Category: Uncategorized

this afternoon — monday, that is — i took my last final of the spring semester. i came home a little after four and i ate the late fast-food lunch i had picked up and i was glad. glad that again, i have made a little step along the road. accomplished another little sliver of personal development or at least completion on paper of the path to a goal. good for me.

so this evening i was sitting on the couch with two of my roommates, and turned to one and said, “this is a great feeling — tomorrow, i have nothing. no work, no class. not even something looming, as in like ‘i should study for this test coming up’ or ‘i should read for that class’, because it’s over. there’s nothing. and that’s great.”

and do you know what he said to me? he said, “yeah, but we still have to pack and move later this week, don’t we?”

that bastard.

other news: waking life comes out on dvd today — tuesday, that is — but i can’t afford to buy it until i start getting paychecks in a week or two. anyone feeling generous? and tomorrow — wednesday, that is — i’m going to see the promise ring and the weakerthans. neat. first summer concert. i’ll let you know about that one.

[now hearing this: the smiths – very best of . . . yeah, so i have a greatest hits collection instead of all the actual albums, so what. it’s cheaper this way and i’m not sure if i like them enough to buy all the separate discs anyway. what are you going to do about it?]

good weekend. really good.

friday night we did make it out to spider-man, even if we had to wait for an 11:30 show to get tickets. what can i say about that movie besides wow. it was just what i wanted it to be — not a great life-changing movie, but a fun-as-hell comic-book movie. and this movie was very comic-bookish, but to me at least it was in a very good way. i liked it a lot and unless you have something against the comic genre, i would recommend you check it out. plus kirsten dunst did a good job of playing a female character from a comic book, if you know what i mean (nudge nudge).

yesterday was perhaps even better. our friends mel and josh (not roommate josh) got a new place near beverly hills, so myself and my lady and my roommate josh and future-roommate justin hopped over for an afternoon barbeque. it was to me the first afternoon of the summer, in my heart, because sitting around in the sun eating cheeseburgers and chilling with friends is what summer is all about, really. it was pretty much perfect. then we made a trip to cold stone creamery (my first) for their fun ice cream projects — if you don’t know, they take a flavor of ice cream and fold in your choice from like 30 toppings like fruits, candies, etc right in front of you — and i started off the summer with a safe bet: coldstone combo #1 — cheescake ice cream w/ strawberries and graham cracker crust. i’m going to keep track of what i get and make sure never to get the same thing twice. anyway, this trip was delicious as expected.

now it’s sunday, so i will be trying to put a bigger dent in infinite jest, which i’ve been neglecting in favor of my lady (not a bad thing), and probably writing a letter. studying, however, is not on the list of things to do; open book examinations are my favorite.

[now hearing this (and i know i forgot this the last few times): mp3 of jeff tweedy (wilco) live & acoustic singing “i’m the man who loves you”, from yankee hotel foxtrot]

i normally try to keep from posting three times in one day, but this is too good to let wait.

check out my new desktop, courtesy of kai, who definitely knows how to party hard.

this fucking rules.

today, i saw the andrew w.k. video for “party hard” for the first time on mtv2. i immediately turned it up to extreme volume, because that seemed like what this video wanted me to do, and immediately after that began laughing hysterically. “let’s get a party going!”? . . . “we do what we like and we like what we do!”? . . . oh my god, it was amazing. i didn’t even fully conceive of how hard i was laughing until after it was over, and in the moment of silence before the next video, my roaring laughter carried over into the quiet as i clutched my stomach. it was inane, and there were four guitar players for some reason, and he was pounding on a piano for christ’s sake! it was stupid and childish and completely over the top . . .

and i think i liked it. i don’t know how to feel about myself. i take comfort in the fact that at least i was laughing at it. i mean, i laughed a lot at the good old linkin park videos (i intend to get their dvd collection in the next month once i get more cash. . . heh heh), but this was like a linkin park video squared. oh man, good stuff. i downloaded it and watched it a few more times, and can’t keep from cracking up at him headbanging against a neon sign background that says “party hard”, and which occasionally reverses or scrolls right or left. jesus, that’s good stuff.

also good is spending an afternoon sitting out on a campus bench in the breeze and sunshine, and also hopefully good will be our jaunt out to see spiderman this evening.

party hard.

oh i’m getting lazy. i took my last final yesterday afternoon and haven’t been up to much of note since then. not doing nothing, mind you — i’ve been spending quality time with friends, with books, with music (some friends have invited me to help review music for a website; isn’t that a truly novel idea? i feel like there is no shortage of music reviewing on the web, but at the same time who can resist to add their opinion? and i really respect the opinions of these friends, and would like to collaborate with them. anyway, i think it will end up being good even if no one ever reads it (the site, that is), but i will put up a link once there is more to see there, in case you actually are interested. we have excellent taste, if i do say so myself . . .).

all in all i’m great right now. it’s post-difficult-finals/pre-summer-job time, so it’s all about sitting around like a bum. i’m loving it. i’m such a bum, in fact, that i forgot totally to switch the song of the week, so that switching it now will shortchange whomever i pick. so, i will pick an old favorite that wouldn’t normally get pulled out or pasted up under the normal “what i’ve been listening to a lot lately” theme for songs of the week. i think this week it will be shiner, because they are at long last touring through southern california this month. i will sadly be missing their show in anaheim tomorrow because no one with a car wants to drive down for it, and i am a carless child at this point. however, i will most certainly not miss the show in hollywood when they swing back through LA next weekend, and will finally get to see one of my favorite bands on a stage in front of me, at what i’m fairly sure will be my first 21 and over show. aren’t i old and wrinkly.

anyhow, i’m hoping to hear a decent amount of their old songs played too, because lula divinia is a fabulous album (as is starless, but i guess it could just be that i’m a fan). for example, if they throw down the situationist, a nice chunk of shiner rock action, i will be thoroughly pleased.

