I’m so into the Local Food movement, I only eat foods from within fifty yards of my house.

My neighbors are getting really pissed.

You know all those stories about Fairyland or the Netherworld or The Kingdom of the Goblins? Where if you manage to get lost there and stay too long, you end up transforming into a permanent resident?

Fortunately, in most of these stories the hero or heroine escapes the foul clutches of the goblins. Or on rarer occasions, they get rescued by their extraordinarily hot and determined older sister. But what if nobody ever managed to escape? What if the lost souls just kept piling up over the years? What would the Goblin King do then?

Leftover party Tupperware is almost exactly like this.

After holding regular Sunday summer barbecues for several years, I have managed to accumulate quite a motley assortment of kitchen items. The rule seems to be that if the person claims the item in the next few weeks, all is well. But if that doesn’t happen, the item somehow morphs into “my stuff”, whether I want it to or not.

So I offer this plea: People! My cupboard of Tupperware barely closes at this point! Fine as your accoutrements may be, I honestly don’t need any more of them. My home is officially closed to your unwanted Tupperware, bowls, serving implements, shot glasses, and — this should really go without saying — boxes of frozen inedible shrimp!

“Pumpkin” “ale” in any season is right out!

The Goblin King hath spoken.

My little sister has graduated from Scripps college. Congratulations little sis!

In true Goer family fashion, we showed up at the time when the ony seats available were the ones way in the back, the five percent or so that were in the sun the entire time. So we sat and broiled. Meanwhile, waaay up in the front, poor Mom was completely stymied in her efforts to take a good picture of Sarah receiving her diploma. See, the college’s plan was that there would be a line for parents to take pictures near the podium, and you would go line up when your daughter was about five names away from being called. But apparently this was the first year they’d tried this, and so the result was a seething mass of fat middle-aged Titans of Southern Californian Industry, bristling with Nikons. And at the edge there was Mom, all 5’3″ of her. Don’t get me wrong, Mom is pretty tough and all, but the laws of physics were just not working in her favor. Next time we attend a Scripps graduation, we’ll know better.

Still, the speeches were above-average quality as these things go. And when things got a little slow, or if you were trying to take your mind off of the ultraviolet light scorching your skin, you could open the program and try to hum the Scripps Alma Mater to yourself, a particular if you don’t know the tune. Or you could flip through all the senior thesis titles, many of which were of an amusingly musty mid-1990s vintage (ex: Towards an Indigenous Return: Values of Improvisation as Resistance to Capitalist Hegemony). I suppose the one observation I had about the speeches is that they focused so heavily on the theme of doing something extraordinary with your elite education. Not that you shouldn’t run out and change the world, but wouldn’t it nice if speakers would also give a nod to simply absorbing and applying one’s elite education to one’s ordinary life? Because that’s what most people end up doing, if they remember their education at all. To be fair, anyone who gives a commencement speech is going to find it hard to view the college experience through that prism. And I suppose that celebrating the mundane is not what commencement speeches are for.

Heading home from the airport, I caught about two minutes of Tech Nation, which is probably my least favorite NPR show this side of Pacific Time or A Prairie Home Companion. The interviewee was giving a lengthy discourse in business-speak that boiled down to, when you have a group of numbers, a few really large numbers can really bring up the average. He then used this to transition to the tech and biotech industries. Apparently you have to run hundreds of experiments just to get one blockbuster new drug! “This means that really have to rethink how we think about failure,” he said.

That’s when I switched the radio off. And as I drove in the dark, I wondered why someone gets airtime for echoing the fifty-year-old folk wisdom of the Silicon Valley back to us. Clearly this fellow on the radio is serving a vital function in the tech industry ecosystem, but what is it? Is it that we need to be immersed in a soothing reinforcing buzz of innovation, innovation, we are all individuals? Is it something else? I am puzzled.

Five years ago, Brian Gee had to drag me kicking and screaming to the HMC Class of 1997 five-year reunion. I mean, who the heck goes to a five-year reunion? Ridiculous. But in the end, I had a pretty good time. I haven’t accomplished a whole heck of a lot in the intervening five years in terms of fame, fortune, or promulgating the family genome. But I do still have a thick, luxurious head of hair, so — ha!

