Keep it brief

A few quick things to note before burying myself under piles of English homework.

First is my conversation with Chris Baker last night, part of which I’ve reproduced below for your perusal:

muskrat3581: i hope you get in
chrisbaker one: if i do i’m still going to cmu
muskrat3581: heh
chrisbaker one: dude, seriously, it was so rad interviewing with these guys!
muskrat3581: that’s tight
chrisbaker one: boston was sooooo pretty this weekend dude. serious.

People familiar with me outside of this website and the Daily know that I have two methods of speech, which I privately refer to as The Scholar and The Surfer. The Surfer usually takes backseat to The Scholar when it comes to writing, but this doesn’t always hold true in conversation, as you can see. Here we are, Chris Baker and I, at the top of our class, discussing selective post-graduate study programs as if they were 18-footers breaking off the coast of La Push. Sometimes I mix the personas up, mostly by accident, with something like “I’m releasing you under your own recognizance, dude.” We all are what we are.

Secondly, I found a place to live in Vienna, tentatively. Here it is on a big old map of the city, if you care. There’s another apartment, right on the other side of the river to the north, that I would prefer, but I haven’t heard back on that one.

Third, I had an article in the Daily today, out of my usual Tuesday slot. My editor was in a bad way for columns, so I gave him the green light to bump me forward in the line-up; more people read the paper on Monday anyway. The story of the piece is pretty uninteresting, as was my weekend: I only left the house once, to read Victorian literature in Ravenna Park, and I didn’t feel too good about the state of affairs. Worse, I spent all of Saturday fighting the other tenants in my apartment building for control of the laundry machines. That night, I was drawing a complete blank for an article topic. I had nothing. The creative well was bone dry. I lamented this fact to Nathan, who suggested a couple ideas I shrugged off before hitting on the concept of laundry customs. Truly, he saved my bacon. A big thanks goes out to the man with the shaggy mane, in lieu of a mention in the article itself; but as I reminded him, he’s already had an article all to himself, and so can’t really complain. If you’re ever sad about my not mentioning you in the Daily, don’t be. I mention Kelly all the time, and as a direct result there’s now a whole group of people on campus who hate her through association with me. Essentially, being in the Daily won’t make anyone like you more than they already do, but it will probably make someone you’ve never met hate your ever-loving guts. So it goes.