affectation.log

So yeah. 2003. Had to make a new directory. Exciting.

A disappointing night. Quite an accomplishment, considering my already low expectations. I didn't feel much like getting drunk, and when I'm not drunk I despise drunk people. A lot.

Alright. Back into the fray.

Once again... I'm awake and everyone else is unconscious. Jon's snoring loudly. Like he always does. I'm trying to block it out with some Remy Zero. Eh. It's not really working.

So once again, some shit happened tonight that I have no idea about. And this time, it's not like I was too drunk to notice. Jon brought some girl from Caldwell. I still don't know how he knows her. I thought her annoying. Being me, I decided not to hold this back. Eventually both she and Jon were drunk. Well, either that, or they were both acting like it. And they were kind of all over each other. So they went for a walk.

I chose to take a walk at the same time. Different direction. When I got back, it had all gone down. People were suddenly in a big rush to get this girl home. And I hear she didn't really want to go, but no one [not even Jon] wanted her to stay.

After returning from taking her home, Jon was silent. As usual. He went out for a walk, came back and slept.

I suppose I'll get the story at some point.

So I was sitting and listening to Coldplay's "Yellow" earlier. That song brings back memories of a concert. No idea which one. Standing in the pit between bands. They were playing Parachutes as filler and "Yellow" came up. Everyone started swaying and singing along. At the time I didn't know the song, but I just closed my eyes and felt the crowd. It was just so soothing... Mmm.

Just saw Two Weeks Notice. Yes, I know I complained about it before. But that's because Counting Crows released "Big Yellow Taxi" for use in it. I still think it's wrong. And in the movie, the song sounds even worse, what with Vanessa Carlton's annoying background vocals.

I liked the opening credits, which featured childhood photos of Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock. She's still pretty attractive. And Alicia Witt was in the movie. Billed third, despite the fact she didn't have much screen time. She's so hot. Too bad her character wasn't meant to be likable. In summary, the movie was cute. I liked it.

I've seen three Hugh Grant films in the past thirty-six hours. After writing that entry New Years morning I rifled through the DVD collection in Lacy's basement. Didn't feel like any comedies. Decided on Bridget Jones' Diary. I'd caught pieces of it on TV, but never seen the whole thing. I didn't much care for Renée Zellweger's British accent, but she was still cute. A pretty good remake of Pride And Prejudice.


Then I decided to watch Notting Hill, despite having already seen it back when it was in theaters. Marveled at the precise freeze-frame capability of DVDs whilst pausing on a shot of Gina McKee. Mmm... Missed most of the latter half of the movie, fading in and out of consciousness. Eh. It's still good.

Then I tried to watch The Cutting Edge, but had to cut it short when Lacy woke up and incited a trip to IHOP. So I borrowed it from her and watched it last night. Truly classic. Especially the montages, with the cheesy early nineties music.

What can I say? I'm a sucker for the chick flicks.

So last night I was browsing Lacy's old entries. Found this online quiz based on the Myers-Briggs personality test.

According to them, my "warped personality" is the Fanatic. I'm "always searching for an Answer with a capital A", though I'm "usually openminded enough to realize the current one isn't good enough after a few years".

This was the INFP type. Back in high school, I took the Myers-Briggs and got the ISTJ type. The only thing the same is the introversion. I went from sensing to intuitive, thinking to feeling, and judging to perceiving. Hm.

Granted, it was a short online quiz. And this is a personality test we're talking about. Not exactly dealing with precise measurements. But still... I have to wonder. Have I changed, or was I lying to myself all that time? Am I now?

Ah, domestic bliss...

Movies watched lately? Donnie Darko and Riding In Cars With Boys. Mmm... Drew Barrymore...

A few people had recommended Donnie Darko to me, saying it was truly a great movie. Sadly oversold. I thought it was alright, but teetering on the precipice of mediocrity. But it bothers me. Like Back To The Future did, but at least that series was more light-hearted. And much, much less heavy-handed. Suffers from your standard time-travel paradoxes, but lacks anything really redeeming.

Riding In Cars With Boys was excellent. Drew Barrymore plays the fifteen to thirty-five age range [her age during filming plus/minus ten years, actually] surprisingly believably, though I didn't care for her accent. And Steve Zahn's always struck me as a good guy [ever since Reality Bites], so it was weird seeing him in the role he plays in Riding. Yes, it was sad. Yes, I cried.

So, if you like sap [like I do], watch Riding In Cars With Boys. And if you're bothered by nonsensical temporal mechanics [like I am], don't watch Donnie Darko.

Went snowboarding again today. Left early, was on the slope at noon, went non-stop 'til five. Today was a good day. Much less falling. Most were less painful. And many were intentional. One run I didn't stop or fall at all. Too bad I couldn't reproduce this feat. Got crushes on a couple girls, ran into one super-bitch. Still, it was a fun day. I'm not even sore. Except for my knee, which I hurt colliding with the super-bitch.

It's been a long day.

Didn't really start until five in the afternoon. Helped Lindsay clean the booth. There was an odd moment, when we found there was no more electrical tape in the booth. So she suggested going to the office in Alden to get some. Then she made me choose between starting to clean the 35mm projectors or going to Alden. I can't remember which I picked. But then she got her coat. And then she either told me to get my coat or I asked why she got hers. I figured it would be, one person staying to start the 35mm cleaning and one going to get the tape. She said something about meaning it to be a group activity. So we both went.

She said she had to be somewhere at eight. So we stopped then.

I went to Subway. Some older woman was ringing up a guy, so the other person behind the counter, a girl, came to help me. I look over and the older woman and the guy are sort of conversing. The guy's saying something about how he's never been to a Subway before, and the woman's explaining their stamp-and-card frequent customer thing. The girl catches me looking at them and tells me that's her mother. Her [the girl's] parents own the franchise. She says something about how her mother can talk to anyone and get their life story in five minutes. Then she says she's turning into her mother. I mutter something about how becoming like your parents is inevitable. I have to repeat it a few times, 'cause she keeps asking me, "What?" Then she says something about how it's weird she's turning into her mother because she's only twelve. I shrug. She tells me how her brother and father and totally different. I shrug again. I get the feeling she's trying to get me to talk. She was talking to the wrong father's son.

Jack arrives, back from Florida. Of course he goes off to be with his fiancée. But first he has to get his car out from the snow it's accumulated since the begininng of break. So Liam and I help him with that. Then we help him extricate it from the driveway, through liberal applications of force to its hood.

Around three in the morning Liam says he's hungry and wants to go to Wendy's. So I go along to keep him company. And since Starship Video's near there, we bring State & Main along, to return it. [We rented it last night.] We drive past Starship and hit Wendy's first, 'cause the Wendy's drive-through closes at three. When we leave Wendy's a cop pulls us over. He noticed Liam's outdated plates. [They still say '02.] Upon inspection of his registration, the cop finds Liam doesn't have insurance. Well, shit.

So we wait as the cop calls a tow truck. We ask if it's alright if I go down the street to Starship to drop off a movie that we were returning. The cop says it's okay, so I go. The last time I remember seeing in the car was 0326. I walk. A long way. Guess what? Starship doesn't have a drop box for returns. So I start back to where Liam's car is pulled over. On my way back, I see the tow truck pass, dragging Liam's car. I assume Liam's in the cab.

So I begin the long walk home. I'm guessing it's two miles or so. Lots of time to think.

What do I think about? Guess. It's a who.

I pass a Thai restaurant where Lindsay, Matt Jackson and I went once. I remember at one point during the meal Lindsay just leaned over and put her head on my shoulder. Keep on walkin'.

I pass a gas station on a corner, with the area around its sign piled high with plowed snow. I remember being in that lot a year and a month ago. I was walking back from Starship with the aforementioned Matt. We'd rented Apt Pupil and were on our way back to E8, where Lindsay was lying on the couch. She didn't feel like making the walk. I'd grabbed a chunk of ice off the curb at that gas station. I carried it almost all the way to E8, tossed it in the skeletal bushes outside the Ellsworth apartments. Couldn't feel my fuckin' hands. Why'd I do that? I wanted Lindsay's attention. I know. I'm an idiot. Walk on.

I've got no watch. It's busted, so I left it back in Jersey. And I'm not carrying my phone. So I have no idea what time it is. Eventually I pass a bank with the time. 0414.

I reach the park at the corner of Highland and Park Street. Elm Park. This one time freshman year, a bunch of people [including myself] were hanging out in Lindsay's and Julia's room. Lindsay just up and leaves. A while later, she's not back. Some [including me] thought she'd just gone to the bathroom. Someone noticed she'd taken her jacket. I don't know why... but I go out to try and look for her. First place I try is this park. I'm wandering around with a weak flashlight. Absolutely terrifying. There's almost no light in the park, except for my flashlight. [shudder]

Why'd I pick there to start looking for her? Sometime earlier [not earlier that day, just earlier] Lindsay and I had just been walking aimlessly. We somehow ended up at the park. And we sat in the little playground castle [you know, that thing with the slide and the monkey bars and occassionally, a big tic-tac-toe game] and talked.

Onward.

I'm at the corner of Sever and Highland. Lindsay lives here. I know from that night we went to the Chopper after a Sunday movie 'cause she felt like pie. I stand there and look up at the apartment. I see a girl sitting with her back against the window. Must be the kitchen; there's a fridge nearby [with a couple bottles of Malibu on it]. She turns and glances down at me. I remain still until she turns back around. I don't think it was her. I stay a while longer, entertaining notions of being Lloyd Dobler. Then I get back to heading home.

At this point I run into Liam, who's walking down Highland. Trying to meet me halfway to Starship, I suppose. He's surprised I made it this far. We head to Ho Farms. It's 0517 on arrival. We spend about a half-hour there. Then we head back. He's got to sleep. Work in the morning. And I... write this entry.

Rubbing my eyes, I just felt some crap under my eyes. Took me a while to realize what it was. Frozen tear residue.

So it's been a long day. Time to sleep.

God, I'm so tired. I went to bed around five-thirty in the morning and woke up around nine-thirty. Why was I up at five in the morning before the first day of classes? Well, if you know me, you're probably not surprised. But oddly enough, I'd planned to go to sleep around three.

Then Selena IMed me. She said she wasn't feeling great, so I stayed and talked to her. But her computer kept dying. Eventually she asked if she could call. I wasn't going to say no, so we talked until five. It was... nice. I like to think I helped. At least distracted her or something.

Yeah, so, I'm tired. And right now I'm skipping a Crow postulant meeting. I loathe my pledge class. The brothers are alright. Alas, the postulants are mostly who I'll have to deal with. I am so quitting by the weekend. 'Cause that's the Postulant Retreat. And there's no way I'm spending my birthday off with those guys. Plus, I never made my big brother a paddle over break. So I might get kicked out. Hm. Means less effort for me.

My classes are pretty uninteresting. There's Calculus of Variations with Konstantine Lurie, whom I still can't understand. Hopefully I'll pass 'cause he knows me from other classes [for which he gave me passing marks, despite my complete incompetence]. And then there's Advanced Calculus I with Fehribach. He's assigned homework already. Due tomorrow. I'm to prove that the set of all rational numbers is countable. I should be working on that, too. And my third class is Linear Algebra II, with Roger "Tricky" Lui. I've never had this guy before. Today's class was somewhat how I imagine a Vietcong POW camp would be like. Frightening. But the material seems easy.

And my total cost of books? About one-forty. The textbooks for two of my classes were each under twenty bucks. The last was regularly priced. But still, I think this is the least amount I've ever spent on books for a term.

Yeah. C term. It's all on now.

So, how did I spend the beginning of my nineteenth year? Technically, it hasn't come to pass yet. And won't, for eight more hours. Unless you count from the time of conception... which I haven't quite gotten my parents to peg. Either way, what was I up to at midnight? I was talking on phone with Selena, who'd called me from a bar in Philadelphia, and watching the end of Coyote Ugly.

Yep. In fact, I've had four separate phone calls from Selena tonight. One was at ten, when she told me to get down to Philadelphia and spend my birthday with her. But then she had to go, as she was getting on the subway. She called again approximately thirty minutes later, once again told me to get my ass down to Philly. So I told her I'd see if I could catch a train or bus or something and get back to her. She called again at eleven. I told her it just wasn't feasible to spend a hundred dollars to take a red-eye down there and come back Sunday. So she said she understood and that she had to go, as she was dealing with a club bouncer. And finally, she called me at midnight, quite drunk, to wish me a happy birthday. About ten times. Fast.

The four calls prompted the following comment from my flatmate Brent: "Whipped." I admit, it is a bit weird. I'll go into some back history. I met Selena back in the day [sometime in late 1997 or early 1998] on the Palace, a sort of IRC-like chat client, except with avatars. We found we lived in adjacent towns. She once paid a visit to my high school, sometime during my junior year, just before she moved to Pennsylvania. I unfortunately remember little about this encounter. Unlike her. Then she moved, and we wrote for a while. Then the drop off the face of the earth occurred. She was probably the last to write. Skipping ahead to this past Thanksgiving break... I was talking to Bryan Bishé at a party about people we knew who went to Montclair High. This reminded me of Selena. So when I got back to Worcester, I looked her up on Google. Surprise, surprise. Found her on some Drexel drama department pages. So we got back in touch. It's easier now, what with AIM and cellphones. Yep. Four calls. Kind of cute, kind of weird.

Yeah, so I watched Coyote Ugly. I was in one of those odd moods. It's got a chick flick story, but it's also got girls dancing on bars. If only its soundtrack wasn't mostly shit, it'd be an excellent movie all-around. Then I thought I'd change it up with Alien: Resurrection. After a half-hour, I decided I wasn't really in an action mood. So I put on Contact. Ah, how I love Jodie Foster. And Jena Malone made a cute young Jodie Foster, too. Whoa. Just checked out her IMDb listing. She's less than a year younger than me. Wonder if I thought she was cute when I saw Contact in theaters. 'Cause I remember having a crush on Michelle Trachtenberg when I saw her in Harriet The Spy... So yeah, I still like Contact. Maybe I'll read the book again. It'll fill the pleasure-reading position until the books that are my mother's present arrive.

And, for no real reason, I'll tell you what the books are. There's The Essential Rilke. Hardcover. There's something about hardcovers; they just make a book more... comfortable. [shrug] So... Kevin Canty's Into The Great Wide Open and Paul Hoffman's biography of Erdös, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, both hardcover. And in paperback: Canty's A Stranger In This World, Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero, Rhett Ellis' Castle Of Wisdom, Rick Moody's Garden State, Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, and e. e. cummings' Fairy Tales.

Yeah. Those ought to keep me busy for a while.

Yeah. Didn't go to that postulant retreat. No fuckin' way I'd spend my birthday hanging out with those guys. [Not that I really did anything at all on my birthday. But that's how I like it. I don't like to be reminded of how time passes.] So I told Crow I'd be working in the projection booth Saturday afternoon. They had Jordan [who's now my big brother] try to convince me to go. Unsuccessfully. Yep. I ended up sleeping in Saturday and not helping in the booth anyway. Meh.

So last night I had a weird dream where I was wandering a supermarket. And Kate was there. And we got back together. Then I woke up in a sweat. I could go into more detail, but the details I remember are scattered. Like, I remember a weird vegetable I was holding. So yeah. I wonder what this means. 'Cause I doubt my subconscious wants Kate back. My conscious definitely doesn't. Although, she is the only girl who's dumped me. I mean, she's not the only experience with rejection I have [duh], but that was the only time I've been dumped. [shrug]


So the movie tonight was My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Blah. It was worth seeing once. I'll say this. If you can get over the fact that there is not one cute girl in it [which I have trouble doing], it's an alright movie. Yeah. Worth seeing just once. But only if it's cheap. Definitely not worth nine dollars.

But it was a short movie. Got out of the first one at eight. So I decided to go get something to eat in the hour before I had to be back for the second one. Zip came with me. So we're walking and out of nowhere he says, "I went out with Lindsay." Bam. So I'm floored. But I manage to keep upright and moving.

He fleshes things out over dinner. Apparently two days after the LnL Christmas party, she wrote him an email, asked him out. He tells me their first date was yesterday. They hung out after the projector cleaning. [Well, now I'm glad I didn't go.] He tells me that he doesn't know about anything long-term. But they've only had a first date, I wouldn't really expect him to be thinking long-term anyway. I chose not to bring up Kristin. [Kristin's this girl Zip knows down in Providence. Apparently they hit it off the summer before they left for college. Mutual attraction that never came to become a relationship. I've been telling him to go for her pretty much ever since I've known him.] So, yeah... Movies are going to be fun all over again.

A bit I left out of my entry about the LnL Christmas party. When the party moved to Christine's place. I was washing some shot glasses in the kitchen and Zip was there. No one else. I ask him, "So, what's going on between you and Lindsay?" I'm not being antagonizing, I'm just curious. Very curious, of course. Besides, I'd told him before about... everything. He says there's nothing between them, just a lot of talking and she seems nice. I go, "Ah," or something and go back to the glass-rinsing. Then he adds, "But anything were to happen, man, you know I'd ask you first." I have to laugh at this, and tell him it's none of my business if anything happens. 'Cause it isn't. But he laughs and tells me he'll keep me apprised anyway.

Which he did. And it's better to hear it from him than to have it come around as gossip. Still...


Sitting here and looking at my AIM buddylist, with Lindsay and Zip both not away and not idle, is probably not very healthy. So I think I'll drink some Jack, have a cigarette, and cry myself to sleep like a proper king of sad.

Went to Subway to get dinner after the LnL meeting. Abby was working there. Now, backstory. I used to hang out on the second floor of Morgan a lot freshman year. 'Cause Lindsay and Tzip and Kate lived there. Spent a lot of time just hanging in the hallway. So I was like a fixture. Abby used to live there. Never talked to her [except maybe saying sorry for being in the way of her door or something], but I remember she was on the swim team. That's pretty much it. Flashin' forward. I actually saw her working at Subway earlier this school year when I stopped in with Liam. I told him I remembered her from freshman year, and kind of stared and thought about how small WPI is.

Well, I actually talked to her tonight. Not about much. I asked her if she lived on Morgan second freshman year, and she said yeah, and she remembered me. She said she hadn't seen me around campus. I said something about spending most of my time in Stratton and the rest off-campus, which is mostly true. I kind of felt weird making long conversation with her, not because of any awkwardness, but because I felt I was wasting her time. Even though there weren't really any customers, I wasn't really paying. The reason I'd gone tonight there was because I'd discovered I had enough frequent customer coupons to get a free sub. So I felt weird, as I wasn't really a paying customer. I ended up getting a drink. Then there was some confusion where I thought I handed her a one-dollar bill and she gave me nine dollars in change. Apparently I handed her a ten. So yeah. I didn't bumble too much. Huh.

I just went on for two paragraphs about a girl I wouldn't even classify as an acquaintance. Wow. Oh, wait. I've done worse. Like pages on one-time interactions with waitresses.

What else is new? Oh, I'm out of Crow completely. Depledged, gave back the pin and books. They said I was still welcome to hang out at the house and such. Which is good. The brothers I like. The postulants were just of significantly lower quality. Funny, though. Some guy I know was telling me about his roommate, who's also a Crow postulant. This pledge was considering quitting as well. Why? He liked the brothers, but he couldn't stand the other postulants. A friend of mine overheard and said to me, "Ha. Isn't that why you quit?" Yeah, if only they'd expelled the crappy postulants. Maybe the remnants would've been a good group of guys to hang out with. Granted, I didn't even like this other hate-filled postulant. But at least I know he thinks along the same lines as I do.

Meh.

First Tuesday night of the semester. Jordan's house. He's no longer my big brother, but he's still a good guy. [That being, you know, why I picked him as my big brother in the first place.] Yep. It was a fairly quiet get-together. No beirut. TV 'n' a bunch of buzzed people talking. It was good.

Damnit. I hate it when you stay up late to do work due the next day and end up oversleeping the class it's due in. Fortunately, I'm in another class with the PLA for that class. Maybe I can just give it to him directly.

Had a long, vivid dream last night. But it was washed away in panic when I woke up. There was a party that didn't happen. We were left with a lot of food. Mainly shrimp. Lots of shrimp. Yeah, that's pretty much all I've got.

I forgot to mention this Wednesday. I dislike the former heads of Coffeehouse. Last term, I'd tried to get That Fleeting World [Alex Holz's band] booked for the first Coffeehouse of D-term. Kerry Lee Anderson, one of the Coffeehouse chairs at the time, told me they'd already booked up all of D-term. So Tuesday night I talked to one of the new Coffeehouse chairs, Tyler. He told me that as of a couple days previous, the spot I wanted [March 11] had still been available, but they finished D-term arrangements Monday. Damn you, Kerry Lee Anderson.

So I'm going to talk to Pub, and maybe the radio station, to see if they'll sponsor the event. And hey, maybe I could get LnL to sponsor it. Or at least lend out the equipment to me. But then I'd have to publicize it myself. Damn it. Coffeehouse would've been perfect.

So the first book arrived yesterday. Kevin Canty's A Stranger In This World. It's hardcover, a pleasant surprise. Though it has some residue from a pricing sticker on the lower left side of the front cover, and there's something written on the title page. I like my books pristine. Or at least, any damage done to them I want done by me. It's a short story collection. Good stuff. I like it almost as much as Burning Chrome. Almost as much.

Good thing FilmCom had a special movie showing tonight, or else I'd have had nothing to do. The Transporter. Meh. I was looking forward to it. But it ended up being like Swordfish. Wasted its entire quota of cool in the first twenty minutes. Then it just dragged. But the banter during the movie was good. So the night wasn't a waste. Despite the fact that I flipped the film during the second showing. [I had the soundtrack away from me, not facing me, ignoring one of the first things about film handling you learn.] This required a full stop mid-film for correction. I suck.

Oh, fuck. I left A Stranger In This World in the booth. I guess I'll get it Sunday. In the meantime, I can start on Garden State. Mmm. New books.

Just played Counter-Strike for a few hours. Gettin' back into the swing. I actually caught the eye of a clan. Heh. Not for me. Lone wolfin' is the way.

Alright, I'm going to curl up in bed with Garden State. I've found that piling crap [like clothes and books and Coffee Crisps] on one side of the bed and leaving myself only half the bed makes it seem less empty. Oh, and plush Bubbles helps. As long as I don't roll over in the middle of the night and trigger her voicebox. Being asked, "Do you want to play?" is one of the more disturbing ways to be woken up. [shudder] Damned Twilight Zone.

Anyway. To bed.

Jealousy. So much jealousy. Lindsay and Zip showed up together for the event setup tonight. So I did the quiet, moody thing for a while. I've got to stop imagining things. Playing out scenarios in my mind just... doesn't help at all. I also have to let it go, but I should start small... Well, smaller.

Ran into Andrea today. I do every so often, really. But this time, she said hi to me. I was midly surprised. I said hey and kept walking. This was as I was leaving the event tonight for a bit, and she was coming in. So I thought, when I get back, I want to ask her something. Like, what exactly does she think of me? 'Cause the reason I stopped talking to her was because I was sick of always being the one to initiate. Again, I wonder if she's listened to that tape I made her. Alas, when I returned she wasn't there.

But I just sent her a rambling, probably incoherent email. [shrug]

I've been tired all day. But now that I'm home, perfectly able to sleep, I'm not tired at all. Just bored. Very bored.

Guess I'll play CS. And maybe drink those beers I found in the road. That's right. I was walking along West Street and spotted some cans of Budweiser on the curb. On closer inspection, I saw the lid on one was intact. So I kicked them all. Two of the four were unopened. So I took them.

Yep. This is pathetic... the definition of my life.

Well, I woke up in mid-afternoon ['cause that's when it all hurts the most]. And I cried. I can't even say why.

An excellent start to the day.

The movie tonight was Igby Goes Down. Not a single likeable character in the movie. Saving grace? The sheer hotness of Claire Danes and Amanda Peet. I'll admit it was better than I'd expected. But that's not saying much. Kind of reminded me of The Catcher In The Rye. All in all... not really worth seeing at all.

There was good, solid talking. That was great.

But, being the sad individual I am... We [Lindsay, Zip and myself] disband after the second movie. I start moving towards the back exit of Fuller [closer to my house] and Lindsay and Zip leave out the front [as they both live out that way]. So they exit. I turn around and go stand at the door and watch them walk off together until I can't see them anymore. Then I turn back and leave.

You know. I've got to maintain my king of sad status.

So yeah, I should be doing my Calculus of Variations homework. But I don't understand it. And I'm not feeling too happy. So, I drink.

So Rainer Maria's playing Boston's Middle East on February first. Eighteen plus, ten dollars. [I'm having my parents send me my passport.] Who else wants to go? They're with Mates of State, Owen, and The Ivory Coast. So if you're into any of those bands... [I could care less about them, myself.] But if you're interested, let me know.

I didn't go to a single class yesterday. Didn't get my ass out of bed until four in the afternoon. The legendary curse of C-term seems to be kicking in. [Though, in the past, C-term's been when I get it together after fucking up A- and B-term.]

Called the Massachusetts Public Safety Office for the umpteenth time. Surprise, surprise. Mark Mooney's not there, and his voicemailbox is still full. I call again, ask the switchboard operator if I can talk to Mooney's boss. She tells me he's gone for the day, as is his assistant. Ignores my request to talk to his boss. Tells me to call again tomorrow. But she does tell me that the state's changed how the motion picture operator test is run. Now, instead of taking the test by appointment, it's run kind of like the SATs. One test time per month. So I might not get my license until the end of February.

So the state sucks. Now I'll have to decline the Head Projectionist nomination. 'Cause as an active LnL member, I can be nominated for the position [and was]. But since I'm not a licensed projectionist, I can't actually hold the position.

Do I really want to be HP, anyway? What is it about the Sunday movies I like best? Well, it's pretty much the only place I talk to Lindsay anymore. And she's probably only there because she has to be. So if I get licensed, she doesn't have to be there... and I might never see her. Yep, I'm pathetic, alright.

