Author: briancollapsing

barbeque went well. came away feeling completely overstuffed though. usually i don’t have that problem because there’s never anything good on the table, but today was a tasty day. mad bratwurst action. [roommate] josh’s friend james came and brought three of his friends, so i think we achieved real ‘gathering’ status. they were cool kids too. james told a story about his mom getting some crazy urge to breed cattle and purchasing four gallons of bull sperm and keeping it in their freezer. it was even funnier when we all tried to imagine how you would go about getting the sperm into a female. yuck.

aaah, holidays. it’s so nice to have my weekend actually start on tuesday night this week. that’s rock and roll right there.

oh, i finished reading high fidelity today too. what a great book. i love the movie, and the two are pretty similar, but although the book lacks the hilarity of jack black, i think the insight into the male mind (or at least one variety of the male mind, one which i felt i could really relate to) in reference to relationships was better dealt with in book form. and i loved it. so i’d recommend it to you. next on the menu, a bit of shakespeare from a book i bought around christmas time but cut off without about a dozen other books for school and a couple since. everything in due time, i say.

one thing about high fidelity though, before i forget: there’s a part where the main character rob says (and i don’t think this was in the movie) that “no serious person can have less than 500 records”. assuming that the same goes for cds — because if it’s strictly records that puts me even farther from being a serious person — i still have a long way to go i think. last time i was troubled enough to count, i think i only had something like half that many. i know i can’t honestly measure myself by these possessions, but i can measure my status in the world of music collectors. . . am i that small-time? do people with multi-thousand disc collections smirk at my attempt to call myself a “music enthusiast”? i guess it’s necessary to point out that i’m only 20 (and a half) years old, and have never had any job that paid me much, as some sort of excuse as to why i haven’t attained amazing heights of collector-dom, but still. i wonder how i compare to my peers in this regard. any opinions can be sent in the usual way.

ooooooh man. fourth of july barbeque coming up in a matter of hours. today is all rock. after sleeping til about eleven and having some blueberry muffins lovingly prepared by my lady friend for breakfast, got showered and cleaned and off to the store. we are stocked up. we got a bunch of hamburgers, hot dogs, and a nice load of bratwurst. so much food! it’s going to be great! even a bunch of these in all flavors for us non-drinkers. mmmm, frosty. it’s gonna be a helluva day, even though it’s a little bit hot. but that’s tolerable when you got the good friends and hot meat cooked over a fire. we’ve got plenty if anyone’s lonely.

story: i was talking during lunch at work yesterday about how i’m going to have a big barbeque today for the fourth, and i mentioned that bratwurst were on the menu. so my boss turns to me and says, “gross dude, you put that on your hot dogs?”. whoa. deja vu. i swear, this really happened. so i’m glad i can set things right with these nutty californians and get them to figure out the difference between sauerkraut on hot dogs and bratwurst instead of hot dogs. mmmm, sausages.

my only complaint is that we don’t have any fireworks, but then again those really aren’t quite as amazing to me as they were when i was a tyke, so i guess i can do without them. instead, we’ve got rock, or at least i do on my box right now. happy independents day! (that’s not a typo).

tonight was good. cooked up some eggs and toast for a satisfying dinner, read some, and went out for a skate with the boys. now i’m showered and fresh and going over to visit the lady. sure, it’s not much of a story but i felt like i needed to wrap up the day.

and if you’re going to be anywhere near downtown LA tomorrow and have nothing to do the afternoon of the fourth, give me a ring, and you can come to our fun rock and roll barbeque. nighty night!

rock. rock rock rock. what a good day this could turn out to be. already i found out that on top of having tomorrow off for the holiday, i also don’t have to go in thursday to work, and since i already don’t work fridays, that means it’s already the weekend! score! how good is that. and i also got to leave work at 3 today, which makes for more happiness.

but that’s not all. i got one of these in the mail from two of my wonderful friends from illinois today; a very belated thank you gift for letting them stay here for five days while they were on spring break. so i’ve spent the past hour fiddling with curious george and string, and other leisurely things, during time when i should normally have been working. aaaah, good day. maybe i’ll catch a flick tonight, or finish a book, or something.

and check it out, collapsing has a friend!

alright, who wants to count down the days until i die? i didn’t fully realize until yesterday that i basically never intake anything of nutritional value. my friend josh said once, “if i keep eating the way i’m eating now for much longer, i’m not going to be alive anymore”. yesterday was a prime illustration of that. my menu for the day: half a domino’s pizza for lunch at around 1pm (no breakfast), and half a pint of new york strawberry cheesecake ice cream and some chips ahoy cookies and milk, around 10pm. couple that with little or no “exercise”, and you have a dead brian.

enough dietary discussion though. it’s awesome that tomorrow is a holiday. holidays were a great idea. to celebrate our nation’s independence, or this dead historical figures birthday, or this religious occasion, let’s stay home and do nothing. great idea. i love it. i’m gonna hook up my friends and i with a fat burger/bratwurst barbeque tomorrow on the patio. it’ll be so . . . independent. in the spirit of the day.

