I had a guy repeatedly call me a "douche bag" after a game. I was losing near the end of the game, and his clock was low (I play fast games, only four minutes total for all moves per side), so I, in a move of desperation, just put the rest of my tiles down and made a bunch of crazy, nonsensical words in the process (for a huge score), hoping that he (I'm guessing it was a dude, chicks usually don't do crap like call people names after an online Scrabble game) would be too time-panicked to challenge. But it didn't work. He challenged it, the tiles came off the board, I lost my turn, and he won.
Despite winning, he apparently took exception to my tactics (which I stand by, if you don't have time to challenge, it's your own fault for letting your clock get so low), and he started bragging and berating me. I think he used five different forms of the word "douche": douche, douche bag, douchyness, douchery, and my personal favorite, douche cock. I thought it was funny at first, so I played along for a few minutes, but it got old quick, so I just ignored him, and he went away. I find this type of behavior really weird. What do you possibly hope to accomplish? Even if you get the reaction you want, you aren't around to see it.
After my Scrabble spree, S and I went for a run, and then we helped S's friend E, who lives in the unit above us, put up some curtain rods. Now, I'm not exactly Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor, but I'm the only dude of the three of us, so by default I had to do all the "toolsy" things like work the drill and put the screws in. It went OK. S and E measured one of the windows incorrectly, which resulted in me having to "rescrew" everything (and it gave E some nice little wholes in her wall that will need to be patched), but other than that no real issues. We got them up, safe and secure. It's probably the type of thing that would've laughably easy for a halfway decent handyman, but sadly I'm nothing close to a halfway decent handyman. An online Scrabble player I am, a factotum I am not. (I added that last statement entirely, because I wanted to use the word "factotum" in a sentence.)
[Did you know Tim Allen once simultaneously had the number one selling comedy movie, book, and TV show? Did you also know that people are fucking idiots?]
Oddly enough, however, I did work construction for a summer (1999) and managed to do a good job. The trick was to a) show up on time everyday halfway sober, and b) do all the easy and lame tasks nobody else wanted to do. See, my crew was mostly delusional deadbeats and drunks who thought they had Bob Villa-esque skills, so nobody ever wanted to do the grunt work -- picking up nails or pushing a broom, etc. This type of work was beneath them. (They preferred to smoke and complain about their lots in life, instead.) So, I just did all the easy stuff that required little to no skill, took my $10/hour (which was a mini-fortune for me at that time) and went home. And by home, of course, I mean the camping pad on the floor of the friend's bedroom I was staying with.
That was a great summer actually. It was the first summer my friends and I were 21, so we used to go down to Dad Watson's in Freemont, fill up a bunch of growlers with beer, go back to the apartment and play Foosball and RBI Baseball until the wee hours of the morning. My friend JY and I literally played a 90-game season of RBI that summer. We kept stats, by hand. I still have them on my computer somewhere. Strangely, I don't recall there ever being any woman around that summer, huh, weird.
[RBI Baseball: possibly the greatest Nintendo game of all time.]
OK, that's all for this entry. I have more to talk about, but I have to go soon. Maybe I'll put up a midweek entry. I would like to start having two shorter entries per week, instead of one long one, but it seems like Saturday is the only day I have the time and energy to really sit down and crank something out.
So until next Wednesday... maybe...
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