Some of my friends blogs are on the come up and mine fell off. I gotta drop in with at least one more solid post before 2010 starts, so here it is!
January
We went to Ibiza’s for New Year’s Eve. Jay set us up with VIP at Ibiza’s. (THANKS!) Then I threw up everywhere. (SORRY.) Amateur night.
February
I remember very little about February. So I checked my calendar to see what I did. Last summer I recorded mundane things I did during the day since it takes less than a minute to enter everything in Google Calendar. So there are a lot of “Starcraft with Jason” entries. Anyway, it’s totally worth doing because it’s the stupid things like where you ate for lunch and who you ate with that help you remember what that time was like day-to-day. Plus you can record things like when you hung out with so and so and what you did that ruined your life for a few weeks.
But I stopped doing that after the summer ended. However, I have a ‘Tentative’ label for important upcoming events. And obviously I don’t go back and delete those events after they’re over, so they’re still there marking the things I deemed important in my life. And February only has one: Street Fighter IV. I’ve mentioned how excited I was for Modern Warfare 2, but I was also pretty excited for SFIV. Those first two weeks were great. I guess the most memorable thing about the game is when I beat Dan a few dozen times in a row then he smashed the controller on the floor. After that I always told him I won’t play if he’s gonna get mad like that. February was awesome.
March
March really isn’t ringing any bells. Probably because my capstone project for Electrical Engineering consumed the entire month. I’ll try not to exaggerate but we put in 8 hour days at least three days a week in the lab and 4 hours for the other days. For some reason people take that class and basically get reamed for the entire quarter but then they look back on it fondly. Myself included. That project to me is like the P90X Ab Ripper X video to Tony Horton—I hate it… but I love it.
April
We went to Vegas for Harvey’s bachelor party. I get the sense that the trip caused me to peak early for the following things: Vegas, bachelor parties, and nightlife. Meaning it was a great trip. I wouldn’t want to be the guy trying to top that bachelor party. Luckily, I’m halfway to a decade without a girlfriend so I won’t be that guy! Phew. Probably the funnest weekend of the year and maybe of the last few years for me.
I remember reading some story from some guy that spent his summer giving tours of the Grand Canyon and sleeping under the stars with nature and how he felt sick when he went to Vegas and saw all the superficial people and extreme materialism. What a loser.
May
This was my last full month of college. I’d say I checked out in my final quarter, but I don’t know if I ever actually checked back in after my internship. Most of my friends had graduated already, I felt old, and I only had graduation requirements which meant zero flexibility choosing classes. Throughout college, whenever something seemed overwhelming I would just ask if it would matter in five years. Basically nothing did. Looking back less than a year out, no single assignment really meant anything. I have a pretty good grasp of the idea that it’s the cumulative success that counts, but I’m just glad I kept a cool head through my projects even with graduation looming. A few members of teams I was on were on the verge of tears and I remember thinking at the time, and even now, whoa calm down.
This was also the month when my classmate said he was thinking of applying to MIT for grad school and asked me if it was private or public. So I said I think it’s private then I looked it up on Wikipedia and said Wikipedia says it’s private. And then he says, wow Wikipedia also says aliens are real, it’s probably public.
Don’t ask me a question if you really don’t care about my answer, especially if it’s a question that can be answered with facts and not opinions. And if you really think Wikipedia is the wild west and anyone can change anything and that it would be incorrect about whether MIT, one of the most famous colleges in the world, is private or public, you’re dumb. And I say that because chances are you use Wikipedia all the time but whenever someone mentions it you denounce it to seem smarter.
June
Graduation was hot. A lot of people say it’s worth it since it might be long but it’s just a day. If I finished in four years and graduated with the people I started with I think it would’ve meant a lot more to me. I definitely enjoyed the departmental graduations though. My advice: do it for your parents.
We also went to Canada for a weekend in June. Potentially really fun, but kind of a bust. Mostly because we went out to try and check out clubs, but we left too late and didn’t get in. And it looked like people were having an awesome time inside. It was an eye opener, though. Vancouver B.C. is about the same trip-length as Oregon and it’s one of the nicest cities I’ve been to. It’s also weird that it’s right there and it seems less like a different country and more like some kind of pseudo world. Driving around seems the same but what the hell does the flashing green light mean? This resembles SportsCenter but there’s so much hockey and NBA Playoffs are covered for two minutes every hour. There’s still a 7- 11, but it’s filled with candy bars I haven’t heard of and ketchup Lays.
