I’ve come up with a new weight loss plan, because I’ve put back on a bit of the weight I lost while on the Soul-Crushing Stress Of College diet earlier this year.

The new plan: The Overcrowded Rock Club Sweat It Out plan.

This plan was developed this evening when I went to see the Chicago Kings, a drag king troupe doing their thing because the big gay parade is tomorrow.

They were playing at the Empty Bottle, an excellently sketchy club here in Chicago that’s normally used by punk or rock bands, and not a massive herd of lesbians and about six gay men.

There were a whole lot of people there, quite a few more than I suspect the fire code allows, and the place is not air conditioned, so it was really goddamn hot.

This is something I don’t get: Many, many places in Chicago have no air conditoning. I think a large part of it is the mindset that most people have that Chicago = cold.

But what people tend to forget is that in the summer, Chicago can get really fuckin’ hot.

And you go into places, many of them cheapo restaurants like the infamous Mr. Beef down near work (referred to by the denziens of Post Effects as Mystery Beef) and the temperature inside is approximately the same as that on the surface of the sun. I can’t imagine what it’s like to work there.

Anyway, so it’s really, really hot at the Empty Bottle because there were at least a couple hundred people there, and the place is just not built to hold that many, and I figured out that I was probably sweating out more calories than I had eaten that evening.

Certainly it was enough to make everyone stop caring what they looked or smelled like, because they knew everybody else looked and smelled just as bad, because we were all in this together, stinking and frizzing away.

Thus the new plan. Not as cheap as the S-CSOC diet, but a hell of a lot more fun.

I was sitting in the core (a large and severely over-air-conditioned tangle of cords, video tape machines, and patch bays that is the nerve center of a post-production house) at work (though I actually got pulled in on a video editing session today cause we were shorthanded) and a thought struck me, so I started to scribble things down on a legal pad:

It’s hard for smart people to find love (or in my case, keep it), because we have a severe tendency to overanalyze things.

Now before I continue, I know some of you are saying, Jesus, Ellen, we read this all the time and you’re not that fucking smart. And I know that damn well. I’m not even close to as smart as most of my friends, and my cousin Jeff’s son Jesse put me in my place when I was 17.

I was at my cousin Amy’s wedding, doing my precalculus homework. I got stuck on a problem, and Jesse (then 8 years old) comes up and says, “Whatcha doin’?”

“Math homework,” I said, dejectedly.

“Lemme see…Oh, that’s wrong,” he said, looking over my shoulder.

“It is?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Yeah, you gotta do it like this,” he said, and proceeded to do the problem very quickly.

I looked in the back of the book, and he had gotten the problem exactly right. “How did you do that?!” I asked.

“Oh, I took that class last year,” he said, and skipped off to find his father. I knew the kid was smart before, but man, did I feel fucking stupid after that.

Anyway, getting back to my original point, I think that part of the reason that intelligent people have trouble finding and/or keeping love is the tendency towards severe overanalyzation.

We are dissectors. We try to predict the future. We try to get inside people’s heads.

The last one is an especially bad idea in a relationship. Because the person you are dating is not thinking what you think they’re thinking. You spend all your time analyzing what the fuck is going wrong, what’s wrong under the surface, or, what the hell happened once everything collapses.

In reality it’s simply a failure to communicate because you’re too busy trying to figure out what the other person is thinking, and not actually asking them what they’re thinking.

That just kind of struck me while I was trying to keep blood flowing to my feet in a frozen room full of whirring machines this afternoon.

That, and the fact that Formula One racing is really fucking amusing when viewed backwards.

Mark, my buddy who is living in my mom’s basement, and thus has free run of the house, has found the massive stack of old magazines that is my room at her house.

Mark suggests that this means I need mental help. Dear, I’ve needed that for years. What I really need is some sort of filing system so I can actually figure out which ones are decent and interesting, and which ones I should just photocopy the one good article out of and then chuck.

Whatever you do, Mark, don’t look at the stack of Guitar World magazines. You won’t like the dates you find on those…

Sign that you’re watching a good movie: The movie ends, you look at your watch, and you realize the movie was about 45 minutes longer than you thought it was.

Plug: Minority Report is pretty goddamn good.

Oh, and since one thing that really bugs me about movies sometimes is when I recognize an actor and can’t place him for half the movie, so if anyone else is wondering, yes, that is Tim Blake Nelson from O Brother, Where Art Thou? as the jailer guy.

This is for Mark Greer, my good buddy and current resident of my mom’s basement, who wrote a highly acclaimed article about students in New York getting pushed into GED programs:

GED Students Hold Own Prom

The Washington Post has a headline on their main page linking to this story that says:

“WorldCom Reveals $3.8B Error; Key Officer Fired”

I think when you’re talking about three point eight billion goddamn dolllars, we’ve officially left the realm of error.

SNAFU, perhaps?

I have a massive stack of unread magazines in my apartment.

Actually, three massive stacks.

For some reason, during the school year, I never have time to read all the magazines I subscribe to, so they all just kind of pile up, waiting to be read. I’ve finally reached the end of 2001 in Sports Illustrated and am quickly polishing off Newsweek for…last year.

