Beer Crisper

I had to clean out the beer crisper today.

The beer crisper is the bottom drawer of the fridge. Most people call it a vegetable crisper, but since a) it does pretty much nothing in terms of keeping vegetables fresh and b) I hardly ever eat vegetables anyway, I started putting beer in it.

I had to clean it out because a bunch of orange juice leaked all over my fridge, and got sticky and disgusting and of course pooled in and under the beer crisper. That got rather disgusting and took an inordinately long time.

On the upside, it's no longer simply making my beer crisp: In addition to 14 cans of assorted cheap beer, I now also have six packs of hard lemonade and hard cider (which I actually, you know, drink) in there.

I was thinking of renaming it, but "beer crisper" has that certain ring to it that "booze crisper" just doesn't have. It shall remain, now and forever, the beer crisper.

Well, until someone who actually eats vegetables moves in.

Some Things I'll Never Understand

I had a real weird day today, but the pinnacle came as me, Tom, and Bryen (the guys I work with) were watching a movie we're supposed to be working on sound for, free of charge, for a friend of a guy who works at Post Effects.

The movie is just plain bad. The script makes no sense, the acting is terrible, the editing is incomprehensible and full of continuity errors (example: Two guys standing in a scene. Next scene, only one. Second guy is never seen again through the rest of the movie, and his presence is never explained).

Well, it does have one redeeming quality: It's really well-shot. It looks beautiful, at least until one of the dumbfuck actors opens his or her mouth to spout the even dumber dialogue.

But anyway, as we loaded the movie into the computer, we watched it with Mitch, the guy who's working on the whole shebang (and who has wisely turned down the Associate Producer credit he was offered) for Post Effects. Mitch gets a phone call, and the following line of dialogue comes up:

"She's got great tits. They're sloping yet...argumentative."

Of all the thousands and thousands of adjectives in the english language that could be used to describe breasts, these idiots came up with argumentative?

Tom, Bryen, and I just doubled over laughing while Mitch chatted away on the phone.

And I decided to thrown in the towel on weirdness-monitoring, because it wasn't going to get any weirder than argumentative tits.

Why I Love The Onion #4765

From America's Finest News Source:

Horrible Band Obviously Not Listening To Its Influences
SAN DIEGO— Puddle Of Mudd, a dreary nü-metal rock band that cites Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Metallica as influences, is obviously not listening to those influences. "Zep, Sabbath, Metallica, Maiden, Aerosmith—growing up, that's what we listened to, and that's what shaped our sound," said lead singer Wes Scantlin, whose mopey, monotone vocals in no way bear the stamp of Robert Plant, Steven Tyler, or his other idols. Scantlin, who made the comments during an interview Monday with Spin reporter Charles Aaron, failed to say which part of Puddle Of Mudd's atrocious new ballad "Drift & Die" resembles "When The Levee Breaks" or "Sweet Emotion."

Further Adventures In Dorkdom

I have got to be the only musician who actually believes a show is going to start at 9:30 when it's advertised as starting at 9:30.

I went down to an open mic tonight, which I had seen started at 9:30. I decided to take the El since I wasn't entirely sure I'd be able to find a parking space, so I left at about 8:15, since it generally takes forever to get to the Fullerton stop from where I am (the Dempster stop on the Purple line, i.e. way, way north of there).

I actually sprinted to make the train, and I don't think I've run that fast in years (I'm somewhat heavyset...OK, that's a lie almost as fat as I am). I actually managed to get the train to wait while I hauled it up the stairs, and plunked down, hyperventilating badly but satisfied that I'd be on time to my precious open mic.

I got to the bar that it's at right around 9pm, expecting pre-drinking to be getting underway. I looked in and it was dark. I wandered in, since the door was open, and there were a grand total of three people: the host of the open mic, the bartender, and a friend of both of theirs.

I took their suggestion when they said I should go to the burrito place down the street (which advertises "Burritos as big as your head!" and are not kidding) even though I had already eaten. I ended up eating two (very good) quesedillas and reading two issues from my massive pile of back issues of Newsweek.

When I got back around quarter to ten, there were a few more people there, and no progress. I sat down and had a couple of beers and tried writing for a while, and it was 10:30 before the host actually got around to starting. It would have been fine if:

a) I had driven and didn't have to worry about making the last purple line back to my house
b) I didn't have to get up at 6:30 in the morning
c) I had actually played somewhere in the last year
d) I had managed to actually convince one of my friends (21 or older, natch) to come with me.

Alas, none of these criteria were met, and I was kind of pissed for a bit. But then I got on stage, busted a string, sang Janis Joplin's "Mercedes-Benz," and all was well with the universe.

Then again, it might have been the beer.

Shit, who are you?!

I have such a terrible memory for names. What I really hate is when I see someone, and I know I know them, and they clearly know me, but I can't remember their name or how I know them.

This happened tonight when I went to Giordano's for some sweet, sweet half price Chicago-style pizza, and I ran into Jackie, who's friends with my ex, Laura.

Except I couldn't remember that initially. She waved and said "Hey, how are ya?" and I started flipping through my mental rolodex of how I know people. Do I know her from class? Was she one of the random people I forgot lived in my dorm at some point? Is she friends with someone I know?

