All My Exes Rent At Blockbuster

So on my final day, I was reminded today of yet another reason I don't want to work at Blockbuster anymore: I constantly run into people I have no desire whatsoever to see. Like an ex. And her boyfriend. Who were being cutesy with each other in line.

This was not Laura. Laura is THE ex, the one person I dated for a year, and I won't really get into what happened there, because I'll go on for pages and bore the living shit out of the three people who read this page.

This is my other ex. The one that most people don't particularly know was my ex, and if they know, they didn't hear it from me. She shall remain nameless in this post since as I understand it, she's not particularly out. I think she also falls into the category of Bisexual In Theory, But In Reality, Only For Angelina Jolie.

Those that don't know the story, I had a bad crush on her early in sophomore year, before I really knew Laura (though after the story Conci loves to tell about how I hit on Laura in a cartoonish fashion when I was ridiculously drunk). The ex and I were together for, oh, three weeks (which of course no one could know about), after which winter break interceded, and then I found out she had a boyfriend at home and had been playing me the whole time, and I pseudo-dumped her.

I say pseudo-dumped becuase it's kind of hard to dump someone who knows they're just fucking with you, since they think they're not in a position to be dumped. This is the "You can't dump me, I'm not even dating you, neener neener neener!" theory of love.

The relationship wasn't a total disaster, but it wasn't quite at the American Pie "I've been used....I've been used!" level. It was a learning experience, and I think it made me a lot more straightforward (pardon the expression) in my relationship with Laura.

So anyway, said ex and her current boyfriend come in, and of course I recognize her immediately, though she's dyed her hair a much lighter color. The first thought to pop into my mind is, of course, oh shit. I haven't really seen her in a year or so, since she essentially avoided me after things ended, and particularly after I started dating Laura. Which is understandable given the awkwardness of the situation, and I didn't particularly feel like dealing with her either.

I hate that when I see her, the bottom drops out of my stomach. She seems to be what my neuroses have decided is the embodiment of my deep-seated fear that I'm not good enough for anyone blah blah self pity yackety schmackety low self esteem etc. It took quite a bit of effort to chitchat when I ended up having to check her and her boyfriend out. I've had to keep a stupid smile plastered on my face many times at Blockbuster, but this was one of the more difficult ones.

It's nice to see friends, like when I got to sarcastically explain to Ray that he really shouldn't expect a movie with a title like The Man Who Wasn't There to actually be there. But shit like having to make nice with the ex and her boyfriend when all I wanted to do was shout "Why the fuck didn't you tell me you had a boyfriend at home?" really kind of wears on you after a while.

But no more. Because I fucking quit! Woo hoo!

What the?

I just saw the Indigo Girls performing...on Headline News...

I thought for a minute it was corporate synergy gone berserk, but they record for Epic, which is a Sony subsidiary.

Anyone wanna explain this to me?

My eyes feel like they're gonna bleed...

I really hate the exhaustion that school brings on. It's one thing to work your ass off 40 hours a week, but I could never be a lawyer or an investment banker or a grad student or some other profession where you have to work ungodly hours and are expected to do fantastic work on little or no sleep.

I really don't perform too well when I've been consistently getting too little sleep for a month. I caught up over spring break, but now I'm back behind again.

Quitting Blockbuster (today's my last day!) is going to help, because it will mean I can just relax on the weekends. And the fact that it's not 85 with a nice solid slice of humidity anymore will also help.

But can I truly be stopped from wandering into walls on a permanent basis? Only time, and a great deal of sleep, shall tell.

Concert mini-review: Patty Griffin

So I went and saw Patty Griffin at the Park West tonight, and she was excellent. The show was fairly low-key (she didn't even have a drummer), which I normally don't like, but I let her and Aimee Mann get away with because they've got such fucking gorgeous voices you actually want spare arrangements live.

Oh, and Coop, she played an unfuckingbelievable version of Springsteen's "Stolen Car."

Anyway, if you like Lucinda Williams or any other alt-country AT ALL, you should really check out 1000 Kisses, Patty's new album.

VH1 = Vicodin and Heroin?

So I was flipping through channels, and I came upon a Sheryl Crow concert on VH1, so naturally I watched it. The show immediately following, however, is what got my attention.

It's called the RedEye. It's a like combination of Queer as Folk, Sex and the City, Beavis and Butt-Head, and some fairly powerful hallucinogens. There's random lesbians kissing and shirtless gay guys dancing, bizzare quick little chats about sex, and then they play some videos. But it's all severely cracked out, with weird camera angles, odd little whip-pans, and digital zooms.

Has anyone else seen this? Or do the rest of you actually do your homework?

It burns!

The following was sitting in my inbox when I got back from class:

"To All Concerned:
A contractor will be burning the prairie grasses surrounding the lagoon beginning at 1:00 p.m. today, April 17, 2002. This is an annual maintenance procedure administered by Facilities Management. While this procedure will produce some smoke, there is no need for concern. The contractor and Evanston Fire Department are aware of this burn and will be monitoring it closely. Thank you for your cooperation."

My question is what happens if the fire gets out of control? Are we still supposed to be wondrously unconcerned, staring out as Tech goes up in flames? Wait, that wouldn't be too bad an idea...

