Category: Conspirators

Context. Ken, DC, Ian and I went to see Revolutions last night. One of the previews was for Punisher, which features Thomas Jane kicking many, many butts in various styles and fashions.

Payoff. Ian, on watching the preview: “Brendan, look! They already made a movie about Sigurdur Petursson!”

I want the Cubs to win the pennant an awful lot. I think I’m becoming a Cubs fan, and it’s all my grandmother’s fault! Plus I tend to like things that lose.

Yeah, I got nothing. Boring weekend.

Update 2337 hrs: No! Not boring! I forgot about seeing Lisa yesterday, and comic shopping, and picking up my first Powers collection, and finding it one of my favorite things ever. Permit me to dork out for a moment, but Brian Michael Bendis is fast becoming my favorite comics writer. Okay, out-dorking complete.

Also finally got a couple of secret projects up to date. One of these you may well already know about, as it’s not terribly hard to find. The other you probably don’t!

And I have health insurance now. Just in case you were wondering.

Apparently only my boy friends have blogs.

Yo ho. I emerge from the shark-thick waters, knife in my teeth and a steely glint in my eye, having taken all three of my double-damned midterms in ONE DAY and lived to tell the scurvy tale. Yo ho.

And now, in lieu of booty, I go to Lexington. What reward holds Lexington, you ask? It holds Jon. It holds Monica. It will hold me and Ken and Maria, and most importantly, it will hold ANGIE APARO!

“Also, in an attempt to re-energize myself, I sort of scotch-taped a quart of milk to my face.”

Sometimes I think the reason the faces in AZWP are so expressive is because they are all Stephen’s real face.

There’s a bit of rough going, as you might have noticed, as I try to install my journal software on the new server. It’ll be back, honest idjit. Meanwhile, things I’ve been meaning to talk about:

  • Sumana has not only been published in Salon, she’s also turned 22 (Sumana is younger than me. I can’t stand it) and written what is possibly the definitive blog entry on spam.
  • Lisa is back at school, next to Flora, having fun without me and taking my single favorite picture of a door ever.
  • My roommate Maria is taking about eighteen exams today, over there in dag blasted medical school. Wish her luck! I’m not really worried about her, since (as I recently discovered) she has a photographic memory. Never try to win an argument with someone who has a photographic memory. Or rather, try as you will, but get ready to lose a lot.
  • The new work-school-rest-school-work schedule is working out very well–it’s a lot of effort, but I’m never as tired as I was this summer, partly because the breakup in my week keeps me refreshed and life interesting. I’m also doing a lot at work. Putting up dummy pages for my journal, for instance. No, I’m not doing anything actually work-related.

That’s most of it. With any luck, the journal will be back this week, but I wouldn’t wager any real estate on it. Meanwhile, if I have any updates of lesser importance, I’ll post in the (again) spanking new forums. Take care. Wear a jacket.

I hated “Too Little Too Late” for a long time. After he picked up the album at Sam Goody in what, September?, Jon left it in his stereo most days; since it doubled as an alarm clock, we’d both wake up to that raucous opening riff every morning, puffy and tired and grouchy. I really resented that guitar, and even though I loved the album, I had to skip the first track to listen to it.

That was the Autumn of Sleepovers, when everyone in our little accidental clique ended up in bed together in some kind of combination. It was all very innocent, except when it wasn’t. And it was all very intimate, and a little desperate, in ways we couldn’t see at the time.

We never had any intention of becoming as self-involved as we did, but that’s the way structures function in small, overeducated, post-adolescent Western society. It tightened until it snapped, and after that we were both more free and more disparate.

I never had any intention of going through an experience like that, either, but I did. I learned a lot when I didn’t think I had much left to learn. I came out the other side still angsty, of course, but I’d grown; I’d also learned how to express myself in cartoons and small sentences. A year later I started this journal, in the small warm shelter of a dorm room shared with Jon and Amanda and sometimes Ken, and the urge to write had some of its origin in the fall of 2000.

I listened to Maroon for the first time in months today, which maybe wasn’t the wisest idea. I’m still at the office, and it’s all very vivid now: nostalgia, unfulfillment and ache.

Amanda, Tara, Lauren, Alison, Rachel, Darren, Ken, and most of all Jon: Forgive me this outburst. I miss you. Come back.

Okay! So! Babies!

Actually just one baby. Talking about Zoe reminded me that I still have my Chicago pictures and I’ve been meaning to post them forever; I was saving them for a rainy no-idea day, but lately the only time I’m not posting is when I’m working on stuff I’m going to post. So pictures! (Which open in a separate window.)

  • The one that inspired this whole post: There was this baby, and his name was Big Man, and he was the sweetest little bowling ball-sized human I’ve ever met. Naturally, I tried to eat his brains.
  • In all my time as a Crummy fan, it never occurred to me what a great band name The Cautious Mad Scientists would be.
  • Did you know they make lawnmowers you have to plug in? I didn’t, which is maybe why I find this team effort so funny.
  • Me and Eric, in the only extant picture of me playing frisbee.
  • Briefly, during one of the big group shots on the beach, I got to make mine a metacamera.
  • Something about me takes a deep joy in the vision of a sign that a) acknowledges the existence of and b) simultaneously tries to prevent peddlin’.
  • I was taking a perfectly nice close-range picture of my thumb until Kat got in the way.
  • Witness my first, second and third complete failures to get a picture of the shot-shy EmilyR. Who then posed quite nicely for all the obligatory group shots.
  • Oh, and lastly, having played basketball against stiff competition in inner-city Chicago, I believe I’m allowed to ask it: Who wants some?

Maria and I saw a church marquee the other day that read

GOD IS BIGGER

We figured it was the ontological argument for God’s existence at its highest possible compression.

For the record, I know that xorph.com is experiencing outages (well, besides the failure of its cartoonist). Deep Fried, my webhost, is getting really flaky because the colo facility from which it resells is also getting really flaky, which explains the problems I’ve had with PHP, ftp and email accounts. I’ll probably be moving to PHPWebhosting soon, as it comes highly recommended and seems to have everything I need. (Stephen, we may have to talk about this–where are you, anyway?)