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Friday night’s party was largely a success. I’m not exactly sure how many people showed up (I would estimate forty), but the party paid for itself, which is a good thing. Of course, that money doesn’t help return our house to a state of normalcy (let alone Iowa).

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of English department people who showed up… I take back all those mean things I said about you and your inability to have a good time, peeps. Then again, several of the second-year TAs I expected to see were no-shows, so that was a little disappointing. You hearing me Colette/Ryan/Luke/Betsy/James/Zach? Puppies in heaven are crying because you didn’t show up. Jebus might be forced to put one of them down, too. I hope you’re happy.

I was also simultaneously disappointed in and surprised by the Sociology department crowd. Lorenzo and Nick both chickened out, though both sent me apologetic instant messages the next morning. Despite their obvious shortcomings in the testicular area, Dwight, my ex-boss and new drinking buddy, ~did~ make an appearance. Justin, master of subtlety, announced Dwight’s arrival with an exclamatory, “Hey, who’s the OLD guy?”

Other interesting tidbits from the evening:

We made it through two kegs and a case, which isn’t bad considering several persons of female persuasion brought their own flavor of suds.

I got in two mock-fights (we were both laughing pretty hard) with Scott, a something-belt in Tae Kwan Do, which resulted in legitimate pain the next day (it seems I like to land on my left side). I believe I held my own fairly well, undoubtedly aided by alcohol, that great leveler of playing fields, wherein someone with training in Tae is a worthy adversary to someone who plays Mortal Kombat during study breaks. I simultaneously hope he ended up a little sore (I did, after all) and hope he wasn’t ~too~ sore (I think he had a match the next morning).

Six of us (Me/Lisa/Sam/Sammie/Justin/Kelsey) made an obligatory run to Perkins around 4am for pancakes. Proving I’ve spent too many late nights in Perkins lately, several of the people working recognized me. To make the story better, the same guy cashed me out eight hours later during Perkins run #2.

One of Sam’s friends named Aaron passed out on the couch while most of us were at Perkins and woke up without any eyebrows. He then passed out again and woke up bald, save for a small ‘tail’ in the back. He was less than amused the next morning.

I wore my contacts for over forty hours straight, and they didn’t bug me at all, even with the fog machine going while simultaneously hanging out with smokers. My eyes seem to be adjusting really well this time ’round. :)

There’s more I could say, but it’s bedtime. G’night, all.

The spammers are back in full force. :( I get between five and ten spam comments a day that I have to then go clean out. To help stem the tide, as of this post, I’m turning on comment moderation. What’s that mean? Well, I’m not exactly sure myself. Ideally, it will work like this: you post a comment to this (or any) post, and MT lets me know I have a new comment. I look at it, approve it, and approve the commenter for commenting, meaning I don’t have to approve your comments anymore.

To make this easier: Leave me a comment on this post, using the name you wanna comment with and either an email or web address. Then I can approve that name for commenting.

In less annoying news…

Halloween Party @ My Place!

We’re having a Halloween party at the ol’ house tomorrow night. It should be a blast. We’ve been really excited about it. For instance, I spent all Monday night decorating instead of doing homework, from like 8pm until 1am. It was fun. :) If you’re in the area and haven’t heard about the party yet, consider this your invitation and get on over here. Costumes not required, but requested. I’ll be the Aragorn-looking guy. *grin*

Guess what I got yesterday? *bounces up and down* Contacts! :) They cost my every last penny (actually, $2 more than my every last penny, so I’ll have to deposit a couple bucks today to avoid an overage), but I finally have my blue eyes back. I love the look of my glasses and all, but I hate the fact that when I’m wearing them, people can hang out with me for months and still believe my eyes to be brown due to some stupid optical trick my glasses pull. Course, then I get contacts, and everybody says, “Oh! You got colored contacts!” Meh.

Summary: Leave me a comment (with name/email or url), come to my party (with or without a costume), and admire my baby blues (with or without sarcasm).

So here I am, sitting in front of my computer, sucking on apricot fruit leather and listening to Gregorian chants at midnight. I just got back from Perkins with Julia, where I devastated three buttermilk pancakes (they didn’t really stand a chance) just because six beers didn’t get me in the mood to start grading brochures, and I had the feeling the seventh wouldn’t help much either. Also, Julia suggested going out for breakfast food. Otherwise, I’ve the feeling none of that stuff would have happened. Well, maybe the chants. They’ve been playing off and on since yesterday.

I’d eaten steak a couple hours before Perkins, alone, which was a sad affair because steak is one of those things I hate eating alone, like salmon or tacos. I consider certain foods community foods. Pizza I can eat alone. Sandwiches wind up in my stomach without an audience. Steak, for whatever reason, seems like a community food. For starters, I never buy one steak: I buy two. I’d planned on sharing them with someone on Wednesday, but everyone I called was feeling sickly and unsteaklike. I ended up eating chicken nuggets Wednesday, because my roomies and I bought a Fry Daddy, and we had to test it out. Hot oil cooks things.

Ooh, guess what else I bought on Wednesday? …[pause of anticipation]… A hoodie! Ya know, one of those hooded sweatshirt things. I’ve never owned one before. I just never really considered myself hoodie material. Unfortunately, autumn is keeping chilly here, and I only own a couple long-sleeve shirts. With a hoodie, I can wear short sleeves and still keep warm. I put it on when I first got home and felt really awkward for a few seconds, cause I’ve never worn one before and I didn’t know how out-of-place I looked. Then, I noticed Sam and Sammie were both sitting on the couch wearing hoodies. I felt better. :)

[transition] I voted today. :) I was planning on doing the whole absentee-ballot thing, but then I realized that my ballot had my old address on it. Since it’s sorta illegal to lie about your address on a ballot, I decided to take advantage of the vote-early stuff on campus all this week and get re-registered. While I was there, I figured I might as well get my vote on. They didn’t have any “I Voted” stickers today, though, which made me sad. Alicia got one when she voted on Monday, so now I’m jealous.

