I keep butting heads with the Managing Editor, who's gotten into the habit of (sometimes rightly) criticizing my edits, but in spite of that last night's Lawrentian was more than tolerable.

The strangest development is my growing awareness of the other editors as fully-functional social entities, which started at Representative Man's party and threatens to continue unabated. Though it's still unlikely that any ed board member will actually cross my conceptual line between "character" and "person" for a few more weeks at least.

In any case, it's clear that my life is going to become increasingly complicated.

So this is the closest thing 218 has to a bulletin board.
It'll have to do.

Let it be proclaimed throughout the land that this Thursday, at 7:45, there will be a presidential debate drinking game in our room.

The rules, worked out this weekend by the Politician, Alan, and Our Bold Hero, are as follows:

1. You have to drink when your word is said by either candidate. But not the moderator or anyone else.
2. One person per word. At 7:45 on Thursday, we draw for choice order. So don't be late. Or get a proxy to draw for you.
3. You also get any words with the same root. "Terrorism" would get you "terrorist," "terror," etc.
4. BYOB. Or whatever kind of alcohol you want to drink.
5. Latecomers must make up all missed drinks to participate.

The person whose word is said the most will get a special prize, provided they don't throw up on our wonderful carpet.

How to say it? Fable is fun (was fun, I've beaten it now) but disapointing. It lacks subtlety, depth. Fable falls well short of what we were promised — and, in the case of Briar Rose (a rival hero who I should have met in Bowerstone), shown.

This being the internet, I see no reason why I should throw more nerdy criticism on what I'm sure is an already heaping pile.

The Wired review says enough.

So on Monday we had the wop party we'd been planning since last term. As with any of our big parties (read: '40s 40s and Jubb's Illicit Birthday Extravaganza) this one attracted a large and diverse group, including many corrupt RLAs. The official count is 75 for the night.





And it was a pretty fun time. One downside of our $1-for-unlimited-wop policy was that one of us always had to be in the bathroom dispensing drinks and guarding the wop. Jubb also had someone stationed at the door to direct new arrivals and deal with more duty-bound RLAs.





And of course, when I wasn't in charge of something, I was taking pictures. Like that one of Jonas and Katie, whose b-day was that night. Note the "My Little Pony" rub-on tattoo.

I'm not sure I'm built for large-party mingling (in fact I'm pretty sure I don't like it) but there's always an annoying trade-off when I decide to record life rather than participate in it. I don't remember participating in any interesting conversations or crazy shenanigans: I got drunk (three glasses) and took pictures.





Just after midnight, the wop ran out. That's my fault, as I hadn't had enough money to buy the six liters of Everclear that Jubb had requested. I got four instead, and after mixing it with about twenty-six liters of cheap punch and throwing in a few pounds of fruit and letting all that sit overnight, the resulting concoction tasted pretty good.

But there just wasn't enough. Which was all well and good, since we got quite a few noise complaints through various channels. This party ended comparitively early.

And since then we've had a few other sorts of parties. There was poker night on Tuesday, under the eager supervision of Freshman Matt. Texas Hold 'Em, tournament style.

Apparently poker ability is one skill (like mastery of semiotics) only useful around similarly talented people, because for all his experience Freshman Matt never seems to win with us class C amateurs. The unreadable Jubb — our resident idiot savant — took the pot. I broke even after a cowardly fold late in the game.

I like that kind of gathering, though the shop talk is probably as uninteresting to me as the standards-and-scandal conversations every Wednesday night at the newspaper are to the average Lawrence illiterati.

Even more comfortable for an embittered introvert like myself are our movie parties. Jubb and I watched Sneakers this week, which doesn't qualify as a party. But when Jubb's friend Alan wheeled a big t.v. in on Friday and more than a dozen people showed up to watch Brain Candy: that was a party.

A quiet party, with nothing to do but drink beer and make the occasional snide reference to Jubb's god-fuelled homophobia, which makes my awkwardness-fuelled homophobia seem less problematic.

The mature adults went to a few bars afterward, ending up at Firefly, hands down my favorite Appleton bar. Though, deep down, I know that bars are just a big waste of money.

And then there was Appleton's big party Saturday, "Octoberfest" (note the sanitized spelling). Jonas had some scheme to start drinking at one, but no one was up to that and we only made one brief foray out onto the Ave, to look for cheap food as the booths closed down.

For a study in parties, I'd hold up the wine and cheese party in Meg(h)an's room that evening as a rare specimen. I'd been suggesting such an event for a little while now, because I don't think our room has the social atmosphere to support chit-chat and crackers, and I was glad it happened so soon.

I actually had a bit of conversation with the Poet while I was pouring myself champagne. I've had probably half a dozen classes with her, and I'm not her biggest fan. But her earnest assessment of my character was disarming, not to mention apt.

Instead of darting off to the next room, I sat down for five minutes and had an actual conversation. Then the Politician called me over for another errand… I can be such a tool, when my heart's in the right place.

One thing I should mention is that, since working on The Lawrentian on Wednesday night, I've been tired. I've just wanted to lie down and relax all week.

I almost went to sleep after the wine and cheese party, but since it was only eight I decided that lazing about would be an almost equally good use of my time.

Because my night wasn't finished, after all.

The Lawrentian ed board party ranks, oddly, next to the wine and cheese party as one of the most enjoyable parties this year. At first there were just three of us: the op/ed editor, myself, and our host-in-chief.

But soon enough we had about seven people and some decent discussions. I nursed a rum and coke then swallowed my pride and had a few wine coolers. The a&e editor and I had a "girlie drink drunk" moment.

I remember calling Representative Man an elitist when he mentioned his subscription to the New Yorker. He led me to a hidden corner with a stack of Atlantic Monthly.

Two gaffes. First, I kept sniping at our managing editor (who wasn't there) for the horribleness of last week's issue, which she laid out while I was in class. Especially painful: despite Representative Man's objections, she didn't give my smoking halo editorial a byline. It looks like a letter to the editor.

And, when a gay Lawrentian (and party guest) was mentioned, I blurted out some facetious nonsense about how I was shocked to see a gay guy at Lawrence. Not PC, not at all. I'm used to 218, this year's designated PC-free zone.

We spent a long time discussing a collection of sex-ed videos for "trainables" ('70s code for the mentally retarded), but that party couldn't last. I wandered over to a disappointing house party, but thought the better of it and went home to wind-down.

And if not for the two hours I spent tutoring tonight and calling more tutors in to the writing lab to satisfy a crush of procrastinist freshman, I'd be relaxed right now.

As is, I've got to do some reading still. There'll be no parties for a while, now.

And yes, I know there was a wop party on Monday. I'll probably write something about it eventually, but at the moment I have more important priorities.

Like finding out why my car won't start.

Worked on The Lawrentian last night, and I had to come in this afternoon for reasons that are still unclear. I ended up writing a filler piece reacting to our dorm's decision to ban smoking within 25 feet of the building.

And I copy-edited, of course. But since everyone went home early last night — due to a dramatic oversight, our layout editor is not a night person — the final proofs for most pages weren't ready to be checked before my 1 p.m. class.

I'm not quite sure where our layout editor went, but when I came in this morning the managing editor was attempting to layout the paper. She didn't know how to work the computer very well… and between her ignorance and my gypsy curse, we managed to crash the one computer that runs our layout program.

A few frantic phone calls, to Computer Services, to Ben, to Jonas, followed. Some problem with the printer seemed to have wrecked the computer, and it took us a few attempts to get all the info we needed on a zip disk in the five second window between when the computer booted up and when it froze.

Eventually, I had the common sense to tell the computer not to try to print anything, and everything was wonderful again. Though we still daren't print out proofs.

I don't quite know what to do with the managing editor. During today's crisis she excelled only at staring forlornly at the keyboard and fleeing to a chair across the room. She doesn't have the assertive personality you'd look for in an editor.

That's publicly. Offstage, she seems to have some hold on our Editor in Chief. Representative Man is much less tolerant of muckraking and negative journalism when she's around.

She's my coworker though, so I'll make this work. I've got my first Ethics class (with Jubb!) tomorrow afternoon, and I've got a bit of sleep to catch up on first.

I realize now that it might be a bit more difficult to blog this year. My computer is pretty close to Jubb's head, and he likes his early nights.

The room still feels a little otherworldly. It's got great party flow, as we proved Saturday and plan to prove tomorrow. But it's cavernous. When I'm over here, and the Politician and Jonas are over in their bedroom on the other side of the living room, it's like we're in separate buildings.

Not a bad thing, since I might not have to go to the library to get some work done. But this much… I believe the word is "privacy"… is strange.

I haven't actually done much with all this free time. Played Fable. Watched Jonas play Fable. Ran errands. Thought about unpacking.

Tonight was low-key; three of us sat around and had some old fashioned pizza and beer while Jubb took a midnight stroll. I need to decompress a bit before I'll be able to appreciate how relaxing all of this is.

