Outie

Well, this is it. I'm punching the sky at 5:10 today, and I'm not coming back until January. I took all my finals, turned everything in, and there's only one thing left. It's a little weird, but I think it's important.

In the world of the internet, Suite 3100 sorta floats on a cloud. If you tried to make a map of Wash U from the stories we tell, it would be a couple of lecture halls, five suites and three rooftops (though I only saw two); a very small liberal arts college. As it turns out, we've got neighbors. Suite 3090 has been pretty quiet this term, and may actually be empty. Suite 3110, however, made first contact last night. Vlad is gone, Alfonzo is AWOL, and Alan was out with Maggie, so I was the one who answered the door.

She's tall, and I don't like tall chicks, so being tall was her first mistake. Her second mistake was walking right in when I opened the door. She crossed her arms and looked me up and down (which is usually a good thing, but she was tall, so it pissed me off) before asking me if the angry depressed goth kid named Alfonzo is my suitemate. I told her he wasn't goth, but that yeah, he lives here.

She pulled out her cameraphone and showed me a picture of him. Pretty good picture of Alfonzo, honestly--dark jacket, cigarette, tape recorder, standing under the Westfield West County sign. That pretty much sums him up, I think.

So she tells me that she saw him at Westfield, and that he was shouting racial slurs into his tape recorder. She recognized him, so she walked up and asked what he was doing (I could have told her that was a bad idea. Never directly approach an Alfonzo in the wild). He stopped tape, kinda glared at her a little bit, then hit record again and started talking about her, in front of her. The word "bitch" was used, and I'm guessing that's the least of it.

Anyway, when she was done with her story, she just kind of stood there with her arms crossed. I shrugged, and she asked me where he was. I told her he was probably right where she left him, and she growled at me and left.

Neighbors... Jesus...

Not that I have to deal with her until next semester.

Like the title of the post says, I'm Outie!

-Chaz

On Filthy Goddamn Southerners

I love them. I'm not talking about Alan (he isn't filthy, and he's more of a "damn southerner" than a "goddamn" one). I'm talking about Brody.

Brody isn't the most-popular guy in Suite 3100, or at Wash U. in general (while we were at an ATM, a girl walked by him and said only the words "Brody the douche". I'm told it's his ex-girlfriend), but I like him. He represents, to me, some of the best parts of the South.

He's lazy.
He's cheap.
He's an idiot.
He talks about Jesus even though he doesn't know anything about him.
He likes guns and gratuitous violence.
He drinks bad liquor.
He's ugly.

In California, you find people who fit two, maybe three of these characteristics. I know plenty of dumb, ugly, cheapskates. I know plenty of people who talk about Jesus and love guns. I know people who are ugly enough for it to count as three separate characteristics. But, in my entire life, Brody is the first person I've met who had all of these things wrapped together.

Plus, he's loaded.


I got online, bored and sober and looking for something to do. Brody, at some point, probably while I was drunk, made it onto my buddy list, and he was the only person who wasn't studying for a final or writing a paper, so we started talking. He wanted to go on some sort of adventure, inevitably involving marijuana and low-grade explosives; I told him I'd see what I could scrape together.

Brody bought the contraband, and I borrowed Alan's zig-zags and his magical joint-rolling pen. I've only ever seen Alan do it, but it seemed simple enough, so I told Brody I knew how. I think I rolled a pretty decent joint for a first-attempt, even though we had to pull on it like we were sucking an egg through a hose (an Alan-ism, probably from the South).

We ended up at Waffle House (after something like seventy wrong turns. Brody was driving). I ordered a hearty southern man's dinner: TEXAS Cheesesteak, double order of hashbrowns, smothered, covered and chunked, and a regular order of hashbrowns smothered and topped.

As I ate my chili-browns, I said to Brody, "You know what I'm doing right now? I'm giving you a great reason to get us back to campus without getting lost." He looked at my plate, then at me, and a look of absolute horror hit his face.

Oh, I forgot that part of being from the South: he farts, and he respects farting as a bargaining token.

Anyway, there's not much point to this story, I realize. I just wanted an excuse to post more pictures. It's no photo-essay (I couldn't stand up to Carl's adventures), but I like the pictures.

Brody using his dick-berry mobile device. Why does he need it? Nobody knows. What good is it? Marking himself as a target for muggers.



Yours truly, in my best Waffle House outfit. That's a Wal-Mart hat. Cost me a dollar, it did.



Brody eating a bowl of chili, so he could return fire on the car ride back to campus. While he wasn't paying attention, I payed our waitress a dollar to spit in it.

Alright, I guess I've got finals to study for.

-Chaz

Holy Shit!

