January 2010 Archives

Saturday
Here we have a quote from my friend Brandon and an entry from him, too. Once again, hanging out at Hillcrest. The restaurant was a pretty typical layout for your standard suburban diner-type restaurant: you come in through a small atrium and lobby in the center front of the building, and there was a long dining room on either side. Most nights, the restaurant would only seat people in the left (uh...east) dining room, and leave the right side closed. However, the restrooms were at the back of the right side. So to go to the restroom, you passed through the lobby into a dimmed, completely empty dining room to the far corner of the building -- the corner that got the least amount of heat or A/C. So in the depths of winter, taking a leak was a cold, cold prospect. It was so cold in the mens' room (which was on the exterior wall) on this particular night that the water in the toilets had a thin film of ice forming on surface.

Sunday
So, I apparently went to see The Song of Jacob Zulu at Steppenwolf Sunday night, and based on my secret writing...

Two college juniors may or may not be hot for me. Wonder what will happen about that. (?)

...I went to with my friend Tim F., his older sister Aimee and one of her friends from school. Aimee was a senior when Tim and I were freshmen, and we flirted on and off for years. I don't actually remember her friend -- this was probably the only time I met her -- but she was probably really cute, because I don't remember Aimee having any ugly friends. So yeah, this would have been a major self-esteem boost. To answer the question I posed to myself, nothing happened with that -- at the time. Aimee and I went on a date a couple years later, and messed around a little bit. Unfortunately, that was our only date, but we remained friends for years after.

I think the drawing is of someone missing the gas tank with a gas pump. If that's the case, I'm sure it was a fascinating and hilarious story ...but I don't remember it.

Thursday
The great thing about public journals, sketchbooks and back-pocket notepads is they become a repository for all sorts of the random thoughts, notes and doodles that fill up daily life. The text on this page doesn't really have any rhyme or reason, and the sketching isn't planned or considered. It's clearly a day of unfinished thoughts. And that's OK, they're useful, too.

"Salut copins!" means "Hello, friends!" by the way.

Friday
Ah, more REM quotes, this time written by a friend -- Daneka, I believe.

Automatic for the People sold 10 million copies, don't forget. I bought the deluxe limited edition, which came in a balsa wood box containing photos and lyrics on translucent vellum, and an all-yellow CD (that was pretty much the exact color of kottke.org's header when I first discovered it).

Judging from the shape of the label on that bottle drawing, I'm going to guess it was a Smirnoff Ice -- in which case it certainly wasn't mine.

The hand outline here is mine; note the knobby knuckles.

Tuesday
This is the first of several hand traces in 1954; it was a handy (pun ...well, yeah, sort of intended) piece of imagery, and a nice organic shape to experiment with. My friend Gabriela's hand was tiny, too, which she was self-conscious about. Chances are if you compared your hand to this outline, your hand would easily envelop it.

Gaby was (and probably still is) a little sensitive about her smaller-than-average hands -- she used to (and probably still does) threaten people by saying "I will beat you about the head and neck with my tiny fists!" That's part of the reason the explanation of the outline is somewhat obscured: she got mad at me, so I made it harder to notice. What can I say? I'm a softy.

Pat was one of my brother Peter's friends. He was a bit of hippy -- as were a lot of kids at BHS. The Grateful Dead and Phish were really popular, and there was plenty of patchouli and hacky-sack around campus. I can only assume that's what Pat was under the influence of when he wrote this. Why else would he think cat food smelled cool?

Wednesday
Oh man. Yeah, bad poetry. This was high school, don't forget.

So, this was a poem about AIDS. This was actually not the official version -- the real one used font changes, creative typesetting and such in order to more visually emote. I felt this poem pretty strongly. I was really disappointed when it wasn't chosen for the school literary journal.

