Deep fried mars bars

I leave for South Africa in one day, and as usual I am totally underprepared.

In fact, at this very moment I have just remembered that I need to take my passport to the International Student Office to have it revalidated. Fuck.

I'll have to write some more stuff later.

Wearing life vicariously

It all started innocently enough.

"I really need to clean out my wardrobe before I move. And since you have already stolen several of my T-shirts, you may as well have these too..."

My roommate Kate is leaving for NM in a couple of weeks. In anticipation of her move, and to avoid the crippling anxiety she experiences with each flight to pastures new, she began the long process of trash-and-pack about a month ago. The customary yearly donation to St Vinnies was about to take place, and to make the bag lighter (and keep my wallet heavier) I took a bundle of shirts off her hands.

Later that week, as I strolled down to lunch one day, someone complimented me on my nice brick red T with a stylistic Asian sun on the front.

"Yeah, its from Miss Saigon's run in Minneapolis." I replied proudly. I looked good in this particular shirt. It was a great fit, and did a particularly convincing job of making me look belly free.

"Oh, that's a great show - I love that scene where she cries on the floor..." the shirt admirer continued. Obviously enjoying her sudden Broadway flashback, she looked to me to share in her excitement and commence an exchange of our Miss Saigon experiences.

At this point I had a choice to make. Did I let this person know I was a massive fraud, and that I had actually only come into possession of the shirt through my inherent Scottish cheapness? Or did I try and fake my way through some synopsis of the show based on the names of the various movements of the Miss Saigon suite I had played in band when I was 14? A bead of sweat appeared on my temple as I vacillated.

"Oh, I actually stole it from a friend. I have never seen the show, but I've heard it is intense and beautiful."

Weak. The only word that came to mind after the words left my mouth. The woman's eyes drifted momentarily toward the ground, suddenly embarrassed for me at the realization my culturaly enriching theater visit was entirely fictional.

"Well, you really should see it you know..." she commented, as their eyes came back to my shirt, and then my face. Her embarrassment had transformed into annoyance. "Its a masterpiece." With that, we parted ways, and I felt the need to cover myself as if to hide the lie I literally wore across my chest.

A few days later, I wore another one of Kate's hand-me-downs as I walked along State St. Minding my own business, I was hanging outside the poster store wondering if the 3 by 5 Hokusai in the window would look good above my bed despite the fact I couldn't afford a frame to encase it. A girl rushed by me, looking purposeful and in rather a hurry. In the corner of my eye I noticed her make a double take, and her do curt twirl and begin to walk backwards. A voice broke through my musing and said

"I went to St Olaf's!"

At first I had no idea why the woman felt the need to share that with me. Maybe she had some complex form of Tourettes, one of her tics manifesting itself as a compulsive, guttural sharing of boring information.

"That's cool."

Then I realized she was staring at my chest, where the word "CARLETON" was emblazoned across my banana yellow shirt in large, blue letters. Situated in Northfield, MN, a fair number of my friends in Madison had attended Carleton College. Being from Scotland, I obviously had not.

"Oh right, St Olaf's is in Northfield too!" I said, finally making some kind of connection.

However, in doing so, I immediately came upon the same dilemma once again - to furnish a tale, or tell the sad truth and look like a loser. The next words I spoke came as no great surprise.

"I didn't go to Carleton - I stole this shirt from a friend."

Again, I received the double take and the look of slight miscomprehension. Followed by that moment movie directors love to stretch out so that the audience can catch up if need be - realization. Her face belied understanding, and she offered me that look of pity that suggested "I am sorry you are so boring that you have to steal your stories and identity form a friend." I again bowed my head, again felt rather pathetic, and again wished I was wearing one of my boring shirts with no shareable experience or Kodak moment described upon it.

However, I realized that this was actually where my problem lay. Most of my shirts are stolen or used in some way. The pink shirt I didn't buy at Mall of America, or the Prairie Walls staff T I didn't get to wear a the shifts I didn't work. The Cambodia T-shirt that my friend's roommate also has, that I didn't buy while bumming around Bangkok as he did. Or the Crazy Legs T shirt I didn't get to sport as I didn't cross the finish line at Camp Randall. All my shirts are records of stories I didn't hear, experiences I never had or challenges I never faced. My cheapness and slight cleptomania have resulted in my only possessing about four T's I actually bought new. I am living my life vicariously through other peoples clothes, and showing the world a level of culture and life experience I have absolutely no claim to.

Some days, it just makes me feel like a huge phoney.

