College!

It feels like it's been a little while. I'm currently in the midst of finals and as of now it's one down and two to go. I had my valuations exam, which surprisingly had very few calculations. Let's just hope that when the professor grades the test he's not surprised at how few calculations I made.

I think the highlight of the past week has been the opening of Big Ten Burrito Cantina, which is only a few blocks from my apartment. Think Chipotle, but cheaper, and with couches, foosball, drunk undergrads, hip-hop and margarita machines. Oh and it's open until 4am. During our last day in Valuations we were in the middle of our 10 minute break, which is about an hour into class, and I sat back down at the desks with my two friends. I was sipping a soup, one guy was eating a salad, and the third guy looks at us, and says, "You want to go play some foosball and drink some beers?". My friend looked at his salad, and then looked over at my soup. Then we looked at each other, put the lids back on our mid-afternoon snacks, picked up our bags and left. It was probably the closest "College!" moment I've had to date since school started. And just for the record I rarely missed class in college and I can say I've never missed an entire class here at Michigan.

BTB Cantina is fun during the day, and at night it turns into Spring Break. Minors are allowed (they don't get wristbands which signifies an "of age" person), and it's packed wall to wall. I was in the bathroom and this guy walks in and he looks really sad. He's just looking in the mirror and shaking his head, so I say, "what's wrong?", and he just says "my shoes, some girl just puked on my shoes". He wasn't lying. But come Sunday I'm going to trade in the faux Ann Arbor Spring Break for the real thing when I go down to Puerto Rico with a couple of friends to surf. We rented a house on the beach in Rincon and we're going to get after it. I'm not bringing my computer, so no new blogs for a bit, but shiiiiiiiiiit, I'll be coming back with plenty o' stories to share with ya'll.

40 Days & 40 Nights...of Tees

I got a gift for Valentine's Day. At the thai place I go for takeout, every time you buy a meal you get a card stamped and after 10 meals, the 11th is free. Well it just so happened that on this February 14th I cashed in on that free meal. Nothing says Valentine's Day like sitting at home alone and eating some curry, right? The guy who was on the wok totally hooked me up too. I'm not sure whether it was because he knows I am a loyal customer, or because at 9:30pm on Valentine's Day I was ordering takeout and he felt bad.

After two nights of going out hard I needed to hit the gym today. Let me tell you, you're not finding any former Prom Queens at the gym at 9pm on Valentine's Day. So what am I doing tonight then you ask, aside from the gym and thai? I'll go to Rick's where the self-esteem is low and drinks are cheap. I don't want to run you through that whole sweater shtick again, but the other night at Scorekeepers I was talking to this girl and she said "um are you..." and I interrupted and said, "wearing a sweater, yes, in business school, yes" and she laughed because that's exactly what she was thinking. It was at that moment that I decided for the next 40 Days and 40 Nights I'm only going to wear t-shirts at the bar, and not just normal t-shirts, but t-shirts that say ridiculous things like "I Am Queens Boulevard". I wore a t-shirt out last night. It really wasn't a big deal when I wore it to a section bowling event (rolled a 171...where's my money Lebowski) because I was kind of working up a little sweat, but by the end of the night all I wanted was a sweater. It's freaking cold up in Ann Arbor. So I'm pretty sure my 40 Days and 40 Nights plan is going to end a robust 1 day. It's not worth getting sick, especially with finals next week and more importantly with a Spring Break surfing vacation coming up.

If you're reading this post on Feb 14th, chances are you're having a pretty crappy Valentine's Day. But don't fret, at least you're not writing this post.

Emoticon

Greetings. I was reading the Times online tonight and saw that in the Sunday Styles section there's an essay writing contest. The contest is for the Modern Love column that runs every Sunday. You can click this link and see the specifics, but the contest asks for college students to write about what they think Love is about these days. Maybe I'll enter, maybe I won't. I'm a college student after all, but that's all secondary.

I went onto Facebook tonight and saw that the girl my good friend was seriously dating is "no longer listed 'as in a relationship'". Stupid Internet, mind your own damn business. In college there were times where your buddy would come into your room, sit on the couch, and say, "I broke up with soandso", and it would catch you completely off guard and you'd put whatever it was you were doing to the side, and you'd sit, face to face, like real people, and you'd be there just to listen and be a friend. I also know that these days I'm not living in the frat house with 30 other guys, so things are of course different, but there are still phones and email. I don't know, I just find it fundamentally wrong that I can get intimate details of friends' relationships the same place I can challenge someone to a game of virtual rock-paper-scissors. This is the second time something like this has happened in the past couple months. Unfortunately, the first time this went down I called my friend and said "I saw that you and soandso broke up", to which he said "what? We did? How do you know?", so I had to explain this Facebook relationship nonsense thing to him. You don't boil a two-year relationship to some stupid icon on a social networking site, you just don't do that.

