So, it’s midnight. That means it’s officially Wednesday – aka, the day my neighborhood loses its damn mind.
I hear a car running outside. When I look out of my window, I see two police cruisers in the street and an unmarked cop car on the side of the building.
I went to Wal-Mart1 after work, so I left my backpack in the car to bring my Wal-Mart bags upstairs. I left my backpack, with my school laptop in it, was in the front passenger seat of the car.
After tossing the bags in the apartment and chucking the milk in the fridge, I got the dog for the evening walk. I left my backpack in my car because the car was going to be within eyesight during the walk.2
Harley and I were about a block away when two teenage girls passed us. The girls reeked of pot and shot me the stank eye.
Yesterday I mentioned how great the view from the Washington Avenue bridge was. Here are pictures of the walk from the Student Union to the Bridge.
I’m at the Starbucks in the student union.
Barista #1 is a middle aged black woman with an accent.
Barista #2 is a teenage Hispanic student.
Me: “May I have a venti dark roast with room?”
Barista #1: “Sure. Hm, this is a refill so it will be 54 cents.”
I pull out my card.
Harley knocked over a mirror last night. It was a $10 Wal-Mart mirror, so it wasn’t a big deal. I cracked open my new box of generic trash bags1 and collected the glass shards.
When I moved to throw out the trash bag, I felt a sharp pain in my thigh – a glass shard had cut through the trash bag, through my shorts, and stabbed into my thigh.
I pulled up the leg of my shorts just in time to see the start of Bloodfest 2009. I grabbed a paper towel, pressed on the cut, and then instant messaged Gibs to see if he could drive me to the hospital.
But Gibs was at work. Drats!
The mass archive import brought on a little nostalgic tinge.
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 suspect cubicle partitions help noise travel. There is a seating area in the hallway near our cubicles. Two women broadcasted their conversation from the seating area today:
Woman 1: “I wonder what Cheryl is going to name the baby.”
Woman 2: “Cheryl’s pregnant?”
Woman 1: “Yeah Cheryl’s pregnant. She’s very pregnant!”
Woman 2: “Oh, I didn’t know.”
Woman 1: “Weren’t you just walking with Cheryl and I a few weeks ago? Cheryl was very pregnant then…”
Woman 1: “But she wasn’t that big! And there’s no polite way to ask if someone is pregnant! Sandra is STILL mad at me for asking if she was pregnant last year!”
Jack and I had to resist the temptation to get up and look at who the women were. The real question is: who’s Sandra?
Enough interns were snickering that the women realized it was time to go.
I only notice the chaos because I have Wills & Trusts at 8:30am the next day, which means that I should probably go to bed early – but I can’t – because on Wednesday nights the entire neighborhood gathers for a chorus of crazy.
Last night’s crazy started with two guys trying to jump a car at the end of the street. The car doing the jumping had a car alarm which went off every time the guy revved his engine.
This went on for 25 minutes.
Today in Wills & Trusts, we are discussing the class schedule for the rest of the semester when Professor W stops and looks at Jack:
Professor W: “Don’t bite your fingers. I can’t watch that! You can go outside and munch all you want!”
The class engages in a collective gasp. Jack throws his hand down and flushes. Giggling ensues.
I left work late, so the only street parking was a few blocks away.
When I got out of my car I noticed someone peering from the dirty white car across the street – it was Terry, the toothless man who sleeps in his car.
I nodded politely but Terry just kept giving me this blank-yet-rabid-stare. I could sense his eyes following me as I walked down the block…ugh.
After getting home and walking the dog, I realize that I left my laptop in my car. I decide that it is more prudent to fetch the computer than to explain to the cops why I left a laptop in a car parked next to a crazed semi-homeless man.
The themes of the past week? Work, fireworks, dog drama, cleaning, and crunk cyclists.
Oh, and birthday festivities. Pictures:
First off we have the awkward retro-kids who roamed into the hiphop room of the gay club:
And some vogue or…erm, whatever this is:
And Jack and his boyfriend John:
Oh, and we saw Borat roaming downtown Minneapolis… pictures and video after the jump, which are not school/work safe:
Here is a list of songs that made me want to shimmy and shake this week:
It’s 3am, and there is one car in front of me at the Taco Bell drive-thru line.
At the ordering-menu is a greasy-looking guy on a bicycle. He’s drunk.
Biker: “Ay ay, I wanna an enchilada!”
Taco Bell Employee (on the menu speakerphone): “Um, sir. We can’t serve you if you’re not in a car.”
Biker: “Ay ay enchilada! And a hard shell ta-co.”
Employee: “Sir. We can’t serve you.”
Biker: “WHAT?”
The people in the car in front of me start giggling nervously. A woman says “Oh no!” in a car behind me.
Harley is afraid of fireworks and gunfire-like popping noises.
So, he’s spent the past week cowering in the bathroom because it’s the only room in the apartment without windows.
I’m making birthday plans with Jack & Company over the phone:
Jack: “Should I just come over at 10 before we go out? I want to see the dog!”
Me: “Erm. I have to clean my apartment first.”
Jack: “You are NOT cleaning your apartment on your birthday!”
Me: “Oh, yes I am!”
I just read the Above The Law story on the 1L deferrals at the University of Miami’s law school, and I thought, “Hm. That picture looks awfully familiar.”
That shouldn’t have been a surprise, since I took the picture last summer.
Remember, if you’re going to swipe content, it’s polite to link.
It’s 1am. I’m in my boxers, crouched in my living room, wiping-up a massive pile of diarrhea.
I lysol. I wipe. I lysol again.
The trash can fills. I get a strong whiff of the nast and shoot the dog a “fuck you and die” glare.
He cowers in the corner.
My windshield wiper fluid had been empty for a week, so I was really proud of myself when I finally bought some fluid from Wal-Mart.
In fact, I was SO excited that I popped my hood in the parking lot and filled the wiper fluid right there. Just because I’m that classy.
But when I got into my car, the “you need windshield wiper fluid” light was still on.
On the way home I realized why the light was still on – I poured the windshield fluid in the radiator!
The next day I was on the phone with Valvoline. They wanted $79 to flush my radiator.
I then called my car dealership’s repair shop – they wanted $125.
