Quote Day, the Third

Braaawk! Trite postmodernism!

-Count Zero

BiiiiiirdMAN!

The other week, I was out to dinner with Sweetums and his aunt, a formidable old lady with a no-nonsense attitude and a great sense of humor. I looked out the window at one point and couldn't help but stare as a figure in a bird mask, complete with raptorial beak and covering his whole head, and colorful cape strode by the restaurant. I stopped mid-sentence in conversation with Sweetums' aunt and had to take a moment to find my place again.

A few days later, Walrus was coming home from somewhere, and he came up to me chortling and bemused. "I just saw a man in a bird mask," he told me.

Evidently, Birdman lives around here, somewhere.

Story the Third, Part the Second: Thin Walls make Strange Neighbors

A brief refresher: During our storied second year at PCU, Schmendrick and I were housed in a particularly unpleasant building among strange and unpleasant people. This is an account of one such, who occupied the room next to ours.
I don't believe I ever learned this personage's name, as we seldom met. In the way of visual information, we assembled the following: Our neighbor was almost certainly male, tall, thin, and probably possessed of some Asian ancestry.
All else which we learned of him came in the form of auditory transfer of insufficiently buffering materiel. Which is to say, the connecting wall was thin and of shoddy construction and we could hear him all too well. Via this route we learned:
Firstly, that he was inordinately fond of online poker games. Late into the night we would hear the steady yet intermittent bells, whistles, and synthesized wind chimes as he presumably amassed and lost fortunes. These were punctuated by infrequent cheers and significantly less infrequent curses and shouts.
Second, he was posessed of... what's a suitable phrase... 'intimate companion'. We never saw her, and in fact can only assume it was a her based on... erm... audio cues, let's say. Of course, we strongly hope that said cues were not entirely accurate, since if they were, the person in question was about twelve.
These, then were the conditions we tolerated at all times. I will finish by recounting an incident which, while it occured but the once, feels representiative of said conditions.
This story takes place during late evening*. I believe Shmendrick was already asleep, I was finishing some assignment for my data structures class (see entry '...and the Wings Fall Off!') when I heard from the hall just outside our door a series of sounds for which 'kerfuffle' should be elevated to onomatopoeia. This sort of thing happened in this setting, so at first I paid it no mind. Once the sirens started, however, it seemed prudent to peek out and ensure that the world wasn't coming to an end. By the time I extracted myself and made my way to the door (armed with a sword, just in case I was wrong and Armageddon was at hand), I observed the following individuals clustered around our neighbor's open door: said neighbor, clearly dressed for bed and apparently bleeding from a sizable cut on his hand, a young woman I had never seen before, a middle-aged woman I had also never seen before, a representative of campus security, and what looked like both a real live paramedic and an honest-to-goodness policeman (the latter in particular being an extreme rarity in this building). Having established that no demons were going to attempt to batter down the door, I went back to work. It was later established that the course of events outside had been roughly these:
The young woman was a recent graduate who, for reasons unclear, had brought her mother (the older woman) back to campus on some sort of nostalgia-fueled tour. She, the daughter, was a member and former resident of the building in which we resided, and had occupied last year the room now containing our next-door poker-loving non-associate. Clearly drunk off her ass, she had decided to visit her old room. At around 11 pm. I'm not sure what her mother's excuse for allowing this was. Perhaps she was drunk too. Anyway, they had approached the room and simply walked in - without bothering to turn the light on. Neighbor Boy, awakened from a likely drug-influenced nap, in the dark, by two people invading his room, got up with such haste and lack of coordination that he broke a mirror and cut his hand on it, at which point he commenced screaming with such volume and ferocity that his uninvited guests called the police.



*A note for non-college students regarding the divsion of time: Time in for us was described by the interactions of the 24 hour solar cycle and and the variable length 'waking cycle', defined as the duration between two times when you wake up, with a minimum of about 14 hours and a maximum in excess of 72. Evening, on a day where you have classes, begins at the end of your last class and lasts until the time you begin the sleep that end with the beginning of the next waking cycle. On days when you do not have classes, evening begins either at dusk or shortly after the first meal of the waking cycle, and lasts until the first time you say or thing 'I should have gone to sleep by now'. Evening follows 'day', and is followed either by 'sleep time', if you took your own advice about going to bed, or 'ass-o-clock in the morning', if you did not.

