Told my millionaire uncle yesterday that I was probably voting for Kerry. I haven't told my dad — who probably thinks I'm some crazy leftist anyways — and I'm going to try and slink out of here without getting mired in an unproductive political debate.

My uncle, a Republican, was a bit taken aback by my decision. I gladly pointed out that my vote, cast as a resident of Wisconsin, will be worth much more than his Minnesotan vote, which will be rendered void by the winner-take-all nature of the electoral college. Plus I think I get to vote for Feingold, the next best thing to voting for McCain.

But it's been a tough choice. Remember: I was in favor of the war in Iraq, not because there could have been WMD, but for long-term humanitarian reasons — not to mention our historical debt to all the Kurds that Saddam killed after Bush Sr. decided it wasn't politically wise to enter Baghdad and oust the dictator.

I don't like the way we went about waging the war (though I can't honestly imagine a scenario where Germany or France would have sent troops to Iraq) and I was disappointed with the way we handled the postwar. The official reasons for going turned out to be just as stupid as Bush's private reasons, but at least we went.

Now if the U.S. would only start paying attention to Africa…

But I'm getting off topic, ranting like a neocon. Bush convinced the party that opposed all of Clinton's military operations to go and take out some of the trash abroad. I don't think that what he did was wrong, and I have as little respect for protesters who cast Bush or Cheney as mustache-twirling villains as I did for my father when he called Gore "evil" in 2000.

So I don't have the big reason for opposing Bush that everyone else does. John Kerry voted for the war, of course, and says he would again even without hints of WMD. But I don't believe that he would have, and I don't think the delegates in Boston (86% of whom opposed the war) did either.

Instead of unthinkingly backing the sandwich in Bush vs. Sandwich, I find myself in the odd position of actually having to evaluate Bush vs. Kerry. As has been pointed out already, both candidates have similar stances on most of the issues I consider important.

I can't even vote Republican as a fiscal conservative, what with all the money Bush is spending. It's frustrating.

In the end, because the candidates are sooooo similar, I think I'll probably vote for Kerry for only one reason. It's enough to make me not want to vote at all.

#1. Kerry isn't a member of the Religious Right.

It's a stupid justification. But you can't pin Bush's support for the gay marriage amendment on Cheney, who seems to side with his lesbian daughter on this one. And even though I think that Kerry's views on abortion should get him excommunicated, Bush's halting attempts at theocracy remind me of a Flannery O'Connor quote:

To a lot of Protestants I know, monks and nuns are fanatics, none greater. And to a lot of monks and nuns I know, my Protestant prophets are fanatics. For my part, I think the only difference between them is that if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief you join the convent and are heard no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about the world getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don't believe anything much at all down on your head.

The lesser of two evils is a pretty horrible choice for a voter to have to make, and I blame two organizations for this eventuality:

1. The Republican party, which (if you ignore the war issue) has become almost as wishy-washy as the Democrats in the past few years. I support David Brooks' proposal for a more Whiggity-Whack GOP [free registration required].

2. I blame the system I've hated ever since high school: the electoral college, which should be dismantled. Not only do the most populous states get the most influence anyways; in a national election it makes more sense to appeal to demographics and interests rather than individual states.

In fact, now that we can rebuild it and we'll have the technology, I'd side with Wired, which has an excellent proposal for nationwide run-off elections (under Problem #2).

So that's where I stand, barring a surprise selection of McCain as VP in New York (which would make Bush practically unbeatable, after all this "Cheney as dark mentor" nonsense). That said, as President of the Lawrence University Wishy-Washy Moderates, I can't claim that my decision is final. I'm sure not satisfied with it.

Now that some of my college-age coworkers are going back to school, I've been getting more and better hours. Which means weekends, mostly. I worked the late shift yesterday night and I've got the same hours today. What do I care?

Though I didn't expect Graham and his girlfriend (who looks vaguely like Kora) to be in town. He came up earlier this week for some oral surgery and I've spent the past few nights chilling at his house. Said "chilling" can run really late when you start at midnight, as I did yesterday.

Graham was probably asleep for most of it, but after catching the end of one predictably gay-themed Bravo program (complete with an over-aspirating man-prize), Ashley and I watched a followup to the apparently-existent show "Showbiz Moms & Dads."

