Friday - Demetri Martin and Pete Holmes

Last Friday evening I had priority tickets to attend a studio recording for season 2 of Demetri Martin's show "Important Things". I went with Laura and a really great couple we know through work. It was awesome. For one, I'd never been to a TV recording before.

Going to a TV recording involves a lot of waiting, as you can see here:

• 8pm - Arrived at the studio with priority tickets in hand and was whisked to the front of the line (past about 350 other people)
• 8:30pm - The filming was supposed to start, but there was a delay.
• 8:40pm - Used the bathroom because once in the studio there are no bathroom breaks, which is important since the recording takes about 2 hours.
• 8:45pm - Return from the bathroom and waited.
• 9:30pm - They herd us on to elevators and have us stand outside the studio.
• 10:00pm - They finally let us in the studio.
• 10:01pm - We Score Front Row Seats!
• 10:05pm - Pete Holmes, an amazing comedian from NY, does the warm up.
• 10:25pm - Demetri comes out and does his stuff. I laugh to the point that all of my muscles ache.
• 1:30am - We finally get out of the show.
• 1:33am - I eat Demetri Martin's apple
• 2:00am - Arrived home and finally got to use the bathroom again.

During Pete Holmes warm-up set for the show, he saw me on the front row and noticed I had a beard. Then he noticed about 5 of us had beards, and he went off on an awesome tangent about beards. The premise was that people with beards are awesome and we each have a falcon named Falcor that sits on our shoulders.

He ended up nick naming me "Blonde Yeti" and the guy behind me "Dual Beard". "Dual Beard" had one of those classic outlaw beards from spaghetti westerns. I'm pretty sure if your beard is that bad ass, you naturally smell like gun smoke, have an immunity to rope burns, a palette for whiskey, and came out of the womb wearing a holster

At the end of the filming Charlyne Yi made a guest appearance and sang a duet with Demetri. She held a guitar during the duet, but she never played it. Odd. Also odd, is that I ate a stage prop. I hadn't eaten dinner before the show, and at one point Demetri had been juggling apples. He dropped one of the apples, and it ended up about a foot from the front of the stage, so as we left I ate the apple. Laura found this pretty disgusting, seeing as the apple probably had not been washed. But I was hungry. And the apple was delicious.

For having a beard and being talked to, I received season 1 of "Important Things" on DVD.

Saturday - Ruckus and Catan!

SharonJo happened to be in town, so I hung out while DMV subjected her to his company. Good fun, amazing tea, swam with some whales. All in all, a good time.

We discovered a cool little garden in the middle of the Tenderloin. Yes, that is the worst name for a neighborhood. On the other hand, the border between Tenderloin and Nob hill is known as the Tender Nob. And if a name is going to be that gross, I insist on spelling it with a k: Tender Knob.

Sharon or a well dressed Ewok?

Swimming with whales.

While having tea, I got distracted by the tiny spoon that came in each cup. I put my spoon on a napkin, and in my head I started pretending it was a train. Seriously. The best part is that I unknowingly started making fairly loud train sounds.

One last photo before I headed off to a friends house, where we played Settlers of Catan and I dominated both games.

Sunday - Poker and Motorcycles

Sunday evening I went to play poker with friends. And on my way back I ran in to Jason Britton and a video crew. They'd blocked off part of Columbus street, and Britton was doing stunts up and down the road. It is amazing what a person can do on a motorcycle. Simply insane.

I rarely blog about work or my home town. I don't talk about work because everything I work on is covered by Non-Disclosure Agreements and usually involves a Fortune 500 company. And the rest of this post is why I rarely blog about my home town.

I grew up in a rural Oklahoma farm town. Let me illustrate how small. First, the town's official population is just under 300. Second, I went to a consolidated school and still only graduated with about 26 other people. For those of you not familiar with a consolidated school, it is when two or more towns combine school systems. It is the school system equivalent of hooking up a bunch of robots to form Voltron. Until we consolidated in my 5th grade year, there were only two boys - counting me - in the class.

A vast majority of the people who blog on sites like Xanga are spoiled because they come from large cities, and that grants them a certain type of anonymity. What they write is not easily associated with them, and so it is easier to maintain anonymity or at least a low profile. Odds are if you're from a large city and you blog you could post anything you wanted and it will never be associated with you in real life. And it is easier to hide your actions, because you most likely belong to many different communities that either partially overlap or do not overlap. (By community I mean any group you're part of).