It took about two minutes of conversation before the name of my Laura's dorm popped up and I put two and two together on how I knew her. She also had another friend of Laura's from the dorm with her, whose name I have already forgotten.

Fortunately, my friend Jack was standing next to me and I was able, after I noticed that he was staring at the ceiling, to say "This is my friend Jack, and these are some of Laura's friends," and Jackie introduced herself. And then her friend introduced herself, but I have no recollection of who she was.

I always feel like such a moron when I do things like that, because I'm only 21, and if my memory is this bad now, I can't imagine how bad it's going to be when I'm old and senile.

I had a great ending for this entry, but I forget what it was.

Maternal Haiku?

I passed along to my mother the odd compliment I had been paid by one of the guys I work for ("You make [the last guy] look like a fire hydrant.") when I talked to her last night, and I recieved this IM this afternoon:

---
(mom):Top this...
You can't!
My daughter is NOT
A fire hydrant!

Apoem by your proud mom, MKL
---

I have no idea what this means.

At all.

Revival

I've been kind of bad lately about actually updating this thing, and I felt I needed to put a bunch of stuff up before I become a DeadBlog, like Elisa's (last update: May 28th) or Eddy's (last update, ironically titled "Must not miss a day of blogging": July 1).

I actually never thought I'd be able to keep this up on a fairly regular basis for as long as I have (almost four months now). I've never kept a diary, at least not successfully. I had a couple of attempts when I was in high school to start one, but they always ran out of steam after a week or so.

This, I think, works better for a couple of reasons: I'm doing this more to entertain others than reveal my deepest inner thoughts, since the latter gets kind of boring and depressing after a while, and it's a great procrastination tool.

And it is nice to have some sort of record of my life for the last few months, remembering little foibles and such.

The odd thing is that now other people know about the foibles. I've always had an uncanny memory for random shit (I have actually remembered away messages people put up 2 months before), but I've learned that apparently I'm not the only one.

Some people will come up to me and say something referring to something I wrote and I'll be like "Huh?" and then remember that I wrote about it a few weeks ago. So that is a little bit odd. It's nice to know, however, that I can look back on all the weird shit that's happened to me over the last few months and laugh.

But I can pretty much guarantee you the weblog will bite the dust if I start getting laid again.

Adventures in Bed Shopping

So my friend Jack is without car, and was in need of a bed.

He has an inflatable mattress, but the problem with it is that it deflates over the course of a night, until he wakes up on the floor. He decided that that was pretty fucking lame, and he needed a real bed.

So I picked him up and we went comparison mattress shopping. Coop said that my away message for this event, "taking Jack to the mattress store", was the best euphemism he'd heard all week.

We went first to a sketchy, sketchy place way out on Dempster, where I had an interesting exchange with the salesman (for those who don't know Jack, he's got a girlfriend, and I would if I had the opportunity):

Salesman: So, what kind of bed are you two looking for?
Me: (gales of laughter)
Salesman: What?
Me: (still laughing) Oh, I'm just the chauffeur.
Salesman: Ohhhh...

Eventually, after going many places (including Mattress Giant, they of the semi-pornographic "Ooooh Aaaah!" on all their radio and TV ads), we actually found him a good bed in his price range at some random furniture store in Niles, so all was well.

And I have a feeling the collective giggling over this excursion will continue for some time to come.

Concert Review: The White Stripes

In the great mess of things I probably should have posted about over the last couple of days, little stands out more than the White Stripes concert I went to friday.

The opening band, the Clone Defects, was pretty bad. Their lead singer looks like James Carville, and pretty much is what Carville would be if he were a rock singer: Badly out of tune and way too enthusiastic.

The Stripes are a great band. Ok, they're technically a duo, since it's just Jack and Meg White, who allege that they are brother and sister, but are evidently man and ex-wife. I'm going to steal Spin's line on them and just call them the Ambiguously Related Duo.

Whatever their relation, they play some damn good punk/blues/country (though mostly punk) music. And they put on one hell of a show. They tore through half their catalogue and a bunch of covers in an hour an a half. My favorite cover was Bob Dylan's "Lovesick", which they did a really perfect job on reconstructing in their own style.

They played a lot of stuff from their first (the White Stripes) and third (White Blood Cells) albums, but not a lot from their second (De Stijl), which I thought was odd, because that was really good. However, they ripped on "Hotel Yorba," so all is forgiven.

The oddest part of the entire show was the audience. Because the show didn't start til 11:30 (because the Metro double-booked themselves), a lot of the audience was at least 30. And if you don't know that that's old for a punk audience, you clearly don't follow music.

I'm not sure if it was because they were old or just weird, but for some reason when the Stripes finished a song, the audience would burst into wild screaming and applause for about 15 seconds, and then suddenly stop. It was really weird:

"WOOOOOOOO!! YEAAAAAAH! (silence)."

Overall, I highly recommend seeing them, if you can get tickets. Me and Cleo had to get ours off of EBay, but if there's tickets left in your area, go. And the Clone Defects are off the tour after tonight, so you won't have to suffer through them.

Unless you're really that hot for James Carville.

(shudder).