Half Past Dead

In exactly fourteen hours, school's out. Well, I do have a class to show up for two hours after THAT, but that's just a show-up-and-leave kinda thing. Trust me, I'll be blasting "School's Out For Summer" at noon anyway. I cannot wait to be done. So sick of it. It's been a fun semester and I'll miss all the college folk, but I'm so sick of school I could spew (I'm also kinda sick in general, which blows chunks...not literally...yet).

Meanwhile, I still have a bit of studying to do for my last final, and will you look at that I have an essay due in two hours, and the only part of it I have yet to complete is the part about the play I never read and the film adaptation I never saw. Best...section...EVER.

It's Kirsten Dunst's birthday. Say whatever you want, she's a babe.

Go to this website and listen to the song that comes on. It's AWESOME.

I recently...acquired seasons 3-10 of The Simpsons (y'know, back when it was good). What a great TV show.

Spider-Man 3 in THREE DAYS. So excited. Too many commercials on TV. Then home. Then Beth's play. Then sleep and watch movies until work starts up mid-May. That first week of vacation will taste so good. If you wanna hang during that time, you'll probably have to get in touch with me, as I'll be somewhere between catatonic and lazy. Although I will want to drive...

Oh, and I got the feed working again onto Facebook, so if you're reading this there, you have about a month's worth of posts to go through. Stop whining, you know you're only on Facebook to waste time in the first place.

It was chicken and waffle night in the Dining Hall! And last night was turkey! Not fake turkey, but real, honest-to-God Thanksgiving turkey! Life can be so great...

Birthday!

Heeeeyyyyyyy I'm 21. Eat it. No, not really. Thanks a ton to everyone who Facebooked and messaged and...I don't think anyone called...oh Chris called. Yay!

I wish I had cool stories to tell, but I really don't so much. My parents (being crazy, yet awesome) left all these presents at Maggiano's (the restaurant we hit tonight for the bday) with random descriptions that were to be given to the person who best fit the description ("For the luckiest one," who received a small book of fortune cookie writings, "For the one who's most precise," who received a tape measure," and so forth). And an inflatable moose head (there are times when I just KNOW my dad was behind something). I only had a little more than half a glass of wine for dinner 'cause I was feeling kinda icky today, so no crazy drinking escapades.

I pretty much woke up, watched Dog Day Afternoon, played a LOT of Super Mario World, realized I had to get my ass in gear to get ready for dinner, then came back, played some more Mario and some Halo, and now am typing this before bed. All in all, a pretty damn good birthday, especially considering all the homework I ditched out on (don't worry, whoever thought up the idea for the pizza with candles Senior year still takes it all home).

Top Five Birthday Messages...

5. "Did you know that you share a birthday with Marcus Aurelius, Muhammad, and Jet Li? And that Lucille Ball died on this day? And so did Osama Bin Laden according to Wikipedia." - Pat

4. "It's off baby" - Ben (in response to my away message that said "take your top off"

3. "Use extreme caution when open mailbox/packages a piece of cake may or may not be on its way to greet you!" - Cynda (this one actually scares me)

2. "2111111111!!!!!!!!!! yeah sucka! pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew!" - Mike Lower (a joke that could not possibly be more inside and more impossible to describe by text alone)

1. "scott if you drink to much....i will hold your hair. have a sweet ass b-day." - Spencer (I owe you an apology...we're watching Newsies in class to finish off the semester, and I actually really like it)

Anyway, thanks again everyone, and I can't wait to see all you Portland folk ASAP.

4/20 whoo!

It's 4/20 tonight in Boston, and indeed in most parts of the world. It means a super-extra boring night for me (I gots work though, so whatevs), all the while trying as hard as possible to avoid going outside. Although, for all my complaining, it is better than St. Patty's Day. I get stoners. I don't know why, but I've always gotten along splendidly with stoners (card games with stoners are especially fun), whereas I just want to punch drunk people in the face. Maybe because I already have a strange fascination with shiny objects and bad jokes. I dunno.

Nonetheless, it's the dorms for me. Got my turkey and my white bread and my half-gallon of milk and my saltines. I'm fortified.

Speaking of drinking though, I do turn 21 in...wow, less than a week (April 26th...send love). While I'm not the drinking sort, I do enjoy the hell out of bars, and it'll be nice to have somewhere to go in Boston after 10 without traveling two miles. And my roommate Ben and I (didn't say "Emerson Ben!") are gonna learn how to make a ton of different drinks so we'll seem uber-classy.
"Can I get you anything to drink? A Shaggy Carpet perhaps?"
And then they won't know what a Shaggy Carpet is and we can scoff at them. Who knows, it might even be a real drink.

