Today's all about the Indie Rock station from launch. My co-worker is sick so I can have the radio up louder, hence the station. What's been on there today?
Burning Airlines, Braid, Enon, New Pornographers, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney, Nothing Painted Blue, Kaito, And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, Jawbox, Bangs, Unwound, Drive Like Jehu, Nation of Ulysses, Built to Spill, Secret Stars, Shellac, etc. An interesting amount of the early 90's Midwest "emocore" type stuff. Right now is a really interesting-sounding song by a band called Mecca Normal. Kind of surfy guitar, but choppy. The lead vocalist is female, gravelly, and very quick-bursts of lines. I like it.
I also highly recommend the Indie Pop station.

Liz arrives today. She's crashing at the townhouse for a little bit while she looks for a place and gets herself established.

Today's the last class of Modern Familiar Essay. This has been one of my favorite classes ever. I'm actually sad it was so short! I've learned a ton. Now it's on to History of Mass Communication next week. The good thing about that class is that it doesn't start until 6, which gives me time to go home and change into different clothes, maybe grab a bite to eat. The bad thing is that it doesn't get over until around 9pm, which will be rough with people visiting for the next couple weeks. Oh, well.

Time for a little whining. I absolutely hate when I'm told to wait around to help out a little with a luncheon thing going on here today that I didn't know about until, well, this morning. I'm told "Oh, they should be here at about 11:30, it won't mess with your lunch schedule too much." It's noon now and they still haven't shown up. I guess they're from Moldova (sp?). Wherever they're from, this is ridiculous. I think noon is a great time to leave.

Today's been a big day for belligerent morons. Two conversations:

Woman standing at my desk: Yes, I need you to give me one of your fall catalogs.
Joel: Sorry, they're not out yet.
Woman: Yes, they are. Please give me one.
Joel: No, they are still in development.
Woman: No, they're out. We have them at (company name) already.
Joel: Wow, well let me go check. Considering they were still working on them yesterday, maybe we printed some overnight and delivered a special batch right to your company.
(Joel wanders around in back for a couple minutes, gets an approximate date of publication, comes back)
Joel: They won't be out until early August.
Woman: They're not out yet?
Joel: Right.

And so on. She would NOT admit she could possibly be mistaken.


Second conversation:

Joel: Hello, (company name).
Old Guy on Phone: Yes, is this Sarah?
Joel: No. There's no Sarah here.
Old Guy: Well, can you get her for me?
Joel: No, you have a wrong number. No one named Sarah works here.
Old Guy: Then take a message for me.
Joel: I can't take a message for someone that doesn't work here.
Old Guy started talking again but another call was coming in so I had to hang up.

NO caffeine yesterday. Wow.

I actually ate pretty healthy up until later on at night when the heat finally did me in and I ate a little too much ice cream. Luckily the ice cream is gone now.

I'm editing the "balance" essay right now. My team and I worked through a good bit of it last night in class. Carrie and Aura were both very kind in their words on the piece and me as a writer. I'd love if they were right.

Right now I'm taking this online Intro to Astronomy class. Wow. It's throwing my mind for a loop. Honestly, I don't like it much at all. It combines elements of chemistry and physics....and that makes things really difficult for me. I really enjoy the really basic explanatory and historical elements of it. I love learning. I just struggle quite a bit with the actualy science elements. I sit there and slug through it, mumbling and occasionally smacking the desk or my head in frustration at my lack of understanding. Then I'll take the chapter practice quiz and pass with not much problem. I just hope the tests are of similar value.
I'm taking the class because I need a 4 hour lab science class in order to graduate next May. It's really stretching me, that's for sure. I'd be happy taking my literature and writing classes until I graduate. Actually, I'd be happy taking literature and writing classes one or two each semester for a few more years (which may lead to me getting a Master's Degree someday?!?) We'll see. I'd love to get a teaching and/or counselling degree. That's really where I'd like to be. Unfortunately, everything takes money, which is something I don't have or earn much of. So...we'll see. It sounds so aimless and slackish, but at this point, I'm just having to have faith and trust God to lead me in the right direction, because I have neither the vision or the means of getting much of anywhere. Someone told me earlier today that "once you know who you are and where you want to go, the path is easy." Well...it is if you have the means. Like I said, though, I have faith...so something will work out.

