Busby Suites 3rd Floor

Bellatrix Lestrange

2010-03-27T10:46:00.006-04:00

In my infinite wisdom while selecting classes for my last semester of my undergraduate career, I decided to take a class that was fun, relevant, and beneficial to my professional development. The decision was a good one, the execution was not. Several months later, I am stuck in CAMS3242W - Greek and Roman Drama - a writing course with Maria Noussia. My reasoning for taking the class was that I needed another writing course on my transcript to graduate, and I enjoy Roman history. In hindsight, that was some shit logic. Roman history is NOT Greek and Roman Drama.

Let me break down the class for you. The class contains about 15 students, only about 8 of which show up to class on any regular basis. About 10 of those students are actually Classics major. In other words, this class is their bread and butter. As a 3000 level course, it's sort of assumed that you have the background knowledge necessary to intelligently contribute in this class. The 10 classics majors clearly have that background, and I clearly do not. I have become THAT kid that always says the most obvious things that no one mentioned before me because they thought it wasn't even worth mentioning. We're expected to relate the metaphors in the reading to other myths and aspects of Athenian culture and lifestyle. The only thing I remember about Greek history is from freshman year of high school in my world civilization class. Needless to say, I feel like that fork that just got sucked into the garbage disposal--Even if I eventually find my way out, I'm just going to end up in the trash anyway--.

Also, No useless writing course would be complete without a Jesus lookalike. I wish I had a picture, but when you think Jesus, you think this kid. He has a righteous beard that he has clearly been growing since birth, and even talks in a soothing voice that makes me want to go to church for the first time in 8 years. He can't buy the books from the bookstore like the rest of us either, he comes in with all these ancient looking manuscripts that he probably got from the Library of Alexandria during his travels doing missionary work.

One other interesting feature of the class is this kid, Arthur. I don't think I can name anyone named Arthur that can be considered 'Normal', and this kid is no exception. I'll just start off with an example for this one. A couple weeks ago, we started a new play in class (Euripides' Medea). Since I've been using a 'pay as I go' methodology for book buying, I didn't have it yet. I excused myself to the "bathroom" and ran to the co-op and dropped a solid $12.87 on the book. When I got back to class around 12:58 (class starts at 12:30), there's Arthur, just standing there reading in the hallway. "Uhhhh... Hey Arthur, what are you doing?" and I wish textual representation could do this kids voice justice, but it just can't. He talks in this really soft, VERY slow drawl that barely qualifies as human speech. "Welllllll, I'mmm justt waiiittinggg for classss to start." Apparently the stupified look on my face didn't trigger anything in his brain, so I just responded with a curt,

"What?!"

No response to that either. So I continued, "Class started a half hour ago. Let's go." I strutted back into the classroom with Arthur in tow. I got that look like, "Where the hell have you been?" so I responded before anyone asked, "Don't worry, I found Arthur, he was just holding down the fort in the hallway."

To summarize, I am an absolute misfit in a class that is way over my head in terms of literature and necessary prerequisites. OH YEA! AND MY PROFESSOR IS BELLATRIX LESTRANGE.

BOOM! You don't even need to use your imagination.

Karma

2009-11-03T09:04:00.003-05:00

I've always enjoyed the idea of 'karma'. The idea that doing something good will yield dividends is a comforting one. Well yesterday it paid off.

I made a trip to CVS yesterday just to pick up the essentials : Febreeze and Pepsi Max. I picked out all the stuff I needed and got in line. There was only one old man in front of man and I figured it would go quick. Things took a turn when the old man in front of me decided to pay with a check. I didn't even know they still made paper checks, let alone that it was still a legally accepted form of currency. I did my best 'I'm not annoyed in the least' face and continued waiting. Another employee came over and asked for the next person in line. That was obviously me, but a stroke of benevolence came over me and let the woman behind me go first. I immediately wanted to punch myself in the head for being nice, but I continued to wait.

A few seconds later, another guy came up to the counter and grabs the cashier's attention. This guy asks, "Hi, Did I leave my CVS card up here?" The cashier looks around for it and eventually says that she can't find it. This guy goes over to a nearby shelf and starting looking through his pocket, his wallet, and then eventually his bags before eventually finding it. After about 6 minutes of waiting in what should have been 30-second wait, I finally check out. I check out in about 25 seconds and then begin walking out of the store. On my way out of the store something caught my eye, the guy that lost his CVS card had left his wallet on the shelf. Without hesitating, I grabbed it and went up to the cashier that he had talked to not 3 minutes before. I told the cashier, "The guy that just came up here asking about his CVS card left his wallet here, so when he comes back for it, here it is." She thanked me and I walked out of the store.

I finally get into the parking lot and I see the guy about to get into his car. I grab his attention and tell him that his wallet is inside. He thanks me and goes back inside to get it. I finally get in my car and I'm about to leave, when that guy comes sprinting out of the store and up to my car. I roll down my window and he goes, "Here, take this." And shoves 20 bucks in my hand! I repeatedly tried to give back the money, but he insisted that I take it. I reluctantly agreed, and thanked him.

I felt like a G after that episode. Being a good guy, AND getting rewarded for it!

On a side note, when someone tries to be generous and offer you something like a reward, or to pay for a meal, sometimes you should LET THEM. There have been times where I'm trying to be nice and do something for someone but they keep refusing and saying that I don't need to. Well that's fucking annoying, just let me be nice. It may cost be time and/or money, but it's something I want to do and something that will make both of us feel good about ourselves. I get to feel good because I did something nice, and you get to feel good because someone cares enough about you to give you something out of kindness.

Maturity Issues

2009-10-19T08:52:00.003-04:00

I consider myself to be a pretty mature. In the vast majority of situations I can stay cool, composed, and respectful. However, I've noticed that there are still several areas of life where I just cannot help it. Those areas are other peoples flatulence in public areas, and random sexual innuendos that get said in the course of normal conversation. The former is pretty self-explanatory and does not have any specific story that I can tell tied to it, but the latter just happened in the middle of my cost accounting class.

A few minutes ago, my relatively old cost accounting professor, Cliff Nelson, decided to open an excel spreadsheet. Cliff is clearly someone who learned to use excel through years of experience rather than intuitive learning. He has his methods and he sticks to them. When something goes wrong, he usually isn't sure what to do if it hasn't happened to him before. Regardless, he opened this excel spreadsheet and the file, for whatever reason, was zoomed into 150%. You could only see half the problem, so he says "Hang on a sec..." He goes down to the zoom bar in the bottom right and begins to slide it to the left so you could see the entire problem. Then he says,

"Alright, let's see if I can fit it all in there."

Game over, T.O. An instant smile came to my face as I resisted, to the best of my ability, to stifle my laughter. It was clear that no one else shared my moment of uncontrollable laughter. I pulled the old "I'm just coughing really awkwardly" trick to a limited degree of success. I eventually brought myself under control and was quite pleased with myself.

Thanks to my self-rationalization, I wrote this event down as a positive. I'm just going to tell myself that I'm someone that doesn't have to take everything seriously. Sometimes a little immaturity goes a long way in brightening your mood or turning around your day.

Ultraviolet

2009-09-27T21:49:00.005-04:00

I have recently come across a new love in my diet soda addiction : Diet Mountain Dew Ultraviolet. In 1964, Pepsi Co. introduced Mountain Dew cola into the market. Shortly thereafter, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and America lost tens of thousands of young men in the Vietnam War. In 1984, Pepsi Co. followed up on its assault on the mind and bodies of American consumers with Diet Mountain Dew. After that, America almost got dragged into nuclear war with Russia, and stagflation sent the American stock market into a tailspin.

America survived the introduction of two Dew's and I thought that the worst was over. That was until just last week. I walked into the local CVS, only to be greeted by a stack of strange bright neon purple boxes. Curiosity caught the best of me and my mind began to wander, thinking of possibilites of what it could be. Anti-freeze? Recycle battery acid? Worse. It was Diet Mountain Dew: Ultraviolet. Temptation quickly overwhelmed reason and I bought a 12-pack. I raced back to the dorm and brought it upstairs. I grabbed a warm can from the box, and began to drink. My insides cringed and everything began to burn. I've since been sucking them down at a clip of 7 a day. Incredible.

Since then, the temperature has dropped 20 degrees, and it has begun to rain. The sun has not been seen since. In addition to that, a car alarm started to go off in the parking lot last night. Shortly there after the car lit on fire, and almost burned to the ground. It was towed away, and has likely been destroyed.

What's next? All I know is that if I don't get more ultraviolet, shit will get ULTRAVIOLENT real quick.

Well... Now what?

2009-09-26T01:59:00.002-04:00

A few hours ago, my roommates and I finished up a session of Jaghtzee. Jaghtzee is our drinking game twist on Yahtzee. It's not much of a variation, the only difference is that after every yahtzee that's rolled, everyone has to take a shot of Jager. Sounds like a good idea in theory. It is not. When we finally finished up after only 2 games, I was feeling pretty tired. But since we also prefaced Jaghtzee night with 5-hour energy (which has become a staple of our weekend festivites), I was also quite awake.

I messed around on the computer for awhile and then decided to just go to bed. It was only 11 o'clock, but everyone else went to the bar and since I'm not 21, I didn't have anything else better to do. I thought I'd fall asleep, just that it would take a few minutes longer. 90 minutes later, I'm still lying in my bed tired, yet wide awake. I tried listening to music, going back on the computer, and looking out the window. All were remarkably ineffective. The problem is that lately whenever I go to bed, my brain decides to think about everything that is going on in my life and brainstorm how events are going to play out. My mind tries to micromanage things that will likely never ever happen, and I just want to tell my brain to shut up. But that hasn't worked yet... So when 1:30 rolled around, I hopped up outta bed, and turned my swag on. I figure if I wasn't going to bed I mind as well have it activated. Since nothing had changed in the two and a half hours from when I first got into my bed, I still had nothing to do.

That's when I decided to swallow my pride and grab my Cost Accounting book. I went into the other room and just banged out an assignment I had to do for monday. At least my mild insomnia resulted in some progress. Yet here I am, coming to the end of this blog post and once again my brain is saying, "Well... Now what?"

Power Song Syndrome

2009-09-24T08:27:00.003-04:00

Last night I had the one of the most bizarre runs in my short running career. I started running at 10:30PM, and as soon as I got outside I thought that the run was going to be a struggle. My legs felt heavy from the previous few days, and it was a lot warmer than it had been. Sure enough, by the time I finished the first mile I sweating like a wildebeest being chased by a lion in the sarengetti, and my legs felt worse and I hadn't even gone up a hill yet.

A few minutes later, I was going up the hill towards the hilltop dorms and apartment when "T.I. - Bring 'Em Out" came up on shuffle. This song is a blast to run to. It's loud, it's upbeat, and it has a catchy beat. I was beginning to get a little energy back in my run. Then it started to rain. I love running in the rain, because it always pumps me up and I feel like I'm in a fight with Mother Nature, and that bitch is about to get tooled on. Unfortunately, this created a little phenomenon I like to call "Power Song Syndrome."

We had actually talked about it before I left for my run. PSS is when a pump-up song comes on and you start to run faster and faster, feeling like you have unlimited energy. Then the song finishes and you're left panting for breath wondering how your body could be so cruel. I've learned to control myself when one of those songs comes on, but this time the combination of circumstances was just too much. Bring 'Em Out came on and the rain started to come down, suddely I felt invisible. My body was telling me, "Hey, I was just tired running at a 9:00 minute mile pace, but now this song is on, let's run 7 minute miles!!!!" Normally my brain enters back in with the voice of reason and puts my body back in line. This night it just shouted back, "Let's do 6 minute miles instead!" I felt like I was about to start flying when I started going down a hill.

When I'm in this "zone" I feel like I'm busting off a 85-yard touchdown run in the superbowl, and the only thing between me and 6 points is 10 yards of open field. The only logical situation in both situations is to throw your hands to the side and start high-stepping. If I was ever videotaped running, you probably wouldn't see me bust out into a full high step, but you would certainly be able to see a few instances where my stride looks a little off, almost like I'm skipping. That's probably the reason why I run at night when no one is around...

Sure enough, after I played the songs 3 times in a row, I was exhausted. But the nights events were not over. When I was coming back past the North Bus Stop (meaning 1 mile left to go), some guy pops out from the little bus station hut, puts out his hands and yells, "WAIT!!!!!" Normally, I would just run past, but he seemed like he had something really important to say. I slowed down and he continued, "How would YOU like...... a free donut!" His friend pops out of nowhere with a full box of Dunkin' Donuts. The Donut holder looked at his friends as if looking for instructions, his friend gives him the head nod and he opens the box like it was a briefcase filled with $100 dollar bills. "Take one, anyone one." Just what I wanted near the end of a 7 mile run, some vile, greasy donut. It would probably sit like lead in my stomach.

Naturally, I selected a chocolate glazed, vanilla frosted, maple syrup donut with sprinkles. I thanked them and bid them farewell. So here I am, running in the now pouring rain, my Zune in my right hand and this donut in my left. I'm panting for breath while at the same time shoving a heart attack into my mouth. Of course it sat like lead, but the sheer lunacy of the situation allowed me to finish my run.

Then when I got back to my dorm, the bus pulls up and the kids that had just given me the donut hop off. "THERE HE IS!!! YEAAAA!!!" We shared a good laugh, and thus ended one of the weirdest runs ever.

Uncooperative

2009-09-23T09:52:00.003-04:00

"Blogger" who hosts this blog, has been being a whiny bitch lately. If you take a look at the post below, it has no title. For whatever reason, Blogger decided that it was too cool to let me post that entry. Eventually, I used some third-party program to get it on here, but I couldn't add a title using the software that I did. When I went to just go add a title on here, it wouldn't let me do that either. Therefore, Blogger is currently on my shitlist trying to dig its way out. I even tried to switch to another blogging site, "WordPress", but it turns out that WordPress is a whiny bitch too. I was able to import all my entires over there, but the result was the same. I tried to add a title to that post/repost it entirely, and no dice yet again. That tells me that blogging sites don't like winter either. Who would of thought?

Anyway, there are things in this world more exciting to talk about than my posting misadventures. Last year at this time I was writing blog entries about how much our 6th roommate sucked the big one. If you don't remember, last year's roommate sucked the big one. So when I found out we got another person randomed in to be that sixth man, I was a little wary. Facebook stalking him didn't really do anything to ease my fears. His number one interest on facebook was "Hanging Out", and his favorite books were listed out by genre. He was certainly going to be different than Mike, but I didn't know if it would be any better.

I spent the entire summer thinking how we were going to send him a message in the beginning of the year to let him know that we aren't here to fuck around with this bad roommate shit. Some of the ideas that were broached included putting all of our beds except his in the other room. This would clear out one of the rooms, and create "SO MUCH ROOM FOR ACTIVITIES!"(Stepbrothers reference). We also considered putting his desk in the closet or taking apart his entire bed frame and putting his matress on the floor. Painting satanic symbols on the wall in red paint wasn't ruled out either... just sayin'.

Turns out though, that our new roommate, Tim, is not a douchebag. I had no idea what to do with myself when on Day 1 of him being here, he made intelligent conversation that wasn't overbearing. His thoughts were clear, concise, and didn't make me want to stick two pencils up my nose and bash them against the table. I thought surely that he would eventually go turn on the TV to volume level 97 of 100 and watch through all hours of the morning. Surprise again, he doesn't even really watch TV. It's been about a month and things have not gotten worse. He is almost never around, and when he is around, his presence is not unwelcome. I might light his bed on fire just to see if I get any type of reaction out of him though.

2009-09-12T11:30:00.000-04:00

Winter's HereAfter a total of three weeks, winter is unofficially here. Every year, I come back to Storrs and marvel on how beautiful the campus is. I take it all in for two weeks before God decides to literally rain on my parade. The rain begins to fall, and the windsslowly starts to pick up. In a couple weeks the leaves will be on the ground, and we'll be left with groves of naked wood staring me down on my way to class. After that, it's only a matter of time until I'm forced to shut myself indoors and hibernate within my dorm room because Storrs, CT turns into an exact replica of the Artic tundra.

The rest of this post is probably going to just be a bunch of random topics strung together, because a good amount of stuff has happened that I haven't written about. So bear with me.

In other news, that whole "blogging throughout the summer" thing sort of fell through the cracks as you may have noticed. My summer turned out to be really busy. By that I of course mean that after my internship ended, I didn't want to spend any of the 10 hours a day of free time I had to write. For future reference, when I say "Oh I just didn't have the time," I'm just lying to whoever I'm talking to and myself. I don't think there has even been a time in my life where I couldn't do something that I wanted to because of time constraints. Even on my busiest of days, there is still probably three hours of time where I'm not actually doing anything.

I'll recap my summer real quick. 10 weeks of it was simply my internship and drum corps. Another two weeks consisted of some thrilling yardwork and drum corps. The last week involved me going down to see a couple of my roommates down in Fairfield. We didn't really do anything while we were there that would impress anybody, but let me just say that5 hour energy + 'Let Me Clear My Throat' led to one of the most bizarre impromptu rock out session I have ever experienced. Bottom line is that it was a pretty low-key summer, and is likely the reason I didn't blog. That and because I "didn't have the time".

The start of a new semester also means a whole new set of notebooks that I need to use. As I was telling my friend Erin the other day, I like to color-associate my notebooks to the classes that I'm taking. For example, my cost accounting notebook is the green one because I associate 'costs' with 'money' which of course is green. Intermediate accounting got the yellow notebook, because intermediate means it's in the middle and what color is in the middle of a stoplight? That's right. My strategic management got the black notebook. The professor in that class is from Turkey, and I feel that the history of Turkey has been filled with struggle and strife. On top of that, they used to be good pals with the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union passed on, Turkey must have went into a deep mourning. Since the professor is from this troubled land, it can only mean one thing: He has never known happiness and his soul is black. Hence, black notebook. Business Law gets the lucky blue notebook because I associate justice with the color dark blue for whatever reason.

I thought I was all set with my notebooks until Erin convinced me to pick up one more class. OPIM4895 - "Special Topics". The special topic turned out to be, "Spreadsheet Modeling Business Management." How the hell do I assign a color to that? Easy. The professor is Asian. And since all Asians are from China, and China is a communist country, she is in fact, a communist. And since she's a communist, her personal motto is in all likelihood, "Better Red than dead." Bam, red notebook. Crisis averted.

Since this blog entry lacks all semblance of organization, I will close with one final comment. I suck at grammar. Case in point : The two paragraphs before this are riddled with more commas that you could ever find a place for. I'm taking a business writing class to fulfill one of my graduation requirements. We did this worksheet filled with sentences and you had to choose True or False on whether the sentence was grammatically correct. I ended up with about a 30%. Yikes. I think I can hold my own when I'm proofreading papers, but in situations where I'm being tested on grammar... fuhget abou' it.

How 'bout them Hurricanes?

2009-06-28T20:06:00.003-04:00

So this really isn't an entertaining post, but I've been a slacker lately on this blog, so I just needed something to get me going again. That being said... The title of this post is inspired by a guy that seemed to tag along to all of the drum corps shows that we were at last year and bellow out before and after each performance, "HOW BOUT THEM HURRICANES?." I always appreciated the raucous support that the gentleman provided, but at our first show last night in Bridgeport, he was strangely absent. Apparently we didn't need it, because the 2009 Hurricanes came out with a vengenance. We came into the show and took first place in Bridgeport for the first time in 26 years. What a day it was.

Report time at Kennedy Stadium was 9am, and we rehearsed all day in the hot, muggy weather. The turf which had soaked up all the moisture from Friday's torrential thunderstorms was evaporating and created a nice little convection oven for us to work in. Rehearsal etiquette was subpar and the staff harped on us the entire time to suck it up, and push through it. We were constantly reminded about how we weren't ready to be a champion, and that the Reading Buccaneers do everything bigger and better. Since they've been champions for four years running, that may still be true, but we took strides to finally close the gap. Lunch was around 11:30, giving us about 45 minutes to ourselves before beginning a four hour visual block. We got a lot accomplished, but afterwards I was absolutley gassed. I took a quick shower in the lovely facilities at Central High School, and grabbed the cooler from my car for dinner. I quickly inhaled a PB&J before resorting to just eating it straight from the jar with a knife, anything I could do to restore some semblance of energy to my body. I sat down in the grass to recuperate, downing a half gallon of water and some pre-show caffeine. It was time to report again at 6:15. We were three minutes late for lining up which our brass caption head was almost delighted to inform us about. We warmed up and did all of our typical pre-show rituals. Then it was show time.

