Everybody Plays Basketball.

It has been a few days.

I am not dead. This is how rumors get started.

After the goat-cheese quesadilla incident, I got caught up in the excitement of the Zurich World Cup Regatta, right here in little Mercer County Park! For those that don't know, that's some world-class rowing... I worked in the information tent, where I was yelled at by some of the best rowers on the planet!

Seriously, there is nothing like a great big regatta to put a smile on my face. I row! He rows! She rows! That Romanian guy rows! That girl eating the hoagie rows! People in more popular sports never get this feeling because everybody plays basketball.

I row 3 times a week at least, and I'm usually up before 5 AM to do it. This can be invigorating, of course, or I wouldn’t do it… but it can also get to be a bit demoralizing when you realize that you love a forgotten sport. I suppose excelling at rowing is like being a really good marathon runner, or rally car driver. Sure, a few fanatics will probably stalk you but mostly nobody cares. So as an amateur rower I’ve developed a whole different athletic dream than most. There’s no buzzer shot in rowing; no Pele kick, no grand slam or 60 yard field goal. There’s no Alan Iverson, no endorsement (other than the occasional print ad, umm, yes, so…), no Subway Series, no none of that. In fact, the US national team practices right there on the same little lake as I do (they do generally don spandex over their Jockeys)… which when you think about it is like borrowing Mike’s Air Jordans every day, just because he has nowhere else to be.

But enough about rowing. I could go on all day, but I won’t.

Very Not So Bad.

The Tuesday after the World Cup I was invited to have dinner with some sales reps from the Japanese company who will purchase the new blood analyzer I’m designing. I was a little hesitant to go for a few reasons. First, who wants to meet the design engineer? I’m not very good at being wined and dined, and I don’t think any engineers have ever been invited to this sort of thing before, and besides – I had tons of work to do! The second problem was that dinner was at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central. Anyone who has ever eaten in my presence knows I don’t eat anything of-the-sea, for a variety of reasons that all center around a particularly violent vomiting episode around age 6.

Hey, maybe I should change this to a web log where I just talk about all the times I’ve puked.

Anyway, I hit the Oyster Bar website (like most former NYC residents, I’d never been there, let alone heard of it… also I hung with the poor crowd in college) and things were looking pretty bleak. 2097 types of oysters! Fresh fish delivered daily! You know what I say, the only thing a fish is good for is hitting someone upside the head. But I digress.

So I vacillated for a few days but finally decided to go. I mean, who could resist, right? Dinner with the customer? It was kind of like I got picked for a prize and I just had to take the train into the city to pick it up… what can I say? The life of an Engineer is neither fortune-filled nor glamorous.

And of course, it turned out to be not so bad. Or as my new friends would say, Very not so bad, may I take your photo please? No joke, I am anti-silly-stereotypes (unless they are really really silly like Irish girls with raccoon sunburns, more on that later) but there were more cameras at that table than customers. None of them could pronounce my name, let alone speak English. They did, however, ask if I was Italian (I think all the vowelliness at the end there confused them), ask if I brought them any analyzers (I hadn’t… they were mostly in pieces on my office floor), and tell me that they think I am “Very Excellent Engineering.”

Wow! Suddenly Japanese wasn’t so hard to understand! Clearly, they were all talking about my not so very lateness and how they were really glad they took a being on vacation to come meet me.

Heh, what’s really funny about that last paragraph is that MS Word’s grammar editor sees nothing wrong with it.

So, I even ate just a tiny bit of calamari and a couple of popcorn shrimp. Needless to say I was very hungry. Turns out the Oyster Bar has some not-of-the-sea (may I take your picture please?) options, like drippy steak, very dry chicken, and a plate of vegetables. I had the chicken.

Susan Gets Disgruntled.

I will take just the slightest of moments to touch just ever so slightly on the travesty that was Survivor II: The Australian Outgrowth. I spent way too much time thinking about vapid people (other than the vapid person sitting right here) and how they should cook more rice! or form an alliance! or cook less rice! or just talk more about nothing!

We had a pool here at work… $5 to draw a Survivor’s name out of a hat, winner takes all. Last year Susan had Susan in the pool; this year she drew Tina and her fake boobs. Congratulations Susan on not just barely being a loser again this year.

Now I have to go get ready for Real World 11: The Metropolitan Relapse.

You Got to Know Your Chicken.

On to the busy busy weekend… Saturday I washed Brave Blue Mike and changed his oil (for those who think I am being metaphoric, click the damn link already), and then headed into NY for the Moldy Peaches – Cibo Matto show at Irving Plaza. All kinds of fun. All kinds of rehashed memories, too. Like being so worried that Marc would be pissed off that I got stuck in tunnel traffic. Then remembering all the fun and not-so-fun (can I take your photo please?) walks through NY we’ve had… also meeting Zohar everywhere, but most especially the first time we ever met him which was actually at Irving Plaza, at a TMBG show.

I want to mention Zohar a little more here (not sure how up to date that site is, but apparently the guy's got a beard now... and I'm a bad friend)… the guy’s a crackhead. Not literally, as in, one whose head is filled with crack… here is where I actually am being metaphoric. Zohar walked up to me, Marc, Karen, Mariss, and Jerry Gay at the TMBG show. It was 1994 I think, and he was with a guy in a red fez. The two of them taught us the Particle Man hand dance, the guy in the fez left to spread the good word further, and we were left with Zo who proceeded to discover we knew his brother. For the next 7 years, Zo would continue to make intermittent appearances in life… on Second Ave on his way back from East Village Cheese, in front of the Telephone Bar, at a party at NYU law school during Karen’s first week there, at a Halloween party in Princeton dressed as a Smurf, etc. Then Marc ran into him recently and brought it all back home.

So I was sort of vaguely expecting Zo to be at this show, just because that’s what he does… Marc and I were wandering around after the Moldy Peaches (awesome, by the way. just great) and Marc glances over my shoulder to see….

Mariss. Not Zohar, but pretty damn close. Weird. And what was stranger was that between the total of 5 people then associated with me at that show, only one had ever listened to either of the bands extensively.

Free Painkillers for All Crews Under 4:07.

Sunday was my first Masters’ Regatta… I am getting old, but I was really only invited because they added a new class just for this regatta that allowed me to participate. Which meant I was the youngest one from my club there, which meant I was officially the knees of the team. I have never heard a group of people complain so much about pain. It’s a damn thousand meters, people, not a marathon.

Nonetheless, a kinder, funner group of rowers is not to be found anywhere and I am so lucky for their existence. And I won a medal.

That’s all for now; sorry for the brain dump. I promise to figure out this archiving thing soon. If anyone reads this and knows how to get that to work on blogspot, please let me know. In the meantime, just enjoy my capitalizing and my excellent grammaring, and may I take your photo please?

Posted at 6:00 PM in category Old (this category is huge!)