This time, baby, I'll be bulletproof

Okay, now that I'm a little more composed and not ranting about the unfortunate screwup with my doctor's office, I can tell the story of Josh and the random dance party on Saturday.

Several friends and I went out to dinner at a French restaurant in the city this past Saturday. (The food was good, but my stomach is NOT used to French cooking... Cream and butter and cheese sound delicious together, but I couldn't even finish half of my plate because it was so heavy.) We stopped at another bar after dinner – it was kind of a, "This place looks chill, and it just started raining, so let's go here!" decision.

The gist of the story goes: there was a party in a large room upstairs next to the bathroom. I asked a girl in the bathroom what was going on, and she goes, "It's so-and-so's going away party! You should totally come! Bring your friends!" (You know, typical drunk bathroom conversation.) I told her we might check it out later (polite answer, considering there was NO ONE there and we'd stick out like sore thumbs. I told my friends about the party and random invitation, saying the DJ up there was amazing, but it was empty as hell.

In meantime we drank for another 90 minutes before deciding to move on. One of my friends urged me to go back upstairs to see if the party had gotten any better, so I bravely did another bathroom run.

The party was now ROCKIN'. Tons of people there, lots of dancing, etc. As I made my way through the room to head back downstairs, who do I see? Josh. Oh, SHIT.

He spots me and I chat with him for about a minute before being interrupted by some girls to grab him and his friends for a photo. Once they were done, one of the girls starts immediately talking to him, and I'm still standing there like a total idiot. After about 20 seconds of this, I realized he was clearly more engrossed in her than continuing to talk to me, so I tap him on the shoulder and tell him I'm going back downstairs to my friends.

Now, is it just me, or was that rude of him? I didn't know anyone there, we were having a conversation until it was interrupted by photo time, and he lets some girl cut in. Either they both were just too sloshed to realize I was standing there (hard to do since I was taller than everyone within a 5 foot radius), or he's a dick.

I told my friends about the now-bumpin' party and the awkward run-in with Josh. Since we were all very buzzed and dying to go dancing (especially my best friend), we decided to scope it out. Hey, we had an invite, why the hell not?

We head upstairs and my friends and I hit the dance floor. Holy shit, it was SO MUCH FUN. The DJ was great, the people around us were having a fantastic time, we were dancing like crazy... and turns out we weren't the only party crashers there, so it was all cool. (And Josh wasn't even near us, so I didn't feel awkward.) Seriously, we were having a complete blast.

And then, as I'm jumping up and down to Katy Perry, I look over to my right and see Josh making out with some chick.

Me:

The funny part was, I didn't really care. I mean, yeah, it blows because I thought Josh was cute, but to glance over and see him sucking some girl's face off at a GOING AWAY PARTY seems kinds tacky. First off, you're 30. This is not a Miami dance club or a fraternity house basement. The hostess is moving across the country, and you're grinding and making out with some chick? Gross.

I think if this happened 10 years ago when I was still in college, I'd be shell-shocked and it would have ruined the rest of my night. But instead, I just turned around and kept dancing and having the time of my life with my friends. I think it just goes to show that if you have the right people with you, it makes all the difference. Also, it made me realize that Josh is a player who only cares about getting ass.

My only regret is giving him the courtesy of saying goodbye when we left about 30 minutes later. I should have just walked out of there without saying anything, because he really didn't deserve another 5 seconds of my time.

All my friends were talking about the party for days afterwards because they had so much fun dancing. In the end, that's what matters!

Sometimes you just got to show how you feel

It's weird how a somewhat good day can turn right on its head into an ugly one with a phone call.

Long story short(ish), a few weeks ago I made a last minute decision to fly to Europe to see my grandmother, who I haven't seen since she left the U.S. about 6 years ago. She's getting up there in years, and my parents were already going, so this was an opportune time to go.

The only issue was that I had a major sports-related appointment in the middle of their trip. I couldn't move the appointment any earlier, but there was an opening the day after I came back. However, that was also the day I was scheduled for minor eye surgery (not Lasix :)), and to try and do the two on the same day was too much to handle, especially after flying back from Europe the night before. After much hemming and hawing, I decided to fly out right after my appointment on Friday, then come back the next Wednesday with my parents (which coincided well with my Thursday eye surgery, so they could pick me up after it was over).

