day six: quack

woah. best roast duck i've ever had in my life.

note to self: when you don't hear the sound of the pouring rain from your room, that does not mean it's not raining.

the one thing i've always thought weird is the rice they give out at village wok. it's always so dry, like a day old rice from the fridge. but today i figured out why. you're not supposed to eat the rice by itself; you're supposed to put some of the sauce and seasoning from the entrees onto it. for some reason the duck seasoning today revived the rice and made it taste super good. now i can sleep with a full stomach.

garnet crow's [CALL MY NAME] is project arms' 2nd ending theme. that's interesting.

so this is a working person's life. you go to work, you come home, you have nothing to do. i guess that's why sometimes people go to work and never come home. i guess i should read for grinstein's project, but then that would make me a nerd. not that i'm not already one.

ah, houshin engi. that can be my last resort.

david called today and told me the funniest thing i've heard since i got here. apparently sam gave his apartment key to jim, who was supposed to make a duplicate. but both are lazy bastards, so they've been postponing making one. well, now the key is lost. there are three people who own a key to the apartment: david, sam, and myself. i am in minnesota, there is no way i'm going back to san diego just to open the door for sam. so sam and jim's last hope is david. but guess where david is?

san fransisco.

congratulations, sam. you've just managed to screw yourself over again.

come to think of it, sam has probably gotten the world record for the number of screwing oneself over unintentionally. sam is like the living proof of mark twain's no good deed goes unpunished. i bet our dear mr. twain is laughing his ass off at sam right now from his grave.

sam, i don't think you can read this since you probably left your laptop inside the apartment, but remember: always know where your towel is.

let's see what the guide has to say about a towel:

a towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker (or a locked out college student) can have. partly it has great practical value. you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of jaglan beta (or sleeping in the nearest park bench); you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of santraginus v, inhaling the heavy sea vapors (or if you decide to sleep on the grass; careful with the poo); you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of kakrafoon (which is what you'll be doing tonight, although not as exotic); use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy river moth (read: sewer); wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat (read: bumfight); wrap it around your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the ravenous bugblatter beast of traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, i t assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you-daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough (watch for the water sprinklers).

more importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. for some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit, etc., etc. furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost." what the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length adn breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

this post is for you, sam. enjoy the moonlight.