SaveTheRhino

2012-01-04T18:32:00.000-05:00

Celebrating the new year is one of the things that I've yet to find a way to fuck up.

My roommate and I hadn't heard of anything fun going on, so we decided to throw a party. It wasn't too crazy or anything, maybe 30 people were there at its climax, but it was pretty fun and there were minimal disasters. Here's just a couple random pictures from the night that I liked:

Things were pretty gross the next morning, as you can see, and it took a couple days to get the house back in shape:

2011-12-23T12:12:00.000-05:00

My girlfriend has this problem where she will become unhappy about where she is suddenly and without warning.

Most recently this happened at a friend's birthday party. Everything seemed to be going well, Sarah was off talking to people and enjoying herself, when, out of nowhere, this happened:

Unbridled misery at a birthday party.

Playing with this theme of misplaced disinterest, some friends began making these pictures and posting them on her Facebook wall, which I've decided to share below:

Oh, and on a side note, I'm a college graduate now! Wooo!

2011-12-05T23:55:00.001-05:00

This is mostly just a photo dump of some things I've been doing since it started being cold out. I swear I'll get back to posting regularly when I graduate (in 2 weeks!).

Making hot whiskey drinks

Cooking fall-based dishes

Playing board games (this one is Confusion, which is like a mix of Guess Who and Chess)

Playing a lot of Skyrim. This is my girlfriend Sarah, just after killing her first dragon

These next two pictures are of ornaments that Sarah made for me with pictures of my friends and I

2011-11-16T14:15:00.001-05:00

I decided to be Matt Smith (from Doctor Who) for Halloween this year, and turned out to be one of the greatest costumes imaginable. Not only did I not have to look gross or wear uncomfortable clothes, but I was approached all night by women who nerded out with me about the show. I wish I had better pictures, but these are really the only two good ones from the night:

2011-11-16T13:15:00.001-05:00

Some friends of mine like to spend their Sundays drinking during the day and finding adventures. They call it "Day Drunk", and I occasionally participate. A few Sunday's back, while hanging out with them, my roommate found a Groupon which gives the purchaser $299 worth of JCPenny portraits for only $40. We all agreed to use it as a group, and signed a piece of paper to make it official.

This last Sunday we finally go around to taking our Day Drunk group photos, and here they are. Enjoy:

We made Christmas cards out of this one

Afterwards we went to a place called Fun Station, which has mini-golf, go karts, and lazer tag - all for $1.50 each. My girlfriend was responsible for taking pictures so, of course, we only got these two:

2011-09-03T20:22:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I decided to make some pasta sauce from scratch. And by "from scratch" I don't mean that I bought some canned tomatoes either. No sir, I'm talking old Italian woman living on a tomato vineyard scratch.

I bought 4lbs of tomatoes, skinned them, chopped and deseeded them, and let them simmer in a bath of spices and vegetables for about 3 hours. It was seriously the best sauce I've ever had.

2011-07-26T23:31:00.003-04:00

Last week my new roommate, Annalise, made breakfast for dinner as a sort of going away party for her old house... and it was awesome:

I also discovered a new way to party last weekend. That sentence sounds weird, I know, but bear with me. I went to what is called a "silent disco", and basically what you do is pay $1 to rent special headphones that broadcast what the DJs at the party are playing. The headphones have three channels, which allow you to tune in to any one of the three DJs who are playing.

The particular party I was at was in a person's back yard, and had maybe 75-100 people at it. I really wanted a picture of everyone wearing the headphones, but unfortunately all I have is a picture my girlfriend took of me on her phone:

It was really fun taking the headphones off, and listening to everyone sing and dance to different songs, then putting the headphones back on and trying to figure out who was singing/dancing to which channel.

Hopefully I'm not terribly late on the idea of silent discos and embarrassing myself here, but I was sort of amazed by the whole thing.

2011-07-14T20:45:00.002-04:00

As a Floridian, I'm used to it being at or near 100 degrees pretty much every day during the summer. What I am not used to is it being that temperature inside my house...

A week after an AC guy did his 6 month checkup and said things were fine with my AC unit, my AC unit decided it didn't have to listen to what AC guys say, and was through cooling my house.

After a few calls, some AC repair men said they were going to come give me a new unit (which is awesome, because my old one was, well, very old and loud), but they were busy this week so it would take like 4 days before I could have AC again.

Enter what I like to call: "Four days of wondering how the hell anyone lived so close to the equator without air conditioning"

I had to sit with a fan literally a foot away from me on full blast to even come close to being relatively comfortable.

Anyway, the AC guys came, finally, last Monday. I left for class while they were working on it and, when I got out of class, I noticed I had a voice mail which went a little something like this (in an angry, old man, southern accent):

"Travis, you need to give the utilities people a call, your damn power went out! We can't do anything until they turn it back on. Give me a call when you get this"

In the two years I've lived in this house I've never not paid my electric bill on time. Of all the fucking months to not pay, and of all the fucking days to get it shut off...

I paid right away, but it still took the utilities people around 30 hours after that to turn my power back on. When I called the power company (for the second time) and asked what was taking so long, they said it was due to what they called a "glitch in the computer", which is what I call "a bullshit excuse people use when they fuck up and don't want to take responsibility".

Anyway, they eventually turned it back on, and the AC guys eventually came back and installed a new (and quiet!) air conditioner.

They even gave me a new thermostat which gives a digital read-out of the temperature in my house. Here is what it had to say:

94 degrees!!

2011-07-10T17:23:00.003-04:00

So Bank of America finally got back to me about my stolen credit card. The verdict? I get all $400 credited back to me! Thank god too. I was starting to get pretty nervous that all the free wine the burglar had shipped to my house (that I drank) was going to turn into, well, normal wine that costs money, and, as we all know, that is the worst kind of wine. Or anything really.

I guess I should throw something in here about 4th of July too. It was fun, but not too crazy. We just went to a pool for a few hours, drank some beer, and took some jello shots.

Then, after a couple hours we went to Adina's to, you guessed it, play board games.

2011-07-09T12:38:00.001-04:00

I recently bought this awesome poster from http://postertext.com/

It's a depiction of the scene in Don Quixote where he attacks the windmill, only, when you look closer it is actually the first 24 chapters of the book.

Normally the posters contain the entire text of whatever book they are from, and I was hoping they'd find some way to squeeze all 900 pages on a poster, but... I guess that's asking for a bit much.

2011-06-29T21:51:00.005-04:00

A few posts back I talked about how I had bought a board game called Settlers of Catan, and a game called Carcassonne. Well, since that time, not so long ago, I've become something of a board game addict.

Some friends and I started having a weekly "Dudes Day In" where we have brunch and play board games, and that has slowly convinced me to buy board game after board game. In the matter of just a couple months, my dining room now has this pile of games in the corner:

To be fair, the old game with duct tape is my roommates, and "Survive" is my girlfriend's game. The rest, however, are the products of my new addiction.

Right now, my favorite by far is Cosmic Encounters. My friends and I have been playing it nearly every day since I bought it a couple weeks back.

I even got my new roommate into it, which means we've been able to have some epic five player games. Essentially all you have to do in the game is attack other people's planets with UFOs, and play attack cards, with the highest number winning. Obviously there's a bit more to it, but that's the gist. What's so awesome about the game though is that you get to be one of 50 different aliens, all with different powers which change the rules of the game. The Filch alien lets you steal cards as long as no one is looking, Leviathan lets you drag planets around as space ships, The fungus lets you "adhere" to other people's ships, etc. Also, the art is awesome:

So if anyone out there has been wondering why I haven't been posting much lately, it's because I've just been having my fun through playing board games all the time, and it's hard to turn that into more than a couple of blog posts, max.

2011-06-21T16:18:00.001-04:00

I'm not exactly sure how, but my credit card info was stolen recently. Some minor purchases were made, then some larger, then some very large. I called my bank and reported it all, and they told me that it might help to call the businesses where the purchases were made. So I did.

One of those places was a winery. The lady gave me the number of the person who called (5284515122, which is a Mexico area code), and the fake E-mail address he used. Then, she gave me the address that all the wine would be shipped to... which, weirdly, was my address.

The only thing I can think is that they refused to send the wine to any address besides my credit card's billing address and, so as to not sound suspicious and just hang up, he just decided to go along with the transaction anyway.

Which brings me to the large delivery I got two days ago:

I also got some kind of crazy futuristic wine opener kit, a binder with wine facts, and some hoaky poster of people pretending to make and taste test wine.

The charge for the wine was taken off of my credit card already, and because no one called me about returning it, I decided to have a few friends and I dress up in suits and drink it after our Sunday brunch.

I kind of hate that I didn't take pictures of us drinking it, but just picture five people drinking wine and playing Cosmic Encounters in their Sunday best. We were all pretty wasted by like 4pm.

So, thank you burglar. I would like to dedicate my Sunday to you, and your unintentionally altruistic thievery.

2011-05-31T11:46:00.003-04:00

Bonnie Prince Billy is, hands down, my favorite musician. I have nearly every album he's ever made which, if you know anything about him, is saying a lot. I also used to randomly check dragcity.com to see if he had any tour dates within a few hour distance of my house (which is rarely).

You can imagine my surprise then, when I accidentally clicked on the "tours" button at pitchfork.com, and saw that Bonnie Prince Billy was doing a free Florida tour the following week.

The closest show was about 2 hours away, in Gainesville, so I rented a car and called a couple friends who I thought would be interested.

Then, the day of the show I got a text from one of my friends that said Bonnie Prince Billy was in our radio station right now, about to play a live set on air.

I rushed over and got to watch the whole thing from the DJ booth... and it was awesome. It was like a personal show for me and the other 5 people in the booth (and, I guess, anyone who was listening on air... but I was there).

After the set we rushed down to Gainesville, only to arrive after it sold out (the venue was a really small record store, and because it was free it was first come first serve). Sadly, this is what we had to watch the show on:

In case you can't tell, that's a small TV in the window of the record store showing, live, the show going on inside. It actually wasn't that terrible to watch, but the sound was kind of quiet, and it was also slightly depressing knowing he was in the flesh just a few feet behind the TV, and that that area was completely inaccessible to me.

It was still a really fun trip though. One of the guys I drove down with, Manley, has done a few DJ gigs in Gainesville, so we went out that night and got some free drinks, and didn't have to pay a single cover thanks to him knowing everyone.

2011-04-27T14:16:00.001-04:00

I spent Easter drinking mimosas, playing board games, and hanging out in kiddie pools with some friends. It was pretty awesome!

Sarah didn't last long

Luckily, Manley drew her back out with the promise of more beer.

2011-04-23T18:49:00.000-04:00

I've been getting really into board games recently. A few weeks ago I bought a game called Settlers of Catan, where you trade resources with other players and try to use them to build settlements, cities and roads. It doesn't sound terribly exciting when I write it out like that, but trust me, it's a lot of fun.


Settlers of Catan

So much fun, in fact, that I bought another game called Carcassonne. It looks pretty similar to Settlers, but the gameplay is pretty different. With Carcassonne you take turns flipping and placing pieces of a map onto the table. You also have little wooden guys that you can place on the map to collect points for completed roads/cities/farms.

Carassonne

I'm trying not to go too crazy with what is probably a phase I'm going through, so I've been resisting buying more games than those two. However, I really want a game called Merchants and Marauders. It looks like Settlers of Catan meets an RPG at sea:

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2011-04-05T23:55:00.006-04:00

I blogged about my trip to Orlando days after it happened, and yet I completely forgot that I went to New York for spring break the week before!

I'd like to pretend that my life is just so interesting that things like that slipping my mind are justified, but honestly, I think it says more about my memory.

So...

I went to New York with Sarah for spring break!

I bought Sarah a ticket for her birthday/Christmas presents because she's got something of a thing for the Big Apple. I've always wanted to go, and my friend Tim kindly agreed to letting Sarah and I stay with him and his girlfriend Alison for the week, so spring break seemed like the perfect time.

Looking back at the trip from this three week distance, I'm probably going to recount a near parody of the trip's events. But, I'm going to try my hardest to at least hit the highlights.

There were a lot of bars. The first night my friend Tim, who we were staying with, brought us to a bar where he knew the DJ, which meant free drink tickets.

I'm pretty sure I met with my friend Max the next night. First we went to a pretty awesome bar called Barcade. Like its name implies, it was a bar/arcade hybrid (read: my kind of place). Then we tried to go to a standup show, but Aziz Ansari (from Parks and Recreation) ended up being there, so it sold out. Dismayed, Max then brought us to some bar where there are honest-to-goodness ski ball leagues. They were having a tournament while we were there, so we watched them for a bit, and played a few games of our own. Then, before heading home, Max brought us to this awesome bar that gives a free pizza for every beer you drink, called Alligator bar.

Pineapple for the win!

The next day I think we went to the Museum of Natural History. It was pretty cool overall. My only complaint really is that I thought dinosaurs were bigger. Like, a lot bigger.

Hollywood is probably to blame here, but I seriously pictured a T-rex being nearly, if not actually, three stories tall. He was barely two... So, to be honest, I'm not really sure why the people in Jurassic Park were so scared.


Pft

Getting there in height, but uh.. herbivores aren't scary no matter their size

More scary than the T-rex, in fact, were the bones of some odd money/human hybrid thing holding a spear... I never figured out what it was, but if I ever saw one scampering around my house holding that little bamboo pole I would shit myself.

Maybe it's just a baby? If so, babies are fucking terrifying underneath their skin

There were some other cool random things there too:


The Deer God from Princess Mononoke

Satan

A Plesiosaur! My favorite dinosaur


And, of course, Rhinos

The next day Sarah and I met up with Arlen, Dan, and some other friends from New York/Tallahassee at a bar where my aforementioned friend, Max, was throwing a comedy/karaoke show. It was an open mic night, but if you sucked at comedy they forced you to do karaoke, and vice versa.

After that we all met with Tim and Alison at another bar because it was Tim's B-day! Everyone got really drunk, a few people did karaoke, and it was a really good night over all.

A $10 minimum bar tab is hard to meet when Highlife tall boys are $2

I'm sort of losing steam here... there was another half week worth of stuff but I'm not sure that the length of this blog entry is proportional to the amount of interesting things inside of it. Basically we went to more bars, some scary drunk guy almost beat me up in the subway, Sarah, Tim and I went to the Aquarium, Sarah and I went to her friend's AA meeting in a giant church with hundreds of people in attendance, we went to central park, and on the last night Sarah and I went to a restaurant with Tim and his friend and we got free food, and a free sample of one of every beer that they brew there.

Phew, I'm out of breath just from typing that sentence. Here's some pictures:


Some trees...

