Given tonight’s night of bar hopping, I leave you with this joke:

Why aren’t good lawyers good designated drivers?  Because they always pass the bar.

Today reminded me of how fortunate I am to be working for a company that is helping with the moving process.  As I sat on my couch watching TV, the movers packed up all of my belongings and loaded them into a truck.  At one point I thought, “Man this is kind of taking awhile,” and then I remembered there are three of them doing it, I have a good amount of stuff (though not the entire amount of it is good), and that I was sitting there watching TV.

Even though I didn’t have to do any of the physical labor, the entire process is still a stressful ordeal.  I had to somehow determine everything that I was going to need for 8 days, and make sure I set it aside.  And these aren’t any normal 8 days - there’s work days, travel days, days off (hopefully not off days), birthday gatherings, apartment movings, and the whole dropping of the ball (not me finally going through puberty, I mean New Years).

But, hey, when you’ve got a positive goal at the end of the tunnel (moving to NYC), it’s all worth it.   And just for fun:

I heard Micheal J. Fox started his own moving company.  It’s called, “Movers and Shakers.

Just to get started you have to get a comforter, duvet cover (FYI - the duvet cover covers the comforter, not a “duvet” which apparently doesn’t exist… makes sense…), sheets, and pillows and pillow cases.  The middle tier adds on a bed skirt, shams, and weird shaped pillows.  Anything else above that is just adding more and more pillows, which is good if you like to go to sleep feeling like you’re in a giant vat of marshmallows.  All of these things add up to well over $300, and much higher depending on cryptic attributes such as “thread count.

I bit the bullet and got all of the stuff for the middle tier, but I’m waiting until NYC to actually put it on my bed, so I have no idea how it compares to what I have now.  I guess at the end of the day, it makes sense to go a little above and beyond for the place that you sleep, considering you spend so much time there.  My only fear is that getting a nicer bed and better bedding will only make it that much harder for me to wake up in the morning.  If that’s the case, I may have to switch to a bed of nails (which isn’t nearly as good as a bed for nailing…).

What do you get God for Christmas?  Omnipresents.

(And yes, I purposely wrote Mary instead of Merry.)

Upon entering the bathroom I noticed that O’Charley’s did what all good restaurants should,  and put newspapers up for each of the urinals.  I didn’t want to make a mistake I’ve made in the past, so I took a look at each of the papers to make sure I picked the right one to read.

It was at this time that another gentleman entered the restroom, finding me standing there, belt undone, standing in front of both urinals, trying to make a decision.

Yeah, some guy at O’Charley’s thinks I’m some kind of weirdo.

The other day I was baby sitting my little cousin, and he came crying to me because his guinea pig was motionless in his cage.  Sure enough, precious Jumbalya had passed on.  And just as my mother had done for me, I helped my little cousin understand the circle of life and mourn for the loss of his first pet.

I just wish I would have realized that not all pets can fit down the toilet.

(Note: None of this morbid story actually ever happened.  I never owned a fish, and I didn’t flush a guinea pig.  We cremated it.)

A.) Warn him about the hair before he accidentally eats it.

B.) Ignore it and pretend you didn’t see it.

C.) Secretly take the hair out when he’s not looking. 

If you answered ‘C’, you are correct.  As a friend, you don’t want him to accidentally swallow the hair.  But at the same time, you don’t want him to know about the hair, because then he’s just gonna be upset, get all mad at the restaurant and not finish the meal.  And if he doesn’t finish the meal, then there will be no chance of him eating the maggots that you strategically placed in the soup to begin with.

When I think about why I always wait to the last minute before getting gifts (after all, Christmas is always on the 25th, it’s not like it changes from year to year like Chanukah), I think it comes down to “deadlines.” The “deadline” (which comes from the old Roman days where if you missed a delivery date you were killed by a line of lions, or linons if you will…) for Christmas is December 23rd (not much is open on the 24th). The deadline for some of the other things I need to get done is sooner, so shopping falls by the wayside.

Now some of you might be thinking - “Doesn’t waiting till the last moment to get people gifts mean that you don’t really care about them?” And I say no. Survival is important to me, and to survive, I must have to food. To have food, I must have money to buy food. To have money, I must work. To work, I have to deliver on projects. To deliver on projects, I have to meet deadlines. Therefore, if I procrastinate on things pertaining to my own survival, clearly that’s what I do with things that are important to me. My family is important to me, so it’s only natural that I wait until the last minute to get them gifts. In fact, to get gifts early would be to say that I didn’t love them.

So take that all you over-ambitious early gift givers trying to make me feel bad. Take that.

I think one of the first things I’d do is buy a bunch of billboards in various places, and rather than advertise anything, I’d just display comic strips, funny jokes, or random pictures.  That, or just have my picture with various un-endorsements of products, and have them displayed right next to billboards for that product.  Like I always see Chipotle Billboards that say “Our Chicken and Pork is naturally and humanely raised.”  I want  to put up a billboard right next to it that says, “So then what do you do to get the steak?”

The next thing I’d do is buy a College Football Bowl Game.  I don’t think this would actually require all that much money, considering how many bowl games exist out there.  It’d be called the “Pride Bowl,” because I would invite the two most disappointing/embarassing teams of that season to gut it out in a loser takes “Biggest Loser” title home.  This year would clearly be Notre Dame vs. any team that finished with less than 2 wins.

And the last thing I’d would be to pay insanely hot people to do incredibly bad jobs.  There’d be the supermodel fast food worker, the Victoria’s Secret Angel bus driver, and the Playboy Bunny Garbage Man.  Not only would this be great for the shear number of double takes people would have when seeing them performing the job, but also the slew of euphemisms that could finally be heard for these professions - “I’ll give her a Biggie Size,” “I’ll pay $1.10 for a ride - caching,” and “Rehn Rehn Rehn - I hope she backs it up.”

For example, people like to start a story by saying “Hey, you guys wanna hear something funny?”  Nope, not me, who wants to have fun?  Of course I want to hear something funny, who doesn’t want to laugh?  I could use a hearty chuckle, a reduction of stress, and the burning of a few calories right now.  The problem is that most people are liars, and they don’t deliver on the goods as promised.  Their “funny story” turns into a 10-minute epic about their cat.

That’s why I’ve decided to start speaking up.  “Golly Sam, that does sound like a personal story about your cat getting stuck in a tree for 8 hours only to be rescued by your 8 year old neighbor, but I’m not sure that it qualifies as being a funny story.  You see, a funny story generally evokes laughter from the people listening, so you got my hopes up because I was expecting to laugh, yet that just didn’t happen.  Now I’m not saying I didn’t want to hear about ‘Jingles,’ I’m just saying let’s not lie about the quality of the story.”

Other false preambling includes “Want to hear something interesting?”, “To make a long story short,” and “Great news- I’m pregnant.”  So next time you hear one of these phrases, do your part to help people lie less and call them on it.