I agreed to a lease on a new apartment today. Not the one I mentioned the other day. Another teacher at RMIT sent around an email yesterday saying she was moving out of her apartment in the city this weekend if anyone was interested. I went and checked it out this morning. It’s located in District 3, right on the border with District 1, on Pham Ngoc Thach street, just north of Dien Bien Phu street. So about a 10 minute walk from Diamond Plaza and that whole area.
It’s a one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a four-story apartment building. (No elevator!) It has a small living room area when you first walk in, then the bedroom, bathroom, and separate kitchen, in that order. It’s pretty small, but the price is right: $430 a month, including free internet access. A maid comes and cleans every day and does all laundry/ironing for $30/month. It’s nothing fancy, but I think it will be a great place to live. About a 25-minute commute from school. It’s actually not that far from the other place I was considering – just in a better location.
The other place was nicer – remodeled more recently, etc., but more expensive at $550 a month. I had a little more room in the other place, but it was a floor in a shared house – and this apartment is my own, completely separate space.
The other teacher moves out this weekend – so I can start moving stuff in on Monday. I also have my house in Phu My Hung through the end of June, so I can take my time moving into the new place, which is good.
Busted: 1 (*I tried to never get busted by the cops and to always go out fighting. They snuck up and got me one time. Bastards.)
Died: 101
People Killed: 1,345 (Ratio of my own deaths to people killed: 1:13.32)
Total Playing Time: 37:37:10 (*Yep, almost a 40-hour workweek was spent playing GTA IV. Now that’s a productive use of my time. Based on 1,345 people killed, that’s an average of 35.87 people killed per hour of playing time. I killed a person on an average of every 1.67 minutes for a 37-hour stretch. Can’t be good for the brain.)
Longest Single Game: 3:32:36 (*I should have been exercising. *I should be exercising right now.)
Longest Cop Chase: 13:43
People Run Down: 666 (*That’s an ominous number. I think I will go home and run over one more person right now.)
Fires Started: 76
Average Speed in Motorcycle/Car: 35.88MPH
Longest Motorcycle Wheelie: 359.42 Feet
Farthest Jump: 234.30 Feet
Highest Jump: 69 Feet
$ Earned for Missions: $892,838
$ Spent on Healthcare: $261,277 (*Every time you get killed, you have to pay the hospital to “treat” you.)
$ Spent on Weapons: $382,050
$ Spent on Clothes: $1,270
$ Spent on Food: $35 (*Ratio of $ Spent on Weapons to $ Spent on Food: 10,916:1 (**Sounds like the U.S. defense budget.))
Bullets Fired: 27,422
Kills by Headshot: 392
Vehicles Blown Up: 114
Cars Blown Up: 102
Boats Blown Up: 7
Helicopters Blown Up: 5
Tires Popped by Gunshot: 101
Weapons Picked Up: 353
Hotdogs Eaten: 5 (*You eat food in the game to get your health back. I didn’t eat a lot – I typically just went on rampages with whatever health I happened to have left until I was killed one way or another.)
Hamburgers Eaten: 2
Okay, I am going to go grade some papers and then I am going to go try to get a life.
These won’t be as funny to those of you who don’t know Cristi – and I can’t really articulate why it’s funny to me – but knowing Cristi like I have since 1993, there’s just something funny to me about seeing her being a mom at Disneyland with her kids!
The look on her face (and the baby slobber on her Obama t-shirt) in this first photo says it all:
Here’s a sweet photo of the Darbulator posing in front of a painting of the Sleeping Beauty kiss:
And finally, here’s baby Tessa. Cristi’s caption is the best: “Tessa’s favorite moment of the trip: playing with this bag.”
Well, for those of you out there who think that I can never stick with anything, hah! Remember a few weeks ago how I said that I have gotten lazy over here. Today I am pleased to announce that I have not only stuck with being lazy – I have actually expanded on it and have added getting fat to the mix! I have a tear in my eye as I write this – I am so proud of myself. (I would also have a spring in my step, but I have gotten too fat for that!)
Seriously, I may be the laziest human being alive right now. I haven’t worked out since before I went to Myanmar back in late April/early May. I lost about 10 pounds on that trip because (a) I was walking miles and miles each day over there; and (b) it was about 140 degrees there, kind of like my own, personal, country-sized sauna. But since I’ve gotten back to Vietnam, I’ve gained those 10 pounds back with a vengeance! I think I’ve probably gained about 15 of those 10 pounds back! Hah!
It would probably help if I would stop drinking two large whole milk lattes every day – one in the morning and one after lunch. (Yes, I am back on the caffeine – if you count two shots of espresso in each latte as caffeine.) It would probably also help if I would stop eating the jelly doughnuts they sell in the staff cafeteria here at school. (It’s so bad that when they recently changed the jelly to an inferior version, three of us complained to the manager and they changed it back.) It would probably also help if I would get off of my ass and go for a run or go to the gym instead of going home and playing Grand Theft Auto IV for two or three hours every night!