Different trees... this time in Central Park

Obligatory Times Square shot

At the aquarium

Beer samples and Tim being possessed


Skyline park, which is an old train track turned park

It rained a lot while we were there...


A LOT

Oh, I also got to see some standup by Jay Pharaoh from SNL (which wasn't that good) and had my mind blown from a performance by Reggie Watts. He does all improvised music/comedy stuff. It was as much performance art as it was comedy really... here's a video of him I found, doing his thing:

2011-03-30T12:23:00.003-04:00

This weekend Sarah and I went to Islands of Adventure to see Harry Potter Island.

Butterbeer!

It was really awesome. Maybe it was just because of how new everything was, but everything seemed much, much more well done in in Harry Potter Island than anywhere else in the park.

Everything went really well with the trip, except that the only room left at the Travelodge we stayed at was a suite, which cost almost three times what a normal room costs.

I've never stayed in a suite before, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Hot tubs? Stripper poles? Mirrors on the ceiling?

Nope. After I walked into the room I realized that a suite, to Travelodge, means nothing more than an open door between two hotel rooms, some couches in one instead of a bed, and a "bar" (shelves nailed to a wall, with a sink below them) and tacky 1970's martini glasses. Not to be discouraged, we made the most of it by drinking our PBR out of the martini glasses and ordering too much Chinese food while watching terrible television shows.

After Islands of Adventure, we drove down to my mom's house in Merritt Island. I met my Mom's new boyfriend (Jeff) and kitten (Stanley), and tried to kill time until Sunday night, when Beth Branches was playing a show at a place called 321 Local. Beth is dating my friend Dan Bynum, who I went to Paris with a few years back (the details of which can be found in the very first posts of this blog!). She does the whole singer/songwriter thing (of which I'm partial), and her show was part of the reason Sarah and I drove down to Brevard. Here's a clip from that night:

Unfortunately Sarah had class Monday morning, so I had to leave the show around 2am and get on the road back home.

2011-02-22T20:57:00.000-05:00

So true...

2011-02-21T11:07:00.005-05:00

Last night I had the privilege of seeing Jonathan Richman perform on campus. I tried to take some pictures to post on here, but they all more or less turned out like this:

So, instead, here's a youtube video I found of him playing on Conan:

It was seriously a shame how few people showed up. Maybe 50, tops. And as much as that sucks for Jonathan Richman's wallet/pride/whatever, it was great for me. I got to stand right up front, and everyone who was there was really into the show. Oh, and he sounded awesome.

2011-02-17T16:04:00.006-05:00

What I've been up to:

I ate like a king for the Super Bowl. This is seriously just a fraction of what me and the four people I was with made:

I saw Wavves and Best Coast, and while I don't especially care for either band, it was a great show:

Sarah and I celebrated Valentines day last Sunday. We went to a Hibachi place for dinner, then we went to The Engine Room where this terribly goofy picture was taken of us:

Sarah's gift to me for Valentines day was an awesome picture of us riding a tandem bike on an alien planet with our friend Doctor Who trailing behind us in his TARDIS (the phone booth):

And lastly, my strawberry plant is almost done making its first strawberry! I started growing a few plants about a year ago, and I'm still not over the fact that I just have to put a seed into dirt, and then stuff I can eat just... appears. Anyway, here he is:

UPDATE: More strawberries!

2011-01-06T22:23:00.005-05:00

For Christmas this year, I ordered Sarah a two-headed taxidermy duckling from a shop on Etsy.

Even though I placed the order pretty early in December, January rolled around and I still found myself duckless. I E-mailed the guy I bought them from, explained the situation, and he kindly offered to send me another.

But still no luck! After even more shipping confusion (I ordered it from China), and even more waiting, it finally came! Both its, actually. Somehow the long lost original duck, and its not-quite-as-long lost twin found their way to my house this afternoon... and here they are:

I think they turned out as awesome as they are creepy. I was honestly a bit scared to touch them at first.

More importantly than all that though, I think Sarah liked them!

2011-01-04T16:14:00.008-05:00

2011 is here, making it about 3 and a half years since I started this thing. At this point I'm certain this blog will one day either prove to be incredibly embarrassing/incriminating, or help launch my million dollar career, in which I write about, and post pictures of, myself.

Only time will tell.

My new years eve celebration was great. I started at Sarah's house, moved to my friend Jessica's, then finished the night at Menace Beach. Quite a few parts are blurry but, really, it was expected. I mean, who wants to time travel sober? I'm not even sure it's possible to be quite honest.

I don't want to overfill this with pictures, so I hope you get the idea I'm trying to express with these two. Namely: I looked awesome.

On to more recent events: Today was the first day of class for my last semester as a philosophy major. I've got some pretty big life decisions to make in the next couple weeks involving my future scholastic career, but this blog has never been a place for my personal dilemmas, so suffice it to say that things are in some ways stressful. However, my classes this semester seem great. Sarah and I have one together called "Religion: Society and Self" in which the teacher called South Park the greatest conceptual show of all time. So, despite having to buy eight books for it, it should be fun. And my other classes are Metaphysics, Epistemology, and a senior seminar on Kant's book "Critique of Pure Reason" and they all seem really interesting so far too.

So, here's to another year. Hopefully it's as good as the last few!

2010-12-27T14:13:00.002-05:00

It's been a while! And because of this, a few things have happened which I'm going to try to blog about all at once.

Let's see. First on the list, at least chronologically, is that I got straight As this semester. I know, thank you.

Next, in celebration of school being out, some friends and I went to North Carolina and hid out for part of our Christmas break in a wintry cabin mansion. With snow!

It was a lot of fun, but the internet was terrible. I wont go into a ton of detail about the week we spent there just because we basically did the same things every day. We watched terrible TV, played pool, sledded down cliffs, and ate great food (prepared mostly by the wonderful Chef Sarah). But, despite the amazing view and luxuries, I was glad to get back to civilization after our week of "ruffin it" with our terribly slow internet (I'd say I'm only about 75% joking here).

After our 12 hour drive home, I relaxed for a day then drove Sarah the 5 hours down to Sarasota to celebrate her birthday with her. There was, however, some terrible miscommunication (or, lack of communication) resulting in there being nothing to do for Sarah's birthday except for going to a party with her sister, Paul, and Michaelene that was filled with kids who none of us really knew, in which one of the kids we didn't know gave awards to the other kids (who were apparently his friends) for things that they've done throughout the year (like, having the best boobs [which Sarah's older sister won for the second year in a row], largest balls [which we all got to see], or best drunk driving experience [the winner being a girl who got on the wrong side of the interstate while under the influence]). It was weird. But, there were free cases of beer everywhere, so it wasn't terrible.

After about an hour of being at this strange party/award ceremony, Michaelene said something about being tired and how she was going to suggest we all just get drunk and hang out in her hot tub instead of going to this party, and that now she sort of wish she had done that. My ears perked up on the mentioned of hot tub, and everyone else agreed that we should blow the strange place we were at for an underwear hot tub night. Sarah, Michaelene, and I stole as many beers as we could before leaving, and went to Michaelene's house, where we pulled off our plan flawlessly by a combination of stripping and drinking. We exchanged our most embarrassing drunk stories, listened to some bad radio rap, and let our fingers and toes artificially age before leaving Michaelene's and going to McDonald's.

It was sort of nice out when we got our food, so Paul suggested we have a picnic on our cars in the parking lot of McDonalds. So... that's how we ended our night: with a picnic at McDonalds.

The next day, I had a 4 hour drive ahead of me to get to my Mom's house.

It really sucked. What should have been a 3 hour drive became 4 because I do this (apparently weird, I'm told) thing where I either argue or explain things to people who aren't there when I'm alone and hopped up on caffeine. This time I got so into whatever I was talking about that I missed my exit and drove for almost 30 mins before realizing it.

Eventually I made it to my mom's though. The next couple days I spent relaxing, and not really doing much of anything. For Christmas, my mom bought me a really nice, tiny digital camera and a $100 gift certificate to H&M. Thanks mom!... Just kidding, I don't think she really reads this. In fact, I sort of hope she doesn't.

Oh, and it's probably worth mentioning that I got those presents on Christmas eve, because my sister is a creepily old for her age. She is 14, but she bought all of her own presents on money given to her by my mom. Then she wrapped them all herself, then opened them back up and pretended to be surprised for the camera on Christmas eve, all because she didn't feel like getting up early on Christmas.

Christmas day was especially awesome thanks to my being able to sleep in, and there being a 24 hour Doctor Who marathon on BBC, followed by an awesome Christmas special. Also, I don't want to jinx anything here, but my sister watched the special with me, and I think she may have liked it...

And... other than the 5 hour drive home yesterday, I think that catches us up. New Years eve is in a couple days, and I'm looking forward to going pretty big with whatever friends decide to spend it up here. Also, since I finally have a camera again, I should have some pretty cool pictures to put up here too.

2010-11-03T20:13:00.001-04:00

Two weekends ago Sarah and I entered a Halloween race called "Talloween". In the race you have to go places marked on a map, then do some task there to get a stamp to prove you were there. One place had us drinking gross liquids, at another we had to go through a haunted house, etc... Anyway, out of the over seventy people who entered, Sarah and I got 5th place. Not only that, but Sarah was the first female to finish... My girlfriend is buff.

Then, this last weekend, Daniel, Dan, Dennis and I drove 15 hours up to Washington D.C. for the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. It was pretty amazing. The crowd estimate was around 215,000 people, and it really made me realize how little grasp I have of physical representations of numbers. It was a literal sea of people, expanding to the edge of my sight in every direction. If you click on the picture below, you'll get a full sized version with a nice red arrow pointing to where I was.

We tried to drive home the night after the rally but God/fate/nature/the universe had it out for us. First we were locked out of Daniel's cousin's apartment complex, which had all of our stuff. His cousin and his cousin's roommate weren't answering their phones, so we tried everything to get in... I even scaled the wall to their second story porch (only to find out it was locked).

We gave up on the apartment, and tried calling hotels. But, guess what, no hotel in the area had vacancies. It was almost as if there were a lot of people in town for some reason... Hm. So, we depressingly decided to sleep in the car. Let me tell ya, even though its still in the 80s in Tallahassee, DC is fucking cold.

The sleeping in the car plan lasted for all of 5 minutes, until we decided to just drive. Somewhere. Anywhere. After some time we got out of town and found a hotel that had one available room (for $300). We weren't yet that desperate, so we drove on. Luckily the next hotel we found was offering a room for the low(ish) price of $140 a night! Deal. We slept, finally got out stuff from Daniel's cousin the next morning, and got on the road to leave by 11am...

And stayed there for a long time. Turns out that Sunday was some giant bike race where they close roads and block highway exits. This, mixed with the 215,000 odd people on the highway trying to leave caused quite the traffic jam. It took us something like two hours to get out of DC (which should have taken 15 mins).

But traffic cleared up, and everything started going smoothly... And the next 4 hours went relatively smoothly too... until our tire blew. "Luckily" it we were right outside of where Daniel and I were dropping off Dennis and Dan, in Raleigh NC. So, after we threw a spare on the car we headed to their place and spent the night.

The next day, we got a new tire and FINALLY got on the road and finished our remaining 10 hour trip.

Despite all the shenanigans in getting home though, the trip was still totally worth it.

2010-10-19T17:07:00.006-04:00

Last Sunday was the season finale of Mad Men. In celebration of the event, a few of us got together the Saturday before and dressed in our nicest 60's clothes, listened to 60's music, and drank enough to make Don Draper proud.

2010-10-12T01:09:00.006-04:00

I fermented some grape juice this last weekend.

Despite how gross the fermentation process was, the purple drank turned out pretty good.

2010-09-29T13:09:00.007-04:00

I just reserved the above cabin in North Carolina for the week before Christmas! And I'm taking Daniel, Dan, Sarah, Arlen, and Adina with me!

According to the site there's five nearby vineyards, skiing, and, as the above picture shows, it might be snowing!

2010-09-27T15:03:00.007-04:00

I was CocoRosie last night and they were amazing. In fact, it was one of the best shows I've been to in a while thanks, largely in part, to their beat boxer.

2010-09-22T12:16:00.004-04:00

Today is World Rhino Day!

2010-09-18T16:06:00.007-04:00

Last weekend Sarah and I went to Orlando to see Crystal Castles.

I still don't have a camera so I only have a couple pictures to post (from Sarah's camera). The show was great, and we had a hotel right around the corner of the venue which was an excuse to get especially wasted.

The next morning we were pretty hung over, which is why you see Sarah drinking melted ice in the below picture:

Later that day we went to the Florida Mall, ate some Chipotle, drove to Brevard, ate dinner with my mom, and saw the Green Goblyn Project play.

2010-09-05T17:06:00.007-04:00

Yesterday I found the game Kane & Lynch 2 in my bedroom, with a note from my wonderful girlfriend saying "Just because".

There's nothing more romantic than the gift of gratuitous violence.

Speaking of which, I, coincidentally, bought her a hatchet earlier this week and had been waiting for a good time to give it to her... which turned out to be last night.

She's wanted a hatchet for a while but for some odd reason her dad would never buy her one. In other news, we were drunk last night and she started swinging it around in the house and dropped it.

2010-08-19T18:04:00.013-04:00

Last weekend I made my third trip into New Orleans. The trip was somewhat random: Daniel said he and Adina were going and wanted to know if Sarah and I would like to tag along and, of course, we said yes.

It was pretty similar to the other times I've been, except that this was Sarah's first time there. We got into town later than we expected, as usual, and drank with Mike and Drew (who graciously hosted all four of us) until around 5 in the morning.

The next day we went to a place called Camellia Grill for breakfast.

There aren't any tables in the restaurant, only a long bar, so there's only room for something like 20 people to sit. After a pretty long wait we got seats and fist bumped the waiter. Apparently fist bumping is like... their thing. Throughout breakfast, you're repeatedly asked to fist bump and perform a call-and-response conversation with the waiters. As in "Ya'll like that food hm? Can I get an 'mmmmmm!'?" to which we would 'mmmmmm', to which he presents his fist, to which we then bump.

After that we got some gelato at a shop whose name I can't remember. It had strange flavors, like coconut basil and white sangria. I got the sangria, which has alcohol in it. Ironically, this was the only time I or anyone else was carded the entire trip. We walked around a bit more, made it back to the car, stopped at a daiquiri place on the way to Mike and Drew's and then drank daiquiris and swam in their pool (where I lost my contacts and, for the rest of the trip, had to wear Mike's glasses).

