Spring Break: Chronicles of a Hobo

March 24th, 2009

A friend of a twin brother of a friend in Group C was so kind to drop me off in front of the dormitories of the former Scholastic Bowl at UIUC as he drove my friend and my friend’s twin brother back to Illinois. My arrival was met with less fanfare and confetti from the old gang than I expected. Although there were nachos, the news of a cake was a fabrication.

fake uni ID I was a infiltrator in the hordes of UofI students. With forged papers, I rode the buses, studied in the libraries and sat on the grass. Neal & Peter among others, took turns swiping me into dining courts. Neal also got me hooked on the fruit smoothies from LateNight, the local after-hours food source which every college seems to have.

While I was there, Neal and I collaborated to convince some dining court workers to make the “Margaret Thatcher” fruit smoothie. It has peach, strawberries, mango and a hint of “Prime Minister-iness”.

What with being away from smoothies for several days, I’m experiencing fairly severe withdrawal symptoms right now. Cravings, anxiety, dysphoria; all of them.

(Neal, if you are reading this, and I know you are, probably fresh from shooting zombies. I need you to mail me a strawberry banana smoothie in a ziploc bag. Purdue is a produce desert. Exotic fruits like mango and blueberries have been hard to come by with Hillenbrand closed and the Great College of Ag Schism.)

I do miss hanging out with Asians. I did all the requisite college Asian things that I haven’t been able to do with my white friends: basketball, sleeping on the floor, studying in the library. I got so much chemistry done at the undergraduate library. And I finished the anatomy chapter I’ve been holding off on. It was awesome.

I also got to watch real Asians play Super Smash Bros. I learned for the second time what it’s like to be beaten and thrown around by a falsetto-voiced pink puffball (JY). And I was a green dinosaur that threw eggs. It was humiliating.

I was also exposed to a lot of Left4Dead, thanks to Neal.

*Neal is playing Left4Dead.*
Neal: This gas can is my son. His name is Fred. I love him.
Tommy: So you pour his insides all over dead people?
Neal: He isn’t potty-trained yet. No, bad Fred!

Friday, I hitched a ride home with Meredith and her dad, which mostly consisted of me snoring (asleep) in the backseat as “travel disco” played. I got back home and my family all said I got fatter. Then I made a massive backup of all my music and I beat Portal. Just like any other return home.

I refilled on laundry detergent and got a new toothbrush. To cut down on weight and space, mom provided dry detergent. I’ve learned by now not to ask where she does her shopping. Though it was tempting in this case when she presented me with a quarter kilo plastic bag of suspicious-looking but nice-smelling white powder. I made a note to myself to do my own shopping from now on as I tried to make it look less stereotypical by transferring it to a tupperware container.

I also sawed off another toothbrush for the same reasons as last time. It’s about time I indulged myself in a new toothbrush. I think I deserve it.

Posted in Day-to-Day, Inside Jokes | 4 Comments »

My Irrational Tattoo

March 14th, 2009

Earlier in the semester, I woke up one morning and went to the dining hall to find Chris and Dylan already eating.

The three of us walked down to the incessantly-legitimate business establishment where my soon-to-be tattooer was chillin’ on a sofa watching TNT.

It took ten minutes to do, and thankfully, there was much cleaning and unwrapping of instruments beforehand. Assembling the multipart needle apparatus was like putting together a rifle or SLR. Then there was all the cleaning with what smelled like phenolics. The actual process hurt like an intramuscular injection given to me by a power sander. But it wasn’t unbearable. It became easier after a while.

A short while later, we were making our way back to Harrison, hopping fences and disrupting the established order in somewhat of a thuggish manner in accordance with my new status as “badass” although I continue to question the aptness of my new designation.

Everyone at the Grille wanted to see it. And the people on my floor when my RA noticed it in our particularly echoey hallway. And then the engineering majors (which is everybody) found out and I had to roll up the sleeve for them, too.

pi tattoo

The design is mostly original. I pulled a free copy off of the internet and photoshopped the hell out of it. The upper bar is actually originally a tilde that I grew to enormous size and tamed and whittled. The legs are flipped around and slimmed variants of the originals.

I’ll spare you the details of the aftercare which lasted a week at a half and involved much more lotion than I care to remember. Although I will have to say that I bled blue without even being a Cubs fan.

I am not so eager to tell my family about this. It’s not the programmer aunts and engineers uncles that are the problem so much as my immigrant grandmother whose math skills are rudimentary at best and whose world views are essentially reactionary and… “distrustful”.

She’ll think I joined a gang.

When I try to explain to her the concept of using pi as a universal constant for Euclidean calculation, she’ll inevitably fill in the words she doesn’t recognize with such panic-inducing terms as “firearms” and “rollin'” and an image of a young urban thug named “Euclid”.

But so it remains. An irrational and constant reminder of a constant and irrational decision.

Posted in Day-to-Day, Ego, Really Nerdy | 2 Comments »

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