The Apprentice LA - Episode 5

Alright, backing up three days--

So it’s day 3 of task 4 (day 12 overall), which means it’s interview day. I’m taken down to the beach for my formal interview (the ones that last 3-4 hours). A pleasant little break. And for the first time, I get to answer questions about things that went right, and how great we were, and how awesome my bulk sale was, and what a good leader Aaron was. Much more fun than the last 3 formal interviews, when I had the pleasure of reminiscing about how much we sucked. Granted, you have to talk about the good and bad in both cases, but after a win, the interview is much more positive.

And this time, I found myself being asked about Nicole a lot. The producer kept asking me questions like, “What are your favorite things about Nicole?” and “Tell me about Nicole’s eyes”—hoping to get that extra cheesy little quote they can use. “No fucking way,” I’d tell them. “No fucking way am I giving you that quote. Not a chance.”

This would become a theme of my interviews. Here and there, I’d give a little (as you’ll see), but for the most part I refused to gush. The main reason is this: Just say I hear, “Tell me about Nicole’s eyes” and I respond, “oh god…okay fine…Nicole has pretty eyes…haha…you happy?” What you’d see on TV is this: a shot of me gazing at Nicole with a dumb look on my face, behind which you’d hear my voiceover, cut from the interview, saying, “Nicole has pretty eyes” as if not only did I volunteer the statement on my own, but that that was the thought going through my head while I gazed in her direction.

So, knowing the hideous consequences of giving them a quote like that, I found myself entrenched in a stealthy battle against the producers in every interview. The problem is this: I can successfully dodge the bullet 99 times, and then slip up once—and they win the whole battle. All they need is one.

And so, as the season wears on, and the exploitation of this thing with Nicole gains momentum, I can only sit here, helpless, cowering in my living room as I watch these episodes, knowing that they have a lot of quotes of mine to work with.

And yes, I got involved with someone on national television. I’m as surprised as you are. Leave me the hell alone.

So interview day winds down, and we’re all sitting together next to the pool, still enjoying our first victory, still thrilled to be on the winning side of the hedge, and a producer tells Aaron he has to head up to the boardroom in 5 minutes. Which reminds us that there’s about to be a boardroom, and we’re not going. Cheers!

After about two hours, Aaron returns, and we all hound him for the gossip like a group of 8th grade girls after their friend returns from a date. Aaron tells us about the boardroom, and that Marisa talked herself into a firing, and about how Trump gave him shit for not saying more in his role. Aaron was noticeably shaken up about the whole thing, and I think he knew this would mean trouble for him down the road. I remember thinking at that moment that being on the right side of the boardroom was as much of a test as being on the wrong side.

So we went to bed, knowing we’d be woken up for a task at 4:30am the next morning, and that our little joyful 24-hour winning celebration was over.

And indeed, the phone rings at 4:30am sharp, and we get into our suits and head out to meet Trump. As I may have mentioned earlier, I only showed up with 2 suits (most people had 3 or 4—Frank had 10)—a navy one and a black pinstriped one—and my navy suit was somehow lost in the shuffle when I changed into my idiot pink pants at the bathing suit runway. We were told by production that we didn’t have time to grab our stuff at the end, and that they would retrieve it for us. Well it never made it back to me, so from week 2 on, the only suit I had was the black one. Which is why I was jacketless at the recent task announcement (my one suit was dirty). They do laundry for us every 3 days, so if I chose to wash the suit, I’d have a day or two without any suit at all. Quite a position I put myself in.

So we meet Trump, he says the word “honey” 14 times while announcing the honey task, and he’s gone. The dossier stated that 4 team members were needed at the bee/honey harvesting plant. Aaron, Surya, and James were all allergic to bees, so that left us with myself, Frank, Nicole, and Steph heading to harvest the honey. The other three would create our brand name and label.

