Name Day!

My Hungarian friend Roland told me that today was his Name Day. This brings up an interesting point to me: Name Day is something that I've heard of from my international friends, something that is very Euro, and something that I've never celebrated. Why is that? I have no idea. But I know that from this point forward, Name Day is going to be a very serious personal holiday for me. Very conveniently, Name Day for "Justin" is on June 1st! I haven't come up with a wish list of items that I want for Name Day, but I think that it will generally center around a social gathering on that evening. Since it's an international festivus, I think that an international theme is appropriate. So maybe we'll make a trek out to a Bohemian beer garden in Queens that I've been reading about or something. But fear not, devoted blogees, you will hear all the details once it's planned!

My theme for the weekend was sports and shopping. My home baseball team, the A's, were in town to face the Yankees for a handful of games, so Friday night I busted out the winter gear to face the chilly evening in the Bronx at Yankee Stadium. If anyone else follows baseball, you will know that the A's STINK this year, so I was prepared to be pelted by empty beer cups, popcorn, hot dog wrappers, chairs, etc. by the devoted Yankee fans sitting above me. It actually turned out to be a good game, though, and the A's finally won a game. They lost the following games in the series, but that's not the point....

Saturday morning I got up early and was amped to try out my rollerblades again. The rain that was predicted never came, so I strapped my 'blades on at about 10:30am and headed East towards the river. Lacking any rhythm or grace, I stumbled my way over sidewalk cracks, chewed up asphalt, and urinating dogs on long leashes to reach the holy grail of rollerblade terrain: smooth asphalt on a long, quiet avenue with little traffic. Somehow I managed to avoid putting my new wrist guards to use on the lovely terrain, though there was no shortage of flailing arms and lack of control.

After my mile and a half loop-d-doop, I stopped by an astro-turf park near by apartment to check out the future of Major League Baseball - a bunch of five and six year olds in their Merril Lynch-sponsored jerseys playing little league, which involved about 20 kids spread around the field and one kid up to bat. It was hilarious watching the fielding take place. No one could catch or throw, so I'm not sure how the innings ended. There was also no shortage of dads yelling "Get on the bag!", a la Will Ferrel on SNL, and no shortage of mom's toting Louis Vutton purses and walking their poodles. Ahhh...the stuff that movies are made of :)

The rest of the day involved developing a green thumb by purchasing some herb...I mean herbs...to grow in my apartment to help reduce grocery expenditures. I have nice, big windows that get lots of light, so we'll see how they do in the next few weeks. I have little doubt that they will die a slow, painful, premature death, but I'll do my best to avoid giving them the death penalty. In addition, D hooked Cathy's friend Lisa and I up with some free courtside tickets for a WNBA game down at Madison Square Gardens. Kind of hard to pass that up!

There was one other item on my shopping list that I hadn't completed after the game, so I headed to the world's largest department store. I've been contemplating the purchase of a new pair of jeans for months. You know how I am with my shopping - very impulsive. And this scares me when it comes to jeans, because most of the designer jeans that fit me are too much cash. While many people don't have any problem dropping $150-$200 on a pair of jeans, I just can't mentally cope with that. So I've set reasonable denim shopping limits on my purchases. I absolutely refuse to pay triple-digits for a pair of jeans and I shoot to pay for under $75. I can't just go to Old Navy and pick up some nice $30 pairs of jeans because they don't fit me right. You see, I'm kind of a tall, lean figure. "Regular Fit" jeans look like hip-hop clothing on me, and that's not my style. I need something restrictive, something uncomfortable, something slim-fitting. So off to the Macy's Euro-Selection-for-Men collection I went, looking for clearance jeans and sales. I pretty much picked out one pair of every brand in my price range and started trying them on to see how they fit my scrawny-ass body. After much, much deliberation and stress, I decided to go with fit over jean appearance and settled on a pair of jeans that were just under my preferred threshold over a pair that had the look I wanted, but were too close for comfort to my upper limit, even though they weren't quite as slim-fitted as I preferred. As I was returning the other less fortunate pairs, I found that the cheaper pair were on sale for $39!!! I was stoked at this point, and the blood started rushing to my head - should I splurge and go for both pairs since I'm getting such a good deal on this pair?? My face turned pale as I confronted this situation and I decided that I deserved to treat myself in this particular case. I work hard for a living, so why not? So two pairs in hand, I went to the register only to find that the $39 clearance pair had been marked down even more - $23!!! That's less than what I pay for dinner!! Yowser, was I elated!

Now I just need a reason to wear these new jeans. Anyone have a Name Day coming up?
J. Riley

Edit: I added a link to the Will Ferrell clip referred to....