AKA Abraham Bacoln

I went tonight with Jay and Matthew to Cookeville’s first Indian restaurant. I believe its name is India Palace, but that doesn’t really matter because, well, it’s the only one. You can’t get it confused with the other Indian restaurant, now can you?

Here’s the tl;dr version: my food was awesome. Jay’s food was awesome. Matthew’s was a little dry. The service was slow. You should still go there anyway because by God this place needs to stay in business. We’re doing fine keeping a Thai joint and a sushi joint around – we must not lose this one.

Well, unless they start to suck. Then it’s okay.

So for you Cookevillans [sic] that don’t know, it’s on 10th street between Washington and the end of Jefferson. That’s right, the old Burger Chef building that has been a series of failures ever since. What was it last, The Crazy Donkey? I hadn’t been inside that building in probably a decade if not longer.

Aaaaaaaaaaanyway let’s see. We went in, got seated, ordered Indian beer, then it took a minute for the beers to be delivered, and they forgot the bottle opener. By the time they got back Matthew and I had taken care of the situation. We tried to tell them that we’re the kind of guys that carry serious hardware but they were out of earshot.

I’m going to stop here for a second and say that at any point in this story you can put in the sentence, “and then it took a minute for [x] to happen.” This place has only been open a day or two now – I don’t mind the service being slow so I’m not going to be mean about it. The food cooking and delivery actually wasn’t slow, considering it’s all made to order. Just everything else.

Jay got the chicken curry, which I did not try, but he and Matthew said was great. Matthew got the chicken tikka masala which he said was a bit dry. I got the lamb vindaloo which the menu said was spicy. My first and only religious experience that was brought about by spicy food was from lamb vindaloo in New Orleans, and I was hoping to have a repeat. Alas, it wasn’t hot enough to get my endorphins going, but it was certainly hot. You can ask them – I had a little trouble speaking for a while there. Man. Nothing like lamb vindaloo.

If I’m not mistaken they had three Indian beers: Kingfisher, Taj Mahal, and one other, the name of which I forget. The menu was extensive, and it’ll take me a while to sample everything I want. The rice was of course tasty Basmati, the naan was great, and that’s all I can talk about, really, as I didn’t have room for dessert.

So go. Go go go. Go soon. Give ’em a try. Get the vindaloo if you want to hurt yourself.

But go! Go give ’em some business. If it fails for lack of diners I’ll blame you personally.

I mean FIREFLY!

Sorry, I just had a firefly inside my apartment. That means that the best part of summer is on its way.

Today I wanted a snack before I went out. While I was cleaning up the apartment I had settled on grilled cheese, but once I got to the kitchen I decided I wanted something More Awesome. Plus the only bread I had was this dark whole wheat, not good standard grilled cheese bread.

Problem was that I didn’t have very much at my disposal in the way of awesome ingredients. However! I persevered! I just got through eating the tastiest snack I’d made for myself in a while, and it wasn’t even anything that impressive.

I took two slices of that dark wheat bread and put it in a skillet with a little bit of butter so that it would brown up good and crispy on one side. Once it started getting warm I put a slice and a half of aged Swiss cheese on each one to start getting melty. When the bread was nicely browned on the bottom I transferred it (with Swiss still on top) to a cookie sheet.

I then lightly sprinkled the two with oregano, and after that I ground some black pepper onto them. Then I grated fresh Parmesan over all of that until I couldn’t see the spices any more and stuck the whole thing under the broiler.

After the cheese had been bubbling for a while but just before it started browning I pulled the slices out and let them cool some before transferring them to a pre-warmed plate. Then I ate them right up.

MAN that was good. And … I’m sorry, but it was so good I didn’t even think to take a picture until it was all gone.

So go broil up some cheese bread for yourself and pretend it’s mine and marvel at how tasty it is and how good it looks or something okay?

Time to go enjoy the sun. See you suckers later.

I YAM SO ANNOYED. It feels WONDERFUL out there this morning. When I opened the door my brain said, “FALL! It’s FALL!” because the air was cool and crisp and the humidity wasn’t overpowering and it just SMELLED like autumn. I expected to see some leaves starting to turn colors.

I just now went outside again to take some things to the recycling bin and it still feels like that. I’m wearing shorts and the breeze is all cool against my legs, and the sun is shining brightly but it’s not hot, and the air is so clear, and …

and

and I just can’t stand the thought of going back to hot muggy summer. Sweating to death. Miserable thick wet Southern oven. Steam bath.

I want October to be here already.

Perpetual October. We don’t even have to have Halloween, just make it … just make it be fall already. Always.

Regarding yesterday’s blog post:

Things have changed.

I received an ominous picture message on my phone today. Out of nowhere:

“I am holding them ransom.”

As if that weren’t enough, shortly thereafter I received this chill-inducing voicemail:

“If you want to see your sunglasses again, meet us at the corner of Freeze and Madison with a bag of twenty dollars in unmarked quarters. I hope you take this message seriously.”

