antiguit.com

Me: “I told my friends that Energizer bunny joke you subjected me to.”
M: “Oh, really?”
Me: “Yeah. And now they’re not my friends anymore.”
M: “Hah! But no, seriously, somebody did get arrested the other day. Some actress.”
Me: “What?”
M: “Yeah, she had stabbed her boyfriend. It was Reese…Reese…”
Me: “Reese Witherspoon?”
M: “No, with her knife.”

My lab partner M has dreadlocks and wears aviator shades to class. He owns the most amazing Charlie Brown tee, has a degree in physics, and wants to teach in Africa someday. Summer biology classes ended today, and that has effectively terminated our mornings filled with terrible jokes and making sure we set nothing on fire in experiments.

One of the last lab activities we attempted today was releasing sperm from ferns (oho ho ho). As M observes his specimen under the microscope, he muffles a chuckle, turns to me and says in a few decibels louder than what he usually subscribes to, “Do you wanna see my sperm?”

I stifle a laugh as best I could and observe the slides, making a comment on how motile they were.

“Yeah,” he anchors both hands on his hips. “It took a while before I got them to come out, but when they did—” he claps once and makes a whooshing sound.

Oh criminey. I wasn’t expecting this from physics majors.

“I was gonna bring in cookies for everyone today,” he says at the tail end of class, “but I got lazy, so I didn’t.” He shoulders his backpack and slides his aviators over his head. “But it’s the thought that counts, no?”

Posted on June 13th, 2008 by Antiguit

Me: “Okay. Should I put up this Star Wars poster or this Empire poster?”
S: “I think you should put up the Empire one. It’s more…romantic.”
Me: “What? What am I going to do with romance?”
S: [Incredulous] “Your room has a Star Wars poster and World War Two-era British propaganda. Isn’t that a little too masculine?”

After finding a single Stormtrooper on my desk and multiple lightsabers strewn inside random drawers, S felt compelled to shell out interior decorating advice with the sole purpose of effeminate-ing my bedroom. But after he discovered these guys on the floor and a single scented candle burning away next to the television, he softened his stance a little. Maybe this is a bad time to tell him about my thinking of subscribing to Armchair General.

Want I want for my walls is my favorite fragments from the Battle of Liaoyang: this picture of Russian general Prince Kuropatkin’s forces getting whipped by the Japanese and him looking back to his men saying “Fuck it lah boys, let’s go!” and straight into the fray.

Nobody did macho bravado like the Russian army, and I can only dream of inheriting some of that bulldozer attitude; summertime and summer classes do not make good bedfellows! All I want to do these days is lie in the grass, read a lot of Tintin, and listen to Joy Division. I want to take pictures of gaudy billboards promoting porn stores on Wisconsin highways. I want to develop velociraptor-warning systems. I want to build a velociraptor.

(It’s so nice now that my sentences can afford to begin with “I want to” and not “I need to.”)

Posted on June 2nd, 2008 by Antiguit

We attended the wedding of X and DO last night. It’s a strange, surreal feeling watching someone your own age make a decision usually reserved for grownups. X is only two years older than me, but she has already reached a place in life I do not project seeing myself in for at least another decade. What a brave girl. The two have been going out for two years, and they married a mere month after he proposed to her; my darling roommate N has been seeing her man-thing for eight years, and there is no talk of marriage on the horizon with them. What is going on with this world?

But I digress. X and DO are wonderful people. They are good for each other, and what a cute couple they make. They exhibited that wonderful, happy glow exhibited by people who are in love, and DO looked especially proud to be standing up there. He had one of those bewildered “My god, I can’t believe it’s her hand I’m holding, her hair I’m stroking” looks on his face the whole time. It would have moved you to tears, if that’s your sort of thing (only one set of eyes on our table that was not dry).

And now we can look forward to the babies they will be having. What do you get when you cross a Chinese and a Brazilian? Oh my goodness. Chizilians! X and DO are going to have the cutest, most beautiful little Chizilian babies! They will be wonderful parents, and I am going straight to hell in a handbasket for that terrible portmanteau.

Posted on May 24th, 2008 by Antiguit

The library reeks of frustration. Young men with stubbled jaws who engage me in conversation on lift rides to the fifth storey smell like freshly-ground coffee beans. These amicable fellows who misplace their razors and smell like a Starbucks—why do they gravitate towards me in lifts, where witty bantering is truncated by the electronic ding that lets you know you’ve arrived on your desired floor, and why so late in the semester?

The ambitions of sleep-deprived undergraduates saturate the air and anywhere, anytime, at any given nook and cranny of this building, thoughts and ideas are skipping across miles and miles of of myelinated neurons. Somebody needs to look into harvesting alternative energy from school-induced stress, if ever we run out of water or wind one day.

In one corner of the library, some mathematics student who should have his eyes fixated on the inherent wisdom of a statistics textbook is shunning his academic duties (he is stalking somebody on Facebook). We don’t know each other and probably never will, but he knows that for one week, there is a solid probability that he has something in common with the history student whose eyes should be fixated on the inherent wisdom of a Woodrow Wilson speech (she is updating a weblog).

But what we have in common are not riches or everlasting love or a desire to change the world; what we have in common is a little less heartwarming. What we have in common is.

Posted on May 14th, 2008 by Antiguit

1. How did I let it get this bad?

2. If I were not made out of propriety and chickenshit and irony, then yes. But I am sober and scared and cynical, so no.

3. And you. What is wrong, and why won’t you let me look after you?

4. Aaaaaarrrggghhh.

5. End of cryptic transmission.

Posted on May 6th, 2008 by Antiguit