Seriously though, the people who came up with this might want to look into the story of the Lanesboro, Minnesota fire cheif who deliberately set a building near his ex-girlfriend's apartment on fire in order to come in and rescue her and thereby be a big hero and win her back. Of course, the fire got completely out of control and burned down a significant chunk of Lanesboro's downtown, and he got busted for arson. The moral of the story: Even fires set with the best of intentions can get out of control.

Besides, I think most of the students probably assume that any large amounts of smoke being blown around the Lagoon are created by the administration.

Flashback

So I have to find two subletters for the summer and a person for the year, and I'm thinking back to last summer, when I lived with Rumya and Aparna, who subsided on nothing but weed and chili powder.

I'm specifically thinking of the time I came home from working at Blockbuster on a friday night, and when I went to the kitchen to grab some food, I saw someone I hadn't met hunched over a plate. Doing a line of what I thought was cocaine off one of the PLATES I WAS EATING OFF OF.

I was fine with the weed, even though they kept offering it to me every day when I repeatedly told them I didn't smoke (it would fuck up my singing voice). However, random people doing lines of coke off our dinner plates was another matter entirely. So I asked Rumya to tell her friends to please do their more massively illegal drugs before they came here. Her reply?

"Oh, it wasn't coke. It was just E."

Well, that makes it SO much better.

It's only ecstasy, which is MDMA cut with other drugs, anything from PCP to speed to fucking heroin. That makes the entire problem of a person I don't know snorting hallucinogens off of a plate I would likely have been eating a peanut butter sandwich on had I not seen him doing this.

So this summer with more strangers should be LOTS of fucking fun.

Fuck fuckity fuck fuck

My mother has offered me $1000 to stop swearing.

I think the main reason she offered me such a large chunk of change is she knows there's no way in hell I'd ever take it.

I have sworn like a drunken sailor who used to be a truck driver driving through New York City since I was twelve and discovered Denis Leary's No Cure For Cancer, and shortly thereafter George Carlin, and she knows there isn't a fucking thing she can do about it. She is well aware of this, even though she really wants me to stop swearing.

So she has turned to what she percieves as my weak point: money. If she hit me in about eight months when I've graduated and am eating ramen three meals a day because I can't afford anything else because I still don't have a real job, she might have actually gotten me to take it (though I still would have argued her up to at least five grand).

Her offer is up from her earliest offer of $100, which I simply laughed at. But I think she's going to have to go to at least 10 grand to get me to seriously consider excising even just the word "fuck" from my vocabulary. If I could keep "fuck," I might be persuaded to stop saying "shit" for about two grand.

Because you gotta have something to say other than "oh my heck" when you stub your toe.

Bitching about the heat

(note: if you don't get the title, click here, scroll to the 4th song, listen to it, then click here and buy my album, for fuck's sake. thank you.)

The weather here is schitzophrenic.

It's 76 in Chicago right now, almost midnight, according to the little weather bug on my computer. It was eightysomething today, a fairly hot day for mid-April. This time last week, it was snowing. This time next week, it will likely be snowing as well.

I don't know if this is evidence that the environment has been seriously fucked up, or that Mother Nature is just as mental as all of us humans.

It's hot as hell in my room, a phenomenon I had been conveniently able to repress since my landlord wasn't particularly heating my room for large, large portions of the winter, and I thought my fingers were going to fall off. I still need to thank the Medilldos upstairs for threatening to write an expose on him in the Daily, which clearly did a lot more good than five months of bitching about the (lack of) heat, since a day or so after I heard they did it, the heat was working fantastically.

It was this hot in the apartment over the summer, but a seven month gap between the end of last summer's worst heat and the beginning of this year's made it easy to forget how much I hate living without air conditioning. Perhaps this year I shall locate a window a/c unit, at least for my room. But more than likely, I'll be too lazy from the heat, and I'll end up just sitting around and drinking margaritas, daquiris, and mudslides to cool off.

Which will make me a whole hell of a lot lazier.

I don't know

Some days I feel like I really don't know anything.

I feel as if don't know how to communicate with humans on a fairly basic level, since several times in the last few months I have said something that I thought was fairly clear, and the person I have been talking to thinks I'm saying something completely different, and usually insulting.

I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with my life. Professional Musician is still my primary career goal, and it's the only one I really want. However, there are several large problems with this, in that I don't have a band, I haven't played a single goddamn gig in over a year, and the number of people who know me and my music are primarily from musician mailing lists I send bitchy emails to every once in a while. Until I can make this line of work somewhat viable or fall desperately in love with someone with a desperately enormous amount of money, I need a goddamn job.

These are just a couple of examples, but lately I've been feeling like I must have killed off too may brain cells drinking last quarter or something, because I feel generally incompetent at pretty much everything.

Though I did score a minor victory in that department by largely assembling a tv-holder-upper ("entertainment center") and a surround sound system. It's odd that the only thing that reassures me that I'm not a total waste of space is that I can follow directions to put things together.

Maybe I should work for someplace like this business in DC called Some Assembly Required that puts furniture and other large objects together for people. They managed to put an excersize bike together at my mom's house (not like it did anything but collect dust). I could do that. I'd be broke as shit, because I doubt they pay well, but I could do that.