neurological dryer lint

well i think it's time to retire this old thing. in college, when i had interesting thoughts and experiences to write about, it was a ton of fun; although it's difficult to read posts from five years ago - up until a year or two ago, my old writing just makes me cringe. but to chronicle this period of my life for my own future reminiscence, it has served its purpose.

i'll still post around on wack mc's, lazyrev, and monster closet, and of course toss up the occasional link. so not much of a farewell, more like a "look over there, shiny object!"

thanks for reading.

tagging has come full circle. prepare yourself:

- i've continued to hold the claim that i am the laziest person i know, and moving has illustrated that. i have spent my whole life avoiding hard work - cutting corners, putting forward the least effort possible to get by. i have determined that is why i hate moving - it is way too much lifting, packing, unpacking, etc. and knowing i will have to work that hard seriously stresses me out.

- even though i have spent my whole life sailing, i get more seasick today than i did when i was a kid. and even though i've spent my whole life swimming, i still get uneasy in deep, opaque water, fearing that something i can't see below will bite me. even in simulated environments - in first person shooters, for example, when moving through water areas, i still move very quickly and get nervous.

- one of my favorite film performances is danny devito's penguin from batman returns. most would disagree - but i think he outdoes jack nicholson's joker.

- in the twelve years i have known my wife, i've never heard her swear. although the very thought of her cursing can make me laugh, no matter what mood i'm in, because it's so absurd. she claims to have done it once - but i don't think i believe her.

- i've never smoked as much as a cigarette, weed, any other drugs, and i've always been super curious what it'd be like. not because there's something wrong with my life that i'd like to modify in that way... more because of our culture's fascination with them, i wonder what all the fuss is about. i'm much too chicken to ever give it a shot, though. i think it was that literature you get when you're in middle school about all the crap drugs will do to your body - it freaked me out enough to always steer clear, even though there were probably four or five boy scouts i'm sure were high during every campout we went on. it's probably a good thing that i've stayed "clean", per se, although i never talked about it because i didn't want to seem like too much of a mama's boy. yeah, the boy scout thing didn't help that out much at all.

- my sister has been one of the most significant influences in my musical taste - introducing me to tons of genres and bands i still love today... with one exception - when i was six, a weekend she was down visiting, and she had been listening to madonna's like a virgin, and i was so fascinated... i remember going downstair (yeah) early in the morning, before anyone was up, popping in her tape and listening to it over and over. there may have also been dancing. i have no idea what compelled me to do that. madonna isn't in any of my regular playlists today... however, another album of hers i scavenged, duran duran's rio, certainly is. thanks renee...

the front of our office looks like metal gear solid 4 starring cicadas - dead and dying bugs litter the parking garage and the walkway in. it's more than a little disconcerting.

the drive in to work from the new house is gravy - left at 7:35, stopped for a bagel, still got here at 8. all backroads (except i need to stay far away from tylersville, coming anywhere near that road seems to add ten minutes to the drive)

hiring movers is the best money i've ever spent. thanks to them, we had enough time to almost completely unpack. well thanks to them, renee's foresight to start moving things in a week ahead of time, and my brother and her sister, both of whom helped immensely.

we did have a few minutes for fun during this terribly long, exhausting weekend - i got in about five hours of MGS4, it's great as you would expect, a good reason to pick up a PS3. i talked about it last week on the podcast and i have a bit more insight this week. the in-game ipod currently works better than my real one, unfortunately, the death clock was dead on - it finally kicked the bucket this weekend. wow, a little over two years, apple. you're never getting another cent from me, ever.

we also saw the happening, which you should avoid at all costs. night has completely lost his touch, it would seem - the film had a great concept but was executed terribly, from the casting to the writing to the friviolous, cheap-feeling shock scenes that felt like they were thought up by a sixth grade boy doodling in class.

we are in the new house... it still doesn't seem like ours yet, i feel like i'm walking through someone else's really awesome empty place. i assume it will when we get our stuff in, or when i finish my first job around the house... renee and her parents have done a crazy good job painting. we'll be fully in sometime the week after next.

i'm discovering the neighborhood. we are pretty far out, which is probably good for me. we're surrounded by a lot of big fields, farms, some newer housing developments, etc... it's peaceful, more quiet than we've had in western hills, ten or fifteen minutes from any major shopping centers. i was too used to having a grocery store next door.

i will miss the nice stuff about stuck-thirty-years-in-the-past western hills, but it's not all lost: there's a little ice cream place down the street, a couple of pizza places, a park right next door... met one of our neighbors already - they are cool, younger like us, with a six year old boy. actually everyone around us seems super friendly. traffic on the way home from the office isn't bad, but it's fastest to take backroads. looks like that motorcycle might actually be reasonable.

