school is absolutely over. for an entire month, i have no scholastic obligations, and what a feeling that is. it makes going to work tomorrow morning as usual seem more unfair than it would otherwise too though.

i feel odd sometimes lately, about how i’m spending my time. it’s as if i’m never unhappy doing any of the things i’m doing, but when i get a moment to reflect afterward i am always asking myself, “what have i been doing with all my time?” i’m in a constant state of feeling like the day ends without me getting to spend enough of it not doing anything. i guess i’m the opposite of bored, but not in an always positive sense. i haven’t read more than 10 pages in as many days, i think, and that’s probably the worst symptom as well as the one that gets under my skin the most. i mean, when you stake so much of your self-image on being ‘one of those people that reads all the time’ but then you never do, you start to wonder what you might really be — a frightening thing.

today i liked though. it was filled to the brim with, well, no reading (yet — there’s still some time), but good company the entire day. the best and most worth sharing was lunch/dinner. the two are hard to separate though when you spend it (them?) at a hometown buffet with six of your housemates, and between the seven males present manage to dispose of a ghastly amount of food. why did we do it? because it’s a buffet, man. it’s a challenge of manhood. the question was raised on each of our first plate’s worth, “say, how many do you think we can eat? 30? 40?…” and for some reason we decided 40 was a good number, and we had a resolution: no leaving until we reach the mark. that still works out to about 6 plates per person, which is a lot of crappy buffet food, i’ll tell you what.

the first three were pretty easy. mashed potatoes, chicken, tacos, ham…alright, none of it was great, but at least it fit. josh managed around plate three or four to eat an entire plate of only corn, simply because we thought it would be funny. he and a few others ate something like 7, covering for those of us who couldn’t get past 5, to our embarrassment. toward the end we started accusing each other of cheating or not eating their share, as i ticked off each empty plate on the back of a receipt (which i kept as a souveneir — i’m thinking about framing it). eventually we started bargaining.

“wait, so if i eat two ice cream cones, that’s a plate right?”

“since he’s mostly done with his and he doesn’t want it, and i just started this salad and it sucks, if we both stop now, that counts as one plate total, right?”

“does soup count?”

and by dessert we were in pain and sundaes or cakes were more like punishment than treats. but we had to do it — we needed dessert plates to get to the goal. we pushed our limits to where it hurt to laugh and every bite was like a hard-fought inch toward the peak of the unscalable mountain. and then with some apple cobbler and pumpkin pie…we made it. 40 plates of bad food for nine dollars each. maybe we couldn’t move, and we questioned why exactly we would do this to ourselves, and people at the other tables couldn’t quite understand why we would high-five each other when we would get up to get more. but the groaning on the way home was a small price to pay to know we’d proven our manhood by spending almost an hour and a half eating in a trashy buffet restaurant

it’s good to be alive, isn’t it?

[now hearing this: this mix cd i made for my car that’s pretty good. rock and roll, man.]