Now, I think everyone is essentially narcissistic, but many of these people took self-absorption to an extreme. As Ashley pointed out, it's hard to tell who's the "worst" parent.

After watching Survivor for a few years now, I have to admit that I like the interesting (though oversimplified) character studies that reality show contestants inevitably provide. If video games provide a safe outlet for violence, then reality shows do the same for my relentless judgment of others.

Which I nonetheless have ample opportunity to pass. The life of a delivery driver is nothing if not an endless cavalcade of strangers.

Last night, for example, I delivered to a drunken mentally-disabled women (affectionately referred to by my coworkers as "the crazy lady") and her equally endowed, much older boyfriend.

This goes into my "the midget found another midget" folder, of course. It gives me hope that, somewhere, there's a pasty white introvert who'd like nothing more than to discuss syntax with me. Granted, that's not the kind of girl I'm looking for, but at least she's probably out there.

Anyways, to make a long and horrible story short, an ugly man suggested that I have sex with his girlfriend, who came highly recommended. His offer ranks below "Can I polish your pearl?" and above "Parking is $18" on my list of things I'd rather not have heard this summer.

Hopefully the moral choices in the Xbox RPG Fable will be less clear-cut. After my GRE on Wednesday, the release of Fable and Graham's birthday the day before are the only events left on my summer calendar.

(The Politician and Jonas are theoretically visiting early this week, but I'm pretty confident that they won't, having neither time nor motive to visit Brainerd. I might end up eating my words and scrambling to get Tuesday off (there's some concert that night or something, so a bunch of people can't work), but, well, Lawrence is a veritable Baskin Robbins of flakiness. Myself included, of course.)

Not that I'm not busy. That website will eat up all of my time, before I'm done. The people at Sevaa have been terribly slow to get everything back in working order after their hard drive failure, so right now no one can purchase anything. And I've still got another 40+ hours of adding products to look forward to.

I refuse to work on the site while I'm at school. There are just too many fun projects and operations that I'd like to do this year. So crunch I shall.

It's been bugging me all summer, and I had to take a break from the Daily Show a week ago, after Jon Stewart turned my stomach by delivering a near-jokeless lecture on the Swift Boat controversy.

Thankfully, the friendly libertarians at Reason magazine's blog noticed too:

Over at his new blog, Reason alumnus Ryan Sager complains that Jon Stewart, who kissed John Kerry's ass on The Daily Show last night, is becoming less funny as he becomes more openly partisan. I agree. The problem is not the attacks on Bush and the Republicans. Lord knows they deserve it, and even when The Daily Show goes after them for the wrong reasons, it's often funny. The problem is the lack of attacks on Kerry and the Democrats, who are equally ripe for mocking. On the increasingly rare occasions when the show does make fun of Democrats, it tends to be a gentle ribbing (e.g., references to Kerry's lack of charisma or his wife's money) rather than the ridicule they deserve. I fear that Stewart, despite his frequent protestations to the contrary ("As a fake journalist…"), has begun to take himself seriously.

As that Ryan Sager guy points out, people don't watch the Daily Show just because it's funny:

But people want more than comedy. They want the real world, but through a filter — a less pompous filter than they'll get from Aaron Brown and a less annoying filter than they'll get from Bill O'Reilly.

I do get my news from the Daily Show, some days. But I try to back it up with other (print) sources. So I'd add a complaint to the Reason piece: Not only is the Daily Show becoming less critical of the Democrats, it's becoming less concerned with the hilarious truth than with rebutting conservative attacks.

Witness Samantha Bee's fawning skit on Michael Moore or Stewart's assertion that the Swift Boat Veterans served with Kerry "in the same sense that Snoopy served with the Red Baron."

This stuff is still funny, but when I take a wishy-washy step back I can't help but notice that it's basically partisan misinformation. I mean, a few of those Swifty jerks were at the same battles where he got his medals, for instance. And people who just watch the Daily Show wouldn't have known that until Stewart was forced to admit it last week, so he could give the aforementioned lecture on discrepancies between one veteran's hostpital record and his Kerry story.

I miss the good old days, back when Jon Stewart at least claimed to be a moderate.

I'm glad to note that the ugly sociological phrase "paradigm shift" has lost most of its former popularity. Magazines and newspapers and commentators are increasingly using the term "sea change," which Shakespeare coined (or so I once read) in Act I, Scene II of The Tempest.

Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples, is under the impression that his father died when their boat sank near an island. Sitting on the shore, he hears Ariel, the spirit whom Prospero commanded to sink the ship, singing nearby:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Shakespeare meant "sea-change" a bit more literally, but as Bartleby notes, it now means any "marked transformation."

A nice little song, by the way, though I never really considered it an important part of The Tempest. A few hundred years later, T.S. Eliot stuck bits and pieces of it into The Waste Land, one of my favorite poems.

So I actually left a few hours too early. The Politician's party started at 7:00, and though my personalized message said I could come early, I had to decide between Appleton and "the cottage" at 4:30.

I should've called the Politician. I could've gone waterskiing.

Instead, I went to Appleton, figuring that my roommate and his girlfriend would want some time alone in the northwoods, before everyone showed up exactly at 7.

I walked in our room (Humongous! Magnificent!), talked to Jubb and special guests Frisbee Matt and Alex for fifteen minutes, searched for Rock Show Girl (who'd mentioned some sort of carpool) and then turned on my heel (see me pivot from the left, my arms in a dramatic pose) and left the building again. I drove north alone.

The Politician's cabin, or "cottage" if you're from Wisconsin or medieval Europe, is conveniently located just south of the Canadian border, north of a town (spelled Shawano) that I've given up trying to pronounce. It's a nice place.

(Another clue that northern Wisconsin is trapped in time: one "village" had a sign informing "peddlers" that they weren't welcome.)

Rock Show Girl and I arrived at the same time. I suspect I was in a mass of tailgaters with her for most of the drive up, in fact. Our simultaneous arrival saved both of us from having to socialize with non-Lawrentians, though some of the Politician's extroverted friends tried to bridge the gap.

It was a pretty low-key affair. Good to see the happy couple, though. And drinking around the campfire was good. And watching the stars was good.

I liked that a kid who'd just returned from Deutschland readily agreed that the Southeast was the "bad" part of Germany. (In retrospect, I should have noted that however bad Bavaria is — and it's the German equivalent of the American South — the Northeast, with its unemployment and neo-Nazis, is the worst quadrant.)

But the quote of the night goes to the Politician's fiancee, mainly because she voiced a frustration I'd been having all night. After a regrettably-mainstream pseudo-hipster — the kind of guy a real hipster might dismiss as a "popular, not critical, success" — used some bookish word, she said:

The Politican's fiancee (aside): You really have to choose when to use your vocabulary.

Or something like that. I'd had like six beers, so I suppose my memory is suspect. But it spoke to me, because the aforementioned pseudo-hipster and some other young'ns had been using the word "yonder" to mean "here" all night. As in:

Some Freshman: Hey, pass that popcorn over yonder.
Our Bold Hero (to audience): No! No! No!

There was other drama, the rare kind that annoys others and entertains me, and that was fun. The Politician's little brother passed out at some point, which I thought was funny until the next morning when he couldn't find his car keys and The Deathtrap was boxed in.

I still made it back to Appleton on time for my Sunday afternoon engagement, which means that I can justifiably cross off one of my seven lofty goals for this summer:

3. Email "dropped" friends

For Brainerdites who've read this far, the answer to the question you didn't care to ask is "Beth" — I met up with my old best friend after spending several years nearly incommunicado. Since some out of context quotes blogburned me last time I mentioned her, I'll just say that we ate at a Mexican restaurant and caught up on current events.

Rock Show Girl and Jubb's special guests left shortly after I got back to the room, leaving Jubb and I alone and unentertained. We played a round of F-golf at Telulah and I was happy to get 20 over tournament. Then, afraid we'd run out of stuff to talk about, we rented and watched two movies in the lounge.

The first, Spartan, was a popcorn thriller that didn't know it was supposed to be a popcorn thriller. The middle third was good, but the rest of the film sucked. Val Kilmer's soldier character randomly spouted the kind of religious claptrap you'd expect in an overreaching play, and I can only assume that David Mamet wrote/directed the implausible ending to win a bet.

We also watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I insisted we see instead of Cliffhanger. That was fun.

