I’d stored my bike at the bookstore over the weekend, so I had to walk there today. On the way, I stopped by the homeless shelter to inquire about need for the shelter idea mentioned in yesterday’s journal entry. Everything Paul the homeless man told me yesterday sounded like an accurate description of the city’s situation, but I wanted to get input from the professionals.
The homeless shelter is located in an old church on the north side of the Rec Center. It offers three meals per day, showers and temporary housing. Walking in the front door, I went downstairs to the common area and told a woman at a desk why I was there. The small basement of the church had about 10 needy people sitting around tables doing nothing. The woman at the desk directed me to another woman behind another desk in an office at the other side of the basement. She was a heavy-set black woman typing on a computer who pleasantly answered my questions.
I was at first confused by this woman’s answers because she said that this shelter offers overnight shelter services. What I didn’t realize at the time was that people cannot just show up in the evening expecting a bed, which is the kind of service I’m interested in. When I enquired about the state/federal funding the shelter receives, I was directed to the main boss, a woman upstairs named Susan Metcalf. Susan is a thin older woman that was scurrying around sending faxes and answering phones while we talked. I did get several minutes of her time uninterrupted, which breathed new life into the plan.
There is a name for the kind of place Paul described to me yesterday; a safe house. Safe houses are eligible to receive HUD(Department of Housing and Urban Development) funding and there are none located anywhere near here. Susan’s conversation seemed much more animated when she realized exactly what I was interested in, saying there is a huge need for such a thing. According to her, the reason no safe houses exist in the area is that Christian organizations and community leaders refuse to fund/organize them. Apparently, these organizations are notorious for crime, drug use and drawing unwanted individuals into the community. The Christians find them immoral and the community leaders fear tarnishing their reputations.
Well, I don’t think safe houses necessarily have to be immoral and I have no political reputation to uphold. So, it’s day two and the plan is still a possibility. One of the main problems will be addressing the concerns of the community, otherwise they’ll probably fight it to the death.
At work, we were out of shipping envelopes again when over 100 books were sitting around waiting to be shipped. Carl and Kelly end up running out of envelopes just about every week and nervously await the arrival of UPS’s next delivery. I was pretty much an envelope stuffing zombie all day.

Josh called around 10 o’clock and I met him at Marina’s house for Scary Movie Night. They often rent cheaply made horror movies for a laugh. This one was about a fraternity/sorority hazing that turned into a bloodbath when an evil book was stolen from an evil professor. There was a particularly interesting sex scene when the professors evil soul possessed a guy’s tongue. Also watching the movie was Emily and three other guys. Emily is Marina’s roommate.
We all went out to the Hangar after the movie, where I ended up seeing Beth and Andrea F.. Beth used to be friends with Jen W. and the three of us used to hang out when Jen was my roommate. She was at the bar with another friend of Jen’s, Erin, whom I hung out with when Jen was in town three weeks ago. The other person I saw tonight, Andrea F., went to school with me since kindergarten or first grade. We always used to wait about an hour after school for our bus with another guy in our class. She was debating whether or not to attend the 10-year class reunion in two weeks and I got her to agree to it on a handshake.
Dan was working as a bouncer/barback tonight so we hung out for a few minutes when he had bouncer duties in the beergarden. Jake showed up about 30 minutes before closing. Next, Josh, Marina and I all went to Don Taco for a snack before going on to Gabe’s house on Gay St., a 2-block walk from the Strip. I’d seen Jake at the bar and he’d invited me over for afterhours. He has been living in the area all summer after moving back from Cincinatti, but this was the first time I’d seen him in months. I didn’t know many of the other people at his house, but had a good time for the 30 minutes we spent there. I did meet one cute little high-energy blonde girl.
On the walk back to the strip I gave Josh and Marina a tour of the Glove Factory roof. The building has a swinging fire escape that allows easy access. We sat on the upper levels looking at the town for a few minutes before realizing the tar roof was leaving black stuff all over us.

Wednesday: August 2, 2006

I talked to Nora on the phone for a while this morning. Mornings seem to be the only time that the Internet connection is fast enough to use my Skype phone service. I Johnny Cash’s song Folsom Prison stuck in my head for no apparent reason, so I put my large collection of his songs on random play. Creepily, Folsom Prison was the first song the computer picked. So, it wasn’t stuck in my head because I’d recently heard it, but because I WAS GOING TO HEAR IT.
At work I was thinking about how all the customers fantasize that the cat remembers them. A girl I know came in and said it today, who used to live next to door when me and Carolyn were roommates at an apartment behind Kroger West. For everyone’s information: the cat is a whore. It loves anyone who will pet it and acts the exact same way whether it’s your first meeting or your thousandth.
In the late afternoon a woman selling books acted as if we’d stolen one by Billy Graham. She and her daughter had brought in several bags and sacks of books while Carl and Kelly were out to lunch. When I started unpacking them she became concerned that I would mix them up with other people’s books. She and her daughter then took a few books back because they’d decided not to sell them at the last second. They returned after running some errands and about half the books were placed back in their boxes because they were not needed in the store. They went through all these boxes and determined that a book by Billy Graham was neither their no in the piles we bought. She asked Carl about it a couple times, then sorted through the boxes again, then asked Carl about it again, then sorted through the boxes again, then asked Carl about it again. He was getting kind of annoyed by that time, especially considering the fact that Billy Graham’s books are worth little or nothing. I accused them of stealing it after the customer left and they accused me of stealing it when I went home at six.
I stopped at Save-A-Lot to buy beef stew making materials on the way home. Back at the apartment I got the stew going in the crock pot after having a sandwich and hot dog for dinner. Then I talked to the tiny people that live in my plant’s pot…..not really…..no tiny people live in my plant’s pot. They’re not human.

Thursday: August 3, 2006

My beef stew was done this morning after 12 hours of cooking, and it was good. Not the best ever, but I think beef bouillon cubes were maybe supposed to be in there. Nothing really amazing happened at work. Nic and Larry came to pick me up just before closing time, at the same time I was across the street at Wendy’s ordering food. I’ve never complained to any businesses before but now might be the time. This Wendy’s always has 10 people working but nobody really doing anything. Today, the 10 employees were slowly taking one person’s order while three people were in line. One person was having their order filled while the other two, including me, were just standing around watching everybody do nothing. Finally, the old man in from of me kindly asked, “Could I trouble somebody to get me a small senior Frosty?”. They finally got to me five minutes later.
Nic was already waiting in the bookstore’s parking lot and seemed mad when I got back, but I reminded him that it was actually several minutes before the time we’d earlier agreed to meet there. Larry was with him. The three of us went to Midland Hills to play nine holes of golf.
According to Nic, the price was supposed to be just $12 during the week, but it was actually regular price, $17. The air was really hot and humid so not too many people were playing, but a group of six was ahead of us and let us pass. Nic then remembered he’d left a five-iron at the last hole so I made two trips to go pick it up. The first time, it wasn’t where he’d left it, then I discovered that the people we’d passed had put in it their bag.
Thunder was building since the first hole and started crashing down around us by the sixth. The air horns sounded from the clubhouse but we never stopped playing. The downpour could be heard hitting the trees at least 60 seconds before it reached us. We played on in the rain and passed the group in front of us. I may have accidentally hit their ball. Nic did bad things on the course. I did a full 180 in the wet grass.
Larry dropped me back off at my bike at the bookstore, then I stopped at home briefly before going over to Dawn’s house. We sat in her backyard for a while till the bugs started biting, then went inside and watched “The Great Flood of 93’” on VHS. The tape’s packaging looked very amateur and I expected to see a lot of interesting interviews with the locals about the flood. It was all that and more.
I arrived back at home around midnight then had a message from Jared saying he was in town for the last weekend before moving up to the house he bought in Bloomington. So, I met him at the Cellar and was unexpectedly greeted by Sara, the little blonde girl I’d seen at Gabe’s house on Tuesday night. That night, we both thought each other looked familiar, but could place it. Turns out both our memories are really bad and that first meeting happened at Nikki’s birthday party just a few weeks ago.
I hung out and talked to Jared for an hour, then he and Holly left and I spent another hour talking to Josh and his girlfriend. I’ve never had a couple show me nude professional photos of themselves in sexual positions before tonight. The photos weren’t graphic, but were um’…..well positioned.

Friday: 8-4-06

Johanna was talking about her trip to Iceland this morning, which starts on Sunday and lasts 8 days. She going with her mom and staying in hostels. Chernobyl would have been a lot nicer. My beef stew developed a hard layer of white fat over the top now that it’s cooled in the fridge. Not sure if that’s really how it’s supposed to have turned out.
Leaving for work, I noticed two books on top of the dumpster that looked saleable, so I gave them to Kelly. I just love the idea of working for a business that based on things people often throw away, seriously, I really do.
The work day was extremely normal, but not bad, as usual. Carl gave me a $320 check for the last two weeks at going-home time. Passing by Save-a-Lot, I did a u’y and went in for some milk and cereal and went plum crazy and bought a plum, along with a few other impulse buys. Back at home I had a generic cheese Hot-Pocket, a cheese and hot dog sandwich and that damn plum.
I took some laundry to my old apartment building’s laundromat just before dark, then made two more trips; one to put it in the dryer and one to take it out. Mike S. came by just as I was headed to get it out of the dryer. He was carrying a bumblebee in a little Tuperware container, which had apparently stung him earlier in the day. The bee had been badly beaten and could only lie on its back and slightly twitch its body in the little container. Mike had definitely gotten even.
After walking with me to pick up the clothes, Mike came in and used my computer to check his Yahoo mail account. He was first trying to type his email address directly into Explorer’s address bar, then I told him to go to Yahoo.com then he tried to type the email address directly into Yahoo’s search bar. He wanted to know how to download attachments after I showed him where to log in, then he seemed to think that Bill Gates was going to give him $240 each time he forwarded an email to his friends. Maybe he was just messing with me, but maybe he’s really expecting his money from Bill.
I met Josh at Marina’s house around 11 o’clock. Marina was out of town and he was feeding her cat, which was begging for attention before violently attacking. Josh and I first walked to the Lost Cross house because Tanner had said there was a party there when I’d seen him on the Strip a few days ago. The house was dead so we walked on to Booby’s. They had a three dollar cover charge so we walked further, seeing Tanner sitting at his normal location in front of Old Town. He asked us if we wanted to get high then requested a beer from the liquor store, which he’s banned from. I bought the Old English he requested and the cashiers knew exactly what was going on. One thought it was funny and the other seemed pissed. Tanner had actually wanted a smaller beer than what I bought, so he was really excited.
Josh and I next went to Sidetracks and had one Coors Light there. The bartender didn’t offer Josh his 50 cents in change back. Our next stop was back at Booby’s. Pabst Blue Ribbons were on sale for 50 cents so we ordered a couple and talked to a couple of Josh’s friends that happened to be standing nearby. One of these friends seems to exactly model his personality off Fez from That 70’s Show.
Josh and I spent most of our Booby’s time sitting on top of a cement picnic table talking and watching the band. The band often played Pink Floyd songs done in a reggae style, with lighting effects and fog makers set up around them. I’ve never seen this lighting and fog equipment used at this bar before, so it was probably the property of the band. A desktop computer was set up to run everything and that’s a lot of work to set and take down all the time when your’re probably being paid little to nothing for the show.
A dancing girl talked to Josh and I about politics for a while, mentioning everyone from Hillary to Obama in the matter of a few minutes. People are often so opinionated but still seem to have no opinion on how to make anything any better.
Next, Josh and I walked into Labamba’s to use the bathroom and the little Mexican woman working said, “Customer’s only”, so I bought a burrito as big as my…head. When Josh was done I asked her if I could also use the restroom even though only one item was ordered. Leaving, I did tell her, “Just kidding, I know that’s got to be a problem at this location”, then I mumbled lots of racial slurs to Josh after we got out of hearing range.
We then went to Don Taco so Josh could order food there. He complimented a girl in line about her sandals so I complimented her friend on her toenails.

