Moderately BC

Не Со Мной?

2009-10-17T02:40:00.005-05:00

I wrote a lot of negative things and I feel better now. Well, better than before at least. Hope springs eternal. :-/

Feed me a stray cat.

Может Быть

2009-10-12T01:52:00.000-05:00

Констанция,

You broke up with him once and it's inevitably going to happen again. You know it's just hurting you but you can't handle being alone. Let me show you that you can be happy in relationship.

Shut Up and Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

2009-07-26T17:05:00.002-05:00

That's what you get for waking up in Vegas

Get up and shake the glitter off your clothes now

That's what you get for waking up in Vegas

// Recent Anything

Greetings Professor Falken. You are a hard man to reach. Could not find you in Seattle and no terminal is in operation at your classified address.

If you are female, Eastern European, between the ages of 22 and 30, moderately attractive+, and know what movie the above quote is from, it is imperative that I take you to dinner.

Haha, anyways...

June 2nd I took a holy random trip to Houston with two of my Taiko bros - CT and Victor the vegetarian. CT texted me the day before to see if I was down and of course I was since I had that particular day off from work. As always there was originally more people planning to go but it ended up being just the three of us. We met up at TI's place that morning planning to leave at 7am but I don't think we left until around almost nine due to CT having to run to OKC to acquire a GPS device. Once we were off we were good...except for the fact that Victor and I hadn't slept and CT only had 3 hours of sleep. Awesome!

The trek to H-Town would undoubtedly be fraught with boredom so to help keep that lingering menace at bay we came up with some...games to play. And being a degenerate gambler I convinced the non-degenerate gamblers to throw some gambling in the mix. We came up with two trip-length games to play: forbidden word and forbidden phrase. Forbidden Word is played by selecting a single word and declaring it forbidden. And whenever someone says the forbidden word they are forced to pay a penalty. In our case every time you said the forbidden word you contributed a dollar to a pot. We ended up choosing the word "what". We decided that whenever we got to Long's place we would high-card and whoever won gets whatever's in the pot.

The second trip-length game we decided to play was Forbidden Phrase. Pretty much the same thing as Forbidden Word except a phrase. We chose any phrase relating to hunger and the first person to say it buys the other two bubble tea upon arriving in Houston. I didn't want the loser to lose something big because I figured I had the biggest chance of losing this one, haha.

We originally were planning on not eating until we got to Houston (lol) but Long pressed for us to eat lunch so we decided to stop and get some pho in Dallas. It was the same place Tony, Loan, and I ate on our way to Houston. Having lunch made the second trip-length game much much easier.

Upon arriving in Houston we headed to the big Asian mall where I again purchased a strawberry slurpy with boba and banh bao. We chilled there until Long got off work and headed to his place. After we arrive we pontificate various activities to engage in after dinner. Long is awesome and got some good tickets to the Astros game so we decided on that after sushi with Quoc.

Several rolls, sake bombs, and glasses of Asahi later we end up at Minute Maid stadium. I'm in full team spirit mode and decide to buy an Astros hat. Unfortunately it's a little too tight and I ended up forgetting to exchange it before we left so bleh. It's ok, beer and hot dogs made it better. We stayed for maybe four innings before heading out to the closest thing that resembled a casino: Dave & Busters.

[lol @ writing this in June. I'm just going to stop and continue from whatever's happened recently. Oh well.]

Haha, so yeah. Today is Sunday, July 26th and I'm currently at work. Sundays are always slow. So, recently?

Thursday night Stanley had scheduled a quasi-brotherhood event which consisted of a home game with the fellas. All of us hadn't played in a home game in forever so we all really needed this. When I get there Stanley asked me if I had my KEM cards. Hmm. No, I actually had no clue as to their location. Well, I did. The last place I saw them was at the Taiko house but you can't really rely on that as a credible information with regards to an item's location. Perhaps they were with the other gambling items that were moved to TI's place. We looked, no luck. Now I started getting upset.

I actually had this conversation with Katherine earlier in the week while we partook of mojitos at Louie's. I'm just too nice. I let people borrow things without them ever being returned to on time or in their original condition. I don't allow my inconvenience to interfere with favors people ask, sometimes despite the severe gravity of the favor's inconvenience to me. And no matter how many times people do this I still continue to aid them when asked. All of this with little or no gratitude. There also exist times when I think I'm being taken advantage of, but maybe I'm just paranoid. The bottom line is that there is just no respect. It's time for BC to learn to say no.

Getting back on topic, we end up using some of Hieu's cards and we actually played nine-handed for several hours. I'd talk about some of the hands but I'm feeling pretty lazy at the moment due to eating a footlong sub plus a bag of chips...ugh. Anyways, I actually had to open the next morning which meant I had to be there at 5am. We played for so long we had to cut the game short around 4:15am so I could go get ready for work, haha. Ended up leaving even but had some crazy swings.

I don't think I wrote about it yet but I got another promotion at work. I open now which I like a lot better than closing. More responsibilities, store keys, alarm codes, safe combos, etc. Neato.

Actually I don't feel like writing much right now. I'll make the rest short.

Ended up working for twelve hours that day (Friday) but due to no fault of my own this time, haha. Had plans to go eat at Eischen's with Tony, Loan, Charlie, and Katherine. We were meeting to leave at Tony's place and I decided to get there a little early to hit up the bar downstairs. LOL BAD IDEA

I had no sleep, intense 12-hour shift, and nothing to eat all day. Why didn't I learn my lesson from NYE???? Haha. So I had two Manhattans, one of which was like a double because the bartender didn't make enough so he just filled the rest up with bourbon, and a double shot kamikaze. Sorry, Tony. Sorry, Loan. Sorry, Charlie. Sorry, Katherine.

It hit me once we got to NW Expressway and I just passed out. I woke up to walk to our booth at Eischen's and passed out. Sometime while we were eating somebody told me to eat a wing. I took a small bite, tasted the grease, and worked hard not to vomit. I went #1 on the way out and it did not look healthy, rofl.

I was out on the way back to Tony's place and started to be able to stay awake once we got there. I was fucking starving so I immediately ordered some Papa John's when we got to Tony's apartment. I was still in the mood for chicken so I ordered the Hawaiin BBQ Chicken pizza. We "watched" the movie Rope. It was eh. Apparently I have narcolepsy.

Work the next day at 2pm, it was all right. My brother and I are caught up with The Office so now we're looking for another thing to watch. Last night also consisted of watching the first two episodes of the new season of Hell's Kitchen and the movie Phantasm. HK was meh, Phatasm was retarded.

And it's Sunday and I'm working. I have tomorrow off, then I open Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday off, working Friday 2-close, Saturday off. I wish I wasn't working Friday.

Hmm...what else?

If you didn't already know, I've taken up learning Russian as a hobby. It's going well but I've been neglecting it lately. :(

That's about it for now, kiddos. <3

A Long Time Ago, We Used To Be Friends

2009-05-17T03:32:00.002-05:00

But I haven't thought of you lately at all

If ever again a greeting I send to you

Short and sweet to the soul I intend

// Recent Anything

So yeah. Updating. From work. I like working Sundays because it's super slow. Anyways, there have been a lot of things that have happened since the Houston trip, but I don't think anything extraordinarily significant has happened so you'll just have to skip out of a couple of months of random shit happening to me. Woe is you.

This past week was finals week for OU. Friday night was an obligatory celebration for many. I had lunch at TEA Cafe with Connie and Stephanie. We surprisingly didn't eat as much as we usually do. It was a lot of fun though because there's always some fucked up hilarious conversation with the three of us. Ugh, there's one part I don't even want to think about, haha.

Afterwards I picked up my check and decided to see Star Trek again. T called me during the movie to see if I wanted to eat, but I didn't pick up. I called him immediately afterwards and he said they were currently in line to eat the seafood buffet at Riverwind. I told him to go ahead and pay for me so I wouldn't have to wait in line and booked it to the casino. It was dinner with some not-so-good crab. Add in the fact that Thomas was there...haha. Tim was there too. Thomas drove the three of them there and left T without a ride when he and Tim left to go swimming or something.

T then starts coaxing me into playing poker. I originally tell him that I can't because I had plans to watch a movie with Tony and Loan at my place at 9pm and since it was already past seven, we'd only be able to get in maybe an hour and a half of poker time. And if you've ever been to the casino with T, you know that an hour and a half is nowhere near adequate. So finally I relented to play. He then tells me that he only has $80 and he wanted to play the slots with it so I spot him a hundred to play poker with. Luckily for us there was no wait so I take a seat at table five. I ask him if he's leaving with me and he says no. Ok. He's caught a cab home before so I don't think it's a big deal.

Two or three regulars at my table but nothing I can't handle. I lose some at the start which is what usually happens. But then! Then I go drop a deuce. It's magical. Everytime this year when I go play I start out losing a little bit, but then I go blast a dookie and start winning. This time was no exception. I was manipulating everybody at the table really well and taking advantage of all their weaknesses. It felt amazing. I was making great bb/100 when Loan called around 8:40pm asking me if I was at my apartment. Crap, they're early. So I play one more hand and go cash out. As I was leaving I looked for T but couldn't find him so I proceeded to leave. He's a big boy and can take care of himself.

I make it home one minute late and we begin to watch the next movie on our list, Mystic River. During the movie I receive a text in slightly broken ebonics about where I was and if I had already left. After telling him I left, he seemed to get angry at me for leaving without him since he planned on getting a ride with me. .... Thanks for telling me, fob! I tell him one of the sober guys later will pick him up.

We finish the movie and it was ok. We head over to the Taiko house and after Tony "parks" we head into the house to see a group of jovial friends who had just finished playing drinking games. wtf? I start high carding whoever would want to for shots of 151. Nobody really wanted to play. :( God writing all of this is retarded. I don't really care anymore.

So we end up at the party and drink more, T calls me asking when his ride is picking him up. I tell him to get a cab, he would if he wasn't busto, lol. So I give the phone to Thomas and other people but nobody is sober enough to pick him up. Damn it. I realized that if I didn't do anything nobody was going to. So being the fucking awesome brother that I am, I walk in the pouring rain, hop a fence, and walk to the nearest recognizable landmark to call for a cab to pick me up, take me to Riverwind, then drive us back. Yeah, it was fun. A $40 cab ride later and Trung and I are walking in the rain back to the party.

End up leaving not long after that and head to TI's place to play some Monopoly. Luke had the best chance to win but I end up taking down the game. Went home, passed out.

Doctor, Doctor, Give Me The News

2009-05-08T04:38:00.000-05:00

I've got a bad case of lovin' you
No pills gonna cure my ills
I've got a bad case of lovin' you

// Spring Break to Houston

Ok, so...Houston! We decided to leave early Wednesday morning. There was something big going on Tuesday, don't rally remember what it was...oh yeah, St. Patrick's Day. I worked till 8pm but didn't get out until a quarter hour after. What a nice guy Tony is. I emerge from the store to find him happily waiting to give me a ride home. After we make the single block drive back to my place, we contemplated various avenues to dine. It being Tuesday, Buffalo Wild Wings naturally made its way into our brainstorming. However with it being St. Patrick's Day the notion of dining there became out of the question.

But, that notion did indeed instill within us an apetite for chicken wings. Chicken Express? No. Wing Stop? Yes. After rushing me to pack, Tony drove us to Wing Stop. It seemed pretty slow. I contemplated getting a beer or two but decided not to since I figured I'd have my fair share of alcohol in Houston. Having quenched our thirst for wings, we headed to Tony's place in the city. Loan was already waiting and we settled in a bit before making a small dent in our IMDB quest. The movie we watched was Sweet Smell of Success. Another badass black & white movie, badass film noir, and a badass male character. Why can't they make movies like this anymore??? So I stopped doing movie reviews because I'm lazy. I'll just add my thoughts on each movie as I write about it instead of making a separate piece at the bottom. If you haven't seen it, I do highly recommend it. You will not be disappointed.

Anyways, it was starting to get late after the movie so we decide to hit the sack since we agreed to be out of the door by 6am. I end up waking up at 5:30am and we all get ready and leave Tony's place by our deadline. While walking in the garage Loan asks Tony if he had checked the air in his tires or something. Then Tony asks why it matters. lmao They both thought they were taking the other person's car on the trip. hahahaha. And as if you needed to ask, Tony relented and we took his car.

The drive started out really slow and boring. As far as I can remember, the whole drive to Texas was pretty boring. Except for this sign:

lol @ Long. (inside jopke) [intentional misspelling, another inside joke]

We finally make it to our breakfast destination: Dallas. I forgot where we ate, too lazy to look up if the other two wheels mentioned it. It was pho. After we ate we headed to the Asian grocery store next door in search of some banh bao for snacking later but found none. :( Then off we headed on the final leg of the race, er...trip to Houston.

Along the way we had some pretty hilarious conversation. At one point we tried to go through the alphabet and through each letter produce attractive female names. And upon doing this we came up with the name for Loan's first daughter: Barbara Grendel Jizzbox Koala Narcissa Queen Sunshine Sprinkles Nguyen.

Once we got to Houston we immediately hit up Cajun Kitchen for some fucking delicious crawfish. That's right, FUCKING DELICIOUS. And you can just eat so so much of it. It will also definitely take a toll on your wallet as it was $5/pound and I could easily eat around fifty bucks of this stuff. Afterwards we became retarded and decided to walk around outside in the hot sun until we came to our senses and just drove to Hong Kong City Mall where I had more delicious food and drink. Banh mi, banh bao, and a bubble strawberry slush ("Wow, that's like the most white thing on the menu." -Tony) from this pretty cute yet flat-chested cashier. Yes, I did just eat crawfish and immediately afterwards ate like a six-inch sandwich, a big steamed bun filled with food, and a drink. I am a fatass.

After the mall we met up with Long at his new schnazzy apartment where we chilled with him for a bit before he had to leave to go play in a work basketball league. In the meantime we decide to watch Hancock since neither Tony nor Loan had seen it. Blah. When Long finally made it back you could insta-read the "not happy" look on his face which typically means that you just skirt the issue of the game and move on to lighter subjects. But oh no, not for Loan. "So Long, how did the game go?" lol immediately I call her out it, ahahahahahaha. His team lost and he suffered a friendly fire injury.

The mood does get brighter though when we start pontificating places to eat. :D "Long, if you had the chance to eat only at one place in Houston, barring crawfish, where would you go?" "Taste of Texas." Long doesn't disappoint as this was probably the best steak experience I've ever had. From specifically choosing what steak I wanted from the butcher shop, to grazing the most fabulous salad bar I'd ever seen (they had radicchio!!!!), to also having the steak wrapped in bacon, it was transcendant.

We made plans during the meal to hit up Spotlight Karaoke afterwards. Wow, awesome place. I had a ton of fun singing. I love singing. Tony and Long. Oh man. Fail. Loan didn't sing. :( Great time, though!

Crashed at Long's...woke up...went to eat at Tan Tan for breakfast/lunch. Again, wow. Great food. The peking duck was like all other food we ate, fucking delicious. Also the house special rice cake. OM NOM NOM

Then after Tan Tan we hit up the outlet mall and I still was unable to find a nice track jacket to play poker in. :( The outlet mall was fun. Tony was harassed by an Israeli. Go go PLO? lol

After shopping we went to go meet up with Long to have dinner at another crawfish restaurant, The Boiling Crab. More expensive @ $7/lb. Not worth it imo. Then we went to the nearby Asian shopping center so Tony could get some food for home. I ended up buying a scratcher which basically consisted of you high carding against the dealer. I netted a dollar profit and called it quits. Bought another white drink at another bubble tea place then we headed home. At one point to stave off the boredom we would randomly start singing a song and then when we either finished it or couldn't remember anymore lyrics, we would start another song and keep doing this until we ran out of songs to think of. Which wasn't really hard to do since we were pretty tired but I think we got at least a solid hour of singing in. Haha.

And thus concludes our trip to Houston. Almost two months late on the update but whatevs. Only finished because I couldn't sleep. Work @ 2 and I need to sleep. lates

And Then Dance If You Want to Dance

2009-03-31T03:49:00.001-05:00

Please brother take a chance
You know they're gonna go
Which way they wanna go
All we know is that we don't know
How it's gonna be
Please brother let it be
Life on the other hand won't make us understand
We're all part of the masterplan

// Take 2

Continuing from my last post...

I had coordinated with several people to go out that day (Thurs 3/13) so I could snag a ride to Wal-Mart to get the rest of my ingredients. However miraculously everyone flaked out on me so now I would be unable to prepare any sauces in advance. Fuck. So this adds a lot more stress because I work the next day (Friday, "cook for Loan day") from 9am-4pm so I would be really pressed for cook time. BLAH! So I kinda sulked around all day until around 9pm when I broke free and started on my mise en place. I cut and diced the vegetables for the Sauce para Lilia and the ceviche. I was slow but my cuts were pretty perfect which I was proud of. Finally I decide to stop so I could get an adequate amount of sleep before the super long day awaiting me. T also called to go play poker and I had to decline. :(

I get to sleep for five hours before being awoken by my phone to get ready for work. Fuck fuck fuck, still a lot of shit to do. I worked from 9-5. All the down time I had was used to mentally prepare an itinerary/game plan for when I got off work. I made lists of stores I would have to visit and what to procure there. Besides Wal-Mart, I needed to stop by a liquor store to get some Marsala wine and a place that sold coffee to grab some espresso for my tiramisu. Doing this helped to alleviate some of the stress in the beginning but I started getting the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as 5 o'clock approached. I wanted my food to be perfect despite knowing it wouldn't be due to having never cooked any of these dishes before. :( STRESSCON 3

Finally five o'clock came and I counted down my till as fast as I could while going over the to-do lists in my head again. I decided to just buy most of the things at Valu Foods that I thought would be cheaper to buy at Wal-Mart, but still needed to go there for stuff VF didn't have. I also ended up stopping by the liquor store a few doors down to see if they had any Marsala. In fact they did, but it was a much lighter color than what I wanted. Oh well, pressed for time, bought anyway. I came home surprised to find my brother there and found out that he was spending a few days here for a mini-vacation away from the 'rents. Loaded up a cooler and a travel bag with all of my ingredients and shit I needed to cook with. This ended up taking a while and thankfully Loan texted me that she would be tardy.

After I finished my packing I headed outside with my bag and sat on my cooler in the cold trying to reach a state of less stress/anxiety. I absolutely fucking hate disorganization. At the time I thought I was super disorganized. Then a glimmer of hope cracked its way through the dark clouds of my mind. "It will be ok as long as I'm not the worst off. Plz to be fucked more than I am, Tony." He hasn't had as much experience cooking a meal like this so I'm hoping he's more behind than I am.

Our first stop was Wal-Mart. We decided to dive my shopping list in half to speed up the shopping process. She handled the non-food items while I grabbed the rest of what I needed. It didn't take long before we regrouped near the entrance and proceeded to check out. The radicchio was a lot smaller than I thought it would be and a bit pricey, but I took care of that when I checked out. ;-) This is also when I forgot to stop at the other location to grab some espresso for my tiramisu.

We ended up getting to Tony's place a little after seven. His progress in prep is much farther along than mine. Fuck. But he's still stirring his lemon aioli. Laffelz. I immediately get to work on my shrimp ceviche since that has to set the longest in the fridge to "cook" the shrimp. After that I get to work on my dish that I put the most heart and soul into - Sauce para Lilia. I ended up using tomatoes with a medium dice because I thought the small pieces of tomato would go better with the calamari than the pureed version the recipe called for. Good call on my part because I thought it tasted much better with my slight alteration. Although I did underestimate the spicy power of the crushed red peppers and the sauce did end up being just a little too spicy. That's what I get for seasoning it blind. Oh well, lesson learned! Delicious nonetheless though. After I made the sauce I decided to make the plantain chips. I've never had plantains before and was a little surprised at the internal textures after I cut them into chips. I thought they were pretty delicious too, more similar to potatoes than I expected also. And after I finished frying the chips, Tony started frying the calamari. Despite the urge to om nom nom the remaining plantain chips, I managed to hold myself together and start prepping for my main dish - Roast Pork Chops with Apple and Radicchio.

The recipe I was using was for four people and I figured that the extra ingredients would come in handy if I made any mistakes prepping or cooking. Which ended up being a great idea because I chopped the first head of radicchio too fine. After the radicchio and apples were nicely chopped we thought it would be best to begin serving our starters.

I don't remember the exact time we started serving Loan's Six-Course Top Chef Fail Spectacular but it was at least around 11pm because I remember making a comment about how it was already past ten o'clock a while before. We started off with the dual calamari along with just my sauce as Tony's aioli didn't quite pan out, lol. I thought the calamari was pretty good, especially the ones with the panko coating. Very om nom nom with my sauce. But by the time we started eating though the calamari had set out a little too long and it was cold. :( Thankfully the sauce helped bring it to another level.

Next was my shrimp ceviche. I hadn't been able to let it set for as long as the recipe calls for but I thought it would be okay. Hmm...next time I use that recipe I'll be sure to par boil the shrimp if I don't have an adequate amount of time to let it "cook". The plantain chips were delicious but I think I should've cut them into smaller slices or fried them a little longer in the oil as they weren't as crispy as I would have liked them to be. And definitely make more chips per serving next time. Also, smaller portions of ceviche if part of a moderately-sized course menu.

The next course was also mine and my favorite of the night - roast pork chops with apple and radicchio. When I cooked the portions of the apple and radicchio, I just kind of eyed the amounts to cook...eh. Everything started out pretty well but at one point I thought the vegetables could use a little more apple cider vinegar. ...oops. Haha. It made it taste a little off to me but Tony and Loan seemed to really enjoy it but I'll just chalk that up to them being really polite. The pork chops themselves though were pretty delicious imo, notably with the sauce I made by deglazing the pan with Marsala wine. A technique which I'm sure to use often in the future whenever possible, om nom nom. My cooking of the pork chops needs some tweaking but for my first time I think I did pretty well. This will probably become my signature dish. :-)

Halfway there! Tony's dish was up next - Braised Tilapia with Fresh Leeks & Cherry Tomatoes with a side of Shrimp Risotto, Asian Style. ("Asian Style" reminds me of the first episode of Top Chef 5 where Patrick made an "Asian Style" dish, rofl.) The risotto was pretty good, but unfortunately suffered the same fate as the calamari as I think we let it sit too long after he cooked it. The flavors were there, it was just the texture that was off. The tilapia itself was good, but tasted like the kind of thing you'd expect from a chain like Chili's or somewhere similar. Although I suppose that's the risk he took when he decided to use a mediocre recipe from a random blog? C'mon Tony, you know better than to take advice from a woman.

Midway through that course I started on my tiramisu. Yeah...my tiramisu... Let's just say I have a better understanding of the pain and frustration Top Chef contestants go through when they attempt desserts. Instead of gently folding the two final mixtures together I decided to whisk them together. Terrible idea because after I added the coffee the texture had an uncanny resemblance to dog shit. "Hmm...maybe it will look better after it sets in the fridge." So while it was setting we partook of Tony's dessert: Baklava a la Tony. I though it tasted pretty good but it was just a tad bit too hard. I remember Loan laughing at me as I tried to cut through it with a fork.

Finally the last course, my tiramisu. Hmm...nope, setting in the fridge had no affect on the texture. Blah. I try to salvage it as best I could with a nice presentation but it still just ended up looking like dog shit in a martini glass. Flavors were there for the most part at least.

All in all I'd say Tony and I did a really good job considering it was our absolute first time cooking with any of these recipes. It was a lot of work but I had a really fun time doing it once we actually got started cooking. All of my anxiety and stress was replaced with passion and determination to do my best preparing a great meal for great friends. I'd definitely want to do it again sometime. ...but in a little more controlled enviroment where I have everything already prepped and ready to go, haha. Mucho thanks to Tony for being a really great host and mucho thanks to Loan for running out to get the ingredients I missed.

So that covers that. Next post: Tony, Loan, and I's trip to Houston.

Some Day You Will Find Me

2009-03-16T21:57:00.003-05:00

Caught beneath the landslide
In a champagne supernova
A champagne supernova in the sky

// Recent anything

Last Thursday I had planned on getting all of the ingredients to so I could do the majority of my mise en place before the actual cooking started at Tony's apartment on Friday. I was able to purchase the majority of my ingredients at Valu Foods, <3. STRESSCON 4

[Well Dragonball: Evolution finished downloading so watching that now. lates.]

Well Now She's Gone

2009-03-11T22:42:00.003-05:00

Even though I hold her tight
I lost my love, my life, that night

// Recent Anything

Sunday I get a call from Binh to see if I wanted to go watch The Watchmen with some of the guys. Sure. Tim, Binh, and Chris Bui picked me up and we headed to Warren Theater for the 10:30pm showing. As we were talking en route the topic came up that Thomas and CT were going to watch the movie in the balcony and partake of alcoholic beverages. I was indifferent and actually didn't feel like drinking so I decided to sit with the guys on the lower level. We enter the theater and see non-Asian Danny. "You got twenty bucks?" "Umm...for what?" "For your balcony ticket, we got it for you already." "Umm....sure." Haha, so much for sitting with the guys. Partook of a dirty martini while the previews started then finally made our way to the seats.

Movie cliffsnotes: blue cock.

Came home, passed out, work at nine the next morning. It went very well. <3

Tuesday I had off and didn't do much besides some online pokering. I'll tell more about that later. Tony called me in the evening so we decided to get online to plan the menu for the six-course meal we believe Loan deserves, haha. Curious as to what we're cooking? Here's the menu!

Course 1: Calamari with a spicy tomato sauce by Tony and me
Course 2: Shrimp ceviche by me
Course 3: Some seafood dish with risotto by Tony
Course 4: Roast Pork Chops with Radicchio and Apples by me
Course 5: Tiramisu by me in honor of Fabio :P

Course 6: Baklava by Tony

Tomorrow I have the day off so I plan to cook the spicy tomato sauce, prep the ceviche, prep the pork chops, radicchio, and apple, and tiramisu. Then Loan will pick me up after work Friday to do the cooking at Tony's place. Hopefully I can time everything right. That seems like the hardest part. And I don't think Tony and I will really be able to enjoy the dinner as we'll be simultaneously trying to make sure everything for the next course is ready by the time we're done with the current course. Ack. Hard work but it will be fun. Can't wait. Tomorrow will be a very long day. I gotta wake up early so I can talk to our meat department so I can get the pork chops cut exactly the way I want them.

Today (Wednesday) I didn't do much. I played some online poker, but just 100 hands 3-tabling 6-max. If I went to Riverwind, playing 100 hands would take over three hours. Today I played that many in just thirty minutes. And much more if I played more than just three tables. I should seriously start considering playing online more. But it's a bit intimidating once I start reading the 2+2 strat forums. After I cashed out all my money on PokerStars last time and used up almost all of my FPPs, I was left with just 10 FPP. So one day last week I decided to take my 10 FPP and play in a $500 freeroll. I ended up getting 314th out of 5829 and won a whopping $0.35, ship it. Then I took that to the $0.02/$0.04 limit hold em tables and won $1.13 to bring my lol onlinebankrollments up to $1.48. Then decided to play $0.01/$0.02 no limit 6-max and netted $2.35 over 183 hands. lol, wow. 100 of those hands were today. Well, anyways. I'm setting a goal to not deposit anymore online. So hopefully I don't run bad and don't go busto with my four bucks at the penny stakes, haha.

The majority of money I've won online has come from playing the heads up single-table tournaments (STT). But that's not really what I want my long-term goal to be so I'm just going to stick with playing 6-max NL. I don't know if I'll be able to play tomorrow due to all of the cooking and prepping. I'm going to start out slow and try to hit at least 200 hands per day. This will add some chunk to my blogging. First step will be to hit up the microstakes full-ring forum on 2+2 and try to absorb as much as I can whenever I have free time. Beating $1/$2 NL at the casino isn't hard. So far this year I've averaged ~$39/hour net at Riverwind. Let's see me try to do that online.

Today at work was pretty atrocious. I am officially the fastest cashier. Somehow that doesn't sound so awesome, haha. The store manager hadn't put up the timesheets the past month and a half so I had no clue how well I was doing. But he put it up for this past week and I averaged 20.11 items per minute. The store manager said he's able to do 27 items per minute so now my goal is to try to hit 30ipm. I think it's very possible. The thing is, whenever you're scanning items, the clock is running at normal time. However when you're scanning then press Enter, the clock slows to half-time running that still counts towards your time. This is by far the biggest leak I have found in my cashiering because after I'm finishing scanning and hit Enter, sometimes it takes the customer fucking forever to pay me. Especially when paying via check.

Today I tried to speed up that process and whenever a customer told me they were paying with cash, I just hit the exact amount and pressed the cash button so the till would open and the clock would stop. Then I'd just do the math in my head with whatever amount they gave me and that'd be the end of it. And the fourth or fifth time I did that, this lady told me she'd be paying with cash so I went ahead and input the amount, pressed cash, etc. and calcuted various change for the most probable amounts she'd tender. No prob, right? Well turns out she didn't have enough cash so she decided to pay by credit. Fuck. I had to re-scan the items and run it as credit. Now if I pulled my till it would show that I was twelve bucks short. No good. So now I had to call a manager to do a return on that amount. Gay. I suppose I'll quit jumping the gun. But hurry the fuck up when paying plz.

And retarded customers galore today. I had four. FOUR. FOUR! People try to correct the math the register calculated that was their total. Are you fucking kidding me? Guy buys ten apples which are 3 for $0.99. Total is $3.56.
"I thought those were 3 for a dollar."
"They are, three for ninety-nine cents. It adds the tax also."
"Oh, how much is the tax?"
"8%." "
That still seems like too much tax added."
"No, you have ten apples which are three for $0.99 each."
"But why is the total so much?"

This is where I started to understand terrorists. If I thought an entire country consisted of people like this, I'd want to ram planes into their buildings also. I then proceed to get a pen and paper and try to explain it. He still doesn't get it. I then get the apples and arrange them in groups of three.

"Oh yeah, the one left over!"
"Right, sir. One that accounts for another $0.33 cents."
"Ok, sorry."

Wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. Goddamnit. This is why I need to get back into poker. I take money from stupid people like this. If I can't kill them, might as well make them more poor. Which in turn just take more money from me via taxes to give them free food. Endless cycle. Does pride still exist? Not amongst them imo.

