Yeah, that awesome weekend buzz… totally waxed. It seems that there was a “problem” with some of the pictures taken. What I thought was a great time turned out to be one of those drunken mistakes that shouldn’t have happened.
Eh, I should have known.
Anyway, I’ve called the necessary people to quell the undesireable pictures and things should be handled.
Lame.
Wow. What a great weekend.
Friday night we started at Kite’s for Tyson’s presidential campaign kick off party. Dave and I picked up a couple Get Moore t-shirts (just like you should too), had a couple beers, and wished Tyson the best.
When midnight rolled around, Forrest was 21 and it was time for Aggieville. We hit O’Malley’s to start, cruised to Rusty’s central, Rusty’s Next Door, Kite’s, Annie Mae’s, the Purple Pig, and Kite’s. Forrest had an awesome time and was definitely trashed. We might instate a new rule around The Bunker though… every 21st birthday now falls on a Thursday. It was definitely over 60 bucks to get Forrest the shots that he needed for his 21st, and that’s just a butt load of money. So I think we should stick to Thursday nights from now on.
Saturday night was the big night, with a combo birthday party for Dawn and Forrest. This was one of my favorite Bunker parties of recent, mainly because of the managable size. The huge parties are awesome, and I love working them… but I end up doing just that… working them. This time there was enough down time that one bartender was sufficient and Dave worked the bar in my stead for a while. Even JD hopped up and covered for a while when Dave and I were both… otherwise occupied. Another nice aspect of the smaller parties is that I can get trashed. I had an awesome time drinking more than my share and then doing the rounds.
A huge factor of Saturday’s fun was undoubtedly when the Clovia girls decided to make an appearance. While it’s pretty clear I’m just setting myself up for a lot of trouble, it’s the most fun I’ve had at a party in quite some time. I even got a drunken re-invite to Hays, (wonder if she’ll remember).
This is just the week of turning things down. First, early in the week I found that I had been offered a seat in the Student Senate as a representative from the College of Engineering. A vacancy has opened up, and it appears that my little ad hoc, same day, write-me-in campaign put me next in the line of succession.
I took a day to think it over, then I respectfully declined the office. I’m trying to put classes first (or at least more first) this semester, and I couldn’t convince myself that it was a good idea to just haphazardly take on yet another responsibility. It’s still an experience I hope to have while here at Kansas State. Just not this semester. I gotta be a student first.
And speaking of being a student, I’m currently typing this blog as I’m missing one of the highlights of each and every week… Dollar Night at Rusty’s! This awesome event that brings about a dozen of my good friends together each week is always something to look forward to. But not tonight. Nope, math551 homework is calling and without Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday to work on it, tonight ends up being the night reserved for working on math.
Yeah… so why I’m a blogging instead of working on my math? Good question.
The last several days have been outright painful. I had a bit of a painful cough on Sunday. It wasn’t anything too severe, but pretty annoying. However, by Monday I was in a world of hurt with ample supply of sinus pressure and painful coughing. I missed my classes on Monday, but scraped myself together to attend the cis690 course that I’m teaching that evening.
I then promptly went to sleep for something like 23 hours, only waking long enough to make the phone calls necessary to stay just barely on top of the tasks I had laid out for the day.
Today I’m feeling quite a bit better, and might have even been able to attend all of my classes. I staying to the safe side, however, and again only attended cis690 where I had a lecture to give.
Here’s to hoping that today is the end of being sick, not just a respite.
So I’m still giving thought to the entire blogging software situation. I was specifically considering the deficiencies of drupal compared to blogger and wordpress in my previous blog on the topic.
So now instead, some thoughts on a philosophy of site building. Right now I’m using drupal for pretty much every site that I’m currently maintaining. And if there’s one thing for sure, it’s that drupal is a great “all in one” framework for content management. Compared to the other CMS’s out there, I really think it offers the best when it comes to managing content, especially with a workflow. (This excludes Plone or any other Zope offering, since I’ve never tried any of them and instead I’ve pretty much tried every single php/mysql offering.)