Saturday: 8-5-06

I was reading news this morning and came upon an article about an Indian court ordering Coca-Cola and Pepsi to reveal their secret formulas because government studies had shown unacceptable levels of insecticides in the drinks. Don’t know why there should be any insecticides at all, but more interestingly, the secret formula is kept in an Atlanta bank vault. Only two executives know it and they are not allowed to ever ride on the same plane together for fear of it crashing.
My afternoon was very laid back; eating some stew, putting pictures online and listening to Chinese till falling asleep. At 4:30, I rode up to Old Town to buy a six pack of Keystone light and some smokes, then bought three Styrofoam cups with lids and straws for 30 cents. Next, I met Jared and Tavis at the frolf course on campus by the lake. If you don’t know what frolf is, then I’ll just say it’s a game that a mixture of two other games. Tavis is in town for the weekend. Him and Jared were just finishing up their first round of frolf when I arrived. They gave me a disk and I played through with them, then we drank some beers in the Styrofoam cups while playing a game of frolf Horse. I lost and Tavis won, of course, because he plays frolf all the time in Cincinnati, as you may have seen from his frolf video.
We next played another round of frolf and Tavis won that too, with Jared and I tied behind him at one under par. We sat at a picnic table for a while then decided to bowl at the Student Center, but the building was closed so we all went our separate ways. Back at home, I listened to some more Chinese and ate, among other things not worth mentioning.
I left the apartment again at 9:30, headed for the hangar. Dan was working at the door and the place looked mostly empty, but Tavis and Katie were sitting at a picnic table out in the beer garden. We read each other trivia questions from a survival game for a while then Jared and another girl showed up. I can’t remember that girl’s name but she used to work at WIDB when me and Gretchen did. That was a long long time ago. I wouldn’t have even remembered had it not been for a night last fall when me, Gabe and Tavis had randomly stopped by her house and she recognized me. In case you’re confused, WIDB is the “radio” station that’s broadcast out of the student center. I say “radio” in quotations because they don’t broadcast over the air, only internet and through local cable.
So, we all sat in the beer garden for a while then Tanner shows up at the bars behind us. The beer garden is surrounded with bars so Tanners can’t get in. He talked crap about horses and dynamite for a while, but I honestly don’t think he’s as crazy as people think, as he’ll tell you in that video. But, he is pretty crazy and he will be totally crazy within the next ten years, I predict.
A few more people showed up later, like Tavis’s sister, Gabe, Holly, Nathan, Nathan’s girlfriend and Andrea F.. We all sat tightly together at a round picnic table, with the class of 2006 people often discussing the upcoming class reunion. That will be quite a time.

Sunday: 8-6-06

I guess I lost $30 on Friday evening. It had been in my pocket while doing laundry that night but wasn’t there later. I’d been hoping to find it laying around in the apartment somewhere but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. Somebody must have been really happy.
After getting up late and having raisin bran for breakfast/lunch, I took a lawn chair, some water and my MP3 player outside to listen to a Chinese lesson. The west side of the building has an enclosed grassy area that probably never sees any activity at all. The front of the building is built into the side of a hill, so sidewalk level is about 10 feet above this area. An embankment of railroad ties is built around three sides of it and bushes grow along the top. The end of the building blocks the other side, forming this perfect little grassy enclosure that nobody ever goes to.
So, I sat in the shade their listening to the MP3 player till the sun moved into my shade, then I moved to the other side of the grassy area where other shade had formed. Each Chinese lesson is only 30 minutes, but they usually take me an hour because I stop and go back often to hear things a second or third time.
Back inside I spent some time looking at a government website featuring all the evidence in the 9/11 Moussaoui trial. It’s the first time that evidence in a criminal federal case has been made available online. A couple things are listed as classified and can’t be downloaded, but there are hundreds of other pieces of evidence that can, including a bunch of really graphic videos and pictures. Although, must of the stuff is just things like copies of receipts from flight training schools, etc.. I went through everything and downloaded any pictures and videos recorded at the Trade Center in the minutes between when the planes hit and when the towers fell, plus a few things from the pentagon. I’ll soon post some links to the material, but as I warned, a lot of it’s really graphic.
I went to the Rec Center at 3:45 to play Racquetball with Nic and Carl. We hadn’t played in nearly two months. Nic has a summer membership and is allowed to bring in two guests each time he comes. Each guest is supposed to pay $4 but the employees haven’t collected that fee from us any of the three times we’ve been this summer.
In the middle of our first game, Carl grazed a ball against Nic’s head, sending his glasses flying to the floor. A lens popped out. He tried to play without them but had to give up before the game was completed. I went on to beat Carl, then he was able to fix the glasses so Nic could join in again for a second game. The Rec Center closes early at 5 o’clock, so there was no third game.
Standing around talking outside the building, I saw the public defender Darren that worked on both mine and Ericka’s DUI cases. We talked a few times last fall when both doing laundry at the same time at Laundry World. He’s some kind of Pacific islander, but I’m not sure which country.
Back at home, I fell asleep for a few minutes, then walked through the lobby for no apparent reason. One of the best looking Asian girls I’ve ever seen was going down the stairs as I was going up. She walked like a clutz in her high heels but that surely didn’t make her any less attractive. Walking on, I flipped through the channels on the big-screen TV before returning to my room. That’s about it for the day, all that happened in the evening was more Internet surfing, Internet bill paying and going to sleep early. I really need to get a TV for nights where I really don’t care to do much. I didn’t bring mine because somebody falsely told me that cable wasn’t included with the apartment.

Monday: 8-7-06

I rode my bike onto campus this morning to try and get some final details of this semester’s schedule worked out. Two of my classes still aren’t registered. One is full and the other needs a signature from the Chinese instructor. I was supposed to be on a wait list for the full one, but wasn’t put on for some reason; a mistake I guess. A person at that advisement office had told me on the phone an hour earlier that I couldn’t be put on the wait list today because all class scheduling computer systems are down for the next two days while students who haven’t paid their fees are dropped from their classes.
I was still hoping to get that signature from my Chinese teacher, but the secretary with the forms, Brooke, wasn’t in her office or anywhere else to be found. So, the only thing I ended up accomplishing was eating lunch at Mcdonalds.
Back at home, I listened to a Chinese lesson then went in to work at 2 o’clock. Monday’s are normally days off, but Carl and Kelly are really busy right now while trying to get their daughter sent away to school in Missouri. On the way, I stopped at the bank to deposit a check, but the lines were too long so I did it at the ATM outside instead. I briefly saw the manager Jeff inside, who worked at the Schnuck’s branch for a couple years.
There were two hours worth of books to be wrapped at work, including one little paperback about neurological studies that sold for $145, which was a mystery to everyone. Kelly also had me help her put gummy worms in 100 little Zip-Lock backs and stable Bookworm bookmarks to them. These will be given away at a freshman orientation day on campus, where local businesses can give away small gifts to promote themselves. They call the gummy worms “book worms”.
Nic picked me up at 5:30 and we went to play frolf at the course by Campus Lake. He had rented two disks from the Rec Center and one quickly ended up stuck on the roof of the domed-shaped pavilion. He put another one into the edge of the lake and had to step thru some pretty thick mud to get it back. All the jogging girls were very distracting.
Next, we decided to check out the frolf course by the Rec Center, which has been partially moved since the new health center was added to the building. For our first throw, we launched our disks from the fourth floor fire escape. We tried to be serious about our second attempt, but my disk ended up flying into a softball field and out of sight. The field was closed and locked up but we couldn’t loose the second rented disk. We searched the softball field high and low but the disk seemed to have vanished. In a final attempt, I climbed onto the roof of the grandstand and found it laying in a corner. Like golf, frolf rules are that you have to throw the disk where it sits or take a penalty shot, so I threw it from the rooftop. The second attempt wasn’t much better than the first.
Nic wanted to keep playing on but I convinced him to drop me back off at the bookstore where my bike was parked. I then ate some food at Wendy’s and saw Mark B. there with his caseworker. He meets with a caseworker each week because he has a brain injury. She appeared to be younger than me and was still in college, and was very friendly, as I guess anybody with that job would have to be. Mark’s is an easygoing guy but I’m sure a lot of the people she deals with aren’t. Her and Mark sat with me at my table till I had to leave and meet Nic at Bob’s house for a game of poker.
I’ve played poker at Bob’s house two times before over the past two months. Tonight was just me, Bob and Cortez playing. I worked at Schnucks with Cortez for years and was in a boxing match with him once, which was stupid considering he’s built like a football player and is about six foot five. Luckily he didn’t kill me that night because he could have with one good hit.
Cortez was the first to go out in the poker game, then Bob followed about 30 mintues later. I took Nic’s chip stack down to almost nothing then he made a comeback by going all-in and winning that hand. In the end, I had him back down to about $5 then Bob and his friends needed to leave, so me and Nic had to split the pot at $5 each. I had about $15 worth of chips but Nic’s so poor that I can’t complain.
Leaving the house, I decided to pee on the outside of it and heard an odd buzzing sound growing louder above my head while standing there. Looking up, I could see about 2000 angry yellow bees looking back down at me, just six inches from my face. I didn’t waste a second getting away and it’s just amazing that there wasn’t a major attack. They seemed well aware of my close proximity, based on the increase in their buzz level.
We showed Bob the bees but he wasn’t impressed, saying there had been more earlier in the year. He attributed my not getting stung to good karma for splitting the pot with Nic when I should have gotten more than half.
Next, the plan was to ride my bike to the Marshall Reed Apartments to meet Nic and Cortez there for another poker game. When I arrived, I realized that the bees had scared the apartment number out of my brain, which Nic had told me right before the incident. I walked up and down the hallways of the building but couldn’t really distinguish any noises as a poker game. I stood by Nic’s car outside for a few minutes but creepy individuals kept staring at me so I left.

Tuesday: 8-8-06

I worked at 9:45 today because Kelly had errands to run and couldn’t be there to help out. Carl arrived at the same time as me. I was left to work by myself for an hour at noon, and the store quickly filled up with customers wanting all kinds of things. One guy asked for “education” books. I wasn’t really sure what he meant, so I asked exactly what kind of book he was looking for and he told me “Demonology, but I’m not a Satanist or anything. I just want to become a certified demon hunter”. He simply wanted to become a demon hunter, so I took him to the “new age” section, where he told me in apparent seriousness, “I’m already licensed to hunt witches but I want to get into demons too”. The first thing I thought to myself was, “What will this guy do to a person if he thinks they’re a witch?”. He looked to be about 30 years old and was a bit heavyset with a creepy look on his face, but was very friendly. I asked him how he became licensed at such a thing and he described the process of filling out some paperwork and sending it somewhere. Hmmmmmm.
Kelly was in the store for the second half of the day. The homeless-looking black guy came in to sell us books today wearing a backpack but no shirt. I went to Wendy’s for lunch and the cashier told me she was in “tweak mode”. I left at five o’clock because the database system was down and there was nothing else for me to do. Stopping at Save-a-Lot on the way home, a woman in line was unsuccessful at swiping her LINK card and told the cashier, “I know my PIN number, you just don’t know what you doin’” The girl working had waited on me dozens of times and surely knew exactly what she was doin’. When it came my turn to be waited on, I said, “Well, you obviously don’t know what you’re doing, so don’t mess my card up too”. She laughed and asked where I worked when I went on to say I was glad that woman doesn’t shop where I work. She’d never heard of Casper or the Bookworm. Casper is famous. He stared at me while I ate my Wendy’s today, chewing into thin air the whole time. It was almost as if he was mocking me.
On the way back to my apartment, I noticed a decent-looking TV in a pile of stuff being thrown out a block away, which I need for my apartment. Walking back after putting away the groceries, all the stuff was exactly where it had been except for the TV, which had somehow vanished. The man in the van had probably taken it, who was pulled up the first time I passed the pile. I’d heard him ask one of the people throwing the stuff out if it was trash, and they yelled back at him, “Take anything you want, JUST DON’T SCATTER IT EVERYWHER!”. They really sounded angry and I just thought it was a dumb thing to say”. Had they said it to me, I might have gone back later to scatter it.
I went over to Dawns house at six o’clock and we had a dinner of beer and pizza, then went to see the movie new Pirates of the Carribean movie at the theatre in the mall. That wouldn’t have been my first choice of movies to go see, but we didn’t really have a plan and that was what was showing at the time we arrived. The special effects and action scenes were great but it lacked a real ending.
I arrived back at my apartment just after 11 o’clock, then Nic and his sister came to pick me up 30 minutes later. We made a stop at Schnuck’s before going out to pick up his sister’s friend at the luxury subdivision on Boskeydell Road. The friend was 18 years old and getting ready to move away to college in a few days, but was apparently grounded and had to sneak out. That seemed weird till I learned that both his parents were Taiwanese immigrants. He was grounded for running head-first into a tree, from what I understood.

