My First Party

Today was (and as I write this at 10:30pm, probably still is) the Riptown summer company party. At about 3pm they school-bussed us down to Jericho Beach for some mostly harmless activities including volleyball, soccer, bocce, croquet, frisbee, and horseshoes. My level of (in)action only included bocce and croquet with a few people I work with regularly. After a few hours, most of the people I know took off, leaving me to try and hang out with the people I barely know.

At 6:30 the party moved to the Brock House, just next to the beach, for drinks and food. Employees were each given five drink tickets each, which was somehow called “responsibility”. I’ve been told, relative to past Riptown parties, five drinks is very conservative. Anyway, once the drinking and eating had subsided, they let loose some belly dancers and opened the play-money gambling tables. It was at this point, shortly after 8pm, that I left the party.

I’ve probably been to just over half a dozen company parties now, and it’s clear to me that the fun I have is inversely proportional to the number of people there. Today, there was roughly 400 people, a far cry from the three thousand or so that go to EA’s Christmas parties. Still, when I’m hanging out with people I don’t know very well and don’t work with regularly — and thus have their own established circle of friends — the fun factor for me goes down. What can I say; I’m not much of a talker and at this point in my life I don’t care much about what other people say, especially in a large group. If I’m going to lunch with three or less people, I’m fine. When the group goes to five or six I usually clam up. Beyond that number and I turn into Keyser Soze. And before any of you smart-asses tell me “well that would be a great time to make new friends!”, how about you take your sage advice and cram it. I got enough of those seize the moment bullshit inspirational phrases thrown my way growing up. I’m 29 now, I’ll make friends my own way: painfully slowly.

Anyhow I’ll post the seven or eight photos I took before I got bored and left the party very soon.

Garrett Knights, transit snob.

I’ve been taking the West Coast Express to work every day for the past six months. Before that, I spent two and a half years driving to work, and before that I relied on city buses to get me where I needed to go. The West Coast Express, or “choo choo” as I like to call it, is really a cut above all other public transit in the GVRD. It’s clean, quiet, air conditioned, and fast. The cleanliness and quietness is no doubt due to the premium price one has to pay to ride it (although it, just like Skytrain, really operates on the honour system for some unknown reason) and the fact there’s no bums/hobos/drunks/riff-raff or otherwise undesirable people on the train. Probably 95% of the ridership is people who work in offices, whose only social offenses are talking on cellphones or twiddling on a Blackberry.

So with six months of travelling in first class, the occasional day I have to take a bus to work is dreadful. Look, I know they’re “just people” but a lot of people on buses stink, and usually the stink is of mothballs or unshowered flesh or alcohol or all of it combined. Long story short, it’s hard to go back to riding a bus. Thus I’m a complete transit snob. The choo-choo has given me an air of superiority, richly deserved because I am an office worker and not a student or a drifter or on my way to Chinatown to buy lizard-on-a-stick. The train is one of the reasons we moved to Port Moody, so that I could continue being a snob and travel to work with other people who apparently value personal hygiene as much as I do.

Boo-urns!

Last night we took in probably the most painful-to-watch Lions game in a long, long time. BC barely came away with a win, despite scoring easily on their first possession of the game. Their opponents, the Ti-Cats, were their equals in awfulness, although they at least established a decent running game. I’m not sure why the Lions were so terrible but the constant penalties being called didn’t help bring any kind of momentum: when the team is stuck at first-and-twenty half the time, it’s not really going to produce many points. To make it worse, the Lions star running back was carried out, in traction, on a stretcher. In the thirteen years I’ve been going to Lions games, I haven’t seen anyone injured that much (or at least haven’t seen the medics take that kind of precaution when hauling a guy off the field).

On top of it all, the game was on a Thursday night. It’s very strange getting up the day after and having to go to work. Football belongs on Fridays! Thursday nights are for getting ‘faced on Wild Turkey and falling asleep in the stairwell.

Wedding update: the “big day” is now exactly six weeks away.

Top Model Post-Mortem

Another season of Canada’s Top Model just ended. Dear readers, if you’ve not yet seen the finale, turn away now; this post contains spoilers.

I have a good record of picking the losers on Top Model. I don’t think I’ve ever picked as my favourite the girl who actually ends up winning. This time, in the first episode, I picked Jacqueline only because I thought she was the prettiest, and she was given the boot after the second episode. With her gone, my next pick was Cori, whom I really never believed would win, but as the kids say these days, she was “hot”. Cori was eliminated in the second-last episode. So, with the group cut down to four finalists, I put my support behind Tia, who was kind of funny-looking. Naturally, she too did not win.

Contrast this with my lady friend, who picked Sinead from day one. She went the distance, only to finish second to that scud Rebecca. Yes, I said it. Scud. I don’t think she has what it takes, but then what do I know (from my lousy track record, apparently nothing).

Overall CNTM 2007 was miles ahead of last year’s show. Jay Manuel is the awesomest gay guy on TV and the production values were bumped up several notches. I’d even say CNTM this year was put together better than the Australian or British versions of the show. Putting last season’s show in Brentwood Bay was a joke; locating it in Toronto made much more sense. Not having Tricia Helfer host was also an excellent move. The girls themselves this year were a lot less “frump-a-dump”, to use a term from my old pal Alice, so hopefully next year will be even better.

Switching gears — I’ve now run out of things to do on Facebook. Seriously, I just don’t “get it”. The only purpose it serves now is the hope to attract new readers.

The Mazda Era comes to a close

Today I sold my car. Yes, the Beige Beauty, the Sand Sedan, or if you prefer, the Mica Mazda, is no longer with us. I’m not going to miss it — since getting a job downtown I was essentially keeping it insured to drive maybe 30km a week, with the one exception of driving to Kamloops on the holiday weekend.

My memories of the Protege consist of this: buying it (and in retrospect getting hosed) from a real cocksucker of a salesman at a dealership in Langley; feeling nauseous after paying for it in cash; being hit by a girl who’d just received her L license, causing close to two grand in damage; having the clutch essentially fail on me driving to work; and now selling it for less than half of the price I paid three years ago. As you can see, there’s nothing much that brings a smile to my face when looking back on the Mazda Era, or “the beige period” as my lady friend calls it. In fact if I were to delivery a eulogy for this car, it would go something like this:

“This car was really good on gas.”

Probably the biggest downer with this car was how much money I spent on it. I’ve assembled a little chart showing just how much, as of today, I am “in the hole” with this vehicle.

Essentially I lost about three grand a year owning this car. Just to reinforce what a horrible “investment” owning a car is, let’s get on the red trolley and take a trip to the land of make-believe. If I had taken that initial 7000 dollars and invested it in any number of ways, I would not have lost money.

Obviously investing in Apple would have required some serious balls — in 2004 the iPod hadn’t really caught on, and to forsee what has happened since wasn’t really imaginable. But even something as unsexy as buying shares in Sears Canada would have paid off big time.

So the lesson in all of this is: if you like having money, don’t buy cars.

I caved! I caved!

Yes, the day finally came — I caved to the pressure and signed up on Facebook. After about half an hour of fiddling with it, adding a dozen or so people to my “friend” list, I realized there’s not really anything to Facebook other than the ability to search for people. At the very least maybe I can drive new traffic to this blog.

It seems like Steve Carrell is the new “it” guy for comedies, and it’s not without reason. He was a key cog in the funny machine that was the Daily Show (and with Steven Colbert gone, John Stewart’s show just isn’t what it was … in fact Colbert > Stewart if you ask me). Ignore the train wreck that apparently is Evan Almighty, of course, and he looks poised to take the void that Jim Carrey left when he tried to turn legit. Next year Carrell will be in the movie adaptation of Get Smart, which is a show I used to watch regularly as a kid. In the old show, you could argue that no one else could have been Agent 86. When I heard that Carrell had been cast in Adams’ role for the movie, I thought, “that might just work.” Now we have a teaser trailer, and while it’s entirely without dialogue, I think this movie is going to be good. Even seeing The Rock cast with a role makes me happy. Anne Hathaway as Agent 99 … ergh, well, I guess it’s can’t all be perfect.