Elliot (aka E-Dawgg)

Silly adventures in lighting update form:

~Twilight: The Britney Spears Musical: It was pretty awesome. I can't sing the real words to Britney songs anymore.
~Red Bull geocaching- we went on adventures in the middle of the night to find energy shots, but the geocaching competition had actually started a month ago, and the treasures were claimed. All the same, we rampaged through the stacks and graveyard.
~Halloween Costumes: Spandex Suit Creeper, Ninja, Slutty Tigger, and Old Greg over the span of Friday and Saturday.
~I am the undisputed Fo'ty Bus Champion of Oh Lev.
~I'm going to China over spring break on a Reach Out trip. Little did I realize two of my favorite bro-skis would also be on the trip.
~I'm leading some big new projects at work for the admissions office, redesigning the main website. It's a pretty big responsibility for a site that generates literally millions of hits, so I'm psyched.
~Leaf-pile jumping. Glorious.
~Finding freshmen hooking up in leaf piles. Hilarious.
~I've been sick for literally 7 weeks. I think I'm recovering? I had better be.
~One more week, one more football game (THE GAME) before fall break then a week of classes, a week of reading and a week of finals. Shee-it, where did the semester go?

I miss having regular updates here, purely for the reason that I then miss out on the opportunity to look back at the absurd collections of things I've done.  IN BRIEF:

~Hide and seek in the SML Stacks library: creepy but awesome.

~Decided to take a semester off this spring studying in Japan, until the forces of the universe conspired against me to make me ineligible.  So next semester will be the same as before, but definitely finding another way to get to Japan soon.

~I dressed up as a scaly manfish for the band party my class threw, Oh Lev Greg and the Story of the Funk.  We made bailey's, drank it from a shoe, painted watercolors, and had manginas.  Then danced for hours to a sweet funky playlist.

~Partied with Investment Bankers in New York.  (The 6th Annual Hedge Fund RocktoberFest, where we played in the finale with a pro rock band, the Subscribers, while dancing with their hot stripper girls, the Subscribettes.  Buffet, open bar, and confetti sticks before hand, followed by attack-banding 42nd street afterwards.

~Parents weekend show: The parents came to visit, and I finally badgered my dad into playing his banjo with the YPMB.  He also wore a shirt from Westport, WA, saying "Pillage Naked, show 'em your cannonballs!"  Clearly my family is cool.

~Bladderball was revived.  I did not participate, but was terrified.

Wow... haven't touched this in a while.  I transferred all my Japan specific stuff for the summer to http://elliotatyale.blogspot.com, and didn't feel the need to keep two blogs going.

BUT- The thing to share here and now follows thusly:  for the first time in 3 years, I will be allowed to sing.  After auditioning and failing far more groups and shows than I'd care to admit, I finally got a part in a musical.  And not just any musical.  Twilight: The Britney Spears Musical.  IT'S ABOUT FRIGGIN' TIME.  My expectations for the quality of the production are oh-so-low, but how can you not love vampire romance set to 90s pop?

And um... can anybody whose read/seen Twilight tell me who Mike is?  Because that's who I'm playing.  I'll confess I know nothing of Twilight, that it was Britney Spears--the poet of our generation--that drew me to the auditions, a moth before a sparkly pop diva flame.

I meant to put this up before I left, but I guess it slipped away.  I'm in Japan!  This means no cell or normal contact for a while.  I have internet, but it's sporadic when and how much I can use it.  But I am updating a blog specific to the Japan shenanigans (or "Japanigans" as I like to call them).  Follow my silliness and look at pretty pictures at http://elliotatyale.blogspot.com/.

I hit the big Two-Oh last week.  Quarter life crisis?  Possibly.  But I'm too busy for that right now.  Japan is kind of a constant sugar rush of over-stimulation, though today served as a wake-up call when the first day of classes reminded me that I was not so nearly self sufficient in this country as I had led myself to believe.  Over the weekend I had some sweet adventures and made friends with a bunch of Japanese people- there's a cultural tendency to praise any foreigner who speaks the slightest degree of Japanese, so they showered me with compliments even for the limited childish conversations I've been able to do so far.  Then school reminded me that I actually know basically nothing.  It's a work in progress.

A recap of beautiful post-term on-campus adventures:

Wed, May 13: Move-out was kind of lame.  I did get to demonstrate my super buffness in carrying other people's couches, at least.  I found one of those red and yellow plastic cars that six year olds can ride in, and found that with a bit of creativity, I too could ride in it.  A cardboard kangaroo cut-out hopped along with me and we had magical funtimes.

Thurs, May 14: For dinner, I created sweet potato casserole without actual kitchen implements required for its making or the actual ingredients required for its making.  Hooray improvisation!  Much of the band went to the Angels and Demons midnight premiere, but I didn't really want to see it.  Instead, I started arranging Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto for a bassoon quartet, learned the Jai Ho dance that would later feature in the Oh Ten movie, and had more shenaniganical encounters with Yale security.  In the middle of the night, I found one of the enormous carts used for move-out.  These are supposed to be locked up so that enterprising fellows like myself can't get up to any mischief, but one was left out.  So clearly, I had no choice but to attach myself to the front, set my friends in the back, and pull it around at a sprint while I yelled out "RICKSHAW! RIIIIICKSHAAAAAAW".  I pulled around several friends before a guy I hadn't yet met put me in the cart and pushed me wheelbarrow style over old campus.  Therefore, he became my friend too.  But then as I (shirtlessly) started pulling Taylor in the rickshaw, I noticed Security coming over.  We both got out and legged it, picking up my shirt on the way back inside.  He did follow us into the Bingham rotunda, but at least by then we were hidden (and I no longer fit the description of "shirtless dude" he was looking for).  In retrospect, though, he probably wasn't trying to stop us, because we weren't doing anything inherently wrong.  More than likely, he saw how much fun the rickshaw was and wanted to play along.

