The Bitterness Blog

I drove past a church yesterday with this sign outside:

Word.

It’s so cold, even the people doing God’s work are pretty much like, “Yeah, fuck it.”

Check out this ad for Tulipian condoms from Argentina, the tag line of which is, “In case 2012 isn’t 2012″ (click on the picture for a better look):

Now that's a party.

Because if I find out the world is ending, the first thing I’m going to do is fulfill my dream of having sex with a person-sized praying mantis.  Condoms be damned.

Should the world not actually be ending, I think at that point, STDs would be pretty low on my list of concerns.

I saw this here at my new favorite website, Jezebel, which you should totally check out when you’re bored at work.

I am awkward.  I’m not, like, Asperger’s awkward, but I’m awkward enough that the idea of a first date causes an actual physical reaction in me, akin to sucking on a lemon.  The main reason I have never tried internet dating is that it would require a first meeting and I can’t think of anything more uncomfortable and unpleasant than that experience.

So perhaps, in hindsight, speed dating was a bad idea.  But it appealed to me because it minimizes the length of awkward face time.  If it’s bad, it’s only bad for a few minutes; then it’s over.  There is no more than 4 minutes of awkward silence, there is no awkward moment while it’s decided who should pay the bill.  There’s not enough time to get drunk enough to accidentally wake up in a stranger’s bed the next morning and realize you got wasted because the your date sucked.  And it’s a quantity over quality situation:  you meet a bunch of people in a short amount of time, so basically it’s all based on physical attraction and the confirmation that neither party has a terrible stutter. Golden.

Every person, guy and girl, got an index card and wore a name tag with a number on it.  At the end of the night you turn in an index card with your number and email address on it, and the number of any person you met that you liked.  If that person put your number on his card, then bingo, you have a match, and you are each emailed with the other person’s info.

I felt pretty good once I got there.  I was worried I would be the proverbial fat kid in the room, but I was definitely one of the cuter people in attendance. (As luck would have it, I was having a cute day.)  One thing I have going for me when it comes to talking to guys is that I’m a hockey fan, and I’m a real hockey fan, not just a girl who says she’s a fan of a sport to impress a guy.  Of course not every guy likes hockey (idiots) but most guys have a basic understanding of all the major sports and basic knowledge of the teams and the major stars.  Also, I essentially work for the Ringling Brothers Circus now, and the office is decorated with crazy circus shit, including a stuffed gorilla that used to perform in the circus for 30 odd years and now resides in a glass case on the 5th floor.  Quirky and fun, no?  The way I saw it, those two topics should provide enough conversation to fill 4 minutes once the requisite where-are-you-from, what-do-you-dos were out of the way.

The first guy was a very nice gentlemen, but he was from India, so he didn’t know anything about hockey.  Then I moved onto the circus.  He wasn’t familiar with that, either.  He was a network engineer and had only been in America for a year.   I’m generally not attracted to that particular ethnicity.  I’m not racist.  It’s kind of like how I have no attraction to red haired men.  Just not my type.  Also not my type:  Asian guys and Hispanic guys.  So sue me.

The next guy was also from India, recently moved to America, and was a network engineer.  The one after that was from India, recently moved to America, and was a software developer.  And so on and so forth. It was like a fucking Punjabi assembly line.  I was seriously starting to think I was being punked.

So it would seem.

I got two Hispanic guys, who were best friends, both recently moved here from Puerto Rico.  One was about 5’1, which, I think it goes without saying, is a deal breaker.  His buddy had a ponytail with all the hair under the ponytail shaved off.  Also a deal breaker.  Turns out guys who grew up in Puerto Rico also have limited interest in hockey, and apparently, Puerto Rico isn’t a stop on the circus tour.

One guy was really sweet but he was former military, which in my experience, I just don’t mesh well with.  He came prepared with a written set of questions. I don’t believe we got past his first question, which was, dog or cat person.  I said dog, obviously and he said cat and then launched into that bullshit monologue that a lot of cat people always spout about how cats make you earn their love and their general disagreeable nature and ungratefulness is somehow charming.  Just admit you like cats because dogs take a lot more work and you’re just too fucking lazy to walk an animal twice a day.

One guy was not even remotely attractive but said he was a hockey fan.  He asked me what team I liked, which I found to be kind of offensive.  Hello, the only team in the area is the Caps.  You support your home team.  I asked him who he liked and he said the Kings, the Caps, and the Devils.  Um, no.  You can’t pick three teams, kind of like you can’t have three wives.

