The Jeanetic Code

A few days ago I was out on some last minute shopping with my two older sisters, as well as my cousin, and Josey (the younger of my two siblings) decided we needed to stop in at Luna. Luna is a small clothing store in a small but popular commercial zone of Columbia, SC. I'd never been in before.

The store is about the size of a tennis court. I looked to my right and saw the Men's' section, which would have fit inside a bathroom. I probably have more clothes in my closet than they had on their racks. I guess quality was their game.

"Oooh, Paper&Denim," Josey cooed, fondling a pair of jeans. "You'd look so good in Paper&Denim." Josey went to Columbia University for undergrad, and now attends UCLA, so she's somewhat of a fashionista. And while I'm no stranger to GQ (It's my go-to magazine for airplanes) fashion means different things to us: To her it means "Clothes made from high quality materials by talented designers cut meticulously to appear stylish and sexy, at a price that is high but worth it," whereas to me it means "Clothes that look pretty good and aren't so expensive that I feel guilty when my mom buys them for me."

I've never heard of Paper&Denim. But I'm always willing to try on a pair of jeans. You never know when you might find a pair that makes you so ruggedly sexy that women tackle you on the street. So while everyone else in my party went off to look at the girl's section, I found a pair of this Paper&Denim in my size.

I no sooner had them off the rack than a young saleswoman came up to me.
"Can get a room started for you?" she asked.
"Huh?" I replied. Always smooth with the ladies, that's me.
"I'll take these to a dressing room for you," she said.
"Uh, okay." Was she going to draw a bath for me as well? Did I look incapable of carrying one pair of jeans to a dressing room? Actually, I probably did. When I go into clothing stores I'm like Stevie Wonder in a House of Mirrors: absolutely no idea what's going on.

Eventually I found my room, which was essentially a poorly lit changing room with no lock on the door. I traded my tried-and-true, bought-at-Target jeans for the Paper&Denim, and looked in the mirror. I looked pretty bad. It's hard to describe why exactly, but they weren't working for me. Oh well, no big deal, really I was just killing time while my sisters shopped. As I was folding them back up, though, I happened to look at the price tag: $178.

Ok, what the hell. Not that I condemn spending money for clothes. I myself have a particular weakness for hats, and so I understand that sometimes you have to spend good money to get something that looks good, but $178? Who were they trying to fool? I know jeans have gotten pretty stylish now, to the point where any day now people are going to start wearing them to funerals, but it still shocks me to see a price - especially on a pair of guy's jeans - that would buy you a Playstation.

I had a similar experience right after I moved to Boston for college. I was down in Harvard Square, wandering around, checking out the sights, and keeping my eye out for a new pair of jeans, when I saw a Diesel store. Hmmm, I thought. I didn't know much about Diesel, except that their advertisements conveyed rugged stylishness that I thought gelled well with my romantic vision of myself. However, I had just spent the previous year in Japan, and missed the whole process by which jeans began to cost more than insulin. As far as I knew, you got jeans at Target for $24.99, they came in blue, and the only style choice was whether or not they had the little loop on the side for a hammer.

So I walked into the Diesel store, as innocent and helpless as a cat wandering into a Chinese restaurant. Immediately the salesman asked if I needed help finding anything. I told him I was looking for jeans in such and such measurements. He assured me that they had them, and then I asked, "How much would they cost?"

"140 dollars," he said, without blinking an eye.

"Oh," I said. I was dumbstruck. The concept of a pair of jeans costing $140 was as foreign to me as paying money to be spit on. I couldn't think of what to say. "That's really expensive," was the best I could manage. Then without further ado, I turned and slunk out of the store, never to return.

Back here in the present day, I've acclimated slightly to this phenomenon of expensive jeans, and since my sisters were still going strong, I decided to have some fun. I went back over to the men's section, and found every style of jean that came in my size. Regretfully the most expensive pair, at $258, seemed targeted at slightly larger-waisted people than I.

Another saleswoman came and took all the jeans - six pairs this time - and got another room ready. When I walked in, they were all hanging up, on display like paintings in a museum. Quickly I tried them on one after another. Six pairs, and in maybe two minutes I'd evaluated them all. And how did they make me look? In a word: gay.