We began our slow, methodical march towards the stadium. The silence was thick with anticipation as Kennedy Stadium loomed into view. The Atlanta CorpsVets were finishing up their show. They finished 'Georgia on my Mind' to an uproarious standing ovation from the decent sized crowd of around 3,000. The adrenaline began to replace any remnants of fatigue that were in my body and the heart rate began to climb steadily. Before I knew it, we were at the stadium gates and our cadence began. We marched on the field with the home crowd showing us their support. We warmed up, took our spots, and began the show. We nailed the first big hit, and the crowd went nuts, fueling my adrenaline rush. The show progressed pretty well, until about halfway through when the adrenaline thinned out and my body was deep in oxygen debt. The corps was running out of gas and portions of Red Pony, and our ballad were mediocre at best. The corps didn't give up though, and we salvaged the closer to finish the show to a standing ovation. I walked off the field dissapointed, knowing that we could have done better.

The mood of the corps after the show was sullen... That is until the staff came back to us and let us know before we were supposed to that we had won the show. We lined up for a full retreat (long and borrringgg) and listened as they announced that we had won high colorguard, percussion, and visual. The Caballeros had won brass by only a few tenths, and that stung a little bit. However, when the announcer came across, "And in first place, with a score of 77.525..." all those problems melted away. And as of now we sit comfortable atop the DCA ladder... Though the other top corps didn't perform that week, so I take it with a grain of salt.

Open Class:
1 - 77.525 Hurricanes (Bridgeport, CT 6/27)
2 - 77.375 Minnesota Brass (Mankato, MN 6/22)
3 - 76.438 Buccaneers (Wildwood, NJ 06/20)
4 - 75.900 Caballeros (Bridgeport, CT 6/27)
5 - 72.388 Renegades (Stanford, CA 6/27)
6 - 70.363 CorpsVets (Bridgeport, CT 6/27)
7 - 68.400 Bushwackers (Bridgeport, CT 6/27)
8 - 60.913 Crusaders (Bridgeport, CT 6/27)

Wooo!

Summer Slackin'

2009-05-19T23:04:00.005-04:00

It's been two weeks since my last entry. What have I been doing? Well finals were around for awhile, and then the whole moving back home thing threw me off my blogging rythym. I really haven't done anything except go up to Dedham once to watch the Celtics in game 5 of the playoffs. Side note: I did not actually see the game. It was simply a gathering upon common ground with a TV. That was a lot of fun, but haven't done much of anything else except hurricanes on the weekend. I've been running a lot which is always fun. It's warm, it smells awesome outside, and Bethlehem offers a change of scenery from Storrs. One thing I have noticed though is that 10 miles in Bethlehem/Watertown is NOT the same as 10 miles at UConn. Bethlehem is a hilly area, and when I went for a run last week, it was like running with an elephant on my shoulders (illustrated below) that was using its trunk to repeatedly punch me in the balls. Oh well, it builds character, and if I didn't like it, I wouldn't do it.
Being at home is nice, but it gets awfully boring. At the end of the day when I'm lying in bed, I try and remember what I did all day. For the large part, I have no idea where 16 hours of my time went. I've decided to make a pie chart that maps out a typical day at home.

Some days I spend less time playing video games and more time doing my 3 site rotation. Also, let it be noted that my swag is on at all times, the piece of the pie above is simply time solely dedicated to the activation of swag.

I found out last week that I get to go to Boston for orientation with Deloitte in June. I spend 4 days there one week, and 3 the next. So that should be a blast. Adding to the excitement is the incredibly vague schedule that they gave me to reference. Ex. Day 1 - W2D. Simple deduction would suggest that the acronym stands for Welcome to Deloitte, but what the balls am I supposed to make of Day 3 - GTKT? Guns, Tanks, and Knives Training is the only thing that I can come up with. Only time will tell. At the very least, the trip should give me some fun material to blog about.

Well, it's time for me to turn it on, because I got a BIG day planned tomorrow. Weedwacking around the yard! Over and out.

THAT guy

2009-05-05T20:31:00.003-04:00

We all know THAT guy. The one that likes to throw the wrench into the gears of life. Whether it's the guy who's cell phone goes off in the middle of an exam, or the guy who when there is a lull in the conversation yells, "It just got real fuckin' quiet in here." In any of those situations I always get annoyed, or just generally feel embarassed for them. But at the same time, I think we have all been THAT guy too.

For example, yesterday I went to go get dinner at South. Since I never eat there, it's a relatively new environment to me, and I don't know the social norms that have been established in that dining hall. The soda fountains at south are particularly long. They're about 6 feet in length for some reason, and the ice dispenser isn't in the right or ever in the middle like it should be, it's on the left. I went to go get some water from the dispenser, but there was a girl in front of me. She walked past the water dispenser so I figured it was fine to grab it for myself. Turns out she was just going quickly for ice and then coming back for it. I totally jacked her spot and became THAT guy. Dan, who watched the entire situation unfold told me that the girl had the most exasperated, annoyed look on her face while my glass of water slowly filled up. I should've apologized for being an asshole, but I didn't. I hate when that happens!

Or when I'm driving on the highway going to the legendary Dedham, Massachusetts, hometown of the Pickens clan. I'm driving along the Mass pike still fuming from when someone cut me off minutes earlier, when I suddenly realize my exit is 500 feet in front of me. I'm in the left lane going 70 with a car to my right. I speed up and cut in front of him and slam on the brakes to make the hairpin turn of the offramp. I mentally hang my head in shame, because doing so physically would surely be catastrophic while driving. The car ended up in the lane next to me again, and I did my best to avoid eye contact.

So next time you get pissed off at THAT guy, try and remember that we are all guilty every once and while. Now I'll proceed to ignore my own advice and get pissed at the next person who takes the ice cream scooper from the left side of the freezer and uses it on the right side.... Bastards.

Time Value of Time?

2009-05-04T12:52:00.003-04:00

So I get out of school this friday, and I always hate packing up my belongings, stuffing it in my car, and then finding a spot for it back home. When I'm done, I just want to be done. My solution this year was to go home the weekend before (I had Hurricanes rehearsal anyway), and bring the vast majority of my stuff home early. Which got me thinking, is there such a thing as the time value of time? In my mind it's similar to the time value of money, which in its simplest form means one dollar today is worth more than one dollar a week from now. Is freeing up time at a later date more/less valuable than freeing up today?

When it comes to money, you calculate how much money from the future is worth today by discounting the cash flow at a certain interest rate that you think you can earn. For example, if Bobby Bobby Billionaire Big Time Baller says he will pay me $100 one year from today, and I can earn a 10% interest rate on money today, than that money is worth $90.90 ($100 / (1 + .10))today. Do we inherently place the same level of appreciation on time in the future? It would explain why people use the rationale "Do it while you're young", or why people later in life are much less likely to take a risk. So I'm kind of hoping that the day I saved unpacking all my stuff last friday, will be worth 1.1 days to me on this coming friday! Of course, then I'd have to subtract all the time I wasted cultivating this theory in my head.

I'd also like to recount one more story into the annals of the internet. Most of the people who read this have already heard the story, but it's worth recording in writing so I never forget about it. So... Rory, my roommate, has been having random allergy attacks at night when he's trying to sleep. It happens every once and awhile, and he ends up not sleeping very well. He pretty much oscillates between stages of consciousness, having weird dreams and overall just feeling out of it. Also worth noting is that he sleep on the bottom bunk of a bunk bed in our dorm. Well last week when he was trying to sleep through the aforementioned allergy attacks, he wakes up, and much to his terror he thinks that his bed is collapsing in on him. He jumps out of bed, and then realizes that Ortiz is still on the top bunk. He shouts, "ORTIZ! THE BED IS FALLING, GET OUT!!" Ortiz springs awake just as Rory comes to. Rory suddenly realizes that he isn't dreaming, and the bed isn't indeed collapsing. He essentially puts his hands on his head and says, "Oh my god... I am sooo sorry." The story is made better in person thanks to the wonders of voice intonation, but I got the general idea across. Awesome.

Home Stretch!

2009-04-28T07:59:00.002-04:00

It's the last week of classes for the semester. After that, there are just three finals between me and the summer. I'm in my 'favorite' class right now, nutrition, and we're doing teacher evaluations, which means it's show time. Apparently, I already have an A in the class, which makes me wonder why I even came to class today. I've never skipped a class before, I don't know if this qualifies, but why risk breaking the streak on such a crappy class? Besides, it got me up early, and I'm writing this blog entry. Chances are I'll be playing video games after I finish this entry, so one could argue that I'm being more productive in class than I would out of it.

It's going to be a busy week for sure, I have a presentation tomorrow and then I have to finish studying for my hardest exam, intermediate accounting, by friday due to Hurricanes on the weekend. Speaking of which, we had our first drill weekend on saturday and sunday, and it was pretty awesome. Saturday was 10-Midnight, and was an absolute marathon. We learned our first 22 sets of drill, and it kicks ass. It's fast and hard, that's what she said, and I have a few moves so far that are on the edge of my physical capability, which is exciting. We had just under 45 horns out of the 50 total we plan to have by our first show, which is a great start. Last year at the same time we had about 25 of the 48 we wanted. Having the numbers from the start, makes learning the drill easier, and will make us sound better by the start of the season. Our brass caption head, Justin, is the man and knows what he's doing. We also managed to piss him off to the point where he didn't show up to the next horn arc. A few people were late to horn arc in the afternoon, and he gets really pissed when people are late. After he made us do a ab workout on the pavement, and these killer lunges, he had us play through our opener without music. He told us to memorize our music, and let's just say we didn't do a very good job. At that point he was like, "We meet back at 6:30, I may show up, I may not, apparently that's how you guys operate." Sure enough, he didn't show up til around 7:30... whoops! Either way, the weekend was a success, and we're in great shape for this point in the season, and I can't wait for it to start.

I'm really looking forward to the summer, and the warm weather this weekend renewed my vigor for the heat. Hurricanes, Internship, and BBQs. That is my summer plan, and I think it's a path to the best summer ever!

The Not-so-Thrilling Conclusion

2009-04-24T08:36:00.002-04:00

If you read my last blog entry, you know that I ran into a bit of a SNAFU with a certain nutrition assignment. In brief synopsis: I had an assignment due, I forgot about it, wrote an e-mail saying I was sick and couldn't turn it in (wrote the e-mail from the class I was supposedly missing). I figured that this entire operation would work as long as I wasn't identified in the class I said was missing. That was unlikely, since I've never talked to her or had to hand anything in directly to her.

The e-mail delivery went off without a hitch, and I thought I'd be all set. What I didn't expect however, is that she'd be such a stalwart for proecudre. Apparently, if you don't make it to class, you have to tell her by 8:00AM the day of the class. Looking at the timestamp of my e-mail, it read 8:06AM... Damn!

"I am sorry that you are sick and missed the deadline. I can't accept your late
submission though. You had to contact me earlier than the class time (8:00am) and
asked me how to submit it electronically instead of submitting in class. Sorry
again. I hope you are getting well soon.
Ock"

She cast away my feigned illness, and drove the stake right into my heart. RUTHLESS! Never being one to accept defeat, I reassesed the situation and send another e-mail saying that these were extenuating circumstances. I reiterated that I spent the time before 8AM calling friends to try and have them turn it in, and as a result didn't get to my computer in time. I had to take a more methodical and technically worded approach this time, which I don't like to do, but that's how she operates. I mixed emotion with facts, and hoped for the best. When I got the response, there was a glimmer of hope. She said that I could submit the assignment to the TA and at the end of the semester they will evaluated my grade and see how much partial credit to give. Horray! I broke through one layer of bureaucracy, and crashed right into another one. At least I didn't have to deal with Dr. Chun anymore. TAs typically have more feelings, or overall just care less about procedure. I pleaded my case for the third time, this time adding in the element of admitting responsibility for my actions, and hoping for leniency. The response is what makes the whole situation "not-so-thrilling":

"Tyler,

Based on your record so far, I believe that you made a sincerely effort to hand the assignment in on time. However, I am not able to grade your assignment now because Dr. Chun seems quite adamant about not accepting late assignments and I cannot override her decision. You would just have to wait until we tally up the points and decide on how much partial credit we can give you.

On that point, have you tried totaling up your grades? I believe you are now at 452 (sum up all exams, assignments, and pop quizzes) which would put you in the A range - so you need not worry too much about Assignment 5. Please calculate your points so far to confirm this.

Hope you get well soon."

Oh... turns out I already had an A in the class... Turns out, I haven't even needed to go to class for the past two weeks, because I don't need to take the final either (she takes the top 3 exam grades out of 4). What a shame, this experience had been the most challenging and exciting part of my semester. Now I have to scrap all my battle plans... Unless I just do it for the fun of it, which is a real possibility. This chain of events has taught me several valuable lessons. Dr. Chun is ruthless (what if I really was sick???), their is never a dead end in negotiation, and you can always cynically manipulate the system.

At the beginning of this post, I used the phrase SNAFU. SNAFU is an acronym for Situation Normal : All Fucked Up. I was curious as to what "Normal" meant, because it seems to be contradictory. I headed over to wikipedia for the answer. Well I didn't find it, but I DID find a list of variations which are absolutley hysterical.

My favorites:
BOHICA - Bend Over, Here It Comes Again
FIDO - Fuck It, Drive On

Blunder!

2009-04-23T08:40:00.002-04:00

Well, I just made my first real slip-up of my college career when it comes to assignment's being due. Over the course of the semester in nutrition, we have had due several assignments. These assignments are pretty easy, and don't take too long. They usually involve things like dietary recall and dietary analysis, which are kind of interesting... when you do them. I came to class today ready to learn/zone out, but then all these people are handing in these giants packets of paper. Apparently, my last assignment was due today. 0 / 40 would probably be a bit detrimental to my grade when there are only 500 points to be had in the class. In these situations, my brain and body like to switch into 'survival' mode. My brain analyzes the situation, and think of possible solutions... This is what I did:

I immediately opened up my laptop, and checked to see what was due. I opened up my e-mail and proceeded to write an e-mail stating that I was sick and had a fever and wouldn't be able to make it to class. Also mentioning that I had done the assignment, but that all my friends in the class had already gone so they couldn't bring it. I asked if my roommate or I could drop it off later in the day.

Now I definitely don't have any friends in the class, and my favorite part is that I wrote the e-mail from the class that I said I wasn't attending. Mind as well take advantage of my professor never learning my name, right? I can't say I'm proud of the whole situation, but I'm still comfortable with my moral standing in the world. Besides, my horoscope says I'm having a 5-star day. I'm just facilitating the portents that pertain to me. Hopefully, my professor isn't an avid reader of this blog and this all works out!

Teacher Evaluations

2009-04-20T11:11:00.002-04:00

At the end of every semester, we have to do teacher evaluations in every class. It involves two forms, one is a scantronesque bubble sheet where you rate the teacher 1-10 on a series of characteristics about the class. The other is a more qualitative analysis, where you get to write comments that the teacher will eventually get to see after the semester ends. It's really just a big waste of time, because as far as I can tell, they have no real impact. Still, it is my little chance to either praise the instructor, or light up the barbecue. For this semester, I stocked up on extra charcoal and lighter fluid, because I was going to be grilling.

Most people don't take them seriously, but knowing that the instructor will get to read the qualitative assessment that I write, inspries me to fill it out. These sheets bring out the worst and me, and are probably the meanest I am at any point in my life. When the sheet is placed in front of me, a flood of emotions from the entire semester come flooding back. This semester, those emotions were mostly negative. My marketing professor will probably take the worst of it this time. She was atrocious, and I just hope that I can ruin her day when she reads it. I want her to be personally offended for wasting 2.5 hours a week for 10 weeks of my life. Time I will never get back, time that I could've been doing something more constructive, like staring at a wall. All she did was read off the slides, and talk in a high-pithced monotone voice. Essentially I wrote that her class was the biggest waste of my time, and that I hated every minute that I was there. By comparison, this assessment was pretty mild. In the past, I've written page-long diatribes in a annoyance-fueled rage. One of my history instructors I let know that no one would ever respect her for who she was. Like I said, that's about as mean as I ever get, but I can't standing wasting my time. Spending money I don't need to, and wasting time are my two least favorite things in the world.

If they do a good job however, I write glowing reviews in the hopes that I make their day in the summer. To my favorite professors, I'll write e-mails saying how much I loved their class and their methods. Those are always well received and appreciated by the instructors, in the same way I hope that my negative reviews are poorly received and ruin the bad instructors days. My class selection this semester was piss poor. The only class I derived any enjoyment out of was my accounting class. It was my hardest class, but the best taught, and most interesting. I learned something everyday I went, and that's all I ask for.

The World Grows a Bit Smaller

2009-04-18T19:59:00.004-04:00

This is a monumental post in several facets. For one, this is post number 50! When I first made the blog, I anticipated that I would lose interest quickly, after the first month or so. Sure enough, I pretty much did, but for some reason I came back to it and took off with it. I never thought I'd see the half-century mark, but here we are! Also, this is the first month with double digit posts. This one will be number 10! And speaking of the number 10, I also broke the 10-mile barrier running this morning, and it was absolutley fantastic. Just a note, this really isn't going to be a very entertaining entry, as I am writing it essentially for myself. But I'm entitled to do that, so BACK OFF!

I was planning on a run this morning for the entire week, and as the week wore on, it appeared that things were going to get in the way. I had to go to the UConn football spring game at 9, and on top of that it was open house, so people would be everywhere. Then finally, just to try and force me to abandon my plans, I got an e-mail informing me they'd be shutting the water off at 7:30am. Too stubborn to listen to the reasoning of my own mind, I decided to wake up at 6am and get my run in BEFORE they shut off the water and BEFORE I had to go to the spring football game. Even though it was Friday night, I got into bed at 11. Sure enough, I psyched myself up for the run too much and I couldn't sleep. I ended up watching the movie that my roommate was watching and didn't go to bed until 2. Again, being stubborn, I still got up at 6 and decided that I was good to go. I laced up my running shoes, grabbed my MP3 player, and embarked on the best run I've ever had.

Running down the road from my dorm, my calves didn't hurt, my shins didn't hurt, my knees didn't hurt, and my breathing wasn't labored at all. It appeared that I'd at least be able to go a respectable distance. Last night, specifically for the run, I decided to make an all-drum corps playlist. Drum corps is perfect for running, especially for those who have done the activity. Each show is 10-13 minutes, and is at a quick tempo. On top of that, I know the emotion that go into these shows and my own body mirrors the adrenaline rush that I'd get if I was doing the show. I queued up 6 shows, starting with the less dramatic ones and ending with my power songs. I took a completely new route, leaving campus and venturing into the Mansfield countryside. The weather was absolutley sensational, and the smell of spring and summer brought a smile to my face. When I was just about done with my run, just shy of what I thought might be 6 miles, I decided that I still felt good, and that I'd run part of the same route I just had to take advantage of the good feelings going around. At this time, the end of playlist was cycling through and I was absolutley pumped. A couple of times I had to restrain myself from just screaming in excitement. I won't lie, when I knew no one was within earshot I let out a couple "whooooo!!s". It wasn't until I was about 1/2 mile from my dorm and going up a steep hill did I really feel any discomfort. The home stretch was extremely tiring, but once I got back to my dorm, I was absolutley elated! As an added bonus, I got to take a hot shower, even though I got back at 7:54.

I came back to the dorm, and mapped out my run, and found out it was 10.17 miles. Suddenly, the world became a little bit smaller... I essentially ran a distance that covers from my house in Bethlehem to the deli I used to work at in Woodbury. When I was in middle school, I used to ride my bike to Tom's house, and that seemed like an absolute hike, even though it was only about a mile or less. Going to Andrew's house was simply out of the question, not with the hills in the way. Now though, either of those distances seems like a skip, hop, and a jump... Pretty cool.

Now for the odd moment of the day... When I came back from my run, I was about to go back in the dorm when a guy pulls up and asked me if I had a cell phone. I told him I didn't, but I could run up and get it for him if he wanted. He asked if I could do him a favor. He wanted me to go upstairs, call his daughter, and tell him that he was downstairs. He gave me her number, and I ran upstairs and had this conversation.
*Dial*
A girl answers in a tired voice, 'Hello?'
"Good Morning! Is this Courtney? You don't know me and this is going to be a little awkward, but I just saw your dad outside and he wanted me to call you and tell you that he's here. I guess he didn't have his cell phone."
She sounded flaberghasted as she stuttered, "O... Okay, thank you very much"

Hopefully, I saved the day for Courtney and her father.