I didn't make it to Coffeehouse setup, but I did show up in time for the show itself. Sucktacular. The performer [Don Conoscenti] sucked ass. His guitar playing was excellent. But his songs were shit. Additionally, he seemed really... senile.

And there was no drinking afterwards. Very disappointing.

So I've been sitting here, doing not much of anything.

I made it up to the Gs tonight. Seeing as how last night I was still on Flickerstick, this means tonight I blew through: Foo Fighters' Foo Fighters, The Colour & The Shape, and There Is Nothing Left To Lose. Fountains Of Wayne, Fountains Of Wayne. Fuel, Sunburn and Something Like Human. I also had Flogging Molly's Swagger and Ben Folds' Rockin' The Suburbs on the list, but they both got cut after a couple songs.


So I was listening to the first song I've got under G, Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes". The mixtape favorite. This, along with Jon's recent entry about not being able to find the book High Fidelity, made me start playing a little image/concept association game with some songs. Perhaps that's not the right term. But I started to think about how many girls that song's made me fall for. The countless times I sat with So in, track five on loop, just dreaming.

The moment then drove me back a couple letters to Econoline Crush. "Tomorrow Starts Today". After my initial thought, which was that I should have put this on the Andrea mixtape instead of "Digging The Heroine" [not that it'd have made a difference], I thought about the change in tone at the beginning of the chorus. My mind completely filled with one image: Standing on the edge of a rocky cliff, back towards the drop. Arms spread, feeling warmth from the sun. And just... leaning back into the fall. Smiling all the way down.

Holy fuck, I'm delirious.

Yeah, I don't know. I should probably get back to my Advanced Calculus work. I've only got five hours until my IQP meeting. And if it's not done by then, it's probably not going to get done.

But first, since I'm not all that anxious to get down to Adv. Calc. proofs... My top-five albums, the latest edition:
      1) Counting Crows, Recovering The Satellites
      2) Black Lab, Your Body Above Me
      3) Remy Zero, The Golden Hum
      4) Collective Soul, Collective Soul
      5) Stroke 9, Nasty Little Thoughts

Honorable mentions, runners-up, or "Fuck! Tough call." In chronological order: Social Distortion, Somewhere Between Heaven And Hell. Gin Blossoms, New Miserable Experience. Sarah McLachlan, Surfacing. Get Up Kids, Something To Write Home About. Econoline Crush, Brand New History. The Promise Ring, Wood/Water.

Alright. That was a good time-waster.

When I got into it, the Advanced Calc. just flew. Sweet. It's like Group Theory. Something just clicks in my head and it all makes sense. In this way, Advanced Calculus is diametrically opposed to such subjects as Discrete Optimization and Calculus of Variations.

Speaking of which, with three hours until my IQP meeting, I can either: Try to learn something from my Calc. of Variations textbook; play Counter-Strike or Jedi Knight II; or read for fun. Sleeping's not an option. I'd never wake up in time.

I'll probably end up reading for fun, with perhaps a little FPS action. Over the past two days, six more of my books came in. "What arrived?" you're probably not asking. Well, I'll tell you. The Essential Rilke, in English and German. And hardcover, to boot. Mmm-mmm. Into The Great Wide Open, also hardcover. Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero [which'll probably be the first book I'll read once I'm done with Garden State]. The Wasp Factory. e.e. cummings' Fairy Tales. And Castle Of Wisdom.

Let the voracity begin.

There should be rules against getting drunk and listening to emo. Eh. If there were, I'd probably have no compunction about breaking them.

So tonight was some SocComm Pub show. At one point I was asleep on a couch next to Lindsay. I guess that was the high point of the evening, until she kicked me awake 'cause the event was over.


So that night back in the day when she called me [12 February 2001] I asked her how long this not being friends thing would last. And she said it was up to me. Sometimes I manage to forget this part, and fantasize that she'll come to me wanting to be friends again. Yeah. So it's up to me. Well, obviously I'm not over her. And she knows this, I'm sure. Fuck.

So, yeah. I guess I'll just sleep with my memories... and my pictures... and my apologies.

And my hiccups. Fuckin' A.

And those omnipresent tears.

So Friday night [or early Saturday, as this was around one] I was in Price Chopper buying cranberry juice to cut with some shitty vodka I had. I grab a gallon of Ocean Spray. The middle-aged woman working the only open checkout aisle laughs as she rings me up. She says, "You're buying juice when everyone else is out drinking alcohol." I look up at her, then down at the scanner. I shake my head and mutter, "Fuckin' degenerates." Then I leave.

I go home and cut it, then BMOB to T. Sam's and get drunk over a late dinner. Come home, listen to emo, cry. Watch City Of Angels, cry. Sleep.

Saturday I go out with my flatmates to Best Buy. I end up getting eighty-six dollars' worth of CDs. The Get Up Kids' On A Wire, Gin Blossoms' New Miserable Experience [the deluxe two-disc edition, with a bonus CD of rare material], Jawbreaker's Etc., Jets To Brazil's Perfecting Loneliness, and Stroke 9's Rip It Off. I've only opened the first two, as I've nowhere to put the little labels that are across the tops of the latter three. I save those.

After Best Buy we went over to Starship and rented a couple movies: Six Ways To Sunday and the most recent version of The Count Of Monte Cristo. I picked up the former 'cause Norman Reedus was in it, and I'd a vague recollection of it getting good reviews. Jack shrugged and went along 'cause he loved The Boondock Saints just as much as I did. Two hours later... all three of us regretted it. Truly, a disturbing, terrifying movie. "Black comedy" was the description on the back of the box. Sounds about right, except for that comedy part. So, if you're ever in the mood to freak yourself out, go watch Six Ways To Sunday.

The Count Of Monte Cristo was much better. Though, after Six Ways even bukkake would look good by comparison. Jack didn't know the story; I gave up some plot accidentally. I was amazed. The Count Of Monte Cristo's a classic. How can you not know it?

So I hate Guy Pearce. My fist, his face. The movie didn't exactly raise my opinion of him. Also in the movie was Luis Guzmán, one of those character actors you vaguely remember from movie to movie. He played Jacopo, the title character's right-hand man. He's cool. However, I don't think this was the role for him. His accent kind of clashed with the whole eighteenth-century French backdrop. But eh. It was an alright movie.

Going to sleep I watched City Of Angels again, as it was still in from when I watched it Saturday morning. Meg Ryan's cute, Nicolas Cage rocks, and Andre Braugher's cool. As a bonus, it's a sad movie. I love it.

Recently I'd begun reading synopses for episodes of the old [relatively speaking, circa 1994] cartoon ReBoot. It took place in a computer, Mainframe. The main character was Bob, Guardian 452, and his defense of Mainframe against such enemies as Megabyte and Hexadecimal. An excellent cartoon. I remember the last episode of the second season, "Web World Wars". There was an invasion of Mainframe by "Web creatures" [the Web was the source of great evil, while the Net was by comparison a happy fun land]. So they wiped the location of Mainframe so nothing could find its way from the Web to Mainframe. Then, just before they sealed the huge portal in the sky that led to the Web, Megabyte captured Bob and launched him into the portal. I was traumatized. I think I cried. It was such a down ending.

Then ABC opted not to pick up the third season. So I never got to see it. I hear Cartoon Network aired it back in 1999. I still haven't seen any of the third to this day, but long ago I read the synopses. I read them again Sunday morning, before City Of Angels. Love that show. Considering going for the boxed DVD sets of it. [Though I probably won't, in the end.] Learned of the existence of a fourth season. Rock. I decided to put off reading those synopses, as it was now about nine o'clock Sunday morning.

Well, I guess I won't be reading those for a while, 'cause my computer is dead. I restarted it when I woke up Sunday afternoon. It froze up. Repeated this a few times with some minor variations. Same end result. So I won't be on AIM for a while. And I won't be responding to email as much [not that I really did to begin with]. Best bet if you want to reach me is my cellphone. Even that's spotty at best, as it likes to shut itself off at random. Either way, the number's 973.930.JUAN [5826]. How long will this last? Indefinitely. I might build a new computer, or buy one, or my current one might decide to start working again on its own. Oh, and entries probably won't be all that frequent. Who knows, maybe losing my computer will provide me with the impetus to get a life. Doubtful, but it's a possibility.

The Sunday movie was Red Dragon. I saw it a couple months ago. Go archive digging if my movie reviews are all that important to you. My hand is cramping up from all this longhand. I'll write, instead, of the talking.

Apparently I left the Get Up Kids' Something To Write Home About in the booth's changer last week. And it came up to play when Lindsay and Zip were benching the movie that afternoon. Some song played and the two deemed it "the most depressing song ever". They couldn't remember which one it was, but after scanning some songs by them, I think it's "Out Of Reach". The only details I could get out of Lindsay were that the song was about being left by one's girlfriend [which "Out Of Reach" isn't about] and that it was of languid pace [though they rejected each slow song as I scanned it by]. Whatever song it was, Lindsay said it was the most depressing song ever, and that listening to it, she could see why I am how I am all the time.


Later, Ryan and I are discussing the Advanced Calc. homework. Lindsay comes over and says, mockingly, that she'll never have to do math homework again. I retort with, "Well, I'll never have to do heat transfer. Or thermo. Or kinematics. Ever." She says that's an excessively mean retaliatory statement, as heat transfer really messed her up back in B-term 2001. I'm confused. I remember her complaining about it, and her punting it, but it never seemed to get to her too much. She elucidates, bringing up her relationships with Justin and Jeff from that time. Ah. She continues, says that her grades that term were two Bs. I say, "Oh yeah? That term I got one C. And that was it." She points out her 'til-then straight-A record. I say, "Hey, I only failed one class freshman year." And then, she says, "Yeah, but did you have any shit happening that B-term?"

I don't know, does the second culmination of an obsessive crush and a three-hour-long sobbing rejection constitute "shit happening"?

I just look at her and blink. Awkward silence. She breaks it: "Yeah, I don't think I want to ask you that." I reply, "Yeah, I don't think I want to answer," and return to my book.

So I've been sitting at the kitchen table for hours. I'm about five pages from the end of Garden State. After that, I'll do my take-home test for Linear Algebra II. Can't do my Advanced Calc. or my Calc. of Variations homework, as the assignments are on my computer, in locally stored email. The Adv. Calc. work is also on the course website, but my roommates are either asleep, or they've gone and left their computers locked.

So that's my weekend. Sigh with me. And... now.

So I guess I won't be Head Projectionist after all. The state still sucks; I'm still not licensed. Special election was just now, at tonight's meeting.

Lindsay asked me about progress on my license, I told her it wasn't going to happen within the week. I told her to do what she felt like. You know when you say that, you kind of expect one thing to happen. I expected her to decline her nomination again. She didn't.

So she ran unopposed, got the three-quarters vote she needed to remain in office. How'd I vote? I abstained.

Sigh.

So tonight I went to go see Playhouse Of The Damned, the latest MWRep presentation. MWRep is WPI's group of alumni actors. But they usually have a bunch of current undergrads in it. I knew a lot of the undergrads in the current play [Deanna, Josie, Christine]. So I went. Skipped on it Wednesday and Thursday 'cause I had two midterms today [Friday]. So tonight was my relaxin' night.

The play was chock full of awful puns. But it was alright, overall. I got to see Brian Roberts [the ex-boyfriend of my ex-girlfriend Kate] play a gun-toting Santa Claus. It was... interesting. Yeah.

Went to the cast party, as Josie and Chris had practically pre-invited me. Good, drunken fun.

Talked to Deanna a rather significant amount. Ended up walking her and another girl [Erin Ellsworth, a freshman who was sort-of in LnL] back to their dorms. Mostly because it was three in the morning and I had nowhere to be and no real reason to stay at the party. And because girls lead and I follow.

As Deanna and I were standing outside her dorm, she said to me that if I needed someone to talk to, she'd be there. And I doubted out loud if she was saying this because she meant it, or because I was drunk and she knew it. She said she meant it, of course. And I want to believe her, of course. Then she asked, "Are you the type that hugs?" Well, yeah, I am. So I responded in the affirmative. And we hugged. And it felt good. Now, I have girls I hug. Like Chris and Josie. But they have boyfriends, and they're just playful. With Dee, it felt different. In a good way. She's engaged and such, so I know there's no chance. But the hugging still felt nice.

After she and I parted, I walked down Trowbridge towards Highland. At one point, I just let myself fall into the snow on someone's yard. Just repeating to myself:


It's been a warm day here in Worcester. That means above zero temperatures. So my tears didn't freeze as I openly sobbed on the walk home. I suppose that's good.

I'll have to write later, detailing my sucktacular week. The tests I've had. The nights I've ended up drinking in my room alone. The songs I've had stuck in my head. The dream I had last night.

But I'm still buzzing from the MWRep cast party. So I'll pass out.

Instead of passing out, I went to Honey Farms with Liam. We walk in the door. This guy standing over by the magazine rack looks at me and goes, "Is your name Emmanuel Go?" I stand there, look at him for a bit. "You look like Dave Kinard."

Yeah, it's him. A kid who went to MKA for one year. He was a sophomore while I was a senior. He's currently not in college. But he's checking them out, trying to find one that fits him perfectly. I resisted the urge to make sarcastic, pessimistic comments. He's staying in Worcester at Chez Brian Hart.

Backstory. I'm going up the stairs in Alumni Gym to the top floor, where crew practice is being held. This must have been sometime last term, when we weren't on the lake anymore. I pass by the basketball court. A guy walks up to me and asks me if my name's Emmanuel Go. I say yeah, stare at him for a while. He eventually says he's Brian Hart. Ah. Well. I never really spent time with him back in the day.

Very weird, to randomly run into people like that.

So yeah, Dave hung with Liam and I at HoFo from around four in the morning 'til just now. He and Liam had some rather meaningful, intellectual conversation. Me, I was recovering from being drunk and tired from only three hours of sleep. So I sat and watched.

Yeah, a very surreal night.

Okay, now I'm going to sleep. I might be going to Boston tonight. To see Rainer Maria. And I might go to the cast party for Playhouse again. But then I have to see the show. [Okay, maybe I don't have to go to the show. But then I'd feel weird going to the party. Since I'm not even on the crew or anything.] Eh. We'll see.

I'll just call the plays from the line.

So I didn't go to Boston and see Rainer Maria last night, 'cause I didn't get in touch with Liam. Ah, well. I don't think my night would've been as memorable if I had.

I went to Playhouse Of The Damned again. The last night. Helped strike afterwards. Went to the cast party.

This cute girl from Tufts showed up. She used to go to WPI's Mass. Academy [a high school program], then went to Tufts, instead of to WPI like people usually do. But she did Masque shows back when she went to Mass. Academy, so she knew the MWRep people. Anyway, I was talking to her after she came in when Josie walked by and undid my pants. Kind of ruined the conversation's flow.

Vickie later tells me Abbie [the Tufts girl] was taken. I am crushed. So I go to Chris and commiserate. I'm trying hard not to be like that kid Andrew from the Skin Of Our Teeth and blither on about some girl. Chris asks me if I want her to go inquire about Abbie's availability. Chris comes back to me and says she's not taken. Jordan comes up and... strongly suggests I go for her. The implied threat of physical violence spurs me on. Well, sort of.

Abbie and I hang out around the drinks and I help her make a fuzzy navel. I make this terrible makeshift mint julep. No mint leaves, so I used [green] creme de menthe. No bourbon, so I used whiskey. I don't think I floated the rum on top very well, either. So yeah, this supposed mint julep was disgusting. She stole my hat. We ended up hanging on the couch, lamenting the waste of alcohol that resided in my very green cup. We also ended up hanging on each other. [Rimshot.] No, really.


We talked about books [F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger and Bret Easton Ellis...] and music [Get Up Kids and Counting Crows and Snoop Doggy Dogg and Phish...] It was great.

And then we kissed. Good thing Chris confirmed her single status. Much less potential for it to turn into a Heather-like situation.

And the party started to disperse. I didn't see the couple she'd come in with. So I asked her if she had a place to stay, and offered my bed [with me on the couch] if she wanted it. She had a place to crash, but she said she'd take me up on my offer. [I was stunned.] We were the last to leave the party. Even the hosts were nowhere to be found. Heh.

And so we got to my place and we hang in my room. I kind of expect her to throw me to the couch any time. But she doesn't. I eventually get up and say, like, I'll see you in the morning, or something. She tells me to stay. [I can hear the "Woo"s now.] So I do. Then we talk about levels of uncomfortability and what's too fast too soon.

At one point, we were lying there, and I was showing her my talking Bubbles doll. [She's a Powerpuff Girls fan, too. Excellent.] And I was telling her about how sometimes I roll over onto her in the middle of the night and she talks, scaring the crap out of me. Then Abbie told me a story of rolling over onto one of her sister's stuffed animals one night. A talking dolphin. And she imitates the noise. Loudly. I get worried that Paul will wake up and chide me about this in the morning. It turns out he didn't hear it at all. Whew.

Then we slept together. Not "sleep"; literal sleep. Actually shared the space while unconscious. It was very nice.

And then we woke up and I walked with her to go get her stuff from her original crash point, some guy she knows in MWRep. And then her stepfather came to pick her up, so we said our goodbyes before we were within eyeshot of the car.


I kind of worry that she was just a solipsist fantasy, that I imagined the entire thing. I'm clutching the piece of paper with her number and AIM name like the brass ring from a carousel. Heh. Even in my better moments... I'm just sad.

So I called Abbie around seven, got her voicemail. Left a message saying something along the lines of, "Hey, it's Emmanuel... Hi. I was just, uh, wondering how you are. So, um, call me back or something. Bye." Haven't been called back. Oh, well.

Flashback to Sunday morning. She and I are walking to Founders, to pick up the backpack she'd left at a friend's room. All the snow that had fallen the night before is now slush. She says, "This was all so much nicer last night." I know she's talking about the snow, how it was fresh last night and how we'd been the first to break its surface most of the walk home.

But I can't help running through a list of self-deprecating comments in my head. I don't say any out loud [hey, maybe I'm learning]. Still worry that she thinks the whole thing was a mistake. After all, we'd both been drinking. I don't know...

Flash foward. I had some self-confidence yesterday. Seems it's faded already. Just spent a while looking in the mirror, picking away at myself. Considering cutting my hair. Shrug, sigh.

Well, the goodbye kiss seemed sincere enough.

So confused. And nervous.

Calling the next day is too desperate and calling three days later gives the impression I don't care. So two days is the time to call. I met her Saturday night, but  we mostly spent early Sunday morning together. Maybe I should have called Tuesday, two days after Sunday. Too late to do anything about it. Now I just have to wait. If she doesn't call me back, well... I probably won't call again. That'd definitely seem desperate.

Yep. Time to break out Hungry Hungry Hippos.

So giddy. Just got off the phone with Abbie. Hour-long conversation. Can't wipe the grin off my face.

Yeah, she called me back tonight at 2221, right near the end of Coffeehouse. I had my phone set to vibrate. Jumped out of my chair. Oddly enough, I didn't get her actual call, but it buzzed to tell me I had voicemail. The voicemail alert was at 2222. Weird. Must've lost reception for just a minute or so.

Yeah, so... I called her back when strike was done. Excitement abounds. I'm not saying that sarcastically, this time.

I was talking to Abbie via AIM. She doesn't use capitalization. Or punctuation. I winced. This widespread disregard for proper typing bothers me. Liam tells me I really have to let it go. But really, does it take so much effort to capitalize and punctuate? Seriously. I suppose I expect too much. Most of my friends don't even live up to my typing standards.

I finished Less Than Zero while doing my laundry. At first, I just couldn't relate to the characters. But I muddled through it anyway, because I don't like to leave books unfinished. By the end, I simultaneously pitied and hated the characters. Kind of reminded me of Requiem For A Dream, but not as bad. Next up is The Wasp Factory. Additionally, I've been reading The Essential Rilke in bits and pieces. Well, in blocks of poems. But those are stand-alone works [for the most part], so it's okay.

Alright. I'm going to sleep. After I clear my bed off. After getting back from doing laundry, I decided to clean my room. It's still a mess. Currently anything I own that's on a hanger is lying at the head of my bed. I'll just shove it to the side for the moment. Why am I cleaning my room? Because when Abbie was here, I was totally embarassed by it. So, I cleaned it a bit. I really need to take my bags of bottles and cans [just clap your hands] to be recycled. So much effort.

But worth it.

So I was checking my site's stats today and saw a visit from dhcp30-240.medford.tufts.edu. I figure it was Abbie. dhcp30-240 spends about a minute and a half looking at the log before they move on. I feel a twinge of panic. My last entry was about how Abbie's typing bothered me. And in a minute and a half, I don't think she get past that to the fawning entries.

Of course, I was being paranoid about this to Jack and he says, "Well, if she read past that, she'd see how desperate you are." So I panic some more.

Turns out it wasn't her, but rather a friend of hers using her computer. I feel relieved for a second, until I realize me bringing it up means that now she'll definitely go here. So I try to tell her not to be offended, but I can't think of a good way to phrase it. I type, "Just try not to take offense at what you read," and delete it. It just sounds wrong. And then she'd go immediately.

I try a different tack, about how I like to keep it all open, for anyone to see. Can't manage to think of a way to phrase that, either. At this point a couple minutes have passed, a significantly long pause in the conversation. Luckily she asks me how my day went, and that kicks it off in another direction.

I suppose this entry is for her. So when she reads this she knows that I try not to hold back when I write.

I'm no good at the short entry. Additionally, I'm tired. Yeah. But I was talking to Abbie. And she's better than sleep. But she just left. So yeah. It's time. The alarm's set for six. Still have to do the MA3831 and MA2073 work I didn't do tonight.

Got invited to hang out at Sigma Pi's house last night. Dave, the grader for Linear Algebra II who's also in my Calculus of Variations class, told me I should come down. So I did. Got offered a bid. Well, this was entirely unexpected. I went to one rush event of theirs [a pool tournament] and I didn't even participate. They emphasized that there's no pressure to sign. I told them that I already quit one fraternity. I think I'll be able to resist signing this time, since I know what I'd be getting into beforehand.

A week until I see Abbie. The fifteenth. Extremely excited. Still unsure of what I should do about Valentine's Day, or if I should do anything at all. Abbie told me she was "not the biggest V-day fan ever" but... eh, I don't know.

Alright. I'm off to set up for some crappy Pub show. But before that, my first meal of the day. Cold heart attack pizza. Oh yeah.

So someone [I don't remember who] asked me why Abbie wouldn't be around for Valentine's Day. I say, she's working on some show at Tufts. But she'll be here Saturday. Person says, why don't you go to her play that night, then. Hmm.

Well, looking at Tufts' theater department's page, I can't find the show time. And I wouldn't really be able to get out there. The whole not having a car thing. And I don't know how the trains and buses run. But otherwise, that'd have been a great idea. [Frown.]

I'm up to Billy Joel tonight. His songs remind me of two things: There's hanging out at Heather's house [her parents were Billy Joel fans]. And there's listening to 106.7 late at night, which in turn reminds me of Katie. So Billy Joel either annoys me, or makes me nostalgic and depressed. Reasons are respective.

So my computer sort of works. Two weeks downtime. Number of calls received? Six. Two from Abbie, two from my parents, one from my sister, and one from Zip [so I could relay to Lindsay that he wouldn't be at the movie that night]. Number of emails I received, not counting mailing list crap? Zero. Well, that's not true. I received a couple from Lindsay asking me if I'd help with James' practical. John Legare sent me a homework assignment, 'cause I asked him to. Oh, and the crew coach bitched at me through email about not getting a physical. So I'll rephrase. Zero worthwhile emails received.

I've made a new AIM name. About three people know it, and that's only because I've IMed them with it. I'm contemplating making it my new full-time name. At least then I could tell myself that the reason no one IMs me is because they don't know my name. And while that's not exactly comforting, at least it hurts less to think about it that way than the alternative.

Later.

Ah. Such a pleasant way to be woken up. Cellphone rings. I figure it's my parents, but I check anyway. Abbie. She called me. She called me. She called me. She was all apologetic about waking me up, too. Very cute. Oh, yes. I am giddy.

So maybe I could take the T out there on Friday. If I'm reading the schedules right [and I'm not sure I am], I could leave Worcester at 1738. Or 1407, if I skip LinAlg II. I'd get to South Station at 1859 [or 1524]. I'd then have to make my way to North Station [I don't even know where either station is in Boston] and catch the 1930 or the 1610 out to West Medford. Once there, I just have to figure out how to get to the Tufts campus.

Well, it's a step in the direction of feasible.

Hm. But she has the play from five to ten. And then dance practice from ten to midnight. And then during the day on the fifteenth, she has a competition at Holy Cross. She'll be busy. Perhaps I shouldn't go out there.

Alright. Time to make the CDs for tonight's movie, The Rules Of Attraction. I'm going with the Cure, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and Wish.

... Well, shit. I need more blanks.

The Rules Of Attraction was decent. Pretty much what I've come to expect from Bret Easton Ellis. Slightly disturbing, no real character growth. Shock for shock's sake. Lindsay didn't like it, to put it mildly. For me, it was simply decent. Okay, poor choice of words. It was alright. And definitely indecent. But the soundtrack was excellent.


So I'm probably incoherent. Been awake all night reading my Calculus of Variations book. I think I vaguely understand it now. But I've got an assignment due for it in... two hours. Which I haven't started. And probably won't start. But at least I understand the material... a little.

Well, I did spend about four hours in Dunkin' Donuts with Liam, Irma and Andrew. Ended up talking about our romantic histories. Or more specifically, everyone we'd kissed, not counting pecks. For me, it's been six girls. At least, that's all I remember. In chronological order: Heather, Kate, Josie, Chris, Vickie and Abbie. Everyone else gave stories. I was fighting off an unrelated urge to throw up, so I just ran down my list, except in reverse.

Yeah, I suppose I could've spent that time doing my MA3475 work. Or my LinAlg II work. What can I say? I've got poor time management skills.

On the upside, this week's fairly light. I've got three days of class. Wednesdays I never have class, and this Thursday's Academic Advising Day. Yep. Plenty of time to do... nothing.

Well, not really. I'm beginning a new mix. Heh. I don't have a tape deck up in Worcester anymore. So I suppose this'll have to be on CD. Although, I really want to get a better feel for her musical taste before making it. So I can be sure the selection is just slightly off the beaten path, and not way off in the wilderness. Then maybe she'll actually listen to it, and not simply shelve it. I suppose I can think of the cover, label and title in the meantime.

I really want to take a nap, but then I might not wake up 'til four. My obligatory sigh has become a groan, punctuated by coughing brought on by a recent increase in clove smoke inhalation, which in turn was a consequence of increased stress levels.

I've got time to shower and change. That's my new plan.

So I've been on AIM again as Enoch Root. Been getting some messages. A lot of them are along the lines of "Where have you been?" What. The. Fuck. That's just infuriating. Most of those messages I haven't dignified with responses.

So tonight I went to Sig Pi's social with AGD. That was alright. There haven't really been LnL get-togethers after Coffeehouses this term, and I've missed partying Tuesday nights. I'm still not signing my bid, but it's nice to hang out. Got pretty loaded off some Soco-heavy "Soco-Cola"s I jumbled together. Took me about four hours to sleep off the effects. But now I can't get back to sleep. So I guess I'll run down the last couple of days in reverse.

The Coffeehouse was better [in terms of actual performance] than the previous few. Some guy named Robert Gish. Unfortunately, technical difficulties abounded. Guitars and mics and DIs didn't work. I think an amp was fried. Some were our fault; some were Gish's. People are probably blaming LnL for the latter. Ah, well.

After crew practice Dee invited me to go with her and a couple rowers to Founders for dinner. I suppose I can't say I'm never offered the opportunity to do things with the crew team. I gave some stupid reason and ran. I don't know why. Should've gone; I think Greg went. No one on the team, myself included, likes that kid. I should've saved people from his presence or something. [Shrug.]

At practice, Dee thanked me for calling her last night. I don't remember how I responded. Most likely I got flustered and bolted.

I signed up to go to some math thing at Holy Cross. We leave at one-thirty. Ah, damn it. It's snowing heavily. Not relishing the prospect of walking through knee-deep drifts.

Wait, let me just put down my commitments for the week, so I don't forget them. Wednesday [today] I've got that math thing, followed by the LnL meeting. Thursday, meeting my advisor at two, weekly math thing at four, WWPI elections at seven. Friday, see Tricky Lui at one-thirty to pick up exam, skip class with Lui at two. And I've got to finish cleaning my room sometime.

Yeah, I don't know if I'm going out to Tufts on Friday, but I'm keeping the option open. [Told Tricky Lui I was taking a train home which leaves at two, hence me not being in class Friday and why I'm picking up the take-home earlier.] I was talking to Lauren about whether it'd be expected of me to do something for Valentine's Day, or if it'd be creepy. I mentioned getting Abbie a single rose. She said a single rose wasn't my style; it was "too cliche" for me. She thought I should go with something truer to my cynical self. When I asked her for an example, she said, "Like a dead rose." Oh, that won't freak Abbie out. And as an added bonus, dead roses give off that goth vibe. Like black roses. "Here, these are for you. They're black. Like my soul." Right. I need understatement. Subtlety. Hm.

Got back my latest Advanced Calculus homework. It says on the top of it, "Come on, Emmanuel, this is getting silly." I don't know if Fehribach is referring to my proofs that aren't really proofs, or that I frequently get lazy and only do half the assignment. Probably both. Either way, now, I don't really care.

Skipping back to last night. Went to sleep relatively early [around midnight], watching Swordfish. I still don't quite get that movie. But that shot near the beginning, where some woman explodes like a human analogue of a Claymore anti-personnel mine? I rewound and watched that about five or six times. My flatmates called me a disturbed individual. But that scene rocks. Except for the horrible CG of the ball bearing rolling towards Hugh Jackman's face.

Before that, I spent an hour talking on the phone with Dee, simultaneously sending her music through AIM. That was cool. Why was I on the phone with her? 'Cause she put up an away message saying "If you like to give hugs, my number is x6840; please call and we will arrange a meeting place between your hug and me. If you don't like to give hugs, please just leave a message." So I IMed her with, "I give hugs. Oh, wait. Maybe I should call." Realized that something could be really bothering her and I just made light of it, so I called. Guess it wasn't really serious, because she seemed alright. So we moved on to the topic of music. I proceeded into elitist bastard mode, hence the music sending. But she took it well.


Jack thought I was talking to Abbie. His comment: "Way to go, jizz genius. Insult her taste in music." My response: "[Shrug.] I foreshat my quota." Here's where the references are probably not caught. Shortly followed by me deciding the explanation is even worse.

Yeah. So I've been hanging out with more math majors. Math/physics majors, to be specific. Kind of makes me want to pick up the second major again. 'Course then I'll definitely be in undergrad for five or six years. Don't know. I was talking with my advisor when one of his students came in. Guy was about forty. They talked of the age issue. This forty-year-old guy's come back to college because he's finally found what he wants to do. But he doesn't mix well with the other students, as to them he represents their parents and everything they've come to college to escape from and rebel against.

Yeah, I definitely don't want to find myself an adult and back at college. I know what I want to be. I want to be the type of person who mentally deconstructs the world he sees and senses into equations. [About the "he": I would have been politically correct and put "he/she", if I didn't think I'd get comments wondering if I wanted a sex change. And about the italicized "politically correct": That's used to signify the raw, seething contempt with which I say the term.] So that's what I want to be. Unfortunately, I don't think that's something I can consciously try to become.

Sigh. Wish I could sleep. I'm going to be fuckin' tired later.

But to put off doing anything for a bit, let's see what Emode wants to tell me. Ah. Apparently I took their "Ultimate Personality Test". Again. Well, the result hasn't changed...

This afternoon I left Abbie a voicemail saying I'm pretty much doing nothing on Friday and wondering if she'd be too busy to do anything. And then I bust out Hungry Hungry Hippos, as I don't really expect an answer from her until much later. Just talked to her on AIM. I don't think she checked her voicemail. So we talk for a while, and I don't want to bring it up, 'cause it'll sound stupid. So I don't mention anything, just kind of hope she checks it and answers me at some point... But she doesn't. In the end she remembers she has a test to study for in the morning. And she's gone.

I know she's really busy and doesn't need something else sucking up her time...

But I guess I can't help setting myself up for the hard fall. Can't help building things up in my head. I don't know. Here comes where I doubt everything. Maybe I have her totally pegged wrong. Maybe she's just really playful and this is nothing special to her. Sigh.

She doesn't read this. She's probably too busy. Or she just doesn't care. So there's no problem in saying this. I decided on the single rose combined with a mix CD. Something romantic and something characteristically me. Like the bitter and the sweet. I'm terrible. And so I've spent tonight starting a new mix. I'm still in the scouting phase, where I just comb my collection for anything I think might possible be good for the mix. I'm at M in Windows Explorer and listening to C on Winamp. Current total length of the prospects? Eight hours, nine minutes, forty-eight seconds.

If I manage to get this done in time, it'll be the quickest I've ever made a mix.


After he said that, I managed to convince myself that Abbie was different. She likes music. She'd listen to it. But as has been shown time and time again, my mood is ever precarious, ready to plummet at any time. Brent just came back from walking his girlfriend home. Came into my room and asked me how the studying was going. I turn, confused. He saw me hunched over the desk, wallowing, and misinterpreted. I passed it off as "tired".

Maybe I'll just scrap it. Come as I am. As I was. As she wants me to be.

Tonight has not been my night.

Almost had both cast parties scheduled at the apartment. They didn't have anywhere else to have them. It'd have made my flatmate who never cleans finally do something. They found somewhere else to have them. Blah. It would've been nice, having it here. Definitely a shorter walk home.

At the LnL meeting, the amendment to the by-laws that I supported [making proxy votes next to pointless] was nullified. And people were being dicks. Baseball bat.

The math meeting at Holy Cross went alright. Played some games, met some people. Alright, indeed. And leaving, I look down the street at a guy walking away from us. He's got a blue and black jacket with MKA on it in big block letters. Huh. Looks like the kind our soccer team had. So I chase the guy down. It's Alex Materna. We shoot the shit for a while. He's pre-med at Holy Cross, currently going for a B.S. in History. Totally unsurprised by my major. He looks the same, just scruffier. He's surprised by my hair. Yeah. So it's still weird, running into people from MKA all around Worcester. It wasn't that big a school. Only about four hundred kids were there at the same time as I was. A fourth of them are still there. So three hundred people scattered, and I've hit three recently. I don't know. Weird.

Rundown of tomorrow: Meeting with IQP advisor at ten-forty-five. Pick up CDs from booth at noon. See Martin about my schedule for next year at two. [I've still got to plan that out. Eh. Tomorrow morning.] Math meeting at four, when I also must hand in the Advanced Calculus homework I convinced my friend the PLA to accept late. [I also have to do that. Also tomorrow morning.] Then radio elections at seven. Maybe I'll see the play afterwards.

Losing the will to do anything. What little of it there was.

It's Academic Adivisng Day, when we here at WPI present to our advisors our plans for the next year. So I was sitting here counting up my credits. And guess what. Math majors need seven credits of math to graduate. Six from classes [so that's eighteen classes] and one from their MQP [Major Qualifying Project]. I've got twenty-four classes. Eight credits. Of classes. Fuck yeah, motherfuckers.

Now I need an MQP and a Sufficiency. I've got my IQP lined up for next year. Hoo yeah.

Dude. If I go back to the physics major, I might not need the Suff. So all that German would be for naught, but I'd have a physics and math degree. Of course, then I'd need about six more physics classes. Is it worth it? I believe so, if I get out of the Suff.

I definitely need to talk to Martin.

I guess I'm not as big a fuck-up as previously thought. ... Alright, I'm still a fuck-up. But I'll be a fuck-up with two motherfuckin' degrees.

Yeah, so I still have to do a Suff if I double-major. Fiddlesticks. Meh. I'll still go for the double major. 'Cause I'm not getting the math degree done in a year. Need that MQP. And the Suff. Gives me plenty of time to do the physics stuff. Four and a half years, perhaps. Though I doubt it.

I shouldn't have worn an LnL shirt to the WWPI elections. I was elected Technical Director. Uncontested. Also, I'm the Programming Manager, should the guy who was elected in absentia choose to decline the position. In that case, I get to choose which I want more. Too bad the radio station sucks so much. Internet broadcast only just isn't so fun. We need a tower and a frequency.

The exec board's all people from my class, too. Not enough freshmen and sophomores are getting into it. Probably 'cause it sucks so much. Well, that's not true... Another DJ, Zaheer [who's been an RA for the past five years] seems to drag his residents into everything he does. So there's still some new people. But still, they don't seem gung-ho about working for the station. Understandable...

Went to the play with Montira [who became Production Manager, also uncontested]. At intermission, no one I knew there seemed to even be recognizing my presence. Got paranoid they were all mad at me or something. And so I didn't wave first or anything. So that hurt a bit. Thought afterwards I'd just slip out quietly or something. Luckily people came up and said hi then. I know. I'm so emotionally fragile.

Yep. Guess I'll go to sleep or something. Maybe play some CS. Nothing better to do.

So yeah... my day hasn't been so great.

I've mentioned before about how I told Tricky Lui I'd be skipping class today. I did. Plus, I skipped Calc. of Variations, as I woke up at eleven-thirty. So I had my one twelve o'clock class. From one to four-thirty [crew practice] I sat in the campus center.

But I forgot my cellphone at the apartment. And the wind was blowin' pretty hard [strong enough to actually move me] so I elected to just sit in the campus center for the whole three and a half hours. Uneventful.

After crew practice lets out around seven, I go home to drop off my bag before going to the play. My cellphone tells me I have one missed call. Abbie, at three-ten. Damn it. And I wasn't even doing anything then. So I kick myself for leaving my phone at home.

I go to the play, I go to the party. Around twelve-thirty, Abbie calls me. I don't hear it, so I don't realize it until a half-hour later. But she's left a voicemail this time. So I exit the apartment and walk up the stairs to the third-floor landing [for better reception].


The floor [or the greatest lower bound, if you will] on my mood just plummets. I'm not faulting her in the least, of course, but I'm certainly disappointed by the whole situation. I've been looking forward to this for two weeks. So I stand on the landing a while, digesting this. I call her back. And I tell her it's okay. And we talk a while, of music and concerts... "A Plain Morning" is her favorite Dashboard Confessional song, too. I had to smile at that. Although, she did call it "July". Tsk, tsk.

So yeah. She's so cute, in everything she does and says. And I'm not seeing her this weekend. So I've got roses [I somehow ended up getting her three] that'll be dead later. And I was going to burn that CD tomorrow, but I guess I won't, now. And I was going to clean my room and do my laundry. But now...

I guess I'll sleep in.

I've had that song stuck in my head all day for some reason. Don't really know why.

Well, that and "Come On" by the Jesus And Mary Chain. But that's just such a go-time song.

I just got home from the cast party. Once again, I was the last to leave. So I'm walking down the street holding the remainder of a one-and-a-half-liter bottle of champagne. No paper bag. This is as classy as I get. Vickie bought two bottles for the cast and crew and such and it didn't get finished, so when she left she gave the rest of the last bottle to me. Yep.

I spent most of the night on the same couch on which I hung out with Abbie two weeks ago. Sometimes I would turn and expect her to be there. Yes, the king of sad am I. I'd go out to Tufts next weekend and see her play, but next weekend's packed with LnL events. And I'd blow those off in a second. But I've also got James' practical nine o' clock Saturday morning. And that's not something I can get out of so easily. Fuckin' A.

So I ended up doing just the cast party and passing on the Sig Pi party. Oh, well. The upside to this is that not once tonight did I interact with Ryan Sternberg. Life's full of trade-offs.

I'm just going to leave the bottle sitting on my desk for the night. So I'll chug about a third of a liter of warm, flat champagne in the morning. Raise the bottle to the future, and drink to the past...

G'night.

I've had that song in my head all day.

I called her this morning. She hasn't called back. Haven't talked to her since Friday night. Well, early Saturday morning. Still, forty-eight hours. I'm upset, but then I kick myself. Because I can't expect anything from her. We don't have a relationship, just that one night. And one night doesn't mean the rest of our lives [that thought being the reason why I've had the song stuck in my head]. I don't know when or if I'll see her again. Whether she likes me or if she's just been talking to me to spare my feelings.

I hate this uncertainty.

Yeah. And the movie tonight didn't do much to help my mood. It was Bowling For Columbine. The movie itself was pretty craptacular. Overrated. Excessively long. Pretty heavy-handed. Damned documentaries.

But that wasn't all. I showed up a couple minutes late. And some new guy had picked the music. So pissed off. The music is my job. No, it's not something officially laid down. I just always pick it. One of my few joys. And so this guy picks Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. Not even a good CD. I was incredibly pissed off.

Interactions with people were pretty cold, too. Perhaps 'cause I wasn't in a good mood. And talking with people it just kind of echoed back. Yeah...

Hey, Abbie's online. I don't really want to IM her first. I don't want to perpetuate my nagging suspicion that I'm bugging her. So I'll wait for her to talk to me. I'm crossing my fingers. King of sad, indeed...

She IMed me. I think I was an idiot, though. Babbled for a while, essentially worrying about what people think of me. Yep. So I seem shallow.


But she IMed me. So I feel better.

I'm now using the empty champagne bottle as a vase for the three roses. I think it looks nice.

I have yet to do my LinAlg II homework and take-home test. The plan is to do the latter in the morning and blow off the former. I'm too tired to do an allnighter. We'll see how it goes. Maybe there'll be a blizzard and everything'll get cancelled. Maybe. I'm hoping.

I'm in the emergency waiting room [what a concept] at UMass Memorial. What the hell am I doing here, you ask. Earlier today I was sitting at my desk doing the LinAlg II take-home test. I kept getting dizzy and had to keep myself from falling onto my desk a few times. I've got this throbbing headache. I don't know what it is, but I complete the test.

Then I go to Paul's room [as he was the only other one home] and ask him if he's feeling weird, too. I'm having problems walking. Paul says he's fine, then walks over to the carbon monoxide detector. He hits the test button. The battery light blinks green, indicating the battery's good. Then another light, red, begins to blink intermittently and there's a beep. This light is labeled "Alarm - Move To Fresh Air". Well, shit. Paul says, "You should probably leave." So I do. This is around one.

I head up to campus and hang out with Lauren and Jessica. The carbon monoxide poisoning feels not unlike being drunk. I go to LinAlg and drop the test. Afterwards I head to the campus' health center. The healthe center people listen for a while, run a couple cursory tests, like blood pressure, temperature, breathing. Then they test my "O2 saturation level" using something I stick my finger into. It registers a ninety-eight, whatever that means. By this time, the dizziness is gone. But they send me to the hospital just to make sure.

So here I am. Just had some blood drawn for testing. I hate that. I'm fine with injections, but the idea of losing blood doesn't sit right. But the nurse was good and I felt nothing. And she was cute. Dirty blonde hair in a ponytail. Dark eyes [vaguely bluish/greenish tint to them] looking tired, ringed with black liner and mascara. Minimal make-up otherwise. Why am I writing this. I'm claimed. Sort of. I'm claimed if Abbie ever asks. But I couldn't help noticing.

Now, I continue to wait for the doctor. And watch Access Hollywood.

So I had zero trace of carbon monoxide in my system. The doctor said this was surprising, considering even hanging out with smokers leaves minute traces. And I smoke. [Though I haven't in a few weeks, so that explains that.] And the fire department checked out the apartment and found no CO. What the fuck. I was definitely dizzy with massive headaches. No conclusions. Great.

While I was lying in a hospital bed in that post-waiting-room, pre-doctor time, I made eye contact with the woman in the room across the hall. I'd been sitting next to her in the waiting room; I remembered her because she was reading Left Behind.

I wandered out and talked to her for a while. She was in due to a stomach virus that she caught from her three-year-old son. Don't know how old she was, but she didn't look it. Then again, I'm not the exactly the go-to guy on judging people's age from their appearance. I cite the girl with the red backpack. But stomach virus woman spoke of a friend of hers who graduated from Bowdoin in 1989, so she's probably in her early thirties. Maybe. [Shrug.] Talked about books and college and such. Yep. I'm practicing that whole talking-to-people-I-don't-know thing.

Got released around nine. Called SNAP to get home, got picked up by another campus police officer. Flatmates expressed dismay and concern. An emotional scene. Very touching.

I'm currently at the Coffeehouse. Got here around nine-thirty, expected strike soon. The show seems to be running long and strong. But that's okay. Willy Porter seems cool. And he's covered Devo. Whip it good.

Sigh. Where to begin. I'll start with... LnL stuff. So this Wednesday Lindsay says she has to talk to me. I figured it's some sort of briefing for James' practical. It isn't.

So Lindsay's going away D-term. And LnL's got no other licensed projectionists. So we're calling Zac back in. But he's not to be bothered with dealing with FilmCom. So a "Projection Committee" is being formed to be the liason. Lindsay's meeting was to tell me that I was not going to be on the committee. There were concerns [apparently from exec board members as well as non-exec board members] regarding my lack of respect for FilmCom and my general state of being an asshole. She asked if I wanted to say anything in my defense. [Hmm... well, after Lindsay, I am the most qualified projectionist we've got...] I say, "No."

Later that day, during the meeting, we hold the special election for webmaster. It's between Adam, me, and Zip. I lose to Zip. Who doesn't even have a fuckin' website. Fuckin' A. I could stand losing to Adam. He's got a site. He's been doing the site thing for just a little less time than I have. Gah. So pissed off.

Additionally... who made it onto the Projection Committee? Zip and Ryan. The state of being pissed off continues, perhaps intensifies.

But apparently the Massachusetts Department of Public Safety finally decided to get off their asses. I got the letter today telling me my test date. It's the twenty-eighth. Next Friday. So if I get licensed, perhaps the whole Projection Committee thing will be discarded. [Shrug.] Of course, then I'd have to show up for Jackass: The Movie and 8 Mile, the first two movies of D-term. I'd have the urge to burn the celluloid.

And tonight I came back home to find an email from Ryan waiting for me:


I wasn't even planning to be there Sunday night. Eh. I suppose I'll give them an idea of what she likes. I don't know. I suppose I won't see her until... A-term next year. But I'm not supposed to care, so I'll try not to.

And now for other stuff. Monday was the snow day. Tuesday I went to one class. Thursday and Friday, I skipped everything. So in the past week, I've gone to one class. Just not feeling the urge to do anything.

Thursday afternoon I was talking to Abbie and told her I could come out there Saturday night. Asked her if she'd be too busy to hang out after the play. She said she'd get back to me. So once again, I cleared my schedule on a maybe and waited for her to bring it up. I didn't want to nag her.

We were talking earlier tonight and she said she was going to sleep. So I tell her wait, and ask her if I should come out there tonight.


She'll be busy. So... in a word, should I go? No.

I've got an empty Saturday night, it seems.

Liam told me, "You know, eventually you're going to have to have a state-of-the-relationship talk." I responded, "What relationship? There doesn't seem to be one." She's a busy person. And she likes to keep busy. If I ever ask her to tell me where I stand with her... I don't think she'll choose me. If I push, I lose. All I can do is throw myself on the fence and hang there for a while. Which is "a very difficult and bitter thing, you know"...

I ended up at the movie tonight. I kind of thought I'd make the effort to see Lindsay that one last time. I'm stupid. She and Zip were all cutesy and holding each other most of the time. Yeah... So I didn't say anything to her, aside from projection-related talk. Well, if you read this, Lindsay... have fun in Africa. Safe trip.

The movie was Amistad. Yeah, it's six years old, but it's Black History Month, so FilmCom had to show something appropriate. And I guess they though no recent film would fit the bill. I think The 25th Hour would've been good enough. Yeah, that's right. Just because it's Spike Lee. I didn't like Amistad for the same reason I didn't like Schindler's List. It didn't make me feel anything. It was just long and boring. [I actually fell asleep during James' practical. Shrug.]

So I didn't head out to Tufts yesterday. I'll run through the day. Had James' practical in the morning. Ate with Zip in the campus center. He said something like, "I feel like I keep doing things that disrespect you." And he apologized. I shrugged it off. What was I supposed to say?

Helped set up for the Pub show for an hour or so, left without saying anything to anyone.

Went out to Upton with Liam. We couldn't get into his house to move his stuff out, so we hung out in Dunkin' Donuts for a while as the rain built to its climax. Then he gave me a tour of his town and we drove back to Worcester.

Traffic on route 290 made us exit early. We dropped out near Greendale Mall, so we decided to check out Best Buy. Liam needed more CD-Rs, and I always like to browse the music. Didn't get eighty dollars' worth this time. Just twenty-five. Rainer Maria's latest, Long Knives Drawn, and Taking Back Sunday's Tell All Your Friends. Couldn't find anyone from whom to download the former, and at ten bucks, the latter wasn't too much to pay to legally possess what I already have in MP3s.

Then Liam went to clean his room and I cruised campus for a while. Caught up with people after the Guerilla Improv show; "people" being Vickie, Chuck, Dave, Paul and Josie. Hung out with them for a while at the Boynton, then at the Bean Counter. Good stuff. Hung out with Chuck at my place for a while. Chillin' out, maxin', relaxin' all cool. Until I took a hard fall off my chair into the stove. My coccyx and lower back are still sore.

After Chuck left, I went to Bickford's with Liam. We had a somewhat cute waitress. Unfortunately, her rating dropped to almost zero when she used the phrase "my cousin and me" as the subject for a sentence. If she was joking or making a point, this wouldn't be bad. But she wasn't. Simply unacceptable.

Then Liam and I decided to do laundry. This took from three to about six in the morning. I wasn't good company by the end of it. That whole lack of sleep thing combined with the whole being awake too long thing. The irritating atmosphere of the laundromat just set me off. We got home and went to our respective apartments to sleep.

Of course, instead of going to sleep, I stayed up for a couple more hours. Listened to one of the songs on the new Rainer Maria on loop for a while. "The Awful Truth Of Loving". Great song. Definitely hit home.


So I called Abbie this morning, but she was walking down the street, so she said she'd call me back later. She didn't call. But she did leave me messages on AIM around two. I was at Ho Farms with Liam. Got back just in time to see her sign off. Drat. I definitely need to talk to her. I'm going to ask her how she feels about me. Perhaps I'm being stupid again, but I'm sick of the wondering and worrying.

Yeah... so point blank, I asked Abbie, "Where do we stand?" And for the next half-hour, there was mostly silence. But one message she sent really sums it up.


Guess I don't have to wonder anymore.

I didn't say this to her, but we're complete opposites. I like my life slow, relaxed. And I'll always have room in my life for a relationship. Because I never hesitate to blow off other commitments for girls. Because I'm a sucker. Case in point: I skipped crew practice to talk to her just now.

So yeah. I asked. I knew her answer, and I asked anyway. Sigh.

I just ate a burger made with Price Chopper 93/7 ground beef. I undercooked it. The inside was definitely red. I fear death.

Been wallowing lately. Continuing to do so. Feeling brief and not really up to writing anything, but I don't want the previous entry to be the first people see on the page.

Tonight's Coffeehouse was an open mic. Always fun... Liam had to work and so couldn't make it there to perform. Ah, well. Ryan Sternberg played again. Terrible. But Travis the accordion-kid wasn't there, so that was a plus. We were done by nine-thirty. So I was left with nothing to do.

Came home, had some undercooked meat. Started to get into an argument with Liam over AIM regarding Ben Folds. I don't like him. Liam does. Didn't really feel up to having my music criticized [and for once, I wasn't actively critical of Ben Folds, just dismissive], so I cut him off. Yep. Nuts to that.

So... yeah, wallowing. Apparently I worried people earlier today with my moping. Kind of nice that they cared. Even though they're pretty much just acquaintances.

Happy birthday, Dizzy. Ten minutes late.

I feel like drinking, but that'd just make me sadder. And I have to be up tomorrow to study my Calc. of Variations and my Advanced Calc. for the tests on Thursday. So I guess I'll just watch a movie or something and go to sleep.