Fri, May 15: Sake bombing followed by karaoke.  I once again sat in my magical red/yellow plastic car designed for six year olds, which is actually not very comfortable for sustained periods of sitting.

Sat, May 16: Oh Lev threw the Rainbows and Unicorns dance party.  We decorated the room with crayon drawings of happy things, and then I brought out the Mighty Dinos! coloring book, and we gave all the dinosaurs unicorn horns to go with their magically bright colors.  We made flavored drinks using Otter Pops, with blue being the most delicious and pink being the least. 

Sun, May 17: A lot of people went to Lake Compounce theme park, but I spontaneously ended up in New Jersey.  I road-tripped with my brothers Murad and Matt to see Dan perform an incredible violin solo in Princeton.  I didn't realize the road trip was actually happening until 1 am the night before, and didn't realize I would spend the night at Dan's House until after we had left.  It's strange, but until then I hadn't ever been to the home and old context of any of my college friends.  We stayed up late watching movies, playing N64 and board games, and having our own unofficial candle pass.  So much bromance.  It's hard to get to the level of comfort where you can be entirely authentic and open with one another, but people never cease to surprise me with the wisdom and perspective they can provide when we just talk.

Tues, May 19: On Tuesday, I finished off the entire email account of student.questions at work for the admissions office.  It's the catch-all address for any emails sent to the admissions office, and in the entire year I've worked there it's never been empty.  But by creatively re-organizing a few of the faq emails that otherwise sat at the top of the inbox and answering all the questions, Katy and I got the inbox down to 0.  My boss then gave me a sweet button that says "In New Haven, I'm a Rock Star".  This complements the previous email incentive button she gave me, "The best guys are from New Haven".

Wed, May 20: Gusto.  What a beautiful game.  It's like kickball, but with beer.  One point for running the bases, one point for finishing a can of beer/soda.  At the start of the game, as I urged team KBBrass to do a team chug to start out on an early lead against the Sqwoodwinds, I had my first successful shotgun.  I've shotgunned before, but always badly and not in one chug.  The enthusiasm of finally doing it right led me to shotgun many more as I spurred my team on to a 25 point victory.  The downside of shotgunning is that it reveals how my tolerance is much more limited by stomach's ability to hold a volume rather than my bloodstream's ability to stay coherent with alcohol.  I found this out after number 9, but rallied to finish strong at 11.

Thurs, May 21: We started filming the Sophomore Sketch, written and directed by Alan because our attempts at coming up with ideas through committee weren't going anywhere (although I still like the idea of musical superheroes, with Inappropriate Social Touching Man and Unreasonably Small Mouth Opening Girl swapping power ballads).  We finished the whole thing in a 36 hour stretch, from it's first conception through all the filming and even the lengthy editing process.  And I must say, I'm quite pleased.  The final product is called Sophomore. (sketch?), a statement of what makes Oh Lev a cohesive social entity and a parenthetical observation of the forces driving our collective identity.  So clearly, it features tree-mounting, elevator raves, sex between stuffed animals in a shower stall, cougars, archaic invocations of the Nordic Pantheon, accosting strangers we found at a biomedical conference, and licking marshmallow fluff off of one another.

Fri, May 22: In the 2nd Annual Rob Golan-Vilella Beer Pong Tournament, I was originally teamed up with Kate Kraft, but Alan ended up taking her place.  I'm so glad I've had the chance to get to know Alan better over deadweek, through hang-outs and shenanigans and heart-to-hearts.  We got second for our bracket and 3rd/4th overall, but it took long enough for results to be tabulated that we stayed at the game so late we ended up missing out on the Pundit's last naked party of the year.  We went over after the game anyway, even though the party had largely died down.  We explained to the mostly clothed people there that we were looking for Alex Lemon's Spider from Mars (a snake bound to a staff... long story) and one senior girl explained that was great, because she was also looking for her panties.  Alan, being the cavalier gentleman that he is, gladly gave her his underwear in exchange for her email so that he could retrieve the boxer briefs the next day.  Turns out this girl gave him somebody else's email address, which made for a hilariously awesome/awkward email exchange.

