Matt’s 7-day forecast:
2pm Friday – Sunday = West Virginia
6:30am Monday – 9pm Friday = New York City
I should really spend my time packing tonight, not uploading pictures, but I can’t resist so here’s the first set:
P.S. How to ensure your band doesn’t make it big, #1834: Name your band ‘Fisticuffs‘.
Bonus points if you’re a British band and design a hardcore logo.
Not only are there Terrapins climbing the staircases at BWI (a marketing move described as “unique” and “unexpected for an educational institution”…………in a good way), but we also won the Grounds Maintenance Award. I originally meant that as a joke, but now that the University is at long last bypassing the sinkhole that is College Park (land of “a thousand permutations on the sandwich”) and creating their own college town, it’s a legitimate sign of good things to come.
Oh, and I hear we’ve got a pretty decent basketball team.
Jetlag doesn’t usually hit me this hard (my nocturnal habits usually compensate) but I’m still beat from traveling. Which is interesting because I’m going to Snowshoe this weekend (with my date, pictured below) and quite possibly spending a good deal of the next two weeks in NYC for work.
I was gonna scale back my coffee intake (Vienna’s amazing coffeehouses certainly didn’t help) but now is clearly not the time. Oh, and if you didn’t read the saga below, my cellphone is currently being air-mailed from Austria for more than it’s worth, so IM or email me if you need me.
If you use Firefox (as you should) you can now get a Christmas theme for it. Beats an advent calendar (sorry Mom).
and while we’re at it, holiday drink recipes.
Short Version:
slept 3am-8am
traveled 8am Saturday – 4:30am Sunday
(Vienna->Paris->Dulles->DC->College Park, world capitals all)
Long Version:
Friday morning I left Jeff’s apartment with him and his friends as they left for a ski trip. I realized soon after waving goodbye at the U-bahn (metro) station that the directions he wrote to the hop-on hop-off bus while trashed were incomplete, so I instead went to an art museum and now risk dying without seeing all fo the Hapsburg dynasty’s palaces.
I came back around 7pm that night, cold and museum-weary, to discover that I had left Jeff’s keys inside the apartment that morning. After buzzing all of the American-sounding and blank names on the mailbox list to no avail, I’m about to
a. cry
b. beg for hostel money
c. buzz the German names and pray that my brother and his roommates hadn’t alienated the buildings native residents (fat chance)
Fortunately I was spared these fates when a 20-something German guy rode up on his bike and let me tailgate inside. When I tried to explain the reason he just assured me he wanted nothing to do with it. I try Jeff’s door and quickly gauge its picka/smasha-bility, and pretending I didn’t realize no one was home, I ask the guy if he knows which number apartments the girls live at. He clearly wishes he had made it those last few feet inside his place and shut the door, so I didn’t expect him to help out here, but my luck continued to hit the extremes and he gave me two numbers.
No. 9 proved fruitful, where a girl named Pearl opened the door after I said “Matt, Jeff’s brother”, even though she later said she does not know who Jeff is. I guess I sounded American enough or she really trusted that first locked door to keep her safe. Pearl ended up being my savior, calling various landlords and cleaning ladies until finally locating a liasion right int eh building to let me in. I fed the guy some crap about staying at a hostel but needing my luggage (Jeff’s landlord somehow thinks she can get away with charging 7 euro for any overnight guests they have, including female friends. Her track record in applying this fee is poor and these few instances involve her letting herself into the apartment with a spare key early in the morning to find naked coeds and empty beer cans.).
So I get in. Disaster averted. Now you’d think I’d take this as a hint to be extra super uber careful about my packing preparations. Well instead, I uploaded a video (post below) to YouTube and watched the rest of The Office Season 2 (I’ve been converted to the US version) on iTunes. I sleep 5 hours and thank god, one of Jeff’s roommates left behind a travel alarm clock.