But, there are lots of little deficiencies when it comes to drupal that just bug me. Like the crappy formatting on the news aggregator, lack of cool new trendy blogging features, etc. In fact, the main perk–sweet ass framework–isn’t even really necessary on a personal site like tbradshaw.net.
On the other hand, there are some quite specialized tools that do only one aspect of drupal’s functionality (like say Planet for feed aggregation, WordPress for blogging) and they tend to do it really freaking well.
So it begs the question. Could I create a better site if, instead of working the kinks out of a full featured (but polish lacking) framework like drupal, I chose to graft together a smattering of smaller applications that each do their respective jobs better?
I’m not sure yet, but I’m leaning towards giving it a shot on tbradshaw.net as soon as I get a little extra time (ha!).
Slashdot’s current poll is a great one. “Maximum number of frags in one shot?”
I couldn’t help but get nostalgic and post my favorite story, and I wanted to share it here:
Oh man, what a great poll. I’ve definitely killed 9 players in one Quake 2 rail shot, and I’ll never forget it.
We were playing this genious map by SwanSong, called 2box4. It was an incredibly simple map, just a small (but nice looking) box. Kind of like this: (wow, nostalgia about an old QuakeCon and ascii art in the same post… damn)
/--------------------\ | .-----| |-----. | | | | | | -- -- | | -- -- | | | | | | `--------------` | \___--__--_s_--_--___/The part in the center is lowest, the little bridge looking elements are stairs to a slightly raised platform (waist high) around the outside, with the portion of the outer “ring” that has the “s” on it (an armor shard) about a full person high.
There were something like 6 spawn points and something like 4 rail guns on this map, no other items except for that armor shard.
It was important to the map, because in Quake 2 you started with 100 health, 0 armor, and one rail slug got you for exactly 100 health. Instead kill. With the shard, you could take two before dying. Very important trivia for why SwagSong’s map was so amazing.
So we’re playing this map at QuakeCon 1998, and we have an assload of people in the server. I really don’t remember the total number on the server at the same time, but it might have been as many as 30. There were definitely times when players would spawn in too fast and telefrag the guy that spawned in just milliseconds ago.
A common tactic on this map would be to strafe along the walls, railing down guys that spawn in below by the rail guns (and usually too busy running for a rail gun of their own to actually dodge anything… very predictable). So one time I just instinctively fire off a shot at a friend, not even considering that we were both strafing along the same wall.
Yeah, I had just fired a rail slug along the wall at the top of that ascii image from the far left hand corner (I remember the wall being on my left). That single slug went through 10 people, killing all but the guy in the middle for a total of nine frags.
That guy in the middle? AceJas… he had picked up the armor shard.
Man, that’s a great memory. Back at QuakeCon in 1998. Hanging out with sickman, sitting next to AceJas, in front of Wendigo and Avatar, and just a couple seats to the left of EvilJohn. Back then I hardly knew any of them. Now EvilJohn and Wendigo are great friends.
Thanks for the poll.
Travis “Ash” Bradshaw
Man, oh, man. The Bunker Grand Opening party was a damn good time. We can not express how appreciative we are to the hundred+ people that joined us to kick off this Spring ‘05 semester in a big way. We’ve been putting a lot of blood, sweat, tears, cash, and beers into building our little collegiate paradise, and it was incredibly rewarding to see it fully operational and running so smooth; and with so many awesome friends!
I’ll have pictures from the party up really soon on our Bunker Photo Gallery (if you want to see party pictures, you’ll need to ask me for an account, by default all party pictures are hidden.) Until then, if you took pictures Saturday night at The Bunker Grand Opening party, then please get a photo CD when you develop your film and bring it by The Bunker so that we can have copies. We’d really appreciate the chance to see them and add them to our gallery.
There isn’t much else to say. Thanks to everyone for showing up, and you’ll definitely find out the next time we put another shindig together. Here are some plans to look forward to:
These are just some of the ideas that we have layed out for this semester, and we want you to be involved. Every party is only as cool as the people who are there. The Bunker is the hottest house party venue in Manhattan, but we’re nothing without our friends. Thanks again for making our Grand Opening so awesome!
