Author: Brendan

July 8, 2003 /

Last week I baked a turkey, which we are still eating. Yes. I made a turkey (well, a turkey breast), and I made it all by myself, and it’s really good! It’s just like Mom used to make, because I used Mom’s secret recipe.*

I love turkey sandwiches beyond all reason, so the discovery that I can get this much delicious turkey meat for less than ten bucks is astounding. It fills me with a kind of joyous freedom, akin to the feeling (I imagine) of learning to drive.

Also, this weekend Maria and I made burritos almost from scratch, and nobody died and they were good too. The novelty of cooking for myself doesn’t look like it’s going to wear off any time soon, so expect a lot more stupid food entries. Food is the new frisbee!

* Basically, “turn it upside down.”

June 30, 2003 /

Hey, remember back at SETC when I talked about how amazing my director Michelle was? And remember when I talked about Strother, expert in Matrix dollies and frightening photography? Well guess what! Through a distinct lack of coincidence, Strother from Kentucky and Michelle from Alabama are working together as tech interns at the Shenandoah University Summer Music Theatre. This is not a coincidence because they were at SETC for the same reason, after all, and apparently Shenandoah has excellent taste in interns.

Anyway, I’ve spent the past week bugging Mr. G____ for visual proof that the two of them coexist, and last night he gave in. For your further mental-image referencing, please find pics below! (Strother is the large hairy one, and Michelle is the smaller one with the headset. And Strother is wearing a purple shirt. With the scary eyes. No, on the left.)

Also last night, I finally met Kim’s dogs, and finally saw Chamber of Secrets, and Ian finally came over to hang out for a while. He brought along Yale, so DC was terrified of us, and that was good. I think there should be some gradual way to introduce people to the experience that is Yale, like the way you’re supposed to immunize yourself to electricity or rabid dogs.* Just meeting him straight away, or even going to his web page (which now appears to be gone), tends to cause sensory overload in humans.

So last night I went to bed all peppy, and then woke up this morning and there wasn’t any hot water so I took a cold shower and it stabbed my children in the face, and I hate you.

* Yeah, I think I made that up.

June 27, 2003 /

I’m writing way too much today. NewsBruiser makes it so easy!

From the back of my instant lemonade tub:

To make 1 quart, fill cap with mix up to line "A." Pour mix from cap into pitcher and add 1 quart cold water; stir to dissolve. To make multiple quarts, repeat instructions.

My instant lemonade tub was designed by a programmer.

June 27, 2003 /

I accidentally threw away my first microfiber glasses-cleaning cloth with my broken case, a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been casting about for another one ever since, substituting shirttails and paper towels. Coincidentally, I started carrying a handkerchief in my pocket back in April, and almost always have it with me.

It wasn’t until today that it occurred to me that these two things might be related. Man, how did I ever graduate?

Landmark

June 27, 2003 /

Just moments ago, I, Brendan Adkins, closed my first issue! And promptly got busted for blogging at work. I think I’m a real professional now.

June 20, 2003 /

There are a number of lyrical, rhythmic and tonal cheap tricks employed in pop music for which I am an absolute sucker. I started a list of those earlier this year, and eventually I’ll write an entry on it too. One of the most specific and fun to talk about, though, is hip-hop songs that define their own terms. They’re great! They’re extremely helpful to geeky white people like myself–you’re given a new cool slang term, and immediately know its usage and basic etymology–and moreover, they’re completely happy and unself-conscious about it. I think Radiohead would have a lot more fun if they took a few pages from the same book.

I first noticed the phenomenon quite some time ago, but I was holding off on writing about it until I had three examples I could remember all at the same time. Last night, Maria inadvertently provided the third, and they are as follows:

  • Nelly’s “Pimp Juice:” “She likes my pimp juice! Pimp juice is anything attract the opposite sex.”
  • Alicia Keys’s “Girlfriend:” “I think I’m jealous of your girlfriend, although she’s just a girl that is your friend.”
  • and the granddaddy, TLC’s “No Scrubs:” “I don’t want no scrubs. A scrub is a guy that can’t get no love from me–hanging out the passenger side of his best friend’s ride, trying to holler at me.”