Wednesday: 8-9-06

I had an email from Channel 3’s news director this morning, thanking me for a story lead I had emailed the station last night about Carbondale’s cyber-terrorist hunter. I’d sent the email because there surprisingly appeared to be no local coverage about the man. The news director had no prior knowledge of him and said was putting people on the story asap. Too bad I don’t have a TV to watch the news on.
This wasn’t the first time I sent a story idea to a local news outlet. I’ve done it a few times over the past few years when noticing situations similar to this one. I once had an anonymous picture printed……
At work, Carl and Kelly were still battling with their new database system. There are two computers in the store and both were running at a crawl due to the increased memory needs of the new software. Neither Carl nor Kelly know much about computers and always have them expensively repaired by professionals, so I had offered yesterday to install the needed memory myself. Carl was going to order it from Dell today, but the prices were actually cheaper at Best Buy. It seems that Dell might be loosing their competitive edge.
One thing Dell does have going for it is that its computer cases just snap open without even needing a screwdriver, so both computers were back up and running within about 20 minutes. The server got a new gigabyte and the workstation got 512M’s, resulting in them actually working for the first time this week. The store’s tens of thousands of books are stored in an SQL database on the server that constantly updates itself as books are placed and sold online, which is what I think requires so much memory.
Today’s customer’s weren’t nearly as weird as yesterday’s, with the best one being a tall skinny drunk man in a stained red tank top that wanted to sell an unopened box of civil war cards. The box was addressed to someone and could have very well been stolen from a mailbox.
I was unusually tired in the afternoon, so I came home and promptly went to sleep for two hours. The large window in my room usually heats it up too much in the late afternoon, so I often keep my door open so the hallway’s air conditioning can enter. The building is nearly empty right now and I’m at the end of a hallway, so it’s very convenient to leave the door open. The hallway lights were replaced yesterday, tricking me into believing I’d been sleeping less than I had. The new lights made it appear that sunlight was still coming through the hallway windows when it wasn’t. At 8:30 I finally realized it was 8:30.
Waking up, I microwaved a pot pie and ate it with a jumbo hot dog. I went out into the courtyard to listen to a Chinese lesson after that, but my iPod was messed up again so I went back inside to fix it. Next, I read some Chinese text from my textbook. This semester’s class will use the same text as last semester’s. I have mostly just focused on listening skills this summer, but need to refresh my memory on the reading before classes start again in less than two weeks. My main weakness last year was listening.

The last thing I did was play some poker with my real-money account online. I had only used the account twice since setting it up at the beginning of the summer. It began with $20 then and there was $24 when I started playing tonight. I’d been very patient with the money before now, but figured to go for all or nothing tonight since there was little chance I’d be playing at all after school starts in a few days. All or nothing only meant going to the 50 cent minimum bet table. I slowly lost $10 then made $30 in a single hand. I went all-in with that $30 against one other player and lost it all on the last card flopped; an ace. Winning that hand would have meant $60 in my account and the plan was to move up to $1 minimum bet tables if I ever hit $100, but maybe next time. Playing against people on the Internet just isn’t as fun as in real life or I would have played the smaller money tables a lot more often. I observed big money tables for a while, where each pot was from $100-500, more or less. Some players at those tables had nearly $10,000 in chips and I was wondering if that was winnings or just the money they started with. The game would have suddenly become a lot more fun had I made even a fraction of that.

Thursday: 8-10-06 bigdog62901

Waffles and a bologna and cheese sandwich sustained me throughout the first part of the day. Customers were somewhat normal at work. I met Rufus at PK’s around 7 o’clock, He wasn’t yet there when I first arrived. A homeless man he knew talked to us most of the time, saying his grandpa was a Chinese emperor. I don’t make this stuff up and I don’t think the homeless man was making it up either. Not that I believe him, of course, but he did believe himself. Rufus and I walked to Old Town at 8:30, then walked back and to PK’s passed a bottle of wine back and fourth at a dumpster. Jennifer came to pick him up at 9 o’clock, then I bought a six pack and went back to my place to get a backpack. Passing through the hallways, a couple of Indian-looking guys were moving in a bunch of suitcases to a nearby apartment. I’m assuming that this building’s about to get really crowded in the next week.
I next rode my bike to Rufus’s house, where him and Jennifer were sitting out front in the yard. Rufus and I walked two trailers down to Oliver Unal’s house, a man that used to substitute teach at our high school. Oliver lives with a bunch of plants and wind chimes and used to drive a Volkswagon bug for years. He came over to Rufus’s house and stayed for about an hour.
A couple more people came in and out of the trailer over the next couple hours, including one who helped Rufus saw up a steel 55 gallon drum barbeque barrel. There was also a guy there that looked nearly 7 feet tall.

Friday: 8-11-06

I consumed four beautiful waffles this morning and water tasted like trash. I recreationally took a Lunesta sample last night that a friend had given me. Lunesta’s commercial with the peacefully flapping luna moth flying into a person’s bedroom is just so relaxing. I never really noticed myself sleeping any more soundly than usual and didn’t feel at all tireder than normal this morning. Microsoft Word says that tireder ain’t a word. My friend said that Lunesta makes all liquid taste like turds the next day and he was right. I bought an experimental Dr. Pepper on the way to work to test the theory further; it also tasted like turds. What a strange side effect.
Speaking of turds, a customer left a wrist-sized trophy in the restroom toilet. It was truly amazing to think it could actually pass through a real living human. After work, I ate a family-sized chicken/rice Banquet entrée. Milk still tasted like turds. Next, I started a load of laundry across the street and then Dawn came over. We had a beer in the courtyard till the laundry was done, then went to Pinch Penny to meet Mike, Carolyn, Amy, Tim and BJ. Dawn and I were the first to arrive and the bar was trying to charge a four dollar cover, so I called everyone and had them meet across the parking lot at Callahan’s. I hate cover charges and was glad our $50+ dollars of business went elsewhere.
At 10 o’clock, we all went to the mall theatre to watch the movie Talledega Nights. If you like slapstick comedy, then it’s a good one. Afterwards, Dawn and I stopped by ABC Liquor, which has completely been remodeled recently. Dawn bought some Mello Yello like thing and I bought a 12-pack of Keystone. I didn’t drink any of the beer but just stuck it in the fridge for future guests. My guests only get the best.
I showed Dawn a couple videos on my computer, then we sat outside in the courtyard. There were three Indian guys there at a picnic table smoking a hooka. They got real quiet when we came out. Back inside later, I showed Dawn her Chinese name and gave her a crash course on using a Chinese dictionary to look up the meaning of the characters. She’ll be moving to Taiwan in about a month, then will stay there for a year while working on an environmental engineering graduate program. Like my sister, she’s just book-smart.

Saturday: 8-12-06

I don’t usually work on Saturday’s, but I did today, from 11:30 till 4. The weirdest customer ever came in, and that’s saying a lot considering the daily overall weirdness of this place. He was a man that had called yesterday about selling 70 leather-bound books. He brought about 25 of them in today, staggering in the door with a cane and falling across the counter. He was skinny and maybe 60 years old, seeming to be much frailer than a person should be at that age. His hair was white and scraggly and his well-worn clothes were tattered. He sat/collapsed onto the floor while Carl took a look at his books. Carl then offered him a chair and he violently collapsed into that, seating himself just a couple feet from an innocent customer sitting in another nearby chair facing him. A terrible terrible smell began to fill the room as Carl opened one of the book bags. The book at the bottom of the bag was covered in some of the fowlest goo imaginable. Carl was gagging as he wiped it off. The smell remained after the goo was removed, so we refused to buy it.
A few minutes later, a woman came in talking over and over about her car accident and asking for books about child molestation. She claimed that they were for someone she knew, saying something like, “She needs these…..oh that poor dear(looking sad)”.
I stopped at Wendy’s and Save-a-Lot on the way home, then took a nap for 30 minutes. I got back up and took a shower, then fell asleep a few more minutes till Mike called around 7:30. He picked me up shortly afterwards and we drove to his mom and Lloyd’s house, narrowly missing a big buck deer on Old 13. John, Amy, Dylan and Carolyn were also there. Carolyn brought me out a huge piece of Mississippi mud pie that Mike’s mom had made, which filled me almost to the point of extinction because of the extreme sweetness. As I told them, it would leave a diabetic with just minutes to live.
Next, I rode with Mike and Carolyn to Tim and BJ’s house. John also met us there. Tim and BJ were running a few minutes late so we sat outside and waited a few minutes for them to get home. The guys played poker in the basement while the girls played with their stupid little crafts upstairs in the room BJ has designed as her ‘scrapbooking room’, which she painted light blue and light green. Jake the dog jumped on my back to hump me when I bent down to take a picture of Tim taking a picture of me.
Poker came down to just me and John. I went all in on three threes when he had three sixes so he’ll have to die. Mike and Carolyn brought me home at 2:30.

Sunday: 8-13-06

I got up late and spent the late morning and early afternoon close to home. I backed up several gigabytes of pictures and music from my computer and bought some more blank CD’s and DVD’s online. I also wanted to buy a more advanced Chinese dictionary than the one I have, but there seems to be a shortage of Chinese-English/English-Chinese dictionaries in print. There are lots that convert words one direction or the other, but not a lot that do it in both directions.
I’ve found nearly $50 in my apartment over the last 24 hours, in the strangest of places. Yesterday, I found last week’s missing 30 dollars in the bottom of my box of checks, then found a totally unexpected $20 bill when looking for something in my hiking backpack today.
I sat in the courtyard under the pedestrian bridge listening to a Chinese lesson at two o’clock, then came in and edited a few minutes of video that I shot last night at Tim and BJ’s house. Nic called at 4 o’clock then came to pick me up to play a game of racquetball at the Rec Center. Waiting for him outside, I saw a guitar stand and cable still sitting on the lawn that had been there all day, so I took it back into my apartment.
The racquetball game was our longest ever, about 40 minutes, and I ended up winning by just a couple points. Nic said he was too tired for a second game and didn’t feel like being “squashed”, but still had the energy to run several laps around the track.
After that, we decided to check out a couple basketballs because the basketball courts were almost completely empty. Usually the courts are crowded and a couple unskilled white guys like ourselves would stick out like sore thumbs, so this was a rare chance to privately practice our terribleness at the game. Our first dozen shots barely hit the rim, then we played a game of 21 only to 7 vs. 6. Nic won. After that, Nic bet me a dollar that I couldn’t hit a half-court shot in 20 attempts, and I couldn’t. I then agreed to double-or-nothing at his urging and he made it on try #6.
This was my first visit to the Rec Center all summer that I have actually been charged as a guest to get in. They charge $6 for a guest card and you get $2 of that back when you turn it in. Turning it in, Josh T. and his dad, Craig, happed to be at the desk getting their own pass. This was the first time I’d ever met Craig and he reminds me of a friend of my family’s, Roger E.. He even kind of looks like Roger E. Josh is getting ready to leave later tonight for a 4-day trip to Vegas, where he hopes to make it with a girl he knows there.
I microwaved a family pack of Banquet Salisbury steaks for dinner and ate four out of six of them. Nic came over with Nelson the dog at 8 o’clock then we went to his house and walked to PK’s from there. After a beer at PK’s we briefly stopped by my apartment again before going on to Gatsby’s to play a couple games of terrible pool. There was a guy sitting in the corner there wearing all black with combat boots, who Nic referred to as the Angel of Death. The Angel of Death was sitting right by the bathroom and the prospect of him walking in behind me seemed scary.
Leaving Gatsby’s, Nic got a sandwich from Jimmy John’s and I got a water, then we walked along the train tracks the whole way back to his house. A long freight train sped by us at speeds that seemed much faster than what’s allowed. There is a Uhaul business next to the tracks near where Nic lives and there were so many Uhauls there that they even had them lined up next to the train tracks. This town is gaining about 10,000 people this week, many of whom used UHauls. Huge piles of trash can be seen throughout the city as landlords and tenants clear out their stuff in preparation for all the new people. One pile of trash near my apartment was about 13 feet tall as of 6PM.
Back at Nic’s house, we picked up Nelson and walked out through the huge cemetery that’s just a few blocks away. The moon was out and casting long shadows on the thousands of headstones, many of which are quite old and elaborate. At the rear of the cemetery we visited Stephen Wikel’s grave, which is a large shrine that I’d first seen last summer when walking through this cemetery. Its center-piece is a boulder with a plaque saying that Stephen touched the world “more than he ever knew”. He was only 19 when he died so it sounds like he might be some rich kid that killed himself. The shrine takes up several hundred square feet and features a circular walkway around the boulder with paths leading out from it in four directions. A tree is planted at each corner.
Back at Nic’s house, he got out a skateboard and fell down in the street, then Sara came home with her friend that had just died her hair black. Nic then realized he lost his wallet so I was looking around for it in the street and found an old dead bird to throw at him.
We realized that Stephen Wikel probably had the wallet, so we walked all the way back to the cemetery. Sure enough, the walled was right at the base of Wikel’s boulder, as if he had pulled it out of Nic’s pocket so we would have to come back and visit him. Leaving the cemetery, we walked through the oldest section, which has an amazing assortment of gigantic old headstones, some of which are about 15 feet tall and must weigh tons.
Police cars went speeding by us as we got back on the street, all headed to a house just a few feet away. There were 6 police cars there and one woman was talking to the cops while another carried out bags of clothes and other possessions from the house.
Back at Nic’s house, Sara came back home from the bars then the three of us went out to find something to eat. Our first choice was Wendy’s, but the car in front of us in the drive thru was the last to be served. A voice simply told us, “were closed”.
So, we drove on to Steak-N-Shake and went in to sit down. Gay people were everywhere and one guy was even wearing a purple feathery thing on his head. It was as if I’d stepped back into a restaurant somewhere in Key West after bar-closing time. It was just that gay.
Our cute waitress took our order then quizzically looked at me and asked, “What’s your name?”. For a moment I thought I might be in some kind of trouble, then she went on to remind me that she used to know my brother and his friends. Her name’s Kristen and she hasn’t had much contact with my brother and his friends since getting married, having two kids and getting divorced. Must be hard raising a four and six year old while working late-nights at Steak-N-Shake.
Sara took the pickles from all of our plates and threw them at cars in the parking lot.

