Spiteivated

Writing my novel, guys. Fuck off.

-E

Nick - The Portrait We Paint

I wonder what somebody would think of me if they read my Classic Brian post every week, but never met me in person? While I could just ask Sunday Robert's Mizzou friends, I elect to decipher for myself instead. Here are the caricatures painted by our blog posts, as well as how accurately they reflect our real personalities.

Sunday Robert

Reading through Sunday Robert's posts, we start off with many sentimental, introspective posts. Robert maintains a strong streak of sentimentality throughout, with occasional bursts of hilarity. I imagine Classic Brian Robert to be a funny, sentimental recluse, living amongst nature and writing fiction.

Resemblance: 8/10

Monday Nick

My own posts read like a story. A story about a video game-obsessed guy with crushing social anxiety, who suddenly snapped and has been on a rampage ever since.

Resemblance: 3/10

Tuesday Mada

Mada comes and goes as she pleases, and never writes about the same thing twice. We never really know what she's going to write about or what to expect. In fact, her caricature is much like a schizophrenic cat: appearing and receding on no particular schedule, and jumping from one thought to the next.

Resemblance: 1/10

Wednesday Eliot

Here we see basically rambling about stuff without getting to a coherent point, intermingled with really interesting posts about various topics. We also get an occasional glimpse at the expert sports journalist lying underneath. He could be some kind of NBA superhero who only comes out to post really late at night, and likes to talk a lot.

Resemblance: 6/10

Thursday Brendan

Brendan's posts paint a picture of somebody who is a very talented writer, an avid fan of Bob Dylan, and generally an overachiever when it comes to writing.

Actually, that pretty much describes him in real life, too. Yeah. Wow.

Resemblance: 10/10

Friday Conor

What facts do we know about Friday Conor? He has a band and he posts really late all the time. But looking through the window of Friday Conor's posts reveals more about him: a guy who goes through frequent and very strange obsessions. In fact, if you read through select posts about Conor's many hobbies, you could very easily imagine him to be a ten-year-old.

Resemblance: 7/10

Classic Brian

Behold, ladies and gentlemen, the Classic Brian. A being of pure spite and ill-will, his only respite from causing havoc is writing lists and half-assing things. I like to picture him as some kind of blogging deity, like the Zeus of Classic Brian, because he is our namesake. Like an evil blogging god, he reigns parody down upon the plight of us mortal bloggers.

Resemblance: 4/10

Living the Dream

The morning came, and everything was as it was before, and I remembered everything but it didn’t feel real, and it didn’t seem to affect me at all. It was as if the last night, however long it was, hadn’t happened.

A headache pounded my skull like a machine, and I crawled out of bed and ached my way downstairs toward sweet Aspirin. I felt weird. Or I felt normal, and that felt weird, because I didn’t want to feel normal. I wanted my life to be different, and it wasn’t. I wanted to be enlightened, or full of wisdom, or to know and see the same things I did before, but I couldn’t. It was all gone.

I didn’t know what time it was; my watch wasn’t on my wrist. I didn’t remember where it was. At the foot of the stairs, I stopped for a moment, and I tilted my head a bit and saw the panorama of strange pictures on the walls. This wasn’t my house. This was Sophie’s house. I let out a quiet chuckle at the insanity that I could come this far without recognizing I wasn’t where I expected. It was weird how that could happen.

Sophie’s parents weren’t home, and I fixed myself some breakfast in her kitchen, or rather, poured myself some cereal with milk, and I couldn’t find the spoons, so I just held the bowl up to my mouth and drank and ate at the same time. The cereal tasted like cereal, and the walls looked like walls, and the table felt smooth like a table, and the very quietness of the house sounded like silence, and it was all very muddling to me for the reasons already stated. I wondered why the cereal didn’t taste like rock and roll on my tongue, and why the walls didn’t sound like soft velvet in my ears. It was all very much the customary way, and that was troubling. I lifted the cereal bowl high into the air above my head and let it drop, and it shattered loudly and violently on the tile floor, and all I felt was remorse for having broken her thing and soiling her floor, and I was only mad at myself as I knelt and removed the stain that really looked like it almost belonged in the unkempt house, which was really more of a shed than a house. Sophie’s parents were mostly like her, I figured, using things only as they needed them and not spending too much of themselves on the sensitive and nostalgic.

I put the normal broken bowl into the normal trash can and opened the normal door into the open world, and I walked out, and there were no epiphanies to be found that morning in the chirping of the robins or in the arms of the bright sunlight, except maybe in the lack thereof, which wasn’t very satisfying at all. Sophie didn’t live that near to me, and the long walk back home was long, and I felt every minute of it, no more and no less of it.

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Hey, guys. It's, uh...been a while since we've talked. It's been about a few months. About a summer, really. I've been busy, you know, just like you. Well, not busy at all, really, which has allowed me to be really very busy. You know, I've had a couple of jobs, but they didn't work too terribly many hours. I took a French class, but that was a joke. Other than my roommates, there wasn't even a full handful of people I knew living in my town. So I uh...wrote a novel! That was an excerpt up there in italics. Do you like it? I like it. It's from chapter 16. There are 28 chapters. It's pretty long. It's 161 pages in Word, which by my best guess might be somewhere a little over 200 pages of a novely book. Yeah, I don't know. I pretty much spent most of all my days this summer either researching or writing it. Six months ago, I never could have imagined I could have done something like this if I hadn't been confronted with a sudden and absolutely vacant summer to do it with. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of tired, but I'm really pretty proud of it, besides the parts of me that are less proud of it. I've been working since the end of May, basically. As a reference point, a couple days before this many posts ago on Classic Brian. I finished Friday, so I guess it took me less than 100 days of work. So far it is as yet untitled. But I did it. I, uh, thought you should know. 

Here's a pie graph that I like to call, "Why I Didn't Tell People (Like My Roommates) About This"

  

Robert Langellier