Another guy said he was big into hockey and his favorite team is the Pittsburgh Penguins.  To which I replied, well, it was nice meeting you, but I’m a Caps fan, so this conversation is clearly over.  He thought I was joking. He was wrong.  There are some principles I just can’t compromise on, some evils which cannot be condoned.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping to meet a man who was a cross between Alexander Skarsgard and Ryan Gosling with a dry wit, a rich family and an English degree, so perhaps I was setting the bar too high.  But I thought there would be at least one person I was moderately attracted to.  Actually, I thought there would be one guy I liked and I would turn in my card and he would turn in his and my number would not be on it.  I was expecting the event to be soul crushing in a putting my self esteem through a meat grinder kind of way.  Instead I didn’t even bother turning in my card.  I also pretended to be a smoker to have an excuse to go outside and sneak out before the event was over.

So, needless to say, it was a bust.  However, my best friend Kim had predicted that at least one guy would make a crass, carpet/drapes redhead comment,and at least every guy I talked to had the decency to keep those to himself.  You know it was a great night when not being subjected to an offensive sexual joke is the highlight of your evening.  Score one for me.

A couple of weeks ago my friend Brittani and her roommates played host to a 21 year old couch surfer from England.  If you’re not familiar with couch surfing, check out the website for more info.  Being an only child and therefore being raised by the parents of an only child, this practice strikes me as astonishingly dangerous, likely to end in one of two outcomes:  your bones as wind chimes, or your skin as lampshades.  Possibly both.  But I understand the theory behind couch surfing, because traveling is expensive and no one knows a place better than the locals and we are the world, blah blah, blah.  Just check references so you don’t end up in Hostel situation, is all I’m saying.

The 21 year old, Nick, had a sort of Michael Cera-esque, charmingly awkward at the age of 21 but likely to be flat out bird faced and chicken-legged by the age of 26, thing going on.  Brittani and I took Nick to Adams Morgan and during the car ride, he had some words of wisdom:

“There are a lot of hipsters in America, but not real hipsters.  The ones that think they’re hipsters really aren’t.  It the ones that don’t know they’re hipsters that are actual hipsters, in the real sense of the world.”

“That group of shirtless black men looks rather dodgy.  We should keep driving.”

“I’ve noticed that black people love McDonald’s.”

Then Nick decided it was time to get serious about his drinking and took a bunch of shots, then got mad at me because he thought I was purposely not getting as drunk as he was (even though we had the same amount to drink). It’s not my fault those British wankers can’t handle their liquor.

Yeah, it was that kind of night.

As we all know, I’m a huge Washington Capitals fan, and today is the 27th birthday of my hockey boyfriend #2, Brooks Laich (hockey boyfriend #1 is Alex Semin, but there is very little space in my heart between 1 and 2 in this case).  Besides being an awesome hockey player who had his first hat trick this past season, Brooks has a reputation for being an insanely good guy.

Case in point:  the same night that the Caps suffered a loss in game 7 of the first round of playoffs, knocking them out of the race for the Stanley Cup, Brooks spotted a car with a flat tire on the side of the highway on his way home from the game and stopped and changed the tire for the driver and her daughter.  In his suit (the guys wear suits before and after the games).  I mean, Christ.  It’s one thing to be a good samaritan, but it’s a whole other animal to be one after suffering a heartbreaking, soul-crushing, early-playoff exit such as the one the Caps suffered that night.  So today, on his birthday, we salute Brooks Laich, because he’s awesome.

The hotness.

Oh, and did I mention he’s super, super hot?  There is a stereotype that all hockey players are toothless, smashed-nose brutes.

Continued hotness.

Brooks Laich is clearly proof that the stereotype does not always apply.

The man knows how to wear a suit.

Happy birthday Brooks!

*Also, I should note that my birthday was yesterday, and if the proximity of our birthdays is not proof that Brooks and I belong together, then I don’t know what is.

The other night, while flipping through the channels, I caught about 2 minutes of the MTV show True Life.  This episode’s topic was, “I’m Addicted to Porn,” and as you can imagine, the men featured in it were real winners. 

Brandon is 26, addicted to porn, and lives with his grandma.  He feels that his porn addiction is hampering his possibility of a relationship with a woman because porn allows him to enjoy women without dealing with all the drama that comes with them. (I’m figuring he favors straight-up, get right to it, fucking-porn, as opposed to porn that attempts a plot; just a guess.)  And by “enjoy women,” he means, “enjoy his own hand.”

Yes, Brandon...your addiction to porn is the reason you can't find a good woman.

