The hour badly spent

And my head hurts. I’m supposed to hang out with friends tonight; John will make strong drinks and play Samurai Shodown. Patrick is a self-righteous bloviator. He is always trying to sell me something. See this movie, go to this restaurant, buy this, go here, etc.

That’s what’s in store for me later. For now I’m watching the Protector, and it’s at the scene when Tony Jaa breaks 200 zillion arms in the space of 10 minutes. After that I’m going to rewind and watch it again. I wonder what everyone’s doing in Manhattan tonight.

Last year the campus was gripped by a shortage of smug blonde rich girls. Brave student leaders immediately rolled up their sleeves and got to work on the greatest crisis of our age.

The efforts of the Greek Affairs employees, students and chapter advisers have not gone in vain. The recent changes they made to improve sorority recruitment resulted in an increase in retention, as well as time and money saved for students, staff and volunteers involved in the Sorority Recruitment Week.
“Recruitment went excellently,” said Shawn Eagleburger, assistant director for Greek Affairs. “We started and finished with more women than we ever have at K-State.” [ed. note: Heh.]
Eagleburger, who is also the primary sorority adviser, said he was impressed with the success of Recruitment Week, which took place August 17-21. Eagleburger and other staff and students changed a few aspects of the week to make it more beneficial, cheaper and less stressful for all those involved, he said.
At the end of the week, the sororities were able to offer 525 women membership and retained 86 percent of the women throughout the process, he said.

I live at Zeta Zeta Zeta Zeta Zeta Beta Theta house, the yacht aficionado frat. All 525 of you are invited to my kegger. Right now.

[Source: Deborah Muhwezi, K-State Collegian]

I picked up a vial of mystery pills standing in line outside of the Electric Daisy Carnival. It was a rave! Fifty thousand of Los Angeles’ most annoyingly young, all in one spot and dressed like the X-Men.

Woody, Silly Question and I had been standing in line to get into the actual party for about two hours, intending — along with Fernando (yeah, who are these fucking people anyway? Don’t worry; it’s not that important, and none of us dressed up) — to meet Solomon and Manuel at the V.I.P section, then run away before a bouncer could kick our asses.

While we were in line, Fernando disappeared.

Woody, you’ve got his number. Call him. Good thinking, no?

It won’t work. I’ve got his phone.

Why in the world would you have his phone?

He asked me to hold it.

Why in the world would anybody even ask somebody else to hold his phone?

Why, indeed. He produced it from his pocket: an iPhone. It was silver and liquidey. It looked like a jewel.

You should let me hold it. I’ve got better pockets.

I was wearing my corduroy hipster jacket. It makes me look dashing and protects me from the Hulk. Plus it’s got a bunch of pockets.

So there we were, still in line, not even technically at the party yet and already we’ve lost someone. The line hadn’t moved in thirty minutes. Around us, ravers were getting out of line and rushing somewhere else. That’s when I saw the bottle of mystery pills and, anticipating a pocket check at the gate, stuffed them into my sock.

Silly Question made as if to swat the bottle out of my hand, gave me her hand-wringing screed about ingesting foreign objects, and assured me that I wouldn’t have to resort to popping mystery pills. She had some X and intended to share.

Great! So when can I have it?

Just wait.

Wait for what?

I waited.

Silly Question’s shoulder was getting tired. "Hold this," she said to Woody, handing off her spinach-green satchel.

Rumour held it that off to the left, another gate was actually open and that the line was actually moving while ours wasn’t.

Hey, I’m gonna just go check out the other line; see if it exists, divine its true purpose. Wait here. I’ll be back.

I found the gents’ then checked out the other gate. It did exist, it was moving, and it brings a message of peace and compassion. When I went back to the old line, Woody was gone.

He went to look for you.

Why? I took a leak and was gone for like three minutes.

He also took my bag.

"…"

It had my wallet and stuff in it.

Naturally. Why would you even have handed it off to him in the first place?

She explained.

Yeah, your back hurts or whatever, but so what? You can’t just switch shoulders?

After twenty minutes he still hadn’t shown up, so fuck it, we went to the mythopoetic alternate gate, where we got in after five minutes (I survived the pat-down with my mystery maybe-poison pills). We wandered around for a while, looking to and fro, hoping for Woody to materialize. An hour later he texted: I’m at the front gate.

Can we, umm, take the stuff now?

I wanna wait til later. Meet up with everyone and then do it all together.

Life is short. Why wait?

We met up with Solomon and Manuel, but still no sign of Fernando. He had gone missing hours ago, far back in line, so we circled the front area hoping he was just now reaching the entrance and he’d just happen to notice the rest of us as he finally trudged in, dejected and alone. That plan sucked and didn’t work. Sol had a new one.

