Gregor's visit, escort services, and spatulas

hey there friends,
so i feel i have to apologize that this took so long to come out, not that any of you really know it took a long time cuz i didn't tell anyone how to find it til it was done so i could have a sort of debut type thing, but it has taken me a while to write this, like most of the stories i am going to tell you happened at least 2 weeks ago, but i guess this is how its going to work now that i am a lame old adult and have to work all day, and i have at least to an extent gotten my sleeping issues under control, thats a big part of it actually, i dont stay awake all night with nothing to do but write... i also apologize because due to the long time between when these events actually occurred im sure i have forgotten things that happened and my poor readers will probably feel cheated knowing there were more exciting stories they wont get to hear, although i imagine this will still end up being plenty long enough
so anyways, my good pal gregor came up to visit me the other weekend, and we had some good times, and i thought i would share some of them with you, first off, gregor had to stay in lubbock on friday morning to take a fish test, and so he wasnt going to get to my place until about 10 at night, and then we had planned to go out after he got here, well, i already mentioned that i am a lame old man, and so i took a nap that evening so i would be able to go out and not be super tired the whole time, and i think that is sad but oh well, so gregor finally got to wichita and he buzzed me on the intercom, and i went and talked to him on the intercom, and then buzzed him into the building, which is one of the things i was super excited about moving into my new apartment, i have to buzz people in when they come visit me, its just like i had always seen in movies or in tv shows like seinfeld, and it always makes me happy except no one ever comes to visit me so i dont get to use it near enough (thats a hint for people to come visit), so he comes up and we make a couple of drinks and i give him the grand tour of my apartment, which really doesnt take that long because its mostly just big empty rooms because i have no furniture (more on this later)
so after a few minutes of "this is the kitchen area, someday i'll put a table there...." we decided to go out and enjoy some of the exciting wichita night life, we went to this place called Mort's Cigar and Martini Bar which is just up the street from my place, and we go inside and the first person i see is a pimp, which was really exciting cuz i have never seen a pimp in real life, a lot of idiots like to dress up as them for halloween and lame things like that but this was a real one, he had a bright red suit on, and a big matching red hat with a feather in it, and he was wearing lots of big gold chains, the rest of the people there were less interesting than that, but it was a cool enough place i guess, we sat and smoked some cigars and had a few more drinks and talked for a long time, they also had this big fancy cupboard style humidor on one wall, and all the little drawers had fancy placards with peoples names on them, and apparently you could rent out one of the little drawers and they would give you a couple of keys and they would hold your cigars for you, so that was fun, and after that we went home and went to sleep
the next morning we went to breakfast at this place called the beacon which is about a block over from my apartment, now, my brother and i have always wanted to find like a little coffee shop diner type place that would be our restaurant, like Monk's in seinfeld (i realize i just said i want my life to be like that show 2 times in this thing already, but i am pretty sure thats the last of that, just so you dont think i wish i was jerry or something) or the waffle house type place in Swingers, some place that serves breakfast 24 hours a day and that we would go to all the time, so the first time i drove by this beacon restaurant, and saw the sign that said breakfast served all the time, i got really excited about it, and gregor and i went and it was this awesome little old style diner type place, and it would have been perfect except for the fact that its only open for breakfast and lunch, which does me very little good, i mean i guess it could turn into a saturday morning after going out friday night type place but i still need to find something that is open all night
after our fine breakfast gregor accompanied me while i went and looked for furniture, and it was pretty fun and i actually did a pretty fast job of picking everything out, i dont even think we were there for 3 full hours, which is lightning fast for me, i am notoriously bad at making up my mind and picking things out (ask anyone whos ever gone out to dinner with me), the other day it took me 10 minutes to pick out a salt and pepper shaker, so the fact that i was able to pick out an entire living room set in under 3 hours is very impressive, although, i had pretty good idea of what i wanted, i wanted a brown leather couch, so we didnt have to sit in every couch in the store, just about 30, and it was pretty obvious which one was best, so we only had to repeat test a small handful of them, a lovely young lady named kristi helped me find my furniture, she thought i was really funny for some reason, i thought she was funny too, especially when she knocked over a fake tree trying to reach a lamp and it knocked a bunch of stuff over, i shouldnt pick on her, she was nice, she let us move a whole bunch of different stuff all over the store so we could see which tables and lamps and whatever matched my couches, and she didnt even make us put everything back, so im really excited to have my furniture, i havent gotten it yet... they didnt have it in stock when i was there that day and so they had to order it and then it finally came into the store and then they had to set up a time to deliver but i went out of town and then they were booked and so i still havent gotten my furniture, it should be here friday so that will be real exciting, although, it is going to cut down on the room i have to dance in after i hit home runs in wii baseball, i mean the kitchen, dining, and entry way area of my apartment is still empty and wide open, although my celebration dances dont tend to take me that far, unless of course i have to do a carlton fisk and keep the ball in fair territory as i hop down the baseline...