Ill Will on the Hill

2009-04-16T08:25:00.006-04:00

Last night, we had another spontaneous dorm war. This was actually dorm war III, and the first one can be read about, in part of an older post, here.I was trying to think of a more clever title for this post. I started off with inspiration from "Malice at the Palace" or the famed brawl between the Detroit Pistons, Detroit Fans, and the Indiana Pacers. I clearly couldn't use Malice at the Palace because that would be unoriginal. First thing to come to mind was, 'Swarm in the Dorm,' which wasn't bad, but definitely room of improvement. Next up was 'Ill Will on the Hill', we live on a hill, and there was certainly ill will, so that won out. I'm just glad I didn't have to resort to, 'Grouse in the House'.

Last night, there wasn't anything going on. There were no interesting baseball games, and no meaningful basketball games. We were at that point where we were so bored, that we didn't even want to try and do anything. We ended up just eating our worries away, with our brand new contraband toaster. I forget exactly how it happened, but I believe someone mentioned, or recounted dorm wars of the past. I remember noting a common denominator was extreme boredom. Boredom was certainly a prominent force last night. I walked over to our table and grabbed a box of nature valley bars, slowly opened it, glanced at Rory, and whipped the box, spreading nature valley bars exploding all over the room like an anti-air flak cannon. Before any of the nature valley bars even hit the ground, Rory took action and reached for the nearest item small enough to hurl. Steve quickly followed suit. Everyone knew it was going to happen, so there was no fuckin' around this time. We went right to the big guns, with direct intention to harm. I grabbed an enormous jar of super chunky peanut butter and fired a rocket at Rory. Rory yelped in anguish as it laid into his ankle. Not one to surrender, he grabbed the nearest basketball and made a bee line to the closet where I was taking refuge. I tried to find some defense, but the best I could do was turn my body and jump as I took a high-velocity basketball right to the knee. Steve, not content to be a spectator, came bounding over, and as Rory turned to face him, he flipped over the whole table sending a wave of food, flatware, and boxes flying everywhere. Rory took a hit from the table as full-scale hostilities continued. Chairs, boxes, bagels, bread, and peanut butter continued to fly. I grabbed an easter cupcake I found on the floor and fired at Steve. I missed completely and got frosting all over Rory's bedspread and personal goods. Then, just as quickly as it had begun, hostilities ceased. Ill will turned to shock and awe at the mess that we had created. I said, "Let's just sit down where we are and pretend this never happened."

I went into the other room to get my laptop which I had put there to keep from getting destroyed. When I stepped back in 363, Rory came over, with the same cupcake I threw at Steve earlier, and smashed it in my face. I simply stood there, turned around, and walked back to my room. I placed my laptop on a chair, and went to the bathroom to wash the frosting off. I stood there for a second, mulling over the consequences of what I was about to do. I made up my mind, and ran back into 363, grabbed the nearest throwable item and attacked. Round 2 had started, a first in dorm wars. This one was more rapid, but much more violent. Steve threw the garbage can across the room, and I grabbed an entire contianer of cookies and hucked them. Steve then grabbed the basketball, or the widowmaker as I had come to know it as, and threw it at Rory. Rory had a kickball which he used to deflect the basketball directly into my face. As I bent over in pain holding my mouth, Rory grabbed the basketball again and fired it right at my ass. Adrenaline masked the pain as I looked to return fire. It was at that time steve grabbed a bag of bagels, and both Rory and I shouted, "NO! BAGELS, BAGELS, NOT THE BAGELS." Common ground had been reached, a truce had been formed.

The clean-up was long and arduous, and the memories of the battle will last a lifetime. I worry that if there is another dorm war, that someone may not make it out alive.

Suns out, Guns out

2009-04-14T15:07:00.002-04:00

I'm just killing a few minutes until my marketing class group members show up to the library. I had to go to the bathroom a few minutes ago, and I had to either bring my laptop to the bathroom with me, or leave it sitting on a table by itself. I decided the best course of action would be to leave it on the table, but put an apple on the keyboard, so THAT way, no one would take it. I was about halfway to the bathroom when I realized that my defense plan was slightly flawed. The apple must've been more intimidating than I thought, because my laptop was still there when I returned.

Referring back to my own personalized Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it appears that I am finally going to be able to move other levels beyond being short-tempered, annoyed, and angry. The fiery orb in the sky has been wielding its power and the wind is cooperating in a minor way. I can now break a sweat if I power up the massive hill that leads up to my dorm... a true sign that warm weather has arrived. When I go for runs in the morning, I no longer want to die for the first 10 minutes until I warm up. All in all, it's been awesome. Perhaps my favorite part is the fact that we can now play basketball outside. Playing at the gym is always a hassle, because you can never find a court and it takes forever to get there from my dorm. Now all we have to do is walk down the hall and look out the window. If there is room on the court, than the only other question you have to ask yourself is... Suns out? Yes? GUNS OUT BABY. I'd like to take this time to personally thank NFL-bound USC QB Mark Sanchez for his SOGO contribution. Mark Sanchez is the epitome of someone who is living the dream in the Los Angeles sunshine. He had an interview with ESPN where basically he said, "Yea I'm the man, it's another beautiful day here in Southern California, you know suns out, guns out." So my fellow roommates and I have latched on to the phrase and we'll proceed to run it into the ground through overuse. I made a poor attempt to find away around the sun requirement by coining, "Lights on, Fights on". That way we can play basketball at night too.

Thanks Mark Sanchez!

WOAHHHHHHH

2009-04-13T10:53:00.006-04:00

Lent ended last thursday, and I've had some caffeine since then, but I really didn't have anything to compare it too because I was at home and in different situations. Well today, back at UConn, I was able to compare my baseline energy level of the past 40 days to the energy level that I have when an energy drink is introduced. At around 9:27am I cracked up a monster and began to power-up....

WOW! Is all I have to say. For the past 90 minutes I've been on a high-octane, action-packed, high-flying, heart-pounding, adrenaline-fueled, edge of your seat, thundercocking thrill ride. It was almost an instant effect, which leads me to believe that the effect of the caffeine is as much psychological as it is physiological. Combined with the post-run endorphin rush from this morning, I don't know if I've ever felt more awake. I've been telling people that it is like my brain is thinking in all capital letters. Sitting in my management class, this is what my thought process was like,

"YEAAA! YEAAAAAAAA!!!!!!! THIS IS AWESOMEE. ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE, FUCK YEA, YEA, ICEBERGS, ARTIFACTS, FIRM VALUES, WHAT'S FOR LUNCH, SUNNY D, BULGARIAN WOMAN, TOP GUN, SHARED PATTERNS OF BELIEF, BASKETBALL, YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

It was ridiculous, I was thinking so fast that I could hardly focus. Basically, I wanted to verbalize my energy like Kevin Nee in the world strongman competitions, all while feeling like another world strongman, Derek Poundstone(who I've made a sandwich for before). The only thing that may be more epic than this caffeine rush, is the crash. Given the 6-hour halflife of caffeine, that'll peg it around the end of my accounting class later. Very exciting.

So collllddd...

2009-04-12T21:48:00.002-04:00

I spend a lot of time in the other room(the one I don't sleep in) of our 2 room suite. In there, the thermostat is controlled by them. Usually when I go in there, I find it absolutley freezing. I sit there for a while, and then eventually I usually say, "It's fuckin' cold in here." Most of the time everyone else is like, "Nah, it's pretty comfortable." I tell them that they're just lying to themselves and go grab a sweatshirt. Usually I just let it go, but lately I've been thinking maybe I'm legitimately lying to MYself. What an interesting concept...

Maybe all these years of glorification for the summer months has just made me think I'm always cold? Maybe that I was always just on a personal vendetta to be different than everyone else and be cold when it's not? I mulled this over for awhile, and eventually decided this wasn't the case. I'm just warm-blooded I guess, or is it cold-blooded? I'm sitting in my room right now in sweatpants and a hoodie with the hood up, with the heat pegged at a balmy 78. Most of myself is warm, but my feet are still freezing, and as a result, not really warm at all. I'd bump the heat up to 85, but I have to have at least some courtesy to my fellow roommates. Being cold all the time; It's actually pretty obnoxius. This is one of the reasons that I take like 3 showers a day. Whenever I'm cold, I go take a shower. And to say I take hot showers would be an understatement. If my skin isn't about to melt into a creamy sludge, then it's not hot enough. Usually, I get out of the shower and there are enormous red streaks across my chest from the hot water.

Well that's enough bitching about myself. In other news, the American captain that was captured by Somalian pirates was rescued. The pirates were gunned down by American snipers and the captain was rescused unharmed. It's an incredible story and I can't wait to find out more details. It gives me that warm fuzzy feeling that only patriotism can bring about. For those who don't know the whole story. Somalian pirates captured an american ship. The crew fought back, took back the ship, and captured the pirates captain, but the american captain was also captured. They tried to do a 1 for 1 exchange, but they dicked us and only took their captain back without releasing ours. We tried to negotiate some kind of settlement with them, but it wasn't going well. Today, when one of the pirates leavened an AK-47 to the back of the captain, an American Navy captain gave the order to the snipers to take the bastards out. They killed the three pirates on the boat with the captain with headshots. It's amazing how good those shooters were... Ship-to-ship shot in choppy seas. Overall, an awesome story. Full article is here.

3-Star Day

2009-04-11T13:30:00.004-04:00

I looked in the prestigious Republican-American newspaper today. It's my go-to source for all things important and useful. Prime example, few years ago : Front Page - Lost Chicken Returned to Owners... Page 11A - 3 Dead in LAX Airport Shooting. It comforts me that the Rep-Am has its priorities straight and understands what the real news is. My only gripe is that the horoscopes are so often buried in section D, when they should also be on the front page, but no entity is perfect. Regardless, I still make it my duty to check my horoscope whenever I read what the MIB would call, The Hot Sheets. Well today's horoscope for myself, a Libra, is as follows :

"LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)

*** A major mood swing could cause some disruption. Be aware of its impact. Use especially good care with a money matter. You might not have all the answers immediately, but given another week, you will. Tonight: Whatever you feel like doing!"

This bodes poorly because today has already been pretty awesome. It turns out that lent ended on Maundy Thursday or April 9th. When Andrew told me this last night, I didn't believe him. There is no way that Jesus made it through the desert on "Maundy" thursday. Maundy sounds like a crappy name from the '70s that people got stuck with and end up living the rest of their lives in fear and seclusion with, a pariah from the ravenous, judgemental hooligans that make up a large part of American society. And since I'm saying how crappy of a name it would, I guess that would make me one of those RJHs. Regardless, when I received the information, I wrote it off as tomfoolery, until a thorough search of wikipedia and google confirmed the report. Several cans of Pepsi followed, as the power began to coarse through my veins. I stayed up later (1:30AM) than I have in the past 40 days, where the average bed time had been about 10:30. The return of caffeine really hasn't been as triumphant as I predicted though. I feel kind of bad of having it after 40 days, because it was such a challenge to make it through. I suppose that's the purpose of the event, so I'll do my best to not let the catholic church guilt me into giving it up for more. Regardless, I'll probably take caffeine in moderation now, at least for awhile.

Back to the 3-star day though. I'm home with my family (who I like), I had an awesome breakfast, I didn't have to pick up sticks in the yard like my mom wanted me to, and I got in a new personal record run of 7.9 miles, which was absolutley fantastic. So based on how great the day has been thus far, the rest of the day is going to go down the shitter. It says a major mood swing can cause disruption, and I am the self-proclaimed master of outrageous mood swings. Most people can't tell, because I internalize the majority of my moods, but I can go from euphoria to anger to melancholy in a very short time frame. Maybe this mood swing will come in the form of this "money matter", which is of great concern, because I'm poor!

Why, oh why, does the Rep-Am torment with such ominous portents? The art of divination is a hard one to decipher, but when has the Rep-Am ever let me down*?

*The answer is 364 days of the year. The lone exception being Christmas when the paper isn't printed.

Ballpark Night

2009-04-07T19:38:00.003-04:00

This is the first time I've ever posted twice in one day, but I think it warrants such. Every once in awhile the dining hall decides to treat us and hosts a themed dinner. Such past events have been a tailgate party, rumble in the jungle, carnival day, and a few others. Tonight happened to be ballpark night in celebration of the start of the baseball season. What an experience it was. If you take money melon day and multiply it by about 12, then you're coming close to tonight. There wasn't any one thing that stuck out in particular, but the sum of the parts equals an exorbitant total.

I didn't think I ate that much until my roommate said, "TO, thinking about how much you ate makes me sick" I tried to protest that I only had a burger, fries, and some ice cream. He was less forgiving in his recollection. "Yea the angus burger, the fries, the huge bag of popcorn, the cotton candy, the choco taco, the strawberry shortcake bar, and the giant cookie."

Oh yea... that too... That certainly explains why I was huffing and puffing when I was marching up the hill back to the dorm. I ran 3 miles before dinner. I needed to run about 12 more to justify the dinner I had. I was planning on getting up tomorrow morning and running, which I certainly feel like I need to now. But we'll see if I'm mobile in 11 hours.

Which reminds me of another gluttonous occasion. Last saturday during UConn's final four game, I ordered a hangar 1 (poorly pictured above, and keep in mind it's about 3 inches deep). A typical hangar 1 is a pound of wings with an obscene amount of fries. A pound is about 8 wings, and that's what I thought I had. I torched through my eight wings like Sherman through Georgia, and then lifted up the paper separating the fries and the wings and found a treasure trove. Four more glorious, golden bbq love sticks. Sherman didn't take prisoners, so of course, I ate those too. Now on the 'Wings Over' website, it says a 8 wings is "Over 1LB Enough for 2" and that's just the wings, not including the fries. Now 12 wings, labeled as a 'skymaster' would be 1 1/2 pounds, and instead of "Enough for 2" it just says "WOW", which I assume is short for "WOW, you're a fat ass". Well the morning after this 24oz assault on my digsetive system, I had the worst pain in my chest, and it didn't go away until today. It's probably from the fact that I inhale my food rather than chew it. It's not the first time it's happened, and it probably won't be the last. Oh well...

If I learned from every mistake I made, then I'd be perfect and life would be boring. So here's to more gluttony!

The Truth About Writing

2009-04-07T08:48:00.004-04:00

I was spacing out in Nutrition just now, because I already know that vitamin C deficiency leads to scurvy. On top of that, the related photos OF scurvy were quite vile. I was talking to my friend Erin on AIM when she said that she sometimes has honey nut cheerios mixed with cookie crisp. I made the observation that that sounds like "Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs," Which is the cereal that Calvin eats in my favorite comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. I threw that phrase into google and decided to see what came up. I came across a site with a bunch of awesome calvin and hobbes quotes, and I came across one that struck me as particularly true and fitting to my situation in college.

"I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!" is what stuck out the most to me. The quote is absolutley true. For the vast majority of assignments that I do that involve writing, I usually don't know enough about the subject to make a powerful, comprehensive argument. Since the assignment is usually worth squat in the big scheme of my grade in the class, I usually don't do the research and begin conjuring the aforementioned fog. Reading that strip convinced me to look into my last few academic writing assignments and see how true it was.

Phrases such as, "This shows that one has to understand that motivation is dynamic, and doesn’t have one recipe for success," are so broad and non-descript that if I just changed the noun motivation to anything else, I could pretty much throw it after any sentence in the paper. It's not a college phenomenon either, you simply just are better at it when you get there. We, at least I, did the same thing in third grade when at the end of sentence you would just slap down "and stuff." and call it a job well done.

If you're bad at the whole process, teachers and professors who are not naive can see right through it, but if you're particularly proficient at the process, you're in business.

Dissapointment

2009-04-04T21:38:00.005-04:00

Well... UConn just blew it in the final four. Guard play was absolutley atrocious. AJ Price couldn't make a bucket, Craig Austrie mind of well not even been there, and Kemba Walker looked like a scared freshman who shoots free throws worse than me. It makes me sad to just think about how dissapointed they feel. I'm pretty pissed because my team just lost, but they actually played the game, and they know what they did wrong. They'll remember this game for the rest of their lives, and know that they were capable of much better. It sucks a lot. They try to make some big story about how since it was Michigan St., that they were giving the people of Michigan -- Detroit Specifically-- hope. Well guess what stupid news people, Detroit isn't the only people that were looking up to their team. Oh well... The pain will subside.

The loss put the clamps down on a pretty good day otherwise. I had a great run in the afternoon that I wasn't exactly planning on taking. Hit a career-high of 7.4 miles, and it was a blast. I went down this access road by my dorm that goes through the woods. Off of that I found this random nature path where I almost rolled my ankle 4 times and ran off the path without even realizing it several other times. I got off of that before I hurt myself, went down the access road, and then made my way back towards campus where I took a winding path through campus and eventually back to my dorm. Finished strong and felt great. I pretty much negated the run by ordering a Hanger 1 of wings (pound of wings with an egregious amount of fries).

Now I'm left here to digest while I wallow in a pool of loathing and self-doubt over the loss of my huskies.

A Vicious Cycle

2009-04-03T09:37:00.002-04:00

I've fallen into an early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise routine in the past couple weeks. The problem is, I was going to bed early because I felt like death, and when I woke up, I wasn't healthy, certainly not wealthy, but perhaps still wise. I'm still not quite sure if I'd rather wake up at 7 every morning and go to bed at 11, or wake up at 9-9:30 and go to bed around 1-2. I've been running in the mornings, and I like that, because it gets everything else out of the way. On the other hand, when I'm dead-tired on a saturday night at 9 o'clock, social activities may take a hit. I'll probably just ignore the entire situation, and reevaluate it in the post-lent era when energy drinks make a thunderous return to my life.

I mentioned in the last paragraph that I was sick for awhile. I've come to the realization that I equate my sicknesses to famous battles, either from World War II or the Roman Empire... The two eras of history in which I'm most familiar with. This last time around I was the allies in World War II during the battle of the bulge. I felt lousy for a week and just hoped it would go away. I thought I was almost to Berlin, when the sickness made a fierce counterattack. Fever, nausea, extreme discomfort, the whole shabang. Thursday to tuesday was spent sending the blasted nazi flu back to the hell from whence it came. Is equating the flu to a World War II-era battle weird? Yes. I can't defend myself on that one.

Other good news: Tio Samuel decided to give me a nice refund of $485. You know what that means? I have enough money to last until my internship starts!

New Maslow's Theory

2009-03-31T07:57:00.003-04:00

Winter has continued to suck here in left-upper-central Connecticut. Just like arts & crafts in Happy Gilmore, Winter seems to have been extended by 4 hours this year. Except instead of hours, it's weeks. But this is not good news people. Winter blows the big one, and if you've been around me for the past few months, you know that I truly an anti-wintite. I still contend that people who say they like winter, are simply full of shit. It's cool for the first snow, for the holidays, and for the occasional snowday. Beyond that, you are looking at dead trees in frigid temperatures with the wind constantly howling. In the past, I remember there seemed to always be one really warm day in the 70s in mid-march that at least gets you excited for the spring, but it's all winter this year(which seems to be October-April now). Apparently, we're in Soviet-Winter, and only weather below 50 with gale-force winds gets by the iron curtain.

Well when it's cold outside, I have a one-track mind on thinking about how to kill winter, or how nice it will be when it's not like it is for 6 months of the year. Today, on the way to class, I developed my own individualized maslow's pyramid. Maslow's theory more or less states that to become a complete person there are basic levels that a person must meet before they can move on to the next ones. For example, a person first seeks out physiological needs like food, water, and shelter. After those basic needs are met, a person will move onto safety and security needs and so on, all the way up to self-actualization. So I used my extensive knowledge of Maslow (2 paragraphs in an old psych book) and Microsoft Paint v5.1, the pinnacle in image editing technology, to make this new model. Which is good, because user-specific and user-generated content is what's HOT in blogging these days, and I'm on the rise. So here's my modified pyramid:

Clinical trials are still in progress to confirm Tyler's Hierarchy of Needs theory, but I'm confident that it will be approved. Basically, if it's winter, I don't want to do anything. I'm bitter, short-tempered, and always cold. In the past, during the dog days of summer, I've always toyed with the idea that winter wasn't so bad, but lately that sentiment has lost traction. I no longer look forward to any facet of winter. That shit is number 2 on my 'To Kill' list, right afer Osama Bin Laden.

Just took a look at the 10-day forecast... Looks like 50 and windy as far as the mighty doppler can see. Looks like safety and security take a backseat again.

