THE SUN RISES AGAIN ANOTHER EVENING-MORNING.

I actually came home from a bar an hour early this evening to play videogames. How nerdy. But WHAT IN THE FUCK EVER! Counterstrike 4 lyfe? ~__~

I was supposed to go to an art show at Evogear tonight with Rachel but she flaked, so instead I went with Graham and his friend Irish Dave, this forty year-old dude he fishes with, who was nothing like I’d imagined, to the Bit Saloon in Ballard. I’d imagined this super scruffy dude after Graham was talking about how he’d been holed up on a boat in Alaska for all of winter, but no, he was totally like clean-cut and reminded me of… someone… but I don’t know who. Anyhow. Pretty entertaining.

At one point Graham got into a conversation with one of Irish Dave’s friends about the troubles Irish immigrants went through when immigrating to the United States, and I was just sitting on this bar thing (like… metal bar, metal railing bar, not bar inside a bar, bar) and listening to them talk… and it was the most painful thing ever. Irish Dave’s friend was drunk as FUCK and barely understood anything Graham was trying to say, or he would try to say stuff and then get embarrassed and be like, “Oh, man, I’m really kind of buzzed,” when in fact “buzzed” was not the correct vernacular for him to be using, at all. And Graham was really set upon the concept that it was the fact that Irish people were Catholic and America was largely settled by Protestants as the primary reason for the Irish being shunned… and while it was a large reason, Irish Dave’s friend was drunkenly trying to say that the sheer number of people immigrating from Ireland to the United States also played a large role, and that poverty was also a huge role. Graham listened to these reasonings kind of, but was still set upon the schism between Catholicism and Protestantism overwhelming all other reasons. I don’t know if that’s true or not (it may very well be since religion is the bane of all existence), but his insistence was interesting. But yeah, Irish Dave’s friend and Graham were totally misunderstanding one another and clashing heads until Irish Dave’s friend mentioned that he was an Aquarius, and Graham said he was too, and soon they became all chum-chummy and gave each other a long ass hug. It was bizarre, the switch of feelings at the drop of the dime. LOL. Irish Dave’s friend also works helping developmentally-disabled adults… and Graham was like, “I’m part Irish; I’m proud of it!” and Irish Dave’s friend got into this thing about how one should only be proud of being a man and for one’s actions, and not for borders or births or (and he couldn’t come up with the word for this concept beyond the word “social”, so I’m going to fill in the blank or him) socially-constructed ideas. It was cute, and true… but you rarely hear people say stuff like that. Idealistic? Perhaaaaps.

Also ran into a friend of some guys from The Accused, and I mentioned that the lead singer of The Accused is my hairdresser! And the dude was like, “Wow! That’s cool, because girls don’t usually go to Rudy’s Barbershop!” and it’s like… REALLY?!!!

There were some other interesting tidbits of knowledge I gleaned from talking to Graham and Irish Dave, mostly of the random fishing fact variety, or like funny anecdotes from their fishing days, and things. It was enjoyable. And I actually had to drink a nasty ass shot because I wasn’t actually going to go in because there was a $5 cover, but Irish Dave insisted, and then insisted on buying drinks for everyone, so I felt obligated to.

Irish Dave also had this big thing about Americans calling him “dude”, and Graham was laying on the usage of “dude” mega-thick. Almost ridiculously thick.

Actually, on a side note… from hanging out with these fisherman humans, I’ve learned some things about barring I never knew… there are probably others but a couple I remember off the top of my head include that Irish people in Ireland used to not really drink hard alcohol and generally would only sip on beer… and it’s still a lot of the case with real Irish people today… so that they’d be drunk but not American drunk. Another thing is… WHAT THE FUCK! BARS SERVE COFFEE?!!!! WHY HAVE I NEVER KNOWN THIS?!!!

This past year, between the month I’d spent in Portland, going to bars with these guys, and the very, very rare occasional bar outing, I’ve been to more bars than I’ve been like, all the rest of my post-21 days combined. Haha. But I don’t know, I’m feeling more and more comfortable with my state of non-drinking these days that I really don’t give a fuck about waltzing into a bar and not drinking at all. So it’s not so bad.

Oh now that I think about it… Irish Dave was also talking about how when he was younger, he NEVER met minorities, and it wasn’t until he was 14 that he met his first black person ever or Indian doctor because Ireland was so isolated at the time. He said that he was always cool with people of other races or whatever, but simply didn’t know how to interact with them (at least initially) when he finally met them regularly in Dublin or in London or in the United States… and that he would go out of his way to be introductory to them because it was just kind of a rare sight for him. He called it ignorance, and said it was bad, but that it was “cute ignorance.” And that one time, he’d met three Jamaicans in London and was going to take them back to Ireland, he made sure to call his mom beforehand and be like, “I’m bringing some friends over, by the way, three of them are black, just so you know,” because it was so not ingrained into the culture at the time he was growing up and it was almost necessary. Really interesting.

Now, I don’t know much about the history of Ireland, like at all… I just know that it was tumultuous or whatever. Definitely interested in learning more about it now, though…

In other news, I went with Lenny to Super Buffet this afternoon and it was fucking expensive, yo!!!! It was nearly $20 per person after tip, and considering I can’t eat much at buffets anymore, it was totally not worth it. Every time I go there, I think of this fact, but I always fucking forget when I decide to go there. Oh well. Afterwards, we swirled around Northgate Mall for a brief about of time, and I bought a new pair of Vans’ Prison Issue shoes… my favorite shoes… which I’ve had since I worked at Snowboard Connection, which is like, two or three years ago, by now. I hadn’t realized how dirty my current pair of Prison Issues are despite people like my parents and Lenny commenting on just how dirty they are, but man, they’re dirty as fuck. I compared the old ones to the nice, crisp, new ones, where the whites are white and the blacks are black, and the old one’s whites are brown and the blacks are grey brown. Haha.