A little context: This was the early '90s, and AIDS was at the very forefront of public consciousness. My junior year the theater department produced a play about HIV and other STDs called Secrets, based on a free script from Kaiser Permanente, that debunked myths and presented scenarios to the student body. I was in it, and one of the roles I played was a gay man who was sexually active but didn't have HIV. I really expected to get teased or at least receive some odd looks in the gym locker room, but instead I got a lot of praise for being brave enough to take the part. In fact, my gym class was the most supportive.

Meanwhile, other actors who may or may not have been actually gay were ridiculed. One kid had pennies thrown at him by a couple idiots while he was on stage playing Don Quixote. (The goons were caught and got Saturday detentions, thankfully.) High school is nothing if not inconsistent.

Sunday
Another day, another dramatic song quote. I was a big fan of R.E.M. back then. (I still like'em, but felt like they lost their way after Up. Actually, even before that, but I enjoyed that album.)

I have no idea who drew or wrote most of what's on this page, but whoever wrote "God is God -God" is a genius. At least I assume the second one is God. Maybe it's really "God is goo."

Monday
Happy birthday, Danny!

Remember The Tao of Pooh? I was way into that book senior year. Not into it enough to spell "tao" correctly, but still.

You can see a little bit of Tuesday's page bleeding through here -- and I colored in that curve in the corner after today as an experiment with the bleeding. I did a lot more of that later in the year as progressed and I got more creative.

Friday
So, remember that "alternative alphabet"? Here's its first use, bigger and slightly more stylized than it would be eventually.

Katrina was a fellow thespian, as well as a fluent Russian speaker and devastating punster. I'd had a mild crush on her since middle school, and finally got up the courage to ask her out on a date. We went dinner at The Around the Clock restaurant for dinner, and then saw Alive! -- the movie about the Uruguayan rugby team that crash landed in the Andes and resorted to cannibalism to survive. Dinner was fine -- we always got along well -- and we had a blast whispering jokes to each other during the movie. So yeah, I thought the date went well... but in my coded note, I said,

But do I get a second date? I don't know whether we were on a real date or if it was simply platonic. I kissed her hand at the end of the night. Was that the right thing to do? I hope so.

I got my answer the next day...

Saturday
In code: Talk about egg on my face.

So, yeah. Just wanted to be friends. Which I should have known, but I was really hoping there might've been more. It stung at the time, but we remained friends.

This map would have taken me to a house in Wynstone, a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course community. A couple of my friends lived in there, most notably one of my oldest friends, Tim F. The address would have been near his place, so I think it was Brad S.'s place. And I think I remember going to his house around this time to play hockey on a frozen pond across the street. I didn't own skates, so I ended up skidding around in my sneakers -- which worked mostly because it was a frozen pond, so there was texture to the ice.

Wednesday
Some people doodle, I crosshatch.

And here's the first point at which I feel compelled to break out my yearbook and see who "D. Embry" is... Ah! She was a junior, and I thought she had pretty eyes. What exactly "I felt the car!" meant, I have no idea; that's one of the great things about random quotes taken out of context.

Thursday
Kent was one of those people who you know is incredibly intelligent, but flabbergasts you with their ditziness at times. He was one of the regulars in the honors classes (there was a group of probably around 50 of us, running into each other in every damn class, especially by senior year) as well as the art department, and had a goofy, flamboyant manner about him. He'd say something sort of airheaded but funny, and then in the next breath make a poignant observation or a completely on-point contribution to the topic at hand -- and then he'd be off again. We teased him a lot, but he was always good-natured about it, and we (well, my friends, anyway) weren't being mean-spirited. You kind of get that sense in this whole page of stream-of-consciousness. You also might get the sense that he was gay -- and you'd be right, as it turned out, though we didn't find out for sure until after graduation. Did the "Vogue, Kent; Vogue, Kent; Vogue, Kent" give it away?

We didn't hang out all that often outside of school, but he was fun to have around. I remember having him over one night -- I can't remember if it was a sleepover or not -- and we picked out Barton Fink and something else at Blockbuster. We had heard good things about Barton Fink, so we went to the basement and popped it in first... and found ourselves dreadfully bored after about half an hour. So we popped it out and watched whatever the other film was. I still haven't gone back to watch it.