We all went to our assigned war-room (an office we’re allowed to use during the task) and had a quick group discussion. I remember suggesting that we go with a cylindrical bottle over a bear-shape because the Sue Bee brand uses the cylinder for its high-quality honey and the bear for the ordinary honey.

After a half hour or so, the four bee people headed about 60 miles east to the bee farm, while James, Surya and Aaron remained in the war room.

Nicole and Stephanie were both terrified of bees. Two full-fledged phobias. The only reason they were forced to be on the bee team was that all three of the others were allergic. Stephanie was very vocal about her fear, and Nicole was not. As a result, Steph’s fear, and resulting bravery in overcoming it, made it into the episode, and Nicole’s fear and bravery did not. I wasn’t with her this past Sunday, but when everyone was gushing over how brave Stephanie was, I imagine Nicole threw the remote through the window (Nicole is so scared of bees that she refuses to eat honey for any reason). Frank was freaking out too, although he was doing it with more of a sense of humor—the two girls were very seriously upset about the situation.

I, on the other hand, was excited. I’m wretchedly terrified of spiders, but bees have never bothered me. Plus, I knew we’d be wearing suits, so what the hell? Sounded fun.

When we arrived, the guy gave us our astronaut suits, and told us to duct tape around the wrists and ankles—without this, bees would get in the suit, and that, we were told, would be mighty unpleasant. Frank and I helped the girls, both of whom insisted on 12 times as much tape as was actually needed. We were also told that bees sense adrenaline, and will attack us much more if we were afraid, and that they could sting us through our suits if a part of the suit was pressed against our skin. The girls were thrilled to hear this. (Incidentally, one of the normal bee farm workers who was walking by mentioned that we were wearing much higher-quality suits than the workers there normally wear.)

So the guy explained the process to us. There were a few dozen stacks of wooden crates, each crate containing a square-shaped beehive composed 10-15 vertical slats—if you picked up a slat it was dripping with honey. Cool.

We’d use a metal tool to pry off the top of a stack, under which we’d find hundreds of silly little bees, buzzing about and doing their thing. At that point we’d shoot a bunch of smoke into the crate, and then cover it back up with a scented board. The smoke would convince the idiot bees that there was a fire and they’d react by gorging their little bee bodies with honey (because they’d presumably be ditching their hive when the fire got to it and wanted to take as much of their delicious honey with them as possible). The smelly ceiling would disgust the poor bees, and they’d descend down into the bottom crate of the stack.

Then, after leaving the bees with the smoke and ceilings for a few minutes, we’d head back over and lift the ceiling up, and sure enough—no bees in sight. Frank or I would lift up the top crate—the heavier it was, the more honey it contained. We only had room in our truck for 30-40 crates, so we only picked the heavy ones.

It was something I’d watch on The Discovery Channel, but I was in the TV. Cool.

After about an hour, we were finished, and headed back west. There was hideous traffic. Stuck in gridlock, we picked up the phone to call the other three to coordinate, and realized our battery was dead. We had our wall charger, but no car charger. This wasn’t the end of the world, but it was inconvenient. So Frank decides he’s gonna cut up our wall charger and convert it to a car charger by exposing the wires and pressing them against the car port.

Of course, the idiot not only breaks the charger, but he breaks the phone, which short-circuits as soon as he tries this and never works again. There are two reasons Frank did not feel the heat from this stupid mistake:

1) The producers decided to let us stop and buy a new phone on the drive. They were not obligated to let us do this—if they had wanted to start a team controversy they could have said that we were without a second phone the rest of the task. These are the little ways the producers influence the show. They could have screwed Frank over here, and for some calculated reason, decided not to.

2) The stop to buy a new phone slowed us up 30 minutes. In other tasks, losing 30 minutes could have been a huge deal. Luckily for Frank, in this case, time was not a factor.

If either of these circumstances had gone the other way, Frank would have been a huge goat, brought into the boardroom, and probably fired—and he would have been remembered as the “phone charger guy” forever.

