2004-09-07 - 1:52 PM

Thursday, as it turned out, just happened to be an isolated low-day. And yeah, it sucked, but the weekend was exponentially better.

Friday, watched a few hours of clone high with Nikki, at some point we fell asleep on the body pillow. I'd forgotten how nice it was to wake up to a pretty girl for the first time, if that makes any sense. As I sat up, she snored and rolled over on her stomach, so I threw the blanket over her and went outside to have a cigarette. I sat there, on the porch, thinking of the weirdness of the month. School had started, I'd moved in with new people of a geeky and fabulous calibre, who's nature I've expounded upon in past entries. My best friend (not in a mutually exclusive way. There are in fact 5 people who hold that title in my life, all of them more important than the other 4 in their own ways) is getting married in less than 2 weeks. I was, I realized, entering a bizarre and prolific, albeit transient period in my life, where everything was (in the immortal words of... er... Albert Schweitzer) oogaly-googaly.

Then Nikki came out, bummed my cigarette and sat there smiling at me. We talked and went out for breadbowls, and I discovered that the token "christ, she's hot" girl from a gened I took four years ago worked at the place we went. She got all stoked when we realized where we recognized eachother from, and then she quoted Napolean Dynamite. And then, like my upgrade before me (?), I fell in love with my waitress.

Saturday, Joyce came over and Andrew took the papa-san and a couple chairs out onto the porch, and the three of us did Automata homework while we watched the rain. Porch Zen, twice in one weekend. Later, went back to the breadbowl place with Joyce and the mythical third Andrew (Carr. Incidentally, he was driving...), where the waitress recognized me. Even by name. "Alex! Two days in a row?" "Just missed you that much..."

Sunday: Lazy. At some point kicked up the Clone High habit again. Around 6, Nikki and I started watching episodes. Around 7, Andrew sat down on the bed and joined us. About 9 or so, Coral and a friend of hers came by, and there were 5 of us watching the e-cybo-pooch episode. Coral frowned in a cute sort of way, I asked what was wrong.

"You're having fun. I was going to ask you something, but the answer's probably going to be no..."
"Well, at least give me a chance to utterly reject you." 3 years ago, the irony of that statement, it would have overwhelmed me.
"I feel like a road trip. No reason. We're going to Pheonix... Wanna come with us?"

Be in a car with another best friend, for a couple hours, with no purpose or reason, no direction, no destination other than the place where we turn around and head back?

Do cops eat donuts?

Half an hour later, there were 3 of us blasting down the I-10 clapping along to fraggle rock, flamboyantly singing "She thinks my tractor's sexy," and all manner of musical eccentricity. Coral is a kind of quality time that I've gotten precious little of lately. Chris (the friend) is a pretty cool guy too. We ended up at Denny's, and I felt dangerous, so I had the steak. Which was actually kinda good. Got back around 1 in the morning, promptly zonked out.

Monday: Last day of the 4 day weekend. Went over to Joyce's to help set up her router. Things were running kind of slow, and popups abounded, so I downloaded and ran adaware. Andrew, Andrew and I took bets on how many things it would find. I had the highest bet, at 500. At about 750, it stopped sporadically incrementing, and just started counting milliseconds or something. She had Netsky on her computer, and apparently had for about a year or two.

For those of you who don't know, as viruses go, Netsky is the bunny of the internet kingdom. It just loves to multiply. The worst case I'd ever seen was 2 weeks ago, Nikki's dad's computer had 3600 copies of it floating around his hard drive.

We watched Joyce's scroll by. at around 14000 copies, we decided to go out to dinner instead of waiting around for it. When we got back, it was still counting. We waited around for a while until it stopped.

This poor girl's computer qualifies for the darwin awards. By all rights, it should be dead. 75,000 copies of Netsky B on a single computer. Seventy Five Thousand Copies. Incidentally, quick math at 22 kb per copy, shows 6.5 gigabytes of pure virus lovin' sitting around on her hard drive.

It was awesome.

Monday really was a geek day. Earlier, we'd caught wind of a Labor Day deal at CompUSA. 200 GB 7200 RPM 8 MB cache maxtor for $100. No Rebates. 50 cents a gig, out the door. So, like some great geek pilgramige, Two andrews, a Joyce, and an I went out the door and each grabbed one. Then wandered around the mall.

A pattern emerged. In Radio Shack, in the game store, waiting outside the bathroom... Someone would comment. "You guys all buy hard drives together?" "Good deal today or something?", pointing at the 4 of us, each with a hard drive in tow. One of us would outline the deal to them. 15 seconds later, the curious stranger was on the phone with a roommate, significant other, or friend in geekhood. "Yeah, dude, 200 gigs, 100 bucks! They're Maxtor's... Yeah, only today. Yeah, pick one up for me, too."

We probably made CompUSA a thousand bucks or so over the course of a day. Kind of makes me wish customers could get commission.

Today, school again. In about an hour, I'm off to watch a couple episodes (sadly, not the movie) of Buffy in my english class. It's so bizarre to think that only 5 days ago I was bitter at the world. Now? I kinda dig it.

-Alex

|

Slide back | Stumble forward