The Things The Carried

They carried laptops: Dell, Sony, Mac. Some weighed 10 pounds, desktop replacement units, as they were known. If you were lucky you had an ultraportable machine, which weighed maybe 5 lbs. Ultraports, though, never got too much respect.
They carried carrying cases for the laptops, full of accessories. Power charger, 24 oz. , USB memory stick 1 oz., a couple of sheets of loose leaf, .1 oz. If they were writing a paper, which they almost always were, they carried books. Stacks and stacks of books. I once saw a young woman buried under the complete works of James Joyce and the Ultimate Southern Living Cookbook. Thinking about these things could drive a man crazy.
The third floor study lounge was the closest thing on Princeton's campus to Vietnam. There was no central air, so in the heat of the midday sun, it could get to feeling hotter than hell. Also, for some unknown reason, the entire bug population of Forbes college had migrated there. Maybe it was the heat.
There was one time, I can't forget it, I saw a girl lose it. The place was packed, but she didn't care. She just started yelling "I can't do it! It's so hot in here!" over and over. But that's not what gets me so many years later. What get's me is that as she sitting there, losing her mind, the guy next to her doesn't even take off his ipod ear-buds. He sat there, humming along, and dreaming, no doubt, of home.

After you've lost all energy or interest in school anymore it's the fear that keeps you going. You've gotta imagine the test and getting your grades back and then energy isn't a problem anymore.
For me at least. I wondered how everyone else did it, so I asked this guy who everyone called Slick Rick.
"You ever see The Ring?" he said
"Yeah"
"Good movie."
"Slick Rick, I don't see what that has to do with my question."
"You know that scene where the girl comes out of the TV after everyone thinks she's gone?"
"Sure, I remember it."
"I love that part."
Later we found out that Slick Rick wasn't a student at Princeton, at all, but rather a functionally retarded homeless man, living in the study lounge. This explained a lot.

One day I had to go in for shots. I was going to China, and just to be safe they were gonna pump me full of vaccines. What did I care? To me it was a chance to get away from a daily grind. My brain was starting to hurt anyway, maybe a nice jab in the arm would take my mind of the pain.
When you're out there, in the study lounge, you tend to forget things. So, I made a mark on the back of my hand. Dragged my number two mechanical pencil up and down till the skin turned red. When I saw the mark, I would think of my vaccines, and I wouldn't miss my appointment.
But making the mark had distracted me. I couldn't focus and started to mess around with my mobile phone (6 oz.). I noticed a feature that I hadn't seen before: quick text. You could program in common text messages and then send them with the click of a button. I got goofy all of a sudden and programmed in the message "please pass the milk please" as the number one quick text. Classic, I thought, I have to remember to write about this in my blog. But how to remember? I glanced down at my hand, and multitasked the mark.

To Be Continued...

iTunes Library

I have this recurring nightmare where Steve Jobs gets a hold of my computer and takes a look at my iTunes library. He starts yelling at me saying how poorly organized it is, without album art, and with messed up genres and some songs that don't even have albums. No! I say, it wasn't supposed to happen like this. It wasn't always this way. There's just too much. You don't understand...I'm working on it, it just takes so long. Then Chris is standing off in the background, and then people start checking my play counts, and laughing that I haven't even listened to London Calling! I have, but then my play counts got cleared! Please believe me.

All I want is to have the best iTunes library in the world. My humble goal is driving me to madness.

05/05/05

This is my third blog post in as many days. At what point do I leave the realm of the mere mortal and become a "blogger"?

Today is 05/05/05. The Mexicans must be thrilled. To celebrate Cinqo de Mayo de Cinqo our cafeteria served a fine assortment of self-proclaimed Mexican food including fried cod and broccolli. As we all know these two dishes practically define Mexican cuisine and the Mexicans get a good laugh out of the Gringo's who asscoiate tacos or burritos or Enchiritos with Mexico.

I was thinking that it was pretty neat that it was 05/05/05, and felt bad that I wasn't celebrating, so I performed a modest, but mildly impressive jig and hummed a merry tune. The tune was "The Power of Suds" by "Weird" Al Yankovich. It is a hilarious parody of "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News.

Today was Chinese Table, which is where the Chinese students all gather around the table at Forbes and speak Chinese with another. I'm a little nervous for going to China, because if you speak English once there you get an automatic "B", and if you speak english twice they send you home. Here is a humorous scene I imagined of what my time in China will be like:

(Tom flying on plane, reading a book. The book is a "choose-your-own adventure", but a pretty mediocre one. Tom's has chosen his adventure such that in the book he is also sitting on a plane reading a choose-your-own-adventure. Thinking about this is making Tom's head hurt, so he takes a nap. Fade to Tom arriving at Beijing University. Tom approaches check-in.)
Tom: Hello there
Chinese Person: Automatic B!
Tom: Oh crap.
Chinese Person: And now you leave!
(Cut to Tom flying back on the plane as humorous music plays in the background).