Sat, May 23: We saw the premiere of Year in Review, the DVD compilation of footage and photos from all the games of the year.  Jackie and I edited the Princeton segment, which turned out amazingly.  We had such prime moments of the band yelling "Harvard sucks, harvard sucks, who the hell are you?", flute dance parties, game face montages, Oh Lev boxers, various dancing queens, two girls (at the same time), and alumni rocking out.  Afterwards, as per tradition, Elliot Fields Eaton, Trumpet Section Leader for the 09 Football season, was duct-taped to the statue of Nathan Hale.  I cheerfully explained to security from the top of my statue that it was consensual as the mob swarmed me with more and more tape, getting both Alan and Rebecca additionally wrapped to the statue in the process.  Once I was cut down, I was left with an enormous ball of duct tape.  A katamari-shaped ball of duct tape.  I then had no choice but to sing "na NAAAAAAA na na na na na, na, na katamari damacy" as I rolled over the grass, first rolling up Alan then Joe.  We played more duct tape ball games for the next hour, before I finally came to the realization that apparently I'm allergic to duct tape.  Itchy hands, swollen face, eyes that don't open... FML.

Sun, May 24: Sunday night featured both Liquid picnic and the screening of the 010 movie.  Rampant hilarity and awesomeness all around.  The late late night beyond the screening featured one of the more unexpectedly hilarious encounters of my life, followed by a very special morning.  Just wow.  Sunday was also the night of the YCB Twilight Concert, which I also played for despite not actually being in YCB.  I've also played recently in the DPorts Concert and subbed in for a YSO Concert, but this one was definitely the most enjoyable- actually well organized, good mix of classical pieces, and all the cool people.  It's also the only concert I've actually felt musically invested in for a while.

Mon, May 25: I led the procession of all the graduates to the Commencement ceremony with a trumpet fanfare, and played the rest of our commencement pieces after that.  Apparently I walked right next to Hillary Clinton, who was there to receive an honorary degree from Yale Law (I thought she already had one?  I guess two is cool).  I also got hired to play a fanfare and processional at the individual Trumbull ceremony afterwards, and I recruited two other non-trumpeters to play trumpet with me.  We were all fatigued pretty badly from the commencement concert, but it was fun and we made money for going to a commencement we all would have attended anyway.  My group made so much love and yelling for the Trumbull 09 grads we adored.  Other people stared oddly at us.

Summary: I love Deadweek.

I just had a nice dinner and prolonged heart-to-heart with my friend Taylor.  As we were hanging out in front of Bingham, I told her that I can't say anything is impossible in my life, because so many impossibly silly things just happen around me.  I then went inside to find the freshmen battling with mops as they crafted a pulley out of belts, ropes, and electrical wires to first remove a sock from the top of a chandelier, then to construct a hammock.  I proceeded to play jumprope on the ethernet cable suspended from the chandelier.  Sometimes I'm not a real person.

Tomorrow begins one of the most glorious times known to Man, DEADWEEK.  I'm sticking around campus for two weeks with the band before playing in commencement on May 25th, which means lots of unstructured play time with a bunch of my favorite people.  I'm getting Katamari shipped from home, because WHO DOESN'T LOVE KATAMARI?  Seriously.  The band is obsessed with it during deadweek.

Anyway, the last couple of weeks have had a lot.  Recap of some fun/cool adventures of the last couple weeks:

My final week of classes, the admitted student's visit for the admissions office, and initiation week of Sigma Chi all fell in the same action-packed monkey barrel.  I was living in the Sigma Chi house for the week under a self-imposed vow of silence as a time of meditation over the principles of the fraternity as well as my own values.  This was complicated by the fact that 4 of my 5 classes required active speaking and participation, as did my job for the admissions office working a bunch of events during Bulldog Days, and all the insanity of the midnight rehearsal recruiting eager pre-frosh for the YPMB.  I ran around campus with dyed blue hair, sporting a long herald trumpet with Yale Banner streaming as I alternated playing our fight songs, the beer cheer, and Bon Jovi, planned out a theatre class final that incorporated bits of Great Gatsby with Franz Ferdinand and John Mayer, and fed pre-frosh mountains and mountains of New Haven's finest spread of pizzas.

The midnight rehearsal for the YPMB was especially cool- I released a song I wrote for our section leader corps (an arrangement of Herb Walter's Spanish Flea, which sounds awesome.  Since it's our section leader cheer, it is renamed the BADASSMOTHERFUCKERS song.  Our quick name is BAMF, short for BADASSMOTHERFUCKERS, which is short for Bad Administrators Deftly Assisting Sweet Sexy Members Of To Harness Energy Reaped From Unity Concurrently Keeping Everything Real, Suckahz!  This only took us three to five hours to come up with on our section leader retreat.  And then we went duckping bowling and played mmmm tzitzi.)  Rambling tangent aside, the rehearsal was awesome because so many pre-frosh came- we actually exhausted the capacity of trumpets and sheet music I had prepared in the Band Room for all the freshmen.  They all seemed pretty good, but one kid in particular was obscenely talented- afterwards we had some music playing and he just played along on trumpet and improvised jazz solos by ear.  I want them all to be here in the fall so I can make them join my section and then we will be LOUD AND AWESOME.  Yeah Band.

