Date: 11/5/99

Hi folks. School and socializing have been keeping me busy, but I always have time to tell stories, so here come some.

In other news, I know some of you haven't seen me since college and will find it hard to believe that I managed to get (in my own distorted opinion) disgustingly fat, but I did! Thanks to a sedentary lifestyle, during the year after graduating mudd, I gained 18 pounds, which is a significant portion (15%) of my body weight. I mean, there are people much more overweight than me, and I am still relatively thin and muscular, I'm not actually a fat slob, but still, thats a lot, on my frame. Anyway, those days are over, and I have been eating healthy and being physical for the past two months, and have succesfully lost 10 of those pounds.

Now, on to the stories that I hadn't told you...

Nevada, June '99

I'm in town for a poker tournament, staying the week. Something they have in Nevada, besides cocktail waitresses, is cigarette girls. They walk around selling various forms of cancer, flashing lights, flashing yo-yo's, and other baubles, while wearing demeaning, dehumanizing cocktail-waitress-like uniforms. Despite this handicap, some of them manage to be cute (its not their fault they have to wear an absurd costume at work). So one night, I walk into the bar area, and a couple of them are sitting down, one off duty, one taking a break. I wander over and insert myself into their conversation. My purple hair performs one of its duties admirably, namely proclaiming without words "This person is a freak - and a pretty cool one at that". The message was well-received, and we began chatting it up.

It was interesting talking to them, and realizing how differently "locals" act when the tourists aren't around. They have their own social scene, totally independent of ours. It gave me a new perspective on all the jerks who hit on the girls to realize that they are taken even less seriously than I had thought. Two barriers exist - the "local/tourist" barrier and the "waitress/customer" barrier. Most of us have seen one of those barriers broken - getting the phone number of a cute waitress at a restaraunt, or meeting someone cool in a town while on a trip. But the combination is like aquarium plexiglass - a casino patron has just about as much chance to score with a cocktail waitress as a striped angelfish does with the visitor whose face is pressed up against its cage's transparent wall.

Eventually, I was invited along for some recreational activity by a phrase that was music to my ears:

"Hey, we're gonna go smoke a joint in the office. Wanna come?"

"Sure." [translation: Hell, yeah! Are you kidding? Finally, the way my life is supposed to be going!]

We smoke, and talk (forgive me if I can't remember the details of the conversation), and arrange to meet at 2am, when they are all off-duty, to go out and party. Three of them and I go to a locals bar, where one of the girls was sleeping with the bartender, and drink until the sun comes up. It was fascinating, because I got to see a slice of life of the sort of people I don't usually associate with, being that I am an intelligence snob. At one point, they asked me if I had graduated. I said "college". They said "Woah!". They had been asking about high school, which not all of them had finished. Two of them were married with children, who they were going to stumble home to (including the one sleeping with the bartender), and all of them were around my age.

In some ways, it made me lonely for smart people. I mean, I can party with anyone, keep up the flow of conversation, nod and grunt when appropriate. And everyone has worth, there are lessons to be learned from everyone, everyone has things they do better than I do, and worse than I do. I had fun with these folks. But it made me realize how few & far between the sorts of people that I feel most comfortable with are, and what a lonely world it is for people like us.

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