misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

Shit ... Fuck Blogger ... I wrote this beautiful blogg on Saturday that took around an hour to compose .. and posted it .. only now, where is it? It had no problems posting ... DId the FBI decide my blogg was too dangerous to public opinion, and hence hacked into our servers (which, by the way, isn't very hard to do, considering Lee's sad attempts at server maintenance). This one is a first, though ... A fully composed and posted blogg disappearing out of the blue. Don't think I was going to leave my valued readers with a lame blogg about my dog-walking experience. That was simply a place-holder, if you will. Well, regardless, you get to miss out on my beautiful prose from Saturday ... I guess i'll save it for conversation, making myself look even smarter, as I had to do some research for Saturday's blogg. The only thing I wanna talk about right now is a simple statement: I am sick of gay people (or, as my brother would say, I am sick of fags.) I work at a transgender club staffed by plenty of gays, I live by Castro street, and yesterday, I worked a food booth at the Gay Day celebration downtown. What is it about homos that makes them so damn flamboyant? It is one thing to be gay, quiet, and live your life without disturbance. But the butt-pirates that live in San Francisco insist on making huge celebrations out of their gayness, and out of trying to get any and all attention and acceptance possible from the non-gays out there (i.e. Me). Start off with Saturday night at asiaSF ... the club being hosted there was a lesbian club, and, as usual, as soon as we were finished with our bachelorette parties for the night, the bachelorettes stayed around to dance with people from the dinner crowd. This was unacceptable for the lesbian promoters, who got on the mic and thanked everyone for coming, but told them this was now a lesbian club and you can go ahead and get out if you weren't lesbian (in so many words). I am glad they are so accomodating. Why exactly can they get on a microphone and tell non-carpet munchers to go home without it being sexist? Just because it is a sexuality issue doesn't give them a right to be so damn exclusionist. If I had a "white" club at asiaSF, and got on the mic to tell all the "negroes" to go home, it would probably make the nightly news, and I'd have Al Sharpton on my ass. Not the lesbos, though ... they have carte blanche in the city. I'll continue ... I go to bed, wake up Sunday morning, and take BART to the Civic Center stop (right in the heart of their parade) .. As I walked up the cement stairs into the glory of daylight, I am met immediately by more lunch-packers than the eye can see ... waves of men wearing stillettos and bras, women wearing construction boots and flannels .. The parade had inflatable penises floating around, and ... well, let us just stop at that for now. Point was as I walked upwards into this sea of dementia, it occured to be that I may very well be in the heart of the coming Apocalypse. Whatever God is up there must be looking down on all this and thinking, "What is this business ... when I made men and women I wasn't exactly planning on this kinda thing ... their expression is cool, but what in My name our they doing down there?" (by the way, I doubt God talks this geeky, but I doubt He swears a lot too, so I had to make do ... and don't believe Kenta when he tells you that God only speaks Japanese) .. Regardless, my theory was confirmed as I worked through the day making garlic fries for the gayest of the gay ...These people were only there simply to shock ... Dudes wearing nothing but leather butt chaps, leather-y speedo things, police uniforms (complete with flashlights), cheerleader outfits ... I stopped noticing after some time ... It was deviance simply for deviance sake ... and it is embraced by this city ... Don't throw your morals on me by making me love gayness ... it is one thing to accept it and not discriminate, it is another thing to make me bounce up and down with glee at your pride parade ... So, I am not making any social statements other than that I have had my all the exposure to butt-pirates I can take .... until at least the next thirty minutes when I go down 24th street to the gay-owned Peasant Pies restaurant to get two pot pies for $4.25 ... That is the saving grace of all these gays ...They sure can cook.

Defense Argument

Those of you who have read Lee's blogg regarding the mysterious yack in the bathtub incident also need to read the following:

* Out of the four suspects, I had the least to drink by far. As the driver, I spread out four beers over the course of four hours.

* I have documented evidence of Lee's ability to puke while not being conscious. In fact, I have documented evidence of his ability to be written on and photographed with testicles on his face, all without consciousness. I further have evidence of his inability to make it to an appropriate place to yack.

* I yack all the time, meaning, I am a professional yacker. I know how long I have, how long it will take, etc. If I were sick in bed, the chances of me passing up my own bathroom toilet and tub, and running to Lee's toilet and tub much further away, are very very low. Besides, my yacks are so loud, I usually wake up half the neighborhood.

* Who pukes in a tub???

