-Wednesday, April 30, 2003 8:32pm-

I went to a campus discussion on affirmative action tonight and I'll tell you this, there are more upset black people on this campus that I'd previously realized.  And I don't blame them.  They feel slighted.  Despite what the university deems to be it's best efforts at diversity, there's still the consensus that things are falling below an acceptable mark.  Earlier today I talked to Brian and Chris at work about the subject and racism in general.  From all these discussions I've come away with a few fresh understandings.  The first is there's an unspoken tension between people of color and whites on this campus.  And until we get rid of that tension, nothing can really move forward.  A perfect example is today when I was talking to Brian at the media desk.  Here you have two black guys having a serious discussion about race.  And then this white guy came up to get a video and it was like all of a sudden everything stopped.  He seemed almost awkward.  Part of our job is to make customers feel comfortable so we disarmed the situation and everyone loosened up a little.  But it's just that I'm sure situations like that occur all the time.  There's nothing wrong with talking about race.  It's not a taboo subject.  Yet Brian and I subconsciously stopped talking as that guy approached the counter.  Even when I talked to Chris, who's white, he lowered his voice when he mentioned that he thought that there weren't enough minorities here and this campus was full of rich white people.  There's that ever present universally agreed upon idea that discussion about race must be made in a kind of hushed confidence when mixed races are present.  If we can't even talk openly about it, what kind of progress can we make. 

Another problem is the divide between the level of interaction between minorities and whites on this campus.  Of course this is no surprise.  But I mean it goes beyond hanging out and making friends.  It's way down at the level of perceptions.  It's like all these people are actually turned off to dealing with each other unless they have to.  Everyone wants to stay in their comfort zone so blacks stick with blacks and whites stick with whites.  But this being a university, some interaction is mandatory.  So while the 11% of minorities inevitably learn to interact with whites, fewer whites ever learn to socialize with them in return.  When they do venture outside of that comfort zone, anything can happen.  I think many white people are afraid to say or do the wrong thing around blacks, so they mainly keep to their comfort zone by sticking with the other 89%.  This keeps the races apart and frustrates everyone.

So we've established that we can't talk, and because we can't talk we can't hang out.  Anyone else see a problem here.  It's not diversity even if you have a 50% "minority" population and a 50% white population if they don't socialize and relate to one another.  Personally, I don't see great strides in racial bonding happening here any time soon.  No even with an evenly split population.  We need to address the underlying problems first.  And that I don't know how to do.

There are few simple pleasures afforded to the college student on break.  Going home to your own house.  Sleeping in your own bed.  Waking up in your own room.  Eating your mother's cooking.  Hugging your pet.  Laughing with old friends.  These things are cool and all, but nothing really compares to that feeling of familiarity you get from just being home.  Home is that place where everything fits effortlessly.  I went shopping at the flea market near my house in NYC on Sunday.  And when I say near my house I mean a good 30 minute walk.  I find that whenever I go home I have to do certain things to remind myself of where I am.  I have to go window shopping on Queens Blvd.  I have to see a movie at the bootleg Main St. Cinema.  I have to ride the E train and read the graffiti etched in the glass.  I have to ride around the city at night with the local peeps.  I have to rent half a dozen movies at the library and incur $4 in late fees.  I have to search the streets of china town in search of impossibly cheap anime.  I have to walk insanely long distances for the sole purpose of saving a buck fifty in bus fare.  I helps to remember.  This time I went home to NY to get fitted for a graduation suit.  That was on Thursday.  Since I didn't have to be back to DE until Monday night, I took the time to get reacquainted with the city.  And do you know what the first thing I noticed was (besides the lack of an obvious racial majority anywhere)?  I noticed that New Yorkers can dress.  I mean far be it for me to malign Delaware fashion, but it's like comparing chocolate and vanilla to Baskin Robbin's 31+ flavors.  You can't put people from so many different races, ages, cultures, and beliefs together without creating a major opportunity to look good.  And nowhere was this more apparent than at the flea market I went to on Sunday.  Beautiful Chinese and Indian people in every major, minor and no-name brand label.  Old professional men in Polo hats and sports jackets.  Young Latin and black girls in Guess this and DKNY that.  White folks in button-down shirts and red Timbs.  Adults with baby carriages and infants.  Different sizes and body shapes all equally comfortable in their chosen style of clothes.  A real cross-section of society.  And best of all for me, not one Abercrombie tee.  It's the only time in my life that I've reconsidered the value of school bussing programs.  UD undergrads should be bussed to this flea market every weekend to learn the value of diversity.

Despite my best attempts at describing it, it's hard to get the feel of a place in writing.  If you ever get the chance to go to Jamaica, NY, go to the Aqueduct racetrack flea market on Rockaway blvd. on a sunny weekend.  Tell me what you think.

By the way, Connie, you rock on ice.  Your letter so made my week.

Ok, now is a good time to write this while I'm nice and drunk.  There was mad drama at my job today.  I worked for like 6 and a half hours and had to put up with all sorts of in-fighting over people who are supposed to be friends.  I mean, what the hell.  What's the good of getting heated over something as simple as the correct way to stack videos in a room.  It's stupid.  Where am I going with this?  I dunno.  But the quote of the day goes to Chris.  He said: "Work is like Bob's kryptonite."  That was funny as hell.  I've gotten so many good quotes over the last few days.  Don't think I've forgotten about you.  I've just been too lazy to update the quotes page is all.  Hmm, Guinness is impairing my thought faculties.  Funny how I can still type tho.  Oh yeah, before I forget, I saw one of my 50%s today.  For those of you who don't know (which should be everyone because i haven't told this to anyone) my 50%s are the two girls on campus who each hold half of my heart.  LOL.  Yeah, how sad is that.  But really, if you saw them you'd be like 'god damn she's fine'.  I mean it's the kind of girl you'd go up to and be like 'seriously, they should celebrate your ass'.  It's just that good.  But yeah, these chiles have my heart on a string.  That's more of my personal slang by the way (chile = hot girl).  Figure it out.  Oh, I noticed something the other day too.  Let me think for a minute..... oh, ok.  Yeah, I noticed that beauty will never replace style.  That's like a capital NEVER.  I mean you can be the hottest girl in Delaware but if you're just physically attractive and have no taste then people will see right through you.  I saw the banginest girl on tuesday just chillin against a wall in DuPont in a long black trench coat and I was like yo, you get so many points for that.  It's the look, plus the clothes, plus the confidence behind it.  Give me a girl with style over a hot girl any day.  This is how I know my wife isn't going to be classically beautiful.  I don't want a beautiful girl.  I want a girl that can go from 0 to 60 in the style department and just completely turn heads.  Like my 50%s, for instance.  They are like polar opposites but they each have their own style.  One is mad ghetto, the other is like a refined Lucy Liu that walks around with this awesome expression on her face that says 'I could be a dominatrix, but it would be beneath me'.  Damn yo, maybe I should not drink before I post from now on.  lol.  Guinness is MY kryptonite.  And I'm so tired of pink.  Well no, that's not really fair.  I don't have anything against pink but what's up with the sudden surge this spring.  Pink coats, pink flip flops, pink shirts, pink hats, pink sweats and windpants?!?!  I mean enough is enough.  Rock the windpants and the hoodies but someone tell me why they must be pink.  And another thing, Kat stopped by the media dept today.  She changed her hair.  She looked nice, and I mean nice (if you could see me right now I'm giving the OK symbol with my hand).  Anyhoo, maybe 72oz of Guinness is my limit.  It's hard to concentrate on the computer screen already.    

Hey all you katz and kittenz.  I can't possibly fill you in on the past 20 or so days.  Ok, I prolly could but I just don't wanna.  Doing catch up posts is like writing that 'What I Did On My Summer Vacation' paper in middle school that you just do to get it over with.  Actually I don't think I've ever really written one of those things.  It would have been like half a paragraph anyway.  I mean how many ways can a little kid expand on 'slept a lot, ate a lot, read a lot, played lots of video games and had the occasional water gun war'?  Eh.

I will say this though.  In light of St. Patrick's day I've come to an understanding about drinking (the idea really came to me about a week ago but what the hell, it sounds more wisdomic if I relate it to a holiday).  I used to think that people got drunk only because it both a) makes it easier to speak your mind and b) relieves some of the responsibility associated with it.  But I just realized that that's only part of the equation.  Maybe a bonus reason is the temporary credibility of being drunk.  People actually pay more attention to things you say under the influence just because they know you're telling it straight.  I call it the Banner effect.  Bruce Banner may be a cool guy, but it's not until he turns into the Incredible Hulk and starts tearing ish up that people start taking pictures.  If Banner tells you he doesn't like your car you'd take it with a grain of salt, but if the Hulk pulled the doors off the thing you'd believe him wouldn't you.  The Banner effect comes in handy for getting a touchy point across.  Combine it with the first two effects and you could easily profess your undying love one day and feign ignorance the next.  And besides, what good is pouring your drunken heart out if no one's really listening.

You know what?  I actually started to miss writing about all the stupid stuff I do all day.  Gotta get back in the saddle.

Ok, worse case scenario, I think I may accidentally overdose on vitamin C in the near future.  I'm stuck in this mode where I come home and can never remember if I took my vitamins for the day.  See I almost always eat breakfast / lunch at Kent now so I have to wait until the evenings to take my daily allowances of whatnot, but sometimes I have a snack before I head out, so when I get back I'm all confused.  So it's possible I'm doubling up and getting like 2166% of my daily C, plus twice all the stuff that's in my multivitamin.  But I figure hey, it's like drinking lots of orange juice right?  Sometimes I wonder how I've survived this long.

Did you know the Japanese version of The Ring had a sequel.  It's pretty good.  I can so see them remaking it in english.  Ring 2 has some pretty spooked-up scenes involving the little boy from the first one, the girl that went crazy and of course the evil little girl.  If the american translation of the first movie is any indication, they should be able to do a lot more with part dos.  With any luck I'll be able to track down the book too.  Yay.

And for all you movie buffs, check out the latest stream of up and coming titles fresh off the IMDB website:

American Pie 3, Desperado 2, Exorcist: Beginnings, and Hypercube (Cube 2).

I'm psyched as a mofo about Cube and American Pie 3.  The new Cube is supposed to have gravity, parallel universe and dimensional traps.  The fan reviews made it seem like people had already seen it though.  Who knows.  All I know is that AP3 is going to be off the heezy.  And Stifler's back baby!   

A couple of nights ago I got the idea to update the list of things I like from my oct 18 y2k post.  It's nothing fancy, but I had fun with this one:

my webpage [dragonfly remix], bubble wrap, Text Twist, Chinese astrology, rey.swoo.net, McIntosh apples, pyrochromatic.com, Bandits, girls in red sneakers, the dollar store, secondhand t-shirts, the media dept, fog, hot showers at 3am, baggy pants, foreign movies, confidence, subtitled anime, Bjork, getting cash in the mail, surveys, the old lady @ Kent dining hall, my cinnamon housecat, Saturday mornings, the sun through my window, yummy food, SCPAB, homemade sweet&sour, Payco coconut ice-cream, splashing in puddles, being a black boy, paintball, Iron Chef, seeing someone read something that makes them smile, mp3 players, video game emulation, desk graffiti, haircuts, Psyduck, bubble baths, flirting, 15 minute Chinese takeout, Lakai sneakers, having my own kitchen, dancing to the radio, finding shortcuts around campus, fat DE squirrels, staying up late, sleeping on the couch, eating at new places, good luck charms, gin rummy, pen pals, Goya Malta, feeding stray cats, cleaning my apt, the mustang 5.0 GT, all the friends that have my back, photographs, feeling connected, a warm blanket in a chilly room, cornbread fresh from the oven, having exact change, seeing McDonalds light up at 5am, jaywalking, accents, friendly cashiers, cool jackets, getting dressed in the morning, Playstation, roommates, post workout fatigue, sleep, shopping w/o the intent to buy, the last 6 years, cute little kids, collecting quotes, giving people street directions, feelin sexy, Cowboy Bebop, international students, that bakery smell, small favors, right now

Has it been a week already?  Here's what I've learned, in no particular order:  I could've made so much loot shoveling snow.  There are freaky naked glass people on the back of the Art House building.  The only thing better than time spent with good friends is time spent with good friends while inebriated.  Alcohol helps me think outside the box.  Working massive overtime during a rainstorm sometimes means you have to mop the floor.  All the red brick sidewalks at UD turn it into a big aqueduct during a storm.  Walking in the fog can make you feel all warm and fuzzy about your campus.  They still make Godzilla movies.  My pancakes officially kick ass.  The foreign version of The Ring is really worth seeing.  Jamie has the most awesome pants I've ever seen.  Some people never change yet seem to get cooler every year.  The girl of my dreams doesn't know I exist.  Sleep is so not overrated.  Neither is a good breakfast.  I can't resist the lure of inexpensive clothes.  Winslow Rd goes straight from Morris Library to the video store.  My upstairs neighbors are vampire wrestlers from india.

This is how it should be.

Day two of hurricane 03 and already I'm bored.  No school again tomorrow.  I never realized how much the cool stuff that happens to me revolves around just walking around going to class.  I look out the window and imagine this is what the early stages of nuclear winter must look like.  Right before the Terminators show up.  Even the McDonalds has been closed for the last two days.  Ooh, I should take a picture.

There's still gobs and gobs of snow outside.  I just saw an suv almost get stuck trying to leave the parking lot.  I sure feel sorry for the kids living in the house I was in last year.  That 2 car driveway was hell to shovel.

On the bright side, I just got my jury duty check in the mail.  80 tax free bucks.  I take back anything nasty I ever said about the jury duty system.  Except the stuff that was true.  

I have never seen so much snow outside.  They say it's supposed to continue into Monday night.  No classes tomorrow.  I'm so freakin giddy.  =]

Yesterday I spent all day at Media.  I went in at 9am and came home at 8:30ish.  I wasn't even officially on shift betw 1 and 5 but I figured I'd just hang around and watch free cable.  Me, Asif and Ed were there and pretty much no one else because the campus was covered in snow.  Then people they knew showed up and the Media dept turned into a spontaneous chill spot.  It's so cool when the same people work the weekends every semester.  Then I made the mistake of going to see Daredevil.  It was only slightly less sucky than I thought it would be.  And Asif was right, it only had one or too really good parts.  Ben Affleck wasn't that bad but they got the DD character completely wrong.  He never was a heartless vigilante that didn't care if his enemies died.  The real DD was more like the comic book Batman that never wanted to risk losing a life.  Colin Farrell was pretty tight as Bullseye though.  He's got the slightly crazy maniac thing down pat.  I think I prolly enjoyed the trailers for X-Men2, Cradle 2 the Grave and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen more than the actual movie.

Quote of the day: "Ahh, the art of snowball warfare." -anchor on NBC10 News

Wow, I slept for like 9 and a half hours last night.  In my street clothes no less.  I feel like a jillion bucks.  Which of course makes it extra hard to drag myself out into the frozen wasteland that is our campus.

.  .  .  

But I did.  Got some serious fliering done but the day went by so incredibly quickly.  I had planned to see Daredevil but I missed the matinee and then went to Joe's to drop off Old School tickets.  Wound up ordering a pizza and watching Invader Zim and Fastlane.  I think he fails to see the beauty of an undercover cop show directed like a music video.  =]

And I'm so going to write a letter to Nickelodeon and protest there representation of men in some of their cartoons.  We were watching some fairy godparent cartoon and the kid wished for all the girls to be gone on valentines day, so the world was divided in two with gals on one side and guys on the other.  The girls' side was all pink and organized and clean with the woman riding around on ponies in togas.  The guys' side was all grungy and violent.  There were like sports stores everywhere and shrines to tools.  And the guys were all wearing dirty wifebeaters and underwear, and sang songs about fighting, bodily functions, fatty foods, body hair, and public urination.  This kid was like "but I still feel like something's missing" and this other kid popped out of a dumpster with a hamburger and a burning stick and was like "I've got food and fire. what else do I need?"  LOL  What the hell is that?  The only reason they got back together in the cartoon was because the girls missed taking care of the guys and the guys missed being taken care of.  How old do you have to be to get the joke in that.  I mean it was hella funny but come on.  Since when do guys need saving from themselves?  And granted that the girls' world was full of shoe stores and chocolate boutiques but they still had some kind of democratic government.  Meanwhile over in guytown they're having fistfights for fun.  So I think mayhaps we need to reexamine gender roles.  Yeah, we have groups like SAGE that are working for gender equality but isn't that more about advancing the idea of equality so women are accepted on equal terms with men.  Who's telling guys that they don't have to walk around in undershirts and ignore their ladies to be more of a guy.  And I think the major reason we have this Mars/Venus divide is because for the most important part of life girls grow up with girls and boys grow up with boys.  We never make those years up.  That's why Hersville was pink and Himsville was dirty.  When we lack information we just fall back on the stereotypes.  There's no law against rough and tumble gals or guys that drink soymilk.  =]  I know none of this stuff is earth shattering but when you see it played out over and over and over on tv and movies you have to remind yourself every now and then to come back to reality.  And maybe kids don't need exposure to it in the first place.

I hope this weekend doesn't suck too much.  What with work and the snow and a crapload of studying and not being able to go to the computer show now, I'm going to need something to get my mind of things by Monday.  I don't even want to sleep right now.  I was listening to some old school Michael Jackson from long before he became a baby dangler on the way home from Joe's and I'm still in a good mood.  Then I was singing along to some Weezer and a guy from across the street was looking at me funny.  Headphone music is mad addictive.  It's like dancing to the radio.  You can't resist.