Monday: 8-14-06

I was hoping to finally talk to my advisor at school today and correct some major problems with my schedule, but she’s still not answering the phone at her office. School starts next Monday so hopefully she turns up soon. It appears that two of the classes I need are scheduled at the same time, and neither of them is offered next semester, so that could be a big problem that would end up costing thousands of extra dollars if I had to come back from China next fall and attend another semester. If that happened and I was offered a job after the internship, then I probably would never end up finishing that last semester.
I left the apartment twice in the early afternoon; the first time take some pictures of the place and the second to go meet Randy and Lisa a couple blocks away. Going out to get my bike, a jumbo-sized raccoon slithered out from some bushes a couple feet from me. It was then cornered under some other bushes and I took several pictures as it peered out at me and lazily tried to escape. It was incredibly hot and humid today, so seeing a raccoon out was kind of unexpected.
Randy and Lisa were at the Saluki Hall building giving one of the managers an estimate for installing some new doors and windows. Randy has been running a handyman business for the past couple years. Nobody was in the lobby of the building when I arrived and the entryway was locked, so I sat and waited for about 10 minutes till they appeared there.
Next, the three of us went to Buffalo Wild Wings and played electronic Texas Hold Em’ while having a couple drinks. I ended up with about $10,000 play dollars in the end and kept going all-in on every hand just before we had to leave. Some of the players were regulars that had accounts with tens of thousands of play dollars, so they were probably really getting pissed.
Johanna just got back from her Iceland trip this evening and we talked for a while then. She said the temperature was in the 40’s some days but the people were all good-looking. After talking to her, I went outside for a few minutes to watch a thunderstorm come in with web-liked lighting arcing all over the city.

Tuesday:

I got up at 8:30 this morning because I have to run the bookstore by myself for the next two days. The store opens at 10 o’clock and there was a lady already staring in the door at 9:50 so I went ahead and let her in early. Several customers were in the store within two minutes of my unlocking the door. I’ve heard that this is normal behavior for Tuesday mornings after the store has been closed for two days. On top of all the attention from people, Casper the cat was starved for attention after being by himself for so long, and he kept sitting on the computer keyboard and trying to lick my hands when I would type or write anything. Kelly had left me a list of things to do, one of which was “give Casper some attention”.
It’s hard to get away from the counter at all when only one person is working in the store. Nic luckily brought me some Wendy’s food for lunch. I locked up the store when it closed at six o’clock, then spent 45 minutes going through several bags of books a person had brought in and left to sell for credit earlier.
After work, I came home for an hour before going to play a poker game at a house behind Turley Park. The game was at Nic’s friend’s house, whom I’d never met before, and Nic wasn’t there yet. The guy that lived in the house was Brian and his roommate and her friend were also there. Coincidentally, I had just seen his roommate’s friend, Sheila, at Westroads just 10 minutes before arriving at the house. She’s a tall pretty children’s horseback riding trainer with a boyfriend.
Nic and Larry showed up at the house a few minutes later, then Sara and her friend Bonnie came. I’ve met Bonnie several times before but could never remember her name before now. The house was quickly becoming full and another guy and girl also arrived.
There were about 10 people at the poker table when the game started. The ratio of guy to girls was 50/50, which is very rare. Those hags ended up taking all my chips just a few minutes into the game. A couple more people came and observed.
I then left for a few minutes and got a couple double cheeseburgers from Mcdonalds. An old highschool classmate was there talking to some employees. His name is Jeremy Frickie(sp) and he graduated the year after me. His friend took a picture of us and he kind of reminds me of Mike E. in the picture. Weird. I ate my 2 cheeseburger at a picnic table in Turley Park.
Back at the poker party house, I just hung out for another 30 minutes then rode my bike home.

Wednesday: 8-16-06

I had to run the bookstore all by myself again all day. Things went smooth and nobody brought in massive amounts of books to sell. For lunch, I had two Jimmy John’s subs delivered, which were not even close to “so fast you’ll freak”. It took about an hour to get them. Casper the cat through up all over the floor. A lady came in and told me that her cats and chickens sleep on her horses’ backs.
Two really old senile ladies came in at different times in the late afternoon. One couldn’t tell the difference between a 10 and 20 dollar bill even when staring closely at it, and the other couldn’t verbally understand the concept of $1.32. This second lady only owed $1.32 but kept thinking it was $32. She was buying two dirty old paperbacks. I tried explaining it was only $1.32 in several ways but she just complained about the high prices while pulling the $32 out of her purse. Finally, I typed 1.32 into a calculator with a jumbo sized display and showed it to her, then she understood. Both these old ladies drove away in cars by themselves.
I stopped at Save-a-Lot and 710 Bookstore on the way home. At 710, I wrote down the ISBN numbers of the books I need for this semester. I looked the numbers up on Amazon at home and found that $12 could be saved by ordering two of the five books online. Chinese textbooks are vastly cheaper than other subjects, with my most expensive one only being $25. Most of these books are for a Chinese culture class and cover topics like Chinese street life, which sounds a lot more interesting than all those business classes I’ve had to take over the past couple years.
I ended up falling asleep about 8 o’clock and couldn’t sleep on past 12:30. That’s a really bad trap to fall into on tired evenings when you have nothing else better to do. It’s just incredibly hard to go back to sleep again. So, I got up and went to the soda machine to buy a Coke for a dollar, which came out uncarbonated and leaking through a small hole in the bottle. I then went back for a second Coke and made a drink with a bit of leftover whiskey in a bottle. I got tired again after having a cigarette in the courtyard and spending some time surfing the Internet.

Thursday: 8-17-06

I went to Schnuck’s this morning to buy a money order because I don’t want to have to pay for another book of checks. There is less and less of a need for checks everyday and I just can’t see spending $20 for more.
I saw Mary B. at the entrance of Schnuck’s, whom I used to work there in the meat department with for several years starting when the store opened in 1997. We talked for about 20 minutes. Getting my money order, Cindy and what’s her name waited on me. I want to know why only cash is accepted for money orders. Does anybody know? Any why can’t I remember the name of what’s her name?
Leaving Schnucks, I ate some food at Burger King before returning home. My student loan check was in the mailbox, so I stopped at the bank on the way to work. Carl and Kelly were back in town today so everything was back to normal at the bookstore. I worked at the counter most of the day while they did other things. A young meth-addicted-looking guy came in looking for cash for a small paperback book, which we don’t give cash for. When I told him that, he paced back and fourth in front of the counter saying, “I don’t know what to do”, several times with a nervous grin on his face. It was really creepy actually.
I left work a few minutes early and ate some food at Wendy’s before going on to get my hair cut from Nathan at The Space. Business was slow and he was out front having a smoke when I arrived. We talked a lot about this weekend’s class reunion while he cut my hair. It’s going to be a blast, I think.
Back at my apartment, I listened to a Chinese lesson then Dawn picked me up and we went to Callahan’s to have a drink and play some darts and pool. I think she won at darts, but it was an electronic game that said I won. Callahan’s has a 50 gallon drum of peanuts in the corner, which I never realized before tonight.
Next, Dawn and I were going to bowl at the student center, but it was closed. So, we sat in the courtyard of my apartment for a while. I introduced her to ant-lions there, which she’d never seen before. I fed a small ant to one that lived under the pedestrian bridge. After that, I showed her the video that my brother and I filmed of Katrina damage last summer.

Friday: 8-18-06

I was in the bathroom this morning and thought of a couple new lines of products. One is based on the previous idea of the Homo Burger fast food chain, which me and Lee came up with a few weeks ago, and the other is about aliens. The Homo and Alien brand names could be on everything from soap to shoes to cheeseburgers. Imagine putting some Alien Gel in your hair or wearing Homo Jeans. The Alien motto could be “Made by Aliens for Aliens. You know who you are”, and a commercial for Alien Gel could go something like, “Having trouble with your host body’s hair, try Alien Gel!”. Maybe the two brands could be mixed to form a HomoAlien line of products…..hmmmmm.

On the way to work today, it was amazing to see the number of UHauls and trailers clogging up all the city’s side streets as students moved into their new homes. One block of one street next to my apartment had about a dozen vehicles pulled up on the curbs that were heavily loaded down with people’s possessions. Nobody was moving in any 7-foot tall suits of armor. All the extra activity was creating traffic jams in places that I never thought traffic jams were possible.

At work, I spent about two hours putting gummy worms into little bags and stapling Bookworm bookmarks to them. Last time I did this, Kelly wanted 10 gummies per bag, but she only wanted 8 today. I was nearly diabetic by the time I finished this job. Carl and Kelly will give the bags away tonight at a freshmen orientation event at the arena tonight, where lots of local businesses are invited to have such giveaways.

I left work 45 minutes early then came home and started a load of laundry. Dozens of people were still moving into their new homes as far down every street that I could see. Tavis and Katie came to pick me up in their family sedan sometime around 8 o’clock. They’d just arrived in town from Cincinnati. We went Tavis’s parent’s house in Murphysboro and hung out with them in the backyard for about an hour. I never realized his dad was a full time Carbondale firefighter before talking to him tonight.
Next, we took one of his parent’s cars to meet some people at WJ P.’s house. We didn’t take the family sedan because it has a manual transmission and Katie doesn’t know how to drive that. We stopped at SI Liquors and picked up a few drinks on the way to WJ’s. There were about 10 people at the house when we arrived and several more came soon after us. Mostly all of these people were from Murphysboro, so lots of faces looked familiar but it had been so long that I couldn’t remember many names. The most familiar were Andrea F., Christian A., Nate W. and his girlfriend. Christian’s wife told me all about how thier home was reduced to just a concrete slab by Katrina last summer. There was a picture on the refrigerator of her and Christian sitting in lawn chairs on their slab. Their whole neighborhood had gotten together for a slab party after the storm.
WJ’s dog chased it tails for hours, which is really funny looking considering it’s a big loud pitbull. He tries to keep of from chasing the tail, but with little luck.
Katie left after about an hour, then came back to pick up Tavis and I sometime later. We went through the Hardees drive thru on the way home and bought some kind of big beautiful burger meals. Thanks for the burger guys.

