Georgetown is Sort of Sucking at this Housing Thing

I have a lot of fun experience with nonsensical bureaucracy and every time I've called they've been very very nice, so I'm still considering this to be an amusing cultural introduction rather than a full-blown annoyance.

Here is the full timeline of events (I have dates because e-mail archives do fun things like remember dates):

March 18th: I receive the letter letting me know that I've been accepted to law school.  Luckily, it's the one I applied to.  Everything is going great.

March 24th: I attend the admitted students open house/weekend.  Very impressive.  Love it.  Everything is going great.

March 25th: I put in a deposit for the housing lottery to hopefully secure a spot in the on-campus apartment building which seems very nice and has a serious location advantage.  I can find housing elsewhere, but it would be nice.  I am told by e-mail that the lottery drawing "will be held at the beginning of May" (emphasis mine) and I also note that "the Office of Residence Life must receive your signed occupancy agreement by June 15th," so I figure I'll have everything squared away a few weeks before then.

May 16th: I write a blog entry in which I convince myself that my memory has lost all credibility because I was CERTAIN that I would know by May 15th for some reason.  Looking back I realize that I probably came up with that date because all the days occurring BEFORE May 15th could be reasonably considered "the beginning" of May.  Logical reasoning.  Good for me.  I double-check the housing website and see that the lottery deposit date was moved to May 13th, so I decide they've just slightly delayed the drawing and I will know soon enough.

May 26th: Just for fun while I'm at home I give the Office of Residence Life a call.  The guy on the line was extremely pleasant.  He told me that the lottery had been held and that letters informing people of their housing had been sent out.  I should receive it by the next day, May 27th.  I asked if they would e-mail out the information as well.  He said they would not as it was official confidential something something something and needed to be mailed.  Great.  So I'll know on the 27th.

May 27th:  I drive back from Burlington, arriving at 1AM.  There is no letter.  Also, Monday is Memorial Day so there will be no letter til Tuesday.  That's okay.

May 31st (Today):  The mail comes but there is no letter.  That's okay, the nice guy I talked with told me to call back if I didn't get a letter by Friday.  I call back.  This time I'm talking with a very nice woman.  She seems entirely unsurprised that I did not get a letter.  She says that she is going to transfer me to the woman in charge who will then just e-mail me my results from the housing lottery.  I resist mumbling something about confidentiality.  I am transfered.  The phone rings.  It goes to voicemail.  I leave a message.  Keeping my fingers crossed for a response.... ever.

Predicted future:

June 1st-14th:  Nothing happens.

June 15th:  I receive a call from a very nice person at Res Life asking why I have not yet submitted my signed occupancy agreement.  I groan in frustration.  They are not surprised by this.  They transfer me to the person in charge.  The person in charge is on vacation.  I leave a message...

August 20th:  I move in to the library.  I bring a tent and a sleeping bag.  I pay no rent.  Life is wonderful.  They try to evict me but are unable to contact the proper person in charge of the library.  He or she is out of the office.  They leave a message.  I live there for three years until I've completed my studies.

I Still Write Music

This is the trailer for my good friend Thomas's new comic masterpiece.  He asked me a few months ago to do the score and told me to make it as serious and epic as possible.  As you might figure out from the trailer, I had a lot of fun with it.  Just this afternoon finished a draft of the song that will go with the ending credits.

"We Won't Be Too Mean"

I would like to tell you that today I returned to my apartment in Maryland to find the letter from the housing department that I was told would be there.  In fact, I would LOVE to say that.  I'm not worried, I'm just ready to know so that I can start making some plans.

So instead of planning my future today, I went and played laser tag.

Tyler, Palmer, Kirk and I met up at the designated place in Arlington, and when we walked in it was apparent that we were in the middle of a ten year old's giant birthday party.  When we bought our tickets, the woman at the front desk looked at us and said "you know you're playing with a bunch of kids, right?"  to which Palmer responded: "we won't be too mean."

We ended up playing two rounds and getting pretty well crushed each time by the onslaught of tiny children (who make TERRIBLE targets).  We went as far as trying to secure the second floor battlements, which had only points of entry, but that was to no avail.  Fun, though.

