Personality Goes A Long Way

The problem with co-workers doing the bare minimum -- not just work-wise, but from a soft-skill, part-of-the-work-environment point-of-view -- is that they in fact are taking from other people, namely energy and morale.

The problem with This Guy isn't that he's quiet.  He is, but that is not the defining trait of This Guy.  There is more to him, and more accurate ways to describe him.  He is not just quiet, but he's also insular, incurious, inflexible, and inert.  Again, those aren't things that impact a work environment to the point where it violates policy.  But while it's not yelling or manipulation or backstabbing, it is a level of toxicity that infects the workplace.  And, yes, it's his fault.

I'm not going to get into details because if I get found out, I'll have to defend myself, and I prefer it happen when I just go off on him.  But the incidents that happened with This Guy today are passive-aggressive, non-verbal cues that accumulate my distrust of him.  The common theme among all these things is that he wants things done his way.  Again, there's nothing I know of that is forbidden in my company to do things your way, so long as the work gets done.  But it's inevitable when you're working in the same department that you either physically cross each other, or your work crosses each other's work, and I have noticed that he does something in reaction to something I have done, and he does it precisely because he didn't like the way I did it, and so he's going to correct it.  Most other people, including the others in this room, would let it go and let it flow.  Not him.  Because even though it really isn't any skin off his ass, he would much, uh, prefer his workspace (which inevitably overlaps with my workspace) just so.

Such persnickety behavior kind of led me to kind of blow up today -- not directly over what he said, and I hope that is how he took it, but maybe he took like I was blowing up on him, and maybe I shouldn't care.  Anyway, upon further reflection it would make sense not to do what I was going to do.  But first of all, he nor anyone else never told me not to do this.  Second of all, what I was about to do was something I was, in fact, trained to do, and I am at work to work.  And finally, even if it makes sense not to do this, This Guy clearly stopped me just because he wanted shit his way.  Most of his micro-aggressions stem from him wanting things his way, and believing that his way is the right way.  And honestly, I would be OK with that ... if he were not insular, incurious, inflexible, and inert.  Like Jules Winnfield said in Pulp Fiction when asked by Vincent Vega if dogs are as filthy as pigs, personality goes a long way.  This Guy?  He's got none.  It would help my cause, and his cause, a lot if he were to engage in small talk, or even a cordial conversation about his day.  But he won't.  I get nothing from him except, "No, this is how it should be done."  It's frustrating.  And he's insufferable.

And it is taking all my willpower not to troll him by continuing to do things to which he needs to correct.  As pissed as I get when I witness his micro-aggressions after what I do, he is doing these things only because he cannot let it go and let it flow, that he can't stand it when things aren't done the way he likes them.  Should I continue to piss him off, just so I can shatter his perfect world where everything's all about him?  I think I will. ...

Bad Driver: Driver Of White Minivan Whose License Plate I Did Not Look At, To Which I Am Bitter About Forgetting

OK, so this asshole drove fast enough to not cut me off, but change onto my lane several dozen yards in front of me.  (This is going to work this morning, by the way.)  This car, a white minivan, maybe a domestic, turns on its right-turn signal to jerk its way onto Lindau, but then veers back left in order to remain on Killebrew.  And too fucking bad for me, that's exactly where I'm going.

Knowing my life, I knew where this was headed, and I knew where he was headed.  At a stoplight close to the Mall Of America, I get onto the lane to his right to see who this fucker is.  It's an Asian man, maybe Tibetan, and dangling on his rearview mirror was some pendant or amulet.  Didn't look like he was a road rage driver.  If anything, he looks more like a guy high on meth or something.  Sure as hell drives like that.

Asshole driving all the way -- the burning acceleration from stops, the tailgaiting, the sense that this guy might be crazy enough to run over a car or dare take a turn in front of an onrushing vehicle.  He did each of those things right to the lot where I park my car, at work.  I'm glad I didn't follow his bitch ass right to a spot, but he took the next right over, and as I was parking, he stopped at the rear of the parking lot and ... well, I went to park my car, so I lost him.

But I was curious as to who the hell this guy is, so after I parked, instead of walking into the warm building, I went the other way, braving the whipping cold wind while trying to locate this a-hole minivan.  And I couldn't find him.  Maybe he drove off.  Or, maybe he parked because -- my God -- he fucking works here.  I don't know this because, once again, when this prick was driving dangerously in front of and beside me, I didn't remember to look at and remember this guy's license plate.  Yeah, I know that the reason I didn't look down at the plate is because I'm driving and it's dangerous to divert your attention from the road.  But shit, getting information about bad drivers is also important to me, and I kick myself after I turn off my car and I realize I didn't even take a look at the license.

So now I don't know if this guy is someone I'll cross downstairs at the cafeteria, or if I'll share an elevator with this jerk.  What if we cross paths again?

Reasons Why This World Cup Of Hockey Is Already A Big Mistake

Hey, today marks the beginning of the World Cup Of Hockey!  Don't you know that?  Come on, it's now the biggest hockey tournament in the world for players playing for their country!  And you don't know that it's beginning today?

Well ... actually, yes, it is, in fact, quite possible that you didn't know that this is World Cup Of Hockey season.  And that is a problem -- not for you or the casual fan or even hardcore hockey fans, but for the WCH itself.  The National Hockey League and its Players' Union decided to resurrect this tournament, which has ancient roots in the Canada Cup, because they no longer wanted to abide by the terms the International Ice Hockey Federation mandated for NHL players and the NHL when they participated in the Winter Olympics.  When it was announced that there would be a 2016 iteration of this World Cup Of Hockey, I took it to mean that those two organizations decided in tandem to totally pull its players out of the Olympics for the time being.  Recent rumblings have hedged that; maybe they'll also go to Pyeongchang two years after this tournament, which will take place entirely in Toronto over the next two weeks just before the NHL season begins.

But if the NHL and NHLPA thinks this is going to be a success, they're fooling themselves.  I am a fairly ardent hockey fan, and I love when players from any sport play for country and not club.  But this idea, the World Cup Of Hockey in 2016, is a horrible idea, and if I am correct, this will prove to be a total effing failure, one that smart people should have seen coming and one that will have consequences beyond itself.

Why?  Here are my reasons, in no particular order.

1) You're doing this right in the middle of football season.  Yes, the NHL begins during the thick of football season, so there is no getting around it.  Still, this much ballyhooed tournament is like shouting at the top of your lungs into the gale of all those football fans after you tried talking in your indoor voice (in this tortured analogy, that's the NHL season) in the middle of said storm.  No one, at least no one in the United States, is talking about this tourney, not at all.  (Canada, at least in Toronto, is a different story, if seeing ads for it plastered everywhere in town is any indication.)  So the NHL or ESPN, the network exclusively carrying the WCH, is just throwing good money down the drain.

2) ESPN is the wrong network to carry this tournament -- or hockey, for that matter.  I remember when The Worldwide Leader broadcast hockey.  They did their best to popularize the sport.  They even, in an embarrassing effort to bring "rad" teens to hockey, put it mostly on ESPN2 when it had snazzy graphics denoting that it's the "cool" sports channel.  But there were howls of protest from diehard hockey fans who didn't think ESPN respected the sport enough to cover it with the dignity they felt the sport was entitled to.  I didn't necessarily buy into the whole bone of their contention, but I did feel that the sport was being squeezed when it came to network coverage and appeal from other sports that, admittedly, were more popular -- sports such as football, though it was far from the only one.

When it was announced several years ago that NBC Sports took the primary NHL package from ESPN (which, I don't think, put up much of a fight to retain), those hardcore hockey fans cheered.  Finally, they said, a network that would put hockey first.  The NBC Sports Network didn't have much of a choice back then; back then hockey was the only sport whose rights it had.  But because of that, NBCSN lavished heaps of attention on the only major sports property they had at the time, and they covered the games, and the game, quite well.  And they still do.

Now, NBC is the network to go to when it comes to hockey.  So why did the league and the players' union decide to give broadcast rights to what they are touting as the premier worldwide tournament in their sport to a network which many people even in the NHL believed was giving them short shrift?  NBCSN was the perfect fit: It's been good to the league, the tournament would naturally lead into the start of the season, and most important of all, it doesn't have football or baseball games that would conflict with the two-week tournament.  (It does have special events like the Ryder Cup and the Paralympics, but the NHL remains its most visible and reliable broadcast partner, so I believe they would easily make room for it.)  It seems like a win-win; the NHL has a broadcast partner that would promote them relentlessly (and probably with some positive spin), and the network has content that would bring in more ad dollars for them.

Instead, the World Cup Of Hockey is being aired by a network with no huge relationship with the NHL in the present, a very rocky relationship in the not-too-distant past, and lots of college football, baseball, and Monday Night Football games that will cannibalize ratings and divert attention away from the tournament, and it doesn't matter that ESPN has ocho channels and could put the entire tournament exclusively on one (it'll be on ESPN2 most of the time, I think).  The WWL is going to be concentrating on football when it doesn't concentrate on baseball.  This tourney, at best, will be the fourth wheel in coverage and newsworthiness, behind the NFL, college football, and MLB.  Why the NHL and NHLPA decided to lay down in this maelstrom, especially when they've been screwed over by this network before, is beyond me.

3) Not many people care about hockey.  Heck, I'll let you in on a little secret: Not even Minnesotans care that much about hockey, although when it comes to states we probably care more about it than every other state except, maybe, Massachusetts.  All this self-generated hype is falling on deaf ears (again, at least here in the U.S. -- I think they're going nuts over it in Canada).  So while putting this on NBCSN would probably be the best situation, it's still going to be drowned out by the other sports being played this time of year.  Heck, the NHL usually gets the shaft when it comes to the sports fan's consciousness, especially when the NBA season starts up.  So I don't think the dividends and impressions the league will actually get from the staging of the WCH will come anywhere close to what they think it will be.

4) The World Cup Of Hockey has no history.  The last time it was played was all the way back in 2004, when the seventh and eighth teams in the eight-team tournament were Germany and Slovakia, games were played in several countries on both sides of the pond, and even I managed to attend the quarterfinal and semifinal games played at the Xcel Energy Center.  I still have the plastic souvenir cup.  (For the record, the U.S. beat Russia in the quarters but lost to Finland in the semis, and gosh, there was this hot Finn chick sitting a few seats to the left of me.  I thought Finns were such dour folk, but holding a beer in her hand she looked like a lot of fun, but I digress.)  The league is touting this as the next edition of this grand tournament, but it can't be if the last edition if it was a dozen years ago.  This obviously is as a dusty trinket hauled out of storage because the league finally decided they wanted to own the profits from a worldwide tournament that they feel they've been giving away to the IIHF whenever they go to the Olympics.

And by the way, before 2004, the World Cup, technically the first-ever World Cup Of Hockey, was last held in 1996.  That replaced the somewhat fabled Canada Cup, whose frequency was also all over the place -- going backwards, the last Canada Cup was 1991, and before it were '87, '84, '81 and '76.  So that tourney was held with much more frequency, but come on, they do another one in five years and then in three and then three and four and finally five?  The constantly changing intervals between tournaments suggest disorganization and, ultimately, an indifference to whether they want to hold a tournament of this type or not.

So, really, this is a brand-new tournament -- and one, like I said, that feels like a ginned-up sham because the NHL and NHLPA arrogantly thinks they can do their own thing and no one would be the wiser.  Sports fans who don't have their heads up their behinds can see through it ... and then they'll see past it as they channel-surf to the football or playoff baseball game.

And one other bad reason that isn't specifically about this World Cup but is tied into all of the reasons stated above:

5) The NHL needs the Olympics, and the Olympics needs the NHL.  When it comes to niche sports -- and let's face it, hockey is the Shemp of The Big Four Sports -- they need all the publicity it can get.  With the introduction of pros playing in the Olympics, and just as important, the fact that everyone knows that the Winter Olympics are held every four years, a cycle of buzz has been established, creating a popularity for this nation tournament that only helps the NHL when its season starts.  That has only gotten bigger with each passing Olympiad, and it at least partially led to the burgeoning contracts the league has extracted from NBC Sports when not too long ago its puny TV contracts were an embarrassment to the league.

But there can only be one tournament for a sport whose players play for country.  That is the Winter Olympics, whether the NHL and players' union like it or not, and they cannot simply replace that with their own tournament and make us fans think that it's legitimate.  We'll be all, "Get back into the Olympics, you hosers!"

This might end up being a lose-lose situation.  While the NHL and NHLPA may go down in flames over their contrived contraption, the Olympics (along with the IIHF and the International Olympic Committee) will see popularity on what arguably is the signature sport of the Winter Games (although you can make a case for figure skating) nosedive.  No one wants to see college players and scrubs man Team USA, Team Canada, or any country whose hockey federation forbids its players from playing in these games because it has the WCH instead.  And if the Americans that trot out to South Korea get hammered so badly they don't even get out of the group stage, the already anemic Winter Olympics ratings, which traditionally pale in comparison to the Summer Games, the most recent iteration of which (in Rio just over a month ago) fell into the toilet, will simply vanish.  Then where would the Winter Olympics be?

