I Sipped Bacardi Like It Was My Birthday

I turned 30 a few days ago without much fanfare, which was fine with me, though I'm kind of surprised I didn't post anything on my birthday. Oh well.

Amanda came downtown to meet me for lunch, and she surprised me by giving me a new guitar for my birthday present!!! I was pretty f'ing excited, I will tell you that. I haven't played since my old guitar was stolen when our house got robbed on the St. Patrick's Day Massacre of 2005. Then Thursday night I got another surprise when my friend Neola from Jackson walked into my apartment. That one really threw me for a loop. Evidently I'm pretty easy to surprise, b/c everyone knew she was coming but me.

Had a "birthday party" Friday night at this dive bar in Santa Monica called "The Speak Easy Cocktail." This place rocked. Good jukebox (which we pumped a bunch of money into), strong drinks (I don't know if they were cheap or not b/c I was getting them handed to me by everybody, but I imagine they were), a couple of pool tables, and a Scottish bartender named Ruth. Ruth bought me a drink also. My roommate Josh told me he thinks I might have drank a whole bottle of scotch, but I doubt that. Although it might have been close.

Today Amanda, Neola and I were having lunch and walking around on Melrose, and I bumped into Toby from Rockstar: Supernova. I shook his hand and said "You fucking rock, man, keep it up and good luck," to which he responded, "Cheers, good on ya, mate." Australians are funny.

I'm gonna get some posts about our trip to Hawaii up here soon, with a few pictures, but in the meantime, if you want me to email you the ophoto album, just leave me a comment with your email address and I'll send them along.

Vegas Baby. Vegas.

8 hours after getting back from Maui, I left for Vegas to meet my buddies for our fantasy football draft/weekend of partying. It was a great weekend, though one with very little sleep. We were like a walking Sports Guy column. No more details - what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but I can say that we all had a fun dinner on Saturday evening.

Beach at Ka'anapali on Maui

This place is absolutely paradise. Will update more when I have a chance, but might not be until after I get back.

28 Shuffle

I have to admit I stole this from some other music blogs I've read, but I don't really care. I put my iPod on shuffle this morning, and these are the first 28 (b/c that's how many lines are on the pages of my legal pads) songs I got. Not bad, really, considering the fact that there's a good bit of crap on my iPod.

1. Ryan Adams - Please Do Not Let Me Go
2. Metallica - Last Caress/Green Hell
3. Ben Folds Five - Evaporated
4. Bruce Springsteen - Missing
5. The Guess Who - Cardboard Empire
6. Ben Harper - Welcome to the Cruel World (live)
7. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy - Go Daddy-O
8. R.E.M. - Beat a Drum
9. Elliott Smith - A Passing Feeling (live)
10. Turin Brakes - By TV Light
11. Grateful Dead - Till the Morning Comes
12. Bob Schneider - Better
13. Bob Dylan - Watcha Gonna Do (Studio Outtake)
14. Paul McCartney & Eric Clapton - While My Guitar Gently Weeps (live)
15. Ryan Adams - Amy
16. Guns & Roses - You're Crazy
17. Snoop Dogg - Too High
18. Metallica - The Prince
19. U2 - New Year's Day
20. Jimi Hendrix - 3rd Stone from the Sun
21. Sleater-Kinney - Jumpers
22. Sufjan Stevens - Riffs & Variations on a Single Note
23. Radiohead - Go to Sleep (Little Man Being Erased)
24. Third Eye Blind - Deep Inside of You
25. Bob Marley & The Wailers - Waiting in Vain
26. Bush - Machinehead
27. Rolling Stones - Sympathy for the Devil
28. R.E.M. - Suspicion (live)

How to Eat Like a College Student

After Saturday's fitness experiment (where Amanda was very excited to see Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tom Cruise's hot wife from The Firm and co-star of fellow Jacobs Camp alum Ginnifer Goodwyn in HBO's Big Love), I had to go home and rest. Big day ahead. There was a Texas alumni barbecue down in Redondo Beach, and they were bringing in Salt Lick Barbecue for the occasion, as well as all-you-can-drink Shiner Bock.

We got to the barbecue around 5:00, and they were supposed to start serving dinner at 5:30. No dice. More like 6:30. At least they had beer and the DVD of the Rose Bowl to keep everybody happy until the food was ready.

I haven't had Salt Lick in years, but it's like riding a bike, you just don't forget how to handle a Salt Lick meal. Step one: starve yourself all day, so you're really really hungry by the time the meat hits the table. Check. Step two: drown (and I mean drown) EVERYTHING on your plate in sauce. Meat, bread, potato salad. Everything. Check. Step three: eat your first heaping plate of ribs, sausage and brisket (leave the chicken alone) as fast as possible, so you don't realize you're full until well into the second plate. Check. Step four: when you start to falter during your second plate, drink a little Coke in order to burp a few times and make some more room in your stomach. Check. Step five: when you realize you're not going to be able to handle much more, eat the sausage first. Everything else is just there to keep the sausage company while it waits to be eaten. Check.

I went at this stuff like my life depended on it. I was so stuffed that I could barely eat lunch the next day. That night we went to a party that some friends of ours were having, and I just sat on the couch the whole time nursing a bottle of beer and a glass of room-temperature Sprite. I was like an overfed baby, I just wanted to lie down and burp until I felt better. When I complained to Amanda that I was so full it hurt, she said, "Well you were shoveling it into your face! You need to learn to eat smaller portions." I responded by telling her that I do know how to eat smaller portions, but that this was Salt Lick, this was different. True, I was in pain (something that didn't happen 10 years ago), but if I had it to do all over again, the only thing I would change would be to try to smuggle some extra sausage out in a cup or a ziploc bag.

