There’s a moral ambiguity to rewrites.

There used to be something else here. It’s gone now.

In my seemingly endless sojourn to find a new cell phone and service, I’ve traveled far and wide, from the distant lands of www.alltel.com to the remote expanse that is www.sprint.com. Which service is best seems a little beside the point since they all cost the same and come with very similar features. The three that I’ve boiled it down to are Alltel, Cellular One and Sprint–listed alphabetically to avoid claims of favoritism. Each have different cell phones to choose from, though for some reason beyond understanding, all want me to have a RAZR. I do not want a RAZR. Unfortunately, the best offering from Alltel seems to be the RAZR. That might be a good reason not to go with Alltel, then.

I am lost in a sea of cell phones that won’t stop ringing, even though none of them get reception in Eau Claire.

I’m descending into wireless oblivion.

Wireless oblivion is also a good way to describe cell phone service where I live. Northern Wisconsin is a desolate wasteland when it comes to quality cell phone coverage. GSM, the more advanced and universally accepted (a.k.a. used in Europe) network is a joke up here, but Cellular One claims that they’ll get me good reception. I’d like to avoid Sprint if possible, if only because I’ve had sour dealings with them in the past. But that was the past, so maybe I don’t need to worry. And then there is Alltel, who can’t decide where I’d roam and where I wouldn’t. It concerns me because they call their plan ‘national’ and then say that I can still roam somehow. I don’t get it. But I need to figure it out, if only because it’s my current obsession of the week.

Maybe next week I’ll be obsessed with phasmatids.

Campus organization works to rid students of thought, emotion.

This is the best table flyer I’ve ever seen. It’s from an ad for spiritual meditation:

Tired of being jerked around by your thoughts and emotions?

I’m aware of their intent, and accept that meditation is a viable way to relax and find focus–but I think someone needs to work on shaping their message. This makes them sound like evil robots, not relgious fanatics–I mean, what? So no, I am not tired of thoughts and emotions, nor do I need anyone else to stop them from jerking me around. I rather enjoy jerking myself around and will stop whenever I damn well please.

And yes–that’s how I intended it to sound.

Something weird happened in choir today.

Everything was going well and we were all having a good time singing the old classics of the semester like Whitacre and that other one, but then we were excused a whole eleven minutes early under mysterious pretenses. We got one note into a song, stopped, and then had to leave. A bunch of us met up in the lobby and tried to put together what had happened. “What am I supposed to do now?” “Can we practice out here?” “I don’t want to go have real life experiences.” My musical clock is set so that at precisely noon on Monday through Friday I am ready to go. And that keeps me going until 12:50. You can understand how upsetting it is when such a delicate balance is thrown out of alignment. My whole day was altered. I don’t know what to do. I’m so confused.

You can’t say that on the internet.

So this has probably been the most interesting, if not action-packed, Thanksgiving break I’ve ever had. After coming home from Iowa yesterday, I spent the evening bumming around town and getting lost, to make things interesting–or maybe I just have a horrible sense of direction… Once I found my way back to the house I was staying at, my friend and I went out to a University of Minnesota Band party. It was much more intense than I expected it to be. The short list: a man without a shirt, a man running around shouting, “Drink from the utter!” and a man ripping his pants down the backside while tap dacing. There were more people than that, thankfully, though they might not have been as much fun to watch.

I’m back in Eau Claire, and it will feel nice to sleep in my own bed tonight, however irritatingly uncomfortable it may be.

But first…Cabaret.

Ever get that “God, I hope there’s a runway in front of us” feeling?

The flight back into Minneapolis was a little bumpier than it needed to be, but I got my fill of jolts and jostles for the year. It honestly wasn’t that bad, but I need to make this sound more interesting. I sat next to a very old woman, but then she moved because she was in the wrong seat. I too think the numbers 10 and 11 look too similar–11 should look more like a b, or something. So another woman sat down, rather professional looking, typing away on her laptop with a cat as her background. In her Powerpoint, she used the phrase “re capture”. It made me giggle.

LeVar Burton’s got nothing better to do.

It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving, and I’ve accomplished nothing. It feels good.

I tried Ubuntu…again. It failed…again. I gave up…again. But this time with finality. I wanted to give up–it was pointless. I’m over it, and moving on. My new obsession? Well, I haven’t found it…yet. And I’m sure there is something out there for me to needlessly pine over for an exessive length of time, because there always is.

There are signs, and a stern British woman.

This morning, I spent some time at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport. Just to get it out of the way—the highlight of my time there was when a woman in front of me didn’t understand what “Caution; you are reaching the end of the moving walkway,” meant. And so she wasn’t paying attention, which caused her to trip and almost fall over. If she had actually fallen over…well I’m not sure what I would have done then.

I was happy it only took about twenty minutes to get through security. That’s probably a record for me, besides the Central Wisconsin Airport security, which doesn’t really count because all they do is ask how many fingers you are holding up. Also—twenty minutes, on Thanksgiving! That’s just awesome. It sounded like I had just missed a huge rush, because someone said to me, “You should have seen the huge rush before!” I was a little confused why there were so many lanes closed at security. I mean, holiday seasons and all, you would think when the line weaves back and forth out of the queue and into the rest of the terminal, you’d pick it up a bit.

