two.points.collapsing

last night two of my roommates sat on my couch drinking 40 ounce bottles of malt liquor and watching what women want on HBO. i am as yet uncertain if this is hilarious and great or really, really sad.

probably the first one.

today is the last day of regular classes at ol’ ‘SC (check out those back to back apostrophes…pretty sweet, huh?). i am at work because i don’t have class on fridays, so yesterday was my last one, which is even better. and the glory that i call piebald is playing at chain reaction tonight so i’m aaaaaaaall about smiles today — compounded by the fact that a beautiful girl is sleeping in this morning in my bed as i write this from the office. (sigh)… good day. great day.

[now hearing this: piebald, but only in my head.]

see, it’s happening again. not writing. i really hate when this happens but i just feel like i can’t do it right now. i shouldn’t have to feel guilty for doing this, and right now i do because of all the school stuff that demands attention and keeps not getting it because i suddenly have a very short attention span. i blame thanksgiving weekend and finally having a girl like me. that’d throw anyone for a loop.

i’ll be back next week, honest. unless an airplane crashes into me and i’m only a burnt smear on the street.

i really like the mountain goats now.

[now hearing this: tallahassee]

i’m in my parents’ house. i only turn up here about once a year these days so it’s almost strange. not uncomfortable or anything — just a little odd. it’s sort of having my adulthood (or near-adulthood, or something) tossed back in my face.

i feel so weird right now for other reasons too. can someone really passionate about music and literature really be close to someone with an ever-growing enthusiasm for sports and school-spirit? i worry about that. and it’s only the tip of the iceberg, really.

there’s no reason to write about that here though. i plan to spend the next few days eating and reading so there won’t be much worth sharing, i imagine, unless my idle time leads me to some profound reflections that the world would benefit from hearing.

kinda doubt it though.

here’s how they get you i think: they sneak up behind your vehicle, possibly on the street side, just to be extra sneaky. most likely in a crouching duck-walk fashion, although maybe even crawling. as soon as they are in sight of both the parking meter blinking its red light and your ill-fated license plate, they duck down again out of sight, perhaps even diving behind a nearby token sidewalk-tree, or a different car. this way you have no idea it’s coming. then once they’ve punched in your penalty, they casually stroll around to the front of the car as it’s printing up, so that when you see them standing there and say, “hey, this is my car, we were just about to leave,” they only say, “oh, sorry, it’s too late, i already entered it.” and hand you the ticket.

see, their delight in this is double: if they just walked around to the front right away, you’d see them before they entered any info into their little park-o-tron handheld ticket-dispenser 9000 thingy and put a stop to it by leaving hastily instead of sitting on the stoop of a shop on sunset blvd that’s closed for the night right smack in front of your car while your date finishes a cigarette. and if they sneakily did the whole process and sneakily put the citation under your wiper and sneakily snuck away the same sneaky way they came, they’d rob themselves of the joy of personally handing you a freshly printed, and according to them too-late-to-cancel fine. oh, they’re tricky ones they are.

and it’s with a fist shaking in the air that i write this check for 29 dollars, city of west hollywood. may your children be born unfit for tv commercial auditions and your overpriced coffee be spat in by girls too moral to sleep with someone for their big break but not too moral to befoul your latte!

oh and i think this week’s song of the week will be a little cursive ditty called the martyr. this domestica cd is so rocking and good i should have found it ages ago.

oh yeah, rest of weekend wrapup — how about it? well friday i saw rainer maria and rilo kiley and they were both solid. i liked rainer maria better overall but the singer for rilo kiley whose name i can’t think of, well she was pretty much amazing. i don’t know if their sound is overall something i’m totally into (just not my cup — could easily be yours cause i do recognize they are good), but that girl. mm, that’s a fine singin’ voice. and in-n-out afterward was great because this cool girl i never talked to came with us and she was really cool. oh lord that last sentence was godawful. very fun girl though; gives a person hope and all that (no i’m not saying i want to date her or anything, just that i respect people with personality, is all).

saturday we trounced our rival football team which of course makes me feel like a more complete person on some level. oh wait it was more that i ate two cheeseburgers at our barbeque, and it wasn’t that i felt more complete as much as that i felt more full. of meat. mmm, meat. and then the date that included a 30 dollar trip to the bookstore, kind of. stupid parking meter. lovely date though. and today i slept too late.

begin, shortened holiday week!

