No, really, I swear!

I stayed in to do work tonight, so of course, no work actually got done.

I did finally watch Y Tu Mamá También, which is an excellent film, though I'm even more disturbed that Alfonso Cuarón is going to be directing the third Harry Potter movie now that I've actually seen the movie than when I had just heard about it.

I should have actually gotten some work done, but alas, because I was so determined to do work, nothing actually happened, other than me cleaning my room, doing laundry, and, well, I'm not sure what else.

I'm so good at wasting time, I don't even know how I do it.

At least tomorrow I know I'll be doing something: Getting up early to drink beer and freeze my ass off and watch a football game. Or at least the first half. I may be a bit of a moron, but I'm not a total masochist.

An outbreak of Zen

I seem to have come down with inner peace.

A friend of mine told Megan (Rugby Girl) some things at the Co-op party tonight (which I had skipped the beginning of to go downtown with other friends) that, well, I would have preferred she not tell her.

I won't go into it here, but suffice it to say, normally, I would have decked my friend for telling a girl I like and am trying to convince that I'm not ridiculously desperate what she told Megan.

For some reason, however, I really don't care. My reaction to this has made absolutely no sense, from a logical perspective.

I didn't deck her on the spot, and other than an embarrassed, "Oh my god! I can't believe you told her that!", I didn't really say anything about it. This is so not me.

I get pissed off at the drop of a hat. I have a somewhat short temper most of the time, so normally recieving news like this would cause veins to bulge in my forehead and my hands to form involuntary fists.

But tonight? Eh.

Perhaps it's the two mile walk home in the bitter cold while wearing cowboy boots talking, but for some reason, I'm not pissed. Maybe all the stress from midterms the last couple weeks has gone totally overboard, pushing me into some sort of weird calm. It's happened before.

Or perhaps it's the fact that I had two beers at the club I went to downtown and a Jell-O shot at the party, though my tolerance has become significantly higher since I turned 21. Perhaps I've accidentally killed all the brain cells that care.

Or perhaps I've just lost my mind completely.

But I guess I'll find out whether this affects anything (or whether Megan even remembers this or took it seriously) in the next couple of days...

Until then, I think I'm going to savor my inner peace. I don't get that too often.

Dammit

Two good guys died today, and oddly enough, they were both only 37 years old.

1. Darrien Chapman, of a heart attack as he was about to play hockey. He was a sportscaster here in Chicago, and he had been in DC for a few years when I was still living there. I remember him as a really good sportscaster,

I remember that he had a heart attack at the ripe old age of 29, and the channel he worked for showed his recovery and talked to him about the fact that his dad died when he was about the same age as Chapman was when he died today.

I remember very clearly that he said he wanted to be around for a long time to come, for his kids. It's a fucking shame that he's not going to be able to, because he seemed like a really decent guy.

2. Jason Mizell, who you probably know as Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC, shot and killed in his recording studio in Jamaica, Queens.

Believe it or not, I used to be really into rap when I was younger, and while I didn't listen to Run-DMC as much as I did to later groups like Salt-N-Pepa and Naughty By Nature, I still knew enough about them and their music to hear what a powerful influence they had on an entire generation of rappers.

I'm fucking tired of seeing good musicians getting killed or committing suicide or just dropping dead for no good goddamn reason.

But these guys were both good people, and the fact that they both died so prematurely on the same day at the same age is just another reminder of how random and stupid life can be.

And unlike most of the random, stupid stuff I write about here, not in a good way.

Why...

...do I like to torture myself by watching romantic comedies?

I'm a film major! I'm supposed to inherently despise these things!

I desperately want to stop. I can see the plot holes from space. I can see the developments coming a mile away. But still I watch.

Oh, there are a few good ones, usually ones that combine romantic comedy with something else. The two I watched tonight did: But I'm A Cheerleader (hybrid RomCom and Satire) and French Kiss (hybrid RomCom and Fish-Out-Of-Water Comedy).

