two.points.collapsing

“man is condemned to freedom.” — sartre

interesting timing to be learning that in my new philosophy class, because i can make excuses all i want for not writing as much as i should, but really it’s just my fault for not making time to write. and of course there is no outer reason that i shouuld write any more than i am, which is the other half of the coin: i’m choosing to want to write more and failing to choose to do it. obviously i am a flawed individual.

speaking of philosophy though i really dig the class. the prof is sharp and speaks at length on existentialism without batting an eye — say what you want about various academic paths but there’s no arguing that someone who can lecture easily about philosophy just sounds so damn smart it makes you wonder what you’ve been wasting your time learning all these years. the other classes are alright too, i guess, even if they may look to be a little more time consuming than i’d like for my last semester here. and in one i get to be a video artist (not as in music video; more like new-age weirdo. yeah, i’m as excited as you are impressed).

oh and the best news is that the ipod is now full speed ahead; cards, operating systems, software — all systems go. without a doubt, this is the coolest gadget i have ever owned (gadget meaning portable — favorite electronic device still goes to my 5.1 stereo system/dvd, runner up to Ps2, even though the ipod is definitely neater than either). 171 songs so far and i’m really loving the shuffling of that many songs in my pocket on the way to class. my parents love me, obviously.

finally, i’m gonna do what i promised before the month is over, i swear to god. some grievously overdue ‘best of’ lists. no one but me cares at this point and all are greedily devouring all new things for 2003 by now i’m sure. it’s really for me though, because i’d like to actually do things like remember which discs and films really got me last year. especially so that i can remember there are still things that can do that in a world where martin lawrence still hasn’t been phased out of ‘coming soon’ lists and j.lo has the number two album (it peaked at #1, don’t worry).

seeing as how i can’t really write up any music or movie ones from work here though, not being able to look over my stack of cds and concert/movie ticket stubs, i’m gonna do a two-sentence-or-less-per-book recap of the best 5 things i read in 2002 (part of a list of books shorter than i would have liked but still not too shabby).

#5–less than zero; bret easton ellis

i read this book in a single day, and i really like ellis, so this one came out of a pack of similarly good but not great books to fill the number five spot. i remember reading one paragraph-long world-weary sentence somewhere around the middle of the book and afterward saying to myself simply, “wow.”

#4–the kid; dan savage

yeah, you know, it surprised me too, but this story about a gay couple trying to adopt a child not only made me laugh frequently (savage cracks me up consistently), but it brought up really good questions about socially accepted standards of parenthood and probably made me want to be a father more than anything else has in my life so far. how’s that for a book by a guy who writes a syndicated sex column?

#3–a heartbreaking work of staggering genius; dave eggers

funny and well-written. it was self-aware and aware of its awareness and made fun of it’s awareness, and found a way to be clever and touching throughout, and i loved it.

#2–infinite jest; david foster wallace

funnier and better-written. this book was absolutely worth the month and a half i spent on it for so many reasons i can hardly get into it, but it’s so intelligent and witty and well-developed that i dare you to read it and not marvel.

and now the big bad surprise of the year (which deserves more than two sentences)….

#1–the preacher: gone to texas and the preacher: until the end of the world, written by garth ennis, illustrated by steve dillon. (vols. 1 and 2 in a 9 volume series)

i refuse to be ashamed. the best thing i read this year was a graphic novel (better known as a comic book). since the separate books were both parts of a whole i have yet to finish, it’s hard to judge fully — maybe the rest of the series will go downhill — but i do like to judge one story arc as a whole, so i didn’t want to split hairs between the two of them i have read. it could be the fact that it’s visual in addition to written, but these books were the most captivating thing i read the whole year, and i can’t wait to get through the rest of the series. it’s weird, it’s funny, it’s violent as hell, and it’s too fucking cool to beat. nevermind that it’s a comic, it’s an amazingly gripping story, and i loved reading it, and that’s what matters.

more best of’s before the weekend’s out, for real this time.

