that other guy’s thoughts

A:

When she makes you the most delicious apple pie you’ve ever tasted, plus some other stuff…wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

Going out of business sale, 90 days: same as cash!

81. I own a gun, a 20-gauge shotgun my father bought me when I was 15. I haven’t been hunting in years and it’s still at my parents house.

82. The very first time I fired a shotgun I was 14. I wasn’t holding it correctly and it left a bruise on my shoulder for 2 months.

83. When I was 10 or 11 I was bitten by a dog while riding my bike. It was big dog and grabbed a hold of my leg and pulled me over. Luckily I was wearing jeans so the teeth didn’t break the skin. This is still one of the scariest moments of my life.

84. My senior year in college I was the project manager for the KU entrant into an international competition where we had to design and build a remote controlled airplane, write a report, and give an oral presentation. I did the design, report, oral presentation, and 2/3 of the building entirely on my own. Despite placing 3rd out of like 40 teams, not delegating out more work is one of the top 5 stupidest things I’ve ever done.

85. I get really annoyed when guys refer to their friends as “buddies” in the 3rd person.

86. I don’t like onions or mushrooms, except for morels. Mmmm…morels.

87. I sold knives to make money one summer. A fact that is not listed on my resume.

88. I can recount all the words to REM’s “End of the World as We Know It” from memory.

89. I am able to distinguish between and appreciate very good but unwatchable movies (e.g. Raging Bull) and bad but wonderfully entertaining movies (e.g. anything Jerry Bruckheimer has ever produced.)

90. I laugh more than anybody else I know.

91. My favorite movie is “The Shawshank Redemption” I first saw it on TBS at 1 in the morning. When I first watched the big reveal scene where the warden pulls down the poster of Raquel Welch at the camera tracks backward down the tunnel, it absolutely blew my mind. That’s the moment when love affair with movies began.

92. The last time I threw up was at 6 am after eating some bad Pizzeria Uno my junior year of college. I skipped all my morning classes that day. It was the last time I’ve called in sick for anything, and the last time I’ve ever eaten at Pizzeria Uno.

93. I throughly, honestly, and completely don’t care about my ethnic heritage.

94. I got really good at cooking Ramen noodles in college, I even made an egg drop soup with them once. I haven’t touched them since graduation.

95. When I was younger I called Ramen, “Secret Soup” and when I wias real little I called bananas, “up-anas”

96. I don’t like the sound of my own voice.

97. I think consistent casual cursing shows a lack of imagination and vocabulary and is a bellwether for a weak mind.

98. I started this blog back in October of ‘02. I’ve been a posting fiend ever since.

99. I was once tossed in the Chi Omega fountain by my fraternity brothers because it was somebody else’s birthday but he was too big and scary to be messed with.

100. That’s pretty much I microcosm of my childhood.

Tomorrow: I actually have to tell a story or have an opinion, oh the humanity!

Are you tired of me yet? I am.

61. I take that back, those are horrible names for dogs. I’ll name them a couple of Roman sounding names, in reverence to my very first dog, Lucius, over whom I last admittedly cried.

62. On the outside I’m an accepting and tolerant person; in my heart I’m really just a non-confrontational snob; deep in my heart, in the sub-cockle area, I’m accepting and tolerant again.

63. People that work at jobs they hate baffle me. A plurality of my life will be spent at work, I’ll be damned if I’m not going to find something that’s at least a bit enjoyable.

64. I’ve always found sad things more beautiful that happy things.

65. From high school on, I’ve done all my homework and writing in pen. There is probably a deep-seed psychological lesson or character trait to learn here, but I have not clue what it is.

66. I’ve got a thing for women who can play the piano. Don’t know why, but I find it wicked sexy.

67. I used to laugh at hippies, then I hated them, then I felt sorry for them. Now I’m back to laughing at them.

68. I’m absolute crap at mental math. Really good with partial differential equations, bad with the multiplication tables. Go Figure.

69. For 3.5 years of my college experience I had a public professed a hatred of people. It started with receiving a poor grade on my very first test, and ended with receiving a job offer. It turns out that my hatred of people was really just misplaced hatred of stress.

70. I had a professor that used the phrase “It turns out that…” so many times that that is the only thing I can remember about him or the 3 different classes I took from him.

71. Every time I think about the Swedish chef from the Muppet Show I laugh out loud. Bork! Bork! Bork!

72. I just laughed out loud thinking about that.

73. I got hooked on jazz music in high school and have never been unhooked.

74. I don’t like the smell of popcorn.

75. I absolutely love the fact that my country doesn’t have an official language. If we ever adopted one I’d be pretty pissed.

76. The number 1 thing I look for in a woman is intelligence, everything else can fight for 2nd place.

77. I have a 1.5″ long scar on the back of my right hand. I don’t remember how I got it, so whenever anyone asks me about it, I just make up a story involving a ninja or a grizzly bear.

