Shits and Giggles

Short post today...At the job I had before I went to school I had an office. Theoretically, if I wanted to take a cat nap I could. Of course I didn't, but I could. When you sit on the trading floor you can't take a nap, even if you wanted to. I was having this discussion yesterday with one of the analysts who came in after a long night and was saying that she would love to just close her eyes for a few minutes. I don't know what your offices are like, but there's a couch in the women's bathroom where I work. I imagine this is pretty common in offices in Manhattan. Well my friend decided that she was going to go into the ladies room and kick back on the couch for a minute. She went into bathroom and came back not a minute later only to report that there was a woman passed the heck out on the couch, shoes off, wrapped in a blanket, taking a nap. I was shocked. And from what I was told this wasn't some hungover intern, this was someone who was kind of senior. In some ways I was jealous though. The ladies can nap one off but the guys can't, after all there's nowhere we can shut our eyes in the men's room. Well apparently there is a place. An hour later I went to the bathroom and while standing at the urinal I heard snoring. I saw a pair of shoes sticking out from under the last stall. Some guy was passed out on the toilet. And in full disclosure, these toilets just are equipped with just a toilet seat and no lid, so you can imagine how comfortable that probably was.

The executive bathroom

I guess grownups need to be put down for a nap sometimes too, especially after the post-lunch food coma kicks in. I had to admire the guy's resourcefulness. Some people can fall asleep anywhere. I happen to not be someone who can fall asleep sitting up...in a bathroom...on a toilet. I guess practice makes perfect though. And speaking of stalls, I'll be talking about paper thin walls and more inappropriateness in my next post. Hopefully you'll stick around for it.

Guns Germs & Steel

There's a significant portion of Jared Diamond's book Guns Germs & Steel that's devoted to hunter vs. gatherer debate. I'd like to chalk up these past weeks to "hunting" or perhaps, "being hunted", and also "gathering" material for future blogs. I'm going to call it a sabbatical. As some of you may know, over the past few weeks I've been embroiled with some craziness that will give me a fireside story to tell for the rest of my days. In fact, last night I was at a clambake, and as we were sitting around a fire at about 11:30p, not 100% sober, I unleashed this beast of a story on a few friends by the fire and definitely "ooh-ed" and "ahh-ed" and "holy-shitted" the crowd for a solid 30 minutes. This story is going to take more than a single blog to tell so at some point I'll get to it. There's still not an ending so as I look for closure on this thing I'll think about how I want to tell it.

Last time I dropped some knowledge was around July 4th. I'm now 7 weeks into my 10 week internship. So far so good. I don't want to bore you with the details of the actual work, but all I'm going to say is that I'm hoping that there's an offer at the end of the rainbow because the more I look at Michigan's upcoming football schedule the more I look forward to the possibility of not having to recruit again right in the middle of it all. Apparently I find out about an offer on the last day of work. I kind of envision it going down in a Gladiator-like fashion, when I step into a room, the king/head recruiter gives me a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and I either die (inside, of course) or I live to fight another day.

Oil is at what?!!

In this type of market you have to prepare for the worst, and hope for the best. And if I'm going down, I'm at least going down with a mouthful of sushi. When I first started working in New York I was always jealous of my friends who got their lunch and dinners paid for by their companies. Meanwhile, I was getting paid less than I would've liked and took to brown-bagging it a solid three to four days a week. How great would it be to have the company pay for dinner, and on top of that, it would even be possible to use my credit card, get the miles, and then expense it back to the company. The equation was simple... eat food = see the world. As I sat at my cube eating the same turkey on wheat day after day I dreamed of the day I'd be able to use Seamless Web on the company's account. Well that day came this summer, and it came in the form of a $25 dinner allowance. The first time I ordered, I ordered $25 of thai food for myself. I stuffed my face as I sat alone at my desk, finishing up my work. If I had to work through dinner it might as well be with a stomach full of pad see ew...and soup...and me krob...and some dessert. At about 8:30pm I sat at my desk, wanting to vomit, and all I had in front of me were five empty takeout dishes and two more hours of work. It took about thirty minutes to realize that staying at work and ordering food sucked, regardless of what my dinner allowance was.

