You Can't Get There From Here

When I woke up yesterday, the 18th of April, and I looked out the window and saw that it had snowed two inches in the early morning hours of April the 18th, and my sleep fogged brain realized that it was snowing, and it was April, I have to say I was pretty fucking pissed off. I stomped off to work and spent the day complaining about the fact that it was cold, and it was snowing, and it was April. Even so, I was relatively certain that it would be the worst morning of my week, what with the snowing and the April, and on the whole I think I took it in stride.

I spent a lot of time thinking wistfully about yesterday morning during the two and a half hour clusterfuck that served as my commute this morning.

It started out well enough. I timed the leaving of my house in a such a way that I would largely miss the rain on my 1/2 mile walk to the train, thereby allowing me to leave my umbrella at home and saving me from having to buy yet another umbrella since I almost invariably forget I have one with me and leave it on the train. A train pulled into the station in due course, and I stepped onto it and found a seat, which is always a bit of a victory. I finished the sudoku while we traveled a few stops. In between Paulina and Southport we stood on the tracks for an unusually long amount of time. I finished the crossword puzzle. The conductor told us there was some trouble with a train that had "broken" ahead of us and that we would be standing "momentarily". I still wasn't alarmed as this happens frequently and we are usually moving again inside of five minutes. Fifteen minutes later we still hadn't moved.

By now I had read the entire paper (to be fair it's the free morning paper and there's not a whole lot to it once you skip all the celebrity gossip and stories about a new bar that won't be open long enough for you to check it out). The conductor came back on to give us the exact same announcement which seemed superfluous as the situation hadn't changed and no one had gotten on or off the train since the last announcement. After another ten minutes he did make a new announcement: the broken train was fairly well fucked. It would not be going anywhere for a while and neither would we. And further to that, when we did go somewhere, it would be to the Southport stop, where we would need to get off and get onto a shuttle bus which would take us to Fullerton where we could get back on a train having bypassed several miles of track to which they had cut power. We had some time to think about our individual game plans though as we couldn't pull into Southport until the train that was already there was able to get onto the northbound tracks and out of our way. Even at this point I was remaining calm. Sometimes things break and it's nobody's fault and there's little you can do about it but soldier on. I called my office and explained the situation and that I didn't know what time I would be in. Then I remembered I had Peggle on my phone and started playing it.

Eventually we pulled into Southport, where we were told there were shuttle buses waiting for us downstairs to take us to Fullerton. Out on the street I did indeed see two buses and also a man in an orange vest with a clipboard who seemed to be directing things. Everything appeared to be under control. It fucking wasn't. There was firstly a problem of physics and the inability to condense the volume of humans that fit into eight train cars into the space of two buses. There was additionally the problem that trains were continuing to come into the station and drop off their human cargo. For me personally, there was the problem that it was 40 degrees outside and that it had started pissing down ice cold rain and I hadn't brought an umbrella. A very lovely Asian girl with an enormous Cubs umbrella offered me a space beneath it - don't ever try to tell me that Cubs fans are assholes, it simply isn't true. The first batch of buses were full up and left without us. I managed to wedge myself on to one of the second set of buses and we took off in rush hour traffic on a circumlocutory route designed to pick up, per orange vest guy, "as many people as possible" from the other three train stops between the one we were at and the one we were headed for. It was possible for us to fit exactly zero other passengers on our clown car of a bus, and we drove past the other stranded CTA customers feeling a mixture of relief and survivor's guilt.

Upon our eventual arrival at Fullerton, we filed into the station like a horde of spawning salmon and headed, logically we collectively believed, to the southbound platform in order that we might catch a southbound train. After allowing us to stand there for ten minutes in the freezing rain and wind, we were disabused of this ridiculous notion by a man on the loudspeaker who told us in a tone dripping with irritation at our stupidity that it was obvious we needed to catch a southbound train on the northbound tracks. As we headed back down the stairs to get to the other platform the woman next to me summed up the feelings of all of us by saying "I've never wanted to get to work so much in my entire life." Almost immediately after the last of us had reached the northbound platform, a brown line train pulled up to the southbound platform we had just vacated. It was followed in about two minutes time by a red line train pulling up to the southbound platform. Those of us who chose not to run back to the other side like the proverbial chicken stood there dumbfounded for the fifteen minutes it took for a train to pull up to the platform to which we had been directed.

By now I was soaked to the core and shivering, having lost my umbrella buddy in the shuffle, and I stepped on the train with no small measure of relief, pleased as punch to find a seat available and for once not caring that there was a mother holding a screaming infant in the seat just in front of me (I also ignored that she was speaking fucking French). About this time, the same announcer who had chastised us earlier began to tell us in the same exasperated tone as before that we were NOT to go to the northbound platform, that southbound trains must obviously be boarded from the southbound platform. He didn't actually finish with "you fucking idiots" but we all heard it. I was already on a train, and had been informed by the conductor that it was a southbound train to the loop, and also I was sitting and starting to dry - I was not, under any circumstances, getting up to go back where I had been in the first place. I continued to sit there for the half hour it took that train to finally close its doors and pull away towards the oasis of downtown. I finally arrived in the office around 11 a.m. at nearly the same time as the person who had flown in that morning from Boston in less time than it had taken me to commute from Lakeview.

And to think, only yesterday I had woken to the sight of beautiful, pristine, non-public transit interrupting April snow. Sigh...

And Get The Hell Out Of My Bed Too.

H-town: lol karen carpenter
*goes to hell*

me: credit to [the bartender] for that one

H-town: i hate feeling that sick
when i got strep this winter it was the worst i've been sick in a decade, too
i thought i was dying, too

me: yeah, strep is a pretty bad one

H-town: i feel ya - moving 2 feet felt like i was climbing mt. everest
thankfully i wasn't hurling
i had a nasty 24 bug last fall though
i can't imagine hurling for more than 24 hrs

me: i was only hurling for about one day, but i had no appetite at all for four
I don't think I ate as much as 500 calories a day for four days straight

H-town: isn't weird when even eating takes too much energy?
bodyFAIL

me: i know right?

H-town: your brain's all, yeah - eating would give me energy and help me, but fuck that noise
then it goes into hibernate mode

me: then some mooching bitch comes in and eats all your porridge

H-town: hahaha

me: LEARN HOW TO COOK WHORE

H-town: HAHAHAHA

Learn From My Fail

Every year, my boss asks me if I'm getting the flu shot, and every year I scoff at him. I have an immune system made of steel and I haven't had the flu in well over a decade. I don't need a flu shot because I'm not going to get the flu, I reason, and as such I'll just skip it and keep the $30 for myself thank you very much. Historically this method has always worked. Unfortunately, what this method doesn't take into account is that extreme stress, such as the unbelievable work and relationship related stress I've been dealing with since the beginning of the year, can and will weaken your immune system. My steel defenses have become more similar to swiss cheese defenses so far this year - through mid March I had already gone through three colds and/or sinus infections. A week and a half after the last one I finally succumbed to the flu.

I didn't even see it coming. I'd been in very good form on Saturday. I got up early, took the cat to the vet, picked up a prescription, put some boxes in storage, dropped off my laundry, bought an Easter dress and did a 45 minute workout all before 2:00 pm. The bartender ordered pizza for dinner and we ate it watching two brilliant college basketball games which both had piss poor outcomes. Shortly after 9:00 pm, I very suddenly became completely exhausted. Because unlike a cold that starts with the sniffles and builds into a full blown illness, the flu prefers to just sneak up on you and clobber you over the head with everything it's got.

"Imma fuck you up."

I was startled at how tired I suddenly was, which is to say I was tired enough to get in bed at 9:30 on a Saturday night. At which point, I immediately realized I was starting to run a fever. And that I had a terrible chest rattling cough. And that I was in for something serious. Because from that moment until this morning, I have only gotten out of bed to pee and throw up*.

I have never, EVER been this ill before as an adult. At some point during the week, I called the comic in a fever delirium to explain that I wouldn't being seeing him in May because I was bound for death in a few short hours. He congratulated me on being sensible enough to stay home from work. Normally I'm not and will force myself to get up get things done, as per the American way. I wasn't being sensible this time either, I simply couldn't move. To go from the couch to my bed was a monumental undertaking. Making it to the kitchen was out of the question. I couldn't have gone to work even if I'd wanted to because there wasn't strength enough in my body to turn a doorknob so as to get out of the house.

I am upright and mobile now, finally, after 6 days. Sort of anyway. I still can't stand for longer than 10 or 15 minutes at a time. I get winded walking across a room. The cough still hasn't abated and my lungs feel like they're on fire. I lost 6 pounds in four days time and I look like Karen Carpenter. I never really grasped before that the flu is something thousands of people actually die from every year, but I get it now. The flu does not fuck around.

Let this be a lesson to you: just get the fucking flu shot.

*Except for the one time I got out of bed to take a shower, which did not go well. I should have taken a bath, but I'd been lying down for three days and I thought I would try being upright for a while. It lasted long enough for me to get shampoo in my hair and then I was overwhelmed. I finished my shower sitting on the bottom of the tub, dried my hair sitting on the bathroom floor, and crawled - literally - back to my bed.

Chain Restaurants Simplified

After seeing a commercial for the Tilted Kilt that used the Dropkick Murphy's "Shipping Up To Boston" yesterday

The bartender (walking past me and grumbling): More stupid suburban bullshit.

Me: I went to the Tilted Kilt with Fish once. It's just a plaid Hooters.

