Metro/Pleasure Victim

First off, a very merry/happy/befuddled Christamchanakwanzadan to everyone! And a belated Festivus to all the people who don’t believe. Believe in pan-holiday consumerism that is! Wo!

Alright there are thing to accomplish so we shall not dwell on wishing you good stuff, we’ll instead (and for a change of pace) turn our attention towards me and my haul of loot this year. Here is the list:

Scarves (many scarves, in fact 4, all of them pretty awesome. Especially the only one I got in black and lime green!)
A briefer History Of Time and The Universe In A Nutshell by Stephen Hawking
Nat’l Geographic’s Theories Of Everything (A History Of Thought From Newton To String Theory)
Note: The books were either one of two thing: my family’s way of saying “get your science requirements done you lazy fuck!” or a cruel joke as few things scare me more than the universe and the laws by which it functions.
One map of the stars (winter sky)
One shirt (very nice and patterned which I normally don’t like but this one is quite nice)
A ton of music (well music potential in the form of a bunch of gift cards to various places, I’ll start the reviewing process soon)
Two novels Forever by Mark Hamill and White Teeth by Zadie Smith (I haven’t read fiction for a while now, it will be nice to get back to made up things)
CANDY!!!!!!!!!
Money (which is nice as “I got’s to get paid”)
FF VII (the collector’s edition! Only my favorite game ever…you’re the best Nando)
An i mutha fuckin’ Pod! Black, 80 gig…dear lord! Have you seen those commercials where the little kids are spasing out over a present? Yeah that was me when I opened it…for about a day and a half.
And then there is the big screen and the Playstation…so much for a small Christmas, huh?

Alright now on to my night last night. After the gratitude of all my new junk wore off my family started driving me crazy again. In order to keep some semblance of peace I decided to get out of the house and just chill. I went to Best Buy and purchased some new music. I went and ate some spicy tuna rolls at my favorite sushi place. Then I headed over to Starbuck and read for a while, sipping a wonderful cup of “joe.” As the evening progressed I grew more calm and relaxed. It was really exactly what I needed. To cap off the evening I thought I might hop the metro down to the Mall and walk around the hopefully deserted streets for an hour or so until metro closed and I headed home. Well I got to the metro station by my house and things headed into interesting territory from there…

As some of you might know, in order to park in the Metro lots you have to have one of their Smartrip cards. I was (and this is totally me bragging cause I don’t actually live inside of DC) one of the first people to get one. I bought mine about a month after they came out. It has been a real help and of course a status symbol to end all status symbols when it comes to both city “cred” and looking cool as apposed to the damn dirty tourists…Well my card has seen better days and when I went to put money on it to get downtown it wouldn’t read. The attendant said I could buy a new one for ten bucks and that it would be fine. One problem. I only had 20s and the machine only took 10s and under. The attendant didn’t have change and neither did anyone I asked. The guy said that I could just write an IOU at the gate and get out after I freaked out for about 10 minutes quietly in the corner. But when I drove up to the gate no one was there. I went back to the attendant who said that there was always someone there and that he was either in the bathroom or patrolling the lot. So I parked where I could see the booth and waited for the parking lot man to come back. He didn’t. An hour passed and I figured that I would just ask the station manager (who was the person helping me earlier) about it. Well he started to get crazy angry. Not at me but at just about everybody you could imagine. He called the parking lot company, metro itself and then the cell phone of whoever was supposed to be there (which he got from a very scared dispatcher). Well after all of that, there was still no gate going up in my near future. Until he manager just gave up and said that he would start pushing buttons in the little box thing until it went up. In addition he was very sorry and said that everybody else was getting out of there free too that night. I thought it was interesting. Trapped in a Metro parking lot for about an hour and a half. I didn’t get mad at all either, and it was nice to be apologized to by someone who works in the service industry.

Listening to really good mixes…