4.29.2002 Working Behavior 1. The girl with the brown shoes mouths literally every word she reads. And she reads slowly, toasting the turning of each page with another sip from her water bottle. The page turns, the book falls face-first on the table, the cap turns right and the girl drinks. Each step is reversed and the reading continues. This cycle repeats every four minutes.
I love this girl, she's a veritable goldmine of nervous behavior. While she reads, the book held firm in her right hand, her left hand wanders like an anxious child. It scrathes blemishes. It pulls pinched portions of hair from clip atop her head, curls them around the index finger, releases the curl, and repeats this process twice before tucking the lock behind her ear and starting anew. She takes another sip from her water bottle.
2. The character with the dreadlocks, well, he maintains his dreadlocks. He tugs at them individually with his left hand, spinning and turning the long ackward chunks so that it looks as if he has oily propellers, greasy turbines, emerging from the back of his scalp.
3. The guy with the buzz cut loves the feel of his own head. Everyone once in a while he stops rubbing his fuzzy skull and gives it a firm squeeze like he's palming a basketball. I know because I can see the muscles in his hand tense up. I've watched elderly women at crowded curbside markets do the same with melons. I wonder if he's rotten.
When he reads, he crumbles his features into a look of absolute despair, but it doesn't last very long, and overall he actually looks relatively unaffected by whatever he's reading. He looks up whenever anyone walks through the room, which is often, and keeps catching me staring at him. I half-scowl like I've caught him staring at me but I don't think he falls for it.
4. And my working behavior? I can't say that I've gotten any work done to speak of.
4.28.2002
I remember very little about the house I first grew up in. I remember it had mice. They would burrow into my cereal boxes until the contents spilled out onto the white painted shelves. I could press my ear up against the wallpaper and hear their conversations. Every few days, my father and I would go on "mouse patrol," collecting various sprung traps and the carcasses held therein from the backs of kitchen cabinets.
I remember watching "Wonder Woman." I remember the fog over the San Francisco bay outside my kitchen window.
I have a vague memory of being bit in the head by a dog (most of my memories of this sort are vague). I remember sticking my head in his food bowl, but not very much after that. The owner of the beast sent me a picture of my vicious assailant to try to ammend my newly-established hatred, but I filled the photograph and the animal therein with pinholes. Imagine a three-year-old scowling as he presses a small nail through the eyes of a paper dog. Years later, when he died, I felt some notion of responsibility, like maybe my enemy had died eyeless and unhappy at my expense.
Last year, for the first time in fifteen years, I killed a mouse. I lived down the hall from the room I live in now, and for some reason, that room had mice and this room doesn't. Anyway, we always had mice down in 201. I once bought an industrial-size box of Snickers, and those tiny bastards ate all of the chocolate, peanuts, and caramel, leaving me only rectangular sticks of misshapen nugat and a veritable fortune of mouse shit.
Anyway, on this particular night last year, I was droning away at my computer, probably downloading some Counting Crows ballad (a gross characterization of the time), when I spotted him out of the corner of my eye. He was an arrogant brown mouse, standing still staring at me atop a mouse-proportionate mountain of my own dirty clothes. His eyes were so large, black and rounded that were my vision better I would have seen my distorted reflection on the curvature of his eye. He kept staring at me.
"Tonight, when you go to sleep, I'm going to eat your Hot Tamales. Ooh, and there's nothing you can do about it..."
"Fuck you! Get the hell out of here!"
"...but go ahead and try anyway. Put them up high on one of your shelves. Surely I can't get up there. Oh, that's right, I forgot. Remember your brownies? You could hardly reach them and I got to those. Oh, and they were good..."
I was yelling at this point, crying practically. And he was laughing a practically inaudible mouse-sized laugh, which I greatly resented, food costing as much as it does. So I tried to scare him. I wonder how many accidental murderers, how many men in self-defense, chalk their misdeed up to such a threat gone wrong. Well, I've never owned a gun I didn't know was loaded or anything moronic like that, but I did own a shovel handle. It was missing a blade, I don't know why I'd picked it up in the first place, but it was there, next to my desk, within arms reach. So I hurled it at him. I was really just trying to scare him, because honestly, who knew I could throw a spear? Well, it hit him. I didn't believe I'd hit him at first, it seemed too illogical, I spent a minute yelling at him to move before approaching his tiny body, the dead product of my action.
"Hey!" No movement.
"Hey! Quit it! Get out of here, quit fucking around!" Motionless.
"Thomas? Thomas, stop it, this isn't funny anymore. Please, get up, I'm not kidding around." Nothing.
I stood there dumbfounded for five minutes. How did this happen again? Let's see, computer, mouse, shovel handle, corpse. Right.
