Goodbye America, Buongiorno Paris

I think my French needs some work. Which means it's time to drop everything and head to Paris for four months. School, work, America . . . all that can wait. Weeks after weeks of baguettes, techno, and existentialism . . . that is more important.

But seriously . . . today is the day I head out of JFK, which is perhaps the size of France, and take flight towards Charles De Gaulle, in search of exciting times, cultural learning, and eye-opening adventure.

The next 36 hours are going to be a whirlwind. I leave in about two to head to the airport, where I will say my goodbyes, and board a plane to France. After a life-changing viewing of Eat, Pray, Love and a delicious meal of semi-warm roast turkey with soggy broccoli, I will be turning 21 years of age. This will be approximately halfway through the flight and will call for much celebration and merrymaking. Around 6:30 am Parisian time, just about when all you assholes are getting to bed, I will be landing in Paris, with euros in my pocket, dreams in my eyes, and about a .09 alcohol content in my blood.

At this point, my journey will begin

After spending several confusing minutes wandering around the airport, looking for signs in English, I will remember some basic French phrases, and attempt to use these to hitchhike to my dorm, despite having no idea where I am or where that is. Arriving four hours later, short 45 euros and a pair of pants, I will get my dorm, bring my luggage up, and, out of sheer exhaustion, sleep for four months until its time to go home.

Last Train Blog

Here's the last blog I'll post from the train; the others sucked.

Leaving Williamsburg

It was a good weekend, albeit a bittersweet one, as I had the chance to celebrate and properly say goodbye to my friends at school. His was a much more difficult endeavor than saying goodbye to my friends back home, because I’ve done that a lot before, and I won’t be missing time with them that I normally wouldn’t have. I can only hope now that everyone at school has a perfectly boring but worthwhile semester.

Forgoing the bitter and getting to the sweet, though, it was certainly a worthwhile weekend. Thursday night was a good old fashioned beer meeting, and I got to have one “yelling at people in Wawa night” which is about what I needed to get me through til August. On Friday night I had the pleasure of going to KA and seeing Adam, Kelsey, Lauren, and Skyler, which was great.

Saturday afternoon brought a special treat, as I got to attend a Tribe men’s basketball game. Not only do I love Tribe basketball, but I am usually expected to attend and be loud. As in, the loudest person there. Forserious, when I realized I would be missing basketball season, I almost decided not to go abroad. It was a tough decision. The game was a typical Tribe home game: exciting, undecided until the last possession, with lots of threes raining down from both teams. Hofstra is a very good team, and I thought the guys played much better than their record and early season woes would have indicated. Brandon Britt, our freshman point guard played with swagger and intensity, but showed his youth with a late and crucial double-dribble. I do think he will have a chance in his career at being the best player in the CAA. He can shoot from all over the floor and can drive to the hoop and draw contact.

Saturday night, though, brought the real excitement. After a strange and wonderful voyage to Toano, Virginia, also known as the Northwest Territories, for some gator, crawfish, and good old southern barbeque, we headed back to metropolitan Williamsburg to set up for the party. Since the RA’s on campus mostly suck and no one really wanted to risk a rager in their apartment, we were forced to enlist the help of one Grayson Orsini, who graciously submitted the basement of his house for our use.

It would be an understatement to say that calling Grayson’s basement shabby would be an understatement. The place is practically feral. Due to a lack of care, inhabitants, and the bulldoxing efforts of one David St. John, the basement is an assortment of rooms with half-walls, patched ceilings, dirt, grime, dust, and general disarray. Seriously, we had to rake the leaves out of the basement before the party, because the door inside doesn’t have a bottom. It resembles, in various different ways, the home of a drug addict squatter, a serial killer’s dream apartment, a recently evacuated meth lab, or a slightly shittier badger den.

Which is why we were unsettled, but not surprised when this little series of events took place:

As we stand in the basement, wondering what possible stories each of the holes in the wall could possibly contain, a slowly become aware of a rustling, squeaking noise. I realize it is coming from above me and look to the ceiling at a large hole, half-assedly covered with a piece of cardboard.

“Hey, Grayson, what is that noise?”

We are all quickly attuned to the situation and its potential for disaster. One of my friends says:

“Oh my God, I think there’s something up there.”