Taking the Plunger

Sweetums has a work-study job, and, like so many of them, it includes a moronic overseer type. Today he came back with a story from one of his fellow underlings about the severity of the boss' moronic tendencies.

This poor schmuck is the janitor for the offices of a technical school. He goes in to a bathroom one day only to find that some asshat has made a complete mess of one of the stalls. He looks about for a plunger to start repairing the damage, and can't find one. So he goes to the bossperson and says, "Do you know where I can find a plunger?"

The bossperson looks at the janitor and says, "What the hell do you need a plunger for?"

Okay, so this is the janitor's boss, and the janitor kindly refrains from pointing out that HE'S A JANITOR. Why else would he need a plunger? "Well, sir, one of the bathrooms is a mess, and I'd like to start cleaning it up."

"You don't know where the plunger is?" comes the incredulous reply.

"No, sir, I looked everywhere, and I didn't see one, so I came to ask."

This scintillating repartee went on for some five minutes before the boss finally exclaimed, "This is not my problem! Why did you bring this to me? Go deal with it!"

...

Later, it was determined that the janitor was docked pay for the duration of this interview.

Weave

I went to an inner city public school with a magnet program. The proportions of the school were something like as follows: 54% Hispanic, 40% Black, 5% White and 1% Asian. As you might guess, the 5% were all in the magnet program. This did not mean that all the White kids were better off than the rest; it meant that the neighborhood around the school was predominantly Black and Hispanic. However, this was often interpreted as some kind of holier-than-thou racism. I never quite understood it.

As one of the minority, I was from time to time subjected to contempt, anger, and ridicule. Some were more subtle than others. But one of the strangest I can recall happened late in the spring of my junior year.

I was heading home at the end of an unusually pleasant (weather-wise) day. My car was parked in the back lot, past a number of buildings that only held classes for students who were not in the magnet program. As it was a nice day out, I had let my hair down for once. My hair, for those of you who don't know, is a giant mass of frizzy, curly, auburn tangles that, when well treated, goes down about to my waist. Most of the time it is either too hot out or too much of a pain to let down.

As I walked past the last of the buildings towards the parking lot, I passed a group of girls from the regular program sitting on some stairs. I didn't know them, and they seemed engrossed in their conversation, so I walked by without thinking too much about it. Suddenly, I felt a great pain in my scalp, stepped backwards and whirled, ready to face my attacker.

One of the girls had gotten up, reached out, and grabbed a large hank of my hair towards the bottom. She immediately let go and backed away as I turned, saying only, "Nice hair."

I contemplated the situation for a stunned moment, deciding to let it go. "Thanks. Don't ever do that again." I walked away hoping they wouldn't follow me. They didn't.

Hours later, I realized that she hadn't meant to hurt me- she'd thought I was wearing weave and wanted to tear it out and make fun of me. The preposterousness of the whole event boggles me to this day.

The Violet Abomination

Since moving to this town, it has been my (admittedly adopted) custom to host a board games evening every Tuesday. For a long while, the regular attendees were myself, my housemate Arisbe, and our friend Francis. All of us happen to share a love for absurdity, and one week, Arisbe announced that she had found something we would all enjoy that happened to happen on board game night: the Spike show "Deadliest Warrior".

As some of you may already know or have guessed, this show was a finely honed example of absurdity and violence. The premise is this: take two categories of famous warrior (say, Shaolin monk and Italian mobster) and get some 'experts' to come on the show, talk big, and demonstrate some of the preferred weaponry. Then they put their data into a magical computer simulator and decide the victor. Complete with 'reenactments' of the supposed fights.

All three of us are history buffs of one sort or another. We decided it must be watched. Francis declared that this would require hard liquor to numb the pain of stupid; he said he'd bring some.

The next games night, after a rousing game of something or other, we sat down in front of the telebi and turned the channel to Spike. Francis pulled out his backpack and brought forth two bottles: Scotch and something brilliantly purple and slightly disturbing.

The violet liquor was something Francis did not know; he'd gotten it out of an elderly relative's cabinet somewhere, and decided that if ever there was a time to find out, this was probably it. We each took a tiny swallow.

It tastes, if you will forgive the poetry, like some rose petals died in a vat of sugar water and then fermented.