Then I didn’t have really bad eggs.

I’m out of Africa, and Eau Claire.

I’ve been kicked out of the dorms–for the weekend. It’s Thanksgiving, if you didn’t notice, and the university is of the belief that I should celebrate it away from my school friends, like they’re a bad infulence or something. I feel it’s discriminatory against the homeless and those who don’t appreciate a good turkey. Personally, I dislike turkey, but do enjoy that which comes with turkey, namely pie and being lazy. Also potatoes. And stuffing. Rolls, too. Did I mention pie? Oh, yes, and spending time with family and friends.

Tomorrow I will embark on a harrowing journey south, far south, to the great state of Iowa. I will depart from Minneapolis and fifty-three–yes, fifty-three–minutes later I will land in Waterloo, home of the National Cattle Congress. From there, it’s a hop, skip, and a rather long car ride to Iowa City, where I’ll be staying.

And now…a moment in history…

But Jordan just seems like it’d be so cool, minus the explosions.

Lately, a.k.a. this past week, I’ve been wrestling with the idea of taking a semester or maybe just a summer and studying in some far off land somewhere. But I don’t want to do it just anywhere. It seems like everyone always goes the same places–Mexico, England, France, Germany–the big four. Now some adventurous souls will venture further and farther to places like Austria and Australia, or even China. Now those people get props for going above and beyond the call of culture craziness. And I would be willing to go to those places, but right now my favorite is Amman, Jordan.

That’s right. I said it.

Sure, it’s surrounded by countries that are about as stable as Windows ME. Sure, it’s in the middle of a desert. Sure, I’d have to take 10 credits of Arabic. But it just sounds so awesome, and if they’d lift their ban on travel outside of Jordan during the semester, I’d be even more pumped. And yes, I’d be perfectly happy with the Czech Republic and moreso with the Netherlands–but come on, Jordan! That’d be awesome.

I’m making it up as I go along, like John Wells without Aaron Sorkin.

I’ve tried starting this post five times, and they all start like this:

Today is Monday.

Really? Like it isn’t obvious, or something. That’s where a lot of my blogging problems start–a good deal of my life is boring, or it’s only interesting to me and so I feel like who would want to read it? But as my forturne cookie post below says, I should make me happy first and work from there. So here goes.

Friday night, I was hit with a sudden and inescapable need to install Ubuntu, a Linux distribution, onto my Mac. I had to. It was obvious to me. I would do anything…except reformat my computer, which is what I needed to do, I guess. So instead of doing what I was supposed to, I spent five hours working on a way to get around that tiny little requirement of completely getting rid of all 80 gigs on my Powerbook. What was I to do? Well, if only I had some kind of external firewire drive I could boot from–hey, what’s that right there? Why it’s an iPod with 16 free gigs. And it can work as a firewire drive! Sweet. Too bad Ubuntu couldn’t make up it’s mind on whether it was an mp3 player first, or a hard drive first, because everytime I tried to format a section of the hard drive, Ubuntu’s music player would mount the other portion, making it impossible to format the rest of it. Not cool, especially since I got it to work once, but didn’t do the required special coding at the end to make it bootible. So I got very upset for a while because I really wanted Ubuntu. Then I decided that I didn’t really need Ubuntu to be truly at peace with my operating system, so I spent all of Saturday changing almost every available option in OSX. If it could be changed, I changed it. Everything looks and sounds different. I even downloaded Thunderbird so I could have a new e-mail system–too bad it deleted every e-mail I ever got from UWEC…that went bye-bye pretty quick.

So Ubuntu was a bust, but at least I have cool new sounds for instant messaging.

I don’t want to know, and yet I’m strangely curious.

If you can’t tell, my bathroom (which happens to be across the hall from my room) has been blocked off to all customers today. It’s also a self-imposed blockade, really, because I wouldn’t go in there even without the big X and the “DO NOT ENTER” covering the door. Why? Because people are stupid. At least the people on my floor are. Hey! Let’s drink way too much, then run around all night screaming our heads off because we’re such losers we can’t find anywhere off-campus to drink! And then, after that, let’s completely forget about common decency and be really gross all over our own bathroom–wouldn’t that rock?! I’d tell you exactly what they did, but I’m not entirely sure myself. All I know is that it is disgusting, and it’s not vomit…

The joys of living in a dorm.

This is me starting strong.

So I’ve decided that my blog can also serve as a repository for all knowledge…err, my writing. So–if you look at the top of the page, you’ll see a title. And then a picture. It’s Prague, by the way. Below that are some links. Use your best judgement to figure out the one I’m talking about. It isn’t finished, but I’ll post a few more every so often.

Enjoy that.

I also posted an About section with some information about me and my life so far.

Enjoy that, also.

Today is the first day of the rest of your blog.

Okay. I’m back. And I mean it.

I’m writing once a day (or more), everyday. I don’t care if I’m missing a foot, though I guess that wouldn’t really stop me from writing. I need to get back into this. I don’t write enough anymore. My NaNoWriMo story is a joke that not even I can laugh at. Two thousand words? That’s it? That’s pathetic. I can’t compel myself to even write the next paragraph, let alone the next 48,000 words. So here I am, writing. It feels good.