I’m up and off to a good start in the morning, with a hot shower and uncharacteristically classy travel otufit (my usual UMD sweatshirt reeks of the Nautica cologne that shattered on it in my checked baggage on the way over). I leave with my two bags and successfully navigate a flea market, the metro, and a train line. The train arrives just as I get to it and as it pulls away from the station, I wonder where my camera is. Oh yeah, in my backpack. And my backpack is…
…still in Jeff’s apartment. There’s not enough time to go back now, although I might have tried anyway if I wasn’t locked out again and still sour from missing my connecting flight in Paris on the way over (that one was entirely the fault of Cheapoair.com – I don’t miss flights). So I convince myself I don’t really need my wallet, cellphone, apartment keys, American money, camera, et cetera x15.
And to think, Jeff had just recently questioned my habit of carrying my passport with me at all times. I guess it’s more necessary for me than others.
I had tons of time to kill in the airport, although no toys or Euros to kill it with. Dad, for the record, I was three hours early for the flight (ignore everything before and after this sentence).
On the plus side, no carry-ons to worry about! I’d really like to believe that somewhere there are people who truly find travel – not the destination, but the actual journey through an actual airport – relaxing, like it is in coffee commercials. They check their black leather luggage and stroll onboard the plane empty-handed with smiles on their faces. But between my father’s crazed travel mode and my own mishaps – nay, adventures (a sense of humor is key when you face being stranded in Paris) – I know the reality all too well.
The flights weren’t bad, the usual crying babies and all, but Air France actually has really good food, which is great, because I couldn’t afford any if I wanted to catch the Metro bus home.
All I really want to do now is crash at my place, dump out my bags, and turn out the ecosystem of receipts, coins, ticket stubs and other litter inhabiting my jacket pockets. But I am lucky that I went to UMD and have a place to crash (it will be really awkward if this happens in like three years, though).
My roommate doesn’t get home until Monday, so I should look sufficiently fatigued / dirty by work Monday morning. Pics coming soon, once Jeff mails them.
The irony of leaving behind my most essential daily living items but remembering Jeff’s extra clothes and already-read books is not lost on my fried brain. It’s time for bed.
Oh, and almost forgot – Merry Christmas-music-playing season to all. May Neil Diamond and the Muppets serenade you all season long.
Well after an evening alone in Jeff’s apartment with only The Office and Neil Diamond’s Christmas Album (best Jewish-produced xmas album of all time, btw) to keep me company (could have been a lot worse, as I was locked out until a girl named Pearl made some calls for me), I’m heading home tomorrow (ideally before my bank account actually hits zero).
Pictures to come shortly, but I thought I’d start you off with a great video clip of a German kid we met who turned out to be the world’s #1 Toto superfan. Watch as he professes how he loves the band as sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.
How to get your music off your iPod
(in case your computer crashes, or to borrow a friend’s entire collection in one fell swoop)
How to fry a turkey
(try not to burn down your house)
This town was meant for passing through
But it ain’t nothing new
Now go and show them
That the world stayed round
-the Killers, “This River is Wild”
Working every day is for the birds. My eyes are going dull from staring at a screen all day. It’s time to leave the town of passing through for an adventure.
Specifically, an adventure to visit my little brother Jeff, who’s studying abroad in Vienna. He went there despite the significant handicap of not knowing a single word of German, which is more than I can say, having gone to London where the biggest language barrier was remembering to call elevators ‘lifts’.
I leave tomorrow night straight from work to embark on an all-night flight to Paris, then another flight to Vienna. Here’s hoping for free booze and personal video screens.
Shortly after arriving, Jeff and I will be taking a train to Munich first thing Sunday morning for a couple of days in the beer gardens, and then back to Vienna. He may miss a German quiz, but then again he got an A++ on the midterm. Why couldn’t my study abroad classes have been pass/fail/ridiculously easy?
Jeff recently had his backpack stolen from the luggage compartment of a bus in Barcelona, losing his iPod, digicam, nice headphones, clothes, etc., so I’m bringing reinforcements. His requests include a wide variety of things, including Ranch dressing and the Neil Diamond Christmas CD.