And then just a bunch of people slowing down my times which just pisses me off. She wasn't there to cheer me up. :/

*sigh* And now I'm just writing, listening to my Oasis station on Pandora, and drinking a glass of bourbon. I think I'll have a Boulevard Wheat after this and hit the sack.

lates

Say It Ain't So

2009-03-10T16:08:00.003-05:00

Your drug is a heartbreaker
Say it ain't so
My love is a lifetaker

// Recent Anything

lol procrastination-amets

I don't have a clue where to begin so let's just pretend nothing ever happened before my, CT, Tony, and Loan's excursion to Dallas. That's right, I'm going to just jump right in logging whatever activities I've done. [Speaking of which, CT hasn't updated at all since his first post so go bitch at him plz.]

So originally the four of us planned to meet in the parking lot of my and CT's apartment complex at 9:00am sharp. Tardiness would consequentially result in the unpunctual paying for the punctuals' lunch meals. I wake up around 6:30am and just do random things on the internet until I decide to shower and get dressed. As I'm tying my shoes next to the door I check the clock on my phone, "8:59pm". FUUUUUUUCK. I kick my remaining foot into the other shoe and scramble out the door to begin the short sprint to the other parking lot, overcoat and scarf clinging on for dear life. Luckily I made it into the car before the proverbial dial hit 9:01. Comrade CT was not so lucky. However after some heated debate and a couple of "Fuck you, Tony."s later, we rendered that no consequence would be sentenced due to multiple clock disambiguity. Oh well.

We proceeded to head to Texas in Loan's car while coping with our apparent hunger. You know what? I don't even feel like writing about the trip in detail. Let me give you the TL;DR version: Went to Texas, had good steak burger for lunch, went to IKEA, I was an asshole (surprise, surprise), went to eat at Tokyo One - it was delicious, especially with the soju flick game, went home, work the next morning with her asking "Are you ok?" "Uh yeah, I feel great. Why?" "I heard you called in yesterday." "Oh, I had some family business to take care of."

And that's that. Oh, the night before we watched another movie, Arsenic and Old Lace. I really liked it. Several of these older movies are surprisingly pleasant to watch.

Anyways, there are other things begging me to do things to them right now so I'll write more later...lol.

Tell Me

2009-03-05T04:45:00.001-06:00

Did you fall for a shooting star
One without a permanent scar
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself

// Recent Anything

So it's a quarter to five in the morning. I received a text from Facebook from my brother posting on my wall that woke me up and now I can't fall back asleep. Luckily I don't have to work today so there's no reason for me to immediately go back to sleep. Actually I fell asleep at 11pm and woke up at 4 so I got five hours of sleep which is already sufficient so I'm not sure if I'll be able to get back to sleep before Charlie and I head to OKC later around noon.

I was dreaming before I was awoken. I was eating with T at The Willows inside Riverwind Casino. We were there on a non-descript day so the buffet menu was forgettable. Although I remember they had pizza and as I was strolling up to a section I noticed they had a single slice of supreme pizza left. I looked around and noticed a woman going down the line who also had her eye on the pizza. I sped up so I could get there first but right as I got there she made a quick spurt to get there ahead of me and snatched it from right in front of me. Blah. I also remember the layout of the restaurant was different than it actually is. It was the layout of the Furr's in Moore. lol Actually, the buffet at Furr's is actually pretty good imo. Haven't had it in a while though. lol

I had another dream the other night where I basically moved to France and made a living by playing at the Aviation Club everyday. It was nice. Maybe I'll do that someday for a year or two. I'd love to meet a nice French girl.

Ah, girls. I don't think I've ever met a girl who if I were to have a real relationship with that it would be settling. Well, except for one. ;-) I have a lot of standards and now that I actually plan on using them (lol) to filter for prospective serious relationships it doesn't seem like anything will be going on in that department for a while. It's ok though, I'm in no rush. To put it into the words of a 2+2er: Women are like tournaments. You win/find one when you least expect it and never win/find one when you're trying to.

And now it's 5:49am. Yeah, I've been procrastinating while writing. Damn you Facebook, reddit, and 2+2. I'm going to try to get some more sleep. I can write more later today. lates

<3

You Came in from the Darkness

2009-02-08T20:00:00.002-06:00

And held the door open wide
You stood there like a vision before my unbelieving eyes
I believe in what I see and also what I hear
But did the night play tricks on me or were you really there

// Recent Anything

Ok, so I'm starting to get back on track with the updating. It also helps that I wasn't scheduled to work today. But I almost did! But didn't. Here's BC's story of today...

At 9:53am I wake up to a phone call from my number one FOB, Trung.

"Ay foo, want to go play the Sunday tournament?"
"Uhh...at 11?"
"Yeah, it's supposed to be really big turnout."
"Uh..what time is it now?"
"Almost ten."
"Uhh....sure."

Then I groggily make my way out of bed and try to find something warm to wear in the casino. Unfortunately my sister purloined all of my clothes to take back home to do laundry while she was visiting the parents so I was left with either ironing clean clothes or wearing what I wore the day before. Day before clothes it is. Right before I started brushing my teeth I get another phone call, caller ID reading "Valu Foods".

"Hey Jonathan, it's Jason. I was wondering if you could work till four today pretty please?"
"Sorry, I'm actually getting ready to leave and have plans. Sorry."
"Ok, no problem."

So had T called just a few minutes later I would have declined the invitation to delve back into my past line of work and be obligated to deal with the proletariat of Norman all day. Whew, close one! So T picks me up and we head to Riverwind to register for the tournament. As we make our way to the poker cashier to register we notice the tournament stats are posted on one of the screens. When we got in line there were 88 registered so far. FUUUUUUUCK. The tournament is limited to the first 100 entries and after that you're put on an alternate list. What that means is that when people start busting out you can buy into the tournament to replace them, but alternates are only able to buy in during the first blind level which lasts fifteen minutes. T ends up being alternate #3 and I'm #4.

Chad, one of the poker floor, noticed we were alternates and tried to assuage our doubts about getting to play in the tournament by saying that they usually get about six alternates in. It worked until ten minutes had passed in the tournament and nobody was elminiated yet. When it got down to four minutes left the first person got eliminated and then at three minutes another. Then at one minute another. T's in. Then there was an all-in with twenty seconds left. No callers, new blind level. Fuck. So I play $1/$2 NL and buy in for a bill.

Maybe on my fifth or sixth hand I see T walking over to my table with a smile on his face, perhaps wanting to tell me about a big pot he just took down. He sits in the empty seat and buys in for a bill also. Haha.

So I wasn't catching aaaaaany cards at all and was getting pretty bored and hungry. Luckily I brought along my package of almonds and was eating them to help. I felt like something needed to change in order for me to start getting cards that were playable. But change what? Hmm. Then a couple of minutes later I got a rumble in my stomach. That's it! I'll defecate the bad chi from my body! haha. So after I dropped a deuce I waited for the blinds to come back around and my first ray of light came when our table was chosen to have the pot splashed.

"Splash the Pot" is a promotion the poker room runs where every hour for five hours a table is selected at random to have an extra $100 added to the pot, or "splashed". Our table is picked for the first drawing and I'm UTG and look at my first card, Ac. Good start, good start. Second card, Kd. I have $82 so I decided to go all-in. Everybody takes several seconds to fold and I actually end up picking up the $102 with nobody calling. Awesome. There were three super weak players in the 3, 6, and 8 seat so everybody was pretty much just picking on them. I managed to catch some good cards and won a nice sized amount before I decided to take a break and grab a bite to eat. I left my chips on the table because I'd be returning soon. I got my comp of $6.60 and headed to Taco Bueno to chow down on six party tacos, haha.

It was about 5pm when I came back, hoping that T would have been knocked out (he was down to his last buy-in) so we could have gone home. But no, but close, he just lost a big pot when seat six caught a gutshot on the river. lolz. I'm at a little over three bills when it's time for us to go. I pick up KJc and decide to limp since we were just six handed, and it was a family pot heading to the flop. 6c8h2c, not a bad flop. Blinds check, I bet ten, BB calls, he only has about $41 left. Turn is a Qd. BB bets $11, I call. River is 10c and I make the second-nut flush. "I don't think I like that last card. But I guess I'll go all-in." "I have the second-nut flush, I call." "Nice hand." He had a flush, but his high card was an eight. Nice. Then we cash out and both grab two bottles of water on the way out. Apparently they upgraded to full size bottles of water from the little ones they used to have.

T drops me off at home around six and goes to get ready for his basketball game in Edmond. I tried to go to sleep because I was really tired, but couldn't end up falling asleep so I decided to write. Nice, eh? I work at 3 tomorrow, blah. Hopefully it will be nice. ;-)

Until next time, kiddos!

She Only Drinks Coffee at Midnight

2009-02-07T20:36:00.004-06:00

When the moment is not right
Her timing is quite, unusual
You see her confidence is tragic
But her intuition magic
And the shape of her body
Unusual

// Recent Anything

Uh...yeah.

Tuesday was the usual rush poker tournament event. I showed up a little late due to work, but thankfully the blind levels were still in the first level. I triple up due to horrible play by a couple of players at my table but eventually end up getting fifth or something. I didn't really care about the poker tournament to begin with. My primary focus about halfway into the tournament was playing Stanley chess when he showed up. We played five games that night and I won them all. So now my record against him is 43-23. I've been reading that chess book that I mentioned in my previous post with the 1001 problems. I figured I'd tackle at least ten problems a day and get through it by the end of the month. Haha. More like ten problems a week to really understand them. But then again I don't spend a lot of time on them. I wish more people played. :(

Wednesday I don't remember anything significant. I slept for almost twelve hours that night though, awesome.

Thursday morning I woke up to see a text message from Tony: "FUCK". This could only mean one thing. His last remaining contestant and the sole remaining member of Team Rainbow had been eliminated in the previous night's episode of Top Chef. Great! This leaves only Loan's four chefs along with my one left to compete for the title of Top Chef. I'm not worried though, Stefan is a much better chef than any of the others and it's his competition to lose. But I don't think that'll happen. Carla has really stepped up to the plate and I'm actually starting to respect her ability to cook. Ready to put her at better odds to win than Hosea, who has no classical training. My current predictions of who has the best chance of winning are Stefan at 95%, Carla at 2%, Hosea at 2%, Fabio at 1%, and Leah at 0%.

Friday, that day of the Taiko/DEPsi party. I worked 11-7. It was so slow, I almost fell asleep. There's also a couple of co-workers at work that have suspicious accents. So today I decided to find out more about them. Apparently she was pretty tired because she stayed up till 5:30am watching movies.

"What movies?"
"Russian movies."
"Oh, you speak Russian?"

Then customers came so we were interrupted. But a little later I need a "pull". A pull is when the money you have in your till exceeds a certain amount and the excess needs to be taken back to the office, or "pulled". But when I looked in my drawer there weren't any pull papers so I went to her register and looked but also couldn't find any there.

"What are you looking for?"
"I'm looking for a pull slip. I need a pull...pazhalsta." ("pazhalsta" = "please" in Russian)
"Ah, how do you know that?"
"Eh, I know a little Russian."

Then when she does my pull I say "spaseeba" which means "thank you" to which she smiles and laughs, then replies "pazhalsta". In Russian when you say "pazhalsta" after somebody says "spaseeba" it's equivalent to "No problem." in English. We continue this and talking a little other Russian for the remainder of my shift. Cool beans.

After work I have dinner with Katherine at the old Pad Thai. I hadn't ordered the pad thai in a while so I did, then remembered why. It's not as good as it used to be.

On the way home I bought two bottles of liquor for the party, one of 151 and one of Maker's Mark. I bought them at the liquor store near my house and was not used to unpleasant liquor prices. Fifty dollars for both, blah. I end up at the Taiko house around 11:15pm and start working on my bottle of 151. The party was a lot of fun, a lot of people I haven't seen which was great, plus a lot of people I don't know, which I'm not really a fan of. Lots of shots of 151 and even a kegstand after which almost put me over my vomit tolerance, haha. At one point I was sitting down feeling not so great, then I closed my eyes and started to rub my forehead which prompted everything to start spinning. That did not feel good. I remember everything that happened that night but here's the weird part - I was never at the point where I was buzzed, or even drunk. I just felt a little sick.

Went home, passed out. Woke up, text from Katherine that we're going to go eat dim sum (YUM!) for Charlie's birthday (24, old man!). It ends up being the three of us plus Thomas, Andy, Binh, Tim, and Adam. Hot tea + dim sum is great. Although near the end the waiters/waitresses kept bypassing us while catering to tables surrounding us and we were still hungry. And wouldn't hear me when I called for them, wtf. Went to the mall afterwards and got a double scoop of chocolate almond ice cream in a waffle cone which helped satiate my continuing apetite.

Went home, took a nap, went to work to check the schedule and picked up some Granny Smith apples, Kool-Aid mix, bananas, and a package of my favorite nut, almonds. My work schedule is totally gay for this week. Here it is for all my sexy stalkers:

Sunday (tomorrow): Off
Monday: 3-9
Tuesday: Off
Wednesday: 3-9
Thursday: 12-7
Friday: 9-4
Saturday: 11-5

Ah, another thing about work. I didn't know this but apparently our meat department actually gets fresh meat, butchers it, then packages it to sell. Unlike Wal-Mart which gets it all prepackaged. So sometime I'm going to transfer to the meat department because I think it will be a lot more fun than being a cashier. BC the butcher. Another job to further expand my Jack-of-all-trades repertoire.

So tomorrow I have the day off and I have no plans. I'll probably download Gran Torino and Slumdog Millionaire because I heard they're both pretty good and I haven't seen a new movie in a while. I think that's about it for this post. Now to eat some almonds, drink some Kool-Aid, and play some chess. :-)

So Sally Can Wait

2009-02-02T18:51:00.004-06:00

She knows it's too late as she's walking on by
Her soul slides away
But don't look back in anger
I heard you say

// Recent Anything

So it's been > 2 weeks. fux0r. I'll just recap the more significant events of the past two weeks. Things may be out of chronological order and this may be broken up into multiple posts if Charlie is free to play some Left 4 Dead anytime soon.

I suppose the next significant after my previous post was trip to hit up the re-release of The Dark Knight at the IMAX theater in Tulsa. It was a school day so to accommodate for the drive and leave ample time for dinner we chose the 10:05pm showing. CT picked me up at 2:45pm and we headed to Tony's apartment to meet up with him and Loan. Traffic ended up being terrible as we had to pass through three school zones that were packed with parents in their cars awaiting to pick up their children and that 12th street was super congested due to being narrowed down to just two lanes. But we finally make it to Tony's apartment where we park in the garage and packed into Loan's car for the drive there.

Along the way we start out playing our standard word game, 20 Questions. But after I use Archduke Franz Ferdinand (average person should know who this is, right??), and Tony effs up when he thinks of a person and we find out he chose Time Warner (company, not a person. gfg), Tony proposes to play the categories game. Which, as the name suggests, one person comes up with a category and everybody takes turns naming things that belong in that category until somebody repeats something that's already been said or can't think of anything. We played in easy mode in the beginning by allowing a player to ask if something has already been said, but later axed that playing option. It's a pretty fun game until you get tired of using the same categories over and over again.

I don't quite remember the whole way so I had to call my brother at home to double-check the exit online to make sure we didn't get lost. The directions are pretty simple, just consisted of one exit then take that till you see the theater. We arrive at the theater and grab the tickets then head to Cheddar's for dinner. The wait was going to take a bit so I immediately break formation to flank the bar and order a Manhattan which unfortunately consisted of mostly sweet vermouth and maybe a few drops of bourbon. Boo. We play the categories game while we wait, clothing brands. I fuck up and say something that's already been said and wasn't able to use my secret back-up brand - OshKosh B'Gosh, haha.

We finally get seated and I order some Maker's Mark neat along with an appetizer sampler of some sort. For the entree I had the bourbon-glazed salmon which was pretty scrumptious. After dinner we head to Woodland Hills Mall to browse and get candy to sneak into the movie. We head to the candy store first and I seek out my favorite candy, chocolate covered almonds. Yum. Wait. $11.99/lb? Damn. Oh well, I ended up getting almost eight dollars worth. That plus a couple of Andes chocolate mints to assauge after-dinner breath. Probably would've spent less had I bought stuff at the theater but meh.

Wall meandering follows until I see a Dairy Queen. It's a reflex, I have no control. I head over to the counter and order a chocolate dipped vanilla cone. A childhood favorite of mine. I miss the quaint smallness of Holdenville. Shortly after indulging my sweet tooth I spot the Banana Republic store. My all-time favorite store, I love classic conservative fashion. They were having a pretty good sale at the time with up to 70% off, holla. I got a pair of boxers for eight bucks and a tie for $12. After meandering back to our point of entry we decide to head to the theater even though we still had ~2hrs left till the movie started.

Tony drove to the theater and parked awkwardly a good distance away from the entrance. Good thing it was pretty warm. Oh wait, it wasn't. Yeah, the IMAX lobby was totally empty. I was first in line, yeah yeah yeah!!! At one point we decided to scope out the rest of the theater to scout out other concessions and the arcade. The rest of the theater was pretty busy and full of overweight/ugly jailbait. Ugh. So after we couldn't take anymore of that we headed back to sit in line for TDK.

Shortly after people started showing up, first a teenage kid that probably got dropped off by his parents, then a group of Indians (dot). While we're waiting to be let in to the movie we're playing the categories game. This time elements from the periodic table. We played in the order in which we sat, which was myself at the front of the line, then CT, then Loan, then Tony. Apparently while we were playing, the loner kid would interject with elements in an attempt to get our attention and join us in our game. I never heard him and after we finished that game and started a new one he would interject with answers again. Most of us just ignored him because we couldn't hear him, but Tony sure did (and ignored him also). Wow. So this pretty much happened until we were let in to the theater. Poor kid, just trying to fit in. Probably spreading bad rep about TKOmega/Asians in Tulsa now. Nice hand, Tony.

But on the bright side I got the best seat in the house and came whenever the bank scene started, LDO. The movie was amazing. I couldn't stop smiling and having that warm fuzzy feeling in my heart. I love it. BTW - I came across an audio clip of Cristian Bale going bezerko on some scrub who messed up a take on the upcoming Terminator movie. lol

The ride back to OKC/Norman seemed super short due to playing the categories game. Went home, passed out.

The next day I don't remember what I did but I had dinner plans with Katherine and we went to Tokyo. They recently came out with some new rolls so we tried a couple of those. I had a glass of wine but she just opted for water, boo, haha. The sushi was soooo delicious. It had been a while since I had it and it was pretty perfect. Afterwards we headed to Bravo! to greet Joel and wish him a happy birthday. Then back home and sleep because I worked the next day.

Next significant event...was the next Tuesday after it super sleeted/iced everywhere and school along with our rush event was cancelled. Instead we had an unofficial Tết celebration at the Taiko house. The housemates setup table games consisiting of the standard new year games along with poker, but with $0.05/$0.10 blinds this time. The biggest hand of the night for me was this. I had about $12 and was UTG with KQos. Seven players so I just limped in, no raises, three players to flop. I bet $0.50, Stanley raises to $2.00, BB folds, I reraise all-in to ~$12, Stanley instacalls. At first I'm like, "SHIT!" cause there was a flush on the board, but felt relieved until I saw his hand. But then the turn and river came. Here's a pic, click to enlarge.

On the flop Stanley had a 2.83% chance of winning. On the turn he had a 9% chance. Good fucking game, bro. But it wasn't that bad, I made like five bucks in tips along with a few dollars extra from something else. The game breaks up aftewards then we just chill and play the other table games. Not me, though. F fob table games. That is until I get the itch and decide to slam whatever I had in quarters on crab in the game bau cua ca cop. I hit two crabs on the dice and profit six bucks and leave. TAKE THAT, HOUSE! Then head home and crash.

The next night is the official brotherhood event and I show up to deal blackjack for Taiko dollars which can be redeemed for raffle tickets which will be drawn for several prizes at the end of the event. I'm just a badass dealer in general, poker or blackjack and get a fuckton of tips, ~$400 in Taiko dollars. I end up winning a 2GB flash drive, nice for just dealing. Hang out for a bit before heading back home around 6am and work that day from 1pm-8pm. Awesome.

Next up is Tony's birthday dinner that Friday evening at Red Primesteak. Thomas, Tim, and I leave at 6:30pm much to Thomas's chagrin after I told him the reservation was for 7:30pm. But there was pretty heavy traffic heading into OKC which delayed our arrival time a good amount so poo on him. We get there seven minutes early and go ahead and get our table. Tony and Loan didn't remember the directions and when they called me I gave them the wrong directions so they were a little late, haha. I ordered a Broadway cocktail which was their version of the Manhattan. It was pretty good but a regular Manhattan tastes a little more urbane which I prefer.

After everybody was there the waitress told us the specials. The first was a bass dish with salmon cake risotto with something consisting of tomatoes and mushrooms. I remember the last time I was there the seafood special was zomg amazing so I went ahead and ordered that. Loan got the same thing and Tony ordered steak. Thomas and Tim ordered the prix fixe menu which was just $35 and consisted of a starter, entree, a side, and dessert. Seems like a great deal until you learn that the cuts and ingredients they use for it are the lowest quality they have on hand. Cue Thomas bitching the entire time. Added to DNI list ainec.

When they brought out my dish and I tasted the risotto first. It was harder than I had expected but I think it's because of the way it was served, not like a standard risotto. Then I took a bite of my bass. OMG came. It was fucking delicious. I haven't eaten anything so great since the last time I was there a year ago. For sides we had two orders of horseradish potato gratin and a single order of flash fried baby spinach. Flash fried baby spinach seemed odd but it was very tasty. For dessert I had strawberry shortcake, as did Loan, and Tony received a complimentary dessert of his choice since it was his birthday. Some sort of ice cream, chocolate, and pecan monstrosity that when it was brought out was almost the size of a pineapple and reminded me of one too. It was good but I was sooo full. What a great dinner. I might have to switch my standard birthday dinner from Royal Bavaria to Red Prime. Mmmm.

We headed back to the Taiko house afterwards to play some drinking games, then poker (cash game), then a poker tournament for food at Waffle House. Binh got out first and just gave us the money because he didn't feel like going to Waffle House but instead decided to go hang out with the little kids at another restaurant. So it's just me, Tony, Loan, CTizzle, and Tim. Well, originally we were going to go to IHOP but it was fucking crowded so we opted for Waffle House instead, which was less crowded. We waited a fair amount of time before finally getting a table. Food was good, coffee was good. Fobs are not good. I can't take anyone seriously until they can translate their thoughts to me in writing that's free of any errors.

And I get to sleep around 6am only to wake up around 10:30am to help Charlie and Katherine move to their new apartment on the cool side of Norman. Apparently I was the only one who picked up their phone that morning so it was just them two plus me moving all of their stuff out. Luckily we got ahold of BJ and Binh to help unload the U-Haul and move stuff into their new apartment. Took no time at all despite it being on the second floor. Had TEA Cafe for lunch then went back to their old apartment to help Charlie clean up. But Stanley and I made a pit stop at Barnes & Noble so I could pick up a chess book, 1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations. Guaranteed to bring a player to at least 1300 level after they've mastered the book. So hopefully that'll be me. =D

There wasn't a lot to do at the old apartment so Stanley and I went back to their new apt to keep Katherine company. We stopped by my place to grab my chess set then TEA Cafe again for drinks. Mmm...taro frappe. Stanley and I ended up playing eleven games of chess that day. Wow. Unfortunately I only won six of them. :( I was destroying him in the beginning, winning four games in a row, then I started getting tired and distracted by watching the Top Chef marathon on tv. I made some really stupid mistakes and I was pretty upset with myself.

That's about it. Time to study some chess! Might add more later if anything comes to mind.

Ain't Nothin' Better

2009-01-18T00:49:00.003-06:00

We beat the odds together
I'm glad we didn't listen
Look at what we would be missin'

// Recent Anything

Anyways, since I love you guys so much I am currently traversing my essential need for sleep and my secondary need to party/drink to bring this entry to you. Well, the party would've been fun to go to, but I don't really think I'm missing out on anything. However sleep is pretty valuable tonight considering I work today (Sunday) from 9am-5pm. asfjvnaso;va Oh well. Plus there have been some interesting things that have happened since my last post and I have been aching to write but there have just been extenuating circumstances that have not allowed me to do so. No need to get into that though. On with this post!

I last left off before Pad Thai. It was a nice dinner with What it do, AVu?, THa, Cbear, T, Taneezy, and Stanley the manly. After dinner we grabbed some Starbucks, espresso truffle(wow after reading that description I feel less of a man for drinking that. Manhattan, please!) for me. Some of us head back to the Taiko house where we originally planned to play poker. But that ended up falling through and while we waited and thought of something else to do, Stanley and I played heads up twice. I won both times, both due to running ridiculously well and being able to read Stanley like a book. After that Andy, Katherine, and I headed to Blockbuster to rent season one of Weeds. It was already pretty late and we barely managed to get through the first disc before calling it a night. Earlier in the night I was told about a trip to Firelake the next night. Yay.

Ok, so maybe I'm really tired and would rather sleep right now. I'll finish after work. I promise!*

*Promise void where instances of alcohol, gambling, IMDB quest, degrading women, or eating exist.

Hokay. So it's currently Wednesday. After Sunday I have been really tired after work and haven't really had the energy to sit down and write. But now I have three days off! :D Now where was I?

Oh yeah. So the next day I work from like, 1-8 I think. But I was kept late an extra thirty minutes again. This made me pretty angry. Thought standard psychopathic thoughts and smiled. FredEx, AVu, and THa picked me up soon afterwards and we made our way to Firelake. Nobody had eaten anything except Thomas so we first stopped at The Grand Stand to grab a bite to eat and a few drinks. Nothing really jumped out at me on the menu so I just got some fried shrimp. When I was a little kid my grandparents used to make fried shrimp pretty often so it's a nice comfort food for me and I love it. But I'm not a big fan of the breading and peel it off most off the time, I just like the actual shrimp. So get a shrimp cocktail instead you say? Nay! If I eat cold seafood it has to be raw. And as always, everybody orders sweet potato french fries and margaritas. Now, the margaritas used to be $.99 but they're now $1.99 and in bigger cups so it's all good.

After eating/drinking we head to the roulette table where I leave briefly to put my name on the $1/$2 NL list. I was pleasantly surprised that when after the floor added my name to the list he handed me a pager similar to the kind you get when you're waiting for a table at a restaurant. Neat. So I just walk back to the roulette table and watch the guys play until I get paged for poker.

I sit down and buy in for just a hundred. I set my sights on the loose/drunk Asian guy and try to stay away from the rest who are old/seem to know what they're doing. Remember the only rule about playing poker that you need to know to profit consistently: Always play with people who are worse than you. If you're at a table where that's not true then ask for a table change. If there is none available, leave and try again later. One of the cons of playing live poker is lack of adequate table selection. Anyways.

I am freaking card dead like a mofo. Catching absolutely nothing. But I still like it because it's been a while since I've played in a casino. Firelake's poker chips have grown on me. They use actual clay chips as opposed to the ceramic chips that Riverwind uses. At first I didn't like the clay chips because when Firelake first got them the edges on them were sooooo sharp. But it's been almost two years and now the chips are comfortable to hold and shuffle and actually sound like real chips. Great.

Later THa, FredEx, and AVu join in but Andy and Thomas play $3/$6 limit instead...ugh. No big hands of the night except for maybe three. I have ~$90 and get pocket nines on the button. One or two limpers and I raise to seven. Just the big blind calls. Flop is like 53Q with two spades. He checks, I bet $12, he calls. Turn is Js. He checks, I check. River is another spade. He checks, I check. He shows JcJh for a set of jacks and I show 9c9s for a flush. Wow....luckiest I was the whole night. But after I flipped my hand over the dealer mucked it and pushed the pot toward the other guy. Whoaaaa, WTF. I stand up and point to the muck. "Hey, I had a flush. I had the winning hand!" The dealer flips over my cards and then pushes the pot to me and apologizes. I tip him a dollar anyway. This dealer was the...large dealer. I kind of felt bad for him because he must have been having a bad night or something but he was making mistakes all night long. He's usually pretty good.

Just before this table breaks another hand comes up where I raise to seven, loose/drunk Asian guy reraises to $25, and I just push since I had a little over sixty at the time. He shows AJos and thinks for a bit before folding. Ehh...I was getting bored and didn't really care. Sure, let's flip a coin. Oh well.

My next table was just as boring as the previous one. No big hands except for my last when I have about fifty and on the button and after a couple of limpers I just decide to push with KQ and lose when the BB (retard) calls with A10. lol.

I then proceed to play roulette and blackjack and lose another hundred. Oh well. At least my Firelake card has 682 points on it! haha.

We leave and get back to Norman around three. We make plans to eat pho in morning (whenever we wake up). The next afternoon it ends up being the four of us again along with Katherine. Fred shows up late and we head to the mall afterwards. Lots of walking. Ugh. That wasn't part of the deal. (+1 if you get the reference)

The mall was pretty boring as I really wasn't in a shopping mood. I had my cashmere/wool overcoat with me and it was pretty warm in the mall so I was stuck lugging it around on my arm everywhere, blah. Then after Penn, Thomas wanted to go to Quail and as I had no control over him, to Quail we went in search for a Slickdeal. But Fred made it there before us and let him know that they were out of the particular product he was looking for just as we were about to turn into the parking lot so we head back home much later than I had anticipated.

Meanwhile I had scheduled a meeting with Emily to go over plans for Phi Dee's new site. It was originally set at six but I kept pushing it back because of Thomas's shopping antics. Eventually we settle on eight-thirty (I think) and I get home early so I clean up and get stuff ready. Ultimately we end up cancelling since she was feeling under-the-weather. We haven't really rescheduled yet but I've been doing preliminary research and planning. I'm actually excited about working with her to create a new Phi Dee site. If you ever want to get me to do something and to do an amazing job then all you have to do is simply appeal to my ego. Emily never did this, but that chord was struck when I saw OU's aKDPhi chapter's site.

After looking at it for a minute I didn't see anything I didn't expect. I could probably make this post twice as long documenting flaws in design and implementation but my constructivism is being exclusively used to write about me right now. But let's just say I also double-checked what I thought with a site with regards to frames and noticed I saw an example of everything under the "Don't do" list, haha. So now my main goal wrt this project is to just make a site that's better. I'm not sure how much better as I won't be in control of the content (hahahahahaha), but I will do my best on my part.

Moving on...

I think we're at Friday now. I had the day off and just chilled at home until Tony and Loan picked me up to go have dinner. They originally wanted to go to Eischen's but the lack of willing participants dictated us to hit up the seafood buffet at Riverwind. And wow. It was incredibly delicious. I think I ate more crab this time than any other. So much crab that I actually got full off of crab. That never happens. Very goot. I'd love to have the buffet this Friday but.....I have other plans. :-) THa decides to join us and we just eat, eat, then eat some more before heading out and leaving Thomas to gamble alone, lol.