story: i had the great idea one day that i hadn’t had bratwurst for a long time, and we should buy some and grill them on the patio (that sounds funny. i don’t mean grill them directly on the patio, but on a small weber grill sitting on a picnic table sitting on the patio). so i asked my girlfriend, knowing that bratwurst might be kind of a chicago-type thing, “have you ever had bratwurst?”. and her reply was, “no, i don’t like that on my hot dogs”. it was so funny. she thought it was a condiment. the end.

back to drudgery. i thought yesterday’s assignment was a one day thing. i was wrong! oh boy!

tell me if you’ve ever had this happen to you. i don’t know how it happened, so i won’t try to explain what lead up to it at all. but i had this random urge to look up the names of people i knew way back as a freshman in high school on the google. this is especially strange to me because i changed schools my sophomore year, and haven’t seen any of the people from that part of my life since i lived it. is this a creepy thing to have done? i hope not, i’m not creepy, just bored with an always-on internet connection.

so not one of them had a web page. i looked myself up, and I have a webpage, sure enough. and i felt as if they owed it to the world to leave some cyber-representation of themselves out for the public eye somewhere, even though that’s not true at all. i found a few archived articles in the local newspaper about them being Ilinois State Scholars at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School and that sort of thing, and one picture of some people i used to have classes with looking exactly as i remember, but that was all.

so i’m not supposed to bridge that gap, it would seem, with even the least bit of information. but what can you do. it did make me remember something else though. two of these guys were in my freshman year french class. it’s so strange, i knew i recognized those names from somewhere, and i finally realized it. so i find their blog from a link on a blog on the page of a band i like, and they end up being people i sat next to in class about five years ago. tripped out man. crazy style.

the state was awesome. who could forget?

ouch. monday was not at its best this week, i’ll tell you that much. for starters, work was far from stimulating, and even Mr. Bossman knew what he was making me do (and doing a bit of himself) was pure drudgery. but sometimes that sort of stuff has to get done, you know? so that was underfun. then, i took off from work 15 minutes early hoping to deposit my paycheck so i could go buy loads of groceries, but i rolled up to the doors of the bank on my skateboard at what must have been 20 seconds after they locked it up. burn. so i get to buy groceries tonight on the 30 dollars i have left in usable currency.

then, i was at least looking forward to coming home and going out to further take advantage of the movie industry with my roommates. tonight: not a movie pre-screening for free, but a ‘panel discussion’, where you watch a trailer and talk about it for half an hour, then they pay you 25 dollars. what a deal that would have been! and i told my ‘mates to leave if i wasn’t back by 5:30 (the panel was at 6), but i got home at 5:20 and they’d already left. burn again. so here i am with my friend the blogger, and you. or maybe just the blogger. poor me.

let me remind you about the pez offer. just drop me a line if you’ve read this and i’ll hook you up. see very first blog for further details. and i’m sure i’ll hear from you soon. you’ll sure hear from me, don’t worry.

it’s monday morning and i’m hungry. still have no food at home, so i had to skip breakfast again. luckily lunch (company buys…nice.) is only a few hours away. not too excited about coming to work today, but i’m already here, so what’s the difference now, huh? i’ll be here ’til five folks…

today i found out i was added to the indieblogs webring. two points collapsing, that’s me right there at number 56! or at least i was at 56 when i checked. will i always be 56? or is it a list by ranking, meaning i should try to work my way up to number one? maybe i will check back in a few days and try to find out more about that. hey, even if i’m always gonna be 56, it’s not such a bad number to be, i guess.

suppose i should do the work thing now. my stomach is growling.

this trip: more or less a success. although the bus ride was pretty long, i got good and inexpensive summer wear, and a tasty corn dog. mmmm. the bus ride back took way too long because the first two times the bus came by our stop, it was too full to pick us up (it was a small bus, sort of like the mini-bus they pick up disabled kids in for school). so we waited 45 minutes and then we had to ride the bus for another 45. it was so pale.

but when we got home, we scooted off to a free pre-screening of rush hour 2. it was not bad as far as action comedy goes. jackie chan is a wizard, as usual, and chris tucker. . . well he sure is chris tucker. i can’t say much more about it though because i signed a waiver that said i wouldn’t post anything about it on the internet and such nonsense, and it would sure be a shame to go to jail over rush hour 2.

this has been the third in a rash of free movie screenings, actually. we saw the score, the next deniro/ed norton movie, a couple weeks ago, and more importantly jay and silent bob strike back earlier this week. the score was good enough that i would have paid for it, and the new kevin smith movie was very fun and enjoyable. cameos come out of the woodwork on that one, and the women. . .oh my. eliza dushku (the really extremely hot brunette lead from bring it on) was in it, and WE SAW HER AT THE THEATRE. she came with some friends to see it, and walked right past us and sat a few spots across the aisle. (sigh…) it was one of my highlights of the summer so far. she’s so gorgeous. mmmm. reason #17 it’s not always so bad living in los angeles. that’s all for now.