It seems my roommate also ran into the illustrious D., and even had dinner with her tonight. Apparently my characterization of her earlier was spot-on. As my roommate writes,

"Apparently she and I run into the same people: D. (as far as I actually paid attention to her) told me all about type-setting and how her famous toy-making highschool teacher should be more famous than he is. Type and fonts are interesting, and she appears to know what she's talking about--er, well, if you discount her calling Courier a sans-serif font. On the other hand, if she'd told one more story about her teacher, I think I should have left at a run..."

D. also started off talking to me by mentioning fonts, which is part of what got me intrigued initially. The continual loud cursing and talking about things which she obviously knew nothing about, though, threw me a bit...but on this we all seem to agree.

Well, this afternoon was productive. I learned about fire-breathing, the proper kind of grain alcohol to use for such pursuits (Graves), which kind of pipe tobacco smells/tastes the best (black Cavendish, though D., in her JAP way, kept querying, "But don't you like the premium blends you can get at HSB Tobacconist on the Loop? I think those are really the best..."), how to corner the high-school marijuana market, that the speed limit in Rationania is 5 mph, and that crackers are its staple delicacy.

I spent the afternoon, you see, sitting in the Quad next to cardboard signs propped and duct-taped against a wooden pallet bearing the legends "Get the U.S. Out of Columbia, Missouri!" and "Welcome to RATIONANIA, Population IIII II" (the talley totaled about six by the time I left at 4 p.m.). A petition was also taped to the pallet, which I signed, and various pieces of pallet were torn off to mark the boundaries of our little country, Rationania (so-called because we're, uh, "rational"). We had a great sense of camaraderie in that 6-foot Absurdist-sponsored square, which I and several others resided in throughout the afternoon (it's being occupied 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day, all week long), as non-Absurdists and Absurdists alike congregated to ask the meaning of our protest, why we were there, and trade B.S. Apparently we're getting a section of chicken-wire fence tomorrow, brought by Zac, the founder of Rationania.

The whole thing reminds me of The Strawberry Statement, really. I simply came up with a couple good rationalizations and started telling them to people. They were absurd, yet still sounded reasonable. "Think," I'd say, "Just think of how many U.S. citizens currently reside in Columbia, Missouri, right now. Almost the entire population of that city consists of American citizens. It's a tragesty! [sic] What about everyone else? This is an insidious, creeping form of oppression to true Columbian citizens. We need to put a stop to it right now." I told others that we were really protesting protests in general. One protester decided that tomorrow the group should find some pretense to get the dining workers to turn down our petition for jobs, then picket in front of Holmes Lounge with signs, noting what a tragesty it is that Rationanian workers are being denied jobs.

I learned that much of the point of this is to make fun of SSDP, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, of which several organizers are members—I signed one of their petitions earlier in the year, the one about eliminating the "prior drug convictions" checkbox on the FAFSA. That group has apparently been protesting U.S. occupation of Colombia—the country, not the city.

I sat around talking to Brian and Kate about psychology classes, mocking vapid psych majors, telling various people what our mission was, and convincing a few people to stop and sit in our square for awhile. We convinced others only of the banality of our non-cause. One, an Arabic student (or perhaps the other Arabic student) left his notebook behind. Lily left a newspaper behind. Kate left her Abnormal Psychology book behind to weigh down the bottom of the pallet. Another protester talked about the circus society she's starting here at the university and smoked her pipe. Brian smoked. Another protester read her gay and lesbian theory book. Brian smoked some more. Ray eventually settled down and read for his Child Development course. The square started to look rather lived-in.

D. sighed melodramatically, chain-smoked, and talked about being a privileged lower New York state JAP art student who needs desperately to be stimulated by her classes. (Another protester said that she, too, was privileged, but not the New York kind of privileged. She's from Chicago.) D. talked on, mentioning her bias towards male professors, whom she claims are genetically more inclined towards wittiness and good teaching skills. She told me she was testing my personality, giving me a scenario in which a boyfriend decided to break up with me and did it in a very grammatically incorrect manner. Which, she asked, would I be more bothered by: getting dumped, or having to hear the grammatical error? I said both.

She plunked herself down and sighed that she didn't like the people here, who she says are altogether too "fake-nice." "Like psych majors!" I chimed in. She wasn't really listening. She says that as a New Yorker, she understands not being nice, and that she doesn't really need niceness, but she'd at least like them to be honest about it, or something to that effect. She says she may either transfer or drop out if she doesn't find something to be interested in here, and that the art school is holding her back. She's decided the Absurdists may be her saving grace. We're apparently doing our job, though frankly D. seems like one of those art students who do it to be "trendy" and "rebel" while wearing their chunky black-and-pink Saucony sneakers.