[now hearing this: the office over my brain wanting a dose of the ipod.]

an excuse and a rain check.

yeah. so i meant to give lots of updates and fill in lots of the blank space left by my trip to illinois, but i sort of failed for this weekend. i have a good excuse though, honest.

see, i got an ipod for christmas, which was an exciting and surprising and fabulous gift (thanks mom and dad); but the thing is, i couldn’t use it on my laptop since it was running win98 (not compatible with ipod software) and didn’t have firewire (so it couldn’t be connected). easily fixable, right? order a firewire card (should arrive any day now) and upgrade to winXP.

well. since my laptop is over three years old the latter step wasn’t so easily done. i wrestled with the damn thing for several hours all friday night and couldn’t figure out why it kept giving up with 34 minutes left in the install process every time. neither could my computer engineer roommate, so i didn’t feel bad. saturday afternoon i resorted to reformatting completely — leaving nothing left on my computer whatsoever — starting fresh, and it worked fine, i just had to reinstall everything new. now it’s mostly back and better and ready to go. that means no more excuses, and lots of updates and really-very-late-by-now ‘best of 2002’ lists.

i’ll do it real soon i promise.

by the way, you should see the movies adaptation and max. the script for the first is simply fantastic and i’ve seen it twice now and have to say it’s one of the more original and fun movies i’ve seen in recent memory. the second is just good, although i’d like to think john cusack wasn’t really trying, for whatever reason, to do a german accent — even though all the other characters were. if in fact he was, i mostly just feel sorry for him because i was none the wiser. didn’t bother me, just something i noted. certainly a recommended film.

[now hearing this: office. until 3, when i get to take off this semester on mondays and wednesdays to go to school (class at 4). for my last four months ever. christ almighty.]

a story and a top five.*

well. i’ve been gone for a long time, and so theoretically i should have a lot to tell from my three wonderful weeks in the midwest. so i’m gonna try to spend the next week or so putting down some of the most fun parts for posterity. and along with that, since i was not internet-ready for the close of 2002, which is normally prime time for reflection on the best things to come out of the year just past, i will try to lay down some year-end top 5 or top 10 lists as appropriate, as a way of looking back. it was a damn eventful year for me, i’ll tell you that much; friends gone and returned, loves lost and gained and lost again, identities wrestled with, futures contemplated…good thing i had such a great vacation to bring it to a close.

so here’s a story.

my second night in chicago i was staying with my roommate dom, and we were meeting up with our other roommate mike who was in town visiting relatives. three california friends meeting up in chicago for a night of frolicking — we couldn’t lose. so after driving with dom to somewhere in the sticks to pick up mike (but not as far in the sticks as i used to live when i was an illinoisan myself, mind you), we head back to the city. the plan had been to meet with some of dom’s local friends and go to a bar that supposedly served pitchers of beer for a penny on saturday nights, then crash at one of the guys’ frat house at northwestern. it sounded too good to be true, not to mention economically infeasible, that they could sell pitchers of beer for a penny: even if you tip and give a dollar or two when you order, how can they be covering the cost of what they’re pouring?

but that wasn’t our problem. maybe the five dollar cover helped. what does it matter though? between 7 guys i’m fairly certain that at these rock-bottom prices we managed to put down something in the neighborhood of 15 pitchers of beer. we were working hard there. the only thing that came between us and our task was the shot girl that was trying to get us to buy some bright green stuff for 4 dollars, which is preposterous considering the alternative. of course, since she was cute enough to want to keep around, and one of dom’s friends is apparently famous for not holding back, he just came out and said he wasn’t interested in the shots. however, he’d buy some off of her if she stood on our table and danced for us.

it wasn’t really that kind of bar, but she was wearing leather pants, so i guess maybe he knew something i didn’t. the best thing wasn’t that actually she did it, but that afterward the guy opened his wallet and had no cash, so he had to get some of the other guys to give her what they had in their pockets which only totalled something like three dollars. it was terrible and wrong, but in that funny way. even funnier still when she came back toward the end of the night and all on her own started dancing really suggestively with another girl that had come over to talk to us. totally free show — not bad at all.

