two.points.collapsing

if at some point in the future i decide to sift through past weeks’ weblog entries for nostalgia’s sake, or maybe to get a better sense of the outstanding progress i’ve made in my writing skills (such as the use of self-inflating hyperbole), i will probably end up reading this week’s sparse entries and thinking, “god, that must have been a pretty boring week”.

and i don’t know if that’s necessarily true — just because nothing remarkable happens, do i fall immediately into the boring bin? i don’t think so. i think you can just have a plain old week spent playing video games and going to class and doing homework and be perfectly alright with yourself. excitement all the time wouldn’t be that exciting anyway, after a while.

but some excitement is certainly a plus. such as two concerts this weekend (piebald and coalesce, tomorrow and sunday. fuckin’ rock, man), the nearing of the end of the semester, the nearing of our sealing a deal on a house for 9 next year (yes, 9 college seniors in one house, and it will surely be the best year of my young life), and the list goes on, even. for example, my favorite girl in the world is coming back from a semester abroad in less than three weeks now, and that will surely be something of pivotal importance in the next year or more as well — at least, it will be if things go as i’m hoping . . .

and if not, well, she’ll still be back, and she’s still great fun. plus she has a car, so she can drive me to amoeba.

oh, another thing (i’m making up for not posting all week here, be patient): i have just seen the third best video of all time, as far as i’m concerned. if you want to know what the first two are, check the archives from last summer (search for words like “hell” and “coffee”), but if you want to see the third, simply utilize your favorite music-videotron and select “frontier psychiatrist” by the avalanches. i’m not saying it’s a new video, just that i saw it for the first time tonight. you see my roommate, who spent the fall in australia, came back bearing the avalanches; and that song kicked my ass already, but seeing the video makes it even more fun. i mean, there’s a monkey playing the drums. and that’s not the half of it.

speaking of monkeys (this is the last thing, i swear), i watched a video in anthropology today with a monkey that drove a golf cart. i swear, he got up, figured out that pressing the pedal made it go, and drove off into the forest. he was a test subject, so he was in a forest near a lab, and had ridden on the golf cart before but never driven it. but i’m telling you right now, you haven’t laughed until you see a monkey drive a golf cart. it’s just that simple.

and so i bid you goodnight.

you know, i’ve never done a phone interview before; but i get to a week from monday. first sign of hope for the summer.

of course, it’s still unpaid — drat.

the thing is, if i got one good job for 2 or 3 days a week that didn’t pay, i’d feel a lot better about working some random job the other 4 days a week to pay for rent and food. if i only got the random one for the summer though, my resume wouldn’t be much advanced by a line that goes something like, “summer 2002 – managed to fend off hunger and homelessness by working as a cashier at local bookstore.” i’m going for something a little more professional than that.

still no summer job, still no house for the fall. this is getting old real fast, let me assure you.

and two midterms this week, presentations and big projects coming due in the next few…

that’s why i don’t have much to say so far. but i do get to go see piebald on saturday, and then coalesce on sunday. sweet, sweet coalesce. i’m glad i have something to look forward to the near future (and something else a million times better in the not-so-distant future, but we’ll talk about that later).

friends visiting from out of state and being as great as you remember them being, as well as bringing new friends just as great; now that’s a good time (i.e., friday night). finally finishing final fantasy X after trying for a week to defeat the big bad final villain is not quite as fulfilling (i.e., saturday night). you might even say it’s an awfully dorky way to spend a saturday night. hopefully taking the bus to amoeba to buy music and grabbing in-n-out (yes, the unstoppable combo once again) puts me back in the not-lame column though. although i have to say in the retelling none of those things come off as very interesting.

guess i can’t be a master storyteller every day of my life — it’d be too exhausting.

