There are approximately eight people working in my office today. We all get to leave at 2 p.m. and don’t have to return until Tuesday. Some people are actually getting things accomplished. I’m almost to that point, but not quite.

After work Olga is treating me to a massage and then we’re getting sushi, then I’m going home and grabbing PSB and going to see Miss Witherspoon again - I really do love it, and I’m thinking PSB will too.

Tomorrow night a few people are heading out to Long Island to escape the city and have a “let’s pretend we’re back in high school!” New Years party, complete with a raid of the liquor cabinets. (Well, maybe not, but I think that would be funny.) Rumor has it there’s a pinball machine in the basement, but it doesn’t work. Probably better that it doesn’t, as we could then avoid this inevitable scenario:

PSB: It’s midnight! Come kiss me, you jerk!
Twin C: Hold on, honey, almost. . . got. . . multiball again. . .
PSB: Fine. I’m kissing everyone else instead. With tongue!
Twin C: Great. . . shit, missed the fucking ramp again. . . I’ll be. . . right. . .

Off to do something. Not sure what exactly. Maybe clean my desk? Yeah, that’s a great idea. Clean my desk. I’m on it.

I want site reports!

We’re more likely to get one from Twin B, who is off to Oklahoma City to visit Jefe, Osborne, and perhaps to meet Gavagirl (or Gavagirl, did we meet you at Burning Man this year?)

Twin D is off with his squeeze and her family on a cruise! Not a reality poker cruise, mind you, but a regular, have lots of fun, eat as much as you want all the time cruise.

I hope they are both having a great time.

So I plunked down some money to see my full employment assessment, and here’s my top ten vocational areas. Gentlemen, start your guffawing:

Rhythmics: dancing, ballet; precision of movement
Driver, Public Transportation: bus, taxi, limousine
Photography: aesthetics, form, color, perspective
Musical, Creative: compose, arrange, improvise
Manipulating: sensory/physical/mechanical work
Craft Management: plan, oversee craft activities
Instructive, Fine Arts: drama, art, music
Customer Service: craft, repair, improvements
Secretarial: clerical; minor executive assignments
Dramatics: interpret, portray roles

Well, fuck. Looks like I’ve been doing the bottom two already, and that hasn’t exactly been working out.

What’s even better is, if I try to search “dancer”, which is my top vocational area according to the website, the website tells me “Oh, you don’t match this job THAT well.”

Here’s some items that I obviously should paste into my resume immediately:

I have a talent for recognizing colors, patterns, shapes, and their relationship to each other, as well as their impact on people.
I have good coordination, dexterity, timing, rhythm and ability with simultaneous functions. If I perform the same physical task repeatedly, it will become a subconscious, automatic function.
I am good at impersonally scheduling and processing whatever is at hand, be it things or people. I am motivated to sequence processes so things get done in the right order.
I naturally generate lots of new ideas and ways of doing things. I like to be included in brainstorming sessions, or whenever new and different solutions must be found.
Activities that require simultaneous timing, coordination, dexterity, rhythm, and depth perception come natural to me. I handle multiple complex physical tasks well.
I possess a combination of physical coordination, depth perception, timing and dexterity to successfully operate heavy equipment.

I’m going to add one more:

I am an idiot for paying for this fucking report. Fuck you, assessment.com.

Or perhaps I was just foolish for thinking I was going to get any bright ideas out of what to do for a low low price.

Whatever. I’m going back to my gentleman of leisure plan.

I’m back at work today along with a few other suckers, but for the most part, everyone’s on vacation. It’s the perfect time to be here, as I can not be driven insane by admin yammering or by overdemanding passive aggressive managers, and I can work on my resume with abandon. The problem is, what am I working on my resume for???? I’m going to suck it up and take an employment aptitude test and maybe get some new ideas about what the fuck I can do with myself, besides my recurring daydreams of being a man of leisure.

Polenberg’s Jewwy Christmas was filled with Jews. It was also filled with two of the lousiest movies ever - Left Behind 1 and 2. What happens when Jesus takes everyone worthwhile and leaves the rest of us to deal with the Antichrist and his nefarious plot to rule the world via the United Nations? You get lousy writing, dumb subplots, and so much exposition you have to wonder why it’s even there - you’d figure the only people who’d watch this drivel (except for us, obviously) would already know the New Testament inside out and would automatically understand what was going on. We found tons of mocking material - it was very MST3K (remember them?). They may have watched part 3, or they may have played the PS2 games I left with them instead, but either way I was done for the night. Olga drove me home.

The 24th and 25th during the day, I helped Olga work on her new apartment, which is going to be fantastic when it’s finished, but for now, let’s just say she’s got a lot of work ahead of her (she is aware of this, and claims that if she knew how much work it was going to be, she never would have taken the place). It’s a big one bedroom in Brooklyn right near the Fort Hamilton Parkway stop on the F. My job helping her was to hold up the fiberglass mesh that she was putting underneath the first layer of plaster she was placing on the ceiling of her bedroom, for extra support. This involved climbing up and down the ladder a zillion times and using my arms (or often my head) to keep the mesh taut. Occasionally I got to load up the trowel with plaster, but except for one tiny patch did not actually do any plastering. I was exhausted after four or five hours of my holding job, and I didn’t even really do anything! However, Olga claims my help was invaluable, and I earned myself a sushi dinner on Saturday night, and a massage on Friday (she is a massage therapist) - nice! (She definitely did need someone to hold up the mesh - I don’t know how she could have done it alone.)

PSB came back from Alabama Monday morning at 1:30 a.m., and we spent the next two days being as lazy as possible. We had a fun date night on Monday night, and yesterday we watch a zillion Freaks and Geeks via Netflix, and Law and Orders via cable. We also watched Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel, which if you do not watch, you really should. Mike Rowe is hysterical, and the jobs he goes to are almost always completely fascinating. Between Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters, Discovery gets a lot of play time in the apartment. And of course, I can always watch the WSOP over and over on ESPN2. I’m really fond of our On Demand channel too, but they didn’t seem to be working yesterday afternoon, which was annoying. . .

And one more final note - our comment spam has reached a new level of weird - we got two for doggie steps. Doggie steps????? WTF, d00d?

I’ve noticed that there’s a direct relationship between me talking about certain topics and the amount of spam comments that come pouring in. Unfortunately, as poker will remain one of the prime things I blog about, we’ll just keep getting bombarded. It’s weird though, that poker messages result in spam about drugs and ring tones.

A real post will be coming shortly.

Every five letters I type, a window pops up asking me to bet, raise, or fold. It can get a little confusing. Hopefully I will choose not to raise my 27 off-suit and fold my pocket aces. (I just lost a small pot, getting suckered in with JJ on a rag board to a slow playing KK. Good thing he didn’t have a stack.)

A friend of mine from college, Caroline, happens to be a pretty high muckamuck at Playwrights Horizons, and last night she got me and a friend free tickets to the current production, Miss Witherspoon, by Christopher Durang. I am a huge Durang fan - playing George Spelvin in The Actor’s Nightmare remains one of my favorite times being onstage, even with it being a really crappy high school production. I haven’t seen any of his recent work, and wasn’t sure what to expect. I am very pleased to say that I LOVED the show - very very funny and touching at the same time, with a pretty interesting premise - a very intense, likely bipolar woman is being forced to go through reincarnation, despite her wishes. I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s definitely worth seeing if you get the chance - I think it’s only open for another week or two.

I took my friend Ivy as my “date”, since PSB is off in Alabama - she came over after she got off (I didn’t have to work yesterday - hooray!), bringing with her the mini-chip set we won when I crashed her holiday party with her last week. I don’t think I blogged about it - it was a HUGE party at a hotel, with a bunch of theme rooms, one of which had five Texas Hold ‘Em tables, with dealers and chips - you could sit down and play for free, and if you won a hand, you’d get to enter a raffle for the chip set, and a laptop, and some other stuff. Ivy and I did pretty well at the table, including Ivy pulling off one of the biggest live suckouts I’ve ever seen. She went all in holding 24 off-suit with a board of KKA against four other people (no one had the boat, or even a K). The turn was a 3, and the river was a 5, giving her the baby straight and stealing a HUGE pot from everyone.

Today I am heading out to Brooklyn to help my friend Olga with her apartment, and then heading out to PJX. I’ve bought a little somthin somthin for the party that will hopefully amuse Twin A, and possibly B. I wonder if D will be there?

From The New Commodore, maker of gadgetry:

Yum!

I want to play Summer Games with the Polenbergs until Bacon and D wind up beating the shit out of each other.

Our corporation graced us with a shortened work day today, and days off on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, which I now need more than anything. I’ve just suffered through an hour of the most annoying bureaucratic nonsense ever. Manager B asked me to check on flights for her to Hawaii a few weeks ago, which I did immediately and reported back to her. Yesterday she finally confirms what she wants, and I try to book them, but now most of what she wants is sold out, so I have to move her to an earlier flight, which is ugly but we don’t really have a choice. The travel company says they have to get approval from the meeting manager, and we’ll get the e-mail shortly. No e-mail arrives. Today, still no e-mail, and I call to ask where it is, and they send it over. Manager B sees the earlier flight, complains, and accepts it. I call back to the travel company to confirm, and they say “We still can’t confirm it - we haven’t heard from the meeting manager.” I call the meeting manager, who is gone on vacation. I e-mail her in a panic, because we can’t book it without approval, and everyone’s out until Wednesday, and I’m afraid this flight is going to sell out as well. It’s a total pig fuck.

Fortunately, as I was typing this kvetchy post, the meeting manager e-mailed approval, and I can stop worrying about this whole thing.

Now I need a drink.

PSB has headed off to Alabama for a few days, leaving me all alone with the Beast. We’re going to party down - drink 40s, have some knife fights, find some hookers, you name it.

Safe travels, PSB! And everyone else going anywhere.

Speaking of which, it looks like the strike is dissipating, so we’ll all be going places soon. Then I can go back to rationalizing why I should take the subway, which takes 20 - 25 minutes, as opposed to just walking to/from work, which takes 30 - 35 minutes, which I discovered to my embarassment this week. It’s a good thing I’m so lazy.

I just got this from a coworker - they know me so well.

I needed to order replacement pre-filters for our air purifier, and Froogled them and found them on SureNeeds.com for a very low price. It’s one of those “catch-all” sites that sells all kinds of items, mostly electronic in nature.

I placed the order yesterday morning, standard shipping, expecting to see them some time next week.

I got them TODAY.

They get mad props for such speedy processing and delivery. I don’t know how they’ll do with other items, but they were like lightning with mine.