overload for sanity and survival

Frequent readers of the site and others who keep close tabs on me understand that my life is not one that would be called "particularly interesting." As such, I spent one evening rummaging through old pictures I took with my digital camera. I forgot that I had amassed quite a collection of photos of tabletops I started sometime last summer for lack of anything else to take pictures of (neighbors got a new set of curtains.) Here is the first of what will be a regular feature.

July 20, 2001 in dorm room (Evanston, IL)
This is why I thought I was cool enough to have a website. It is the top of my fridge and shelf-thing in my dorm room and it just happened to show a good cross section of most of my interests at the time. Last summer I had absolutely nothing to do. I was taking one class that met 3 hours a week and that was taught by a friend of mine. I was playing ultimate frisbee three or four times a week. Outside of that, the only thing I had scheduled was occasionally sleeping. Most of my friends had left the area or were working more than a few hours a week. The people who lived around me in the dorm were all taking Orgo-- one of the hardest classes here at NU-- so none of them intended to see any daylight that summer. After a few weeks, I figured I had to find something better to do before they killed me out of sheer irritation. There were a few times I bumped into them as they came back from 8 hours of class whereas I was wandering out of my room having just woken up at 5 in the afternoon (did I mention that I had a night class?) Whenever that happened, they didn't say much, but those eyelids got a little twitchy.

The only arranging I did for the picture was to move the case logic in the back to where it would be more readable. In it, you can barely see two DVD rips; Rounders and Chasing Amy. That case logic contains about 80 DVD rips-- the rest of my collection is elsewhere. The stack of books on the left contains Idoru by William Gibson, the Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis, Hold'em Excellence by Lou Krieger and Modern Portfolio Theory by Robert Hagin. Next to that, there's my Brood War CD caught in a rare moment outside my computer. For a few years, I think my interest in the game Starcraft and the expansion set Brood War could be classified as "near fanatic." My cool friends (as opposed to my dork friends) think they appreciate how much of a complete dork I can be. They have absolutely no idea. I can be downright embarassing without even trying. The stack of CD's was meant to introduce and educate me in the ways of misc rock (popular and non) as was the Rolling Stone magazine. I read, skimmed, and referenced the stack of books on the right to learn Perl and to create the dynamic and magnificient site you see before you today.

Then, of course, there's a Red Bull to help me get through everything. The water and Gatorade are to keep my piss from coming out like toothpaste. Like I said before, I played a ton of ultimate. It's humid as hell out here during the summer; I basically irrigate the field with my sweat every time I play.

So that's what I spent a bunch of my time on. I didn't sleep any earlier or any less, but I guess staying in my dorm room more kept me from wandering around in my pyjamas and annoying my suitemates to violence.