thememoryhole

[thememoryhole]

The Dude of Jack

August of 2004, probably almost exactly thirteen years ago. This story is the second in a series involving NSO (New Student Orientation) and is actually closely related to the first one.

As I mentioned in that previous story, part of NSO involved placement exams. However, that's not entirely accurate. NSO itself did not include placement exams, but to make life easier for incoming freshman, the university scheduled the exams for the days preceding NSO. The idea being that you could come one day earlier, knock out some placement exams, and then attend NSO.

One issue for us neighbor island kids was that, while NSO provided accommodations on-campus, if you went one day earlier, no such accommodations were available. I'm sure many people had friends or family on Oahu that they could lodge with for the extra day, but a couple of haole boys like John and I had no such luck.

The school did have an agreement with some hotel to help students in our situation. As I recall, it still wasn't cheap, definitely over a hundred dollars, which to a couple of teenagers fresh out of high school seemed like an insane amount of money to spend on a place to stay for one night. Between the two of us, the cost wasn't quite as bad, at least.

John and I flew to Honolulu that morning and the first order of business was checking in to the hotel. I don't even remember how we got there—I can't believe we'd be stupid enough to waste the money on taking a taxi, but on the other hand, we didn't know anything about Honolulu, so getting around was not yet our forte.

That's a theme I must stress from the beginning—we didn't know where we were or what we were doing. The epitome of small town kids lost in the big city for the first time, I can't be too specific on many of the details in this story because for the most part they were a blur. Though we would later grow to be quite adept at navigating the rough and tough streets of Honolulu, these were our first brave steps on our own.

I actually think that the hotel might have had an airport shuttle, which makes sense given that, when we arrived, it was like, a legit nice hotel. Not something super fancy, but this wasn't a Motel 8, either. Despite having reserved the room through the school, I remember needing a credit card, which was a big "holy shit" moment because we were still kids who didn't have anything. One of us used our newly-minted FHB debit cards. I think it was me, because for the rest of my time on Oahu I constantly worried about how the authorization hold on the card had basically reduced the amount of money I could spend during the entire trip to $30 or something ridiculous like that.

The hotel was in, or at least around, Waikiki, I am certain of that. I probably ended up walking past it a thousand times later on in life, but I never could remember which one it was. As we used the little keycard to open the door, I think we were both amazed that it was such a nice place. Why was this necessary for college kids here just to take entrance exams? The cost made sense, now, at least. It was fun, though. I enjoyed having a nice room to chill in. It would definitely beat the dorms they'd stick us in for NSO, as we'd soon find out.

I actually remember how we got to UH on that first day. Because the school at least had provided some public transportation guides for students staying at that hotel. We took the bus. I want to say it was the 4, but I have no idea if that's accurate or if TheBus still even uses the same line numbers as they did a decade and a half ago, so it's probably moot.

Regardless, I also remember that taking the bus was a big deal. Dude, we're just like, getting on this bus, who knows if we'll even get where we need to go? There were no smartphones back then, it wasn't like we could check our progress with an app or GPS. Just hop in, slide the two dollars in the little machine, take a seat, and hope eventually the little LED screen says the next stop is UH.

Clearly, we did get to UH, and I've already detailed some of the experiences there. I don't actually remember much more from that first day, obviously at some point we made our way back to the hotel and there isn't a whole lot that sticks out in my mind about that evening. What I remember more is the next morning. We had to get up early, to check out and then head back to UH for the official start of NSO.

But before that, we needed to grab breakfast. Being brave, we decided to wander the streets for a while and see if the big city could offer us anything novel. This is what makes me believe the hotel was at least in very close proximity to Waikiki, because we were easily able to stumble upon what felt like a very main drag of Waikiki. It was a weekday and still early yet, so it wasn't very busy, but it was very wandering tourist/pedestrian-friendly.

Then we saw it. Jack in the Box. At the time, Kauai had been Jack in the Box-less for a long, long time. I have no idea what John knew of Jack in the Box back then (I can't remember when Kauai's locations shut down), but I had fond memories. And when I had visited family in California, I always had a chance to rekindle my love affair with the fine purveyor of artery-clogging goodness.

It was clear. We were gonna have breakfast at Jack in the Box. Duh.

We wandered in, poring over the breakfast menu that was unfamiliar to us. There were a few other people in there, but we were in our own little brave new world. We placed our order, and waited.

I was probably talking too loudly, as usual. I wanted to appear cultured and worldly to John, and I was regaling him with stories of other rare fast food eateries. Jack in the Box was only one of the gluttonous delights we were denied back home on Kauai. I was telling him how in California, not only was I able to regularly enjoy Jack in the Box, but also this fabled little chain called Del Taco.

At that moment, the gentleman standing next to us at the counter butted into the conversation. He was a dude probably in his mid-30s, local, and possibly homeless. He was certainly slightly unhinged, as we were about to find out. He said, with no uncertain enthusiasm, "Oh yeah, man! I love Del Taco, too!"

Thinking back now, I suppose he was just joining in on the conversation because he was weird, but I remember at the time feeling like he was mocking me, like I was gushing too excitedly and noisily about something and he just had to step in and start ragging on me. And while it's not unheard of for a random stranger to join a conversation on Kauai or basically anywhere else, I still felt kind of uncomfortable because I was vaguely aware that things could be more dangerous in a big city.

Yep, small town kid for sure.

This dude certainly proved noisier than I ever could have been. He kept going on, "It's so much better than Taco Bell, or as I like to call it, TACO HELL!!!" The grin on his face indicated that he meant this as a joke, and an extremely funny and original joke at that. We nervously and politely chuckled.

I remember looking to the staff to see their reaction, which was one of indifference. Perhaps he was a regular that came in and behaved this way all the time, or perhaps they just weren't getting paid enough to deal with this shit. Couldn't blame them.

He asked us some questions, I can't remember what exactly, but somehow the topic of music came up and he suddenly asked, "Hey, do you guys like Linkin Park?!"

Maybe we looked like LP fans, or maybe he just really wanted to talk about Linkin Park. I think we muttered some sort of vague agreement, not wanting to push any buttons with this clearly unstable dude who was on a tear at seven o'clock in the morning at Jack in the Box.

"Oh, yeah? I like them too, but I don't know how that guy sings like that," he said. Then, without warning, he turned away from the counter, towards the dining area and screamed into an air mic, "CRAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWLLLLLLING IN MY SKIIIIIIN!!!"

When I say "scream," I'm not speaking hyperbolically. He put more energy into it than even Chester Bennington himself does in the real song. (His recent death is what inspired this story, because even thirteen years later whenever I think of Linkin Park all I can do is think back immediately to this morning spent in Jack in the Box.)

I think John and I both were pretty aware that we were fully on board the crazy train by now. Fortunately, the dude's attention had now shifted out towards the dining area. There was a Japanese family eating their breakfast, clearly tourists. As I recall, they were dressed in swimsuits, ready to hit the beach. Dad, mom, and a couple of small kids.

Who knew what was going through their mind as this guy started screaming loudly, but they could hardly expect that he would approach them and start talking to them in an over-the-top racist faux-Japanese accent. "OH, HERRO! GOOD MORNING!" he said, and they nodded nervously, hoping they weren't about to be murdered.

For some reason, he pulled out a $5 bill and proudly brandished it in their faces, pulling the bill taut a few times between his two hands for dramatic effect. "America quiz time! Do you know who this man is?!" he asked, waving the bill around the table. The family looked very confused. I have no idea if they understood in the slightest what was going on.

But after a moment of stunned silence, he made a buzzing sound. "Bzzt! WRONG! I guess you didn't know it's Mister Abraham Lincoln. Or probably as you would say it"—again he put on the heavy accent—"Abe-ra-ham RIN-con!" He laughed heartily at his own joke.

I wondered if this situation was going to get worse, like maybe he was not going to leave these poor tourists alone. Or maybe he would turn his attention back towards us. I had very little experience dealing with random crazies, I realized. Sheltered life.

But just as quickly as it started, it resolved. His order was ready, he grabbed the bag, and headed out the door, never to be seen again. John and I sat at a table and chowed down our breakfast, too bewildered by what had just happened to truly enjoy its goodness. We headed back to the hotel, checked out, and got back on a bus for UH.

The main reason for us coming to Oahu had not yet begun, but I had already learned something. Buying breakfast could be an adventure. So, this was what life was going to be like for the next four years.

[thememoryhole]

Laundry / Laundry Card Girl

Freshman year, 2004-2005.

Part I: Laundry

I suppose I never gave a thought to how I would do my laundry once I moved to college. Sure, I did my own laundry at home in high school, but I always just took having a washer and dryer for granted.

Our dorms had on-site laundromats, fortunately. But like so many things at UH and especially in student housing, nothing was straightforward or easy. The laundry machines were not coin-operated, but used a smart card with a little chip on it. This may seem pretty unimpressive in 2016, but the technology was very much in its infancy in the early aughts.

The laundry cards were billed as a convenience, because students didn't have to worry about finding quarters when it was time to do a wash. In reality, they were just another way to screw students. Firstly, there was a "deposit" that you had to pay when you got a card, which I'm sure a vast majority of students never got back. I never did. I always felt like it was just buying a card, which I then had to load funds onto.

