I speak in fact.

Four days ago, my brother and I went to Grauman's Chinese Theater for the world premiere of Disturbia. It seems that, to fill the house, they invited a bunch of regular people to come enjoy the movie. We were let in, not through a back alley, but on the actual red carpet leading to the front door. This momentary bob in the balance of the universe must have thrown the rest of my reality out of order for the rest of the night. The movie itself turned out to be lots of fun. Then we got our parking pass stamped by a parking validation guy on the way out of the theater lobby, but when we were pulling out of the garage in the car, the parking attendant charged me $3, looked at the ticket again, and claimed that it was not a real validation. I told him it was officially stamped by a man with a validating stamp at Grauman's Chinese Theater. He asked to see a receipt to prove we had been to the movie, so we showed him our official giant tickets (the size of a door hanger) that had a picture of the Disturbia poster on them, but he said he couldn't accept that (in retrospect, I should've pointed out the specific seat number on the bottom of the ticket). So he charged me $10 for parking. I asked him if I could see what an actual validation stamp looks like, for future reference. He said he couldn't show me. He pulled one out and flashed it at me really quick, but claimed I wasn't allowed to see it. So, that's great for the next time I go to this theater. I guess he's afraid I'm going to go home and get started on a fake validation stamp with my stamp-making kit. I asked him how I was supposed to know if my next stamp at this theater is a true validation if I'm not even allowed to see what it looks like. He said to just tell them to give me a parking validation next time I'm there. THAT'S WHAT I DID THIS TIME, DICKHEAD.

The way I see it, I just paid the universe a $7 fine for not being able to talk sense into a stranger. This is not the first time something like this has happened. Maybe I should work on that. I think my main problem is that I fundamentally hate arguing, to the point that it is leaving me at a disadvantage when fruitcakes like this try to have a fuck with me.

Then, on the way home, my landlady called me and said my brother's rent check had been rejected by the bank because he wrote it in pencil. Now, I had watched my brother write this check out, and he had used a pen, so I told her that, and she reinforced that the bank said he had used a pencil. If you ask me, the bank couldn't read my brother's typically illegible handwriting, and my landlady probably just misunderstood. I'm sure it didn't help that he wrote that particular check out at 4am while he was half asleep. I just wrote a new check and sent it to her. This was not a major inconvenience, yet worth noting because it's just weird to have two people in a row tell me that I am wrong about things I know to be true.

Cheers,
Diego