Saturday: 8-19-06

I slept on the Tavis’s parent’s couch last night and him and Katie slept on an air mattress on the floor. We lounged around for a while in the morning watching some TV, including parts of the movie Tin Cup and a show about the ever-so-talented Christina Agulera or however you spell her name.
For lunch, the three of us went to Buffalo Wild Wings in Carbondale. We played a Golden Tee Live machine the whole time, even while eating. Golden Tee Live is like regular Golden Tee except for the fact that it has better graphics and is wired to the Internet. Its records identity by a credit card swipe, then all Golden Tee Live machines all over the world will know who you are when the same card is swiped at them. The point of that is to keep a record of your points and redeem points for things like new clothes for your player. Tavis’s player sports some disco-looking clothes and a cowboy hat. I really wanted to beat him badly at his own game, but both he and Katie ended up beating me. Some little boy kept inching closer and closer to us and even took the controls from Katie once. He didn’t want a cigarette or a beer, but said he might smoke someday when he’s older.
Next, Tavis and I dropped Katie back off at his parent’s house and went back to Carbondale to play a couple rounds of frolf at the course by Campus Lake. I really wanted to beat him at this, especially after the brutal Golden Tee whooping. But, he just always seems to choose games he knows he’ll win at. He beat me both rounds, but did end up loosing one of his disks in the lake. We played a skins-style game, where the winner of each hole gets a “skin”. The person with the most skins at the end of the round wins. In the event of a tied hole, the skin carries over to the next hole. We tied on the 8th and 9th holes of the last round and had a throw-off to decide who got the final two skins. I at least won that. Afterwards, we sat on the sundial-looking sculpture by the engineering building and had a smoke before heading back to Murphysboro.
At the house, Katie and Tavis’s dad were out at the pool working on a crossword puzzle. I came out in swimming trunks a little later to join them and so did his mom. I jumped in the pool with his dad and he told me that anybody who jumps in his pool is alright in his book. I realized my pocket was full of cash after jumping in, which really wasn’t a disappointment considering the money had been forgotten in the pocket for at least a week. It was just like getting some free wet money.
I took a shower and put on my suit at 5 o’clock, then Tavis and I went to the Old Depot to meet some others for a couple pre-reunion drinks. Tavis also wore a suit. Nate W. came to meet us after a few minutes, then Christian, his girlfriend, Ben Y. and his girlfriend also joined us.
An hour later, Tavis and I returned to the house to pick up Katie, then we all headed to the reunion. It was held at the Mills warehouse next to 17th Street B&G. The warehouse has a room with a bar, dance floor, dining area and kitchen that is rented out for this type of thing. At the door, Gretchen ?. and a couple other girls were giving out nametags. My group was about 45 minutes late so most of the other guests were already there, about 100 of them. Most had already eaten and were either sitting at tables talking or standing by the bar partying like it was 1996. After a few minutes of bar talk, I snuck to a table by myself with a plate of food.
There were so many people that I hadn’t seen in so long that I’ll let the pictures and video tell most of the story. One of the most changed people was Levi M., who had gone from a long-haired partier to a short-haired career military man. He was even wearing his Coast Guard uniform. Tavis and I were the only ones in suits, making us look much more successful than we actually are, as planned.
After a couple hours, the DJ’s gave me a microphone so I could invite everyone to the front for a group picture. At first, nobody looked like they were going to make a move for the picture, but then a couple walked up and nearly everybody followed. There were so many that I couldn’t ever really get them all in the picture no matter how hard I tried.
Walking around with my camcorder later, Cara D. ran up and pulled me in the women’s restroom, where a crowd of people was gathered around a toilet stall. In the toilet were the longest thickest turds I’d probably ever seen. Made by a female! It was really good to see that nobody had really changed that much and we could still all laugh at turds together.
I put a piece of paper in my front suit pocket with the words “Hit List” sticking out the top. There was a book of biographies distributed at the party, which had been put together by 200-word submissions from everyone. I’d heard that people were asking each other if mine was actually true, which I had put a couple hours into getting just perfect. The picture I chose was me standing in my family’s kitchen several months ago wearing a visor and apron while holding cards and a fake handgun.
Someone else got on the microphone later in the evening, maybe John H. but I can’t remember for sure. He invited all the women to one side of the room and all the men to the other, then had the women pick dancing partners. I was shared between Naureen R. and her friend Jamie. I’d met Jamie about 10 years ago at Eddie R.’s trailer in Carbondale. We had an interesting dance session. After that, Katie had me request Thriller from the DJ’s then we had another dance session.
The party ended at midnight and me and Tavis were sucking helium from all the balloons after the others left. Katie frowned but held the camcorder and endured it. Gretchen ?. appeared to have been left by herself to clean up the mess. Outside, severe storms were quickly moving into the area, lighting up the sky with nearly constant lightning. Back at the house, Tavis and I sat outside watching them come in. This was one of the most violent storms I’ve seen in a long time and we seriously considered a run for the basement. Huge gusts of wind could be heard in the distance pushing down trees and smashing metal. Those strongest gusts didn’t hit near the house but what did hit was still strong enough to flip over chairs and put the deck umbrella in the pool. There are a couple 100-year-old-looking trees near the backyard that were a bit scary to sit under. Their huge trunks were swaying more than I thought possible and we just stared up into the tops of them as the lightning strikes illuminated their violently blown branches. We probably had more courage than we should have, but it sure was cool to watch.

Sunday: 8-20-06

Tavis, Katie and I woke up in the living room of his parent’s house at about 11 o’clock this morning, then quickly packed up our things and took off by noon. We listened to the song “Dancing in a Lesbian Bar” again in the car, which was the third time we’d heard it since last night. We wanted to eat breakfast/lunch at Denny’s, but the lot was so crowded that the Corner Diner seemed like a better alternative. I finished my orange juice then the waitress brought another one. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard of the free orange juice refill.
Tavis and Katie dropped me off at my apartment around 2 o’clock, then I spent some time at my computer writing about the weekend and putting new pictures online.
At 5 o’clock, I met Carl and Nic at the Rec Center for some racquetball games. I figured I’d be a pretty bad player from all the drinks this weekend, but was a lot worse than expected, with reaction time like a retard. Carl won two games.
On the way home, I stopped at 710 book store and bought a couple more books for my Chinese culture class, including a new dictionary to replace my old beginner one. I’m definitely still in the beginning phases, but the old dictionary just didn’t have a big enough vocabulary.
Back at home, I quickly fell asleep from 6:30 till 9:30 and it was awesome, then I spent a couple hours capturing and editing last night’s reunion video. It should be online by tomorrow evening.

Monday: 8-20-06

Today was the first day of classes, but I don’t have any on Mondays this semester. I’ll have a 300 level Chinese language class at 1 o’clock Tuesdays through Fridays, and a general foreign culture class at 3:45 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The foreign culture class has a lab section that meets on Thursdays at 2 o’clock. My other two classes are both independent studies where I will meet with the Chinese instructor at unspecified times. One is a Chinese culture class and the other is language. The Chinese culture class is not usually taught as an independent study, but the teacher agreed to do it for me because it conflicts with the general foreign culture class, which does not meet next semester. Had the teacher not agreed to give it to me as independent study, then I would have had to come back to school next fall if I wanted to graduate.
I got up at 8 o’clock this morning to go register for the general culture and independent language class. One of them was full so my advisor had left a closed-class card on her door so I would be allowed to sign up for it. As always since I’ve been a FLIT major, I had to sign up for classes at the College of Liberal Arts advisement office, which is always insanely crowded this time of year. A student working at a desk there was able to sign me up for the culture class, but said he would need to know the instructors section number to sign me up for the other one. That was info that could have been gathered from the Internet-wired computer he was sitting at, but he apparently didn’t feel like looking. So, I went to the computer lab in the building to use the Internet, but my account was locked because I hadn’t changed my password all summer. Passwords have to be changed every 90 days, which can be really annoying when you get locked out over the summer like I did today. At the computer lab’s service desk, a student reactivated my account but said it would take 30 minutes for it to be reactivated, so I got a newspaper from the student center and sat outside to read it for 30 minutes. Back at the lab, my account was still locked and I heard an employee tell a student having the same problem that it would be at least 30 minutes before it worked again. So, I asked her to sign me on temporarily so I could look up my Chinese instructors section number, which was 739.
Back at the advisement office, a different person was sitting at the desk and they said that any class with a section number in the 700’s needed a closed class card from the instructor. The guy who had been sitting at the desk earlier was now sitting next to it and I wanted to strangle him but he apologized for not telling me that in the first place. Next, I made an attempt to get that closed class card from the Chinese instructor, but he wasn’t in his office so I left.
On the way home, I stopped at 710 Bookstore to write down the ISBN numbers of all the 6 books needed for the foreign culture class. Luckily, they’re all little paperbacks that don’t cost more than $20 each. Back at home, I logged onto Amazon and bought 4 of the books at reduced prices. One of the books cost $16 in the store and $169 online. There was only one available from a private seller and they must have thought it was more valuable than it was. I wanted to send them a message telling them how crazy they were, but it was too complicated to mess with.
The blank CD’s and DVD’s I ordered were in the apartment’s office today. The small blonde girl was working there along with two of the black guys. I’d heard from one of the black guys, Brian, that the girl was studying Chinese, so I asked her about it today. She is, but only independently. She claimed to not know much but said she was learning because she has Chinese friends, so maybe she knows more than she lets on.
I spent some time finishing editing video from the class reunion in the early afternoon, then fell asleep. At 5 o’clock, I rode my bike to the bookstore to give a store key back to Kelly and Carl that I’d been forgetting to return since last Tuesday. Arriving at the store, I remembered that it was closed on Monday’s, so I put the key through the mail slot. Carl emerged from the dark store just as I was riding away. I told him my new schedule and we tentatively came up with a Wednesday, Friday, Saturday work week for me. I’ll be able to come in at two o’clock on Wednesdays and Fridays, then work whenever on Saturdays.
I got some food from Wendy’s for dinner, then went in to Save-a-Lot to buy a few lunch items before going back home. Dawn came over around 7:30 and I helped her order a digital camera and iPod online, which she wants to have when she moves to Taiwan in a week. She hadn’t ever ordered anything online before, so just needed advice on what websites to use and how to navigate them. She ended up getting the upgraded 7.1 megapixel version of my camera from Amazon for just a few more dollars than I’d paid. We ordered a 20GB iPod from an Ebay Buy It Now seller.
After that, we went to the Student Center and bowled two rounds, both of which she won. I only lost by two points the first game, at 90, but lost by several in the second. She used to bowl in a league. I had forgotten to bring any socks with me so I just wore my sandals and nobody said anything. I did get scolded for having a 7-UP in the pit area.
After the bowling defeat, we went to the Cellar so I could win at something; shuffleboard. That was even uncertain for a few minutes. It was Dawn’s first time ever playing, but she was ahead for a couple rounds after scoring five points on a single turn. After the game, we sat at a table for another hour before going home. I tried to give her a brief Chinese lesson in preparation for Taiwan but I’m not yet a very good teacher.

