February 4th, 2002. Monday
 

 
   

    I didn't have much trouble waking up today. Once I woke up, I got straight out of bed. Unfortunately, it was about an hour and a half too late. So I was rather late coming into the office this morning. Not that I'm terribly busy or anything. But tardiness is always troublesome for me. I hate being late. So it's odd that I'm late so often. I guess my love of sleep is just that much greater than my hatred of truancy.

    On Friday I attended a little dinner party hosted by Jen K. It turned out to be more fun than I'd expected. This was largely due to the fact that almost everything served featured bacon. Just about the only thing to not have bacon bits or wrapped in bacon were the pork chops. We sure do love bacon. It was a rather small affair, filled mostly with Parks people and Jen's friends from highschool and NYU. I had planned on staying till about ten, then maybe go out to a bar with my friends, but I stayed until about 3 in the morning. I can't really remember what all the conversations were about, or how I managed to stay so late. I talked a lot with Jen's friend Beth, the dread-locked black girl we've been trying to assimilate into our group of friends. She was pretty entertaining. She was telling me how, growing up in the Connecticut suburbs, she worked as a waitress, and people would always ask where she was from, saying with astonishment "You speak so well!" I can appreciate her somewhat diluted ethnicity. She's slightly more black than I am Chinese. Anyway, a while ago Jen K told me her boyfriend just broke up with her. Apparently, she was "too nice." I didn't really understand that, but after talking to her at some length, I can sort of see how someone might think that. She's just a little too nice and cute and slight and soft-spoken. Though I was highly entertained by playing with her dreads.

    For some reason, late in the evening, Jen K punched me in the head. She was pretty drunk at this point, as were many of the guests. Then later she was wearing my clothes. I have pictures. They should all be detroyed. She punched me pretty hard. I guess she thought I'd block. I didn't think she'd get that close. She also retold stories of her getting arrest when she was 15, stealing a life-size Popeye cutout, and how her parents wouldn't go pick her up in an Atlantic City jail. Also stories about her highschool friends who had several abortions and shot heroin in the bathroom, and were now in jail. Or, "the pokey" as she likes to call it. And we all wondered where the hell she went to school. I never heard of anyone shooting heroin in high school. Catholic girls' school. Typical. Anyway, I guess this is how I ended up staying so late. One story just blead into another. Plus, it was cold outside, and I couldn't muster the energy required to go out into the cold. And there was plenty of bacon left too.

    So let's see. Saturday, I was planning on maybe hanging out with Caryn in the city, and also go up to Queens to hang out with Aaron, but that blasted cold kept me home. Jen K called a few times to see if I wanted to have lunch with her and her parents, and if I wanted to hang out in the evening. I told her sure, the she proceeded to flake out ont over the course of about four phone calls, and decided to stay home and watch the James Bond movie on tv. So I spent most of the day finishing my Underpants Cowboy tape conversions, first into .aiff files to burn onto cds, then into mp3s. The mp3s are now on the Underpants Cowboy page, so feel free to download and listen at your leisure. I would highly recommend "It's A Buy," and "Joe Namath Has A Posse." But that's just me.

    Around midnight roommate Dylan and I went down to Great Lakes, to find it absolutely packed. And unfamiliar faces. Except that creepy asian guy and the loser who used to wear the goggles. I almost wished he was still wearing them, because now he just looks sad.

    It was cold once again on Sunday, and once again I stayed inside for the majority of the day. I had a wonderful time sleeping and relaxing. The furthest I ventured was three blocks down to Dizzy's to get a cup of coffee. There's a waitress there who I find strangely intriguing. She's not particulary attractive, or tall, or thin, or in her early to mid-20s. You know, your typical marks of beauty. But I've seen her several times, and there's something very interesting about her. I guess maybe she just seems like a real person. Like there's more to her than her just being a waitress. I know this is of course true of everyone, but it's a little more obvious with her. But not in any sort of profound or artsy way. That'd be a big disappointment.

    So then we watched the Super Bowl. No one really cared about the game, except for our usual desire to see heavy favorites lose. The game was made infinitely more interesting by gambling, from organized systems like a little grid, to betting to how long the hang time for each punt lasted, to whether the first person seen in the next commercial break would be white or black. The biggest cheer in the entire evening came toward the end of a Dodge Ram commercial, when a black, Samuel Jackson-esqu engineer was shown. netting Jed exactly one dollar. The other major enjoyment was had through the combination of Hormel canned chili and Velveeta, melted in the microwave. Excellent. Being the health-conscious guy I am, I opted for the turkey chili, which was advertised as being 99% fat free. Another snack note- I simply cannot eat enough of those Tostitos with lime.

    Throughout the game, we watched with aggravated curiousity several ads for something called "mlife." The never told you what the product was. It just told you to go to the website. We were all dying to know what it was, but we didn't want to succumb to their little game of corporate intrigue. It was bad enough that we had to sit through the commercials, but it was absolutely infuriating that the commercials were so effective in us wanting to learn more about their accursed product, whatever it may be. Finally, Matt sneaked through our security- he had been the lone dissenter- and tried to log onto the site, only to find it unavailable. Curiously, I think last Super Bowl, or the one before, there was an IBM commercial, where people are sitting in some sort of support group, and a guy's like "Hi, my name's Bob." and the other guys are like "Hi, Bob!" and Bob says how he was so stupid, how he had this internet company, and how their webpage got great publicity all of a sudden and the site go all these hits, and how it ruined his life. And everyone's like that's great. What's wrong? And he says he forgot to tell the server guys and the site crashed, and the head of the group says, "That was stupid, Bob." Anyway, I thought of this as Matt tried to access mlife.com several times without success. Finally, during the second half of the game, it was revealed that it was a product from AT&T wireless. whoopee.