Articles from: 2002

I got a haircut yesterday. I somehow remember haircuts to be an angst filled extravaganza when I was growing up where I would somehow metamorphazie into something more attractive. Great pains were taken in determining proper length, part, and the use of everything from VO5 to hair gel (Dep was my friend back in the days – but not a very forgiving one). Now I’ve pretty much settled into the idea that I’m going to look unappealing regardless of hairstyle. I have much bigger flaws.

Ugh, I’m beeling sik. Um tied, mah nos is runee an my troat hurts so much. Yesturda I god a fon ca frob bancoba feem skoo. Tey ask me kestions. I don’t dink I answer bell. Oh bell, be’ll see. I habent been sleebing bell. I gud fib hours of sleeb ober last two nites. I godup at tree dis mornn nd I came to work do color picdure. Maybee I go hom now.

Yesterday during my last class I saw a student doodling on some dry erase board when she tried to write out the word “pretty.” She tried variations on the word including “prety,” “preaty,” preatty.”  She eventually gave up and wrote “beautiful.”

I’ve been wearing the same pair of pants for eight days in a row (they’re a pair of blue old navy kahkis). Seeing as how there’s a slim chance that I’m getting that scholarship, this may be the biggest accomplishment I’ve had in a while. Maybe I can wear them another week. Unfortunately, wear is starting to show in the knee area but that never really stopped me from wearing them before. Mosquito bites have been waking me up to some strange dreams which I only vaguely remember bits and pieces of. In one I remember riding on a school bus on some school trip and Lana was there but she was as small as a midget for some reason. I also dreamed of being in Syria with many of the same archaeological team members but having this new attractive asian girl on the dig. We took a break from the dig and went to some nearby city where they were playing late night showings of Episode II but we never got to see it. Who knows if there’s any meaning behind this dream, but if this does forecast a third trip to Syria, I’d have to tell God the mosquito bites were a nice touch.

While I was biking on Wednesday my headphones got tangled around my rear gears and I had quite a time getting the whole thing out, even with a pocket knife. I guess that means I’m giving my CD player a rest but the money I save in buying batteries can go towards a new pair of headphones! It all works out in the end . . . or does it?

Over the weekend I went to Allentown to see Don Bluth in seminar.  This is how it went:

• I slept in the bathtub. Yesseree bob, it seems like a year and a half of habitual earplug wearing during sleep has made me ultra sensitive to any kind of noise. So I woke up at 3am to the sound of wind blowing outside my window and finding the bathroom to be a quiet haven comparatively, I lined the bathtub with the extra pillows and slept till 8 or so.
• I sat by a guy who wore all black and happened to be a seventeen year performing magician. Of course I didn’t know he was when I sat by him so I just disregarded him as a Matrix loner type who like wearing black leather pants with a black vest under a black cloak. On Sunday he actually performed some wicked cool card tricks at lunch which blew us all away. He seemed pretty dexterous with playing cards and could fan them out like nobody’s business. Which all goes to show you shouldn’t judge a book by his cover.
• I met the biggest fan of the Secret of Nimh. His name was Chris and he seemed like a nice guy. He writes for fun and works in a video store and was telling me how the Secret of Nimh changed his life and how he always wanted to meet Don. I was glad that he could meet his hero in person.
• I saw this girl that I thought was cute.
• Oh yeah I saw Don Bluth.

I discovered I have a new slew of mice running around my apartment. I think I have one trapped in a garbage bag and I know they can chew through the plastic but garbage day isn’t until Thursday so I’ve decided to keep rebagging the same bag of garbage every so often, hopefully bagging it more than the mice can chew through it. Pretty smart, huh! I went to the zoo twice. I generally think animals are more fun to draw than people, maybe because I’m not as self conscious as how an animal might react to seeing my drawing. Then again, as I was drawing the lions, a bird pooped on my sketchbook from above but I doubt it has anything to do with my drawing ability. But you never know. Hmmmmm. (I would have ripped out the page but I thought I had a pretty good drawing of a lioness that I’d like to keep so, yes, I decided to archive it, poop and all) Anyway for those of you that think drawing animals is harder because they always move, I think people move around just as much if not more. I guess if you stuck people in a 10′ x 12′ cage, they wouldn’t move around as much. Come to think of it, my living room is about 10′ x 12′. And I don’t move around very much when I play videogames. Hmmmm … interesting. I finished a book called Everyman’s Battle. It’s a self help book about dealing with sexual lust and although you might not think that’s very funny, there actually are some paragraphs which had me laughing out loud. One was talking about how to repel women who are attracted to you by playing the dork. I find it interesting that I don’t seem to have this problem of attracting women.

Today at lunch time, Mark spotted a guy with an ibook with these two blonde girls, one on either side of them. At that point I felt a strange attachment to my fellow macintosh kinsman. I grinned as I thought of how few we are, and yet how we are able to attract the masses to the sheer sexyness of the machine, the power of the processor, the aesthetic superiority of the operating system and how this particular user and I share an intimate bond not just through the mutual satisfaction of a brand name but through an enlighted joy of using beautiful technology. Of course it could just be that I want a girlfriend and the thought of two attractive women sitting beside a mac user like me appealed to me, but, well, that sounds so trite.

The other day as I left Scott’s place, some black dude in a black car drove up to me and asked where I was going and I said “center city” and motioned me to get in his car while he said “come on, I’ll give you a lift” and I said “No thanks, I have a bike” as I went to my bike and i thought that this might be the only time that I could use the advice “don’t get in any cars with strangers” which I heard many times long long ago. And then as I rode off I wondered whether or not I should have reported this incident to this police and then I thought that I really didn’t have any info to give them other than the fact that it was a black man in a black car and it was probably nothing really but then I thought of the worst case scenario, if, for that brief instance I lapsed in judgment and got in that car, if I would have been driven to some dark lot and slaughtered with a knife. “Nah that couldn’t ever happen,” I told myself. But then the thought occurred to me: why did he practically floor it as he went away after he talked to me.

I’ve been thinking about the formalities of going on a cross country (Philly to Portland) bike tour this summer and have run into a problem: money. It turns out it takes more than a little sweat and patience to go across the country:

• a new bike ($$) – My bike isn’t really suited for touring not to mention it’s a little too big for me and causes backaches on long rides. But I’m not really keen about getting a touring bike because, well, racing bikes are cooler.
• gear ($$) – According to the guy at the bike shop, includes $70 padded bike shorts and $100 panniers.
• food ($$) – I’ve read you can burn 5000 calories in a day. I’m thinking of just getting a tub of those add-water 1000 calorie shakes but I’m not so sure about living off this stuff for a month.
• housing ($$) – The thought of spending a night on the side of the road in a tent frightens me
• plane ticket home ($$) – I don’t particularly want to stay in Portland.

Plus I sorta wish I had a friend to go with and you can’t really buy friends. Of course, for the right price, I’d be your friend. Email me for current prices.