Ok, remember what I said yesterday about going out to buy food.  Ain't gonna happen.  I just got in and my eyes are watering from the cold.  I was waiting to see if the tear would freeze in mid-air before it hit the ground.  So here's the plan.  I break out the leftovers and bake some cornbread.  I make rice, I make pasta, then I hibernate like a beast till morning.

Think I saw Jess today on the way to my first class.  It looked like jRiv and walked like jRiv and was dressed like jRiv so it must have been her.  And she wasn't wearing a hat.  Is she crazy?

Hey, did you know that in 1995 the operating loss for Amtrak was 1 billion dollars?  And it has massive losses every year.  I was reading all this stuff for my Transportation Design class today and apparently Amtrak has lost money continuously since it was created by the govt in 1970.  It practically lives on federal grants and in 1979 it lost 28 times what it made, with a deficit of 600 million dollars.  How can that be?  Who would design a transit system that inherently loses money.  That's like playing Monopoly and having to pay a thousand dollars every time you pass GO.  It doesn't make any sense.

How crappy is it that I just remembered I have a class on Monday night and can't go to the advanced screening of Old School.  It's like a curse.  They just can't stand to see me happy. =[

So on the way home tonight I was window shopping for a new hat and who should I spy in Village Imports but Rachel from my graduating class.  Seems she's still hanging around Newark for a while, doing the interview thing.  She told me about this peace walk they're going to have on Main Street this Saturday between 12 and 1pm.  I think it's part of a bunch of big anti-war demonstrations going down on Feb 15.  There's also one in NY among other places around the world.  So I told her I'd help her out by posting the flier on campus.  Then she reminded me that it would have to be officially stamped by UD.  That's when my advertising spidey-sense kicked in and I told her I could get it stamped for her.  Of course on further thought, I probably can't.  So my new idea is that I'm going to go to Media tomorrow and make a half dozen copies of this thing.  Then I'm going to pirate advertise on the boards around campus and hopefully they won't get ripped down until after Sat afternoon.  It's worth a shot.  Maintenance loves to be super efficient about weeding out pirates.  It's probably an actual paid position; pirate flier ripper-downer.  Maybe they get a special glove.  Usually I get pissed when I see people breaking the ad board rules just because it makes it harder for the rest of us who have to legitimately advertise.  Space is a commodity and location is everything, ya know.  But I figure I'll make an exception just this once.

Who knew writing would be so time consuming.  I don't even know if I'm getting anywhere.  I've got a little over 4 pages so far but I dunno how much of that I'm going to have to rewrite.  It's coming along though.  I think.  If I didn't think I was even remotely good at this I would have stopped a long time ago.  *sigh*  I need a shoulder massage.  What's a hard working black writer have to do for a little pampering around here.

At least work was diverting.  Seeing everyone at Media put me back in the swing of things and officially kicked off the semester.  3 of the viewing stations are already out of order.  We got 2 ginchy new dvd/vhs players.  The weekend shifts are under minority rule, as per usual, and Nikki is still cute as hell.  Yay.  =]

Plus, I only wound up spending $176 on books (instead of 234).  Lieberman's actually had used books for what I thought was a new text.  I wonder how much money the University bookstore makes each year due to ignorance alone.  I'm sure I've paid them more than my fair share.  They're such shameless crooks.  They'll rip your ass off and sell it back to you for double the price.

So what's up with this code orange we're in.  Should we really be worried?  Today I was watching the news and getting all paranoid for my family and peeps in NY.  I mean I could care less what happens to me as long as my family is ok.  I returned my mom's phone call and she told me to buy some extra canned food and water.  Sure, why not.  But the closest target to us is prolly Dover Air Force Base.  That's a bit of a hop skip and a jump.  Even so, better safe than sorry, right.  But damn, if Newark Delaware isn't safe then what the hell is?

Random thought: with all the duct tape and plastic sheeting flying off the dept store shelves out there, I can smell a gag valentine's Day gift in the making.

Hopefully if I'm not shut in against nuclear fallout by Sunday I'll get to go to the Marketpro computer show at the BCC with Jason.  And I'll FINALLY get to buy some more memory for my computer.  I'm sure Triumph will appreciate that.  Then on Monday is the advanced screening of Old School in Trabant.  It's free people.  Come out and support SCPAB.  My plan is to actually see the movie this time, not get there two hours after it ends like I did last year for Red Dragon.

It snowed again today.  It snows every day.  But it didn't really put a damper on things.  Class was fun.  The bad news is that I have to spend $234 on books this semester.  That's for two books.  117 bones a book.  Do you know how much money that is?  I don't think I know anything worth $117.  Even if you stuck a bunch of my thoughts together.  I better start workin.  And I do, tomorrow.  First day back at the Media dept.  I'm excited for no reason at all.  Maybe just the prospect of someone paying me to do something titillates me.  Anyway.  I didn't even want to post tonight because I'm so amped about this short story I'm writing.  I got the idea from the most totally random place.  I'm so hyped I'm not even going to tell you about it so I won't accidentally jinx it.  When I finish it I'll definitely post it to the website though.  The only other thing that happened today was activities night at Trabant University Center.  That's the event where all the campus clubs get to put out displays and recruit optimistic and unsuspecting undergrads.  Free stuff too.  Not to mention that SCPAB (our beloved SCPAB) had both the best display location and the tightest free stuff.  I don't know who they paid off to make that happen.  ^_^  Oh, and I was at this one random table and I asked the girl if I could have a free sour apple blow pop and she was like 'well are you interested in united sororities of america' and I was like '...... not exactly'.  Good times.  

Word to the wise: turkey meatballs, not a good idea.

First day of classes went off almost without a hitch.  Did some food shopping before heading off to class at 5:30 then came home and cooked for like an hour and a half.  It would have been perfect except for this stupid weather.  Absolutely hate it.  I don't mind the snow so much, it's just that I almost killed myself a dozen times walking home on the frozen sidewalks.  For every 10 feet I walked today I must have hydroplaned 2.  At one point in front of a gas station I was literally sliding sideways into the street every time I tried to move.  I got so pissed that I just walked for a block in the turning lane.  What the hell is going on.  It's never been this icy before, especially at night.  It's like a deathtrap out there.  If I die in the street I'm going to haunt this town for a thousand years.

On a lighter note, I think my guardian spirit may be a yellow Mitsubishi Lancer.  Let me explain.  Once upon a time when I was just getting into cars I thought the Lancer was the coolest thing on wheels.  I guess it's still kind of tight but I've since moved on.  Anywho, back then I noticed this yellow Lancer with the license plate EK8 that was always parked near the Newark CoOp.  I'd pass it on the way to class and I started taking it as a good luck sign if I saw it driving around campus.  Well to make a long story short, today I saw it pass as I left home this morning and it passed again as I was coming home tonight, right around my apt.  It's the first time it's ever done that so in some strange way I see it as a good omen for the new semester.  And why not.  If a guardian spirit can be a rabbit or an owl or a penguin that says "slide", maybe it can be a canary yellow 4wd Mitsubishi Lancer 4 door.  Just thought I'd share that with you.  ^_^

Speaking of canaries, here's the quote of the day, compliments of Late Night with Conan O'Brien: 

"Sex is the canary in the coal mine of love."  

See, cuz like the canary warns the miners right, and then there's the gas and the choking and the running..... yeah, you get it.

Saw an ad for someone selling the Power Glove on the UD Classifieds page.  Yeah, that Power Glove!  As featured in the movie The Wiz starring Fred Savage.  LOL.  And he's asking $35.  That's a bit much isn't it?  I mean didn't the Power Glove have like one game for it.  It was like ROB for Atari.  No point.  Strictly for enthusiasts.  And by enthusiasts I mean parents who wanted to buy their kid's affection.  I should email this guy and find out if he sold it because if he did, I'm so bringing my nintendo Laser Scope up here after spring break.  People will buy anything retro nowadays.  And Jason, he works at Comcast, yo.  That's your boy.

This little quiz popped up after I checked my email this morning so I took it and apparently I have only a remedial understanding of tools.  Which doesn't surprise me one bit.  I couldn't tell a U screw from a quarter inch picney flange.  So I retook the test, intentionally getting everything wrong so I could see the correct answers to the questions I'd guessed at.  I did so poorly they gave me a tool dictionary that I'm now sharing with you.  It could come in handy.

So I conquered pancakes this weekend.  I actually made pancakes that didn't stick to the pan, turn into coal, get all poptarty (crisp on the outside, gooey on the inside) when I ate them, or generally suck in any way.  They were good.  This is a big moment for me.  I no longer have any kryptonite in the kitchen.  Mwuhahahaha.

Ok, check this out.  I had a dream last night where I went to the movies with my brother and his girlfriend.  I don't remember what we went to see but the coming attractions were off the hook:

The first one was this animated Disney movie kind of like Lilo and Stitch.  It was about this quirky modern cartoon character that goes back into black and white cartoons to find love.  He kind of looked like a small bat or a mouse.  They showed this big black and white ballroom scene where he was dancing with some girl toon.  As the screen fades to a blue green circle he's says "Marco" in this funny cartoon voice and the title Marco Polo comes up.

The second preview started out showing sweeping overhead camera shots of this futuristic city built around a sort of desert landscape with cliffs like in a Wile E Coyote cartoon.  There were all these black glass buildings and lots of black grain silo type things clustered together.  The whole time this computeristic female voice was talking eerily in the background.  And then right when the camera gets over the center of the city, the voice says "Systems analysis complete. Subject is Fordo Baggins." and you see a black rider swoop down into the camera on one of those dragon things from Lord of the Rings 2.  And the typical movie narrator voice comes on and says something like "Before the giant events of Lord of the Rings, there was the making of the ring."  Then the screen shows Lord of the Rings 0 in that fancy yellow lettering, and the zero looked like a ring.  I remember sitting in the theatre like 'what the hell?'.  So apparently there's like a supercomputer in the past that predicts Frodo gets the ring.  Remember, you heard it here first.

The third trailer started out like a normal Star Wars Episode 3 trailer.  It showed Samuel L Jackson and Yoda blocking lasers with their light sabers before ducking into a hut but Yoda gets hit.  Then it showed Anakin jump into a huge laser gun turret and Obi Wan was like "He's using the force to take out the leader."  Then Anakin started firing and they showed the plane he was shooting at like 5 miles away trying to dodge the fire before it blew up.  Then Imperial Walkers were attacking this city and the people were running away.  And now the dream gets retarded because all of a sudden Gollum is in it and he's herding this giant purple blob into this huge cage.  Then there's a giant Elmo doing something and then I'm in the movie with two storm troopers and Fozzie the Bear from the muppets.  Everything kind of deteriorates after that point.  Blah.

I'm kind of psyched now man.  Lord of the Rings Zero looks off the heezy.  Of course none of that stuff really happens in the series but maybe someone could make the movie anyway.  If any Tolkien fanboy and amateur director is reading this I'd be willing to sell you the rights for real cheap.  ^_^

You know what I just realized?  I don't know of any female movie directors.  Why is that?  There's got to be some, right.  Think I'll do an internet search.  But how much would it suck if there weren't any woman in movie directing.

I never thought I'd get so tired of snow.  You know what I want to know?  How come every time I plan to get a haircut it snows the same night.  My afro is the only thing keeping my head warm in this nipple hardening weather and as long as it continues I can't get a decent trim.  Dumb groundhog.

You may have noticed I'm doing this 'post midnight' thing instead of putting the time in like I usually do.  It just makes it easier to separate my days.  Thursday won't start until I go to sleep and wake up... usually sometime around noon.  Yeah, how bad is that.  But kind of understandable when you hit the sack at 4am.  Damn, it's 1:22 and I haven't even had a real dinner yet.  Just a late lunch of dinner type foods and a post late lunch snack of McIntosh apples that Joe brought me from the store.  I think I'll close out the day with sweet and sour chicken leftovers.  Joe's been on this soymilk kick for a while now.  How exactly do you get milk from a bean, that's what I'd like to know.  I mean, I've milked cows and that' hard enough.  That's what I miss.  I miss feeding the goats on the farm in Jamaica.  On the plank steps of that old house with the pigeons in the rafters and the baby kittens in the back room.  Le-sigh.  Anyway.

Spent most of the day resizing pictures and finishing my ny pics page.  Hmm, someone just got busted by the cops outside for drag racing.  I think it's universally agreed that lots of people think they looked like dorks when they were younger and would rather not revisit those times.  ^_^  I still refuse to believe that my nose is that big.  What the hell.  But hey man, you've gotta start somewhere right.  Like Steve Harvey said: "I wasn't always sure about these big lips.  But I know what to do with them now."

And I'm getting some drama from persons that I know on IM.  I'll put it like this:  Guys are dicks.  And they'll get away with it as long as you let them.  You're too smart for that and you know this.  It may not feel like it yet but this is life, not just college, not just freshman year.  Step back a minute and reevaluate.  Don't sell yourself short chica.  

I went nutz and made sweet and sour chicken for dinner tonight.  Actually it turned out looking more like dysfunctional popcorn shrimp than sweet and sour anything.  But I get an E for effort, right?  And it still tastes great.  I'd rather have that than something that looks professional but tastes like crap any day.  Be that as it may, I'm not sure Ms. So would approve of me butchering her recipe and turning a 1 hour sweet n sour dish into a 3 hour popcorn shrimp ordeal.  Yeah well, we all can't afford fancy things like woks and deep fryers and.... wooden spoons.  Hey, at least I didn't start a grease fire like last year.  But let's just keep that on the q-t.

So I was in the Pathmark buying ingredients n stuff for dinner and I overheard something that kind of disappointed me.  I was in the fruit isle picking up a couple cans of pineapple chunks and right on the other side are the Goya products.  Well this young teenage girl was coming down the isle behind me with two other young people and she pointed to the Malta bottled drinks and said something like 'I can't stand that stuff.  My brother made me try it once and it was disgusting.'  I actually thought that was kind of funny because I already had plans to buy a whole case of those drinks (which I love).  But then she went on to say 'I don't even know why they have this stuff here.  There's not a big hispanic population around here.'  I was like what?  That's like going into a video store and being like 'what are all these foreign movies doing here?  there's not a big foreign population around here.'  Lots of people buy Goya stuff.  Why?  Because it's good and it's cheap.  Well some of it's cheap.  But if we're going to live in her world of a culture specific selection then she'd have to put back half the food in her cart.  I had half a mind to snatch her Skippy and say 'Gimme my black man's peanut butter!'  Maybe I'm being too hard on her.  She was young and it was probably an innocent comment.  And young people say stuff like that but the problem is that young people who say stuff like that grow into old people who say stuff like that.  Heaven forbid they might even start to believe it.  Attitudes like that need to be nipped in the bud.  Right square in the bud!  A supermarket, like a library, should be a place of equal representation, not just for variety's sake, but for the sake of the people who make the stuff that we take for granted.  I remember not long ago when Fresh Samantha was just getting its foothold in Newark.  What would have happened if everyone went to the Scrounge and was like 'we don't need another fruit drink. get the hell outta here.'  We would not have the Fresh Samantha with which we mix our rum today.  So open your mind little girl.  Support both the Goya company and the peanut farmer in your weekly purchases.  That even reminds me of a line from Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture, the book I'm currently reading:

"The figure held a pastry in the palm of one hand, while in the other, she balanced the planet Earth on a single finger. The caption read:  Ivana realizes that by eating a single danish she is changing the world."

Ok, what the hell.  I've spent the last half-hour google searching the internet on info about the death of Kevin Smith after I read on several sites that he had died in Feb 2002.  I was like how could Silent Bob, the director of Mallrats, Clerks, and all sorts of other indy classics have died a whole year ago without me finding out about it until now.  Further complicating matters is that his profile on the Internet Movie Database not only says that he's still alive but starring in a minor role in the new Daredevil movie.  Turns out it was Kevin Smith the actor who played Ares on the Hercules series that had died in 02.  I am way too confused right now.  I think even their wives have the same first name.  This is what happens when you stay up past 4am.

Last night was fun.  In my dreams that is.  Once again I had a freaky series of dreams interrupted by my alarm clock.  I think it actually helps to set your alarm to wake you up.  Not so loud that you get out of bed to turn off the music but just loud enough to notice.  Dave and Ash were in this one and we were back at my old grammar school (which they didn't even go to by the way).  We were messing around playing bball in the gym and all these thug little kids showed up and wanted to get a game.  They started shooting for captains and I took a head count of over ten people.  So I was like 'Do you want to run a full?' and no one was sure what was going on.  Dave was like 'Come on let's go' and when we got out in the hall I was like 'I want to play ball for the first time in 5 years and you want to go?'  We went to another gym where some guys were setting up a stage and then all of a sudden the principal was directing a bunch of us to do arts and crafts.  It was so retarded because it was the three of us, some little kids, and like the janitors standing behind these fold up tables coloring paper flowers.  She (the principal) was on a microphone and I guess I missed something she said because everyone else was doing stuff and Dave came up with this green thing he'd done and was like 'Where's your flower?'.  Then we left there and we were running around the neighborhood for a while until we got to this muddy park area.  Other people started showing up and that's when it hit me that this had to be a dream.  Then I did something I've never done before.  I checked to see if it was a dream.  I don't quite know how to describe it but I sort of reached back into my consciousness and bumped against this familiar fuzzy gray wall in my mind that was like the edge of my dream world.  It's kind of like sailing to the edge of the world and looking over the rim to see the ocean pouring off into space.  It's just that freaky.  Then I stopped because I knew if I kept pushing against the wall I'd wake up.  Looking back now, it's probably this trick that's let me wake myself up from bad dreams in the past.  I just find that familiar feeling and keep concentrating until I find myself in bed.  

