How I Got the F- Out of Dodge, Part 1

A couple nights ago I dreamt that I broke down and told off all my Providence friends, telling them that I couldn't stand them or the city and that I was leaving for good. I count it as a bad dream, seeing as my arguments for telling people I really like that I disliked them were pretty bad, but it was defintely the capstone to a night where it became painfully obvious that Providence wasn't a place I'd ever call home. And as my dream self cried unthorough insults, my real self slept somewhere besides my own bed for the first time in months.

I spent that day criss-crossing New York, first from Brooklyn to the Bronx to see my aunt, then from the Bronx to Jersey, then on the ferry from Jersey to Manhattan. A cross-town bus later, I met up with my friend Daniel and spent a few hours with him and his co-workers at a frattastical bar that held a lame fake orgasm contest. Daniel assured me that co-worker bar nights rarely happened, though in my mind, I believed they did. Daniel had apparently "pimped me out" to his single co-worker, so much so that his male co-workers greeted me with, "Oh, so you're Daniel's single friend." Owen and Yu-wen met up with us there, and we had dinner and hung out at an Italian restaurant in the Meatpacking District. Kept a seat away from the girl I wanted to hit on, Owen and I caught up.

Daniel and I headed back to Brooklyn, munching on a donut and a cookie. In a half-drunk, half-concussed moment of truth, Daniel and I talked about how much life and work became more fulfulling for him when he left Providence. And while he cut some ties, he basically said he's happier. I felt like a wet blanket, as Patrick would put it later, droning on about how I had no motivation to work. But, it seemed very clear after that that I should get the fuck out of dodge.

The Finer Points of Pancaking

While others may choose to do good while procrastinating on their
dissertations, some of us (me) just make ourselves fat by cooking.
Well, I like to think of it as practice feeding my offspring, lest
they succumb to Red Vines and Soft Batch cookies.

Here we see what happens when you get one side of the pancake right
and then you leave to see if anyone responded to your email about
basketball and burn the other side. Also, those banana pieces were
supposed to be inside the pancake, but I blame a lack of oversight. So
basically, I forgot to use up all my remaining groceries in this batch.

Of course no kitchen folly would be complete without me dropping my
knife as picked up the plate. As you can see, without supervision I am
pointless.

Harey Kiri?

A while back when I was a Netflix subscriber (happier times...), I ran through classic films, just to get a sense of what I was missing by watching Star Trek IV over and over as a kid. Admittedly, I liked Ben Hur, but fell asleep during Raging Bull, but I also managed to fit in lots of great Blacksploitation films, Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (ever see a pair of lungs preen itself?), and Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

Anyway, I kinda want to go through some of Hollywood's depression era screwball comedies, but without Netflix, I'm limited to reading summaries on Wikipedia (or exerting effort to find them at the Brown Library). But one thing stands out: the Wikipedia page for silent film actor Harry Carey -- who played the Senate President in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington -- has a little disambiguation link at the top. You may have accidentally wandered into his biography looking for a way to commit ritual suicide, or Hara Kiri, which I can only assume happens when you're looking for Capra movie actors and thinking in a Southern accent.

In other news, we're under more snow, with more snow to come. These are the kind of days when I wonder why I really need a Ph.D.