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blur Wednesday March 31
i also bought four new CDs in london:
- radiohead - ok computer (didn't have it, it's a standard, and it was five quid)
- gomez - liquid skin (again, five quid)
- the shins - chutes too narrow
- blur - the best of blur
i love the best of blur disc. in fact, the blur cd spurred this post. basically, if you only know "song 2", you're missing out. it seems like a catchy, fun, one-hit-wonder of the late nineties -- but if you listen to it in context with the rest of their music, it transcends its burnt-out altpop radio homeland and returns to the place where songs actually have meaning and are worth listening to.
back in ussa Monday March 29
a couple weeks ago, i described my life as 'intense' trying to keep up with all of the schoolwork i had to do. vacation held the same intensity, but in a different way, and it seems it won't be stopping anytime soon. back to schoooool.
i have four things to comment on: spain, cara and more, new york, and theories about travel. i have decided to subdivide my post into these themed segments such that you can skip to whichever interests you...or read all the way through.
on the airplane on the way in, i already loved (northern) spain. it's beautiful -- sloping mountains, green hillsides, beautifully refreshing short rainstorms (cara hates rain, though -- i think she's missing out), and good food. the food in northern spain in general is faaaantastic. seafood, amazing. pintxos, amazing. everything is fresh. i envy those living in larger american cities that have access to fresh fruit, meat, and bread products. certainly, i bet i could get fresh baked bread in champaign as well, but it's just the principle of the matter. we all go to the grocery store and buy everything. and even when we do go to speciality shops, we get in our cars and drive to each one -- in spain, we left cara's apartment at 1:30 or so -- making it to the bakery, butcher, fruit shop, and general store all before 2 (when they close for siesta). they're all that close to her apartment.
inspired by the pintxos and ensalada mixto, i'm having a dinner party next tuesday. leave a note in the comments if you're interested.
when i arrived in new york city, i unpacked my cell phone from my backpack and called michael to arrange my transfer between JFK and newark airport. the customs people yelled at me for using my phone before clearing customs, but before i hung up mike indicated that he was in the hospital and unable to take me.
on the other side of customs i called my dad, who told me that it was not serious, but that michael had entered the hospital with a blood clot in his lung. i've never heard of such a thing, but i'm just glad that it wasn't serious. it was serious enough, though, that the hospital admitted him saturday afternoon, and as of sunday evening he wasn't leaving.
thus, i walked over to the american ticket counter and changed my ticket to the first outbound flight in the morning, and then took public transportation over to mike's store to meet up with his wife, juan (aya). after waiting for a little bit for her to finish some business at the store, we went over to the hospital by mike's apartment. he was acting just fine, but he was also on blood thinner: maybe the clot would come back when the medication is removed? that's my concern.
my fourteen hours in new york city, though, have convinced me that it's time to seriously figure out what i am doing this summer. i've hinted in a previous post that i don't know what i want to do -- and i have a lot of options. i believe at this point that the most economical thing to do is to go to new york city.
there's quite a lot to say here, and i suppose the title of 'cara and more' is a little deceptive. certainly, i'm not going to write about her at great length; it's not fair of me to discuss her in a public forum that she has no control over. however, i can discuss myself in relation to her, and i think that even as she reads this, she'll agree that it is not inappropriate. it's far more about me.
one of my lesser qualities is one that i inherit from both my mother and my father: i am stubborn when i get stuck on something. in the case of cara, i got stuck on the idea that we could make our relationship work with effort. but she herself asked me about a week ago what it was about her that was so special -- and objectively, nothing. certainly, there are things about cara that are unique, and i won't find these combinations of traits in anyone else.
but when i think about the aspects of the dating relationship i valued most, they came in the form of love and support and other feel-good words that are not tied to a direct person, but words that are more the result of spending a significant amount of time building a relationship with some person. and because i had invested so much time in cara as it were, i wasn't just going to give up easily at the first sign of failure.
failure is a dangerous word, and i wouldn't call our situation that, either. more or less, it is the recognition that while we have compatible personalities and goals, we also have a different value system pertaining to our handling of relationships, and that makes us incapable of dating each other as our current selves. i don't rule out the future because i can't predict it. if you were to ask me, though, if i'd date heather again, i'd say 'no' flat-out. i can already say with decent certainty, that heather is not the kind of person that i need to be with to be happy. she's a wonderful person and was a wonderful girlfriend, but the combination of the two of us just wouldn't work. i could go on on this, but it's not necessary to drag out old laundry for no reason. just take my word for it, it's a side point to the final thought anyway.
i can say that the only reason i am so sure i'll never date heather again is that i dated cara, and there were things that my relationship with cara that could not have been (and could not be as far as i can tell) with heather. thus, by method of comparison, cara has been the closest person to what i am seeking in a serious dating relationship. i find this comforting in the sense that she is also my last relationship, and the general trend is encouraging.
indeed, i see my own mistakes from my relationship with cara; when she left last fall i held her back as a pitiful attempt to keep her close to me, and that was selfish: i should have let her be herself. if at that point she chose to stay close with me, then it would be testament to the mutual commitment to the relationship.