If I truly am able to wake up in the middle of the night, go to a tub, puke, go back into a room and get into bed without being awake or having memory, commit me to a hospital now, cause something is amiss with my brain. Although I do like the theory of spite offered by Lee .. I was pissed at him so I ... puked in his tub. I'll need to remember that method of revenge for the future.

Exhibit A: Evidence of Lee's inability to consume alcohol. Click here to see aforementioned exhibit. Warning, Dragonhair, if you continue to implicate me in the vomit scandal, I will be forced to reveal the picture that is twice as bad as this one. The picture you wanted to forget. The picture that all of America is begging to see. Step off, and you shall be saved. Step forward, and you will regret it.

Ahhhhh, jeah. Workmonkey's alter-ego, intoxicated Workmonkey, is back again, ready to rap at cha. This is as good as Workmonkey gets, pure and simple. Words flow from my mouth like yack flowed into Lee's tub. Like marbles frozen in jello, however, I will slowly jiggle my thoughts into this blogg, rather than the full rolling I usually display. Speaking of Lee's tub, Lee's relatives are in town. Like all Tawainese, Lee's family is cheap, and insists on staying in our cramped apartment for days on end. This time, however, there is only a Lee mother and a Lee father to contend with, which I can handle. A few months ago, I had a Lee Uncle, a Lee Aunt, and two Lee cousins staying in our pad. How do you say "Get a Motel 6, for the love of God" in chink language? I would have payed for it myself if they couldn't afford the $14.99 a night room charge. Six people in a small two-bedroom apartment in SF is a bit much, unless you are Mexican or something. Suffice to say, when they left, we were missing our 100 lb bag of rice and the rice cooker. I think it is against Chinese culture to actually pay for a motel room when you are in town, regardless of whether or not you have room available. Last time my brother and sister were in town, they had a few hotel rooms between them, just in case anyone else showed up. The good thing about having Lee's relatives in town, though, is that they always come bearing gifts. I walked into the kitchen tonight, and sure enough there was a bowl of fresh pears, a bag of raisins, and loads of lychee, I am sure (though I haven't found it yet). Anyway, I am hoping to learn some Mandarin this weekend ... In other news, I had my first full set of classes at Miami Ad School today ... Assignment #1 for my Ad Concepts class: Come up with 30 print ad ideas for a chewing gum of your choice. I'll be taking suggestions all week, so feel free to page me ...

The death of a healthy diet starts with your mind, first. The dedication it takes to stay away from foods high in saturated fats wavers over time, essentially because strawberry shortcake tastes better than plain strawberries. Cheesesteak tastes better than turkey cutlets. The defense you can offer yourself is to only eat at home and keep these foods from entering the confines of your cupboard or fridge. This weekend, I worked four days at the Marin County Fair, at my favorite job of choice, that of a food services specialist for Earthly Delights. I'll keep it plain, our food offerings our unhealthy at best. Garlic fries, philly cheesesteaks, chicken sandwiches marinated with butter, garlic and various sauces, fajita chicken salads in a fried tortilla shell, bbq pork sandwiches, hot links, polish sausages, Italian sausages, and soda. When you work twelve hour days, you have to go through three meal cycles (from breakfast through to dinner). When you love french fries, and you work making and serving french fries all day long, it follows that you will eat some of those french fries. Do you like cheesesteak? Yeah? Well, try to avoid them for forty straight hours of working in front of them. It starts with a fry here and a fry there, and by the end of the weekend you are shoving fries down your throat as soon as they are made. Who gives a shit. The booth next to you is serving soft-serve ice cream wedged in between two freshly-baked cookies, the booths across the river are serving corn dogs and fried zuchinni, and the booth by the ferris wheel is serving fried calamari. You think a booth that offered fresh spinach and carrot juice would sell anything at these fairs? Point is, your options for healthy eating consists of picking the kidney beans out of the taco salad. And that keeps you full for roughly twelve minutes. Then you move on to simply eating the fajita chicken ... Chicken is healthy, right? Next, you try the bbq pork, because, pork is the other white meat, so it cannot be bad for you. You move on to the Italian sausage next, complete with grilled onions and spicy mustard. By the end of the weekend you have so much cheesesteak grease running down your face, your shirt looks like the fryer. And you revel in it. I felt like a fat little cherub with puffy cheeks flying around with my cheesesteak arrows, shooting all the fat people in the ass. I woke up this morning as if from a drunken stupor ... four days of debauchery and indulgence weighing heavily in my gut. Feeling guilty, I sat on the couch to watch CNN to watch an interview with Dr. Atkins, of the famed Atkins diet. Apparantly all the shit I was eating is good for me, (with the exception of the bread around the cheesesteak and the starched potatoes)! So i've never had a healthier four days in my life. Eat cheesesteak all you want, young ones, apparantly you cholesterol and triglycerides will shoot down like sausages into your stomach. Just stay away from the bread ... if only I had known. Then some other doctor comes on CNN to say that although evidence does reveal in the short-term that the Atkins diet provides weight loss and lowered cholesterol diets, the long-term affects are unknown. And it all became painfully clear that doctors don't know what the hell is good and what the hell is bad, and they fight amongst themselves like spoiled little children. Then it quickly occured to me that Beer is a carbohydrate, and as such is not part of the Atkins diet. Beer not part of a healthy diet? That Atkins bitch is a fraud. You heard it here first.