When I told Jon about this, months ago, he immediately suggested that we start putting our own terms into general parlance via Rhythm Method songs, then created the first one on the spot: “She like mah mantelpiece! The mantelpiece is the bulge in the front of your pants.”

If anybody knows more of these, drop them off. With a little thought we could have our very own Rap Dictionary.

June 16, 2003 /

6.16.03 1731 hrs: I’m standing here at the pseudo-bus stop nearest my job (1944 Goldsmith) and whoop, the bus came. On cue.

6.16.03 1745 hrs and Bus 21 has hit the end of its route. The kindly tired driver is taking a three-minute cigarette break and then telling me I should take 23, not 17, to get home.

6.16.03 1759 hrs at the stop in front of Taco Bell. This is rapidly degenerating into the kind of minute-by-minute narratives I would write about every six months in grade school, when I got a diary for my birthday or Christmas and get inspired, sometimes for a whole day.

As pulling out the notepad has failed to magically produce a bus this time, I can talk about my situation a bit. I ride the bus now, or I say I do, since it’s my first day doing it and I’m not even home yet. As someone who’s depended on the kindness of strangers for transportation his whole life, though, I kind of like it. The buses are clean and, so far, uncrowded, and they have a neat acronym. TARC. It makes me want to rename this thing TARCblog (Ken gets that).

6.16.03 1808 hrs and I’m on 17. What the hell, it got here first.

So this is how I go from place to place now, here, being someone who lives on Bardstown Road. I’ve plunged into this and I’m glad, because I LIKE it. I am infatuated with Louisville. I want to understand the Highlands. I want to grok TARC.

6.16.03 1919 hrs: home, showered, redressed, finally posting again. And here’s this: I MADE IT THROUGH MY FIRST DAY.

Talk about the last week point five (a million years) soon enough. For now I have to get back out and do things, here, in this bright green shoppy place where I am. I have a boss and a cubicle. I have a kitchen stuffed with food. I have the interweb on cable. I can walk to the ice cream store and the comic book store and the CD store, and I have friends and a phone and summer.

I am unjustifiably lighthearted. I can’t believe how good it is to have this, my big new happy perfectly ordinary life.

June 1, 2003 /

Today is the day I plug Mindy in the blog. Mindy Mindy Mindy! Mindy is a frosher, only she’s not because the year is over, only she still IS because that’s who she is in my head. And yes, Mindy reads this and wanted to be name-checked like Emily and Strother and whoever else. Congratulations, Mindy: approximately five more people have now read your name.

What I really (still) want is for all my friends to get blogs, or Livejournals, or their own sites, or something. The presence of my crew on the interweb is disappointingly low. I want to check in on them and read about their love lives and be fascinated by the way they think, especially when I’m exiled to Richmond, but they stubbornly persist in their absence. Get blogs, all of you! I promise to link you if you do!

Oh, that means I should talk about Sara. Sara is a (former) frosher with a blog! You could all take a page from her cyber-book, other friends.

I’m still going through the sum of all my belongings, sorting and repacking things for the great exodus to Louisville, and yesterday I found three items of interest. The first is a piece of paper from last summer, on which is scrawled the following:

If I die, and somebody goes to a vanity press or something and has a posthumous collection of my work published, and it’s not called Destroy the Evidence, I shall be very angry and want an explanation.

And you know, it’s still true.

The second was the package of pictures I took in Brazil, all twelve of them. It’s very strange to me that it’s been four years since I was there. I slept on a mattress one inch thick in the same room as Tiago, the world’s biggest Goons and Hoses fan, and ate a lot of beans and rice and lost probably thirty pounds. I started watching Dawson’s Creek for the first time, and was surprised to find that I liked it, and pined for home and Erika too much.

I had an incredibly sweet host sister named Joana, who tried to reach out to me any way she could: we played Quake II together, and she introduced me to cocoa in condensed milk. I saw a giant Jesus and many, many streetside orange vendors. I went to Mass with my host grandmother, who spoke no English at all but who smiled and patted my hand the way my own grandmother would have. I took showers that froze me, burned me and gave me some nasty electric shocks.

Along with the blue acrylic painting I bought at an art fair (still one of my favorite possessions), those pictures are the only souvenirs I still have from Brazil. The Rio pin I used to have was lost with my first bucket hat, fall term of my first year at Centre; I think the futbol calendar Tiago gave me is packed away somewhere in the attic, probably for a long time. It was a very self-centered time for me, and I wish now that it had been otherwise. I should have learned some Portuguese, I should have thrown myself into life there instead of trying to live here in my head, and I should definitely have played less Pokemon.

No regrets, though. I Went There, and I Came Back.

The third thing will have to wait, probably for quite a while, as I want to make it a part of this site and I’m going to have to write some code to do it. Right now I have to lug bags of potato chips over to Emily R’s house for a pre-Chicago Trip meeting. My life is filled with travel.

May 27, 2003 /

I want the last two shots to be the last Idiotcams© from in Rodes 2, but there’s a problem: apparently I spent all of senior week adding to the Plastic Mullet Series.

Yes, I am aware that thanks to the Fox network, mullets themselves have jumped the shark, but I still find the plastic mullet itself (which turns out to have belonged to Lisa all along, and which she ended up donating to me) a singularly baroque object. It possesses a level of absurdity above and beyond that of the standard mullet picture. It is, in short, a higher calling.

That I might better answer its siren song, I present to you Plastic Mullet Extravalooza 2K3! This unprecedented collection not only the mighty Darren at last, but new inanimate objects and the only girl who’s ever seemed happy to be wrangled into the headdress. If you order now, you’ll also get Jon’s whole entire dang family, not to mention a couple of Lallys (elder and younger). To top it all off, this one-time-only special captures the elusive Evan and–yes!–my own sister!

Back to bittersweet angst soon, I promise, but right now I’m going to have to glory in the possession of this much dirt on so many people. I hope none of you ever want to run for office, guys. I own you.

May 25, 2003 /

This is how I graduate: the only Centre commencement in living memory on which it has rained, in alphabetical order yet in the middle of the pack, ending up shivering in the library halfway to the auditorium, which was in neither the sunny nor rainy day plans. Our baccalaureate speaker was a fervent liberal and our keynote speaker a stolid conservative; hackles were raised at each and both. I tried to dry the rain off my glasses and found that polyester robes don’t soak up much.

My apartment has been messily slaughtered, furniture shoved and stolen and hidden mold revealed. One more time I’m the last one to move out. The walls are bare, and most of what I own is in piles on the floor. I’ll never live with Jon or Amanda or David again.

I said goodbye and soon to many, many people, and went to my uncle’s house to see Ken, Jon and Emily one more time and to be astounded by the generosity of my family. I fell asleep sitting up before we came back here. I’m going to pack all night and leave in the morning, which I was explicitly told not to do.

Those of you who know me from my first Governor’s Scholars Program will be gratified to know, I hope, that I brought an umbrella onstage with me at the ceremony. As we were leaving, I ended up facing the wrong way and didn’t notice I was supposed to be moving for several long seconds after the rest of my row had gone. I jumped and cursed onstage (at my own commencement) and scrambled out. I was so flustered I forgot the umbrella.

On my way out to meet my family I stood for a few minutes on the stage in Weisiger. That was the first place I found myself on the first day of GSP, here at Centre; I stood in the dark, having come in out of the rain, and wrote about quiet stages on a chalkboard. Later that night, Milton Reigelman would point it out in his opening convo speech, and I would feel a strange mix of shame and pride at having something I’d written read.

This is how I graduate: I am bone-deep nothing-left weary, and I have miles to go before I sleep. I know my time here is done and I am satisfied with it, and I’m ready and willing and glad to go. I’m hurt and hollow, childish and scared. I want desperately to put off the deep wrench I’m feeling, because it means I’m really leaving home.