anyways, after mostly just hanging out the rest of the afternoon we had a very classy evening, we got dressed up in suits and went to one of the fanciest restaurants in all of wichita, Scotch & Sirloin, supposedly its where all the celebrities go to eat when they come to wichita, and you are probably thinking the same thing i did when i first heard that, "celebrities go to wichita?", as surprising as it may be its true, (or so ive been told, ive never seen any), but wichita is the aviation capitol of the world and so they like to come here to check out and buy their fancy private jets, and when they are in town they like to eat at Scotch & Sirloin, and i dont really blame them, it was super nice, our waitress that night was also named Kristi, which we found very amusing and so we did our fake snobby laugh that we had adopted for the evening, but the food was really awesome and the servings were enormous which is always good, (i think the smallest steak they had was 14 oz), and the wine was excellent, and i managed to make it though the entire meal without spilling on myself, which is always an accomplishment, hey speaking of spilling on myself, the other day i was out to lunch with some of my co-workers, and i was attempting to drink some iced tea, and all the ice was stuck at the bottom of my glass, but then as i drank it all broke loose and i poured about a third of a cup of tea down the front of my shirt and pants, it was pretty awesome....actually it wasnt that bad, it dried pretty well, anyways, Scotch & Sirloin is an excellent restaurant, and i highly recommend it, if anyone decides to come visit me just bring at least 50 bucks and we'll go
after our fine meal we continued our classy evening by going to the symphony, the symphony here is in the convention center downtown, in this cool round building, and being great lovers of the arts, gregor and i thought this would be a very good way to spend the evening, the first piece they played was Concerto For Orchestra by Bela Bartok, which is a 5 movement work that in my opinion should have been cut down to two, the opening and ending movements were fun and exciting, but the middle parts were not as great, we did get to use our snobby fake laughs again during the 4th movement when Bartok made a musical joke, at one point towards the end of the 4th movement the piece switches and they play "a burlesque of a theme from Shosakovich's Seventh Symphony that Bartok had found ludicrous", we only knew about it cuz the program booklet pointed it out, otherwise we would have just thought, wow, that bit sounded like crap, which i dont really get, if you think someone elses work sounds dumb, why would you put it in your own piece and make your stuff sound crappy, i never understood musical jokes, in college i took a music appreciation class and a couple times our professor pointed out some musical jokes that the composer had made and they never made any sense to me and i didnt think they were funny at all
The next piece featured a guest performer, Stewart Goodyear on Piano, as they played Franz Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Minor, and it honestly was one of the most amazing things ive ever seen in person, now i think people tend to give standing ovations way too often, and i generally try to avoid them, but i jumped out of my seat in applause when he finished because he was that good, here is a video of him playing The Blue Danube by Strauss, hes a pretty funny looking guy but he is amazing on the piano, unfortunately in this video he has his head shaved so you dont get to see him with his awesome long slicked back funny hair




i really love the faces he makes when he is playing, i could watch him play all day, the combination of how funny looking he is and how amazing he plays would entertain me for hours
the last piece they played was Beethoven's Fantasia for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra, OP. 80., which was pretty good, i enjoy listening to people sing in foreign, although, i think they should have done it second cuz it was a bit of a let down after the liszt piece, but it was still good
after the symphony was over we took about a 180 degree turn from classy night and went to this dive of an irish bar to play darts and drink Guinness, we changed out of our suits first so they wouldnt smell like cheap cigarettes and so we didnt stick out quite so much, at the bar they had this set up where people could play guitar hero on a projection screen real big on the wall and they played the music over the speakers, which at first i thought was kind of cool, but then i changed my mind, because it wasnt like anyone was super good at it, so it was kind of like hanging out almost listening to good songs, except someone was ruining them cuz they kept messing up, other than that it was fun, oh and except gregor is a lot better than i at darts and so he destroyed me all night, when after a couple of hours i finally won a game we decided it was time to call it a night
in the morning i made waffles and then he went home