It is at this point we all know exactly what is about to happen. As I am standing directly adjacent to the hole in the ceiling, I have a violent and jarring vision of a huge rat jumping out and into my collar. I begin to duck, and as I do, the rustling gets more frenetic and the squeaking much louder. A fuzzy brown blur launches itself from the hole as I cover my head and run to the opposite side of the room. Another form comes squeaking out of the whole. As I get to the corner and turn around, I finally identify the culprit. An angry and probably very frightened sparrow is making a beeline for me and Dave, frozen and horrified. It banks a sharp turn and heads into the adjacent room, zipping over the heads of my five other friends as it joins its partner in the back room. Taking advantage of this opportunity, all seven of us sprint for the exits and congregate outside in the cold. After a couple moments to catch our breath:

“What the fuck just happened?!?”

“Were those fucking birds?”

“Sparrows dude, sparrows.”

“What the fuck? We cannot have this.”

Realizing we were set to host a party with presumably dozens of people attending, including many women, we knew what we had to do. Grabbing a couple of brooms, we set back inside. After opening all of the doors and windows, we set to finding the birds and chasing them out, which took a couple of minutes. Triumphant, we again tried to reckon the events that had transpired. Grayson’s basement had yielded many magical and horrifying events, but this one took the cake. We set back again to cleaning up, but twenty minutes later, disaster struck again.

As a the rustling and squeaking returned to the same exact patch in the ceiling, we let out a collective, “oh, fuck.”

Prepared this time, we grabbed our brooms and rakes, and waited for the demon Spearows to be cast from their ceilingly dwelling. After chasing them out a second time, we determined that they must have an alternate entry into the house from outside. There was nothing we could do to stop the sparrows from getting into the ceiling.

But there was damn sure something we could do to keep them up there.

Armed with duck tape and frenzied determination, we covered up and reinforced any holes or patches in the ceilings or walls. If anybody asked what that noise was, we would say there was a cat upstairs.

After this ridiculous adventure, the party seemed relatively tame, despite its fair share of drunken people slapping drunken people, broken glass, floor-pissers, face-lickers, and table-breakers. All in all, it was a great weekend. Well, except for the Jets game of course.

Another Train Blog

This one's boring, you're probably going to want to avoid it:

Trains Suck

As I leave Baltimore, the City of Shining Lights, I have decided I would give you a post that is a rambling mess of uninteresting personal bullshit. Also known as my life story.

I know, I know, I promised in the first post not to waste your time with this. Then I realized how much of my life you people are all really missing, and that it would be a shame not to fill you in. I’m gonna do this in snapshot style; a whole linear plot seems unnecessary.

February 1, 1990: It’s a cold dreary night in Wirral, England, which is to say, it is a night in England. Despite not being due until March 1^st, I decided I’ve had enough of the amniotic sac, and I bust out of there right quick. This catches everyone off guard, including my dad, who had scheduled an impossibly important meeting under the seemingly safe assumption that it wouldn’t run a month long and interfere with my birth. When he heard I was on my way, he had to walk right out of that meeting, which I assume was with the CEO of Unilever and potentially the Prime Minister. Needless to say, if I had waited like a normal baby, my family would probably be worth a couple million dollars more right now. These are the sacrifices people make for me.

My birth was also marked by several great and powerful omens. As my father drove to the hospital after ruining his professional career by walking out of a meeting with George HW Bush and the UN Secretary General, the back window of his car shattered for apparently no reason. He had hit no bump and there wasn’t any evidence of a projectile being hurtled through it. My brother, who was in the back seat, swears it was aliens that shot it out. Clearly someone was trying to warn the world. Finally, as I was born, the doctor, who I assume was some sort of bubbling British slapstick doc, “slipped” and cut me with a knife, right on my ass. I still have the scar. Clearly people were worried about this crazy baby that just couldn’t wait to get out and wreak havoc on the world.

August, 1994: In what is one of my earliest and most clearly fabricated memories, I caused quite an uproar while on a family vacation to Spain. Don’t ask me how, but for some reason my shorts got stuck up in a tree about 50 feet in the air. This would be the start of the trend of me taking my pants off in the wrong places, but at the time it was a serious and unprecedented incident. While everyone panicked, I stayed calm, determined to get my shorts down by throwing my superball at it, which I obviously did not actually do because I was four and four year olds can’t really throw things very well. After this failed, my family and I logically decided to call up a crane, which came and retrieved the shorts, to everyone’s relief. This also obviously did not happen, because it’s just plain ridiculous. But that’s seriously how I remember it, and I definitely don’t really understand how the brain works.

