Love and Basketball

It is snowy here, and I'm sitting in my apartment, listening to Jay Z on my stereo. I just fried and egg and put it on top of some leftover Korean food. I went to the gym this morning for an hour and a half and I have class at 2:20p today. It is my only class today. I will come home, continue to plan my Spring Break trip to Australia and then meet my friends for dinner before our Wednesday bowling league starts. When we are done we will go to the bars. I've been getting a lot of people saying "are you sad to be leaving school in a few months?". What do you think.

Upon some gentle chiding from a friend last week about not playing basketball enough and not loving it enough I've been getting on the court more and more in the past few weeks.

Just like this...except not at all like this.

In the NYTimes a few weeks back there was an article about how when Michelle Robinson first started dating the President she asked her brother Craig Robinson to play pickup with Barack, because there was a belief in the Robinson family (a family with a strong basketball pedigree) that you could tell a lot about a person by the way they played basketball. Unfortunately I can't find the article, but when I do I'll link to it. (It was from Time). Well I would agree 100% with that. Last week I played my first refereed game since I left New York, which was fun, except for this one guy on my team. This guy has all the gear, he is stronger than pretty much anyone out there, yet complains the most about fouls. I don't know if he can dunk, but he sure as hell can miss a ton of attempted dunks during warmups. He doesn't play defense. He doesn't come out of the game, and he is a horrendous shooter. When I play pickup with this guy and he's on the other team I just yell "shoot it" whenever he touches it. And he usually does. If you play you know someone like this.

So then I got to thinking, would I want to be in a group with this guy, or work with this guy? Probably not. So our reffed game last week was part of a grad league, and I was just subbing in for someone that couldn't make it. I was hoping we'd play the med school or the law school, but no, we get the School of Information. Five Chinese guys, three with identical black glasses, one white guy, and two white girls. So what does our no-defense-playing-horrible-shooting friend do as soon as the 5'1" girl takes a jumper...he sends into the 42nd row. That's cute, especially because we were up by about 20. I don't get too emotional out there on the court, but at one point I went to the bench and told someone to take him out. I got pissed, and now when I play against him and he makes a shot I say out loud "that dude is garbage, keep giving him that". My blood is boiling...

But back to the rec league game. So at one point the School of Information was making a bit of a run, and I couldn't understand how. But then I realized what was going on and let the ref in on a little piece of information, if you will. These guys were subbing on the fly, and right off the break like it was a freaking hockey game. I was in China for a few weeks back in 2004 and I played about a half an hour of pickup with my cousin and his Chinese friends, and there was absolutely no stoppage in play, so once that ball went through the hoop they just started up again. They clearly didn't know any better. It was amusing more than anything, and most importantly, no broken fingers, ankles, or noses.

And now to love love love. We had our Business School Prom/Formal last weekend. I will not bore you with prom nostalgia, but you can check it out here if you love schadenfreude. So what of Prom 2009. A bunch of nerds getting dressed up and possibly having their first and only night out of the year. Getting drunk, "acting a fool", stuffing their faces with cookies and cake, beer tears, fights, wine stained dresses. Yes ma'am, I have seen it all. How about an extra scoop of INFIDELITY on top of all that. If this event had a theme it would be "Infidelity Rules the Day". Who knew? Especially from the collective awkwardness that is business school. Maybe I don't mix it up with b-school folks as much as others, but good Lord, all the gossip and the drunken debauchery with people who were married or fiance-d or just in relationships. I would say that if you go to school here, and your significant other does not, there is a solid 40% chance you are being cheated on, or you are cheating on your (apparently not so) special someone. If your "other" is not in the US bump that up to 70%. What? Do you question this? Do you want stories? How about the one where the European girl comes to town and she's arguably "bschool cute" (nothing to aspire to, trust me) but engaged to her Slavic Prince Charming...but then basically started dating a piece of American Apple Pie with blonde hair and broke off the engagement. I suppose once you kind of granulate all these relationships it's kind of like Junior High, but now it's junior high with wedding rings and kids. I suppose junior high has kids these days though. The point being, MBA stands not for 'Masters of Business Administration', but for 'Married But Available'.

So if you want to do some due diligence on that potential mate, a) take them to the courts for a little pickup basketball, and b) take them to prom and feed a couple Makers rocks then witness them actually or metaphorically swat that little girl's shot into the 42nd row, and then make that decision of whether you want that person on your team for life.

Surround Sound

I am sick, and I am tired, but I also have the day off from school so I can rest up...or can I. I cannot sleep late ever and let me tell you why. So when three things happen you call it a trifecta, like in horse racing. Well my apartment is officially the Quadfecta of Auditory Hell. I am a light sleeper which makes it worse, but if the government is looking for new sleep deprivation tactics, I think I might recommend apartment 402 at the wonderful Forest Plaza Inn Resort. I'm just going to break it down by direction. So assume I am lying face up on my bed at this point...

To the Left: To the left is really the most mild of my annoyances.I have a noisy fridge, one that clicks and hums, and occasionally sounds like it is about to explode. The good news is my fridge only broke once this year. I have to walk through my kitchen to get anywhere else in my apartment which apparently is the hallmark of a building built circa 1925. I made that up, but in case I feel like making a grilled cheese on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night I am incredibly well situated.

Towards my Feet: So this is where I have my window. My view to the world. It's actually a pretty decent view and in the Winter I can see a lot. I can also see the back door of the undergrad housing complex next door and around 11am on pretty much any day of the week I can see girls leave wearing their skanky outfits from the night before. Awwww. Daddy would be proud. But with the good comes the bad, or should I say, the "bayg". When there's a party on one of the top floors, and there are only 5 floors, and it's in an apartment facing mine I can hear literally every single word. I don't mean to sound like Old Man River, bitching about the youth of America, but sometimes at 4am you don't need to hear dudes yelling, "Dude, rip another shot. Go! Go! Go! Ahhhh Collllleeeege!" I'm actually kind of jealous they are all having so much fun. But those girls. Will they not shut up? Jesus. This is a typical conversation I hear.

Girl 1: Bayg Bayg. Bayg bayg bayg.
Girl 2: No way!
Girl 1: Bayg.
Girl 2: That's amaaaaaazing. She is such a bitch.

But that's not even the worst part. The worst part is the burned out Fraternity house that is being worked on. Here's the link. So the workers start at about oh 6am every morning, and they are working on the top floors and apparently they are gutting the place. So this means of course they are clearing debris and putting it in the garbage. And when I say clearing debris I mean dropping huge pieces of metal from the roof into one of those huge industrial metal garbage containers ...all morning...every morning...rain or shine. This of course is awesome because I have an unobstructed view to this house and can see when stuff is about to be dumped off the roof. Of course, you know, I'd rather be sleeping, but a show is a show right?

Behind my Head: There are four floors in my building and my head is directly, directly, directly next to the elevator shaft. And we are talking about an elevator shaft that is over 80 years old. I am not exaggerating. It's the kind with the two doors you have to pull back to get in. You have to pull back the two metal doors that slam every time they close. Any time anyone gets in and operates the elevator, on any floor, I hear it. I'm just going to repeat that last sentence. Any time comma anyone gets in and operates the elevator comma on any floor comma I hear it. The sound is not is not a gentle buzz, or a little click. It's like this.

Elevator: Knock knock.
Me: Who's there?
Elevator: It's the Industrial Revolution, motherfucker, and your ass is mine.

I don't know exactly what the Industrial Revolution would sound like, but that's what it sounds like every time the elevator is used. I hear it, and I feel the rumbling in my bones, from 5am when people wake up to run or whatever, to 3am, when the Chinese cats across the hall come home and smoke Pall Malls and watch Friends. It's been a year and a half and I still can't get used to it. True story, I used to go to the second floor, and then leave the elevator door slightly ajar so it wouldn't move if someone presses the button (there's some mechanism that requires full-closure of the elevator, thankfully). But if you are on the second floor you take the stairs, so the hope was that people would come in, press the button and the elevator would stay on Two forever so they'd give up and walk up all the way, and thus nobody would use the elevator. Sometimes it works. I'm an ass.

To my Right (aka through my wall): Have you ever watched Discovery Channel? I hope you have. Have you ever seen a lion catch a gazelle and bring it down? Do you remember what it sounds like? The guttural snarls and the high pitched whimpering. No? Well maybe you should meet my neighbor then. I think his name is Steve and I think he weighs 400 lbs, and I think about buying him breathe-right strips all the time to open up his passages. Sometimes I think he is choking, sometimes I think he is harboring African rhinos, sometimes it sounds like he is nursing raccoons, and there are other times I think he is chopping wood.

For starters it's like we are living in Memoirs of a Geisha times. The walls might as well be made of paper. And if they were I would reach through those walls and slap the man silly.

Steve, I can hear AND see you eating a gazelle in bed. Didn't we already discuss this?

Basically, this is my life.

I've smacked that wall so many times trying to get this guy to shut up, and maybe he will stop for a minute but then it's back to operating that chainsaw. But let's say that ol' Steve has had a quiet night, and that Mr. FingerTheBlog is sleeping like a little bebe, well at 6:08am Steve's alarm goes off. That damn alarm might as well be next to my face because I hear it like a whisper in my ear. Sometimes I'll wake up with Steve at 6:08 and slap the wall like it's a snooze button. 6:08am, like clockwork. And if I am so lucky as to fall back asleep right away, well you think 400lb Steve is taking the stairs when he leaves his apartment at 6:30am. Oh helllll no.

So there you have it. A cacophony of sound that is free with the rent I pay. I have four months left of this. If you don't think I'm buying Steve Breathe-Right strips and sliding them under his door before I leave Ann Arbor you are sorely mistaken.

That Smell in the Air...That is Business

Recruiting for MBA1s starts up next week and if you want to reminisce like I do you can go back and read some of my old posts. I'm still slightly involved with the process, giving my time to first years for mock interviews (you can call me Saint FingerTheBlog or San DedoElBlogo for those of you bilingually inclined). It's kind of funny because I try to be tough in these mock interviews because the better prepared these folks are the easier it is going to be for the real thing. I put on this pseudo-scowl, and sometimes I cut people off if they're taking too long to answer something...all tactics that were done to me when I was on the other side of the table. My favorite part of the mock interviews is when I rattle off a bunch of technical questions and then some scenario questions (tell me about a time when....) and then I kind of pause, pretend to write something down, scowl, and then say, without even looking up, "what do you do for fun?". And every time it catches the interviewee off guard. It's the easiest question in the world, but people are always thrown off. I was giving a mock yesterday and I asked "what do you do for fun?" and dude's all, "ummmm, I like reading", so I ask what's the last book he read and he starts saying something and cuts himself off, and then says "Winning by Jack Welch". Liar liar, pantalones en fuego. I don't know, but that question allows you to say just about anything in the world about anything at all, but if your answer to "what do you do for fun" is that you read Jack Welch, which is cool and all, it just sounds supremely lame. You can say you fly kites, rassle gators, or eat jalapenos. Reading Jack Welch...yawn...let me hit that snooze button for the rest of the interview.

Gator Bait!

Last week I interviewed a chinese girl who I've met with a few times to help out. So I gave her a mock and we're talking after the mock and I'm about to say goodbye and leave and she's like "One more thing, is my english good enough?" So I say, "yes, you should be fine", which I truly believe, but then she pressed a little bit and it's like she wanted me to measure how good she was. I'm not sure what she wanted to hear but I was tempted to say, "yeah, you're a little better than Yao Ming, but not quite as good as Jackie Chan".

Yo. Yao? Yo. Yao.

I just told her, like I tell everyone "you should be fine".

Let me tell you what is also fine, the new $100 million business school, which finally opened it's doors. It's pretty unbelievable, and I don't want to complain so as to sound spoiled but I have one minor beef...

Minor beef

...and I don't want you to think that I am opposed to LEED Certification because I love me some LEED Certification but the urinals are soooo green, (how green are they?), the urinals are so green that they are WATER FREE. Remember back in the day when you were at the water fountain on the playground and some kid was taking forever and someone would yell out, "hey save some for the fish" and then everyone would laugh and then throw dodgeballs at the fat kid? I do. Well let me tell you, the Ross School of Business is saving some for the fish, in fact, they are saving a ton of water for the fish. The only issue is that the bathroom smells like a "squatty-potty" by about 1pm every day.

Squatty Potty

Instead of Water Free can we have an "Almost Water Free But Just Enough Water Not to Stank But Also Just Enough to Help the Environment" urinal? Can we do that instead. Like I say when people complain about the new school, "next time you want something different you spend your own $100 million". I got $23 in my wallet, so that's a start.

I Got a Feeling 2009 is Going to be Kind of Awesome

Hello 2009. Classes start tomorrow and I think I'm ready to get going on this new semester. I've got Susan Sarandon narrating Discovery Channel's Planet Earth for me this evening, while I chow down on a burrito and blog...and such is the life of a business school student. Winter Break, I believe, is reason enough to go back to graduate school. I spent break down in Florida with family, eating right, relaxing, and soaking the Vitamin D from the sun. Almost 3 weeks later I'm ready to rock in 2009. These poor seals stand no chance against this Great White shark by the way. It's like me trying to outrun a killer school bus with razor-sharp teeth. Anyway, Ann Arbor is no Palm Beach. For example last night I went out with some friends in Ann Arbor and enjoyed some local beers during a 10p-midnight happy hour, while listening to a pretty good cover band at an Irish Pub. In Palm Beach the scene is different. One night some kid had some people push his Lamborghini out of a parking spot, and then proceeded to get in and peel out of the parking lot at many miles per hour. Everyone at the bar probably thought the kid was a complete tool. That type of thing just doesn't happen in Ann Arbor. I think snow tires on a Lamborghini would probably look stupid anyway.

Before I left I cashed in on some free burritos from Chipotle. In Ann Arbor they were giving out burritos, and apparently in Palm Beach they were giving away tremendously largely tremendous diamond engagement rings. A couple years ago they were giving out these in Palm Beach...

Bentley Continentals for EVERYONE!!!

This year it's diamond rings. Maybe they grow on trees down there, or maybe they are given out like samples of iced mocha lattes at Starbucks. It's pretty shocking really. Now I know some of these kids cannot possibly afford such trinkets, so I'm just going to assume that they've just gotten extremely proficient at jewel theft. Maybe I'll explore starting a jewel theft cooperative in my Entrepreneurial Studies class this term.

I've decided to put Finance and Accounting behind me and explore some of the other types of classes offered here at Michigan. I'm taking a negotiations class, which I absolutely know will give me some blog fodder.

That's really all I got. This is second semester senior year all over again. Everyone's all "dude, we gotta go out hard" and there's something to be said for that. We'll see who is all talk and who is for real I guess. All I know is that I'll appreciate Second Semester Senior Year: Part Two way more than I appreciated Second Semester Senior Year: Part One.

561's and Heartbreak

A word play on Kanye's new album "808's and Heartbreak". You know, 561, being the Palm Beach area code. Get it? Jeez.

I see hawks circling The Breakers right now, which means they either are about to chow down on the scraps of a ridiculously overpriced lunch, or they can read the New York Times. I’m at the epicenter of this Bernie Madoff scandal, sunny Palm Beach. If you ever wanted to hear some grown up people use some grown up language, just take a walk down the street or go into a restaurant and ask someone about Bernie Madoff. I’m out by the pool listening to Gucci Mane’s Hard To Kill, and ol’ Gucci uses some strong words, but you bring in someone’s Grandma who just got hoodwinked by Mr. Madoff, and I feel like you’ll hear some Yiddish mixed in with some Hotlanta hoodrat slang that would even have our friend Gucci Mane heading for the hills with his tail between his legs. And I don’t mean to sound flippant about this but, “what about the children?”, not the trustafarians, but all the kids that were helped by the charitable donations Mr. Madoff’s clients made. Not cool, Bernie. Not cool. You open today’s NYTimes and you see this crook walking around Manhattan with his Barbour coat on mugging for the camera and it’s sick. Apparently he’s under house arrest from 7pm to 9am. Poor baby. Between HBO onDemand, the Nintendo Wii, and SeamlessWeb, this guy’s probably having more fun while under house arrest than he was before he was under house arrest. Does The Law think they are preventing an old man/crook from going to One Oak and getting bottle service? I’ve lived in New York in the Winter, and during those rough January nights I basically put myself on house arrest. Baby, it’s cold outside.

But on a lighter and more awesome note, I am on hiatus from eating like a college kid right now. Food, and I mean real food, tastes delicious as hell. My tastebuds are like, Anise!?, Paprika!?, Keylime!?. Sweet culinary relief. To open the freezer and see ice cream sandwiches is a beautiful thing. I just don’t buy that stuff for myself, ever. What would I do for a Klondike bar? Apparently the answer is to get on a plane and head to Florida.

This time of the year all the grandkids come down to Florida and everyone wears their pastels, khakis, and loafers sans socks and generally looks pretty. I went to a new bar by myself the other night to have a beer and watch some sports. Next to me were two guys, probably late 20s, early 30s, with some very very attractive blonde girls who looked like they were the spawn of Lily Pulitzer and Paul Newman. For my own sanity I’m going to assume they were absolute bitches with bad values (even though they probably were not). And the reason I say this is because they were hanging out with these two guys, Piper and Blakeley, who seemed like they’d rank kind of high on the jerk scale. Again, judging books by covers. Judging books by covers. Ok, so maybe I was just a little jealous. Why can’t my name be Piper, damn it, or at the very least something cool like Barkevious Mingo. And if you think I’ve got the Tom Wolfe-ian skills to make up names like that, I swear to you, on the 6-month CD with 4% return I just opened, that those names are for real. See, a 4% return…not good, not bad, but a good chance that in 6 months I won’t want to call Citibank a motherfucking schmendrik and punch it in the face.

Love Me, Love my Sweater

I'm outy 5000. Off to Florida for Winter Break. A new tradition that I've adopted during the holidays since I've been at school has become what I'm going to call the "Kitchen Sink Omelet Jambaroo". This entails making an omelet with every perishable item in my fridge and pushing myself as far as I can without throwing up. Tonight's omelet was pretty historical...eggs, roast beef, zucchini, cucumbers, and provolone, with a little bit of BBQ sauce to mask the nastiness, or add to the nastiness, I'm not sure. Waste not want not.

Exams are over and I have two other written deliverables due in the next couple of days, but it's nothing I can't do remotely from a computer. Thank you Steve Jobs. This whole winter break thing is a pretty sweet deal. In fact, it's so sweet I'm thinking about pursuing a dual degree so I can stick around one more year and get another set of summer vacation, winter breakage, and spring breakage. Sticking around one more year would also let me take advantage of the awesomely impressive new business school. If you want to see what $100 million can get you, come up and visit the new business school. It's state of the art, and incredibly environmentally friendly. In fact, it is so environmentally friendly that urinals don't use water. I don't understand how that's possible. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't urinals without water just called walls? Anyway, the main atrium aka the Winter Garden, is lit by what seems to be a few 60watt bulbs, but through some crazy smoke and mirror effect, some mice on treadmills, some well placed reflectors, and a splash of Kanye West, the entire building gets lit up from just a few small lights. It's definitely some black magic nonsense. There's also a fancy pants gym which is great because for just $99.99 for the semester you can now work out next to the annoying people you see all the time in class. I will not be joining, for the same reason I don't think I'd ever join a gym in the same building I worked in. It's kind of like separation of church and state. You feel me?

And something else I am totally feeling are these ugly sweater parties. I brought the sweater pictured below to Ann Arbor because a) I like it and b) it's warm as hell, and now it's become my "ugly sweater". I think ugly sweaters in the northeast can't hold a candle to ugly sweaters in the midwest.



And if you are wondering about the masks, a buddy is going abroad for the second semester (yes, that still happens, even in business school), so we made a few funnies over sake bombs and hibachi.

Pretty creepy. One of us joked that it would be funny if we all went in and robbed a bank while wearing the masks. What wasn't funny was when one of the guys above ended up in jail later that night. Oops. I guess that's the thing with sake bombs, they sneak up on you like whoa.

I'm as pale as I'm going to get, so it's time to sign off from Ann Arbor.

Blogging Malaise

I'm a little peeved about the formatting of this blog. Something happened and this just isn't as pretty as it used to be, not that it was ever particularly aesthetically pleasing. Also, I'm a little peeved that everyone and their mother has a blog because I'm starting to feel like I've jumped the shark a little bit. I was reading some other blog the other day, and it was like, "Oh my, the bloody marys at my new favorite brunch spot in the West Village are so totally amaaaaazing", and I thought to my self, who gives a shit, and then I said, well who gives a chicken apple sausage about what I'm saying. This blue and drab green color-scheme makes my blog depressing too, so I think a change /face lift will be coming shortly.

So to recap, Thanksgiving was good, flying in and out of Detroit, the worst city of all time was easy and now I'm nose to the grindstone for the next week with exams/papers and such. My biggest observation from New York, if you go out and dress like a trendy lumberjack you are just fine. Plaid is the new black, the new Chinese, and the new Paul Bunyan-ness. The one night I went out in the city my white button down left me feeling like Professor Square. While I am assuming the role of Professor for just a moment, let me adjust my glasses and make a remark about the auto industry bailout. I have not read anything indicating that five years from now GM, Chrysler, or Ford will be able to compete with foreign automakers, with the bailout money, or even with "Arab Money"...



As we learn in class, pre-negotiated bankruptcy allows you a piece of the pie while there still is at least some pie to cut a piece from. I've seen these Michiganders and believe me, they love their pie, so let's give them at least a little bit, and not make them pay to help these poor CEOs avoid flying coach to their next bailout hearing. If you think it's only the Big 3 who are suffering here in Michigan you are sorely mistaken. Chipotle is getting desperate too. I received a coupon in the mail for a free burrito, salad, or order of tacos. Do you know what's about to happen? A Fajita Burrito Bowl, with barbacoa, sour cream, lettuce, salsa, cheese, and guac is about to happen. Now I will get to Chipotle and I won't order nachos, or a drink so I feel kind of bad because they're trying to get you to buy the fixins as well, but I'm bringing a buddy along to have dinner with me, so I'm stimulating the Michigan economy...one burrito at a time. Put that in your Nobel Prize for Economics pipe Paul Krugman. And if that doesn't work, just hire Busta Rhymes and Andy Garcia's Arab doppelganger.

I'm avoiding all of the Michigan economic messiness, and from my asbestos filled faux-ivory tower, my biggest issue right now is figuring out where to go for Spring Break. Everyone wants something different, and you can't please everyone. I was always the guy who messed up housing in undergrad because I didn't want to piss anyone off. And I'm still that guy today. While everyone is looking for the most cost-efficient trip, I think it is going to turn out that we're going to go somewhere halfway around the world. The good thing is that Spring Break is two weeks this year instead of one. Why? I don't know. I will not be arguing this.

This blog is all over the place but I was due. Enjoy the weekend, and watch Duke vs Michigan because I'm going to try to sit awfully close to the court and get my mug on TV.