Fishs  

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. Mine was somewhat doomed to be lonely, but I ended up having a good time anyway.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t get away from work; my official job takes like a month off for the holidays; it’s expected that I don’t show up for work this week. However, the somewhat recent crises in my life have left me just a bit financially down, though that’s turning around now that the cafe’s been having me pull more shifts than I worked before I was fired (I know, I should really explain this, maybe later).

Anyway, plane tickets were offered to me, but even the cost of work hours was too much this year. If I fly to Seattle, I want to be there for at least a couple weeks, and I can’t afford that right now.

So I spent the holiday here in NYC, which was basically a ghost town for a few days. Patrick and I spent the eve at 7A with some of our friends who were also stuck in the city. Then we got up in the morning and played a bunch of hip-hop christmas songs at the cafe. That was basically it. Oh yeah, Lucy stopped by with some muffins for us.

Did santa come? Did santa come? No? Hm.

I was searching for a simple means to keep track of all my favorite blogs; bookmarks aren’t a very good system, since I usually end up forgetting to check the ones that don’t get updated as much, and some of my favorite blogs won’t get updated if no one reads them. So, I began my search for an RSS reader that has a nice interface and doesn’t look ugly.

My search ended when I found Shrook:

It does a very elegant job of compiling everything and notifying you when something gets posted. It’s basically perfect for my purposes, though most of the blogs I read don’t have a very high volume of posts, so it’s possible that it becomes more annoying when you set it up with different sorts of blogs. Oh, also it helps to be decently knowledgeable about internet syntax when you’re setting things up.

My only major complaint at this point is that it looks a lot like iTunes, which is the direction Apple’s evidently going, unfortunately. Anyway, if you’ve got a mac (os 10.4 or later), and you’re interested in a nice way of checking my blog and others without having to go to my website every day, check out [Shrook].

That’s my recommendation for the day. I don’t know if there’s a good one out there for Windows, but I’m guessing not. What, do you expect me to not be biased against Windows here? Look at the freakin’ layout on this blog!

Well, I wanted to wait until I had some pictures from the night, but I guess I’ll have to do without, considering it’s been about two weeks since it happened. I will instead suggest that you search for images yourself, because there are a thousand million of them posted to the internet.

So, it was a saturday afternoon, and I got done early at the cafe. The one I don’t work at. Oh, yeah, that’s another post in itself. Anyway, my favorite bartender was working next door, so I decided to stop by for one quick drink. Maybe two. Now, this in itself is the beginning of many a strange and ridiculous story. However, mine gets even better.

So, I’m in the middle of my second or third drink, and I look up and see something roughly resembling this:

Ten billion trillion thousand quadrillion santas had converged upon the bar. This is a yearly event called “santacon”, considered by some to be the original “flash mob”. Basically santas, santas everywhere. The place was filled to capacity, and it was me, two bartenders, and santas; nothing else. It was difficult to find anyone not wearing a bright red-and-white suit.

So, one thing led to another, and I eventually found myself parading around the east village with a bunch of people I’d never met, all dressed as santa. They even convinced me to wear a santa hat to get into the spirit, though I was enjoying being the only non-santa around.

We moved on to this other bar, whose name and location I may never know, which was vast and huge, with two floors, filled with a sea of santas. I can’t stress this enough. Santas. Santas, santas, santas.

The streets were filled with santas. The parks were filled with santas. The bars were filled with santas. Yes, even the everything was filled with santas.

And then I woke up early the next morning to open the cafe I don’t work at, in a very hung-over manner. Ho ho ho.

It’s very hard to convey just how surreal the night was, but I did my best. Wait, no I didn’t. Well, I didn’t do my laziest. And that’s what counts.