Travis Bradshaw
* KY might be exchanged for Green Jello… we just don’t know yet.
I’m sitting in my office, it’s 4:50, and it’s high time for a blog entry. My first day of classes was pretty fun, it’s great to be back into the student-life. Winter break was fun too, but it’s the “sloth” kind of fun, instead of the “happenin’” kind of fun that I prefer.
I started the day with a total freshman moment. You’d think that by the time a guy ends up a senior at a major university, he’d be able to read his class schedule. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. I totally went to the wrong building today for my econ510 course. I just looked at my schedule a long time ago, saw BT and thought: Bluemont. Buzzzzz, wrong answer. BT actually stands for Burt Hall. I was three feet from walking into Bluemont 114 instead of Burt 114, but thankfully the instructor was speaking in German, which tipped off my Spidey Sense and I was able to stop in my tracks and head to a bench to reconsult my schedule.
So there started my day, wrong building, wrong classroom. But I was all smiles. It was kind of nice to have that little bit of excitement to start the day. Speaking of econ510, I’m looking forward to it. The teacher was relatively eloquent and seemed to enjoy the subject matter and encouraged class participation. All of which are big perks in my book.
Cole and I had lunch in the Union, which was weird. They have switched Origins and Market Carvery, but apparently not moved the cooking equipment… so the food was just like jumbled together. I had some pretty good speghetti (made with lo mein), mashed potatoes and gravy, and fried asparagus (from a wok). Craziness. I did get to see Nanette at lunch, so that was fun.
Right after lunch was math551, which I initially forgot to blog about before, but I’ve added it in post-hast, heh heh. Everyone always talks about how math professors rarely speak English as their primary language. I didn’t know what everyone meant for sure, because I’ve started math551 twice before and I always had American instructors. Well my luck ran out this year, I now have a math551 instructor from somewhere in the Middle East (I’m not good enough with accents to know where from really.) It’s kind of painful because he has difficulty expressing himself. But his hand writing is quite good, and he seems to emphasize vocabulary, so I’ve got high hopes that he’s going to turn out okay. Also, Kevin is in my math551 class, so that’s cool.
Right after math551, Cole and I quickly came back to Nichols for our weekly systems team meeting. It was cut very short when we had a catastrophic failure of authentication right at the beginning of the meeting that demanded immediate attention. It’s worth a blog of it’s own accord, so I won’t go into detail here, but we got it “taken care of” in short order.
Then off Cole and I went to arch301. This class is fun, still fun, and hasn’t changed much at all since last time I took most of it. I just can’t help but love a class that starts with “We realize that this is probably the least important class on your schedule, and that you probably don’t care too much about the subject matter. We provide this class as a service to other colleges because there just aren’t enough 300 level humanities courses. You should show up most of the time if you can, I’ll take attendance randomly.”
After arch301 I had a little time to kill before meeting with Nathan and Dr. Wallentine regarding the cis690 class. It looks like we’re going to schedule that Mondays and Wednesdays at 4:30 until around 5:20. I was also assigned the task of coming up with the first homework and the first lecture (perhaps the first several). So there’s something to work on this week, that’s for sure.
All in all it’s been a good day. I’m excited to go home, eat some food, and then take a big soft nap. Mmmmm, nap.
This is it! We’re officially fully operational! The Bunker is ready to have it’s Grand Opening party! I sent out an email to our announcement list, but I wanted to reprint the text here for those that have yet to get onto our mailing list. However, if you aren’t, you should be, so join!
Anyway, here’s the email:
Hey hey hey!
The beginning of this semester is really huge for us here at The Bunker, because we’re actually close to completing all of our crazy projects. (At least, all of the original projects we had when we moved in… I keep thinking of new shit all the time.)
So in honor of a new semester, we’re having a Back to School, Grand Opening party. And if you’re reading this, then you were hand selected and personally invited!