Money Melon

2009-03-05T08:30:00.002-05:00

Having to eat at a dining hall everyday can get pretty bland, but over time there comes a number of days that you specifically look forward to. There is clam chowder fridays, chicken ricardo, taco day, and every once in awhile -- if you're lucky -- money melon day! Money melon day is that one day where the honey dew melon and the cantaloupe are perfectly ripe. Typically, they are pretty hard and tasteless, that'swhatshesaid, but on money melon day, they are ripe, juicy, sweet, and delicious. I pretty much have the same thing for breakfast everyday, a bowl of cereal and 2 slices of cantaloupe, and 2 slices of honey dew. Cereal is always good, but when the melon exceeds its expectations, what a day it will be! It's only ever one day though, yesterday was money melon day. I thought that today maybe there'd be some residual effect, nope, it was a bit slimy and gross.

In other news, I finally got through all my socials and interviews for accounting internships. It appears to have paid off! I got an offer from two different firms this past monday, and now I have a job for the summer. This means that I no longer have to make sandwiches all summer. Which is exciting, but not when you've been doing it for three years. Now I'll get to do challenging work, have set hours, and get paid very well. It's a 10-week internship so I'll even have some free time before and after it, which is also awesome. I don't think I'll get any formal job to fill in the gaps, because I like to sit around sometimes and do things. The past couple summers, I never really had time to do anything with anyone, but I think that this will change. One thing I'll definitely engage in is mad barbecues. Everyone loves BBQs, so why not have more?

Spring break starts in about a half hour for me. No real big plans, I'm going to go home and chill for a few days, and then head out to the big east tournament in NYC with the pep band. Also, I will definitely bring home my books so that they can sit there while I lie to myself that I'll study later.

Winter sucks, but besides weather, March has been pretty sweet so far.

40 Days, 40 Nights

2009-02-26T08:12:00.002-05:00

In my infinite wisdom, I've decided to give up caffeinated drinks for lent. I'm not doing it for any religious purpose, in fact, being the heathen that I am I really don't know what lent is exactly all about. Regardless, I felt like it would be good to give something up for once just to see if I could do it. I immediately regret the decision. Not being able to have my morning energy drink, or my afternoon energy drink, or one of myriad other sodas throughout the day sucks a bit. Yesterday, was the first full day without any caffeine. I had a bit of a headache, but I didn't cold sweats or the shakes, so that's always a good sign. I'm sure I'll keep you updated through this about how it's all going.

Now to do some ranting.

I hate group projects. 85% of the people that I end up working with are completely stupid. It's like working with sticks in mud... Strike that... it's like working with rebar welded into concrete. I try not to stifle their already limited creativity by being overbearing, but every time I try to get anything going or take any ideas... they're always retarded!! We had an assignment in my management class the other day, where you put a CD into your computer and worked with a group of 5, going through these fake management situations. It was a pretty cool program; you would choose options about this person based on what they say, and then you'd either get more choices or it would tell you how everything turned out. Well we listened to the background story and it mind as well have gone in one ear and out the other for my illustrious companions. I wasn't sure of the right answer, but at least I had reasons to back up my choices. They'd sit there for a minute (this was one of the times where I tried to let them do something) and then one kid would good, "Well I think *babble babble babble* and so that's how he'd react. He never really said anything. He did what people do when they're trying to lie when they already KNOW they got caught red-handed. Well, I've been wrong before, so I let the boy have his shining moment... Nope. Wrong answer. Everyone in my group was the same way, and since I wasn't in control of the computer, it took absloutley forever to get anything... Very frustrating.

I've getting very annoyed with my classes. Three of my four real classes are with foreign women with strong accents. I can deal with the voice, but it seems the voice bleeds directly over to the teaching style. None of the three feel the need to ever let us go before the full 75 minutes are up. In my marketing class, a class with a woman who has the highest pitched voice in the world, and uses zero voice inflection, we have to sit there for 60 minutes while she reads directly off the slides. She talks so loud that I can't even zone out and pretend I'm trying ot listen. At the end of the 60 minutes, a group of 2 has to do a presentation on the chapter. It's supposed to last the rest of the 15 minutes of class, but if they go 12 minutes, she'll be very sure to get the last bit of fucking useless information out about whatever the balls she is talking about. Somehow, I got seated in the front row. My open annoyance with her is getting a little strong, and I'm afraid she's going to call me out on it someday. Last time she said, "We'll lecture for the last 3 minutes." I flailed my arms in the air like a two year old and put my head down on the table... also like a two year old. I can't help it though, my frustration transcends all maturity. I think my sister Kim hates Asian's, or at least that's the impression that I get when she yells, "Gung Hay Fat Choy you chinese piece of shit" when some asian woman tries to merge on the highway. I'm afraid that I may be headed down the same road.

Also during this week, has been interviews and socials with accounting firms in hopes of getting an internship for the summer. There are a lot of people going for a few spots, so competition is tight. I got 4 interviews, two regional firms, and two of the 'Big 4'. Because of all this, it's been a very long and stressful week. I had several exams last week to go along with two interviews and a social. At least the socials are kind of cool. It involves food and mingling, and who doesn't love free food? The bigger guys, also took us out to their offices in Hartford, where they treat us to a catered meal. Not bad, but pretty tiring. My last interview is today at 12:45. I think tonight might be a 6 o'clock bedtime. Now I wait til monday, which is offer day, to see if my phone rings in the middle of class. So sunday night/monday morning are going to be not nerve-wracking at all!

Hopefully I get an internship, and that winter ends soon. I feel like once those two things happen, my mood will greatly improve. I must have some of that seasonal affective disorder or something, because the last two months of winter I am always surly and annoyed all the time. It's almost march, so we'll at least start getting glimpses of spring on those random warm days that seem to pop up.

Here's to warmer days!

Strange Dreams

2009-02-13T09:42:00.005-05:00

I can almost guarantee this is going to be a pretty incoherent post. I very rarely remember my dreams at all, so when I remember even just a brief clip, I get pretty pumped. As a result, I'm going to type up what I remember from my dream last night. Okay...

So I was in a big field with I think Andrew and my roommate Steve. It was a big green meadow on a hill. At the bottom of the hill were the woods, and up the hill was this big concrete bunker. I remember there being powerlines all around too. I feel like we were going to try and fly a kite or something, but that part get a little fuzzy. Well, we never did that. Instead we went up to the bunker, and peeked inside. I was the schmuck that decided to crawl into it. Well I did, and it became frighteningly obvious it wasn't meant for human inhabitation. It was more of a storm drain than a bunker. So I could get in, but I couldn't get out. I was freakin' the hell out because I couldn't get out, and I yelled at andrew and steve to call for help. I then went through in my head, all the possible rescue scenarios. I was convinced they were either going to cover my body in vaseline and pull me out, or use explosives to blow a hole in the side of the hill... Those were the only two plausible solutions. Well apparently, GE, who owned the hill or something, dispatched what I can only describe as a helicopter-blimp to check the efficacy of our claim. Even though I was just in that bunker/storm drain, the dream transported me to on top of that blimpacopter. It didn't have a blade on top, it must've been somewhere else, but it was moving pretty quick and had some pretty sharp turns. The top was soft like one of those bouncy castles, and the blimp was only about 7 feet long and 2 feet wide. So I was hanging on for dear life, terrified that it was going to take a sharp turn and I would just slide off. Then I began to think, "This is to fucked up for reality... wasn't I just in that bunker? This must be a dream." I seem to be able to have some ability to control my dreams sometimes. I decided that this shit was too freaky for me, so I just let go and fell to the ground. I ended up in a river in the middle of a jungle. Then this kid I used to work with randomly appeared there too. Now we had to wait for rescue from outside of this temple on the edge of the river. We climbed out of the water and decided to make a fire. Apparently we had a lighter? But we were trying to make a fire out of a pile of worms... I don't know either. I'm glad this dream was short.

Oh one more dream I just remember from last night. All I remember is that I was trying to cook for everybody, and I had lost all ability to do anything right. I put a singular baked potato in a giant saucepan and put the whole thing in the oven... I put that right next to the already-prepared mashed potatoes (that were overflowing). Next to that was the pasta that I also decided to cook in the oven with no water in the pot. Someone came in and told me off, and prepared the whole meal in like 14 seconds... End of dreaming.

Number of dreams I remembered from the past 6 months not including these ones? 0

So it was a weird morning, felt like things were off, but it was kinda cool.

54

2009-02-11T09:28:00.005-05:00

Never has there been a more wretched hive of scum and villiany... then winter. I hate winter, and that is the main motivation behind this blog post. I'm essentially writing it to myself in the future... So when it's 95 degrees this july and I'm outside all day in the hot sun and I come inside and I say, "You know... I wouldn't mind if it was winter" I can then say to myself, "No, fuck you Tyler, winter is worse than the holocaust" ... almost. According to the forecast today, it is supposed to be a blistering 54 degrees with minimal wind. I specifically left my winter jacket in the closet and began to walk outside... I had to turn around because my ID and wallet were in that jacket, but after that, it was to the great outdoors. It was wonderful. I love warm weather. I love it so much that it makes me type and talk in simple sentences. The last time I broke a sweat just by walking to class was in early October. If only it would last.

So I recently learned why parents never want you to play any type of outdoor game inside. A few blog posts ago, I wrote about a basketball hoop that Rory brought back from winter break. We took advantage of it by playing 2v2 "full-court" basketball in the dorm room. It was a series of slicing the lane and thundercocking the ball in the hoop. Goaltending was rampant, and dribbiling a 4 inch ball is quite the challenge... It was a high-octane thrill ride and the score was tight. Then my foot decided to take on the bed post when I tried to take a charge from Rory. The bed post won the battle, but I played through. Later, when I took a knuckle to the temple I decided to throw in the towel. Looking at the toe now, it's pretty guesomely awesome. My pinky toe is a rich purple, and the top right half of my foot is a deep red. It's an art project in itself. I give it another week before I'm back on the hardwood... and by hardwood I mean slippery carpet.

On another note, Syracuse vs UConn at Gampel Pavilion is tonight. I've been waiting for this matchup since freshman year when our team last played 'Cuse at Gampel. That game was one of the best games I've ever been to. It was loud, it was intense, and we won. I've never heard such loud and prolonged booing of an opponent it was amazing. Words cannot describe so I won't try.

Another radical shift in topic... I just finished up my management class and it was pretty fun. We had this assignment, and the premise of which was that you're a racecar team manager, and you have to make the decision to either race or not race in the last race of the season. If you finish in the Top 5 you get a bunch of sponsorships etc. If you race and blow your engine, you lose almost everything. If you don't race you lose some of your sponsorship, but not all. The kicker is that all season you've been blowing gaskets during races. If you blow a gasket in this race, you lose almost all of your sponsorships and the team goes down the tubes pretty much. You have a ton of research that points to the fact that cold weather is the cause of the blown gaskets. The forecast is 49 degrees, and that is the coldest temperature raced yet. There are pieces of data that help sway your choice one way or another. The logical choice would be not to race. I chose to race because, it's not guaranteed to blow a gasket, they had changed something two races ago and haven't had a problem, and my main kicker was, that you're going to continue to have the problem next season regardless, and if the gasket does blow and you lose sponsorships, maybe that can be your opportunity to get out of a losing business. Well I said race.

She flips through a few slides and says, "This is the data, slightly modified, for the Challenger, and you just sent it up. None of you even considered the human life aspect."

You do NOT drop a bombshell like that on Tyler G Owens. I lit up the barbecue and began to grill. Saying, "They are completely unrelated fields. A space shuttle involves seven lives, and if a mistake happens there you are almost 100% guaranteed to die." I had a whole outline in my head to defend my point, and I was about to continue... But apparently the flame from my barbecue lit the classroom like a flamethrower in a hay barn. Everyone ganged up against her and totally destroyed the point of the exercise. I'll admit that I probably made the wrong choice, but the consequences of my choice were a LOT different than that of the challenger, and I took them into account. So take that Bulgarian woman.

Dumb Panic

2009-02-10T08:47:00.003-05:00

UConn dining services "has decided to remove all peanut butter products in dining units and convenience stores on campus." Despite the fact that UConn's supplier of peanut butter has not been added to the potentially-salmonellaified list. Dennis Pierce, director of dining services, explained that, "Even though that all the peanut butter supplied to UConn is safe, many students would be concerned if they saw a peanut butter product in their dining unit and may probably opt not to eat it anyhow."

...

What the fuck!? Listen chief, I'm not an idiot. If I walked into "my dining unit" today and saw peanut butter, I'd be pretty stoked. Even if I was worried that dining services was just lying to me and it was contaminated... I just wouldn't eat it. Why don't you just put up a god damn sign that says, "Our peanut butter is safe". Good point, throwing it all out is the better option. I blame the mass media for spreading this panic and not properly educating people on what the safe brands of peanut butter are, and if the danger is still prevalent in the brands that were called out for being contaminated. They have no problem reporting that peanut butter sales when down the shitter. Bastards...

I've tapped the peanut butter black market though. I've been keeping two massive jars of peanut butter in my closet for just this occasion. I bought a loaf of bread and a jar of jelly from Big Y. I set up a PB&J lab in my own dorm room. I've been eating it for every other meal, while selling the surplus to other addicts on campus. Granted, I have only obtained 'Super-Chunky' peanut butter, I'm working on a refining process that'll get me up to weapons-grade/creamy peanut butter. They can try and control the industry, but the black market will always find a way. I've also been working on getting in touch with the Palestinians to get some tips on how to build underground tunnel networks... This would allow us to more readily distribute contraband peanut butter. Viva la Resistance!

One half of that paragraph is true, the other is fabricated, you be the judge.

Recent Developments

2009-02-08T14:34:00.003-05:00

Over the past couple weeks, some form of the flu has popped up on campus here at UConn. It's almost frightening the pace at which it has spread throughout the university. Almost everyone I talk to either has it, had it, or their roommate(s) has/had it. Well, I'm pretty sure I caught it the other day, which is pretty dissapointing. For some reason, whenever their is some kind of virus going through the community, I ask myself, "What if this was the plague?". It becomes like a personal competition for survival. This time, just like so many others, I wouldn't be the lucky son of a bitch who rides out the death-wave and survives the plague. I guess that game is a little morbid, but too bad. Hopefully, the sickness is short, because I'm looking forward to that feeling after you're sick when you just feel absolutley fantastic by comparison.

In other news, remember the lightshade that fell from the ceiling and broke? Remember how I said it was only a matter of time before the bulb broke? Well, it broke, but not the way I expected it too. The cause? Fight club. I don't think I've addressed this phenomenon on this blog before, but I will now. Every night, around 12-12:30, and occasionally times throughout the day. There are a serious of loud bangs, thuds, and crashes from the room above ours. Speculation has been rampant on what the hell they could possibly doing. Through deductive reasoning and empirical research, we've determined that it can only be one thing... People beating each other up for sport. Either that, or people trying to tame wild bears. Regardless of which of those two options it is, Rory was sitting in the room one night when fight club started up. A loud bang came from upstairs and the entire room began shaking... Shaking so much that the lightbulb itself came loose from the holder, swung down, hovered for a few seconds, and then plummeted to the floor in a spectacular explosion of glass. It also released a magical white powder. Thanks to the GE lighting website, I've determined that the light wasn't a cocaine mule that was supposed to be shipped to a drugdealer that mistakenly found its way to UConn, but instead a light-emitting compound "phosphor". Whether or not I'm now at risk for mesothelioma is unknown, but so far it appears that it isn't dangerous. The bad news is, is that we can't really see anything in the room after 5 o'clock, the good news is, we can make it into a nightclub that features urban lighting, alcohol, and shards of glass on the floor -- the three essentials to any great night club --.

Well class is almost over, and I'm getting really hungry, so time to call it quits on this post. There will likely be more later.

Keep it up

2009-02-04T09:37:00.005-05:00

You know that game that you play when you have a ball and you just keep hitting it trying to keep it in the air, hence "keep it up"? Well I'm convinced that that is the best game in the world. It's a game that my suitemates and I have been playing for the past couple weeks. A sleugh of acrobatic maneuvers and unwarranted destruction ensued. Coming back from christmas, Rory brought back a basketball hoop that was "about 72 inches" aka more like 60 inches. We broke the hoop on the second shot, but the ball it came with is perfect for keep it up. It's ridiculously bouncy and just the right size. We have about 3000 dollars worth of entertainment electronics and games in our room, but we are having more fun with a 50 cent rubber ball. Highlight of the game thus far? Breaking the lightshade that covers the light in the room. We hit it just the right way, it fell, hit the ground, and shattered into pieces. Without the light shade, there is just the bare bulbs showing. Holy shit it is bright. Those bulbs produce about 60,000 lumens of light. I don't know what the hell a lumen is, but I know it has to do with light and since no one else probably knows what it is, 60,000 is enough to get my point across. You have to be careful in that room now or you might get sunburned. The good news is, is that it is only a matter of time until we shatter the lightbulb itself.

I've finally gotten my "available blogging shchedule" down, aka which classes I can just zone out in and type away without drawing too much attention to myself... One such class (also the one I'm now) is Management 3101. It's actually a pretty interesting class, but the material is really easy. The professor is from Bulgaria but she's pretty cool. The highlight of the class thus far has been when she was just talking and out of nowhere she just drooled about a pint of saliva. I was slumped down in my chair pretty much falling asleep, but when that happened, I perked right up and did that jim halpert wide eyed stare.

I'll leave you with soemthing else from the class. The topic is perceptions, and we got one of those "what do you see" pictures. I hate these damn things.

Stupid eskimo.

Top 5 Songs of the Week!

2009-01-28T16:58:00.002-05:00

I've been struggling a bit to find the time to write blog entries. I haven't been particularly busy, but I haven't been in any type of routine for the past couple weeks so it's been tough. I had winter break, which consisted of time at home, work at sandwich co, a bowl trip to Toronto, and a trip to Florida. They were all good fun more or less, but I never wrote any blog entries.

A few days ago, I invested a "Zune pass". Which basically means I get to download all the music I want for 15 dollars a month, and then permanently keep 10 songs every month. Since I own a zune, it kind of makes sense, and I can find a lot of obscure stuff on it that I can't find on the on-campus hub. So I figure I'd make it easy no myself and just write a top 5 (well kuind of 6) song entry. Away we go...

Honorable Mention : Young Buck - Get Buck - Some solid beats in this song that make me feel pretty bad ass. I started listening to this song while I was in Florida. Everytime I went to go shoot around at the basketball court at our timeshare I would listen to this song. I think I shoot better with music, and when I listen to this song I would shoot lights out (which for me is like 20%).

5. Common - Announcment ft. Pharrel - I really just like the way this song starts off. To be honest, I have no idea what he says for the first 8 seconds of the song, and I really don't feel like looking it up. Regardless, I like the way the song flows. The tempo is pretty slow, but it's ryhtmic and good for when I'm walking my way to class.

4. Jim Jones & Ron Browz - Pop Champagne - I've heard like 5 versions of this song, but I like most of them. It has one of the most infectious rythyms that have ever graced my ears. It's the one in the very beginning that continues through the entire song. It sounds like synthesized bongos to me, which probably isn't even close, but I can still dream of becoming a world reknown synth bongo player. I'll be sitting in class and just find myself tapping the rythym on the desk. Sitting here right now, I can only think of only one line off the top of my head, which is a testament to the music behind the words (which probably are pretty crappy).

3. Taylor Swift - Forever and Always - Now the list takes a complete 360. I was in Florida driving through Orlando when Love Story by Taylor Swift came across the satellite radio. I immediately texted my roommate (while driving), "Do you like that song Love Story by Taylor Swift?" The response was quick and to the point, "Yes. Forever and Always is another great song." I had to wait another week until I had access to it, but I was not dissapointed when I turned it on. I'll just come out and say it, I absolutely love upbeat pop songs. Some people would say liking Taylor Swift as a guy isn't cool. I say, fuck those people. I sometimes wonder what people think when they walk by my room and hear this blaring from my room...

2. Taylor Swift - Fearless - Another great Taylor Swift song. The album by the same title was the first thing I downloaded when I got my zune pass. I figured if there was a song with the same name as the album, it's probably good. Sure enough, it was. She has a wonderful voice, and she just makes all her lyrics sound awesome. My favorite lyric is the first line of the song,
"There's somethin' 'bout the way
The street looks when it's just rained
There’s a glow off the pavement
Walk me to the car
And you know I wanna ask you to dance right there
In the middle of the parking lot."
Typing it out just doesn't do it justice.

