What's there to say. I feel like Graham has said it all already, better than I ever could. Graham knew Manney better than I did: even after the three of us had known each other for years I felt odd hanging out with just Manney, like I wouldn't be interesting enough or something.



But there are very few people in this world I consider my friends, and Manney Anderson was one of them. I hope he knew that.

Coming home this weekend. I talked to Adam tonight, and that was good. He's coming home too.

I noticed that a lot of people have been coming to this site lately, but I don't have much to say right now. Later I will, but for now I'd rather be quiet and think. It's been a rough week, and I want to go home.

I remember the first time I heard the Eels.

I'm going to the University of Chicago. There, it's decided. Now to tell my parents and the school itself. Must mail acceptance certificate today. I'm also living here this summer, at least that's what I've told the Politician, my future flatmate.

Hopefully that will cheer me up. I've been down all week for reasons I can't pinpoint.

It's really strange, actually. Nothing has changed since last week. I'm still frustrated by all the same things and have all the same responsibilities, which I won't go into here thank god.

Even last night's game of Illuminati seemed less exciting than usual. It was actually, and I blame that on the unusual number of slow beginners, including what I can safely say was the most boring prospie I've ever met, who put our total number of players up to six.

Most of the players also spent the game whining about how they wanted to be out. With the Politician you can assume that he's whining out of habit, as it seems to be a control thing for him, and Alan, our reigning Illuminati champion, was apparently trying out a new mindgame. But it still sucked a bit more fun out of the game.

Whatever. I like playing. But next time I play it will be with a small group of veterans. With drinking and perhaps cheating.

1. That this Tuesday might actually be fun:

A Birthday Reminder from CollegeFacebook
This is a reminder from CollegeFacebook that [The Politician]'s birthday is coming up in 2 days.

2. That I've finally reached the point in my life where the writers I'm reading for class have their own weblogs. It's actually what you'd expect, by the way:

Michael Berube online.

3. That I'm the only Non-Frisbee Coalition member ever to get a personal page on the Lawrence Ultimate site:

Soft Player: Dan

4. And finally, that the magazine outside my door with Maxine Hong-Kingston on the cover — not the first face I want to see in the morning — was Representative Man's revenge for the unflattering description of his tenure in the incoming editor-in-chief's recent editorial:

No Subject
I know the livejournal and alignment lines were yours.
Your comeuppance from me will make you long for the inane
days of unslatted bed-falls at 6:15 AM.

I should note, because many people seem to think otherwise, that I didn't fall through my unslatted bed that night. But after noticing that my mattress was sitting suspiciously low, I was annoyed that I actually could.

Cut to me waking Jubb. Something to keep in mind for the future: you can't say you "remember" something or "saw" something if you were asleep while it happened. That's how completely inconsequential rumors get started.

A lot on my mind this week. Woke up a few nights ago, for instance, with the sudden realization that my story has no plot.

You'd think I'd have one, five pages into it. But no. So naturally it's a thrilling read. But I won't say anything more until it's done.

More pressingly, there's the looming deadline for my decision to attend graduate school. I have to tell them before the month is out.

Upon closer inspection the "M.A. equivalent" program at the University of Chicago doesn't look nearly as sketchy as I'd at first thought, and of course the easiest thing to do right now would be to grab that option rather than create a new one.

I see two career paths for myself — copy editor and professor, for those of you who don't talk to me often — and the question continues to be which one I want to try first. Chicago says I shouldn't apply to a Ph.D. program until after I've graduated from their A.M. program (no idea why it's "A.M." and not "M.A.") so it looks like I have the '06-'07 school year off.

So… I do a year of graduate school, burn out, then work in a thankless copy-editing job at the Podunk Times somewhere. That actually sounds like a good plan, underneath the cynicism.

I'm going to let this stew for a while, see how I feel about it. But I think I may have made a decision already.

Ran two important errands in town today: first, I dropped off a resume at the Appleton Post-Crescent in the hopes that I can work there soon. They've already hired their interns for the summer, but given the relative scarcity of copy-editing interns and the general awesomeness of my high-powered resume — my list of duties at The Lawrentian is impressive — I think I might have a chance.

I also mailed out my tax forms, which I completed with Turbotax while I was home a few weekends ago. I'm getting a modest refund, like most of you.

Unlike most of you, I qualify for a tax break because I'm legally blind. My vision has dropped off rather precipitously since I matriculated, and it's now worse than 20/200, the cutoff for blindness in America.

This will probably continue to be a problem, as prettymuch everything I do is bad for my eyes. On the plus side, maybe I could turn nearsightedness to my literary advantage, like Milton in Book Three:

but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that rowl in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled.

Probably too late for that. I'd have to be blind and black and Irish and orphaned to be interesting nowadays. White males are so out.

Not that it's an issue, anyways. While my Lawrentian coworker Layout is already at work on his second story, I'm still trying to get my character to the phone.

That's a good class, by the way. With the exception of my philosophy class, which being a required course is basically a "Who's Who" of philosophy majors, all my classes are full of students who really care about the material.

Contemporary Critical Theory is full of what I like to think of as Theory People. You've seen them: mussed hair, slightly eccentric dress, a faint smell of chai tea. I hesitate to call them hipsters because the theory people's posturing seems accidental. Maybe that means they're just really good at being hipsters. Anyways, it's amusing to hear someone use the word "hermeneutic" unselfconsciously.

"The English Language" is similar. Even the Politician's freshman year roommate, usually a dunce and an ass, seems to be on his best behavior. It's stuffed with linguistics majors, the kind of people who titter at the word "Frisian."

Would that I were one of them. But it's too late now.

