Day 23 - Give pictures of 5 guys who are famous who you find attractive.

Hot famous men, huh?

I suppose I could change it to women to suit my orientation.  But I think I’ll leave it like this. (ps: I really did try to think of people who weren’t musicians… didn’t work out)

1. Owen Pallett

2. Julian Casablancas

3. Kele Okereke

4. Zach Condon

5. Sufjan Stevens (obligatory)

moral of the story: if you take a random handful of people whose music I love, they will probably be some good-looking dudes

CLEARLY THAT’S BECAUSE I’M SHALLOW

Day 22 - How have you changed in the past 2 years?

I thrive on music now.

I went from having ridiculously long curly hair to having short hair that I always straightened in the front.  and now I’ve gone back to the former again, but mainly out of lack of a haircut rather than any stylistic choice.

I’ve ‘come out of my shell’, so to speak, in a lot of ways.  I’ve developed some close and meaningful friendships, I’ve learned about life, love, blah blah blah.

I’m more mature and (usually) less mopey.  Still nerdy, but in a different fashion.  I stopped expecting the Wii to turn out anything great ages ago (though that might have been longer than two years… I don’t even know how long that damn system has been around) and, for that matter, don’t really have much interest in video games anymore.  Instead of wasting my time on a gaming forum, I’ve got Tumblr, Reddit, and music blogs to suck away my time.

Day 20 - How important you think education is.

Very.

I guess I just have trouble understanding people who don’t want to know more about how things work or why things happen or curious phenomena or what have you.

I mean, I understand why people probably get alienated when I talk about stuff I’m learning in Fundamentals of CS; certainly macros and fixed-point generators and lambda calculus are not everybody’s cup of tea.  But I don’t understand how people couldn’t find something that interests them enough to learn more about it.  Biology? European history? Sculpture? Sociology? Astrophysics? Theology? Gender studies?

Which do you think is worse: somebody wanting to get an education who is unable to afford it, or somebody who doesn’t desire an education whatsoever?

Day 16 - Your views on mainstream music.

My interest in it comes and goes, depending on how good things are.  Some of it sounds good.  A lot of it sounds terrible.  A TON of it all sounds the same. But that’s how it is with pretty much anything.

Last December, I heard a song on some blog that I quite enjoyed.  It was called “Your Love is My Drug”, it was by some person I’d never heard of until that point named Kesha (there was a picture of her upcoming album’s cover; I thought it was a little silly that she used a $ as an S… a little tacky and kinda played out; I didn’t realize anybody still did that.) and, as far as I knew, nobody else knew much about her either.  I didn’t hear Tik Tok until a few weeks later.

I liked the song because she had a nice little knack for word  sometimes, and there were a few turns of phrase that I loved, and still do (particularly do I make your heart beat like an 808 drum?, both for the simile and the rhythm of its delivery).  I gave her album a listen when it leaked, found it pretty enjoyable.  But now I don’t bother keeping up with her.  It’s what overexposure can do to a person.  I get sick of hearing about her, both from people who think she’s their Messiah and people who hope in their disparaging way that she contracts some disease or gets arrested and vanishes from public consciousness altogether.  She was nothing special, but it was cheery music to shovel a driveway to.  I listen to it more sparingly these days.

Lately I’m getting annoyed with a bothersome trend in pop music from people like Ke$ha and Gaga, and that’s the trend of lazy songwriting through repeated syllables.  I dunno, it can be catchy when used sparingly, but going along with this theme of getting sick of things after overexposure… “we are who we are-are, are are are are”, really? It’s in almost every song, and I’m over it. (/grumpyoldman)

ps: the new Kanye album is overrated; it’s good but not perfect, mainly thanks to bloated songs and that fucking bit with Chris Rock. The G.O.O.D. Friday tracks made me expect better.  but that’s another story for another time.

pps: popular “country music” is a genre that I feel quite comfortable broadly insulting.  I’m no huge country fan, but I’m pretty confident that it’s by and large terrible.  Not really something I can get behind.  Which isn’t to say I haven’t heard good country songs… but that’s where the ‘popular’ comes in.

ppps: it kills me when other people who write for my music magazine give higher scores to things like the Glee soundtrack than I’ve given to albums I thought were great.  I am, at the end of the day, not averse to being a music snob.  Sure, I may say ‘judge not lest ye be judged’ but if you’re listening to Maroon 5 then all bets are off.

pppps: I should probably say something about Hot Topic-core here, but I don’t know enough to really comment. My opening statements still hold.  Some of it sounds good.  A lot of it sounds terrible.  A TON of it all sounds the same.

Day 13 - Somewhere you’d like to move or visit.

I’ve never been out of North America.  I’d like to visit lots of European countries.  Japan would also be nice.  Maybe India or Korea.

In terms of nature-ish things I’d like to see some of the sights in Canada.

With regards to actually living somewhere… It’d be nice if I was able to support the government wherever I move.  Massachusetts is certainly closer to that than much of the US, but I’m still pretty unsatisfied with the current (and foreseeable future) federal government.

But I won’t lie… I’d feel guilty and inadequate trying to live anywhere where English isn’t an official language.  That leaves me with, what? Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK?  From what I’m aware, the British government isn’t much of an improvement beyond what I’m under right now.  I suppose I can be the stereotypical “I’d like to move to Canada” guy.  I don’t even know.  Maybe if I ever visit some nice European country I’ll change my mind.  I suppose if I were in Switzerland I could try and manage with English as I refresh my knowledge of German.  But anyway, all this amounts to is a bunch of blind speculation about places I’ve never been.

Day 12 - Bullet your whole day.

• Wake up around 8
• Shower
• Rewrite a conclusion to an essay
• Email essays to professor
• Packed a few things
• Went to dining hall: had a danish, a banana, and a glass of milk
• spilled the milk all over the table.  Cleaned it up.
• Headed to comparative arts a little late.
• Passed the professor (who was going in the opposite direction) while going up the stairs to the classroom. Prof: “Get to class, dude!” Me (feebly): “uh, I’m going?”
• Walked into the classroom, was greeted by the tender musical embrace of Berio’s Sinfonia.  Greeted, then spat on, slapped, and kicked around for the next ten minutes while we waited for the guest lecturer to get there.
• Guest lecturer was Eliot Fisk, a classical guitarist of some renown. Berio wrote the Sequenza for guitar specifically for Eliot.
• Eliot launched into a meandering and fascinating talk about a whole lot of stuff only tangentially related to the topic; i.e.: Islamic influence on Spanish culture, the tremendous resources available in modern day thanks to technology, the significance of the precision with which many modern composers write their scores, the significance of Bach’s handwriting, how Italians basically live in a museum
• Then he played a bunch of snippets from the (unsurprisingly enough) ridiculously chaotic Sequenza while discussing various guitar playing techniques (tambour, strumming, tremolo, trills, etc.) that were utilized in the song.
• Apparently a while into the song, Berio put a section where the guitarist plays a lot of open strings, which can be used to retune the guitar.  Apparently Berio said something like ‘after ten pages of rape, the instrument will probably need retuned.’  I wasn’t sure if I ought to be offended or not.  You be the judge.
• Anyway.  My recitation today was canceled so I went back to the room.  Threw some underwear into the suitcase.
• Went to lunch with friends.  Had a California Grilled Chicken Club with no mayonnaise.
• Went back to dorm.  Threw stuff in bags, walked out the door.
• Headed to the airport among a large crowd of other students with luggage.
• Easiest airport security I’ve ever been in.  I spent the majority of my time there putting stuff into bins.  I walked through a metal detector and was done with it.  Simple.  Easy.  No patdowns, no radiation. There wasn’t even a line.
• Thanks to my speedy time at security and everything going much better than expected, I had two hours to sit and wait at the gate.
• The airport wifi is terrible.
• Got on my flight, had trouble finding an overhead bin in which to put my luggage.
• The in-flight wifi was faster than the wifi at the airport, which says a lot.
• Right before landing, found out that the person sitting behind me lives a floor below me.
• Got picked up by my parents
• Stopped at some little Italian place for dinner
• Slept
• Got home
• relished the sense of being in this environment again.

Day 11 - Put your ipod on shuffle and write 10 songs that pop up.

1. One for the Team - Ha Ha
2. Kanye West - Can’t Tell Me Nothing (DJ Godfather Remix)
3. Paulson - Optimism is for Stupid Idiots
4. Arctic Monkeys - Fire and the Thud
5. Josh Ritter - Lark
6. Laura Cantrell - Love Vigilantes
7. Los Campesinos! - Heart Swells/Pacific Daylight Time
8. Clive Tanaka y su orquesta - Skinjob
9. Joanna Newsom - Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie
10. Florence + The Machine - Dog Days are Over

Day 10 - Discuss your first love and first kiss.