I’ll get back in the swing of things. As of July 1st I will be moving back into the city (the Phu My Hung experiment is coming to an end – more on this below), and will be closer to my gym, so hopefully I can get back in the routine of heading to the gym in the evening.
Speaking of GTA IV, I finally “finished” the game last night. I put “finished” in quotes because even though I’ve completed all of the main missions of the game and the credits rolled, etc., the stats say that I’ve only completed about 60% of the game. That’s because there are a bunch of other things you can do besides the main missions – like fly helicopters under all of the bridges on the map, kill all of the 200 pigeons hidden around the map, find all of the secret weapons, do all of the stunt jumps, etc. Just finishing the main missions took long enough and there is no way I am going to go back and do all of that other stuff.
I meant to write down the detailed stats from my gameplay – BUT I AM TOO FREAKING LAZY!!! I still might write them down at some point because they’re actually pretty interesting. For now, let’s just say I killed a lot of people in a lot of different ways. Thao came by the other night and watched me play for about ten minutes. Everything I would do – like run over some pedestrian on the sidewalk just for the hell of it, or get out of my car and mow about six pedestrians down with a machine gun – she would say “Why?!?” in this bewildered voice. She also said “Ghê quá!” (So terrible!) a lot. But she got into it when the police started chasing me – as I ran from the police, when a police car would be heading toward me, she would yell “Police!” and point at the screen. (After a while, whenever any car would appear on the screen she would yell “Police!” and point at it, which was frankly less helpful.)
Anyway, done with GTA IV.
I looked at a house that I really liked yesterday. Back up in District 3, right on the border of District 1 and District 3. (near Vo Thi Sau and Tran Quac Thao for anyone who knows/cares). I would be renting a whole floor in a house – two big rooms, one bedroom and one kitchen/office, etc. Two bathrooms. Very nice, newly remodeled house and a great location. Will be about a 25-minute commute to school (instead of the 3-minute commute I currently have), but not too bad. We’re currently going back and forth about the rent, but I think I would pay their asking price anyway so I think we’ll have a deal here shortly.
If I end up moving in, I will take some photos and you can judge for yourself whether the new place is as pimptacular and/or magniculous as my joint in Phu My Hung.
For as much time as I’ve spent in bars over my lifetime, I have never really liked the whole bar scene. I currently drink less now than I have in a long time – I will have a beer or two with dinner every now and then, but I rarely go out and get smashed. (Last weekend being an exception, unfortunately. I went out with one of my coworkers who is in the process of getting separated from his wife and so currently has the blues. We both got hammered. I paid for it dearly all day long the next day.)
For one thing, I really do get more hungover than I used to. (See above.) For another, I am 37 years old now. Most people my age are married and have kids – they’re not out in bars all of the time. And, because they’re married and have kids, they don’t feel any pressure to be out in bars all of the time. When you’re still single, people are always asking you: “Why don’t you go out more? Don’t you want to meet some women?”, etc. Generally, yes, I want to meet some women. But I’ve never really been that impressed with the quality of the women I’ve met in bars. And that is particularly true here in Vietnam – the type of women I like to associate with here generally aren’t out hanging out in bars frequented by foreigners. (And I’m not being critical of Vietnamese women or culture here – I don’t want another “pearl of Vietnam” episode.)
But the main reason I don’t like to go out to bars – or just to drink a lot generally – anymore is I really don’t like the person I become when I’ve had a few drinks. None of this will be any surprise to anyone who has been out drinking with me in the past, but I tend to get loud, say things I wouldn’t ordinarily say, have a more juvenile and vulgar sense of humor, become more critical of other people, and sometimes even become physically aggressive (more in the past than recently, but still). [Actually, the above description sounds even more fitting for a certain individual I know from South Carolina who goes by the name A. Fatman and or SC Fatman. Fatman, you out there? Holla at your boy! I still have a scar from that piece of glass you stuck in my chin at Whistler you son of a bitch.] And even after I’ve had three or four beers, I can feel those aspects of my personality coming to the forefront, and I don’t like it.
But then people are like “But you’re so much fun when you drink!” And to that I say two things: (1) Yeah, that’s probably right – some of the most fun I’ve had in my life has been while drinking. That may be sad to say or terrible to admit, but it’s just plain true. I’ve had a lot of good times. But: (2) There’s a fine line (for me at least) between drinking enough to have a lot of fun and drinking too much and crossing that line between having a lot of fun and doing some really dumb shit that might come back to haunt you. Almost without exception, the really, really dumb things I’ve done in my life have been done when I was drunk. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve done some really dumb things sober too – but most of the really, really dumb things I’ve done – the ones that had consequences for me later, were done while I was hammered. And that’s a terrible feeling to have done something really stupid while you were so drunk that you barely even remember doing it.