I was initiated to Sigma Chi that saturday, 4/25.  As hilarious as it is to think of me as a frat-bro, I'm actually incredibly happy with my unexpected decision to join Sigma Chi.  It is definitely not Animal House; the image I have of myself is not compatible with that image of a bro, and if Sigma Chi were actually like that there's no way I would have stuck around.  Sure, there's shenanigans and fun times, but the most important element of the pledging process for me has been a chance to redefine my own values and the things that make me happy.  I'm reaching the end of what has been a very self-altering and introspective year, and though fundamentally my basic values and principles haven't changed I've became much more aware of what they are and what they mean to me.  It's too much of a roundabout rambling though process to effectively articulate here, but the fact that I've started to become aware of myself in relationship to everything else may be one of the most valuable things I'll take away from my sophomore year.  The open discussions of the pledge process and the ideas behind the symbolism and rituals have been very meaningful, and I've forged some very close connections with my pledge brothers.  I crave authenticity, and there's a lot of groups and places that don't value that in the same why I do.

I went to Spider Ball with my friend Michele- I taught her some swing dance and we had a fun time.  I rocked out over Spring Fling, starting the day sipping margaritas in a kiddy pool before going to a game of Edward Forty Hands- the weather was perfect and beautiful and I spent the whole day outside.  It was great, except for the fact that half of my suite got injured playing frisbee.

I got through Finals without too much trauma, just a lot of birds.  (Anything after last spring's finals week, where I had 6 tests in 5 five days on top of a full crew schedule, will be an absolute cakewalk).  In one week, though, I did write a paper on bird sex, take a lab practical on identifying birds, and take a lecture exam on bird biology.  That's just far too many birds, and now everytime I see one I yell at them.  

Moveout was tough, but done.  I'm now living in Bingham on Old Campus with the band, but getting my suite (and a number of others) out of JE fell largely on me.  I spent hours moving stuff for other people, often neglecting the stuff that had to get done to get myself out.  The most epic was a piano- some random freshmen in Welsh bought a cheap secondhand piano and kept it in his first floor room this year.  Now that summer's come, he has no way to store it or deal with it, so when my friend Chloe heard this she leapt at the opportunity to have a piano in her off-campus house next year (never mind the fact that she doesn't play piano).  With a team of brave and/or jacked men, we dollied the cart from Welsh to 35 Lynwood for an hour then spent the next hour trying to get it up the stairs- winding, narrow stairs with gougeable walls and breakable banisters.  We gouged the walls, we broke the banisters, we removed a leg or two from the piano, but sheer physics and malice dictated that we would never get it up the sharp turns in the stairs.  The piano now lives in her backyard, and my back hurts.

So, I'm at work with admissions right now.  I stood up to lean across the table and look at Katie Grunzwieg's monitor as I was helping her out with a problem, then sat back down.  The chair was not where it was before.  So I just kind of sat there, rump to the floor and feet in the air, laughing.  In front of my boss and co-workers.  In my defense, it was a broken chair that's needed replacement for a while, which then prompted my boss to go get me a much snazzier chair with armrests.  The armrests are like bumpers at the bowling alley for children too small to bowl by themselves, who wouldn't have very much fun otherwise.  This is an appropriate analogy for my chair-sitting abilities.  :D

Hey there LJ, it's been awhile.  Even though I know so few people who actually post here anymore, and mostly just lurk, I still value this as a venue to look back and see a tranche d'vie from my own experiences. 

As of today, I am halfway through college.  Shit.  I am finished with my last final.  I am starting to move out.  I am starting to move on.  I am a junior in school, and I am still a junior in life.  Yet I am the oldest and most experienced junior I've ever been.  I am going to Japan on someone else's tab!  I am so sick of birds.  I am not a bird-watcher at heart.  I am perpetually in deep admiration for the passion some people hold for birds, but a bird-watcher is not what I am.  I am still not set on an academic major or a career path or a life goal.  I am spreading, I am changing.  I am so different from any projections I ever imagined.  The older self of what I am may have felt differently, but I am so proud of what I have become.  As much as I am attached to these visions and fantasies I once held, and how I could have loved to be them, I am happy for where I am.  I am looking into the uncertain future.  I am a brother of Sigma Chi.  I am a man of good character.  I am a student of fair ability, with ambitious purposes and a congenial disposition.  I am possessed of good morals, with a high sense of honor and a deep sense of personal responsibility.  I am more open than before, about myself and with myself and of myself.  In that respect, I am duck sauce.  Whenever I am aware of duck sauce, I am contemplating: is it made of ducks, or for ducks, or by ducks?  I am loved.  I am halfway done with college.  Did I say that before?  I am halfway done with college.  Again: shit.  I am poised to do things like never before.  I am independent.  I am anchored and chained, but free.  I am not the one to leave an indelible swath behind with my mark of glory, the world has been here for years and I am pretty sure it can keep on turning with very little notice of what I do or who I am, but I find what matters to me and what matters to the people who matter to me.  I am poised.  I am standing on an edge, an edge that has always been there but now seems higher, ready to reach forward and higher and not let the haters get me down, ready to find the wonder in every moment and the love in every connection.

I am gonna play Katamari SO SOOOOOOOON.

Notice how that turned into one of those "I am" poems from 12th grade English with Corey Davis?  Yeah.  I just started and it made sense to keep it going.  This year has been the proverbial I Am poem of my life.

A lot to digest still... a lot of crazy stories to recount and share and revere and remember from this semester.  These will be coming along shortly.  But for now comes the much needed chance to rest.  And Deadweek!  Since I'm staying until commencement day to play music with the band, I basically now have the opportunity for two weeks of shenanigans and hangouts and shmeezing with a bunch of my best friends and no real obligations.

