I picked up a copy of the Improper Bostonian on Friday when we went into the city to meet up with one of the guys we went to Montreal with. For those of you who don't live in Boston or don't read the Improper, it's a bi-weekly free magazine that considers itself the hip guide to what's going on in Boston. Personally, I read it because it amuses me -- specifically, the "Impersonals" section that they have at the back of the magazine.

The Impersonals is a column where people can write in short anonymous messages in the hopes of meeting that certain someone they shared a prolonged eye contact moment with. A typical message might read something like this:

Sunday 1/14 on the Red Line: you were wearing a red shirt and jeans, I was the guy in the A&F sweatshirt. We bumped into each other accidentally when the train suddenly stopped and you said you were sorry and smiled at me. I was so taken by your smile and the way you looked at me. But you got off at the next stop before I could get up enough nerve to ask you out. I was stupid for that, hopefully, you'll read this. --RedLineSmiler@hotmail.com

It's a completely guilty pleasure for me to read these. It's like a short printed version of "Blind Date" or something along those lines. Personally, I can't remember what I was wearing three days ago, let alone three weeks ago. And people are supposed to be able to recall that they bumped into someone on the T or in a club at a concert and respond to this? I can't honestly see anyone ever answering any of these ads, and I wonder what makes people write them in the first place. Is it because that Hollywood has drilled into our heads the need for the Chance Encounter With That Certain Special Someone?

In Stephen Sondheim's musical Company, one of the songs talks about the fact that there are so many people in the city -- the lyrics go "And another hundred people just off of the train/And came off of the bus/And got off of the plane/It's a city of strangers/Some come to work, some to play..." There are so many random people running around any given city at any given time that the chance of The Random Encounter leading to something meaningful that would change your life is a little hard to swallow.

So said the Iraqi soldiers in the film Three Kings after George Clooney and crew busted in on their little underground bunker, and so said I as we sped away from the U.S./Canada border after I was moderately interrogated by the border guards. I didn't think that I was that suspicious looking. But the odd thing is that the guard kept questioning my friend who was driving about me rather than asking me directly. And it wasn't like we were all being targeted, the guard specifically asked "what's the story with your friend in the back there?" and proceeded to grill my friend about me.

Either way, we had a great time. I will invoke the tired old clichés of "discretion is the better part of valor" and "there are some things best left unsaid" to protect the privacy of those involved. I will also say that I think my liver exploded somewhere on Crescent Street in Montreal, as we all drank extremely heavily -- suffice it to say the comment "uhh... you mean to say we've been drinking for 8 1/2 hours straight?" was made on Saturday night.

So. I'm back Stateside, and we now resume our regular programming. Carry on.

I need to get out of this Godforsaken town.

Too many memories. Too many ghosts still walking around here. And I'm scared to death of becoming one of them. Even though I know my stay here will only be a month or so, I saw too many familiar faces when I went tonight with a friend to the town's only bar. I can't get stuck here. I don't want to be like those kids in high school who I knew would never leave. I know it sounds so Hollywood-esque and trite, but I had to be one of those people who left and made something of myself. I knew if I stayed here, all that potential would just go untapped and waste away.

Staying here is proving less relaxing than I had hoped. Old faces and friends now haunt me both while I'm awake and while I'm asleep. Thankfully, I leave for three days in Montreal tomorrow morning, and when I come back, I will begin Phase II of the Great Western Migration with eagerness and vigor. I can't stay here much longer.

Other ways that I've been affected by my loss of high-speed Internet access:
- The microwave takes too long.
- The ice maker doesn't make ice fast enough.
- Hell, some of the clocks still need to be wound every week, what's up with that?
- People actually buy music?

Well, the failed experiment in browser wars has finished. After many months of trying to make Netscape 6 work on a regular basis, its faults just proved too costly for me to continue using it. Memory leaks, frequent crashes and a general blahness are just too much for me to deal with. So, at the recommendation of my local computer guru, I've gone back to Netscape 4.79. Lord help me if I ever find that Internet Explorer is the best thing for me to use -- I know it handles some functions better, but it's just not aesthetically pleasing to me. I'll deal with the consequences of not being able to fulfill certain functions when they come up.

I just got back from seeing The Count of Monte Cristo with my father. 'Twas a great film and Jim Caviezel did an excellent job -- much to my surprise, since I thought his acting in Frequency was mediocre at best (which fit the mediocre-at-best film, I suppose). Dad and I have patched things up, especially since I sat him down and told him that I knew he was freaking out about his upcoming move and having to find a job, but to please realize that I was going through the very same thing he was except that he already had a place to live when he moves and he has a lot more money to play around with than I do, plus I'm working in a much shorter timespan than he is. Once the lightbulb finally went on above his head, things were cool between us.

