It was raining, cold, and I wasn’t drunk enough, but it was still extremely fun. Bye, 2008. See you never.

This morning I woke to a blizzard and the voice of Wolf Blitzer on CNN. There are two or so feet of snow on the ground. I watched the Patriots beat up on the Cardinals in the snow, then turned over to the Seahawks game and the weather in Seattle was not any better. But at least they won.

I went out for lunch at Bertucci’s with my cousin, brother and his girlfriend. I also learned by talking to Rachel that Bertucci’s has not branched out to the opposite coast yet. I came home and helped do some shoveling and I am not excited that we are expected to have another storm on Wednesday. I spent a lot of time on the computer downloading movies and obsessively checking Facebook, my email, and Google Reader. I thought a lot about buying a new mobile phone. If anyone currently reading have any suggestions of good phones with touch screens and fun, useful, interesting features, and that are usable with Verizon, don’t hesitate to let me know.

This evening I got a phone call from Lee asking me to come out with her and Laura and get drinks. I was reluctant because the weather has been horrendous and because I have a certain stigma about bars and clubs on the North Shore of metropolitan Massachusetts. In the end, though, I went out and we found ourselves at nearly empty Jade’s chinese restaurant with some loudly Bostonian plow drivers. Lee was the only one who drank anything with alcohol (Laura and I got Coke’s), but it was fun to just be out with friends I haven’t seen yet.

And that’s all. Until tomorrow.

Babyless, STDless sex at least. I know this is old, but whatever. (via)

Borders is now trading at 51 cents a share for stock, at the time of the writing of this post. It has been common knowledge in the publishing industry that Borders is going under. It’s expected to be gone, as we know it, by February.

In the comments and in a separate post people relate stories about Borders. So here I will relate mine.

When I first got started playing music with people, about a year after I had begun playing guitar, the first gig that I ever played was an open mic night at Borders in Peabody. My friend Lee, a singer, and I played “405″ by Death Cab For Cutie and “Drive” by Incubus in front of maybe twenty-five or so people (including family and close friends) in the second floor café. I was nervous as hell; when I signed up my palms were sweating and when we got there to play my knees were shaking. But once we were up I think we got through it with minimal mistakes. This one small open mic led to a two year stint in a full band. It was quite a night. The only picture ever taken of this event was a cell phone photo taken by Lee’s brother, and I present it for you here.

I have another story about Borders in Seattle that is quite long (and largely uneventful) that maybe I will post it some other time.

I’ve been feeling a bit like a vagrant in my own home. I can’t sleep in my room because in the time I’ve been away it’s become a surrogate home for junk that isn’t used but for whatever reason isn’t ready to be thrown away. It’s in the basement and the air quality has degraded such that if I spend a night in there anymore I feel like I’ll have a nose bleed the next morning and develop mesothelioma over the course of the week. Also my bed is simply uncomfortable, especially when compared to the bed at my apartment. But then again, there’s little that compares to a queen-sized IKEA foam mattress.

Not even my brother’s memory foam mattress. I slept on that for the last week and over Thanksgiving and it’s comfortable enough, but I’m wondering where the “memory” comes into the foam. It sleeps more like a thick layer of corrugated cardboard. There were nights when I just couldn’t sleep on the damn thing. But in any case, my brother got back from Australia today after some flight difficulty and of course bearing many funny stories that only my brother could tell (such as being chased by a kangaroo and bitten by an opossum). And now that he’s back I move into my sister’s lesbo’d out room until she gets back on Tuesday, and after that I’m couch surfing it until I leave on the 29th.

I have not been doing much lately and tomorrow will probably not be any different. It is supposed to snow like nobody’s business tomorrow and into Saturday (a cool ten inches or so in Peabody, so they say). I always somehow miss the snow in Seattle and make it for the snow in Peabody. Why would I care, you ask? Because snow is not an oddity anywhere in New England; for Seattle it is and is therefore fun. Also, in Seattle I have no shoveling to do and there is the potential for snow days.

The lip is healing as expected. The stitches still drive me nuts (as does spelling ’stitches’). They appear to be dissolving on schedule, although there still seems somewhat to be a hole there which I can tell will drive me nuts if it’s still there after these stitches are gone. I can only hope that one day I read through the archives of this written record and say out loud, “Oh, yeah, remember that time I had that annoying thing removed and it really sucked?” And that will be the period on the final sentence that was this very irritating health problem.

I’ve mostly learned that it’s difficult to type the word ’stitches’ correctly in one try.

Today my grades were posted and I hold them up as Exhibit Whatever in my personal ongoing trial of education as a fraud. I received two A-minuses and one B. The two A’s I got in the two classes in which I did not actively participate, wrote papers on multiple glasses of wine and did very little of the assigned reading. The B was received in Writing Non-Fiction, which required that I simply write personal essays about my life. Go figure.

Speaking of trials, I have jury duty tomorrow and I do not think I am going to go. It worries me because I am already considered a delinquent for not attending two years ago, which they have finally caught on to. I am not going because I would much prefer to attend jury duty in Seattle and I also have no intention of driving to Lawrence. Lawrence, Massachusetts is one of the crime ridden armpits of the state, along with Dorchester and Roxbury, et cetera. Not to mention I’d probably end up getting a parking ticket as well as getting yelled at by the people who work at the Office of the Jury Commissioner, who are notoriously unreasonable and rude, which would only add to my mild disapproval of my home state.

It’s all just a mess is what I’m trying to say.

And to top that off, here is my newest favorite blog: Way To Suck That Dick! Needless to say, it is NSFW in the least.

The lip is slowly but definitely recovering. I got some serious ibuprofin and some Vicodin for it, so the next few days should be pretty good. More tomorrow.

Basically, I bit my lip and I’ve been suffering for it since.

Today I got it removed.

I couldn’t sleep last night so I was late this morning to the appointment with the oral surgeon by thirty minutes. Thankfully, they allowed me to stay and fit me in about another thirty minutes after I got there. I followed a nurse across the hall into a big chair with straps on the arms and legs. I didn’t need to be strapped in, of course, but I sat down and they leaned me back. Within minutes I had pink gel on my lip, traveling down my throat every time I swallowed—the numbness making subsequent swallows more difficult. The surgeon came in an stuck an angular needle painfully into my lip a few times then left.

When he came back, my lip felt huge because of the novocaine, but unlike most times I’ve had anesthesia in my life, my lip was actually very large. He left once more and when he came back he began cutting. I closed my eyes for most of it because I have a fear of sharp objects, but I knew there was lots of blood. Periodically I felt it trickle down my chin. The doctor and his assistants joked and laughed a bit about other things as they were doing this. At one point I heard the surgeon say quietly, “Yeah, this one is pretty deep.” Deep mucoceles are a danger because if they are too deep and they are removed, there is a risk of nerve tissue damage. Meaning when the novocaine subsides, I may permanently have a “coin-shaped” area of numbness in my lower lip.

In less than ten minutes he was finished and stitching me up. They cleaned off my lip and sat me up. He asked if I wanted to see it, and of course I said yes. It was a blood-red chunk as big as a raisin with a white sac in the middle of it. I struggled to imagine how something like that came out of my lip.

I’m home now, icing it as they told me to do no fewer than five times. I’d really prefer not to leave the house or talk to anyone, as my lip is still numbed enormous. In any case, I’ll of course be updating here about my status as the week goes on and hope that my lip isn’t permanently fucked up.