Tonight was the Willy St Co-op members party. Free food and beer, along with some live music and community spirit, were provided by the good staff at the co-op as a thank you for our customer loyalty and investment. I felt like a treasured family member, and wallowed in the feeling of belonging. Which I felt entirely entitled to do, seeing as I spent $9 on a honeydew melon there only yesterday.

I sat at the table, tongue slipping out in concentration, smothering my organic bratwurst in organic mustard, trying not to get any on the organic bun. Across the table sat a wonderfully Willy St family, complete with Patagonia tank tops, Gramicci pants and that faint odor of patchouli. After smuggling glances at me for a few minutes, the woman leaned across the table and inquired

"Has the AIDS cycle been and gone already?"

I was wearing a long sleeve, burnt sienna shirt covered in AIDS ride logos. Which of course, I had picked up at an end-of-line T-shirt sale at a community fest a few days earlier.

"Yeah," I replied. "It finished a few days ago. I didn't ride in it though."

I paused for a second, deliberating, before continuing;

"But I volunteer for AIDS network, and we were astounded by the amount of money raised. Over $300,000! The ride went through a whole bunch of little towns in Southern WI, and people turned out to cheer. It was awesome!"

The lady looked pleased, and congratulated me on my involvement.

Of course, I neither volunteer for AIDS network, nor know anything about the rides route. I assembled what little information I offered from various news reports and emails I had received about the event. A man at OutReach had mentioned the total raised, so I threw it out there to lend credence to my tale. I had just told a massive, barefaced lie, to this complete stranger. And after I did I sat there, glowing in the good feeling that not doing all that volunteer work gave me. I hadn't done a service to my community, and it felt fantastic.

Feeling like sad little man with no life of your own isn't fun for long. Sometimes, its nice to talk to random strangers about topics inspired by your current garment. Sometimes, its fun to embellish tales of events your friends attended, claiming their life as your own. Anyway, how are these people supposed to know I didn't do any of these things?

After all, I had the T-shirt, and that proves I was there - right??

I just watched the new Teen Girl Squad.

As always, their insanely weird antics and lack of grammar made me laugh my ass off. Which is a good thing because I just had a meeting with my boss on the phone. Trying to tell him that I want to work for someone else in the fall is not going so well, and so I think for now I am just going to ignore it on his part. I am sick of being so anxious at work all the time. It can't be doing anything good for my skin at all.

Combined with the fact that I am

a) single
b) totally utterly broke
c) in need of a trip to the bathroom

I am feeling ridiculously sorry for myself right now. And I think thats rather lame of me. I could be dying of starvation in Africa, or fighting for my freedom from oppression in any number of awful dicatorships right now. Instead, I am in my air conditioned office, avoiding the heat and moaning about how much I hate my job that I have and get paid by.

So I think i'll thank my lucky stars that my life is so great, put on a cd and get some work done. Oh - and I probably should go pee too...

wipeable for easy cleaning

I put new flooring in my rats cage today.

They have this really annoying habit you see, of just peeing and shitting right at the top of the cage. They sleep in a hammock in the upper part of the cage. Obviously, like most animals, the don't like sleeping in their own filth. However, aparently they don't mind eating, playing and walking around in it. During the day when they are sleepy, they climb out of the hammock, do a little pee, and maybe a poo, right on the top shelf of the cage. Of course since the cage is made of a mesh, this tends to just fall on whatever is below - their exercise wheel, food or even their cagemate (if he isn't passed out in afore mentioned hammock).

So, in the interests of the smell and their health, I fitted the three shelfs with some lino I found in the basement. Its the same stuff we have in our bathroom, minus the huge stains created rather artistically by years of water damage. So now rather than urinating and defecating all over the cgae, they just do it on the plastic flooring, where it can be easily cleaned up with something like a rat sized Swiffer WetJet. Not that they would use it if they knew how - lazy little bastards...

Now I know how my mother felt when I was a kid and I'd miss the toilet bowl. Or how she felt when I was a drunk 22 year old and I'd miss the toilet bowl. Cleaning up another creatures own waste products really is a special form of intimacy, that you only share with a select few people in your life. Unless you are a nurse. My friend Sheila cleans up shit and piss all the time (apparently its a bit easier than cleaning someones face up after it has been grated on the pavement during a biking accident). My mom has probably cleaned up enough faeces and urine to fill a football stadium in her long career as a nurse, Which is probably why she didn't balk at my own wasted aim.

And why I did when forced to clean it up with a horrible hangover.

better use of time?

I am mind numbingly bored.