And I know we aren't supposed to use words like that, but frankly it's true. Those jeans would only be appropriate if I were in Greenwich Village drinking Cosmopolitans at a bar called the Screwdriver. And I didn't even look like a stylish gay man; I looked like a gay man who bought overpriced jeans in a desperate bid to have people overlook his shitty personality. No self-respecting gay man who fit the stereotype of being sartorially intelligent would buy these pants.

Bottom line is I tried on $1000 dollars worth of jeans, and actually felt worse when I finished. I walked out of the dressing room and handed then all back to the saleslady. My sisters were finished shopping.
"How did the jeans work out," Ricky asked. "How'd you look?"
"I looked gay," I replied sharply. Not the most mature response, I know, but something about the whole experience had made me bitter. The saleswoman overheard and laughed shortly, but I know inside she agreed with me. She sees guys walk in there, with their gelled hair and popped collars on their pink Polo shirts, and they buy $400 dollars of pants, and strut around and just one day she wants to yell "FOR GOD'S SAKES GO OUT AND PUT ON SOME WRANGLERS!" But she can't, because she's part of the system.

My sisters, of course, tried to justify the existence of such expensive jeans, citing the difficulty of finding a cut that fits well, the longevity of a well-made pair, and of course the fact that one can wear jeans every day of his or her life. I agree that those are all valid points - if you're a woman. At the risk of appearing callous, boorish even, I'm going to say that guys, in our lower bodies, do not exhibit the great variety, nor the excruciating need for flattery, that girls do. And I see nothing wrong with the efforts girls put in to finding a flattering pair of jeans. In fact, I see quite a bit of good in it, and if some girl needs to spend $200 dollars so that I can admire her ass, then that's just the way it has to be. But not for me. All I know is I tried on $1000 dollars worth of jeans and didn't come any closer to having sex. At the least one of the saleswomen should have burst in on me, I mean that's the only plausible reason that there aren't locks on the changing room doors. Ultimately, I'm not properly convinced of the necessity of owning a $200 pair of jeans. And anyway, there's no chance that my mom would by them for me.

Losing It

Today Papa Bear, my housemate, reached that moment in his life that every young man comes upon eventually. At the age of 21, he reached it later than most, but let's not discriminate on age. Yes, the time finally came when he stepped into that next stage of manhood: he realized that a girl he thought was hot was, in all actuality, quite ugly.

Now, as much as we'd like to rag on him for the rest of his life, even until late age in the retirement home ("Hey! Remember that time in college when you thought that girl was really hot, and then realized that she was a complete dog?" "No, actually I don't remember") we must achnowledge that we've all been there.

For me it was sixth grade. There was this one girl and I thought she was the hottest thing ever, and it was months before I realized her face looked like she'd been using it to juggle bowling balls. So I sympathize with Papa Bear on this one, though I'm certainly not going to let him completely off the hook. We can't forget our mistakes, lest we repeat them.

We were in the gym when it happened. I saw him talking to this nondescript, unattractive girl, and assumed she was just a classmate. She walked away and he said, sadly, "The gym keeps disillusioning me about girls."

See, something similar had happened two months ago, when we saw a girl whom we both found very attractive in the gym, and discovered that she was just a little skinny. Not that she still wasn't pretty, but it cost her a full point deduction. And my housemate especially does not go for the skinny girls; Papa Bear is a pretty muscular guy, and he needs a woman that can give him a little something to work with.

Alas, this problem of thinness is all too common up here at Tufts. I come from South Carolina, where not only is the female population by and large very attractive (the fact that the weather rarely necessitates covering all of one's body certainly helps) but down there, when a girl is not at her ideal weight, she tends exceede it. Up here however, the problem is the opposite. Many, of these northern girls would be very attractive if they'd only gain eight pounds, but they resist. The sheer unliklihood blows my mind; it is so difficult for them to be unattractive, yet they suceed! They have to exercise rigorously and monitor their eating like the Gestapo, and if they would only be less dilligent for a week or two they'd become gorgeous examples of feminity, but as it is they look like they've been caught up in the wrong end of the white slave trade.

I even had an English teacher like this. She taught my class on James Joyce's Ulysses. She was brilliant, well-spoken, and hilarious. She would have been very hot, except she had the body fat of a telephone pole. It's just as well, because the last thing I needed was a romantic obsession with my English teacher, but all the same I was depressed to see a woman who was just a few dinners at the Cheesecake Factory away from perfection. At the end of the year, when we had to fill out our teacher evaluations, I wrote: Professor________ is one of the most brilliant people I know. She's intelligent, funny, and made the class very interesting. However, I do worry that she's not eating enough. I hope she's taking care of herself. That is a true story. I haven't seen her since, so I don't know if she took my anonymous advice to heart. I have heard through the grapevine, however, that her new boyfriend is a real loser, which is yet another common problem here at Tufts, but not one that we need to get into now.