"I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”
-Etienne De Grellet

My computer has recently started putting random characters into Japanese, for a reason I can't begin to fathom.  Like in reading an email, it says "Julia rogers sent this message at 午後11:49." Or in looking at someone's facebook profile, "Lewis and Clark High School Alum ”0タ”.  I can't begin to explain this.  I use the Japanese input settings often enough on my mac, but seeing it everywhere else is bizarre.  The first one was at least the right meaning for the characters, the latter is just nonsense.  But I'm going to Japan this summer!  I won the Richard U. Light fellowship, which will give me many monies to do an intensive language program in Hakodate.  I'm pumped.

I got what I assumed to be intestinal parasites in Ecuador (full update on that still coming).  Instead, it now just appears that Ecuador made me lactose intolerant.  Also fruit intolerant, tomato intolerant, spice intolerant, and meat intolerant, which is basically the sum total of everything I love.  It's something that naturally goes away as the body's natural bacteria readjust to normal food, and it's been getting better, but I've spent a lot of time on the nothing but burnt bread diet, which is not very much fun.  That is, until Friday night, when I splurged and got a Wenzel, the infamous fatty/greasy/beautiful late night Yale snack of Buffalo chicken, cheese, mayonnaise, and hot sauce in a toasted bun, the epitome of everything I'm not allowed to eat.  And the next morning, I was at least temporarily cured of Donovan and Penelope Ann (the names I gave to the supposed parasites hanging out in GI Joe).  This is why I love college.

Oh man.  Tomorrow is first day of classes after break.  Totally unprepared and unrested.  Break fail.  Updates on Ecuadorian adventures to come later.

TAKE OFF YOUR SHIRTTTTTTTTT

Or at least that's what's been running through my mind all week.  Spring break, please come now.  I'm going to Ecuador to play with birds!  I'm an in ornithology class that's getting funded to go trekking for 12 days through a bunch of Ecuadorian rainforests and look at birds.  I've had mixed reactions to this for a while, because when I signed up for the lab I thought it would be field work or some sort of scientific study, but instead it's just birdwatching.  My previous sojourn into birdwatching came when the lab got up early on a saturday (BOO) to go to Rhode Island.  We saw 37 different species of ducks.  I like ducks as much as the next guy, but there's a certain point where I could only say, yeah, it's another duck.  Because of that, I was kinda worried about the prospects of many days spent looking at bird after bird.  But now I'm realizing that I could really use some downtime that's not entirely goal/objective/obligation driven, and more importantly, I'M GONNA GO HANG OUT IN ECUADORAN RAINFORESTS.  Which is just awesome.

The same time I'll be flying to Ecuador, I'll be reading a book on Ecuadoran oil ("Savages" by Paul Kane) for my environmental studies seminar.  I think I've managed to nix this from my list of majors, because even though I like this class, I can't see how focusing more heavily on this kind of assignment and coursework would make me happy.  Like right now, I've been having some major stress from the intimidation alone of a 25 page paper from primary sources.  I was sorely tempted by this Friday's drop deadline, to just rid myself of that and free time up for the surprising amount of other responsibilities I've suddenly got myself committed to.I made the decision not to drop the class, though, because sooner or later I'll run into more of these kinds of papers (like say... senior thesis?) and the only way I'm going to get better at them is by doing them.  And more than that, I hate the implication in dropping the course that I flat out can't handle that kind of paper.  It's on the Credit/D option of grading though, so worst case scenario, I plow through the paper and learn from the process without consequences to GPA.

Surprise of my life, I really enjoy the process of pledging a fraternity.  This will be expanded upon later, but right now I should probably finish cleaning and maybe jump on that paper... yeah.  About that.  SO CLOSE TO SPRING BREAK.  I leave Sunday and then will be out of contact until the 21st.

I'm realizing now just how terrible my handwriting is.  Not that this is actually a very new or startling revelation.  The brunt of my extensive writing happens on the compy, which certainly contributes in some way by lessening the need for ideal handwriting.  But this is not a rant how technology is making us lose our previous values and abilities.  Instead, compies are beautiful for my writing- I still have lingering tendonitis and generally screwed up joints from my days of piano and tennis that limit the volume I can write by hand.

More than that, so much of what I write by hand now is either frantically scribbling notes to keep up with what a professor says, or trying to get through a written assignment as fast as possible for the limited time I have to deal with it.  Both of these are compounded by my obsessive personality that hates wasting page space, so the writing gets continually more cramped as it reaches the bottom of the page (there's nothing silly that bothers me more than a single lecture's worth of notes taking one full page and then just a line or two onto the next).

The thing that prompted this is that I just received from my crazy crazy mother a photocopy of a hand-written note made by sister in what was probably second grade.  And she, as a second grader, had far better handwriting than I ever have.  That's just silly.  Also, her handwriting looks enough like my mother's that its scary.  Certain qualities within my family are contagious... I just think I got the antibody for that one.

I think I just pledged a fraternity.  Sometimes things happen around me and that they're just so hilarious I go along with them.  My life makes no sense. :D

Only slightly belated, it's time for resolutions for 2009!  I missed out on that beautifully sappy and hopeful zeitgeist surround the first few days of a new year, but I still have a lot of practical concerns to deal with this upcoming year.

