04/21/2005 - 4:11 a.m. | to rid my dirty mind of all of its preciousness

An e-mail from Melissa mere hours after the previous entry was written:

"We've got tickets to the Chicago show now! Get excited."

Irony, you cruel, delicious bitch.

We've entered a fantastic new stage of our relationship, by the way. Missy has discovered AIM, but only to the extent where she will come online and ask, "why didn't you pick up?" when I don't pick up the phone. "Uh, no reason... You know... we could talk on here now and again, huh?" "I miss hearing your voice :(" "Dialing..."

It's past 4 in the morning, my so-called point of no return. I should be exhausted as hell, in fact, will be exhausted as hell when I wake up in a few hours, but right now, there is no desire to rest. It's been a surreal 24 hours, to say the least, not least of all because I was in an amazingly good mood for some of it. Perhaps because I've been self-medicating some, adjusting the dose on my meds, so I'm not nearly as doped up, and hello Mr. and Mrs. Mood Swings.

At work yesterday, I was completely surrounded by loud black girls, which was fairly hilarious from my perspective. Most of the evening they discussed penis size, all disbelieving that the average is only 5.5 inches. "I thought it was 7 inches," said one girl as she pulled out a ruler (she had a ruler?) and started measuring various things in comparison. All of them kept shooting me meaningful looks like I was supposed to fill them in on my length and/or girth, but I had hard enough time cackling and stuttering over the phone as it was.

The weather afterwards was as close to perfect as I have ever seen, so when Shelly suggested we take a walk, there was no way I wasn't going along for that ride. We hit an absolute shit-ton of campus, from the Siebel Center ("the most advanced Computer Science building in the world," my telemarketing script automatically chimes in) to the brand new CRCE building over by Allen. New buildings are so weird, guys. The Siebel one is all creepy and deserted and po-mo, and when we ran into Kyle and Spritz there, I could just imagine them all there five years down the road, earning their big wages while I sit in the corner, unemployed and impressed by the huge KimWipes (Mr. Lawrence used to make us conserve the little itty-bitty ones at IMSA, and these are like fucking beach towels, and I could no doubt just pile them on the floor). They have cute robot cameras as well. CRCE was even more disturbing in my mind, having worked there in its previous incarnation. It's so huge and spacious and modern now. It's like where the cast of "90210" would go to work out or something, and as we walked by the old, sealed-off entrance where I used to work, I got sort of sad about the good old days. I liked things much better when they were shitty; no one would ever allow an employee like me to blast karaoke throughout the building these days. We carried on while I tried to figure out the Roman numerals for the new pope's name - 40... subtract one, carry four over... 10? Well, whatever. As he is quite the spring chicken at 72, I'm sure it won't be long 'til we meet Pious XVII or whoever.

Andy called with reports of thrown out huge art projects over by Greg Hall, so we took a precarious drive over there. The giant picinic basket was still there, but some fucks had already snatched the big lobster. That was a serious loss to our cause.

OK, fuck. I need to sleep it off now. I will finish tomorrow.

Well, I stayed up longer than intended, trying to finish my advertising thing before I went to bed. I failed, but when I did fall asleep, I had bizarre dreams about a E! True Hollywood Story about the making of "Cheers." "Originally, there wasn't going to be a bar at all." Oh, that makes sense.

For my hippie psych class, we were supposed to do some community service. My group (I have a group?) e-mailed me and told me about some thing we were supposed to be doing Wednesday morning. I showed up, really no idea what was going on at all, and rode off in a car with two sorority sluts, a gay Frenchman, and my slightly-creepy psych TA. Honestly, I had not read the series of e-mails carefully enough, so I sort of went under the impression we were going to do some yardwork. We get to this old Asian couple's house by Parkland, and they want us to cut a fucking tree down. A huge, wide 20 foot tall tree. All right - let's get on it. Everyone else was scared as fuck of the chainsaw they had borrowed (as was I, frankly; that scene from the new Dawn of the Dead kept repeating in my head - *chop boob*), but the idea was far too hilarious to pass up. "I'll cut the damn thing," I said. The teacher raised some issues of liability and whatnot, and I just sort of waved my hands away. "I probably won't sue. Someone start the saw." That took forever, by the way, but the old Asian man ran and got some googles and a yellow hard hat that made me look fairly silly, I bet, but soon enough I was hacking away at this tree. I had vague ideas about cutting wedges, and the Asian man kept trying to yell instructions, but there were some language barrier issues, and I did not want branches falling on his head. We had ropes rigged up, which everyone else yanked while I hacked away. Finally, the old fucker fell over - and not onto anyone's house! I even got to yell "timber!" The couple invited us to have some drinks once we had finished, but being old school Asian, they were soon dumping piles of fried rice and fresh fruit on our plates. Second serving: "No, I really don't need anymore." *two huge scoops* "Oh, thanks." Community service wouldn't be bad at all, if it were all chopping down trees all day.

After class, I sat in the atrium of the psych building, frantically trying to decide what my finished advertising product would be. Finally, I decided to cut up all the notes I had taken and put them into some semblance of order on a sheet of paper. "I shall need a gluestick," I yelled and ran across the street. It turned out fairly OK, I think. My word, by the way, was "fingertips."

I passed out for a good long time the rest of that day (Oops! So much for work. That only leaves three bonus days off... *tear*) and then Smacko came over to watch the "Baywatch" video I won at the last bingo (I won a "Baywatch" video?) I don't know if this was a particularly impressive episode or what, but I found myself absolutely fascinated by the whole thing. The dialogue is so crappy and poor-acted, and yet, it draws me in so easily. Hasselhoff's beautiful singing voice, boobies galore, and an attack by both a stock footage shark and a man in a bear suit grimly determined to roll over the log Neely was on. Hasselhoff's son is called "Hoabie," but I just kept yelling about hoagies over and over and over. How is that not funny, my friends? How?

Today, I did nothing, and Shelly managed to eat all of her popcorn chicken. Good job, girl. I think mine is going to make me puke.