Jonas and Mi� Sarah surprised us back in the room; I considered the event worthy of a pratfall. It was good to see them, naturally. I'd forgotten how infectious Jonas' enthusiasm can be: he's made me all excited to be playing old games on his MAME cabinet this year.

And he finished Lucky Wander Boy, a book I praised somewhat too soon. All the wonderful modernist stuff at the beginning is undermined by some annoying postmodernist (or "post-postmodernist", if you'll accept that Trojan horse) quirks at the end.

As much as I love ambiguity in storytelling, I've always been frustrated by the inability of postmodernists to make tough decisions and cut stuff out. I'm glad to hear that Jonas found Lucky Wander Boy's multiple endings equally frustrating.

Soon enough, it was Jubb's bedtime, and the three of us left to get a quick midnight snack before parting ways for the night. The Politician surprised everyone by calling and arranging to meet us at Perkins with his girl, so we had another roommate reunion there. Also, I had some pancakes.

And that — finally — brings me to today. Jubb and I met during his lunchbreak and ate some Mexican food before I left. I attribute the teeth-gnashing pain I experienced earlier tonight, as I was driving through the Cities, to some secret and malicious ingredient in my giant burrito.

I cut short a visit to Dylan because of some unexpected rain and my affliction.

I felt like I'd been punched in the crotch. I had to get an ice pack.

And that's the last time I'll go to Appleton before school starts, he finished lamely.

It's a good time, especially compared to my one-man mission in Brainerd — but it's quite a trek and the Deathtrap is at 207,000 already. As long as it holds together long enough to get me to school, I'm happy.

Just got the call: the helpful stoner at work was gracious enough to take my shift on Sunday (though he was also canny enough not accept a trade). So I'm going to Appleton this weekend.

Anyone need anything from Minnesota? I didn't think so.

So this site, and my dad's company webpage, have both been down all week. This was not scheduled downtime. As my server administrator put it:

Sure enough, Tuesday morning the master hard disk failed due to what now appears to be a poor power issue.

So that was very bad. But he made a backup.

When the backup drive was mounted, all data older than July 4th was missing. There is no explanation as to why this happened.

So that is very bad. Not for this page; all my posts were saved at Blogger anyways. But the website I've been designing for my dad took quite the hit. I lost about 50 hours worth of work, and the inventory was reduced to 116 products from a modest 183.

The server people are sending the failed hard disk to a disaster recovery center, so I'm hesitant to start re-adding products just yet. Which leaves me with nothing to do, just when I was planning to buckle down and get it done.

Jenna, Manney, and the newly-repatriated Graham are up this weekend, so Brainerd is exciting again. Not that we do anything exciting, mind, it's just nice to get out of the house and do something different.

Maybe I should follow Dylan's drunken advice and hang out more with Manney's girlfriend Amelia, if only for the sake of all the movies I'm not seeing.

On Saturday I saw Graham again, finally. It was anticlimactic, really, considering the time that's passed. We all met up at Amelia's and drank a few beers (I'm the only one who didn't opt for Leinee's Honey Weiss) and tried to learn a German game only to give up early so we could play Illuminati.

Good old Illuminati. I'm starting to think that Manney is right, that Illuminati really is only fun when you play it with Graham. I've never played without him (excepting one game of the bastardized CCG version of Illuminati) but I can see how, without Graham, the game would lose much of its drama.

Manney, sowing distrust as usual, had the Bavarian Illuminati, a group that tries to amass a large amount of power. Graham, waxing histrionic as usual, controlled the Gnomes of Zurich, a money-focused group. Jenna, before she got bored with the game and stormed off (also as usual) controlled the UFOs and got to keep her (poorly) chosen goal super-secret. I got stuck with The Church of the Subgenius, which has the lame goal of getting one less group than the number required for anyone to win the game.

It was still a lot of fun, and Manney and Graham's never-ending arguments kept everyone entertained and distracted so that I could steal money from the bank and Graham. I love a game where the rulebook encourages you to cheat.

I only mention the game because I won. I've never won before when I wasn't the most sober person in the room. And I suppose that's still the case. Still, good for me.

Everyone is the same. I'm sure there are some subtle changes that I'm not noticing, but even Graham seems unaffected by six months of study abroad. As for me, I think I'm having one of my biweekly existential crises, but I doubt it's affecting my behavior.