78. I bought the house I live currently live in on the day before my 23rd birthday. It was the greatest self-birthday present ever.

79. I grew up in a town so rural that a guy once came to school with a deer in the back of his truck that he had shot that morning, and nobody thought it was weird.

80. I’m currently a Wichitan, a Kansan, and a Cessnan. I’ve never be called a charlatan, but there’s still time.

Tomorrow: Volume 5/5!

the trains keeps a-rollin, all night long: Volume 3

41. I was in the scouts from 1st grade until the I turned 18. I made it all the way to Eagle. It’s a big part of why I’m so self-reliant and outdoorsy.

42. When I was in 5th grade I was tired of the Kansas City Royals always sucking so I picked a new favorite baseball team, the Atlanta Braves. I’ve loved them with all my heart ever since.

43. My favorite childhood book was The Witches by Roald Dahl. I’m still convinced it was non-fiction and all teachers secretly have square feet and no toes.

44. I suck at hide-and-go-seek. I always find good hiding spots, but the second I hunker down , I immediately have to pee. It never fails.

45. I pride myself on being a quick learner.

46. Despite occasionally needing to be medicated to sleep, once I’m asleep I’m out for 8 or 9 hours or until you punch me in the face. A fact that my fraternity brothers and mother can attest to.

47. One summer in college I discovered the Food Network. My world has never been the same since.

48. The last time I will admit to crying is when my dog died when I was 12.

49. Because I don’t cry, the only way I know how to exercise my sadness is by being rude to people and not eating.

50. I briefly thought about joining the military, but then I realized that I don’t handle authority very well and didn’t want to be immunized for 143 different tropical diseases.

51. Did I mention I hate needles? hate

52. I do not now, nor have ever run advertisements on my website. Blogging isn’t like that for me.

53. I’ve read the bible from cover to cover. It didn’t take as long as you’d think.

54. In addition to the bible, I own a copy of the Qur’an and the Book of Mormon. I want to pick up a copy of the Torah but keep forgetting.

55. Breakfast is my favorite meal to both cook and eat.

56. I feel a deep ideological connection with my country, but absolutely no connection in terms of heritage or history. I don’t even root that hard for us at the Olympics.

57. I’m allergic to both cats and dogs but didn’t realize it until I went to college and was no longer around them. Up until then my family and I just assumed I sneezed constantly because I had hay fever.

58. As a freshman in college, my roommate’s bottle of Mountain Dew exploded all over my TI-89 calculator, I was rude and went hungry for the rest of the week. To this day the keys still stick a bit.

59. I’ve been an obsessive money-saver my entire life. That’s going to pay off eventually, or so I’m told.

60. If I ever have pets again, it will be two dogs which I’ll name Bascetti and Beat Malls.

Tomorrow: Volume 4!

I promised it yesterday, so here it is: Volume 2

21. I almost got held back in 4th grade.

22. My 5th grade teacher had me tested and discovered I was “gifted.” That once act so drastically changed my future for the better that I’m going to erect a statue of her on the grounds of my Presidential Library.

23. My 8th grade teacher didn’t think I could handle high school biology so he recommend I take the lowest science class available “lab science.” I want to go back and rub his face in my Baccalaureate of Science diploma.

24. In college I was diagnosed with a sleeping disorder. For a while it got so bad that I had to medically regulate my sleep patterns with pills. Eventually we figured out that it was all stress induced.

25. I don’t like driving long distances on a regular basis, I find it both wasteful and boring. A short commute was the number 1 thing on my list of attributes when I went house shopping.

26. I once stayed up for 47 straight hours before passing out on a couch and not moving for the next 18.

27. Most people gain 15 pounds as a freshman in college. I lost 5.

28. My front to teeth are actually fake as a result of a childhood accident involving a roller-racer, a rock, and a concrete driveway.

29. My favorite writer is Aaron Sorkin.

30. My 2nd favorite writer is Thomas Jefferson.

31. I was actually born in a suburb of Denver, but my family moved back to Kansas when I was 18-months old.

32. I have taught/am teaching myself to play the guitar. I’m not real good, but I enjoy playing and that’s what counts.

33. For the entirety of my childhood and adolescence I was among the 5 shortest people in my class. Now I’m 5′ 11-3/4″ and taller than the average American male. Total vindication.

34. I’m the youngest person in my office, despite being the 2nd most experienced after my boss.

35. For my entire college career I lived at Triangle fraternity. Absolutely every friend I had in high school refused to believe that I joined a fraternity.

36. It was cheaper to live at the Triangle house than the dorms and you have to have an engineering, architecture, or science major to join. I joined so that I would be surrounded by 30 people smarter than me, who were taking the same classes, and were compelled through duty to help me out. It almost seemed stupid NOT to join.