Anyway, Carter's all excited now about getting the zine going again. Of course, I'm wicked busy. We'll see what happens.

I love the ambiguity here! I just keep laughing.

Apparently the "Comments" feature is taking a sick day.

If you haven't yet, read the below essay and yes, please comment. If the comment feature is not working, then um....email familiar@vagrantcafe.com and say something in the subject line that doesn't sound like spam.

One of the best ways to near the end of the workday (I leave an hour early today for class) is a certain King Missile song coming on my launchplayer.

(I'm editing the essay that went here...it needs it!)

I was walking outside. A couple of the boys were skateboarding, but there was a vacant board so I was messing around with it. I told the one boy that I didn't have any balance, so I couldn't skateboard. He asked, "If you don't have any balance, how do you walk?"

Too much colour blinds the eye,
Too much music deafens the ear,
Too much taste dulls the palate,
Too much play maddens the mind,
Too much desire tears the heart.

--from the Tao Te Ching

For the record, this isn't posted to say "oh i hurt so bad, Stacey's not here right now, wah wah wah!" I'm using it in an essay about balance for my Modern Familiar Essay class.

The hardest is the day after she's gone back home. The day when it is longest before you see her again.
At least for me.
I miss her and it hurts and it's funny because I'm sad but I'm happy because I couldn't be sad if I weren't happy and in love.

Today was a big block party. A guy from the city's Public Works came out and opened the fire hydrant for the kids. he hooked up a big hose and ran it to a really large, powerful sprinkler that sometimes shot dozens of streams 30 feet into the air. I had fun hanging out with the neighbors and getting in water fights with the kids.

Hey kids.
I'll save you from the mush, I promise. I just have to say that I just dropped Stacey off at the airport. I think it ranks on the top 5 hardest things I've ever done. Driving from her house in May was on the list but isn't anymore, since I'm not allowing two things of the same nature on the same list. I'm such a legalist on my own made-up games. Unlike most of the other things on that list, this item has hope. She'll be back soon.

I'm glad to be with someone so great. She's a better vegetarian than I am, that's for sure, but I'm glad to be with someone who is happy to go to McFoster's and Wild Oats and eat vegetarian at home with me. It's things like that that I think about quite a bit.

She's letting me borrow the new Deftones album for a while. I'm listening to that right now and delaying tonight's goals: washing dishes, putting some wet carpet that we've had outside drying for a few days now back on the hardwood floor, doing Astronomy homework, working on my last essay for class.

If I can get through at least one chapter of the Astronomy tonight, I'm going to give myself a reward of veggie pizza and bbq pringles.

Tomorrow is the big neighborhood block party. Should be fun. Of COURSE Stacey should be here...but that's beside the point. ; )

By the way, thanks for the comment, Renee...is this Renee who is going to school near Seattle? Are you home for the summer?
If not, this must be another Renee I don't know about who stalks via blog. hehe. Oh well, whoever it was, too bad we missed you...Katy and Jon and Stacey and I and Jason were all hanging out for a couple minutes afterward (just at the venue), wish we'd have seen you and said hey. I think the Renee who is in Seattle spells it "Renea," anyway, so who knows. Anyway, thanks for saying hello!

bye for now.

One sign of aging may be that a person listens to stations featuring music from a certain decade because it reminds him of songs he liked "back in the day."

Lately I've been into listening to launch's 90's rock, alternative rock, and even "hits" station. The hits station gets very little love from me because it does play a lot of crap (though let's face it, just like any time period, many of the hits in the 90's were absolute crap from a true pop music standard, much less from my snobbier point of view). I'm the first to admit that on the "rock" and "alt rock" stations, the song quality isn't the greatest. Let's face it, The Presidents of the United States of America were a fun band, but nothing really all that great. In fact, had they come along within the last 5 years, I probably wouldn't have given them the time of day.

Back then, I made mix tapes by taping off the radio, then splicing my favorite songs together. Not nearly as efficient as today's CD-burning, and the sound quality is much less, but I was still discovering what will always be my idea of a good time.