Francis declared that he was going to pour it out, but I decided I liked the color of it. He let me keep it. Even now, it lives on top of the television. Right next to the duck.

Sick

When I was about eight, I had a very surreal experience while rather ill.

I had contracted some sort of virus, as I often did (and still do, albeit less frequently) and was miserable for much of a day and evening. At long last, around dusk, I finally fell asleep. When I woke, I noted that a) my fever had broken, and b) the dawn was just breaking. How odd, I thought, to have slept only until dawn.

I went out into the kitchen, feeling hungry for the first time since I fell ill, and was surprised to find my entire family dressed and at the table. "Family breakfast?" I asked. My family stared at me, apparently not having heard me get up. They took in the nightgown and the question, and finally my mother said, "No, it's dinnertime."

I had slept a full 24 hours and not even noticed.

Quote Day, the Second

In honor of my good friend's wedding, which happened two days ago, and also the fact that I am feeling lazy.

"Knives are a lot like cards, you know; at first you keep them concealed." Insert image of a small, fey girl holding a bunch of plastic knives all lined up so they look like only one. "But then you go ALL OUT!" Then she fans them out, grinning maniacally.

Swimming

We return you now to the life and near-death times of our good friend Shmendrick. Shmendrick spent a while abroad in Germany, and while he was there he and a couple of his friends encountered a river. The river was at a place that was narrow-ish and curving, and the current near the bank they were on was slow.

Somehow these factors added up in Shmendrick's head to the need to swim across the river.

His friends tried to dissuade him, but were eventually persuaded to meet him on the other side. In full garb, Shmendrick jumped into the river and began to swim.

About halfway across, physics asserted itself; on the outside of the curve of a narrow part of the river, the current is FAST. Shmendrick found himself being carried quickly off course and struggling just to stay above the water. He told me later that he wasn't sure he would make it across at all, and was exhausted when he pulled himself up on the bank a couple of miles downstream.

When Shmendrick was telling me this story, about six months later, I laughed, called him an idiot and reminded him not to break The Rule (no dying). I then invited him to come swimming with me in a much safer environment: the PCU gymnasium. He agreed readily, and off we went.

I am something of a natural swimmer. I don't tire easily, once my muscles remember how the swimming thing goes, and I usually end up stopping around ten or fifteen laps because I need to go do something else rather than reaching my limit. After a half a lap at my slow, breaststroke pace, I look over to see Shmendrick flailing around in a semblance of a breathless front crawl, kicking up three times as much water as he needed to and turning red in the face from effort. I waited for him to reach me and asked if he was okay. He said he was fine but a little out of breath. I asked him if he was having more trouble than usual with the crawl, and he said no, he just wanted to do another lap. I persuaded him to catch his breath at least, then went back to swimming.

After perhaps a lap and a half, Shmendrick was past the point of endurance, red and sweating in the water, clearly cramping and having trouble breathing. I ordered him (yeah, I'm bossy) to get out and go sit.

When I got out several laps later, I couldn't help but ask, "And you decided to SWIM A RIVER?!"

...And the Wings Fall Off!

PCU numbered among its professors a particularly unfortunate computer science teacher named, for the duration, Professor Vizzini. Vizzini was an exceptionally nice man with, as far as I can tell, no experience programming computers whatsoever. At different points, both Walrus and I had Professor Vizzini, but today's story is actually from Walrus' experience rather than mine.

Professor Vizzini was trying to explain why some computer science languages are not used for things like, say, airlines. The explanation culminated in the exclamation, "...and the plane goes, I don't know how to add two strings!, and THE WINGS FALL OFF!"

Bad Taxi

Earlier today, my friend (who shall henceforth be known as Sweetums) told me a tale from upstate New York that I think qualifies as taking the bucket.

He was attempting to get somewhere, and, as one might, hailed a taxi. The taxi driver looked back apologetically and asked, "Do you mind if I run into a store real quick?" Being as Sweetums was not in a terrible rush, he said sure, no problem.

The taxi driver pulled up to a porn shop and went in. It was thirty minutes before he came back.

After he finally got Sweetums where he was going, the driver still had the nerve to charge him a fare. Fortunately for all concerned, he had NOT left the meter running while he jerked off.

Story the Third, Part the First: On Living Conditions

Having posted two stories therefrom, I believe the time has come to discuss the exact nature of the accommodations shared by Schmedrick and myself during our notorious second year at PCU. To begin, I should explain how the housing system at that estimable edifice operates. First year students are assigned their rooms based on some fairly loose guidelines of their selection. They vary in quality but are, on the whole not bad. After the first year, students organize themselves into housing groups from one to around six people they wish to live with in various sized houses, rooms and apartments. These groups receive a number, randomized within year groups, and then each take a turn choosing where they will live, based on the space still available. Lower numbers go sooner, and are thus more desirable. As it happened, there were 463 groups on the year in question. I was part of a group of six, although that will turn out to be largely irrelevant. This is because we received number 463. As in last. So. There was a series of large gatherings at which the groups' numbers would be called and they would select their housing. We went to the last of these, naturally, and waited while, say, numbers 325 through 440 were called up and picked through the increasingly distasteful refuse of the earlier groups. At this point it was announced that:
A. The university had a '100% occupancy' policy - meaning that, in theory, they needed to fill every space in every room.
B. There was an estimated number of students who would not return next year, due to transfers, dropouts, and... I dunno, being eaten by weasels wearing jetpacks, maybe. Therefore:
C. All the rooms were now filled, and the remaining 20 groups or so might as well not have bothered coming, because there was no space left to give out. Instead, they would wait for those estimated people to do their transferring, dropping out, and feeding of jet-propelled weasels. Then, everyone who had already gone would 'move up' into such spaces as those folks had vacated, and we, the lucky last few, would get whatever those people had already rejected. We would be informed of what those places were a few weeks before the semester started.
This took place over five years ago, and just thinking about it still makes my long for the chance to eviscerate those responsible with a spork. In any case, the appointed time arrived, and we learned where we would be spending the next several months. Firstly, two of our group (entertaining pseudonyms as yet unselected) would be located far across the campus, on the far side of a busy multi-lane thoroughfare. I'm given to understand that one or more students are hit by cars on it in a typical year. Needless to say, we didn't see them very often. The rest of us would be located in a building that was home to a group which, for all that they called themselves a 'Society' is best understood as the agglomeration of the worst aspects of every crap-tastic fraternity you may have encountered in fiction or fact. Let me tell you of them.
At some point in the distant past, they must have been fairly respectable. Their house was, from the outside, a pleasant enough neoclassical brick structure. On the inside, however, it showed clear evidence of a past rich in idiocy and poor in maintenance. It was dingy. Most anything that could be broken had been, and none of it repaired or replaced. It stank - I would estimate it smelled of 50% spilled beer, 30% urine, 10% sweat, and 20% unidentifiable horror. At any given time, counting the partially empty beer cans and bottles in the upstairs hallway would require the fingers of both hands (not that any of them likely every did this at a time when they were sober enough to count, even on their fingers). At one time, there had been a kitchen. Or so I am informed. I am also told that, in the recent past, the inhabitants stripped the kitchen in order to sell the appliances. Apparently the supply of drugs was running low. Yes, the majority of the occupants were almost certainly on drugs. You're probably thinking I'm referring to the 70/20/10 mixture of caffinne, booze, and weed that is typically associated with college students. That is not what I mean. That would have been a vast improvement. So how do I know they were hopped up on something illegal? For one thing, none of them ever slept. I have a fairly odd sleep schedule when there aren't classes to nail it down, so there were times when I was awake at every hour of the day over a week-long period. No matter what time I dared venture from our room, there they were: drinking and being generally noisy in the hall. The same people, for the most part. I consulted with Schmendick, who had a more normal schedule and was thus awake often when I was not. He confirmed that these people did not sleep. Additionally, they were prone to random acts of violence, generally against the various parts of the building not already destroyed. One more story of note along those lines is yet forthcoming. It should come as no surprise that these folks loved to party. However, they apparently saw no reason to go elsewhere to do it. Thus they hosted parties. Every weekend. And by weekend, I mean Thursday afternoon through Monday morning. Needless to say, Shemdrick and I both had morning classes on Friday. 8:30 AM on Friday is one of the few times it was quiet in that hellhole. It's possible the natives slept, but I consider it far more likely that they were simply busy drugging themselves in order to be ready for the party to resume in a few hours. We got to walk, carefully, to avoid the cans and puddles of ichor, downstairs to the door. On the way, we would pass the hired cleaning staff, who would be disgustedly sweeping the piles of crap in the downstairs rooms into piles. We would attempt to convey by our expressions at firstly, we were very sorry they had to deal with this and secondly, it really wasn't our fault. I don't know if they understood. I hope they did.
The parties were quite popular among the sort of person who likes that sort of thing. There were enough such that most evenings during the Party Span, it would be too crowded to get inside and to our rooms. Getting back inside involved going round to the back of the building. First, we would convince a large and likely intoxicated person that yes, we really did live here. Then, we would climb two floors up the fire escape (the point where it started was below the level of the ground floor). We didn't get out much, and once out, we did not lightly return.
The closest thing to a positive memory of our time there was going out to the aforementioned fire escape and climbing the last flight up to the roof. No one else seemed to go there, it had a great view of the campus, and it gave much needed detachment from the noise below.
Given these remarkable conditions, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of my stories come from this time period.
Next Time, in Part Two: Thin Walls Make Poor Neighbors

