Race ism

As much as I've been forcing the summer issue by wearing flip flops and chinos around, grilling when it's too cold out and getting irrationally drunk on Sundays; it finally arrives for real this weekend. Yes, Memorial Day weekend is the official kick off to summer. North Ave beach will open, pastels will be fair game and I will up my drinking to 5 nights a week. But before we enjoy the greatest summer city in the world for the next 3-4 months we all need to take a weekend trip a few hours south. It's racing season.

Fuck ya, Indianapolis motor speedway...you are the only reason I still own a tent and an extremely impressive selection of jorts. In the past I have gone for extreme shock value in my outfits, usually gunning for about a 2 inch inseam on any denim I am wearing. An old school Reggie Miller jersey or a Troup 444 cub scout top have been a couple on my better performances. Unfortunately I think I have lost all my Marlboro 500 hats throughout the years but I should still be able to dig out a nice Schlitz koozie at my parents house.

It is a fact that if you are from Indiana, you love the race. You love the weekend, the coke lot, the Papa Roach carb day concert, it is the one weekend where you openly celebrate (or mock) the perception the rest of the country has against you. I've gone every year since I was about 10. When I turned 18 I started camping out in the Coke lot the night before and getting into various misadventures at night. I've stolen the Moller road sign at least 5 times...so badass. I'm pretty sure that anyone that has ever spent time in Indiana should check it out. Not only is it a bad ass race (cars going 230? sure) the entire grandeur of the event is like something that you will never experience...and when I say grandeur I'm talking about amateur pole dancing competitions, unlimited free cans of dip, millions of Budweisers and if you are lucky a burning couch and a bum fight. (I've already implicated myself in at least 3 crimes in this post.)

Anyway, if you like being American and you aren't ultra suceptible to heat stroke, you should check it out. You will come away with a bad sunburn and some brown urine, but chances are you can tough it out. Trade in the designer jeans and the blazers for a pair of dirty overalls for one weekend and see how the other side lives. These fans are passionate and they are quite often great people...definitely patriots. Because playing posts, icing your bros, and bagging a strange in your muggy ass tent, those are the principles this country was founded on, no? I'll be wandering the streets of Speedway, IN all weekend, turkey leg in hand placing bets on the underground cock fights that go on in the back rooms of the strip clubs near the track. Hope to see ya there.

Sleeping from home

Because that's what you do right? You wake up when you would regularly get into the office, log into your Citrix and then fall back asleep. Hopefully you have the volume turned up loud enough so that when your boss instant messages you it will wake you up. In fact, if I had work from home priviledges, I would have by now developed some sort of machine to keep me from going idle. I suppose for now the fake meetings will have to suffice. Sustainability initiative preliminary call with Australia, 2 hours: aka this is me walking to Whole Foods to get a fat steak and setting up the Ipod speakers outside while I pop the shirt, bag some rays and read a script.

However, I don't get to do that. So fuck all of you who do...I hope there is a selective rapture tomorrow and you lucky shits are all eradicated from the Earth. While the other unfortunate Marketing majors of 2009 drove out to random suburbs to do some obscure sales job, you slept until noon and started drinking. I envy you. I hate you. But instead of sitting here in anger all day I am going to have a work from home day from the office. Boss is out until June, and he can't fire me via webcam a la Up in the Air, because as George Clooney demonstrated I could just get up and walk away and he couldn't follow me.

Speaking of this rapture thing, I think that I should get an excused absence for religious observance today. What if I was a fundementalist Christian and I truly believed the world was going to end? Isn't that a bigger deal than some oil lasting 8 days? I don't even know if they get a day off for that, and I don't mean to go all Lars von Trier right now (it's a current event, he praised Nazism at Cannes and got banned for life) but the woman next to me leverages her religion once a week and no one in HR gives her shit because we are a 6000 person company and they are all pussies. So if the world is ending tomorrow I want at least a half day to prepare...thoughts?

So it's about 10:42 right now as I type this, all the people working from home have probably made a nice brunch, possibly gone to the gym, sauna'd showered, I'm sure about 20% of them have treated themselved to a nice beat sesh and the most thrilling thing I have done today is water my cactus. The tweets will start pouring in at 3pm: it's beautiful out, who is ready for happy hour? Zella's patio, #happyhour, oh don't worry I'll be on the Edens listening to Rebecca Black until 8pm.

The worst thing about the work from home crowd is the peer pressure provided under false pretenses. "Hey man let's stay out until 2, I have work tomorrow too." Ya if work consists of sleeping all day, responding to 2 emails, doing your laundry, and going for a 1pm jog.

