The Memory Hole

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 likely they were fake bullets from some hot topic belt, but I digress.

I snapped at him and gave him a ton of shit about how it was really dangerous to be playing with real bullets, how if the primer somehow got struck in the wrong way he could kill somebody, and I didn’t want to be involved until he took them off.

He took off his little bullet attachments.  I probably didn’t really care.

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 all begin our college careers, I invited everyone over to my room.  I don’t know why, I guess because it was supposed to be cool in college and it was going to be cool socializing all the time.

I can’t remember exactly who was there, because I believe some of the people I didn’t even know that well.  Definitely John, Evan, Fuj, K-Ching, and probably at least a few other random people from floor four.  Maybe Alex?  I remember also there were at least a few Regents girls there, I want to say Iris was there, I definitely know Jillian was there because I had to let her in from the Honors building (HA Lehua?), they even made us go through the silly “guest sign in” process and she even brought some drinks.

By drinks I mean Hawaiian Sun soft drinks.  We were pretty square.

All I remember was that it was kind of awkward, we all sat around my room and talked for like an hour or two.  And that’s how college began.

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 I didn’t really know my way around UH at all, I remember hanging out with John the whole time and Oahu was a pretty wild and crazy world.  It was a few weeks before college started, it included New Student Orientation which is actually a goldmine of memories in themselves, but alas.

I took Japanese for three years in high school, surely that would count for something, right?  Well, apparently not, I remember being shuffled into some room in Moore Hall (I didn’t know it was Moore Hall at the time) and we had to fill out some form which was filled with a lot of Kanji and then listen to tapes of Japanese and answer questions—there were probably three questions I knew the answer to.

So I was placed in JPN 100, which isn’t quite 101, it’s for people who have had “some” experience with Japanese (i.e. they didn’t bother to teach us hiragana and katakana) but other than that it was basically starting from square one.

They were apparently very disappointed with me though, because somewhere on the form I had marked that my mother was a native speaker of Japanese.  Still don’t know how I managed that one, but it was sort of embarrassing.  I mean, back then I was a huge Japanophile but not to the point of pretending my mom was Japanese.

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 fart.

But that’s just every meal for me.  Sometimes there are things that make them especially awkward.  For me, the first time in college came literally on the first day of classes of my first semester in university.  So that dates this story to lunchtime on a Monday in the Fall of 2004.

Awkward factor #1: I was meeting a girl from the internet.

Perhaps a little backstory is in order.  By now, it should be clear to anyone that knows me that I don’t have any aversion to meeting strangers from the internet, since I clearly lack the skills to meet people in any other way.  I’m a huge nerd.  And arguably, I was an even bigger nerd back in the high school days.  Such a nerd, in fact, that I belonged to a mailing list whose subject was the video game Final Fantasy.  To make things worse, occasionally groups of us from this Final Fantasy Mailing List would meet up at Anime Expos, hang out, and share hotel rooms.  So I had met a bunch of people from the internet, and even shared sleeping quarters with them, since I was like fourteen.

I can’t believe I just wrote those last couple of sentences, and that they’re completely true and non-fictional.  This is the stuff of my nightmares, the fact that those statements are actually true.

Anyway, on this Final Fantasy Mailing List, there was a girl my age who was also from Hawaii.  And surprise, surprise, she was entering UH at the same time I was.  I had never seen her before or even spoken to her outside of emails and IM conversations, but for some reason we decided that we should totally hang out once school started.  I’m not sure why.  I guess we had talked to each other on AIM for two years, and now we’d be going to the same school at the same time, so it just made sense.

It was stupid for me.  I’m such an antisocial person, and already, college was this new overwhelming thing, it was crazy—living in a dorm, going to classes at random times, et cetera.  It was the first day, and here I was planning to put myself into a stressful (to me—I know, I’m insane) situation of meeting a new person whom I had talked to online a bunch.

Usually I will just find a way to weasel out of any situation I’m uncomfortable with (i.e. most situations) but maybe my whole avoidance system was overloaded by the newness of university life, or maybe I really thought that college was just going to be meeting new people 24/7, so I thought I’d have to deal with it anyway.

I remember her calling me a bit before noon, saying she was on her way down to the dorm cafeteria.  I had big knots in my stomach.  I should say it had nothing to do with it being a girl or anything, it was mostly like “oh man I dunno what this person is gonna be like, and I’ve spoken to them for a while and what if I’m really different in person and they hate me, this is so weird why am I even doing this?”