The point is, up here, standards start to change, and sometimes, as a guy, your vision gets blurry and things look a little better than they are. But that's not what happened to Papa Bear. This was no small matter of fuzzy grey area. This was looking at beef jerky and seeing a T-Bone steak. And when he saw this girl in the gym this morning, finally the A-1 sauce was wiped from his eyes. In a way it was a disaster narrowly avoided. God forbid something develop between the two of them, and then one day they decide to get intimate and OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS THING IN MY BED! Because it's kind of hard to turn back, once you reach a certain point. Can't really start making out with a girl and then, as soon as all her clothes are off, say, "You know what? Maybe this wasn't such a good idea." I mean, there's no graceful exit, what are you going to say? "Oh, that's right. Seeing you naked reminded me that I'm gay. Sorry about the misunderstanding." So although Papa Bear took his sweet time getting to this point with a girl, we shouldn't be too hard on him. At least he didn't wait until marriage.

Walkin' on Suuuuunshiiiiiiine

For a moment, I thought my streak had ended. Ever since Friday and my 12 laps, I've been living on a cloud. Things just cannot go wrong, and every day I cannot feel better, but then something happens, some unforseeable awesomeness, and I reach a new level of euphoria. But when I got to the door of Redbones Monday evening, at 7, and saw the sign Closed on Monday 12/12 for a Staff Party I thought it was over. All Colin and I wanted was to meet for a degenerate barbecue feast, and we were being foiled by a staff party. Staff party, what the hell was that? They should be partying by serving me ribs! Unbelievable.

Colin is a good friend of mine that I met when I trained Kung Fu here in Boston my first year. He went to MIT, but finished grad school last May (at the tender age of 21) and relocated to San Diego. Colin and I are very into the martial lifestyle, which to us means doing things like putting extra hot sauce in our beef noodle soup. Since he left for the pastel coast we obviously haven't been able to hang out much, but he was back in town, so we decided to be very martial and go challenge our stomachs at Redbones.

Going to Redbones is sort of like a pilgrimage. It's not far, only 15 minutes from my house or campus, but it's just expensive enough to make eating there a special occasion. And the food...oh my. Everything at Redbones is big: big ribs, big plates of meat, if you order a coke it comes in a mason jar, even the waiters are big. One of the guys there has to be at least 6'5". The only small things are the napkins, but that's ok because you don't need to clean your fingers, you just dry them when you finish licking them. Redbones was actually where I learned the meaning of the phrase "falling of the bone." Their ribs are like meat cotton candy. Just thinking about it I need to go take a cold shower.

Naturally, after fantasizing about the food all day, and putting myself on a near starvation diet of only eating once between lunch and dinner, I almost cried when I saw the sign. There aren't many things that bring tears to my eyes, but the ending of It's a Wonderful Life and Redbones being closed always get the waterworks going.

Our second option was a Tibetan restaurant that I'd eaten at a few times before, but it was closed as well; it always closed on Mondays. I was starting to worry that my cloud was turning into rain.

"Are there any bar-type restaurants around?" Colin asked.
"Sure, there's the Joshua Tree," I said. To be honest, I wasn't thrilled about going there. I'd had lunch there before, and it was decent enough, but I just don't normally go for that style of restaurant. However I figured that the atmosphere would be closest to Redbones, and besides, Colin and I are guys and we needed to have guy conversation, and you just can't do that at an Indian restaurant with soft lighting.

We walked in and I asked the host if they had a table for two.
"It's a little different today guys, can I see your ID's?" We handed them over. "Ok, here's the deal. We're not serving food until 8, but until then we have a free buffet and free drinks. Find a seat and take as much as you want."
...
...
...
Both Colin and I were a little confused. Free food and drinks? How was this possible? We stumbled around the restaurant, like mice looking for cheese in a maze. Eventually one of the waitresses told us to sit anywhere, so we found ourselves a nice table for two, dropped off our coats, and attacked the buffet like wild dogs.

