The University of Miami has gone through some major renovations since the last time I visited.
The cell-block dorm towers are still there, as is the law school and library, however there is a brand new student center, a hospital, and the dumpy student dive bar is now a gorgeous multistory restaurant.
Club O-Zone was the only club within walking distance of the University of Miami during my freshman year. The club was in a semi-abandoned strip mall, right next to the Florida Department of Family Services, and yes, it was absolutely hilarious.
The university bought the strip mall, flipped it, and now a pack of luxury apartment buildings sits where I created some of the best memories of freshman and sophomore year. Good thing I took pictures.
College was hilarious.
My college dorm rooms were a little… colorful?
The old dorm: it didn’t feel as cluttered as it looks.
I’ve officially been in Minnesota for a year. There are already extensive summaries of fall semester and spring semester, so I’ve decided to pick a picture/memory to represent each month.
Here it goes:
August: Exploring Twin Cities
September: school starts, law students riverdance.
October: Let’s talk about the weave
November: Outlining…oh, and Fedde Le Grand/Moon Goons!
I uploaded my full archive. The blog now starts during the finals period of my first semester in college. You can start at the beginning or see the highlights below. Caution: bad writing ahead.
Are you looking for some poorly written angst-laced posts? Well I have got a treat for you!
No.634 now contains my archive of posts from senior year of college.
Frankly, I don’t understand why anyone hung out with me.
It all started when I decided to transfer my dennis-jansen.com domain to hostmonster (which hosts this site). The transfer deleted a significant number of images from my blog archives because the images were hosted on the old server. Basically, all the posts from first semester had lost their images! And I can’t just let my archives get sloppy because a lot of pre-law students read blawg archives, especially right before law school. And I like to show I care. Really…
Most of the images were on facebook, so I went through the tedious process of downloading a shit-ton of images from facebook and re-uploading them to wordpress.
As I reconstructed my archives from fall semester, I realized that this blog started in an odd way. I used Livejournal during college, and began the earliest incarnation of this blog during the summer before law school.
For a while, No.634 was my “law school only” blog. I kept a personal blog in addition to No.634.
The closer I came to starting law school, the more I found myself posting the same content to both blogs – the line between “blawg-worthy” and personal-blog-worthy blurred, and keeping two blogs seemed, well, stupid.
So I eventually gave up the personal blog and started blogging exclusively here. But the early archives of No.634 still retained that odd, stuffy “business only” feel. So, to give everyone a more complete view of where I came from (ie, my angsty, annoying roots) I have added my senior year to the archives. And yes, they are tragic. Enjoy!
I ate lunch outside today.
The campus squirrels chased eachother so intensely that they jumped on my table and then scurried across my bench.
They circled my table and then came back around and crashed head-on into my pantleg.
After the chaos calmed down I fed both of them.
I ended up leaving after a sickly (rotting) looking squirrel approached my table and wouldn’t go away. It completely sketched me out because its fur was patchy and part of his jaw was gone. (I lost the picture as part of a server change…remind me, I may be able to find it somewhere…)
It wouldn’t shoo…so I left before I got attacked.
Pissy dressing room attendant:
“You should smile. You look so sad.”
Me:
“Funny. I just thought the same thing about you.”
Mann und Frau kaufen rollende Schuhe um zusammen zu rollen. Sie rollen und können nicht halten und stürzen und versinken im heißen Asphalt.
Und der Hans von der harten Musik kommt vorbei, und auf ihm lastet es schwer. Er sieht den Dingen ins Auge. Er hat den Augapfel gepierct.
Und ein Schwarm auserirdischer Kinder in großen Hosen fällt er über die Stadt. Und sie überspringen alle Mäuerchen und ich glaub so werden, so werden Skateboards gezeugt. Halleluja, das ist der Sommer im Asphalt sitzen und versinken…Skateboards zeugen, Augäpfel piercen, Halleluja das ist der Sommer.
Peter Licht Rockt.
Translation of the song + youtube of it after the cut.
On another midnight walk with the boys I stopped and pointed.
I was like, “Wait, Interpol portapotties? For seriously?”
But no, it’s Interpool, not interpol.