Instead, Frank lucked out, this was not a factor, and it didn’t even make the episode—hell, there’s a good chance that Frank’s fat, massive head doesn’t even remember this. And there are a ton of instances just like this. If the Kinetic had ganged up on Heidi week 4 instead of Marisa, no one would even remember that a chicken suit had ever been brought up during that task. The events that make it into the episode become immortalized, and often define a cast member’s character for everyone who watches; everything that doesn’t make the cut becomes a distant, fading and eventually forgotten memory.

Anyway. We rendezvous with the other team pretty late that night (11pm or so?). We are booked at the bottling plant shortly after (both teams had a pre-assigned time to do their bottling). Supposedly, we’d be bottling the exact honey that we harvested earlier that day, though I highly doubt it.

At the time, trying to bottle as many as possible seemed somewhat important. Looking back, both the honey harvesting and the bottling would be completely irrelevant to the outcome of the task. No matter what happened, both teams would automatically end up at their store with ample bottles of honey to sell the following day (the labels wouldn’t matter either, in retrospect—no customer cared about the labels. All that mattered was the price at which we set the bottles, and how well we could convince customers to buy them. And bulk sales. Fucking bulk sales. More on this in a bit).

So suddenly, I’m once again watching the Discovery Channel, this time a special about the bottling process at a honey factory, and once again, I’m in the TV. Very fun task.

It was really cool. Basically a bunch of blank, empty bottles are dumped into a funnel. The machine then stands them up, lines them up, labels them, fills them with honey, caps them, groups them into 3 by 4 rectangles, and boxes them. This left me with no choice but to be intensely fascinated. An efficiency orgasm.

We’re told that we each have to man a station. We wouldn’t be doing much—mainly just watching and stopping the machines when something went wrong.

I’m immediately drawn to the coolest station—the one where 8 pumps shoot honey into 8 bottles at a time. It was really really cool. The lady there told each of us what we had to do. My jobs would be to make sure the pumps were filling the bottles to the correct level (if not I could increase or decrease any of the 8), and to stop the machine immediately if a bottle fell, or if something wasn’t lined up.

How hard could that be?

The machine starts, and everything runs smoothly. Until, about 15 minutes in, a couple of the bottles collide in a weird way and suddenly the 8 bottles that are pushed under the pumps are a half a centimeter off. The result is that the honey pours out, misses the targets, and goes everywhere (imagine pouring 8 16-oz bottles—a gallon—of honey out all over the place. It makes a monstrous mess). So the whole process stops while I clean it up, Frank starts giving me shit, and we start screaming back and forth.

After 10-15 minutes of cleaning, we start it up again. Everything runs smoothly. Until, a few minutes later, a bottle falls over right as it goes under the pumps and knocks everything out of place.

There are few feelings in the world as dreadful as the one you get when you see that the bottles under the pump are off-line. You know that in less than one second, a half gallon of honey will crash down on top of everything, and there’s nothing you can do.

I saw this—in horror—and was like, “NNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO” and lunged for the emergency stop button. But alas, it was too late. Yet again, honey was everywhere.

Frank’s head starts yelling and we start going at it again, and the factory ladies (who trained us, and are now on the side watching everything) are dying with laughter. Frank yells that I “can’t even put syrup in a bottle,” and I tell him I’m gonna pour honey all over his ugly, fat face.

You can see this scene once more here:
http://apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week5_videos.html#1643454

Anyway, looking back, it was fun, but at the time it was a bit stressful—only because there was a slim chance that quantity would actually prove a problem, and it could actually maybe kind of come back to me if we lost because we ran out of bottles. That said, I wasn’t really worried, since there wasn’t much I could have done in the factory, and it didn’t seem like a realistic thing to bring up in a boardroom. As it turned out, we sold 217 bottles out of over 1,000 we bottled.

One other note: the other team screwed up the same exact station. Like always, though, we were much more entertaining so our screw-up made the edit and Kinetic’s didn’t.

