I had a wonderful dream last night about being stranded on some island off the coast of Thailand, where I hacked out an impressive little bamboo hut and mini-civilization out of the nearby jungle and spent the days soaking up the sun and the nights staring out at a pristine starry sky (like the one scene in "The Beach"). Of course, we all know that in reality, I wouldn't survive more than two days out in the wild before being eaten by a vicious tiger, wild boar or squirrel (cross reference my run in with the animal-sci-bldg's feral squirrel guardian). But it was a wonderful dream nevertheless...

Well, it's Friday. Today people start flitting ff to all manner of exotic locales for spring break, while I, in the grand tradition established over the past four-and-a-half years, remain in Madison and work my poor panda butt off to make some of those 'dead prez' i be loving so very much. I think I could get by without working so much if I didn't have such expensive tastes (i.e. super cute gadgets, clothes and periodic tickets to japan)...

As I was reminiscing about this, a very shady character sauntered into the computer lab, holding some random band flyer and wearing what I think to be the bottom half of a gray sweat-pant leg on his head (right down to the elastic cuff on the ankle!). He then proceeded to exclaim "COOL!" in a loud "i hope someone's gonna notice and pay attention to me because i'm an lame 42 year old dude and can't get no play any other way" sort of way and proceeds to start swinging one of the optical mice around in the air, pretending to be all tranced out by the glowing red laser. Now normally I'm a pretty relaxed guy (translation: I'm too lazy to get off my ass and say something") but in this case, I clearly felt that some John Woo was in short order. However, since Bill had left by now, i restrained the urge to go "code tarter sauce" as John would say, straight off, and instead in my most voicemail-announcement like voice inquired "Can I help you sir?".

"Naw man, just checkin' shit out, ya know what I'm saying dawg?" came the cross-culturally-confused reply (this was a very very white dude by the way). Since he had stopped swinging the mouse around when he was talking to me, I decided to leave things at that, as we all need to just check shit out every once and again. So I returned to letting my thoughts wander back to the good old days, until suddenly I became aware of a distinct "click click ...BANG SMACK!" sound penetrating the dimly filtering mush of memories sluicing around in my brain. Peering around my monitor, I found the gentleman repeatedly swinging a mouse around by the cord with his right hand, whilst furiously clicking on another mouse with his left. The banging and smacking came from when he would periodically smack the swinging mouse into a nearby monitor. Deciding that at this point even my own lazy inertia had to be overcome, I cleared my throat: