Time to Punch Something

I'm glad Kerry conceded, though I'm rather upset at the outcome. I can't say I'm too surprised because the Republicans really had their act together and an amazingly effective attack machine against Kerry. Besides, Bush was an incumbent war president. It was an uphill battle anyway, what with the advantageous position of the Republican National Convention coming after the Democratic one, and Bush getting to close the debates last, and the whole Swift Boat thing (which Bush didn't sponsor, but which helped him). All the big Democratic punches, the convention and Fahrenheit 9/11, happened during the summer and the sentiment dissipated by October.

Fuck the "Anti-Bush." I wish that a pro-Kerry documentary could've been more widely accessible, as opposed to Fahrenheit 9/11, an anti-Bush tract. I saw "Going Upriver," a documentary about Kerry in Vietnam, and it was then that I believed in him. It was only the day before the election, and I saw how courageous and gracious he was as a 27-year old speaking before a Senate Committee. At 27 he made an impact like a meteor, his five minutes of airtime on the national news- five minutes on the news, mind you- riveting the nation, President Nixon, the FBI. 27, hm? What am I going to be doing in eight years? I thought to myself, watching that footage, "There goes the president of the United States."

I wish they'd count the absentee ballots and the provisional ballots. Right now I feel like my vote doesn't really matter, like my vote somehow wasn't "worth" as much as other votes because it was an absentee ballot, because it wasn't in a swing state. I want my vote to be just the same as everyone else's. I know they will count them, but it just seems like an afterthought and a joke right now. And in these four years, with everything that's happened, the states were still pretty much divided the same way as they were in 2000. How many people were actually informed voters, and how many people just voted the party line? The debates didn't seem to matter at all. Young people didn't make a difference after all. After all that we tried, we didn't change a single thing. But I'm glad it was at least a clean election. Thank God for that.

>____<

Today was my first day working at the soup kitchen in Baltimore's East Side. Not because I'm compassionate or noble or whatever; I really don't care about poor people. This sometimes puts me at odds with my extremely liberal group which likes Raising Awareness and Advocates Causes and whatnot. I think Raising Awareness is pretty lame; for example we're doing this event where we give out pieces of candy with hunger trivia facts on them. This isn't even for fundraising, we're just Raising Awareness. First off, I think we're giving candy to the wrong people. Since we're trying to feed the hungry and all, maybe we ought to give candy to, you know, the hungry people. But maybe that's just me. Also, who the fuck needs to raise awareness for hunger? Who doesn't know what hunger is? "Aw Jeez, I'm so full right now! I never knew people could not be full all the time!!"

Also, I personally, think it's subtly wrong if you Care About the Poor, to spend other people's money. You're just a glorified beggar, guilting other people into donating THEIR hard-earned money for your Good Cause. Presumably if you really cared you'd spend some of your own grubby money. You'd get a job and donate your proceeds to charity, or build a house for the homeless or cook food for the hungry or tend the sick. It'd be part of yourself you'd be giving, not part of other people like a fucking commie. Besides, in these fundraising things, the cost of fliers and your non-profit bread-and-circus type events is probably almost as prohibitive as the proceeds. "A portion of proceeds goes to..." Fuck that. However, I also think that as a person I ought to accumulate as many different experiences as possible, which is why I went to the soup kitchen.

I think I spent the time in a state of perpetual frustration. I went into the shelter's "office," which was just basically a room with stuff strewn about it. You know, tables, stacked up chairs, a tiny tv, somone's shitty computer, crappy cast-off shit that people donate to charities for the tax deduction. Nothing was in working order; there weren't labels on anything so we didn't know where anything was. Additionally, Miss Rose, who runs the shelter, didn't have anything meaningful for us to do, and her ebonics coupled with old person talk made her completely incoherent. This meant that she'd tell us to do something trivial, like fetch her the newspaper, and we wouldn't know what she said or where to get it. By the time we actually deciphered her request and found, for example, the newspaper, she could've up and got it herself. Miss Rose is a wonderful lady, but we were the most inefficient team to ever walk the face of the Earth. Miss Rose is damn well capable of running her shelter pretty much by herself with Carlos and Plata. We were just kind of... there. I felt so retarded.

