And The Winner Is...!

So first of all, thank you for entering the contest for the bike and for explaining how you "Free Your Y."

Again, I could not trust myself to be a fair judge of entries, because I don't know what my standard would be. Funniest? Most heart-warming? Best ideas? You had some pretty great answers if I do say so.

So instead, I did what I did for the booze contest.

[Hi. By the way? More of you entered the contest for free booze (value approx = $40) than for A NEW BIKE (value approx = $400). That says a lot about you, readers. Like why you visit this blog. And also why I love you so damn much.]

Anyway, I took all of your comments, pasted them into a text document, removed the content of the comments, and just left the time stamps.


I did remove extra entries -- there were a couple of you who commented once and then left your city/state after. I only kept one comment per person in the list.

Then I pasted the list into "List Randomizer" on Random.org.


And as you can see (I cut and pasted with lots of spaces in between the time stamps, which is why there are so many empty lines in the randomizing results), the winner is:

2:43 PM, May 08, 2008 - "stacy" from San Francisco!

Congrats, Stacy!

In case you missed it, Stacy's comments (I deleted the first in the randomized list) were:

stacy said...

This is a terrible day for this!! I think I killed my Y last night by accident! I took all the students from my audio production class (of which I am the professor) to a public broadcast station where I am a consulting producer -- so they could finish up their final projects on professional equipment. Of course everyone was behind, and things just got later and later. When my husband stopped by to bring me dinner, the students met him and were shocked (!) by how cool he was. Mm-hmm. Shocked!

The next ill-boding event was when I walked into the green room and was amused at how they'd created an enormous mess with scattered starbursts (ew!) and little bottled waters and other college backpack staples like lip gloss, ipods, car keys and crumpled paper strewn everywhere. There was a chewed chunk of red chewing gum on the floor by the trash can. They seemed so...young! One told me she'd been awake for 36 hours because of finals. I was so tired because it was after midnight that I fleetingly considered suggesting we all just take a ten minute nap before wrapping up and heading home.

When I did get home at 1 a.m., I sat down on the sofa next to the sleeping husband and drank two QUARTS of beet kvass - a fermented health "tonic" similar to kombucha. This was a huge, huge mistake and has resulted in me having tyramine hangover-headache today (the kind you get from having too much fermented food, like cheese or wine). So as I sit here mid-day frowning through my bed-head at an amici's take out menu and considering just going to Ocean Beach for the rest of the day. (Maybe I'll just sit on the back porch for a few, since I have work to do.) I recall vaguely when staying up until 1 a.m. was simply part of my daily routine, when hangovers were the result of a night of heavy cocktails, and when I would NEVER have consumed anything from a commercial pizza place, let alone drunk a tonic made from beets.

Do you think my Y is dead??? I'm hoping my Y comes back before summer, because riding that bike would be s-weet! (I'm going to lose, aren't I?)

2:37 PM, May 08, 2008

And then she added:

stacy said...

Oh -- was I supposed to state my city? everyone else seems to be doing that. Maybe I was too tired to comprehend the rules. San Francisco.

Wait, is this working? San Francisco.

2:43 PM, May 08, 2008

Awesomeness. Stacy, you had me at "two QUARTS of beet kvass."

(Please email me your info!)

Also, I did want to point out this comment, which was definitely one of my favorites, from my BlogHer friend and fabu blogger/writer, Laurie (from LaurieWrites):

laurie said...

Okay, first of all jen in suffolk, you're funny. And no blog posts since December! And only one at that. Come on now.

Also, I keep having to refer back to the original post for specifics about what a "Y" might be, because apparently I need to free other things besides my Y. And also I keep singing "FREE YOUR Y, AND THE REST WILL FOLLOW" in my head.

The most recent thing I have done to...er, free my Y....was taking the train to New York to read at an event called "Cringe," that involves grown people resurrecting their material from their teen years and reading it aloud at a MICROPHONE at a bar in Brooklyn.

I read at length from my Precious Moments diary from 1985, which was dedicated to Mikhail Baryshnikov, John Taylor from Duran Duran, Paul Young, Sting, the man from the Windsong commercials (I'm not making this up) and Dante Aguilar, a boy I was infatuated with at the time.

It was awesome. However, that particular part of my Y is likely best let out only on occasion.

On a more regular basis I...

1. Sleep on my parents' couch every other week or so, ostensibly to watch "my stories" that I can't catch at my house because I don't have a tv right now. But really it's so I can sleep on the couch and write in my 2008 blog-style diary. And occasionally eat French onion dip.

2. I go out with the people from my master's program, most of whom needed to be told who Jane Fonda was when I was all jazzed up about dancing to "I'm Every Woman" with her in a hotel in New Orleans. Occasionally I say things like "Word" and "jacked up," only because I am mirroring them! Like when I use a lot of exclamation points and single words separated. by. periods. in my blog!

I do not drink PBR from a can, however. When I was a "Y", that shit was not consumed by anyone except my grandfather and other men on stools at the American Legion. Also unlike my classmates, I do not shop at Forever 21 (and not just because the security guard kind of looks at me like "Why?" when I come in - jerk - and because I cannot pull off flouncy dresses with spaghetti straps.) or Hollister. And I do not own a t-shirt that says "You can't HANDLE THIS." in glitter paint.

3. I drink excessive amounts of wine and watch hours of the heavy metal video show on VH1 classic, dancing my ass off and having thoughts like "Dokken SHOULD STILL BE FAMOUS." Also I watch Rock of Love. Repeatedly.

4. I stalk childhood friends on classmates.com, but not in a scary way.

5. I try to hang out with people who make me laugh, or at least don't make me cry into my coffee and/or red wine. If I have to get old, I'm going down swinging (apparently a boomerang, or something else vaguely Y-shaped.)

7:32 AM, May 10, 2008

I would also like to point out that when I received this comment, I immediately read it aloud to Ish, who interrupted me to SING the Windsong commercial jingle.

Isn't the internet spectacular?