I will spare you, gentle reader, the details of my hellish adventure, and leave it only to say that my sunglasses are now safely back in my possession. They are slightly worse for wear as they were nicked by a shot from my bodyguard Matt’s .45, but it is a small price to have paid to have restored the status quo.

As for the other part of my post, I also managed to find opportunity to take a picture so that’s something.

Now I’m off to the grocery store to buy “cold pregnancy cereal”.

[ note: the image was distorted to protect the identity of one of the perpetrators. the audio is exactly as I received it ]

So … yeah.

How’ve you been?

I’m fine, I suppose. Kind of busy. I’m mainly writing to say that I’m sorry I haven’t taken many pictures lately, though now it occurs to me that maybe I should post a picture to my Flickr account saying as much, since that’s where pictures go and this is the place for words. Oh it doesn’t matter anyway, does it?

My boss convinced me to be in a play this summer, so that kind of takes up a lot of time. Practice is from 7:00-9:00PM which means that my evenings are effectively split in half and I can’t do much or go too far. That alone is enough reason to have slacked on photography, right? Right! Oh, yes, I also have that internship this summer, so I’m all kind of brained-up about that, and I’m not even sure what that means, but it seems like the right words.

I also haven’t been drinking coffee lately so that’s kind of slowed me down, or so I feel, but maybe I just don’t think I’m going as fast because because I’m not drinking coffee which would let me see how fast I’m going. In my head. The part of the machine that makes words isn’t spinning right this morning. Fire up the gyroscopes.

Fire gyroscopes.

Fyroscopes.

…

Guh. Lost track for a second. It’s very difficult for me to write this right now because I don’t even remember why I’m wriOH YES I have lost my sunglasses which is kind of dumb. I (almost almost almost) NEVER lose things. I keep track of things, I keep track of things for myself, I keep track of other people’s stuff. It’s disheartening when I lose something of my own. I feel like I’ve let you all down.

But these sunglasses, man, they’re old. I’ve had them almost a year now. The little rubber noseresters fell out a long time ago, and I had to tighten up the joints every week or so with the needle-nose pliers otherwise they would have just fallen right apart. That’s what you get for $11 sunglasses from K-Mart, right? But now I’m blind when I go out, I have to squint, and it feels like I’m in Spain all over again. It’s been 24 hours now and I haven’t seen my sunglasses, and they’re not in my apartment or my car or at work or at the theater so they’re just gone, grew legs and walked off, and I

I guess I’m just going to have to go sunglasses shopping, and that’s one of my least-favorite things.

but hey! Let’s do that thing here, why don’t you join me in it! What’s that least-favorite thing of yours that you’re going to have to do soon? What’s bugging you, making you grumpy? I’m grumpy about having to shop for sunglasses. Isn’t that stupid? Isn’t that just mind-bogglingly American and middle-class and privileged? If finding new sunglasses is the biggest of my worries at the moment then man, I am living one hell of a life.

You probably don’t remember what happened last year, so I’ll sum it up and give you a link. Basically I said, “You know what? I don’t need anything. But there is this girl, my wonderful friend Liz, and she has the same birthday as I do. And she needs you to donate to a good cause.”

And some of you did, and that was awesome.

Well, this year I still don’t need anything. And once again Liz does need something, but this time it’s even easier. It doesn’t require you to spend any money.

What Liz and I want for our birthdays this year:
for Mark to grow milk boobs

I rarely end up getting sick, so when I do get sick it’s Important. Also, as has been the very loose under-theme of this journal, I am not Smart. Those things are running together today.

I am sick, for once. It’s just a little cold, the worst of it was yesterday and that wasn’t even that bad. I haven’t even taken any medicine. Seriously, I rarely get sick. So that’s what makes it Important, you see. When I am sick that means I deserve a chance to pamper myself and just lie around and do nothing.

Well tonight I got off of work and lazed around and read a book for a while and then I was hungry and I thought, “I should go find some food. Whatever I want. For I am Sick, and therefore Entitled and may eat as I choose.”

UnFORtunately, the only thing I wanted was sausage casserole. I bought the ingredients a few days ago but hadn’t had the chance to make it yet. So there I found myself, already hungry, juggling two skillets and a saucepan and the hot oven, trying to make dinner. I must say to my credit that it turned out as it is supposed to, which is to say it was Delicious.

So I ate. And then I relaxed. And then I thought, “You know what I want? Dessert!” and of course I am Entitled to eat whatever my black little heart desires. And what does it desire? Chocolate cherry cake. Yeah, from scratch.

So I dragged my sick self back into the kitchen and baked up a chocolate cherry cake. Well, it’s not done yet – there’s still 11 minutes on the timer and I have to do the icing afterwards, but it’s nearly done.

All this is to say that obviously I am very smart and good at taking care of myself when I’m sick, and giving myself lots of rest.

Because I am also doing laundry in the middle of all this.

Goodnight!

p.s. please do not call me or come over expecting sausage casserole or cake handouts. It is all for me, because I am stupid and I deserve it.

