Saturday, April 05, 2003
 

Yesterday was my birthday. In spite of all odds (or, perhaps, in spite of all my oddness), I made it through another one. Whoo-hoo.

Of course, most of it was spent in a seminar room in the student center, listening to a speaking coach critique our styles of paper delivery. From 10:00 until 5:30, we made consonant noises, spent time lying on the floor and breathing, reading a Dylan Thomas excerpt out loud (repeatedly), and reading paragraphs of our own writing to the group. This, of course, is one of the things I hate most in life: being put on the spot, with all eyes on me. The guy says that I don't sound mean enough when I read my paper (?), so he made me read every sentence with "buddy" tacked on to the end. So, needless to say, my nickname now seems to be "Buddy."

We also had to lie in the floor, in close proximity to Other People, and breathe. I have a thing about hearing other people breathe. I don't like it. Let alone being that close to Other People, and on the nasty nasty floor to boot.

We also had to go around in a circle and make consonant noises individually, while he critiqued them. Many of us, myself included, had to try multiple times to make the sounds the way he wanted to hear them. I ended up really freaked out. They should have warned those of us with social anxiety to take Xanax or something before we came.

A friend and I were passing notes by about an hour and a half into it, which probably means that we were failing to be Model Graduate Students. Oh, well. I was frankly not in a mood to care.

After the day of exquisite torture (not to mention excruciating boredom), eight of us hauled off to an Italian restaurant for a birthday dinner. I ate waaaaaaaaaaaay too much, but it was very good. We ordered family style, so we had several dishes. There was a slight problem, given that two of the people were on the Atkins diet and hence can eat only meat, I'm a vegetarian, and one other person was Catholic and was thus limited to fish, when it came to meat. But, between the salads, the cheese garlic bread, and the various entrees, I don't think anyone left hungry.

Then, of course, desert. We had these multicolored ice cream loaves, which were very rich, and I got the "Celebration Cake," which was the world's largest chunk ("slice" doesn't really cover it) of red velvet cake. And Holmes told them that my name was "Buddy," so I got the rousing chorus of "happy birthday, dear Buddy" from the staff. That was my third happy birthday chorus of the day, so I was ready to crawl under the table, at that point. But in a good way.

After supper (and it took us an hour and 45 minutes to get seated, then quite awhile to eat), we headed back to the very nice house of Holmes and her husband, where we hung around for awhile and played with her bichon, Napoleon. Finally, we headed off, and it was nearly 2 AM when I got back here.

So, needless to say, I slept in. Big time. But now my butt seriously needs to get to work.

Elvisette philosophized at 1:57 PM