The Andrew Report

gym class

2005-12-31T17:43:00.000-08:00

i've always avoided going to a gym. which is not to say i don't work out or don't like working out although if i could achieve this temple without having to work out i'd do that. but i've never like going to a gym. for a few reasons. one i can't lift anything. two i had some bad times in gym growing up. there was the time(s) i couldn't do a pull up. there was the time i somehow used this curling device wrong and ended up smashing this barbell into my mouth. there was the time i was doing upside sit ups hanging from this thing and couldn't figure out how to get back down. there was the time my friend chris was spotting me bench pressing and didn't quite grasp the idea of what spotting means and so i sat there with this heavy barbell sitting resting on my forhead for about 15 seconds before he put it together that he was supposed to lift said barbell off my head so i could breath and live. these events and probably a few others i've buried down deep make me feel that going to a gym will be an endless string of me falling off treadmills, dropping weights on my foot and seeing a pretty girl only to remember that i'm a sweaty mess and that she'll probably think that's gross.
until this year. this year i joined a gym. because i got a discount from work and i decided that i need to get in shape for swimsuit season. and the gym i joined is perfect. it's mostly 80 year old ladies and people in worse shape than me so i felt ok the first time i tried doing pushups and collapsed after 3.
the only unfortunate side to the place is that there are some weirdos in the lockeroom. and by weirdos i don't mean sexual deviants who are trying to follow you in the bathroom stalls or anything. no i mean there are actually some guys in there who i think are a little crazy.
like the man who came into the steam room one day wearing all his clothes. he sat down and started doing some sort of stretches that required him to make sounds usually reserved for the bedroom. then he took a shower wearing all his clothes. the showers in the gym are the kind where everyone gets their own private shower with a door that you close. however last week there was some guy who thought it would be better to leave the door open. i could understand if this was some kind of swingers gym or something, but like i said it's all 80 year old ladies. there was another guy who had his shower door closed but was singing as if he wanted people outside to hear him. and he wasn't singing a song really with words, but humming some tschovsky (however you spell that) song. there was a guy singing in the gym last week while doing situps of all thing. he was singing along to the radio that comes through the gym. and of all songs you'd expect to hear pumping through a work out room it was none other than linda rondstant's "it's so easy to fall in love." i actually offered to the people at the desk to bring in some new slightly more recent cds of music to listen to at the gym but they sort of gave me a puzzled look as if to say "what could possibly be more inspiring and rousing than fine young cannibals or ace of base?"
one last thing.i say there are all 80 year old ladies, but there are actually on occasion some super hotties in the place. they are mostly in for the spinning and aerobics classes. i have this trainer guy and we've worked out a system that should any of these girls walk by while i'm trying to lift anything heavier than my towel that instead of counting out loud my actual progress like "4...5...6..etc" he should say "54...55...56." so far it hasn't gotten me any phone numbers. with my luck it'll end up accidentally putting some of the 80 year olds under my spell.

fights

2005-09-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

there are few altercations as enjoyable to watch as a drunk person taking on a crazy person on the subway. as i took the 6 train into work today i couldn't help but notice the screaming rants of the man standing next to me. he was carrying a bunch of cardboard and some metal poles. as though he was going to build the worlds sturdiest totally flamable shitty fort. he started telling everyone on the train excatly how mayor bloomberg was cheating the city out of billions of dollars, presumbably because people bought New York Newsday newspaper. His speech lasted only a few minutes, so he decided to repeat it verbatim 4 times. Around the 2nd time the sleeping drooling man to my right woke up and began analyzing the crazy man's discourse. After listening to and taking in his ideas about the corrupt publishing empire and misuse of city funds, the drunk man naturally enough asked "Are you a pedaphile?" The crazy man in turn asked the other passengers on the train to help him refute the drunk mans acusations and said some almost coherent things about the michael jackson trial and new york fire department. The drunk man now stood up and went over to the crazy man so they could stare into each others lazy eyes and debate properly. He made a chicken dance motion and told the crazy man to go home and shut the fuck up, although presumably not in that order. The crazy man wanted him to produce evidence of the pedaphile business. This went on for two stops. Finally the drunk man said that he was becoming so enraged by the crazy man that he was going to get off the train. Which he did. As it happens I did too. So no idea what crazy man did afterwards.
At lunch i saw another, although much smaller and not as funny, arguement at the deli. A woman who falsely claimed she'd won the lottery was trying to get the cashier to pay her out a huge sum. The cashier lost her shit and said that the woman's voice was driving her insane. Unable to do anything about her voice the woman kept talking as she had been, although now her demands went from untold thousands in lottery winnings to four quarters for a dollar. like the drunk man in the morning, the cashier suddenly became so overwhelmed that she had to leave the cashier screaming. among her final acts was to ban the woman from the store and make someone else get the woman her change since she was "too excited" to deal with her anymore.
i would hope that the cashier and drunk man find each other, as do the crazy man and woman who felt she won the lottery. and go on a double date in a small cramped space or something.

