Conor - I'm A Big Dummy

Hey can I text you content of my Classic Brian? I don't have internet where I'm at now.

A Classic Brian in 160 character installments. A Classic Brian for the twitter age.

Okay. This text plus those first two make up the introduction. My statement of purpose. Hello, Classic Brian readers. How have you been?

Also Nick keep in mind I'll probably be sending you this over the course of the night. You're a good friend. Nick Dietrich, everyone. He's a real cool bro.

Let me set the scene for you guys. Here I sit, on a couch in a condo in the Durango Mountain Resort in Durango, Colorado. I've been here since Monday night.

It's a nice place. There are decorative skis on the walls, which seems sortof silly. There is a virtual fireplace. Also silly.

Nick you better be seperating these texts with paragraph breaks. These thoughts are grouped together for a reason, god damnit.

Not that I don't trust you.

I'm currently watching episode 5 season 1 of the Wire with the 5 other people I'm on this trip with.

I slept for 12 hours today and I've spent the day alone in the condo, reading The Girl Who Played With Fire and listening to music.

Had things not turned out how they did, I would've been snowboarding all day with the rest of these guys. That's how things were looking, before The Incident.

Capitalize The Incident, Nick.

Snowboarding is hard. Let me tell you. Snowboarding is very difficult. Mountains are big and steep, and even when you master turning left, there's still right.

We've been snowboarding all week, and things were going swimmingly. I'm not the best at snowboarding but I've seen some dumb fools up here who are eeeven worse.

So Thursday, our second full day of mountain time, we agreed to meet for lunch around 12:30.

I've been sticking around with my friend Caitlin all week, because we are pretty much the worst of our group.

Mike sucks way worse than us though because he switched to skis midway through our first full day. He's not a soldier. Caitlin and I? We're soldiers.

I would dedicate more space to insulting Mike more I don't have much more material. Skiing's weak though.

So anyway around noon Caitlin and I get to the bottom of the mountain, half an hour before our agreed lunch meeting time.

I decide to go up the mountain for another run, and Caitlin, not caring for my personal safety, decides to stay.

Let me phrase this in no uncertain terms: everything that happens after this point is Caitlin's fault.

The rest of this story is pieced together through secondary sources, because I have no idea what happened. I lost 6 or 7 hours of memory.

12 minutes later later Caitlin finds me at the bottom of the mountain. She waves, but I don't acknoledge her. I don't seem to recognize her.

When she approaches me I tell her I can't remember how to take my snowboard off. I tell her that I think I hit my head, that I need to go get it looked at.

Apparently they took me to urgent care. I proceeded to have the same 2 conversations with everyone for two hours not remembering that they had already occurred.

After a little while I didn't improve, and they decided I needed to go to the hospital and get a CAT scan.

For anybody who's interested, the first conversation was about the color of my socks (pink), and the second was about whether or not I was acting like myself.

The long and short of it was I got a concussion. The CAT scan showed up clean, and I was let go once I became more coherent. Which I eventually did.

Shout out to Chris Larberg, who stayed with me the entire time, and who also witnessed some reportedly interesting events.

Shortly before I got more sensible I went "fuuuuuuuck. This painting is trite. I hate this place. Let's escape."

Even a dehabilitating head injury could not quell my revolutionary impulses.

The painting in question was a house in a meadow. It was painted in broad, impressionistic strokes, and it was truly a little unnecessary.

It's scary, losing several hours of your memory. For a while there I lost a lot more. I forgot several things that happened over the course of the year.

Everything's back, excluding the hours leading upto and after the crash, but still. That was honestly really scary.

Nick, embed a youtube video of some really sad music here, to really sell this part. Your call on the song.

I forgot things about winter break. Things about this last semester.

I did not forget anything about the Wire.

Or the spelling of chords, I guess. Chris said that one of the only things I consistently knew was chords.

It all came back over the course of the night, thank god. My sister Betsy tried to trick into thinking I owed her $80. Soooooortof a bitch.

I can't excersize for a week and my head hurts like shit, but all in all, things turned out okay.

So that's the past 32 hours of my life. C-Dawg out.


Nick, feel free to title and tag this whatever you want. You're the man.

Tell me when you post that.

Wait, one more thing. I have stats that my friend Becca took while I was in urgent care. When she realized how many times we were going to be having the same

conversations, she started keeping track. Here are the counts.

How long have I been here in this room - IIIIIIIIIIII (12)

How long have I been here in Durango - IIIIIII (7)

What day is it? - IIIIII (6)

My socks are pink - IIIIIII (7)

Should I have this ice on my head - IIII (4)

Have my parents been notified? - II (2)

How did this happen? - IIIIIII (7)

Was anyone with me? - III (3)

When did this happen? - III (3)

Have we had similar conversations? - IIIII (5)

Can I go to sleep? - I (...1)

Can I sit up - III (3)

Is this a real medical concern? - II (2)

I blame myself for what happened - II (2)

I blame my friends for what happened - IIII (4)



Have you posted that shit?

Nick - The Misadventures Of Mitt Romney

The best costumes are ones that involve acting. That is why this year I dressed as Mitt Romney for Halloween. That and because I'm not black enough to dress as Herman Cain.

By "dressed," I of course mean that I put on a suit and used an excessive, disgusting amount of hair gel, because that is what Mitt Romney does. Then I proceeded to introduce myself to people and shake their hands, all presidential like, and drop subtle and annoying political references.

