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For some reason, I've avoided making additions to this site until today, December 12th, 2005. Yes, this is almost two years since the events happened, and my memory is flaky at best, but at least that will allow me to fill in the gaps with ridiculous bullshit that is more exciting than what really happened...

Funky Email Time!

In this section, I am going to describe the events surrounding some of the most absurd emails I have ever received or sent. Oddly enough, they all happened during my 4th year, and relatively close to one another. The first actually happened during the Fall semester. Zach was semi-dating a semi-nice girl named Katie Briggs who was like 25 and just sort of hanging around Charlottesville. She was pretty intelligent, and I enjoyed talking with her whenever she was over to see Zach. I was dating Kelly at the time, and Katie also had a boyfriend who was off somewhere else. If not for this boyfriend guy, I am confident that she and Zach would have really hit it off. However, this did not happen. Things were winding down between Zach and her when I all of a sudden received the following email at around 5pm one random day:

Hi Colin,
It was really fun hanging out with you last night. Your ability to be annoying is impressive. You cause me to question my notions of liberal toleration. How much toleration is reasonable? My whole worldview is changing.
Anyway, I am going to cut the crap. I think you are insanely hot. I know that you are in a relationship now, and I totally respect that. In fact, I am in the same position. I really miss and love my boyfriend, but I really miss having sex too. I think that it would be really fun if we hooked up some time.
The only concern that I have is my friendship with your roommate, who, obviously, is a really fun and amazing person. His feelings would really be hurt if he found out.
Basically, the idea of getting it on sounds pretty good, but the sneaking around might suck. Let me know if you have any thoughts about this.
later,
Briggs

Well, there it is. I'm sure I don't need to expain how ridiculous it is. I thought it was a joke that Zach was playing on me, so I immediately notified him. He was sort of shocked, and assurred me it was real. I hadn't watched enough MTV or daytime trash TV to know what to do, so I just sort of let it fizzle at that point. Katie didn't really come around any more.

Winter break was pretty much uneventful and cold, so I'll skip to the next semester...

I decided sometime in the fall that I no longer cared to go to classes, and that I also felt that being graded was overrated. So, I decided to take only four classes again (one being the writing of my economics thesis) and have two of the four be pass/fail. The only class that could be considered real was 'complex analysis'. I attended the class only once (the first day), and skipped every single quiz in this course. It was no surprise that I received this email from my professor on March 23rd:

Dear Colin,

Please make an appointment to come to see me regarding Math 334. I have frankly been confused from time to time if you are enrolled in the class because you have not been attending or taking the weekly quizzes. There is an attendance policy for the course. "Regular attendance is expected. Daily attendance will be taken, and unsatisfactory attendance can result in lowering your final grade by a letter grade." Your score on Test 2 was very poor. You are losing touch with the course and in danger of failing the course.
J. Rovnyak

So I ended up having to go to every class and take every quiz from then on, or else he would fail me. Given that I needed this course to graduate, I acquiesed. The last month of the course was actually somewhat interesting, although completely useless outside the context of a University classroom. For all of my fans out there, do not worry, I ended passing the course after he regraded my Test. For some reason he decided to fail me the first time through- even though I got almost everything correct...

With the exception of this course, John Bates and I were in every class together. We had a great professor in Number Theory and Cryptology and also took Charlie Holt's mathematical Economics, which was a pushover course. We stayed involved in Rock Climbing and frequently took class days off to skip stones and drink beer in the Shenandoah mountains. Overall, it was my favorite college semester. One of the other great contributors to the quality of the semester was April McCollum. April was a 4th year in the Comm School who was taking MATH514, Mathematics of Derivative Securities, which I happened to be a grader for. She needed tutoring help, and I offered my assistance. Our first interaction was over email, and I was as charming as always (keep in mind that her name is APRIL):

Hey Michele, I can't do anything today, seeing as i am intoxicated right now and will be until I leave, but I'll be lenient on your assignment, and also do not fret too much about the homeworks, they do not count much and its better to go over them after the fact anyway so that you really learn the material. I will meet with you one of the first days after spring break to go over the more important things that you are discussing in class and some additional topics that might be helpful. ~Colin

Charming, No? Anyway, in exchange for helping April pass the course with flying colors, she dated me for, coincidentally, the month of April. It was a great relationship, and we both felt strongly for one another, but I dropped the ball a few times, and couldn't really argue when she decided to break up with me. It was a very non-serious relationship on account of the fact we were graduating and going our separate ways in such a short time. An example of this was one night when we went to bars and had a bet over who could go home with a more attractive person of the opposite sex.




One of the most frantic activities of the Spring was my continued efforts in the world of job searching. I had numerous interviews that I felt had gone well at the time, but now in retrospect, I realize that I probably came across pretty poorly compared to other candidates. I eventually had a follow-up test and interview with a company called Epic. Upon visiting, I decided that it was a perfect fit for me (with the exception of being in Madison, Wisconsin) and decided to accept their generous job offer. Having a job secured in the early part of the semester really allowed me to relax for the remainder of my experience at UVA.