Amber And Heather Ruin All Your Fantasies

H-Town: i like your fake About Me section
i laughed at the secret sex dungeon part
out loud
a chortle
COL

me: some day, heather. some day...

H-town: we all have dreams
background music swells up
well-choreographed song and dance routine happens

me: it has a round bed in it and shackles on the wall

H-town: does the bed spin?

me: well it does now

Heather: hahaha
you know, speaking of interesting rooms, i remember seeing a Cribs episode where they went through Tommy Lee's house
besides being afraid that there'd be herpes EVERYWHERE, i was a fan of his shower set up

me: does he have a separate bed for his wang to sleep on?

H-town: you could see the shower from his bed
so whatever ladies he had over, you could see a little of them in the shower
trashy, but I liked it

me: oh i like that too, great idea

H-town: it wasn't totally clear glass
so now you have a spinning bed and a nearby see-thru shower
he also had a sex swing in his bedroom
not surprising

me: i don't really get those, but maybe that's because i've never really seen one live

H-town: yeah, same here
they look dangerous
i'd most certainly end up seriously injuring myself


me: pretty sure i'd forget all about the sex if i had a swing though. i'd be like WHEEE!!!!!

H-town: hahaha
SEX? who cares!
PUSH ME!
no, not with that
use your hands!

me: wind it up so i can spin! and then i throw up on everything. party's over

H-town: haha

me: off to the visible shower

H-town: less exciting now

me: sex dungeons can be perilous for all the wrong reasons sometimes

What's All This Then?

After more than six years of the same old same old, I've made some changes/upgrades to Bizzybiz (obviously) that I've been meaning to do for a long time. For one thing, I have now gone through all the archives and added labels to all the posts, so now if you want to see everything I've ever written about spiders all at once (my research is extensive after all, everything you need to know is here somewhere) you just need to click on the "spiders" label.

I've also added some tabs at the top, an About Me page that is filled with lies, and a page of links to things that I often read when I'm not writing on Bizzybiz or checking the corners of the room and the ceiling for spiders, as well as the websites for the podcasts I frequently mention. That same page also has a link to my Twitter account, so if you want you can follow me and find out if I am as clever when I don't have infinite space to go on and on and on about things (probably not).

I am still working on tweaking the template, so if you have any suggestions or complaints like "What the fuck? I can't even read this!" let me know and I'll do my best to fix it. I also intend to add more links on the Linkylinks page - those were just the things I thought of off the top of my head last night when I was working on this - so check back for more and send me your suggestions.

Bizzybiz 2.0 - now with more ridiculousness.

The Relative Value of Los Angeles

I'm confused about how Battle: Los Angeles made it to number one at the box office. Now in all fairness, I haven't actually seen the movie nor do I have any plans to see it because it looks pretty stupid. But based on the trailers for it, I'm pretty sure it's just a remake of Independence Day, and Independence Day fucking sucked. Right? Aliens are invading our planet to get our resources and are systematically wiping us out. That's the same plot as Independence Day, isn't it? I've already seen Battle: Los Angeles then and it isn't any good.

Now, granted, it's possible that maybe they've improved on Independence Day. Certainly there was a ton of room for improvement: Bill Pullman is possibly the least convincing person to ever play the President (seriously, once you've played Lone Star in Spaceballs, you've pretty much typecast yourself as "not the President"), Jeff Goldblum has played the exact same character in every single movie he's ever starred in, and the dialogue is so terrible the only line in the whole thing I even bothered to remember was Will Smith punching the alien in the face and saying "Welcome to Earth." But even if you fix all those things, you're still left with a stale plot of alien invasion, humanity is woefully outnumbered, at the eleventh hour someone comes up with a brilliantly unorthodox plan and (presumably) sacrifices him or herself which saves the day and everyone is happy because it's a movie and therefore easy to ignore the devastating aftermath that would certainly follow a protracted war with a hostile extra terrestrial invasion force. In other words, it looks dumb.

At least they put out more trailers than just the first one I saw, because they provided some clarification I desperately needed. The first trailer made it look, to me anyway, like the aliens were invading Los Angeles only, and with all due respect to any friends I have who live there, my immediate reaction was "Who fucking cares?" Because, come on. Aliens are planning an invasion and the target they settle on is Los Angeles and that's it? A couple things come to mind. 1. These aliens are not terribly bright, unless the resources they're looking for are film reels and silicone (if so then good job aliens, you have chosen wisely). 2. All they want is Los Angeles and they'll leave the rest of us alone? GREAT! Give it to them! I'm happy to turn over Los Angeles if it means nothing changes for the rest of the Earth, other than having a new sort of weird neighbor, and we have plenty of those already, life won't be all that different. We don't need Los Angeles. Los Angeles is pretty much jewelery: it's pretty and sparkly and meant to show off our wealth, but it's not really that important and when the money runs out we should pawn that first. I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. Let them have it. After seeing subsequent trailers though, the plot made a little more sense. Apparently, they are attacking all over the place and in fact most of the major cities of the Earth have already been overrun. Los Angeles is not the focal point of the attack, it's simply where mankind has chosen to make its last stand. Which is an entirely different story and far more plausible. If Los Angeles is all we have left, then yes, I agree, defend it with everything you've got. If it's our last toehold and holds the key to our continued existence as a species then it is certainly important enough of a place to serve as the setting of an alien invasion movie.

But it still looks dumb.

More Hatiness

Still sick and really hopped up on whatever it is I'm taking. I've been acting like I'm on speed all day long, and have just overwhelmed the accountant with a conversation in the kitchen that included diagonal air vents, aliens, ethnic heritage, things that are green, the fact that all the Bourne movies taken together are one extremely long chase scene, the relative value of Los Angeles and a half a dozen other things that I've already forgotten. Which is not the point. In reality I probably would have been somewhat better off not coming to work. However, it is bar night tonight AND it is St. Pat's AND the NCAA tourney started this morning AND I'm still feeling hostile, so I want to go to Tai's tonight in my "Fuck You" etc. t-shirt and argue with people. But in my head there's an "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?" kind of thing going on where I feel like if I think I'm too sick to go to work, I must then also be too sick to go to the bar. So I had to go to work. Which also isn't the point. The entire paragraph is to introduce the fact that I still feel like I did yesterday and offer that up as an explanation of why I am ranting about another commercial that I hate. Which I told you would probably happen. OK? Good.

There was one commercial I forgot to mention yesterday which I also hate right now, which is the latest offering from 5 Hour Energy. Apparently, they are trying to gain market share now by going after the morning wake up market in addition to the stay-up-all-night crowd and the man-that-was-a-long-day crowd by attacking coffee. Specifically, by pointing out how enormously difficult and taxing it is to brew it and have to add cream and sugar to it, or what a travesty it is to have to wait in line to buy it if you don't want to make it yourself. It is the classic ploy of creating a problem that doesn't actually exist and then providing a solution that nobody needs. Listen to me: making coffee is not that hard. It isn't. It just isn't. You don't want to wait in line at this Starbucks? NO PROBLEM. There's bound to be five other ones across the street. You make yours at home but you don't want to have to wait for it to brew? NO PROBLEM. Most coffee makers these days have timers set on them so you can program when you want it to start brewing and then when you get up there will be a fresh pot of coffee waiting for you as if by magic. It's so much work to stir in a little cream? Actually, I can't really help you here. If you can't handle the thought of having to put cream in your coffee there is no hope for you anyway. Fuck off and drink it black then. NO ONE IS CHALLENGED BY COFFEE*. And if you are sitting in your kitchen staring at the empty coffee pot thinking "You mean I have to turn on a machine and wait for it to brew and pour it into a cup and put things in it and lift the cup to my lips and take a sip and swallow this coffee all by myself? Why must I be made to suffer this gross injustice day in and day out?" then maybe you better re-evaluate your life and whether or not it should be allowed to continue because you are the most useless human being on the entire planet and an asshole on top of it. No, 5 hour energy needs to stick with what it's good at, which is sending college students to an early grave due to massive amounts of alternating stimulants and depressants.

*Generally. Strictly speaking, this is not always true. When I went to visit the comic the first time he asked me to make him a cup of coffee and I have to admit I was stymied by it at first. This is because in England they all drink instant coffee, not brewed coffee, and I was unfamiliar. "You just put a spoonful of crystals into the water and stir it," he explained. It seemed like it was almost too easy and I was worried that it might be a trap. But I tried it and it worked and nothing bad happened at all, if you don't count the comic drinking a really shitty cup of coffee. Which I don't because he is English and doesn't know any better.

Commercials I Hate

Right, listen. I'm running a fever and I hate having a fever with the hatiest of hates. So fair warning: this post will be nit-picky, overly critical and full of vitriol. This will also be your only warning, so heed it. I am hostile.

With brilliant commercials like the Old Spice Guy, The Most Interesting Man in the World, all the Jameson ones and of course the long running and fabulous SportsCenter promos, it is obvious that there is a lot of talent out there in the advertising world. Why is it then, that there are so many flat out fucking shitty commercials still being made? There's just no excuse for that.

For as good as the SportsCenter series has been for years, I saw an ESPN promo today that was completely off the mark. It was for NASCAR. Now, I get that you have to really talk up NASCAR if you want people to watch it because NASCAR is dumb. But I think it is taking things a bit far to tell people that watching a NASCAR race is exciting because "there's uncertainty around every turn". What? No there isn't. Have you even seen NASCAR? It's a bunch of greasy hilljacks (plus one bow-legged overly dramatic woman) driving in circles. There's nothing that is uncertain here. I assure you, the only thing that is going to happen around every turn is that they're all going to make a left. Well whoopidy-do, assholes. NASCAR still sucks. Fuck off.