We’ve been really hard at work on The Bunker, and we want to have a party to celebrate just how far we’ve come. Here are the highlights:
- The Bar Is Finished! — You thought we could serve up a party before, you have no idea what we can do now. Fully painted (!), newly remodeled over the winter break; we’re now boasting almost 100″ of speed rails (those metal thingies that hold the booze), three mini-fridges of refrigerated storage, stainless steel insulated ice basin, and more! And of course we still have domestic beer on tap!
- The Soda Gun Is Finished! — When you arrive on Saturday, we’ll have Coke, Sprite, Barq’s, Soda Water, Sour Mix, Cranberry Juice, Pineapple Juice, Tea, and Water all on tap at our bar! DD’s drink fountain drinks for free all night long! (Of course, they can still tip all they want.
- Digital Media Jukebox! — No more random mix CD’s. Llama was awesome at cooking those up in a hurry when we needed them, but we are now sporting a fully featured digital multimedia computer system! Tons and tons of music, all available, all the time. In fact, you ladies could even get a dance thing going now… it’s crazy… but it’s true! You can queue up music yourself, just walk up to the TV, find the song you want, and add it in.
Depending on how much work we get done over the course of the week, we might even be adding a lounge! That’s right! Adding a lounge!
So it’s the first weekend after school gets back in session, and it’s the best way that we could think of to start off the semester. A bunch of our friends, a cheap cash bar, and good times.
Of course, a party is only as good as it’s people. So we hope that you’ll join us for our Grand Opening, Start the Semester bash. We’ve put in a ton of work to get ready for this, and it’s only the beginning! You can definitely bring your friends.
In fact, shoot me an email to let me know you’re coming and what friends you’re going to bring. We’ll make sure we have plenty of booze on hand (so don’t go to the liquor store, just bring a little cash). We can also do tabs (for friends, not strangers) if you forget, and we can even up later.
If you have some music, or some specific drinks that you want to have, just let us know! You can bring over CD’s at any time and we’ll add them to our digital media jukebox in a couple minutes and give you your CD right back. (If you’ve got some favorite music, that’s the best way to make sure it gets here!)
For all of the guys here at The Bunker: We can’t wait to see you on Saturday!
Travis Bradshaw
travis at ksubunker.com
That’s the scoop! Be there! And let us know you’re coming!
It’s hard to believe that the next semester starts in only a day. (It’s a lot harder to swallow right now as I’m typing a blog entry at 4:33am.)
I’m currently working on the sleep schedule though. Throughout the last week or two not only have I been staying up really late (early?), but I’ve been sleeping a lot. Each night’s sleep has been a luxurious eight hour vacation to the fine white sand beaches of Slumberland. Now that it’s obvious that it’s about time to start up “college life” again, I’m working on toning it down to the 4-6 hours that are my normal for a night’s sleep. It’s kind of hard since I don’t have napping (the college life ace in the hole) to turn to, but for now a little nap in the evenings isn’t hurting anything. (Normally I work way too much to get the afternoon nap that is a staple of most college student’s life).
The next important thing about the coming semester is the class schedule. My actual schedule is available (as always) on my online calendar. It’s dynamic, so it’s kind of always changing. (Chances are if there are any gaps, they just aren’t booked yet… or I’ve forgotten to hit the update button from my laptop.) However, I figured I’d provide my schedule here for just general use. So here it goes, in numerical order:
So yeah, that’s the schedule this semester in a nut shell. I’m actually looking forward to giving classes the number one slot on the priority list this semester. Last semester was an embarassing and painful disaster. I’ve got beef with this whole failure thing now, so I’ve got a lot to prove to myself. Good luck me.
Once again I have been bit by the procrastination bug. This time it’s affected my schedule for replacing the print server for the department.
I had it all layed out, I was going to come in on Sunday the 9th, late and night, finish up my testing and start the transition. It was cutting it kind of close, but I work really good with tight deadlines and was more than willing to stay up all night if that’s what it took. (After all, I’ve been staying up all night almost every other night.)
