Category: People

July 18, 2003 /

A 24-exposure roll of film lasts me about a year, not because I take about two pictures a month, but because I take about eleven pictures in two spurts ten months apart. The roll I just got developed ends with pictures of the Chicago trip, and begins with pictures from the end of GSP last summer. In between are a couple of great shots from SETC, which I’ll have to post soon.

The one I want to put up right now, though, is a special treat for a few proud conspirators. Remember, those who understand this, that we are sentinels, templars, proud emperors of an age gone by. Remember what we did. Remember what we were. Remember, and treasure this in your secret minds, the single hallmark I left behind me in Rodes 2.

The DBC was here

July 17, 2003 /

Magically, ridiculously, I met Emma again last night. She appeared from nowhere (okay, from Meg’s apartment) and found me talking on the phone and doing laundry at like midnight, and seeing her again made me frighteningly happy. Wow. How many times do you think you can replay one encounter in your head before the tape wears out?

July 16, 2003 /

Yesterday I learned from Maria that if you fall asleep at a boring meeting, lecture, movie, ancetera, it means you haven’t been getting enough sleep, even if you think you have. If you really actually don’t have “sleep debt”–if you’ve been getting your statistical eight hours a night–you can’t and won’t fall asleep during the day.

Since that means I’ve been constantly in debt for a good six years now, that’s a little worrisome, but it’s also good to know. Hanging out with Maria is a process of continually finding out new things about biology and discovering that half the things I thought I knew were wrong. I guess that should be embarrassing, but really it’s pretty cool. My brain is getting bigger! (Inner Maria: No it’s not!)

July 14, 2003 /

The LeonardR writes:

“I made a doob-doob (http://www.crummy.com/2002/09/03/1) rendition of Xorph. I’d give you a picture, but I have no way of getting it to you.”

First, that makes me feel bad, since I haven’t updated Xorph in a long, long time. Well, no, first it makes me feel all tingly and flushed, as happens every time someone cool talks about my comic. Second it makes me feel bad. Third: Leonard has made fan art for Xorph; the fan art is made of paper; I have never seen this fan art; I have also never seen most things made of paper. The question this poses, obviously, is are all paper things I haven’t seen actually Xorph fan art?, but I kind of like it better unanswered.

July 11, 2003 /

So the design isn’t quite done yet, but here it is: NFD now bruises its news with some of the neatest software I’ve ever had the chance to yell at. The archive navigation is a lot different now, but one thing I’m actually pretty proud of is that all the old permalinks will still work–if I’ve done it right, there’s a little script that will redirect you right to the newly bruised entry.

I actually started working on this over a week ago, and once I’d started using NB to post I couldn’t go back (which is why there hasn’t been anything on the old NFD page for so long). Switching my journal software was like walking into a dealership with a wheelbarrow and driving out with a red Ferrari, so I’ve been writing, but in here instead. You can read like two weeks of the stuff starting on June 27 (although I think this next one is my favorite yet).

The front-page design has been trickier, since I wanted to finally have something on this site that was valid XHTML and built entirely with CSS. I think it’s pretty close now, but the design still looks better in IE than Netscape. I also tried to tidy all the old code in the conversion, but I’m sure I missed something; if you find broken links or funny-looking entries, let me know.

So enjoy the calendar, the searchability, the randomnymity and the category madness; pretty soon there should be something else up top, either a random quote or a Today in History feature. Expect entries to be rather more frequent but correspondingly shorter, as now updating isn’t such an ordeal that I feel I have to save up my material. Expect also at least two more of the secret projects I’ll be developing this summer, involving obsessions and imperatives.

I really do hope you like the new NFD (BC). And I’d love to stay and type more, but today is Blood Drive Day and I’ve gotta go faint.

July 8, 2003 /

Last week I baked a turkey, which we are still eating. Yes. I made a turkey (well, a turkey breast), and I made it all by myself, and it’s really good! It’s just like Mom used to make, because I used Mom’s secret recipe.*

I love turkey sandwiches beyond all reason, so the discovery that I can get this much delicious turkey meat for less than ten bucks is astounding. It fills me with a kind of joyous freedom, akin to the feeling (I imagine) of learning to drive.

Also, this weekend Maria and I made burritos almost from scratch, and nobody died and they were good too. The novelty of cooking for myself doesn’t look like it’s going to wear off any time soon, so expect a lot more stupid food entries. Food is the new frisbee!

* Basically, “turn it upside down.”

June 30, 2003 /

Hey, remember back at SETC when I talked about how amazing my director Michelle was? And remember when I talked about Strother, expert in Matrix dollies and frightening photography? Well guess what! Through a distinct lack of coincidence, Strother from Kentucky and Michelle from Alabama are working together as tech interns at the Shenandoah University Summer Music Theatre. This is not a coincidence because they were at SETC for the same reason, after all, and apparently Shenandoah has excellent taste in interns.

Anyway, I’ve spent the past week bugging Mr. G____ for visual proof that the two of them coexist, and last night he gave in. For your further mental-image referencing, please find pics below! (Strother is the large hairy one, and Michelle is the smaller one with the headset. And Strother is wearing a purple shirt. With the scary eyes. No, on the left.)

Also last night, I finally met Kim’s dogs, and finally saw Chamber of Secrets, and Ian finally came over to hang out for a while. He brought along Yale, so DC was terrified of us, and that was good. I think there should be some gradual way to introduce people to the experience that is Yale, like the way you’re supposed to immunize yourself to electricity or rabid dogs.* Just meeting him straight away, or even going to his web page (which now appears to be gone), tends to cause sensory overload in humans.