So there I am standing in the mud, watching people set up a flea market or something around us, knowing I'm on borrowed time before my second alarm wakes me up.  But I still wasn't convinced.  How could this be a dream if I was completely aware of what was going on.  I could even feel a cool breeze blowing against my face.  Aside from the dude that pulled up in the backseat of a car driven by his dog, everything was norm.  Maybe the dream world is like the Matrix.  Everything feels completely real once you're inside it but if you look in the right spot you find the loophole.  Unfortunately a few minutes later I woke up before I could do anything Neo-like.  I tried to get back to sleep into some dream about being a samurai but it didn't take.  But this is deep stuff.  If we can feel complex sensations and think complex thoughts in dreams, maybe there's no limit to the things we can do.  Maybe I'm still dreaming and we only wake up when we die.  You never know.

I forgot to wish you a happy Groundhog's day yesterday.  The damn thing saw its shadow, so it's 6 weeks more winter.  Curse you Phil, and your eerie psychic powers.

Most of you probably know about the movie-list website right?  It's on my links page, so of course you know about it.  ahem... sure.  Anyway, it's the site where you can see trailers for all the newest film releases if you miss them in theatres.  At least I used to think they had the newest stuff.  Then last night I found this place and it turns out there are at least half a dozen tight new movies that movie-list shamefully neglects to mention.  Check out this list:

2 Fast 2 Furious, Freddy vs Jason, Harry Potter 3, Lord of the Rings 3, Matrix Revolutions, Spider-Man 2, Star Wars 3, and Tomb Raider 2.

Granted most of them don't have viewable trailers yet but you can still find out about the actors, plots, and browse through some nice movie stills.  And how else would I know that Dr. Octopus and the Lizard are going to be in Spider-Man 2.  I think Sam Neil (Jurassic Park 1 and 3) is gonna play Doc Oc.  How cool is this!  I'm so going to disneyworld.

I take back what I said about Fox yesterday.  Even Fastlane can't make up for all this shoddy reality tv of late.  They even have Joe Millionaire, a good old fashioned salt of the earth guy questioning his morals.  The poor fella's losing sleep after only a month of lying to and making out with beautiful women.  Where's my violin.  I think mayhaps the reality genre is running out of ideas.  Pretty soon they'll run out of midgets and brides and monkeys and then what.  Who else can we exploit.  People who wear socks with sandals?  The urban legends gimmick is circling the drain too.  Now we have the tooth fairy killing people?  Come on man.  They need to stop........ just as soon as they make an Easter bunny movie.  No, really.  See the bunny goes around biting people's heads off and putting them in colorful chocolate eggs.  Tell me that wouldn't make money.

Ok, here's a 'what would you do' scenario.  You've gotten a bag of raisin bagels at the Dollar Store.  You've already eaten four and when you take the bag out to eat another one you find the next one already has a bite in it.  Do you assume A) you just forgot taking the bite and putting it back or B) someone sold you a nasty bag of half-eaten bagels.  This still has me freaked out.  I haven't bought a bagel since.  And that was the sweetest deal going.  6 bagels for a dollar.  They cost over 2 bucks in a normal store.  I would buy them like 2 or 3 at a time.  But I'd rather not have to weigh convenience against the potential for eating someone's leftovers.  I've gotten dusty taco boxes and dented cans from the dollar store before but at least I knew no one was playing with it before it went in my mouth.  On the bright side, I think I've almost completely transferred over to eating poisonous McIntosh apples.  It really is a shame though.  Ultimately I guess you get what you pay for.

Isaac:  "See, that's the thing.  It's cheaper but you may get a bite out of our bagel."

Hell man, who am I kidding.  I just couldn't stay away.  My big post the other day (that I never got around to writing) was just about how I was planning to give up this website for a while, maybe even for good, so I could spend some more time trying to figure out what I'm going to do with myself after college.  I still intend to start a real (pen and ink) journal again so maybe I am calling it quits on here for at least a month or so.  I just thought this whole thing was so fake.  I started thinking that how I represent myself on this page isn't how I actually am.  But then I read the last 5 entries or so and at the end I was like, *shrug* 'yeah, that's me.'  So maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.  Wouldn't be the first time.

For now I guess I'll just do this on a day by day basis and treat each entry as if it might be the last.  That's probably how you should live life, huh?  Yeah well, whateva.

Have you seen the show Fastlane on Fox?  I mean I'll be the first to admit that Fox produces some craptacular spectacles but this show is truly off the hook.  It's like if John Woo directed a rap video.  Yeah, it's completely shallow in that the topics revolve around money, guns, sex, and cars but somehow the way they film it totally makes up for it.  Everything is slow motions and fast forwards and bright colors right out of Dick Tracy.  And even as I criticized it to my roommate I knew it was just that kind of shameless cliché music video appeal that makes it so good.  As far as anything resembling a plot, I'd describe it as all about being a hard ass undercover officer and going to posh clubs and getting shot at by everyone and diving over car hoods for cover and street racing and talkin slang and pulling out guns at random moments and having gratuitous sex and being a black cop with a white partner and being a white cop with a black guy and getting knocked unconscious in street fights and talkin trash and flipping fast cars and wearing purple shirts and leather jackets and swat teams jumping out and being an edgy cop from the hood and throwing house parties... well that in a nutshell.

Prolly the most redeeming part of this show is the choice of hot classic and current vehicles.  Last episode they had a race between the new Nissan Z and this tight BMW roadster.  At one point the Z was driving backwards and pulled off this nasty J-turn.  Sweet.  This show even commits popular music theft better than Smallville.  As far as casting goes, they threw me for a loop.  I was like what the hell is Bill Bellamy doing on tv?  Last time I saw him he was guest hosting some MTV beach thing with Daisy Fuentes.  But he plays a convincing thug cop, opposite the dude that apparently was the bad guy from the Scorpion King.  And hey, Treach was in the last ep too.  I think I understood maybe every other sentence in the scenes he was in.  It was like taking the ebonics SATs.  My closed captions won't even speak to me any more.  

But anywho, you must check this show out.  Fridays at 8pm I believe.  And I don't know what happened to Boomtown on NBC Sundays.  Somebody tell me something.  That was my joint.  Today instead of Boomtown they had the premiere of Kingpin, which is kind of like Traffic meets The Sopranos.  The first episode and already 4 people got gunned down.  How graphic can you get?  The national broadcasting corporation is not playing games with you chicos y chicas.

On a side note, are apple seeds bad for you?  I heard somewhere that they were poisonous if you eat enough of them (ok, I'll admit, it was that episode of GI Joe where they were trying to kill the giant blob that was eating everything so they got all these apples and Shipwreck was still throwing them after everyone else had run off like 'maybe this will be the one that stops it! maybe its this one!' Yeah, like you didn't learn stuff from GI Joe as a kid ^_^).  I've been eating about two apples worth of seeds for the last couple weeks or so.  Those small McIntosh apples are so tiny that you just can't help but eat the whole thing in 4 or 5 bites.  So umm, if you don't hear from me again, send pretty flowers. 

Oh please don't let me start rambling about GI Joe.  *Sigh*, ok.  You remember the little 'knowing is half the battle' service ads at the end of every episode.  Well a couple of years ago when I was living in the Towers my roommates and I rented the GI Joe movie dvd and it had a whole mess of those ads at the end.  We were dying at how funny these things are.  Like in one ad some kids will be sleeping and all of a sudden smoke will start coming from under the door.  Then one kid gets up and says "let's get out of here!" and before they even get to the door the GI Joe guy is halfway through the window and he's like "wait kids!" and they're all like "Firefly!" and he's all "did you check that door for heat?".  Or a girl will ask some boys to play on the playground and one will be like "don't let her play, she's a girl." and Lady Jay will show up and be like "hold on a minute" and everyone will shout "Lady Jay!".  If GI Joe is such a crack team of anti-terrorists, what are they doing climbing in people's bedroom windows and hangin out at the local bodega swapping apples for candy bars.  If I was Cobra, I'd just dress up as a little kid and when Wetsuit showed up at the YMCA to tell me not to eat before getting in the pool I'd waste him.  Then I'd take all the money I'd save on fancy technology and have a pizza party or something.

Happy New Year.  I just deleted the post I'd originally written.  It didn't come out the way I'd intended it and it's kind of important so I think I'll just leave it for tomorrow.  You can just use this one as a place-marker.  So little time left to do but so much time to remember (and regret).  Isn't that always the way.

Saw Resident Evil the other day and I was totally surprised at how good it was.  And freaky.  I wasn't expecting all that freakiness (like the woman with the red eyes pressed against the side of the water tank. *shiver*).  Just imagine how spooked-up the Silent Hill movie would be.

RE was definitely one of those sleeper hits that has a cheesy trailer betraying an awesome flick.  It made Tomb Raider look like the Super Mario Bros. movie.  I like how they actually made an effort to incorporate game elements into the script instead of just relying on the title to cover for a crappy action movie.  The T-virus, zombies, umbrella, STARS, the licker, nemesis, raccoon city; all that good stuff is at least mentioned in there.  The ending scene just clinched it for me.  Very nice segue from the first game into the second.  They can even have a sequel now and it probably wouldn't suck.

Mila Jovavich was a good choice for the lead part.  She rocked the scene in The Messenger too but I'd forgotten that she can do emotions so well.  Maybe it's just that they tried to make her character a real person instead of a superhero like Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider.  It's kinda sucky that Michelle Rodriguez was once again typecast as a thug though.  She's probably got some acting skills but with flicks like Girlfight, Fast and the Furious, Resident Evil and Blue Crush under her belt, who's going to know.

The only thing I really don't get about the plot is why the infiltration squad took Mila, her husband, and the cop with them into the facility.  When you're breaking into a top secret, state-of-the-art complex with a killer computer controlling everything, it's really not the time to have 3 extra people walking around like tourists.  You're just asking for someone to get killed.  My only other gripe was during the water scene near the end when they missed a perfectly good opportunity to throw in the shark from the game.  How could they have missed that?

I need to study for finals.  One on tuesday, one on wednesday.  I need to block out the fact that my birthday is on the 16th, Lord of the Rings is on the 18th, I go home on the 20th, and Christmas is on the 25.  So basically I need to seal myself in the library this weekend and ignore the desire to have fun.  Guess I'll just suck it up and celebrate on wednesday or whatever.  Sounds like a plan.  See ya then.

Today was a full-ass day if ever there was one.  Left at 7:30am with my McDonalds Hot Chocolate cappuccino and got back at 9:30pm with raisin bagels from the Dollar Store.  Possibly the longest, most productive amount of time I've spent on campus all semester.  Rock.

And so I'm sitting in Kent dining hall, doing some homework when someone says 'Hey Ian' and I look up and it's none other than Special Dan from last weekend.  I'm surprised I recognized him right away.  Usually new names and faces are hard to piece together on a moment's notice.  I'm even more surprised he remembered who I was.  Anyway, he sat down at the table next to mine and proceeded to talk about meaningful stuff from the night before.  I mean, here he doesn't know me from Adam but we're having a real non-bullshit conversation.  Not your typical guy, that Special Dan.  I need to know more people like that.

I keep having disturbing yet heartwarming dreams about my cat.  Back to back on Sunday and Monday.  And in every dream I think I'm saving him from something.  Right before I left to come back to DE after Thanksgiving, I put him outside and somehow he must have gotten out of his harness because he wasn't there when I came back out.  So I called for him and looked for him and turns out he was right next door.  I don't even know why I worry anymore.  He's too smart to get into any real trouble.  Either that or too lazy to cross the street.  Damn cats and their curiosityism.

This is my current fetish.  Schooled Ashley twice in this jammy-jam.  It's even more fun than slime volleyball and a lot less frustrating.

You ever find yourself using other people's slang on a regular basis?  I think I've been doing that more and more lately.  Last summer in Expository Writing we talked about how small groups of close people have their own slang that they only use around each other.  But I think recently I've been using everyone's slang all over the place.  Not in any attempt to be a trend setter or to appear "cool", but just because hey, it's a new word.  How often do we get those.  Instant messenger has become like my canvas for trying out new material.  I've noticed that when I use a new slang word, the person I'm talking to will sometimes slip their own new word into the conversation.  It's a good way to connect with people and keep a heads up on slang in other areas of the country.  My boy Ash's claim to fame is that he supposedly popularized the expression "nice face" in our old hs and allegedly even started a small faction at SJU.  People still use it.  It's like his legacy.

  I doubt if any of my original material will ever catch on.  I'm not a "connector" type, as Mr. Gladwell puts it in his book.  And plus, I make up too many words for the same thing.  I think "cc" might have a chance though.  Carbon copy.  That's what I call people who dress and act alike.  Usually the herds of Aberzombie on campus.  My roommate and I freshman year had our own code.  It was so funny.  I think we had a nickname for everyone.  There was this girl we called sdk because she didn't know how hot she was.  Good times.

So now when I throw around the occasional "yesh" or "okies" or "introxicated," I'll think of the original owner as I say it and it doesn't seem quite as retarded.

Got back to NY at like 3pm Thanksgiving day.  I'm thankful for my family, my friends, my health, Septa and Dart busses for leaving me stranded in DE and my roommate for his high speed driving skills that got me to the Amtrak station in Wilmington mere minutes before the train pulled off.

Isaac:  "How much time do we have left so I know how fast to drive."

Thursday was the big shopping day and I hit every store I could think of.  Even did the bi-yearly trek to Chinatown and haggled with street vendors over the price of cologne.  Then Friday night was the Molloy 5 year reunion.  Wow.  Who were those people.  Everyone either looked exactly the same or they were now built, gay, or dressed like a fighter pilot.  My boy ash got hit on by some guy's boyfriend.  Funny as hell.  Oh yeah, and free drinks after the $15 price of admission.  It was interesting how me and my friends composed about 90% of the minorities in the room with me being the only black guy.  Just like old times baby.  Then we hit the bars and it was all good.  I've never been in a bar where I've actually recognized so many people before.  I felt popular or something.  haha.  I see why people throw keggers now.

On Sunday me, dave, ash, jon, kim, sean, and darren played touch football in nipple freezing weather.  We had one person too many so I played offense for both teams, freeing up a quarterback for each team on offense.  This was all of a week ago and my legs are still sore from all the running.  I started wondering 'why am I trying so hard to win, I'M ON BOTH TEAMS!'

That Monday I spent maybe 6 or 7 hours on public transportation trying to save a buck on my way back to DE.  Left my house at 9:40am, got into Newark at 5:30pm and still had to walk 40min to my apt.  I think every transfer I needed was pulling out of the station as I was pulling in.  Ok lets count em: Green Bus to NY subway to NJ Transit to Penn Septa to DE Septa (to DE Dart Bus optional).  And all it costs is $22.45, a day's travel and your sanity.     

And then it snowed and everyone said ooh, look at the snow, and kids were playing and making snowmen and angels and having snowball fights and taking pictures (all Rockwellian like) and sleeping in and putting up cute away messages and I was going to class in huge snow drifts.  And then it got dark and you had the carolers and the tree lighting and the band and the eggnog and people generally looking good in winter colors for a change.  Something happens when students are forced to coordinate hats and scarves and gloves and coats without relying on being able to show their ass.  They actually look GOOD.  The colors man, the colors!

Everyone's heard of black ice but few people know about black water.  That's when you're walking at night and you step in an invisible puddle.  Black water.

As an end of the year thing SCPAB had this party where they represented I think 6 religious holidays with performances by various campus groups like the Gospel Choir, D-Sharps, and Vision.  Gospel Choir can wail boy!  I didn't think that many people would come out but it was so packed I had to sit on the floor.  And in between acts the reps of the different religions would come on stage and say their piece about Hanukah, Christmas, Ramadan, Yule, Festivus or what have you.  The only static was at the end of the night when as I was cleaning up I heard a girl from one group pissed because she felt some other group kind of took the opportunity to get up on a soap box.  But no, I disagree.  This isn't Higher Learning.  You can't really get all these religions together in the spirit of unity and not expect some of them to contradict each other.  A lot of religions today involve some form of campaigning as a matter of course and to not expect that is to set yourself up for disappointment.

Which brings me to yesterday and the end of the year SCPAB house party.  I was looking forward to this all week.  It was byob so I braved the elements to get my favorite bottle of Long Island Iced Tea from the liquor store up by Superfresh.  I rolled in about 9:30pm and people were just starting to show up.  People talked for a while and we started playing Never Have I Ever, where you drink if you have done what the current person hasn't.  There's always one guy at the party who I've never met before that winds up being like my best friend after a few drinks and tonight it was Special Dan.  Special Dan would always drink to the most ridiculous things.  Never Have I Ever had a threesome: Special Dan drinks.  Never Have I Ever had a sexual fantasy about a cartoon character: Special Dan drinks.

Me:  "Who is this guy?"

Special Dan:  "I'm Dan."  

