I am sitting in the Clive Library by the fireplace in one of the big leather comfy chairs. The fireplace is off. In front of the fireplace is a display table that says "Finally...February!" The sign has a bunch of other f-words (make your own joke) and the books around the sign all start with the letter f: e.g. Fallen Angels, Flyover States, the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I am trying to make my way through Infinite Jest. I'm on page 392 or so. It's difficult because of two reasons. The first reason is because I am tired. Today I woke up at 5:30 in the morning for work. This wasn't as bad as it sounds - I was surprisingly alert; a warm shower and swing music and bacon will do that to you - but now I am tired.

Reason two is because out of all of the libraries in the area, the Clive Library is not the best "quiet place" library. This is thanks to Clive's estimated population of 29.5% of people below the age of eighteen, this particular library is a hopping place for kids. This means that the Clive Library has a sizable collection of kids books, which is cool and all - I'm all for getting the kids interested in reading - but it comes at a price: it is loud. This is thanks in part to the kids themselves and thanks in other part to the toys/birdcages that surround the kids' part of the library. Walking by the kids' part of the library one sees a lot more kids playing with toys than kids looking at books. It's like they're trying to bribe the kids into reading, but the plan somehow seems flawed.

This isn't to say that it's a bad thing. In one of my moments of lost focus I overheard the following conversation between two kids probably around the age of eight:

GIRL: My daddy taught me how to play checkers. I'm really good. I beat him with three kings.
BOY: I like checkers. Do you work here?
GIRL: No. My mom needed to get a program on the computer.
BOY: Mine too. (after a brief pause) I can't get these pieces unstuck.
GIRL: I was trying to get on the Clifford website, but I couldn't make it work.
BOY: I can see if I can make it work.

And then their voices faded to some other corner of the library. It's as if I was overhearing some primitive form of flirting, which was both funny and disconcerting at the same time.

The second distraction is the kid sitting across from me. He came here about ten minutes ago. He is wearing a red Cabela's hat. He is a little overweight and probably about fifteen years old. I am fairly certain he has some degree of autism. He is reading one of those Great Classics Condensed For The Youngins books - "The Adventures of King Arthur And His Knights," this one is called. His mother is sitting next to me. She is reading a yellowed paperback book. The autistic(?) boy occasionally makes little grumbling noises in different timbres and pitches whenever he reads some dialogue in the book. I assume that the high pitch means that the princess character is speaking, the diaphramic pitch indicates that King Arthur is speaking, and that this gravely warbly voice he does means that an old man is speaking - probably some crazy old guy or a wizard.

He hasn't been doing so much of the dialogue thing now. His mother - or maybe she's just his nanny or something; she acts rather coldly toward him - told him to shhh one too many times. Now he just makes occasional reactive sounds - gasps for exciting parts, laughing for funny parts, etc.

The Clive Library is a wonderful place to people watch, but not so good of a place to read.

If the guys from Wet Hot and my friend Kyle - do you still read this, Kyle? - teamed up to make YouTube videos, I would imagine that they'd be something like these videos starring Marty Chang, an advice guru who appears to be the physical embodiment of absurd stream of consciousness. My two favorites of his regard gardening and horoscopes, but there are a few others.

Anyway, a couple of days ago these videos had only a thousandish views; the numbers have skyrocketed over the past day and damn do these videos deserve your viewing.

I've been meaning to link to this game for the longest time. It's called You Have To Burn The Rope; not only is it fun and hilarious, but it's a great example of how video games can be used as a satirical medium.

Even though I belong to a generation that doesn't know of life without the personal computer (and only vaguely remembers life without the internet), I still spend more time than I ought to staring at technology with complete and utter awe. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like this is really easy to do; just take your iPod out of your pocket and realize that you've got five thousand songs on the thing with room to spare. Or consider that you can access the internet - an amazing thing in itself, the internet - from anywhere in your house on that same little device. Throw in the fact that the thing is slimmer than a deck of cards (not to mention that it's hundreds of times more powerful than the huge brick of a computer that was my family's first) and I dare you to tell me how that little thing isn't a kind of a miracle.

So in short, I spend way too much time going "woah" with regards to technology. A certain amount is reasonable, but sometimes I go too far; for instance, a couple nights ago I interrupted my homework to marvel at the fact that the computer I was using was so tiny and well designed. "How do people make these things?" I said for a solid fifteen minutes before getting back to work.

This is probably the reason why I've made so many posts that have amounted to nothing more than, "Look! I'm making a post from [INSERT ELECTRONIC THING HERE]." (One day there will be a toaster that can connect to the internet, and when that day comes, expect the first ever toast post out of me.)

