Category: Uncategorized

the barbeque was a total success and great time. 8 people showed up that don’t live in this apartment, and everyone ate their fill of flame-kissed meat . . . oooh, so good. see you again next weekend for memorial day?

today we’re heading to goodwill in search of shirts. working in an office with a dress code had rendered the better part of my wardrobe mostly useless, and i have to fix it so that i don’t wear the same 5 shirts every week, see? so we’re off to look for clothes with buttons and collars and what have you. if i can get 4 or 5 cool-looking shirts for 20 bucks, i’ll call it a big mission accomplished.

the plan is to read like a madman today because infinite jest is proving to be living up to it’s title lately, for me. i just can’t make time to make real progress lately. i’ve been tempted to skip eating during my lunch hour at work and spend the whole 60 minutes reading, just so i can get farther faster. it’s so strange how your priorities differ from other people who don’t love reading sometimes, when you’re a bookworm like me. the other day, the first day i busted out the abnormally thick book in the conference/lunch room after i finished eating and started reading, the big boss as well as two other people stopped and looked at me and asked, “what are you reading?” in a bewildered and questioning tone that also implied “why are you reading?” i couldn’t help at least slightly laughing in place of offering an actual answer — what else am i supposed to say? i don’t ask them questions like, “why are you watching ally mcbeal?” or “why are you listening to slow jams on the radio?”, do i?

[now hearing this: chick corea – “la fiesta” courtesy of josh the jazzy roommate right as we’re about to step out the door.]

the other night my roommate josh and i were standing in the concession line at an AMC to buy candy before attack of the clones started. i figured i’d indulge in some three-dollar sour patch kids since it was star wars, and those are pretty much the best candy ever invented. that’s when i had this funny idea, and i said to my friend, “hey josh, i bet you that roughly one third of the movie trailers we see tonight feature either eddie griffin, martin lawrence, or chris rock, and failing those three, some other ‘sassy black guy’ character that pretty much serves the same purpose.” i even went into more specifics and said i would put actual money on the 30-40% range, and he could have all the rest, but he didn’t want to actually bet money because he knew i was probably right.

trailers we saw:

1) lil’ bow wow in like mike (he gets magic shoes and can jump really high — NBA stardom follows)

2) minority report (i have to say i’m interested, A.I. notwithstanding)

3) undercover brother (eddie griffin! AND chris kattan!)

4) spy kids II (oh christ.)

5) men in black II (less grating than griffin or lawrence, but still not a fan)

6) matrix reloaded (this teaser did it’s job — i REALLY want to see this movie)

7) austin powers: goldmember. (can you say ‘jumped the shark’?)

alright, let’s do the math. 3 out of 7 if you count will smith and lil’ bow wow as ‘sassy black’ characters, which i do. that’s 42.85 percent. josh should have taken that bet, i think. he would have won five bucks. unless, of course, you only count lil’ bow wow as half a sassy black character due to the ‘lil” which precedes him — not an unfair assumption, i’d say, and a point worth arguing perhaps — and you get 2.5 out of 7, or 35.71 percent, and i would have got the 5-spot. either way, it’s pretty funny to have done the math here. the important thing though is that episode II is badass.

i’m also somewhat disturbed by the fact that four out of the seven trailers (57.14 percent!) were for sequels. honestly, hollywood must be getting scared to take risks and i don’t know, try producing a film that wasn’t already a box office hit. pretty lame if you ask me.

and in yet further movie commentary — i saw about a boy last night with my buddy joe and his roommate ben who can’t come to my barbeque this afternoon because they’re going to a dodger game. wow, did i like that movie. the book i read last summer and was in love with, and the film is a hell of an adaptation. it does a fine job of capturing both the hilarious callousness of hugh grant’s character will, and the heartbreaking awkwardness of the little boy marcus too, the combination of which made the book so good, i thought. i would fully recommend you see it (after you see star wars, of course).

oh yeah, and i’m having a barbeque tonight at 7:30 and you should come. kickin’ off summer and breaking in the summertime apartment with some grilled meat, which is really the only way to do it.

