Before I get started, I truly hope that this is the only post I’ll ever make combining a “drinking story” with “enjoying anime”, but as they say, there’s a time and a place for everything, and well, here I am.

Saturday night, I went to the Watering Hole and Duffy’s…again. While I definitely did not have as much to drink as I had on Thursday night, I was still feeling pretty good by the time I made it home at 1. By 2:30, I was quite tired and read to go to sleep. Since I usually watch at least one (non-anime) show on Adult Swim per evening, I turned on the TV to see what was on. I don’t know if it was the buzz, the tiredness, the initial lack of paying attention, or all three, but for some reason, when I saw that an anime series was on and the episode title mentioned something to the effect of “stand alone show”, I was intrigued. (As anyone who has actually ever watched anime knows, the sheer absurdity and complexity of the story lines puts any American soap opera to shame.) So, to make a long story short, I watched about 15 minutes before falling alseep, and for those 15 minutes, I enjoyed anime. I’m a horrible, horrible person. Really.

To satisfy my curiosity, I looked up what I watched Saturday night; it was episode 12 of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. After reading the episode summaries, I couldn’t tell if the series is non-serial. Are the episodes actually standalone, or is it just a reference to the spinoff nature of the series?

As longtime readers of my blog know, I had a small epiphany back in October with regards to how I view myself. Since then, I’ve been doing very well, and I truly believe that I’m as calm and confident as I’ve been in a long time. In fact, several people have told me that they’ve noticed a change in how I carry myself (for the better), so I must be doing something right. But anyway, onwards to the stupid thought promised in this post title…

While being told that you’re a very nice person (by several people) and attractive enough (by fewer people) is great and all, I have an itch that I haven’t been able to scratch sufficiently in over 3 years. You guessed it: I’ve swung back to the “Hey, it’d be great to have a girlfriend again!” line of thinking. But wait…there’s more.

As best as I can reasonably estimate, I can now describe my dating situation as a Venn diagram in which the sets “ladies I’d like to date” and “ladies who’d like to date me” do not intersect. (If you believe this to not be the case, just…oh, never mind.) Therefore, it stands to reason that I, Jesse Whidden, should meet new people. My situation is complicated further (kinda) by the fact that I don’t know where I’ll be living after December, as the whole long-term thing would be preferable. So…any suggestions on how I should go about this? Should I delve into the depths of online dating sites? Do I need to beat myself senselessly for sharing this with you in the first place?

Since last night was Thursday, I spent my evening in several of the fine establishments lining O St., eating, drinking, and being merry. In retrospect, perhaps I did a bit too much of the latter two items:

• I realized today that I drank about 2 pitchers of beer over the course of the evening. Yes…it happened.
• I knocked a glass over at Duffy’s; I am very rarely a “sloppy drunk”.
• After I got back from the bars, I turned on the TV to watch “Family Guy”. However, I don’t have any recollection of which episode I watched; after I fell asleep, I kept hearing people talking. I didn’t realize until 7 a.m. that my TV was still on and at a fairly loud volume.
• Today at lunch, I realized I was shaking a bit.

The strangest part of all this was that I never felt drunk, sick, or distinctly hung over at any point. Oh well; life goes on.

In addition, an advisory for the Lincoln-area drinking population: If you try Fat Tire on tap in the near future, it may taste distinctly “buttery” (from diacetyl) and otherwise off; I had Fat Tire at two locations last night, and both of them were off. Other New Belgium products don’t seem to be affected. Hopefully, this is just localized to the Lincoln distribution area…

This past weekend, Rusty brought back a copy of Battletoads from his grandmother’s house in Kansas. Even though I have this game back at home (somewhere) and emulated on my computer (which is of dubious legality at best), I had forgotten how much fun this game can be…and how ridiculously hard it is, to boot. But anyway, two-player mode on Battletoads is one of the small joys in life that everyone should experience at least once.

It’s been a few posts since I’ve mentioned homebrewing in this blog, so, for those interested:

Batch #3 (a pale ale) was started a week ago; it is coming along quite nicely, with an appropriate “piney” hops aroma. I’ll bottle it at the end of the week, and it will be available for drinking around February 10.

Homebrewing, like so many hobbies, is quite cheap and easy to dive into, but after a bit of experience, the desire to become better (and the time/money required to do so) becomes an inevitability. Already, I dream of expanding my repertoire to wort chillers, secondary frementers, antioxidants, and all-grain brewing. If nothing else, this is one of the more “mainstream hobbies” I’ve had thus far.

As usual, I should bother to read a bit more before going off and posting about fairly silly personal/economic topics. In last Sunday’s Journal-Star, there was an article about how two-income households are more at risk financially than single-income households were a generation ago. The most frightening statistic? Housing cost have risen 70 times faster than individual wages have in the past 30 years. Now that, boys and girls, is a rate that can’t be sustained forever.

Today, after five months of parking in my current parking garage, I realized that I can walk indoors via skywalk from the corner of 10th and Q through the Embassy Suites to the garage on 11th to the west side of 12th between P and Q (about 100′ away from the door to my apartment). I can’t believe that I hadn’t noticed this earlier, honestly.

Along with my financial insight in the previous post, I’ve also been lobbing this thought about my synapses recently: One of the (numerous) enjoyable results that I’ll derive from getting married (at some point in a hypothetical future, to some hypothetical female), is the fact that 2 incomes will be used to support the living expenses that sum to less than those of 2 individuals. I’m really excited about that.

Today was the first time this semester that I had to fill in and teach the JDE juniors’ Finance 361 class. It didn’t go horribly, but I definitely left myself a great amount of room for improvement (of course, this was all planned, I assure you…)

On a somewhat related note, a thought about the current situation of the foreign exchange market with respect to the dollar: If I had the means to do so, I would buy a large amount of Chinese yuan (and to a lesser extent, Japanese yen), as large and growing trade deficits and the buying spree of U.S. Treasury notes by those countries’ central banks to keep their currencies from appreciating are not sustainable, in the long run. (The sharp appreciation of the euro and the British pound versus the dollar has been due in part to their ability to float more easily and thus has adsorbed much of this currency imbalance.) While there are no sure things in finance and investments, in my opinion, it is very likely that the dollar will depreciate against the yuan and yen sometime in the near-to-intermediate future.*

* Of course, I am not an actual financial expert, and anyone who bases their financial decisions on this post would be extremely stupid to do so.

There are many things in life that amuse and/or interest me. Here’s a smattering of both:

I received more mail than usual today. (Unless it’s Thursday, I have only two non-junk items to expect per month.) One item was a 1099-INT form from my bank informing me that I earned $5.10 in interest during 2004. Take that, IRS! Also, I got a health insurance card from Aetna as part of my grad assistant health insurance…which I opted out of back in September. (At least I thought I did; there was definitely some paperwork filled out at that time.)

For my International Finance homework, I had to poke about the Bureau of Economic Analysis site…there a lot of information there, if you’re willing to stare at it for a few minutes. Go! Do it now!

Finally…I (along with Kell) spent way, WAY too much time editing this Wikipedia article in the past few days. As if I need more things to encourage my procrastinatory tendencies…