wedding crashers

2005-07-16T18:08:00.000-07:00

go see this movie. i don't care what some fancy pants critics are saying. it is funny as shit. the last 30 minutes sort of of blows, but up until then there are some big laughs. it's no film student class movie but it is a good time with lots of fun swearing, boobies, crazy stufff and dinner table hi-jinks.
i had read that it was not funny or something, but today was gladly proven wrong. if you liked old school than you will freak out over this one.
also, war of the worlds sort of sucks.

used cars

2005-05-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

in 1992 or something a friend called me up and said if i could come up with $300 and a ride to the minneapolis city impound lot, i could be the proud owner of a 1974 bmw 2002. this seemed like quite a deal. $300 for a car, prestige, and the promise of endless attention and affection from any number of hot girls in minneapolis who had a taste for the finer things in life. but such luxury and high living surely wouldn't come without a price. aside from the $300 part. which was the first problem. raising $300. back then $25 seemed like a load of cash to me. for $25 i could somehow go out every night of the week and maybe see a movie. so $300 seemed like a number too high to count. but the allure of being a foreign car owner made me find a way. first i dug through all my pants and clothes in the closet and came up with about $20 in change. then i sold basically half my cd collection (and some of my roommates i think) and raised about $150. i think i might have sold some of the cds straight up to my sister who was willing to pay more than the $2 a cd the record store felt was adequete. i then basically closed my bank account, got the $300 in 20's and some loose change and headed to the impound lot. i went there with my buddy matt who was behind this incredible deal in the first place. he liked to fix cars. he'd taken said bmw from some guy who wanted the car worked on for cheap. however, something happened where the car got towed because matt parked it wrong or something and suddenly nobody wanted or could get the car. the owner had decided the car wasn't worth the impound lot fee, and matt already had a couple cars that barely ran so he didn't want another. however i didn't have a car that barely ran, so i was excited to get in the soup as it were with the world of used car troubles.
we went to the lot, bought the car and drove it out to my parent's house. this journey also marked my learning how to drive a stick. or rather this thing in the car that looked like a stick but swiveled all over the place and occasionally seemed to try and fall off. i later learned at the first of many mechanics i'd come to know and humor over the years with my love for bmw 2002's that the stick in question basically was held to the car by positive thoughts and gravity.
in adition to needing to reweld the transmission back together, the mechanic also pointed out several other potential problems the car had. he drew my attention to the fact that the frame was about to break in half, due to years of exposure to the salty roads of minnesota. to prove his point, he showed me how the car had totally rusted through beneath the carpet on the passenger side. the feeling being as long as i didn't cart around any really heavy people in the passenger side, i (and more importantly they) should be ok. the trunk had also become one large hole, which aside from rendering a spare tire immediately useless, it also provided easy access for the exhaust fumes to re-enter the car via the back seat paper thin upolhstry. the quick solution for this problem was to just leavea the windows open at all times when driving, allowing all deadluy fumes an speedy exit. this particular problem sort of fixed itself many months later when, while driving home late at night, the entire muffler system fell off the car and disappeared somewhere off the side of the dark highway. so the air coming into the trunk hole thing was now cleaner, however now i had no muffler so my car sounded like a dying, farting, old tractor driving at high speed through loud speakers. but the spontaneous failure of the water pump fixed that problem, making the car unable to drive and hence make noise. over the next few years i'd dump a bit of money into it each year to get it running for another season. re-welding the transmission together become a spring tradition. along with resealing the radiator and having to take the doors apart to get the windows to roll up.
in adition to all of this junk, my dreams of having every hottie in minneapolis try to hitchhike should i drive by didn't quite happen. i think once at a stoplight some girl yelled that she thought the car looked cool. or maybe she was talking about a different car. or maybe not even yelling at all. but it was almost a great moment all the same.
there is no big ending to this story, except that it has a part two. the impound lot car eventually became to life threatening to drive or deal with much at all and eventually was hoisted up on some truck and towed away by someone who was either going to use the car for parts (although i'm not sure which parts since all of them were in varying states of distintegration). and it wasn't even a full year before i decided to replace it with a slightly newer (1976) model in califronia and begin what was an even more exciting 4 year adventure of mechanic mishaps and misguided romantic notions. but that is what part two is about. and in fact that story isn't quite yet over. but in a couple weeks i think it will be. i hope.