Also, what is with the Xfinity commercials (for that matter, what is with the name "Xfinity"? That's not a word. It's not even a portmanteau. You suck.)? That bundle of wires crawling around is fucking creepy. Congratulations, you've somehow managed to make electrical components look gross. Right now Xfinity is promoting their baseball package. They went for the American heritage angle, which is ok, but they go and ruin it by telling you that baseball is "America's first space program". Sorry, I believe the organization you're looking for was called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Hitting a baseball is not the same thing as going to space. No one has ever actually hit a baseball into space. If someone had we'd know about it because he'd have to be a fucking mutant. Baseball has nothing to do with space. Shut up.

Then there are the commercials for Windows Cloud. These are not all bad. The one in the airport makes sense - the flight is delayed, they're stuck there, might as well watch some television. I'll just overlook the fact that the show they chose to watch was called Celebrity Rehab because I'm magnanimous like that. It's pretty neat when you think about it. Who would have thought back in the 80's, when televisions were less of an appliance and more of a piece of furniture, and computers were ginormous and had no hard drives, that someday we'd be watching television on a computer small enough to carry around with you and that you wouldn't have to plug it into anything? No, the one I'm on about is the one with the mom who is editing the family photo. Again, no problem with that per se - I'm all for retouching your photos, no one wants to see Pam's stretch marks in Playboy. The problem I have is with the two lines she has at the end. I'll take each in turn:

1. "There! A photo I can share without ridicule." Are you serious? You just dressed your entire family in the exact same god-awful blue flannel shirt, you most certainly are going to get ridiculed. Here, I'll do it right now: you look like a bunch of fucking tools dressed like that. Are you high? You know your kids are going to get the shit beaten out of them at school if anyone ever sees this don't you? Actually, maybe that was the plan all along because the next line is
2. "Cloud gives me the family that nature never could." Wow. Thanks, June Cleaver. Way to make your husband and kids feel like failures. Seriously, how bad could they be? They did all dress up in that hideous fucking shirt that may yet get them killed in an effort to make you happy, I think that's pretty nice of them. I sure as hell wouldn't do it. Your impossible standards are going to leave you a lonely bitter woman after your kids cut you out of their lives (after years of therapy from how you fucked them up) and your husband leaves you for his secretary because at least she doesn't criticize every. single. thing. he. does. You seem like a bitch. I don't want to use any products that you use, Cloud is tainted now.

Like I said, fever. Stuck on the couch. I'm sure there will be more so stay turned.

I Need New Hobbies, I Think.

I have no use for St. Pat's on the whole because I am not Irish and I am not Catholic and therefore it doesn't apply to me. The thing is I'm kind of torn about it because one thing I do enjoy having an occasion for is day drinking. The city of Chicago, where I live and dream, always celebrates St. Pat's on the preceding Saturday. The claim is that it's so children can see the river dyed green and the parade rather than holding those events on a school day. I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on that and advance my own theory that this is how Chicagoans justify day drinking twice in one week, once on the sanctioned Saturday and then again on the actual holiday, in the hope that it will tide them over to the next made up holiday Cinco De Mayo.

For the past few years I've split the difference between my opposing views by going out day drinking with wrongly colored hair and a t-shirt that reads "Fuck you, you're Irish". But after being awakened just after 6 a.m. this Saturday by ALREADY drunk dickwads with presumably little or no Irish ancestry walking down my street and yelling, I decided that this year I would skip the jackassery and stay home by myself (the bartender not having the option to stay home because, well, he's a bartender). So I did.

What I did not do was to pair that decision with another one to also skip the day drinking. It is a designated day drinking day in Chicago, after all, and there is a mostly untouched handle of Captain sitting forlornly in my kitchen crying "Drink me, please, so I can fulfill my destiny". So I got with the pouring and sat down to watch WWII in Color on the Military Channel for reasons I can't explain even to myself. I was drunk by 2:30, which is right around the time I decided to e-mail the comic.

The comic and I have a storied history of drunk communication. He has a peculiar habit of calling me when he's on vacation and then putting someone else on the phone. On my end, since drunk dialing from here would normally wake him up because he's in the future, I've taken to drunk e-mailing. The thing is, I can barely spell when I'm stone cold sober and combined with drunk typing, most of my messages end up being incoherent. He finds the e-mails highly amusing and pulls his favorite phrases out of them to use against me on Facebook (such as the time I wrote "HOLTY FUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!!" for who knows what reason, which became his response to everything I posted for the next three days). Here is the message I sent him on Saturday:

"Im drun k. Im going to dfrunk work out and then drunk bake cookies becauase it's daydsrinking dau in chiACBGO. i can't find my cat. national lampoons christmas vcacation is on becausr thaT makes sense in march. OOOO CAT IS HERE!!!!! bye"


to which he responded "chiACBGO is the best spelling of Chicago I have ever seen".

Little known fact: there is a stage in my drunkenness that comes before the one where I am Loud that I call Ambition. Ambition is the time when I have the sudden urge to do things that my drunk brain considers constructive. And sometimes they are, such as when I decide to CLEAN ALL THE THINGS! (by the way, if you're not reading Hyperbole and a Half I suggest you start doing so immediately). It is little known because it's usually short lived and I'm rarely in a position to do anything about it ("I should totally reupholster the dining room chairs right now!" I'll say to myself when I'm drunk in a different country from the one that has my chairs). In this case, the Ambition told me I should work out and then bake cookies, which in hindsight seems totally counterproductive. I did end up doing both of these things, plus a sink full of dishes. But the Ambition can only take you so far, and it did not take me far enough to actually put on workout clothes, or in fact any clothes. My workout attire was panties and a pair of socks with kitties on them. I'm sure it was very attractive. I did at least think to put some clothes on before I started baking. You can tell because if I hadn't, right now you'd most likely be reading a blog post about how I managed to get burn marks on my nipples from naked cookie making and that I'm so much more hardcore than the stupid Girl Scouts. I'm not, by the way, I'm just far more accident prone.

The Highest Level Of Laziness

BrownsFan: Did you like that link I sent you?

Me: Yes. So I tweeted it and said "That's my dinner sorted." At least it would be, if I ever left the house.

BrownsFan: You want to be slutty but you're too lazy?

Me: Exactly. Why can't I just be slutty from the couch?

PROOF!

I was talking to BrownsFan last week, because I would spontaneously combust if I didn't talk to her every day, and she showed me an article she found on the interwebs she thought I'd be interested in. This one. She also kindly covered up the photograph so I could read the article without having a nervous breakdown.

That's right people: 52,000 cars are being recalled on account of an obviously coordinated attack by the spider nation's Arachni-terrorist division, and I have one thing to say about it.

I FUCKING TOLD  YOU SO.

One type of car? Just the one? And I'm supposed to believe that this is some sort of accident of fate? This is no accident, this is the work of a CREATURE WHO SCHEMES. And these creatures are scheming to GET ME.

"But amberance," I hear you asking, "if the spiders were out to get YOU specifically, wouldn't they be building webs in the exhaust systems of MINI Coopers, such as the one you yourself drive?"

Oh you poor, naive little things. Of course not. That would be too obvious. Don't you see how a direct attack would create too much risk of me just going out and buying a different kind of car? No, no, children, they are way to cunning for that. No, they are building them in Mazdas for a reason. You know who drives a Mazda? MrSteve. A Mazda I've been in a number of times, such as when we used to go for long drives on gorgeous summer afternoons, enjoying the weather, relaxing, my guard completely down...yeah. Do you see it now? The creepy bastards are trying to get to me through my friends, and their efforts have escalated now to a pinpointed attack on Mazdas because I hang around with one. What will these foul creatures think of next? Hiding in the rims of beer kegs so they can get to me through the bartender? Gathering their forces inside bags of cat food so as to ambush me when I go to feed my kitty (she's evil too. I need to be on guard for this plan, she may cut a deal with them.)? Massing inside the floatation devices of planes used for international flights so they can jump out and devour me on my way to England (it worked for the snakes)?

One thing is for sure: they are coming for me. The proof is in the Mazdas.

Northwestern Here I Come

So, just to be sure I have all the facts straight...

A group of 100 ADULT college students who CHOSE to take a course in human sexuality witnessed a sex act during an OPTIONAL after class session between two people who were in a committed relationship, and it caused such outrage that the university is investigating, the professor has been forced to apologize and people are threatening to pull their (again, adult) children who weren't even involved in the incident out of school?

This is SHOCKING. It is obvious that something needs to be done.




Such as me going back to school.

Seriously, did you see the size of that homemade drilldo? That thing is fucking impressive.

Breaking News: Amberance Went Somewhere

There have been no updates to the blog lately, mainly because there is nothing at all of substance going on in my life. I go to work, I come home, I watch Tosh.0 and imagine having rough sex with the host (I don't know, the guy just looks dirty to me), I go to bed. Sometimes I work out or try to cross-stitch (which is made difficult by a cat who thinks any and all thread in the home must be attacked and destroyed), but for the most part there simply hasn't been anything to write about. Over the weekend I attempted to rectify six week's worth of lameness by cramming my entire social life into three days.