I know he blogg flow has been severely constricted lately, but I have been knee deep in one of the by-products I had forgotten about when you are in school -- homework. And this creative homework is a difficult transition from the world of HTML code and server binaries. Due today, thirty print ads for Nerf, targeted at the parents of children ages 3 - 15. Ten ads have to be simply images, ten images with text, and ten with text only. Due tomorrow, sixty ads for Haagen Dazs. The problem starts with the fact that I have about two good ideas for any product, and that is only worth two ads. That leaves a lot of shitty ads to show to the class. Luckily, since we are the ad rookies, teachers already know all the work we present is going to be straight ass. That is the best part, I sit here and put in all this work to ideas I think are good, and then the teacher is like 'cliche' or 'cannot ever use puns in ads'. So I have to sacrafice my first few quarters of presenting shitty ads so that I can learn what makes a good ad. Funny how you think you are just gonna walk into school and start doing great work. That is why I am in school, to get all the crap out of the way and actually learn what the hell is going on. Everyone at this school is adamant that advertising is an art like any other. It has been corrupted by the influx of shitty advertising out there, as you'll find anytime you sit down to watch tv or read magazines. But the ads you never see (in other words, the good ones that the corporate types are too afraid to risk money on producing) are just as cool as looking at a good painting. We spent an hour and a half last night watching the award-winning commercials from around the world .. They were like mini-movies. I like commercials because my attention span usually drifts after two minutes anyway, so the length is perfect. I am writing to much ... I got class in two hours and still have twenty-one shitty ads to draw out. Let's see if he likes my idea of a picture of a whaling ship trying to harpoon a whale with a Nerf Harpoon and the tagline "Nerf. Not all our products have been good ideas." Right underneath that is the tagline "Mark. Needs to apologize for this shitty ad."

I believe I have the mentality of a potential alcoholic. This mentality essentially consists of the idea that if one beer is good, two beers must be even better. Then you feel the joy that two beers brings, and you want to keep it, so you drink another one. And this continues until you are drunk. Why stop at one? That would be like ordering a plate of chili cheese fries and only eating two. I like the feeling of escape that drinking beer allows. This must be the reason beer and wine has been present throughout all of human history. I don't think this mentality is bad, mind you, as everyone needs escape from the pressures encountered during the course of a day. Beer is one escape. Sleep is my other. Working out is another. I mix and match. Some people prefer yoga, some people prefer reading, some people prefer watching tv. I prefer beer. However, just as some people might watch too many hours of tv, I am in constant danger of drinking too many beers. The initial sip of beer is like meeting a good friend. Enjoying the frothy bubbling of hops and yeast fermented in water through an age-old process makes me feel as if I am connecting with past generations. I can almost picture a fifteenth-century monk stooped over a silver barrel in a darkened stone room, lit only from the faint light of two wax candles burning gently behind him, burlap bags of freshly harvested wheat and barley stacked behind him. Peering into the silver barrel with the love and attention of his ancestors, knowing that he has been entrusted with brewing the hidden recipie of Ale that has been passed down to him through the constant watching and studying of the older monks. The brew is scented by the soft spring air of a German night, lillies and oak trees blooming in abundance in the endless green fields surrounding the brewer's workshop. I can see the monk smiling as he recites his blessing of his brew, smiling because he knows that his work is of top importance to the hundreds of thousands of thirsty men coming in from a hard day's work in the fields. His brew will bring them the escape from the stress of a hard and cruel world. His brew will bring them as close to the purity of happiness as they will ever. He blows out the candles with a soft exhale of breath, and stands for one more moment admiring his work before retiring upstairs for the quiet sleep of a German night.