From now on we gotta stick together.

Be realistic. There’s six of us. Well, five of us. And fifty thousand people swarming around like desert sands. At some point we will get separated. We need a backup plan. A meeting place.

Right here. Front gate.

Front gate?

Front gate.

Front gate it is.

The vodka I had been sipping out of a Gatorade bottle while we were in line was starting to wear off.

Losing buzz, gimme drugs!

Not yet.

It’s already ten. What are we waiting for?

We decided to go into the Coliseum and do the thing. After we popped the pills Solomon wanted to head back to the VIP lounge and I wanted to hit the football field, which was packed wall-to-wall with naked gyrating hipsters. We agreed to split up and meet back in the cheap seats, and if we didn’t see each other there, we’d fall back to the Front Gate Backup Plan.

Silly Question and I maneuvered our way down into the field, shoving our way as close to the stage as we could. There was also a woman dressed like the Amazing Spider-Stripper threading her way up, down, and all over a big steel cage in the middle of the field. At midnight, we headed back to the cheap seats, as planned, and seeing nobody there, made for the front gate. At some point along the way, Silly Question made a left while I went straight, or vice versa, and we lost each other. FRONT GATE: that was the plan, right? I made it there and waited. Silly Question didn’t show. While I was chain smoking, Solomon and Manuel showed up, grinning and sweating like — well, we don’t make that kind of simile on this blog, but you get the idea.

Where’s Silly Question?

We got lost. I’m waiting for her to show.

The pills work?

No.

That sucks. I am feelin pretty good right now.

Then they left: we’re going to the bathroom, we’ll be right back.

Later on, talking about this with the Poetess, she observed that a rave probably wouldn’t be fun if you weren’t high. She’s right. I was getting pissed. If we’d hit the X earlier, I would have known before one in the morning that the shit wouldn’t work. Then I could have made contingency plans. I could have made vodka plans. In Russia, vodka plan YOU!

Silly Question finally texted me; she was standing out on a hill beside the Coliseum, under a floodlight. Christ, what ever happened to "THE FRONT GATE!" When I found her I let her have it. FRONT GATE FRONT GATE FRONT GATE I said. We went back to the FRONT GATE to wait for Solomon.

A half hour later it was pretty clear he wasn’t gonna show. And I was STILL NOT HIGH. Fuck it, I said. We headed back into the Coliseum to try and dance with the raging hordes. What was the point of coming up with a plan nobody would follow?

We stood near the top of the stadium, facing down the same midnight-black soup of naked hipsters we had been wading through hours ago, peppered gently with their glowey, spinney accessories.

Sorry I yelled at you about the front gate. It’s just that we made a plan. A simple plan. If you’re lost, do this. I thought you, of all people, would just follow it. There are fifty thousand people up in here. Of course we’d get separated! My own effing parents could be down there having wild koala sex and I’d never even know it. That’s why we made the plan. Front gate.

She nodded.

Look at them now! Fifty thousand skanks, with their fishnets and their glowsticks. Elbowing their way through spikey-haired tweakers. Tripping over lovers and empty water bottles. Making out with each other. Look at them now; here and there one lights something up and makes it spin. They have all come together, not knowing how beautiful they look from up here. But you and I don’t matter to them one bit.

Dude, I think your pill is kicking in.

Hm. I guess it must be. Yours isn’t having any effect?

Manuel is holding mine.

Jeez, how long ago did we go through this? You’re gonna thrash this high that I only became aware of mere seconds ago. Happiness is fleeting, like glitter in the moonlight. I know, right? That’s the drugs talking. Mostly.

The night was finally picking up. And yes, I still have these:

In "Climate hype? People should look at the research," Mark Wampler presents the issue of global warming as bunch of blowhards shouting at each other. One side makes one claim, the other side claims the opposite. Which side is right? It is apparently not Mark’s job to check up on either of their claims. His job is to present one side as a bunch of wild-eyed kooks, and show the other side as being calm and rational without even adding any science to the article, as if his point is self-evident. Instead of putting forth a single bit of evidence either way, he just sells us an image of the people behind the argument, and so undermines the validity of his own headline.

In actuality, leading scientists are divided on the seriousness of the perceived global warming threats. While the cries of ignorance are abound, there is not an overwhelming amount of scientific data that supports climate change disaster.

Underneath Mark’s PR job, his point is that, ecologically, we have nothing to worry about. But what is this conclusion based on? Someone else said so. But why did that person say so? How do rising temperatures affect ecosystems? What does hotter air actually do to the environment, and how does this affect the human population? Though they seem like obvious questions to bring up in an article on global warming, Mark just glides right around them, preferring instead to just cherry-pick some "experts" from either side and call it a day. A vast majority of the scientific community does indeed believe that global warming, a result of increased CO2 emissions, does have lasting effects. This isn’t some radical hairy-fringes brainwashing; this is chapter 13 in a textbook I’m holding in my hand right now.