speaking of bars, before gregor came to visit i tried to do a little bit of research to learn something about all the bars around here, there are tons of bars all over the area right around my place and i was just trying to get an idea about what sort of things each bar had to offer, like i mentioned earlier gregor likes to play darts so i was hoping to find out where we could do that and whatever, so i had just searched downtown wichita bars or something like that, and was skimming through some online maps and websites and such, and at one point in my search i came across a link that was for some kind of wichita escort service, i didnt even know escort services actually existed, let alone had fancy websites so i checked that out based on pure curiosity, turns out it was a pretty big deal that had operations in several different cities including kansas city and a couple of places in texas as well, (i guess people in oklahoma can get real dates), i guess the idea is you pick out a girl, and you go to some sort of event, after that you go home for a quick romp, give her a couple hundred bucks and send her on her way (you might have to pay upfront, i didnt look at the site close enough to study the payment options), somewhere on the site it had a description along the lines of "the perfect companion for a social event, office get together, or evening out", and i thought about that and i thought about how hilarious it would be if someone came to like an office picnic or something with someone who was obviously a hooker, i picture some guy with some sleazy girl on his arm and everyone else just kind of stares at them and talks quietly behind their back, i mean the site claims that their girls are real classy and can dress for all occasions so maybe i should give the girls more credit, they are professionals after all, but based on their profile pictures they had i just couldnt really imagine any of them going to some classy upscale event like an opera and blending in at all, although, that might be worth it just to see the looks on all the snobby old peoples faces, id send her home right after the opera was over of course, i have no interest in my little joke on rich people resulting in some sort of long term medical issue... gross
so i was at bed bath and beyond the other day, and i thought to myself "i need a spatula", and so i wandered over to that area and of course they had way to many to choose from which as you know always poses a huge issue for me, but i actually made this choice pretty quickly, cuz some of them were like 12 dollars and looked super fancy, but its a spatula and so i didnt really care, i was just tired of scraping the last little bits of things out of jars or whatever with my fingers, and i saw one that was like $1.95 and so i decided on that one, and then later i saw on the little cardboard tag thing that my little 2 dollar spatula had a 25 year guarantee, which i thought was very interesting and so i thought about that for a while, picture this with me
its 24 years from now, and im dang near 50 years old, and lets say i have a wife and kids, and 24 years from now they could potentially be graduating high school, (im not saying thats likely, just a possibility and to help you how distant in the future this is) and im mixing up something in the kitchen with my trusty old spatula and the handle snaps!! oh no!! it didnt last 25 years!! ive been screwed!! i demand reparations!! im going to call the company and make them give me a new one!
no, theres no way i would react like that, and i cant imagine anyone who would, personally if my spatula broke a week later i would probably say "dang, i guess this time ill get the 5 dollar one", and then i started thinking about how would you go about getting another one, do you have to save your reciept and your little cardboard tag thing as proof of purchase, and you have to file this away for a couple decades in the chance that it breaks, and then say it breaks 20 years from now are you actually going to go find your receipts, and track down the company, and either go see them or call them and make them give you a new one, and then what happens when you do go see them, and they say "let me see how you stir" and so you show them, and they say you have improper stirring technique which voids the guarantee, none of that could even possibly be worth the 2 dollars it saves you when they give you a new crappy spatula or do you suppose they just take your word for it, and anyone who contacts them they just give a new spatula cuz its not worth their trouble either, and so then i was wondering why would you bother putting a 25 year guarantee on the little tag anyways if it would never be worth it for anyone to actually follow through with that, im not a marketing major so i dont know exactly how this works, do you suppose they did some kind of calculation where they figured out the cost in fractions of a penny for the ink added to the tag to put that on there, and then compared that to the number of suckers who would actually buy the spatula just because it had a guarantee on it and see how much profit they would make, im picturing some little nerd intern in a cubicle with the worst summer job ever, anyways, so they decide to put it on there for whatever reason, and now my question is why 25 years? did they actually perform tests on their spatulas and determine that was the actual expected lifetime, or did they just make up a kind of big number since it doesnt really matter anyways, they may as well have said 50 or 100 years, or a lifetime guarantee, hell, why not just say it has a million year guarantee as long as we are making stuff up, at least that would get peoples attention
anyways, this is the kind of thing you think about when you move to a new city where you dont know anyone, and you dont have cable or internet or furniture, you sit on the floor and you think about spatulas, im just joking, thats not true, i thought about that when i was driving home from the store, and i dont really watch much tv anyways, pretty much all ive watched since i got cable is college basketball and the discovery channel, and i dont just sit around on the floor, i have some nice bar stools and an outdoor foldy type chair, although, it was pretty sad, it was the first night i lived here, and i made myself a really nice spaghetti dinner, and then i realized i hadnt put my stools together yet, so i had to eat my fancy dinner sitting in my foldy chair and eating off of the box for my surround sound system because my chair was too short to reach the counter, it was pretty sad
oh, and i after that super long rant, i still dont think ive used my spatula since i bought it...