"They all ladies," said Miss Rose. Despite the fact that there were seven girls and we insisted that we were strong willing, Miss Rose refused to let us help do the heavy lifting. So one scrawny boy from our group was appropriated by Carlos and Plata (two elderly men) to move donated furniture into the house across the street, while seven young women of differing athletic ability stood around because ladies just aren't of help.

In general, we had seven volunteers with nothing to do. The first thing we did was carry boxes of cans downstairs. Except that we didn't need the last box of cans so carrying it down was completely unecessary. Because there were so many of us, we even clogged each other in the halls. Then we sorted the cans, filled plastic bags with five cans and a loaf of bread, and placed the bags on a counter for people coming into the shelter to take them home. That was it. We got it done pretty quickly, assembly-line style with eight of us, but Carlos and Plata could've done it. Maybe it would've taken them a longer, but they could've done it, unlike the eight of us who got it done in like five minutes and spent the next hour milling around in awkward silence.

We didn't serve food or use the canned food to cook meals for people; we just gave them bags of cans and sent them on their way. Plata was eating a breakfast of canned corn. How pathetic is that? These dozens of people coming in and their major source of sustenance is eating canned corn. It's the saddest thing in the world; People just throw a can into a cardboard box during a canned food drive and, having done their "duty" to charity, consider the problem taken care of. And meanwhile people are eating canned corn for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that's our solution. Let's throw another fucking can into the cardboard box. I think next week I'm going to bake some brownies the night before so Plata can eat some real food.

After the can-sorting, as an interuption from the aimless milling, I went with another girl into the urine-soaked backyard. This is something that's really notable about the 'hood (as Carlos calls it). We, as middle class college students, just take for granted that the campus doesn't smell. Sometimes I think, "I'm really fortunate to have a place to stay at night," or, "I'm really lucky to have food on the table," but I've never ever thought to think, "Man, I'm so grateful my house doesn't smell like piss." Well, the next time you say grace, if you do that sort of thing, after you've thanked Our Father Who Art in Heaven for your daily bread, thank him for a reeking-piss-free life too. In any case, we put donated clothes, which hadn't been washed, into different bags. At the end we were left with a giant pile of mismatched shoes and socks we had to throw out because some IDIOTS decided it would be a good idea to donate clothes to charity one sock at a time.

I honestly think most "volunteer opportunities" don't actually help people and are created for the benefit of volunteers to feel better about themselves.

I saw some people outside sweeping the sidewalk so I told everyone, "Hey, it looks like they need help, let's go join them." At this point, maybe an hour into our little trip, we had literally nothing left to do. Ostensibly we were suppose to give people plastic bags full of those goddamned cans of peas and corn, and by "give" I mean, "inadvertantly make them feel intimidated as they come into the shelter to pick up bags of food on the counter in front of them, revealing their lack of financial independence to seven random strangers trying not to stare."

So I said that we should go outside and help the community clean the gutters. Since we had rubber gloves and trash bags, we could pick up trash. But everyone was saying, "Eh..what if people don't like us going into their property?" What they meant was: "Eh.. I really don't feel like it..".. because there were people already outside cleaning the streets and sidewalks (completely public areas) and when I asked Miss Rose if the community would be hostile towards the idea, she said they'd love it. My group said, "Gee, you really want to clean, don't you?" but nobody actually moved to do anything. So we sat around making small talk for the next half an hour.

Some people left to go to the Ford Rally, a rally to protest Ford's new hybrid vehicle. Apparently, Ford's new hybrid is a "a marketing ploy to distract people from realizing the fuel inefficiency of Ford's other models" and we need to boycott Ford. Apparently the great plan to save the environment is to boycott companies when they start trying to reform.

Then, one lady, Miss Anne, came in to chat with Miss Rose, and then took a broom and dustpan and started sweeping up trash in the gutters. I got the rubber gloves and trash bag and went outside after her (she had the only broom) because I wasn't going to let a frail, elderly woman who relies on a soup kitchen to make ends meet clean up trash while FIVE young college students sit on their asses talking about who's doing what major. So I had two people come with me from the group and we picked up trash and threw it in the trash bag.

