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We have a couple of long-focal-distance microscopes in our lab that I used on my master’s research; they’re handy for taking hi-mag images and measurements of test specimens that you can’t get up close and personal with using the standard traveling microscopes. The specimens I was testing were being inductively heated with basically a big magnetic coil up to a temperature of 1400F. Not only could you not lean over and stare at them without baking your face nicely, but the rapidly oscillating magnetic field that was heating up the metallic specimen by exciting its electrons would also do the same to, you know, your blood. And that’s just freaky. The tingle means you’re dying!

But that’s not important right now. What is important is that after a few years of sitting idle in dark corners of our lab, someone wants to use them again, and I’m the only person that remembers how to get them working again. I had to go around the corner to a part of the lab we use even less than these microscopes to find the little computer stand that has the control system for the microscopes on it. When I was piling all the cables back onto the various shelves so I could push the little castor-wheeled contraption down the hall, I managed to knock a CD-ROM out of some crevice somewhere.

I opened it up to discover the CD of personal effects I had burned off my old work computer before I left Honeywell in Phoenix, and that I hadn’t seen in about six years.

Among those personal effects are a bunch of photographs that I had made color photocopies of, and then scanned onto the computer prior to cutting the copies up for a scrapbook I made my grandfather one Christmas. You know, old photographs. Some really old photographs, dating back into the 1900s, I think. Yes, the photocopies live on in that scrapbook somewhere, but I had always wanted to compile them digitally someday. Now I have another distraction on my plate.

That’s li’l ol’ me and my Granny back in ‘74. Dig those cabinets. Dig that dress.

There’s Granny and Grandpa in Spain the year before, and I’m pretty sure my cousin Darcy. (If it’s one of my cousins, that’s her, she’s our only girl. And technically, I think that’s either as they were leaving for Spain or just getting back from there; that sure looks an awful lot like their old front door on 53rd Court, which would also explain the presence of my cousin.) Grandpa was always kinda goofy like that, at least, once he was a grandpa. I hear he could be a pretty stern father on occasion, but being a grandpa seems to soften people up a lot, don’t ya think?

I really miss them sometimes. I’m really glad I had to dig through that hole of a lab.

I have this problem with anticlimax.

Maybe it’s just a biological hangover that comes from two days of adrenaline, but I’m pretty sure it’s mostly psychological. I got the same way after weekend trips to the weddings of my college friends: I always hated the Sunday mornings. Friday night and Saturday were just non-stop upbeat fun, reuniting with old friends, making new memories, opening a new chapter of life for at least two of them (who knows what else happened in those hotels), and then…Sunday morning, there were the chance encounters at breakfast, hasty checkouts through clouds of hangover to catch a mid-day flight, rushed and unceremonious goodbyes, and plenty of invisible early departures that didn’t even garner a hug. Those Sunday let-downs always made me queasy and mopey.

Wandering around Charleston on Tuesday looking for a WiFi cafe and comparing my immediate past to my near-term future was little different, and that emotional concussion combined with trying to spool back up and remember what the hell it is I do here in my lab both contributed to the delay in this recap — and will surely mute the representation of what it was actually like.

A big part of the bummer has to come from the fact that I just flubbed it. Looking back on what the hell it was I actually accomplished with the trip, I have to say, not much. This was my first trip that I didn’t actually get to talk to Joe Biden, although more quality time with some of the staff was nice; I didn’t have either the time or the chutzpah to acquire the kind of celebrity video footage I might have hoped for; and I certainly didn’t get noticed by anyone in particular, despite what I thought was a pretty novel mobile-streaming addition to an already webbed-out event. I probably would have come to this conclusion on my own, but it was hastened by the fact that immediately upon waking — facing an ordinary Tuesday as once again a mere mortal, in a strange hotel room, with a bit of a hangover, TV beaming the face of a much more celebrate political vlogger right back in my nameless mug — a Twitter tweet thrust me toward a lackluster explanation of my general failure as citizen-journalist (though I was apparently supposed to read it as a compliment rather than coming out with guns blazing as I did).

But hey, I did get to see the inside of a spin room, interview two major CNN anchors, get more footage of my candidate, meet some awesome Charlestonians, and drink a few beers on Google’s tab. Not bad for a road trip.

