January 2012
1 post
10 tags
steak night.
Freshman year of university. The only year I was living in the on-campus dorms, which were different than living in the on-campus apartments, because you were required to have a meal plan.
The logic behind it made sense. In the apartments there were full kitchens, so it was plausible that students were cooking their own food. But in the dorms, they didn’t want students to starve to death,...
July 2011
1 post
matching attire.
I don’t know exactly why I thought of this. Perhaps it is because here in Taiwan, I see way too many people wearing matching clothes. It’s pretty ridiculous that many couples find this practice acceptable and on their weekend outings will be sporting, at the very least, a matching shirt, if not matching pants and matching accessories to go with them.
I can think of two such...
June 2011
1 post
9 tags
death of a bird.
When I was a teenager, I engaged in a vast amount of stupid activities involving motor vehicles that were dangerous, reckless, and could have ended in the deaths of myself, my friends, and innocent bystanders. But I don’t think that I am too unique in this regard, at least when it comes to those of us who grew up in America.
I think about that now. Here in Taiwan, kids don’t get...
May 2011
1 post
welcher.
Time to sell out another one of my friends in one of these posts.
Well, not really. But John, this is about you.
Pretty much everyone knows that we are hetero life partners or BFFs or whatever you want to call it, so I’m not too worried when writing this. But John, there were quite a few agreements that you welched on throughout our college career, and I wanted to make a post for the...
April 2011
3 posts
8 tags
residential evil.
Another freshman year story.
I had a Nintendo Gamecube in my dorm room that year. It was the only console I owned back then. Honestly, there weren’t a lot of good games for it and it wasn’t a very good system in general, but I guess back then I was just a helpless Nintendo fanboy.
Evan was really into the Resident Evil video game series, something I never really got too much into...
16 tags
vegetarian dinner.
I’ve written a lot about freshman year, I guess that’s when things were at their newest and the most happening-est. I’ve also already written about eating, and the dorm cafeteria, and girls, and well, my point is, this post is going to be a combination of all these things.
It was definitely freshman year, probably Spring semester, so that’d put this in the Spring of 2005....
7 tags
oil change.
The first proper high school era post. It had to happen sometime. I had even less adventures that involved other people in high school than the few I did in college, so expect these to be relevant to nobody but me. Anyway, here goes.
May of 2004. Senior year. Things were getting closed to being wrapped up. By now, colleges had been chosen and life plans were finally starting to fall into...
March 2011
1 post
japanese girls and tamagotchis.
I’ve already written about how I thought college was going to be different. I was going to be social, be surrounded by lots of girls, et cetera. I won’t rehash it.
The last entry was about how, from the onset, my social encounters with girls were kind of strange. Actually, I remembered something even worse last night.
Fall of 2004. The weekend before school started, before it was...
February 2011
2 posts
14 tags
awkward meal number 1.
Throughout my entire life, especially my college career, pretty much every social event is punctuated by something awkward, especially meals. Maybe it’s just because I’m a fat bastard, but I know despite usually being an inherently social event, I always feel like I am going to mess up somehow while eating—get food all over the place, spit food in other people’s faces, and...
8 tags
"we've got a runner."
Spring ‘07. I can’t remember the title of the class, but it was some Political Science class that I think we were required to take. Patterson, John, and I were all in the same class together, which was always a recipe for disaster, especially if Freaks and Monsters was any indication.
Well, Patterson alone was always a recipe for disaster, he made a course on Indian religions rather...
January 2011
1 post
self-directed learning.
This was Spring ‘05. Second semester of college, I distinctly remember sitting around my single dorm in Ilima reading the book. Anyway…
UH had some weird classes, I forget the special name they gave them, but basically it was a “teach yourself” kind of deal. They were all 100-level courses that I guess were basic requirement/core classes, and rather than pay professors...
April 2010
1 post
5 tags
sun chips aren't the only sun-powered chips.
Another random moment from that Freaks and Monsters class in Spring 2006.
One day, the professor comes in, and for some reason she begins talking about Fritos. Like, the corn chips. I’m not sure exactly what she was getting at, I believe she just wanted to talk about how symbolism pervades everything around us and can be used to manipulate our perception of things.
Either way, the...
January 2010
5 posts
10 tags
drunk man on the can.
John, your latest tweet reminded me of this little incident. I wonder if you remember it.
It was senior year. Probably Spring 2008, although theoretically it could have been Fall ‘08. Definitely living in Wainani. I want to say it was a Tuesday night. It wasn’t entirely late, like maybe seven or eight at night when this happened. John had been out drinking somewhere, and came...
10 tags
freaks, monsters, and raelians.
Spring 2006. John, Patterson, and I took “Freaks and Monsters,” a general LLEA class that was about, well, uh, what people have called odd, strange, etc. There are about a million things that could be said about this class, but here’s one for today.
The whole vibe of the class was that it was really wrong to make fun of “the other.” That is, the name “Freaks...
8 tags
japanese placement exam.
Fall 2004.
I remember before we even officially started college, we had to go up to Oahu to take some placement exams. Well, I guess I didn’t have to take the math placement exam because I had gotten a good enough grade on my AP Calculus exam to automatically qualify for Calc at University, but I do remember having to take the Japanese one.
The whole experience was kind of weird, because...
7 tags
the weakest party.
Definitely 2004, Fall, Freshman year. It was the Sunday before school officially started, my first semester.
I had a single apartment in Hale Aloha Ilima, Room 433. I had no idea what to expect from college life. I was living around a lot of friends from high school, and a lot of others that I had recently been introduced to through being a Regents Scholar.
So that last night before we would...
9 tags
bullet belt.
Circa fall 2004 - spring 2005. freshman year.
We were playing airsoft at the time. Evan was one of the regular players. We went to the nearby CQB place, and I noticed Evan had a belt which he claimed had real bullets. His dad was a cop, you see, and he had access to real bullets, or something. Now that sounds fishy but apparently four years ago I believed him rather than figuring that more...