Single women of the world rejoice, I am once again available.
As with all dating matters, I will keep my blogging on this matter rather vague so as to minimize any potential embarrassment on the part of my co-dater. I understand that association with me can be rather damaging to ones reputation and hold you back from many upper level government positions. For those of you that don’t speak Chris co-dater would be my girlfriend, who no longer qualifies as such.
It was fun while it lasted. We dated for exactly a week. She was and is a fantastic girl who I greatly enjoy being with. But by the end of the week I knew that I wasn’t going to marry her (timing played a role here, but it was primarily some inherent differences between us) so there was no point in continuing the relationship. Having a girlfriend is great, but that’s not my end goal. So I broke it off, which admittedly is easier than being dumped, but by no means a pleasant event. Time will tell if we remain friends or by necessity separate ourselves.
So that’s it. I’m back on the market and taking the highest (and cutest) bidder.
Song of the moment: “Landed” by Ben Folds
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Sunday, March 05, 2006
The Sum of All Stress
April sucks. I’m sorry for those of you that think “sucks” is a swear word, but you’re from Utah, and you’re wrong. April does suck, and for a wide variety of reasons. It starts out with April Fools Day, where the longer it takes you to clean up the “joke” your “friends” pull the funnier it supposedly is. During April we have the pleasure of doing taxes, followed immediately by complaining about how little we get back. April showers suck, and the May flowers that result aren’t anything to shout about. And to top it all off we get to take finals, the bane of college existence.
Is there anything worse than a final? Sure, every so often you get a teacher who gives a group final or has everyone show up and eat donuts and call that a final. But usually it’s a time to cram four months of neuroanatomy into your head and hope it doesn’t explode during the test. Because of course this would ruin your scantron. You slave your way through several hours of writing, guessing and praying, and once you finish you have thirty minutes to relax before your linguistics exam begins. The most wonderful time of the year this is not.
Here are some tips on how to cope with the stress that finals inflict upon us:
Belittle The Exam. Stress comes from thinking the test is a big deal. You can eliminate stress by making the test seem unimportant. If you’re extremely good at this you can even talk yourself out of bothering to show up to the exam. We don’t recommend taking it to this extreme. Try to reach a level where you’re still motivated enough to study and actually take the exam, but where you’re not giving yourself ulcers over it. Ladies just repeat this mantra to yourself: “I’m here to find a husband. He doesn’t care about my GPA. Stress gives you wrinkles.” Men have a similar chant to go over “I’m here to find a wife. I can lie about my GPA. Retaking the class will help me meet more girls.” Just repeat these lines over and over until you feel better.
Snack Attack. Nothing helps you forget about finals quite like sugar and trans fats. Luckily for you Provorem has a nice selection of overpriced and undercooked food that you can enjoy at 3 in the morning. Head over to IHOP or Dennys to mingle with other students procrastinating their studying. Betos and 7-11 are surprisingly popular at 4:30 AM. Any of these places are guaranteed to make you just queasy enough to stay awake for another couple hours, but won’t usually make you sick enough to miss the test. If you don’t feel like leaving the apartment (this is usually due to a significant drop in personal hygiene standards during finals week) you can just step into the kitchen and whip yourself up a snack. Anything to take you away from those books for a few minutes of relief and replenishment.
Misery Loves Company. Keep in mind that everyone else is suffering through this as well. Except those stupid roommates who are just working or taking a semester off. Avoid them during finals because they’ll just make you mad. But everyone else is sharing your pain. Join together and do a couple stress-relieving activities. Catch a movie at the dollar theater. Throw a mini-dance party. Burn textbooks that you can’t sell back. Have any kind of fun that will take about an hour.
Yes, finals suck. But you’ll make it through. There are relatively few classes that are a matter of life and death. And if they do happen to kill you, you won’t have to worry about finals next semester.
Is there anything worse than a final? Sure, every so often you get a teacher who gives a group final or has everyone show up and eat donuts and call that a final. But usually it’s a time to cram four months of neuroanatomy into your head and hope it doesn’t explode during the test. Because of course this would ruin your scantron. You slave your way through several hours of writing, guessing and praying, and once you finish you have thirty minutes to relax before your linguistics exam begins. The most wonderful time of the year this is not.