I still have a soft spot of thinking that the Olympics should be all about amateurism.  I have given up that ideal and just enjoyed seeing the best players in the world bearing flags on their jerseys, however -- so much so that if Team USA or any other Olympics squad goes back to sending amateurs because the NHL forbids its best players to play in that tournament, I won't watch.

Don't want to sound like Donald Trump, but this is a disaster in the making, and it'll create nasty ripple effects to the connected parties for years.  But go ahead, watch the World Cup Of Hockey and think it's really awesome and stuff.  I might even watch it; it's live sport in the daytime, so I can watch it while I'm working out.  Doesn't mean it's important, and it sure as heck doesn't mean it makes any darn sense, either.

Bad Driver: 007MT

Silver Ram pick-up.  This morning, driving to work.  The thing is, this guy had a firefighter's logo on his license plate.  Oh, so just because you fight fires means you can challenge me and then just cut me off when I'm trying to get to your lane before mine runs out?  And I see you jerking back-and-forth on 494 East.  Do you know where the hell you're going?  No, but you don't mind driving fast and pissing people off while you're figuring it out.

I am shocked and disappointed at civil servants who think they can road rage on the highway.  What an asshole.

Hate This Traffic

What I've decided I need to do is to cool my heels after work at the Mall of America.  I've told you this already, right?  Well, there have been times where I think I may have waited a bit too long.  As in, I leave around a quarter after 6 and get there at 7, and I think that it's possible that I would get home in the same 45-minute time period if I leave at 6.

I thought about that when I left the Megamall for home ... at a quarter after 6.  And I immediately had to reconsider that because I almost got into two accidents on 35WN.  First, I tried merging to the right, but at the last second I saw on my side mirror the car that, I swear, merged into that lane right before I tried to.  No, I didn't look at my blind spot over my shoulder.  Sue me.  Then, I had to brake really, really hard because of the car(s) in front of me.  I think that some idiot driver several vehicles ahead of me decide to stop right in the middle of the highway in order to merge to the right.  Dammit, that's so dangerous!  What is that moron thinking?

To top it all off, I decided to go watch Bridge Of Spies in the evening after reaching home ... after about 45 minutes.  While backing down my driveway, I didn't see the jogger scoot past behind me.  If I backed up all the way, I'm pretty sure I would have run the old dude over, and that reflective tape, by the way, didn't help none.  By the way, who in the hell jogs on a winter night?  It was a quarter after 7, for God's sake.

So I got into almost three accidents last night.  Still, that didn't deter me from leaving MOA at 6 tonight because, hey, I wanted to get home.  Luckily there were no close calls on the highway tonight, even though it is raining buckets right now.  I'm going to press said luck and go to the coffeehouse to do the Expenses Without Receipt(s) blog, which should be up soon.  And finally, I guess this means that I can leave a little closer to 6 from now on, just so I can catch the Bonus Round on Wheel Of Fortune.

I Have Three Pairs Of Shoes, But In Actuality Have None

One of the ways My Father shows me he loves me -- hey, try saying "I love you" once in your life!  Ah, too late, I'll probably think he's full of it -- is by buying me clothes.  A few weeks before they left, as I came home from "work," he pointed down at the new pair of shoes at the foot of the foyer rug and said, "Try this on, see if it fits you."  It didn't, but he brought them back to ... well, I'm guessing Kohl's and got a new pair for me to try on the next night.  This one was long enough and so it didn't pinch my toes.  So I said, "Yes, Father, these shoes work.  Thank you."  And I meant it sincerely.

But then he and Mother leave the country with not one but two new pairs of shoes.  One of the pairs I did try on; the other I didn't.  I didn't think it was necessary, but Father pointed out that the shoes I was currently using (shoes, by the way, that he bought for me) were falling apart.  I didn't think so ... but in the three or so weeks between him saying that and them getting out of town, everything on these shoes fell apart.  When I heard the bottom of the shoe scrape against the ground while I walked because it was hanging loose, that's when I knew I had to make the switch to the new shoes My Father bought me.

And that's when I realized something very, very important: Neither pair had removable insoles.  So I braved it and tried to wear both shoes without them.  The first one, a leather pair of ... well, I don't know if you call them boat shoes or if they're just moccasins, they were alright, but I could feel the weight of my left arch collapsing while wearing them at work Monday, and I wasn't so sure if I could keep wearing them.  So I tried the other pair, and this one was the exact one that I tried and said were totally fine (it was the mocs/boat shoes that I hadn't ever tried on, and I have no idea why Father decided to buy them for me), and after one Tuesday afternoon of wearing them at work I could feel my left leg land wrong whenever I took a step, to the point where I had an active and acute pain on my left hip.  I have no idea why I told him these shoes were fine; without the insoles that would prop up flat feet, they were absolutely painful to wear.

So with both shoes having no space for my insoles and the shoes I had tried on before being so obviously wrong for me that it was starting to get dangerous to wear, on Tuesday evening I reverted to a Plan C.  Through this now-defunct company/website affiliated with American Express, I bought a pair of Doc Martens for what I thought (and still believe) were rock-bottom prices.  I didn't need them at the time, but I couldn't pass up on a deal, so I figured I'd just store them until I needed them.  That time was now.  The thing is is that I bought them sight unseen; I tried to do as much research as possible, but I had no idea how they were going to fit my feet.  I didn't even know whether their insoles were removable.

Well, I opened up the box when I received this shipment (I received the shipment, by the way, about 18 months, two years ago) and was able to pry out the insoles that came with the Docs.  Good.  So now I'm wearing these.  Unfortunately I still feel pain -- not the the shocking pain from that pair of "good" shoes, but pain up and down my left leg and foot nonetheless.  (Of course, I have no idea if this pain is the result of the Doc Martens or lingering effects from walking in those "nice" shoes Father bought for me for a day.)  Furthermore, they are narrow and pinch my pinky toes, the right one way more than my left.  So every day since Wednesday, when I walk, I feel this throbbing pain from my baby toes, particularly the right one.  I'm such an oblivious masochist that I'll probably keep wearing them until the leather dries and peels.  But that may be because I bought these shoes on my own, so I'll be damned if I don't wear them out, regardless of a pain that may, in the long run, be worse than the two shoe pairs that don't allow for my own specially made insoles.

Bottom line is I have two pairs of shoes I can't (or at least shouldn't ) wear, and three pairs that cause varying degrees of pain.  Guess I just can't buy a pair of shoes that fit my feet just fine.

