Met the man last week!

More soon...

Random, sometimes incoherent thoughts from your favorite bartender

1. I love the new schedule. There's nothing like coming in at 3 or 4 AM with tax free cash in your pocket, knowing you can sleep in as late as you want the next morning and hang out all day and do it again the next night.

2. Bartending is 90% personality, 10% knowledge and technique. If a bar patron comes in and asks for a screaming multiple orgasm up against the wall, and you don't know how to make it, they don't care as long as you smile and ask them just what the hell is in such a concoction. Of course they love it just as much if you can smile, nod and make their drink to perfection with no questions asked and incredibly engineered precision, but the tip will still be the same.

3. Lesbians, as a group, tip better than anyone else; Gay men are a close second, followed by straight men. Straight women are dead last (What else would you expect from a bitch?). My theory on this phenomenon is that they're so used to men fawning over them and falling at their feet, practically begging to pay for whatever they want, that they don't carry much money with them in the event that they actually do have to pay for something. Oh, and flirting with me isn't going to get you served any faster or your French Martini made any quicker. I can see right through that like crotchless panties. Just be cordial and I won't give you a cement mixer.

4. The only exception to my tipping theory is bitches that are coked out of their minds. They tip incredibly well, perhaps because they can't tell the difference between a $1 bill and a $10 bill. It's not like I'm going to point it out to them. This past Saturday night (and the first Sat. night of every month) we have a DJ from NYC come in for a rave. I can't stand the music, but damn the money is good those nights.

5. If the rest of the straight male population wasn't so damned homophobic (no names shall be mentioned) they'd realize how flattering it is to be hit on by a gay man. Of course all that would change if one of them were to come over the bar and plant one on me, but I don't foresee that occuring.

6. One of the most enjoyable things about bartending is being practically the only sober person in the place. This allows for the observation of so many entertaining things...terrible attempts at picking up the opposite sex (This works both ways!)...terrible singing...uncontrollable comments...you name it. One dude stumbled up to the bar so drunk Saturday night I had to ask him four times what he wanted because his speech was so slurred. Bud Light sounded like "good night." It didn't help that he was as guido as they come, though not quite as guido as my roommate.

7. The biggest positive to bartending: I don't spend any money at Starbuck's because I sleep in every morning, and I don't spend any money going out drinking because I AM THE BARTENDER.

8. You know the economy is bad when even strippers have business cards. This totally hot goth stripper passed me her business card with her empty martini glass Friday night and told me to come see her for a free lap dance. I'd go, but no doubt this would lead to subsequent lap dances and me spending money I don't have to spend when I can just step my game up a bit and leave the club WITH the stripper, though we all know how that ended up the last time that happened.

9. If any of you can figure out which bar I'm tending right now and come by when I'm working, I'll buy you my Almost Hugely Famous Rum Runner. Good luck.

10. Subject change: My summer league team's fourth kickball game is tonight. By my calculations we're tied for first right now in the standings. Here's to staying sober this time and actually trying.

This is Brilliant! Gnarls Barkley does it again!

Everyone already knows how dope Gnarls Barkley is and how cutting edge their first album St. Elsewhere was in 2006. Well, in my opinion, they've gone and topped that with the music video for Who's Gonna Save my Soul?

There's not a man out there who can't relate to this scenario, and Gnarls Barkley nailed it. I've never seen a more accurate embodiment of this sort of situation in terms of capturing the true emotion and feeling of it. A few bitches immediately came to mind when I watched this for the first time. I could easily see any of them taking the woman's place in this video. No hard feelings though.

This is art. This is perfection. Sheer genius. Enjoy...

Where I've been, What I've been doing...

Welcome back boys and girls to my little corner of the web. It's been a couple of weeks. If you're reading this then you've no doubt been wondering what I've been up to. The highlights:

First and foremost, I spent all of last week getting my bartending training at Raleigh's Bartending School. It was a ton of information crammed into a single week. I'm talking techniques, terminology, and most importantly, recipes. How many, you ask. Try 100. I know I'll probably never have to make most of them, but they're worth knowing so I can impress the one nice looking lady who asks for a Bahama Mama or a Pink Lady or an orgasm, or better yet, a screaming multiple orgasm (Rocks glass, ice, Bailey's, Amaretto, Galliano and vodka floated, in case you were wondering). It's sure to get me a big tip if I don't have to look it up in some manual, and, if I'm lucky, the opportunity to give her the real thing later that night (Yes, multiples, and yes, screaming. Ex-girlfriends feel free to back me up on this. That is, if we split on amicable terms, of course. THe rest of you, go away.). So, after learning 100 different drinks, the final test involved making 12 drinks in less than 5 minutes. The 12 required are chosen at random from a stack of index cards by the instructor on the spot, so I had no idea which drinks I'd have to make. I finished, with no mistakes, in 4:42. Practicing I could almost do it in 4 minutes flat, but I panicked a bit on the spot. I doubt this will happen in reality, however.