"Gee, people living here must really like pixie sticks," said a girl I was working with, after we had picked up a plethora of small tube wrappers filled with white powder.

After we finished cleaning the street as best as we were able, that was about time to leave. We met up with the two people who hadn't gone on the cleaning expedition with us, who had been chatting about their majors.

---
Carlos says they need "jobs. It don't matter if it McDonalds, we just need something to make us feel like we worth somethin'." He wants to write a book someday. During the cleaning, besides Miss Anne, we'd met a young woman who told us how she appreciated what we did, and James, who'd been sweeping the streets for eight years. We met an easy-going bald man who joked about us being "working gals," and an old man who would put milk out in little tuna cans for the stray cats that belong to the whole neighborhood.

---

We thought maybe for lunch we could visit to a cadre of young men from the "Jefferson Group," who had been friendly to us when we'd arrived and invited us to eat at the deli on the corner. However, the girl leading our group didn't want to go.

"The less time we spend in this neighborhood, the better," she said, "This place scares me."

... so we went to the NSA museum and we pushed the power button on the Cray supercomputer and all the microprocessor lights turned off. Except then the alarm went off and we ran away. But then we snuck back in and pressed the 'disable alarm' button. So it was all good.

As a writing exercise, I was supposed to write about a place on campus. This is:

The Drainage Ditch By the Admin Parking Lot

A monolithic bunker stands, concrete and compact, beside the grotto overlapped in green. Tiers upon tiers of cars and their glinting window panes rise above dirt, grass, trees. Light flashes through the leaves, the glare off glass and metal. Twinkling like stars, the sunburst flares briefly and then becomes shadowed by the swaying of arboreal curtains. Wind-bent branches and leafy canopy swim above my head and cast their reflections below me into the hazy water. The water runs trickling from the rim of a cement tube, a giant’s jar tipped over, into a pool so thick and murky that the water seems almost solid. Chalky rocks, white and angular, tumble down into the gully where the excess water flows and from the deep-rooted soil, the dark and soft trees reach towards the sky.

The Conservative Case Against George W. Bush

... but I put it out, eventually.

....so somebody decided to use my credit card number to finance an all-expense paid shopping trip to Miami, and my laptop caught fire after something got jammed in the floppy drive.

It's a little embarrassing that I don't know who my suitemates are. Oh, I know who they are because I know their names, and being that I have two suitemates, I have a fifty-fifty chance of calling one the right name. But it's problematic when I'm bringing back the mail and don't know who to give it to. And who wants to tell people they live with that they've forgotten their names?

A really frickin' long description of the Baltimore Aquarium.

Keep on Swimming: The Place Where "Finding Nemo" Quotes Are Said So Often They Get Annoying

Went to the Baltimore Aquarium last Friday. The lobby has a walkway over a pool of sting rays. The water's clear enough that the sting rays, with wings slowly fanning the water, or rippling like the flanges of hovercraft, look like they're flying above the pool bottom.

At the very top of the museum is the rainforest exhibit encased in a glass greenhouse, which also serves as the aquarium's roof. It was close to the aquarium's closing time, and the rainforest was damp and dark. Everything was asleep, except for large toads that sat in dark areas of the footpath, waiting to be stepped on. I saw a sleeping scarlet ibis, which I'd only known about from the story, with head tucked into wing, one leg delicately lifted and the other spindly leg balanced on a cable like some sort of tightrope walking ballerina. It graciously woke up for me, its head swiveling on its long neck. The sloth hanging against an unfortunately shadowed section of mesh, was merely a dark, furry silhouette.

Went to the dolphin show too and sat in the splash zone (aka front row seats), but I was off by the side so I didn't get splashed. In the middle of an arena is a giant tank. You walk up to what appears to be basically a wall of glass that's taller than you are, and you think, "Oh, a seven foot deep tank," which is pretty impressive in itself. However, if you stand next to it and look down, you see the dizzying drop-off where the straight walls of the tank extend, far below your feet. (It's 25 feet deep, actually).

For the show, lights come on inside the pool, they turn the lights off around the stadium, and all of the water glows. The glass is so thick that the distortion is intense. If a dolphin is under water, the dark figure you see at the surface of the water and the figure you see through the glass are in such drastically different locations that sometimes you'd confuse them for two dolphins. If a dolphin or trainer is partway in the water, the part that is above and the part that is below the water seem spliced like twenty feet away from each other. That's how thick the glass is. It's an impressive feat in itself.

Dolphins are strange animals. Because of all that's said about the bond between humans and dolphins, I think I'd subconsciously expected them to look more anthropomorphic, to smile or wink or something. Of course, instead, they looked just like other animals, with expressions that are completely inscrutable. In simpler terms, they aren't really as cute as they're hyped up to be. However, the power in their muscles and their bursts of energy are simply amazing. Maybe you don't think about this except when you see dolphins up close, but dolphins are big, and their sleek musculature is a sight to see.

The show itself was fantastic, but I don't think I as a spectator could describe it to you in a way so that you'd get a better impression than by say, just watching a tape. It is different from watching it on tv though. Take my word for it. They did some stuff, like stand on their tails and propel themselves backwards, splash the audience, beach themselves on shallows and wave, play catch with balls in their mouths, jump into the air to hit a ball with their noses, and swim around dragging a trainer behind at the speed of a small (and completely silent!) motor boat. Stuff you see on tv. But, because it's in real life, better.

If you take a set of stairs under the stadium, you can see through a great glass window at the bottom of the tank. If you look up, you see the underside of the surface of the water, twenty five feet above your head. This is like the height of a two and a half storey building, if such a thing were to exist, or a sizeable city wall. It's intimidating. The glass is thick here too, and curved to bulge outward. At certain points because of the distortion, the dolphins will appear to swim out of the tank. Up close against the glass, you notice their imprefections. Scars here, splotches there, signs of age and experience. Maybe it's just me looking too much into things.

Outside the dolphin arena is a section of the aquarium with all sorts of interactive activities. I stood in a little booth where a computerized voice measured my height. I'm five foot four and a quarter inches, the exact length of a harbor dolphin. I'm so proud.

In another section of the aquarium, there's a racetrack shaped tank, filled with coral and tropical fish, and in the middle of it is a walkway that spirals downward along the inward wall. Because of its shape, all the fish swim in one direction in laps, as if there were some invisible traffic cop. All the fish are pretty cool, like some square-headed fish that look as if they were beaten out of aluminum foil, and an unpuffed puffer fish the size of a watermelon. As you descend the spiral walk, the lapping fish follow you. At night, near closing time when most people have left and the lights are dimmed out of consideration for the sleeping fish, this tank is a bit creepy in its loneliness.

The spiral track descends under the coral tank, the wall around the walk is covered with black silhouettes of different species of sharks, rimmed by purple light. Any babies being carried by their parents begin crying at this point. Under the wall of cutouts, we reach the racetrack shaped shark tank. Unlike the coral tank, it's not filled with color but monochromes. The sharks drift slowly around in laps (traffic cop again), like floating starships of science fiction. In the silence and serenity that fills the expanse, several people sit on the floor, studying. There are ugly sharks and beautiful sharks, sharks sorely in need of braces with teeth jutting out of their mouths every which way, sharks plopped down upon the sand, sharks with skin shimmering iridescent under the intermitant shafts of light, to disappear into the unlit sections of the pool on regular intervals. There's a door in the side of the shark pool, big enough for a human. I wonder why it's there.

Under the shark tank, if you descend further, you reach a window that peeks into the bottom of the sting ray tank, and if you exit that, you're back in the lobby again.

More angst!

See, for an English assignment I have to write a story from the point of view of the guy in this poem.

Being that I've never had a loved one or even a pet die on me, I find it difficult wrapping my head around this whole "grief" mindset, especially with my roommate playing upbeat rock music.

So I'd like to take this time to dredge up my going to college blog posts compilation, kind of like a "best hits" album.

Anyway, I don't know the ethics of quoting blog posts nearly verbatim for English assignments though, so to be safe I won't do it. Bummer. It'll force me to write new material every once in a while, I suppose. I wonder how much I'm allowed to lift; because if I can't use any of my blog, then that means I can't write (in future assignments) about anything that's happened to me for the last three years. Anything of note that's happened to me for the last three years I've written about in my blog already (okay, maybe some stuff about Jeremy that'd be too private to go into an English assignment anyway) and in creative nonfiction format too, so I'm screwed.