I really haven't had to stay late a whole bunch this summer, which I suppose is good, but I can 100% understand why some of my friends who are bankers put on some serious lbs. when they started work. If you are ordering on someone else's dime, maybe you order that extra sushi roll in case you want it, and of course you end up eating it when you probably didn't need to. And if you do that for a year, that one extra yellowtail roll really ends up being 30-40 extra yellowtail rolls, and that extra side of cornbread becomes 30-40 extra sides of cornbread, and the only thing Seamless about any of this is the transition to bigger pant sizes. I'm not advocating smaller meal stipends, although I wouldn't be surprised to see them shrink in this market, but I am advocating restraint, not for the sake of money, but for the sake of well-being. I know that as soon as I realize I'm staying for dinner I start planning out where I'm going to be seamless webbing later that night. Not good. I acknowledge that I'm still an amateur at this and I suppose that if I did this more often I'd be able to find my sweet spot where I could eat, eat quickly, eat healthfully, and get my work done and leave, but with a whopping seven weeks of seamless web experience I'm still struggling with the whole, "my eyes are bigger than my stomach" thing.

I guess practice makes perfect though. I just feel lucky that I've been able to avoid ordering seamless web for dinner at around 8:00pm and then ordering breakfast at 5am the next morning. Some of my fellow Michigan summer associates haven't been as lucky, because as Snoop Dogg would say, they may come in at 10:00am but "they ain't leaving 'til 6 in the, 6 in the morn". Anyway, I've got about nine more hours until my bacon egg and cheese sandwich tomorrow morning and the faster I can get to sleep the closer I can get to my beloved breakfast sandwich.

Even Diddy Would Blush

First, fifty lashes with a wet noodle for being so delinquent on this blog. 

Now, onto business.

Justin Timberlake, stop biting my shit. This link was posted in January and has gone through some iterations. The gist of that January post was as follows...in the midst of the Giants epic playoff run I put some new words to Three Dog Night's "Eli's Coming". If you want this blog to make any sense you should probably click on the link above now and read that post and then come back. 

Again, because I sure as hell can't get enough...

What's 5'6", dates attractive woman, dances extraordinary well, and is behind the originality curve by five months...

You heard it hear first, kinda, sorta, whatever. For you loyal readers, I thought you'd appreciate knowing that when you read this blog, you are, like, looking several months into the future, or something. 

Anyway, on to more pressing matters...Despite what it may say above, today is July 4th, and in true American fashion I am spending the 4th in the epicenter of gluttony, The Hamptons. Despite what VH1 might feed you, coming out here can be a very relaxing, mellow, and quiet. However, fortunately for cable TV networks, the Hamptons are also abound with d-bags, and baygs who provide fuel for the fire, and in this case, my blog. Last weekend, after a lovely dinner, a friend recommended we go to this guy's house. He said something to the effect of, "this isn't going to be fun, but it's amazing people watching". I love me some people watching so I agreed to tag along. We arrived at a very nice house in Southampton that had been rented by a singular person. This kid apparently had money to burn. When we entered the house a cadre of girls were playing around with this pretty sweet looking blender and making strawberry margaritas, with patron, obviously. Anything less would be uncivilized. After standing around and playing some jewish geography I just didn't want to be there anymore. The atmosphere was getting stale, it had been a hectic day at work, and I just wanted to go home. And then someone suggested playing a few games of flip cup...talk about something right in my wheelhouse.

I went outside to the table and saw no beer. Kind of hard to play flip cup with no beer. Never fear, tonight flip cup would not be played with beer, it would be played with Dom Perignon. 

Definitely does not go down as smoothly as Miller Lite.

I'm not really into champagne, but who was I to pass up on this most utterly ridiculous variation of flip cup. This was more offensive than Diddy driving motorcycles off of his diving board into his pool just because he could. After several quick games and four empty bottles on the table, one girl remarked as she pointed to the empties, "that's a pair of shoes right there". What type of shoes were we talking about here? I countered by saying that the equivalent amount of money could've been taken to the Bass Outlet in Amagansett and used to purchase footwear for all 37 Pitt-Jolie children. 

I guess the point is that back in 1776, if the American soldiers had any idea they were fighting so that in 2008 some over-privileged kid could pour expensive French champagne all over a Chinese made table while smoking Canadian-grown marijuana, the soldiers probably would have laid down their guns, gone home, and watched reruns of Entourage. 

On this July 4th 2008, I am thankful for Eli Manning...what? Wrong holiday. On this July 4th I say Americans...grab an American flag (made in China), grab a burger (from a cattle ranch in Canada), grab your stereo (made in Japan), and grab the nearest piece of tail (your Polish housekeeper, nicely done), and just realize we ain't in Kansas anymore.