Author: briancollapsing

something i love: professors who don’t waste my time. let me add to this. i absolutely love professors like this. for example: today i went to my religions of asia class, which i think will be my ony really good one this semester. it’s scheduled from 10am to 10:50, three days a week. the professor shows up and starts lecturing on time, and delivers a really interesting, informative and pretty clear and well presented lecture that lasts about 35 minutes (with a few student questions, answered straighforwardly and concisely, thrown in), and says “okay, that’s all”. and we leave. it was perfect. i learned a lot i didn’t already know, and didn’t have to sit through a guy talking just to hear his own voice echo over the faces of 300 bored students. i love this guy (professor slingerland, if you’re interested).

example of what NOT to do: my first session of finance (pronounced fuh-NANCE if you’re this professor) consisted of the first hour or more of a two hour class being filled with him reading us the syllabus, which he did not hand out to us, but told us to go to his website and print out on our own (only one person out of about 200 had done this before class). in this case, not only did he waste my time, but told me that i have to use my own paper and ink for the syllabus for his dumb class. after that, he went over the table of contents from our textbook for another twenty minutes, telling us the topic sentences of what we’d learn later. then he gave a flimsy 25 minute lecture. it was awful, and that was just the first day.

i hope teachers, current or prospective, somehow read this and take note. this is important stuff here.

in other news, there isn’t much. impossibles this weekend at chain reaction (saturday) and then again here on campus on monday. god they put on a fantastic live show. can’t wait.

first off, i’m with josh, financial aid is ridiculous. they told me last week i couldn’t have any of the student loan money that i borrowed, that went above what i owed them, until the end of the semester. so my loans that should be partially covering grocery expenses that i don’t have time to work to pay for, are stuck in usc’s pocket until december. ripoff!

if only i could get a pizza for four american dollars. and your apartment’s way bigger? you suck.

speaking of big apartments, i hung out with my rad buddy spencer (yes, i said the word rad) today, and we went to his new apartment. oh my lord. he lives with four other guys in a five-bedroom, four-bathroom, hardwood-floored, high-ceilinged, fifth-floor rock-ass apartment that makes me entirely envious, and ashamed of our tiny crappy university-owned place here. and i don’t think this place is that bad, really, it’s just compared to spencer’s place that it seems like a hole. so hopefully i can hang out with him there a lot and feel like a real grownup in a real apartment in the mid-wilshire area instead of two blocks from campus. plus, spencer and his roommates are the coolest guys i know outside of my roommates (and dominic), because they’re so smart and funny. they’re the sort of people i wish i knew more of.

and they have a pool table AND a ping pong table! (sigh…)

classes are…well, classes. visual culture and literacy looks like it’s gonna be a little on the strict side; that professor was all about business. she wasn’t messing around. marketing seems like it’ll be okay, but not great. my hope is that since my classes aren’t going to be very interesting, at least they won’t be hard. that’s about the best i could do at this point, which isn’t very cool, but neither is being a business major. brian, you’re just too practical, you would have made such a good english major, or something like that.

but then how’d i get the fat cash for all the fly honeys?

take that! i finally got to go see ghost world. it’s about time too. and let me tell you this before i say anything else; it wasn’t at all what i expected it to be. the trailer made it out to be some cynical sarcastic comedy about being the outsider. that’s not really what it was at all. i liked it quite a bit though, because it was very moving. it was funny a little here and there, but mostly it was a sad story about being carried away with your cynicism, and not being able to relate to anyone, and what sort of a life that leaves you with. it really made me think about some things, which is more than i can say about a lot of movies. so all in all i have to say i’m really glad i saw it, even if it wasn’t what i thought it would be going in, and also even if i’m a little blue now thinking about some of the things that hit close to home.

on the up side i don’t have class until 12:30 tomorrow, so even if today’s classes weren’t all the rage, at least tomorrow will be a short day. and i’m supposed to hang out with my business major buddy spencer, my partner in extreme cynicism and suffering through being in business school, at his cool new apartment which i’m sure i’ll find puts ours to shame by a power of ten. so that’ll be good for sure. i have a headache though so i’m gonna get away from this here screen and maybe get some shut-eye. ‘night all.

sooooo…. my finance class is bad, already, on the first day. yikes. this can’t be good. but that’s not what i wanted to talk about. i just have a few humorous observances to share, briefly.

one: you know how abercrombie and fitch has made a business out of selling fake shirts for various organizations, one of my personal favorites (and when i say favorites, i mean the ones that i laugh at the most) being the “abercrombie snowmobile rescue team”. well today i saw one that topped even that, on a guy a few rows in front of me in finance class. it was “abercrombie presents jojo the boxing kangaroo”, as if it were a promotional shirt for an event. and it also said, underneath jojo’s name, “the thunder from down under”, which is also very creative. who okay’s these plans? what the hell are they doing to our nation’s youth? why do people buy that stuff? but let’s move on.

two: i was checking out my tracker page again, and i finally came up in some people’s search engines. of course, no one seems to search for my name, or for the title of this page, and that makes sense. but some random things people did search for, that turned up this page:

1) cheap skateboard backpacks

2) stogies, pictures (that one particularly blew me away…some dirty person searching for dirty cigar fetish photos got to read about what i thought of the latest jimmy eat world cd or something.)

and my personal favorite, number 3) p. diddy golf stiller.

i guess someone wanted to see the shameful clip of ben stiller appearing in a puff daddy video (he lost points from me for that one), and got to read about me thinking p. diddy was retarted, me playing mini-golf, and me thinking ben stiller was funny. they weren’t connected then, but they are now. sorry for stealing your audience, mr. combs.

that’s more than enough for today unless something epic happens.