So last night I went to bed all peppy, and then woke up this morning and there wasn’t any hot water so I took a cold shower and it stabbed my children in the face, and I hate you.

* Yeah, I think I made that up.

June 20, 2003 /

There are a number of lyrical, rhythmic and tonal cheap tricks employed in pop music for which I am an absolute sucker. I started a list of those earlier this year, and eventually I’ll write an entry on it too. One of the most specific and fun to talk about, though, is hip-hop songs that define their own terms. They’re great! They’re extremely helpful to geeky white people like myself–you’re given a new cool slang term, and immediately know its usage and basic etymology–and moreover, they’re completely happy and unself-conscious about it. I think Radiohead would have a lot more fun if they took a few pages from the same book.

I first noticed the phenomenon quite some time ago, but I was holding off on writing about it until I had three examples I could remember all at the same time. Last night, Maria inadvertently provided the third, and they are as follows:

  • Nelly’s “Pimp Juice:” “She likes my pimp juice! Pimp juice is anything attract the opposite sex.”
  • Alicia Keys’s “Girlfriend:” “I think I’m jealous of your girlfriend, although she’s just a girl that is your friend.”
  • and the granddaddy, TLC’s “No Scrubs:” “I don’t want no scrubs. A scrub is a guy that can’t get no love from me–hanging out the passenger side of his best friend’s ride, trying to holler at me.”

When I told Jon about this, months ago, he immediately suggested that we start putting our own terms into general parlance via Rhythm Method songs, then created the first one on the spot: “She like mah mantelpiece! The mantelpiece is the bulge in the front of your pants.”

If anybody knows more of these, drop them off. With a little thought we could have our very own Rap Dictionary.

June 1, 2003 /

Today is the day I plug Mindy in the blog. Mindy Mindy Mindy! Mindy is a frosher, only she’s not because the year is over, only she still IS because that’s who she is in my head. And yes, Mindy reads this and wanted to be name-checked like Emily and Strother and whoever else. Congratulations, Mindy: approximately five more people have now read your name.

What I really (still) want is for all my friends to get blogs, or Livejournals, or their own sites, or something. The presence of my crew on the interweb is disappointingly low. I want to check in on them and read about their love lives and be fascinated by the way they think, especially when I’m exiled to Richmond, but they stubbornly persist in their absence. Get blogs, all of you! I promise to link you if you do!

Oh, that means I should talk about Sara. Sara is a (former) frosher with a blog! You could all take a page from her cyber-book, other friends.

I’m still going through the sum of all my belongings, sorting and repacking things for the great exodus to Louisville, and yesterday I found three items of interest. The first is a piece of paper from last summer, on which is scrawled the following:

If I die, and somebody goes to a vanity press or something and has a posthumous collection of my work published, and it’s not called Destroy the Evidence, I shall be very angry and want an explanation.

And you know, it’s still true.

The second was the package of pictures I took in Brazil, all twelve of them. It’s very strange to me that it’s been four years since I was there. I slept on a mattress one inch thick in the same room as Tiago, the world’s biggest Goons and Hoses fan, and ate a lot of beans and rice and lost probably thirty pounds. I started watching Dawson’s Creek for the first time, and was surprised to find that I liked it, and pined for home and Erika too much.

I had an incredibly sweet host sister named Joana, who tried to reach out to me any way she could: we played Quake II together, and she introduced me to cocoa in condensed milk. I saw a giant Jesus and many, many streetside orange vendors. I went to Mass with my host grandmother, who spoke no English at all but who smiled and patted my hand the way my own grandmother would have. I took showers that froze me, burned me and gave me some nasty electric shocks.

Along with the blue acrylic painting I bought at an art fair (still one of my favorite possessions), those pictures are the only souvenirs I still have from Brazil. The Rio pin I used to have was lost with my first bucket hat, fall term of my first year at Centre; I think the futbol calendar Tiago gave me is packed away somewhere in the attic, probably for a long time. It was a very self-centered time for me, and I wish now that it had been otherwise. I should have learned some Portuguese, I should have thrown myself into life there instead of trying to live here in my head, and I should definitely have played less Pokemon.

No regrets, though. I Went There, and I Came Back.

The third thing will have to wait, probably for quite a while, as I want to make it a part of this site and I’m going to have to write some code to do it. Right now I have to lug bags of potato chips over to Emily R’s house for a pre-Chicago Trip meeting. My life is filled with travel.

May 27, 2003 /

I want the last two shots to be the last Idiotcams© from in Rodes 2, but there’s a problem: apparently I spent all of senior week adding to the Plastic Mullet Series.

Yes, I am aware that thanks to the Fox network, mullets themselves have jumped the shark, but I still find the plastic mullet itself (which turns out to have belonged to Lisa all along, and which she ended up donating to me) a singularly baroque object. It possesses a level of absurdity above and beyond that of the standard mullet picture. It is, in short, a higher calling.

That I might better answer its siren song, I present to you Plastic Mullet Extravalooza 2K3! This unprecedented collection not only the mighty Darren at last, but new inanimate objects and the only girl who’s ever seemed happy to be wrangled into the headdress. If you order now, you’ll also get Jon’s whole entire dang family, not to mention a couple of Lallys (elder and younger). To top it all off, this one-time-only special captures the elusive Evan and–yes!–my own sister!

Back to bittersweet angst soon, I promise, but right now I’m going to have to glory in the possession of this much dirt on so many people. I hope none of you ever want to run for office, guys. I own you.