But this post is a little different. To be honest, this is another one of those "Look! I'm making a post from..." posts, this time from the Dell Mini 9 that arrived Saturday. It's an incredibly tiny and super portable (and super cheap) computer that is ideal for those moments when you're not doing much more than using Stumble/playing some online game. Don't get me wrong; I love my MacBook Pro and this computer is by no means a replacement for it - though it's great for web surfing and brief sessions of typing, its tiny keyboard and relatively slow processor speed make it less than ideal for let's-get-down-to-business sort of tasks.

It's a really neat computer, though. I never thought I'd one day be able to buy a laptop with wireless internet and a webcam for less than $350 - not to mention the thing's just a little bigger than a paperback book.

A couple of nights ago I had a very bizarre dream. I know some other stuff happened, but all I remember is sitting in the passenger seat of my car which was in turn sitting in my driveway. No one was sitting in the driver's seat. And then I sneezed and out of my nose came a piece of lettuce. The experience wasn't painful or gross; the sneeze felt totally normal and the lettuce was not caked in any bodily fluids.

Just last night I had a dream that I was cleaning out my room. Amidst the clutter I found a transparent cookie jar. Inside that cookie jar was about five boxelder bugs and a piece of lettuce. I concluded that I put the lettuce inside of the jar when I was in second grtade because I had this weird obsession with saving things when I was that age.¹

Lettuce is obviously becoming a reoccurring theme in my dreams. So my question: what is my subconscious trying to tell me? Is there some weird Freudian explanation for this (i.e. lettuce = leaf = bush = pubic connotations = sex) or does some deep part of my brain want more veggies?

¹ True story. I remember saving a french fry back in the day because I felt bad for it.

Holy shit. So I was just thinking, "Hmm. It's February. Isn't February when I made my blog is? I wonder what my blog's birthday is." And it's today.

This blog is now seven years old. It is closer to being ten than it is to being one. That may seem a little goofy or insignificant to you, but I find it to be kind of a big deal. That means that this blog has existed for about 36% of my life.

This is what that looks like in pie chart form. I realize that the yellow part doesn't look like a lot, but it's not going to do anything but grow.

Honestly, I'm still amazed that I continue to update this thing - not to mention that people read it. So thanks. And maybe as an act of celebration, you can view the first thing I ever linked to. You know. Back in the pre YouTube days.

In elementary school, I was never a part of ELP - Extended Learning Program, where the smart kids (read: most of my friends) would go for an hour or two every week. The rationale, Mrs. Whitehead said, was that my standardized test scores were pretty high, but not high enough. My reading scores were remarkably high, but my math scores were average to abysmal. Mrs. Whitehead said that she admired this, but my scores indicated someone the exact opposite of the criteria for joining ELP; most of the gifted and talented kids she worked with week after week had solid math scores but not-quite-as-solid English scores.

Nevertheless, I still managed to scoot by as a sort of an honorary member of ELP. If ELP was The Beatles, I was Billy Preston. When the ELP kids did Night of the Notables, I was invited to tag along. When they did a sketch comedy-ish show as a fundraiser, I was asked to partake. So occasionally I'd sit in at a few of the ELP meetings, which would always begin with what Mrs. Whitehead called a temperature reading.

Temperature readings worked like this: Mrs. Whitehead would ask you how you were a feeling on a scale of one to ten. Then she'd ask you to justify your rating. The whole thing was like a big inside joke that Mrs. Whitehead wasn't quite a part of. Us kids would treat it with a sarcastic sort of detachment, which I mostly attribute to our unwillingness to partake in the touchy-feely bullshit that swirled around our elementary school curriculum like flies to a corpse. We'd make little bets with one another to try to use the most riddiculous numbers possible, mostly by means of crazy abstruse decimals. Like:

WHITEHEAD: Thomas, how are you feeling?

THOMAS: Oh, I'd say about a 8.275.

WHITEHEAD: (nods and smiles courteously)

Unfortunately, we never went insanely far with the number thing. In hindsight, I wish I had said that I felt like pi.

Flashforward to now time. Given the shenanigans that have taken place over the past couple of weeks (and arguably, months - and to a certain extent if you really want to get analytical, years) I've been seeing a therapist on a weekly basis. She's very nice and helpful and all that, and as a result I have none of the cynicism toward her that our culture tends to frequently direct toward the whole therapist notion.

During our last meeting she asked me a question about my self-confidence. And then the memories of my adjunct ELP meetings started. 

"On a scale of one to ten," she said, "ten being the highest..."

"It reminds me of that Steven Wright joke," I interrupted. "'On a scale of one to ten, six being the highest.'"