Had an odd dream last night. I was in this play, where I played a cup of soda. Over the course of the play my character grew from a foot high to six feet high [straw not included in measurements]. I looked kind of like Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force by the end. Except I was grey. I don't remember much, except running around backstage trying to find my full-size costume. And I remember finding it hard to wait in the wings while dressed in that costume.

From here the dream somehow managed to lose coherency. I went back to my computer to find about six messages from Abbie, each one corresponding to an email she sent me at the same time. I read them, and they were full of nonsensical words typed out in all capitals. I was going to start talking to her, but something woke me up.

After dealing with that [i.e., yelling shut up], I went back to sleep. My parents and I were driving east to pick up a car they'd bought for me. East of where? I don't know. But it was about an hour east of wherever our starting point was. We get there. "There" is an airport hangar. My new ride is apparently a plane. Small plane, like a Cessna. But what the fuck. My father mentions the new car my sister bought.

Cut to my sister driving around. I'm in the passenger seat. The controls for her car are sort of like those in a plane, if you took the U-shaped bar off the controls and put a Playstation controller in its place. No idea what the buttons did, as she didn't touch them. But she rotated the entire controller to turn. There were still pedals. More interesting was where she was driving. Through a large hotel. Though there didn't seem to be many people around. But we were speeding down hallways and going up spiral staircases with glass and metal railings. From the intent way my sister was driving and the speed she was going, I could tell she was chasing someone. I never saw this someone, but she seemed to know which way to go to follow them.

I get out of the car, one way or another. My parents and I are staying in the hotel. I get some weird scenes of what some other guests are up to...

I watch a couple eat desserts. On the landing of a stairway, overlooking the central lobby area [which is huge].

A couple girls staying in the hotel go to some party and get loaded and two guys take them to their rooms. My spectre follows one of the guy-girl pairs. She's out of it. She wanders the room; I lose sight of him. He comes back wearing a mask and brandishing a knife. She screams. He's joking around. What the fuck.

Yeah, it was weird.

Fuck. I need to find someone willing to be awake and drive early Friday morning. Need to get to my projection test somehow. It's at nine, and about an hour away. Damn it.

Additionally, I need to find a place to live next year. Nine Goulding isn't really doing it for me, plus half the people here are moving out and away from Worcester.

The safety pin on my desk is staring at me. Abbie had a necklace. Probably one of the first things I said to her was "Cool necklace." The clasp on it was broken, held together by a safety pin. When she took the necklace off to go to sleep she put it on my desk. Later, in the darkness, I accidentally knocked it off my desk. In the morning we found the necklace but not the pin. I found the pin a couple weeks later when cleaning my room up [in anticipation of her visit]. It's been sitting on my desk since. Now we're having a staring contest.

So today I had a bad fuckin' case of hives. I don't remember having any blueberries or herbal tea recently. [Those being the two known allergies I have.] So I lie in bed, itching. I don't go to my finals. I write my professors, tell them of this.

I get back one response from Lurie [Calculus of Variations] almost immediately. I'll sum it up with one line from it: "Should you even have 100 on your final, that would not be enough to pass." So he tells me there's no real point in me showing up. Okay.

Lui's test for Linear Algebra II was on Tuesday. My final grade in that class is a 64.5 out of 100. I hope this is enough for a C.

I wait for Fehribach's response. He gets back to me at eleven at night. His email outlines my shoddy work in the class. He closes with the following paragraph:


Huh. I just noticed that he CC'ed this to the aforementioned Ann Garvin, to Bill Farr [assistant head of the math department], and to Martin. Great.

So at most, I'm passing one of my classes this term. But even that one's shaky. Fantastic. Times like this I just want to drop out. Or curl up and die.

What did I do tonight? I checked out an apartment I'll probably be in next year [assuming I'm still here]. It was nice. A real adult-looking apartment. Scary. The whole adult thing. Recently I've realized just how young I am. Right now, I should be a freshman. Wide-eyed and exuberant. Well, perhaps that's a stretch. But I shouldn't be one year away from graduation, thinking about grad school or getting a job. Sigh.

Ate dinner with Chuck at some Italian place down Park. Biagio's or something. I tried to get him to hit on the waitress, unsuccessfully. Ah, well. I think she liked him. Then we wandered Starship for a while looking at and criticizing movies.

Picked up two: Permanent Midnight [my choice] and Dark City [Chuck's]. Went and watched them. Permanent Midnight was at the same time depressing and uplifting. Depressing as it's about one man's battle with heroin addiction. But it's told in flashback, so you know he makes it through the really bad parts alright and [physically] undamaged. I liked it. Plus, it's got a Black Lab song on the soundtrack, "Horses". So that doesn't hurt. Nor does having Ben Stiller play the main character, with Janeane Garofalo in a bit part. Now I want to read the book it was based on.

Dark City was definitely fucked up. But good. I like the whole gritty, fifties atmosphere. And though I don't like Rufus Sewell [like in the terrible movie A Knight's Tale], I love Jennifer Connelly. Oftentimes I was totally confused, but kept going with the hopes that there would be a resolution of some kind. And there was, thankfully. Not one of those that leaves you hanging. Yeah.

In the middle of Dark City Abbie called. As I flip my phone open, it decides to reboot. Son of a bitch. So I lose her call. I call her, get her voicemail. I have Chuck unpause and continue the movie as I wait for my voicemail alert thing to go off. It doesn't. After a few minutes I ask Chuck to pause it again as I call her back. She's drunk. One of Abbie's friends was trying to use Abbie's phone to call someone else, accidentally called me instead. She mentions something about being excited that I called. She's kind of incoherent. She asks how my finals went. "Not well." The "not" must get cut off, because she responds, "Oh, that's good." She says she'll call me later tomorrow. And we say bye.

Yep. We finished up the movie, hung out for a bit. I went home. Here I am.

That was my end of the term.

So my projection test was today. Been a nerve-testing day in general.

I couldn't sleep last night. Kept thinking about failure. And how I can't think of what I want to do with my life. How I don't even really have a survival instinct. I just kind of... drift. I called my sister at five in the morning. Woke her up. We had an incoherent discussion. She told me to call her when I was done with the projection test. I'll get to that after this entry.

So yeah, the projection test is out in Boston. I estimate an hour to get out there. So I tell Liam that we leave at eight. I wake up at seven-thirty. Begin IMing Liam. Nothing. I go upstairs and knock repeatedly. Nothing. Eventually I call his roommate and get her to open the door. He's not even in his room. Fucking A.

So I go back downstairs and sit in my apartment. Started writing another entry. At eight-thirty, Liam appears at the door with Irma. He tells me he heard eight-thirty as the leaving time. So we head out there. I'm pissed off. Pissed off about not passing my classes and missing my projection test.

I'm not even sure if they'll accept me late or if I missed my window. So we head out there. By the time we get to the testing place it's ten-fifteen. But luckily, they'll still take me. I just have to wait until eleven, when the next batch of supplicants begin their tests.

I think I passed.

We get out of there, and I'm in a better mood. Still feeling like crap, but... better crap.

We get back to Worcester. By this time, Liam has to go to work. So Liam drops Irma at home, then me and heads off.

Yeah, this entry's brief, but I'm tired. I think I'll take a nap.

The hives remain.

Last night in Worcester. No one left in the apartment except for me. It's lonely.

I talked to Abbie on the phone earlier. She said she'd call, but she didn't... so I called her. It was kind of late, two in the morning. But she wasn't asleep, and she said it was a "pleasant surprise", which of course brought a stupid grin to my face. We talked about nothing much. At one point we were talking dream cars. I mention my love for the old Chevy Impalas. And she says that her family has one sitting behind their house. 1968. Powder blue. Oh god. The sexiness.

What else did I do tonight... had dinner with and hung out with Chuck again. We watched my copy of Amelie 'cause he hadn't seen it before.

Hung out with Liam a bit at his place. He rocked out on the piano while I just rocked out. Got him to cover random songs I pulled from his computer.

Yeah. I'm going to go to sleep now. Tired still. And my parents'll be here tomorrow, and I need to pack. I'll put on Serendipity, which I tried to watch again this afternoon [but ended up falling asleep]. I'll no doubt fall asleep again. But it's a cute movie, and perhaps it'll put me in a happier mood. I'm not bitter at the moment, just... down.

So around one o'clock today [1310, more exactly] my parents are at my apartment and I'm packing. Yeah, I never have my act together in time. Abbie calls. She asks if I'm in Worcester. I say I will be for about ten more minutes. She expresses disappointment. She's in town for the day, had to help her brother with something in the morning. She got that over with and she wanted to see me. But it'd take a while for her to get to WPI. Damn it.

The underlying order of the universe has a perverse sense of timing.

Yep. Back in Jersey. Watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark with my parents. Later I'll teach them how to use their DVD player and we'll watch the first part of Band Of Brothers. Exciting.

Still at home. Been watching movies. Still just hanging out with the family, as Lacy seems to be still down in Virginia. Tons o' fun.

Had blood drawn today. Sucked. The nurse wasn't as good as the nurse from UMass Memorial. Nor was she anywhere near as cute. So I got my arm jabbed three times, and it hurt. Man, I could have done a better job of finding a vein.

Heh. I've got my headphones on [no speakers for my computer at home] with the TV blaring in the background. I hear A Flock Of Seagulls' "I Ran" behind me. Turn around... an ad for Vice City. I can't wait 'til it hits the PC. The Getaway looks like a fun game, too.

On a down note, Good Charlotte's on Leno. Simply terrible. For some reason I thought their first album was alright. Inane, but alright. The new one, just inane. No redemption. Abbie asks, "Not a fan?" I said, "Perhaps I had some sense smacked into me."


So, as always, the parents are constantly telling me to stop smoking. I haven't actually smoked in a week or so. And before that cigarette, a month or so. Eh. Even if I did quit, they wouldn't believe me. On the topic of vices I enjoy... my father's challenged me to another SoCo drinking contest. But he's got work, so it's planned for sometime this weekend.

Tomorrow [or later today] I'll be heading out to Allentown with Brian Holz to catch his brother Alex's band [That Fleeting World] at Crocodile Rock in Allentown. I believe tickets are eleven dollars. I don't really think I've got anyone reading this who'll be in the area [aside from Alex] but if you can go, I recommend it.

I'm in Allentown, at the show. Holz's band is up next. Not a big crowd, about thirty or forty people. It's a comfortable crowd.

Huh. Four weeks ago was when Abbie first called me. Four weeks to the minute, actually. [Shrug.]

And they're taking the stage.

Makeshift Miracle's over. The end of an era. I remember when it began. 10 September 2001. Think it's the first comic for which I witnessed the entire run as it was uploaded. Kind of makes me feel old.

Earlier tonight Alex asked me how Abbie was doing. I said she, and we, were alright. I guess I emitted an anxious vibe. He said, assuringly, that I would be able to tell how she feels about me from her kiss. Guess that old song holds true in Holz's world.

I'm currently at the SigEp house at Lehigh. Since no one else is up, I'm just watching TV. Family Ties rerun, at the moment. It's the one where Alex dates a girl at college, Trish, who he found by checking out the freshmen in the facebook. She turns out to be ditzy and annoying. But he meets her roommate, Ellen, an art major with whom he has nothing in common. Naturally, they fall for each other and can't bring themselves to admit it. A two-parter. Very cute.

Right. So how was the show. It was good. Mouthed along to the songs, as I felt it'd be weird shouting along with such a small crowd. Holz's strutting on stage reminded me of Jagger. Or Axl. Heh. Good stuff. Even their covers were done well [Matthew Good Band's "Generation X-Wing", the Cure's "Just Like Heaven", Jimmy Eat World's "No Sensitivity", Bush's "Everything Zen" and the Toadies' "Possum Kingdom"]. And of course, their originals were good, especially "Ausable Chasm". Oh, and by the way, Holz, I still need the rest of the Elbow Room CD.

We're at the part of the Family Ties episode where the words "I love you" magically fix everything. Like the fact that Ellen is about to marry her boyfriend from back home and Alex is still dating her roommate. Kiss, kiss, everything's dandy. Too bad this shit doesn't happen in real life. To me.

I miss Abbie.

Hey, the sun's rising.

I remember this one part of Paul Reiser's book Couplehood [yeah, I read it ages ago, laugh it up]. He talks about holding hands with this girl and how their hands were a perfect fit. No previous coordination; they just spontaneously reached for each other's hand and just slid perfectly into place. At the moment I'm staring at my hand, wondering who owns its complement. If a complement exists.

Had a night out with my mother tonight. We went to a couple of movies. Daredevil and Chicago, in that order. I liked Daredevil better than Spider-Man, though they both seemed to have the same shitty soundtrack. Jennifer Garner's sheer hot-ness was key. [Yes, she beats out Kirsten Dunst. Easily.] The lines "Stay. Stay with me." were used too often. Okay, they were only used thrice, but it was still overkill. The kicker for my better-than-decent rating is Daredevil actually killing a victim. That's the way vigilanteism should work. None of that dumbass tying-them-up-for-the-cops shit.

Chicago was a well-done adaptation of the musical. There were definitely parts where I went, "That's not in the musical..." and got pissed off. Though, things that the movie did better were parts where things happen in multiple places at once [see: "Funny Honey"]. The ability to cut back and forth just helps, y'know. On the same lines, "Razzle Dazzle" was excellent, with the set changing back and forth between a courtroom and a circus' center ring. Another bit I thought the movie did better than the play was the "Cell Block Tango". The women were attractive [especially Susan Misner, who played Liz... the "pop" woman], and there were more than six [at the peak of the number, anyway]. I'm hard pressed to think of down points, except one: The sudden changes in speed. Hated it in Gladiator, too, where it was used much more often.

The castings... Well, I guess I can only compare them to when I saw the musical. Though I saw the musical twice, I can't remember the actors from the second time. Except for Bebe Neuwirth, who was the only constant main for me, I think. Renée Zellweger was much better than Ann Reinking, whose voice was so fucking grating on the nerves. But I think Zellweger's cute all the time. Catherine Zeta-Jones is better looking than Bebe Neuwirth, but somehow less believeable as a homicidal jazz singer/dancer. Richard Gere... eh. He was okay, and I can't remember either of the two guys who I saw play Billy. John C. Reilly? Cool as he is, he's no Joel Grey. And Queen Latifah was surprisingly good as Mama Morton [I had really low expectations]. Yeah. The movie earns a thumbs-up from me. I'd see it again.

Actually, I watched a lot of movies lately. I spent a lot of Wednesday morning in the living room at the SigEp house at Lehigh. Watched TV instead of sleeping. Watched Better Off Dead..., Virtuosity, Desperado, A.I., El Diablo, Judge Dredd, Love & Sex, Valentine [though I flickered in and out of consciousness on that one], 3000 Miles To Graceland [only caught the first half-hour or so, then it was go-time], and an hour of Mad About You. That's in addition to the two episodes of Family Ties, which I mentioned previously.



I'll be brief. I'd seen most of them before. Better Off Dead... was surreal and corny, but it's a John Cusack movie. I have to at least like it. Virtuosity and Desperado, excellent action movies. Judge Dredd, terrible action movie. Valentine, stupid slasher with hot actresses. That's the way it goes. A.I., horribly long. And horrible. Except for Clara Bellar [the nanny android], who was cute. Love & Sex was a cute romantic comedy. And Famke Janssen's hot. El Diablo, terrible campy western. 3000 Miles To Graceland looked to be a pretty lackluster movie [though it had some pretty sweet cars], but now that I've seen the beginning I have to rent it to see the rest. It'll bother me otherwise. Mad About You is just as cute as I remember. Mmm, Helen Hunt.

Yeah, I'm going to sleep now. Oh, wait. Happy birthday to my sister, who will never see this. Now sleep.

Just woke up. Odd dream. I worked for some biotech company. My office was this fairly large, bright white lab. I spent the entire dream at my desk in this lab. Someone had sent me a message saying my genetic makeup had been a close match to someone else's. I doubt this dream makes much scientific sense, but eh. So I was looking into all these people. Under their "benefactors", there would be a couple names, and then something along the lines of "Donor GX4X". As this Donor GX4X was the only common one between all these names, I concluded it was me. But how would I have "children" I didn't know about? Well...

People kept coming in and injecting me with various substances or drawing blood off. This was, apparently part of my job. By the end of the dream, my arms had become all tracked out. I told this to the next person who came in and presented my arms. She was silent, just stood there looking at me for a second. Then without warning, she stabbed downwards with the syringe, driving it into my thigh. Then she pulled up the plunger, removed the syringe and left. My leg hurt like a bitch. I sat there stunned at my desk for a while, then I woke up.

Yep. Not much's been happening. Hung out with Lacy the last couple of nights I spent in Jersey. We drove around, committed some minor vandalism. Good times.

Back in Worcester now, not doing much. Class starts tomorrow. I'm still shuffling up my schedule. I'm going to use the 2000-2001 requirements for the mathematical sciences degree, which Martin said I could. The difference is, now I don't have to take seven-thirds credits' worth of math classes at or above the three-thousand level. So my many two-thousand-level classes will be just as good, assuming I fill the other requirements, which I do [except for passing 3831 and 3832, which I'll do next year]. So now I just have to fill my CS requirement, finish my Suff, and find an MQP. I don't think I'll be going for the physics degree.

Just got a new cellphone. The Samsung A500. Bought it used. The LG1100 I've got [which Sprint doesn't even sell anymore] keeps randomly restarting. And with poor timing. So yeah, my number'll be the same. Not that it matters, as no one really calls me.

Man, do I hate WPI. So I switched around my D-term schedule. It was formerly three math classes. Only one of those three remains. I had to drop MA3832 [Advanced Calculus II], 'cause I didn't pass the precursor. And I dropped MA4214 [Survival Models], as it's a four-thousand-level actuarial class. So what remains is MA2271, Graph Theory. And about that... Well, while switching classes around, at one point I dropped Graph Theory by accident [selected it instead of Advanced Calc. II]. When I tried to add it again, it rejected me and put me on the waitlist. Despite the fact that there was now one vacancy in the class [the one I just made]. Son of a bitch.

So I go to Christopher [the prof. for Graph Theory] yesterday before class and explain it. He says it's all cool, and tells me I'm back in the class. Alright. So I go to the registrar today, to make sure things are okay.

They tell me that I'm still not in the class. Additionally, I'm not in Rhetoric Of Visual Design. So they hand me an add-drop form and tell me to get the two teachers to sign it. Now, at this point, I came from Founders [after a PQP meeting early this morning] up the hill to the registrar at Boynton. So I go to get Christopher's signature. His office is on the third floor of Stratton. Excellent. Then to go see Trimbur and get his signature. Down the hill, past Founders, to 39 Dean. To the second floor... and he's not there. Back up the hill to Boynton. I'll at least get Graph Theory squared away.

They tell me to hold on to the add-drop and come back when I've got both signatures.

So I leave. I'm at the sundial outside Boynton when I remember an email the crew coach sent out. "If you want credit for D term, see the registrars ASAP." So I go back to registrar, see if I'm signed up for Crew. Surprise, surprise. I'm not. Nor do I have credit for A-term. Now, in A-term, the coach told me to give him some information so I'd get credit for the course. So I gave them this information, assumed they took care of it. Apparently, they didn't. and now there's a thirty-five dollar fee to get credit for A-term. So the woman at the registrar's gives me a petition to make the PE department pay for it. She also adds a line to the add-drop form for Crew this term and sends me off to Alumni.

So to Alumni I go. And the Crew office is deserted. Fan-fucking-tastic.

So I went home.

Fuckin' school.

Happy birthday, Dee.

Got my schedule squared away today. Whew. Although, immediately after I had it all finalized at two, I forgot I had gym and ended up skipping. Second day and I'm already ditching. I am smooth.

Judging from the first class, it looks like Rhetoric of Visual Design is going to be fun. No sarcasm. Today we compared bottles of different brands of bottled water and talked about the impression they gave. We also compared two differently-packaged versions of the same book, and the new and old logos for WPI. It was fun. And exactly the kind of thing I'm interested in. Sweet ass.

And now, I'm going to do my reading for that class. Even though the next time it meets is Monday. The book's just interesting.

Today rocked. My phone came in early. I've been enjoying its sexiness all day. Color screen, blue backlighting... oh yeah. Daddy likes that.

Speaking of sexiness... Abbie visited today. She's on spring break now. She was supposed to get on campus around three-thirty, but got delayed and arrived an hour later than scheduled. So we hung out in the radio station [which I'd pirated, out of boredom]. I got a better grasp on her music taste. Yeah, I never finished making her that CD. Ah, well.

But she had to be in Holden at six-thirty to teach someone how to drive a manual transmission. So she had to go. And I had to get to practice [eventually].

So we kissed goodbye. [I'm grinning stupidly at the moment.] And I don't know exactly how to analyze a kiss, but I think she likes me. Tee-hee.

As a math major and WPI student, I'm obligated to celebrate Pi day. So I helped Martin put together a little thing in the campus center around two [1359] in the afternoon. Served some pie. Heh.

Oh, and I'm obligated to point out it's Racist Friday. This follows Misogynist Thursday, and precedes Anti-Semitic Sunday and Mick-Murderin' Monday. Just a few holidays from me and my flatmates. Thursday was Brent's idea, Sunday was Jack's, and the other two were yours truly's. I admit Racist Friday's a bit wide in scope, but it's a weekend. Time to go nuts.

This morning [Saturday] I was woken up by my new phone ringing. So I sit up, look around, grab the phone. Abbie. Check the time... seven-twenty. I hit "talk". Static. "Hello?" More static. Silence. I look at the phone. Call lost. I think... hm, maybe I'm dreaming. Lay back down, end up going back to sleep.

I called her around noon, confused. Left a rambling voicemail asking her if she actually called or if I was imagining it. She called back at night. Started off by apologizing profusely, because she didn't mean to leave me bewildered. Of course I say it's okay, as I'm confused most of the time. Yes, she called at seven-twenty. Why? Because she was about to enter Canada [she's on spring break, so she's taking a road trip with some friends for a couple days] and she was worried about whether she'd have phone service there, so she wanted to talk to me while she could. I melted. Incredibly sweet of her.

Hm. Movies I watched recently... I'll just tick 'em off. As I'm really tired. Back To The Future, Jackass, Cradle 2 The Grave, and Willard. In order... a classic; terrible; hilariously terrible; disappointing.

Been awake too long. Took four fuckin' hours to bench 8 Mile today. Pain in the ass. Anyway. Sleep now.

Huh. Phone just rang again. "ID Blocked". Pick it up... static. Call lost. Hm. Well, I can't call them back, so oh well. They'll call back if they really wanted me. Sleep now. Again.

A bit of news... all Saturday my parents kept leaving me messages on AIM telling me to call home immediately. I got back to them that night. Apparently my blood work came back. My cholesterol level is through the roof, and I have an as-yet unidentified problem with my endocrine system. Hm, fucked-up hormones. Perhaps that explains my not being as cold as the rest of the crew team out on the frozen lake, or my feverish awakenings in the middle of the night. Or why I'm sweating right now in my 72.5°F room.

Yeah. The race to be my killer is on. Will it be the cholesterol, the mouth/throat/lung cancer, or my liver exploding?

Speaking of which... I'm down to one clove. I've smoked six this weekend. After this one's gone, I think I'll try to take another break. And even though I now have ID and can buy them myself, I'm confident I can keep myself in check. Or I'll just be too lazy to go buy. [Shrug.]

Alright. I'm going to sleep, finish up my Visual Design reading in the morning.

I just spent about twenty minutes standing on Highland Street, babysitting a beagle. Why? I was walking home when I came upon this dog running around on the sidewalk. Occasionally it'd dart out into traffic. So this woman grabbed a hold of it, and I called around trying to get someone to pick it up. The tag on its collar listed an animal clinic, so I called there first. They told me they couldn't do anything about it, but they gave me the owner's name and number. Okay... called the owner. No one home. I left a message telling her her dog was running around on Highland, gave her the approximate location, and told her I'd call back when we decided what to do about the dog. I tried Animal Control. No answer, no machine. Alright. The cops. Dispatcher said they'd send someone up, so I called the owner and told her to talk to the police.

So we waited for the cops. And waited.

A lot of WPI students walked by. I knew many of them by name. Unfortunately, they didn't know me, so there were no verbal exchanges. Or maybe they did know me, and that's why none of them said hi.

Eventually, the owner came by and got the dog. So I called the cops and told them the situation resolved itself.

And now I'm sneezing, as there's dog hair on my clothes. Great.

So, something that's been bothering me lately... Should I consider myself taken? I like Abbie. She says she likes me, but she's a busy person... Now, it's not like I have hordes of girls breaking down my door, I know. But should I mark myself as... reserved or something?

People who read my site, talk to me.

Well, those of you who haven't already dropped your opinion. So far most people are in the "If you don't mean enough to her for her to make time for you, forget about her" camp. Besides, she does make time for me... she calls me. But she can't come out to Worcester just whenever.

So yeah, I'm equivocal here. Help me out.

People of the land of Buttermilk, I hear you loud and clear. I am to talk to her at the earliest opportunity to clarify things. [Haven't talked to her since early Wednesday morning. Left a message for her Thursday night, she hasn't called back or left me any messages on AIM.] Furthermore, I am not to consider myself taken, as that would be opening myself up to a whole world of hurt. Roger.

And now, I continue to play the waiting game.

Jon sent me the Ataris' latest. Haven't listened to all of it, but... eh. Not impressive. Not quite as bad as Lacy made it out to be. Heard a couple of them before, as they were on previous releases ["Radio #2" was on the soundtrack to Orange County, and "Looking Back On Today" was on the 2001 Warped Tour compilation]. I'd also heard "In This Diary" [and seen the video] and was turned off. And I'm skeptical of this cover of Don Henley's "The Boys Of Summer", as I like the original. I'm reserving judgement, even though it's a matter of infinite hope. Also I believe that's referring to reserving judgement forever. Whereas I only need a finite amount of hope to reserve judgement for a set amount of time.

Conversation was over before it started. Wonder if she's avoiding talking about it.


