ever since the public library said i can't get a card there no matter how many care packages my family sends me, my only internet access is at work

6/18/2006
it's christmas at walsh jesuit and i have a university of chicago bio lab in the basement of ricco fieldhouse. I park my Dodge in the guest lot and make my way past the chapel (where the choir is singing and most of the school is at Mass), through the Commons, to the fieldhouse. i'm sipping a red slurpee. finally i get to the basement lab. mr. parker, the AP physics teacher, is TAing. my lab partner is benno. i'm pretty sure it's fall 2004. parker directs us to a mud-bottomed tank full of brown fish and brown plants and gives us a lab manual. i open it. there's just one line of print:

Your task is to find the piece of walnut fudge I put in there.

it takes us less than 10 minutes to find and remove the fudge with a little aquarium net. a girl who was in my core bio topics study group walks by carrying keys and talking about a mailbox*. benno leaves in a hurry, and i gather up my stuff to head out as well. i grab a red slurpee on the lab bench. when i come to the door, i notice that my slurpee is near the door, where i left it. ashamed**, i grab it too and hope the person the first one belongs to doesn't notice i took it. of course, on my way to the door i see lee (a kid from my QMech lab) asking for help on a much more difficult lab, and realise immediately that the slurpee is his. i run for the door.

* my notes don't clarify exactly what i meant by this; i clearly thought it was more memorable than it actually was. my notes also say "rescom w.o." and (i think) "can't sit"
** pregretting, eggy

6/17/2006
part I
occam's razor decides to have a really experimental show in BSLC. we do a combination of improv and very bizarre sketch, sometimes two unrelated scenes simultaneously (one improv and one sketch). several people who are not actually in occam's are in the sketch troupe, incl. benno [again--wtf] and ross [from wjhs]. at one point benno and ross pick a man named ed from the audience and improvise a song about him while someone i don't know makes an improvised music video on powerpoint. daniel reads some of the plays he wrote with the neo-futurists. despite the giant pillar that blocks the stage for 1/4 the audience, the show is an enormous success. i can't join everyone for the cast party afterwards because i have to move out of the shoreland, which is now made entirely of glass and ruled by those two people who gave us the communal microwave.

part II
i link to the channelwood age in MYST only to find that it has become a children's TV show since i last visited. everything is much less grungy, and i am greeted almost immediately by steve from blue's clues, his weird successor whose name i forget, and two other guys in different-colored striped shirts. steve brought blue, the other guy brought magenta, and the third guy has a little yellow dog; the guy in the black and gray shirt has an alligator wearing a rubber dog nose.
after a brief introduction, i follow them to a bulgarian dinner theater owned by a family whose members constantly scream and fling hot pots at each other. the father does not want customers to use coupons, even though he prints them; he has a little wooden podium from which he lectures about this whenever he has a spare moment. Unfortunately, if he has a spare moment it is usually because the restaurant/theatre is empty, so no one ever hears him.
Not surprisingly, it turns out the reason I'm in the theater is to do an occam's show. Kyle gets yelled at for trying to use a coupon at our pre-show dinner. It really shouldn't matter because free dinner was part of our compensation anyway. The Blue's Clues guys leave to go to a baseball game.

6/16/2006
nick wakes me up at like 8AM (on a saturday) for an important tradition: every year nick's brother (greg) and greg's high school friends dress in light blue soccer uniforms, call themselves the Super Savers, and go back to New Trier to take the multivariable calculus final again (for fun). this year nick and i have purchased uniforms and become part of the team. taking the calculus exam seems to involve a lot of storming buildings with some sort of yellow weaponry and raiding cabinets. a few minutes into that, my consciousness temporarily shifts to the body of a squirrel sitting on a tree branch in a sandusky backyard. below the tree, two girls (one from my physics class and one who I think was Nick's sister) are having a tea party on white wicker chairs.

6/14/2006
the University of Chicago is a huge, surreal stone castle/mountain. don randel's office looks like captain's quarters on a galleon poking out of one rock face. i walk across campus to see it, but when I get inside Admiral Ackbar confronts me.
"what do you want?" he says.
"i just wanted to check out the architecture," i reply lamely.
he believes my excuse, but only lets me look at the room after pulling me over to the door and ranting for a good five minutes about how he deserves better than a training vessel and my God i've been a Navy officer for 40 years now and what kind of career is this? i look over his shoulder and notice five Annapolis men struggling to maintain control of a giant steering wheel near randel's desk.
five seconds later i'm in the shoreland ballroom (restored, but painted sickly pink and gold) breaking off an affair i've been having. i leave the building and ride a carriage to go tell nick. for some reason it doesn't seem likely to me at all that Nick might mind that i was having an affair to begin with.

6/13/2006
n.lux drunk e-mails me to tell me she is like totally buzzed on this junior juice. i sigh and delete it. she does this like every day.