She laughed and said that she'd love to try saying that to some of the kids she'd counseled, but that probably wouldn't go well.

"Anyway," she went on, "on a scale of one to ten, where would you place your self-confidence as of now?"

And that's when I realized why I thought the temperature reading stuff was bullshit. First off: what does ten equal? Does ten mean you're at a reasonable level of self confidence, or does it mean you're cocky? I decided ten meant cocky - but did that mean my therapist regarded a ten as cocky, too?

I eventually obliged and settled on a number - somewhere between an eight and a nine, thank you very much - but then I went on a little rant.

"I'm a little confused. What exactly is a 'ten' to you? Is that, like, I'm-a-gonna-jump-off-a-bridge-because-I-bet-I-can-fly delusional self-confidence or is it a more reasonable level of confidence?"

She said that a ten would probably indeed be in the realm of too much confidence. An eight to a nine is standard operating procedure for a socially functional human being; a five is kind of low; a two to a one is nearly catatonic. We then waxed philosophic about what she's getting at when she asks people the number based questions, the conclusion she came to basically being that most people don't really think through the whole number business that much. Plus, they'd typically elaborate after they say the number, and that elaboration is far more valuable information than a number in and of itself.

That's the thing about numbers. They're awesome for dealing with concrete stuff (i.e. how many apples do I have? how much money left in the bank account?) but when it comes to dealing with more metaphorical stuff - like emotions - numbers don't quite work, since society doesn't agree on the metaphorical definition of "five" like they do the literal definition. 

Maybe that was one of the reasons we were so skeptical of that temperature reading stuff back in elementary school. And maybe one of the reasons that Mrs. Whitehead used numbers to gauge emotion is because she was trying to bridge the gap between the worlds of the abstract (English) and concrete (numbers) - perhaps to improve those ELP kids' reading/writing scores.

Still, though. If I ask you "What's up?" and you reply "12," fuck off.

On Saturday I helped out at IHSSA. I was the doorperson for the improv room. I was there from 7:30 AM to 4 PM. My job was to cross off the names of the groups that went and to yell at people to be quiet. Every so often after I'd deliver a particularly scathing "shut up" sort of spiel, a spiel that was condescending but not so condescending that it wasn't effective, one of the parents would say to me, "Good job," like being condescending in an effective manner is something very difficult that one has to train for.

Even though my job didn't require a lot of...well, any real physical movement - when I wasn't sitting I was standing on my chair to give said spiels - I was dead tired by the end of the day. It was as if I'd actually been participating in IHSSA like years past. There's just something about hanging out with a bunch of so-called "drama kids" that sucks the energy out of you. They're energetic in the sort of way that you actually feel tired after having spoken to them. They're like energy vampires; they suck the energy out of you and thrive on it.

Near the end of the day when I was about to fall into some half-conscious REM state, this girl - probably a freshman, short, long brown hair, big wide eyes, oversized front teeth, something vaguely chipmunkish about her face - ran down the hallway and stopped in front of me. She stared at me as she panted heavily, her entire body rising up and down in this rhythmic sort of way while her face expressed pure ecstatic joy, like I was Santa Claus on Christmas morning. She didn't blink.

"Can I help you?" I asked.
"I JUST RAN AROUND THE SCHOOL! TWICE!"

And with that she started running again.

Media Consumption

Film: I saw Coraline Saturday night. I'd read the book last year and enjoyed it quite a bit. It's by far the creepiest kids book I've ever read, and I mean that in the best way possible. Anyway, Coraline the film: see it in 3D. At first the whole 3D thing is a little weird (I found my eyes going out of focus here and there like they didn't know what the hell exactly they were supposed to be focusing on - what the fuck is going on with our depth perception? they seemed to be screaming to my occipital lobe) but then it just becomes flat out immersive. As for the film itself: not as enjoyable as the book (surprise surprise) but still enjoyable in its own right.

TV: Of course I've been mildly obsessed with the latest season of Lost; my dad and I watch it every week and at least once per episode we shout "OH!" like we've witnessed a particularly shocking play in a football game. But I've also been enjoying season 2 of Dead Like Me, a neat little show about death by the creator of Pushing Daises. It's smart, but not too smart, which means that it's a great way to zone out for 40 minutes at the end of the day.

Books: I'm 170 pages through David Foster Wallace's behemoth of a book Infinite Jest, which is both funny and thought-provoking in amazing ways at the same time. Think White Noise except smarter and with a better sense of humor.

Games: Haven't had a lot of time for these. When I do play a video game, it's Crosswords DS, which is just what it sounds like.

