Category: Travel and Acronyms

The Story of King David

August 16, 2003 /

Once upon a time there was a king, and his name was David the Flora.

And King David WAS a good king, and his minions, they DIDST love upon him; and David the Flora was well pleased with them.

And his minions did ENJOY his presence; such that at certain times they WERE unable to keep from WRESTING him to the floor; and that at others they DIDST pile themselves upon him.

And there was among these minions ONE whose name was Alison.

And it CAME to pass that on a night in Virginia, David Flora DID bring himself unto Alison; and she held in her hand a long, flexible plastic lily, which she HAD stolen from a restaurant.

And Alison said unto David Flora, in a calm voice: “I’m gonna hit you with this.”

And David Flora DID smile, so that his eyes SEEMED almost to disappear.

And Alison said unto David Flora: “It’s probably gonna hurt.”

And David Flora SMILED again; for he WAS drunk on whiskey.

And Alison DID hit him with the flower, which was like unto a whip; and David Flora FELT greatly hurt.

And Alison DID hit him a second time; and both of these were in the top part of his breast.

And David Flora WAS in incredible pain, and he wept, and he was like unto a woman. And yea, Brendan Adkins did laugh so hard he almost WET himself.

Lord. That WAS so goddamn funny.

The End.

August 11, 2003 /

Okay! So! Babies!

Actually just one baby. Talking about Zoe reminded me that I still have my Chicago pictures and I’ve been meaning to post them forever; I was saving them for a rainy no-idea day, but lately the only time I’m not posting is when I’m working on stuff I’m going to post. So pictures! (Which open in a separate window.)

  • The one that inspired this whole post: There was this baby, and his name was Big Man, and he was the sweetest little bowling ball-sized human I’ve ever met. Naturally, I tried to eat his brains.
  • In all my time as a Crummy fan, it never occurred to me what a great band name The Cautious Mad Scientists would be.
  • Did you know they make lawnmowers you have to plug in? I didn’t, which is maybe why I find this team effort so funny.
  • Me and Eric, in the only extant picture of me playing frisbee.
  • Briefly, during one of the big group shots on the beach, I got to make mine a metacamera.
  • Something about me takes a deep joy in the vision of a sign that a) acknowledges the existence of and b) simultaneously tries to prevent peddlin’.
  • I was taking a perfectly nice close-range picture of my thumb until Kat got in the way.
  • Witness my first, second and third complete failures to get a picture of the shot-shy EmilyR. Who then posed quite nicely for all the obligatory group shots.
  • Oh, and lastly, having played basketball against stiff competition in inner-city Chicago, I believe I’m allowed to ask it: Who wants some?

August 8, 2003 /

It’s the Talk To a Terrifyingly Quick Standup Comic in California on the Phone Game!

  • Premise: You have been contacted by email and phone, so as to double the super top secretness of a responsibility with which you have been entrusted. After such secretness is secured, your contact will call you back later and you’ll end up talking for like an hour.
  • Imagine the conversation as a cooperative race, in which the object is not to reach a finish line, but rather to match pace with the other conversant.
  • For the purposes of this scenario, you have an old bicycle, the one from when you lived in Georgetown. It has pink flowers on it, and one squeaky training wheel that likes to make you turn right.
  • Meanwhile, Sumana has a street-illegal Ferrari.
  • Sumana is a kindly driver, and will cruise along comfortably halfway up the gear train, in eighth. You will attempt to pedal along at speeds matching her train (er, car) of thought; if you were on a real bicycle and not a metaphorical one, this would cause your tires to sublimate.
  • Now–and this is important–try to make it look easy.
  • Seriously, I did get to talk to one of my role bloggers on the cellular telephone last night. Layla cut us off a couple of times (I think she was cranky, and maybe jealous), but it was still pretty great, and my face hurt from smiling afterwards.
  • I think I’m going to have to make a California road trip next summer after all, and hit San Francisco and LA and of course San Diego. Sumana recommended Amtrak, which could totally be a week’s worth of party. Stephen, Maria, you guys still up for Comic Con?
  • Oh, right, the topic and such.

Thanks for playing the Talk To a Terrifyingly Quick Standup Comic in California on the Phone Game!

August 4, 2003 /

No presentation this morning–the CEO had appendicitis this weekend! (And I got a hernia!) He’s fine, though, so it’s just rescheduled for a week later.

