04/20/2006 - 2:00 a.m. | �damn grandma, you sexy� *pours glass of wine*

It�s weird with diaries, isn�t it? Some times I feel like I could write in this thing all the time, and other times it is just a huge, nagging pain. Lately, it�s been a lot more of the latter. I don�t know � each phrase is just kind of a pain in the ass to actually sit here and write out. If I were telling you things, that�d be fine and quick, but just seems a little slow and painful. So why write when I�m not in the mood? Because you have to know, don�t you?

So, the latest development, at least in terms of olfactory glands (Let�s start organizing events by smell, how about it?), Omar has moved in, and with him the smell of burning incense is leaking into my room, fogging my brain. And obviously, he is an assault on the sense of sound, being louder than sin and insisting on greeting everyone every time they return from anything. I walk by his room to use the bathroom or something � �Yo.� I came back up from the bathroom thirty seconds later � �What�s up, man?� We live together. Stop greeting me. Then there�s the music blasting. Jazz I can handle (even if it is in two rooms at a time); it makes me feel like I�m in some mediocre Starbucks. But when he starts blasting that Bob Marley or one of the infinity rap songs about smoking weed, I am not going to be pleasant company.

So, how did this happen? How did one man go in the space of a month from total stranger to Kramer-like appendage to part of our household? Well, I bloody well couldn�t tell you. So, he�d been kicked out of PAR for weed, kicked out of Allen for weed, and about a week ago was getting kicked out of the apartment next door� for not paying his rent (probably as a result of weed*). Meanwhile, Gautam finished his thesis and moved out, leaving us with a vacant room. Oh, a stoner retard who we know doesn�t pay rent? Let him on board! I was against it from the start, and I felt like I was winning over Shelly and Spritz (�Well, we could use the extra money�� �But he�s not actually going to give us any money�), but we�re all too afraid of him to actually turn him down, and suddenly his stuff is moved in, and yep. There you go. Strange people in the house, even more constant chatter about weed, and I suddenly have an upstairs neighbor. It�s actually very new to me. Spending most of my time up here alone (or with Gautam � same thing), I kind of got to thinking we lived in a quiet house. This was clearly never the case, and I am going to be looking back on those days fondly. Anyway, we talked about establishing some ground rules, but that never happened, and it�s not like any of us are brave enough to kick him out anyway if he broke any of them. I guess the thing that disturbs me the most is that he can never go home now. Like, before, it was always comforting to be like, �Well, he�ll be going home at some point.� This is his home. He has rights now. Oh lord.

*Here�s the confusing thing, though � he always talks about how poor he is, you know, part of the hippie free-spirit mystique he tries to generate, his whole reasoning for why he couldn�t pay rent and all � but he is just the most (pardon the phrase) nigger rich man I�ve ever seen. He bought a fucking $2,000 monitor, has multiple Rolexes, is always getting grams of weed or coke or something, and yet he can�t afford his stupid rent. Of course, part of that is that his parents don�t know he was kicked out of the dorms, but wait! The good news is that he might be getting kicked out of U of I as well. At least from what Smacko told me. I guess, the two dorm bootings were strikes one and two, and his arrest on Unofficial put him in serious trouble. Allegedly, he is to be suspended for a year, might even be suspended now, but he is trying to appeal the last part. Well, whatever. I can hold out with bitching and earplugs� as long as he doesn�t stay the summer.

The last week or so has been pretty busy trying to get some decent Tower Records ads. In fact, I was downright burned out, but I guess that is how the job is supposed to be sometimes. Have I told you about this thing? For the first time (because we are so awesome, no doubt), Peter managed to set up a project with a bunch of people at DDB, a very big, very good ad agency. We were sorted into pairs (me and Brenna again, obviously), given the Tower Records assignment, and like a week and a half to put together some rough stuff to show five former students who are now getting kind of high up in said agency. On the whole, this was very scary. We had months and months to prepare for stupid Postal Vault, but for people we actually sort of cared about impressing? No, not much time. So we worked like mad, meeting pretty much every night and getting not very far, it felt like. Still, I felt like this was one product I was actually made for � I am the target market, so I should know how to convince myself. I reread High Fidelity just in case.

