My IU Weekend, Your Words

Note: This post is the result of a “My Weekend in Your Words” post, which can be found here. People requested words to be used in this post and I, being the good little blogwhore that I am, complied. Words/phrases will be underlined and highlighted (unless they’re linked, in which case they’ll be italicized). Also: You people suck.

Thursday
All week the plan had been to wake up at a reasonable hour, and get on the road to Illinois. This plan was contingent upon getting some work done by Wednesday night. Because it is spring break and, therefore, forbidden by law to be productive unless absolutely necessary… I did nothing prior to waking up on Thursday morning. This meant that I had a lot to do. I eventually got it all done and got on the road by noonish. The big news story of the day was the death of Terri Schiavo (which I had been able to bring myself to care very little about) but I do have to wonder… did she have someone to wipe for her, or was she also plagued with dingleberries in addition to the whole starving to death thing? I don’t know.

Anyway, the drive back was pretty uneventful… it was a nice day to drive, though, and I “made good time” (which means that I drove fast) to Illinois all while avoiding, synecdochically speaking, the law.. It’s always nice to see the giant, stoic cross. I also got to stop at Steak ‘n Shake for an order of fries and a Banana milkshake. Good stuff. I noticed a surprisingly large number of White Castle commercials on the way back — mainly talking about the fact that they serve chicken. Very odd. Really, I don’t want chicken from a restaurant that has a burger called the slider (so named because that’s what it does in your throat). Anyway. I was afforded the opportunity to chit-chat with an anonymous friend about the latest CKI Controversy which there’s much more about elsewhere… but that made the drive easier, for sure. When I got into good ol’ L-Town I was attacked by RJ, the family lunatic, and his friend casey, who was… how can I put this delicately… completely tanked. I hung out with them and their other friends for a while and eventually decided to get some sleep. Ara’s cat did not like the idea of me sleeping, however, and I almost had to tie the obnoxious little furball to a passing car. I was informed the next day that she was so ornery because I didn’t let her sleep under the covers. The mere thought of that inspired painful thoughts of shredded flesh and penal lacerations… neither of which I presume are very pleasant.

Friday
Kecia and I got up and made the exceptionally boring drive to IU late in the morning… it’s only a few hours, but when you’re driving through west-central Indiana, it seems like much, much more. Allow me to discuss the awful driving of Hoosiers for a moment. They were bad. Not necessarily in Bloomington, but the rest of the state was awful. I wanted to beat them with their own drive trains. The regular practice of willful blindness on the roads was enough to make me wish that the egg that they came from had gotten lost somewhere in the fallopian tubes. I’m pretty sure that a quick amniocentesis on most of them would have uncovered that they have “Bad Driver’s Gene”. No kidding. I think it could be best described as a Good Cars, Loony Owners situation, with Lexii and new Mustangs everywhere, but being driven so poorly as to be offensive. Frankly, I just wish they’d move somewhere far away. Like Edmonton. Either that, or just go back to their jobs at the Potato Hut and quit bothering the rest of us with their sub-par driving. A big part of the drive was on little two-lane roads and with some of the drivers, I was really wishing that my car had the pferd power to make it in some of the shorter passing zones. No such luck, though.

When we finally got to IU we drove around for a while and eventually found a visitor information center where we got ourselves a campus map and a map of Bloomington. It was mid-afternoon and parking was a nightmare and caused much confusement, so we decided to get a day parking permit… which proved to be much more complicated than it ought to be, largely on account of the fact that the administrative building where the parking services people are located is… well… an anomaly in space-time. Getting from one end of a floor to the other often requires the use of elevators, quantum physics, and Tibetan mountain yaks. Eventually, we found a guide (that smelled of dead fish) to lead us to the office — for whatever reason, he demanded that we refer to him as chim-chim chucklechunks. It was an odd request, but paid off in spades[,the ace of] when we finally found the parking services office’s florescent lights pouring into a darkened hallway. We finally got a parking permit which we then realized we wouldn’t even have time to use. Consider the cost of the permit the first five dollars of a large, three-year cash donation to Indiana University. I do think I’m going to have fun living with the little sister next year, though I’m quite certain that I’ll need an ankle bracelet to keep track of her once she gets to her social butterfly-like ways. I’m also concerned that there will be a large amount of intentional infliction of emotional distress, but it will be funny if nothing else.