1. Taylor Swift - Love Story - I guess you can tell what artist I've been listening to for the past couple weeks. This is the first song I heard by Taylor Swift, and definitely my favorite. It puts me in an incredibly good mood. The music video is also fantastic, and confirms my suspicion that Ms. Swift is one of the most attractive girls I've ever seen. By the time I make another one of these top 5 lists Taylor Swift probably won't be on it, but I'll definitely be listening to this song and the rest of her album for quite some time.

That's where it comes from

2008-12-22T23:47:00.004-05:00

I recentely started playing Civilization IV again recently. It is a turn-based strategy game, and is the reason I haven't posted anything in almost a week. I find that when I get addicted to a game, almost everything else takes a backseat. Instead of a bunch of different activities taking up my day, it is instead condensed to video game and meals (which are usually taken in conjuction with the game). If there is something else that comes up like work or snow removal, I'll plan the whole day around that one event so I can still maximize my playing time. Last night, I was going to bed and I told myself I'd play in bed on my laptop for 15 minutes and then call it a night. It was only after my battery was about to die two hours later that I was forced to retire. It's a little bit sickening, but typically these addictions last a week or two max, and they usually don't happen at all if I'm at school.

Anyway... Over the years, my mom has always been yelling at me for one thing or another. Typically it was for something miniscule that I never really saw as that big of a deal to get upset over. I always told myself that I'd probably understand some day when I'm older. It just so happened that that day was Sunday. I woke up to about a foot of snow outside, and I was ready for a day of CivIV. I had my one big event for the day -- snowblowing -- already planned out. So I proceeded with my day of doing nothing particularly productive. I was getting ready to go snowblow when I decided to clean up the kitchen a bit. I grabbed a cereal box that was sitting out on the counter and went to go put it back in the pantry. When I reached the pantry, I heard a crunch under my foot as I stepped on a pile of tortilla chips that were there for seemingly no good reason. A bit annoyed, I cleaned that up and then went over to the sink to start loading the dishwasher. I went to grab a dish and there was just soggy apple pie all over the inside of the sink. What the hell! Somebody had left the sink a complete mess and I got kinda pissed off.

*DING*

That's where it comes from. I've gotten yelled at for dropping stuff on the floor and leaving the sink a mess for years. I never saw it as a big deal, but now I could definitely see why my mom gets mad. I laughed to myself and continued on with my task. However, there are still a bunch of things that my mom does that I am convinced that I will neither understand nor endorse as reasonable. Things like trying to find every little scrap of paper that is lying around before I can take out the trash. That little piece of paper can just as easily fit on the bottom of the next bag. That's just the tip of the iceberg for her, but you get the idea.

After that, I headed outside to snowblow the driveway. I went into the garage to start up the snowblower. One would think that starting the damn thing up would be the easiest part of the job. NOPE. I was following the blasted directions on the stupid machine. Turn the knob, hold the lever, and push the button. Negative. I tried various combinations of the directions, but still no dice. I find myself extremely patient with things that can give me feedback, like people, but just the opposite with things that cannot tell me what's the problem. I just wanted to snowblow, I didn't want to spend more time getting the stupid machine to start than actually using it. I don't like wasting my time, I don't like when things don't work like they're supposed to, and I don't like hurting myself in the process. When this trifecta of terror comes together, I don't get mad, or angry, I go absolutely ape-shit beserk. So when I punched the metal snowblower in frustration the stars aligned and I went nuts. At that point I just wanted to throw things and break things. I instead relieved the tension of the situation with a loud verbalization of the 'F word'. The anger subsided as quick as it had come. After about 25 minutes of wrasslin' with the stupid thing, I finally it working and snowblowed the driveway pretty quick.

And for the bizarre event of the week... After snowblowing, I was trying to walk back into the house, and adversity struck. I had gloves on, and I got my thumb stuck between the door knob and the edge of the door frame. Typically when my hand touches that knob, I just turn it and walk right in the house. Well this time, I grabbed the knob and tried to turn it, but I was thwarted by my thumb that got wedged agains the frame. Well the little men that works in my thumb (who is not related to guy that turns the light on in the fridge) forgot to call his supervisor up in my brain, because the brain division still sent the "GO" signal for walking through the door. I ended up annihiliating my face agains the wooden barrier that was the entry way to my house. I think my nose might be bruised a bit, but the thing that hurts the most is my pride. I couldn't do anything but laugh at myself and try again. Don't worry, I conquered the door on the second try.

It's December 16th

2008-12-16T21:56:00.003-05:00

As the title would suggest, it's the 16th of December... And you know what that means right? It's make your son a lunch day once again! Make Your Son a Lunch Day is a holiday I made up 7 or 8 years ago one day when I didn't feel like making myself a lunch for school. I just said, "Dad, It's make your son a lunch day," and that was that. I have no idea how I/we managed to make the holiday stick. But every year since then he has made me a lunch on that day. I've tried to spread it around to some of my friends, and they've gotten in on some of the action. At the very least, it's going to be a holiday that I will follow for years to come. I can definitely see myself making a trip from wherever the hell I end up living when I'm older, just to celebrate the holiday. And if I have a son, you bet your ass I'll be continuing the tradition.

So if you read this then feel free to celebrate. And if you're a daughter, I'm sorry, there is, as of this time, no female equivalent. Of course the only real barrier is lack of interest haha.

So today, I had just gotten out of the shower and was brushing my teeth. I heard a knock on the door. I ran up to the door and opened it, expecting it to be my mom or dad with their hands full... Nope, it's my neighbor stopping by to drop off some cookies. I'm in nothing but a towel, and I'm brushing my teeth. She explains that she's just here to drop off some cookies. She ignores the condition I'm in and keeps badgering me with questions.

"I'm Kathy, what's your name?"
"WyWer" (I had a mouth full of toothpaste, half of which I ended up swallowing)

Didn't end there.. "Are you home from college?" "Where do you go?" "When do you go back" "How old are you?"

Beyond being a bit awkward, it was freakin' cold outside and the wind was blowing in... Come on! At least the cookies were awesome.

Props to Stanley Robinson

2008-12-15T17:18:00.005-05:00

Stanley Robinson was a starter on last years UConn Men's basketball team. He was a solid all-around player. He obviously showed that he had NBA-Level talent. A very raw talent, but talent none-the-less. At the beginning of this year however, Stanley Robinson was not a part of the men's basketball team. He wasn't academically ineligible, he wasn't arrested, and he didn't do anything specific wrong. According to an article on ESPN:

"The only one being harmed was Stanley," Calhoun said. "I had a couple of players I asked to leave the program. I didn't want Stanley to leave. He's a really good kid with a heart of gold, but he had to get his life square. I saw signs, little things. He'd be late to study hall or late to practice. He wasn't always going to class. He just wasn't focused."

Basically, he lost his scholarship and wasn't a part of UConn in anyway this semester because he had an attitude problem. Ever since Stanley came up from Birmingham, Alabama, he's had a lax attitude. He isn't very sociable, and he's been very homesick. He has two kids back in Alabama. He has a very complicated life. Now about 99.9% of college players would just transfer to another school if they got kicked off the team. Almost any school in the nation would be ecstatic to have the caliber of player that Robinson is, but he chose not to do that. Instead he got a job at a local steel mill in Connecticut, and by earning $700/week, earned enough money to re-enroll at the University of Connecticut. That's right, when he comes back to UConn tonight against Stony Brook, he will technically be a walk-on. A likely first-round draft pick paying to play at UConn for the coach that kicked him off the team. If that isn't a testament to the man's character, than I don't know what is.

When he returns tonight at 7PM, I don't know if he'll even play, but he will surely receive a resounding ovation in Hartford. I hope only the very best for him, and I thought writing a blog post about him was the least I could do to show my support for him.

A longer article basically expanding on what I just said can be found here.

Holiday-Related Anecdote

2008-12-14T23:59:00.003-05:00

Needless to say, my family is pretty weird. Most families likely are, but in different ways. I'll touch on a few things that I like about my family.

We like to do dumb things that make us laugh. We typically don't show too much restraint at public venues or events. A prime example is my sister Kim's graduation. When she graduated from the University of Rhode Island a few years ago we had quite the good time. The ceremonies themselves were miserably boring, and that's right, there were multiple ceremonies. They had one enormous ceremony for the whole school where they gave speeches, and then they broke up by specific college for the actual giving out of degrees. We had to walk through the woods to get to this other ceremony. Funny thing was, was that we were leading the pack somehow, and we had no clue where we were going. We eventually got to the right spot, but if we took a random turn, EVERYONE would have followed us. Anyway, we got to this other building, and we were there for about an hour and they were starting to read off names. My sister is actually my step-sister so her last name starts with a B and she was done and over with pretty quick. That left us with about 650 more names to sit through in our incredible boredom. My family and I devised a fun game: Pick a name on the list of someone we thought had no one there to support them, and bring on the obnoxious yells from the Owens family. Xi Yang Hou or something very similar was the first recipient of our generosity. We collaborated with my sister via text message to get the people around her to cheer as well... "Xi Yang Hou"... "WOOOOOOOOO!" Everyone within 30 rows of us looked in our direction, and were probably wondering why some random ass white folk were cheering for some asian girl. They probably were really wondering what was going on when we did it for several more random people. That pretty much represents the caliber of my family.

So every holiday season, we always send out a plethora of christmas cards to all of our friends and family. But this year, just to spice things up, we sent a little holiday cheer to some random family in another state. I really hope that "Charles & Linda Johnson" from Bethlehem, GA, are appreciative of their christmas card with no return address from "Phil, Marge, Kim, Steph, & Ty". That really got our jollies going around the kitchen table tonight.

Also, you can probably look forward to a favorite songs of my week post coming up soon. Chances are by "week" I'm going to mean like 2.5 weeks, but who's counting?

Man vs. Nature: The Road to Victory

2008-12-13T16:32:00.003-05:00

Well exams are over, and that means I am at home for winter break. Five weeks off to do everything else that isn't school. I'm not sure if I'm really looking forward to this break. I do enjoy being home, and I love being with my family, but at the same time I miss UConn and the constant interaction with my friends, peers, and classmates, hell, I even miss going to class. Anyway, that isn't an option, so home it is!

Anyway, I woke up this morning and surfed the internet for a good hour before having to help my dad with some yardwork. We have this tree in our front yard that had been rotting for as long as I could remember, and we were finally able to get rid of it thanks to the wonderful people at CL&P. They chopped down the majority of the tree, just leaving a creepy 12 foot stump with a few major branches coming off of it that make it look like a decaying person praying to god. I hope it leaves some freaky-ass shadows on my wall in the middle of the night! They chopped it down, but they didn't clear it; That was up to us. We pulled out the tractor from the barn and utilized our pick up truck to facilitate the operation. As I was walking across my front yard, I saw an enormous flatbed trunk piled about 20 feet high with 60-foot long logs pull into my neighbors yard... He has these machines that cut all the wood for him (It's actually pretty cool). Back in our own yard, my dad was hacking away at the big logs with the chainsaw while I threw the brush into the back of the truck. After I filled up the truck, I went down into our backyard to dump it into the woods.

I took a break from throwing everything into the woods, and stood up in the back of the pickup truck and looked towards my house, which had smoke billowing from the chimney from the fire I had set earlier. In the distance I saw my dad brandishing the chainsaw above his head hacking down my neighbors shrubery (presumably at her request). From there I looked into my neighbors yard to see an enormous mechinal claw pull a 60-foot log into the air and onto the conveyer belt of saws. As I stood in a pile of brush up to my waist, the words of Saruman from Lord of the Rings ran through my mind...

"The old world will burn in the fires of industry. Forests will fall. A new order will rise."

I paused for a second and turned around and peered deep into the woods for any sign of an Ent army coming to quash Bethlehem's apparently vibrant forestry removal enterprise. I didn't see anything, so I continued throwing rotting chunks of wood into the forest... Mother Nature 0 Tyler 1... Chalk it up.

That also got me thinking. Two hundred years ago, people got around with horses and wagons and such. Today, we get around in cars. Two hundred years ago, electricity wasn't invented. Today, we have television and nuclear power. Two hundred years ago, people heated their homes with wood. Today, we heat our home with wood. I find it slightly amusing that we are depending on such archaic technology to surive. Take it as you will, I have some more nothing to do.

Monopoly Rundown

2008-12-10T02:02:00.009-05:00

It's 2am, and I think that's a fine time to rank the monopoly tokens in a standard monopoly set. There are 11 pieces that I am going to consider for the list. There are a few others that are in the deluxe edition or something, but if they aren't in my box, they ain't legit.

From the top
1. Battleship - My favorite piece. If you run with the battleship, you aren't taking flack from anybody. You call the shots on the board. You have the technical know-how to get through the game, but when you don't feel like thinking you can still brute-force your way through it.

2. Wheelbarrow - The wheelbarrow is a perennial dark horse. People forget about it because it is such a simple machine that they think it doesn't warrant their attention. Well, if you underestimate this token, your body is going to be trucked off the board in the wheelbarrow at the end of the game.

3. Scottie Dog - A favorite of the female persuasion. Something with four legs can't get much classier than the Scottie. It is clear that the controller of this token is well groomed with great posture. While it's hard to tell on the piece, I'm sure that the dog and it's controller has great nails as well.

4. Iron - The iron represents industry. The owner of this token is all about getting it done. They put in the 60 hours a week to get food on the table, and send their kids to college. The pinnacle of their week is the church social on sunday after mass.

5. Bag of Cash - The baggers are greedy and arrogant, but they aren't afraid to flaunt that fact. They'll drop stacks of cash on inane purchases. Steven Jackson, of the Golden State Warriors, would be the cash bag.

6. Howitzer - Brute force, plain and simple. The player who picks the Howitzer will choose to confront any situation rather than try to avoid it. They are the schmuck that says, "It just got real fuckin' quiet in here" when there is a sudden silence in the room.

7. Top Hat - The owners of the Top Hat are reminiscent folk. They wear outdated clothing styles, but still manage to pull them off somehow. They are fascinated by history, and love to travel.

8. Horse and Rider - Good ol' fashion horsepower. The one who picks this token typically has had some contact with horses in their life. They usually aren't the most popular people in the world, but are solid friends.

9. Thimble - A favorite of the older generation. Those who knit or crochet are naturally drawn to this piece. Every once awhile, a young kid will pick it up. These are the same kids that put shaving cream on their face, and think they are shaving when they take a plastic knife and scrape it across their face.

10. Shoe - If the shoe were a real shoe, it wouldn't stay on your foot. It always baffles me, and it's kinda dumb. I hate the damn thing, I wish I could kick it out of the game. Zing!

11. Car - If you pick the car, you're an asshole. Plain and Simple. I hate the car, and everything it represents. I'm getting all fired up just thinking about people I know that have picked the car in the past... Have some originality you schmucks.

That's that. I don't really know why I just wrote all that. I just made it all up, but if you find that any of it is true, please share your experiences.

Another fun thing I'd like to share is Richard Cheese. Richard Cheese parodies popular songs into clever lounge tunes. It's pretty hysterical. These are some of my favorites:

Milkshake Song
Down with the Sickness
Baby Got Back

Red Delicious

2008-12-09T09:30:00.006-05:00

Well, I'm about two and a half hours removed from being done with the hardest of my exams. I had no exams yesterday, but I have two today (managerial accounting and finance). I just finished managerial accounting, and it went well, and as long as I didn't do anything stupid(always a possibility), I'll be okay. Finance is what I'm really worried about. My professor(Captain Orange Sweater himself) is ruthless in his question selection, and expects you to know everything. He curves ridiculously as a result, but I don't like to have to rely on the curve, I like knowing I did well before I get the grade back. That exam starts in less than an hour, but why study, when you can blog?

If you know me, or have read part of this blog before, you know I play fantasy basketball. Well, one of my players, Derrick Rose, recently had a strange altercation between himself and a piece of mother nature. A few nights ago,he decided to have an apple while lying in bed. He got his nice shiny apple, took out a knife, sat down in bed and turned on his favorite TV show. He finished his apple without incident, and then got up to get a glass of water. Apparently, no alarm bells went off in his head when he decided to leave the knife in his bed. He came back with his dose of H2O, and it was only seconds later when he was cuddling with 4 inches of razor-sharp steel. He sliced his non-shooting arm (thank god) and needed ten stitches to fix himself up. He said it was a "silly" mistake. 'Silly' isn't the word Derrick.

I do have to give him credit though, it's not the dumbest thing an athlete has done to injure himself lately. At least he didn't accidentally shoot himself in the thigh while trying to unload his illegaly-held pistol at a night club WHILE drinking wine a la Plaxico Burress. This is what happens in my mind:

"Plax, you can't have that gun in here, you're going to have to unload it and leave it back here with us."
"Awww come on man. Alright fine."
*Pulls out gun, and begins to unload*
"Where's my Chardonnay. Ohhh here it is... This is soooo tast...*BLAM!*"

Followed by this thought process:

"Oh shit... I just shot myself in the leg... You know what, no one probably recognized me, I'm only one of the highest paid, and most prolific wide receivers in the history of the NFL. I'll just walk out the front door, with my friend Antonio Pierce, also one of the more famous players in the NFL, and no one will notice the trail of blood I'm leaving behind me. Oh and then, I'll go to a hospital and say my name is Harris Smith, and say I got shot at a local Applebee's, I won't get caught... And when I go to practice next week with a giant hole in my leg, I'll say I had a pencil in my pocket and I fell on the sharp end"

True story... Except the pencil part, he got caught by then.

Under the news article about Derrick Rose, there was a comments section. Props to Sparzo for telling this to me; Someone had commented below that now they should call Derrick Rose, "Red Delicious", in honor of his mistake. I like it.

In other news, Hurricanes started up again. Open house was on sunday, and it was a blast. Our new show is called, "Gold Rush". Last year, our show was called "A Journey West" and featured songs that would reflect that, like Copland's Hoedown. This year, we're taking music that reflect the gold rush era, none of which I've heard of, but it's good none-the-less. I also won the Rookie of the Year award from last year. I won a plaque, and got to take home one of the trophies the corps won from our competitions last year. I chose our 3rd place trophy from our homeshow. It may be third place, but that was a great show. The cheers we got just entering the field were deafening to the point where I couldn't hear the snare captain tap us onto the field. The rush of adrenaline I got when we were finishing up our closer and the crowd rose to its feet with about 30 seconds to go. I get goosebumps just thinking about it now. The score didn't reflect how we thought we did, but it was awesome none-the-less. When I came back home with the trophy this sunday, I felt a bit like Happy Gilmore when he walks into the nursing home after winning the Waterbury Open. I was just waiting for someone to say, "Mr. Owens, how do you... Wow that's a tremendous looking trophy you got there." That never happened, but at least I get to expand my trophy collection from 0 to 1.

Count it.

Top 5 Songs of my week

2008-12-06T20:05:00.003-05:00

Well it's been a bit of a rough and long day. I'm pretty tired, and a bit upset with myself, so why not blog my worries away? I've always liked numbered lists. That sounds really dumb, but I love countdowns, and organized information. So I figure, since I like reading other peoples lists, why not make one of my own. So I'll just recap my top 5 favorite songs from my week. Typically, during the course of a week, I'll listen to a select number of songs, over and over again. These are some of those songs. If they have a link, it's to a youtube video of the song for your listening pleasure.

5. Jesse McCartney - Leavin' - I love this song, and I am not ashamed to admit it. It's very subtle, pretty slow paced, and doesn't have a lot of background noise. It flows very nicely, and tends to put me in a good mood. I like to turn this song on in the car and just drive and listen to it over and over again. Turns out, my roommate Steve also really likes this song.

4. Code Red - Elbow Room - This song is great. I found it one time on the 'Zune Marketplace' when I was looking for a song I heard in an ESPN commercial. I never found the song I was looking for, but I did find this one. It's fast paced, has a thumping bass, and a plethora of digitized hand claps. Apparently, ESPN has used this song in the past to promote college basketball. Consequently, the song is entirely about college basketball, and it's a blast.

Favorite Line : "This is for my baller's in the 3-point range, surrounded by D in 3 a point game, it's time to have heart like a soulja', pop the shot and watch the shot drop right at the buzza'"

If I'm in a good mood, this song will amplify tenfold. When this song is blasting through my MP3, I am walking with a swagger. I feel like Brian Urlacher on that old spice commercial. I will legit walk with a bounce in my step. Chances are I look like the biggest tool in the world, but I feel like I can conquer the world.

