"You just couldn't hold it, could you?"

It's 4:30 PDT, I just finished having my ass handed to me in foosball, and I'm deep into my second pint of Guinness. Did I mention that I'm still at work? Being a short-timer is fun!!

Today was pretty productive on the whole transition to med school front. I got my moving company all lined up. I think I am going to go with "City-to-City" a division of "Door-to-Door" moving and storage company. They are going to drop off a "pod" at my house on August 8th, I'll pack it full o' stuff, and then they'll pick it up and ship it to New Jersey. It is supposed to get there in 2 weeks. I told the sales lady on the phone that I hope my bass guitar and I don't get stuck in the "pod" and have to have roadies come and open it up with cutting torches. She didn't get it. It's going to run me $1700 for them to get all my stuff out there, whereas U-Haul was going to be $1800 and I would have to drive the fucker myself, gas the fucker myself and stay in seedy motels along the way. Though I am going regret missing the seedy motels, this way I can buy a dirt-cheap one-way Jet Blue ticket to NY and have a few more days in sunny CA. Once the "pod" is out there I will have to rent a truck for the day to get all my stuff from NJ to the Bronx, but it's only 13 miles so it should be no big deal.

I also went back into deferment on my previous student loan. I have a pretty small balance left (well, for 10 years worth of student loans, it's pretty small), but I figured if Uncle Sam is willing to foot the interest while I am in school, I should really take him up on it. The people at Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation were so nice to me on the phone it was amazing. Seriously, unless someone starts trying to screw me, writing this blog is going to get really challenging.

Pssshhhht!!!!

I know what you are asking, dear reader: "What was that sound? Have you just cracked open your third Guinness?"

No, as a matter of fact I have not. The break room fridge is currently out of Guinness so I have switched over to Newcastle Brown Ale. I will have to taper off after this one, though, or that 20 mile bike ride home will prove arduous. Unless...I could fill my Camel Back with a few pints of Newcastle.

I now realize that I may have just acted without prudent forethought. I am currently drinking my third beer, after which I am going to head home on a 90 minute bike ride. The problem, you see, is that I have a notoriously weak bladder.

For as long as I can remember, I have had problems with this, particularly after drinking beer. I remember one night during grad school I was going to go see the David Bowie/Nine Inch Nails concert in Phoenix's Desert Sky Pavilion. My friends and I left from Tucson after I drank 2 beers. Honestly, TWO BEERS. I stupidly broke the seal before we left and in those 2 hours, I had to stop 3 times to pee. On the last stop, I very nearly soiled the front seat of the car.

Then there was my 35th birthday. I had a softball game that night and afterward, my teammates and I stayed at the club for a few beers. I wasn't driving so I helped myself to a modestly greedy proportion of the purchased pitchers. My friend drove me home and about half way to my house (read: 15 minutes into the trip), I had to ask her to take the next exit. We got onto the frontage road and it was pretty dark, so I just jumped out of the car and whipped it out and let fly. No big deal, right? We men do this all the time. I finished up, hopped back in the car, she pulled a U-turn and headed back to the highway. Just as she was finishing the U-turn, the rollers came on behind us. They were CHiPs man, Baker and Ponch, the Nazi's of law enforcement. So she pulled over and as we waited for the trooper to get to the car all I could do was look over at her and say,

"I am 35 today. Arguably, I am now middle-aged. I am going to get a public urination ticket on my 35th birthday."

The cop came to the window and looked over at me and said "You just couldn't hold it, could you?"

"Nope, sorry"

He ran both of our licenses for warrants and let me go with a warning to "show more respect to our highways in the future." Yeah, like the choice between peeing on the road and fouling my friend's car as if it were a a port'o-let doesn't decide itself. As he handed my license back to me he said "Happy birthday."

So anyway, here I am, three beers in and I've broken my seal about 15 minutes ago. I currently face a 90 minute bike ride along busy freeways, in broad daylight, wearing nothing but tight biking shorts. These truly are the Weak Bladder Blues.

"I mean COME ON!! Nine-thirty? Is she insane?"

I worked my final night in the ER tonight. The computers were down so we had to write out all the patient charts by hand. It takes a long time to get all the info into the charts this way, bringing the whole system to a crawl. The Group A contingent was quite displeased. A family of four came in and one of the kids had shoved a little plastic BB into his ear. When I asked the parents to fill out the triage form, they both said in unison "You mean we have to wait?!" Oh, I'm sorry did you say he had the BB in his ear? My goodness, that is a dire emergency warranting us to drop everything we are doing. In fact, if we don't attend to the boy immediately, the BB could actually fall out of his ear on its own. Wouldn't that make your whole trip to the ER not worthwhile?

I had to train another kid tonight. He was surprisingly competent. I noticed that we were wearing really similar glasses and he was also kind of balding. If it weren't for him being about 8 inches shorter than me, we could have been twins. Nurse Carl walked by the triage area and shouted over "Hey there Quagmire!, Hey there...mini Quagmire!" That Carl, what a goof.


