I rue this day

Hello my steady doppelgängers, I am sorry that I haven't updated in so long. Believe me - I am sorry. I now have to remember and write all the shit that's happened in the last weeks and, unfortunately, it's a lot. Fuck.
Well first: I had my exam. Woo! Glad that was over with. It was a toughie, that fine Thursday morning. Afterwards was debauchery the likes of which can only be seen by medical students. I complimented it, of course, by having a gin'n'tonic ready in my Nalgene, with lime and everything, waiting for me when I finished. The exam-takers quickly moved to the university bar, conveniently located downstairs from the test rooms, and rowdiness ensued. I had gone to the bar 2 days prior to let them know that ~300 people would be going there and they adjusted drink specials accordingly. At one point (this was 2pm) a guy got up and peed right in a potted plant, in front of everybody, in front of a window, behind which people sat. He got escorted out to jeers and cheers. My friends and I merely grimaced at the thought of the medical profession's future.
I called it an early evening because I had to start baking to prepare for Friday's picnic. I made a glorious cheesecake and then called it a night. The next morning, I got up, chilled and basked in my freedom from the excess of study the previous weeks held. I prepared another dish for the picnic and set off. We all met at the ferry stop and head off to a nice park to barbecue, drink, and have make general merry.It was a resplendent night, I must say. We hung out at the park, which was on the river, and ate a lot and made jokes and hung out and, as if of course bound to happen, talked about what we put on the test and undermined each other's confidence. We then headed off to one of the lady's house and drank a bit more and told jokes and stories.

you don't even want to know what this story was about

We then flew off to a cool bowling alley/bar place. I bowled much worse than I ever have in my life but it was in good spirit because it's Australia and, let's face, these people cannot bowl. Adjoining the alley was a bar with live music where we played darts and rocked out for a while. I was getting ready to head off (it was 11pm and I had a flight the next morning) but I was convince to stay out and do something really outrageous: go bar/clubhopping in the city!
I hate doing that shit. For one, you have to dress up. You also have to wait in line and sometimes have to spend money to go to a crowded place that's feature is 12$/beer night. But I did it. We ended up going to a really skeezy place called the Down Under Bar - located at the basement of the biggest hostel in Brisbane - renowned for it's sleazy bartenders and even sleazier patrons. We danced. A lot.I only ended up getting home at 3am, when I had to pack and get ready for my flight in a couple hours.
The flights home went very uneventfully. God bless Ambien. I flew with Air New Zealand, which was a very nice little company with a nice airplane. I watched a couple movies, none of them exceptionally shitty - impressive for an airplane, and ate the ahead-of-time-ordered Asian meal. It was not good.
I arranged to have an extended layover in LA, since I had two friends whom I had met in Korea living there. Sweetly enough, one of them was having a surprise birthday part for the other! And I made a lovely surprise.
I have previously talked about Chase, but this will be a nice recap to show how socially amazing he is and how many weird little adventures we get into together.
He meets me at the airport, idling his time flirting with a really hot girl, and we drive off. He goes to buy a present for Mike, the other guy, and in the store is constantly talking to random people. We all meet up, Surprise!, and have a couple cocktails with the nasty Captain Morgan's Black Rum I bought in the Duty Free on the way over for 10$. We have to run a quick errand and in the parking lot, Chase decides to pull aside a random dude and have him be in our picture. He does and it turns out the guy's a high management guy for American Airlines. Business cards are swapped. We set off to Redondo Beach, near his place, to check out some sun and get some food. We hang out on the pier for 5 minutes before turning around to walk to the main strip to go to a Mexican restaurant. We are walking in a heavily peopled area when I notice my friends step over a nice wad of cash. I swoop and get it: 4 crisp 20$ bills, folded together.
I panic.