But I still have almost a year’s worth of Spin, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly to plow through, and it’s going to take me some time.

It’s odd and somewhat disturbing to have to read repeatedly about September 11th, several months after it happened. But sometimes, it’s kind of funny to read old news. Especially watching certain changes in attitude of the media over a couple of months, but when read over a couple of days.

Like when everyone thought the war in Afghanistan was turning into another Vietnam, then, like, two weeks later, the Taliban collapsed like a flan in a cupboard. It’s really amusing to read all the pundits tripping over themselves to pretend they weren’t claiming it was a quagmire and admonishing those who did.

I’ve got about a 40 minute el ride to and from work, so that’s letting me polish off a couple issues a day. Especially on days like today, when I got stuck at the El stop waiting for a train that wasn’t packed sardine-can tight full of people to get on to go home for like 20 minutes.

It is nice to have something to read, though I’ve still got an entire shelf of unread books waiting for me to make my move. But I’m comin’, baby. Don’t you worry about that.

My key thingy broke yesterday.

Technically, I believe it’s called a lanyard. It’s one of the big things that you can attach your keys to. Colleges, churches, football teams, lots of people sell them. Mine was a black one with “Orioles” stitched on the side in orange.

I bought it for five bucks outside Oriole Park at Camden Yards during the playoffs (the O’s choked, as usual) when I was sixteen. I had finally gotten my driver’s license, and I decided I needed something to put my car keys on so I wouldn’t lose them.

It served me well through high school, through college, through road trips across twenty-three states.

But as I wandered home from a final night of partying with my friends as many of them wandered off to start real lives after graduation, I was flinging it around, wrapping and unwrapping it around my hand as I have always done. Finally, the thread just gave out, and my keys pathetically plopped to the ground.

I knew it was coming. The sides had been fraying for years, so I knew it was only a matter of time before it bit the dust, but it still makes me kind of sad to see this thing that has really become an integral part of who I am just…gone.

I always had the lanyard part hanging out of my right front pocket, and it’s odd to not have that anymore. I got one of those carabiner things to hold my keys until I have something more permanent, but it’s really weird to have my constant companion of five years no longer with me.

I know what you’re thinking: “Jesus, Ellen, it’s a keychain for fuck’s sake.”

And I can certainly see where you’re coming from on that.

But at a time where I’ve just had a large number of my friends move away for good, where my mom is seriously thinking about selling the house I grew up in, and I have little contact with most of my friends from high school, something like this affects me quite a bit more than it really should.

Well, that, and it’s the Happy Fun Time of the Month, so you know how we chicks get. All emotional about things that just make no goddamn sense to get emotional over. Thanks, estrogen!

But while I’d like to be able to dismiss it as periodic emotional oddity, I really feel sad that this stupid thing broke. It was a symbol of my youth and freedom, and now it’s gone.

And yes, I realize I’m reading way too much into this, but this is my weblog, not yours, so nyaaaaaah.

Lots of stuff tonight.

Fair warning that I think this may be the way it goes this summer: nothing for a couple of days and then a massive volume of posts at once. I guess we’ll see.

My god, they’re all gone.

All the kids a year ahead of me have graduated. Even a couple in my year are gone too, taking advantage of ridiculous numbers of AP credits to get the fuck out of this fine university a year early. God knows I would have if I had the credit.

But somehow it doesn’t feel like the end.

Maybe it’s because I, personally, am not graduating. Maybe it’s because several of them are staying in Chicago, and I’ll still see them all the time. Maybe it’s simply denial.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I know I’ll stay in contact with people I really want to. We all say this after high school, but for some reason, college friends seem to last a hell of a lot longer.

My mom is still friends with a number of people she went to UConn with, and I think that’s part of what gives me comfort over not being able to see a lot of my friends from here much for at least the next year or so.

The other thing, appropriately enough, is the internet.

I know I already spend way too much time on this damn computer, but I find it extremely comforting that I can talk to people online in Atlanta (or Pennsylvania or Boston or wherever the fuck everyone is moving) the same way I talk to people who live two doors down.

And I can read about the trials and the tribulations of everyone I know through stupid things like this weblog. Although I personally try not to deal in profundities, many people do, and I at least find out about the weird things going on in peoples’ lives.

And when it gets right down to it, life is nothing but a collection of weird things that happen to you in some sort of sequence, and the stories you tell about those things.

Nobody ever spends a great deal of time talking about their daily routine of work, they talk about times when something interesting, amusing, annoying, bizzare, or otherwise out of the ordinary happens.

Nobody talks about the routine of their relationship, at least not after they’ve been going out for more than a couple of months and have realized that they’re boring the living shit out of their friends by incessantly talking about the minituae of their relationship.

No, it’s the oddities, the great stories, and the profound thoughts that make life fantastic, and I hope I get to read them, hear them, and maybe even once in a great, great while, speak them, for a long time to come.

Congratulations to the graduates, and you guys look incredibly dippy in those hats.

Feel free to make fun of me in exactly 363 days. You better fucking believe I’m counting.