chewtastic

nerd times

2009-02-20T00:34:00.003-06:00

Sometimes I find it hard to remember I'm in my thirties. Today I had a late lunch at El Chilito with an old high school friend I hadn't seen in at least five years. Playing catch-up is always sort of weird to me, for how much I tend to overshare and expect others to know, and even stranger when I realize later I've just hung out with someone I'm not related to but have known literally half my life. It was the same dynamic we had in high school, but thankfully tempered with age and distance; comparing notes on who we're keeping up with, how small the world is (he works in VA with another alum's fiancee's sister, but the couple lives in CO), how we're different from who we were. I found it startling how many of these math and science kids ended up in film production, of all things.

breaking news!

2009-02-03T13:21:00.002-06:00

Facebook usage has spiraled out of control, so I'm taking another week-long vacation from touching it. It's sort of maddening though, because I've begun to think in status updates. "Chewtastic has done six loads of laundry today and read two books." "Chewtastic apparently now only crushes on guys who wear dress kilts unironically." Gah.

Stuff, with a capital S

2009-02-03T00:37:00.004-06:00

Recently, I've (probably annoyingly) begun saying "Stuff!", flinging my arms out broadly, instead of reexplaining each time that what I mean is a ridiculously positive turnabout in my perception of life. Stuff! is the ineffable, the swath of possibilities and first and second and third chances, the opportunity to try something new and get it wrong, the perceived flattening of obstacles previously intimidatingly insurmountable, the rerecognition that the only reason to desire immortality is for the sake of eternal omniscience and joy, that there's just not enough time unless you fire up the will.

What does this mean? I'm in a disturbingly perpetual good mood, and my cigarette boat of newfound hope and overexcitability will do its damnedest to drag you all kneeboarding along in its wake, coughing and spitting as you twist on the tow rope.

Yes, I'm cautiously happy.

erm

2009-01-22T04:06:00.002-06:00

there's always something awful and poignant and cheesy and heartbreaking, all at the same time, when you end something; the emotionally polar opposite of what you both held in your hands and your hearts in the thick of it, the being with someone for the foreseeable future, past the horizon of belief. there's no going back, no revisiting, no reliving. the irrevocable moment has passed, and things can not ever be the same. the word, the look, the argument. you can still love someone and hope and believe in them, want them to be the best they can be and still shower encouragement on them, but you don't have to be a part of it any more; and that's a relief, no matter how much empathy you have for their struggle. it's a hard heart that can do that. a hard, hard heart.

anything i's a blessing

2008-12-09T02:42:00.002-06:00

so it's taken me longer than usual. we don't need to go into how fucked up he made me, since if you had the misfortune, you've had to deal with it or heard it. but - my brain is coming back, the old me is crawling out of the shell, and i'm going to try harder to be less of a shitbag.

so there. fwiw.

bleh

2008-11-13T16:00:00.002-06:00

um, barf. are blogs and msm doing stories on how much the downturn is affecting rich people just to piss off the vast majority of the country?

fun fun awkward awkward!

2008-11-09T22:51:00.002-06:00

so i finally talked to my ex of ... he said it was 11 years, but i think it was longer. whatever. anyway - it was really fun to talk to him, and he has a wife and a 10 month old, and is doing pretty well for... still living in denton. i never thought he'd leave for good anyway, but i'm amused that he's still playing shows. also? ffff = funner with the backstage pass. i talked to some random guys who seemed entertained, and i also enjoyed today's shows a lot more than yesterday. it's weird to smile for more than a second. i guess there probably is something wrong with me.

Obligatory photo of dave. Happy birthday

2008-11-07T23:22:00.000-06:00

Karen after the obama annoucement

2008-11-04T22:21:00.000-06:00

my phone's on viiiiiiiiiiiiihhhhhhh...

2008-11-04T01:26:00.002-06:00

uh, i got back into rufus tonight. hell, it's either that or magnetic fields every time roomie and i spend too long of a time on the back porch, and we checked out our favorite songs from last month's performances that are on the youtube.

leave me alone.

also, don't ask me how nanowrimo's going. i'm losing horribly.

click through to noms

2008-11-02T22:27:00.004-06:00

mzzzh

2008-11-01T04:04:00.003-05:00

i've decided to take a week-long facebook vacation (facecation? staytubeation?). i've been having dreams about facebook. it's surely precipitated by spending at least ten hours a day on it, but it's not going anywhere, and i would prefer to dream about something other than scramble or someone stalking me through ADS on facebook. so, you might hear a bit more than usual on this front. i've signed up for nanowrimo again too, so hopefully that'll be productive. if we scramble maybe it'll be actual boggle, where i have to write words instead of typing. maybe the vacation will include not listening to hercules and love affair, because it's sort of turning me into a vamping tranny (which isn't really something i'm cut out for in life). who knows! perhaps boring shenanigans will ensue. basically, this is your license for bitching me out if you see me on facebook.

also, i really hope the brown lipstick around my eye and the red permanent marker ink backwards B come off by tomorrow. it was a little bit more effort than i can expend to take care of that right now.

i like it

2008-10-08T19:54:00.001-05:00

the drunken socks guy posted this, and i heart it.

link

otherwise, i got nothin'. no complaints, no giddiness.

Pre-re-branding

2008-10-05T22:36:00.000-05:00

the art of doing things obnoxiously

2008-09-30T12:16:00.003-05:00

i had never heard of the beer pallet tower in LA, but the description sounds amusing. perhaps this is a photo of it?

hmm

2008-09-26T09:45:00.003-05:00

you know how i said a few months ago new YA is awful? well, just because it's awful doesn't mean it should be banned. SERIOUSLY, people. it's not flowers in the attic or anything. way to draw attention to it. try banning anne of green gables or something. it's your own fault your child isn't sheltered enough.

toot toot!