[now hearing this: the mountain goats – tallahassee. oh my god, this cd is spectacular. wow. really, have you heard this? it’s so good. so good. oh. it’s good alright.]

after today’s class, during which the second batch of groups presented their case competition recommendations, we had to take the last five minutes to vote for which group we thought should go on to compete for our class against the other classes. and although part of me says, “who really wants to go on to have to present again in some sort of competition against other senior classes?” of course there is another part of me and all of my groupmates that says “we want to be the best.” that’s only natural.

and we were the best, i’d say. we were really entertaining, much more so than any other group, several times over. maybe some of our jokes were bordering on offensive, but we are adults, and it wasn’t by any means raunchy or immature. everyone liked ours the best, and everyone laughed. and our ideas were solid as well, the professor admitted that to us later.

of course, not before he took a second before the voting to basically say, “i know that group was the best but don’t vote for them,” because one of our 20 slides had a joke on it that said, “if you bleach your hair, everyone will like you.” we saw it, as did our audience, as a jab at greek life on campus and general southern california valley-girl fashion sense. it was well-received by the class as sarcastic humor. however the professor was apparently not pleased at all by this particular joke, and thought it could be easily construed as racist — given the presentation was on how to get more college students to shop at the local “ethnic” grocery store to increase its revenue — by suggesting that everyone just wants to be white.

now apart from being shocked that someone would get that idea from us, and sure, a tiny bit embarrassed that i hadn’t really thought of it that way even in a precautionary sense (which i think is because i’m far more prejudiced against bleached-blond airheads than i am racist in any way), i was mostly disappointed that something like that would make him decide we were not to be considered when picking the best group in class. and we asked around. everyone was going to vote for us.

i’m not sure if the lesson is to be more politically correct and/or don’t ever take risks, but i’m a little disheartened, i have to say. but then again, he did admit openly that we were going to win if he didn’t intervene, and he had to admit that beneath our cynicism we had a really strong presentation and good business recommendations, so it’s nothing to be entirely unhappy about.

but it’s just so in line with everything i already feel about my curriculum, and its tendency to strangle any life out of us and make us all strive to be average, that i have to hold onto some bitterness anyway if only because it’s so perfectly validating.

i have to call my mom now because i told her i would two days ago and i didn’t.

[now hearing this: cursive – domestica. i’m telling you, last night’s amoeba trip was one of the best i’ve ever made. plus a free poster for their one-year anniversary in hollywood! they’re so good, i just love that place.]

alright. so i meant to, i really meant to write yesterday. i had company though, so i couldn’t. good company though, so i didn’t. mind, that is.

an eventful week since i posted last. i found out last thursday that my group (my friend jen and i — a dynamic duo of marketing, if you will, of which of course i called dibs on being batman) had the pleasure of presenting our final project the first day. that being only four days from then on tuesday. which was on top of my other presentation we already had on tuesday. so i worked all weekend basically. end of boring schoolwork whining.

good things are happening though. i had a date on friday night and it was lovely. i smiled a lot and that’s in the face of having seen the new harry potter movie. my review is about the same as the first one — not bad for a kids’ movie. if i had kids and they watched that movie a lot, i’d get less sick of it less quickly than if they watched something much worse than that. kenneth branaugh was pretty hilariously over the top and i enjoyed that quite a bit.

oh, and sunday i just happened to see, well, you know, mr. show, janeane garafalo, triumph and kids in the hall LIVE all part of one fantastic show. it was so worth the money (which went to charity, even). any of them alone might not have been that impressive, and surprisingly i laughed the hardest and most often at triumph out of the four, but the fact that all four of them were on the same bill made it so fucking cool…so cool i bought hip concert-tour style poster which is weird they made since there was only one show and which has all their names on it and looks really pretty badass hanging in my room. sometimes living in los angeles is not a tragedy after all.

so monday i kept working but tuesday it was all done and now i’m flying free and feelin’ fine. so fine i went to amoeba and bought myself three new cds because i deserve them. so i will have thoughts on the new mountain goats cd, the new debut full-length from minus the bear (which i’m listening to right now, which seems like it’s pretty damn fantastic), and the not-as-new-but-still-exciting cursive cd. mmm, rock music.

oh, and the reason i deserved three new cds was that our presentations both went swimmingly. we were the only group that managed to have any fun with a business school case competition and deliver an entertaining 12 minutes of recommendations. one of our powerpoint slides was titled, “low overhead: the best kind of ‘head,” for example. we’re so rebellious, but everyone loved us and was probably jealous because they wish they had the guts to actually make theirs fun. we rule. and we hate our class, so really it’s a recipe for shenanigans.

umm, last up before you hate me for my longwinded post. the song of the week is a mountain goats song you can get from their website or mine, for now, called no children, which i must have listened to at least ten times the first day i downloaded it and a few per day since then. i bought the cd now and have to judge it as a whole, but this track is outstanding i tell you. brilliant. listen up and listen often. so bitter and charming.

oh and by the way if you missed the victoria’s secret fashion show on tv tonight and you’re a guy then i’m sorry but you failed to see the most exciting hour of television you will ever see. holy christ in a g-string, that was fun to watch.