Survived ... Barely.

I am DYING! Amanda and I just finished taking a class at Barry's Boot Camp, where my college roommate Mark is a trainer. Damn. It's a good thing I was sweating so much, so you couldn't see the tears running down my face. More on this later, I have to eat breakfast before I pass out.

Sometimes LA Rules

Despite the lack of A/C in our apartment, the traffic, the ridiculous amount of time it takes to get anywhere, the distance from most of our family and friends, and the cost of living, sometimes living in LA is just awesome. Last night, Amanda and I went with a friend of ours who has a good hook-up to see an advance screening of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. A good movie is a good movie, and a free movie is a good movie, but a free good movie that hasn't even come out yet is just awesome. I wrote a review of it over at The Water Cooler, but you should all definitely go see it when it comes out this weekend, it was hilarious! Super-duper!!

Hell-A

It is so damn hot here. I mean, it's not Mississippi, we don't have the humidity, but we also don't have air conditioning in our apartment, so even without the humidity, it is absolutely miserable. It's like Elaine told Puddy, when he told her she was going to Hell.

I'm going to Hell! The worst place imaginable. With the ragged clothing, and the heat, my God the heat!

I've been sleeping on the couch some nights, and one night last week I had to resort to drastic measures. I went downstairs and grabbed an ice cold can of Pabst out of the fridge just to hold in my hand while I tried to fall asleep. It worked, for a little while, and I fell asleep feeling a little cooler, but then I woke up again about 30 minutes later drenched in sweat, and holding a warm beer. A friend suggested I place an entire cooler next to the bed, so that when one beer warms up, I can switch it out for a cold one. Doesn't sound like a bad idea.

It is actually cooler outside our apartment than inside. We've been trying to adjust by doing things outdoors. Last night we went to see a movie. In a cemetary. It was as weird as it sounds. They do movie screenings at the Hollywood Forever cemetary (which is the creepiest name for a cemetary I can think of) during the summer, and last night they showed Woody Allen's "Manhattan." First time I've seen it, and it was awesome. As if seeing a movie in a cemetary wasn't weird enough, they had a DJ spinning tunes before and after the movie, and everyone sits there and has picnic dinners before the show starts. Nothing like bringing a bunch beer and wine to the graveyard. Just a normal Saturday evening in Hollywood, I guess.

The Water Cooler

ATTENTION!!!

There's a brand new pop-culture blog out there that I feel the need to call your attention to for many reasons, not the least of which is that I am one of the two (currently) contributors to it.

The Water Cooler

I would urge you all (some more than others, but hey, we're all family here, right?) to head over there and check it out, b/c in my humble opinion, it's damn good. We've got a bunch of stuff going on over there, might be a little ambitious, and who knows how long it will last, but we think we need to at least put in as much time updating the blog as we did designing it, so that gives us a minimum of 2 weeks. I would imagine it'll go much longer. Most of what we do over there is going to be pop-culture related, reviews of movies, music, etc. Two things to look out for are our fake reviews of books we have never read (our "Judge a Book By Its Cover" series), and my "30 Years of Rock" series in which I will be reviewing the top 10 albums of each year of my life, each year on a new day leading up to my 30th birthday next month.

One thing I want to point out, though, is that for some reason, the template we used looks like complete crap on Internet Explorer. This would be a great time for you to download and use Mozilla Firefox as your web browser, if you don't already. With tabbed browsing, you can have multiple sites open at once in the same window (without crowding your computer with so many browser windows open at one time), and it has much MUCH better pop-up blockers and security features than IE does. Best of all, it's free!! Get it here.

There's a lot going on out here in the City of Angels, so don't think that I'm abandoning Manifest Destiny in favor of The Water Cooler. I don't like one more than the other, I just like them in different ways. It's like the way my parents feel about my sisters. They don't love one more than the other, they just love them differently. They do, of course, love me more. That's a joke. They love me much less.

So, check out The Water Cooler, bookmark it, read it early, read it often, and keep coming back here as well, b/c I'm going to be posting different stuff in both places. And thanks for reading. You stay classy, San Diego.

PS - My buddy Micah's latest Chicago Sports Review column got picked up by the up-and-coming (at a very fast pace) sports blog Deadspin. Check it out here, it's quality stuff.

I Don't Roll on Shabbas

But I will roll the day after Shabbas.

Saturday we spent the day at the beach in Malibu with a bunch of friends. It was great, the waves were huge, and we were like 7-year olds jumping around in them. We packed lunches and a cooler full of water (and beer), and some of us forgot to put sunscreen on various parts of our bodies. I got a weird burn on a small strip of the back of one of my arms. I was one of the lucky ones. Frisbees and footballs are much more fun on the beach than they are in real life, I learned.

That night Amanda and I went to the MOCA for some sort of "Night Vision" event. It was pretty cool, they had a cash bar and a DJ spinning tracks in the museum courtyard, and the exhibit was open, so we went inside and checked out the art. Maybe I was just exhausted from the Sun, but I wasn't too impressed, despite the fact that the artist had attended the University of Texas for a brief period.

Yesterday we went out to the Valley (where it really is 10-15 degrees hotter than the city) for my roommate Josh's surprise bowling birthday party. (He's a good bowler but his younger brother bowled two games over 200.) Then we went over to his parents' house to hang out in the pool and have a cookout. It was a really fun day, but I think I spent too much time in the Sun this weekend, b/c I'm completely drained. I did manage to put up my unofficial (b/c I can't remember my previous record) high score yesterday, though, of a 146. I took a picture so the next time I break it, it won't be unofficial anymore.