Tuesday: 8-22-06

I went to 710 Bookstore this morning and bought the remaining three books needed for classes, at a cost of $50. No backpacks are allowed in the store and everyone is expected to put theirs on racks in the entryway hallway, where anyone could just walk away with them. Student bookstores and publishers are just evil. I had a camera and iPod in my backpack, so I carried it up to an employee monitoring the cashiers and asked her to watch it.
On campus, I got a closed class card from my Chinese teacher at his office, then used it to sign up for Chinese 305 at the College of Liberal Arts advisement office. So, my schedule is finally complete. Next, I went to the computer lab to make sure that I wasn’t locked out of the system anymore, as I had been yesterday. I still wasn’t able to log in, but unlike yesterday, didn’t get any message saying my account was locked. I asked an employee about it and he apologetically directed me to a huge line of people with problems like mine. I decided to make one last attempt at login and realized my password was just wrong. It’s really weird that an employee was able to successfully unlock my account yesterday even though I had used the same wrong password I initially did today. Well whatever, it works now.
Next, I went upstairs to find the room that my Chinese language class would be held in this year, which just so happens to be the same room as last year. The class didn’t start for another hour, but I already had some assigned reading to do for another class. When I’d talked to the Chinese teacher an hour earlier, he’d given me a syllabus for the Chinese culture class that he’s teaching me as an independent study. That syllabus said that there’s a 130 page reading assignment for this week in one of the books I’d just bought, so I sat and read in the empty classroom for the next hour. The book is called Red China Blues and is basically the travelogue of a Chinese-Canadian girl that returned to her homeland in search of herself during early 1970’s. She arrived with the typical anti-establishment views of the era, expecting China’s communist system to be the answer to all the world’s ills. A few pages into the book, she is already hinting at how naïve her initial ideas about the country were.
There’s only one new student in Chinese class this year, a preacher-looking 30-something year old guy that speaks Chinese pretty well and sat in on a single class last semester. His abilities seem to be far above the rest of the class, but I assume that he’s interested in learning more on proper grammar and how to write Chinese characters. One of the students, Regina, just had a baby a few weeks ago. She’s the one that had that great party last semester at the big house in the forest she shares with her husband.
Our class just reviewed today and the teacher asked everyone questions in Chinese about simple topics. Afterwards, I ate lunch at Mcdonalds then went to the west lawn of the engineering building to continue reading Red China Blues. It was uncomfortably hot out, so I found the classroom in the engineering building where my FL 301i(cross cultural orientation) class would be held. Class didn’t start for another 45 minutes and the big classroom was empty. I continued reading till another student came in early and struck up a conversation. I can’t remember her name but she works in my advisor’s office and wrote the article in the department’s newsletter about my internship in Chicago last spring.
The first day of FL301i class was a bit boring, which is taught by my advisor for the first 4 weeks. After that, other instructors will come in every two weeks to focus on specific cultures in the world. The class first had to fill out an anonymous pre-test, asking us to rate questions like “No other culture is as intelligent as mine” on a scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. After that, we just discussed all the many things that will be involved in passing the class. I’m going to have to do a lot of reading this semester.
Unfortunately, yet another book is required for this class, which is a $49 spiral-bound book that is produced and sold only at Kopies and More. The teacher apologized about the price, saying the publishers had raised copyright fees dramatically this year. The book consists of copies made from other books, and was originally designed to save students from having to buy all those other books, but $50 doesn’t seem like a very good deal for a little flimsy 100-page stack of papers.
After class, I went to Kopies and More to buy that expensive little stack of papers. All the copy machines there were in use as students copied pages out of textbooks. Elliot’s roommate Pam was standing in line waiting for one of the machines. We were talking when I noticed one of the many cute girls from my FL301i class walk in the door. I asked if she was there for the expensive little stack of papers but she said she was looking for a job application so she could afford the expensive little stack of papers. Talking to her, I noticed that she had totally ungroomed eyebrows, which is unusual for such a good looking girl.
Back at home, I wrote everything above and did some reading and an assignment about it for my world cultures class. The reading was out of a book called American Ways, which is a guide about Americans for foreigners traveling to the US. This is the main text for that class and just the first few pages were quite amusing, explaining such things why we aren’t necessarily bad people for doing things like putting our parents in nursing homes.
One of the main activities of the class will include weekly one-hour meetings with a partner from our country of study and writing journals about discussion of topics from the American Ways book with that partner. So for instance, I could ask my partner if he thinks Americans are bad for putting their parents in nursing homes. I’m surely going to try and make my journals as interesting and weird as possible, as they are subject to being posted on the class website. I’ll surely post them all to this website too. It somehow feels like the class is treating foreigners like lab rats……
Later, I went back to reading the book Red China Blues, which I’m enjoying more and more with every page. According to the rear cover, it was labeled by Time magazine as “one of the ten best books of 1996”. If might not be so interesting for anyone not already somewhat familiar with China’s Mao Zedong era, but don’t take my work for it. This is just the type of writing I would love to do after really getting to know the culture through learning the language and spending lots of time there.
I went to Schnucks at ten o’clock to buy a tube of toothpaste. I’ve been secretly stealing the Indian’s for the past two days, replacing the tube perfectly to its exact position each time.

Wednesday: 8-23-06

I awoke at 4:30 AM remembering a wild vivid dream; probably a result of reading the book Red China Blues last night. I typed this right after I woke up:
Genetically engineered intelligent creatures have been created for huge television-series production project. Some of these creatures resemble yellow Pacmen while others are somewhat like a mix between a chicken and turtle. They speak English and live and work on the elaborate small-town-like set with human actors in a world like that of the movie The Truman Show. Production takes place over years; nobody ever gets out and nobody ever gets in. The actors know the reality of the situation, but the creatures do not. A few actors become sympathetic to the creatures and create a secret underground movement to free them, which ends up just meeting in an abandoned trailer for years, really doing nothing. Finally, one of the men in the underground is involved in a civil war battle reenactment one day when he suddenly flips out and abducts one of the chicken-turtle like creatures and takes it to the abandoned trailer. Because of the underground’s inaction, he plans on smuggling the creature out himself and presenting its humanness to the world to create more sympathizers.
Knowing the top secret location of the studios only method of exit, he is able to escape into the city that surrounds and supports it. This high-tech exit transports him directly into a small machinery-filled room inside the Orwellian-style corporate offices of the production studio. The chicken-turtle appears to have died from wounds suffered in the abduction struggle. The machinery inside the room can also transport him out of the city, his only chance at escape, but he doesn’t know how to work it. Therefore, he is inadvertently trapped in the building for years and must at first only come out at night to find food and survive. Eventually, he learns to blend in during the days and begins to take more and more risks, even once getting caught in his hiding place and talking his way out of the situation.
Since his arrival at the compound, the chicken-turtle creature has been left for dead in a bag under the machinery of the room the man sleeps in. It suddenly rips itself from the bag on the same evening an employee had almost discovered his identity. It curses the man the man for not having the courage to finish the plan and rips a hole in the floor, exposing an elaborate underworld of the city. The underworld is a deep maze of brick-walled passageways connected by crumbling wooden ladders. The underworld has been abandoned for decades since construction on the city was finished. Due to its deteriorated condition, no human could traverse it without special equipment. But, the creature instantly discovers that it seems to have been meant to quickly and easily travel through such a place……... Then I woke up. Crazy dream.

I had to meet with my Chinese teacher at noon in his office to talk about the two independent study classes he’ll be teaching me. Both of them require keeping journals, and so does another one of my classes, so I’ll be writing more than ever this semester. The teacher let me borrow three books to decide topics to write about. After a book is chosen, then I’ll meet with an assigned language partner each week and talk about what I’ve read. The journal will consist of my discussions with that person. The book I decided on is a compilation of anti-American articles from the China People’s Daily newspaper. Should be interesting.
I sat in an empty classroom reading my Red China Blues book until a teacher came in to prepare herself for a lecture. In Chinese class, the assistant taught, who I think will be very much more effective than last year’s assistant. The old one was very polite and friendly, but never really pressured students to speak. This new one, a tiny economics grad student, is quite the opposite and will not proceed with class until the student she has posed a question to answers it.
I went to work at 2 o’clock and stayed till six, which will be my schedule on Wednesdays and Fridays now. I’ll also work on Saturdays and maybe Mondays, but that’s not all worked out yet.
Back at home, I ate a prison-like dinner of a cold sandwich and a cheap hot dog, but being so hungry made it taste alright. I spent the next couple hours working on some homework, then Dawn picked me up at 10 o’clock. We went to Mugsy’s and ordered a $2.50 pitcher of Keystone light with a plate of $1.50 nachos. It was a few minutes after 10 o’clock at that time and we were informed that no food is served after 10. Nachos are microwave food so screw them for not selling them after 10. And screw them more for their games taking our money. Last time we’d been here, their air hockey table had cheated us a round and their buck hunting arcade game had only lasted about 30 seconds. And tonight, their impatient Golden Tee arcade machine took about $4 from us because we were talking too long between holes, then their dart machine only let us play one player when we wanted two, THEN the air hockey table stole another round from us. Screw Mugsy’s and screw Josh T. for working there. It’s his fault. His cheapness is rubbing off on the place.

Thursday: 8-24-06

I went to Kopies and More this morning to copy one of the books that my Chinese teacher had let me borrow yesterday, the one with anti-American newspaper articles in it. I was lucky to enter the store at a time when two of the four public copy machines were available. The remaining one was quickly taken and everybody was doing the same thing as me; copying textbooks. A line of unhappy people quickly started to develop; it takes a long time to copy a textbook. Mine took about 45 minutes, and I wasn’t even copying the whole thing.
My old Murphysboro neighbor Alex R. happened to walk in the store while I was copying. He’s working for Clear Channel(radio station conglomerate) and was trying to sell an ad to the store. He said he was also working as a DJ for the gay bar at nights.
When it was all finished, my copies consisted of 41 11X9 sheets and 42 11X17’s, which came to a total of just under $7. The book was really cheap online, but this saved me two weeks of waiting for it.
I wanted to cut the 11X17 sheets in half and put everything into a 3-hole binder, but the stores paper cutter was so worn out that it just ripped things to shreds. So, I took everything to the library. Walking around looking for the right equipment there, I ran into that homeless guy who told me his grandfather was a reincarnated Chinese emperor at PK’s a couple weeks ago. His name is Kirk and he was at a corner table today about to start reading some book about the ancient Egyptians, probably because his dad was King Tut.
Getting all my papers cut, punched and organized took another 45 minutes, then I went on to Chinese class a few minutes early. The new guy in class that makes everybody look bad, Erick, also walked in early. Talking to him, I learned that he’s a local minister who gives sermons in Chinese each week. He learned the language while living in China for 3 years. He invited me to his church but I think some people might frown upon going there just to learn Chinese, but I’ll talk to him more about it to see what he thinks.
I had a two hour break after class, most of which I spent reading the remainder of this week’s assigned section of Red China Blues on the second floor balcony of the Engineering building.
In my culture class at 3:35, we received a list showing who our “culture partners” would be. I’d expected to be assigned to a single person, but we will actually be meeting in groups. My group consists of one other classmate and three culture partners from Taiwan, one of which is named Peter Pan. During class discussions, the teacher talked about how it isn’t always politically correct for Americans to call themselves Americans because people of other nations on the American continent sometimes also refer to themselves as Americans. A student objected, “Well, I was in Europe and they didn’t call themselves Americans there”. A couple people giggled.
Back at home, I worked studied Chinese till 8 o’clock, then Dawn came over. We first walked to Old Town Liquors so I could buy a few things to put in my fridge for the weekend(I’m expecting company). Taner was outside the store ranting something about his penis hurting. Back at my apartment, we sat in the courtyard drinking a bottle of local Blue Sky wine that Dawn had brought with her. Around 10:30, we decided to walk down the street to our old apartment complex and see if Don and Delayna happened to be sitting outside in their chairs. As I’ve mentioned before here, they are the building’s resident music professors that seem too good to be true. Despite their colorful busy lives, they regularly host meals at the apartment and seem to have time to listen to anyone’s problems. Things were just meant to be tonight, as the two of them actually were sitting in their chairs when Dawn and I walked by.
As always, they were happy to have some company, recognizing both of us before we even stepped out of the dark. And they were in especially good spirits, celebrating the success of Piano Wizard. Piano Wizard is a piano-based video game that was developed by one of their students here. Based on its initial success, the creator marketed it to the major toy companies. Tonight’s celebration was due to the fact that one of those companies had signed a deal, effectively making the inventor a millionaire. I love Don and Delayna. Stories like this flow every time. You can check all this out at pianowizard.com.

Friday: 8-25-06

A plumber unexpectedly showed up at my apartment sometime around 10 o’clock this morning, a burly but friendly man over six feet tall. The cold water tap on one of the bathroom’s two sinks hadn’t been working since I moved in. I at first just went about my own business in the apartment while Mr. Plumber worked, but stopped to talk with him after noticing that he liked to talk while he worked. He’s lived in Carbondale for over 20 years and regularly hosts SIU exchange students at home with his wife. They’ve had over 100 in the past, from a couple dozen different countries. The students will usually stay for a semester, but a couple have stayed over two years, including one that’s there now. In all his years of hosting these students, only three ever had to be kicked out; all girls from Taiwan. One of the girls took a swing at his wife and another went into a rage of throwing whatever happened to be nearby.
I didn’t get to hear about the third girl because Mr. Plumber went into an even more unusual story. One of his African exchange students told of how the natives from his country would swing nets in the air as huge swarms of flies flew off a lakefront. Once the net was sufficiently full of thousands of flies, it would be wrung tightly to create a fly paste. This paste is made into fly patties and cooked just like a hamburger! UUUUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! Just think about that.
An idea for a religious comedy popped into my head on the bike ride to class, in which the Christian masses believe that Jesus has returned. The problem is that the new Jesus doesn’t want to have anything to do with his followers. The basic plotline could go something like this; a baby is born with a perfect Virgin Mary birthmark stretching across its entire back. This instantly attracts worldwide attention, then random miracles begin happening to everyone who touches the baby. Flash forward 20 years………Jesus is a pizza-delivering hippie stoner that’s constantly trying to avoid the throngs of people that are continuously making pilgrimages to see him. That’s all I’ve got so far.
In my Chinese classroom, Michelle, Matt and I somehow got into a conversation about dead baby urban legends, like the one where drug smugglers stuffed drugs inside a baby and took it on a commercial flight wrapped in a shawl. The preacher student suddenly walked in mid-conversation and we all abruptly stopped talking. He’d already heard enough, surprising asking, “Have you ever seen the episode of Frasier where Frasier dreams that he accidentally cooks a baby into a pie crust?”
At work, Nora came in to see me about 2:30. I’d been expecting her tonight, but not till six or later. I was in the back office packaging Internet orders when she came in. Instead of leading her to the back, Carl/Kelly had me come out and speak with her in the store. This paranoid privacy issue makes me wonder what would happen if the back office walls inexplicably began to bleed paint one evening to form perfect Virgin Mary murals from floor to ceiling. The next morning, a can of white paint would be purchased and the murals would be over-painted before I arrived. The event would never be spoken of for fear of the secret room being invaded by the entire world. The sin of ruining God’s work would invite demons into the room, which would easily possess me considering the hours spent wrapping orders back there and the fact that I never go to church. Just a thought.