2008-09-24T09:56:00.002-05:00

the "next few months" is an awfully vague date of service rollout. at least there are bike racks.
link

asdaresgfg

2008-09-18T01:05:00.002-05:00

so if you looked up hercules and love affair on youtube, and then picked you belong, you would get a video that looks something like if you got drunk, really drunk - honestly, mostly wasted, in 1995, and then heard something dance-y in 2008, and made a video that is what you kind of remember videos looked like in 1995, and especially included the way people danced then, but you made the video with a gap-toothed friend who was kind of cute but not totally but has nice bangs, and it's in black and white so it looks good if you're drunk, but then sober you realize animated houndstooth isn't the best pattern for the background but it's too late and you really just like watching your hot-gay-man friends dance around shirtless in that arm-noodley way, and it sort of improves the song and sort of makes it suckier too, and then you're like, fuck it, i'll just try again later for another imaginary video.

except you actually did this (hypothetically speaking) and then you're like, oops.

link

NO.

2008-09-17T13:24:00.002-05:00

don't even think about it. why would someone do this?

holy footnotes, batman!

2008-09-14T03:22:00.003-05:00

wow.

crazy shit. i actually enjoyed reading "infinite jest." he wasn't even fifty.

For joolie

2008-09-12T16:37:00.000-05:00

2008-09-11T16:17:00.003-05:00

just add this to the list of dumb shit i would buy if i was a rich asshole:

crazy spanish furniture

the more you know

2008-09-10T23:00:00.001-05:00

did you know there was a "Surprise Hurricane" that hit Houston in 1943? They totally called it that too.

nosubj

2008-09-08T15:50:00.002-05:00

so lykke li youth novels sounds alternately like stereo-total fucked up on pills, or a three-way cage match between april march, feist, and cyndi lauper, all with OMD horn background interludes and phil spector timpani. or am i crazy?

just think how mean i could be if i didn't like it. the word Duffy could totally have been used. yea.

oops

2008-09-08T01:41:00.003-05:00

so i cracked and joined facebook, though i did do the store's first, and this could be a problem. remember when i've had crises in the past involving snooping social networks and google? well, this could turn out very, very unhealthily, for now i can snoop a lot of the people that i couldn't before. ah, class and social networking. creepy!

i keep my knife sharp

2008-08-12T23:19:00.002-05:00

when i hear you speak

shit me like o' the day:

the word demonym - it's so satisfactory. the nym of naming, the demos of demo, of populace, the knowledge that you have a word that describes a specific class of other words, nomnomnom. especially because, well, fuck. how do you explain why it's dentonite and not dentonian, unless you want to turn it into interpretive dance with a mstrkrft remix soundtrack, and just elide that with an um-ah-just-because-that-how-it-be? naw. no 'splainin'. demonym is like english mouth-bling: bish, dentonite be the demonym for it. that just how the language roll. deal, yo. you don't want to sound all ignorant, huh?

a rant, with lots and lots of all caps. fair warning.

2008-08-05T21:59:00.003-05:00

so. the decline and fall of old media. the grasping at of blog-shaped straws, etc. the slackening of ad revenue. maybe - there are certain kinds of content that they aren't taking advantage of. like NOT FILLING THE GODDAMN THING WITH WIRE ARTICLES AND ADS. oh, in-house content? *shudders* well, for one, it's not spelled "high jacking" a bus. LIKE I COULD EVEN ARTICULATE WHAT I COULD PRETEND WHAT THAT MEANS, THOUGH I HAVE SOME PRETTY CRAZY IDEAS WHERE THAT'S CONCERNED. please, continue to ignore my request. i realize i don't really want to see what i'm asking for.

why is it, that with all the hullabaloo over the brave new world of looking at the same old shit, just faster and online, the olds are still not getting with the program? or, doing it in the most irritating way possible?

beijing olympics - oh my god. can one find a more useless, less navigable site? fuck your schedule! the runners ought to suffer, and you should redirect all the smog-reduction monies to the goddamn website. hello, global traffic? no? okay, well, how about the usatf? i know you have a lot of content that must needs be organized, but since you obviously have the organization down, fucking fill it in! don't send me to a 404 "why did you try to change something? you have no rights" when i FUCKING put in a term in the search box and hit enter. don't leave filler in the style sheet when i'm trying to look at something and all it tells me is "About me text". are you serious? what, is there one harried, overworked gnome in a broom closet writing all this shit for you? on the original Lisa? do you hate all your amateur athletes that much? US olympic site! yeah, i'm looking at you! HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING JUST MAKE LISTS? all our stupid teams are lists! why do i have to open a pdf OF HATE just to see who's on what goddamn sport team and who the goddamn coaches are? FUCK A BUNCH OF SPORTS. this is why fucking pro wrestling wins: because i can fucking find the info i'm looking for. DUMMY.

how about a different topic? guess what? an adobe license to make pdfs searchable is not that fucking expensive. if you don't want to take one lobbyist's single night in a hotel room out of the budget for it, don't make the damned info a pdf. copy and paste is FREE, but i can't find shit in your 987-page report unless i have all fucking day and perfect eyesight. this goes for all your damn court judgments too. all of them. FUCK a bunch of pdfs. *heart palpitates*

that's provided i can find the damn thing. have you never heard of accessibility standards? what if i was blind? could there possibly be worse web design out there? are you that unable to organize a web site or make it properly searchable that i start to have major doubts about your agency's activities and forthright behavior? what is wrong with all of you? judicial system, i'm looking at you. county government, i'm looking at you. city government, i'm looking at you. AND I HATE ALL OF YOU.