A Coincidence

My friend Chinmoku recently discovered a roleplaying game called Little Fears. The premise of this game is that the monsters under the bed, et cetera and so on, are real, and that only children of a certain age and temperament are ever given the ability to perceive and thus fight the horrors from this nether realm. However, once they reach a certain age, they are cut off from this and forget their experiences with it.

In looking at my own childhood, I have decided that this is the best explanation I have yet encountered for several things, among them, memory of flying under my own power at age four and my somewhat inexplicable fear of vampires.

Quote Day!

Neko: I thought you kept saying "waif-a-lo," and I was thinking, "What's a waif-a-lo?"

Benedick: It's like a buffalo, only it's a small, thin girl... who roams the plains.

When you dream...

One evening, my friend Francis and I were coming home from a long day out of town with our fellows. It was about two a.m. when we started the drive, and it was a two hour drive, so mostly his job was to keep me awake so we didn't crash and die.

This was several moons past, so I no longer recall the exact context of either of the following, so you will forgive me if I insert something comparably irrelevant. Please note that Francis is quite in the habit of stating things declaratively and argumentatively; it only makes it better.

Me: I always thought polecats were something like a large weasel.
Francis: Well, no, their feet are different.
Me: Different how?
Francis: A polecat's feet are kind of like... a compound fracture of the foot.

Pardon?

Turns out Francis had fallen asleep midsentence. Who knows what he was dreaming in between. It happened a couple more times on the drive, but none so dramatically as this:

Me: I like webcomics.
Francis: So, are you afraid that there will be too much peanut butter versus the jelly, or that the jelly is the wrong kind?

New goal in life: get Francis sleep deprived and semi-caffeinated more often, and have a tape recorder next time.

Ehoba

Once upon a time, I was living with a family in a suburb of a major city in Japan. Japanese suburbs are fairly rural- the Japanese tend to build vertically when they build due to lack of space, so there were small farms and rural temples about mixed in with the fairly nice modern houses.

When one does laundry in Japan, it is generally hung outside to dry rather than being run through a dryer. Since I was in school most of the time, my choices for doing laundry were fairly limited to the weekend. One Sunday, I was starting to take my wash out to hang when my host mother stopped me.

{Don't dry your laundry out there today!}* she said. {The neighbors always have barbeques on Sunday. All your clothing will smell like food for the week.}

I thanked her for telling me, going to set up the indoor drying rack in my room instead. When I came back, I asked her why the neighbors did that. As far as I had seen, they were a fairly normal Japanese family, doing their best to ignore the fact that their neighbors were hosting a gaijin and going about their business.

{They're... what do you call them...} She thought for a moment. "Ehoba."

"Ehoba?"

{Yes... they're not quite Christians... they come to the door sometimes and ask if we've accepted Jesus, and I tell them 'No thanks, I'm Buddhist!'}

{You can't mean Jehovah's Witnesses?}

{That sounds right.}

{I didn't think they HAD Jehovah's Witnesses in Japan!}

{Maybe not; let's look it up.}

So we pulled out the battered old Japanese-English dictionary she kept by the kitchen table, and there it was... Ehoba- Jehovah's Witness. You could have knocked me over with a poke, I was so surprised to find out that my Japanese next door neighbors were Jehovah's Witnesses.

Come to think of it, I'm still kind of shocked!

*{} = Translated from Japanese