I got a job.
Against all odds, I wound up getting a temp gig in April,
and I’ve held it to now. I’m making a decent wage, and I’m getting closer to
feeling like having an actual semblance of a life. Of course, it does play havoc
for my annual big trip to a big comic book convention.
I made a token effort to get a ticket to Comic-Con
International in San Diego,
but that didn’t come close to panning out. I didn’t get an airline voucher for
my birthday, so Toronto
was out. C2E2 in Chicago?
Too early in the year for me. In the end, I elected to go back to the Baltimore
Comic Con this weekend. It’s a two-day convention, but I can save on travel by
driving down there from Staten Island. What’s
a few hours on the road? And I figured that I would try to do the tourist thing
while I was in the area. To that end, I sat on my thumbs and debated on hotels
before paying a little too much for two nights for a hotel room near the con.
Today’s plan? Get up early, hit the road, get into Baltimore, hit the local aquarium and/or the
local sports museum, and have fun.
Did I succeed? Well, I am in a nice room, and I’m near the
convention center . . . but I had hitches. Lots of hitches. It wasn’t like last
year in Toronto,
where I felt like I had been kicked in the groin multiple times. Today was more
about getting hit upside the head a lot.
The first problem came when I woke up later than scheduled.
I hurried in packing and prepping. I was ready. I got in the car. I turned on
the ignition. I looked for my EZ
Pass.
Oh. Fuck.
Yep, I lost the EZ
Pass. I dug through the
couch and checked a few of the usual places. Instead of hitting the New Jersey
Turnpike, I went in the opposite direction, looking for my mother’s car in the
hope that she had it there. And then I found out she had parked her car in a
different location. So I wasted more time getting there. And nope . . . she
didn’t have it. So now I had to have my wallet out for all the tolls I hit
along the way.
Luckily for me, the biggest problems I had were hitting
traffic and misinterpreting my GPS. It took about four hours, but I made it.
And just for the hell of it, I decided to call the Baltimore Orioles’ ticket
office to see if there were any seats. Normally, this would be easy, since the O’s
have sucked eggs for years. Even with the Yankees in town and their obnoxious,
knuckle-dragging fans heading south to cheer their guys, tickets would still be
an easy “get.” But when I wasn’t looking, the Orioles got good. Really good.
Tied with the Yankees for first place good. Seriously, what the hell?
Anyway. I make a call, and I wound up getting a ticket.
Since it was a “Prime” game, I had to pay extra. And this was done through
Ticketmaster, so I had to pay more. And since I was doing all this a few hours
before the game, I had to print out the ticket. Of course, I didn’t have a
printer with me. So I wound up going online at the hotel, hitting my e-mail
account and printing it out. Easy, right?
Once again, I got smacked upside the head. First, the
printers had no paper. When somebody finally loaded it up, a business document
got printed out. Over and over and over and oh my friggin’ GOD, somebody
printed out roughly a hundred copies of the same thing. And this guy didn’t
bother asking for paper, so I had to burn time waiting for my ticket to get
printed. And I was fuming. The guy’s
name, address, phone number as e-mail address kept coming up, and it took
personal strength to not grab a copy and give this asshole the business.
By the time I got to the Inner Harbor,
I was out of tourist options. I figured that I needed a few hours to burn
through the aquarium, and I didn’t have the time. U.S.S. Constellation? They
were close to closing up shop, or pulling up anchor, or however you want to see
it. And the Sports
Legends Museum
was out. It wasn’t urgent for me to go somewhere, but I figured that I’d feel
like less of a geek if I actually did tourist stuff beyond hitting baseball
games in the area.
Luckily, I stumbled into a museum dedicated to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! This was
ironic, given that my mother got a deal on the one on 42nd Street in Manhattan. After finding out
it wouldn’t take long to tear through, I bought admission. It was fun . . .
small, full of bizarre exhibits and interactive stuff. Ever want to see images
engrained on rice through a microscope? Done. Portraits of Bill & Hillary
Clinton with hamburger grease as a medium? Bam. How about a giant penny made of
thousands of pennies? Done and done.
*deep sigh*
At this point, I would go into detail about attending a game
at Camden Yards that actually meant something to the hometown fans, against the
most hated of teams. Well, not tonight.
Remember what I said about getting smacked in the head?
Well, when I asked for a room with a queen-sized bed instead of a double, it
didn’t occur to me to ask about getting online. I assumed there would be an
Ethernet connection. I thought wrong. Of course, my laptop has no Wi-Fi
capability. Or maybe I can’t get it to work. After several calls, I found out I
was in a room with no physical connection to the Internet. Next thing I know, I’m
packing up all the crap I had spread out in my room, making sure I leave
nothing behind, then get escorted to a room six floors higher to a room that’s
more convenient to me, because fucking around online in the lobby after
midnight was not an option. Did I mention my escort was a uniformed guard? It’s
been that kind of day for me. And since I haven’t been online all day beyond
getting the ticket earlier, I’m ending things now. The short story is that the
Yankees jumped all over the Orioles, the O’s tried to bounce back, but it was
for naught. The Yankees won, 8-4, and
their fans were as annoying and obnoxious as you’d expect. I got the scorecard,
and I’ll go over what happened in the near future. Right now, I just want to go
online, fiddle around with the TV (Comedy Central! Lewis Black’s new comedy special!)
and get some sleep.
And guess what? Turns out I can fit into a double bed.
Ironic, huh?
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