Uhhhh...

Two double-aught seven

My new years resolution for 2007:
Eat more black pepper. Much more black pepper.

I moved the majority of my shit into my new place in JP. I'm staying at Julie's until she comes back, however, because the location is far superior in relation to work, and I wanna make sure her snake doesn't die while I'm supposed to be taking care of it. I'm extremely excited about my new place as I already feel at home when I walk in there, despite not having spent a single night over so far. It's pretty well equipped for entertaining guests, so assuming I can get people to come out to JP, I want to have company as much as possible. If you are reading this, you are [probably] invited over to my new place.

NYE was much fun. Wes and Dan threw a party over on Columbus and it ended up being a pretty decent success. I got into the spirit(s) of things and had a great time. Steve and Corey came into town to join me so it made things even better. Someone got proposed to at the party, apparently, although she didn't seem exceptionally excited about the whole thing. I love it when shit like that happens. Asking someone to marry you in front of a large group of people is definitely a bad idea, but it sure is entertaining for everyone to watch. While I didn't see the proposal myself, it seems this one was similar to watching someone open a gift and trying her damnedest to look excited upon realizing she's the proud new owner of a set of yorkshire terrier themed drink coasters... but of course this is much worse 'cause you can't re-wrap your fiance up and give him to someone else next year.

Other than that, I've been clocking in plenty of hours at Starbucks, which was going well until around my 9th or 10th consecutive day there. I got pangs of murderous tendency, but I think that's my body just adjusting to working full time in a coffee shop (on Newbury St.). Hopefully I'll be able to supplement my time there with some production related work which I've been hunting for on a daily basis. Gotta try to put that $120k+ education to use somehow.

Got to see Sara a few times whiles she's been home visiting from Israel. Nice to catch up with old friends, especially since it's so easy to lose touch when separated by long distances. That actually reminds me that I need to take advantage of my Judaism and cash in on my free trip to Israel through Birthright. Now that I'm finally outta school I have no good reason not to. I doubt I'd have any sort of great religious revelations while visiting, but who am I to scoff at an all expenses paid journey to the central location of the cause of so much of today's global turmoil? I do love current events, after all. Plus, I've heard the falafel is bitchin' and my faux-Hebrew "Go Fuck Yourself" t-shirt is getting a bit faded.

I can't think of much else to report on, so I'm gonna go climb some fake rocks now.

Best of luck to everyone in the Year of Our Lord, 2007. Don't do anything I wouldn't.

More Transitioning

So college is done. Commencement is in May, but I'll be receiving my degree in January. My final GPA: 3.459. This doesn't mean much, I know, but at least I wasn't slacking too hard the last 4 and a half years. Somehow I managed to earn a B+ in my Argentina class this last semester, although this is probably due in large part to the proofreading efforts of my Spanish-speaking friends. Whatever.

Been floating freely between Boston and Foxboro this last week. Starting today, I'll have a more permanent spot in the city as I'm serpent-sitting for Julie while she's away on break, and am receiving free housing in return. I've never had any sort of business with a snake before (literally speaking), but I think I'm gonna like this one as it's small, harmless and fun to play with.

I signed my lease a couple of days ago, so I'm very definitely moving in to JP on the 1st, and then life can take on some sort of normalcy... maybe.

At the moment, I'm 3 days through an 11 consecutive-day work stint. This sucks hard, but after my next paycheck, I won't be complaining, especially with the time and a half I get on Christmas. Still, I think my head might explode if I have to hear Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby sing about mistletoe for much longer. I get a few days off around New Years at least, I just need something to do for the occasion. I hate the idea of paying for a ticket to get in some bar or restaurant only to have to dish out again to get a few beers. Somebody needs to have a house party.

Ooh, and I know you don't care, but I got an 80 gig iPod for a graduation present. So hot.

The End of Dan's [formal] Education

Ahh. Here's a quick one just in case you aren't sure what's up with my life at the moment.

So here I am at the very end of my college education. I have under a week to go before I am finished forever (unless I one day decide to go to grad school, which is currently not in the cards). I'm occupied, to a ridiculous extent, with finishing 3 major projects: my 22 minute behemoth of a student film, a "professional quality" edit of a climactic fight scene of an episode of Highlander (that stupid 90s show about immortal British people chopping one another's heads off), and a 12 page paper about Argentina in relation to all the crap* I supposedly read about in class (en español). It's a lot of junk heaved on my plate and it's all due on Wednesday morning. Unfortunately, all three of these undertakings involve my staring at a computer screen for a total of 12+ hours a day. My poor eyeballs. I'm working a few shifts at Starbucks between now and then, as well. These will serve as breaks for my oculars. I'm confident everything will come out just sterling, however, so no worries. I am, after all, pretty goddamned incredible.

I've been looking at apartments in Jamaica Plain, which will likely be my place of residence for the next year or so (hopefully not much longer than that). I'll be looking for jobs within my field very shortly, and will hopefully not fall into the quagmire that is the Starbucks Career Ladder. The chances of this happening, regardless of my getting a job in the TV industry, are exceedingly thin, however.

