Fear and Loathing in Ames. Or, yes, we're in Iowa.

This weekend was pretty good. I helped a friend move, had dinner with my family, found part of my Halloween costume. I spent a little too much time in the car, had a decent workout, explored a part of Ames' Main St. that I hadn't visited before.

Preparations for taekwondo testing are in good shape. I think the hardest part of this is simply going to be keeping my nerves about me the day of the event. We have three weeks.

Something happened this weekend which I could not have forseen or imagined, and I believe it is worth sharing in some detail. So, Saturday night, I was playing darts at the Corner Pocket with my friend Scott, when a comely young woman came down the stairs next to the dartboard and begins talking to us. She had chest-length blonde hair, wore light-blue jeans and a greenish-patterned tank with some kind of jacket over it; she was tanned and looked to be in fair shape at worst. She began talking to us, and I don't know if I can reproduce her exact words, but here is how they exist in the malleable fabric of my memory:
"Hey, how's it going? Can I talk to you guys? I was upstairs and there isn't anyone for me to talk to there. It's just all black people and gay people and I don't like black people or gay people. So what are you guys doing? Just playing darts? Are you Iowa State students?"
Scott: "Sort of,"; Me: "Not really."
Her: "You two aren't gay, are you?"
Us: "No." (In hindsight, we missed an opportunity here.)
Her: "Okay, because I just don't like gay men." At this point we introduced ourselves; our little bigot's name was Lindsey.
Her: "Well I'm going back upstairs." (to Scott:) "You should come up."

At this point she left the same way she came. We had to sit down. Did this really happen? Sure it did. Lindsey may have been under the influence of alcohol at this point in the evening, but she seemed coherent when she spoke. Both Scott and myself agreed that we probably should have said something but our words were bound with disbelief when this actually happened. Still, it was astonishing. Such bigotry is a rare and stealthy animal, not often seen and rarely believeable when it is in this day and age.

We did eventually go upstairs, mostly out of morbid curiosity. Lindsey never crossed our paths again. The rest of the evening was fun though relatively uneventful, and it was never really in doubt that it would be.

Today's Music that Jason is Listening To is Twoism by Boards of Canada. This is ethereal, dreamy electronic music. It has no real vocal structure and only sparing use of language, mostly using percussion and various synthesizers to create a layered aural tapestry. It is not as emotional as, say, Mogwai or Explosions in the Sky; I usually find myself listening to BoC in the mornings when the fuzz of sleep is not entirely cast off. Still, this record's reserved nature is a choice rather than an inability to be something else, as it achieves a nice minimalist effect but still offers a fair amount of interplay on each track. I also enjoy the song titles, which are almost always nonsensical at their most relevant. This music may be too simple for some, or just not rock hard enough for others; I would agree that it is somewhat situational for my tastes but I certainly enjoy it. It manages to not always be everything that I want, but to not be something that I do not desire or appreciate.