Diary04/06/00Today's big issue: e!?! I've been a weird kind of tired lately. I'll write more on the weekend. Um... 04/03/00 Today's big issue: zzzz I just finished writing a longish essay for philosophy- this is what I get for waiting until the last minute... St. Augustine is a punk. 04/02/00 Today's big issue: good and bad I had a cool weekend, right until some news on sunday morning. The good stuff: I didn't really do anything that could be considered a real acheivement but I had a whole bunch of fun. Zak was back and we chilled pretty much as much as was possible, and Ariel was there for a lot of it, too. On saturday we sort of chilled around, went to compusa so i could get stickers that I could print on in my printer and then watched Brain Candy. I hadn't seen it before, but I pretty much knew all of the lines because Zak recites them all the freaking time =). Then today Zak and I went over to Ariel's house and played with Legos and her (amazingly still functional) Colecovision. Rock. The bad: My sister is in the hospital recovering from (as in she was safe and getting better by the time I heard anything) a very life threatening condition that I won't get into here. So despite what would normally be good things, things definitely weren't perfect. 03/30/00 Today's big issue: heehee Today was weird. I got hate mail and for some reason it cheered me up. Heehee. 03/29/00 Today has not been good. I'm getting the feeling that my entire choice of what i'm going to do in life was wrong, that i'm not good enough to make it in college and that all of my dreams were just worthless fantasies that i followed along in the absence of anything else that could make me happy. I'm 19 years old and all that i have to show for it is a semister of classes at a lacklustre school, a large music collection, a second rate webzine, dwindling personal savings and every weeknight spent alone in front of a computer screen. and this is the easy part - i don't have to worry about getting a job or a home or a car yet, i don't have to worry about leaving the sheltered existence of education, yet i can't even handle this. in highschool, i always thought i could do well, and i figured that that would translate over to college and on paper it looks like it has - i have a 4.0 gpa, but it just doesn't feel right. i haven't done anything that i'm proud of at school, and i don't even feel motivated anymore. something that i had in highschool is just gone and i don't know how to survive without it. and my only choice is to wait and see what happens in school. i can't transfer anywhere else and even if i did it wouldn't solve anything and i have no other options. i need to go back to second grade. 03/27/00 Today's big issue: twinkle twinkle, blah blah blah. e! t! c! I'm still sick. This is pissing me off. Oh well... I had better get better soon... My computer decided to start hating me again - it wouldn't mount CDs, so I booted up from the OS9 cd and did a bit of a system reinstall... plus, in the process i was able to "upgrade" from quictime 4.1 to 4.03. Quicktime 4.1 sucks. BAD Apple, naughty naughty Apple. 03/26/00 Today's big issue: oy I'm sick, ill, not feeling well, all that. I fell asleep in the middle of the day and got very little work done... damn and blast. Yesterday, me and kevin went over to raessa's and watched the Burbs and 12 Monkeys.. that was nice... now i'm going to go to bed. 03/24/00 Today's big issue: whee! Yay friday - i wen't home again, of course. Kevin was still back on spring break so we rented Batteries Not Included. I love that movie... Otherwise, not much happened - I had my one friday class that everyone impatiently sat through and then I went home yayayayaya 03/23/00 Today's big issue: yay? I think probably the best thing about today was that it got rid of itself in a prompt manner. I knew from the start that it was going to suck: I mean, I went to a show last night so I was still tired when I got up, I had a quiz early in the morning, and a physics exam later on. I thouroughly kicked the behinds of my two tests, so I'm all happy now. This was weird, though: about ten or twenty minutes into the physics test, a kid stood up, announced "I don't understand any of this," and then crumpled up his test, dropped it in front of one of the TAs and then ran out of the room. Everyone just sort of sat there stunned for a bit and then some people giggled and we moved on. It's not like the test was even hard - it's just electromagnetic waves and stuff. I skooled it. Otherwise, hmph. Today is over and tomorrow is friday. I'm all good. 03/22/00 Today's big issue: yay! Yay! I just saw the Promise Ring! It was a great show! I'll review it sometime, but now i have to pass out