January 26, 2001 — Loneliness

It's Friday night, and normally that would mean a journal entry explaining that I've spent the entire night on the computer without even a hint of social activity. Admittedly, last week this wasn't the case, as it was Andrew's birthday. But then, out of nowhere, it happened again this week.

Sort of. I mean, it's not like I wasn't home by 10:30PM, and I do have to admit that I've spent most of the night working on the new message board, but at least I did leave the house. To the beginning, then.

With my body now settled quite nicely into its 5:00AM to 12:30PM sleeping habit, I missed lunch yet again today and ate rice crackers with cheese. Again. (But I'm out of rice crackers, so unless my mom sends more, this'll be the last you hear about what was my meal replacement of choice for this week.) I'd begun working on the message board almost immediately after waking up and hadn't accomplished much.

Luckily, Laura was on ICQ and we decided to go to a movie, ensuring that I wouldn't accomplish anything for the entire afternoon. After a few games of pinball, I made my way to Ryerson before going with Sarah and Laura to see "Snatch." Which turned out to be a hell of a lot better than I thought it would be, having seen luke-warm reviews in a couple of places. Brad Pitt was quite impressive throughout, and the performance of his mullet-wearing right-hand man sent chills down my spine. I won't give anything away, but I would definitely recommend the movie in a second, even if some of the editing seemed to've been inspired (at least a little bit) by the time-lapse sequences in "Requiem for a Dream." Or maybe I'm showing my complete ignorance of editing technique and that's a common method that's been used for years. In any case, good movie, that.

We stopped at Chapters on the way home so that Laura could use her gift certificate. I was looking through the bargain book section and stumbled across a dictionary of acronyms. Remember the question about the meaning of "PDA" from a couple of days back, I decided to see what the dictionary of acronyms had to say. It seems that in addition to meaning "personal digital assistant" and "public display of affection" (the context under which I'd used it), "PDA" also can be the short form of "projected drift angle." Don't acronyms just renew your will to live?

Well, they should.

Anyhoo, we eventually made it back to Ryerson, and after dinner we dropped into Gwen's suite party. (I'd met Gwen last week at Andrew's birthday, if you don't remember.) Laura wanted to buy something containing sugar and I was started to get a bit antsy with so much socializing and so little typing, so we didn't stay very long. But I was introduced to a bunch more Ryerson people whose names I promptly forgot, and that must count for something. I made careful note of the plastic army men holding fort by the window in Gwen's suite and, just as I'd done when we visited last week, I reminded myself of how empty my life continues to be without my own set of army men that I can imagine patrolling my room at night, "Toy Story"-style.

And then I took the subway home and got to work on the message board. Much progress was made, so much so that I decided that I deserved a snack at 2:15AM, and was lucky enough to find Pizza Pizza still open and serving vegetarian slices. You can't find that in Richmond. The real bonus, though, was seeing the extremely skanky-looking strippers walking out of the Brass Rail (a local strip club) at around 2:45AM as I was headed home. Let's just say that this has made me all the more keen to never visit the ol' Brass Rail.

Finally, since I haven't mentioned Jeff at all in this journal and because he was so proud to be mentioned as many times as he was last time, I've got a story involving the trip Jeff, Stefan and I took to Chinatown on Friday. On our way home (after seeing the pig corpses in the truck), we walked past a group of asian teenagers. As we walked past, one of them reached under his shirt (as if he was reaching for a gun), pulled out his hand (now shaped like a gun), pointed at my head, and feigned a recoil effect. I didn't really know what to do. I was pretty sure he was just hoping for a reaction, so I gave none, but it's hard to know how to take it when complete strangers decide to pretend to shoot you in the head. Maybe I should've smiled...

I think that's about it. I got more done on the message board than I really expected to today, even if it's still not done. I honestly think I might be able to finish tomorrow night. But again, don't hold your breath. And fuck, who am I kidding? You don't give a shit. But dammit, it floats my boat, and I demand to be placated. So pretend you care. Please?

(Footnote: if you're looking for the most impressive combination of nerdiness and trying to be funny but not pulling it off at all, this is the place for you. Questions as to why I was at a Masters of the Universe site will not be answered. And while we're on the topic of funny components of the Internet, search for "dumb motherfucker" on Google. Deep down, even Republicans are laughing at that one.)