Quote of the Day

"Prick the sacred cow!"

-my econ professor on small business, mixing his idioms.

Went to the Inner Harbor with my parents today to watch the fireworks explode over Fort McHenry. Those of you who serve and make this possible for the rest of us, I thank you.

Involvement Fest today. It was fun people watching. Unfortunately, the Political Economics booth I was manning was sandwiched with the Baptist Ministry, the Catholic frats, and the Mormons, so people basically walked by quickly, trying very hard not to make eye contact. If I had wrangled in the Republicans' Club member dressed like a giant flip-flop, I could've made it Conservative Alley or something.

Moved the booth next to the quiet heavily-trafficked College Democrats and Habitat for Humanity tables, and got quite a bit more traffic after that. As a bonus, I now have gimungous John Kerry for President sign which I'm displaying at my dorm room window.

Hey, did you know that there's a group going to Florida to campaign for Kerry? Man, that takes dedication.

Jeremy came to visit me on the weekend. It was very nice. Same feelings that I get whenever I see him after a long interval. You know how it is. I get used to not having him around and it gets weird with him around, and then I get used to having him around and then he leaves and its weird again.

He told me how much he missed me. We also talked about what sort of weapons would be most effective against a T-Rex.

Well, in the evening, Sam IMed me asking me if I wanted to go to Ascension, the name for Goth night at Club Orpheus in Baltimore. So I said yes, because I didn't foresee myself having anything better to do, and dragged Jose along too, because I didn't want to be at a club without at least one person who I knew decently well. We went with Sam and Jenny, his cousin, who seemed nice, if chronically angry. It's a strange combination, but it works like this:

Jenny: Hi!!! I'm Jenny!!!! ^__^
Jenny: Will you hurry the fuck up, Sam??? >___<
Jenny: Nice to meet you guys!! ^__^
Jenny: Goddammit! I need a smoke!!! >___<

Sam and Jose don't mix well. Both Sam and Jose have their annoying mannerisms, and while sometimes two people's annoying mannerisms can enhance one another's, in this case they aggravated each other like a particularly volatile reaction, or like the physics textbook illustrations of sound wave interference. Some of the things though, I don't understand why Sam does. Like why wear Devil's horns in public? Hmm? You must have been asking for the jeers at 7-11.

Ascension itself is close to the Harbor, in a Fell's Pointy type place though I couldn't be sure. You unlatch the thick, wooden door of an unassuming townhouse, and lo! a Goth club. Upon seeing that door, I almost expected one of those scenarios where you have to knock three times and someone pulls back a creaking panel, squints out, and says, "What is the shadow of the five moon ghost?" It didn't happen though. We just had to show our IDs and pay $6.

Orpheus in general seems pretty shitty as a club. It has a basement smell, or maybe the backstage of a community theater smell, and looks somewhat like a garret with a sound system and tables in a corner. The drywall wasn't even completely painted over yet; I think that's why they keep the lights dim. We went at nine, and no one was there. Jose complained that we would have a private club, which I thought was more the better, because Goths hate people anyway. There were people, maybe a handful, and everyone was huddled around the bar, smoking. At any given point there were like maybe three people dancing. Dancing, because you're a goth, in as unenergetic a way as possible, like in that South Park episode on Goth kids. It has to match the operatic moaning soundtrack, after all.

I think I had fun though. Not dancing, of course. The people there were fun to talk to, and Orpheus is quite a successful lounge, if a shitty club. I met a few nice Victorian gentlemen with swordcanes, who gave me good advice on getting good plus-sized men's Goth clothes (cowboy re-enactor sites, surprisingly), and bondage clubs in D.C. It's a shame about its club pretensions, actually, since once you stop trying to be cool (and fail miserably) it's a good place. If we could actually talk without shouting and choking on secondhand smoke, it would be lovely. Overall, I'm glad to be out on a different social scene every once in a while.

Plus, they had free pecan sandies.