Anyway, enough of my own, private, self-administered 12-step program here. The point of this post was to say that I like this quotation by Paul Broomfield, a former bartender who is now a yoga instructor:
“When you work at a bar, you get to see the best and worst of a person in one night. They come in wearing a mask, looking like they’ve got it all together. As they get drunk, you see the decline, all the demons they’re battling will emerge on a magnified scale. It’s all about self-affirmation, getting the attention you crave. The funny thing with the bar is that seldom are people there to help you. They want to take as much energy from you as they can.”
The following is something that my friend Dave C., AKA “My Man Dave C.,” and I came up with at some point over the course of our long friendship – I think sometime during college but it could have been earlier.
We used to always come up with stuff like this – not really sure why or how. We’d basically always be saying dumb stuff and every now and then some of it would “take” or “stick.” This one stuck – although until not too long ago I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. Then, when I did, I found it as hilarious as ever. I’ll analyze it and what it (probably) means afterward, but now that I’ve built up the hype, prepare to be thoroughly disappointed:
[*Note: For proper effect, you have to read this out loud in a "gangsta rapper" voice - a very deep voice with a very angry, somewhat staccato, boastful delivery. Dr. Dre is probably the best example of this.]
“I can’t do nothin’ with my jank leg;
Got me laid up in that bed, talk ’bout some cornbread;
I never disrespected my main man;
Since he rearranged my face with a fryin’ pan.”
Okay, what does that (probably) mean, and how is that possibly funny?
“I can’t do nothin’ with my jank leg” – “Jank leg” is either a mishearing or an intentional misstatement of the phrase “jake leg.” Probably the former. I don’t know where I heard the term “jake leg,” but it is a paralytic condition caused by the drinking of Jamaican Ginger Extract, or “jake.” Jake was a patent medicine consumed during Prohibition because it had a very high alcohol content (but wasn’t considered “alcohol” under the Prohibition laws). Drinking jake damaged the human nervous system and resulted in a very distinctive walk that came to be known as “jake leg” or the “jake leg shuffle.”
I think I used to talk about the “jank leg shuffle” in college at Ole Miss, but, again, I can’t remember how I first learned about this.
Here’s a very boring YouTube video discussing “jake leg”:
Here’s another, short one that even specifically mentions the “jake leg shuffle”:
There are a lot of blues songs that reference jake leg, so maybe I did hear about it when I was at Ole Miss – you tend to hear a lot of blues music in Mississippi, and for good reason.
Anyway, enough about the first line.
The second line, “Got me laid up in that bed, talk ’bout some cornbread” – well, I have no idea, really. “Got me laid up in that bed” is pretty obvious, I guess – poor boy’s got the jake leg shuffle so bad he’s laid up. “Talk ’bout some cornbread.” Really, no idea. Probably only because “bread” sort of rhymes with “leg” in the first line.
Third and fourth lines: “I never disrepected my main man; since he rearranged my face with a fryin’ pan.” This is the funniest part to me. And for it to be funny, I think you have to hear it in the tone that Dave C. and I used to say it in. Very angry, but also prideful and boastful. So the guy is basically bragging about he never disrespects his “main man” – which is cool. Whatever. But then you find out that this newfound respect has only arisen since his “main man” “rearranged his face with a fryin’ pan.” In other words, he did disrepect this guy at some point in the past, at which time this guy beat the hell out of him with a frying pan. Thereafter, of course, no disrepect.
To say that is one thing, but to be proud and boastful about it is quite another – you’re basically bragging that every since some dude bashed you in the face with a frying pan, you haven’t stood up to him. Which, obviously, is really nothing to be bragging about. That is funny. To me and Dave C. at least.
Anyway, as I ride around Saigon on my motorbike, I’m always singing or rapping (no radio, obviously, and not really safe to drive with headphones on, so no iPod). And lately I’ve been rapping the above and laughing out loud as I drive around.
Way to go Hillary Clinton (yes, I’m calling her by name again), saying that one reason you’re staying in the race is because RFK was assassinated in June 1968 – implying that the same might happen to Barack Obama in 2008, thereby enabling her to step in to be the Democratic nominee.
This should do two things: (1) immediately stop any talk of Clinton being the VP (“Yes, I am aware that a couple of months ago my VP candidate was essentially hoping that I would be murdered, and no, I don’t think that poses any problems for working together as a close team to best govern this nation.”); and (2) cause a flood of superdelegates to immediately move to Obama, thereby ending this “Groundhog Day”-style debacle.
That someone with as much time in and around politics as that woman could make a statement like that boggles the mind. But I’m glad she did. It’s way past time to put this charade to bed.
