two.points.collapsing

monday night i got to see the postal service live. since they only have one cd, that means i got to hear them play every song they have, right there in the palace. the sound was good and the show was excellent — ben gibbard singing is almost always a jaw-dropping experience. love that jenny lewis too. my only complaint is that they didn’t play ‘evan and chan’, which they definitely should have done if they were thinking, ‘what would make brian really pleased with this concert?’ apparently they weren’t. they must have been distracted by their own semi-cheesy video projection backdrop.

and quite nicely, the show also gave me some time hanging out with a girl i have a majorly huge crush on, but with whom i failed to do what i very obviously should have done by now (don’t be crass, i meant kiss her goodnight or something). this has done two things to my mindframe right now: one being to make me very paranoid that she thinks i am not interested, but luckily on the other hand make me very determined to overcome my bashful tendency and go for it very very soon. aided by the fact that my friend jen keeps yelling at me that i’m gonna miss my chance if i don’t act soon. can she be trusted on this topic? i am unsure. she is a girl, so maybe she would know. however, she is crazy, so maybe i’m just fine. either way it’s high time to do something.

i was sitting on her bed for god’s sake. how did i screw that up?

[now hearing this: certainly not a song of the week, because i have missed my window. i’ll do better next sunday, but in the meantime i recommend you download the new deftones single cause it’s pretty fuckin’ good.]

for your edification, it ended up taking 3 ugly organs and most of one in streams (by centaur) to finish that 4 page philosophy paper. it was good even though it was shorter than it should have been. at this point it’s just about having anything at all to hand in though.

1 video critique, 1 paper, 1 test to go. fucking golden.

[now hearing this: nothing. song of the week tomorrow probably.]

quickly, because there is work to be done, i have to recommend you see x-men 2. great movie. best of the superhero wave i’d say, without a doubt, on account of there being characters you actually care about and a story that you actually want to see develop. lovely time.

also, we rented 8 mile which was also pretty good. i don’t want to get all critical on it or anything, i just liked watching it and was definitely rooting for eminem by the end. not a bad weekend for moviegoing in my world.

too bad sunday night has to be the supreme downer of trying to muster the will to write a philosophy paper in the midnight hour of a sunday night when i could be watching adult swim on cartoon network. maybe i will bolster my motivation by seeing how many times i can to listen to the ugly organ before i finish writing.

hey, that’s not a bad idea.

sorry i don’t have a song of the week yet. maybe tomorrow if i get a chance, but don’t hold your breath. got that postal service concert to go to and all.

[now hearing this: “sing along — i’m on the ugly organ, again….”]

momentous occasions as you imagine them are never really as momentous as you’d imagine. yesterday i attended my last class ever. yes, that’s right, my last formal, sit-down-and-listen class session of what has been my nearly life-long education. what a pivotal moment! it’s all life from here: no more talking about it, time to do it! what does ‘taking notes’ mean anyway?

but the experience was fully lackluster. maybe because i do have finals left after all and having tests left to take keep me from realizing what just happened to me. all i know is that having a few beers here and there, watching half of a lakers game and eating a burger and some donuts wasn’t really getting me worked up the way i pictured i would be having finished my ultimate tutorial. sort of a letdown, overall.

i pictured more of a scene where i burst through double doors and do a few cartwheels, righting myself just in time to catch a smiling beauty queen who is falling into my arms, who i swoop up and toss into my convertible so we can drive to the beach for the big year-end bonfire party where everyone i know is engaging in revelrous debauchery. i really could have used that, too; i’ve been kind of stressed out lately.

since my life is not a musical, however, things did not work out this way. luckily in the next 72 hours there’s plenty to look forward to for consolation, like seeing the x-men sequel tonight, my dear friend’s birthday tomorrow, and a postal service concert on monday night to which a certain lady should be accompanying me, things going as planned.

i can live with that. especially after what i thought was a darling little exchange that went something like this:

[walking to class, after being interrupted just before i was about to say something along the lines of, “so what are you doing next week?” with a preemptive, “so i probably won’t see you around anymore, so you have my number, right?”]

[smiling] “yeah, i was just going to ask when you’d be free between finals next week. we should go out for coffee or something.”

[smiling back] “do you drink coffee?”

“well, no, hot chocolate actually . . . i just wanted to sound cool.” [both laugh, brushing against eachother while walking]

“yeah, i don’t usually drink coffee either…”

“well that’s what i like about you, you saw right through me. we could just get milkshakes instead i guess.”

“ooo, that’s a good idea, milkshakes are good…”

[farewells and i’ll-call-you’s exchanged with more smiling before i skate away to my class]

that was a rough transcription from memory but it sure was cute at the time. i’m excited.

[now hearing this: braid, but only in my head. competing with honest-to-goodness office chatter.]

“Lost in this whole controversy is one important point: That the Dixie Chicks’ music profoundly blows.”

haha… this isn’t much of a post, really, but i have to say that other than ‘news in brief’, my favorite part of each week’s new onion is almost always the what do you think? section. it’s always hilarious. how do they do that?

i wish i could have been one of the six people whose photos they use every single week — that’s a kind of fame no one can touch.

what i have left to do before being done with school amounts to a paltry handful of tasks. a philosphy paper on sartre’s views of love vs. sexual desire (5-7 pages), an economics final exam with requisite study time, a philosophy take-home exam (two 3-page essays), and that video art project i’ve been putting off and not doing for forever now. and i even started that thing this week and it’s more than half done in its rough form, so really i’m in the endgame here.