Well, today I get a voicemail from my doctor's office, saying they hadn't received the new photos of my eye needed to get the pre-approval from my insurance company for the procedure. I was confused, because I had sent the photos almost two weeks ago. I called the office and told them that, and the receptionist told me the nurse I'd emailed them to never received them. As a result, I'd have to change my surgery date because they couldn't get the pre-approval in time for next Thursday's and wait another MONTH to have it done.

I was pissed. I had specifically built my travel plans around this damn surgery, only to have the doctor's office screw up. One would think if they hadn't gotten the photos I'd promised to send when they reminded me on July 22nd, they would have called! But I did send them, on July 24th, and now I'm being told they were never received. (Maybe, just maybe, if your office had its own email address and you weren't relying on someone's personal account, we wouldn't have had this issue!)

I forwarded the original message back to her and told her to check the email again. I was so upset that I hung up the phone and started crying at my desk because a) all that stressing/planning was for absolutely nothing, and b) now I'm going to have stitches in my eyelid right in the middle of competition season, which fucking sucks. I'm still furious, because I have the original email that clearly has the two photos, and it was sent with plenty of time to process the pre-approval. It was THEIR mistake, not mine, although obviously I should have called and confirmed they'd received them, since they didn't let me know they hadn't. (Since I had sent/received email from them before, there's no reason why it would get "lost" or sent to the spam folder.)

Jeez. I'm sorry for the two negative posts in a row, but I hate, hate, hate it when crap like this happens. I specifically told work that I'd take a sick day for the surgery, but now that I'm going to be home, there's no sense in me not going into work, since I have the world's worst vacation accrual policy and the three days I'm taking in Sweden are 25% of my current vacation allotment. (Meanwhile, I get to listen to my cubiclemate prepare fun work international travel plans and get twice as much vacation because of the comp time she receives while on travel.) It's annoying because if my sick leave were just PTO, I'd have oodles of vacation time. (I swear, sick leave is discriminatory towards single, healthy people without kids.)

Stop being upset over nothing, self. You didn't cry when you saw Josh making out with some chick at a dance party this past Saturday (story for another time), why should something like this cue the waterworks?





Post title song reference: "You're So Real" - Matchbox 20

Maybe I just feel too much

Depression is such a selfish beast. It'll sit there dormant while everything in life seems to go right, and then when a few wrong things happen in a row, it lurches out of the darkness, grabs ahold of your soul, and sucks you back down with him. That's kind of how I feel like now... sliding down the tar pit of bummed-out-ness.

British guy from OKC never messaged me back. I completely went against my own rule and messaged him a second time (over two weeks after I sent the first, so it wasn't like I did it immediately), just to see he'd bite. I figured I had a 0% chance of response if I didn't ping him, and if I did send a message, the worst outcome would still be 0%. But I should have figured a guy with a "red" response rate isn't going to give anyone a chance. I know I shouldn't take these things so personally, but I'm sitting here tearing up because I don't feel good enough. Over one guy... stupid, right? :-/

Sometimes I wish I had gone to grad school years ago, because at the least I'd be back in an environment where you meet guys and establish a friendship before actually going out. I feel like my online personality is different from my real life persona, and I can't seem to get the two to match up. It was the same way when I did kickball – I felt much more comfortable meeting people there because the bar scene was so relaxed and casual. Unfortunately the league I played in self-destructed and it's full of 22 year olds now.

In other news, last week I logged into my credit card account to find some purchases I definitely didn't make. This is the third time in 5 years that my credit card number has been stolen! I think I'm extremely vigilant about using my card safely, yet for some reason my damn number has been up for grabs. It's getting tiresome... thankfully it hasn't affected my credit score or anything, but it's still a nuisance and a little (okay, a LOT) unsettling.

Annnnd now my manager is griping at me because one of our analytics applications is running slowly, probably because they've added like 150 websites and are tracking too many. So that's my fault that our server can't handle that kind of load, and I'm getting flack for it. "I love my job, I love my job, I love my job..."
Friday, you can't come soon enough!




Post title song reference: Foo Fighters - End Over End

Fighting the battle of who could care less

Also known as, "Adventures in OKCupid messages."

