Marketplace Misadventures

I was going to get straight to work today. You know, when I GOT to work, but I didn’t. then I was going to start studying…but I didn’t do that either. Instead I sat here reading the many messages my newest little friends left me. It’s always nice to get to work and find you’re loved. *sigh it’s lovely. Yesterday I got home from work and grubbed my mothers Pozole. We suspect it may have been left out overnight and that’s just ass disaster waiting to happen, but we were so hungry that we didn’t care and ate a bowl of yummy Pozole soup though I have to admit, I stayed away from the pigs feet. GOD I just don’t have it in my heart to tell my mom I don’t like pigs feet anymore. They’re sick and grody and suddenly make my skin crawl.

Everyone has strange dishes in their background even good old Caucasian Americans. I believe bull balls are on that menu. I’m Mexican American and we have strange dishes too like such as intestines, cow head (eyes included though I don’t know if anyone actually eats the eyes), pigs feet, tripe etc. Pozole is made with funky shit like spine, pigs feet or nice piggy meat…I think they call it pork loin. They say it’s great for hangovers and although I myself have tried it haven’t actually found that to be the case. Same goes for Menudo.

SO…why am I talking about this? No clue actually because what I really wanted to discuss was the Xbox Live Market Place experience I’ve had since I brought my shiny new off white 360 home. Why the fuck is it off white? (You like that transition between subjects don’t you? I know you do. You LOVE it! Much like my finger in your butt! Ok, sorry enough of that.) SPEAKING of fingers in assholes that’s exactly what I felt like yesterday as I was watching my movie Ask the Dust with Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek. But wait! I’m getting ahead of myself!!! Get it? A-Head………yeah, I don’t either.

I brought my Xbox home the day after Christmas. I would have had it sooner, but Pumpo begged me not to until he gave me my present. It was a great present, but I could have done with getting my box sooner. Hey, even a day sooner would have been great for me. I took a little too much time to try and play some of the games that I bought. I even went online a few times with my best online friends. It was a little difficult navigating around all the menus and the whole experience was a little overwhelming, but setting the whole thing up and getting online was much easier than I expected. All in all I was in HEAVEN!!!!!!!!!

Unfortunately for me and my friends I have so much studying to do that I can’t always take the time to play and have decide between online gaming and offline gaming wisely. Did you read my last post about guilt… Guilt and I run hand in hand and well, having to choose between online gaming and offline gaming is SUPER hard for me. So in the end I decide to quit altogether and focus on nothing but studying. I have to get through this last month or so and hopefully (cross my fingers, eyes, toes and throw a bat over my wing) pass this horrible nightmare of an exam. This means that all I do is sit there and take notes while my husband plays Oblivion to death. TO DEATH! He’s beaten the game, is the head of the thieves guild, head of the…Who am I kidding. He’s the head of shit loads of guilds and I’m sitting there studying like a dumb ass catching snippets of dialog here and there. He’s running around enjoying MY game on MY box and I’m STUDYING!!! It’s infuriating but then there’s the lovely market place.

Every once in a while I allow myself some special quality time to distress and not think about absolutely anything. I completely engross myself in a movie or TV show and get back to studying right away. Sometimes I can’t muster up the energy and just lay there with a lifeless look on my face, much like a jellyfish if it had a face and looked like it was alive at all and then not. One day I got a giant bug up my arse to order a movie from the Xbox Live Marketplace. This was to be quite an adventure. It took me forever to decide on a movie and finally give up the points I’d purchased almost a month ago, that I had yet to use, on a movie. Ask the Dust was that movie. It was that movie because all the movies on the Marketplace pretty much suck ass OR I’ve seen them or both…which is pretty much all the movies in the Marketplace save one or two.

Excited and giggly I throw caution to the wind and use my points (ZONKERS!). I try to figure out in my head how much this actually means in dollars and give up upon the brilliant realization that I suck at figures and also I’m a moron. I watch breathless as my points disappear when suddenly it hits me. I have to wait for the download. SHIT! I dash over to the Active Downloads section and watch with my mother on the sofa as the movie downloads to my harddrive. I watch, and I watch and I watch and I watch. It never hit even 1% download when I finally gave up. I told my mom we wouldn’t be watching that movie and set off to watch something else.

About 2.5 hrs later I checked my active download screen…54%. I took a nice deep breath, I’m trying deep breathing exercises to relieve my stress thus lowering the chances of having to pop my Drug Pushers (aka my P-sychiatrist) ee-mergency pills. I get back to studying. At some point Rigid decided that he needed to play Oblivion and signed on to his gamertag. I thought it would continue to download for some idiotic reason (remember, moron) and didn’t give it a second thought. I studied for hours and had to take a break. I made him get off Oblivion so I could watch my movie, but no such luck. It was still at 54 %. Mind you it’s a feat for me to find my way to the Active Downloads screen each and every time for some reason and by the time I get there I’m REALLY pissed. I continue to study while I let the download go and make mom and Rigid watch TV. I have no idea how long I was studying for or how long we left the 360 running, but it may have been 4 hrs later and it was only at 71%. WTF??? I’m thinking that obviously my connection sucks fat balls and there’s not much I can do but wait. So, more studying…naturally.