One of the greatest events that is celebrated at the University of Virginia is a horse race known as foxfields. It's basically an event where people pay $32 each to hang out in a field of trucks full of beer with 7,000 other people and get absolutely shit-faced. I swear that I didn't even see one horse this time that I went. Like most things in college, it's an excuse to drink, a lot. My friends had gotten one of the truck lots, and invited me to come with, so I wasn't going to argue. I remember that April came too, but I don't think that I saw her while I was there... but that will come into the story later. Here's a picture of John Bates, Abe and I unloading the truck:



I had been drinking the whole way there (which takes forever due to the traffic jam) so by the time the truck was unloaded, I really needed to pee. Instead of bathrooms, they have trough-rooms at Foxfields, so the guys basically piss into these slightly slanted 20 foot long troughs, and the piss runs down to the end into a gutter. One of the great foxfield traditions is that a drunk frat guy will take donations for a trough dive, which is when he sprints and leaps into the trough, seeing how far down the piss can carry him before he stops. On this day, I was fortunate enough to witness one such dive, and then the chaos that ensued after he jumped up and tried to hug people. I must say it was one of the most hilarious things I have ever seen. After the piss, I figured I'd light up a cigar with my buddy Abe:



Since I couldn't find April, I started feeling deprived of affection. With me, that leads to one thing: wanton confusion of sexuality. Since John Bates also had no significant other, we started groping one another. Luckily enough, someone with a camera captured us in the act:



After this shot was taken the drinking got really heavy. I walked around with my shirt off for a while then sat down on a lawn chair next to john. I put my shirt on loosely and sort of just peacefully existed in that uber-drunken state where your eyes are half open and you still can't see anything... All of a sudden a girl jumped into my lap and starts making out with me. In my condition, I wasn't going to resist, but when she started putting her hands down my pants and saying really really dirty things in my ear, i was like, "whoa!!" It wasn't April, and it wasn't another attractive girl, so even then I figured we'd gone far enough. I thought maybe giving her my phone number would get her away from me, so I did, but I stupidly gave her the right phone number... Here's a picture of some of our drunk crew around this time:



I was worried that April may have seen what happened, so I went looking for her again. I couldn't find her, but I found one of her friends, and we started talking. She was a cute friend, and she was sort of into me on that day, so somehow we ended up making out in a lawn chair. According to eye-witness reports, it lasted about an hour, and there was no way that April wouldn't have seen it... I hardly remember any of it. That's actually the last thing that I remember that day, except my phone incessantly ringing later that night. When they dropped me off at my place, here's what I looked like:



It turns out that April didn't see anything, but I fessed up to 'kissing another girl' and she seemed to not mind too much, although i never went into detail about who it was...
Both of the John's and I continued our climbing routine well into the spring semester. We even had a few opportunities to do some outdoor bouldering when the weather got nicer:



My friend Ronen from High School came to town to visit and we had a blast together. Ronen is one of my closest friends, and sadly I do not get to see him very often. He is a really smart guy and is at Harvard beating heads right now :) Anyway, Ronen and I decided to hike Old Rag together, and had a blast doing it. Here's a picture of us together on the way up:



To give you guys an idea of how great a climb old rag is, here's a picture of the ridge viewed from the summit:



You basically scramble over the rocks on the ridge all the way up to the very very top, as you can see two people in the picture doing. It is quite thrilling, and far more intense than a normal hike. There are also lots of opportunities to stray off the normal trail, and try out your freelance rock climbing skillz! If you are adventurous enough, you will find a cave down into the rock that leads to an opening in the cliff. Here is the entrance to the cave:



We have a number of pictures of all of us sillhouetted against the sky in this cave. See if you can match the sillhouette to the person:






Here is another pic that was taken in this same cave:



The rest of the semester was not too eventful. I worked on grading all the MATH514 papers on time, and spent a lot of time with April while we were still together. Once that was over, I mostly just concentrated on getting everything finished up before graduation. Ah, graduation, another college ceremony that is completely for show. Yes, it is true that we will not be coming back next year, but why make such a big deal? Are they that happy to get rid of us? It may be meaningful for the more erudite students, but for most of us, it's complete fakery. We came, we half-assed, let's limp off into the sunset. Perhaps the parents like it, I don't know; for me, it interrupted my daily 10am - 'Wet Hot American Summer' schedule, so how could I not be upset.

To give you fine gents a good idea of how the day went, I will relate the procession of events in a play-by-play style:
First, they set up the chairs and waited for people to arrive:

Then, they held the graduation ceremony:

Finally, everyone vacated so the next ceremony could take place:


I felt more proud showing my parents the huge pile of beer bottle caps on my kitchen floor...

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