So at the company where I work there is an unwritten rule about morning meetings. That rule states that you shall not schedule a meeting to begin before 10 AM. Part of the reasoning is that traffic is unpredictable here and it's entirely possible to be stuck for over an hour on the freeway, should there be an accident or something. The other, more pressing reason is because our workplace is composed predominantly of pasty, thick-glassed, nerdly computer programmers. The quintessential computer programmer work day begins at about noon and ends in the neighborhood of 4:30 AM. I think the sun is literally toxic to them. Think about it, have you ever seen a vampire and a computer programmer at the same time? So at about 3:30 PM today I get a meeting invitation for a 9:30 AM meeting tomorrow morning.

Normally I would merely grumble quietly about a 9:30 AM meeting. For a 9:30 AM meeting called in the late afternoon on the day before, I might actually bitch a little. However, for a 9:30 AM meeting called late in the afternoon on the day before when I have just over 1 week left before I quit, I erupt with insane, hair-raising cackles.

Small Asian Girl looks over and says "What's so funny?"

So I invite her over to my cube and show her this:









"We just got invited to a 9:30 AM meeting! I don't go to 9:30 AM meetings. I mean seriously, when is the last time someone called a 9:30 AM meeting? I mean COME ON!! Nine-thirty? Is she insane?"

Right after this rant I heard my boss say over my cubicle wall "You know, the whole company can hear you."

"OK, we'll keep it down," I said as I clicked the Tentative button on the meeting RSVP.

"So you HAVE been 'Swabbed'!"

My little brother is in town on business. I say little brother only in reference to his age. He is four inches my superior (in height only!) and outweighs me by at least 30 pounds. He lives in Seattle with his wife, son and brand new baby daughter who, incidentally, has blue eyes. Little Bro has brown eyes and a degree in genetics from the University of Wisconsin. Anyone with a degree in genetics knows that brown eyes are a dominant trait. Meaning that if a blue-eyed woman and a brown-eyed man have, say, a daughter, she should have brown eyes, because his trait would dominate the blue eye trait. I like to remind him that I possess green eyes, which is a recessive trait relative to blue eyes. He doesn't see the same intrigue that I do on this point.

As I said, Little Bro just had a daughter, about 3 months ago. He and my Little Sis-in-law have had a little trouble having kids. Nothing major was wrong (clearly nothing major since they now have 2 kids au naturale) but he had to go get "tested" to make sure his guns were, indeed, a'blazin'. He was at my house last night and, over a few homebrews, we began discussing exactly what his battery of "tests" included.

Fertility testing is utterly humiliating. I do not have children, nor do I have a searing desire to procreate. Should I, in the future, feel the need to bear fruit, I will simply let nature take her course rather than stand behind a strong, hot spot-light and interrogate our fine Mother Nature as to what the whole hang-up is. One of the more graphic tests Little Bro described to me was a procedure designed to rule out any sexually transmitted diseases that may be the root of any obstacle to his fecundity. It was this test that he euphemistically referred to as "The Swab".

He didn't need to describe what "The Swab" entailed. I think anyone who has ever watched a civil war reenactment, where filthy men pack muskets, can imagine well enough what "The Swab" is like.

Little Bro asked me if I had ever been "Swabbed".

"No, never"
"You've never been 'Swabbed'. Even in college, where they routinely check for STD's?"
"Never, I've never been 'Swabbed'. I'm not even 100% sure what that means."
"Don't give me that, you know exactly what that means."
"Well, I have an idea what it means, but if you're asking me if I am completely and unwaveringly sure about what it means, I don't"
"OK, so you don't know what it means. Fine. Then why did you cringe when I told you I had gotten 'Swabbed' as part of the tests I had run?"
"Well, I just thought about how it must feel to have that wad of dry, coarse cotton pushed up the length of your urethra, and it gave me those body chills where you can't help but shudder"
"Ah-Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!! So you HAVE been 'Swabbed'!"

Despite the fact that Little Bro would probably feel more at ease with his own body should he have someone who could identify with his "Swabbing" trauma, I could not afford him any empathy. Though I wish I could commiserate, I have not had the grave misfortune of being "swabbed".


There are a lot of people quitting at the company I work for. My boss has not made a general announcement that I am leaving the company yet, so there are still a few pockets of folks who are surprised to hear it. From those that do know I am leaving soon, I am getting the inevitable "short-timer" comments. Additionally, I have noticed a slight change in attitude among those that I interact with at work. Put more explicitly, there is a thinly-veiled hostility I perceive from my coworkers. It's nothing overt, and there is nothing concrete I can point to, but still, I can tell that people at work are now treating me differently in my last few days than they did when I was a regular worker bee trapped as they are now. For example, tonight I walked out of the building almost in-step with Tiny Asian Girl, who is normally very friendly with me and is often chatty to the point of annoyance. Not tonight though, she walked near me with the casual distance shared by strangers in a long elevator ascent. Her desire to avoid conversation was as perceptible to me as were her usual ramblings about her church group and her soft-spoken, effeminate boyfriend.

