Between communicating in the big annual Fantasy Baseball Draft on Sunday, or keeping up with friends from home, Skype and iChat both offer free video and voice communication. It really is remarkable that this capability comes default with a Mac computer, and very cheaply on many others.

Watch this, guys – as a twenty year old I’m about to wax poetic about how technology has changed in my lifetime.

Ten years ago, when I saw Starship Troopers (a hilariously terrible movie), there was video communication between parents and their college-aged son away from home. This was supposed to be way in the distant future, and when I saw it I thought, “We must be so far away from that being possible.”

Well, here we are, and I’m already angry at it when it doesn’t work perfectly.

Yesterday was a trip to Harrods to buy gifts for my young cousins. I don’t want to give away the surprises, but it should be good stuff. It’s hard to buy for them, on the one hand, because you don’t want it to seem like one sibling got something better than another, but if you just get them the same thing it won’t be as special. I tried to walk this tight rope.

Andrew and Molly always got us the best gifts when I was a kid. I will reiterate here what I told Andrew, that I will repay them by giving stuff to their kids.

Yesterday I actually went to the first Catholic Mass of my lifetime. Being that it was Easter Sunday, and most people are gone for the weekend or vacation, activities are limited. My friend David is a pretty devout Catholic, and I accompanied him to Westminster Cathedral for the seven o’clock. The building really was ornate and nice to look at – there were a lot more mosaics than I would have expected. That’s more of a Byzantine/Greek Orthodox sort of thing, but I suppose there’s bound to be some overlap.

I didn’t follow along verbally or take communion. I did, however, reflect on the people I care about, and I enjoyed the Priest’s homily. He was a very soft-spoken person, and he talked a lot about how the resurrection is not some scientific, logical fact. He said that the story goes that the first people on the scene – Jesus’ close personal friends – were confused by what was happening, and didn’t quite understand things for a while. It had to sink in. Likewise, he says Christians should not pretend it’s something easy to understand, and that it’s difficult to believe, and it takes trust.

It isn’t a religious point for me, but I liked it as a literary and philosophical point.

I did go up and when I crossed my arms to deny the communion, one of the priests still put his thumb on my head and said something like, “The lord bless and protect you.” It was pretty clear I didn’t know what I was doing but people were still very welcoming.

I think I’ve lived far too long in my life without religion to want it at this point. My friend Dan describes me as “a secular humanist who has replaced God with his parents.” But, I was curious, and I think I can appreciate why it’s important to the people who are religious a little bit more.

It’s not for me, but it doesn’t terrify me as much as it used to.

This is the earliest Easter that I can remember in my life, and if the statistic Annalisa cited to me is correct, Easter won’t be this early again until 2290. When that comes I’ll compare and contrast the two, deciding which one was better.

It has been remarkably cold the past few days, perhaps the coldest since I’ve been here. The good thing is that it snowed for about two hours this morning. It didn’t stick, the ground was too warm, but it was really beautiful. First snow I’ve seen falling in a long, long time.

Happy Easter, all.

The first day of the NCAA Tournament is complete. In the one tournament I have money on, I am in second place, with 14 correct out of 16. The two people ahead of me each had USC going to the Sweet 16, and one had them going to the Elite 8, so I consider myself ahead of them.

Jacob pointed out that the Facebook bracket doesn’t have a tie-breaker for the championship game. Usually you guess the final score. With a bracket pool as large as Facebook – with hundreds of thousands of people – there are bound to be several hundred people tied for the high score. I guess they’re going to declare a 900 way tie. Really a major oversight.

Further it’s telling me that I was wrong picking Texas A&M, and that Texas A&M really won. Boy do I feel foolish.

After not sleeping at all on Tuesday night, I slept from four in the afternoon until midnight. I spent a few hours with my English and American friends, they were in the midst of celebrating the end of classes. I managed to squeeze in a few hours of sleep then before I had to meet my professor at the book store to discuss my essay on A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne.

She rather liked it, and we talked about a wide range of things. We met in a book store basement café, as she was kind enough to give me an extension and meet with me even after University had closed for Easter. It came up that she has a book coming out at the end of the month called Boxing and it’s a historical-cultural examination of the evolution of the sport of boxing. Her name is Kasia Boddy if you are interesting in picking it up when it comes out.