My Mother's Parenting, For The Next Generation

Ever since my niece was born I thought that my parents have mellowed out.  (Well, actually that's just Mother; Father remains very hands-off whenever they get to babysit her, although he apparently loves to get pictures of her.)  It would make sense; they can be nicer to her because they don't have to raise her.  It's so weird to see Mother (and Father to a lesser extent) smile, laugh, and act goofy around her -- basically to act like a grandmother.

I know that she didn't act that way around me.  The few memories I have of her (and that's only partially because I was young; I am sure that she worked so often at their businesses that she obviated parenting responsibility to Grandmother) are bad.  I remember my brother and I playing in the front yard and she would come out, screaming either at us or Grandmother to yell at us.  I remember her slapping my hand when I opened a lighter.  And she beat me.  A lot.  I mean, a lot.  Really, whenever she didn't beat me she was yelling at me.  She was so bad that I grew up fearing her -- and, when I got a little older, hating her.  She's mellowed out in my early adult years as Father turned into My Fucking Father, but I will never, ever forget nor forgive what she did to me when I was young.  She's half the reason I'm not going to have kids.

The parenting "skills" Mother exhibited on me, I'm afraid, came to the fore last (Saturday) evening, when my brother and sister-in-law left their daughter at home for us (mostly Mother but I sat and looked at her a long time too) so they could do some stuff around this part of town.  Mother was her bubbly self as we ate dinner and my niece was grabbing things.  After Mother got finished eating she sat her granddaughter on the couch to feed her; I was too tuckered out walking around the lake and watching babes, then watching this baby, so I retreated into the bedroom.  While I was tweeted about tomorrow's party I hear, "What?  You're not going to eat?  I'll beat your ass!  Your mother and father aren't here, so I'll beat your ass if you don't eat!"

Oh no.  Then I thought, Oh, hell no.  And then I thought, Oh, fuck no.  As tired as I was, I got up off of my bed and marched out to the living room to make sure she doesn't slap her, and I didn't give two flying fucks if she wasn't eating.  But she was, and because of that, Mother turned all happy and smiling and making coo-coo noises again, because her niece obeyed her.

I wonder if Mother understands how two-faced she just became.  Was she raised that being sweet to a baby, then threatening her, looks weird to a third party?  It seemed fucked up to me when she was doing that to me.  That's why I've grown to never truly love her like a child is supposed to love his/her mother.

My niece didn't finish all of her food, but instead of beating her, Mother relented and took her to the bathroom to wipe her face.  Phew, she didn't go completely crazy.  So I went back to my bedroom to tweet stuff.  Then my brother and sister-in-law came home, and so I sauntered back out to say goodbye to them and to my niece.  But for some reason they sat down in the living room and just hung out while Mother continued to play with my niece (and Father was all the way in the dining room, just admiring his granddaughter).

Then Mother started to do this thing where she would "scare" her, or at least throw her hands at her and scream.  Eventually my niece started to yell, loud, every single time Mother did that.  Man, she can scream.  But while she wasn't crying, like I probably would if I had some stranger I only saw at night try to come at me, I never got the feeling that she was yelling in exhortation.  I think she was scared.  And Mother kept doing that, without stopping once to consider what my niece might be going through.

What happened next floored me.  As Mother kept frightening my niece and my niece kept screaming every time she did that, my brother yelled his daughter, "Stop yelling!"  It's the first time I've ever seen him act nasty toward her.  But she didn't tell his mom, Mother, to stop.  He was telling my niece to shut up.  Why?  Couldn't he see that my niece was yelling only because Mother kept scaring her?  I don't think Mother has the self-awareness (or maybe even the intelligence) to comprehend what she is doing, but my brother is college-educated.  What's his fucking excuse?

I have one theory: He likes being "old school."  I'll tell you guys a secret: I think Mother has always liked my brother more than me.  Growing up I can count numerous times where she came down hard on me while giving my brother a pass.  (My Grandmother was the complete opposite.  I don't know if that was in reaction to how Mother treated the both of us, but that has to be the reason why I gravitate and continue to be loyal to Grandmother even after Mother has put her out of mind.)  So if that's the case, he will endorse Mother's "parenting skills" and incorporate them into his own.

That, to me, if true, is absolutely despicable.  That would mean that, to paraphrase the famous axiom, the sins committed by the mother is continued by the son.  Now I have even more reason not to have kids: I don't want them raising them, at all.  And I fear, I really, really am frightened, how he (and by extension, I'm afraid, his wife) treats my niece behind closed doors, without me around.

Hope To Whip Out My Pee-Pee Again

OK, so I was at this party a few weeks ago.  This is a different house party, not hosted by *e** but by a girl who still dances at My Favorite Stripclub (Non-Cover Version), ********a.  This was, I think, my fourth time going to this party.  It wasn't my favorite, to be honest, because before I came over for my first visit ********a said I had to keep it in my pants.  Oh, darn.

Still, she invites me over.  I've been good to all the dancers there; I've gotten one dance from each girl working the party that night.  But if there is no contact, let alone extras, why would I go?  Nevertheless I went to this one.  First of all, ********a invited me personally through Facebook.  Second of all, I've missed the past couple parties she's thrown, and I don't want to completely lose her favor.  Third of all, the roster of four was the strongest of my four visits there, including two girls, *****y and *****e, that still work at My Favorite Stripclub (Non-Cover Edition).  While this house party is tame (or purports to be tame), the rules at this place are different than those at My Favorite Stripclub (Non-Cover Division) -- specifically, you are allowed to touch the stripper's breasts.  And those two girls have tits I've wanted to lay hands on for years.  Finally, I'm still a fucking pervert, so I'm not gonna stop trying to take out my pee-pee at this place in the hopes that one of them will placate my evil urges and touch my dick.  One girl groped me the last time I went, thus I'm encouraged.

So soon after I got there the fourth girl, ****a, asked me if I wanted to get a dance from her.  She's really hot: nice-sized boobs that are real, let's me see the cooch once in a while.  I had no complaints.  So we went downstairs where, luckily for me, *****y was finishing up with another fat guy customer as we were starting.  And just like that, my dick got hard.  Come on, two girls!

But I had to play it cool.  I needed to make sure that this guy didn't see as he went back upstairs.  Then, even though this was not part of my plan, only fortuitousness, I told ****a that it was just my luck *****y was down there because now I could just ask her down there for a dance after I got done with ****a.  No worries, ****a said -- she just asked *****y to not follow the guy he gave a lap dance to upstairs and instead wait around for me.