Continuing to wrap orders and ponder demonic possession, I came across a book called “Herb Gardening for Dummies”, which gave me the spoof idea, “Pot Farming for Potheads”. Another idea I had today was for plant doctors. Just think, there are doctors for people and animals, so why not plants? I wonder what kind of joke responses a newspaper ad for the plant doctor would get……..
I left work an hour early to meet Nora back at my apartment. I’d already given her the key so she could come in and get comfortable. She didn’t know about the Indian in the bathroom and said she had nearly walked in his room naked after taking a shower. She had come in town from Wisconsin for her friend Jess’s wedding, which will happen tomorrow.
We talked about eating dinner at Thai Taste first, but went to Walmart because neither of us were yet hungry enough. We never did end up making it to that restaurant or any other. At Walmart, I bought an inflatable queen sized mattress and a pump to accommodate tonight’s guest and any others that might come in the future.
Nora wanted to go out and try and relive her Carbondale college years tonight.
Our first stop was PK’s, where Dan and Joe(Curtis) stopped by our stools to chat. They both used to work with me at Schnucks. Tonight was Curtis’s birthday so I bought him a drink. Dan told us what it is like to have dated a blind woman for the past 6 years. They’re still together and are apparently very happy.
Leaving PK’s, a car horn blared at me and Nora while crossing the street. It was Nic and Sara. Nic talked us into going with him to Big Boy’s Q’n, which was hosting a “mullet night” where anyone with a real mullet or a mullet wig got half-price admission and cheaper drinks. Obviously, none of us had mullets or wigs, but there just happened to be some kind of nighttime community yardsale at the town pavilion across the street. Unfortunately, they were selling no wigs, but Nora did find a nice peacock feather mask for $2.00.
As usual, Big Boy’s Q’n was a disappointing experience. There were no mullets among the few patrons and one of the owners was rude to me when he saw that Nora’s cigarette was about to burn his cheap wooden ledge by the pool tables. He had apparently been to fat and lazy to put any ashtrays there.
Nora ended up beating Nic in two games of pool, which I thoroughly enjoyed watching. Next, we tried to go to the nearby Cadillac lounge, the local black-only bar, but it was closed. We were then planning on going into the gay bar until an ex-Schnucks coworker working at the door, Amy, informed us that it would be $3 each. Nic had never been in a gay bar and was quite relieved.
The Hangar came next. Soon after arrival, Nic motioned for me across the bar and a tall pretty skinny blond thought he was motioning for her. She walked up to him immediately, at the same time as I did. He stared up at her from his stool, mumbling, “Uh uh uh um, I meant my friend”, so I joked with him, “There’s a town that way”(watch Dumb and Dumber if you don’t get that).
Leaving the Hangar, we accidentally left the peacock feather mask at the bar. The fourth bar-stop of the night was the Cellar, where Nic and Nora played a couple games of pool on a team. Both of their skills were quite diminished by this time. The fifth bar stop was back at the gay bar. Nic turned white as we got close, then sat at a table chain smoking for 45 minutes. He rarely smokes. The thought of a guy grabbing his ass almost made him hysterical. Nora kept pulling me to the dance floor, leaving Nic alone and even more scared. The drag show was his tipping point. Two huge men, one black and one white, came onto stage in their tight dresses and thick makeup. Nic asked me to walk him out.
Next, Nora and I bought a couple 40oz’s from ABC liquor. The inside of the store was closed so we had to wait in the drive-thru line. Music could be heard coming from Tres Hombres’s beer garden, so we danced in line a bit to entertain the people sitting in cars. Walking on to Walgreen’s, Nora went in to purchase a couple things while I stood guard of our beers outside. A young kid on a bike walked up to me and asked for a smoke, saying he had just escaped from some center for troubled youth and was using the payphone to call his mom.
Nora and I next went into the graveyard that’s behind Wendy’s, where we hung out next to the above-ground cement coffin for a while before returning home.

Saturday: 8-26-06

Nora and I went to the corner diner for lunch/breakfast this morning. It was already hot out and we passed a normal-looking guy wearing a jean jacket on the sidewalk. We walked towards Campus Lake after the meal but the humidity was too much. We were already ready for a break by the time we got to the Faner building, so Nora wanted to go up to the fourth floor to see if any of her old professors happened to be working. The floor was completely abandoned and all the lights were shut off, making for an eerie feeling considering the huge size of the building. We rested on some coaches for a while then walked on to the Student Center. Nora wanted to shop for Saluki clothes at the bookstore there. She ended up buying a shirt then we returned to my apartment.
She had come down for a wedding, and her friend Jamie came to pick her up for it at 3 o’clock. Nora, Jamie and I all went together on that Wisconsin camping trip over the summer. Just before they left, Nora offered her car keys to me, saying I could drive to the reception in Marion after work if I wanted to.
I worked from 3:15 till 6:00, mostly just trying to make progress on putting the many books online that have come in over the past week. That’s something that I spent several hours doing each week all summer long, but hadn’t had time to do any of since school started, which is probably why there are so many.
After work, I immediately got ready for the wedding reception and left in Nora’s car. The fuel tank meter was below “E”, so I stopped to get gas, also getting some money from an ATM and two cheeseburgers from McDonalds. The gas station at Wal-Mart is just awful because it’s too small for the amount of traffic that would like to use it. There are twelve pumps and only one of them was available. Pulling in, I realized that the gas cap was on the other side of the car, but people were driving around like vultures just waiting for any cars to pull out. I sat there waiting a few minutes for the perfect opportunity to quickly pull out and turn around. The guy to the right of me ended up leaving before that happened, so I quickly took over his position.
I knew from a phone message that the reception was at Kokopellie’s in Marion, but really had no idea where that was. Once in Marion, I asked a man working at a gas station, who informed me that it was the name of a golf course over behind the new Super WalMart that’s under construction. I easily found a sign reading “Kokopellie Estates and Golf Club”, but didn’t easily find the golf club. I drove around gawking at mansions while trying to find the place. There are some amazing homes in that part of the city, a couple of which could maybe be worth a million. I even had to stop and take a picture of the nicest one. The entrance to the gold course just happened to be next to that nicest one, but I didn’t realize that before driving around lost for the next 25 minutes. The reception was held in a luxurious building that may or may not have also served as the golf course’s club house. It’s about as nice as you get for Southern Illinois. At the top of a staircase, I came upon a reception of over 200 guests. Nora had just happened to be on the phone outside when I arrived, so she led me in to her table, where three of her friends that I knew were sitting; Jamie, Andrea and John.
There were many foreigners among the guests, due to the bride and groom’s connections with the university. Dinner had already been served and put away by the time I got there, and beer and wine were now flowing freely from the bar. I didn’t drink much because it soon became evident that I should drive Nora back to Carbondale later. A man in a tux quietly sat down facing me a few minutes after I arrived, saying he would have to “screen” me because I was Nora’s guest. He turned out to be Terry, the father of the groom and chair of the marketing department at SIU. I successfully countered all his questions with questions until other guests came and took his attention off me. Nora caught the bouquet when the bride threw it.
One of the bartenders happened to be Whitney, the girl who rented my apartment to me last August; the one that had flirted so hard I ran into a door frame that day. We talked briefly a few times when she wasn’t very busy.
The reception ended about 11 o’clock. Nora had lost her shoes and I found them under the cake table. A member of the wedding party invited her to the Drury Inn, then rolled his eyes when she said I was coming. This guy had seemed jealous all night whenever Nora gave me any attention. She spilled wine all over me walking to the parking lot.
At the Drury in, Jen K’s brother Jeff happened to be working at the front desk. A “party bus” had taken people from the reception to the hotel, and was now waiting outside to take people to a bar in Carbondale. This was the nicest wedding I’ve been to, with videographers and a party bus. They apparently had three videoographers at the ceremony, making everyone feel like they were on a reality show.
Not too many people got on the bus, then we followed it into Carbondale. Along the way, Nora decided she was done and didn’t feel like going anywhere else.

Sunday: 8-27-06

Nora left at 8 o’clock this morning. I spent some time writing about the weekend in the morning and early afternoon as thunderstorms built up outside. A delivery man thought he was trapped in the courtyard. My window was open and I heard him cussing and repeating to himself, “trapped! No! Can’t be trapped!”. The doors leading to the courtyard lock themselves when closed, and the man didn’t know that you could exit by walking around the edge of the building. He was relived when I leaned out the window to direct him around the corner.
I did a load of laundry after the rain subsided, noticing a seemingly good looking hideaway bed being thrown away across the street from my old apartment building. I’ve been on the lookout for that and a TV since moving into this apartment a month ago. I really want to be able to remove the twin bed that came with the room. I long to sit on a couch again. Nic came over to help move the couch in, but I realized it wasn’t worth taking before he arrived. It was soaking wet and had a few imperfections I hadn’t noticed earlier.
As planned, Nic and I did go on to the Rec Center to play racquetball with Carl at five o’clock. I made up for last week’s terrible performance by winning two of our three games. On the way home, a bolt of lightning struck close enough to the car to sound like a gunshot. The rumbling continued for the next couple hours.
My Internet access was down all day and has continued to be unreliable for the whole month I’ve lived here. I would expect it to be somewhat slow, but the constant interruptions in service shouldn’t be happening. It will go in and out dozens of times some days, usually for just a second or two at a time. Those short outages can make using my phone service and FTP nearly impossible at times. So, I left a note on the office door for the network administrator, leaving it underneath another note saying that the Internet service wouldn’t be restored till tomorrow. Checking my mailbox, I found another check from the university, this one for $700. It was totally unexpected, so I should probably look into its source before cashing it.
I spent the evening continuing to read Red China Blues. The human rights record of the Chinese government is often criticized, but today’s world is probably nothing like how the book describes life in the 70’s. People couldn’t even trust their friends when it came to mentioning even the slightest gossip about government officials. People had become brainwashed and riends would turn in friends just to look better in the eyes of the party. One woman the author knew was imprisoned and tortured for years for mentioning to a college roommate that a distant family member had once dated Mao Zedong’s third wife. This was used an excuse to also imprison most of the woman’s family, with much of the real reason probably being their indirect long-lost connections to people holding positions of power within Taiwan’s government. It seems more “logical” to just imprison people for no reason, but that’s just not the way things were done. It will always seem unreal how masses of people can be coerced into acting in such ways.

Monday: August 28, 2006

My Internet access was still down this morning, so I was forced to just continue reading Red China Blues and work on the homework that’s assigned with it. Having the Internet really cuts into productivity, and everybody knows that, but you really notice it when your access goes down and you get more done. And what have I really missed? Nothing. Well actually, not having my Skype phone service kind of sucked.
I ate way too big of a bowl of canned beef stew for lunch, then went to work at 1 o’clock. The store is closed on Mondays, but Carl and Kelly needed me to package Internet orders and put new books online. They went to Duquoin shortly after I arrived, leaving me in the darkened store alone with the cat. The mood of the day was kind of nice, with heavily overcast skies while working alone in a dark store. I don’t know why that was nice, but it was. It seemed to make Casper the cat all the more lonely though, and he barely ignored me for an instant while Carl and Kelly were gone for two hours. He would rub his head on my pen when writing, lay on the keyboard when typing and lay on my feet when I’d move him.
I had dinner at Wendy’s on the way home. The employees were acting kind of weird and it made me suspicious. They asked with grins three times if the food was for the lobby or to go, then one asked if I was going to “kill it” when I said I’d come back for a chicken sandwich that would be cooking for two more minutes. There appeared to be no strange ingredients in the sandwiches, but who really knows. I went on home after buying a few groceries at Save-a-Lot.
The Internet was finally working again tonight. Dawn came over at 8 o’clock so I could help her set up a website, which she wants to use to stay in touch with people while she’s in Taiwan for the next year. We found a hosting company and signed up for it, then realized that the domain she wanted, dawnbrady.com, is already reserved. The hosting company let us register it and accepted her payment, so hopefully they’ll refund the money after realizing it’s already taken.

