This Has Nothing to Do with Cheese Sandwiches
A week later and I am still more or less in the forensic phase regarding the corridor party. I have received madly conflicting eyewitness accounts of that evening, and I suspect I will continue to run into people who were there for quite some time, each of them adding their own stained piece to the warped overall puzzle. As far as I can tell, at one point or another that night, I:
My excellent German friend Ben has been up for a week, which of course necessitated a pub crawl in his honor. It was quite an excellent affair, as Ben possesses the same affinity for both Tom Waits and for elaborate inebriated storytelling that I have. Together we kept a motley group of a dozen or so assorted people entertained through six or seven pubs before we finally hit a non-university nightspot (where beers suddenly cost between six and eleven dollars) where we split into two battalions--Ben's lot salsa-ing on the dance floor, my group sitting at the bar, clutching drinks which were far more expensive than refined crude oil. After an hour or so of this, we were driven out into the rain (spring seems to be showing up, so everything is covered in brown sludge and that cold steel rain has started to fall again incessantly) and decided to hit up Max, which is the one and only Swedish fast food chain.
The place looked about like what you'd imagine a place would look like at four in the morning after being ransacked marauding hordes of hungry drunken college students, only with the vaguely European sense that this may have been a recurring phenomenon since at least the time of Karl XII. In some places, I seem to recall the heaps of wrappers, fry boxes, plastic trays, soda cups, and carrion-pecked corpses were nearly thigh-deep.
But let me tell you, coming in drunk from the cold and the rain to a hot meal of fast food at 4 AM is...a very spiritual sort of experience.
At some point during the evening, I came across Sanna, who was completely blasted and looking for her lost purse. Pleading a guilty conscience, she elaborated on last week's end to our brief affair: the chemistry, she felt, was just insufficient, despite a considerable degree of both physical and intellectual attraction. We agreed to meet for coffee this coming week so that she can sit around looking really good (to remind me of what I'm not having) and probably talking about how "confused" she's feeling and no doubt a new guy she's probably started seeing. I went off to pound my head against a wall in an effort to further my understanding of estrogen-based logic.
What I'm Reading
Timothy J. Sinclair, The New Masters of Capital
Graham T. Allison, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis
Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy
- Drew an intricate, highly detailed (and wildly inaccurate) map of interstate highways in the
- Explained in great detail how Lord Salisbury’s solution to the 1878 Russo-Turkish war would be extremely useful in
- Argued with a devoutly Christian Iranian for half an hour about
- Recited Hamlet’s Act IV, Scene 4 soliloquy in reverse. (“Worth nothing be or bloody be thoughts my forth time this from O!”)
- Spoke Polish.
- Either hit a guy with a salted herring, or was myself hit with a bucket. Witnesses describe the same person and the same argument, but differ as to who was hit with what.
- Opened several beers with my teeth.
My excellent German friend Ben has been up for a week, which of course necessitated a pub crawl in his honor. It was quite an excellent affair, as Ben possesses the same affinity for both Tom Waits and for elaborate inebriated storytelling that I have. Together we kept a motley group of a dozen or so assorted people entertained through six or seven pubs before we finally hit a non-university nightspot (where beers suddenly cost between six and eleven dollars) where we split into two battalions--Ben's lot salsa-ing on the dance floor, my group sitting at the bar, clutching drinks which were far more expensive than refined crude oil. After an hour or so of this, we were driven out into the rain (spring seems to be showing up, so everything is covered in brown sludge and that cold steel rain has started to fall again incessantly) and decided to hit up Max, which is the one and only Swedish fast food chain.
The place looked about like what you'd imagine a place would look like at four in the morning after being ransacked marauding hordes of hungry drunken college students, only with the vaguely European sense that this may have been a recurring phenomenon since at least the time of Karl XII. In some places, I seem to recall the heaps of wrappers, fry boxes, plastic trays, soda cups, and carrion-pecked corpses were nearly thigh-deep.
But let me tell you, coming in drunk from the cold and the rain to a hot meal of fast food at 4 AM is...a very spiritual sort of experience.
At some point during the evening, I came across Sanna, who was completely blasted and looking for her lost purse. Pleading a guilty conscience, she elaborated on last week's end to our brief affair: the chemistry, she felt, was just insufficient, despite a considerable degree of both physical and intellectual attraction. We agreed to meet for coffee this coming week so that she can sit around looking really good (to remind me of what I'm not having) and probably talking about how "confused" she's feeling and no doubt a new guy she's probably started seeing. I went off to pound my head against a wall in an effort to further my understanding of estrogen-based logic.
What I'm Reading
Timothy J. Sinclair, The New Masters of Capital
Graham T. Allison, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis
Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy
posted by Eccarius | 10:59 AM
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