I'll bet this same attitude presents itself in prisoners who learn of another's plan to escape. It's not that the non-escaping prisoner wishes the other to be incarcerated any longer than is necessary. Rather, the left-behind prisoner just wants the other's incarceration to be as long or slightly longer than the one he himself must endure. I guess it's human nature to want to share your misery with others afflicted by similar circumstances. Perhaps it's the escapee that reminds the incarcerated of their own lack of ambition or self-reliance to escape the crap-hole their life has become.

I'm probably wrong though, I usually am. My logical hemisphere says that the other half of my brain is imagining all this and no one is acting differently now. It is just my own perception that is skewed given the abrupt change my life is about to take.

OK, I'm waxing too philosophic for a Wednesday night (read: this is getting boring).

Maybe there are some Q-tips in the bathroom that I can use to explore the forbidden ecstasy that comes with a "Swabbing".

"How does Gentle look?! How do you think?! She looks like a Raccoon!"

I had another softball game tonight. This one was a 10:10 game. I really don't like 10:10 games, and not just because the club bar closes before the 10:10 games finish, though I admit that's a big part of it. I also hate getting home at midnight or 1 AM and being so revved up from the game that trying to sleep is utter futility. Now I'll be drowsy all day tomorrow at work. I feel really guilty that my productivity has fallen off in these last 2 weeks I have at work. To make up for it, maybe I'll go in over next weekend.

We won again tonight, which is really bad for our team. Much like the Minnesota Vikings, whenever we start a season with a great winning streak, usually by the last game we are barely able to walk onto the field without falling on our asses. It takes two hands to count the number of seasons where we have gone into the playoff tournament undefeated, only to lose in the first round to the team that went the whole season without a win.


Ah, Gentle and the keg stand that went horribly, horribly wrong. What a vibrant memory. Jenn, Jer and The Big Nasty are three dear friends of mine from graduate school. After one of our grad student parties, we ended up with a full leftover keg. We stashed it in a laboratory cold room and the next weekend decided to try to kill it before returning the empty barrel. If memory serves, it was me, Jer, TBN, Jenn and this cute undergraduate named Gentle who worked in Jenn's lab. Yes, that's 5 people trying to kill an entire half-barrel of beer. We did not complete our mission. We did however manage to pull off some extreme keg standing. We even got The Big Nasty inverted a couple of times, which is no small feat being that he is about 6'4" and weighs in the neighborhood of 250.

Towards the end of the evening, Gentle decided she wanted to do another keg stand and recruited TBN and I to act as her safety spotters, because when you're keg standing, safety always comes first. So TBN and I were standing there talking to Jer as Gentle was getting ready to mount the keg. Without warning, she hurled herself into a handstand on the barrel, flinging her legs high into the air. TBN and I were taken by complete surprise and lunged to support her so she didn't kill herself. Just as her arms buckled, we completely missed catching her and she fell straight down and hit the bridge of her nose right on the lip of the keg. In our defense, we did catch her before she caromed off the barrel onto the ground. By the time we got her back on her feet, she already had a visible bruise right between her eyes where she hit the edge of the keg.

The following Monday I called Jenn in her lab and asked how Gentle looked.

"How does Gentle look?! How do you think?! She looks like a Raccoon! She looks like two idiot drunks dropped her on her head onto a metal keg!"

Gentle had broken her nose and had two black eyes. I think college is an appropriate time in a young person's life to learn the valuable lesson of Don't Trust Drunkee.


Finally, many thanks to those that made helpful suggestions regarding the move to NY. The "pod" suggestion was a really good one and I may go in that direction. Thanks EJ. To those of you who made smart-ass comments, including the private email suggesting I hitch-hike to NY with my belongings in my rectum:

"I'll give you $5 if you do a keg-stand"

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone...

OK, so the kid was only 14 years old and yes, I am 22 years older than he is, but $5 is $5. He showed me the fin, a neutral party held it, and I fulfilled my end of the bargain. The kid learned something that will make him immensely popular in college, the rest of the BBQ patrons witnessed my return to glory, and I went home $5 on the plus side. Everybody was a winner tonight. I ask you, dear reader, are you still able to chug beer while inverted?

"ohhh, Quagmire, I choose not to chug beer upside down. I've matured past the mental age of 19."

To all the 19-year-old hottie girls reading this (and I know there must be thousands of you), I'm right in your mental sweet-spot. So how about hitting that little email button down at the bottom of this page and let's set up a little sum'n-sum'n.

Now to this side of reality:

I reserved a U-Haul for the move to NY today. The smallest and cheapest truck available for a California to NY move is $1600. That really hurts. Perhaps one of the three of you who read these little missives can suggest alternate moving strategies. Seriously, at this point, I'm considering jumping onto a boxcar with the barest of necessities and hoboing it to NY.

Well, that's about it. No more to see here. You don't need to see my identification. These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along, move along.