and YOU! for the last goddamn time, a myspace profile is NOT a proper band page! especially if it doesn't finish loading EVER because you dumped so much crap into it! damn you thomas and your stupid myspace editor! do you think it looks good when you have forty videos and some horrible animated wallpaper and music samples that all start playing at once and NO USEFUL INFORMATION whatsoever on the page? no band member listing, no discography, no upcoming shows? who let you on the goddamn internets! you ALL GO DOWN THE insinkerator of the series of tubes! why with the giant font where i literally have to scroll horizontally to see that YES THIS IS ACTUAL TEXT AND THAT WAS A WORD, NOT JUST GIANT PIXELS OF WHITE SPACE. you are an author. an AUTHOR. your livelihood is words. just because you make words GIANT does not make me respect your GIANT words as GIANT thoughts. OH MY GOD.

and YOU! no, i do NOT want your page to open four hundred other windows. NO, i do not want to take the goddamned survey whenever i try to look something up on allmusic. NO, i do not GIVE A SHIT-ON-FIRE about the movie you are promoting today on imdb, damn interfering-baggage ad that fucking floats down on top of whatever i'm trying to see. NO, i don't want to wait for your fucking intro to load that you paid ENTIRELY TOO MUCH to have made, because i'm going to LOOK AT SOMETHING ELSE while i wait for it to load, and it may very well be how much toe jam i have created today or my disgusting gray boogers that i wish i could wipe on your website. no, i do NOT WANT you to switch my browser to your page when i open it, that's why i fucking opened it in another tab. no, i WON'T fucking register to continue looking at your stupid-ass site, i am going to clear my cookies and just iesumirabile look at what i fucking intended to before you so presumptuously interrupted me. douche.

did you want more about how i hate the internet denizens? because i have to go breathe into a paper grocery bag for a while before i can continue.

GOOSED BY CONTENT

2008-07-29T21:11:00.006-05:00

[sorry, this is old and i meant to finish it that day, before i got distracted.]
29.07.08:

sheesh. earthquake? *sneeze* legal notice shenaniganery? *covers self in filth*

i mayhap have subjected you to a shrill, possibly drunken diatribe at one point in the past couple years concerning one author of whom i might rather disapprove. like any good Christian conservative, she is completely fucking insane and a proper hypocrite.

well, maybe she has a point, but not in the way she intended.

back in the hoary old days of 2006, i worked for *nameless and soulless digital content company*, and they had a contract to scan, OCR, and upload *publishing company*'s books. a proofreader's job at this company was to check the OCR-produced text file against the scanned page image. not terribly demanding, as evidenced by the intellectual prowess of my co-workers. YA-oriented celebrity-twin horse fiction took up rather too much of my day, or at least the bits that weren't filled with the interminable drivel put out by paulo coelho or the disturbing discovery that isabel allende (GIWLF) passionately believes a cheese log rolled in fucking diced prunes is conducive to, ah, fucking. *wipes self uncontrollably, swears to never eat any food listed in the aphrodisial cookbook ever again*

once we started in on one of the *publishing company*'s imprints (namely the jeebus one), however, the remnants of my bleeding-heart baby-killing pro-civil-liberties homophilic hackles were raised, for i discovered the "life-changing fiction" of a latently racist, closed-minded hateful harridan with skin the color of a carotene-heavy diet's shit.

imagine, if you will: not one, but two novels blatantly exploitative of 9/11, down to their titles; plot twists that include an amnesiac who can pass for a woman's dead WTC-fire-fighting husband TO HER AND THEIR DAUGHTER, for months; claiming marijuana use promotes, nay, instigates violent gang rape on the part of the partakers; mise en scene creation that hangs on killing off (in a fiery mid-ocean plane crash in the first two pages, no less) an innocent flight attendant (pacific islander) because, though saved by jeebus, she had a child out of wedlock with an airline pilot (not saved by jeebus yet - later, natch); all nonwhite characters are painfully of the Magical Black Man sort, even when they are neither black nor men; physical attraction loosely disguised as growing faith in the evangelical flavor of jeebus, heightening at a first chaste kiss more than a hundred pages in; and so forth, all couched in grating, breathless prose that cannot attain the height of craft acheived by the Left Behind series. (i'm not joking here. i read the first six of those.)

so the gall of filing a cease-and-desist order against a blogger who dare use the phrase "life-changing fiction" is near-appalling, save for the fact that she did change my life.

FOR THE WORSE.

fuck you, karen kingsbury.

link

content, the lack thereof

2008-07-29T20:37:00.002-05:00

poo.

i've made a decision. i think it's something i can live with for the next year or so, hopefully. maybe not the best choice, but i think as most of my life is not terribly fraught with good choices, this is the best i can expect, and will certainly make me much happier than i've been in that sense for the past months.

things are looking better-ish financially too. i suppose there's something to be said for having hoarded gobs of vinyl for twelve years. i sort of feel bad betraying my record-collector scum self - no giant indie-rock time capsule for YOUR beneficiaries, sucka! - but as it perpetuates the sloughing-off of material goods that was thoughtfully precipitated by the Triangle development and the shoddy wastewater planning courtesy of the city of Austin, i'm not going to get terribly anxious about it. i figure if you're willing to pay that much for the damn sea and cake record i found for four dollars at the houston sound exchange in 1996, you're probably going to give it a good home and maybe some sweet, sweet aural lovin' in the bargain.

there's more, but i don't really feel like talking about it at the moment.

2008-07-24T00:23:00.002-05:00

if you don't give a damn, we don't give a fuck ...

however, i do like the way you work it.

*sigh*

i'm depressed. cheering, prease?

you'd think that the new girl talk would make me sufficiently happy.

And yes, i know.

2008-07-17T22:35:00.001-05:00

Neighbor kitty!