The reason I’m telling you all this is not to discuss what a loser Brandon is, because really, Brandon being a loser was already implicit when he not only became addicted to porn, but went on MTV to tell the world about it.  No, I’m telling you this because the few minutes I spent watching Brandon left me with this memorable quote:

“One of my favorite things to do is smoke cigars while I watch porno.  Keep it luxurious.”

Luxurious and classy.

Brandon with his cigar. You don't even want to know where he put that cigar before he smoked it.

My best friend Kim’s sister Mel posted a comment on my blog saying that her husband Eddie is disappointed I haven’t posted about the no-goal on-ice ruling made against the Washington Capitals in game 7 of their playoff series against the Montreal Canadiens. 

Ask, and you shall receive.

One reason I haven’t posted anything about the Caps’ recent playoff devastation is that the only people who read this blog are my friends, and they don’t really care about hockey.  Does this suggest that I should seriously reconsider my choice in friends?  Yes, yes it does.  Does it also say something about what a fucking fantastic friend I am that I try to please my friends/readers by not posting about things I know they don’t give a crap about?  Absolutely.  In addition to that, my friends either see me in person or talk to me using methods of communication that aren’t my blog, meaning they already hear me brag/gush/lament/curl up in the fetal position and cry about the Caps on a regular basis.  So I didn’t post about it mainly because I was being considerate.  I know, I’m awesome.

Also, until recently, it was simply too soon.  I had to go through the 7 stages of grief first, in my own time, and I think I’ve finally reached the acceptance/hope stage.  The Capitals had an amazing regular season and I thoroughly enjoyed witnessing it up close and personal.  When a team has a banner year like that, expectations going into the playoffs are high, and when said expectations aren fallen (ridiculously) short of, it’s a little bit soul-crushing.  I’m not going to lie; there were tears.  But like I said, I feel like I’ve healed enough that I can talk/write about the situation, so here goes:

First, let me say this to Eddie:  I  have a hunch that you want me to discuss the no-goal call in game 7 because you assume that I didn’t agree with the call and think they would have won the game if the call had gone the other way, and  you are simply trying to bait me into a tin-foil hat wearing Caps conspiracy theory tirade.  Do I think that the penalty disparity in the series last year against Pittsburgh was suspect?  Um, very much so.  Do I think the no-goal call in game 7 against the Habs was bullshit?  Yes.  In general I think the NHL suffers from glaring inconsistency issues when it comes to penalty calls, goal decisions like the one in game 7 and disciplinary actions.  I don’t, however, think that is the reason we lost that series or even that game.  Had that goal been deemed a good goal, we would have tied the Habs at that point, and I think we still would have lost.  We came up against a seriously hot goaltender in Jaroslav Halak, and I think at best, we would have gone into OT had that goal been allowed and our OT record is shoddy at best.  More importantly, in my view, we lost that series when we failed to close it out in Game 5.  We had a 3-1 lead in the series, having beat the Habs in their own arena twice and having chased Halak in Game 3.  Instead of maintaining that momentum and heading into Game 5 on home ice with a killer instinct and putting the series away, we came out flat and allowed 2 goals in the first period.  The momentum shifted, and as Halak tends to do, he just got more and more confident as the game went on.  I knew then that it was over.

To sum up, I think it was a bad call, and I recognize that it’s not the first time in recent years that a controversial no-goal call against the Caps in a Game 7 has occurred.  But in my opinion, the major factors contributing to the loss of the series were 10 terrible minutes in Game 5, ridiculous shot-blocking abilities by the Habs,  the strange and unexplained disappearing act pulled by our power play, and Halak the hot goalie.  And pure, old-fashioned bad luck.  Good and bad bounces in hockey can make or break a game, and for those last 3 games, we just couldn’t get a good bounce.  It happens.  It sucks a big fat one, but it happens.

And now, I’m forced to choose between rooting for the Pens (deep-seeded, historical, intense hatred) or the Habs (new-found bewildered hatred).  I’m rooting for the Habs, because when it comes down to it, Pittsburgh offends me as a city and not just as a hockey team.  But since my dad spent time in Boston and I have family in that area, I’m now rooting for the Bruins, who are currently kicking some serious Philadelphian ass, to take it all this postseason.  A wise man (aka the Caps announcer at the Verizon center) once said, “Nothing does my heart good like seeing Pennsylvania fans go home sad.”

Truer words were never spoken.

At least losing doesn't diminish the hotness of our players. Oh Brooks Laich, will you hold me while I cry?

