Oh, also, I took a practice GRE a little while back and totally forgot that there would be math on it, so I didn't bring a calculator with me. I scored in the 22nd percentile for the math section. According to Kaplan, I've "got a lot of work to do and there's no time to waste!" Thankfully, they also say "it's easy to improve your score from here (i.e. bring a calculator, stupid), so don't panic. Kaplan has the strategies and techniques that will help you raise your score and your confidence. Choose Kaplan and gain the advantage!" Gee thanks, Kaplan! If I didn't know any better, I would think that you either A) administered the test, or B) had something to gain from me doing poorly. Hrmm.
Okay, so The Girl was down this weekend and we did stuff. Saw
Heart of Gold and that rocked (mad props to The Girl for seeing it twice). Saw Erik Petersen in this dude's kitchen in West The Moon playing a set of all covers. My weekdays are turning into tests of endurance, though my job at the phonathon is really just turning into me doing the Wonderword in the Inquirer and making an occasional phone call to someone's answering machine. And since I tried to make substantive posts and failed, I'ma stick to mindless gibberish for now. Also, here's a good quote about writing.
"In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused."
-Ernest Hemingway
I started this story today. It's been fun to write so far, but I stalled out. I've been reading a lot of Donald Barthelme lately, specifically
Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning. But yea, here goes.
"Isaac before the knight"
Isaac at the table. Mother is preparing a stew from the legs of yesterday's pig. A black pot over the fire. The stones of the hearth hot to the touch. Isaac drops his fork on the floor.
"Isaac!" screams Mother.
"Mother!" screams Isaac. "It fell!"
Isaac reading a book by candlelight. Fingerprint smudges on the worn pages. Black ink on his fingers. Names he can't pronounce yet. Ideas he starts to understand. He weeps from joy. Brother squints at him.
"Why do you cry, Isaac?" asks Brother.
"It is beautiful," says Isaac.
Isaac as a young man. Trapped in the library. Feet tapping, fingers drumming, watching animals outside the window. The books have become too short. The nights getting longer and Isaac can't sleep through them anymore. Laudable letters from admirers.
"Please write back," they say.
"Please stop writing me," he begs.
Days getting longer, Isaac languishing. Tip of his tongue, at the end of his fingers, right underneath his feet. The shade of the tree. Exhaustion overbearing, overcoming, hunger overpowering. Stomach twisted in knots, mind warped from slumber, eyes sore from staring. Uneventful visit to the orchard this time. An angry passerby.
"You are too smart to languish," says the passerby.
"Not enough reason," mumbles Isaac.
Isaac near the sea. He gazes at the dying sun. He knows the world goes on beyond the horizon, but he feels the doubt behind his eyes. Gypsies banging a drum inside his head. The picnic basket almost empty. The girl beside him splitting blades of grass, sifting handfuls of sand.
"Where are you now, Isaac?" she asks.
"I wish I could say," he says.
It started innocently enough: I had to trim my beard. But a perfunctory cleansing of the bathroom sink led to a more thorough job, and that led to a full-out Cleaning Of The Bathroom. It needed to be done, and I spent the last 55 minutes cleaning our 2x2 foot bathroom. Weird shit in the creases of the shower. About a year's worth of hair and dust on the ground. Soap that was becoming part of the sink. Sorry if this doesn't make much sense - I have a small shower and I used a shitload of Fantastik. I don't care if everything (more or less) in the bathroom comes from our own bodies or via our bodies - for the record, that shit's gross.
Speaking of for the record, my Top Five in the
Collegian this week was about bands that get written off as one-hit wonders by the "mainstream" when really their whole catalogues prove them to be ridiculously good. The list consisted of Blur, Blind Melon, Nada Surf, At The Drive-In, and Harvey Danger. (This is a nuanced argument, but the point is that these bands don't achieve
mainstream respect, even if they are critically acclaimed or loved by underground fans.) I might add to that list Pavement, Fiona Apple, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Ben Folds Five, Dinosaur Jr., Hum, The Lemonheads, Warren Zevon, The Violent Femmes, and The Beatles. That is all.
As much as we'd like to think differently, energy drinks still don't have as much caffeine as good ol' coffee (they have about half, from what I understand). But it seems like with the success of Red Bull and other assorted purveyers of the nectar of the gods, we've been confronted with an assault of pep. My two favorites earn dubious distinctions.
First up,
Tab. Yep, the sultan of saccharin is back - only this time without the cancer. Coca-Cola opted for sucralose (Splenda) as the sweetener this time around, though a decade after the original Tab was pulled for causing cancer in lab rats the soda was put back on the market. (Side note: friends and I once had the "cancer challenge," wherein we had to drink a sixer of Tab and not get cancer. I won.) The new energy drink has a spiffy can and the Tab name...and tastes like garbage. Kinda tastes like banana a little (actual banana, which you don't expect from something so blatantly artificial), but mostly still tastes like cancer. Next!
Vault. Another gem produced by Coke, the company claims that it's trying to outduel Mountain Dew as the official drinks of mountain bikers, snowboarders, and other douchebags who can't seem to stop speaking at 3.2 DPS ("dudes" per sentence). I tried this stuff out the other day, and it seemed to bring me back a couple of years, though I couldn't quite figure it out. I decided to give it another go, and again the taste was unbelievably familiar. The I studied the bottle, the color of the drink, smelled it - and it hit me. Coke is bringing back that most vaunted of the covert energy drinks -
SUUUUUUUUUUUUUURGE. That's right, kiddies, it's only a matter of time before your local
Lazer Tag arena opens up again.
I made my inaugural trip to Atlantic City this last night. It was pretty fuckin great. I ended up only being down about 15 bucks, which is pretty hot for 7 hours of gambling and other assorted mild debauchery. Between the four of us, we ended up losing something like 650 bucks. Poor E-Rock lost damn near five hundo. After losing the 420 he came down with, we went to a pub and I bought him dinner and we took turns buying him shots of the cheapest whiskey they had.
E-Rock: (to waitress) How much is the cheapest whiskey you have?
Waitress: 3.50
Joe Smash: Bring him a shot of that on me.
E-Rock: Bring me another shot of that on me.
So if you know E-Rock, give him a pat on the back. Also, don't tell his girlfriend how much he lost.
So what did we learn? Don't listen to
Floorpunch.
Wilkommen,
Sully! Yet another
Fund egomaniac. Good to see so many faces.
Rage Against the Machine is a good band. I find it hard to believe that a band like that existed for as long as it did - as far as I'm concerned no other band has mixed musical innovation, politics, and pure fury quite as well as they did. Audioslave, for the record, can fuck off. Let's compare lyrics, shall we?
Zach de la Rocha:
"Hoover, he was a body remover
I'll give ya a dose
But it'll never come close
To the rage built up inside of me
Fist in the air, in the land of hypocrisy"
-from "Wake Up"
Chris Cornell:
"I've been wandering sideways
I've stared straight into the sun
Still, I don't know why you're dying
Long before your time has come"
-from "Your Time Has Come"
Finally, this is getting silly:
Woo! Plastic Coffee Cups is turning 100 posts old! To celebrate,
Lou and Michelle made a cake, complete with butter frosting from scratch. It was rich as hell, and
Drew had a diabetic seizure afterwards, even though he's never been diabetic. (Okay, so they didn't make it for me or this shitty blog, but they made it nonetheless, and it was good.)
Welcome,
Denise! I, for one, am excited to have you on board. Plus you just look so cute in your smart pantsuit.
We ended up getting about a foot of snow here on The Moon, though that's really just me throwing out a number without doing any searching at all. The Girl In New York said that they got 26 inches, so that's pretty impressive, I guess. Got some very nice pictures and very cold extremities out of it, and that's nice.
