Categories
It Happened to Me

Look Before You Poop

Toilet

Perhaps I’ve become a bit too comfortable in Logan International Airport’s Terminal C.

Terminal C is the terminal I use most often, after the ones in Toronto. Of the airlines that have regular Toronto-Boston routes, Air Canada is probably the best option, both price- and comfort-wise. They tend to use larger and more comfortable jets than the next-best option, American Eagle, and they use Terminal C, which has better restaurants and stores and more available power outlets than Terminal B. It’s also where the Logan branch of Legal Sea Foods, home of some very good “chowdah”, is located.

Yesterday afternoon, I took Brent Ashley to Legal for some chowder and calamari, to thank him for giving me a free pass to the Ajax Experience conference. The “Thai Style” calamari is pretty nice, with its spicy pineapple-and-peanut sauce, but let’s face it: it’s seriously deep-fried and greasily travels through your system like Mario Andretti down a straightaway. Needless to say, I felt nature’s rather urgent call while waiting at the gate and asked Brent to keep an eye on my stuff while I beelined for the bathroom.

I’ve used the bathroom at Terminal C dozens of times, so I navigated my way there on auto-pilot. I saw a set of open stalls, picked one and went about my business.

As I was finishing up, I noticed that the voices of the guys in the room were a little…weird.

That’s when I realized that I’d just taken a crap in the women’s room.

A plane must’ve just landed, because the bathroom got very full. I decided that right then would be a very bad time to emerge from the stall; better by far to wait for a lull. The last thing I needed was a room full of women who might be under the mistaken impression that I was some kind of Japanese toilet pervert who got his jollies listening to women using the bathroom.

I even briefly considered tossing my black blazer over my head in the hopes that it would hide my bearded face and perhaps even fool casual onlookers into thinking I was wearing some kind of chador. Hey, I’ve had stupider ideas.

A few minutes later, I got the lull I was waiting for. I opened the stall door and set a quick but not overly hurried path for the door and crossed the hall into the men’s washroom, where I washed my hands.

Note to self: Look before you poop.

(By the bye, the women’s washroom at Logan is just as poorly-maintained as the men’s.)

The Attractiveness/Relationship Graph

[via reddit] Here’s further proof that everything under the sun can be expressed mathematically: the Attractiveness/Relationship graph (it’s not as complex as it sounds). To those of you who are going to waste the next couple of hours classifying people they know along the graph, I apologize in advance.

Physical/Mental attractiveness two-axis relationship graph.

Saturday Night at Hooters, Explained Concisely in a Diagram

A guy named “Ikes” has created some strange diagrams on his site. I used to live near a Hooters, and for a while, I worked across the street from one, and from casual observation would say that the diagram below is fairly accurate not just of the downtown Hooters, but most places in Accordion City’s club district:

Strange diagram of a Saturday night at Hooter's, depicted using electrical plugs and sockets.

Categories
It Happened to Me

A Year’s Worth of Girl Trouble

The web statistics suggest that I’m getting a crop of new readers, partially because of the Love/Hate T-shirt entry, partially because of the entry featuring the Family Circus/Cthulhu mashups and partly because of RailsConf and some nice linkage from the Ruby community’s very own rock star, why the lucky stiff and his Ruby-related site, RedHanded.

Welcome, new readers! Go fetch your favourite beverage and feel free to cruise through the archives. There’s almost five years’ worth of stuff here, ranging from silly to serious. If you’re at a loss for a place to start, try this page, which features links to my favourite blog entries.

To narrow it down further, let me suggest the “Girl Trouble” entries of 2003, which are listed below. Enjoy!

Worst Date Ever

I’ll cut to the chase: the date ends with her screaming while curled up in the fetal position.

She was a pretty blonde waitress with an English accent who worked at the cafe I frequented. I had a crush on her from the first moment I laid eyes on her, and it turns out that she had a thing for me, too. Unfortunately, that’s about the only thing that went right. This multi-part story has got it all: adult situations, violence, ketamine, strong language and ABBA.

The New Girl Story

This is the blog entry that got me nominated for a bloggie and landed me a chapter in the book Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: Best of Blogs.

The short version: I gush about my new girlfriend in a blog entry,

someone reads that entry and sends me an email warning me that the

girlfriend is not whom she says she is. Creepiness ensues.

Last Night

In this entry covering a single night, I face romantic disappointment, thwart a pickpocket,

endure bad poetry, entertain a crowd, aid and abet underage drinking,

come between a small-town girl and two Gap ninjas, entertain another

crowd and get complimented on my hat.

Categories
It Happened to Me

"They Keep Pulling Me Back In!"

Over at the web page recommendation application known as reddit, an article of mine from 2003, The Girl Who Cried Webmaster is currently holding the number 5 position. Perhaps I should write a follow-up sometime.

The Hottest Thing You Can Say

Recently, Deenster wrote about an article in Men’s Health magazine: The 30 Hottest Things You Can Say to a Naked Woman. I think that’s a bit ahead of the game — there’s still no consensus on the hottest things one can say to a fully-clothed woman:


Click the comic to see it at full size.

The guy in the second-to-last panel looks and sounds like my old housemate Paul. The guy in the last panel kind of looks and sounds like me!

The THIRTY Year Old Virgin

Promotional poster image for 'The Forty Year Old Virgin'.

[via Just a Gwai Lo] On Ask Metafilter, a thirty-year old who’s still a virgin asks two questions:

First, how rare are 30-year-old male virgins? Has anyone here lost

their virginity after 30? (I suppose I mean to exclude from this

question people who purposefully made a choice to abtain prior to

marriage.) Does anyone have any (preferably recent) links or materials

as to the age when men lose their virginity? Even if I knew that it was

as low as 1% of the population, that still lets me think to myself that

that probably translates into at least 100 or 200 guys in the same boat

here in Chicago, and ten or twenty thousand nationally. It would let me

feel a little less like the Only Virginal Freak in the World.

My second question is for the women here. Please tell me, honestly,

what your reaction to a partner would be if he told you he was a

virgin. Don’t try to spare my feelings, because I frankly need your

honesty here. My initial desire is to be honest with whomever my first

partner is, because we’ll be in a caring relationship, and heck, for

all I know, it might be a positive thing in their eyes. But I’ve heard

from a few (male) friends of mine that this is something I shouldn’t

reveal … that it will make them wonder what the hell is wrong with

me. Of course, there’s also the fact that my first time will probably

very obviously be my first time to my partner whether I tell her or not.

The responses for the most part have been kind and understanding, which runs counter to the insinuation that the Internet is a nasty place full of liars that a lot of journos have been making as of late. In fact, the questions and responses show just the sort of thing that might not have been possible outside of the ‘net and certainly not possible within a newspaper or magazine.