Trivial Pursuits
The Flying Ghoti: Unintelligent Design at work.
Tuesday the First of January, Two Thousand and Eight
Eh, I would have had a headache anyway.
Okay, so we were down at Max's of Broadway, a bar in Fell's Point, and after ringing in several time zones worth of New Years with the appropriate number of Heavy Seas (the Winter Storm is really quite a pleasant little beverage), we were on our way back to the car. Suddenly, out of nowhere, this young gentleman was really pissed at me. (He was also, to mix my dialects a bit, really pissed in general.) The only theory that the rest of us were able to come up with after the fact was Kerry's—she thought she might have brushed up against him and he thought it was me, possibly coming on to him or something, which is plausible enough given the way drunk logic works. Anyway, he punched me. One shot to the left cheekbone. It didn't really hurt, and in fact it was a little while after that before I realized what had just happened—I just felt a lot of pressure in my face, saw some stars, all that exciting stuff.
After that, my concern was defusing the situation and getting my friends out of there. Me and my friends outnumbered the guy who hit me and his friend by about two to one, and the guys I was with were both willing and entirely able to pummel them both into the sidewalk, but I didn't want them to, for various reasons I didn't do a very good job of explaining. Fortunately, our designated driver Alex (who's about three times my size) was on the same page as me, and the combination of sheer physical presence and sobriety that he brought to the table was enough to prevent what had seemed inevitable. I shook hands with the guy who hit me (his name was Matt), he and my friend Yoni looked for my glasses (apparently they weren't enough to stop him punching me after all), Yoni found them under a car about eight feet away from where I had been standing, and I thought we were okay. One of my friends, Mende, did manage to get in a small altercation with Matt's friend (Dave—apparently the secret to remembering people's names is mild head trauma) which I didn't really see but which ended up with Mende in the gutter, having evidently busted his head on the way down. It bled a fair bit, as head wounds are prone to do, but it was a small cut and didn't require stitches or anything.
Anyway, after that we got everybody out. I felt bad that I had let a friend get hurt defending me, and even though I know I did the right thing trying to defuse the situation, I still felt very old and prudent.
The eye is fine; a bit of a bruise on the cheekbone, a couple small cuts from my glasses. No shiner. Mildly uncomfortable, but not painful. It was a good experience, honestly, or would have been if Mende hadn't gotten hurt too. I've always secretly wondered what it's like to get punched—I think a lot of people do, otherwise Chuck Palahniuk would be a lot poorer.
congenially posted by Martin Marks at 2:37 in the afternoon // three comments by:
Well, that's all my resolutions dealt with.
So far in 2008 I've been smooched and punched in the eye.
aimlessly posted by Martin Marks at 4:25 at night // five comments by:
Monday the Thirty-First of December, Two Thousand and Seven
Google will come to your house and do your laundry for you.
Google now has a free 411 service. Dang.
chimerically posted by Martin Marks at 12:46 in the afternoon // two comments by:
So glad I'm not working today.
Apparently I really did catch up on my sleep yesterday, because after being out until like 1:30 last night, I found myself unable to sleep past seven. Crazy.
abstemiously posted by Martin Marks at 7:59 in the morning // comment? by:
Sunday the Thirtieth of December, Two Thousand and Seven
240 and counting!
I had an accomplishmenty-fresh day! Woo!
surreptitiously posted by Martin Marks at 10:44 in the evening // comment? by:
Now I have a too-much-sleep headache.
Oh, sleep. How I've missed you.
I am very glad that Sasha has figured out that I don't appreciate being woken at four in the morning. I was not looking forward to having to throttle her. Actually, she seems to have developed a rather uncanny Santa-sense thing—the instant I wake up, she knows immediately and comes running. I honestly think she might be the sweetest-natured representative of any animal species I have yet encountered. When the aliens come demanding to know why Earth should be spared from their fury, we should really just introduce them to Sasha.
absentmindedly posted by Martin Marks at 1:31 in the afternoon // comment? by:
Saturday the Twenty-Ninth of December, Two Thousand and Seven
"Anyway, this cake is great."
The Year in Online Video, by our beloved Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg. A thousand bonus points if you manage to watch all twelve videos in their entirety without crying. (I managed it, though by minute four of "Chocolate Rain" I was pretty close to breaking.)
adverbially posted by Martin Marks at 3:12 in the afternoon // four comments by:
Friday the Twenty-Eighth of December, Two Thousand and Seven
And yet I can't help feeling like I should have more books than this.
Bookshelf 1: English-language fiction (Adams-Vonnegut)
Bookshelf 2: English-language fiction (Vonnegut-Yehoshua), foreign-language fiction, memoirs, poetry, general non-fiction, linguistics
Built-in shelves: General reference, linguistics reference, Spanish, Russian, other languages, photography reference, art/photography, comics, religion/folklore, philosophy
Actually, I have a lot more shelf space than I realized, thanks to my thirty-six linear feet of built-in bookshelves. That's a very good thing, because those shelves are the closest I have to a pantry. (My apartment, I've noticed, has plenty of storage space in theory, but the distribution isn't exactly optimal.)
Are there any good authors whose last names start with "E"?
parenthetically posted by Martin Marks at 7:57 in the evening // ten comments by:
Where in the hell am I going to put Persepolis?
I hate trying to categorize things. It always seems so arbitrary.
dubiously posted by Martin Marks at 6:03 in the evening // six comments by:
"But I'm not done vomiting!"
So I tried to make today a Decadence Friday, but as it turns out, my idea of shameless and unabashed hedonism is apparently sleeping in until 6:45. Also, I somehow managed to volunteer to come in to work tomorrow. I suck at Decadence Friday.
peevishly posted by Martin Marks at 4:23 in the afternoon // one comment by:
Thursday the Twenty-Seventh of December, Two Thousand and Seven
"My breakfast was half-English, and I'm half-English too."
Mango trifle!
animatedly posted by Martin Marks at 7:34 in the evening // comment? by:
Wednesday the Twenty-Sixth of December, Two Thousand and Seven
"Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel."
I can't believe I'm working on Boxing Day. So not cool.
abjectly posted by Martin Marks at 5:38 at night // comment? by:
|
