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Friday, August 26, 2005

This one's optimistic

Last night I saw two guys doing karaoke to Optimistic by Radiohead. They did the quasi-falsetto parts and everything. It wasn't I Will Survive, but it was pretty great. That was at The 13th Floor, which is a cool space on the, um, 13th floor of a grand old hotel north of downtown. The building is the tallest in that part of town, and it's on a bit of a hill, so the view of downtown and the rest of the city is impressive. Alysssa, a second-year at IPS, had convinced a few of us from IPS to go see a band that a couple of her friends from college are in. Surprisingly, it was actually pretty good -- intelligent rapping over jazz-inflected music. When combined with my enormous $3 glass of (crappy) wine, a nice evening. (I must admit that I've been doing a lot more drinking than normal this past week...)

A few of us went to see the Orioles play the A's this evening. The baseball was boring, but of course the point (yet again) was mostly to spend some time hanging out with our new classmates. I ate a "New York Style" hot dog that was completely submerged under piles of overbearing relish and sauerkraut.

My bike riding yesterday went smoothly enough. As a rule, the pavement is a lot worse here than in Minneapolis, which is weird considering how much harsher the weather is in MN. I tooled around to a couple neat neighborhood hardware stores in search of ant traps (they're in our kitchen) and those Command adhesive strips for putting up posters (no luck). I also picked up a couple tasty doughnuts at the decidedly old-school New System Bakery in Hampden. (This makes for exciting reading, I realize.)

No definitive word on a Research Assistant position yet, but I spoke with the assistant director of the program and she told me not to worry because she'd talked about it previously with this professor who's on vacation for a couple weeks right now.
Hopefully I'll get rolling with that soon.

It's been a good first week -- all signs are that I'm going to enjoy myself here. We'll see what I have to say once actual classes start.

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