(yeah, I put this on hold a few days ago because I needed to keep from sitting down for hour-long posts.  But I’m home.  So I get to go back to being overly verbose again.  it’s all good, you’re quite capable of scrolling past if you don’t want to read huge walls of self-centered text.  But this one is going to be more aimless than usual.)

I was in 10th grade.  She was a year older than me.  We were both in choir.  The first conversation I ever had with her consisted of her trying to strike one up before a practice and me telling her apologetically that I’m not very good at small talk.

Then… we were… emailing for some reason? I can’t remember why and I don’t seem to have the emails.  It seems so… quaint. And then I went to her house with some people for a pool party. They straightened my long long hair. We watched Moulin Rouge. Somebody rested their head on someone’s shoulder.

Then during a choir concert a friend of hers got her to ask me out.  I was caught off guard. I don’t think I saw it coming.  After pausing to think, I said yes.  We sat and watched the choir concert next to each other.  I think I made a feeble attempt at putting my arm over her shoulder.  It should probably be mentioned that she’s six inches taller than me and I was always the tiny one in that couple.

We were wasting away a few hours before a baccalaureate we had to perform at as part of choir.  we went to a park and got rained on so we sat in the backseat of her car for the remainder of the time.  Awkward is an overused word, but it’s the most appropriate one. (After all, I’m not very good at small talk.)  It consisted of two hours of long silences punctuated by short bits of forced conversation.  And then we sort of fumbled toward kissing.  The first attempts didn’t really work well.  It’s kind of silly, in a way, to think of our innocence… we had no idea what to do.  It’s what I think of when I hear that Hold Steady line… “I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers.”  Citrus is probably my favorite Hold Steady song, incidentally; though, to be fair, I don’t know that many others.  I need to listen to more sometime.

When we got to the baccalaureate, people made fun of us because our hair was disheveled from the rain.  That was in the end of May.  June was delightful.  She went to Europe for most of July.  We talked every night, big cell phone bills, you know.  All the cliche stuff.  Then she broke up with me for the first time.

We dated on and off, flipping between being a couple and being really close friends, until early March of the following year, when we broke up for the last time.  It was not a good point in my life and it was months until I got over the breakup. And then it turned out that she hadn’t gotten over the breakup.  And things got really bad.  We went without talking for about as long as we had dated. But now everything’s good again, I think.

We were inseparable in the best and the worst ways.  ‘Us’ was, at times, the only thing in the world we felt we could trust or believe in, regardless of how many times ‘us’ had let us down.  I’ve got a lot of great memories and a lot of terrible ones.  I treasure the knowledge of what I’ve been through.  In so many ways, I’m completely unlike the person I was before the relationship.  But then again, in some ways, I’m completely unlike the person I was during the relationship.

That sort of hopeless young love where two people just want to hide from all the terrors of the world together and cuddle under a blanket until everything gets better, where they don’t have to face anything, not even the terrors that lie within… I wouldn’t wish that sort of profound sadness on anyone but at the same time I feel like that sort of emotion is something that forever sticks with someone and I think they’re a better person for having experienced it.

Day 07 - Your zodiac sign and if you think it fits your personality.

I’m a Pisces. Sorry to give the dull answer, but horoscopes are bullshit.

Anyway, I have the tendency to be helpful and put others in front of myself sometimes (though I’m not as bad about that as I used to be) which I guess is apparently a Pisces characteristic, according to the horoscope.  As are a ton of other characteristics which I’m sure the majority of people would associate with themselves.

Coincidentally enough, Feferi, the troll associated with Pisces in MSPA, is my least favorite character in the series.  I don’t hate her, but I’m a little disappointed that even though she was revealed last out of all the trolls, all the others were more interesting.

Day 06 - Write 30 interesting facts about yourself.