When it was time to put money on the cards, we had to add funds in dollar increments. Rarely would laundry expenses perfectly add up to an even dollar amount, meaning we often wound up carrying a balance that in the end we would never get back. That was if you managed to not lose or damage your card. If that happened, you could just say goodbye to whatever money was on them.

And the whole system was finicky. Yes, coin-operated machines can jam or eat your change, but trying to get the machine to read your smart card was often pure torture. I most definitely had instances where the machines glitched out and took my money without actually doing anything. Even loading money on the cards could be a pain.

I actually called the company once, when I tried to deposit $10 onto a card. The machine happily took my cash, but didn't update my card. The little help number on the side of the machine was busy. I tried several times. I eventually gave up after waiting an hour or so. Ten dollars was a lot of money to a destitute college kid just trying to wash his clothes.

Another problem to this high-tech solution presented itself when hundreds of freshman students suddenly descended upon the dormitory laundromats for the first time: the laundry cards themselves. The machine which vended them had a limited stock. A limited stock that was very easily depleted on the first weekend the dorms were open.

You could have all the quarters in the world, there was no way you were washing your rancid-ass clothes unless you could get ahold of one of those dumb smart cards. The contracted company could have foreseen such a demand, or even made an effort to restock the machine in a timely fashion, but two weeks into the semester, people were still having difficulty getting their hands on a card.

Part II: Laundry Card Girl

John had a card. I was hanging out in his room on one of those early nights when a girl knocked on the door. I think she was in one of his classes, and had brought up how she didn't have a laundry card. John, being the gentleman that he is, offered to let her borrow his. She was there to take possession of the rare object.

I had a card, too. I couldn't help but feel some jealousy at the situation.  John just seemed like the luckiest sonovabitch in the world. Why weren't girls knocking at my door asking me to borrow my card?

Okay, that's pretty stupid. But it wasn't entirely unfounded. Later interactions, just while walking around campus or bumping into her in the dorms, made it pretty clear to me and our other friends that "laundry card girl" (as she soon became known) had a thing for John.

Laundry card girl wasn't exactly someone you'd write home about physically, which was all I could judge her on. If I had to pick one word to describe how she looked, I'd go with "dumpy." Nor was John returning her advances, since he was in a relationship at the time. Still, I did what any mature friend would do: start to make fun of him about her.

The ribbing went on for a while, some to his face and some behind his back. Whenever we'd see her, it'd be a horrible impersonation in a mannish voice, "HEY JOHN, CAN I BORROW YOUR LAUNDRY CARD??"

Here's the thing I need to admit: laundry card girl played a large part in my life, and I don't think anyone, herself included, knows it.

Social networking was a new thing back in those days. Myspace was all the rage and I'd all too often end up just clicking around on random profiles and basically e-stalking the heck out of people. One day I saw laundry card girl's profile on John's page, and I ended up discovering that she had a blog.

I gave it a read. Just for a laugh, I assured myself. She liked to write, I found out. I ended up enjoying her blog, I have to admit. I started reading it regularly, and I even started commenting on it, pretty regularly, too.

I remember not wanting to reveal who I was. For one, I would have zero non-creepy ways of explaining why I was reading her site. Additionally, I was totally afraid that if my friends ever caught wind that I was somehow interested in laundry card girl's life, I would be on the receiving end of a lot of well-deserved ridicule for my hypocrisy.

So I always commented as "Anonymous," and eventually someone else also started commenting as Anonymous as well, and I was seriously concerned that she'd associate me with that other Anonymous douchebag. So, as you can see, I was somewhat emotionally invested.

I don't remember a lot about her writing, and I know this will sound corny as fuck, but I was actually inspired by the fact that she was just some other student at my school who was putting her words out there on the internet.

In an overall sense, laundry card girl encouraged me to keep writing and to keep putting shit out there, even if the only people who read it are random assholes that stumble upon your site after ridiculing you and finding your profile on their friend's Myspace.

In a very direct sense, she was behind the creation of S&P, my longest-running and I suppose most "successful" (50 likes on Facebook, and it only took nine years, folks!) writing project thus far. I distinctly remember her doing some sort of ten-minute everyday writing challenge thing, and I decided to do it too, and that's how S&P started.

This is just one of many examples of massive hypocrisy in my life. I guess it didn't really matter, I just can't believe that I ended up teasing John so much because some girl liked him and wanted to borrow his laundry card, and then I ended up anonymously interacting with her for years afterward online. Man, life is strange.

I don't know when or why I stopped reading her site, but eventually I did. And I don't even remember her real name anymore. Anyway, thanks laundry card girl. It's your fault I'm still writing.

[thememoryhole]

December 17, 2004 - Last day in the dorm before going home for winter break.

My first semester in college was done. The refrigerator was unplugged and defrosted. I wasn’t moving out, but I’d be gone for a few weeks.

I suppose some kids would show off how cool or hardcore they were by piling up empty beer cans or liquor bottles in their rooms. Me? I stacked up all my empty Diet Pepsi cans in the window.

That’s the kind of hardcore college life I was living.

It’s 2016 now, and the memory hole is back. Maybe.

[thememoryhole]

steak night.

Freshman year of university. The only year I was living in the on-campus dorms, which were different than living in the on-campus apartments, because you were required to have a meal plan.

The logic behind it made sense. In the apartments there were full kitchens, so it was plausible that students were cooking their own food. But in the dorms, they didn't want students to starve to death, and even if parents just gave their kids a bunch of money to go buy food, very little of it would probably be put to that purpose. 99% of it would probably go to booze or illicit substances, with the remaining 1% spent on impulse-buy munchies at 7-11.

But in truth, the meal plans themselves were huge scams designed to line the pockets of Sodexo, our school's food service contractor that ran basically everything that served food on campus. They were extremely expensive, if I recall correctly the cheapest plan was way north of another thousand dollars added to the already expensive dorm rental fees.

They were also designed so that they weren't really that good of a value. Like, okay, if you spent $1000 upfront but could eat every meal every day on campus for free, maybe it would work out. But there were always weird rules, like you could only eat a certain amount of times per day, or only at certain places, or things like that.

The one my mom got me was pretty decent, I could eat two meals a day at the dorm cafeteria, I think all seven days a week.  But it didn't stack, so I couldn't eat one meal on Monday there and then eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Tuesday.  So if I ever chose to eat out elsewhere, that was a "lost" meal that I paid for but didn't receive. I also didn't get any allowances at any other of the Sodexo food vendors, it was the cafeteria or nothing.

The cafeteria wasn't terrible, it's been the topic of a few posts already here. After subsisting on it for a year, though, I can happily say I never wanted to eat there again. The food was also really greasy and bad for you, almost surely responsible for untold numbers of Freshman 15s every semester.

It was buffet style, and they had different stations, a pizza station, a grill station, a pasta section, et cetera. I think I wrote about this before in the vegetarian dinner entry.

Anyway, there was one shitty night. Thursday night. Steak night. For some reason, on Thursdays the cafeteria would forego its typical food for steak night. My first week at school, a few people told me about it excitedly.

"Oh man, just wait until Thursday. It's STEAK NIGHT! If you eat at the cafeteria one night a week using your meal plan, make it steak night!"

These kids that told me this didn't seem to be alone, either. Thursday night was the one night a week where it was pretty much a given that you'd be waiting in a line out the door to get in for dinner service. Sometimes, it was a really long line where you'd have to wait upwards of half an hour.

But I'm going to let you in on a little secret: steak night fucking sucked. After you waited in the long line, you were given a ticket for your entree. The cafeteria was usually all you can eat, but I guess steak is too expensive for that, so you were only allowed to get one serving.

Now, I'm not a huge steak fanatic, but it was pretty much in the same class as the other low-grade shit that Sodexo served every other meal of the day. I can't honestly imagine that this steak cost much at all, since it had the texture and appearance of an abused tire. And it wasn't just a bad cut of meat, it was also tiny as hell, I guess again due to cost issues. You got about three bites of meat, along with a potato, I think.

You did have an alternative to go for a chicken breast, and after a while I ultimately just began opting for that every week as the year wore on. Chicken's chicken, it was nothing spectacular but at least it wasn't a colossal disappointment like the steak was.

To make it even lamer, when it was steak night, the steak/chicken distribution took up one of the other stations, I think it was usually the grill (burger/fries/sandwich/chicken nuggets) station, which was typically my favorite station, so you not only had to eat your one little serving of crappy steak (or chicken), but you couldn't get the other stuff that was at least decent.

I never understood why students would get so amped up about steak night, nor why Sodexo even bothered at all.

Fuck steak night. 

[thememoryhole]

matching attire.

I don't know exactly why I thought of this.  Perhaps it is because here in Taiwan, I see way too many people wearing matching clothes.  It's pretty ridiculous that many couples find this practice acceptable and on their weekend outings will be sporting, at the very least, a matching shirt, if not matching pants and matching accessories to go with them.

I can think of two such instances during my career as a student where I wore the exact same t-shirt as someone else.  Of course, I am excluding events where we all needed to wear the same shirt, like club shirts for a club activity or something.  No, I am talking about random occurrences of matching wardrobe.

The first was in high school, I'd guess senior year.  Senior year because it involves Thrice's album The Artist in the Ambulance, which was released during the summer of 2003.  I had never pre-ordered an album in my life before, but I really liked Thrice, and Fuj had turned me onto the fact that if you pre-ordered it, not only did it not cost anything extra, but you also got a free t-shirt.  You also got a deluxe version of the album that was pretty cool.  Seemed win-win to me.