Then, I was wondering what to do with my erection.  Neither of these girls have seen it before, and if neither of them liked me taking it out (or, worse, both of them didn't like it), I would be facing a 2-on-1 down there, by myself, with no one being able to hear me.  Well, some of the guys upstairs would be able to hear me, and then they'd probably do what they'd order them to do, which is kick my ass.  So I wasn't going to just take it out right in front of them.  Hopefully there'd be an easier way of doing that, such as them taking it out for me.

Instead, surprising me, it kind of slipped out on its own.  I always wear my porno pants to house parties like these, and I always make sure the fly's open so I have easy access.  It rarely ever comes out anymore, mostly because my penis isn't hard enough at these places to have enough strength to slip through the hole.  But seeing two gorgeous women around me made me salute.

I felt the wind from ****a's gyrations on my dick; that's when I thought something was, uh, "wrong."  Then, the only light in the basement cast a light on the left side of my pee-pee.  *****y may or may not have spotted it, but ****a was lying across my legs, left to right, so she didn't see it.  I was at a crossroads: Tuck myself back in, or take it out.  I decided to be conservative and reholstered myself.  I don't know if I could offend two people at once.

I still don't know if ****a got a look, but, being the pervert that I am, I hope she did and didn't mind.  Later in the night she left the party.  She had been complaining about all the smoke inside the house triggering her asthma, but when I said something like, "Do you need a ride home?" (see, I'm always a pervert) she snapped at me.  Maybe she did see it.

---

It was ****a who made her way upstairs after our hot dance, leaving the entire basement to me and *****y.  This place is rarely empty; there are usually several guys there, and they do pay the money to get dances from the strippers that work.  Having a very rare 1-on-1, I was less concerned about *****y seeing my hard cock.

And you know, maybe it was the way I was lying on the bed or something, but OMG, it popped out again!  And this time *****y did see it.  She was about to sit on top of me I think when she saw my hard-on.  "Wow, it's got a mind of its own!" to which I replied ... something.  I hope it was funny, but I don't remember if I was able to stammer out anything at all.

*****y always has a poker face.  Hell, I don't even consider her one of the nicer dancers at My Favorite Stripclub (Non-Cover Version), plus she has an overrated face.  But she's got one of the nicest bodies there.  She upgraded her tits, which I was able to feel (you can tell they're fake, but they're spectacular nevertheless).  She didn't seem to care, and it didn't look like she told ********a that it came out.  However, later in the party, we sat at opposite ends of the couch talking to another guy that was hanging out there.  I was kind of slapping her in such a way to get her attention, you know, because I wanted to interject into the conversation, when this other guy kept talking.  Well, as I was waiting for this other guy to finish, *****y saw my hand, slapped it away and got up from the couch.  Okaaaaaaaaay.

I'm going to get a dance from her at the stripclub, just as a peace offering.

---

*****e was next.  I thought she was going to be the prize of the party, so as soon as I saw she was free, I asked that we go downstairs.  As much as I wanted to grab her real but small tits, it was her rocking abs that I wanted to touch more.  She's walking sex, y'all.  And she was wearing a Vikings bikini, the front of the top of which she pulled down to reveal her breasts.

It was hard, but it did not come out.  Good thing, because there was someone else right there.

---

********a was last.  As she was the last time, she was drunk as fuck.  Last party I bit into her humongous breasts so hard she recoiled in horror.  I made sure to respect her request never to do that again.  Anything else, however, is in play, in my opinion.

It did not get hard.  ********a's really smart, and she's really nice.  But she's, at best, buxom, and beyond rubbing her tits over my pants, I don't get hard when she's on top of me.  This time, however, I did get a semi.  And after we were done, she did see that semi and groped it.  Ding-ding-ding!!!  We were alone, and my back was towards the staircase, so I said, "Hey, you want to touch it for real?" and I whipped it out!  To which she said, "No, not here!!!" and I playfully tucked myself back in.

********a was not mad after I did that.  How do I know that?  Because she invited me to her next party.  Which is tonight.  And although *****y isn't there (boy, she must really be mad at me), ****a and *****e will be.  I think it's time I whipped it out on them -- hopefully alone.  Best of all, ****e* will be there instead.  Not only do I need her number, which I lost when my cellphone got all jacked up, but we've been talking for some time for extras.  This would be a great occasion to arrange that -- or to actually get that.  Wish me luck!

The Things I Hate About The Home Remodel

A day short of a month ago I listed all the things I liked about the house remodel.  So it's long overdue to list the flip side.  But there are so many things that I hate about the remodel.  Where to begin?