My father doesn’t know  how to properly tie his shoelaces.  He can tie them, but he can’t get them to stay tied.  His laces seriously come undone upwards of 20 times a day, at least when I’m with him.  When we go to Caps’ games, we park about 3 blocks away from the arena because we can park there for 10 bucks or pay twice as much to park a block closer, and we’re cheap people.  Pretty much every game, my father’s laces come untied either on the way to the game, the way back from the game, or, if I’m really lucky, both.  And he won’t continue walking until the situation has been remedied, so we have to stop and do a pull over while he fixes the situation.  It’s a little ridiculous, and it begs the question, how did I learn to successfully tie my shoelaces?

I assumed my mother must have taught me, but my father assures me it was him, and I believe him, because in most of my vague and distant childhood memories, he’s the star player on the life lessons front.  He taught me to ride my bike, he taught me to drive, he helped me with my homework.  I guess it’s just a fucking miracle that his shoelace-tying lessons didn’t end up severely hampering my abilities to walk my own path, as it were.  On more than one occassion, my father has accused me of perhaps setting him up in some way to cause his laces to become untied.  I’m not entirely sure how one would go about this, but my father lives in a general state of paranoia in which he believes that my mother and I conspire to make him think he’s going senile.  Usually the real culprit is the fact that if you wake him up when he’s asleep, he won’t remember it the next day, so there have been many times when I was accused of not telling him I had made it home alive after a night of what he believed to be “drinking and partying and inappropriate behavior.”  But really, I totally came home and woke him up and he just doesn’t remember.  You would think he would remember b/c everytime I come home after dark the first question he asks me is, “Are you sober?”  But no.

One time my mother and I asked him what he would do if we both died in a freak accident, leaving him all alone.  I think  the answer we were expecting was something along the lines of, “Cry myself to sleep every night” or “commit suicide and donate my body to science.”  The answer we got was, “I don’t know, maybe I’d move to a tropical place and shack up with an island girl.” 

Mom took that well.  But when we first made a teasing comment about how we had better be careful or we’d be replaced with an island girl and island spawn, he asked us what we were talking about.  He still claims he never said that and that my mother and I are colluding to make him look bad and drive him insane.

But I digress.  Shoelaces.  Untied.  Frequently.  Don’t know why he has such an issue, but I suspect it may be the shoes and/or laces.  My father has worn the same pair of sneakers for pretty much my whole life.  They are hard to find in stores now but he orders them online.  So I figure maybe it’s just a flaw in the design or something.

I wore sneakers to work today and it’s 1:24pm and my laces have already come undone twice.  This never happens to me.  So I sent my dad the following text message:

My shoelaces have come undone twice today.  Is this sabotage?  Did you oil up my laces or something?

And my dad replied, via text:

ITS IN YOUR GENES. 

And that is the continuing joy of my father learning how to text.

Meet my future stepmom. At least if my dad ends up on an island, the shoelaces probably won't be an issue any longer.

While watching the hockey game the other night on tv my dad was doing his usual bit of harassing me via making fun of my favorite Caps player, Alex Semin.  A caller on a post-game radio show once referred to Semin as a “PR Nightmare” and that phrase was seared into my father’s brain and vocabulary instantaneously.  It was one of those moments where, as soon as the words came over the radio airwaves, I knew it would be something I would hear oft-repeated by my father for the rest of my natural life.  And there is some legitimacy to it because Semin pretends not to speak English (he’s Russian), never does any interviews, and is generally surly during forced (and rare) public appearances.  I still love him with the fire of a thousands suns, so fuck the haters.  Anyhoo. 

So during the game my dad was harassing me about Semin as per usual and telling me how if I were smart, I would set my romantic dreams of being a kept hockey woman on Nick Backstrom, another player on the team.  Last year I didn’t think Backstrom was cute, but then I saw him in person at a function and he’s clearly one of those people who looks much better in person than in pictures and on tv, and to top it all off, he was uber polite and gentlemanly.  I reminded my dad that I do enjoy some Nick Backstrom, and that in fact, I think he is growing on me over time even more and quickly moving up the fantasy hockey boyfriend ranks.  My dad was pleased and said that was a good call.  Unfortunately, Backstrom is only 22 years and I am…not, which I pointed out to my father.  His response?

“That’s okay.  Backstrom is Swedish.  They’re experimental.”

They’re experimental. 

I’m not sure which I’m more flummoxed by, the idea that a relationship with a woman who is older by years that can be counted on one hand is experimental, or the impression my dad has that Swedish people are sexually experimental.  Or perhaps simply that he said that out loud.  To his only daughter.  And meant it.

Nick Backstrom. Swedish and experimental. And set to make upwards of 6mil a year starting next season. Yes, cuter every day.