The Finite

In a standing agreement established last year, John, Matt, JY and I were to wait outside Fry’s Electronics for the Black Friday sale. Matt picked us up from our respective houses at 11:00PM and we drove to Downers Grove. When we arrived, there wasn’t much of a line. It only stretched 120 feet from the doors to one corner of the building.

I had maybe overprepared. I was just a little paranoid because a week earlier, I was helping to build the Habitat for Humanity house in Lafayette and I was woefully underdressed. I had on only a windbreaker over a sweater to fight the 20° air. And my usually oversized feet shrunk from the cold causing cold air to rush into my shoes, making them even colder

Well, I swore not to let that happen again. I wore my Schol bowl hoodie, sweatpants under my jeans and three layers of socks, as well as my winter coat and gloves. I guess my Columbia “outerwear” is not really outerwear if I wear something over it. Well, in that case, it’s like a non-windbreaking cotton jacket thing that I also wore.

I also overprepared equipment wise. This was my first Fry’s camp out after all. Who knows what we’ll have to face. I brought my old 4-person tent, which definitely came in handy. I also had two sleeping bags, Scrabble, and water bottles. We also had our brass knuckles, my rape whistle, and for protection, the “Doorbuster”: an old wooden bat embedded with shards of that plastic that encapsulates new flash drives.

JY says he misses being mentioned on my blog and has sworn a personal vendetta against Dilbo.

It wasn’t long in the tent before I realized: I had so many pants that I couldn’t bend at the waist. I had to run back to Matt’s van to lose a pair. Luckily he parked in a corner of the parking lot. I tried to get redressed as fast as possible. One van almost pulled up next to it, but then pulled away at the last minute. Possibly because they saw a better spot, possibly because either the driver or the kid in the backseat saw me. Hopefully the former.

We tried to do a lot of stuff in the tent: sleep, talk, watch a movie. There was so MUCH sex though! I was surprised, but I should have known better. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a Judd Apatow production.

I think one of the gratuitous sex scenes chased away those loud Cantonese speakers who were having a conversation near our tent. If you’ve never heard a Cantonese conversation before, they’re basically yelling at each other, no matter what they’re talking about. I don’t know why it happens but I’ve observed it in my family too. They made the beginning of the movie difficult to watch, plus someone kept cast weird shadows on the tent or making… flapping … noises.

At 3:50 the line began to get impatient and compressed itself towards the door, forcing us to disassemble the tent and wrap ourselves in blankets as we moved up to 70 feet from the door in a dense crowd. When the ten-minute countdown started, there was a standoff between some unscrupulous shoppers that had just arrived, who were planning on jumping the barricades outside the door and being lost in the inrushing crowd, which they did, despite the police officers on duty. With no time to watch the ensuing fistfight, all four of us were split up and rushed headlong in the store, vaulting over planters and dodging shopping carts.

We reunited burdened with many value-priced electronics, John and I each with BFGs, JY with a external HDD and Walthers with nothing. There were also free-after-rebate microSD cards, card readers, $15 wireless-N routers and $10 8GB flash drives. As usual with new flashdrives, I superstitiously wore it on a lanyard around my neck to ward off evil spirits and manufacturer defects.