Then the classic failure of the procrastinator hit me. There was an unexpected delay and there was nothing that I could do about it. In this case, I go to plug ike into the printer network so I can begin the final round of testing… and the cable is dead. Of course it’s like 7:00pm on a Sunday when I’m starting this, and so there’s no one around but me.
Normally, one wouldn’t expect that this would matter. I mean, it’s just a cable. I can obviously run a cable if need be. It’s just not that easy here at the computer science department. See, our physical layer networking is really freaking scary! I really tried to see if I could find the printer network, but there was nothing I could do. The rats nest is too much for me to conquer. I even call Sterling to see if he could just give me a tip on where to look for the switch that makes up the printer network.
It’s a lost cause. I was totally 0wn3d and there was nothing that I could do about it. My procrastination set me up the bomb, and I dropped it. I came into the office today… actually when people are “supposed” to be up and working, and I got nailed again. Earl had already left for the day to take a trip to Junction City or something.
So now I’m seriously behind on the printer server replacement, and of course I have no one to blame but myself. It would have been nice if the network drop to the server rack was actually ran correctly and worked. But this really could have been fixed easily if I would have been in the office during business hours last week.
I suck.
| An action shot of me taking off my Doc’s for the first time. |
I bit the bullet today. I was out and about taking care of errands, and I just couldn’t help but get annoyed at the fact that my shoes were taking in water from the snow. This wasn’t the first time that I had been annoyed with my current shoes, it was more of the “last straw” after a long series of fights with my current shoes.
With no tread left, my Soaps were just begging to be retired. They are ripped up on the inside with the foam and cloth coming out whenever I take them off, and they no longer even pretend to be suitable for adverse weather.
So I had decided some time ago, that I needed to get a nice pair of boots. There’s an important caveat though, I don’t know anything about boots. I’ve never had more than a couple pairs of boots way back when I barely knew how to tie them. Word of mouth was strong, however, and I had never talked to a single person that owned a pair of Doc Martin’s, past or present, that didn’t love them. With a great feature set, distinctive style, and an estimated life expectancy of at least six years, I decided that a pair of Doc Martin’s were what I wanted.
I did some power shopping online for a while, checking out the various styles and prices, and decided that I really just needed to try some on and see what I thought. Well today I did just that, heading to the mall to check out a nice selection of Docs at the Trade Post (or something like that, a store in the mall halfway between the pretzel shop and Mastercuts). The salesman was knowledgable and helpful, and got me right into a pair of Docs that felt great and fit pretty darn well.
Then to top it all off, after I was paying for the boots (and after the sale was finished), he was making small talk, asking where I was from. I mentioned that I was from El Dorado, and he responded that he had a sister that played basketball for the Grizzlies a while back. I then politely returned that I, too, had went to Butler for a couple years… and you know what he said?
“Oh, did you play football there?”
Aahahahahahaha. I was flattered beyond belief that this guy thought I might have played football for one of the biggest football teams in the NJCAA, and I couldn’t help but respond, “Heh heh, nah. Thanks though. I’m actually a computer geek from there.” He said something about my looking big and he knew that there was a really good football team there. So I replied, “Yeah, they are really good. I was actually the team’s math tutor for a while there.” He got a kick out of that, for sure.
Anyway, all in all I had a great experience purchasing my first pair of Docs. So far they have been very comfortable, and I understand they are only going to get better as I break them in.
So I’ve been thinking more about Boof which is, in turn, making me think more about blogging software in general. Of course, mainly when I’m considering blogging software, I’m thinking about my personal sites, drupal, and the things that I don’t like about them.
One of my most recent kind of techno-lusts has been for more blogging functionality. I mean, drupal definitely kicks it out with the basics. I have my categories and RSS feeds. But it just doesn’t seem as full featured as I would like. I’ve been really looking at blogger and wondering… can it really be done any better? They have photoblogging, moblogging (mobile blogging), and an Atom API implementation. It seems almost perfect. I still have qualms about storing my data on someone else’s server… but it just seems so simple.
