Goodbye January. I'll miss you.

Classes start tomorrow morning, and while I'm fairly excited about my schedule, the past month has spoiled me for months to come, setting the standard of fun higher than it needs to be. I closed it out with a couple more movie nights, a couple more poker tournaments, and the most ghetto brownie baking experience of my life. To get an idea, I melted my face on my school ID because the brownies were too hot when we cut them with it. But, they turned out to be super tasty. Oishii desu!

Plus, there are a couple of fun things coming up. Superbowl for one. The Chinese New Year celebration (turns out 2005 is the year of the cock). And perhaps the Ozeki promotion (slash shindeshi inauguration?) semiformal.

Other interesting stories:

I ordered this BMW lighter (just like Strong Bad's) off of eBay, so I could burninate stuff in style, and after waiting three weeks for it to ship from Hong Kong, I eagerly open the package, only to discover that the guy sent me a Volkswagen lighter instead! What a bummer. The good news is, I got a one line email in broken English that might have been indicating that he was sending the right one along. Crossing my fingers.

Also, I had a pretty adventurous time at the mall today. Jenny and I got up early to hop the bus to the mall, only to wait around about half an hour until we finally gave up, deciding that it wouldn't show. We came back two hours later, at the next scheduled stop time: same deal again. Frustrated with the Jersey Transit, we in the heat of the moment decided to get a cab. After all, we needed presents for Jess and Tiff. I won't disclose the cost of the cab out of sheer embarrassment. It was a good time once we got there, though. I got to weird out a little kid and her mom by talking about sumo, and similarly weirded out a clerk by accepting the merchandise rikishi style. When it was time to return, we decided to try the bus stop again. When the 605 again didn't show for twenty minutes, we called a friend on campus, who confirmed our suspicions that they had changed the schedule. We waited another half hour, and the bus came on time, we rode it back, no problem. Of course, I felt like a total dumbass for not checking to see what was up before I took an expensive and unnecessary taxi to the mall. Think, Textor, think. You're going to need to in about eight hours.

I played poker in an elevator.

That's right. With a table, and chairs, and three opponents, in a functioning elevator that several people wanted to use during our hold 'em tournament. As can be imagined, some of their reactions were more than slightly humorous.

All the time, I have these moments where I wonder what happened, what I did, which way I went to get to where I am right then. It happened a lot watching sumo, a lot watching sunrises before having gone to bed. But it was never so powerful as when I looked around and thought about the fact that I was sitting in the Dod elevator playing fake money poker in the wee hours of the morning, and I'm pretty sure that whenever it happens from this point forth, I'll be thinking, "Wow. This is almost like the time we had the poker game in the Dod elevator."

And I'd like to apologize for my use/misuse of commas in this post.

Back from Beantown, and a Farewell to Hatsu Basho

As expected, my Boston trip was awesome to the max. We (my roommate, her friend from high school, and I) managed to get there and back with only minor travelling difficulties. After a pleasant lunch with another of Jenny's friends from high school (a freshman now at MIT), I headed to MIT and met up with a couple of people I made friends with at Campus Preview Weekend as a prefrosh. Ben and Madeleine showed me a good time, cooking me an amazing dinner (complete with fried ice cream), juggling fire, and hanging out with me into the wee hours of the night.

The following day, I hit the town with Jenny and EJ, walking around the Common and doing a little shopping. It was a good time, but the subzero temperatures put a bit of a damper on things. The Memphis girls probably had more problems than I did, though. ; ) We got dinner at a kick-ass Italian place downtown, and then returned to MIT to finish out the trip by watching sumo through the live internet feed in an MIT cluster, alone. Sounds a bit pathetic, but I feel kind of proud.

As we were heading home the next day, a big blizzard hit the northeast, and we ran into some cancelled trains on our way back to Princeton, but in the end, we made it back to campus in one piece, and not too late to catch the band party and the last night of sumo for six weeks. I mourn the passing of my first, but certainly not my last basho. In fact, the Yokuzuna Deliberation Council has decided to allow me to join the Basho of Imagination. I am deeply honored. Doomo arigato gozaimasu! As an added bonus, Furidoman-san, former conducter of the PUB and a friend of mine, has placed into Japanese 102 for next semester, so three members of the fantasy sumo league will be in that class, which promises good times galore.

