Why am I so retarded?
This weekend was a bit up and down, but overall pretty good. I actually got into NYC late Wed night. I stopped in to see Keiko for a bit, and then headed down to the local pool hall to have one of our traditional best-of-7 rounds of pool. In a sign that the universe sometimes actually is fair, I beat his ass 4-1.
The next day Keiko and I celebrated her birthday at Blue Hill restaurant, on the west side of Washington Square Park. The food was awesome, as was the champagne, and we got merrily drunk. So, two good days in a row.
Dinner at Blue Hill. We are wobbly after all the champagne.
Friday I had bought us all tickets to the Yankees-Mets game. I got right field bleacher seats, which is where all the craziest Yankee fans sit. It's the last season of Yankee stadium, so it promised to be a good game. Until the giant storm blew in that afternoon.
We headed up to the stadium anyhow [me, Keiko, Ed, Allison, MK, Socci, JRob, and Freedman], in the hopes that the rain might let up enough for there to be a game, but after waiting for a while in the cold and wet, they called it. So now I have a bunch of tickets to a game to be made up later, presumably on a day when I'm not in NYC. Dammit.
And MK swears he's not gay. Finally, photographic evidence to the contrary.
However, we all went back down to the Upper East Side and had great Italian food at Elio's on 2nd Ave, followed by drinks at Molly's. I never got more than tipsy, and we got home by a mere 2a.m., which is pretty good for hanging out with Ed, Freedman, and JRob, so overall it was still a pretty good day.
Dinner with the guys (and Keiko and Allison). I don't know where MK went... presumably he's in the bathroom wanking after thinking about the pic earlier.Saturday Keiko and I had brunch with Ed and Allison at the Mansion diner at 86th & York, which was awesome. Plus, we have compatible feelings about brunch best happening at like 1pm. From there we went to Carl Schurz park and sat on benches in the sunshine and watched boats zooming up and down the East river. Ed pointed out that it was a perfect day for a baseball game. I pointed out that had I gotten the tickets for Sat afternoon instead of Friday night, the storm would have materialized on Sat instead of Friday. I further pointed out that Ed could go to hell, and Ed responded by pointing out that while he was there, I could lick his balls. All in all, a pretty normal day of hanging out with Ed.
After Ed and Allison left to go down to the OTB to bet on the Preakness, Keiko and I went to see Speed Racer, which we both thought was great. Then we eventually met up with Ed and Allison again to go down to the Corner Bistro, in the West Village, which has the best burgers in NYC. You should definitely hit the Corner Bistro next time you're in NYC. From there Keiko and I had to race back up to the UES for a coffeehouse acoustic guitar gig by a friend of a friend. Mainly, we were going because Keiko wanted to meet her old roommate's new boyfriend. He's a bit suspect if you ask me, but as long as she's happy, whatever.
After the show, we went to Mustang for drinks. Mustang is a very nostalgic place for me; I watched the Cardinals win the 2006 World Series there with Ed and MK and Carrie. That night, Ed started a drinking war by insisting that I was drinking my margarita too slowly. So I had to throw down. I don't remember exactly how many margaritas I had, but it was definitely one for each run that scored. And we drank them quickly, thanks to Ed. By the time the game was over, Ed and I were beyond hammered. And then, as we were getting ready to leave, I dropped my phone on the floor. In an effort to retrieve it, I moved my head too quickly in a vertical direction, and wound up slumped over the table, head on my forearm, vomiting like crazy onto the floor under the table. Where my feet were, BTW.
Although I don't remember this part, MK apologized to the waitress on my behalf, and she apparently was pretty chill about it, probably because she could just order one of the busboys to get a bucket and a mop and clean it up. They walked me home, which thankfully was only 2 blocks away, and I staggered upstairs to my apartment, where I spent the next 3 hours curled up around my toilet in the bathroom, vomiting/dry heaving. I finally finished all that around 330a.m., and went to sleep.