2008-07-17T22:28:00.001-05:00

i forgot

2008-07-15T01:55:00.001-05:00

that this existed. how on earth can clicking on topsy taylor not make you feel better about the world's brief shortage of new LOLCATs?

the weather, and assorted scintillation

2008-07-14T19:56:00.003-05:00

the wind is right and i can smell donuts in my carport. the air is a gravid weight, full of mosquitoes and yellowjackets and moisture refusing to precipitate, miniscule plant matter and maybe even a bit of california fire. my laptop is still insistent in its belief it is merely a typewriter, spontaneously opening the cd drive as an inappropriate carriage return. it's not as though it's requesting something new to listen to, like a demanding pre-internet teenager who has discovered college radio and zines all at once. it had better not be, at any rate. i would think it wouldn't have much to write about in its journal, but i could be wrong.

my right shoulder has reconfigured its musculature, knotting and protesting against any position deviating from how i move the mouse eight hours a day, cutting and pasting and opening and closing ones and zeroes. i hunch more frequently now, longing for the days of ergonomic government workspaces, while my chin juts forward and my face angles up to a permanent, invisible screen even as i drive.

Can you find my well-dressed neighbor?

2008-07-14T19:37:00.001-05:00

are you TOTALLY STOKED?

2008-07-12T04:26:00.002-05:00

because i am.

a. party. holla!
b. is this not the early eighties all over again? because i feel like it is. i totally felt teh bite of the S&L failure when i was six, and i'm sure i can feel it comin' in the air tonight again. or if not tonight, then maybe soonish? i mean, come on! wonky gas prices, crazy republican in the white house, i'm regressing to reading YA fiction... what other signifiers do you need? weird slutty madonna (check). retarded poppy dance music? check. cocaine? totes checkers. the dollar making a horribly slurpy sucking sound on global currency markets? check. crazy nonWASPy nonanglo terrorists about to not really do anything to us again because we breed like rats? um, check. insert random fact that is semicorrelated with something that happened 25 years ago? check and AFGHANISTAN check, bitches. how can i not win this argument, omg? OK, yeah, except there wasn't OMG back then. whatever, shut up, go to the B&S show tomorrow (see below) after buying art at end of an ear and then we can stand around at a party being all drunk and deep and shit about how this country is still going to hell and it's still the old people's fault. and maybe we can start our own goddamned newsweekly and make stupid money with it. and on that note, also see below.

"SHEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyit."

whee!

2008-07-12T04:07:00.002-05:00

well, not really. sort of. i had missed knob creek, and now i don't. there's a party tomorrow/tonight! saturday night.

let's make a deal. if you don't already know about it, go to the brothers and (not ampersand) sisters cd release at club deville, and then you'll see me, and i'll tell you about it in between singing along loudly and off-key to "i don't rely" and other gems, which could potentially but probably won't include "september girls/gurls." (because they hate me.) and then we can stand around in a front yard or sit around on a couch or - even! in a back yard and drink and talk nonsense at each other. which is different from what we normally do, with all our glasses-pushed-back-up-our-noses-as-they-slip-down impossibly erudite lofty conversation and whatnot.

is there any way i could possibly not sell this to you more? not even a. me getting drunk and showing you my tiny boobs you've already seen too many times, or b. walking over to concordia for a midnight inspection of the demolition to date? or c. horrors! both? double-you-tee-eff, mate!

text a bitch.

did i mention i'm drunk? also, if you insist (and probably, possibly, if you don't) i'll tell you more than I wanted to know about avocados and drug possession in the netherlands and worldwide "age of onset" drug use. gee, i hope i'm not spoiling next week's alternative newsweekly for you. just wait til you hear what torrid scandals surround the potential development of the lions golf course! the brutal conflict between two former UT-golf-teammates!

oh.

you don't care about any of it. why am i not surprised?

The creepy paper towel dispenser

2008-07-10T00:07:00.001-05:00

Dave is at it again.

2008-06-29T22:32:00.001-05:00

why YA fiction is embarrassing

2008-06-27T13:04:00.001-05:00

the abomination that is ttyl, ttfn, and l8r, g8r

Oh my shit. Loteria partyware and cards.

2008-06-25T23:21:00.001-05:00

Almost tired of street art.

2008-06-24T20:35:00.001-05:00

score, and score alike

2008-06-23T21:25:00.005-05:00

i found camilla, by madeleine l'engle, today. it's been something i've been looking for, for a long, long time.

the first time i read this book was when i was ten. well into voracious, insatiable reader-mode, the kind where even the librarians laugh at you because your arms aren't long enough to hold the stack of books you want to check out, the topmost book wedged precariously under your chin, because your parents will only take you to the library once every two weeks and you always, always finish that stack before the first week ends and accidentally wash your umpteenth library card, the one with your name and card number in the crazy bulbous faux computer font; the kind where you're borrowing books that seem unrelated, but reference an author or subject from the last bunch, which built on the bunch before and the bunch before, and you slowly begin to realize that everything is about everything and how daunting being grown-up will really be; the kind when you start figuring out that the answer to life, besides living it, is vicariously experiencing it through books if you're not allowed to live it.

my elementary school had a fairly decent library, since it was a magnet public school and the powers that be invariably deem it necessary for the gifted and talented (and the rich neighborhood kids) to have a wider selection of books. to this day, i can't reconcile being a prole with actually, you know, being a prole. i had put the horsey books away in short order: all of fourth grade was consumed by the marguerite henry oeuvre, down to her letters from readers book, and walter farley and his ghostwriters. i even consumed the burly will james works, laying the foundation for my distaste/fascination with all things western. but camilla, oh camilla...

the wrinkle in time series is perennially a YA favorite. you can't go wrong with the sympathetic, smart, self-conscious, homely outsider, a misfit sometimes even in her own home. i shudder to think about those who never went much past babysitter twins and the francine pascal monolith, branching only into v.c. andrews before taking the grownup plunge into bodice-rippery, throbbing purple manhood (menhood? manhoods?) and all. camilla is different.