Be better at picking classes.
Although now that I've picked spring semester classes, with great difficulty, I'm not doing so well here.

Get a major.
Um... yeah. Top three between Environmental Studies, Evolutionary and Ecological Biology, and Neuroscience.

Do something meaningful with summer, and other periods of time off.
I got into a lab that's doing ornithornological all expense paid field work to Ecuador over spring break!  Now if I can just get that fellowship to study in Japan over the summer.

Don't let haters get me down
Don't let them. 

Authenticity.
Something I'm finding increasingly to be one of my core values, but one that's the most difficult to uphold, especially in some of the areas I've been devoting myself to.

Listen to Kelvin's bedtime stories and not be a little bitch.
My suitemate Kelvin suggested this to me when I didn't enjoy listening to his bedtime stories about MDRTB, multiple drug resistant tuberculosis.

Win at intermural innertube water polo
The best sport ever.  JE has to win the championships.  There is no other option.  We've got a great team, but I'm still reeling from our first loss against Berkeley.  Can't let that stop us from being awesome.

Win.
Just in general.  Also at backgammon, which my whole suite now plays.  We have official standings on the wall.

Do something new and unexpected.
I'm currently kinda sorta rushing a frat?  Um... yeah.  Maybe not.

Do something meaningful.
Something I can be really proud of.  This is too vague to actually be helpful.

Continue being jacked.
I no longer row crew, but I like its what done for me.  Keep up with the crossfits.  Every day is not realisitic, but as much as possible.

Arrange and compose and create.
I've loved arranging charts for the YPMB, but I want to be better at it.  I liked free-writing exercises from my theatre class last semester, and I want to expand my final project from that class into a one-man show.  I have so many creative desires that are not being fulfilled in my current state.  Fix that.

Expand on cooking talents
I'm now kitchen manager and will be providing weekly confections for the JE Cafe, so I want to experiment and make better stuff than ever before.  Nom nom nom.

Appreciate my talents and abilities for what they are
...which  means not being emo for what they aren't.

For several years in a row I've put New Year's Resolutions up on lj so that I could hold myself accountable to them, and at year's end, rank myself on each while manipulating the numbers in such a way so as to prove mathematically that I am significantly more awesome than I ever dared to be before.  Except in 2008, I posted no resolutions at all.  If I had some, they were lost in the lonely and abandoned attic of my mind (it's dark and scary in there).  So, to continue the tradition of narcissistically quantifying my own perfection, I shall make up 2008 resolutions, ex post facto, and rate myself according.

Rave on an elevator.
~Check.
[5/5]

Buy a skin-tight full body black spandex suit from Hong Kong for a class project.
~Check.  I really like the fact that I get to justify it as a class project. 
[5/5]
+1 because the suit has seen much more use beyond that, as a Dementor suit for the Wingardium OhLeviosa party that Oh Lev threw, and also as my iPod dancer costume, the fourth costume of the night for Halloween.

Get a job.
~Even though I none of the internships I planned to do over the summer would offer me a job, I did secure positions to be a summer RA for the Junior Statesmen of America summer school (at Yale, though not actually Yale affiliated), a $4,000 grant to do research on the evolution of nymphalid butterfly wing eyespots, and a fulltime summer job at Yale Undergraduate Admissions.  I went with the last option (which was sad to turn down the other two) and have kept at it part-time through the year.  The first thing that told me the job was a keeper was when the entire office, including my boss, director of Undergraduate Outreach Jeremah Quinlan, crowded around a computer to watch Shark vs. Octopus (skip to 1:35 to avoid the stupid commentary)
[4/5]

Get jacked.
Rowing a year's worth of lightweight crew at college made a huge difference to my level of fitness.  Any amount of time spent sedentary or any bad eating habits are now painfully obvious to me, to the point where I just about go crazy if I can't get in a good workout (like now, for instance, where I'm largely housebound and have nowhere to go until I fly back to campus on Saturday.)  Crossfit.com has become my fitness bible.  Speaking of which, I still need to get on today's front squat WoD.
[4/5]

Don't fail out of school.
Spring semester was harsh, trying to row crew and do plays and a tough academic schedule simultaneously, and multi-variable calculus in particular was not kind to me.  I've been trying to re-evaluate the balance.  The end of this semester swung the far opposite direction, with basically no extra-curriculars, although it did result in the best grades I've ever had at college.  Still, that's not the balance that makes me happy.  We'll try again this term.
[3/5]

Win at college theatre.
In the early spring I had a bit part in two Woody Allen one acts, which wasn't a great experience.  Then I did The Bacchae: A Modern Collective Adaptation, which for most of the process was frustrating but then turned out to be one of the most rewarding projects I've ever done.  This fall had no theatre because I elected to not double up with crew in the fall, but I was still taking an acting class with a heavy emphasis on writing our own material, and the final was a self-written 12 minute solo piece.  Getting through the night to finish and learn that piece in the middle of reading week was devastating, but then the performance itself was beautiful and cathartic.  One of the most influential comments from previous work came from Emma Barasche, who lauded my ability to interweave layers of the fun and the profound into one cohesive whole.  And that was kinda the basis of my performance- under the guise of things so superficial as talking to my favorite monkey named Honey Ryder, and baking and subsequently force-feeding someone a trifle, and nomming and crushing an acorn squash, I spoke out on the things that genuinely move me, or wound me, or fill me with such passion that I don't know whether to cry or yell or laugh. All the same, I want to be in shows again.  And I need to sing.
[2.5/5]

