Olympics, Politics and Racks

I've been very busy the past few weeks. Chicago's in the running for the 2016 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games and the begining of the month the International Olympic Committee came to town to tour. There was no hope in getting them out to my small Village, however our Village President managed to sway the 2016 committee to add us to a list of tours that were available to the large contingent of press that was in town following the event. We spent weeks preping for this tour hoping to get 20-30 press from all over the world in our town for a tour and hopeful mention in any articles they would write up. We prepared a nice booklet agenda of our town with a special invitation wraped with string in the front. Due to a communication error within the 2016 committee the PR Manager was not notified we were an official tour and thus pulled 75 invites out of these booklets but left the booklets in because she "liked our town". Thus, all that work went for naught and I was surprisingly ok with it all because I had not spent any money on this and I now had a day back to myself to do actual work vs. fuck around town on a FAM tour. Fucking PR people, I mean they're not the brightest bulbs in the drawer. Any moron can graduate with a bachelor's in communication and do "PR". Sadly, you look and read their efforts every day. From working with them about 20 years now I can tell you a large majority are genuinely stupid as well as personally vindictive. Who knows if what happened happend as we were told or because of some backdoor politics or petty jealousies. As I told the disspointed Village President, "It's ok, when they choose Chicago someone will owe us one" Damn straight and it'll be something a lot better a FAM tour. When they first started going after this I thought we didn't have a prayer. In the past year, we've been brought into the planning and all I can say is wow. The city is doing a great job with this and it's exciting. Me, yes me I am saying something is exciting so it does have some merit. Check out one of the promo videos the committee put together, it's very well done.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRV8yYq5L3A[/youtube] There were also elections a few weeks back and thankfully the sane majority won again. I'm friends with a few of the politicians in town and in my job that's almost a must. I never really have had to lean on that friendship, it's just a subtle undertone that's there kind of like the Godfather "some day I will call on you for to provide a service..." It's a tad dangerous to go to their victory party as you're supposed to be neutral in public because what if some wacko's actually do get into office like the other year. Then you're known as a "friend to them" and then your funding becomes threatened or things become ridiculously hard to do because they want to hurt you for your lack of friendship. Politics come into play with this job everyday, and in reality they're a part of everything even gaming. I've seen people work and plot behind the scenes within guilds or within servers themselves to get what they want and it's always funny because you would think that would be the one place you could go to escape something yet there it is alive and well. I'm a part of three guilds on 3 different servers and in varying degrees there's politics within each one, but I've extradited myself from any type of leadership position in any of them which makes my gaming life much better because what I hated about being a co-gm or officer was that after a hard day at work, a day of backstabbing, bitching and general assholishness you come home and there it is to greet you in a world you're supposedly going to get away from all of it. People suck sometimes.

Finally, the economy sucks. We all know it, we've all felt it. I've been in a lot of financial troubles for the past several years, mainly due to an addiction I had and I've been digging myself out ever since. Now it's especially hard so I've cut back on a lot, no more HBO, limited dry cleaning, making every meal vs. eating out stuff like that. The other week I did what for me was normally the unthinkable; I bought dress clothes off the rack at a department store. EWWWW......yeah, I did it thinking "ok, you need some clothes it's not a big deal and you still got your expensive shit to squeeze into when you need to; this is everyday stuff it's ok" Well, I bought 2 sport coats thinking I was saving money and in actuality I wasn't because by the time I had to have everything tailored to the degree I would not have had I just went to the fucking Men's Wearhouse I ended up spending about the same and with more hassle because, tailors are a hard find. It's not like I'm in Chicago and there's actual shops, no I'm stuck with the people inside the Dry Cleaners....no more italian tailor shops like I used to have at my disposal in the city. So I finally found a good one after many checks and the tailoring on my two coats almost came out to be what I paid for the two of them. It's ok, I'll get years of use out of them but a lesson learned. Stick with pants and shirts.....off the rack...eww......