I think my worst mistake of the night was having a shot of Bacardi 151.  Apparently it's 151 proof (75 percent alcohol) which will pretty effectively sterilize dirt if you want it to.  So my other friend dan set me up and we did the chant, licked the salt, did the shot and ate the lime together.  Mind you, this is after 2 LI Iced Teas, 1 wine, and a shot of te-kill-ya.  Afterwards I had a cup of  a green drink that tasted like sour apple and started working on a beer.  NEVER mix alcohol.  I prolly could have seriously gotten alcohol poisoning.  Don't know what I was thinking, but I know what I was doing in the bathroom sink after about 15 minutes.  I'll spare you the gory details.  But I did indeed chuck at least 3 times that night.  Someone drove me home.  Thanks Jenny.  And as soon as I got my coat off I was asleep in bed (boots still on).  Woke up in the morning, freshened up and walked to work still slightly drunk I think (yup, still wearing the same clothes too).  I eventually composed myself and wrote a very genuine apology email to Melissa for worshipping the porcelain god in her apt and she forgave me (yeah, she's cool).  

So after a long shower and some good Thanksgiving leftovers in me, here I be.  I realized something when I was riding the subway in NY during the break.  Sitting on that train next to grown adults, 9 to 5ing it and dollar-billing it every day, I realized that I'm clinging onto the youth of campus life more than I realized.  There really is a big divide between growing up and not.  You can't pretend you're a kid when you sit on that subway every day and look at those faces across from you.  It's a completely different world but I feel normal there now like I learned to feel normal here.  I've gotten so used to living in one big walk-in neighborhood and passing bright-eyed & bushy-tailed kids on the street.  College culture is fun but this isn't for me any more.  Time to blow this pop stand.

Awww crap.  I just now realized I missed Boomtown on Sunday when I went to see Harry Potter 2.  Grrrr.  I guess it was a trade-off, but I could have seen Harry Potter anytime.  Boomtown is like now or forever hold your peace.  Hey, that's a cool expression.  I've gotta get that on a t-shirt.  Or I could make it ghetto and have like a pic of a thugged out guy holding a huge gat in the foreground with the caption "foreva hold yo piece".  Heh.  Yes, this is why I never went into graphic design.

So Harry Potter was dark as all hell.  It's hard to imagine the same guy directed both movies.  This one felt more like a Tim Burton film.  Good but dark.  And I think it beats out Star Wars Episodes 1 and 2 in terms of special effects use.  The one scene where Harry and the evil kid are trying to catch the quiddich under the stands and the game ball is trying to kill him was easily more suspenseful and intense than SW's pod racing scene.  And all the special effects actually built and complimented the story instead of feeling like an action intermission.  I'd even say it was a better movie overall.  The only weakness was in the end.  If you don't want any spoilers don't read the rest of this paragraph.  I just thought it was kind of hokey how the acting turned comic-bookish at the end.  The bad guy's like "Ok Potter, your bird may have pecked out my snakes eye's but he can still hear you!" *after Harry kills snake* "You may have defeated my snake but you're too late to save the girl!"  I was like shut up man.  Who are you, the narrator?        

But other than that it was awesome.  I'd see it again.  The lovely Halle is on my viewing schedule for this week.  Too bad Pierce Brosnan has single-handedly turned 007 into a man-whore.  Roger Moore would turn in his grave if he were dead.

Oh, I never made it to see Fox weather.  I barely got to work on time this morning.  Staying up too late will do that.  Plus I've been spending too much money on food recently.  It'll be good to get home and not have to worry about where my next meal is coming from.  Home is where your cat is.

I was kind of creeped out walking around DuPont after hours on Friday night.  That place is a haunted house waiting to happen.  I was turning in my lab report at 10pm and since the building officially closes at like 7, I was sure I'd have to go home and come back with my key to let myself in.  But the first door I checked hadn't been pulled shut all the way so I got in and headed upstairs.  The second floor hallway leads to a catwalk overlooking the huge metal shop below.  All the lights were off and at night it's like a big robot graveyard down there.  So I drop off my lab and as I'm walking back towards the lit hallway, out of the corner or my eye I catch the reflection of my backlit silhouette as the glass door swings closed.  If that's not the most messed up feeling in the world!  I started looking for shadow babies running around in the halls behind me and stuff.  Damn video games.  I still wonder if that door had really been accidentally left open, or if DuPont had wanted me there... alone. 

On a lighter note, Fox weather is broadcasting out of the Scrounge this morning from 5am-9am.  I'm still deciding whether I should streak or not.  Or alternately, whether I feel like getting up in 6 hours and freezing my ass off to sit through an hour of droll commentary on the odd chance that I'll be on tv for half a second and someone I know will be watching at that ungodly hour.  Do you wanna take bets on my choice?

When is it going to stop raining rain and start raining snow?  I mean it might as well at these temperatures.  

I know what animal I want to be now if I have to be reincarnated when I die.  I want to be a squirrel.  Squirrels have all the fun.  Especially Delaware squirrels, the fat bastards.  Delaware doesn't really have any natural predators for animals to worry about, other than the occasional bird of prey.  And from the grisly evidence I've seen on occasion around campus, they only go after smaller birds.  Which means the only dangers squirrels have to worry about are the ones produced by the Ford Motor Company.  But if you're fast and lucky, you'll live forever.  Have you ever seen squirrels play?  Forget reindeer games, squirrel tag is where it's at.  I saw a squirrel do a 90 degree turn at full speed from the ground through the ring of a chain link fence.  The chasing squirrel did the same thing to follow him.  Spider-man my ass.  Squirrel reflexes are the shizzit!

Don't know why but after my new Thursday shift at work today I felt like Chinese food.  So I walked across campus (in the rain) to our local Happy Garden and ordered up a pint of sweet & sour chicken and pork fried rice.  Even ran into Roy D. while I was waiting.  Everyone loves Chinese food.  ^_^  And who should ring up my order but the ever stylin Glam Rock girl in a nice Mudd Sports sweater top.  Did I say nice?  I meant niiiiiiiiiice.

I get home, turn on the idiot box and to my surprise I find A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving between channel flips.  I didn't remember Franklin being in that one as Peppermint Patty's friend.  How festive of Mr. Schulz.  But you don't really need a reason to have Franklin in an episode.  He was your regular stand up guy.  I figure if Peanuts was around today it would probably go the way of Rugrats and have all sorts of minority characters.  Or hell, at least two.

Jenn IMed me fresh from getting her drizzink on last night at Klondike Kate's and I told her I'd give her a shoutout today.  She's one of my chill neighbors from 2 years ago.  If you scroll down, she's in the April 27, 2001 vent.  Someday she's gonna be a CEO and the company car is gonna be a badass Mustang Shelby GT.  Seriously, this girl has got potential out the yin-yang.  If this webpage were a yearbook, I'd vote her 'most likely to succeed but not rub your face in it while drunk.'  I always tease her about drinking too much but she probably doesn't.  PROBABLY.  *_*  She also cranks out ill articles for our campus newspaper.

I think the first thing I really noticed about Jenn way back was how much better than me she dressed.  I don't think I've ever seen her short on style.  I was like hey, she's gonna come to our apartment and make me look bad?  And that's not a far stretch of the imagination because I think girls usually put more thought into clothes than guys.  But she would just like wear a cool visor and it would show up my whole outfit. 

She can cook too!  You can't get that any more.  Where can you get that?  Even makes cornbread almost as well as I do (tee-hee).  In a word, she's a catch.  Oh yeah, and .. ahem, "Jenn is the best girl on earth, no one can compare to her"  haha  Ya heard.

Bad Things:  

Missed breakfast

Ruler broke in two

Forgot calculator at home

Forgot soils lab at home

Had hunger pains all morning

Good Things:

Dining lady hooked me up with free lunch

Saw a "perfect" ass

As you can see, I'm in the red zone a bit.  But it's only 1:45.  That means there's still plenty of time left for stuff to go wrong.  :-P

Why am I still seeing Halloween pumpkins in front of houses on my walk home?  Isn't there some kind of social etiquette that discourages people from rolling one holiday into the next.  I mean, yeah ok, pumpkins kind of go with the Thanksgiving theme but it's still kinda tacky if it has a scary face in it, no?  I remember we had a pumpkin at my place last year and it sat on our back porch well into the winter.  No one even bothered to carve it.  When I finally tried to pick it up by the stem to throw it out the entire top half of the pumpkin came with it and the rest kind of pathetically collapsed in on itself like a soufflé in a Bug's Bunny cartoon.  I think I even heard it sigh.  That poor pumpkin didn't have to go out like that.  No pumpkin should.  It's time we took a stand against inappropriate holiday extensions before another innocent is lost.  Anyone who's seen The Nightmare Before Christmas knows the disasters that occur when holiday worlds collide.

.  .  .

...and at day's end we add to the final tally:

Bad Things:

Nuthin

Good Things:                

Cracked the secrets of Mohr's Circle

Free post-lunch/pre-dinner pizza

Free comedian Billy Burr

The kikkoman website!!

I'm back in the green baby!  I've said it before and I'll say it again:  You cannot beat free stuff.  

...and the Soil Mechanics marathon continues.  Drop on by.  Bring popcorn.

So Harry Potter didn't happen this weekend but I have slightly bigger things on my mind with an exam coming up this week.  Tomorrow (or today I guess) for the first time ever I don't have class until 6pm at night.  Unfortunately I won't get to sleep in and enjoy it.  But getting up early and studying all day after a night of little sleep builds character right?  Right?  *sob*    

Met up with Kirsten for lunch today and shot the breeze about old times.  Ah memories.  Kirsten is good peoples.  I had such a good time that it made up for having to eat the worst chicken sandwich since that disaster of a turkey sub from The Bagelot.  I didn't even get carded for my Yeungling.  Bonus.  Unfortunately events at work kept me from getting home to fetch my camera beforehand, which sucks.  I have like no pictures of half the people I know.  And then an old friend pops up from out of state and I have no way of capturing the Kodak moment.  le-sigh.

Ooh, and I got rained on today.  It's been raining all day actually, so I don't know why I was surprised when it was waiting for me when I got off this evening.  And I was so looking forward to seeing Harry Potter 2 tonight.  Maybe I'll catch a matinee tomorrow.

My freaking window is leaking in two places now!  I hear this peeing on the carpet sound and I turn around and see this line of water going down my wall.  The first time it happened it scared the crap out of me.  It's like being haunted by a ghost that just pees everywhere.  How do you deal with that?

Now if the people upstairs could just stop German wrestling so I can sleep.

It's my brother's birthday today.  Happy 24th bro.  Love u man.

I really can't wait until Thanksgiving.  I'll get to see my friends again and shop in Chinatown and generally forget that I spend most of my year in Delaware.  NY feels normal.  Maybe I'll go to Octopus Kingdom and buy some little anime figurines to hang on my book bag.  I meant to do that last time but didn't really have the dough.  Now I just scored 6.5 more hours a week at work so I can afford it.  Besides, I've been good with money lately.

It's hard when your friend's world is torn apart and there's really nothing you can do to make it better.  Can't remember the last time I cried twice in the same week for two completely different reasons.  The older I get the more I realize that I'm very unprepared to get any older.  I've dealt with death before, but always in a kind of detached way.  I don't know what I'd really do if someone close to me died.  Don't know if I'd ever get completely over it.  

Sometimes I feel like I don't get too attached to anything for the specific purpose of keeping myself from getting hurt.  And sometimes it leaves me feeling like I don't have anything extensive in my life outside of myself.  I mean you know how some people (usually younger people) say that they don't know what love feels like.  Well I'm not sure if I really know what missing someone feels like.  I think everyone has the potential for feeling all emotions equally strongly at some point in their life but I've never experienced anything close to missing someone as much as I enjoyed their presence when they were around.  It's like as soon as they're gone I kind of accept it and move on.  I can't imagine I could do that with someone I was really close to.

Maybe I don't know how to divide my emotions among people and still have enough left over for myself.  Most of the time I wind up caring way too much or not enough at all.  And since this happens so often if feels normal to me.  It also makes me a hard person to figure out from casual observation.  People could easily get the impression that I'm a distant person if they watched me go about my typical day and didn't speak to me, and that bothers me on a certain level.  But just as easily I can have a totally awesome conversation with someone I know, or randomly compliment a stranger on their Powerpuff Girls watch and it doesn't matter any more.  And beyond getting standoffish about stupid stuff I just chalk it up to who I am.  I've just never really felt like emotionally tagging along for the hell of it.

So why am I telling you all this?  I dunno.  Today's been a pretty shitty day and I think I just needed to get some stuff out there.

I just realized that it's almost new years again.  The memory of my new year's resolutions from last January is faint at best.  I think this year I'll resolve to pay less money to own nicer stuff, which is good since I just figured out how to do that.  Money is important.  It's the first step in solving many of life's problems.  Really.  

So now I've just gotta figure out what to get my brother for his birthday.  I've got a vague idea but it'll mean another mall trip sometime soon.  Let's see, three days to deliver means I have a week from today to find something cool.  How time flies when life is passing you by.

I don't remember at what point exactly the image of a college social life became juxtaposed with the image of the bar scene but damn, that's just disturbing.  I wonder how many of the bad habits we develop in life start on our nation's campuses.

And for completely different reasons I've started to believe that eventually college gets to everyone, even the seemingly cool and collected people.  What hope does that leave for anyone in high school.  I mean if you heard that at some point in your college career you'll be mentally messed with, stressed out, and generally touched in the head would you want to come here.  I always used to blow off those tv-news studies on how kids are being subjected to more stress than in previous years.  Maybe there's something to that.

You know what?  It's cold.  Not only that, it's damn cold!  Joe was right.  I hadn't realized it was that bad until my umbrella hand went numb half-way home in the rain today.  When did Delaware decide to just open up all of Hell's frostiness and dump it on us poor college kids?

"Just take what you need

And be on your way

And stop crying your heart out."  -Oasis

SMALLVILLE, man!  The formula for that show must be:

1) Get hit music from store shelves 2) Insert perfectly into new episode.

Ok, this is new.  Two people dressed as a banana and an apple gave me these little chocolates on the street today.  And since I'm way past the age of fearing candy from strangers, I read the writing on the labels as I enjoyed the unexpected afternoon treat.  What did kind of set off my spider-sense was that one label said "may contain traces of nuts".  What do they mean may.  Isn't that something they should know.  You don't see other foods listing possible ingredients.  What kind of slip-shod manufacturing is going on at the Green&Black's chocolate factory.  Perhaps in the future I'll read before I snack.

Paintball on Saturday was the bomb.  I'm not ever sure if I hit anyone but I had a hella good time.  I think my favorite memory is running through a thorn bush and crawling flat on my stomach under a log to evade enemy fire (aka charlie) ^_^.  Yeah baby, frontline is where it's at.  There's nothing like being pinned down behind a tree to get the old ticker pumping.  I was really impressed by how good our 12 year old, 4 foot nuthin instructors were.  Its a good thing they were split evenly between our teams because if not it would have been a dull day indeed.

Liz:  "Do you guys mind if just the bunch of us play for a while... because I really didn't plan on coming here to get killed by 12 year olds."

Kid:  "Well if it helps, I'm 13."

One of the things that popped into my head as I was lying under that log, tending my wounds after my journey through the thorn bush is that I've actually taken a liking to all sorts of injury prone sports exactly because of that quality.  It's almost not fun unless you get scrapes, bruises or come home sore.  I think that's what first attracted me to broom hockey and rock climbing but I don't know why that is.  I'm not a particularly rough and tumble type, but at the same time I like getting dirty, love physical exertion, and appreciate a good war injury to wax nostalgic about the next day.  It's like there are these wildly tangent parts to me that I can't even explain.  The neatness guru, the environmental nut, the asian fanboy, johnny altruism, and now the happy, dirty, dangerous guy.  I could have my own Herman's Head with Al Roker as my inexplicable optimism.  Think of the possibilities.

So me and my roommate hatched this plan to dress up as power rangers for Halloween.  But the thing is, we're going to be bootleg power rangers.  He found these big tele-tubby sized power ranger helmets down at the Goodwill and I told him I'd get one if he did.  Now all I have to do is get some matching sweats, make a belt and I'll be all set.  Hope they have the green ranger head.  It would just be so stereotyped for me to be the black ranger.

That show had so much promise once upon a time.  Even though it was crazy racial and inane you can't get much closer to a live action Sailor Moon.  Like the one episode when Trini, the yellow (aka asian) ranger, was learning the praying mantis fighting style and the bad guys coincidentally created a giant mantis monster that knew the praying mantis style.  Guess who had to fight him?  Stupid stuff like that kept the show fun.  I think instead of doing all sorts of retarded stuff with the characters, all they should have done is introduced more colors.  This way they could slowly introduce more token races and and stereotypes into the mix.  You could have like the indian ranger, the mexican ranger, the canadian ranger, the gay ranger, the feminist ranger and the goth ranger.  There are plenty of colors left to go around.

I've already gotten two compliments on how cute my buddy icon is.  ^_^  Chicks dig giraffes.

I got a new instant messenger icon today.  

It looks like this: Yeah, it's a frowning giraffe.  How cool is that.  I found it here but apparently there's a whole freakin universe of these guys here.  It's like some kind of dysfunctional Hello Kitty... only funnier.

Probably the best thing about this site, aside from mixmonkey that lets you DJ 4 tracks of music, are the cartoon episodes:

Worry Bear: That's it.  I'm calling the police.

Julius:  To report what?  A really cute and sweet average every day girl who dresses in a pink fluffy bunny suit and lives in a hole in the ground?

This guy Paul Frank must have had one freaky childhood.  But I guess it paid off because this site if jam-packed with tight music, witty humor, and cartoon animals, making it my new favorite spot on the web.