3. T.I. - Whatever You Like - T.I. has become one of my favorite artists. I love all of his new work. I've never really been big on rap or hip-hop, but I've been beginning to enjoy it a lot more. This is another song I love to listen to while in the car. I put this song on, and just start thinking about everything. Typically, I listen to this song on when I'm not in the best of moods. It doesn't really put me in a good mood, but it motivates me and that motivation will eventually put me in a good mood again. If I'm in a bad mood, I love turning this song on and just going for a longggg run, hitting the replay button on my MP3 player everytime the song finishes for miles.

2. Akon - I'm so paid (Feat. Lil Wayne) - Basically what I wrote for 'Whatever You Like' applies for this song as well. Good contemplative song, great running song. I ran 7.25 miles earlier in the week basically by just playing this song on loop.

Favorite Line : "I get in 'til sunrise, Doing 90 in a 65, Windows rolled down screaming 'ahhhhh', Hey, ey, ey, I'm so paid"

I also find if I'm listening to this song, I'm not in the mood for talking. I spend a lot of my time thinking, and if you interrupt my thinking I usually get unreasonably annoyed. So if you ever experience that, I apologize in advance, I don't mean anything by it.

1. T.I. - Live Your Life (Ft. Rihanna) - This one edges out the past two by a slim margin to become my favorite song of the week. T.I. is pretty much the man. Mad props to him and Rihanna for taking an internet phenomenon (the Numa Numa song) and make a hit song out of it. If I'm shooting around at the gym, I like to have this song playing. So when I'm missing 85% of my shots like usual, this song makes me not care in the least, because I am (here it comes...) just living my life.

Favorite Line : "I'm the opposite of moderate, immaculately polished with the spirit of a hustler and the swagger of a college kid, allergic to the counterfeit, impartial to the politics, articulate but still'll grab a nig** by the collar quick"

Then when Rihanna comes in with her part at the end, just icing on the cake.

Well that ends that. I should have been studying for finals for the past 45 minutes, but this made me feel better. Some of it was probably a bit on the sappy/emo side, so sorry for that, but then again, it's always good to know that I'm just not a cold-hearted, cynical, angry bastard.

End of Classes

2008-12-04T11:49:00.005-05:00

Well I finished up classes yesterday afternoon. I still have my finals next week, but as far as routine classes go, I be done. It feels pretty good, and I'm excited for the upcoming week. We have our last football game of the year, and then I have Hurricanes open house on sunday which I am absolutley pumped for. On top of that, I've actually gotten some studying done during the week so I'm not going to be freaking out as much. Being the end of the semester, I guess it's time to reflect. I've learned a few lessons of the semester, so I suppose I'll share some of them with you.

1. Most of class is a waste of time. I've been figuring this is the case for awhile now, but I really haven't confirmed it until I was able to bring my laptop to class with me. Woody Allen once said, "80% of success is just showing up", and I think that applies to my classes quite well. Showing up and paying attention for five minutes will essentially get you that 80, the 20 extra points is either paying attention for the full 75 minute class period, or an extra hour of studying before the exam. I typically choose the latter of those options, and it has worked out very well. This isn't to say that I've been skipping classes, because I still haven't skipped a class in 5 semesters. Either way, it brings me to my next point.

2. Class is the most productive time of my day. One would think this counters my first point, time to drop some knowledge on yo' ass. Again, thanks to the wonders of a laptop, I've transformed class into some wonderfully productive times. I've been expanding my horizons in all manners of life. During the hour so of each class where I don't feel the need to tune in, I am still learning. I've planned trips, worked out my course of study for next semester, learned to deal with shin splints while running, bought shoes, bought games, made my christmas list, learned to use microsoft excel, wrote the majority of this blog, created a fantasy basketball rating spreadsheet with that aforementioned excel knowledge, accidentally looked up porn while searching "Sarah Palin" in google images with 'Safe Search' off, downloaded movies, bought stock, caught up on 30 Rock and House, kept in touch with my friends and family, managed my finances, kept up to date with all my favorite sports teams, and myriad other things. Either way, class has made me a more complete person, mostly because of what I do while not paying attention. It's a bit of a goal of mine to be at least proficient in everything I attempt, and class facilitates that dream.

3. Class is the best time to people watch. It's great to watch the habits of your fellow peers and professors when they don't think anyone is watching them. Essentially, it's stalking, but it's okay because we're in the same room. It's fun to see people develop relationships with the people around them. They make small talk in the beginning of the semester, and by the end of it, they're sharing their life story. It's pretty sketchy, AND pretty cool. A twofer.

4. Turn the volume down on your cell phone. I really don't care if my cell phone or someone elses cell phone goes off in class. In fact, I love when "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" comes blasting out of someones backpack. So why would I turn down the volume? Well... Going back to lesson number three about people watching, I noticed that my finance professor liked to wear the same orange sweater, every. single. day... So I was planning to write a blog entry about it, and to provide evidence to back up my point, I was taking pictures of him with my cell phone during class. (Again, typing this makes me looks like the ultimate sketch... but what can you do?) Anyway, everything was going great, I got three pictures without incident, but then the fourth one came. It was in the middle of class, and I pulled out my cell phone, pretended I was typing a text message, and took apicture. Well the digitized sound of a shutter snapping that the phone makes carries very well on the "Very High" volume setting. My heart rate went from about 65 to 200 as everyone in the room looked at me. I tried to play it off like I had hit the wrong button, but it was pretty freakin' obvious. My B, My B.

I'm sure there are a ton of other things I could write about, but I don't want to make this too long, so I'll just round out with rule number 5.

5. Don't smoke crack.

In other news, I ran a lot of miles this week, 7.25 on tuesday, and then 4.7 on wednesday. On thursday, my legs were absolutley shot, but I still wanted to do something physical. I decided to try swimming laps in the pool at the gym. Don't get me wrong, I can swim, but only recreationally I guess, swimming laps is not my forte. I cannot swim at a slow pace without drowning. So I had to go at a pretty fast clip, but I exhausted myself very quickly. And I can't tell you how many times I thought I was in the shallow end of a pool when I tried to stand, but then come to find out, when I'm 4 feet underwater trying to breathe, that I was in the 12 foot end of the pool.

I was trying to find that drowning warning label of a child falling into a 5-gallon bucket to go with this blog entry. My google search of "5 gallon baby bucket drown" didn't turn up what I wanted, but I did get this picture which I find hilarious. Click on it to see it clearly.

Week 3 Wrapup

2008-11-30T12:12:00.003-05:00

A few of my roommates and I run a 4-team Fantasy Basketball Team, and I decided to write a mock wrap-up of the past weeks fantasy basketball action. Most of it probably won't make sense to you if you aren't involved, but I thought I'd post it here anyway because I like it.

Here we go:

A lopsided week 3 is coming to an end. T1ttyphuckers09 is dominating The 555 deal is rare, and not much in the way of the score is expected to change. Meanwhile, The Norse Valkyries wiped the floor with Team Fuck You Ortiz. All of Fuck You Ortiz nation is shouting "Fuck you Ortiz", as they become increasingly annoyed with the lack of personnel changes within the organization. They are baffled as to why manager Stephen Ortiz, continues to send out injured players onto the floor, while leaving perennial all-stars like Amare Stoudemire and Danny Granger glued to the bench. If Ortiz's neglect of the team continues, it has been rumored that rival manager Rory Pickens, of T1ttyphuckers09, will take control of the team. No official word from either manager has been received however.

Week 3 has shown less movement then past weeks, but there has still been some movement worth noting. The Norse Valkyrie's cut Andrew Bynum, for continuing to be a pain in the ass and sucking up a roster spot while putting out mediocre numbers. Shortly thereafter, Bynum aggravated a foot injury, likely from stamping the floor in a post-firing temper tantrum. Manager Matthew Sparzo of The 555 Deal is Rare dropped Kevin Martin in favor of David Lee. Kevin Martin has been injured since essentially the start of the season. Now that he is within a few days of returning to the line-up, Sparzo decides that NOW is the best time to cut him. Fans are puzzled as to why they let him sit injured on the bench for two weeks, and then drop him when he is finally returning. The switch coul dhave easily been made two weeks ago, but Matthew Sparzo insists he has a winning strategy and will continue to operate the team as he sees fit. If we take David Lee's stats from the past 24 hours and extend it over the rest of the season, David Lee will contribute 38 points a night and 17 rebounds, and cruise to become league MVP. Unfortunately, if we take the season averages, and assume those continue instead, he is looking at 14 points, 9 rebounds a game. When confronted with these statistics, The 555 Deal is Rare spokesman, manager, and owner, Matthew Sparzo replied, "I'm just taking it one day at a time."

He sure is.

The league standings will likely go unchanged. The Norse Valkyries will likely pick up a game or two on t1ttyphuckers09, and The 555 Deal is Rare will inch closer to the third spot occupied by Team Fuck You Ortiz.

We look forward to next week for a repeat of the exhibition week games. Chris Paul and The Norse Valkyries face off against David Lee and The 555 Deal is Rare, while LeBron James and T1ttyphuckers09 squares off against the empty roster spots of Fuck You Ortiz.

TO -- OUT

Doing Nothing

2008-11-24T22:21:00.003-05:00

I think that today is the first day in a long time, possibly even a couple years, where I genuinely did not have anything to do. It was an absolutley glorious day. It's not something I'd like to replicate on a daily basis, but it was a treat. I didn't have to go anywhere, I didn't have to see anyone, I didn't have to go to work, I didn't have any work to do, and there was nothing looming over me.

It sounds pretty dumb, but I feel revitalized and alive. I typically do a lot of thinking throughout the course of a day, constantly mulling things over and assessing each and every situation that I've encountered or plan to encounter, but today there was a minimum of that. I woke up in my brand new bed--which is very comfortable if you care to know--got up and ate some cheerios in front of SportsCenter on TV. I proceeded to kill zombies for a bit in a new game I bought just for this thanksgiving break, Left 4 Dead. That was good fun. I went for a solid run to the center of town and back. I went to a deli in the next town over and got some delicious lunch. After that, I did do some chores, but I didn't mind doing it, and I didn't actually have to do it. All I had to do was fill up our hatchway with wood. A quick 30-minutes and I was back to killing zombies. I watched a Ocean's Thirteen, and just sat around for awhile surfing the web.

The past paragraph probably wasn't very entertaining to read, because none of those things were particularly exciting, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If you ever get the chance to have a day where you legitimately have nothing to interfere with yourself, take it. I don't mean taking a day off of work, or skipping class, because that's not the same, you're still thinking about it. It's not something you can plan I guess, just something that happens.

The night is rounding out nicely as well, my fantasy basketball team is tearing it up, and the UConn men are about to win the Paradise Jam tournament, they're shaping up to be a great team this year. Alright, I got to go throw some more logs on the fire, the temperature seems to dipped below 75, far too chilly for my tastes.

Champions

2008-11-21T00:37:00.003-05:00

Tonight we had our last intramural basketball game. Contrary to what the title of the entry would suggest, we got dominated. Bad Newz Kennelz never got it going tonight and we got blown, excuse me, blowed out. It was a good run though. I finish our three game run with 5 points, and a ton of solid hustle minutes. On the plus side, I got to take a full court shot at the buzzer. The 75-footer was on target, but it sailed OVER the backboard. It didn't go in, but I was impressed that I could throw that far. So where does champions come in you my ask?

We went across the street to the Student Union and got some dranks and food. I wasn't planning on going back to the room just yet, so I headed to the ESPN lounge as I like to call it and began eating my mashed potatoes. I thought the rest of the guys had gone back to the room, but I get a text message a few minutes later from Rory,

"I'm at the MK [mariokart] tournament but no one joined me"

My interest was immediately piqued. We had all seen the fliers in our building about the mariokart tournanment, but none of us though that our intramural game would get out in time. I forgot about it until I got the text message. I decided to toss the potatoes and head upstairs to room 304B for some hot mariokart action.

Turns out there was a $5 dollar entry fee, I didn't have any money or my debit card to get money out. Rory had borrowed five bucks from Steve, and didn't have any more cash. But being the great friend that he is, he gave me his debit card, and pin number. I ran down to the ATM got my cash money and headed back upstairs. GAMETIME.

I knew that Rory and I were good, but we've never really tested our skills on anyone outside our suite, so we couldn't be sure. We had sometime to warm-up, and it was clear that we had the serious edge. The format of the tournament was a best of three races, 1v1, deathmatch. Rory entered his first match and easily swept it 2-0, leading by more than a 1/4 lap in each race. My first match was shortly thereafter, and I picked the races we were to do out of a hat. I drew Rainbow Road, Wario Stadium, and Frappe snowland. I was annoyed, and a bit worried. Rainbow Road, and Wario are some of my least favorite races, and by far the two longest in the game. A lot could go wrong in a lot of time.

Rainbow Road was up first. The items favored him at first and got him an early advantage. But it was a clear that I was the superior racer. I used solid racing, and clutch weapon usage to regain the lead within a quarter of a lap, and then led wire to wire from that point on. The nerves I had going were eased a bit, and we headed into Wario Stadium. Wario Stadium is a race with a jump where you can fall in between and lose a lot of ground. In a 1v1 match, it could easily decide the race if someone gets a lightning. He got a lightning first, but in novice fashion, he blew it to early and didn't really do anything. I drew the magic bolt next, and when the jump came, I sent him careening over the edge. Not to be outdone, he received one on the next set of boxes, and I got a mushroom. He though he'd be all clever and wait until the jump and send me off and win the race. At this point, I did, what Rory coined as, "Mindfucked" him. The jump was coming up, and to avoid the same fate that he suffered two laps earlier, braked at the top of the jump. He didn't take the bait and it was a Colombian standoff. I hesitated for a few seconds, and then popped the mushroom and went flying over the jump. His reaction time was to slow, he popped the lightning but it was too late and I got over and coasted to victory. Game, set, match.

It was smooth sailing from that point on, I never lost a race and beat everyone by about a half lap. I was satisfied to discover that two hours a day for three years of my college career hadn't gone to waste. Eventually I found my way to the finals with Rory, who also hadn't lost a race, and a girl by the name of Heather. Heather seemed like a nice girl, but she clearly was not on the same level as us. She had some skill, but she was like Craig Austrie, a solid college bball player, and we were Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, NBA allstars. It was first to three wins who would win it all, and then the next one to three who would get second. Unfortunately for Heather, she got six thirds, but she held her own and was pretty solid. Rory and I battled for top kicks. Rory won the first race, I won the second, but he cleaned up the next two for the crown. I won the next two over Heather for second.

The prize for first and second were the same, a big bowl of candy and chips were granted to us for our exploits. We proudly walked back in the freezing cold, displaying our delicious trophy for all to see. Rory offered up some of his candy to a group of girls standing around in the lobby of our dorm building. They walked away satisfied, appreciative, and aware of the legends that are Rory and I. We finished the walk upstairs, and feasted.

It feels good to be a champion.

Boredom Fueled Hilarity

2008-11-20T09:43:00.003-05:00

Last night was one of those nights where after 9 o'clock rolled around, I was ready to just climb into bed and call it a night. Earlier in the evening, our intramural basketball team, 'Bad Newz Kennelz', beat the 'Psi Stars' 51-21. We then went back and ate dinner and watched basketball for a few hours. Surprisingly, I made it to around 11 o'clock, which was about the same time that Sparzo decided to take a shower.

Steve, Rory, and myself were sitting around when Rory said.

"Wanna fuck with Sparzo?"

"YES!" Steve said without hesitation

"Lets use the cans in the whale-condom" I added.

It was a full-team effort already. I grabbed the whale-condom--which is just one of those enormous clear garbage bags that some people collect leaves in, but we use it to collect our diet soda cans--which was filled with about 3 to 400 soda cans from the past couple weeks. We walked into the bathroom and surveyed the situation. I was doing my best not to crinkle the huge bag and make a ton of noise. Sparzo must've heard something because he says,

"Hey T.O.! Can I get some tunes?"

"Why certainly" I responded with a genuine smile.

Sparzo was doing his best to facilitate our ploy as we cranked some random song on the IPod that's in the bathroom. We regrouped for a minute to discuss the plan and then went to work. Steve went in and crawled under the stall to unlock the door--there are really two doors to get to the shower-- so we had better access to the shower itself. I hesitate for a moment and then burst into the stall and hoist the bag over my head.

He barely managed to yell, "Hey... WHAT?!" as a tidal wave of cans poured into the shower. The noise it made could easily be heard through the building, but the noise of our hysterical laughter was probably comparable. We cranked the volume on the IPod all the way and blasted our way out of the bathroom, shut the doors, and turned off the lights. We went back into our room and waited. You could hear him trying to kick the hundreds of cans out of the shower so he could at least finish. After about 10 minutes you hear the shower shut off, and then him trying to wade through the cans in the dark to get out. He comes out of the bathroom, stops dead in the his tracks, turns his head to us and says,

"Yea.... that was pretty funny"

Since he was such a good sport about it, we took it upon ourselves to clean up the mess.

No Class

2008-11-18T09:25:00.004-05:00

First things first (what a dumb statement), we went to Syracuse for the UConn-Syracuse football game last saturday. It had its ups and downs. I'm always a fan of UConn football, so I enjoyed the game. The real downer was the bus ride up. 6+ hours both ways sucked a bit. We didn't get back until 4:30am, but it wasn't the worst thing ever.

The game itself was a blowout in UConn's favor. We looked pretty tenative during the first quarter, and I wasn't sure how we were going to do. On the plus side, Tyler Lorenzen, our 1st-string quarterback who has been injured for the past two months, finally came back. I don't know what it is with him, but whenever he plays, he usually doesn't do that well, but we usually win. UConn is now 15-4 in games where he starts. He was 7-for-15 for like 75 yards, but he ran for a bunch, and opened the game up enough for our running backs to do work. Defense and special teams had a great game, getting a safety, a couple interception returns for touchdowns. All enroute to a 39-10 UConn victory. It's really cool going to an away game when you're the visiting team, it's just a really cool atmosphere. The Carrier Dome, where Syracuse plays, was dissapointing. It's a very concrete-heavy structure, it's very dreary and orange, and it was never more than half full. It's like the crowd was in a coma for most of the game too. This is the program that spawned Donovan McNabb and Marvin Harrison in recent years, and myriad other NFL greats from the past. They've fallen quite a bit in recent years.

Anyway, the band performed okay, when we did our little joint-performance with Syracuse, the guy conducting in front completely missed a spot where we were supposed to hold a note for 4 beats, but the back guy didn't. It was a pretty horrendous tear, but I doubt anyone in the stands even realized, so all is well. The Syracuse band was mad classy, they cheered for their team, and even cheered for us after it was all over. Props to them for that.

I didn't get a picture of the UConn-Syracuse formation, but my friend got this picture that I quite like.

Circling back now to the title of this post... I got an e-mail from my Business Information Systems professor, and this is what it read:

"Hey there,

According to the reliable source, it's gonna be very very cold
tomorrow. Can we just cancel the class and stay warm at home? :-)

...

I figure we
can finish the rest stuff in 3 classes and therefore there is no need
to do a make-up class. If you guys don't mind, let's just take a break
tomorrow and see you guys Thursday.

BTW, I don't grade the exam yet since I need to prepare for this
meeting. I'll do it during the thanksgiving break.

Thank you for your understanding. Enjoy the last week before the
thanksgiving break."

Answer to the first question : I suppose we could

I like how he goes on to apologize, and says things like "if you guys don't mind, let's just take a break" and "thank you for understanding". I understand completely, I understand that I'm going back to my room after my first class and playing video games for 4 hours.

Going to Syracuse

2008-11-13T09:59:00.006-05:00

As you may or may not know, I'm in the UConn marching band. I never intended to join in when I applied to the university in 2005, but here in 2008, I'm in my third year of being it. I knew that I wanted to be in the pep band, because I was a huge UConn basketball fan. Then I found out that the pep band draws mostly from the marching band. Alas, I made the decision to join. It's turned out to be a great choice, I've met some pretty awesome people, learned to love UConn football--and all football in general for that matter--, and got to take some pretty sweet trips.

Well this weekend will mark the first week that we're going to an away football game. Many universities, mostly the big ones, like USC, go to all their football away games. But not being a big football school, we're not going to do that anytime soon. So this weekend, we're making the 6+ hour bus ride up to Syracuse, NY, where right now it is 47 degrees and raining. Not bad, considering I was expecting it to be snowing, and it's only 42 degrees here in Storrs. Either way, it doesn't really matter because they play in a dome. But, I'm pretty stoked.

