Ted: I’m a master of cryptography.

Ted: You actually can’t export me to Syria.

It seems like an impossibly long time ago, but once upon a time, it was actually summer.  It was warm and sunny, and life was considerably more carefree than it has been since school started up again.  I was working my internship, singing with my a cappella group, and more or less just having the time of my life.  One weekend, a friend of mine who’d recently graduated and was working for Microsoft Games (Hi Karena!) decided to get a bunch of people together for a night of good ‘ole fashioned karaoke.

You see, before there was Rock Band, before there was Karaoke Revolution, there was karaoke.  Straight up karaoke, complete with terrible MIDI instrumental tracks, questionable transcriptions of song lyrics, giant tomes full of song titles and six-digit codes, and more reverb than anyone could ever possibly need.

So I found myself with around 12 other people, most of whom I didn’t know, in a little Asian karaoke place somewhere in the middle of Seattle.  We didn’t have much in common other than we were all friends with Karena, but we sang anyways.  We sang the classics, we sang Backstreet Boys, we sang harmonies with each other, we sang in key, we sang off key.  Hell, we even sang the guitar parts to “Knights of Cydonia” by Muse, complete with requisite headbanging and hardcoreness.

It was good times.