bye

if you haven't heard yet, mitch hedberg died yesterday. i just found out. i could give two shits about terri schiavo, but i'm really upset about mitch. of course i'm embarassed to care so much, but there it is, i'm upset. i don't feel like doing any more work today, just spending the rest of the day toasting a dead comedian. if you want to read the story, google it. i don't do links. this is not that kind of blog. bye mitch.

you're not a dog, are you tommy?

having returned safely to illinois, i immediately set out on a seven-day bender. saw constantine the first night and stayed up until four...reading sin city. the worst part about that comic is the way it portrays women. the classic stereotype: hot, ready, sometimes badass but dependent on men nevertheless. then i come home and here's champaign in the springtime, driving the stereotype home.

i guess i'm ready to talk about trying to kiss maureen, now that i've outed society for being sexist and making me into the pig i am. maureen has a boyfriend whom i know and like. we have never had feelings for each other. but we drink together. and just before spring break, we were drunk at 4 or so, and i tried to kiss her. whoops! she made the mistake of putting an arm around me and looking me in the eye or something. you know how you look a dog dead in the eye and it gets freaked out and has to bark? (or bite you and be put to sleep. sorry zoe) well, if a human being is looked in the eye just the right way, and he's drunk, and perhaps no better than a dog to begin with, he may forget that you have a boyfriend, whom he knows and likes, and that's it. thirty minutes later we were alone on her couch, we had another moment, and i moved in to kiss. she turned away in the nick of time, and not to be discouraged by disinterest, i went for the neck. tenacity! she did arch her back, and i didn't stop, but she again came to her senses and stood up. and honest to god i had her sit on my lap for five minutes, and we talked it out, and good sense prevailed, and i tried to get her to let me sleep in her bed since now i was sensible and safe, and good sense prevailed again, and i slept on the couch. she said everything was cool and not to worry about it, but we agreed she'd be mighty upset in the morning.

i've feared for nearly two weeks. i left the bar with her alone tonight (it's tuesday. 5:00 somewhere. i'm taking my leisure time very seriously) and finally got a chance to apologize. apologies are a luxury unknown to the average remorseful dog. she said it was water under the bridge, and we had an easy chat on the bus ride home.

so here's the comprehension question straight out of a fifth-grade CAT test: has there ever been a time when you and a platonic friend of the opposite sex made out, fucked, or otherwise aired your mutual attraction, and how did it turn out? did it bring you closer or make your friendship more awkward? you don't have to post. i know it's an awfully personal question. just think about it.

a streetcar named phillip

yesterday i explored by myself. got to know downtown san francisco and the BART. practice for spain. today emily and i went thrift shopping in the mission, people watching in the haight, and playing around in the presidio. i bought too many books to take back, so i gave emily one entitled "the sexual life", published in 1904 and dedicated to the author's mother. in the haight we bought pizza, and a hippie i'd been checking out asked for a bite. i'd turned down a lot needier people for spare change, of which i have plenty, but i gave her a bite of my pizza because it was a totally unexpected and ballsy request. my pizza was gooey and delicious. she took a huge bite and put her pierced lips all over it. (as a side note, i think most americans' germophobia is more suited to AIDS patients than healthy adults and is probably related to our puritan past.) then she said thank you and walked away. there was no real generosity in my compliance, and i don't think there was any real need in her request.

so san francisco has got me thinking about taboos again. drugs, voluntary homelessness, fetishism. sf is full of that, and they seem fine with it. and the midwest has such a problem with all of it. i know i'm going to have a great time when i go back home to illinois though. it's springtime there, and the symbolism of the end of my last midwestern winter is on my mind. maybe i can enjoy it there more knowing that seattle is just a few months away.

noe valley

i'm staying with emily and grady in san francisco. they're great hosts, and they've helped me find places to go, things to do, they put me up, and except when emily has to work, i get all her time. noe valley is a big family neighborhood. everyone here is about ten years older than us. also, twenty years younger than us, if you count those as people and not just delicious meals. so the nightlife here is nonexistent. but the mission district is only a few blocks away, and i have the next two days to explore it. so, here goes...

the weather is rainy, i wish you were here

i'm in palo alto, and this is what i can tell you: it's really quiet, it rains all the time, and the hotels are really far away from the stanfords. it's possible that my experiences are more a result of bad luck than a lameness innate to ca, but, you know, fair warning, don't come here, it sucks.