[Update: I guess Canada was in May. I really don’t remember it being before graduation.]
July
My birthday was ridiculously hot. Like literally the hottest day ever in Seattle hot. (Now that we’re starting to get a grasp of the subtleties of the usage of the word ‘irony’—basically, nothing I think is ironic actually is—can we move on to ‘literally’?) Uncomfortable. I was glad everyone made it to happy hour that night. But what I’ll remember is how hard it was to sleep that night. I soaked some towels that day in water and froze them in one of those giant ziplocs that fishermen use to store whole fish. At the time, I was picturing all-cold-side-of-the-pillow-everything, but they just froze together in a big block. So I put the block next to my head hoping it’d work like an air conditioner. It did next to nothing. And I stayed awake long enough for the block to melt enough to peel a towel off. And I just put it on my forehead and slept for an hour, then tossed it back in the ziploc and peeled another towel off, and repeated that. It was a mess. But at least it wasn’t a hot mess!
August
I went to San Francisco with a few friends—my first time back in the bay area since my San Jose internship last year. Lots of eating and lots of homeless people. And a couple of crazy taxi drivers stick out. One drove us to the club from our hotel and floored it through Chinatown. And the only time I remember really stopping is when the driver said “It ain’t that hot.” when he saw a guy walking wearing a black wife beater. I call the second crazy taxi driver The Transporter, because he showed zero emotion as he sped and cut through multiple lanes at odd angles.
September
Camping sticks out the most for me in September. Actually, preparing for camping might be the most memorable part of it. Me, Jerry, and Russ bought 80 pounds of meat for the weekend. I’ll always remember asking for 17 two-pound rib-eyes. We really didn’t do anything except eat meat and sleep.
October
Jay-Z came to Seattle for the first time in something like a decade. Favorite concert ever for me. He puts on a good show and it was a great crowd that was probably happy to pack Key Arena again. I was singing lyrics I didn’t realize I knew and yelling made up lyrics for the rest. The only downside was missing J. Cole because he came out at 7:40 for a concert scheduled for 8:00. A rap concert. But he came out to do his verse for A Star is Born, which helped make up for it.
That week also included the annual live fantasy basketball draft. We did it bigger this year and got a place with a projector that we couldn’t hook anything up to.
After booking the Jay-Z tickets, me and some friends were calling this The Greatest Week Ever. But Jay-Z and the draft took second place behind a trip to Hawaii. I wrote about part of the trip and never finished. One of the funnest trips of my life. It’s hard for me to choose between the Vegas trip and the Hawaii trip. I asked myself if I could only go on one which would it be, and I decided it’d be the Vegas trip mostly because of the bigger group. But it’s hard to beat relaxing in the water under the Hawaiian sun knowing it was pouring rain in Seattle. I’m glad I was lucky enough to go to both.
November
Modern Warfare 2 came out this month and so did the BlackBerry 9700. I love Modern Warfare 2. For a few weeks before it came out, a few of us played Modern Warfare 1. Here’s the thing, I never played MW1 before and it was basically awesome. They could have released MW1 labeled as MW2 and I would’ve been happy. It was all new to me. Then it made me think of the two years that I could’ve been playing it. Last year I could have been playing it in San Jose instead of whatever the hell I was doing. Luckily they released MW2 as MW2 and it was even better. My friend Paul always says he’s jealous of people that haven’t seen Friends since they can still watch them and it’s new to them. Well, I still haven’t beat the single player campaign for MW2 so I’m lucky in the same way.
December
Will 2009’s biggest news story be Michael Jackson’s death or Tiger’s fall from grace? Who cares, this post is about me! According to my calendar, December so far consists of MW2 during the week and going out on the weekends. Pretty fun month so far and there’s still a lot to look forward to: pre-Christmas party, Secret Santa lunch at a brazilian BBQ, Christmas-eve party, Christmas, and then a trip to San Diego to end the month. December is also the month I made an awful analogy about Friends and MW2’s single player campaign.
After reminiscing about the year and thinking about all the great times in each month and all the friends I spent time and bonded with, I realized something: I need to hang out with girls.
See you in 2010!