We finished around 2am and headed back to the mansion, which was almost an hour away. We got there and had about 2 hours to sleep, since we wanted to be at our assigned selling location (Ralph’s supermarket) at 6am to set up. The task would run from 9am to 2pm. Frank and I had built a huge yellow and black striped stand for the honey, and set that up right in the front of the store. We used other Ralph’s stands for more honey, and Steph and James set up stations with samples. We all kind of fell into roles. Frank and I would sell in the front, Steph and James would sell at their stations, Nicole would call businesses to try and make bulk sales, and Aaron would coordinate things. I don’t remember what Surya was going to do.

So the store opened and we started selling. It was going alright, but since honey never goes bad (literally never), most people have honey already and don’t need more. So I started with the whole, “Feel this bottle—it’s still warm! We harvested it less than 24 hours ago!” It was working alright, but about an hour in, I kept noticing that most people immediately said, “someone already tried to sell me honey—no thanks, no thanks.” We actually had too many people selling. 3 or 4 people could easily cover every customer in the store.

So Aaron decided to do another bulk sales mission. He had to send two people (remember, if the team splits into two groups, each group must have at least two people), so he sent Nicole, who had been doing the research, and me, because I had made the sale the last week. The ironic thing is that last week’s mission was not a good idea, even though it ended up working—we needed all the manpower we had at that restaurant, and it was a real long shot—and this week’s bulk run made perfect sense. We didn’t need everyone in the supermarket selling, and honey is a great thing to sell in bulk—a lot of businesses have honey in their inventory, and it never goes bad, so if you’re getting a good deal you might buy extra. If I were PM for both tasks, with the benefit of hindsight, I would probably kill the bulk sales idea for El Pollo Loco, and for this one I would have two people do nothing all task but focus on bulk sales.

Of course, since we didn’t end up making the sale, they made it look like a bad, hopeless idea. But it wasn’t.

We had two targets in mind. Bakeries, which makes sense, and gas stations, which doesn’t. Why the hell would you try to sell honey at a gas station, you ask? I was asking the same exact question. Nicole brokers large acquisitions of gas stations for a living—it’s her expertise. She noted that gas station owners don’t give a damn what they sell in their store, they only care about one thing—profit margin, the amount they profit when they sell an item as a percentage of what they bought it for (which she explained was actually the “markup” but that gas station owners typically incorrectly call it “profit margin” so she uses the incorrect term in her dealings).

We walked into the first station. Sure enough, he was selling flags, hats, kazoos, bread, magazines, Soy Sauce—there was no rhyme or reason whatsoever. So why not honey as well?

The dossier let us sell the bottles for as little as $1.98, so we priced a case of 12 at somewhere between $24 and $29. We walked in and Nicole (who had told me to let her “do her thing”) launched into her pitch, beginning with “hello” in some Indian dialect, which seemed to please Alex, the Indian gas station owner, greatly. She suggested to him that most of what he is selling produces a 25-50% profit margin. He nodded, and seemed even more intrigued. She explained that we were selling honey for $2 a bottle that’s normally sold for at least $3.99, and that he’d be generating a 100% profit margin off of them. She went on for a bit with some other selling points, including the fact that it doesn’t take up much shelf space, and never goes bad, so he’d never lose any bottles to expiration problems. And with that, he was sold. I was thoroughly impressed (and accordingly smitten). He agreed to buy 2 cases. We explained that he had to come with us to the store—that we weren’t able to deliver the cases to him (dossier), and he said he couldn’t come now but that he’d make his way over to the store (across the street) a bit later. We explained that the “sale” was only going on until 2, and he said he’d go over before then.

So we headed back to Ralph’s, and brought two cases out, and wrote a note on top—“FOR ‘ALEX’--$24/CASE” and we brought them to Aaron and explained that he had agreed reluctantly to buy 2 cases because we told him if he bought less it would be a worse rate. Aaron was thrilled and it was only 11:30am, so we headed back out.

