Call Me Nostradamus

I've decided to go ahead and post my prediction for the Election Day results. I think the vast majority of people at this point are assuming that Obama will win, and I hope with every fiber of my being that it's true.

In the meantime, here is my call on the actual electoral outcome -- let's see how badly I can embarrass myself:


My biggest dilemma was deciding which one would take Ohio, so I am going to assume that racism is alive and well in the Buckeye state and say that they send their electoral votes McCain's way. I was also wondering about Florida, but I'm pretty sure they will manage to fuck up the vote count yet again and some Republican nobody will hijack the state. Probably to no avail. Here's hoping.

Unfortunate Events

Well it had been a few months since I'd had a truly embarrassing drunken moment (I think we can all agree I've been relatively well-behaved lately) so I suppose it was overdue.

On Friday, as mentioned, we had our work quarterly event. Someone who was definitely not me thought that 80's tennis was a great theme. Might have worked out better for some if we hadn't started drinking before the tournament. My doubles partner and I made it to the Grand Final (with little to no help from me) only for me to choke and us to lose the game. Other highlights:

1) Accidentally telling my boss to "fuck off" in the middle of a conversation. It wasn't in a mean way, just one of those moments where you say something really casually and there are major consequences for your career as a result. You know how it is.

2) Falling on the ground (because a colleague had decided to jump on me) and my boss telling me that I am a "sad, pathetic man". Bitter much?

3) Losing my bottle of wine at the club at least twice. It was like an easter egg hunt for alcoholics.

4) Dragging around 10 people to a friend's apartment across the street from the club, and partying very loudly and drunkenly there until close to 2am. Casualties seem to include a few wine glasses and a clothes hamper. And one of my coworkers claims to have a bruise on his arm because I fell on him at one point. Score.


Needless to say, I only left my apartment on Saturday in order to rent a DVD that I could watch while eating the pizza I ordered. I backed it up on Sunday with a few bottles of wine, but decided it was time to go home when I looked at my hand and it was bleeding. WTF. Not my weekend.

Back At Square One

I've actually had a relatively quiet week. There was most likely a little too much wine at the Night Noodle Markets on Tuesday night (after wine and a shot at lunch), but I was functional on Wednesday and haven't had a drink since.

And so tonight promises to be a glorious disaster. We are leaving the office at 2pm and heading to some tennis courts for our work quarterly event, the theme of which today is "Wimbledon '82" -- so we will basically dress up like assholes (my head and wristbands are ready to go, and I already see some wigs in the office), pretend we can play tennis (I believe 4 out of 25 people have played in the last year, if ever), and then focus very hard on getting obliterated on the company's dime.


Have I mentioned I love Australia?

It Shouldn't Be That Hard

*Please forgive any grammar or spelling mistakes, I am sitting in my office at 2pm on a Tuesday smelling like white wine and sour apple schnappes.

As I'm sure I've mentioned here, I'm throwing a huge Halloween bash on the 31st. I've booked out a couple of spaces at a fun bar with a DJ, costumes have been delivered, and we are in the process of selecting which food we want served.

However what's been causing me the most grief over the last couple of days is determining a Halloween cocktail that I want added to the drinks menu that night. All I want is something green (I think red or orange is too common, and black is too difficult) that isn't too hard for the bartenders to make and tastes half decent, but all I can find is ghetto websites with extremely complicated suggestions. Surely we can just throw some vodka, tonic water, and midori in a glass and give it a cheesy Halloween name?

I love that typing this post is what helped me come up with that. Name suggestions are still welcome, though. Maybe a "Witches Tit"?

The End Of The Blog?

No, not really. Although I am feeling rather lonely these days since most of my blogging compatriots seem to have abandoned their sites. But no, I posed that question because I just had possibly the quietest weekend I've had in longer than I can remember.

I did have a few drinks on Friday night, but didn't have a drop of alcohol on Saturday, which is easily my biggest accomplishment. Sunday included a few glasses of champagne in the park in the afternoon, but still ended with me laying on my couch, almost completely sober.

I'm pretty excited that I finally managed to have the quiet weekend I've been trying to have since I got back from my ridiculous trip. Mostly because I feel like I've earned some of the messy weekends that I know I have coming up in the near future. I've even just planned a minor surgery around my upcoming drinking schedule. More details on that to follow.

Website of the Month

Yesterday I mailed in my absentee ballot, I think it goes without saying that I am voting for Obama/Biden. I would make more political commentary on here, but I find the whole situation so shocking and upsetting that I'm afraid it would turn into an insane rant.

As it is, I will just leave you with this fantastic website to play around with -- click around the room for laughs:

Older or Dumber?

I was trying to decide which of those resulted in me ending up totally trashed and in bed before midnight on both Friday and Saturday. I'm guessing it was the latter. I love how after 3 years of Fridays in this country, I still say "I can just eat at the end of the night, don't want to ruin my buzz", and quickly find myself unable to see or walk and desperate for a taxi home.

Saturday was the most ridiculous -- after breakfast and meeting a couple of friends (who were both still drunk from the night before, I should mention) at the Costume Shop in preparation for my Halloween party, we decided it couldn't hurt to head back to my place and drink a couple of beers on the balcony. At 1pm.

It would have been bad enough that we were blasting music and singing along by 7pm, but that was all topped off by security actually SHUTTING OFF POWER TO MY APARTMENT to make it all stop. Yeah, for reals.

So I guess that's a new low, considering it's not like it was the middle of the night or anything, so we must have been REALLY loud. I barely remember that stage of the evening to be honest.

