Where can you find me at 2pm on a Thursday? If you guessed by the pool being fed peeled grapes by the Swedish bikini team, you'll be surprised to hear that you're wrong.

No, really. You're wrong... At least this Thursday.

Actually, my friend Hayden.. WAIT... this is an important but totally unrelated sidenote :

The History Hayden and his Impact on Better Than Your Boyfriend

Last year I was on a cruise with some friends, one of whom was Hayden. I was pissed off because I had been going out to clubs and bars frequently and meeting girls, but no one I thought was amazing. Maybe the main problem is that I have little interest dating someone who drinks.

So I got to thinking, as I do on a near weekly basis. Where were the girls that I wanted? Well, the problem is that there's no specific stereotype of girl I'm interested in. I'm more concerned with personal values like drinking, honesty, and how hot she is. The problem is that I'm so picky that it's hardly worth my time to strike up a conversation with every girl I find attractive, because so few have the qualities I'm looking for.

And then an idea hit me : I'd advertise. I was going to make 2000 posters, and with my friends help, plaster Austin with them. I'd put them all over campus and around all my favorite places to go. I had almost finished the poster, but I needed a good web site to send the lovely ladies to. I own reallyawesome.com and I was going to use that, but it really wasn't good enough, or specific enough, for this.

On the cruise we had a lot of downtime where we'd just sit around (and eat) and talk. We were trying to come up with good domains, but nothing was clicking. And then Hayden said it:

Better than your Boyfriend.com

I loved it. Unfortunately it was so good that he wanted it too.

However, his interest waned in the next couple days and he gave me permission to register it.

I don't remember why I never did the posters. I think that I had some doubts as to whether it would work, and I started seeing someone.

Hmm.. maybe I should do the posters now. I actually have an even better idea that I'll probably do and report about here. Anyway... the point is that if it weren't for Hayden this site wouldn't be at such a cool domain.. so thanks Hayden.

Back to our story...

Hayden had a project to do for a class called "Weird Science". It was an open topic and he wanted to do it on healthy eating, raw food, etc. As you may well know, I'm really into that stuff, so he asked for my help in preparing a raw food feast and asked me to help present it to the class.

I was happy to practice making raw food on his dime and hadn't been to school in years, so I forgot the horror that is class.

He woke up late, curling got in the way, there was a communications mixup, and then he was late (as he always is), so instead of 8am, we got started on the project at around 1 or 2 am. We drove out to the supermarket, and by the time we'd resolved the argument of what we were going to make and found all the ingredients, it was about 4am.

Starting off with the "fun" part, we decided to extract the necessary coconut meat. My god was that hard. I mercilessly hacked at each coconut, fighting to get to the precious bounty within.

We finished getting our coconut meat around 5am.

I took my 5am nap, but then went into my office instead of continuing with the food prep. Hayden fell asleep, and I dozed off in my chair, oversleeping by an hour. Oops.

When I woke up he was still asleep, so I wandered about the house trying to stay awake. Finally at 8am we went to Whole Foods, bought the few remaining ingredients, and headed back.

By then he had to go to class, so I got stuck finishing all of the dishes. We'd done most of the hard part, though, so I didn't really mind.

He came back at 12, finished up the foods while I took a shower and napped, and we aimed the car at class and gunned it.

Here I want to do another sidebar about what an awful driver Hayden is, but let's not disparage him in his moment of glory. We'll do it next week.

As soon as I entered the classroom, I knew this wasn't going to be a normal class. The class was squared around a huge homemade table in the middle of the classroom. The students looked normal enough (a clear misconception).

We had arrived halfway through one person's presentation and were left wondering what electrocuting his classmate had to do with science. I couldn't figure out what his project was, but I'm always happy to see someone get electrocuted.

We went next, because we didn't want our creations to melt. As soon as I was introduced one of the students (actually, I think he was the TA) identified me as the guy who went into the tunnels. EVERYONE else murmured in agreement - many of them had seen the site (hi guys! hi mom!). The teacher had even seen it and said that she thought it was cool - ok... maybe I shouldn't have assumed she was an evil witch. Not many teachers at UT would be impressed with the journey to the tunnels.

Within a few minutes I accidentally stole the show. I mentioned polyphasic sleeping and everyone had questions. I was actually a bit surprised at the high level of interest. I answered questions, occasionally throwing in a futile attempt to return the topic to healthy eating. After a little while the teacher said that we had to move on, but invited me to return the following week to speak at greater length about polyphasic sleeping. I agreed because I really enjoy public speaking and opening people's minds to crazy yet practical ideas.

Now... if you're allergic to absolute madness, you may want to just cut your reading of this post short - there have been some good times, and there's no need to press your luck.

Some of the other students presented. Oh my god are these people crazy. Oh my god are these people crazy. That's not a typo - that's emphasis that even bold and italic letters couldn't hope to acheive.

I don't want to give a breakdown of all of the projects, but here are some highlights :

- A guy who covered his head and hands in tinfoil and claimed to have a mental activity reader. Like an idiot, I tried to think happy thoughts to move the needle. He later revealed that it was a scam.

- A guy who contructed a giant mutated ant out of vegetables and a crab

- A girl who is so obsessed with dolphins that I was both slightly aroused and speechless when she talked about her deep love for the creatures.

- A guy who has a nuts theory about the shapes of the letters in a bands name, and how that relates to the type of music they play (ok, it even made some sense)

The most bizarre part is that the teacher was INTO IT! These people all got good grades.

Then there was the last project. This semi-attractive girl with a beautiful Portuguese accent started presenting in Portuguese. I speak decent Spanish, so I could understand parts of it, but overall was somewhat lost.

Then she played a short film which was visually stunning. I was really straining to figure out what it was about, and simultaneously hoping that the increasingly revealing shots of her would result in her being topless. They did, and I was pretty surprised. The video ended, and she asked if anyone had any questions.

Everyone sorta looked around, no one wanting to break the news to her that we had no idea what was happening. Then she said that she wanted to simulate the feeling you would get if you had serious memory loss. Whoa! That was pretty clever. Out of all the presentations, that was my favorite, and not just because we saw her topless.

The funny thing is this : I really enjoyed the class. The people were somewhat nuts, and the presentations were corny, but they actually resulted in a dialog about ideas between people. School was NEVER about that in any of my classes, which was disappointing. If more of my classes were in this style, I may have stayed in school. Probably not, but maybe I would have at least considered it.

Before leaving the class I made plans with the teacher - next week I'm going to give a full presentation to them on polyphasic sleep. I'm going to video it, so expect some highlights. I'm out!