On Friday, the great Jon from Total Talk Nonsense, the greatest podcast anywhere, was playing a gig out in the suburbs with his new band, The Toxic Crayons. I had originally planned on attending as a participant - the lead singer had been asking me to sing with their various bands for years, and we'd finally nailed down some actual songs to work on rather than just the vague idea that "you should sing with us". Side note: I find the request for me to sing with the band completely hilarious, given that none of them, including Jon, have ever actually heard me sing. They're basing this decision solely on the fact that I told them I could sing, which they've taken at face value and assumed that I'm brilliant. Which I am, but they have no way of actually knowing that. For all they know I could just be saying I can sing when I really sound like Roseanne Barr. Anywhore, the plans fell through when I never went to band practice because various members may or may not have learned the songs. For my own part, I would have been nervous anyway - I know I am capable of singing "Heartbreaker", I just don't think I'm nearly cool enough to pull off getting on stage and looking like I have any business singing Pat Benatar. Besides, boy who doesn't call was supposed to be there and despite the fact that I want to lick him, singing in front of him gives me pause. It didn't matter, because he wasn't there and I didn't sing anyway. I knew I was in the suburbs when I walked into the bar and was immediately surrounded by children. Not college kids on a binge, actual children. Because in the suburbs, you can take your kids to the pub for dinner and not worry that they might see someone getting fingerbanged in full view of the public. The show went pretty well for the most part, despite half the band being sick and one song that completely disintegrated. They made up for it by playing some Stray Cats. In the meantime, I got a round of applause from the band wives and other fans sitting near me for getting carded, which I attributed to my green hair but Mrs. Jon insisted had more to do with my "young face".

I left there and drove Alistair back to the city to leave at the bar for the bartender to run errands after work ("I want you to promise me you'll be very careful," said the Crayon's bass player while bear hugging me goodbye, "because it is snowing and everyone else on the road is drunk, and you're adorable."). Then I went into the bar to let the bartender know where the car was. Mistake. There were too many friends there to just walk in and walk back out again, and I wound up hanging around for an hour and a half, listening to 90's hip hop (yes, I still know all the words to "The Humpy Dance" AND "Poison" by Bel Biv DeVoe, thanks for asking) and chatting with Hellbilly about various concerts and, unfortunately, UFC fighting. By chatting I mean nodding, Hellbilly needs no partner to carry on a conversation because he never ever ever shuts up.

I eventually got home from Tai's some time after 3 a.m. and spend another 45 minutes stalking people on Facebook and eating pretzels before I went to bed. My plans for Saturday had involved a lot of errand running and some weight lifting, all of which fell apart when I didn't get out of bed until 5 in the afternoon (this was not all my fault - I woke up at 3, but was immediately trapped under a cuddly cat who growled and hissed every time I tried to ease her off of me). Instead I spent the evening watching Chicago and deciding that Velma Kelly is the roll for me and that Queen Latifa is actually pretty fucking sexy.

On Sunday, the bartender and I headed over to the Congress to see Against Me! and the Dropkick Murphys. The Congress is one of my favorite venues to see music in Chicago. Unfortunately it is run by idiots. We had bought tickets online, or thought we had. After standing in line to get in for five minutes, we were told that anyone with paper tickets had to go stand in line at Will Call and trade them in for real tickets, which if I have to stand in line for them, it largely defeats the point of buying them online. While standing in the cold and rain waiting in line and shivering, we saw a group of girls who were not exactly dressed for the weather much at all which happily has inspired the name of my new all girl band - Daddy Issues. Our first single will be called "Get In Line" and is about running a train (Google it if you don't know, just don't watch the videos. Or watch them, I don't know your preferences). The line moved more slowly than it needed to - Will Call has but one door for both ingress and egress because clearly these people are geniuses. Once we got to the front of the line, they took our pieces of paper and issued us our tickets: basically little red tickets you would use for a raffle that I could have bought a roll of 1000 of for $5 at the party store. Then we got back in the first line, where they didn't even bother to take my little raffle ticket anyway, so I'm mystified why they made me stand in line to get one. Once inside we met up with the loquacious Hellbilly and a friend of his and settled in to the side of the main crowd because we are old people and also it's closer to the beer.

The Dropkick Murphys draw an interesting crowd. It's a mix of punks and people who think they're Irish, and everyone is drunk before they even get there. One girl was clearly on Ecstasy and had no idea she was not at a rave. The Dropkick Murphys were brilliant as always, one of their roadies proposed to his girlfriend on stage (she said "HOLY SHIT" which the crowd took as a yes) and they brought Chris Pisani on stage during "I'm Shipping Up To Boston", who Blackhawks fans will know as "That guy who dances to the Dropkick Murphys song at every Blackhawks game". All the while, Hellbilly was trying to kill us with Jameson, which I eventually had to start discreetly setting on the floor and knocking over to avoid a trip to the ER. The show had started very late due to Against Me! getting stuck in traffic driving up from Houston and the Dropkick Murphys having attended the Blackhawks game which went to shootouts. Consequently, there were many disappointed 12 year olds who didn't get flashed during "Kiss me I'm Shitfaced" (which my friend Tanyas participated in at the Saturday night show and then stole a set list) because they left before the encore, and I didn't get home until after 1 a.m. on a school night and paid for dearly the next day.

I am a party animal.

Everything's Perfectly All Right Now. We're Fine. We're All Fine Here Now, Thank You. How Are You?

Everything's under control. Situation normal. Thanks for asking. In case you somehow managed to not get clobbered over the head by the media last week, Chicago and in a fact a very large swath of the entire country got hammered by a blizzard last Tuesday and Wednesday. I was not one of the poor souls who got trapped in their cars on Lake Shore Drive all night long last Tuesday, mainly because when meteorologists nationwide all say "There is going to be a big fuck off storm, stay inside" and the local meteorologists say "The big fuck off storm is going to be worst near the shoreline of Lake Michigan, don't use Lake Shore Drive", I assume that they probably know more than I do and I STAY INSIDE, far, far away from Lake Shore Drive. Morons.

I woke up Wednesday morning to find that it looked like Hoth outside and a renewed interesting in buying this. Now, I don't attend a lot of sleep overs these days and when I do they rarely involve my having to sleep on the floor because my friends are grown ups with spare bedrooms or at least a couch. But I think we can all agree this sleeping bag should be filed under "Need" rather than under "Want".

I also experienced that most elusive of all storms - thundersnow. I'm sure there's a very good scientific reason why it almost never thunders during a snowstorm and that H-town or the bartender can tell you all about it while you pretend to be paying attention during their nerdgasm (speaking of nerdgams, Chicagoans, was anyone else concerned that Tom Skilling might rip his clothes off from his overwhelming excitement over this severe weather? Because I was happy for him and everything but, seriously, no one needs to see that). All I know is, thunder during a snow storm is awesomely rare and now that I've experienced it I'm merely one tornado away from being ready to die.

The only other severe blizzard I've lived through nearly killed me (and it actually DID kill 70 other people). The Great Blizzard of 1978 barrelled into Cleveland on January 25th of that year. I was two weeks old. My parents were noobs at the whole parenting thing, what with me being their first child and all, and they were totally unprepared for the apocalypse that completely buried every door to the house. They were trapped. Then they ran out of baby formula for me. Big thanks to the Middleburg Heights police department for answering my parents' call for help by going to the store, buying me formula, and then digging a tunnel to our front door in order to deliver said formula (which they refused to let my parents pay for, bless) and keep me from starving to death. When I told that story to the CEO he said "Oh, so THAT'S what's wrong with you." It's one of the things.

I Hate You, Mentos

Remember the Mentos freshmaker commercials from the 90's? The ones that were so infectious the Foo Fighters parodied them in their video back when bands other than OK Go made videos? They were excellent. I would go so far as to say they were fresh and full of life even. I've always had a soft spot for Mentos because of their clever advertising. Until.

Have you guys seen it yet? Have you? Have you seen the new commercial where a fucking spider BEATS THE SHIT out of some dude who tries to squash him? Seriously, it's like they climbed into my brain, filmed my very worst nightmare and then deliberately ambushed me in my waking moments with it while I'm minding my own business watching TV. There are close ups. Close up on the spider crawling across the room. Close up on the battered spider reaching up and grabbing the guy by the finger and slamming him repeatedly into a wall with the super human strength I knew they'd been hiding all along. Malice! Vengeance! Purpose! Everything that fucking terrifies me about these demon spawn, on my television, and presented to me at completely unpredictable intervals. Which is the final insult: the premise of the commercial is that it's always better to know what's coming. Yes, Mentos, it is. It's always better to know that I can turn on my television and not be besieged by horrors. But no, now I can't trust my television anymore because I don't know when this commercial is going to come on.

FUCK YOU MENTOS. FUCK. YOU.

The Post That Is More Of The "Holy Fuck It's Finally My Birthday" Variety

The holidays are officially over and that can only mean one thing: it's about to be my muthafuckin' birthday, y'all. In fact, it's Wednesday, but feel free to start getting your drink on RIGHT NOW. As Supreme Ruler of the month of January (because that's when my birthday is) I officially give you permission and encourage you to start celebrating my birthday right this minute, as well as retroactively back to the beginning of this year, and for the duration of this entire month.

