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For once, I am going to make good on a future-blog promise and tell you all about the dweeb we are here with. He has a lot of names, actually. Dweeb, Poindexter, Imp, and Alfred E. Newman. I wasn't aware of this fact, but apparently Alfred E. Newman is the name of the character on the front of MAD Magazine. This kid looks EXACTLY like him; I'm so not even kidding. Buckteeth, big ears, and stupid butt-cut hairdo. Normally I wouldn't make fun of someone for the way they look, but after two weeks, this kid is on my last fucking nerve. And you all know what a nice guy I am. Right? ... Right? Fuck you.
Everything I describe is probably going to sound really petty, but it's just one of those things where it wears on you and wears on you until he can do no right. I find myself disagreeing what whatever he says, just for the sake of disagreeing. So far on this trip, we have been doing a lot of drinking. I mean a lot of drinking, and yet, I have only been drunk once (Friday night). They just have a wealth of great beers and we've been stopping into a pub to enjoy a beer or two with Paul the Englishman. We knew we were in trouble the first night when Poindexter ordered water at the bar. "I'm not much of a drinker." He stared as us the entire time we were there until he finally excused himself early. He does that every night now, always in bed by 8. What a waste of a vacation. "Fancy that," Paul said, "Not even being able to enjoy one beer when he's in a pub."
We've made sure everyone here knows he's not a typical American. "He's not a typical anything," seems to be the common response. So he don't drink, he don't smoke, and he goes to bed early every night. Aight, whatever. He'd also never played pool before in his life. Now I'm no pool shark. Being as I grew up with a table maybe I should be, but I still warn people before I play them that I am "no good." So when he warned us he was "no good" I thought he meant he would miss some of the long shots, or suck at banking, or not really know how to use English on the cue ball. HA! If he knew HOW TO USE THE CUE BALL. This fool steps up to the table, grabs the cue stick about halfway down the shaft leaving a huge dead weight behind him he can barely control and takes aim at the 12 ball. Unfathomable. No matter how bad you are, you should at least know to hit the white ball.
Aight, whatev. Maybe biljards aren't his thing. So we play darts another night. Kid has never thrown a dart in his life nor does he have any concept of how to play. Incidentally, I am pretty good at darts now after playing almost every night with Keith and Paul. The other night we were at our favorite little bar here and this guy came in and asked if maybe he could play with us on teams. Sure, what the hell. This dude ends up being ranked like #8 in all of Scandinavia. It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. We were playing cricket and he would close out like 3 numbers each turn. The guy could tell you where his dart was gonna go and it would go there. I can tell you which quadrant of the board I'll land in, not much more. Keith and Paul headed back to the hotel but I wanted to play more darts so I stayed out late learning from this guy. I improved my game like 100 fold. I was nailing 1 or 2 triple 20's every throw. It was fun.
This is going to be the longest blog ever. Bear with me. So now he's not much of a drinker, not much of a smoker, not much of a pool player, and not much of a darts player. These are starting to add up. But I guess that's cool that he likes to be responsible during the week. That's understandable. The weekends, though, that's when the fun begins. Foreign country, dude! What happens in Sverige, stays in Sverige, right? There's a casino here that I suggested maybe we could check out. Unfortunately, he's "not much of a gambler." Good fuckin' xrist. So I invited him out to Étage with me. He's "not much of a club goer." On Monday when he asked me how my weekend was I said, "Omega, crazy fun. You?" "Well... I don't know how crazy it was [ed: all condescending like] but I saw some parks and canals and really interesting stuff." The only thing homeboy did all weekend was walk around town like we've done a thousand times before. The parks are just empty squares scattered around town, and the canal is just a canal. Nothing to see there.
I don't care if somebody is a nerd, though, as long as they're cool. This guy is nothing of the sort. We went out pretty late on Thursday and that Friday I was a little late to breakfast, a little achy, and a little dehydrated and he says to me, "Heh, that's what you get for starting your weekend on Thursday," a reference to my earlier description of how often I drink which goes: "Monday is Funday, Tuesday is Boozeday, Wednesday is Humpday and Thursday starts the weekend!" If my head hadn't been swimming, I would have jumped over the table and beat him. Then the other day walking back from lunch, Keith and I were enjoying our post-meal cigarettes. He gets this smirk on his face. That's how you can tell he's about to say something that will inevitably be fucking stupid, but he thinks it's clever. He turns to us and says, "You know, I hear that lung cancer is a painful way to die." And I said, "You know, I hear running your fucking mouth is a painful way to die." ... Okay, I didn't say that but I did think of it later.
The four of us go to dinner together every night. It's the most painful part of the day because we have to sit there with the dweeb. He is such a conversation killer. Anything we talk about he kills by saying something retarded, so we generally eat in silence waiting for him to go back to the hotel and then we talk about our days. And we've all kind of taken a turn picking up the tab. We are expensing our meals so it's all free, and if you pick up the tab for a co-worker, that can go under entertainment expenses. And since the only things we really have to talk about are work-related, that's totally kosher. And since I've only paid for dinner about every third night, accounting will certainly notice that I've had my tab picked up other people enough to further justify my reciprocation. Right now you should be thinking to yourself, every third night? Didn't you say there were four of you?" Man, I can't get anything by you. Poindexter refuses to pick up a tab. We started noticing the pattern after the first week and talked about it after he left. We agreed he was OBVIOUSLY the most socially inept person alive so he probably didn't realize he needed to pick one up. So we blatantly said, "Alright dude, it's your turn tonight." And he refused!
He is afraid that he won't be able to expense it since it's entertainment, although I suspect he just has moral conflicts with paying for beer. But still, come on, we all work for the same fucking company, they WILL reimburse it. Especially if you haven't paid for a since dinner yet since you've been to Sweden. g*d, this kid pisses me off. He's just one of those people that when you catch him looking at you, you just kinda wanna smash his face in. But you don't because you are a pacifist.
You should see him at breakfast. It's one of the oddest things I've ever seen. Dude will get about 12 slices of bread ... all different kinds. And he'll proceed to eat them... dry... with nothing to drink. And when he's done with that, he gets up and gets a bowl full of this granola-nut-muesli cluster concoction. It's very hearty, European cereal. He proceeds to eat the whole bowl ... dry. I like it just fine, but I soak mine with milk for a while before I eat it or else I just feel like a horse. And when he's done with that, he gets up and gets a plate full of crackers... and eats them dry. He is so fucking weird.
He actually reminds me a lot of my fourth college roommate, Clark. He's got that same irritating manner about him, which leads me to suspect this kid is a hardcore x-tian. Thank jebus I only have to see him one more day, and then with any luck, never, never again.
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