Hm. Even though this version of the song isn't acoustic, it still makes me want to cry. Too much emotion vested in the original acoustic version, it seems.

I've been awake too long. I think the Design project is under control. The Graph Theory homework was pushed back. And my Personal Finance test isn't until Tuesday. Unfortunately another progress report for the PQP is due tomorrow. And I've got nothing. And I've got to polish my LnL t-shirt design before five tomorrow afternoon. Yeah.

I left my room around nine Saturday night and didn't get back until ten or so Sunday morning. What'd I do? Liam and I went out to dinner, then played pool for about six hours straight. We quit around five in the morning, but then he saw a sign that advertised Risk at the Science Fiction Society's Gaming Weekend, so we went there. We played a little DDR, which I still suck at. Liam played a four-hour game of Risk, annihilated everyone. I taunted them all [including Liam]. Then we left.

I got home, took a shower, started my work.

Skipped out on the movies tonight, for the most part. Showed up late to the first movie, caught the end of Analyze That. I didn't see it all, but it seemed crappy. I didn't bother with the second movie. I stopped into the campus center, where some SocComm people were having an Oscar party and holding a little predict-the-winners contest. I showed up late, so I didn't get a chance at the first three. It was based on the total you got right at the end. So basically I started off down three. But I still kicked ass. Correctly predicted ten of the winners. And I got first place. Twenty-dollar certificate to Best Buy. Heh. Just what I need, a reason to go out there and drop a hundred dollars or so.

For the record...  The ones I got right were Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Film Editing, Art Direction, Costume Design, Makeup, Documentary Feature, Documentary Short, and Live Action Short. The ones I predicted wrong were Rob Marshall for Director, Renee Zellweger for Actress, Paul Newman for Supporting Actor, My Big Fat Greek Wedding for Original Screenplay, Adaptation for Adapted Screenplay, Chicago for Cinematography, Road To Perdition for Sound Editing, "I Move On" from Chicago for Original Song, Road To Perdition for Original Score, The Man Without A Past for Foreign Language Film, and Das Rad for Animated Short. Yeah, I mostly hit up Chicago. Best movie of the year, apparently not only according to me, but to the Academy.


Man, do I hate Michael Moore. I knew Bowling For Columbine would win Best Documentary Feature, even though I hated it. Because people are idiots. But he turned his acceptance speech into an anti-war/anti-government rant. Stupid fuckin' hippies. There were a few cheers for him, but they were overpowered by boos. I laughed, as did a few SocCommers. Eventually they cut his mic and had the orchestra play them off, but not soon enough for my taste. [Disappointed head-shaking.] There were some other presenters who expressed pacifist sentiments, though none were as obnoxious as Moore. Susan Sarandon seemed to have a hard time containing herself, though. Sigh. I repeat. Stupid fuckin' hippies.


Still, the Oscar party definitely beat doing PQP work.

Hm... "Blister" is Abbie's favorite JEW song. Fancy that.

Alright. No sleep since Saturday morning means I'm really fuckin' tired. And pretty irritable [or more so than usual]. So I'm going to sleep.

... But he goes right for her.

Yeah, so I just called her. Because her away message on AIM said something like, "Yay, I'm back at school. I'm currently lying in bed, if [some girl's name] wants to come by or you want to call to talk." I don't think she specifically meant me to call, but I apparently deluded myself for at least as long as it took to pick up my phone and hit the speed dial button. We talked for about twenty minutes about nothing important. I wanted to bring up The Talk, Part Two, but I just couldn't.

In the end I lost out to a book. Yep. She hung up to read one more chapter of Anne Rice's The Witching Hour and go to sleep.

I'm afraid I might be living this song.

Went drinking at Justin and Josh's last night. There were supposed to be more people, but they bailed, so the two of them and I played a few games of beirut; each won one. Then, buzzing, I headed home.

Came home, found Abbie had IMed me. So I talked to her. An excerpt, fragmented to get to the point:


To be blatantly suggestive, I'm a past hand at shafting myself.

And yes, I know that by posting this, I continue to do so. But I like keeping my life open. Too bad more people don't seem to understand that.

The Taking Back Sunday show last night was disappointing. Openers were Breaking Pangaea, Recover, and From Autumn To Ashes. None of them were good; Recover scratched the bottom of "decent". TBS was pretty lackluster. Their lead singer seemed drunk or high, or something. Perhaps he's just that idiotic all the time. And preceding their set, a girl came out on stage and asked if the crowd if they were "ready to rock". This wouldn't be so bad, if she'd used the lead vocal mic. For some reason she decided to use one of the amp mics. And she also decided to yell into the mic. So it sounded terrible.

... Yeah, disappointing.

It'd been a while since I'd been to a show [the last time being the Brand New show over winter break], just long enough for me to forget why I don't go to them more often. The idiots, they were numerous.

There are your spiky pierced kids, a subsection of the kids who are rebelling for the sake of rebelling. Your teenyboppers who have crushes on the lead singer. There's your moshers. Idiots. Watched one guy punch a girl in the face while thrashing and never look back or see if she was okay. I guess she was alright, because she just kind of held her jaw for a while and moved closer to the stage. Or she could have been so blinded with lust for the lead singer of Breaking Pangaea that she didn't care.

Kate was there. Weird. The last concert we went to [Midtown, sometime in the spring of 2001] she had to leave the pit because she seemed to be getting a headache. So it was odd, bumping into her in the pit during Breaking Pangaea. Though, by Taking Back Sunday she'd moved to the back, as Jon and I had.

So for the second time in my life, I've been asked by a guy whom I don't know to make out with a female friend of his whom I also don't know. Between Breaking Pangaea's and Recover's sets Jon and I and standing by this guy who's there with his girlfriend [or so we assumed, by how they were all over each other] and a female friend of theirs. At some point the guy turns to me and says, "Hey, do you want to make out with Amy?" and gestures to the friend. I'll admit, Amy was pretty cute. So, being the smooth pimp I am, I go, "Uh..." and the moment is lost. The guy then turned to the girl and said, "Don't worry. I'll find you a boyfriend by the end of the night." I have to not hesitate when situations like this come up. Jon said the next time that happens and he's there, he'll answer for me.

Oh, and speaking of people making moves for me, Vickie [whose computer I'm currently using] says that if I don't ask a girl out, she'll do it in my name. Or set me up with a "seahag". Strong words.

So I'm thinking about quitting crew. Sure, I do nothing. But really, I do nothing. I show up, I sit/stand around, I leave. People don't acknowledge me or talk to me unless I talk to them first. Today I showed up. No one tells me what's going on, nor have I received an email or anything else regarding a schedule. One group of rowers goes off to do a run. Another group piles into a car and goes off to the lake. I decided to make a pre-emptive strike against sitting there like an idiot by walking off as they loaded into the car.

Really, it wouldn't be so much quitting as not bothering to even show up. I seem to be more than halfway off the team anyway. I don't even get acknowledged when I run into people on the team outside of practice. So, no loss. Except all the time I've wasted.

The biggest pain in the ass will be the PE credit. I still haven't gotten the credit from A-term. And then I won't have any for D-term... And so I'll have to find another way to finish my requirement. That'd be easy enough to do.

So Wednesday I went to Best Buy and used that SocComm prize as an excuse to expand my collection. Bought six CDs: Ash's Free All Angels, The Ataris' Anywhere But Here [the copy on my computer was lost to bad hard drive sectors or a corrupted file allocation table or some shit], Coldplay's A Rush Of Blood To The Head, Further Seems Forever's The Moon Is Down and How To Start A Fire, and Oleander's Joyride. Yep.

Guess I'll spend tonight listening to them. Got nothing better to do.

So Simple Harmonic Motion [WPI's male acapella group] sponsored a concert tonight. There were six groups from five schools: WPI's SHM and Interstate 8, RPI's Rusty Pipes, MIT's Resonance, Clark's Clark Bars, UConn's Rubyfruit [or at least that's what their name sounded like]. So I went to that. Went to the party afterwards, too. Details to follow, after I wake up in the morning.

In the meantime: I scored a 83% on the "How Jersey Are You?" Quiz. Jon and Lacy took it, so I had to. I only had four "no"s. If I had a license, I'd probably forget about the full-service-only-in-NJ thing and not get out of my car in other states. I didn't go to the shore, nor to Seaside, after either of the proms I went to. And I don't have a blue recycling bin at home. Four "no"s: 83%. Lands me right in the middle of Jon and Lacy. Not a bad place to be.

Okay, so I'm looking at MIT's site. I met this girl Charlene tonight... she's super-attractive, but she had a boyfriend... And he was at the party, so that was right out. Anyway, I googled Charlene and I'm looking at MIT's site. And man... it'd be worth it to have gone there and committed suicide by self-immolation or something. Sigh. Burning blindingly bright and briefly would be far preferable to burning out and living a dull life.

Alright. Time to sleep. Stuff to do in the morning: PQP work, Rhetoric Of Visual Design papers [that's right, more than one], Graph Theory homework. Oh, and formulate a schedule for my senior year that lets me graduate. That'd be a plus. Oh, and have I mentioned I don't have a MQP yet?

But on the upside, the Massachusetts Board of Public Safety finally decided to get around to grading my exam. I'm now a licensed 35mm projectionist in the state of Massachusetts. Oh, yeah. I'm sure I'll be a babe magnet now.

Sigh.

Alright, sleep time.

So I'm trying to sleep, but all I can think about is Charlene from Resonance and the cute girls from the Rusty Pipes and the Clark Bars... I suppose, visually speaking, I'm one of the easiest-to-please guys out there. Otherwise, I'm one of the most picky. I want a girl that's both cynical and optimistic, one that's simultaneously intellectual and low-brow. One who knows when to be serious and when it's all right to be childish.

You know, one that's just as much of a contradiction as I am. [Bordering on schizophrenic is a plus; going over the line is a turn-off.]

She's out there somewhere... and right now I'm drunk enough to be confident that I'll find her.

God. I'm trying to piece last night together from half-eroded memories and five and a half pages of notes scribbled while still recovering. I should just bug myself. Eyepiece camera, mics. It'd be easier.

So last night I went to the acapella concert that SHM sponsored. It was good, though I'm not too big a fan of acapella. Maybe with a little acoustic guitar, it'd be perfect. But there were some good renditions. The best, in my opinion, was the Rusty Pipes doing "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls with five girls switching off. Not sure if they actually had each girl do the lines for a specific Spice Girl. That'd be attention to detail.

And as I'm no doubt expected to mention... There were several cute girls. MIT's Resonance had a few. There was the one who sang the solo to "I Want A Dildo" [Resonance's re-write of "Holding Out For A Hero"] at the party. [Her name seems to be Sara Jo.] And there was Charlene, who spent the intermission trying to sell pre-orders for their next CD. She was holding a sign up, handwritten with a sharpie on a legal pad. I felt sorry for her and I'd probably have bought a CD from her if I'd figured out a way to get her name without weirding her out. [Sure, I know her name now... but I didn't learn it until the party.] And I can't remember the others, but there were some. My notes clearly mention like, five cute girls in Resonance.

The Clark Bars. Two cute girls. Chuck, whom I was sitting with, thought one of them was "slutty-looking". I admit, she did have quite a bit of makeup on. But she was short and cute. Black hair down to her neck... Other details are fuzzy. The other girl Chuck liked for her "mystery". On stage she looked like Kate Hudson from the Almost Famous poster. Long, wavy, blond hair. Ridiculously huge highway patrolman sunglasses. I thought she was cute, but that she should lose the silly sunglasses. During intermission she did, changed to regular glasses. Very cute, especially when she took off her button-down Clark Bar uniform shirt and used it as a sort of cloak to venture out into the rain. On my open-ended scale, she rated in the area of nine or ten.

RPI's Rusty Pipes had two cute girls. Their shortest and second shortest, actually. The group's unifying wardrobe element was overalls, which added to the cuteness. The second shortest [Michelle] was one of the five main vocals in "Wannabe", and played a mean air fiddle in a country song they did. Freckled, with neck-length wavy, reddish-brown hair. Hella cute. The other had the solo in their second song, but unfortunately, that's all my notes say. Thanks a lot, drunken me.

UConn's Rubyfruit was, by and large, full of unattractive girls. The soloist in their version of Tori Amos' "Silent All These Years", Michelle, was kind of cute. And the soloist for their version of Alicia Keys' "Falling" [her name seems to be Shobha] blew me away. Not cute, but sang incredibly well.

So I spent too much time at home between the concert and the party. Decided to change my shirt, as "Fudge Patrol" wasn't really the message I wanted to convey at the party. Changed into my "WPI Crew frosh" shirt, as it was the first clean shirt I found. Also, Brent was playing Final Fantasy VI/III, so I sat and watched him play that for a while, reminiscing. Eventually I made my way over. Apparently the other LnL people [Dave, Kelly, Paul Messier] showed up earlier and decided to bail. So I walk in and know no one. I'm hoping people at least remember me from strike and don't think it's weird that I'm there. I try to find someone I know. Chris is there [as she's in Interstate 8], so that's one person I know. I'm acquainted with a lot of people there, but I don't know them well enough to say hi or anything.

So I mingle, except for that part where you make casual conversation with people. I'm making my way out to the porch when Mike Roberts says "Hey! It's EGo!" as I pass. So I stop and talk to him for a while. This girl then comes up to us and introduces herself as Rachel. Rachel tells us that she's not normally this social, but she's had quite a few drinks. There's introductions between her and Mike and myself. She seems to like my nickname. I go off to find a drink.

I came to the party with a cup of coffee from the Bean Counter that was sitting on my desk. It wasn't old, just from this morning, and I didn't want it to go bad, so I brought it. So I'm now double-fisting high-proof punch and coffee. Of course, not for long. I run into Chris, who wants to make a run to Store 24 for cloves. So I pound the espresso-and-condensed-milk mix and down the punch. And then... hey, wait, I was trying to not smoke...


Gaze with awe at my conviction.

So she and I come back from the sto' and we're heading out to the back porch, the designated smoking area. Before I make it out the door, I'm pulled aside by Rachel, who yells "EGo!" She asks me seemingly randomly if I'm in a frat. I tell her of my brushes with Crow and Sigma Pi. She mentions her boyfriend's a Crow [Brian Weindling]. Perhaps she recognized me from one of their parties or something. So we talk for a while, but a friend of hers starts crying, so she goes to tend to her.

So I smoke, and mingle. As the C2H5OH kicks in I get slightly more sociable. Slightly. I go inside, talk to Max, this kid who lived on the same floor as me freshman year. Never really talked to him then, but the alcohol diminishes the awkwardness. He has a condom stuck to his head. I realize that a bunch of people have condoms stuck to their heads. Huh.

Whenever Rachel sees me she yells "EGo!" and introduces me to people like so: "This is EGo. His posse showed up but abandoned him." I'm glad this is my defining characteristic.

They start playing flip-cup at the table in the kitchen. I wander in and watch, despite the fact I have no idea how to play the game. Chris comes by. I express disappointment that a lot of the cute girls didn't go to the party. I point out the ones that did. Charlene's the closest. Chris tells me to go talk to her. Chris says to go talk to her or she won't flirt with me anymore. This isn't much of an ultimatum, but in my mind I make it a bigger deal than it is. To try to motivate myself to do it.

So I walk up to her and ask her what's going on, gesturing in the general direction of the table. She explains flip-cup to me. Rachel goes by and yells "EGo!" again. I tell Charlene that Rachel doing that's kind of embarassing. Charlene says no one ever remembers her name. Naturally this is when I ask her what her name is. And then Travis [yep, the annoying kid from the open mic nights] comes over and hugs her. She looks kind of freaked out, and I'm embarassed for everyone concerned. He pokes her stomach, looks confused. She pulls her shirt up a bit to reveal a bellybutton ring. Then she sticks her tongue out; there's an inch of metal going through it. Hm. Somehow Travis disappears, and I'm grateful. Charlene says something like, "He's a little too touchy." I probably say something stupid like, "Heh. Yeah. That he is."

But then she says it's weird because she goes to clubs and ends up being the one drinking on the sidelines. She says no one flirts with her. I express shock, out loud. I think I said, "I don't believe that. You're just so cute." And then she says she's bi and I express more disbelief that she doesn't get hit on more. I'm so suave. [Smacking my forehead.] Ever so casually, she mentions her boyfriend, who's also in Resonance and at the party. And just as casually, after some more small talk, she drifts away.

Mingled more; the party started to dissipate. I went up to Charlene later, talked to her again. I believe I opened with, "I still can't get over the fact you don't get hit on more often." What the fuck is wrong with me? Someone says something about my hair, asks me if I cut it off. I'd just tied it up under my hat. I tell them I was sick of being called "miss" or "lady". Charlene says that they should be able to tell from facial structure. Whenever someone says that, I always wonder what their reaction would be if they saw me with my hair down. I ask some girl about the people with the condoms on their heads, and she says when they came back to their bags after the concert they all had a condom inside. So they just decided to stick them to their heads. Charlene and I agree that it seems more like they're advertising. Like, "Hey, I'm prepared. Take me home with you."

Charlene notes that the party seems to be a hook-up fest. I think those might have even been her exact words. I shrug; I don't really think random people are getting together, just that the couple who are there are big into public displays. I make some kind of pathetic statement of loneliness. I note my empty cup, so I leave the room for a refill. On my way back in I'm assaulted by Chris. Charlene comes up and says, "You have no right to complain about not having a person to hook up with." And so I explain to Charlene that Chris is a huggy sort of person, and that her boyfriend and I know each other.

Charlene hears another math major from WPI and I talk about how actuarial math isn't respectable math, and she mentions that one of the best moments in her life was turning down Harvard for MIT. I respond with, "Heh, both of those schools rejected me." But wait; it gets better. So she's leaving with her boyfriend and the other people from MIT. I say, "Bye, Charlene. See, remembered your name." Her smile and nod seem to say, "You are an idiot" as she says, "Yes, you did." I am one smooth pimp.

The party's almost dead. So the people remaining decide to break out the orange Bacardi. And so we continue to get hammered despite the fact there are only about ten of us. And none of us live there. Although, one of us is the brother of a person who lives there. Malia's brother. Malia who is in her room with Travis. [Shudder.] I can't believe that. Anyway. So it's just us people who don't feel like leaving 'cause there's nothing to go home to, slowly coming to terms with the inevitable.

By the time I made it home it was four or so. I crawled into bed and put on whatever movie was in my computer. Payback. I couldn't fall asleep, so I watched the entire thing. It was six and the sun was up before I went to sleep. Woke up at ten. Oddly, I'm not tired. But I definitely will be later.

Still have all that work to do... and my schedule for next year to make.

I always believed you should respect your elders.


Ah, but I never told her I wouldn't smoke.

Did my schedule for next year. 2x bowling. Oh yeah. Daddy likes. Daddy can definitely quit the crew team now.

I still don't have any of the papers for Visual Design written. Nor have I done any PQP work.

That entry yesterday? Took five hours to write. That's why the timestamp on it says 1235, but no one saw it until just before I went to the movie at six, when I uploaded it.

Alright, time to write the two papers due immediately. Treatin' it like triage.

So last night I had a dream where I was dating a girl I know. Dee, an extremely cute, but very taken, very engaged girl I know. The entire dream was just the two of us, hanging out. That was it. There wasn't anything explicit, nothing beyond hugging. But it felt real. Like I was actually holding her and vice versa. A little too real, I suppose. Woke up, had that moment where I thought it wasn't just a dream, got crushed.

Thanks a lot, unconscious me.

I didn't post about this earlier today. In fact, I didn't even write down any details. [That being why I don't really remember much about it.] I asked Deanna about it first. Am I learning? I don't know; wonder what I would've done if she hadn't been okay with it. I might've written about it anyway.

Well, I might not have an IQP much longer. We're still in the PQP phase and my enthusiasm's gone negative. When Riedel first tried to get me on board, he told me it'd be very little work. Which apparently wasn't quite accurate. And while the other guys in my group wet themselves at the prospect of working with old arms and armor, I'm less than thrilled. So I'm probably quitting.

Now I'll have to find another IQP. One that's actually interesting.

So I'm crossing Highland during rush hour on my way to crew practice. It's raining. So I wait until a substantial gap appears in both directions. I walk through the first gap. I'm standing on the center line waiting for the last car to pass. I wouldn't be waiting, but they're slowing down. They stop just next to me. I'm making hand gestures to let them know I want them to go ahead, but the woman driving just waves me across. So I shrug and scamper across.

I turn back; the car's still sitting there a second. Seems to be a woman driving her daughter [I'm estimating late teens] somewhere. The daughter's in the passenger seat, head down. She looks like she's doing her homework or reading or something. But she looks up. There's a long moment of eye contact. Then she smiles.

The car starts moving again and they're gone.

Moments like that, they just make your day.

It's not often one gets a second chance at a dream. About a year or so ago, I had this dream where I transferred to another school. I don't remember which one. But I got this new group of friends. They were kind of geeky. But this group had a girl, and I liked her. I was closest to her. The dream kind of timelapsed, and she started dating some jock, and I was crushed. And she said that she would've gone out with me, if I'd only made a move.

So this time around, I did. I had the same dream where I transferred, to the same school. But I remembered the old dream. And I didn't make the same mistake. Apparently we got together just before some kind of term break, because her leaving on a plane for home is the last thing I remember before waking up.

Before that dream do-over, I had this other one where this woman who looked like Jodie Foster was my mother [at least I think that was the relationship between us]. And she was a professor at MIT, insanely smart. And I was her precocious kid. She was having trouble getting over her husband's death [my father, I suppose]. And I, in all my precociousness, helped her date some guy. It was a terribly cliché dream.

Had some weird dreams this morning. Started out with my sister coming up for the Everclear concert early. We hang out, then go to sleep. Or perhaps only I go to sleep, because I wake up in the middle of the night and the lights are on and she's sitting there, trying to smoke a bowl. She's apparently having trouble with the flame aspect, so I help her out and then lie back down. So then she passes it to me. I take a hit and go back to sleep.

I wake up; it's morning. Genie's gone. I assume she's off taking care of some business related to the concert tickets. I'm so tired I have trouble walking. Paul and some friend of his I don't know are going to T. Sam's; they ask me if I want to come along. I say, "Sure." Then I go back to my room and sit down at my desk. So great is my fatigue that I can't stand back up. Paul and his friend leave for T. Sam's without me. Eventually they return. But their numbers seem to have grown. There are like, twenty of them now. Uninvited, they all come into my room and just hang out. Now twenty people in my actual room would be a problem, as it's not that large and it's a mess. But my room in the dream was fairly large. Square, about fifteen feet to a side. Two opposing walls [neither with the door] were not really walls at all, but made of wooden panels that slid on tracks. These panels were open, but still, all these people in my room bothered me. So I kicked them out and slid the panels closed.

After what must have been one odd transition, I'm in lightsaber dueling arena. There are many people here. My recurring rival seems to be Desann, who registers as Jon to me when I look at him. [Like, if we were playing JK2, the character model would be Desann, but the player's name would be Jon.] And Desann/Jon is kicking my ass. So I have to run or be cheap. Or die. But the arena's a little bit too real. Not only are you controlling the character through your own body movements, but injuries your character takes are actually inflicted on you. As I run by another pair of duelists [running from Desann/Jon] one of their blades slices off part of my right hand, the meaty part between the thumb and forefinger. I yell out and collapse. Jon catches up. Surprisingly, instead of finishing the duel, he stands there looking concerned.

And then I woke up for real.

So I'm walking outside the library with Chris. I'm bitching about getting booted out of my IQP. She says it's easy to get one; just take the courses on teaching that WPI offers, then teach Mass Academy or something. I say, "But that'd just make people think I want to be a math teacher."

The guy walking about ten feet in front of us stops and turns around. He says, "Do not concern yourself with what others think of you. What matters is only what you think of yourself." Then he turns back around.

I respond, "Heh, yeah. That's not very much either."

He stops and turns around again. "Hey. I can tell just by looking at you that you've got a better heart than most of the people around here."

Chris pulls me to go the opposite way. I'm a bit freaked out, so I go with her. I think I said, "Wow," for lack of a better response.

I wish I could say things to random people I don't know. Like that guy. Except without coming off creepy and freaking them out. That'd be key.

Right, so... backtracking. I got kicked out of the IQP I was in. In the email ejecting me from the project group, the advisor wrote, "I cannot be confident of your ability to perform at the level of that the museum needs from its interns." There was something about me being too unprofessional in there, too. Sigh. So I have to find another IQP.

It snowed pretty heavily a few days ago. That was nice. I definitely don't want spring to be here. All the people outside, happy and cheery... just bothers me.

So I finally got the site running again. Weird permissions on seemingly unrelated directories apparently fucked everything up. [shrug]

Incidentally, I didn't get the job at WPI's Web Development Office. The fact that my site was down could have done it. Though, it's not my fault the school decided to fuck PHP up. The site always worked on my local un-tweaked Apache-and-PHP set-up. Ah, well. I'm going for other webdev jobs for the summer. Either in Boston or down in Jersey. We'll see how that goes.

Everclear concert with my sister Friday night. She's coming up Thursday night, and we're heading back to Jersey Friday afternoon. I'll be back Sunday. I need to download and listen to their latest. Hopefully they'll play a few off Sparkle And Fade and So Much For The Afterglow. Ought to be fun.

I'm currently not working on my Design Experiment for Rhetoric Of Visual Design. That class is hella fun. But no ideas are coming to me for the project. I'm supposed to either re-design an inforgraphic or design one in response to one of the scenarios given. It's due in the morning, naturally.

I suppose I'll get to work on it, or at least, stop writing this and giving myself an excuse to not work.

Happy birthday, Katie. Wherever you are.

Got a call about an hour ago. I was over at my sister's boyfriend's place [details to follow] so reception was poor. So I check it. "One new message from phone number 508—" I got excited at this point, thought it was Abbie. [Haven't talked to her in a long time...] But the next seven digits weren't any I recognized as hers, so I was confused for a bit. It was Jordan. Told me New Voices strike was finishing up, the cast party was at Vickie's. They're wondering where I am 'cause they didn't see me. If I show up, cool; if not, it's okay and they'll see me later. That was nice. I mean, I didn't do anything for the show. It's nice to be called like that. Too bad I'm in Jersey, otherwise I'd definitely be there. Of course, if I wasn't in Jersey, I'd probably have been at the play tonight, and so would know where the party was. Ah, well.

