04/09/2004 - 3:10 a.m. | i'm pleased to hear that you're wam 'cause i'm freezing

I don't have to cross the guard tomorrow (yet another crazy random Illinois holiday - happy pants day!), so it's just you and me, diary! You and me and a bottle of Smirnoff Fagshitwhatever because if I don't get to them, Spritz will wake up and drink them all, and that just isn't healthy. Besides, I have 2 days to cover, and much self-loating to present to you. Actually, we don't do those sort of entries anymore. Praise Jesus.

Running errands is a lot more fun for me than pretty much anything because I get to make a little mental list and tick things off of it and drive around listening to music. So I did that. But first I slept very, very late. I like to think that I have a pretty good sense of location, but I do not think that this is actually the case because even though I knew where both First and Stoughton were, I could not for the life of me find the corner of First and Stoughton. My respect for crossing guard lady only grows now that I am fully aware that she owns an apartment building right in the middle of a ghetto. These are the types of things a person like me dreams of. And the bike actually is really great. Like, it definitely needs some work because the brakes are about as useful as me yelling at the bike to stop, and there are quite a few loose and rattling parts, but I swear I've never had a smoother ride. Smoother than your mom even, as Kyle put it. But then he was referring to my mom, and that ain't cool, so strike it from the record!! Anyway, I can drive over curbs and stuff now, and they feel like the tiniest little nudges. Meanwhile, in Spritz's SUV every brick in the road is a punch directly aimed at my spine. "BUT THE UTILITY!" you cry, and I don't really have a retort for that because you are so damn stupid. Damn you.

HOLD EVERYTHING!! Okay, so it was pretty nice on Wednesday, so everyone was required to do spring stuff, except me who just has to lurch out with his crossing guard sign and glare hatefully up at the sun. Anyway, so I come outside, and Sarah Lucas is sunbathing on the grass. "Urp," I said (and I quote) and then walked as quickly as I could without it actually looking like flat out sprinting before I let out my sigh of gratitude. My immediate thought was of my access to both the roof above her and a video camera, but I'm trying to quell those urges. I swear to God, though, if I were an attractive man......

I spent all of four seconds making a collage about men and penis size for abnormal psychology (adding in little hearts and stars to fill in any holes in the overall quality), and that was about it for me and homework then. Meanwhile, Kyle and Michelle were on like there 30th hour without sleep in preparation for their physics test. Short term justification makes me happy. Besides, I am almost sure to be stabbed to pieces long before roles have reversed.

Yousaf called, and off we went on a little adventure. OK, bad habit. I really have to stop calling pretty much any trip - including ones to the hardware store - an adventure. Because what if I finally do start, dunno, fighting ninja robots and having premarital sex? What will I call those? I will have to invent a new word, and I just don't think I could take that kind of pressure. It would probably end up sounding really stupid and Dr. Seussy. A blortznak. Yeah, suck.

So, Yousaf has this $1000 projector or whatever, right? But he has it balancing on this precarious pile of piano benches and stuff, so he finally built up the nerve to get the supplies to build some sort of stand for it. He brought me along, because of my intimate knowledge of everything hardware related (my dad scoffed when I told him this; stupid masculine father) or possibly because I am the only one available at any given time. Anyway, we went to Lowe's and just started wandering around. Yousaf had made at least a partial list of particulars, but that still left a lot of leg and/or guess work for us. "So, what do you think of this handsaw, Nate?" "Yes, that should do the trick! It's, um, carbon and all!" The wood was an entirely different story, as the helpful hardware folk there seemed to hate both foreigners and homosexuals, and we appear to be both. Maybe he just hated his whole damn miserable life, though. I'm not sure. Anyway, Yousaf needed some wood cut up, and the guy was like, "Is it for an art project or something real?" and he said "art project" like it was possibly the gayest thing people could do. So Yousaf, terrified out of his mind by this horrible old man, tries to explain the shelfing system he wants to build, and the guy's like, "Sounds like an art project to me!" It's not a foot fungus, you wretched creature. I made an excuse about going to look at light bulbs or something and then ran to get a 2x2 and pole vault with it. As Kyle would point out later (apparently holding a great deal of experience in this himself), it's tough to do on their concrete floors, but I got the job done at least one time.

By the time we got done with all our little trips (Best Buy, Lowes, Meijer), it was nearly 9 o'clock and time for me to meet up with Kyle to go to his dad's 50th birthday party. If you know me at all, you'll recall that I typically despise going to these sorts of things for my own family, so choosing to attend a relative stranger's party like this is tantamount to taking the cyanide pill just to see what death feels like. But, my relatives don't have karaoke machines at their little events. As soon as Kyle and I got enough warmed up Asian food in our tummies, we pretty much took over the machine for the next 2 hours. I am really curious as to what all of Kyle's little Filipino relatives think of me. "Who is this white boy? Why is he singing so much?" I know at least a few were impressed. It is a stark contrat, though. Most of the time I'd just stand around all quietly and then all of a sudden I'm busting out Bachman Turner Overdrive at the top of my lungs. Sadly, though, my falsetto has gone to the land where pretty much everyone else's did four years ago. We knew it was coming someday.

