Gettin' Down With The Sickness

>> I am one sick mamma jamma right now. Here's a breakdown of how my December 3rd has gone down thus far:

Midnight- 2pm: In bed. Alternately dreaming about doubling down on hard 14s, and how awesome my Taco John's is gonna taste next time Dunph comes to town (who has two thumbs and bet that the Big 10 would win the Big 10/ACC Challenge for the first time in history? This guy!) Could've stayed in bed longer, too, and probably should have.

2pm-now: Alternating between eating bananas, trying to take down OJ like my name was Marcia Clark, reading books (leatherbound, naturally, my apartment smells of rich mahogany) and watching every episode of Community and Parks and Recreation that Hulu has to offer.

I just got done mainlining an entire bottle of nasal spray and taking down a few packages of the old drop-drop fizz-fizz, and now I will attempt to type coherently, just for you.


>> My fantasy football team is rocking the shit this year. I had a pretty solid draft (I told anyone who would listen that Chris Johnson was the best player in the NFL; my Tony Romo pick, which was a flier at the time, has turned out pretty well; and I've been able to turn a couple of my savvy late-round picks, Carson Palmer and LeSean McCoy, into trades for solid starters...let's just agree to not mention my argument that Larry Johnson would turn out to be a steal as my third RB.) But once again, I have no luck. (Argument from friends: but Hammen, you won the championship game in 2007 when Clinton Portis threw a touchdown pass. Counter-argument: last year, when Desean Jackson carelessly flipped the ball over his shoulder at the 1-yard-line against the Cowboys, it ended up costing me the game, the tiebreaker in my division, and a playoff spot. So my karma reversed, and I can bitch about bad luck again. Glad we settled that.) At one point this season, I was third in the league in points, but had a 2-5 record. Now I am 7 points out of the top spot in points, but still only 6-6, so I'll probably miss the playoffs. If I sneak in somehow, though, I am anointing myself as the team no one wants to play.

{See, this is why I hate talking about fantasy football. For one, talking about your team is like talking about dreams; you might think it's interesting as hell, but the person listening couldn't give a shit less, because it's not their team. It either turns out as gloating about how great your team is, or whining about how your team got screwed. I'm no statitician or anything, but I've started keeping track, and roughly 95% of all fantasy football conversations are one of those two things. And if you're talking with multiple people, you just take turns going around the room talking about how your team got screwed this way or that way, barely listening to each other, and just waiting for your next chance to one-up the current story. I'm about one more year of shitty luck away from lumping fantasy football in with poker, in the respect that the multitude of negativity it brings into my life far outweighs whatever happiness it brings me when things are going well. There's a reason I haven't played poker in almost four years.}


>> On a more upbeat note, the movie 2012 was pretty stellar. There's a reason Signs is one of my favorite movies of all time; why, in the history of remote controls, I have never changed the channel off of Independence Day; and why The Day After Tomorrow actually holds a spot on my DVD rack: I'm a sucker for armageddon-type movies. (Notice I did not capitalize armageddon, I meant the event, not the movie, which was clown shoes. As "movies released in 1998 in which asteroids threaten to destroy Earth" go, Deep Impact was so much better- but admittedly that had a lot to do with Morgan Freeman being President.) Speaking personally, any movie where 1) at some point the president goes on TV and basically tells the entire country/world "We are completely and totally fucked right now, and there is no solution. You have 12 hours left to get your shit in order. Peace." and 2) there are multiple gratuitous, lasting-for-10-minutes, I-don't-care-how-unrealistic-this-is-it's-still-awesome scenes of cities and landmarks being destroyed.....well then enjoy my 8 bucks, Hollywood. It's a good thing my mom bought me a few packages of socks for my birthday, because this movie rocked mine right off.


>> Speaking of my birthday, I like to keep mine off the radar. I've never been much of a birthday lover (although I love Paul's! Back in the day, we had a time-honored tradition of outdoing one another on each other's birthday, which is no small feat when the real birthday boy was getting his drinks bought for him all night. One of my favorite stupid traditions. Hopefully somewhere out there in Montana, Paul kept it alive and is battling a good hanger today.) Now since I'm getting old and there are no more landmark birthdays to look forward to, I would just as soon not celebrate mine at all. But unfortunately we're going out tomorrow for Katie's birthday, and I know that word will get out that it was my bday yesterday, and I'll end up getting peer pressured into birthday shots and all that hullabaloo, since I can't say no.

So just know that if I crash my car into a fire hydrant and a tree outside my apartment at 2 in the morning, and Alex has to break into my car with a golf club and pull me to safety, it's not gonna be Tiger Woods-style......alcohol was definitely a factor.