Sunday night, my friend Sarah gave me the nickel tour of her favorite drinking establishments: a quality Irish pub in North Chucktown, Madra Rua, and a total dive-bar by the Citadel named Moe’s Crosstown Tavern. I talked a little shop with guys from the Biden campaign there before enjoying an Irish Car Bomb at a Polish bar and turning in for the night.

And right there might have been the crux of my dilemma: I think I fumbled the job of citizen journalism because I was always also trying to think like a Biden volunteer. Sunday night we divvied up who would be where videotaping what, and keeping a campaign itinerary in mind significantly hampered my ability to be an equal-opportunity in-your-face smartass with a camcorder. Once the debate was over I had one eye ever on the door waiting for Biden to come in so I never coughed up the chutzpah to go talk to the tall redhead we both apparently like best about Kucinich. I wasn’t interested enough in the “top tier” candidates’ focus-grouped positions to muscle my way through crowds just to hear from their surrogates. And I didn’t have time to wait for Chris Dodd. Conversely, all weekend I had one eye looking for generally applicable and amusing footage, and thus wasn’t focused enough to go up to the people we encountered and ask them what they thought of my guy. I tried to have it both ways, and shined at neither. Alas.

Outside the spin room, during the debate itself, the press hall was a rather dull experience. I sent an email out to a number of vloggers that I thought might be in attendance to see if they wanted to join me on live-stream for a little running color commentary, but I only heard back from James Kotecki, who could only reply vaguely and apologetically that he had no idea where he’d be or what he’d be doing — which I now know was the result of a gag order from YouTube to keep their importation of a handful of “top tier” political YouTubers a surprise. All those kids spent their time in the debate itself and not lingering in the press hall, and the other bloggers in the Yellow Room with me were pretty much quietly tapping away on their laptops, quite uninterested in any snark from the Peanut Gallery. (Oddly enough it was the Republican sitting next to me and the as-yet-unidentified older guy with big hair behidn me who were most inclined to contribute anything to the webcam.) I’m wholly unsurprised at this point by the lack of any reply from Jeff Jarvis, who doesn’t seem to feel the same need to engage in dialog that he expects from presidential candidates; and I don’t know what happened to the guy from TechPresident who never claimed his seat.

I was largely too busy writing, keeping up with the chat room, or tweaking the video feed settings to pay close attention to the debate, but I was generally unimpressed with the new format. It seemed like the same ol’ same ol’, just asked by a few plebeians who had been allowed into the Citadel by CNN’s big screen. The lukewarm response in my media room suggested the same general impression. And plenty of other bloggers have already pontificated on the subject, so I’ll leave it at that: color me unimpressed.

The evening’s campaign activities weren’t quite as fun as the daytime ones: Biden gave a very short (I mean shorter than some of his debate answers) speech for the firefighters’ benefit at the SCDP party on campus, and then we rushed over to the Courtyard by Marriott for a campaign after-party. That was basically face-time and signatures for the South Carolina volunteers, prefaced with stump speech material that I have already learned by heart because I like the guy for a reason: I know what he stands for and I like it. It wasn’t too long there before my unaffiliated citizen journalist side began to rear its head again and tap its imaginary wristwatch to remind me to get a-movin’ to the Google party downtown.

By contrast, Monday morning had a thoroughly informative press conference in a park complete with gigantic million-dollar Tonka toys — the new MRAP vehicles Biden has been pushing for — and some flesh-pressing with higher-up campaign staffers that I hope will be able to help me with a Biden event for the Young Dems of Atlanta. Then there was a trolley-ride through town to my favorite kind of destination — a pub — for some schmoozing with local IBEW types. I felt compelled to patronize the establishment for their troubles as they were swarmed with media of all types, and I barely had time to swill most of my Guinness before we walked up the street to another park for a lemon ice. I was walking backwards filming the Biden entourage when I realized that there was some more hubbub behind me, because lo! and behold, John Edwards wanted some photos at that particlar fountain, too. The two campaigns stayed on opposite sides of the fountain for a while, with the Biden side being louder and much more decorated (I think Edwards blew his sign load on the absolute carpet bombing of a park in front of the Citadel the afternoon before), before two rivals shook hands in advance of the competition.

