Monday, September 11, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. At work it's the first day of orientation. This year we're bringing 123 students in to our PharmD program, and they're all very excited to be here. While not helping out with orientation activities, I have been coding a revised subsite on our staging server. It's pretty basic work—just a lot of content reworking and some restructuring of pages. Evening run: 10 minutes. Dinner at home with Patrick: pizza, coconut shrimp. Just now I sent Patrick an e-mail with the subject line "this answers everything" and a link to sneeper's current blog entry. Yesterday over dinner (or maybe grocery shopping) he mentioned to me that sneeper stopped in at Books, Inc. and I said something like "That doesn't sound like sneeper" and Patrick responded, "He was on his way to The Transfer" and this is where I made a face that was half puzzled and half like I just smelled something bad because The Transfer is a really divey bar at the intersection of Church, Market, and 17th Streets. "Well, that sounds more like him," I said. His blog post today explains all. The co-owner of The Transfer decided to recreate the spirit of a defunct Castro bar called Lalo's. Sneeper ended up visiting and drinking too much and later revisiting the contents of his stomach several times over in his own home. Upon reading this news, I immediately recalled the worst result of a drinking binge to which I had ever been witness (sort of). I was in college at UC Santa Cruz and the drinker lived in the dorm room next door to mine. After a long night of drinking—also tequila—he spent the entire night loudly moaning variations on "Soooomeboooooody, pleeeeeaaaaaase kiiiiiiiiill meeeeeeeee!" and "Kiiiiiiiiiiilllll meeeeeeeeee!" It was rather otherworldly, like being in a film. There would be a pause followed by the sound of vomit and food chunks splattering into the trash can some friends had left with him, and the "Kill me!" moaning would continue. Repeat for hours. I don't know if anyone actually stayed in the room with him, but I can't imagine it would have been bearable either emotionally or olfactorily. In cases like that, stories about people suffocating on their own vomit always worried me. I figured as long as we continued hearing him he was at least alive. Sean Hetherington's first published piece is on freshyarn, and it's really funny and smart and human at the same time. I told him in e-mail a long time ago that he should send his writing to places (even Lodestar, even though I know it's not the kind of writing that Patrick is likely to accept for it). I'm very glad to see that Sean is starting to get published and appreciated for his writing, wit, and clever humor. Go Sean! Chatted with Steve Miles tonight. Spent a couple of very frustrating hours trying to set up the HP LaserJet 1320 and SMC wireless print server (SMCWPS-G). It looks like I might have to return the HP printer because the lights indicate Fatal Error according to their documentation, and I haven't even printed a single page!