Alan now has his own blog. There's something delightful about the fact that he enabled comments on a blog that he probably won't be able to see himself until he returns, what with this Great Firewall of China I've heard so much about.

So far he's missing out on Tariq's attempts to correct his grammar and spelling, so it can't be that much of a loss. Still, here's hoping he keeps at it (unlike some people) because it's easier and less awkward than exchanging emails.

Now I only have to get the Politician blogging and I'll have earned my wings.

Didn't get the job at Pizza Hut; after grad school came up they soon got wise to my "work one month then leave" plan and told me I could get virtually no hours.

Which is still better than my work schedule right now. But whatever. Still shocked, though.

As consolation I went F-golfing yesterday for the first time since last fall. I'm either twice as bad as I used to be or still not used to playing with tournament par. Either way, that +35 was irritating: O'Hauser rocked me.

I can't really take F-golf too seriously, but I do remember being under 20 consistently last summer. Only one way to improve.

The Politician suggests that (and here there are all kind of hidden assumptions about how cheaply I live) I just have fun for a month and worry about a job in Chicago. (I have plenty of other stuff to worry about before August, I might add.)

Copping out is tempting, and perhaps likely, but I know of a dark place, where, perhaps, I can find what I seek... Papa John's.

A rainy day. I'm inside, trying to figure my apartment situation for the next year. I've done this only once before, and I'm always surprised by how much of a gamble it ends up being.

Do I wait for the University of Chicago to send me a housing application (MAPH people have to call and request one, apparently)? Or do I go for the reasonably priced but relatively distant apartment before someone else grabs it? Should I just play it safe and grab the cheap studio, even if it means paying for an extra month? Decisions, decisions...

Since Danielle's wedding on Saturday, B-town has gradually reverted to the unexciting town of my childhood. We left soon after people started dancing and went to Jenna's, where I had a shot of Graham's bijo, which he billed as a sort of "Chinese tequila."

Easily the most horrible shot I have ever taken, worse than Jagermeister or Ouzo, though it tasted a little like the latter. Everyone left shortly thereafter and I naturally, but erroneously, assumed it was because of the bijo.

Jenna and Adam went home on Sunday, after meeting us for lunch at Rafferty's Pizza. I think Adam and his girlfriend only spent slightly more than 24 hours in B-town. I wouldn't have made the trip, personally, but he had his brother's grad party to attend.

After all that excitement Graham and I decided to see Batman Begins, which I keep referring to as Batman: Year One out of force of habit. I'm still one of those people who think Aronofsky will make another movie, someday. Dreamers all...

It was a pretty good movie, albeit with some of the inevitable logical flaws. After dinner we met up again at Amelia's house for a few rounds of Lunch Money, a card game that will never replace Illuminati in my heart of hearts.

And today, rain. And busywork.

Today is Bloomsday, the high holy holiday of everyone's favorite literary period, Modernism. Technically it's a celebration of James Joyce and his novel Ulysses, but I'll take what I can get.

I haven't read Ulysses, actually, just a bunch of Joyce's short stories and the entry-level classic A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Probably another reason why I like to think of this holiday in broader terms.

But back to business. Still no phone service in our apartment and still no job -- though I expect to hear back from Pizza Hut sometime next week, and hopes are high. They gave me a free personal pan pizza just for applying.

By my estimate I'll be working there all of a month if I get hired. This summer is looking more and more like a wash.

In the meantime I've been playing a lot of the new GTA: San Andreas on the Xbox, and while it's amazingly M-for-mature compared to the other games in the franchise, that's finally ceased to surprise me and I can just enjoy the game. The characters and story are head and shoulders above, say, GTA: Vice City, which is probably the game's saving grace when I'm on one of the 15-minute missions.

Going home this weekend, and since my cell phone is acting up and Jenna didn't email me any directions I'm hoping the logistics work out. Assuming I get there, it should be a good time. A regular B-town reunion.

So I'm posting this from the library because we don't yet have the Internet, or even a telephone line, in our apartment. It's a nice place, though. Overlooking the river, across the hall from a professor...