1. That Father changed the wastebasket in my upstairs bathroom.  We had, for the longest time, just a small yellow plastic trash can that had a deep crack on its side.  And it did the job.  Why?  'Cause it's a fucking wastebasket to throw all your shit-stained toilet paper in.  But for some goddamn reason, after he threw out Grandmother and redid the whole bathroom, he sought to replace that perfectly functional wastebasket with a sleek, state-of-the-art stainless steel wastebasket.  That's all well and good, even though it is totally unnecessary when you note its sole purpose in life.  And it has a lid, so that the guests who we never invite over won't catch a glimpse of those streaks of shit on our used up toilet paper.  The lid opens with a foot pedal, which really pisses me off because I now have to multitask when throwing away my shit-filled toilet paper.  Who in the fuck has to use his heel and wait for the lid to open to dispose of his toilet paper?  This guy, right fuckin' here.  And whenever My Fucking Father rampages through the house with a mop, he pushes aside the wastebasket with the mop so he can clean the floor.  So whenever I go take a shit, I see the wastebasket pinned all the way back to a corner, way behind me and beyond my reach, so I have to fucking reach over and haul the garbage can over and put it close to my side so that I can touch the pedal with my heel in order to open up the can to throw my shit-filled toilet paper in.  Why am I working so goddamn hard when I'm taking a dump?!?!?!  What a stupid fucking decision.
2. The toilet paper role dispenser is now attached at a different place.  Before it was well within my reach against the outside wall.  But for some goddamn reason, the contractor who did this and My Fucking Father drilled the new holes closer to me -- way closer to me.  Now, instead of reaching out to get the toilet paper, I now have to reach back, really bend my elbow and crimp my shoulder behind my back in order to get it.  So imagine the tableau: I am reaching back with my left hand for my toilet paper, pulling that paper all the way across my body to pass it over to my right hand, wiping my ass, then stretching down with my right heel to open up the garbage can so I can drop the shit-stained paper into it with my right hand (this of course after I had to reach back with my right hand to nudge the wastebasket forward from the corner).  What the fuck was the contractor thinking changing the spot where the toilet paper dispenser connects to the wall?  Why did he have to fucking move it?  Finally, I say again: Why am I working so goddamn hard when I'm taking a dump?!?!?!
3. The clock on the wall is no longer there.  I don't know when or who, but one day they installed a small wall clock right above where the piano was for a long, long time.  It was a square-shaped clock with a picture of a loon in the middle of the number of clock.  And all it did was work, consistently and without any drama.  It ran on one single AA battery, and I don't remember if I ever needed to replace it.  Seriously.  Also, it was in the same place for many years of my life, at the end of the hall right above the piano.  That turned out to be a great place to put a clock; I learned that if I needed to know what the time was, I just had to go to our living room (that we never use) and look up and it'll be there, and it'll usually be right.  That's how it has been for years.  We even took it for granted; it was just there for us to keep track of the time.  But then My Fucking Father had the brick wall on which was ensconced de-bricked and painted over.  And he didn't put up the clock that did nothing except give us the time, every time.  Instead he put up these ... oh, I'll call them art pieces.  Nothing wrong with putting them up, but I don't know where the clock is.  My Fucking Father continues to change things around the house even though things worked perfectly.  And I still catch myself automatically looking up at the place in the wall where the clock was when I need to know the time and I get pissed off because I depended on it even though I didn't realize it till it was gone.
4. The new counter is too high off the ground.  I've blogged about this before: It's now a bitch to use it when I want to clip my toenails.  Still pissing me off.
5. The level of the floor is now different in the upper floor.  Part of the upper floors has a wood floor; the other half had linoleum that I remember a long time ago my parents (with the help of family and a contractor) putting down.  It was getting old, but otherwise I had no issue with it.  But apparently My Fucking Father did, and the contractor he hired after the contractors that skipped out on us (have I talked about them yet?) wanted the linoleum gone.  I believe they first tried ripping the linoleum out, but last time I saw just the linoleum on the ground the contractor only managed to rip out one tile.  My feeling is that they decided then to just put the new floor, marble tile, on top of the linoleum instead.  Don't know if being able to rip out the linoleum would have made a difference, but in any case we now have two fairly different grades of floor on the upper floor: While the living room, main hallway, upper bath and my room have the wood floor, the dining room, kitchen, the two auxiliary rooms and the hallway leading to such are on the marble tile floor that's raised by at least half an inch.  I haven't tripped over it or stubbed my toe on it yet, nor can I envision a case where the difference in level will be a problem.  But I still think it looks kind of ghetto.
6. The toilet is not level, and I know that it's not level because the water in the bowl is not resting evenly. I noticed this well after the bathroom was renovated.  One day, I don't know, several weeks ago I noticed as I walked in and looked into the toilet bowl that there was more water to the left of the ... uh ... (looking online real quick for "parts of a toilet bowl") ... opening at the base of the bowl where all the water and body waste goes through than the right.  You would think that any normal toilet would rest such that each point at the rim of the water would be equidistant towards the exact center of the toilet bowl if you're looking down at it, you know what I mean?  Doesn't really matter in the long run, I don't think, but you would think a toilet should be level to the ground and therefore symmetrical, no?
7. The toilet seat is sliding to the point it's slipping off the rim of the toilet.  Started noticing this only a few days ago.  One day I was taking a shit and it felt like the back of my left upper leg was getting cold, like it was resting against the side of the toilet.  I then looked over to my left and saw that the seat had slid to the right, allowing my left leg to, indeed, rest against the rim of the bowl.  This was a problem I had to deal with with the old toilet.  Somehow years of sitting on it smashed the little rectangular left foot of the toilet seat.  That foot was made of rubber, I think, which made it much harder to move the seat while your ass is fidgeting while sitting on it as you're reaching around to wipe your ass or, I don't know, you're just fidgeting.  This toilet seat doesn't have two rubber feet but four plastic, uh, indentations.  None of them are broken, yet.  But I did confirm that the seat is not flush against the toilet.  I'm pretty sure it was screwed on right.  I just think that when I reach around to wipe my ass (with my right hand) I pivot on my left ass bone to lift up my right butt check so I can reach my anus, and I think that pivot creates rotational force that goes from right to left.  Guess I've done it so much that the toilet seat's unhinged to the point where it's now pulling to the right.  This is something that could get really annoying if it gets worse.

My Fucking Father, in his infinite wisdom, has been varnishing these old wood ... things that go between the base of the walls and the floor.  What do you call them?  He's been doing this the past couple nights, and he's been using a fan in order to dry them.

What I didn't know -- or he didn't tell me -- is that some of these are going to go up where my bedroom now is.  He did this last night, except that it wasn't as dry as it was supposed to be.  So he turned on a fan to dry off the varnish around, say, 9 o'clock.  And the fan was pointed so that the fumes from the varnish would seep into my bedroom.

So, all of a sudden, I start to feel dizzy and faint.  To the point where I had to step outside three fucking times, in the cold and (albeit beautiful) snowfall to clear my head.  I have no fucking idea if My Fucking Father knows what varnish can do to you if you smell it long enough, but there's a warning right on the can that says you need proper ventilation.  You don't get proper ventilation on a winter's night, when it's snowing and 9 degrees outside and when the only thing blowing throughout the house is heat.

I had to do something, so I took the fan and turned it around.  The only way I could get the fan pointed away from my bedroom is to plug it into my bedroom, and luckily Grandmother's bedroom has an outlet just inside the door.  I felt a little better after stepping outside anyway, but I was really miffed that the goddamn varnish fumes were being blown right toward me.  In my more paranoid moods, I would have thought My Fucking Father wanted it that way.  Probably, though, he just didn't think about my well-being.

---

That fan was there for about half-an-hour.  That's when, inevitably, My Fucking Father went upstairs to tend to the fan.  He wasn't bent out-of-shape that I moved the fan.  Unfortunately, looking at the fan meant he could peer into the crack of my door that I had to keep open for the wire to the fan.

While he told me to put the fan away, he thought it was a good occasion to say, "Whenever you have time, clean up your room."

FUCK YOU, GODDAMMIT!!!!!!!!!!!!  THIS WAS A TRAP, I KNEW IT WAS A TRAP!!!!!!!!!!!

Actually, that's not how I feel.  This is how I feel: My Fucking Father set me up.  By not caring that the fumes were being carried into my bedroom, I was forced to open up what I consider to be my private space.  I had a feeling that he was, in my opinion, going to take advantage of that, and he did, and he wouldn't have if I didn't leave the crack in my door open, which I had to do because I wanted the varnish fumes to be blown away from me.