Measurements made on bubbles of air trapped in Greenland and Antarctic ice deposits show that there was little change in CO2 concentration in the ten thousand years before 1860 [which coincides with intensifying industrializing in Western countries - ed.]. The CO2 content of the atmosphere has gone up by over 20 percent since 1860 and is today increasing faster than ever. The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is currently 27 percent higher than it has been at any time in the past 650,000 years.

Once industrialization become widespread and far-reaching, CO2 concentration throughout the atmosphere rose. More CO2 concentration bulked up the earth’s greenhouse effect, according to Konrad Krauskopf and Arthur Beiser’s twelfth edition of The Physical Universe, ©Mcgraw-Hill, 2008.

    "As fossil fuels continue to be burned at a high rate, the greenhouse ‘window’ of CO2 becomses a better trap for heat and the atmosphere will continue to warm up," according to Krauskopf and Beiser.  The proliferation of greenhouse gases produces a global warming feedback loop: as Earth’s average temperature rises, more ice melts. With less ice, sunlight is absorbed instead of being reflected back into space, making the temperature rise further. Krauskopf and Beiser go on:

On the basis of plausible assumptions, the best guess is that the average temperature in a hundred years will be between 1.4°C and 5.8°C higher than it is now. Even the lower figure represents an extremely quick jump, a warming rate nearly 40 times faster than the warming that ended the most recent Ice Age. At a 5.8° increase, the world would be an unrecognizably different place.

But that’s all just "scientific research," which is frequently the least persuasive point one can make in a red state. So if the back-and-forth thing is more your style - as if science is a basketball game - I defer to an international group of scientists who recently convened to report on the effects of global warming. Their results line up nicely with the figures in my textbook. Almost like lovers spooning (actually I don’t really know much about stuff like that). It’s as though their research is based on universally accepted nuggets of information. "Facts," so to speak. Before dismissing them as batty doomsday rhetoreticians, global-warming maniacs, whatever, be aware that they do have a large part of the scientific community behind them. They are the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they won a Nobel Prize last year. They are among the scientists Mark sourced for his column. Too bad he didn’t manage to fit their research in with his argument.

 

I’m kind of puzzled. Former yearbook staffer and passive-aggressive gesturist Adrianne DeWeese seems to be on fire with her profile articles, artfully translating slices of someone’s life into something strikingly detailed, so that the readers get a coherent snapshot of her subject. Case and point: "Retirement community resident has seen little change by aging process," in which I found out that at 95, Helen Toburen can beat me at basketball. Whatever; I’d still win at cigarette smoking.

But why can’t looker-awayer Adrianne do the same thing with stories that are not profiles? Case and point: the first two paragraphs of "Study finds more people living to, past 100:"

A recent study suggests the compression of morbidity and compression of disability might be separate phenomena, making it easier for people to live to age 100.
Compression involves delaying morbidity or disability so it takes up a smaller percentage of a person’s total lifespan. The study was published Feb. 11 in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

By the time I finished her article, I had prostate cancer.

 

 

"The week passed for most citizens of the United States with little awareness of the powder keg ready to blow in Europe." And so begins this week’s issue of Neocon Weekly in the Collegian’s Op Ed page.

Brett King’s article focuses on the release of Fitna, a 15-minute documentary made by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, that reportedly shows video segments of militant Muslims declaring war on Western civilization, in addition to Quran quotes encouraging violence.

(As if those particular soundbites are the entire Quran. Like they’re even put into context in their respective passages).

In 1984 (what, don’t you fucking read?), Orwell writes about a daily ritual called the two-minutes’ hate, in which the ruling political party gathers all of its members together in front of a bigscreen TV and makes them watch a video depicting an Enemy of the People maligning the nation. Whipped into senseless fury, the party members shout and throw shit at the screen, expressing their surging rage against whoever the authorities tell them to.

 

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Sounds like their team is winning! So why, exactly, are they so pissed? Their authoritarian government has made almost every aspect of human nature illegal (especially fucking); the people come to the two-minutes’ hate so they can expel the violence and humanity simmering beneath their consciousness. That way no aggression will remain to direct against authoritarianism, the true enemy of humanity.

 

"The only hate speech which seems to be spread is coming from the radical Muslims themselves," wrote King, failing to grasp in the slightest how this film is patently offensive. That, presumably, is always the problem: willful ignorance.