Okay, a small part of it probably had to do with my lunch partner being a girl.  But I wasn’t thinking of this as a date or something that might even lead to that, she was just a random internet friend that I now happened to go to school with.

But enter awkward factor #2: Chino.

Chino is a really good guy.  He’d been one of my closest friends in high school since we had a lot of the same classes, and he almost always was positive and upbeat.  Chino is still a good friend of mine, so I really hope he doesn’t take this the wrong way.

But for Chino, especially at this time, stuff was always about “the chicks.”  I think he really had crazy expectations for college, when we were going in, that our lives were gonna go crazy and we were gonna be banging chicks left and right and there’d be girls everywhere.

So when I told him about meeting A GIRL for lunch, on the very first day of school, he made it out like this girl was probably going to be my first college conquest.  He was making it sound like I had “picked up” this girl and it was totally a date, or more.  Of course, having him talk like this just made it more awkward for me.  What did I know?  Was he right?  Should I be treating this as something more?

Of course not.  But when you’re an awkward teenager in a really weird situation, you can quite easily doubt yourself, especially when someone as confident and powerful as Chino is interjecting alternate suggestions in your ear the whole time.

Fuck, I was way more nervous now.

I met her, for the first time in real life (as the saying goes), outside my dorm.  Meeting people from the internet, it can be a really weird thing.  I don’t think humans are quite fully adapted to it yet, to have simultaneously this background and friendship and at the same time be overwhelmed by this feeling of “I don’t know this person.”

This one wasn’t any weirder than any other, but it wasn’t any smoother, either.  I remember going to the cafe, echoes of Chino’s comments started to ring in my ears.  I had a meal plan, since I lived in the dorms, but she didn’t.  She started to pay, and I was thinking nervous thoughts to myself, “Shit, is this a date? Should I be paying?!”

At that time, I was definitely my fattest, and with a meal plan to the all you can eat dorm cafeteria, well, let’s just say typically I was ingesting a lot of food at any given meal.  I remember, though, I was so nervous, I just followed her lead.  She got one slice of pizza.  So I got one slice of pizza.  That’s all I ate for that entire meal.

Me?  At the dorm cafe, eating just one slice of pizza?  You now have proof that I was an awkward, nervous wreck during that meal.

We sat down, and the conversation proceeded.  Like I said, it’s weird.  We had chatted so much in the past on computers, but now in person, it just turned to the typical “I just met you” smalltalk.  ”So, how was your first class today?  Are you liking school here so far?”  That kind of thing.

The conversation and the conservative eating of just one slice of pizza, slowly (to not look like a fat pig, of course), was awkward enough.  But then Chino made a reappearance.

I’m not sure if he was just there to keep tabs on how my lunch was going or if it was just a coincidence, but I think it was a little of both.  He was perfectly seated behind her so that I could see him just fine, but she would have no idea.  And the whole time, whenever I made eye contact with him, he was giving me the biggest shit-eating grin.

At one point, during a moment of prolonged eye contact, he nodded at the girl and seriously gave me a huge thumbs up, as if to say, “Yeah, she’s hot dude, way to go.”  It was really creepy, especially since obviously that was not where this meal was headed at all.

That’s about it.  The meal ended uneventfully, she went back to class and I went back to my room.  As far as I can recall, I never actually hung out with her socially again, although we definitely bumped into each other a few times and we were still friendly.

It wasn’t a terribly bad meal, or anything special in terms of awkwardness.  I just find it amazing that, going into my college career, I stumbled (fell?) out the gate with a pretty awkward encounter, no wonder my entire career would be cursed.  I didn’t even get one good, non-weird lunch under my belt before shit started to go all strange.

But really, the one thing I’ll never forget about that lunch was Chino’s damn smile and thumbs up.  That’s really what all these words were for.

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.  It involves myself, John, and our mutual female acquaintance Iris.  I had met her originally through my scholarship thing, since all of us who got the scholarship were forced to do a summer orientation together (note to self: that’d be a good one to post about later, too).

I’m not sure how John got into this social group, but the dude has an uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with any group that includes women so I guess it makes sense.

Anyway, it’s not like I was super close friends with Iris.  Or maybe I was, I don’t really remember that clearly—I think we would often IM each other.  Oftentimes we’d go eat at the dormitory cafeteria together, too, but it wasn’t like a daily ritual—maybe once a week or so, if I’d have to guess.