we are on episode three of the podcast and i think we're getting more comfortable and into our rhythm. artie has been generous enough to come up with some awesome looking concept art for the site, and i can't wait to see how it will turn out.

the new weezer disc has a higher ratio of woo! to yawn than their past two releases. that pleases me. plus, there's more electronics, a grittier, dirtier guitar (see the first part of the greatest man that ever lived) and far more interesting songwriting from rivers... there's very little "boo hoo i didn't get the girl" from them, probably cause rivers got married. exciting!

remember the scene in jurassic park when dennis nedry, played masterfully by wayne knight, is trying to get off the island and loses his way, ending up at the mercy of the acid-spitting dinosaurs? it's one of the most tense moments i've ever seen in a film - just thinking about it gets my blood pressure elevated. spielberg sure knew back then how to get the audience to the edge of their seats...

i've felt that tense most of the day, trying to get prepared to close on the house tomorrow. granted this is way too commonplace of an event in American society for mistakes or incompetence (either on my part or someone else's) to totally derail the whole thing. that's exactly what i am expecting will happen, though - and events are conspiring to bring it to fruition. mortage dude emails me crucial paperwork that he'd forgotten about the night before... i find out i won't know the exact amount i need to bring to the closing until the morning of... you're thinking, these things probably aren't a big deal. true!

nearly every nightmare i've had in the past ten years has looked something like this: i'm in a room or a hallway, usually at a high school or college, and i'm late to a meeting or a class of some kind, and i can't find something i need - a bag, a folder, etc. i am turning over tables, opening drawers and lockers, desperately trying to find whatever crucial thing i am missing. someone is in the room with me urging me to hurry up, and i get more and more frantic.

so apparently, my greatest fear is that i will irreversibly screw up something important by being late to something - or not having some thing very important that i am supposed to have - or not knowing something i am supposed to know, and i will let down people that are important to me. so i expect myself to be a little tense for the next 24 hours until this thing gets done - after all, this event is the most important one of its kind that i have ever faced.

i was very pleased to have a 5-6 week buffer zone between when our offer was accepted and when we closed - it was so this type of crap would get taken care of, by someone else that does it for a living, waaaayy ahead of time, and i wouldn't be able to futz it all up, or have to prepare paperwork so close to the deadline and not know the information i'm supposed to...

prayer has helped a lot to bring calm... driving around the new neighborhood today has also... watching hockey certainly doesn't (does anyone else get really tense watching hockey?) - but it looks really good in HD so i'm doing it anyway...

i drove home at 2:30am last night, squirming uncomfortably in the driver's seat... i felt like someone had kicked me in the stones - it was the most visceral physical response to an emotional wound i had ever felt, and its cause was an overwhelming disappointment drowning my heart.

indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull was soulless and empty, a scifi b-movie-of-the-week poorly dressed up like the films from the 80's that i loved. it was like going on a date with a mannequin that looks like your girlfriend. comparisons to the new star wars trilogy (raiders of the lost ark is to a new hope as the phantom menace is to crystal skull) skip over one important point - episode 1 had some redeeming qualities.

you could recognize lucas' abysmal writing and story from a mile off, something i braced myself against walking in... but nearly every otheraspect of the film matched that low quality - one dimensional characters (wow, shia lebouf, you're such a rebel who plays by his own rules), an uninteresting villain, and a convoluted "backstory" that they tried to present as mysterious but came across as half-baked and confusing (apparently indy was in the cia? whatever).

and since when does ILM let their janitor create their special effects? for the most part they were run-of-the-mill, except for the very end, in one of the final crucial scenes - i won't spoil it, but i will say i felt like i was watching men in black.

the most stunning betrayal came in harrison ford's utter failure in reviving the indiana jones character. twenty years ago he was funny, clever, committed, the guy had heart. there was absolutely no heart in the indy i saw last night - 90% of the time, harrison played the grumpy, i'm-always-right, get-off-my-plane, give-me-back-my-family old man he's been in every film role for the past ten years... for the other 10% he was a disconcertingly sensitive, warm-and-fuzzy chump that made me want to projectile vomit.

depressed yet? don't watch this film, unless you want to feel like someone just ran over your dog.

i'm not sure i have the right look for radio, but i do know tony does, as he already runs a successful podcast. and ryan, duh, homie was born for it. i have suckered these two into a new experiment, monster closet, a podcast about games. shhh! it's still sleeping. hopefully we will record episode one soon. in the meantime, someone make me a better logo, my photoshop skills really butchered this poor mudkip.

i was totally wrong about tim armstrong's solo album a poet's life. i heard into action and kind of yawned because it wasn't another pure rancid or op ivy track. turns out there's nothing wrong with the album, though, its really solid, head-bobbing reggae/dub/ska with tim's heavy, gritty vocals. a bunch of the tracks hearken to early stuff by the specials... very reflective of tim's roots influences, and definitely worth a listen.