yeah yeah yeah

It's been a while. I know. I'm planning more posts soon, but was told I had to post tonight to avoid retribution from my youngest brother. Fuck you Mattle.

So in lieu of real content -- which I swear to God is coming soon -- here's something to spark a lil discussion, maybe. My current top 10 most played songs in iTunes:


So looking at this makes me wonder, "Did my taste change this much in a year?" A year ago I listened to only two of these bands/artists: Spoon and Deerhoof. Anyhow, to turn this into something to talk about for anyone possibly still stopping by this godforsaken blog, what are your top 10 most played songs, do you have anything embarrassing in there (I'll admit, I love that Feist song but don't really want anyone to know about it) or just surprising? Go ahead, share in the comments, post your list or take geeky screenshots like I did and link to them.

And here are some coming posts/attractions to whet your appetite:

• why I think the things you like about your favorite band and favorite people tend to be the same
• a rundown on all the blog posting by friends/family while I've been out of the loop
• stories/pix from new orleans
• recap on rocking with my new "special friend" and Dan.
• exciting internet trends from 8 months ago that i'm just getting into!
• my fucking stupid new haircut
  

january project day 9

(Shockingly I missed days 7 + 8 with more hantavirus. I think I must have somehow borrowed Tom Hanks' immune system from Philadelphia this past month. Being sick is the lamest.)

Drinkers: Luke, Dan, Wes, me
Server: Dani
Drinks: I missed when everyone ordered. I had a gin and tonic. Update me in the comments guys.
Tab: $8
Subject matter discussed: Ok, this one I remember because it only happened a couple hours ago. Dan brought up his recent blog post about his deep-seated hatred of baby boomers in general and the Doors specifically. Check out his rant over at his site, it's pretty spot on.

From the jumping-off point of the Doors, we decided to plow through what we thought were the most overrated bands now and past, and boy, would I have hated to be the people sitting a table near us and have to overhear our amazingly smug and self-satisfied (and obviously spot-fucking-on) repartee. Much fun was had by all.

Notable and particularly ballsy overrated throwdowns by each drinker:
Luke: The Smiths
Dan: Velvet Underground
Wes: Pavement (for this blasphemy our Okie friend will one day pay dearly)
me: My Bloody Valentine

january project day 6

Drinkers: Ben, Luke, Hammer, Mari, Dan, Wes, me
Server: Dani
Drinks: The Greyhound, this night's special was a big hit. I think about 10-12 of these were ordered in total, also in the Salty Dog variation. I had a couple gin and tonics. Anyone else can fill in their drink from that night in the comments.

Again, I was pretty under the weather this night, so if anyone remembers details of conversation, fill them in in the comments. I think I said something foul to Mari.

january project day 5

I missed Friday, JPd4, due to the hantavirus.

Drinkers: Mari, Dan, Wes, Joel, me
Server: Dani (sp?)
Drinks: Since I still kinda had hantavirus the only thing I remember is that I was talked into getting a Hot Toddy for the first time. verdict: ehh

I don't really remember much else from this evening mainly due to Tylenol PM hangover and the fact that I was scolded by Dan on Thursday for bringing my notebook to JPd3. I was told that "documenting the event fundamentally changes it." Yeah yeah yeah. Good work, how was that 10th grade philosophy class, dickwad?

Ok, that looks more bitter than I really am. xoxoxo

january project day 3

Ok I know this is late, but I've been sick as a dog and actually missed some January Project dates. Other more resolute and less sickly and weak members of the January Project soldiered on in the meanwhile. I'm going to give my recollections of Thu 1/3. More recent days that I attended to come soon.

January Project Day 3

In attendance: Luke, Dan, Wes, me
Server: Jen
Drinking: Luke - rum + coke, Dan - bourbon + ginger, Wes - Newcastle + an Anchorsteam, me - gin + tonic
Question of the night: Iowa caucus predictions. We started drinking at around 7:15pm MDT and we hadn't yet seen preliminary results. So these are the predictions we ended up with:

Dem:
Luke: Clinton winning
Dan: Edwards will do better than expected, Obama will do worse than expected
Wes: Obama, Clinton, Edwards
me: Obama, Edwards, Clinton

GOP:
Luke: Huckabee
Dan: Huckabee
Wes: Romney, Huckabee, McCain
me: Romney

We didn't do too badly overall, but I guess by this point in the evening it wasn't the hardest thing to call.