I take incredibly guilty pleasure in watching these movies, especially because I generally end up feeling depressed and like I'm never going to meet anyone, when I'm actually just buying into an idealistic world that doesn't exist, and deep down, I know that.

But part of me will always be waiting for the bad girl with the heart of gold to take me away, or the smirky yet sensitive Frenchman who will steal my heart.

Alas, until such time, I'm just going to have to stumble blindly through the funnel of love (you've gotta see But I'm A Cheerleader to know what I'm talking about) and try not to make an ass of myself with people I'm trying to convince to sleep with me.

(Sigh).

Oh, shut up, I know what you're thinking. So fuck you. :)

O.P.D.

Marky Monkey's weblog is now officially a deadblog, since he hasn't updated the damn thing in two months. Should he decide to return to it, I'll put it back in its rightful, insightfully rambling place.

Until then, it will have to sit facing the corner and wearing a dunce cap.

Motivate this.

I think I really only have a finite amount of motivation each night.

This is because, generally, when I first sit down to do something, I will sit down and bang stuff out and really be on the ball and get things done, and done well and quickly. Then, after about an hour of that, I start fading.

I check my email repeatedly, I read the entire Washington Post online (and occasionally, if I'm getting really desperate, the whole Trib, too), I check websites of musicians whose sites I haven't looked at in months.

Finally, I take the away message off of IM and try and work and IM people at the same time, which is always the death of my motivation, since I'd much rather talk to my friends than do actual work.

I used my alloted motivation tonight to finally get a couple of job applications out, seeing as how they're due tomorrow. However, this leaves me with the problem of my 3pm midterm tomorrow. I've been typing up my notes, since

a) they're hard to study from because they're essentially illegible, because my handwriting is worse than my 84 year old grandmother's, and

b) it's a lot easier for me to learn something by writing it down than it is to read it repeatedly.

However, my wrists are really starting to hurt from typing so much, and I actually managed to avoid taking a nap this afternoon (though not without a great deal of effort), so I think I'm going to have to stop soon, before I pitch face-first onto my keyboard.

I don't think that would really be learning by osmosis. Learning by osmosis would be sleeping on my notes. Which I have tried before, both intentionally and unintentionally (after falling facefirst onto my notes trying not to fail The Earth As A Planet, or as the professor pronounced it, Zee Earf As A Plannette).

It doesn't work. Not on zis Earf.

Oh lordy...

The Republicans are up to their weird flash animations again.

And once again, this is not a joke.

It's funny because it's true

Click me.

Ms. Shapiro and the Vicious Circle

I have got to stop falling asleep mid-afternoon.

I get tired in the middle of the afternoon, especially after I eat, so I take a nap. So then I'm not tired at night, and I'm up til 4am.

Which means I get tired in the middle of the afternoon.

God damn it. This, more than anything, is why I need a real job: less opportunity for loafing.

When I was working over the summer, this didn't happen. Well, other than a couple of incidents of low-grade narcolepsy during days where nothing was going on. But for the most part, I could actually stay awake all day, because I slept all night.

Drinking a double-shot mocha at 11pm probably didn't help tonight, though...

Perhaps I just need to stop being a moron. Except life is significantly easier when you're a moron, because you have quite a bit less responsibility.

Which means fuck it, I'm taking a nap tomorrow afternoon. So there.

Nyaaaaah.

The Others

Ellen is not a terribly common name, but there are a good number of us. There's already a queer Ellen singer-songwriter in Chicagoland (Ellen Rosner, who is really goddamn good), and now, there's another Ellen in one of my various circles of friends.

She's dating my friend Sarah, which made for some odd initial conversations about their relationship:

Me: How's things with Ellen?
Sarah: Oh, they're fine, Ellen.

For conversations with her, I've designated the girlfriend "Other Ellen," though I think (given a couple of comments I've heard) the rest of the group are differentiating us as "Big Ellen" and "Little Ellen."