The three of us go to Loan's place to make progress on our IMDB quest. To my suprise, neither Tony nor Loan have seen Casino Royale so we proceed to watch that. CTizzle joins us about halfway through. After that we end up watching the next movie on the list, Young Frankenstein. I get a ride back to my place afterwards and pass out because it's pretty late.

Then...Saturday I suppose I worked. Don't remember much. This brings us up to speed to when I first started this post. Now to catch up on what's happened since then.

Umm...Sunday I worked 9-5. The morning was fabulous but I don't think I'm writing about why here, sorry. ^^ After work I went with Katherine to go watch Fred play basketball. His team lost. The better team won. His team kept making a lot of mistakes. Why play if you're bad?

My schedule for this week consisted of working a lot everday finishing up Wednesday night at 8. Then I have Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off for fun times. I...don't really remember anything interesting.

I had dinner when I got home. My sister cooked BBQ chicken along with rice and green beans. I washed it down with a couple of bottles of Boulevard Wheat. I started writing this three hours ago so now I'm pretty tired and will probably head to bed soon.

// Movie Reviews

Casino Royale
A really good restart of the James Bond franchise. Hot and beautiful women were great to watch, but what stole the show was the Aston Martin DBS.

(click to enlarge)
Check out this video of Top Gear reviewing the car. Awesome.
BC's rating: 8.5/10 (mainly for the car)

Young Frankenstein
As Tony said in his review, this movie wasn't impressive since I've seen every gag they had numerous times. The thing is though, the gags I've seen were pulled from this movie. I'm glad to have seen the original. My favorite part was the singing and dancing. I'd recommend this movie to anyone who hasn't seen it. So everybody minus Tony, Loan, CT, and myself.
BC's rating: 7.5/10

The singing and dancing was a parody of Fred Astaire's Puttin' on the Ritz performance in Blue Skies. OMG I want to dress/dance like that.

Anyways...sleepy...so...later.

I Would Swallow My Pride

2009-01-13T15:38:00.003-06:00

I would choke on the rinds,
But the lack thereof would leave me empty inside
Swallow my doubt
Turn it inside out
Find nothing but faith in nothing
Want to put my tender heart in a blender
Watch it spin 'round into a beautiful oblivion
Rendezvous, then I'm through with you

// Recent Anything

Ok, so blah. I've been busy. Really? Yeah, kind of. I'm always so tired after the days that I work. I was going to update yesterday after I had finished watching the four new episodes of 24, but Stanley said to come over to the Taiko house so he ended up coming over and giving me a ride. ...to the 'party'.

I really can't recall any great work stories since I've last posted, but there are a few I remember. The one that stands out the most is when I was tending to a guy that looked around my age and in the cart's child seat he had a culinary book that had the multi-colored Post-It Flags throughout and it looked as if he was really trying to learn to cook well. But then I look at the rest of the cart and I notice just three items: a package of spaghettie noodles, a package of ground beef, and a jar of spaghetti sauce. OMG, I wanted to slap him. Freaking retard. You have a culinary cookbook and you buy premade shit? *sigh*

Then there was another time when I was told to sweep around the entrance of the store and the registers. So being a nice little worker I happily obliged. Most of my co-workers are females. That is to say, all of the other cashiers are female. Awesome you may think at first glance. But no. Anyways, the store manager comes over and notices me actually working while three of the girls are standing around chatting it up while playing with a cane that somebody had left there for about a month. I make a joke about how the girls aren't close enough to the food to be productive and I have a good chuckle that's shared with...no one. haha

This past Friday when I was assigned a till and was counting it, one of the back office workers told me I had to take a produce test. Curious, I asked what one was. She directed me to a stack of papers labeled, "Produce Test" and the cart behind me. On top of the cart were ten places numbered 1-10 and each spot containing a vegetable or fruit. The paper had ten blank spaces where I was supposed to correctly name the produce along with its PLU number. Great, my first quickfire challenge. I wasn't sure how these were graded so I considered flat-out failing the test in case it was graded by % improvement. But I asked and was told that these aren't graded nor do they any reflection upon one's evaluation. They're just there to help the workers get better acquainted with the produce. Oh. So it's worthless. So I just try my best and identify the produce and only three or four PLU numbers because I don't know them that well.

Then after work I walked home and got ready to go out to drink with Tony and Loan. We decide to head over to the old O'Connell's which is great because I'm hungry also. We grab some seats at the bar as we wait for Katherine and Thomas to join us. I order a Manhattan, Loan gets an apple martini, and Tony gets some iced tea. After I finish my Manhattan, I opt to get the scotch equivalent, the Rob Roy. They used a meh scotch though. Next time I'll have to order a premium one before I decide to rate it. We grab a booth once Thomas and Katherine arrive and I order some spicy chicken strips which were surprisingly really delicious although I'm sure that's probably a combination of being super hungry and drinking. I don't remember talking about anything in particular. We're there for a while before we decide to leave and Tony, Loan, and I head back to her place to knock the next movie off of our IMDB quest, The Planet of the Apes. Wow, what a great movie. What a great soundtrack.

Went home, knocked out after that. Had work from 3-9 on Saturday. It was meh. Played some more games with Charlie when I got home. The next day I worked from 12-8, it was all right. I get a text from Katherine after I get off work to go drink with Thomas since it would be his birthday at midnight, so sure. They pick me up and we head back to O'Connell's where I get a Tom Collins and more spicy chicken strips. I love gin almost as much as I love bourbon and this was a nice light and refreshing drink. I ended up ordering two more since the bar was out of sweet vermouth. :( Thomas starts to get sleepy so I order a round of kamikaze shots and we finish our food and other drinks before moving to play some pool. After Thomas pwned me in pool, Katherine ordered some mind eraser shots. We then play another game and finish our other drinks before heading over to the Taiko house.

Thomas and I decide to play Madden '09 against each other. I played as the Dallas Cowboys and he was the NO Saints. I scored four touchdowns in the first quarter and shut him out until he decided to resign after half-time. :)

We take another weird shot at midnight to celebrate his birthday. It was three parts Dr Pepper, one part 151, and one part frappucino. It actually tasted good. I go home after Thomas passes out and pass out myself.

Monday I worked from 11-7. It was kinda retarded because I never got a break and my feet were so exhausted. As I stated in the beginning, I went over to the Taiko house and to no surprise, Thomas was passed out. Somebody actually said that he had filled an entire bag with vomit while en route back home from his birthday dinner. Wow. So I just hung out with the guys and girls there. After mostly everybody left, it was just me, TI, Stanley, Andy, Ronny, Victor, Banh Bao, and Tony P. So we're singing on Singstar which is pretty fun. We actually end up buying 15 new songs to play. Then I go home and pass out.

Now it's Tuesday and I think some of us are going to go eat at Pad Thai around six. That's about it. If I forget anything....meh. I work tomorrow from 1-8, hopefully I can secure a place in the union to watch this week's episode of Top Chef. Yay, Hung! And go go go Team BC! :D

// Edit

Oh yeah, played another game of chess against Stanley but I wasn't mentally there and blundered a few times and he won. So now I'm 32-18 against him. :(

// Movie Review

The Planet of the Apes
Much much better than I thought it was going to be. I was expecting something Michael Bay-ish but was pleasantly surprised with the concept, plot, and great acting. Charlton Heston is really great, and most especially is Linda Harrison. Linda who, you ask? Allow me to educate you.

Click the image to get the full-sized picture.

She's absolutely beautiful. *sigh* Anyways, it's a really good movie and I highly suggest you see it if you haven't. And if you have seen the 2001 remake and not this one, do not let it put you off because the remake is absolute shit.
BC's rating: 9.0/10

Deep Down in Louisiana Close to New Orleans

2009-01-04T23:11:00.002-06:00

Way back up in the woods among the evergreens
There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood
Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode
Who never ever learned to read or write so well
But he could play the guitar just like a ringing a bell

// Recent Anything

Worked from noon to eight today. It went pretty smoothly with the exception of one incident. Food stamp guy, further referred to as FSG. I'm working the express lane and he comes over with six items. Everything's good so far. I ring up four boxes of cereal and two king-sized Hershey candy bars. He proceeds to tell me he's paying with food stamps. That's fine too. After the entire transaction is completed he looks over his receipt and notices that the computer charged him $1.29 for each candy bar. That would have been fine too if they weren't currently on sale for $0.99. I do a semi-cringe because doing food stamp returns is more work than doing a regular return. But I'm not fretting because it takes an upper-level employee to do returns so I just call one over, let's call her Judi.

After I explain the problem to Judi she scurries over to where FSG picked up the candy bars to verify the sale price. When she returns to my register she tells me that $0.99 is the correct price and we'll have to do a return. It was then when FSG started to get angry and actually swore at Judi about the price descrepancy. And it's not like Judi is some punk kid. Judi is in fact a mature woman with grey hair. Whatever would compel a man to swear at an old lady over sixty cents is beyond me. Judi then pages an actual manager to facilitate the situation.

Now while this situation is frustrating, I really didn't mind it or care. That is, until the guy started swearing. I began to get angry myself. This was my co-worker being verbally assaulted. My colleague. My TEAMMATE. I tried to sedate my feelings but I knew if the situation got worse I would have to put the guy in his place. While the manager sorted out the situation I kept replaying possible scenarios out in my head. The one that I favored the most was when I take a twenty out of my wallet and tell the guy to take the money, which he must really need if he is going to swear at an old lady for sixty cents, and go fuck himself and never come back again. That would've been great. Or you know, that standard double tap to the forehead of whichever pistol I'm favoring at the moment. What was funny was at the end the guy didn't even apologize, he just tried shifting the blame from the workers to the computer and talked about how bad computers are. Wowwwwww. After he left the rest of the people in my line kept telling me how much of a douche that guy was, lol.

The next event that happened at work is pretty bad. Not bad like the above situation, but...just wrong. Today I really realized that if there is a hell then not only am I guaranteed a spot there, but also a Flash Pass to bypass the line at the entrance. So...around half past five I'm checking people out and I come to this one lady wearing a white beanie. Nothing too unusual. Then as I check out her face as I'm bagging I notice she has a black eye. My reflex is to laugh. I had to look away and pretend to cough. WOW. I tried to finish bagging and the transaction as fast as I could because it took almost all of my energy to not laugh. Even then, I still couldn't help but try to hide the smirk on my face I couldn't get rid of. I...yeah. I kept smiling for the remainder of my shift because of it. I'm so bad. I blame TV and the internet. But it's ok....maybe she just walked into a door???

And that concludes my day at work. Today was the store manager's last day as she is being reassigned to a different store. As such, I couldn't request a day off. However tomorrow the new store manager will be there so I'll do it then since I work from noon to eight again. But I have Tuesday off! So let's party! But not too much because I work Monday 11am-7pm! Blah! Time to sleep because I'm tired. Later, kiddies.

Baby If You Give It To Me

2009-01-03T23:59:00.001-06:00

I'll give it to you
I know what you want
You know I got it
Baby if you give it to me
I'll give it to you
As long as you want
You know I got it

// Recent Anything

Parents came down today to help my brother move back. Cleaned the apartment, awesome. Had work from 3pm to 9pm. OMG. So I was servicing this one lady (lol) and the package of meat she selected to purchase had an excess amount of blood in it and was actually dripping blood. Since she's the one that picked it out I surmised that she likes blood so I scan and bag as usual. It was so fucking disgusting. Hands sticky from blood and all. Blood dripping onto the conveyer belt. Right after she left I had to find the hand sanitizer station and generously soak my hands in them. But I couldn't find the portable sanitizer bottle to clean up my station. Being the lazy ass that I am, I just made sure that my cleanliness was taken care of and preserved and left the blood stains there to dry - avoiding contact with my hands but not with other consumers' products. Yes, I feel bad about it but the place isn't exactly Whole Foods. Beggers can't be choosers, and if you're shopping there you're probably begging for something. This six hour shift seemed a lot longer than any of my eight hour ones.

After work I am delighted to find an e-mail reply from the Cinemark IMAX in Tulsa that they'll be showing The Dark Knight again, starting on the 23rd. I work tomorrow from 12pm-8pm and plan to request the 23rd off. I don't know what I'll do if they won't let me off to go see The Dark Knight. Probably take a cue from Israel or something. ROFLMAO!

Played more Empire Earth with Charlie. We're still working out a good comp stomp game to play.

Now I'm super tired and would like some sleep. Until next time, comrades.

I Don't Know What To Do

2008-12-28T18:48:00.004-06:00

Just can't explain to you
I don't know what to say
Oh not another word
Just la la la la la
It goes around the world
Just la la la la la

// Recent Anything

[Sunday]
First day of work at Valu Foods. Semi-excited and pumped up to join the forces of Norman's proletariat. I donned a white Ralph Lauren v-neck undershit, a pair of khaki Banana Republic pants, and my black Kenneth Cole shoes. Totally going to be the best dressed cashier there. My shift started at noon and I arrived ten minutes early to help get situated. The first thing I had to do was fill out a bunch of paperwork. Like, a lot of paperwork. Probably more paperwork than I've ever had to fill out. Ever. Most of it were of papers of me acknowledging various protocols and rules. Valu Foods loves their rules. Every area that's not public is plastered with ghetto-printed papers reminding everybody of certain rules. Some make sense and are logical to me, some I think are purely retarded but I'm sure have been put in place due to many bad experiences with some not-so-professional employees.

One rule that I think is a poor way to control cell phone usage is that if any employee is caught with a cell phone on their person while on the clock then they are automatically terminated. I'm all for rules that make sense, but once somebody tells me to do something or threatens me due to something as retarded as this, it makes me very angry. I just ignore the rule and if I get caught then they can have good luck finding somebody as skilled and intelligent as I am to replace me. I don't take it seriously because this job is just a means to build my poker bankroll back up. All I need to do is raise $4k then I'll be done and can just play poker for a living like I used to do. I miss the freedom. :-\

So after the paperwork was finished, one of the managers grabbed me the standard polo that every employee wears along with my misspelled nametag. "Johnathan" is just ugly with the extra 'h'. :-( Once he handed it to me I was like, "Hmm...doesn't look too clean." And upon my inspection I noticed some stains on the front, the not-so-clean smell, and the presence of deodorant on the inside armpit area. GROSS. I sent the manager to fetch me a new and clean shirt. Next I was put under the initial care of a chipper young worker that started to cursorily show me the ropes of the fine art of cashiering. It was a pretty slow day which made an easy day to learn.

During one of my transactions I made a mistake and uttered the word, "Fuck". I did a semi-cringe but I didn't get any read from the female customer so I guess she didn't hear it. Haha. Thankfully I haven't done it anymore, but that's just because I don't make mistakes. Besides that, everybody says I'm really polite and nice. Hahahahaha.

I'm totally not used to standing up for so long. My calves ache. :-(

After my shift is done, I head back into the customer service office and countdown my till then leave. Not a bad first day, but not a great one either. I feel humbled.

After I get off work I get a text from Binh wanting to go to the office. He said he and T would pick me up in a couple of hours so I take a nap. We get to the office ~9pm and it's a short wait before they open a new $1/$2 table with me in seat 6, Binh in seat 5, and T in seat 4. Binh loses his first buy-in semi-fast and T offers to stake him (LOL!) which Binh totally accepts and is back in the game. Meanwhile I'm totally card dead. The best had I've had is pocket eights and I had to fold preflop when somebody raised to $12 and I only had a stack of like $80 and OOP. Finally when I get down to about half my buy-in, I currently deem the table a lost cause and decide to cash out and just read the book I brought along, How to Reassess Your Chess.

However right as I get up I get an itch. An itch to play a game that I was only a few days from having not played it for an entire year. I scratched that itch. Yes, I succumbed and played blackjack. I let it all ride and hoped for the best. My first card was a jack. Yes! Second card was a ten. Yes! Dealer showed a queen. Gay! Dealer flips over a 9. Yes! I doubled up and immediately cashed out. The best way to play blackjack is to hit and run because if you keep playing you will lose it all.

So then I decide to take a break and grab a bite to eat. Binh ends up losing his staked buy-in when the board is double-paired with 7s and 9s, and he goes all in having a 7 for the small boat. Uh, pretty sure the only thing that's going to call you is somebody that has a 9. And that's just what happened, and it happened to be T. lol. So we both take a break and get food with our comps. I also ended up finding that the comp is actually for $6.60 and not just $6 so I end up getting a fresh slice of pizza and a chili cheese hotdog. Binh and I have some good conversation and Jason shows up so we hang out for a while before heading back to the poker room. I just read and talk to Binh. T had said that he wanted to play until 6am but failed to mention that to me before we played so I was like, wtf. I worked the next day at 4pm and would've liked to get ample sleep.

So Binh and I just spectate and hang out around the poker room until I get super bored and just decide to buy in again and play. I'm still card dead and my stack is just whittling away. Finally it's around six am and T decides to start cashing out. I'm like, "Finally!" but just as T cashes out I get pocket kings. Seriously? I'm thinking they're about to get cracked to punish me for playing blackjack earlier but I'm UTG and raise to $10 and get two callers then the button reraises to $20. I call, UTG+1 calls, and it's just the three of us to the flop. 9-6-3. I go all in for my remaining fifty or so and they both call. Fuck. The guy to my left is really tight. He also knows that I'm really tight. So I keep thinking he has aces. I pray for a king to come. And it does on the turn. Holla! River is a blank. Guy on my left ended up having jacks and the button had KQ. Tipped Steve a redbird (five dollar chip) and cashout. I felt kinda bad because it's bad etiquette to just hit and run but whatever. I'm tired and I want to leave. Pass out around 8am.

[Monday]
I wake up around 11:30am and am pretty hungry. I get a text from Charlie to see what I was up to and I invite him out for some lunch at Pad Thai's Boyd location. We meet up and have a good lunch. We hit up Wal-Mart afterwards because I needed to get some things before getting ready for my second day of work. I wasn't officially scheduled to work this day but somebody needed somebody to work part of their shift today and hey, why not ask the new guy? So I get ready to tackle my second day of work that lasts from 4pm to 9pm. I don't really remember anything about this work day. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. After work I grab some Taco Bell and head back home and see what everybody was up to. I call Charlie and he tells me that there are a lot of guys congregating at the Taiko house so I grab my food and chess stuff and get a ride over there.

However upon arriving I'm faced with the harsh reality that everyone there is prepping to go play football at Campus Lodge. Srsly? So I eat one of my burritos and give in to the group and agree to go play football with the guys. But I'm dressed BC so I need to go home and change before heading over to play.

There ends up being only nine of us so they decide to have one guy be all-time quarterback which sounds like something that I'd be really great at. So when they decide to flip for it I join in and it gets heads up between Hieu and I for all-time quarterback but lose the final cointoss. :-( But what's more fucked up than me being the all-time quarterback is how the teams were stacked. Chris B., Thomas, Johnny, and BJ versus TI, Charlie, Victor, and myself with Hieu being QB for both sides. Yeah, gg motherfuckers.

I'm hella tired when we make it back to the Taiko house so I pass out in the living room for an hour or two and awaken to the sound of Stanley talking to some of the guys. Which is great because that means I'll be able to school him in chess some more! :D But he opts to play Johnny first and I observe for the last half of the match. It was pretty frustrating because I noticed in a few spots where Stanley had mate in one move against Johnny and never noticed. Anyways, Johnny is pretty bad so it's an easy victory for Stanley. My turn.

For the last maybe 8 or 9 games that we've played, Stanley has used the same opening against me - the Philidor Defense. After the third or fourth time playing that opening with him I just decided to look up the best way to counter it and have been pretty much crushing him, hahahaha. But today he used a different opening so I relied on my basic knowledge of strategy and tactics to control the f7 square after he castled which made for a quick and easy mate. By the way, Stanley loves to play as black for some reason so I always play as white. Weird. Anyways, he only has time for one game so that's the only one we played and I went home to sleep after that.

[Tuesday]
No work today. I run errands during the day and plan to hit up BWW later with Charlie and Katherine. Something comes up though and Katherine can't make it so Charlie and I decide to get it to-go and head over to TI's place to watch a movie or something. So Charlie and I head over to pick up the wings and run into a few of the other older guys who are waiting for a table. I totally didn't know there was a bowl game that night, OSU vs. Oregon...don't really care. I just didn't like how it made Buffalo Wild Wings super crowded. After we get the food I call Stanley and tell him to meet us at TI's so we could eat and squeeze in a few games of chess also. Binh ends up coming over too so it's just the five of us. After eating Stanley and I start to play. I win a few games, then I freakin' blunder one. Like I forgot that my rook was protecting b1 or something and I move it to start pushing his king into a corner and right as I let my hand go of the piece I say, "Fuck!" because then it hit me. So gay. I almost lose the next game, but pull through and win a couple more. As it stands now my record vs. Stanley is 27-15.

After eating we're pretty bored and don't really feel like watching a movie so I suggest we play some poker. There are no chips to play with at TI's place so we head over to the Taiko house and setup the poker table and I divvy out the chips. We high card to see who deals the cards and we decide to do that every thirty minutes because dealing kind of sucks. We then high card again to see who starts out with the button. We play our standard no-limit $0.01/$0.02 game with an uncapped buy-in. I buy in for a dollar and after an hour or so I lose that and buy in for a dollar again then lose that. So then I buy in for five dollars which makes me in the game for seven. When we decided to stop playing the cash game, I cash out with $28 so I'm up $21. Pretty crazy for a four-handed one cent/two cent game. Binh was playing pretty terrible and kept paying me off all night with my big hands. But one hand he was supposed to and when the money went all in, we both acted a good deal.

I pick up AJos UTG+1 and raise to 5BB. Everybody calls. Flop is K-Q-10r so I flop the nuts. Checked around. Turn is a seven. Binh bets 10BB, I reraise to 20BB, and he reraises to 100BB. This is when we really start acting. Binh is in the big blind so I'm talking out loud about my thinking process. What he'd limp in and call a raise with, etc. Finally I just push all in and I have him covered. He had a nice-sized stack because Thomas played for a little bit and gave a lot to Binh. So then Binh starts to try to act. "Jack-9, BC? Really? You wouldn't raise preflop with J9. AJ? Nah...KQ? No, you wouldn't have checked the flop. " Then we just act back and forth to each other before he finally calls. River is a blank and he flips his cards over. J9 for the second nuts. Then I flip my hand over and take the pot. lololol

After we finished playing the cash game we decided to play a tournament. $5 buy-in winner-take-tall with one rebuy per player. Two people rebought and I ended up winning. Well, actually, I decided to be nice to Binh and split it 67/33 when we got heads up. It was a pretty crazy night of poker because I got aces at least seven times the whole night. If only my variance was that great at the casino....bleh. So after that I go home and pass out.

[Wednesday]
I worked 11am-7pm. I got a nice surprise at work when Tony and Loan decided to visit me and grab some stuff for the NYE party that night at the Taiko house. We arranged to have dinner together after I got off work so I was looking forward to that. 7pm arrives and I go back home to change and get ready while Tony and Loan head over to pick me up. While I was working I was thinking about possible places to eat and thought about how I hadn't had steak in a while and thought that dining at Saltgrass would be nice. And it turns out that Tony was thinking the exact same thing. Standard. But it's NYE and it's probably a big wait so Loan GOOG411's the restaurant and secures us a place in line that has a current wait of an hour and a half. Ack! We cursorily contemplate other options but just end up heading there. Thankfully there were three spaces available at the bar so we decided to wait there and order some apertifs. I get a Manhattan, Loan gets an amaretto sour, and Tony gets a water (lol). I make quick work of my cocktail and order a second. Hmm.

I haven't eaten anything but a tv dinner for breakfast before work. Standing up all day really drained me and my body was starving for sustenance. I thought quenching it with a few cocktails first would be ok. I thought wrong. After my second Manhattan I decide to order a martini. Loan is also working on her third cocktail when our buzzer lights up and vibrates to signal that our table is ready. Tony and Loan go ahead and secure our table while I take care of the tab at the bar. At this point I'm pretty buzzed but not stumbling or anything. This however changes quickly. Now my memory is a bit fuzzy but I remember the bread coming out and generously dousing it in the very delicious butter. I remember ordering my food and it being served. Was I drinking straight out of the carafe of water?

At one point I stumbled to the bathroom and had to consequently vomit. Yeah, I know. wtfmate. After I got that taken care of I remember being really, really sleepy. Like more sleepy than I have ever felt. Then I remember leaving but not getting back to my place. The next thing I know is that I'm being woken up by Fred, Tony, and Loan in my room. (It's pretty messy at the moment, sowwie.) And we talked about...stuff I don't remember. I just remember them visiting and leaving. Then I pass out again. So yeah, I missed out on all the new year's festivities because I was sleeping like a baby.

[Thursday]
I wake up feeling fine and dandy. I work from 1pm to 9pm so I make sure I'm ready before then while trying to piece together exactly what happened the night before. It was really hard to leave for work. Like, I really didn't want to go and just resign or something. I'm so lazy. Once I get there everything's all good and stuff, it's just that initial spurt to get there that I have a problem with. But alas, I think about how great it will be to later have my freedom so I make the short trek to work. It was all right. Haha, at one point one of the managers asked me to do a cart pick-up. I gave her a raised eyebrow and asked, "What?" A cart pick-up, as you can imagine, is exactly that. You go outside and herd all of the discarded carts back inside for people to use and discard again. Really? Being a good little worker that I am, I happily comply with the request, humbled again. The outside air felt nice. I couldn't help but smile at the current picture of myself.

The rest of the workday went smooth. I was stationed at the 10 items or less lane and despite the sign stating so, there were many patrons who felt they were above store protocol. I didn't care because just standing there is pretty boring. However the express lanes are much shorter than the regular lanes so if somebody has 15 or more items it really clogs up my limited amount of bagging space and reduces the efficiency of my workflow. And I can't stand reduced efficiency. One of the bigger offenders of this I noticed was wearing a bunch of OSU paraphenalia so I made a quip about if he watched the game on Tuesday (they lost, LDO haha). Before my shift was over the store manager finally added me to the clock-in system which is actually a pretty neat biometric system.

After work I called around but nobody picked up. After a couple of callbacks I pass out in bed. Slept for ~11 hours.

[Friday]
Visited by the 'rents today, brought pho and other food and drinks to stock up. We originally got a six-month lease which ends at the end of January and we plan to renew it this week. And surprise, my brother is also lazy and ended up missing the deadline for OU's spring enrollment. Wow. So he's actually going to be moving back to El Reno to go to school there for a semester before coming back. Which is good because now I have half of the apartment to myself instead of having to share it with my brother.

Spent the rest of the day playing Empire Earth with Charlie. Hooray, he finally grasped the right way to micromanage at this game! So now he actually pulls his weight when we play which is nice. But now that we have a pretty good team it's hard to find different scenarios to play that keep us entertained while not getting us destroyed by the AI because the AI cheats whenever we play. Pulling resources out its ass like no other.

After a few games I wanted to play/study some chess but instead decided to write. And good thing that I did because it's been two hours since I started writing again. I work tomorrow from 3pm-9pm. Today was payday but their pay period is from Sunday-Saturday and since I started this past Sunday I'll have a full paycheck next week (they pay weekly, wtf?).

Anyways, I'm pretty tired now so I'm going to e-mail the IMAX theater in Tulsa about The Dark Knight rerelease then head to bed. Thanks for reading!

With A Taste Of Your Lips

2008-12-23T11:53:00.003-06:00

I’m on a ride
You're toxic
I'm slipping under
With a taste of a poison paradise
I’m addicted to you
Don’t you know that you’re toxic?

// Recent Anything

Nothing really happened last week because everybody had finals. Umm...the earliest thing I can remember since my last post was...

Wow, I can't really remember anything. I haven't slept yet and that's probably what's causing my lapse in memory. As a matter of fact, this post will consist of me jumping from topic to topic as I remember events.

Top Chef. What a nutty episode this past Wednesday. 75% of my fantasy chefs were in the top rankings this week, but none of them won the elimination challenge. :( And sadly the other 25% were in the bottom, though it was of no concern to me since Eugene...

Actually I'm going to finish writing this when I've had sleep. lates

As I was saying, I'm pretty sure I'm going to win fantasy Top Chef barring any fuck up from Stefan or Jeff. Don't think so? Put your....mouth where your mouth is? I'm down for another prop bet for anyone that I win the draft and am currently willing to offer 3-1 odds up to $100. Actually, I think liquor would be more fun. So no money, just shots of a liquor of the winner's choice. So...let me know if you want to prop with BC. One condition - alcoholic percentage maximum is 151 proof and the lowest is 80 proof.

I downloaded Chessmaster - Grandmaster Edition like a week ago and have been going through all the lessons and drills. It's actually a really great program for learning how to play chess. There's an academy section inside that is taught by Josh Waitzkin, who if you didn't know or don't remember, is the guy that the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer is based off of. I have that movie too, good times. I highly recommend this program if you're looking to start getting into chess as it's spectacular for the beginning/intermediate player. Right now my rating is hovering around 990/1000. :-( I suck.

So I'm having a really hard time remembering all that has happend pre-Christmas so I'm just going to pretend nothing ever happened.

Except that I played my first game of Madden ever. Against Tim. And it wasn't a shutout, holla. I don't really remember the score, I think it was something like 15-60. The controls are so confusing as is the screen. I'm so terribad at the game but I hope to improve. I ended up playing Stanley the next day and did okay because he played as a team that he usually never plays as. I'm not familiar with the nuances and repuations of any of the teams so I just choose to play as the Dallas Cowboys since I'm kind of partial to them. That game's score was 13-21. I'd say I was getting better, but small sample size imo.

Speaking of playing with Stanley.... My chess record has improved against him and currently stands at 23-13. I lucked out in one game where he managed to get way ahead in material and I was down to just a king and a couple of pawns. I ended up getting him to stalemate me. :-) I need to start recording our games again.

I also played some chess while home for Christmas against my youngest sister, Kellie (11). She was supposed to join the chess club, but she never ended up doing so. Well, she needs to because she basically just knows how to move the pieces and I destroyed her, lol. We also played some Monopoly while at home! And holy cow, I almost lost! Against my youngest brother, Douglas (16). It all started like this.... I didn't see him as a real threat and we were at a point in the game where like 95% of the properties were bought up but nobody had a monopoly. So after heavy negotations, I managed to trade him one red property to give me a monopoly in exchange for ten free stays at the red properties. I start putting houses and hotels on the properties and end up knocking out the other three players but my brother ends up owning monopolies on all of the properties between Jail and Free Parking and puts either maxes out houses on them or hotels.