In other words, this is all My Fucking Father's fault.  On top of this, he had no idea that I, in fact, did clean my room yesterday afternoon and evening while I was cooped up because I had nowhere to go because it was snowing outside.  But again, he doesn't care.  All he cares about is me cleaning my room to a level that I'm not aware of specifically, but is probably unobtainable.

God, I hate My Father.  I really, really hate My Fucking Father.

---

I played a waiting game this morning to see if they would leave before they would know I woke up.  I could lie awake in bed for hours, contemplating stuff.  I woke up at 9 (I was so fucking depressed and tired that after watching the rerun of Saturday Night Live I just fell asleep) and was waiting for them to, you know, leave.  But they didn't.

It's a little after 11:30 and they still haven't.  Oh my God, are they not leaving?  Have they closed The Store permanently??  Is this is my worst nightmare finally made real???

I had to get up; if they're not leaving, I had to get up.  Good thing, too, because about a half-hour ago My Fucking Father bellowed from outside my bedroom, "Is Unforgivable Wetness (he doesn't call me that, by the way, I'm just hiding my identity) not up yet?!?!?!"  I was up, and since I had just changed my sheets I technically was cleaning my room.  And I said such: "I'm cleaning my room!"

He left me alone.  But not before Mother said something that angered My Fucking Father: "Are you kidding me?  It's such-and-such a time and he's not up yet???" or something like that he said.

So now it's a quarter to noon and they're ... not leaving.  My intention is to get away from these fucking people as quickly as possible, by eating out for lunch and then exercising, only coming home as the Super Bowl's about to start.

But goddamn, My Fucking Father is pissed off.  I have yet to step out of this bedroom.  And I have no idea what's waiting for me once I step out.

If it's anything worth writing, I'll let you know what happens.  If my next blog post or two is about other things, well, shit's blown over.

The Most Gross Thing I've Seen In A Long Time

Was at the NCAA women's volleyball tournament at the Sports Pavilion.  Creighton swept Marquette in three tight sets decided by a total of seven points, then Minnesota swept Liberty, but not before the Lady Flames took the Golden Gophers to the edge in the third, 34-32.

But that's not what I want to talk about.  I want to talk about why I hate taking a shit in public, even if I have been resigned to taking a shit in public.  When you gotta go, you gotta go, you know?  But I always hate doing it because of the possibility that someone else would shit in the stall next to me.  I know it's natural, but I don't need to hear a stranger's scatological noises.

I took a dump at work today because I had a banana in the morning.  My mistake was going down to the ground floor bathroom.  I didn't want to use the bathroom up in the floor I work at because other guys at the place I work use it, and I might be in the very awkward position of hearing my supervisor or another guy at work grunting and shitting feces through his asshole.  No, thank you.  I might get so disgusted I would quit right then and there.

But I keep forgetting that other people who are entering the office building would use the ground floor bathroom.  And mere seconds after I went into the stall at a bit after 11, which I think is the beginning of lunch hour, what seemed like a group of people went into the bathroom to relieve themselves.  One guy took the second, other stall.  Thank goodness he wasn't loud.  In fact, I don't remember much beyond a couple forlorn farts.  But I swear that the guy following him (I don't know if he was with him or not) wanted to use my stall and saw my feet.  And then there were two other guys talking to each other at the urinals.  My God, it's like these men were congregating in the bathroom, even if they probably weren't together.

But anyway, onto the Sports Pavilion.  I had a pizza at the eatery on the ground floor at work before leaving for the Pav in time to catch the Bluejays-Golden Eagles game at 4:30.  But I thought I needed to shit.  Even though I guess I could have held it in, I decided that because I had arrived well before the first match was supposed to start and the crowd would be sparse because only fans of the two non-local teams would be there, I would just dook there.

I guess I thought in passing I would have complete quiet, but I didn't.  However, I don't think it would've been this hectic.  I took the middle of three stalls.  Someone used the one on the left, then someone used the one on the right.  And this asshole on the right, he kept farting and farting and farting.  Then I heard his belt buckle jingle, indicating to me that he was about to be done.

But then I heard no noise at all.  Then I heard some rubbing, like he took toilet paper and starting wiping his ass with it, but wouldn't stop and kept wiping and wiping and wiping his ass.  Except that what he was wiping didn't sound like his ass.  More like fabric or something.

That was the noise that creeped me out and got my blood boiling.  He sounded so gross in there that I was going to punch him if I saw him face-to-face and he did something weird towards me.

I bolted out the door and towards the sink.  Thank Buddha he didn't leave at the same time.  But he did exit while I was washing my hands.  It was an old guy, who had that time of hairstyle where he was bald at the top but had long hair around the sides and back of his head.  He had on these old sneakers that I saw underneath the divider between the stalls.  And he had this brown pleather jacket, very 70's-like.

He shuffles out of the stall ... then leaves the bathroom without either flushing the fucking toilet or washing his fucking hands.  Oh, are you fucking kidding me?!?!?!  The last time I saw something that fucking gross was when I was defecating at the Ridgedale library; some guy pushed the door of the stall next to me open, dropped his pants, quickly evacuated his wet bowels, and got up and left without flushing the toilet or even wiping his ass.  He was in and out in, like, five minutes.  This reminded me of that, and it just about made me throw up.  Now I was going to punch him if I saw him face-to-face because he already did something weird towards me.  I'm glad he wasn't the Seinfeld cook.

When I was done drying my hands I held up my coat so, when I walked past that dirty fucker's stall, it would be between me and ... that.  And I looked off to the other side, the right side, just to make sure.

The bathroom door was propped open for some reason.  Thankfully no one was in there while I was washing my hands.  But as I was leaving the bathroom some guy walked up to it, turned his head as if he finally found the men's bathroom, and passed me as he was going in.  Great -- now he's going to look at that fucking pile of shit in that goddamn toilet and forever think I did that.

Grandmother's Food-Wasting Problem

Have I talked about this before? Returning from a full day of sitting on my ass in a hospital bed for an experiment, I shove the jar of piss into the fridge, only to see, once again, a brown goo leaking at its floor. I still don't know what it is; all I know is that it happens when there's a lot of vegetables down in that refrigerator floor sitting for a long, long time.

That there are a bunch of veggies down there is Grandmother's fault. She still has this problem of using her welfare money to buy food that, by and large, none of us don't eat. It is one of the two main things -- forgetting things that puts the house in peril, such as forgetting to turn off the sink or close the back door -- that leads Father to push for Grandmother's move into a nursing home. It is a prime bone of contention for him. It's a mere pain in the ass for me, but I can't ignore the fact that Father is going to go off if he sees this tomorrow. Hell, he might have done that already and decided not to clean it up because he was too sick and/or tired.