Which is fair, since in addition to being a couple inches shorter than me, she's also about 100 pounds lighter.

I'm getting a glimpse of what my friends who all have such common first names that they must be designated by their last names are going through.

However, nobody can top my friend Jon. His boyfriend's name? Jon.

Lord help me if I start dating another Ellen...

Go, Short Stack!

I, for one, am very happy the Angels won the World Series.

Firstly, because they beat the Yankees. I fucking hate the Yankees. I feel that anyone who beats the Yankees in the playoffs is entitled to win the World Series.

Secondly, because I like their shortstop, David Eckstein, who I've nicknamed Short Stack, since he's 5'6" ("By his own admission," the announcers helpfully added about fifteen times during the playoffs).

He's so short (for a baseball player, at least) that when he comes up to bat, he's just barely as tall as the squatting catcher. Being only two inches shorter than him, I find his success tremendously endearing.

I've been rooting for him since the Yankees series, largely because I find him tremendously entertaining, because despite the short legs, he runs like a maniac and ends up beating out little dribblers in the infield.

It was very cool to see him holding the World Series trophy, especially because the damn thing was only half as big as him.

Thirdly, I wanted the Angels to win because I like Mike Scoscia. He was a great player for the Dodgers for a really long time, and he was on the team that won on Kirk Gibson's home run.

According to the Fox graphic, he's the 27th person to win Series rings as both a player and a manager. I also like that he was totally honest when asked if it's better to win as a player or a manager: "Oh, it's much better as a player!"

He was also extremely funny when he guest starred on the Simpsons episode where Burns makes a million dollar bet on a plant softball league game and brings in a bunch of ringers. Scoscia is the one who's actually interested in doing the work.

Fourthly, I wanted the Angels to win because Barry Bonds is an asshole, and I didn't want to see eight bajillion glowing articles about how he's changed now that he has a World Series to his credit.

Fifthly, I wanted them to win for old Gene Autry, who owned the team for almost 40 years, and because I wanted Disney, the team's current owner, to look even stupider for trying to unload them.

Mikey Eisner, trying to look casual by wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt and a sport jacket, then jumping around with John Travolta, definitely made them look pretty goddamn dumb.

Finally, I wanted the Angels to win because a few of my friends were really rooting for them. I like tweaking people whose teams lose, simply because my teams usually lose and I'm usually the one getting tweaked.

It's nice to turn the tables of mockery once in a while.

Amazes me, the will of instinct

I just saw the entirety of Nirvana Unplugged for the first time.

I've listened to the album hundreds, if not thousands of times, but I had never actually seen the whole of the taped special, even though the special is almost ten years old.

I'd seen the performance of "All Apologies," since it had been released as a single back when a) I still watched MTV on a regular basis and b) MTV still played videos. But tonight, flipping through channels, I saw the beginning of it come on, and I watched the whole thing, mesmerized.

There are minor differences between the CD and the show. Some banter is added, some removed. "Oh Me" and "Something In The Way" were both dumped for time restraints, which I think were the right songs to omit, if omission was necessary.

The most striking moments come just watching Kurt Cobain, though. His eyes (when he manages to open them) still have a vitality in them, even though at this point his heroin addiction was getting worse and worse, and within a year, he'd be dead.

The strain on his face, especially when singing in "Pennyroyal Tea" about cherry-flavored antacid (Cobain's heroin addiction was apparently a product of an otherwise futile quest to silence debilitating stomach pain), is just wrenching, making the pain in his voice seem even stronger.

I've read dozens of descriptions of the taping of the show, and by all accounts, rehearsals had been disastrous, which makes the final product all the more amazing.

There's one thing I don't think I'm ever going to be able to listen to the same way again: The very end of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?". Simply listening to it still gives me goosebumps, even though I've listened to it and played it myself thousands of times.

