I said do you speak my language; he just smiled, and gave me a vegemite sandwich - Men At Work, Down Under

Few things to catch up on - the SFFS party, the party (and lack thereof) last night, Shelley's Friday night, etc.

So I'll start with boring stuff first, to get it out of the way. I finally processed the 500+ DDR mp3s I got through DDRAmerica. That was a major pain in the ass. I had to go through and edit each one's ID3v2 tags, because they had all kinds of weird capitalizations going on, and I had to retype the name and artist fields on each one. The album field was fine, though. That took something like three to five hours. But that's finally over with, and I've got all of them on my playlist now (which has been updated, now up to almost 2200).

I've got some pictures to upload; I'll see if I can get to that today before I have to go to work. Probably not, though - I have to clean my room and mow the lawn. Fun times.

So, the SFFS Party:

I found out about it Monday while playing DDR; I asked Derrick if he or anyone else was going to Dragon's Lair for open gaming on Thursday; he said no, because he was DJ'ing at the SFFS Halloween party, and most of the SFFS people would be there. I asked the guys about it while playing D&D that night (well, sort of; I didn't stay long; I'll come back to that). Michael said he'd go if he wasn't doing anything else, and to call him and ask. So I did, and he wasn't, so we went. Lilie was working 4 - C, or I would have invited her as well. I got my fairy costume together - the wings, bought a new tiara, the old magic wand, and some glitter. I tried to find a girl to put it on - to make sure nothing went wrong - but was having trouble. I forgot momentarily that Lilie was at work and called her (This becomes important a few chapters down the road), but just couldn't find anyone. I ended up talking to Lauren Wyatt, who I really haven't seen since high school (though we did run each other at Spider-Man, but spoke only briefly). She cut her hair fairly short, and she wasn't wearing a necklace. Other than that, she seems basically like I remember. Anyway, she put the glitter on my face; I also learned how to do it on my own, should the need arise later (and it did). She also lent Michael some horns on a leather band, so he had a costume as well - a white devil, or something like that. Preparations complete, we headed to the LBJ Student Center.

There was a guy dressed as Robin Hood standing outside the door, greeting people. I would later learn he was the SFFS's faculty advisor. Michael and I went in and paid our entrance fees; Brett was sitting in one of the chairs at the table. That was weird. I guess I knew in the back of my subconscious that he was in the SFFS, but it didn't really occur to me that he'd be there - he didn't say anything Monday night, and an officer at that!

The setup was fairly standard - there was a table on the back wall with some food and drinks, as well as two little globe things with dry ice and water to provide some odd smoke; a handful of round tables scattered throughout the room; there was a projection TV set up on one wall with Halo and two linked X-Boxes; Derrick had brought in his computer to play music, though the speaker setup sucked - it was just his personal speakers. They provided decent music, but the whole effect was... kind of laughable. Not that many people showed up - I'd guess less than twenty. At least half the people there were involved in setting it up, which is cool, but not a good ratio.

I played a lot of Halo, though I don't think we ever even got a full eight players. I stayed on the projection TV and held my own for once. We played mainly 2 on 3 or 3 on 3 teams. A few people rotated in and out, but there was core group of four or so people - I also met Rem, who does Halo LAN things, and I may be going to some of those. Which would be cool.

Caleb was there. That was another occurrence I should have anticipated, but didn't because I wasn't thinking. He wanted to talk about why I had stopped talking to him, while I really didn't. I really just didn't want to talk to him at all. I'm not mad at him or anything, I just don't want to be friends with him or hang out or anything.

Oh, and I got hit on, for the first time in my life. Of course, it was by a gay guy. Which puts a humorous slant on the whole thing. I'm flattered, don't get me wrong. It's just funny. It started during the officer auction, which was just sad. No one bid on anyone. Not really. Michael won Brett for like 20 bucks. Anyway, I was sitting at one table with Michael, and this guy was sitting at this other table with a much larger group. We kept making eye contact, and he raised his eyebrows at me once or twice. Michael noticed this and commented on it. Later, when we were just standing around talking, he totally just came up and started joining in on our conversation. Or tried to, at least - none of us really responded to him at all. Later, after Lilie called (more on this later), Michael, Brett and I were standing around talking. I was relating what had just transpired between us to them, and again he came up and stood with us. I kept referring to 'her' in an obviously more-than-friends manner (well, sorta - "She just wants to be friends", "She called and we talked", etc). So I think he realized I'm not gay. But then Brett asked me what Caleb wanted - I guess he noticed that Caleb kept coming up to me and trying to talk to me - and I said, "Well, he wanted to talk about why we broke up." (which is what I refer to it as). Later, Michael commented on that - "Do you realize what you just said?" (Talking about breaking up with another guy in front of the gay guy who'd been hitting on me). That alone was worth the price of admission.

There were some cool costumes. Well, I guess. There were two Indiana Jones, neither of which was James East (who was also there) or Josh (who usually does that). There was a wizard, who looked really cool. Lily (Derrick's girlfriend) was a cat. There were two other girls dressed as cats as well, though I didn't know any of them. Brett was dressed as some 70's guy - big fro, white shite, gold chain with a peace sign. He wouldn't disco, but Michael may force him to since he bought him in the auction. Liz, this girl, had on a huge burgundy dress and a sort of peacock mask - it was really pretty, and had a lot of glitter on her exposed shoulders and upper torso. We even had a weird discussion about the differences in our glitter - mine was much more outspoken; hers, more subtle. When we first started talking, she asked me if she knew me from somewhere, but I didn't remember seeing her before. She later changed into a much smaller black dress, and I didn't even recognize her - I'm just not good with faces until I spend some more time around someone. But she seemed pretty cool. CJ was some anime character and won the Male division of the costume contest, which annoyed me. Seriously. He's kind of annoying overall. The overall winners were these two chicks dressed as vampires. Not cool vampires, but angst-filled, noble-type vampires like something out of Vampire: The Masquerade or something. The one who spoke couldn't think very fast on her feet, either - she tried to deliver an impromptu monologue, but it didn't work at all. I wanted to smack her. Hard.

I did win a door prize, though. As did Michael. We could take one thing off of one table, or five comics. I took this little grey stuffed spider with six legs. Which makes it not a spider, I s'pose. The other choices were a bar of soap with a Princess Amidala action figure in the middle, or something else. That, and I don't like comic books. That's what Michael took. They ended up giving away all of the comic books at the end anyway.

Lilie called me at one point. That's significant, 'cause she NEVER calls people. Well, she calls people back, but that's about it. And she was just returning my call from earlier. But we had it out. We talked about our relationship, and our physicalility - as she put it, her 'line' is in a different place from other people's. So we're just friends. Which is cool. Because we're very close friends - I trust her immensely, and do feel very close to her. We're fairly close physically as well, which is what was was causing me all the confusion in the first place, even though she had said that we were just friends. It's just one of these things that's ingrained deep in my psyche. I'm working on not falling in love with her just 'cause we hug a lot and what-not, and she shows such definite caring, and is so sweet, and... well, you get the point. I do like her. A lot. But I can live with 'just friends'.

Mom's freaking out about me not having the yard mowed yet, so I'm going to have to do the rest later.