neighbors

2005-03-15T20:17:00.000-08:00

for whatever reason i've tended to have weird neighbors. not freaks or anything or people who seem out of their medication, rather fairly normal looking folks who turn out to be maniacs. or at least major pains in the ass. there is one neighbor who i don't know by name, but by car exhaust. she parks her car right next to my bedroom window (which i tend to leave open because i live in california and it's always warm outside) and is in the habit of letting her car warm up for about 20 minutes before she drives it. which is just the right amount of time to fill my apartment with just not quite enough car exhaust to render me incapable. i saw her at a gas station once and thought i would mention this to her but chickened out. mostly because she's like 80. also, because she complained about the noise i had at the one all night party i've ever had at my apartment and so i figure as long as she keeps trying to sort of kill me each day then i have a case for making lots of noise at all hours of the night. what's interesting about the time she complained about my party was that she did it 3 weeks after the fact. she called my superintendent. said if i did it again she'd call the cops. but i wonder if she'd call them the night of the party or a month later.
my new upstairs neighbors are two girls and live the exact opposite life i do. first they enjoy nothing more than clogs and find themselves constantly needing to walk the length of their apartment several times for something. then they like to invite all their friends (who apparently also enjoy wooden shoes) over at 3 am to help them walk all over the apartment. a few weeks ago they took up some kind of construction project which involved lots of drilling and lots of dropping heavy things on the floor every few minutes. then there is the question of their lovers. apparently both have several and i think there is a bit of sharing going on because i'll hear squeaking bed springs, moaning and wrestling, and then footsteps going from one room to the other and then what sounds like people being subbed in (i.e. multiple new footsteps running everywhere).
there is the girl down the hall who has taken it upon herself to install her own burglar alarm. i once thought that if she just put a sticker on her door saying she had a burglar alarm, or that none of the other apartments had one, then maybe would-be robbers would just make a note to skip her place and hit either mine or the girl across the hall. i also wonder what robber would be dumb enough to rob from the one apartment that is right in the front lobby where everyone is walking.
there is the neighbor i had a couple years ago who would almost always lose or forget her keys and need me to buzz her in. amazingly she always had the key to her actual apartment which begged the question why she kept the building door key on a separate chain. once she made an appearance outside my fire escape window at 3 am trying to get in through her kitchen window. what amazed me about that was that the fire escape ends/starts 20 some feet off the ground. and she was nowhere near tall enough to make even a leaping jump up to get on it from the ground. she and i moved out of that building the same weekend. she had movers, i had now former friends. during the occasional moments we were both outside our doors waiting for someone else to move something heavy she confided in me that she was moving out to move in with her boyfriend and that she thought maybe he was the biggest mistake of her life. all i could do was help hold her door open as the movers moved/broke her canopy bed and try to talk about something else.
the craziest neighbor i've ever had was the brother of these sisters who lived above me once. he had just gotten out of jail (for robbing graves and storing dismembered limbs in a freezer once) and needed a place to crash and also practice playing the drum he had built out of an old tree trunk at sunrise every morning. given the funny stories the sisters relayed to me about the grave robbing and limbs in the freezer, i opted to tolerate his daybreak sort-of conga playing. at least he didn't idle his car outside my window the whole time.

fiber

2005-03-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

it's been told to me by various people that fiber is good for your diet. what it's supposed to do i'm not quite sure. what it did do for me last saturday was take me back to my earliest memories of severe intestinal trauma - the days when i got into fights in the first grade.

those days were sometime in the fall or spring of first grade. the fights were pretty simple really. i'd be standing around doing much of nothing waiting for the bus and these 3rd and 4th graders who until then had been teaching me fun words i could use around the dinner table like shit and the f-word (they also taught me the universal gesture for "hey, how are you?" which of course involves sticking the index finger of one hand in and out of a circle you make with your other hand) would walk up and challenge me to any number of contests which involved me getting sacked in the stomach and yet somehow winning. like the old "softest punch" contest where i'd almost pretend to hit them and then they'd send me to the ground with all their might, and in doing so crown me champion. at some point, either because i took to simply lying on the ground when they were near or that the principal got wise and started following them around with a yard stick, my street fighting career came to a gradual close.

(the best fight i ever saw was between my buddies greg and roger in i think 3rd or 4th grade. the two of them spent about 8 minutes trying their hardest to actually hit each other with grace and force but, unable to do that, went for trying to pull each others sweaters off (not really the same spectacle as a punch to the nose) and eventually one of them, i think roger, either because he felt embarassed with his sweater off or the thought that greg might go for the pants next, caved in and resorted to kicking. for some reason, long ago it was decided only girls kick and therefore a totally unacceptable and "no fair" method for guys. which is a shame i think because kicking seems much more effective and make fights funnier. and it would have saved roger the time it took to form the crowd that naturally enough spent the rest of the day making fun of his sissy ways).

these are just some of the memories a few small pieces of broccoli brought back to me saturday evening. there i was a few hours after eating dinner, watching television, brushing my teeth, all the while drifting back to the bus stops of my youth, the countless belly flops i endured every time i tried to do anything off a diving board, the time i was mistakenly put in as center during football, my failure at the horse vault in gym, and of course every other time in my life when i somehow thought i could introduce many missed years worth of fiber into my system all at once.

so i did a little research on fiber on the google and the only advice it seemed to offer was that the cure for feeling like you've been kicked by a horse after eating fiber is to eat more fiber. marvelous. one site also included this lovely thought "Finally, perform a good colon cleansing program on a regular basis." which of course raises far too many questions than i can handle. what's a good colon cleansing program? a bad one? perform? when's a regular basis? perhaps these are the same questions roger and greg were fighting over. i would like to think they were.

oscar!