and then study for the calculus quiz i have in the morning and then the physics exam i have in the afternoon... but yay! And Russ is cool in person and Vivian is, too! Yay there really are nice people at my school! Hmm.. I used the word "yay" a lot in that... I am in a good mood after all. Yay! 03/21/00 Today's big issue: ... i'm...fine. 03/20/00 Today's big issue: new skool, old skool, it's still all about the benjaminz Ladeda. Back at school. Dull dull dull, but for some reason I'm not as depressed about it as I normally am. I guess my trip worked wonders for my attitude towards things. Or something. Anyway, not much has been happening here. I should be doing more work, but I'm not. I should be sleeping more, but I'm not. I'm not doing much of anything, but it's taking up all my time. Today was Ariel's birthday, but I didn't call her. I wasn't being mean, she just said she was going to be way busy all week and had to do lighting stuff, so I didn't want to be a pest. But now that it's too late I'm thinking that I really should have called. Send her love, people =) 03/19/00 Today's big issue: YAY! Yeah so my vacation rocked. I was my usual shy self through most of it, so i feel kind of bad about that - i wasn't as good company as I should have been, but I still think we had lots and lots and lots of fun. The show on wednesday, which included The Part Time Losers, Mishima, the Musical Chairs, Jumprope and Dominic Waxing Lyrical (3/4 of St. Christopher gone punk, in place of St. Christopher, because one of them was sick and on another continent). It was so much fun! I loved all the bands! I bought cds from the Musical Chairs and Damien Waxing Lyrical (the others weren't selling cd, except for Jumprope but I already have their cd. They were all SO great. The Part Time Losers (usually one kid, sometimes accompanied by Brad Searles on snare drum) kind of remind me of Eric Metronome, the Musical Chairs aren't as surly as they look, Mishima is just cool, Jumprope have been my heroes for a while, and Damien Waxing Lyrical was... interesting. Definitely not what I was expecting from St. Christopher people, but fun nonetheless. The next day, Mel and I got on our bus to new york city at 8am. New York was fun, too! By the end we were sort of cursing the species that could create such a place, but it retrospect it was a good adventure. VERY busy city... we generally went around and saw the sights, and we hung out for a while in central park, which was one of my favorite parts, and we saw Miss Saigon on broadway, and that was cool too. The sets are so amazing for that. Heh - then getting back was the more harrowing part. We thought "oh, we'll just take a cab! it will be just as easy as it is in other cities and we will get back to port authority without much trouble!" heh. So yeah, we tried unsuccessfully to hail a cab for a while in the rain and then finally got directions back to port authority by subway and got to our bus like 5 minutes before it left. But we made it. All is good. For most of the rest, we had fun just enjoying Boston. The aquarium is the coolest! Penguins, seals, and otters are the cutest animals! We got to the science museum a bit late, so we didn't get to check out everything, but what we saw was really cool. I'm all about hands on science stuff. So yeah, boston ruled! Yay! I needed a vacation, and now I had one. And for some reason I'm not depressed right now even though I'm back at school. Yay! And, um, sorry to all the people i didn't write emails back to... i didn't go online while i was there and got back to an inbox with 298 new messages... heehee. Most of it was indiepop-list stuff, but that was still quite shocking =) If you wrote me, I'll really get back to you in the next few days ok? And I forgot to upload my last diary entries before I left, too. Oh well. Still, yay, I say! Yay! I'm going to upload some of my pictures tomorrow... 03/13/00 Today's big issue: tomorrow! I leave for Boston tomorrow! AYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYA!!! That's pretty much it for today: I just prepared - deposited my tax return (which I will in turn deposit into the Boston economy), finished all of the preparation shopping I needed to do, and packed. I'm all set. I've been ready for weeks, actually, but now I'm physically prepared. This is kinda strange, I guess: I would consider Mel a really good friend, and I don't even know what she looks like. Who says that appearances matter? If I can be friends with someone who I have no clue what she looks like, why can't people forget about such things as race? Ahh... if everyone was like me =) I wrote a lot of new reviews today, too. I didn't want to feel bad about neglecting this page while I was on vacation. I might update my diary while I'm there, it all depends on whether or not I can get an IP address at MIT without doing anything funky. 