conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
Archive for January, 2006
January 12, 2006 at 1:28 am · Filed under wahoowa
paulbui (1:23:01 AM): buhhhhhhhhhhhhh
wahooswu (1:23:16 AM): hmm … are you drunk?
paulbui (1:23:23 AM): of course!
paulbui (1:23:30 AM): wed night at maarten’s
wahooswu (1:23:37 AM): what’s there on wed nights?
paulbui (1:23:37 AM): pitcher of killians for $5
wahooswu (1:23:41 AM): woah dude
paulbui (1:23:48 AM): yeah, I killed a pitcher+
paulbui (1:24:02 AM): where you headed off to?
wahooswu (1:24:07 AM): bed
paulbui (1:24:24 AM): why aren’t you out?
wahooswu (1:24:31 AM): had work to do
paulbui (1:24:43 AM): yeah, I should be doing that too
paulbui (1:25:14 AM): but I’ll hold that off until tuesday
paulbui (1:25:22 AM): i mean fgriday
paulbui (1:25:23 AM): shit
paulbui (1:25:29 AM): I typed the completely wrong day
January 9, 2006 at 11:51 pm · Filed under dating/relationships
Browsing Amazon again, I found the following table of contents (from He’s Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys, by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo):
- He’s just not that into you if he’s not asking you out.
- He’s just not that into you if he’s not calling you
- He’s just not that into you if he’s not dating you
- He’s just not that into you if he’s not having sex with you
- He’s just not that into you if he’s having sex with someone else
- He’s just not that into you if he only wants to see you when he’s drunk
- He’s just not that into you if he doesn’t want to marry you
- He’s just not that into you if he’s breaking up with you
- He’s just not that into you if he’s disappeared on you
- He’s just not that into you if he’s married (and other insane variations of being unavailable)
- He’s just not that into you if he’s a selfish jerk, a bully, or a really big freak
Okay, okay, I get the point. But I must ask, when is he EVER into me?
January 8, 2006 at 10:37 pm · Filed under daily grind
Here is a snippet of a conversation I had yesterday with Philip, a friend of mine from UVA:
Phil: Oh, i talked on the phone with this girl for 30 minutes today
Me (all excited): Really?? Cool! What girl? tell me about her!
Phil: Well, she’s not “available”
Me: Why not?
Phil: She’s married … well, separated. She’s getting a divorce
Me: oh god.
Phil: But she’s soo sooo hot.
“Because short men equals flat shoes,” reads an ad at the South Station T-stop that I saw today. Umm … I don’t think so, but nice try. Short men equals short men. Period. I wear heels whenever I want to. Period. Also to note: flat shoes does not equal comfortable, so I don’t even know what this ad is trying to say.
Boys (and men), regardless of whether or not they are short, hardly ever say the right things. In fact, recent phenomena point to tall men erring more noticeably. Yes, not saying something does count as having not said the right thing. Silence is no excuse.
The trend of gaucho pants/capris must stop. I saw a woman wearing gaucho jeans today. Where did THAT one come from? Here’s a heads-up: it’s snowing outside; put some real pants on. The dressier ones are okay for spring/summer/fall casual dress-up, but the big flowy yoga looking pants just really need to go away.
At the end of the day, today was unproductive, volatile, and it made me cry. Just spectacular.
January 6, 2006 at 8:21 pm · Filed under hobbies
What I read over Christmas break (in chronological order):
1. Freakonomics
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
3. Angels and Demons
4. The Broker
5. Me Talk Pretty One Day
6. The Tipping Point
7. The Five People You Meet in Heaven
These, along with the hours I spent reading book-jackets in Barnes and Noble, have led me to the following conclusions:
- I really don’t care for Dan Brown. DaVinci Code was, eh, okay. Deception Point … not too great, but entertaining enough for the train ride from Berlin to Munich. Angels and Demons, not so much. So no more Dan Brown.
- John Grisham sold out to the bestseller list. The Broker was 419 pages of bland non-substance. I will give up my whole closet (shoes and all) if the John Grisham of A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief lore would only return.
- I am rather sick of fiction. I think this stems from my current thoughts on life: a big pot of nothin’. Maybe it would be more satisfying to embark on journeys in search of fake treasures in fake places with fake people if I even had a flicker of an idea about what is up with my real life.
- Maybe I’m only sick of bland bestseller fiction, the ones whose back covers are decorated with “Thoroughly thrilling! A joy-ride!”, but end up being empty sell-outs with plots that appeal to housewives with too much time on their hands (not that there is anything wrong with being a housewife).
- Barnes and Noble and airport newstands are huge ripoffs. Buy your books on Amazon; everything I’ve searched for so far has had discounts of 20-25%.
And the obsession continues …
–My current read: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
–On the deck: When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night. (The second one is bestseller fiction, but there was a semblance of nerdy-cool to the title that drew me in).
–In transit, from Amazon.com: Bringing Down the House (I’ve never read it), He’s Just Not That Into You (because I need some self-help, and this book was so raved about), and What Should I Do With My Life? (by Po Bronson, recommended by a friend who is ditching science for teaching, and maybe, just maybe, this book will help me to learn to enjoy fiction again).
January 5, 2006 at 5:35 pm · Filed under life thoughts, wahoowa
I was a Lawn Resident my fourth year at UVA. In fact, I was the Head Resident on the Lawn. What is the meaning of this, you ask? Did I sleep in a tent on a grassy knoll every night? No. Well, I must have had my own special chair, one of those high-back Adirondacks, on a courtyard, right? Wrong. Being “on the Lawn” meant that I lived in a matchbox single room with ancient electrical wiring. I walked outside to use the bathroom, even in the middle of the night (though some may choose to argue this point). During the winters, I tread through 4 inches of snow in my bathrobe and flipflops to get to the showers. When it wasn’t winter, I endured the embarrassment (or was it glory and pride?) of walking through high-traffic zones with wet, freshly-shampooed hair wearing my plush, terry-cloth robe, bought expressly for that purpose.
So what is this Lawn?
The Lawn is a pivotal concept without which undergraduate life at UVA would be worlds apart from what it is today. The Lawn pits students against each other extracurricularly from the moment they step on Grounds. It feuds a competition to see who can rack up the most credentials outside of the classroom while still keeping a decently high GPA. It plants seemingly life-or-death goals in students’ minds as they each strive to gain his/her peers’ highest ratings on the fuzzy criteria of “significant contributions to the University community.” All in the name of one letter, mailed from the housing office, that reads “Congratulations! You are one of 47 distinguished students selected to live on the Lawn.”
So, why do I bring this up now?
Recently, I was asked by a fellow 2004 Lawn resident to dig up information on a girl, our year, who claimed to have received a “congratulations” letter, but ultimately never lived on the Lawn because she turned down the offer before the school year began. My friend suspected that this girl was lying, but had no proof, so he checked with me, the Head Resident. The girl was lying.
As good little graduates of the University all know, lying is an Honor offense that leads to automatic expulsion. But what is the meaning of lying about the Lawn AFTER graduating? Or even better, what is the meaning of the Lawn itself after graduating?
In all honesty, the Lawn means nothing after UVA. Non-Virginians laugh and laugh about the idea of “sleeping in someone’s front yard”. Furthermore, the whole concept of intense extracurricular competition so engrained in us wahoos means about as much as German sausages to everyone else: foreign, and probably bad for your health when ingested in large quantities.
So what changed about the Lawn after we graduated that demoted it from “this means the whole world to me” to “this means nothing at all” in a mere year or two? The tiny rooms are still there, with its brick exteriors, cobwebs, and a different set of over-achieving residents inside.
So, why does it feel different?
It feels different because we have lost the context of the Lawn. Some meanings are universal, no doubt: lying means doing something wrong, or having a cold means not feeling so great for a few days. Most things, however, only have meanings in context. Honor is vague in the minds of most, but Honor means precisely “no lying, cheating, or stealing” to Virginia students and alums. NASA means the space agency to most Americans, but for a select group, it may mean the Native American Student Association. For just about everyone, the lawn is what you hire the neighbor’s son to mow, but the Lawn is the Holy Grail of achievements at UVA. How we interpret the context around us is important, as is finding the context for which our thoughts are even relevant. That seems obvious enough, no astrophysics degree needed here. (At this point, I’m almost tempted to launch into something on the Tipping Point’s third rule: Power of Context. But I shall refrain in the interest of length.)
