I had a bad moment today where I was boarding through the parking lot behind the biology labs and saw a chick talking on her cell phone. Her head was encased in some kind of unfortunate orange cloth helmet (it's been mild here but wet, the kind of suspended-moisture situation that clams to your skin and drops the body temperature in a really unfair way), but, you know, her ass was decent and I was enjoying the view as I rowed past. Getting closer, though, I heard her voice and realized it was actually a guy. The egg-shaped head covering thing had completely neutralized any cues. Fortunately I don't think anyone else was close enough to notice me checking him out, so I just jagged right the first chance I got and found an area with some actual females. Simon Federales: stopping mistakes before they happen.
I was hoping to avoid it this year, but today I set my alarm for six. January is a great and terrible time to take pictures: at certain hours the sky provides the kind of flat, unaffective light that people spend days trying to recreate in a studio setting. If you're lucky, of course, that light has a lifespan about the same length as a tampon's. My class schedule hits the clock in such a way as to almost completely lock up my usual shooting hours, so it looks like another winter of early mornings and early retirement. I need the weekends for homework and shit, plus the refinement of existing shots, and the occasional trip out to wherever. A couple of my friends have been leaning on me to get back into snowboarding as well. Oh, about that: I almost wish I hadn't mused my way backwards into this idea that most of my friends are consumed in some way or another by their own egos. Now that I've picked it out, I can't stop noticing it. The guys I used to board with, Trese and Ian, are perfect examples of this. (I'm only exploring this subject right now because it's more likely that I will run to the top of a mountain and eat a dinner of microwaved dung than that either of them will ever read a paragraph on the Internet containing as many words as this.) They are both great, fun guys, both of them working hard to earn degrees in fields that will ultimately allow them to do much good for others, but they are both so full of themselves that they need bags to carry around the surplus. I don't know. Do some people just not know what doubt is? The full-speed-ahead mentality, I understand it but I don't know what the appeal is. I'd rather get to the right place than get to the wrong place fast. But yeah, they've been talking about boarding over at the Swan resort and I probably won't have the heart to defer much longer. It's been awhile -- maybe it will feel good to get the snow back into my lungs.
I was at a party a couple nights ago where somebody had the idea to throw on Pulp Fiction and play probably the most basic drinking game known to man -- just sip every time there is profanity or drug use, basically every time the R rating is earned. I usually crap out of drinking games way ahead of everyone else, and as I think I mentioned my tolerance has been way down lately, so after a while I was just watching the movie. What a good movie. I mean, the dialogue is as bad as anything Tarantino has ever written, but visually, kinetically -- the guy knows how to run film. I actually slowed out of the rounds a little sooner than my body chemistry would have demanded, and I noticed that most people were pretty much doing the same; by the time Mia was getting around to explaining Raven McCoy, almost everyone else was just watching the movie, you know, and enjoying it. I guess one of the other guys, this Canadian kid named Will who is shaped like a gumdrop and has one of those bowl cuts that don't look good on anyone past the third grade, noticed it too, because at around that point he started announcing the drinking cues in his terrible systems-analyst voice. "Coke is fucking dead as dead." "DRINK!" "I don't want to hear about no motherfuckin' ifs." "DRINK!" Then there were the debates about whether "nigger" is a curse, and whether it was actually "nigga" when Jules said it. Jesus, Will. If everyone wanted to drink, that would be one thing, but I think most people were just going along with it because Will basically has no other friends. I hate when someone can't catch the vibe of a room, though. Mainly I just feel bad for the guy, but regardless I don't think I'll be visiting that hall for a while.