[now hearing this: the white stripes – white blood cells. they’re playing like four shows here next week and they’re all sold out long long ago. pretty weak.]

how did i totally forget to mention that i went to a glassjaw/recover show on wednesday night? well, i’m just a bad blogger.

but it was a good show. the first band was pretty laughable — they were called “vex red” and the lead singer had eye makeup, blond-streaked, long hair, and a bunch of flowers, christmas lights, and a naked barbie doll strapped to his mic stand, if that tells you anything about them. they weren’t so bad as much as boring as shit. but recover came on afterward and i like them a lot so that was a pretty great set despite a lukewarm reception from the glassjaw crowd.

glassjaw wrapped up pretty well though. their singer is pretty possessed when he starts screaming and singing and jumping, so it was fun to watch, despite my two major complaints. the first being that we got to avoid more hardcore monkey-dance kids flailing their fists and occasionally roundhouse kicking, which i maintain is still one of the stupidest things i’ve seen a real person actually do with himself (probably not a coincidence it’s primarily teenage males…). the second being that daryl (singer) said some pretty damn stupid inter-song comments. he gave a little rant i thought was pretty much bullshit about how they’re serving something called “confinement loaf” in prisons in substitute of normal food, and how “it won’t be long until they’re serving that in the public school system! . . .[almost no response from crowd] . . . am i right?”

it fell totally flat and i thought that was pretty funny. still a good show though.

[now hearing this: still nothing because i’m at work and we’re about to have a meeting!]

yeah, so maybe a couple sequences went a little long, and it’s still not quite on a level with the classics — it just doesn’t feel quite the same with so much computer-generated stuff going on — but it was still a damn fine movie. so i had a great time last night.

and now it’s “casual friday”, so how could i not be happy?

[now hearing this: birds outside the window. i have to leave in a few minutes and my roommate’s still asleep, so that’s all i’ve got for the moment.]

star wars: episode II: attack of the clones tonight at 11, anyone?

you’d better believe it. I just hope that no one who saw it at 12:01 last night goes and ruins it for me somehow. those people are pretty dastardly. i can just imagine flipping through radio stations in the car this morning and having some ass-brain morning radio idiot yammering off plot details i’d much rather see than have told to me by some dumbshit.

whoa, where did that hostility come from?

my job in entertainment marketing requires i peruse certain entertainment trade magazines, e.g. the hollywood reporter, where i get to read fascinating and up-to-the-minute tidbits like this:

“paramount pictures and mtv films have teamed with rapper ludacris to develop a comedic feature film around the rap star tenatively titled ‘skip day’. the film is described as ‘house party’ meets ‘ferris bueller’s day off’ set in atlanta. it’s about a high school teenager (ludacris) and his buddy, who are transferred from an innter-city school to an uptight suburban prep school where they turn things upside down in their quest to initiate a skip-day among the senior students.”

turn things upside down? oh my god.

i just can’t seem to blog as daily as i’d like to this month. i will improve though. not for you — for me.

i’ve been busy though. saturday at around 4:30, only a few hours after taking my dad to the airport, we got the order to start moving. so we spent about 6 hours saturday night and the better part of sunday hauling our belongings down the street to the summer building in the new building (it’s not new, really, it’s old, and we even lived there last summer. but it’s new for now).

i did, however, quit around 7, and then make the trek a bit later out to spaceland to catch the shiner show. the first band, twig, wasn’t so great. in fact they were sort of stupid. but whatever, they weren’t as bad as that band that opened for the promise ring at least. houston, who are touring with shiner and were the middle act, were surprisingly excellent. what usually happens with a good opening band, you see, is that i think, “hey, they’re decent, i should check them out.” then i download a few of their songs when i get home, listen to them for a month, and if they’re lucky i still am interested enough to buy the cd. with this band i skipped straight to the buy the cd part and bought their cd head like a road map from the merch guy. anyway, very good band. dig the houston.