I heard, last night, that it was supposed to snow. I woke up and looked out the window this morning, and there wasn't a single snowflake to be seen. After showering, I came back into my room and saw the magic begin. And it has continued, almost without stopping, since 8:20 this morning. It's snowing lighter now than it has all day, but we've got a solid 3 or 4 inches on the ground.

All these midwesterners and new englanders look at me weird when I run around in the snow, kicking it, tossing balls of it into the air, laughing like a retard the whole time. They don't understand. It's SNOW! Here, I took some pictures for you:

Here, we see a normal, everyday staircase turned evil slippery death-trap of doom. It was all I could do to go to class, knowing that if I waited long enough, I'd see someone bust their ass.

This is the big street that runs between WU campus and the South 40. I spent most of my day staring out the windows at the rooves of buildings. The sky was exactly the same color as the rooves; the only way I knew where one ended and the other began was by finding the faint line between them! It was like the whole campus got swallowed into some endless white void. I think I've seen a movie or a TV show that that happened in.

Finally, nobody knows how to chill on a snow day better than Wash U's "The Bunny". There've been a lot of people bad mouthing the bunny ever since Taco Bell got kicked off campus; they say that everyone loved the bell and everyone hates the bunny. I think the fact that the bunny has stayed, not moving, just thinking about shit, says a lot about his right to be there. Taco Bell sucked, anyway; you can find higher quality beef in a public restroom, if you look hard enough.

Alright, well I'm going with Alan to Wal-Mart so we can buy a sled! Who knows when we'll see this much snow again?

-Chaz

Oh, Alan

There really is something to the hippie way of life, Alan. I know this isn't the first time we've gone out smoking, but every time we do, I fall asleep in the best fucking mood. Booze isn't really the drug of happy people. People drink to forget. They drink to forget their job, they drink to forget their wife (or husband), and they drink so that they can become somebody they can't be sober. At 5'o'clock, America turns into a country of Mr. Hydes. They drink to let the monsters out.

I say "they" like I haven't done it, but I have. Everybody has monsters inside, somewhere.

Since things have been pretty quiet around Suite 3100 (the blog and the actual suite), I guess I'll give you an update. Just to be fair, I'm not really the "go-to" guy for keeping track of people's emotional lives; I'm really only able to see what people do when they are around.

Okay, so Vlad lives in the library now. He asked around--professors, deans, and the head librarian--and made a list of books he should read before starting next semester as a English major. That was almost two weeks ago, I think. He stops by, every once in a while, to visit the suite. Even then, he turns the TV to CNN as soon as he comes in, and you can tell he's only half listening when you talk to him. Whatever happened to him has turned him into some sort of sponge for information. If he could plug the internet straight into his head, I'm sure he would; I wouldn't be surprised if he's working on a way to do it. Also, last time I asked, Vlad isn't planning on going home for the holiday break. Such is his dedication.

Of all the things on Vlad's to-do list, there's been one thing that he's had trouble getting done. He's been visiting the suite partially to see me and Alan, but the main reason is because he's trying to reconsile with Alfonzo. Old Alfie got pretty secretive when Vlad and I came back from Kansas. I haven't seen him since the news came down that Vlad was becoming an English major. It seems pretty clear that Alfonzo is planning something, but he's got so many arch-nemeses that he could be after any one of them. My best guess is that he's at the mall with Cliff. He's definitely not with that gothic high school girl anymore, unless she gets off on writing death threats to him on her blog. Alfonzo, always a mystery to me.

And Alan. Alan and I have been around the suite, mostly. He spends more time here than he used to; less time over in Dauten, either due to having too much work or being too lazy to make the trip as often. We try to watch a movie every other night--something neither of us has seen. As it turns out, I've seen pretty much everything he hasn't (action, western, slasher flicks, and comedies like American Pie) and he's seen everything that I haven't (indie stuff, chick flicks, stuff they call "pussy fare" down at the frats). Sometimes we think of something we both haven't seen, but mostly one of us ends up making the other one watch the essentials. I think he really liked "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly," and I thought "The Royal Tenenbaums" was pretty funny (I didn't know Owen Wilson did serious movies).

But enough about movies. Alan has been posting occasionally, so there isn't much I can say about him that you don't already probably know. He seems stressed out and tired, but who isn't at the end of semester. I haven't seen Marina around as much, but she takes, like, ten language courses. She's probably lying dead, somewhere, under a pile of _______-to-English dictionaries.

Humans are not supposed to live in weather this cold. It never got this cold last year, did it? Today it was 17 degrees, but it felt like 5. Tomorrow's high is a whopping 28 degrees; I'm sweating already!

As much as I love college (and I fucking love college), I can't wait to get back to Cali, because God has obviously abandoned the Midwest.

-Chaz