The Weekly Numbers, Trebek Style

Ah the Weekly Numbers. That's why I enjoy running features. When my lazy ass has absolutely dick-all to say, I can always just fire off a few "Weekly" numbers for you. There's actually a mishmash of crap to discuss from recent weeks, so the Numbers also provide a good medium to barf out all the potpourri ("Your mother's a whore, Trebek!") in my overloaded keppy.

Onto the numbers...

1: Number nights I got to stay in my beloved D.C. for a business trip a couple weeks back, and, incidentally, number of people who gave me "poor" feedback on the presentation I conducted while on said trip. How dare they. Don't they know I hardly worked at all on it and didn't practice that much?

Approx 13: Number of drinks I had in me before getting on board my flight home, after an after-work happy hour and a two-hour airport delay (that I of course spent in the handy bar right next to my gate). How is it that people are always getting thrown off planes for being intoxicated? I mean, unless you're on the side of the road in the middle of the night trying to recite the alphabet between the letters "L" and "T," it's really not that hard to disguise utter smashedness. Just keep your mouth shut (unless you're sticking gum in it).

2: Number of guys I met at the airport bar during said delay.

1: Number of guys I met at the airport bar during said delay that were actually on my flight, AND asked for my phone number (look at Fu, picking up dudes in an airport!).

1:30: Time in the MORNING the Airport Guy called me (SIX days after our Airport Meet-Cute), drunk and surrounded by hooting friends, wanting to know "what I was doing." I'm sure the response he was hoping for was not "What am I DOING? It's 130 in the morning, DICKSLAP!" but rather, "Well pretty soon I'm gonna be doing YOU, Airport Guy! Purrrrr!"

243: Approximate number of bottles of booze on the counter at my fourth of July party, I think we made it through about 156 of them.

3: Attempts it took before I figured out how to work my dad's grill. (I may be leaving out the fact that I had to call him up in Phoenix and ask him to tell me how to work the grill, for fear that after my first two attempts I might actually vaporize the deck, the house and the surrounding property and be left standing in the middle of it with soot all over my face and my hair standing on end, like when Wile E. Coyote's Acme bomb goes very, very wrong.)

3: Attempts it took before I actually figured out how to cook a hamburger on said grill. (I may be leaving out that after the first two burgers incinerated and fell apart in gooey chunks respectively, I had to call up Dad again to ask advice on proper burger cookage.)

1: Number of blind dates my parents' best friends have offered to set me up on with their neighbor, who may or may not be an ex-con.

0.0002: number of seconds after hearing this offer that I began to feel reeeeeeally pathetic.

2: Number of planes it's going to take me to get to New Orleans for my brother-in-law's birthday party-slash-girls' weekend with my sister and many friends tonight.

141483:1 : Odds of me actually getting on second leg of journey, as am flying standby and may end up curled up in an airport all night. You ever wonder why homeless people don't just go live at the airport, like that Tom Hanks movie? No one ever hassles people sleeping on the ground in an airport, they just assume they are stranded. Not like staying in an airport is awesome, but at least it's warm in the winter and stuff. Plus they could probably score a lot of those little mini liquor bottles, and pretend they are giants!

5: Time in the morning it was on Sunday when a friend and I rolled back into her apartment in Boston after partying all night on Saturday.

4? Approximate number of times I barfed after the lethal combination of "Many (delicious blueberry) Beers," "Many Shots," "334 Cigarettes," "Tragic Loss at Wii Bowling," and "2 Cupfuls of Turpentine Red Wine at 4 a.m." This is only a guess, as I hardly remember it, I remember only the horrendous splitting headache I woke up with on her futon at 7 a.m. after curling up there in a pathetic heap with no blanket or pillow.

28: My age in years, in about two months. Now go back and read the previous paragraph again. Now come back and slap me upside my stupid head for continuing to act so foolishly. Then make me repeat: "Just because my friend is 22 does NOT mean I am too" 50 times. Then slap me in the head again. Then hit me with a shovel to remind me how I felt that morning and why I should never, ever, ever, do that again.

25: Number of minutes until I leave work. I'd better wrap things up....