I put his tiny body in the bushes outside the Old Gym for his tiny relatives to find and bury properly (or eat him, I don't know how sentimental mice are). And for the first time in fifteen years, I thought about mouse patrol. I remembered the unnatural ways their crushed bodies were strewn across the traps, the obvious broken limbs and hardened muscles. I remembered how much joy I used to take from searching the cabinets for what we had caught and I thought about how much I have changed.
Soundtrack for this post:Yo La Tengo - From Black to Blue.
Download the song, then come back and read the post. Please don't insult my direction -- download the song, go eat a sandwich, then come back and read this post while enjoiyng your new song.
I've been feeling strange lately. There are a lot of moments where I will be having a conversation with someone and I can tell by the look on their face that they don't understand me at all. I don't think that most of the people I'm with on a daily basis know me that well at all. With a lot of them, I feel like I'm constantly trying to work my way out of their conception of me - it's always quite clear that most people, even my friends, consider me to be someone different than I am, and almost always treat me accordingly. It makes my stomach hurt. I like when my friend Leonia gets drunk, because she often turns to me and starts slurring in her funny drunken way the fact that she doesn't know who I am. I like that about her, because it means that unlike a lot of the people I know, she hasn't decided who I am. But then again, it could just be drunk talk. She might have quite literally forgotten my identity, and here I am romanticizing it.
I also don't trust my face. You know how you can never really trust anyone who is doing something behind you? Well, that's how I feel about my face, like it's always putting bunny ears on my sincerity. Sometimes I feel like even when I'm trying to express the greatest, most heartfelt sympathy, my features are maliciously contorting themselves to monstrous lengths out of spite for my honest emotion. I can't find any other way to rationalize how constantly misunderstood I think I am.
Idea: If you have any thoughts on the subject, send them to me and I'll post them.
4.26.2002
My name is Lester Burnham. This is my street. This is my neighborhood. This is my life. I am 42 years old. In less than a year, I will be dead. Of course, I don't know that yet, and in a way, I'm dead already. Look at me, jerking off in the shower. This will be the highlight of my day. It's all downhill from here. That's my wife Carolyn. See the way the handle on those pruning shears matches her gardening clogs? That's not an accident. That's our neighbor, Jim, and that's his lover, Jim. Man, I get exhausted just watching her. She wasn't always like this. She used to be happy. We used to be happy. My daughter, Jane. Only child. Janie's a pretty typical teenager: angry, insecure, confused. I wish I could tell her that's all going to pass...but I don't want to lie to her. Both my wife and daughter think I'm this gigantic loser. And in a way, they're right. I have lost something. I'm not exactly sure what, but I know I didn't always feel this...sedated. But you know what? It's never too late to get it back.
"Daddy, why do you walk funny?" I've been paying some attention lately to the various marks I've collected on my body over the years. Since I seriously burned my thumb on Adam's spiffy zippo lighter Saturday afternoon, I've had this perfect rectangle on my right thumb, indicating, in case I could forget, just where I scalded my own flesh. It's a funny mark, really, you can see perfectly the treads of the wheel in the skin of my thumb, twelve parallel grooves vertically traversing the spiralling lines of my thumbprint. To literally add insult to injury, I spilled hydrochloric acid all over the same thumb in lab yesterday, which has interestingly changed the color of the wound from an expected red to an extreme pale white. Having recently abandoned my career in medicine, I will take a layman's approach and assume that means I'm dying.
On my left knee I have a four-square-related scar, more precisely a series of scars, having in common their precise location on the point of my left knee. Every week I play four square, and every week I hurt that knee again. I often wonder if I'm permanently injuring that knee, if I'll have a limp as an adult or trouble managing stairs because of my physical enthusiasm for a childrens' game.
"Daddy, why do you walk funny?"
"Err...Daddy hurt his knee playing sports in college."
Except unlike other fathers who might have to explain similar deficiencies, I'll have to explain to my kids that I injured myself playing the same game that they play during recess.
I'm at the library, kidding myself that I might do well on tomorrow's chemistry exam. If you send me a letter, I promise I'll reply. I need the distraction.
4.23.2002 Library Observations 1. Every time I look to my right, the guy at the next table is staring at me. I'd think he was making obvious some romantic intention, except every time I talk to someone, he very rudely hushes me! I want to slap this kid in the nose! The quiet room, which is absurdly quiet, is literally fourteen paces away. He, however, is in the loudest room in the library, a room designated for mumbling lunatics and the chemistry students who would watch them instead of study. I feel like telling him that. I feel like approaching him the next time I hear a *hush!* and asking, "Are you serious? I was just wondering, because I thought for a second that you might be serious, and then I thought about slapping you in the nose." I'm not a violent guy, I just don't like serious people.
