You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2008.
My photo, Rainbow Power, was chosen as the Seattlest Flickr Photo of the Day for today, May 29th, 2008. It’s my third photo to appear on Seattlest. As you may see from my comment on that post, it is my personal belief after Monday’s performance that Wayne Coyne is as close as the human race is going to get to the second coming of Jesus. And that’s not half bad if you ask me.
Sasquatch! was this past weekend. Highlights after the jump:
This weekend I will not be posting. I’m going to be in Quincy, WA at the Gorge Amphitheater watching bands, generally giving myself sensory overload and likely worsening my hearing. I’m bringing earplugs, don’t worry. In any case, it’s going to be three straight days of camping, music, comedy, and all out madness.
I’m excited.
Yesterday I started biting my nails again in earnest. I acquired the nervous habit of nail-biting when I was a wee lad and oddly enough, gave it up nearly cold turkey when I was about a sophomore or junior in high school. Yesterday, though, I was sitting in Starbucks reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reflecting upon the near-impossible busyness of the end of this spring quarter and I just unconsciously started biting them out of need simply to be doing something with my mouth. It’s kind of the same rationale I have about always doing something with my hands when I’m walking somewhere, such as endlessly digging around in my pockets. Kind of.
But I digress.
2:30pm - Fall registration.
1:30pm - Class.
12:45pm - Now. Typing blog post.
9:15am - Late for work. It’s okay, my boss isn’t here yet.
9:00am - Wake up final time. Say “Shit” out loud. Rush to get clothes on and get to work.
5:00am - Wake up again. Realize it’s still morning.
4:18am - Wake up fully clothed in what I was wearing last night, mouth disgusting from unbrushed teeth. Sun is rising. Get up, go to the bathroom to relieve aching bladder. Brush teeth. Get into bed.
1:30am - Rachel leaves my room. I’m face down on my pillow. I’ve just told her that I’m not going to bed because I have to brush my teeth.
12:56am - Turn on Conan. In bed with Rach. Denis Leary is funny. Conan is more. Mates of State play. They are talented. Reflect upon the bands I will be seeing this weekend, including Mates.
11:30pm - Say I’m going to continue reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin for class. Have humorous conversation with Rachel and my roommate instead. I’m in that silly-tired stage at this point.
10:55pm - Leave studio.
8:36pm - Realize I’ve booked studio time while playing guitar and run to Public Safety to get the keys. Spend two and a half hours getting remarkably little done, but finish Thursday’s homework at least. Resolve once again to post a song or two on blog, but not set any sort of timeline to do so.
This weekend I learned that there was a glacier in Montana that suddenly broke and released a giant flood westward 14,000 years ago that reversed the flow of rivers and carved large jagged canyons into central Washington. I also learned that 14,000 years later, that same area of the state is now basically desert. I learned that 14,000 years ago there would have been a mile of water above my head in that photo. I also learned I’m scared of snakes. Also, I learned the importance of sunscreen.
I spent Friday and Sunday in a hot van and Saturday in a very flat part of Washington called Moses Coulee. The land formations and history about that place are really amazing, such as a now dried up waterfall that was once much larger than Niagara and plunged about as deeply, if not deeper.
It was over 100 degrees in Moses Coulee on Saturday while we were working for hours and hours doing line transects on McCarthy Creek, so needless to say I now have the sunburn from hell on the backs of my legs, arms, neck, and feet. The first night was freezing cold. The second was a comfortable warm, but windy. I have cuts and scratches everywhere. Somehow out of fifteen people, I picked the least comfortable spot to sleep on in the field. Overall, I’d say this weekend was a success.
Yesterday I got the call from Grist offering me the job and I done snatched that shit up gladly accepted the position. It’s really weird and exciting to have things work out for a change. Too, I’d just become accustomed to the idea that life just doesn’t work that way. It’s just weird that I now have the job that I fretted so much over not getting that I decided to make a change in that direction. And it worked. So right on.
I “start” Tuesday, for which I’ll have to reschedule a day with my current boss. I may have to postpone it, though, as I don’t actually yet have work study aid for summer. It needs to be applied for. My faith in Financial Services getting their shit together by then is minimal.
I’m going on another ecology trip this weekend, this time to Moses Coulee. It’s out pretty much in the very center of Washington State in the middle of nowhere where it’s more like desert than the lush, verdant Emerald City. It’s supposed to be in the nineties, too. Needless to say you won’t see a post from me on Saturday. Cross your fingers once again that I don’t become Canteen Boy, this time literally in the middle of nowhere.
Yesterday I signed a lease for an apartment in a yellow house on Capitol Hill for one year. So it’s official. I’m moving away from home on or around June 1st. It doesn’t really feel that special or different or important. I’m as excited for it as I am worried about all the minutiae of actually moving in. Like, where the fuck am I going to get a decent mattress and bed frame? Desk? How am I going to get them into the apartment? What about a car? Parking? Roommates, subleases, all kinds of shit that needs to get worked out.
Great Tits Cope Well With Warming
The research uses a long record of great tits in a breeding site at Wytham Woods near Oxford, where observations began in 1947.
Right off the bat I’m going to tell you that I am procrastinating. I should be reading Typee by Herman Melville. I should be drafting a response paper, due tomorrow. I should be doing a lot of things. But I’m looking up strings of things on Wikipedia and listening to Death Cab For Cutie in quiet anticipation of their new album tomorrow.