As crazy as I normally am about my birthday, and as many of you know about my birthday celebrating, you can't stop me, you can only hope to contain me, this year I have been particularly looking forward to it ever since June. Why June? Because that's when my beloved Chicago Blackhawks won their first Stanley Cup title in 50 years, and almost immediately after that I made the decision to build my own confectionery Stanley Cup out of cake for my birthday (really it was almost immediately. Toews hoisted the cup, and passed it to Hossa, who shares my birthday like the fucking rockstar he is, and I looked at my birthday twin holding the cup over his head and thought, "I'm fucking eating that on my birthday." I don't know how my brain works, I only know that it does.)

Since then I've been doing a lot of research. The actual Stanley Cup is approximately a foot and a half wide at its base and about 3 feet tall. Duff made a full size replica Stanley Cup cake for a wedding on whatever the fuck cake making show he's on (I don't watch it, I just found a clip of it when I googled "how to make a Stanley Cup cake". They had the actual Stanley Cup brought into the bakery to use as a reference which is flat out fucking unfair, in my opinion) and was expecting it to serve 300 people. I don't actually know 300 people, nor do I have the kind of resources to make that huge of a cake (I had to buy a tiara and a princess wand so everyone would know it was my birthday, after all - I'm not fucking made of money people) so I had to scale it down. My cake will be 9 inches wide and about a foot and a half tall and I expect it to take 5-7 boxes of cake to complete. By the way, don't even think about getting up my ass about using boxed cake for this. I'm making the frosting from scratch because I make the best fucking frosting in the world and also, I'M BUILDING THE STANLEY CUP OUT OF CAKE which is a lot of work as it is, and I am not going to also make cake batter from scratch because believe it or not I have other shit to do, such as my job. Besides, boxed cake is moist and delicious and spongy and I have absolutely no reason to be ashamed.

Even scaled down that much, there's no way I can transport that tall of a cake from my third floor dwelling to Tai's and have it stay in one piece, so I'll have the additional challenge of having to assemble, ice and decorate most of it sitting at the bar. I've also had to work out a great deal of structural engineering for support, because anyone who bakes tiered cakes knows, if you don't secure them with cardboard and sticks on the inside, it will either start to resemble the leaning tower of Pisa or collapse in on itself like so many legendary Vegas casinos torn down in the interest of newer, shinier Vegas casinos. Keep it tuned here for photos, kids - this cake is going to be legendary, regardless of whether it turns out to be my greatest triumph or most soul crushing failure (it won't be - it's my birthday, and on my birthday there is no failure, only magic and rainbows and kittens).

But enough about cake - let's talk about the other things that make my birthday the most awesome day on the calendar. Such as the tea party I'm having at work on my birthday. BrownsFan suggested it jokingly when I mentioned I didn't want to make a cake for work because I am making such an enormous one for the bar. "You know, with scones. And cucumber sandwiches," she teased. She really ought to know better, because instead of being all "haha motherfucker", I gasped with joy and immediately began making plans to subject my co-workers to tiny cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. I will also be eating crab legs for dinner on Wednesday because that's what the bartender and I have for dinner any time it's one of our birthdays (or half birthdays. Or if we just found some money lying around. Or if one of us goes to Costco on a Saturday. We like crab legs, ok?).

And then there's the presents. The comic has had some sort of stroke or something and decided a birthday gift was in order, which I am suspicious of, because he rarely buys people things that aren't booze and it is obvious he's up to something. Also, the bartender keeps hinting at a gift that is going to trump my Christmas gifts (many of which actually were booze because my roommate totally gets me). As for myself, I've bought an ensemble of frilly red things, the aforementioned tiara and princess wand so everyone will know it's my birthday (the bartender: "Right. Because there's any possibility that people aren't going to know whose birthday it is.") and I am going to the toy store on my way home tomorrow for a new toy (or seven, you can never have enough toys). I will NOT be buying myself another 3000 piece puzzle, possibly ever again, because I can't build them anymore - the cat steals pieces out of the box and hides them and also she likes to knock the parts I've completed onto the floor as if to say "That's what you get. Now get your shit off my table." Even the TV executives wanted to get me something nice: tomorrow, on my birthday eve, Comedy Central starts airing new episodes of the brilliant Tosh.0 and it is totally because they KNEW it was my birthday and they wanted me to be happy (that is also why the new Social Distortion album comes out next week. For real). Fuckin' A.

I'll keep you guys updated on the progress of the greatest birthday cake of all time and about how awesome the next few days are going to be as time allows. I don't know if you heard, but it's my birthday and there will be too much awesome happening to really be online much. But don't worry, you'll be too busy celebrating my birthday to really notice.

Amberance: Nerdtastic

I just got off the phone with MrSteve. He was checking on the plans for my birthday party, seeing as how it's almost my birthday (there is another post coming which will be more of the HOLY FUCK IT'S FINALLY MY BIRTHDAY variety, don't worry). MrSteve has crossed over to the dark side into Grownupdom, what with his house and his family and his job having nonsense, and every time he calls I needle him about it because it amuses the crap out of me. While reminding him how hilarious it is that he does grown up stuff like commuting and lawn care, the conversation took a turn for the geek.

Me: Speaking of being an adult, 33 is the coming-of-age age for a hobbit, so according the the hobbits I'm going to be a grown up now.

MrSteve (with horror and disdain): Oh my god. I mean, [the actress] and I joke around about which one of us is the bigger nerd, but you are just...wow.

Me: Well I think it's because I have a variety of nerdery. I'm not just a sci-fi nerd, or just a iPad nerd. I have a lot of different nerd interests.

MrSteve: You're a broad ranging nerd.

Me: Yes. It's important to be a multi-faceted nerd. In increases your chances of meeting someone you don't actually want to date.

Being Healthy is Rotting Away My Brain

I've been avoiding writing this next post because I don't want to admit to you all that I broke down and joined a gym (I've been avoiding writing any posts at all because my parents bought me an iPad for Christmas and I cannot. Put. It. Down.). After all my anti-gym sentiment about how if people were really motivated they could exercise at home for free, and that gym people are obsessive weirdos who can't talk about anything except how many reps they did when they blasted their pecs that morning, and how spin class sounds to me like a real olfactory horror show O my brothers, it seemed like blogging "Omigod you guys, I totes joined the gym wheeee!" was an invitation for ridicule. The truth is, I still feel basically the same about the gym, but I joined one anyway because I was afraid I'd fall off the fitness wagon if I stopped my walking regimen and I'm way too much of a pussy to go outside during a Chicago winter for anything other than what is strictly necessary for basic survival. So I joined the gym in the building where I work, which is handy as I don't have to go outside even to get there and I don't have to motivate myself to get up and go to the gym in the wee hours of the morning or convince myself to do it at the end of the day - I can just swing by there at lunch when I would have just been sitting at my desk trolling Facebook anyway.

I remembered immediately one of the biggest reasons why I hate the gym: women. The gym has handy little tvs on every piece of equipment so as to distract you from the fact that you're doing something you absolutely hate. Because of this I can tell you with a high degree of accuracy the gender of the person who was on the machine before me. Sportscenter or the financial news? Dude (or BrownsFan, who throws off my calculations because she is glorious). One Life to Live or anything involving a Kardashian? Fuckin broad.

The locker room is even worse, because in the locker room the sound is on and it's loud enough for me to hear it in the shower so it can't be ignored. I've been subjected to Tabatha's Salon Takeover, staring a bitchy Australian woman who bosses around salon owners and their stylists with a level of assholeness that approaches Gordon Ramsey; Judge Joe Brown and his band of mouth breathing idiots who have the nerve to be surprised when the losers they date turn out to be losers and steal from them; a number of different soap operas that have been running since the dawn of time with the same twelve characters having the same set of problems that aren't actual problems ("But Danny's threatening to take the kids away because I'm having an affair!" It never occurs to them to just *stop* having an affair); some weird cooking with celebrities show where Matthew McConaughey taught me how to make a salad; and perhaps most disturbingly, Celebrity Plastic Surgery: Did They or Didn't They? which was too appalling for me to even describe. I know, I know, that this is NOT what is being watched in the men's locker room. They've got ESPN on in there, I can feel it, and it makes me want to go around and ask all the guys in the place if any of them would mind if I switched locker rooms. Even when BrownsFan managed to get Sportcenter on in our locker room, by the time I got done with my workout it had reverted back to Fashion Emergency! or something equally vapid. The only good thing about it is that it gets me in and out of the shower and back at my desk at an amazing speed.

WOMEN OF THE GYM: I have nothing profound to say here. Just please, please STOP.

The Legendary Night Of Christmas Eve Eve

Today is Festivus, a time for the Airing of the Grievances and the Feats of Strength, or, if you don't know what I'm talking about, a time to go watch probably the best episode of Seinfeld ever.

Before it was Festivus, today was what I used to call Christmas Eve Eve, which in my family was the last shopping day before Christmas because our festival of holidays lasted three days from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, after which time we'd eaten so much no one could move.

