Author: briancollapsing

had a good time last night at the party. spencer’s place always delivers. i even beat a girl at pool — i am the man.

also, josh and i (he went with me to the party) observed some really gorgeous girls that came with boyfriends that didn’t look very cool or good looking at all. i don’t know about you (personally i think that everyone does this) but it makes me feel better knowing that average joes somehow manage to end up with amazing looking girls sometimes. it gives a guy hope.

nevermind that fact that we didn’t actually speak to any. that’s just details.

i think i got my first birthday present today. i say i think, because it’s this huge envelope with a return address i don’t recognize and would have to reason to be expecting anything from, so i’m assuming it’s a gift from someone. maybe it’s just some random crap though. i guess i’ll find out on thursday.

so as it turns out i’m going to a party tonight after all (don’t scream hypocrite, i’m very sensitive). it’s okay though, because it’s not a regular stupid college affair, it’s away from campus in my buddy spencer’s nice place on wilshire, and the crowds that he and his roommates draw are almost entirely cool kids and no meatheads. so it’s different and acceptable. and this may have to be night #3 of drinking (the corruption is beginning, i can feel it…) because, well, see above. plus it’s a three day weekend, so many would say i owe it to myself to stay up until 4am and come home wobbly.

and what kind of a man would i be if i didn’t believe what everyone else told me?

just kidding–i don’t see it as caving in, i see it as part of the grand “i’m turning 21 this month” experiment to determine to what extent alcohol will play a part in my adult social life. it’s all in the name of science, folks.

[brian then realizes that talking about drinking makes him sound really immature and young and stupid and shuts up promptly. have a good night kids.]

writing things out (read: whining) sometimes make me feel better, so either indulge me here or just skip over this part.

i’ve been feeling really socially unsatisfied lately. i go to class, i come home and do schoolwork or watch movies or just hang around listening to music or goofing around with my roommates. now i love my roommates to death, and i love movies and music and school is even not so bad this semester, so that’s all fine. but i’ve definitely been ill at ease for most of this week because there’s something missing for sure. i feel pent up, like i’m never getting to interact with anyone outside my small circle and it’s driving me nuts. again, nothing at all against my friends. they’re the best thing in my life, i’d say.

so what do i do about this? do i go to a party? see, that might be your first guess, and i’ve thought about it. but i’ve been to parties. i already know that i don’t like parties. so i wouldn’t just put myself in that situation where i know i wouldn’t have a good time or feel any better. it would probably depress me more. part of me is wondering maybe it’s an acquired taste and i just need to do it because that’s what college is and i’m going to regret missing out on it someday, but the other half says you know yourself better than that, and that’s not your scene. so how else do i fill this little gap that seems to be yawning especially wide this week? i wish i knew.

it’s just so rare for me to meet someone that really interests me, and if ever i felt like i needed that, it’s right now. only i never know how to bring it about on my own; it’s always just been a matter of chance for me. so i’m stuck i guess. stuck waiting — or looking for the opportunity i guess, which is like waiting, but with more tension. ugh.

at least i got some death and dismemberment tickets. i could be the loneliest soul around and still be happy that night. and it’s only six weeks away . . . .

(buries face in hands)

holy crap i almost forgot to change the song of the week. i didn’t though. i’m just a half a day late.

anyway, i have grown to really appreciate a nice phat beat now and then thanks to my techno-listening roommate. he knows his stuff. but even independent of that, once you’ve heard “where’s your head at?” by the basement jaxx, it doesn’t matter what sort of a music fan you are. this song is rump-shakingly infectious. (i promise never to use that phrase again. now let’s move on).

anyway, so that’s the new song of the week, enjoy it while you can. and if you haven’t seen the video for that one either, i recommend tracking it down. it’s got all these monkeys with semi-human faces playing music and singing and causing trouble for these weird scientists that are trying to steal some guy’s brain… it’s scary and weird and wonderful.

today:

i didn’t have class until two so i worked on a secret project all morning and enjoyed some time to myself. not working is awesome.