Venting after being gone for such a long time feels like cramming for a test.  Not very fun.  It's amazing how many times I've almost posted in the last several days.  But then I'll realize the words won't come out right because I have nothing to say.  I've got to feel it to write it.  

I used to hate the idea of having a webpage.  The first one I ever made is still out there somewhere and I don't remember the link.  It's like this little piece of cyber garbage anchored somewhere on the web.  I didn't even understand the internet back then.  I thought it was kind of like a physically connected thing in cyberspace that your computer goes to, like this room is part of all the apartments in this building.  I didn't get that my webpage wasn't really 'out there' as much as it was just sitting in the university's hard drive taking up space with miles and miles between it and another site.  Kind of cool to think about it.  Some kid in China could accidentally type in my address and my page would pop up.

Can't get this song out of my head.  You know that jeans commercial where the guy dumps the car off the dock and then dives back in to get the French book?  It's that song.  That's a good morning song to play while you're still in your jammies.   This is a great one to sing in the shower.  Go on, give it a spin.

Yeah, I know.  Technically this should be down there with the previous post.  But when you go to sleep in the dark and wake up in the light, it's a new day baby.

Ok, I'm officially retarded.  I just found out that for 3 years I've been resizing pictures the hard way.  Promise you won't laugh?  Well I've been using the sketch/skew feature in the generic paint program that comes with my computer instead of just stretching the pic from the corner like a file window.  I didn't know you could do that.  So that big dilemma I had over resizing 66 pictures becomes a little project that will be done by this weekend.  Hurrah.

I had a dream the other night where I was that warrior guy from the PS2 game, The Mark of Kri.  I had my little hawk companion flying around, only I think it was an owl instead.  There was this other big hawk trying to attack it so I tried to use the owl to lead the hawk in closer so I could fire an arrow at it, but whenever the hawk got close it would fly away before my X became a solid color and the arrows would miss.  Very frustrating for a warrior.

Go here and visit Connie's site.  She writes beautiful poetry.  I have a bet with her to see who can get published first.  There's a bottle of champagne riding on it.  Methinks I don't stand a chance.

I did so much cooking this weekend.  Even made a pumpkin pie.  It's so good with this $1 coconut ice cream I got at the dollar store.  So I figure I won't have to cook now for another week at least.  One less thing to worry about.

DSL isn't all I thought it was going to be.  I don't think Triumph is finding it too appetizing either.  My programs have been crashing like crazy and it won't shut down any more so I have to turn the power off manually.  It's just not worth the hassle.  Easy come, easy go I suppose.

I find it incredibly amusing that there's a company out there that specializes in making little plastic bags of air for use in shipment packaging.  I got two of these little air cushions in my DSL box.  They even have a website: www.polyair.com.  What a novel idea.  You can actually patent packaged air.  You can even call it a 'pillow packaging system'.  And when you travel on business flights and the person next to you asks you about your profession, you can tell them you pack air.  lol  What a world we live in.  

Time refuses to stop for me.  No matter how nicely I ask it.  No matter how often I reason with it.

This shouldn't be a difficult thing right?  You have something to do, you do it.  A rational response wouldn't be to hope for time to stop.  

Rain.  It was bound to happen.

Walking in the rain today made me think of lots of random rain-related stuff.  And that stuff made me think of other random stuff that reminded me of completely non-rain-related stuff that I was thinking about earlier.  And totally not paying attention, I stepped right into a puddle.  And when I looked back to see the first puddle, I stepped into an even bigger puddle.  Gotta love the rain.

You ever notice how the weather affects people's facial expressions?  I saw a girl today with a perfect frown.  It was like a perfect upside down U.  Almost cartoony.  I felt bad for her because she didn't have an umbrella and didn't seem to be handling it well at all.  I always feel like giving my umbrella to people like that.  Like that guy in the Singing in the Rain song did after he finishes dancing and the cop makes him move along.  Just wait till I get rich. 

And answer me this.  Why would Dodge make a car called the Stealth and then allow it to be painted bright superball orange?  Orange isn't exactly the stealthiest color.  When I saw it I thought it might be an endorsed custom car or something, like the ones in Daytona.  But I couldn't find any Tropicana stickers anywhere.  Then I thought that maybe this one car had slipped out of the factory under Dodge's radar.  But then I remembered that Dodge also makes the Neon, the most visually obnoxious car known to man.  And somehow Dodge is proud of this car, so they paint it according to the name and it comes out plum purple, mustard yellow, moss green and every other color that failed in Crayola test groups.  So I'm left with the impression that this orange Stealth was probably someone's idea.  Maybe one of their better ones.  Lord help us.

I wonder if there's any place in the world where it's still safe to hitchhike.  It's unfortunate that we can't make things like that happen in America again.  You could spend a whole summer bumming across the country.  Aren't you curious to find out how far you could get with only personal charisma to make up for limited fundage?  Just once I'd like to walk into a diner with a duffel bag over my shoulder and have the waitress say "Hey stranger, you're not from around these parts are ya?" And I'd be all like "Reckon I'm not maam."  You can't get that anymore.

You know what would be the best birthday/holiday present?  A gift certificate for the dollar store.  Think about it.  You give someone a $25 gift certificate to the dollar store and they could go through that place like reverse Santa Claus.  If it were me, I would already have all my Pokemon stickers picked out.  That dollars worth of nickels and dimes that you amass from not using exact change can be used to buy a Spider-Man coloring book for your coffee table.  For like $7 you can eat for 3 days if you shop at the dollar store.  EVERYTHING THAT YOU BUY SOMEWHERE ELSE IS OVERPRICED.  I don't know how that place stays in business.  How can you sell commercially available stuff for 30 cents on the dollar and make a profit?  My biggest fear is that one day I'll stop in to buy my weekly bag of raisin bagels and the store will be gone, all gone.  Almost like a dream.  And the people who never knew about it will have never dreamed.  Le-sigh.

There are at least 8 places to get your hair cut that are within walking distance of Main Street.  6 barber shops and 2 salons.  No one tells you these things.  Even if you ask.  You have to find out the hard way.

As I was heading in the rain to my friend's place (because I know he still has those awesome fake-chocolate chip cookies) I started thinking about Cookie Monster.  I saw Sesame Street for the first time in ages yesterday and am I the only one who thinks that Cookie Monster should get a lifetime achievement award?  Sesame Street has been going strong since I was a kid, so it's probably at least a couple of decades old. And in all that time, what blue googley-eyed monster has continued to entertain us with his binge diet of cookies?  I mean, come on, everyone loves Cookie Monster!  This is a given.  I say we write letters to whoever you write letters to about these things.  Hey, if Chewbacca can win an award, you know CM is a sure thing.

But on a serious note, have you seen Sesame Street lately? Watch it some time.  It made me so honestly happy to see something that positive on television.  To see a show where minority children get to see themselves on tv and learn from people who look and sound like them is a beautiful thing.  And realizing that these images are reaching young children all across the nation just makes my heart happy.  They even have a segment now that has a Spanish word of the day.  It's just amazing.  I saw this other show on PBS called the American Family with Edward James Olmos and it was so good.  Why can't every network be like that.  Why do we have to have a FOX and a UPN?  Why aren't there more prime time shows like The Cosby Show?  I'd give up the WB for another PBS.  We don't need more channels, we just need to give up the crappy ones we have and get back the great ones we used to have.

And on closer inspection of a flier in my book bag I realize that I missed the Hispanic Heritage Month dinner at Kent dining hall tonight.  Hmm.  The menu says they had Seven Layer Dip, Chili Con Carne, Gazpacho, Chimichurri Flank Steak, Adobo Chicken with Tomato Basil Salsa, Cuban Black Beans, Cilantro Rice, Roasted Corn and Vegetables, Fried Plantain, Heart of Palm Salad, Espinacs Ensalada, Cornbread, Margarita Cake, Churros, Fresh Fruit Salad and Fruit Smoothies.  Can you believe that?  CHURROS!  Damn.  Tonight my entree will include Arroz Amarillo and Cornbread with Corn, Green Beans and a chilled Apple Juice.  What a gip.  

Never turn your back on a rainy day.

The "You Saw It First" concert rocked my socks.  Hopefully one day Revis, Carbondale and Kill Hannah will become stars.  Kazzer was ok too, just because they had break-dancing and a DJ, but maybe just a little too loud and busy to be really good.  Kill Hannah had these bar lights on their guitars that would have looked so jedi if we could have talked the lighting staff off their donut break to come up and turn off the stage lights.  Either way, you still got maybe $100 worth of entertainment for the price of a McDonald's meal.  I didn't get a free cd as I had hoped but free just about everything else kind of made up for it.  And I got to take home almost a whole leftover pizza.  I love being a bootleg roadie.

Cool portions of the last two days include:  

(1) Right before I left on Fri night I checked my messages and found one from Verizon confirming that my phone line was ready for DSL installation.  Yeah baby!  And on that note the weekend festivities began.

(2) Driving up to the Field House with the Pixies whining on the radio and then banging on the ice arena windows when we found the doors locked.  So unfortunately we didn't get to go to midnight broom hockey (how frustrating is it when you can see people through the window having fun. damn their reindeer games.) but I still got to hang out with my roommate at Jam'n Java over a pitcher of Yeungling.

(3) The live concert music!  It's a shame it did so poorly because a lot of people would have paid more than $5 to see 4 hot bands.  Oh well.  Their loss is the gain of the some 40 odd people who showed up, the crew, the staff, the police and security people who stopped in to see what all the hubbub was.  So yeah.  Take that UD football game!

(4) An awesome free SCPAB collared dress shirt (even though it does kind of make me look like a janitor).  Gotta love a man in uniform.

(5) Talking to a Kazzer member after the show about his kick ass sneakers from Canada.  He even gave me the number of the Nike hotline, ey.  I'm so getting that catalog, ey.  Lol, Canadians rock.  

(6) This conversation:

Band member: "Do they shoot cooking shows in here?"

Kyle: "Yeah, it's a classroom."

Band member: "That's so awesome.  You ever see the show Iron Chef?"

Me: "Yeah, I love that show.  Iron Chef Chinese, man."

Band member: "No one fucks with Kobe."

(7) And the crew manager totally offered us a beer after the show.  But unfortunately he wasn't sure of school policy and didn't want to get anyone in trouble so he had to retract his offer.  Man, those are good peeps.  What a difference from Nickelback, who needs 2 agents, a press secretary and a lawyer before they can shake your hand.

I can't believe so many people missed out on such a fun night.  We were in Trabant until about 1:30am and it was dead empty.  They even shut off the lights in the bathroom.  Closing places out like that really makes you feel like you did something.  Forget backstage passes.  Work event staff.

So all of a sudden my tagboard is back and I don't really know if it was ever gone.  Guess I should have asked if anyone else could see it.  Oh well.  At least now I can stop writing frantic emails to tag-board.com.  It's just so strange though.

We're going on a field trip in Water Resources Engineering next Monday.  Oh, I'm sorry, I mean a "field reconnaissance".  Hey, I'm surprised I spelled that right on the first try.  But anywho, it should be cool.  The great outdoors and everything.  Maybe if we finish early we can roast smores and tell ghost stories... at like 10:30 in the morning.  lol

And I can't deal with these pictures.  I spent over 5 hours in the lab scanning all 66 of them and now they all need to be resized and most of them are too dark and I don't know if I have the patience to do it.  I'm just finding out you can't trust those new plastic mesh monitor screens that make everything look different depending on what angle you're looking from.  It's like a holograph card or something.  What a design flaw.  There just has to be an alternative to resizing 63 pictures.  

Ok, don't blow up Verizon world headquarters just yet.  Apparently they aren't as assholeular as I first thought.  They're quite reasonable and accommodating actually.  And their operatives are very helpful and succeeded in their goal of providing exceptional service or whatever the spiel is.  Have you heard that little thing they do at the end of the conversation?  I guess that's like a new quality control thing.  But what happens if like 50 people say 'no, you did not provide me with exceptional service today'?  Do they get fired or something?  That would be a shame.  Seems like such cool people work the phones at Verizon.

On the other hand, Integretel (the unknown company) feels that people do like to be mistreated and billed unjustly.  Feel free to do whatever you want to their world headquarters.

I can't figure out what happened to my tagboard and Tag-Board.com hasn't responded to my email yet.  I'll give them a few more days before I take the code off this page.  It's kind of pointless to have the page refresh every few seconds without there even being a tagboard there.

And I saw Edward James Olmos tonight at the Hispanic Heritage Month kickoff event baby!  Former star of Stand and Deliver, Selena, and that's right, Miami Vice.  This guy has really got his act together.  Not only is he funny and charismatic, he also makes you feel like you're missing something in life that you could really use.  I'm so on a history quest now.  I need to find out where I fit into this big jumble of culture and ancestry.  I need to really look around.  And incidentally, the first chance I get I'm going to watch Blade Runner and American Me.  Just for kicks.

This weekend is going to be so yummy.  Midnight broom hockey at the Gold Ice Arena on Friday, load-in for the You Saw It First Concert the next morning and load-out that night.  Man, I'm gonna be sore to the bone.  Yay.

You know what?  I lost major cool points today.  I was given an opportunity to do something really nice for someone and I just totally screwed the pooch.  I need to get my priorities straight because this is not going to work.

They're going to turn our phone off, possibly tomorrow at the earliest.  And all because of some $66 dollar charge that no one can account for.  Don't you love it when some unknown company randomly charges you and it shows up on your phone bill.  Then Verizon tells you that because the unknown company is an outside business, it won't affect your phone service if you don't pay it.  Finally Verizon sends you a statement telling you they lied and they're going to turn off your phone if you don't pay by Monday.  Well guess what?  Fuck you Verizon.  And I'll be sure to show my appreciation for your customer friendly policies when I speak with you on the phone tomorrow.  Assuming it's not turned off.

Anywho, I'll be glad when this phone thing gets straightened out because soon we'll have free DSL for a month.  That's all the mp3s, game demos, and bootleg movies I can stand to watch.  As we speak the DSL modem should be wending its way through the US postal system, zeroing in on this address.  I mean, you just can't beat free stuff.

Speaking of free, I saw the coolest outdoor concert yesterday on my way home from work.  This band called The Eliza Letters was jammin out across from the CVS and I stopped and caught the last half-hour or so.  It was around 8:30 at night and I sitting on the little wall divider betw the park and the street, maybe 10 feet from the curb.  With the way the band looked in the spotlights on my right and the oncoming traffic trailing into the distance on my left, for a while I felt like I was in a music video.  Wish I could have videotaped it.

Usually on dreary, rainy days like this I like to break out the old (real) journal and remember how I used to be.  I have this theory that we were all cooler as kids.  Back when our ideas weren't too watered down by reality and pride was a strange word.  Of course I didn't keep a journal that far back, so I'm left with college-type vents from yesteryear.  Oh well.  I still wanna be a lion.  >^..^<

Mon December 31, 2001 11:50pm

I don't know why people get so hyped over arbitrary holidays. one year rolls into the next. the only thing that ever changes is you. see you in 2K2.

I don't know what to say about 9/11, so I won't say much.  It's been a long day and I really don't have the energy to force my thoughts onto this page just so I can read them later.  It's enough that I have them with me in my head and my heart.  All I'll say is I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to listen to the words of other people on this campus who feel a deep love and respect for our country.  I'm glad to have them with me here at the University of Delaware.

Two things I'll never forget about the days surrounding this time last year:  One is that feeling I had as I watched on live television as the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center.  Up until then I don't think I can recall ever having felt real desperation.  Fear and anxiety I can relate to, but not that sudden flash of helplessness that cramps you inside.  That feeling of complete wrongness that cracks your voice and makes you shout out at the tv screen for someone do so something.  I'll always remember that feeling.

The other thing I'll remember is how everyone seemed to stop and turn around for a minute.  Every website just stopped business as usual and paid attention.  Nothing else even remotely mattered.  That's how you know it was real.  Because you couldn't buy a book on amazon.com, check your horoscope, or search on google without knowing what was happening to our country.  For maybe one day out of the entire year, everyone in America stood together and looked in the same direction.  That's real.   

I just saw the movie Bandits today and it rocked my world.  I'm going to have to completely revise the way I review movies because this one was absolutely flawless.  Movies like this and Josie and the Pussycats make me wish I bought cds or at least still had a fast internet connection so I could download the songs on mp3.  Speaking of mp3s, Maxim rated the top download programs and Imesh kicked the crap out of Kazzaa.  Hah!  Take that Ashley.

Now for some movie reviewing.  Here is a list of some of the ginchiest movies I've seen.  I'm not going to rank these in any particular order because ranking doesn't reflect the little things that make movies great.  All it really is is a broad generalization that oversimplifies the true value.  It's kinda like ranking your pets or your favorite erotic fantasies.  It doesn't do anyone any good.  ^_^    So I'll just give a little reason why each one stands out from the rest.  That should be fair.  I don't actually expect you to go out and see any of them based on my two cents.  It's my experience that people don't see unfamiliar movies unless they're recommended by close friends, and even then it's hit or miss.  So feel free to just smile and nod your head.

AKA Don Bonus - A real life documentary about a high school kid.  The brutal honesty of Don Bonus makes you believe his reality.

Bandits - Thelma and Louise meets Josie and the Pussycats.  This is as close to a perfect movie as I'm ever going to see.  Everything is so damn sexy. 

