this week at work is going to be freakin' dead. i think its actually better to stick around here - you don't use up vacation time and you don't have anything to do, so it's like vacation, except, you know, you go to work.

anyways.

i hope everyone had a good christmas weekend. or a good long weekend, if you don't celebrate christmas. or a good weekend, if you didn't get monday off.

i spent the weekend up in rochester with jen. i stayed at her house for 3 days, met some of her high school friends (i hadn't met any of them before), and also went out to the middle of nowhere to hang out with some of her extended family. i'll go ahead and let the air out of ... something by announcing that it went incredibly well and i had a really good time. as i said to a friend earlier, "no 'oh shit' moments", and really, what more could you want?

so i got in pretty late on friday night with an upset, empty stomach. not the best way to start off, for sure. jen picked me up and we went to her house, cruising through downtown rochester on the way back. there's really not much to report about the rochester skyline, in case you were curious. we got to jen's and i talked with her parents for a little while. once i decided that i did not feel like eating, we headed over to jen's friend megan's house. megan's family was having a christmas party, and apparently jen's core crew was there, so i was going headfirst into this thing.

an aside: jen's core crew consists of 3 other girls: pam, megan, and katie. pam lives in nyc and i'm not sure what she does, katie lives in d.c. and is a paralegal, and megan is engaged, lives in nashville with her beau, and attends the vanderbilt teaching school, peabody. of course, the peabody school is associated with the school i went to for 3 years in nashville, the university school of nashville. so that was a nice angle that i did not use once at all the entire weekend, except with jen's parents. note to self: use that angle in the future.

everyone was impressively drunk at megan's house, adults and "kids" alike. i think i met a relatively sober pam first, but megan stumbled over pretty fast. when she found out i was in fact niv, she said something to the effect of "we don't shake hands, we hug", and proceeded to hug me while pouring her glass of wine down my back.

so within 5 minutes of jumping into this headfirst, i was literally wet. (ba-dum-dum)

katie and pam and megan were all really nice and i had a good time friday night. a few fun tidbits:

• during a particularly strange iteration of suburban basement beirut, megan's mom was calling two frat-boy-esque guys fairies and catching the ping-pong ball in mid-air when they attempted to, you know, play beirut.
• rochester is right up there with kansas city in terms of whitest cities i've been to. i always think boston's really white when i go to cleveland, but then i go to places like madison and kc and rochester and realize that this whole freakin country is really white
• the rochester "scene" is half lame and half offensive. actually, there's more like a 75-25 offensive to lame ratio. there are just a ton of guys and they are all sexist pricks and the bar we went into really seemed to cater to the sexist male demographic. maybe small sample size, i dunno. jen gives me the impression that i'm mostly right on this one

i slept in pretty late on saturday. we spent the day eating food, watching football, and wrapping gifts. jen and i did go out and run errands, hitting up the fabulous wegman's grocery store among other places. i really wish grocery stores around here were like wegman's. then we ate some more, including a ton of shrimp for me - i ate about half the shrimp cocktail on my own and jen's mom made amazing shrimp scampi that was so good that my mouth waters just writing out the word 'scampi'. jen and i closed out the night on the couch watching old james bond movies on spike. it was quite an uneventful day, but it was really relaxing and really nice to hang out with jen's family and just do christmas-y things. it got me in the spirit, i guess.

sunday brought christmas along with it, which was nice of sunday. i got up pretty early, around 9 or so. we gathered around the tree, and the sheer number of gifts under the tree were really impressive to me. i had 3 total presents under the tree; the rest of the presents were for either jen, her sister, her mom, or her dad. it took over 2 hours to open all of them, which is incredible to me. they had probably 3 times the number of presents we ever had under our tree, even in the glory days back in texas. i was impressed, to say the least.

so i got jen a citizen watch, one of the super-thin ones. she needs to shift over to the civilized world of watch-wearers, mostly so she has a better grasp of how long to cook the things she loves to cook. i got her dad a book on abraham lincoln and how he (lincoln) surrounded himself with people who disliked him and disagreed with him. jen's sister got gilmore girls season 5 on dvd from me and a fun story about how asian jon likes the gilmore girls. actually, that was almost an 'oh shit' moment - telling jen that 'asian' like the gilmore girls. i keep forgetting that the nickname 'asian' is pretty inappropriate. eh, fuck asian.

i'm going to not try and remember everything that jen got, but i'll use her words to describe the gifts (as i remember her saying to friends and family over the course of the next two days) - mostly stuff for the apartment, decorative and whatnot. i do know she got a computer desk, which is nice, because her computer has been sitting on the floor in the corner of her living room for 5 months now.

me, i got pretty much the most amazing set of gifts possible. i'll start with some of the things i got before christmas day - a check from my parents (after imploring them to get me nothing at all about 500 times), a couple of books from my sister (david rakoff's don't get too comfortable and a beginner's guide to running), and $25 on amazon.com from one of my cousins which has already gone towards a new set of AKG K 26 P headphones (talk about a stupid model name). so this was all well and good, even though the check from my parents did annoy me somewhat. however, i knew i was in for presents from jen's family, so rather than fight it i embraced it. the result was pretty stunning. i got season 2 of arrested development on dvd from jen's sister, the complete calvin and hobbes box set from jen's parents, and a 30gb black ipod from jen.

