A little time-passing

There is no power at my office right now.

At roughly 1pm a taletale thud resonated throughout the building, selfishly denying the entire floor of tasty blue electricity. Over the years, I’ve become acclimated to the otherwise jarring transition from sitting in bright, white fluorescent light to a fumbling around a pitch-black abyss illuminated by the eerie glow of laptop monitors and back again. Call me a veteran of 21 long, hot, wet hurricane seasons.

It’s a strange day to be in dark—the very last day before Cristina, Louie, Augusta, Flowers, Korey, Zach, Sam, and I all high-tail it to Fredericksburg, Shiner, and the other popular places to consume culture in east/central Texas. I’d been counting the seconds until happy hour since I got into the office this morning, but now I’m watching the tiny little battery icon in my taskbar slowly, slowly deplete itself. And when I finally run out of juice on the Funputer, I’m slinging my office wares over my shoulder and saying sianarya until March 7.

There are ten different APCs in my office, all beeping and booping and sounding like an impromptu Hot Chip cover. It’s only taken an hour for the floor to rise about ten degrees. Fuck you, Houston February. Everyone in my office is slowly going insane without the bone-chilling frost of the air conditioner sputtering out of the ceiling. Right now they’re arguing about which among them is the office Fire Martial, and what the chain of command is after the Vice Fire Martial, and I think there might be blood if I don’t step in and restrain them.

26%... and the hits just keep on coming.

Oh, speaking of Spring Break…

Shit, the thing was lying to me. I’ve only got 5%. SAVE AND CLOSE, SAVE AND CLOSE!




...Nevermind. It came back.

Oh, the nerd shame!

This is just flat-out nerdy. I've been trying to come to terms with Linux ever since I took a job where 30% of my day is spent in a PuTTy session. I've always wanted to use Linux if for no other reason than to impress people by doing everything from the command line, LIKE MORPHEUS. Most of the people here at the office check their e-mail and edit code straight from the shell.

Anyways, today I found out about Lynx-- a text-based browser at my disposal-- and decided to give it a spin. It's awesome... I CAN THINK SO CLEARLY WITHOUT ALL THE VISUAL CLUTTER. Above is this site in Lynx. But yeah, okay friends, disown me or whatever.

*YANK* The breakfast burrito says "I'm delicious!"

My family went on a skiing trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, when I was about 14 years old. One dark, early morning, we all woke up and joined a bunch of elderly tourists and snowboarders on a re-purposed school bus bound for one of the state's more remote slopes-- which is totally redundant since I'm pretty sure ten people live in Jackson Hole.

It was still too dark to see anything but the slightly yellowed tips of the early morning mountaintops when we all stopped at the strangest, most remote ski shop ever for a potty break. Inside was a kitschy mix of huge, stuffed bears and elk and nice, expensive ski equipment. And off to the corner was a windowed countertop where a toothless old man was hawking breakfast burritos out of a Rubbermaid cooler for two bucks.

There weren't your soggy, deflated Sonic burritos-- they were the Peter North of elongated breakfast foots. These were Chipotle-size behemoths stuffed full of chorizo, cheddar, eggs, bacon, tomato, onion, peppers, thick salsa, and wrapped in the first whole-wheat flour tortilla I ever remember eating. They were spicy as hell, I recall, and believe me when I say I was raised to endure the pain of spicy food.

They were honestly the best breakfast burritos I've ever had. Nothing since has been able to compare to the wild ratios of egg-to-cheese-to-meat present in this godly morning phallus.

I stumbled upon an article this morning about breakfast burritos being the perfect make-in-bulk food. They really are. I'm off to the store right after work to make about a thousand breakfast burritos, in search of that childhood burrito that has so enticed me.

[The Simple Dollar - Bulk Breakfast Burritos: Convenient, Cheap, Healthy, and Easier Than You Think]

Living on-campus at Rice will ruin your future

With no certain regard for next year's living situation, I let Rice's on-campus housing deadline pass this past week without throwing my name in the hat. Some people will call me crazy; I could have easily scored a lovely little single at the newly-built McMurtry College. They're sticking all of the members of my own residential college and former home-- Will Rice-- at McMurtry while they pull the asbestos out from the air ducts and scrape the green resin off the walls of the 90's. They got pods for bathrooms, grass for roofs, and personal space for all.