That totally owns me and finally after almost getting knocked out I realized that I super retardedly overlooked something. The hotels on my red properties were useless since he didn't have to pay rent so why not liquidate them to develop my other properties? I felt like such an idiot. But I've never come across that situation before so lesson learned. Plus the dice never rolled my way in the opening and middle game, but they really helped in the end game and I end up bankrupting my brother. I was pretty worried there for a while.

Christmas was fun. My brother Douglas got the new Call of Duty: Word at War and Left 4 Dead, both on Xbox 360 so we spent most of the time playing those games. Left 4 Dead is freakin' crazy. I like the original Call of Duty 4 better though. But still, I just can't stand FPS games on consoles. NEED MOUSE!

We came back Christmas Day because my sister had to work. Apparently she changed jobs. She now works at the movie theater since she was like the assistant manager at the theater in El Reno and just manages.....I think? I dunno, don't care. What matters now is that I can see movies for free with up to a group of five. Ship it. Too bad there's nothing out that I want to see. I think the next theater trip I'll make will be to the IMAX in Tulsa for you know what. And if you don't, gdiaf.

Today (Saturday the 27th) I plan to get a haircut. I need one. And I think maybe making some progress on the movie quest. I'll try to update more often so this doesn't happen, but we all know that's an empty promise. :-)

California Here We Come

2008-12-15T01:07:00.002-06:00

Right back where we started from

// Recent Anything

Ooh, a weekend update! Let's see...last update was Friday evening. Since a fair amount of my favorite TV shows just ended their current season, I have had to find other shows to watch. Actually I just started watching The O.C. again from the beginning. It's been over a year since I've seen it so I figure it's ok. Then later that night I get a call from Stanley around 11:30 to invite me to another movie night at TI's place with the guys and girls. I'm down so I get my sister to drive me and also grab my chess set on the way out. I arrive as a lot of the guys arrive and we enter/storm the house at the same time, reminiscent of 1939 Poland. Stanley and I played three games that night with him winning two of them, which brings my record against Stanley to 17-10. :-(

The first movie we watched was Mirrors. I'm pretty sure Kiefer will forever be pigeon-holed as a kickass counter-terrorist agent because that's all I could see during the film. After that we popped in the movie that if it were a person I would kidnap, shackle, and force to be my bride. I'm talking about the The Dark Knight, of course. Almost everybody fell asleep during it though. I'll admit, I was dozing off a bit at times. But I had a legitimate reason other than being tired. While watching Mirrors I drank about a glassful of vodka. God, that sounds so bad typing it out. Such a degen. Anyways...everybody falls asleep and the movie keeps playing on repeat. I think it played at least three times before BJ turned off the TV.

I wake up maybe two hours later and watch BJ and Johnny play Soul Calibur IV (which I'm pretty damn good at btw). They do this for a long time before everybody decides to leave. Johnny drops me off back at my place but I can't seem to go back to sleep. So instead I repartition and format my primary hard drive giving my Windows partition ten extra gigabytes of space so I have room to play more games. I actually haven't done anything to the extra partition yet, I'm currently on my main partition which I also formatted and installed Fedora 10 that was released last month. It's really awesome. I spent the whole day updating and tweaking everything to where it's just the way I like it. I plan to install XP on the Windows partition on Monday.

Eventually I shower and get dressed because I planned to go to Lisa's birthday get-together at Rok Bar. I got a ride to the Taiko house around 11 then Thomas and I headed to the club. The bouncer was being kind of gay even though we had VIP so I had to call Lisa to bring us in. Thomas buys the first round, vodka Redbulls. What a girl. I get the next and get Thomas the same thing but order a neat bourbon for me and the bartender actually fills the glass 2/3s the way up. :-D Yum! I had a total empty stomach and was starving when he arrived and after I had drank about half of it I started to feel a little buzzed. Double yay.

But Lisa comes up as I'm talking to David and Jeff to say that everybody's heading over to Skky now. Great, except that I still have a fair amount of bourbon left and I don't want to down it. So they leave and I stay to finish my drink. Then I get an idea, haha. While I was talking to David and Jeff, I noticed this girl sitting at a table, kind of looking bored and we exchanged a smile or two. Well after I finish my drink I see some dude trying to talk to her and she looks so not interested. Then I thought, fuck it. I walk up to her and said, "You look bored. Let's dance." And holy shit it worked! I totally cockblocked that guy and took the girl. HAHA! We danced for like two songs then I told her my friends left and I had to go find them and left for Skky Bar. I was high as a kite after that. Drank some more at Skky and danced with Lisa and her friends. After last call everybody decided to go eat at IHOP but Thomas and I weren't in the mood so we just went home. What a great night. :D

Then this afternoon I woke up feeling not so well. I haven't really done anything besides check out more stuff for Fedora and eat and watch The O.C. It's almost 3am now and I should get to sleep.

And that's my weekend in a nutshell.

Swing Swing

2008-12-12T17:34:00.006-06:00

From the tangles of
My heart is crushed by a former love
Can you help me find a way to carry on again?

// Recent Anything

Damn. I waited too long to write and now I don't really remember anything that's happened. Let's try to figure this out. Actually I don't think there's anything significant to write about that's happened. I had to miss a ceremony because I was sick and that was no bueno. I played more chess with Stanley this week, now I'm 16-8 against him. Bleh. Wednesday night I played Monopoly with Tim, Tan, and CT. It got so bad that I had to let all three of them combine into one entity to try to defeat me. And that still didn't work. Why does everybody suck at Monopoly? I want a challenge, damn it!

T came over Thursday afternoon so I could take a look at his laptop and try to salvage some data off of it before formatting it. Holy cow, what the fuck did he do to his laptop? I mean...wow. It will boot to POST but that's pretty much all it does. I tried using both an Ubuntu and Fedora live cd but neither worked. So I'm pretty much left with getting quotes from places to retrieve the data since I'm a lazy bastard and T needs to be taught a lesson on how to properly maintain and take care of a computer though I doubt he'll learn anything and I will continue to snicker.

He also wanted me to accompany him to go eat pho in the city along with some of the other guys and girls. I had to emphatically decline since I had already made dinner plans with Katherine and she would destroy me if I stood her up again. So after he left I got ready for dinner and started backing up stuff on my computer because I plan to reformat it this weekend and give a little extra space for my Windows partition.

Katherine picked me up around 5pm and we originally planned to eat pho in the city but she was in an alcoholic mood so we switched to dining at BJ's. For apertifs, I had a Manhattan and she got her favorite, Framboise. I was starving and had a completely empty stomach. What came next was a surprise for me. I actually started to feel the alcohol! I wasn't buzzed or anything but I felt myself getting there. However it all disappeared after I started eating my balsamic glazed chicken so boo. I had a great time, I miss the constant dinners we used to have. The conversation was good, catching up. She pulled a sly one on me though and while I went to the bathroom she paid for the meal.

I remember one time...haha. I decided to check out a Gamblers Anonymous meeting for shits and giggles and Katherine and Jessica accompanied me. The meeting was pretty wow then we went to go eat at Thai Kum Koon afterwards and Katherine said she was going to the bathroom but actually paid for Jessica and I. It's not that big of a deal. Usually when we go out we just take turns paying. Anyways, off topic.

I'm still thirsty but not keen on drinking at BJ's so I suggest we hit up campus corner. She drives to Louie's and we commence (lol, not "come in" oldddd joke) with further drinking. I order another Manhattan and she gets...some mixed drink. We take a couple of shots of Washington Apples, then some kamikazes before calling it a night and make plans to drink again every night the next week in which she doesn't work the next day. :-)

After she dropped me off I played a few games of chess until I get a call from T. He invites me to go watch a movie at TI's place and for me to get some beer. Uh...I already drank so I decline to get beer. He then goes off on me about buying alcohol. Wow. Really? That kind of pissed me off but I didn't let it get to me. It gets fun later though. Keep reading.

After arriving at the house we find out that TI isn't there yet so we wait around in his room. I sinisterly change his homepage to Meatspin (I know someone's going to click the link) and watch Hannibal in the living room. Tammy doesn't like it though. :( She says it's scary. I love to be scared. Like really scared. Fear right now is probably the only thing that really makes me feel alive. I'd love to spend a weekend in an abandoned house out in the middle of nowhere or somewhere scary. Anyways...

Tim decides to cook some chicken alfredo and T decides to help. They put foil on an oven rack and then throw plain frozed chicken wings on it to cook.

"Uh...aren't you guys going to season the chicken?"
No answer.
"Oh, ok. Well I'm not keen on the culinary arts of Vietnam so if this is how they do it then just ignore my comment."

This gets under T's skin and later after I blunder a surefire victory for me against Jason into a stalemate, T quips, "I thought you'd be good after all the reading and playing you do."

"I'm still a beginner T. Though I'm sure running over another one of your dogs will help clear my mind"
"Wow, BC. That was a little..."
*BC smiling*

For what it's worth, T lost the poodle sometime last week. I don't think he'll find it unless he checks the grill of my brother's car. (loljaykaysmileyface)

That brings up another point. I'm a man who loves to debate and argue. But there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. The right way would be to, in a calm and respectful tone, state your argument with supporting reasons and then listen to the opposition state their case with reasons and then manipulate, validate, or invalidate both side's reasons in order to pursuade your opposition to believe your point. Sadly there are only one or two people I know of who understand and argue this way. What I absolutely cannot stand is when somebody wants to argue with me and they use an elevated, hostile tone and make frivolous points. It's just another one of those things that puts me on life tilt.

That's about it for now. I might write later if I want to write about it.

Hello. =)

// Facebook Note Survey

If I contracted a contagious and fatal disease I would kill myself and burn the body so nobody else would ever be exposed. With that being said, I'm not spreading this around. :-)

1. I have OCD. Not all of the time, but a healthy amount of the time when I'm watching something or listening/talking to people, I have to make the punctuation marks in the sentences being spoken with my right big toe. Nobody notices because I'm usually wearing shoes, but I do it a lot. I also have to 'balance out' events between the left and right side of my body. Like if I step on a crack with my left foot, I have to do the same with my right or I will feel off. Or if something touches my left arm, I have to make something touch my right arm.

2. If I'm not 100% sure about something then I will usually back off if given enough resistance. This really limits me whenever I play poker.

3. If I'm 100% sure about something, then it's really easy to tell I am. This is also a detriment to my ability to play poker. Everybody pretty much knows this about me. If I offer anybody a bet, it's guaranteed that it's either a lock for me or I have a ginormous edge. So never accept a bet from me.

4. The main reason that I started to like Manhattans and bourbon is because of The Simpsons.

5. Most of what I say is said in jest. If you take it seriously then you are either a weak-minded girl or you are retarded. If you can't laugh at most of the things I say, then there is something wrong with you. Probably raped by your dad or something.

6. I'm an ass and legs man.

7. I can't stand people who can't take a look at the big picture and realize whatever they're fretting about doesn't matter. If you have a problem with someone, be a civilized adult and talk to them about it. It doesn't matter how the conversation goes as long as the both of you laugh over it afterwards over a drink.

8. Honestly I don't want to be your friend if you don't know how to use Google. Respect me by figuring it out yourself. If that doesn't work, then you may ask me.

9. In sixth grade I did a presentation for a higher grade's science class about the consequences of an airburst 20 kiloton nuclear explosion in the middle of El Reno. I kind of got a reputation after that that lasted for a while, haha.

10. I love playing 20 Questions when taking car trips.

11. I enjoy writing in my blog. If you don't read it, you should! There's a link in my profile.

12. While I enjoy conversation, I also really enjoy silence. Riding in a car with somebody, sitting at a table, or walking somewhere together.

13. I enjoy cooking for people. Especially breakfast. :-\ (lol)

14. I really don't like going to clubs. However I really enjoy bars. But sadly all of my friends are the opposite. :(

15. My favorite chess opening is the Sicilian Defense / Alapin Variation.

16. I don't think I've played Monopoly in over a year. Somebody fix that please.

[You can tell I got lazy writing this by how the length of the responses shortened. haha]

Comin Down The World Turned Over

2008-12-05T14:40:00.005-06:00

And angels fall without you there
And I go on as you get colder
Or are you someones prayer

// Recent Anything

Nothing really happened Wednesday morning but as I was in the middle of an afternoon nap I got a phone call from T to go play some poker with him staking. Naturally I accepted, he picked me up, and off we both went to work. This was around 3pm and we figured we'd play until around 6:30pm so we could hit up Tony's Adobe Premier Pro seminar at 7pm.

***whoops, got to go help get things setup for the big party tonight, will update later!***

I got a little lucky on one had where I picked up pocket queens in the hijack and raise to seven. (Note: this table is super loose-passive with pretty much everybody limping in every hand with no raises.) The small blind and UTG call, they have me covered. I have ~65BB when the hand started. The flop is 10-7-3r. Small blind checks, UTG bets 5BB and I raise to 13BB. Small blind folds, UTG calls. Red alert! A king comes on the turn, we both check. The river is another king. He checks, I value bet 4BB (which is kind of a mistake cause he could easily raise here and get me to fold, but I haven't seen anything from him that would prove that he would and I wanted to get value from hands that I beat) and he calls. He turns over 10-7 so he flopped two pair. I turn over my queens for a better two pair. Runner runner. Whew.

Another hand that had me a little worried was when I picked up pocket aces UTG. I raise to seven and the cutoff and button call. Great, out of position. Flop is 8-9-4 with two spades. I bet fifteen, cutoff goes all-in for his remaining 35, and the button calls. Gay! I had about 120 left and the button had me covered. I thought about it for a while then decided to push for an extra 85 on top. The button thought about it for a long while, but I knew he was tight and folded. He showed me 10-7 of spades for an open-ended straight flush draw. Wow! The turn was a jack and the river was a spade. Good job BC on getting him to fold! And the cutoff didn't have anything. Whew!

I decided to cash out around 6:10pm to get my comp and eat at Taco Bueno before we left. After I finished I came back to get T to cash out so we wouldn't be late to Tony's seminar and I arrive to find him all in and subsequently lose. :(

We make it over to the Alma Wilson room of the union to see a lot of the guys there for the seminar. I glance over to Tan's laptop and notice he's copying a file. I look at everybody else and notice nobody has the program installed. I facepalm and cursorily help Tan install his. It takes forever for everyone to get ready and I feel quite surprised by how well Tony is taking this sheer ignorance and retardation. Finally everybody gets ready and Tony gives his spiel. We hang out in the union for a bit afterwards before deciding to get something to eat. And everybody chooses Fat Sandwiches. I hate Fat Sandwiches. Ugh.

After eating there we decide to go to the Taiko house to decorate for a little bit before heading out to the Beta Chi party. It was so cold. And they pretty much didn't have any liquor left when we got there. :( We ended up staying there for a lot longer than I would have liked. We regrouped back at the Taiko house afterwards and everybody either left or went to sleep, leaving just me, Tim, Thomas, and BJ. We were all pretty hungry and somehow the idea of getting 75 tacos was brought up. Which is what we were originally going to do except people started backing out and it was just the four of us. We reduced the number to 40 and headed over to the Taco Bell near Robinson and 12th. CLOSED. FUCK. It's a quarter past three. We then try the Taco Bell at Lindsey and 12th. OPEN. We get in line at the drive-thru and Tim orders. It was actually pretty hilarious if you were there. Thomas made some videos of it on his iPhone and uploaded them to Facebook. You should watch them. We also took pictures upon arriving home.

Here is Tim modeling with the tacos.

Tim is in fact, the Tex-Mex Jesus.

Taco outline.

Lisa came back and ate with us. Tim took me home after.

The first thing I did after entering my apartment was download the latest episode of Top Chef. It took a little less than thirty minutes and I just watched a chess video in the meantime. Overall I thought this episode was kinda weak. The best part was Fabio's line, "Where I come from, breakfast is sweet and fruity. But OK next time I'll just fry a piece of toast and put bacon on top with some bullsh*t egg and end up in the top 3." Stupid Rocco. And with that episode completed, there are now 12 remaining chefs which mean that Tony, Loan, and I can do our fantasy Top Chef draft. We do that later, keep reading.

I end up falling asleep around 7am and wake up around 2pm to T calling me to come help set up for the party. I get a ride from CTizzle and work on the red omega sign until T, Tim, and I leave to get liquor and some other stuff for the party. It was 3pm and I figured it couldn't take more than three hours to buy liquor and supplies because Katherine and I were planning to have dinner whenever she got off work. Unfortunately T and Tim decide to also have dinner in the city, leaving me stranded and having to cancel at the last minute (whenever she called). Oops. So I ended up not eating the whole time we're in the city. After pho we go to a liquor store owned by one of Lisa's family and get retardedly good discounts on liquor plus no tax. Ship it. Then we stop by Wal-Mart and T's house and head back to Norman. Got a call from her wanting to have dinner but wouldn't be in Norman still for a while so no go.

We finally make it back to the Taiko house and I get Tim to drop me off back home and proceed to shower and get ready for the party. My sister drops me back off at the Taiko house and I help get ready. Vu and I leave to grab some Taco Bell and I wasn't really planning on eating but I suppose I should eat a little bit so I just get a #1 with fruit punch. We make it back and I pour a good amount of Everclear into the fruit punch and take care of that while waiting for the party to start.

The party ended up being a great success and actually a lot of fun. And I'm not one particularly fond of large parties. The bar we had went smoothly and there wasn't a lot of trouble or mess the whole night. I end up passing out in a chair in the living room after the party's over and wake back up around 7am to hear the pledges getting ready to leave to go attend their skydiving class. I go back to sleep and wake up around 10 when everybody else is starting to get ready. I get a ride from BJ back home to shower and change and head back to the Taiko house with CTizzle. The cars full of people stopped to get gas and left for the Oklahoma Skydiving Center. CT, BJ, and I played 20 Questions for the entire way there, though BJ fell asleep halfway there.

Upon arriving at the hangar we left in a big group to hit up the KFC buffet that Cushing offers. The food was great (no doubt because I hadn't eaten anything since the night before it was after 1pm) and we ended up taking up half the seating area. I forgot how unpleasant it was to dine with little kids (our guys) as they were extremely loud the whole time while saying inappropriate things when children were present. No respect.

Back at the hangar we just chilled until it was time for the Kappa Tigers to skydive. Once Stanley showed up we played two games of chess in which he lost both times. I think all but two Kappas landed on their feet, the guys played a little football, then back to Norman.

Everybody planned to watch the game at the Taiko house, but I wouldn't be staying there for long. Tony came and picked me up so he, Loan, and I could knock off three more movies in our quest. I left with them and we had to think of a familiar problem to solve - where to watch the movies? Loan didn't have her key and my monitor isn't that big so we went back to Cate to see if the tv was free, but there were people watching the game so no go. We decide to eat first and head to Pad Thai to eat. I had some deliciously spicy evil jungle chicken. We decided that CT's apartment would be our best bet. Unfortunately CT said he'd be in the city so due to losing the coinflip with Tony, I called Adam to see if it was cool. Adam obliged and after dinner we headed back to the Taiko house to grab a DVD player since CT didn't have one. I came up with the idea for Tony, Loan, and I to high card for our fantasy Top Chef draft while there. I grabbed a deck of cards from the closet and shuffled them. Each of us would pick a number between 1 & 52 and the corresponding positioned card in the deck was our choice.

I picked the lowest positioned so I got my card first and turned it over. 3. FUCK. Loan's was next and she turned it over to reveal a 4! Then Tony turned his over to reveal a......3! YES! So Loan won the high card and now Tony and I would have to redraw for second and last draft positions. He pulled a jack and I luckboxed an ace to win. We decided we would have our draft at CT's place so we hurried over. Tony grabbed a notebook out of my messenger bag and wrote down the remaining contestants. Here are our picks!

Loan
Fabio
Leah
Carla
Hosea

BC
Stefan
Jeff
Radhika
Melissa

Tony
Eugene
Daniel
Ariane
Jaime

We haven't officially decided upon a prize for whoever picked the winner, but I think we're leaning towards the other two people cooking dinner for the winner. I think either Hosea or Melissa is going to have to pack their knives and go this week.

After we got that out of the way we started watching the first of three movies for this session: Laura, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

// Movie Reviews

Laura
The second black & white movie we've watched where there's a male character who is an utter badass motherfucker. This time it's Clifton Webb in the role of classy, but evil radio columnist Waldo Lydecker. I really enjoyed this movie and it helped me understand the political dynamics between films back then and now. Thankfully Daniel Craig (oh wow, he was in A Kid in King Arthur's Court?) is helping to bring it back. This was a really nice break from that. The only thing I didn't like was the fact that they had written Vincent Price's character as a man from Tennessee so he has this weird accent that I'm not accustomed to from him. So yes, I would recommend this film to someone. It even seems like a good date movie imo.
BC's Rating - 8.5/10

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
A 1920's German silent film. The only positive thing about this movie was that it was silent and you could talk for the actors a la Mystery Science Theater 3000. I really didn't like this movie but I suppose it's because I'm not used to movies being made so shitty and the fact that I didn't give it any slack considering it was made while Germany was still struggling to get back on its feet after World War I. Another big factor in my dislike of this film was the fact that it had been somewhat restored and the text frames replaced with some sort of retardly wacky text with a shroom-induced artistic background. Let me save you some time - it was all Francis's fantasy as he is a mental patient. This would be a great date movie if you wanted to skip the movie entirely and head straight for the sex. Sex with about anybody would be better than watching this film imo.
BC's rating - 2/10

The Nightmare Before Christmas
I really liked this movie when I was a child. The quality of the stop-motion animation is phenomenal. However I was pretty freakin' tired when I watched this so I wasn't really in the mood. It seemed to move a lot faster than I remember. I'd still recommend this movie to anyone who hasn't seen it.
BC's rating - 8/10

Six movies down, ~224 more to go!

Went home, crashed. Woke up today feeling that sick feeling. Like there was something in my throat which I was later able to extricate via coughs and blowing my nose. I ended up staying in bed most of the day. I blame Loan.

How Many Nights Did I Wander In the Dark

2008-12-04T01:24:00.002-06:00

Counting secrets of my heart
Now and then I wonder 'bout
Who's eating, sleeping with you now
How many times did I kiss you in the dark
Watching memories depart
Then again I wonder 'bout
But I don't give a damn about you

// Recent Anything

Sunday morning I woke up to find that I had a missed call and a voicemail. I didn't recognize the number, but it had a 405 prefix. Hmm. I was curious as to who would have called me at five in the morning so I checked my voicemail. "Jonathan. Uh, this is Scott. I haven't talked to you in forever. I know it's five o'clock in the morning...but you still should've picked up. Anyways, that's it." Scott is one of my good friends from high school who I haven't talked to in over four years. So we scheduled dinner for Tuesday at Royal Bavaria to catch up. Yum.

He picked me up around six thirty and off we went. I had the mixed grill and a liter boot of the most delicious beer I've ever had the privilege to taste. The conversation was great and there ended up being a photographer there that took pictures (promotional I guess) and we got to pose while drinking out of the boots. We were both incredibly full after dinner so we headed over to his place where he is also living with another mutual good friend from high school who I also haven't seen in forever. We watched the movie Se7en and played video games for a good while before Scott dropped me back home. It was a lot of fun and I look forward to hanging out with them more often.

Wednesday I helped the guys out with their charity fundraising on the south oval. It was fun, but I was a little disappointed because Stanley didn't show up and the primary reason I was there was because Stanley was supposed to be there so we could play chess afterwards. But it ended up not being so bad because after it ended, T and I went to go play poker for a few hours and that went pretty well. :-) We couldn't play for too long though because T had to make it back so he could play in Beta Chi's charity dodgeball tournament. Dodgeball started out pretty great for us but it was all downhill after our first game.

Everybody was pretty hungry (I was effin' starving) after we got out so like ten of us went to TEA Cafe (standard). I ordered a pot of jasmine green tea and spicy shrimp fried rice. I ate it all in an instant but didn't order more because BC is a big fat pig. OINK OINK OINK! HEY PIGGY PIGGY! OINK OINK OINK! When everybody was pretty much finished I brought up the idea of playing credit card roulette. What can I say? It's so much fun to gamboooooool! Most everybody pussied out though so it was just between me, T, and Stanley. Stanley ended up losing and picked up the $40 tab between the three of us.

Stanley took me to the union afterwards where we would finally play some chess after him blowing me off for like, four days. I tried some crazy maneuver during the middlegame and ended up sacrificing too much material before realizing that my plan wouldn't work. Blah. So I lost the first one, but won the second one. Next I played Vu twice and I lost each time. Goddamn I suck at chess. I WILL get better though. Or at the very least, I will take all of their money whenever we play poker. Then I just hung out and talked with Chris T. about competitive Counter-Strike for a pretty long time.

That's about it I think.

Mistletoe Hung Where You Can See

2008-11-28T23:45:00.005-06:00

Ev'ry couple tries to stop
[*sigh* This would have been my girlfriend's blog title if I had one.]

// Recent Anything

Yeah....suffice it to say that I've been neglecting this blog. There has been so much that has happened since my last post. However nothing so significant which would compel me to write about in this post, so I'll just start with my Thanksgiving holiday.

It all started this past Monday night when I got a text from Binh, "U guys wanna play a home game tonite???" and I replied, "For the love of God, yes." So I got a ride from CTizzle to the Taiko house around 1am and to my surprise there were enough people there that played poker to fill a whole table plus a waiting list. We played our standard game. Nothing too notable to write about. I decided to flip a coin, my AK vs Stanley's 77 for a ~$16 pot and lost. Oh well, I didn't really care. We finally wrapped the game up a little before 7am because Tim mentioned that he had a court appearance at 8am in Wewoka. Upon hearing this I volunteered to accompany Tim for the sake of help keeping him awake while driving and to make the journey less boring, but really I just couldn't stop picturing having lunch at Catfish Round Up in my head.

Will add more later, about to LAN! :-D
[Charlie had to do chores and I got tired so I canceled it.]

Ugh, don't feel like writing but I have to finish sometime.

Let's see. I left with Tim from the Taiko house to my place to change into appropriate court attire then hit up the gas station and off we were. We took the Highway 9 route through mucho country. It reminded me of the movie Deliverance. Hmm...I wonder if that's one of the top 250. [checks quickly] Wow, so gay. It's rated 7.9/10 and the current bottom two movies are 7.9 so it missed the list by an inch which totally sucks because it's a really good movie and referenced a fuckton throughout popular culture. :-(

[distracted by checking out IMDB's Bottom 100 - Hmm, I've only seen five on the list.]

It's a much longer drive than I remember. I don't remember much of what we talked about but I believe most of it was of the opposite sex. That's always fun, right?

We arrive a few minutes past 8am and enter the courtroom. Ugh, I start feeling uncomfortable. I give Tim a few pointers about addressing the judge and picture in my head how I would take control of the building. lol Anyways, the judge totally fucks up Tim's name (his real first name is Huy btw) and somehow pronounces his last name "throng". He ends up getting a three-month deferrment which is what he was aiming for so all is good. We leave the courthouse and I guide him to Shawnee.

Upon arriving in Shawnee [holy crap, Brad Pitt was born in Shawnee.] I suggest to waste time at the mall until Catfish Round-Up is open for lunch. We browse a few stores and I actually did a little shopping so as to save the trip there from pointlessness. After about an hour we decide to head out and as I was walking to the exit some random guy grabbed my arm and guided me to his stand. I was like, wtf. Then he asked me to pick a finger. What the hell? This guy was middle eastern so I wasn't sure if I was going to fuck with him so I complied. He took a nail thing and started working on my thumb nail while talking in a thick accent about the product. He gave his spiel and we left with my thumb nail looking so gay. He was Isreali so I just should've told him that because he was wasting my time I would donate money to Hezbollah or Hamas or something. Haha. I gotta remember that for the next time I'm harassed. Gold.

So we drive to Catfish Round-Up only to find out they won't be open for another 30 minutes. Drat. However across the street there is a casino that's attached to a gas station so we spend thirty minutes and five dollars before heading back to the restaurant. We both order the all-you-can-eat catfish dinner and feast on apple fritters until the food is delivered. Waitress is more attractive than I would've thought. Mmm, blonde. We were the first ones in and the restaurant filled up surprisingly fast for lunch. Man, I'm hungry right now and just thinking of how great the catfish tastes is pure torture. The pieces you get are pretty big and you get several of them to start out with. After finishing the initial batch, I could barely eat another. Tim and I noted that next time we might just get the regular dinner instead of the AYCE.

After lunch we headed back to the casino to get a couple bags of free popcorn, fill up, and head back to Norman. Tuesday evening was also the day of the annual Taiko/Phi Dee Turkey Dinner so I was pretty excited for that though both Tim and I doubted that it would top our lunch. I ended up falling asleep at 3pm planning to sleep for a couple of hours before waking up and getting ready. I should have known better as I ended up sleeping until 1:15am to somebody calling me. Blah. So I end up getting a ride to the afterparty from Ronny and Tony. When I arrive there pretty much isn't any liquor left but I spotted a full bottle of tequila. That'll do. So I fill up a cup with that and quenching my thirst. The party was fun despite arriving ridiculously late. I caught a ride home from CT and went to sleep.

I woke up earlier than I expected and was pretty hungry. So I microwave some leftover pizza and eat while watching a movie when I get the expected call from Tony. So he and Loan pick me up and we head to Pho Lan. I had already eaten a couple of slices but still ordered the extra large bowl of pho. Most of the conversation was about our IMDB quest. For those of you unaware of what that is, check out Tony's blog. After lunch we head over to Loan's apartment to watch more movies. lol upon entering though, Tony blundered by setting up the most trite type of joke. "Is this your first time here?" Nice hand, sir.

We proceed to watch Shaun of the Dead and then Ace in the Hole. We had already watched The 400 Blows at Tony's place last week. I'll review each film at the end of each post. So damn, I'll be reviewing ~230 movies. Fuck.

It's Wednesday so we were all pining to see that night's episode of Top Chef. We came up with a plan to pick up a birthday cake Tony ordered, then grab a bite and go eat and watch Top Chef at the union. After securing the cake, we decided to eat Chicken Express. En route however, we thought Charlie might be working so I gave him a ring to see if he would like any food. Turned out he wasn't working and said that the union would be closing early today. *gasp* Nooooo. I call union maintenance to confirm and was told that it would be closing within thirty minutes. Du ma.

So now we had a problem, no venue in which to watch Top Chef. Loan and I don't have cable and Tony lives in OKC. First option - the Taiko house. Unfortunately there's nobody there and ALL of the doors are locked. Bollocks. Where else has a public tv to watch? Our focus was now on the dorms. Who lives in the dorms that could let us in? Tony gets Vu's number and I call him only to find out he left the dorms an hour ago. He let me know of two other people there though that we could call. Umm....yeah. Then Loan remembered a place with a tv in one of the Cate dorms where we could watch. Then if that didn't work we would work on the dorms. So we grabbed our food while on that side of the town and headed to Cate. Success! We gained entry and secured the tv area with an hour to spare so we just watched last week's episode and ate.

