confusionA British woman in Spain climbed a three meter high wall to stick her hand in the lion cage. The lions then ripped her arm off. Good. Some stupid woman, 54 years old, climbs a protective fence to “pet the pretty kitties.” They should have ripped her fucking head off…. (Reuters story: here)
Ya! Went to Binghamton this weekend to hand with Flugie! Great weekend, aside from it being so cold you could not be outside for more than then minutes at a time. I drive up on Saturday and when I got there Flugie and his flat mates where unloading a keg. Needless to say with a beginning of like that there was much drinking that night. After a few hours of watching people play beer pong while A█████ and I caught up. We headed downtown to the bars.
At the bars A█████ kept handing me money and saying get us something to drink… A hundred dollars later A█████ did not know where he was and was being undressed in the club several hot girls. So Mike a friend of A█████s and I left him in one of their hands and headed home.
Ten o’clock the next morning A█████ called me to say he would be home soon. Apparently he had walked with the girl back to her house to get her car and then while they where talking he fell asleep. When he woke up he fell off the bed and broke the girls turtle tank—drunkard!
We just chilled all day talked and played on the computer—I got to talk to C███████ which was very, very nice. Not to mention convoluted and funny with A█████ in the room. Anyway, that night was, of course, Superbowl Sunday and A█████ and his roomies rented a projector and stole a screen for it. There where 30 or so people at the house for the game—which sucked.. the Raiders did not look like they know it was the Superbowl. They looked nonchalant about the whole thing, like it was a mid season game. Oh well, I don’t watch football anyway. Afterwards we watched ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and fell asleep.
On Monday Sherman called to say that Lockheed had decided to offer him a job. Very cool, I hope he takes it, would be great if he lived around here. I got to talk to C███████ on messenger again. I wish I could talk to her everyday like that. I headed out around five pm. After locking my keys in my truck—which is all A█████s falt! I was going to clean the snow off the truck and A█████ said to let it warm up. Normal enough but I never do it. So I turned the truck on and the heat. Then I closed the door and started scraping the snow. When I got done I remembered that when you first turn the ignition on the truck locks all the doors! Shit. Luckily I was able to use a coat hanger to push the auto window down button. So I finally managed to leave about 5:30. The East coast is so cold right now that the ice on the hood of my truck was still there when I got home—five hours of strait driving and there was still ice on my hood!
Anyway it was a great weekend, I wish C███████ could have been there in person rather than on messenger but there is nothing I can do about that right now… I can’t wait to do it all again. But with less alcohol!
Oh my god! The wind chill right now is negative fucking freezing! It’s so cold and windy. You get brain freeze just walking down the street!
Anyway, I went to dinner with Sherman tonight. He’s in town because he has an interview with Lockheed Martin tomorrow. So I gave him the inside scoop—on how cool the projects are, how boring the awaiting clearance process is and how painful the polygraph is! Hope I did not scare him too badly! I really hope he gets the job, or some other job in the NoVa/DC area. It would be great to have another friend who is a city person here. Pub crawls and nights out! He said he would want to live in the District if he lived here.
I’m going to see A█████ this weekend, so I will get to relive some more England memories. I really miss London. I miss all of Europe. I was stumbling around the web today and ran across more pictures of London and Paris. I don’t know there is just a feeling of home in the pictures, even when they where of places in the cities I never went or saw they still felt like home. Maybe it’s just that I still feel uprooted from my moves (London to C’ville, C’ville to NoVA, NoVa to C’ville and then C’ville to DC all in one summer!) or maybe it’s my biggest emotional connection is to London, or maybe it’s my subconscious desire to be euro-trash. I don’t know, most times I don’t think about it but every once in a while I just feel in the pit of my stomach that I would be happier in London, and I curse the way immigration and national borders work…
Oh… haven’t ranted in a few days… nothing much happening right now. Finishing my last few days at Lockheed, I won’t be sorry that I am gone from the job, but I will miss some of the people. Hope they keep in touch. Speaking of keeping in touch with people; I’m taking a couple of days off the beginning of next week to and will head up to Binghamton [binghamton.edu] to see Flugie. And tomorrow Sherman will be here in DC to interview for a job, so I am going to dinner with him! Yea! Get to relive London days!
Real quick roundup of the anti-war rally; Meet G████ at 10:00am at Metro Center. From there we grabbed some coffee and a bite to eat before heading down to the mall for the rally. There where quite a few people already milling around on the mall. It was freezing cold—the high for the day was only 24 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite the weather there was a really good turnout, around 250,000 people.
Th speakers started around 11 o’clock, including Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton, Jessica Lange and Rep. John Conyers Jr. I have to say I don’t agree with much of what most of the speakers stand for, they used the anti-war rally to speak about various causes that have nothing to do with the war, but that’s the way these things always go. (though I will say there was far less socialist influence than at the anti-war rally I went to in England before the Afghan campaign began.)
By 1:30 the key-note speakers where done and the front of the crowd had begun the march to Navy Yard in Southeast. The march took over an hour, and at one point while G████ and I where at the top of a hill the crowd stretched as far as we could see in front of us and behind us and we where near the front of the crowd when the march started.
On of the best moments of the march was when we passed a group of seven or eight people all dressed up and sipping champaign on a second story balcony with a white board that they had written “hippies go home” on. The crowd stopped in the street below the building and chanted “we are home.”
The protest went off peacefully without any violence or mass arrests. The media gave it better coverage than the last rally in October, so maybe more people will see it and public opinion in favor of Bush’s warmongering can be changed. I don’t think that war is a priori bad in this case, but I think that if the Bush administration really does have evidence of Iraq having these weapons of mass destruction (which I don’t doubt Iraq does have) then they should be taking this evidence to the leaders of the free country and giving it to the weapons inspectors so they can show the world that there is in fact a threat, that we need to use force to deal with this situation.
Anyway, the rally was for a good cause and was a success. Afterwards G████ and I went over to Fado’s and had dinner then bar hopped across Adams Morgan. All in all a good day, that my body is complaining about today.