The film is a one-sided portrayal of the Muslim world; a view that panders to racism and fear. Flyover-state neocons will see this and take this video to be the truth about all of Islam. They will write op-ed columns in newspapers across America that will marginalize all Muslims based on this small, vocal segment. I know how it works all too well; in L.A. we’ve all watched "Bowling for Columbine" ten thousand times. We think all Midwesterners are exactly like Tim McVeigh. Also: I learned all about women from 2 girls, 1 cup.

"Racial divides in Europe have increased substantially over the past decades as Muslims have immigrated to many European countries," writes Brett. "Refusing to integrate to European society and committing themselves to continue the practice of Sharia law within the borders of their host country has produced a difficult situation for many." Solution: strike down freedom of religion. Replace it with a border fence!

"Film should not be condemned but studied," reads the column’s headline, somewhat awkwardly. Yes, the video should be studied; but not in isolation, like a formula that purports to tell us exactly how all Muslims supposedly tick. Rather, it should — wait for it — be put into context with the rest of Islamic society.

An enormous portion of Muslim society has been quick to try to distance itself from the rhetoric on Arab TV stations. Yesterday, Radwan Abu Ayyash, deputy minister of culture in Ramallah, was quoted in the New York Times on this exact issue:

What is not fine is to build up children with a culture of hatred, of closed minds, a culture of sickness. I don’t think they always know what they are creating. People use one weapon, language, without realizing that they also use it against themselves.

Seriously man, front-page story. Don’t you fucking read? Of course you don’t. "The week passed for most citizens of the United States with little awareness…"

Drinking age should span all college students. At first, I thought Aubree Casper’s op-ed piece would be shameless, thoughtless cheerleading for the cause of under-21 drinking. But she presented a persuasive, carefully researched argument, backed up by figures (plus, she’s kind of hot): the presence of a university brings people to town; if you allow more people to drink (responsibly), you could also tax their purchases and give some of that money back to the school. That way, everyone’s happy and everyone’s drunk, which makes them happier. We all win! Next round’s on you!

Aubree, I’m sure an intelligent, pretty columnist like you has no trouble obtaining cocktails when the moment is right. However, if you find yourself in dire straits, just, umm, leave me a blog comment. We’ll work something out.

On a related note, what’s with all the cute, smart women writing columns today? The Collegian is kind of making me wet. Thank goodness my martini’s still dry. If the paper hadn’t printed another preachy, unoriginal Blake Osborn column ("As college students we should heed the thrifty admonitions of older generations and not get tangled in the spending spiral that drains so many accounts"), I’d take this as a sign of the end times.

My best friend broke his right arm three weeks ago. Unable to drive a stickshift, he let me borrow his Mustang all week. You know what’s more fun than using a muscle car to pick up hot chicks?

 

 

Using a muscle car to run over hot chicks.

Kids these days! Anything for a thrill! When I was young it was circle jerking. Nowadays it’s auto-erotic asphyxiation!

According to K-State extension youth development specialist Elaine Johannes in Study reveals hike in choking for pleasure, “When there are cases of children strangling themselves or having friends do it, it can be difficult to know if the child is doing it to get a high or if it is a suicide attempt.”

I’m disappointed that Kristin didn’t even mention the OBVIOUS third option in her article: emo S&M. Include that angle and her figures would rise as sharply as the crack of a leather whip.

Since I haven’t blogged in a few days, that chart shall serve as a benchmark while I recap the week:

Monday: really don’t remember much, except for a couple of bloody marys. That is not a euphemism.

Wednesday: I made a new friend! A supercute 28-year old redheaded geek girl. No, not that supercute 28-year-old redheaded geek girl. Come to think of it, "romp" makes the whole thing sound way more sordid than it really was, which entailed going to Auntie May’s for happy hour, where we bought each other beers and made small talk. Then we walked around for a little bit. The great big city’s a wonderous toy, just made for a girl and boy. We turned Manhattan into an isle of joy! Okay, she walked me to the Digital Shelf, where we drooled over the anime section. One day she will appreciate Ranma 1/2 as much as I do. One day.

Later, I called the Poetess to tell her I made a new friend. She was feeling blue, and wanted company, so I obliged. I drank her box wine and had a long talk with her about the true meaning of friendship. As it turns out, hippies can love after all! Before I left, she let me have one of her uppers.

Friday: I asked Arianna to go a semi-formal dance put on by the Association of Residence Halls. It was held in the Union Ballroom, which is a pretty big place. Because of that, I was expecting to wall-to-wall hotties gyrating in slinky, knee-length dresses. So OF COURSE we arrive and it’s like 15 kids, awkwardly twisting around to the Spice Girls. No, we are not leaving, I told Arianna. She wore these incredibly pointy black shoes that mangled her feet and made movement difficult, but looked terrific. I was deeply moved by her suffering. She and I sat in the back of the room, not-so-silently judging everyone, and talked about the ungodly horror of high school dances, while waiting for the D.J. to play something slow and romantic because that’s why you go to dances in the first place. It didn’t happen, so after an hour, we left to hit up a better party. And OF COURSE as we were gathering our coats and our purses and our, ahem, man-purses, the Old Man Controlling Everything We Hear finally put on a slow number. I might have been able to talk Arianna into staying for three more minutes, but it was a country song, and by then my heart just wasn’t in it.