Ribs, chicken, meatball spaghetti, salad, it was all there. And the ribs were actually pretty damn good. Not Redbones, but very acceptable. And it was all free. Then a waitress came and asked us would we like anything to drink? We'll of course we would.
If there's a better time than eating some ribs, drinking some beer, and swapping tragi-comic stories about women with a good friend, I don't know what it is, except for maybe when you add flirting with the waitress, which we did. I was having a great time. Cloud 9 was the cloud that people not having as much fun as I was were on; I was on Cloud a googol.

Desiring to know the source of the night's awesomeness, I asked one of the waiters what the occasion was.
"It's customer appreciation night," he said. "We do this once a year, usually around the holidays."

Once a year. Of all the days in the year, on only one do they have free food and drinks, and Colin and I just so happened to walk in on that day. And only because Redbones was closed. What are the odds of that?

Well, 365:1, obviously. But I don't think it was random chance that led us to the Joshua Tree; I believe it was this beam of light in which I've been walking, that has been blessing my steps and charming my words. It's like I'm some sort of demi-god, where I have unconscious powers that I can't control, but work for my benefit anyway. Fathers hide your daughters; I'm working with a higher power now, and I can't control it. Sons, you might want to hide your mothers as well, just to be safe.

Eventually we took off, leaving a healthy tip for the waitress. I'm a lightweight with alcohol, so between the free food, good conversation, and a little bit to drink, I was about as happy as I've ever been. When I get older, I'll probably reminisce about the time I went to the Joshua Tree. "Ah, those were the days," I'll say. "Things just aren't like they used to be."

We headed back to my place, played some Mario Kart, and watched Iron Monkey. It just doesn't get any better than that. But the beauty of it all is that it will. I don't know how, but I believe. There are no shadows on my street, I'm walking on the sunny side any way I go.

The Charge of the White Brigade

12 laps. 12 sober laps. This Naked Quad Run was, in all honesty, probably the most significant thing I've done since I came to Tufts. If the naked quad run were the Olympics, I would be China, minus the performance-enhancing drugs. That's how much I owned Friday night.
The day did not start auspiciously. We got our first snowstorm of the winter Friday morning, and the wind-chill was in the teens. Worse, for most of the day I thought I'd be running solo, which is bad. I'd been trying to get some of my martial arts buddies to run with me, but they were unable. And after striking out with two of them, I realized just how few people up here I really call friends. Sure there were other people I knew, but it's kind of awkward to call them up and say, "Hey, what are you doing tonight? Running naked? Hey, me too! We should team up!"

So up until two hours before the run, I didn't have a wingman. I admit, there were moments of weakness where I thought about turning back. But then I remembered that I'm not a little boy anymore. "No excuses!" I told myself, "A real man would run no matter what the obstacles! A setback is just a chance to man up!"

And then I received some good news in the form of Augie. Augie is another one of my training buddies, and besides being a supremely talented martial artist, he also turned out to be a supremely game naked runner. Augie hadn't run before, but he was willing.
At 8:00, two hours before game time, I prepared to head up to campus, a 15 minute walk. I dressed myself in jeans over tear away pants, fleece, a hoodie, scarf, hat, and long overcoat, and stepped outside. "Hey, it stopped snowing," I thought. "This won't be so bad after all." According to weather.com, the wind chill was 20 degrees. I was actually, in the security of my turtle shell of clothes, a little disappointed. The NQR is one of many rites of manhood one passes through, and I just felt like I would be a little more manly if hail were falling. It's amazing how idiotic I can be sometimes.

To get some more fuel for the fire, I stopped by the house of a girl whom I find very attractive, yet also excruciatingly infuriating. As I rang the doorbell, I knew I would leave the house angier than I'd gone in, but that was all part of the plan. Some people get drunk, I get angry.
Half an hour later I got to campus, socialized a bit, and scoped out the course. It was not promising. It looked like a scene from Dr. Zhigavo. And when hundreds of rowdy, naked college students start running around, turning snow into a churned mess, it can lead to a lot of problems.
I met Augie, and two of his friends who were also running, with just a few minutes to spare before the gates opened. We hurried into a nearby dorm and stripped down to our most insignificant piece of clothing, then ran outside, joined the mass of people who were waiting to run, removed the one remaining item of clothing protecting our decency, and started hollering. Mere seconds later, the first group of people took off, and we went out right behind them, dashing through the snow like Santa's four best-endowed reindeer.

