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In other news, to motivate myself to do some of the updates I feel I ought to, I shall list them until I get them done, as a reminder of my laziness:
Guided by Voices @ Southgate House
Swearing at Motorists CD
Fairmount Girls CD
Rockets to Mars CDEP
There, that'll help me to get this crap done.
24 March 2000
Well, it looks like I'm going to Cleveland today, and coming back tomorrow,
so I will go down to Kentucky to watch GbV.
I've been thinking about the web a lot recently. I look at lots of semi-daily updated sites, and there are about a zillion of them out there. And truth be told, most of them, like this one, suck. I, of course, don't care, because the beauty of the web isn't that there's lots of information out there, or that there's this great new medium for ideas and such. No, my friends, the beauty of the web is that you're always only one click away from somewhere else. The best site is never the one you're looking at, it's always the next click. And when eventually you've been let down by enough links in a row, you get tired and click your browser closed (or hit 'q' in lynx) and go live in the real world.
Being one click away from everything is good because it pretty much works like that no matter how big the web gets. For instance, I only go to google and search on "pictures of my cats" if I really want to see someone's cats.
The point, and yes I do have one, is that the web serves as a useful way to not have to deal with people or things you don't want to. Identifying the pros and cons of this are left as an exercise to the reader. Or, you can just click on a link and go somewhere else.
23 March 2000
Well, I was all prepared to go see Guided by Voices on Saturday, but then I
get a call from long-lost Stett from San Antonio and he's going to be in
Cleveland this weekend deciding whether he can deal with 3 years of law school
at Case Western. So, change of plans--I'll be in Cleveland on Saturday night
drinking to the past and to the future.
20 March 2000
Well, my life is much more relaxed this week without school, although I'd like
to find out how one of my classes went. Yesterday was a downer with Stanford
losing, once again shattering my hopes. I pity the next student caller
looking for alumni donations, as s/he is going to get a piece of my mind about
clutch shooting.
And today got even better, because my follow-up eye exam pretty much confirmed that I'll need glasses, which marks a return to my pre-teen years, as it's been that long since I've had them. This probably isn't good, but as opposed to just having plain crappy vision in my left eye, I have a verifiable condition: keratoconus. It's actually not bad, and since my right eye is actually better than 20/20, I didn't even notice it. I suggested I get one of those Colonel Klink monocles, but the optometrist didn't seem to think that was the best idea. So this is one of those conditions where they really just monitor you and see how it goes from year to year. In the worst case, you get a corneal transplant, in the best case you live with glasses and the knowledge that your cornea is misshapen. I should've gotten a copy of my corneal topography though, as it would've been cool to post.
This is really one of those situations where you'd like sympathy and then have it turn out that nothing bad ever happens. Of course, I wouldn't have much sympathy until something bad happened (check back in 10 years, and see where I am then), so I don't expect any. And this is more than you ever wanted to know about my left eye.
In other news, like all good indie kids, I finally read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. It was pretty good, and I raced throught it, but it wasn't the laugh-a-minute romp I had hoped for, but perhaps that's just because I'm not British. I'll probably see the movie sometime, although maybe not until video.
Finally, I was kind of jazzed to go to a concert tonight, but there are none worth going to, which is kind of rare. So I think I'll stay at home, watch TV, and read some more from Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, which so far seems amazingly current for a book written in the early 80s.
18 March 2000
Well I survived St. Patrick's Day. It wasn't actually that exciting in terms
of things to relate, and for the record the best St. Patrick's Day I ever
spent was 1998 in San Antonio, but it was OK. These past two days have been
sort of anticlimactic. I figured that when you combine two of my favorite
things, St. Patrick's Day and the start of the NCAA tournament, that it would
be just that much better, but a final and some other miscellaneous items kept
me from watching basketball as much as I'd like and from starting the reverie
too early yesterday. Still, it wasn't bad.
On another note, I bought a CD burner and I plan to recoup my costs by selling bootleg copies of Britney Spears and N'Sync CDs, so send your check for $5 to:
Illegal Copyright Violations
Dayton OH 45458
and I'll send you the CD of your choice by these fine artists.
Actually, it is pretty cool, although it's only working on 2 of 3 OSes right now (Goddamn Windows 98). The first thing I did once I got it working was to create a CD with some MP3s from indiepoplive which I converted into regular WAVs so I could listen to it in my car. Tres cool.
14 March 2000
Thought for the day:
There is nothing quite so amazing as not making an impression when you thought
you had.
12 March 2000
New addition for stalkers: my tentative plans. For
the rest of you, these are not my longterm plans for life, which will be
coming soon enough.
11 March 2000
Just got back from going to see Turing Machine as a kind of reward to myself
for slogging through my papers. Now all I have left is finals, which hopefully
won't be too bad.
The show was good, although it was alot different from seeing them open for the Plan last week. Last week there were a couple hundred folks there--tonight there were 30 tops, and then some of the high school kids left to make their curfew I guess. The disappointment of the evening was that they sold out of their shirts in my size, which was annoying, as it was going to be my geek fashion statement for the year. I haven't bought a shirt at a concert in years though, so perhaps it just wasn't meant to be.
The rest of the weekend should be rather tame. I'll go to some friend of a friend's party tomorrow and hope that a bunch of people I know won't be there.
10 March 2000
Time: 0220
Time left: 13hrs 40 min
Pages left: ~3 (different paper)
Music queue: Flaming Lips
Well, for those of you who've been worried, I did manage to finish my paper,
and now I've got a minor one due tomorrow. Sure, I could've come straight
home and pounded it out by now, but instead I came straight home and fell
asleep for 4 hours, so now I'm up late again. Still, this shouldn't be too
difficult, and once I struggle through tomorrow, it'll be the weekend and I
can try to regain some of the sleep I've been deprived of.
09 March 2000
Time: 0515
Time left: 11hrs 45 min less time at work
Pages left: ~8
Well, it's either crash for an hour, or just go to work early, and I'm scared
if I crash now I won't wake up. Oh well.
08 March 2000
Time: 2355
Time left: 17hrs 5 min less time at work
Pages left: ~15
Beverage Choices: Coke, Peet's Arabian Mocha Sanani
Food Choices: Fat-free saltines
Music Queue: Silo the Huskie, Promenade, Dismemberment Plan, Radiohead
It's going to be a long night ladies and gentleman.
06 March 2000
Returned, alive, well, and happy from a brief excursion to Illinois. Made it
to Champaign Saturday morning, met up with
Nick, ate lunch, then prepared
for a trip to parts north to see
Dismemberment Plan at the Fireside Bowl. We traveled up to Chicago with
Sebastian Signal
Drench,
Jared
Entopy et al. for some pre-show record shopping and dining.
As for the show, I'm sure at least one of the
above, or Dan Apathy, who also appeared
and counts among the indie-rock-weblog cabal, will provide a more in-depth
review of the show, but let's just say that it was amazing. It's been a long
time since I've been to a show where everybody was dancing and getting sweaty,
and that's a damn shame. I had seen the Plan back in November when they played
to 20 people in Dayton, and that show was cool, but the large crowd and the
bands certainly managed to synergistically couple into something phenomenal.
Hopefully they'll be coming back to Ohio in April.
In the mean time, you can go check out one of the acts who opened and played
through blood for appreciative fans.
Turing Machine appears
March 10th at Club Safari in Dayton.
I'll be there assuming I handle this mountain of work that I'm currently
staring at.
02 March 2000
Time flys so quickly when you're out doing stuff. Unfortunately, since I last
wrote in this space, I've pretty much been doing mundane things which are not
worth writing about. There's hope for me though, assuming I get my act
together. If I can pound out a decent chunk of text for a paper I need to
write before Saturday morning, then I can go to visit Nick Monosyllabic and
see Dismemberment Plan before jamming back to Ohio. Otherwise, it's no fun
this weekend.
I think my fortunes will rise as we go deeper into March. I mean, there's all sorts of exciting stuff happening, like college basketball, a visit from GbV, warmer weather. Who knows what life changing things will happen in March? Well, actually, I've got an inkling, but you'll have to stay tuned for future updates as they come. Anyway, categorize my mood as extremely optimistic for some reason right now. Funny, I felt different ten minutes ago.
Oh yeah, in other news: I might have some eye dystrophy which might cause me grief in the (not-near) future.
And I'm still feeling fine.