An ode to the Ville (and the people therein)

It's 11:04 Wednesday night as I sit down to begin this entry. That means I have approximately sixteen hours and six minutes before taking off for the one and only Beantown. So I thought I'd take this one final chance to say farewell to the town that's been so good to me for the past sixteen years. I often (okay, fine... always) give the South a hard time, but at the same time, Charlottesville has always been the glorious exception to the generally god-awful rule that is this corner of the United States.

I have loads of reasons to admit that I loved this town. (I may be coming back in four months, but four months seems like an eternity to me right now, so I'm gonna go ahead and use the past tense here. I loved C-Ville.) I'm really gonna miss this place.

I'm gonna miss the fact that a place like Bodo's Bagels can be treated with more respect than most places of worship. I'm gonna miss the fact that Monticello is considered the greatest piece of architecture in the history of mankind. I'm gonna miss the unbelievably lofty god complex that has been hoisted upon "Mister Jefferson." I'm gonna miss the egomaniacs who can't stop bragging about USA Today and how amazing they think our town is. I'm gonna miss the snobs who are too pretentious to just call "first-years" freshmen and the "University Grounds" a campus. I'm gonna miss the spoiled little brats who can't stop complaining about how "there's nothing to do in this town," even though they'd probably be just as bored anywhere else. And, to conclude with an example not nearly as sarcastic and bitter as the five before it, I am most definitely going to miss the way Charlottesvillians look at Republicans as if they're some strange kind of alien life form. There aren't many places in the world like that.

(Luckily for me though, I'm heading off tomorrow to spend four years in another one of them. Ha.)

Anyway, when I said I was "concluding," I lied. Because I should definitely add that I'm also going to miss the people here. I'm not gonna name names here, because you all know who you are. But to everyone who's gone out of their way recently to say goodbye to me, I only wish I knew how to thank you. Perhaps writing this here blog entry is a start. If it is, then you're welcome. If it isn't, then I'll be back in December to say hey to everyone, and I can only pray that you'll be as awesome to me then as you were to me this past week.

A week in limbo

An update for those of you playing along at home:

countdown to boston: 5 days
countdown to tufts: 8 days
countdown to actual classes starting: 16 days
getting the hell out of the south: priceless

(Why yes, I am going to keep shoving my hatred of the South in people's faces as long as it keeps pissing them off. Yes, I do enjoy controversy. It keeps life exciting. Thanks for asking.)

All obnoxiousness aside, I just want to say that this week -- the one beginning last Thursday when all the UVA and W+M people were gone and ending next Thursday when I will be -- is set to be an unthinkably boring one. I don't have many high school friends, because they either left, or they're leaving, or they're still in high school, which means they're scrambling to finish up all their summer work (and then starting Monday they're... gasp... going to school, suckers). And as for college friends, well, I haven't met them yet. So basically, I'm in this lonely, bored state of limbo.

I shouldn't be too worried about being bored though, because I have loads of stuff that needs to get done. Not being distracted is a good thing, I guess. For one thing, cleaning out my room is most definitely a week-long project. I've been putting in a couple hours a day, but each day I reach a certain point where I just can't go on. I keep finding new mementos of the high school years though, so that helps keep the job interesting. Today I uncovered a letter I wrote to myself on the first day of my freshman year (it was a theater class assignment), and a folder full of old essays from sophomore and junior year English classes. Plus the original handwritten copy of the lyrics to a songwriting masterpiece -- the Lauren Bleam/Miranda Bennett opus "Silent Wainwright," a Christmas carol sung to the tune of "Silent Night." Good times.

I suppose there are other things I should be accomplishing this week. There's a bit more college shopping that needs to get done, there are classes that need to get researched, and there's some "mandatory alcohol education" work I need to do for school. Plus I should keep in touch with my roommate (who, by the way, is a rock star).

And along with all the boring mundane things, there will also be a whole lot of goodbyes. Those are going to be painful, and I don't feel like thinking about that right now. Perhaps, since it's 3:06 in the morning, I'll just go cry myself to sleep instead.

One week to go...

As of whatever wee hour in the morning it is as I sit down to write this, today is technically Thursday. That means I have one week left in scenic Charlottesville (or the bustling suburb of Covesville, as it were) before leaving for beautiful sunny Medford.

And there's so little to do, and so much time... wait, scratch that, reverse it. The next seven days should be packed with loads of school-shopping, room-cleaning, goodbye-saying fun.

Cleaning out my room is looking like it will take about six or seven hours a day, every day, all week. I have so much random crap to sort through before I can pack everything I need to take to school... only God knows how long it's going to take. The worst part is that just about every ten seconds, I come across something interesting in one of the big piles of the aforementioned crap, and I have to spend an hour admiring it. Some of the things I've uncovered in my room include...

