austin stories

the austin real world house, partially disassembled already










my hotel room - to be referenced shortly





first off, i forgot to mention something fun... nine days ago in atlanta, a bunch of us finally got to play trivia (remember we tried the previous two nights but didnt end up going? of course you dont). we ended up having a trivial run for the ages, getting every single question correct until the last one, which we missed and ended up coming in third place. but mike says hes never had a trivia night like that, and he used to play a lot. it was great. i should have mentioned it the day after it happened, but i forgot. i guess i was too busy admiring the atlanta-to-memphis landscapes.

so up there is a picture of the real world house, which i forgot was here until yesterdays comment aboot it. you can see it doesnt have the austin sign on it and the glass doors are gone. ive always had a strange relationship with the real world. sometimes ill watch it if i can find absolutely nothing else on, but once i do, ill be dying to see the next few episodes. then ill quickly stop caring again. so i watched the austin one just a little bit. it had the dude whose mom died and the girl who always wants to bone him, and the ugly dude who thought he was all that, and the spicy latina temptress. one weird thing aboot this real world is that it had three people who were not at all interesting. usually each season has one person like that (id cite examples, but they were uninteresting, so i dont remember their names). and its usually 'the freaky one' who isnt interesting. but this time it was army nurse girl, black guy, and midwestern virgin weirdo.

today i went to maybe the greatest record store ive ever been to, and ive been to quite a few. its called waterloo. i cant describe why its so great, it just is. i couldve spent all day there, and now im thinking of going back. i bought five tom waits albums. ive had his two greatest hits for a few years now, but i realized on the way to memphis (while listening to him of course) that i like him more than that, so ive moved him up to a buy-every-album type artist. well, hes in a probation period i guess: ill listen to those five albums, which are supposed to be his best, and if i like them enough, which i of course plan to, ill buy everything. another place i went was a fast food chain called whataburger (which id been to a few times before in these last couple weeks), which i urge everyone to try if theyre ever in this part of the world.

so the second picture you see is of my room. i now have a huge bruise on my left knee, and ill tell you why. anyone that knows me well knows that i often like to try to jump over things, figure things out, lift things, see if things hurt, etc. any circumstance that pits me against an inanimate object is one i relish and want to conquer. examples are past events such as hurdling a bush with dave (fourteen inch leg scar), bb-gun ass-shooting with frank (bb in ass for two days), ice bag whacking with mike (too drunk to sustain any noticeable damage), and the mother of them all, the monkeyboy incident at penn state (dual shin scars and remnant pain nine years later). anyway, you can see that next to my bed, there is a inner window into the kitchen. i decided i needed to jump through that window to get into the kitchen rather than walk around the area to the door. why you ask? because it was there. of course it went horribly wrong and i whaled my knee against the bottom of the window. hence the bruise and sore knee im sporting today. this goes to show that even though i am 27, i need constant supervision. but it was acknowledged many years ago that im an idiot, so ive learned nothing from this experience.