i got some pictures developed and found out that i need much more practice to get the hang of my new flash. it’s okay though, because learning is good.

i barely survived my business law class. holy mother of god is that class boring. still better than finance though.

i went to a free radio-station sponsored show (my show starts on tuesday nights in the next few weeks, by the way) on campus with a band called cattle decapitation headlining. no, i’m not kidding. they were hardcore/metal and i only went because it was free and my friend spencer likes them and my other friend justin put it together. the singer had an inhuman ability to go from ultra-low grumbly metal screams to ultra-high shrieking metal screams. it sounded unreal, but it was just him and a microphone — no effects, no nothing. impressive, even if it was pretty bad music. before them was a band called shiva that i actually kind of liked, as far as metal goes. they were more musical and did more shredding instead of just having one guy scream a lot, and they had cool creepy keyboards too. shiva is better than cattle decapitation, everybody. that’s my official stance.

after that i went to shoot another role of film because practice makes perfect. now it’s about midnight and time to start homework. see you tomorrow, thursday the 17th, which, what’s this? is only a single week from my 21st birthday. send money or i’ll think you don’t love me.

am i allowed to say, “i’m making a mixtape” if i’m putting it on a cd? for come reason saying “mix cd” just doesn’t have the same effect. perhaps something about my geeky past has given the word mixtape a certain sentimental meaning that i don’t want to let go just because i have friends with cd burners now. another one of those things i just have to slowly let go in the rising tide of technology i guess.

so i’m making a mix CD then, but i’m also on my way to a raquetball date (non-romantic, sadly), so i will have to write more later. just wanted to get something down for tuesday in case i forgot later.

monday morning and uh oh! i’m not at work.

yes, i made it out of there finally. ideally, that will be the final time i ever have to touch a piece of microfiche. i told my boss friday that i didn’t want to work this semester, and it was as if she flat out wasn’t going to let me quit. she said things like, “oh you, don’t want another job because it will just be too exhausting compared to this one, which is relaxed and easy.” and, “we can cut back your hours a little so you can do whatever you need to do, and you can still come in, okay?”. all this she said as if the matter were settled, i was just foolish in thinking i wanted to quit. i agreed out of politeness more than anything that i’d think about it over the weekend, which i did, which went something like this:

hmm… work 10 hours for not much money doing something which makes time crawl, which frustrates and depresses me in its mindlessness, and which adds absolutely nothing to my skill set in any way, OR stop working here and (a) not have to do anything until 2pm two days a week during which i could sleep in or even better, get up and spend the time doing valuable things such as start looking for summer internships, a place to live for next year, or doing reading for my 20 unit class load, and (b) not have to spend my two hour lunch break two days a week trapped in a basement library, nor the hours of 3-5pm on fridays — when i should be free and frolicking with joy — hitting my head against filing cabinets waiting for the clock to tick faster…

so really the choice was very difficult for me, but somehow i came to the conclusion that i’d be better off letting this opportunity go. it’s true, someday i may regret it and go crawling back, just hoping i could get my hands on a sweet microfiche filing job again, but for now i was willing to take the risk. so i emailed her this morning and told her i’d thought about it, but sorry, it just didn’t work for me this semester.

and moving on always feels really good.

this morning i had a very waking life moment (which was my favorite movie of the year, i decided, beating out tenenbaums, wet hot american summer, amelie, how high, and all the other outstanding films from this year, along with the multitudes of awful ones like that royal whopper of a disappointment, planet of the apes).

i’m assuming you have probably heard of lucid dreaming, that is, having a dream in which you know you are dreaming and take control of the events in your dream. well, i’ve heard about this but never experienced it before in my life. today, after a couple of other regular dreams (i slept in pretty late), i was having a dream with a motif similar to some dreams i’ve had before, but which i will not attempt to describe because it just wouldn’t make sense. anyway, dream-brian — as i will call the me in my dreams to make the telling of this less confusing — was washing his hands in a bathroom and saw himself in a mirror, and said to himself, in the dream, “i love when i have dreams like this” (referring to the repeated dream motif). at that point, dream brian thought to himself, “hey wait, i just realized that i’m dreaming! that means i can do whatever i want!” at this point dream-brian got very excited, because he’d never had this sort of experience before. he left the bathroom and went into the main room of the house he was in, and of course, began thinking about what any guy in this i-can-do-anything-i-want situation would start thinking about…

that’s right.