Tomorrow: Wop party. It's themeless, despite the Politician's halfhearted protests, so/but it should be exciting. I'm told that some people have been looking forward to this since last spring; no one can help sneaking a peek at the eight gallons of devil's punch we mixed earlier today.

So. For reasons I stilll don't understand I switched shifts yesterday, making Thursday my last day at Giovanni's.

(It's a franchise, by the way. I thought we were the only one, but apparently there are a few others in Minnesota, and who-knows-how-many elsewhere in the country.)

Which means that I have a lot yet to do today, if I'm going to leave Saturday morning. Packing won't take long (all my stuff is still right where I dropped it in June), and I don't have any errands that I can't run in Appleton, but it looks like I have about fifty products (mostly different varieties of soap) to put up on my dad's webpage by the end of the day.

So I shouldn't be blogging. Or reading the latest from master essayist Joseph Epstein. And the five or six hours I spent playing Fable this week (as far as I can tell, I bought the last copy from Target, the first store in the area to get the game on Wednesday) were probably ill-advised.

Back to work, then.

Probably the biggest problem with having a blog is the way it changes your day-to-day experience. Diaries are necessarily private — or should be, until enough people have died. And at the other end of the spectrum you have mainstream news, which — for most people anyways — is far from personal.

Blogs occupy an interesting middle ground, in that the vast majority are personal, even private: the average diarist can rely on a certain amount of apathy, trusting that, in the long run, only people he knows will be interested is his site. But the events are still recorded as "news" and served up for public consumption.

And this awareness of public consumption is what alters the blogger's perception of daily life. As a recent article at Spiked put it:

Sociologists such as Anthony Giddens describe this self-monitoring as 'reflexivity', with individuals dwelling on the tiniest aspects of their lives. 'At each moment, or at least at regular intervals, the individual is asked to conduct a self-interrogation in terms of what is happening', writes Giddens (7). This includes questions such as 'What am I doing? What am I feeling? How am I breathing?'.

Not to mention the most important question:
"Is this blog-worthy?"

(That article, incidentally, got me to stop obsessively scanning in old photos earlier this summer. I didn't go outside and enjoy life without reflection — since I started journaling as a teenager, that kind of knee-jerk fun has become increasingly difficult to find — but it did get me reading books again, and that's a start.)

I'd wager that disgust with this "reflexivity" is second only to laziness as a cause of abandoned weblogs. I often get fed up with being my own personal historian (which is part of the reason why not every Lawrence event gets a rundown here, thank god) and I'm sure it's the same for others.

Which is why I've opted for a photo-heavy treatment of Graham's birthday party, which I attended yesterday. You'll find that post below.

Silly putty penis firmly in hand, Graham blows out the candles on a decidedly non-chocolate homemade birthday cake.

Earlier, at the celebratory dinner, there was more homemade goodness: [Graham's housemate] Melissa's delicious lasagna and [Graham's girlfriend] Ashley's salad, which I tentatively decided was an antipasta, whatever that means. Thinking it was white wine, I brought Graham two bottles of champagne to make up for several giftless years.





A shocking amount of naps and bad television later, we assembled at the Turf Club for Graham's power hour. Friends of Graham's who'd missed our intimate dinner showed up for the midnight drunkening. Mercifully, the (deafening) live music finished playing soon after we arrived.





Having slept on not a few Hamline couches in my day, I was already acquainted with most of Graham's well-wishers. Here, the one they call Barry (left) and the one they call Kevin both take a shot with Graham. In a departure from Lawrence's unspoken 21st birthday etiquette, many of the people who bought Graham drinks were not so good as to drink the same thing along with him.





And then there were the Brainerdites. Jenna showed up with the two guys shown above, and well, Manney lives with Graham, so he was with us all day. He showed us a park controlled by some Christian gang. I know it was just the Hawaiian shirt and facial hair, but on Sunday Manney seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to Rupert, one of my favorite Survivors.





My friend drank a lot of alcohol. I've lost count now, but there were at least four shots, and of course I maliciously suggested a Long Island Iced Tea, which didn't help matters. Meanwhile, I'd only had two beers when we got kicked out at closing.





For all that, there was little damage. A beer got knocked over during some ill-advised girlfriend twirling, and Barry decided to playfully attack Graham for some alcohol-related reason. No one threw up at the bar, and even while inebriated Graham still managed to beat me at pinball, with his hoity-toity "technique."

It was a nice night, and after a pleasant, nearly fisticuffs-free walk back to Graham and Manney's, no one was quite ready to go to sleep. But even Cartoon Network can't keep me up forever, and at 3:30, reasonably confident that there'd be no death-by-misadventures that night, I laid out on a living room couch.