I woke up at three or four this morning fully clothed with all of my effects in the bed around me. I was still intoxicated out of my mind. I’m told that in a single fluid motion I removed the covers from my body, got up, and booked it down the hall to the bathroom. This I remember doing. I didn’t, however, immediately remember who paid for the two beers I had last night at Quinn’s with Rachel and her friends Bobby and Tom from California.
I have been having these dreams lately that my first girlfriend is dead. They’re not recurring in that they are not the same dream, but they all start and end the same way.
There will be this situation where I’m doing something that is generally considered fun and happy, ice skating or something. The dream goes on, and there’s just this strange awkward feeling permeating the dream that the real, sleeping me doesn’t immediately know the cause of, but my dream self does. Then at some point in the course of the dream, I stop doing what I’m doing, bury my face in something and start to cry. I’ve realized that she’s gone and I will never see her again. I lament the fact that she was too young.
Then I wake up and realize that, though the dream is a complete fabrication by little understood processes of my brain, I will still probably never see her again.
I’m signing a lease on an apartment, but the people I have planned to be roommates with for six months have flaked out. I decided to recover my computer because I realized the futility of waiting to get a new one, only to have it shit the bed on me once again. Just as I was working effectively with my boss, we went off the deep end. I’m taking one of the easiest quarters of my life and using it as an excuse to be far too lackadaisical about the work that I actually have. I still retain more money than I ever have, but I’m desperately trying to hang on to it amidst far too many fiscal obligations.
My shiny aluminum-encased million-dollar-researched super-engineered Apple laptop is dying a slow death that is painful only to me and I am in desperate need of a new one. Sadly, there’s just no money. Nor is there a high enough credit line. But I digress.
My weekend begins now and ends at 10:00am Tuesday morning.
There is a lot of talk about Hillary Clinton already losing the nomination. Over at Americablog, apparently even Clinton insiders are singing the same tune everyone else is. But if you look at the comments to that posting, about seven comments from the bottom, is one of the smartest pieces of Internetery that I’ve ever read. I quote it here:
I find it hard to believe that you still don’t understand what’s happening here.
Hilary Clinton is running her campaign the same way she has faced every major challenge in her life. She is fighting twice as hard as any man would have to, and she is ignoring everyone who is telling her that, for the good of the (1) family or (2) company or (3) party or (4) country, get back in your place and for G-d’s sake stop your yapping, woman.
It angers me when my boss misrepresents situations to put me at fault for his shortcomings and the fact that things don’t get finished when he wants. I hate when anybody talks about respect as if they deserve it, even if they’re not reciprocating (though they will always say they do). So as it stands I hate my boss, my bosses colleagues, my job, the department I work in, and the pointless, ridiculous busy work I’m forced to do.
I am feeling the crunch, and I’m just starting to not care about schoolwork or work-work or anything. It’s like being a high school senior again. But I suppose this is what happens when you lose sight of the importance of school, jobs, personal relationships, and become petulant about how late spring is creeping into the area.
I’m going to look at an apartment in one hour and a house in three days. It makes me nervous when people around me start signing leases and I barely have anything on the table. But I am confident that my housing situation will square away with time.
ALBUM: Ghost by Radical Face
BAND: Death Cab For Cutie
BEER: Guinness Draught
BOARD GAME: Omega Virus
BOOK: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
CAFÉ: Café Vita
CANDY: Swedish Fish
CARTOON: Three-Way Tie: Angry Beavers, Doug, and Harvey Birdman
CEREAL: Apple-Cinnamon Cheerios
COFFEE: Peet’s
DIRECTOR: Michel Gondry
FRUIT: Grapefruit
GUITAR: 1984 Squier Bullet
MOVIE: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
PICKLE: Bread and Butter
PLACE: San Francisco, CA
RADIO STATION: 90.3 KEXP
SHOW: The Adventures of Pete and Pete
SPORT: Baseball
TEACHER: Kyrle Holland, junior history
VENUE: Showbox
“It would be awesome if we got back to the city and it’s seventy degrees and the skies were blue.”
“Don’t get my hopes up.”
I woke up in a room without heat above a garage in a yellow house in Long Beach, WA to the sound of a girl named Jasmine speaking. The skies were grey and it was slightly chilly. I had the above exchange with Colleen while packing the vans—I was the optimist. Do you believe it?
I am leaving for Long Beach in about an hour and I’ll be gone until Sunday, so needless to say you won’t be reading anything I write until then or thereabouts.
Keep yourselves entertained, and pray that this doesn’t happen to me.
Today I moved all day. I woke up at 9:30am and left my room in slacks and a shirt and tie and a hoodie. I had to wait for my boss and then go to his group’s performance at Seattle City Hall and stand at an information table for two hours. Then we came back, he left, and I waited for him to come back. After that I stuffed folders for two hours. I didn’t even finish. I could feel the exhaustion physically and I just didn’t have it in me. I didn’t eat all day until about an hour ago.
Needless to say, it’s been a hard week. Tomorrow I’m leaving in the afternoon for Long Beach, WA with my ecology class. It’s a camping ecological trail-building happy-go-lucky environmental studies field trip. Yay. I would say it will be great fun and just a fun beer-drinking bonfire environmental time but at this point I’m afraid it’s just going to be work and maybe forced sodomy. Don’t ask.