this might be a fun mental picture though: sitting at the bus stop outside of amoeba, a homeless white guy with a piece of carpet padding wrapped around himself for warmth (i assume) shambles toward us. he took a swig from a bottle of liquor before approaching, then tucked it away and asked for change from us and the family of three also waiting at the bus stop after buying some music of their own. josh gave him seven cents, the man gave him maybe 35 cents or something. the bum then said, “yeah, i’ve lived in LA for 25 years. grew up in south central, man…” then he sort of teetered, stood just off the curb looking around at us and the cars passing, then he started rapping. that’s right, rapping. wish i could place exactly what it was, but i cannot. could have been a freestyle, who will ever know. definitely included a lot of swearing though. then he took another swallow of liquor, and halfway through crossing the street called into one of the cars waiting at the stoplight, “hey there loveable thing . . .” on his way to jack-in-the-box.

i like that: “loveable thing”. see, you do learn your most valuable lessons outside the classroom.

good song of the week this week. mm hmm.

hey mjarc, you’re not the only one who can’t read the wire.

we have a meeting in a couple hours with another property manager. it’s exciting to think we may actually have a place to live for next year. in the “contracts are about to be signed and we can stop worrying” sense. but we’re not there yet so we will play it cool and not start buying curtains.

also: viewing of wet hot american summer at my apartment tonight with old friends and new. ice cream sundaes and root beer floats provided. mmm, creamy.

ha, i totally guessed it too. congratulations on the big big plans. gives the rest of us hope about love and life and all that. best wishes to you.

also, i slacked off again on the song of the week, but i remembered now, and this week is a good one. this band’s demo found its way to the radio station somehow, and i gave it a listen and really liked it. they sound like old jimmy eat world, and that’s a high compliment coming from me. they’re just starting out i guess, only four songs so far on the disc, which you can get for 2 dollars shipping at their website. you can also download two songs, but i’ll save you the trouble by just putting them up here and spreading the love. so check out blue sky goodbye, the song of the week stop raining, and another bonus track on top of that.

now i go to gobble up some taquitos.

i’m listening to “dead leaves and the dirty ground” by the white stripes right now. this song is so damn good it’s hard to listen to sitting down.

on to serious matters — tonight was “senior concentration night” at the business school where a bunch of department heads told us about the various course options for our last year at business school. choose from a handful of exciting tracks into corporate america such as finance, operations, information systems, management consulting, marketing . . . each with its own list of available courses in how to prepare ourselves for the all-important Selling Out to the Man we’re about to face in a manner of months. it just becomes a matter of what function you wish to perform in His service. so i was sitting and listening to these men and women list off careers, potential employers, starting salaries, and all that lovely stuff and it hit me. in the next week or two (we register for fall courses second week of april), i will in essence be selecting my career path, as long as we’re assuming what i study is what i end up doing. in the next 15 days, i could decide hey, maybe consulting would be fulfilling. maybe what i really ought to do is go into I.S. — everyone needs computers nowadays right? or i’ll just stick with marketing, nevermind that it’ll mean some of the lowest starting salaries in the business school. what’s important is that i enjoy what i do, not that i can pay off my mountain of loans . . .

all i’m trying to say is that this is scary. i’m all for change, but being aware that you’re at a key turning point in your life — in a decidedly serious, long-term kind of way — is pretty damn intimidating.

back to more lighthearted things: if you can, you really really ought to try to catch today’s daily show. one of the correspondents gave a commentary on the new star wars trailer and how much he loved it and trailers in general, and then he talked about how much better his commentary would have been to watch if it were in trailer form, and then they played it in trailer form. complete with melodramatic intro lines, gratuitous car crashes, and the cutting off of him about to say a swear word by explosion of tanker truck. it was utterly brilliant.

i remember this feeling. it set in last year at about this time. just after spring break (although i could feel it creeping up just before then too). i also recall it from november, just before thanksgiving. this is not a good feeling to have, even though it feels good — don’t get the two mixed up.

this is a definite and hard-to-resist urge to do what i’m doing right now: sit in my desk chair which is thankfully able to rock back and forth, listening to music and swaying front to back, staring at the posters, out the window, at a blank computer screen; to do this only, and at all times. schoolwork and even things that at other times would be enjoyable hobbies have no appeal or draw or hold over me. the list of projects to work on cowers in the shadow of my lethargic springtime apathy. i want to sit in the sun and watch the wind blow through the trees. i certainly have no desire to study the morphological differences of monkeys vs. apes, look through job listings, or give presentations to classes full of similarly disinterested students.