Stupid wacky image sites. About 1 in a thousand might make me giggle the tiniest bit, so I go through all these sites of the same crap over and over just in case there's something new. In the meantime, I baked banana bread. Actually, it was really easy. I like to think this is because of my preternatural cooking abilities (I simply intuited that it would be easy to make the whole thing in the blender, etc.), but who am I kidding? I was kind of worried that a) I did not use overly ripe bananas and b) that I would not be able to try some without it being blatantly obvious, but luckily I am a moron and forgot to bring it this morning, and like I said, tomorrow is a day off, so I have a weekend to improve myself. At baking, I mean.

It would seem that I am more or less fearless of germs but typically like things being neat. Kyle Wild is the opposite. It's just that I would do things that others might find entirely repulsive, like drinking this big jug of lemonade you just found somewhere. Like a bank. More errands, because that's all I love, and then to sit in class and read while others learn again what has already been typed up for them on a series of Powerpoint slides. I simply cannot let that happen to me. Redhead A totally has a thing for me, but either she does not get my jokes or she does not find them funny, and NEITHER OF THOSE WORK VERY WELL WITH ME. It's so much more fun being picky than being rejected. I am glad that there is this weird little symbiosis where some Asian girls like skinny white guys, and some skinny white guys really like Asian girls. It seems fair at least.

Spritz and I went to the mall. I got goooood hours at the Buckle next week. I hope the trend continues. I was really intent upon buying some new duds so I wouldn't be quite the sore thumb I am now (the personality thing already poses a problem), but no manager, no discount, so I fled. Man, I had to stop for a bit because of some suck that seriously pissed me off. See, if we want to wear athletic shoes at work, they have to be a brand that we carry (Diesel, Puma, or - God forbid - KSwiss), and yesterday night I found a pair of tan Pumas with green accents that were absolutely perfect. I checked the same site a day later, and now they're gone, and I'm all mopey. I want my cute shoes. And I'm sort of worried I just made them up somehow. Know what else pisses me off? How Adidas has a monopoly on the whole 3 stripe shoes thing. OK, it's not them that really piss me off, it's more like the other companies that try to put stripes on, but since they can't have 3, they use 2 or 4 or 5, and it just looks so, so bad. I'm sure they know it, too; I just wish they'd give in because there's no point in even trying when you can't even compete with the best. The best numbr, I mean. I hung out in Express while Spritz pranced or whatever people do in there. I found a really cute shirt and tie combo that I would love to wear for like the six times in my life that I need to dress up, but I don't have the $700 they ask. Rob a bank. So many guards, I say!

I never really much believed in astrology or anything, but I do reading one thing about Virgos that I did feel really applied to me. We don't have many friends, but the ones we do are close, and we'll do anything for. However, if that trust is betrayed, it's nearly impossible to get it back. So. Don't blame me; blame the stars.

Work was just nerdiness on top of nerdiness, so much so that I shall not speak further. When I stopped to get supplies at the gas station beforehand, the cashier extolled the virtues of green tea to me. Yes, that should about cancel out the sack of jelly beans and the can of ranch Pringles. Arg. Since the key to the one gym was already bent and since they were supposed to be sending someone over with a new one shortly (they did not, so sassy dancing black lady got pissed), I figured that chopping off the broken part of the old key might miraculously make it work, and I could talk about how I'm so bright and filled with common sense and junk. It did not, and I am not. Darn it. Weird people kept showing up, including Stacia who... I'm not sure. I always felt like I should be friends with her but that she would never really accept me. Possibly because I was so mediocre at Spanish. I killed the last hour alone upon my groundbreaking discovery of a tennis ball serving machine in some back room. Oh, the things I could do. We could turn our house next year into a little battleship. "Landlubbers off the port bow!" and etc. Unfortunately, it was loud as hell, and despite all my poking around, I wasn't entirely sure how to work it. I don't need six tennis balls to the face. I've got enough problems as it is.

The Yousaf Time Scale works as follows: Take whatever time he says something will take and multiply it by three. I went over to watch a movie with him, but he had some crazy idea about making this black cloth border around where the screen is projected ("It makes the black blacker, see!!"). 20 minute project, he says. Perhaps with an army of pixies maybe. But with his measuring and cutting and me having no clear idea of what's going on, followed by 40 minutes of him trying to pin the cloth to the wall, losing pins, screaming in fear at the prospect of later rolling upon lost pins, grunting homoerotically, and nearly passing out from exhaustion, we had no hope. On the plus side, when he put the two strips of cloth across his chest, he looked like a hilarious character from "Mortal Kombat" and would be my background now if I had had a camera on me at the time. We watched The Usual Suspects eventually (I threw the popcorn outside and Yousaf punched the sour cream, I think), and I gave Yousaf shit about the dust spots and fixed pixels on the projection. I also mentally kept track of the number of ways people pronounced "Keyser Soze." Why would you pick something that's impossible to pronounce for the most important character in a movie. I like to think in the Spanish dubbing, he is Keyser Jos�. But then I'm living a pipe dream, aren't I? Have I said this already?