2. The blond girl diagonally to my left scratches the top of her scalp whenever she proofreads. It's hilarious. It's like clockwork. The typing stops, the scratching starts. And we're talking two hands. Maybe she has lice. I had lice once when I was ten, I don't recommend them. I remember combing those little bastards out of my hair, it was absolutely preposterous. I remember taking painfully hot showers and thinking, "Burn, bitches, burn!" But those things never drown, all I did was burn my scalp. Anyway, this girl doesn't seem like the lice type, she's probably just neurotic.
3. A line is forming in the computer lab, I feel like a jerk depriving someone else of a word-processor just so I can procrastinate and update my blog. However, I don't feel like I'm the biggest jerk, because the guy in the next row is not only playing virtual pool, but he's playing it very loudly. He's been lining up his shots with the long side of one of the reference books of the girl next to him, it's absolutely nonsensical. One of the girls waiting keeps catching my glance, it's eating away at me. Alright, I give up. She wins. Back to the lobby and my romantic jerk of a neighbor.
I sat down to lunch alone today. I was in the middle of a contest I was having with myself over how much of a turkey sandwich I could fit in my mouth without choking and dying when my friend Leonia walked up, smiled, pointed at my headphoned head and cheered "astronaut headphones!" I was taken aback, partly because I was finally winning/losing the aforementioned contest, and could accordingly hardly breathe, but mostly because I'm always surprised when elements of this page leak into my tangible reality.
A couple months ago in the campus center, ironically while I was working on a similar turkey sandwich (my life is really dull), a girl who I had not seen before and actually have not seen since marched up and casually reported, "I know who you are. I've been reading about you." Then she smiled and walked off.
Last week at Kenyon, my high school friend Brendan was talking to a prospective student who was choosing between Bard and Kenyon.
He told her, "Oh, I have a friend who goes to Bard!"
To which she replied, "Oh! You're Brendan!"
She recognized him from pictures on this page. She recognized a total stranger from pictures on the webpage of another total stranger. How crazy is that?! (If you are this girl, please e-mail me, I would love to hear your side of the story and then ask you to be my wife.)
UPDATE: She wrote me! : "As for my side of the story, I was sitting on a couch in the middle of
this activity fair and Brendan came over and offered some greeting and
we chatted for a few seconds. I had immediately recognized him from
your site, but I thought he might be freaked out by this random girl who
had seen some picture of him online on his friend's web site, so
naturally I went ahead and told him all this, as he's recounted to you.
It was funny, almost like meeting a celebrity or a character from a
book. Very weird, but also cool....I hope you're getting as much
enjoyment out of all this as I have."
I love connectivity, but it's eerie in a sense. I'm always surprised that people even read my drivel, let alone that they retain any of it. So I guess this is a thank you.
4.22.2002
I keep getting viruses in my mailbox, it's been disappointing. One thing I've started doing, at least with the viruses I get from AOL screen names, is taking the names and adding them to my buddy list so that I can verbally assault the sender when they sign on. This is how I came to meet Natalie, a girl who yesterday sent me a very nice poem with a virus attachment that consumed twenty minutes of my important, important life that I'll never get back. I was thrilled when she signed on. (I've disguised her name so that you can't steal her away from me, jewel that she is.)
Guitar 15m: who are you?
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: who ar eu?
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: *are u
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: is this BRANDON?
Guitar 15m: im the guy you tried to send a virus
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: is tjis JESSE?
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: *-this
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: WHAT?
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: i never tried to send ya shit!
Guitar 15m: no, this is none of your friends
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: WHO THE FUCK IS THIS?
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: HELLO?
Guitar 15m: calm down, getting upset wont achieve anything
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: F'REALZ I DIDNT SEND YA SHIT DAMN!
Guitar 15m: i pulled your name directly out of my e-mail box, i received a virus from you yesterday
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: WHAT?
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: i dont even knoiw how to send peoples those things
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: i have a feeling that this is Jesse
Guitar 15m: i, however, have a contrasting feeling
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: YOUR WIERD
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: i dont kno0w you
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: i dont even have you email adress
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: soo how the fuck are u supposibly blameing shit on me?
Guitar 15m: well, if you're not feigning this level of ignorance, i'll warn you that you probably have a virus on your computer
Guitar 15m: oh, your grammar is atrocious
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: DAMN SHUT UP
Guitar 15m: sorry
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: I DONT GIVE A FLYING FUCK ABOUT MY GRAMMER!
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: damn
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: okay emailed me that stupid thing u got from me
Guitar 15m: pardon? your tenses are all confused, it makes you hard to follow.
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: EMAIL ME THAT STUPID THING
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: OR THAT VIRUS!
Guitar 15m: oh, i deleted it. and anyways, why would you want me to send you a virus?
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: NM
Guitar 15m: right.