Dan made me write down that a jukebox highlight was "Sailor Girl" by the Shins. I don't know this song but apparently he enjoyed it. So, yeah.

Dan also induced a solid WTF look from me when he said, "You know if this comes down to Obama and Huckabee in the general, I'm really not sure how I'm gonna vote..."

So that was Day 3. Yay alcoholism!

january project day 3 update coming

Until then, enjoy my favorite highlights from tonight's Iowa caucuses:

Obama
Huckabee
Paul

Can I get an "aww yeah!" for a incredibly undemocratic means of selecting our next president? Really, fuck Iowa and this silly-ass hokey-pokey way they do things . I still <3 NH though.

the january project begins

I'll get to year end wrap up sometime later this week, but I'm not feeling particularly reflective at the moment so this update on a project Wes and I have undertaken will have to suffice for now.

For some reason it seemed like a great idea to me and Wes back in early December to visit Gabor's, our neighborhood bar par excellence, each day for the month of January to consume at least one drink. I'll leave it to Wes to remind me of why we thought this would be a great idea -- I know we had some cool, compelling reason that was not simply just giving structure to our nascent alcoholism. Think of it as our version of NaNoWriMo, but with more drinking and slightly less crushing self-delusion.

Because I'm feeling lazy and just took two Tylenol PMs (hoping to cure both my nasty case of slut voice and some insomnia) this update will be somewhat brief. Here goes:


The January Project, Day 2, 1/2/08 *

Attending: Dan, Shelley, Wes, me
Drinking: Bourbon + coke x2 (Dan), Anchor Steam (Shelley), unidentified beer (Wes), gin + tonic x2 (me)
Server: Jen
Subject matter discussed: Admitting to low-grade highly-specific racism, the best times for parents to divorce, the sexual proclivities of distant acquaintances and why hockey is the most tragic of all major sports.
Jukebox highlight: Sonic Youth - 'Incinerate'
The tab: $12

Anyone reading this in the local area or beyond is welcome to join in our not-so-slow descent into alcoholism and dive-bar-regular-status. Just give a holler. It'll be a good time.

* You may be rightly asking, "Ok asshole, where is the post from Day 1?" Wes and I technically spent time drinking at Gabor's on January 1st since we rang in the New Year there and were feeling too wounded to head back on Tuesday, plus we had the entire first season of 30 Rock to watch. There will be an out-of-sequence post covering New Years coming soon.

fuck myspace. srsly.

I signed up for a myspace account a few months back so that I could post something on mari's blog, probably some form of taunting or heckling. I haven't made a myspace page. I don't really care for myspace. But, since I have an account, I get myspace friend requests. I'm starting to notice a pattern.So apparently I either have recently made a lot of friends at a local strip club or myspace has some astonishingly shitty control over spammers. Any of you guys reading actually use myspace and not just Scrabulous, er, Facebook? This shit is annoying as hell and I don't even use the service at all.

On a related note - mari, for fuck's sake, drop myspace and put your blog on blogger or wordpress or anywhere else. My jihad on your blog will remain in place until action is taken on your part.

in time we will show the world why the world made us

Work has been hard. I'm not saying my job is harder than anyone else's, I don't believe that
for a moment. Everyone has hard jobs.

Stop snickering Dan.

Right now though, if Toby Russell were still in the office and was to ask me, like he would with some frequency, "so, are you winning?," I would have to answer no. I am not winning. I don't know who is if I'm not, because that's usually a pretty binary situation, but I know it's not me.

It's probably just time to go out with friends and drink a bit (check), listen to some pissed off music (check), and then step back and try to figure out what the hell is going on (still to do). We'll see how that goes. Until then, enjoy a song from the album that I've been listening to pretty non-stop while I've been riding the fail-train the last few weeks.

Les Savy Fav - "The Lowest Bitter"

wait, i have a blog?

Yeah, apparently I do. How bout that.