Whatever, I'll just read twitter, gchat, contribute to email chains, and blog during peak times to up my hit count until 5. Thank god it's the weekend.

Girl cute

Above image: Guy cute

A couple years ago I was on a ski trip in Aspen with some friends. After a long day at the slopes we went to a nice bar for dinner named Little Annie's. It's an outstanding place they do a beer and a shot for $3. On a sidenote, I want to know the origin of beer and a shot, it seems like something a blue collar construction worker may order after his shift, or maybe that's just because I watched season 2 of the wire. Regardless, in terms of this practice I am very pro. The reason being, is you drink your 3 dollar beers all night, I'm thinking you may go through 7 or 8 during a leisurely dinner now double that because of the shots BOOM wasted.

I assure you this story is going somewhere and I didn't just write that paragraph to let everyone know that I ski Aspen (I'm so elitist.) In walks a gorgeous blonde with a couple ski buddies and they plop down directly next to us, actually directly next to me. In my drunken stupor I stare at the young woman for quite some time, because I know I've seen her somewhere before. Flowing blonde hair, a lovely rack, perfectly toned skin and this Cindy Crawfordesque beauty mark on her fa...holy fuck that is Serena Van Der Woodsen. I am sitting next to the embodiment of perfection, usually I'm far too awkward to say something but after a day of skiing and close to 20 drinks at the bar I am feeling confident. Unfortunately I have passed liquid courage drunk and entered, idiot frat boy drunk. What the fuck is her real name? It's weird, but kinda cool. It's a boys name. Oh fuck it. "Hey, are you Serena?"

"Um, that's not actually my name"
"Oh, because you looke like that chick from Gossip Girl"
"Ha, ya but my name isn't Serena."

God I just fucked that up. I buried my head in cowardice while the rest of the table mocked my failure. I spent the rest of the time she was there staring at my phone trying to determine if her mole was in the right place or not, hard to do on Blackberry screen when you are seeing triple. Maybe it's just a look alike, nope it's definitely her. After an hour or so her party got up to leave, I was so full of regret, anger, shame...and then it hit me Blake Lively. BLAKE FUCKING LIVELY!

"Bye Blake, have a nice night"
"You too, bye"

Redemption.

Why do I bring up a semi entertaining Blake Lively story? It's somewhat relevant. I think Blake Lively is the most sexy/beautiful/perfect actress working today...with Scarlett Johansson a close second and maybe Keira Knightley shows (horse racing term for 3rd.) Her character on Gossip Girl is everything a guy could ever possibly find attractive. Her Co-star, Leighton Meester who portrays Blair Waldorf, is attractive but in the grand scheme of things doesn't hold a candle to Blake. This is the opinion on every male on Earth.

However, most girls prefer Blair. Do you know why? Because that character is "girl cute." She has fantastic outfits, wonderful accessories and thousand dollar heels. Oh, I'm sorry I didn't notice your new Prada bag...I was stearing at Serena's enormous tits. Guys don't give a fuck about women's fashion, nor should they. Women that show off lots of cleavage, some upper thigh and have long hair worn down...that's where its at. Yet every girl wants to have that French Bun and that french designed dress and crazy shoes that fashion magazines call fabulous. They often end up looking like an ill fated piece of abstract art.

Ok but that's just a stupid show on the CW, right? No, this shit has broken into our culture. Do you ever see a girl's outfit and think she looks like a fucking idiot? Yet her friends fawn over how amazing it is. The scary truth is, she wore it for them. Girls dress to impress other girls. Believe it or not, most girls don't go out with the intention to give you awkward boners on the dance floor when you see a single bead of sweat roll down her mostly exposed breast. They don't go out (well I think most don't) trying to get passionately slammed in the bathroom of a nightclub. Nope, they want to be the envy of the other girls based on their outfits. They want to light a fury of rage within their friends who will go home and say she looked fat or that she is a dumb cunt for trying to match those heels with that ensemble, they're jealous...it's insanity.

Gents, try as we may there is no stopping this. Girls are no longer trying to impress us. We can tell them what turns us on, they don't care. Some get it...some like the fictional Serena van der Woodsen. But she is fake, and even the fake version of her is out of my league and the real version is dating Leo. I would gladly settle for a nice dress with moderate cleavage and plenty of upper thigh, but no girl would be impressed by that outfit, so this is a fashion that will soon be dying out. All the attractive women in the world are going to be donned in something that Andrew McQueen scribbled down in his suicide note. I fear for the future where all women are sexless robots obsessed with bizarre fashion choices and criticizing eachother's selections...this is a much more real possibility than whatever the fuck was going on in the movie Children of Men. So to wrap up this post nicely with a bow I leave you with: Tits or GTFO!