So, since finishing last Friday, I've been out trying to find a gig downtown, somewhere trendy. I'd ideally like to work at a couple of different places, with completely different atmospheres. Right now I'm trying to get in at one of the nicest restaurants in Raleigh, with the opportunity to make some real cash. I should know more later this week. But I don't want to spend all of my time around snobs, therefore I'm also trying to get in at a place with a more relaxed atmosphere, where I know the regulars names and their drinks.

I'm sure you're wondering, why bartending? Because I think it will be fun, that's why. Sure it's crazy hours, but who said putting on a suit and tie and sitting in an office 8 hours a day Monday through Friday was normal anyway? If it is, I want no part of it. I'll leave that up to the rest of you. Also, I think the opportunity to actually make more money than I did banking is out there. Not to mention the atmosphere is more laid back, and I stand to meet much cooler people.

A few other things...

The writing has been slow for the past couple of weeks. I'm trying to get the job thing squared away first before diving back into the novel. It shall be finished before Christmas though, make no mistake about it.

I just finished reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. I recommend it to everyone. Then when you're done, watch the film Capote starring Phillip Seymore Hoffman. Capote was probably the greatest writer of the last hundred years, and this book stands as the defining book of that decade (the 50's).



My summer kickball league got started last Thursday. I've got a lot of cool teammates, and it was fun even though we lost our first game. I did manage to make one play on defense that everyone on both sides agreed was Sportscenter Top Ten play material. You know, if they showed co-ed twenty-somethings kickball league highlights on ESPN. Hell, they show poker, so why not?

The dating situation is unchanged. I'm as single as ever. Here's to hoping a new gig at a new bar will change that quickly. I do however have a story about an older woman, which I could feature in an upcoming post called "When Cougars Attack".



Stay tuned...

The Transformation

From this:



To this:



Details soon to come, but I'm sure you get the point.

PostSecret

If any of you don't know what PostSecret is, it's a website that anonymously publishes homemade postcards that people send in with a secret on them. There are also several books the website's owner published of the cards too. Last night I saw this one on the site, and it made me cry because I related to it.

Beauty vs. Obesity

You may have seen somewhere online or on the news this week the story about Russian model Ruslana Korshunova falling from her 9th floor condo in the Financial District of Manhattan. I say falling, but as of the time of this writing, all signs point to her death being a suicide. I didn't know this beauty; all I know about her is from what I've read. Therefore it would be unfair for me to speculate on the cause of her death. With that said, I'm going to do it anyway. I'll go with two scenarios, either she was on anti-depressants, which ups the odds that a person will commit suicide, or she was high on some drug and decided to fly. Like I said, I really don't know. That is pure speculation on my part. I'm sure toxicology tests will tell the true story.

Anyway, let me get to my real point of this post. It is clear from the picture to the right that Ruslana was a very beautiful young woman. For some women, that would be enough. Beauty, though fleeting, is power for a woman. It is the equivalent of a male having a corner office and the title CEO after his name in the company email directory. Don't believe me? Look at athletes and movie stars. Tiger's wife? Smoking hot. Kobe's wife? Check. Every woman Derek Jeter's ever dated? Check. Everyone knows those guys would marry/date no less than the finest women. Why? Because they can. And would you expect women of such beauty to date/marry lesser men? Of course not. Why? Because they're beautiful, and therefore powerful, they command the most famous, wealthy men. That's just the way it is. Beauty, for women, is simply power in this world.

Now here's the thing that gets me. The way this story was handled was so ridiculous, yet so predictable. When a woman of such beauty dies, no matter the cause of death, it's labeled a tragedy and everyone wants to wax philosophical about the woman, her life, what a shame it is, etc. But when an obese person dies - and that's 280,000 in the United States alone, annually - what are they? They're reduced to a simple statistic. Now I know what you're probably thinking; something like "But Raleigh Bachelor, fat people choose to eat the Asian buffet every day, they chose death." My rebuttal to that is that this beautiful woman chose death too. Even if she had not committed suicide, she probably would have eventually died anyway, and she would have not been the first model to do so. Many of the women in the modeling industry, especially at the highest level starve themselves to be attractive, and do lines of cocaine in the bathroom to stay thin. That kills too, just not as quickly as stepping off a ledge. And why? All in the name of beauty.

People think beautiful people have it easy. To that I say, not so fast. Beautiful people are shoehorned into a mold of who society says they are, just as obese people are. We look at obese people and think to ourselves, put down the fried chicken fatty. But when we look at beautiful people we are in awe, and envy them. Society says beautiful people can't be smart, they can't have opinions that matter, and they have to maintain a social life on par with that of Paris Hilton. They're just supposed to shut up and be beautiful, and smile for the camera. Now, let me be clear, I'm not claiming to be beautiful here, but I would have to assume that being pegged like that and told who you are in this world must be pretty lonely, and can lead to depression. It would not surprise me at all if this young woman took drugs to combat depression and decided she couldn't take being who society said she had to be anymore. Maybe she wanted to be someone else but found that to be too daunting of a task. Maybe she'd been brainwashed into thinking her beauty was all she had.

So I ask you, reader, would you rather be beautiful or obese?