I had never been to the casa de supernerdy English Major Jimbo; so when I got to his basement, which had a bar and a bigscreen TV and and a bunch of geeks talking about Baldur’s friggin’ Gate and a wall full of action figures and computer circuitboards and a ceiling plastered with movie posters, I didn’t know whether to love Jimbo for having an awesome place, hate Jimbo for having an awesome place, or hate myself for loving Jimbo for having an awesome place, and the whole thing got even more confusing and beautiful after I pulled out the bottle of cheap whiskey I brought.

I met lots of new people, most notably a blonde girl from the theater department, who I thought was cute and intelligent. She was the lead actress in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, wherein she did this amazing thing with her voice that made her sound like a domineering 1930s WASP. She got bonus points when I found out Cherry hates her. Nevertheless, I am definitely leaving that one alone. Actresses are terrifying.

Saturday was Fake Patty’s Day in Manhattan. The real St. Patrick’s day falls during K-State’s spring break, so Aggieville celebrates it a week early while students are still in town. I fully intended to start the pubcrawl at 9 in the morning, when the bars open, but I was too hung over. I ended up lounging around all day long, then, at midnight, crashing a get-together at Madeline’s in celebration of the coming-to-town of her childhood friend Megan, who has apparently developed into a cute, aloof hipster.

A moment after I arrived, Jenna, Maddie’s awesome roommate; Jenna’s boyfriend Graham, who is also awesome, and Megan, decided to hit the bars. Despite the fantasticity of Jenna and Graham, along with my typically asinine outbursts of wit, we were unable to stop Megan from sitting around, pouting, and looking bored. Thankfully she left and returned to Madeline’s place on her own, before she completely killed my buzz and ruined my life.

Although aluminum doesn’t normally burn, Professor Sorenson demonstrated in physics lecture that if you take a strip of it - with a wide surface area - and toss it into a bunsen burner, you will yield a nice dramatic poof, with an explosion as big and bright as fireworks.

Sorenson thought explosions are so kewl (because face it: they are) that he did it again. And again. After his third go, however, the fire alarm activated: flashing lights and a faraway whistley noise. Peter, a physics GTA, stuck his head in the door to see if we were still alive.

"This the only room it’s going off in?" asked Sorenson.

"Whole building," Peter said.

And so we filed outside, hung out with everyone else who was in the building, and waited for the fire department to swing by to take care of the alarm thingie. After we had been out there for 15 minutes, Sorenson disappeared inside with one of the firemen. When he came back, he addressed the cheering mob of students who could not wait to get back to class:

"I was burning aluminum in a bunsen burner, and apparently the smoke from the demonstration activated the fire alarm. The problem now is that we can’t shut the alarm off. You know, when my smoke alarm goes off at home, I just grab my ball pein hammer and beat the shit out of it. But it looks like we can’t do that here."

"In other news, this will be my last semester at K-State. Just kidding."

Professor, don’t toy with our emotions like that. And when you really do have to go, don’t half-ass anything; be sure to leave with a bang. 

Cherry had a birthday this week! Friday night she threw a party and everyone showed up. Obviously, no good could come of this, yet I went anyway. I brought her a 3-foot paper-mache rose, a card, and a bottle of Jack (the bottle was really for me. I need it a lot more than she does). Although a dozen people were already there, I somehow managed to sneak the big-ass rose by everyone and smuggle it into Cherry’s room.

Cherry’s parents were there - three weeks ago they threw a Superbowl party and Cherry took me along, and so that’s when I met them. They appointed me the Bartender and Keeper of Cover Charges. I carried this out dutifully, except for when I stepped out to chain-smoke with the Poetess, leaving Chelsea to watch the money.

I hadn’t seen the Poetess in weeks and she looked great. We went out to the porch, down the steps, to the driveway, out by someone’s Honda, and lit up.

"So earlier this week when I told you I was feeling great? I totally lied."
"Me too! Grand. So what’s got you down?"
She related detailed information of a sensitive personal nature. "So hon, your turn."
And we talked some more, then disappeared back into the party; which, for me, was a haze of cash/liquor exchanges, with an occasional pause for me to dose up on whiskey. The chaperones had left by now. Life was great, until I saw Cherry making out with someone on the coffee table.