At nightfall we went to a couple bars, then met up with Adina's friend at some two story bar that had a DJ upstairs. We did that for a bit, went home, drank a little more, then got in bed, again, around 5am.

The next morning we went to an all-you-can-eat breakfast place called Lil' Dizzy's that served all-you-can-drink mimosas. The restaurant itself was in an old bank, and there was even seating in the vault. Also, all around the walls is a giant mural depicting a bank robbery. Pretty cool stuff. Because we had to get up pretty early to make their breakfast hours, after we finished eating we went back to Mike and Drew's and went back to bed for a few hours.

Later we ate dinner at a bar/hamburger place whose name is escaping me at the moment, and I think we just went back to Mike and Drew's and watched TV and drank after that.

The next morning we went to Napoleon Cafe, I got an awesome Po' Boy sandwich, and then we hit the rode for Tallahassee!

2010-07-22T12:00:00.004-04:00

Seriously?

Apparently this lady beat me by a year in having a blog dedicated to her porn store stories. I guess NPR found it, interviewed her about it, then her shit blew up and she got a book deal.

2010-07-15T16:37:00.005-04:00

This popped up on my Facebook page today.

2010-07-07T08:54:00.009-04:00

The last couple weeks:

I gave Manley a tattoo for his birthday:

And I gave Dave a tattoo on his side just because:

Then, on the 26th, some people came into town for my/Manley's/Wolfy's/Santiago's birthday, and the Hydra played

2010-06-15T11:03:00.006-04:00

I gamble a lot. Not so much in the typical ways, with cards and roulette wheels, but on the mundane.

"What is that guy's name? Don? I think its Don."
"Dinner tomorrow says it isn't."
"You're on!"

Usually the betting takes place versus Daniel, and usually I win. There are times, however, when I don't...

Believe it or not, that alien-esc face belongs to me. I had to shave my beard into a mustache because I lost a game of ping pong... and I'm more than a little embarrassed to leave the house right now.

2010-06-07T11:52:00.012-04:00

Last Saturday Sarah, Daniel, and I drank some whiskey at Sarah's until around 1am. We got wasted, hung out, then Daniel went home.

Once he was gone, Sarah and I started to get fresh on her couch. We made out, started to take our clothes off, and then I realized the blinds were open. So, I quickly got up, tried to close them (accidentally leaving a corner open still) and went back to business.

Here is where things get weird. Sarah and I are having sex, and suddenly we hear a knock on the door. It's only been about 20 minutes since Daniel left, and it was on a bike so I thought maybe he had a flat or something. I tell Sarah to go to her room, and I quickly pull up some shorts that were lying on the ground. Then I opened the door.

To my surprise, a large, dreaded (as in his hair style, not my fear of him) black man was standing in front of me. Then, before I could speak, he placed his hand on the door, pushed it open, walked inside, turned around, closed the door, and locked the deadbolt.

I'm about to die, I thought, or possibly witness a rape.

"Yo man, where's that girl?" Said the dreaded man (dreaded now referring to both his hair, and my fear of him).

Rape it is.

"She's in her room, but how about you tell me what you want" I responded, doing my best impersonation of someone who isn't scared shitless.

He sort of laughs and slurs something that I think sounds like "something something ecstasy something something roxies". I decide that this would be too strange of a selling method for a drug dealer, so I assume I've misheard or misinterpreted him in some way. Maybe he was alluding to what he was about to do, like "I'm in ecstasy for your girlfriend, she's so foxy". Or perhaps he's really some kind-hearted soul, bursting in from the night to offer relationship advice, as in "Treat her wrong, she'll be your ex, you see? I know I'm a stranger, but trust me." Too much of a stretch? Maybe, but given the circumstances, who knows?

We have a continued back-and-forth, consisting of mumbles, and questions over the dreaded man's intent, from him and I respectively. As this was happening, he was making his way, oddly, to my girlfriend's door.

Now, I said "oddly" just then because, as far as I know, this man has never been in Sarah's house before. So, to know where her room is, seems sort of, well, odd. That is, unless he had been watching us have sex through the unclosed portion of the blinds, and saw where Sarah nakedly ran off to.

Back to the story: He begins to say something about being the neighbor, and at this moment we are in front of Sarah's room. She, not expecting the visitor to parade into her room, didn't lock or even close her door. So, as he grabbed the door and began to push it open, I had to place my hand over his and pull it shut. This happened twice, all the while I'm saying "She's not dressed, just tell me what you want and maybe I can help you."

You may be thinking that telling this man that my girlfriend is naked behind an unlocked door, a person whose list of possible intentions includes "rape", was not the best of ideas. So, it should be noted that all of this has, thus far, taken place in a minute or less. I didn't have much time to think.

After the second forced closure of the door, the man said to me "mumble mumble don't believe mumble mumble hear it from her."

So, I said "Sarah, are you dressed?"

To which she responded "NO!"

He chuckled, I thought I heard the words "ecstasy" and "roxies" again, and Sarah slammed the door open, wearing some night gown.

"Ey, I'm your neighbor, you know me, right girl?" said the man, in an oddly discernible manner.

"Yes, I've seen you before, and I'm going to make this easy; Leave or I'll call the cops. I don't want to have problems with the neighbors, you guys are cool, just leave."

"Nah girl, I just got these here pills of ecstasy, and I wanna trade 'em for some roxies."

I turns out what seemed to be the least plausible of my guesses was true. It appears the man was attempting, possibly for the first time in history, a B & EDD: Breaking and entering drug deal. And a very specific one at that. I don't know the rates of roxie abuse in America, but I would guess it's at or below 1% of the general population. Assuming this is true, the man would have to break into, on average, 100 homes before finding someone who is able to fulfill the requisites of his drug-barter. And that's assuming they even wanted to trade their roxies for ecstasy in the first place. I mean, I can't imagine anyone going out of their way to buy some 20$ pills, only to hold on to them in hopes that someone would break into their house and offer a trade for a different, comparably priced drug. But I digress.

Sarah began to literally push the man towards the door, all the while saying something like "Come on, just leave and I wont call the cops. I want us to be cool," while he, indirectly pointing out how non-threatening I am, kept saying "I liked him (referring to me) better, I wanna talk to him".

She got the man to the door, pushed him out, locked all the locks, fixed the blinds, turned out all the lights, and we frightfully laid in bed hoping that it was all over. And it was.

The next morning we found an empty bottle of liquor in the yard and, other than Sarah seeing him out the window a couple times, we've not heard from the guy again. Either he A) doesn't remember our encounter, or B) he's embarrassed over the whole ordeal (I mean, don't you hate it when you get wasted and do something stupid. Like... spy on a couple having sex, then break into their house under the possibly false cover of wanting to drug swap?).

And that was my Saturday night.

2010-05-25T17:38:00.008-04:00

I went to Brevard with Sarah this weekend. It was fun, Sarah got to meet my mom and sister, then we got a hotel in Orlando, checked out some bars, went to Wet 'n Wild, and toured the Brevard Zoo (where I got to see some Rhinos and some turtles makin' babies!)

2010-05-25T12:28:00.004-04:00

Dan got a tattoo based on a drawing I made based on an idea he had...

2010-05-15T17:39:00.007-04:00

A friend of mine made some shirts based on a picture Daniel took in Paris. Here is a picture of my friend Lauren wearing one:

2010-04-29T18:03:00.015-04:00

Here's what I've been up to the last couple weeks.

I bought a ping pong table.

Grilled some amazing food in my back yard.

Went to a pool party full of blow-up animals and boats.

Went to a block party in my former apartment turned fraternity.

Went to a huge party at the black fraternity next to my house (where a group of girls pinched my ass and told me I was adorable).

Had multiple days of lounging by the Villa Christina's pool.

I did a photo shoot for some swimsuits.

I went to a few bars.

And, finally, I saw Vieux Farka Toure and Beach House live... for free! (Thanks Manley!)

2010-04-15T17:07:00.008-04:00

I went to Bear Paw on Sunday and floated down the river with some friends. We utilized our floating cooler, and got extremely drunk for four hours. Daniel has recently become single and was supposed to come but, as usual, slept in and missed the whole thing. I mention him being single because, hilariously, the trip ended up being 12 girls and 3 guys. In other words it's exactly where a recently singled guy should be.

Then on Monday my friends Wolfy and Xtian came to town for a night. I got crazy drunk and decided, once incapacitated, to play a sober Daniel in pool to see who gets the master bedroom. Not only did I lose badly, but I cut my finger kinda bad on the pool table.

Tuesday I was extremely hung over.

And today, Thursday, I am... wait for it... buying a ping pong table!! I played for the first time at a pool the other day (Friday?) and loved it. So... now I'm buying one for the back yard!

2010-04-12T17:34:00.005-04:00

I love Carl Sagan.

2010-04-10T14:11:00.008-04:00

So I busted my toe nail on my bike's kick stand yesterday, making it the third nail I've busted in as many months. I hate my overly-long appendages.

Also - I went to a random party last night that was doing "Beerfest", which was some guys I didn't know that got together for a drinking contest. My friends and I signed up and chose to represent the country of Kenya. The first game was a chugging contest, where the contestants had to drink beer out of a 28 ounce plastic boot. The first team did really well, especially the first team mate who downed his boot in what had to be close to 5 seconds. Then, after they finished, one of the members started puking everywhere.

Then Team Kenya was up. Sarah went first and, being a girl, she only had to drink half the boot, which she did extremely fast. Then it was up to me and... well it took me probably close to 2 minutes. BUT- I didn't puke... That is important. Then it was to Dan, and he chugged his beer super quick.

When the third team started, D. Schleith told Sarah that if she blew cigarette smoke into the chuggers face, it'll make him puke. So... that's what she did. Then Dan joined in and, sure enough, the guy chugging blew chunks everywhere. It was ridiculous. I decided then that our team should be sub-named Team NoPuke.

Then there was flip cup, which we placed second in. And then there was a game where you have to chug beer from a hollow baseball bat and then spin for as long as it took you to drink the beer, then you have to try and hit a ball thrown at you with the bat. This was HARD. I chugged the beer in 11 seconds, spun 11 times, then stood up in what seemed like a perfect batter's stance... only to fall face first into the dirt, not even standing long enough to even try to swing at the ball. Luckily, the same thing happened to Sarah.

Oh, and on a weird note, some guy has gone missing while taking a walk on my street. ON MY STREET, as in the road that my house is on. So that's scary.

2010-04-07T22:47:00.006-04:00

Holy cow am I excited.

First: I just bought this awesome Bonnie 'Prince' Billy poster:

Maybe it would be slightly adolescent of me, but I'm thinking about getting a Dr. Who poster too. Wait. I should mention I've been drinking... In fact, I'm getting off Ebay right now. I'm a terrible drunk ebayer.

Second bit of excitement: I'm going to Bear Paw this weekend! It's a river where you sit on a raft and get drunk for 4 hours, while it lazily moves you to its end point. Dan and I went out to buy rafts today, and we ran across a baller floating cooler for only $15. It hold 24 beers and has like 4 or 5 cup holders around it. I can't wait!

2010-04-05T00:33:00.018-04:00

Sarah and I rode in a bike race this weekend called Tallentines.

It was a couples race, and it started with a 3 legged race from one end of a field to another, where the bikes were. You can see Sarah and I in the middle of the picture below:

The race was a whole lot of fun, and Sarah and I did the whole thing in something like 2 hours (which was really good). In fact, if we wouldn't have stupidly skipped one egg hunt, we would have actually placed.

Some of the checkpoints were to park at a bike shop, walk to a giant tree, climb the tree, and "be adorable". For Sarah, this meant trying to jump up the tree where I was, fail, hang for a moment, fall, and then kiss me from the ground. Another checkpoint was at a different bike shop, and we had to recite poetry to one another. At another we had to ride a certain distance with both of us on my bike, then Sarah and I had to play ukuleles and sing a song to the people at the checkpoint. We did Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, because we are, apparently, the least creative people in the world.

The end of the race was at Bread and Roses Co-op, and they set up an awesome prom dance type thing with punch, streamers, and lights.

Oh, and a tandem bike photo op:

The rest of the weekend was pretty good too. Friday I resigned the lease to my house. I'm going to be living with Daniel Schleith next semester (which means the landlord just crossed off Daniel Morales' last name from the least and wrote "Schleith" over top of it, haha). I'm hoping to get a third roommate to cheapen things up a bit, but even if we don't find one, things will still be pretty cool. I envision an amazing study room...

Then today, Sunday, Dan, Arlen, Justin, Sarah, and I went to the pool for a bit.

From there we went home, napped, then had a pretty delicious BBQ.

I'm so happy its not cold out any more!

2010-04-02T17:02:00.004-04:00

April 4th is coming, and we all know what that means... Whats that? Easter?! What the hell is wrong with you? I'm talking about the new season of Doctor Who!

I'm stupidly excited, and felt that the excitement should be expressed in a medium where, in 10 years time when I'm ashamed of said love of said show, I wont be able to deny who I was and be forced to live in shame.

Wait... that's not right.

What I meant to say was... Let's scratch that and start over.

Hi. So as you all probably (don't) know, I've got about a year left of college. This might not seem so soon to those of you on the "4 year plan", but to me, someone on the 8 year plan, it's inches away.

But then what? I'll have a fucking degree that will, in all likelihood, hinder my ability to land a job.

"Jesus Christ... a BA in Philosophy? If these are the kind of decisions he makes about his life, what kind will he make for my company??"

Which leads me to my current dilemma: Apply to Law School, or get my PhD in philosophy? There are pros and cons to both, but hot damn I wish I had more choices. I sort of don't want to do either, and change my mind about which I'd not like to do more almost by the hour.

Anyway, I guess that's all. I just drank some coffee and felt like writing and... this is what happens. I'm now going to wander around and clean the house until my buzz wears off.

2010-03-29T19:49:00.013-04:00

So this is a second part to my previous post.

When we last left our heroes, they had just gotten a rental car from a shack in a scary southern town where the repair men have no teeth and the tow truck drivers are named Bubba.

The GPS told us that we could make it to Atlanta in just under 2 hours. This would still give us enough time to eat and then see Joanna Newsom.

The ride was nice for the first hour. So nice that we actually shaved a bit of time off of our ETA. Then 5 o'clock rolled around.

Atlanta traffic is bad... really really bad. So bad that our ETA went from 6, to 7:15. We took back roads, but still got held up. The show started at 8:30, so we began to get worried.