---

Came back with Jose. Around one at night, the weather was cool but the campus abandoned. We were on our way to Late Night when we were accosted by a guy yelling, "HEY!" at us. I thought he was drunk, and began walking faster, with my head down. In a very shady tone, he went, "Hey... you guys fileshare? Are you anti-government? Well we all know this school rips you off, and I think it's about time we give something back to the students. Just this year, five students have been arrested for filesharing." The slowness of our downloads is oppressive, the expense of the dining hall an outrage, and Kazaa a political cause. Apparently he runs some sort of private direct-connection filesharing intranet on campus and wants us to be in on it, though he couldn't provide us enough specifications about it to really satisfy our curiosity. Convo goes as follows:

"So, where do you live?" Jose says amiably.

"Apartments."

"Which one?" asks Jose.

"I can't tell you." The guy is dead serious. "You scare me because you're asking so many questions." The guy's eyes dart from side to side. "Stop asking so many questions."

"Hillside!" guesses Jose.

The guy flinches.

"Casselman!" I narrow it down. Me and Jose think of Kay, and laugh.

The guy goes rigid. "Are you laughing at me???" he demands.

"No," Jose says, putting his hands up to defuse a confrontation, "it's just an inside joke."

"Tell me what it is," he insists, demanding proof that we aren't mocking his anti-authoritarian revolution, "I need to know."

So we have to explain it to him, how Kay lives in Casselman and has his own ftp which he uses to share files and the rest. By the time we explain it to him, it's not funny anymore, which is, of course why you don't explain inside jokes in the first place.

The guy gives us the ip address and then, seeing two other guys walking towards the dining hall, yells towards them, "HEY! HEY YOU!"

"Do we know you?" one of the guys calls back in a knife-edge polite, conversation-terminating inquiry. They begin walking faster.

The first guy writes his AIM handle down, and hands us a slip of paper.

"Here," he says. "You'll find me online."
---

Can someone tell me what the fuck?

Weird Day

Had classes... Kay's in my Greek history class, as are Becca and Michelle, the punks of archaeology I knew from Greek Archaeology last fall semester. Apparently Becca and Kay know each other, due to him helping her with Italian during her trip to Rome. This school is so small (for a state college) it's basically like six degrees of everything. Had Creative Essays, with the coolest teacher, and then Women in the Classical World. Becca (and all her friends) warned me extensively against the professor, saying she was insane, literally insane, in ways inconceivable to the human mind.

"You're taking the Women's Studies course, right?" Becca said. "That's her specialty. You'll die."

The class was interesting.

Actually, I don't see what the big fuss is about. It does seem like fun, though I don't like the idea of group projects and oral presentations. Curriculum-wise I'm also not too hot on the fact that the course, as Ancient Studies 320, is also a Women's Studies class. There are only like two guys in the class, and more than half of the class has never taken an ancient history class.

Upon being asked what they knew about women in the ancient world, the students were generally like, "Um.. Athenian women were like.. oppressed .. and stuff."

God help me. It's like taking Bio for Non-majors. Science majors, you understand my sentiment.

After class, I had this weird AIM convo with Will, which I don't think I'll post here. But, if you knew what it was, you'd agree with me that it was weird.

Just nod to this.

Had my first classes today.

Roman history seems alright. I'm glad there's no paper, though there seems to be a bit of reading. My professor seems good, if unconfident and young, like an older version of Peter Parker, with Toby Maguire playing him.

Econ was fine, but it sounds like a hard class.

Advanced Exposition sounds annoying; it seems like a class where you just write essays on political and social views. Also, there are six papers to write. But I need it for my writing minor, so unless I hope for a better teacher (and though I've heard my teacher is a bit crazy, I don't know if she's necessarily bad) I should probably just take it anyway.

