a post about last week from my laptop that i wrote while i had no internet

I spent most of last week in kent, which, for once meant less blogging than being at home, based mostly on the fact that I was doing so many things on any given day in the real world that the amount of time I spent typing madly in the 697 basement was negligible.

I got up there on tuesday evening, thanks once again to the good graces of miss andrea sue, esq. and her hardy toyota corolla. she actually met my family and I at the chipotle in belden village, and we had a pretty pleasant low-key dinner together. the three or four times my parents and I and andrea have all had dinner together since we broke up a few years ago have been pointedly more enjoyable than any of the meals we shared together when we two were dating; yet another indication that that particular move was a good one. I’ve long since made up my mind on that point, but a little extra validation after the fact never hurt anyone.

I got a tour of her new digs afterwards. it’s such an awesome house. I’d seen a little of it back when her and I were looking at moving into it together before I got my original WSU acceptance letter back in 2005 (way back before the dinosaurs, seemingly) and I really loved it. I love it even more now. and bonus points for phenomenal acoustics in the wood-floored living room.

we shipped off from there to giant eagle in stow, where we met bowes and my cargo was transferred to his car (I had planned on staying up there for 5-6 days and so I was hauling this ridiculous case with my belongings and chages of clothes in it around with me). we got to sit in on andrea’s (apparent) first encounter with the robot check-out machine. she survived admirably. but then again, she didn’t have to weigh any produce…

everyone had “jobs” to go to in the morning, so they went to bed shortly thereafter, and if I remember correctly I stayed up until something absurd like 7am, looking up articles on vampire literature and chatting with V.

wednesday was one of the most pleasant days I’ve had in recent memory, despite the fact that our landlord’s mom showed up to do his laundry at 10am and woke me the fuck up after three hours of sleep. a few peanut butter sandwiches, a diet coke and some regina spektor later, I was up and about. we got together with john later at starbucks and had what was (at least to me) a pretty pleasant chill-out session necessitated by john’s waiting to show up until after we’d been there for an hour. it was somewhere also within this intervening hour that I once again had the realization that some girls are attractive and even cerebrally interesting. sometimes I forget this for weeks or months at a time, and this is probably for the best. however, now I’m back in full-on romantic-whiny mode, and it will probably last me for at least a few weeks if not longer.

from starbucks it was off to front campus, and an impromptu frisbee-toss and 2-on-2 ultimate game (as a rule, we travel pretty much everywhere in kent with a frisbee, so frisbee can happen anytime, anywhere). probably the most exercise I’ve had in months. also probably the worst attack I’ve had of being a disgusting, sweaty-ass human being in awhile. I decided to play the last few minutes of the game in bare feet, in the hopes that I would be able to run faster. in reality, this just led to me tripping over a divot and faceplanting in the dirt, and hurting my ankle not quite enough to call it a bonafide sprain, but enough that it would bother me the rest of the week and weekend. it actually sort of hurts right now.

having not eaten all day at that point, it was clearly time to hit chipotle again for about 1500 calories of meal-ness. hitting the patio at chipotle at sunset reminded me of the good old days of 2002-2004, and for once not the bad alcoholic-y parts, but the good parts.

thursday, by comparison, was pretty low-key. sat around a lot working on some things I needed to catch up on, for work and whatnot. I was supposed to go to see “prince caspian” with andrea later in the day, and ended up going to the plaza theatres with her and my erstwhile roommates. it was a good movie. a good sequel. certainly not reinventing the wheel in any sense, but a solid movie for people who liked the first one. it was also fun to watch because I had no idea what happened ahead of time because I’ve never actually read any of the chroincles of narnia (yeah, I know).

that night was the other night that I believe I stayed up reading about vampires and talking to V. this time it worked out a bit better because I actually got to sleep in a bit the next day. getting enough sleep is extra important when you’re sleeping on a too-short couch, and no matter how much sleep you get, it’s at least in some ways not enough regardless. this was another excellent day. got to meet with moe for the first time since christmas, and got to see another friend of mine that I haven’t seen for something like four years. we went to the raj in akron/the falls and had an absolutely enormous dinner, after getting to play frisbee with two really adorable five-or-so-year-old asian girls who were apparently wandering around town on their own.