Tonight was even more low-key than last night, a feat considering that all we did Saturday was drink, play a nerdy card game, and begrudgingly go to Perkins.

The same group, sans Amelia, had dinner at Graham's with his mom. There was lasagna, salad, and the usual Lampa drama. Graham says more to his mom in one sitting than I say to my entire family over the course of a week.

After we'd all tried Jenna's homemade dessert (mashed-up berries over Angelfood cake) and everyone had doubted my tale of St. Paul's oft-stolen yellow bikes, we retrieved Amelia and ended up seeing Anchorman with the free passes Graham's mom had procured.

It wasn't as funny as I'd hoped, either because the preview has almost all the best parts or because the last half of the movie was stretched SNL-thin. But it was worth seeing for free, and Will Ferrell is still wonderful.

Jenna refused to see it again, a decision I respect, and sat through Collateral in the meantime. I'm told it's awful.

We had to wait for her, because of course Tom Cruise doesn't do short movies anymore. Watching Graham rock some pinball in the lobby, it felt like the night was already winding down.

Jenna came, we cruised around some empty North Brainerd streets for a bit, and soon enough the night was officially over.

I wish I had pictures of some of this stuff, but I haven't had the sense to get the photos from Graham. That excuse is all you get for now.

No, I don't need a scanner, not really.

But I love my scanner. I've already loaded a whole desk's worth of memories onto my computer, where space is plentiful. The hard copies go in the trash.

And this is more than a passing whim. Today was the official launch date of the Dan Digital Archive Project. Here's a blurb from a DDAP pamphlet:

Building on the success of Dan's Webpage and Dan's excessive use of his digital camera, the DDAP plans to take the fusion of narcissism and technology to a whole new level.

Save space: The DDAP eliminates the "need" for hard copies of old letters, pictures, postcards, schoolwork, ticket stubs, and all the other ephemera Dan, a rather obsessive packrat, collects. Free yourself from the weight of useless material possessions!

Save time: You'd never need to see it again, but now finding it is even easier! The DDAP categorizes scanned images into convenient folders like "Correspondence" and "Grade school stories", making a soothing lapse into nostalgia easier than ever!

And it goes on. It's for stockholders, so it's a bit over the top.

But I don't think this is a waste of my time — even though, from an economic standpoint, I'm losing a potential $10/hour whenever I don't work on my dad's webpage. Scanning in all this crap has been enjoyable, and what's more, it's been edifying. For one thing, it's just amazing how much I'd forgotten or simply glossed over, in my attempt to shape my life into a convenient narrative.

Speaking of narratives, I suppose I should add that one of The Politician's fairy tale get-togethers is actually going to happen, if the invitation I received today (an aptly punctuated "You knew it was coming… we're getting married. Now come celebrate with us!") is any guide.

It's a struggle not to bloviate again on some random issue. I've got nothing to report and my workaday routine is unworthy of mention.

No, that isn't self-pity, that's just self-conscious cynicism you smell. Yeah, I know. Just like chocolate poptarts.

Or did I mean cynical self-consciousness…?

Book news. I recently finished The Difference Engine, a decent enough book I bought solely because it's the posterchild for an obscure genre: "steampunk." Think alternate-universe historical fiction with a cyberpunk ethos.

[Hit-or-miss Wired columnist] Bruce Sterling and [overrated cyberpunk legend] William Gibson cowrote the novel, which might explain why — like the travelogue I cowrote with Graham in grade school — it reads like a bunch of causally-unrelated scenes patched together into a semblance of plot.

So it was underwhelming, although the concept was intriguing. I'm now thoroughly convinced that neither of these supposed cyberpunk masters can hold a candle to Neal Stephenson, whose Snow Crash made me believe in that possibly-already-dead genre. If only he would go back to writing shorter, less intimidating books…

That was Monday, and now that I no longer have a book to read, Brainerd is boring again. I will live in a city next summer. That's the only thing I think I know.

I figured it had been a while, so I went to the Obscure Store this morning for the kind of news that normally concerns only Lewis Black. I was not disappointed.

However, one of the more interesting articles has me a bit peeved. Last time I was in the Cities, Jenna somehow managed to get several free copies of the Pioneer Press, which she and her housemate Kevin lambasted for its (actual) conservative bias and (supposed) lack of journalistic integrity…

By pointing to distortions in one story in particular. But it seems that the Pioneer Press was right: a former Lawrentian is selling "I Had An Abortion T-Shirts" through, and with the official approval of, Planned Parenthood. Which makes Kevin and Jenna knee-jerk liberals, I'm afraid.

