Author: chris

i took a test on scantron last thursday.  if you don’t know what this is, it’s just a page you bubble your answers in on.  this is how the professor grades it:

put scantron page into scantron machine.

that’s it.  nothing more.  so why haven’t i gotten my grade for this test?  could it be because every professor on every campus is out to make the students’ lives an exact reflection of hell?  i have the sneaking suspicion that the answer is a resounding yes, with little sparks flying outward all around it.  like this:

if i was a professor, that would be my biggest goal.  but i think my reasons are more justifyable than theirs. 

regarding a test i had this morning, a professor (of the evil variety, of course) sent an email last night telling us we could bring a dictionary to use during the test.  i read this email at 1:50 in the morning, as i was about to go to bed.  i felt he was telling me something, hinting that what will really get me an A on the test is a dictionary, that a dictionary is all i need be armed with for the trials of life.  sadly, however, i didn’t have a dictionary, but i felt that the message was so strong that i got into my car and drove to a 24 hour store.  they didn’t have dictionaries, so i went to another one, six minutes away.  they had them–TRIUMPH!–and i purchased it for $4.00.  i carefully put it in my bag when i got home, carefully, carefully, carefully as it was my key to life, and went to sleep at 2:30, confident that it would help me achieve my highly desired and much needed grade.

i took the test and didn’t open the dictionary once.

is it bad when your knee hurts whichever way you bend it?

i went to see clinic last night in austin.  i don’t know what i was expecting, so i don’t know if it was a letdown or not…i can tell you it wasn’t worth 15 dollars.  They didn’t even play for a full hour, it was about 50 minutes.  they played a lot of the songs that i was hoping they wouldn’t, off their newer albums (most of which, oddly, sound like they are the same song.  example: “hey, didn’t they already play this song? oh wait…that one just added a clarinet. okay…” or “hey, didn’t they already play this song? oh wait…that one just added a harmonica. okay…” 

don’t get me wrong.  they are a good band, even if their superiority over other bands dwindled after their first album, from which they did play quite a few songs, thankfully.  they had one encore (they had stayed off stage for about 2 minutes, probably less) which consisted of three songs.  then they left.  again, don’t get me wrong. i hate encores.  i think they are stupidly contrived piles of garbage designed to boost the morale of the band.  you know what?  boost your own morale and just play a whole set, okay?  i went to an american analog set show where they did this, had no encores.  though that did kind of piss people off, because we had no warning that there would be no encore.  no warning!!

laura and i hadn’t been to austin in several months until last night.  i wanted to stay forever, but then i’d just end up spending money i shouldn’t be.  the record store here, in san marcos, rarely has anything good that is used.  waterloo ALWAYS has something i’ve been wanting. bless you waterloo.

i just posted a new story: the crippled scholar. the scholar is not only crippled; he is also paralyzed. this helps lay an exciting foundation for a story that involves the scholar sitting there, and then sitting there some more.

for the weekend, i went home, leaving friday and not getting back until sunday.  upon arriving at my apartment on sunday, laura brought it to my attention that, not only were the mats inside my bathroom all completely soaked, and not only was there an inch deep puddle of water sitting in my bathroom, but also that the carpet leading into my living room was completely soaked.  this was ten o’clock at night.  when i finally got ahold of the maintenance guy, i thought he’d come over immediately to get the carpet dried, so as to avoid replacing it all once it got moldy.  quite the contrary.  “i’ll be there tomorrow morning,” he said…with complete disinterest and apathy.  the water was dripping from the hose that runs from the toilet to the wall (not toilet water…fresh water, before entering the toilet).  i have to turn the water back on any time i want to flush it, so i put a hand towel underneath the dripping when i do this.  it’s fascinating to see how fast slowly dripping water can completely soak a hand towel.

i was going to tell you about how my alarm didn’t go off this morning, but that’s not interesting.  i will tell you that because of this i didn’t eat anything this morning, so now i am too hungry to concentrate on doing the homework that i couldn’t do last night because i was mopping my bathroom floor.  also, there’s no way i could possibly concentrate on homework, not just because i’m hungry, but because in my rush to get ready this morning i put my boxers on backwards.  i can’t turn them right now because that’s gross.

that is interesting.

i have recently resigned myself to the fact that i’m not going to have a career. resigned is the wrong word.  but it’s because i can’t imagine myself doing the same thing for the rest of my life (except, of course, writing, making music, and creating models of a vomitting oklahoma giving birth to a mule, but creating models of a vomitting oklahoma giving birth to a mule does not pay the bills).  i get bored, if not after a few days, then at least after 6 months of doing the same thing.  in the future maybe i can stretch that out to 7 months…i really can’t make it more than that.

i’ve spent hours in the library looking at saturday evening post magazines from the early 50s.  have you ever seen a magazine from the 50s?  being absorbed in it for a few hours is quite possibly the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me.  i made copies of a few ads and things, and i’m going to color them with colored pencils and then put them on the site, at which point i will notify you, so that you can see what i’m talking about.  but on about every tenth page there was an ad for a company commenting on “the terrible condition the world is in” and asking “won’t you want a reliable air filter in your fallout shelter?” and creepy, identical looking mothers telling you which girder best tucks in that tummy fat to which your husband shouldn’t be subjected.  cigarette ads everywhere, including a series from 1951 to about 1954 by marlboro where there was a picture of a cute baby’s face who was saying “That’s right, my dad smokes MARLBORO!  What else is there?” and other equally disturbing blurbs.  there was also an odd abundance of spark plug advertisements, many of which said something like “isn’t it nice to know that when the appocalypse arrives in the form of a nuclear holocaust, your spark plugs will still be in tip top shape?”

