the world has turned and left me here

trapped in an elevator

Coming back from a party last night the elevator got stuck. It was silly of me to take the elevator anyway, I only did it because I had my bike along and didn't feel like carrying it up two flights of stairs. Anyway now it is 2:30 am. Within about 15 minutes a CSO (Campus Security Officer) shows up. He asks me if I'm claustrophobic and I say no, and then we just start talking through the door about stuff. He seems pretty cool.

Eventually I just lay down in the elevator and go to sleep. It is almost 5:00 am before they finally get me out of there, and when I do I get to meet the voice from the other side of the door. Only it is a voice plus a uniform, and somehow the buddy connection I felt for the guy is completely dispelled by this. Talking to the elevator repairman when he finally showed up at 4:30 I learned that he hadn't been called until 4:00--there was some kind of mixup between the operator who took my call and the CSO. I make the mistake of bringing this up with the CSO and this puts him on the defensive, so he counterattacks with questions about where I had been drinking, whether there were minors there, checks my backpack for alcohol--all the usual things that earn cops their reputation as pigs.

You were the voice of a friend man until your uniform came into play. What gives?

reinforcing behavior

Yesterday and the day before I was up for 40 h straight. Save for a 15 min nap outside in the grass that is, a nap that was interrupted when some girl I hardly knew sat down and started talking to me while I was still sleeping. Some 5 min later I realized I was talking to her. I honestly have no idea what I said to her; could have been anything. Dimly remember something about bowling.

Anyway it was a pretty apocalyptic sort of week for me. Friday we signed off on our Design Studio project, so all of a sudden I have about 20 more free hours in my week. I had two talks to do Friday, one on gravitational lensing which I started on at about 1:00 am Friday morning and finally finished at 7:30, and another in my QC class which I just jotted some notes down for right before going. The first one sucked, and the second one rocked. Now you tell me which behavior just got reinforced here.

personality

Dream in which I am curled up pretending to sleep. A guy stops in the doorway and looks in at me. Thinking I can't hear him, he says sneeringly, "Do you have a personality? Or do you just put one on?" I am cut to the quick.

the heat of deeds

Macbeth: Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

judgemental looks

Standing around outside smoking a pipe I got hit up by a pair of Mormons on their mission trip. I have never seen a more judgemental look directed at a tobacco pipe as they questioned me about it, asking whether it was addictive, etc. Remember these are the people who will not drink anything caffeinated so already there I must be like public enemy number one. Anyway we got to talking and they came on strong with their smarm. But I kept stuff real, joked a lot, and called them on anything I didn't really agree with. I got out of it with the assurance that they wouldn't birddog me, refusing to give them my phone number or tell them I'd consider a single word they said, so V is for victory.

the essence of college

Too much frisbee playing last night led to crunch time on a paper for my physics course, which had to be done before 8:30 the next morning, and more importantly had to be done come 11:00 pm so I could get my drink on with Chris, Suga and friends. Well at 11:00 pm she was about halfway there and I just said screw it. Upon my return at 4:00 am, many beers later, I attempted to finish the thing but kept falling asleep with my hands on the keyboard. So I set my alarm for two hours, got up at 6:30 hung over but clear-headed and finished her off. Subsequently demonstrated that I could sleep soundly through the class. Experiences like this, I believe, are the essence of what it means to be in college.

the real world

There is no reason to specify what is and what isn't the "real world." Is there any other kind? Why do you and I continue to refer to other ones as if they existed apart from the one we have chosen to call "reality"?

barber's sonata

Barber's Piano Sonata Op. 26, you are strange, but I love you. In the third movement we finally see everything that is wrong, and everything that is right, with the world.

burning with energy

Sometimes my body seems to be burning all over with energy. Sometimes this is when I am trying to sleep, and then it's best to just give up on the whole sleep thing and just go with it. It happened last night and I was up dancing around to System of a Down at 4:00 in the morning. I got up at 8:00, after three hours of sleep, to the sound of Pat knocking on my bedroom door. I dressed in a flash and we biked down to Pioneers Park in south Lincoln, where we cheered Drew and the UNL cycling team on. We set up at the bottom of a long, painful hill, and screamed at the pelaton on its way up. I hopped up and down in a day-glo yellow and orange suit.

Next engagement was at 2:00 when we got a bunch of Kauffman people up for a game against the UNL Ultimate club team. First game was darn close, we lost 9-7, second game we were thoroughly demoralized. I am sunburned and short on sleep. But feel good.

bruising

Dream in which a mantle of shrunken bruising covers my shoulders, the upper half of my back, and my upper arms. The skin is gray and deflated except for the places where bones push it outward, where it appears normal. Something to do with diving for frisbees.

search me

I upgraded to MT 2.63 and it has a sweet searching feature, check it out on the sidebar.

Nebraska's sick sense of humor

Friday I was reading under these palm trees in Phoenix, Arizona.

Today I am in Lincoln Nebraska, and even though it is in April, it looks like this.

a pleasant surprise

My flight got in and I finally got back at 12:30 am. I was all ready to go to sleep when I opened the door to my room and found this.

It was a pleasant surprise, and I intend to thank the person responsible in similar fashion. Such is my gratitude.

impotence

Suburban America I know what you hide--impotence. For all that swagger and show you go home at the end of the day and copulate apathetically at best. This frightens you to no end when you think about it but mostly you don't think about it.

reality delayed by .1 seconds

Interviewed in Scottsdale, AZ, the capital of the upper middle class world, for a summer internship. After the interviews they took us out for happy hour. I returned to my hotel room happy. At this point I discovered that Russian choral music suddenly made a great deal of sense and I heard things in the Vespers that I've never heard before. The night was still young and it was time to go to a club named Martini Ranch. I called a cab. It was a white luxury car--everything in Scottsdale is a luxury car--driven by a deformed Slavic guy in a suit who flipped through radio stations asking me at each one if I liked the music.

The club was big and filled with beautiful people. Black limo parked outside. It didn't stack up against the Keller of course, but it did get me all nostalgic for the life again. A cover band called Wonderbread came in for a set. They had on giant afros, about 3 or 4 feet wide I'd say, basketball jerseys, and silver sparkling pants. They were wacky as hell. They did covers of Superfreak, Tupac, the Violent Femmes. The lead singer poured Jaegermeister into the waiting mouths of girls. As they played, a big screen off to the left showed a video feed of them with a slight delay between frames, because reality delayed by .1 seconds is so much cooler than reality undelayed.

8 mile

Watched 8 Mile last night. As a result I dreamt I was driving around Lincoln (on a grocery run in fact, who the heck dreams about going on a grocery run anyway?) and kept seeing isolated black guys along the way, getting down to their own inner beats. All of them were wearing bright red shoes.

This wasn't exactly the content of the movie so I'd say my subconscious lost a little bit in the translation. Anyway, the movie was alright...it was the bonus footage that really got to me. The director was as white and unhip as they come, a skinny salt-and-pepper haired guy who kept using his biggest SAT vocabulary words to describe the beat battles. It was painful, so painful, to watch.