Richmond, by the way, is Richmond, Illinois, a great antiquing town northwest of Chicago, near the Wisconsin border. Not sure if we actually went.

Monday
Wow, I'm deep.

Tuesday
Happy birthday, Christian!

RQ -- short for Religious Quest in Literature -- is the AP English lit and comp class at Barrington High School. When I was there, it was taught by Mr. Griffith, who was one of my classmate's father and the head of the English department. (It's still being taught, apparently.) It was considered one of the most challenging classes taught at BHS, but it was also definitely one of the most rewarding.

I may come back and fill more details in about RQ later, but for now I want to draw your attention to the bottom left corner of the page. What's partly hiding under that crosshatching is the first draft and key to an "alternative alphabet" (or, as I understand now, really more of a crypto font) that I developed for use in 1954. See, it only took me three weeks to realize that if I was going to write my personal thoughts and dreams in what was meant to be a public journal, I was going to have to figure out a way to make them more private. So, I developed this coded type to "hide" my thoughts in plain site.

Some of the letters are pretty obvious, but others were quite hard to identify -- and combined with the coded punctuation as well (including the spaces between words), only a couple people ever figured out how to read it. See if you can figure it out later this week, when it makes its first appearance in use.

A lot of what ended up in 1954 was random funny quotes heard out and about.

Thursday
I think Walt V. might have written this. He was way into Mensa.

Friday
Not only was I in theater in high school, but I was also an "art fag"¹. I had at least one art class every semester of high school, and frequently had two. The second semester of senior year, in fact, I took printmaking I and "independent study" photography during the same 8th hour period, which was possible because they were housed in the same classroom, and necessary because although I only needed a credit and a half that semester to graduate, I was required to take five credits worth of classes to be considered a full-time student. Taking two art classes simultaneously allowed me fulfill that without having to give up my three open periods during lunch.

Anyway, I'm way out of practice, but I used to draw a lot. And this is an example of the crosshatching style I developed and began to refine that year. I used it to great effect in that printmaking class when I tried out etching.

1. Yes, fag is an offensive epithet. However, "art fag" is widely used by people of all sexual preferences to describe each other and themselves. It's usually used in a self-depricating way, but never in an insulting or derogatory manner, at least in my experience. Regardless, it's what we called ourselves back then, not something I call myself now, so... yeah. ↑

Tuesday
Yep, I was a "Ren & Stimpy" fan.

Wednesday
Boy, we got a long way coming up with alternative nicknames for menu items at Hillcress, huh? I think we were playing off diner lingo.

I think "MRE" was Mike E. Not sure.

Savitha was a pretty awesome person. She still might be, but I haven't spoken to her in years, so I don't know. I think we're friends on Facebook, though, so I guess the possibility's still there. I used to tease her by pronouncing her name "SAV-ith-uh" (it's pronounced "Suh-VEE-thuh".) The irony that I was so sensitive about my own name while being insensitive about someone else's is not lost on me. Hey, it was high school.

Sunday
More of the aftermath from the ISTH trip.

I ended up becoming a big fan of Brenda Kahn, who wrote "I Don't Sleep, I Drink Coffee Instead." Here's the really awful video.

Monday
Up until my senior year in high school, I was known as Andy -- or more often than not, Andyhuff, all one word. I never liked being an Andy, so I started getting my friends to call me Andrew starting sometime senior year, to varying success. New friends took to it easily -- although they'd frequently be asked "Who's Andrew?" when they talked about something we did together. "Andrew Huff." "Oh, you mean Andyhuff!"

It was tougher for friends who'd known me for years, so I was touched when they made an effort to make the change. It meant a lot.

This is one long story of the craziness the night a bunch of us theater folk went down to the Illinois High School Festival, which was held that night at ISU in Bloomington-Normal. We stayed at a La Quinta Inn somewhere on the edge of town, and we knew there would be minimal supervision -- the chaperones would of course go to bed long before we would -- there was plenty of booze brought down for the occasion. These very dense pages describe the insanity that ensued. I don't think I have much to add to it.