GO SEE HOT FUZZ. It just opened today, and your excuses...I have no need for them. You'll enjoy it. I promise. Same guys (writers, director, and stars) who did Shaun of the Dead, and I've yet to meet anyone who doesn't like that.

At the deli today they had a set-up with free tastes of all-natural beef from California. It was so good I wanted to punch the guy who was watching over it and take it all home. I miss real food.

I was trying to find where I posted the stuff I wrote about Spider-Man 2 (I just got my tickets for 3 and I am so stoked I could explode), which lead me to my old blog (at Xanga), which lead me to many many memories from Senior Year. Man those were good times. Anyway, I didn't end up finding what I was looking for, but it was a fun little gaze back. Aaaaaannnnnnnd that's about as emotionally open as you're gonna get from me here.

My So-Called Schedule

Well, my Fall schedule's been changing every couple of days, and I've been registered for everything from Studies in Digital Media and Culture to Introduction to Political Communication and Law to now Intro to Creative Writing: Fiction. I'm still fighting to get into Film 1 and/or Writing the Feature Film, but for now here's my bi-annual brag.

Tuesdays and Thursdays
10-11:45 AM - Intro to Creative Writing: Fiction
2-3:45 PM - Intro to Magazine Writing
6-7:45 PM - Communications and Race Relations

Wednesdays
6-9:45 - Radio Studies

So yeah. Good news, no Mondays or Fridays. Four day weekend every single weekend (I'm telling myself it'll give me more time to get work done, and it will definitely mean I can go to church regularly without wanting to kill myself Monday morning because I lost all my sleep). Bad news, I'm on campus for 10 hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays (3 2-hour classes with 2 2-hour breaks between...enough time so that if I have to run back to the apartment, I've got enough time to do it, but not so much that I can easily go back every day; it'll definitely force me to get some work done in those in-betweens). Also a bummer is that those three days run pretty well into the night. But hey, they're all classes that I'm interested in, so it'll be worth it (Creative Writing scares me a touch 'cause I've grown way too comfortable with writing scripts as opposed to prose, but it'll be good to get back into the mix).

Anyway, any of this could change at any time, but it felt like a pretty good time to brag. And I do love to brag.

It's Free Scoop Day at Ben & Jerry's!

It's ON!

We just signed the lease on a super-cool, swanky-as-hell apartment twenty minutes off campus (twenty by train that is, which for most of you probably seems like lightyears, but for Boston ain't as much as all that). Plus it's swanky as hell. Pictures coming soon, for sure. Anyway, you should all visit. AT THE SAME TIME.

That's really it. In a few hours I'll be catching AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE COLON MOVIE FILM FOR THEATERS (best title ever), the movie that sent Boston into a panic a few months back and now the mayor wants boycotted "out of respect to the people of Boston" (respect for who? no one was hurt! everyone was just super-duper inconvenienced. respect our inconvenience!). Be sure to vote on whether or not I cut my hair. The fate of the future depends on it.

QUESTION

Should I cut my hair when I get back to Portland, or let it go long and lustrous for the summer? You vote, I decide.

For future reference, the following topics of conversation will never, ever interest me...
-Pet stories
-Poker strategy
-The nutrition values of various foods (the discussion of food and its taste and quality is highly encouraged, however)

This list is subject to be expanded, but those you can pretty much rely on. Also, know that anytime anyone tries to insist that soccer is some sort of great sport, it just sounds silly to me. I don't mean to be cruel by any of this, I just figured it was worth mentioning.

But believe it or not, I'm actually in a good mood. The weather was kinda nice today sorta, I skipped one class, and I'm definitely counting down the days until I never, ever have to go to Multicultural Literature ever again. Unless the path continues and I just fail, fail, fail.

I did registration for Fall semester on Tuesday, and it didn't go particularly well. I only got one of the classes I need, one of the classes I want, and I have to wait 'til we get past this "Majors Only Until 4/16/07" to be over with to POSSIBLY get into a couple of other classes. But I am in a class called Radio Studies, which should be pretty great.

Top 5 Songs I Discovered Through Movies

It's been too long since I blogged about...anything...and I still can't come up with any interested insights or anecdotes (you wouldn't believe how many tries it took before I even came up with a word that spell-check would identify as me TRYING to spell "anecdote"...at one time they thought I meant "candidate"). So I started to write a thing on the addiction of watching LOST and 24, but that'll take a bit longer, so I was like "well, there's GOTTA be a top 5 I can do." So I thought and thought about different kinds of music and movies and stuff, and then I was like...wait, a lot of my favorite songs are in movies! So in order to clarify, I looked through all the songs in iTunes that I first discovered in some movie I saw, and then put them in order of least to greatest. This is purely judging the song, not the movie, or even how well they fit into the movie.

Links will take you to 30-second clips at AllMusic.com that have the sound quality of a big pile of dookie, but you'll get the idea.

