holy crap. it's awesome. me and some friends jammed out on it a bit. and the three of us had a wonderful time. almost too wonderful....so i can only imagine what a hundred people will do with it. completely rad. so today i'm a little busy tidying up for the party (which i probably won't end up not doing sufficently). so i should get off my inkstone (see below) and clean. the mp3ing process is almost complete. amen. so, i'm excited about the party because of the karaoke machine. ah, the simple pleasures.
i stumbled across this quote in one of my old japanese quote books. i think it suits the greater blogging community well. goes as follows....
How foolish I feel when I realize that I have spent another day in front of my inkstone, jotting down aimless thoughts as they occurred to me, all because I was bored and had nothing better to do.
ha ha ha. i can't help but laugh at myself. i highlighted it and underlined it. i can think of a whole group of people who would like these essays by recluse-memoirists (teresa!).
yesterday was nice nice nice. i woke up diligently at about 8 or 9 (not like today) and i bailed on bowen in mixing the Gallon Challenge video, which is good because there's more fun to be had in binge drinking lactose...thus more file footage for the video.. i may be doing it, but i'm not sure. i really hate throwing up because i cry and get all pathetic, but that'd make a good going away party and some good footage of a guy crying about throwing up. yuck. i'm not sure. but then i went to double dave's which ended up being a double date with "girlfriends", go me. but i had to draw the line and say i was going to japan. that happens so often.
then i sat on my butt all afternoon ripping CDs again. arrgh. its so tedious. i don't like it one bit. i bailed on my hope group because i felt cleaning pressure, to which i did very little. i got frustrated with the broken rice cooker so i went to Taqueria Arandas Gudalajara Numero Cinco!! what was better than the cheap food was the wonderful company. then i went to the melt banana show.
i felt like a dork because i was out of uniform for the show. and i thought i'd feel that way, but i have this ethic about changing what i've been wearing just to go to a concert...that to me feels like a poser. so 99% of the time i go to concerts in what i'm wearing and i refuse to gussy up. but since i'm at the bottom of my dirty clothes pile (yes, i said that right) i looked like a college boy (ironic i am). anyways, the show took forever to start and i just sat around by myself until adam showed up. then we just piddled around. i talked to a girl from melt banana about japan in japanese. that felt kind of rad. i thought i was just talking to a normal japanese girl, but this girl freaking wailed at the bass. she tore it up. and she also let down her hair and look slightly more evil under the red lights. maybe she put on some creepy make-up or something. but i'll get to that later...but man, if i had known she played the bass, i'da been a lot more talkative.
the first band, OH BEAST! was pretty good. like devo in a way but crazier and louder, and distortier. i laughed a lot. it was a great performance.
the second band, America is Waiting, was...well, a let down. the had really mastered the art of guitar-slinging and harmonic noise making, but they let me down at the end. the show was going well when at the feedback end of one of their songs (all their songs had this) one of the three guitarists decided his telecaster wasn't good enough, so he smashed it up against a pole. this was alright. but i see all these things as "tricks" now. like, let's break a guitar because that will be awesomer! but its not really, its a guy wasting $300-$1000. then in the next song after the "technical difficulty" a new guitar was brought out and more rocking ensued. then this is where it turned from performance tricks to drunken behavior. the singer went to say something in the mic and fell off the stage, guitar and all, on his butt in the crowd. let some kid get on stage and clang on his guitar, then more guitar breaking and throwing. then more falling off the stage, then the old "leave the guitars feeding back and then leave the stage" trick. oh, did i mention he threw beer over the whole crowd? so....i lost interest and the band goes down as uncool in my book, even though they had potential. sucks to be opinionated doesn't it?
then melt banana came up. rock and roll hardcore. the pit was stirring in a very creepy middle-aged guy sort of way and adam, donald, myself, and this guy where stuck being the protectorate of girls getting crushed at the front. BUT to some degree they're asking to get crushed. i knew i was...so...they wailed. the guitarist was amazing, the bassist as i've mentioned was radical, the singer was high pitched and yappy (in a good way) and the drummer was phenomenal. the show ended late and adam and i exited.
we had to change a tire on my car because it had a tumor, and that leads to blowouts. so that took some time getting home. but it was fun. but as we were driving to adam's on mopac we heard this expulsion of gaseous material, this freaked us out because it sounded like the donut failed. we stopped and checked, luckily, all was well. so we went on home. so now, after i post i'm going to go get new tires and rent a karaoke machine! ya! then today will be the last day i own my car.
in exactly one month i will be landing in japan for, as i've said, one to three years and maybe the rest of my life. exciting.
blogger finally merged me over to the new system of things. its a little different now than when i tested awhile ago. but hey. its pretty hot looking. i can't complain. and i'm pretty stoked about viewing features. so...i'm moving into the blogging future way behind everyone else.
speaking of blogging future...i've received two notifications of people having blogs. one, i will need to get permission to post because its more personal (which isn't bad, its just more personal) but the other one i will gladly laugh about...post about. its from my compadre Reagan Ray and his compadre Mik, its their diary of their summer roadtrips to find advertising jobs in a bear market recession economy. its pretty funny. and i actually found out about another friend who rocks a blog, but her's is in japanese...so that doesn't help the mass public out there...ok. so enjoy those.
afterwards, i'll go to the brownpaperhope and then i'll connect with my japanese crew and we'll go see Melt Banana, a japanese hardcore (but not-so-hardcore) band. should be rock and roll. well...i'm excited.
my party is coming up and i have to get all kinds of crap together, like a clean house and all my CDs ripped so that i can give them away at the party. awesome huh? so much to do, so little time to do it. rawr.
OH! yesterday i downloaded a freeware multitrack recording program called Audacity, its sweet and will allow me to cheaply produce some music....expect music to hit the music page probably within a couple of weeks. exciting huh? ok. i must leave you because i'm feeling busy right now even though i'll piddle the next few hours away on the internet. ok. bye.
i've been reading that book shame by salman rushdie and i'm blown away by how this guy writes. its intricate and narrative. but there was one little piece that keeps echoing in my head. i quote a bit of p.50 below. some background info you need to know, zoroaster is a customs officer on the barren (likely Afghani) border of the Pakistani frontier, his daughter got pregnant as a teenager and brought shame upon the family, "Q." is the town (likely Quetta)...
...Zoroaster the customs officer had fallen sick under the spell of the bribeless desert and had taken to standing stark naked on top of concrete bollards while mirror fragments ripped his feet. Arms outstretched and daughterless, Zoroaster addressed teh sun, begging it to come down to earth and engulf the planet in its brilliant cleansing fire. The tribals who bore this tale into the bazaar of Q. were of the opinion that the customs-wallah's fervour was so great that he would undoubtedly succeed, so that it was worth making preparations for the end of the word [sic, world?].this i carry on my mind all day. to me the allusion and the imagery is too intense to verbalize...i could only scream it.
i seriously sit here, watching my back, and think, "my life is freaking crazy (wait until my blog hears about this)." this is crazy. the email, and this lightens up a bit, went on to explain certain situations and children that i might come across and it talked of a young girl named Rina Yamaoka and here's what the email said, "There is one student in this class and her name is Rina Yamaoka. She is very smiley. She can't move nor speak. It's tough teaching her but you get use to it. I'll leave you some copies on what I did with her. She loves colouring, so you have a fairytale colouring book over if you like, I'm sure it would help a lot." i was brought to tears when i read this.