Other than that, I've been just killing time around campus with my friends, relishing the fact that I have no school work to do (for the first time since starting college). That and writing giant posts for my blog.

Done!

Just finished my final final a few hours ago. On all three of my exams (math, physics, and japanese, and my final paper for my writing seminar, for that matter), I feel like I hit about the class average. I didn't do exceptionally well, but didn't bomb them either. Sounds like a decent way to finish up a freshman fall semester. Plenty of room for the grades to change in either direction.

It's amazing how much fun finals week has been. There's always someone with nothing to do, and always someone with everything to do. So, no matter on which end of the spectrum you fall, you've got someone in the same boat. It's been great times, and I'm looking forward to more of the same during the last few days of finals week (which happen to coincide with the last few days of hatsu basho), and then intersession. With a trip to Boston and a bunch of band events on the agenda, I don't think I can go wrong.

In other exciting news, I am currently working what could be my last shift at my boring library job. Seriously, I've been here for two hours and I have not done any discernable trace of work. Oh well. Maybe I'll take a nap on the job...and get paid more than minimum wage to do so.

Books and Basho

I'm finally finished with my first final. January is a crazy month at Princeton. At times it feels like there's a ton of work crammed into a short time, and at other times it feels like a smidgen of work spread out over weeks. At any rate, I'm finally about done, with physics on monday and Japanese on tuesday.

Reading period and the time leading up to my math final have been amazing, though. I've been mad productive (for the most part) all day long, but after midnight or so, I've been up late making WaWa runs, watching movies, playing foosball, and just chilling out in general, surrounded by a wicked awesome group of people. The biggest contributer to my slightly wacky sleep schedule must be sumo, though.

For the past week straight, I've been watching the sumo basho on Japanese TV from 2:30 to 4:00am, and hardly understanding a word. A few of my friends have a fantasy league, pick squadrons, and actually know enough about sumo to make it meaningful. It just cracks me up every night, when I stop for a second and think about the fact that it's the middle of the night, I'm hanging out with a bunch of nerds watching a random sport in a language that none of us know. The highlight, however, was the night that, after basho, we played with some liquid nitrogen that our in-house chemical engineer somehow came to obtain. Nothing like fooling around with a potentially hazardous substance in the wee hours of the morning during finals week.

Isn't college the best?

It's long.

It's great to finally be back on campus. Not that home is super oppressive, but Corry, PA slash Sherman, NY, with their multiple feet of snow, camoflauge clothing fashion trends, and an overall below average number of teeth per citizen, can't really hold a candle to Princeton, the academia, the low buy-in hold 'em, the scramble band.

However, home is always good for bloggable events, as demonstrated by the following:

• Apparently our phoney Christmas tree was malfunctioning when my brother erected it, and for some reason, wouldn't fit in its stand. His solution was to put it in a live Christmas tree stand. Results: the tree, and its metric ton of decorations fell the hell over and snapped in two in the middle of gift exchange!

• Irksome memories from my childhood were brought back with my stepsister (one of Clayton's; I'm saving stories about the steps from the other side for my autobiography). The situation: in my mom's dinky little house, my parents and brother were sleeping in their rooms, my sister and her husband in the guest room, and I on the couch. This is when my stepsister (age 22, married) has a fight with her mother and needs to stay with her dad. Congratulations, Cindi! You win the love seat, where you won't be able to sleep much for lack of space, and you'll be awakened at seven am by whoever first decides they need to watch loud TV. Luckily, little brother inadvertently fell asleep in the living room, and I stole his bed. Sucker! Hopefully I didn't get head lice or anything. At any rate, it reminded me of how unfair things used to be when April lived with us. For example, when we first moved in to one of the houses we lived in in Corry, Rhonda, Keith and I were in a single bedroom, and April had her own, of equal or greater size. Plenty of other stuff like that, but I'm done ranting. No need to become bitter. Besides, I didn't even get the shaft. Little brother did!

So naturally, I was more than happy to return to the comfort of my own bed. Funny. Most kids say that when they go home. All in all, I'd say it was a fine break, though. I came back super rested, and at the same time, ready to get some work done. And then two days went by and I decided to update my blog instead. And a long entry, at that.

: )

Or, the underused ( :