need water...can't even type capital letterrrrrrrrrrgh

June 17, 2006

That is what it would have been like if I'd had a computer with me during my race today.  As it was, my near death dragged out over an agonizing ten miles that wasn't so much the Moon Pie 10-mile race as it was Climbing Mount Bell Buckle. 
The course was described as "rolling hills", which I thought meant gently rolling hills.  It turns out the people who wrote the course description would cheerfully use the words "rolling hills" to describe the Himalayas.  My goal before the race was to average lower than 7 minutes per mile.  I managed that feat for a grand total of zero of the miles, with my first mile being a 7:02 and all subsequent miles being slower.  I revised this goal during the race, first to averaging less than 7 and a half minutes per mile, then to not leaving my fetid corpse out on the course for the other runners to spit on as they passed.  I experienced slow, painful death for the entire second half of the race and finally finished in 1:16:35.  However, the day was not yet done.  I drank two Sun Drops and ate a sausage biscuit, a popsicle, and a chocolate chip cookie, making that by far my most unhealthy post-race meal ever, totally wiping out the previous record - a KFC bucket of pocorn chicken.  Furthermore, I finally got my Freecell win percentage up over 50%.  All in all, not a bad day.

XOxoXoOxXOxX

The Avenging Avenger of Vengeance and His Trusty Sidekick, Tim

June 16, 2006I went paintballing yesterday with my youth group and had a blast.  That's me in the title and Tim was my rental gun.  I named Tim after the wizard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who blows things up and at one point turns a stick into a flamethrower for no apparent reason.  However, Tim caused much less destruction than I had anticipated, and the first few games ended with me getting shot without ever, technically, shooting anything other than random objects.  During about the fourth game (paintball related neck injuries prevented me from keeping count accurately), I got a wide open look at Courtney Walkup.  Being the chivalrous gentleman that I am, I hesitated for a full three nanoseconds before opening fire and scoring my first hit.  Tim wreaked some more havoc during a game where the players could regenerate, but unfortunately I mistook five of the best enemy players for persons on my team, resulting in a large amount of what can only be described as "pain".  Tim shortly thereafter ran out of ammunition, and I ended the game in disgrace.  Tim and I held our own and got a couple more hits, but nothing much of note happened until the last game.  The plan for the last game was to just play until we all ran out of paintballs.  Fortunately, Tim and I had recently stocked up, so I decided to go up in a tower and shoot like a maniac and forget about hiding since getting hit wouldn't put me out.  There were a lot of people in a building across from me on both stories, but I could see Courtney really well through the bottom right window.  I took a moment to reflect upon the fact that since her brother is an excellent paintball player and had been doing his best to shoot her as much as possible, and I had already shot her once, plus this was just a game to get rid of excess paintballs, so there was really no need for me to shoot her again.  Instead, I decided to try and cheer her up with my Rambo impression, during which I, totally accidentally, shot her twice.  Then I was on a roll and shot one of the snipers on the other roof while his shots whizzed harmlessly by me, just standing there.  I also shot Buck in the bottom left window, and he decided to remedy his poor position by moving a good fifteen feet back from the window opening.  This set the stage for Tim's finest hour.  I squared up, took careful aim, and shot just to the left of the window.  In order to be symmetric, I  placed my next shot just to the right of the window.  My third shot sailed straight through the center of the window, flew all the way back, and hit Buck square in the leg.  The beauty of that sight was at least three times that of the Sistine Chapel, and I firmly believe that if I had a video of that shot it would get placed in the Louvre Museum.  After that most everyone ran out of paintballs and Tim and I just reveled in the glory until the end.  You have probably guessed that since the last game was the only game in which getting shot would not have negatively affected me at all, it was also the only game in which I did not get shot.  But that's okay.  Unlike most sports legends, Tim and I retired at the top of our game.  We really are the greatest heroes in history.

Part A of the Master Plan

May 30, 2006I have decided to use my newly acquired funding to purchase a laptop.  I realized I needed one after noticing that in the various movie scenes where the enemy base must be infiltrated, the lovable, comic relief computer hacker never uses a desktop.  In Independence Day, I believe a laptop is actually used to take down the alien mothership.  I cannot think of even one example of a desktop computer performing so heroically.  I asked myself:  self, what if in the course of your religious studies at Belmont you were called to, for example, hack into Hell's computer system (of course Hell uses computers; what could cause more anguish than a hard drive crash?) to find out what Satan and his lackeys are up to?  The only answer I had to that question was that I must acquire a laptop.  The laptop must be Windows-compatible because Hell would naturally choose Windows as its operating system.  So, which laptop would be suited best to my plans?

Hunter

May 26, 2006

Hunter is a big disappointment to his mother.

EDIT:  For those of you who weren't watching Phusebox just waiting for me to update during the appropriate half hour, Hunter got on my computer and posted under my name that I had an addiction to eating pantaloons, unfortunately misread as platoons.  Partially as retaliation and partially just because I didn't have anything interesting to post, I edited it to be about Hunter disappointing his mother.

I'm offically graduated...

May 20, 2006I know you can't put a price on the love of your family, but it turns out that if you tried to estimate that with graduation gifts the amount would be:  a lot of money.  Quite apart from not being broke anymore, I can now afford that troupe of breakdancing lemurs I've wanted for so long.  In addition to suddenly becoming so wealthy that I plan to finance a panda smuggling operation (buy our stock, we're a sure bet to skyrocket), I also became one of the select few valedictorians to utilize a Johnny Cash quote in their speeches (with the voice imitation, too).  I passed the 2,487 hours that it took to hand out all the diplomas (1 graduation hour = 2,000 normal hours) yelling amusing comments at everyone walking across the stage since I was on the front row up there.  Brian betrayed the school the instant he received his diploma, and is probably plotting a hostile takeover as I type.  Alex Pilote got a new nickname - "ham salad" - which I did not hesitate to yell at him no less than three times.  I gave many post-graduation goodbyes and hugs, the most ironic being Dana (because we're mortal enemies) and Lana (because she is so tall I actually hugged her ankle).  I then rewarded my family for their extraordinary generosity by having Hunter over during the post-graduation party, where he was of course polite, quiet, and subdued (if you did not detect the lies in that sentence, either you don't know Hunter or your IQ is probably in the single digits).  Then my youth minister, David, swung by with his family, and I owned up with his son on Mario Kart (we went 1-0).  The lack of AP Physics and AP English is something too beautiful to put into words, but if anyone were to try to express this feeling, it would probably come out sounding a lot like "Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles.