On The Road

I'll be off having a Kerouac-style adventure and/or trying not to slide into a snowbank for the next three weeks or so, so posts here are about to get random and sporadic.

I'll be driving from here to Salt Lake City starting tomorrow morning, then picking up my dad to go skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho on Tuesday, so ya may not hear from me until then, because I'm not sure I'll have internet access until I get hold of my dad's laptop.

Pray for sun along Interstate 80, and I'll post a big update on my tour of random roadside attractions from the ski slopes.

Victory is Mine!

I got a higher score on the Southerner Quiz than an actual Southerner.

Joel (who's from South Carolina, which is way more of a part of the south than D.C.) got a 73, and I got a 77. He did ask me a logical question, though, when I IM'ed him to gloat:

Me: hahahaha, i got a 77 on the southerner quiz :-)
Joel: good God
Me: i rule!
Joel: is that something you really want to be proud of?

Adventures in Capitalism

Approximate amount I paid for books I sold back today: $250.

Amount I got back for said books: $20.50.

Fucking hell. It was barely enough to buy me a CD at Best Buy.

Baby, even the losers get lucky sometimes

That waitress who was hitting on me the other night? I got her email address tonight.

(pause for applause).

It was excellent, because I went to Bar Louie with Nate, and we initially didn't see her, though it turned out she was working this insanely busy section of the bar (not ours), so I thought I saw her looking rightpast me a few times, so I figured I was done for.

Instead, as Nate and I were settling up the check, she came over and said hi, and I told her although I was leaving for a bit, I wanted to know if I could have her phone and email...she begged off on the phone on account of it's about to get turned off (not sure what to make of that...) but I did get her email.

Hey, it may not seem like an accomplishment to you, Mr./Mrs. I Get Three Phone Numbers A Night Neener Neener Neener, but she seems really nice, and even getting the slightest bit of attention from someone like her gives me hope.

And that's something I haven't had in a while. So I dare ya to come wipe the smile off my face.

The Eternal Battle

The Wimp vs. The Warrior: The ultimate winter-weather driving battle.

I don't think I've ever read anything that captures the sheer lunacy of the way D.C. folks act during a snow/ice storm so eloquently.

I can see the piles and piles and piles and piles...

So, as a big giant nerd, when I was (yay! I love putting that in the past tense!) in college, I tended to be ridiculously focused on grades and such, letting some not-so-crucial things slip. This has now left me with a somewhat unintended side effect:

Giant piles of reading matter.

This is an offshoot of another problem I have, my complete inability to throw away useless shit. This has been commented on repeatedly, but this is a new facet: The Unread Stuff.

For example, I have finally started in on my massive pile of old issues of Rolling Stone, and I'm currently reading the year-end issue of, you guessed it, last year.

I'm a bit better on most of my other mags, being only about a month behind on Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and Entertainment Weekly. But in Rolling Stone, I'm just now reading about the death of Ken Kesey. It's like some sort of weird time capsule you dig up after only a year.

I also have managed to accumulate a large number of books I've been meaning to read. When I'm in School Mode, I am only really able to read books I'm required to, and then only with a great deal of difficulty.

But when I'm not, I read like crazy. Witness my reading of four and a half books in five days over Thanksgiving.

I am certainly not short of material: I have the three-volume Lord Of The Rings set, a two-volume Elvis biography, a 1,000+ page book on the A-bomb, and several other big, thick monstrosities awaiting my eager little eyes.

Whatever. I've got three weeks of nothing but frozen tundra and my dad, save for a few days in Vegas. I'm sure North Platte, Nebraska is fascinating, but I'd really rather read about hobbits.

Sick?

I think I may be coming down with something.

I've been kinda woozy all day, which I had been attributing to being tired until I started coughing like crazy while I was watching The Man Who Wasn't There.

It's possible my coughing fit may have been brought on by the thought of all the secondhand smoke of all the characters, who chainsmoked like crazy, but it's probably some sort of virus instead.