2005-02-28T22:58:00.000-08:00

my first oscar memory comes from gym class in 1982. i think i was playing dodgeball or trench or some game where i didn't have to catch or hit anything with a racket so i think i was probably having the time of my life. somehow the conversation on the court turned to mutual disgust for chariots of fire winning best picture. which leads me to think that i wasn't really "in the game" if, when having dozens of red bouncy balls aimed skillfully at my person by pretty much everyone in my class, that was the topic that filled my head. also a mystery is how whatever we were talking about segued into talking about chariots of fire winning best picture. "hey guys, dave likes lisa" "do not! want me to fight you?! hey, what's up with chariots of fire?" i'm guessing it had to do with the fact that raiders of the lost ark did not win best picture (yes it was nominated).
my next oscars memory is that "Ghandi" won the following year beating out "E.T." and "Tootsie" which i saw and laughed at throughout, but only learned years later that i didn't get any of the jokes at the time. again, my friends thought that ghandi winning was totally lame. there was one dissenting voice, my friend husam who at the time had me convinced that instead of opting for make-up to create the illusion of ben kingsley aging several years in three hours, they actually filmed the movie throughout his life and what we saw on screen was in fact a man aging for real. there is an outside chance that to this day husam still believes this, so i won't dwell on how the insanity of his theory too much.
my third memory of the oscars was that "Do the right thing" wasn't nominated at all, and that Kim Bassinger apparently wore a funny dress and talked about it on stage. Fourth is when Rob Lowe and Snow White did some pre-show musical number that was so good i think i went to bed. Fifth was that Geena Davis apparently won at some point. I don't remember her winning, only that she was on stage when they did this big "salute to previous oscar winners" thing a few years ago and all these people stood on stage and i saw geena davis and thought "how is that possible?". Sixth was when i went to work the day after David Letterman hosted eagerly awaiting to talk to everyone i saw about how awesome he was as host only to find out that apparently everyone else on earth thought he sucked.
since then nothing really stands out in my mind. except last night when whoopi goldberg was somehow the perfect choice to recount the life and times of johnny carson. what?

dumb bells

2005-02-23T22:14:00.000-08:00

the other day i went and bought some weights. just some simple free weights that i can use to get ready for the upcoming bathing suit season. actually the reason i bought them was that my doc said that i should have at least some muscle mass on my arms in case i ever need to pick up anything heavier than my pants. i could just join a gym i guess, but my feeling is that i need to get in better shape before i join a gym. also i went to a gym recently and none of the equipment resembled any of the stuff i was used to from high school (when i was last in a gym) and it seemed to me all too likely that i'd wind up sitting on some machine backwards and either ruining my stance or being laughed at and eventually asked to leave. so right now the workout at home option seems to be just the thing. although i've only had the weights for like 4 days so the sessions have been kind of in the 2 minute area. and the reason that is is because i opted to skip the whole "working your way up" method of excercise and start right out with weights that are almost to heavy to pick up or look at. and that is because when i went to the sporting goods store i thought "there's no way i can just come in here and buy the children's sized weights. i need to look like i'm not shopping for my grandmother. better go with something hefty." i went with the 20 pounders. which may seem like toys to most people, but for me that's enough. and as it turned out just the perfect heaviness when standing in a long line of people just buying magazines and bandana and other really light stuff. and i thought "imagine the bad ass who walks in here and buys the 250 pound weight sets. do they feel pressured to try and just make one trip to the car?" that's what i would like to see. and then i wonder if the person who can just walk out of here with the 250 pound set does stuff like that when buying a washing machine or piano. "no, thanks, i got it. my van's just down the street." but so for now i've got these weights and so far haven't really noticed much change. i'm guessing it'll take a few months before the effects kick in. and maybe i'll just work one arm a lot more than the other so i have this crazy super strong arm and the other one for shaking peoples hands and high fives. wouldn't that be something. gross.