During the NQR, the spectators line the track so closely that you can reach out and high-five them. Shy people, who are only running because they were pressured into it by their friends Jack Daniels and Jim Beam, tend to run on the inside of the track, in large masses of people where individual naked bodies are indistinguishable. Not us. We ran out in all our glory, like the charge of the light brigade, and indeed it would not be unwarranted for a poet of Tennyson's skill to write some lines in celebration of our heroic beauty. Screaming, fist pumping, and heavy-metal saluting, we tore around the track.

"How many laps are we running?" asked Augie?
"How about five?" I shouted back. There's a lot of screaming during the NQR.
"Alright! Five laps! Let's Go!"

And we went. The first lap was easy, but by the second the course had gotten packed. Oftentimes we were reduced to a shuffling run. You had to dodge and weave in and out of people, trying to avoid all physical contact, like a chaotic mass of magnets all of the same polarity. I passed a girl running and talking on her cell phone, which really proved to me that this whole cell phone thing has gotten out of hand. She's perfectly comfortable without any clothes on, but don't put down that phone!
I heard a female voice behind me say, "Jesus Christ, why do these people run so slow?" I turned around and who was it but the girl I'd visited on the way up! I cannot wait for our next conversation; it seems the tables have turned...
We got to lap four. "Alright, next lap is our last!" shouted Augie.
"I don't know, I could run a few more!" I responded. Little did Augie know that I was relying on our mutual competitiveness to push both of us to unheard of feats of naked running.
"How many more?" he asked.
"Well, I heard of someone who did eight!" I said.
"Eight! Holy crap that's a lot!"
"I know. I think we should do nine!" I proposed. And Augie, champion that he is, said:
"Alright! Nine laps HERE WE GO!"

And so we ran more laps. We passed people we knew, and were passed by them. People shouted our names from the stands. People in front of us fell down, and we had to dodge them. We swerved to the outside for high fives, and to the inside to avoid traffic jams. At one point some guy in front of me stumbled, and I juked left, then dodged right, managed to maintain my footing on the slush, and fell right back into stride like a naked caucasian Michael Vick.

Around lap seven I started hurting. Most of me felt great, but the cold began to strike me in my most vulnerable region. It was like being stabbed with an icicle, really. Also I started to have to pee. But like Odysseus clinging to the masthead, I persevered.

We got to lap nine. "Alright, last lap!" shouted Augie.
"Actually, I could do a few more!" I shouted back. "I really want to hit double digits!"
Augie looked at me, looked at the track, looked at the bystanders, and said, "Alright! Double digits!"
That is why I love him.

Lap ten came around, and without breaking down the conversation too much, I roped Augie into going for 12. And 12 glorious laps we did. The pack of runners had thinned out significantly, and though new ones were still joining, the bulk had gone already. We finished the 12th lap, and turned finally back to where I'd left my tear away pants. They were on one side of a low fence, and I just so happened to walk to the wrong side. Fortunately, there was a girl (clothed, a bystander) right next to them.

"Excuse me," I said, in my most polite southern gentleman tone. "I know this is a bit awkward, but could you hand me those pants?"
She didn't even blink. "Sure, no problem." What poise, what dignity. Maybe she too was from the South.

I then found Papa Bear - my housemate and good friend - who had the rest of my clothes. We walked up to one of the dorm buildings, but the door was closed. A little Asian girl clad only in her underwear came out to open the door. "Hey, you're in my Japanese class!" she said, spraying vodka breath in my face, and opened up her arms for a hug.

"I certainly am," I said, and being the always obliging person that I am, wrapped her up in my arms. I really need to get over this fixation I have with sobriety. It's like there's another world out there, and it's clearly more accommodating. I walked inside to the lounge, and there was yet another girl from one of my classes. She had been a bystander.
"How was it for you?" I asked.
"It was...okay." She said. "I've had better."
Obviously she hadn't seen any of my 12 laps.

I was still in significant pain, so I went to the bathroom and attempted to warm myself up with some hot water, and while I did a girl walked in wearing only a T-shirt.
"You're in the wrong bathroom," one of the other guys said.
"I don't care," she shot back. What class. What dignity.