10 days into logging back into OKCupid, and not much on the horizon. I've gotten plenty of visitors and a handful of messages, but unfortunately quality != quantity.

For example, one message I got last Saturday consisted of: "Princess, I'm taking you out for dinner and dancing. On me, of course. Call 555-555-5555 blah blah blah."

Princess? Only my mom calls me that, and even then I don't like it.

And then we have the overachievers... there's the guy that sent me two messages in the span of 6 hours (and keeps visiting my profile), and another that sent me a message that said, "Hi, I'm ___. Pleased to meet your acquaintance." I deleted it, because he sounded like a scammer, and the next day I received ANOTHER message from him: "Did you get my last message?" SRSLY?!

And the best one so far -- I couldn't delete this one fast enough -- "You look like a dominant submissive. Am I right?" (WTF? Isn't that kind of an oxymoron...?)

[Headdesk.]

I have responded to a couple of messages (I have a little trivia question on my profile, and lots of them try to answer it. Unfortunately, it's kind of nerdy, so it attracts nerds). Some seem to have potential, but overall I still seem to be attracting duds. And, go figure, the couple of guys I've initiated contact with don't reply. Go figure. I really wish cute-possibly-British-guy would respond, but I also didn't give him much to go on... plus I did it before I updated my information and photos, so he probably saw my not-so-great old phot (provided he checked my profile!). I dunno, sucks that the few guys I'm immediately turned off by are either 1) cowards afraid of women taking initiative, or 2) I suck.
 
On a side note relating to OKCupid, here's something crazy: last night when I was on my bike ride, I passed a guy walking out of his apartment building over to his motorcycle. I smiled at him, he smiled back, and as I pedaled away, I thought, "He's cute! Wow, he looks a LOT like one of the guys I have on my Favorites list." This morning, I went and checked, and I'm about 70% sure it's the same guy. He rides motorcycles and lists renovating his apartment in (that area of town where I was riding) as his interests, and I know for a fact that that apartment building is owner-only. Or I could be completely wrong and just ended up smiling at a random guy. ;)



Post title song reference: "Battle of Who Could Care Less" - Ben Folds Five

Got my mind set on you

I made the mistake of buying a cupcake for dessert, eating 75% of it, and then finishing the rest a few hours later. I'm literally vibrating from the sugar overdose. I can't stop shaking my leg and I was starting to get a headache.

But man, it was SO GOOD. Chocolate and vanilla cream cheese marble cake with cream cheese frosting. DELISH. A reminder of why I only allow myself to have cake once in awhile, because I have no self control over sweets.

Anyway, Bluemoon's post about climbing out of the online dating pool in September reminds me that I need to get more involved in it. This past weekend, I went on OKCupid and updated some of my profile (considering I logged in maybe once a month, that's pretty big. And it apparently bumps your profile back up, because I started getting all these messages and visitors). I went to my favorites list, and (sad to say?) a lot of my favorites were still active. I don't know, maybe it's a good thing, considering I had only messaged one of them in the past six months. (He didn't respond.)

As I was "window shopping," I looked at this guy's profile that sounded amazing. I don't want to go into too much detail, but the more I read, the more excited I got: "Dude, he's SO FREAKING CUTE on paper! And in photos! And it sounds like he has an accent! AND HE HAS GLASSES!" (I've had a glasses fetish since I was like, 7. It's kind of sad/weird.)

And, go figure, I sent him a little message (nothing too serious), and he hasn't responded. Or checked out my profile.

NOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Is this karma for me not replying to messages I've received? Granted, I haven't read most of them (I feel skeezy doing it at work, and my hard drive died on my laptop, so I've had to resort to my phone), but still. The ultimate men-and-women dating issue: why is he not interested when I express interest in him, and vice versa?

What I need to do is reply to messages that interest me, send a few messages to ones on my favorite list, and forget about the adorable guy and move along. Right? I'm going out for drinks with Noah tonight, the guy who used to work in my office... I like him but he's just really, really smart and I don't really feel much connection with him. We'll see.

He's good at being what he's not, gives nothing away

And now for something completely superficial!

I've been so amazingly good at NOT checking D's Twitter feed or Facebook in the past couple of months. And I didn't wish him a happy birthday (easy to do since the asshat didn't send me one), so I was doing really well.