Hrm… I had more stuff to say, but I know I’m just rambling and Word just informed me that I’m writing at a 7th grade level, so I think it’s time for bed. Perchance I’ll update tomorrow.

Alicia and I went to the Kerry/Edwards rally in Des Moines last night and had a really great time, considering. The “considering” part, by the by, had nothing to do with the company and an awful lot to do with other situational elements. For starters, the rally was (of course) outside. I am verrah grateful to Alicia for talking me into bringing a coat, because it was ~cold~ outside. And then there was the chronometric* problem. We arrived at the fairgrounds around 5:15 and got back to the car around 10:30. We were standing, outside in the cold, that entire time. I had parts go numb I didn’t even know I had until their absence rendered them conspicuous. And the most annoying part? Kerry and Edwards didn’t even take the stage until almost 10. Prior to their appearance, we had music, music, other politicians, music, and even a musical intermission to the music.

Despite the cold and the standing and the music (my God, the music), we left happy. It was a fun time. I got to shiver within fifty yards of people like Josh Hartnett and Hal Ketchum, and within a few feet of local politicians like Senator Harkin and Governor Vilsack. We were also briefly within lunging distance (I’d say six feet) of John Kerry, John Edwards, and their respective wives, Teresa and Elizabeth. If the Johns end up in the White House, I’ll be able to say I’ve stood within a few feet of them. I’ll probably leave out the lunging part.

It was also cool to feel the emotion of the crowd. Ever since the VEISHEA riots earlier this year, I’ve considered crowds (mobs, whatever) to be an organic being, comprised of individuals, but ultimately a singular whole capable of acting and feeling as one. During the riot, those feelings were of camaraderie, but also of tension, anger, and expectation; we had an enemy, and it was us against them. The rally was, thankfully, different. We still had an ‘enemy’ of sorts, of course, but that enemy was not present and was therefore more an idea than anything else. As such, camaraderie and single-purposedness (not in the negative sense) were the overwhelming emotions. I felt I was surrounded by 15,000 friends, and was not afraid to smile and speak to the people next to me.

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Oh, and they were really pushing people to push people to vote, so… vote! I was impressed they didn’t tell us ~who~ to get people to vote for (maybe that was implied…), but I wouldn’t have told you anyways. You’ve minds… make ‘em. I think voter turnout is going to be surprisingly high this election, which is a cool thing.

Linkage

Unregistered: DelcareYourself. That’s where I registered a few months ago. It’s pretty easy to do, though you still have to print something out and mail it. I have an absentee ballot sitting next to my computer, since I have class all day the 2nd.

Interesting: Video comparing President Bush’s eloquence ten years ago to what passes for it today. I have this linked in my miniblog, but I’ve the feeling most of you don’t read that.

Bipartisan: Flash movie equally insulting (and hilarious) to both parties. It’s awesome. And NSFCW (Not Safe For Conservative Workplaces).

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* I had this word in my book review, and Quinn made me take it out. Since then, I’ve been jonesing to use it. Huzzah!

Yup, academic-type writing is still getting on my nerves. I’m beginning to think the only true requirement for academic prose isn’t original thought, but is instead obscure language. The more difficult your text is to understand, the better you are at communicating. I don’t get it. Especially in the stuff I’m reading. These people are supposed to be expert technical communicators, for crying out loud. The primary tenet of technical communication (as I understand it) is to write clearly.

Some of the stuff I’ve read today isn’t ~so~ bad… I mean, I figured out pretty fast that “Olympian perspective” was just a fancy way of saying “bird’s-eye view.” It took me a little longer to realize “ocular cacophony” was a roundabout way of saying “visual mess.” And then, I literally laughed aloud when I realized that instead of saying “people are lazy,” one author went so far as to say that people “economize on cognitive resource allocation and attempt to produce satisfactory output with minimal effort.” And that was in one of the ~good~ essays.

Those aren’t the best examples I’ve got, but they’re the ones most easily decipherable into real words. For instance, I’m still pondering the subtleties of gems like this one:

“Thus far in our discussion of denaturalization techniques for the map, we have advocated a paradigmatic shift to a heterogeneity of representational order induced by the juxtaposition of various representational systems — a juxtaposition metaphorically captured by the expression map as collage. Indeed, construction the map as collage proved a useful heuristic for discovering a radical design practice that would juxtapose communication elements laterally in seemingly anarchistic fields and thereby accord representational status to hitherto excluded or repressed interests” (Barton & Barton, “Ideology and the Map”).

Here’s a list of words I need to look up for this week as a result of my reading:

• concomitant
• meritorious
• elucidation (and elides, are they related?)
• vacillate
• hegemony (again… I always forget the nuances)
• simians
• solipsism (again.. is my guess right?)
• intimates
• pogrom
• telos
• reify
• endoxal
• omphalos
• interpellate
• palimpsest

Know what the worst part is? I’ll probably end up sounding like these people someday. When that day comes, I charge you people with smacking me upside the head and reminding me that “comprehensive taxonomy” is probably just a fancy way of saying “good, long list.”