Belly - DMX and Nas are friends on different roads in life.  This movie felt so cinematic when I watched it.  The music and the visuals make it much better than its subject content.

Black and White - Explores the issue of black culture's influence on white youths.  An all star cast and some great one liners by Mike Tyson.  The freestyle at the end is the cherry on top.

Bulworth - A senator has a mental breakdown and becomes a rapper.  This is the funniest movie that you've never seen.  Warren Beaty is hilarious in hip hop mode.

Clockers - A street drug dealer tries to go strait.  Great performances all around and the 'what if' type reality scenes give it that Usual Suspects edge.

Mary Shelly's Frankenstein - Deniro plays the Frankenstein monster in his quest for revenge against Dr Frank.  The violence is done is such an artsy way that you can't look away.

Ghost Dog, Way of the Samurai - The Ghost Dog is an urban samurai who serves as professional hitman for a mobster.  Whittaker brings his traditional quiet style to the role.  Gotta love the quotes from the Hagakure. 

Heat - Pacino and Deniro play cops and robbers.  The casting, the music, the dialogue.  I love this movie for every reason.

Josie & The Pussycats - Josie and friends try to make it big as a rock band.  The feel good movie of the year.  The soundtrack alone will get you hyped.

The Last Emperor - The story of the last emperor of China.  The roaming story leaves you wondering what's going to happen next.  Pay close attention and it just might make sense the first time.

Memento - A guy with no memory tries to reconstruct his past.  When things start to piece together you won't believe it.  Good till the last drop.

Romeo & Juliet - The classic tale with a pop culture spin.  The fact that they kept the original Shakespearean dialogue works so well.

Seven Samurai - Ronin samurai are hired to defend a village from bandits.  Each character endears you with a unique identity and motivation.

Slam - The lyrical word is a means to survival in this story about a slam poet unjustly sent to jail.  The freestyling.  You can't resist the freestyling.

Sneakers - A very clever action/comedy without the use of one curse word.  I know it's true and I still don't believe it. 

Timecode - Four interconnected movies simultaneously shown in splitscreen.  It's insane to think a movie based around so much improv can be so good.

Titus - Anthony Hopkins plays a general in this Shakespearean tragedy.  The whole theatrical atmosphere and the time skipping make this movie so freakin hot.

The Warriors - The warriors have to fight their way through rival gangs back to Coney Island.  The fight scenes are the stuff of legend.

The Wings of Honneamaise - The first mission to put a man in space occurs during the onset of war.  The last sequence should win a national climax award or something.

I just realized that my work schedule at the library totally conflicts with all the events for the rock climbing club.  How much does that suck.  Now I have to try to beg people to switch times with me on Saturday.  And if not, then what?  Quit my job?  This is like the one thing I wanted to do this semester and it's already fucked from the word go.

But on a lighter note, I picked up this package that had been waiting all summer for me in the SCPAB office and it turns out it was a nice graduation gift from the university.  It was a really cool Delaware pullover and a big bag of m&ms.  How sweet.  After dinner I ate like 1/4 of the m&ms because hey, it's m&ms.  How can you resist?  And then I felt hyped so I went out and jogged until my stomach hurt.  Still, it would have been a better night if I wasn't so pissed about this rock climbing thing.  That, and I completely forgot about my soil mechanics lab orientation today.  

I'd forgotten how good the warm sun feels on your back.  I'll have to go to the beach more often.

I'm so less than enthusiastic about going to work tomorrow.  I have to get up in about 6 hours and eat and shave and do all that crap.  I'd rather stay in bed and eat waffles.  Yeah man, waffles.  Waffles and cheese blintzes.  You know, I just realized that there's a pretty big gap between the two times in your life when someone will cook for you for free.  When you're a little kid and when you get married.  So the options are to get married or to never grow up if you want free eats.  Too bad you can't do both.  It's the only real disadvantage to being a Lost Boy.

What's the difference between boo-ya and boo-yaka.  Is it like a conjugation of the same word?  Like boo-yo, boo-yas, boo-ya, boo-yaka?  And is boom-shakalaka part of that family.  These little thoughts stick with me throughout the day.

There's nothing like the first week of school to remind you that the beginning of fall is just the ass end of summer.  If I have to see any more flip-flops, boobs falling out of low cut v-neck Tshirts, or bikini bottom-sized shorts I'm going to throw up.  It's like everywhere you turn you're assaulted by naked flesh and you can't walk 5 feet without passing through a cloud of someone's favorite perfume.  I actually got queasy today on the way to class.  Either I should have gone to school in a colder climate or these girls need to learn to dress with some tact.

And of course, there's nothing like the beginning of a year to remind me how white this campus is.  I mean I've long since gotten used to being the only black guy in most of my classes.  You kind of just phase it out after a while.  But when I leave the class and start walking around the difference is overwhelming.  I feel like I passed a thousand white faces today.  It's almost like culture shock for the first couple of weeks.  This past year or so everything's been different.  The last time I talked to Joe about it he noticed the same thing.  Like we don't see things the same as when we got here.  We can't make the colors and the ages blend together as easily as we used to.  Everything seems so much more polarized.  I used to laugh at my roommate freshman year for calling this place Vanillaville.  But maybe he just saw what I couldn't see yet because my high school had blinded me to it.    

This is nothing against white people in general.  It's not even against specific white people.  It's just that the fact that my brain is calling attention to this for the first time kind of disturbs me.  It makes me think that I was ignoring it all along.

In a way it's like my brain isn't normalizing the situation anymore.  It's poking me, saying 'hey  ian, this is important. notice this'.  And I'm saying, 'yeah man, you're right. what the fuck?'  

Now that's one thing, but the other thing is that I'm thinking about issues in an entirely different way.  It reminds me of something that Chris Rock said on television the other day about how black comedy is now mainstream comedy.  When I hear a white guy blasting rap music from his car it's not strange to me any more.  I kind of realize that he's not listening to rap music, he's just listening to music.  It's just another option.  Orange juice, purple stuff, Sunny D.  It probably doesn't even register to him any more, if it ever did.  When did that happen?

And that's like the tip of the iceberg.  But I think the problem is that no one really gets to that level.  We're still stuck on the controversial stuff like white people dressing in black fashions (everyone's using everyone else's junk anyway), but what about the things that everyone takes for granted.  We hear about integrated proms but never about post-integration sidewalks.  No one asks 'how do you routinely interact with other races every day and how does that affect you?'.  You could actually learn something from a question like that.

It's always encouraging to find that NY is just as I left it.  The Q9 still runs late.  The subway still drops me off in Chinatown.  A fun night can be had with 4 friends, a car, and a nice Sangria Red.  I miss it already.

Rock climbing kicks major ass.  I think that's going to be my new thing this semester.  I already signed up for the trainer course at Carpenter Sports building so I can tackle the walls after class.  Cliffhanger baby.  It sure beats waiting 5 minutes to use the bench press.  Now if I can just get an exercise bike in the morning I'll be straight.    

I came back yesterday and I found more soap in our bathroom.  Not like liquid soap or store-bought soap, but real homemade soap.  Every time I look away more of it pops up.  I don't know when my roommate gets the time to make all this soap.  It's like if Martha Stewart and MacGuyver had a son.  It's even in two colors now.  We have coarse/oatmeal soap and smooth/white soap.  When should I start to worry?

And somehow I'm working for Media again this year.  If you can call that a job.  Francis was like 'It's good that you're coming back.  We need someone good to really hold it down on the weekends.'  You know, this isn't exactly mission control or 911.  If I see 20 people on the weekends it's practically a bum rush.  But hey, I'm getting paid and I work with good peeps so I'll make the best of it.

Oh, I almost forgot.  I saw supercop today, doing his usual thing at the crosswalk.  I mean, here's a guy who must really takes his job seriously.  He's dressed in full police uniform (with hat and white gloves), standing in the middle of a three-way intersection (with working traffic lights), blowing a whistle and directing pedestrian/automobile traffic.  The way he runs the show you would think the pope was crossing the street every 30 seconds.  That's more dedication than some professors I know.  Maybe the mechanical engineering department can build an animatronic replacement or something so we can send this guy on vacation.  Lol.  Here's to you supercop, for making our lives a little bit safer, whether we appreciate it or not.

Another school year is rolling around and the only thing I really look forward to is working and making money.  That's kind of bass ackwards isn't it?  And what the hell is going on at home.  It seems like everyone can't wait for me to get my ass back to Queens.  I guess life doesn't get more interesting after graduation.

Oh yeah, I finally pulled Jason out to the bars on Saturday but we got there like 3 minutes before last call.  Eh, so we couldn't drink.  We just walked up and down Main Street and watched little kids threaten each other, piss against walls in full view of the public, and stare down the police.  You gotta love Newark.  I know the next time I'm about to get into a fight I'll have to remember to say, "You don't wanna mess with me man, I was on the wrestling team in high school!"  lol

But drinking isn't all it's cracked up to be.  We had that conversation while we were watching the teenie-boppers stumble their way home.  I think I gained some insight.  I'm afraid that's the kind of insight that I'm going to lose forever once I graduate college and leave this intellectually hostile environment in favor of the physically and emotionally hostile reality of life.  I might not be able to get those good conversations anymore.  *le-sigh*

I had a messed up dream last night.  I was in a bar with a friend and I asked the bartender for a certain kind of drink.  I think he gave it to me (this yellow liquid on the rocks) and I drank it and asked for another.  He said he was all out of the ingredients or something so he gave me the joint equivalent!  That is, he stood there and rolled a joint on the bar that was supposedly equivalent in effect to the drink I just had and held it out to me.  What??  The thing looked like a golf tee, only fatter.  I just stared at it as he lit the end and immediately like an inch of it burnt into ash and fell off.

I have the strangest dreams.

Saw the first part of The French Connection today.  Ok, the chase scene was good but it wasn't that good.  Still, it was pretty cool to find out that Gene Hackman and Roy Schneider were kick ass actors long before the days of  Superman and Jaws.

I re-watched the tape of the 2001 roommate challenge again tonight.  Man, that's some funny ish.  I'm glad I'll have that to watch when I'm older and Delaware is only a distant memory.  That is if they still have vcrs by then.  It'll probably be like Cowboy Bebop and I'll have to descend into the ruined remains of post apocalyptic New York to find one.  I miss cable just for that show.  

According to my online biorhythm reading here, I'm 8286 days old.  I don't know why that's significant.  Maybe I'll win something when I hit 10,000.

I was at emode the other night and I took this test to find out my lucky number.  It was like a 3 page test!?!  I wasn't expecting anything particularly insightful but the results were surprising.  It almost kinda sounds like me (except for being super gullible, I hope):

-Wednesday August 21, 2002 1:47am-

Somehow I managed to watch three movies today.  Well, two and a half actually.  I finished watching the end of The Hidden Fortress that I had started yesterday and then I saw Super Troopers and Kung-Pow.  Definitely the ace of the bunch was Super Troopers (no offense to Kurosawa), but the quote of the night has got to go to Kung-Pow:  

"You must make your anger like a monkey in a piñata... hiding inside with the candy... hoping that the kids don't break through with the stick."  

Now all I have to do is find a way to work that into a conversation.

And unfortunately I also managed to break the two day rule.  Even though I was only drunk momentarily this evening (off of one Guinness), I still count it as a loss.  But at least it was for a good occasion and enjoyed with good peeps.  Hardly an excuse though.

On an entirely unrelated note, there are sadly few minorities represented in comic books and video games.  I know this comes as no great shock to most people but what the hell are we doing about this.  I mean the rest of society has pretty much jumped on the minority bandwagon, so what are these two industries waiting for.  Screw the core audience that may not identify with a black, hispanic, asian, idian, etc. lead character.   I don't believe that crap anyway.  If our fashion, music, art forms and general cultures are good enough for white America then why aren't our faces.  I'm so sick of seeing the same images on my character select screens and on the covers of graphic novels.  And I don't want the lip service either.  If I have to read about a token black character then you might as well leave her/him out altogether.  Contrary to popular belief, the minorities don't always have to have the edgier personas with the hugest muscles and biggest guns.  There are fucking real minority people out there that don't fit into your small-minded roles.  I thought we were living in America.  It's time for this bullshit to end. 

I was at the CrossGen online comic book site today and spent a good hour or so sifting through the drivel they're trying to pass as entertainment.  I found roughly 4 or 5 black characters out of a total 9 or so comics.  It's a good thing I actually see black people in real life, because if I got all my information from comic books, I'd think all black men were bald and built.  Is there really a story out there worth telling anymore or have most comics finally become a print version of the Fox network with big breasted white women falling out of their clothes and body builder men in skin tight whatever.  Do we have to give up and say "I used to like comics when they were cool and interesting before you needed to pander to everyone's assumptions to sell a mag?"  Or maybe that time never really existed.  Maybe the naiveté has just gone away as I've gotten older.  No, that can't be it, because I can remember the Marvel Secret Wars with the black female Captain Marvel, and the black Jim Rhodes as Iron Man.  Back then nothing was falling out of a skimpy top or ripping out of a shirt.  People in comics actually looked like people on the streets.  What a concept.  I really detest this softcore porn phase our culture is going through.  I so can't wait for it to cave in on itself.  

-Tuesday August 20, 2002 2:21Am-

Halo and tequila are a good combination.  Even though I suck at Halo.

I'm so upset that I didn't get to go to the Deer Park last Saturday.  Well, not really.  I 'm just kinda upset that Jason stood me up.  Pretty much lied to me.  If he didn't want to go he should have made it clear.  I don't respect people who go back on their word.

Saw a dead butterfly today.  I'd never seen a butterfly not moving before.  Even that little thing where they sit on a leaf or something and slowly flap their wings.  It didn't do that.  It was just lying on the sidewalk.  Not moving.  It was so beautiful.  I wanted to do something for it but, you know, what?  I couldn't really do anything.  I guess I could blow it all up and go into this big thing about how we take beauty for granted and dress up to look nice for other people while to a butterfly, beauty is life.  To a butterfly, yellow spots on black means the difference between getting eaten or not while to us it means whether or not we catch someone's eye.  But forget the significance.  Forget the moral of the story.  Today I saw a butterfly, and it was beautiful, even in death.

-Thursday July 18, 2002 11:20pm-

I'm exhibiting classic avoidance behavior.  I just thought you should know that.

It's incredibly hot in this apartment.  Funny how night time is the hottest time of day around here.  I'm hardly wearing any clothes and I'm still soaked to the bone.  Maybe I should just go commando and walk around naked.

Got the lyrics to the Maxwell song "This Woman's Work" today and they turned out to be very much different than what I thought.  I even thought the frikkin title was This Woman's World.  I kinda like mine better.  Anywho, now at least I can sing along with the whole song.

I have to remember to call Gabe.  And there was something else...  Oh yeah, I'm participating in another psychological experiment on Monday.  I've been doing all these experiments where basically you give up an hour or so of your time to answer some questions or watch a movie or take a test while someone monitors you and at the end they give you $5 or $6 or whatever.  It's good money and it's fun as hell.  Plus it breaks the monotony of the day.  Yay.

We have to find a couch too.  That is, my roommate and I.  We just got a bamboo plant today.  We're supposed to feed it eggshells.  Yeah.  I give it three weeks to live, tops.  Our spider plant should fare better.  I'm kicking around the idea of naming it Peter Parker.

I have Playstation and the only game I have to play is Gran Turismo.  See I borrowed the Initial D series from Jay when I was in NY and I fell in love with drifting.  So I ran out and got a used copy of GT for like $11.  The Toyota Corolla/ Trueno is such a piece of junk and it's like the star car of the whole series.  Hachi-Rokou my ass.  So now I have an S13 and a rear wheel drive Skyline.  I call myself Akina02.  I still can't drift though.  Blah.  It's a hard life for us lonely racecar drivers without girlfriends.  lol  ^_^

Why's it so damn hot.

-Tuesday May 13, 2002 12:58am-

Today was a good day for eyes.  I saw my counselor today for the first time and he had these awesome sad eyes.  That's the best way I can think to describe them.  They had this deep emotional quality to them.  I don't know how someone gets eyes like that.  Then tonight I saw Serial Experiments Lain.  Lain also has some wild eyes.  Hers look totally emotionless to me though.  A complete blank.  If you ever look at your own eyes in a mirror, like in one of those big well-lit mirrors they have in hotel rooms, you'll see that they look completely different from how they normally look.  In the right light the pupils stand out from the rest of the cornea.  And in the right light your eyes can totally highlight your face.  I'm not even an eye person but I've been totally caught off guard in the past by how incredible someone's eyes have looked in the right place and at the right time.  It easy to believe it when people say the eyes are the windows to the soul.