the gold italic lettering on the spine stood out on the shelf. it looked awkward, gangly next to its brethren, orderly and content in their pert roles as part of a set, different yet matchy-matchy like the girls in my class. the lettering was flashy and brilliant once, yet losing its luster to much handling or abuse. the dust jacket had been shed many a reader-and-waterstain ago, the binding coming loose and beginning to angle defiantly against the book's place on the shelf, but hanging in there with the help of the determined endsheets. a musty whiff as the cover opened reinforced the silent testament of the few names on the check-out card, the ancient-to-the-young dates, 1973, 1981, the spring of 1984, on the Date Due sheet facing the card jacket. the end of the Reagan era was nigh, to be sure. have you ever met a formerly six-year-old misfit fan of Mondale? you have now.

i took it home. everything must be read, after all. it must be good, or at least fun-and-science-y, judging from her earlier books. i was wrong, in the most perfect way.

she said i wasn't alone in being alone. that's the short version. the long one? realizing that i was an i, ego, id, fragile and resilient as an egg, an individual separate from my parents, from my family, an unalienable/alienable person; that crying was something that you did end up having to hide a lot, that the purple dye on the cover starts to bleed when you take it into the bath and don't continually dry your hands before handling it to turn the page, the book precariously propped on the porcelain edge with a damp washcloth near; that Vietnam was a tangible war, the damage that it did to real people, physical and psychological, shaping and destroying lives far from the frontlines; that war and money and circumstances make other people's lives different from yours, and you're different but they're also all different not only from you but from each other, secrets or no; that people do do things for themselves despite their feelings for you, that trust can exist in forms other than all or nothing - this was the book that told me everything will be sort of okay and you can get over it in the long run.

camilla helped me grow up, and i'm sorry that i'll never meet her or her creator, and, maybe, just a little bit sorry for myself and who i'm not, in that special, YA-primed self-pitying way.

Is this purple?

2008-06-18T23:44:00.000-05:00

2008-06-18T21:25:00.002-05:00

i'm not really sure what's happening with these sporadic mood swings. i did talk out some of the more egregious issues sunday and monday with the right audience, and i'm sort of less grumpy; just back to the state of needing a lot of money, again. unless i find something fucking stupendous AND flexible, i think i'll be doomed to working six days a week for a long while.

a long, long while.

i don't suppose anyone knows of an ad or government agency that'll give me *sneeze*K a year, and also be flexible enough to work with a school schedule? i'm willing to ho it out on weekends and the late.

that's all i got. expect next week's issue to completely abolish www.ci.austin.tx.us in favor of www.cityofaustin.org in URL listings. not that i hate you (because i hate myself for letting it happen), but it's all in the name of consistency.

Well, dang.

2008-06-17T22:07:00.001-05:00

Black helicopters circling

2008-06-14T08:00:00.001-05:00

new or whatever

2008-06-13T18:48:00.004-05:00

liveblogging!
weezer (red):
track 01 - this is kind of emo. i'm not really noticing it, because i'm reading the intertubes, but now i am. wtf? who starts an album off with a fucking ballad. next!
track 02 - "automatic" oh. whoops, i guess i should do this right. uh, the last one was called "we made a lot of money off the other albums, so now we're artistes." no, i read that wrong. it's called "the angel and the one." huh. that was short and a little too guitar-hero noisy. does that make any sense? like it was an easy version of the song that should have been, and was sort of attempting to rock like a Sword song on medium? eek! falling behind!
track 03 - "cold dark world" hmm. yeah, soCal totes is a crazy epicenter of seasonal affective disorder. angel girl, i'm gonna be your man/angel girl, i'll make you understand. maybe i should pay attention to lyrics instead of typing. no? okay, sounds good.
track 04 - "thought i knew" it started off kind of promising, until he started singing 'sorry about my past life.' maybe it'll be okay? *waits* *goes pee*
track 05 - "dreamin'" sorry about that, i ended up all number two on that shit. hey! it sounds weezer-y, with the guitars and whatnot! huh! why am i so bad? why is the sun shining? wait, what did you say you were dreaming of? the night? oh, you were dreaming during these points in the day. i guess this is what happens when i start drinking at work. oh shit, wait for me!
track 06 - "everybody get dangerous" baw-bahbahbaw-bah-bawbaw-bah-bawbaw! there is something totally midNineties wrong with this, but i can't put my finger on it. i know someone else can. i'm going ahead and skipping it. "there must be a guardian angel or some other destiny we have" uh, ???
track 07 - "heart songs" that sounds all Robert-Bly. yaaahh!! this is like some sort of sublime gunk! "i never listened to much jazz." aural pain, huh. SKIP. "these are the songs i keep singin'" my ass. it is so not-hot to namecheck debbie gibson, not even nerd-hot. i think maybe i'm getting drunk, or MAYBE i don't understand why i just heard a Fresh Prince namecheck.
track 08 - "pork and beans" look, we're near the end! the first line is "they say i need some rogaine to put in my hair." i think that allopecia is not a laughing matter. (yes, i've got a weird stress-related bald spot again. why do you ask?) oh hey, the chorus is more old weezy-style. "everyone likes to dance to a happy song/with a catchy chorus and beat so they can sing along." true, but i'm not looking for this perspective in my pop music. i'll let it slide because you're doing the cute wall of guitar/harmonizing thing again. play to your strengths!
track 09 - "the greatest man that ever lived" why does this start off with a piano intro for blue-eyed bonnie or some sort of traditional song that i can't place? and then it does the red-eyed fly macho style of crunchy guitar alternating with the pretty-boy singing thing? hmm. i'm baffled, yet it's working better than the other ballad-y things. i think i probably started listening to this with the expectation that it'd satisfy the weezer-need, and got a couple songs out of it but am being too judgmental about the other ones. hey, the end's totally "pink triangle"-y. cool. i like that.
track 10 - "troublemaker" yay! more weezer-y-ness! bitchin! good job with the whole not leaving a bad taste in my mouth!

i guess i could give this another listen. 2.5/5 for now, kids. yes, there could have been a lot more hyphens and general copy-editing.