not to let things end there, we walked out to get some food around 1:30am. dom’s friends were all about the burger king a few doors down from the bar, but mike and i, who only get out to the midwest once a year, were hell-bent on white castle. we could not be dissuaded. only none of the guys knew where to find one, and of course mike and i had no clue where to go from this random bar near loyola university.

mike, ever the quick thinker and fast mover, did what anyone as purposeful as we were should have done, which is flag down a cab and ask how much it costs to get to the nearest white castle (answer: about 6 dollars). in minutes the three of us had departed from the group and were ordering our crave case (with cheese). for those who don’t know what that is, it’s 30 steam-grilled mini-cheeseburgers which are at the same time disgusting and delicious somehow, and strangely irresistible. keep in mind we’d already drank probably at least a meal’s worth of fluid apiece, and now we were sitting down to this questionable feast with one mission: to polish off this box of burgers.

perhaps i just couldn’t feel my stomach, but eating my 10 seemed almost too easy. maybe the hometown buffet the week before had trained me well. dom also seemed to have no difficulty, although we both groaned a little and feared for the aftermath. mike slowed down around 8, and finished his 9th about ready to give up. he had drank more, which we conceded, but all the same we threatened to call him “niner” from then on if he didn’t sack up, and i even offered to eat the last one for him just to humiliate him. he flailed about a little and got moral support from some of the other people in white castle at 2 in the morning — one guy responded to mike’s asking if he thought if he could do it with a hearty, “hey man, my money’s on you! — and finally gobbled it down. we rushed out victorious and ready to sleep, and mike had a nice conversation in the cab ride back about why the driver should never, ever go to white castle, but why he should see the lord of the rings movies.

we crashed on some leather couches in the living room of a frat house, and we all felt a little funny the next day (car windows had to be rolled down, for sure), but we did get some good pictures which i may share if i get them scanned. aaah, the midwest is great.

*note: top five live shows of 2002 postponed because of space: i do go on sometimes.

[now hearing this: jawbox – my scrapbook of fatal accidents; sure, it’s out of print, but if you check under “j” every time you go to amoeba for about a year, you’re sure to find it eventually (i.e. yesterday). mmmmm, jawbox.]

how embarrassing that the post that is left up for two weeks has a mistake in it. no, i can’t tell the future — it snowed on christmas eve, not new year’s eve. i’m such a moron.

but a moron who has returned to california. once things are in order and i have regained mental clarity after my post-vacation fog, i should have lots to say.

it’s good to be home.

alright, i could tell you the long stories from my trip so far (penny pitchers of beer + a crave case — that is 30 white castles — divided by three people?), i could talk about being back in illinois some more (delicious hometown eateries i finally get to revisit?), i could talk about the holiday tumult (assorted family mayhem?), the snow (on new years eve!), what i got for christmas (ipod! for real!)…

but the thing i really thought i should write down is that last night i was up late here at my grandparents’ house, by myself. and i was sitting in a rocking chair doing two things. 1) reading sartre’s nausea and contemplating existentialist thought, and 2) watching fox’s fastlane starring bill bellamy and that other bonehead who’s white instead of black and has awful long hair, and which is directed by a guy named ‘mcg’, and which was being aired on mtv for some reason at 12:30 in the morning.

i was reading more than i was watching, i swear. good book. but the idea of those two contrasting inputs in the same room made me laugh so i had to tell someone. hopefully i’ll remember to tell the better stories from my vacation a little later on. today it’s off to a bears game and then from there who knows what so i’ll write more when i can, i guess.

merry christmas and a happy new year.

who’s in illinois?

i’m in illinois.

who’s getting johnny’s beef for lunch and giordano’s superbly excellent deep dish pizza for dinner?

that’d be me.

who’s going to some northwestern bar with his roommates to get wasted, to hopefully be followed by the coveted midwestern privilege of white castle burgers?

you’re damn right i am.

and it’s almost christmas to boot. if i wasn’t so sleepy from my freaking 12 hour travel day yesterday, i’d be on top of the world.

as it is, i’m just in the arctic circle, figuratively speaking. good enough, right?

working with adults is funny, because some of them have kids, and sometimes you hear them talk about those kids. today at lunch a topic of conversation was santa claus, and whether or not a media planner’s 9 and 7 year old kids still believed in santa claus.

apparently they both do, but somewhere along the lines they asked said media planner why santa making all those toys at the north pole wasn’t copyright infringement. they believe a guy can fly around the world in a night, but still manage to worry about how he covers all the licensing fees?

kids are so weird.