Having done my research, I had a nice list of places for Kecia and I to look around… but it was 3:00 and most places closed by 5:00, so we prioritized. The first place we called gave us a 5:00 appointment. The second place a 4:00. We called at third place which didn’t take appointments… just come on by whenever. By this time it was quarter after three and every high school, grade school, middle school, obedience school, finishing school, and school of fish within a 100 mile radios was letting out and the third place was on the other side of town. Short of building a UH-60 out of twigs and mud to fly over or getting picked up by a chinook we weren’t going to get there, so we decided to go between our 4:00 and 5:00 appointments. We cruised around town (by this I mean that we sat in traffic) until a little before 4:00 when we got to the houses we were supposed to be looking at.

Some time passed and nearly half an hour later someone showed up to show us the houses… except, SURPRISE, she claimed that she didn’t have any three-bedroom houses. She gave us a list of three bedroom apartments that we could call her about at 5:00 if we were interested and then left. What. The. Fuck. We had definitely been hornswoggled by that watermelon head (FWIW, she could’ve used a few rounds of liposuction to get her down to ‘morbidly obese’). Frankly, I would advise against renting from grant properties — sure, it might have just been that this particular employee was a moron but hey… respondeat superior… Grant Properties is moronic by extension.

So now it’s 4:30, we have an appointment at 5:00, there’s no time to see other place, and we didn’t even get to see the first one. I was not pleased. The one place we actually got to look at was nice and the price was reasonable… but they didn’t know if they had any left for the fall. They suggested that we look at one of their other properties (which I think we will eventually) but we didn’t go see those because it was already too late for that. So, in short, our apartment hunting trip was a resounding failure. GOSH!

That night, however, we went to a fun little house party with the IU Men’s and Women’s Ultimate teams… it was a good time. Despite my strong preference for flip-cup, Kecia and I teamed up for a few games of doubles beer pong, and lost both of them. That’s alright, though. All in all, the Mamas and the Janes are fun people, and we had a good time. I managed to get written on with a sharpie (across pretty much my entire stomach)… I can’t really read it anymore, but I’m quite sure that it was either a formal derivation of Bernoulli’s equation or a drawing of the Kyoto Accordion. I was also forced to win the right to live with my sister (by winning a thumb war) from one of the Janes who just liked her a little more than I thought was healthy.

Saturday
Ahhh Saturday. We got out to the fields some time between 8:00 and 9:00 only to find that it was a) raining, b) chilly, and c) windy as hell. Kecia had planned to stay for a few games before heading back to Illinois for her Birthday celebration (quite the cowinkydink that Ryne and Teresa share a birthday with my sister, BTW) and to watch the final four. After about two minutes of being out in that crap, we realized that she’d be miserable the entire time she was at the fields, and that she’d have plenty of time next year to watch ultimate… so I sent her home.

I mentioned that it was raining… but did I mention that it had been raining for several days? And that there was a wizened old man on the other side of town building a large boat on the and collecting pairs of animals ( chirpy and otherwise) to load up? Yeah… it was a little moist. The fields were a bit muddy: if you dove for any reason, removing the mud would require all five Backstreet Boys, armed with squeegees, to adequately remove. Aside from the cold, it was a lot of fun… and after a few game the rain and clouds went away and it was sunny (if still windy as hell). We played alright, won one of the games, almost won another.

After the games I got to enjoy a local Bloomington eatery. It’s across from the Law School (kinda) so I can only imagine I’m going to be eating there a bit next year. The eatery in question is Penn Station and I had the Chicken Parmesean sub, which contains chicken breast, provolone, parmesan, grilled onions, mushrooms, oregano, pizza sauce> it was very good. Friday after we were done apartment hunting we ate at Mother Bear’s, which had some good Italian food. Neither of these two fine eateries seemed to have prosciutto or matzo balls… which didn’t bother me, but I just thought Ryne might want to know. What did bother me, though, was the fact that I didn’t get a chance to partake of the traditional Irish dish of liver with seisen… I might just have to bring a new cultural phenomenon to Bloomington if I can’t find a good dish like that around.