We stopped at a nearby bakery, and gave our pitch, but they already had honey. A restaurant—same thing, no need for more honey. Then we stopped in a bakery right next door to Ralph’s, called “The Love Bakery.” As I noticed the name, I cringed, and for good reason—only minutes later, I’d find myself in an OTF (“On The Fly” interview), being asked, “So is it destiny that you and Nicole make a big sale at The Love Bakery?” This was my life.

We went in to the frickin Love Bakery and there was a young girl working the register, who seemed to be alone in the shop. I gave her the whole spiel, along with my charmingest smile. She said that actually, they had opened recently and didn’t have honey yet. I asked her if they wanted to buy top quality honey at a bulk rate, and she said she’d have to ask the owner. We explained that this was a one-day sale only, so she called the owner, an Israeli guy named Elly. He picked up, and she handed the phone to me. I made my whole pitch—well-known brand name honey at bulk rate, one-day sale only, he could fill the Sue Bee bottles with lesser-known brands after they emptied—and he thought about it…

And said he’d take 20 cases.

Halleluiah!

I tried to keep my cool, and said that we unfortunately could not bring the bottles over, but that if he would come with us to Ralph’s to purchase it, or send someone else over, we’d carry it back for him. He said he’d be in the store later and he’d come by Ralph’s then. I told him that the sale finished strictly at 2pm, and that he had to be there by then. He thought about it, and said he’d try to make it to the store by 1:30. We told him we’d be there to meet him.

We walked out and tried to contain our excitement—we didn’t want to jinx it. We were about to demolish Kinetic with one sale. We decided not to tell the rest of the team because we didn’t want them to sell less hard, in case our sale fell through. We had an hour to kill, so we went to couple more gas stations, but both of their owners were on a lunch break.

We went back to check on Alex. He told us he had already been over to Ralph’s, but that he had only bought one bottle, and that he’d buy more another day if this one sold.

What?

We called Aaron, and asked what the hell had happened, and he said that Alex only asked for one bottle so they only sold him one. This was incredibly frustrating—if either Nicole or I had been there and told him that he had to buy 2 cases to get the bulk deal, he would have. We gave Aaron strict instructions to tell him this was a one day only deal and that he had to buy 2 cases to get that deal, and to show Alex that they had his cases all ready at the register.

Luckily, it didn’t matter, because we had just sold 20 cases at The Love Bakery.

Around 1:15 we headed back there. Still just the girl there. We asked her to call Elly. She did, and he didn’t pick up. Highly stressful. We waited an excruciating 15 minutes and had her call him again at 1:30. I got the number from her and began to call him on my phone. I called him every minute and got nothing, until finally around 1:40 he picked up. I asked him what the deal was. He told us he would not be able to make it there until around 3pm, and that he’d come and pick them up then.

Deep breath.

I told him we had a strict deadline of 2pm, and he thought about it and said there was no way he’d make it there before then. We asked if the girl could come over, and he said no, since she was the only person in the shop. I offered to stand at the door for 10 minutes in case a customer came, and he said he couldn’t do that.

Nnnnnoooooooo.

Such a letdown. We had spent all afternoon thinking we had just made in incredibly successful bulk run, and had won our team the task. It suddenly hit us that Alex had fallen through, and that Elly had fucked us, and now we were heading back completely empty-handed. And we had been so close.

We went back—dejected—and joined the team in a final push, dropping the price of all the bottles to $2 and selling as many as possible before the deadline.

We finished, and it did seem as if we had sold a lot anyway. Maybe, just maybe, we’d win.

So we get to resolution. Trump’s at some weird cult convention in Minneapolis, and Sean announces the outcome:

Arrow: $775
Kinetic: $836

Misery.

If Alex had bought both his cases, he would have spent $43 more, and we still would have lost (thank god—this would have been unspeakably frustrating). However, if Elly had shown up, we would have won by $539. It would have been a landslide.