in the middle of my first day of class . . . class number one, religions of asia, was pretty good. the professor came straight out and said it would be more work than a lot of other general education classes, so if you were just there to fill the requirement, you might want to look for another course. totally my kind of guy. hopefully half the class won’t come on wednesday for the next class. slackers!

i’m in a computer lab that’s chilled to the temperature of a meat locker right now for my multimedia authoring class, and the teacher’s showing off his portfolio of work. he’s pretty happy about what he’s done, but i figured i could stand to post a bit while he’s going on about himself.

it’s good to be back in school so far. it’s nice to see a bunch of people around here, lots of faces (lots of feminine faces, specifically), and just be in a crowd of peers. i like that feeling, even if at least half of the people look exactly the same (i think i saw a pack of about fifteen identical looking bleach-blond girls in sorority tee shirts and dark sunglasses and had to hold in my scoffing). my main concern right now is when i’m going to be able to get some food though. if this class goes all the way until two, and i have to go straight to the next one, lunch will have given me the slip. we’ll see how it goes.

aw nuts, i missed my chance to post on sunday. guess i neglected blogging over the weekend, but i was busy. saturday was concert day… and what a show! i haven’t been that sweaty or tired after a concert in a long time. there was some major rocking going on. rx bandits certainly know what they’re doing. they get better every time i see them too, i swear. so much energy and such great songs… i can’t even describe it adequately. it was so much fun though i’m sorry you couldn’t be there enjoying it with me. and i really like them using the great, great keyboardist rich from the hippos. he’s got it going on. haha.

and sunday, today, well we’ve been busy putting up posters and lights and whatnot (like the disco ball . . . yeah, we’re those guys). it’s rough work. roommate number four showed up today too. now we’re a complete set of four. and just in time for class tomorrow morning.

oh yeah, my friend pat from high school — and now from college too — called me up and we hung out today. that was neat. how strange that we’d go to the same high school in illinois, then the same college in california. random and crazy, but that’s life. apparently a lot of people from my high school came in this year, which can only mean good things about the school i picked, right? let’s hope so, because i’m giving them a lot of my money and all of my time starting tomorrow at ten a.m.

weekend’s over, summer’s over, day’s over, and this post is definitely over. time to wrap up get ready for junior year. yikes!

happy new school year everybody! more tomorrow/later.

got me some money today! yeeah buddy. so i bought some school supplies i needed pretty bad (like ink for my printer), and tape to put up posters (the walls are so bare!). rxbandits concert in a few hours, still very excited about that. and my parents are very nice for helping me out with stuff.

you must must must go here if you like my so called life at all. if every single person that reads this puts their email in, we could end up contributing a whole heaping 10 signatures to this list. and then i’ll buy the boxed set and all of you can just come over and watch it, or borrow it. it’d be perfect. so don’t let me down with this one people.

time to decorate. i’m out to rock and roll. i’ll tell you how it went.

damn you football! i hate being in the non-sports-going majority, because there are no television offerings that i find enjoyable that would ever supercede normal broadcast schedules, but it’s totally okay for pre-season nfl games (minnesota vs. indiana! hot dog!) to supercede the only television program that i ever want to watch. what a day. i’ll say it again, damn you football!!

that’s right, two exclamation points. i’m not kidding around here.

well the mail brought no respite, so again i’ve been foiled, and no movies tonight. tomorrow rock and roll august marches on in glory with a show by the ever-impressive rx bandits, and i’ve got to save my few dollars for some in-n-out burger after the show. …because it’s traditional, and right now we need about as much tradition as we can get. that’s from american gods, roughly. excellent book so far. i’m not too good at remembering exact literary quotes, but that’s approximate, and appropriate. you can’t mess with tradition. so no movies tonight. just dinner and some hanging out for ol’ brian.

i was checking my handy webpage tracker, and noticed that almost half of the visits to this page are from people at okplusthree (or i get a whole lot of repeated visits from one person there). of course that’s a slightly exagerrated ratio, but still, it’s a lot. not that that’s bad, faithful reader(s)! it’s just amazing to know that someone is either (a) that bored, or (b) cares that much about what i have to say. maybe it’s a little healthy portion of both. no matter what, i’m just glad that someone’s interested at all. and oh yeah, wish jen a happy birthday today. i did, and will again here. happy birthday!

simpsons are on, must go now!

last night we went to hollywood star lanes again, and it was so much fun! there were seven guys, and we were all having a great time. apparently we saw the short annoying girl from “that’s 70’s show” and some midget guy that was a regular on mtv’s show “jackass” (which i’ve never seen, but a couple of the guys were very sure that’s who this midget guy was). and we suspected that the two girls and a one guy in the lane next to us were two adult film actresses and their producer, but that was mere theory. it’s hard to really be sure. the guy was a complete tool though and fell down a couple times when he bowled. i laughed at him.

my first game was an embarrassing 80, but the second was a very decent (for me) 134. i was satisfied. my only regret is jammin my finger halfway through the second game trying to give one of the guys the high-five-low-five windmill move after he got a strike. it was pretty humiliating and my right middle finger is still bruised. i’m a complete imbecile.

and i still have no money because my college’s financial offices are crazy and won’t allow me access to my own excess student loan funds until the end of the semester. but i need the money for food and school supplies NOW, don’t you see? i can’t wait until december to buy a folder to put papers in from my first day of class, or to buy dinner for next week. crazy colleges, always so impractical and impersonal. maybe the mail will bring me financial respite this afternoon…(fingers crossed).

maybe, if i’m lucky, i’ll FINALLY get to see ghost world, but i’m not going to get my hopes up because for some reason when i do the plans always get thwarted. at least there’s always that sliver of hope, somewhere. and that’s all i really need.