I officially ran out of food a few days ago.  Technically I still have rice and spaghetti and ramen but I don't really consider that food.  There's no substance left.  Oh yeah, and soup.  I have instant soup.  Today I had breakfast at about 3pm and it consisted of a big grille cheeseburger (i had actually ordered a hamburger but the guy messed it up because i guess he was so used to making cheeseburgers. i never really understood the appeal of the cheeseburger. don't people know greasy cheese is bad for you) and overpriced large fries.  Not worth the 4 and change I paid for it.  But I've always had this thing where I like to get down to the bare essentials of anything.  Like I started out the year with all this food and it was kind of my goal to eat absolutely everything just to see if I could.  Apparently I can.  ^_^

I still have stuff that I don't plan on using, like half a box of instant milk, a full box of pancake batter (i can't make pancakes to save my life), a bag of flour and an assortment of condiment packages in all different colors and flavors.  I never manage to tell the Chinese food lady (it's always the same chica in the "Glam Rock" t-shirt) not to give me any soy sauce (which you really only need if you get an egg roll) or mustard (which i never use).  I think I feel like it's being too picky to ask for only duck sauce.  Stupid, yes.  If you added up all the soy sauce and mustard packets (over two weeks old) in all the fridges and drawers in all the houses in America there's probably a substantial amount of money there.  And then sometimes they give you the plastic fork and leave out the fortune cookies.  It's like a grab bag, you never know what you're gonna get.  I got a pint of sweet and sour chicken and a bag of fortune cookies the other day.  While I was eating I did some quick math and here's what I came up with: I got two free fortune cookies with my meal but the bag of 6 fortune cookies cost me a dollar.  So with a normal meal I get 33cents worth of cookies for free.  That's about 20 percent the price of my meal which amounts to about 2 pieces of chicken.  So why can't I just get two extra pieces of chicken next time instead of the fortune cookies?  These are the questions that govern our lives.

Like the CVS people who are always in such a hurry to shove your purchase into those little plastic bags that aren't good for anything except carrying a tube of toothpaste home.  They only ask you if you buy a stick of gum or something.  I want to know what is it with people who need to hide their groceries?  What's the harm in walking down a block with a box of Pop-Tarts in your hand or a gallon of milk.  There's no shame in it.  I love to let people see what I've bought.  Maybe one day someone will be turned on to Raisin Bran Crunch by my simple act of pedestrian advertising.  And no one walks around eating anything anymore.  Except ice-cream.  But that's too easy.  I walked home once eating a sandwich.  I'm a strong advocate of the presence of food in public.  If you can eat in outdoor cafes, eat behind the wheel (not a good idea), eat at ball-games, and walk around with your ass hanging out of your skirt/pants (also not the best idea), then you shouldn't feel any shame in displaying your food in public.  I mean come on, what's sexier than someone eating an apple in public.

But yeah man, I'm down to just K rations.  I've been too unmotivated lately to go to the Superfresh and buy food.  It's like a 25 min walk both ways (with several dozen pounds of groceries on the way back).  That's a hell of a disincentive.  So I wind up eating bagels and rice and ramen and snacking on $1 boxes of animal crackers.  Did you know that you can get 4 packages of ramen for a dollar.  That's crazy.  That's 18 meals for the price of what I ate today.  If it didn't taste so salty I'd probably eat it more often.  But anyway, the point is I need to drag my ass to the store tomorrow.

Oh, something cool happened yesterday.  Every time I left a building to go somewhere it would just start to rain.  Whenever I went inside it would eventually stop.  This happened three times but I had an umbrella so I didn't get wet.  I was so amused by the third time that I just let it rain on me.  You can't buy stuff like that.

-Wednesday May 8, 2002 2:30am-

Today was a pretty busy day.  I'm excited because I have 4 new apartments to visit this week.  I signed up to work a table outside of Trabant for Battle of the Bands on Thursday and I'm doing cleanup for Final Fling that same night.  Come to think of it, Thursday is going to be a long ass day.  I have to meet a bunch of potential roommates for next year and I have 3 other meetings that day.  Actually, now that I really think about it I believe I might have scheduled two overlapping things.  I'm going to have to get an organizer or something.  I don't know why volunteering for stuff gets me so overzealous.  Maybe it's just the prospect of free food and free entertainment.  Thursday is my new favorite day of the week.

I mailed my Mother's day gift today.  I got two bottles of this awesome African hot sauce at this new store called Village Imports on Main Street.  I asked the lady in the store if the had a branch in New York and she said she didn't know because they were a free trade store and when I stood there blankly she took pity on me and explained all about it.  ^_^.  It makes all the difference when people actually go out of their way to make that personal connection to their customers.  She even gave me some bubble wrap so my bottles wouldn't shatter en route.  But anywho, I was very pleased with my purchase.  It's funny, Main St. has a lot of those natural, earthy type stores with the incense, the fiber paper journals and handcrafted clothing.  With names like Grass Roots and Home Grown every time I walk in there I get a mental picture of people smoking hemp or weed or some other type of root in the back room.  I've gotta shake that connection.  But prove me wrong people.  Prove me wrong.       

I went house hunting today.  If this was an actual career I'd take it.  I'd drive around the country and look for apartments for people to live in.  Maybe that really is a career.  Tenant representative?  I might even do it for free if I was rich.  But anyway, I so want to live at Pinebrook Apts. next year.  Not only is it cheaper than I'm paying now but it's such a cozy atmosphere.  The place has a pool and they're building a gym as we speak.  I even saw my first garbage disposal today.  Ever.  What a novel idea.  You put your garbage in your sink.  Why aren't these things more common?  The apartment itself is right across from the laundry room and besides being incredibly nice my potential pre-vet roommate has an adorable white cat.  And she actually likes to conserve energy.  Juan de Fuca?!?  You mean there are two of us on this planet?!  Heaven forbid she knows how to wash dishes too.  And we don't even have to pay for water.  I find it upsetting that I'm not living there right now.  Hell, I find it upsetting that I haven't been living there all my life.  But will this pan out for Ian?  Who knows.  Hope for the best and plan for the worst I guess.

I never post on this page any more.

Here's a ten cents recap of the interesting stuff:  I hung out with my housemate, got very much drunk and wound up having a great time with my neighbors from last year.  I went barhopping with my former roommates and an impromptu sleepover broke out at my house.  I worked load in/ load out for a Nickelback/Injected/Default concert on campus but Starsailor (the free band outside) totally stole the show.  I saw a hot religious variety show and got a blazin CD from this Christian rapper T.R.U.T.H.  I got free pancakes for dinner.  I had my mind read by the Evasons (www.evason.com).  I went down to Washington D.C. to a service and lecture on the history of denominationalism in Christianity and got a bootleg Philly cheese steak.  I won my first time playing the board game Risk.  I got lost while jogging.  I saw a guy dressed as Batman in a comic book store.  I celebrated Cinco de Mayo with good peeps over chili and a dog almost ate my cheesecake.   And I'm one and a half days lust free baby!

That's about it.  Maybe you had to be there.

-Tuesday April 9, 2002 2:39pm-

Spring break was the best I ever had.  Every day I did something new and cooler than the day before.  See, I think the secret to a good vacation is not to unpack.  I don't know why but it's sort of a psychological thing.  Your vacation is entirely dependent on how seriously you take it.  If you unpack like a business trip, your vacation will feel like one.  It should be all about the unplanned.  

The only thing that sucked was jury duty on Monday.  See I served jury duty in the summer of last year but apparently when I left, the proof of service card that I turned in wasn't stamped so it didn't count.  So these suits send me another jury duty summons that coincidentally falls during my spring break.  I go down to the court house and find out that I can't serve unless I have at least two weeks so I have to reschedule for this summer.  On the way home I'm waiting for a green bus so I only have to pay $1 and a blue bus comes at the same time ($1.50).  They run basically the same route.  The blue bus pulls up and an old couple pulls up right behind it so the green bus can't pull into its spot.  The light is green so the green bus starts to pull around to leave and when I try to get his attention he makes a gesture toward the blue bus like 'use that one' and he totally knows he's screwing me.  I'm so tired of the judicial system.  They're going on my shoutdown list.

Tuesday I walked by my old high school and went to see Blade 2.  My high school just turned coed about 2 years ago.  Whenever I come home the first thing to greet me in my room is always a stack of mail on my bed and somewhere in there without fail is a newsletter from the high school.  I never read them though.  It's kind of hard to get excited about high school when you're only worried about graduating college.  Don't they realize that I'm now someone else's tuition whore.  

It rained on Wednesday.  Boo.  I took the time to read Roadwork by Richard Bachman.  It's kind of like the movie Falling Down (in it's original version, not the one where they edit out the scene when the little black kid shows him how to blow up the bulldozer with the bazooka).  It has a totally ruckus ending.  And for those of you who don't know, Bachman is Stephen King's evil twin.  More or less.  

The strangest thing happened to me Thursday on the way to the city.  I was on the bus and the lady sitting next to me started making small-talk.  Then she asked me if I had Jesus in my life and when I responded she told me that he's coming soon.  I was like 'I didn't know that' and she was like 'Yes, he's coming soon.  Read your bible'.  This wouldn't be so significant to me except that I've been approached by people preaching the message about 5 times in the last 2 years or so.  And I mean in totally random places people seem to pick me out of a crowd.  I don't mind or anything, I love discussing religion.  It just makes me think, ya know.  Maybe I look like a lost soul or something.  Hmmm. 

On Thursday I also got Lain.  That is, I went to Manhattan Mall and bought the first four episodes of Lain on vhs with a gift certificate at Suncoast.  Actually, Thursday found me all over Manhattan.  Manhattan's cool and everything, but I think I just like to ride the subway.  E to the F.  F to the A.  A to the V.  V to the S.  I love being underground.  I get this thing now where no matter what subway car I get onto I feel like I've been there before, like deja-vu.  And it only happens when I read the graffiti etched in the windows, which I always do.  I feel like I've seen it before.  It's a cool feeling.  Like I'm home.  Later on I hung out with Jon, Dave and Darren and we went bowling.  We were trying to come up with different racial comic book characters in the Marvel Universe.  We got 10 black people, then 10 asian and we started on hispanic but only came up with two.  I've since come up with 4 more but that's the best I can do.  I got two for american-indian (maybe three) but then I gave up.  Isn't that sad.  Either my comic knowledge isn't up to par or we still have a long way to go towards diversity.  The day closed out with watching The King of Masks on video.  Subtitled for your pleasure.

I got to shop in China Town on Friday.  I bought the Cowboy Bebop movie and the new Vampire Hunter D for 10 bucks!  How blaze is that.  I also saw this awesome Japanese computer game called Crazy Designer (I think).  It's pretty much just like the Sims only everything is in Japanese and the animations look more cartoony.  I'm so getting it when I make some more money.  I also picked up a ticket for Ground Zero at South Street Seaport.  That night Dave, Ashley and I drove out to see The Panic Room.  Definitely Forest Whittaker's best performance since Ghost Dog, Way of the Samurai.  

On Saturday I was totally unprepared for how sad Ground Zero would be.  While you're waiting in line to get onto the observation platform there's a large iron fence on your right hand side.  It's covered with all types of flags, banners, pictures, origami, candles, and dedications to the FDNY, loved ones and the city as a whole.  And the entire wooden platform was covered in writing.  Anyone who felt they had thoughts they wanted to share could add to the wall and the result was this amazing work of human expression.  I think that choked me up more than the site itself.  I was totally moved to tears.

From there I went to Aqueduct and did some clothes shopping.  While I was there it snowed.  Yeah, real snow.  I got home and took a nap and that evening I went with my family to the Universoul Circus, which is the only circus in the world owned and operated by African Americans.  It was off the heezy for sheezy.  They did so much more to keep you entertained than Ringling Brothers for instance.  It was the combination of using a smaller ring and popular music, while getting the audience involved in most of the show.

The last thing I did before I came back to Delaware was to get some driving lessons.  Ashley let me drive his car around a small neighborhood in Kew Gardens and with Dave in the back seat they gave me some pointers on improving my skillz, or lack thereof.  I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn't been so concerned about damaging my boy Ash's car.  Maybe it's just me but it feels so much more natural to drive with one hand. 

I had a really shitty realization the other day that just snuck up on me until I was faced with it one morning.  I have a wrinkle.  Like a real 'for the rest of your life' wrinkle.  I hope that doesn't sound vain or anything but I'm only 22.  I shouldn't have wrinkles yet.  The worst part is that it isn't even symmetrical.  It's like a laugh wrinkle and it's only on one side of my face.  This is totally unacceptable.  u-n-a-septable.  Something must be done.  

Well this will be the last post before spring break.  I won't even really get to upload this to the web until after I get back.  Where does the time go.  I should just stay here for spring break.  I'd be happier I think.  I wanted to have this webpage finished by now but things never work out the way I plan.  Le sigh.

There's a part of me that agrees with Bryant Gumbel.  Maybe the solution to all this death and destruction is something bigger than any of us can see right now.  But then there's another part of me that does want to "bomb them back to the stone age".  They crippled my city.  Killed SO many people.  Affected the face of our country forever.  You can't get much more personal than that.  So I choose to take it personally.

Promises are hella hard to keep.  When was the last time you actually said the words 'I promise' to someone and meant it?  I said those words last Friday and I've been going nuts trying to stay true to them.  See it's easy enough when you promise something that comes naturally to you, like 'I promise to take out the garbage' or 'I promise not to tell anyone about your fire engine pajamas' but when it's something that you actually have to work at it's insanely hard sometimes.  I don't know how I'm going to do it.  I really don't.

Last night was pretty funny.  See we got 2 large pizzas with one topping each for $12.99 from Papa Johns and with a 2 dollar tip that comes to $15.  So me and my roommates make 4 people and $15 dollars divided 4 ways comes to $3.75 each right?  Nope.  I paid 5 bucks, another roommate paid 3 bucks and another paid 7 because he was covering for the other one.  I was all set for my 4 slices because I was pretty hungry but lo and behold I only got 3.  This may sound like bitching to most people but I think I was justified.  If I only got slighted on the pizza I would have been cool with it.  But I got gipped on my change too.  And it was my last 5 dollars.  So I'm like 'hey, 5 dollars for 3 slices doesn't add up' and then all sorts of crap about me not being fast enough and who pays for alcohol most of the time and various other nitpicking stuff comes up.  It's funny though.  I wasn't really even that pissed off about the money or the pizza, I was pissed off about the principle.  The principle is this: if person A doesn't pay for pizza, how does person A takes 4 slices anyway.  And I'm not a math major but buying beer that no one really asks for and allowing anyone to drink it if they want to isn't the same as buying pizza when everyone's hungry.  If stupid ish like that can come up over pizza then there's obviously a lot not being seen here.    

My brother is graduating this weekend.  I'm very happy for him.  Graduation is like that one defining line between youth and adulthood.  Sort of like the last safety net.  Then you're out there trying to make it in the 'real world'.  It's big.  So everyone's growing up and I'm growing up and finding myself trying to decide what I want to do with the rest of my grownup life.  I saw my faculty advisor a little while ago and he got me thinking about going into transportation engineering.  I was thinking, you know, I could really get behind something like that.  But how to get from here to there I don't know.  I know people my age getting married.  That's like, wow.  Friends of mine who I can totally not see as Mr. and Mrs. something.  It's nutz.  But this is the rest of my life.  I'm going to be what?  An engineer.  A husband.  A father.  An uncle?  ^_^  There's just so much I'm not ready for.

I want to say congratulations to all the graduates this year.  It's no trivial task to get a college diploma.  You've earned it.  Some of you may be the first in your families.  Be proud of yourself.  I'm sure plenty of others are proud of you.  Best wishes in your careers and lives and don't forget to take a moment every now and then to reminisce.

"I only drink when there's alcohol." -Chris

Happy belated Cinco de Mayo.  Too bad I have this whole 2 day rule or I probably would have had some vodka last night.  As my roommate pointed out, we must celebrate our Mexican roots.  I know, it seems like all I talk about on here now is alcohol, but rest assured that I'm not an alcoholic.  I usually only drink if I know that fun guests are coming over and never 2 days in a row (hence the 2 day rule).  Personally I don't see the whole appeal of drinking for the hell of it.

Have you ever seen this movie by John Woo with Chow Yun-Fat called 'Hard Boiled'.  Well it features Chow in his typical roll as a tough guy (this time a cop) going around and shooting people with spectacular flips in typical Woo style.  No doves or pigeons though.  They are all subtly replaced by paper cranes.  Anyway, one of the weird things about this foreign movie is the dialogue and how it plays out on the screen.  In one scene Tequila (Yun-Fat) jumps out of a hospital window with a baby wrapped in his coat just before the building explodes.  He uses an electrical wire to swing down on and then runs over to the gathered police.  This women pushes forward and calmly says "Is that mine, thank you." and takes her baby.  It's hilarious.  In another scene when Tequila is still in the building with the baby he starts singing a nursery rhyme and then starts shooting bad guys with the nursery music playing in the background.  In slow motion of course.  This film also features classic lines such as "I've got more hostages than you've had hot meals." and "Give this guy a gun and he's superman. Give him two and he's God."  I recommend seeing it but don't expect to be blown away.  No pun intended.

Last night was pretty good, even though I didn't get to go to bed until about 2:30.  Maybe that wasn't such a good idea considering I had to get up to go jogging this morning at 8:00.  But still I figure it was worth it because various fun and fashionable female neighbors came over and good conversations were had.  They even tried my jamaican spiced bun, thus earning them many cool points in my book.  And I got to watch Finding Forrester on tv which has the coolest cameo appearance near the end.  But I don't want to shine over this food thing so let's get back to it for a minute.  I love all different kinds of food and it always astounds me what other people won't eat.  My only real dislikes are: orange soda, beets, liver, ackee, and pigs feet.  Anything else I'll try at least once, no matter what it sounds or looks like.  As long as it won't kill me.  So like I said, when I hear people say that they don't like this or don't like that it's way over my head.  Just trying new foods is one of the joys of life.  I made sorrel (a jamaican drink) a little while back and it was my first time making it even though I've had it since I was a kid.  You basically have to boil some leaves in water all day then add ginger and sugar.  I thought it came out pretty good and was trying to get everyone to try it.  Much props to all my roommates and neighbors that gave it a shot ( I understand that it can be an acquired taste) but one of my roommates never even got around to tasting it.  I thought that was pretty messed up.  When is he ever going to get the opportunity to try it again.  Little things like that stick in my head.  If anyone ever cooks anything or makes anything or even gets something from the store that they like and I've never tried before I'm the first in line to try some.  That's not only good manners, it's just basic friendship.  I've never seen such picky people in college. 