*if i get around to it, up next will be ghost - in stormy nights (which was on at work, and promising), alexander's dark band, rae davis, and those peabodys. i don't know that i'll write about the roller.*

parade, parade

2008-06-08T10:36:00.004-05:00

the parade was cute. i liked the looks on the neighbors' faces: "oh, those white kids are doin' it again. what the hell, we'll stand in the yard and watch for a bit." the people who showed up were that weird confluence of circles of friends, and for the most part everyone seems to finally know each other. bicycles and light trucks all decked out, and everyone seems to get skinnier lately instead of fatter. maybe it's a good sign? dislodging from the velvet rut? my favorite bit - toward the end, one guy on a bike going home politely waited for everyone to pass, though he had two buckets of heb fried chicken in a bag hanging from his handlebars and was probably hungry. i also liked the mermaids' fancy satiny swimsuits and veiled umbrellas. yay for people-that-aren't-me dressing up!

yaah! a retarded dove just gently crashed into the side of my house. stupid.

the guerrilla disco party was nothing thrilling to speak of, although as we walked up the popo were talking to jacob. they didn't give him a ticket, but just told him to turn it down. dancing in the parking lot of the bike pedlar didn't seem that fun, so we walked back to michelle brown's house.

ended up leaving and going to bed early [midnight!], but watched some mr. wizard video about adhesives beforehand. the linked video has the same FLDS-looking girl with stripper nails as the episode i saw. then, apparently, i am the only person who had never seen the charles and ray eames powers of 10 short, so we watched that. pretty nifty.

[for some reason, i don't like embedding video. i think it's because i rarely watch them if they are embedded.]

the two-tone teal and silver chevy just left hooker house. i wonder how much an hour costs. maybe one day i'll do field work for economic sociology and find out.

Proud husband

2008-06-07T19:05:00.001-05:00

Mermaid parade!

2008-06-07T19:03:00.001-05:00

finally paying attention

2008-06-06T20:24:00.001-05:00

from austin chronicle's TDP convention blogging, just now:
"I'm Representative Jim Dunnam from Waco, and for the purposes of this convention, Tom Craddick is not recognized."

hee hee!

oh, work

2008-06-05T18:50:00.002-05:00

you gotta just keep fact-checking, even if it's about this.

[flickr search, possibly nsfw. probably.]

super-adventure time!

2008-06-05T18:33:00.002-05:00

we took our own concordia excursion last night. the dorm at the corner is creepy: all the lights are left on and the doors open at night. we didn't go very far in there. jon found a gangly feral kitty with its head caught in the field netting (what a terrible hazard!), so after a few gouges to our arms, he pinned it down with some backstop padding and cut it free with nailclippers i had forgotten i'd stashed in my pocket. kitty was very ungrateful, but he was pretty panicky and thrashed around violently before we could grab him. then we wandered around the rest of the place and tried random doors and whatnot. i climbed almost to the top of the giant dirt mound, but pussed out ten feet away and gingerly made my way back down. that place makes weird horrible noises at night, and i kept expecting a hobo attack or something.

more unphotoshopped dark pictures to follow!

Concordia

2008-06-05T01:02:00.001-05:00

an update from the land of ick

2008-06-02T19:43:00.002-05:00

or, performance art ... to the X-TREEM!

(our tastes tend toward one-upmanship in tasteless, but i find myself hard-pressed to believe even can-smashing robot would follow this concept through... to UN-fruition. oh god.)

linky-link-link, just a news article

Stinky husks

2008-06-02T19:27:00.001-05:00

hmm

2008-06-02T19:22:00.002-05:00

brilliant midday beach sun + cameraphone = some guy's ass posting, wrongly. fixing in a minute.

my back fat is mildly sunburnt. i'll pretend i mistakenly thought the UV rays would fry it off.

we had fun and the dog and i are tired, although i'm not sure how her lying around right now is any different from before she went.

if i find others' photos, i'll link ya to them. i didn't even take pictures of a couple of polaroids that i should have.

Coconuts smell wretched

2008-05-31T14:45:00.001-05:00

Done

2008-05-29T19:52:00.001-05:00

p.s.a.

2008-05-29T14:50:00.001-05:00

please welcome trireme to the unofficial blog ring! i eagerly await her updates, as they don't involve hookers or nosy/weirdo neighbors.

Blue valkyrie is now a level 80 champion

2008-05-29T01:46:00.001-05:00

fuck you city of austin

2008-05-25T13:08:00.001-05:00

if south austin is so great WHY DO YOU MAKE IT SO FUCKING HARD TO GET DOWN THERE BY CLOSING ALL THE STREETS? IT'S LIKE SOME OREGON TRAIL BULLSHIT UP IN HERE!

also, i like the corporate carrot on the starbucks at 38th and guadalupe. hooray for summer carrots!

Plastic bag man at heb

2008-05-21T16:55:00.001-05:00

bite my lip and close my eyes

2008-05-20T21:20:00.002-05:00

so who's going to see green day? are you totally wondering why they aren't allowing cameras? what if it sells out? did you get that new offspring album? what wave of ska are we on? did you find my flannel shirt at your house? what color laces am i supposed to wear with my docs?

what year is this again?

free ipod!

2008-05-20T09:56:00.002-05:00

my brother gave me his old 30 gig, with special treats on it. well, he took off the more embarrassing stuff on it, like coldplay, but left me the darkness and david bowie and kind of a shit-ton of other things. i should find out how big his new one is; he got it through work. i have to buy some sort of power source for it: right now it is maybe charging through the usb cable? the n00b has no clue how this works.

oh - he also plans to get a ps3 for gtaIV, so whenever he stops going away on business trips we should invade his new place. i told him to get rock band and then we joked about how he would be the loneliest rock band player ever, trying to play everything by himself and crying and taping it.

um, i dunno. i'm going to take a shower and ride my bike to work before it gets too hot.

I'm drunk.

2008-05-17T02:21:00.001-05:00

embedding?