I can't remember our address, but I'm pretty sure I can find my way back there. It's very close to Lawrence, so I'm hoping I can start using my bike to get around. Very old school.

We've only had a few guests to the place so far. The Intended stopped by last night to watch a movie with Our Bold Hero and her beloved Politician. And Sockless Pete and Alan came by the night after graduation and hung out for a bit.

The fact that I won't see Alan for at least six months, while he's in China and whatnot, is the only striking change so far. He's really the only person I saw every day who isn't living here this summer. If he ever sets up a blog I'll link to it.

The graduation ceremony was decent enough, by the way. We didn't get a big speaker, instead there were three little speakers of varying quality. Everything dragged on except my time on the stage, which I can hardly remember. Those who wish can now refer to me as line designation, G-11R. Or simply G-11 for short.

Afterwards a quick lunch with my family and a few errands, I went back to the room and helped Jubb move and dealt with Hiett 218's own "tragedy of the commons," i.e. the mess in the center room. Jubb left on a roadtrip as soon as he finished, bequeathing me most of his food.

And now... well, I don't have a job yet, but I'm making another go at it today. Preferably somewhere where I can get free food, cheapo that I am. I've been playing too much GTA for my own good, so I've checked out some books (Samuel Delany's Babel-17 and Joseph Epstein's Snobbery) so that my brain doesn't turn into goo. And I'm going to start playing Frisbee golf again in my spare time, since so many people who play live in the area.

Would that I'd been drunker. I didn't enjoy tonight as much as some other people, but I did get to go up to the so-called "Nipple of Knowledge," as the cupola atop Main Hall is widely known. A good night.

It's all spiders and plywood, in case you were wondering. And there was some paint, as you can see.

My clothes are covered in grass stains, which is a bit of a surprise. It's either from rolling down Union hill (someone had most of my girly drink while I was on my way down: anger) or sleeping under the graduation tent. I'm glad we did that.

So many regrets this year. I just... I dunno. It seems like I could have been a lot happier if I'd done... well, even the little things. One more drink last night and I would have been as drunk as anyone. Not paranoid and cynical.

So for anyone with Windows who wants to get pictures from my computer before I leave, here are some visual instructions:





And make sure you use the right kind of slashes. Backslashes.

Went to the Wooden Nickel with Zack and Sockless Pete tonight, drank three pitchers and had a considerable amount of fun. Still, there's a strange amount of guilt and regret in my system right now; maybe it's the three pitchers. I also learned some things. You can never be too cynical, folks.

Also, we produced this chart during our discussion of a proposed Lawrence "Fantasy Chotch" league:

I've missed you, Dear Reader. And someday we can be together again, as soon as I finish my essay on Arthur Schnitzler's "Die Weissagung" ("The Prophecy"), which is due on Tuesday. I've got quite a bit to go, almost the whole thing, but even writing an essay in German is faster than writing fiction in English.

It's been a bad term for fiction. The Literati liked the first and only thing I showed them this term, the first section of a postapocalyptic story that I still think is spectacular in concept, but which for various reasons (I won't go into them here) I couldn't make any progress on beyond that first bit.

Well, I'll tell you one: it's really hard to work fake blog posts into a work of fiction in an interesting way. Unless you're reading them as they happen and they're explaining the action, I suppose, but that wasn't the case here.

I didn't have any ideas. There was nothing I wanted to say that I thought I was capable of saying (I have a tendency to bite off more than I can chew as is) so when one of the guys in our class used the phrase "a night and a half with a hip flask" in the course of explaining his writing process I challenged everyone in earshot to write a story with that title. Some people actually did.

Sando finished hers in time for us to read it, and in my defense I know perfectly well that it's better than what I wrote. I'm hoping to see some of the others this week.

Well, here's my mediocre entry, a thirty-page monstrosity that represents the bulk of my work this term: Our Bold Hero's "A night and a half with a hip flask." It took forever to write from the perspective of a drunkard, by the way. Yeah, I was surprised too.