Which brings me back to Advanced Fiction Writing, a breath of fresh air after listening to Prof. Ryckman's soft-spoken droning for two hours.

Everyone there, with the exception of fellow graduating senior Cinnamon, has taken a Fiction Writing class before, and we're all there to do work. Some of these people can't stop writing. One guy, an insightful critic dubbed Tracer Bullet, had a 360-page detective story ready for us on the first day of class.

Of course, after that the flow stopped. We've read two stories since then, and both of them could have used some more TLC. Layout surprised me by writing a Lovecraftian romance, but I was the only one who seemed to have guessed his intensions, and I wound up hurling the word "neo-phantastisch" at Prof. Dintenfass, who wanted either a realistic story or a completely fantastic one.

My writing is going unnervingly slow. I either don't have the time or, when I do, I take too long to say everything just how I want to say it. I've got about half a page right now, and I like it, but at this rate I won't finish before the term ends.

I think it's probably a bad sign that, when my roommate leaves campus for the weekend, it suddenly seems like there's nothing to do.

It's probably for the best. I ended up playing Illuminati, the card game of world domination, with Alan, Ben, and Sockless Pete. I was the UFOs and lost miserably, though I managed to take Sockless Pete and his Gnomes of Zurich down with me.

Alan, the Lawrentian who'd repeatedly suggested that we play, won as the Society of Assassins. It was all so delightfully geeky: Jinx and Jagger took one look, turned up their noses, and left the room again.

And the game really is better when you've been drinking. It's best when you're cheating too, but I'm always a bit nervous about cheating when playing with the newly initiated.

I always forget how long a game lasts, because I usually don't care. However, we'd been planning to play King's Cup or somesuch afterwards, so the Politician and his intended were there for about two hours, vocally trying to wait us out.

By the way, the Politician and I have one of our hypothetical schemes again.

Sometimes, in fact almost all the time, I get enamoured of an idea but am too lazy to follow it through. But just as one of my favorite hobbies is judging and classifying people, the Politician gets a kick out of goading them.

So I've decided to go through with this particular super-secret scheme. You'll find out more in a few weeks, once everything is ready.

(I have deju vu right now, and I'm suddenly struck by how bad the phrase "the weirdest sense of deju vu" (120 hits on Google) sounds to me.)

So this weekend: low-key. It's both a shibboleth and a prediction, at this point.

Wow. So I have about three or four half-written posts but nothing to show for it. To paraphrase my boss at Scripps, can it really wait until tomorrow?

It couldn't, that time. Ah, memories of failure.

First: Got my Georgia pictures back from Evil Jubb, my roommate's alternate universe counterpart. It took me a week of unanswered calls before I got the notion that he mightn't have a phone. I talked to him in person yesterday, because he really doesn't have a phone in his room. He was happy to help, but mistakenly gave me a shiny coaster that didn't actually have any photos burned on it.

I surmised, rightfully as it turns out, that he'd deleted the pictures after I left. Sorrow. Anguish.

Thankfully, inability to burn a CD correlates nicely with inability to empty the trash. This afternoon I went to Evil Jubb's room, whipped out my iPod — not just for transporting downloaded anime to B-town anymore — grabbed the pictures, and like ze smoke I was gone.

Ironically, I'm not too fond of any of these pictures. Maybe if I'd gotten them last week, when I was still muttering "Soft soft in the middle, soft soft in the middle middle middle" whenever I was in a hurry. Yeah, then I would have cared more.

I went home this weekend for my littlest brother's confirmation. As most of you know, I'm no longer Catholic (to the extent that anyone can cease to be Catholic) so this was the first time in a while I'd been to church. I think it's been at least a year.

I'm a big fan of solemnity, of course, but there wasn't much in this ceremony. I'd always casually assumed that rank and eloquence went hand in hand in the Catholic church, but of course that's wrong. Bishop Schnurr, though I'm sure he's a man of strong faith, is a surprisingly poor speaker compared to any of the various priests who've been stationed at St. Christopher's at one point or another: Fathers Charlie, Shamus — even George, the new non-Irish priest, can give a better sermon. We're a cash cow for the Duluth diocese so I guess we get the better priests.

Anyways, he gave a stilted pre-obituary for the pope, who was not yet dead on Saturday morning, and we were told to pray for him. It bothered me, and bothers me still, because it seemed like we were praying for him not to die. If a guy's in pain and has a golden ticket to Heaven, I say pray for his swift and painless death if you truly believe in such a glorius afterlife. But that's just me.

Speaking of the pope, my weekend in B-town, boring as it was, culminated in this exchange, set in kitchen full of relatives:

[Ring-a-ling]
Our Bold Hero: Hello?
Woman: Hello, could I speak to your mom?
Our Bold Hero: Sure. Mom?
My mom: Hello. Ok. Oh. I see. [Hangs up.]
Chorus: Well?
My mom: The pope just died.
Our Bold Hero: Mom, did you organize some sort of pope's death calling tree?
[Scattered laughter from college-age relatives]
Our Bold Hero: What, too soon?

Matt liked that one. We have an understanding. Also, he cleared up some preconceptions I'd had about one of his college friends who's living in Appleton right now.

I left on Sunday. There was some discussion of my future in general and grad school options in particular while I was home, and I'm still on the fence about the U of Chicago masters program. That's an expensive year.

But enough of that. It's enough to make me want to drop off the grid entirely. I'll live out of the Deathtrap in the American Southwest. Eat cacti and lizards.

Back to the Lawrence bubble. I have an office in the library now, which is very exciting, and I'm looking forward to getting a lot of work done there. I'm even hauling in Jubb's computer so I can do some writing.

Ah, speaking of the library…