However, the other day I was playing around with my Twitter account and clicked on his name from a direct message sent about 2 years ago. I figured I had been good for so long that I could cheat one day... wrong.

One of his tweets from early in June said, "Our first ultrasound!" with a link to a photo of him and Jailbait next to a monitor. Fortunately, I had already seen the newer tweets that said, "It was a joke!", so I didn't immediately pass out. (She's an "athlete" for a living – I use that term loosely since her sport is pretty stupid and her parents pay for everything while she doesn't work or go to college – and presumably was getting an ultrasound for an injury or something.)

Seriously. What a sick fucking joke. She's fucking 21, for chrissakes. Could you imagine if her parents saw that tweet? I think mine would have killed me. (Hell, they'd have knocked some sense into me for dating a guy 13 years older than me when I was that age.)

Worse yet, people were saying, "Congrats!" to D, as if it were some giant blessing that he knocked up some chick who doesn't even have a college education or future beyond her "professional athlete" schtick. (Can you tell I'm still pissed at him for, well, everything? Not just the breaking my heart part, but letting some cheating skank charm him into giving up everything and drop the ball on the project I worked my ass off to help him with.) As I've probably said before, I'm equally as angry with myself for falling for his bullshit and false promises.

Anyway, on a more happy note... I am obsessed with this video. My grandmother used to have a Siamese when I was a little kid, who was one of the best, most tolerant cats ever... so I have a soft spot for the little blue-eyed cuties. Enjoy. :)

Post title song reference: Nikka Costa - "Push & Pull"

Hatred passed on, passed on and passed on

This is going to be a little different (and late, considering the SCOTUS rulings were last week), but does anyone else get really disheartened when you see nasty, politically themed bumper stickers or plates? Specifically, I'm talking about these types:

Helloooo, crazy.

The other day I saw a guy with stickers on his car: "My dog bites Democrats," and "My cat is smarter than the President." Come on, dude, don't drag your poor animals into this!

And then, of course, there's this license plate, which really bothers me, because I'm relatively sure Ben Franklin did NOT envision the rattlesnake to be a symbol of ass-backwards-ness:

To be perfectly honest, the Tea Party frightens me. Even though Wikipedia defines them as a group that "advocates protection of the work of the founding fathers of the United States, reducing U.S. government spending and taxes, and reducing the U.S. national debt and federal budget deficit," I feel they certainly don't portray that message. All I hear is the garbage and hatred spewed by the likes of Michelle Bachman and Rush Limbaugh and the "they're gonna terk our guns!" crazies. I feel like since the radical anti-government, bigoted nutjobs have a socially acceptable, common ground with the TP (small government and conservative social values), they feel it's OK for them to express their prejudice publicly in the name of a political party:

"Tea Party members are not necessarily any more racist than typical white Americans, but that the movement's supporters are more likely to be, leading the researchers to conclude that, 'what the Tea Party means to its members and what it represents to the large public may, in fact, not be the same thing.' The study of survey data compiled in 2010 found that people who viewed the Tea Party favorably more often agreed with negative sentiments about African-Americans, than did the general population."

I know I'm supposed to be tolerant, that expressing dislike doesn't make me any better than them. I know everyone is entitled to their opinion and political views. But when these opinions and views are narrow-minded, homophobic, and fucking downright racist, it makes me furious. I get it: there are Tea Party members who aren't racist assholes. Yet not enough TP members are stepping up to refute the overt bigotry and prejudice, and it certainly doesn't help that those same people are against gay rights and think it's OK to make ridiculous laws to control women's bodies, so you know they're not very tolerant to begin with. ;)

I think what's triggering this semi-rant is 1) DOMA and Prop 8 being struck down (thank you, lawd!), 2) the Voting Rights being repealed (boo), and 3) when I was out biking on Saturday, I got angry honked at by a guy with a "Don't Tread on Me" sticker. For what reason, I don't know – it was a rural country road with low traffic, I was so far over to the right side of the road that I was practically in the gravel, and I had my blinky light on, so it's not like I riding at night and invisible. Maybe he was pissed because I was a woman and exercising instead of cooking dinner and doing laundry at home, where I obviously belonged! Ha.

Anyway. I suck at writing political opinion stuff, so sorry if it's hard to read. :)





Post title song reference: Rage Against the Machine - Settle for Nothing