So I pre-ordered it, as did he.  The shirt was actually pretty decent, design-wise, although it was printed on possibly the cheapest shirt in the world.  Anyway, it was an olive-drab shirt with a red cross on the front (like a medic, get it?) that said "Thrice" above it, and on the back it just had "The Artist in the Ambulance" printed in black across the top.

I wore it randomly whenever it came up in my shirt rotation.  Well, of course, one day, I showed up at school, and so did Fuj, and we found out that we were both wearing the same damn shirt.  It wasn't exactly a big deal, but in high school you're always afraid of every little embarrassing thing, plus since we were in the same social group we were always hanging out right by each other and so the similar shirts stood out a lot more than if we had just passed by each other once in the hall or something.

I remember at some point during recess Shandra Shinno suddenly realized it and she announced it loudly, "Oh! You guys are wearing the same shirt! That's so cute!  Did you guys like...plan that?"  Fuj and I may have literally facepalmed, it was pretty bad.

The other time was in college, and it also involved a Thrice shirt, somehow.  One of those weird coincidences of the universe.  Oddly enough, though, not the same Thrice shirt.  This shirt was one I had bought at Hot Topic, it was a black shirt with blue print.  The design was like a box, and on the left hand side there was the Thrice logo thing, then on the right hand side it said "Thrice" in biggish letters and I believe some song lyrics underneath it.

I've tried Googling for images of either shirt but didn't find anything.  I know I have both of them still, unfortunately they're back in America.

Anyway, I was walking up the outside stairs in Kuykendall Hall, on the side by the Campus Center building.  I think I was going to my Anthropology 152 class which would have made it freshman year, but I'm not certain.  I was wearing said Thrice shirt.  As I passed the second floor's hallway doors, continuing onward towards the third floor, I heard someone call out to me.

It was Christian Cook.  Another Kauai kid.  Truth be told, I didn't really like him.  Nothing against him personally, I actually didn't know him all that well, but when we had spoken, he had always been pretty nice to me.  He was one of those people I knew better on MSN than in real life, at some point during high school he had made it to my MSN list and we had chatted occasionally.  He always seemed alright.

But I didn't like him.  And since this whole thing would be nothing without confessions that I would have never told anyone at the time, I guess I should tell you why.  Back in high school, for a period in time, I had the biggest crush on Roxanne ever.  I guess it's not such a huge secret since I have told her that since, although I don't think she really believed me.

It was true, though.  And for a time, when I was first getting to know her and develop this crush, I found out she was dating this Christian Cook person.  He was a Kapaa kid, so I didn't even know him, but from then on I had a nice bit of hatred for this guy.  I remember one time Roxanne and I were in class, she was drawing in the little day planner thing the school gave us, and on the weekend she wrote something like "Hanging out with Christian" and drew some hearts, and man, you better believe I went home bitter about him.

Not that I would have had a chance with her or anything but yeah, that's digging into some high school angst that I'm sure I'll be better suited to write about at another time.

Anyway, the point is, I really never liked him.  Christian, if you ever read this, not that it mattered to you, since we weren't even really acquaintances, and not that I ever let my feelings show or something, but hey man sorry for hating on you just because you were dating a crush of mine during high school.  We were all stupid kids.

This was at least two years after the fact, but yeah, I still didn't like him.  But he called out to me.  I turned, and looked.  He was sitting outside the doorways that led to Kuykendall's inner hallway.  He said nothing at first, but he ripped his jacket open, in a Superman-like fashion.  He pointed at his chest, and I saw that what he was revealing to me was the fact that he, too, was wearing the exact same Thrice t-shirt.

He let out a "Yeah!" and gave a thumbs up.  Like I said, he was always nice enough to me, and hey, we had similar taste in music, I guess.  I didn't really react, I just gave him like a head nod and kept climbing the stairs.

I don't think I wore either of those shirts much after that.

[thememoryhole]

death of a bird.

When I was a teenager, I engaged in a vast amount of stupid activities involving motor vehicles that were dangerous, reckless, and could have ended in the deaths of myself, my friends, and innocent bystanders.  But I don't think that I am too unique in this regard, at least when it comes to those of us who grew up in America.

I think about that now.  Here in Taiwan, kids don't get their licenses until they're 18, and even then, they all just usually drive mopeds.  It's probably for the best, but still, those years in high school, where my friends drove first, and then I finally drove.  I didn't even particularly love it, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't have a big impact on growing up.

Anyway, that's not what I intend to write about.  This story does take place in high school though, probably senior year but we could have been juniors, too.  I was driving by then, and I couldn't get my license until my birthday in junior year, so it was definitely after that.  I had my 4Runner, Big Blue, although at the time she wasn't called that.

After I started driving, sometimes, when I'd spend the night at my dad's house during the week, I'd wake up early, and go get breakfast at Camp House Grill at 6:30 or whenever they opened.  I'd eat and then head off to school.  It would still be early then.  I don't know why I would always try to go to school so early.

I suppose part of it is that I am just a nerd.  School was comfortable for me.  I also just definitely have anxiety about being places on time.  It's why I prefer to be an hour and a half early to places, even now, rather than chance even being one minute late.  I don't like the feeling of rushing, I guess.  And I hated the rush hour traffic heading into town that came with going to school later.  Going early meant I could beat all that, get a good parking space, and just chill out and study or goof off at school.

Getting back to the main story, John would also sometimes join me for a Camp House breakfast at the time.  I'm not sure why he would be up and headed to school so early too, but he was.  I don't think the things I just described in the previous paragraph were true of him, at all.  I want to guess that it had something to do with his girlfriend at the time, something like that she was there early too and they could hang out more easily in those school mornings since her parents were strict, but I could be completely wrong on that.

So yeah, this wasn't a very regular occurrence, since at most I was at my Dad's house in Kalaheo once a week, and John wasn't there every time I went.  But we did the Camp House breakfast every so often.  Then afterward, we would both drive to school, each in our respective vehicles.

I don't know why, but we would sometimes try to "race" each other.  I use the danger quotes because really neither of us were going anywhere fast.  My V6 SUV couldn't get anywhere fast and John's V4 Civic wasn't necessarily a speed demon, either.  Don't get me wrong, I am pretty sure both of us loved our respective vehicles, but they weren't tricked-out, souped-up race cars.  But we had a habit of doing these stupid little fake drag race-esque things, usually wherever there was a truck bypass lane or something, since most of Kauai's roads are just one lane.

It was stupid, and it was probably unsafe, too.  But especially in these early mornings, where the roads were clear, we couldn't help ourselves.

And I remember one such time, we left from Kalaheo and headed down into Lawai valley.  Right after the intersection with Koloa Road, when you headed back up the hill on the other side of the valley, there was that truck bypass lane.  I started out ahead, staying in the left lane.  John ducked out on the right hand side, into the slow lane and pounded it.  His car was light, and pretty quick at accelerating up the hill.  On the other hand, my heavy beast of a vehicle was doing its best to pull itself up, but there was no doubt I was falling behind.

It was a nice, crisp Thursday morning, and despite the fact that I was losing, there wasn't much wrong in the air as I watched the green hatchback pull away from me in the right hand lane.  It was just good fun.  Then, suddenly, there was something in the air.

No really, it was a bunch of birds, taking flight.  They must have been resting on the side of the road or something, and were startled by the sudden approach of two cars with their engines roaring.  Like I said, the roads were quite empty at those times.  So they all were taking off.  I was further behind, so I wasn't too close to them, but I also got to watch the whole thing unfold.

John's Civic was passing through the flock, and for a moment it looked like everything would be fine--that all the birds would make it through clearly.  But we were going pretty fast.  And I guess he was going too fast for one of the birds to make it.

All I saw from my car was a sudden plume of feathers erupt from John's car.

"Holy shit!" I yelled to myself as I witnessed it.

I remember we pulled off into the parking lot of K-Mart when we finally made it to town, and inspected the surprisingly little remains of the bird that had been splattered on his windshield.  He told me it sounded like a rock when he hit it, and he had thought the windshield itself might break.

Fortunately for him though, the vaporizing body of a bird that size apparently does not carry enough mass or force to shatter a windshield.  I think we tried to clean it off as best as we could in that parking lot, although that mostly consisted of pulling away stray feathers and whatnot.

It wasn't a major thing.  It was just some pigeon or a bird like that, tens of thousands probably get run over every day by cars.  It wasn't like either of our lives were in danger or anything, either.  So I don't know why it stuck with me so much.

I admit I always have had a soft spot for birds, but I don't think that was really why, either.  I felt bad for the bird, surely, and it was a death of an animal as a result of our stupid driving behavior.  But it didn't hang heavy on my soul or anything like that.

Yet I always remember it.  I still think about it.  The memory of the feathers just erupting in a cloud around his car, when both of us had our pedals to the metal, I don't know, it stuck with me.

So here it is.

[thememoryhole]

welcher.

Time to sell out another one of my friends in one of these posts.

Well, not really.  But John, this is about you.

Pretty much everyone knows that we are hetero life partners or BFFs or whatever you want to call it, so I'm not too worried when writing this.  But John, there were quite a few agreements that you welched on throughout our college career, and I wanted to make a post for the ages to document a few of your outstanding agreements.