Call me a hypocrite though, because I've been putting my business out on Front Street via this blog since last May, and I know somehow, in some way, FingerTheBlog is going to end up biting me in the tush, hard. You better believe that if I met a girl that could possibly be Mrs. FingertheBlog I sure as hell wouldn't write a single word about her, although I'm sure at times I'd be tempted. The blurred distinction between public and private is really sick and interesting, and I'm willing to bet that a lot of you have stories similar to the ones I've shared above.

I don't know what I'd write for that NYTimes essay contest, but I will say that today Love can start with an intimate date and end with a cracked heart emoticon two years later, or it can start with a jager bomb in a dive bar and lead to the altar. I'm notorious for thinking that every one of my friends' relationships are going to lead to marriage, and I've been wrong close to 100% of the time, so that shows you how much I know.

And by the way...in case you've seen something like this before, you have, here.

So Happy I'm Blue

I went to two Giants games this year. I saw the Giants beat up on a pathetic 49ers team, and then watched them squeak one out in Detroit against the Lions. I watched a skittish Eli Manning throw off his back foot time and again, and I watched a defense with so much potential make Jon Kitna look half decent. Now...if I have two sons I'm going to name one Eli Manning Finger and the other one David Mother Effing Tyree Are You Serious Finger. Truth be told, I was more fired up after the Packers game, but I'm guessing it was because after last night's game I just couldn't believe what I had seen. Wasn't it just two years ago when Nick Goings and the Panthers dropped a bagel on the Giants in East Rutherford? I sat there with my Dad, in the slush, and wondered whether the Giants would ever bounce back. But they did, and the guy I admit to having called "a loser with no friends" was so calm out there that it was borderline scary. Eli's going to be all right, he always knew he was going to be all right, it was just everyone else who doubted it. In March 2003 I went down to Nassau for Spring Break. Among the groups staying at the glorious Crystal Palace Resort was a crew from Ole' Miss and none other than Eli Manning. Here he was with his buddies and some seriously gorgeous girls, in Nassau, wearing cut off jean shorts and Blueblocker sunglasses, playing volleyball with me and a bunch of other guys from my house. If you had told me then that this scrappy looking dude was going to take the Giants down the field in the last two minutes of Super Bowl XLII to beat an undefeated juggernaut and pull off the biggest upset in Super Bowl history I would've told you that you should never buy drugs from a local on the beach. Ever.

All I know is that I cannot get enough of what's being written about the Giants. I read everything because I don't know when the next time it'll ever be this good for this team. Eli, if I ever see you out, you drink on my tab all night (once I start getting paid of course). And to all the doubters out there...hey, I mean, winning the Super Bowl is almost as good as, I don't know, getting to interview Dr. Ruth...

Prom

Saturday night is the Business School Prom, which I imagine will both be dorky and a ridiculously good time all at once. One foreign student in my section wrote the following email to our section:

"What if I don't know how to dance? Do I need to sell the ticket I bought?"

I sent her the clip of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine dances at the holiday party and told her to just do that and she'd be fine.



I'm joking, I didn't send her that clip. I have to imagine that with an open bar and interviewing stress, things are going to get not just crazy, but "business school crazy", whatever that means exactly. There's a Pre-party at a friend's house, complete with picture taking and hopefully some awkward corsage exchanging. The weird thing is that parents will be there, but this time the parents are my classmates.

As some of you may know, for me, Prom elicits emotions such as shame, sadness, anger, and apathy. Let me just give you the quick rundown...

Junior Prom: My best friend hooks up with my date. Not cool. I even give him a ride home because that's the kind of guy I am. You can't stay mad at best friends (unless you're on The Hills) and we can laugh about it now...and by laugh I mean cry on the inside.

Senior Prom: My date ends up crying to her ex-boyfriend for the better portion of the night because she thought he looked sad. In an effort of one-upsmanship I try to look even more sad than the ex-boyfriend which didn't work. I'd like to think I spent the evening on the dance floor doing the "running man" with everyone saying "Go Fin-ger, go Fin-ger, go Fin-ger..." but I'm pretty sure I just sat and complained to my friends. She was apologetic. I say to her, "well at least you didn't hook up with someone else, which I guess is an improvement over last year".

Freshman Year Rush Date Party: I took a girl from Spanish class. Some jackass (later to be my pledge-brother and good friend) hooks up with her at the bar...which given the goings-on of the last two years seems about par for the course. I say to the girl, "¿Eres una prostituta?"

So how can I ensure that my date doesn't stray? Simple. No date. The vast majority of the folks going are going solo anyway, so it's no big deal. Regardless of what happens, I know I'll have the Giants to root for the next day, which should ease any potential wounds from Prom 3.0.

And that's about it folks. Enjoy your weekend.