(this is a note to myself to remember later to write out what i was thinking earlier about having too many friends and it keeping me from playing video games as much as i’d like to…just kidding. i’ll explain later when i’m not at work.)

[now hearing this: inner tick-tock-tick-tock because it’s 4:50 and not 5:00.]

school is absolutely over. for an entire month, i have no scholastic obligations, and what a feeling that is. it makes going to work tomorrow morning as usual seem more unfair than it would otherwise too though.

i feel odd sometimes lately, about how i’m spending my time. it’s as if i’m never unhappy doing any of the things i’m doing, but when i get a moment to reflect afterward i am always asking myself, “what have i been doing with all my time?” i’m in a constant state of feeling like the day ends without me getting to spend enough of it not doing anything. i guess i’m the opposite of bored, but not in an always positive sense. i haven’t read more than 10 pages in as many days, i think, and that’s probably the worst symptom as well as the one that gets under my skin the most. i mean, when you stake so much of your self-image on being ‘one of those people that reads all the time’ but then you never do, you start to wonder what you might really be — a frightening thing.

today i liked though. it was filled to the brim with, well, no reading (yet — there’s still some time), but good company the entire day. the best and most worth sharing was lunch/dinner. the two are hard to separate though when you spend it (them?) at a hometown buffet with six of your housemates, and between the seven males present manage to dispose of a ghastly amount of food. why did we do it? because it’s a buffet, man. it’s a challenge of manhood. the question was raised on each of our first plate’s worth, “say, how many do you think we can eat? 30? 40?…” and for some reason we decided 40 was a good number, and we had a resolution: no leaving until we reach the mark. that still works out to about 6 plates per person, which is a lot of crappy buffet food, i’ll tell you what.

the first three were pretty easy. mashed potatoes, chicken, tacos, ham…alright, none of it was great, but at least it fit. josh managed around plate three or four to eat an entire plate of only corn, simply because we thought it would be funny. he and a few others ate something like 7, covering for those of us who couldn’t get past 5, to our embarrassment. toward the end we started accusing each other of cheating or not eating their share, as i ticked off each empty plate on the back of a receipt (which i kept as a souveneir — i’m thinking about framing it). eventually we started bargaining.

“wait, so if i eat two ice cream cones, that’s a plate right?”

“since he’s mostly done with his and he doesn’t want it, and i just started this salad and it sucks, if we both stop now, that counts as one plate total, right?”

“does soup count?”

and by dessert we were in pain and sundaes or cakes were more like punishment than treats. but we had to do it — we needed dessert plates to get to the goal. we pushed our limits to where it hurt to laugh and every bite was like a hard-fought inch toward the peak of the unscalable mountain. and then with some apple cobbler and pumpkin pie…we made it. 40 plates of bad food for nine dollars each. maybe we couldn’t move, and we questioned why exactly we would do this to ourselves, and people at the other tables couldn’t quite understand why we would high-five each other when we would get up to get more. but the groaning on the way home was a small price to pay to know we’d proven our manhood by spending almost an hour and a half eating in a trashy buffet restaurant

it’s good to be alive, isn’t it?