Pardon me while I get a little Seinfeldian here, but it's always made me kind of grin when I think about the fights that go on simply because of the positioning of the toilet paper. The "over-the-roll/under-the-roll" debate has been going on for ages, and someone will probably still be arguing with someone else about it when the world ends.

Personally, I'm an over-the-roll guy. I was trained that way by my parents and it's just always seemed more convenient, more aesthetically pleasing and easier to find where the roll starts for me that way. I had roommates who were under-the-roll guys, and we used to have subliminally fight about it -- I'd come into the bathroom and find the toilet paper roll switched around, so I'd put it back the way I wanted it. They'd come in and find I'd done that, so they'd reverse it back the way they wanted it. We actually got into a fight about it when one of them saw me going into the bathroom and asked me not to switch the roll, I basically responded, "Look, you guys never pay for toilet paper, I always end up buying it, so I'll put it however I want it."

On a different note, many many many thanks to Meredith, who sent me three über-cool CDs as well as really nice custom-printed labels for them. Thanks, Meredith!

I went to see Black Hawk Down with my dad tonight. The frenetic pace of the film proved its point -- the whole mess was exactly that: a mess, a big bloody hopeless mess.

According to my father, the fact that the director specifically shot the film in such a way that didn't allow for character development or an audience to be able to follow a specific group's activities due to the way everything seemed to happen to everyone at once was due to his desire to shoot more of a semi-documentary than a film. And it served its anti-war purpose.

Unfortunately, I come away with a rather bitter taste in my mouth. Yes, war is hell. Yes, we all hope for world peace. But I seriously doubt that it'll happen anytime in the near future. Humans seem -- by nature -- to be predisposed towards using coveting that which is not theirs and using violence to obtain it. Case in point, our Fearless Leader is gearing up to take on half the world unilaterally in order to rid the world of terrorism by attacking Iran, Iraq and North Korea without support from any other nations. In fact, someone in the administration specifically said that he's planning on doing it regardless of whether we get help from anyone else. Ironic that he claims to be working towards peace by engaging in war.

At least I can find some solace in the fact that Greta Van Susteren's eyelift has gotten as much media attention as our recent Afghan activities. That says things might be returning to normal.

Sign #26 that you have a sinus infection:
That quiet whistling noise you hear is not a sample from the De La Soul CD you're listening to, it's your own breathing because your nose is almost completely clogged up.

Given this rather than the rather unpleasant side effects I experienced earlier this week from the antibiotics I was taking, I'll take this. And I'll spare you the description of the side effects. Suffice to say that my parents both told me I looked very very pale for the better part of a day.

I know you love it when I share these personal details. But at least you'll have some fun when you read my attempts at blogging under the influence of cough syrup with codeine.

I promised myself that I wouldn't dwell much more about this. But it's just gnawing at me.

I really am getting sick of seeing President Moron on television. He just aggravates and annoys and grates on me like you wouldn't believe. I flipped on the TV to kill a few minutes this afternoon and it happened to be on CNN, which was airing his homeland security speech. I literally watched 15 seconds of it, then couldn't watch anymore. When he said something about fighting the Forces of Evil and invoked the phrase "let's roll," I quickly turned to Comedy Central before my brains made my arm grab the nearest hammer and start pounding it into my own skull.

The man's got decent public presence. I'll grant you that. He knows how to read pretty well -- that is, if he's actually reading the words off the TelePrompter, they could've made him memorize his speeches by rote and maybe the TelePrompter operator is just scrolling lyrics to Britney Spears songs. But as soon as he's off that crutch of having his speeches written for him, his whole way of speaking changes. It no longer flows evenly (though his speeches sound very preachy in both vocal intonation and material), questions have to be repeated in order for him to be able to give the people sitting behind the curtain time to come up with a good answer to whisper in his earpiece, and he can't say a few words without sputtering or stuttering or saying "uh" or "um."

Say what you will about Bill Clinton. His personal character flaw of not being able to keep his fly zipped was his biggest downfall. But at least Bill was intelligent and it showed in his demeanor, his public appearances and his ability to think on his feet and act on the fly (no pun intended). With Georgie, it's all a big magic trick how things happen. "Abracadabra... look, I made Enron disappear! But let's go after Kenneth Lay instead and decry all that lost 401(k) money! And as an added bonus... poof! I made our budget surplus disappear too!" Great trick, Moron, you somehow managed to bend laws to make the finger point away from your administration. Compared to this, Whitewater was a stream trickling through a woods next to your thundering waterfall.