Spring, 1999: My television debut, and a kind of strange story. In third grade, for some as of yet unexplained reason, the curriculum revolved almost entirely around birds. We learned about birds, we read books about birds, we gave presentations, wrote stories, and drew pictures almost exclusively about birds. Sounds essential for nine year olds, right? Anyways, one of those trips was to Wild Birds Unlimited, a store that sold bird stuff, like baths and feeders and shit like that. Again, it was a strange curriculum. Anyways, that store also happened to be the favorite store of Rosie O’Donnell, who had a talk show and wanted to a segment on birding. Like, seriously, what the fuck was going on in 1999? Anyways, she wanted a couple of cute kids to be on the show (obviously) so she asked the store owner for recommendations. He remembered our field trip, probably because we were the only class to ever take a trip there, and asked my teacher to send the two smartest, cutest, most well spoken kids. Obviously, I was one of them. All of this led to me uttering the now infamous line, “I like squirrels” on the Rosie O’Donnell show, which I swear to god would have gone viral if it happened in 2007. It also led me to get thoroughly rejected by angry bitch Rosie at Ramsey Day the next year. You know what? Fuck her and her show.

August, 1999: The first of my two crowning athletic achievements. I won the Ramsey Golf and Country Club’s 9 year old six hole championship, taking down some pretty impressive golfers with a score of 28. I did this all using essentially a five iron and a putter, because I was nine, and nine year olds don’t really know how to play golf. Anyways, this was the only time I’ve ever been the best at anything sports related, which sucks, because I really don’t like golf. Despite the promise in such an impressive young golfer, I actually turned out to be pretty shitty. When you look at what I did in 1999, it was a pretty baller year. Factor in the Mets having an awesome season, the Jets making it to the AFC championship at the beginning of the year and the Devils starting a Stanley Cup season, and it was spectacular. I was really popular back then, too. Its kinda sad to think I peaked when I was nine.

June 30, 2000: The best day ever. First off, I was ten years old and it was summer, which means life is awesome. Then, me and my family all got to go to a Mets game, which means its already one of my top days ever. After a the Mets went down 7-1 in the eighth inning, the day was looking in jeopardy. When the Mets scored 10 in the eighth, capped by an Edgardo Alfonzo two run single and a Mike Piazza laser beam three run home run, which I may still consider the single greatest moment of my life, the day was full on number one. To top even that off, it was fireworks night, and I got to see the single greatest pyrotechnics show I’ve ever seen, highlighted by when they set the show to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” which is my mom’s favorite song. Throw in the ride home, when we listened to Steve Somer’s wonderful epilogue to the game and heard the guy next to us, who was sitting with three braves fans, call in and lament that he left in the seventh inning and missed one of the greatest games ever, and you have a full day that will be seriously hard to beat. To all people who know me: if I’m ever sad, or angry, or down in any way and you want to cheer me up, mention this day to me. BEST DAY EVER.

June, 2003: My second greatest sports achievement. In the championship game for my last year of rec baseball, which was my favorite but far from my best sport growing up, I sat on the bench well into the game, even after we were winning in a rampant blowout. Since there were no mercy rules in the final, the game was still going in the last inning as we had a 15 plus run lead. Coach had actually forgotten about me, which sucks, because there was no guarantee I would get to bat now. Luckily, I was able to get up fifth in that inning. Unluckily, I was promptly plunked straight in the elbow. I don’t know if any of you readers out there have elbows or play baseball, but straight to the elbow joint is one of the five or six most painful places to get hit. Painful enough that I was at first worried that I broke or fractured it. I came out of the game to ice it down, and I definitely DID NOT shed a tear or two. Now my coach, who was actually a great guy, was pretty upset that he had forgotten about me all game and now that I got in, I had gotten injured. Luckily, our team batted around that inning, and my elbow turned out to be fine, albeit fairly sore. So I went back up to bat again (This was little league so it definitely doesn’t matter that I already came out of the game). This time I turned on an inside pitch and laced (read: blooped) it into left field for a 2-run single. I was fucking ecstatic. I also may be the only person in America whose favorite sports memory involves crying.