- A picture of my old dog, who passed away four years ago
- A clipping from a Daily Progress front page showing the pop quiz team the day we left for our Chicago trip
- My Tufts acceptance letter
- An old picture of Guthrie (good LORD, that is a lot of hair), signed "to Evans, love Guff," in Taylor's handwriting
- Boatloads of programs (from plays, graduations, award ceremonies, inductions, and more)
- A post-it note reading "Taylor's Wager: $20 with Evans Clinchy On Me Getting Into Washington And Lee"
- A love letter from Hal in Lauren's handwriting
- A love letter from Lauren in Hal's handwriting
- My speeding ticket (and ironically, next to it, my driving school diploma)
- The very first quote sheet: a scrap from a Boston Park Plaza Hotel pad of paper with the words "'We are racist against midgets' -Ben Starkweather" inscribed on it

I'm struggling to hold back the tears as I recount some of the amazing memories I have had over the past four years. Just kidding. I'm laughing at what a weird life I have.

Countin' down to college

I suppose that if you're reading this, you've been looking through my profile on AIM. And I suppose that if you've been looking through my profile on AIM, then you've probably seen the "countdown" I keep posted at the bottom, which as of Saturday looks a little somethin' like this:

countdown to boston: 12 days
countdown to tufts: 15 days
countdown to actual classes starting: 23 days
getting the hell out of the south: priceless

Now if you're reading this because you're a future classmate up in Medford, then you probably don't mind seeing that at all; you know I'm excited to be headed up there to meet all you guys. But if you're a former classmate, then you've probably been sending me angry IMs berating me for being disrespectful to my sweet home Virginia. To all of the latter, I offer my deepest of apologies, and I would like to be given the chance to fully explain why I wrote those horribly appalling words. I invite you all to direct your attentions here; all your questions will be answered.

Unemployed and loving it

As many of you may know, I followed up my little fireworks-selling gig on July 4th with another venture into the workplace, beginning the very next day. It was a really, really, really, really boring job, but money is money, and I like money.

I don't want to go into too many details of the boringness that was my life (eight hours a day of it, anyway)... that would only make you exit this window instead of reading all the fascinating things I have to say. So I'll keep it short and sweet... basically it was just sitting at a desk looking for a bunch of businesspeople around the world, trying to call them or find their websites or something, so that I could collect all their contact info and add it to the Standard and Poor's database.

While 99% of it was horribly mindnumbingly devoid of interestingness, the other 1% was awesome. I got to research some really sketchy people, so it got exciting every now and then. Among the people I called, or at least attempted to, were:

- A marketing executive for RJ Reynolds, who was in trouble for marketing cigarettes to kids
- The vice president of the Playboy Group, enough said
- One of the owners of the Florida Panthers... he spent money on one of the worst teams in THE world's worst sport, there must be something wrong with him...
- The best friend of Tom Ridge, who led the Homeland Security department in Bush's first term... this friend of his had left his job to serve in Ridge's cabinet when he was governor of Pennsylvania
- Coincidentally, the best friend of Bernard Kerik, the guy Bush nominated to replace Ridge. This guy had reported mob connections, and was convicted in a forty million dollar fraud case. Awesome.
- The coolest one of all: a guy who left his job when he was accused of terrorism in a court of international law. He was the CEO of DynCorp, one of the leading sponsors of the U.S.'s defense spending (the big three were them, Enron, and Halliburton... yeah, that's elite company all right), until 2002. Apparently it's frowned upon to spray toxic herbicides over 14 percent of the landmass of Colombia. He failed in his effort to eliminate the nation's cocaine problem, and instead destroyed the land of tens of thousands of peasant farmers, and caused over a thousand illnesses in the nation's citizens. Ummm... whoops?

Anyway, virtually everything else about the month I spent working for S&P absolutely positively sucked. I was hoping to at least gain some valuable life experience or something, but I didn't really learn anything except that Texas has a town called Snook, the Clorox corporation has about nineteen different vice presidents, and, oh yeah, I hate working for the man (or woman, as it were).

So, in short, I'm unemployed and loving it. These three weeks are pretty much all I have left of my childhood, so, needless to say... I'm going to sleep through as much of them as I possibly can. And while I'm awake, I'll be spending every second enjoying what little time I have left with absolutely no responsibilities in life. Time is a wonderful thing to waste.

In other news, I'm starting to hear things from school besides "please visit our website to electronically sign this form verifying your financial aid award." (That's been written on about ten different letters I've gotten from Tufts this summer. I'm getting sick of it already.) As of yesterday, I finally have a dorm (Tilton 307), and a roommate (who is kinda tricky to get in touch with... he's in Japan). So if you're back home in Virginia and wanna get in touch with me sometime, here's everything you need to know...

Evans Clinchy
307 Tilton Hall
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155

(617) 627-7215
evans.clinchy@tufts.edu

The address and phone number are good as of August 28th when I move in, and the email address will be up and running on the 30th. Yes, you read that right, I don't have my email address yet. Translation: the next person who says the word "facebook" in my presence is lucky I don't own any firearms, because if I did I'd most likely be using them on you. I know you have Facebook, you know I'm jealous, and you don't have to rub it in. Really. Seriously.

Anyway, I'm not really as angry as it seems, I'm just being dramatic because I like being like that.

Okay... it's 2:16 in the morning and I'm about to pass out, so I'll just leave you with this, because it's too hilarious not to.

gotpilk7: i resent your comment about the south
gotpilk7: you stupid northern elitist liberal
gotpilk7: go turn communist

Good night, world.