I've been slacking lately in general, or at least it feels like it. I want to blame it on fall arriving, or something that involves planetary movement and gravity and massive celestial forces represented by Greek characters that you can't get your head around and need to watch a NOVA episode to feel like you understand but you still really don't. That would be more comforting than just admitting I've been lame lately - not calling my family, not going to the last few excellent shows that have come through town (Deerhoof, Architecture in Helsinki, etc), not going to Halloween parties and nights out at Gabor's. Lame, lame, lame.

So here's my first stab at getting back on the right track - I'll post something long and rambling tonight and not stay up working. Here goes.

Going backwards from last I posted, I went with other folks in my dept. to Madison for a conference on using WebGUI. Wait a second, don't go look at Facebook or that hentai site (Dan!) there's actually some funny shit that happened. Here's the run down:

• I was caught acting intolerant towards arguably the most tolerant people on the planet. Yes, that's right, the Dutch. So apparently WebGUI (the content management system we use at work) is amazingly popular in the Netherlands and several of the presenters at our conference were from the land of tulips and semi-legal hash. The only problem - you couldn't understand a fucking word they were saying most of the time. At one point Shelley and I determined what was coming out of one Dutch presenter's mouth was the sound of a throat full of cock. It was that bad. Really. So one day during the free lunch that was provided to us at the hotel where the conference was hosted (mmm, Xangos!), I decided to express my frustration with these presentations, perhaps including the phrase "Jesus Christ, not another fucking cock-throated Dutch guy mumbling for two hours this afternoon. Kill me." This in turn earned me about a dozen stink eyes from a table full of Dutch folks who unbeknownst to me were seated a mere five feet away. Turns out they don't have cocks in their ears and could hear my apparent anti-Dutch bigotry loud and clear. Damnit. I really do love the Dutch. But please, cock out of your throats when you're trying to explain SQL forms to me. Thanks guys.
  
• In honor of Shelley's birthday, Wes and I went out in search of alcohol -- on foot and in a driving rainstorm -- from the sumptuous Motel 6 where we were staying. Turns out that although Madison gets a lot of hype for being the drinkingest town in the Midwest, it's really fucking hard to find alcohol after 9PM along a highway filled with strip malls and Mexican restaurants named something like 'Snugadero's.' Refusing to come back empty handed, we decided to purchase the most birthday-themed appetizers and depressing desserts from the Arby's across the street from the Motel 6 (in case you were wondering, the primary ingredient in Arby's Cherry Turnovers is sugar, followed closely by high-fructose fucking awful syrup). We capped off this awesome feat with dropping our gourmet purchases in the middle of the highway in front of oncoming traffic. It was epic, and Shelley was nearly asleep when we got back to the motel and had to be browbeaten into eating her birthday turnover. Sorry Shelley.
• Everyone in our tiny room snored. Maybe not plo. Maybe. This forced us to spend $20 one night on his and hers ear plugs (men's are blue and called HEAROS and women's are pink and called Sleep Pretty in Pink - and it turns out they're made by the same company, which also happens to also make a line of ear plugs targeting Latinos(?!), called Muy Buenas Noches), BreatheRight strips and sleeping pills. All that shit kinda worked. Only kinda.
  
• We got to fly into Rockford, Illinois (oddly enough not part of the metro-Madison area, but is the world-renowned home of the Sock Monkey), on one of the tiniest, sketchiest airplanes I've ever been on. Fuck aisle seats.
• The Essen Haus rules. We drank a giant flower vase full of beer and ate manly German food.
  
• Cheese curds and Big Buck Hunter rule as well.
  

So that was Madison.