Summer, 2005: The peak of The Sac. You must be wondering, Hey Brendan? What the hell is The Sac? Are you talking about testicles? While you would normally be right, I am actually talking about an organization, nay, an idea, that my friends and I created while whiling away our summers in the heat of suburban New Jersey. The Sac is short for the cul-de-sac, which is where we would gather during the middle months. Here, we would assemble to do nothing but play wiffleball, drink sodas, eat candy, and manage our MVP 2005 baseball team, the Brew-Crew. I swear to God, we were innocent teens. Anyways, the sac represented the Tom Sawyer mythos of careless and endless summers where kids would simply hang around and do shit. Even without really any alcohol, girls, crime, or excitement of any sort, these were the best summers I ever had. As we got older, The Sac changed, but the idea remained the same: let’s chill out and talk about sports. It’s where I learned to be a man. You know, except for the women part.

Homecoming, 2006: This exchange:

Brendan: Hey mom, I just remembered my suit doesn’t fit anymore.

Mom: Oh that’s OK. I borrowed Matty’s suit from next door, it should fit you.

Brendan: Oh cool thanks.

Mom: Just one thing. It’s a really nice suit, so you know, make sure you take care of it.

Brendan: Don’t worry about it.

Mom: You know, just stay out of situations where you might ruin it.

Brendan: It’s a dance, Mom. What would those situations be?

Mom: Oh , you know. Eating, drinking . . . getting in knife fights . . .

Brendan: . . . ? First off, where the hell would I get in a knife fight. Secondly, why the hell would you be worried about the suit?!?!?

December, 2008

Me and my friends are in the Bahamas, and it is the first time I’ve really gotten to drink a lot and have uninhibited fun. On New Year’s Eve, we are sitting in Maggiano’s, having drinks with dinner, in a sem-private back room that accommodates our whole group including my friend Mike, his family, me, and two of my other friends. We notice shortly into the meal that Ray Liotta, of Goodfellas fame, is sitting at the table next to us. We don’t want to disturb his meal, so we don’t say anything. Later on, when we are finishing up our entrees, Ray and his family get up to leave. My friend’s stepdad notices and asks very politely if Ray would like to get a picture with the kids. Much to all of our shock, this only kind of famous actor replies, “Excuse me. This is my vacation as well. I’m here with my family, and I’d like to be left alone.”

Well, shit. Who would have thought Ray Liotta was such an asshole. I mean, he may have been a strung out gangster in Goodfellas, but he was at least the nice strung out gangster. Maybe he was pissed, we thought, because the best movie he’d done since Goodfellas was fucking Operation Dumbo Drop. Whatever it was, we were convinced he was a dickhole.

Twenty minutes later, we were leaving the restaurant, joking around as seventeen year olds are wont to do, when we hear a voice shout at us.

“Hey, you. Kids!”

Oh shit, we thought, what did we do this time?

We turn, and Ray Liotta was sitting on a bench staring us down. We all thought he was about to stab us to death in the eye with a pen, Scorsese style. He must have really been pissed about us interrupting his family time.

“You guys want that picture now? I didn’t want to do it in the restaurant, because there would have been a huge crowd and everyone would have wanted one. Sorry about that.”

In an instant, our opinion of Ray Liotta reversed completely. He sat outside alone for twenty minutes just to get a picture with a bunch of asshole kids. Moral of the story: Ray Liotta is a great guy.

When I’m famous, I’m going to be nothing like him.

Train Blog, Part One

Since I wrote a lot of words on the train, and I'm not yet sure if I will post all of them, I will give you sections as I decide. Here is the first entry from last Thursday:

Sitting in the Café Car

Well, here it is. 11:00 AM, and I’m already through Elizabeth, New Jersey, the City of Dreams and Destiny. The trip has been a rollicking success so far, mainly because of the incredible, friendly, and convenient service of the Amtrak Regional Train System. That is, indeed, a sentence that I never believed I would write, speak, or think, as Amtrak is usually anything but helpful; most of the time it is comically inefficient and counterproductive. Here are some of the experiences I have had on the train:

n On a ride from Williamsburg to New Jersey, the train arrived 45 minutes late, which doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that there is only one stop before Williamsburg in that direction. The train was doing well enough, until just after Richmond, when we slowed to about a walking crawl and maintained this speed for a half hour. I was already understandably frustrated with the ride, until we finally started moving with some semblance of speed. Except we were now moving BACKWARDS, and I was more than just frustrated. I was full on pissed. Which sounds like something you could get on craigslist.