the reason for this search was originally to find characters to go in my art piece called “the fecal house,” but i started finding horrific images that i couldn’t help but copy to color later.  they are coming soon.  i promise (this isn’t like the shallow promise of producing the tales of karen deathrage, an evil woman who stole my heart and soul).

i just put a link to 2% magazine on my site. i have a story published in it this month.  total with shipping is $3.50 (basically printing costs and shipping), and i assure you it is greatly worth it.  well…i haven’t gotten it yet, so i haven’t read it yet…but my story alone is at least worth…a third of that…or 10 cents of that…and it’s 30 pages, and the editor is an intelligent guy with good taste, so i’m sure the rest of it must be just as good, or better, filling up the remaining $3.40.   (this is u.s. shipping.  not sure about international…) but you can pay with paypal, in any case.

i would have posted a story today, except for a few things: i have written a few very short things lately, and while they aren’t terrible, they also aren’t fantastic.  so i’ll hold of posting them until i’m really desperate.  i blame this lack of style in my recent stories solely on, of course, my accounting course, whose texts and information should all be placed upon a ship and set alight.

also cause for celebration: i found my journal that i had been doing without for three weeks (this, i believe, was another reason for my jaded attempts at writing of late.  it was like my intestines or other bodily organ went missing for a few weeks, and my body didn’t know how it could possibly handle it).  incidentally, the journal was right beside my bed.

also, i just found a deal for cd-rs: 100 fine quality recordable cds for $25. http://store.yahoo.com/cdrsavings/taiyonotfuji.html (if you have money to cash in on this deal i know you have enough money to buy a $3.50 magazine.)

i am taking a children’s literature class this semester.  we had a test in it last week, when i had three or four tests at once, and i made a hundred on it.  at first, i was excited, because it’s the first hundred on a test i’ve ever made in college…and i’ve made pretty much every other grade possible.  but then i thought–the only class you can get a hundred in is children’s literature??

i’m not listening to “puking and crying” by s.  i’m listening to “sadstyle” by s.  they don’t have it on amazon. in fact they don’t have it anywhere, and it took me about a year and a half of searching for it to finally get it…and i didn’t even find it!  my lovely girlfriend, laura, found it on ebay (you will never know how much she paid for it).  depressingly, as it just so happens, there is another copy on ebay again, right now.  sigh.  maybe i’ll have to get that one too.  it’s too fine a cd for just anyone to own.  puking and crying was released a couple of weeks ago…i’ll be getting that for 10 dollars very very soon. maybe you should too.  (cheap-cds.com)

about once every year or two i get the incessant urge to play the sims.  their babble starts floating through my head, and the television babble puts me in a trance, and i have to go reload it on my computer–because it’s crashed completely at least four times since i’ve played it, no doubt–and devote my week to it.  abusive families, lesbian minogue est troise, lonely bachelor science geeks, and children barricaded inside their homes are all under my rule.  but after a certain amount of time, though, it becomes the most monotonous waste of time ever invented by man.  yes, worse than the lifetime channel. but until then, it’s the only thing i want to do.

triumphantly, “puking and crying” is the only record that comes up when you search for “puking.”  more album titles need to be vomit-related.

in trying to search for “beatles” in xangazon, i got zero results. then i searched for “mystery tour” and got five results…maybe it was four. hmm.

i’m actually not listening to magical mystery tour. the people in the apartment below me (i think they may be lesbians, but i’m not sure. their dog barks at me through the window and i stomp louder on the stairs.) are listening to it. i can make out the bass riffs, which i recognize immediately, of course, as strawberry fields forever. i laid with my ear on the floor listening to it for 10 minutes. when i decided to put my own mmt cd in and listen to it, it just wasn’t the same. so i returned to the floor.

i feel thoroughly raped and beaten and broken after taking three tests in the last two days. do all professors get together and plan malicious test dates at the same time? can’t they just pry into our stomachs with screwdrivers and pour in rubbing alcohol instead?

i updated my site with mustard spatterings. i dropped the mustard from my third story apartment and took pictures of it, then took two pints of water down to wash it off. i poured the pints on the mustard and it just turned the runoff water a little yellow, but didn’t get rid of it at all. it’s behind the apartment complex where not many people go, so maybe someone will slip on it and hit their head on the concrete and then nobody will be able to help them because nobody will ever see them and they’ll die by mustard.

i’ve gotten a few strange emails…people seem to be confused. www.noconversation.com is my website. this is not my website. this is a frail appendage of my website. my website is about five or six years old. this, of course, is not.

i just left a few blogrings that i was a member of. why? i felt stupid being a member of so many blogrings. what’s the point.

have you ever tried to end your membership with a blogring? it’s like trying to end your membership with sprint, or the gym. “are you SURE you want to leave? but, look at all the women with large breasts–don’t you want to see large breasts in the gym? no? okay, well fill out this ten page end-of-membership form and you’ll be set!” when you leave a blogring, you can’t just click somewhere on your xanga and leave it. you have to go to the blogring, you have to click the link that takes you to the site with your membership information, you have to click leave blogring, you have to type your password in even if you are already logged in, you have to then click yes i want to leave, and then it takes you to xanga.com. i have better things to do than this.

it says i’m currently playing songs for the new year by simon joyner. that’s a lie. i’m sorry. i’m listening to simon joyner’s album the cowardly traveller pays his toll. i think it must have been a vinyl only release from 1994…i’m not sure. i love it. the first song, 747, is superb. go find it. it’s worth it.

how i said i’m listening to cowardly traveller pays his toll…that’s a lie too. i’m sorry. i wish i was listening to it, but i am not home yet, so i am playing it in my head.

what am i still doing away from my apartment?? i have to get on the bus and go back home so i can buy mustard to drop from my balconey and take a picture of it.