Words, in three parts

This is pretty long, so I've broken it up into three mostly distinct parts. They're in the order, loosely speaking, that I wrote them in, but by no means does that mean the most compelling bits are in the beginning. The parts are like this:

1. Yesterday's Activities: Fine Dining
2. Some quick remarks on AIM
3. on blogs

And it should be noted that all of this is incredibly self involved and at times maybe a bit pretentious.

Part the first: food

So my sister is in town for a couple days, and as she is an aspiring chef (that is, she works on the line in a somewhat higher class place, but it's not some 4 star super dining establishment), I get to eat really well when she visits because she wants to take me out to fancy places. Last night, for example, we went out to this place called Kevin's. It's at 9 W Hubbard I think, just north of the loop proper, and I really really liked the food. I ordered this Tuna Tartare appetizer and this bean-sauce glazed rack of lamb for an entre, then finished with an Apricot and some other fruits and nuts strudel, with apricot-chamomile ice cream. Oh man, it was amazing. I also had a sampling of all the dishes that my aunt and her friends who brought us there got as well. I don't remember exactly what everybody else got, so I'm going to not bother listing them.

So, yeah, last night I had an amazing dinner, and tonight she's taking me out to Topolobampo (I think that's how it's spelled) because she admires Rick Bayless and this is one of his restaurants. It's a 4-star place, apparently, so, I'm going to be totally outclassed. Holy crap.

One thing that was kind of funny was when we were talking about how my sister is considering moving to Chicago, these two people I didn't know, who I guess are Neurology bigwigs at some other university around here (they live in Oak Park I think?), mentioned how me being a student at U of C must mean I don't get out much. I started to protest, and realized this was the second time I've stepped out of Hyde Park this quarter. I used to get out more, but this year I've become really sad on that front, I think.

After dinner last night, we went and saw Ep. III. It was pretty impressive but I generally have to agree with a bunch of critic's reviews: Action cool, dialogue not cool. I also kind of liked the pacing and tension of the old saber-duels, rather than these new ones which are much more frenetic and have far less talking. Whatever, I do not want to sit here and nitpick star wars. It was a very fun movie to watch, and I suspect I'll probably get dragged (not dragged as I will go willingly) to see it again in the near future.

Part the second: AIM

So having just recently realized that I was in a dialogue with somebody I actually know, rather than some anonymous internet stranger, I went ahead and skimmed over some random selections from their blog, because rather than do the personable thing and talk with them, it was easier this morning while I munched on cereal to page through some entries online. Anyhow, one of the entries had this remark about the drawbacks of one's parents learning to use AIM. I found it really amusing actually. See, the thing is, my parent's use AIM a lot, because it's much easier, cheaper and often more convenient, than phone calls or email, as they are in China. So while at first I worried about what kind of things I left up in my away message or profile, I got over that really quickly, because I fast realized that they didn't seem to care too much, if ever they even checked. The thing that made me briefly worried again, was when my grandparents started using AIM. At the behest of my parents, they got it installed, with some help from my cousins I think, and learned how to use AIM, and one day my grandmother im's me and I had some away message up with some movie quote I think, which might have been interpreted in an entirely bad way, and were it not for the quotation marks which I often omit, probably would have been. As it was, she simply asked what that meant, and eventually signed off (I only saw all this after the fact, clearly). So later I caught one of them online and explained that often I will leave up away messages that might normally be cause for alarm, but they shouldn't worry about it, or ever take it seriously. As they've all got an understanding of this now, I don't really think about who's reading it anymore.

It's also kind of funny sometimes the reactions I've gotten when people discover that not only do my parents use AIM, a lot, but that my grandparents do as well. As I understand it, my parents' use of AIM puts them in a fairly select minority, nevermind my grandparents.

Part the third: blogging

This section is going to be pretty rambly, since I don't really feel like organizing my thoughts beforehand to make this more readable. So recently I discover this blog of this person I know, and sort of through it reinitiate contact with them. Then I later discover that this person is in fact good friends with this other person I know, pretty much totally unbeknownst to me. And so I'm commenting on this person's blog and this other person I know is also commenting there, and there is in some sense this dialogue going on but I have no idea it's somebody I know. Then one day, that is to say, this morning, I click a couple times, skim a few paragraphs and am totally surprised to discover just who this internet stranger is.

Anyhow, that's just sort of vaguely related to the remarks I wanted to say. I had some well thought out motivation I was going to provide for justification for these remarks, but I can't remember what they were and they weren't really terribly meaningful as I don't really have any real motivation save for an interest in passing time.

I started a blog when I was in 9th grade. And it, like every blog I've tried to start maintaining since, got me in trouble. In 9th grade, it was just this dumb experiment with HTML, more than anything else. I made silly remarks about stuff I did, and I don't even have an archive of it anymore. Much like every incarnation since, I used it as a place to randomly vent frustrations of mine. Actually it may have been 10th grade. In any case, that year, MA was testing a new standardized test they were going to institute as a requirement for receiving a high school diploma. So anyway, me being totally polarized against more testing in schools, only because as a student, I did not like taking tests (though in retrospect this makes little sense since I tested better than I perform GPA-wise (still true, really)), I decided to lambaste the test on my web log, to a readership of me, maybe a couple friends, and whoever happened to see it because it was the home page on a couple of the computer lab's computers, in a silly and stupid and entirely reasonless attempt to boost my hit-count.

Now, here's what happened: There was this question on the science section, and it was something about the water cycle, short "essay" format (that is, maybe 5 sentences). Since it was being tested on me, and I didn't really care at all, I entered what I thought to be a hilarious joke answer about some little kid peeing in a pool and it evaporating and so forth. Then I posted as much on my weblog. And this is where it got messy. Some teacher went to use a computer in the computer lab, and was greeted by my weblog. Then they saw that I had posted the prompt for the question and my "parody" answer. They then reported me to the vice principal for "cheating" on the test. See, what I had failed to consider, among a great many other things, was that the test is administered to high schools all over the state over the course of a few weeks, and not all schools are obligated to be on the same schedule. That is, some schools hadn't yet taken the science section. So I was sitting in World Geography class I think, and there's a call and the teacher is like "Russell, you've been requested to go to the office and talk to the Vice Principal." And I'm like "uh crap" and the class is like "oooooooooooooh." So I walk down there and she's like "I hope you realize what you've done, this is serious business. I've already printed and faxed your webpage to the Dept. of Education. It's in their hands now." She explained how I wasn't supposed to do that, and how it could invalidate the results of the whole school's testing and it'd be all my fault and to be honest it scared the crap out of me, though I think at the time I kept a pretty good straight face. Ultimately, nothing came of it, but it got me to shut down and purge my website from existence damn quick.

Ok that's a really long and pretty silly story. Anyway, I've since tried multiple times to start and maintain blogs, and they always fail because I say something stupid, and somebody calls me out on it, and it ends with somebody being pretty upset at me. I imagine with time I'll manage that here as well, or I'll just stop because I might get bored. Who knows.

Oh right, so the point is, through high school I kept it up and I was really really angsty and depressed and angry and ranted a lot, but I found it to be extremely cathartic. I think in lieu of going and actually seeking professional help, in many ways writing down all that depressed and high-school-angst filled crap did for me what I understand something like talk therapy is supposed to do for people.

I really did not enjoy high school much at all, as an aside.

But I made it through, about as fast as I could, and left, and life after high school has been substantially better.

I need to learn to restrain myself. I feel like I'm just pumping out an absurdly large number of words, so much so that it's probably very cumbersome to read.