n There was one more train ride that compares to this one. The spectacularly fucked southbound jaunt got off the ground about an hour and a half late, and it wasn’t about to make up any time. It was going well enough until the BWI station, where a lady decided to break her ankle upon exiting the train. This shouldn’t really be a delay, but like any good friend, the Amtrak driver decided he needed to be there for this lady until the ambulance arrived. 45 freaking minutes later. As if that wasn’t enough, this was right around the time of Obama’s inauguration, so of course the bomb sniffing dogs needed another 35 minutes in Washington to make sure we weren’t threatening the president. After this point there was an average of about three people to a car and it was approaching midnight rather rapidly. I spent the rest of the ride with a headache laying down in a row of seats listening to the chef at the Bonefish Grill in Newport News talk about how awesome his job was. I was crushed when he mentioned he was a William & Mary grad.

n This doesn’t really have to do with Amtrak service, but on one crowded Thanksgiving train, I was forced between Washington and home to sit next to a guy trading stocks on the Filipino Stock Exchange and playing online roulette on his computer. Both of which sound about the equivalent to throwing money down a well.

There have been many other Amtrak trips that have followed similar storylines. The point is, this trip has so far not been one of them, though I don’t want to jinx anything. When I checked on my phone on the way to the station, the train was an hour and a half late. Typical. Yet upon arrival at Newark, I was told that they had re-routed a train from New York and we would now be perfectly on time. To make matters even better, the train was relatively empty thanks to skipping over all the pre-NYC stops.

All this is a way of saying that I finally get to live my dream. I get to sit in the Café Car of the Amtrak train. Yes, this is a modest dream, one of my many dreams that have absolutely nothing to do with achievement. (I will one day blog a post that lists these, include my subset of dreams that involves things I want to do in the medians of highways.)

Anyways, I have always wanted to sit in the café car for a number of reasons. Most importantly, though, the café car is where spies and international dissidents sit. This isn’t just an opinion, it’s in the goddamn dictionary of FACTS. Spies sit in the café car for a number of reasons. First off, all spies are smart, and they know that in the café car, you get more legroom, more table room, proximity to food and drinks, and a reduced likelihood of having to sit next to a Filipino investment banker/online roulette player. (Seriously, I can understand online poker, but roulette? It’s like clicking your mouse and watching your bank account get depleted.)

Besides knowing about the comforts and amenities of the café car, spies have many other reasons for sitting where they do. For instance, the café car is where people who know what they are talking about sit. Besides the fact that all the train employees sit there and do train employee things like count tickets or rearrange tickets, all the people who like to think they know anything about the transit industry sit there, presumably to talk to the train employees. Furthermore, rich people who don’t want to be spotted sit in the café car so they don’t have to be crammed in with the proles while they’re skipping business class. This is where spies come in, as the aforementioned groups are all the people a spy would presumably be spying on or gleaning information from while on a train. I basically just described the train insiders, the desperate criminals trying to get to the train insiders, and the rich supervillain who is planning an assassination of the train.

So here I sit, on my way to Philadelphia, the City of Bells and Mirrors, now, hoping that my presence in the café car (I look like a writer with my comfy sweater and laptop!) will lead me to encounter and possibly adventure with an international superspy. I’m crossing my fingers for Matt Damon.

Tomorrow's (Not so) Live Blog

Tomorrow, I will be experimenting with a never before attempted (by myself) blogging technique: the retrospectively live blog. During the course of my seven-hour train ride from Newark to Williamsburg, I will be blogging my experiences and thoughts so that you know exactly what it is like to ride on a train for seven hours. Since there is no internet, though, I will have to post all of these blog entries later. I plan to also do this for my train ride back on Monday, unless I am too hungover

American Weekend

After spending the week shoveling snow and doing physical therapy, I needed a weekend to relax. I also spent some time glancing at my planner, and realized that I had but three weekends in America left and only one with my friends from Ramsey. So I decided that I needed to have my self a good old, rip-roaring, wet and wild, goddamn AMERICAN WEEKEND.

For our uneducated or perhaps European readers, I will explain briefly what constitutes an AMERICAN WEEKEND

First off, there must be beer. And none of that un-american bullshit like Bud Light with Lime. We're talking about real, quality American beer, like Bud Light without lime, or Heineken or Beck's or something American sounding like that.