So where am I going with this?
To generalize, and at the risk of sounding terribly obvious: we find the meanings for things around us in our surroundings. Most things lose their significance given a different context, which really should not come as a surprise. I think what I have failed to understand until very recently is how incredibly universal this idea is. (Oh the irony: the universality of specific context.) As my mother always says: 退一步，海阔天空。 Literally, it means to “take a step back, the sea and the sky are expansive”. Contexually, it means to take a step back, see the big picture. Taking a step back and seeing the big picture has made all the difference for me in 2005: helping me to go from “I am so f-ing miserable, I want another life” to “I can live with this; this really isn’t so bad.” The universal meanings are still there, and always will be: life goes on; but the contextual meanings are only what I make of them. Not everything can, or should, be trivialized, but just about everything can be contexualized so we can forgive ourselves a little more than we have been allowing ourselves to.
With that, here’s to 2006: the year of opportunities, of meanings, and when put into the right context: the year of the dog!
January 4, 2006 at 12:33 pm · Filed under going out
Here is Paula’s account of our New Year’s Eve, in case you need another opinion. I joined in starting Act II Scene 3. I’m mentioned by name, except where I’m mentioned as the “bond girl”. Yeah. Anyways. Just chalk it up to high school.
January 1, 2006 at 10:27 pm · Filed under going out
The first time I celebrated the turn of any year was New Year’s Eve 2005. As the clock struck midnight, I stood to clink my champagne glass with a friend’s … only to find a gay man sitting on the floor of my gay friend’s apartment hugging my right leg, tugging on my jeans, and regretfully proclaiming, while he gazed into my eyes, that if only I didn’t have a boyfriend, he would give me a New Year’s kiss. With this delectable memory of my first new year’s eve celebration, and with the bye-bye of the aforementioned boyfriend who hitherto stood between me and my flamboyant kiss, I had nothing but the highest expectations for the ringing in of 2006.
In the company of only one gay man last night, five high school buddies and I hit up Broad Street. One buddy was our “in” to the Charleston social scene, promising us pubs, after parties, and his hunkish straight med school friends. There were no disappointments before midnight as the rounds of drinks poured in, and we girls were surrounded by hot, southern, funny, and charming doctors-in-training. Less than an hour after the ball dropped at midnight though, the ball also dropped on our show. Our social butterfly of a buddy ended up sick over a trash bin at the pub, and was driven home by his roommate. Another friend was beyond inebriated, with a guy none of us knew hanging onto her shoulders not ready to let go anytime soon. There were dynamics of somethmm-somethmm developing within our group. Later, completely unrelated, there was a bathroom stall sharing incident, the details of which are a bit fuzzy.
With our “in”-buddy passed out in his roommate’s car en route to bed, we had about as much chance of finding the after party as we had of not being stupid enough to try anyway. We ended up walking for an hour through quiet residential streets with multi-million-dollar, porch-lined, southern mansions loudly debating whether “legare street” is pronounced luh-gair or luh-gree (luh-gree; it’s “french”). We never found the after party, but of course someone inevitably had to urinate in the drive way of a gajillion-dollar mansion. We did manage to eventually all end up at our friend’s place downtown without being stopped by cops, where we crashed for the night.
The highlights of the collective aftermaths today include a lost contact, a clogged kitchen sink, a bloody eye, a lock-in that really wasn’t, shrimp and grits, a Hillary Clinton spotting (that’s Senator Hillary Clinton), and a phone call from a guy whom I apparently gave my number to.
Happy 2006 everyone. I was too busy with libations last night to make resolutions, though it may not be a bad idea to start with “to drink less.”
*Addition* - Reminesce 2005 with Dave Barry in his annual month-by-month year in review.
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