[I'm tired and hungry so I'm going to take a break. ]

Eff Team Rainbow! Only one member left and she's performed well and I think she'll go pretty far. I would have preferred Ariane go, but somehow she cooked a better turkey than my favorite to win, Stefan. Speaking of favorites to win, Tony, Loan, and myself are going to have a fantasy Top Chef of sorts when it gets down to twelve chefs. Again, check out Tony's blog for more info.

[Goddamn I have a lot more to write. Another break, haha.]

After Top Chef, Tony and Loan dropped me off back at my apartment where I played a little chess and went to sleep. The next morning (Thanksgiving) me, my brother, and sister headed back home to El Reno. It was nice. CoD4 with my youngest brother was a lot of fun. After we ate, I was browsing what was on tv [*drool* digital cable] and found out that The Godfather just started. Sweet. Turns out AMC was playing the whole trilogy. I knew the first two were on the top 250, but I couldn't resist and watched them. =/ I know The Godfather is #1 and the sequel is not far from it so it will be quite a while before we watch it so there. We left kind of early because my sister had to work that evening. I was pretty tired when we got home so I just messed around online before heading to bed.

Woke up the next day having leftovers for breakfast. Got a call around noon from uh...yeah. She'd be coming over after work so I could finish burning the rest of Gossip Girls season one and to watch the most recent episode of Top Chef. My place was a bit of a mess so I cleaned everything up including all of my clothes which took forever. To top it off, being the nice guy that I am, thought we'd both be hungry when she came over so I ordered a slab of Van's ribs with fries and okra. I hadn't had Van's in a pretty long time so I was looking forward to eating. She also ended up bringing some cupcakes she baked so that was nice. We ate and watched Top Chef. I burned the DVDs, she left. I had mixed feelings about her visit but dealt with them by playing some Empire Earth with Charlie while he was at work.

Friday...I don't remember anything important.

Saturday...played chess and took naps all day.

Sunday (today)...no plans except will probably play some chess with Stanley tonight.

// Movie Reviews

The 400 Blows

I think this movie suffered from me being in a funny mood as to why I wasn't very fond of it to begin with. I watched it again at home alone a few days ago and can now understand why people give it so much praise. That being said, I still don't think it deserves to be on the top 250 solely because I strongly believe Deliverance is a better overall movie.
BC's rating - 7.5/10

Shaun of the Dead

This is the movie that I was in the mood for. A satirical take on zombie movies with the nice-every-once-in-a-while British colloquialisms. I remember first watching this when it came out in 2004 and thought it was pretty good. If you haven't seen it then I suggest you do. I'm sure we can all relate to the inherent human need to grab a pint while being attacked by zombies.
BC's rating - 8/10

Ace in the Hole

Wow. Move over, Samuel L. Jackson. Kirk Douglas is the motherfucking man. Made in 1951, black and white film about myself if I had chosen the field of journalism for a career. "Make me." Priceless. Hopefully there are more Kirk Douglas movies on the top 250 for me to watch.
BC's rating - 8.5/10

Well that does it for now, kiddos. I'll seriously try to update more often. ;-)

Last Night I Held Aladdin's Lamp

2008-11-04T00:30:00.002-06:00

And so I wished that I could stay
Before the thing could answer me
Well, someone came and took the lamp away
I looked around, a lousy candle's all I found

// Recent Anything

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what I've been. I suppose apathetic fits. Well, not exactly. I care. Just not enough. I can only say I'll try to do better at updating. I'm somewhat sorry but not enough to offer an apology.

I don't really remember anything pre-Halloween. I've been on a losing streak at the office and those are always no fun. It doesn't really make me feel depressed or down but I suppose what losing makes me feel can be characterized as stress. I can't be mad at myself because when I review the hands of a session I don't really find any big mistakes. I make appropriate commitment decisions regarding a situation and my reads have been stellar. I'm making good decisions and that's all that matters. Besides, I'm only on a five buy-in downswing and that's a small downswing. Don't sweat it, BC! You're the best! :D

Halloween was fun. I ended up going as an off-kilter Mormon who was intent on spreading the magnificent gospel of backdoor penetration. I went on a mini-crusade during the party trying to convert girls to experience rear gloriousness and to my surprise I was never slapped. Although there were plenty of girls who were less than enthused.

Oh yeah, the best part about Halloween: the seafood buffet at Riverwind. ZOMG the crab was SO GOOD. It wasn't salty at all and tasted delicious. So was the crawfish but they ran out of that pretty fast by the time we got there. I went with T, Thomas, and his girlfriend Celia. haha

Here's a picture to fill up space:

The night was pretty fun. Lots of drinking.

Oh yeah, there was a lot of drinking the night before Halloween too. What a great party. It was me, Thomas, Binh for a little bit and ten girls just consuming lots of alcohol. What an awesome ratio, RIGHT? Especially after Thomas knocked out and left me to entertain them all. No prob, Thomas! :)

Let's see...what else...

I have a problem with retarded authority. That is to say, whenever an individual of authority commands me to do something irrational, illogical, or something for the sake of them exercising their authority I get angry. And by angry I mean I mentally picture manipulating an Islamic radical to go all jihad with a vest of C4 coated with ball bearings and walk into their house during Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas morning. I'd give examples, but....yeah.

Trung's birthday (22) was Saturday and we had a surprise party for him Sunday night. Lots of drinking, chess, and poker. Good times.

Happy Birthday, Trung!

I finished all nine of the Vince Flynn novels last week. Oh man were they good. I'm just sad that there isn't a new one to read yet and considering that the most recent one was released like two weeks ago then it will probably be a while until the next one. :( I really recommend reading his novels. In case you didn't know, his novels are about the wonderful world of counterterrorism. Even if you aren't into the subject, read them. You won't look at national security quite the same way afterwards. I have the first two books, just ask to borrow them!

Speaking of national security, the elections are today. I'm registered republican, but goddamnit John McCain. Did you really have to choose such a poor running mate? Come on! Really??? I would feel pretty shitty if Palin ever became President so I'm voting for Obama. I really only care about national security. Obama's stance isn't as hard as McCain's but if he does what he says then I'm confident he'll do a good job protecting the country. What I'd really like is whoever the next president is, give the CIA carte blanche to take care of the terrorists and their source of funding. *cough* Saudi Arabia *cough*

That's it for now.

There is a House in New Orleans

2008-10-17T10:07:00.000-05:00

They call the Rising Sun
And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I'm one

// Recent Anything

Umm...let's see. Got back to Norman Saturday after the game. For some reason I had a real strong urge to play poker. I FB messaged Binh to see if he wanted to go and to my delight, he and Jason were already planning on going in an hour. So later Binh picks me up and we head to Jamie's house so Binh could help paint the AASA banner for a little bit before myself, Binh, and Trung headed to Riverwind.

Now I'm still in the process of building a poker bankroll so I had planned to play some 3/6 limit instead of 1/2 no limit. However when I called the poker room to put my name on the list, they informed me that they no longer spread 3/6 limit and the minimum was now 4/8 limit. Uhh...f that so I put my name on the list for 1/2 NL.

Hokay. So, here's the earth. Wait. So, me, Binh, and T headed off to Riverwind around 7pm with Jason joining us later. The poker room was about 3/4 full and it took like ten minutes before there was a seat open for me. There were a few players I recognized at my table, but I didn't really remember how they played. So I was playing pretty tight until I had everybody pretty much figured out. It's been a while since Friday, so I don't really remember any hands except for the big one.

I was UTG+2 with about 60BB ($120) and get KK and raise to 6BB (3-5BB preflop raises were standard at this table). Everybody folds to a guy named Tom in the cutoff who is short and looks like an oompa loompa who calls. Now Tom was playing pretty tight so I really got to narrow his range to 99+ and premium suited connectors. The flop was AAK with two hearts. YAHTZEE! I flop a full house! Now flopping a big hand such as this usually calls for a check to let your opponent catch up to pay you off but I was pretty confident in my read that he had at least an ace and we would either get all-in soon or he'd instafold to any bet so I bet 10BB into the 13BB pot, he calls. The turn is the jack of hearts which completes both the flush and straight draw. And I was praying he didn't have AJ for a bigger full house. After leading out on the flop, I decide to check the turn. He bets 30BB which is 68% of my remaining stack. I'm happy because this makes my all-in raise only 14BB more so he's trapped. So I reraise all-in and he reluctantly calls. The river is a blank and I flip over my kings full of aces and he flips over the second-nut flush and says, "Nice hand." This hand played really great but I suppose the vilian wasn't as tight as he was since he called a 6BB raise with 9h10h, though I suppose he had position?

Besides that slight misread I was totally on top of my reading game. I mean, really on. However I channelled a little Daniel Negreanu later on by correctly calling the exact hands that beat me but paid them off anyway. Ooh, also... Whenever T and I play poker we play a side game where when somebody wins a pot >= $100, they have to buy the other person a drink. T "won" the game first so he bought me one of the test tube shots that the waitresses were carrying around. Unfortunately for me, it was just a test tube filled with Bailey's. Weaksauce. So after I doubled up through the oompa loompa I bought three double shots of apple juice (Bacardi 151) for me, T, and Binh (they never checked ID that day). BUT. T was being a little girl and didn't want to take the shot so instead I gave it to James Phan who was also sitting at T's table and we headed over to Binh to give him his and we took it. Wow. Delicious. I won again but forgot with what hand but instead of buying more apple juice I opted for beer for us this time.

Yeah...but after turning into a POW (payoff wizard) and after Binh lost two buy-ins I decide to cash out while I'm still up. As I start to put my chips in a rack I check my watch and LOLWTF it's 3am. Wow time went by fast. I totally thought it was around 11-11:30pm. T cashed out also to take care of some business and left immediately while Binh, Jason, and I headed over to the table games to watch Jason play three-card poker. I told him it was a terrible idea and that he was an idiot every step of the way. TABLE GAMES ARE ONLY FOR RETARDED PEOPLE. Jesus Christ it pisses me off to no end to watch one of my friends play blackjack, three-card poker, or any other table game. But I suppose as long as it's not me losing money then it's ok. Anyway, while Jason plays, Binh and I head over to the food court to use our comps. After we get our food Jason joins us with a disappointing look on his face. Standard.

Jason drives us back to Binh's car and still wide awake we decide to head over to the union to hang out with TI for a while. Charlie and Michael Vu were there also and we hung out for a while before I get bored/tired and have Binh drive me home.

I wake up the next day (Sunday) to the sound of my phone ringing. "Ay foo, let's go eat." I'm sure you can figure out who called. So I head over to the Taiko house and watch some football for a bit while T gets ready then we head to the pho place by Warren Theater in Moore. Not quite as good as Pho Hoa, but definitely better than Pho Sooner. Their pho only comes in two sizes if I remember correctly and their largest bowl I think is about the same as the large size at Pho Hoa. They need an extra large because large does not fill my fat ass up! All the while T is trying to convince me to go play poker again. It surprisingly took longer than I thought it would so we go to Riverwind afterwards.

The first table I sit at I instantly recognize some people that I do NOT want to play with so I immediately request a table change. T "wins" the game again and I get some Maker's Mark neat.

I do well at the next table until this next hand. I don't remember the specifics that well, just that I made two pair with K10 but it gave somebody a straight. :( I only had one buy in because I didn't bring that much for lunch so T agreed to stake me. Let me talk about staking for a minute. When somebody agrees to stake a player, the staker provides the stakee with a buy in. If the stakee turns a profit, the buy in is returned to the staker along with a percentage of the profits. The standard stake is for 50% of the profits. However if the stakee loses the money, the loss is on the staker so the stakee doesn't owe anything. So T stakes me a hundred and I play for a couple of hands before I decided to play in the tournament instead. So I give the T back forty and buy in for the tournament.

I do well, but the blinds go up fast and suddenly I have an M of 11. ACK! So I decide to open-push with A4 suited UTG and get two callers. The flop is A48. I feel good. The BB bets 1/2 pot, UTG+2 calls. Turn is a 4. WOW! I feel really good about my hand, I have a full house. BB bets 1/2 pot, UTG+2 folds. The river is a 10 and we flip our hands up. I flip mine over first because I was pretty sure I won but....yeah. The guy in the big blind had AA for AAA44. :( I can't feel too bad because he had me crushed the whole way. Oh well.

I didn't feel like playing anymore so I ask T when he says his table is really good and he wants to stay for a few more hours. Ugh. So I ask him to stake me again. But since I lost his sixty in the tournament he agrees to stake me but for a 75/25 split. I couldn't pursuade him back to 50/50 so it was either take a shitty stake at 75/25 or sit there and wait for hours. Fuck. I decide to take the stake and long story short, I run the hundred up to 470 before we cash out and leave. So 370 profit, of which I only get to keep 25% of, which turns out to be only like 93 bucks. Gay. So we go home and I crash since we played for 12 hours.

Monday....didn't do anything. My birthday was Tuesday though so at midnight I got some good calls and texts and one not so good call. Bleh.

Luckily I get a call from T that cheers me up. Thomas picks me up although he's a bit buzzed and we head to Riverwind to rendezvous with T and Binh. Thomas and I sat at the same table and he lost his first buy in on his first hand. I loaned him a hundred and he quickly lost that too and went home. Binh doesn't play and just watches me and T. My table was retardedly tight and boring but I managed to really manipulate those target SPR's and when we finished I had about 310. It was around 4am when we finally left. We were hungry so we headed to IHOP but there...*gasp* CLOSED! They were doing maintenance and wouldn't be open for a few more hours so we went to Waffle House instead. T treated since he was up like a k. Talked about poker and brotherhood stuff. Go home, pass out. All in all, a great start to my birthday.

I woke up around ??? and got a bday call from Katherine and decide the big kids will go eat at Royal Bavaria around 7. So I dilly-dally and get ready. Charlie and her pick me up and we headed to Royal Bavaria. Thomas pulled up next to us in the parking lot just as we got out. Good timing. We get a table and I get the King's Weizen in a 1L boot. It was delicious. I had the rainbow trout with wild rice and asparagus (yes, we made comments about it making "it" taste bad) and that was really good also. Afterwards Charlie and Katherine went home to study while Thomas and I headed over to the union so he could study for an hour before we went out drinking. It was pretty boring for me until we finally left. One of Thomas's friends picked us plus Adam and Lili to go to the Library.

I had never been there before and thought it was really cozy. I ordered a Manhattan and everybody else ordered drinks but Adam hit a snag when the bartender informed the waitress who informed us that his license had been expired for two weeks rendering his ID invalid so he couldn't drink. Haha, the waitress asked if he had a passport like three times. Silly fobs. After I finished my Manhattan I ended up ordering some Knob Creek (there is a Maker's Mark shortage) neat with a water back. *sigh* I love bourbon. It's a drink that really makes me feel alive.

After that we head back to the union and Thomas drops me off at my apartment. I pick up my chess set and drive to the Taiko house, but not before picking up some Taco Bell. I play Stanley chess when I get there, winning the first game, but getting cocky and losing the second one. I can immediately tell he's a novice player the way he plays the opening so I really shouldn't lose to him anymore. Hopefully.

I end up buying more food for me, Stanley, and CT while they setup stuff for the Rockband tournament, then head home to pass out.

Damnit, there's still a lot to write.

Ok, so...Wednesday. I have a dry cough that I've had for almost two months and it's really annoying. All it is is a cough. So I go to Wal-Mart to get some medicine before heading to the Taiko house to help prepare for the Rockband tournament. Thomas and I are hungry so we high card to see who buys food. I lose. We high card again for a beer. I win. Thomas wanted to hit up Pad Thai to see this girl that works there (laffelz), but it was closed and Thomas had the bright idea of trying the other Pad Thai even though I told him that it would be closed also. Yep, I was right. So we settled to get some food from Pho Sooner to-go.

We get there and there are surprisingly a lot of people. I immediately start chowing down. Ugh, I'm reminded it's from Pho Sooner. I eat it all anyways because I was effin' hungry. After I finished I decided to help with the tournament and was assigned to work with Binh at station 4. The tournament was more disorganized than I would've liked and it really pissed me off. If you really know me then you know how truly angry I get at disorganization and stupidity. I'm not lying when I said that I really could've punched Stanley for ill planning. No joke, I was pissed. I had to get out of there. So I left alone to campus corner and sat at the bar at Louie's. Ordered (tried to at least) some Maker's Mark but alas they were also out so I had some more Knob Creek neat, this time without a water back. They were pretty generous with it too. :) Since it was happy hour I figured there would've been more people, but it was just some really old people. Great, that's just my style since I was rockin' the old man fashion that day.

I felt happier after I finished and headed back to the tournament. The team I wanted to win, won, but I didn't win the raffle so bleh. It was great seeing Linda and Chris come also. Afterwards a lot of us went to TEA Cafe. I wasn't hungry so I just had some hot jasmine tea. T tells me to call "the office" and see how many tables they had and to our delight, there were ten tables.

T wanted to stop at the Taiko house first to change since he wanted to dress up like me and Binh did too. They actually ended up dressing better than I did because I was just the upper-end of business casual where T ended up wearing a suit and tie. Here's a pic of us after the Rockband tournament. Yeah, I'm the one on the right. The two scrubs on the bottom with the guitars are Binh and T.

We took a picture of just us three dressed up before we left for the casino and I'll post that when I get it. Good times.

Binh and I ended up sitting at the same table, T got a table with a couple of regulars. I don't remember a lot of hands, let's see. Oh yeah, I got uncomfortably close to physically assaulting a female when she called a pot sized bet on a gutshot and hit. :) I set a goal for this session, $300. I don't usually set stop-win limits but I let T stake me again since I really enjoy not having to risk anything. So if I get to $300, that's a $100 profit to me with no risk. I ended up cashing out like $317 and kept the change. Binh lost a hand to this Indian (dot) guy on my left. Binh had him the whole way, but he shouldn't have been putting money in the pot anyways. Long story short, after plenty of betting, Binh gets all in on the turn of a A10Q10 board with Q9. Wow, are you serious? Just guess what the other guy had. Pocket jacks! asdfjakfjasflasjf;asf And spiked a jack on the river for a full house. Come on, Binh! Seriously! *shakes head* He started that hand with like $130 too. *sigh*

T wasn't doing well either. When we went to go watch him he was already in for 5. After about an hour and a half of waiting around I jump in the game and T starts winning and leaves down only a bill. We get our comps and go to the Taiko house to eat.

Thursday afternoon I get a FB message from Binh to go eat. I go over to the Taiko house where me, Thomas, CT, and Stanley go to TEA cafe where we run into Gwenn (Happy Birthday), Lisa, and Tiffani and we pull up a table to their booth and eat together. I had some spicy shrimp fried rice, yummy. Thomas picks up the bill (thanks) and we went to go pick up Thomas's dry cleaning then headed to the PokerShop.com's B&M location on Flood. I picked up another deck set of KEM cards and a sturdy black cut card.

Drove back to the house, then went home and fell asleep around 6pm. Woke up at 4:30am and have been up ever since. Not sure what I'm doing today. I'm hungry though so it's time for some breakfast. lates

I Was Frying on the Bench Slide in the Park Across the Street

2008-10-09T09:05:00.003-05:00

L-a-t-e-r that week
My sticky paws were into making straws out of big fat slurpy treats
An incredible eight foot heap
Now the funny glare to pay a gleaming tear in a staring under heat
Involved an under usual feat
And I'm not only among but I invite who I want to come
So I missed a million miles of fun

// Recent Anything

I finished Executive Power about a week ago and had started on Memorial Day, but the only copies I have of all of the books beside the first two are in .mp3 format that I downloaded. This limits my "reading" to whenever I'm on the computer. And whenever I'm on the computer I'd much rather just listen to music because I'm usually doing something that requires most of my concentration so I don't really pay attention to whatever is being sung/said. So yesterday I decided to head over to the Norman Public Library and get a library card and just check the book out.

I pinpointed the parking lot using Google StreetView and left my place a little after 11am. I filled out the forms but unfortunately didn't have a photo ID that had my Norman address on it so they just mailed my library card to me, but I was still able to check books out so it wasn't a problem. I head over to the non-fiction section while checking out the people there. There was one nice-looking girl working who looked maybe a little older than me, brunette, hmm. Will have to scout out more intel later because I was on a more important mission and could not be distracted.

I peel into the correct aisle and start skimming names. After maybe five seconds I found the Vince Flynn novels. I scan the novels left-to-right and see all of his novels except the one I'm looking for. Hmm. Maybe I missed it. I scan again starting from the right. Interesting, no sign of the book. Perhaps it's checked out? I head over to the catalog computer and look up the book. My hopes crushed, it is in fact checked out and due back Oct. 22nd. Et tu, Brute? The library has failed me. The library has never failed me. I even occasionally sing the library song from Arthur for good library karma. WHY????

Oh. First off, why would this book be checked out? It's the sixth out of nine(arguably eight) in a series. Off all the books to be checked out, it had to be the one I needed. And the library had multiple copies of of the other books but only one of the one I needed. My day was ruwined. :( I suppose I'll just have to settle for the audio version, finish it, and blitzkrieg my way to the library for the next one.

Anyways, that was the big part of my day yesterday. Today I'll be heading home to El Reno sometime around 2pm and will be back in Norman sometime Sunday so I probably won't update until then. lates

Her Name Was Lola, She Was a Showgirl

2008-10-07T07:40:00.002-05:00

With yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there
She would merengue and do the cha-cha
And while she tried to be a star, Tony always tended bar
Across a crowded floor, they worked from 8 till 4
They were young and they had each other
Who could ask for more?

// Recent Anything

Let's see....what do I remember... Last post was on Tuesday so it's been a week. Eek! I forgot to add that sometime last week at 4am I get a call from Binh to play basketball at Campus Lodge with the guys to help cheer up Stanley cause he was having girl problems (standard). So for Stanley I oblige to play. But as it turned out, he didn't want to come out and play so it was just me, Trung, Binh, and Tim. I almost died again that morning from exhuastion. blah

Anyways, I don't remember much last week. Thursday night we had a surprise birthday party for Andy Vu and we played poker afterwards, our standard game. I bought in for a dollar and when the game broke I left with a profit of $20. It wasn't variance either because I wasn't running hot, I was just running average. I made a nice profit because I was able to get my opponents to make some pretty big mistakes. The biggest pot I won was also the last hand of the game, I had ~$550BB and was heads up against Binh who I barely had covered. He kept raising every hand preflop to 10BB so I loosened my starting hand requirements against him since I had really good implied odds. I finally got him when I limped/called UTG against him with QJ. He flopped middle pair, I had a gutshot. I checked, he bet 15BB, I call. We both checked the turn (lol cashaments) and I spike my straight on the river and get him to stack off against me with second-bottom pair. WOWWWWWWWWW

The next day was the AASA date auction. Umm...yeah. Drank at the Taiko house until everybody decided to leave. I finished the bourbon. =( The party was ok. The best part for me was the karaoke. I sang a few songs and would've sung more if the party didn't end. I sang..."Mandy" by Barry Manilow, "Absolutely (Story of a Girl)" by Nine Days, and..."Candy" by Mandy Moore. What good times! Except for that bitch. Wow. I would go into details, but...yeah.

Went back to the Taiko house afterwards to chill/eat. After a while there, a bunch of us decided to go to Luke's place and watch a movie. We ended up watching The Incredible Hulk, the one with Ed Norton. It was all right, but I couldn't get over the fact of how blatantly ugly Liv Tyler's lips were. Botox gone bad. It was so ugly I had to keep pointing it out throughout the movie. ugh

Went home around 8:30am, passed out. I don't remember doing anything at all on Saturday. I didn't sleep Saturday night though, I was just never tired. Then Sunday around noon I get a message from Thomas to go eat lunch. I head over to the Taiko house and a couple of hours later, it's me, Thomas, Stanley, and Michael Vu heading to Vista Sports Gar & Grill for lunch. I order the reuben as does Thomas and Michael. Stanley gets fajitas. We watch the football games while we eat. I seem to be dominating Thomas pretty badly. Go go Eli Manning, Clinton Portis, and the Chicago Defense! I end up beating Thomas this week, 96-75. I face CT next and he's ranked last with a 1-4 record. I'm not too worried.

Sometime during lunch somebody gets the bright idea (I forgot who) to play tennis. So after we eat we all scramble to change and get our tennis gear and head out to the courts south of the dorms. I hate to say it, but I actually think I'm better at basketball than tennis. But it's ok because that was maybe the fourth or fifth time I had played tennis, with the first few times being during the fall of '04. Oh well. When are we going to play PC games???? :(

After tennis, didn't do anything. Passed out around 8:30pm at my place. Played Empire Earth and watched a few shows online.

That's about it. Not too interesting this entry. And with my birthday fast approaching, hopefully it will stay that way. lates

This is The Story of a Girl

2008-09-30T03:39:00.004-05:00

Who cried a river and drowned the whole world
And while she looked so sad in photographs
I absolutely love her
When she smiles

// Recent Anything

Friday I had dinner at Riverwind with Tony, Loan, Binh, Thomas, Trung, and CT. The last two showed up way late though. The crab was sometimes salty, sometimes delicious, and the crawfish was bad. >:-O Conversation was racist, very insensitive, and groin-grabbingly hilarious. We also got Thomas to enjoy eating seafood. Well, crab legs anyways. I think that's all the seafood he tried. But he kept eating it the entire time we were there. It was funny watching him trying to get the meat out of the legs...like a little kid.

We brainstormed about what to do after dinner and the consensus was, of course, was to satiate our immense alcoholic cravings. Nine pm had passed while we were eating so unfortunately there would be no "apple juice". :-( I came up with the idea of playing drinking games at the house and everybody took to it. However there were other people who were not present that would've rather gone to Skky Bar. *cough* Katherine and Lili *cough* Clubs are really not my scene. I'm more of a bar man. Besides there were some people who wouldn't be able to accompany us.

So after we eat, everybody sans Trung headed to the Taiko house. I had to drop a deuce and ended up going in T's bathroom, ahahahaha. We just kinda chilled for a bit until Katherine and Lili showed up. I prepared the table and the liquor and the drinking began. I proposed playing a version of blackjack. However everybody would get a dixie cup and pour their bet. You could bet any type of liquor we had plus beer and wine, and any amount that would fit in the dixie cup. I decided to be dealer first and we rotated clockwise. Yeah, sucks to be dealer. Everytime is was Thomas's turn to be dealer he busted. =) And at one point when I had to be dealer, he wagered an almost overflowing cup of vodka against me. =( But success, we ended up pushing so it was a tie and none of us had to drink. However his bet remained and he would be wagering it against Binh. Binh ended up winning and Thomas had to down all of it. Good times.

After a while the younger guys wanted to hit up a lambda party so we headed over there. Despite playing many rounds of alcoholic blackjack I was still sober. Surprise, surprise. I was hopeful though that there would be a remedy for me at the party. Unfortunately there really wasn't anything to drink there either. I also felt super old among everyone that was there. I needed to get to a bar. Instead I found a place on the couch, crossed my legs, and drank copious amounts of lambda blue eagerly wanting to feel something and not be fazed by the increasingly annoying strobe light. Upon everyone realizing that we really just wanted to drink, we left and went back to the Taiko house and drank more.

So I'm anxiously trying to find other things to do online besides writing this so I'll try to remember and just sum up the rest. I'm not sorry.

Umm....more people came over to hang out and drink and we chilled for a long time until deciding to go home.

The next day...Saturday...parents came over...after they left I headed to the Taiko house to watch the football game, good times. We wanted to play poker but nobody really came over so me and Tim decided to play a round-of-each tournament heads up. I won, five dollar profit. We finished at 2am so I went home and slept.

The next day I didn't do much until I headed over to the Taiko house to meet up with some people then go to the basketball game in Edmond. Our guys' team lost, went back to Norman, went home, read.

Didn't do much the rest of the week besides cursorily look for a job and finish Separation of Power. Now I'm reading Executive Power. Vince Flynn is soooo good. It's just like 24 and will hold me over until the new season starts in January.

So...I also stumbled across a fuckton of old shit that I had archived. One of which was a scanned copy of an old high school assignment where we were given a question and supposed to write an answer for it. I don't remember what the question was, but I'm pretty sure I just went on a tangent about systematically elmininating everybody with HIV/AIDS or putting them in concentration/labor camps. I got a 90 on it. rofl I'll upload it later, I'm too lazy now.

Anyways....that's it. blah!

I See A Red Door And I Want It Painted Black

2008-09-26T00:38:00.002-05:00

No colors anymore I want them to turn black
I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes

// Recent Anything

Wow, I didn't realize how long it's been since I had last written. Tempus fugit! =/ I'm trying to think about what's happened... Monday I went to chapter, that was about it.

Tuesday, on the other hand, was a good deal more interesting. Binh came around 9pm because he needed help writing a paper over something he had absolutely no clue on. I was somewhat knowledgeable on the subject so he came to me for help. However it didn't start out well. We kept Facebooking and doing similar procrastinatory activities while cursorily researching a defined topic for him to write about. Our minds were pretty much on everything except the paper.

Finally we decided that we needed to get the procrastination out of our system by just leaving and doing something else. Surprise, surprise, we head over to the Taiko house and play some pokahhh. We get like seven people to play at our standard game and I end up down three bucks. =( I decided that we would leave by 3:45am at the latest (the paper was due at 8:30am). So we get back to my place at 3:45am and "Binh" ends up finishing his paper with 15 minutes to spare till class starts. rofl

I'm not sleepy yet so I whip up some breakfast and watch some of The F Word season 3. Afterwards I'm still not sleepy so I pretty much just read all day. Sometime in the afternoon I get a text from Jeff saying that he needed help with a problem he was having with setting up a website so we arrange to meet up later that night.

He comes over after class and we get everything setup. Silly IE and CMYK. When we're done we decide to head over to the bowling alley to hang out with the all the brothers and pledges since they were there for Taiko Olympics. It was fun. I felt happy being amongst all the brothers. I just spectated and chatted though since I'm terribad at bowling.

After that, came home and watched the new episode of House. Got a call from T for more poker at the Taiko house so after I eat I head over there. Note: I still haven't slept and aren't sleepy. I drive (lol) over there with my current book, Transfer of Power, because I know we never start playing immediately so I brought it to help pass the time.

Transfer of Power is the second novel by Vince Flynn and he's an amazing author. Like a modern Tom Clancy. He's even consulted for 24. I highly recommend you read them, although most of you aren't into politics or counterterrorism so you're not interested anyways. I need more friends.