But if you come from a small town your different communities overlap and often they completely overlap and consist of the same people but in a different setting. For example, the people I went to Church with are the people I went to school with, the people I went to school with are the people I worked with, and so on.

Let's suppose I posted a story about someone from my home town - not necessarily a bad story or a good story, but just a story. I guarantee that person would know within 24 hours *. In my town we all know each other, and word spreads fast. Potentially for the rest of my life any time I returned home people might associate me with that story or even or information. And when you're from a small town, you don't want to alienate yourself, because unlike a large city, there isn't always a new place to fit in.

Not only that, I want to respect the people who still live there. If I said something that offended a perosn or family, it might affect how people interact with my family. Imagine how terrible it would be if my parents were treated differently because of something I said on my blog. And this isn't an impossible scenario in a small town.

(By the way, don't discount word spreading fast as a bad thing. Good news spreads as fast as gossip. And being part of such tightly overlapping communities, information spreading can't be helped. It isn't out of malice. It is simply how small town life works.)

I am not saying I have bad things to say about my town or the people. Quite the contrary. Rather, it means no matter the story I have to be careful even if I find the story harmless. A story I tell about Oklahoma will not affect me in San Francisco. But it might affect someone who still lives in Oklahoma.

* = And if you don't believe me, a few months ago I posted a story about grade school. The other person the story was about found out (not that I had attempted to hide the story) and took time to send me a fairly hard-toned e-mail. I meant nothing by the story, other than it is funny how much we change as we grow up. In the end we both realized neither of us meant any harm, and it all ended cordially. That incident was a silly story about grade school. It happened when I was maybe ten. What if I'd told a story that mattered?

I long for snow, a snowball fight, sledding, making snowmen, and the knocking over other snowmen. To celebrate my winter spirit, today I set my desktop backgrounds to Calvin and Hobbes. The most important thing that Bill Watterson taught me is that I want to sled with a tiger.

I've even made a checklist:

1. Sled
2. Tiger
3. Snow
4. Snicker doodles

If I'm going through the trouble to get a sled, a tiger, and snow, then why not get delicious cookies too? More people should remember this. It has real world applications too. Would you rather be laid off or be laid off and get some cookies? Would you rather win the lottery or win the lottery and get some cookies?

Last night while I browsed the Action and Adventure movies on Netflix, I realized that the covers to all action movies feature one of three colors:

I'm not sure why gun isn't an official color. But it should be, and this post is proof that gun should at least be nominated by the Crayola Crayon Color Nomenclature Board of Directors. Besides, there should be one color in a box of crayons that inspires fears. Or makes little kids poo their pants. And it gives Hollywood one more line to add to movies to let you know how scary a bad guy is...

Clint Eastwood: "I don't trust that gun eyed son of a bitch."

As a surprise, yesterday I took Laura to Terra Mia where we spent the afternoon decorating pottery. She decorated a butter dish, and I decorated a rimmed dinner plate. I felt a bit uninspired and defaulted to my UFO and robots motif. I decorated the bottom of the plate like the bottom of a UFO and the top as a robot.

The colors will be much more rich after firing. I'll be sure to post another picture. And that is obviously an old-school ray gun, not a hair dryer, that he is wielding. There is nothing scary about a hair dryer toting robot. I've encountered a few, and they didn't even cause a chill to run down my spine. If you want street cred equip your robots ray guns.

I've learned a new trick.

Yes, I do need a haircut.

After finishing our pottery, we headed to the Purple Onion for the CD recording of Hasan Minhaj's comedy album. The Purple Onion is the same venue Zach Galifnakis recorded his incredibly hysterical DVD. I liked Hasan's material, but there are styles I prefer more, and I never quite warmed up to his stage presence. The album comes out in January. And I recommend you purchase it for two tracks:

• The one where I sneezed
• The one where I yelled out "Oklahoma!"

On a final note, I hate how slow oil paintings dry. I painted 5 master pieces a week ago, and none of them have finished drying yet. And damn it, I'm ready to post about them. I'm off to either slay some badass creatures in Warcraft or to pick up my government check in Call of Duty: Modern Welfare in which I'm a level 15 dead-beat dad, with 4 children by 3 mothers, a beat up Geo Metro, a part-time job at Wal-Mart, and have a Bangles football tattoo. I'm hoping that today I can unlock diabetes and a rascal scooter.