if you do come, though, go to the happy donut on el camino. the donuts here are as good as mel-o-cream, plus they're open 24 hours. that means fresh donuts at 2am!!! how can people gush about krispy kreme (NYSE: KKD)? god what a stupid name. why doesn't mel-o-cream or some other good local place get a regional franchise going? i'll tell you why! because krispy kreme are marketing geniuses and have branded their joe-average glazed donuts as the greatest thing since sliced bread. dave thomas was a ruthless cunt and could have killed their brand if he hadn't blown his brains out. *sigh*

matt's plane gets in town tomorrow and we might stay thursday night in a sorority house in santa barbara. i'm still serious about this two girlfriends idea. i'm not going to cheat on them, and i'll be honest with them and treat them right and beat people up for them. i saw a McCafe here, attached to a mcdonalds. i'd been wandering up and down el camino for an hour by that time and would have settled for anything, but apparently that kind of desperation didn't drive in enough customers. there was a sign: "the mccafe test in this market has ended". surprising, that californians would shun a company that openly refers to their neighborhoods as markets.

lonely phillip

eyal and i were going to go drinking last night after the AAAi submission website closed at midnight. but the considerate AAAI allowed submissions until 3am pacific time or later, so my friends kept submitting, and eyal had to stay at the happy donut to help them. hannaneh went 40 hours without sleep, all of them working. by the end it was a blessing when the website closed. bless you, AAAI. we celebrated at denny's instead of a bar, and that was basically the end of college. maybe it was the moons-over-my-hammy, but it was a bit of an anti-climax. the real problem is i got interested in what i'm doing. a long time ago i had to stop believing so i wouldn't be frustrated all the time - just go on auto-pilot, do what i'm told, and get the degree. i didn't believe we'd get into AAAI, but i put myself under the gun anyway, because the project deserved that. by last week, i'd given up class, work, weekends, friends, exercise, and real food. and i still don't know how it happened, but somewhere in there i took the reins, and by the time i got here the whole project had crystallized. how do i explain this? i'll have an unnoticed thesis, a small paper ready to publish in november, and a project to be published next year that'll get me some respect. but it doesn't take away the feeling of disappointment right now that i didn't produce something great when it really counted.

if you're going somewhere, take the bus

i just found out the bus that goes to my work runs a block from my house. laziness, ho! so we took the bus back from swimming this morning. when you've been crawling along at less than a mile an hour, a bus feels like you're in a fucking stock car with your feet out the window.

friday night we went cosmic bowling. they call it cosmic so they can charge $8 for a pitcher. the bartender was cosmically rude, but i'd be bitter too if i was 50 and had to serve miller light to guys in neon green shoes on a friday night. i won the first game but self-destructed like rick ankiel when someone pointed out that not only was there a speedometer, but i had been rolling the fastest. i rolled about a 75 and i think i rolled so fast the speedometer broke in the 8th frame.

then i found out that this guy pete was mike roller's roommate freshman year. pete's a grad student with graying hair who likes baseball and bands and lived in paris, texas for a while. i had a crush on his girlfriend before, but now it's a whole couple crush.

back to work! the AAAI deadline is a week from today and after that i'll explore frisco for a couple days and after that i'm gonna try to have two girlfriends at the same time.

getting up

i got up before 7am three times this week. you're probably saying holy shit right now. i don't even start in on the lap of luxury (watching sports center in my underwear) until 10 at least. but i'm getting in shape for running season. that means (a) start swimming, (b) stop eating so much, and (c) don't bother running, stretching, or buying the inserts i need! yes, 1km of lap swimming in two weeks is certain to prepare me for the kentucky derby (half) marathon. this is the marathon that gives you two free passes to churchill downs just for participating! you have to use them a week before the derby, but i bet it'll be electric there without all those horses and people to distract us...from that electricity.

yes, 6:30am, three times. 1km. that's 500m a day. you do the math...that's 1000m total, into two days...carry the two...that's only two days! why was i up so early the third day if not to swim? why, drinking! oh yes, friday was unofficial st. patrick's day at the U of I. the famous local holiday invented because some drunken paddies felt cheated one year when the real st. patrick's fell on spring break. and on many (most?) lucky years, the real day is not actually during spring break, so we celebrate twice! the best thing about unofficial is that the university continues to function, even though half the campus starts drinking before 10am. a couple years ago unofficial somehow coincided with engineering open house. every 17-year-old engineer considering a promising career in nerddom at Illinois had to (got to? no, these are engineers) had to wade through a sea of drunks to get to their programming contests and poster presentations. classes continue, and many people go...drunk. they say in some of the bigger lecture halls you'll see a few diehards in the back still drinking through class.