Speaking of simple, that’s one of the things that I don’t really like about drupal. Drupal is some sweet ass portal software (as OpenSourceCMS categorizes it). But I wonder, do I really need a portal for my personal site? Not really, just need a nice blog… and some static pages for things like projects and Boof.
Static pages really bring up an important problem. I don’t like the URI’s that drupal creates. When I write something on www.tbradshaw.net, I really plan on it being available for the “duration”. That is, for the forseeable future at least. Placing links into blog entries that look like http://www.tbradshaw.net/?q=node/133 is not something that’s going to stay around forever. On the contrary, that’s a very drupal specific URI that will be dead as soon as I move from drupal, or change my pages to something static… or whatever. It’s not very forward thinking for me to use some blogging software that isn’t creating… well… “permalinks” is what I think they are calling them now.
At least that’s something that WordPress appears to get right. The URI’s are much cleaner, and make sense in such a way that a guy could even just turn all of his content from dynamic to static, archive, and call it good. Even without WordPress, it wouldn’t be too difficult to keep the URI’s from WordPress alive indefinitely.
However, I can’t help but then think about what exactly I do want. I know what I think I want, and that’s:
So I get to thinking about this, and drupal doesn’t seem to be the winner. It’s feature set is awesome, but I’m not convinced that it’s exactly what I want. WordPress seems pretty close, but it still doesn’t have everything that I want in one nice package.
I’m not sure that there is any current blogging software that really does everything that I want it to do. The obvious response to that is to write my own. But damn, that totally fails on the “simplicity” part. It’s not an “easy” solution if I have to freaking write it myself.
The problem is that when I look at drupal or any other current CMS, I don’t see something that I would enjoy customizing to be exactly what I want. Either there is a huge learning curve, or (most commonly) it just doesn’t look like fun. I realize that drupal is pretty well architected to be extensible… I mean… that’s exactly why I picked it in the first place. But to be completely honest, I don’t really want to monkey around with PHP when it comes to programming. If I’m going to be coding in a scripting language, I want to do my work in Python. I just love that language.
I guess I just need to find a way to reconvince myself that a CMS is the way to go, that I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, and that I should just be happy with what I’ve got. That’s not an easy task though, I’m still using the default theme for this freaking site… and it’s been up for months, heh heh.
Ah well, enough ruminations on blogging software for now.
Okay, so it’s completely destroyed. Any semblance of a “normal” sleeping pattern, totally butchered. It’s 4:35am right now, I’m not even kind of tired. In fact, I just had another meal, dinner I think it would be.
It started to fall apart last week, when the nights kept getting longer and longer. Soon, not only were the night’s activities getting longer and longer, but then the sleeping part of the night started getting longer and longer. Next thing you know, I’m going to be at like 7am each “night”, and then waking up at 3:30pm in the “morning”.
And then, just when I think I might be ready to fix it and start sleeping on a schedule that resembles the majority of the rest of the earths population: bad weather strikes. Next thing I know, there is no reason to leave home, because it’s like -2342 degrees outside and my Jeep is completely enclosed in a protective casing of ice several inches thick.
Oh but it gets better. The next big thing to hit is almost unbeatable… the rest of my entire freaking house starts doing the same thing. That’s right, all five… wait… six… wait… seven guys that are currently living in my house are all staying up for the duration of the night. Primarily so that we can LAN it up with a new game called Savage that I recently stumbled upon in a slashdot comment.
I don’t know what it’s going to take to get me back on a semi-regular schedule. But school is coming up soon, so I don’t have that much time to get things back on the regular “sun clock”. And it won’t be much longer and I’m going to have to go to the bank and actually go into the office… there just isn’t that much left for me to do on my current project at work that I can do from home. Eventually I’m going to have to start catching paper out of the printers to test the new printer server.
Anyway, this blog doesn’t really have that much of a point. Other than to express my observation that my sleep schedule is completely wacked out.
