Author: Jess

the leadership institute leadership day is this friday and they have a banquet for lunch near the beginning of it. this includes three sandwich choices: beef, ham, or turkey. which does not include any sort of remotely vegetarian options for me to eat. which makes me extremely angry. i feel like less of a person when they push me out of their little omnivorous world. and i hate it because there isn’t a whole lot i can do about it. i’m vegetarian and this is my choice not to eat meat and at this point cheating just a little would make me sick.

as the title suggests, joe and i went to garden city yesterday. it was about the funnest thing ever. i like to think that we subconciously gained inspiration for this trip by watching nappy d. you know the part where the kid is like “what are you gonna do today napoleon?” and nappy d is like “whatever i wanna do! gosh.”? well this was pretty much just like that. except the kid would be tonya. and throwing an action figure out the window would be driving to garden city and annaleigh has to fit in somewhere too on the grounds of she’s the one with the idea about the vietnamese. alright. it goes like this. joe and i went to this things on mexicans and the meatpacking industry in garden city on friday as was documented on friday-saturday. we decide at the thing that we should go to garden city but as i had work both friday and saturday those days were out. so we wait until sunday. until saturday night it was pretty unclear as to whether or not we were actually going but we both adore road trips and its some bizarre joke on tonya (= girl on forensics squad who is obsessed with garden city). so on saturday night it becomes clear to both of us that neither of us is going to back out of the trip. so joe, steve and i watch this woody allen flick that steve picked out and was actually pretty brilliant (Hollywood Ending). when steve went home joe and i watched some family guy that i slept during and then went to bed (i basically just staid asleep on the couch).

joe went to mass then at 7 am and came back to his apartment at about 930 ish with doughnuts which is when i realized we were actually going. so i took a shower and attempted to look kind of alright. and then i called my mom and pseudo-swindled her permission for the deal. we left town at like about 10:23 am i believe and we kept record of what happened, via saying “Let the record show…” and then we would record that fact. This record pretty much demonstrates our insanity as we stayed on the road and day turned into night and hays turned into oakley turned into garden city turned into dodge turned into snoooooooow.

topeka to abilene was relatively uneventful. it occured to us sometime in topeka that neither of us actually had a mapquest explaining how to get there. this turned out to be what might be considered our downfall. we had talks about manhattan and whether or not it was actually close. i pointed out where timothy mcveigh rented the uhaul they used to be motherfucking terrorists with… typical kansas tourism hyjinks for that area.

abilene to lucas was probably the exciting part of the trip. seeing the attractions of abilene (ie the lot that used to be a uhaul rental and the holiday inn i once stayed at) gave us the adrenaline necessary to continue. there had been talk of plans for lunch in salina, originally with clayton but he kinda was busy, but we drove through it instead because joe didn’t stop and i didn’t care. we eventually stumbled upon a sign that said “Garden of Eden Lucas, KS 16 miles” So we turned off of I-70 and went to see the garden of eden which is this absolutely bizarre sculpture garden made by this pretty groovy populist in the 1920-30s. It depicts scenes that are anti-big business and anti-discrimination as well as scenes from genesis, though basically just adam and eve and cain and abel. his house was tourable too. that was mostly just really creepy because the fourth room we entered was the bedroom and the only accompanying plaques said “Dinsmoor [the guy who made the sculptures and the house] died in this room.” augh! so creepy. why coudln’t they just say something nice? also bizarre about the house was over 600 varieties of barbed wire displayed on this tack board.. it was so weird. as if the house wasn’t bizarre enough. then outside there was the sculptures and the mausoleum that contained the body of dinsmoor and his first wife. his first wife was in a concrete coffin underneath him but he was in a mostly concrete coffin that had a glass part where you could actually see the body. it was pretty insane, i’m not going to lie.

lucas to garden city was done in a weird way. we should’ve turned in hays but drove through hays for kicks instead and then went to ellis where we were told that oakley then south was the easiest way. which is a lie. so we drove out to oakley on i70 then south a lot until we got to garden city. we orginially went to garden city for this vietnamese restaurant and the joke on tonya. but we were zizeked a little because the vietnamese restaurant was closed. but i still felt really satisfied. i didn’t want the vietnamese food anymore i just wanted to be in garden city. so we arbitrarily chose a mexican restaurant that was amazing and had really phenomenal service. the el camino even had a vegetarian combinations section. i was a happy little camper. at this point we were foucaulted when we selfpoliced ourselves from attempting to hit on the waitress because we care about our significant others and they could find out.

garden city to topekapost mexican food we drove back to topeka and this time took the “short way”. we were a little concerned that it took us at least 2 hours more to get out to garden city than it should have even give our huge detour to lucas and back. so we went through dodge and hwy-50 was just a fucking mess. it was so snowy out there and i could barely tolerate it plus joe had to just guess and check drive because we’d never seen the highway in daylight to know what it was like. and we couldn’t see it at all in the night. good thing western kansas = no trees = no deer.