sadly, my class was at 12:30, so i skipped it. it's usually very easy to make a 12:30 class on a friday, but not when you've been drinking since 8 (it would have been 7, but we had to settle for breakfast until the bars opened). andy and british matt had to give a presentation at 9:45, which means they'd been guzzling green beer for an hour and a half. there's a bunch of old jokes about a priest drinking vodka at the pulpit to stay relaxed. this was probably similar, but more pathetic than funny. neeta and my new friend pete showed up to carry the torch, and we played our first hand of cards at about 10:00 with a group of strangers who'd known somebody or other. matt and andy showed up, somewhat sobered up, and we switched bars for some lunch at 11:30. having been in a bar over three hours, i was astonished to walk outside to warm sunlight, the most beautiful day yet this year, and hordes of people in the streets. at the lunch bar i saw two Carries: current carrie (caroline) and last year accident carrie, who buzzed her hair with a #4 guard a few weeks after we made out and jacked her face on something, and then had a friendly fistfight with lexi a month later, which is a great story for another time.

lunch made me feel sick and exhausted. matt found some girls to take our pitcher, and i napped on neeta's bed while she and matt watched harold and kumar. when matt found me 30 minutes later i was in the fetal position hugging a pillow. drunk and adorable. sour kraut ben had shown up, which spellt the end of a nice morning. andy and pete had left to spend the afternoon in meetings, half drunk, smelling of booze, and sporting over-21 wrist bands. we returned to lunch bar (legends) without neeta, now having acquired maureen, by all (three of) her friends who haven't slept with matt, and a nice guy named sam. and we played cards and drank more horrible green beer uneventfully until dinner. the streets at this point are still full of people, mostly now those who have only been out since their classes ended, the first wave having long since gone home to bed. i saw tessa working at jimmy john's. she came in drunk because they needed her, the rush was so bad. they sent her home later because she threw up. full of pitas, we went to yet another bar, and feeling that it was now dark outside and we'd been drinking all day, if we were going to make it really feel like night time, we should switch to whiskey. at this point the day starts accelerating because i remember less of it. we left that bar for murphy's at 10:00. what better place to spend the last four hours of unofficial? here the jack and cokes were the same price we'd been paying, but they were now doubles. i met a hot welsh girl. mo's friend showed up, upon whom she quite plainly had a big girl crush. at some point there were shots. andy and pete came back, this time with more fun: boston ben. boston ben is way more fun than german ben, but sadly not as tall. his lack of stature and confidence stop him from impressing girls (actually just the confidence) but not from trying. he struck out a few times but left with a sweet girl we all liked, whose name must have been kate, since that's what was on the back of her shirt.

and the night ended in lexi's room high atop the dirtiest house in urbana, our group whittle down to me, ben, matt, and maureen. finally settling down to pbr and rum straight from the bottle. liquor lost the power to affect us. i fell victim to dana, a sad sad girl who never gets tired of talking about how messed up her boyfriend is. she tried to tell matt about astrology, and he responded by reading her palm and telling her it was in her stars to be gullible. me, i just disappoeared when she went to the bathroom.

and that's how it all ended. no sex, no adventures, just 21 hours of alcohol. and i wonder why i'm getting stupider.

lame roommates

My roommates' joke hardcore band is playing the courtyard tonight. I'm not mentioning the name, because they'll google for it tomorrow and find my blog, and that is not acceptable. The plan was to go back to springfield to do my taxes tonight, but I forgot about this. So if you wanna see me, I'll probly be in town thursday night.

the trick to a successful joke band is to find a good drummer. this is the trick to any successful band. a choady kid someone knew joined the band as rhythm guitar or something. someone made a derogatory comment about god during practice and he took offense. he asked if they could do the same show without the blasphemy. so we invented a joke on the way to schnucks that matt'll use as stage banter:

jesus, santa, and the easter bunny walk into a bar. santa offers to buy a round of shots. how many shot glasses does the bartender bring? anyone? guesses?

none! bartenders don't serve imaginary people.

kid doesn't know about the joke yet. tonight he'll have his little moment in the garden of gethsemane and decide his soul is more important than this dumb band. his first night as a fake rock star will be his last, and his bible study group will applaud his decision. hopefully they'll pray for this stupid band to get hit by lightning. i'll be praying that god lets me see it.