If I could have just vanished, just poof! and a cloud of bats and I disappear into the night, I would have done exactly that. Instead I had to actually go gather my coat, and my scarf, and my man-purse, and collect my dignity (which - ironic on so many levels - was inside the man-purse), and this took long enough for Cate to see me.

"What’s going on?"

I led her through the crowd, to the porch, to the side of the house, and told her everything.

A couple of people must have heard us talking. All the right players, in fact. Arianna! Chelsea! A bunch of other people! Thankfully not the Poetess. I didn’t know what to say to them other than "Hi guys." So I leaned into Cate’s ear. "LookIhaftagothanks."

I think Arianna kind of knew.

"Where are ya going?"

"Home."

"You’re leaving?"

"Yeah, I’m leaving."

And I left.

When I got home, I remembered the cash cup. It wasn’t safe back behind that bar. I called Arianna and asked her to get the cup, grab the cash, put it in her purse, and deliver the money to Cherry tomorrow. She was fairly drunk so I stayed on the phone with her.

"Hyper-literate bastard, I’m sorry. I can’t find it."

Perfect.

The assistant manager in me decided to head back and find that fucking money my fucking self, and of course I didn’t find it, but now of course I’m back stuck at this thing, the most god-awful party I’ve been at since I was in grade school, and I can’t look anyone in the eye; the kid who was making out with Cherry is now making out with the rest of the theater department (kids these days!); Jimbo, another geeky English major, is grinding with Cherry, and no matter how many times I snap my fingers and whisper "beetlejuice" that fucking money still won’t show up. When I see Cherry alone for a second I let her know it’s missing and swear I’ll pay her back (yay! a reason to whore myself!). Then I finally grow a pair and dance with the birthday girl herself. She was wearing a slinky black strapless number and she was sporting that hemlock-laced smile I love and fear at the same time. So, yeah, we danced for a little while and then separated.

The next time I went looking for her she was nowhere to be found. Neither was Jimbo. The porch, around the side of the house, the garage, the kitchen, the living room, her room, nada. Then I remembered there was another door in the garage. I opened it and there they were (what did I expect?), standing together and talking. OhSorry! I said, slamming the door, maybe a little too fast. "Hyper-literate bastard, wait!" said Cherry. I opened it again and she was fumbling through her coat. "Wish I had my cigarettes," she was mumbing. "Iknowwheretheyare!!" I shut the door again, took a breath, dashed off to the living room, grabbed her swank, shiny, fully stocked cigarette case, returned to the yard, handed her one, and put the case in her pocket.

I held the lighter in front of her.

She hates that. She likes to light them herself. She moved to grab it from me, but I have the reflexes of a meth-addled ninja tabbycat. Plus, she’s pretty drunk. I lit it for her.

"I kind of hate you right now," she said.
"Aw shucks, I know you don’t mean that."
Small talk ensues. A minute later:

"Gimme the lighter. I wanna re-light it.
"Don’t be such a baby."
Jimbo and I both laughed at Cherry. Then he went inside.

"So, are you having fun?"
"It’s your party. Are you having fun?"
"I guess." It’s complicated.
It’s pitch black except for the smokes. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure we’re both looking at each other.
"You seemed like you didn’t wanna talk to us yesterday."
Pardon?
"Me, Cate, and Arianna thought you didn’t wanna talk to us at the play."
Umm, hello, I’ve been lonely, depressed, and ashamed for a few weeks. Errr, I mean:
"I got the opposite impression. That you didn’t wanna talk to me. I mean, I know you were busy with Mud-River-Stone, but you just never called me back or gave me a text."
I continued. "And I missed ya, a lot, but last night I really didn’t know what to say."

"Listen, I was hoping that, after the party dies down, maybe I could - stay? Spend the night? With you."
"Yeah, sure," she said. "A few other people are crashing here, so no problem."
I didn’t mean it in the sense of "crashing here," but whatever.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

We went in and danced some more. A few hours later, Liz, a drunken emo townie, went ape shit over I-don’t-know-what and refused to let anyone drive her home. The girls went outside to talk her down. Negotiations lasted about an hour and killed the party. Finally, Drunken Emo Townie came back inside; Cherry’s little sister agreed to walk with her to the car. It was 6am. I was out on the porch, chain-smoking, when they walked by me. Not wanting them to get dragged off and raped, I asked quickly:

"Want me to walk with you guys?"
"Yeah," mouthed Jasmine.

We made it up the street a little ways, to the Townie’s car. Although she’s still drunk, she patently refuses to give up the keys or the driver’s seat. In the end we relented and let her almost kill us swerving up Sunset Avenue (doesn’t this defeat the purpose of coming with her?). But we made it to wherever she wanted to go, and she headed inside and sent us on our merry way. Yay! Everyone’s still alive! Now I get to trudge back to campus in this 20-degree dawn. I am not dressed for a 20-degree dawn. Also: since I’m not from this town I have no idea where the fuck I am. Jasmine led the way, up the street, down the street, across the park, a left on Anderson, back to Sunset, up again, to the left, and presto, Cherry’s casa. The sun is fully up and Cherry is probably completely knocked out, so I bid Jasmine good day and go back home, completely cockblocked by that fucking Townie. C’est la vie.