Totally F*cked

There's a moment you know when you're fucked...it's the moment that your plane touches down on the runway after your 10 day denial of the real world and the karma angel you gave a toothy blowjob to takes a massive shit on your face. Like seriously I would rather go be Dsitrict 12's next representative in the Hunger Games than see all the painfully middle class lifers give me shit for going on a family vacation that involved me actually boarding a plane. Seriously sometimes I have to bite my toungue when I hear about their "vacations." Spending a long weekend at your parents' cottage in Wisconsin doesn't count. That is a fine weekend activity but you aren't allowed to get fired up and tell vacation stories about a normal Saturday. Someone please tell me that vacations exist after you turn 40? I went on Spring Break every year since I was 3...I always thought people that didn't go were weird. Now I come back to snivveling jealousy, oh the audacity to take off 2 weeks when you have only been here 18 months. Oh really? Oh the audacity of you to procreate, bringing a child into the world with a combined family income of under $100,000 is like having kids when you are HIV+ he is fucked...unless he is really good at sports or something, and I'm looking at you, he will be fat and unsuccessful.
/End Rant

Clearly I'm having a spectacular week team, I'm staying late to blog to give the illusion that I am staying late to work, to give the illusion that I care. Call me David Copperfield. While all my friends are drinking 1 dollar beers waiting to watch Taj Gibson deliver another cumshot to D Wade's face I am slowly typing some hate filled diatribe that will eventually leak out and lead to my firing...but it's better than getting dismissed by a shift assistant with a GED at the Gap over a Jew joke.

I've been passively looking for jobs the last few months because if I have to drive to Lake Forest one more time, it better be to take Tom Waddle's oldest daughter to Tsukasa for dinner because I believe this drive kills me a little every day and takes what used to be fun and light heartened into deadened rage. I've been having some fun with my cover letters and because I don't have anything else to complain about at the moment, I though I would share one with you. Enjoy, hope to see my fellow party people by halftime.

I swear to god, I honestly submitted this one, but I will remove the company name and my name for those who haven't figured it out yet...you are retarted, and I don't mean that in the you're an idiot kind of way, I mean like actually handicapped, like Sue Sylvester's sister who died last night in Glee kind of way. Spoiler alert.

In business school we were always taught that a cover letter should accomplish one goal which was to obtain an interview. After that we went over horrifying content and formatting restrictions which probably reflect why my stock resume still looks like the other 1000 Kelley School of Business applicants that companies such as you receive each and every day. If that’s all I have to get my foot in the door, it might as well be a crap shoot whether the former ball boy from Indianapolis that sold computers and cigarettes during and after college receives an interview. Welcome to the world of the creative (name redacted,) you are free of all restriction.
Thank you, I feel so much better now. I’ve never been one to format my resume into some crazy graphic, my skills in Photoshop end at me adding corgis to famous photos to make myself laugh. However, I have always had a way with words and a knack for thinking outside the box. Life can be so boring when you color within the lines, there is so much more opportunity and people often appreciate this different type of thought . I think often we underestimate that in business, in the world.
So what makes me memorable, do I show my prowess as a screenwriter and write a CV as a screenplay? That’s a novel idea, but I’m sure it’s been done before. Surely I could write some social commentary laced with profanity perhaps, but I’m sure you’ve read a blog or a twitter account before. At the end of the day, maybe reading this has spurred a certain interest within you. Maybe you just want to see what color tie I would wear to the interview, maybe you genuinely think I could provide value to (name redacted.) I’ll spare you the praise of your company that you often read, and skip the part where I list my skills and achievements and draw real world examples as to how I can use them in this new position. I will simply leave it at this, my name is (name redacted) and I want to work for you. Thanks.

I'm coming home again

Ok so that whole thing about me blogging my Italy trip didn't really work out. I didn't have internet and I suppose I was too busy doing cool things and thought it would be rather lame of me to sit in an internet cafe and torture you with my adventures. I'll go ahead and get this all out of the way quickly and then resume my standard blogging.

Yes, I went to the Oil Shoppe, Aqua Al Due (yes i got the blueberry steak) JJ Cathedral changed its name so did Michael Collins but they are still the same.