Earlier
So about a week ago I stopped back by my dorm-of-one-day for what I think will be the last time. There I packed up all of my stuff. It was kind of a sad thing; not because I'd grown any attachment to the dorm, but rather because the act of packing up my dorm felt like some sort of physical manifestation of failure.

(Though, yes, I am perfectly aware that some of what happened is partially due to factors beyond my control - and we talked a hell of a lot in the therapy thing about responsibility vs. blame [responsible = you made what you thought was the best decision given the information that you had at the time, blame = you set out to purposefully fuck things up] - so I'm aware that there is no need to blame myself for this whole fiasco, that I should instead just be taking responsibility and moving on, which is what I'm doing, seriously, I swear, otherwise I wouldn't be feeling half as good or half as productive as I am now, but anyway the whole packing thing felt like kind of a bit of a bummer regardless.)

So I was loading up the remnants into some cardboard boxes that were being unpacked only a week or so ago when my roommate - or should I say former roommate - came in.

"Hey," he said. He was wearing a suit.
"Hi," I said.
"What's up?"
"I'm moving out."
"Oh. Man." He looks really tired.
"How was the fraternity thing?" He spent a week in the fraternity house for some initiation thing.
"Tiring," he said. "I'm really tired. But I'm on my way to get initiated."
"Well that's awesome."
"Yeah," he said.

Two of his other friends show up. They're also going to join the fraternity, so they're wearing suits too. The three of them stand facing me in this little triangular pattern which makes them look like a group of well-dressed bowling pins.

"You're back," one of them said.
"Not for long, actually - I'm moving out."
"Oh." You can tell they wanted to ask why but social norms dictate that it could be awkward.
"It's a long story," I say. Which is true.

"It involves trouble at home," I continue. Which is also true - to a certain extent, of course. When I hear the phrase "trouble at home", I don't necessarily think of depression. It might be somewhere down the train of thought, but there are other things that pop in my mind first: divorce, domestic abuse, money troubles. I'm experiencing none of those things, but for all my former floormates know...well, who knows what they think I meant by "trouble at home." Then again, maybe they do know what I meant by "trouble at home"; after all, I did shoot my (now former) roommate a brief Facebook message so he wouldn't be terribly concerned that I had disappeared from the dorms. "I'd appreciate it if you kept this between the two of us," I said, which was true, but if he had let the others know what he knew, I wouldn't have minded.

"Ahh," they said.
"Well," my roommate said, "if you want to hang out or anything, just give us a call. You're in the area, after all."
"This is true," I said. We exchange numbers, shake hands, it's nice to have met you, best of luck with the whole initiation thing and that's that.

Most everything is packed now. There's only two things left: the minifridge (which will be a hell of a lot of fun to get in the Escape, let me tell you) and the dry foods. I throw the foods I'd bought after moving in into my big trashcan, except I'm a little hesitant about this, because I sort of feel like giving the big trashcan to my now-former roommate as a sort of a "thanks for being understanding about all of this stuff" sort of thing. But the food is placed into a bag which is placed into the trashcan: pringles, check, pretzels, check, candy, check, case of Coke (somehow never made its way into the fridge), check...wait.

The drawer is empty now. I'm relatively certain I bought a bag of buffalo chicken flavored beef jerky - way better than it sounds, I swear. Did I put it somewhere else?

A brief inspection around the room later and I've found the bag, except it's empty, crumpled up, and sitting on the top of now-former-roommate's smaller trashcan.

They ate my beef jerky.

Oh well. Everything is loaded up into the car. Life goes on.

Later
Home, days later. The remenants of my dorm room lie in the corner of the sunroom. This includes a box of snacks that is rapidly depleting as the days pass.

I head to the snack pile to grab a few Pringles...as it turns out, they're already opened. The stack of Pringles is an inch or two shorter than one would typically expect from a normal package. I don't think I date the Pringles while I was in the dorm. Is someone else to blame? I feel a little like the Three Bears.

Even Later
More days later. Lunchtime. Noodles sound wonderful. I bought a noodle bowl during my short stay at the dorms; now sounds like a good time to heat it up.

Except it's not there. Goddammit.

I begin to realize that though none of this has been any fun, maybe this moving out thing was for the best.

I'm (still) in the process of cleaning out my room and I wanted to share with you a few things that I discovered:

1. A magazine ad that is almost too awesome to be taken ironically
2. A magazine cover that rides that fine line between disturbing and hilarious. I'm trying to imagine the situation that took place leading up to this photo. "Look here," the boy in the photo said. "I will give you a Mystery Dollar if you allow me to look at your ass."