I talked to Cherry again at noon. Hi how are you did you like the party thanks for the rose I might be too busy to see you the rest of the weekend but I hope you had a good time don’t worry we got the money.

"You got the money?"
"Yeah. Earlier, I grabbed the cash cup and I hid it."

Relief.

According to Brett King’s latest right-wing ejaculation, gun control was a measure Nazi Germany took to ensure ethnic minorities were powerless when the government wanted to haul a bunch of them off to death camps. Gun control in America will be like Nazism in America. Get it? GUN CONTROL = NAZISM.

Brett, if you vote Democrat and elect a leader who’s black or a woman, you won’t have to worry about it.

Nevertheless, the central issue remains: will violence be stamped out if we let students with conceal-and-carry permits take guns around school and into classes? You bet it will! It’s like with the atom bomb; when only one nation had it, those white people basically blasted whatever Asians they wanted to; now that a whole bunch of people have nukes, the world is a much safer place! Still not convinced? Consider this chart:

As you can clearly see, the more guns in circulation, the fewer deaths. Until everyone gets them and we all kill each other. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it. The important thing is to take the first step and arm as many people as we can.

Enough quibbling over figures. Why stop with just letting students pack heat? I say we split the campus up, let the elites carrying concealed each be responsible for a different "territory," and the rest of us can just pay protection money!

Also: thanks for sharing that "Hearty Stew" recipe. But I’m kind of a city boy, so instead of venison, I use the flesh of urban schoolchildren. The only drawback is that it tends to be high in crack. On the plus side, it’s high in crack.

In Tuesday’s physics lecture, Sorenson explained that while sugar water is electrically bland, salt water is conductive.

"Say you’ve got an electric shaver while you’re in a tub of salt water. Say you drop the shaver. What happens? Well, you stop shaving."

Duh.

"Here. I’ll prove it."

Now I sat up. Sorenson strikes me as the type of drunk old man who casually hunts and kills angry hydras for breakfast. Was he really about to hop into a tub of water hooked up to electrodes and have nothing happen to him? I wouldn’t have been surprised, but as it turns out, he just had some hookup to get electricity from a small vat of water. The drunk old man theory, however, picked up weight as he entreated us to further ponder the concept of solubility:

"Do alcohol and water mix? You bet. They’re in my beer."

After he finished the lecture, he decided it might be fun to show us some real mixin’. So he made us cluster around a table and started pouring shit from bottles into beakers that had other shit in it.

Nothing happened.

"There’s some rule about solubility," he explained. "Either you’re supposed to add acid to water or water to acid. I’ve never been able to remember which."

At this, he re-did the procedure correctly. Meanwhile, we all started inching away in terror. "Yeah, you might wanna stand back," Sorenson advised. Chuckling.

Thanks for the tip. But teacher, seriously, why do you have on those enormous fucking goggles, and will the rest of us need a pair?

 

I volunteered to go on-stage for Fred Winters’ hypnotism show last night, and it was so educational! He sat the volunteers down on stage, 18 in all, in a semicircle. He talked with a pleasant kind of authority to his voice, and played some 80s music to relax us while he spoke.

It was nice! It was working! I was relaxed - not as deeply as the other recruits (the kid sitting next to me - dressed like Mystery - fell asleep with his head in my lap) - but I felt completely at ease. I didn’t feel the stage fright I usually feel, oh, all the time. I knew the audience was out there laughing at me, but that didn’t seem so important. "Nothing you feel is wrong," said Fred, rightly. They were still laughing, but it was like they were far off, behind a glass wall, up in space. Their volume was turned way down. Everything was fine. There was only music and the Voice of Fred. My feet were on the floor. My hands were in my lap. My eyes were closed. The Voice went up, it went down, it stayed the same, all at once. He counted to ten.

Suddenly, "Sleep!"

The way he said it, fast and powerful, like getting socked in the head; the same jolt, the same flash of white light at the moment of impact, but no aggression, can’t hit back, don’t even want to, just wanna sink into the chair.

"Sleep!" Pow!

My breathing was slow, steady. My head tilted forward toward my lap. Everything was so heavy. Everything just wanted to stay put. Everything was fine.

At first.

My arms and legs felt like cinderblocks, just like he said they would. That was nice. But the part of my brain that connects dots, articulates nuances, makes jokes, appreciates art; that part was turned off. Shut down. Out of reach. As though I could touch it, but the part I could touch was only a memory. I get that same stupid feeling from weed, which is why I hate being high.