Ah, but that wasn't enough, I was still six double-spaced pages short of my fifty. So I slapped together "Wilderness," which is probably a much better story, yesterday and today. If "slapped together" is the right word for my incredibly slow writing process.

Dintenfass always says it's not what you're writing now, it's what you're writing ten years from now. And I think to myself: what if I'm working on the same project?

If you ever want to read this stuff it'll also be available on the Fiction page. Needless to say you should have other priorities.

That was a good class, Sando and Ol' Layout came up with some great fiction for the last day so I had fun homework instead of just philosophy stuff. The Cheerful Cynic wasn't that annoying, and budding writer Cinnamon didn't really say much of anything at all -- she was obviously intimidated, so I felt kinda bad about that. There was overall a real abundance of good fiction, at least on the days when we had class.

The one real irritation was Tracer Bullet, a would-be noir writer who, despite having very insightful things to say about many of the works, earns my eternal opprobrium for proving once again that my adviser hates me. After being told (reminded, really) that I couldn't use stuff I'd written earlier in the year to satisfy the page requirement I was shocked to see Tracer get credit for a novel he wasn't even planning to revise this term. He wrote nothing for the class, as far as I can tell.

It was up there with The Feminist's special exemption from Prof. Dintenfass's "life experience" rule my freshman year, when both of us tried to get in.

Well, I don't mean to get frustrated at the end here. It's good to be done. Er, close to done.

For those of you who don't know Christopher Hitchens, a political writer who pops up all sorts of places, well, here's a little background: Hitchens and his brother Peter recently appeared together for the first time since one of them (or both, the story doesn't concern me) made a flippant comment about the other one endorsing Stalinism or something.

So the Guardian, which none of us have thought about since they had that horrible Clark County letter-writing idea, got the two brothers together at this festival. And here's the best part of the interview. Yeah, the other brother isn't even in this scene:

Female audience member: Excuse me. I'm not usually awkward at all but I'm sitting here and we're asked not to smoke. And I don't like being in a room where smoking is going on.

Christopher Hitchens (smoking heavily): Well you don't have to stay darling, do you? I'm working here and I'm your guest, OK? And this is what I'm like; nobody has to like it.

The Guardian: Would you just stub that one out?

Hitchens: No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it.

Female audience member: We should all be allowed to smoke then.

Hitchens: Fair enough. I wouldn't object. It might get pretty nasty though. I have a privileged position here, I'm not just one of the audience, so it would be horrible if everyone was like me. This is my last of five gigs, I've worked very hard for the festival. I'm going from here to Heathrow airport. If anyone doesn't like it they can kiss my ass.

The Guardian: Would anyone like to take up that challenge?

(Laughter. Woman walks out)

Thanks to Neil Gaiman for the link. Yeah, he's got a blog apparently, and it's pretty pretentious:

Which probably bubbled into my mind because Terry Pratchett and I were talking about Crowley and Aziraphale over dinner the other night and wondering what they'd been up to. (links added)

Which reminds me: read Small Gods. And Sandman, it really picks up around book four, honest. I remember "Brief Lives" being especially good.

So I should probably say something about Wednesday. Well, I should probably be writing fiction, actually, but a bit of blogging won't hurt me. Here goes.

At 5:30 we had the senior dinner. I was assigned to Prof Hoffmann (every professor gets a minder so they always have someone to talk to… yeah it's bizarre), the only professor in the department who doesn't intimidate me, and we chatted on and off at the reception beforehand, mostly about Lawrence since she went here as an undergraduate.

I like Prof. Hoffmann, but she's hard to read. You can usually tell when Prof. Spurgin is patronizing you (yeah… uh huh… uh huh… yes…) and the older guard don't really play that game — Prof. Goldgar especially can't disguise his contempt for ignorance. Hoffmann is an exception, not cynical, apparently genuinely interested in what's being said. She laughs all the time.

And there's the dilemma. I have a hard time believing that someone can be both clever and "nice" — like B-town's own Meghan Rahn, intelligent nice people tend to be guileless and gullible — so maybe she's just really good at faking one of the two.