To keep the ramble up a bit, here are some of the things that have been occupying my time while not being social or blogging:

1. Weeds. Part of me thinks that I shouldn't like this as much as I do. I actually feel more guilty about liking this than I do BSG. But it's great. Go watch it online here.
2. The GFW Radio podcast . Ok, I feel even guiltier about this, but this podcast is fucking hilarious. Ostensibly, it's about PC gaming, which I don't do, but that is just a front for the guys on the show to discuss the endless strangeness of internet culture. The apex of each show is the "Heroes of the Web" segment where one of participants on the podcast does dramatic readings of internet message board posts covering things like otherkin, furries, and people who fall in love with video game characters. I find myself laughing because otherwise I'd be weeping for humanity. Check out these mp3 samples of "Heroes of the Web", you won't be disappointed (click the links to go to yousendit DL page):
   
• A Zelda fan dreams of digital romance come to life
  
• Scenes from a geek wedding from Ain't It Cool News forums
  
• An otherkin appeals for help discovering his/its true self
  
• A heated debate over whether Superman can sweat or urinate
  
• And finally a Halo 3 fan loses his shit waiting for a review of the game to be posted online
3. Uncov.com. I justify reading this blog because it's kinda part of my job to keep up on trends on the web. That being said, the guy who writes it is a former Google employee who may be the most bitter, dark-hearted human in the world. The images accompanying the posts are, depending on your own level of misanthropy, either the funniest thing you'll see all day or will make you want to take a shower. I've been finding them pretty funny.
4. Scrabulous. This shit is a force of nature. I'm fully addicted, but you already know that because anyone reading this blog is probably also currently playing a game of it with me right now.
   

OK, I feel like I've done my due diligence. If you disagree, yell at me in the comments. Yell at me in there anyway. Seems like everyone's been a bit quiet on their blogs lately. Maybe we can all come out of hiding at the same time.

See y'all again, sooner.

episode three: stupid again

As further evidence of my man-childhood, I missed my scheduled flight out of Boston last week because I misplaced my wallet. After a couple hours of sanity-questioning searching of my family's house where I was staying, I found that it had fallen down behind the twin bed I was sleeping in during my brief stay at the Natick homestead after Alpha training. Just fucking retarded.

This led to some further stupidity of course. When I found my wallet it was around 9:30PM and my flight left at 10:55. As I scrambled to figure out a way to still make the flight, I called my brother Mike, who was out boozing it up with some friends from out of town, to run my brilliant scheme by him. What follows is the conversation as I remember it:

MIKE: Hi Bill, you at the airport?

ME: Hey Mike! Yeah.. not there just yet.

MIKE: Huh? Why not?

ME: Well, I lost my wallet, but.. that's beside the point. I want to ask you something.

MIKE: (in a tone that sounding as though I was about to ask him for a kidney) What?

ME: (taken aback) Huh?

MIKE: (more perturbed) What is it?

ME: Um, ok... well I was wondering if you thought it'd be a stupid idea if I drove Mom's car to the airport, ditched it there in the parking and had her pick it up in a couple days when she gets back from her trip. I'd send her money for the parking and all that.

MIKE: (now realizing that his kidneys were safe) Oh... well yeah. I guess that'd be fine. I mean, I can just drive you to the airport.

ME: Ok, well, that would be great, but my flight leaves in like an hour.

MIKE: (now truly realizing what a hopeless tard he has for an older brother) Ok, well, good luck with your plan there.

ME: Alright, catch you later.


So I peel out of the homestead, and make it to Logan in about 35 minutes. It's now 10:25. I'm under the impression that I'll have about 30 minutes to make my flight and that this should be fine since it's a Saturday night and there shouldn't really be much in the way of lines. Stupid again.

I walk up to the jetBlue counter as the last ticket agent is getting her belongings together to leave, and I'm informed that the plane is taxing down the runway at that moment.

The ticket agent informs me that she'll "see what she can do" and picks up a walkie-talkie but looks at me with pure contempt and clearly has no expectation that I'll be getting on this flight. She is not amused by my suggestion that they could provide me with a tricked out sports car or lend me a baggage transport vehicle in order to catch the plane on the runway like you might see in a shitty Vin Diesel movie. She then informs me I definitely won't be making my flight because the plane is now in the air. I resist the urge to inquire as to the availability of a jet-pack.

Having completely resisted my charm offensive, the ticket agent then informed me that I should just call the airline's 800 number to get a flight for tomorrow, since if she did it, she'd "be here all night, and I gotta get out of here." I can't really blame her. I wouldn't have helped me in this situation.

And since I think it's been a bit since I posted a song, here's one from what I feel safe in calling Pittsburgh's finest.