On the way out, I rewarded myself by picking up a couple books of recreational reading. One of them is a collection of Henry James’ short stories. Daisy Miller is one of my absolute favorites, and it is included, but I just finished reading “Four Meetings.” Once again, a crushingly sad story about a naïve young American woman who is destroyed by Europe. The protagonist is either incapable of, or ignorant of how to save her.

Perhaps it is simply more evidence for my Uncle’s brilliant definition of a short story (paraphrased), “A short work in which one of the character’s lives is ruined.”

It’s beautiful, though, and he has a way of phrasing something very simply at a pivotal moment. It allows for very powerful understatement. The sort of thing I go for, and the examples I always give are Winterbourne saying, “She would have appreciated one’s esteem” or Nick saying to Gatsby, “They are careless people.”

As of today, I am exactly half way between birthdays. I have also completed my 5th essay of the term, out of eight. I just submitted the second of two today in the past hour or so. I’m completely exhausted – just did not sleep last night. I’m trying to decide whether I should “nap” or just stay up until about 8pm, and then crash for 14 hours. Probably the latter.

This means I have no more classes to attend here, and only three more papers to turn in in May, and I’m done. Not a bad feeling. So, this also means there should be a lot more updates here in the near future, as I actually resume doing things that are worth writing about.

Also – happy belated half birthday to my sister Annalisa. Hers falls on the slightly less well-known holiday of St. Patrick’s Day.

I pulled an all-nighter trying to finish a 2,500 word essay by 5:00 p.m. today. I had received an email saying it was the departmental deadline. I’d prepared pages of notes last week, but had put off writing much of the essay. I got to 2,000 words this morning before I left for class. In class, the one it was supposed to be for, I found out that not only could I hand it in by the 19th in order to get feedback, I can hand it in on the 21st at the latest or something along those lines. The 17th deadline was for a paper I’d handed in 10 days ago.

So, I’m going to sleep now – as soon as they stop testing the fire alarms – and then finish it up tonight. I picked up three books of criticism on Sterne so I can write my second, shorter essay for Wednesday evening. It’s going to be busy, but once I finish them it’s rather smooth sailing.

Today was Selection Sunday. I have not been able to watch much college basketball this year – in fact, I couldn’t cite a single game that I’ve watched this year. But, I have been reading Vegas Watch pretty much every day for quite some time. It’s written by my friend Jacob from Emory, and he spends more time than is probably healthy working on this, but he’s getting a lot of impressive recognition from sportswriters in the business. ( Here )

Therefore, I am basing all of my picks on one other person’s research. I’ve found I can’t bank on dumb luck like I could when I was a kid. For those who don’t know the family anecdotes, I won a pool at my father’s office when I was eight for a significant amount of money by betting on 4 Seed Arizona to win it all, and they did. I might as well have thrown a dart at the page, but there you go.

I’ll let you guys know how this works out. Oh, and check out Jacob’s site if you like sports at all.

As you can see from the comments below, my mom is my biggest fan. The support means a lot.

Last night I had my first stand up comedy performance in London, at a pub called the Camden Tup. Including the 10 or so friends of mine that I brought (I was really amazed that so many of them turned out), there were probably 30-35 people in the audience. I went on 5th out of 6 people. One comedian struggled, but for the most part they were good. I went on for 10 minutes, did mostly old material, but worked in a new bit in the middle and retooled some of the old stuff. It went over really well.

One woman was yelling things out from the back at people. Not heckling, per se, just…dumb things. For example, during my lithium bit, at one point she yelled out “Magnesium.” I just kind of paused, looked at her, and said, “Good.” The audience found it amusing. At the end of my Pimp Construction Worker bit where I make a joke about a cocktail waitress offering to give me “Amber and Candy”, she yelled, “Did that really happen?” and I said, “No, if it did, I wouldn’t be here” which the audience got a kick out of.

It’s the greatest feeling in the world to have stand up go well, and I felt wonderful. The big hurdle of fearing that the English won’t like my jokes has been cleared.