In any case, I decided to assume that she wasn't patronizing me and had a pretty good time. My side of the table at dinner was all English geeks so we tended to be on the same page when it came to the speeches. Even the keynote address was disappointing.

And the ghost of senior dinners past appeared in the form of the wine restriction. Apparently someone puked on Prof. Podair two years ago so everyone only got one glass of free wine.

Ah, but afterwards. After a perfunctory pre-party in Hiett many of us went to the VR for the afterparty. Hoffmann was there, and with Representative Man we ended up talking about literature, critical theory, and some of the professors Lawrence didn't hire during the last search. She was easily the most cynical I'd ever seen her; perhaps this is the dark side that only comes out when she's talking to Main Hall's resident curmudgeon.

In the spirit of Graham, who's always putting up pictures of professors on his blog, here's the three of us moments before Representative Man literally attacked me for favoring Foucault over Derrida:





Needless to say, it was a lot of fun. Though I kept waiting for Goldgar to show up for a quick mint julep. There would have been no topping that, ever.

Yes, yes, there was drinking. The night after senior dinner is traditionally a wild night, and the VR was packed with seniors. I had four Long Island iced teas over the course of a few hours, and it didn't help (though it was mighty nice) that Jubb treated me to two of them, extra-strong. Jubb bought a lot of drinks for a lot of people that night, here he is in the act:





By 11:30 I was drunk, but not falling over drunk, and I was having a lot of fun talking to various people at random. I also took some of the best pictures I've taken all term.





Soon enough, it was that time again.

So I streaked, running alongside Sockless (and everything elseless, in this case) Pete and a few others for much of the circuit around Science Hall. '80s-style streaking is hard, and I was incredibly winded by the time I was done. A separate naked-parade-style contingent followed.

There are four main reasons why this year's Senior Streak was slightly disappointing:

1. Failure to inform the underclassmen. Most of them had no idea what was going on and when. That's probably usually the case anyways, but word-of-mouth went nowhere. Why?

2. The Phi Tau offensive. Apparently they were the main force behind the campaign to move the streak to Friday, but there were other people too. Our class secretary urged us not to streak that night during his speech at the dinner (presumably because the university wouldn't be able to tell the difference between correlation and causation; my one glass of wine wore off before dessert) and I heard other people not affiliated with the frat spreading the news as well. The confusion means that there will be two smaller streaks instead of one big one. Oh and there was also:

3. The police rumor. Some of the same culprits were claiming that there were police on campus and they might arrest us. It's my understanding that the Appleton cops are usually aware of the streak and are more concerned with keeping Lawrence and Appleton separate for the duration. I remember Carry-Out Carrie arguing that even if were arrested it would be hilarious. Though I don't remember seeing her streak, actually, which may have something to do with the final reason:

4. Lameness. Wow, a lot of Lawrentians are lame. Not just whoever tried to steal our clothes while we were gone (Grace had our backs), but the various people who whined, hesitated, and just generally flaked.

There were people who weren't willing to do it unless the herd joined in: Zack and my two senior roommates hesitated until I actually led them over and showed them that most of the senior girls we knew, as bold of heroes as there every was, had already undressed and in some cases already streaked, like so many sketchy fratboys before them. Kudos to the girls.

Even worse, there were people who only refrained because of what other people might think, and since I'm sure this applies to plenty of people I won't single anyone out. I'm probably too caught up in the symbolism of this (recent, according to Hoffmann) tradition, but streaking seems highly individualistic, a revolt against those very tendencies.

Certainly, there were passerby who did not appreciate the streaking. I overheard a loud aside near Hiett to that effect, and someone shouted "Newsflash seniors! No one wants to see you naked!" as we ran past Science Hall. The voice in my head shouted "prude!" but running naked is not a stance tailored for debate.

And lastly, there were a number of people who will never get naked and had no intention of doing so that night. Seniors who watched the streak deserve special condemnation in that regard, the other people have their individual reasons but are generally lame. Because there's no real argument against the streak, unless you're the kind of person who's not willing to do this kind of thing at any point in your life.

There's not really much dignity in streaking itself, but I have a lot of respect for the kind of person who can just say "what the hell" every now and then.