Girl Talk - "Warm It Up"

So this song breaks my rules I set out in August a bit (anyone remember those? or give a shit? didn't think so. me either) but I'm sure it's destined to qualify in about a week. It's a mashup, but that's kind of an understatement. I think there are at least 10-15 songs sampled on this track, from Wire to Fergie to Annie (!) to Kansas to a number of random-ass club songs to Smokey Robinson. This shit is unbeatable.

Happy now, nagbot?

episode two: seemingly bigoted (but maybe just into trannies)

THE SCENE: Riding the commuter rail from South Station out to Natick on Friday night, and I've just settled into my seat.

THE PLAYERS:

• DT: A disheveled transvestite/transgendered individual with a sequined purple bow in his long salt-and-pepper hair and a five o'clock shadow
• TT: a burly MBTA ticket taker
• FP: four to five fellow commuter rail passengers within earshot
  
• ME: your faithful emissary from Fuckyouistan

THE ACTION:

ME: (takes a seat on the commuter rail in the bottom half of a double-decker car, towards the back. puts headphones on.)

DT: (Lurches through the aisle, inexplicably getting his/her (ok, what's the correct terminology for this? do you use the sex they were clearly born with or the one they are "working towards"? is it just their call entirely and you're to go with what they want to be referred to as? are these questions in and of themselves offensive? i think they are.) bags repeatedly caught on the armrests of the seats he/she is passing, only to be unstuck when someone else (FP) frees the straps of his/her numerous bags. DT sits down in a seat three in front of mine, but only briefly. He/she drops one of their bags in the seat and then suddenly rushes away from the seat, up the aisle away from me, in search of something.)

ME: (DT has caught my attention, not so much for his/her appearance but more for the fact that they dropped a bag in a seat and then took off. It's a post-9/11 world, and I don't know, maybe Al-Qaeda has taken to using the transgendered as a means to slip past standard profiling. OK, I admit that thought only spent a half second in my head. Mostly, I just thought it was odd.)

TT: (loudly to me) Checking out the broad, buddy?

ME: (trying to play it cool, responding with sarcasm) Oh yeah, totally.

TT: (to fellow passengers, again loudly) I'm trying to ask this guy like ten times for his ticket and he's all entranced with the missus there!

FP: (nervous quiet laughter, glances in my direction)

ME: (handing my ticket over) Hey, I had my headphones on...

DT: (returns to the lower section of the car and begins walking quickly back towards the part of the car where TT is currently tormenting me)

TT: Oh hey! Here comes your girl again, your lucky day buddy!

ME: (softly, defeated) Aww, c'mon....

- end scene -

I'm pretty sure I'm at least partially to blame for this whole fiasco taking place, whether or not it's just the fact that I had my headphones on in the wrong time or that I shouldn't be so jittery on trains to read something sinister into something that I'm sure is commonplace. Any interpretation on this is much appreciated.

EPISODE 3: STUPID AGAIN, wherein I temporarily lose my wallet and have to pay $45 because of it will be out tomorrow.

stupid, seemingly bigoted, stupid again: the fuckyouistan x-country tour stops in boston

Episodes from my week spent in my hometown, or at least the nearest metropolitan area to my hometown:

EPISODE 1 - STUPID

Needing to make a phone call and smoke a cigarette, I went downstairs and outside the Winter Street office. I made my call and smoked my smoke, and then tried to re-enter the building. Forgetting that after 6PM all the doors to the building lock automatically, I was screwed. Everyone who could let me in had either already left for the day or I didn't have their cell number. So I tried to call Dan in Denver to get him to IM people who might still be in the building. In the meantime I kept an eye open for people leaving the building who might be able to let me in.

After about 30 minutes, some callers from the TOP left the building. I smiled and tried to seem harmless while I went in the open door, only to be trapped between the outer door and a locked door in front of me. This pattern repeated itself over another 30 minutes as I got through to the foyer containing the elevator, then to the stairwell, and then finally into the building. With each layer of 'security' I breached I imagine I looked sketchier and sketchier as it became more absurd that I was in an area and unable to get out of.