We're going to do part of our halftime show, and then syracuse will bring their band on the field with us, and we'll do something together I think, and then they'll do theres. It's always pretty cool to see another band, and even though their is not judging, it's almost like a competition and everyone usually brings their A game. West Virginia brought their band to our last home game, and even though their football team destroyed us... again... it was still pretty cool. This was the end result:

If I can get a picture of us at the carrier dome, I'll put it up here too.

Sleep Talking

2008-11-09T22:25:00.002-05:00

Over the years, I've come to find that I really don't remember my dreams ever. I'm always jealous when someone recounts their crazy-ass dreams. Whether it's them playing Mariokart with Barack Obama--apparently he kicked our asses--, or them playing little league baseball with BJ Upton, I envy them. But what I lack in remembering dreams, I certainly make up for in sleep walking and talking.

Apparently, I like to showcase my profanity during my sleeping hours. What comes out of my mouth during my sleep, is eerily similar to what I'm yelling while playing mariokart. Let me explain that a bit... My friends and I are MarioKart64 experts, and when we make the smallest dumb mistake, or we get edged at the end of a race, we can get pretty heated, and yell some things. I'm probably the worst of everybody, because I seem to have a random swear generator going in my head. My understanding is that it basically consists of three lists. The first list is filled with generic swear prefix like, "Holy", "Jesus", as well as typical swear words. Then the other two lists are just lists of every swear I know. Basically when I mess up in my mariokart, the swear generator kicks in, and out comes out a three word phrase like "Jesus Balls Cock" or "Motherfuckin' bitch tits". What I really like is that the swear generator will malfunciton and get two words from the same list... like "Holy shit shit", and I'm so surprised when it happens.

I've been told by numerous people that I swear in my sleep. One of my friends from back home told me I was over his house once and I just started yelling "FUCK FUCK FUCK!" over and over again. That's a little disturbing, and makes me wonder what the hell I'm dreaming about. There have been many other instances of me just yelling out swears in my sleep. Sounds like sleep tourettes to me. My favorite one: one of my roommates told me that it was about three in the morning, and I just started talking... "I'm black, I'm black, I'm black! No... I'm white, now I'm black!"... I bet that was a quality dream.

I've also had some epic sleep walking episodes, but words can't do that any type of justice at this time. Those who were there in that Washington DC hotel room will never forget...

Recent Developments

2008-11-05T09:16:00.003-05:00

So Barack Obama is going to be the next president. That's pretty exciting in a number of ways. I actually voted for McCain-Palin for a variety of reasons, but I'm not overly devestated that Obama won. I had solid reasons to vote for McCain, but maybe a change of pace isn't the worst thing for the country. The United States's international 'street cred' has significantly declined over the past eight years, and if McCain was elected, that was not going to change, regardless of what he did. With the election of Obama, people around the world, for at least a day or two, will "like" America again. It will probably fade in time, but hey, I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

The country has become stagnant for quite some time now with congress in a virtual deadlock and Bush doing nothing but living the dream for the last of his second term. Obama getting elected will stir the pot, and get politics going again. The Republicans have four years to regroup themselves after a devestating loss in the house, senate, and presidential offices, so that'll be exciting in the future as well. I just hope I don't have to listen to the issue of "race" for the next four years. That's not what Obama based his platform on, and it's not really what won him the election, but for the past 12 hours of news coverage that I've watched, that's all I've heard, people ignore the issues they've been debating for months and are talking only about Obama being black.

The reaction to Obama getting elected has been a bit obscene from what I've witnessed. There were people parading around campus last night--and you all know how much I hate parades--chanting "Obama" and "USA"... I don't get that... It's incredibly awkward, and you could be spending that time listening to the acceptance speech of the man you just helped become president. But that's okay.

But that brings up another thing... Who is the schmuck that always starts the 'USA' chant at any event that is remotely related to America... During McCain's concession speech last night, after a few bouts of "booing" from the crowd because Obama won and the response "My friends, please" from McCain, you can hear one guy start it up.... "U...S...A.... U...S...A" and everyone starts to join in. I don't get it! I love the USA, but that chant is not going anywhere. I'm tempted to see how effective it is in my Finance class in a few minutes. Professor Vasanth will walk in, "You guys did pretty poorly on the exam".... awkward silence.... "U...S...A...! U...S...A...!".... Alright, I guess that would be pretty thrilling, I can see where those guys are coming from.

As I've told a few other people, the real loser in this election is comedy. I was hoping for four more years of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, and a deluge of maverick references at every corner. Obama isn't really that exciting to make fun of, he doesn't make verbal miscues very often, and Biden is even worse--except when he talks in the third person, JOE BIDEN LOVES JOE BIDEN--. The guy they have playing Obama now on SNL is servicable at best... It'll be a rough four years.

In other news, somebody decided to break into my car. Well, by break into I mean, opened the unlocked door. I don't really keep anything of value in my car, and it's worth the convienence to me to leave it unlocked. Well apparently, my mp3 radio transmitter that I got for $2.75 is of value to somebody. Well at least some of it, apparently they didn't want the power adapter they need to make it work. Only reason I knew someone had broken in, is because half the contents of my glove compartment were on the floor of my car. So it was a major inconvience more than anything else.... The hour and a half ride back home to go vote was quite music-less as a result, and my trust in humanity took a major hit. I got a replacement at home though, so all is well once again.

Parades and Dorm Warfare

2008-11-03T07:54:00.012-05:00

I marched in the veteran's day parade in Hartford yesterday with the UConn marching band. It was alright, I've never been the biggest fan of parades ever since this past summer that I spent with the Hurricanes. In Hurcs this past July 4th weekend, we were headed down to Manassas, VA, for a drum corps competition. I got up around 4 in the morning, caught the bus around 5:30, and then we were on our way. On the way down, we did three parades in 90+ degree heat, and we rolled into the competition site around 6:30. On a typical competition day you'll normally have about 7 hours of rehearsal, from about 10 - 5. Clearly we didn't have it on this day. We were all exhausted as we ran off the bus and set up on the field for 45 minutes of last-second preparation. We set up the opening set on the practice field and then the sprinklers went off. We needed the practice, and we typically take showers before the show anyway, so we rehearsed in the sprinklers! That's when I started to dislike parades.
But there is still one thing that I enjoy about doing parades. Marching over bridges. It's sounds dumb, but I feel like a bad ass motherfucker (BAMF) everytime I march over one. It's like we've conquered the town, and we're marching in, just to show everyone who is boss. I can see why people invade countries, it's thrilling to conquer them! So I'm just throwing this out there now... I want to invade countries when I'm older. I'm thinking of dropping this accounting major gig, and picking up an individualized major, that I like to call, Territorial Reconciliation. It'll go nicely with my "bounty hunting" minor too. This statement pretty much ends any chances of myself being elected to public office, because this blog will be relentlessly waved in my face at the most inconvienent of times to show the voters that I am "off my rocker", but what can you do? I'll tell ya what I can do, take it by force baby! Viva la revolution.

And while we're on the topic of invasion/warfare, I'd like to talk about this weekend a little bit. This weekend was pretty much a wash as far as productive things are concerned, but it contained a lot of value in other areas.

It was Saturday evening, I was exhausted, and pretty much ready to fall asleep aronud 9:30. The earlier portion of the day was spent at the UConn-West Virginia football game, where we got annihilated for our first loss at home since my freshman year. Losses in any of our UConn sports usually tire me out quite a bit for some reason. Anyway, it was also around 9:30 when my roommate came into the room holding our Frankenstein bucket that had previously been loaded with candy. It wasn't so loaded anymore, only containing about 20 small boxes of Nerds. They aren't bad candy, but they're certainly nothing to write home about. So Steve walks in with the container... and for some reason starts throwing the nerds in the air and trying to catch them in the bucket again. He misses a few and they crash to the floor. It was at that time I said.

"You WON'T pick those up and throw them at Rory"

I picked up a container and underhand tossed it in Rory's direction, to little effect, I was off by about a furlong, and I thought it was over. But apparently, Steve took my "you won't" personally, as an orange box of nerds came rocketing by my head at mach speed, and explodes against the wall like a frag greande behind Rory in a glorious blaze of orange nerd glory. My thought process went something like this. "WOW... Did not see that coming... game over, that's going to take forever to clean..." Thought process ended right there as the box that I threw earlier came flying back towards us and exploded against the wall closest to me.

Primal instinct kicked in, I dove into the closet and my roommate retreated into the bathroom. Teams were formed, it was Steve and I, versus Rory and Sparzo, to the death. The Adrenaline was coarsing threw my veins as I army crawled towards the bucket filled with the remaining nerves. We made our best impersonations of Jonathon Papelbon by using our laser-rocket arms and gassing containers of nerds like 98-mph fastballs at each other. The sounds of nerds raining down from the exploding containers was constant. Only glancing blows were scored for the first few volleys of the war, but hten I grabbed a container, jumped out from the closet, squared up and rocketed a pack of nerds into Rory's ribs. The thud was sickening as he collapsed to his bed in pain.

In warfare though, pain fades quickly and is replaced by rage. Rory quickly recovered and threw an empty vitamin water bottle in retaliation, making a loud pop against the back wall as I dove back into the relative safety of the closet. Things escalated quickly, and nerds were suddenly the least of our worries. Steve grabbed the folding table we had in the bathroom as a shield, as we both dodged a folding chair that came screaming by. n We threw whatever was in reach at each other. Battlefield courtesy degraded quickly as Rory turned on Sparzo and engaged in a hand to hand struggled. Steve scowled the room for the next power weapon. He reached for a box of CapriSun, to find that there was one left in the box. He quickly discarded the box and threw the CapriSun at Rory. It hit the wall, and Rory recovered. I was getting ready to hurl a bottle as a silver flash went past my eyes. It was the caprisun pouch. It hit the wall with such force that the silver lining, that to this day I struggle to puncture with a straw, ruptured and exploded all over the room. The air was rank with the smell of 'Atlantic Cooler' and we all knew the battle was over.

We emerged from our makeshift fox holes and discovered the damage that had been done. There was white and orange nerds everywhere, several chairs and large objects were scatted across the floor in the most random of places. Everyone survived, but there were no winners in this war. Just an enormous amount of hilarity.

This spontaneous war, was some of the best fun I've had in many, many years. It was an absolute thrill, and I'm sure that it will happen again sometime soon. It took about an hour to clean up, and the pile of trash that we accumulated magically dissapeared..... Later when we left our rooms we found that some assholes had swept a bunch of wet nerds, paper, and dirt into the hallway and spread it all over the rug so that you couldn't tell which room it had come out of... Unbelievable.

Test of Endurance

2008-10-29T10:03:00.006-04:00

Last night, I was looking to go to bed around 11:30pm. Though when 11:30 rolled around, I asked myself, "Really, what IS the difference between 11:30 and 5:30am?".
^ That's AM! ^ I brought it upon myself I suppose, but it exceeded my wildest expectations. Yesterday, I had a managerial accounting exam from 6:30 - 8:30pm, I had been studying for that for the past few days, and really hadn't paid attention to an income tax project that I had due this morning at 8am. The project was a series of complicated tax returns with lots of little details that are very easy to get wrong. With these tax returns, you're so nicely given 'check figures' along the way, just to make sure your on the right path. Well I more often found myself in the jagged rocks at the bottom of a boundless chasm, than anywhere near this mystical pathway to success. I would've rather they not give us these check figures. That way, when I hit the enter button my calculator, bringing together 30 minutes of intense tax research and formula-crunching, I would be abysmally wrong! But I wouldn't know that, and I would feel like I accomplished something. I'd be able to live the high life for two weeks until I got the assignment back with a big shiny D on it. But we'll let bygones be bygones.

So it's shaping up to be one of those weeks from hell. Today won't be too bad except for the fact I'm dead tired. I'll just be sitting here and realize that I've completely zoned out and do not remember anything that happened in the past 10 minutes. Quite an interesting phenomenon. Even looking at the clock now, it's 10:30, that means I've been in class for an hour, and only have 15 minutes left. I feel like I just got here.

I also was going to write about something else, but I can't even remember what it was... Oh well, maybe after I get some sleep!

A Couple of Cool Things

2008-10-28T09:35:00.007-04:00

So late last night at around 10:45pm, I set off on what turned out to be my best run ever. I've been running quite a bit lately, and last week I was getting pretty discouraged because I was getting exhausted very quickly. When I ran last friday, I hardly ran more than a mile before I was winded and had shooting pains in my shins. I shut it down for the weekend. To rest, for one, and also because I had a bunch of other stuff to keep me busy. i.e. UConn vs. Cincinatti football game, where we smoked them 41-10! Woo! And we're now bowl-eligible, but that's a whole other topic altogether. Anyway, I started this run on monday night, not sure how it was going to go.

Well let me tell you, I busted out the best run of my life. I guess resting really is all it is cracked up to be. I kept running, and I simply did not get tired. I took a lot of random turns, and random roads just so I could keep going for a bit longer. When I finally got back to my dorm later, I was running just short of a sprint, I pulled up to the door, took two quick breaths, and bam, I wasn't out of breath in the least. Quite a turn around. Sorry, if this seems like bragging, but it felt so great being able to do this. I guess this is one of those "small victories in life" that I never really understood. And besides, no one actually reads this blog, besides myself, a few others (thanks!), so as a primary shareholder in my own blog, I vote that it's okay.

Anyway, that's not what I was going to originally write about, but it's related. One of my friends showed me that you could make maps on google maps that don't have to follow the roads, but it will still calculate distance and all that. Basically, if you run, and you run through a random path in the woods or something, you can just draw a line across the path on google maps and it'll calculate it. I guess a picture is worth a thousand words... or at the very least a baker's dozen words.

That's the map last night after my killer run. It's a pretty lengthy path around and through campus, but it was very nice. And that random line that juts out near the bottom, is a road that I went on for the first time. If you're familiar with campus, it's the road that goes past Shenkman, Morrone Stadium, and the baseball fields. Well I never went down it before, but all the lights began to dissapear, and the road was winding in places that I did not expect. I thought I was going to get raped, armed robbed, or mauled by a bear. Turns out, none of the above happened because I turned around. But me and my brutal fighting skills that I've acquired living on the frontier that is Bethlehem, CT, were ready to take down any threat that came my way. And the big loop up top, is where I live/where I started from. You can see that I went around the parking lot a couple times at the end so I could finish a song I was listening too. So anyway, I calculated my run up, and woah! 6.6 miles! That's definitely a new record for me, and for all of last night it made me forget all about the exam I have in a few hours, and the countless hours that I'll be spending after that exam working on a project that's due tomorrow morning. Hell yea! So if you want to use that features on google maps... I think you just have to log in/make an account with google, and then go to my maps, and go to "create map" pretty cool.

Well this post is getting pretty lengthy(I have to pay attention in class, I'm learning about forecasting again, and there are symbols on the board I didn't know existed), so I'll shore up the second cool thing pretty quickly. Last week, we went to walmart, on the way we played the hot and cold game (either roll up the windows and blast the heat, or roll down the windows and blast the AC), then bought a shitload of candy, and a gross of diet soda. 12 12-packs of diet soda, 144 cans. Well, needless to say, that was last tuesday, and now it's almost gone. But! We've decided to put our addiciton to a productive use and construct things from our empty cans. Our first project was to build a magazine stand(pictured below) for our bathroom stall. Well we used all the cans we'd saved from the previous day and made that. And in the four hours after I finished that and I went to bed, there were about another 25 cans ready to be used. Which made us wonder... What next? Magazine stand today... Empire State Building Replica tomorow baby!!

We're going to build an enormous tower of cans in the corner of our room, and it will be glorious! People will come from near and far, we're going to charge admission so we can afford to get more diet soda to move on to more ambitious projects. Space travel is not out of the question.

Success!

2008-10-23T10:09:00.006-04:00

Ladies and Gentleman... We got him, and by 'him', I don't mean Saddam Hussein, I was just trying to capture the momentous occasion that just happened. I really didn't get anyone, instead I finished something I've been working on for a couple weeks. At 10:07am, during my OPIM3014 class, I completed the final level of Bloons Tower Defense III on hard. There are a total of eight levels, and each one presents a unique challenge that you have to overcome in order to beat the level on hard. Easy and medium are a piece of cake, but in hard you are constantly strapped for cash, and you really have to work.

I first played the game a few weeks ago, and it quickly grew into an obsession. It's what I do when I'm not writing a blog post or randomly surfing the internet in class. The experience has really taught me to multitask. I can now focus in class exactly when I need to, and do other things when I don't. My grades haven't dropped at all, and in fact, I think I am doing better, because it sort of kicks my mind into overdrive and makes me think more in short bursts. Typically, I'd just sit in class and become more and more comatose and pay less and less attention as my energy level begins to fade. Plus, sometimes I think I don't even need to go to class, but I do anyway... just to learn about "Queue management". Yeap, that's waiting in line. I'm learning that if you have a line, and you add another person to serve the people in those line, the line will move faster. Groundbreaking! Look at that, I've also affected somebody else in my class. The girl sitting next to me isn't paying attention either, and I just looked over at her laptop, and she as well, is playing Bloons Tower Defense!

I just tuned back in for about 30 seconds, and I'm learning about forecasting. I've just learned that forecasting is predicting what will happen in the future. Fantastic. I just took a peak ahead in the powerpoint slides for "forecasting" and there are a few gems in there. My favorite out of the 114 freakin' slides, is number 12.

Sorry, I don't trust the shady man in the black sweater, wearing his sunglasses in a professional business environemnt. The man in the suit is likely an undercover cop investigating this guy for stalking 15-year-old girls in chatrooms. Good luck in taking down that scumbag officer!

Addictive things

2008-10-21T10:24:00.003-04:00

I've lived with essentially the same group of people for the past three years, and I've really begun to notice that we, and by we, I mostly mean Steve (my roommate) and myself, really get out of control with certain foods/drinks/games to the point of unhealthy addiction.

Our latest kick is diet soda. I think the roots of it began when I brought back some diet soda with some regular sugar-packed soda that I bought while it was on sale. We slowly chipped away at it, and it was pretty slammin'. The fad died for awhile until Sparzo (suitemate) brought back some DMDCR--diet mountain dew code red--. Let me tell you, that stuff is phenomenal, and it's not available anywhere in New England. You have to get it from Maryland or Delaware and bring it back up. We plowed through that pretty quick until Sparzo laid down the hammer and said we couldn't have anymore. So we got our own diet soda. We got two things of diet soda from walmart, and brought them back and put them in the fridge. They quickly began to dissapear. Within the week they were completely wiped out. We've slowly built our addiciton up to the point where we make emergency trips down the street to CVS, and buy 4 12-packs of diet soda. Actually, our last trip involved me and steve getting a total of four, and sparzo getting four. The 8 12-packs lasted a week between the three of us, with Steve and I consuming about 80% of it.

We've been out of water in our dorm for 3 weeks, but we've had diet soda on hand at all times. Diet soda is now our water. The penultimate conclusion in this was Steve drinking a 3-liter bottle of diet Rally cola (Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm tassttyyyy) in an hour and a half. He was shakin' a bit by the end of it, but he was able to fall asleep within an hour despite enough caffeine circultaing through his system to kill a small pony.

Diet soda isn't the only thing that has gotten out of control in the past. Other addictions--and it's not limited to juts food--include, Dubble Bubble, Mariokart (about 3 hours a day for the past two years), NBA Live 07 (Current addiction, about 3 hours a day), Super Mario World(got to the point where we'd beat the entire game twice a day), "Hall Ball", Wings, Sgt. Peps, etc. etc.

Pretty ridiculous stuff, and it's definitely not good for us. But you know my motto... Never start a land war in Asia.

Story of my Life

2008-10-20T09:36:00.003-04:00

I'm sitting class right now, angrily typing away at my laptop to the point where people are starting to look at me for typing so loud. For as long as I can remember since I've been in school, consistency is the name of my game. I essentially get the same grade in class on a very consistent basis. In high school, if you look at my term grades they varied about 3 points max over the course of a year. Once a base amount was set for whatever class, that's what I'd get for the whole year. Another thing that consistently happens is dumb ass mistakes. I agonize over the advanced concepts when I'm studying to make sure I don't go into the exam with that dreadful feeling of... "Oh shit, oh shit, I really don't know what I'm doing." And about 95% of the time I'm rip-rarrin' to go. But one thing I always do is make critical mistakes in essential basic skills... such as adding.