[now hearing this: minus the bear – highly refined pirates. you should have guessed by now i dig this band. but you should also look up their new cd and check out the track titles. they’re all pretty hilarious. “booyah achieved”? pure gold!]

sorry for the downtime. this weekend has been the busiest of the semester. i spent from 4-11pm on saturday working on a school project. yeah, it was that bad. be back on later, maybe tomorrow with more (e.g. the clash of the titans…).

today i saw a car with a pennsylvania license plate, and along the bottom it had their web address, www.state.pa.us. my question is this: why the hell would the state of pennsylvania feel the need to drive traffic to their website? especially in their own state, where most of those plates should theoretically be seen?

stupid pennsylvania.

as an addendum: it’s also funny how just when things look bright there always turns up a shard of glass sticking through your lighthearted day, and usually one you’re helpless to remove. but it’s funny in that way you hate and you only laugh so you don’t have to really think about it.

[now hearing this: engine down, who did a fine job opening for the d-plan last week. bravo gentlemen. i like their website too, very artsy.]

alright, it’s obvious to me that i’ve arrived at a point in the life of this webpage where it’s not getting the attention it used to. no, i’m not quitting and/or asking for sappy farewells. i like this and i don’t want to stop.

i do realize though what the issue is. there’s a pretty close correlation between happy/busy periods and blog neglect. when i’ve got lots to do, i don’t make time to write. and when i’m having a great day or feeling fine, i don’t feel the need to write. maybe this is all well and good and i should be glad for those times and enjoy them for what they are, and then return on those days of defeat to dump my sourness or loneliness or idle musings on this thing.

that doesn’t seem fair though. people read this and don’t get the complete picture of a person they might want. my mom even reads this sometimes; maybe she suspects i’m this world-weary eccentric who bounces between complaining about not having a girl and talking about books and video games (i’m not mom–there’s a whole WORLD of things you don’t know about…heh heh).

and as far as personal reasons for writing this, sure half of it is getting things off my chest. i could never keep a personal private journal because it seems pointless to me if no one ever gets to see it — i wouldn’t find it worthwhile. i do recognize the value in writing out your thoughts though to help you understand and cope with things better, and having it semi-public gives that extra little motivation to be articulate and entertaining at the same time that makes it more fun than a little notebook with hearts drawn on the front with a ballpoint.

the other half though should ideally be to have a sort of record of myself to reflect on, right? i could look back to the week of a big upset and reflect on how things have gone since then. but it’s going to be a poor timeline if it’s only a spiked record of days where i felt alone, finished a concert/movie/game/book, noticed something funny while walking driving or taking public transportation, or had to rant one more time about not liking my classes. that’s a pretty weakly developed character, and i’d prefer to think i’m a multidimensional guy. that’s why i can’t let myself neglect this just because this week i’m feeling tip top.

of course now i’ve gone on long enough to call it a day. but don’t worry about me: i’m feeling tip top.

[now hearing this: the20goto10 – demo from their (his?) website, because i happen to be loving all things post-impossibles so far. (can’t wait for slow reader at chain reaction next month — they’re opening for piebald! what a great idea.]

i get so excited by art that i really enjoy and connect with. there are so many people in the world that consider themselves artists or painters or poets, and out of the hundreds of thousands of those, how many of them have any similar slant on the world as i do? what are the odds that how they see and then turn around and present things will really say a single thing that means anything to me? i feel those odds are small. so when i see something with a style and a story and a sentiment that reaches me, i get really excited. and tonight i went to see the senior art show for three guys here at my school, one of whom i knew already, and i really felt inspired. the pieces were skillful and right in line with my tastes, and it gave me one of those thank heaven for artists moments.

too bad there’s no money in it, huh.

oh, that’s just a bit of business student sarcasm there, don’t worry.

[now hearing this: my morning jacket – at dawn]