Though I typically leave the abortion debate to the women, I will say this: for abortion rights supporters, this T-shirt is a great idea. Currently an appalling percentage of the women who have had abortions are publicly against abortion, sometimes with good reason (psychological trauma) but sometimes, I assume, out of cowardice.

(As one of women in the MJS article notes, fear of obloquy and violent reprisal creates a chilling effect.)

I can't find evidence to verify this online, but according to our politics professor in Freiburg, the German anti-abortion movement was dealt a stunning blow decades ago, when a number of high-ranking female politicians publicly and unrepentantly announced that they'd had abortions, making public acceptance of abortion a viable political stance almost overnight.

So all the better to clear the air. If these baby-killers are pro-abortion, then a dramatic stand, comparable to the possibly-nonexistent German declaration, is in order. Selling a few hundred T-shirts to wear at rallies is bold, but it isn't, as they say, daring. Getting someone famous and respected to wear one: now that would shift some paradigms.

But I'll take a hint from Kevin's reaction. When even a Hamlinite refuses to believe that Planned Parenthood would perpetrate such an act, preferring instead to see a conservative plot to perjorate the pro-abortion position, perhaps America isn't prepared to honestly confront what its citizens are legally doing.

So it looks like several more newspapers in Germany are abandoning the government-sanctioned spelling reforms, known collectively as the Rechtschreibreform, in effect since 1996.

As someone who learned German under the new rules (which, among other things, cut down on the number of times you have to use the difficult-to-pronounce sharp S sound, written "ß"), this could make my life marginally more difficult.

Still, it's interesting. I don't know what I feel about the rollback. The German goverment probably has no business telling people how to write, and the pre-Rechtschreibreform language is probably in some ways more authentic. On the other hand, it's my understanding that many of these spelling reforms weren't pulled out of thin air: they represent demotic forms that tradition-minded German institutions were stodigly refusing to accept.

All in all, it's actually a moot point. For better or worse, the German language is gradually being supplanted by the much-more-flexible English, forming a German/English pigdin known as "Genglish."

German popular culture is full of terms borrowed from our language. Many advertisements are written in English without translation (unlike in draconian France, where bilingual advertising is required by law). Words like "chill-out area" are casually mixed in with German lyrics in songs.

And, as I write this, two German businessmen in Hamburg are talking to each other in English, unaware of the irony.

Went down to the Cities yesterday for a belated reunion with The Suburbanite and The Pancake Man at the former's St. Paul residence. The Pancake Man had to return to Vermont this morning, so this was my last chance to see my old acquaintances from Freiburg with any degree of efficiency.

The main event (or, at least, the reason people other than me were there at all) was a backyard BBQ, and I alternated between eating half the available bratwurst and sucking at an interesting backyard game called "polish golf," also known as "cowboy golf" or, if you're trying to sell something that anyone could easily build themselves, "ladder golf."

The Suburbanite is the social animal I'd always assumed she'd be. There were about a dozen people there, not from my chosen crowd (in fact, one Abercrombie-clad specimen boasted both obviously-bleached hair and obviously-bleached jeans) but nice people nonetheless. And The Suburbanite was, as in Freiburg, an attention locus.

It took me a surprisingly long time to get into a conversation with the only English major and Modest Mouse fan in attendance, so until then I talked to The Pancake Man.

Who is a different kind of social animal. I often wonder if he's actually a robot, built by desperate Venusian women who wanted the perfect man. He just asks questions and listens, then asks more questions, courting a rambling and tedious conversation.

And girls fall for it, every time. They talk about their majors and their family and their family's pet's diseases. It might be useful to imitate but I can't care about those details right off the bat, as he seems to, and I couldn't "fake it" without punching myself in the gut.

(His gift doesn't work on men, oddly enough. Attempting to schmooze with me, The Pancake Man asked about my family. I was just really weirded out by the question.)

I had a few drinks for no good reason (it might have been nerves, with all those bright and shiny people about) and most of The Suburbanite's friends did the same, eventually migrating to a bar somewhere.