of course there are also a few incidentals that i should probably do real soon too for non-class things. i feel so motherly trying to plan our graduation picnic, for example. i actually had a moment of worry about whether or not we should get table cloths. of course only moments after worrying, “but it’ll look so much nicer if we had them!” my inner maleness, which i assure you exists truly and strongly no matter what you may think, fired back with a firm, “of course we don’t need them, you sissy. this is a barbeque and that money can be much better spent on beer.” but i do have to call and rent tables and chairs because personal maleness aside, my grandmother would most likely not be excited about sitting on our lawn of gravel to eat a bunch of ribs. i’d hate to see that happen. i’m more excited about calling to order 400 dollars worth of barbequed meat though. talk about maleness.

plus i’m racking my brains for a good first-date plan. it’s times like this when i think to myself, ‘how can i have lived in this city for four years and still have no idea where to take a girl?’ but since the answer is probably that i don’t really go on dates ever i start doing other things to keep from having to own up to that fact.

some of those things include such delights as: reading about progressive scan dvd players and how they will affect the picture on a rear projection television that i want to own before the year’s end and worrying that some of them don’t have coaxial audio out, only optical audio out (gasp!); trying to kill people in one sniper shot while playing networked halo with my roommates; listening to the foghat hit ‘slow ride’ at cranked-up volume more times than is acceptable and playing air guitar on an old croquet mallet out in the entryway of our house; and talking to my friend jen about how i’m probably screwing things up by not having asked this girl out on a real date by now.

yeah, it really isn’t much of a wonder that i’m single. here’s to beating the odds!

[now hearing this: “sloooooow riiiiiiide…(duh duh, duh, duh…)…take it eeeeeas-aayyyy!”]

you know, you try to be nice to circuit city and link to their site and it just doesn’t happen, so you just end up going back to good old best buy anyway. i hate broken links only slightly more than i hate posting about having fixed them, but it had to be done. so now you really can click on the links from the past two days and actually get somewhere. good. done.

i went to a computer lab to work on my final project this afternoon, and i worked on it for almost a whole hour before i left. someone was on the computer i needed to use that had my files on it, so after i uploaded a bunch of things from a different station, i picked coming home over politely asking her to move so i could do my project on that machine. now i’m here doing this and about to read for a while and i think i made the right decision. doing work sure is hard. (yes, bask in my profundity).

for the song of the week this time we’re gonna have to go with the inevitable cursive track, so i can finally shut up about them for now. the new cd isn’t as jaw-dropping as i think domestica was, but i still think it’s a great thing to pick up. it’s possibly worth it just for a gentleman caller, which i think is a masterpiece of a song. i love it. probably the best new track i’ve heard this year so far, and one of the best uses of ‘do-do, do-do’ sounds in a rock song ever. the ugly organ is good too though, don’t get me wrong. it just doesn’t grab you the same way despite the fact that it’s an intricate and well put-together piece of music. i love this song though. lemme tell ya.

tonight we jazz club. yes, she will be there. the ball is in my court.

[now hearing this: the cure – ‘six different ways’, which we latched onto after hearing it in rules of attraction. great tune.]

NOTE: the link may have been broken on the word “this” in yesterday’s post, and that was my fault. hopefully now they’re both fixed so no one has any doubt on how to be my wealthy benefactor.

i got an email solicitation with the subject line ‘increased sexual potency’ this morning, as i have so many times before along with the ones for ‘daddy doing daughter’ or maybe ‘all natural beauties’, so i wasn’t impressed. but then i looked in the from: field, and it was from TRON! no, i’m not kidding. the savior of cyberspace has my email address, and he wants me to have increased size and stamina to please my woman right! of course i knew that guy had things figured out, but i thought it ended with ridding the mainframe of evil. i had no idea he’d concern himself with a user like that. what a great guy.

last night’s concert was quite potent itself. i really love the addition of a cellist to the cursive lineup — i think it gives their songs a much fuller, grander feel. nevermind she was very cute. but the sound was just huge and powerful and i was loving every minute of it. that is, until they had to play the art-ified version of ‘the radiator hums’, my favorite cursive song which normally rocks, only now turned into some soulful piano-centric version that didn’t rock at all. it was good, or it would have been if i didn’t know about the original and want much much more to hear that instead, but i was just angry. that was about the fourth song in though. the whole rest of the set was great and i did enjoy it. appleseed cast and no knife weren’t too bad either.

then we came home to go to our friends’ party, and were greeted by several cop cars, a firetruck, an ambulance, and a HELICOPTER circling overhead. i swear i am not making any of this up. we missed a party that warranted a helicopter. no one was hurt or anything; it was just so huge it had to be stopped. before we even showed up. weak shit man. real weak.

so last night we settled for going to get tacos, and today it’s not warm enough to go to the beach so we have to find something else to do and are going stir-crazy. if anyone’s having a picnic give me a shout so i can enjoy the sunshine with you.

[now hearing this: cursive – the ugly organ.]

when you’re at work at 4:15 on a sunny springtime friday afternoon and not a single person from your department is at their desks, it’s hard not to just grab your backpack and run like hell. so hard.

yeah, i still have something i need to show to someone before i leave once she shows her face over here again, but i am one antsy man right now. there are two guys tossing a football back and forth down the walkway right next to my desk, for god’s sake. not a nerf one, and not from their chairs. (the office is sort of warehouse-style with clumps of desks, so this is easily done). i just want to leave here and drive fast on my way home cranking some rock music. then go hear some later. then come back to my hood for a nice big party at my dear friend’s house.

and since graduation is coming up and some reader out there just may happen to be a wealthy and generous fan of collapsing, i just happen to think this would be an awfully nice addition to my living room… come on, free shipping!

[now hearing this: people dribbling basketballs. yes, we also have a full basketball court in the center of the building.]