After that his suggestions got hairy. Deep down, I didn’t really wanna dance, I didn’t really wanna see Fred naked, and I didn’t wanna act like Fred was invisible. He commanded us to forget our names. Yeah, right. He went to each recruit and asked them, one by one, "What’s your name?" Some were silent. Some stuttered. They even bantered with Fred about shit I’ve forgotten. But they. Just. Could. Not. Say. Their. Names. What gives? I could remember mine, "Hyper-literate Bastard," but it was distant, like the audience, up on a high shelf. I could just reach up and grab it - that’s all! Fred kept going. Students kept forgetting. Until Jeff.

When Fred asked his name, it came out right away, not even missing a beat. "Jeff." Suddenly the spell was broken for me, too. The microphone came down in front of me. I reached up to the shelf and gave Fred what I found: "Hyper-literate Bastard."

These things happen, he said.

From then on, the audience and the lights still had that same distant quality, but not as much so as before. The spell was broken. I didn’t feel like dancing anymore. Earlier, Fred told us that all he does is suggest; that hypnotism won’t work if we don’t open our minds and just let it happen. Well, it wasn’t happening. Maybe I had other things on my mind. Or maybe it’s because I was waltzing with a fat lesbian (Actually, I didn’t mind that so much. By the way, what is it with me meeting all these gay girls? Last semester I couldn’t meet a minority to save my life. Now they’re multiplying like goblins). At any rate, when he told me to act like I had laid an egg, I faked it.

My delicate shell of mean-spirited, drunken snark has now come into the crosshairs of not ONE but TWO proficient googlebastards. I don’t mind the Cranky Editrix peeking here every now and then; my frequent deviations from AP style drive her away after mere seconds of reading; she shouts, shakes her fists at the screen, foams at the mouth, then returns to Facebook and all is well. Plus, she’s repeatedly demonstrated an unfortunate tendency to miss the point, so I’m not worried about what she reads.

But now the Communist Spy has discovered this laughably self-indulgent blog and read about certain things I feel but don’t say. Suddenly, there’s some person out there, not quite a stranger, staring directly into my id, perusing all my emo secrets. Just when I had decided I was intensely depressed and should avoid other people for a while! Life is grand!

My best defense from prying eyes was to make my shit so boring that any normal reader would click away after a few seconds just to avoid gagging. But Communists like to read, apparently! And they’re determined to know stuff! How do I feel about this new development? I think I need a drink!

The way I see it, 3 options:

1. Abandon this dusty corner of the blogosphere and start over at Wordpress.
2. Just don’t post any more embarassing livejournalley rants. But who am I kidding? Isin’t that why I fired up this blog in the first place? And did I honestly think it would never be discovered?
3. Go with the flow, continue blogging as if nothing ever happened, and nervously avoid eye contact whenever I see her on campus (like I don’t already do that anyway).

I think I kind of like it here, so I’m gonna stick around and see where door #3 takes us (probably the same dark ungodly place to which doors 1 & 2 lead). Loyal reader, just remember to comment often and, for fuck’s sake, bring the liquor or bring the funny!

 

Today truly is a day for lovers. A lady pulled up in front of Marlatt to deliver a Valentine. It was a card with a silver heart-shaped helium balloon attached. The lady handed it off to the front-desk clerk, who blandly informed her that Marlatt could not accept the item, because - no, really - although it was addressed to "Alex" in "room 00X," it did not include a LAST NAME; because of that glaring omission, there was no way to be certain that "Alex" was the intended Alex. No way!

So listen up, you moronic red-tape drone: it was a VALENTINE. These things tend to take a somewhat informal tone. "Dear Alex, I wuv you vewy vewy much, love, Huggymuffin" is stylistically preferable to "Attention Alex W. Smith: Thank you for your romantic attention. Regards, Huggymuffin Lee, Esq."

You could always go the extra mile and contact "Alex" in "room 00X" to verify whether he is, in fact, acquainted with a "Huggymuffin;" when he screams in joy because he was, in fact, expecting a Valentine from a certain "muffinly" individual, that seems like it ought to be enough proof (unless you’re a Terminator). But don’t turn back a Valentine delivered by COURIER just because you’re a fuckwit.

It almost makes me want to believe in love. Just to spite people.

 

Because of the hot weather, a pressure valve normally closed to make heat circulate throughout Hale opened up, and out whooshed a whole lot of steam. The valve closed promptly at 3pm. It sounded like a thunderclap. No kidding.

Okay, I was kidding. I totally snuck up the stairwell to get high. My 50-foot bong went ka-boom right next to a vent, obvs. At the time, it was pretty funny. Get me?