Tuesday: 8-29-06

The Indian was hogging the bathroom this morning, so I couldn’t take a shower before going to work at 10 o’clock. Since the bookstore has lately been getting backed up with newly traded in books and outgoing Internet orders, I was invited to work some earlier morning and later afternoon shifts on Tuesdays and Thursdays(my classes take most of the midday). I think I’m going to have a lot more classwork than anticipated, but I’ll try working these extra hours for a while and see how it goes.
At lunchtime, the lines at the Student Center McDonald’s were enormous, and so were the ones at the several little restaurants in the cafeteria area. Impatience led to healthier eating; the only restaurant without a line was a new one selling panini sandwiches in the cafeteria area. Not sure how healthy a ham and cheese panani is either, but coming from somebody that doesn’t have a problem with eating at Mcdonalds several times a week, do I really care how healthy a panini really is? The important thing is that it tasted good when I ate it in my empty Chinese classroom before class started.
I had to go home during my break because I’d just realized that my culture class journal that was due today was still sitting on my computer desktop. My printer isn’t working, so I emailed it to myself and went to the library to print. I’m locked out of the school’s computer system again because I forgot to change the password last week after it was unlocked. You only have a couple days to do that before getting locked out again. So, I had to wait for one of the 8 computers to come available that don’t require a login. A red-haired tomboy got up just in time to get the assignment printed.
In culture class, we talked about “Overcoming the Golden Rule”, which means that you’re not always supposed to expect people to be treated as you would. We also talked about the Golden Rule’s alternative, the “Lead Rule”, which states that a person deserves to be treated how they treat others. And I quote the text here, “If we assume they are bad, we may try to punish them. If they do not respond to punishment, then we may be compelled to employ the full force of the Lead Rule, which is to kill them”. Our teacher conveniently skipped the part about killing people when discussing the lead rule, so I of course had to stop her before she went on. A few classmates gasped or giggled, then one asked for an explanation of the killing. The teacher said that, according to the Lead Rule, people who kill should be killed. What the hell does this have to do with a class on cross-cultural communication? It seems that parts of this class are going to be a bunch of academic cross-cultural crap. Hopefully more of the crap will at least be so weird and out of place that it’s funny. We also discussed the concept “Describe, Interpret, Evaluate”, which has been affectionately given the acronym D-I-E. The teacher went on to describe the acronym with a completely straight face, saying, “It’s something we do every day but just don’t think about”.
On the way back to work, I saw a man on the sidewalk wearing shiny black leather jeans and a shiny black trenchcoat. WTF. It wasn’t hot outside, but it definitely wasn’t cool either. That’s just a sick person. What else could it be? I’ve got to start taking pictures of this stuff.
I worked till 6:20, then filled up the nearly flat back tire of my bike on the way home. Passing by Laundry World, Tanner yelled at me from the bushes behind the building. I turned around and found him sitting on a ledge drinking vodka from a bottle and chasing it with juice from a Styrofoam cup. I stood there talking with him for about 15 minutes. He likes the fact that I put his video on the Internet and he wants more coverage. I just might have to take him up on that offer. An old man with a white ponytail and unbuttoned shirt walked up to us with a cane and spoke a couple words before moving on.
Back at home, most of the evening was spent translating just one paragraph from the Chinese propaganda book I copied from my teacher last week. This propaganda is taken directly out of the People’s Daily newspaper. The paragraph I translated tonight surprisingly didn’t sound much different than a conservative campaign speech in the US. It said that thousands of American teenagers are homeless and only a small number can stay at shelters. The shelters mistreat the kids, so they run away and roam the streets. The kids are homeless because of drugs, single parent household’s, etc..------ This isn’t what I want to read. I want to see things like “American’s eyes are so big that there is less space in the head for their brains”.
Stepping out into the courtyard to have a beer and a smoke later, I noticed a group of international students surrounding something on the second floor balcony. It turned out to be a huge garden spider that they had been feeding bugs to. Garden spiders can have a legspan of 3 or 4 inches and have that strange habit of sitting in one place while they rock their web back and fourth, so it was probably an unusual experience for someone who’s never seen one before. Or maybe they were fattening it up for dinner.

Wednesday: 8-30-06

What up biotches? It was almost chilly today. I didn’t eat fast food even one time. The assistant teacher in my Chinese class seems depressed all of the sudden. She was really the opposite of that on her first day teaching, so we must just be a depressing class to teach. Maybe it’s because most people don’t do most of the assigned homework, including me, but that’s because it’s not graded and would take hours to complete. With an emphasis in her voice, she asked us again at the end of class to “please do your homework”, but she just started teaching and probably doesn’t understand what takes her five minutes would take us two hours.
At work, the most annoying family ever came in. If someone gave me a choice of death or spending one night in their house, I would have to know how I’d be killed before making a decision. Judging this family’s conversation, the mother was homeschooling the children; a young teenage girl, an older teenage boy and a younger boy. The mother nagged the kids repeatedly in her whiny voice about buying only books that she could test them on. She literally said this 50 or more times, spacing it out every 10 seconds or so. The youngest kid responded every time that he wanted something different than what she wanted him to buy. He was tying to buy something under his reading level and the mother kept suggesting that a particular book about Santa Claus was better. She argued with this little boy for 30 minutes about the issue. The older boy was wearing baggy clothes with a scarf over his head and listening to rap on headphones, rapping along “you so fine, blow my mind, that shape is nice and so is the mind”, over and over as he kept picking out books his mom didn’t like. The girl just kind of ignored everybody.
Back at home, I spent a couple hours actually doing my most of my Chinese homework, then Dawn came over at 9 o’clock so we could work on her website again. It turns out that dawnbrady.com is in fact taken. It has been registered to a man named Rob in Minessota since 2001, but he’s never developed it. The registration record listed a phone number, so we called and a woman answered. I simply asked for Rob, then told him, “Hi, I’m Garth from Illinois calling about dawnbrady.com. Do you know what I mean?” Rob said, “Yes, that’s my wife”, and I said, “I’m sitting here with Dawn Brady and we were wondering what you plan on doing with the site”. Rob said, “Well, I haven’t really thought about it but I was planning on renewing my ownership and might be willing to sell”. Then I just said thanks and goodbye. We were hoping that he would just give it up when the current registration ended in a week, but I guess not. We could try to steal it but he’s probably already pre-renewed the registration considering the fact that he’s held the name for five years.
Luckily, the hosting company that Dawn had paid for service with earlier in the week is willing to refund her money. That seems fair because they did lead us to believe that dawnbrady.com was available when it wasn’t. Instead of a website, I helped her link together a free blog and free photo hosting service. That works great for her because those are the only two things she really wanted to do. The only reason she wanted a website was to have a domain name that was easy for people to remember.
She left about two o’clock and that’s probably the last time I’ll se here for a year. She’ll drive home to Wisconsin tomorrow, then leave from Chicago for Taiwan next Wednesday.

Thursday: 8-31-06

Breakfast: 4 pieces of toast with butter – 9AM
Lunch: Small fries and chicken sandwich from Wendy’s – 12:30PM
Snack: Approx. 10 gummy worms – 5:30PM
Dinner: One banquet chicken pot pie and one turkey breast sandwich – 6:30PM
Snack: Fresh human thumb, one cigarette, one beer – 12:15AM

I worked from 10 till 12:30 today. Carl brought me some Wendy’s for lunch when he went there to get his. There were barely any customers in the store, but one was memorable. An older women had special-ordered a big book describing all different kinds of health issues. She was so excited to see the good condition of the used book that she just couldn’t stop raving about it for several minutes. It seemed funny that she was so excited about a book that was going to teach her about all the terrible ways she could die.

I raced a train yesterday on my bike, crossing the tracks about 100 feet in front of it. In Chinese class today, the teacher didn’t cover any of the homework I did last night. It turns out that there was other homework I hadn’t noticed, but it doesn’t matter since none of it’s graded anyways. Culture class met immediately after Chinese in a Faner computer lab on the third floor. That class usually meets in the Engineering building, but had to change it’s Thursday schedule. The new classroom’s space is almost entirely taken up by computers, which we won’t even be using. Each computer has its own cubicle and there are more cubicles than students, so two have to sit at each one. I suffered while tightly squished between a pretty blonde and brunette. I could barely concentrate on a minute of class. The cubicle walls are so high that you can barely see the teacher at the front of the room……..hmmmmm. We turned off the lights and watched a video for 40 minutes…hmmm. The video, from the 70’s, was about race relations in the US and featured group of ordinary people that was put together in a room and asked to discuss the issues. Most of the debate happened between a big black man and a wealthy-looking white man. The white man told that black one that all his problems were his own fault and the black man exploded into a long violent verbal rage. There were several different races of people in the room, which the white man always collectively referred to as “you coloreds”.
The reason our class changed its schedule was so we could meet with our culture groups at the normal class time. The foreign members of our culture groups are all students at the Center for English as a Second Language(CESL). The original schedule was to meet with these people every Thursday at 2 o’clock, but CESL holds classes at that time.
CESL is located on the first floor of the Faner building, and our class met their class in the hallway leading to it. Everyone was given color-coded nametags so we could find our group members.

(This section also turned in as a required journal for the class)-------------------------

The foreigners in my group are three Taiwanese; Jay Chi, Chen Lung and Peter Pan. Ironically, I’ve always thought the classical cartoon version of Peter Pan looked Chinese, but the Peter Pan in my group doesn’t fit the profile because of his tall muscular build. Too bad. But, he does seem to find humor in calling himself Peter Pan, as he laughed and repeated the name when introducing himself.
All the other groups used up all the available classrooms in the hallway, so we were forced to sit on the more comfortable couches in the hallway. Peter initiated the conversation, asking everyone to tell a bit about themselves. The other American and I tried hard to suppress laughter when one of the Taiwanese said she lived in “ahole”. She apparently meant to say “A-hall”, an abbreviation for Ambassador Hall. Based on everyone’s surprise at hearing I studied Chinese, it’s probably safe to assume they haven’t met any other American Chinese language students.
Next Peter asked myself and the other American what we thought the differences were between Taiwan and China. The other said that she thought most aspects of the popular culture were the same, and I said that the average rural Taiwanese probably lived a much more modern lifestyle than their Chinese counterpart. The difference that Peter actually had in mind was the political one, saying that people in Taiwan were free to express their views about the government while those in China were not.
One of the other Taiwanese then mentioned how Google had helped China censor search results about sensitive political topics. I replied that they appear to have only been effective at censoring websites authored in Chinese, saying that I was able to retrieve pictures of the Tiananmen Square Massacre from an Internet café across the street from the square.
We did get to a couple issues from the American Ways book. First of all, we proposed the idea of a five year old child spending his own money, describing a situation where a parent would give the child $5 at the beginning of a shopping trip and telling him he could do whatever he wanted till that money was gone. The Taiwanese all laughed at this but said they understood the concept of trying to teach the child about money. They said that no Taiwanese family would do this because they wish to control what the child spends his money on. One member of the group said the lesson could be appropriate for a child that was at least 10 years old.
Our next question involved the practice of the American president routinely allowing himself to be photographed in sweaty jogging clothes. The Taiwanese said that this is a good idea because it shows that he is just like everyone else. They shared a story about Mayor Ma of Taipei, who can regularly be seen jogging all over his capital city. Their president has apparently exhibited the same behavior at times, but for the most part, they said that these two examples were exceptions to the general rule; most Taiwanese officials prefer to be seen in more formal settings.

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I went back to work till 6: 15 directly after the meeting with the foreigners. The air was nearly chilly and the sky was mostly cloudy again all day. Back at home, I went to work on several homework assignments for hours, trying to clear the way for a mostly free weekend. In the book Red China Blues, I read the section where the author had lived through the Tiananmen Square Massacre. I’d always just assumed that the army did all of it’s killing in just a few hours, but it actually went on for days. The author of this book is a reporter that spent the worst of those times on the 14th floor balcony of a hotel across the street from the square, so she offers very vivid descriptions of the battles. The chaos didn’t just consist of citizen vs. military violence. One army regiment had accidentally run over several members of another with tanks, leading to them battling each other for several days. Supposedly, the president eventually had the leaders of each regiment shake hands, effectively ending any fear of civil war.
As for the massacring of civilians, I’d never known exactly how brutal those days had been till reading this book. Beijing had seen similar protests a decade earlier, which were squashed with gun-free violence. Many attributed that government violence to the popularity of the second round of protests in 1989. If that’s the case, then where will things end next time? If it does happen again, I would expect the sentiment to be so widespread that the government looses the battle.
Hopefully the Chinese government doesn’t read my blog when I move there.