Kat and I are going to play at a blogger tourney in April’s honor at Adam’s place. I just looked at the map and realized that it’s off of Slaughter. That’s across the river. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Austin, we have the traditional The Outsiders division going on, only the Socs are replaced with hippies, college students, and hipsters, while the Greasers are comprised of nerdy software engineers and suburbanites. I hope there isn’t a rumble – I forgot to pack any soap.

I play a lot of soccer, but unfortunately because I play for established teams (4 in all) I don’t get to choose our team name. I’m always on the lookout for some good team names though. Here’s my favorites as of late, with refernce links for those of you who haven’t watched some of these great soccer movies/tv shows.

• The Ladybugs – This name is even somewhat applicable because my men’s indoor team has a female player.
• Sylvester Stallone is our goalkeeper
• Coach McGuirk’s protégés
• Big Green Guttenberg
• We’re in the U.S., it’s soccer not football you moron

Now that I’ve been out of college for five years, my alma mater has really uped the pressure on me to donate to the university. Now I do donate to charities, but generally just causes I believe in or organizations that I want to be a member of (membership in a lot of organizations is tax-deductible). But last time I was on campus, the fundraiser people told me about an exciting opportunity for me to donate money to the University and be selfish and vain at the same time. For $1000/year, I can have my own scholarship. For $1500/year I could sponsor my own graduate student, but let’s face it, I don’t particularly like grad students, so there’s no sense in paying one.

I do like the idea of having my own scholarship though. I could come up with stringent requirements that barely anyone could meet. Or I could have an insanely long questionnaire that the student had to fill out to apply. I already have some questions lined up:

1. Who would win a fight between Kid and Play? Why?
2. Which movie is better: Disorderlies or Krush Groove? Why?
3. Describe the plot of Police Academy 7.
4. In the two-part episode of Different Strokes where Arnold gets held hostage in a bank robbery, what does he request from the police?
5. If Jesse was such a bitch all the time, why did the Saved by the Bell gang continue to hang out with her?
6. What did Steve (from 90210) give to the gas station attendant to get directions to the super-secret rave?
7. Which would you rather wear – leopard print or cow print?
8. What was the name of the club that Dalton worked at before the Double Deuce in Road House?
9. Who is Gus’ least favorite professor at OU? Why? (Hint: she still sucks and she still teaches there)
10. Which is a worse crime against humanity when programming in C++ – overusing GOTO statements or using one-based array manipulation rather than zero-based?

Now I understand that you’d have to really know me in order to know the answer to question 9, so I guess rather than requiring a 100%, I’ll just go with a 90%. Oh yeah, and no partial credit, I need to maintain the integrity of the Gustavo Gonzalez Scholarship. Feel free to try the questions yourself.

***the title of this post references to Mr. Bungle’s California***

Sung to the tune of “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge:

We are fam-i-ly
Fuck Cingular’s ridiculous fees
We are fam-i-ly
Kat and I can talk until three

We are fam-i-ly
My phone’s got l33t L-E-Ds
We are fam-i-ly
People will think I am thirteen

---

Alright, alright, enough silliness for now. What’s the news? If you’ve tried to call me in the past couple days, you may have noticed that my voicemail immediately picked up. Unbeknownst to me, this was because my Cingular phone had been deactivated. The reason it was deactivated is because Kat and I made the largest commitment a mid-20s couple can make (just behind changing our myspace status to “In a relationship”): we got a family talk plan with t-mobile.

Since I got a free phone for signing up, I decided to go with the Nokia 3220, mainly for it’s size and freeness, but also for it’s obnoxious LEDs and stupid attention whore ringtones. When you go to the site, check out the “Interactive Tutorial” under Phone Features to get an idea of how obnoxious the LEDs are.

This phone is really just a placeholder until I get the Audiovox 5600 which will just kick ass.

The really kickass part in all of this is that I will no longer be burning through all of my minutes talking to Kat and suffering the ridiculous overage charges every month. Hooray for family talk!

All of this practicing at bowling is actually making my game better. Lately I’ve been making fewer mistakes on spare shots and when I can keep myself from getting too lazy, I’m hitting my mark the majority of the time. Last night, in the final event of the Dan McP birthday weekend we hit AMF Showplace once again for some bowling action. McP has gotten extremely good for a house ball / house shoes bowler. How good? He shot 584. He was on a fucking tear. I thought he was going to completely sweep me, but I pulled out a miraculous 225 to take the third game and series. Here’s the recap:

Six game: 178, 195, 221, 202, 225, 153

I shot 594 and almost got swept. Insane. I was happy with my play last night because I marked in the nineth frame of all six games (not a normal occurrence for me). Oh yeah, and I’ll give you five guesses to figure out what game I was starting when I stepped in water.