internally, i've also been guilty of living in the past. with cara gone but not gone, i could conveniently remember past good times to avoid seeking new ones, and this led to stagnation. while i've certainly done things this year that have been developmental, i will already concede that junior year was far more important in my early young adulthood.
i can cite many positive changes in myself throughout last year, and i'm having more difficulty doing the same this year. i am more or less the same, stagnant. worse yet, by constantly projecting myself into my post-graduation future, and by watching friends' similar growing distaste for champaign-urbana (cf. todd), i was able to convince myself that my developmental stagnation was appropriate, and that there was nothing i could do about it other than wait it until i could change my locale.
peggy kilgore always says that it's not where you are, it's who you are. life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety how you react to it. i have failed to look inward enough this year and grow myself, and i have blamed it on a host
of other factors: location, fewer close friends in town, etc..
and that leaves me right where i always end up (no, not existentialism this time), which is questioning what i really want from my young life. i am amazed how most of us live our lives not knowing where were going, or if we do, why we're going there, and if we do know why, questioning whether that's the best for us. and there's a whole new post that should be started right now on this thread, but i'm going to let it go for now.
i talked to some people in champaign who did the standard florida/cancun/south padre-style spring break, and it made me think about how i travel. certainly, what i was looking for from my trip is different than what those friends were looking for; they went as a big group of friends to a location within the continental united states for the express purpose of getting sun, drinking, eating out, and potentially, meaninglessly, and temporarily trysting with members of the opposite sex. and yes, "tryst" can be used as an intransitive verb. i looked it up, foo.
i told charlotte this afternoon that my ideal vacation always seems to be one where i'm ready to go back by the end of it because i've so worn myself down "on vacation". while my impromptu, unplanned vacation to london last fall was a success, i call it such because i got to "live" in london for five days: doing work that i could have been doing in champaign, but was still choosing to do while "on vacation". it's not that i can't escape from work, it is more that my daily life is not stressful enough to warrant "break time" where i can get away and forget everything.
i bought a book called the art of travel when i was in london last time, and it covers this topic significantly: what does it mean to "vacation"? what are we really in search of, anyway? for me, it is never escape, it is always discovery either in self, location, or others. i told reva that i enjoy just going to somewhere new to watch how people from that locale live. watching how people live is fascinating to me, and i think this is further evidence that i should be a social anthropologist. my first task to get such a job, though, is to be able to spell anthropologist without looking it up to make sure it's correct.
i'm sure there's more to be explored on this topic, too, but i'll get there eventually. i just want to get this up and online so i can get back to catching up on my homework. you know, the homework that was due a week ago, but i was out of the country?
out of urbana Wednesday March 17
for the second time in a year, i'm taking off out of the country. by the time i go to japan, hopefully i'll have the miles for a free ticket?
i'm going to go get my fish-n-chips on, see y'all in a couple weeks. of course, there will be blog & picture updates when possible.
self-reward Monday March 15
it has been one crazy weekend. far too much school work and pitchpipe work, and i'm starting to see that it is not possible for me to do pitchpipe so full time if i want to get a better-than-B average this semester. whatever, these are decisions for after spring break. but, to console myself in the writing of my EALC 391 midterm (which i am currently penning in the undergrad), i purchased three new cds yesterday to listen to:
the beta band - the three eps
almost eighty minutes of music on a commercial cd. unheard of. brilliant disc; i had some of the songs downloaded from sophomore year, and i finally got around to buying the cd. not at all disappointed.
incubus - a crow left of the murder
love the single, love incubus. bought the disc. heard people say they've been disappointed. i'm sure it'll take a few listens; gretchen told me that -- so we're giving it the listens it needs. i will say that it is probably more like keep it together in that it takes time, less like morning view or make yourself.
jets to brazil - orange rhyming dictionary
i should have bought this years ago. two plays and i have it stuck in my head. not in a bad poppy sort of way, either. the lyrics are phenomenally memorable: "do you know what would be good right here / some yellow / touch of humility, original sin or two / from you" ... "unflinching trigger finger / coffee fetcher to the letter / seeing through" ... "finishing school is done / the appropriate responses are wrong / for once in your life / man just think / unemployed war heroes / hating this peacetime"
the feeder cd Sunday March 14
last week i expected one package. but not two. when alissa told me yesterday that a cd mailer had come for me, i was curious.
for those of you who don't know or don't remember, i lent this girl christina my feeder cd in december. after realizing that my situation with her was going nowhere fast, i wanted to get my cd back. i quickly realized that i might not get it back quickly if i didn't act quickly.
yet, winter break happened, and she still had the disc. efforts were made in mid-january to retrieve it. she went as far as to promise to drive it over to me before going out one night, but i was stood up. so about three weeks lateron, i sent her an e-mail with two words:
keep it
i expected that this would either guilt her into returning it, or it would guilt her into keeping it to avoid dealing with the shame of returning it. what i had not counted upon, however, was a third possibility: that she would spend $1.42 in postage plus the cost of the mailer to return it to me by post.
to make matters more interesting, she included another cd (burned), and a note saying:
mark, my apologies for the delay...i have included a burned copy of an artist i've recently discovered. i don't know if you're familiar with him or not, but i really enjoy it and thought you might too.happy listening,
christina
the note is very sterile, and it doesn't leave too much room for further communication between the two of us. but that's all right, crazy girls are a dime a dozen these days, and i definitely don't need any of that. what i do need, however, is my feeder cd.
and i have it.