See, I love to espouse the benefits of living off-campus. I lived on-campus for two years and off-campus for nearly two years and compiled a laundry list of pros and cons along the way. Generally, living off-campus fosters a sense of independence and adulthood that I found to be markedly lacking while living on-campus. Stumbling out of bed and throwing on a free T-shirt and pajama pants and grumbling about waking up at 10am while you trudge fifty feet to your first class is not a lifestyle I wish to revisit.

There are logistic benefits and detractors, of course, but I think it all boils down to "don't shit where you eat." Your school should be school, your personal life should be your personal life, your job should be some job, and there should never be overlap between them. Your life should be a Swiss-Army knife with separate tools for every facet, not one tool that does everything shittily (read: a spork).

One of my favorite things about living off-campus is seeing the city everyday, particularly the marvelous homes and businesses in the Rice University area. I make a point to drive through the neighborhood west of campus on my way to work every day. The area is interspersed with little parks, two-story brick-and-mortar abodes for the UMC, and the tall, whitewashed walls of the occasional art deco mansion. Basically, I masturbate to the homes along Sunset and the Bissonnet corridor. Stuff white people like, indeed.

But there's no reason to feel guilty about admiring architecture. I think that big houses are a seminal building block of the American Dream-- they're something to want. A goal. A benchmark that might, one day, indicate that you've made it as far as you ever wanted.

That benchmark is sadly lacking from day-to-day on-campus life. Campus architecture isn't lacking, per se, but those buildings do not serve as any sort of motivator. They're not the potential containers of your four-member future family-- they're the dungeons where you toil away, trying to cram yourself with enough knowledge and good work habits to piss further than anyone else in Real World. Living off-campus affords one with daily reminders of what could be, without the jealousy that comes from being 35 and wishing you lived in a bigger place.

You can imagine it on the way to morning classes. You can bring your car to a complete stop at your favorite neighborhood intersection and look and suddenly feel your hand pushing open the ten-foot dark mahogany door to your dream home. You can feel the resilience of the brushed aluminum spiral staircase that leads to an upstairs foyer where you can look back and just barely see down into kitchen with the black marble countertops and matching appliances with the fridge that has a pull-out freezer and... oh Jesus, wait, I just peaked into the master bedroom. There's a small black telescope next to the floor-to-ceiling windows obscured by sliding-panel blinds. The bathroom is a brightly-lit orgy of authentic Mediterranean tile art, five massaging showerheads, this particular jacuzzi, and there are no faucets centered by the dual sinks-- just one knob at each basin that shoots a straight stream of water down from the ceiling. There's a dog in the backyard, barking, but it's hypoallergenic and can speak French. The baby crying down the hall quickly stops when you pull out your BlackBerry and reset his Baby Einstein tapes using the WebUI you developed to control everything on your property, including the turrets which automatically pelt intruders with pepper spray paintballs if they even look at your house crooked. The pepper spray washes out of the carpet easily because the carpet is coated in nano-particles that repel stains and prevent cancer and are worth more than a cinderblock of iridium. There is a sex swing in the master's second walk-in closet which is lined with rose petals and self-cleans in a fashion somewhat similar to today's ovens. Everything in the home is pained either black or white, and you own another one outside San Fransisco.

I think I want to start a business. And I didn't even have to talk about the entertainment system.

See? You're the one holding the steering wheel on this blind drive down the I-10 of life-- so where's the daily nudge to keep you from veering off into the food service industry? Mine is homes. Big, sexy homes that I see every day, because I live off-campus.

People You Hate on Facebook

Just like the Matrix, the Internet has gone through several incarnations in its sentient quest toward perfection. Remember 1996? Remember watching a lot of JenniCam? Remember downloading funny Wayne's World gifs to put on your homepage? Remember reading "underground" wrestling news sites between bouts of watching more JenniCam?

Okay, maybe you weren't me 13 years ago. Whatever. A lot has changed since then: Right now I'm Torrenting all the dirty video highlights from JenniCam while video blogging about John Cena and sending my old roommate pictures of SNL skits-turned-movies on Facebook just because.

I love social networking more than anything. Facebook, though. Not MySpace. MySpace is for bands and hooking up with scene chicks when you're back home for Christmas. Facebook, on the other hand, is a respectable tool used to communicate with people you know. People like your mom (Limited Profile), your boss (Limited Profile), your best friend from high school (Limited Profile) and your girlfriend (Limited Profile). And by "communicate with," I mean "hide your profane, secret lifestyle from."