There was flash flood warning tonight, and of course everyone wants to stay in and watch a movie and order a pizza when it rains. So we were busy, the other driver and I, and I didn't help matters when, after completing the first delivery in a triple, I returned to The Deathtrap to find I'd locked myself out.

Step back, take a good look at my incompetence. And that wonderfully Kafkaesque second sentence.

Either I accidentally bumped the lock down on my way out, or I reflexively locked the door as if I were back at the pizza parlor. It's my fault, yes, I know. The whole situation was embarrassing and unpleasant. But I have another point to make here.

People are jerks. Specifically: people in Southeast Brainerd, on Pine Street, on the 1300 block, are huge jerks.

So here's the deal. My car was running, with the lights on and my keys and my wallet and my cell phone inside, because I really didn't need any of those things to walk to the door and deliver a pizza. And I was standing in the rain.

I used my amazing coping skills and walked back over to the house I'd just delivered a pizza to. I knocked.

And I know they heard me. I could see them. I knocked again, louder. But I guess I'm not worth opening the door for if I don't have hot pizza with me. Isn't that right, 1315 Pine Street?

Frustrated, I walked to the next lit house. They had a walk-in porch area, so I went through the first door and knocked on the "real" door, only slightly perturbed by the "Forget the Dog: Beware of Owner" sign with the picture of a revolver pointing at me. No answer.

I tried three other houses on the block; everyone must have forgotten to turn their lights off before leaving town.

Back at The Deathtrap, I tried all the doors again, baffled that the side door was actually locked for once.

Finally, a man in a pickup pulled up to one of the houses I hadn't tried. I told him I was locked out of my car and asked if I could use his phone. He said no and walked inside.

So I gave up and ran over to a nearby laundromat to call work. The pay phones were broken, oddly enough, or they didn't like quarters from my moneybag. I was a bit wary of Southeast Brainerd after getting snubbed on Pine, but I noticed that a nonthreatening woman had been watching me from her van as the pay phone rejected me.

I explained my plight and asked if I could use her cell phone to call work. I told her it was a local call, and at that she demurred. She was from the Cities and didn't want to pay roaming charges.

I went back to the van and tried all the doors again.

Back at the laundromat, I discovered that most people who have to wash their clothes at a laundromat don't seem to have cell phones. And both pay phones were still, and inexplicably, broken.

I finally found a couple willing to let me use their phone (after some quick deliberation) and I gave them a dollar to make up for the ten cents my call probably cost. That was a spite-dollar, really, a conscious rejection of Southeast Brainerd's grudging decision to show me some goodwill. Like when the Underground Man pays the whore.

My family is up at the cabin this weekend, so Giovanni's had to call me a locksmith ($60=scam). They sent someone else out with replacement pizzas, for the two people whose food was still in my car. And I went back to the van and stood in the rain for about ten minutes, unwilling to wait in the porches of jerks.

I think I just have different expectations of what people should do for other people.

Or maybe the people of Southeast Brainerd have more reason to be apprehensive of strangers than someone from Unorganized Territory does; I've noticed that they lock their doors right after they close them.

Or perhaps the apathy and diffusion of responsibility that I associate with more urban locales has already taken root in our small town.

Probably all of the above. Well, whatever.

So last night one of the other drivers was tipped with a can of beer instead of money. It's not really that unheard of — one customer tried to tip me with coffee — but since he didn't like the brand (Bud Light), he brought it inside and gave it to our crazy-religious assistant manager.

That was a mistake. Our assistant manager doesn't drink, and her only experience with alcohol was some champagne when she was 16.

Crazy-Ass: I got tipsy off of one glass.
Our Bold Hero: It always takes a lot less champagne than you think, in my experience.

Sensing that her authority would provide a useful Trojan horse for her moralizing, she rushed to the phone to call the customers. "If they ever give alcohol to one of my drivers again…" she muttered.

The driver who'd received the beer was able to talk her out of the phone call, and the day was saved.

I had my own brush with this teetotaler earlier this week, when I asked for next Monday off for drinking-related reasons. Her horror at the thought of me, or anyone, drinking ("I can't imagine anyone seeing a "good side" to drinking") struck me as especially ill-informed.

I would have pulled out my favorite Milton quote, the one about fugitive and cloistered virtues, but I've given up trying to convince the crazy-religious assistant manager of anything.

Yesterday was a good day for drinking, though. Thanks in part to the friendly stoner at work, who picked up my Sunday shift, I can attend all of Graham's 21st birthday drunkening.