I learned that the fire-breather uses a welding rod to hold the fire, like a torch, and that while no one really seems to know what the welding rod was originally for, it works just dandy for fire-breathing. Apparently her shtick is belly-dancing while breathing fire, plus accordion-playing. She and I traded stories about Chicago's El, mine simply appropriated from the collection of stories my mother told Jie at dinner the other night, hers from actual experience. She said she scares people away on the train by pretending to be crazy and rocking back and forth mumbling, though it doesn't always work.

I grinned at people and talked about random things. I had fun. When I left, Ray the PNP major grinned back at me. Perhaps he'll miss me, not that we really talked about much of anything. No matter—I'll be back there tomorrow. On the shuttle ride back home, I got in a random conversation with the guy who's always at the library when I go to pick up my books from the hold shelf. I told him about the cause, and he asked me what I thought about the actual war. I told him I wasn't sure what to think.

The lost hour is over.

As I speak, I am posting from the "lost hour." Time has stopped and ceased to matter for this one hour, as right now it is about 1 a.m. here in the central time zone, and in an hour it will be...1 a.m.

A question: are sukkahs supposed to be left up until they disintegrate? The sukkahs on campus have both fallen into disrepair after Sukkot, and it really makes me wonder why they're even still up. If they're not supposed to be left to disintegrate, what are they waiting for? Wouldn't leaving something ceremonial like that up to be destroyed by the forces of nature be disrespectful? Or is this some faction keeping themselves visible?

If it's actually unnecessary, leaving those up is about as pointless as the university's practice of watering the grass on the swamp until the field floods due to the campus' bad drainage, not replacing trees snapped off by drunk people, taking down the swing in the Quad due to possible "liability" and then refusing to tell anyone the real reason, endangering my health by giving me cold pasta when it should be hot, listening to the newspaper editorial board's antagonistic jabs at the administration regarding the alcohol policy, calling oneself "X-treme," chanting neofeminist slogans about rape until one's voice cracks, taping up T-shirts with fake messages in little kids' handwriting on them about how they hate their fake relatives who sexually abused them, not posting midterm grades for upperclassmen, and all the other stupid things that happen around here...

In other news, though, thrift store serendipity struck again, and I found Richard Bach's book A Gift of Wings on the first shelf of books I looked on at the thrift store earlier. I requested that book from MOBIUS just yesterday. These things happen.

I also got a copy of The Point's Alternative Summer compilation from 1996, which is like getting back a little piece of that summer when I first discovered KPNT et al. among St. Louis radio. I just want to drink this in and go back there somehow. Finding the music then was like a revelation, and now I'm feeling it all over again, however corny I know it must be for you all to hear me say it.

Here's a question: who selects our homecoming court here at the university? A photo on the newspaper's front page shows one member of the mystery cult, I mean, court, but otherwise, there's no further information, and even we reporters are stumped. Where is this information publicized? Neither I nor anyone else I know heard anything regarding that...not that I'd know any given student who might choose to run for the court well enough to make an educated decision, as it'd primarily be a Greek event, I'm guessing, but nonetheless, it'd be nice to know where they come by these things.

I really shouldn't read the news. I picked up The New York Times that was sitting on my table at lunch, and the stuff they have in there makes me think more and more that the world is ending, or at least that American society "as we know it" really doesn't exist. Things seem to be going downhill fast. A fashion columnist called the latest trends towards '50s-inspired cuts, floral/gold fabrics, and an emphasis on hip-flattering designs for the spring season "dangerously regressive," snarkily adding, "Note to self: make a donation to the National Organization for Women." Right, as if we're headed towards certain doom in the whirlpool of fascism and the only way out is to pull, pull for the shores of gender feminism. Everyone knows, of course, that emaciated, heroin-chic models are really feminists (faminists?), too, and they're an essential part of our American culture—all you big-hipped women out there, you're McCarthyists. Yeah, I'm sure those models are very progressive in their views, pulling for gender equality and all that as they pull another drag on their cigarettes. While the columnist probably just meant her comments to be witty, they belie an underlying bias that's really hard to stomach.