I'm not sure what it is that makes me want to listen to this. It's not exactly reminiscing about happier or even necessarily happy times. I mean, I had some good friends back in high school and early college, for sure, and we did have some good times, but for the most part I was not necessarily a happy or totally unmiserable person back in the early to mid-90's. Much of what I listened to back then I definitely would not listen to again. I had horrible taste. I'm not even going to discuss much of what I filled my head with, what tapes I bought, etc., but "country" is what I listened to quite a bit. It was kind of a compromise between parents who were in no way going to allow their child to listen to rock and roll and a young man who liked rock and roll but listened to what was "frowned upon," but somehow less bad because country music has this tendency to sprinkle religious elements into music enough that it kept them from disallowing it altogether (unlike straight-up rock). Of course, this was during the birth/rebirth of "hot new country," which is not really country at all, but some sort of horrible twangified cheap pop imitation. Anyway, thank God I got past that.

On the 90's rock, however...one thing that must be understood is that the radio music format is different now than it was then. Back in the early 90's, top 40 stations played quite a bit of rock. Sure, part of the reason does have to do with Nirvana and the whole "grunge" thing, but rock in general was still a part of the top 40 format back in that time. It was not unusual to hear r&b tracks one minute, then the Spin Doctors or Gin Blossoms or Collective Soul or Pearl Jam the next. Guns 'n Roses wasn't at all out of place on a station also playing hip-hop, which was finally becoming commercially viable. We even saw acts like En Vogue, who, on occasion, blended r&b and rock n roll the way it was meant to be. Indie hipsters who adore Weezer probably started doing so when they heard the band's songs played between Boyz II Men and Metallica. Somewhere toward the late 90's, things started changing. There are technical reasons for the loss of rock in the popular format, much of it having to do with a realigning of how billboard's top 100 was being gathered--which brought attention to the fact that rap and r&b was selling much more than anyone had thought or reported to that point. That, blended with the cycle of pop music returning to non-rock-bubblegum, brought about the loss of rock and roll from your average top 40 station.

So why do I listen to this?
I think it's because it's the first rock and roll I listened to, and that's when I fell in love with the rock. Sure, I'd been into the Beach Boys since before that, but then was the first time I was hearing songs that I, not my parents, enjoyed, songs that were about life, songs that made me feel like a human being. I on't really care about "remembering growing up," so it's not about that--it's about realizing there was more to life than a hypocritical existence within the shelter, it's about listening to something and evaluating it for myself rather than being told. It's about having someone -- albeit someone I've never met, someone I hear on the radio -- identifying with me, saying something I can actually relate to, like "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

So...yes, call me old if you want. I criticize many of the popular newer bands as being nothing but cheap watered-down ripoffs of the bands that the old guys were saying the same about eight or ten years ago. I can rattle off a list of rock and roll heroes I've seen crash and burn in my lifetime. I have veins that automatically pulse harder when someone slaps a label on a band that doesn't deserve it. I suppose this is a rite of passage of sorts, and I'm loving every minute of it.

I technically wrote that last post a week ago and somehow it never got posted. needless to say, i never really did get around to using the blog to chronicle caffeine intake. I've done tons better, though.

Last night we went and saw Starflyer 59 and Ester Drang. Only got there for the last few Drang songs, but they were luscious. Starflyer shows are always interesting because they're notoriously underwhelming live. They actually were more so in the past. This time around was a really good show. As rock and roll as the new album is, the show was quite a bit more rocknroll than that...but that's live shows in general, really. Anyway, good times. Johnathon and Katy crashed at my place overnight, which was great.

The biggest news? Stacey's in town. This is the part where I screech with glee like a chimpanzee.

All right, that was a nice few days off. I'm not sure why, but I just have to do that now and then.

By the way, read Treble Bandoppler's blog at bandoppler.com, you can thank me later.

I'm pretty sure the new Denison Witmer album is out today. Supposedly Borders nationwide should have it, as well as some local indie stores. Of course, I just called Borders and the local one can only order it. Luckily Homer's (local store) has a couple copies, or so they say.

Yeah, the new Radiohead is out today, too. That one I'll pick up next time I go and trade in some used discs, which should be soon.

I'm going to use this blog as a means of chronicling my reduction in caffeine intake...or my failure to do so.
After a fairly regular amount of caffeine intake in the morning and afternoon, I had none last night.
This morning I have had one cup, half of it being decaf...my refill was mostly decaf. So...i've about half of that is less. That puts me at less than a cup this morning.

Spinning lately: Sufjan Stevens, Elliott Smith, Summer Hymns, Simon & Garfunkel, Raft of Dead Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Paul McCartney, and so on.

I think it's lunch time.