I Hate Ohio (No Explanation Included)

Back from Chicago. I took a depressingly meager amount of pictures over the weekend because my camera ran out of batteries and I neglected to bring a working charger. I don't have time to upload them tonight so I'll save that for tomorrow.

Chicago was fun. It's not the most exciting city in the world, but it was still a good time. The number of times I almost got hit by a car turning right on red was enough to make the time interesting. See, downtown Chicago is somewhat like Manhattan and in Manhattan you can't turn right on red, but in Chicago you can. Hence the confusion.

There's so much to discuss that it's hard to begin. The drive down wasn't too annoying, believe it or not. I didn't sleep for very much of the drive at all, but the twelve or whatever hours went by pretty quick. Well, except for the late start. We were supposed to leave at like 5:45 or something, but the bus broke down and we didn't end up leaving until almost 7:30. People were starting to come to school by the time we left (in Laidlaw buses, which brought us to our new tour bus in Buffalo).

Thursday night we went to some pizza place in Chicago, which had writing over every square inch of its surfaces. In the bathroom there was this excellent poem written on the wall. I can't remember it exactly, but I wrote it down on some piece of paper in my luggage and I'll post it tomorrow. Long story short I scribbled out a second stanza and used a sharpie to add it to the wall next to the original.

Friday we did lots of strange tourist-like stuff. We took a "gangster" tour of the city, observing all the noteworthy crime spots from the twenties with a character actor spilling out jokes and facts. We went to some other places, but I hate being a tourist and, therefore, remember very little of them. We ate dinner at a jazz club with a pretty good blues group fronted by a pretty nifty sax player (although visually he was awkward).

Saturday was more tourist stuff in the morning and the actual jazz competition in the afternoon. We played pretty well, especially on our firs two tunes, but we ended up getting second anyway. Whatever. I forgot we went to Chicago for a competition until around noon on Saturday. After the competition we went to this really surreal Medieval-themed place (with all the other bands from the festival) and witnessed some crazy jousting and this and that while eating poorly cooked food. We made comments about the varying self esteems of the employees of the facility, noting specifically that the affectionately dubbed "poop guy" must have difficulty explaining his job to members of the opposite sex on dates and in other venues. Then there was a dance that we could only stay at for twenty minutes before we had to leave for the hotel. Lame.

A little while after we were sent to our rooms K-Mahl and I busted out to do some exploration of the hotel. We managed to make our way onto the roof and climb this giant glass dome that was above the pool. That was the hilight of the escapade. We went back to our room at about 2:45, accidentally woke Eric up who was trying to get some sleep before his flight to Arizona at 4:30, and felt really bad. I managed to sleep through Eric's wake up call at 3:45 and our wake up call at 6:00 (we wanted to go swimming before leaving in the morning). I woke up about five minutes before we were supposed to leave, frantically packed, and dashed to the bus. The dash was sort of unnecessary as many people were later arriving than I was.

The trip home was relatively uneventful, or at least I'm too tired to remember anything eventful. When I got home, however, I got bombarred with numerous bad things in a row. One, I have an outstanding library charge of $100 that I need to pay in like five days or I'm in all sorts of trouble. Including, according to my dad, the inability to get loans for college if a collection agency comes after me for the library money. I'll take care of it tomorrow, but it's just adding to the return home stress. And two, Geva didn't select "Trinity" for the readings. I'm pretty bummed about that. I was pretty proud of my play. I'm gonna keep on telling myself it was because of the high level of controversy of if, because it's soothing, not because I actually believe it's an accurate assesment. Rather annoyed, in general.

Jimmy was nice enough to phone me with my Stars of Tomorrow comments and I'm pretty damn pleased. The one that I liked the most was one of the least important ones (I guess). It talked about what I did during Stiff Upper Lip. I dunno. It was nice that something so obscure and relatively trivial got picked up on. I could explain better but I should probably be sleeping.

I need to really get in to work some days this week. I need money for Florida, money for this library book pontentially, I have to pay back my mom for Chicago...

Double Yew Tee Eff. Pictures (more eleboration too) and stuff tomorrow.