So we finally get the game going, and as the night before, I endlessly keep getting sucked out on. This used to frustrate me to no end, but it didn't bother me at all. Maybe it's because I was enjoying a few fingers of bourbon while playing? The burn felt so good. In the end, I'm down four dollars and head home. I stay up till about 6:30am until the NyQuil kicks in and I finally get some sleep.

Today I ended up getting out of bed around 6:30pm. Gay. My sleeping schedule is going to be totally effed up now. I mainly read most of the rest of the day. I finished Transfer of Power when I got home earlier this morning and now I'm reading Professional No Limit Hold Em Vol. 1 again. This time really read it though and not skim through parts. I need to stop by Barnes & Noble and pick up the next Vince Flynn novel.

I took another nap around 10pm and slept for a couple of hours. I missed a call from Tony and had him call me back to let me know that he and Loan were eating at Riverwind on Friday for the seafood buffet and invited me and a couple of others to come. Thanks, Tony. That's exactly what I need. Now if we show up and Riverwind somehow doesn't have the crawfish, then that may be the day.

Anyways, I'm done. Later.

When I Say Out Loud

2008-09-21T23:15:00.002-05:00

I want to get out of this
I wonder is there anything
I'm going to miss

// Recent Anything

I felt much better upon waking Friday morning. My throat felt normal although I still had a cough and runny nose. Nothing I couldn't handle. Most of the day I spent reading Term Limits. I had bought it back in '05, but never finished it. It was a lot more interesting than I remember and I knew I would finish it by the end of the weekend. I didn't really have plans Friday besides for fraternity business. My parents decided to drop by for some reason and brought dinner and cleaned the kitchen (yesss). Before they left I had my father drop me off at the Taiko house for fraternity business. That lasted for a while, and after it was done Tau Kappa Omega emerged with ten pledges for the fall 2008 semester. :-)

Everybody hung out at the Taiko house afterwards and chilled. I took point on starting a poker game with some of the brothers and new pledges. Our standard game with an uncapped buy-in. To say the game was loose would be an understatement. Suffice it to say, Stanley ran mad hot during the game and cashed out with $22 despite at one point having over $35. Tiep was in for over $30, but thanks to his stubbornness and Stanley, managed to get up at the end. I think the only ones up were Stanley, Tiep, and Chris. There was almost a hundred dollars invested in this single table of $0.01/$0.02. Gotta love poker at the Taiko house. We stopped playing around 5:30am. I got a ride home and crashed.

I woke up Saturday afternoon and was eagerly awaiting to feast on crawfish for dinner with the guys then hit up the state fair. I called Tim and found out that we were meeting up at the Taiko house and leaving around 7 to hit up Phi Dee's fundraiser at Crawdaddyz. I do something stupid and get angry so I bring my bottle of bourbon along with me to the Taiko house early and start drinking. I would've preferred to watch The Bourne Supremacy, but instead had to bear through college football.

Tim arrived, but he didn't want to go to the fair afterwards. Then I got a call from Tony. Apparently Crawdaddyz had run out of crawfish. WTF! I had been looking forward to this ever since the event was posted on Facebook. Ever since the inedible Saii incident. :'-( I had one out. Bypass Crawdaddyz altogether and head directly to the state fair to indulge my glutton alter-ego with as much as I could handle. Thomas and I finally convinced Tim to accompany us and the three of us decided to play some poker while we waited for Tony to get to the Taiko house so we could all go together.

I love playing poker with Thomas. He always, always tries to bluff and never gives up. I buy in for a dollar and cash out up eight, Tim is up seven, Thomas is down fifteen. Good times. Tony finally shows up so we embark on our state fair adventure.

As always, I love car rides with the guys because the conversation is always good and humorous. After navigating through various droves of proletariat, we find a spot to park not too far off from the entrance, the Itchy lot. We buy our tickets and start scouting out the fair. Different aromas scatter the warm fall air. First the pleasant smell of fair food permeated my nose to arouse my empty stomach. But then like a car crashing into a wall, I was hit with the foul odor of body odor. Ugh. I forgot that it wasn't just me and the food present, but thousands of other people. Ugly people. :(

We walked around until Thomas saw his first target, a basketball game. Result? Mission failed. I decide to get a beer to help take my mind off of other matters my mind was preoccupied with earlier. We wander some more while I kept my eye out for a turkey leg stand. Success! Tony spotted one and off I went, losing myself in a crowd of fair-goers. I expected the food to be expensive so I wasn't fazed by the seven dollar price tag. It was a jumbo turkey leg. The first bite felt sooo good. Not just because it tasted delicious, but also because of the feeling of holding a piece of charred animal and biting into it. YUM.

I offered a bite to Tony and Tim and both partook of this amazing experience. Thomas bought his own leg. Beer in one hand, jumbo turkey leg in the other, I walked with the group around the fairgrounds, not really paying attention to anything but the animal leg in my hand.

I finish the leg in the building where they have commercial booths setup, and we walk around some more. Tony and I decide to get some corn and quickly locate a stand selling them. We're both in different lines and when the person in front of me leaves, the worker calls to a woman standing at least three feet behind me to get helped. I was like wtf, "Hey, I haven't been helped and I'm at the front." She replies, "Well son, you know, ladies first." I swear if I was armed it would've been two in the chest and one in the head. Flashbacks were triggered from *** and I's trip to Six Flags and the food incident there and I became really angry. This lady just discriminated against me. Wow. Well, you know, pay it forward. The next time I get to help either a woman, a black person, or an old person, I won't. Fuck you, corn stand lady!

I finally get my corn and sprinkle seasoning over it. Mmmm, BC's urge to kill has faded. We wander some more and find a place to just chill while we call other people at the fair to meet up. I'm still hungry after I finish the corn so I leave to get a funnel cake. The workers there weren't polite, but at least they served me when it was my turn. I saw Hieu with some temple people and we went to join the other guys who also ran into some friends, the Gammas. We talked for a bit then they left and we tried to find BJ and Tan. Along the way while trying to take a bite out of the funnel cake I inhaled a lot of powdered sugar and almost suffocated.

After going to a similar, but different monument that we both agreed on, we walked all the way to their position. I finished the funnel cake and still felt hungry, but my stomach felt full. Kind of similar to when I'm drinking when I feel totally sober but my stomach can't take any more alcohol without throwing up. So I implement the same solution and just wait a few minutes before getting more food.

We finally meet up with BJ, Tan, and Kevin and walk around with them. This trip is starting to sound like Randal's explanation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in Clerk's 2.

Blah, blah, blah, games, Thomas spending thirty dollars on a game before he finally wins a prize, candy apple with nuts, my favorite apple is granny smith, Tony's is fuji/red delicious. Back in the car and on the way home, Tim can't navigate streets, etc.

We watch some Destroyed in Seconds at the Taiko house, then we all go home.

Today I finished reading Term Limits and tomorrow we're going home for my youngest sister's birthday.

I want to write more about how I'm feeling, but I started writing this at 11:15pm and now it's almost 3am. No, not because I'm a slow writer, but because I've been helping people with their problems (writing a paper and web development), chatting, facebooking, and watching things on youtube. So yeah, you could say I got distracted. Anyways, time for bed. Ciao!

So Give Me A Light

2008-09-18T02:30:00.002-05:00

Or give me a drink
Just give me a reason
To feel what I think

// Recent Anything

So I'm sick. It all started when I woke up one day feeling something wrong with my throat. Which turned into coughing, which in turned made my throat sore. It got pretty bad Tuesday night so I decided to man up and head to Wal-Mart to get some medicine around 1:30 in the morning. I called *** for some pharmacy advice, but no answer so after studying boxes I decided on the generic version of NyQuil. I took my first dose when I came home while eating a tv dinner.

I felt a lot better the next day. I spent the whole day taking hour naps every other hour and reading forums/facebooking.

Earlier on Tuesday my fraternity had our spring roll eating contest rush event. The second best event IMO, first is the poker tournament, LDO. I got there about two hours early to help setup because I distinctly remember last year's event and how the preparation went for that. To my surprise there were a lot of cars already at the house and at least seven of the guys plus Katherine helping to prep. I was impressed. I crushed the peanuts for the peanut sauce and helped roll spring rolls for the competition.

Got bored while waiting for the event to start so Fred suggested we play heads up. I can't say no so we do, but just for a dollar (blah). We both start with 100bb and the blinds stay the same. I end up losing a coinflip and only have about 20bb and Fred starts pushing every hand. I finally double up when I get JJ and he has J5. Then lose another coinflip when I push with pocket fours and he calls with A10. He smooth called on the button. Perhaps I should have just raised and pushed the flop? (ace came on the turn)

After the event was over I went home and became more ill and did what I wrote at the top.

Not much going on this weekend I think. I'm supposed to have lunch with a friend from high school on Friday but I don't want to go if I'm sick, so we'll see how well I am later today. If I'm still coughing I'll cancel. But even if I'm still coughing I don't think I'll miss Phi Dee's Crawdaddy'z fundraiser. I mean, after the utter disgusting crawfish debacle at Saii, I NEED some good crawfish. So, hopefully it delivers. And hopefully Phi Dee will peel my crawfish for me. Wait, no. That's the best part. I remember a conversation I had with some of the guys while eating the seafood buffet at Riverwind. Have you ever thought about if there was an animal higher up on the food chain that boiled/fried humans and just ate them off the bone? Interesting.

So I'm finally set on a costume for Halloween. I'm going to be Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. I'll be wearing the same thing he is when he kills Paul Allen in his apartment. The clear raincoat over a suit with an axe. Click here to watch the scene on YouTube. A big plus for this costume is that not a lot of people will recognize it, only the cool people will.

That's it for now, kiddos.

And I Said What About "Breakfast at Tiffany's?"

2008-09-14T18:16:00.002-05:00

She said, "I think I remember the film,
And as I recall, I think, we both kinda liked it."
And I said, "Well, that's the one thing we've got."

// Recent Anything

It's been a week, eek! Ok, ok. So I started playing Half-Life single-player again and it's been the cause of my distraction and procrastination from writing. Me so solly. Although nothing too exciting has happened except for the past few days.

**Wednesday**
It rained so the kickball rush event was canceled. Instead everybody was supposed to meet up at Cici's pizza, but my sister made chicken and dumplings for dinner that day so I ate that instead. Tasted so good on a rainy day.

**Thursday**
Wii Sports - Tennis tournament at the Taiko house. I lost in my first match against Tiep. It was more fun playing the tank game on Wii Play instead. I totally dominate everyone at that game. Finally. It's been a long time since I was better than everybody at a console game. Last time I checked, it had been with GoldenEye and Aerofighters Assault.

**Friday**
My day wasn't too interesting until six o'clock swung around and Katherine picked me up to go to Fred's surprise birthday dinner at Saii Bistro. We get there at like 7pm and Cynthia is the only person there and is sitting in the waiting area because apparently there was a mix-up with the amount of people the restaurant thought were attending so that added over an hour to the overall wait. Tony and Loan show up next and we chat for a bit. When the next person arrives, I suggest that me, Katherine, Tony, and Loan go wait at the bar. I order a Manhattan (standard), Loan gets a sex on the beach, and Katherine gets some blue drink, I didn't catch the name. This was only the second bar I've been to that actually had bitters for the Manhattan. Nice.

So we chat and drink for a good while until our table is finally ready. Initially the people who weren't waiting at the bar sat at the tables nearest the entrance while the people who were at the bar sat at the next pair of tables. Taking into account who had shown up next, I made a snide remark about the division of tables between the fobs and non-fobs, haha.

Fred, the birthday boy, still hadn't shown up yet so we wait almost another hour until we finally order food and he arrives just as the waiter leaves with our orders. It then takes an even longer time for all of our food to arrive. Now, I had never heard of Saii Bistro before this event so I was pretty skeptical about how good the sushi was. Especially considering how big their menu was (they had pad thai on the menu, lolwtf). When I first got there I asked Cynthia if she had ever eaten at Tokyo and she said she really didn't like it. And the warning sirens go off in my head. Perhaps she just confused Tokyo with another bad sushi restaurant? I take my first bite.

Rice is dry, a little hard. The first thing that popped into my mind was that it was like the sushi they serve at Crossroads in the student union. Really nothing special besides the fact that it does in fact taste like seafood and look like actual sushi. I'd say the rolls I had were just a notch below mediocre. Ha, and don't get me started on the crawfish. Totally disgusting. I had Fred take a bite and he said and I quote, "That is nasty." Definitely not worth the price. After paying for drinks and just two rolls I ended up dropping fifty dollars. !!! I could've eaten some really good sushi for that much. :( It would have been ok since it was for Fred, BUT he ended up being a little baby and after dinner hid at his house in the city while a fuckton of people came over to the after-party at the Taiko house for his birthday party. Pretty fucked up if you ask me.

After we finished eating, me, Tony, Loan, and Tan headed over to Tony's apartment for a little bit. I really liked it, but it did need some furniture, lol.

When we arrived at the Taiko house it was almost a total sausage fest consisting of Taikos and DEPsi's. I didn't feel like drinking in the beginning, but all it took was a little push. 151 all night long. I had nine or ten shots within a two-and-a-half hour period and was totally sober. So maybe it wasn't Eischen's chicken. Maybe the problem is me. I can't get drunk. I think I started to feel a little buzz but that was about it. It made me sad. :( I miss being a drunk, beligerent asshole.

The Gammas came over and they were pretty cool for not being big drinkers. Before some of them left, Danny gave them rides on his motorcycle and we talked outside for a while. They mentioned a really, really good taco stand in OKC. I'm thinking the Latino equivalent of Bobo's/Eischen's? Interesante.

Anyways, Danny gives me a ride home and I pass out.

**Saturday**
Stomach doesn't feel good, parents come over to visit. Mom cleans the kitchen, dad buys dinner (Taco Bueno) and lots of groceries for us. Ship it.

I fall asleep after they leave and wake up around 7pm and start playing Half-Life. An hour later T calls me to come over to watch the game and play poker afterwards. I play for another 30 mins and head over. All of the football games were pretty boring except for the Auburn/Mississippi St. game, lol footballaments.

It starts getting late and some of us are hungry so Trammy decides to run to TEA Cafe for us to get food and drinks. I order kung pao chicken and it was good. The money Trammy collected would go to good use for poker.

We start poker with about seven players, our standard cash game. I bought in for a dollar. I end up losing that plus two more dollars before I decide to buy in for five. I win two big pots. First from Diane when I crack her aces with my kings, then from my favorite player to win a pot against: Trung! He's on the button and I'm in the BB with QhQc. Trammy limps in middle position, folded to T who makes it $.30. SB folds, I reraise to $1, Trammy folds, T reraises to $3. Hmm. I called despite putting him on a bigger overpair. Flop is all low cards, but three hearts. I check, he goes all-in. He shows me his aces (no heart) and I show him my queens with a heart. I decide to gamble and call all-in. Turn is a queen (lololololololololol), and the river is the ace of hearts to complete my flush. So the two biggest pots I win that night are from cracking aces with underpairs. rofl

Yeah, winning big pots is nice but I wasn't even close to how well Trammy did. She was in for three dollars, buying in for a dollar three times. She managed to run her last buy-in of a dollar into over $30. WOWOWOWOWOWOWOW Where did all of that money come from? Well, Stanley left out $15 as did T, and everybody else that played lost except for me, Jason, and TI.

Went home, slept.

**Sunday**
That's today. I made a super omelette and bacon for breakfast/lunch (woke up at 3pm). That's about it for today.

I'm going to try to play in CAL again, I don't care who with. Probably CAL-O, BLAH! I just want to be a part of a good team. As a matter of fact, I'm going to find a team to play for now. lates

For The Life Of Me I Cannot Remember

2008-09-07T17:13:00.002-05:00

What made us think that we were wise and
We'd never compromise
For the life of me I cannot believe
We'd ever die for these sins
We were merely freshmen

// Recent Anything

**Friday**
The majority of the day I spent anxiously awaiting the fried chicken endeavor that evening. Loan, Tony, and Stanley picked me up around 6:15pm and embarked on our trek to Eischen's. The car ride was a lot of fun. Catching up with each other, entertainment/culture discussions, and last but not least, gossip! hahaha

We get there and surprisingly there is no wait considering what I've read about the place and that it's a Friday night. We got lucky because just as we arrived there was a waitress cleaning off what would be the only available booth. Immediately the waitress asks us if we would like anything to drink.

Waitress: So what would you guys like to drink?
BC: What do you have on tap?
Waitress: Coors Light and Bud Light. Do you want glasses or do you guys want a pitcher?
BC: We'll take a pitcher of Bud Light.
Waitress: [to Loan] Can I see your ID?
[waitress leaves without asking me, Tony, or Stanley for our ID]

lol @ Loan

[waitress comes back with a pitcher and glasses]
Stanley: Can we get a menu?
Waitress: Hun, we don't have menus here. There's a list of what we have there. [points to sign on wall] And there. [points to a place on the table that lists food]

Add in a honey controversy, delicious chicken, fried okra, and chili cheese nachos and that sums up our time there.

More great conversation on the way back to Norman before we stop by Loan's to drop Stanley off at his car, then Loan takes me and Tony over to the Taiko house to pre-drink for the party later that night. We stopped at a gas station on the way there to grab a corkscrew for the merlot that Loan brought. I drop a deuce when we get there and that's when the fun starts.

Thomas and I begin with a shot of 151, referred to from now on as 'apple juice'. It goes down surprisingly easy. I pour myself a glass of Loan's merlot and socialize with the guys there until I had another apple juice craving. This continues several times with Loan joining us for a good share of those times. I formed a hypothesis that night that Eischen's chicken has magical alcohol absorbtion properties because before we finally headed off to the party I had taken twelve (12) shots of apple juice and I was stone cold sober. No joke. I felt totally fine. It wasn't until my fourth or fifth kamikaze at the party that I started to get a buzz and felt pretty good.

I met a couple of girls at the bar that night. The Chinese girl stood out the most. Hmm.

We left as the party started to whine down. I left with Katherine and Danny to the Taiko house. Chilled there for a little bit then headed to the lambda after-party before finally heading home. My sister made meat loaf with scalloped potatoes and green beans for dinner so I had a ton of that when I got home since I was super hungry and it was totally delicious! Passed out.

**Saturday**
Me, my brother, and my sister gathered up dirty laundry and headed home to El Reno to celebrate my brother's 18th birthday. I had forgotten to bring my Ubuntu cd to install on my dad's computer so I just did my best to get rid of all of the spyware, etc. on his computer without formatting it. Good times with the family. We headed back around 6pm and I finally got caught up to the current episode of Weeds.

I was thinking about The Dark Knight (LDO) and remembered Loan's question the previous day about whether there was a better copy out. So I did some looking around and a screener copy came out a couple of days ago. It looks great. Not quite DVD quality, but so close. Video:9/10 ; Audio:9/10.

**Sunday**
Fantasy football is looking like absolute shit for me. I should've known better than to trust T to draft players for me. Goddamnit, I'm pretty pissed off.

Entourage season 5 premiers tonight, can't wait to get that later tonight. :D VICTORY!!!!!!!

All The Things That I Used To Say

2008-09-04T23:23:00.004-05:00

All the words that got in the way
All the things that I used to know
Have gone out the window
All the things that she used to bring
All the songs she used to sing
All the favorite TV shows
Have gone out the window

// Recent Anything

So tons have happened since I last wrote, I'll try to do my best. I don't remember anything big last week except for the weekend.

**Friday**
My aunt visited from Dallas for the day. She absolutely loves to clean. No joke, I swear she has cleaning OCD because every time she visits my house she cleans everything, you name it. Which I really enjoy. My dad, on the other hand, absolutely loathes because sometimes she throws things away or moves them without asking or letting us know so it can get annoying at times. Now since she can't bear to have her favorite nephew live in a dirty apartment, she is going to start paying for weekly maid service. Holla! No more doing dishes, cleaning the kitchen or bathroom, or anything! yay!!! Best aunt ever. After she finished cleaning we just chilled and drank all afternoon since she brought a couple of cases of Texas beer, yum. I think we ended up having Raising Cane's for dinner then she left for my house in El Reno to spend the weekend.

Earlier that day I stopped by the liquor store to grab a bottle of pinot grigio (not for me, housewarming gift for somebody) and a new bottle of bourbon. So far I've only bought and tried two different bourbons, Wild Turkey and Bulliet. This time I opted for some Maker's Mark and was pleasantly surprised. The taste when you take a drink and hold it in your mouth, then swallow and allow the aromatics to fill your mouth and nose....just feels right. Like there's this special bond between me and the drink. Like we really know and understand each other. To make this sound even more crazy, right as I started typing out the description, The Everly Brothers - All I Have to Dream started playing in Winamp. ;-)

Anyways, Katherine and some other people were coming over to predrink so as soon as my aunt left I quickly showered and got everything ready. Lo and behold, she shows up with none other than Jessica at her side. Ecstatic, we exchange hugs and catch up while drinking some of the delicious Skky Infusion Passion Fruit that Katherine brought over mixed with some Sprite. It was super good. After catching up for a while, I get a text from one of my favorite fobs, Tiep, that says the party is cancelled. lolwtf So we head down to the Red Room to see what's up.

After finding out about a lot of stuff (sorry, not writing about it), we headed to the Taiko house to drink/party, which evidently ended up being the place where everybody ended up going.

The party was p-a-c-k-e-d with people. At one point everywhere in the house was elbow-to-elbow and boy, was it hotter than a motherfucker in there. I mainly chilled in Thomas's room, sipping on some alcohol and browing TwoPlusTwo and reading more about CSS3. DJ Eddie Brasco from Power 103.5 was the house DJ and brought all his DJ/sound equipment so we had a pretty bangin' party. Unfortunately my taste in music differs from standard club playlists so I pulled up YouTube and had my own mini-DJ session in Thomas's room with a wildly eclectic steam of music which ranged from 90's alternative to classical, all the way to some old K- and J-pop. Still futily awaiting S.E.S.'s surprise US reunion tour, haha.

When the party ended everybody headed to IHOP then home to pass out afterwards.

**Saturday**
I woke up sometime in the afternoon, don't really remember when. Ah, yes. I was woken by the sound of my phone ringing and BEST Cleaners calling me to tell me that my suit was ready to be picked up. So I groggilly put on something suitable and head over to pick it up and then start getting ready to go to Linda and Chris's wedding reception.

Charlie and Katherine picked me up around 4:45pm and off we headed to Grand House. Took pictures with the newlyweds as we entered and awkwardly found a table to sit at. Fred, Tiep and others arrived shortly thereafter so we chatted for a bit. Once Andy arrived, he and I hit up the bar to grab a couple of glasses of Stella Artois. It was fun, but we sat near the back and I don't think the audio system was designed to broadcast in our section because we really couldn't hear anything. Regardless, it was still a good time up until we left early because Charlie had to work.

Oh, the ride back. What a fun time that was. It was raining. Hard. It was a lot of fun because Katherine was freaking out since she really, really hates driving in the rain. Haha, there was this one time where she and I went to Tulsa for Andy and Fred's white coat ceremony and on the way back it was raining super hard and she was having an episode so we actually had to pull over and I had to drive home. Good times.

**Sunday**
Don't remember anything going on Sunday.

Oh yeah, so remember how my aunt loves to clean and my dad hates it? Well apparently he had enough and they had a little tiff at the house so she came back to Norman to meet up with me and we headed to Dallas to pick up some furniture she had for the apartment. It was a long drive, but we had a great talk. When we finally made it to her house, we started drinking and talking some more. Good times. Then she brought out a present for me. I like presents. When I saw what it was, I was like, heck yeah! She bought me an original Burberry check scarf. Now I can't wait for the weather to get cold so I can wear it. =D She also a Tri-Delt OU alumnus (no jokes, Fred and Andy) and mentioned that she was going to one of their formals or whatever in two weeks. And since my uncle really isn't into those types of things, she's taking me as her date. fun!

We loaded up the stuff in the car and headed back the next day.

**Monday**
Don't remember anything going on Monday. Went to the Taiko house to take an inventory of all the poker chips for the rush tournament the next day. Went to chapter later that night, then home and sleep.

**Tuesday**
Showed up at the Taiko house around 5pm to help setup for the poker tournament. I did a really great job helping run the event. *pat on the back*

About thirty minutes before the event "officially" started, me, Fred, and Thomas were hungry. Since it was Tuesday I suggested B-Dubs but met resistance with regards to distance from Fred. Eventually he caved and we headed off to the mecca of Tuesdays with an order list for 78 wings. We get back and stealthily enter through the garage and make a beeline towards Binh's room and setup a table with the food. I sneak back out and grab cups with ice and a two liter of Sprite to bring back and we start annihilating the wings.

Fifteen minutes later and after coming to T's rescue, the tournament finally begins. I have an easy enough table and sit on Fred's right. I do something really stupid early and try to buy my flush against one of the prospects which ends up not working out, blahhh. This in turn starts to make me tilt a little bit so I break out my bottle of Maker's and pour me about three fingers worth of sweet, sweet bourbon. Apparently the fumes were making people secondhand tipsy from what Binh was saying. Score for me.

By the time the rebuy period was about to be over, I had about an M of over 30, but still wasn't feeling too great about it. Then this hand happens.

The blinds are 4/8 and I have about 32BB.
I'm in middle position with A10os and limp in. (bad, I know, but whatev)
Fred raises to like 25. Button calls, sb calls, bb calls, I call. Pot is like 125.
Flop is 89Jr.
SB bets like 25 (lol donkaments), BB calls, I push (lol squeeze play), Fred calls, SB calls, BB calls (LOLWTF)
Turn is a Q, ship it, bitches.

This starts a snowball effect. The next hand I'm in the BB with aces and the button goes all in with like AJ, haha. I just keep the momentum up and the tournament progresses until the final table is set. Lo and behold, it's all Taikos. (Catfish was playing, but gave his seat and GINORMOUS chip stack to Fred who busted out earlier)

The field gets whittled down until it gets down to me, Jason, Binh, and Trung. Jason goes out, and Binh still refuses to take a deal with me and Trung. I have a small chipstack but double up through Binh a few times before eventually taking him out. He collected a whopping ten dollars while Trung and I decided to just chop the remaning $120 to take home sixty each. Not a bad return on investment for me since I just invested my initial $5 buy-in. Took some good pictures and while watching them play some Madden I decided to join Taiko's fantasy football league this year.

**Wednesday**
Texted Katherine when I woke up about taking her to her bday dinner. She initially declines saying she has to study, but then changes her mind and would head over at 7 to go to dinner. I was super excited because I haven't had sushi in a while and the thought of eating a raw animal made me hot. (lol jk)...?

She arrived a little later than usual and we head to the best sushi in Oklahoma, Tokyo. We ordered four rolls and two glasses of Choya, a plum wine. We'll defintely order those rolls in the future, but definitely not the Choya. It just tasted bad, like it had a sort of pungent plum taste. The conversation was great, I always love our dinners. Nothing beats good food and good talk.

We planned to hit up the bar at BJ's afterwards, but ended up postponing that until Friday to start off the predrinking for the party later that night.

On the way to drop me off, we decide to head over to the Taiko house and surprisingly they're still having the live draft for the Taiko Football League. Earlier I let Trung pick for me since I couldn't make it so I fully put my trust in him. After the draft ended, Katherine dropped me back at my apartment.

Once I got back home and noticing the lack of "real" food I decide to go shopping. But for what? I decide I wanted to make some evil jungle chicken so I head to Wal-Mart to pick up the ingredients for that, but alas, they don't have everything I need. Ok, I should've expected that. So instead I buy a bunch of frozen hot wings, ice cream, and more Kool-Aid mix.

**Thursday**
Nothing exciting happened today. Got a Facebook message from Loan about a culinary (boner) adventure tomorrow which involves traveling to Okarche. I can't wait! :D

Wow, that was a lot of writing. I started at 11:23pm Thurs, and it's not 1:24am Friday. I admit there were distractions. Bathroomx2, refilling bourbonx1, Facebookxinfinite, etc.

I'm totally pumped up for fantasy football. It reminds me a lot of playing in CAL, lol. I hope my team does good! Agents of Chaos, haha.

Toodles, kiddos.

Well Now, I Get Low I Get High

2008-08-26T15:13:00.003-05:00

And if I can't get either, I really try
Got the wings of heaven on my shoes
I'm a dancin' man and I just can't lose
You know it's all right, it's ok
I'll live to see another day
We can try to understand
The New York Times effect on man

// Recent Anything

A lot has happened and I'll do my best to recap!

*Friday*
There was a pre-wedding day get together for Michael and Kim in OKC which turned out to be a lot of fun (from what I can remember). Met up with the guys at the Taiko house before me, Andy, Adam, and Katherine headed out. There was never any mention of a dress code so I just did what I usually do in situations like this and dressed business! I wore my favorite dress shirt and a black tie with my suit, pretty much the same outfit that I wore to Phi Dee's FD. French cuffs are my favorite!

Anyways, we get there and I'm starving so I head straight to the food table, greeting people en route. I decide to wash it down with a Heineken. I continue snacking and chatting with people until Christine and Paul both made a toast to the happy couple. It was at this point where I started to annihilate the wine. =/ Now the last time I drank copious amounts of wine was before Katherine left to Korea and we had dinner in Bricktown. I ended up ordering a bottle of wine only having to drink it all myself because she doesn't like red wine, boooooo. Katherine sums it up pretty nicely here.

So with that, coupled with the fact that Christine said to finish all of the liquor because it would just be wasted, I simply thought it would be the polite and respectful thing to drink as much as I could to help. You know how greatly I enjoy helping people, right? Right. So I finished the big bottle of chardonnay and was on my way to finishing another bottle before we had to leave. The older people were going to a club so that's where my group headed. I don't remember anything at the club but apparently the super asshole devil inside me surfaced once again that night and I ended up spending sixty dollars at the bar somehow.

*Saturday*
I awoke in my comfy bed the next afternoon feeling absolutely terrible. Wine hangovers are the worst, they tend to last a lot longer than tequila hangovers for me. Until I went to sleep around 6am that day, I had the strong urge to vomit all day. Spending time sitting next to the toilet anticipating a no-show vomit gets tiring. So I was in recovery mode all day, nothing really happened, never puked. Although I did find some on my suit, har har.

*Sunday*
Still needing my leet IT consulting skills despite my super asshole conversation with her Fri night, the ex called me (woke me up) so she could come over and we (I) could look for a new laptop for her. She really wanted it that day from Best Buy (ugh, gross!) so I ended up choosing a nice, little Acer laptop. After hitting up BB she had to go buy some things from Target so we headed there, blahhhhhh. Shopping with a girl has always been unpleasant for me. They never really know what they're doing. When she's done there, we head back to my place so we can set up her laptop, remove bloatware, and install/update other necessary software.