I remained in a fair amount of pain for most of the walk home, but by the time I got inside and had a hot shower, I was pretty much back to normal, one more step to manhood complete. A fairly large step, I think. 12 laps is significant. And I was one hundred percent sober, which though not unique to the NQR, is fairly rare. Perhaps it would have been easier to run with a little fortification, but I know James Bond wouldn't need it, and so neither would I. I doubt 12 laps is a record, but it's got to be up there. 12 sober laps might be a record, but that isn't what matters. What's important is that the first time I ran I only made one circuit, but a lot has changed in two years. I've grown up and become a greater man, although Friday night, by looking at me, you wouldn't have known. Hey, it was cold outside.

Jumbo Pride

Once a year, I am proud to be a Tufts student. That’s not knocking against Tufts; it’s a top-level liberal arts school with outstanding faculty, hard-working/hard-playing students, and a mascot who sports a 5-foot penis. (Our mascot is Jumbo the Elephant, in case you didn’t know. Jumbo was an actual elephant in the Barnum & Bailey circus, and you can find a brief bio of him here: http://ase.tufts.edu/athletics/history.html)
But despite the endowments of our mascot, Tufts has no distinct character. There is a certain panache, a savoir-faire, a je ne sai quoi, a mot ou expression francais which we lack. However, once a year, in the middle of December, when finals loom like a dangerous metaphor over the entire student body, thousands of students mobilize for our one great moment: the Naked Quad Run.
The first day of the reading period, in the interim between the end of classes and the beginning of finals, the residential quad becomes the site of a race that would make the ancient Greeks proud. Hundreds of naked co-eds make lap after lap around the roughly quarter mile circuit, with thousands of bystanders cheering them on. Some people not of the Tufts community are confused about the meaning of “Naked Quad Run.” My good friend Richard once asked, “So, exactly how naked does everyone get?” My answer was that it’s the sort of naked where to have to undertake detailed personal maintenance if you want to make a good showing. As a side note, Richard goes to Roanoke College, and if you also attend that college you should immediately click on this link (http://www.collegehumor.com/pictures/1636549/) and feel proud of yourselves. And since I’ve mentioned Richard, I should flesh out his character by noting that, if he were a Tufts student, and ran the NQR, he would be the only male running, because every other guy would be in his room crying to his pillow, while the entire female population of Massachusetts would be lining the course.
But I digress. The only clothing permitted in the NQR is shoes. The reason being that it’s typically about 23 degrees on the day, and an easy foot of snow covers the ground. The path has typically been cleared of all powder, leaving a nice sheet of ice on which Jesus would slip. And it goes without saying that that vast majority of the runners are as drunk as initiation-week freshmen.
Now, due to the environmental conditions, this event is not really the best forum to show off one’s body. For the guys, it actually excuses us from any degree of accountability, because it really is cold outside. So we don’t feel so bad about parading around looking like we lost our genitals in a tragic beer pong accident and had to get a transplant from a malnourished eighth-grader. And the girls…well, let’s just say that if any girl were suddenly captured in one of those glass mime boxes, she could cut her way to freedom quite easily. Of course, there is a certain contingent of guys who seem unaffected, who manage to defy the cold, who actually seem to grow stronger from it, but we all know it’s because they're black.
My first year here I participated in the NQR, and found it thrilling, exhilarating, and refreshing. I also feel entitled to note that I ran 100 percent sober. I understand why many people turn to liquid courage to embolden them, remove their inhibitions, and even keep them warm. But there are those of us out there, many far bolder than I, with the bravado, the guts, and the testicular fortitude to run with all faculties intact. Really, my contribution to the NQR is negligible so far, but like the guy in the orchestra who plays the triangle, I make every moment count.
When the time rolled around again my sophomore year, I didn’t feel the desire to run. So I watched, which was a worthy experience in its own right. But this year, though only my third, will be my last, and as such I’ve felt the desire stirring again. The run is this Friday, in only a few days, and I think I will be on the course. I’ve been in the gym all semester, training furiously, and now I know why. If all goes well, this weekend there will be a post-game report, with major plays, errors, fumbles (these things all happen) and perhaps the MVP. Stay tuned. And get naked.


Here, I must take a moment to thank the progenitor of this blog: Quinn Maynard. Quinn, who goes to school with Richard, was not only the inspiration for my taking up blogging, but also the creator of this blog’s name. And I should say that, if Quinn were to run the NQR, the other runners would part before him as though he were Moses and they were the Red Sea. Calling Quinn “studly” is like calling Yao Ming “tall.” You can enjoy his writings here: www.qwmaynard.blogspot.com.