The plus side of getting wasted and passing out so early is that you wake up the next day feeling pretty good and ready for more, or at least a lazy afternoon on the beach like yesterday. Now if I can just stay away from the booze for a few days...

Party Foul

Earlier this year, I realized that Halloween actually fell on a Friday this year. Australians don't really celebrate anywhere near the same way that we do back in the U.S., and since it's easily one of my favorite holidays, I decided I would throw a party with my friend Jules and show the Aussies how it's done.

So I booked the biggest room at one of my favorite bars in Sydney, and even had a designer at work create an invite for me to email out:


And as I always do, I wrote up a long email to set the scene and get people interested in the party, and emailed it out last week. I also decided to create it as a Facebook event, since I actually don't have email addresses for a lot of friends.

So you can imagine my shock when I caught up with Busty on Saturday for some drinks, and she asked me if I had found my Halloween invitation text on the internet. When I asked why she would think that, she told me that she had actually received almost the exact same invitation on Facebook from a different friend a day after she had received and accepted mine.

That's right -- her friend saw my invite on Facebook, COPIED AND PASTED the text over to her own invite, and after some minor changes (including location and date, of course) sent it out to all of her friends. Naturally I had a few questions:

1) Who does that?!

2) If you are going to do something that tacky and unoriginal, wouldn't you at least NOT invite the person who received my invite the previous day?

3) WHO DOES THAT?!!


I immediately had Busty text message this chick to let her know that I thought she was a thief. Most people have told me that I should be flattered, but I think I'm more bothered by the fact that others might see my invite and think that it was ME who was being unoriginal. As if.

The thief (who I feel I should mention is Canadian - figures) has since admitted to stealing my invite, and said I should come to her party, which I think I find even more insulting. I have passed along my own invitation to her, saying she should come to my party as "a Plagiarist", and I will be more than happy to have a shirt waiting for her with "COPY" on the front and "PASTE" on the back.

Loser.

Weight Watchers, Here I Come!

I'm a little disappointed in myself for not blogging for an entire week -- I think I posted more often during my hectic trip around the world. If I have any excuse at all (and trust me, I know this is a flimsy one) I was drunk Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday AND Sunday nights, and Monday night was much needed recovery before I went to a dinner party last night and once again consumed far too much wine.

Which all ties pretty neatly into something I'm trying to make a focus at the moment, and that's my health. After a month of traveling around the world, getting little to no exercise (unless you include dancing the night away in a trashy club, I don't), and eating complete and utter crap, I arrived back in Sydney feeling pretty disgusting. Not that I've ever been the epitome of healthy living, but in the last couple of years I've tended to balance out the bad drinking and eating habits with at least a few healthy things like swimming and the occasional multi-vitamin.

So now I need to focus. And here are the three rules I am trying to set for myself at the moment:

1) Exercise more. It's not that hard for me -- when I first started swimming in the mornings early last year, I did it every single day including weekends. In the past 6 months that's tapered off to around every other day, but that's still not too bad. And considering I'm one of the few people who seems to even look forward to waking up at 6am to jump into a pool that's not nearly heated enough, the prospects on this one look good. Especially when I wake up in the morning and see a fatty staring back at me.

2) Eat less. Probably the most obvious one for most people, but consider that I'm one of those people who has never had to think about what he eats. So my new rules around eating are that lunch needs only consist of one serving (one burrito will suffice, I don't need two quesadillas to go with it), and the afternoon trips to McDonald's to "hold me over until dinner" are completely unnecessary. And if I feel any hunger pains, I can think of that as what it feels like to get skinnier. I learned that one from an actual anorexic.

3) Drink less. So this is the trickiest one. Not only because I am a really social person who finds it hard to turn down an invitation to drinks (and please don't make the ridiculous suggestion that I should go to a bar but not drink, it ain't gonna happen), but mostly because it completely screws me over for the first two rules. Generally I drink for a few hours after work, and then get something ridiculously unhealthy on the way home, which is the only way to soften the blow of the hangover the next morning, which still isn't enough to make me feel like going swimming when I wake up.


Notice none of this refers to any proper diet or detox. I find it amazing that people still do those things even though any doctor, medical study, or person with an ounce of common sense could tell you that cutting anything out of your life completely for some time, only to start up again weeks or months later, probably just reduces your body's ability to process it, and makes you feel even worse in the long run.

So this week, I've turned over a new leaf. Since last night was a dinner party with a family friend, I have excused the few glasses of wine. I was just being polite. Otherwise, I am going to attempt to limit my drinking to 3 nights a week, and I will also aim to drink less beer, since I think it's no coincidence that my general weight gain started to happen around the time I moved to Australia and started drinking beer for many hours at a time, several times a week.

We'll see how I go -- I'm not actually fat (although the bitchier people in my life would tend to disagree), so it's just about feeling a bit better and if I lose a little of the chubbiness in my face and also regain something that could at least resemble abdominal muscles in certain light, then I'll be more than happy.

Easing Back Into It

Well folks, I'm back in Sydney. By the end of my trip, all I really wanted was to just get back here and return to my life, since I think a month is kind of a long time to be away from it all. Not that I've had that much to come back to in terms of work, especially. Sure a couple more people have resigned, including my arch-nemesis, which I've found strangely unsatisfactory, since I love having enemies. But other than that the only real exciting development has been a huge new monitor to hook up to my existing work computer, which means I can read my Gmail and check my Facebook account at the same time. Yes, really.

In the meantime, I should probably get to work on the rest of my photos from the big trip, although I have a new favorite photo ever of myself that Emla was kind enough to send through -- HOT STUFF. I think the extra chromosome really brings out my eyes.