I am sitting at my desk at work and I am supposed to be calculating signal to noise values for the observations we'll be carrying out at SALT in the fall. Searching through papers from the 60s (since no one has deemed our objects interesting to look at since then since then) for flux values and continuum brightnesses, I have had the sobering realization that I actually don't give a shit about any of this stuff. I really don't care where the dust is in the Orion Nebula, and although vaguely interesting, will it ever change anyones life to know about magnetic fields in a planetary nebula?

Yesterday I actually went as far as to apply for a job. Its with McGraw-Hill, who amongst their many interests create, market and publish educational supplementary material like textbooks, work-kits and cdroms. I actually used some of their stuff in high school and liked it. The job is to help develop materials for K-12 math, science and spelling programs. It sounds really interesting, its creative and most importantly it will perhaps one day benefit a little kid somewhere.

I still don't really know why I applied.

The job is in, of all the ironic places, Columbus OH. I don't really think they'll even get in touch with me, or that I would have the balls to pack in the PhD and take the job should it ever come up. One question clearly requires answering though - why do I keep looking at the job pages, and why can't I get out of bed most mornings to come into the office and rack my brains all day over all this astronomy crap?

A clap across the face

I have been thinking about thunder today. Not because when I finally emerged from bed today at 10am the weather was crappy and the sky gray. And not because I really felt like I needed another couple of hours sleep (which I always feel). I am thinking about thunder because of an incredible story I was privileged enough to hear yesterday.

I went to a book group at Outreach WI last night. Outreach is Madison's local LGBT community center, and I was attending Big Gay Steve's Big Gay Book Group for the first time. It was a lot of fun, even though there were only three of us. The two men who were there, Steve (of the group's name) and Rodger, are both extensively involved with LGBT issues in the state, and volunteer with the Speaker's Bureau at the center. We sat around and talked about queer life in general, the topics mainly coming from the book we read - "My Little Book of Neuroses - Trials From My Queer Life" by Michael Thomas Ford. In the course of this, we inevitably exchanged coming out stories. Steve has without doubt the most interesting tale I have ever heard. In finally deciding to tell his family, he blurted himself out of the closet to his brother while watching ESPN. His brother replied with a somber "You are going to have to have a long talk with Dad about this". Thinking this was going to lead to a horrible, long conversation, Steve told his father on the way out of the door that night to avoid confrontation.

"We'll need to talk about this tomorrow" was his dad's response.

While walking in the woods the next day, with the sole purpose of discussing Steve's newly revealed homosexuality, his father calmly presented his own thoughts on the matter

"I had a gay fuck-buddy for 10 years before I met your mother."

Not really knowing how to reply, Steve had a rather incredible realization. At the one moment in every gay man or woman's life that they should truly be able to call their own, he had been usurped by, of all people, his father. Whose coming out was after all, rather more dramatic.

I personally cannot imagine this scenario. I think it would invoke some strange backlash prejudice in me. I can't decide whether it makes the whole experience easier, or harder, or just completely strange. One thing is clear however - if anyone has ever had their thunder stolen, its Steve on his coming out day!

Every saga needs an origin...

Hello select few who know about this blog,

So, in the time honored tradition of complete nerds with too much time on their hands, I have decided to try and keep an online record of my life. It feels quite weird succombing to the temptation of slapping my life on line. Like thousands of other geeks and exhibitionists, I feel the time is right. Maybe it will be good for my mental health - my therapist seems to think writing about your problems is a good way to realize what they are and to start dealing with them. I don't know if I agree.

I have always felt that the weirdest people I have met have been those who keep journals. I think spending too much time in your own head is unhealthy. Our minds are the greenhouses for our neuroses, and tending them and watering them only serves to help them grow, consume all available resources and break through our face, rendering us as hideous plantlike parodies of Swamp Thing. Or, as the rest of the world sees us, 20-somethings.

Yes, I believe I am having my quarterlife crisis a few years early. Grad school and living in the states has taken its toll on me and turned me into a crazy man. Or a drama queen. One or the other. In either case, I feel that I have to develop an avenue for expressing myself, and since the beautiful yet complex language of math can actually prove that self expression is infact, completely imaginary, a blog seemed like a good start.

So, I intend to present my thoughts here is a completely unorganized, slightly spaz kind of way. And since all you lovely people know me well, that shouldn't come as any surprise. Topics will come and go, my opinions will probably self conflict, but hopefully - if all goes well - it will at least provoke a thought, giggle, or desire to send me anthrax in the mail. Enjoy!!!