Gradually, we did come up with some good ideas, including a series of ads that I kind of personally took under my wing. See, typically, ads try to be as short and quick as possible � people have terrible attention spans and hate ads, so you have to catch them on the fly � but I asked myself what kind of ad I would like to see and ended up handwriting like a page full of text � three of them actually � allegedly tips on how to act like a poseur. Nobody ever likes my long copy ads � they�re too wordy and esoteric � but for once, Peter fucking loved them. Said they were rock and roll, said they were cool and smart and hysterical. Even liked my handwriting. Awesome. He suggested I expand beyond mocking poseurs and write all sorts of esoteric essays, so I did. �Musicians Turned Actors: Great or Merely Awesome?� �Terrible Songs Ironic Enough to Still Enjoy� �Why Garfunkel is Cooler Than Simon� Not all of them worked (the Garfunkel one was pretty much just a series of Jewfro jokes), but they were easy and fun to write because they were, well, me. But I kind of felt bad because Brenna and I usually work as a team, and I was kind of taking over this one, so apparently I wrote her a wine-addled e-mail last night.

Actually, I wrote a lot of those. I was feeling warmly affectionate towards the world (as little sleep, high stress, and a bottle and a half of awesome pinot will do to a man), and that never, ever happens, so I was trying to correct all sorts of social wrongs I felt I�d committed. I�ll let you know how that turns out.

Update: Thus far, I�ve gotten replies from two three exes, a former crush, a roommate, and a stalker. I was busy. Everyone is basically confused but sort of happy, which I think is about the best mood overall. It�s certainly my favorite.

Anyway, it was just days and days of ads, culminating in an all night AIM conversation the night before (she was back home already) trying to get the stupid things together. As such, I got about three hours of sleep the day the thing went down. Luckily, I had nerves to keep me running pretty much the whole day through. First, there was the notion of city driving, which terrifies me, plus construction work, which terrifies me even more. It�s not that I�m a bad driver, really � everything went fine � but it doesn�t stop me from worrying every single time. Plus, I am always weirdly confident that I know what I�m doing better than Mapquest, so I ended up a little lost for a while there. Luckily, on the directions sheet they gave us beforehand, there was a little map with about four or five streets labeled. So I memorized them quickly and used my keen sense of direction to go in what I figured was the proper direction, using the streets as landmarks. I was so happy to be anywhere near the general area I was supposed to be in that I parked way the fuck far away.

Omar�s Song
by Omar

�Fuck yeah!�
(repeat)

It is so warm in this stupid room sometimes that my sweaty hands render the touchpad on my laptop useless.

While at DDB, I decided that I am reinstating human pyramids as the preferred method of posing in photographs. The Walsh family used to do them all the time, but it sort of fizzled when my uncle lost his soul to wife and children. Well, no longer! This is the new Thing, and I am going to make some sort of button or pin announcing my views.

Speaking of family, I was talking to Brenna about my family�s dark history of inbreeding, and she said we could put a positive spin on it. After all, nobility � aristocrats and kings and shit � used to do it all the time. �Inbreeding is the noblest thing� would look pretty good on a shirt. I�d wear it to the family reunion, but we�ll all be too busy hitting on each other to notice.

The nerves of being judged on my ads kept me floating along the next few hours. Being critiqued in anything is kind of unnerving, but it�s worse when it�s something you care about and worse still when it�s something you want to spend your life doing. As such, both Brenna and I were a total mess. My hands were shaking, and she kept saying how much she needed to go vomit.

Surprisingly, the whole thing went really well. And maybe the five alums were just really nice, or maybe I�m just an arrogant prick, but I think that our ads in particular went over really well. Everyone else said that each of the five people gave wildly varying advice, but it was remarkably static across the board for our stuff, such that by the last time, it was like, �Yeah, heard it four times now. Don�t need a headline. Got it.� But overall, pretty positive. We would start with the long copy ads, and they would kind of stroke my ego for a while, telling me how well-written they were and what a good voice and how funny and everything. Although none of them really laughed out loud. I bet that is a thing to do to look like a badass in the advertising industry. Never laugh, only point out what is funny. One guy was like, �These really show a lot of research,� and I was like, �Motherfucker, please! This was all my BRAIN!� Except that that did not actually happen. Then they would try to argue that people still don�t like long copy, though, and more often than not Peter would appear out of nowhere and come to bat for the ads, which is very flattering, because he never does that sort of thing for us kids. Then we would move on to our short ads, and they would seem that much better and more concise in comparison. Everyone seemed to like them a whole ton, and one guy (the one everyone else said was sort of bitchy and didn�t like anything) said it was the best campaign in the room. In fact, he actually gave us his contact information, telling us that if we�d like to show him some of our other stuff, he might be able to help us get a leg up or something. I�d only considered this in my wildest dreams, impressing one of the five with both our work and candor, so for it to actually happen was just amazing.