The next few hours before game time were just a blur of schedule coordination, ticket pickup, wristband re-engineering, and shopping for liquor and flowers; not too much to recount there. And the Google-hosted after-party, well, that’ll earn its own video post later, I suppose.

So yeah, that’s that. And I’ve noticed lately that apparently some bloggers actually get financial support to go and bring back tribal knowledge for the community, so if you liked watching the webcam’s live-stream from the spin room (or its archived recording), feel free to put something in the tip jar to offset the kind of gas and hotel money an unemployed graduate student ain’t got lying around; I am happy, of course, to teach you what I learned about pulling such things off technologically. I know the audio quality left something to be desired — I had the levels set way too high so the general cacophony of the spin room created significant distortion in the sound — but that’s one of the lessons learned from this experimental endeavor. And frankly, there were enough of you watching who knew how to hail by via text message as I frequently requested, but no one let me know (complaining the next morning is easier), so you get out what you put in. Support blog research, and I will come share the brains!

Goodnight, Charleston. I hope to see you again soon.

Interesting and Fun-to-Know Fact About Me #47: I spent the first two decades of my life almost exclusively going by the nickname “Chip.” Surprisingly enough, I still have people who I consider pretty good friends look around my apartment and suddenly blurt out, “Who the hell is ‘Chip’ and why do you have a poster signed by Dave Barry to him?” So I might as well get it overwith for the rest of you: yes, they call me Chip at home; I’m a Jr., and that’s apparently what you can do with that, so go on, get it out of your system and let’s get back to behaving like adults. Done?

I’m not really sure when I decided to eschew the campy nickname for my more formal legal name — okay, that’s a lie, I know exactly which straw broke that camel’s back, but I’m not sharing the story right now. I did, however, gradually deprecate its use like an obsolete piece of HTML, primarily by no longer correcting new professors on the first day of class when they went through roll call and asked for corrections and nicknames. As I transitioned from the class of ‘96 to ‘97 in the Aerospace program (thanks to the five-year liberal arts double major), most of my new not-quite-my-friend classmates knew me only as the professors knew me — Shelby — and I myself got used to my new-old grown-up name.

The final nail in the coffin for the notion of ever going through life under a diminutive nickname was when my new department receptionist for my first Real Job asked me exactly how I wanted my business cards: did I want the Jr. on there, or a nickname, or what? I thought about the work ahead of me and decided that the last thing I felt should be associated with advanced turbomachinery that might one day fly on something as formidable as a Comanche or a
UCAV is the signature of a guy named Chip. Golf, tennis, or surfing lessons? Go see Chip. Ceramic turbine blades or forward-swept shrouded fans? Call Shelby. Simple as that.

Now, as I steer my career toward the political, I keep seeing the best and final reason to drop the whole nickname nonsense once you pull the punk rock posters off your wall.

Randy “Duke” Cunningham sentenced to eight years for bribery and fraud.

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on trial for obstruction of justice during CIA leak investigation.

Ex-CIA No. 3 Kyle “Dusty” Foggo indicted in corruption inquiry

I don’t know what the hell is wrong with all of these people, but there’s something about their douchey nicknames that brings extra douche to their criminal douchebaggery. If I get caught up in some crapstorm someday, I’m going down with my proud, legal name, no-middle-name and all.

My senior year of high school, every runner in Miami was chasing after this guy named Luiz Prestes. Luiz was an oddly shaped little fellow — kind of short, vaguely trapezoidal like a gymnast or something — who quickly pulled so far away from the rest of us we couldn’t even see his bright right Miami Beach uniform. He turned out sub-15:00 performances effortlessly, and by the time the Dade County championship race came around, he got so tired of beating all our asses that he frequently left town in search of better, national-caliber competition, leaving the rest of us mere mortals to compete for a somewhat undermined local title.