Here are some tips on how to cope with the stress that finals inflict upon us:
Belittle The Exam. Stress comes from thinking the test is a big deal. You can eliminate stress by making the test seem unimportant. If you’re extremely good at this you can even talk yourself out of bothering to show up to the exam. We don’t recommend taking it to this extreme. Try to reach a level where you’re still motivated enough to study and actually take the exam, but where you’re not giving yourself ulcers over it. Ladies just repeat this mantra to yourself: “I’m here to find a husband. He doesn’t care about my GPA. Stress gives you wrinkles.” Men have a similar chant to go over “I’m here to find a wife. I can lie about my GPA. Retaking the class will help me meet more girls.” Just repeat these lines over and over until you feel better.
Snack Attack. Nothing helps you forget about finals quite like sugar and trans fats. Luckily for you Provorem has a nice selection of overpriced and undercooked food that you can enjoy at 3 in the morning. Head over to IHOP or Dennys to mingle with other students procrastinating their studying. Betos and 7-11 are surprisingly popular at 4:30 AM. Any of these places are guaranteed to make you just queasy enough to stay awake for another couple hours, but won’t usually make you sick enough to miss the test. If you don’t feel like leaving the apartment (this is usually due to a significant drop in personal hygiene standards during finals week) you can just step into the kitchen and whip yourself up a snack. Anything to take you away from those books for a few minutes of relief and replenishment.
Misery Loves Company. Keep in mind that everyone else is suffering through this as well. Except those stupid roommates who are just working or taking a semester off. Avoid them during finals because they’ll just make you mad. But everyone else is sharing your pain. Join together and do a couple stress-relieving activities. Catch a movie at the dollar theater. Throw a mini-dance party. Burn textbooks that you can’t sell back. Have any kind of fun that will take about an hour.
Yes, finals suck. But you’ll make it through. There are relatively few classes that are a matter of life and death. And if they do happen to kill you, you won’t have to worry about finals next semester.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Hire me B&J!
By my estimation the best jobs in the world are: movie critic, ice cream taster and professional napper. Sadly I have yet to be offered any of these positions, despite a tremendous amount of experience in each area. But I’m going to hope that the powers that be read the following resterauant review and see that I would be perfectly suited to specialize in critiquing ice cream, movies and sleeping conditions.
The Thai Pepper – located in Provo Utah. They have an address but I’m too lazy to look it up.
We went to the Thai Pepper last night to go along with watching the movie Ghandi. To be more accurate we could have gone to the Bombay House, and to be more comical we could have eaten hamburgers off the grill. But we wanted to try someplace new, so the Pepper (soon to be renamed the Thai Kitchen) fit the bill perfectly.
We arrived at about 7:30 to find the place completely full. Although I’ve had friends who would only eat places that were full, claiming it shows that the food is good, I’ve never followed this rule. In fact I would love to be the only person in a restaurant at any given time. This could be my antisocial tendencies at work, but it is most definitely the most efficient way to eat. Because the Thai Pepper was full we ended up waiting an hour for our food and got to sit elbow to elbow with 30 other people. Neither of these won the place any points in my book.
The décor was lacking. I don’t really care about decorations in the slightest, but if you do, don’t go to the Thai Pepper for the ambiance. The restaurant consists of a large rectangular room with white walls and the occasional Asian decoration. The employees all had accents, but I have no idea whether they were Thai. I suspect they were Laotians pretending to be Thai because no one wants to go eat Laotian food.
Were I a real critic I would’ve ordered more than one thing, but I’m actually a college student so stuck with the curry. I love curry and am too lazy to make it myself, so must order it whenever presented the opportunity. My date ordered curry (of a different variety) as well so I can’t really critique the whole menu for you. The place did suffer a bit from Mexican syndrome, that is that all the food sounded the same. There were 6 different curries, but each only had one ingredient that made it unique from the others. But both the Pineapple (mine) and Peanut (hers) were quite tasty.
The food was good, which is most likely the important thing. Our particular dishes were a mere 2 stars on their spice scale. This sounds wimpy but 4 was labeled as very hot and 5 was labeled with a question mark. So it had enough kick to make you notice, but not enough to make you cry. I attempt not to cry during dates, only afterward, so marked this as a plus. Having never been to Thailand I can’t comment as to the authenticity of the dish, but again, I don’t really care about such things. It tasted good.
Overall: it was a good experience. However, it was no better than Thai Ruby. The food was comparable, and the price was comparable. Thai Ruby has the benefit of better decoration, shorter waiting and much better location. I can walk to the Ruby in 1 minute, versus driving to the Pepper in 10 minutes. For me the Ruby will be the obvious choice for my future curry needs.
The Thai Pepper – located in Provo Utah. They have an address but I’m too lazy to look it up.
We went to the Thai Pepper last night to go along with watching the movie Ghandi. To be more accurate we could have gone to the Bombay House, and to be more comical we could have eaten hamburgers off the grill. But we wanted to try someplace new, so the Pepper (soon to be renamed the Thai Kitchen) fit the bill perfectly.
