Cokes's WWYD Journal

This is Cokes' Journal for Ed Bellis's What Would You Do.

Day 1
I slept late this morning, missed my first class. No big deal, though. I decided to watch the Price is Right. There was an Asian guy on whose name was Paul Simon, and he won a BRAND NEW CAR!!!, but he didn't get to the showcase showdown. I didn't get to see him spin the wheel though, because, thanks to my proximity to New York, TPiR got pre-empted for five minutes or so because Spitzer announced that he was eventually going to resign and that the Lieutenant Governor was going to take over. Like I give a flying **** about the Governor of New York. I'm from the greater Boston area, and I go to the University of Massachusetts. Go jump in a canyon with your Governor and his steeply priced "Emperor's Club" (what the hell kind of name is that, anyway?) prostitutes, however attractive they may be. Does anyone really care?

But I digress. I hung out, watched a bunch of college basketball, including Syracuse losing to Villanova by nineteen points, and West Virginia beating providence by four or five points. There's really nothing like college basketball in the month of March, anything can happen in any given game. Just this afternoon, in the Women's Big Twelve tournament, a team that went 0-16 in conference beat a team that went 16-0 in conference. If that doesn't exemplify how crazy things can be, I don't know what does.

Anyway, I'm anxiously looking forward to UMass's game tomorrow evening against either Charlotte or Pats_D's Rhode Island Rams. A game against Rhode Island would be the third between our schools this year. UMass has won the first 2. We also beat Charlotte in the only game we played. Luckily for me, the game doesn't start until 9pm. I say luckily, because I have a midterm at 7pm that could last until 9, for math.

What will be hard, though, is this dumb project type deal I have to do for my Inequality and Oppression class (which, ironically enough, is taught by a black woman). I have to find like...10 "key terms" from everything we've read (which is a ton of articles and such). The problem is, the key terms in question can be anything at all, but they have to be relevant. And then I have to like...present them all or something. I don't know exactly. I don't have the paper in front of me. But it's not something I'm looking forward to doing...it could end up being an all night thing, and I value my sleep a lot.

Anyway, I finally got to play some Brawl today. Went over my old roommate's place, played for three and a half hours or so. Maybe more. He only had Snake, Luigi, Ness, Falcon, and Marth unlocked, though, because he's been busy with work and midterms and such. We actually unlocked Luigi and Snake while I was there. My favorite final smash at this point is probably Wario's. Turning into Wario Man may not look very incredible, but I'll be damned if it isn't the most practical, at least of the ones I saw (which was all of the available ones, basically). Snake's and Olimar's were probably number two and number three in terms of usefulness...though Pit 's and Dedede's can be very excellent under the right situations. The most gratifying one, I think, is probably Zelda/Sheik. Incredibly hard to hit with, but man, does your opponent hate you when you do. Most aggravating was probably Volt Tackle. That was incredibly difficult to control, but very powerful. Luigi's is hilarious, but not super useful, especially in one on one situations. Of all the new characters, I liked Lucas and Snake the most. Of the original 12, I probably played as Ness the most, and it's good to see he's not as sucktastic as he was in Melee. Of the Melee newcomers, I would have to give say that Sheik is probably still tops, at least of the few I played, though ICs seem a little bit better now. I feel like a lot of characters ranginess was decreased, though, to a point where, even after not playing Melee for 6 months, I found it obvious. Oh well.

Day 2
Today kinda sucked. A lot. After watching a hilarious episode of Late night with Conan O'Brien, which featured the ever-entertaining Snoop, I more or less crawled into bed and tried to fall asleep, because i have an early class on thursdays, at 9:30. Much to my dismay, I was unable to fall asleep, despite trying every trick in the book to make me tired. Listening to music, reading books, reading an "overrated" topic, everything. I ended up pacing the halls of my dorm building for a while. I eventually fell asleep around 6am.

I then proceeded to sleep through my roommate's alarm, his noisy tendencies, my own alarm, and woke up around 1pm. I watched some decent college basketball games, including the West Virginia upset of UConn in the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden. Later on, I started to prepare for my math midterm, which turned out to be an unnecessary waste of my time, as the test, which started at 7pm, was surprisingly easy. Only one or two questions I didn't know, but since they were multiple choice (who does multiple choice for math, anyway?). I got back, and had another piece of birthday cake to celebrate

Then came the most aggravating part of my day. The UMass-Charlotte basketball game. It started out pretty tight, but UMass charged in the latter part of the first half to take a 36 to 19 lead at the half. We came out flat, and allowed the 49ers to get back into the game. With a little help from the refs, who called ticky-tack fouls on all of our big men, they outrebounded us by twelve for the game. They had thirteen more offensive rebounds than us, which led to about twenty more shots for the 49ers. Absolutely inexcusable, as was our inability to knock down foul shots. I also find it very painful that we got beat by some dumb mother****er named Leemire Goldwire. I mean really, who the hell names their kid that? (and before you ask, yes, he's black). We lost by four points, though it was, for all intents and purposes, actually one point. So now, we Minutemen Faithful are going to be on pins and needles for the entirety of the weekend, waiting for the likely screw job by the selection committee that will result in one team from the Atlantic 10 in the tournament, Xavier.

