Wednesday, March 23, 2005

I've felt pretty good lately, despite a newly acquired sore throat from one of several germs that have hit half the campus recently. I was a little concerned earlier this week when I came home expecting to find a package from Amazon and all I found was a note saying the box was on the floor. I looked down, and much to my disappointment, there was no box. I didn't pay Amazon thirty bucks for a nice note of intent from UPS, so I set about searching the area for my stuff. It wasn't in the other building, and it wasn't on the other two floors, so I immediately assumed that my box had either been mistakenly picked up by another student living here, or that it had been stolen by some grubby little neighborhood coke addict. I hoped it was the former option, so I could get my stuff back without going to a pawnshop, but I also secretly hoped it would be the latter, because in my mind that scenario ends like the “stuck in the middle with you” scene in Reservoir Dogs. I got back from class later and found the box by my door with a nice note from #9 saying that she had picked it up without looking at the address. The funny thing is that the box was meticulously taped back together with scotch tape over the packing tape. Funny because the box only had to go two flights of stairs down to me, and because that means that the accidental recipient opened the box to find the new Dropkick Murphys CD and the latest book by Sarah Vowell. I'm sure that she didn't expect that, but it would be great if it was a coincidence because that would mean there was somebody really cool living here. I'd have someone to talk to without having to walk across the parking lot.

I have the CD on now, and I love it. The second track is a cover of “Fortunate Son.” It rocked on the live CD, and this studio recorded version is just awesome. Picture a skinny cracker standing in front of his computer speakers rocking air guitar and mouthing the words. It's funny. There's also a cover of a song by Motorhead. Dropkick Murphys doing Motorhead is the best combo since black and tan.

The book in the box was a surprise. It isn't actually supposed to be released until next month, or so I thought. The computer at Amazon wasn't going to ship my order until the book was released. I wanted my CD as soon as I could get it, so I set it to ship the items separately. The package shipped that day, and the invoice said that the book was included. Yadda yadda, now I have the book.

I got another CD that I ordered in the mail recently as well: Carla Bruni. I can't spell the title, and I'm looking right at the CD case. It's something foreign, probably French, and about as far removed from drunken blue-collar punk as one can get, but I like it. I heard a song from the album on WBNI (Fort Wayne public radio) while driving south of Hartford City a few weeks ago, and it really stuck with me. I couldn't write down the artist's name while driving in the dark in the middle of nowhere, so I just chanted her name like a lunatic for about five miles so that I would remember what to look up on Amazon. The CD is about to be released domestically, but the new edition will be on V2- a subsidiary of Virgin, a member of the RIAA. Luckily, the import is from some European label that the RIAA Radar site said was safe. I paid a little extra, but I can sleep soundly knowing I did the right thing.

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Just a quick note to welcome Tom to the blogosphere. He brings a wealth of knowledge and raises the bar for personal hygene among the people that I link to.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

I've added more links to the list on the right. It's "Drawn," a blog devoted to graphic design from all over the place. It's an RSS feed too, for those of you cool enough to care. I'm also adding Penny Arcade because I read it and enjoy it. I put boingboing up there too, since I get almost all the interesting stuff I post or forward from there.

Break is going well, as breaks go. That is to say, I haven't done anything strenuous. I've gotten some reading done, visited my alma mater, and played video games. Any of these could be worth blogging about, if I had the accumen to do so anymore. I've lost that bloggin' feeling. I don't plan to quit, but I'm not all that happy with my blog writing of late. I think I wrote better when I was miserable and unemployed a year and a half ago. I had more time to sit and think, rather than constantly running around without time to think. I am quite a bit happier now so I suppose it's a fair trade.

Friday, March 04, 2005

It's been said by someone far more altruistic than myself that we should try to leave the world a better place than we found it. This is a lovely idea, but I think my fellow students and I may have blown it this past weekend. We shot a movie in an old building full of rusty nails, splintered wood, over one thousand various athletic t-shirts, bats, beautiful antique wood panels, and water damage worse than the Lusitania. It did not have heat, running water, or electricity in the traditional sense.

I started a post about this after the first weekend of shooting, but it occurred to me that the post would contain spoilers galore, and some of my blog audience will see the movie at some point. It's a shame, too, because there were some good stories involving me in the back of a cop car and a temperamental fog machine.

This past weekend was my second weekend working on the movie. The presence of feeling in my legs was a sign that the weather was better. We worked for over twelve hours a day both days, relying on flashlights to work where the work light didn't reach. There was a funny incident on Saturday night when an actor stepped into a dark hall and two bats swooped right over his head. He wouldn't go down to the other end of the hall where his next shot was, so I took my flashlight and the fog machine to smoke the bats out. This must have worked, because we didn't have a problem with bats for the rest of the weekend.

For some reason, many of the eating establishments in Hartford City do not take any sort of magnetic card payment. The first weekend we ate at a recently opened Chinese buffet where the young woman at the register claimed that they could not accept electronic payment because it was Sunday. I'm not sure what that meant, but we figured that since they had only been open for a few days that their system wasn't perfect yet. I'm also not sure what was significant about it being Sunday, but it would be funny if the bank owner was a burn-out turned born-again fundie who refused to let his computer work on Sunday. The next weekend we went to Subway and my order and my friend's order were half done when we learned that they didn't take cards either. This is a national chain, mind you. My friend commented that he and his girlfriend had paid with a card at a Subway in the hills of Virginia just a few months prior. Fortunately, Pizza King was up on current technology circa 1995, so we enjoyed mediocre pizza and luxuriously standard indoor heating.

It was a good weekend for me.