What brought this to mind were the recent final episodes of Season 18 of The Amazing Race--oddly enough, a show we used to watch together all the time.  I won't spoil anything for anyone who hasn't seen it, but needless to say one of the tasks towards the end of the show involved both team members needing to endure fifteen minutes of a wax while in Brazil.

Many may know that I am quite a hairy individual.  So hairy, in fact, that last weekend, while I was dining at a restaurant, a young kid walking by just quite openly exclaimed, in Chinese, "Wow!  So hairy!" or something to that effect.

I don't know how it came up, but at some point during university we were talking about me getting a wax.  I think it was me comparing my chest hair to those of the eponymous main character of The 40-Year Old Virgin.  I said I'd like to have my hairy chest rectified in the same way, even if it meant a very painful wax.  But I would never have gone out of my way to spend my own money for something very superficial.

Well, you agreed to pay for the waxing if you could just witness the hilarity and document it in some form so that more people could enjoy me crying in pain as a billion hairs were ripped from my flesh.  I was done, yet the money never materialized, man.  What happened?  As far as I'm concerned, my end of the offer is still in good standing.  Let's make it happen.

Another instance I remember was in the Fall of 2007, the beginning of our senior year.  I had come back from Japan that summer and spent a little over three weeks on Kauai before moving back to campus.  During that time, I decided not to shave my facial hair until the first day of the semester.

So when we all showed up at our apartment, I believe it was the first time you saw it.  For some reason, you thought it was really cool.  You made an outrageous claim, "That's it!  I'm not going to shave for the entire semester!  This is going to be awesome!"  No one believed you, but you swore you were going to stick to it.

I told you what kind of itchy hell I was in after just a few weeks, but you were adamant.

Well, when the first Monday rolled around, you better believe I enjoyed shaving that disgusting thing off.  But you had a bit of stubble going.  For a second, I might have believed that you were really going to pull it off.

Maybe about a week went by, but honestly I don't even think it was that much.  It was probably like Friday that week, I was talking to you in the apartment and I suddenly realized, "Dude, you shaved!"

I almost thought perhaps you had made a mistake, like you had forgotten that you had made this vow to not shave, and just accidentally did it out of routine or something.  But you just shook your head.

"Yeah, I know.  Man, it was getting really uncomfortable."

And that was it.  Like that made it understandable!  Rightly so, I gave you shit about how you had gone back against these grandiose claims you had just made a few days ago.  "Come on man, you couldn't go through with it like we all said, what am I getting out of this deal?!"

Truth be told, I remember you "paid" my share of the U-HAUL truck that we used to get our stuff out of storage.  I say "paid" because actually you had already paid for it and I guess it was more like you were just forgetting my debt, which was pretty cool because I think it was like thirty bucks or something.

So I guess I got something from you reneging on that agreement, but still, it would have been cool to see you going through with a few month's worth of facial hair.

The third and final instance of you welching that I shall write about tonight is perhaps the biggest one, in my eyes.  The year was 2007.  I had gotten all of us--well, you and Andy--into Formula One the season before, and for one reason or another, you had taken an affinity towards Kimi Raikkonen.

Well, in 2007, Kimi moved to Ferrari, and given that I am a lifelong Ferrari fan, it put us pretty much on the same side when it came to rooting for our favorites.  But the year hadn't looked the best for Raikkonen or Ferrari.  It really looked like it was McLaren's year, but Kimi had enough success throughout the season that he had an outside chance at the championship.

Still, it was just that, a very very outside chance.  It was one of those things that was a mathematical possibility but would require some very unlikely events to occur.  Well, a few races from the finish, you happily declared, "If Kimi Raikkonen wins the WDC, I'm going to get a huge tattoo of his face on my chest."  You were serious, it wasn't a wager made in jest.

As the season ticked on, it didn't necessarily look like it was all that probable that you'd end up under the needle, even at the final race of the season in Brazil.  It would have required Kimi to win and his main rival, Hamilton, to end up pretty far back in the pack.  Kimi only qualified P3, Hamilton was P2, it just wasn't going to happen.

But, to make a long story short, it did.  Barely, but it happened.  We were so stoked.  I remember being in disbelief that Ferrari won in a year that looked so likely to go to McLaren.  We were up early and I was so amped I remember we went out to get some celebratory breakfast.  We tried to go to the Original House of Pancakes (Dutch Baby, mm-mm) but it was too busy, so we ended up at Big City Diner at Ward.

I was in a state of euphoria and disbelief for some time, that I think it took me a while to remember that you had made your promise about what you would do if Kimi had won.  But eventually, it came up.  "I'm going to do it," you still said, pretty elated about Kimi's win yourself.

This October will mark the fourth anniversary of Kimi's win at Interlagos, yet, as far as I know, you are still without a Kimi Raikkonen tattoo on your chest.  For some time, you held fast to the fact that you were going to get it done, but as time wore on, you seemed less sure.  A month or two later, either Andy or I gave you some shit about it.

"I looked in to it, but do you know how fucking expensive a tattoo is?  Just to get like a couple of square inches done will cost me hundreds of dollars.  I don't have that kind of money to blow."

Come on.  Okay, no, I didn't know that, and no one would expect you to drop $400 or $500 on a dumb tattoo like that.  But really, that wasn't the thing holding you back, was it?

It was the fact that you didn't want a huge tattoo of some dude's face on your chest for the rest of your life.

Not that I blame you, I don't think anyone really believed that you were actually going to do it, since something like that is crazy, and it's the special kind of crazy that lives with you for the rest of your life.

It was just the fact that you were so adamant that you were actually going to do it.  Maybe that's what we can take from this.  It's not a big deal that you didn't get a dumb as hell tattoo, or didn't grow your beard for three months, or didn't pay for me to get my chest waxed.  It's just that you're too quick to make an often-crazy promise and then stick to your guns when someone doubts you.

I just realized that two out of these three involve body hair.  Man, that's weird.

[thememoryhole]

residential evil.

Another freshman year story.

I had a Nintendo Gamecube in my dorm room that year.  It was the only console I owned back then.  Honestly, there weren't a lot of good games for it and it wasn't a very good system in general, but I guess back then I was just a helpless Nintendo fanboy.

Evan was really into the Resident Evil video game series, something I never really got too much into myself.  One of the Gamecube's more well-known attempts at branching out from the "just for kids" stereotype that Nintendo had earned was a remake of the original Resident Evil game on the Gamecube.  It had really good graphics for the time and as I recall actually had to be put on two of those little tiny gamecube discs.

Anyway, so one day Evan asked me if he could use my Gamecube to play Resident Evil if he bought the game.  I said sure--it wasn't like I used it very much anyway.  So he bought it, and he was hanging out in my room playing the game.

Evan, I love you dude, and obviously I would learn to eventually live with all your little foibles (and you with mine, I'm sure) when we ended up as roommates for our last two years of undergrad, but at the time, I was used to having my own room to myself and I didn't have to deal with anyone else normally.

The thing was, Evan would play it in long runs.  Like, three or four hours at a time.  It was no big deal, it's not like I had anything else going on.  But after a while, having the TV on blaring Resident Evil was getting annoying.  He would really get into it and have it really loud.  Sometimes he'd yell in reaction to something that happened--I guess it is a "horror" game and enemies would pop out unexpectedly, resulting in a cry of surprised and frantic working of the controller.  I remember there were like permanent sweat marks on the controller after all was said and done--that's how into it he was.

No big deal, I thought.  All I had in my dorm room was my pissant little 13" TV, but one cool thing about it was that it had a normal headphone jack right on the front.  I told Evan how the sound was bothering me a bit, so I offered up my headphones and asked if he'd play wearing them.  Evan's a cool guy and he understood and obliged right away.

It was great.  Silence permeated the room.  Aside from the hum of the TV, there was really no sound in the room.  I was really getting used to it, and I was thinking that actually him playing Resident Evil in my room wasn't going to bother me at all--he could now play till the Gamecube burned out for all I cared.

Some time went by, maybe twenty minutes.  And then, suddenly, out of the calm silence, Evan's shout suddenly filled the air, coupled with frantic movement of the sticks on the controller.  I guess an enemy had popped up unexpectedly or something.  The thing was, while the game itself could be put through headphones, Evan's own reactions couldn't.

This was worse.  Before, the noise was annoying and constant, but at least when he would have a loud reaction to the game, it wasn't such a break in the atmosphere.  It could almost be expected.  But now, I had quiet tranquility pierced by the occasional "OH FUCK!  SHIT!!!" or something along those lines.  Honestly, I wasn't even playing this game and it was still scaring me, because Evan's unpredictable and unexpected reactions would surprise me and make me jump too.

It went on like that for the night.  I think in the future I just told him to forget the headphones, I'd rather just put them on myself, play some music, and block out all sound.  Fortunately I think he beat the game to 100% completion within the span of a week or something, so it wasn't that bad.

Those were the days.

[thememoryhole]

vegetarian dinner.

I've written a lot about freshman year, I guess that's when things were at their newest and the most happening-est.  I've also already written about eating, and the dorm cafeteria, and girls, and well, my point is, this post is going to be a combination of all these things.

It was definitely freshman year, probably Spring semester, so that'd put this in the Spring of 2005.  It involves myself, John, and our mutual female acquaintance Iris.  I had met her originally through my scholarship thing, since all of us who got the scholarship were forced to do a summer orientation together (note to self: that'd be a good one to post about later, too).