Thursday night I went to The Velveeta Room to watch Hedges perform in Spite Club, a stand-up comedy competition of sorts as well as the open-mike night following Spite Club. Since stand-up comedy is one of my super-secret interests, I sucked it up and decided to sign up for the open mike. It sounded simple enough, a three minute bit. How hard could that be? I started getting extremely nervous the second I hung up the phone after signing up. Damn me and my fear of public speaking.

Starting the night off, Spite Club was entertaining. Hedges’ opening statement was awesome, unfortunately the guy he was going up against killed in the first two rounds and there was no way Hedges could recover. Still entertaining though. Before the open mic night started, Ruhmann mentioned that the comedians at the open mike were *really* good. Jesus he was right. There were some damn funny comedians. Like fucking touring professionals. That’s when my nervousness kicked into high gear. To combat the nerves, I went with my usual plan of drinking myself silly. That wasn’t a good idea, but still better than my decision to not rehearse or prepare any material. I had no concept of how long three minutes really was. It turns out that three minutes is a lot shorter than I thought it was. I did work out a bit in my head, but I never really tried it out or timed it. In the end, I guess everything worked out alright though. I cut myself short because the last thing I wanted to do was go over my time. I felt really awkward up there, but everyone that stuck around to watch me was really sweet about my performance. Next time I’m definitely practicing though. Here’s the content of what I wanted to cover in my bit.

“I went back to my hometown recently. I love going back there because it’s a small enough place that everyone knows everyone and the majority of people never leave. So if you are one of the few people that left town, you get this instant celebrity status when you go back. Random people recognize you and are interested in you. And that’s the real definition of celebrity. When people you don’t give a fuck about are interested in your life, you’ve really made it. Being a celebrity is nice. The part that’s hard for me though is that all the people that recognize me are people that I should theoretically know, since we both knew each other at some point. But my memory is terrible; I don’t remember anyway. That’s alright though because I’m the celebrity; I don’t have to remember anyone. That’s what I have the entourage for. When some jackass working as a parking lot attendant says “hey, you’re Gus. You went to Mustang, right? I’m Brian.” Yeah, like I’m supposed to remember a Brian? I’m a fucking celebrity. I turn to my best friend and say “who is this fucking guy?” “Yeah, that’s big tall Brian, the stoner that was always begging for change in high school” Ooooohhh, that guy! It’s all so clear to me now. It’s unfortunate that people don’t just mention their most embarrassing quality to try to help you jog your memory. That’s the only way I can remember people. I don’t remember Stephanie Baker, but I do remember the girl that came to my house after huffing butane and got naked in my living room just as my dad got home from work. Why couldn’t she just say that as she was introducing me to her four year old in the Walmart parking lot?”

From there I wanted to get into my propensity for throwing up when drinking, even at my ripe old age. It may take me a little while to figure out how I would make the transition into that bit though. Now I just need to put myself on a schedule so I will actually stick with it.

I’m crazy excited because tonight I’m going to see Minus the Bear tonight at Emo’s. I missed them last time they came through town, so it’s cool that I’ll actually be here for it this time. To get ready for the show I dug up this video someone made for “Absinthe Party at the Fly Honey Warehouse” (from a prior post) . So awesome. I couldn’t watch the new video he made though, something about not having the right quicktime components. Ah well, maybe later.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-klahoma!

O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A

That’s right, I was in “Red Earth” (that’s what Oklahoma means in some indian language – for you non-oklahomies). I was recruiting over the past couple weeks, which is partially why you haven’t seen any updates on ye olde blog. Not that I haven’t done anything worth mentioning, but rather that I have had little time to do much of anything (though I have gotten some time to play a bit of poker).

Random thoughts:

• Jim has a punching bag. It’s awesome and oddly compelling. I can’t walk by it without punching or kicking it. The desire is generally more for kicking for me since I can’t punch that hard. The desire is magnified when I’ve been drinking. Exponentially magnified. To dangerous levels (dangerous to myself). I need to get one of these.
• Watching football with Jim is much more entertaining than watching with anyone else. He knows more about football than anyone I’ve ever met. I somehow feel like my conversations with him will eventually make me a better Madden 200x player, if I ever start playing Madden 200x.
• Andy has the stinkiest farts I’ve ever smelled. He’ll be on the pro tour some day
• Jen is awesome and her place is not just rad, it’s krad
• Sushi Neko is by far the best sushi restaurant I’ve ever been to in Oklahoma (thanks jen!)
• Juniors is a kick ass bar. 70s nostalgia is the best. (thanks one more time jen!)
• Walmart brand beef jerky is tasty and probably made from sweatshop workers that were fired after the Kathie Lee incident
• Miles driven in the past two weeks: 1448 (yeah, I’m fucking exhausted)

I’ll have more thoughts from Oklahoma later. Hooray for being home!