Both Emily and HR Neglected This...

I don't proclaim to know everything that Emily Post had written, but I can say with 90 percent certainty that Emily Post failed to mention how to handle one particular scenario for which I desperately needed to know earlier today. And I know with a 100 percent certainty that the employee handbook didn't cover this either...

What do you do when you are greeted with a foul smelling air lingering in the restroom when all you needed to do was tingle; and while you make audible gagging sounds and hurry through your tingle, the toilet flushes in a stall and out comes someone you work with? And what do you do when you go to wash your hands and you realize it was your boss's turd aroma responsible for the stench, and he asks, "How's it going, John?" while he dries his hands with paper towels?

Do you make short little acknowledgments? Or do you try to carry a normal conversation pretending you're in his office? And do you keep eye contact at all, or focus on the lather on your hands? Or is it simply best to look at him through the mirror?

Help?

Who's the Wuss Now, Huh???

2009 had been kind of strange for me so far. In a good way, that is. When I went in to renew my driver's license with the state of Illinois back in January, I thought long and hard about some of my life choices in the past while waiting in line. No, not my choice in sexual orientation, but something profoundly deeper.

For the longest time since being licensed by Pennsylvania, Missouri and Illinois, I had always left that little checkbox that read "organ donor" blank. My thought process was that if it was time for one to leave the world of the living, then it was time. Why should some doctor get to play a higher form of deity and take one of my organs to extend the life of another?

Well, suffice to say, I decided to check that "organ donor" box this past January. Change of heart? Possibly. I realized that playing a form of deity was not a problem of mine in this whole thing. I also realized that it was entirely selfish of me to take my healthy organs to the grave should I be lucky enough to become brain dead in some kind of a freak accident. (Preferably involving two hot naked chicks...)

In that same train of thought, I decided without hesitation to give blood when my company sent out an email informing us of an employee blood drive. The 10th of February is now forever sketched into my electronic calendar as the day I first gave blood for the very first time in my life.

The reading materials warning me of the gazillion reasons why I may or may not be a suitable candidate as a blood donor? No big deal. The 369 questions (or so I thought) in the questionnaire regarding my history, such as if I had ever slept with a person who received or made payment for sexual favors? Believe it or not, I actually struggled with this questionnaire. I thought, what about one night stands, and I had worn protection? Was that any less critical than being in sexual cahoots with a "person who received or made payment for sexual acts?" LOL

Okay, so I wasn't really struggling with the questionnaire, but I did chuckle to myself with ethical minefields I was conjuring up in my wickedly twisted mind. After all that hustle, I finally sat in the waiting area for a free lawn chair that looked like the ones the American Red Cross had stolen from the poolside of some imitation swanky hotel pools. Except these came with the hooks to hang your blood bag with.

As an athlete, I am always subconsciously competitive with most trivial things. I had overheard the big guy who had already started giving blood that it wasn't his first time. Again, in my twisted mind, I created a little competition to see if I could give a pint of my blood close to the time this big guy got done.

Unfortunately, the competition quickly faded because suddenly all my manhood momentarily seeped away when the nurse took out this ginormous needle with a needle hole large enough to fit a Tic Tac! "This will only sting a little," was all I could hear before I thought I was going to pass out. Remember, I'm the kind of guy who enjoys watching the needle pierce my skin and muscles. Like I said, I'm kind of twisted.

Thankfully, the sting was indeed little, even though it lasted a good second too long. And before long, I was focusing back on the competition. I don't remember how many times I must've done this, but I turned my head to look at the big man in the eyes, followed by looking deeply into his pint bag. If only I could see what he was thinking every time I did that. But soon enough, my pint bag was bursting in the seams before the big guy gave a pint. Ding Ding! I had won. In fact, I even had enough time to get the nurse to take pictures of me before the big guy finished.

As I proudly walked over to the snack table, I read over the list of things to do or not do in the five hours after giving blood. I sat down to chug two boxes of apple juice, and that's when the big guy came over. He drank some orange juice, and we both snacked away. The guy kept on sitting there, eating slowly, and taking his sweet ass time. I thought I could copy that, because what can possibly be better than to waste productivity on company initiatives, especially when free food was involved?

But before long, the moral person in me whispered in my ears, "Get your ass going! You have a couple things you have to do before you leave for work!" So I did. As I left, I snickered to myself thinking of the big guy still sitting there snacking away slowly, What a wuss! Big giant guy can't take it like a man for just a pint of blood?

Of course, after walking back hurriedly to my desk, I started feeling dizzy and wobbly. Turned out that yeah, you really need to take your time to recover after giving blood. So who was the wuss now?

Damn!

Hello, 2009!

It sure has been a long time since I last updated my blog, hasn't it? To be accurate, it has been 225 days and some change since I last updated my blog. I guess it is a good thing that I am unlike most other bloggers who tried to bank on blogosphere, eh?

Admittedly, my last entry was somewhat boring in nature. I was taking a little break to go to the west coast to see my new niece and family, and since my dad had passed my blog address out, I thought it would be fitting to update family members new to my blog with a diary journal of sorts to highlight my father-and-son trip up and down the western seaboard.

So why did I stop writing in the midst of the trip? Well, you should know that the whole journaling during the trip was all done retroactively. So by the time I wasn't on the train anymore, I stopped writing. I mean, if you're in Seattle, would you rather go out and have fun, or stay in and write? =) As you can tell, being cooped up in a train car for days on end without much mobility really made a dent on my humorous writing. Okay, maybe I wasn't humorous, but it sure got less humorous right after I started the train ride.

By the time I got back to Chicago, I had to catch up with so many things. The most important of all, which is in the order of livelihood, not personal passion ruler, was work. August 17, 2008 was the date for which all the hard work I had been putting in ever since starting at the hospital hinged on: Go-live date. And of course, once we successfully went live on IBM servers, it was a bit of hell to take on full responsibilities for the daily operations, when pressure type changed from ensuring project progress toward maintenance so that the systems don't go down.

Next up: The 2008 Chicago Marathon training. Seeing how I had missed the first, fourth and fifth week of the marathon training for being out of town, I thought it would be best that I finally get into the thick of things. I mean, that was my first ever to volunteer as a group leader for CARA, and I had close to 30 runners I'm responsible for. And naturally, as the weeks go by, the higher the mileage of the runs. So more running meant less personal time. This in turn meant no time to blog for me.

Of course, you can ask me why I didn't get back into it once I have completed the Chicago Marathon. Well... I went and ran the Seattle Marathon afterwards, followed by falling almost deadly ill for three weeks straight. Since then, I have yet to stop my lazy ass from becoming a total couch potato.

But no more of that! It took seven weeks of 2009 for me to finally realize that I got to get my lardy ass and second-trimester belly with A-cup manboops in some sort of a shape and get back into my normal routines.

Ta-dah! Here I am! (Only because blogging is hell of a lot easier than running...)

Disclaimer: Despite declaring my return to normal routines in such a transparent media, I sure as hell am not guaranteeing that I'll eat my own boxers if I fail to update this blog as often as when I was traveling for work. =)