The verdict

Spent a night thinking about it. I decided that between going on talking about nothing or starting to share personal thoughts and experiences, I'd rather say nothing. This blog's hyperextended life is at an end.

Beginning of the end?

As I think about it more and more, I seem to be attracted to the idea of retiring the blog. I don't post much, and when I do, it's normally things of relatively small impact. The usual blog fodder, bikes and cameras, are being pushed to the wayside. That's not all of it. Even the health of my car, which I loved so much, is deteriorating. Schoolwork is redundant and unexciting.

I suppose this the problem with a blog: I am capable of expressing myself freely, but I really can't (or perhaps shouldn't). So now that all these other things are being dropped, there's not much left for me to write about. I'd like to sooner quit writing than write about nothing.

What are the major things that I've learned and have forced me to grow in the last couple of years? Most of them are things I'm not at liberty to let the whole world know, if the whole world even cares. If you can identify with me, learn from me, or teach me, let's skip the blog and get to know each other.

Enigmatic Sayings of the Prodigious

This is a list of a few of the sayings of Professor James Gothard of my business law class (MGMT 455).

Unfortunately, the list is by no means exhaustive and they lack context.

"I have my hands around Ben's neck, I'm bashing his head on the ground, blood is splattering up on my shirt, he's yelling at me to stop, everyone is screaming, I'm laughing..."

"...Involuntary intoxication. After one hundred years of practicing law, I still don't know what that means."

"There are winners and losers in life. And, well, you're a loser."

"That's a legal term, by the way."

"Satan doesn't get a free bite."

"If you don't understand a test question, don't raise your hand and ask me about it. If it looks stupid, it probably is. That's a legal term."

"Trust me, I'm a lawyer."

"I put both my elbows on my desk, leaned forward, and told my client, 'You're a loser.'"

"So what do we do? Oh, come on, this is America! We sue everyone."

"For those of you in the back, that says one hundred quadrillion dollars."

"I just love the feeling of squeezing Ben's neck in my hands... I want to go and finish the job."

Tool Box Talk

In BCM 175 we had a toolbox talk. We were being introduced to personal protection equipment. Essentially, it was very boring. "This is a hardhat. These are gloves. These are earplugs...." Anyway, as he started talking about respirators, I couldn't help but think of one fellow laborer and what he said this past summer.

We were tearing out a room and throwing its contents out of a hole in the wall down into a dumptster. We were shoveling old plaster and grout, throwing lath, and various insulating materials. So basically, it was extremely dusty and we were naturally wearing dust masks.

As we paused to take a break, this fellow laborer pulled off his dust mask and took out a cigarette and lit it up. He walked toward the hole in the wall to the fresh air and took a drag on his cigarette. He looks back into the room with all the dust in the air. He looks at me and says, with cigarette in hand, "That's some nasty s&@+, you know it, Pat?"

All I could do was smile at the irony. He then took another drag on his cigarette.

I should be doing homework...

I'd highly recommend to anyone who enjoys bicycling to give the Hoosier Hills bike tour a try. It's 100k long, so it has enough length that you can feel you've accomplished something, and there are enough hills to provide adequate challenge without being overly burdensome.

I'll grant that it's burdensome enough that I had to give myself a moment to find a second wind, but not so much that I had to walk. It was definitely enough that my quads started talking to me somewhere around the halfway point.

I hate to be one to toot my own horn, but kudos to Bright and myself for finishing faster than this group of sorority girls presumably from IU with their fancy jerseys and uber-expensive Scott and high-end Specialized bikes. Even though it probably wasn't evenly matched between Bright and I and these girls, I still think we can definitively draw from it that Purdue is better than IU.

My birthday brought in all sorts of strange foods. Black olives, peanut butter, and pickles. The not-so-strange foods included 36 cupcakes that a classmate brought in to my physics lecture for me. Plus, I received Blazing Saddles, which is pretty much awesome.

And as for now, the week is going fast and I'm surviving my first battery of exams. This is good for two reasons: if I survive the exam, it means it didn't kill me, and classes typically slow down after exams--so less work!

But more importantly than exams and homework, swing dancing appears to be going relatively smoothly. At least, it's going a lot more smoothly than I anticipated it would! At the very least, the music is awesome. Of course, it's usually jazz, but they occasionally throw in a contemporary song. The best ones is when they put on a rap song. Hilarious.

sulk!

I should be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but instead, I think I'll sulk for a bit.

Kudos to anyone who ever put up with four years of this college garbage. I think I'd sooner join the army... or even *gasp* the French Legion. Or something. Man.

Years ago...

When I was first learning how to shoot trap, an older gentleman got right up behind me and guided my arms as I held a shotgun and started oscillating his hips, repeating, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." He was demonstrating the importance of following through when going for a clay pigeon.

I couldn't help but think about that a lot last night at the swing dance callout.

Ha!

When I was staying with my brother in Chicago, my mom sent me a check to reimburse me for some tuition, and at the time, I had absolutely no cash on me and I needed to fix that. But the problem was I was in Chicago and nowhere near a PEFCU or IMCU, so I couldn't cash that check. But not to worry, I just handed it over to Paul and let him cash part of it, and deposit the rest in his savings account.

Now that I'm back in West Lafayette within walking distance of a PEFCU, Paul has paid me back the remainder of the check. And on the check he wrote to me, he wrote something very amusing.

Prepare to be amused