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Goatee.

Come back tomorrow to see what kind of random shit my face is doing.

Put away your winter clothes!

For the two people who read this blog that don't live in either Houston, TX or Panama City, FL, I hope you feel intense tinges of jealousy raping every pore of your body right now. That's right-- spring has arrived! It's the two weeks of the year where Houston isn't a cloudy, sad mess or a minefield of spontaneous combustion zones in the midst of triple-digit temperatures.

I'm not usually so excited about the weather because, as you know, I'm not one to creep out of my cave for more than twenty minutes of any given day. This year is different, though. I feel this intense invisible hand lifting me up by my taint and throwing me into good spirits due to the coming of spring. Maybe it's the pollen fucking with my brain. It's sure as hell fucking with my allergies.

My mommy came into town this past weekend. I giggled with the excitement of several Japanese schoolgirls as she took me out to my favorite restaurants in Houston, namely Benjy's, Chuy's, and PF Chang's. It's weird that my favorite places to eat are all possessive proper nouns, as a certain English major pointed out to me. But honestly, they are the best places to eat in this wonderful culture-struggling Texas town. We also went to the Galleria and she let me go crazy in Urban Outfitters, which really made me feel like the indie college kid I am on the inside.

While my mom was visiting, though, things were amiss back in Panama City. My poor brother peeked outside one morning to find that my cat Katie-- the one I've had since I was five-- was dead. Then he had to throw her in a bag and bury her in the backyard. I miss my cat but I feel about twenty times worse about Brent having to handle that situation by himself.

My and my mom talked about my living situation for next year as well. Barring a miracle situation that presents itself in the next couple weeks, I'll be living in a single at the Esplanade down the hall from my other friends who currently live there. We both know I'm responsible and sane enough to live by myself. I guess the real question is if I want to live by myself. It would be quite a change-- going from Long Hall my freshman year to the 90's my sophomore year to living both off campus and by myself.

But I think that's the change I want. I want to have nice things that won't be broken all the time. I want a place to take a girl that won't smell of filth and body odor. I want a place to be proud of while, at the same time, keeping close proximity to friends I can hang out with. If Louie, Sean, Johan, Allen, etc. are all down the hall from me then I really don't have anything to complain about. I have company when I want it and privacy when I need it.

Keep your ears open. Once I have my spring break plans solidified, I'll post about them. And my job plans. Two words, though. And by two words I mean two bands...

EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY
THE SHINS

For Sale or Trade

Wanted: Approximately one person with the intestinal fortitude to kick the everliving fuck out of me every time I put off a project or paper until the last goddamn minute.

I am so mad at myself right now. I could be hitting hour six of a good, REM-filled sleep session but instead I'm up to my ass in Earnest Hemingway, multiplexers, and the need to fill my lungs with savory and cheap Pall Mall cigarettes. No, I don't mean smoking-- I mean littering stuffing an entire pack of twenty cotton-filtered sticks down my windpipe and hoping that my lungs figure out how to turn them into pure euphoria.

Instead of sleeping I'm reveling in awe at this awesomely bad paper about moral ambiguity in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and wondering how I could possibly attach my name to it. I mean, the physical body of Kyle Barnhart sat and typed every word but the damn thing reads like the dissertation of a 13-year-old who huffs oven cleaner to get his rocks off. If I ever have to type out the title of that story again I'm going to shit pineapple grenades all over the floor of my suite and that's really going to make my roommates mad. And fuck Hemingway for writing a story with dialog that goes thirty lines without referencing who's actually speaking. Imagine this:

"I ate a dog today," said the man.
"Yeah," responded another man.
"It was good."
"Yeah."
"Yeah.
"Good."
"Okay."
"Yeah."
"Huh?"
"Oh, nevermind."
"I'm going to Cabo."
"I'm too old to go to Cabo."
"Let's change subjects."
"Horse dick."
"Leprechaun."
...

