:: a.whisper.in.water ::

:: Monday, July 21, 2003 ::

Backdrifting (Oh, *So* Over Is the Honeymoon)
They're shot, they're all shot. My chips, the poor beleaguered chips of prior-post fame are shorted out almost irrevocably. A single conductive blob of epoxy isn't to be simultaneously touching the side (where gate voltage was to be applied) and the contact pads. Guess where it is on all but one of the junctions on the three chips that survived Penn's lithography process and my clumsiness. Yeah, so the remaining two weeks of my work will be spent making up for my mistakes and trying to get some sort of results. If this were a real job...oy. Benefits to this include wandering around the Chemistryfolk's nicer lab, listening to their music (I heard Aqua's "Barbie Girl" twice in a 4 hour span and nearly swallowed my teeth in rage), and working with this stankonious fast-curing putty epoxy (imagine play-doh that, upon its mixing, gave you two minutes to decide what the fuck you wanted it to be forever and smelled like everything that ever blocked your drain. On fire.) that I have to use to attach a small piece of reflective silicon onto a (wait for it) really long q-tip. I deserve what I get, I suppose.

Order of the Phoenix is no more. I finished its ass this weekend, start to finish, as mandated by rules of Harry Potter etiquette (don't stop reading if you can avoid it; do you really want to?). So, book 6, how about it J.K.? I swear, the books are actually crafted by a machine with an overzealous child-growth simulation engine; I had to look up a few words now and again (3: asperity, convalescent, and mollify. The last two were reassurance lookups, but I'd never heard asperity ever used prior). Really, it seemed like sugarcoated SAT prep for kids who don't actually read. All my best wishes that Harry gets over this whole "being a wang" phase (and Dumbledore gets out of his "not a real character" phase, and Hagrid gets out of his "cameo role" phase, et cetera...) in time for the next release, which I expect to top 1,000 pages and feature a hilarious sideplot with Hermione bringing a peeping Mr. Filch to justice, with madcap hijinks all along the way. Ugh, end my life, I read too much goddamn Harry Potter too fast.

In weird weekend news, Juils spent a fair amount of time at Haverford with K and I, though the majority of it was involuntary, as Maura's car sprung a flat. Le scoop: so, I was lent Maura's car (thanks Maura!) in order to pick up Juliana at the camp where she works, and after the introduction of a few hilarious time-constraints, Keith and I had precisely no time to spend at the camp itself. That is, this was either a drive for our health (with the Beastie Boys providing soundtrack), and not an easy drive at that, or a consensual kidnapping, with Juliana spending the night, and being driven back before 7:30, the latter of which was the course we decided on. The night passed relatively well, with a little bit of unforeseen drunkenness from our dear friends Timothy and Aaron, and a bit of wholly-expected drunnkeness from the rest. Some guy I'd not met before (called Aamir) introduced himself to me twice in ten minutes while following me around. This isn't the casual sort hello-handshake kind of introduction we're dealing with here. We're talking two identical 3-minute conversations concerning what grade I'm in, a search for common acquaintances, and a brief discussion of where we each were living next year. As our dear friends can attest, kind of funny, sure, but definitely kind of sad. Anyways.

So, a night of old Nickelodeon shows under our belts, we decide to retire for a brief 2-hour nap, at which point we needed to drive Juils back to camp, which would have gone off without a hitch (but still have been a little weird, understandably) had all the tires on Maura's car been free of air-releasing nails. Lamentably, this could only be said of three of her tires, thus resulting in the god-awful-flattest tire I have ever had the displeasure of driving 5 feet on, ascertaining it was flat, and then PARALLEL PARKING. Yep, my first real-life parallel parking job was on 3 tires and a rim (pretty well done, too) and only took one pass. K, Maura, and I then changed my first real-life tire, which was also cool in that not-entirely-worthless-on-my-own way, though that didn't solve the problem of getting Juliana back to Camp Kweebec, since a small, spare tire is no substitute for a real one on a drive the length of ours. So, there was anxiety in getting her home, and I was ringing people up at Too Damn Early on a Sunday morning trying to get a ride/car, which is a pretty fucking hard thing to do, though eventually (like, 6 hours after the whole thing began) Corinne+Ducky served as ride-guardian-angel and drove her back to camp. A weight off my soul, that was.

My mission, should I choose to accept it: go home from work, get in touch with Maddie, who is in town with a cellphone-that-is-never-on. Oh well, time to cross my fingers before dialing.

Music: All the questionable, cheap techno Adolphe puts on his server. I'll stick to BT, Daft Punk, and Radiohead, thanks. You can keep your Darude vs. Robert Miles (not to mention the ultimate in Aziz-infuriation, Darude vs. AT-fucking-B) remixes, lest my gastrointestinal tract catch wind and I'm forced to eject my stomach contents on the nearest kid sporting a glowstick and big pants.

:: Aziz 7:34 PM [+] ::
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