Really the only thing better than making a reference that somebody catches is making a reference that nobody catches. For example, when the subject of Native Americans came up, I put on my best Mitt Romney smile and laughed sociably, and then said, "We should ship them all back to Mexico," very politely, as if it's a completely reasonable thing to say.

I had many such moments this weekend, and the response was always the same. People would turn and look at me as if I was about to realize my mistake, and then they would nervously try to act like nothing had happened at all. I managed to make such tasteless statements on the subjects of race, homosexuality, religion, and various other topics, all without being called out / people realizing it was part of my costume.

Just imagine what I could have done if I were Herman Cain.

-Nick.

Conor - Can't You See I'm Dying

Last Sunday I poked my head into the lounge of my dorm when the superbowl was just getting started. My RA, Tyler, was in there and I made awkward conversation with him. The awkwardness there was mainly my fault. I think my RA is a really cool guy, and my mind goes into super overdrive mode whenever I run into him. I try extremely hard to be witty and impressive and cool, and usually I come off as pretty weird.

This time though, my autopilot found an especially pathetic way to leave a lasting impression on this guy. I should have known that I was going to fare horribly in this situation anyway. He was watching the superbowl for christ's sake. I was only really qualified to answer a handful of questions about the superbowl* and it would be suicidal for me to ask them an American Football question.

"Hey guys." I say. Confidently. Everyone in the room greets me. I follow this up with "Watching the Superbowl?" Genius. They're obviously fucking watching the superbowl, says me to myself. They confirm my fears and are, in fact, watching the big game. I stumble for what to say yes. Oh right I'm a MUSIC MAJOR here we go conversation saved.

"Who's playing the half time show, do you guys know?" All three in the room don't actually know, but one tosses out a name I don't recognize and things get out of hand as they all laugh and grow closer to one another over their shared love for Wiz Khlaifa. I just had to look him up. Awesome. So now everyone's talking about their shared love of football and rap. I decide to leave.

As I'm leaving though, as like, an afterthought, I mention that it's my birthday. "It's my birthday today," I say, as I turn and leave the room.

TYLER MY RA, WHY CAN'T YOU SEE HOW COOL I AM.

I'm not lonely here in Oklahoma. I know a lot of really cool people, I'm having a really good time. I feel like I'm getting defensive here, but trust me. I'm popular and I have lunch with 4 or 5 people pretty regularly and I never sleep alone, blah blah blah.

I'm just sometimes really, really bad at showing people who I am. As a general rule I try to act more or less the same to and around most everyone I run into, be they authority figures or little kids. But sometimes I just can't be myself around certain people. Or more accurately, sometimes maybe just I, myself, maybe I am really weird and can't really talk to people sometimes. I'd say most of the time it's around people I want to impress, which, you know... of course it is.

I always notice it after it's too late. I same something like "that sounds like a rock n rollin good time!" to somebody whom doesn't know me well enough to understand why I would ever say something like "that sounds like a rocking good time!" and then it just snowballs from there. I question them. I question myself. I question my jokes. But for some reason, I can't stop. I barrel forward. As the situation worsens, I start to find it funny. Which damns the whole ordeal even further, because now I'm saying stupid things and then laughing at the reactions my stupid comments are getting. I say something, allow the silence to become almost overwhelming, and then laugh at the silence that I had created in the first place. A horrible, horrible self-fuffilling prophecy.

I laugh because I understand that things are going badly, and that they're going badly in a comedic way. I can accept comedic failures. Sometimes I prefer comedic failures to boring victories, but I think that's also just a defensive mechanism. I blow things out of proportion the second I just fail to hit it off with a person. It's hard for me to accept that maybe just everybody wouldn't like me, even if they were to get to know me, which is a pretty ridiculous thing to get upset about, I understand. It's not like I want to be perfect, I just want to be good enough in everyone's eyes.

My Uncle David is one of the coolest guys I know, and he's not only a great uncle but a very good friend to me, and when I graduated high school he wrote one of the nicest, most sincere cards to me I have ever received. There was one part of the letter that said something along the lines of "you try to be everything to everyone and you almost succeed." That's so kind of him. I trust David, and for him to tell me that means a lot to me, but the first time I read it I felt it I focused on that implied failure in his statement. Which is preeeeetty pathetic of me. In the face of one of the nicest compliments I'll ever receive I wanted to have earned more. THE MORAL OF THIS STORY IS NOT THAT YOU DIDN'T COMPLIMENT ME ENOUGH, UNCLE DAVID. YOU'RE AS COOL AS THEY GET FOR REALZ.

I'm not going to please everyone. I haven't, I'm currently not, and I will not in the future. Yes I understand this. This problem is an easy one to solve when put into context, but it nags at me from time to time. I have a lot and I recognize and appreciate this.

Wanting to please people isn't the worst habit in the world, anyway, as long as I don't let it be an obsession or a need. I never drastically change the way I act in order to achieve the acceptance I want. I honestly believe that. I try to treat everyone with kindness and respect, I just want to get rid of the disappointment of realizing that not everyone wants to be my best friend. I know that. It's not a big deal.

I'm definitely going to stop using "it's my birthday today" as a final play for attention as I leave the room, though. I think we can all agree that's a pretty piss poor strategy that I can safely lose.

Superbowl questions I totally knew: "Who is playing in this year's superbowl?" "Which team does Eliot want to win?" and "What sport will they be playing?"