8. 28. 97
Excerpts from a recent chat session with my good friend on a heavily lagged telnet connection in a Unix environment:

Tom: You'll all be very proud of me. I was at the Kitsap Mall, finding a copy of Windows 95 so I could donate $100 to the Microsoft Empire and I passed by Electronics Boutique. I informed my niece Jayme not to shop there as they oppress the righteous with petty managers. Perhaps the sole inspiration for Dilbert. Jayme agreed that she wouldn't go there either then. :)

Go Tom! Is this not a shining example of how to mold young people into conscientious consumers?

Tom: You know, I think if email had mass, my inbox would've long since collapsed from its own weight into a black hole. I'm so bad at deleting things.

He was in rare form on this day. My friend is not only a true scientist but hilariously sarcastic by nature. I can read the smirk on his face and the twitch in his knee from the other side of the world.

Tom: Luana has me convinced that I should DM a D&D game with her gaming group. Frankly, I'm dubious.

Me: Wow, great alliteration in that sentence. Dave says: Dude, DM-ing a dubious D&D disaster can be damaging to your dendrites. Doh!

Wow, was that an AP English flashback? I think yes. Mrs. Schuck where are you? Did you notice the clever comeback Dave and I made? Dave quickly whipped out the response, but I was the one who conjured up "dendrites". I guess my BS (as opposed to BA) is really paying off.

[later]

I'm snacking on Skittles. Normally I wouldn't touch them but I needed something sweet and I'm trying to cut back on chocolate these days. Skittles? Chocolate? Skittles? Chocolate? Chocolate. I'd be scarfing some of it now if it weren't for the fact that there is none in the house and I'd have to go out and actually buy some. I guess my slacker self is more powerful than my addiction. Hmm, which is worse? I think I'd rather keep my addiction and be more motivated. Definitely.

So today is a big laundry day. I gotta get every thing clean before tomorrow's trip. Woohoo! If the plane crashes at least I'll die feeling happy that I was going home. In fact, I'm getting quite anxious, in an unaware kind of way. I think at once that I'm not too excited but then I wake up way too early in the morning and I sit here nervously gobbling Skittles. Something's wacked. I was feeling a little depressed yesterday. I was thinking about how I have all these obligations to visit family while I'm home, but I really want to just indulge: to be debaucherous and a hedonist. The weird thing about when I visited with families while I was home last time was that the get-togethers were business-as-usual. For them it was just another gathering, just like any other. For me, every moment was an American Sensory Extravaganza. I was a sponge trying to soak in every bit of the environment so that I could remember what it was like to be in the country that is Disneyland to rest of the planet. I was annoyed by the difference between my experience and theirs. I'm not looking forward to that again. At least with my friends I can frequent my favorite eateries and rush off to the movies on a whim. With the families we do a lot of sitting. It's not that I don't want to see my family, I just feel so worried that I won't be able to do everything that I want to do. And I only have two weeks!

Now only the orange and red Skittles remain. I'm happy that this bag had a bunch of red ones; they're the best, of course. Too bad I'm full already.
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