03/11/00 Today's big issue: oh yeah... I forgot that it was possible to have fun and anticipate having fun simultaneously. I'm all excited about Boston (still. are you sick of hearing me say that yet? well, I AM very excited about going to Boston), and today I actually had fun! Imagine that: a nice day that doesn't have that shadow of "i have to go back to school soon" hanging over it... yay! I went over to Ariel's house in the afternoon and Eric's house later on. I must say that Eric's kitty, Bug, is the cutest thing in the world. And I found the uglist shirt in my closet. It's so so SO hideous... you just wouldn't believe. I wore it today, of course. There was just something about how disgusting it was that made it irrisistable. Eric made me promise to never wear it again. Less than three more days! 03/10/00 Today's big issue: Then he pouts to try to sway me, but I don't think so... I got the books that I was planning on reading during my bus trips to and from Boston in the mail today: High Fidelity by Nick Hornby and Hit Men by Frediac Dannen. Well, I was going to read them on the bus. I ended up reading all of High Fidelity today. Whoops. It had been too long since I read a book in one sitting just for the heck of it anyway. I made Ariel a happy birthday mix tape today too, yay. Her birthday is on the 20th and I get back on the 19th, but I'm probably not going to get to see her between getting back and going to school so I should probably get it to her before I leave... I spent £12.42 at Southern today. I don't even know how much that is... it seems reasonable for two 7-inches and an LP, right? Especially since the price they said for the Secret Stars 7" was £0.00, which seems a bit low. It probably means that they don't have any left. Nobody has any left. But it did have a price on it, unlike the first secret stars 7" which just had a "request" button... so maybe hopefully? I mean I have the RPMs/Congress one, but I want the Nightingale/RPMs one! And my offer still stands: my soul for the Wait/Riot Kill one. I got a $450 tax return. That's larger than any paycheck I've gotten, I think... weird. Someone out there wants me to have a nice vacation. Anyway... 4 days until i'm in boston! 03/09/00 Today's big issue: one more just one more and that's it just one more only one... I have one more day of school. One class. One hour. Then I can go home and be happy. Zak really wants me and Eric to visit him, and I want to as well, but I'm not sure about how I would get myself down there. FIVE DAYS UNTIL I'M IN BOSTON! I didn't even realize before that we were going to be there for St. Patrick's day - neato! What do people do when they celebrate that, anyway? I never really did before... I made a bunch of booboos on a calc quiz today... well i'm not sure if that's quite the right expression: i looked at it, and i had no idea how to do any of it so I made up a few things that seemed right. Maybe I'll get partial credit or discover a new theorem =) Maybe I get too worried when I think people are upset with me? Or maybe when I get concerned they act like it's ok 03/08/00 Today's big issue: Oh, what a busy day! Will it ever be over? Two more days. I have to stop waiting until I'm too tired to write in my diary. 03/07/00 Today's big issue: more ticking noises Boston is getting closer and closer... Today: School, chill, sleep. Not much else. I talked to a bunch of people online and that's pretty much all I did. I kind of wish I did something outside other than going to class since the weather was beautiful today... 03/06/00 Today's big issue: TICK! TICK! TICK! In one week I'm going to be on my way to Boston! YAYAYAYAYAYA! This is going to rule so much. Hee I talked to Mel on the phone for almost two hours today, too yay! It turns out that we have very similiar childhood memories: we seem to remember the same episodes of Mathnet (remember that? the Dragnet-like educational show?) and when the subject of Grover came up we both thought of the same book, There's a Monster at the End of This Book. Heehee. Plus, Construx! Otherwise, not much happened today. Nothing really exciting happened in either of my classes and my social life here is still almost completely nonexistant. Oh well. 4 more school days and then vacation! I was so bored that I made this. 03/05/00 Today's big issue: omigod! THE PROMISE RING IS GOING TO PLAY AT VALENTINE'S!!!!!!![continue gratuitous exclaimation marks]!!!!!!!!!!! March 22nd! 8pm! The Orange is opening! [at this point Nick just crumbled into jumping around merrily and sputtering