By 7:30 we had arrived to Hadas' house, dropped off our stuff, and walked to a bar that had food in Little Five Points, right next to the venue. Hadas' friend Ciara and her friend met up with us, we all ate, and then we went to Joanna Newsom. It was an absolutely amazing show. Here's a video someone took that night of her awesome rendition of Peach, Plum, Pear:

Afterward, we went back to Hadas' and Ciara, Dan, Sarah, Arlen, Hadas and I walked to a club underneath a hotel that I stayed at one time when I saw Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. It was an "indie dance night" and had some weird robot theme in the corner where you could pose and get free beer.

We danced until 3am or so, until everyone left and the lights were turned on.

We had found out before the Joanna Newsom show that King Khan and the Shrines were playing Saturday, so we brainstormed on a way to be able to stay an extra day. This is what we came up with:

Drive the two hours BACK to Cardele, get Arlen's car from the shop, drop off the rental car, and drive back to Atlanta again.

So, we woke up around 9am the next day, got back in the car, and followed the plan. It all worked really well other than the horrible traffic that we ran into again, which added an extra hour to our trip back.

When we got back to Atlanta we went to Elmyr's, the best burrito place in the entire world, and then drove out to the club where King Khan was playing. The show was AWESOME. I'd put it in the top 10 of all time, no doubt about it. The venue was small, and we were literally in the very front. Here's a video from that night, and a picture of the gang plus the King:

After the show we went to a bar called The Graveyard that was down the street, met up with Hadas, and after a drink we went home.

We joked about "we're never going to leave, we're just going to find one show after another to stay for and get stuck here forever."

And, of course, we found a show to stay another day for: Major Lazer.

I mean... come on!

I had two papers due by Thursday, and staying for Major Lazer meant not getting home until Monday afternoon. I hadn't even started them yet... Everyone else had things to do too, so the next morning we decided it'd be best to leave and miss the show.

But, I must say... even though we missed the show, it was an awesome weekend!

2010-03-28T23:57:00.008-04:00

I don't typically title my posts, but if I did, this one would be called something like:

Bubba: the redneck savior.

and it might be subtitled something like:

The weekend that I spent most of my waking hours sitting in a car.

with the parenthetical:

(Snoozefest 2k10)

Allow me to elaborate. My roommate Dan, his girlfriend Arlen, Myself, and my girlfriend Sarah left for Atlanta at 10am Friday morning. The plan was to drive up early, check out some shops, see Joanna Newsom, and leave the next day.

That was the plan.

The first, and most glaring discrepancy between our ideal weekend and the weekend which actually happened, was the breakdown of our (Arlen's) car, just outside of Cordele GA. Haven't heard of Cordele? Well, that's because it's the cliche southern Georgia town. The kind you drive through and literally forget about the moment you leave. The kind where when you call numbers for a rental car because yours broke down just outside of town, you hear "We're sorry, the number you dialed is not in service", and when you call AAA to tow your car to a repair shop, you get a tow man named Bubba.

Which is a good place to start this post really; Bubba.

Already this post is a bit long, and I haven't really started it, so I'm going to try to summarize a bit. Let's see...

Arlen called for a tow truck and the company said that only two of us could ride with the driver, and the other two would have to call a cab. When we called a cab for a price quote, we were told it'd be $100. We decided that 100 is way to much, and that the best idea would be to play dumb when the tow truck driver came, and hope he would let us all pile in.

While we were waiting for Bubba, Sarah found a superhero toy on the ground outside the car. His name, Dr. Doom, was somewhat eerily homonymous with our feelings. It felt like an omen. We really wanted to see Joanna Newsom, but we were beginning to wonder if it was going to be possible to even get there on time, not to mention cheaply. We were Dr. Doomed.

Well, things turned around. Our tow truck driver came, and he was the nicest Bubba I have ever met. He looked a bit like Angus Young, and was even wearing a AC/DC hat. He told us (all) to hop in his truck, let the girls sit on our laps (no cab!), and drove us to the auto shop while Sarah creepily took photographs of him without asking.

Once we made it to the auto shop, a near-toothless man informed us that we needed a new alternator and the car would have to stay over night. The shop looked like this:

We decided to rent a car and try to race to Atlanta. When we finally found a place that had a car we could rent (which was much harder than it sounds), Bubba offered to give us a free ride over there in his tow truck.

The car rental place was literally just a small room, with something like 6 cars out front, but it served its purpose. We had a way to get to Atlanta. It was around 4pm at this point, so we got in the car and headed north.

And... I'm pretty tired. So I've just decided that this post is going to have to be a two parter. So much for brevity.

2010-03-17T14:47:00.008-04:00

I hate talking on the phone with people. There's maybe three really close friends that I can call and not have the conversation turn into an uncomfortable mess.

Sometimes, though, I have no choice but to talk to strangers.

My roommates and I got a notice from the city telling us to cut our lawn. It's uh... justified. If I were about 4 feet shorter, the weeds in our front yard would present themselves as a literal forest. We have these weeds that look like tiny trees and they take up about half of our yard... All winter they stayed super tiny, but in the two weeks since it started warming up they've shot up. Anyway, the city gave us 10 days to clean it all up, so I called a lawn maintenance place.

My biggest problem with calling companies like this, is I never know how to start the conversation. Example:

Secretary: Hi, this is Tallahassee Lawn care.
Me: Hi, uh... I would like my lawn mowed. Please.
Secretary: (giggle)

Ridiculous right? Well that wasn't a hypothetical. It's how I actually started the conversation. And I guess it should be noted that my tone is about a half octave higher than normal... it's my nervous polite voice.

Secretary: Okay, what services exactly would you like?
Me: Well, I need the grass and weeds cut and uh... The bushes like uh... made not ugly? I don't know the technical terminology for anything, I'm sorry.
Secretary: Trim the hedges, got it.
Me: Oh, right, trim the hedges, of course.
Secretary: I just need your name, address, and phone number so we can look at the lawn and give you an estimate.

Let me pull you out of this dialogue for a moment to explain something. I gave her my name and address, but I don't know my phone number. It's on my to-do list, okay? Anyway, I figured that I've sounded enough of a fool already, so I just can't bring myself to tell her that I don't know my own phone number. Solution? I made one up. Brilliant, I know. You don't have to tell me.

So we hung up and I texted my roommate asking him what my phone number was. He gave it to me and I had to (awkwardly, of course) call the lady back and tell her it'd be better if she called me at a different number.

Then I went on with my morning and made some coffee. As I was sipping it, enjoying my status as someone who isn't on a telephone, I step outside to check the weather. It is in this moment that I see the trees, plural, that have fallen into our back yard. This isn't new news to me, I've known they were there the two or three months since they've fallen... Our tentative plan was to just leave them and cut them up when they finish dying and use them as fire wood next winter. I just don't think about them that often. Anyway, they're not like branches or anything, it's a large pine tree, and some other slightly less large mystery trees. And they block the way to my back yard. I guess this whole part is to explain that I'm doubtlessly going to have a phone call from them, confusedly asking about our trees and me explaining in some awful way, like "Trees? hm... ohhhh, yes yes the treeeees. We were uh, just ignore them, mow around if you can. Oh, you can't get to the backyard. Well the city just mandated the front yard be mowed. Yes, the city. What's that? No, I said mandated. They left a note say- look, it's not important. Just mow what you can. Thank you."

2010-03-16T23:39:00.005-04:00

The first 150 people to pre-order the new Bonnie 'Prince' Billy album got this hand carved wine stopper...
This deal was posted at 10:30 this morning. I left for class... at exactly 10:30. So, when I went online at 3pm and saw the deal, they were already sold out!

God damn it.

2010-03-07T21:11:00.005-05:00

Ah, spring break. A time to roll up change, sit around, exercise, and hate your roommate, his girlfriend, your own girlfriend, your best friend, his girlfriend, and your ex girlfriend for all (coincidentally) going to California for spring break while you stay at home.

Speaking of rolling up change, I had a small trashcan about half full of change which (after an entire day of rolling it up) produced $371.50. Hot damn! I have no idea what to do with it, but I want it to be awesome.

And speaking of sitting around, I've been playing (and, as of last night, beat) Mass Effect while listening to podcasts. One podcast I was listening to (for some horrible, horrible reason) was about bizarre ways to die. They were all sort of funny or sad, like the kid who died by putting on way way too much deodorant every day... then there was this one. It's terrifying. Put shortly, some kids went camping and died. How? No one knows, but they tore through their tent from the inside, and 5 died not far from it by exposure. 4, however, died from their skulls and chest being crushed (but with no outward cuts or signs of injury). AND they were all radioactive. AND they had tanned faces, might have gone blind before death, their hair turned gray, and um... people were seeing UFOs around those parts at that time. Or course they were. I don't get scared easily, but I was terrified. In fact, I just got a little scared again writing about it... I need to stop watching Farscape and playing Mass Effect. Too much alien stuff in my brain.

And, lastly, I've been working out every day. This is mostly because Sarah thinks she can outrun me on the track on campus (hah!). She's so confident that she can win that we're racing when she gets back and whoever loses has to buy the other one dinner. I mean, talk about a foolish bet. I have the body of a god damn Kenyan. Sure she exercises every day, but look at me! I'm like a razor, able to slice straight through wind when I run. Anyway, I think her competitive spirit is adorable, and it gives me something to do during this boring, boring spring break.

2010-03-04T16:05:00.003-05:00

So I just told my landlord that I wont be able to sign the lease for next year, and I'm a little bummed about it... the place is super cheap and looks like how I imagine my grandparent's house would look in the 70s (which is awesome, in case that isn't clear). But, things change, especially in a college town... one of my roommates is moving closer to campus and the other might be leaving town for graduate school. This leaves me with zero roommates to pay the rent, hence my not being able to resign the lease, hence my being bummed, etc...

To top it all off, I just got off the phone with the landlord to tell her I wont be resigning and she said to me "If you find anyone else to move in with you, just let me know. You've all been really sweet and I'd love to have you stay another year." I mean, come on! How sweet is my land lord?

2010-02-25T14:45:00.007-05:00

So my money troubles seem to be somewhat alleviated, if not entire gone. My mom sent me an E-mail this morning telling me that she still remembers she owes me $300 and she'll send it out this week. Ummmm, what $300?

Well, after some (not so) in depth detective work, I realized that she was meant the cost of my school books! I had no idea she was going to pay for them. Yes! I was just telling (whining to) Sarah that I went to get a money order for rent yesterday, so I wouldn't accidentally go below the amount of the cost of rent in my bank, only to realize I already couldn't pay it... Whoops.

$300, however, covers rent and then some, leaving me in a position to have food money until my government cash comes in. Score!

2010-02-22T17:31:00.010-05:00

There is some sort of link between a love of philosophy & humanities, and the love of science fiction. Like most things in my life, I had believed the link to exist only within me and be part of what made me "unique", only to later find out I fit into a pretty standard modern archetype.

But this is not about me. This is about two of my teachers from the last year (one humanities and one philosophy) who are published science fiction authors, and the fact that I've made it a point to buy one of each of their books.

My first teacher, Mark Canter, wrote a book called Ember of the Sun and it's about some cave lady who is thawed in modern days (or near future?) and somehow lives. I've not read it but it sounded... eh.

The other teacher, whom I have now, wrote a book about people being able to upload their minds into host bodies (bodies that, for some reason, have tails...). His name is Justin Leiber and it in no way sounds interesting to me. So why did I buy it?

Part of the reason I bought the book was because reading things from people I know is much more interesting than reading random things from random unknown people (like the difference between seeing any random person naked on the internet, and seeing someone that I know naked on the internet. Maybe that's a weird example, but if you're from Brevard, then you understand).

Anyway, the other reason I bought the book was because of the cover. Check this baby out:
I mean come on! I love cheesy science fiction cover art almost as much as I love cheesy science fiction. If you look closely you can even see her tail on the right side of her body.

I can only hope that one day I'll have produced some cheesy writing worthy of such an amazingly cheesy cover.

2010-02-20T18:26:00.003-05:00

So I'm borderline broke broke. My free government money, much like last semester, has been slower coming than I would like. With that, I've been slowly becoming Frugal Travis again, eating only egg sandwhiches, spaghetti, and whatever Publix has for buy-one-get-one.

None of this really bothers me much, except I'm seeing Joanna Newsom next month in ATL and I'm worried my money still wont be in yet.

Also, I just got her new 3 disc album and um... she is one prolific lady. I'm not even sure if I'll be able to absorb all three discs in time for the show.

And speaking of shows; Akron/Family is in a couple hours and I'm fucking pumped. I missed them last time they came, so I'm going to be camping out before the doors open tonight to make sure I get in.

And... I guess that's it? This semester has been pretty bad for writing in the blog. I've just been doing a lot of reading/writing for school... But... hopefully things will pick up again soon.

2010-02-15T22:36:00.006-05:00

Valentines day was fun!

Sarah and I went to a Japanese restaurant called Kitcho. Sarah is an Asian person and the internet told me that Kitcho has the best sushi 'round these parts, so... It was in the bag really.

Because most of the menu was fish, and fish is gross, I got one of the only chicken dishes that they offered. It was Chicken Tempura. I had no idea what that meant. Now, I'm not sure if Chicken Tempura is like this everywhere, but basically what Kitcho gave me was a deep fried tipi. It was like a traditional Japanese dish fucked a traditional American dish (oh snap, unintentional foreshadowing?). They basically threw some chicken and a bunch of different vegetables together, arranged them in a tipi shape, soaked them in batter, and deep fried the whole shebang. It was delicious, but hard to eat with chop sticks, to say the least.

I also got Sarah some flowers (her love of said plants being her only expression of girliness) and a satin robe that I put in a keyboard box, wrapped in a publix bag, and taped with Postal Service masking tape (hoping that this would make it masculine enough for her). I think she approved.

She got me a sweet new messenger bag, the type that you can bike with, and baked me some blondies.

Then, to finish it off we went back to her house ate the blondies, drank some Two Hearted Ale, and watched several hours worth of a Planet Earth marathon on Animal Planet. Score.

2010-02-13T20:25:00.016-05:00

Brevard, the county I was born and raised in, has been on a role lately.

First, I was listening to a show about how the space center affected race relations in the south on NPR the other night. The lady said that Florida had the highest amount of lynchings in the south before the 50s, then went on to say that among the worst counties in Florida was Brevard County. Apparently there was an especially large amount of the population involved in the KKK, from store owners to people holding public office, and even a junior KKK for the kids! Goodness, how wholesome. (For what it's worth though, I couldn't find anything about this online, so I don't know where they got their facts.)

Anyway, people wanted the space center to come and fix it all by bringing in more diverse and educated people, and the feds said sure, why not... and placed the space center right on top of an all black community called Artesia. The city had its own mini-mall and schools. It was legit. After the space center was built many of the previous residents, being uneducated and relying on their now lost land for their livelihood, were forced to become janitors in the very place that robbed them of their homes.