Anyway, I’m curious — of my classmates who read this journal (all two of you), are you going this time around? And which official events are you attending? The reunion dinner and Media Studio are both mandatory as far as I’m concerned. But I’m not sure about the other events — maybe its best to stay flexible. You don’t want to be stuck at some $20 event when everyone else is running off to Donutman for strawberry doughnuts. Thoughts?

UPDATE: Did you know that this year HMC installed a new president, and her last name is Klawe? President Klawe. That’s beyond awesome.

Also, since my list of accomplishments is so meager, I’m soliciting suggestions for, errr, augmenting this list. Ideally these would be accomplishments that sound impressive, are vaguely plausible, but are extremely hard to verify. Thanks!

Tonight I’m heading over to Sam and Pat’s place. It’s one wild Friday night, let me tell you. We’ll be drinking beer and making Sam’s Famous Spicy Cabbage Soup (not to be confused with Sam’s Famous Tom Kha Gai or Sam’s Famous Chicken Marinade Which Is Definitely Not Kerrick’s Famous Chicken Marinade). Also we might play some head-to-head World of Warcraft. Or maybe even watch the director’s cut of Aliens. Perhaps we will have an extended debate about the merits of the M41A Pulse Rifle, and discuss the evil of Burke and his upturned collar — proof positive that he was an evil corporate drone… from the future! Hey man, this is Soup Night. Anything could happen!

Also, we will be celebrating the completion of Pat’s paramedic internship. Congratulations, Pat! I have to say, I’m a little jealous of Pat right now. He saves lives for a living, and he wears a cool uniform. Chicks dig that kind of stuff. Tech writers… well, we don’t have cool uniforms, although there are some tech writers out there that save lives (indirectly). Of course, there are also tech writers out there that kill people (indirectly). You won’t be surprised to learn that the latter group totally sucks at their job. Losers.

Did God create the flu to punish the wicked? Or did He just want to make sure that all his earthly servants, even the teetotallers, would understand what a crushing hangover feels like?

Woke up Saturday morning feeling awful. Feeling somewhat better Sunday and today, but not good enough to hike into work and spread around the germs. I hear the flu generally knocks people out of commission for a week, so maybe I didn’t have the flu, just a bad cold. Or maybe one helpful factor in my rapid recovery was having Mom and Dad and Little Sis swing by with chicken soup and tea and old WWII movie DVDs. If you have a Mom and Dad and Little Sis in your area, I strongly recommend you add them to your treatment regimen.

Anyway, aside from sleeping a lot, I’ve accomplished quite a bit, I think.

• Watched the aforementioned WWII DVDs, including Guadalcanal Diary and Halls of Montezuma. Twentieth Century Fox helpfully ships each DVD with a yellow “Support Our Troops” magnet. Since I don’t own an SUV, I’ve decided to put the magnet on my refrigerator instead.

• Read Dru‘s collection of Russian fairy tales. Maybe it’s the fever, but man, even by European folk tale standards, the Russian stuff is downright nonlinear.

• Finished Njal’s Saga. Now the Icelandic sagas, at least, are coherent stories. They’re populated with authentic medieval people, true, but you can at least understand WTF is going on most of the time. Maybe the Icelanders didn’t have access to the same drugs the Russians had.

• Read the entire His Dark Materials trilogy. Some of the best YA I’ve ever read.

• Paid some bills. Despaired at the disorganized state of my office. Halfheartedly picked up some papers.

• Fixed a broken spatula with Krazy Glue. Krazy Glue and duct tape will get you far in life.

• Nearly sent my broken window fan back to the manufacturer. The fan had mysteriously stopped working a few months ago, and I’d been waffling about whether to toss it or get them to send a replacement under warranty. I bet they didn’t plan on anyone in this throwaway consumer culture taking them up on their “five year warranty”, ha! But then I discovered the fan was… mysteriously working again. Righteous high dudgeon faded, just as mysteriously.

• Catalogued some recent books in Delicious Library. Looked at books that I have loaned out to other people. “Oh yeah, she’s the one who has my Feynman book. Guess I’m not seeing that one again.”

• Dropped my 24 Hour Fitness membership — something I should have done a year and a half ago. With the corporate gym, there’s just no reason to be a member of a separate gym. Of course if you have the flu, there’s just no reason to be a member of any gym. Slim that waistline — results guaranteed!

