand and relate to.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. “I can solve a Rubik’s cube in about 1 minute.  What colorful toys are you that good at?”
2. “I see you have hot dogs in that mac & cheese you’re eating.” [side note: I totally expect to be referencing the food on their bibs] ” I once ate an entire package of 8 hot dogs—including buns!—in under 5 minutes.  Boom goes the dynamite!”
3. “Come on, think about it logically.  What sort of physical explanation can you come up with for how those reindeer stay in the air?  It’s just not feasible.”
4. “If you were an animal on Arthur, what kind of animal would you be?  I call lion.  I’d never go hungry with all of those aardvarks around, that’s for sure!”
5. “Don’t hang out with little Suzie too much.  Before you know it middle school will roll around, and you’ll be stuck in the ‘friend zone’ when it actually counts.”
6. “Back in my day, garbage men used to hang off the back of the truck!  It’s never too late for you to change your aspirations, kid.  If you really put your mind to it, you too could hang off the back of a garbage truck someday.”
7. “So your twitter background is a photo of elmo, huh?”

Hopefully Ally has seven or fewer 5 year old cousins.  I’d be completely stumped with what to talk to number eight about.

Let me know if you can come up with any.

…of Ally’s new blog design. Dustin and I worked all night on it.

Fresh it up!

The LOST premier last night blew me away. Maybe I just do a poor job of holding in my emotions, but I couldn’t help but smile through the whole thing.  I do have to admit, though, that it was partially due to the company.

Mark, Gordon, Ally and I got together for (almost?) every LOST last season and made something of a tradition out of it.  Each week a different person would have to cook the whole group dinner.  I somehow got branded as the motherly one, cooking (baking mostly) things like potpie and lasagna, you know, the kind with ricotta and spinach.

We all got together last night (plus Annabelle) for the first time in 8 months to keep our traditional LOST nights alive through the final season.  With Mark living in Denver and Gordon living in…unemployment? things are a bit different this year, so coordinating it happened all at the last minute. To make it easy on everybody else while we get back into the rhythm, I volunteered to cook for the premier.

I then realized only 20 hours before dinner was supposed to be served that I was going to spend 7 of those hours sleeping, 10 of them at work and school, 1 of them in transit, and the other 2 getting ready for bed/getting out of bed.  Nowhere in there would I have time to find a recipe, go shopping, or cook. So Ally stepped up and took the responsibility off of my shoulders even though she had NO time to herself either since she had class AND and had to get ready to leave the state the next morning…er, this morning.

But she took it like the champ she is and threw together a simple but lovely salad, and cooked (baked! Haha, maybe I won’t be the matron this time around!) a few pizzas, one with veggies and the other with pepperoni.

Oh, I forgot to mention the other big difference between this season and last.  Last year, 3 out of the 4 of us were vegetarian with me being the token omnivore (one that coincidentally hardly ever ate meat, not out of principle or taste, but out of lack-of-opportunity).  All of our dinners were vegetarian, and each week’s appointed chef came up with a damn good meal.  It’s going to be strange this season now that only one of our clan has stuck with vegetarianism.  It’s hard to say whether Ally’s dual pizzas set a precedent of making meals that cater to all parties, or if we’re going to end up cooking strictly vegetarian meals out of respect for Mark (and laziness to not have to prepare two versions).  I guess we’ll find out…

Until tonight, I had never sat at a bar by myself and drank. I see movies all the time that glorify it, but also enough drunks at the Cafe doing it to cancel out the cool.

I sit here alone mobile blogging from the bar at City O’ City on 13th and Sherman in Denver. I have a candle, a cup of water, and a glass of Wild Turkey in front of me, in order from left to right.

A super cute late-20-something hipster couple sits to my right reading their own books that they just bought from a used book store, neither of them more than ten pages in, looking up only every few minutes to have small but meaningful conversations with one another.

I have little to do here other than sip and be observant. But I’m happy doing just that.

I watch the bartenders do their work and shoot the shit with the usuals. They occasionally notice me watching, and we just smile at eachother. One bartender, the one that gave me the heavy pour, a girl, tells me that my smile is inviting, and says that every time she sees it she feels compelled to ask if I’m ready for another round or some food. I take it as I look lonely and need someone to be nice to me, but she says it’s a good thing. I believe her because her smile is reassuring.