It took longer than expected and Katherine showed up because we were going to go have dinner, but luckily it only took a minute or two after she showed up so I kicked the ex out of the apartment and embarked on dinner with my favorite drinking buddy. She's on this silly diet and really "cutting back" on her carb intake. So where do I decide to eat? Johnny Carino's! Italians don't have carbs! It's different there. ha ha

So we have some good conversation en route, there, and en return? I don't remember doing anything else that day.

*Monday*
Pretty much didn't do anything exciting all day besides doing more web dev work for clients. Should be totally done with one by the end of the week, then I can concentrate entirely on this other one I'm semi-excited about. Oh yeah, so my hair was super long and I really wanted to get it cut. However my brother didn't want to drive me to OKC to get a haircut so I did some online research and decided to go with this place called Salon Zen. Their website design is "nice" but I was pretty turned off by its execution. When I saw that they didn't even declare a doctype I was pretty disgusted. But, they hired a company to develop it and I can't judge hair cutting ability by a third-party's web dev skills so I let that slide. Luckily they were able to fit me in that day at 6pm sharp so I was excited.

When I showed up I was happily greeted and got down straight to business. I've had this same haircut since junior high so I was tired of it and wanted something new. I told her she could do whatever she wanted to it as long as it wasn't long and off she went. In the end I got something that was like a cross between my old haircut and a fauxhawk. It will take some getting used to, but I don't really care. I just hope it won't look too unprofessional to future employers.

Went to chapter later that night, it was meh. After chapter, I headed to the Taiko house and me and Binh watched Rumble in the Bronx on DVD and I brought Digiorno. Good times.

*Tuesday*
So far, nothing. Actually my stable income endeavor made further progress with additional testing scheduled for the City of Norman on Friday morning at 8:30 (zomgwtf) and an interview for a software support personnel position tomorrow at 2pm. From the latter's job description, it seems like something I can do with super ease. Hopefully it pays something sufficient.

That's it for today, kiddos!

She Said I Don't Know If I've Ever Been Good Enough

2008-08-22T01:16:00.002-05:00

I'm a little bit rusty, and I think my head is caving in
And I don't know if I've ever been really loved
By hand that's touched me, well I feel like something's gonna give
And I'm a little bit angry, well

// Recent Anything

Let's see...woke up to the sound of an incoming text from AVu and we set up a business lunch with he and his brother at 1pm. I meant to wake up right then but ended up sleeping till 12:35pm and didn't get a chance to shower (bleh) so I found something BC-ish to wear, cleaned up a little, then off we went to T.E.A. Cafe.

I personally don't like T.E.A. Cafe that much. Their food just isn't that good to me. Sure, I used to really love their Kung Pao Chicken but now it's like my palate has become more developed and I just don't find their food appetizing anymore. If I want Asian food in Norman it has to be Thai because I think that's the only genre of Asian food you can get in Norman that's any good. If I want Viet, I either make it myself or wander over to some FOB's house.

The business lunch went well, saw Gwenn working, then we headed back to my place to chill for a little bit and talk shop some more. After they left I passed out for a little bit then I went with my brother to see about a job for him. Then I had him drive to the Bank of America near Main and Berry so I could take care of some banking. After that I told him to figure out how to get back to the apartment. He totally sucks at driving btw. Actually I guided him until we were going east on Alameda approaching 12th st. As we drove up to the intersection he asked me if we take a left or a right to get back home. I said, "What do you think?". Yeah he ended up taking a left and we ended up driving on 12th to where we were almost at Royal Bavaria before he finally decided to turn around. NICE HAND, BRO! And he still couldn't figure out how to get home until I told him to just go south on 12th. And he couldn't even understand that, I had to be like, "ok, take a left up here. Now a right. Goddamn finally." Being driven by my bro puts me on severe life-tilt. I swear, I was so close to just punching him in the face and beating the crap out of him and putting him in the trunk for the ride home.

When we came back it was almost five and Andy and I talked about going to the free wine tasting but ended up just hitting up the happy hour at Louie's. ZOMG $1.99 Boulevard Wheat drafts make one happy BC! :-D Andy and I talked for a while, then Katherine and Charlie showed up and we talked for a while more. I ended up only drinking three, but you can't beat that many Boulevards for just six bucks! We were hungry so all of us ended up going to Chicken Express to eat and chat some more. Afterwards me and Andy headed over to the Taiko house but nobody was home although there was a guy 'supposedly' fixing the air conditioning when we first showed up. This was confirmed after we 'broke in' (went in through the garage) and it was super hot insided. We left a few minutes later and he dropped me back off at home and I fell asleep again and just now woke up.

I haven't seen American Psycho and heard it was my style of movie so I decided to download it and it just finished so I'm going to find something to eat and watch it. lates

It's Nothing, It's So Normal You

2008-08-20T10:04:00.002-05:00

Just stand there I could say so much
But I don't go there cause I don't want to
I was thinking if you were lonely
Maybe we could leave here and no one would know
At least not to the point we would think so

// Recent Anything

I don't know what we're doing.

You Make Me Come

2008-08-19T01:24:00.003-05:00

You make me complete
You make me completely miserable

// Recent Anything

Cleaned today and didn't do too much till she came by after work and we went to dinner at Pad Thai. We had the regular chicken pad thai, spicy level 3/5 and the evil jungle chicken and ate family style. Conversation was interesting. Stopped by the Taiko house afterwards and hung out with the guys and girls there for a bit before we went back to my place to back up files on her laptop then she left and I watched the Comedy Central roast of Bob Saget, then the one of William Shatner.

I'm going to bed.

Actually, I feel like shooting people's faces so I'm going to play some Counter-Strike:Source! :D Good thing I'm still dual-booting Windows!

=( I have to restart though cause I'm on Fedora right now. LIVE LIVE LIVE!

No More Silent Voices To Whisper In Your Ear

2008-08-18T01:31:00.002-05:00

I am in my element with a panoramic view
There's no inspiration like
A military coup

// Recent Anything

So I've neglected this pretty badly. It's just that if I stop for one day, things just snowball and I end up with a lot of stuff to write which makes me not want to have to write about all of it. So I'm not. The only thing worth noting that's happened was that I watched The Dark Knight again but this time at Warren with Tony, Loan, and Stanley. People think this sounds weird, but every time I watch that movie I get this extremely happy sensation. And the only thing I can compare it to is the feeling of falling in love for the first time. Judge not lest ye be judged.

So now I thought of a good topic to write about if there is a day when there's nothing to write about: me falling in love for the first time. Ah, memories. I've never been able to meet anyone else that mentally stimulated me as much as she did. Or that I could stay up all night with on the phone having a real conversation...or... *sigh* Let's not get into all of this now.

But I suppose love's the segue for today because the ex called me Saturday afternoon and I picked up despite knowing that she'd only call if she had a problem that I could help her fix. Her Vaio had been having video problems for about a month where about 85% of the time when she turned it on, it would boot up normally except the screen would stay off. It would take several restarts in order for the screen to start working again and it would seem as if nothing was wrong. So I did some sleuthing (Googling) and found out there is an inherent manufacturing problem with this particular model of laptop. Sony knew about it and sent out a service bulletin. In '05. So sans warranty, she is SOL. Which totally sucks because she bought it for a little over 2k.

I backed up her important files and she's picking it back up this evening after work. There's more to add to all of this but I don't think I should. =X

lol

2008-08-07T21:52:00.001-05:00

Picked this hand up right before Tammy and Emily picked me up. holla!

PokerStars Game #19445952322: Hold'em No Limit ($0.01/$0.02) - 2008/08/07 - 22:50:17 (ET)
Table 'Lobelia' 6-max Seat #6 is the button
Seat 1: wander2809 ($6.15 in chips)
Seat 3: ModeratelyBC ($0.98 in chips)
Seat 4: g ten ($1.23 in chips)
Seat 5: yellodog99 ($3.98 in chips)
Seat 6: Soho69 ($1.48 in chips)
wander2809: posts small blind $0.01
ModeratelyBC: posts big blind $0.02
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to ModeratelyBC [5d Jd]
g ten: folds
yellodog99: folds
Soho69: folds
wander2809: calls $0.01
ModeratelyBC: checks
*** FLOP *** [9c 8c 5c]
wander2809: checks
ModeratelyBC: checks
*** TURN *** [9c 8c 5c] [5h]
wander2809: checks
ModeratelyBC: checks
*** RIVER *** [9c 8c 5c 5h] [Jh]
wander2809: bets $0.12
ModeratelyBC: raises $0.84 to $0.96 and is all-in
wander2809: calls $0.84
*** SHOW DOWN ***
ModeratelyBC: shows [5d Jd] (a full house, Fives full of Jacks)
wander2809: mucks hand
ModeratelyBC collected $1.91 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $1.96 | Rake $0.05
Board [9c 8c 5c 5h Jh]
Seat 1: wander2809 (small blind) mucked [5s Td]
Seat 3: ModeratelyBC (big blind) showed [5d Jd] and won ($1.91) with a full house, Fives full of Jacks
Seat 4: g ten folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 5: yellodog99 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 6: Soho69 (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet)

It's The Way You Love Me

2008-08-07T15:00:00.000-05:00

It's a feeling like this
It's centrifugal motion
It's perpetual bliss

// Recent Anything

So I've been plenty busy since the move so I'll try to recap everything as best I can.

***Sunday***
I spent most of the weekend unpacking/cleaning the apartment, but on Sunday my newly reunited drinking buddy Katherine picked me up and we headed to OKC to watch Fred play some bball in the Oklahoma Asian Basketball Association League. She picked me up at 6:15pm since Danny told her the game started at 7pm. Well we get there and we don't see any of our friends except for Tiep and it turns out that the game that we wanted to watch started at 9pm. Wow. So we chatted a bit and watched a game until more of our friends showed up and at around 8:40pm me, Katherine, and Thomas decide to go grab a beer before the game. Thomas suggested a semi-nearby bowling alley since we didn't really see any bars nearby so we head there and get a pitcher of beer and drink it fast despite my inability to consume large quantities of beer quickly. That's the one thing I can't do, but Thomas is good at it so we finish it off and head back to the game. It had already started but I don't think we missed that much. It was a pretty intense game and Fred's team ended up winning by five points against a pretty hard team so kudos to them. Went home, crashed.

***Monday***
Woke up sometime in the early afternoon to Stanley calling me about helping My move in. Blahhhh ok. So I get dressed and wait for him and Danny to head to her apartment with her stuff in the U-Haul truck. I didn't have to travel far since she lives a block down the street from me. It was effin' hot outside though, 107F. After we return the truck, we head to Sonic and I get a root beer float, yay. Then we headed back to her old apartment to get some more stuff to bring over and grab some KFC to eat later at the Taiko house. I walked back home after we finished unloading, showered, and had my brother Anthony drive me to the Taiko house and ate KFC along with three-fingers of bourbon on the rocks. :D Oh yeah, and an amuse bouche of vodka with Thomas.

After more people started showing up a lot of us decided to play some poker. I staked a few of the girls and together we played as Team BC, which consisted of me, Emily, Tammy, and My. Other players included Trung, Binh, Tan, TI, and...I don't remember the rest. Played the standard $0.01/$0.02 no-limit Texas hold 'em cash game. In the end I think I was up a couple of dollars, but that was only because Tammy took Trung to school a few times. Drank some more then passed out in Trung's bed.

***Tuesday***
Woke up and played the Wii in the living room with Danny for a while until Trung and I left to go eat at Pho Hoa in the city with Binh and Diane (I think?). But before we left I challenged Trung to an epic battle of high-card to see who pays for pho. In an amazing turnaround of luck, I pulled the ace of spades. Ship it. After pho we headed to the mall for a while. Afterwards Binh and I headed back to my place to hang out and watch The Dark Knight. :D Binh got the bright idea on the way back to go swimming so he called up people and later we all met up at the pool at the Greens. I usually don't like swimming that much but I ended up having a lot of fun. The synchronized swimming at the end will definitely make the Founders' Day video, haha. Binh's such a great thinker because afterwards he suggested we all play poker at the Taiko house. Great! So we all headed there, but I stopped back at the apt to change first.

What a grand time poker was. It was the standard game and I bought in for just a dollar since the table dynamics called for it. Emily turned out to be a really good dealer and dealt this nice hand just before we were about to stop:

I had like $3.50 in SB
TI was BB with a little over $3
Dustin was UTG with about the same as me
Johnny was UTG+1 with everybody covered

Dustin raised to like $0.10 or $0.15
Johnny re-raised to like $0.60
I decided to call with 10d8d
TI called
Dustin called

FLOP: [10h8h4h] $2.40

I decide to push with top two
TI calls
Dustin ends up calling
Johnny calls

Turn: [10h8h4h] [10c]

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The river was a blank and take a pretty big pot for just one cent/two cent blinds.

GG Emily.

I was wearing my blue Pure Pwnage/Counter-Strike shirt that has a silhouette of a Desert Eagle shooting the face of a terrorist and kept telling Emily that if she didn't put another ten out there after the flop that her fate could be similar to the terrorist, haha.

Then we just hung out and I got a ride home from Tammy and Emily (thanks!). Crashed.

***Wednesday***
Didn't do much today as my family came down to drop some more stuff off and go swimming for most of the day. Around 11:30pm Trung called me to play poker at the house after he and Fred finished playing poker at the casino. He took his time in leaving and by the time he showed up we only had six players. Still plenty imo. But Tan left after busting out twice and we just played five-handed for a while until Dustin came over and played. I just donked around and lost two bucks. Afterwards though, I came up with the idea of a six-person tournament in which the bottom three players paid for the top three players' McDonald's since we were kinda hungry. Genius. The blinds however went up after each orbit. Dustin was the first one out. Then Fred when he had J7 and flopped trips but lost to Trung's Q7. Then TI. So me, Binh, and Trung got free food. Fred dropped me off back home before he went back to the city and I fell asleep.

***Thursday (thus far)***
So we don't have a wireless router at the apartment yet so I'm leeching off of an unsecured network right now but it's a really shitty connection so I'm going to hack the ones that use WEP encryption right after I finished posting this. I just downloaded the necessary utilities and thought of blogging while they downloaded. And they're done so off to get better free internet.

Oh yeah, there's going to be a big crawfish feast at the Taiko house today and I can't wait. :D

Toodles!

And I Still Find It So Hard

2008-08-02T02:04:00.003-05:00

To say what I need to say
But I'm quite sure that you'll tell me
Just how I should feel today

// Recent Anything

So in about five more hours the moving process will begin. Well, I suppose the process has already begun, it's just that in about five hours the U-Haul truck is scheduled to depart this urine-soaked hell hole and make the trek to beautiful, alcohol-filled Norman. :D

Is it a bad thing that I have more stuff than either my brother or sister? ....nah. And as you can probably tell, my computer will be that last thing that will be packed and will be the first thing unpacked. After all, how can one unpack without some good tuneskis? Is it also lame that after unpacking my first priority will be to iron all of my shirts and pants? ^___^

So this weekend will be spent getting the living situation adjusted and the following week will be spent going to job interviews. Hopes are high, and if anything else, there's always the Bulleit.

In other news, PokerStars recently updated their default layout to a blackish theme which I have grown quite fond of. However you'll need to manually update the table themes to match. In addition to the new layout, they also sent me an e-mail saying how impressed they were with my play money table play so they shipped a whopping five bucks to my account. So now my PokerStars account balance is.....a whopping five dollars. I cashed out the big chunk in January and just played with a few free dollars in March/April until I donked it off. But I suppose this will be a good chance to hone my skills once again in preparation for my triumphant return to the micro-stakes Taiko home games. *crowd cheering* Yes, yes. BC the VC who is not PC is back again to take the Iotas to valuetown.

I'm also going to take this chance to actually try to get over the next semi-steep learning curve in poker. I'm pretty far past the first one, but I haven't quite gotten over the second one. So I'll be using this blog also as a poker journal to help track my mental progression of the game. After sessions I'll post some hands and try to analyze them appropriately. I'll also start posting in the micro-stakes nl section of the 2+2 forums for advice there. This could all be in vain however, as five dollars is not much of a bankroll to start out with. Ideally I'd need at least twenty dollars to adequately play $0.01/$0.02 if I buy-in for the minimum of $1. Oh well, it will add substance to this blog. Wish me luck!

Look Around Everywhere You Turn Is Heartache

2008-07-27T21:45:00.002-05:00

It's everywhere that you go (look around)
You try everything you can to escape
The pain of life that you know (life that you know)

// Recent Anything

So I suppose I'll wrap up what happened on my latest excursion to Norman.

I arrived this past Friday around 3:30pm at the Taiko house to find Binh there along with some random. After some small chit-chat, Danny came and me and the random talked with Danny in his room as Binh got ready to pick up Taneezy in Mustang. I also called Fred who was already en route to Riverwind to confirm our dinner later that evening for the seafood buffet at Riverwind. I also called Tony, but apparently I didn't get the memo that he really wasn't going to be in town and ended up leaving him a voicemail invite. Also recruited Katherine and Trung.

It was pretty boring until Danny decided to make some Jello shots so we hit up Wal-Mart to gather the necessary supplies and swing by his old apartment to get more alcohol. He ended up making pretty good Jello shots although I don't think I was a good tester due to my abnormal alcohol palate.

Hours go by and I start getting pretty hungry. Eventually Trung arrives ~7:20pm and we head to get more party supplies and when we get back, Katherine is already at the house so we decide to use her vehicle to get more liquor and the keg. We then head over to Joe's Place on Alameda to pick up the liquor. I was getting a bottle for me and one for Fred and had initially decided to get some bourbon in the form of Wild Turkey for me, but after getting some recommendations from one of the staff I ended up getting a bottle of Bulleit bourbon. As for Fred I got a bottle of tequila, but I don't remember what brand. It was another staff recommendation and I ended up really loving it.

After the liquor run, we stop by the house again to drop it off and decide to get the keg after dinner so we finally head to dinner, yay! We get there and it still takes a long time for me to eat because when we showed up Fred was UTG+1 and he said he wanted to play his blinds then leave. Yeah, Fred. You want to voluntarily play the two worst positions then leave. Then after he's in the small blind he starts to get up but I stop him because if he didn't play as the dealer it would've fucked up the blinds. I hate that small-small-big shit. Even after Fred cashed out, we waited for Tiep to cash out (he did pretty good at 2/5) then we headed to the buffet.

And it didn't turn out to be great either. The crab legs were salty and by the time we got there they stopped serving the crawfish and were out of oysters. ZOMGWTF So that was really gay, but I still ended up eating a lot. Better luck next time.

After dinner we get the keg and head back to the house to set everything up. I crack open my bourbon and it ends up tasting pretty good, but not as good as I had remembered. Perhaps I should've gone with a bottle of Knob Creek? I'll have plenty of time to experiment with different bourbons once I move back to Norman.

I started out with a couple of shots of 151 and just sipped on bourbon for about the first half of the party. Then it was pretty much whatever drinks Channara made plus lots of tequila. Delicious. I don't remember getting really drunk, but I remember being tipsy and quoting The Dark Knight a little too much maybe? Nahhhh.

At one point the cops show up and I don't really know anything that was going on, I just remember playing this drinking game in the garage and a cop walking behind me carrying somebody by the collar outside. I was like, uhhh wtf. Stood there and watched for a little bit and then decided to go inside for another drink.

[About the drinking game, it was a team game with playing cards and whatever you pulled dictated the action. One of the actions was that you choose a category and the other team has to name things in that category. Anthony pulled that card for us to use on them and I super pwned them with the category of 'Linux distributions' yeah, good luck with that one, ladies.]

At one point Fred took me and another person to go get ice cream. We ended up traveling to three different McDonald's and none of them were serving ice cream. Wow, ~~firebomb~~ love you much lately? A gas station ended up being our ice cream savior.

Went back to the party, blah blah blah, sleep, blah blah blah, wake up, head back to El Reno.

Not very interesting but I still had a lot of fun. Trung talks about a weekly micro-stakes home game. $$$

So I'm not sure if I already wrote about this but I got rid of Ubuntu because my ego couldn't handle using the Linux distro for n00bs so now I'm dual-booting Fedora 9 and XP Pro. However I'm only using Windows for gaming purposes. I do everything else on Fedora.

Oh yeah.....

So Michael and I originally thought that my license suspension would be applied retroactively from when I was first arrested this past March but it turns out that it starts on the date that my temp license expires which is Aug 28th. But Michael said that I could turn my temp license in now and get a credit for the unused days which would amount to about a month so now I won't be able to drive until the end of December. I was pretty upset about that to say the least, but then I realize how much FUN things could be. :-D Everybody at the OK DPS could use a smile on their face!

As for right now I'm just going to do a lot of reading. First some web development stuff, then some poker!

Cheers.

Say, We Can Go Where We Want To

2008-07-19T15:46:00.003-05:00

A place where they will never find
And we can act like we come from out of this world
Leave the real one far behind

// Recent Anything

July 17
(11:26:46 PM) Fred Huynh: what u doin?
(11:32:10 PM) Jonathan Nguyen: eating
(11:32:26 PM) Fred Huynh: want to go gamble?
(11:32:31 PM) Fred Huynh: i'll drive to lucky star
(11:32:34 PM) Jonathan Nguyen: lol
...
...
(11:41:15 PM) Fred Huynh: man, i want to do something right now
(11:41:19 PM) Jonathan Nguyen: lol
(11:42:19 PM) Fred Huynh: can't believe u just rejected my gambling offer
(11:42:25 PM) Fred Huynh: kinda hurt actually
(11:42:29 PM) Jonathan Nguyen: Dude, have you been to Luck Star?
(11:42:33 PM) Jonathan Nguyen: Lucky*
(11:42:41 PM) Fred Huynh: not really
(11:42:44 PM) Fred Huynh: once i think
(11:42:50 PM) Jonathan Nguyen: You know what? Let's go. I'm down.
(11:42:51 PM) Fred Huynh: remember poker room is small
(11:43:43 PM) Jonathan Nguyen: lol wait, let me call and make sure there's a game going.
(11:44:38 PM) Jonathan Nguyen: One table of 3/6 and two tables of 1/2.
(11:46:28 PM) Fred Huynh: we good?
(11:46:33 PM) Jonathan Nguyen: Yep.

July 18
And so Fredator began his trek towards El Reno to rendezvous at my house and head to Lucky Star. When we arrived there was a 1/2 table open with two seats next to each other. I went first and ended up choosing to have the seat on the left to have position on Fred which turned out to be a bad decision. Sitting in seat 5 was a guy who was noticeably drunk and, in everybody else at the table's honest opinion, mentally slow. The good news was that he had a lot of money and would be reloading several times that morning.

Fred started off a little rocky when he decided to play A7os in the small blind. lolwtf Fred. But then a couple of hands later he more than doubled up when he had KJos on a board of KJJxx. And things just kept getting better for him as he continued to rape the drunk/slow guy. He ended the night up about $400, averaging a little over $100/hr. Not bad.

Myself, on the other hand, didn't do quite as well. Almost every pot I played with the drunk/slow guy I lost when he kept sucking out on me. Runner-runner flushes and all. I didn't really care though strangely. One time that motherfucker even slowrolled me and I got sort of pissed but not too much because pretty much everybody at the table kept making fun of him for being slow and that sort of made me happy. I just bought in for a hundred and at one point was down to thirty dollars, but ran that back up to $160 before leaving with about $120. I won a pretty big coinflip for about $120 when I had 1010 against somebody's AQ all-in preflop. That woke me up.

So we played for about four hours before finally deciding to leave. This excursion totally effed up my sleeping schedule as I have been usually going to sleep around 9/10pm and waking up around 5am. It also sucked because I planned to head to the OK Department of Health in the morning to obtain an original birth certificate so I could get a state ID since I have no license.

I went to sleep around 5am and woke up at 9:30am to go get my birth certificate. Mom tagged along to drive and get one for my youngest sister as well. When I got to the front of the line with my application, the lady wasn't sure my state-issued temp license wasn't an adequate form of ID so she told me to go speak at another person in a window. After a couple of minutes my mom came over and told me that she could just get one for me since she's a parent. Frustrated, I head back over to the applications lady who directed us to the back of the line. WTF, my mom just talked to you. This pissed me off so much because the line was long and slow. Like, I was in total psycho mode where thousands of pretty ideas flooded my mind which would've sent me to jail for a long time if uttered, especially in a federal building. I calmed myself down though, knowing that later that evening I would be seeing The Dark Knight in IMAX.

After we got my birth certificate we headed to the Yukon Department of Public Safety to get my ID. I pulled a ticket out of the dispenser and I was #469 and the were on #450. Eleven doesn't sound like a lot but goddamn that place is slow. Thankfully Fredator didn't accompany to the DMV that day because the quality of jailbait there was pretty lacking. :-(

Finally after we got my ID we headed home where I anxiously awaited Susan to arrive and start our trip to Tulsa. She picked me up around 2pm and we had a fun ride up with some pretty funny conversation and her trying to kill me by braking really hard while I had to briefly remove my seatbelt to get money for the tollbooth and ended up hitting my head her rearview mirror and the windshield. Nice hand, sir!

After about two hours we get to Tulsa and I pick up the tickets then we find a place to eat. Ended up eating at Fish Daddy's which was meh, but sporting my nifty new ID I was able to drink a couple of glasses of Shiner Bock. Woodland Hills Mall was near and Susan wanted to check it out and do a little shopping while we were there. I really didn't want to and just head to the theater to wait in line to get into the movie. But being the nice guy that I am, we head over to the mall where she parks ridiculously far from the entrance. We enter after baking in the 20-mile hike and decide to get candy to put in her purse for the movie. Chocolate covered almonds are my favorite candy though I don't remember them costing so much.

When we left the restaurant it was 5pm so I really wanted to spend as little time at the mall as possible so I told her she could go to two stores or stay for 10 minutes, which ever happened first. Yeah, we ended up leaving around 6:05pm. WOW A tear literally fell from my eye as we were stuck in traffic en route to the theater. :'-(

We get to the theater and she drops me off so I could get us a place in line and holy shit the line was already fsking long. She starts apologizing when she gets in, but I'm hearing none of it. This totally sucks. When we were finally admitted into the theater there were only two rows left to occupy, the first two. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! GODDAMNIT!!!

So there I am, sitting in the second row with my head straining to see all of the IMAX screen and thoroughly upset.

The movie from what I could see sitting two inches next to the screen was absolutely incredible. In my opinion, I thought it was too short. I would've loved to see more. The Joker reminds me of.....me when I enter my special stage of anger. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

The experience was spoiled so much by having to sit so close, I was so sad and devastated. While we were waiting in line I told her I wouldn't mind going to jail for two days if it meant I could be at the front of the line. She thinks I'm crazy, I think it's fine. My heart was d-a-m-a-g-e-d. :'-(

I'm going to see it again tonight at the theater in El Reno. *sigh*

They're Piling in the Back Seat

2008-07-17T18:18:00.003-05:00

They're generating steam heat
Pulsating to the back beat
The Blitzkrieg Bop

// Recent Anything

So my plans for an IMAX Dark Knight filled Friday evening were almost obliterated yesterday. Ack! The original plan was for my brother to drive both of us to Tulsa to see the movie. However Daddy didn't take lightly the idea of my pretty inexperienced bro driving all the way to Tulsa and back so he denied my brother's request for moderately-ranged auto use. This left me in a terrible situation, in posession of priceless tickets to the IMAX showing of The Dark Knight and with no way to get there. After thinking about it for a couple of minutes I convinced my brother to sell me his ticket and I would find somebody to replace him that would drive.

The only problem was most everybody already had tickets to see it and none thought it was worth the drive to see in IMAX. The fools! I also offered to pay for gas and turnpike fees for the driver. After getting no luck with people I knew I went so far as to post a listing on Craigslist about it after I made a Facebook post. I was getting super nervous and constantly refreshing my e-mail for a couple of hours until I found somebody that I knew that would go. So now Susan will be picking me up and we'll head to Tulsa super early to eat and get in line to make sure we get a good seat. I'm giddy like a schoolgirl for the movie tomorrow! Can't wait! =D

You Must Watch The Dark Knight in IMAX

The Dark Knight: To IMAX or Not

How The Dark Knight Went IMAX

I also got my VirtualBox setup and the way I want it so now I can run native Windows applications (games mostly) on my box too! Yay!

1, 2, 3, 4, 5

2008-07-15T08:45:00.002-05:00

Everybody in the car so come on, let's ride
To the liquor store around the corner
The boys said he wants some gin and juice
But I really don't wanna
Get a buzz like I had last week

// Recent Anything

For the love of God, today I will get networking working on my VMware server. After I get that taken care of, today will probably just be spent casually working on projects since I can't really do anything else until they ship me some data. I'm kind of tired because my sleeping schedule is still weird. I tend to knock out around 4pm and wake up around 1am, blah. Anyways, I don't have much to update about. Hopefully something to write about will strike me later.

Smeared Black Ink

2008-07-14T00:42:00.003-05:00

Your palms are sweaty
And I'm barely listening to last demands
I'm staring at the asphalt wondering
What's buried beneath
Where I am

// Recent Anything

Today was was a super productive day for web development. I'm so close to finishing one project, all I lack is more data from the client and after I add that I'll be done! =D I still have to write a communication brief for my other project though. I'll try to work on that after I'm done writing this. Adhering to proper web development workflow standards takes some getting used to for a newbie freelancer.

The rest of the day has been spent learning various Linux stuff and trying to configure a bunch of shit that I don't know how to configure. blah, still having difficulty with VMware server networking. asdfjkl;asdfjkl;

In other news, the 2008 WSOP World Championship $10,000 No Limit Hold Em Main Event is winding down with just 29 people left as I write this. Mike Matusow actually busted out in 30th which totally sucks because now there are no respectable players left. Also the way they're doing it this year is pretty retarded. After they have nine players left for the final table they're going to postpone the rest of the tournament until sometime in November and then continue so that ESPN will be allowed to broadcast the final table. gayyyy

A good amount of pros made it pretty far in this year's main event which had the second biggest field ever of 6,844.
30th - Mike Matusow
41st - Kido Pham
45th - Phill Hellmuth Jr.
47th - Nhan Le (Nam Le's bro)
64th - Victor Ramdin
73rd - David Benefield (raptor)
105th - Shawn Sheikhan
117th - Allen Cunningham
160th - Gus Hansen
yadda yadda yadda....