37. My IT skillz put me through college. I worked 20 hours a week during the school year and 40 hours a week in the summer as the network administrator for the Aerospace Department at KU. When I first started I wasn’t even remotely qualified but I got pretty good at it by time I quit.

38. For three and a half years, I spent nearly ever Thursday night at the same Bar & Grill for half-price appetizers and girls. (For those of you on dangling modifier patrol, only the appetizers were half-price, the girls were just awesome.)

39. I don’t really drink alcohol despite growing up in the middle of nowhere, going to college, and living in a fraternity. Crazy, I know.

40. I have a favorite movie writer, director, and production company, but no favorite actor.

Monday: Volume 3!

Dang what a bunch of whiners.

Since divulging the presence of a new girlfriend apparently only holds out my readers for one week, and I’ve been sapped of all original post ideas by powers beyond my control, I give you all the sadly formulaic but surprisingly interesting list of 100 things about me:

1. I have several little birth marks on my scalp. As a child my mother use to keep my hair long so that nobody could see them. Nowadays I keep my hair short because ease-of-maintenance trumps somebody being able to see a big freckle next to my ear.

2. I intentionally lost my 4th-grade spelling bee. I didn’t want to have to stand up in front of the entire school, so when there were only 5-6 people left in the class bee, I purposely misspelled business, b-u-i-s-n-e-s-s.

3. I have a big vocabulary, I have since I was a little kid. I only need to hear or read a word once or twice and then I’ll remember it forever. It’s a gift because it makes me seem smarter than I actually am.

4. I have a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Kansas. So technically speaking, I’m a trained rocket scientist. Though I’ve never been a big fan of rockets. I was always more of an airplane guy.

5. I knew what I wanted to be since I was in the 4th grade. As an 8-year old I told my mother, “I want to make airplanes when I grow up so I need to go to college, do we have enough money for college?”

6. I started playing the trumpet when I was 9, I put it away after the last concert of the year as a senior in high school. I haven’t tried it since.

7. I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed writing until I graduated college and got a real job.

8. My very 1st car was an ‘86 Camry that was originally my grandmother’s. It’s still running today and my Dad drives it back and forth to work every day.

9. Between my junior and senior years of high school I went hiking in New Mexico for 2 weeks with 10 other teenage boys whom I’d never met. It was the greatest 2 weeks of my adolescence.

10. I got kicked out of my first high school computer class because I was smarter than the crappy substitute teacher. I honestly couldn’t believe it at first, I thought she was playing a joke so I refused to leave my seat. Then she yelled at me, so I laughed at her. That didn’t go over well.

11. In the 11 years prior to my expulsion from that lame typing class my disciplinary record consisted of one 30-minute detention for chronic lateness in 6th grade and one check mark beside my name in kindergarten because I hid the Kleenex box.

13. If I had to do it over again, I don’t think I would be an aerospace engineer. Not because of any doubts or dislikes I have about my job or my industry or any regrets about the life I’ve chosen. But because if I knew the monumental amount of work it would take to get the degree I would probably just cry and go to buisness business school.

14. I used to hate my red hair because it made me different. Now I love it for the same reason.

15. I haven’t had a a caffeinated soda since graduation.

16. I developed my sense of humor as a defense mechanism from a early age.

17. I discovered sarcasm and invented my very first joke as a 3-year-old in preschool, “That’s not a diamond, it’s a crooked square!” Sadly my humor was wasted on those dumb paste-eaters.

18. Never in my life have I been a registered member of a political party. Not true anymore, I registered as a Democrat so I could participate in the ‘08 caucuses.

19. As an 11-year old watching the evening news I once asked my dad, “How come everybody argues about what works and never about what the right thing to do is?” I still don’t have an answer to this question.

20. I don’t drink coffee. It looks and tastes like muddy water, because basically, that’s what it is.

Tomorrow: Volume 2!

Sometimes the simplest writing is the best writing:

I now have a girlfriend, her name is Katie, and I’m very happy.

I hate you so much it hurts sometimes.

Though I don’t have one
I’ve been told my haiku is
in today’s Eagle

I wrote it Tuesday
Posted online that evening
A real poet now

Actually wrote nine
Seven bad, one offensive
People like penguins

Now I’m annoyed
Can not stop speaking in verse
My lyrical curse

A: Working until 1 in the morning, then coming home to a 85-degree home and hypothesizing that the recent lightning storm blew out both 250V-25 amp fuses that go to your central air-conditioner, then realizing that to get a replacement you’ll have to wait until the hardware stores open at 9 am. and having to sleep in your 80-degree basement.

Lightning sucks.

11 a.m. Update: The heat has been vanquished, I am victorious!

Day-after Update: I apologize to anyone who’s ever sleep on my hide-a-bed. I now understand that the mattress is unfit for human use, as evidenced by the weird twitchy muscle in my back.