HONORABLE MENTION - "Hold Tight" (Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich; featured in Death Proof)
I'm completely in love with this song since I saw "Death Proof" on Friday night (part of GRINDHOUSE, which'll have a review super-quick). It gets honorable mention 'cause it's been in my life for...three days, so there's no telling the staying power, but I've been playing it pretty consistently since then.
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, & Tich formed in 1964, and in their five-year career made pretty big names for themselves in the United Kingdom, which for that time would have been pretty impressive (this was the time of the BEATLES, man). Besides this, they also hit the top ten with six other songs, and they topped it with "Legend of Xanadu."
This song is mind-numbingly great, dirty in a just-subtle-enough kinda way (I didn't realize why iTunes labeled it "Explicit" until I looked up the lyrics), and like any great early-British-Invasion rock song, it gets in, does some damage, and gets out of there fast. It's a quick, easy listen.

5. "Most of the Time" (Bob Dylan, featured in the movie High Fidelity)
Part of the reason this is included here is because it comes in at such a great part of the movie, how can I not fall in love with it? But the song does stand on its own, and as much as mopey emo kids will say Bright Eyes or some crap "speaks to their soul" when some chick or dude broke their heart, you will not and cannot find a better broken heart song than this. It's all denial, and it's all the kind of pep-talk each one of us has given ourselves when that time comes (or maybe it's just a guy thing...I dunno, maybe girls just listen to that one special song over and over until they get sick of it or something), and you swear it's all behind you...most of the time. What a great song.

4. TIE "Melody of the Fallen Tree" (Windsor for the Derby) and "Ceremony" (New Order); [featured in the movie Marie Antoinette]
This is, like, my favorite soundtrack in the world right now. I hate ties in Top 5's. Hate them. But I had to go with both of these, because they're impossibly good and I couldn't pick and I didn't wanna do a list with more than one from the same soundtrack. I know almost nothing about either band, but I cannot stop listening to either song.
"Melody of the Fallen Tree" trades places with Iron & Wine's "The Trapeze Swinger" when I need to calm myself down before bedtime. This is a tad more upbeat, but it's still totally soothing, even when it goes into its second half of pure instrumental (in fact, I'd say especially when it goes there). I don't have a frickin' clue what the song means, but it's one of those (not unlike The Shins' "New Slang") in which the lyrics are really just part of the music. I'm sure this is a great listen if you're stoned.
As for "Ceremony," it was one of the first songs I discovered from Marie Antoinette (it was in the trailer), but it's really this song that captures the mood of the movie for me. It's a wonderful song, with all the energy, enthusiasm, and production values you'd want from 80s music, and one of very, very few reasons I will never completely write off that decade.

3. "Combination of the Two" (Janis Joplin with Big Brother & the Holding Company; featured in the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
This song is absolutely insane, which I guess would be required to open a movie like Fear and Loathing. In the opening speech on the live track for this, some guy in the band (I presume Big Brother) says the song's about San Francisco, which means they're all pretty much on acid during the whole thing, but I'm sure somehow it makes sense. Try to stop me from blasting this song at, really, ANY point during the summer. This was one of the themes of the summer of '05.

2. "A Quick One, While He's Away" (The Who, featured in the movie Rushmore)
If any one person has assembled soundtracks that are aimed specifically at me, it's Wes Anderson. Both Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums soundtracks are perfect in every single way. Of course, I knew most of the songs already, but THIS...this underheard, underappreciated, completely fantastic Who song I'd never heard before and have been listening to since. It's really excessively long and feels completely disjointed, not unlike every great epic Who song, but this one even moreso. It really sounds like they just made it all up right there on the spot, and I believe that because The Who were just that talented.
The song's basically...and you can tell this from the title, which is fantastic, about a girl whose husband or boyfriend or something...love of her life basically, who leaves for whatever reason, and while she's away she cheats on him with (of all people) a train conductor, and the song is alternatingly from the perspective of the town she lives in, the train conductor, the man trying to get home, the girl herself, and the man again. It's frickin' brilliant.

1. "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters" (Elton John; featured in the movie Almost Famous)
"Although the showy "Tiny Dancer" scene got all the attention in Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical movie Almost Famous, a later, quieter scene between Patrick Fugit and Kate Hudson uses "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters" to devastating effect." - AllMusic
This was another one of my summer '05 songs. There's a line...in this movie, actually, where Sapphire is talking about this new batch of groupies that joined the tour, and she said "They don't even know what it is to be a fan. Y'know? To truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts." I love this song so much that it hurts. It really does. This song is impossibly great, and I point to it every single time I hear crap for thinking Elton John is brilliant. Because he is, and there are a hundred other songs that could prove it, but this is the one that does it for me. Argh. I'm listening to it right now, and it's killing me.