See, there's nothing I love more than free money. I am a J-O-O, after all. But I also do have a conscience and a brain and know that this did come from some person. I hang around the area for 5 minutes, frantically searching for a frenetic person seeking out monies. He or she does not come. I ask my friends if I should bring it to the cops. They scoff, saying that the cops will just pocket an indiscriminate amount of cash like that. They further persuade me, saying that in this area everyone is loaded anyway and I should consider it karma for being a good guy.
"Well then," I says, "dinner's on me."
We head over to the Mexican joint (I've been living in Australia for 5 months at this time, remember, so all I want is Mexican food) and wait in line for 15 minutes to get a table outside. In the meantime, Chase recruits a couple 9 year-old-boys on skateboards to cruise around, asking girls if they want to have a drink. Everyone sitting in the patio of the restaurant is watching and laughing, egging the kids on and giving advice. The kids do it with minimal success and we sit down when a kid finally comes back with a really cute girl and some friends, with whom Chase immediately begins chatting. They hit it off, digits are exchanged, we are in awe. After she leaves, a table gets up to leave and one of the women says that she likes "Chase's style" and gives him her business card, instructing him to call her for her niece's number, whom she promises is hot. We eat and drink margaritas and talk to all the people around us who are so involved with us.
We leave and walk down the beach promenade where there are houses. We notice some raucous 40ish year-old-women drinking and singing karaoke on their patio. We start chatting with them and they reward us with super-strong vodka-cranberries. They are all rich bitties from Texas who have been surgeried and Botoxed beyond recognition, on holidays. We stay for a bit, act polite, drink, and then walk a little more till we get to the apartment of one of the guys' friends. This apartment is on the beach and we watched the sunset over the ocean from his house as he offered us shots of 1000$-a-bottle whiskey. This guy was some super-rich dude who had a limosine company, entailing Nelly's personal Phantom that was sitting in this guy's garage. He was pretty down-to-earth and amazingly nice - all this made me feel the worse for stealing a bunch of his shit. Just kidding. It was surprising, though, how nice the dude was.
We head back to the car, feeling full and good, and start off for the guys' apartments (don't worry, Mike's little bro was DD). The surprise party was kickin' when we got there. Lots of rich people and everything. I don't understand the Business Person and don't understand their lifestyle. I'm not particularly jealous, to speak soothe, but kind of curious. Anyway, I left the party early to catch my 12:30AM flight to Minneapolis.
I got home and it was very nice to see the family, friends, and, dare I say, Minneapolis. I hate Minnesota but early June is pretty loverly. I did get to finally meet my little bro, Ben T. Cherrypit, and, though I hate babies, he is a decent bloke. He did throw up on me the first time I held him, though... I also got to see my stupid dog who was forced to wear a lampshade. She's looks like (and is) such an idiot I couldn't help but laugh at the dumb pooch who would continuously lick her wound after surgery.I won't bore you with the mundane details of the rest of my time back home. Highlights include: going biking with the family - meeting my older brother's girlfriend Sylvia for the first time, who was nicer and more attractive than we the image we feared in our minds
- going to Fogo de Chao. Twice. This is one of those churrascaria restaurants where you get unlimited awesome meat sliced onto your plate. The first time we went there was nice but nothing special. The second time was the coup de grace. See, they had a Father's Day sweepstakes where you could enter your dad to be a Gaucho for a day, so he could cut the meat and shit and, more important, 8 people can come and eat while he's working. So, being the loving father that my dad is, he entered himself under our names and won. Well, you can't argue with that.
- I got to be 1st assist at several surgeries with my dad, which was fucking amazing. The first one, the point where my dad had me grab the 1 month old's testicle outside of the scrotum with my forceps made me pretty damn queasy and I immediately had to set the forceps and teste down before I fainted. By the last surgery, I was a pro... at cutting wire.
- I found out that I'm sick. Yay! See, you might be able to tell from picture, but I have recently lost a decent chunk of weight. Like more than 20lbs in less than 2 months I also noticed higher heart, breathing, and defecation rate than normal. Oh oh, spaghettio! Turns out I have a thyroid problem, something which I couldn't take care of in America with my family because health-care in the States is just tooooooo good for an uninsured bloke like me. Oh well. Back in Australia to get that shit fixed.