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: 'CAUSE YOUR SAYING THAT I "TRIED" SENDIN U A VIRUS..
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: WHEN I DINT
Guitar 15m: well, to conclude, you really should really virus-check your computer, 'cause it's sending out mail
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: DAMN
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: I DONT KNOW U
XpReCiOuSeNaTaLiX: YUR PATHETIC
Later she tried to convince me that as a geek, I should do her homework. And despite my continued attempts to get her to check her computer for viruses, she repeatedly refused, out of what I could only interpret as spite. This was the extent of my relationship with Natalie.
My new hobby is losing important things. It's a lot of fun. My most recent project has been my chemistry lab notebook, without which I am completely screwed. I have three labs to hand-in to the professor, and all of my data is in that notebook. I've looked everywhere. I'm really in a lot of trouble.
Before that it was my headphones. They're not just normal headphones, either, they're gigantic astronaut headphones. I'm absolutely in love with them, they sound beautiful and they shut out all the chatter of people making fun of me for wearing them. Actually, I really like wearing them around, everyone smiles at me. And even if it is at my expense, I really love being smiled at. So when I thought I'd lost them, (I actually thought they were stolen, I went out to my car one day to find one of the doors wide open) my world was crushed (I'm really petty, things like that crush me). It turned out that Alex Hale had them all along. He denies having my lab notebook.
Uggh...this is going to ruin my day. I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon tearing through drawers, frantically searching out a notebook of topics I don't enjoy. This is a really destructive hobby.
4.21.2002
I went on a tour in some Italian church some number of years ago (I actually went on so many tours of so many cathedrals that they've run together into a single memory of a single elaborate church. I have the same problem with years. Anyway, the church in my mind is devastatingly beautiful, rich with all the art of half the cathedrals in Italy, if only it existed I would recommend you visit.) The tour guide described the artistic process of one of the Renaissance painters (again, same problem, this is a recurring theme throughout my memory of details), we'll lie and say Michaelangelo. When Michaelangelo was contracted to illustrate an elaborate palace, he found himself incapable, overcome by the task, his visions too grand and too detailed. So, instead of taking on the entire palace, he focused his energy on the detail of a single tower. And when he found himself overcome by even the lone tower, he would focus on just a single face of the tower. And when even that was too much, he would concentrate his energy on the detail of a single brick. And so he was freed.
The girl across from me is so fixed on her monitor that she has not noticed my rude stare. It's not even her that I'm staring at. Her hair is pulled back, nothing exceptional about that. The only notable thing about the girl is the one hair she missed. One hair on this girl's concentrated head is standing straight up. It's fantastic. When she blinks it wavers. She tilts her hair with the movement of the mouse and the hair falls forward and rests at an illogical angle, suspended in the air five inches above her eyes as if angels for my amusement tug at it with invisible strings. I want to tie a carrot to it. My eyes have been dancing with that hair for ten minutes, I almost want to thank her.
I'm a bad person 1. Somewhere between my room and the library, I inexplicably managed to lose not one but two pens. I find that quite impressive, really, I never even sat down. But instead of making the four-minute walk back to my room to find another, I stole a pen from one of the empty front desks of the library. This one was much nicer than the ones I'd lost, it had a ritzy rubber grip and everything.
Several minutes later, on another floor of the library, I was approached by a total stranger. He paused next to me, clearly waiting for me to look up.
"Excuse me, is that your pen?"
"Uhh...yeah, I found it."
He smiled smugly, "You see the names on the side of that pen?"
This wasn't going good places. I could hardly think over my mind screaming "ABORT! ABORT!" But, I pulled myself together and looked down at the ritzy pen in my sweaty hand. There were three names, it was a ritzy law firm pen. I knew where this was going.
"Which one are you?"
"Yeah, I'm that one." he pointed to the middle name.
"Right. Sorry."
I gave it back to him and he walked off.
2. Having no illusions about already having earned my place in hell, I made yet another attempt to procure a writing utensil without resorting to moral means. This time, I scavenged the entire library, scrutinizing the contents of each of the senior stalls until I eventually found another pen at an empty stall. This time, having learned from the aforementioned moral massacre, I carefully disguised the stolen property with white-out and tape I'd found at a stall a floor below. I returned the tape and white-out, however, I'm not all bad. But, again, I have no illusions about ever walking through pearly gates.
Today is another day of "hard work," expect more posts.
4.17.2002
Yesterday, cramped and winded from dodging bees, the fastest, sharpest, and most irritable of nature's projectiles, I stopped to rest in a circle of freshmen finding comfort in being slowly cooked. Topic of discussion quickly turned from my fear of bees and running to a mythological spring where carbonated nectar flows freely as if from the mouth of the gods themselves. Apparently, in Keen North, a freshman dorm on north campus, there is a soda machine with a learning disorder. If you insert a dime, not only does the counter recognize the dime, but it gives the dime back. So, accordingly, if you inserted the same dime ten times, voila!: free drink. And you get to keep your dime!
