Misdirection, Playing everyone everywhich way, PennTV Returns, Harvard by the Balls, RISD Parties, Egyptology Help, 99 Problems, Midnight Blogging, the Journalist Triumphant

I'd start at the beginning if I could but there is nothing as accurate or imperfect as a beginning, and struggling to find one, I begin where I can.

You never know where it is that life will catch up you, or where the paths that you've worn in impropriety will cross again the path of your life as it is. In short, I mean that it is always fun, nostalgic, exciting, and entertaining to note that you were in the very space you suddenly are, for an event of altogether different substance. Difficult moments are contrasted with beautiful ones.

I am crossing Thayer at Soldier's Arch and realizing simultaneously that my last crossing was 11 hours before with a beautiful Egyptology student. It was 3:30 in the morning then, the fabric of imagination and enchantment close about my eyes and mind like the curtains closed around an excited soul.

There is no saving my current position: I am back in that most nightmarish of realities which is chiefly the attempt to program some java in the heart of the Sun Lab.

A week ago, I was coming off a weekend of the most joyful impropriety. Taking up the opportunity to follow up a project of my own devising, I found a camera from Media Services in the Sci Li with 2 minutes to spare on a chilling Saturday afternoon. I went over to Pembroke and woke up Sky. He was passed out on his bed from pushing the partying to dawn.

I collected Faust and recruited Blessing for the occassion. There was to be no going back or wimping out. Our committment to a road trip would have to be final.

Armed with a CVS bag of nuclear holocaust survival food, we traveled to Boston in Sky's rumble box Subaru. Even putting on the E-break made the car sound like it was taking a turn at Le Mans.

On the way up, we plotted angles, techniques and clever ways of trapping Harvard students into the same ficition that had made our first PennTV expose so popular with Ivy League bloggers. For all we knew, fame and notoriety had already exposed to the entirety of the Ivy League. Arriving at Harvard, we would surely be either welcomed as heroes and thrown virgins to entertain ourselves, or shunned and rode out of town- tarred and feathered- on a rail.

No such fate awaited us. After a delicious meal at Bartleby's- that most cherished and iconic of eating establishments- we made a go on Harvard Yard. We found suicidal first-year girls and pretentious Stanford Anthropology Grad students. They were neither as smart as we assumed nor as cool. Tepid answers exposed either weak personalities on camera or weak shit coming out of the Harvard social scene. Clearly, we would need to push things further.

We went for coffee to take refuge from the impossible cold. Blessing bore our overt masogynism tirelessly and was unfailable in her ability to solicit subjects for our all-out documentation of Harvard loserism.

Sky maintained a personality of excellent charm and wit. He smiled when things got awkward and comforted people that this was not a scam (it is, incidentally, a scam). By the time we discovered some absolute iconic Tuxedo-Dinner Dress hilarity at Lowell House, we were all set for a full exposure of Harvard's lameness. A girl pointed out that Sky's fly was unzipped, that women were subverted and forced to be submissive by Harvard's male-driven social scene, and stood speechless when Faust hit her with an unexpected blast of Brunonia's most potent feminist propaganda.

By 12:00- I was at Sigma Chi dancing with women of questionable moral values and dodging a stalker under the skillful guidance of Nick G. I was asked repeatedly about pledging and promised Godfrey that I would consider it if he did. I toasted to the evening and the soapy snow falling outside the beautifully lit House as I slid home for bed. Everything in the world was amazing- I was guiding the GuerillaJournalism project and loving it, I was hopeful for a girl I knew, and I was ready to help Sebas become an MCM god. Sky was busy becoming an internet icon under the guise of a Penn student.

and I was drunk- at least, a little bit.

The Osiris Project

Ingredients:

1 Medium Bottle of Jagermeister
4 Cans of Red Bull
As much Marijuana as you can find

Only once I came down from the all-out destruction of the Osiris Project did I realize what it should be called or what infernal combination of chemicals had made possible its impressive potency. The room was strewn with empty cans of Red Bull and the air smelled slightly of Marijuana. Some strange lamp was hanging from the sprinkler system in a contortion so bizarre even Hunter S. Thompson would have been skeptical of its reality.

When I got back from more well-wasted hours in the Sun Lab, I found the room occupied by Sky Sky, Fasut and the Day Warrior. They were watching the Animatrix and tripping balls. Faust screamed occassionally at the anime-rendered depiction of the mechanization of man. Sky looked at me and gestured to a bottle of Jager that I had requested. I smiled, opened the bag, and pulled out a package of four cans of Red Bull.

"Jager bombs." I said.

He nodded knowlingly.

We did two Jager Bombs apiece and then smoked two bowls. The lights began to flicker, dim, and recite e.e.cummings to my twisted mind. I took another shot of Jager and hit another bowl. I did again. We matched rounds of shots of Jager with resin hits and small bowls. In a half hour, time became as lucid and dissolved as Dali portrait. I was tripping hard on the floor mapping out the nerve endings in my brain like they were christmas lights hung lovingly on a tree. They twinkeld, blinked, and recited Ginssberg in my self-imposed silence.

Suddenly, I leapt up and turned off the lights. I put on Trance and set the iTunes visualizer to display pure energy. We spaced out to Apple illustrations or music so profound that I felt my soul slipping away to follow it into the mountain.

I cut lose. I danced for an uncertain amount of time before finally collapsing on the floor. My body was cut into a hundred pieces. Thrown around the world. and then, slowly, reconstructed. I was ferried across the river of the dead and put back together again. I was resurrected and revived.

I was at the table at Bartleby's about to expose the fact that a Harvard student would never do something like I did the night before when it became clear what the process needed to be named.

"Dude" I said suddenly, "let's call that shit we did last night the Osiris Project."

A few days later, while pulling three nights of all-nighters to finish our MCM project, I suggested the title again as a name for our revamped iTunes visualizer. Seb and Sky agreed. We went ahead with three nights and no days of endless programming and MCMing. We built a site, a poster, a statement and a program that matched tagged photos from the internet to song lyrics. We re-invented the medium of the Visualizer and then crashed hard.

We were cut into pieces with lethary, recollected, reborn, and reignited.

We were Osiris.

Blogging, Misdirection, IvyGate

and so it is that my life catches up with me again and I remember all that I must accomplish before the curtain comes crashing down at the end of the semester. One thing is certain: I passed MC 75 with Tribe, and additionally managed to procure a position as TA for next semester's section.

As for my other classes, I have an English Paper to write on Walter Benjamin (aka my hero) Roland Barthes (aka would marry this dude if he was still alive) or Michelle Citron (the things that I would do to her...) and a History Final next week. Just for fun, I have to make a Paint program for CS 15- and if I can survive that- a life worth living somewhere in January.

Recently, I have been enjoying playing the BDH, IvyGateBlog.Com, and my PennTV project all against each other. I write for one about another, blog for IvyGate while laughing that they include my PennTV videos and spending time that should be doing work, writing this post or editting the footage that burns Harvard on YouTube.

Life can have it however it wants it. It has every part of me that I didn't give to a beautiful Egyptology student in the MCM. I will laugh and cry myself through finals. I don't want to go home. To much has happened here. When IvyGate gets a second dose of PennTV it also manages to recieve a post on the lyrical genius of Brown's Pirate Acapella.

I wish there were an easier way to pass CS.

I better go.