A Birthday Recap, for the Morbidly Curious

000: Ding! It's my birthday. I'm playing D&D, and there's nothing I'd rather be doing.
0230: Gale the Elven Ranger gets his head torn off by Regiarax the dragon. This is all I really wanted for my birthday.
0330: The game wraps up. My apartment is a mess - I stagger off to bed.
1000: I wake up and stumble towards the bathroom - Eric is cleaning it, which is odd, but I occasionally have random cleaning jags, so it's not that weird.
1015: The bathroom is cleaned. I use the toilet. It clogs and floods. Fuck.
1020: Plunging fails. I start mopping up the overflow with paper towels, then give up and call maintenance, who presumedly own a mop (unlike me). I tell Eric about these developments; he tells me that he had a similar problem previously, hence the early morning cleaning. Fuck fuck fuck.
1030: I shower downstairs in 203. Later, Meggie will tell me that my soap smells nice, and I won't realize what she's talking about for a long, long time.
1115: I start cleaning the kitchen from last night's festivities. The dishes are innumerable and gross, but I have no one to blame but myself - I put on a New Pornographers album and dig in.
1215: I finish cleaning. Eric and I chat about last night's game, and I begin telling him about last night's epic battle.
1220: The maintenance guy arrives - it's just a guy wearing jeans, sneakers, and a jacket, and carrying a plunger, no other tools or equipment. He opens the door to the bathroom.
"It's flooded."
"Yeah, I mentioned that on the phone."
He goes over and flushes the toilet, which promptly floods, doubling the volume of the water on the floor.
"Hey!"
"The toilet's clogged." What did you expect would happen? He plunges it for a while - it's clear.
"You should take care of that water as soon as possible." Gee, thanks - what am I paying you for? Wait, am I paying you? I don't press the issue, and he leaves. I grab a roll of paper towels, and get to work.
1315: That was unpleasant. Eric kindly helped, and I finished telling him the THRILLING STORY of last night's session. He suggests that we take this opportunity to watch The Fountain - he's been suggesting that we do this for some time. "After my bike ride," I agree, but around then Zach returns from the first leg of the Saturday morning shopping trip. He's got an RA event, so I need to cover the second leg. No problem, I love grocery shopping.
1500: Well, that took longer than expected. Jack and I discuss housing - our lead looks promising, and she might be willing to negotiate on the summer rent. I buy some Girl Scout cookies from a troop outside the grocery store, and marvel at the physical and social awkwardness of preteen girls.
1505: Time to get some work done - I pull out some REU applications and start filling them out. Fortunately, they're not due until... later today. So much for that bike ride.
1530: I talk to my parents. Hooray! It's my birthday! The mailroom seems intent on withholding any and all birthday presents - this upsets me more than I let on.
1600: Myself, Eric, and others settle in to watch The Fountain.
1745: Wow, what an incredible movie. I kind of want to watch Requiem for a Dream and Pi now, but I'm too scared - drug use and math make me nervous.
1800: Jack has bad news - Sean can't afford the house, and he's dropping out of the deal. Unless we can find a sixth person in short order, we're right fucked. In my heart, I was already moved in - I contain my tears.
1815: Sully comes over. He brought me a present! Fantastic! I try to be appreciative, but I'm still really upset about the house. I realize this, and make an excuse about calling Ben - I go into my room and lie down, and start crying. I just want to have a place to live, and not have to worry about it anymore. I start feeling that I've wasted the day - I didn't even go on a bike ride that I've been promising myself all week. At this point, it's almost too much for me to handle.
1820: I actually call Ben. This helps a lot. I talk about housing, and how I'm doing poorly academically, and about many other things - he listens patiently and sympathetically, like the good brother he is.
1930: I hang up, feeling much better. Liz is over! I love Liz. We go downstairs, where Jack is making wings.
2030: I have eaten a lot of wings.
2130: Liz and I are wrestling on the floor. Before you get any ideas, let me assure you that this is an act of pure violence on our behalf, the consequence of my attempt to break up another argument of moral relativism vs. moral absolutism between her and Zach. I've got forty pounds on her, but damn, she's scrappy. She tells me that putting her in a chokehold is illegal, w.r.t. wrestling rules - I didn't realize there were rules to beating the bejeezus out of people.
2230: We're teaching Jwatzman how to take off a bra. This is possibly the most useful thing he will learn in his entire undergraduate career.
2330: Good friends, good food, and they got me a cake! I have the best friends ever. I make a wish and blow out the candles.
2359: The party isn't over yet, but I started at 0000, so I should end here. Besides, we all go home pretty soon in the future anyway.

So there you have it - a perfectly lovely birthday. Definitely within the top 20. I am among friends here, dear friends, and don't you forget it.

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sing us out

Rice, My Old Arch-Nemesis, We Meet Again

I don't think I've ever failed quite so hard at cooking as I did earlier tonight. The meal took a long time, used costly ingredients, and wasn't any damn good whatsoever - and I managed to destroy my friend's wok, to boot.

The culprit, of course, was rice - the rice held everything else up, stuck to the wok, and still wasn't finished long after I had lost my patience for it. How can billions of people subsist on such an obstinate, finicky grain for their daily sustenance? The mind boggles.

Finally, the problem was compounded by the expectations of eight of my friends, waiting to be fed. I didn't just have terrible food, I had a lot of it. Fortunately, my friends are barbarians with no taste, so they didn't particularly care - and for barbarians, they're very polite; the only audible complaints were from me.

This is made even worse when one considers that I've tangled with rice before. Its niceties are not entirely unknown to me. At least, that's what I thought when I started cooking tonight. As with many things in life, there is one correct outcome for rice, and a million failures.

This is the part of the post where I try to make it seem like what I'm writing about is important, but the only conclusion that I can come to is that I suck at cooking rice. Maybe I should... suck less? I'll figure out how to do rice right someday, but I wish I had methods other than "exhaust all possible failures".

As of now, I am formally instituting rice as my culinary arch-nemesis. It's on.

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subatomic waves from the underwater caves

Every Society Is Only Three Meals Away From Revolution*

This article in today's New York Times speaks to a lot of the issues I've recently been considering regarding food.

The matter is both complicated and simple. It is complicated in that it intricately brings together aspects of economics, agriculture, and politics both foreign and domestick. It is simple in that it is at heart about the answer to the question, "What should we have for dinner?".

One of the most important observations, made implicitly by the article, is the foolishness with which we try to outdo nature in her own element. Nature abhors a monoculture, and with good reason - the resilience of any ecosystem lies primarily in its diversity. And yet every aspect of the American agricultural system is designed (deliberately or accidentally) to promote monocultures. It's astonishing to think that much of the magnificent topsoil of the American midwest lies bare for five months of the year, but it's the natural outcome of the system implemented by the federal government. The dual problems of nitrogenous fertilizer and waste from high-density feedlots only emphasize the inherent clusterfuckedness of the situation - American industrial agriculture is akin to forcing round pegs into square holes.

Mother Nature tacitly notes that they are doing it wrong.

In attempting to divine the source of these problems, one comes to the inevitable conclusion that when the only tool available is federal subsidies, everything starts looking like a nail. The system was designed using subsidies to provide cheap calories, and it does so quite well. However, it's a house of cards, relying heavily on cheap energy both for fertilization and transport. And given the end result of the system, it's not a particularly appetizing house of cards. The design goal of the modern industrial agricultural system was the McDonald's hamburger.

It's really nice how the article is phrased as a potential agenda for our next president - there's no shortage of reasonable suggestions. It seems to me that the easiest way to politicize this issue is to phrase it in terms of energy, which is already a known quantity within political spheres. The article discusses the necessity of energy independence, which would be part and parcel with a comprehensive energy plan. It's one thing for our economy to be dependent on oil, but our food? See the title of this post.

There's a lot that I'm not even touching upon here - regulation of CAFOs, water use issues - but it's reassuring to me that this issue is continuing to loom large in the public consciousness. Real change will be slow, since the current system has a lot of momentum. But the question is not if change is coming, but rather what will happen when it comes. Will we direct it, or will it direct us?

Next: More about zombies.

EDIT: Oh, it's by the guy who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma. That makes a lot of sense, actually.

*I couldn't find a legitimate source for this saying, so I'm just going to claim that I invented it.

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i got more records than the K.G.B.