It was a nice weekend getting out of the house for the first time in two weeks. The crazy cold from the bowels of hell that incapacitated me with racking coughs and buckets of phlegm seems to have taken a break until next cold season allowing me to face the world once again. There was the dinner at Kushi Shabu, a hot pot-cook-your own-all-you-can-eat Japanese spot that was expensive and highly overrated. All you can eat? Well, when it tastes like bland, generic meat, I suddenly find I don't end up wanting too much of it. To make the matters worse, the thin strips of meat that they do give you to cook begin to pollute the water in the most disgusting fashion. Eventually, you have this brownish gunk floating on the surface; a sort of meat puke, if you will. Hoo boy, nothing like scraping dark snot off your dinner. I know I'm still hungry! I'm already morally opposed to having to cook my own dinner at a restaurant anyways. I have plenty of friends who live this crap, but I'll say what I always say; if I wanted to cook, I would stay at home and microwave a burrito. You should at least get a discount, what with having to do most of the labor.

I'd mention the club and the goofy, drunken shenanigans, but they weren't as interesting as when we were in our twenties. Now it's just sad. Anytime you have a friend who ends up suffering from gout like symptoms from drinking, it might be time to think about laying off the binge drinking. I will say the place we went to was a sort of hybrid bar/club where it basically represented the worst of both. It was way too loud to talk to someone, but their dance floor was away from the main area and tiny. I think you should either go all out with the club, or try and make it into a fun bar atmosphere. But, what do I know? The place was crowded enough as is. Plus, I didn't have to pay a cover, so that almost made up for the deafening music and the 12 dollar drinks.

Now that I'm able to walk two steps without coughing violently, I was able to play in the adult league basketball game this Sunday. It's no secret that my game resembles Brian Scalabrine more than Paul Pierce. I'm fairly terrible, for the most part. I'm there to rebound, box out, and play physical defense. As far as scoring is concerned, I'm the 7th option on a team with 7 players. Well, make that 6th option; Newjen is even less involved than I am in a given game. This was our third game of the season, and coming off two dominating performances against our last two opponents, we were feeling pretty confident. Well, our good players were, anyways. I was just hoping to not to pass out from being physically weakened from my sickness. With our last two victories being over 20 points, we've had good reason to be confident. Our opponent was supposed to be one of the good teams in our league, but they were either replaced with pod people, or aliens stole their basketball talents. With 5 minutes left in the half, we were up by 30-6. Needless to say, they began to get frustrated and one of their players, this chubby short white guy who thought he was Lebron, started to get chippy.

With the frustration mounting, our opponents went to the usual outlet; blame the refs. However, the refs weren't really having it that night. It might be because we were putting down an epic ass whoopin' on them and they had no idea why they would be complaining about calls. In fact, at one point, one of the refs actually asked white Lebron, "You're down 29 points. What exactly do you want? This game was over 15 minutes ago!" The result wasn't surprising; at least 4 technical fouls on their team for stupid decisions and loudly cursing. They've decided to crack down on the profanity in our league recently, but they only enforce it sparingly, usually to keep a situation from escalating. I think they're hoping to keep people from threatening to knife someone in the parking lot after the game, as a former teammate once did. (True story)

My favorite exchange between the refs and white Lebron was when he went barreling into one of our best players, Josh, and had his shot casually swatted away. He continued his forward progress crashing into Josh and tumbling onto his back in proper melodramatic fashion, then leaped up yelling at the ref, wondering where his foul call was. The ref dismissively looked down at him, clapped his hands and said, "Hear that? That was the sound of the ball getting cleanly smacked out of your possession. Just because you run into someone out of control doesn't mean you get a call. Now play ball." I started to feel bad for the other team and they even began to get embarrassed for the performance of their most outspoken teammate. When the game mercifully ended (which resulted in the one ref rolling her eyes and yelling out, "Finally! Thank god!") with a 30 point victory, we all did the usual sportsmanlike shaking of hands and wishing each other good luck in our next games. Because White Lebron is a complete dick, he couldn't even just silently nod his head and decided to try and pick a fight with Josh after the game. With his award winning unsportsmanlike attitude, I guess he is similar to Lebron after all. His actions were so shameful that one of the guys from the team actually walked over to us after the game to apologize for his teammate. All I can say is, we'll probably see them in the playoffs. That'll be interesting, to say the least. I just hope nobody gets thrown out.