And it keeps going like that for twenty more lines, only referencing the speakers at the top of the page. Little things like that piss me off because they add nothing to the style; I reckon it's just Hemingway's morbid way of making me read his shitty dry dialog twenty times and making little notes about the speaking order on my course packet. Fucking pious bastard.

But wait, my day can only go uphill from here. I have so much to look forward to besides turning my paper in, like getting my moderately dismal results back from an oral exam I took last Thursday in my Waves and Photonics class. Talk about exciting! Then, for the rest of the afternoon up until midnight I get to finish a computer engineering project that was due last Friday! Let's hear it for ten percent of my grade! Oh, and then I have to do a three-hour take home exam for the same class. I'm going to stop using exclamation points to hint at sarcasm because, honestly, it's not funny.

I would rather be opening little, pink exotic drink umbrellas in my urethra right now but instead I have roughly twenty more hours of awake time to pile onto my tired and broken brain. The great thing is that even if I make it to Tuesday with all my work done it's going to be another trudging week where I pull more all-nighters and then on Friday my mom comes into town. Maybe she'll let me spend the entire weekend catatonic on the fold-out couch of the Hilton she's staying it. Maybe.

I used to employ Google Calendar to remind me when things were due but, honestly, I'm starting to realize that I'm more of an "obscene amounts of neon Post-it notes all over the computer screen" kind of guy. All I know is that if I don't get some sort of system down soon my brain is going to turn into sleep-deprived goo-- it's going to transform into the kind of generic Gak that you get at an arcade for 500 tickets. Seriously, I need people to ask me what I have due soon. I also need those same people to follow up with a swift tire iron to my gonads if I tell them I have anything due soon that I haven't started.

Judging by how hard it was to write all that down, I can safely assume that the next twenty hours are going to be fruitless and that, per the usual, I will barely skate by with a passing grade on everything I've done today. Well fuck me.

I heart my mommy

Valentines Day came a bit early for me. Mommy really knows how to make me smile.

Blast from the past

What follows is a letter I wrote to myself back in 2002. It was an assignment for my biology class and, shockingly, it actually found its way back to me five years later.

Enjoy.

Dear Future Self,

It's the sophomore year of high school and there's not a whole lot to say. I'm hoping you remember your old computer and the sleepless nights of Counter-Strike and the sorts. Hah! No, really, you were this smart when you were in high school..

Speaking of smart, I hope I (you) got into a good college. MIT? We can only hope. What I really hope is that I (we, whatever) won that darn vala-whatever award. If you did, then I knew we could do it! Otherwise... shame!

Hope you grew a beard and ditched the contacts. It'll be the college look that drives the ladies wild! Speaking of ladies... heh heh. Hope I end up with one of the ones I was attempting earlier this year. Yeah. I would just love if you called one of them up sometime (if you're not already "occupied"). Hopefully you're not as dirty as I am. And a ton smarter.

Let's hope this letter reaches the future genius I know I am. Particle physics forever! It's all theory...

Cheers,
Kyle Barnhart
Former Self

It's not just sort of weird to look back on that letter-- it's downright fucked up. When people say they were "different people" back in high school, they're probably using gross hyperbole compared to me. My brain straight-up lived in a different world back then. Like, I don't know what kind of kid would honestly want to go to MIT when Rice is closer, cheaper, and obviously more fun.

Then again, I WAS a sophomore in high school when I wrote this.

This letter also reminded me of the full-circle nature of my academic interests. Back then I was into "particle physics" simply because that's what Gordon Freeman from the video game Half-Life was into, and I thought it sounded cool. Then I drifted towards computer science and engineering during the later years of high school and early college. I even thought I was going to be a mechanical engineer at one point. But now I'm back to electrical engineering and quantum electronics which isn't a far cry from particle physics at all.

FAR OUT, MAN.

I'm not even going to comment on how inept I was when it came to girls. I think I still believed in cooties at that point. At least I can stand proudly with my hands fixed to my hip and laugh like a pirate about it now. Because I totally understand women these days.

*chirp, chirp*

HAVE THAT CRICKET MURDERED IN MY SLAUGHTERTORIUM.

Thursdays are weird.