And then there were three. And I'll say this: as a would-be director, The Pancake Man has some lofty filmmaking goals, but none of his projects (including our reenactment of Mission Impossible in Prague) will ever have the effect on me that his casual documentary from Freiburg did.

There's already so much I'd forgotten, which is absolutely scary. I'd forgotten names and field trips. I'd forgotten the ice I stuffed in my backpack on way to Oktoberfest. I'd forgotten that the signs at German crosswalks make a clicking sound, so the blind can tell when to cross.

To my complete surprise, I come off really well on the tapes; everyone does, with one glaring exception. I look pretty good, for whatever reasons. There are even a few brief moments of me acting like a decisive, well-adjusted human being.

And I'm hilarious, partially because I was rationing my English-language comments and partially because no scene in the film lasts long enough for me to make a complete spectacle of myself.

Hopefully I can get a copy.

(Along the same lines, I'm deliberating whether or not to buy a scanner, so I can have access to a lot more memories and cut down on my compulsive memento-hoarding. But I don't know that it's a bigger priority than, say, fixing my laptop.)

After the movie, we talked until the wee hours of the morning. Four o'clock. It was similar to many a conversation we'd had in Freiburg: The Suburbanite listened passively while The Pancake Man tried to convince me that everything he's been told by his parents is true. Our Bold Hero heroically donned the mantle of Moderatism and fought for Reason and Fairness.

We ran the usual gamut, from religion (ganging up on The Suburbanite's literal take on Genesis), to politics (I argued that the American media, though often owned by corporations with conservative tendencies, is liberal. The Pancake Man disagreed), to philosophy.

Most memorable argument? A half hour during which The Pancake Man tried to convince us that the gays are fighting essentially the same battle blacks once fought. Narrowly straddling the line between trivializing the civil rights movement and watering down his claim to the point of meaninglessness, our favorite Vermont Democrat seemed unusually earnest to affirm something. But whatever he was going for, The Suburbanite and I weren't about to follow.

The Suburbanite fried up some German pancakes (whatever that actually means) for breakfast early that morning, and I took my leave afterwards so that she could drive The Pancake Man to the airport. There wasn't anything else to do in the Cities, so I drove straight home.

I'm really tired now, but it was good to swim in nostalgia for a night. Ah, Freiburg.

So this weekend was pretty ridiculous. The muffler fell off of The Deathtrap on Thursday, and I couldn't find a professional to fix it on such short notice, so I ended up driving my mom's gigantic SUV, an Eddie Bauer edition Expedition affectionately called "The Eddie," to Milwaukee and back.

I stayed at Jenna and Manney's on Friday. Predictably, I was way behind schedule and wasn't able to get dinner with Jenna and Kevin (one of their other housemates), which is just as well because I'm told they blew $50+ on raw fish.

Once those two got back, we sat around deliberating whether or not to go to Edina, where some friend-of-a-friend was having a wild shindig. The problem wasn't how to get there but how to get back. No one wants to sleep in Edina.

So we didn't go. Eventually, everyone got sick of fretting and we somehow got ourselves to the Turf Club, some sort of hipster joint. Or a joint filled with hipsters. There were sad clown pictures all over the walls, so I think it was the former.

Two more Hamlinites had joined us in the meantime, and after Jenna's well-meaning attempt to get a conversation going between me and the philosophy major led nowhere, I ended up spending most of the night talking to a Hamline English major with an ungodly amount of liberal guilt. Manney's belated arrival saved me from pontificating further on the Democrat's ill-advised efforts to win back the South.

Several pitchers of beer later, we somehow got back to Manney and Jenna's, where I seem to have sat motionless in a chair until deciding to go to sleep. As I drifted off, I heard Kevin trying to organize a drunken trip to the beech. Again, there were no drivers.

On Saturday I got lost on the way to the wedding, and arrived minutes before the procession. Or so I thought. I actually walked up the aisle and past the groom's parents, who were being ceremonially shown to their pew by the groom's younger brother. They didn't notice, but everyone else certainly did.

Moments later, the rest of the wedding party filed into the room. It was a good interdenominational wedding, with a rambling sermon on C.S. Lewis by the Catholic bishop and a much better though similarly themed speech by an Episcopalian bishop closely related to the bride.

I grabbed a cookie and drove to Milwaukee, via Madison.