off giddy, incomprehensible exlaimations. -ed] ... Yeah, this is the morning after now and I completely forgot to write down my adventure! I went for a walk in downtown Troy and ended up lost and alone in the crack friendly section of Troy, hooray! It wasn't that bad though, and I made it back alive to boot. Before I got into the really bad section, I took some pictures: Downtown Troy at it's finest I. AM. ROBOSAM. BEEP BEEP! This lion is so gonna hurl! I just liked this. 03/04/00 Today's big issue: yaaaay! (mostly) Today was a nice day on the whole. I went over to Zak's house and we had a lot of silly fun. We bought even more Legos and we sat on the porch with the bubble pipes Mel gave me and pretended to be old English generals ("Yess. rahthar!" *bubble*). Eventually I went over to get Ariel (which took a lot longer than expected due to a lost tape thingie to hook up her cd player to the car) and we went over a chilled for a bit and then went to a show at Valentines (review here for that part) and then came back and chilled even more. A nice day on the whole. Yay! 03/03/00 Today's big issue: yay! Today officially ruled. So I went to the post office and there was a little slip in my mailbox saying that there was a package for me. "Weird," I thought, since I wasn't expecting anything. So the guy brings me this package with bubbles drawn all over it and it's from Mel! I bring it back, thoroghly confused and excited since she kept it a suprise, and inside there is, wrapped in bubblewrap and comics, a bubble wand, a bubble straw, a container of bubble fluid, two bubble pipes, and a pack of bubblegum! It's the coolest thing I've ever gotten in the mail! yaay! Then after I got back, I finally got in touch with Zak and me and him and his dad went to a jazz show at the Troy Music Hall, the Pat Metheny Trio. They were really amazing. He (Pat) played guitar and it had a very haunting sound to it, but would still get into quite a frenzy at points. He even broke a string! The drummer looked like he was going to pop out of his seat and the bass player, well the bass player was playing an upright bass and in my strange little world there's no way you can go wrong when you're playing an upright bass. Then, out of nowhere, they played this amazing untitled song that pretty much blew me away. It actually reminded me of Melt-Banana, which is pretty impressive for a jazz trio. He got out this weird looking Borg-like guitar that had the harshest sound I've ever heard come out of a guitar and the bass player started bowing his bass near the bridge and the drummer made rumbling noises on his drums and then it just exploded and then subsided again and exploded again and so on. I was pretty impressed. Hey this is almost like a show review... nah. I'd sound like a retard if I tried to review jazz... see current paragraph... of course, same thing follows for everything else... anyway... After that, me and Zak went back to his house and chilled for a bit and then it was getting late and now I'm here. yay! weekends are so much better than week days, and SOON I'm going to be going to Boston for spring break and it's going to be the best thing ever. woo! 03/02/00 Today's big issue: this is going to be a short entry see? 03/01/00 Today's big issue: March makes a bad first impression I just got off the phone with Ariel... she has been having a ton of computer problems that have kept her from printing a thingie for French tomorrow... it's after midnight and she has to get up at 6am, and it's still not printed. Sucky. Even Macs can be total bastards sometimes. Anyway... in two weeks time I'm going to be at the Jumprope/St. Christopher/Mishima/Saturday People/Part-time Losers show in Boston! And in less than two weeks I'm going to be on my way to Boston! And in less than that, spring break is going to come! Yaaaay! So, yeah things are having an annoying tendency to suck today, but I still have things to look forward to. I'm going to a show with Zak and his dad on friday and a show with Ariel and maybe Zak on Saturday (the saturday one is the Orange at Valentine's - all nerdrock fans in the area had better go...) And I CAN'T stop listening to the new From Bubblegum to Sky album... it's keeping me up at the moment- I want to go to sleep, but I don't want to turn off the CD. It's weird, I bought the 7" a while ago and I liked it, but it wasn't one of those things that I listened to over and over again, but damn this album is good. Review to come soon, along with a few more hopefully. I've been kind of neglecting that (except for the review that I put up yesterday..). Ever notice how I hardly ever give bad reviews? I guess I'm a bit too... enthusiastic, but I just don't get the point of