I had two final exams today, Spanish lit and business statistics. I had my alarm set so I could wake up nice and early and go over Spanish and maybe stats again before it was time to go suffer.

I was awokenated at about 45 minutes before my Spanish final by a text message. Turns out somehow I slept through my alarm. Oh well, no cram time. Got to campus with about five minutes to spare, but since my professor is a nice guy he had already handed out the exams and I walked into a room of dead silence with heads bowed and hands writing furiously. Got through two grueling hours of literary analysis and finally I had a break. My calendar said my stats final was at 1:30, which gave me about an hour. After walking to the office to check my email and spending a few minutes just spacing out, I then decided to go to the business building to sit around and look over stats.

Of course as I got to the door I saw people running in, and that gave me the impression my calendar might have been wrong. Sure enough, I got to the classroom to see the professor handing out the exams. Stats didn’t take me the full two hours but it felt like it.

So yeah. I’m just wondering if there’s any other way to screw up my schedule today or to fail to be on time for something.

I’m pretty sure I made As on both my exams, though, so that’s good.

Presentations are finally over

Cargado originalmente por Brother O’Mara

No more dressing up this semester.

So something happened somewhere and I have no idea what it was or why it happened. I became good at public speaking. I know, those of you who know me in real life are probably laughing and shaking your heads because you know I’m never afraid to make noise or talk too much about a subject, or just generally keep rattling on until I’m a pain in the ass when I’m hanging out with you.

But I did used to be afraid (did used to – that doesn’t sound like gooder English) to speak in front of a group of strangers. Stage fright. Anxeity. I always hated to do it in high school. When I finally got to college (the first time) I had to take a speech class, which I wasn’t really looking forward to. The instructor, intending to make us more comfortable, started the class out by making us sit in a circle and the conversation went around and everyone had to tell the group something about talking in public. Most everyone there just said they were nervous, or hesitant. Of course there were a few that weren’t. Then when it became my turn I said, “My name is Kevin, and I’m pretty sure I’m blushing right now …” and of course it was totally true and everyone laughed a whole lot. For the rest of the semester I would get up to deliver my speech, say, “Hold on a second, let me get the blushing out of the way” and of course everyone would laugh then too, and afterwards I knew it was going to be okay.

But that was just one class. I was comfortable with those people, but not anyone else. They didn’t know about my automatic blushing, my reluctance to have all the eyes of all those strangers on me. Presentations in any other classes were, while not hellish per se, certainly something I dreaded.

And then I left college and moved about for a while, and lived life, etc. Somewhere in those intervening years I just kind of forgot about being nervous. I know that in part I have developed more of a “I don’t care what you think” attitude, both in the sense of “it’s okay for you to have an opinion, and if your opinion is that I’m a dork or a jackass that’s fine, it won’t change who I feel I am” and also in the sense of, “No, REALLY, I DO NOT CARE WHAT YOU THINK.”

I have to do that, because deep down I really do care what everyone thinks, far far too much. S’why I’m always asking my friends, “ZOMG do you think I should shave my beard or not? What about the food? Was it okay? Do you mind if we do this or that or the other?” But I’ve come to realize that those are my friends’ opinions, and those people are my friends for a reason (or for multiple reasons), and their opinions matter. But everyone else? I’m working on it.

Wow, look how far off-topic I got there! I can almost see the original thread from here!

Aaaaaaaanyway so when I got back to college in 2006 I had to give presentations of course – by the way, the whole ‘presentations’ thing is a result of being in the school of business. We can’t just write papers, nooooo, we have to stand up and TALK about the papers after they’re written. So yeah, I gave a presentation a year or so ago and practiced the hell out of it and stood up and did it, and I probably didn’t even blush. It didn’t feel like I blushed. I was still nervous, though.

Now for the present day. I just got done with two presentations this week. For both of them I maybe practiced a little bit. Some. Maybe. Forget notecards, though. I just somewhere along the line developed the attitude of, “Eh, I know the subject material enough. I’ll wing it.” And wing it I did. And get fantastic grades I did. And actually have random classmates come up to me afterwards and say, “Man, nice job” I did. I even had one girl say (and no, she wasn’t flirting with me) “these presentations have been so boring, but as soon as you started talking I was like WHOA hold on something interesting is happening!” I feel like I know how to get people’s attention. I look them in the eye, not in that way in which people just kind of scan the room, but I find someone and I get their attention, and sometimes you can see them sit up a little and have that look on their face like, “Oh, he’s talking to ME.” I feel like I can connect with my listeners. I can make them smile, I can make them laugh. I can even make them care about the demographic breakdown of potential market share for the coastal region of Nigeria with regards to sales of anti-dandruff shampoo.

And I honestly have no idea where it came from. I don’t know whatever happened to being afraid, but it’s long gone.

So I feel good. This semester’s presentations are over, and I have lost my fear of public speaking. If you need me to get up and make words at your next club meeting you just let me know. I have low rates.