The reason I'm angrily typing this post is because I got a 97 on a finance exam. Typically, I'm thrilled with a 97, especially when it's one of the highest grades in the class. I first saw it and I was stoked. Then I flipped through my exam booklet and saw what I lost those 3 points on. I had to split up 70 into two proportions. So I had 25/70 as my first one... and the second one... I guess here is what I did... 70 - 25 = FUCKING FIFTY FIVE?!?? How the hell do I do that? I've always been a freakin' pro at basic adding and subtracting. And apparently on the last question on the exam, my temporal lobe decided to pack it's bag and get loaded on some dopamine. This happens all the time.

I'll get a 100 on the rest of the test, but then come to find out that I skipped an entire page. I've gotten 9 points off on a geometrey test because one of my 6's looked like a degree symbol. It's frustrating as hell.

So remember everybody, 70-25 does not equal 55, it is... in fact, 45. Fuckin' A.

New Things

2008-10-16T10:17:00.002-04:00

Over the past couple years I've really been doing a lot of things that are completely new to me. In high school, I never did any sports or very much physical activity at all... outside of wiffleball. I played a lot of video games, and did a few things here and there, but not much else. Since coming to UConn, I've really expanded my horizon. I started off by doing marching band, something completely new to me. I made some new friends who lived on my floor freshman year--who I now live with--, and began playing pick-up basketball with them on a regular basis. I began to watch ESPN a lot more since everyone else did, I began to seriously enjoy watching football and NBA basketball, and really got into that. My sophomore year, I really started going to gym on semi-regular basis. I played a good amount of basketball, and introduced racquetball to my repetoire. Over this past summer, I joined the Connecticut Hurricanes, a competitive drum and bugle corps. Again, something that was pretty much out of my comfort zone, but it was freakin' awesome regardless, and it made my summer... because it was my summer. This year, I started going to the gym on a more regular basis. I played intramural soccer, and I wasn't as completely terrible as I thought I'd be, apparently I retained some soccer ability from my youth. We made the playoffs, and had a lot of fun.

Yesterday, I ran my first 5k. It was the "Husky Race" or something, basically you just run a 5k with the basketball team. Not really competitive, but again it was something completely new to me. I didn't really know what to expect. I definitely paced myself too slow, because when I finished I wasn't even breathing heavy... whoops. It was a lot of fun, you get a lot of satisfaction out of making yourself suffer, as weird as that sounds. What I was most impressed with was the fact I ran 3.4 miles in 25:10... The top finishers finished in under 20 I believe, but I didn't care. At the end of high school, I would struggle, and I mean struggle, to run just 1 mile in under 10 minutes. I've missed out on doing a lot of things over the past few years, but I still feel great on all the things I've accomplished over the past few years.

Moral of the story, trying new things is awesome, and it opens a lot of doors.

Isn't it funny?

2008-10-13T10:07:00.004-04:00

Here's a post that has nothing to do with my roommate... But maybe that's a good thing?

Ever notice that when something comes your way that you're not completely used to, that you and everyone else freaks out. Not even big things either. Ever have a class where you could use a "cheat sheet"? You can use the cheat sheet for the first two exams, and you're all satisfied in your cocoon of consistecy, and then all of a sudden the professor is like "and for the last exam you can't have a cheat sheet."

You can hear their voice echoing through the massive lecture hall... Then shit... goes... down.... All of a sudden it's chaos... "It's complete bullshit." "That's not fair." "How can you do that?" Everyone freaks out. A wrench is thrown into the gears of your life's machine, and it shows no sign of getting repaired. Let a week pass, and it's not even a big deal anymore, no one cares, and everyone got used to it. Bottom line, people don't like change.

More prominent examples. Facebook. It annoys me to no end when things change and everyone goes insane. Remember the mini-feed/news feed? There was such an incredible backlash from that. People formed entire coalitions against the movement, and it even made national news. Let a week past? People can't live without it. The new facebook? "Woe is me! Facebook is ruined! I'm too incompetent to learn how to deal with change!" Let a week past, turns out, were not all idiots, and that facebook isn't ruined. Everyone adapted just fine, and to be honest, I like the change. Change isn't a big deal, nothing ever really changes that much. Obviously, I'll change nothing with this post. But try and tell yourself, when something out of the norm happens, it'll be okay.

The Sixth Man Part II

2008-10-06T12:35:00.005-04:00

Ever play that game on NES, or PlayStation... Rampage? Well if you aren't familiar with this game, you basically played as king kong or godzilla and destroy buildings. One way they do this is by climbing up the side of the buildings.

Well I go to bed usually pretty early in evening, anywhere from 11pm to 1am. Typically I fall asleep to the lovely sounds of people getting stabbed by Dexter, a character from a show by the same name. My wonderful roommate has consistently tried to tell me how wonderful this show is. It's always, "Check this out". Guess what? I don't want to check it out, I just want to fucking go to bed, okay? "Yea this show is about a sociopath who needs to kill people, and his dad recognized it at a young age, and so he taught him to kill bad people."

Wow, what a great plot for a great show. GREAT show + GREAT plot = S H I T. Anyway, the first night that I fell asleep to this show on was quite a treat. After a few minutes I guess I woke up. I look at the TV and there's a woman saran wrapped to a table in an abandoned house. A creepy guy stands over her with a knife. Plot twist? Nope, he just stabs her to death in a bloody mess... Good Night Tyler, sweet dreams! After the first month though I got used to sleeping through whatever was on the TV. What I didn't get used to however was my roommate climbing in to bed.

Now do we see where Rampage is coming in? I swear, every time he climbs into bed he doesn't it in the most ungraceful, forceful manner imaginable. It's like he just wants a thrill everytime he goes to bed. I don't really get a kick out of rocking the bed back and forth like I'm having sex with an 800-pound gorilla, but hey, who am I to judge?

Wow, I wrote the previous paragraph before getting the picture, but we're coming full circle now. Speaking of the 800-lb gorilla, that will now represnt my roommate. That gray building he climbs represents the bed. I don't know about you, but it's hard to sleep when king kong is rippin' shit down. So every night when he goes to bed around 2 to 3am, I'm awake. Now once he gets into bed it's not over. I can't see him since his bed is bunked above mine. But I can only guess, that every time he turns over he tries to do a 360 degree barrel roll. I constantly wake up in the middle of the night and think to myself... "Wow, why would anyone build a major university on a fault line?" Every morning, I then check the paper, only to find out that, in fact, there was no earthquake the night before. It was just my roommate doing aerial maneuvers in his own bed at 3am.

I would also like to take a picture of the bed frame that is splitting at key structural points, but I'm in class right now, so that's not feasible. Hopefully it doesn't collapse before I get a chance to take one.

The Sixth Man

2008-10-02T20:11:00.003-04:00

Typically I try to make my posts flow in an intelligent manner, but I may lax into a bit of a rambling mess as I rant about this topic. I apologize in advance.

This also may be a bad idea due to the pervasive nature of the internet. Anyone can read this if they find the URL, which typically isn't hard, but this has to be done.

A couple of months ago I was stoked to be in a three-person dorm room with only two people. This loophole was achieved when we picked out charter oak suite with six people (two rooms of three). Shortly after we did this, our sixth man overall, and third in my room dropped out. It was widely accepted that they almost never fill vacancies. I was on a cloud. My roommate, Steve, and I were going to have a ton of room. There were talks of things like a futon, a second fridge, a pool, and even room for all of our clothes. It was with 3 days left until I moved in that I found out that this was not to be. Our vacancy was filled. UConn in their infinite wisdom overaccepted the freshman class and ResLife was struggling to put freshman and transfers wherever they could. We got a transfer student from Western Connecticut, by the name of Mike. Now Mike went to my high school, he was the year under me, and he always struck me as a bit of a tool. But that is always something you can grow out of... right? Nope.

I was a little upset when I found out that we'd have a sixth man in our suite, but the pain subsided a bit when Mike informed me he had a 42'' HDTV and a solid entertainment system to compliment our room. Things were gonna be just fine! Turns out, Mike has no sense of volume control. We have been taught since elementary school about common courtesy, and using our inside voices, etc. Apparently somebody had ADD and was more preoccupied with the class's pet gerbil, Hoppy, then anything the teacher was saying. It's 11:45PM on a wednesday evening. My roommate has to get up at 4:45am for clinicals, and I have to get up around 7 to get ready for my 8am. We have been lying in bed for about 15 minutes when Mike decides to ask us...

"Did you know today is pirate day?"

The statement itself was harmless, we talked about it for a few short minutes, and then I continued to try and fall asleep. Apparently, Mike wasn't finished. Pirate Day would end in 14 minutes, and he was going to make the most of that 14 minutes so help him God. He unhooks the surround sound system from the TV, and hooks it up to his computer. Cranks the volume on aforementioned surround sound to 58 of 60. It started off as a low rumble, and quickly grew into a low-grade earthquake, as the speakers quaked with shitty Pirate music. that he convienently had located on his computer. FANTASTIC! This is great! Celebrating some shitty made-up holiday with my favorite bud. Life was going great, I grabbed my cell phone, and text messaged Steve who was lying 8 feet away. "HAPPY PIRATE DAY!!!" I would've just verbalized it to him, but the sound of my voice would've been enveloped by the wall of noise that was coming from every corner of the room. At this time, one of my suitemates, Sparzo, came in from next door to make sure everyone was okay, because he heard and felt the noise coming from our room. He walks in, looks around, and I quickly inform him of the situation. "Today is Pirate day!".... a blank stare ensues, as he pauses for a few seconds, acknowledges our pain with nonverbal communcation, and quickly retreats into the safety of his own room. The song finishes, and another starts up, this one even more bass-thumping good than the last!

We made the most of pirate day, at 12:01 I looked at a text message I just received from Steve.... "Happy fuckin' Pirate day"

Just 355 days until the NEXT Pirate Day.
Let me just say, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The McMahon Monstrosity

2008-04-14T20:13:00.007-04:00

I cannot describe the elation that I am feeling... the sense of accomplishment... of sheer amazement at what we have done. Today, on April 14th, 2008, Steven Sainte (my roommate), Rory Pickens, and myself (Tyler Owens) installed, in our 6th floor McMahon dormitory... A Ceiling Fan.

It started as an offhand comment, "I wish we had a fan hanging from the ceiling like right here *pointing)." I was essentially kidding, but we started discussing the idea, but then eventually I exclaimed, "I'd do it, except we don't have an extension cord" Well alas, my roommate procured a contraband extension cord from his storage box, and it was on. It later turned out we didn't even need it, but it established the cornerstone of the entire project.

We position the chairs in the room for the best access to the construction site in a corner of our room, and got the roll of duct tape. I didn't a little pre-tape work so we'd have somewhere to start, and once we got it attached to the ceiling just a little bit we went to town on it. About 400 feet of duct tape later, we have a ceiling fan. It is tilted just right so it covers the entire room and creates a circulatory cross-breeze through the whole room constantly. It is a vast improvement over it's previous location (on top of the TV). So far it's holding steady. We're waiting for it to collapse in the middle of night and break everything beneath it. That wouldn't be the last of it either, the blade would still be spinning creating a deadly spinning whirlwind of plastic. There will likely be fire involved as well.

All in all... Best... Idea.... Ever....

Achilles, HUGE douchebag

2008-04-02T13:28:00.005-04:00

Today in Roman Civilization we were learning about Aeneas and his role in Vergil's the Aeneid. Now the Aeneid is essentially a remake of Homer's the Illiad and Odyssey, so we ended up learning about Achilles to better understand Aeneas.

Now the relevant story of Achilles goes like this. He was unmatched in warfare, no one could beat him, and he single-handedly helped the Greek's continue the fight against the Trojans for as long as they did (10 years). But one 22-day span was when everything went to hell.

This is what happened: At one point in the story, the King of the Greeks, Agamemnon, captures the daughter of a priest of Apollo. The priest demands the return of his daughter, which Agamemnon refuses, as a result Apollo casts a plague on the Greeks, and they begin dying in droves. Still Agamemnon refuses to relinquish the women. Achilles decides to intervene, because he thought of Agamemnon as his inferior in every day. Achilles used crushing reason to push for the return of the daughter of the priest. Agamemnon's pride was obviously hurt, and as a result he took Achilles' girlfriend for his own. Achilles, obviously sleighted, says "Fuckin' PEACE!" to the Greeks, and he sits on the beach while the Greeks begin to get slaughtered on the battlefield.

About this time, Patroclus, Achilles younger friends appeals to Achilles to come back and fight. He continues to refuse, but makes a compromise: To allow Patroclus to wear his armor. Patroclus goes to fight, and ends up locked in one-on-one combat with the Achilles equivalent on the Trojan side, Hector. Hector was under the impression he was fighting Achilles, which he obviously wasn't. Patroclus which was no match for the Trojan hero was quickly overwhelmed and killed. Hector then stripped Patroclus of his(/Achilles) armor, a HUGE no-no in the ancient world.

When Achilles heard of Patroclus' death, he went absolutely ape shit. He was outfitted with divine armor from his goddess mother Thetis, made by the fire god, Hephaestion. He is a cold-blooded killing machine on the battlefield. He mows down the Trojans with reckless abandon.

This is where the douchbaggery comes in. Eventually he ends up in one on one combat with Hector. It's an epic battle, that Achilles eventually wins. Hector is struck down. Then... THEN, Achilles' takes the body of Hector, strips it bear, and ties it to the back of his chariot. Then for NINE days, he drives around the city of Troy for all to see. Each day his body just gets more bloodied, mangled, and mutilated. NINE DAYS. Do you know how long nine days is? Think about it, in the past nine days, I've taken three exams, written two papers, celebrated a holiday, been to three different states, and beaten Super Mario World 4 times. Remember that big bombing campaign at the beginning of the Iraq war, "Shock and Awe"? That lasted like 4 hours... Multiply that by 200, and that's what Achilles did. Honestly, a real dick move on Achilles part.

A long post for that final point, but that's okay.

Another Big Week in MarioKart

2008-03-23T15:52:00.004-04:00

After 3/19's barrage of MarioKart history, the following day (3/20) didn't dissapoint either.

When it comes to 4-player circuit racing in MarioKart 64, when you reach a certain level of proficiency at the sport, it's hard to consistently win against tough competition. Anything more than 5 or 6 wins in a 16-race circuit is quite the accomplishment, and up until recently, 8 has been the mark to beat. I equate the McMahon 6th Floor Professional Mariokart League--Notice how I keep tacking on additional adjectives for effect--to the Big East Conference in Men's college basketball. On any given day, anybody can be anybody. Syracuse can beat Georgetown (number 1 in the conference) on monday, and then lose to South Florida on wednesday (the worst team in the conference), such is the way in our league. Each participant often shows flashes of brilliance, sometimes dominating an entire cup, or certain races of a period of time, but it is never anything consistent.

Then Thursday, March 20th, came to be. It had to be our third circuit of the day, and keep in mind each circuit takes roughly about 51 minutes. Though that time could be longer depending on pausations, and mutual fucketry on certain race's such as Royal Raceway, and Wario Stadium. Fatigue may have been settling in, but that didn't stop myself from continuing to fight. I started off slow in the mushroom cup, amounting a single victory, a second, and two fourths. It appeared it was going to be another unproductive circuit for TO Racing Enterprises (TORE)...(just made that shit up). Then TORE decided to go on a tear. During Frappe Snowland I proclaimed, "If I win the rest, I can still get 12". What happened next was historic, I won the next 7 races in dramatic fashion. Each victory more contested and tightly fought for than the last. At the end of Bowser's Castle, I felt unstoppable. That's when I hit the wall. I had tied the record of 8 set previously by Rory Pickens, and Matthew Sparzo, but I couldn't seal the deal. It's happened before, many times people have tied records only to fall apart in the special cup, and it appeared that I was not going to be an exception.

At the beginning of DK Jungle Parkway, I was still gunning for two records: All-Time Wins, and No 3rd Place Victories. At the end of DK Jungle Parkway, I was out of the running for the latter, and the former was that much further away. Yoshi Valley, or Yoshi's Violent Adventure as it has been known to be called did not go much better, and then the Big Play Offense (more on that in the future) of Mr. Pickens demolished any chance I had in Banshee Boardwalk. It would come down to Rainbow Road. It was tightly fought for the entire race, and it came down to the last set of boxes on the last straightaway. I was in third place, and Steve (Yoshi) and Sparzo (Luigi) were in sight in front of me. They were conspiring to take my boxes to leave me powerless to overcome them. They completely blew it of course and it was like the parting of the Red Sea. Yoshi swerved to the left and Luigi to the right, I stepped on the gas and powered right through the center and got a box. Three Red Mushrooms. Normally when you get that weapon, you groan is disgust, but I pounded those motherfuckers down and shot out to a 1st-place photo finish. Sealing the now all-time record of 9 Wins in a 4-player circuit.

That was the big news for the day, but let us not forget other impressive accomplishments of other racers. Mr. Pickens once again tied his record for most 3rd place finishes with 9, but more impressively and more true to his prowess as a racer accomplished the second-ever personal 5-5-5 deal. Sparzo set the bar for the most 2nd places in a circuit with 8, and Steve tied the wins record for a 3-player circuit with 8. Quite the historical day. But wait, there is more.

By mandate of the SPKM (Senatus Publusque Kartus Marius) a new rule was instituted in relation to bank shots with green shells. I'll let the recordings, courtesy of my new digital voice recorder, explain the story. Just so you know, I was the only one who knew the recorder was in the room, and I didn't do anything that was remotely out of the ordinary.

First:

Steve gives an explanation of the rule to his girlfriend Meg, aka Megathy.
Bank Explanation.mp3

Second:

The first ever execution of a bank, followed by a more exciting second.
Two Banks by Steve.mp3
Third:

My personal favorite: The second bank slowed down.

And just to clear up any misunderstandings, no blowjobs have actually been doled out.

Two Banks by Steve(Slow).mp3

In non-Mario Kart news, I found a quarter, and a freakin' awesome ChiaPet plastic clock (pictured above) on the ground outside.

Day of Firsts

2008-03-19T20:25:00.001-04:00

This happens to be the first post of my blog, and it will just have random things on it. Basically I caved under the pressure that has been passively exerted on me by some of my friends. I'll make this first post short, and get right to the big news.

That's right, I hit my first personal 5-5-5 deal in MarioKart64. This may not mean anything to you, but let me tell you, to enthusiasts of the sport it is a huge accomplishment. All official MarioKart64 statistics are compiled through a complete 'circuit' of all 16 races. Now to complete a personal 5-5-5 deal (with 3 people) you need to compile a record of 5 firsts, 5 seconds, and 5 thirds, before the start of Rainbow Road. It is also possible with 4 people but is very rare, and has never been completed by the McMahon 6th floor MarioKart league. This is the first personal 5-5-5 completed in the senate era--since 2/18/08--and is estimated to be the third-all time--since the start of my college career--. Another record set today was by the resident ginger, Rory Pickens. He managed to get 9 thirds in a 3-player circuit, which is currently the record.

Let me elaborate on the completion of my 5-5-5 deal. I had 5-4-5 heading on to Banshee Boardwalk. I started off the race on a tear, quickly gaining first place, but a few hiccups along the road had me flipflop into third. At the end of the second lap (of three), I laid an impact box--upside down item box that is a bomb--at the finish line and exclaimed "Watch I'll hit that at the end of the race when I'm in first place and fall into third, and miss both getting to 6 wins and the possible completion of the 5-5-5 deal". Apparently I am a descendant of Nostradamus. Rory and I came barreling around the last turn and heading up the straightaway. I swirved in front of him and nailed him with a banana giving me the spacing I needed to comfortably win the race. But I was looking at his screen, and then the forgotten impact box made its resurgence with a vengenance and stopped me in my tracks 3 feet from the finish line. Sparzo came from no where with the Red Army--three circling red shells-, and let 'em rip. My wheels just started turning when they bored into me sending me sky high. Like I said, I must be descendant of Nostradamus... but we all know he was just a crock of shit. As it turns out, I had JUST enough forward momentum to get shot forward ever so slightly. It was a bang-bang photo finish at the checkered line, but I got it. 2nd PLACE! Mediocrity has never felt so good. We took a brief respite as I shook hands with my fellow competitors, and completed the normal pleasentries associated with such a momentus occasion. I followed up my 5-5-5 completion with a winner-take-all victory on Rainbow Road. What a circuit. Cash-Money.

In all seriousness, my 5 friends on my floor (McMahon 6th) take great pride in our mariokart abilities, and as noted by our extensive jargon, have become quite skilled and learned on the game. So it sounds like an exaggerated story, but we get overly-pumped up over our mariokart play and can often be heard three floors below us because we're so loud. "Get him a body bag" is not an uncommon phrase emanating from the Room 642 Arena, or 636 on rare occasions.

I think that'll do for a first post.