All of this personal exposure-- all of this culture surrounding You-- has given rise to the pariahs of Facebook. Jerks who feed on the nature of the beast. Idiots that throw a monkey wrench into your relaxing semisocial experience. You know the ones.

Or maybe you aren't familiar with the beasts I bemoan. Allow me to introduce you a few types of people you absolutely hate on Facebook. I've attached pictures.

People You Hate on Facebook

The Guy Who's Not on Facebook
The first person who annoys me on Facebook is, ironically, not on Facebook at all. He's the person who is scared of Facebook for privacy reasons. Or maybe he's doing it just to be cool-- totally counterculture. Whatever the reason, he refuses to get with the program and provide three easy-to-access pieces of information in order to join the digital revolución.

To the Guy Who's Not on Facebook: Get real. There is no world outside of the Internet anymore. The real world is the Internet. Google e-mails me breakfast every morning for Christsakes, and it's fucking delicious. Sure, I had to give them my social security number in return for a delicious picture of orange juice and a bagel covered in lox and capers, but it's a price I'm willing to pay for the convenience.

So what if advertisers know that you love the Jonas Brothers and The Boondock Saints? So does the CIA, and you put a waterboard's worth of trust in them. Trust the corporations: They're hiring.

The Critic
I suppose it's sort of ironic that I hate this sort of person, considering I have my own well-formed opinions and you're reading them right now. But I also leave a lot of my opinions to myself and try not to do it all the time. I know what it's like to be hassled all the time about your opinions, thanks to these jokers.

The Critic is the person who looks at everything you post on Facebook and tells you that you're wrong. Is your status related to a song you like? That song is worse than Three Doors Down's National Guard advertisement. Did you post a link to your favorite new restaurant? Papercuts have more flavor than their cheeseburgers. This person thinks every band you enjoy is an audio abortion and every movie you list as a favorite is a visual vulgarity.

Most of these people have sharpened their ability to argue against you, but are pretty bad at defending their own opinions. There's an encyclopedic volume of psychology literature dedicated to the fact that these people are actually soft-spoken cowards in real life. Not the Internet real life I was talking about earlier, but the one where you go to class and learn stuff before getting drunk at 2pm. Find these Critics and stare them down next time you see them. They will cry. It's a doctor-recommended remedy to your distress.

The Appmonger
I wake up every day and after eating my digital Jewish breakfast, I wade through all of my Facebook application invites. My friends really know me. They know my affinity for things like "Compare Friends," "Which Desperate Housewives Mailman Are You," "Enhanced Texas Hold-Em.biz,"and "Contribute to my Birthday Cause." But I've already got all the applications I want, so I have to spend time deleting all these invites. And after I'm done I leave my apartment and swing by the unemployment office to pick up my check before continuing to the hospital to have fluids fed to me intravenously because I've spent twenty days deleting application invites and not eating or working.

I am a victim of the Appmonger. There are only two explanations as to why this sort of person exists. Either there are people-- groups of people!-- out there who enjoy having twenty different Facebook apps installed on their profile and they wish to share this elation with others, or people are knowingly trying to kill me using the Internet. Damn, you know my weakness.

The Kid You Know Well Enough to Friend
One of the most awkward thing about the online world is drawing the definition of a "Friend." Don't worry: The hot girl next to you in class is most definitely your friend, regardless of whether you've ever spoken to her or not. But what about that creepy kid in the back of class that, one day, decided to send you a friend invite out of nowhere? You had a group project with him, once, and he's in like five of your other classes. I mean, why not?

Don't do it! The subtle, real-real life awkwardness is simply a portent of awkward situations to come. When you accept Facebook friend invites from the kid you don't know, you're limiting yourself to a few possible online outcomes. In one familiar situation, you will be inundated with their personal life on your News Feed, forever, and not have the guts to remove them. Maybe you'll enjoy reading about them for a while, sure, but things are going to get ugly when they start dating your ex.

A more likely situation is that they will turn out to be one of the archetypes above, and you will just have more Facebook friends you hate. There's always a slim chance that they're a serial murderer and friending them will spare your life later on. I think not. Obviously, the most probable outcome is that they barge into your hotel room one night and hold you at knifepoint while they take pictures of you screwing your wife.