Every time I get drunk there's no one to work the video camera.  And I also have to get my pictures developed so everyone can see them but I don't want to be one of those people who just takes pics or random things to finish the roll.  Why waste quality film on meaningless moments.

Girls, when you play with alcohol, boys will be more assholeular than usual and try to take advantage of you (Yeah, it's a word.  Look it up.).  Guys, don't drink and become more assholeular.  There's always drama involved whenever anyone has too much.  I know from personal experience by what I see around me.  People say stupid things under the influence.  And the sad thing is they mean it.  A promise isn't a promise unless it's kept.  It's like... I don't know what it's like.  I made this nice analogy last night between Captain Morgan's rum and fighting Mike Tyson.  You don't have to get your ass beat by Mike 3 times before you know you're not gonna win.  So I'm done with the Captain.  As for truth and keeping your word and all this other stuff, what are all these mind games people play with each other.  It's totally unnecessary.

Yesterday I got to do some work in the office on an electric typewriter.  I haven't used a typewriter of any sort since senior year in high school so it's fair to say I was typing at about 10 words per minute for a while.  I suppose it would have taken a lot less time is someone had told me how to use the white error sheet thing.  But I guess trying to write without errors makes you more precise.  Like writing an essay in pen with no whiteout.  These are the challenges of our lives. ^_^

...oh, I almost forgot.  I made some totally badass cornbread last night but I left it in the oven 10 minutes too long and it got a little burnt.  And I finally got it to rise!  Iron chef cornbread is back baby.  I was disappointed by the burning but I still ate the whole thing.  Nothing like flat beer and cornbread.  And Jamaican bun.  Flat beer, burnt cornbread and jamaican spiced bun.  There ya get.

The better parts of life consist of a finite amount of moments spent sitting around a room late at night, eating pizza and talking with blaze friends.

Tonight was filled with drunken roommate tennis, and good conversation.  It almost makes me want to live in an apartment for the rest of my life.  I love this kind of spontaneous social interaction.  You don't really get that living in a household.  But I guess when you get older and married and have to put bread on the table you don't have time for that kind of open relationship with everyone around you.  That sux, but it's realistic.

And today at my place of employment I got to do some serious office work for a change.  It was there that I was introduced to the subtle nuances of office gossip.  You'll probably never hear about it in any little workshop on adapting to business climate.  It's quite an enlightening experience really.  Of course now that I've admitted  I can type I have no excuse to just do homework or read a book when there isn't anything else to do.  Guess you can't have everything.

-Monday April 30, 2001 10:35am-

This weekend has been, in a word, great.  I got mad work done, saw the Patriot, had good peeps visit, and had chinese.  Keep it simple.

Today's been pretty good so far also.  That's even though I found out I have to do my lab over and got a package that I was waiting for 5 days late.  What tipped the scales was that today I was totally taken aback by the human capacity for giving.  Amy, you totally made my month.

  'anyway, its never how much you do for a person, its how much you sacrifice that is really important' -NYKID01

Never sell your mind.  Never sell your body.  Never sell your soul.  Never sell your life.  Remember that.

Last night was pretty freaky.  I mean I had gobs of fun until I started puking, but I'm getting ahead of myself.  It all started innocently enough with the neighbors coming over en troupe.  Jenn, Andrea and Steph.  They keep mentioning that I never talk about them on this page so I might as well blow up the spot all in one fell swoop.  They brought over the game Taboo but it never got played that night.  Chris had the bottle of Captain Morgan out and was fixing up rum and cokes.  Oh, this is mad funny: Andrea comes in and is like, 'you look different ian'.  I'm like, 'really?', while thinking to myself , 'ha ha, someone actually mentioned something'.  See, I messed up my eyebrows a few days ago while trying to shape them up (god knows why) and I just look odd now. Same thing happens every now and then with my mustache.  You can never count on your roommates to tell you when you've screwed up your facial hair ^_^.  So anywho, Andrea starts talking about her messed up intro to performance teacher who's apparently this closet pothead and from what it seems, shouldn't be teaching at this school at all.  Meanwhile I'm having two beers.  We have a book on our middle room table called 'Hot Sex: How To Do It' and Steph claims to have studied it cover to cover so I start to give her a little quiz, asking her random questions and stuff.  We get a little to loud for my other roommates so we move over to the neighbor's room where I proceed to drink rum and cokes with reckless abandon.  

Sometime during the night several things happen, not necessarily in this order: the topic of how often guys vs girls think about sex comes up; I try to guess the ages of the neighbors' siblings; I call Jenn's youngest sister jailbait; I drink too much; I go to the bathroom several times; we talk about why not to hook up with people who live on your floor; the question of whether guys really prefer thin model-type girls over more normal figures is answered; Andrea agrees with me that eating a chocolate rabbit is justified as long as it's hollow; Steph tells me not to pass out; I stand up for girls that are thick in the thighs; I watch my hand distort; I say ' I'm wasted/toasted/never been this drunk before' quite a number of times and mean it; I make a joke about Chris' penis size; I stare at pez. lots of pez; I make a mental note of how attractive my neighbors are; lifting my glass I ask Chris why it's so heavy and he replies 'because you're drunk'; I make a game out of focusing on people's faces until they only have one pair of eyes.... and so on and so forth.  At the end of the night I walk back over to my room and toss my cookies.  And Chris was right, I did feel a lot better afterwards.  I think I just stood there with my head in the sink for about 10 minutes.  Then I crawled into bed, kicked my shoes off and fell asleep.  Yay.  That was around 2 o'clock I hear.  Waking up for work in the morning is another story.

And through all this I've learned something.  Drinking causes shrinkage.  I was quite disturbed by this in the morning when I took my shower.  These are things you never hear about ^_^.  But the moral of this story is don't drink to excess.  And if you do, don't chuck in your neighbor's room.  And um... hmm... don't say anything while intoxicated that you're going to regret later.  Anything else?.... nah, that's it.  Oh yeah, Jenn bought me Ginger Ale today when she found out I was still recovering.  She getz mad propz.  Steph bought us chinese food once upon a time.  She's the bizomb.  Andrea is just Andrea.  That's good enough for my punk azz.  Jess, who was M.I.A. but chipped in for drinks last time, is a cool gal and anyone who insults her driving has to answer to the man.  Ya heard.    

Today I spent way too much time working on this webpage.  Why is it that work is so very easy to avoid.  I'm avoiding it right now.  I can get hella motivated to clean our damn bathroom or tackle some retarded job at the library but not for my major.  I don't know what I need but I ain't gettin it.  

Be careful what you wish for kiddies.  You just might get it.

And on another note, my neighbor may have inadvertently caused her fish brain damage.  I didn't know that was possible.  Well the story goes that she was changing the water and it was slightly warmer than it should have been.  To make a long story short, her fish now doesn't move around as much and she thinks it might be clinically depressed or something.  Wow.  Considering all that our fish have been through, they should probably be on prozac by now.  Yeah, they're still alive.  We have food now too, which is a bonus.  That reminds me, I have to feed them dinner tonight.  So I guess the moral of this story is that fish have feelings too.  So don't accidentally boil them or feed them people food.  And pray there's no such thing as karma or in the next life you too may be bait.  

I really need to update my links page.  Some of those sites no longer exist and I think two or three of them even make reference to the Soviet Union. ^_^

I had so much fun yesterday it should be outlawed.  Everything takes on a different perspective once you've had a few beers.  It's like I tried to explain to my neighbor last night, being drunk is like seeing yourself simultaneously in the present and 5 seconds in the past.  It takes a little longer for everything to catch up to you but life is still going on in real time.  It's an unusual experience.  And I think I may be one of those philosophical drunks.  For some reason, when I'm blitzed I think I know a lot, so I'm always trying to solve moral dilemmas n such.  I was on point with the logic too.  But unfortunately, being drunk doesn't give you perfect foresight, which I don't have when I'm sober either.  So looking back on it now, there are probably some things about last night that I would change to spare some feelings.  Vague enough for ya?

Yay, I have a few dozen labs to do by Monday, a test to study for, all sorts of crap to complete and figure out and several other miracles to pull out of my ass in 2 days.  So am I worried?  Nah.  I obviously don't understand the situation.

Here's something to think about.  You ever have a friend that you think you know at least reasonably well and then you find out they have another side to them that is totally opposed to how you normally think of them.  I've had that happen to me and I still don't know whether to believe it.  In a way it's off-putting because I liked my old perception better.  It's kinda like finding out your librarian wife used to be a stripper.  

Today was bad.  As bad as it gets sometimes.  I hate days like today.  They rip me apart.  But then you come home and good peeps come over and watch pokemon with you.  Then more good peeps make you macaroni and cheese for dinner.  Then other good peeps come online and listen to your sob story.  Peeps save the day.

I saw the funniest thing the other day.  I was walking through Trabant, our major food court on campus, and at the end of it there's this store that sells school supplies.  Anyway, I was passing by the store and I hear a lady say "don't run with those" so I look over and I see a little kid holding a pair of large scissors.  It was like someone staged a public service announcement or something.   Ok, it was pretty damn funny at the time. ^_^  What a perfect example of mom reflex though.  I was telling someone about it the other day and I was like ,who ever really wants to run with scissors.  Personally I've never had to get somewhere to cut something right this minute. Who's like 'I've got to get there and cut it before it's too late.'  You never see that.

I'm really not trying to go to Atlantic city this spring break.  I know it'll be fun and all but I just can't justify spending the money.  It's enough cash just to come home from Del on the Amtrak.  So now I go back to the old neighborhood and see some friends, maybe get some schoolwork done, probably read a book or two.  And that's it.  I'd probably rather stay up here and sleep late in the mornings, get up around noon and grab breakfast from a friendly neighborhood Chinese food establishment or a box of Apple Jacks.  Then catch a movie for free at the library and read The Last Samurai until they close the place down.  Or maybe I'd get up early every other day and go jogging, like early around 7 or 7:30 while my inhibitions are still asleep.  Then come back and cook myself breakfast, maybe try making pancakes for the first time and boil some sorrel to drink for dinner.  I can think of a million little things to start or finish up here but I get back to NY and all it seems like I do is get up with allergies and go back to sleep with nothing accomplished.  It's like my whole world is contained in that house and it's discouraging to be back there with nothing to do.  I mean right now all I have plans to do besides the Atlantic city thing is to go clothes shopping and maybe buy Sailor Moon R and S.  It's funny how time shrink-wraps itself around boredom.  If you really want to feel like you've spent the whole day doing something, do something you hate.  But you're not feelin me.  Wish I had my Mood Demistify cd right now.     

Oh yeah, our fish are going to die and nobody cares.  No one's going to be here for a week and we ran out of food about 4 days ago.  I just stare at the tank like I expect myself to come up with an idea or something because I don't want them to die.  See, for some reason I've become quite attached to these fish when apparently no one else has.  We had 4 before the winter break and my mother decided to take them home because it would be a week before my roommate would come back.  Needless to say they survived the car trip and at the beginning of fall semester they were reintroduced into our apartment tank (which my roommate had neglected to clean all winter, but whatever).  I got in the habit of feeding them in the morning before I left for class and when I got home in the evenings.  That is until we ran out of food.  So no one around here has fish and I did a yahoo search for the nearest fish store which turned out to be damn far away.  But that's probably an excuse.  If I really wanted to save them I'd have jumped a bus or bummed a ride right?  But I'm not even the one with the car, I mean no one else can get food?  It's not that hard.  Maybe I'm just getting pissed off with this on top of every other act of neglect that goes on around here but I just feel bad for the damn fish and pointing fingers won't solve anything.  What really pissed me off at one point though was when one of the 4 fish finally died after we tried to put it in fresh water to save it and my roommates wanted to fuck with the dead fish like it was a joke or something.  I feel like that girl that got kicked of Survivor after she got attached to the food chickens.  But still I think I'm justified.  And what's more, they wanted me to fuck with the dead fish as part of a prank, when they didn't have the balls to do it themselves.  So I've gotta leave tomorrow and I don't see myself taking these fish on the Amtrak so when I get back they'll most likely be dead.  These fish we've had for like 6 or 7 months.  Ain't that some ish.  I feel like such a dick.              

I think it's quite a shame that apparently some people have yet to be introduced to the joy of the anime smiley face.  At least that's what I like to call it.  It's this little thing: ^_^ .  People on IM still ask me what that is.  College kids no less!  What's this country come to.  Yup, I have NOTHING better to talk about.  Heh.

If you're looking for a good anime to watch, look into Furi Kuri.  A friend of mine introduced me to it the other day and I was completely taken over with the visual style and music.  The whole sequence of events that allowed me to watch it is in itself is a story of the age we live in.  This friend messages me on Instant Messenger and asks if I've seen Furi Kuri.  I say nah so he uploads it to me.  I can't play it on my Media Player so he sends me some files to update my player.  I update, play the movie and totally get into it.  The soundtrack is hot so I download it on Napster and play it on Winamp.  And I'm now telling you about it on a personal webpage.  From communication, to visual entertainment, to audio entertainment, to communication, all through the same user friendly system and without spending a dime.  It's almost too easy.    

Ok, here's the plan.  I'm gonna pool all my cash to hire someone to cook for me and do my laundry and stuff while I play Pokemon Gold all day on my color GameBoy emulator.  How is it that you can spend hundreds of dollars on a PS2 or a Dreamcast (not that I would) and wander aimlessly from game to game without satisfaction and then find a game on GameBoy, of all things, that totally rocks your world and ruins you for anything else.  I'm an official Pokemon fanboy now.  All that's left is for me to drop out of college, start trapping animals and go around throwing balls at people.    

Happy New Year.  Ya know, one thing that sort of integrated itself into my life when I turned 21 is the whole alcohol thing.  It's a good thing beer and other intoxicants taste like ass or I might drink them too often and become an alcoholic.  I mean for me, 'drinking' is just drinking.  Except that I only drink in the evening and never 3 days in a row.  The rest of the time it's like that old Sunny Delight commercial.  I open the fridge and I go 'orange juice, purple stuff, hey beer'.  Sometimes you just get a taste for it, even though it tastes like ass.  Why is that?

Looks like it's only been 3 months since I've updated.  Not too shabby.  My New Year's res is to run a six minute mile.  I haven't run for 3 months though so I doubt I can still do a 6:53 but just getting back into it is going to feel so great.  Oh, see Timecode if you haven't.  It's a totally new approach to movie-making.  The screen is split into 4 boxes and 4 different cameras follow 4 different stories centered around a bunch of people who are somehow or another connected throughout their stories.  There are absolutely no cuts in the entire hour and a half and a lot of it is improvisation around a base story idea.  It's awesome and it's easier to follow than you would think.  People keep walking into each other's camera zones and it's great.  And besides, Salma Hayek is in it.  This is before she lost like 200lbs to be in Traffic.  There just aren't any hot women in Hollywood anymore.      

There was a guy in the dining hall wearing a NYPD shirt at lunch.  I was wearing my white New York City shirt because I had just come back from Tai Chi.  I was so tempted to stand up and shout "I DIDN'T DO IT!" and run for the door.  lol  That would have been a shining moment for the NLF ^_^.

What's this big thing Delaware kids have with rap music.  I mean I don't know how far back it goes but gradually it's become like the thing to do or something.  If you see someone in an expensive new car, a beat up old one or anything in between the beat bumpin out of it is invariably going to be the same, guy or gal.  I don't see anything wrong with rap being for everyone to enjoy but the shear amount of coverage can't be because everyone just discovered it one day.  What about all the other underrepresented music?  Why don't I hear Lenny Kravitz or Portishead blasting from someone's trunk.  Maybe it's just that the people who do play those guys play it at a reasonable volume so we all don't get to enjoy.  What a waste.  Just wait till I get a car and a nice paycheck.  It's gonna be all sorts of 'late night Napster search, only heard it twice but it sounds hot so I'm burning  it to a cd' joints playing 24-7 baby!

For all you people that don't know, "Pi" is a hot movie.  Go out and rent it right now.  You betta rekonize.

A few days ago I realized that my whole college career (if you want to call it that) has symbolically come 360 degrees right back to where it started.  I was walking across campus in the middle of the night and I was like, damn, I've done this before.  This summer session is so much like the one before freshman year that I'm starting to wonder if maybe I only imagined the last 3 years.  All the late nights, early mornings and info crammed brain cells and I'm right back in Rodney with the same old closet-sized room and 7 credits worth of classes.  It's funny, they've torn down and built up everywhere else on campus but the Rodney complex always stays the same.  Like a roach trapped in amber or something.  lol 

But seriously though, the only difference between this semester and that one is that I'll be leaving for good pretty soon after this one's over.  UD gone, CUNY here I come.  And I wonder about all this stuff like what was the biggest opportunity that I missed, and what class should I have taken that would have been tight.  Who should I have met and who should I have listened to.  I mean it's not like I don't still have another semester to do stuff but who's to say that anything's going to change and I'm going to start doing those things that I've been neglecting all this time.  If history is any indication then I won't.  So I'm left feeling unfulfilled and there's this big ass chunk of money that's gone to show for it.  And you slap a label on it and call it college.