And no one but me, Nicole, the producers, and now you, will ever know how close we came to that.

I’ve since learned that the other team had a couple mini bulk sales in their store, selling 3 or so cases a few times by flirting with guys. This proved to be the difference. We sold 217 bottles and fell 12 bottles short. Like the car wash and the bathing suits, we lost by a tiny margin. I’d much rather get crushed (like the hideous tour bus task, which I don’t want to speak of ever again).

So whose fault was it? You can’t blame Stephanie, who apparently sold very well. You can’t blame Frank, who apparently did too (lucky dog that the broken cell phone was not a factor). It’s hard to really blame me or Nicole, since having us in the store would not have helped, and a bulk sale mission is by definition a long shot (however, at the time I was not really thinking along those lines, and immediately after finding out we lost, I was completely assuming it would be me and Nicole in the boardroom with Aaron). That leaves Aaron, Surya, and James. Aaron was a decent leader, but he should have sent the bulk mission out earlier, and he didn’t do much selling of his own. Surya apparently was not a convincing salesman, but I did not feel like he was the reason we lost. James did nothing specifically wrong on this task, but he did little specifically right, either, and I had heard through the grapevine that his station sold very little.

So we all went back to the house and moved our stuff back to the good old campsite, and I sat down on the grass and tried to think of ways to defend myself in the boardroom (my main argument was that bulk sales were a long shot and that in two tries I was 1 for 2, and it would be crazy to fire someone for failing to make a bulk sale when they had a 50% success rate).

Surya sat down next to me, and we talked about it. He didn’t realize how vulnerable I felt, and I had no idea how vulnerable he felt (he was mainly vulnerable because a lot of the team didn’t really like him—in fact, he only got along with me and Nicole, and neither of us witnessed the sales in the store—given that, he was indeed in trouble). When I explained my own fears, he said that that was ridiculous, and that there’s no way I should be fired on this task. He said he’d fully back me in the boardroom. I thought about it, and didn’t see a real reason he should be fired, and told him I’d back him as well.

Then I told Surya I wanted to be PM if I didn’t get fired. And I was ready—this was exactly the time I had planned on taking the role. He said he’d back me in that as well, but asked that if he almost got fired but survived that I’d let him take the role instead. The idea—and this is conventional Apprentice wisdom—is that when someone barely makes it out of a boardroom, they should step up as PM the next task as a statement to Trump (hence Aimee being PM after ending up in the final three in Marisa’s boardroom). I agreed—if he really had his back against the wall, I’d back him as PM. He told me that if he was ever PM, he wanted me to be his second in command. I said I would. Then we kissed.

A little later, Aaron brought me aside, and told me that he was definitely not bringing me into the final three. This was a huge relief. I had survived another week. Suddenly, my thoughts could move away from my own defense. I told Aaron that I thought he was a good, understated PM, and that I would say that in the boardroom.

And then I realized that I had told both Surya and Aaron—the two vulnerable people—that I’d back them in the boardroom. Uh oh.

This left me in a bad spot. So I thought about it, and decided that hell, I’d attack James.

The next day, we all went on our long interviews, and I felt much more relaxed—I was safe. I figured Aaron would bring Surya and Nicole, since he was too tight with James to bring him, and he could use the failed bulk sales reason on Nicole (Nicole and not me because she was the official person he had assigned to bulk sales from the beginning, and I had been tacked on at the end). I wasn’t worried—she was not going home.

I talked to her and she wasn’t worried either. She agreed with me that this wasn’t Surya’s fault and told me that it seemed like everyone was ganging up on him because he was an outsider and that she thought that was bullshit. I told her I was attacking James, and she said she agreed with my reasons, and that she would decide between Aaron and James before going in.

Later, I was lying next to the campfire, and James and I somehow got into a conversation about his job, and his wife—he was telling me all about his family.