I bought a TV yesterday, although I ended up choosing brand reliability over a flat screen and got a Phillips. We still don’t have cable at home, but I do have an XBox and a brand-new high-definition AV pack, and now–no offense, TARC–me and S-Video are best friends.

Speaking of TARC, the same bus I’d been taking from the old apartment actually comes right by the new apartment, which is convenient to the point of suspicion. I have to get up earlier, but I also get to nap on the bus now. Coming soon: sleepy Brendan misses his stop and ends up hitching back from Indiana.

August 2, 2003 /

We spent all of yesterday moving the entire world from Richmond and my old apartment into the new apartment with Maria. My forearms are killing me, and our living room is choked with stuff, but my room actually looks fairly good and my bookshelf is full.

I literally did move everything I own this time; I no longer have any possessions in Richmond, and only a few boxes in storage. There was a big ordeal with getting a moving truck (notice: when U-Haul says “your reservation is confirmed,” what they actually mean is “eat a fuck, shitbrains”), but Ian’s roommate’s family had one that was bigger than what they needed and they were kind enough to help.

So it all worked out eventually, but the process took so long that it was 2030 hrs by the time Mom could head back home. Needless to say, it was also a little late for me to go home and pick up the half-day of work I’d wanted. That’s why I’m in the office alone on a Saturday, putting together my presentation for the CEO ‘n’ company on Monday morning. The fact that I’m in the office is in turn the only reason I can post this, since we have no interweb at home for the moment.

Why isn’t there some source of free crappy broadcast interweb, like there is with TV? Ad-supported. Big networks. Come on, it would be so convenient for people who just moved in.

Also, why not make cell phone rings work like my cell phone’s alarm? It starts off by vibrating, then gradually makes its beeping louder and louder until you wake up. It obviously isn’t hard to do, and that would give you a little notice so you could go for the phone before it just jumped in at the same annoying volume immediately. I hate cell phones. I love my cell phone.

Probably no more activity until Monday at the soonest (although of course I make all my posts from work now anyway).

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.

March 28, 2003 /

Back from a whole, whole lot of driving (or, technically, riding). I’ve played cards and doodled and finally bought the third Sandman book and now am trying to think of things to amuse a sinus-infected Audrey. This is not to say that the sinusly infected aren’t easily amused–she’s currently zoning out at the fake wood grain on my desk–but rather that thinking of things to amuse her helps make me feel useful in the face of illness. I hate it when people are sick.

And speaking of that, I should really quit talking about “somebody” and talk about Maria, who was the person about whom I was worried and who turned out fine after all. She goes to Brown and she’s one of my best friends in the world, and now you, true believer, will have a reference for when I mention her.

I can’t do what I’d like to do, of course, and mention her name with a link to her blog, because she doesn’t have a blog. Why do so few of my friends have convenient blogs? Get a blog, Maria!

For the perceived length of this spring break, I really don’t have much other news, except this: dream school Carnegie Mellon said yes to me but no to any kind of financial support, which essentially means saying no to me, as I don’t think I’m legally permitted to Stafford-borrow as much as it would cost to go there. Still, it feels good to know that I could be there, in another life. Maybe there’s another Brendan in potentiality who software engineered himself right through Pittsburgh and into Blizzard after all.

And maybe he got smashed by a pig truck. You know, it really doesn’t do any good to speculate.

March 13, 2003 /

Over the hump of the week now, I think. Wow. Coming back from SETC and going straight back into school things was like jumping out of a placid, cozy houseboat right into a sausage grinder (um, underwater). Makeup tests, makeup homework, Cento, road show, consultant meetings, old-computer hauling, more road show–it’s all been a bit ridiculous,and I’ve had fourteen hours of sleep in the last sixty.

Next couple of days are a bit of a breath, thankfully, and then it’s only a week until spring break. It looks as if Jon, Amanda and I are going to roll up to Bloomington to check out IU and maybe do some interviewing, even though Jon most likely won’t end up there–they apparently only give money to PhD students, and Wake Forest is still falling over itself to attach his name to cash for a Master’s.

Also, on the way up we might get to see Guster in Cincinnati! I want to visit people in Louisville, too, and I’m trying to figure out a way to get dropped off and just stay there on our way back from Indiana. Anybody have a room to let? I’m penniless, but I’m a right hard-working scullery boy, I have all my own teeth, and I reckon I can pick out a merry tune on my nose-flute.