I'm not sure how John got into this social group, but the dude has an uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with any group that includes women so I guess it makes sense.

Anyway, it's not like I was super close friends with Iris.  Or maybe I was, I don't really remember that clearly--I think we would often IM each other.  Oftentimes we'd go eat at the dormitory cafeteria together, too, but it wasn't like a daily ritual--maybe once a week or so, if I'd have to guess.

For John, I'd imagine it was pretty much the same, he would often be part of the group that would eat at the cafeteria.  Now, I can't recall whether Iris was a complete vegetarian or just espoused a more veggie-filled lifestyle, but if I'd have to guess, I'd say she was a full-blown vegetarian.  Which probably didn't leave her a lot of options at that cafeteria.

That shitty Sodexho (or Sodexo now, I agree, that "h" was totally superfluous) cafeteria.  All my other friends and I weren't even vegetarians and we still loved to bag on how bad the food was.  I mean, all of it was bad for you in the health sense.  Greasy, mass-produced with low-quality ingredients, all-you-can eat to encourage binging, et cetera.  But a lot of the time, the dishes were just, well, uninspired as well.  I mean, sure, they always had burgers and plain cheese pizza as safe bets, but anything with any variety tended to be on the side of suck.

So one day, while we were probably talking about how crappy the food was at the cafeteria, Iris starts to tell us about these microwaveable vegetarian meals she eats.  "They're great!" she said energetically.  John and I were something more skeptical.  First of all, vegetarian meals of any kind were not conjuring up images of deliciousness to us two carnivores.  Go meat or go home.

But even if we could stomach going vegetarian for one meal, something that came pre-packed in a microwaveable container that was ready to be eaten after a few minutes of zapping didn't sound too good either.  Heck, I wasn't health-minded, but it didn't even sound healthy. I know all those pre-made meals are typically loaded with sodium and preservatives and other shit that is almost certainly going to give us cancer in a few years.  Why would I subject myself to vegetables if they weren't even good for you?

A tepid, microwaved meal that also happened to be vegetarian.  I wasn't seeing a lot of upsides to that, I've gotta say.

She promised it would be great, and that someday she would have us try one.  We acquiesced, figuring that "someday" was a nebulous enough term that we might not ever actually have to eat one of these vegetarian microwaved meals.

And thus time wore on.  At some point, I had discovered that you could access a schedule for what the cafeteria would be cooking every night.  I made sure to go when I knew they'd be having a dish I really liked.  Like I said, there weren't many that I liked, but there were two "specials" that were my favorites.

The first one was chicken nuggets.  Now, I know that sounds pretty lame, but what can I say, I'm a fat guy and I love chicken nuggets.  I remember they'd serve them in those little red baskets from the "grill" area of the cafeteria (the one that usually had cheeseburgers, grilled cheese and french fries).  May god strike me down if I am lying when I say that I consumed roughly 5,000 chicken nuggets on any night when they were serving them.  Okay, god's probably gonna strike me down in the form of grotesque obesity even if that statement is true, but anyway.

The other dish I liked was a little more inspired.  It was buffalo chicken pizza.  This is something that actually seemed pretty unique, especially when most of their pizzas there sucked.  It was a pizza with big, hearty chunks of chicken all over it, drenched in buffalo chicken sauce.  Okay, so maybe it wasn't that inspired, but it was tasty and another thing I'd load up on if they were serving it.

So, as it just so happens, one particular week, I happened to peek at the schedule, and I could not believe my eyes when I saw what was slated for Friday night dinner.  I almost wept tears of pure joy as I saw the combination: "Chicken Nuggets/Buffalo Chicken Pizza."

...No words... They--they should have sent a poet...

It was beautiful.  Most college freshmen probably looked forward to going out and getting wasted, laid, or some combination thereof on a Friday night.  I looked forward to chicken nuggets and pizza.  Does it surprise anyone that I am overweight?

I looked forward to Friday all week.  Finally, Friday afternoon.  Just a few more hours.  As I sat in my dorm room it was almost as if I could smell the salivation-inducing odors emanating from the kitchens in the cafeteria.  That's when the worst thing happened.

A message popped up on my computer screen.  It read something like this:

Iris: Hey!  I bought you guys those vegetarian dinners I talked about!  Let's have them tonight, okay?

Fuck.  This could not be happening.  I immediately consulted with John about what to do.  While I doubt he was anywhere nearly as passionate about the shitty, greasy cafeteria food as I was, he wasn't too excited at the prospect of having to forego eating real food in order to try these meals that Iris had purchased for us.

There was some reason that this suffering couldn't be delayed.  I think maybe the meals were only good for a certain amount of time, or she was going home for the weekend, or something like that.  Either way, dinner had to be that night, and she wasn't letting us escape easily.

Time ticked on and the day rolled into night, and she had cajoled us into at least saying we were coming to eat.  Neither of us had the heart to tell her straight up that we truly did not want to eat the food, but the situation was getting increasingly dire.  I remember riding the elevator in our building up to the tenth floor, where she lived.

That was a little weird in itself, since in our building the floors were divided by gender, and thus she lived on an all-girl's floor.  It felt a little bit like I was in a place I shouldn't be, like I was just waiting for the RA to pop out from behind a corner and scream, "MEN?!  ON MY FLOOR?!!!" and then throw us down the garbage chute or something.

Well, actually, our dorm buildings didn't have corners, but she sure as hell would have popped out from somewhere.

John and I ended up in Iris' room, where the meals were already spinning in the microwave.  We pleaded with her, "Iris, you don't understand, these are the best dishes the cafeteria serves, if we don't go to dinner tonight we miss out."  She was a nice girl, but she was also showing a rather unrelenting side.

She seemed confused, like it truly baffled her that we didn't want to eat these delicious vegetarian microwaved meals.  "I picked out each meal for you guys individually," she said.  She showed us the boxes, and I don't know exactly how John felt, but I knew she wasn't winning me over.  Mine was like some mushroom thing, that's all I remember.  Mushrooms.  I didn't really like mushrooms at all back then, and even now, I wouldn't really make a meal of them.

I remember she started to get just a tiny bit annoyed at our reluctance to eat them.  Truth be told, I don't know why we didn't think to eat them and then still go to dinner afterwards.  I guess there would have been less room for the delicious nuggets and pizza if our stomachs were all crammed up with stupid vegetarian food.

Honestly, even if it wasn't chicken nugget and buffalo chicken pizza night, the meals didn't look appealing at all.  I've since gotten over most of my food squeamishness, but at that time I was still way more on the picky end of things, and I wasn't even sure if I could eat it.

Eventually, I guess my hunger pains got the best of me.  I think it was when she started to show a bit of anger at us for not wanting to eat it.  I responded in kind.  I yelled, quite loudly, "IRIS!  IT'S FUCKING CHICKEN NUGGETS AND BUFFALO CHICKEN PIZZA NIGHT!  IT'S THE BEST FOOD, AND I'M NOT GOING TO MISS IT FOR THIS VEGETARIAN BULLSHIT!" Or something along those lines.

I was joking--well, maybe not completely--but I still did raise my voice and I actually remember thinking, "oh no, I'm on the girl's floor, they're gonna think there's some assault going on here or something."  I think she got the point though.

And so John and I left.  We didn't eat the food.  I'm not sure if she made us take them with us, so that we could eat them later, or if we just left her with all those crappy vegetarian meals to deal with herself.  I felt bad, especially about the yelling, even if it was in jest.  But you can only humor a person so far.  There's a difference between someone being nice and someone hoisting their niceness onto you where it becomes contrary to what you actually want to do.

We went to the cafeteria.  The food was glorious.  I regret nothing.

[thememoryhole]

oil change.

The first proper high school era post.  It had to happen sometime.  I had even less adventures that involved other people in high school than the few I did in college, so expect these to be relevant to nobody but me.  Anyway, here goes.

May of 2004.  Senior year.  Things were getting closed to being wrapped up.  By now, colleges had been chosen and life plans were finally starting to fall into order.  High school was at the very brink of tipping off into the past for us.  Just a few weeks.

But for nerds like me, the studying never could stop.  No, especially not now, because even though we had already done our SATs, our SAT IIs, and everything else, we still had our AP exams.

I guess I can't knock those AP exams.  Ultimately I got to skip a bunch of core classes at UH since I actually did get credit for them, so perhaps all that work paid off.  While suckers wasted time in English 100 or whatever, I got that shit out of the way in high school.  And the AP classes were actually some of the only decent courses offered at my high school, so I actually "got" something out of my public school education, as cheesy as that sounds.

Anyone remember Tokita always telling us about stating our "plan of attack" right after our thesis?  No?  Okay, well I'll carry on, then.

Anyway, this isn't directly about AP exams.  But that is when it happened.  Well, actually it was the day before the exam.  I think the exam was on a Tuesday, and it was Monday afternoon.  The cool thing about AP exams were that we got the day off from school, so the next day was "free," although it wasn't really since we had to take these big fat tests.

But I felt like I had a little free time that day, because at least I didn't have any homework.  I suppose I could have studied, but with most of the subjects, well, wait, was it English Literature that year? Or Composition? Pretty sure it was English Literature, US History, and Calculus senior year, but I could be wrong since we did some junior year as well.  But anyway, I didn't feel like there was a lot to study.  For English and History, it was all about writing essays for the most part, you could memorize "facts" for some things but in the end I never was one to cram like that.