Right now, Chris is making a comic strip that we wrote. It's pretty funny, and I'll post it here when he's done.

Ice-T and Ice Cube

As I've mentioned previously in the blog I got a bunch of snapple iced tea at the Fristfest. Too much in fact. So to get rid of the Snapple Iced Tea that was clogging up my refrigerator like so much bad cholesterol I decided to throw a party called: "Tom's Iced Tea/Ice-T Party". The theme was that I would play Ice-T songs and everyone that came would get a free iced tea (or two if they were greedy!) Well right away we had a problem--I had no Ice-T songs! To my chagrin, noone was even streaming Ice-T over iTunes. Thanks to some quick thinking, and the Princeton populations general ignorance of the subtleties of gangsta rap, I was able to play Ice Cube and noone noticed. The party was a mild success, with several people coming. I will not try to claim that it was a blowout, but I think if you asked my guests to list the top 5 moments in their life, you would see this party on a number of lists.

Chris just showed me that Mr. Raibon's cd is on iTunes now, but then I noticed that noone has bought it. Depressing.

Speaking of iTunes, I have something to say to bands making albums nowadays. This is directed at Green Day, Brian Wilson etc... the bands that make their albums designed to be one constant song so that the end of every song is the beginning of the next song. Stop it! iTunes and iPod's do not have gapless playback meaning that the end and beginning of every song sounds stupid and ridiculous. Actually maybe I should direct this at apple. To all the apple exec's that read this blog (Steve Jobs, I'm looking at you) please add gapless playback to iTunes. How long could it possibly take? A couple of seconds? And don't give me that "use the cross fader" nonsense. How dare you even invent the cross fader. How dare you!

Now the part where I write about music, and seem pretentious and noone reads. Nashville Skyline is great. Much less depressing than "Blood on the Tracks" which I can hardly listen to anymore, because it's so sad. I listened to "Velvet Underground" today for the first time, and was quite pleased (not the band, the album, you idiot). The end of this one reminds me of the end of "Flood" of all albums, because the second to last track is experimental, followed by a very slow soft song. Come to think of it, that's how the Beatles ended the white album. Before that album they put the experimental song at the end (see Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's). When critics look back at this blog, they will probably say that it follows in the tradition of "The White Album" in that the penultimate paragraph is very experimental and technically wild, while the last paragraph is slow, soft, and ultimately dull and pointless. How Meta.

Andrew WK and Banquets

Andrew WK came to perform here on Sunday. It was so ill and offensive that I was freaking out. There was a giant mosh pit, where people danced agressively and wildly and people not in the mosh pit were probably thinking, oh how I wish I could dance with such moves. If they tried they quickly discovered that the mosh pit was full of mud and violence, and was not the place that they had imagined it to be. At one point I noticed that Andrew WK and I both have the same shoes, namely Asics Duomax Gels. I sorely wanted to share this fact with him with the hope that he would then become good friends with me, and key me in on his party animal lifestyle as described in such hits as "Party Hard", "It's Time to Party", and "Party 'till I puke". To do this I had to fight my way to the front of the mosh pit, which was exciting in itself and resulted in me getting a confusing footprint on my upper thigh. Then when I got to the front, I noticed that when anyone confronted AWK, he would make them sing along with his songs. I got nervous that he would put the mic in front of my face, and to be honest I don't really know the lyrics of his song too well. I decided that I would have to show him our identical shoes later in life. Also, my shoes were so covered in mud that he probably couldn't even recognize them even if I did know the lyrics.

I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks lately. Such as Artemis Fowl, which is a children's book so packed full of cliches that it amazes me that the binding doesn't burst at the seams. Then, I remembered it's an audiobook, and you can't well expect mpec encoded bits and bytes to burst out of the ipod shuffle. Also, it's very simple and easy to listen to on tape, unlike Sense and Sensibility, which is what I'm on now. Jane Austen amuses me.

Today for lunch I had 10 minutes before Chinese, so I had to eat in about two minutes. I got a messy beef pita sandwich, egg salad, and peas. What followed was a spectacle that attracted the attention of the majority of the people in the dining hall. I felt sick for the entire class.

Dinner was quite different, as the Daily Princetonian was holding a banquet celebrating my accopmilshments as a COLUMNIST (as well as all the other stuff to do with the paper). Dinner was brought out at the breakneck pace of 30 minutes per course, so that although the banquet began at 6, I nearly missed my radio show at 9 o' clock. Congratulations to Laura Sillers and Leslie Lee for winning awards for their work at the Princeton. Obviously there was some clerical error that explains why I didn't get a prize, but I'm sure it will all be sorted out in due time.