early work

2005-02-23T13:53:00.000-08:00

when i was a kid i was a caddy. for two summers i think. the hours were bogus. i had to be alert and ready to carry one if not two heavy golf club bags at 5:30 in the morning. the later day shifts were no good deal either because it was like 95 degrees out. either way it was a bum deal. and now looking back on what the wages were and how i thought they seemed fair it makes me wonder how i managed not to get held back in school several times over. i think for 18 holes you got a flat rate of like 5 or maybe 10 dollars. but the promise of a maybe getting 4 dollar tip i think is what kept us going. of course at the time i was 11 years old and 10 dollars was a huge sum. especially since i couldn't think of anything to buy other than cokes which were free if you knew how to use the pop machine properly. but i'm not here to whine about the country clubs violation of all child labor laws. no, i mention this exciting tale of my first real job (my first "job" was selling apples out of the back of the family truck at the end of our driveway on a highway. but that didn't really go anywhere because my mom didn't want me too close to the road, so i set up shop about 20 feet back, behind some trees, and was basically invisible to the highway drivers who were going about 50 mph (it's worth noting that not that many people drove on this road in the first place). but it's a lot to ask a driver at that speed to notice a apple vendor hidden from view holding a sign that can't be read from more than two steps away. occasionally through a miracle or because my mom called her friends someone would stop by and buy a bucket of apples (i grew up way out in the country and we had a few dozen apple trees and so the feeling was that we could have this cash cow on our hands if we could only figure out how to get the apples off the trees and ground and into the teeth of speeding drivers just yards off our property hence the selling apples out of the back of a truck that nobody could see in the first place) for the bargain rate of something like a dollar a huge bag. i'm not quite sure what the going rate was back then, but i'm pretty sure i never made enough money to better myself in anyway. )
but back to golf.
so caddying was my first real job outside of my front yard. and the reason i bring it up at all in the first place is that i went to the driving range today and saw all these guys in fancy sweaters and expired cologne hitting golf balls and talking business over their cell phones and i remembered that when i was a kid doing this caddy business that i'd be caddying for all sorts of people who were ceo's and fancy lads at various companies and that every now and then i thought "what kind of jobs do these people have where they can play golf all day?" and then i thought of all the movies i saw like caddyshack where it was totally normal for ceos and fancy corporate folks to have "meetings" and make big deals while playing golf and drinking lots of scotch throughout the day. and then i thought of all the jobs i've had and i can't figure out how i could ever pull that kind of stuff off without being fired or arrested instantly.
there's not much of a big point to this. the reason i've been playing golf during the workday is that i'm kind of on sabbatical right now. which is a whole other story entirely. about 25% of my shots look like the work of someone in the know. the rest are either flat out embarrassing or potentially hazardous to whomever is playing on the neighboring fairways. which, when considering that those other people could be ceos drinking scotch and about to make some big deal, could be a real problem i guess.

5 years

2005-02-22T13:28:00.000-08:00

it's been 5 years to the day that i moved to california. not that that's a big deal to anybody, but i just remembered it during lunch.
when i came to san francisco 5 years ago i showed up too early to my sort of hotel where i lived for the first month i was here, and so i had to hang around for two hours before my room was ready. so i walked up to this park on top of nob hill and read the paper. there was an add for a play staring joan collins and george hamilton. and i remember thinking "this is where it's at. living in a city where i can go see theater with big leaugers like george hamilton and joan collins. interestingly enough, years and years ago my aunt joan dated george hamilton when she was a young vixen living in europe. or at least they went out once. anyways, her name was joan, joan collins, etc.
and so i was reading the paper and then a woman walked up to me and asked me directions to someplace. and i thought "wow, i already give off the impression that i live here." which was odd considering that i was sitting in a park with a bunch of luggage. as it happened i had no idea how to tell her where to go because i had no idea where i was, or what direction north was for that matter. that was a strange thing. the first week i was here it was cloudy everyday and i could never figure out which way north and south and stuff was.
time passed, some of my paper blew away, and i went to try and check into my hotel again. this time it worked. i hopped in the elevator which was covered in these enormous red padded things for loading furniture i guess. to make matters more delightful the famous san francisco twins were in the elevator, also decked out in all red. i had never heard of these two gals before and so was understandably amazed/scared too be sharing my first california elevator ride with the senior cast of twin peaks. but they kept their hands to themselves so it was an uneventful ride to the third floor. or fourth or wherever i was living. all i remember was that i shared the floor for at least a week with i think a teenage soccer team from a country where people scream all the time and throw anything they can find against the nearest wall. all i know is that they were always in gym clothes and screamed and threw things against the other side of my walls.
i lived in this sort of hotel for a month. then i moved to the marina and that's where things really got exciting. but it's 65 and sunny out now so i'm going to go celebrate my quintcenteniall and hit some golf balls.

Fresh

2005-02-21T19:23:00.000-08:00

This is my first entry.