My car needed an oil change.  I always tried to keep up with that.  Hey, I was a teenager in high school and I had a car.  As surprising as it may seem, I really appreciated that fact.  Since I never really had a job in high school, and I always spent what little money I came across on stupid stuff, I probably would have never saved up for a car on my own.  It had been given to me by my grandma, and so I tried to take care of it.

I didn't know jack shit about cars, and in fact I still don't.  But somehow the importance of changing your oil got into my head and I tried to be really diligent about it.  I don't know why I never paid the $30 or whatever it was to get Jiffy Lube to do it, but I did it by myself.

Again, I know nothing about cars and I'm not very good with machines in general.  I'm clumsy and I've broken more things than I've fixed.  So why did I ever even start changing my own oil?  But hey, you know what, I actually had done it two or three times by myself just fine.  It was kind of cool in a manly way, even though I think it was my mom who actually taught me how to do it.  She was always breaking down those gender barriers.

It was cool to buy the Fram oil filter in its little orange box, and the oil I would need the day before.  To get under the car, drain out the old oil (and make a mess of everything in the process), and then change the filter.  Actually, the filter was always the hardest part, I had a special oil filter tool to help me with it just because it was in such an impossible spot on my car.

So since I had no homework, and I guess I wanted to get my mind off of the exams the next day--which did make me quite nervous--I decided to change my oil.  Even having done it before, I always consulted the manual before doing it.  Drain the old oil.  Remove old filter, install new filter.  Put in new oil.

Okay, so I did that.  Got under, put the drip plan, undid the little bolt and the black oil started coming out.  After it stopped, I got to work on that dumb filter, finally got it off, then managed to get the new one one, and finally I put some new oil in.

Everything seemed to go fine, just as it had before.  I decided to go for a quick drive just to make sure everything was okay.  I start the engine up, everything is purring fine.  The oil pressure thing seemed to be a bit higher than I was expecting, but nothing outside of safe ranges.  I just let it idle for a few minutes, no problems.  Seemed okay to go for a little drive.

I got to the top of the little hill outside my house, and at first everything seemed hunky dory.  I decided to take a cruise around the Koloa bypass road, and that's where things started to get weird.  The engine was revving really high, and then it seemed like I was losing power.  I knew it wasn't a coincidence. 

"Oh shit, I fucked up my car."  It was all I could think.

I barely made it home, it would stop, sputter, jitter, and do all kinds of weird things.  I slowly nursed the car home at like five miles an hour.  I tried to drive it up the hill again, I don't know why, and this time it wouldn't even go up.

I was already stressed because of the impending exams, but now, shit, I had fucked up the single largest and most valuable possession I had ever been responsible for.  I was freaking out.  I think I called my mom crying that I had broken my car.

Eventually, it got worked out, I think I borrowed the Intrepid (was it my Grandpa's by that point?) for the exam the next day, since I needed some way to drive myself to the KCC campus to take the exam.

I was still freaking out, thinking that I had probably destroyed my car's engine and that I no longer had a car, and it was going to cost thousands of dollars to fix.  I had looked up my problems online, and I figured it was a problem with the oil and the pistons had blown or something and it was all really fucked up.

Fortunately my grandpa let me use his car to go to school and stuff too, since by that point I was way too cool to be seen on a schoolbus.  I had basically no money, so my mom paid to have the car towed to some repair shop the day after the exam. I remember they came and put it on the back of like a flatbed truck and I remember thinking I didn't even have the money to pay for the tow, forget about the repair itself.

I think a lot of it was handled by Tony actually, and for that I'm super thankful.  Either way, it was later that day, when they called me up.  It was about my car.

"Did they find out what the problem was?" I asked.  I can't remember if I was talking to Tony or my mom, but I think it was Tony, actually.  He said, "Yeah, well, they took a look and they actually got it fixed up."  "What was wrong?"

"Well, they discovered that the car had about two times the amount of engine oil it should have, and absolutely zero transmission fluid.  So actually the cost of the repair was just the price of an oil change and a few bottles of transmission fluid.  The car's good to go."

There was a bit of laughter just barely bubbling under the words as he said them, because it was a funny situation.  I had been freaking out the whole time about thousands of dollars and a whole new engine, and in reality it was about $30, I think.  The tow did actually cost more than the repair, as I recall.

So that was it.  I had been racking my brain trying to figure out what I had done wrong, thinking maybe I put in too much oil or that the filter wasn't on properly or what.  As it turns out, I had undone the wrong valve underneath the car, and had drained the transmission fluid out instead.  Then I just added new oil to the still-present old engine oil.  Like I said, I was stressed out due to the exams, and I guess my mind was just in other places at the time.

To Toyota's credit, even after driving around a few miles on zero transmission fluid, after everything was sorted out, the car ran perfectly again.  I was able to use my car for the last few weeks of school, and thank god for that.

From that point on, I always paid for an oil change.  Forget about being a man, forget about the satisfaction of doing something yourself, I never wanted to be stressed out like that again about my car.

I always felt really stupid about it, though.

That's a lot of words for what I basically could have said as "in high school I accidentally drained my car's transmission fluid instead of the engine oil when doing an oil change and I thought my car was destroyed" but I'm in a rambling mood, I guess.

[thememoryhole]

japanese girls and tamagotchis.

I've already written about how I thought college was going to be different.  I was going to be social, be surrounded by lots of girls, et cetera.  I won't rehash it.

The last entry was about how, from the onset, my social encounters with girls were kind of strange.  Actually, I remembered something even worse last night.

Fall of 2004.  The weekend before school started, before it was time to begin my first semester at university.  Again, it was a time filled with promise.  But it was also a hectic time, for me it would be my first real experience living on my own.  It was the Thursday or Friday before the semester began--whatever day it was that on-campus housing was officially available for check-in.

My mom had taken the day off to help me move my stuff, and I remember we were catching a flight around midday.  We were already running late, which really sucks for someone like me who is paranoid about always being on time.  It was a lot of luggage, I remember we just paid the skycap to take our bags and check us in.  I had been chosen for secondary screening, but since I was a Hawaii resident, somehow the skycap was able to get me past it.  Thanks, guy.

Anyway, so we got into the security line at the Lihue airport, which was already pretty long.  Lihue typically isn't so bad, but we were behind a large Japanese tourist group that apparently was going home.

So, as we stood in line, I tended to my Tamagotchi.  Yeah, my Tamagotchi.  I was such a dork, I actually had a virtual pet.  I remember they had been re-released in Japan a few months before we graduated from high school, and Tyler was able to score us a couple of them.  Actually, I don't care what you think, Tamagotchis are still cool and I'd take care of one now if you gave me the chance.

There I was, about to enter university, dreaming of being a player, and yet I was tending to something that most children lost interest in around fifth grade or so.

But hey, it wasn't so bad, because actually the two Japanese girls who were right ahead of me in line saw it, and were apparently interested in it.  Hey, Japanese girls.  Interested in me.  Sorta.  Things were going well.

I'd studied Japanese for three years at that point, so I figured why not try and impress them a bit?  So, I said in really basic Japanese, "It's good, isn't it?" pointing to the Tamagotchi.  They laughed, I guess because I tried to speak Japanese to them, and also probably because I sounded dumb as fuck.  They just said back, in Japanese, "It's good!"

And that was it.  I was on some high, thinking, again, that this was an omen of things to come.  I'd probably be rolling in Japanese chicks in university, once I got there.  I was getting ready to live the dream, as opposed to realizing just how fucking pathetic of a situation it was.

Maybe I should have kept the Tamagotchi around.  I remember eventually it died and then my friend Iris reset it and took care of it, I think she even made me "babysit" it once while she went somewhere one weekend.  So it was kind of a girl magnet.  Kind of.

Where's my Tamagotchi?

[thememoryhole]

awkward meal number 1.

Throughout my entire life, especially my college career, pretty much every social event is punctuated by something awkward, especially meals.  Maybe it's just because I'm a fat bastard, but I know despite usually being an inherently social event, I always feel like I am going to mess up somehow while eating--get food all over the place, spit food in other people's faces, and fart.

But that's just every meal for me.  Sometimes there are things that make them especially awkward.  For me, the first time in college came literally on the first day of classes of my first semester in university.  So that dates this story to lunchtime on a Monday in the Fall of 2004.

Awkward factor #1: I was meeting a girl from the internet.

Perhaps a little backstory is in order.  By now, it should be clear to anyone that knows me that I don't have any aversion to meeting strangers from the internet, since I clearly lack the skills to meet people in any other way.  I'm a huge nerd.  And arguably, I was an even bigger nerd back in the high school days.  Such a nerd, in fact, that I belonged to a mailing list whose subject was the video game Final Fantasy.  To make things worse, occasionally groups of us from this Final Fantasy Mailing List would meet up at Anime Expos, hang out, and share hotel rooms.  So I had met a bunch of people from the internet, and even shared sleeping quarters with them, since I was like fourteen.

I can't believe I just wrote those last couple of sentences, and that they're completely true and non-fictional.  This is the stuff of my nightmares, the fact that those statements are actually true.

Anyway, on this Final Fantasy Mailing List, there was a girl my age who was also from Hawaii.  And surprise, surprise, she was entering UH at the same time I was.  I had never seen her before or even spoken to her outside of emails and IM conversations, but for some reason we decided that we should totally hang out once school started.  I'm not sure why.  I guess we had talked to each other on AIM for two years, and now we'd be going to the same school at the same time, so it just made sense.