Which means I have to step in. I wanted to help out at The Store, but I know these vegetables piling up is going to be a big problem, and I need harmony at the house before The Store, even if it is, um ... sorry, it's still hard for me to say. So after I drop off my piss at the U. and go to the mall for my free chocolate, I'm going to spend some time cleaning out the fridge, figuring out what needs to be thrown away and mentally tabulating how much Grandmother wasted on food.

(Oh, and there are four gallons of skim milk in the fridge. Two of them have expired. My fucking God, what is wrong with her that makes her buy so much shit?)

I doubt Grandmother will protest. All she will do is buy more food none of us eats again.

I don't think that's enough of an issue to throw her into a nursing home. It's just so annoying that sometimes I want to. That's all.

Why Is NPR Pissing Their Pants Because Of Some Right-Wing Cheap Shot Artist?

This is a couple weeks ago, but did you know that the head of National Public Radio was "resigned?"  And because some other top official was caught saying that right-wingnut teabaggers were racist?

First of all, this guy, Ron Schiller, a Vice-President with NPR, was right about right-wingnut teabaggers being racist.  Second of all, this was yet another set-up by that lying little prick, James O'Keefe.  He's the asshole who brought down ACORN and cost Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod her job, even though it turns out the hidden videotapes used to "out" ACORN and Sherrod were heavily edited.

No matter.  Ron Schiller apparently "resigned" about a week before the hidden camera leak.  Afterward, there was so much heat that NPR was the true racists that its CEO, Vivian Schiller, was effectively told to follow him out the door.  (Ron and Vivina Schiller are not related, which raises an non-sequitir question: Can you think of a last name less common than "Schiller" that two unrleated people in the same story share?  I can't.)

I'm still stunned that an institution as huge and as vaulted as National Public Radio would be shaken to its core by the ambushes by some punk-ass kid.  I mean, look at this fucker.  He brought down NPR?

But it's the same political stereotypes at work again, manifesting itself to intensely I'm once again starting to think they're not stereotypes.  Republicans are evil, duplicitous, cagey cheaters that can drum up false evidence to use as ammunition for their frequent verbal abuse disguised as self-victimization.  And Democrats are innocent, unsavvy, idealist schmucks who see they're getting yelled at from all sides and, in an effort to show that they're "above it all," decides to keep the peace by sacrificing themselves.  And O'Keefe and the right-wingnut teabaggers win again -- although media critics have since scrutinized the tape O'Keefe released about the lunch with the NPR exec and basically said, There's more shit going on here.  And although Ron Schiller was doing nothing but telling the truth.  And although James O'Keefe looks like he does.

Esquire gets it right: Fear is ruling the day, and the Republicans are the ones wielding it.  Come on, NPR, I want to like you.  I hated you back when I was assigned to listen to you by my college journalism professor, but now that I'm closer to death I listen to All Things Considered every afternoon.  Conservatives think you're too liberal, and liberals think you're too conservatve, which means you must be doing something right.

But the way you immediately go to the PR crisis playbook and execute the first rule -- fire the people in the middle of the controversy -- upon the first whiff of a hit piece by some guy who, as Esquire said, "by all rights should be shucking crawfish in a Louisiana prison farm," is bizarre.  Be like a Republican-run corporation and grow some balls for once.  Say something like, "I do not like the comments Ron Schiller made in that piece of videotape, but we recognize the source as someone who has heavily doctored similar videos in the past, so until James O'Keefe agrees to give us his unedited evidence, Mr. Schiller remains an employee of NPR."

See?  You should've done that.  Now it looks like you droppe a deuce in your tighty-whities because of some 26-year-old.  When you could have proven yourselves to be a paragon of rectitude you turned into a house made out of straw, demolished by an underhanded douchelord blowing his hot air.

Sad and pathetic.

Father's Home -- Yay?

The mood at home is night-and-day when Father's away.  I can breathe easier at home.  My heart beats a little lighter at home because Mother usually doesn't give a shit.  It's been that way the past four days.  It may have helped that his vacation coincided with the break in the weather; while it was humid when he left, it's been mighty comfortable -- perfect late-summer weather -- since being gone.

Tonight I hunkered down for his return.  Actually, I thought I was going to enjoy one last supper in peace with Mother, but she was kind of a bitch tonight, yelling at me while she was fluttering about making this huge dinner only three of us would eat.  Whatever.  Father called around this time; he excitedly talked to me about buying this condo, but I acted distracted, as if I was doing something else at the time, because if I had let him know I was in good spirits, he'd find a way to shut me down.

Expectations seemed pretty low when I realized that there was some traffic on the way down to the airport; for some reason there was construction going on in an area connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul, and for some reason there were a lot of people going through this area at 10:30 at night.  It took about 25 minutes to get through that fuckin' area, so I was 15 minutes away from the airport when he called.

Thankfully this time he was patient about it and didn't make a fuss when I finally got to the airport.  To "make up" for my cold reception to him over the phone and for being late, I engaged him on conversation about the new condo.  He seemed excited -- genuinely excited.  Unfortunately, he also told me he was disatisfied with his old one, and in fact needed my help in figuring out how to tell these guys he no longer wanted to close on it.  So instead of cleaning up my room or mowing the lawn, that's the shit I need to do.

He got kind of obsessed about why he no longer wanted this particular condo as we got him, and then when he got something to eat.  Meanwhile, the food stuck between my teeth were really bothering me, so slipped into the bathroom to floss.  That's when I heard from outside My Father calling me.

I come out in case something hinky might be going on, and sadly, there was: Father heard and walked back toward me from my hallway and through the dining room.  He thought I was in my room, therefore he walked down the hallway to talk to me about something.

And now my paranoid meter starts pinging off the hook.  Did he not see that there were no lights on?  And, by God, did he manage to open the door?  Did he hit his head on the door because there was a huge bag containing my comforter right behind it?  Did he see the stack of clothes I've yet to put away?  How about the myriad bags of papers I still have, or the papers strewn around the floor?  Did his mood immediately darken because I haven't cleaned up my room?  Well, fuck him!

Great, I'm trying to anticipate how he's thinking again.  And he just got home 45 minutes ago.

So I'm working on his letter right now.  We'll see if he passive-aggressively gets back at me.

I guess I have to add that after our conversation, I opened my door.  It was completely closed, but I don't remember if I completely closed it when I left.