Christmas Eve Eve holds a special place in my memory because it is the anniversary of the first time I was ever drunk. I was a late bloomer as far as the whole drinking thing (I suppose I had to be a late bloomer at something to make up for my early and enthusiastic adoption of the sex, but I digress). My high school friends weren't big drinkers. I mean, they weren't tee totalers or anything, but most of us were more occupied with playing sports or music or both, and all of us would have been killed and eaten by our parents if we didn't keep up our universally excellent grades. College is where most of the group finally took to the sauce - I've heard stories of my brother running down the road barefoot wearing a flag as a cape his freshman year and I know I was drunk dialed more than once by Kelly and TupperDoug. It was not so for me. In a misguided attempt to please my family, I had started dating and subsequently got engaged to a bible thumping deliberate virgin, and under no circumstances would there be any pre-marital sex or drinking of any kind (the biggest fight we ever had is when some of the guys on his floor were watching porn and I was like "OOO! PORN!" and then found out that The Lord would smite me if I even thought about enjoying porn.) (oh also, even though I was only with him because I thought he was the kind of guy my family wanted me to be with, I found out later that they all hated him because he was an annoying know-it-all and they were all relieved when I broke up with him. So, gigantic waste of time then, except that it came in handy a couple of weeks ago at trivia when I knew who had the highest lifetime batting average in the MLB because he was a walking sports almanac and made me memorize that sort of thing. It was Ty Cobb, by the way, .367.) So that collegiate right of passage was ruined for me. Eventually I broke up with him because SERIOUSLY WHAT THE HELL?, but by then I had graduated and gone back to Cleveland, two years early because I had plenty of time on my hands for studying and going to class since I wasn't drinking or having any sex, and all my friends were still away at school having a normal and more awesome experience.

We would make it a point to get together over breaks. One year on Christmas Eve Eve, I believe in 1999, TupperDoug, Kelly and I realized we all had a little last minute shopping we needed to take care of. Kelly had only just gotten home so our plan was that she would have dinner with her parents and her sister and then she would call us when they were finished and we would go pick her up and head to the McMall. TupperDoug came over to my house where we hung out waiting for the call from Kelly. We waited. And waited. And waited. A number of hours went by and TupperDoug and I were getting a little bit pissy. Finally we called her and this is what she had to say. "I'm sooo sorry you guys, we totally lost track of time. See, we had a bottle of wine with dinner, and then we got to talking and we had another bottle of wine and......... listen, my whole family's drunk. Do you want to just come over here instead?" Obviously we did, so we hopped in the Tuppermobile and headed over, stopping along the way to pick up some beer or something from the liquor store. By the time we got there, a few other friends and neighbors had been called and were sitting around the table with Kelly, Simmy and their parents and they were all drinking toasts to, well, anything really. "Doug and Amber are here YYYYEEEEAAAA!" they shouted, raising their glasses to us and gulping down some wine. "Oh look and they brought beer YYYEEEAAAA!" they shouted, raising their glasses to us and gulping down more wine. TupperDoug and I got right to it. Someone poured me a glass of red and we joined in on what had basically become a "cheers to everything" drinking game. This continued for a long time, as more friends and neighbors kept showing up, because apparently they had called everyone in the address book and said "come drink".

And then the shots started. I specifically remember vodka and moonshine, which Kelly and Simmy's dad had been given by someone for a reason I never cared to find out. There may have been some tequila. Hell, there may have been anything really, I was already half plowed before the shots even started. Despite being the oldest and most experienced drinkers, and also being English, the parents (who are also my pretend aunt and uncle, though for some reason I've been calling them "Mum and Dad" for the better part of 20 years) were already annihilated (the several hour head start probably didn't help matters). So when Simmy's date that night showed up to take her out, her Dad immediately started pouring the guy a shot. What followed was a several minute struggle between the two parents, with Simmy's mother yelling "Stop that! HE'S DRIVING YOUR DAUGHTER!" while trying to pour the shots back into the bottle, even as Simmy's dad was tipping the bottle sideways and pouring even more shots. They bathed the table in spilled vodka.

In the meantime, I had completely lost control of myself. The alcohol hit me hard and also all at once, so I went from interesting conversationalist to totally incoherent in the space of one sentence.

Let's take a break from that and talk about family traits for a moment. You know how sometimes you can look at a family and every has the same nose or the same smile? In my family, we all seem to have the same set of personality traits. For instance, everyone in my family allegedly makes the same face when we are trying to make a point. This was christened "The [My family name] Stare" by the comic when we were visiting Cap and Mrs. Sizemore in St. Louis. Despite not knowing the term because he had only just made it up, Mrs. Sizemore instantly knew what he was talking about and the two of them collapsed into conspiratorial laughter. So there's that one. There's also another one: when we have been drinking we get Loud. My suspicion is that this is due to our collective thinly disguised feeling of smug superiority. When we've had to much to drink, we dispense with the disguise entirely, and because we believe what we have to say is really PROFOUND and IMPORTANT, we all very suddenly go to eleven.

This being the first time I'd ever been drunk we were all about to find this out. The moment I realized I was impaired, I was struck by the desire to inform everyone of the momentousness of the occasion. "YOU GUYS!" I screamed. "I am SUPERDRUNK! You can't let me drink ANY MORE. I AM CUT OFF! DO you hear me? CUT! OFF!" And then I poured myself some more wine and repeated this at top volume throughout the evening.

The "cheers to everything" drinking game was still going on, but now it had evolved (or maybe devolved) into "cheers to drunk dialing". It worked like this: Mum would call someone, the rest of us didn't know who (she may not have either) and then she would say some random thing and the rest of us would erupt with screams and cheering. Everyone would take a drink, mum would hang up, and we'd start the whole process over again. We were having a good time with this until she made one call that started with "Hello! We're all DRUNK!" A mighty roar erupted from the crowd, but then she continued with "So I just wanted to let you guys know that Amber probably won't be coming home tonight." She'd just drunk dialed my parents and then ratted me out. I was too drunk to be furious but had no problem being Loudly Incredulous per the family tradition.

The rest of the night I remember in patches, as drunks are wont to do. At one point my pseudo-uncle was sitting on the kitchen floor mumbling to himself, "Turn your head and cough!" and we have a lovely photo somewhere of my pseudo-aunt standing next to the table covered in empty bottles where she looks for all the world like a spree killer who just happened upon a herd of fresh prostitutes. As for myself, I learned another important lesson that night about me and drinking, which is that when I hit the wall I don't just run into it, I plow through it like the Kool-Aid man yelling "OH YEAH!" while bricks rain down on me. One minute I was fine, the next minute I had passed out on the couch and managed to vomit gallons of red wine onto my white sweater while remaining passed out. When they found me they did the only thing they could - pull my shirt off me, carry my ass to the bathroom and lay me on the floor. This would prove to be the start of something golden. To this day, if the stories told the next day don't end up with me sleeping on the bathroom floor, then I wasn't really that drunk. Kelly did her best to get me to sleep in a bed and also to put a shirt on, but I wasn't having it. I liked the floor and I wasn't moving, so instead she laid a clean shirt on top of me like a blanket and left me there to sleep it off. Around 7:00 a.m. I was awoken by TupperDoug, who had come to collect me before sneaking out.

It was now Christmas Eve, and by tradition we were all expected at my (real) aunt and uncle's place mid-afternoon for a ham dinner and to sing "Happy Birthday" to Jesus (really) before heading off to church (another fond childhood memory - before church started they would hand out little white candles for us to light and hold up at the end of the service when everyone sang Christmas hymns by candlelight. All the kids in my family would spend the entire church service warming the candles in our hands and between our knees to soften them up so we could bend them into odd shapes. One time my cousin Bryan managed to tie his candle in a knot). Upon arrival the five of us who'd been involved in the prior evening's festivities looked one another over and I have to tell you, we looked like shit. We felt even worse and the idea of ham or food of any kind was simply nauseating. But as much as we all wanted to die, there was a sparkle in the eyes of all of us as co-conspirators of what would become the Legendary Night of Christmas Eve Eve.

KELLY, DOUG, SIMONE and anyone else who was there and happens to read this: PLEASE leave your memories of this night in the comments. I know we will never be able to give a complete picture of the awesomeness to anyone who wasn't there but damn it, we can try.

Nostalgia And Shit Like That.

When I was growing up, my family liked to play board games at Christmas. It started out with the adults while us kids were busy having a wrestling match with cheap-ass plastic and its tag-team partner gravity. When we outgrew that frustration we joined them. The first one I remember playing is Pictionary, which I hated because to this day I can barely color inside the lines, let alone draw something freehand and have it be recognizable. I also remember quite a bit of Trivial Pursuit, although in my family there was nothing trivial about it - we were pretty fucking serious about wanting to win, and by "win" I mean beat my dad.

By far the most popular game we ever played and the one that dominates my memories was Crack the Case. My parents got it for my brother as a gift one year and the entire extended family decided to test it out after dinner. We were instantly hooked. Nevermind that we didn't even play it right. Almost immediately we stopped keeping score and just played it until we felt like stopping, no small feat considering the disturbing amount of competitive spirit that myself, my father AND my brother all carry around to this day (remind me to tell you how I'm "winning" at sex right now). Crack the Case worked like this: one person would pick a card out of a pile. There were three piles to choose from: Easy, Medium, and Hard. Over time as we got good at it we started disregarding the Easy cards almost entirely. On the front of the card would be a "case" - some mystery, usually a suspicious dead body, and a handful of details about the environment or circumstances the body was found in. The back of the card had all the details about what had happened. The goal was to solve the case: Who killed this person, how and why? The more difficult cards had either less initial information, or the information given was misleading. I remember one time spending several hours and no small amount of frustration on a case where the card read, "A woman has died. On the ground is a puddle of water and a hat. Who killed her, how did they do it and what was the reason?"* The trick to the thing was that you were only allowed to ask the person reading the card yes or no questions. It was like do-it-yourself CSI before there was any such show as CSI. Everybody stayed at the table and played. If sitting around playing board games as a family sounds completely dorktastic, that's because it is. Except that it wasn't. The game has been out of print for years, so good luck finding it, but if you do, I defy you to sit down with your family and play this game without thinking it is the most fun and addictive thing you've ever done with your family (unless your family sits around having "family heroin time", which would be more addictive, though I dare say it's probably not nearly as fun, at least after a while).