On the upside, I'm now on break, as I have no classes tomorrow. I can't wait to get out of here, go home, play some Brawl, catch up with friends, and relax for a while. Unfortunately, most of tomorrow is just travel and such, so I won't get a ton done, but it's worth the aggravation to have some time off.

I'm sorta wishing I had a way to fill more space, but today was a rough day, and I really don't care to talk too much about it, mainly because it wasn't very remarkable.

I do sort of miss Guitar Hero, which is weird, because I've gone basically two months without it. I need to beat The Metal on expert. Badly. I have been stuck on it for eons now.

Oh, there was one interesting thing about today, which I will recount here:

As some of you may know, I got to play Brawl for the first time yesterday, at a friend's place. He lacked proper controllers, though, so we had to use Wiimote/Nunchuk. After about 4 hours of playing, I had developed a massive blister on the tip of my left thumb, which made life rather uncomfy, since I'm left handed. By the time I went to bed last night, if I gave my desk lamp a thumbs up, I could see light through the profile of the blister, it was that large.

http://imgcake.com/img/thumb1.jpg http://imgcake.com/img/thumb2.jpg

So just now, I decided to let the fluid out of it, and bandage it. I lacked a needle or anything, so the best I could do was clip the very edge of it with nail clippers. A veritable fountain of fluid came out. The result was what looked like some bizarre...marking on my skin. It was also numb for a few minutes.

http://imgcake.com/my.php?image=thumb4a.jpg

All is good now though. http://imgcake.com/my.php?image=thumb4.jpg

Day 3
Anyway, today was mainly a travel day. Slept until ten thirty, got my stuff packed up and such, and left to catch a 12:35 Peter Pan bus to Boston. I get to the place where they sell the tickets at 12:15 or so, and the line is out the door. I just miss the 12:35 bus, so I'm stuck with a couple dozen others waiting for the 1:35 one, which gets there at 1:20. We all hop onboard, and every single seat is taken by the time we leave. I get into South Station in Boston at about 3:30, grab some pizza, because I was really goddamn hungry.

I go down stairs, hop on the Red Line (that's one of our four subway branches, for those of you who have never had the fortune to visit the greatest city in the world), go a couple stops, transfer onto the Green Line, ride that to North Station, and hop on a train toward home. I get to Salem around 5PM or so, go pick up my brother, we play a little Brawl (good god, he's atrocious, it scares me how gaming-tarded he is sometimes).

We do a little of the Subspace Emissary on Hard, but then I depart to see my high school's senior show. It's a sort of sketch comedy/variety show thing that the senior class puts on each March, and, with the exception of last year, every time I've gone, it's been hilarious. This year was the best I've seen (aside from my classe's, of course). Only one skit didn't go over so hot, which was disappointing, because a friend of mine wrote it, and it was about The Floor is Lava. There were a few musical acts, a group of three kids did Sublime's "Santeria". A girl sang, one guy played guitar, and the other kid beatboxed the rest. It was pretty sweet. Same girl also sang "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" by U2, with the support of a full band. There was also a group that did "Come Together" and "Twist and Shout", both obviously Beatles tunes, and the kid that played guitar for them was pretty damn good. He wrote a solo into Twist and Shout and played it, it was pretty sweet. There were also two guys who did a Dave Matthews song...they weren't great.

Other highlights consisted mainly of lampooning the teachers and staff, the two funniest of which were the result of men in drag (one playing a super butch, super stern administrator, and one playing a tiny, crazy, yet very effeminate Spanish teacher, who looks like Edna from The Incredibles). It was a very enjoyable show from top to bottom.

I got home afterwards, and continued onward in Brawl, partly with my brother. We got through maybe...25% of the Subspace Emisarry before he went to bed, and since then, I've unlocked Snake, Ness, and I'm working on Falco now, actually. I'm thinking I'll go for Captain Falcon next....but I'm not positive. Haven't unlocked any stages or anything yet, though I do want to play on 75m pretty badly for some reason. I also can't wait to dig into the Stage Builder and see what crazy contraptions and such I can come up with.

Unfortunately, I can't stay up all night, really, because I have a breakfast engagement at 10am, and an ultimate frisbee game at noon, then later on, dinner and a concert. Who's playing, you ask? Ted Leo and The Pharmacists, one of, if not my all time favorite, is opening, and the headlining act, as you might suspect in the Boston area this particular weekend, is none other than our very own Dropkick Murphys, who I also love. I'm very excited to see two of my favorites in the same concert. I'm sure much of my post tomorrow night will detail the concert. I can't wait.