This is what I think every time I sip a beer. And this is why I will drink beer until the day air no longer passes into my lungs.

Blogger is shitty and has not been posting my bloggs ... cut me some slack here, I have the interests of my dedicated readers at heart, and would never have gone this long without posting a blogg. I had to change up the template too .. time for something new and exciting. xoxox. mark.

almost three a.m. and I am sitting here trying to come up with thirty ads for a Pro-Choice coalition ... i read this old abortion debate book i had from college, and that didn't help ... Pro-choice isn't a freakin' product ... how do you visually advertise for something so emotionally-charged and debated? so, instead, I posted some shit to the forum ... felt it was more appropriate there then here .. it took me some time, because my Internet Explorer has this thing where it loads 99% of the page and then freezes for a minute before coming back .. it does this for every page .. this is after bug patches, a new version install, etc. it still does it, so if any of your random readers have advice for me, feel free to send it.

for now, enjoy the forum postings.

I have many people to thank for my discovery of the bar that has now become the official Miami Ad School San Francisco watering hole of choice. First, I'd like to thank Lee, for his immature and attitude-filled throwing of a beer glass at a bartender the night of my birthday. Because of the strongman complex he gets when he drinks, we were thrown out of Royale, and thus walked to the bar across the street called Lost 'n Found. This was my first experience with the bar that so many people now have a love affair with. Secondly, I'd like to thank Slaven, for moving to the crowded, expensive, gaudy neighborhood of North Beach. On our visits to his apartment, we needed to find a small, chill bar to get a beer at, and since Lost 'n Found is in North Beach, we would go there. Also, I would like to thank P, for making me drink the night we were out in North Beach for dinner. I was full, and didn't want a beer, but we trucked over to Lost 'n Found anyway. Incidentally, this was the first night I noticed that this bar was special. Upon ordering a Newcastle Brown Ale, I was handed a funny looking token. I asked him what the token was. He told me to turn it in for a free beer next time I came up. I thought we had won something, or he liked us, or maybe it was a special night. But then we went up to buy the third round, we were handed tokens again. So I asked the bartender what the deal was, and he pointed to a big chalkboard above my head. It read "2 for 1 always. 32 beers on tap." So there it was. Buy a beer, and get one for free. No matter the day or time. Granted, this is only a somewhat nice perk, at least nice enough to get me to go anytime I am in North Beach. Perhaps you are saying to yourself, that is nice Mark, but what is the big deal?? Well, I haven't gotten to the punchline yet. I go back a month ago with Slaven for a beer. I asked for a Hefeweizen, and got one, and I handed her a five dollar bill, expecting to get change and a free beer token. Instead, she gave me 4 dollars back. I thought she made a mistake. In the land of 4 dollar beers, you never find a beer below three dollars, more or less one dollar. I asked the bartender, and like an angel, she pointed to that same chalkboard I had seen earlier. I read out the recent addition with the purest of glee known to man. Above the 2 for 1 offer, it read "Pyramid Hefeweizen and Coastline Pilsner $1 all day every day". I quizzed the bartender about this impossible find. She confirmed. Two beers on tap were being served for a dollar. And not just that bullshit of 5-7 pm from Monday to Thursday. It was a dollar also on Fridays and Saturdays, all night long. Dollar beer. Amazing. Apparantly, they are doing a promotion with Pyramid breweries for the next few months. And as long as they do, they will have dollar beers. So last week after class, I took a couple of broke fellow students there for drinks. They were more amazed than I was. Word spread, signs were raised ... Now, half the school is there every single night .. Talking to the bartender last night, she said the last month their crowds have grown dramatically. I should get a commission, as I am singlehandedly responsible for most of that growth. Regardless, this is the best promotion I have ever seen. Dollar beer will get you crowds, I tell you this now. And I have worked up a taste for Pyramid Hefeweizen at that. I was a drunk before, I am even more so now. Sadly, somewhere down the line, word was lost at exactly who brought this amazing money-saver into the minds of my fellow students. That is fine, though. I will sit back, silently, watching people drink and have a good time, all the while knowing that I am singlehandedly responsible for the happiness of forty young men and women in this great city of ours. A small contribution, yes. But a contribution, nonetheless.