I made the decision several years ago not to spend any more holidays with my family and I can't say I regret it. I've grown very attached to the freedom of not having anything expected of me. I don't have anywhere I'm supposed to be at any certain time. There is no dress code. I don't have to get dressed at all if I want. If I wake up that morning and decide "You know what? Fuck ham. I don't feel like cooking. Imma eat candy all fucking day and no one can stop me", I can sit there with a massive bowl of M&Ms in my paint splatter sweatpants watching "A Christmas Story" 16 times in a row and never take a shower. Of course I would never actually do that because OHMIGOD YOU GUYS, Christmas is so TOTALLY, like, my FAVORITE as by now you all know (and if somehow you've missed this piece of information about me, I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you that my living room is currently a forest of Christmas trees. Seven of them). Also, ham is awesome.When people ask "What are you doing for Christmas?" I have to restrain myself from saying "WHATEVER THE FUCK I WANT! SUCK ON THAT, BITCH!" and making their trip to rural Indiana to see their crazy aunt that farts at the table and their racist grandparents seem like purgatory. But the one thing that I do always miss this time of year is that time right after dessert when someone would go to the cupboard and pull out Crack the Case.

*Cap, Bry, Simmy and Kelly: Who remembers this case? We seriously spent like two hours on it. Bonus points for the first person to comment with the answer.

They Came Through!

So this ought to be a challenging post, because I'm super excited about something that happened at work today and I can't wait to tell you about it, but I have to be a lil sneaky and talk around a couple things to avoid breaches of confidentiality about where I work, what I do, and whom we do business with, partly because it might be in violation of the company privacy policy (I have perhaps ill-advisedly given the address to this blog to our compliance maven, but I had to - she's my best friend here and also she's on it a lot. OK, fine, it's BrownsFan) but mostly because I love you guys, but only in an anonymous internety sort of way and don't want to provide anyone with enough details to track me down in real life.

ANYWAY, long story even longer, the pistachios are here (BrownsFan, where the hell are you? The pistachios are here!). And I know you're thinking "Yeah, big deal" and normally you would be right, but no, this time you are wrong. Way wrong. These are special pistachios. They come from a company that does things related to what my company does and they send them out every year in a big tin as a holiday gift. If you know or think you may have guessed what I do and you work at a company that does a similar thing and does business with this company, then you already know the exact tin of pistachios I am talking about because they are legendary. Also they are magical. They are gigantic by the standards of a normal pistachio and more importantly THERE ARE NEVER ANY BAD ONES. You know the bad ones: they look like a normal pistachio but when you eat them your face goes all Emperor Palpatine because they taste like all of nature just died inside your mouth. There's a few in every package, it's part of the pistachio eating experience. Pistachio roulette if you will. Well, in the whole history of getting these specific pistachios (nigh going on nine years now because we also got them at the place I worked in Cleveland) I have never had a bad one or even heard of anyone else having a bad one. Each and every pistachio is pristine of flavor (and massive). They are grown on trees made of gold in a land of perpetual rainbows and picked by angels Victoria's Secret could never hope to surpass in beauty or quality of underwear. And I am eating them right now.

I was concerned that maybe they weren't coming this year. Last week I had marched into BrownsFan's office demanding to know "Where the fuck are the pistachios?" (or more likely a similar question with less of the word "fuck" but an equal amount of inappropriateness) and she had pointed out that the big leader guy was going through some personal Scariness and sending out pistachios may not be at the top of his to do list, and also there's that whole thing where the economy is maybe not so good right now. I went away and sulked. But then! Today at precisely 3:24 p.m. Central Standard Time, Parent Company Accountant messaged me with one concise and glorious word: "pistachios!" and all the pieces of my life fell back into place.

Welcome back, magic pistachios. Please make yourself at home in my mouth.

Amber And Jenny Know How To Party

Mrs. Sizemore: Also, wanna home depot trip sometime this eel for a diy project?

Me: lol. eel

Mrs. Sizemore: Haha I meant week, no idea where eel came from

Me: best sentence of the day. then we can go to home depot and be like "where are your eels?" and they'll be like what? and we'll be like "the EELS! WHERE ARE THE EELS?" and then we'll get thrown out

Mrs. Sizemore: Hahahaha Let's

Me: it's a plan

In Which Amberance Has Opinions About Sports

• College football - It is not Cam Newton's fault that his father is a douchebag.
• NBA basketball - I'm not going to sit here and pretend like I suddenly care about the NBA or that I've ever been a Cavaliers fan. That said, I am veeerrrry interested to see what goes down tonight when LeBron returns to Cleveland. A heard a clip from a talk show earlier where a caller said that Cleveland fans need to be given credit for being civilized human beings at heart. I'm pretty sure this man has never been to or met anyone from Cleveland. I've seen people throw Monopoly money on the field at Albert Belle. I've seen the Cleveland Browns have to surround an opposing team and walk them off the field to protect them from the fans. Jim Thome still gets booed every time he sets foot on the field. And those were at relatively low levels of collective pissed-offedness. Are we really expecting there to be no incidents tonight? Because I don't care how much "security" you have, angry-ass people are creative at smuggling and as I discussed with BrownsFan earlier today, there's only one figure in all of sports that Cleveland fans hate more than LeBron James, and that man hasn't set foot in the city since the day he stole our football team for fear of actual bodily harm or possible assassination. Just sayin'.
• Sunday Night Football - Ben Roethlisberger has a broken foot. SWEEP THE LEG!*

*Just to clarify, this statement is not meant as any kind of support for the Ravens. I'm just saying there's an opportunity here to take this missing link out for the remainder of the season and it would be a shame to pass on that. <----This is what I'm talking about. Cleveland sports fans clearly are animals.

Suck It, Fondant

I've outdone myself. Most likely I've outdone you. I know that sounds arrogant, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

If you are a fan of the show Sons of Anarchy (and you should be) you will most likely recognize this as the top rocker and reaper logo from the Sons colors (motorcycle jacket for those that don't watch the show or Gangland on the History Channel):


Looks an awful lot like a leather jacket, no?


I drew that myself.

IN FROSTING.


Cake (not a leather jacket)


BUTTERCREAM FROSTING.


I'm better than you. Na na na boo boo, stick your head in doo doo.

The frosting of the moment is fondant. Its consistency makes it the favorite for detail work in current cake decorating trends. It is also a bitch to work with, tastes like chemicals and won't adhere to your cake on its own meaning that you still have to make buttercream frosting to decorate a cake with fondant. Fondant loyalists will try to tell you you will never get the kind of precision with buttercream that you can get with fondant. I point to the above cake as definitive evidence to the contrary. My cake is pretty AND delicious, and I defy you to repeat the detail work of the reaper's bony hands and bloody scythe with friggin' fondant.

A Heartwarming Story Of Love You Definitely Don't Want To Read

"You should not have said that. I mean it. You have no idea what you're getting yourself into. None," I said to the volleyball team at the end of the bar. It is uncharacteristic of me to voluntarily talk to total strangers, but in this case my sense of duty outweighed my social phobias. A cute, young, apparently volleyball-playing girl had come in with the rest of her team and announced, to no one in particular, that she wanted to hear some gross out stories. She said this within earshot of the bartender. I have known the bartender for over six years at this point and we have been roommates for more than four of those years, so I know better than anyone: between working at Tai's, his prior work experience at the notorious Manhole, the cast of characters he hangs around with and his normal every day activities, the bartender has accumulated more gross stories than any human should be able to collect in a life time, and there is nothing he enjoys more than relaying those stories to unsuspecting newbies.

I knew what was coming. The Poo Bottle, Public Fisting Incident, Pool Table Porno, Drilldo + Midget Stripper, Turd of Frightening Diameter, Cocaine Toilet Seat, Sausage Fingers, Suspected Incest...I'd heard them all, but one story always stands out above the rest of them, and as the bartender turned to me grinning and asked me "Should I tell it first or save it for the end?" I knew he could only be talking about one story: Condom Holly.

Holly is a peripheral friend of the bartender and me, and by that I mean we know a lot of the same people and she tends to show up in places the bartender and I are known to frequent (rather than that she is somehow actually our friend). She is also a fucking train wreck. I mean it. If you look up "train wreck" in the dictionary, there is a photo of Holly and a note that reads "See also: Shit show, Hot mess." Holly lives off an apparently infinite supply of money from a settlement she was awarded after an accident many years ago. Her entire life consists of going to concerts and consuming as much drugs and alcohol as her smallish frame can handle (and usually more). Her commitment to complete self-annihilation is staggering to the point of almost being impressive: she has managed to age herself to a point where she looks fully 25 years older than she actually is and she makes the comic look like a tee totalling choir-boy.

Holly has an on again/off again boyfriend who is nearly as gross as she is. They fight and make up constantly and she always takes him back despite the fact that in the course of these fights he regularly beats the shit out of her. It was the aftermath of one of these fights that lead to the now infamous "Condom Holly" story. I will warn you now just as I warned the volleyball team on Thursday night: this story is not for everyone. As a matter of fact, this story really shouldn't be for anyone, but it takes all kinds and since I've already pretty much started it, it would be unfair of me not to go the whole nine. Just remember, I warned you to stop reading now and will not be held responsible for any retching or nightmares you may experience should you choose to keep reading. You are hereby informed.