And by the time we got to the final mile of that county race, Roy Vargas of Southridge candidly wheezed to my coach as he passed him, “He’s got me, coach.” Twenty yards ahead of me, Coach Pietsch’s eyes bugged out, magnified by his thick glasses, and he started jumping up and down, pointing wildly at the guy who was about to give up the lead, hissing, “He says you’ve got him!” I had no semblance of a “kick” whatsoever, and anyone I hadn’t broken by the third mile was likely to whoosh past me in the final hundred yards; but I had also practiced this course enough times to know where the harder patches of packed sand were in the killer beach-like valley of death, just four hundred yards before the finish. I got him.

As I spoke to Miami Herald sports reporter Mike Phillips afterwards, I had a number of quotable gems for him. I told him very honestly what we all knew: that I wasn’t really the county champion, because there was no way any of us could ever beat Prestes in a fair meet. “I’m just grateful to him for giving the rest of us a chance at the trophy,” I said. I also confided that this was an fantastic way to end a high school athletic career that almost got replaced by joining the golf team, of all things, after a lackluster first year on JV.

And then, when I thought the interview was basically over, I casually mentioned that I had to rush home and hit the books, because all of my teachers had really piled on the assignments during this critical cross-country week. “This’ll show ‘em,” I joked, “I oughta bring them the trophy and be like, ‘See what I did in spite of your papers? Here, this one’s for you.’” I also mentioned that I wished my dad wasn’t in the middle of a case so he could have seen the win in person.

“I won this race for my teachers and for my father,” was how the quote came out in the paper. I got roughly 2.5 metric tons of shit for it on campus the next day. Dork factor 9.7.

Thursday before last, an AJC reporter came out to the Young Democrats of Atlanta happy hour, and spent about three hours there talking at length to several of our officers and one lucky ex-officer, yours truly. He killed almost half an hour with me, long past the point when I had told him everything he needed to know about our podcast, the almost-was relationship with Air Atlanta, the different categories of internet video we put up, and where we were going with all this web 2.0 crap. When he asked how it felt to be so solidly the minority party in this red state of ours, I told him I actually relished the role of the underdog and ended up comparing it in quite esoteric terms to Knute Rockne’s development of the Fighting Irish into the underdog heroes of the Catholic working class.

It turns out this reporter was more interested in what I was drinking. As I took a sip of my Guinness to wet my throat in the middle of the interview, his eyes bugged out like Coach Pietsch’s: “What is THAT?” You’d think he’d never seen a stout before, and I really think he hadn’t, strangely enough for a guy named Duffy. “It’s so DARK!” I told him it was just a Guinness, and it was hard not to take a liking to if you’ve ever been to Ireland.

One week later, Guinness and Ireland were my primary defining characteristics:

The video was the creation of Shelby Highsmith, 32, a graduate student at Georgia Tech. He’s a Notre Dame University alum who’s backpacked in Ireland, drinks Guinness and says about recruiting Young Dems, “We just need to identify those Knute Rocknes” — passionate people who won’t accept defeat.

Aside from its profound irrelevance, I’m not sure whether he was painting me as a dark beer-swilling Irishman (despite my English name and German-Polish blood), or an effete fancy beer-drinking liberal elitist. And if you didn’t already know this, saying we’re from “Notre Dame University” is like calling us the “Democrat Party.” It’s just wrong, and it gets under our skin.

The reporter also consulted the state chairman of the Young Republicans, who proceeded to mislead the crap out of him to try and make us look bad; I called him on his crap over here.

Another one of our officers also learned a tough lesson about the press this week: you have to say “off the record” before you say something off the record; an afterthought of “don’t print that” doesn’t work.

Manica calls the state’s Republican leadership “the Christian supremacist Taliban.”

Sure enough, that was the sound bite I heard about at the office. Oh well; two steps forward, one step back.

What ever happened to time capsules, anyway? I mean, besides the obvious fact that they are somewhere in the ground, rusting, rotting, and being churned up by backhoes in the wake of so many condominium developments. (I said backhoes.) I seem to remember a period of my youth in which “time capsule” was quite a regular figure of speech, probably because it was quite a regular activity. Was it just around years that ended in zero? Was it an eighties thing? Was it just something that grade school classes did as a fun arts ‘n’ crafts project? ‘Cause if that’s the case, that’s a really stupid class project, considering I, one of the smarter ones I dare say, would have no flippin’ idea where we buried any of that shit, or even what we buried. Tip #1: don’t engage in projects requiring long-term memory recall from 8-year-olds.