Secondly, there must be mediocre corporate chain restaurants. Nothing is more American than a restaurant with identical branches all over the country, which serve crappy food and slowly crush the spirits of their overworked, underpaid employees. Bonus point

Finally, there need to be a healthy amount of poor decisions, embarrassing decisions, and completely irrational. This speaks for itself.

In pursuit of these goals, I set out Friday evening after physical therapy to the premiere corporate chain restaurant in the area: Chili's. Since my other friends bailed, it left me and my buddy Mike alone on a man-date with $150 worth of Brinker International Restaurant gift cards, and dreams of the perfect American Weekend.

Arriving at Chili's we were pleased to encounter lax underage drinking restraints, cheap beer, and a "lively atmosphere." No wonder the Chili's president wrote this franchise a letter praising there hard work in "cornering the market share." This letter was posted on the wall and dated just around the time when the TGI Friday's down the road went out of business. Kudos to Chili's. After sharing a fairly gay amount of food, alcohol, and molten lava cake while awkwardly hitting on our semi-cute waitress, I decided I had healthily checked beer off my list of American Weekend musts, and called it a night. I decided I could use as little more chain restaurant and a lot more poor decisions, though.

With this in mind, we set out with a full crew on Saturday, intent on achieving our American Weekend while simultaneously celebrating my other friend Mike's birthday. After another splendid visit to Chili's we headed to the mall to hit up Dave and Buster's, which wouldn't let us in with their silly rules requiring a 25 year old escort for younger twenty-somethings. (Does this make any sense?) We decided to out-America Dave and Buster's by drinking at first Buffalo Wild Wings and then Lucky Strikes combination bowling alley and trendy bar/lounge.

This turned out to be the perfect location to get trashed and make bad decisions, as cheap jello shots led to my friends (I was designated driving) being generally belligerent. I don't know what compels people to blindly assault car doors, shout racist comments at passersby, and cut their hands while punching a dippin dots vending machine, but I assume it has something to do with alcohol. At the conclusion of the night, it was clear we had completed an American Weekend. Throw in some sweet football victories (J E T S) and you have a solid weekend to work with before France.

Coming Soon: I will be blogging on the train rides to and from Williamsburg. On the way there, I will be previewing the weekend, and the Paris semester in general, and on the way back I will be recapping the weekend and offering my final thoughts on the final preparations and anticipations of my trip.

I did not and will not proofread.

Free Time: There's a Lot of It.

48 days is a long time. A super long time. Long enough to get a French visa, book plane tickets, make a couple thousand dollars, host a party, watch an entire television series, visit south Jersey, New York City, and Williamsburg, celebrate Christmas and New Years (and MLK day) and still be so bored that you have to start your blog a month before your trip to Paris just to kill time.

That basically sums up where I'm at right now, halfway through the longest winter break of my life and running out of ways to kill time. So if you have any ideas, and they don't involve sitting in a basement drinking beer and watching movies, let me know. As for now, I'm going to continue working (I got another $1000 plus assignment; I'm beginning to think I have a Dickensian benefactor) and watching movies (my goal is to see all 10 best picture nominees). Should be slow end to January.

But since you are all riveted by my day to day life and its details, I figured I'd offer up a brief summary.

The pre-Christmas leg of break consisted of me obtaining my French visa, the most tedious of obligations. After waiting outside the consulate for an hour, and inside a hot waiting room for another hour, I was shuttled back and forth between windows before being told that I have to come back in a week to get my visa, which would end up being square in the poorly handled aftermath of the 2010 NYC Blizzardtacular. Unfortunately, any of the enjoyment I might have reaped from incessant complaining immediately after about the hours upon hours of cold emotionless bureaucracy I experienced was crushed when the final step of the visa process involved a cute blonde French girl excitedly giving me my visa and cheering for me. Damn you French consulate . . . damn you.

After a rather uneventful Christmas, I headed south to Rowan to spend New Years getting soaked in champagne and Febreze. Since that fun-filled evening, I have had only other night of serious partying, the landmark and oddly eventful Michael Zanfardino January Fiesta. I suppose there's no way to describe it other than to say that two of my good (male) friends woke up in the same bed, one covered in puke and the other in only his boxers, neither having remembered going to sleep there.