2008-05-12T13:47:00.001-05:00

cain't figure it out. anyway, the robots look constipated.
link

hmm

2008-05-09T09:48:00.002-05:00

i'm getting better at work; getting the hang of AP style and everything. of course, that means much more self-editing before i commit words to paper/screen, but oh well. i think i'm going to ride my bike to work today - it's something i said i would do once school was over, and it's over.

the bad thing about work is i don't like the mac keyboard, or even using a mac. OS X is fucking up all my muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts, and i hate the mac keyboard because it doesn't seem as responsive. what are all those extra fucking keys for? why is the shortcut to flip through firefox tabs so counterintuitive? what the shit?

i've fucked myself this weekend too. i just agreed about twenty minutes ago to work e-day tomorrow. so that's easily a fifteen-hour day, and then eight hours sunday at the store, and then a normal work-week again. maybe i hate myself.

AAAHHH!!! WHY ARE ALL THESE HORRIBLE BIRDS GOING APESHIT IN THE BACKYARD? they're squawking and flapping around so much they're sort of scaring my dog.

that's all i've got. well, i'm getting fat again. YAAAH! they just dropped a huge branch four feet away from me! OMG.

no subject!

2008-05-05T00:33:00.001-05:00

the ultimate triumph of our petrodollar deficit!

also, i like "drive on, driver" from the latest magnetic fields album.

fine, i'll do it too.

2008-05-01T23:11:00.003-05:00

Bold = I've read it for fun
Underline = I read it for school
Italics = I started it but didn't finish
Asterisk = I own it, but haven't read it

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose: FUCK YES WHORES
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace*
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma: HATE AUSTEN
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum: WHAT DID I JUST SAY ABOUT ECO?
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

hi!

2008-05-01T10:49:00.002-05:00

work, school, boy - i should get out more and see you guys, i guess. school's over soon, and work is supposed to be slow over the summer. don't forget to vote. since i'm not working for any government agency, i'll give you my one endorsement: don't vote for jennifer kim. she's "sure not perfect!" *stabs*

anyway, knitting night seems to have devolved into game night, so if you want to play drunken uno or something after 8:30, let me know.

and there's an article on the UT maya studies whatnot this week in the chron. although it seems to be more about the personality cult of schele, but whatevs.

Jon and bonermobile, post-hair movie

2008-05-01T02:02:00.001-05:00

The Dale brothers.

2008-04-27T21:05:00.001-05:00

B and s want choo!

2008-04-26T01:17:00.001-05:00

all right, bitches

2008-04-21T01:04:00.001-05:00

who's going to go see the thomas kinkade movie coming out later this year?

yeah, you know the chew shits you not.

unh ... special ...

2008-04-17T00:09:00.003-05:00

today was my first day (night?) of staying until everything's ready to go to press. i forgot how tired my eyes get proofing all day; i forgot i start feeling special when i stay late to proof; and i also forgot that sometimes i forget how to proof when i'm being special.

i'm also special because i corrected my name in the masthead. it somehow feels like an own-goal.

SO PICK UP A COPY TOMORROW. i made corie give me an autograph by her credit in the informal class catalog.

also, the two boys whose names start with Jo- should pick one up and read it for their special reason. i didn't actually get to read it, but there was one bit i heard that made me think it will be special.

and, uh, if anyone wants to interview, there's one more opening. LMK ASAP. or ask me nosy questions about it verbally first.

drinks / cries / rants

2008-04-15T21:12:00.003-05:00

i spend nearly five hundred dollars to kill my fucking cat with you people (not to mention i ASKED you and you AGREED to hold the checks until i got paid TODAY and then it turns out they were deposited ANYWAY when i didn't have money in my account, ASSHOLES), and then i get a bunch of chintzy laser-printed dumbass fucking animal poetry on fancy office fucking depot paper, and what looks like a fucking AD&D dice bag with ugly embroidery that says dumb shit, and a hobby lobby fucking cedar box with a plastic bag with what's left of my cat inside it, and the goddamn name of your company is RAINBOW BRIDGE, and EVERYTHING WITH MY FUCKING CAT'S NAME ON IT IS TWO FUCKING WORDS WHEN IT'S ONE FUCKING WORD. GODDAMN FUCKING MOTORBOAT. DO I HAVE TO KILL ANOTHER ONE WITH YOU TO FUCKING GET IT RIGHT? AND I WILL STAB THE NEXT BITCH WHO TALKS ABOUT A FUCKING PET HEAVEN.

STAB.

seriously, boat would have fucking peed on all this shit.

insert litany of other complaints here. feel free to make up some of your own.

yay! and not-yay!

2008-04-14T20:21:00.002-05:00

dum-dum actually did her taxes before the deadline this year!

dum-dum still has two flavors of homework to do.

dum-dum is broke, but gets paid tomorrow.

dum-dum hasn't yet formed an opinion about new job.

dum-dum doesn't know what to do about school.

Passive-aggressive parking is hilarious.

2008-04-13T23:47:00.001-05:00

oh yeah

2008-04-09T17:10:00.001-05:00

i also got on twitter. haven't added a widget to this yet, but i'm the same there. i think i figured out how to get updates on the phone.

and no, i don't really want to talk about the cat.

bleah

2008-04-09T16:43:00.002-05:00

only one more day working for county. friday i start the new job. i got an A on the economics test, also post-curve.

stuff is still sort of weird and sucky. is it anxiety if you always feel like there's another hammer above your head, just waiting to drop? i can't tell any more.

I will always miss you.

2008-04-07T21:24:00.001-05:00

Big sky

2008-04-04T19:24:00.001-05:00

awww yeah

2008-04-04T08:45:00.001-05:00

who made the second-highest grade in class on the geology midterm??

YEAH BITCHES. WORD.

Working!

2008-04-01T11:35:00.001-05:00

holy crap

2008-03-31T16:04:00.001-05:00

i can see my house on google maps street view!

okay. i really have to get to work.

everything's coming up choo!