giving a band on an indie label a bad review - if I don't like something, I don't see the point of talking about it. If there's something that i love, I can't shut up about it. I guess I just don't enjoy negativity as much as people my age living in America at this time are supposed to. And Mel has an orange teddy bear named Crayon! heehee =) 02/29/00 Today's big issue: and just think: in any normal year, today wouldn't have even happened! Yeah, so today kinda sucked. I found out that there was this mandatory review session for physics that I forgot to go to yesterday. It counts for two lab grades, both of which i get zeros for. Fooey. I mean, it shouldn't be a BIG problem since i've been regulatin' on the REAL labs and we get to drop one lab grade for the semister anyway, but i would have preferred if the one I dropped could have been an actual lab that I actually had a problem with. The only reason I had to go to this review session in the first place is stupid: there were three of them and whether or not you had to go was decided by your performance on a test we were given on the first day of class. Fair enough. If you passed the first part, you could skip the first session, same for the second and third parts. BUT we had about 40 minutes to answer 120 questions so I didn't get to finish, therefore I didn't pass the third part and had to go to the session. I already knew what they were going over, but their test was lame. Oh well. Otherwise today, I walked around and stood on a muddy hill and took a picture of the sunset while people looked at me like I was from Neptune. 02/28/00 Today's big issue: grr I kinda messed up on the presentation for dinosaurs... I forgot how to talk and then my brain stopped working and i forgot to put up one of the transparencies... gah. Otherwise, yesterday (it's now the day after) was ok, I guess. I got the new Cinnamon and From Bubblegum to Sky albums in the mail, and I wrote a review of the new Posterchildren album that I haven't been able to upload (along with my diary) because my server is being all wacky. It won't let me into the main directory... little bastard. Hee I figured out what big orange crayon stands for: Bidirectional Interpreter Group for Omni-Random Array Negative Generator Engine in Compact Redundant Access Yielding Option Node. So you see... 02/27/00 Today's big issue: [insert meloncholy song lyric here] Today was a weird day. I came back to school, got settled in and all of that, and commenced being very very bored. I ended up going for a very long walk. It took about an hour and I walked the whole time with no specific destination, i just went out and walked. Weird. I took a few pictures and here are some of them: Only. Pipe Troy looking deceptively pleasant This is where I decided to turn back Yeah, so that was kind of nice. After that I got back and talked to mel online and played pod racer against zak and matt. After that I kind of loafed around and listened to Built to Spill albums and then talked to Ariel on the phone. So I guess today was pretty nice. Yesterday was nicer though, probably. I went over to Ariel's and then we went to the supermarket. They were out of the little pills that expand into dinosaurs in water, but they had the sea creature ones so we got a couple of packs of those. I don't know why I find those things so pleasant, I just do... 02/25/00 today's big issue: hooray! I've done it! I can do silly things again, but still be at college! Of course, the silly thing I did doesn't directly involve anyone at school, but it's the principle. I sent a package of silly things to Tina! I would list the contents, but that would ruin the suprise, you know? On the other end of the spectrum, today I learned that in our society it is legal to shoot an unarmed, innocent person 19 times. It was, self defense, you see? I don't. The excuse was that they had reason to be afraid for their lives. The only reason that they were is that they were racists. I would normally consider this something that I would personally get scared about, but they wouldn't consider me a threat. It's really disappointing that we still live in a world where people think that the color of someone's skin relates anything about who they are. I know that I've gotten tans and my personality hasn't changed a bit from it. 02/24/00 Today's big issue: something happened today, right? I get the feeling that something important happened today, but i can't for the life of me remember what it was... so it's probably something important that I forgot about. Lame. Um... woke up early... class.. class... small period of time without class... class... chill.. bed. I don't think i left anything out. huh. The older entries are here... |