After laser tag Tyler and I went to a nearby mall to see if we could find a DVD of the best of Star Trek TNG in order to use it to play BeerTrek.  BeerTrek is a game that I discovered college courtesy of one of my PMA music fraternity brothers and is up there among the nerdiest things that I do.  Since I didn't remember the exact rules, Tyler and I made up a new batch that we felt would do the job.  We didn't end up finding a new DVD, but here are the rules anyway, in case anyone wants to play or add to them:

The Illustrious Rules of BeerTrek

The Most Noble Game where Man Drinks Beer to what no Man has Drunk Beer to Before

While Watching StarTrek: The Next Generation

ONE MUST DRINK WHEREUPON IT IS POINTED OUT THAT:

• Data remarks upon his emotional state, or his desire for one.
• Warf expresses an aggressive emotion or desire.
• There is unusual or unnecessary sexual tension.
• Picard says “Make it so.”
• Someone is teleported.
• Someone says “onscreen.”
• Someone is scanned.
• Someone wears a costume which was clearly not made for ease of movement in space.
• Picard says “star date.”
• They go into warp drive.
• The prime directive is called upon.
• Geordi is blind. (This one can be invoked at any time, excepting cases in which you're watching a rare episode in which Geordi regains his sight.)

ONE MUST FINISH THEIR BEER WHEREUPON IT IS NOTED THAT:

• A little-known extra dies.
• The warp drive malfunctions.
• There is an identifiable guest-star (he or she who makes the ID does not have to drink). (Actual names are not necessary. For example: Shooter McGavin! John Locke! etc...)
• The Enterprise is boarded in a hostile way.
• A time/space paradox is formed or narrowly avoided.
• The previous scene was a dream/hallucination/implanted memory.

Past the Point of No Return

In lieu of coming to her high school graduation, my sister requested that I come see her sing at her school's end-of-year musical revue.  That's a trade I was all too happy to make.  

So I went back for a very brief jaunt in Burlington.  Rachel's role was singing three of Christine's songs from Phantom.  I didn't really know what to expect, since I have mostly heard her sing in the lower range in the past.  The show had some trouble starting off: they were doing a Rogers and Hammerstein medley (oh man do I hate medleys... if Rogers and Hammerstein wanted their music squashed together like that, then they would have written it that way.) and the backing CD started to skip.  Having been behind the sound board during similar mishaps, my heart went out to the poor sound tech.  That said, someone immediately made the decision to replace the skipping CD with the rehearsal CD (the one you sing along with that still has all the voices on it).  So.  Rogers and Hammerstein medley karaoke-style.  Even better.

The kids deserve commendation for dealing with it as well as they did- they still tackled the music gamely and there were some very good voices among them.  Fortunately they saved Rachel's songs for right near the very end, and all the technical glitches were fixed by then (though there was one microphone that kept cutting out and I was hoping that she wouldn't end up with that one by some sort of cruel theatrical Russian Roulette- she didn't).  When she started to sing the show went from feeling like a musical revue to feeling like a show.  If her voice were in the actual Broadway show either no one would notice or they would think Christine's voice was better than usual. And I'm not saying that just because I'm her brother.  If it weren't true this blog post would be about something else entirely.  Much better than sitting through a graduation.  Good deal.  Here are pictures:

 

My grandmother and aunt came down from MD as well.

 

Since my phone works as a camera, I ended up taking the pictures without being in any of them.  Ah well.

In other good-deal news, I gave Georgetown a call because I read the housing information sheet again and saw that it indeed did say the lottery would be held in "early May."  So I'm not crazy.  They said that they had just done the lottery and had sent out mail and that I should have it by Friday.  Hurrah.  I hope it's good news.  I'm assuming it's good news.  Either way I'll know, and knowing is half the battle.

And Then I Ground the Testicles

I was going to write up a whole story about the great haggis-roast this weekend that the ever gracious Kirk and Julianne hosted, but I feel like pictures should do....  To preface: Will, Kirk, and Tyler bought an entire lamb and then invited a lot of people over to eat the various parts of it.  The main focus was on the oft-neglected bits.

The very appropriately-garbed William holding our three sacks of haggis, which I had the great honor of helping to grind.  What went in the grinder?  Lamb heart, lamb lungs, lamb liver, and lamb fat.

 Will, Tyler and I with the finished haggis product, shortly after the haggis was ceremonially marched out as I piped (wearing a very meta t-shirt that says "I would rather be playing my bagpipe") and subsequently given the official Robert Burns haggis toast.

And then I ground the testicles.  The resulting "white pudding" was considerably less successful and delicious than the haggis, but didn't kill anyone...

Old friends, new friends, very new food, and a beautiful day well spent.  Haggis, I was surprised, is actually pretty tasty when done right.

Hey Mr. Johnson... do you still teach here?

This Thursday and Friday I returned to my true Virginia home, Woodberry.  Woodberry is a place towards which I have an unreasonably unwaivering loyalty-- the kind of place where I would want to make my last stand in the event of zombies (and not just for the advantageous terrain and built-in supply of weaponry thanks to the rod and gun club).