For John, I’d imagine it was pretty much the same, he would often be part of the group that would eat at the cafeteria.  Now, I can’t recall whether Iris was a complete vegetarian or just espoused a more veggie-filled lifestyle, but if I’d have to guess, I’d say she was a full-blown vegetarian.  Which probably didn’t leave her a lot of options at that cafeteria.

That shitty Sodexho (or Sodexo now, I agree, that “h” was totally superfluous) cafeteria.  All my other friends and I weren’t even vegetarians and we still loved to bag on how bad the food was.  I mean, all of it was bad for you in the health sense.  Greasy, mass-produced with low-quality ingredients, all-you-can eat to encourage binging, et cetera.  But a lot of the time, the dishes were just, well, uninspired as well.  I mean, sure, they always had burgers and plain cheese pizza as safe bets, but anything with any variety tended to be on the side of suck.

So one day, while we were probably talking about how crappy the food was at the cafeteria, Iris starts to tell us about these microwaveable vegetarian meals she eats.  ”They’re great!” she said energetically.  John and I were something more skeptical.  First of all, vegetarian meals of any kind were not conjuring up images of deliciousness to us two carnivores.  Go meat or go home.

But even if we could stomach going vegetarian for one meal, something that came pre-packed in a microwaveable container that was ready to be eaten after a few minutes of zapping didn’t sound too good either.  Heck, I wasn’t health-minded, but it didn’t even sound healthy. I know all those pre-made meals are typically loaded with sodium and preservatives and other shit that is almost certainly going to give us cancer in a few years.  Why would I subject myself to vegetables if they weren’t even good for you?

A tepid, microwaved meal that also happened to be vegetarian.  I wasn’t seeing a lot of upsides to that, I’ve gotta say.

She promised it would be great, and that someday she would have us try one.  We acquiesced, figuring that “someday” was a nebulous enough term that we might not ever actually have to eat one of these vegetarian microwaved meals.

And thus time wore on.  At some point, I had discovered that you could access a schedule for what the cafeteria would be cooking every night.  I made sure to go when I knew they’d be having a dish I really liked.  Like I said, there weren’t many that I liked, but there were two “specials” that were my favorites.

The first one was chicken nuggets.  Now, I know that sounds pretty lame, but what can I say, I’m a fat guy and I love chicken nuggets.  I remember they’d serve them in those little red baskets from the “grill” area of the cafeteria (the one that usually had cheeseburgers, grilled cheese and french fries).  May god strike me down if I am lying when I say that I consumed roughly 5,000 chicken nuggets on any night when they were serving them.  Okay, god’s probably gonna strike me down in the form of grotesque obesity even if that statement is true, but anyway.

The other dish I liked was a little more inspired.  It was buffalo chicken pizza.  This is something that actually seemed pretty unique, especially when most of their pizzas there sucked.  It was a pizza with big, hearty chunks of chicken all over it, drenched in buffalo chicken sauce.  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that inspired, but it was tasty and another thing I’d load up on if they were serving it.

So, as it just so happens, one particular week, I happened to peek at the schedule, and I could not believe my eyes when I saw what was slated for Friday night dinner.  I almost wept tears of pure joy as I saw the combination: “Chicken Nuggets/Buffalo Chicken Pizza.”

…No words… They—they should have sent a poet…

It was beautiful.  Most college freshmen probably looked forward to going out and getting wasted, laid, or some combination thereof on a Friday night.  I looked forward to chicken nuggets and pizza.  Does it surprise anyone that I am overweight?

I looked forward to Friday all week.  Finally, Friday afternoon.  Just a few more hours.  As I sat in my dorm room it was almost as if I could smell the salivation-inducing odors emanating from the kitchens in the cafeteria.  That’s when the worst thing happened.

A message popped up on my computer screen.  It read something like this:

Iris: Hey!  I bought you guys those vegetarian dinners I talked about!  Let’s have them tonight, okay?

Fuck.  This could not be happening.  I immediately consulted with John about what to do.  While I doubt he was anywhere nearly as passionate about the shitty, greasy cafeteria food as I was, he wasn’t too excited at the prospect of having to forego eating real food in order to try these meals that Iris had purchased for us.

There was some reason that this suffering couldn’t be delayed.  I think maybe the meals were only good for a certain amount of time, or she was going home for the weekend, or something like that.  Either way, dinner had to be that night, and she wasn’t letting us escape easily.

Time ticked on and the day rolled into night, and she had cajoled us into at least saying we were coming to eat.  Neither of us had the heart to tell her straight up that we truly did not want to eat the food, but the situation was getting increasingly dire.  I remember riding the elevator in our building up to the tenth floor, where she lived.

