I got back from Chicago yesterday (or Sunday), after spending the weekend there. Even though I really didn't have much time, I did manage to pop over to Hyde Park to meet up with one of my soon-to-be roommates, Gary. He's a total geek, it's awesome. If the other two are anything like him, I'm in for a really good year. Unfortunately, I only had about an hour before I had to get back downtown and head for the airport, but we had a good conversation over breakfast anyway. That says something because I don't have good conversations with very many people, and it's one of the reasons I'm going to U of C: I know I can have good conversations with people there. Towards the end, we started talking about girls, inevitably, but then listening to myself, I almost felt like some horny baller from out West. I know those of you in Chico are gasping in horror (or laughing in disbelief), so let me offer you a little conversion table that might help:

	in Chico	at U of C
You're horny if	you haven't had sex in two days.	you think about girls.
You're a baller if	your goal in life is to sleep with as many girls as possible.	you're interested in meeting/dating girls.
You're a pimp if	your best estimate of the number of girls you've slept with is only accurate to the nearest 10^n (where n>2).	you have the guts to ask a girl out.

So as you can see, in Chico, I wasn't even horny because being horny assumes that you actually have a sex life. At Chicago though, I'll be somewhere between a baller and a pimp, and if I live up to my aspirations, I be pimpin' for real G.

Oh, this actually might be a good time to unveil my Scary Old Man Test script I wrote. With this nifty little program, I can easily make sure a potential is old enough to date without rendering myself a "scary old man". Having to check actually might make me a "scary old man", but well, sometimes we just have to pick our poison. Anyway, how it works is, you put in the girl's birth date, and it calculates whether or not the girl is old enough. If she's not, it'll also calculate when she'll become old enough (basically, it's when my age is twice the sum of the difference between our ages and seven years). Unfortunately, PHP's date functions (or perhaps the POSIX functions themselves) choke if the date is beyond 2035, so I know I'm in trouble if it spits out a date in 1905.

At any rate, I was actually in Chicago to attend a wedding. Well, sort of. I was there to see Kathryn, the sister of the groom and one of my best friends (there were two) from high school. Her brother (the groom) was also my brother's best friend from high school, and that completes the loop. Anyway, I had a great time. I actually dressed up (sorry, no photos yet) and, believe it or not, was forced into dancing in public for the first time since... since 8th grade, I think. Well, if you could call Ryo stumbling randomly "dancing", that is. The thought of it still makes me cringe (and it probably has the same effect for the poor souls who had to watch) and it probably will for the rest of my life, but, alas, I seem to be free of symptoms for PTSD.
I also got to see people I hadn't seen in years, and quite frankly, didn't think I'd ever see again. I was very happy to see Danny, who used to bug us in the sound and light booth all the time, and whom I had to kick out all the time (and then do whatever possible to keep him out). I didn't have a problem with letting "unauthorized personnel" in the booth as long as they behaved themselves and didn't interfere, but Danny failed on both counts without exception. One time he lasted for 5 minutes, but then threw M&Ms at us when I commented on how well he was behaving. Anyways, jump forward 5 years (I think), and he's not a little kid any more. He's over 6 feet tall (at least tall enough to make my neck hurt), and furthermore, he's very well behaved and even picked up a crisp British accent. I felt sorry for him because it turned out that his school in England didn't let students do theatre tech, but at least he's learned to calm down, which I think will open up more doors for him than he might know. Of course, I can only be happy for him because I don't know of the horrors he must've gone through to actually learn to behave that well...
Apart from Danny, I also saw a couple of kids that I baby sat a few times back in Germany. I probably would've baby sat them more if I hadn't gotten addicted to a game they had and kept one of 'em up until their parents came home. I don't know if that was the official reason, but I was never invited back after that... It still felt great to seem them all grown up though.
And then there was Katie, a childhood friend of Kathryn's, whom I'd actually met the Summer of '96. I don't think we did much together that summer, and perhaps the only reason I even remember having met her was because she was the first girl I was attracted to after getting out of a traumatic infatuation (and I'm not kidding when I say "traumatic"; it literally changed my personality, and took 4 years before I could think about it without getting depressed). Anyway, we got along for some reason (I think... yay for low esteem) and I'm debating whether I should email her (and we all know how often I even get email addresses).

You know, it just occurred to me that these blog entries are so un-manly (which makes it feminine, I guess), especially that last block of text. If you cut that out, changed around the genders of one or two characters and showed it to people, I'm fairly certain that most of them would assume the author to be female. No wonder everybody thought I was gay. Or maybe I am and I'm in denial. Denial is a scary thing. I could be an alien in denial, a Jesus reincarnate in denial, a genius in denial, a mass murderer in denial, or possibly even dead and in denial. I mean, who can provide empirical evidence for any of these things? Anyway, back to the whole gender-of-the-author question, which actually might be a pretty big gender issue. Feminists (and others) claim that men are the oppressors, which is true, but I think we've just found an example of men oppressing themselves (or ourselves). Machismo is a masculine concept in that it's imposed by men on other men, however, in many respects, it's just as restrictive as male endorsed ideals of femininity. And that makes me wonder. You've got feminists looking out for women, and the gay culture looks out for their own, but who looks out for effeminate men who aren't gay? But then, maybe we don't need anyone to look out for us because we slip under the radar... I mean, after all, nobody's ever gotten eggs thrown at them for writing effeminate posts in their blog. Or I could flip the whole issue on its head and say all men are in denial: they'd write girly posts if they only had the guts to do so. So there.