shiner, i must say, were a blast. i’m a big fan, so finally seeing them live was just great, and they had their own cool lighting and played really well, and put on a good damn show. they played a lot of stuff from the egg,which i love, but i was very satisfied when they played “the situationist” (last week’s song of the week, which i hoped/predicted then they would/should play) as an encore. their songs are just so heavy and grooving, it really begs to be heard live. and josh newton their second guitarist, went psycho with the guitar-pounding on a couple of those songs . . . oh man, it was good.

oh, and today was my first day of work, during which i had not a free minute to blog, even. so far so good, but today was just orientation which included free lunch and little work, so i can’t exactly say how great this job is yet. i can say i get the feeling they actually want the interns to do a lot and be an important part of the office, which is nice. maybe working full time will actually be fulfilling this summer (fingers crossed).

it damn well better be for the amount i’m getting paid, anyway.

see you tomorrow.

[now hearing this: houston – “waves”, from the aforementioned cd; and don’t be confused — both the first and the last track on this disc are called “waves”. i mean the second one, which is way cooler.]

been out of the loop for a couple days. my dear old dad came in thursday night (right before my last post), and i just dropped him off at the airport a little while ago. he was kind enough to drive a car out here for me for the summer since my brother wouldn’t be needing it and so i wouldn’t have to take the bus to work everyday.

having him here for a few days was strange. i’m not used to seeing my family often; even less to seeing them here in california. usually my social and family lives are totally separate. i leave this life via airplane, and arrive to my homelife, then come back here to begin my normal life again. my family’s great, i’m not saying i didn’t like having him here at all — we like the dad and mom, and it was great to see him. just a little odd. guess it’s back to ordinary again, only we’re moving apartments this weekend so ordinary will be in a different room probably starting tomorrow. oh, turbulent college life.

[now hearing this: braid – lucky to be alive. daaaaamn good. whew. so good. and hearing them say their goodbye’s and thank-you’s at the end always makes me sad.]

moving isn’t fun! why do i have to move every 8 months or less? i have to move now, and then again around the beginning of august. fuckin’ weak. and not fun, like i said before.

last night was fun though. hot damn! we went to see the promise ring/ weakerthans show and it was highly excellent. the opening band was a pain though. they were called “say anything” and they were trying SO hard and you could tell they wanted to be good, so badly… they just weren’t. the guy could not really sing and their songs were un-good. oh well.

the weakerthans, who i’d never seen before live, were just fantastic. they sounded wonderful and played great stuff. i think that show upped my respect for them another notch, and it was already at a comfortable level. tres bien. then the promise ring, who i’d also not seen before, came on and were mighty fine as well. great show, i thought. i did pick up the new cd, and some of those songs sounded a-okay to me live, but after listening i have to say i still think “nothing feels good” is their best album. it’s just the most fun to listen to, it’s that simple.

ugh. packing. well i will get back to that, but first switch off the song of the week, by the promise ring as luck would have it, is one of the very pretty songs off wood/water. it’s called “become one anything one time“. enjoy.

[now hearing this: piebald – we’re the only friends we have. a month since i saw them live and picked up this cd and it still rocks my world. highly brian-endorsed.]

i don’t think i’d had any alcohol in my system (worth mentioning — i had one drink at this thing i went to last weekend where drinks were five bucks and i only really ordered one to feel cool about being 21 and that was that) since well before spring break, if i’m not mistaken. which is weird, because i had a couple stiff drinks tonight, and you know what? it’s fun. it’s not scary and not even really that stupid if you’re not an ass about it. stay away from cars, don’t pick fights, and being dizzy for no apparent reason and speaking more freely — these are enjoyable things, i think. puking’s not so great, but i’m miles from that danger zone.

anyway, i still feel like this whole world of alcohol is new to me so forgive my childish-sounding thoughts here. i just got back from a “school’s over for the year” party and i’m feelin’ fine, so i had to, of course, jump on the blogger and put down a little cheerful musing. i can just see my little sister reading this and shaking her head at me for praising the use of alcohol so carelessly.

JUST DON’T EVER DRINK AND DRIVE, LITTLE SISTER (name withheld for security purposes), OR GET IN A CAR WITH SOMEONE WHO DRANK.

the end.