Now is, of course, both a perfect and imperfect time for me to get sick. Perfect because I have no more school, imperfect because I have to leave Friday and drive for three days to Salt Lake City, a drive I am making alone.

Katy, one of my roommates, has some herbal stuff that she swears by, calling it "damn hippie crap," but claiming it works like a charm, and I'm strongly considering asking her for some of it if I still feel like this when I wake up.

The only problem with this solution is that this involves taking pills that are quite literally the size of my middle finger up to the first knuckle. These things are huge, and you have to take three of them every two hours (or possibly two every three hours...I forget).

I can deal with pills, but these? I dunno...I'm probably gonna have some NyQuil, let that do its job overnight, but if that doesn't work, I'll just have to make like Mr. Ed and take my horse pills.

Further Philosophizing...

...on the nature of being graduated shall occur once sobriety is achieved, which should be sometime next week.

The Kicker

And, while I was out getting drunk to celebrate this momentous occasion, I got hit on by the waitress at Bar Louie.

I'm really, really bad at interpreting signals from people I suspect may or may not be hitting on me, but got confirmation that I wasn't imagining that she was hitting on me from all six people that I went with, so I was happy.

I asked her when her next night on was (since I was WAY too chicken to ask for her number), and found out it will be Thursday night, so I have to go find out if she was hitting on me because she wanted a better tip or because she thought I was cute.

I figure either is possible, but it certainly couldn't hurt to find out ;). Happy graduation to me, happy graduation to me...

Officiallamaly Edumacated!

I am officially, FINALLY, at long last, done with College!

(Insert Handel's Messiah: Halleluliah Chorus).

Zero!

I'm in the process of writing my last paper, which is going to be an absolute pile of shit. It's due at 5pm, so I've still got some time, except I have other stuff I need to do by 5, so in reality, it's actually due at like 3.

I have my last final from 7-9pm, and then I'm going out and celebrating finally being freed from this hellhole.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm not sure I'm ready to face the real world, but I know if I had to be in college the rest of the year, I'd snap and kill someone by mid-January. It's taken a lot of effort to make it this far without doing so.

But I will have nothing hanging over my head (well, except finding a job, which I've relegated to the back back back burner right now, with the front burner being the retrieval of my sanity) over break, and that makes me very happy.

So now I must write my concluding paragraph and make this a fully steaming pile of bullshit, sufficient to be handed in to one of Northwestern's finest. Goodnight.

Some days...

...I wish I had some sort of device that would detect when I'm about to say something stupid, and then reach out of the back of my head and slap a piece of duct tape over my mouth.

Is Not Seattle

So I guess I'm not moving to Seattle...I got my official rejection letter from Microsoft yesterday.

I'm not terribly disappointed. I was relatively sure I wasn't going to get the job, so no big loss. And starting off my career in marketing and PR for a company with the absolute worst PR problem in the universe may not have been the best idea.

But it is nice to not have that hanging over my head for break. I'm not hearing back from Starcom (the place I really want to work for) until first week of January at the earliest, so I can now go drive around out west in a bit of peace and quiet and lack of worry.

Bartending school, here I come!

To Marky

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you.
You look like a monkey
and we call you one, too!

Happy 22nd, Mark!

One!

And on the next to last day of college, I got drunk.

I had a wee little christmas-hannukah-kwanzaa-solstice-tet-whatever party, and things overall went very well.

I still haven't started the paper I have due on monday at 5pm, but I don't particuarly care right now. This might have something to do with the massive amount of egg nog and hot-chocolate-with-peppermint-schnapps I had, but you never know.

And as I fall asleep to the strains of my drunk roommate and his drunk friends singing along to Hootie and the Blowfish, I'm happy to know that so many people care about me (or at least the free booze I serve) to come stop by and say hi.

Thanks for coming, those that came. And neener neener neener, those that didn't.