That was a little weird in itself, since in our building the floors were divided by gender, and thus she lived on an all-girl’s floor.  It felt a little bit like I was in a place I shouldn’t be, like I was just waiting for the RA to pop out from behind a corner and scream, “MEN?!  ON MY FLOOR?!!!” and then throw us down the garbage chute or something.

Well, actually, our dorm buildings didn’t have corners, but she sure as hell would have popped out from somewhere.

John and I ended up in Iris’ room, where the meals were already spinning in the microwave.  We pleaded with her, “Iris, you don’t understand, these are the best dishes the cafeteria serves, if we don’t go to dinner tonight we miss out.”  She was a nice girl, but she was also showing a rather unrelenting side.

She seemed confused, like it truly baffled her that we didn’t want to eat these delicious vegetarian microwaved meals.  ”I picked out each meal for you guys individually,” she said.  She showed us the boxes, and I don’t know exactly how John felt, but I knew she wasn’t winning me over.  Mine was like some mushroom thing, that’s all I remember.  Mushrooms.  I didn’t really like mushrooms at all back then, and even now, I wouldn’t really make a meal of them.

I remember she started to get just a tiny bit annoyed at our reluctance to eat them.  Truth be told, I don’t know why we didn’t think to eat them and then still go to dinner afterwards.  I guess there would have been less room for the delicious nuggets and pizza if our stomachs were all crammed up with stupid vegetarian food.

Honestly, even if it wasn’t chicken nugget and buffalo chicken pizza night, the meals didn’t look appealing at all.  I’ve since gotten over most of my food squeamishness, but at that time I was still way more on the picky end of things, and I wasn’t even sure if I could eat it.

Eventually, I guess my hunger pains got the best of me.  I think it was when she started to show a bit of anger at us for not wanting to eat it.  I responded in kind.  I yelled, quite loudly, “IRIS!  IT’S FUCKING CHICKEN NUGGETS AND BUFFALO CHICKEN PIZZA NIGHT!  IT’S THE BEST FOOD, AND I’M NOT GOING TO MISS IT FOR THIS VEGETARIAN BULLSHIT!” Or something along those lines.

I was joking—well, maybe not completely—but I still did raise my voice and I actually remember thinking, “oh no, I’m on the girl’s floor, they’re gonna think there’s some assault going on here or something.”  I think she got the point though.

And so John and I left.  We didn’t eat the food.  I’m not sure if she made us take them with us, so that we could eat them later, or if we just left her with all those crappy vegetarian meals to deal with herself.  I felt bad, especially about the yelling, even if it was in jest.  But you can only humor a person so far.  There’s a difference between someone being nice and someone hoisting their niceness onto you where it becomes contrary to what you actually want to do.

We went to the cafeteria.  The food was glorious.  I regret nothing.

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 myself.  One of the Gamecube’s more well-known attempts at branching out from the “just for kids” stereotype that Nintendo had earned was a remake of the original Resident Evil game on the Gamecube.  It had really good graphics for the time and as I recall actually had to be put on two of those little tiny gamecube discs.

Anyway, so one day Evan asked me if he could use my Gamecube to play Resident Evil if he bought the game.  I said sure—it wasn’t like I used it very much anyway.  So he bought it, and he was hanging out in my room playing the game.

Evan, I love you dude, and obviously I would learn to eventually live with all your little foibles (and you with mine, I’m sure) when we ended up as roommates for our last two years of undergrad, but at the time, I was used to having my own room to myself and I didn’t have to deal with anyone else normally.

The thing was, Evan would play it in long runs.  Like, three or four hours at a time.  It was no big deal, it’s not like I had anything else going on.  But after a while, having the TV on blaring Resident Evil was getting annoying.  He would really get into it and have it really loud.  Sometimes he’d yell in reaction to something that happened—I guess it is a “horror” game and enemies would pop out unexpectedly, resulting in a cry of surprised and frantic working of the controller.  I remember there were like permanent sweat marks on the controller after all was said and done—that’s how into it he was.

No big deal, I thought.  All I had in my dorm room was my pissant little 13” TV, but one cool thing about it was that it had a normal headphone jack right on the front.  I told Evan how the sound was bothering me a bit, so I offered up my headphones and asked if he’d play wearing them.  Evan’s a cool guy and he understood and obliged right away.