Sadly, I had to get up at 7 a.m. because it was Saturday, and I taught a pro bono class for the LEDA program, that identifies smart kids from poor socioeconomic backgrounds and gives them extra classes and college application assistance. Our group does the SAT prep for them, and so every Saturday I had to be way the hell down on NYU's campus at 830 a.m. to teach them for 2 hours.
Prior to that Saturday, I had never sat down while teaching them; since there were 15 kids, you really had to wander the room a lot, and be in their faces to keep them from wandering. But that day, I walked in, slumped into a chair at the front of the class, and put my face in my hands. This had the desired effect of shutting them all up immediately, since it was unlike any behavior I'd ever exhibited before.
"Are you OK?" asked one of the kids.
"This is how it's going to be today," I said. "I am going to talk- minimally- and you are going to listen. You will not say a word. If I hear anything that could even possibly be construed as a 'peep' from any of you, I will not attempt to identify who made that 'peep'. I will simply kill _all_ of you, dump your bodies in the corner, and then catch a cab back to my apartment so I can go back to bed. Are we clear?"
[shocked silence]
"Good. Now, let me also say- and this may be one of the most important things you ever learn from me- that some of you, many of you, may at some point in your lives experiment with alcohol. Mind you, I'm not condoning that; I'm just starting with that as an operating assumption.
If you do decide to ever experiment with alcohol, it is vitally important that you observe this advice: first, don't drink a ton of alcohol on an empty stomach. Second, drink lots of water before going to bed, no matter how drunk you are. Third- and this is the most important one- you should never, ever, ever get into a drinking race with your dumbass friend who doesn't have to get up the next morning and work like you do, and who doesn't have the common decency to leave his phone on so that you can call his ass at 730a.m., when you get up to go to work with cottonmouth and a splitting headache, to inform him that you are going to kill him and fuck his rotting corpse at the earliest opportunity.
If you don't do these 3 things, what'll happen is, you'll spend half the night puking into your toilet and then show up to work the next day looking like this.
Of course, you kids can do whatever the hell you want. I leave it up to you to decide. In the meantime, we're going to do Reading Comp today. I want to hear absolutely nothing for the next 20 minutes while you read this passage and I put my head on the desk and contemplate dying."
After gutting through that lesson, I went back uptown, where I was scheduled to have 4 lessons in a row in my office. Lexi, a GMAT student, was the first one. She arrived about 10 minutes after I got back to the office from LEDA. I tried to get through the lesson, but about halfway through I started getting cold sweats and got very dizzy.
Abruptly, I stopped the lesson. Lexi looked at me and said, "Uh, are you OK?"
"Lexi, " I said, "This is what's going to happen right now. I'm going to give you homework for our next lesson on Wednesday. Then, you're going to get the hell out of my office and go home. We'll both pretend this never happened- me by not billing you, and you by never ever mentioning this day again."
So Lexi left, giving me an hour and a half until the next student. JJM advised me to get a bacon cheddar omelette, which I did, and whose grease was instrumental in helping me survive, and then I took an hour nap on the floor underneath my table. JRob apparently has vivid memories of walking by my office and seeing me curled up unconscious under the table.
I did eventually gut through the other 2 lessons, and then met Ed late that night for dinner and drinks. Although I didn't kill him, I did get to have a little schadenfreude when he told me he woke up the next morning feeling good that he hadn't thrown up last night, only to discover he had to throw up right then.
Oh, and that pair of shoes was ruined forever.
Anyway, I've only been back to Mustang a few times since, and Saturday was one of those times. And the new BF, being 25 and not, in my opinion, terribly bright, decided that the way to bond was through tequila shots. So it was tequila shots and margaritas at Mustang. Thankfully, neither Keiko nor I got sick.
Sunday I had lunch with a longtime student who is about to graduate from high school, and then I went to the Upper West Side for the Columbia Business School graduation, to see my student Alix graduate. As it turns out, 2 other students of mine graduated that day from CBS, including my navy fighter pilot that I tutored over the phone, sometimes while he was on an aircraft carrier. It was a terribly rainy day, but it was good to see her graduate; she had to fight hard to survive the place. Tutoring her was like living Legally Blonde.