A good amount of pros also either won or runnered-up a lot of events
Andy Bloch - 2nd @ $10k Pot-Limit Holdem Event
David Singer - 1st @ $1.5k No-Limit Holdem EVent
Erick Lindgren - 1st @ $5k Mixed Holdem
Ted Forrest - 2nd @ $2k Omaha Hi-Lo Split-8 or Better
Mike Matusow - 1st @ $5k No-Limit 2-7 Lowball w/Rebuys
Daniel Negreanu - 1st @ $2k Limit Holdem
Kenny Tran - 1st @ $10k World Championship Heads Up No-Limit Holdem
Barry Greenstein - 1st @ $1.5k Razz
Phil Galfond - 1st @ $5k Pot Limit Omaha w/Rebuys
John Phan - 1st @ $3k No Limit Holdem
Chris Ferguson - 2nd @ $10k World Championship Seven-Card Stud Hi-Lo Split-8 or Better
David Benyamine - 1st @ $10k World Championship Omaha Hi-Lo Split-8 or Better
Scotty Nguyen - 1st @ $50k World Championship H.O.R.S.E.
J.C. Tran - 1st @ $1.5k No-Limit Holdem

Scotty Nguyen became the first player to win both the Main Event and the H.O.R.S.E world championships and Phil Hellmuth set a record for number of WSOP final tables which is now 41. Yikes.

Talk about filler for my blog. That about does it for now. Later.

Sing With Me, Sing for the Year

2008-07-12T06:57:00.006-05:00

Sing for the laughter, sing for the tears
Sing with me, if it's just for today
Maybe tomorrow, the good Lord will take you away

// Recent Anything

So poo to my sleeping. Went to sleep around 4:30pm and woke up around 1am. However much to my delight, Fred was online. He was actually at work, but was free to chat till he got off at 7am so we did. Mainly about the Asian Basketball League website. He was experimenting with using Flash for the navigation, which you should pretty much never do.

Why, you ask? Well, all of the reasons I know of don't matter if you're not "seriously" using your site. If you're making a site for personal, non-commercial use then it's fine because nobody cares. But if you're making a serious site then it's pretty much better to never use it unless it's something that's needed for interactivity like a game or videos. Most of the reasons why you'd use Flash in a site can be accomplished by using Ajax, which is a million times better. I don't care how "cool" you think Flash is, it's not.

Today will be spent working because I will have nothing better to do. And updating if I want to write about something.

She Says Baby

2008-07-11T07:02:00.003-05:00

It's 3 a.m. I must be lonely
When she says baby
Well I can't help but be scared of it all sometimes
And the rain's gonna wash away I believe it

// Recent Anything

So I think my sleeping schedule is good now. I actually ended up falling asleep for three and a half hours yesterday half past noon, but I don't think it hurt me that bad since I was able to go to sleep before midnight and I woke up about an hour ago. Hopefully it's regular now. *crosses fingers*

Today I'll be heading down to Norman with my sister to take care of things for our apartment. Blah, apartments. Whatever. Anyways, my bro and sister liked Brookhollow the best so we'll be moving there sometime next month. I can't wait to move back! =D

I had a dream, but I can't remember it right now. Which sucks because I remembered it when I woke up, but then pinched a loaf then made a nice music playlist and now I can't remember. Fiddlesticks.

The third episode of I Survived a Japanese Game Show came out on torrent yesterday. Use The Pirate Bay for this particular episode because Mininova's torrents for this episode are all using a private tracker (last time I checked). It's an interesting show that has it's funny moments, a standard thing to watch while I eat something at my computer. The basic premise of the show is that ten people were selected for a reality tv show, but they didn't know any information about the show. When they all arrive at the airport they're shipped off in another plane to Tokyo and find out about everything. If you don't know anything about Japanese game shows, they're pretty crazy to begin with. American game shows are primarily based on knowledge or trivia whereas in Japan they're more like an advanced form of Double Dare. I like Ninja Warrior myself.

Anyways, I'm hungry so...time to cook breakfast. lates

And I Don't Want The World To See Me

2008-07-10T10:49:00.005-05:00

'Cause I don't think that they'd understand
When everything's made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am

// Recent Anything

Ok seriously. Today I will correct my sleeping schedule. I ended up falling asleep around 4pm yesterday and woke up almost seven hours later and I've been up ever since. I'm not tired in the least yet, but I know as it gets deeper into the afternoon I'll start having trouble. Perhaps playing my bro heads up will help that. Or installing some neat Linux games that I came across earlier.

So I finished season one of Top Gear, which is great in that now I can concentrate on my work instead of getting distracted. I admit I've been a little sluggish in all of my projects the past couple of days.

I still need to head to Norman to schedule all of my DUI stuff, blah. It's pretty inconveniencing to say the least and I'm actually kind of glad I got one. I admit that I have driven more than my fair share of times while I was definitely over the legal limit, sometimes over pretty long distances. But now that I know how horrible life can get if you do, I know I'll never do it again. And there's always the positive aspect of never having to drive ever again when I go somewhere to drink. The responsibility always falls on somebody and never again will it be me.

So the goal for today will be to finish the final design, sans complicated graphics, for one of my clients. It's estimated to be done by Friday but by God I'm going to get it done today. Which means I won't fiddle with my music today. Damn. Ok. Sacrifices must be made. No hookers or blow today either. Maybe a little racketeering, but I'll play it by ear.

Actually I'm going to start with a break by playing Mario Party 8 on the Wii with my brother and sister. =D

EDIT @ 12:09 PM - Mario Party 8 is fucking retarded and I'm a very sore loser. That is all.

EDIT @ 12:13 PM - So I'm actually pretty tired and can't really concentrate so I'm going to try to figure out how to stay up until at least 8pm. blah

She Packed My Bags

2008-07-09T09:32:00.004-05:00

Last night, pre-flight
Zero hour nine a.m.

// Recent Anything

So I have a ton of music by my standards, 37 GB, and a lot of them have incorrect ID3 tags so when I imported them into Amarok my collection was pretty disorganized. I've been fixing them for an hour or so and it's going to take a loooong time, blah. But, that isn't what this post is about. I started getting distracted while looking up track names for certain CDs and began browsing the TwoPlusTwo forums. I stumbed upon this pretty funny pedopeliac saying:

Little kids are like square roots. If they're under 13, do them in your head.

It was the first time I've heard that expression and I was laughing my ass off. Good stuff. Not that I endorse pedophilia, it's a terrible thing. But you can always turn something into a joke and as long as it's for the purposes of humor with absolutely no intention to offend then it's ok. I love to make inappropriate remarks and jokes. But that's all it is, a joke. I don't really mean anything I say, I just say it to make myself and other people laugh. If you can't take a joke then I'm not going to be very fun to be around. Especially when I've had a good amount to drink. :-)

Ooh, I also stumbled upon this site called Simply Noise where it just plays white noise. I think it's pretty awesome because I listen to music really loud to drown out the sounds of my house but sometimes I just can't concentrate with regular music playling. SImply Noise is a great alternative and I imagine I'll be using it a lot.

I Got a New Life

2008-07-08T22:17:00.003-05:00

You would hardly recognize me I'm so glad
How could a person like me care for you
Why do I bother
When you're not the one for me
Ooooo, is enough, enough?

// Recent Anything

So I just woke up. Ended up going to sleep at 1pm today. BLAH. Had a crazy dream though. I seem to have a ton of crazy dreams, I'll be sure to write about them more often.

So me and some random girl are in a Jeep driving down a lone stretch of highway reminiscent of the scene from Dumb & Dumber where Lloyd and Harry leave that diner with Seabass en route to Aspen. Suddenly for some reason there's a motorcycle chasing us. Somebody that wanted to kill us. I'm in the passenger seat LDO so I keep telling the girl to let him catch up to us and when he's right behind us to hit the brakes and annihilate the motorcycle. In the dream I thought this was a good thing. But she doesn't listen because she's a girl and a terrible driver so eventually it gets dark and we travel down this dirt road and look for a place to hide. The road eventually ends with a perpendicular fork and we turn left which leads to a maze-y road filled with all kinds of shrubbery in which to hide in. Then another car comes that's also looking for us. We hide to avoid it but in the midst of evasion we get separated. I circle around to exit the maze and try the other road. It leads to a cemetary where if you enter you're pretty much guaranteed to die. So I think no, and I run back down the dirt road until I see the original bad guy chasing us, and he's chasing some other person. I watch him kill the other guy and apparently the bad guy has like superhuman powers and likes to torture his victims. I try to hide but it doesn't work and he catches up to me. Realizing there's absolutely nothing I can do, I get in the standard execution position, kneeling with my hands behind my back and tell him to make it quick. He slams his knee through skull and that's that.

Yeah, that's pretty crazy. I miss the dreams I used to have when I was the president of Russia and had to evade Whoopi Goldberg by getting on a bus driven by Tom Cruise. Those were the days.

Well I just woke up so I'm starving. Time to eat and watch the first season of Top Gear which I started downloading earlier.

I'm in Distress, Oh Mistress

2008-07-08T05:38:00.002-05:00

I confess so do it one more time
These handcuffs are too tight
You know I will obey, so please
Don't make me beg
For blood, sex, and booze you give me

// Recent Anything

I finally got my virtual machine server set up with Windows XP; however, I'm still trying to figure out a couple of networking aspects of the vm. This will allow me to run native Windows applications. I don't need to use these applications but it will ease the transition to the Linux equivalents.

My schedule for today is rather bland, just work on web development projects. Like writing, it's hard to get started but once I get into the groove I'm like a machine.

I talked with an old friend today. It was great, she's really funny and I was a bit down and frustrated at the time so she really cheered me up.

I finished downloading every season of The Simpsons. They're resting comfortably in a folder on my external hard drive next to The Database. It's great to watch several episodes when I'm bored (procrastinating)....of The Simpsons.

Every time I mention The Dark Knight my brother mentions how great the Dragonball movie will be. Yeah, right. The guy playing Goku looks like a huge douche.

Anyways, I'm running out of things to talk about (Not really, just don't feel like going on a long rant. I'll save it for another time.) so I'm going to cook some breakfast and watch some Simpsons.

knkz pz jig late #bad

I'm a Little Bit Rusty

2008-07-07T22:27:00.002-05:00

And I think my head is caving in
And I don't know if I've ever really been loved
By the hand that's touched me, well I feel like something's gonna give
And I'm a little bit angry

// Recent Anything

Well Fedora ended up being more of a challenge so now I'm using Ubuntu. Sigh, BC is indeed a Linux noob. Right now I'm trying to install a virtual machine server that I can use but it's not going too well. I have it installed but am having problems configuring it through the terminal, which is similar to the Windows command prompt. There's still a bit I need to learn, but afterwards everything will be so much easier. I really like how everything works now. However I had some trouble getting all aspects of my sound card to work so now I'm using the onboard sound, blah. It's not bad and doesn't really matter as long as I don't game that much. And it's not like I'm going to be playing in the CPL anytime soon. :-/

My brother and I bought our Dark Knight tickets today. Mmm...IMAX deliciousness. I'm busy trying to get some stuff to work so...maybe I'll update later tonight.

And I Forget

2008-07-05T02:12:00.002-05:00

Just what it takes
And yet I guess it makes me smile
I found it hard
It's hard to find
Oh well, whatever, nevermind

// Recent Anything

Right now I'm downloading the install cds (all six of them) of Fedora 9. They're downloading pretty fast, like 1Mbps. After which I will proceed to format my primary hard drive (again, did it like a week ago), install Fedora, and learn to exclusively use this particular distribution of Linux. I've been wanting to do this for years but I've just either been really preoccupied or lazy.

What prompted such a radical change? Why would I throw myself into the clutches of a whole new operating system that I've only cursory researched? Well, I'm just tired of Windows. Tired of how no matter what you do, everything will eventually get slower. Tired of the amount of congestion the operating system deems necessary to impose upon one's system. And yeah, my computer is a few years old so installing Linux will definitely help with the speed.

I started with a Wubi installation of Ubuntu and liked it. But I feel that Fedora is an overall better fit for me. The great thing about Linux is, if you're not liking one particular distro, it's easy to switch. I suspect this will keep me up all night which is great because my sleeping schedule is absolute crap again.

One really great thing that I'm excited about using is Quanta Plus. It's this really kickass web development IDE for Linux. It will totally replace Dreamweaver CS3 for me. Which is great since I have a few freelance web development projects that I'm working on for some extra capital. And great again since I lost some playing 1/2 and 3/6 today. lol cashaments

If you ever start developing for the web in Linux, this link is great.

Enough about techy stuff. I'm heading down to Norman sometime this week to schedule an appoinment for a DUI assessment before I can begin DUI school and the rest of the crap I have to do. It's retarded because I actually have to walk-in to schedule an appointment, you can't do it over the phone. This is because they require a $100 cash deposit. lol drunkdriveaments My license is also el suspendedo for the time being so my brother will be driving me down. He sucks at driving, blah.

Not much else going on this week. The week after next though....THE DARK KNIGHT! I absolutely can't wait and I'm super hyped. Which would normally be a bad thing, but everybody that's seen it says it's really great. ASDFASLKFJASKLFNSKLFNASKLFNASKLFNASKLFJ I plan to see it at the IMAX theater in Tulsa that Friday night. The earliest show Thursday night at midnight is already sold out so I should probably buy my tickets online soon. It'd be fun to go with a group so I'll probably Facebook people later today after I wake up about it. But man, we'd probably have to show up super early. I remember being an hour early for Transformers and the line was already super long.

I've also been schooling my siblings at the Nintendo Wii. My brother bought it like a week ago along with a few games and with a Wii Zapper for a shooting arcade game, House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return which I totally suck at.

Not much else has been going on. Last week my favorite drinking buddy, Katherine, drove all the way out to El Reno to pick me up and we went to go eat some pho before we proceeded to Edmond to watch Fred dominate in the Asian Basketball League.

Anyways, the final disc finished downloading so it's time to install. I'll seriously try to update more often. It's just that when you stop just once, it's really hard to start back up again.

Cheers.

[and I just thought about something to write about next time!]

That's a Special Feeling, Lloyd

2008-06-05T10:22:00.004-05:00

The first time I set eyes on Mary Swanson, I just got that old fashioned romantic feeling where I'd do anything to bone her.

// Recent Anything

So reading seems to have become more abundant lately. Reading is great, but I can't really stand being away from my computer if I can help it (read: lazy). I've tried e-books, but I get distracted too easily. So in lieu of reading classic literature, I've decided to watch classic/popular movies that I've never seen. Some of these movies I may have seen partially, but have never watched completely through. I'm using the list from IMDb's Top 250. 250 movies? That's a lot of movies. Over/under on how many I've seen? I haven't gone through the list yet and I say I've seen at least 150, but probably not more than 200. If I was given a space of just ten movies, I'd probably take 175-185. Nobody to bet with. =(

Holy crap. Out of IMDb's Top 250 movies voted by users, I have only seen 58! What the heck?! I thought I had seen more. But then again after looking back, I don't see Dumb & Dumber making the list so I'm considering it flawed. As matter of fact, Dumb & Dumber isn't even on the New York Times Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made list. Wow. Good game.

In other news, has anybody ever played or remember the game Gizmos & Gadgets? I remembered the game while playing another nostalgic game, Chip's Challenge. I couldn't remember the name, only that you collected parts for vehicles, raced them, and solved puzzles. Eventually I figured it out.

Morty Maxwell, the Master of Mischief, has moved into the Shady Glen Technology Center and taken over as the head scientist! Your job is to accept Morty's challenge and prove that you are a better scientist than he is. Morty has locked the doors in the warehouse with science puzzles. Show him how much you know about science by solving the puzzles. Then go through the doors, find the best vehicle parts, and build faster vehicles than Morty builds. To make your job more difficult, Morty's sneaky Cyber Chimps are collecting vehicle parts, too. Outsmart the Chimps by throwing bananas to them and making them take a nap. Race against Morty and win all 15 of the challenge races. You will reclaim the Technology Center and be the head scientist!

Some good screenshots of the game are available here. I remember playing this and another game a lot whenever I had computer time in elementary school.

Lately I've also felt the strong desire to cook. Perhaps a job as a cook? I could use the extra practice. Although Michael suggested that absolutely the most fun way to get a fast increase in cash flow is to become a waiter. So maybe I'll try that.

Toodles.

Hoodoo? I do.

2008-06-04T15:49:00.004-05:00

It is time, Lord
From the dry dust
Out of these chains
From the Devil's house

It is time, Lord
To take me
From the dry dust
Break me
From these chains
Bring me
From the Devil's house

Take me out of darkness
Walk me out of blindness
Lift me out of sadness
Save me from my damned-ness

Please, Lord

It is time, Lord

// Recent Anything

So I'm donking it up in a freeroll today and decide to listen to some music to help with the extreme boredom that usually accompanies mass multi-table tournaments. I set my music app to shuffle through my entire audio library and after a few songs pass, lo and behold, I hear the ominous beginnings of a drum beat and the voice of Papa Justify.

The song is The Conjure of Sacrifice, from The Skeleton Key soundtrack. Me, Charlie, and a few others watch it at his previous residence last year and had a pretty entertaining time doing so. The song itself is creepy and I used to play it whenever Charlie and I played EE together in the union.

Anyways, listening to it brought back a lot of those memories and piqued my curiosity so I Googled "hoodoo" and came across this website.

Holy shit, the section regarding fluids had me crackin' up pretty bad. Overall the whole website is pretty creepy/entertaining and made the tournament less boring.

I suppose I've always had an interest in the folklore and the occult since I was probably the world's #1 Ghostbuster fan when I was a kid. I think it would be fun to go out to an abandoned house in the middle-of-nowhere with a group of people and conduct fear experiments. Who wants to come? haha [Note to self: Don't forget the bourbon and Barry Manilow CD.]

Mmm...bourbon. Mom made roast for dinner. I miss the seafood buffet at Riverwind. FOOD

Ducky

.....

........

(yes, long silence)

Quack.......quack.

........

............

"She does not like it."

If you understand that then congratulations. lalalalalalalala no sleep yet. Still trying to get on a regular schedule. I'm happy that there was a central topic to today's post. Hopefully that will happen again tomorrow.

P.S. There is a new Ghostbusters game coming out that looks totally bitchin'. There is some gameplay footage available on YouTube here. Wowowowowow.

One Way

2008-06-03T04:41:00.002-05:00

In the eyes of a passerby
I'll look around for another try
And fade away

// Recent Thoughts

Writing seems to have turned back into this big monster that I lethargically attempt to slay. I'm not quit sure what it is, I just know that I suck at it. This is going to be retarded, but I'm going to talk about random things and just jump/skip around.

When I was in third grade, my siblings and my mother lived with my grandparents as my parents were having marital problems. I went to school there and coincidentally my grandmother was my third grade teacher. Every morning she would have a hot wet towel for us to use and make us hot chocolate. The good kind of hot chocolate that was made with milk, not water. I can't stand watery hot chocolate. Grandma is top notch.

The school I went to had a basketball team that all the guys played on. I find it hard to imagine that it's possible to play worse than I can now, but I'm sure I did back then. I remember sitting on the bench mostly and whenever I did get to play I had no idea what I was doing. Good coaching, coach! Just assume everybody knows the rules and how to play the game and wants to be there!

Practice was slightly worse though. I remember the coach would make us run laps around this field near the school. Since I was small, I would get picked on sometimes. I don't really remember anything about getting picked on except for them putting insects down my clothes, mostly these big grasshoppers. Kids are retarded.

I think I was the only person in the world to never own a pog. They were huge back then and everybody played them. Everyone except me, I'd just watch. However I do admit that later on I had quite the Pokemon card collection.

I remember in first grade we were working on a project that our teacher taught us how to do. At one point I figured out a super efficient way to do it and showed the girl next to me. She then called the teacher's attention and exclaimed she found a much better way to do it and the teacher let her present it to the class with her getting all of the credit. That pissed me off a lot.

My favorite time of the year when I was a kid was Christmas time. Every year in elementary school (sans third grade), my grandparents would drive up to El Reno and pick me and my siblings up at school early the Friday before break. It was so great getting out of school a little early, then making the two hour drive down to my grandparents' house.

Wow this post sucks. I can't think of anything to write. Something is better than nothing? Give me ideas or questions, I don't really care what they are. Man, I'm negative. I'd like to end this entry on a positive note.

This is a funny clip of Rachel Ray that made me laugh.

Long read about a food critic's trip to Le Bernardin.

Today's Cyanide & Happiness. (good chuckle)

I'll try to be better, but no promises! ;-)

Oh Mandy

2008-05-30T13:06:00.006-05:00

Well you came and you gave without taking

// Recent Events

Well let's start with what everybody is most curious about. This past Wednesday I had my arraignment at the Cleveland County courthouse. I was scheduled to meet up with Michael thirty minutes beforehand, but accidentally went to the wrong courthouse (it was at the county courthouse, I was at the municipal one). I also got a little lost as I didn't know where it was and actually ended up making it there like five minutes beforehand.

My case was formally read and I entered a plea of 'no contest'. The whole thing lasted pretty short. At most I think I was in the courtroom for twenty minutes, mostly because of people in front me. I was in front of the judge for probably three minutes.

Michael is a great attorney and thanks to him my consequences will pretty much be the absolute best thing I could have hoped for, short of getting off scot-free due to a technicality. He's been very helpful throughout the whole process and I am grateful for all the work that he has done. I ended up receiving the statutory minimum terms for probation for my criminal charge which are as follows:

2-year probationary term without formal supervision by Dept. of Corrections
DUI School
Victim Impact Panel
Evaluation and follow-up
40 hours of community service
District attorney supervision for 1 year

After I complete all of that and stay out of trouble until 4:00pm on May 10th, 2010, all of this nonsense disappears with nothing on my record. All of this isn't cheap either mind you. A few thousand dollars will put a dent into any 1/2 player's bankroll. So right now I'm looking for a regular job. *gulp* Yeah, that's right. Back to the super dull grind of 'real' work. But only until I build my bankroll up to play 1/2 safely.

So while I'm thankful that the consequence are relatively not bad, this whole thing still sucks ass. And that's the low down on BC's legal life.

In other news, I've been distracted from doing anything productive by playing through the entire Half-life and Half-Life 2 series. I immediately fell in love with them all over again. *sigh*

I also stumbled onto this great site called MySoju.com. It's like Hulu, but for Asian dramas and movies. This has also distracted me from doing anything productive. Let's recap some dramas I've watched!

The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince
Probably the best one I've seen thus far. Although I cringed at some of the gay parts even though it wasn't really gay, the guy just thinks the girl is a dude. Definitely a must watch.

Full House
Another great one. I thought the Three Bears scene was really funny and it was a great drama to put me in a good mood.

Bambino!
This one I really like because it's about a chef! The story is great and I think it's more of an accurate representation of what it's like to work in a 'real' restaurant than the restaurant sitcoms I've seen in America. Not to mention his super hot chef co-worker. I would also recommend watching it before the others because it's not as long and will ease the transition into watching a long drama series. Love it!

My Boss My Hero
My favorite genre of Asian dramas are ones involving organized crime. This is a Japanese series based on the the Korean movie of the same name (which is A+++ imo). At first I didn't like it because I was attached to the Korean version, but it grew on me. I liked it despite it tilting me with how girly dramas make Asian guys seem, which goes for pretty much every drama I've seen.

Yukan Club
A Japanese series about a group of high school students solving mysteries. Interesting, but kinda gay.

Gokusen
Another fish-out-of-water type series involving gangsters. Similar to My Boss My Hero, except the roles are reversed. It was somewhat entertaining, but still meh.

Goong S
At first I only watched this because I thought it was a top-rated drama called 'Goong', but it's just a spin off of sorts. I'm currently stuck on episode five and have lost interest.

That does it for drama series, now on to movies I've watched!

100 Days with Mr. Arrogant
Wow, did BC really watch all of that? I'm definitely not in the movie's targeted demographic, though it had some funny and cute parts.

Marrying the Mafia
Funny at parts, but really not worth the time imo.

My Boss My Hero
This movie originally came in a DVD package that was a complimentary gift with a region-free DVD player I bought several years ago. I ended up downloading it several days ago and found it streaming online as well. This movie is awesome and funny.

My Boss My Teacher
The sequel to My Boss My Hero. I thought it was a little funnier than the first, but maybe that's because I had already seen the first one.

And....here are some movies that I've seen before that I think you should watch.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter....and Spring
Probably one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. Wow.

How to Keep My Love
Funny chick-flick.

Last Present
Couldn't find this one online, but honestly I've never really cried during a movie, perhaps a tear or two. However I couldn't really hold anything back at the end of this one. Wow.

Another distraction that I've picked up was trying to learn how to read/write Vietnamese. I'm using vietcourses.com which is totally free and from my experience, a pretty good place to learn. I'm able to write a lot of baby sentences right now and have mastered about 55 words. So much easier than speaking.

That about sums it up for what I've been doing. My dad left for Vietnam early this morning and I've been up ever since, trying to get my sleeping schedule regular. Doom 3 just finished downloading and I'll crap my pants playing it later tonight because it's the absolute scariest game I've ever played in my life.

// Recent Thoughts

Binh gets a blog, Tammy gets a blog, people are updating theirs more often...wow. I keep saying that I'll update more often, I keep telling myself that I'll update more often, but I end up not doing so. That's one of the biggest problems I have. I always know what to do, I always tell myself I'm going to do it, I just never do. wtf, I'm retarded.

This blog needs change. No longer can I write about my day as it is no longer interesting. So tomorrow I will try to write about thoughts instead of events. We all know I'm pretty shitty at writing thoughts, but I'm sure I'll think of something. I'm amazing at bs.

Chocolate Almond

2008-05-07T23:31:00.002-05:00

Is one of my top dessert flavor combinations. Especially ice cream!

// Recent Events

Well I usually spend my whole day inside. Actually now that I think about it, the only time I've gone outside was whenever I left for Norman. Outside is boring here. But, I've been pretty busy inside thankfully.

Work on the new Alpha chapter website is going along great. Right now I'm copying over all the files from the test site over to the main site, so check out my progress @ http://ou.taukappaomega.com and let me know if you have any suggestions or comments to improve the functionality. As for the aesthetics, I couldn't care less. I'm going to let Charlie take over that aspect because creative and artistic are not synonymous with BC.

Then work on the general site, then Beta colony's. I'm also going to experiment with an intranet for Alpha chapter that will facilitate project management and coordination without having to rely on outside sources. Yes....

Besides that, I've been downloading classic movies and playing a little poker. Right now I'm just playing tournaments, very different from cash games. I really need to find a soft home game around here.

What else....

Oh wait, there's nothing else. My life is boring here. Until next time!

And She Called Out a Warning

2008-05-03T15:30:00.001-05:00

Attempting to start posting in my blog again per request of several people at Tony and Long's graduation party last night.

// Recent Events

I started working on some web development projects for Taiko a few days ago. The plan is to make a general fraternity website for the taukappaomega.com domain that does not concentrate on the day-to-day activities of a particular chapter, but serves as an informative website about the fraternity. Then create individual sites for different chapters under a taukappaomega.com subdomain. The one for Alpha chapter will be http://ou.taukappaomega.com.

I looked around at several different content management systems to use and researched some suggested ones and after some deliberation I ended up choosing to use Joomla!. I made a local site to learn the basic ins and outs and it's pretty similar to another CMS I have used in the past. After I was comfortable with everything I made a test site directory on the web server for each different site to create the individual websites. Now comes the arduous task of actually developing three websites. FTB

I'm in that zone where all I want to do is bang out three rockin' websites and nothing else matters. However that 'zoning' was broken when I decided I would head down to Norman for Tony and Long's graduation party. I was ecstatic. It had been a long time since I had a drink and I was sure I could use several. Oh yeah, it would also be nice to see my bros. Just kidding, I missed them so much more than drinking.

I got a ride from [nameless] to Norman and ended up at Charlie's house around 1:30pm and just hung out there for a while. He introduced me to a short tv series on Hulu called My Bare Lady. The basic premise is some great British theater director/whatever auditioning porn stars to act in classic scense in a classy British theater. Nautica Thorn? I'm there.

Charlie and I planned to go see Iron Man at the Warren Theater in Moore that afternoon. Binh came with us and we went to the 3:15pm showing. It was Charlie and I's first time at Warren Theater since it opened and I really liked it. Charlie wasn't a big fan of the decor style, but I much preferred it over the standard red cloth seats and a white screen surrounded by a plain black area. A huge plus is that they serve alcohol there. Not just beer, but actual liquor.

I wasn't too hyped up for the movie. I thought it just looked ok from the previews. I ended up thoroughly enjoying the movie and do highly recommend it. What an awesome house.

Afterwards we stopped by the liquor store and picked up some vodka for the party and just chilled at Charlie's house for a while. I was hungry so Binh took me to get some Raising Cane's and chilled back at Charlie's house with TI and Julie while Charlie went to work. After we ate we decided to play some poker. Not wanting to play for money, we ended up playing a tournament where the first one out had to drink half a glass of pickle juice and the second one out had to take a shot of pickle juice. It's a weak bet, I know, but...whatever, it's what we could think of at the time.

Me, Binh, and TI started out with 150BB with the blinds never going up. I play super aggressive because it's fun to play crazy. But crazy, not stupid. Binh ends up being the first one out because he likes his super big bluffs and TI calls with two pair. The pickle juice makes Binh kind of sick. I don't feel like playing anymore so I raise to to like 10BB on the button, TI calls. Flop is J37 rainbow. I have A7 for middle pair, top kicker. TI bets like half the pot, I push, he calls. He had 33 and that's game.

Then Binh and I head over to Trung's house and help him set up his house. I washed his dishes.

Nobody really showed up until about midnight. I didn't feel like shots so instead I just drink Crown on the rocks all night. I'm not a big fan of Crown, but it was the only whiskey there. I should have gotten some Wild Turkey. I love me some bourbon. Blah blah blah, lots of people drinking, dancing, keg stands, and flip cup. The young kids acted crazy and danced while the old people just chilled around and talked, mainly in the garage/dining room.

The weird thing was that I really didn't feel like drinking a lot once I was actually able to. I just felt like playing poker. Hmmz.

Everybody started leaving around 2:45, Charlie and I left sometime after then. We headed back to his house and he cooked some food. The meat however ended up being spoiled so he got us Taco Bell instead and we watched the first half of Iron Man online since it was up already (with Chinese subtitles) then went to sleep.

I woke up around 8:30 that morning, but kept falling back asleep then woke up around 11:30 and just chilled with Charlie and Binh until I left.

As for today, I will work on the web projects and hopefully play some poker. I'll try to keep updating.

Congratulations to Tony and Long again, I'm proud of you guys.

// Recent Thoughts

No. No. No. No. No. NO.

But....