My subconscious appears to be running away with itself. My dreams are getting stranger and more vivid, yet are making less sense. And for the first time in as long as I can remember, I woke up without knowing where I was even though it's the same place I've woken up for the past week (and for many years before that too when I was actually living here).

And I just got into another fight with my father. I knew living here again would put a strain on things.

Reading Michele's rants on the usage of September 11th as a guilt trip to get people to think your way stoked my own fire on the issue. Personally, I wish I'd said it first because she put it so well, but I'll give it a shot.

I'm sick of all these Tributes to America. I was appalled by those Superbowl commercials that our government put up -- that we as taxpayers paid for -- telling us that buying drugs helps contribute to terrorist funds. I'm not happy at all with the dictatorial direction our government is taking because of September 11th, and I'm pissed off at our nation as a whole for allowing ourselves to become such sheep to the President Moron administration for allowing them free reign to do whatever they want in their fight against the Axis of Evil or whatever they're calling it now simply by using "we're fighting terrorism" as the excuse. First of all, the discrimination/racial profiling issue. America is a melting pot. It was conceived as one, it was built as one, and the diversity of our population is what made and makes it the country that it is. A good chunk of people (my ancestors included) came to this country to escape persecution, not delay it for a few generations. So how come now everyone's forgetting why their predecessors came to this country by inflicting the same situation on others? It's never fun when it happens to you, but you never think of it when you're on the delivering end and not the receiving end. I'll refrain from quoting that entire "first they came for the [insert group here] but I was not one so I kept silent" thing.

Second of all, buying drugs helps contribute to terrorist funds? Hello? Our government paid the Taliban $43 million to stop Afghan farmers from harvesting poppy seeds for opium and heroin! Excuse me, who's paying the terrorists? Then again, since our government gets most of its money from taxes, we probably ended up ponying up that cash anyways, but it wasn't my choice to spend it that way.

Finally, the Tributes to America. Yes, we know we have a lot of brave people here. Yes, we know that there was an incredible outpouring of assistance from all over the country after September 11th went down. But Dear Lord, enough's enough! If I have to hear that trite song Paul McCartney wrote about "Freedom" one more time, I'm going to exercise my freedom to scream bloody hell from the rooftops. What about the freedom of those people being racially profiled and being asked to leave planes or subjected to rigorous security checks based solely on their appearance? What about the freedom to decide not to put up an American flag on my car/my home/my desk without my patriotism being questioned (because it has -- people have asked me "where's your flag?")? What about my freedom to openly criticize our government now (because people have asked me "how can you criticize/not support our government/president at a time like this?") in spite of this overwhelming wave of blind love for our adminstration? I disagree with just about everything that our Moron-In-Command is doing and you know what -- it's my freedom as an American that should allow me to do that, not keep me from it, and I do it because I'm being patriotic and want our country to take the best possible course of action in my opinion. The great thing about our political system is that it was designed with checks and balances, part of which comes through representation so if we don't like what our leaders are doing, we can let our representatives know and ask them to protest on our behalf or we can vote our representatives out of office. But what's the use when we're all following so blindly that our part of doing the checking and balancing doesn't happen anymore? I shouldn't be made to feel guilty simply because I have a differing opinion of what our government and our populace should be doing, and I shouldn't be made to feel like an enemy of America because I openly dislike our president and can't see what he's done (if anything) that deserves the support he's getting.

I'm going to Montreal this coming weekend with some friends. We'll see if I decide to come back.

To continue the Steven Wright-esque train of thought, can anyone tell me why seats & traytables need to be in their full upright position in preparation for takeoff & landing? Does the positioning really make that much of a difference in the balance of the plane?

In other news, I'm starting to get hits from Google again. This mildly disturbs me because I had included code in my pages that specifically banned Google's crawlers from indexing my page -- I wanted people to find my page because they found a link & wanted to read what I had to say, not because they were looking for "Olsen+twins+nude+with+Jello+Osama." But the thing is, these people finding my page on Google seem to be looking for me specifically. A couple of them were searches for my name and another was a search for my blog title. I'm wondering if some of my old friends are starting to go through that "what does it all mean" phase described in High Fidelity and want to reminisce about past times.