Dick Cheney:
quick on the trigger in so many ways. Nice shootin', Tex.
I got some hot new sweaters:
Both those and three books for $4.91 at Village Thrift across the bridge. Hotness! (And yes, I realize how creepy those pics look in succession. What can I say, the pose works.)
Oh, and of course...
Anyways, wish me luck in the triple digits!
To me, the muffled silence that falls on the world when it snows is one of the most beautiful sounds I can imagine.
My beloved tea house in winter.
Soundtrack for a snowy Saturday night at home: Billy Bragg and Wilco
Mermaid Avenue, Volume One. Specifically, "Way Over Yonder" and "Ingrid Bergman."
The previously-mentioned awesome shit occurred eight blocks from
The Cobra Commander's house in historic Bethlehem, PA. You know, I noticed that when I was watching it, but I'm glad you remembered - because I didn't. Much obliged, sir.
Also, finally got back to doing some artwork. Trying out some new techniques. Check it.
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Also, 17:10:49. And yes, I plan on continuing to mention this.
So I was watching this show
Cheap Seats with Randy and Jason Sklar tonight. I could take or leave the Sklar brothers(except for their work on
The Oblongs, of course), but this show actually turned out to be pretty good. They were doing a program from the 1999 Highland Games, where contestants do
awesome shit. Then they showed me the glory that is
hurling, the most dangerous sport this side of stickle. Hurling is basically like field hockey, rugby, soccer, lacrosse, and 1970s
NHL Hockey rolled into one ridiculous sport.
Anyways, my point is that Cheap Seats can be pretty hilarious, but it just made me miss Joel and the boys from
MST3K that much more. (That's what we nerds call it so that we can have more time to play Warcraft.)
Also, remember
Magic Eye? Shit was off the hook.
And for the record, I've been online 16 days, 1 hour, and 35 minutes. Even
I feel sorry for myself.
[EDIT: I forgot to mention that everyone should check out
Rick's blog. Rick is a dear old friend of mine - we played Pop Warner football together oh-so-long-ago. Also, he was the first non-The Girl recipient of mailed artwork.]
I've been online a long time.
(I was going to blur out my screen name, but then I realized that I would just be flattering myself. I talk to all of you online anyways.)
Not too much to report on this end. Just got back from New York, finally started writing an essay on the city. What a weird place.
Steelers won. Some might ask how much stuff
Danno has set on fire; I would ask how much stuff he hasn't.
I love doing the Collegian, but sometimes it gets to be a burden. Thank goodness I only have one page, no writers, and no real layout or time consumption. Sucks to be
Drew and
Lou, though. (Real editors.)
Daggers is (hypothetically) going into the studio this weekend. I'm more skeptical than last time, but still filled with youthful optimism. I'll be more impressed when we get there and start recording.
More art and writing forthcoming. Also, had my first idea for a comic in over two years, so we'll see how that goes.
Observations:
1)People who put their name/nickname/initials/prison name at the top of their AIM profiles crack me up
2) I really, really hate people who have music on the myspace profile.
3) The Cure is still pretty good, especially since I buy my earrings at Hot Topic.
4) I'm quite ravenous.
5) Ravenous is a good word.
6) Still hate Facebook.
7) List of good words forthcoming, a collaborative effort between Drew and I. Suggestions?
Ok, so here are two more splatter-type deals. I think I'm going to start doing these on colored backgrounds. I also picked up some new paints yesterday, which is always very exciting. I believe that both of these are spoken for, though (11) may or may not be available, depending on The Girl In New York's taste. Availability update Monday.
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I present these because they prove how un-artistic I am. However, some of them are a few years old by this point, and I got a chuckle out of some of them when I rediscovered them (especially the last one). (Click the picture if you actually want to read them - they come up small here. Also, if you care to see who I ripped off, go
here.)
Here's the latest one. Available pieces update: 2, 3, and 10 are available. Also let me know if you want a custom job!
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