It was stupid for me.  I'm such an antisocial person, and already, college was this new overwhelming thing, it was crazy--living in a dorm, going to classes at random times, et cetera.  It was the first day, and here I was planning to put myself into a stressful (to me--I know, I'm insane) situation of meeting a new person whom I had talked to online a bunch.

Usually I will just find a way to weasel out of any situation I'm uncomfortable with (i.e. most situations) but maybe my whole avoidance system was overloaded by the newness of university life, or maybe I really thought that college was just going to be meeting new people 24/7, so I thought I'd have to deal with it anyway.

I remember her calling me a bit before noon, saying she was on her way down to the dorm cafeteria.  I had big knots in my stomach.  I should say it had nothing to do with it being a girl or anything, it was mostly like "oh man I dunno what this person is gonna be like, and I've spoken to them for a while and what if I'm really different in person and they hate me, this is so weird why am I even doing this?"

Okay, a small part of it probably had to do with my lunch partner being a girl.  But I wasn't thinking of this as a date or something that might even lead to that, she was just a random internet friend that I now happened to go to school with.

But enter awkward factor #2: Chino.

Chino is a really good guy.  He'd been one of my closest friends in high school since we had a lot of the same classes, and he almost always was positive and upbeat.  Chino is still a good friend of mine, so I really hope he doesn't take this the wrong way.

But for Chino, especially at this time, stuff was always about "the chicks."  I think he really had crazy expectations for college, when we were going in, that our lives were gonna go crazy and we were gonna be banging chicks left and right and there'd be girls everywhere.

So when I told him about meeting A GIRL for lunch, on the very first day of school, he made it out like this girl was probably going to be my first college conquest.  He was making it sound like I had "picked up" this girl and it was totally a date, or more.  Of course, having him talk like this just made it more awkward for me.  What did I know?  Was he right?  Should I be treating this as something more?

Of course not.  But when you're an awkward teenager in a really weird situation, you can quite easily doubt yourself, especially when someone as confident and powerful as Chino is interjecting alternate suggestions in your ear the whole time.

Fuck, I was way more nervous now.

I met her, for the first time in real life (as the saying goes), outside my dorm.  Meeting people from the internet, it can be a really weird thing.  I don't think humans are quite fully adapted to it yet, to have simultaneously this background and friendship and at the same time be overwhelmed by this feeling of "I don't know this person."

This one wasn't any weirder than any other, but it wasn't any smoother, either.  I remember going to the cafe, echoes of Chino's comments started to ring in my ears.  I had a meal plan, since I lived in the dorms, but she didn't.  She started to pay, and I was thinking nervous thoughts to myself, "Shit, is this a date? Should I be paying?!"

At that time, I was definitely my fattest, and with a meal plan to the all you can eat dorm cafeteria, well, let's just say typically I was ingesting a lot of food at any given meal.  I remember, though, I was so nervous, I just followed her lead.  She got one slice of pizza.  So I got one slice of pizza.  That's all I ate for that entire meal.

Me?  At the dorm cafe, eating just one slice of pizza?  You now have proof that I was an awkward, nervous wreck during that meal.

We sat down, and the conversation proceeded.  Like I said, it's weird.  We had chatted so much in the past on computers, but now in person, it just turned to the typical "I just met you" smalltalk.  "So, how was your first class today?  Are you liking school here so far?"  That kind of thing.

The conversation and the conservative eating of just one slice of pizza, slowly (to not look like a fat pig, of course), was awkward enough.  But then Chino made a reappearance.

I'm not sure if he was just there to keep tabs on how my lunch was going or if it was just a coincidence, but I think it was a little of both.  He was perfectly seated behind her so that I could see him just fine, but she would have no idea.  And the whole time, whenever I made eye contact with him, he was giving me the biggest shit-eating grin.

At one point, during a moment of prolonged eye contact, he nodded at the girl and seriously gave me a huge thumbs up, as if to say, "Yeah, she's hot dude, way to go."  It was really creepy, especially since obviously that was not where this meal was headed at all.

That's about it.  The meal ended uneventfully, she went back to class and I went back to my room.  As far as I can recall, I never actually hung out with her socially again, although we definitely bumped into each other a few times and we were still friendly.

It wasn't a terribly bad meal, or anything special in terms of awkwardness.  I just find it amazing that, going into my college career, I stumbled (fell?) out the gate with a pretty awkward encounter, no wonder my entire career would be cursed.  I didn't even get one good, non-weird lunch under my belt before shit started to go all strange.

But really, the one thing I'll never forget about that lunch was Chino's damn smile and thumbs up.  That's really what all these words were for.

[thememoryhole]

"we've got a runner."

Spring '07.  I can't remember the title of the class, but it was some Political Science class that I think we were required to take.  Patterson, John, and I were all in the same class together, which was always a recipe for disaster, especially if Freaks and Monsters was any indication.

Well, Patterson alone was always a recipe for disaster, he made a course on Indian religions rather interesting as well, but that's neither here nor there.

This class was taught by a graduate student who shall remain nameless, as I wouldn't want to besmirch her good name, but yeah, it was a pretty lame class.  She was as liberal as they come, especially in her teaching style, she was trying totally "new and hip" ways of teaching that actually came across as pretty lame almost all of the time.

I mean, you can't knock her for trying, but it was cringeworthy at times. By "at times", I mean "basically all of the time." Like, you'd walk into class and she'd be pounding Rage Against the Machine on her Macbook because it's music that "really makes you think about stuff" or something.

There were lots of things that happened in that class, but here perhaps is our crowning achievement.

It was a class where attendance wasn't counted everyday, but somedays she would pass around a paper to sign into or have an activity and you would get graded on whether you participated.

One such activity was one of those aforementioned cringeworthy lame things.  I remember we had to get into groups to roleplay various people/groups.  Like, one person was supposed to be the UN, another was a businessman, another was a poor farmer in South America, et cetera.  It was pretty goofy for college students to do, something I couldn't really get into, anyway, and I think my two cohorts were feeling the same way.

I remember feeling a little bit bad because we needed four people in a group, and the three of us had paired up with some random girl who apparently didn't know anyone in the class.  We were sitting in a little circle of desks, looking over the papers the teacher had handed us, instructing us how the roleplay was supposed to go down.

The three of us noticed the teacher had temporarily stepped out while we were working in our groups, presumably to go to the bathroom or something.  We looked at each other.  We had already signed in for the day.

"I'm thinking we should bail," one of us said.  We mulled it over.  She would notice we were gone, but this activity was incredibly lame.  Like I said, I felt bad for that girl because she was like, "you guys are bailing?"  I remember her actually saying "bailing" like it was a foreign word to her or something.

We kicked it around a bit longer, but ultimately, yes, we were bailing.  Our groupmate got up and tried to merge into another group, and we packed our bags.  We walked out of the classroom, into the hallway, talking shit about how stupid of an activity it is.  "Uhh, Durr, I'm the UN!" probably was uttered at some very mature point.

But the maturity level was only beginning to show.  The building had a long hallway with doors on either end, and you had to go out those doors into an outdoor area where the stairs were.  We opened the door, goofing off and laughing, and boom, who was there on the other side?

Our teacher.  She was like looking at signs posted on the bulletin board, which obviously was a real efficient use of her teaching time.  But I digress.  She turned and looked at us, standing probably five feet away.

Now, here I was just complaining that such a silly roleplay activity wasn't really suited to college-aged kids.  But how did these college-aged kids react to being caught red-handed in the act of ditching class?

We ran.

We just took off, bolting towards the stairs.  We might have even said something like "oh shit" right before the three of us took flight.  I remember thinking and/or saying, "this is so fucking stupid!", self-conscious of the act but taking part in it all the same.  When we got to the first floor, we were laughing hard and asking ourselves if we really just ran away from our teacher as if we were in grade school.

She never said anything directly about it in class.  She probably wasn't even surprised that we were ditching class, since we were the resident shitheads in that class anyway, but even I still can't believe how we reacted.  Did we think she was going to turn us into the truancy cops or something?

The best part of that class was our final reports.  She sent them over email, so I still have mine.  All three of us had a very similar line, basically word for word, at the end of our report, with only the grade values changed.  Here is what it said:

"I would have given you an [one grade higher than what we got] for the consistency and quality of your work; however, your in-class 'negative' participation was, quite honestly, a distraction and annoyance."

[thememoryhole]

self-directed learning.

This was Spring '05.  Second semester of college, I distinctly remember sitting around my single dorm in Ilima reading the book.  Anyway...

UH had some weird classes, I forget the special name they gave them, but basically it was a "teach yourself" kind of deal.  They were all 100-level courses that I guess were basic requirement/core classes, and rather than pay professors to actually teach things that most students weren't going to give two shits about, they worked out this newfangled system to let students do it themselves.

One of these classes was Psychology 100.  It was pretty "advanced", you had to buy a brand new, expensive book that contained a code.  You registered this code with an account you created on this website.  The website contained quizzes for each chapter.  The quizzes were 10-questions, multiple-choice.

Basically, to pass the course, you had to pass a certain amount of these quizzes before the semester was up.  You could do it at your own pace, if you were a super genius you could pretty much go jam it all out in like one week if you wanted to, or leave it all until the end like most people probably did.