2008-03-31T15:45:00.002-05:00

- done moving
- mostly done unpacking
- the geology test of evil got moved to tomorrow, and i found out in time that the government test got pushed up to today
- got a new job that, while i haven't had a salary this low in YEARS, looks sexy on a resume and i can learn interesting shit at AND proofread
- the cat might have actually peed in her box today, instead of ON MY BED for the umpteenth day running
- survived a very easy first day of early voting, without horrible equipment-related issues like i dreaded
- bought a fucking computer in five minutes, and am posting this from my porch

i don't have time right now to figure out what it does, since i just downloaded firefox, avast, and office to cover what i need to do for the moment, but i'm sure i'll keep you updated needlessly. additionally, i'd like to apologize for the poor quality of the last two photos. it's a camera phone.

Bagel accident!

2008-03-31T10:06:00.001-05:00

Backhoe sex!

2008-03-30T15:44:00.001-05:00

hmm

2008-03-24T17:41:00.001-05:00

i have a different interview friday. in-teresting.

it's sort of like... how they rerun certain movies on tv EVERY year. practice is good, i suppose. it's not for carnegie hall though.

damn

2008-03-21T17:18:00.000-05:00

damn.

*sigh*

oh my fucking shit

2008-03-21T01:59:00.003-05:00

the proofreader posting has been taken down.

...

*gives beat-down to undersized and inexplicably cheerful gnome of hope that lives in the piss-alley behind my liver*

...

jeebus fucking christ. i will cry either way.

damn it barry, why did you give me hope on saturday?

*drunkenly cries self to sleep, swears no posting until receipt of dreaded TLC letter*

the ish, not in the tionna smalls sense

2008-03-21T00:47:00.005-05:00

i am much better today, thanks to a) a four+ hour crying jag yesterday, in which the ocd-choo drunkenly bewailed and berated, about, at, and alternately, the unassailable mountain of empty boxes in her living room, the insurmountable obstacle of STUFF which needs to not be wherever it is, and the robot she decided to sleep with, and the ungrateful-choo lamented to rightfully unsympathetic ears about her stress-related loss of appetite/not-so-latent anorexia and potential to fit into tiny, tiny pants if she so chose to go shopping, and b) moving another carload and having a roommates-all-in-the-same-place hangout/discussion/beerage/catch-up moment(s). oh, and c)? eating. because the choo didn't EAT yesterday even when sternly lectured to do so. something about blood sugar and being stupid, wasn't paying attention while whining.

apparently i need to go to PUNCTUATION/REFERRING-TO-ONESELF-IN-
THIRD-PERSON USERS ANONYMOUS. or you can nominate me for some sort of SXSW interactive symbol-overuser award next year. especially because i'm a tool and read two of the blogs that got a shit-ton of that crap this year (and last).

stay tuned for further stupid updates, in which i will complain about my non-iraqi life that is SO HARD, if you want even more detail than my whiny texts, emails, and phone calls provide. call me for friday/tomorrow night shenaniganery, if i didn't already tell you what's happening and you want to have mild-mannered age-appropriate social interaction with holiday (in)appropriate alcoholic beverages.

High productivity in geology today!

2008-03-18T20:01:00.000-05:00

i don't care

2008-03-17T19:24:00.002-05:00

this presidential shenaniganery makes me so tired. if i cared, i would read the asian-american something-or-another blog, but it's not like i ever feel like part of the AA community unless some dickbag is shouting "me so horny!" at me, and the feminism-old-vs.-new-generation gripery makes me hate BOTH, and i can't possibly decide which is worse, racism or sexism, when there's a bunch of other stupid shit going on too.

*throws hands up*

bitches, just do the time warp and DECIDE already. we're still going to be fucked, and there is no hope of any more good punk rock or anything in the future.

One bookshelf, beer for scale.

2008-03-17T17:23:00.001-05:00

Self on new phone

2008-03-17T15:20:00.001-05:00

hmph

2008-03-17T13:28:00.002-05:00

this new phone lets me add words to T9, and already had "fuck" and "shit" in there. sweet. other than that, it's sort of a hideous greenish-gold, and the ac port is in the way when i'm charging and texting simultaneously. samsung has moved around the softkeys on the slide, which is sort of awkward. apparently it records audio, as well as doing all that other shit i don't care about. the camera is still eh, 1.3 megapixel, no flash. the center of gravity issue when the slide is open has been fixed, but now there's a bumper at the bottom of the phone, making it harder to get to the bottom row if you're a both-thumbs texter. i can buy extra memory for this thing, but then that would be more numbers to lose, right?

*sigh*

okay, back to whatever it was i was doing before i got the phone.

I FUCKING HATE SOUTH X

2008-03-15T17:35:00.002-05:00

i lost my fucking phone at fucking emo's last night. i walked "home" with jon dale's friend liz, and luckily he came home a day early, and i had my tantrum at him. now i have a piece of shit phone with the same number until my new phone comes next week, but unless i have your phone number written down, i'm not calling you. you can still call me. i'm drunk and grumpy like a two-year-old that has to wear noise-cancelling headphones to sxsw shows. my face is all puffy and stupid, i'm sweaty and haven't showered, i'm doing laundry instead of napping, i ran into a bunch of people i know, i'm grumpy, i'm going to have to enter 246 numbers into this new sim card, the shit phone doesn't have T9 and a fully charged battery, i haven't gotten caught up on school like i wanted, crystal castles SUCKS live, like flosstradamus, i lost the $7 earplugs i bought at cvs yesterday because they were the only ones left, my liver hates me, i'm dehydrated despite drinking mad water, i don't want to do anything else and i hate the heat and this week and all the tourists and loudness and being social.

i'm also a liar and i love everyone i ran into and i'm a whore for positive feedback about what a great proofreader i am and a tiny part of me still secretly likes music.