[now hearing this: the song of the week]

one final down the tubes. taking a class pass/fail is the best, because you only have to try half as hard as you would in a normal class and you’re still pretty much fine. it’s a fun little taste of mediocrity.

i have another tomorrow, but i’d really like to spend a little time with my lady before i study the night away. and since she’s not around right now, well, i still can’t study yet — it’s too bright outside still. intensive studying is best done in the absense of sunlight, i find.

i’m so glad it’s almost summer too. that’s made extra exciting because i’m predicting this to be the most socially rich summer of my life to date; because fortunately for me (and unlike last summer), it seems like a substantial majority of my circles are sticking around LA for the summer and without the weight of homework everyone’s ready to have fun every night and weekend. it’s going to be [grinning; nodding slowly, repeatedly] “niiiiiiiiice.”

i also failed to mention (i’m writing choppily all over the board today, this i realize) that i am about 10 days and 260 pages into the panaphobically, pirouettily, former-braidily praised infinite jest, and seeing why it could be a person’s favorite book. will suspend judgment until more days and pages have passed. i hesitate to share this and give the idea that to my feeble mind, this is the only thing noteworthy about the book (hopefully you’ll give me more credit than that), but i will anyway: the description of the ennet house residents tormenting the mental patients was a fucking riot.

yeah, the other couple hundred pages are really good too, though.

[new unoriginal feature i think will be fun to try for a while as a way to trace my personal music chronology:]

[now hearing this: deltron 3030 – “positive contact” off of deltron 3030 … this song is phat. as in, “damn, that’s a phat beat.”]

instead of having finals week be monday through friday (you know, a single week), our school likes to take spring semester’s finals “week” and make it tuesday through friday, with the next monday and tuesday tacked on for kicks. isn’t that cool? well, not necessarily, but it does mean for one thing that the tests i have are more spread out and i can be more leisurely in preparing for them, and also that today, monday, no one has any finals and is free to bum around like the springtime afternoon is so fiercely trying to convince us to do. so i had lunch and kicked it with a couple of my favorite non-future-roommate guys just now and it was great. a solid three hours of quality april daytime.

[note: when i say my favorite non-future-roommates, i do not mean to imply that all roommates come first, and all non-roommates come after. without getting into any sort of intricate ranking system which would be utterly stupid, i just mean to say that it so happens that a lot of my favorite guys will be living under the same roof come august, whereas there are still some rad guys who will not, e.g. my company this afternoon.]

so i’m a big fan of lazy sunny afternoons is what i’m saying i guess, and it’s too bad i have to start memorizing the cranium sizes, dental structures, etc. of prehistoric human ancestors sometime soon for a final tomorrow (yes, it’s true, nariokatome boy does have a very modern post-cranial bone structure, which allows him to walk long distances — thanks for asking!)

it’s also too bad that being aware that the only reason you’re indignant or embarrassed is your stupid male ego still doesn’t make it any easier to just shake off the indignity or embarrasment you know is just stupid and male of you to be feeling. of course, girls all think they look fat so i guess that wouldn’t be too fun either.

so. she came home. and she’s better than i remembered, even.

and things feel wonderful.

(i’ll have something else to talk about soon i promise. this is just a very big deal and deserved it’s quite little moment.)

man, things are sure coming together. good week, this week, let me tell you. we got our house. school is almost over and the things i have left to do are very few and non-threatening. i have one job offer which i will gladly take, unless i get another even better offer (still possible at this point). and most importantly, my favorite girl in the world is coming home from a semester abroad in only 20 hours (and counting). it’s the kind of week that makes you feel like life is on your side for once.

so on the bragging-about-how-great-it-is-to-be-me-these-days tip, how about i share a similarly themed song of the week? actually, i don’t think the song is about that at all, but if you take the chorus out of context, you could get that idea. “you can’t be me i’m a rock star,” is absolutely how i’m feeling right now. so mixing it up with a little n.e.r.d. is what we’re gonna do this time for the song of the week. are you down?

i got an email from the shiner mailing list about their upcoming shows (only a few weeks away, in LA), and how they’re playing a show in KC with Centaur. Centaur is a new band fronted by matt talbot (former singer/guitarist of hum, now producing in champaign IL), which being a huge fan of hum i was eager to hear about. so after some minor internet exploring i found out they have an unofficial website where you can download some live tracks, and that they have a debut cd coming out in june on parasol. naturally, these things are both exciting to me. now if only i lived in central illinois, i could go see them play a show.

in other news — well, school is almost over and the only things really between me and summer are three final exams, which i am not excessively worried about. that’s just how i am about these things usually.

today in my business communication class (basically a public speaking course with business slant) we made a big circle, and went around, and when it was your turn, people in the class had to comment on what they thought your strengths were as a speaker, as they had observed in class. the consensus for me was something about me being very intelligent, which was great, because that’s exactly what i was going for.

my professor also made a broader comment about how a few of us (naming a couple names, myself included) have a “shoot from the hip” sort of sarcasm that is very refreshing. i thought that was very flattering, and of course, totally accurate, because i am one refreshing guy, with some qualities not unlike citrus sodas.

is it thursday yet?