I don’t know when, but EVENTUALLY I had nothing on my active downloads screen. Thing is that I couldn’t watch the movie because I’d watched Battlestar Gallactica and The Dresden Files instead and couldn’t spare anymore time to watch anything else as Chapter 18 awaited. I gave up until last night. I wasn’t supposed to take the time to watch anything other than Heros, but I HAD to watch the movie because when we checked the final time to see if the movie downloaded Rigid hit the play button and we now had 24 hrs to watch our movie. We hadn’t even gone past that stupid mountain at the beginning of the film before he turned it off…I may have screamed a little…Ok, so maybe I screamed a bit more, but he deserved it! hitting the play button on market place movies is like clicking a 24hr time bomb…you only have so much time damn it!!! and I don’t have time to watch it on Monday!!! I was pissed as hell and there was nothing I could do about it. Back to studying. (breath breath breath breath, in out in out in out ino utblah blahblbaha)

Monday comes around and we sit down to eat some lunch quick as we can, watch a little TV, maybe have a bit of a conversation and it’s time to start studying. He throws on Oblivion and were back in our little routine when suddenly Rigid gasps, (he really did gasp, I think I make him nervous) “Your movie, hooha! We have to watch it today. Shit! Silly poppette we forgot!” Now I’m really ticked off, my pen is in my hand and my pages are in front of me and I’m torn again. Movie or studying? Fuck it, BOTH. Now the stress in my neck and shoulders is really built up, but I have to watch this movie or I wasted my points for nothing. ‘I’m going to fail’, I think. ‘I’m going to fail and for what? Movies, videogames and other crap I shouldn’t be doing. Fuck it…I’m going to fail.’

As I engrossed myself in this movie, and boy when I mean engross I mean EN-gross (mostly because I have a one track mind), I could feel the tension leave my body. The aching in my neck, the feeling of veins pushing up against my skin from my shoulder to just under my ear all melted away. The movie was fantastic from the start. The narration was interesting and the plot was as well. I was really into the movie, there was no talking to me, I was consumed. Just when things were getting thick: and earthquake shook LA, people started dying, life was dire; POOF no more movie. Just like that. INSTANDLY the veins in my neck popped, if I had a skinny neck you’d see them throbbing. I asked Rigid to call Xbox Live customer service, but he gave me lip. I don’t know how we avoided that one, but I really think he’s starting to get the picture. I’m flapping my hands in your direction, talking too fast and asking you to help me before I get too upset. JUST CALL!!!! He brought my pills out just in case and dialed the number. He had so much trouble getting through though and eventually I had to do it because the idiotic voice thingy couldn’t understand his accent. (Damn you English! Damn you to all mighty hell!!!)

I jumped on the line and interrupted the voice thingy with the word Operator. I sounded like a broken record.

Voicethingy: Okay, so we can better assist you, blah blah blah, please say ‘billing and payments’… ‘tech…
Maha: Operator
Voicetingy: I’m sorry, I didn’t…
Maha: Operator
Voicethingy: I didn’t
Maha: OPERATOR
Voicethingy: O-Kaaayyyy, you want an operator. Please hold while I transfer your call blah blah blah

Something about how long it could take and the order it’s received. Rigid sits in amazement. Of course, this is the second time I had to do this because the first time it hung up on me and I nearly spurted a vein. (breathing!!!) FINALLY someone jumps on and I swear if I got into all the shit I had to go through just with the first guy I would end up on page 4 before I got to the second guy, let alone the time I had the wait for the “supervisor” to give me back my points because the “tech” guy couldn’t “remember” how. “Get it???”


In the end though, I got all my points back, though I swear they should have given me a few extra for my trouble. Now this weekend I’m going to have to make Rigid find me this movie because if I don’t finish watching it I’m sure I’ll end up in a coma by the end of the week. Not because that’s how good it is, but because if I don’t finish something bad things happen to me. I get rashes and stomachaches and headaches and bad bad juju stuff happens like the sky falls and cars crash and earthquakes kill skinny people in foreign countries. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s been scientifically proven. I can prove it. Just watch, don’t finish watching a movie and see what happens to YOU. Don’t judge me!!!

note: i wrote this super fast because i have a few important things i have to do and because i'm really tired and there's no point in thinking about anything (like i ever think about anything). if anything seems wierd, retarded, ass backwards, not spelled right, totally grammatically incorrect and downright frightening don't fret! it's perfectly natural i do this everyday. lol