Pablo said that this was a dorky thing to post. I don’t care.
Madre Jansen just called.
Madre: *cough* how are you?
Me: Fine, what’s up?
Madre: On my way to pick up my meds. Apparently I’ve got bronchitis.
Yikes.
Madre’s had a tough medical year. So far, she’s dislocated her shoulder from being hit by car, landed in the ER/isolation for flesh eating bacteria, and now bronchitis.
Madre Jansen is hilarious though – two days after the car accident she’s jogging on the beach, arm in sling.
And, after she got out of quarantine during the whole bacteria scare she had me bring her work laptop:
“Just because I’m hospitalized doesn’t mean I can’t get some work done.”
People who think I’m hardcore obviously never met mom.
1pm lunch rush at Taco Bell: About a dozen people waited inside the restaurant lobby for their orders. They rolled their eyes, sucked their teeth, and eventually started bitching aloud about the wait.
Taco Bells are designed so you can see the kitchen if you’re inside, so I don’t understand why people bitched about the wait when they could see the frantic pace of the workers. You try to make that many orders at once. I worked as a cook at WingZone a few summers ago, so maybe I’m more sympathetic…I don’t know.
I think bitching about a wait at lunch rush is like getting on a highway at 5pm and whining about the traffic. What do you expect?
There was another problem: the guy who brought the orders out didn’t speak English. He called out the numbers in Spanish, which, becuase we are in Miami wasn’t really a problem. The rule of thumb is to remember who is in line before you to figure out if you’re next. Seriously. It’s not that hard.
A nurse who was also waiting for her food decided to help the Kitchen Guy and called out the numbers in English when no one responded to his Spanish calls. This worked for a while.
But then came the Hick’s order.
The Kitchen Guy called out the number several times and eventually the nurse called it out in English. The Hick, a 6-foot tall, unshaven guy with the mandatory ponytail, dirty work clothes, and trucker hat, stormed to the counter and screamed, “WE ARE IN AMERICA. SPEAK ENGLISH!”
About six of us were crammed together near the soda fountain. It was a crowded, awkward space, and the Hick broke the unspoken golden rule of crowded, awkward spaces: thou shant cause drama.
We all held our breaths and mouthed “woah.”
The Hick stormed off with his tacos. Kitchen Guy looked perturbed, but he didn’t really speak enough English to really understand anything beyond that he was just bitched at. This was a good thing because Kitchen Guy looked like he could unleash all sorts of crazy.
Looks were exchanged. We all looked sympathetically at the poor unilingual Kitchen Guy, and everyone stopped their bitching about the wait, and glared at the Hick, who was still bitching at his booth.
Yes Miami is technically in America, but it’s a different kind of America than what The Hick and people like him envision: Miami is 69% Hispanic, 57.7% immigrant (foreign-born), and English is not the primary language of 76.2% of the households. Yes Kitchen Guy can do better. But at the end of the day he is Kitchen Guy, and English is not a requirement for that job.
If you want to demand that people (especially unskilled, min. wage workers) speak English then move to The Provence like everyone else.
Homeboy must have realized that my thoughts had turned to murder because he eventually, with great show, got out of my way and took to glaring from a distance (as I happily drove off.)
July 4th was rained out. Not that it mattered because I was on duty (which is akin to house arrest). I’ve been on summer RA/conference duty on the 4th for the past three years, so I’m used to it being a non-event. (This goes for Christmas and New Years too. Holidays in college consisted of me alone (and on call) in a completely empty dorm building. You know, just in case the two random exchange students still on campus decided to perhaps, burn something or snort coke in halls.)
Hey, you never know.
Crap. So I got behind again…oodles of snippets…
I ran into Henry, the campus alligator last night.
I’m pretty sure there are multiple gators, but I refer to them all as Henry, since I only see one at a time.
I wonder what type of wildlife Minneapolis has…
Miami during summer: Rain, rain, heat, rain, rain, humidity, parrot, rain.
The parrots are SO loud. I need a beebee gun.
Days have been lazy, nights have been fun…and well, loud, when the parrots are around. We have a wild flock that roams around campus. They drill their nests in old palm trees.