really, it doesn't get any better than those three presents for me.

after opening presents, we had a huge breakfast in which i almost repeated my performance at ken's house in terms of bacon-eating. we had to get going though, and by 1:30 we were clean and ready to go to jen's grandmother's house near auburn, ny. i slept most of the drive, but by 3 we had survived the freezing rain and made it to a house that was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. i met 3 of jen's cousins, an uncle and an aunt, and of course her grandmother. i was pretty nervous, but her family was unbelievably nice and welcoming and i felt pretty comfortable the whole time. also, i think this was the first time i had actually eaten a homemade ham, which was spectacular. again, my mouth is watering.

dinner was sandwiched by two things - a game of "pit" before dinner, and a yankee swap after dinner. the yankee swap was fairly uneventful, with me ending up with a shower radio that jen in fact bought (and wanted), and my gift of a cheese fondue set ending up with a cousin's boyfriend or something. the game of pit was pretty freakin' fun though, and deserves mentioning.

pit is a game that has been around since 1904. the amazon.com page can be found here, but allow me to describe the action to you. the game is meant to recreate a commodities market, in some form. you are dealt a number of cards, each one with a commodity on it. your goal is to corner the market on a commodity by trading with the other players in the game, and upon cornering the market, dinging the bell in the middle to close the market for the round. the different commodities have different values, so winning with wheat is much better than winning for oranges, for example. anyways, the real fun is the trading:

• you trade cards face down
• if you want to trade more than one card at a time, the cards have to be of the same commodity

adding to the fun, and believe me, it is fun, are the bull and bear cards. if you complete a set and have the bull card, you double up. if the round ends and you have the bull or the bear card in your hand, you get a -20 for the round. thus, trading and following these cards becomes an important aspect to not getting creamed in this game.

once i got my head around the game, my goal was to end up with a positive score, which i did. one day when i live around enough people that i can get 6 or 7 together on a whim, i'm going to get this game, and my neighbors will be subjected to it on fairly regular intervals.

we left around 7 and got back to jen's around 9. i started playing with my ipod and downloading a video to it - snl was giving away one of their skits for free, the now-i'm-sure-infamous chronic(what?)les of narnia rap. this skit is up there with "more cowbell" guys, it's really really good stuff. it's no "jane you ignorant slut", but it's in the top tier of snl skits. after fiddling around with the ipod for a bit, jen and i went over to katie's house, where her 4 friends played the very-even-numbers-oriented game of taboo, forcing me to talk to geoff and chad for about 45 minutes on the phone, which was nice until chad started calling me an idiot. actually, it was nice after that too. we made tentative plans to meet up on MLK weekend, but then i found out that i don't get MLK day off. but catching up with those guys was fun, regardless.

jen and i left katie's house around midnight and attempted to watch the muppet christmas movie after returning to jen's house, but we both were falling asleep about 15 minutes into it. ah well, i'll see it next december i guess. or maybe in july.

i flew out on monday, but not before jen and i had a few more adventures in rochester. we headed over to the verizon store where jen got a new phone that

• is uncomfortable to use
• isn't easy to switch from regular mode to manner mode
• takes video

so of course she likes it. cell phones suck so bad. from the verizon store, we went over to a very large mall. this mall had like 5 department stores and passed my litmus test for being big slash awesome - it had both a gamestop and a electronics boutique. it was silly though, because despite having so many freaking stores, the mall was just one story. it just winded along, being about 3 times bigger than it had to be. eh, if the land is cheap, no reason not to i guess.

so the mall was really freakin busy and caused me to challenge jen's assertion that rochester is a tiny city. however, i guess she's right, but i just have no grasp of how many people "500,00" really is and how that number of people can easily crowd 5 or 6 malls to capacity on any given day. i think about this a lot now though - 300 million people live in the united states, and i have no grasp of how many people that really is - it's a whole fuckin' lot more than i ever think at first.

anyways.

the mall had an arby's. poor arby's must lose so much business because it sounds kinda like hardees, but god it's so freakin good. i need to find if there's an arby's within 200 miles of here. i'm guessing there isn't.

my final adventure was the rocky ride home. logically, when one flies from rochester to boston for the least amount of money possible, one must fly through bwi (in between baltimore and washington d.c.). logically. so i had a 30 minute window in bwi, which is stunning planning... except the flight out of rochester was running late. 25 minutes late, to be exact. there wasn't much i could do but wait and know that there was another flight from bwi to boston one hour after mine, so i wouldn't get stranded in between baltimore and washington d.c. overnight. so my flight ended up being more like 45 minutes late into bwi. i was sitting towards the back of the plane, but as soon as i got off i hauled ass down to the gate where the boston flight was leaving. the area was half full, indicating to me at least that these people were waiting for a flight an hour away or so and the boston flight had already loaded up. my indications were dead wrong - the boston flight was half full and delayed, so the double delay worked out in my favor in that i ended up getting to boston 30 minutes later than scheduled, and not an hour later.

in case you were wondering, airtran fucking sucks.

so that's my long, winding tale. it took me 3 days to write and ended up going so much longer than expected, but i had a really good time and i guess it came through. i hope you guys had a good long weekend last weekend and have a good long weekend coming up. i'm out til 2006 - happy new year peeps.