And I talked to Jubb (crazy-religious in a much different way), who placed a large Everclear order for our room's inaugural wop party, tenatively set for the first Monday. If I can find some that's cheap enough, that is.

(Aside: After quite a bit of searching, I can find neither a definitive spelling for "wop" or "WOP" nor a clue as to its etymology. I'm hesitant to tie it to the obvious "wop", that vulgar word for Italians which (despite the insistence of ignorant folk etymologists who claim it stands for "WithOut Papers) probably comes from guappo, an Italian word meaning "thug."

And I'm suspicious of claims that wop/WOP is an acronym — as Ripon College's Drugs and Alcohol policy statement implies — because as we saw with aforementioned racial slur, it's easy to make words into acronyms after the fact. For now, just understand that WOP (or wop) is roughly equivalent to what some people call Jungle Juice.

My best guess is that "wop" is being used as a variant form of "whop", an outdated noun meaning "An act of whopping; a heavy blow or impact; a bump." Anything that needs that much Everclear has to pack a punch.)

While I was asking for Monday off, I decided that the following Friday, the 17th, would be a good last day. Assuming that I can get everything packed and ready, I should be back at Lawrence on the 18th, where I'll be laying low until Sunday, the official move-in date.

I can tell already that I'm romanticizing Lawrence, just like I romanticized Brainerd spring term. The grass is always greener, and all that.

In my defense, I'm trying to keep my expectations in check; there's nothing worse than not enjoying a good thing because you were expecting it to be a great thing.

Chris Matthews, who as the host of Hardball is probably the only person on MSNBC capable of being spotted in a crowd, was on The Daily Show tonight, where he received a hero's welcome from the audience for grilling vitriolic fake Democrat Zell Miller on Monday's show.

From the transcript, it's clear that Senator Miller was a bit confused, and not necessarily as crazy as the Daily Show made him out to be in yesterday's hilarious "Zell on Earth" segment. But for trying to cast Miller's convention speech in more objective terms, and facing strong resistance in the process, Matthews deserved his applause.

And from a more Wishy-Washy perspective, Matthews deserves all the nonpartisan kudos we can spare for one glorious moment in his Daily Show interview, when he once again showed that he can ask the tough questions.

TiVo-Powered Transcript:

Stewart: I think it should be a nonpartisan — Democrat or Republican, everyone should be questioned on these stupid — and pardon my French — f____ing talking points and we should be able to have a normal conversation.

Matthews: Ah — did you ever ask Kerry where he stood on Iraq?

Stewart: No—

Matthews: [Uncontrollable laughter]

Stewart: —but here's the thing… I'm a comedian!

His "I'm a comedian" cop-out certainly doesn't convince me. Stewart has actually alluded to this poll — which claims that 21% of young people get their campaign information from TV comedy shows — on the air.

So I don't quite believe that the people at the Daily Show see themselves as apolitical actors. With the possible exception of Lewis Black (which might explain why he is, unlike much of the show, consistently funny), everyone on the show seems pretty concerned with attacking Republicans and defending Democrats.

If Kerry wins, I guess we'll see if Stewart's "we're just attacking them because they're in control" argument holds up. For now, Matthews is right to poke fun at Stewart's comedic one-sidedness.

And I promise that this is the last time this summer that I'll blog about the Daily Show. Unless something amazing happens.

Now that I've finally taken the GRE, all the stress and self-imposed isolation of the past few days feels a little silly.

Not that you shouldn't study for the GRE. A shocking number of words in the verbal section — which is basically an elaborate vocabulary test — were ones I already knew from studying the "high frequency words" page of my test prep book. I only wish I'd remembered a few more of them.

A simple analogy for the uninformed: the GRE is to graduate school as the SAT is to undergraduate institutions. Except that you take the GRE on a computer. There's a verbal section and a quantitative section, both of which are graded on the same 800 point scale as an SAT test.

There's also an analytical writing section composed of two essays: a longer "issue" essay reacting to a quote, and a shorter "argument analysis" essay wherein you pick apart the logical flaws in a given argument. That last part was actually fun.

After the test I got my scores for everything except the two essays (which some professors somewhere have to look over first) and I decided not to submit them to anywhere just yet, even if it was free.

I'm happy with my scores, it's just that I still have no idea whatsoever what I'm going to be doing a year from now. Or even what I want to be doing.

But those nagging questions about the future can wait for now. I'm just happy to relax again.

I can already sense the boredom waiting for me out there, now that I've lost the purpose of the past few days…