I'm pretty sure federal law would not approve though.

My buddy Scott sent this to me because it reminded him of Fleet Floxes and he figured that I, being such a huge FF fan, would maybe like it. Well, I don't like it. I love it. I want to marry it. I want to take long walks on the beach with it. I want to have pillow fights and tickling wars with it and then in the  morning I want to eat some motherfucking pancakes with it.

"I never win anything!"

Yesterday was "Dress Like a Tacky Tourist Day" at our client site. My team made some rather half-hearted attempts at outfit coordination before realizing none of us actually owned loud Hawaiian shirts or gigantic cargo shorts or god-awful Crocs. (Which I think speaks to the classiness of our team. Go team!) We decided to go with just bright colors and summer accessories.

Not pictured: tackiness

Turns out the program-wide response to DLATTD was less lukewarm than we'd originally thought - there was only a handful of tech people who braved the minus 20 degree weather outside and dressed er, down - so by process of elimination we rather puzzledly accepted a prize that we didn't know existed in the first place for a free dinner + drinks at some restaurant that we also didn't know existed in the first place. But hey, no complaints here. I rocked out in Ray Bans and flippie floppies and am getting free food out of it. All in a day's work, eh?

On a tangentially related subject: one thing that bothers me to no end is when winners of anything, no matter how trivial the prize, scream and cry and then inevitably gush, "But like, I never win anything!!!!!!!!" Well...yeah. It is not at all unlikely or remarkable that you've never won anything, because almost nobody ever wins anything (or almost everyone never wins anything). That's the point. If we all won things all the time, all joy of winning would go away. "I never win anything!" is just about as insightful a remark as saying "Wow guys, I never get married!" at your wedding speech or yelling "Can you believe it?? I'm eating a sandwich!!" every time you're eating a sandwich.

In fact, I'd much prefer it if instead of the winner getting up and wasting everyone's time with insipid proclamations of undeserved surprise, everyone who didn't win would stomp their feet and pound their fists and stand up and yell, "God damn it, I never lose anything!" Which I realize makes equally little sense, but would at the very least make for a far more interesting event every time a winner is chosen (or a lot of non-winners aren't).

I was productive this weekend!

Repost - for those who asked why I deleted the original entry, it's cause the first video got very out of sync about twenty seconds in. Apologies for the confusion, I know it stayed on my Google Buzz even after I'd deleted it - fail. But hopefully it should never happen again, as I learned the very valuable lesson that whenever possible, iMovie should be used for YouTube uploads instead of evil, evil QuickTime.

I spent an unplanned extended weekend in Chicago and found the luxury of some spare time.

So I drew a drawing:

I call this "7/8ths of an Elephant's Face"

And I learned a new Rural Alberta Advantage song:

I call this "Disregard the Goof-up in the Fourth Verse"

I hadn't done anything artistic or tried fiddling around with anything new on the guitar in a long time. It felt good to make something with my hands for once.

Also, this is totally unrelated but at one point yesterday I found myself smack in the middle of the UChicago campus to grab lunch with some friends. It was my first time on campus in a while and long story short, I nearly had an existential crisis in the middle of Hutch courtyard. It just felt so unbelievably weird to be walking around on the bustling quads with my friends - just like the good old days, except this time mumbling to myself, "I should be here. But I'm not. I'm flying to Calgary in two hours. A year ago I didn't even know Calgary existed. What the fuck."

I also kept mistaking strangers for people I knew. I'd see somebody familiar and excitedly ask, "OMG, is that so-and-so?" And get responses like "No, that's just an impostor", "no, that's a first year", and "no, that's a tree."

Then I ran into my friend who was celebrating his birthday by running around campus with liquor. We did a shot together in the middle of our student center and that made everything better again.