I’ve been hesitant to mention a new position I’ve applied for at IBM, just, I guess, not to “jinx” it. However, since I’m not a superstitious person, that makes no sense.
All I’ll say here now is that I’ve been told I’m on the “very short list,” I interviewed for the position today, and from my perspective at least, it went quite well.
I will sit and wait now. The decision is supposed to come “soon.” Getting this position would be like “winning the job lottery” to me.
I had three affirmations today — see, I do know that affirmation has two “effs” in it, in spite of my blog name.
These affirmations are very, very meaningful to me, and warmed my heart. They were, respectively, from a gay man, a straight man, and a straight woman with two kids in their 20s:
| “I love to watch you dance.” |
| “I love reading your blog.” |
| “My kids love you. And trust you, in my book. And that means a lot. That is huge. They both need, for different reasons, stable men in their lives. Thank you for being the tip of the top.” |
“We B M” had another “meeting” tonight at 
, which included, once again, 
and team trivia. Building off the momentum of our last meeting, we did worse. Last time, I believe we scored in the 38-point range. This time we scored 29. This was out of 60. I’m feeling the need to graph that in an excel spreadsheet, but I am resisting.
“We,” tonight, consisted of Amy & Will, E-Ching & David, and after Round 2, Amelia & Steve. Tonight’s trivia contest categories were:
|
Round
|
Category
|
|
1
|
General Knowledge
|
|
2
|
Places
|
|
3
|
Music
|
|
4
|
Sports
|
|
5
|
State Symbols
|
|
6
|
Colors
|
Since, the last time they thought “We B M” had something to do with a bowel movement, I wrote in the upper right corner of our sheet, “We B M, as in IBM, but several of us.”
For the music category, we had to listen to clips of songs, and identify the song title and its artist.
Though I thought the State Symbols were “things associated with NC State,” I quickly realized that we were not playing 
, and that they were questions about the State of North Carolina’s symbols.
Did you know that “The Dogwood” is the state flower, not the state tree? And, no Pepsi isn’t the state drink, milk is. Our most ridiculous, and wrong I might add, guesses were in making our decision for the state of North Carolina’s official vegetable.
Because inquiring minds simply want to know, these are the North Carolina state symbols. The ones in red are the ones for which we had to come up with answers in Round 5.
Berries | Beverage | Bird | Boat | Carnivorous Plant | Colors | Dances | Dog | Festivals | Fish | Flag | Flower | Fruit | Insect | Mammal | Military Academy | Motto | Nickname | Pottery birthplace | Reptile | Rock | Seal | Shell | Song | Stone | Toast | Tree | Vegetable | Wildflower
These are from a website, and it bugs me that they are not either all in the singular or all in the plural. Berries should be berry. Colors should be color, dances should be dance,… Well you get the gist as I digress.
As per usual, there were the two “between round activities” of a beer chugging contest, and a joke-telling session.
The joke-telling session was horrible, and started off with an old man (you know he was old if I’m calling him old) telling a “Polack joke.”
After the rolling of eyes of people, and comments like, “Oh boy, what century is this?” and “Been to any sensitivity training lately?” and “Anybody else know of any other racist jokes we can tell?” the comments turned to those about how long this dreadful joke was going on. The guy at the table next to us looked at his watch and said, “Hey man, I’ve got to work tomorrow.”
I said, “I wonder if anyone will tell a ‘gay joke’ next.”
Amelia said, “John, you should go up there and tell one.”
“Yeah,” I said. “How about this one? I’ll go up and say, ‘There were these two gay guys… One of them was me. Thank you very much,’ and sit back down.”
I told a paraphrased version of this little ditty from The Humanity Critic’s blog in a posting where he’s talking about “stupid things he’s done while being high on marijuana”:
Speed Racer: A few friends and I were driving home from a concert that we had went to. We had gotten high at the concert but the marijuana didn’t kick in until we were half way home. I felt that I was speeding, and my friends kept telling me to slow down. I ignored them, and continued to race down the street. Then the cops pulled us over. When the officer approached me he said, “Son, do you know how fast you were going?” I said, “I don’t know, pretty fast huh?” The officer gave me a bewildered look and said, “You were going 7 miles an hour!!!”
This is from his posting entitled, Embarrassing Moments in my Marijuana History.
Overall, our night out was a large time, and we managed to talk about just about everyone who wasn’t there. A good time by the lowest of standards.
I stopped by Flex after that, where Tuesday Night Karaoke was in full swing, and it had just about the most bizarre crowd I’ve ever seen there. They were kids. And most of them girls. And they almost all smoked. Most wore black, some leather, several tattoos, and bended genders. Interesting.
I had one drink, and left after about 45 minutes.