Zen Crib Notes

Last week I wrote that it was like Hell on Earth from the ungodly heat wave that's been taking over the West Coast.

Now it's raining and freaking cold. I suppose that's what the heat was preparing for, for which I'm grateful.

In recent events, I'm going to attempt setting up an Anime Club at my college, since it has the egregious offense of not having one at all. The paperwork seems kind of daunting, as it has guidelines for things like field trips and food sales and event-planning that needed to be approved by student senate, and for someone who had never founded a club I felt a little overwhelmed by the possibilities since all I wanted to do was watch anime. But I'm also excited for it, because I've always wanted to start something like this, and it's not like I don't have the materials for the club in terms of content, since I've got lots of DVDs and a Crunchyroll account that I can just show on the computer through a projector. And if I really got the club rolling, maybe I can do stuff like raise money for a whole party of people to a convention, like Anime Expo '11.

Last night was a work night, and towards the end of the night, one lady customer was buying a man at the bar for a drink. Having never seen that before except in works of fiction or hearsay (yeah, I'm so sheltered, right?), I was thinking "Oh cool, romantic rendevous" like some dumb Harlequin romance reader, and it really looked like they were having a good time. When I got off, I sat at the bar eating dinner and just sort slipped into their active conversation. By then, there were around three empty Newcastles at the bar, and then the two were ordering hot and cold sake. I remember thinking of my Alcohol Edu segment last semester and I was getting a little worried for the lady, because women tend to get drunk easier and this lady seemed to get steadily wasted by the minute. But we got to talking and it turned out that she is a nurse teaching at a clinic at Montecito or something like that, and that she has connections with people who got her that job and that she's a Canadian-American but was born in Minnesota in Fargo of all places (she had the exact accent from the film) and that she traveled the world doing medicinal stuff like in Europe and Asia and had a master's degree in nursing and etc.

Now, I've never seen a drunk lady before, but it was apparent that she was plastered because she kept repeating the same subjects and tidbits of information like she's a character from "Memento." She started to get sloppy in pouring drinks and doing a lot of repetitive motions and I was thinking "How can this lady be a nurse?" since it seems like she doesn't know how to take care of herself. And the guy is pretty nice about the whole thing because it's not like she's being really out of control and loud and annoying, not at all, and it was sort of fun regardless, but then she started to want to go to bars and dance clubs because the restaurant was closing and pretty much me, the other waitresses and the guy was trying to convince out of it. There wasn't much of a satisfying conclusion to this story, but in the end we gave her and the guy a ride to the bowling alley where a good happy hour was apparently going on after 10 pm, and me and my co-worker left feeling an anxious kind of responsibility for them because we facilitated in them getting drunk. I'm hoping that things are all right for the both of them, but they both seemed pretty vulnerable due to being under the influence, so if there's anything I got out of that experience it's that I won't let anyone I know be in that kind of condition.

Tips: $50

At the very least, I also got her contact information in case I want to have a cheap chemical peel. And she did give out some very inspirational speeches.