Some observations from the drive down.

A few hours into the drive I walked into a Burger King and caused quite a stir with my Blogger T-shirt. I bought it a few years ago during an online promotion but I've only now atrophied away enough muscle mass to fit into it. Now that the DNC has thrust Bloggers (or, as Samantha Bee and the Daily Show erroneously and redundantly call them, "Internet Bloggers") into the hazy edge of the national spotlight, a shirt that says "Blogger" on the front and proclaims that "The Revolution Will Be Bloggerized" on the back actually means something to a decent amount of people.

The cooks (teenagers) exchanged knowing glances and, behind me, I could hear restaurant patrons speaking in hushed tones. If I know anything about hushed tones, someone actually pointed out that "That shirt, that's the thing they were talking about." Referring, I assume, to some pundits, and not other diners.

Also, I passed a billboard for what must be the world's most poorly named gentleman's club: "Cruisin' Chubbys." Given the state of contemporary spelling, my guess is that it's missing an apostrophe (stolen by whomever took the "g") and Chubby is supposed to be someone's name. Because, well, could you actually put something that crude on a billboard?

Otherwise, southern Wisconsin is beautiful.

The concert was good. I paid an outrageous amount for parking ($18), met Jubb at the appointed place at the appointed time, then spent an outrageous amount of his money ($6.50) on a bottle of MGD.

But the concert, yes. There was music, not just gouging. We stood off to the right, behind a cluster of tall people and in front of a cluster of short pot-smoking girls. I'd like to blame the location, but the main reason that this was a good concert and not a great one was Modest Mouse's choice of songs.

Too many from the new album. I liked them, but they didn't build up nearly the energy that the smattering of old songs they worked in did. "Doin' the Cockroach" alone made the drive worthwhile. Wow, what a great song. And I have a special place in my heart for "Cowboy Dan", another song off of Lonesome Crowded West.

I saw about a half-dozen people with Oktoberfest-themed T-shirts, which struck me as odd. I still don't know if people were wearing them ironically or what. It's hard to tell with these ignorant new fans.

Ah, elitism.

Back at Lawrence after a gas-station hunting misadventure, we got the cooler from the Eddie and had a few beers. The nights run together, but I don't remember doing much of anything Saturday.

Sunday, Jubb and I did a great many things, which was great because it made me feel less guilty for missing the rest of the wedding. We had some unambitious Mexican food at a little place on College Ave (I swear that my chimichanga was just a burrito with cheese on top), bought a bunch of beer at everyone's favorite grocery store, and played a nice round of disc golf at Plaumen.

I don't remember what Jubb got (I think he golfed his best game ever there) but I got a +9. It's such a great feeling to be under ten. But then again, Plaumen is a forgiving course.

Dinner was on Jubb. He'd been excited about sushi all day, and the place we went to (also on the Ave, near the PAC) was great, gigantic golden bear-phalluses notwithstanding. The sushi was delicious (and cost much less than what Jenna and Kevin ate) and the green tea was of jade-like resplendency.

Apparently, Jubb's gone there a few times, but only with men. We assume that the staff thinks he's gay.

The last scheduled event was seeing The Bourne Supremacy, an enjoyable flick with some very good action scenes and a decent enough plot. It doesn't revolve around cell phones, which is looking to be a huge plus.

While I (just?) self-mythologize, Jubb has a penchant for gilding his past experiences. His first reaction to the movie was "meh" but I think he's now decided that it was great.

Then there was drinking. Since Jubb's summer crew was spending the day watching pretentious piano-themed movies, we went to Lawrence's under-utilized woods and sat on some train tracks that no longer lead anywhere, unless "partially over the river" is a place trains would like to go.





There's Jubb. The only good picture I have. We'd opted for top-shelf beers, and the Bavarian Lagers were might tasty. The New Glarus I.P.A., on the other hand, seems to be just yeast and a few drops of water.

Once all but one beer (and far too many cigarettes: remind me not to do that any more) was gone, we marched back to Plantz, the designated summer housing unit for Lawrentians. The night ended in fits of conversation and a best-of Will Ferrell DVD.

Drove home the next morning. I didn't meet up with the Freiburg people tonight because, on further inspection, The Suburbanite's cabin is farther from my house than St. Cloud.