Driven by the heat, my natural nemesis, this news was cause enough to revive my stride. I made my way back to my room by racing from shadow to shadow, soaking up what comfort I could before facing the celestial oven again. I don't do very well with heat. I literally collected the dimes from my couch cushions and made my way to north campus with a backpack to carry the promised prize. I was so excited. I took orders. The girl down the hall wanted a Nestea. I would surprise the quiet guy downstairs whose name when I learn it will be news to me with a supply of cold Coke. Everyone loves a mythological hero.
When I finally found the fortress, which, I might add, smells like cat food and rotting dishes, it was unexpectedly impenetrable. I tried everything, even knocking. When an inhabitant eventually came along, I was busily trying to pry open one of the windows with a metal shaft I had broken off of a foldable lawn chair. His apparent surprise at my enthusiastic breaking and entering only served to clarify that he knew not the contents of his own kingdom. And I certainly wasn't going to tell him, already far too thirty and selfish for altruism.
After losing one of my three dimes to a decoy left out to distract the ignorant, I found the mouth of the Pierian spring. I could hardly orient the small coin in my fingers, I was so thirsty with anticipation of heroism and high-fructose corn syrup. I pressed the first Coke button,
"SOLD OUT."
"What?"
"SOLD OUT."
"What do you mean 'SOLD OUT'?"
"SOLD OUT."
"Well, surely you still have some Sprite..."
"SOLD OUT."
I frantically pressed each button in turn, my posture less and less Greek with each display of depletion. The spring had run dry with the conquests of past heroes. I had failed. I had been robbed of my illusions and left standing with twenty cents and an empty backpack in a dirty lobby, the smell of old cat food permeating my senses.
UPDATE: Courtesy of Mike: "The machine has since been turned off. On friday, I came home from class and there was a note on it which said, 'Out of order due to theft. Call Cris for any questions or comments.' The three funny things about this are:
1.) he is just the vending guy, and he put his number there,
2.) he spells his name "Cris," and
3.) he has changed that machine three times before without noticing this miracle of God."
4.16.2002
Since the weight on my chest is significantly lighter now, I can actually get up and enjoy the day. I spent two hours today wandering around barefoot in the sunlight, pointing my camera at flowers and running frantically from bees.
Look at me, I'm a fucking hippie. Sorta. I still smell good.
It's really gorgeous out today, I need to upload some appropriate music.
Alright, I'm offering you two songs today.
1. Etta James - At Last - This is one of those "everything is too perfect to have a worry" songs. (Actually, life would be perfect if my room were two degrees cooler than it is.) Just as an interesting sidenote, if you listen to this song carefully , there's one superfluous note right after the second "you smile" that sounds exactly like my doorbell at home. During the period where I listened to this song to death, I would repeatedly run downstairs to answer the door. I eventually figured it out. I'm an idiot.
2. The Beta Band - Human Being - I've decided that it's my job to push the Beta Band. This is less a "sunny day" song and more a "I really think you should start listening to more of the Beta Band" song. And as you're listening to this song, I want you to take a second to think about Adam Conover, who, by giving me a copy of this CD, which I am now sharing for free with the entire internet, is indirectly stealing from the pockets of struggling musicians. We hate Adam. He disgusts us.
4.15.2002 I'll remember this day. I should write down the details. Warm, humid, high of seventy-nine degrees. Slight breeze. It was a really beautiful day.
I've wanted to be a doctor for as long as I can remember. I used to go on rounds with my father at the hospital, it's one of my earliest memories. I wore a tiny white coat, I had a briefcase with a stethoscope and a cheap imitation rubber hammer. I saw patients.
Years later I would make my first business cards. "Ben Popik, Sientist," scribbled in gold ink on poorly-cut rectangles of construction paper. I would tear through my kitchen cabinets, choosing the most obscure ingredients and blindly mixing them, as was my understanding of the scientific process.
In elementary school I would flip back and forth on the television between Inspector Gadget and the cardiac surgery on one of the public learning channels. That's where I learned how to spell "catheter," the meaning of which I would not learn for another ten years and would not use for another twelve. I was still terrified of blood.
Ten years later at Oxford I discovered the brain. I remember lying on one of the many carefully-maintained lawns, my eyes climbing the walls of the gothic buildings and fixing on the clouds above. I would lie there and soak my mind in theories about consciousness and the concept of a self and wonder how they kept those lawns so well maintained. Seriously, it's like a putting green.