So, because of my stupidity I spent over an hour traveling roughly 100 feet. I'm pretty sure that both turtles and those without arms and legs can top that blazing speed.

EPISODE 2 - SEEMINGLY BIGOTED coming tomorrow.

omg fuckyouistan x-country tour - NYC edition

OK, not really. I'm on layover at JFK and there's free wireless. So yeah, technically in NYC, but it might as well be Mars.

The one little slice of New York I did get was from the satellite TV provided by my jetBlue flight. I got to watch the 6am Sunday news broadcast on the NBC affiliate here, and I have to say, New York is comparatively a much more interesting place than I generally give it credit for. First up - a chunk of the East Side being shutdown b/c of Iran's president coming to town for the UN General Assembly. As much as I'm getting to love Denver, that kind of shit isn't happening anytime soon. The closest we might get would be a slightly more crowded 16th Street Mall shuttle because of the Wheat Growers Convention. But wait - HOLY SHIT - there's a "Ninja Bandit" (NBC's quotes, not mine) on the loose in Staten Island! He's robbed about 16 homes in the last few months and in his latest break-in was apparently scared away by what was described by the anchor as "a dentist's wife." Maybe the best new story I've seen this year. So, I admit it, NYC does have some charms.

It's 6 in the morning btw - so of course I'm pissed that I'm awake, but I'm also pissed that I thought that a redeye flight would be such a great idea. Redeye + shitloads of stuff to watch on jetBlue's satellite TV = i r zombie now. I just couldn't resist watching the following programming on my 3.5 hour flight:

• Iron Chef America - Apples were the special ingredient! omigosh! Among the 'celebrity' judges was a man referred to as 'Chef Bonecrusher' who had to get up and hug the challenger chef after sampling his candied apple dessert. And also inform him that Jesus blesses him.
  
• An amazingly crass History Channel series called MegaDisasters about gamma ray bursts from outer space and their potential to destroy our planet. I'll ruin it for you -- they won't! I just saved you one tedious stock-footage-laden-and-over-zealously-narrated hour. You're welcome. This show won some points though for finding ways to make the work that astrophysicists do seem active and engaging for a TV audience. They somehow got two of these guys who are way into space from KSU to be shot pouring some kind of acid onto a fossil. I'm sorry, someone who's taken a science class more recently than the 10th grade as I have please correct me, but that seemed like some ridiculousness to me.
  
• An infomercial for a TimeLife CD box set called Flower Power. Hosted - I shit you not - by Peter Fonda.

- ok wait up - breaking news - apparently people from our office in Denver have sent out some kind of message to the listserve they're on for people who are amazingly inept with computers because a random Germanic man just interrupting my blogging (I have headphones on too, which I thought was the international symbol for 'I don't care to speak to you very much right now, Germanic man') to ask me how to connect his laptop to the free wireless service here in the terminal. It looked like he had just unpacked the laptop - it still had stickers everywhere and was running Vista. What an ugly and confusing OS. Fuck that noise. It only took me about 5 minutes to explain to him how to do something that essentially involved one click. Technology is awesome. ok back to stories about tv...

• A snippet of Hannity and Colmes with Hannity blasting Al Gore for using a private jet to travel from Nashville to LA. He had a cute graphic of an average American family's carbon output from their average American station wagon making the same trip, and how much less impact they would have than Gore. It was adorable.
  
• A poker tournament on ESPN Classic. I enjoyed this more than I should've.
  
• The awesome local NBC news broadcast.

Ok, so the result of all that is that i've been up all night and am writing completely incoherently. This is probably not much more than an aimlessly snarky word-salad. But I did successfully kill the hour and 45 minutes between my flights, so it's not a total loss.

oh ps - that shit that crystal wrote the other day about her friend saying how blogs should be raw and revealing and all that, that's utter shit. i'll make a comment over there when i'm not completely insomnia-drunk, but the short of it - telling all your secrets on the internet is like gossiping to your friend who remembers everything and will answer any question posed to them by anyone at all. shit stays here forever and everyone can see it if they want. if you want to read honest stories from people's lives that aren't filtered, go read PostSecret. you don't open up a vein to a gathering of friends at a coffeehouse, and you shouldn't expect to see it when you're reading a friend's blog. i go to all your blogs looking for news about whatever clever, interesting thing you're all up to atm, or what you want to vent about. I'm not going there to peek through your windows or read your diary. fuck that.