Other than that, I've been, as I mentioned, going to see a lot of movies, notably True Grit, The King's Speech, Black Swan, and the Fighter, all of which I found immensely delightful. I figure those plus Inception and The Social Network should take care of 6 of the 10 Oscar spots, while I'll need to see probably The Kids are Alright and a couple others. The only way I definitely won't complete this task is if Rabbit Hole is nominated, as that movie looks way too sad and soul crushing for me.

Random observations from the break:

- Blue Mountain State is hilarious
- I only really get a full body, full day hangover when I sleep in my own bed in Ramsey. I'll put that one on classic family guilt.
- This winter has been a lot less awesome for music than last winter for me. I've yet to find some new stuff to keep me occupied, so I'd appreciate any suggestions.
- My reading list will never ever even see 50% completion

Hey everyone, my blog is up

I'm not going to waste any time with introductions, since if you're reading my blog you either

a) know me personally

or

b) randomly troll the internet looking for semi-interesting travel blogs by people you don't know, in which case you are resourceful(creepy) enough to find out about me without me having to tell you.

So that brings me to the main point: why dare to blog, when so many have blogged and failed? I'll preface my answer by saying that I expect and fully intend to fail. There's almost no chance I keep this blog up for an entire year. But, more importantly, I decided to start blogging because I feel that, in the year 2011, I may have something interesting to share with the world.

Between my upcoming semester abroad in Paris, my long awaited and potentially world-changing 21st birthday, a hearty stab at getting an internship and real responsibilities this summer, and my glorious return to William & Mary and 903 Lafayette in the fall, I feel that I will have some experiences to share with the rest of the interwebs that are most likely already being shared by thousands of self-important college students that can't write for shit like myself.

Hopefully, what this blog will suffer from in redundancy, it will make up for with exciting and wholly fabricated anecdotes from abroad, crudely made MS paint drawings, and inside jokes that only I will get. So without further self-deprecation, let's jump right into the first blog post, which you probably thought had already started, making you question your commitment to reading this entire entry!

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So if you've been paying attention so far, you'll notice that the first interesting event and most interesting event of my year is my semester abroad in Paris, the city of baguettes. You'll be disappointed to know that my adventures in Paris sadly will not begin for another month. Why start blogging this early you ask? Well, partly because the anticipation and preparation for a month abroad is probably almost as interesting as the actual experience, but mostly because winter break is often excruciatingly boring and I have little patience for its lazymaking shenanigans.

So, like any good sports magazine, we'll begin the semester abroad blogging with a good old fashioned season preview:

Brendan Goes to Paris

Summary: Brendan Linard, fresh off five semesters with William & Mary, has signed a new, lucrative contract to play one semester for the Catholic University of Paris. This is a risky move late in his career, but many believe a change of scenery will be exactly what he needs to meet his limitless potential.

Outlook: Like everyone else faced with such an experience, I am unimaginably excited. In all honesty, though, I'm also a little bit nervous. Although I've lived in the shadow if New York City for nearly my entire life, I've never fully explored it, and have always been slightly intimidated by it. Putting me in Paris, one of the world's most vibrant, important, and immense cities, places me slightly outside of my comfort zone. This, though, is a challenge I'm willing and excited to face.

The program should certainly be an interesting one. Putting aside all the aspects involving study and life in a foreign country, it is looking like I will be the sole male in my program. This is certainly intriguing, especially since I've always been someone with many more close male friends than female.

Forgetting that for a second, though, brings up the experience of living in Paris. From what I know about the city, I expect every night to play out roughly like this:

7:00 PM: Gourmet dinner at five star restaurant with various supermodels. Gerard Depardieu picks up the check.

9:00 PM: Wine. Lots of wine.

10:00 PM: Head to the night clubs for some MDMA and electronic music.

11:30 PM: Free Daft Punk concert at the Arc de Triomphe. 3D glasses.

12:30 AM: Baguette fight!

12:45 AM: More wine.

3:00 AM: Wake up enslaved in Gypsy camp. Buy freedom with tales of adventure.

5:00 AM: Climb Eiffel Tower to check out sunrise.

8:00 AM: Croissants and cafe au lait at one of Paris's many famous sidewalk cafes.

9:00 AM: Class

So basically, Paris should be the most ballin'est time of all time, no barring of holds. Even if most nights don't play out like this, I still expect a great deal of fun, learning, cultural exposure, and the simple joy of living a foreign and new life.

Predictions: First place finish, best semester ever. Though there looks to be close competition from prospects fall and spring senior year. Keep an eye out.