Practicalmadness

Today is Valentine's Day, or as I like to think of it, Single Awareness Day. Or: Red Rose Preservation Day. Ultimately, I'd like to see the holiday renamed in the U.S. to honor the man or woman who invented the candy heart.

We have discovered the following amazing facts:

• Chai Tea French Toast: it can work.
• If you walk far enough from State Street, there's this whole other world called the "West Side", so named because it's, like, west of all the cool shit. But the weird part is that if you get on a Halsted bus in the "West" Side, you eventually end up in areas traditionally lumped in with the North Side, like the shops at North and Clybourn, the shops on Armitage and the shops in Boys Town.
• Just as love is not everlasting, neither are cell phone batteries. However, unlike love, batteries can be supplemented or replaced at this one shop on North for just $50. But like love, the batteries are currently out of stock.
• There's this thing on the Mac called "Rendezvous", that not only lets you mooch music from everyone in the dorm, but also talk to them. Amazing, right? The thing is, I don't think anyone uses it except this one guy suffering from Jewel-ophobla. In honor of Single Awareness Day, I've spent part of my evening playing virtual Jehovah's Witness. Have you accepted savior as your personal Jesus?
• When you're talking about steel rulers with corky non-skid backing, six inches can hardly be called sufficient. I also find your suggestion of using them as a new source of clean, cheap energy to be quite laughable.
• Speaking of bookends, now's a good time to be glad that you got one of them nice windows with the nice, big sill.
• Vodka + Dr. Pepper Red Fusion = still tastes like Red Fusion, only 100% more intoxicating and only 30% more vile.
• "Having wild monkey sex" is not the answer you anticipate when you send a text message saying "Whazzup???" at 11 AM.
• Nearly any event in 20th century history, cinema or literature can in some way be related to the Gothic. When in doubt, launch into a detailed explication of the correlation between totalitarian governments, specifically Nazism, the sublimity of terror and the improbablility of horror, uh, ism.
• Chinatown is a very slow movie if you already know that John Huston fucked Faye Dunaway.
• Sex is a subject best left to certain TV networks. MTV, HBO, Showtime: good. The History Channel, specifically a documentary narrated by Peter Coyote with insightful commentary by Hugh Hefner: bad.
• Ryan, be careful: Some things in here don't react well to bullets.
• Your boredom has reached its zenith when you find yourself on a Saturday night listening to the Moonlight Sonata, watching a documentary on Al Capone and making your bed at roughly the same time, such that going to the supermarket for bottled water and a box of cellentani is a major outing.