I can't remember a lot of the specifics on how it worked, but it was all set up so you couldn't easily game the system.  Like, I think you had to get 9 out of 10 to pass, and the questions weren't easy, they were very specific random things about the chapter so that in theory you'd have to really read it and study it.  If you failed, you couldn't just retake the test, it was a progressive thing.  Like, the first time you failed, you had to wait two hours to retake it, then if you failed it the second time, the wait time until the third increased to one day, and then on the 4th or subsequent attempts you had to talk to someone who worked in the lab, i.e. to prevent people from just sitting there and taking it day after day until the same questions would eventually pop up and they could pass it.

Oh, and yeah, that was another thing, you had to go to a special computer lab.  You couldn't just do it at home.  I remember the pain in the ass of not passing a test and yet wanting to just pass it to get that information out of my head, and having to walk all the way back up to campus to that dumb lab.  The staff at the lab would check your ID I guess so you couldn't just send some smart person (or someone who already took it) in to take your test, although they never actually verified that you signed into your account so I suppose as long as you and your ringer were both registered at the same time, taking another person's test was possible.

They were also there to deter and catch cheaters, which, from what I heard was actually quite common, and commonly retarded (like people trying to sneak open the book in their backpack or something).  The greatest thing about it was, even though it was a dumbass 100-level course, they automatically referred anyone caught cheating to the dean, which pretty much meant expulsion.  Imagine telling your parents you got caught cheating on a dumb 10-question multiple choice exam for PSY-100 and you were now kicked out of UH after one semester or something.

There were a bunch of other weird rules.  Like, if you aced a quiz (10/10), you got a bonus point that could then be later applied to another quiz where you got 8/10 to still pass.  That was pretty sweet, because as I recall, getting 8 out of 10 seemed to be a hell of a lot easier than 9.  There were a few times throughout the semester where they gave bonus points for participating in some PSY department research project or something, too.

Finally, I guess to try and legitimize the "class" aspect of it, there was this little discussion group that was once a week for fifty minutes.  It was a total joke, like 10 students, "taught" by a senior majoring in psychology, and you just talked about some random stuff in the book since there was no way to gauge where everyone actually was in the course at any given point in time.  Plus, nothing about those discussion classes counted aside from showing up.  You got there, signed in on a sheet of paper, and just said nothing for an hour, and that was it.

I remember that was actually a problem.  Aimee and Alex were in the same class as John and I, and one time Aimee came without Alex.  She signed in for him, though, and no one was volunteering to speak, so our "teacher" went through the sign in sheet to call on someone to answer.  Of course, the first name she called was Alex.  She got really pissed and went on this whole little diatribe about not signing in people who didn't actually come.

I don't remember exactly how the grading all worked out, but John and I figured out that if we attended all of the discussions up to spring break, and finished all of the chapter quizzes, that would be enough to give us an A for the course and we could just completely stop going.  So it was our goal to completely finish it by spring break, and as I recall, we did so and it ruled.  Indeed, we totally stopped going and it was suddenly like having one less class.

As it turned out, John went on to work in the lab next year and witnessed people cheating and whatnot--I'm sure he has a bunch of good stories from that.  That was the end of my experience with these "teach yourself"-type classes, and while no doubt I didn't learn very much at all, the same could be said for most of the 100-level classes I took only to fulfill requirements, and at least this one I could just power through and get it done easily and quickly.

I don't really have a point, it was just a thing from college.  Sorry.

[thememoryhole]

sun chips aren't the only sun-powered chips.

Another random moment from that Freaks and Monsters class in Spring 2006. One day, the professor comes in, and for some reason she begins talking about Fritos. Like, the corn chips. I'm not sure exactly what she was getting at, I believe she just wanted to talk about how symbolism pervades everything around us and can be used to manipulate our perception of things. Either way, the point she was getting at was something like, "Look at the package. The font they use on the front, the colors, and the advertising they use. Where are we made to believe Fritos come from?" There was this retarded girl in the class, retarded in the pejorative sense but sometimes I really think she danced a fine line and strayed into the the "no really, she's got a mental problem" sense occasionally. This girl loved to raise her hand, offer inane opinions and retarded insight. I actually think the professor was asking the question rhetorically, but alas, this girl just shouts out in a moment of pure-"I KNOW THE ANSWER, PROFESSOR!" ecstasy: "THE SUN!!!" Silence. "Well, uh, no. Maybe, the sun. But more specifically, I was talking about Mexico. They want us to associate Fritos with Mexico."

[thememoryhole]

drunk man on the can.

John, your latest tweet reminded me of this little incident.  I wonder if you remember it.

It was senior year.  Probably Spring 2008, although theoretically it could have been Fall '08.  Definitely living in Wainani.  I want to say it was a Tuesday night.  It wasn't entirely late, like maybe seven or eight at night when this happened.  John had been out drinking somewhere, and came back, and proceeded to make friends with and hug the toilet when he came back.

I don't drink, but I'm fine with people that do and I guess sometimes you just drink too much, you know?  I'm all for letting an intoxicated person do what they have to do with the toilet--I'd much rather it be there than all over the living room carpet or something like that.

The problem was... he stayed in there.  For a good while.  For some time there was the lovely sound of spewing, but after a while, nothingness.

Being the responsible college students that we were, Andy, Evan, and I did pretty much nothing.  Actually, we got irritated, because damn man, there's only one bathroom in the apartment.  But we were pretty much also passive aggressive and lazy so we didn't do much.

In truth, I had to take a leak, but I also had to buy something at Walmart.  I remember distinctly, in fact, I had to buy a rechargeable battery for my Xbox 360 controller.  So I headed out to Walmart.  I remember getting a text from Andy at some point while I was on my Walmart trip that was something to the effect of "He's still in there."

Well, when I finally got back from the battery trip, he was still in there.  I don't want to sound like a hero, but goddamn at least I finally took some action.  That action was to walk up to the door:

"John?  What the fuck man? Are you alive?"  No response.  The door was unlocked.  With some slight trepidation and the other roommates looking on, I turned the knob and pushed the door open, only to have it stop quickly.

It was banging against John, who was kneeling at the base of the toilet, apparently passed out.  The bathroom was small, so it was impossible to open the door more than like an inch or two before it hit John.  If it was bigger, perhaps we could have like, moved him or something.

Instead, doing the responsible thing, I proceeded to spend like a minute just whacking the door against him with increasing intensity.  "Get up, man!"  No response.  We all looked at each other, probably with two concerns: 1) When will we be able to freely shit and piss in our apartment? and 2) What the hell do we do about it if he's dead?

Needless to say, it must have been a delayed response, as all responses tend to be when one is drunk, but the door jolting must have worked.  A few minutes later he mysteriously emerged from the bathroom, walked to his bed, and collapsed.  The next day I believe he was fine.

[thememoryhole]

freaks, monsters, and raelians.

Spring 2006.  John, Patterson, and I took "Freaks and Monsters," a general LLEA class that was about, well, uh, what people have called odd, strange, etc.  There are about a million things that could be said about this class, but here's one for today.

The whole vibe of the class was that it was really wrong to make fun of "the other."  That is, the name "Freaks and Monsters" was somewhat tongue-in-cheek.  As the professor pointed out on the first day, she was actually all about teaching tolerance.  We were learning that those who had been castigated as freaks and whatnot did not deserve such a treatment, and at the very least we should all respect each other as fellow humanoids, even if they were conjoined at the head or were pinheads...er, I mean, microcephalics.  Yeah, I still remember that.  So the professor did impart something worthwhile to me.  In retrospect, it really wasn't a terrible class, but it wasn't great either. It was honestly interesting subject matter, but it probably could have been better, but eh, I suppose the professor was trying and it was a 200-level lecture class, so it's not going to be the best ever.

Actually, that's neither here nor there, but that's enough of a disclaimer of me not actually out to hate on the class or the professor.  That being said, that class had its moments:

Oftentimes in class I was gagging on the amount of "tolerance" that was crammed down our throats, and then suddenly one day there was a clear break.  I am almost certain it was the last day before Spring Break, because I remember thinking that I would soon be free, only having to tolerate one more period of tolerance.

The topic was cloning.  At one point the professor starts talking about the Raelians, which for those of you who don't know, is some small UFO-cult that claimed that they had already successfully cloned a human.

The class had covered way "kookier" things than Raelism, but for some reason this small UFO cult that claimed they had cloned a human was the professor's breaking point.  She started cracking a ton of jokes about how crazy they were.  I mean really, she spent at least a good twenty to thirty minutes surfing around their website, reading every claim they made on the site out loud, and mocking them.  It was actually rather vitriolic.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm no Raelian apologist.  Nor do I really have any problem with making fun of them.  I agree, they're pretty much crazy and definitely a weird cult, but on the grand scheme of things I don't know if they're actually harmful or anything.  God/Rael knows I'm no expert on Raelian practices and beliefs, although I guess if I remembered that day in class more clearly I might have been, since she did go into them in detail.

Anyhow, so it's not like I was really offended or anything.  But I definitely noticed it was a clear break from her "love everyone" mentality, and that makes it stick out in my mind for some reason.  I wonder if someone in her family was abducted by Raelians or something.

Then we talked about Alcor, the company that has Ted Williams' body on ice, and well, then I went and ate lunch.