Congrats to the Alpha Psi inductees. Except Paul Messier. 'Cause you still annoy me, Paul.

So I spent the night hanging out with my sister, her boyfriend Tom, and some of his friends. My sister calls me this morning [okay, it was three-thirty in the afternoon, but I was still asleep, naturally] and invites me to this barbeque that her boyfriend's roommate is throwing. I'm kind of skeptical about hanging out with a bunch of people older than me who are at best acquaintances. But faced with the prospect of spending the night at home with my parents discussing my not graduating in four years, I decided to go. The offer of booze was merely icing.

So we get there, seems the roommate got tired and decided not to have the barbeque. So it's just Tom, his friend Brian, and Brian's wife Melissa. Gee, not awkward at all. So I drink Soco until it feels less so. We watch Jackass and they all think it's hilarious. I don't say anything because I don't feel comfortable enough with them to be overtly elitist. So I quietly judge them. Then we watch Sorority Boys. It was funny, though I'll have to say it's worth seeing only once. That's pretty much the lowest rating I give. [Yes, movies such as Jackass rate below that, but the number of movies that bad is relatively low.] So it wasn't so awkward, but it was worse than I had been expecting. Seeing as how my sister had told me it would be a huge party. In a huge party, I could get lost or something. Kind of hard to do with only five people.

The Everclear concert was alright. So many damned teenyboppers. One in particular pissed me off. She was with this extremely fat guy in a black Member's Only jacket. In the pit. And for some reason she'd decided to bring this gigantic shoulder bag which occupied the same space as another person. So this couple that was standing next to my sister and I and behind this girl start smoking. So this girl gets all huffy. The woman smoking blows hers directly on the girl. I wanted to applaud. Instead, I just asked the man if he'd get his girlfriend to blow her smoke on the girl again. Won my sister and I some friends that way.


That was between the last opening act [The Exies] and Everclear. So the couple and my sister and I shoot the shit for a while. They're from Jersey, too. The woman's of college age but doesn't attend; the guy's a plumber. They're all right people. The guy produces a joint just as Everclear takes the stage. So it gets passed between him, his girlfriend, and my sister. I decline. [It's not that I'm against pot use. It's just that everytime I've partaken I've never felt anything. So I don't bother wasting anyone's supply anymore.] Yep. They're all right people.

The openers were okay. Authority Zero and the aforementioned Exies. Authority Zero sounded familiar. Their name, anyway. They were decent, although I don't think I'd bother to listen to them by choice. The Exies were better, kind of alt-rock. Got pissed off at people booing them in their eagerness to see Everclear. Fuckin' A, people. You pay for a concert, you might as well see all the acts and get your full money's worth. Sigh.

So... Everclear. I wasn't well acquainted with their newer stuff. Hadn't heard anything off their newest album, Slow Motion Daydream, until my sister played it in the car on the way south from Worcester. And I feel asleep. And I hadn't really liked Songs From An American Movie, Volume II. Though, thankfully, they didn't play any off of that album.

They kicked off with "You Make Me Feel Like A Whore". My sister approved; she was hoping they'd play stuff off Sparkle And Fade. I was glad, too, as I didn't think much of their newer stuff. We were not to disappointed as they went on to the previous track off Sparkle And Fade, "Heroin Girl". I'm screaming along. Then they shift gears and go into "Blackjack" off Slow Motion Daydream. So I just have to stand there confused. I look to my sister for guidance, but even she doesn't know it. And she owns the CD.

Now, I wouldn't actually be bothering to write down a set list while in the pit, but my sister bugged me into doing it. It was quite the bitch. Definitely more lively than Counting Crows. Has its ups and downs.

They do two more songs I recognize and can yell along to, "Fire Maple Song" and "Wonderful". I actually cried during "Wonderful". A pansy is me. They then go into "Volvo Driving Soccer Mom", again off their latest, so I nod along.

Craig Montoya is the motherfuckin' man. The next seven minutes or so is him alone on the stage, cigarette in mouth, pickin' away on the bass. Rocked.

The other guys come back on, play some song that I don't recognize. And still don't. But my sister tells me the name's "Walk Around". I don't see it on the tracklist for Slow Motion Daydream, so... [shrug] I don't know. They move on to tracks five and six off Sparkle And Fade. "Summerland" and "Strawberry". Very nice.

It's Greg Eklund's birthday, so Art leads the crowd in singing "Happy Birthday" to him. Then there's another birthday. A girl is led onstage by her boyfriend, whom I think is one of the roadies or something. It's her twentieth birthday. Cheers ensue. Then Art says that her boyfriend would like to say something. Boyfriend gets on one knee and proposes. She accepts, although I'm sure anyone would have a hard time saying no with a crowd watching. Y'know, given the subject matter of Everclear's songs, I don't think I'd want to propose at one of their concerts. Just kind of starts it all wrong.

They do, however, play one of their happier songs next, one of my favorites. "Learning How To Smile". Art tells the story of how he met his wife at the Hammerstein Ballroom [where the concert was being held] four years ago. Aww. Craig puts down the bass and busts out a keyboard for the string section. I sing along. And cry. I mean, come on. That song is the life I want to live:


So... damned romantic. If I could find a girl who'd do that with me... fuck it all, we'd be gone.

... Right. The rest of the Everclear set. After "Learning How To Smile" they played "New York Times", another new song I didn't recognize. But it was the last. "Pale Green Stars" followed by "I Will Buy You A New Life". Ah, the dysfunctionality. Then "Father Of Mine", which was split into two parts by a long drum solo from Greg. Then Art asks, "Anyone know how to play 'Santa Monica' on guitar?" Lots of screaming. This thirteen-year-old girl goes up. I feel old. This girl was five when Sparkle And Fade came out. Christ. But she plays it without incident, although with some coaching. And that's how they close.

The lights go down. People start chanting "USA". What the fuck. That dies down, then the chants of "Everclear" begin. Minutes pass.

The band comes back out and asks for some people to dance onstage. They pull three guys and three girls. One of the guys is fat. Very fat. At one point he even started stripping. [shudder] Luckily he ended up keeping it all on. I believe Art said, "Okay, I don't want to see that." Two of the girls are nasty. The third is damned hot. I entertained thoughts of ripping paper from my notepad and trying to pass her a note [yeah, we were close enough to the stage] or perhaps trying to get onstage myself. Of course, I didn't end up doing either.

Then Art yells, "Surf's up, motherfuckers!" An instrumental ensues. There are only hints of the old surf rock. It lasts much too long. The dancers from the crowd don't know what they're doing; they kind of stand there dumbly for a while before doing anything. They stay onstage as they proceed into "Everything To Everyone". There is much jumping. More people are pulled onstage from the crowd. This is a long process, as Art walks the perimeter, choosing people. Finally, with the stage packed, a very drunk Craig sings "Surrender" by Cheap Trick. I repeat, Craig Montoya is the man. Sure, he's drunk during the set, but he doesn't miss a beat.

So that's been my time at home. I'm guessing that talk with my parents got delayed until the morning. I don't think I'll be able to avoid it. I guess I'll go to sleep. So I'm not nodding off as they yell at me.

When people ask me if I'm all right, I blurt out, "Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just tired." 'Cause I think, "A throwaway answer to a throwaway question." Except I'm not tired, usually. And I'd like people to ask me what's up. I don't want to bleed everything out without provocation. But when they do ask, I just... blow it. And then, since I know they read the site, I don't write anything about it.

I've really got to suppress that reflex.

So I woke up this morning at eleven. I've got two papers to write for Visual Design. I think, bah, I'll do them tonight, sleep some more. Then I spend the afternoon watching Jack play Freelancer and writing the proposal for my MQP. Around three, Jon calls. I call him back, no answer. I figure it's not important.

I don't get in touch with him until five. He says he'll be in Worcester in an hour. Huh? Crap, Bad Religion concert. Totally forgot. I should get to work on my Design crap! So I go watch Jack play more Freelancer.

The concert's all right. They play a lot of stuff I don't recognize. And I really wish they'd have played "Infected". Ah, well. The openers were S.T.U.N. and the Casualties. Sucktastic. Reminds me why I'm not a fan of hardcore. But Bad Religion was decent. At least they were headlining this time.

So Jon and I get back, hang out in my room for a while. Watch the one episode of ReBoot I've downloaded. Yep. So it's midnight and I haven't started my work.

Jon leaves. I check Abbie's away message. "driving around in circles. call my cell and I'll come pick you up. no, I'm serious. Provided you are within an hour of me." Hm. I figure she'll never bother to drive out here, but I call her anyway. Y'know, since I've got an excuse. She says another friend of hers called first, so Abbie's going to go pick her up. And if her friend feels like it, they'll head out here.

So they are. They should be here within an hour. And I still haven't done any work.

Indeed, my time management skills are awesome.

But at least I'll get to see her again. Works out to... once a month.

Well, nevermind that. Something came up, and she has to head home. Tufts home, I mean. Her roommate called her and said Abbie's fish died. So Abbie has to go back and confirm.

Yep.

Guess I'll get started on those papers.

Last night I dreamt I blew up my old elementary school. Don't really know why I did; it wasn't that bad. If I blew up anything, it'd be my old high school. Maybe I'd already taken care of that in the dream.

It was all pretty laidback. Took my time setting it up. Although I don't think I'd planned it out very well. For some reason I brought a lot of things I didn't need during the bombing run. Like an extra set of clothing. Now, if I was doing this at night and was wearing all black or something, this would've made slightly more sense. But I was in jeans and a t-shirt, and it was during the day. Yeah, pretty poor at the planning thing.

So I packed the pillars in the foundation with plastique and little detonators. And then, instead of leaving, I decided to go up to the top floor. Somehow, I ended up uninjured despite the entire building collapsing. So I walked away.

That was one of the four dreams I had last night. Woke up every two hours. Another dream was just me yelling at my sister because she bought another car. In real life, she's got two. One of them she bought new and barely drives [to keep it fresh while she tries unsuccessfully to sell it]. In the dream, she had three, two of which she barely drove. It was a relatively uninteresting dream.

Another one was some sort of reunion on a boat. An elementary school reunion, even, judging from the other people I remember in it. Whether it preceded the bombing dream or came afterwards, I don't know. I remember some pieces of it, like me hitting a glass plate hard enough to break it. And some random parts that I'm pretty sure I copied out of an old episode of Dharma And Greg.

Yeah, so. Time to do the work I've been avoiding.

I can't really explain why, but my tongue feels like a foreign object in my mouth. I believe this is a side effect of the Claritin. If it isn't, then I've no clue.

And I am done for the year.

Almost.

Okay, not really. I've got a Graph Theory take-home to hand in tomorrow and an MQP proposal to write by Thursday.

But I took my Personal Finance final at nine, handed in my last Visual Design paper at noon, and took my Graph Theory in-class just now. The latter rocked me hard. I definitely wasn't expecting it to be so damned difficult. At least I had an A average going in, so I'm pretty much assured a C by showing up.

Right now, I've got to crash. As I've been telling everyone I've run into all day [regardless of whether they care or not], I've been awake since eight a.m., Sunday morning. So I'm pushin' thirty-one hours now. As to how I'm holding myself together, that's telekinesis, Kyle.

Yes. That was a Tenacious D reference. I don't know why I put that CD on before, as it normally annoys the fuck out of me. Perhaps I'm not so annoyed by Jack Black's idiocy when I'm so tired I can't see straight. [shrug]

Now, to sleep. All I have to do is resist the call of Freelancer and  make it to my bed...

Another year's done. And I can't say I'm really any closer to graduation. Nor am I any more ready to graduate. Yeah...

Ataris concert tonight. Openers were Juliana Theory, Further Seems Forever, and Damone. We got there late, missed Damone and FSF. Damn it. I'd really wanted to see FSF, too. Juliana Theory sucked less this time than when we saw them open for Our Lady Peace back in October. The problem's their lead singer. He spends way too much thrusting at the air and feeling himself up. As for the Ataris, they rocked. Jon and I burrowed pretty well. Got into the pit at the start of their set, worked our way to the front about halfway through the set. They played "Takeoffs And Landings", "1*15*96", "Your Boyfriend Sucks", "Make It Last". Among others, but yeah, those are definitely songs I love. I was kind of bummed they didn't play "Looking Back On Today". It was even the thirtieth of April. Ah, well.

That song still makes me cry. Even when I just read the lyrics.

Had the traditional end-of-term dinner with Jack and Brent earlier tonight. Weird how four terms make a tradition. [shrug] We lamented how in a few weeks, many inside jokes will die. The two of them'll be graduating and heading off. Well, Jack is, in a few weeks. Brent's got a course to make up over the summer before he can. Still, end result's the same. Simultaneously, a year feels really long and yet, too short.

Totally didn't mention how the Brand New show went last Friday. It was good. First time I'd seen them play "Soco Amaretto Lime". In my opinion, that's the best song on their one album. It's certainly not "Seventy Times 7". "Soco"'s is a much better sing-along. And as its position as the last album rightly suggests, it's an awesome closer. But no, they just drop it in the middle of the set. I can't remember what they closed with, though. Something fast. That is definitely not the way. Can't remember. I should ask Jon; he caught the set list in a fantastic leap-curl-up-drop manuever.

So I'm tired. I need to take a shower. And clear off my bed. I've got a bunch of clothes on it, and three packaged leftovers. Two from the WWPI exec dinner at Vinny Testa's Tuesday night [when we racked up a three-hundred-and-twenty-dollar bill, including tip] and one from the dinner with the roommates tonight.

Hm. I've had the same small playlist for the past few days. Thirty tracks. Black Lab's "Circus Lights" and "What Child Is This", Counting Crows' "Open All Night" and "Shallow Days", Desaparecidos' "Greater Omaha", Everclear's Slow Motion Daydream, the Roswell soundtrack, and Tonic's "Head On Straight". The playlist was just the two albums for a while. I threw on the others for a little variety. Just added the acoustic version of "Looking Back On Today". I figure, I don't cry nearly as much as I should. Maybe I'll stop making obscenely long playlists. It was too time-consuming, anyway.

So by the fact that Abbie doesn't talk to me unless I talk to her first... I'm thinking that she just wants to forget anything ever happened. And I hate chasing. So... perhaps she'll pass over into the realm of people I once vaguely knew, but now never talk to.

That reminds me. I accidentally triple-booked my evening tonight. Yesterday was supposed to be the end-of-term thing with my roommates, but I pushed that back a night to accomodate the WWPI dinner. I'd totally forgotten about the Ataris concert [as I usually do, until Jon calls to tell me he's leaving for Worcester]. And I was invited by Jordan to some get-together, told him I'd go. Managed to squeeze the first two in. Jordan said he'd call me with the details of the party, but he never did. Perhaps he was more drunk than I gave him credit for when the arrangements were made. Ah, well. I guess I wouldn't have gone anyway.

Anyway, shower. My mouth tastes like a bloody ashtray [bloody as in "stained with blood", not the British intensive slang], I have the lingerings of sweat [mine as well as others'] all over me, and for some reason I smell vodka on myself. That last one's kind of intriguing.

Haven't been up to much. The MQP thing's gone awry. The advisor we picked, Peter Christopher, loved me, hated Alison [my partner]. So at the moment Alison's scoping other advisors for us. If she can't find one, I might go back and do a solo project with Christopher. One of the project ideas he suggested sounding interesting.

Wish I was drunk now. This time of year is always... uneventful. I woke up at three in the afternoon today. In the last twelve hours, I've accomplished nothing. I watched some movies I'd already seen. Played some Freelancer, until I decided that I'd taken the character in a direction I didn't want to go and restored from last night's save. Read more of a book which didn't impress me the first time I read it, years ago. Yep. Today's story, zero character development.


Tomorrow Brent goes home for a while and I'm left in an empty apartment. That'll be depressing. I hate it when there's no one around. Brings back memories of the summer after freshman year of college. I stayed in the dorms for a few weeks after everyone left. Empty hallways with doors hanging open to empty rooms. So very disconcerting. I had trouble sleeping. Cliff Poncier was right, about me, anyway. Being alone is definitely a nasty hang.

This song just makes me want to yell along and cry. I guess I could; Jack and Paul are gone, so the two adjacent rooms are empty. I'll do that 'til I'm tired. A good short-term plan.

On a related note, I think I know what I'll do this summer. I'll take a page from John O'Brien, go somewhere and drink myself to death. But you can't buy yourself, you say. Well, I can in Canada. Besides, I'd like to die somewhere cold.

Tonight was better. Yeah, the apartment was empty. To combat the loneliness I blasted my music. Kind of worked... Not really.

Jon busted his leg and woke up this morning to find he couldn't walk. We were supposed to go to this discrete math confererence WPI was having today. Without him, I saw no point in going, so I spent the day asleep. Had this fucked-up dream where Jon and I ran off [literally] to join the army. We didn't make it. They say you can't die in dreams, but I seem to have no problem doing so. [Shrug.] Didn't bother getting out of bed until I noticed the sun was down. Seven at night.

Checked my grades for the term. The only ones that are in for me are my PE class and Personal Finance. I got an A in gym. It was attendance based. Easy enough to sign in and go play frisbee on the quad. Personal Finance was the one class I wasn't sure about this term. I took because it seemed easy, and I did intern at my uncle's hedge fund management firm last summer. The first test was a breeze, but I bombed the second test. [Yeah, on something that was supposed to be in the bag, I consider a twenty-eight out of forty bombing.] But apaprently I did well enough on the final to get a B. Score. I definitely aced Graph Theory, and there's no way I could've gotten less than a B in Visual Design. All my essays were eights and nines [on a ten-point scale]. So no Academic Probation. Rock.

Hung out with Liam. Spent a couple hours at Bickford's. We hadn't been there in months. Service was terrible. And apparently they're under new management now; they don't do the student discount or the frequent customer card thing. Ah, well. Rented a couple movies at Starship. Discovered along with the checkout girl that God has a membership at Starship [apparently listed right under mine]. Members listed under God's account as able to rent are "all His children", and there's a special note that indicates that the Devil is not allowed to rent anything. Heh. Some employee was bored. I wanted to know what movies God's rented, but it seems that's closed business.

We got two movies, both my suggestions: The One and Playing Mona Lisa. The former I'd seen a couple times, when I projected it. It's a great action movie. Jet Li on Jet Li fight scenes. Awesome. The latter's been on my to-see list for a while, ever since I saw the trailer before Ethan Hawke's terrible version of Hamlet. It seemed cute, and I love Alicia Witt. Witt plays a piano prodigy whose life gets turned upside-down after her boyfriend dumps her. She has to move back home, and her family's equally fucked-up. It seemed to drag at points, just wander aimlessly. But it all came together wonderfully.

I should be packing or sleeping or something. I'm heading back to Jersey in the morning. For a week. Just to re-take my road test and get checked out by all these specialist doctors. Neurologist, endocrinologist... oh, boy. The fun in store. Other plans for my home time include renting Leaving Las Vegas. Tried to rent it tonight at Starship, but some bastard's already got it.

Alright, time to either gather up my empty boxes and bottles and cans, pack my clothes, or go to sleep. I'll probably do the latter, while watching some cute romantic comedy I have and eating an entire box of Thin Mints. Gah. Why am I such a girl?

Home is just great.


And at lunch...

Back in Worcester. Been back for a while; I've just been lazy. Haven't been doing much. Just watching movie asfter movie, same way I spent my time at home. Saw X2: X-Men United, Identity, Confidence, Gosford Park, Leaving Las Vegas, Gone In Sixty Seconds, The Green Mile, Die Hard 2, and The Bourne Identity. That sums up my time at home.

X2 was much better than the original, and I'm hoping the third movie involves Phoenix. Or Gambit. Or Morph. Or Cable. Or the Sentinels. Man, the X-Men movies have been more than just a little disappointing. Identity was pretty short; I didn't really feel I got my money's worth of entertainment. And as much as I love John Cusack, he didn't redeem the movie. Confidence was awesome. Rachel Weisz is hot and Edward Burns is slick. Excellent.

I'd had a copy of Gosford Park in DivX for a long time, but never bothered to watch it. So over this sort-of break, I did. It was good, though at time I wished I had subtitles. And Kelly MacDonald is hella cute. Got around to renting Leaving Las Vegas [sort of stole my mother's car while she was at work to drive to the video store]. It continues to be awesome in its depressing nature. Elisabeth Shue is hot, and I enjoy Nicolas Cage's mania in most anything [extreme cases like Bringing Out The Dead are exclusions]. Still in a Cage mood, I watched Gone In Sixty Seconds again and marveled at how much better it is compared to The Fast And The Furious. Not that that's saying much. But Gone In Sixty Seconds is good.

Watched The Green Mile and Die Hard 2 again because they were on TV [though they were also highly censored]. The Green Mile is still a decent movie. Not great, not awful. But woo, David Morse. He's been cool in my book ever since The Langoliers. Die Hard 2... I don't even know why I watched that in entirety. Sure, Bruce Willis and William Sadler are cool, but "Yippie-ai kai yay, Mr. Falcon"? That's just terrible.

Got back in Worcester Sunday afternoon. Monday afternoon, went to the mall with the roommates. Went into Electronics Boutique with two dollars cash in my pocket. Walked by the used DVD rack. Discovered credit card in other pocket. Bought five DVDs, seventy-two dollars. The Salton Sea, Clerks: The Animated Series, Gosford Park, Minority Report, and the collector's edition of Pulp Fiction. Purchases in hand, I follow the roommates to FYE. Well, shit, another media store. My weakness. So I browse their music. Most are twenty dollars. Good, I think. I can resist buying things here. We're on our way out. Right past a rack with the Grosse Pointe Blank DVD on sale for ten dollars. John Cusack. Must buy. Walk to register. At the register, The Truth About Cats And Dogs for six dollars. Janeane Garofalo. Must buy.

Seven DVDs, just under ninety dollars. I am a consumer whore. And how.

I hate my computer. I write a nice long entry. I save, Notepad crashes. File lost. Fan-fucking-tastic. Three hours. Lost.

I was going to try some reconsctruction, but I'll just be really, really brief about everything. And maybe I'll expound later. It was all, and still is, important to me, but probably less so to you. Each of these was a paragraph at least, several in some cases.

I've been depressed the last few days. Essentially, it's the time of year. Summer's depressing, especially so this year because the seniors I know are leaving. Probably never see them again.

Wednesday I got asked to see Matrix: Reloaded. Declined. Too many nerds opening night. And people who seem to feel it's acceptable to cheer or boo loudly. Idiots.

Thursday my plan for an IQP fell through. Too bad. My plans for graduating on time were coming together.

Went to Borders tonight. Got Enter The Dragon and Pi.

Went to Bickford's with Liam. Talked of desperation and one-night stands, shared moments and missing out on experiences in life. [That's a solid page and a half of text in one sentence. As much as the original text wanted to make me cry, it being lost makes me even more depressed.]

And that's what I've been up to. For more details... call me or something. I'm not really paying attention to AIM anymore.

Context for the above? We were at a restaurant and my father noted that our seater was cute. I said she was a bit chubby. That was his response.

Yeah, my parents came up this past weekend. Fun times. Read parts of Leviticus 18 from the Gideon Bible in their hotel room, like "Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy daughter in law: she is thy son's wife; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness." My father would response to each verse with variations on "Clinton did that". Now, I hate Clinton; don't be mistaken. But I pointed out that Clinton didn't have a son, which is a requirement to have sex with your son's wife. He countered with the concept of bastard sons. Touché.

Over the past weeks, I've not been up to much. Moved out of Goulding St., out of the ghetto, into a palatial Worcesterian estate on the other side of campus. Nice big room, lots of outlets. It's sweet.

Unfortunately, we don't have an internet connection yet. Nor do we have an intranet. So my cellphone's my only contact with the outside. And the odd trip to an on-campus computer center.

Oh, right. My brain scan results came back. Apparently my MRI didn't indicate anything. But my EEG apparently showed that I was prone to "seizure or short circuiting". I'm not allowed to drive. Nor am I allowed to do anything alone, "anything" being a task where losing consciousness is dangerous.

I still don't have a job. But I do have an MQP. Predicting the number of customers for some funeral homes in central Massachusetts. It's morbidly delicious.

Yeah, so... back to my apartment to unpack some more. Or something else.

Not much going on. Apartment's all set up. Well, enough for me anyway. Still no internet connection.

Saw the Matrix sequel. It was bleak. I liked it. Better than the first, in fact. The overt sexuality was just a bonus. Though I could have done without seeing Keanu Reeves' bare ass. What was poor about the film was the fight scenes. The horde of Agents Smith versus Neo fight was in the trailer, so I don't feel I'm spoiling anything. It may look good, but... what's the point? Neo's power are on par with a deity. Couldn't he move one arm faster than Smith could attack in the first movie? On a related note, Agents seem to have been downgraded, as opposed to upgraded. Taking them on seems to be less of a deal now. What happened to their strategy of flight? I admit some time has passed between the first movie and the second, but no more than a year. In the first movie, weren't the non-Neo characters at their peak of mental acuity? What the fuck.

On the positive side, there's the aforementioned bleakness. And the deception. Everyone's got their own agenda. The characters of the Keymaker and Seraph. And of course, the hotness of Carrie-Anne Moss and Monica Bellucci. I think that's it. But the key factor to my enjoyment was the bleakness.

Yep.

So Paul called the apartment at nine, said he needed to be picked up. I ask him where he is. He says UPS. I ask him where that is. He gets all exasperated and tells me to look it up in the phone book. So I say fine, I will. We hang up.

So I look in the phone book. There's no address for UPS, only a toll-free number. I call the number and ask for the UPS store nearest to Worcester. They tell me the closest one is in Holden. Hm. Brent and I are confused; Paul walked there this morning. We've got no way to reach him now, so we just wait for him to call back. Which he doesn't.