Speaking of which, my dreams have become populated with people that I haven't thought about in years. Friends from high school, friends from summer camp, and an odd dream where I was arguing with the governor of Massachusetts but the role of me was being played by Emilio Estevez. (I can't explain the last one.) I'm trying to figure out if the sudden appearance of all these people I haven't thought about is due to the fact that I'm going through all my old belongings to try to figure out what to keep & what to pitch, or just plain due to the fact that I'm suddenly again living in the town I grew up in. The only consolation I have is to constantly remind myself that this is only temporary, I sublet my place so I had to get out as soon as I could because he needed to move in immediately, and I'll have a place of my own in Los Angeles within two months.

I'm trying to decide if the world really needs Al Roker, or if generically, all "Today Show" weathermen -- excuse me, meteorologists (though i never quite understood why that term is used to describe weathermen since they're not studying meteors) -- are meant to be the butt of all jokes.

With an incredible last-few-seconds play, the New England Patriots brought home Boston's first major sports victory in over a decade. I think the last one was when the Celtics won the NBA playoffs back in the '80s. There was rejoicing in the streets of Boston tonight, with T drivers blowing their horns, car drivers beeping their horns, people screaming out their apartment windows (me & my friends included) and people screaming and running through the streets. Honestly, I think the city deserved it. Boston's thoroughly convinced that it's cursed in the sports arenas, so to have its underdog football team win their first NFL championship in 42 years is a huge boost.

I was thankful that I was able to get up to Boston to be a part of it. Things just wouldn't seem the same if I were watching the game at my parents' house by myself, even if my friend Geoff wasn't at the party that he was supposed to co-host because he ended up getting a last-minute opportunity to actually be at the Superbowl. The spirit of the city was contagious, and for a little while, I forgot all the agony that I'd been through over the past few months and all the times that I ranted about how much I hated Boston.

There's hope yet. If the Little Football Team That Could can win the Superbowl, then I can take the plunge despite people's opinions that I'm too much a creature of habit to uproot myself and move to a totally alien city 3000 miles away.

I'm not expecting to grow flowers in the desert
But I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime...
-- Big Country, "In a Big Country"

I'll be heading back up to Boston for the Superbowl in an hour or so. It'll be great to see my friends again, if only for an afternoon, though next weekend we're off for three days of abject debauchery in Montreal.

In this morning's paper, there was an article about a local doctor, how she was giving a speech which must've inflamed someone, since afterwards she came out to the parking lot to find her tires flattened. The local authorities as well as the director of the group on whose behalf she was giving the speech are calling it an act of terrorism. An act meant to inspire terror or warning? Most likely. Terrorism? I think that after September 11th, that term has been tossed around a bit too liberally. Odd that suicide bombers in Israel were labeled just that -- "suicide bombers" -- but not terrorists, while someone poking holes in someone else's tires here in the States is a terrorist. Once our own little bubble of news and awareness here was popped and terrorism suddenly became not just a word heard in the news, but something directly experienced by Americans, we've suddenly gone terrorist-crazy.

I also saw another article talking about how Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security, doesn't have enough money or power to fight the Forces of Evil, and that most Democrats support racial profiling here in our own country. It scares me to think that Joe Lieberman, a man who I supported for many years, has come out in favor of going after Saddam Hussein. I wonder how much of this is going to turn out like the McCarthy trials of the '50s, where all we have to do is point a finger at someone and say, "He/she's a terrorist!" and they'll be persecuted. And it also makes me wonder how far this battle against the Forces of Evil will go when we're taking it upon ourselves to go charging around the world to fight all these terrorists. I'm not that much of an isolationist when it comes to politics, especially since I know that it led in part to both of the World Wars, but all we're really doing is reinforcing the belief in other countries' minds that we view ourselves as the Policemen of the World and we firmly believe in Might Makes Right.

While going through my stuff last night, I found my grandfather's dogtags from World War II, which I brought upstairs to give to my mother. She began to tell me about she could probably find her own -- since New Yorkers believed that they were a target during the Cold War and that a nuclear exchange was inevitable, students and most citizens were required to wear government-issued dogtags with identification on them, so that in the case of a nuclear attack, their remains would be able to be identified. It's rather odd that -- at least in our own perception due to our news agencies covering relatively inane American-centric cultural events for the past few years -- in the space of only a few months, we seem to have gone from a relatively peaceful world situation to one where war is conceivable again. Now, we're probably in even more danger given the relative Swiss-Cheeseness of our borders and security, so it would be pretty easy to sneak nuclear, chemical or biological weaponry into our country, or even manufacture it here once the terrorists arrived. Hell, the anthrax that was sent through our mails seems to have been "misplaced" from one of our own Army labs and somehow wound up in the hands of malcontents who sent it first-class to our government. I wonder if we'll be issued dogtags soon.