We arrived at about 7:30 to find the place completely full. Although I’ve had friends who would only eat places that were full, claiming it shows that the food is good, I’ve never followed this rule. In fact I would love to be the only person in a restaurant at any given time. This could be my antisocial tendencies at work, but it is most definitely the most efficient way to eat. Because the Thai Pepper was full we ended up waiting an hour for our food and got to sit elbow to elbow with 30 other people. Neither of these won the place any points in my book.
The décor was lacking. I don’t really care about decorations in the slightest, but if you do, don’t go to the Thai Pepper for the ambiance. The restaurant consists of a large rectangular room with white walls and the occasional Asian decoration. The employees all had accents, but I have no idea whether they were Thai. I suspect they were Laotians pretending to be Thai because no one wants to go eat Laotian food.
Were I a real critic I would’ve ordered more than one thing, but I’m actually a college student so stuck with the curry. I love curry and am too lazy to make it myself, so must order it whenever presented the opportunity. My date ordered curry (of a different variety) as well so I can’t really critique the whole menu for you. The place did suffer a bit from Mexican syndrome, that is that all the food sounded the same. There were 6 different curries, but each only had one ingredient that made it unique from the others. But both the Pineapple (mine) and Peanut (hers) were quite tasty.
The food was good, which is most likely the important thing. Our particular dishes were a mere 2 stars on their spice scale. This sounds wimpy but 4 was labeled as very hot and 5 was labeled with a question mark. So it had enough kick to make you notice, but not enough to make you cry. I attempt not to cry during dates, only afterward, so marked this as a plus. Having never been to Thailand I can’t comment as to the authenticity of the dish, but again, I don’t really care about such things. It tasted good.
Overall: it was a good experience. However, it was no better than Thai Ruby. The food was comparable, and the price was comparable. Thai Ruby has the benefit of better decoration, shorter waiting and much better location. I can walk to the Ruby in 1 minute, versus driving to the Pepper in 10 minutes. For me the Ruby will be the obvious choice for my future curry needs.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Bizarro
The pattern in my life thus far has been such: Chris likes girls (to be fair I rarely commit myself to a particular one), Chris attempts to gain girls’ favor, fails, and complains about the whole endeavor. Last weekend this pattern strangely inverted. I had a girl ask me out one night (not a first, but a rarity) and another tell me she really likes me the other. To say confess her undying love for me would be quite an exaggeration, but she did come out and tell me that she has liked me for a while (I could’ve broken my dateless Valentines streak) and that I’ve evidently been completely missing the signals. I like her as well and we’re now dating. Weird no? I guess this is the way it’s supposed to work, but I’ve never really experienced it this easily. My theory is that the closer I get to medical school the more irresistible I become. That and my sideburns are pretty much amazing.
Weatherbugged
You know what they say about Provo, if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes. You know what? They say that everywhere. And everywhere you go they seem to think that their weather is more variable than anyone else’s. Weather changes unpredictably and quickly people; your city isn’t special. Unless you’re in California, where everything’s always perfect. Except for the drive-bys. But weather-wise it’s obviously top notch and we all hate you for it.
But in terms of weather, Provo has been quite strange lately. It was 65 on Monday. You can’t complain too much about 65 in February. Then Tuesday it rained all day, which I can and did complain about. Today we got back near 60, but then we have snow slated for later this week. What did people do before Weatherbug? An even scarier question is what did we all do before Mapquest? And if you think back really hard you may be able to remember a time when there was no internet and we had to bring pictures to Kinkos to get them blown up into posters, haggling all the while whether or not they were copyrighted. Basically life sucked back then. This obviously has nothing to do with Provo’s unpredictable weather. And on an equally unrelated note: I have a girlfriend now.
Song of the day: “All These Things That I’ve Done” The Killers
But in terms of weather, Provo has been quite strange lately. It was 65 on Monday. You can’t complain too much about 65 in February. Then Tuesday it rained all day, which I can and did complain about. Today we got back near 60, but then we have snow slated for later this week. What did people do before Weatherbug? An even scarier question is what did we all do before Mapquest? And if you think back really hard you may be able to remember a time when there was no internet and we had to bring pictures to Kinkos to get them blown up into posters, haggling all the while whether or not they were copyrighted. Basically life sucked back then. This obviously has nothing to do with Provo’s unpredictable weather. And on an equally unrelated note: I have a girlfriend now.
Song of the day: “All These Things That I’ve Done” The Killers
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