Superbowl Sunday

It's Superbowl Sunday, a rematch of epic proportions between the New York Football Giants and the New England Tom Brady Patriots. It's looking to be a great game and I'm working during it. Yes, I'm bouncing during the superbowl. At least I'll be at a sports bar with entirely too many televisions, so I will be able to watch it, while also attempting to watch the packed masses of patriots and giants fans yelling and screaming and getting drunk. I'm rooting for the giants though I'm not looking forward to after the game if the patriots lose. Hopefully the pats fans don't do anything crazy, but we'll see.

Lately, when bouncing, my position has been at "the top of the stairs" which means I get to count people who go up and downstairs, and when we reach a certain number, I'm the one who gets to start a line. For some reason people really want to go down into the sweaty hot mess that is downstairs. It is simply a large dance floor with a dj booth and a bar. The upstairs is playing the same music, but everybody wants to go downstairs. It becomes incessantly hot and sweaty, with over a hundred people bumping and grinding with terrible dance(if you could call it that) moves. It takes awhile to get a drink and honestly I don't see the reason to want to go downstairs when it's packed, yet every weekend night, it fills up and a huge line forms. The funny part is, often upstairs will look slow and dead while the line is fucking packed. I mean, most times, if everyone in line simply merged into the open space upstairs and started dancing, it would be the same goddamn thing as downstairs. Yet there we go, everyone has to shove themselves downstairs, attempting to get by me with every trick in the book. Many people simply try not to catch my eye and walk past me. Then when I say "there's a line for downstairs, you gotta wait" they act all surprised "oh there's a line?" Yes there is a damn line, that's why these people are standing here, for god's sake. Every night there's at least two or three girls and guys whose 21st birthday it is, the dj apparently has about fifty girlfriends and friends, different ones each night of course, and then of course there's the go-to "all my friends are down thereeeeeee." Well maybe you should have come before 12:30 on a saturday goddamn night to a goddamn club in Boston. It is infuriating. Two guys friday night tried to tell me "the guy at the front said we were good, man". They didn't even know the bouncer's name. Then five minutes later they came back. "The guy back there said we could go." Their pathetic attempt made me laugh, I even asked them "where? what guy?" and they just pointed toward the back of the bar. "The guy over there." Needless to say I did not let them in.

The difficult part is making everyone happy because it's impossible. Letting people cut in line make the people in line pissed off, not letting people cut makes those people pissed off. You have to be kind of an asshole to be a door man, which I don't think I like being. It's not too bad though, I try to just remind myself I'm not really being a dick, I'm just trying to do my job and if these college kids get pissy then it's their own damn fault.

Substitution is going well, still getting many assignments. There are some classes though, where I wonder about their teachers...Classes where the kids don't listen, talk too much, and don't seem to take rules very seriously, like perhaps they haven't really had consequences for their actions. I can't really say whether that's on the teacher though, or if they simply think they can get away with it because I'm a substitute. I have been forced to write down a kid's name for the teacher and tell her that her class was acting up constantly. The kid asked if I had written down his name and I said yes. I told him "I told you if you kept talking off-task and not doing your work, I would write your name down." His response baffled me. "Yeah but I didn't think you actually would..." Some kids make me wonder about their parents in the same sense. Do those parents really enforce the rules or simply let them off easy every time? It's a wealthy area, and to be honest, many of the kids seem like they've been babied or spoiled. I see kids walking around in elementary school with ipods and smartphones. It seems strange to me to think "Back in my day we never would have..." I mean, I'm not old, and yet school seems very different.

It is essentially peculiar to deal with children. Teaching them is not like teaching your peers. There are simple concepts they cannot grasp easily and must be told often and in different ways. It's somewhat frightening in a way, because if you fuck up hardcore, then maybe you just messed some kid up in some way. If you say the wrong thing on accident, maybe you it affected him or her deeply. I don't really know how to explain it, it's just this strange feeling in the back of my mind, that I am truly changing what a person thinks and knows and may eventually turn out to be.

Anyways, I have a twitter. I am a twat, a twit, and I tweet occasionally. It is https://twitter.com/#!/ben_cheese if you care, which you probably don't. Twitter is not entirely crap, which is what I thought at first. It's a nice way to follow interesting people, celebs, comedians, and others, in various industries that you are interested in. It's a way to leave short thoughts you have, a way to plug your various projects and ideas. I like it because occasionally I think of something and I don't want to write a whole blogpost about, I just want to write a sentence. Or I'll see something I think is cool on the internet in regards to video games, tv, movies or just about anything and throw it up there, . Recently, I've been documenting my February Wordrace against my friend Nate, putting up our numbers and commenting back and forth. It's interesting. It's not just a place filled with facebook update statuses or constant updates about menial tasks throughout the day. Well okay, there is alot of that, especially if you follow certain people. In fact, the 'trends' are usually filled with boring and teeny-bopper romance crap just like facebook statuses from high-schoolers, but you can get by simply by not following those type of people.

Speaking of my February Wordrace, it is going well. It's been a pretty close race so far and we've also come up with a secondary challenge which is to write over 50k by the end of the month, because that is basically Nano only harder because we've only got 28 days. Errrr, 29 because it's leap-year, from what I hear. Anyways, 7,130 words so far. I've been pumping out content for my book and enjoying it for the most part. The winner receives a steak dinner from the loser along with the purchase of a drink/beer for every 1000 words the loser is beaten by. Should be close. Unfortunately, the weekend of the 18th I will be at a hunting camp without computer, internet, or phone service, so writing will be impossible. I will have to make up for it somehow.

Speaking of writing, I've gone and visited an old site I used to frequent, Storymash.com. It's a great site for free-writing. Essentially, you write a starting chapter and anyone who is registered as a writer for the site can add a chapter to yours. It is fantastic for collaboratively writing a story, and because of having different authors, the stories are incredibly creative. There is also a group of writers there who are quite good, who I have written stories with a few times and are great for commenting on what you've written and talking about writing itself. I'm glad I went back, because it's nice to just write something off the top of your head, to add a chapter to a crazy storyline you just found and not caring about whether the chapter is 'publishable' or has been perfectly editted.

OH YEAH! BEER!
Tomorrow marks the 4th week of my beer being bottled. OFFICIAL TASTING EVENT. Not really. I will be tasting it though. Hopefully it tastes decent. Hopefully it is carbonated. So I guess tomorrow I'll try one and stick a bunch in the fridge to get cold. I'm excited to try it and I hope it doesn't suck big time.

That's all, I gotta get some words in my novel before I go to work or else Nate's going to pass me!