One day, Holly showed up at a divey punk bar on Clark Street with bruises on her arms and a black eye. This sort of thing had happened before, and the owner of the bar did his best to talk some sense into her. "You have to get rid of this guy," he told her. "He's a fucking loser. I mean, you're no prize, Holly, but you deserve better than that piece of shit."

"You don't get it," she replied. "He LOVES me."

"Holly, he FUCKING HITS YOU. Kick his ass to the curb already!"

"No, he loves me. And I can prove it," she said with absolute conviction.

She then proceeded to cite an example that she felt "proved" that he loved her: Several months earlier they had got into yet another fight that degraded into a screaming match and possibly some fisticuffs. Eventually he stormed out of the apartment. She stormed out as well and headed directly to the nearest bar where she proceeded to get completely shit-faced. In due course, she managed to attract the attention of some random ne'er-do-well who was clearly too drunk to notice or care that she has the face of a bog monster suffering from smallpox (not to mention the breath of a coke addict - I should know, she's breathed on me in the past) and per the rules of white-trash culture, she took him home with her for a one night stand.

Some time the next afternoon, the loser boyfriend returned home all apologies and contrition and Holly of course took him back, as she always does. What followed was the inevitable make up sex. Holly had apparently not bothered to have a good wash after her activities of the night before. This was made evident when the boyfriend started going down on her and...and...(excuse me, I just threw up in my mouth a little)...and wound up sucking the used condom from the other guy that was still in her from the night before into his mouth.

"...and he STAYED with me," she finished to her horrified audience. "because he LOVES me." I can't necessarily argue with her logic on that. What frightens me most though was not even that this ACTUALLY HAPPENED but that she felt this was a story that was acceptable to tell other people and that it has now become so infamous that the bartender and now I also have come to think it's acceptable to tell other people.

There you go: the Condom Holly story. I informed you thusly.

Stand And Deliver

It's been pretty well established, I think, that I am remarkably lazy and perhaps a little bit selfish as well. Many of us are. There are a few people among us, however, whose selflessness and courage allow the rest of us to be this way. These people are called veterans. They are also called awesome. And today is Veterans Day, they day in which we do what we should be doing every day - honoring them and thanking them for their service to their country.

My most sincere and heartfelt thanks to both of my grandfathers and my roommate's father (R.I.P.), my dad (I love you Papa!), my Uncle John (who I only know because of his service - he's not my real uncle, he's my dad's best friend from the Navy), my parent's friend John K. (he's my friend too), Juice and Will from Tai's (Semper Fi, mofos), Terry (also from Tai's but he was Navy), Michelle (my R.A. from college), my amazing high school friend Erin (also I am jealous of her gargantuan boobs), my ex's father Ozzie and best friend Ronnie (miss you guys), Jamie from the Globe (Royal Navy), my favorite Browns fan Eric and his father Earl (who happen to be the brother and father of my best friend H-Town. Eric once sent me a photo of a camel spider while stationed in Iraq, I haven't slept well since), Dave from Ginger's (keep on rippin' and tearin' buddy), Machetti and Pretty Sean from Delilah's (drool drool drool), the incomparable Corporal a.k.a Chris (oi my good friend. P.S. You're ignorant!), my gorgeous friend Marty (he is seriously hot. I'd hit that. For sure.) and my former neighbor Marcus (who has appeared on this blog under the name "the Marine" when he accused the bartender of being a Communist because he doesn't like The Princess Bride, also he has two cats named Patton and Nimitz). I am so very proud of all of you and I am eternally grateful for all you've done. I owe you, well, everything, but I'm hoping you'll settle for beer.

Happy Veterans Day everyone!

Amberance: Hopeless Romantic

on why I won't be the one to walk away from my pseudo-relationship first:

I could tolerate you for decades if I only have to see you twice a year.

Tremendously Tremendous

Me: I'm kind of starting to have a crush on Eddie Olczyk.

BrownsFan: (horrified) Not...physically...right?

Me: Um, well not really because I think he'd keep yelling "stop it right here" all the time. And that wouldn't be fun.

BrownsFan: ....Ok.

Me: I just think he's really funny and intelligent and I sort of like his little accent (giggle).

BrownsFan: Look, I know you finally had your way with [boy who doesn't call], but I REALLY think you need to go to Bermuda and have sex all week so you're not so...

Me: Boy crazy?

BrownsFan: Obsessed.

A Trip Down Memory Lane: Six Years of Bullshit Bizzybiz

For the first time in six years I have realized that it is my blogaversary on the actual day of my blogaversary. Six years ago today, I posted two very short blog posts: one because I was upset that CAKE hadn't scheduled a show in Cleveland until after I'd already driven all the way to Columbus to see them and the other because earlier that day, the CEO of the company I was working for at the time had asked the question "What is the process of statement processing?" which he thought constituted a double entendre (per the fabulous Mary (who I miss terribly) immediately after leaving that meeting, "I believe the word you're looking for is 'redundancy'. 'REDUNDANCY'!"). And thus Bizzybiz was born.

I started a blog primarily because I had started reading the blog of Salam Pax a.k.a. the Baghdad Blogger, a young Iraqi architect who was writing an amazing blog about what he was experiencing as a resident of Baghdad while we were bombing it called "Where is Raed?". I was tremendously impressed with his writing but moreover I was completely fascinated with the medium. The idea that regular people could share anything they wanted to say with everyone in the world who had an internet connection seemed completely amazing to me back then. H-town also had a blog at the time (she's been on extended hiatus for a few years) which turned out to be instrumental in changing our relationship from college buddies who called to catch up once in a while to the one we have now where she is my very best friend because it enabled me to keep up with her life on a daily basis. Also it was frikkin' hilarious. I wanted in.

I don't think I've ever taken the time to explain what "bizzybiz" actually means. I named this journal "The Bizzybiz Blog" because of an incident that occurred in close proximity to the time I started think about starting a blog. When I worked at the number factory, there was another company on the same floor of our building and like most office high rises, everyone on the floor shared a bathroom. Most of the women who worked there were nice when you'd run into them at the sinks, but there was this one angry looking red-headed girl who would scowl at you every time you walked in as if you were scum coughed up from hell just to ruin her private hand washing moment. The women of my company were discussing it on our way to the sundry shop to buy cigarettes (this was also right around the time that I tried to take up smoking because I wanted to be a cool kid. I hated it and couldn't stand to have a cigarette unless I also had a big glass of chocolate milk to kill that horrible charred ass taste. It was my smokin' milk. This adventure lasted 4 months before I finally woke up and said "What the fuck am I DOING?") and I said something along the lines of "That girl is a biz-atch" because I sometimes like to talk like Snoop Dogg. Bia, who was from Romania and who spoke impeccable English except for when she was trying to repeat words I had just made up, agreed with me by saying "Yeah! She is a...bizzybiz! Or whatever you just said." The new word wound up being a staple of our conversations. So "Bizzybiz Blog" literally translates as "Bitch Blog". Now you know.

When I first started the blog, I didn't set up a stat counter because I am an incorrigible narcissist and I would never have gotten anything done because I would have constantly been checking to see how many page views I had. Fortunately or unfortunately, earlier this year when blogger did a redesign, one of the changes they made was a tab that automatically tracks your stats whether you asked for it or not. I am fucking obsessed with my stats now, exactly as I predicted (to be fair, so is the comic. "How many page views do you get per day?" he wanted to know last week as we both kept frantically hitting the refresh button.). What I found out was I have a LOT more lurkers than I realized, and in places I wouldn't have expected. For instance, I have far more pageviews in the Netherlands than I do in the U.K. despite the fact that I go to England to visit friends every year but have never been to Holland and don't know anyone Dutch. India and South Korea seem to have taken a great deal of interest as well. Also, hello to my lovely readers in China, I am pleased that you are here since I just assumed I was banned in China. People seem to find the site while searching for some really bizarre things ("slutty Hogwarts", "men and women licking frosting", "huge naked grandma boobs"). The most viewed blog post is Amber And The Intern: Bad Wedding Guests  and I have absolutely no idea why unless the intern is running around driving people to that page (thanks if you are. I still think your decision to take up the bagpipes is really weird). I've also want to say thanks to a couple of readers who have been around since the beginning: my wonderful Canadian friend Pronto and the amazing but spider loving monogodo whose home I will never be visiting as he and his wife have surrounded themselves with tarantulas. You guys rock.

Thanks to each and every one of my Bizzybiz readers for your inexplicable interest in the ramblings of a highly accident prone, sex obsessed, boy crazy, immature, neurotic, socially inept, Christmas loving, moderately drunken midwestern girl with a Girl Scout Cookie addiction. You complete me. (But seriously, naked grandma boobs? How the hell does that search get you to here?)

Brotherly Love

I had lunch with my brother today.

Cap: Ok, see you. Be good.

Me: Yeah, see you soon. (pause) I'm not going to be good.

Cap: Oh, ok. Well go fuck yourself then.

Amberance, Simplified

You know you have chosen the right person as your best friend when they know you well enough to distill your entire existence into three words and a drawing. For example, MY best friend H-Town made this for me on Someecards yesterday:

That's the kind of person you should be looking for. If they can explain what exactly a barometer is measuring, that's handy as well (I've been assured it doesn't count how many baros there are, nor tell you the direction of the nearest drinking establishment).

Just As An Aside

When editing that last post, Blogger spell check said I should be spelling Schaumburg "Scumbag".