Further, a front-page story about textbooks noted the spectacle that the more conscientious among us have been decrying for years, namely the exhorbitant prices American college students are forced to pay for textbooks. You know those $100-plus psychology, engineering, chemistry, economics, and biology books? Yeah, kids overseas can get those babies for around $50 a pop. Can you say monopoly? Did you know that essentially only three major companies control the U.S. textbook industry? Yeah, that's the state of things. It's too bad the article didn't address the other conspiracy of the U.S. textbook industry, though, namely the fact that so much of the textbook review and revision process is faulty, fundamentally flawed. The world is ending, one textbook at a time.

Further, another couple of articles discussed John Muhammad's decision to represent himself in the D.C. sniper murder trial, with one commentary masquerading as an article sharing equal space with a more objective account of the subject. Several experts essentially said that it's suicide these days to attempt to represent oneself in court, as the issues involved are "too complex" for the layman to handle. What kind of country is this? I understand that there are probably too many laws to handle out there (yet another flaw of our doomed empire), and the complicated shifting about of legal precedents, etc., is tricky, especially if one doesn't have formal legal training. That said, the jury is still composed of people. All these complicated arguments devised by lawyers to intimidate the hell out of the judge and opposing counsel mean jack shit to the jury, which, if composed of ordinary American citizens, will see it for the chicanery and obfuscation that it is. In Muhammad's case, his lawyers didn't give a shit about representing what he wanted, about pleading for what he wanted, regardless of whether it was true or not, they had an agenda, deciding that they were going to simply try to get him life in prison as opposed to the death penalty. Some help they were. If hired lawyers won't do what their client asks, what recourse does one have?

In any case...I simply shouldn't read the news.

The upshot of all this, though, is that most people here don't really read the news all that often, and a lot of times, like when you're walking down the street admiring the freshly cut grass and catching the scent of leaves in the air, everything seems fine. You look at the sidewalk, and it's solid, it's not falling apart all that much yet, and even if the world ends or the U.S. empire crumbles, that sidewalk will probably still be there for quite some time. The only major annoyance would be people crowing about the fall of the empire, but they'd shut up and die of smallpox soon enough.

I just had what I think may be a great idea for a psych study, albeit with some tweaking. Here's the deal: you get students in the lab, measure personality and satisfaction with their university social experiences on various scales for error checking, plus get self-report data through a questionnaire of some sort. Then, somehow, either through self-report or through university information—although getting one's hands on that information might be difficult due to privacy concerns—find out where each given student lives currently, where they lived their freshman year, and then, whether by asking the students or by looking at schematics of dorms, find out where each given room lies within its respective residence hall or apartment, then within the larger sphere of university and off-campus housing. The university community could be assigned a center, or several centers, with proximity to each center assigned a certain value or range of values.

Once numbers are assigned, statistical analysis could be done to show whether certain areas or residence halls show a bias or predisposition towards unhappiness or satisfaction, etc. Possible confounding factors might include specific events that happen within each area, who lives around each given student, academic conflicts, communication between students regarding the experiment, inaccuracies from self-report measures, problems getting data on student residences, and the fact that the students surveyed would be mainly from the psychology-major subject pool. The last of those could be gotten around possibly by bringing the measures to students in their dorm rooms and apartments, or making the test available online, thereby ensuring a larger sample size and a less skewed mix of respondents, although then the control over the environment in which students are tested would be lost, hence skewing the students' answers.

There are problems with this, to be certain, but do you see what I'm getting at? The essential question is, Do differences between various residential areas and dorm environments lead to corresponding differences in students' levels of satisfaction with the university's social environment? If so, what kind of differences? Further, how do specific locational factors influence students' satisfaction levels across the board in all locations?

In short, the experimental design isn't quite clear, there are so many factors I'd like to include, but it'd probably end up being a series of experiments/correlational studies. The within-dorm location questions, plus measures of personality and satisfaction with the university social experience, are the real key to what I was thinking about when I wrote that all down. I thought of it on the way back home, while looking at the old dorms and thinking, per usual, about their boxy, hivelike nature. Living in one of those rooms is like living in a cubby hole in a set of wall-mounted mailboxes.

I wonder if university students in general use A. too many commas or B. too few commas in their writing. Both are problematic, but I wonder where the bias lies.

I'm not so sure that most people my age can claim to be beyond the coincidences and little serendipities that make up life. For better or for worse, that's how people find each other in this world. We don't meet people through regularly scheduled programming; we meet through the interruptions thereof, on days when we happen to walk a different way to get to class and run into someone fabulous, or when we go into a room expecting to meet no one and come out the proud owner of someone's phone number...these things happen.
"These things happen...to other people—they don't happen at all, in fact."