If I get enough requests, I'll transcribe the whole thing; I know it's a bit hard to read. This would be one of those cases where it's probably easiest to view it large on flickr.

This was the second time I ever got drunk. Before this, it was on my friend Dave's 16th birthday. That was a weird night. I'll tell that story some other time.

Wednesday
When I was a junior, I tried to date a fellow actor who was, it turned out, only temporarily broken up with her boyfriend. The boyfriend happened to be one of the senior lead actors and a wrestler.¹ He was a very possessive and jealous guy, so I ended up blackballed among the theater cool kids for most of junior year. It sucked, but I didn't have it as bad as the next guy who tried to date her got -- not only was he on the cool kids' shit list, but Mr. Jealousy wrote nasty things on his lawn with gasoline, which brought down his parents' wrath as well.

Anyway, the theater trip I'm referring to here is the Illinois High School Theater Association annual theater festival. More on that in a couple pages.

Thursday
Nice fable from my friend Mike, explaining who the "they" in "they say..." is.

Regarding the Hitler comment: President George Bush's New World Order speech was recent history, so learning this factoid seemed relevant, I'm sure.

What "Truth or Dave" meant: I had a friend named Dave H. who sometimes got a little too enthusiastic about stuff. One time, we were playing Truth or Dare with a bunch of friends in my basement, and Dave kept trying to encourage people to pick Dare -- particularly the girls in the group. He got so worked up about it (in an endearing, amusing way), and was so happy to suggest crazy dares for people to do when the questioner couldn't come up with a good one, that we started calling the game "Truth or Dave" among our friends in his honor. He wasn't on this trip, and I think we may have been playing it on the bus ride down to Bloomington, so no Dave and no dares.

1. Yes, both an actor and a wrestler; it was a weird quirk, but there were several guys in theater who also wrestled at my school. I was one of them, sort of -- I wrestled freshman year, then got into theater sophomore year. ↑

Monday
I was a theater kid in high school and the first part of college, and I got started sophomore year as a dancer and chorus member in Bye Bye Birdie. It was a ton of fun -- I'd never danced or sung before -- and the only reason I auditioned for musicals was to do just that. So I was sort of annoyed that I was cast as Doc in West Side Story, one of the only non-singing, non-dancing roles. On the other hand, I already had a deep voice and was one of the more experienced actors at that point, so our director, Mr. Faust, wanted me in that role because I would actually be convincing and deliver a nuanced portrayal. It did turn out to be a good show -- I was really proud to be in it. More later, naturally.

In case you can't read the second bit, here's a transcription:

I'm going to do an installation self-portrait. It's going to be -- if I can do it -- in the theater. I'm going to put the self-portrait on a square(?) flat on stage. It will be viewed from the back of the auditorium. I might do it a performance piece. Who knows? I still have to ask for permission from Deignan. He might not go for it.

(No idea who wrote "your hands and feet are mangos," but whoever it was was hilarious.)

Tuesday
My friend Chad B. gave me a bottle of K-Man, "the cologne of the Cayman Islands," as a late Christmas present. It was funny, but seriously gross-smelling.

Note the new girl trouble: now I've got three girls I'm interested in. Like I said, I was incredibly fickle.

Saturday
Like I said, plenty of drama. Looking back, I can't believe I wrote some what I did back then in what was meant to be a public form -- although there are plenty of other people's tragic and overly dramatic writings in here.

Hillcress, incidentally, was one of the diners where my friends and I spent hours hanging out. A typical night would see us spend time at Yvette's, the espresso shop in Barrington that my friend Lauren B.'s parents owned, head to Hillcress in Lake Zurich, and possibly the Denny's at Rand and Dundee or if it was a weekend night, Kafein in Evanston. Ah, under-age life in the northwest suburbs.

I'm guessing the angst here was directly related to New Year's Eve, and probably regret that my Christmas break was a bust.

Sunday
No idea who this "new hope" was; I got infatuated with a new girl constantly back then. Totally fickle.

About the bowling thing: I firmly believe you shouldn't get too good at bowling. Being good at bowling is a sign you have too much free time on your hands.

I still dig those quotes from The Lonely Planet, by Steven Dietz:
"Irony is the penicillin of modern thought."
"I think everything good is obtained through simplicity. I think that's why when you're all fucked up, they say you have a complex."

Wow, I remember this night, but had forgotten that it was New Year's Eve. I have vague memories of wandering around a mostly darkened house (I think James' parents were at a party somewhere else -- hence all the hookups). I'm not entirely sure who wrote the lists here; I think one is by Mike P., who is now one of my oldest friends (we met in summer school the summer before freshman year, when I was taking typing and he was taking math).

As you can see, there was plenty of high school drama right off the bat in 1993. A list of hookups and their locations (thankfully not correlated), and me being moody. I didn't drink back then, in part because I wanted to make sure someone was sober enough to drive folks home. Apparently I used dip that night, though -- that would be what the "pack'n a fatty" comment refers to.

In the autumn of 1991, on a school-sponsored trip to Stratford, Ontario, for the Shakespeare Festival, I wandered into a used bookstore with some friends and made an unexpected find: a completely blank datebook from 1954. It had a handsome grey cover with the year and the name Alex F. Hahn printed on it, along with the logo and name of the Toronto-based McLeod, Young, Weir & Company Limited. A date, including the day of the week, was printed in dark blue text at the top of each thin page, which were otherwise a light beige color -- not yellowed so much as tanned. It measured 4"x6¾"x1" -- a quite comfortable size, just small enough to squeeze into a back pocket if necessary.

Throughout high school, I kept a series of sketchbook-slash-public journals that were somewhat arbitrarily named Jehovah by my friends Jill and Charlotte (more about those later). The idea of using this odd little book as a Jehovah intrigued me, so I bought it. (Wish I could remember for how much.) Then I noticed that the name on cover -- Alex F. Hahn -- had the same initials as me (my middle name is Francis.) Spooky! It made it feel like I was meant to find the book and use it. That weekend, I got to wondering whether the dates would line up with a year in the near future -- after all, the first of the year must fall on a Friday every seven years or so, right? It turned out that 1993 was one of those years. What a coincidence! So I decided to start using the book on Friday, January 1, 1993 and every day that year. Inside the cover I wrote:

Welcome to:
1954

It's not quite a journal, but it's not quite a Jehovah project, either. There is only one page aloted [sic] to each day. Actually, to be a little more specific, one may only write on pages of day gone by; the pages before and including today's date. Hopefully, I won't be the only one to write in here. Enjoy your visit to 1954! ☺
—Andrew Huff

Fortunately, I wasn't the only one who wrote in it. all sorts of interesting stuff was recorded in 1954 -- by me, by my friends, by complete strangers. And with very few exceptions, the rule against writing in the future held fast. (One of those exceptions was granting permission to record one's or someone else's birthday on that date. That came in handy.) 1954 became a record of one of the most important years of my life: much of my senior year at Barrington High School, the summer before college, and those difficult first few months at The Ohio State University. And it's a record of so many people, places and experiences both for me and for so many others. I realized a few years back that I wanted to put it on the web in some fashion, but I wasn't sure how. After developing and scrapping I don't know how many overly complex concepts, I finally decided to just scan the damn thing and post it on a blog. And then I realized: in 2010, January 1 would once again be on a Friday. There was a certain elegance to posting 1954 day by day, just as it had been written.

And so here we are.

For convenience, I'm scanning the book in two-page spreads. As often as possible, I'm going to write my recollections and reflections on what's happening on the page -- and sometimes on what's not. Feel free to comment, particularly if you happened to have been there. The images will also be posted in my flickr account, where they may be thoroughly explicated and will no doubt rack up plenty of comments as well; I'll include a link in each post. If you would prefer to email me privately, my address is -- I look forward to hearing from you.