Have moved into my dorm, at Harbor North, 342. My roommate seems sociable but not in the cheerful, party girl breed of outgoing that was characteristic of my last two roommates. Weird getting into the hang of things, especially when you look at old dorm buildings that you reflexively think of as your or your friends' dorms, but of course you don't live there anymore. My roommate has a webcam, which she says is basically her only way to see her boyfriend in New York. Will M has one too, one of the fancy ones that tracks his motions. I think this is a good idea for me and Jeremy, seeing that I might as well put my T1 (or T3, is it?) and his cable connection to good use. Also, I'm reminded of Jeremy a lot more than I was at home; I keep thinking I see him out of the corner of my eye, and oddly enough, certain smells remind me of him, though I can't really pin down what they are. Just certain hallway smells (not the Sus smell, mind you, which is still even after that building was renovated). He may be coming to visit me this weekend, God willing. Conflicted as to whether I'm happier around him or no; I mean, it is a lot harder to find things for two people to do than one person to do on this boring campus, as I by myself am pretty easy to please entertainment-wise. Give me the net and peer 2 peer.

Have spent my time after move-in unpacking and decorating. My room is smaller than the one at Chesapeake or Jeremy's room in Erickson, but it does have its own common room and a bathroom that is, unlike Chesapeake, bigger than a closet. Both the bedrooms, the common room, and the bathroom are invadvertantly accessorized in pastel shades, down to the lamps and shower curtains. It looks nice, but I think my Aragorn poster ruins this effect.

Pat and Biting Chris (who should not be confused with Malfean Chris, or Chris K, aka "Brian's Chris") happen to coincidentally share an apartment, so I helped them unpack also, and move furniture around to optimize space in the apartment singles. This is like squeezing blood from a stone. Tagged around after Jose and Brian K, who share a room in Erickson, like some sort of heirs to the Kay-Niall-Jeremy Ericksonian throne. It is, of course, not the same room, but since all rooms in one building look alike, it certainly feels like they've picked up where Kay, Niall and Jeremy left off. Have made various other social calls, including to Will M and On My Hall Andrew (He no longer lives in my hall this year, but this is a name I've given him to distinguish him from Andrew D and P).

A funny story goes here; I was keeping Pat company as he was working the cashier at Late Night, and this girl came in, panicked to the point of hyperventilating, that she had accidentally taken bread from the dining hall, and wanted to pay us three dollars, (I suppose to salve her guilt over accidentally stealing). Pat reassured her by invoking the unwritten truce between the resident student body and the dining hall, passed down though oral tradition, generation to generation, from a time immemorial; that unless anyone saw her stealing, it wasn't actually stealing. I don't think she was very convinced even then, very desperately wanting us to not think her some sort of criminal. Eventually, we persuaded her to keep her three bucks.

Ahhh... freshmen.

Will go now: have class at 8 am tomorrow.

My classes tomorrow are Roman history, Intermediate Macroeconomics (which I've read ahead by about four chapters on), and Advanced Exposition. Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have Women in Ancient Greece, Creative Essay Writing, and Ancient Greek History. I'm majoring in econ, stealthily. Well, until I've got Intermediate Micro and Macro, the prereqs for the advanced classes, out of the way, there's not much I can do in that subject anyway.

Ancient Studies is my declared minor.

Lorica Plumata Americana

I wonder if it would be possible to make scale armor (scale mail, as incorrectly known among D&D players) out of military dog tags? I hope it wouldn't be disrespectful. Maybe you could use those fake fashion statement dog tags, as opposed to authentic ones actually issued to soldiers. In the fake ones, you could customize the text, so that each scale had a sentence of a short story, or a word in a song or poem, or maybe scripture, or the Gettysburg Address, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, of Bill of Rights. Or, you could simply have them be names, maybe names of soldiers in Iraq, or those killed in 9/11, or just names of random, everyday soldiers with no specific theme. In any case, as concept art, I think it'd make an interesting statement, though what it is, I don't know.

One possible interpretation, if you wanted to be cynical, is that it equates the American military with imperial Rome, since scale armor was used as ceremonial armor extensively among Roman officers. (It was too expensive for the everyday soldier.) Another, more patriotic, interpretation is that each serviceman is part of a greater, unified whole in the protection of our country. However, I think the latter statement would only work with ring mail, with the symbolism of interlocked links and such. I don't think the US military gives servicemen rings, do they? However, you could still make the dog tag scale armor, and have it backed by chain, hence becoming actual scale mail. That seems like a bit much.