The official purpose of my visit was to go see Oooooooooooook-LAHOMA in its debut performance on the Woodberry stage, but even if there were no shows to see I would still try and visit every few months because I like the people so very much (and with three month intervals between visits,  they are both excited to see me AND remember who I am).   I had dinner in the dining hall to take advantage of the delicious food (I gave terrible looks to students who didn't appreciate having prime rib- "again").  There is also never any lack of Woodberry news, and I was entertained with many a snarky story.

The production itself was fantastic.  I had never seen Oklahoma! and was expecting it to be a dry 1940's musical.  In reality it's quite innovative (it balks a lot of musical traditions that I had been under the mistaken impression it had started)  and the cast was having a lot of fun with it.  I didn't realize until the end of the show that a couple of students (who had been on tech crew last year) gave me shout-outs in their playbill bios.  One said something along the lines of "special thanks to Houyoux [edit: my predecessor as tech director] for teaching me everything I know about tech, and also to the god among men, Mike Johnson."  I was both touched and pleased that he accurately attributed all tech skill teaching to not me.

Friday afternoon, before I left, another Woodberry alum (who also helped out with Usher) played an organ recital that was open to the community.  He did a number of beautiful pieces and ended by DESTROYING Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C Minor (less impressive version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFW7bk_oQ1Y) .  Very cool.

As I left the Forest once again I got an e-mail from one of the guys in my class- someone who I hadn't talked to since reunion.  It was a group e-mail to a number of us who used to be involved with "The Pariah," which was the underground (often highly inappropriate) literary magazine that only existed for our senior year.  Attached was the greatest thing that we (or maybe not me- you have no proof that I was involved) ever published: a letter from an angry parent (of a boy who got kicked out for lying) which we proceeded to mark up and edit as though it were the first draft of a 9th grader's English essay.  The general tenor of the note was that they were far too important, rich, and well connected for their son to be kicked out, even though he did, admittedly, lie.  It was very poorly written (by a PHD, as they informed us many times in the letter).  The parents also decided to forward it to the entire student body in the hopes that it would incite sympathy from the students.  It did not.  (For the record: it is a terrible thing anytime a kid is kicked out of any school and Woodberry admittedly has harsher regulations than most, but when you invoke the "we're rich and know people" defense AND you make the letter public, you're pretty much asking for derision.)

I would post the best-of the letter but it would be impossible to do so without including identifying features, which would be unfair to the kid who got kicked out so many years ago.  This is the "teacher's note" at the end, though:  

We were not terribly nice, but what great bonding we had that night poring over this essay for mistakes (just as we never had for our own).

Still Don't Know Where I'm Living Next Year

I was expecting to hear about student housing sometime nowish because I got it into my head that May 15th was the day that they ran the lottery thing and notified people.  Going back and reading all the information over again, I realize that I must have completely made that up.  See?  My memory is TERRIBLE and I MAKE THINGS UP and don't even know it  (or they did have May 15th written down at some point and then decided to change the date for administrative purposes).  My reasoning behind making this blog grows stronger by the day.

I should still find out sometime soon...

In the meantime, I have cobbled together a great way to make bacon, egg, and cheese bagels.

Okay, so breakfast foods aren't hard for... anyone... but it's the only meal over which I have some sort of culinary control.  I JUST learned how to bake a potato a month ago (thanks, Josh).

I had a better picture of the completed bagel, but I'll have to settle for this prep picture because I didn't actually save the finished picture and the bagel lasted mere seconds after that. 

Circle of Life

Saturday evening I went down to DC (as I do semi-regularly now) to hang out with Tyler and Palmer, some old Woodberry friends. Tyler Brown is quite literally the Woodberry friend I have known the longest, as he was my host when I visited the Woodberry campus for the very first time. His gloriously blatant honesty (which contrasted sharply with the patronizing feeling I got from my hosts at other schools I visited) was the thing that tipped me over the edge in wanting to go to Woodberry.

The conversation went something like this (but it was ten years ago, so it's likely that none of this actually happened and I've gone beyond paraphrasing into mythology):

Me: "So tell me about Woodberry."

Tyler: "Sometimes it sucks. A lot of people don't like being here because they were forced to go here in one way or another. There are a good number of jerks. A lot of the rules are arbitrary But... it's a beautiful campus, they've got lots of resources, and if you want to they'll let you do really awesome things sometimes."

And that was it for me. It was a good choice on my part, and I've always been grateful to Tyler for, in his own way, convincing me to go to Woodberry.

This year, in another completely roundabout way, Tyler Brown convinced me to go to Law School. Well, it was mostly Palmer, but Tyler was the catalyst and if I can fit Tyler into the story it makes for a nicer... story.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll put the details of that conversion ("what?! I DON'T hate the idea of law?") in another post.