What is with this notion, anyway, that you can bury some objects in the ground in some vain attempt to hold onto a moment forever? Not that it’s a bad one — I certainly appreciate the intent. But sometimes you have to dig things up to make a memory stick around.

Seniors at my high school were not required to take a final exam in any class in which they had a B, I believe, so what with the study days and the dead week and all that, the last day of classes for seniors was a good few weeks earlier than it was for the rest of the students. Like many other arbitrarily assigned special occasions during one’s senior year, this day warranted extreme celebration. My friends and I gathered at one of our favorite party spots: the beachfront apartment building on Key Biscayne where one of our classmates’ parents pretty much let us run amok whenever we wanted if only by virtue of the fact that it’s hard to keep tabs on drunk high schoolers from 11 stories up. No matter what the weather in general was, the wind on this side of the Key was always whipping up with some vitality, carrying the heavy scent of ocean and damp sand into your nose at all times. There was drinking and dancing and a bonfire and general carrying-on, as would be expected at the end of one’s secondary school obligations, and as would be expected to eventually draw the attention of the local tight-ass police force.

Intoxicated minors quickly scattered into the darkness up and down the beach from the party, leaving behind only those who deserved to be caught in spite of the fact that they should want most not to be caught, half-baked and too stupid to run in time. Alex and Lambros and I caught our breath near some sea turtle sign or something, still carrying the barely-opened bottle of rank but potent orange-flavored Greek liquor. Once reality caught up with us, we knew we should get back to the building, sober enough to pass muster, to see who might need bailing out later. We didn’t want to return to the scene of the crime carrying the evidence, so I counted out five haphazard paces from the signpost and we buried our liquid treasure under a foot of sand, just in case.

A few weeks later, I’m back on Key Biscayne, having barely survived one of the most seriously boring and unnecessarily sober prom nights of my life. It was not my own senior prom, but that of the girl I was dating at the time from our rival (and my former) prep school. I quickly remembered why I was glad I left, lifeless prison camp that it was. And my girlfriend? A devout Christian teetotaler, whose not-so-Christian friends were still sufficiently enthralled with the single bottle of cheap champagne they had secured for the six of us to leave me high and dry for the duration of the night with nary a blip on the BAL-o-meter. By the time we reached our post-prom destination on the Key, our four limo-mates were perfectly content to sully up the darkness with the sounds of rampant makeoutery, but I was still itching for an adventure I knew I wasn’t going to get in that hotel room to make up for the hours of quiet desperation I’d survived to that point. Taking a walk out toward the beach with my date, I ran into a much livelier friend of mine — another cross-country runner I’d barely managed to stay ahead of all year, but a runner nonetheless that shared our bond of self-torture and general wackiness — who had a definite lead on me in the drinking department and was out angling to pick up the pace.

“Waaai-haaait a second,” I sang as I stopped us all in our tracks, and then I looked up at this small crowd with a devilish grin. “Let’s take a walk down the beach!” We hit the sand and cavorted and stumbled and skipped and trotted down the beach until we hit the well-demarcated breeding ground for shelled reptiles. “Where the hell are we going?” someone who had the tenacity to say “hell” wondered allowed. “This has got to be the one,” quoth I, and I marched my five paces inland from the signpost. When I got down on my knees and started digging, I’m pretty sure I saw them all take a careful step backwards — whether from what I might dig up or just from me, we’ll never know.

Dink! There it was! Dink! Dink! I plucked the bottle of God-knows-what from the sand and jumped to my feet holding our sacred liquor aloft. From the wide eyes of my drinking cohorts, I knew I had just finagled a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes, and I was perfectly happy to be the savior so long as I might be filled with the spirit myself. In the end, it didn’t make an overall lousy prom night all that much more entertaining, but it made sleeping through the sounds of makeoutery more likely, and for that one, brief moment, it made me feel like nobody else in the world.

So that memory was dug up and made actual and is certainly burned into my brain (even if immediately weathered by alcohol), but I have to admit there is something about it that will never be freed from the earth from whence it came. Snapshots of space and time are, like smell, inextricably linked to human memory, and if I were to stand five paces from that sign on the beach on the right kind of night, I would shed fourteen years in a beat of my heart.

