Brain Drippings (Blog)

October 31, 2026

Happy Birthday, Me!

My birthday is October 29, and therefore, according to the callous and unrelenting grip of logic, I just turned the horrendously grown-up age of 23. I threw a "J's Terrifying March Toward Death" party in my little apartment.

In attendance:

Thanks for coming, guys!

In fact, it was basically a birthday miracle that the party came off at all, since the day before I was struck down by a virus and spent the whole day sick in bed, feverish, delirious, and uncomfortable. But against all odds, I woke up on Thursday feeling moderately functional, and I really didn't want to send out a message to all my friends cancelling the party, especially since I'd already bought snacks, decorations, and ingredients for a cake on Tuesday, while deep in the throes of denial that the impending virus doom-sensation which had been dogging me all day would in fact manifest in an illness. So I skipped my Thursday class and spent the day trudging the handful of blocks to buy the few ingredients I'd forgotten and a bottle of vodka, baking a cake, and hanging plastic spiderwebs (listen, I am aware on principle of the environmental obscenity of the stuff, but as an American, my love for cheap Chinese manufacturing has to find an outlet somewhere, and thanks to an aggressive mail-order brainwashing campaign implemented since birth by Oriental Trading (did anyone else used to get those catalogues, feverishly circling a neon plastic cornucopia with pure ecstatic bliss of the as-yet-unhardened and almost shamanically receptive consumerist mind of a child?), plus maybe an innate predilection for the macabre and the cynically ironic which nice middle-class families shelling out year after year for cheap toy representations of their own inevitable death and decay really wonderfully satisfies, that outlet has been so inalterably associated in my neural wiring with Halloween, and at an impressionable enough age, to be near-Freudian in its compulsive power. Much like the logic of The Purge, I figure the best I can do is to get it out of my system once a year.), balloons, and streamers around my apartment.

Sorry for the scarily long sentence I just subjected you to, but, well, it is Halloween after all. Boo!

I also wrote a list of questions for "J Trivia," which I made my guests play. Here were the questions:

  1. Which philosopher was famously put to death in Athens in 399 B.C.?
  2. Which English rock band was originally named On A Friday, because they would rehearse on Fridays, before changing their name once they were signed to a label?
  3. What is the name of Pink Floyd's founding member who left the band after their first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn?
  4. What is the name of this nearly 4-hour epic historical film, released in 1962 and starring Peter O'Toole, which tells the story of an English officer who unites the Arab tribes to fight against the Turks?
  5. Which philosopher famously declared God is dead.?
  6. Radiohead took their name from a song by another band. What was that band?
  7. Name at least two of the five feature films starring the Beatles released between 1964 and 1970.
  8. Which philosopher, famous today as the progenitor of an influential theory of ethics, thought that all moral virtues are a mean between extremes?
  9. Name the director of a movie where one character tells another that in Paris, a quarter pounder with cheese is called a Royale with cheese.
  10. Which poet is the author of the famous line I am large, I contain multitudes.?
  11. Which sci-fi author wrote the famous anti-war novel, published in 1969 and alternately titled The Children's Crusade, in which aliens from the planet Tralfamadore perceive all of time simultaneously rather than progressing through it linearly?
  12. Which 20th-century French philosopher is the author of a famous novel in which the protagonist shoots and kills an Arab man on a beach?
  13. What English rock band released the song Killing an Arab, inspired by the novel in the previous question, as their debut single in 1980?
  14. This band, fronted by Tom Verlaine and recorded by Brain Eno, was a fixture of CBGB and influential in the early punk-rock scene of the 70's in New York. Name the band.
  15. The remaining members of this band re-formed as New Order after their frontman's death by suicide in 1980. Name the band.
  16. Which philosopher, famous as the progenitor of another theory of ethics, invented the categorical imperative, and maintained that lying is wrong under all circumstances?
  17. Name two literary figures of the Beat generation.

I'll put the answers in a separate blog post in case you want to play along. Let me know how many you get!

My guests formed teams of two, and the winning team was Jordyn and Sofia, who got 7 out of 17 correct. I was happily surprised that three out of four teams got question 4 right — two because they remembered me talking about the movie, and one who had never heard me talking about it, but independently knew of the film! The only two questions which no one got right were 12 and 14. Listen to Marquee Moon, guys...

I also turned my cake into a pumpkin patch by impaling its border with a pretzel stick-fence, covering the surface with coconut that I dyed green by shaking it in a bag with food coloring, and scattering mini mellowcreme pumpkins from the harvest candy-corn mix on top.

Now I am paying penance for my day of fun and lucky reprieve from sickness, as I have been put-upon by a horrible scratchy throat the past two days, which caused me to completely lose my voice. I went to class on Friday not realizing until I tried to greet people, and my mouth moved without any sound coming out. This feeble effort so irritated my throat that I spent the rest of class fighting down a cough and uptaking practically nothing, and then felt very sick again so I went home and spent the rest of the day in bed. Now I've regained a bit of sound-production ability, but still can't speak in anything but a painful rasp, so that pretty much precludes going out, seeing anyone, or doing anything fun on Halloween night. Well, I guess writing a blog post is some kind of fun. Make your own fun, right?

I wanted to make a flaming shot, which Nadyah generously volunteered to take.

Vim was the first to hand me a J and Frank, which he already mentioned some time ago he was going to get me for my birthday. I was surprised he had remembered! Then, one by one over the course of the night, each person hands me a J and Frank, and then even more start appearing around my apartment everywhere I look. Turns out they gave me 23 in total. It was pretty funny.

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