we got pretty insane trying to deal with the snow.. i made a few phone calls to figure out exactly which way we were going and as soon as we were on hwy-56 that wasn’t also hwy-50 it wasn’t as bad and by i-183 it was barely raining but we could see the raod again. Little did we know, things were about to go terribly awry.

joe almost ran a stopsign when the visibility was still really low but stopped when he saw it and i announced that he should probably stop. as we stop we note a state trooper turning to go the opposite way on the highway. but no big deal. because almost not stopping is not a crime. but joe has this thing where he looks at medians as “suggestions”. and he may or may not have swerved past it a few times. thus we get pulled over. and the trooper comes up and is talking to us and pretty much convinced we’re drunk. because we can’t explain to our friends that really know us why we’re going to garden city let alone an officer of the law. then we realize that joe doesn’t have his proof of insurance because he cleaned his car and this got taken inside during the cleaning. we also can’t get the glove compartment open so we become positive that it is in there. and the cop takes joe’s missouri license (funny story, joe had two because they never switched his missouri car registration to kansas which they were supposed to do…) and the cop goes away. in the meantime i manage to break the door off of the glove compartment, of course discovering no insurance, so joe and i shove the door back on and just pretend that we never got it open in the first place. the cop comes back after a long time and asks joe if he has a kansas license. joe throws around some bullshit about him not knowing if it were in affect yet and we get off with a warning for failure to maintain a lane. problem: joe’s missouri license is confiscated which sucks because some people were only friends with joe because he had two licenses.

by this point in the trip we became both awake and still really retarded. so we were pretty much like idiot savants where our savant was that we could stay awake and say really stupid things for long amounts of time.

again, it was about the funnest thing ever.
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it snowed this evening. i know that mom doesn’t really love the snow or anything but i kinda like it and i think its absolutely beautiful tonight. when i drove into work there were these huge flakes falling and collecting in a powder on the ground. it just made everything look so nice an innocent and it really wasn’t that horrible to be out in, either.

joe and i went to a seminar/lecture on mexicans and meatpacking, speaking specifically of garden city. we tried to get tonya to go but we couldn’t find her. annaleigh also refused so we just went alone. it was actually a pretty good experience. they talked a lot about how beef is packaged which made me pretty glad i wasn’t eating it. that was about all that the seminar covered. afterward we talked to the speaker and he was talking about how cosmopolitan garden city is and how we should probably go there. so joe and i are going to go to garden city. we’ll take lots of pictures for tonya. w00t.

steve and i hung out tonight and i cried about my uncle again. this time i think i was actually sad and not just angry. its hard to remember he was a human being too. and subject to human being misery and anger and happiness and love even. i don’t know. i still resent him for a lot of what he’s cause his entire family even in the things he did pre-death. it gets a little better every now and then though, and i think eventually i’ll be able to actually grieve. oi. its such a long process.

i got ani’s new cd along with both bright eyes cds (The new ones) today at best buy during my 45 minute gap between international politics and chemistry, but i’ve only gotten to track 2 or 3 on ani’s cd because i had to go to chemistry which is where i am now. so far it sounds really amazing. its a little more folky and slightly less experimental, so far, from her last album. i think right now at least i really love her early stuff the best. Like I Said is just such a great, smooth album. But I love everything Ani does. So i suppose it doesn’t matter. Ineed to listen to the bright eyes stuff still, too.

I’m in chemistry, as was stated earlier, and i’ve determined that this class will be okay because it has wireless internet. he’s being anthrocentric right now though. saying that human studies are bad because they studied on the jews and animal studies are okay because mice aren’t jewish. but maybe the mice are jewish. or maybe we just shouldn’t look at animals as less than us thereby exposing them to arsenic. i’m in no way contending we should test arsenic on jews. maybe just cutters. my notes are pretty fucking crazy today too. it goes like this: “b. problem is, mice aren’t humans.” sometimes i think i take notes on really obvious things.

steve and i spoke about why we liked each other last night. it was good to know. although its funny cos sometimes i think the reason that he likes me is because i’m not him and i like him becuse he’s not me.

now i’m going to tell this story so sarah can read it: my friend was experimenting on the psychology of this rat (islamic). so the rat would be in a shoebox with a star hole and a circular hole and if it came out the star it got squirted with water and if it came out the circle it got cheese. so my friend lost the squirt bottle and had to dump water on its head. and the rat was really fucking pissed. so the rat comes out through the star and my friend goes to dump the water and the rat charges out of the star. my friend got bit. a jewish rat would never bite.

i think i’m on drugs.

i got to meet joe’s girlfriend caitlin tonight. that was fun. she cooked with her friends for the boys in the apartment as well as steve, dan, and i. i tried to help with the cooking as much as i could. mostly i just whisked eggwhites for the cake. the food turned out really wonderful though and i must say she’s a great catch. we also watched a LOT of family guy which is a great way to spend one’s saturday night. in a few weekends we’re going to do vegetarian food that i cook mostly for the superbowl. i’m thinking tofu-tballs. lol. bad jokes are awesome!