Graduating in the pouring rain...After an afternoon of graduation ceremony crap, including several monumentally dull, self-congratulatory speeches that went on way too long, I headed back to Keiko's to pack.
[Excerpt- the only non-lethally dull excerpt- from the speech by Jerry Speyer, paraphrased by me: Hi, I'm Jerry Speyer. I co-founded Tishman Speyer, which owns like half the real estate in NYC. I had 2 roommates when I went to Columbia undergrad- Sandy and Art. Sandy went blind at the end of sophomore year, and could've given up and gone home. But instead, in a story which is inspirational and uplifting, he stuck it out. Early junior year Art took Sandy with him on an errand downtown, and then when it was time to come back said, "I'm leaving you here Art. You'll have to figure out how to get back on your own."
So Sandy, who had never ridden the subway as a blind person without assistance, had to figure it out on his own, and did eventually make it back up to Columbia, where it turned out that Art had never left him at all; he had just kept quiet to see if Sandy would make it on his own. Well, although Sandy probably could've killed Art right then, he took the lesson to heart and eventually graduated summa cum laude, and went on to become the Sandy Greenberg that you all know as a titan of the NYC business scene. He even eventually became the manager of Art's musical career, after he and Paul Simon split up.
That's right, I said it, Art Garfunkel was my roommate. I'm so cool, I'm amazing myself right now, and I already know this story.]
Anyway, I headed back to Keiko's to pack, and then we went out for dinner and drinks with Ed, JRob, and Freedman at Cilantro on 2nd ave. Cilantro has a special on Sunday nights- $4 margaritas. They come in Pint glasses and they don't skimp on the tequila. It only takes a couple of them to get you pretty wasted.
1.5 margaritas each and a ton of food later, Keiko and I and the others had to move on, since Cilantro was closing, so we went across the street to Elaine's which is a bar where the literary movers and shakers of NYC have apparently liked to frequent for the last 40 years. There we had deserts and a few glasses of wine. So, once again we got home at 2a.m., totally souced. That sucked, because I had to be up at 5am to get down to Grand Central to catch the 540a.m. bus to JFK. The 3 hours of sleep I was looking at were further whittled away by Keiko's getting sick at 330a.m., causing me to pass glasses of water to her in the bathroom until she could come back to bed. So, when I woke up at 5 a.m., I was wiped out. I basically got about an hour of sleep.
Still, all went well. I was checking a bag for the first time in years, since I was bringing back some of the last things from Keiko's office that never made it into the UHaul trailer when I moved last summer. So, I planned to be at the airport extra early. No coming in at the very last minute for me. No sirree, I was going to be a responsible human and be there on time.
I got to the bus at grand central at 535, it left at 540, I got to JFK at 615, was checked in by 620, dropped off my checked bag at 630, and got to the gate at 640a.m. Oh yeah, I thought to myself, I am almost 2 hours early- my flight was 830am. This was a whole new Gus, a better Gus, a much more responsible Gus. I settled down in a seat and read for about 45 minutes.
And then I fell asleep in the chair. I was abruptly awakened by the sound of an alarm on the gate door going off. I looked at my phone and saw that it said 821a.m. I looked up and frantically ran up to the counter.
"Have you started boarding the flight yet??" I asked the gate agent.
"Which flight?" he asked.
"The 830 to San Jose."
"Uh, that flight's boarded and the door is shut. We shut the door at 820, ten minutes before departure." He looks at my boarding pass. "Oh yeah, we called your name."
Fuck me. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck me.
I slept through the ENTIRE boarding process, including my own name over the fucking loudspeaker. So I had to go back out to the counter, and I am currently on standby for the 6pm flight this evening. Hopefully I'll get on. In the meantime, I have to call my CA students I was supposed to see this evening to tell them I can't make it because their high-priced tutor is a fucking moron.
Damn.
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