That evening was pretty uneventful… watched basketball, which is now over and we’re going to be burdened with talk of sliders and bullpens and switch hitters (no, not that kind, you perv) until a real sport starts back up. Fucking baseball. I’d rather listen to Vanilla Ice.

Sunday
Sunday I woke up before 7:00. I find it odd that Bloomington doesn’t celebrate Daylight Savings Time, but that’s just the way it is, I suppose. I had a big breakfast and got ready to play a little ultimate. The weather was MUCH nicer than the day before. The sun was still out and the wind had died down a bit, but the waving petunias were definitely still waving. The fields were much more oobleck-like and despite losing in the first round of bracket play, I played a pretty solid game. I stuck around to watch IU’s A team play (I played with the B Team)… they had played well on Saturday, going undefeated (including a win over the Michigan Wolverines B Team). I was hoping to get on the road by 2:00 or 3:00… but the first game I watched was sloppy and not really very impressive… so I decided to stick around for the finals against Arch-Rival Purdue. That was a lot more like it. It was an exciting game, and IU beat the hell out of them… 15-4 (or something like that) it was fun to watch.

Ultimate has a big heckling culture… it’s perfectly acceptable (and encouraged) to do more ranting and carrying on than Michael Moore at a Hillary Clinton rally… there was one particular trio of people who were out to watch the final game that were new to ultimate, but picked up on the heckling right away. The worst was a little Asian chick who crossed the line more times than WrestleMania. She made a snide comment about a swarthy guy who was with her “going world trade center” on someone’s ass because he was of arab descent. I was half expecting her to make a comment about a camel jockey in a sand storm or a discussion about his trip to the Hagi-mart for a Baleen flavored squishee or a hard cider. On top of that group, we also had a fan watching in a mullet wig — why, I really don’t know.

Also on Sunday, while we were watching the finals, some random filly brought out a gigantic bag of peanut butter cookies and a plate of rice rice krispy treats. The guy on the team that she’s friends with apparently has a serious girlfriend… which makes her a very interesting friend with benefits. No, those are not the traditional benefits, but as Marshall McLuhan would say: the medium is the message. But anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that she is hot and she bakes for ultimate players… which is a big plus. There has to be a downside somewhere… she’s probably a tarot card reader or a follower of Asatru or some such.

It was a little after 5:00 before I got on the road, which put me home by 1:00… much later than I’d wanted. The last hour or so of the drive was hard — nobody on the road, nothing on the radio, phone out of batteries so nobody to talk to… it was rough. Though earlier in the evening I did get to chat with Mandy for a while which made the drive through southern Tennessee and Northern Alabama much easier. Prior to that call I was listening to some Christian station on which they were talking about why wives need to have more sex with their husbands, but they failed to offer an opinion on whether doing it Animal Style as any less godly than missionary. It was interesting. Usually when those stations talk about the topic of sex it’s to talk about how evil porn is. I don’t really get it… so some guys like to admire some enterprising woman’s [vertical] smile… so what? Anyway… I arrived home to about 30,000 IMs… one of which was from Laura, informing me that her mother baked for me over spring break. This is not the first time, either — she likes to bake and she feels bad that my mother (also an excellent cook in all regards) is too far away to cook for me. That is a shame, but I’m lucky to have such people looking out for me. The baked good was an awesome Hummingbird Cake… very yummy. Also, there was some banana pudding (w/ Pineapple) that I enjoyed lots as well.

So that was the trip. Nothing too special, I didn’t get into too much trouble — at least none that you can pin on me. I’m the master of plausible deniability. I’m looking forward to heading up that direction in the next few months and I think it’ll be a good place to spend a few years. Maybe I’ll find a place to live eventually.