1. I don’t see what’s so great about Whip My Hair.
2. I feel like ever since I came to college, I’ve eaten less per meal. I just get full faster.
3. That said, I haven’t been eating healthily enough.  The dining hall I usually go to has too many dumb (or unappetizingly prepared) veggies instead of the tasty ones, usually.  And their salads suck. It upsets me.
4. It’s not that I think that they’re wrong, but whenever I hear arguments against meat/animal products in terms of animal cruelty, I have difficulty caring.  Human death usually doesn’t bother me, so why would another species? I’m all for that sort of thing from an environmental & anti-factory farming standpoint though.
5. When writing a story in first grade, I plagiarized the beginning of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  The teacher took me out into the hall and told me how great the story was and that I ought to continue it. However, I never did; I think I had a sense of how that sort of dishonesty was wrong.
6. I adore apple cider.  My family owns a neat cider press and most years we get some people together and make a few gallons of cider.  I haven’t had enough cider this fall.
7. Ever since seeing an expedition on his printmaking techniques this summer, I’ve been fascinated with Edvard Munch.  He was a brilliant artist and I think it’s a shame that all he’s ever remembered for is The Scream.
8. Whenever I see a well-filmed video of a live performance by a talented band/artist with great sound that inexplicably has less than 1000 views, a little part of me dies inside.
9. I’ve never had a job.
10. Tuesday is going to be the first time I fly on a plane without my family.
11. Even with all the hullabaloo going on about the TSA right now, it’s still probably going to be simpler for me without my dad going through the security screening.
12. I’ve got three exams and an array of other obligations between then and now.  I have no idea when I’ll pack. (this isn’t really an interesting fact, is it? also, it’s now only 2 exams as of the time I publish this.  It took me a while to come up with 30 interesting facts.)
13. I wish I could review music as well as Anthony Fantano does.
14. I can never resist a challenge to make a playlist/mix CD. (well, almost never)
15. I was compelled to put that ‘almost never’ on there because I don’t like black-and-white statements.  To me, they normally seem to be distortions of the truth. This makes me seem even more indecisive when I refuse to answer yes-or-no questions with a simple one-word answer.
16. Seven is my favorite number. It’s a really unoriginal one. But whenever I need to throw out a random number into conversation, I usually use either 12 or 5280.
17. In second or third grade, we had to write one of those TV Tune-In essays about our favorite TV show. I never watched TV at that point, so I wrote my essay about something on PBS I had seen once in my entire life. I think the episode I saw was about robots.
18. The music video is one of my favorite art forms.
19. I just looked out the window and saw an airplane in the night sky and realized… It looks nothing like a shooting star.  Who the hell is that stupid song trying to fool?
20. I’m a tenor.
21. On the subject of voice; I’m sure I’m not alone in saying so, but I can’t stand to hear my voice in recordings.  And yet I might be participating in some podcasts soon.  This will either help me get over this feeling, or cause me to have a breakdown.
22. I like the taste of metal.  Coins, zippers…
23. Once, when I was at Boy Scout camp during their last week of the summer, my friend Nick and I bought out the camp store’s entire remaining stock of Milano cookies.  Or maybe Nick bought them all and I bummed off of him.  Anyway, the end result is the same, and Milano cookies are forever associated with that memory. I’m eating some mint ones as I write this.
24. There’s a grocery store in one of the larger towns near where I live that has a coffee shop inside of it.  Now, I am not a coffee drinker, but my ex-girlfriend and some of her friends were borderline-obsessed with going there whenever convenient, and were especially fond of their ‘big straws’ (about 2 cm in diameter, regular length) so I would of course come along.  One time as I tried to figure out if I should get a smoothie or something, the guy working there, a dude by the name of Britain, says to me that he made himself a milkshake earlier and it turned out well, and offers me one. I go for it, and it’s quite possibly the best goddamn milkshake I’ve ever had.  So whenever Britain was working we’d get him to make us one (since it wasn’t actually on the menu).   I suppose this isn’t a fact about myself, so here’s one: I’m really fond of the name Britain. Also, Gabe.
25. I don’t talk to either of my main childhood friends anymore. It upsets me sometimes.
26. I can bend the bottom joint of my thumb in weird and interesting ways.
27. I’m afraid that I crack my joints too often and that it’ll cause me pain later in life.
28. I’m wearing a shirt with a huge picture of Pikachu on it right now.
29. The other day I saw a guy stealing salt from the dining hall. He took an empty coffee cup and emptied an entire salt shaker into it before taking it with him.  Just seems like a strange thing to take.
30. It’s been about a day since I started writing things on this list.  I’m too unimaginative and too perfectionist at mundane tasks.