i finished the book i’ve been reading for the past few weeks yesterday at work. its called House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski and it had to be one of the craziest books i’ve ever read.

the majority of the text of the book is a manuscript written by this man Zampano. Zampano lived in this little appartment and lived under extremely strange circumstances. he always walked around the courtyard daily and rarely did anything else with his time, as far as the neighbors could see. so this man Lude and his friend Johnny Truant were scouting the apartment cos they knew he would die soon and they figured the rent wouldn’t be that steep. so the man dies and Johnny moves into the apartment. when he gets there he finds this trunk containing all of this writing.. including regular sheets of paper, matchbooks, stamps, etc. just all of this paper. so he starts reading the story and decides to transcribe it onto something workable because he believes it should be published. meanwhile, the deeper he gets into the story the crazier he gets. the manuscript itself is about this documentary called The Navidson Record which doesn’t exist even in the world of Zampano and Johnny Truant about this family that moves into a house and discovers that the outer dimensions of the house are smaller than the inner dimensions. then the house begins to shift shapes and a new closet appears, then a whole new hallway appears.. so they begin to explore the hallway and it drives all of them insane. basically. a few people die in the exploration and eventually the house engulfs everything in it. but it eventually rebuilds. Johnny’s insanity is mapped throughout the book via footnotes on random passages in the text. Mostly, these footnotes chronicle johnny trying to find out more about zampano’s life by tracking down the girls that read to him (zampano was blind). johnny also comes from a line of insanity. his mom spent the majority of his life in a mental institution because she tried to kill him twice. johnny’s dad died when he was around ten i think so johnny grew up in foster care and had a horrible slew of foster parents. the story basically just capitulizes on the insanity of johnny, the navidsons, and johnny’s mom in some ways, plus zampano, though the last two are in the footnotes.

the book is designed in a way that really messes with one’s psyche. first, every occurance of the word House is in blue.. including other language version of house. and then parts of the text reads from bottom to top or its just like a word or a few words on the page. in some places they spacially follow what is happening in the story. it’s insane.

i recommend it to everyone. or if you have read it… talk to me about it, yo. i’d love to bounce ideas off of people.

this week has been a good one. i bought my ticket to see ani difranco in concert on feb. 23 today. which is about the best news ever. i’m so excited to see her live. i’m not sure what i’m going to do. probably just freak out a whole lot. and its at liberty hall which is a realy great venue cos its all nice and kinda small.

my classes seem like they’re going to be alright. at least, i hope they will be. the only ones that seem to require attendance are the ones that i actually wish to attend. that’s good news. also i think i should be able to easily pull a 4.0 this semester without too much work. the reading seems interesting, the course work doesn’t seem stressful. i think it will be great. and we have a pretty stellar group of people in most of my classes which is great news too.

i also put up a new layout.

i got ani’s like i said and an actual copy of coheed and cambria’s newest. i’m excited about both of them, but especially the ani because i hadn’t heard this one yet but it has two of my favorite songs on it (both hands and firedoor).. so i’m a happy girl. joyful even.

i start class today which kind of sucks. though i have huge collections of really cool people in all of my classes, especially Beatty’s which will be a huge benefit cos its Beatty and then there’s Dane, Dan, Marcus, and I. w00t. so much fun, i can’t handle it. Dave has that class too and we all know him so I suppose we’ll hang out with him some too. The rest of my classes will probably be alright. i have one class with sarah and i’m uberexcited about that.

I did kind of randomly at Concordia’s LD tournament. I went 0-4 in the first part of the tournament. mostly because i went in pretty defensive because i wanted to prove myself and I had this mindset that Creighton was good. but they aren’t. well they are.. but that doesn’t mean i’m not. so i hit creighton 4 times and due to slight judges bias as well as my own inability to win the flow on the offense.. I lose. Eh. I get pissed off as i’m likely to do. So I talk to one of my judges and then go into the next tournament (another 4 rounds which i don’t really want to do at this point..) and i rock. I hit skoglund on the neg and beat him.. then i pick up two creighton kids, back to back, on the aff. including one kid who i’d hit the day before and picked up against me and ran the same arguments. but i had better understanding. so i break this day. w00t. i went 3-1 (dropped to keiran’s god damn death penalty case. what a fuck. i’m going to kill it, like whoa.) and i pick up an outround in open which kevin says washburn hasn’t really done this year in LD and that was awesome. because i took on a squirrel case that i knew i’d have nothing on but volunteered to be neg anyway (they had so many flows on my aff it was ridiculous.) and i beat him. plus joe and brandon agree that my cx was hot. i dropped to keiran again in finals but i scared him. take that.