Yeah, it’s already January 5th and I’m just now getting around to posting about New Years. This year was just kind of crazy when it came to activities. We had a pretty full Bunker evening lined up. It was scheduled something like this:
The party started earlier than expected with a relatively full house here at the Bunker by like 7:30pm. We were heading to PJ’s when stuff started going weird. Chase couldn’t get off work in time to make it to the show, and so Copus was bumped into the last playing spot. The schedule started to fall apart.
Dave and I then took the underage girls back to the Bunker, since most of the people with us didn’t want to wait three hours in PJ’s for Copus to go on (especially the underage people that can’t drink at the bars). Generally speaking, most of the groups split up quite a bit. I played Taxi driver for about four rounds of people to and from Aggieville and the Bunker. It’s a noble job, but still not exactly a party.
Around midnight we made our trip back to Aggieville so that we could watch the ball drop, and follow it up with the concert at PJ’s. Again I taxi’d people down, and then had to park clear back at Nichols hall before I could start on my way back to Aggieville.
I made the call to Dave so that I could find out where my friends were in the mass of people, and I started to make my way to them with only 4 minutes left until the ball dropped. I made a tactical error though, and tried to take the most direct route to my friends that were waiting at 12th and Moro. I didn’t pause to think that the most direct route would have like six thousand people in the way. I made it right to the corner of Manhattan and Moro when it became obvious that I wasn’t going to be going anywhere else.
It was kind of a powerful moment, one of those that just reaks of symbolism and such. So there I was, crammed in like a sardine with about 2,000 other people that were on the very front row for the ball drop. I had probably one of the best views one could have of the laser show, the ball drop, and the following fireworks–right from under the Dusty Bookshelf’s awning. And for some reason, it seemed fitting. I was packed in the center of where everything was happening, I had the best view one could have, but I was definitely alone. It had this “all alone in the middle of everything” feel that just kind of sneaks up on a person unexpectedly.
I had one of those deep introspective moments, as I watched the fireworks explode over the sea of K-Staters and townies, with everything so loud it was muffled, thinking of just what exactly that moment meant. It was just like a freaking movie.
And then it was over. Kind of all tingly, I went to find my friends at the corner of 12th and Moro. We shared a little bit of our divergent stories, and then decided it was time for a beer. Dave, Kari, and I were all just too damn sober for an event that was supposed to be so rockin’.
The night started to really get better and liven up from that point on. The concert was great, both Mr. Yuck and Copus, and there was some pretty fun mosh pit action. I hadn’t seen Christi in quite some time, so I had fun chatting with her. Shannon was in full effect, stumbling around and having a great time. I even took some time to shoot some pool in the back, though I couldn’t quite overcome the amazingly crappy sticks at PJ’s.
After the concert, we headed back to the Bunker where we actually did party until the sun came up. It was a smaller party than the last one we had, probably still forty or so people, but just thinner than the last one. I bartended the duration of the night, but had a great time telling stories from the bar to a very entertained audience. Eventually everyone was either gone, or passed out, or both. And once again, it was just me.
I took some time to clean up any significant messes, throw some cups away, and wipe down the bar. I moved Pat from the tiny couch where he had passed out sitting up, across the room to our couch Napster where he could lay out. (He doesn’t remember, but I’m sure his neck and back thanked me in the morning.) Then I wandered up to my room and hopped onto the computer for a little bit.
I was feeling a little lonely (and a little drunk), so I fired off a couple text messages. One to Nan, who has been in Kansas City the entire break. She’s one of my favorite out-of-house drinking buddies and an SMS messaging champ.
And then another SMS to that one girl I keep thinking about each day but probably shouldn’t. It’s one of those “she doesn’t contact me unless I contact her first” scenarios that are an obvious sign to run away, heh heh.
That’s it. That’s my New Year’s experience. It was interesting to say the least, with the strange mixture of quiet introspection and energetic partying. I don’t yet know if this night was a product of the way I feel lately, or more of a foreshadowing. But one thing is for sure, while some New Year’s just come and go with no particular fan fare, this New Year’s had the geniune feel of transition. My life is definitely changing. This last semester was too drastic to go by without demanding permanent effect.
Here’s to hoping it’s for the better.