Yes I went to Yab, yep it still stucks, no I didn't see the Jersey Shore cast or find the secret bakery. Yup still American, did not talk to anyone Italian in Florence that wasn't servicing me in some respect...no I didn't hook up with any Italians.

Rome is still there, it's still old, the churches are impressive, Campo di Fiori still kicks ass. Scholars is a good time.

Yes I drank a lot of red wine, no my dad didn't like it, yes we argued about it, yes I threatened to fight him.

Cinque Terra is still fun, and the hiking is still beyond brutal.

I walked a lot.

I spent 25% of my vacation on trains.

I got 8 beefs from that random beef stand.

The open container laws still aren't enforced.

American Airlines doesn't have free alcohol on internetional flights...remember this if you rememebr nothing else.

Finland, pretty much what you would expect.

Yes I got very very drunk.

Yep my calf muscles still hurt from climbing the Duomo.

Yes I bought a leather band from that shop on the Ponte Vecchio.

Yes I ate a lot of pasta.

Yes it sucks to be back, but I did miss my friends.

Ok that's pretty much what I would have said had I been blogging the whole time I was abroad, maybe a few more high brow pop culture references and dare I say jokes but that's about it. Regular blogging resumes tomorrow.

USA! USA!

So last night as I was scarfing down my spicy tuna roll at a friend's going away dinner I started checking twitter because I was drunk and rather unimpressed with the people sitting near me. I saw the standard sports tweets, my uncreative friends overusing the phrase "Sunday funday" and a few of the cats that I follow were talking about comfortable places to nap. Then I saw a tweet from Brobible or TFM that said "Bush gets the win, obama gets the save" to which I was like wtf? My painfully slow Twitterberry finally refreshed and I saw about 10 million tweets that we had killed Osama Bin Laden. Of course my drunk ass stood up in a BYOB sushi restaurant and proudly declared that "Obama was dead!" Now me dressed as a faux Martha's Vineyard wannabe may give people the impression that I am a conservative douche, but not one to celebrate our presiden't demise. I quickly corrected my bold proclamation and proposed a toast to the Americans murdering OSAMA. Many of the Asians still looked at me blankly...whatever dude.

Anyway, despite the fact that I am most likely going to now require a cavity search to fly to Europe Thursday (I've got a record yo) last night was extremely badass. I stayed at US Beer Co until about 1230 drinking Old Styles because I couldn't think of any tangible connection it would have with non-American things (like Bud to inbev or Coors to Canada)

I got to work today and planned on doing extensive research on what happened. I ended up just laughing at Tumblr pages and Obama .gifs all day and one extremely awesome Taiwanese animators recreation of the events. At this point I think I know we doubletapped bin Laden in the face after mercing his 24 year old son and filling his wife full of lead after he tried to use her as a shield. Sorry brah.

The most interesting find of the day though was on his "wanted" poster. Cash reward for killing Osama 25 million dollars. 25 million fucking dollars to kill a skinny tall Arab? and I studied Marketing in College? Indiana needs to look into a new degree called Terrorist Hunter in the School of Mercenary. Osama was promised virgins in heaven? Imagine if you killed Osama! I imagine it would go like this.

*knock knock*
(Man answers door)
Man: Hello, may I help you?
Me: Oh, hello sir, I am here to sleep with your 18 year old virgin daughter.
Man: You have 10 seconds to leave or I am going to get my gun and fucking murder you.
Me: No sir, it's ok. I was the one that killed Osama bin Laden.
Man: Well why didn't you say so? Come on in son! Feel free to hit it raw, if you knock her up I'll cover the abortion, and thanks for the sacrifice you made for our country!
Me: Is your wife home too?
Man: I'll send her up in an hour and cook you a steak too.

And you could fucking repeat that shit daily for the rest of your life! And you would have 25 million dollars, not like you would have to ever spend money, I'm pretty sure the government would issue you a legal ID that says "Osama Assassin" and everything you could ever want is comped, I may even request to have my face added to Rushmore and Secret Service protection, and I would definitely want an EP credit when my story was eventually optioned off to be a biopic.

Moral of the story is: America fucking rocks, and 160 pounds is too skinny when you're 6'6" we probably could have killed that shifty fuck with powerful airsoft guns. In the mean time I'll be using the following line at bars on extremely drunk chicks. "Ya, I just got back from the Middle East, I was involved in a top secret president ordered assassination you may have heard of..."

Photo credit: Paul Bird...of course he was celebrating at Ground Zero