so as dream-brian is mulling over who the lucky lady will be, and very interested to see how this all works out in this newly discovered state, dream-brian thought to himself, “geez, i sure hope i don’t wake up…”

which of course trailed off into me waking up. i opened my eyes nervously and was sad to see that yes, i had ruined everything. i’ve never been that frustrated with the plain fact that i was awake before. what a rip off. i really tried to go back to sleep soon enough and pick up where i left off but we all knew that wasn’t going to work.

(sigh)…well, i suppose my interactions with supermodels will have to be limited to daydreams for the time being. so it goes.

how this got past me, or furthermore, why i didn’t post something about this sooner after i heard about it, i guess we’ll never know. nonetheless, let me share with you something that blew my mind.

when i was in illinois for a week, i spent one night at my grandparents’ house in bourbonnais, illinois. while there, they alerted me to the fact that the kankakee metropolitan area (yes, that’s a real town. doesn’t it sound weird?) — of which the town i grew up in, bourbonnais, is a part — was rated the worst overall out of all the metropolitan areas considered in a recent study, or something like that. my grandparents didn’t know many details, but they did say that the town was mentioned on david letterman a few times because of its new title.

i just now remembered that i wanted to look up more information on this, and although it seems difficult to find much online, i did find the name of the book, the places rated almanac, that bestowed this lovely title on my former home. i did find a couple mentions, like one article which talks about letterman’s poking fun at the city, and another one that just shows the rankings, with kankakee at the bottom. at least one place includes a quote from the book in which the author says that although kankakee ranked dead last (that’s overall–apparently it’s not dead last in any specific category like recreation, safety, cost of living, etc.):

“it looks good,” Savageau [the author] says, “if you’re looking for a low cost of living, a 90-minute drive from Chicago, surrounded by prairies, where nothing much is happening.”

so that’s something that makes me laugh, basically. now i don’t feel bad that i was so bored and complained so much as a junior high kid with no car and nothing to do. apparently it wasn’t unfounded.

of course, it’s friday night, i’m living in the second biggest city in the country, and i’m sitting here in my apartment blogging, so maybe the problem wasn’t with the town i grew up in…

umm…. i gotta go.

well the advertising class i went to tonight does look promising, it turns out. it seems like we’re going to cover all the things i should probably learn, since i’m thinking of going into advertising, and in fact the professor does work for an ad agency in LA. and she’s pretty young and down to earth, so it may just be a good class after all.

plus another observation making it okay; if i were not interested in my future, or didn’t care about having a slacker major, i would (or i guess i should have a while ago) switch my major to communications. that school is 80 percent girls, i swear, and the majority of them cute. it’s bizarre. as i walked into the comm. building to go to this class, i felt as if i shouldn’t even be there, like i was sneaking into a girls’ dorm or sorority house or something. it was just so densely filled with girls i was intimidated. tempted to run out screaming, i somehow made it to my class, which was also well over two-thirds female and many of them cute. so this might not be so bad a way to spend the beginning of thursday evenings after all — learn about my chosen profession (potentially) while in a room full of comm chicks. i guess it could be worse.

okay, complete change of subject: i got a dozen new dvd’s for christmas, so i’m still trying to work through watching them and their many special features. it took me a couple days to get through the phantom menace stuff, and i even postponed the commentary until a later date because i was star warred out. so tonight i watched being john malkovitch, which is a weird but cool movie. but have you seen the extra stuff on this disc? it’s so weird! the “intimate portrait of background driving” and “interview with spike jonze” both had me utterly baffled. i’m not sure if spike jonze is brilliant or just scary. i suppose he could be both. like me, once i get those black contact lenses like the guy from limp bizkit.

yeah, i know, i should have let that one go yesterday, but i am a big dumb idiot, after all.