I've spent the last two years of college taking a lot of courses I haven't necessarily wanted to take. Some of them I would have taken on my own free will, but half of them have been pre-med requirements. You have no idea how many courses I haven't been able to take because they conflicted with one lab or another. I've had to abandon the arts, much to my dissatisfaction. I've learned a lot of neuroscience, but I haven't been able to put anything into that. It's not so much a creative genre.
So where does that path lead? Twelve to fourteen more years of formal education: medical school, specialization, residency, fellowship. A career at thirty-four. A predictable, comfortable, bio-degradeable future.
I'm tossing aside the oldest dream I have. I've conquered and overthrown my own world.
I guess in many ways the life I had planned was too easy. I know I'd be able to be a neurologist or neurosurgeon, no surprises there. I know what the rewards and limitations of that life are, and I just don't know if it would honestly satisfy me. But I think the hardest part is the knowing. And now, I just don't know anything.
So now I have absolutely no idea what life lies before me. I'm going to major in creative writing, for a start. I'm shaking with excitement, this is one of the biggest things I've ever done.
4.13.2002
Just a quick note before I go to bed, check out the results of a Google image search for "talentless hack." At least the internet knows what it's talking about. Goodnight everyone.
4.12.2002 Image fun for everyone 1. You're going to be really excited when you click on the image links in this post, I'm finally starting to figure out what I'm doing. I've been working on a new template, so look forward to that soon. Actually, if you're going to look forward to that, you might just want to turn off your computer and check out the rest of the world, nothing I do is that exciting.
2. Am I allowed to have a wishlist? Every college girl with a weblog on the internet has some sort of wishlist, implying that someone, presumably my father's friends, is buying things for these girls. I have needs too, dammit, and I will unquestionably take my shirt off for some new speakers. Actually, if you buy now, I'll take my shirt off for a sandwich.
3. Do you know what song doesn't get nearly enough credit? Otis Redding's version of Try A Little Tenderness. It's so good! It starts out really slowly with some horns, and then as the song progresses, other instruments come in and the tempo picks up. Every thirty seconds a new level is added. And by the end of the song, Otis is so completely into what he's singing that he's screaming and howling and it's perfect. It makes such a great transition over three minutes. Sigh. I wish it were longer. Anyway, download this song, you really need it, and frankly, I'm kinda disappointed that you don't have it already.
4. My canadian chemistry professor is hilarious. He only refers to America as "the big, bad war machine." Anyway, yesterday someone mentioned some novel and he went off on lit majors: "Ooh, look at us, we're lit majors! Ooh, let's go outside and sit on a blanket! Let's get a degree for that!"
5.Lauren complained last night in one of the comment boxes that I haven't posted enough lately. And while she's absolutely right, I'll have you all know that I did write a long post last night about the Beta Band concert and a calzone I was eating (and yes, that is the actual calzone), but Blogger ate my fucking post like a half pound of bread and ricotta. I hate when that happens. And it only happens when I''m really happy with the wording of one of my posts, so that when I try to rewrite what I had written before, I am comparatively disappointed with the phrasing, and usually give up all together.
4.09.2002 I'm in a pissy mood. I got fired today. It was my first day of work. And I was on time and everything.
I guess the necessary introduction to how I got fired is an explanation of how I got this job in the first place. Remember back when I kept getting jobs? Well, this was one of those jobs. Adam Conover and I went to Tivoli to get tickets for the Cat Power show at Milagros, this great cafe built inside of an abandoned church, and I ended up getting a job by writing a fake resume on a napkin and giving it to the manager. The resume consisted of my name, phone number, "no background in food services," and then five of the best adjectives I could think of, regardless of whether they applied to me or not (charming, brilliant, handsome, punctual, and qualified). I really didn't think I'd get the job, what with my apparent disrespect for the formal traditions of the labor industry, but sure enough, four days later, my phone rang. Not that I was there to answer it, being as busy and popular as I am. But a week later I checked my messages, and sure enough, they had called.
I went in two weeks ago and met the manager and owner, both of whom were nice. The manager, incapable of remembering my monosyllabic name, instead insisted on calling me "the charming guy," annoyingly taken from my napkin resume. Nick Drake was playing on the stereo. Things were good. "Why don't you come in Tuesday after Spring Break and I'll train you then." Beautiful.
I woke up at 9:10 this morning, and then again at 9:20 and 9:35. I showered, dressed myself (both feats for such an early hour), and made my way to Tivoli. There was a new girl in an apron at the counter.
"Hi," I said, "is [the manager] in?"
"Actually, she's not yet. But she's supposed to show up any minute. She's training me today."
"Me too!" I exclaimed, not making the connection that would become painfully obvious over the next five minutes.
The owner walked out of the back carrying a crate of drinks, "Can I help you?"