And on returning, I might collapse under the weight of remembering all the mundane drudgery that we learn in the years that pass after moments like that one.

To this day, researchers have not been able to pinpoint exactly what it is about the Fall London Program at the University of Notre Dame that increases the risk of mental defect by several orders of magnitude, and without conclusive evidence the university carelessly allows the program to continue unfettered. While many suspect the sudden deprivation of football Saturdays and the subsequent, socially accepted Post-Football Sub-Coital Interhall Macking Racking and Yacking (PFSCIMRY), other factors such as weather, geomagnetic field, and hot foreign accents have not been ruled out. In the meantime, the dark side of Fall “Londomers,” as they are known, is relegated to the soft case files of the rumor mill and the Post Londomer Support Group (PLSG) that has yet to be officially recognized by Campus Ministry. This does not make the human pain and suffering any less real.

To those who suffer the second-hand consequences of the affliction, the symptoms are not at all simply “anecdotal.” The bizarre haircuts, the unforeseen urge to have something pierced or tattooed, the unnatural obsession with hard cider and public transportation, having semi-naked adventures with several of your closest neighbors at once, these are all well-recognized side-effects of the FLP@UND that have destroyed countless lives — well, if not lives, then at least relationships and telephones.

It was Superbowl Sunday, 1996, and my FLP@UND girlfriend and I had just celebrated an anniversary and promptly broken up so she could continue to pretend she was in London by cutting her hair short and hooking up with a guy with a dumber name than mine. There was a party at a mutual friend’s, some kind of an argument, and a heated post-Superbowl fight about who sucked more via telephone. And then, as reality began to trump Londonitis, I was hung up on.

Todd and Kevin were in our room watching the post-game show and gnawing on Summer Sausage as I sat on the floor out in the hallway and stared incredulously at the dead receiver in my hand. Out of nowhere, they heard above the din of the TV a

SMACK-KLANG!!!!

“What was that?”

KERPOW! CRASH-BLANG!!!

“I think it’s the phone.”

FWACK! whoosh-CRACK! KER-PLANG!!!!

The phone sailed back into the room in the terminal phase of a post-kick ballistic trajectory, crashing down square in the middle of the large gray swatch of factory-leftover wall-to-wall carpeting that had been vacated of skanky-70’s-brown couches in anticipation of a Superbowl Party that never happened.

“Correction: that was the phone.”

I walked back into the room and looked down at the sad little mess that was our means of reaching out to the rest of the world. I stooped over, picked up the base with my left hand and with my right put the receiver to my ear as I pressed and released the hook in hopes of regaining a dial tone. Nothing. I looked down at the roommates who stared up at me in anticipatory silence, shrugged, and put the phone base back down on the floor and gently laid the receiver back to rest on the hook. And then, as Todd so eloquently put it,

It was like one of those Wile E. Coyote cartoons — you jumped into the air, and then hovered there for a second, and your body remained still in the air while your legs came down like a jackhammer. It was surreal.

There was one large chunk of green circuit-board left amid the splinters of almond-brown retro phone shell, and Todd picked it up, pinned it to the bulletin board outside our door, and labelled it with a piece of paper that quoted the Beastie Boys, “Phone is ringin’, oh mah gawd.” Father David came in the following evening, having studied the silicon aftermath, and said, “You know, in the grand scheme of post-breakup freakouts I’ve seen in this dorm, if all you do is destroy a plastic phone, I think you’re doing alright.” While comforting, Father David’s words were also enabling, it might be said. That would not be the last phone to die at my hands. Or, you know, feet.

Incidentally, she’s now happily married. I am not. You do the math. Ohmahgawd.

My freshman year of college, I fell for this uniquely insane woman in my philosophy class largely because she could argue like a drunk, angry sonuvabitch and fought with me tooth and nail on everything from Plato’s innate ideas to Kant’s moral philosophy, agreeing with me only on the opinion that everyone else in our reading group was a complete and utter dolt. (Cue the Gilbert Gottfried voice: “Oh there’s a big surprise! I think I’m going to have a heart attack and die because of that surprise.”) But this pale, mousy vixen, on top of being completely mad, had a boyfriend.