This post was written while listening to "Matchbook Seeks Maniac" by Deerhoof and wanting a cigarette so badly I could cut someone. I've got a plane to catch right now so no mp3 of the song, I'll post it later. bye now.

that's when i reach for my revolver

It's been a bit since I posted. Lately I have been both busy with work and sick as hell, not great conditions under which one can be expected to keep up appearances on my silly blog.

So a quick inventory of the past few weeks:

• Spent the past weekend in Boulder -- polluted myself, ran from a cat with three other grown men, bought cocktail parasols, ate a fantastic burger, learned foosball and played it horribly, and actually got some work done.
• Been listening to lots of LCD Soundsystem and Xiu Xiu -- I do now, in fact, je t’aime the valley OH! and feel like North American scum.
• Rocked with greater frequency with Dan out in the garage. The name for our band is, tentatively, Gestetners. For more info on the stencil duplicator that would be our namesake, check this. I think it kinda works, and I think Dan does too, though he can tell you otherwise in the comments if he so chooses.
  
• Been getting more excited by the day about my brother Mike coming to town this week. I'll be heading out with him to the Monolith Festival this weekend, as well showing him all of the tiny slice of Denver I myself have seen so far. OH AND YEAH IF YOU'RE READING THIS GO BUY MONOLITH TIX NOW!!! They're still available and even if I didn't hold a fundraiser to pay for your way to the show like I may have promised, I've decided I'm no longer accepting that as a valid excuse for some people not making it out here. Besides, I was super sick for like three weeks and I couldn't have made any money at a kissing booth even if I tried.
  
• Started cooking again to mixed results - tomato sauce from scratch turned out considerably better than eggplant parm, which I forgot needed to be sauteed or somehow heated and transformed before being placed in a casserole to bake. I proceeded to bake the eggplant for roughly 4 hours at 250 degrees to reach the desired consistency. Which it still really didn't. It was an utter shit show.
  
• Actually woke up for Friday morning breakfasts two weeks in a row. Got to listen to lots of baby-centric conversation I thought I wouldn't be party to for another 15 years. Silently prayed for my own infertility.
  
• Still haven't seen Superbad. I did however watch New York Stories and sat through about 15 minutes of the "Life Without Zoe" segment from the Coppola family before it was proclaimed by the room to be among the most criminal of garbages and I retreated for a smoke. Woody Allen's "Oedipus Wrecks" short was quite enjoyable though and salvaged the experience.
• Played RISK for the first time in maybe 15 years, and although it's been over a week since the game was started and I'm not the winner, I'm still happy I wasn't the first person eliminated. Sorry again, Wes.
  
• Rediscovered and re-embraced my long-standing love of the powdered, sugar-free drink mix and nectar of the gods known as Crystal Light. Oh, and a special fuck you to all the CL haters out there - you know who you are. More on this development to come in future posts.
  

I suppose that was a handy excuse to avoid recapping my last few weeks in coherent sentences, but well, that's your problem now, not mine.

So now onto the present day. It seems that some of the groups I work on behalf of have me confused with the fine professional pictured below:


So yeah, I'm not an internet secretary, I'm an internet organizer. I feel like some days to get that through the fucking skulls of some of the people I'm working on behalf of I need teach them like Anne Sullivan, spelling the words "I WILL SEND YOU THE REQUESTED MESSAGING AND STRATEGY MEMOS" into their palm in ASL. How hard can this possibly fucking be? It's OK, don't answer that question, I'm not sure I want to know the answer.

Lest you think I'm a completely miserable sod, I will say that work on the whole has been pretty great lately, with the above outburst being an exception to the norm, and living at the Marion House still feels it's the days of wine and roses. And on top of that, today felt like the first day of fall - a startling crispness was in the air and people were wearing sweaters all over the place. Things could be a lot fucking worse.

Almost forgot, here's a song, currently at 59 plays in my iTunes:

Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma