When this was originally on a couple months ago, I immediately realized that it is the perfect summation of things from 1/20/01-1/19/09.



89 minutes to go....

You guys, it's that time of year again. It's not always in January, so there is a good chance that this could be one of many: today is the first day of the Best Week Ever...and not in that stupid VH1 sort of way. Well, I'll get to that part.

Tuesday

American Idol is back! Woooo! Why am I the only one "Woooo"-ing? They're promising substantive changes this season, but we'll see how much of the four hour(!) premiere week I will bleep-bloop through. The good news is they're reducing the length of the audition rounds while expanding Hollywood week coverage. They're also bringing back the wild card round. I'm just hoping this season shapes up to be awesome like season 6 and not a blech-fest like last year.

Wednesday

Since getting back to work, I've been developing a presentation on mental game and physical preparation for bowling. Just going over the material has been helping me out with my game. I bowled a 267 game in a 667 series last night. That's my highest sanctioned series (my 752 was for Keglers, not that it makes a real difference). Anyway, I get to present tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it, as I get the title "Guest Lecturer".

Thursday

Sober House on VH1. Oh my God, you guys.

Friday

In case you don't keep up with individuals via their facebook statuses, I've been dating someone for the last few weeks. His name is Brandon and things have been going well. Anyway, Friday is his birthday. Happy Birthday!

Saturday

Speaking of birthdays, Saturday is mine. Happy birthday! To celebrate our joint birthdays, Brandon, Sarah, and her boyfriend David and I are going to hit the cliz-ubbs down in Columbus. Or, what is more likely going to happen, we'll get Ethiopian food then find a bar and hang out there all night. Either way, it's going to be an awesome weekend.

Sunday

That'll be two months for Brandon and me. Wooo!

Monday

I get Martin Luther King Jr Day off from work. Awesome.

Tuesday, again

Super Obamarama. I almost wish the Inauguration was at night to make partying while watching the swearing in a lot easier. Yes we can has.

Best week ever! Wooo!

Back at the end of October I attended the USBC Silver conference down in Newport, Kentucky. The conference went well, I learned a lot about bowling, took a test, and according to Rod Ross, a Gold level coach who lead the workshop, I passed the exam. When I received the e-mail from Rod he mentioned that with the regular bureaucracy compound by USBC moving from Wisconsin to Texas it would take four weeks or so for my status to be updated.

This past Wednesday, with still no word from USBC, I sent an e-mail to the coaching department asking "what the dilly yo?" Well, I was a bit more professional, but that was the gist. Here is the response I got today:

Mike,

The certificates were finally printed and ready to be mailed when it was discovered that our supply of Silver emblems was depleted. An order for additional emblems has been placed and the certificates will be mailed as soon as they arrive.

In the meantime, your certification has been updated in our database.

My sincerest apologies for this lengthy delay!

Regards,

Cindy W.

Seriously, USBC Coaching? My professional coaching status was on hold because you were out of patches? And somehow that prevented my status from being updated in your database? Also, there are only 3-4 Silver Conferences a year -- how long does it take to restock the inventory in between gigs?

How can USBC expect to revitalize the sport of bowling when it consistently makes boneheaded mistakes of this nature?

I'm working on a new side project to pass the downtime that I seem to have a lot of lately. And to justify having Little House on the Prairie adding 4 hours to my TiVo playlist daily (seriously, Hallmark Channel?). It's a recap blog called "WTF, Little House on the Prairie?". I have just an intro post at the moment, but I have a recap in progress and a few episodes in the hopper. My big plan is to do an episode a week, posting one segment each day. Although I would prefer to do a Monday-Friday schedule, I think this first episode will start Friday and post through Tuesday.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what y'all think!

Edit: Part 1 of the first recap is posted with part two on its way later today. Woo!

*I attempted an alfredo style dish on Tuesday. Chop up some onions, garlic, green pepper, spinach, and various other tasty bits and set aside. Boil some water for pasta (I was using some rainbow colored various shaped pasta from Trader Joe's). Cut up some sausage (Sun-dried tomato chicken sausage from TJ's is a good choice). Heat up a skillet and pour some olive oil. Throw in all the veggies except the spinach and get a nice sizzle. Throw in the sausage and get the flavors to congregate. The pasta should be cooking at this point. Use one of those alfredo packets and follow the instructions, but add a little pesto to give it some personality. Once the pasta is ready, drain then add to the skillet. Throw in the spinach and cover the skillet. Once the alfredo is ready, add to the mix and really get everything to gel together.

I was disappointed at the initial serving -- the alfredo didn't quite congeal the way I had hoped it would. However, it has been delicious as microwaved leftovers. Go figure.

*I may have finally figured out how to get out of my bowling slump. I've adopted a point-and-shoot approach where I just pick where I will stand, pick where I'm targeting, and then go. It worked well Wednesday (bowled a 199 on Shark). Thursday it worked even better: I have a 178 average in that league and bowled a 643 series. It was the high series for the team. Unfortunately, if the only bowler on the team with a sub-200 average is the only bowler who bowls a 600+ series, then the team is going to have difficulty winning. We got swept.

*There was a book sale at the library today. I didn't plan on going -- I just happened to have books that were due. I peeked in and was a little disappointed. Not one copy of Lee Iacocca's autobiography to be found. Maybe it's a Michigan thing, but no book sale is worth its salt without at least 7 copies of it for sale. It becomes a game of hide-and-seek, since the book will be filed in biographies, automotive, history, popular, and often times miscategorized. I was at one book sale where I found 20 copies, none of which were located adjacently. The closest I got today was two copies of John Stossel's book, which managed to drown out the shrieking toddler at the sale with its shrillness. I did get a Christmas present out of the sale, so it wasn't a total loss.

*There is a potential follow-up to my last post, but it will have to wait until Sunday or Monday. I want the full story first.

"Doc, my brother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken."
"Why don't you turn him in?"
"I would, but I need the eggs."

So before you hear any wild rumors, I decided to start seeing a therapist again. I've been really stressed out lately and have been acting out in irrational, socially awkward/inapprorpriate ways. So for anyone avoiding me recently because of said acting out, would you consider this an early Christmas present?

I am seeing a different therapist this time around. My old therapist isn't covered by my insurance and, in retrospect, she wasn't as productive as I would have hoped. Her meeting room was rather poorly lit which contributed to a stifled feeling I would have in my sessions. I also felt like I wasn't a real priority on her docket. I very well could have been the least crisised of her clients, but for the 55 minutes that I am paying fully out-of-pocket for, I think it would at least be a professional courtesy to fake it.

In my most recent session the subject of romantic relationships came up and it was a bit of an eye-opener. It was the first line of questioning that poked that ooey-gooey spot, causing me to pull it together before continuing. We talked about it in generalities with a few specifics thrown in, but time ran out before we could prep for the full dissection. The subject has weighed on my mind since the end of my session Wednesday afternoon.

The timing of this realization was semi-optimal. On the one hand, I feel like I'm making some progress. On the other, it did put a bit of a pall on my weekend. For starters, I think it prevented me from fully enjoying Margaret Cho when I saw her Friday night. I didn't have as many belly laughs as I would have hoped, though the potential was certainly there. However, when she was talking about Proposition 8 (which she is PISSED about, as you might imagine) she spoke about how gay people really need to get over themselves -- we have enough obstacles thrown our way without creating our own. She was talking about this in the context of her being considered a Goldilocks in the Bear community. It reminded me of how RuPaul would sign off on her short-lived VH1 talk show: "If you don't love yourself, how the hell can you love anybody else?" I am fairly certain this will be the only time I will quote RuPaul on this blog.

As I slowly picked at this food for thought as I moved it around my plate this weekend, I started evaluating my process for dating. Ummm, the process needs an overhaul. I'm not a fan of the club scene for several reasons. First, geography is currently an obstacle as Cleveland and Sandusky are both a significant drive away. I think there are places in Lorain, but just the idea of that seems sketchy and makes me feel the need to shower. I'm intimidated by the meat market mentality that pervades the clubs -- I feel like I'm ranked somewhere between prison grade meat and the stuff hot dogs are made of. The bravado and success rate of the club scene requires confidence, which that last sentence shows could use some improvement. Also, I feel weird about going by myself when I am a complete wallflower. I can stand in the corner and look at my watch repeatedly at home, thank you very much. If there were people I could go with it would be easier, but again I don't have the confidence yet to interact with complete strangers, so I would just stay with my friends and not accomplish what I set out to do in the first place.