[now hearing this: this mix cd i made for my car that’s pretty good. rock and roll, man.]

so about books, lately…

well that’s the sad thing actually. it’s more like, “so about this one book”, and not as much lately as “…that took forever to finish because i was sometimes busy, sometimes lazy, and sometimes fed up with reading this long book that wouldn’t end.” but the thing was by the end i really ended up liking it and so i felt like it was worth the weeks of wishing it was just over. this book is called the count of monte cristo by alexandre dumas and i’d say you should read it if you have more focus than i do and can finish it more promptly. it’s a good book if maybe a wee bit overrated. i bet it would make a good movie.

that was a joke, see?

now i’m reading one flew over the cuckoo’s nest and again not finishing as quickly as i would like because of finals. that shouldn’t bother me, except that last december i decided i was going to set an arbitrary number of books to try to read this year, and it’s looking like i will fail. now, i had no way of knowing how many books i would really read in a year, having never counted before. i knew that i go through spurts of furious reading followed by periods of video game tendencies (during which i still read, but less avidly i guess, for a little change of pace). but the thing was i started off really strong in the spring, and thought i could get to my number well before the end of the year and maybe set a nice precedent for next year. that didn’t happen though. i’m still around 10 books short. that’s awful!

i don’t blame myself though. of course i don’t. no one ever does. i say it’s the fault of two books of large scale that took much longer to consume than your average workaday book. yes, these culprits are at the root of my tardiness. they are the count like i said before, and this little 1100 page wonder called infinite jest, which was an enormous and bible-esque volume (i didn’t think biblical would be the right word to use in this case) but which was better by several times than the adventure novel. much better.

those two were so long though, they’re really like 2.5 books or something instead of 1, so really i’m only 6 or 7 short of my goal. and if i finish a few more before the new years, which should be cake, i’ll be right on track. and that doesn’t even count the graphic novels, which i think would just be cheating. right? yes, right.

oh and otherwise concering literature: a girl in my advertising class group was here in my place because we met here for a project with our group of 6. she said two things which roughly translate to, “brian, i’d make a great friend and you should totally talk to me more often so we can hang out some time,” and those things were, “oh, i love your books,” and, picking my copy of atlas shrugged off the bookshelf (alphabetically under R), “this is just the best book, isn’t it?” which implies she bothered to read it — another 1000 pager — and enjoyed it, which both say to me “yes, i am a smart and interesting person.”

not to say you aren’t if you haven’t read it. (or didn’t compliment my library). just that if you have…well, that’s a large stride in the exactly right direction.

time to stop geeking out and start sleeping in.

[now hearing this: the dismemberment plan – is terrified]

there’s a lot i could say and maybe i’ll say it all but probably i’ll just trim it down. i’m always trimming things down because there isn’t enough time or i don’t have enough energy. that should end some day, but i doubt it ever will.

piebald was great as they usually are, even if they could have been greater had they played some of the songs we really wanted to hear and sing along to and a few less of the songs i don’t think i’ve ever heard before and had to just sort of nod in time to. still love that band though. got me a nifty t-shirt with a castle on it that says ‘piebald’ right on there. it’s a real hum dinger.

the three bands in between were not really interesting at all so i sat outside with my dear friend for most of them. slow reader opened up the very beginning though and it was so lovely to see those guys again. i miss them in their older incarnation but they are still making good tunes, even if much more somber. dug the set, and i’m pretty sure gabe and rory are the funniest people to hear banter on stage out of any of the bands i like. i don’t know how much that factors in to them being a good band, but it’s fun at least. and i think they’re a good band either way. i bought the cd and it’s pretty great judging by the four listens i’ve given it in the past two days (check the song of the week and see if you agree. it’s called so this is it and it’s catchy, my man).

school is soooooo over. well, mostly. 1 project, 1 test and i’m out like trout for a whole rip roarin’ month, to be spent chillin’ round here some but mostly in the great prairie state goes by the initials IL. oh that’s right, i shall return to my home town of bourbonnais, as well as the hometowns of many former compatriots scattered about that fair state. i have to say i’m downright excited. and christmas is thrown in there somewhere too so that i guess has the chance of being fun too. ha! i’m just havin’ you on…i love christmas. presents and family and egg nog. oh hell yes.

and reading. so much reading. don’t let me forget to tell you about my book issues later.

[now hearing this: slow reader – (self titled)]