And then she didn’t have a boyfriend, or at least not really, well it’s hard to explain, You see we just started dating so quickly after we got here as freshmen and bla bla bla college bla bla bla other people bla bla bla take me to your dance already. And I don’t think that ever ended up meaning I was her boyfriend, but I was tangled up enough in the whole bamboozle to suffer a massive sphincter-clench when her erstwhile and future boyfriend shot me an email inviting me to a party in his dorm a couple weeks later. For some reason, I actually went, even though I could not rule out the possibility that there would be Roofies in my Natty Light and the gang of five suitemates would weigh my body down to the bottom of St. Mary’s lake with chains and dumbbells.

About 9 months later, I was moving into their dorm, having put it at the top of my list of hopeful new homes when the onslaught of female enrollment resulted in the castration of the finest men’s hall on campus and the diaspora of all its noble residents. Over the following two years — during which the erstwhile and future boyfriend became the eventual and erstwhile fiancé — I would live with said boyfriend Kevin and associate suitemate Todd. It couldn’t have happened a better way.

The first couple years after we wandered apart were a bit spotty on the communication. (I say that like we talk on the phone every weekend like girls today, when nothing could be further from the truth. Even the one who’s finally joined the Mac-users community, complete with built-in iSight camera, has yet to successfully negotiate a videochat for a beer, and I haven’t the faintest idea what our lawyer is doing these days.) But in 1999, with one in med school, another in law school, and the third making more money than he could spend in a podunk desert town, we decided a reunion was in order. We convened on the mean streets of Washington, D.C. — okay, technically, Alexandria, VA, though the “mean streets” part is totally accurate, complete with a dead hooker in our motel the month before we got there — and, well, as giddy 25-year-olds are wont to do, drank and cavorted like Prince & the Revolution weren’t kidding, party over oops out of time.

See, looky there: at some point in the adventure, some fine native ladies took us on a 2am tour of Alexandria architecture, indulging us with group photographs in front of million-dollar townhomes that were no wider than a malnourished rock-climber. How many square Todds is your townhome? Oh, only 8.5 upstairs and downstairs, but the back yard is an entire Kevin! There was also something with a motorcycle, an exchange of jewelry, maybe a stripper, lost keys, lesbians in traffic, childbearing Asians, climbing a photolab, many Bloody Marys, and at least one totally unnecessary photograph of someone’s private parts when I left my camera unattended thanks a lot you asshole.

And then it was another four years of bobkes. With the exception of a Thanksgiving dinner in Atlanta (where one set of in-laws lives) after I moved out here for grad school, we returned to our typical Christmas-card-frequency communication (save for when either of them surf on over to this site, which is one of the reasons I started blogging in the first place eight years ago, before I knew we were called something so unsightly as bloggers). Next up: Summer 2003, when both of those bastards got married one weekend right after the other. See, looky there, we even come with our own priest, Father Dave, who has been known to violently overthrow the DJ at Senior Bar after his second pitcher of beer. I know it’s cliché, but you’ve all got those kinds of friends: after untold months of separation and silence, it’s like bang-zoom, pick right up like it was no time at all.

I’m really glad those guys are a lot smarter than they look, too, because what with all the disastrous managerial decisions the Bush administration has made over the years, suddenly “cronyism” has become this big nasty awful bad word. Cronyism. Yeah, it sure don’t sound none too pleasant. But here’s the thing: if my political ambitions, as modest as they are, ever amount to anything, those rapscallions are the first two people I am going to think of if I ever need a legal counsel and a…whatever the hell it is that other one does, something about making sure the International Space Station doesn’t come falling out of the sky (yeah, med school, whatever, and I thought I was the goddamn rocket scientist around here). I’m sorry George W. Bush doesn’t have more competent friends to call upon, for our nation’s sake, but I can’t be 100% critical of this so-called cronyism, because sometimes I think there are just some positions I wouldn’t want to open up to equal opportunity employment, not when it comes to who’s standing right next to me when the fit hits the shan. Some things you just need to know in your gut. So thank God for those goofy so-and-so’s.