So my only real recourse is online chat rooms. Here I have a little more control of the process. The wallflower strategy, which I implement like a pro, has mixed-to-poor results here as well. Sitting around waiting for someone, anyone, to IM is not the best way to spend an evening, let me tell you. So this weekend I've been a bit more proactive and attempted to start conversations. This is not without challenges. Sometimes, people just don't feel like chatting and trying to force a conversation just doesn't work. Other times, people are freak shows and the conversation shifts from bland pleasantries to figuring out how to permanently ignore the person. The biggest difficulty is the people who seem perfectly nice but are challenging to converse with. Against my better judgment, I'm slowly getting over the use of internet shorthand (how I loathe "how r u? kewl") and the overuse of "lol" ("I'm John...lol"), but there are a lot of people out there who haven't realized that telling me that you're bored is not conducive to a good conversation. Granted, "bored" is usually code for "me want sex", but since me no want sex at this point in our soon-to-be-truncated relationship, there's really no point in continuing to try to talk. But I have been persevering and things are going slightly better. So far I inadvertently hit on someone who might be a colleague (I didn't ask for confirmation since that would have been extra weird at that point) and have had a few decent conversations with some Clevelanders and central New Yorkers (might as well prep for next year).

I won't get into the actual dating part now, since this post is far longer than I anticipated, but I will offer a bit more clarification before I go. I TiVo'd Annie Hall last week and got around to watching it this morning. Each time I see it, I find more parallels to my own experience and identify more and more with Alvie Singer. I'm not sure if that is a positive or an inevitability for the viewer. Anyway, the movie ends with the joke that began this post and this hypothesis:

"I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs."

Help me, Wolf Blitzer. You're my only hope!



Huh.

I never knew how amazing a program Excel is until I successfully used it to show how I got totally fucked over by my job.

First, I enter in my hours starting July 1, 2008. I separate out the hours that would be considered overtime -- so far just the ones over 40. I then create 4 columns:

Multiply just the non-overtime hours by 11.60 (my hourly rate on June 30)

Multiply the regular and overtime hours by 11.60

Multiply the regular hours by 11.60 and the overtime by 17.40 (time and a half)

Multiply the regular hours by 12.00 (what my pay probably would have been raised to) and the overtime by 18

Now, add up the totals of each column for the month. Compare that to 1/12 the salary the college is paying. You will see that I am making less now than I would have been if I stayed hourly. But for that privilege, I get health insurance -- which I have yet to use and, if I maintain a healthy lifestyle, may never need to use. ALSO, there is an expectation that I work 40 hours a week. The data I'm using has me working less than that (I've technically taken 3 vacation days already).

I could be angry, but there really isn't a point in that anymore. I'm just tired. I'm tired of defending this institution and its questionable financial practices. I'm tired of working more for less pay. This isn't "overworked and underpaid", this is work more for less pay. I'm tired of being a martyr for lost causes. I know it sounds like sour grapes, but I was assured when the changeover happened that I wouldn't be taking a pay cut in exchange for health insurance. I'm tired of being lied to by proxy.

Only 9 months until I get to burn this bridge.

Tuesdays are usually a lighter load/catchup day in terms of programming. Since I generally don't get home much before 10pm on Mondays and have to be at work at 10am on Tuesdays, I can't watch all that gets recorded. But there is still new stuff added and here it is:

House

I started watching House last season and was surprised by how quickly I got hooked. I'm usually not into medical dramas, but this one is so wonderfully written and Hugh Laurie is brilliant. The search for the new fellows story arc was rather engaging, though I'm still not won over by Taub (dude, chill), Kutner (dude, stop setting patients on fire) or Thirteen (dude...just dude). The season finale was incredibly good, though I think I will miss Amber/Cut Throat Bitch.

However, this has now set up a story line where House and Wilson have essentially broken up. We're two episodes into the season (counting tonight's episode) and I still don't know how I feel about this development. Although it is organic in terms of the characters' histories, the House/Wilson relationship moved from subtext to text which takes out some of the fun. The show is usually pretty good about reaching satisfactory resolutions, but I'm still a little leery.

Dancing with the Stars: Results

3 minutes of content (6 if there's a group number) in 60 minutes of program. After 8 years of reality television you would think that ratio would have gotten less oppressive.