"Yeah, my name is Ben, I'm waiting for [the manager], she's supposed to train me today."
Looking at me with distrust, "I don't know you."
"Sure you do. We met two weeks ago. I was leaning on the counter and you told me 'If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.'"
"Oh, right, the charming guy."
"Uhh...yeah."
So apparently while I was Spring-Break-ing-it-up in Ohio, little miss "look I've got an apron and you don't" applied for the same job as me. Unfortunately for me, she had a genuine background in the food preparation industry. "Ooh, look at me, I'm a chef." So, before I ever had a chance to even try out my new job, I was fired. And they were playing Elliott Fucking Smith on the stereo! I really wanted that job. So I don't know what I'm going to do now. Probably just mope around feeling sorry for myself.
(More Ohio stories coming, I just had to get this out of my system)
1. It was a strange intersection, the road jogged to the right where the path in front of us became comsumed by cones and the corner of a South Manhattan tower. Cars were slowing and rolling down their windows to take pictures of the space created by the absence of the World Trade Towers, a traffic cop was waving his arms wildly in all directions, and we miraculously had an open lane in front of us that cut though the madness. Jon didn't think we had any reason to stop or yield or value the life of a traffic cop, so we rolled right on through.
And then we drove into the cop. Well, actually, then the cop walked backwards into the side of my moving car. Well, actually, we're not even sure if we grazed him at all, but whatever we'd done, we had apparently disappointed the public servant.
Me: (looking out window) "Uhh, Jon, that cop is chasing us."
Jon: "What?"
Casi: "Oh shit, he's running!"
Alex: "Dude, go!"
Jon: "I'm going!"
But we ran into traffic halfway down the one-lane alley, and our winded persuer made his eventual kill. So, only minutes after leaving, we had already been chased down and pulled over, by a traffic cop on foot nonetheless. This man was breathing hard. Oh, and the yelling. This man just kept on yelling. Apparently, in crazy mixed-up New York, when a cop flails his arms while running after you, that means to pull over and accept a ticket. He claimed to have been screaming (pain? anger?) as well, but we couldn't have possibly heard that over the Beatles, who were comically still blazing from the stereo even during discussion with the angry cop.
Cop: "(Panting) What the hell were you doin' back there?!"
Jon: "I'm sorry, I didn't know you wanted me to stop."
Cop: "You couldn't see me holding up my hand and signalling you to stop?"
Paul McCartney: "Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been..."
Jon: "I didn't see you signalling, I'm sorry."
Casi: "Excuse me, officer. We've been looking for the Holland Tunnel and we--"
Cop: "Not now."
Me: (finally manages to open bag of gummy worms by tearing at the bag with teeth, sits back to enjoy situation already in progress, Alex giggling beside).
Casi managed to distract the traffic cop from his yelling at us with a second request for directions and her "Look at me, I'm a girl and you like that" face, at which point he transformed from a yelling uniform to a dyslexic Magellan, providing us detailed directions to the entirely wrong part of town. And while receiving poor directions was unquestionably more favorable than receiving a ticket, they were the shittiest directions we'd receive all week.
2. Jon and I drove a total of 1762 miles between Tuesday and Saturday. On one leg of our journey, a two-hour trip between Oberlin and Kenyon, we stopped in Cleveland and had some chinese food. I had the sweet and sour chicken and a small cup of the won-ton soup. The soup was gorgeous, but I had mixed feelings about the chicken, which I wrapped and brought with me to give to a homeless woman who was missing teeth and had asked me for a Sprite. Homeless people in Cleveland are very specific about their desires, and I respect that.
Once we were back on the road, we argued a bit over what to listen to, having already exhausted our supply of unheard albums. We were just settling for Moby's Play when I discovered in my rear view mirror the front end of the car behind me. This car was literally in my back seat. But it wasn't a car. Oh no, it wasn't just a car. It was the motherfucking ice cream man. This character had driven straight out of my childhood and right onto Route 71 South, and we were overjoyed. Granted, he was practically running us off the road, but at the same time, who was I to judge this man? This incarnation of benevolence? He sells ice cream to children. So how did we celebrate our love for this man? We tried to get him to smoke a joint with us.
We pulled into the right lane and caught up to the speeding hero, who was, I might add, testing how fast he could get a giant metallic tin of ice cream to go. He certainly wasn't going slowly, but we kept up, keeping pace on his right. Please picture this. Me holding the wheel, grinning wildly with childhood memories and the idea of smoking a joint while eating a snow cone; Jon rummaging through his things furiously, looking for a previously rolled joint. Upon finding the prize, Jon continued to wave his arms around excitedly madly until he caught the attention of the heroic vendor, miming the action of smoking and entreating the driver to join us with motions to exit.
The ice cream man laughed, it was great. He even looked like he was debating the adulteration of his enchanted occupation for the chance to smoke with two kids at an Ohio rest area. But alas, he gave us a reluctant right-thumb down, and continued on his hurried way. And while it was disappointing that he didn't join us, myself having already begun to word the story I would tell everyone I know, the look on his face was still fantastic. It was a great moment.
3. At Kenyon we stayed with Brendan, my best friend from high school. His room is on the fifth floor of the tallest building in the county, his school being in Ohio and Ohio being as flat as a seventh-grade girl. We literally found his dorm by looking for the tallest building in sight. Anyway, we had an eventful day: we played four square with the Kenyon Four Square crew (an upcoming story), Jon rolled eight cigarettes and smoked seven, we went to an Andrew Sullivan lecture on why aspects of hate should be embraced, it was an interesting day. But the memory that strikes me as the most absurd is from that night.
Brendan and his roommate Keith having no other place to sleep, and certainly not open to sharing a bed with either of us, Jon and I slept on the floor between their beds. I slept on half a mattress, next to a microwave, facing Jon's feet. And while I have no complaints about the situation, our roadtrip being considerably cheap, oweing to our proclivity for mooching and stealing food from cafeterias, it was somewhat alarming to sleep with my head directly next to a microwave. And while the radioactive appliance wasn't necessarily doing me any harm, it certainly wasn't doing me any favors. Tumors are not favors. Sterility is not a favor.
But it wasn't even the microwave that kept me up that night. It was the concern that Keith would forget that we were there, having talked to us for literally only moments hours earlier, and that he would step out of bed and onto my face. There was just something logical about it. It seemed like something that would happen to me. And even after I'd curled to a position I thought might distance me enough from the path of his waking limbs, I couldn't get the thought out of my head. It's no wonder that once I fell asleep I immediately had a dream in which Keith stepped on me. In my dream, he threw his legs over the side of the bed and forced them down directly on my nose, at which point I woke up in a confused panic, staring at a microwave.
But, thankfully, after all that internal torment, my dream was wrong, and I awoke with nose intact. And Keith's foot in my eye. It happened. It fucking happened. He stepped on my face. And even though I was in a considerable amount of pain, I had to laugh. Of course he stepped on my face. After that, I fell into a wonderful deep sleep, a smile on my aching face, completely free of worry.
4. Ever since Jon and I brought four square to Bard, I've heard a lot of rumors about other schools starting up chapters in response. But there has always been a lot of crazy hype around four square, so I was never sure how much of it was true. I heard stories about Oregon, Illinois, North Carolina. (I was actually once contacted by the head of the UNC Four Square chapter, she had started her club by rewording one of our original posters, and wanted more advertising pointers.) I even heard stories about Ohio.
When we finally made it to Kenyon, I was surprised to hear that not only were the rumors true, but that there was going to be a game that night in our honor. And there was. And it was crazy.
First of all, they don't really play the same way we do. Four square at Bard is relatively straightforward, and increasingly cut-throat. We don't rely on nonsensical rules, months and months of weekly play have resulted in god-like ability and an unnatural thirst for blood on the once child-like court. Kenyon, however, was a chaotic amalgamation of four or five simultaneous rules which more often than not will bring about the end of the round. For instance, the player in the dominant square not only chooses the speed of the game, and I do mean literally ("Kickass fast! GO!"), but often the volume of the game. Often when advancing to a new square, players will have to perform some action (for example, "Alright, now you have to back that ass up!"), ignorance of the action resulting in automatic disqualification. More than once, I was sent to the back of the line for not scratching some part of my body while advancing to another square.
And even though we messed those kids up, leaving them bloody and crying on their own court, they've promised to bring a team out to New York for an official intercollegiate tournament, a promise that I suspect they'll uphold, pride having the value that it does in this day and age.
4.01.2002
This is the third day of my short Spring break, and as much as I enjoy sneezing, my presence in the household having been replaced by cat hair, I'm leaving tomorrow to drive to Ohio. What's in Ohio? I'm not sure, that's really the point of the trip. Like most other worthwhile ventures in my life, the motivating factor behind this trip is less careful planning and more lack of anything definite to do. And so we're just going to drive, Jon, Alex, Casi and I. I don't really know Casi, but I guess I will by the end of this week, which, for the reasons listed in the last post, has a definite draw for me. If she hadn't asked to come along, I'm sure we would have been picking up hitchhikers or trying to convince complete strangers to join our random roadtrip. I don't even know where Ohio is. I'm not sure I have a map featuring Ohio. But that's not the point, I'm not concerned about getting there quickly, we may very well just work out some sort of concensus of which way to drive, and get there that way. I mean, come on, if four college kids can't democratically navigate, what are we paying all this money for? I'm sure we know the way.