I think it's altogether too idealistic to think that one can meet someone and fall for them any other way but through these little vicissitudes.

"She sat outside my room and howled and clawed at the turf. I couldn't work, so I married her."

Perhaps it seems ridiculous, but I still believe in Richard Bach's powers of coincidence as regards meeting the people who end up mattering most in one's life. Social climbing aside, most people end up getting to know those who are thrown into the social fish tank with them around the same time.

If I hadn't decided to skip class, I'd never have met him. As I walked out of the student center, I saw the shuttle bus there, waiting. I surveyed the shuttle's two passengers as I got on, both of whom were sitting a row back from the front, each wearing headphones—the one on my left, a girl, looked slightly junior high-style grungy, with dark brown hair and pale, emaciated skin. The one on my right, a guy, had light blonde, fuzzy-spiked hair, and looked back at me when I glanced over at him as though he knew what I was thinking, saying, "Hi." I said hi back, smiled perhaps a bit self-consciously, then sat down in a front seat catty-corner from where he was sprawled out, all the while wondering what I'd done to merit an actual greeting.

I slouched in my seat, legs crossed, pondering who this guy was and surreptitiously trying to see if he was still watching me, squinting out of the corner of my left eye, as he'd seemed to try to hold my gaze when I first said hi. He seemed like some messianic version of an old friend, or like the box guy, i.e. the Christian seminary student who sometimes sits outside of Ursa's with a white box covered in rhetorical questions, waiting for random people to engage him in conversation about God. Perhaps this mysterious guy was the one who would grant me knowledge of God's "good news," effecting my conversion. Perhaps he wanted me. Who could tell? I waited to get off the bus until it had already gone past my usual stop, as I was curious about this guy. When I finally got up to leave, as I turned to get another look at him while shrugging on my backpack, he simply said, "Bye," with what might've been a slight smile and an earnest look.

It's not much of a story. It's a really short sound bite—hello, goodbye—something small that happened on the way home from class. Yet it left me with dozens of questions: Who was that guy? Does he just sit there and say hello to people? Does he only say hello to girls, or even just certain kinds of girls? Perhaps he chooses people he feels sorry for in some way, or people he finds attractive or who he thinks might be fascinating to talk to. Maybe he just talks to everyone. Did he say hello to the girl who was on the shuttle before I got there? Why was he wearing headphones if he meant to talk to people? Was he trying to start conversation, or is his goal simply to elicit this kind of existential confusion in those he meets? Maybe I was part of a psych experiment, part of a protocol, however short-lived. Perhaps it was a test of my humanity: Would I say hello back? Perhaps he was just on his way through, going somewhere else, and decided to cut through the boredom by saying hello and getting reactions from people. Some people, I suppose, might have a problem with that, saying, "What? You can't just talk to people!" Oh, but he can.

The situation was just like the kind of thing I keep trying to do, talking to people I don't know. Yes, I know, how dare I do such a thing? I'm one of the few people I know who actually meets people that way, like characters in novels do, by simply telling people things while waiting for food or walking or sitting on a campus shuttle bus. That's how I met the random guy-with-a-cell-phone named Anthony who one roommate kept seeing around—as a friend and I were laying bets as to which typical-guy name he possessed, whether Scott, Chris, Jason, Chad, Matt, or Mark, I just decided to ask him, at which point he not only told me his, but asked mine in return. These things happen.

Now, though, I want to ask this guy who he is. I want to run into him on campus and stop him, make him chat with me for awhile. I wanted to just stay on the bus and keep that open potential there, especially considering I had two hours left at the time, anyway, before I would've been home if I'd decided to actually go to class. Perhaps that was his mission, to see how much curiosity a simple greeting could inspire. Perhaps so.

Maybe he didn't really exist. People like that can't really exist, anyway, neh?

Weather like today's deserves to be commemorated in some way.

It wasn't quite brisk, yet it wasn't anywhere near warm, either. The chill in the air, ostensibly from the north, felt the way an air conditioner feels when you first start up your car on a fall day, only to realize you've got the air conditioning going full blast. You turn it down quickly, but it's that first gust of cold that's somewhere between refreshing and chilly...like the cold inside a refrigerator that lingers a bit when you open the door, or a wash of cold air off the top of an ice-skating rink. It portends winter, but it's refreshing, just the same. In any case, this afternoon felt more like windy, just-past-winter March than October.