I just finished sending off email thank-yous to all the holiday cards I received this year. Admittedly, sending an email response to a physical Christmas card is probably not up to snuff from an etiquette standpoint. I can only hope that my friends have low expectations, given that the Undomesticated Young Jewish Male is perhaps the least likely demographic in the English-speaking world to do a good job with the whole holiday card thing. Anyway, I have grown to appreciate holiday cards, and despite my failure to fully hold up my end of the holiday card bargain, friends and relatives keep sending them to me anyway. And so I read them and smile and put them up on the mantle and feel warm and fuzzy seeing them up there. So, thank you friends and relatives!

I did have a disturbing experience sending thank-yous this year. I picked up one card from an old friend of mine that had arrived a few days before. It was a delightful little card with a hand-drawn cartoon on the front, portraying each family member as a robot with a Santa hat. “Oh, the robot card! I really liked the robot card,” I thought. Then I opened an email to send them a thank you — and suddenly I experienced the sensation of knowing who to send it too but not the name of the person to send it to. I could remember my friend’s face, the names and faces of my friend’s immediate family, the name of her blog (which I had read several hours before), but not her actual name. I considered looking inside the card, but decided that no, that would be cheating. Finally, after about fifteen agonizing seconds, my brain dredged out the correct name. Stupid brain! What do I pay you for, anyway?

Recently, this has been happening a lot to names of good friends, fairly close relatives, and other bits of information that I should be able to retrieve instantaneously. Last night, I took my sisters and my brother-in-law to a holiday party, and I remember introducing my brother-in-law as, “this is uh, my brother-in-law Adiv.” I cleverly snuck in the “uh, my brother-in-law” part because I needed an extra one-and-a-half seconds to retrieve his name. This is a guy I’ve known for about six years now, not to mention that we had been chatting in the car just a few minutes before. At least I remembered my sisters’ names. And the hosts. That would have been embarrassing.^[1]

If I were exhibiting any other symptoms, I’d be seriously worried that this was some kind of early-onset medical condition. Then again, if I were experiencing any other symptoms, would I be the best one to notice? Maybe I should ask friends and family members to please keep an eye out for… what, exactly? Agitation? Mood swings? Irascibility? Hoo-boy. I’m basically screwed.

1. An addendum to the party: as I started up the car for the trip home, I saw a five-or-six point buck galloping down the sidewalk, nearly brushing the car. Fortunately, everyone else in the car saw it too. So I’m not going completely crazy.

Today I went to the annual Ryan Troll Holiday party, which includes a “White Elephant” gift exchange.

What I gave up: components for a vintage 1998 home-built computer — 350 MHz Pentium II processor with heatsink and fan, Asus P2B motherboard, 128 MB of screaming fast RAM, Matrox graphics card with 8 MB of VRAM, two sound cards, various cables and documentation.

What I received: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wine in near-mint condition.

Looks like Santa’s got my back this year. I’m as tsetummelt as anyone over this. Who knew?

Happy birthday to me! I am 100000 years old today.

Also, happy birthday to Tovarisch Andrei Zmievski, who has just turned the big 3-0. Tomorrow I and many other Party members in good standing will be reporting to comrade Andrei’s dascha to celebrate this glorious occasion. After all, we don’t want to be first against the wall when the Revolution comes.

Sam: who needs an alarm system? http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060922/od_nm/austria_heads_dc

Evan: Wunderbar.

Evan: I thought that in order to construct your Post-Apocalyptic Throne of Skulls, you had to actually live in the post-apocalyptic era. But I guess all you need to be is an ordinary Austrian dentist.

Sam: Who knew?

Evan: seriously.

Sam: Novacaine for the Blood God!

Evan: haha

Evan: I wonder if those tests you take for job aptitude & career placement are able to measure your capabilities as a post-apocalyptic warlord.

Evan: “Dentist, Pharmacist, …”

Evan: “Post Apocalyptic Warlord”

Sam: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how positively do you view pain inflicted on others for your own gain?”

Sam: 9-10 range probably qualifies you for dentist/warlord

Sam: altho the pile of skulls thing does make dentistry that much more metal.

Evan: Again, who knew?

Sam: Not your average austrian burglar thats for sure.