Eek.

I thought about mentioning my plan to attack him (and as you’ve seen I’ve been confrontational with everyone else I’ve ultimately attacked so far), but decided against it, because I thought there was a good chance Trump wouldn’t ask me who I thought should be fired and then I wouldn’t have to attack him at all, and if I can avoid making an enemy, I’d like to.

Surya was incredibly stressed out all afternoon, while Aaron had a sense of humor about things. I remember Aaron telling me that he had the firing music (Duh-Duh! Duh-Duh! Duh-Duh! duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh Duh-Duh!) stuck in his head all day, and I joked that it played out loud every time he got up and walked, and then stopped the second he sat down, and then resumed when he got up. We were actually laughing really hard about this. Gotta love a good old laid back dude.

So we headed into the boardroom. Steph, James, Aaron, and Frank said Surya should be fired. Surya said Aaron. Then Trump asked me. First I defended Aaron, and then I said James should be fired. I explained that he tends to second-guess things once it’s too late to change them, and that I had heard that he did not sell well at all today. Eek.

Nicole agreed with me, though she noted that both of us were only going on word-of-mouth regarding James’ sales. (My defense of Aaron was completely cut out, and they actually made it look as if I said Aaron should be fired. You can see the truth in the uncut version: http://apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week5_videos.html#1643463)

And then, when I was talking about making a bulk sales run with Nicole, Frank said it.

“Ask him if he wants to marry Nicole.”

I was not expecting this. What the hell was Frank doing??

Trump, though, loved it. One thing that has not been shown is that Trump loves Nicole. Every boardroom so far he had made a comment about what a star she was. So it was no surprise when he started with the whole, “If you can land her, you’d be my hero.”

Well, I landed her. So I guess I’m Donald Trump’s hero. Who would have thought?

Anyway, this was further confirmation that whatever was going on between me and Nicole, it really, actually was going to be a part of the show.

Was this a good thing? I wasn’t sure (still not). Did I want to have a televised relationship? Who the hell has a televised relationship? In the back of my head, I knew that it could be something I’d regret later, and it could definitely end up getting me fired. But on the other hand, Trump didn’t seem to think of it as something to be criticized, the team seemed to love it, and most importantly, what was happening was real--

So what the hell.

I had really gone into, “fuck the cameras, I’m drinking when I want to drink, swearing when I want to swear, putting myself on the line when I have a good idea, etc.” mode, where I didn’t think about consequences at all—I think this was a self-protecting mode, since deep down I knew that if I worried about the consequences, the stress would be overwhelming. And part of being in this mode was not worrying about any consequences with anything involving Nicole.

And then, on Sunday, I saw the “Scenes from next week.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, the consequences!

On the negative side, I’ll be subjecting you and 10 million other people to a dose of PDA (with a capital P) three days from now. My advanced apologies.

However, on the positive side, my father called me after seeing the scenes from next week and said, “Are you crazy?” So whatever you find yourself watching during next week’s episode, just remember that he’s watching that same thing, and that may be a plus overall.

Also, here is a recent text message exchange I had with Nicole’s brother, Jimmy (who I’m very scared of):

Jimmy: I’ll be arriving in LA about an hour before the show on Sunday.

Me: [petrified, trying to play it cool] What show?

Jimmy: A show called The Apprentice. I heard about some kind of romance, and we need to have a word.

Me: [petrified, still trying to play it cool] I thought that show was about business.

Jimmy: So did I. So…did I.

So, my friends, these are the positives that we can extract from this absurd situation that’s occurring (though I may be dead by Sunday).

And it is absurd. I go through four fucking years of college and can’t find one girl I’m into, and then—in this situation—this happens.

Anyway, she’s here visiting me at the moment. She went to sleep a few hours ago, confused as to why I had to write this long recap to hundreds of angry demanding people. So I guess it was worth it.

And with that, I’ll bang my head into the table.

Until the next--