At ten-twenty or so Brent and I mount an expedition down Main Street, as the nearest UPS store was "800 Main Street, Holden, Massachusetts". And looking it up online Brent apparently found something else UPS-related at eight-hundred and forty-something on Main Street. So we go. He's not there.

But on Main Street [as we're on it from the one-hundreds to the eight-hundreds], we encounter a red Ford Taurus. Its occupants are two girls. I notice it because Brent says, "Hey, those girls are looking at us." Sure enough, they are. Staring, actually. So I wave. The passenger girl waves back. They go down Main Street a ways, and we catch up to them at lights sometimes. And they're still staring. They were cute, too. I told Brent we should have gone after them instead of hunting down Paul. Of course, we didn't. Then again, if we had, I wouldn't know what to do. Still, the whole being-stared-at thing was kind of weird and flattering at the same time.

We didn't find Paul; we just gave up eventually. And so that was my night. We should've gone after those girls.

Oh, and I'm writing this on my computer without an internet connection, so this'll get posted much later.

So last night I was walking home from CS1005 in Kaven, perhaps the furthest building from my apartment. I pass Stratton. On a whim, I climb the fire escape. Spend a little time up there, just looking around. I see the cops go by in their Segways. Hope they don't look up. They don't.

I think of Abbie. She said she loved to hang out here when she went to WPI. I give her a call, get her voicemail. I leave some message mentioning where I am and wondering what she's up to. She calls me a half-hour or so later, when I get home. She happens to be home at the moment. Caught her right between camp counselor training and when camp begins [Thursday]. We talk a bit, then she goes 'cause she's hanging out with people before she leaves for camp.

I didn't sleep last night, so I've been tired all today. Around nine I passed out on my bed. Woke up to the phone ringing around eleven-thirty. Abbie. She's wondering if I want to hang out a bit. I'm still half-asleep but amazingly I'm coherent enough to accept.

So we went and hung out on Stratton's fire escape. I was the antithesis of suave, as usual. Completely bumbling. We hung out until around half past midnight. Smoked, talked. The goodbye kiss was too brief. Though, that could be said of the entire experience. Sigh.

Thursday night, Jon tells me about this party going on a couple hours away, down by Philadelphia. This girl he knows, Ceil [pronounced seal], invited him and anyone he wanted to bring. It's decided that this party is too far away to be worth it.

Saturday morning... okay, at noon on Saturday, Jon wakes me up by calling to tell me that the party isn't down by Philadelphia, it's instead in Newton. Which is supposedly about an hour west [obeying the speed limit]. So what the hell, we're goin'.

Jon can bring whoever he wants. So he invites a few people. We make plans to rendezvous at Jon's apartment at 2015. Being the well-oiled machines we are, the plan is fucked. At 2145, we've got twelve people in three cars ready to hit the road.

And thus begins a nice race, goin' down Route 80 at speeds in the eighty to ninety miles-per-hour range. I put on some Fat Of The Land, trying to dig spurs into Jon's sides. It works. Thirty minutes later we're there. "There" is the middle of nowhere. Farmland. Y's reaction: "You could rape and kill someone out here." Reassuring.

We find the house. It's dark, but the party is found around back. There's some shock as the party meets the invaders influx. There are some introductions I don't really remember... some blinding flash bulbs... some cigarettes smoked, and of course, quite a bit of alcohol consumed.

I keep myself in check by making sure I remember everyone's name. If I can't remember my own, it's time to pass out. There are a couple of cute girls there. One is named Lisa, a short redheaded girl. The other's name is Vessna [which I probably misspelled]. According to her, it means "spring" [the season] in Russian. She's taller... and let's say that Vessna was kind of like a club-type Amazon woman, while Lisa was from the high plains.

Vessna seems kind of ditzy and so I turn attention toward Lisa. Unfortunately our group of twelve people brought ten single guys and two attached lesbians. The party we joined was mostly girls, a strange concept for me to wrap my mind around. Basically my main competition are the guys I came with. Here and there I manage to catch Lisa and converse with her. I pick up things like the facts that she's twenty and that she's at the party with her older brother. She's just starting college [that could mean she just finished a freshman year... it was a bit vague], majoring in Journalism because she wants to be a writer.

I get the impression that I just don't do the small talk thing well enough to hold her attention for very long. Well, I don't know. I was talking to her just before she left. But there weren't many people around at that point with whom I'd have to vie for her attention. In the end I don't have her number and, since she lives kind of far away, am resigned to the fact that our paths will probably never cross again.


Zing.

Well, maybe not. Jon got pretty close to this girl Elizabeth. And somehow Elizabeth caught wind of me not getting Lisa's number, which Elizabeth happens to possess. Perhaps she heard me lamenting to Jon. And so, this girl Elizabeth took down my number. Why she didn't just give me the number herself, I don't know. Maybe I'm being screened first.

So right, Jon and Elizabeth. At one point they went off on a walk together, unnoticed [well, by me, but I was a bit drunk and trying to flirt with Lisa]. Candice asks me where Jon is, and so I ask around until I find out they've left. At the same time Sherry, a friend of Elizabeth's, went looking for her. So when I find out, I tell Sherry. This only seems to agitate her. She expresses concern about what type of person Jon is and brandishes her spiked bracelet, saying something like, "That's why I brought these to the party." Well, I'm scared. So I reassure her about Jon's character, or try to.

After it all wound down, Jon and Elizabeth were off somewhere, as were Becky [the host of the party] and her boyfriend. Left were myself, Sherry, and a guy I can only remember as Shroom Boy. I'm not sure if I ever got his name, but later, when I was collapsed on the couch facing the screen door outside, he enters with a flashlight and bemoans his lack of luck at finding shrooms out in the wilderness. Interesting individual. Vessna must've been around, as she appeared in the morning, but after Shroom Boy went hunting/gathering, it was just Sherry and me. So we ended up talking for about... six hours. Time's unclear because my cellphone didn't have service out there. And apparently without service my phone doesn't function even as a timepiece. So I don't know when the party broke down, but I know it was just after 0800 when the conversation died and we passed out on the couches.

Two hours later Jon and Elizabeth appear. Everyone sits around for a while talking. Jon says some things that make me worry about Sherry whipping out the spike bracelet. To my pleasant surprise the conversation is without incident and we head home around 1130.

That was last night. And this morning. Good times.

So what've I been up to the last... month and a half?

Well, the classes went smoothly. I'm fairly sure I aced both. The MQP... well, it's turning out to be... not so great. The data collection is done and now the advisor wants us to work on the proposal. Near the end of the term, I finally snapped at Alison regarding how annoying she is. Haven't really talked to her since then.

Clearly I'm back in Jersey. Have been since the end of the term. Will be until ... 12 August or so. First week's passed. Gone to two parties and one show. Upcoming events: More blood tests, nerve tests. Exciting times ahead. I don't really go online because the dialup connection that dies every few minutes is kind of frustrating to use. And it's dying quite a bit now, so I don't know when this'll get posted.

Well, that's a long update about last night and a short update about the last month or so. Until the next.

Well, that was a disturbing dream. To get the point, my father died in my arms. It seems it was a natural death, but in the dream he wasn't any older than he is now. We were sitting there, then he winced in pain. I was kind of confused. Then he grabbed his chest and collapsed. The last thing he said was, "Take care of yourself, son." I let out this scream unlike any I'd ever before. Then I kept shouting, "You just don't do that!" with scattered cursing. Then I woke up.

The buildup of the dream seems insignificant by comparison. It wasn't a standard dream, not that I have any sort of recurring dream. But throughout the entire dream I'd just visit with my father for a couple of minutes and then go. The last time in the dream I talked to him before he died he was telling me about how much he loved S.W.A.T. And he was excited because, for some reason, Samuel L. Jackson visited him.

I'll call my father later.

And update my journal.

This was just such a shock I had to share it now.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been avoiding contact with LnL. Why? Because I feel pretty much that the people there don't hold respect me in the least, and that dealing with them is more hassle than it's worth. But today I wondered if my actions have been childish. They certainly seem so. And if I was letting my feelings about these people stop from doing things I enjoy out of stubbornness, then yes, I've been immature. Not that this is by any means a new thing for me. So I began thinking about whether I actually enjoy doing LnL or if I just use it to enable me to drink more or to see Lindsay...

Her name still gives me pause.

While I'm leaning toward the latter, especially given the past few minutes, I'm still not certain. So I think I'll go to the meeting tomorrow. See how that goes.

What else has been up with me? Well, after that disturbing dream Friday, I was going to call my father. But then I remembered he wasn't going into work that day. And since he was at home, he'd probably be out in his garden and not hear the phone were I to call. So I didn't. And the reason he didn't go into work was because that was the first day of his and my mother's week-long vacation. This is a relatively recent tradition for them, the Labor Day vacation. Basically since I've been at college. They go to places in New England so that they can visit me on the way there and back.

This year, their destination was Boston. And since it was relatively close, they insisted [or rather, my mother did her suggestion-and-guilt-trip combo move] that I spend the long weekend with them. So naturally, I did. It was pretty nice, actually. Spent some time eating in ridiculously expensive Boston restaurants with my parents, spotted cute girls with my father, watched him hit on some of them... Got served a Rolling Rock without an ID check. Thanks be to Dilyana, the Bulgarian waitress at Legal. My parents are staying on the top floor of the old Boston Custom House, which is now part of the Marriott franchise. The height made me dizzy. And whenever we chanced to ride with other guests in the elevator, they seemed impressed. I was pretty impressed with my parents landing that as well, though the tower is pretty narrow so the place wasn't very large. Still, everywhere we went in Boston we could see our room. Even when we ventured out to the edge of Boston Harbor to see the lighthouse.

So yeah, all in all it was an alright weekend with my parents. There were incidents with my father being crabby and my mother unconsciously [or perhaps conciously, I wouldn't know] raising her voice and making scenes in public. Yes, other than that, the weekend was good.

On the last day I spent with them, Monday, we visited the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. Apparently they've transplanted an entire mansion from Northern China to the courtyard in the center of the museum. For some reason, the mere concept angered me. But both my parents seemed to want to go, so we went. It was a beautiful house. But still the whole thing bothered me. That they just took an entire house and moved it to New England... Sigh.

So yeah, my father just eats up anything related to Chinese culture. I ended up wandering the museum giftshop kind of hoping we'd leave soon. Eventually my father found me and said we should check out the other miscellaneous pieces of Chinese art the museum had. I was kind of tired and didn't feel like walking around anymore. [There weren't any places to sit... that weren't in the presence of screaming children or loud obnoxious museum snobs.] So I told him to go check them out and I'd wait in the shop. But he didn't. Apparently he wanted some bonding. But if we went to go see this art he'd just end up asking me with each piece, "Look at this; aren't you proud of your Chinese heritage?" And my quota was filled while we were still in the house. So yeah, I feel bad that he didn't see all that he wanted. Especially considering all the crap I've dragged him to through the years...

Well, now I just feel bad.

So last night was fun. Played some Unreal Tournament 2003 with Emily and her s.o., D [short for David, not to be confused with Deanna]. I think I like it better than Unreal Tournament Classic. I was never a big fan of Domination or Assault. The Double Domination mode in UT2003 is more team-oriented, which I like. And Bombing Run is awesome. Though, really, since they don't bother calling it a bomb, they should just call it Football or something. Plus, UT2003's just prettier. So anyway, fun.

Then Emily asked if I wanted to go play frisbee on the quad with some people. People included Darren and Josh. Josh, who's apparently called Nagilum. From the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Where Silence Has Lease". Sadly, he didn't know the details of his nickname's origin. All he knew was that it was from a ST:TNG episode. Not even which one it was. So I educated him at the risk of self-incrimination. Including the whole Richard Mulligan thing. Man, am I a geek.

Speaking of which. According to this test, I'm 54.04339% geek, giving me the rank of Super Geek. So sad.

Right, so we're going to playing frisbee. Before we leave the apartment, Emily pulls a beer from the fridge. [Why, I have no idea.] Not to be outdone, I pour myself a shot of SoCo and a double-shot of Pucker. And we go.

While playing, Kyle Merchant [one of my former IQP partners] walks by, so he joins the game. Long story short, the frisbee is fun. Though tiring. People gradually drop until it's just me and Kyle throwing it while the others watch from a bench. After a couple of long passes, we quit.

Someone's hungry, so Emily, D, Darren and I end up going to Denny's. Yes, I know I swore I'd never go to one again. Back when I was ten I went to one somewhere in the South. We were the only non-white people there. And it definitely affected the service, among other things. Ask my parents about it and they won't know what I'm talking about, but my sister and I remember. My grandmother probably would, too. If she were alive. Even now, thinking of the hours we were there [as that's how long it took for us to get served] fills me with an indescribable amount of rage. You know, I don't think I was full of hate before that night.

So anyway... Apparently there are no diners anywhere [which is one of the things I miss about Jersey]. And I was getting kind of hungry. So we went. Though it isn't saying much, this time went way smoother. Still would've rather gone to a diner. Ah, well.

It was a good night.

I want to go to grad school. My father keeps telling me to. And it beats getting a job. The problem is, what should I go to grad school for? The where question's covered. Kind of. I really want to go to UDub, but my parents don't want me that far from home. And they implied that, were I to go there, they wouldn't pay for it. Which would definitely be the shaft. But Jon might go there. And that would be awesome. And I'd get to see Mariner home games. Some serious thinking is required.

Man, reading Levenger gets me hot.

Sweetness. Quicksilver is out. It joins Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [hardcover] and Sports Night - The Complete Series Boxed Set on my Amazon.com wish list. One day they shall be mine. Quicksilver sooner, 'cause I'll probably order that tomorrow. And throw in the Sports Night collection to kick it into the land of free shipping. I wonder why I bother putting it on the wish list. Hm. I guess it keeps everything in one easily accessible place. Yeah, that's it.

So yeah, John Ritter died. Totally unexpectedly. Just dropped dead. Ripped from the world in his prime, at 54. But that wasn't the day's most upsetting news.

Johnny Cash, the Man in Black, passed away. Damn you, diabetes! Someone'd better have a Cash tribute weekend. Fuckin' A.

Thirteen hundred and ninety-six miles. Eight states. This weekend was great.

It started Friday afternoon, when Jon came up from Rhode Island. We then drove down to Lehigh University. I say "we drove" despite the fact that Jon drove the entire way. I still don't trust myself to drive. As for in-car provisions, I brought two pounds of Tabasco Cheez-Its. These kind of make you thirsty. What did we have to drink? A bottle of SoCo, a bottle of Pucker, and a thirty-rack of Rolling Rock. Heh. That aspect lacked a bit of planning.

So we left Worcester at four-thirty and arrived at Lehigh at ten. Just in time to catch Holz before he and his band, That Fleeting World, went on stage. They played a nice two-hour set. Good stuff, even the covers. Like "How Do You Talk To An Angel" by the Heights, which no one seemed to remember until the chorus. And inserting Tina Turner's "I Don't Wanna Fight" into "Bleed", one of their originals? Genius. So, even though Holz was sick, he still rocked.

Then there was a nice party. And Jon and I learned how they play beirut down in Bethlehem. Three-person teams, fifteen cups with three beers. Penalty shots for airballs. And they don't remove cups as they're sunk. Jon, Holz and I played a game, and didn't do so poorly. Only lost by two cups. If I didn't hit so much air, we could've won. Oh, well.

Crashed at Holz's place. Jon crashed; I stayed up and watched some movies. Van Wilder and Jackie Brown. Actually, I only really saw the former, as I fell asleep after half an hour of Jackie Brown, then woke up near the end. Van Wilder was pretty much your standard National Lampoon fare. Which I don't really care for. And from what I saw of Jackie Brown, which admittedly wasn't much, I don't think it's as good as Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs. The dialogue smacked of wit in those. Here, it just didn't seem to.

So, nine-thirty Saturday morning, back on the road. Now, down to Roanoke. We're there by four.

Derailment. Girls with Southern accents [e.g., Lacy's roommate] drive me crazy. In the good way.


So we eat and begin drinking. Lacy introduces Jon and me to her friends, who all seem to be ridiculously cute girls. Then most of us go to the concert. The opening act, some band called Complete Circle, isn't so rockin'. So we go back to Lacy's room and drink some more. Nice and buzzed, we go back in time to hear Complete Circle cover the Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)", and not well. Then we stand around for a while and wait for Better Than Ezra.

Over the course of Better Than Ezra's set, I lose most of them, 'cause they're moshing and somehow migrating further back, and I'm just standing there. So, how was the set? Not so good. They didn't do "Cry In The Sun". They broke up "This Time Of Year" for some audience-bonding, pulling some kid from Roanoke up on stage to play. He played decently, but the school pride dampened the depressing content. Somehow "Desperately Wanting" also suffered this removal of melancholy. Rather disappointing.

Afterwards we just kind of hung out in Lacy's room and drank until it was time to pass out.

Left at nine or so in the morning. Chased a cute girl driving a black VW with Skidmore and Exeter stickers on her car most of the way down Route 78. Retreated back to childhood bus rides and made seven trucks honk. Fun times.

After enduring much traffic in Jersey, we stopped to have dinner with my parents. Stared at the tall blonde seater girl at the restaurant. Told my father he should hit on her, but he didn't. A shame. Hit the road again at seven or so.

On the way back up to Worcester, Jon did battle with many trucks on Route 84. And there was this recurring character of a car; it had this ugly blue interior lighting. Truly tacky.

Made it back to Worcester safe and sound, to find messages asking "Are you there" and "What's up". Now, this would be understandable had I left my usual, vague sort of away message. But this time I said where I was, when I'd be back, and how to reach me. And yet... This. That's just sad.

So that was my weekend. It was much fun.

Yeah, I'm sorry about the last entry. Near the end I just didn't feel like writing anymore. I was busy sinking into my usual depression. It's never difficult, but I helped it along with a few beers and some Lost And Gone Forever.

So far the weekends have been keeping me stable. I haven't spent a single one in Worcester since I came back in the middle of August. It's nice, having things to do. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll be around next weekend. And the next... Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. Can't you tell?

Sigh.

Actually, I still don't feel like writing, but this was weird.

So, once again WPI shows itself to be a small world. I knew Lindsay lived above Bonardi's, on the corner of Sever and Highland. I also knew my MQP partner, Alison, lived there. In fact, I'd been at Alison's for a party before.

So today after our MQP meeting Alison asks me: "Is the Lindsay you write about in your journal's last name Wright?" I cautiously respond in the affirmative, not exactly sure why Alison would be asking. Even though I knew she'd read my log last night, I didn't really see where this might be going. Apparently they're flatmates.

They lived on the same floor freshman year, but I didn't think they talked to each other. Actually, they still don't really talk to each other, according to Alison.

Then Alison told me about how they came to be flatmates, and how quiet she is, and how often her boyfriend is over. From the description Alison gives, she's still dating Zip. Now, I did ask how they ended up living together, but all other information Alison provided without me prompting.

Yeah, there's no real point to this. It's just kind of unsettling.

So it's Thursday. And I had a radio exec meeting. And some math major thing. And the grad class my MQP advisor teaches and suggested I audit. But I got out of my German midterm [which violated me in unbelieveable ways], and immediately got home and started to watch Sports Night. That's right. I got the collection. And I've got my mother's old copy of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. And my copy of Quicksilver's in the mail. That completes the Amazon wish list I had a couple weeks ago.

So anyway, I jet home and start watching Sports Night. And completely forget what else I have to do. Totally missed the radio meeting and the math thing, and the grad class started about fifteen minutes ago. Yes, I know it goes for three hours, but I don't want to walk in in the middle of class.

Let's see... my list of things I was going to write entries about.

Apparently I have a female double at WPI. People report seeing this girl and thinking it's me, but approaching and coming to their senses. According to one person she even dresses like me. Guess that means there's some short, black-haired girl here who has no sense of style. Naturally, my first question was, "Now, are you sure it wasn't just me you were seeing?" Though I don't really spend time on campus when I don't have to, so that didn't hold much water. People also tell me it would amusing if I were to date this girl. I think, however, it'd be a little too freaky.

Item one. "Female double." Check.

So both my roommates are attached. And honestly, I'm none too thrilled with their s.o.'s. Angela, Paul's girlfriend, is perky and bubbly and she does her laundry at our place, which annoys me. Interestingly, I had a crush on Angela freshman year. Brent admits that he did as well. And then we both agreed that she would have annoyed us to no end. Then again, I did date Kate, who was also kind of annoying. But I stuck with that, for some reason. Probably desperation.

And Emily's dating D [short for David; I think I said that earlier]. He's kind of loud, kind of obnoxious. That pretty much sums that up.

And yet, with these two aggravating people, they manage to be sickeningly cute. Oh yes, I loathe couples.

Sometime last week—Tuesday night, I believe—I had a dream where I was in the apartment. Emily and D were there, as were Paul and Angela. For unknown reasons, two or three other couples were there, too. I, of course, was alone. Things go on for a while, everyone being cute and couple-y. So I lock myself in my room. And then I begin to cry uncontrollably. When I open my door, still crying, everyone was gone. But who was there? Arnold Schwarzenegger. He gives me some manly advice to make me feel better, none of which I remembered once I was conscious. Then the dream picks itself apart into the abstract.

Item two. "Schwarzenegger dream and couple loathing." Check.


Went over to Alison's to work on the MQP last Saturday. We broke for a while, and I started playing Super Mario Sunshine. Alison told me it was a pretty crappy game, and so I had to try it. Surprisingly addictive. Damn addictive. I ended up playing it for about seven hours in that one stretch. The next day I asked her if I could borrow her GameCube so I could play it at the apartment. She let me, and so I played it even more. I reached an impasse in the game a couple days ago, beyond which I simply could not progress. That would be the definition of impasse, yes. And Alison wanted her Cube back. So I gave it back. Definitely feeling the shine withdrawal. But it'll be fine. I've replaced shines with some less addictive: cocaine.

Item three. "Shine addiction." Check.

Item four is "Dream girls", a note I clearly didn't put enough thought into. I have no idea what I meant. Well, I have a vague idea; that being that I dreamt about some girls. But beyond that, nothing.

"Recent media." Projected Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle on Sunday. Funny, but still meh. The first one was stronger. They brought back Crispin Glover, which was unassailably cool. And they tried to give some more background for his character. But I saw it twice, back-to-back, and yet, I still don't know what the hell they were saying. Justin Theroux gets a big thumbs-down from me. As does Bernie Mac. Uncool and unfunny, respectively. But Demi Moore still looks good. She is only forty-one, after all. From the hype about the movie, I'd have thought she was over fifty or something. [shrug] So yeah, decent movie.

Been downloading watching, on totally legal videotape, episodes of Smallville. I've just been watching them in order they come in, and I haven't seen them all, so it's kind of weird and disjointed in terms of long-term plot. But there's one constant. Allison Mack [Chloe] is simply too cute for words. Every time I see her I just want to cry. And there's the over-the-top episodes, like "Fever". She pours her heart out to an unconscious Clark. The tears flowed freely. I don't know why, but for some reason when I first watched the show I liked Lana. What the fuck was I on? She's a bit airheaded. And too whiny. Totally undeserving of the raw lust that every guy in Smallville seems to have for her.

And then there's Sports Night. I just bought the collection last night. Within the span of fifteen minutes, I think I told Emily more than five times that "Sports Night is an awesome show." Those exact words. "Hey, Emily, did you know that Sports Night is an awesome show? Did I tell you that Sports Night is an awesome show? Hey, Emily. Sports Night is an awesome show." First and foremost, there's the dialogue. Literally, it crackles with wit. Or maybe those are my speakers. Either way, it's witty. And the well-written characters, my favorite being Natalie, played by Sabrina Lloyd. [You know, the girl from Sliders who wasn't Kari Wuhrer, but was in actuality far superior to Kari Wuhrer.] Yes, Sports Night is truly an awesome show. Back in Jersey, the only other person who watched it was my mother. No one I know back home remembers it. And before you argue this: No, I've brought it up. You didn't remember it. Anyway, here at WPI, people remember it. It is strange, but cool. Wish they hadn't pulled it after only two seasons.

Item five. Check.

"Dream of Ari." There isn't much to this one. It was the night before last. I remember running through fields of tall grass with a few people, one of whom was Ari. This is the old, freshman-year-of-high-school Ari, with the long hair. She grabs my arm and stops me. She then proceeds to write and/or draw something on my arm. She tells me, "Show that off." And in that instant, she and everyone else are gone. Though, I sense that the others vanished the second Ari stopped me. Then I wander. Out of the fields, into the aisles of a warehouse-like bulk store. Like Costco. I woke up without further development.

Last item. Check.

Talking to Alison today...


I wrote, "Now, I did ask how they ended up living together, but all other information Alison provided without me prompting." I'll clarify why I wrote this. I didn't mean to imply that Alison was being vicious. Rather, I wrote it to point out that I was not being pathetic and prying. I did wonder how they came to be roommates, but I didn't ask anything more. Not being pathetic.

That's all I've got right now. In the time it took me to write this entry [approximately two hours], five people checked my site. Apologies. Once again I'm going to say that writing long entries sucks because that's when you've got things to say, and that's when people are least likely to read it. No, they just skip around and read the mindless short entries that take five minutes to write and a proportional amount of actual thought. Sigh. In closing, and to totally rip Aaron Sorkin off, if you've had half as much fun reading this entry as I've had writing it, well, then I've had twice as much fun writing this entry as you've had reading it.

There's got to be a reason I just stayed awake until three in the morning playing Freecell to the soundtrack of my own breathing. But I can't, for the life of me, think of it.

Pretty much had a sleepless night last night, too. Broke it up in the middle of the day by having a nap with my German midterm.

I suppose I might as well start my German homework now.

So I just got shot down by my advisor, Prof. William Martin. No recommendation for the NSA. Actually, he said he'd think more about it, but in the meantime not to count on him for a glowing recommendation. He asked whether I really wanted to do this, and whether I thought I could pull it off. I said it wouldn't hurt to try. His response: "No. It'd only hurt me." See, he's trying to get a grant from the NSA and he doesn't want to recommend to them some lackluster student of his.