then more actually-doing-nature/exercise-stuff ensued. we went to this park that I didn’t already know existed in the falls, which had a fantastic lookout point and an open field that put playing frisbee in towner’s woods to shame.

because the last two weeks of my life haven’t already had enough ice cream in them, we went to his custard place in the falls and hung out there for about two hours, and then, being stricken with the sort of night-madness that seems to set in a lot in kent on the weekends in the summer, we went to the zephyr. since I’ve obviously developed horrid impulse control in the last year or so, I managed to get myself moderately drunk in the 45 minutes or so that we were there. this made everything else that happened that night seem really fun. it also made it so I can’t remember what any of that fun stuff actually was.

saturday we had big plans to go up geneva to see moe play in his band. and we did. we almost even got there on time. but upon arrival, we decided for various reasons that it would be better to hang out at geneva-on-the-lake for a few hours. what followed was a parade of culturally-degrading shitsplosions (I’ll let you parse that yourselves). in short, “g on the l” was pretty terrifying, depressing, and hilarious all at once. but we remedied the situation a bit with ice cream and caffeine and by skipping rocks on the lake erie beach for an hour. we caught the end of moe’s concert after that, and then unleashed ourselves on northeast ohio, taking john’s borrowed car all along the north edge of ohio in search of something to do in classic undergrad-at-KSU style. in the process I had possibly the best donut I’ve ever had, after we drove all the way to presti’s in little italy and found it closed and ended up settling on some weird 24 hour donut shop in the middle of suburb hell. we did some other stuff until it got to be almost painfully late, and then bowes and I, both bereft of significant caloric intake for at least about 12 hours, hit luna’s in kent, confusing the hell out of the goths and wannabe punks. it made me wish I had stole parliament lights out of my mom’s purse or something.

then it was back home to canton on sunday morning for my cousin’s graduation party (from high school) and a few birthdays (all thrown together into one party because everyone in my family was born in late june/july). this ended up being really, really fun because it drew out pretty much everyone in my family, including a lot of people I only get to see once a year usually (on christmas). we were treated to the usual summer-in-ohio weather of sudden thunderstorms and deluges every few hours, but we made the best of it, and I at least for one had a good time.

today it was back to sort of cleaning things up and trying to figure out real-life things like buying a plane ticket and get an eye appointment for new glasses and how to afford being alive for the next four years. or at least the next three months or so. starting small helps.

I actually want to write up some in-depth reviews of a few new CDs and stuff like I used to do back in the day, but the fact is I haven’t listened to enough of them to have a decent opinion at the moment. so hopefully I’ll get to that. castlevania: symphony of the night was fantastic, though not as mind-bendingly original as it might have been had I not played aria of sorrow first. now I’m playing sword of mana on the GBA, a remake of final fantasy adventure, a game that I played obsessively as a kid. it’s really cool to see all the modern touches they’ve added without changing the heart of what was a really well-made and excellently paced but elegantly simple game. I’m getting so pumped about starcraft 2 though that it’s likely only a matter of time before I jump back into brood war and don’t play anything else until football seasons starts.

I’m liking the shins more after a few listens.

sooo…my “big surprise” I mentioned was that I was going to dye my hair blue for the rest of the summer. this was something I was really pumped about doing, right up there with the tattoo thing…however, it’s looking like with my natural hair color, the only way to really get a decent shade of electric blue would be by bleaching my hair first. and I’m hesitant to do that for two reasons:

1) my hair is already really thin and though it’s not falling out like I once thought, I’m still paranoid about doing anything that might cause it to do so.
2) I have really bad problems with dry scalp, and I’m worried that bleach would exacerbate that.
3) bleaching would definitely not be undoable in something like 2 months, unless I wanted to shave my head, which I am definitely not going to do. my other option would be going to work in august with part blue, part blonde and part brown hair. not cool.

that’s three reasons.

hopefully this will still happen sometime…just not now. I’ve always sort of wanted blue hair. sigh.