two.points.collapsing

i just played 45 minutes of raquetball.

you have to realize, this is highly unorthodox behavior. i can’t say for sure when the last time i did something you could call “exercise”. i’m sure it’s been months. even longer since i’ve done anything that could be called a sport, even remotely (besides bowling). it was a lot of fun too. i’m a beast.

so thanks are due to my girlfriend for convincing me to have a good time. sometimes i don’t know what’s good for me on my own. plus, she’s making dinner. excellent.

and later, the luckily-not-hit-by-a-car-like-i-feared pat will probably stop by, and we’ll get in that hanging out we were supposed to do back on friday. everything’s working out just fine, and tomorrow, no school. splendid!

gotta gotta get up. before you get down.

sadly, the month of solid rock is now at an end. the fourth weekend in a row with a rock-ass concerts has just passed by with an intense show by the impossibles. they still haven’t let me down any time i’ve seen them. i don’t know any other band that flips out more than they do while in the midst of some major guitar pounding. and the crowd reacts insanely to this, which was why everyone in that place was sweating bullets and packed in tighter than fat sardines trying to get close to the band. it was hot in there too, but it didn’t seem to prevent the majority of us from going nuts and jumping and dancing and having a blast. what a great time!

we arrived late and missed the first two bands, and saw limbeck which wasn’t much of a thrill, and left after the impossibles robbing ozma of our attention, but sweating like i was there was no way i was going to enjoy any more standing around that place to a far less exciting show. impossibles really should have gone last and played more songs, that would have been far better.

i have to say this though, to try to get the word out. if you, or anyone you know, is in the habit of taking their shirt off in the sweating crowd of concertgoers, please, please, please tell them that it’s totally disgusting. sweating people in shirts at least have the layer of fabric to keep their sweat on their own bodies. topless guys slamming around in the crowd are the worst, because my forearm, in attempt to block them from totally rubbing all over me, has to slide against their slippery, sweaty bare skin, and i have to be fully aware that my arm just got coated in some other guy’s sweat. AAAAAAH! it’s not something i like to have happen. and you can’t tell me they don’t know that people have to touch them like this, it’s a crowded club. yuck. gross gross gross. major concert pet peeve. that and girls with big, huge, poofy amounts of hair that they don’t tie up or tie down or anything that stand right in front of me and bounce and make me eat mouthfuls of fluffy awfulness. gaaaaah…

alright enough complaining already. another high point: we called josh way down in australia last night to wish him happy birthday. it was great talking to him and we all miss him and we’re bad friends because we haven’t sent him presents yet (although mine are wrapped and waiting to be sent at least). plus i even played him a tiny bit of the arrogant worms song “happy happy birthday song”, which we’ve sort of started a tradition of playing instead of singing happy birthday, and dancing around all crazy. he appreciated that too.

today, well, who knows what. i’ll have to relay that information as it becomes available.

i’ve been really slacking here lately and not writing much, but maybe it’s better that way. quality not quantity, again.

last night i didn’t really do anything. i sat around the apartment and read, listened to music, talked with whoever was in and out throughout the night. it was okay though. my only concern is that my friend pat was supposed to drop by, but never did. i hope he didn’t get hit by a car or kidnapped or something. but i’m going to bet he didn’t.

if something bad did happen though, boy won’t my face be red.

today’s the first football game of the year and everyone’s off to see it. not me though. i may be off to see the barber, but football will have to go on without me. no matter what i do i just can’t be interested. i think i’m school spirit impaired. to some that may make me seem like i’m no fun but i’d like to think that i’m just too cool. the trick is convincing someone else that’s actually true.

here’s something i laughed at. last night we noticed an abc 7 news van on the corner of our street and 28th street (fraternity row) on the way back from a jack in the box snack run. we being dominic, dustin and i. so we turned on channel 7 news, since it was on right about the time we walked into my apartment, to see why they were so close to home. well, the second or third segment into the show, a piece on college binge drinking comes up, and there’s a newswoman reporting live from the corner we passed only 15 minutes ago. there are about 8 of us hanging out in my apartment at that point, and once we realized she was right down the street, dominic and my roommate mike bolt out the door running to that corner. of course, after a few seconds of introduction, it’s not showing her anymore, just her voice-over between interview clips taken from earlier that night and some stock footage of people pouring pitchers of beer and what have you. so after hearing one guy say “yeah, i’ve drank every night this week… college is fun…”, a medical guy say more than four drinks an hour is binge drinking succeeded by an interview with a guy saying “yeah, i could do about, say, seven drinks in an hour, probably”, it cuts back to the newswoman saying “this is [newswoman’s name], signing off for abc news”. and right after she says that, right before the camera cuts away to the anchorperson, mike and dominic stroll casually by on the sidewalk at an angle towards the camera. mike turns to the camera and gives a big, goofy grin too. the 6 of us back in my apartment all cheer and laugh loudly. it was pretty funny. i guess they had to sprint to make it there on time. crazy thursday nights at usc, i tell ya.

okay, so maybe you had to be there.

for anyone who only reads this on weekdays, i’ll make this plea now: wish josh a happy birthday before it’s too late! he turns twenty on sunday. he’s almost all growed up. i’m sure if you were in australia, far away from your pals and your family, you’d like a birthday email too.

happy birthday josh! i love you in a very sincere but very not homosexual, non-threatening way. and presents for you are in the mail, because everyone else wants to send stuff at the same time but didn’t have their act together on time. now i will dine.

it’s looking as if instead of posting morningtime and afternoontime like i did all summer at work, i’ll probably not have much to say when i wake up in the morning (or feel like saying it), so post afternoon after class and maybe more later at night. i’m sorry if that interrupts your reading schedule, but quality over quantity. you’ll have to read someone else’s nonsense when you get to work in the morning. or just read mine from the night before.

in case anyone is keeping track besides me, i was just notified that we now have collapsing friend #8 out there. and his name is brian too, which is a fine name. if i keep this up, i’ll soon have a vast network of cohorts throughout the country. in business school they call this sort of thing networking, but i see it as potential floors to sleep on someday in emergency situations. not even that, in all honesty (although i’d certainly offer my floor, or couch, to anyone who needed it). but having interesting things to read, and supposedly having interesting people read this, both strike me as strong positives. exchange of ideas among distinguished peers = good.

and go read bipolar if you don’t already.

in light of reading some of you bloggers’ baseball stories, i’ve come to think i would be a very different person today had my father raised me a cubs fan instead of a white sox fan. you cubs people are awfully dedicated, and here i am, long since having lost all interest in the white sox (whom i loved as a little leaguer) or baseball, hell, organized sports in general. just imagine what could’ve been. do the dodgers play the cubs? maybe i could catch that game and change my life, rooting for some good old midwest tradition.

i got a job today, but told the very nice lady i was waiting to hear about the job i interviewed for last week. so tomorrow i get to make the tough decision between a good but hard job and an easy but maybe boring job (same pay), unless job number one guy calls and tells me i didn’t get it, in which case i get to make a very easy decision between the two. tonight, though, i relax and read my neil gaiman, so i can continue on soon to american psycho which i purchased today to motivate me.

i have to go return some videotapes….

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.