So I don't have two recommendations, the minimum requirement for the NSA summer program. I'll talk about the one recommendation I do have later. For now I've got a meeting.

Long time, no write. Let me consult the notes. Damn, most of this is vague. Maybe I was drunk when I wrote some of these. There's "The girl I want will never want me." Clearly I had something specific in mind when I wrote this. Alas, it's lost to the winds.


I'm going to try to be less... like I am. Less depressing, less of an ass. See where it gets me. 'Cause I've known that a large stumbling block on my road to happiness was me. But I'm going to try and stop wallowing and doing things. What prompted this change? William Martin's comments in the previous entry. Yeah, I've got this lofty image of who I want to be. Yes, it's nothing like the person I am. And there's only one way to fix it.

More on me and William Martin in a bit.

First, "the two-hour conversation with my father". I'm thinking this is due to me listening to "Cats In The Cradle" one too many times. One Friday night I grabbed the bottle of Southern Comfort, poured myself a drink and called my father. And we had a nice father-son chat. Really, it was nice. Part of that whole not-being-an-ass thing is not being a dick to my parents. So he and I talked. Rather disturbingly, we spoke of politics a great deal. Found some common Republican ground. I do tend to be more conservative in my views than my friends, but I'm still not quite at my father's level. Still, I'd rather be considered a liberal-leaning conservative than the alternative. He also spoke excitedly of China's space launch. [Yeah, that's how long ago this talk was.] That was nice, hearing about things he's interested in. Other than coin- or stamp-collecting. Never really understood that. Oh, and gardening. But since I'm pollen-sensitive [blame that on my mother] he's never really pushed that on me.

So yeah, he and I had a nice talk.

That brings me to the last of the notes, which I stopped writing just before break. So... about break.

First, a bit of humor. So I'm checking my email and I get this piece of spam. I'm sure others have, too.


I actually laughed out loud upon seeing that one.

Turned out Lacy and I didn't have the same fall break this year, which we didn't really find out until she was already on break and I was in the midst of finals. That sucked. We did hang out the night I got back in Jersey, which was the night before she left to go back to Virginia. Hit a liquor store and a diner. Just hung out. I deemed it good.

I was supposed to see Dan over break. This was planned. The fact we had the same break was confirmed. I have not seen him since... Well, shit. I can't even remember. Probably the summer after freshman year of college. You can tell from the tone that I, in fact, did not see him. I'm not even sure how this failed.

So, what did I do with the rest of my break? Watched a bunch of movies, mostly with my mother. The ones I saw for the first time were: Sweet Home Alabama, Kill Bill: Volume 1, Underworld, Great Expectations, My Life Without Me, Mystic River, Runaway Jury. Briefly...

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Sweet Home Alabama was cute. The director's commentary was equally entertaining. Like so many other viewers [according to the director], at the end I didn't feel right about the guy who didn't get the girl. He just didn't do anything wrong. Why doesn't he get the girl? That bothered me. Otherwise, it was an alright movie.

About Kill Bill: Volume 1... Technically, I wasn't supposed to see this movie yet. Liam had said before break that he didn't have anyone to go see it with. Then I said I didn't think my mother would want to go see it, so I'd go with him. And that was the deal. But it turns out my mother did want to see it. And movies are what we do together. So we went. I thought the violence was over the top. Not excessive, but absurd. I admit that blood pressure exists. But if Tarantino's right, if you pricked your finger with a needle you'd die in seconds from exsanguination. Additionally, I didn't like the cartoon portions of the movie illustrating the backstory of Lucy Liu's character. [Though, that was my mother's favorite part.] So yeah. I didn't like it. And if I didn't promise Liam I'd go I wouldn't pay nine dollars to see it again. But I'll go tomorrow night and pretend it's the first time I'm seeing it.

Underworld was some good action with a poorly-executed love story. I see why the Kate Beckinsale-Scott Speedman was integral to the story. But like a switch she goes from not caring about him in one scene... to making out with him in the same scene. That's right. What the fuck. If they'd shown some sort of development of her feelings for him, then this movie would be even better. Maybe there was such a sequence, but it was for some reason lost to the cutting room floor. Once the DVD comes out, the commentary may tell. Until then, I just can't not like a movie that keeps Kate Beckinsale in tight black leather in every scene. On a side note, the projectionist for this movie was incompetent or unobservant, and the movie was out of focus the entire time. That sucked.

Great Expectations. Never read the book, but found the movie in my sister's collection. [She's a huge fan of Ethan Hawke.] Once again, I found Anne Bancroft terrifying [this and The Graduate being the only movies I've seen with her in a major role]. But that's part of the plot, and so... I suppose I'm supposed to be scared of her. Chris Cooper and De Niro were good in their roles. On the other hand, Ethan Hawke's character's artwork was crap. Call me simple, but I prefer my art realistic. Aside from the shitty art, it was a good movie. I'm not running out to read the book, though.

My Life Without Me was a great movie. I actually heard about it from side banners on IMDb. So when my sister told me it was playing at a small local theater, we went. The movie's about a woman who's diagnosed with cancer and told she's only got a couple more months to live. And yet, it's a cute movie. Sure, you know how it ends, and that's not exactly an upnote. But it wasn't depressing. My crush on Sarah Polley grows. I wish The Event wasn't just a limited release.

Unlike My Life Without Me, Mystic River was a depressing movie. But that was why I liked it. When a movie starts out with child molestation, you don't think it can get darker. And yet it does. On the down side, I usually like Laura Linney, but her character in this movie was just... not likable. Don't really think she was meant to be likable, though. So it's okay.

Runaway Jury is another great movie made out of another shitty Grisham novel. I'm not one to like legal thrillers, and in fact I almost fell asleep before the movie started. But once it got rolling, gold. I'm biased, of course. I love John Cusack and I love Rachel Weisz. But I think it still would've been a good movie without them. There's the whole cynical aspect of it, that the actual cases presented by the lawyers are essentially for show. Great movie.

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That brings us up to today. The first day of B-term. At ten o'clock I had the first session of my last German class. It's the first time I'll have Dollenmayer as my professor. I'd have taken Prof. Even's class, but it didn't fit in my schedule. I always thought the guy hated me. You know, for being a huge failure. Well, he didn't seem patently hostile. And I don't think I seemed patently unprepared [as unprepared as one can be on the first day]. So maybe it won't be so bad.

Then there was Numerical Methods For Linear and Nonlinear Systems with Luis Roman. He spent the first forty minutes rushing through an explanation of Horner's Method for evaluating polynomials, and the last ten minutes explaining it after someone [not me] bravely spoke up about his tempo. I sense this class will be a large source of stress.

And last was Rings and Fields with good ol' Professor Martin. This'll be the first real math class I've taken with him. And now that he's got tenure, he's free to run the class however he wants, which he kindly pointed out to us. There will be presentations. And he's grading on a "threshold system". In order to get an A, you need above 85% on assignments, above 80% on tests, above 90% on participation, and above 75% on attendance. Anything less in any category, and you'll get at best a B. Well, shit.

After class, Martin says he needs to speak to me. This is rather intimidating, as I'd noticed he visited my site this morning. I expected a stern talking-to about privacy issues or something. Instead, he struck a deal with me. If I get an A in Rings and Fields, he'll write me a recommendation for the NSA program. I pointed out that the application deadline was two weeks ago; he pointed out the gross inefficiency of government committees. Touché. So there go the thoughts of dropping the class. Also, I'm going with him to Boston tomorrow to see a talk regarding rings and graph theory. I actually find this interesting. Here's to hoping I can understand it.

Oh, and about the recommendation for the NSA? I had the one from Christopher, who thinks I'm a star student. I certainly won't shake him of this, as talking to him is kind of reassuring. Especially after I had that other talk with Martin. And for the second recommendation I went to Stanley Selkow, who I had for Discrete Math. That class was so easy, there was no way I couldn't get an A. And Selkow seemed like an easygoing guy, enough to take on writing a recommendation due in two days. Which he did. Submitted my application just in time. Martin's recommendation'll just be some sort of icing on the applcation-cake metaphor.


Take it and like it, second law of thermodynamics.

Just got back from Boston. Technically, not true. As soon as I got back I called my parents and spoke to them for a while. [My mother'd called me during the talk, so I had to get back to her or else they'd worry that I was dead in a ditch somewhere.] Regarding that, my father says he's liking the changes he's seeing in me. When I asked which he meant, he said the newfound sense of purpose. Yes. I too am liking this.

The math talk went well. Sort of. I grasped at best a third of it. And the speaker, Jan Saxl, was a bit absentminded at times [like using small g to represent both graphs and elements of a group G]. Handwaved a bit much. But that's just because he was covering much in a short time and didn't want to get bogged down proving things for undergrads who shouldn't be there in the first place. He didn't even finish all that he wanted to, as fast as he went. But it was very interesting. Distance relative graphs. Heavy dose of group theory. It was cool.

The talk was at MIT. Walking around there, I was seething with envy. The pre-talk gathering over coffee and stuff was held in one [of what I'm sure is many] math lounges. The students in there were working on what I guessed was normal homework. I could not grasp how to do any of it. Damn.


Lots of envy.

Speaking of which, Martin and I got along well. Driving into and out of Boston provided a lot of time to talk. Avoiding the awkward silence. We seemed to talk a lot about about substance abuse. It was ... well, not entertaining. But not awkward and weird or anything. Better than silence.

So it turns out whatever browser Martin uses on his computer in his office [old Netscape, it seems] doesn't deal with IFRAMEs well. So actually, he didn't read anything on my site. He loaded the page, but the body wasn't visible. Found this out yesterday, to great relief. But in the car today, he asked me, "So, if I were to actually load your site, what sort of things would I see?" I held back the urge to laugh, and told him there was a journal I don't update often and some brief personal information. A lie, but only by omission.

I've got some German stuff to read. So I don't give Dollenmayer cause to hate me.

Man, I'm mad at Alison [the MQP partner]. So we were supposed to meet with Wilbur [the advisor] yesterday morning at nine. This was planned before break, comparing everyone's schedule. But Alison shifted some classes around and seemed to unanimously decide the meeting would be eight. I'm not doing that. The advisor then said he was free at eleven Thursday, but I've got a class then. Told them as much.

Sometime while I was at class on Thursday, the two of them decided the meeting would be at three today, just after Alison and I have Rings And Fields. Yesterday in Rings And Fields Alison tells me, "Three pm tomorrow. Don't forget." I come home that day to find a couple IMs from her with the same message.

So today rolls around. Alison's not in Rings And Fields. Okay. I don't care if she skips or not.

I go to the meeting after class. Half an hour in, she's still not there. He asks me if she said she couldn't make it or something. I say I haven't talked to her since yesterday, which is true. He checks his email and finds one from her. Not cancelling or explaining anything, but with a bunch of files attached.

These files are all the work I did before break. The night before I left, I didn't sleep. Why? Because Alison said she'd be meeting with Wilbur over break and needed my stuff before then. Eight hours of chi-squared tests. I send them to her that morning. Why was I doing them then? Because she said she'd need them to write up her part during break.

Her attachments are the tables and tests with about a paragraph each. I don't really expect much writing, actually. But because it wasn't much, I did expect it to be sent to him sooner. When Wilbur says something about it arriving just now, I tell him I did the tables before break. I'd also sent Alison, attached to the tables, some questions I wanted her to pass to Wilbur.

Well, now I see why I never got an email from Wilbur answering those questions.

Leaving the meeting at four-thirty, I walk out of Stratton to see Alison heading home down West Street. I yell to her, "Hey, forget anything today?" To which she responds, "Nope," with what I'm assuming is a sly smile. I'm very pissed off. If she was just going to skip, I'd have appreciated knowing, 'cause then I'd have tried to schedule a time which was good for me. Fuckin' A.

Well, I've got to go bake some damned cookies.

Ain't nowhere safe; I just can't find a comfortable place to be. Being in the apartment's frustrating, what with the roommates' omnipresent significant others. And I don't really have anywhere else to go. Right now I'm more eager than ever to graduate and blow this town.

There were things going on, in that supposed realm outside of academics referred to as "having a social life", but they've dead-ended. So there's no real point to reporting on them.

I started using my Rio again. On the upside, it maintains a nice barrier between me and the outside world. On the downside, tonight I ran headlong into a streetlight and almost got run over on Institute.

If I want to go to grad school next fall, applications are due soon. And I have to take the GRE sometime. I already missed the deadline for the math-specific GRE test in December. Also, things have happened lately which have undermined my confidence in graduating on time. Namely, my plans for an IQP during C- and D-term fell through. I've got a few weeks to find another one. And grad school applications are pretty expensive. If I get in, I can't just defer them to the next year. So if I apply now, and don't graduate, there goes a few hundred dollars.

I thought Thanksgiving break was sooner than it was. I realized this morning while lying in bed that it was more than two weeks away. I was very much looking forward to it. Not so much to see my family, but just to get the hell out of here for a while.

... Five-minute break...


I'm calling it an early night.

This week hasn't exactly been my finest hour. It's midterm time here at WPI. The first midterm I heard about was in Rings and Fields, which was Tuesday. Then I realized I should probably check when my other tests were. Wednesday and Thursday. The one today [Numerical Methods] went alright. German's looking dicey. I had a solid start at the beginning of the term, but I failed the last quiz.

I've also had plenty of work to do, but instead of doing said work I've procrastinated in a major way. Mostly due to the new distraction that's moved into the apartment. Goes by the name of Disgaea. Oh, the grid-based battling. Just looking at the manual makes me hot.

This term Thursday night's been my big homework night, as I have homework due in each class and quizzes in two of them on Friday. But I'm going to the Saves The Day show with Jon Thursday night [tonight], so I don't think much'll get done then. Also, I'm still trying to puzzle together the simple model for the MQP which should be wrapping up this term. Should be. It's threatening to stretch another term. Yee-haw.

I don't think I'll be sleeping tomorrow night. So I think I'll take a nap for a couple hours.

Further developments.

I didn't get into the NSA program. When I went to go tell Martin this, he asked if it was really a surprise. Then he blasted my academic career. And as it turns out, he eventually got around to reading my site sometime recently. He claims to have never said what I reported. Though he did. I admit since I typed it from memory, it may not be exact. But he definitely said he saw me sitting there "making a website", "staring at the wall", or "finding a radio show to do". And the last line about the difference between where I want to be and who I am he definitely said as well. And yes, he used the phrases "image of who you want to be" and "reality of who you are". And to close, he said something about it being libel and how he could sue if he so chose. Then, "You should find another advisor. Goodbye." I dismissed the idea of just giving him the finger as too immature so I just said "Later" and left.

Speaking of people with images of themselves that are disjoint from reality, Martin's not that great a person himself. For one, he seems to send discouraging emails to students, then denies it later. For example, Alison got some from him. Also, Martin complained about her to her advisor. When Alison told her advisor about the emails, the advisor went to Martin, who denied sending them. Wonder how that'll turn out.

Either way, I don't have an advisor at the moment.

Went to the Saves The Day concert last night. It was good, though I'd hoped they'd play "Take Our Cars Now" or "Driving In The Dark". But it was still all right. Openers were Taking Back Sunday [towards whom I'm now apathetic] and Moneen [of whose act Jon and I caught the tail end].

And WPI's got a decent Winter Carnival lined up. The big concert is going to be Eve 6 and Brand New on 07 December, and Soccomm Pub is getting Catch 22 the preceding Friday. That should be fun.

Time to head over to Daniels to fill out a change of advisor form. Maybe I'll change to Christopher, who actually seems to like me.

Another sleepless night.

When I called my mother to ask about the NSA letter, she didn't want to tell me about it at first, because she and my father were afraid I'd become depressed and discouraged. Of course, by saying this she pretty much spelled it out for me.

They were right. [They should be, what which them being my parents and all.] I really don't feel like doing anything anymore, except for drinking myself into oblivion. And even that doesn't work, since I can't sleep.

I'm hoping break will be a nice, refreshing change of pace. Though, since I've been hoping this for a while now, it's bound to disappoint.

Thanksgiving break didn't live up to the lofty expectations I'd set for it, but it was still good. Hung out with Jon, Lacy, and others nightly. Watched some of my sister's and parents' DVDs. Read first-hand the letter from the NSA. Yeah.

Saturday night was a kind of downer, though. Jon and Lacy had both left that morning. After going to dinner with my parents, I went over to Mark's for a while. People were there, most of whom I didn't really know, nor did I care to get to know them. And I sense the feeling was mutual. But they insulted me quite a bit anyway. It was probably not serious [for the most part], but I just wasn't in the mood. Eventually I had enough and bade my leave. Sat in the car and tried to call other people whose departure times I wasn't sure of. They were either already gone or unreachable. I ended up driving up Eagle Rock Reservation and sitting there for a while, drinking the booze I'd brought in anticipation of actually having people to drink with. Went home.

Probably wasn't a good way to end the break.

Another stress-filled Thursday night. I dare not sleep, lest I find myself lying in bed at four in the afternoon. Matlab work's done. Rings and Fields homework needs to be rewritten, and about three hours ago I realized I had a German essay due at ten. Fun.

Looking forward to seeing Catch 22 tonight, though. And Eve 6 and Brand New on Sunday. I'm very glad SocComm's choice in bands isn't sucking as hard as it has in previous years.

Sometimes I get lost and I can't remember how I ended up where I am. I think about my report cards and how they used to be full of A's. People would fawn over me and ask if I'd go to medical school when I was sixteen or something. And yet, here I am. Twenty, barely graduating college. How did I get here?

I'm not going to grad school. At least not next fall. I'm not even applying. Called my parents last night to tell them this. My mother said that was fine and I should just concentrate on graduating. My father yelled at me to get my shit together and do whatever it takes to get to grad school in the fall. A little good cop, bad cop, there.

I've got two options for an IQP. One is a nice, easy IQP with Lemone where I'd make dynamic web pages. But it runs C-, D-, and E-term, so I'd graduate at the end of the summer. Or, I could go for the project running only through C- and D-term and graduate on time. This, however, is the brutal IQP of pain with Carrera, for which I'd have to analyze the safety level of campus buildings [although I wouldn't have to do it by myself]. I'm leaning toward the IQP of pain, so I can get the hell out of Dodge as soon as possible. And also so my parents can see me walk in May.

In other news, I've signed up to be Sound Designer and Sound Engineer for the Masque play in C-term [the show's Valentine's Day weekend] and I'm House Manager for the MWRep show the last weekend in January. Why? Because I'm an sucker. So, uh... anyone want to usher?

I had an A average heading into the Rings and Fields final today. I needed a thirty-three out of forty to secure it. The final seemed easy, but then again, so did the midterm. And I only got a thirty-one on that. Way above the failing class average, but that don't feed the bulldog. Additionally, at the last mandatory office hour Martin said he'd still write a recommendation if I asked him to. He knows I know the material. And I do need multiple math doctorates to recommend me... I don't know.

And as most people know, living on the WPI campus and all, the Eve 6/Brand New show a couple weeks back was cancelled indefinitely due to the snow. Which bit hard. They'd better not reschedule it to Quadfest and gyp the student body out of another good Quadfest show. For the social fee [that my parents pay], I want my two fuckin' concerts.

Got ridiculously drunk last night. Of course, that's what the last night of the term's all about. Started the night at Emily's birthday party, which I had to leave for a bit to meet the IQP group I'll be joining next term. Apparently freaked out one of D's friends [Becca], 'cause I knew two of her ex-roommates [Pi and Jess]. Ah, well.

After that [around 2015] I went over to Perreault for the LnL pre-Christmas Party movie. Every year the Treasurer gets to pick this movie in secret, telling only the Head Projectionist. Then they spring it on us just before the Christmas Party. Last year it was the old Batman movie. With Adam West. Hilariously bad. This year? Paul Messier picked Oliver. Christ. The terribleness. It's not even something you can heckle. And it's two and a half fucking hours long. So I left as soon as I arrived, with Josh and Justin, to go begin drinking.

Played some beirut. Lost horribly, of course. Got a good buzz going before going to the party. Walked over to the party. Drank a lot; I can't even say exactly what; Rob told me what was in the punches they mixed, but I don't remember. Except... one had blue curacao, and the other had Jack Daniels. Either way, they were good. TJ offered me a Guiness, but I left before taking him up on it. And Jordan was there. Hadn't drank with him in a while, and it was cool.

There was some talk of Lindsay, as she wasn't at the party. For a moment I felt something, but it was fleeting and, no doubt, liquor-induced. I must've said something, because someone said she wasn't worth obsessing over, and they're right. No, this wasn't a revelation. I am fine now. No sarcasm. A week ago, I had some nice friendly small talk with her at Once Upon A Time In Mexico. It was weird, but only because it'd been so long since we'd talked.

Anyway, I left the Christmas party pretty early, mostly because I didn't want to end up crashing there again this year. Also because Josh and Justin were leaving, and they live near me, and I didn't want to end up walking home by myself. Also, I didn't really want to hang around too long, because, well, I'm not all that close with the people in LnL. And back at the apartment Brent was visiting. So yeah, I checked out early.

On the walk home I slipped and fell hard on the ice. Scraped up my hands nicely. My left's got a substantial piece of skin missing and something that's either a blood blister or a large splinter buried completely under the skin. The right's just scraped in the palm. But it still hurts to type, which is why I'm so terse. After I fell I just lied there in the ice. Probably would've slept there, or at least lied there for the better part of an hour, if Justin hadn't come over and helped me up. Heh.

Got home, played some ineffectual drunken Starcraft, fell down from a standing position on purpose to amuse people, and watched half of The Exorcist. At 0400, just before I went to sleep, I was still feeling some effects. It was definitely a good night.

And it's a good thing I've got the fridge below my bed. I drank almost the entire two-litre bottle of Sprite I have in there. Saved me from what would most definitely have been a nasty hangover.

So, as was alluded to above, I have an IQP. The informal agreement is that it'll be two-thirds in C-term and one-third in D-term. This means in C-term I'm doing one-third MQP, two-thirds IQP, Advanced Calculus I, and Elements of Writing. Five-thirds. And the two plays. I'm suicidal.

So I'm back in Jersey.

My family's a bunch of packrats, save my father. So my room's always been full of crap. My sister's room, also filled with crap. Now, my sister, who's twenty-six years old, moved back home a few years ago. Since then, she's continued to fill the house with her crap. Because she lives at home, she leeches off our parents for food and occasional lodging. This leaves her free to spend her entire salary on clothes and other crap. The area by the washer and dryer in our basement is covered with piles of her clothing. Her shoes pile up in the hallway around the door to her room. Random books she's received from work and CDs she's bought are piled on the floor of the living room.

For a long time, her room's been too full to live in. Does she clean it? No. When I left for college, she co-opted my room. So now it, too, is filled with piles of her clothes. Previously [and still] it was filled with piles of my stuff. Do I mean that she cleaned my room and then began to fill it? No, no. She just put her shit on top of mine. Now there is no room to move. I have to jump from the door to my bed. I can't even open the door all the way because she's got a pile right behind it.

Well, no longer. I just started picking up her things and throwing them into the crack that is the maximum degree her room's door will open. I've at least cleared enough so that I can open the door and get to the bed. That's enough for tonight.

Yes, our parents tell her to clean her stuff up. But my sister doesn't respect them and just ignores them. Now, I'm familiar with this tactic when it comes to cleaning. My room was never clean. Still isn't. But my crap isn't as widespread as hers. God, this pisses me off. She seems to have theis feeling that our parents owe her something, and that they like me better. Well, they do like me better, because I don't treat them like shit. I mean, what the fuck. Actually, there are times when I'm mean to them, but even then I'm better than my sister.

One day, I hope I'll be able to buy my parents a house where they can live free of my sister's and my crap. Of course, my mother's books will fill the house, but that'd be better than Steve Madden shoes and clothes from American Eagle.

I'm going to go unpack as much of my stuff as I can.

My sister bought me the Memento limited edition DVD for Christmas. And I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth; Memento is a truly excellent movie, which I found even more enjoyable through multiple viewings. But the DVD is extremely frustrating. I spent tonight watching the movie with commentary, which was sort of a feat. On the menu for the first DVD, which is five columns of words, you have to pick the word "comment" to turn it on.

But this was nothing compared to the second DVD. The main menu on that disc is six columns of four little pictures each. Only half of them are selectable. And only half of those take you someplace other than back to the menu. But six of them take you to questions. It's like a psychological exam. I just spent about an hour flipping through these while listening to little clips from the movie. Freaked me out. Right now I'm online looking up exactly what I have to do to access the damned extras.

... And what I'm reading is that most reviewers find the extras not worth the trouble to find them. But no doubt I'll end up going down each path. Sigh. Regardless, the Memento: Limited Edition DVD is a fine example of incredibly poor information design.

So last night I had this dream. There's a part one and a part two. In part one, I was on the United States' Olympic hockey team. This part was no doubt influenced by Quicksilver, which I was reading just before bed. The characters were iceskating in wintery Amsterdam. Shrug. In part two, my mother committed suicide by hanging herself. Disturbing, to say the least. Told my parents about it, as it's the second dream I've had in which one of my parents died. They said it was probably due to our visit to the Silans yesterday [friends of family]. Their mother died a couple years ago around Christmas, of an aneurysm. Maybe it was that; maybe it was partially due to the Simpsons episode I saw a couple days ago [the one where Maude Flanders dies].

I don't know. It's all a rich tapestry.

Moving on... The past couple of New Year's Eve parties have been at Lacy's house. And they've been all right. But there were some cons which make it perfectly understandable that she doesn't want to have it there this year. So instead the plan is to have it at this kid's house. This kid's a friend of Mark's. [He was one of the people who was there the last night of Thanksgiving break, in fact.] I actually went to elementary school with this kid, but since I can barely stand him, he doesn't get a closer degree than two in my book.

I've no doubt that this party will be full of people I don't want to be around. Some friends of Mark's I find pretty irritating. And I predict quite a few skanky girls will be there as well. So I'm looking for something else to do that night. If I don't, well, I'll just pop in to the party for an hour or so, hang out with Jon and Lacy, and then take my leave.

Well. We've got the makings.