Back to Saturday. Palmer finished his final law school exams and so we had some drinks and then went to the BEST Chinese place ever, Jackey Cafe. On second thought, I really have no objective way of knowing whether it's the best ever, but the sesame chicken I had there was the BEST sesame chicken I've ever had.

Sunday- saw Thor with Tyler. Entertainingly underwhelming.

Sunday evening Tyler and I went into Baltimore to find somewhere random to eat before he took a train back to DC. We took a gamble with an Afghan Kabob place and won bigtime. After tenuously placing our order with the ten-year-old cashier (no one else seemed to be around, so we thought he might be making our food as well...) we sat back and watched Al Jazeera on the TV for a bit (where I learned more about the upcoming Endeavor launch than I think I ever would have on CNN, FOX, NBC, etc...). When the food came out, there was a ton of it and the kabobs were delicious. More importantly, though, my meal came with a side-dish of seasoned chickpeas which may as well have been laced with laced with crack cocaine. I could have eaten those chickpeas for every meal for a week. They were THAT good (though I'm pretty sure I'm displaying my ignorance about crack cocaine and drug consumption in general when saying something like that. I just don't have any go-to metaphors for when something tastes good, since tastes are subjective. Laced with nicotine? Salvia? I'm out of my territory here. Is there a highly addictive and flavorless substance that you just eat?).

So this entire post was to say that if you go to Afghan Kabob on North Charles Street in Baltimore, I recommend the chickpeas. That was what I wanted to get across when I sat down (stood up) to write this.

Standing

This weekend, the last group of people that I actually really know and was friends with in college are graduating. Congratulations to all of my friends at WM- including Absi, who gets to graduate from WM twice, but this time with a Masters.

I realized a few days ago that, with the absence of these folk to greet me whenever I return to Williamsburg, they have been replaced by... students at William and Mary whom I have taught at Woodberry. Awesome. Now I'm old. That thought works especially well today, as my back is killing me.

I've had pull-up bar that I can hang on a doorway for over a year now, but I haven't used it much this year because I don't really have a door with a proper frame that is tall enough. I mentioned this yesterday to Pete, and he made me feel REALLY smart by suggesting I just use the shorter door and bend my knees in order to keep my feet off the ground. That worked great, and so I celebrated by doing many rounds of pull ups throughout the day just because I could. This morning I remembered that I hadn't been regularly working out those specific muscles in my back when I awoke to the feeling of being crucified (not the hands and feet and blood and Christian allusion part, but the compressed-back-difficult-to-breathe part). It's slowly improving, but it's nice to have physical reminders of when I have been especially foolish.

One intelligent (I hope) thing I did the other day involved chucking my desk chair and converting my awesome worksstation into an even more awesome STANDING work station. Of course, being me and being extremely cheap, this is how I did it:

It's all surprisingly stable.

There have been a number of studies recently that say sitting down all day is bad for your health. I mostly just wanted to try out a different configuration, and so far it has vastly increased my productivity. My feet hurt terribly at the end of any given day, but I feel like eventually I will get used to it. Probably around the time I move out.

Speaking of which, I theoretically find out either tomorrow or the next day if I made it into the student apartment complex on campus. The odds are very good, but it would be nice to have confirmation that I have somewhere to live for the next year.

At Least I Know I Don't Know What I'm Getting Into

Why am I starting this blog?

I find more and more that I have a terrible memory and having a blog or journal may, relativistically, increase my lifespan. When going back through the blog I kept while I was in China, I constantly find things that I had forgotten. This allows me to relive those moments, in a way, and reclaim them. I also pretty regularly find information in my online past (e-mails, blogs, etc...) which partially or completely contradict stories which I have been telling for years and which I had come to believe. Since I can’t trust myself in the future to get things right, I have to trust myself now to write things right.

(Subtext: the two blogs that I once kept were not enough to satisfy my raging narcissism.)

The main purpose of this blog is to chronicle, in some small way, the next three years as I attempt to get a J.D. It will not be limited to discussions of Law School, because I like it when other things happen, too. I will do my very best to update regularly, but the reason that I’m making a public blog (rather than keeping a private journal) is so that I might feel some sort of pressure from friends and family to actually write once in a while. I lack internal willpower in a lot of areas... record keeping is one of them.

The name of the blog comes from a quotation which I was forwarded while I was attending admitted students day about a month ago. As the story goes, a graduating law student sent a text message to a friend of his (who in turn turned out to be a friend of mine) saying something along the lines of: “Admitted students day here at the law school. They look too happy for a group of people about to walk into a buzz saw!”

Great. Bring it.