And God willing, we could use all the help we can get. When there was time left, we�d ask the alum about the search for their first job, and it was nothing but shudders and bitterness. One guy worked at JC Penney for 2 years before he got a job. �On the plus side,� he said, �now I�m working on ads for them, so it�s full circle.� It was sort of reassuring how much each of them hated portfolio school, though, and they kind of gave me an interesting trail of logic to use during interviews and such: If you dedicate two damn years of your life just to producing an adequate portfolio, of course it�s going to be pretty good. If you throw enough darts enough times, eventually you�re going to hit the bull�s-eye. Does that mean you�re good at darts, though?

Update update: Brenna talked to Peter outside of class one day, and it turns out that a) Toru was the pissy one, so yay all the better, and b) it was pretty much unanimous across the room that we had the best stuff. Ahahaha, take that! Man, it would be sort of cool if Brenna and I could get a job at the same agency and continue to work on stuff together. But I�m always full of weird pipe dreams like that. If I could meet up with any of these people in the real world, I�d be sort of secretly pleased, because it would mean that we had sort of made it. I guess Dan would probably top my list, just because he is about as offensively funny as me (e.g. for Postal Vault, the two of us conceived an alternative media campaign wherein retards would come to your door with your mail. "IF I CAN STEAL IT, ANYONE CAAAAN" they'd moan, swiveling their hips)

The pressure briefly off, hearts filled with joy, some of us went out for a stupidly expensive lunch at the caf� on Millennium Park. Is this what city living is? 6 dollar fries? 3 dollar orange juice? Should I ever live in this city, I am going to need to take out a loan to get my Chef Boyardee canned ravioli.

I experienced my first senseless traffic jam on the ride home, and the hilarious discrepancy between urban and rural motorists. In Chicago, everyone drives so, so fast pretty much without looking anywhere around them. Three or four people nearly merged right into me. �I am sorry! I am still occupying this bit of space and time! Come back later!� (although possibly the sheer obnoxiousness of my car led them to try and kamikaze my ass) As I got closer to home, however, everyone slowed to a fucking crawl, ten, fifteen under the speed limit and became just the most cautious motherfuckers on the planet. Is there not a happy medium?

So, I was listening to a lot of radio, and I was starting to really question my place in the human race. I mean, some songs, they were probably OK at one point but for the sheer number of times they have been played over the ensuing decades. Like, if you could erase my memory and then hand me some Beatles albums, I�d probably like some of them a whole lot. Problem is, I�ve had that fucking meter maid and her ilk crammed into my brain for nearly 22 years now, and I�m bloody well spent of them. So, those I can at least understand. I don�t understand how you mongoloids don�t tire of them, but I at least understand the original charm inherent in them. Some songs, though� how the fuck did they become hits? And I�m not talking about country songs or bubblegum pop, because a lot of subcultures are stupid. No, in particular I am thinking of Don Henley�s �Dirty Laundry.� I mean, the Eagles suck in general, and then you take that fucking guy from them and give him some second-rate blues riff played on church organ or something and you just have him moan about fucking laundry from 4 damn minutes, and I just want to know: Which of you fucking people like that song? Stop it. Right now.

My parents just seemed overjoyed to see me, which was really rather sweet, and made me wish I could have stayed a little longer. They had people over, and though Doug knows me well enough, I�m not entirely sure Mom�s friend from work really got me. I mean, I was frayed to begin with � the stress of driving gone, my last bits of lucidity were slipping away � and then you dump like a liter of nice wine into me, and I get a little interesting. I can�t imagine she thought I was a very� moral person, but come on! I kept my swearing to a PG-13 level for you, ma�am! For you!

I woke up less hungover than I had feared and drove back to town for my 11 hour labsitting shift. I was actually sort of looking forward to it in my masochistic way. Thought I�d do some work, get some writing done, maybe drag Dank over to watch Showgirls on the projector, who knows? Then, just as hour six rolls around and I�m starting to get a little stir crazy (posting pictures of Avril Lavigne in her Hooters Halloween costume everywhere), some bitch actually comes in so I don�t have to work the whole time. Well, fuck. And we were nearly hit by another tornado, and I was not allowed to dance in it. Fuck again!

The rest of the week has been pretty slow and lame. I had some pie and skipped some classes and did eventually watch Showgirls. It was bad. Tomorrow morning I�m going to Detroit with the remaining two people who did not flake on the trip up there for the advertising competition. It should be okay. I will grab some fireworks and am planning on giving myself some sort of liver condition over these next few days. I will let you know how that goes. If I have a coherent thought in the next day or so, I will try to get it down on paper.