I thought this was all interesting enough, and texted a few friends in a "Ha! NPR said Brevard was racist" type deal, only to forget about it by the next day.

Until a friend posted this:

Palm bay-Melbourne, of course, being cities in Brevard, spitting distance from where I lived. I Googled this to verify it and found out that we've been #2 for at least 2 years now, with 9.1% of the population being "heavy drinkers".

I mean, I've always said that Brevard is a horrible place to raise a child. This only justifies my belief, and convinces me further that I never stood a chance.

2010-02-11T17:37:00.011-05:00

Overheard while walking to class today:

Girl 1: "Of course I believe in God. I can't stand the bench sitters." Meaning, of course, fence sitters.

Girl 2: "Yeah... Who was that guy, I think it was Nietzsche who said," (in a ghost voice) "'Goooooood doessss noooooot exissssst'"

::Dumb laughter about how stupid Nietzsche and his "quote" are::

College student 1: "You know, I wanted to be a philosophy minor too until I took Modern Philosophy. The teacher just talked a lot and I never got to give my opinions about everything, which is, of course, the most important part of philosophy."

2010-01-30T15:42:00.012-05:00

Last night it was raining when I got home from a party, so I decided to run from my car to the front door of my house.

What I didn't account for, however, was the lack of traction on the bottom of the over-glorified socks that I wear as shoes. I jumped from the lawn to the cement walkway near my front door and slipped backwards and sideways, skinning my knee and bruising my hip on my pinky.

How does one bruise a hip from a pinky you ask? Well, you fall on it with the full force of your boney childbearing hip and, like a 140lb hammer guided downwards by gravity, you crush it. My pinky is fuckkkked. I mean, my pinky hurt my hip so badly that I had to sleep on my left side.

It um... looks worse in real life. I swear.

2010-01-19T10:25:00.006-05:00

It's been a long time since I've done an update on my personal life. So, let's see... to encompass the last two or so months in a tiny amount of space I'll just say-

I went to Brevard for Christmas break, came home to Tallahassee for new years eve (where Sarah surprised me by being in town after saying she wouldn't be able to make it), started a new semester in school, and bought tickets to see Joanna Newsom in ATL in March.

I think that gets the big stuff out of the way. As for the details... Well, nothing especially exciting is coming to mind. A lot of the usual bars and party stuff. I got a Nook for Christmas and have a ton of reading due for school, so I've been shut away doing that a lot. And... Hm, I'm trying to find a way to make this post more boring, but I'm out of ideas.

2009-12-17T17:05:00.008-05:00

I've been neglecting this thing lately. Mostly that's because ever since I finished my finals last Tuesday, every day's been like a Saturday. What did I get on my finals you ask? Well, I made a 100%, 94%, 93%, and uh... ::cough:: 60% ::cough::, giving me three As and a B overall.

So what have I been doing with my perpetual Saturday? Well, I hit up some all-you-can-eat at Los Compadres with a bunch of people to celebrate the end of the semester, then I played Wisest Wizard afterward (and got a personal high score of 9 beers). I also went to a bunch of bars (where team TravisSarah beat some ass in pool), cooked some amazing eggnog french toast, made homemade sloppy joes (turns out the secret ingredient is ketchup... who knew?), ate at Chubbys Chicken more than any man should, went to a vegan chili cook off, watched some good movies, saw Paleo play at The Mansion, etc... etc... Nothing too crazy really, but it's been a lot of fun.

And... I think that's it really. I'm heading back to Brevard tomorrow to see my family, and will be staying for an undetermined amount of time (maybe even until the new year?).

2009-12-06T21:50:00.003-05:00

This weekend was pretty tame. Dan, Arlen, Sarah, and I hung out, saw a movie, and went to some parties (one of which was a masquerade party).

And that's the update!

2009-11-29T15:37:00.029-05:00

I got to spend Thanksgiving with my family for the first time in years. It was really great. I brought a camera, but managed to only take pictures of like... the least interesting things that happened. So, enjoy?

Tuesday:
My mom had a high school friend, Ron, staying with her and helping with everything. He cooked a lot (which I appreciated) and was teaching my sister to play guitar (which, by the way, she had only had two lessons and was already able to play chords and sing at the same time).

And actually, speaking of my sister, she's like a real person now... It's sort of crazy. Not only does she talk in complete sentences (which, at 13, I guess is expected), but she's legitimately funny and has a real personality.

Anyway, we all hung out in the living room and talked until like 11pm, then went to bed.

Wednesday:
I went to Orlando and visited my dad in his new (much nicer) nursing home. He's doing better physically than last time I saw him (he's able to walk again now), but mentally he's doing a bit worse. He doesn't speak much anymore, and whenever he does, he seems pretty confused (he thought I was his brother for most of the visit, for example).

I got home and had dinner with the family and Ron, and vegged out with everyone in front of the television. There was a Woodstock documentary, followed by a Beatles documentary, followed by an overwhelming urge to sleep.

Thursday:
Ron cooked an amazing breakfast of french toast (with real maple syrup) , "eggs" (he cooked the left over french toast batter, which cooked into this cinnamon/vanilla flavored brown stuff that we pretended were eggs), strawberries, and bacon. Then, it being Thanksgiving, they began cooking. Ron's recipe for the turkey went like this: Slather turkey in mayo, place inside of two paper Publix bags, place in oven for 3 hours.

Despite how gross that sounds, it turned out great.

After my Thanksgiving dinner, I went out to the Goblyn Compound (an apartment complex rented out by a bunch of friends of mine) to do some catching up. I called Abi and asked her to stop by, but I guess tryptophan got the best of everyone because by the time she showed up, Daniel and I were literally the only people standing outside. It wasn't even 10pm yet.

Feeling bad for asking Abi to drive so far for nothing, Daniel and I invited her to Daniel's parent's garage to dress in weird clothes we found around the house, play scrabble, and drink whiskey. I kicked everyone's ass.

Friday:
It was Dan Morales's birthday Friday. He and Arlen got into town earlier that day and we and a dozen or so people went out for a birthday Dinner. Arlen had never been to Brevard before, and Dan had never been to the Goblyn Compound, so I decided to make them all go to a show out there.

At the compound I ran into a bunch of people I haven't seen in a long time, and Dan took a lot of shots of cheap whiskey. Very shortly after he began vomiting. It didn't really stop the entire night, so periodically during the rest of the post you can inject "and Dan continued throwing up" if you'd like.

Green Goblyn started playing and after the first song Arlen said something like "Oh, I like them". Trying to be nice, I pushed her forward into the crowd a bit so she could get a better view. Then the moshing happened... Arlen ~~ran away~~ stepped back gingerly.

I had a great time hearing The Green Goblyn Project and singing along with everyone. After it was done, I went back to Xtian/Wolfy/Mollie's place and waited for Wolfy to play. Wolfy wanted some people to leave before he started playing and I was hoping once it stopped being so crowded and Arlen heard Wolfy play her night would improve a bit (I, at this point, was feeling like a terrible tour guide for my city). Dan was still puking.

After sitting around for a couple minutes we heard some screaming outside. We walked out front and wouldn't you know it, 40 or so people had decided to start punching each other. It would start, then stop, then start again, until finally someone got into a truck, ran into some things in the parking lot, and finally, while bottles were being thrown at it, drove off. People were screaming, people were crying, and Xtian and the other inhabitants of the compound were trying to kick everyone out. Here is a terrible picture of the fight:

I remember hearing someone say something like "Well what do you expect when this many people (about 50, tops) get together? Of course there's going to be a fight." Which I thought was hilarious, and incredibly telling of the mindset of my home town.

I went into an apartment for a bit, hoping to avoid the inevitable cop visit, and after an hour or so drove Jordie, James, and Daniel back to Daniel's parent's house. Once there, we decided to continue drinking and play Scrabble.

Everyone looked really attractive.

Saturday:
I woke up on top of the floor/my wallet/my camera at 10am, and tired, hung over, and aching, drove Jordie and James back to Jordie's car at the compound. The cops were there talking to what looked like everyone who lived there, and, thinking back to Friday night, I said to Jordie:

"Man, I feel so bad for Arlen... she's never been to Brevard, and now her only experience is going to be filled with dirty, hairy, tattooed people, a puking boyfriend, and a huge fight"

To which Jordie replied:

"Why do you feel bad? That sounds exactly like Brevard to me."

Touche Jordie. Touche.

2009-11-26T10:19:00.003-05:00

I'm getting a Nook for Christmas!

2009-11-22T12:08:00.006-05:00

My Weekend:

Friday I saw Neko Case and Deer Tick at The Moon. The show was decent, nothing crazy, and afterward I went to the Dyno house where Deer Tick showed up and played a whole other set in the living room.

Saturday I made some lasagna for my roommates and Sarah, and Caitlyn. We grubbed on it while watching Moon and then had some apple pie/mush that Sarah brought over for dessert. The reason I say mush is that Sarah had to duct tape the pie to her bike to get it over here and it was, though delicious, lacking a certain aesthetic quality by the time it arrived.

Afterward we went to my friend Kim's house, where I sold half of the twelve book club shirts I printed. It was a good feeling having so many people, a lot of whom aren't even in my book club, like my shirts enough to buy them.

And from there we went to The Engine Room to play Scrabble. Team Loser, that is, Sarah and I, um... lost.

On to Sunday, today. I have to write a research paper that is due, you guessed it, tomorrow. So, I've armed myself with a strong cup of coffee, and some leftover lasagna.

Time to write the shit out of this paper.

2009-11-18T23:12:00.001-05:00

I got my book club shirts last night, and they turned out great!

Dan Schmahl, the guy who made them, has a blog about his screen printing endeavors and posted an entry about making my shirts, so if you're interested you should check it out.

2009-11-18T19:28:00.014-05:00

Here is a recap of my weekend in a cabin in Tennessee with Alren, Dan, Sarah, Caitlyn, and Amie...

Day 1:
We got our rental van around 8am, and got on the road by around 9. The ride there seemed surprisingly quick and went without a problem (thanks, largely in part to Dan's really nice GPS thing).

Somewhere off the road in Georgia

We stopped only once at a Krystal Burger, and otherwise sustained ourselves on muffins and whatnot provided by the girls (who brought many baked goods, including home made apple-walnut bread, and banana bread... mmmm).

We made it to the cabin around 6, and after we unpacked, Amie cooked some hot dogs and chili on the grill outside. We ate and, immediately afterward, started drinking.

There was a game room of sorts on the bottom level so we all went down there and played pool and arcade games for a few hours until someone suggested getting in the hot tub. So... that's what we did.

Once in the hot tub, Arlen suggested that Dan and I kiss, and said once we did, all the girls would kiss each other. We, naively, took her up on her offer. You know, because we're in high school.

Now, allow me to digress slightly here. It seems that Arlen, being something of a Devil Woman, had every intention of laughing at us after we kissed, and not going through with the agreement.

But, we lucked out...

Sarah, in respecting the sanctity of our social contract (and also, in being incredibly drunk and unaware of Arlen's plan), proceeded to attack (almost literally) the other girls with a lustful attachment of her mouth. This then served as the catalyst which got the rest of the girls to follow suit in kissing one another. It was great for all, except Amie who busted her lip in the process of kissing Sarah.

After the tub, Sarah and I went back up to our awesome top floor bedroom, at which point she went insane and hallucinated a lot of stuff, the details of which I'd rather not get into, but that were incredibly funny. And weird.

Day 2:
I woke up, embarrassed Sarah as much as possible for her actions (hallucinations) the previous night, drank some coffee, and read for a while on our third floor balcony. Afterward, Sarah, Dan, Arlen, and I went for a "hike" where we walked a few yards past the end of our driveway and then turned back with an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment.

The next five hours we all spent transcending space and time. All of us, that is, except Amie, who got really bored (and I suspect jealous) existing in her measly three-dimensions.

When we came back to earth we were ready for food. Lucky for us, Sarah cooked home made pulled BBQ chicken!

It was around this time that I realized we had drank all the beer. This left only liquor.Which... is alright, I guess. Something about me just wanted beer, specifically beer, so badly. It was odd. I was sad. I settled with apple cider and whiskey, and then an odd contraption I made with juice from a can of fruit, red fruit punch, and some squeezed lemons (we were running low on mixers).

Dan, at this point, had the great idea to play hide and seek. So, we played hide and seek. At night. With all the house lights off. It was intense and lot of fun.

And, other than some more pool and whatnot, that was the bulk of our night.

Day 3:
Our last day was spent eating some croissants and cleaning. We had to be out by 11am, so we got up early, and finished cleaning/packing just in time.

We decided to stop by Atlanta on the way home, and ate at my favorite burrito place of all time, whose name I've never bothered to remember. It, of course, was delicious. We shopped a bit, then got back on the road, putting us back in Tallahassee around 7pm.

After returning the car to the rental place, Dan and I went home and drank some Olde English while watching The Office. We did this until neither of us could stay awake any longer.

All in all I enjoyed the fuck out of the weekend. Now, without regard for chronology, here's a few random photos from the trip that I couldn't really fit into the post:

Our guest book entry

The agreement I had to sign "warned" me about flying squirrel and lady bug
infestations, but this was one of like 5 lady bugs we saw... Also, no squirrels.

2009-11-11T19:17:00.020-05:00

The other day I was drinking Olde English and cruisin' around Ebay.

As individual actions, those two things have proven mostly harmless. When done in conjunction, however, their sum seems to manifests itself thusly:

Yep. I woke up this morning to an E-mail which told me I'm now the uh... proud? No. Ashamed? Umm.... I am now the ambivalent owner of a 20 volume "Harvard Classic Books" set from the 1930s. Goody?!

Also, I made this cool design for my book club today:

2009-11-09T15:09:00.024-05:00

"For here or to go?" is not a question you expect to have thrown at you when ordering a drink at a bar.

That is, unless you're in New Orleans.

This last Friday through Sunday was spent exploring, via horribly paved roads, said city with Daniel and attempting to make all those who couldn't come as jealous as possible (i.e. Sarah, mostly... and Dan a little too).

I'm not super awake right now, so rather than a play-by-play I'll keep this all brief.

I stayed at Mike and Drew's place, who not only graciously provided us with a bed/couch to sleep on, but also with liquids to help us get to sleep... liquor.

So the first night was spent at the house drinking.

The second day was spent exploring the city, eating fried pickles/chicken, checking out a book fair, and stopping at a few bars in between.

When night came we went out to Bourbon St... which is a street that thinks "a normal weekend evening" is synonymous with "Mardi Gras". The crowds were insane, beads were thrown, breasts exposed, etc... We just stumbled from bar to bar mostly. I made everyone take a detour so I could pose with a statue of Ignatius Reilly, and then Daniel had us make another at a strip club (where he spent well over $100 and a stripper danced to a Crystal Castles song [which, alone, made the detour worth while]).

The next morning we were supposed to get up and go to a brunch thing that's in an old bank and sounded really cool, but Daniel's a bitch and refused wake up until he'd slept for 12 hours... so we missed it. Instead, we went back to the French Quarter, ate some po' boy sandwiches, bought some bad gifts, and got on the road by 3ish.

And that was the trip in a nut shell!

2009-11-05T14:18:00.010-05:00

As I'm sitting here in my living room, with the front door open, the cool outside air filling my house, and my near naked body exposing itself to my poor neighbors across the street, I've decided that today is a very nice day. In fact the entire week has been, and seems like it will continue to be, a very nice week.

The cherry on top of it all is that Daniel has invited me to New Orleans this weekend, and offered to pay for my gas/alcohol! Now I can finally see the statue of Ignatius Reilly that exists somewhere in the city!

And then next week I have Wednesday off for Veteran's Day, and am skipping Friday for... wait for it... The Mansion Cabin!

Not to jinx it, but that sounds like a recipe for another nice week to me.

2009-11-02T18:38:00.008-05:00

Apparently there's some new scholarship at the Veteran's Affairs office called the something 9/11 something GI Bill for people who something something blah blah blah 9/11 Amercuh.

What this means for me is that I'm broke.

See, thing is, my scholarship is through the VA office too. I'm supposed to get somewhere around $1000 a month because my dad was in 'Nam. But, when I turned in my paperwork at the beginning of the semester, the lady at the desk was like "We're extremely backed up right now because of this new GI scholarship we're offering, so it may take a while to get your first check. But don't worry! Whenever the first check does come in, it'll back-pay for the months that you didn't get."

Well, I'm 2/3 the way through the semester and I've yet to receive any checks. This puts me in an odd place. As it stands I, in theory, have thousands of dollars to my name. It's just not... here yet. And in not-theory, I have uh... let's see, carry the one, bring down the zero... umm... $60. And that's not including the two months cable and utilities I owe. Woo!

2009-10-29T13:00:00.008-04:00

Last week I realized that my coffee drinking had gotten a bit out of control (at least for my standards). I used to drink maybe 5 cups a week, max. As of last week I was up to about 10. This isn't a shocking amount by any means, but I hate feeling like I need things to function.

Luckily!(?) I ran out of coffee a couple days ago and decided, as an experiment, to abstain from it. How hard could breaking a caffeine addiction be, right?

It was a couple hours past my normal coffee ingestion when the Headache started. Then a couple hours after that I was so unbearably tired that I HAD to take a nap.... that lasted for 4 hours. When I woke up I felt a bit different... I was grumpy, and slightly depressed. Seriously caffeine?! Seriously??

Those exact same symptoms continued the following day (including the 4 hour nap).

I woke up today, my third day being caffeine free, and was at first steadfast in my commitment. Then, by the end of my first class, I, tired, grumpy, and sad, found myself weighing the pros and cons of my addiction (pro: happiness, con: breaking some abstract principle I've, for unknown reasons, created for myself. Etc...).

So now, after the (not so) intense internal debate, I've decided to be content with my addiction, and will now pronounce myself, officially and proudly, a caffeine addict.

Here's to being alert, productive, and happy!

2009-10-26T10:15:00.007-04:00

This weekend was a great mix of wholesome and non-wholesome activities. I went on a sweet bike race, with awesome check points (like getting a tattoo, and singing karaoke with a live backing band)... only to have my tire pop before I finished. Luckily, Caitlyn came and got me from the graveyard in which I was stranded. Thanks Caitlyn!

I went from there, to my house to "pregame" (drink way too much, way too fast), to Geoff's birthday party, which was a pretty standard shindig, with not much to report except I got way, way too drunk and had some pretty ridiculous conversations.

Also I played some tennis (and got killed- 6 losses, 1 win), worked out at the campus's gym for the first time, and went to a Greek food festival where they had some really over priced (but good) foods and amazing live music.

And then that night there was an awesome birthday party for Arlen's little sister which involved cupcake fights and pinatas.

2009-10-23T14:17:00.007-04:00

I got two As and an 89.5 on my midterms. Also one of my teachers, in front of the entire class, told me how much she loved my paper today. She said it was a "joy to grade" and that she "laughed so hard (she) was worried the neighbors would complain about the noise."

It's like the harder I party, the better I do in my classes. Which is good, because I plan on getting straight A's this semester... If you know what I mean.

Partying is... what I mean. It was a reference to the continued increase of the hardness of my partying. I wasn't sure if that was clear. Also, I find that jokes are typically funnier when you explain them... and keep talking for no apparent reason after you've explained them.

......

2009-10-21T18:36:00.009-04:00

Last night some friends came up from Gainesville.

A few local people joined us, we bought a $40 bottle of whiskey, took some acid, started a fire in my back yard, and laid in the grass to watch a meteor shower.

Also Daniel kicked a branch off the roof of the house and into my face, bloodying up my nose and making me look retarded.

2009-10-18T14:16:00.015-04:00

Dan's little brother came up for his birthday this Friday, so we brought him to Menace Beach with Dan, Justin, Myself, and 10 girls.

It was a lot of fun for me, and I'm sure way more fun for him. He had only been drunk once before, so not only did we make him drink some whiskey and cokes at the house, but one of the girls took him out to her car to do some shots during Menace Beach.

Then it came up that he's never kissed a girl before, so three of the girls we were with lined up and kissed him. I think he went home a happy boy.

The next day Dan's mom took us all out to eat, then afterward we all went to see Where The Wild Things Are, which was something of a disappointment.

After that, we went to Liz Allen's going away party. There was some live jazz, a fire, and wine and food and stuff. It was... quaint. At some point a girl took something like 20 pictures of me and Dan posing in what will undoubtedly be pretty regrettable positions. We were trying to be "sexy". Ohhhhhh alcohol.

Once our photo shoot was over, we all went out back, stood around a fire for a bit, finished our beer and wine, taught Dan the proper way to pronounce conch shell, and then left.

From there we went to my house and tried to start a fire. The wet logs resulted in it being more work than what we were willing to do, so we walked next door and used the neighbor's fire to roast our marshmallows. It was a "thug" type party, so we stuck out pretty bad. Also Dan brought his machete for some reason... that was weird.

The best way to fit in, we decided, was to stand by ourselves in the corner and drunkenly fall over a lot while trying to stand on some swings...

Anyway, after burning our bridges with the neighbors, we filled some cups with their keg beer, walked back home, and eventually went to bed.

The next morning we went to a park off High Road and had a picnic. We flew kites, ate something amazing called pumpkin butter, and pretended not to see various people that we knew who kept showing up to also have picnics.

From there we went to Banditos where I ate the perfect amount of food. Then Caitlyn, Sarah, Dan and I decided to play some tennis at Tom Brown park. It was a lot of fun, we all played awful, Sarah kept hitting "home runs", and the weather was perfect.

Oh, and Dan and I were dressed like this:

2009-10-17T15:33:00.016-04:00

Arlen (of La Bonbonniere) and I baked the above "blondies" for my book club this Wednesday. Blondies are basically cookies with the consistency of brownies... Or Brownies that are cookie flavored. Actually, what they really are is amazing.

To make them is simple: you mix some flour and stuff together, break some eggs on the floor, cover the kitchen/your apron with sugar, add some bananas that you've viciously banged on a table, some white and milk chocolate chips, and some walnuts. Then you throw the whole shebang into the oven for just long enough that it makes you late for whatever gathering it is you're baking them for. In this case, it was my book club. Hm... I should start a cooking blog.

Because I was late, I decided not to wait for the food to cool. Arlen and I hurriedly threw the still hot and gooey mess of cookie/brownie delight to a plate and I drove off hoping to make it to the meeting before it was over.

Then, just as I got to the street where the book club is held I got this text:

"Book club moved back to next Wednesday, a lot of people have midterms in the morning."

Fuck. Me.

I gorged on the sweets defiantly on the way home. With each bite I was pretending to take more pleasure than humanly possible to rub it in the non-present book club member's faces. MMMM! DELICIOUS! TOO BAD YOU CAN'T HAVE ANY!!

Oh, and this is what I looked like while baking:

2009-10-12T17:01:00.004-04:00

I've officially rented the bad ass cabin I was talking about a couple posts ago!

Part of the contract I had to sign said:

"I understand there is an excessive amount of ladybugs during certain times of the year. I am also aware that... flying squirrels are common in the woods and may enter the cabin. There will be NO REFUNDS due to these issues. "

Refunds?! I'd pay EXTRA for a lady bug surplus/flying squirrel infestation!

2009-10-11T20:54:00.021-04:00

Dan has brought me back from my indefinite tattooing hiatus. He wanted a tattoo of uh... of something, I don't remember exactly. Whatever it was, it was doable-ish, but I explained that I'd rather not taint his near virgin skin with something so large and complicated, due to my only moderate (at best) ability to translate pictures from paper to skin. So instead, he opted for a tiny triceratops. That I can do.

So there it is. It's weird, but I feel like I've actually gotten better since I took the several month break. It's hard to explain, but I've "learned" that if I go slower, the tattoo looks better. Obvious right? I mean, I've gotten more than my share of tattoos, I know how fast you're supposed to go. In execution though, it's so hard to relax, take your time, and just... flow.

Anyway, I'm stoked on it. The lines are straight, and it came out exactly like the stencil.

I'm not sure if I've blogged about this before, but I started drawing again. Or... I did a few months back, and am now planning on re-re-starting the hobby. Dan asked me to draw an octopus riding an elephant because he was thinking of getting it as a tattoo, so I came up with this bad boy:

He said he digs it, and decided that he wants to get it on his thigh after I get a bit more practice. On a side note, he wants there to be a banner under it that says "Where are they going?" which I'm just mentioning because I think it's awesome.

Also, Daniel Schleith's little brother wants a shark busting out of his ass with a banner above it that says "Jawsome" and another below it that says "Live every week like it's shark week," which, again, I think is awesome and am going to try and draw out soon.

What I'm trying to say is, I'm getting stoked on tattooing again.

Oh, and I'm putting the $300 deposit down tomorrow on the Cabin Mansion! Cansion. Mabin.... The thing I was talking about in my last post. Hopefully it's still available... Wish me luck!

2009-10-10T16:27:00.006-04:00

So, I'm terrified that I'm going to jinx everything by posting this, but uh... I think I'm going to be staying in this bad ass cabin for a couple days next month:

Here's what it looks like inside:

And! AND! It has an outdoor hot tub!

AND A GAME ROOM WITH A POOL TABLE AND ARCADE MACHINE!!

I'm still waiting on the go ahead from two more people, so I'm trying not to get too excited... but... fuck it, I'm so fucking excited!

2009-10-09T10:32:00.006-04:00

Dan and I are working on a concept album at the moment. The finer details of the thing are a little secret, but what I can say is that yesterday we finished recording a Dirty South rap. It's the second song we've recorded of the multi-genre album, and I've discovered that when dropping my vocals an octave, I sound like the largest black man to have ever lived.

2009-10-06T11:16:00.007-04:00

A couple posts back I was talking about last Monday night, in which I went to a show and did some post show hangage, causing me to not go to bed until... well, I basically didn't sleep.

What I didn't mention was that I had a test the next morning worth almost half of my grade, in my highest level class, a philosophy class, the only philosophy class I've ever taken, at 9am. I was hungover, tired, and may or may not have studied for less than an hour... Not the best decisions I've ever made, granted.

The test itself was seven essays (with a suggested word count of, I shit you not, 250 words each), three short answers, and pretty tough. I finished just fifteen minutes before the end of the class... but of the 60 people who take the class with me, I was within the first five people to complete it. I was therefore both worried that it took me too long to finish, and that I was rushing. I didn't feel good walking out of the class that day.

I sit behind the T.A., and today she started a conversation with me. Using this as an in, I started asking about the tests.

"They were really, really bad" she said "There was only a very few people who got above a 90."

She went on from there going into a small rant of our class's inability to think properly.

Now I sort of think she's cute, in a teacher/philosophy lover sort of way, and have been hoping she'd talk to me for quite some time now. So now not only was I worried about my test grade in general, but I was also worried that she was going to notice I was one of those stupid kids she was ranting about, and never talk to me again.

Long story uh... well, long I guess, she passed the tests back and when she called my name I motioned her over. Then, she took a secondary look at my paper and made a face. I wasn't sure what kind. I panicked. She folded it in half and handed it to me...

91%!

I am a philosophy GOD!

With that being said, I feel a lot better about the fun shit I have planned for this week. Every night, from Monday to Friday, has something fun to do. Two shows, a book club movie night, and two parties. Huzzah! I have a bit of reading/studying to do this week, but so far I've been more than on track. Here's to staying that way

2009-10-05T13:48:00.031-04:00

I spent some time in Paris a couple summers back with my friends Daniel and Dan. We're all pretty shy, and since our stay in the city was somewhat prolonged, we decided to try to meet some people through Craigslist's "Strictly Platonic" section.

Everyone we met through it ended up being completely insane, with the only exception being a girl named Graziella. She had an add out saying she loved American culture, and wanted to practice her English with someone, so Daniel wrote her asking if we could get together. The next day we met up at a cafe, and talked about everything from her getting lost on a field trip as a kid because she was looking down and accidentally followed a herd of cows instead of her group, to asking what P-I-M-P means because she keeps hearing it in all the American rap songs. In other words, she was not only normal, but exceedingly nice and fun to talk to.

In the next couple months, she took us to the castle at Versailles, showed us around Paris, and even took Daniel to the doctor when he got really sick, where she had the unenviable job of translating his symptoms (explosive diarrhea, vomiting, etc...) to the doctor. She definitely made our trip, not only more fun, but a lot less stressful.

She seemed to have fun too. Enough fun that, when Daniel flew back to America in August, Graziella came with him... to Brevard county. I'm sure it was terribly boring, and I'm not entirely certain why Daniel thought it'd be a good idea to let Brevard be her first encounter with our country, but she stuck through our awful weather and food and people with only minor, or uh... well, moderate amounts of complaining. Daniel and Graziella then drove up to Tallahassee to visit me for a couple days, and we hung out around some pools and went to some parties.

That was the last time I saw her. We kept up a bit through Facebook, I'd send a message asking how she was doing, or asking her to help me with my French homework, or whatever, and she'd always respond right away, and with adorably broken English.

Anyway, I was feeling nostalgic today and went to send her a message, only to find out she committed suicide on the 17th of September. I guess I'm just writing this to get it out of me. This is the first time anyone I've known has killed themselves before, and it's just really sad that it had to be someone so nice, who helped my friends and I so much...

2009-10-04T20:13:00.021-04:00

The only thing written in my planner for the weekend was "Go big." Today I gave it not one, but two check marks.

I started the weekend on Thursday. I went to Arlen's to watch Always Sunny, drank some beer, then went to Menace Beach. I got drunk, had some good conversation, and that was the night.

Friday I went to First Friday with some friends and looked at the art exhibits there. After, we went back to Arlen's house and started pregaming before going to The Shuffler's show. The show was a lot of fun and they put on a great performance. We only wanted to see the one band though, so when the set was over, my friends and I tried to cash out our credit card tabs and go... only to discover that there's a $10 minimum on tabs, and we had come nowhere near it. So, everyone bought themselves pitchers and drank them as fast as possible. We got incredibly wasted in a very short time. We left by, at the latest, midnight, but we were all of us near or at the stage of blacking out. On the way to the car I bought an amazing hot dog at a stand (which I decided to recreate and improve on the grill at my house the next day) and crammed into Dan's car.

I'm not using the word "crammed" lightly here either. There were 6 of us, and we all somehow "fit" into Dan's two door car. I was literally laying down across the girl's laps in the back of the seat. From what I heard the next day, there was a lot of crotch elbowing on the way home... the girls think they're really funny. Joke's on them though, because I have no memory of any elbow to crotch contact. It may be the only time blacking out has worked to my advantage.

We went back to Arlen's again, and had an underwear party with me, Dan, and the 4 girls. At some point I remember a bottle being broken, and after that I remember a lot of blood. But, it wasn't mine (for once) so the specifics of that part are lost on me.

The next day I woke up and Dan, Sarah, and I met the Schmahl brothers and two girls that I don't know at Bamboo house for breakfast/lunch. The food was great, like always, and then Dan and I went home saying we were going to "do homework" and "take naps" which for me meant laying in bed for an hour, unable to sleep despite my inability to think properly or motivate myself to move.

After about an hour of struggling to either wake entirely up or fall entirely asleep, I decided to give up and clean the house and get the grill ready for a BBQ. Dan and I invited a few people, and we ate, listened to my BBQ playlist, and relaxed in the cool shade of my porch.

Because of how good the day was up to that point, we decided to try and keep the good coming by dropping some money on fancy drinks. We all threw in and bought over $60 worth of white russian supplies. We drank, played some card games, and did some amazing renditions of Joanna Newsome, Beirut, and Neutral Milk Hotel songs in the music room. By this time almost all the liquor was gone, and it wasn't quite midnight... We were worried we were going to make the pregame the actual game, so we decided to drive to a party I saw on Facebook. I glanced at what street it was on to see if it was too far and, deciding it wasn't, drove off.

Once we got near the road where it was, someone said to me "Okay, right or left here?" To which I said, "Um... I have no clue where the party is. Dan! I thought you looked!" to which Dan said "I thought you looked!" So we drove aimlessly for a few minutes, saw some people, and I think someone yelled out the window "Is this Brittany's party?" and then I think someone yelled back in the positive, so we parked. It was supposed to be a "Smiths Dance Party" according to the event page, but walking inside I noticed it was, in fact, a normal party in which someone had a half broken Ipod plugged into a speaker that had some Smiths songs on it, but that wasn't even playing.

Being unimpressed with it all, Dan decided to set off a flare that I found a few days ago on the side of the road. We thought that flares shoot stuff into the air like a gun/firework hybrid, and were very much hoping that after shooting it, because we were in a giant field, a helicopter would land and try to save us from whatever peril people might be in when they shoot flares off into the sky. It turns out though, a flare is just an over glorified sparkler, so we got sort of sad.

At this point we'd gotten into a bit of the keg beer and I think we all lost our minds. I started wandering the house looking for the keg but being horribly incapable of finding it (it was in plain sight in the kitchen), Sarah was laying in the grass and trying to lift people in the air in a "game" that's apparently called "airplane", Dan was being Normal Drunk Dan and running amok in the house, and Arlen was hand feeding an alarmingly obese cat some sort of something that I hope wasn't poison. After pissing off a few people (burning a hole in the neighbors yard, screaming outside, not having money to throw down on beer, etc...), we decided we were too drunk and on the path of getting kicked out. So, we left.

On the way to the car, I piggy backed Sarah down a long stretch of stairs. During the journey, I heard our new enemies snicker and vocalize their hope of Sarah and I falling. I made it all the way to the bottom, out to the road, and just before getting into the car Sarah's sandal fell off. Instead of putting her down so she could grab it though, I decided to get fancy and tried to tilt my body just enough so she could, from my back, slip the sandal back on. This was a bad idea. The second I tilted my body, I started an exxxxtremely slow fall forward into the concrete. According to eye witnesses, Sarah and I hit the road face first. Then, before I could even figure out if I was okay or not, I heard laughing from the porch of the house followed by "GET THE FUUUCK OUT OF THE ROAD!!" Lovely people, they were.

I crawled to Sarah and asked if she was okay. I don't know if she responded, but I saw that she was laughing and thought it safe to assume she'd pull through. I then crawled closer to the car, struggling to gain the ability to walk upright again, and, finally made it.

Now once getting back to my house I honestly don't know what happened for the first couple hours. There were a couple pictures on my camera that gave some clues, but they were all sort of weird. It seems my inability to walk properly had transferred from me to my companions, and at some point everyone was either sprawled out on the floor or couch while I, possibly knowing I wouldn't remember anything, was documenting everything by standing above them and taking pictures of their near comatose body's/my feet.

We woke up today, Sunday, around noon and went to the Crepe Vine. It was great, as usual. Then we headed out to the Flea Market. I found some amazing (and cheap) instruments, and a Trombone for $75(!!) that I really REALLY want to buy. I decided to sleep on it first though. Also I found a book vendor at the very end who had, literally, ALL great books. Kafka, Joyce, Asimov, Vonnegut, Pynchon, Phillip K. Dick, etc... for ONE DOLLAR EACH! When the guy saw me pick up three PKD books to figure out which I wanted, he was like "If you buy those 6, I'll give you one of 'em for free." I mean! Come on! How amazing is that?! Anyway, I only ended up getting 4 books, because I don't know why... because I'm stupid, and only paid $3.50 for them. So, yay!

Dan and I then came back to the house, cleaned a bit, did some homework, then threw all the leftovers from Saturday on the grill. The hot dogs were just as amazing, the playlist still proved relaxing, and the weather was more than agreeable. Since dinner I've just been relaxing in my room with the windows open, listening to music and writing.

It was a good weekend.

2009-09-27T21:06:00.031-04:00

I went to Dirt's wedding this weekend!

Sort of? I was uh... slightly late...

I did get there before the end of the reception though! That counts right?

It was a lot of fun. The people's attire and general looks ranged from dapper as fuck, to not giving a fuck. It was easily the most eclectic group of wedding goers I've ever seen.

Also during my stay in Brevard I got to hang at the Goblyn Compound, the beach, and Backbooth. I met some new people and ate really well. Shit was good.

By Monday I was back in Tallahassee. I saw Pains of Being Pure at Heart that night... They sucked. Also Cymbals Eat Guitars. They sucked too.

And finally, last night, I saw They Promised Us Jetpacks, Frightened Rabbit, and The Twilight Sad. After the show some of the band members came up to some people I was with and wanted to know what we were doing... Soooo I and 5 or so of my friends hung out at St. Mikes with various Scottish men from said bands. Then, after last call, Caitlyn, Sarah and I went on a drive with the bass player from The Twilight Sad down Apalache road for the sole purpose of letting him watch our capital building's phallus penetrate the morning sky. Unfortunately though... it was too dark to discern anything past a blackish blob in the distance. The man explained to us, however, that he understood what a penis looked like and that he'd use his imagination. What a sweetheart.

I then woke up at 7 this morning so that I could have enough time to walk home and then study for my test that's at 9:30am... Only to have Dan's altruistic ass drive down Jackson Bluff, find me on the side of the road, pick me up, and drive me home. Now THAT'S what I call a roommate.

STUDY TIME!

2009-09-23T09:21:00.006-04:00

Due to some rather unexpected side effects of my anxiety medicine (that I'd rather not get into), I've decided to quit taking it, cold turkey. This, in itself, seems to have produced some rather odd side effects (that I would like to get into).

Last night, after having not taken the pills for a full 24 hours, I had a dream that I opened some container and a foot long red spider crawled out, jumped onto my face, and then ran onto my bedroom wall. I then, being scared shitless, got out of my bed (in real life, mind you) and ran to my bedroom door to escape. As I opened the door and jumped out into the hallway, I heard the voices of some people still awake in the living room. I then instantly realized it was all a dream. It was so instant in fact, going from full terror to completely understanding how ridiculous what had just happened was, that almost immediately after jumping into the hallway I said "Goddddd damn it... God damn it" and slowly walked back to bed. Defeated and embarrassed.

I guess now I can add sleepwalking to my incredibly long list of weird shit I do when I sleep. Goddddd damn it... God damn it.

2009-09-22T12:45:00.018-04:00

The sexy beast of a man in the picture above's name is Dirt... and he's getting married this Friday. Despite it being a somewhat depressing reminder of my age and despite how silly I think it is that he, of all my good friends, is getting married, I'm happy for him and pretty excited for the wedding.

I've only ever been to my grandpa and cousin's weddings, but even they were a lot of fun. So, even though I haven't got a date (female or male, ugh), going to a friend's wedding should be the shit... I can't wait.

2009-09-21T10:34:00.011-04:00

There was a 6 hour Cosby Show marathon on yesterday... my day didn't stand a chance.

Dan and I sat through the entire thing, with me leaving the couch only one time, to (quite reluctantly) make food so that I might stay alive long enough to see the marathon to its conclusion.

After it was over I proceeded to "take a nap" on the recliner for an hour. When I woke up I drove to Lauren's house to watch the season premier of Curb Your Enthusiasm only to then go directly back to my house. It didn't occur to me at the time, but maybe it's weird to go to someone's place just to watch a TV show, then leave? I'm incredibly bad at social faux pas. Anyway, weird or not, I went back to my house and watched the amazing season premier of Fringe (for the second time), before going to bed. I'm not sure if I've ever had a lazier day in my entire life...

It was much needed though. This weekend was full to the point of overflowing with late night debauch. Even with the entire day of rest, I still feel completely out of it. But good news! The 2 hour season premier of House is tonight! And there is nothing my near comatose body wants more than to laze in front of the cool light of my television for one more day... Mmmmmmm.

2009-09-17T11:06:00.020-04:00

An artist's depiction of me, after eating tacos for a week straight

Yesterday was Taco Day. Dan and I cooked a wicked ton of taco stuffs for ourselves and Justin. We all three barely put a dent in it and will most likely be eating tacos until the end of the week. I like to picture us, by then, wearing sombreros on our heads and sporting Pancho Villa mustaches. What I'm trying to say is, we (I) really like to get into the theme of whatever we're (I'm) doing... For instance: I made a playlist to listen to while cooking/eating tacos! It consists of over 100 "Spanish-y" songs! The list included everything from the authentic sounds of Buena Vista Social Club and solo Spanish guitar, to the not so authentic sounds of The Clash's "Spanish Bombs" and Calexico, and everything else in between. Listening with eyes closed, one would might actually think themselves to be in Mexico... Okay, enough of this.

Yesterday I read something like 200 pages from 3 different books (total, that is... not from each book). I decided last week that my already insanely huge amounts of required reading wasn't enough, so I've joined a book club, thus ending any chance of my having free time during the week. It adds one extra book in my 'to read' list every two weeks. And let me tell you, moving from John Stuart Mill's view of causality philosophy in "Utilitarianism", to John Steinbeck's view of the dust bowl migration in "The Grapes of Wrath", and then to Phillip K. Dick's view of our future in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is incredibly hard to do in one day, let alone one sitting. My brain is fried... but in a good way? I don't know... In an accomplished way, I guess.

2009-09-14T20:22:00.009-04:00

Feeling the financial pressure common in a non-income household, the 'mates and I have decided to institute "Family Dinners". Basically, a couple nights of the week we're going to make some sort of big meal, like tacos or lasagna or whatever. We figured out that if we buy in enough bulk for all three of us, we can make delicious things to eat for $3-6 each. Also I love cooking, so uh... it's sort of win/win.

Tonight was our first night. The meal: A homemade failure pile, in a sadness bowl. It was... amazing. And if you don't know what it is, do yourself a favor and watch this:

2009-09-14T10:36:00.005-04:00

The weekend, for me, consisted of just Friday. I went out to Laurens and did some pregaming, then went to Arlens and did some more pregaming. Then I went to a party for a girl that looks incredibly similar to Hermione Granger. From there we went to a green pool and tried to catch some diseases by swimming in it. We left as the cops were arriving to kick us out and went back to Arlen's where I drank for another hour or two and then went to bed.

The next day I felt sort of gross, not just from my hangover, but also from the oncoming of some awful sickness which I am still trying to get rid of. It basically made me bed/couch bound until today. Therefore, I'm dedicating this blog to Dan, or, slightly more accurately, to Dan's car.

It all started on Friday, when Dan was trying to back out of Lauren's parking lot. Not being great (good) at driving, he smashed in his side light by turning into one of the support beams of the building. He was sad, but it wasn't too bad.

Then yesterday afternoon he had to jump Arlen's car. After helping her, he pulled up into the car port and forgot to hit his emergency break. His car, being a manual, then proceeded to roll down our driveway, into my car (breaking the front right headlight and streaking the front bumper with blue paint), backed over our trash cans, crossed the street, broke our neighbor's mail box, and stopped by slamming into the neighbor's car (breaking their front bumper).

You'd think he'd learn after this, but no. After this morning I'm convinced some secret part of his mind actually wants to kill his poor poor car... See, as he was leaving for class a few minutes ago I heard a screech and a crash. I ran outside to see what had happened and he explained to me that he put his car in first gear (for some reason? I forget what his "reason" was) and so when he turned the car on it jumped forward and stalled which made the car slam into our car port's wall, breaking the wood border around our utility closet and putting some nice white streaks across the front of his car.

So that was my weekend, as seen through the events of Dan. As maybe shitty as it sounds, it was the most entertainment I could expect from my unmoving position on the couch. No offense to Dan (or his car).

2009-09-09T16:57:00.025-04:00

I read a study once that said people who quit smoking's dreams can become more vivid. I can personally attest to this.

Shortly after I quit smoking cigarettes my dreams did in fact sharpen a bit. They continued to come into focus for a while until they not only started making a lot of sense, but they also began to parallel the real world with a lot of accuracy. So much so, that I've actually thought I've had conversations with people, only to later realize it was from a dream.

This might, from the outset, seem cool. As if I get to live two separate lives. Well, it's not. The problem is that my dreams are so incredibly close to my real life that they bore the hell out of me. In the past I had quite a few about work. I would literally be ringing people up and doing returns all night in my sleep, only to wake up for my 8AM alarm and realize that not only did I not get paid for my 8 hours of "work", but that I have to go do it all over again in real life.

This brings me to last night, when I had the most boring dream of all time. It was simply this: I was talking to Daniel about my bike. You see his bike's wheel wasn't running smoothly for some reason and he was going to take it to the shop. I looked at it and, unable to fix it, decided to rub in how awesome my 40 year old bike is, and how it doesn't have that problem, and on and on and on... I mean... if it were possible for Dream Travis to fall asleep of boredom inside the dream, he would have.

So, to solve this, I'm going to take up smoking again. Hah... always looking for an excuse aren't ya Travis? No that's silly, but I really do want my dreams to stop being so boring. Please?

2009-09-07T23:34:00.020-04:00

The three day weekend is over! Here is a brief retelling of what went down:

Friday was Menace Beach. It was pretty typical in most ways other than the massive amounts of people, which made it um... claustrophobic. So my friends and I left after a bit and drank at my house. Nothing crazy really.

Saturday I started my new medication (Zoloft), which made me nauseous. I'm not allowed to drink on it, so I went to a bar. After that I and some friends went to a party with a lot of young girls who were dressed like animals. I started feeling a bit sicker at this point, so I decided to listen to my doctor and stopped drinking. In retrospect, not drinking was a mistake and I will, in the future, only be at a young girls dressed like animals party if I'm plastered. We stayed a couple hours, but then I think we (Sarah) killed the party by taking over the music (and making it good). Once everyone started leaving/going outside to get away from the awesome pumping jams, we went back to Arlen's where we played cards and I remained sober amongst a group of ever drunkening people.

Here is a picture from the animal party where I am rejecting Drunk Dan, who appears to be trying to kiss me, with his hand in between my crossed legs and uncomfortably near my crotch. Ohhhh Dan.

Sunday Dan and I went on a man date. We saw District 9 (which was great), shopped for some clothes, and Dan bought a $250 loop pedal which I'm really stoked on playing with. That night the roommates and I went to Arlen's house where there were like 7 or so people... all of who were women except this one guy who was weird. I decided to try drinking on my meds again, and this time I didn't get sick! So I got drunk, and there were girls doing cartwheels, some dancing with percussion instruments, and some weird game where you write things and then draw them... I forget, but it was all fun.

And finally, Monday, today, is what I like to call "That time I went to the beach with my roommate and 6 women". Basically, the girls from the previous night's party wanted to go to the beach and they invited my roommates and I to go with them. Dan couldn't go because he's gay and only likes being around men, which put Justin and I in an enviable situation. It was a great way to spend labor day, there were dolphins, and frisbee tossing, and swimming... the normal beach stuff basically. But with a 3:1 gender ratio.

I got home from the beach before 9, and still had time to do my homework and write this here blog, huzzah!

2009-09-02T10:48:00.006-04:00

I have an appointment to see the doctor today about my anxiety. Ironically, this is making me pretty anxious.

I'm worried about two things. The first is overselling my symptoms and ending up having to get tested for Crohn's Disease or something, and the second is underselling them and being thrown back into the harsh world without some pill sized pillows to cushion the fall... It's a tightrope.

Anyway, assuming all goes well and I get some pills, I'm pretty excited. I really (really) need them as of late. All of my classes require participation and in one I've got to do a 20 minute long presentation on a book. With a partner. In front of my almost entirely female class. It's like my worst nightmare made manifest.

So... wish me luck?

2009-08-31T00:54:00.041-04:00

One of the first days after my roommates and I moved into our new house, some homeless kid came over and asked to wash our cars for $5. As a rule, I always say no to those people, as I'm paranoid that their request for work is simply a ruse, and that their real motives lie in "casing the joint".

Maybe I'm a bit paranoid... but Michelle was robbed by a kid who would ask to mow her lawn, and I think it gave me secondhand PTSD.

So anyway, the homeless kid asked to wash our cars, and Justin said sure. When he was done, the kid tricked us into giving him more money than was previously agreed, and talked Justin into driving him somewhere.

Then, later that same day, he came back while I was alone in the house and asked for another ride. I said no, and explained to him that I'm moving into my house right now and am therefore slightly busy. He didn't see this as a fitting response and actually argued with me about the whole thing until I ended it with, "Look man, arguing with me is just making me mad, so the more we do this the less I want to give you rides places." My logic was irrefutable even to him. He looked to the ground and walked away, as I swear I heard that sad snoopy song playing quietly in the distance.

Problem solved...

But of course problem wasn't solved and, today, the very day that I am writing this exact entry, the doorbell rang. I, not expecting anyone at my house... ever, answered the door with a certain amount of reluctance. It was the kid again.

"Ay man, your roommates home?"
"No."
"Ah shit. Hey man, lemme get a ride real quick."
I laugh, only somewhat unintentionally, and say, "Are you... are you serious?! No!"

Now I don't know when exactly I started getting attitudes with people I don't know, especially when they're potential thief/murderers. It's a somewhat new thing, though. In response to my somewhat rude declination, he struck the "guy pose". The "guy pose" being when you put your arms at your side, clench your fists, and suck up air into your chest to create a false sense of "buffness". Meanwhile you slowly shake your head left and right, and contort your face into something of a snarl in an attempt to make it say "Only through shear force of will and even temperament will I not beat the living shit out of you." He also made the sound "Tsss." After a moment or two of this he walked away and I closed the door.

Dan and Justin came home soon after and I told them all about my adventure. We agreed to call the cops if he ever came back, and weighed the pros and cons of murder as a means of problem solving.

About an hour later Dan and Justin went to the gym, leaving me alone in the house... again. I'm in the kitchen cleaning or cooking or something, when I hear the doorbell. I figure there's absolutely no way it could be that kid again, and that Dan is just fucking with me. So confident am I at first that it's Dan, that I don't even walk to the door.

Then it rings again. And again. Then over and over really quickly, as if he's confused my doorbell for the kick button in Street Fighter, and attempting to execute Chun-Li's Lightning Kick. I lose my temper. I answer the door. It's the homeless kid again.

"Ay man, your roommates back yet?" As he says it, he's looking behind me off into the house.
"NO!" I say, and before he has a chance to strike the "guy pose" again, and barely giving him enough time to mumble "pffff, c'mon mannnnnnnn" I slam the door and call the police.

They say "Well next time he comes, try to keep a conversation going with him while someone else calls the cops. That way it'll give us enough time to get there then get him for trespassing, or give him a restraining order." Which was a wordy way of saying "The only thing we can do for you is make him mad enough to kill you then rob your house at some later point while there's no law enforcement around." Well, I guess they're both about as wordy, but I feel my interpretation is slightly more accurate.

Dan and Justin come home, and I update them on everything.

So then, just 20 minutes ago, I got up after unsuccessfully trying to sleep, to use the bathroom. I open my bedroom door and immediately hear my name whispered. I turn to my right and see Justin hunched in the corner holding a knife.

"Did you hear the noise too?" He said.
"No, what noise?"
"You didn't hear it? It was loud, and I think I just heard something in the living room."
I go into my room to get my glasses and phone so that I can see and/or call 911 if need be. I come back out and look at Justin. He is holding a machete now. We investigate.

After combing the house and area around it as best we could, I decided that Justin had gone mad. I ask him: "If I wouldn't have come out of my room tonight, would I have woken up tomorrow to you passed out in the corner with a knife?" He said no, but I'm not sure I believed him.

and even now, since writing this, I swear I heard a door open in the living room...

I think we're all going mad.

2009-08-29T14:00:00.011-04:00

So there I am, surrounded by pretty girls at a party with a keg and a cooler full of "panty dropper" shooters. I had been drinking somewhat heavily leading up to this point, and everything is going pretty well...

Then Dan decides to tell ghost stories; My social Achilles heel.

I'm doing surprisingly well and not saying anything about how silly I feel the whole concept of ghosts are. In fact I would even go as far as saying that I was being an attentive listener.

Then, from my left, the following question was aimed at me: "Why don't you believe in ghosts?"

It is in this moment that things went terribly wrong.

So again, there I am. It's five minutes later, and I'm still surrounded by pretty girls, beer, and liquor... arguing with my roommate. Not about ghosts even, no. That would be too easy. I was arguing, rather vehemently, about the nature of the word belief, and the non existence of absolute truth. The heavy shit, in other words. People leave. People get annoyed. We alienate the girls we came to the party with.

I become in that moment the cliche drunk philosophy major. Dan, the cliche drunk science major.

You may be thinking, well at least it can't get any worse than being the douche bags arguing about pointless shit at a party right. No my friend, it can. We broke new ground in the depths of low that night. The argument was merely a 15 minute prelude to an insane and mostly regrettable night. A relative zenith against the nadir of the night's end.

Without a job, my "going big" has gotten much too large. This semester is going to be interesting.

2009-08-27T23:44:00.007-04:00

Dan: "We need to guide each others cocks, Travis"
Me: "Excuse me? That may be the gayest thing I've ever heard..."
Dan: "Instead of blocking them!! It's a thing! People say it!"

2009-08-25T21:59:00.017-04:00

Two posts in one day!

I actually had an pretty eventful weekend, and didn't want my stalker boss story to just be the intro to a really really long post.

Anyway, Friday I had to miss Menace Beach because it was my last day of work, but Daniel and a few people showed up at the house with some whiskey afterward.

We drank the bottle by around 5am, but, unfortunately, we wanted to keep it going...

We didn't feel like driving to Georgia, and couldn't remember if even there you could get booze so late... but then I remembered a place my friend Abi used to bring me that sold after hours to her. She and I would walk in at any time of night and they would sell us alcohol. I never asked her how it worked... like maybe she knows them? Also, she is an attractive girl, so I was worried that that may be a (the) factor in her after hours privileges.

Basically I was scared that they wouldn't sell to just me. So, having a genius drunk moment, I made Dan drive me and Jordie to the store, and had Jordie (who isn't even old enough to buy alcohol) come in with me to... seduce? the counter man. Yeah, I was that drunk. But guess what?.. I shit you not, it worked. The man sold it to us.

Now to be fair, they're probably just really shady, and sell it indiscriminately to whoever. I'd like to pretend for the sake of this story though, that it was my cunning that got us our 5am case of beer.

We came back and eventually everyone fell asleep except me and Jordie, who kept it going until somewhere around 11am.

The next day we went to a pool, grilled some food, went to some parties, met some new (rich) sorority girls that we (somehow?) became friends with, and that invited us to their really fancy house with a pool. There was some skinny dipping, which was fun, but it was really cold so Chelsea, Jordie and I decided to go back to my place and make a hot tub out of the bath.

When I got home I tore the shower apart to make it more comfortable (something which would be awkward and regretful in the morning), and we sat around drinking/talking until the water ran cold.

As we were getting out of the tub Jordie said something like "I hope you guys aren't tired, because I'm going to be up for a while!"

We dried off, walked to the living room and Jordie passed out instantly.

Which was fine. I got to know Jordie's roommate, Chelsea, better through it. We talked for a while, and eventually decided it was time to get Jordie to a bed.

The next day Dan had to return a car which he stole while blacked out to one of the sorority girls. I too had an awkward task, the task or returning booze which I stole in a clear and conscious mind... from the same girl. The one with the nice house and pool... She seemed strangely okay with the whole thing. In fact, we laid out by her pool that day for a few hours in a hungover bliss after returning everything. When it got late we went home and grilled hot dogs before going to bed early.

It was a really good way to end summer... I'm only sad days like this had to start soon before school.

2009-08-25T15:25:00.013-04:00

My last day of work at Rick's Toy Box was last Friday. As I left that night, the owner said something to the effect of being really sad that I'm leaving and that I was one of the ones he wanted to keep, which, coming from such a sociopath was actually pretty touching.

By the time I got into my car to drive home it was about 2:30 in the morning. Some people were expecting me at my house, and they wanted me to stop and pick up some stuff from the store on the way. So, I hurried home taking some back roads to expedite the trip. It was about 5 minutes into my drive that I happened to look back and, about 3 or 4 car lengths behind me, make out what appeared to be a black Escalade/Hummer looking thing (I'm not great with cars). The alarming thing about this is that it's the same car that the owner of Rick's drives. And that if it is in fact him behind me, he's going the direction that isn't his house. I decided not to panic yet though, and thought, hey, maybe it's not that weird. I mean, I'm in Frenchtown, it's not exactly out of place to see a car like that here.

It was about this time that I slid through a yellow light, just before it turned red. I then watched the black car behind me very obviously run the light. My boss is following me, I'm positive now.

I replay our last conversation: "You were one of the ones I wanted to keep". It suddenly takes on new meaning. I picture myself in some sort of cage back at his house. Or shot, in the "If I can't have you, no one can" fashion. Facts I'd rather not think about start to pop into my head: He always has several guns on him. He brags about shooting them all the time. He's a paranoid schizophrenic. Oh my god, this is it. I'm going to die, or worse, be some sort of sex slave.

Just before my house, I make that stop at a gas station. I pulled into one entrance, and he pulled into another one across the way.... and just sat there, not even going into a spot, his car idling.

I decided to confront him there, where there's people around, rather than my house where my friends might not be yet. I walked to the far entrance so I'd pass his car. He had the window down but was looking at the floor. When I said hi he said, with a badly faked tone of causality, like he just happened to be at the same gas station half an hour away from his house at 2:30 in the morning, something to the effect of "Oh, er, uh... Travis! Hey! Wait, don't uh. Hey don't you live around here?" I told him yes, yes I did, to which he asked "Well hey, since I'm so close do you mind if I drive by and see it?" I said that I didn't see a problem with it, and after getting some stuff in the store, got back into my car.

He followed me the rest of the way home and when I arrived I got out of my car and told him, while he was still in his car, "Well... this is it." He said "Oh nice, wow. Okay, thanks. Hey I'll bring you a six pack or something some time. Later!" and drove off.

I'm scared I may be being stalked by my 30 something, kind of gay, schizophrenic, sociopath multimillionaire of an ex boss.