Find a life-sized cardboard cutout of a creepy beer lady outside of Toad's, place it in the bathroom so that Kelvin finds it and screams, get Katie Cobb's help to place it on Chris Young's balcony while he's out, close the blinds so that when somebody else calls him and says she's outside he finds the creepy beer lady and screams and tries to find me and Jackie, later find an exceedingly soggy creepy beer lady face-down in the mud outside after a night of exceedingly poor choices, take her home in the rain, get her caught in the JE gate so that she tears in half, and leave the two soggy halves outside of Hannah Rachel Jacobson's room to dry out:
Been there, done that.
[Yes/5]

Find a major
Oops.  Apparently reality and pressing concerns have a way of catching up with you.  The top three potential options seem to be between Evolutionary & Ecological Biology, Environmental Studies, and Japanese.  I've flitted between subjects so often that there's no reason to believe this batch is more permanent, except for the fact that I'm running out of time and have to pick something.  Many meetings with the Dean and department heads, coming up this monday.
[1.001/5]

Create fake facebook profiles dedicated to an aggregate personality devoted to writing awkwardly creepy things on friends walls and/or my favorite stuffed animal friend who is always ready for adventure.
Yup.
[Christopher Crieper and Tanuki-Kun/5]

Become an internet sensation.
Still working on that one.  But I can't *make* it happen.  It just will.  The closest I've gotten is the debaucle where the YPMB was disbanded, and the story leaked first to the Yale Daily News, then the New Haven Register, then the US News & World Report.
[1/5]

~~~~~~~~~~~~


Final Tally: [27.001 + Yes + Christopher Tanuki and Tanuki / 50]
Not all of these things divide evenly into 50.  this is a problem.  Let's convert them into yamshakes, at the exchange rate of each distinct non-dividable entity becoming 1 yam worth of shake, which means 2 generous servings.

Therefore, 54.002% better as a person, plus yamshakes for 6.
All in all, not a bad year.

It's time for 2008: a Year in Review, where I repost the first line or so from each month's first entry as a way of further convincing myself I'm not a real person, because such unrestrained rampant silliness does not happen to real people.

January: So... guess how I and a suite-full of other college males are spending our saturday night? With Space Kitteh, where you fly through space using a magical jetpack to save all the kitties. Holy crap team, we're cool.

February: Sometimes, when I work myself to utter exhaustion, I find myself thinking that this whole college thing is silly. But then I randomly get fed flank steak and lobster at a dining hall, and I remember it's actually pretty awesome.

March: Elliot's List of Successfully Completed High Fives, 3/9/08

April: Bouncy castles are quite possibly the single greatest creation of all time. <3

May: The weekend leading into reading week was my play, The Bacchae: An Experimental Collective Adaptation. We took the original Euripides text, distilled it down to the parts we connected with, and then did crazy stuff. Most of the process was really disorganized, which kind of aggravated me, but the final product was incredible. The director was basing it off the idea of how theatre was supposed to be a religious, even transcendental experience in its original context, so we pulled the audience into our rites in worship of Dionysus, visceral and physical mysteries that were about losing oneself to a tide of emotion greater than what we could experience by ourselves. I was skeptical it would work, but the performances were great.

June: Friday night, the Members Of Oh Tev put on the Client Number Ninth Floor party in Bingham, with the theme of Eliot Spitzer's Ho. John sacrificed his red shirt to cover the lights, giving the room a red glow, and was thus half nekkid at the party. I felt it was my duty as a good friend to not let him be the only awkward shirtless person, so we had shirtless raves together. Many others followed suit.

July: The part my mother didn't realize in her trip planning was that the last week of June in San Francisco was Pride Week, or that the last day of our trip would coincide with the nation's largest LGBT Pride parade. You'd think that the rainbow flags on every streetsign might have tipped them off, but the parents assumed that was just a San Francisco thing.

August: New Haven continues to be awesome. I recently had a rave on the roof of Trumbull college. It's not supposed to be an accessible place, but we clambered out of some narrow windows and then over lots of fancy Gothic Masonry to reach a nice flat part. Cascada assisted in our rocking out. I felt a little sorry for the man whose window opened onto our plaza, since he was evidently trying to study, but too bad for him. Afterwards, I reached another terrace, that due to height, nobody from my group had ever before reached. But I used my gangles and climbing skillz to corner mount my way up the wall. And... I found a barbecue.

September:  My transition into the school year has been complicated by the complete death of my hard drive over the summer. Nothing was salvageable. Nothing was backed up.  [Don't let this happen to you!  BACK IT UP!]

October: I have plenty of work to do today in a rather small timeframe in which to do it, which is all rather complicated by my stigmata blisters created at yesterday's 5:30 am workout for crew. They ooze. Yay crew.

November: After an amazingly watching/commentary watching session of Fellowship of the Ring with my suitemates, I made the mistake of introducing them all to They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard. This song has not stopped playing in our suite for the last 24 hours. I hurt from spontaneously breaking into so many techno dance parties.