*sigh8
yes, i know i'm stealing todd's thing. first, i'll say what i need, and hopefully someone can help me:
i need a copy of windows xp pro service pack 1, or windows 2003 server. who's got me? i only need the CD for about five minutes.
now here's why. a couple christmases ago, i asked for a couple hundred dollars to purchase two IDE 30gb hard drives, and i bought an IDE RAID card to go with that. ever since, i've been running XP off of a 60gb. this fall, my computer started acting up -- and would randomly corrupt sectors. this proved not to be a big deal -- i could go into the recovery console and chkdsk and fix them.
this time, the corruption is leading to a BSOD that won't let the recovery console run.
and as a side note, i tried knoppix as a tool to fix. wasn't able to mount my corrupt ntfs partition -- but impressed me beyond all belief.
i'm THIS close from switching to linux. all i need is todd telling me to do it. but first i'd like to steal off all my data from the ntfs drive..hence why i need the CDs for this other recovery package that will work.
len Friday March 12
i've been rocking the "random" mp3 playlist while programming this week. as only music can, i've gotten pulled into random excursions of mental nostalgia...
while driving back from the conclave radio conference last summer, bickham told everyone that when crossing a state line, you must, if possible, play len - steal my sunshine loudly. and everyone in the car has to sing. of course this is totally preposterous, as is bickham. but to appease the man, we did so between wisconsin and illinois.
the problem with that song, though, is that it's so bouncy and poppy that no one wants to admit that they actually like it. certainly, it's not musically interesting enough, and it really doesn't challenge the listener... but such is pop music. but there's a reason pop music sells. so yes, i will be the first to admit, in print that i enjoy now and again listening to the song.
of course, there's also the nostalgia angle. ignoring last summer, i recall the first time i heard the song -- on the now-extinct kiss 92.5 fm in chicago on the way to the airport with nathan and my dad to go to japan in 1999. that whole trip, when i wasn't listening to cake - motorcade of generosity, i had len stuck in my head.
i hate it when you have a song stuck in your head that you don't know the lyrics to. naomi, as a side note, never lets this prevent her from singing the song. anyway, i digress.
good times, japan in 1999. i still remember michael teaching me katakana at his kitchen table. he explained that the characters for gureepu juusu really only had phonetic value, and that i, too, could pronounce grape juice in japanese. i don't know if i was fascinated at the time because it was japanese; i truly believe it was more that michael was teaching, and i have always absorbed everything he teaches, rarely forgetting. oh, and he also indicated that the little circle changed the phonetic fu to pu. i remember liking the circle at the time. maybe i should have learned korean?
ok, enough self-distraction from indulging in old memories that are only shared with two others. i'm going back to programming.
while studying Wednesday March 10
psych textbooks can be fascinating. particularly, i think it'd be fun to develop/run these experiments. anyway, my test is in 7 hours, and here's something i found interesting:
"...rats that had been handled as pups were less susceptible to adult stress than rats that had been left alone as pups. for example, the previously handled rats secreted less coricosteroid in response to a wide variety of adult stressors. this effect was termed stress immunization because a little stress early in life seemed to make the animals more resilient to later stress." (emphasis in original)
(this appears on page 494 of biological psychology, 2002, by rosenzweig, breedlove, and leiman.)
intensity Tuesday March 9
sometimes, life just gets really intense. school work, work work, friends. exams. feels good though, makes you know you're alive.
doesn't leave you with much time to blog, though. see y'all on the other side of wednesday...
curry rice Wednesday March 3
last may, i made some really good curry, and so i took a picture of it. the picture prompted me to practice my japanese by posting the recipe on the japanese side of this blog. at the outset, i said that no one should actually make the curry based on the recipe, as i was only writing it for practice. and i didn't trust my ability to write instructions in a foreign language.
the title of the post is "how to make curry rice" (karei raisu no tsukurikata), and the result is that i get a large number of hits from google searches on "how to make curry rice", in japanese. and now, someone just commented did not heed my advice, and she made my curry anyway. and it was good.
so yeah, i taught a japanese person how to make curry rice. the name is manmaru, i don't know if that's a male or female name. it's either a really polite guy, or a girl, but i don't think boys make a regular habit of using 'airashii'.
yeah, what's up?
summer plans Tuesday March 2
currently contemplating my summer plans. some potentials:
- taking a summer session ii class and working in c-u
- selling software to radio stations who need help
- going to new york city to work
- bicycling to roscoe from champaign
- getting wisdom teeth pulled
- selling all of my worldly possessions, buying a one-way to beijing, driving north to inner mongolia, becoming a desert nomad, and never looking back
- bringing chance to champaign-urbana, or the desert