On Friday, I STed for the first time for Exalted, in a one-shot with Doug, Andrew, and his brother James. We were all Solars, part of a traveling boyband of weaponcrafters called the ArrowSmiths. :P Name courtesy of Andrew.

Came up with the plot 10 minutes before, in the car.

Didn't get anything done plotwise, because we only had two hours. But apparently people had fun. I'm not sure if I'm satisfied with myself; obviously I could've done a longer session, and if I had more time I could've worked out more setting information, coordinated it to fit in better with the player characters, and other details, like NPCs. I didn't feel I got a chance to describe things very well; I have no sense of oral tradition. Example of me as an ST:

"You are in a city. It's pretty big and crowded. Um, yeah."

"I go to the merchant's district."

"After a little while of disorientation, you make your way in the general direction of the merchant's district, uphill. It looks like an open air market. There are stalls.. and people selling things on blankets.. and ... stuff. Yeah."

"I go to the local smith's."

"It's a smithy. Smoke rises up from it. Inside it is an anvil."

It's terrible. I can write much better than this, and I know more than this.

(The houses are made with clay and plaster washed white, with flat roofs accessible by external stairs. The city is built on a hill at the apex of which is a ziggurat with terraced gardens. As you make your winding way uphill, you notice that the streets become wider. Your honor guard leads you up a wide ramp through a pylon gate to the ziggurat's outer courtyard.)

I just can't narrate on the fly. After a certain point I gave up, and told the players, "You're in Messopotamia," to which Doug responded, "I've never been to Mesopotamia." Well, I haven't either, but I still have a rather specific atmosphere for my setting that I wish I could've conveyed. I may use the setting again though.. it's not bad.

I like my character also, a graciously classist aristocrat bastard: "Your retainers are quite skilled. Where did you buy them?" -regarding Doug's characters fellow party members. I'm also quite happy that the whole bell obsession made the cut: "By the time you are a few minutes into dinner, you've noticed that all the kitchen utensils have been tuned." (To E major, in case anyone was wondering.)

Doug and Andrew's characters were also great, doing the usual party bickering to comic effect, which really saved me a lot of effort since the game essentialy ran itself.

Andrew: "Yay, free food! What's for dinner?"
Me: "You're in the servant's quarters, right?"
Andrew: "Yeah.."
Me: "....Gruel."
Andrew: "Rolling... temperance..."

I noticed something that actually didn't come up in the session, but would've come up in a future session. I was talking to the group about what would've happened had the one-shot continued. My character will attempt to convince the party that he's following a set of tracks in order to lead the party in the wrong direction. There actually are no tracks.

Andrew's response: But you have no survival! Why would we believe you?

Which is annoying, because in character, I have high manipulation, so it's not as if Andrew's character would know I didn't have any survival. It's beside the point anyway, since Andrew's character has high survival, so in a contested roll he would probably have had a good chance at calling my bluff.* But if I'd made him do a contested roll, even if the character had failed, Andrew the player would begin to have out of character suspicions: after all, making someone roll a contested manipulation roll means that I have something to hide. It'd be annoying.

Note to self: Get ST screen. Hide ST character sheets. Roll manipulation checks, investigation checks, and other such sorts, behind screen.

Second note to self: Know what skills each character has before making a story. For example, stories that don't hinge on characters having low survival, and stories that hinge on people having investigate...

On Saturday, discovered a starter adventure on Kazaa. -_- Would've saved me some trouble.

But I would recycle the adventure, I really would. Make it a full, multi-session thing. Mostly regretable is that it just worked so well because of the specific chemistry between all the characters. I don't know if it would work as well for another set of chars.

*This is an example of my typical lack of system knowledge. Would that be Manipulation + Survival on my part vs. his Manipulation + Survival, or Intelligence + Survival? I would think that it would be Manipulation + Survival for him if he was using his skill in detecting bullshit, and Intelligence + Survival if he were using his vast tracts of knowledge to check for factual errors. Kind of like how if you were really gullible, but knew a lot about cows, you could still end up being skeptical of a guy's stories about growing up on a ranch. That kind of thing. In the end, I just kind of end up going, "Whatever," and let the players use whatever the hell die pools they want.