December: Tonight, with 16 of my closest friends, in Casino attire, surrounded by strobe lights, with playlists synchronized on our iPods, I RAVED IN AN ELEVATOR. This redefines mobile dance parties, where vertical awesome never stops. We probably violated all sorts of rules, and the grad students who encountered us and waved awkwardly on the 6th floor probably thought we were pretty strange. But holy crap. It was awesome.

I'm home! I flew out of the airport in Hartford hours before the blizzards hit there, and managed to sneak in to the Spokane airport in the narrow window during which snow wasn't causing massive delays and cancellations. And it only took 11 hours, amazing considering some of the higher end travel times have taken me 27.

Holy crap snow. They weren't kidding. But this means I get to go sledding! WEEEEEEEE. The downside is that I very rarely want to go outside, and in my first night back I had to dig my car or someone else's car out of snow banks on five separate ocassions. I think my favorite was definitely when I got stuck in my driveway, not even 10 seconds after having started driving.

Also, let me say: WHAT THE HELL, Spokane. There was not a snow day since I was in the 2nd grade, and that time the entire city lost power. And then as soon as I leave for college, we have not one, but TWO years in a row when schools shut down for snow. Seriously, Spokane? Seriously?

It's weird to have no set schedule, to have no immediately pressing concerns looming over my head. (Except christmas shopping, I guess... not a fan of shopping. Can I just give everyone very sincere and genuine high fives instead?) I don't yet know what time zone or sleep schedule I'm pursuing... despite the post-finals exhaustion, I didn't sleep the night before my early morning shuttle and flight to get home. I was helping an inebriated freshmen get home, and in the process ended up hanging out until 4 am when I left for my shuttle. Then I slept a few hours in transit home, and ended up staying out way way late that night in Spokane with more adventures of cars getting stuck.

Today I made a cake and did basically nothing else. Aw yeah.

Whoo, it's been a while. Or maybe it hasn't, it just feels like an enormous quantity of time has passed so quickly. End of semester three at Yale. I may have actually gotten good grades this semester- the inevitable result of having no extracurriculars. I wasn't doing theatre shows and other artsy things because I was doing crew, and then I finally did extricate myself from rowing at the end of the fall season. So then I just had band, which then got disbanded. And now I just wrapped up the last of my finals. Not very bad considering the hell that I went through last spring with 6 finals in a week, but all the same pretty exhausting.

My life, or at least the last month, in bullet points-
~I competed in Yale's Iron Chef, making a kick-ass fall curry based on butternut squash, with the most amazing appetizer salad of candied squash, fried goat cheese medallions, and pink onions on a bed of arugula. NOM NOM NOM. I got a sweet new chef's hat out of the deal, too.
~As a result of my participation, I got offered a position as a culinary consultant at Mory's, the pub that ties back into Yale lore and traditions since 1849.
~Skiing in Vermont with JE! The East Coast has lame mountains after the standards I'm used to in the Inland Northwest.
~...followed immediately by my final project for Japanese, less than half an hour after returning to campus...
~...followed the next morning by my final for Theatre Studies, a 12 minute self-written solo piece. Despite the fact that none of it was written/understood/blocked/memorized the night before, it was actually an incredibly rewarding experience. My professor in that class is the single most beautifully wise person I've ever met. I'm going to have to read more of her work over break.
~A number of questionable choices over reading week. Questionable.
~JE has a basement! For the first time since arriving at Yale, my residential college actually has facilities. And damn, they're sweet.
~On that subject, I was elected Kitchen Manager. Because I'm awesome and badass like that.
~Went to my first Catholic Mass when some friends invited me along. It was neat-o.

So... I think I'm definitely ready to go home. Haven't been in Spokane since July 4th, when I departed for my summer job in New Haven. Some of my best friends I haven't seen since last Thanksgiving. It hit me when one of my suitemates mentioned how great it was to go home for this Thanksgiving, how he came back totally recharged and ready to learn and work like never before. I definitely didn't get that. Thanksgiving was basically only stressful. However, my ability to return home is largely dependent on the ability of planes to first take off in Hartford, then land in Spokane. Both of these are rather questionable as a result of snow.

I'd be fine if I knew I had to stay here another day or two and just hang out, but getting stuck at an airport for hours/days is really the last thing I could take right now.

Tonight, with 16 of my closest friends, in Casino attire, surrounded by strobe lights, with playlists synchronized on our iPods, I RAVED IN AN ELEVATOR. This redefines mobile dance parties, where vertical awesome never stops. We probably violated all sorts of rules, and the grad students who encountered us and waved awkwardly on the 6th floor probably thought we were pretty strange. But holy crap. It was awesome.

This was actually the pre-function for Oh Lev to a real party, and even though the party was fun, rocking out in the elevator before finally spilling over to the streets, moshing in the intersection and catching the first snowflakes of the season, totally takes the cake.

I have just won the annual Thanksgiving Sibling Bread Ripping Epic Battle. Hillary tried to cheat, but even her wicked ways were not enough to snag her doomed attempts from the jaws of defeat. Through the attempted possum lock-out attempts, and the loaves knocked off the table, and the theft of my bag, I persevered, ever onwards on my path to greatness.

I AM A CHAMPION.