So that's about everything in two short paragraphs.

Any questions?

*Most of it isn't actually crap, and is in fact exceedingly incredible literature, but when I have to write 12 pages about it, it automatically receives the "crap" label.

I forgot I had a blog

I swear I forgot I had a blog, which should explain the lack of updates.

I could start going into stupid reasons why I don't actually update this thing much, but it basically boils down to my forgetting about it and not feeling anything monumental enough in my life has occurred that's worth writing about. I'll attempt to pinch one out, however, because ya'll are so important to me.

Just got back from 4 night stay in Foxboro complete with gorging, sleeping, and the friends/family combo-blitz. Things went rather standard with little out of the ordinary to report on. Got to see some people that I haven't in a while, though, which was nice. It was a good little break from schoolwork before I finish up in these next couple weeks. I think for a little while I was pretending it was like it was in high school, driving around Foxboro and surrounding towns with friends looking for nightly diversions like bowling or whatever. It was a cool change of pace, and nice to spend time with good people. There really wasn't any schoolwork I could have done since I basically just need to edit the shit out of my movie to make it look somewhat decent. At the moment I'm running into the issue of it possibly dragging (it might clock in at over 20 minutes), so I have a lot of tweaking so I can keep things interesting.

I finished a video project for my other class but now that it's done I'm pretty disappointed with how it came out, which is a bummer. It's not yet up on youtube or whatever, and I'm hesitant to throw it on there as I'm not exceptionally proud of it. It ended up being over-edited to facilitate the assignment's requirement that we had to have a shitload of special effects in it. As a result it sort of warped into something I didn't want it to be. I'm pretty sure given enough time I could go back and mutate it into a finished product that I like, but there's really not time for that at this point. Always gotta move forward.

I think I wiped my ass with the Spanish test I took last week with only a minimal amount of studying beforehand. It's nice that the stuff we read is so famous that the individual stories are written about in detail on Wikipedia (with links to English translations of the entire books), thus cutting translation and analysis time down hugely. It was just mentioned that we'll have to complete a 12 pager in a little under 2 weeks, and while I have no clue whatsoever when I'll find the time to do this, I'm not stressing it too much, as I managed worse while in Spain and things seemed to turn out alright. I just need to get someone fluent to proofread for me...

Anyone?

I'm done with school and must be out of my place on the 15th. While this hasn't exactly snuck up on me, it's gradually been catching me off guard (if that makes any sense). I've been too busy to job and apartment hunt with any sort of conviction. I need to squeeze all that in with the finishing up of this semester's work. I have mixed feelings about finishing here, but it's definitely for the best to be moving on at this point. I've been getting a weird reflective-college-life-flashing-before-my-eyes recently which is kinda movie-cheeseballish but I can't really avoid it. I guess I feel like the last 4 or so years have had as significant of an effect on my life as the previous 10 years had. So much has happened and so much has changed in various short periods of time that it's been weird to realize how much differently I look at life in general as a result. We've yet to see if this change is for the best... Only time will tell.

Hmmmm.

Mid-term elections

Well, as of writing this the Dems have the House and seem like they could quite possibly take the Senate, as well. Historically, this is pretty standard stuff, I suppose. The 6th year into a re-elected president's term, there tends to be some reversals. This is especially so since the Senate and House were solidly Republican, anyway. It's nice to see that people are finally pissed off enough to vote the conscience, though.

I voted yesterday, which felt pretty good. I guess it sort of made me hopeful that there is a chance that we can reverse some of the horrible trends that have been championed so proudly by our leadership these last 6 years. Our international image needs a whole hell of a lot of work, and this will certainly be a positive step in that direction, I would think. A win in the Senate for the Dems would be pretty huge, as the whole legislative agenda could be shifted towards more productive ends, maybe pushing along things like alternative energy initiatives, an issue I find to be of grave importance, since the market really isn't adjusting quickly enough to address the issue (prime examples: Ford and GM).

I'm still lost on the whole war issue. I've thought it was a terrible idea since the very first time I heard the UN was going in to look for weapons, and it's gone terribly since. I really have no clue what we're supposed to do now that everything has fallen even more to shit, and loads of people are being horrible maimed and killed every day. I am wondering if anybody does...

Anyway, I'm receiving all of this with a pretty healthy amount of skepticism. It would be nice to see a "changed" Democratic party that will be held accountable for their actions, and make decisions based on that idea. There's a lot of shit that needs addressing, both domestically and internationally, and we'll have to see if a shakeup in Washington will solve anything. It'll be nice, regardless, to have Bush tone down is overzealous rhetoric as he can't push his crazy policies through so easily now.

So off politics...

Life is chugging along, unrelentingly... That is all for now.

Week of Fun shit

Busy as usual, although I've had a lot of fun the past week.

as a warning, this next part might be boring if you aren't into Frank Zappa. You might wanna skip ahead if you don't want to hear about the concert I just went to in excruciating detail.

Wednesday, Greg and I drove down to Providence to see the Zappa Plays Zappa concert. I mentioned it last post and I can truly say it was the single most impressive display of music I've ever experienced in my life. Having been born too late to see Frank perform, watching his son, Dweezil, and three of the original band members perform a incredibly long list of his material. It probably helped that the three original performers- Steve Vai, Terry Bozzio, and Napoleon Murphy Brock- were probably some of the most charismatic and talented players Zappa toured with, but the younger talent recruited for the tour was spot on as well. Each musician was featured prominently at different points during the show, just as Frank used to do with his band mates.

Napoleon, despite being old and balding (and maybe a little fat), was still dancing around like a maniac during the entire show like he did in his 20s. Bozzio didn't seem to be in top form and was showing his age a little bit more, but he still wowed everyone with his 60+ piece drum kit, and even performed Punky's Whips. Vai was Vai. Not a whole lot needs to be said as he is still the greatest modern rock guitar player of our time. He had plenty of jaw-dropping shit to keep the audience screaming at the top of their lungs. Dweezil tore it up unbelievably. He must have practiced a whole hell of a lot as his performance of Black Napkins was absolutely perfect. The entire band was on top of its game, really, with the "kids" playing all of their parts perfectly and looking like they were having the greatest time ever doing so. I think it was great that I got to see this show so late in the tour as the band has been playing together now for months and has had a chance to really get the material under their belt. Even if they had a year to practice that monstrous volume of ultra-dense music (they didn't), there's no way they could possibly have had it entirely "down" when the tour started. I can imagine they weren't quite so proficient for the first couple shows back during the summer.

What really made this show so incredible, though, was that they did everything a hardcore Zappa fan could hope for. So much of the best material was covered from all different eras of Zappa's career, and every time I was thinking "it'd be cool if they did X song," 10 minutes later they would break into it. There was even some audience participation like Frank used to do. Something that also impressed me was the way they took some songs and modernized them, putting their own spin on them. I'm the Slime was the best example as it's still a wonderfully pertinent song that sounded as if it was written as recently as this year. They heavied it up, making it sound borderline metal. It almost felt more appropriate for the subject matter than the original scoring did.

Finally, possibly the most impressive aspect of the show was how they played for over 3 and a half hours without a single real break. There were breaks that were sort of worked in for individual musicians over the course of the show, but there wasn't an intermission. The longest we went without hearing music once the show began was the 2 minutes between when everyone left the stage before coming back on for a very long encore. The whole thing was extremely unpretentious and was nothing but a pure display of ultra high-quality musicianship. I think Frank would have been proud and most certainly approved at his son's handling of the music.

The crowd was interesting, as it was composed mainly of people my parents' age with a smattering of 30-somethings. I found there to be very few people my age in the crowd. I liked how there was a large handful of young kids present with their parents (I saw a few that couldn't have been over 8 or 9, no kidding). It was also great to see that these young kids were dancing their asses off, having the time of their lives. It's reassuring to know that there are parents that are wise enough to bring their children to such a great concert and helping to make sure that the music of Frank Zappa is still finding new audiences.

Sorry if that was a bit of shameless rant, but I do have just under 100 hours of Zappa on my computer (yes, that's over 4 straight days of MP3s) so I guess I'm what some might call a bit of a fanatic. Seeing this show has been an incredible culmination of the last 4 years of my life spent avidly collecting and listening to Frank's music, all of which has been incredibly rewarding to wade through and begin to understand.

So moving on, Eric came to visit this weekend from Colorado. He's never seen Boston (or the east coast for that matter), so it was fun to show a complete New England virgin around. I never fully realized how much there is to do and see here when it's all new to you, as I've slowly built up knowledge of the city over the last 4 years. Friday we went out to some bars, eventually meeting up with a group of Starbucks girls to celebrate some birthdays. Saturday night was the Belgian Beer Festival which was amazing. I have some pics that I'll get up on Flickr eventually. There were over 200 beers to choose from and you just walked around with your little sample cup moving from table to table. I tried lots of beer that night and it was a great reminder of my time spent in Brussels. The wonderful benefit of drinking such good beer is the fact that you don't get any sort of hangover the next day. Today, I showed him the Garment District's awesome $1.50 per pound clothing pit. We watched the Colts/Broncos game this evening before Eric had to leave to catch his plane.

So now I'm left with a project to finish tomorrow morning and a midterm to study for (which I'm definitely not feeling confident about) that I gotta take tomorrow night. Thursday I need to present a long presentation to the class about anything Argentinian of my choosing. So far, I've put zero minutes into this, and am feeling more than a bit of apprehension about the whole thing. I'm hoping it doesn't turn into a train wreck for me. Unlike the test that I ended up getting an A on unexpectedly, I can't bullshit when I have to stand up in front of the class and talk. I also can't whip out my dictionary when I need it to look up that key word I'm missing either. Ack.

Yeah. So I'm gonna just try to get through these next two days and then we'll see what happens after that. Mmkay?