It was great.  Silence permeated the room.  Aside from the hum of the TV, there was really no sound in the room.  I was really getting used to it, and I was thinking that actually him playing Resident Evil in my room wasn’t going to bother me at all—he could now play till the Gamecube burned out for all I cared.

Some time went by, maybe twenty minutes.  And then, suddenly, out of the calm silence, Evan’s shout suddenly filled the air, coupled with frantic movement of the sticks on the controller.  I guess an enemy had popped up unexpectedly or something.  The thing was, while the game itself could be put through headphones, Evan’s own reactions couldn’t.

This was worse.  Before, the noise was annoying and constant, but at least when he would have a loud reaction to the game, it wasn’t such a break in the atmosphere.  It could almost be expected.  But now, I had quiet tranquility pierced by the occasional “OH FUCK!  SHIT!!!” or something along those lines.  Honestly, I wasn’t even playing this game and it was still scaring me, because Evan’s unpredictable and unexpected reactions would surprise me and make me jump too.

It went on like that for the night.  I think in the future I just told him to forget the headphones, I’d rather just put them on myself, play some music, and block out all sound.  Fortunately I think he beat the game to 100% completion within the span of a week or something, so it wasn’t that bad.

Those were the days.

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, and even if parents just gave their kids a bunch of money to go buy food, very little of it would probably be put to that purpose. 99% of it would probably go to booze or illicit substances, with the remaining 1% spent on impulse-buy munchies at 7-11.

But in truth, the meal plans themselves were huge scams designed to line the pockets of Sodexo, our school’s food service contractor that ran basically everything that served food on campus. They were extremely expensive, if I recall correctly the cheapest plan was way north of another thousand dollars added to the already expensive dorm rental fees.

They were also designed so that they weren’t really that good of a value. Like, okay, if you spent $1000 upfront but could eat every meal every day on campus for free, maybe it would work out. But there were always weird rules, like you could only eat a certain amount of times per day, or only at certain places, or things like that.

The one my mom got me was pretty decent, I could eat two meals a day at the dorm cafeteria, I think all seven days a week.  But it didn’t stack, so I couldn’t eat one meal on Monday there and then eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Tuesday.  So if I ever chose to eat out elsewhere, that was a “lost” meal that I paid for but didn’t receive. I also didn’t get any allowances at any other of the Sodexo food vendors, it was the cafeteria or nothing.

The cafeteria wasn’t terrible, it’s been the topic of a few posts already here. After subsisting on it for a year, though, I can happily say I never wanted to eat there again. The food was also really greasy and bad for you, almost surely responsible for untold numbers of Freshman 15s every semester.

It was buffet style, and they had different stations, a pizza station, a grill station, a pasta section, et cetera. I think I wrote about this before in the vegetarian dinner entry.

Anyway, there was one shitty night. Thursday night. Steak night. For some reason, on Thursdays the cafeteria would forego its typical food for steak night. My first week at school, a few people told me about it excitedly.

“Oh man, just wait until Thursday. It’s STEAK NIGHT! If you eat at the cafeteria one night a week using your meal plan, make it steak night!”

These kids that told me this didn’t seem to be alone, either. Thursday night was the one night a week where it was pretty much a given that you’d be waiting in a line out the door to get in for dinner service. Sometimes, it was a really long line where you’d have to wait upwards of half an hour.

But I’m going to let you in on a little secret: steak night fucking sucked. After you waited in the long line, you were given a ticket for your entree. The cafeteria was usually all you can eat, but I guess steak is too expensive for that, so you were only allowed to get one serving.

Now, I’m not a huge steak fanatic, but it was pretty much in the same class as the other low-grade shit that Sodexo served every other meal of the day. I can’t honestly imagine that this steak cost much at all, since it had the texture and appearance of an abused tire. And it wasn’t just a bad cut of meat, it was also tiny as hell, I guess again due to cost issues. You got about three bites of meat, along with a potato, I think.

You did have an alternative to go for a chicken breast, and after a while I ultimately just began opting for that every week as the year wore on. Chicken’s chicken, it was nothing spectacular but at least it wasn’t a colossal disappointment like the steak was.

To make it even lamer, when it was steak night, the steak/chicken distribution took up one of the other stations, I think it was usually the grill (burger/fries/sandwich/chicken nuggets) station, which was typically my favorite station, so you not only had to eat your one little serving of crappy steak (or chicken), but you couldn’t get the other stuff that was at least decent.

I never understood why students would get so amped up about steak night, nor why Sodexo even bothered at all.

Fuck steak night.