I worked from home today, and I participated in three conference calls:
- A meeting with my manager to receive my 2007 Personal Business Commitments rating, which was exactly what I expected it would be, which is exactly how it should be. [World without end, amen.]
- The last half (as the aforementioned meeting with my manager was double-booked over the first half) of a Professional Vitality Session on Message Scoring.
- The first 10 minutes of the ITIM IDD (Information Development & Design) Weekly Status Meeting, where I’m first on their agenda to talk about any editing needs or issues, so I can drop off after that. Which I gladly did.
One of the 30 or so things on my 2008 (and after-graduation) To-Do list is to start dabbling a little again in the stock market. To that end…
Today I put in a limit order for 250 shares of SONS at $3.50. Though the price ranged from $3.00 to $3.97 today, the dip below $3.50 happened before I placed my order. It never dipped to that (or lower) after I placed the order, so the order expired at market close. I’ll try it again tomorrow.
Annoyed due to no answer to a 12/20/07 and an 01/08/08 e-mail to NCSU about an Alumni Membership to Carmichael Gymnasium, I finally just picked up the phone and called the place.
Turns out the contact listed on their web page—to whom I sent both e-mails—is on maternity leave, although allegedly, she is checking her e-mail and forwarding important stuff to be handled by someone else. I’m here to tell you: That process ain’t-a-working.
When it was all said and done, it was confirmed that I cannot join the gym as an alumnus until an “enrollment period” from mid-May to mid-August, which completely sucks.
When I get back from my weekend in Georgia, I’m going to join Planet Fitness for $10-a-month with no contract and no commitment. This will be my stop-gap measure until May, when I plan to join Carmichael, even though it’ll be $5 more a month to be a member there.
Today, I played the Russian Roulette that getting a ripe cantaloupe is, but I’m glad to report that I hit the jackpot. Sweet. Sweet. Sweet.
A blurb from The Week‘s Good Week For… and Bad Week For… feature, which is one of my favorite features in the magazine:
| A bad week for Bozo…
…after a British study found that decorating hospitals’ children’s wards with images of clowns only serves to terrify the patients. “Clowns are universally disliked by children,” said researcher Penny Curtis. Kids, she said, find their strange faces, weird hair, and ostensibly funny behavior “frightening and unknowable.” |
I know a couple of people personally who are either afraid of, or hate, clowns.
Myself, they don’t bother me, and the mere mention of them always reminds me of one of my all-time favorite puns, which I know I included in my December 10th entry: Two cannibals were eating a clown. One turns to the other and says, “Does this taste funny to you?”
I took a 1.5-hour nap this evening, and I had the most realistic, disturbing dream that I was so happy to wake up from to realize that it was just that—a dream.
In it, I woke up on a guy’s bed, and when I looked at him he was really blurry, and I couldn’t get up easily. “Did you drug me?” I asked him.
“I just gave you a little bit of something,” he said.
When I finally got out to the driveway to leave, my car wasn’t there. There was a car in the driveway, but it wasn’t mine. I asked where mine was, and he said, “You have to move that one first, then I’ll bring yours out.”
With difficulty, I backed the car out of the driveway, and I moved it to a spot catty-corner to his driveway. I’d backed the car into a parking spot and when I got out of it, only then did I realize that there was a car so close to the one I’d just parked that there was no way I wouldn’t have hit it backing in without seeing it.
I then walked back across the street to get my car, and when I saw no car, went to the door, where a person other than the guy greeted me, and said, “Man, he sold your car.”
I just froze and thought, “My god, what have I gotten myself into here?” Then I woke up.
I went to Karaoke tonight, which was hosted by Chastity. I have to say that she was pretty funny tonight, in spite of a tendency to yammer.
She did start off with a surprisingly touching little speech about the death of Heath Ledger, at one point saying, “Our community really has to be thankful for straight men who play roles like the ones Jake and Heath played. The naysayers warned him about the career implications of taking that role, but he did it anyway. For two hours that man walked in our shoes.”
Chastity, I’m assuming is a stage name, and he mostly looks like a girl even though he hasn’t transitioned and sometimes still dresses like a guy. On the lighter side, this was my favorite “snap snap” line from him during the night. Someone was semi-jokingly arguing with him about something, and he quipped, “Don’t make me take off my earrings.”
Mostly I spoke with Paul (ex-Republican), Curt (pipe), and David (Sadlock’s), but I met the cutest couple—Champ and Jim. Lots of affirmations from these two guys.
Champ, 25, beautiful smile, and just brimming with life was sitting in front of me, and heard me singing from behind. He said, “Man. You gonna sing? You have a great voice. If I could sing like you, I’d be up on the stage.”
He had just come out in August and you could tell that he was ecstatic to be living his authentic life. I told him I’d come out at 35. “Oh, so you’re just out, too,” he said.
“Actually, I just turned 50 in October, so no.”
He squealed and said, “No shit!” And that’s when I met Jim, who was just coming back from the bar and said to Champ, “Don’t scream like that.” After introducing me to Jim, Champ said to him, “Guess how old he is,” pointing to me.
“42,” Jim said sizing me up.
“He’s fifty,” Champ said and then Jim squealed and said, “No shit!” Champ said, “Don’t scream like that!”
And then Champ said to me, “I hope I look half as good as you do when I’m 50. Seriously, man.”
Talk about people not meeting the stereotypes we have of them: Jim was 22, long blond hair around his face, roughed in goatee going on, and if I’d just seen him on the streets I would have thought he was probably the biggest redneck, and possibly even a clan member. And here he was, gay, and totally in love with Champ, an African American.
I asked them how they’d met, and smiled as they both talked about how much they loved each other (after dating a month), and I thought about how these two “kids” have “their whole lives ahead of them”— to be filled with the kind of excitement they’re both experiencing right now, the heartbreaks that lie ahead, and their eventual “coming into their own” as they grow older and wiser. Sigh.
At one point, they went into the bathroom together, and when Jim came out, first, he said to me, “I asked Champ to marry me!”
“Where are you going to do that?” I asked.
“Boston,” he replied with the hugest grin on his face.
I played a couple of games of pool with David—we each won one, and then Jim asked to play the winner, which was me for that particular game. We had a long game, both of us missing a lot of easy shots.
I said my goodbyes to Jim and Champ and they both said separately, as they were in separate parts of the bar when I said my good nights, “I like you.”
“I like you, too,” I’d said to both of them, and then, also to each, “I hope you continue to be happy together.”