Of course, I already mailed him a care package consisting of 12 red Solo cups and two ping pong balls. The lady at the Post Office wasn’t feeling my love and insisted I meant Vienna, VA when I filled out the three international forms. Brian pointed out that I could mail a box of air if I so chose to pay for it, and thus is the downside of being a federal employee. Here’s hoping those cups are still clean enough for some Europong.
I’ll be taking far too many pictures, and I’ll share them here when I get back.
My 21st and 22nd birthdays were polar opposites. My 21st was a Saturday night, with everyone I’ve ever met (at UMD anyway) at the bar, with the Red Sox having just destroyed the Yankees and swept the World Series. My 22nd was a Monday night, where 6 good friends showed up anyway and helped me pretend the night had some significance.
So in short, turning 22 sucks because it’s a letdown after turning 21. But 23 is the perfect middle between being too old for your college friends and too young for your work friends. And it’s Election Day this year, and with any luck I’ll be able to read the news without fighting the urge to vomit for the first time since 2000.
And 23 is Michael Jordan’s number.
(This last piece of logic doesn’t apply to turning 45)
Freshman year was a hard time to do schoolwork. I lived in a quad, converted into a triple, and we rarely went to bed before 4 or 5am. i actually dropped a grade in a class because i slept through it 3 times (not counting the extensive rolodex of excuses I burned through…never faked any deaths though, unlike some roommates). But this class was at 10am, which is pretty pathetic.
So to get work done, Slash and I would occasionally retreat to Mckeldin library, which was a convenient 50 feet away from our dorm. I’d estimate that I read as much in one night there as I could in a week in my room. The best nights were the ones where Slash and I would go in for Mckeldin Magic.
photo by David Byers
Mckeldin Magic consisted of a clock on the second floor that was never adjusted for daylight savings time, and thus was an hour fast. We would study until 3 or 4am, and upon leaving (only down the magic elevator, which was the smallest one that I don’t think you were really supposed to use), we would magically gain an extra hour and maybe be able to sleep a little before that exam.
Slash took Mckeldin Magic to extreme lengths, as with many things, and began “saving” his extra hour of daylight savings for when he really needed it. He wouldn’t change his clocks or otherwise acknowledge that the rest of society had shifted its collective schedule until he needed an extra hour.
This morning I woke up at 9:30, quickly regretting watching Old School late last night. I then discovered that I, too, had saved an extra hour and hadn’t changed my bedside clock yet. Needless to say I used my bonus hour and am in a much better mood now than if I had shifted clocks with everyone else.
Of course, my cellphone automatically switched Saturday night while I was out, which kind of takes the fun out of saving up hours, but you have to believe for magic to work.
What are some other things you should be able to accrue and use at your leisure like holiday leave?
It’s always interesting to see what the University of Maryland considers worthy of its homepage real estate. National basketball championships, Nobel Prize winners, these are obvious choices. But once in a while they (OIT? Administration? marketing?) make a bold move and give an entire box to things like the Capitol One Mascot showdown.
For those of you who haven’t voted for Testudo yet, go ahead and do so and get it out of your system so I can continue my rant.
Now, I expect this contest to get passed around the fraternity listserv and some AIM profiles, but I didn’t really expect my alma mater to promote it to its front page with more flair than a number of major university achievements are given. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen this same lame contest for five years now, and you always have to vote for EVERY SINGLE MATCHUP when you clearly only care about your school’s mascot (thus ensuring that 5 out of every 6 votes is someone randomly clicking so they can submit).
But the system’s integrity aside, don’t you think it’s beneath UMD to have this as a major part of the main site? I mean this is Capital One’s dream come true. They buy the rights to our mascots and then this “contest” gets them, a credit card company, on the front page of a major university’s website, space they could never have outright purchased no matter how much they offered. Never mind the fact that the average American already has over $8,500 in credit card debt or that they love targeting students.
Oh, and Testudo’s video sucks. He’s got much better moves than what appears to be drunk disco dancing.
update: They’ve since taken it down. But still.