springtime is definitely here, and that means it’s time for a change. if i could make a wish right now, my first thought would be to skip the month of april. but then my first fear becomes, “what happens after next spring, when i’m not guaranteed a change of pace every 4 months? what do i look forward to then?”

stagnation is a terrifying adversary.

another thing i didn’t mention from saturday night: it always astounds me how quiet and deserted some parts of a city this large can get at 3am. sure, it’s 3am, but you’d think that there’d still be a decent amount of life out on the major avenues. this is not true. it’s eerily peaceful and fairly strange that a world with so many street lights can have streets so deserted. that’s another reason i like going on late night bus trips.

enough about the weekend already, how about today? it’s a mild and pleasant day here in los angeles. i just took a quick dash trip (dash is the downtown shuttle bus system. short range trips for only a quarter, very practical and nice padded seats) to pick up my trusty pocketwatch. everything seems shiny and precise, so i’m happy. the man at the house of time was friendly and cheerful as well, so all in all that went well. if you need a watch repaired while you’re downtown in la, i recommend house of time, 404 w. 7th st. #301. now you know.

oh, and to top it off, i was looking at some preliminary scheduling for next semester (fall, that is), and if i’m not making any mistakes, and i get into all the classes that i want, i’ll be looking at two days of class per week. sure, i may be at school for 9 (non-consecutive) hours those two days, but still — only TWO days of class a week! i’m sure i can steel myself against having to be somewhere at 8am for those two days if it means the other three days i have no educational obligations whatsoever. this could be a whole new world of opportunity here. i mean, imagine the possibilities of having brian unleashed on an ususpecting world that would guess i’d have class monday wednesday and friday. they’ll never know what hit them.

for once i feel like i have so much i want to write down, i have to actually hold some of it back so that i don’t overdo it. is overdo a word, or is it just over do? that’s not one of the things i wanted to talk about though.

last night i had started feeling cooped up so i went on a public transit outing to see gosford park and get some in-n-out. all in all, it ended up taking over six hours from leaving to returning to my apartment; this should attest to the efficiency of los angeles mass transit. what added to the inconvenience of the whole affair was the fact that, as i already told you, my watch is broken. since i have no replacement timepiece, this causes me great stress when trying to take busses to a theatre in time for a movie, for the main reason that i’m not able to know if and by how much time i am running late. and, as knowing how late i am is key in figuring out how worried i should be about getting there on time — which of course has a vital effect on the travel time in my semi-compulsive mind — not knowing adds the extra worry of not knowing how worried to be.

somehow by trying to read (just started naked lunch; terrific book) and otherwise not think about it, i managed to worry just the right amount and buy a ticket at 10:08 for a 10:15 showing (so says the ticket stub), and sit down, take off my hooded sweatshirt and kick back just as the lights dimmed. yes, i am considering doing this professionally.

the movie was not excessively funny, or excessively intriguing as far as mysteries go. but still, i really liked it. it seemed very professional, i think, as a film, and i appreciated that. and it was pretty clever even if there were fewer outright laughs than i might have expected. some might say though that the hardest laughs to get though are the internal, cerebral ones that don’t really evoke guffawing as much as an inner tip-of-the-hat. maybe i was cracking up on the inside. say what you will, i liked it all the same.

waiting at the bus stop on sunset after a tasty burger was exciting, because i got to watch people cruising for a good half hour at least. it wasn’t so awful i guess — waiting for busses in populated areas is kind of fun almost. it makes me feel like part of the city. leaning against a signpost, watching cars crawl by in a steady stop-go stream; it’s sort of calming. that was ruined though by sitting right behind mr. itchy once the bus came. mr. itchy was a bony black guy who must have been tripping on something, because aside from smelling strongly of feet, he could not stop scratching himself all over his body. hands in his shirt scratching his chest. scratching his bald head. pulling up his pantleg to scratch his legs. oh, and he was drooling too. then he took off his shoes and socks, scratched some more, and put them back on again. all of this was not as calming. mostly unsettling and malodorous, actually. i didn’t have the heart to just stand up and move to another seat for some reason either, so i just tried to read my book through tearing eyes until i could escape the stench 10 blocks later.