- My last day in MN I went hiking with my mommy in a cool state park in Wisconsin called Perrot State Park. It was a bit of a drive away (~3hrs) but well worth it. We went hiking on some cool bluffs and canoed along the lovely Trempeleau river. Afterwards we stopped by at a BBQ restaurant. I normally don't like BBQ food, and this was no exception. I even got sauce all over my shirt, like in any movie or TV show, which is something that I have never done! I was abashed. At least I snapped this pic of myself:After leaving Minnesota, I headed off to Sonoma, where my dad has an awesome place to hang up his hat or two. I flew Frontier Airlines, which had a nifty little thing I'd never seen before, where you can pay to watch what you want. 5$ to get DirectTV for the whole flight and 1$ for a PPV movie. Good deal, all in all, but I had my Archos. It was gorgeous over there and the days were filled with swimming, chores, eating, and drinking wine, of course. One night I even got to babysit.

Like all good things, they say, this vacation too had to come to an end. My flights back were good and plentiful. I flew Alaska Air from Sonoma to LAX and they had free good microbrew beer on the flight! A fabulous first. When I first alighted onto the aircraft, I saw that my seat was conveniently placed next to a very fat woman with a lap "baby" who had to have been at least 3 years old. This was a small airplane and the seats weren't that big. I immediately approached the flight attendant, who's name I shit you not was Dawn Summer, and said that I needed a new seat. I got a row to myself and safely made my way to LA. I saw this gem in LAX; it's so perfect it would need a 1000 words to describe it:Ah, Northwest, I have never hated a thing more than I hate you. I was so happy to not have to fly on that airline for my 12 hour LAX-Auckland flight. They somehow had no window-seats or exit-rows when I checked in, so I grudgingly took the aisle. I sat down next to some squares and immediately looked around me like a prairie-dog ready to save the day, seeking out a better seat. I noticed a little woman sitting all alone at the window of her own aisle. I got up (they had locked the doors and were rolling, as they say) and asked the flight attendant if I could move there. She asked what my seat number was and where I wanted to move to (46G/51C). Luckily, I just pointed because she came up with some malodorous doctrine saying that one is allowed to move laterally within the row, but not up or down! What the F is that? I sat down in my rightfully earned seat and started chatting up the woman who's flight I obviously ruined by prohibiting her from lying down. Luckily she was drunk and had separated from her husband the previous day and was willing to talk. At some point a different flight attendant tried to get me to move back (this was because I had gotten back up to get my stuff since we were sitting on the runway for 10 minutes and I had nothing to do besides watch my cock get smaller) and I told him that it was okay. It was great - that extra room really pays off on a 12 hour flight. Ambien Again!
In NZ I bought some gin in the duty free (2 1-liter bottles for 24$ US), snapped this photo of the blue screen of death making its appearance, and jumped on the next flight, where sadly I wasn't sitting with no one next to me; instead, I had a really ugly old woman. Seriously, I'm usually not that judgmental but this woman would be kicked out of the pug category in the Blue Ribbon Dog Show.So I finally landed, 8AM, in Brisbane after traveling for exactly 24 hours. Fortunately, the Brisbanites had thought ahead and had not 1 but 2 immigration officers to handle the 3 planes of Chinese people that had just landed. After that stupid hour, I went through customs where they nabbed my dried cherries (I crammed a handful in my mouth before I let them throw it) but not the alcohol (I was over the limit of how much you can bring! Ha!) and then trained it to the city, just in time to miss my bus. After waiting 30 minutes, I got home with enough time to change my shirt, liberally apply deodorant and cologne (boy howdy I smelled) and then run off to class, where I was met surprisingly warmly.
So now I'm back in business and some busy times ahead. I have a video-taped history-taking/interview with a patient thing and a stupid 10page essay due in 2 weeks and HyeShin comes this weekend and will be here. Plus I have to catch up on the stuff I missed this week.