But as he sings the very last line, Cobain's eyes suddenly shoot wide open, exposing his beautiful, striking, and deeply frightened blue eyes for about a second and a half, before he launches into the last two shivering notes of the song.

I don't think that image will ever leave my mind.

Watching it and listening to it again, I got so angry at Kurt for killing himself all over again. But alas, time has marched on, and the only time you can see him on MTV is at midnight on a Sunday, singing for kids who were five when he died.

Maybe, just maybe, watching it, these kids will get an idea of the magnitude of the loss that a lot of us felt in 1994. Or maybe they'll just make fun of the flannel, and go back to listening to Christina Aguilera.

But I sure as hell hope it's the former.

Seemed like a good idea at the time...

(SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Posted While Still Kinda Drunk, More Than Likely Incoherent)

Penny pitchers of Budweiser and Bud Light were advertised as the Saturday Special at The Pumping Company, a fine establishment on the North Side of Chicago, about a 30 minute El ride from where I live.

It's also just a short walk from Standee's, the finest shitty, NYC-style all-nite diner the North Side of Chicago has to offer, so we could sober up easily. Or so we thought.

Things like this always seem like the ingredient for a brilliant, drunken Saturday night.

Instead, they usually end up brilliant and drunken for about an hour and a half or so, and then as total fiascoes the rest of the evening.

So, not realizing this at the time, of course we went, and we drank. Or at least I drank. A pitcher and a half of not as watered down Bud Light as I anticipated in an hour and a half.

I have no tolerance and a 15-minute drunkenness lag, so as soon as I even start to feel drunk, I need to stop drinking, because I know I'm going to be feeling quite fucked up in the very near future.

However, I'm also a fucking idiot, so I continued drinking after I started to feel drunk. So I was good and fucked up by the time I called one of my friends' girlfriend "titalicious."

Really.

Thankfully, she took this as a compliment.

I realized I needed some food when after two bottles of water, I was still incredibly fucked up, so I walked (or more accurately, weaved) over to Standee's while others continued drinking.

There was a girl there with a literature book and a journal, who I'm relatively sure was writing literarily (if that's a word) about all the random drunks in this coffee shop, although she claimed it was purely self-reflective.

I'm sure I'll wind up as a minor, pancake-eating alcoholic in some great work of literature someday.

After a couple of cups of coffee, my friend Jon joined me, then slowly people started coming in. I think my friend whose girlfriend I, uh, complimented, didn't smack me simply because he was even more fucked up than I was.

He ended up puking repeatedly, and his girlfriend (who was sober, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), drove him and my roomate and another friend home.

The other 4 of us ended up taking the El, and at the transfer from the Red to the Purple line, I had to pee so badly it wasn't even funny.

The usual wait for the El, which is normally just annoying, seems particularly torturous when you think you're going to explode. I felt the pain of another friend of mine who was with us, and I swear I will never make fun of him again for having to pee every five seconds.

So I finally get home, go directly to bathroom, not passing go, not collecting $200, and when my business is finished, I come out, and nobody's home.

I don't notice a note that has gotten kicked into a pile of trash next to my door in my drunken stupor. Emphasis on stupor.

So I call my roommate's cell phone. No answer. I call all three other people that drove home together. No answer from any of them. I call them all again. Still, nobody picks up.

I started to panic. If any single one of them had picked up, I probably would have calmed the fuck down, at least partially. I was still too stupid to notice the note.

So I bring two of my friends who were drinking with us into it. One claims he is going to get in his car and go look for all of them, which I expressly forbid either of them from doing, since I know how much they were drinking.

So they call a sober friend of his, and they start looking. Finally, I call Ms. Titalicious' house, and I determine that Ms. and Mr. Titalicious are at her apartment, where he is recovering and she is about to go to bed, though they don't know where the other two are, though they dropped them off at friend #3's apartment, half a block from mine.

My two friends who had gone a' lookin' went over to friend #3's apartment, knocked on the door, and thankfully, her still-awake and still-sober roommate told them that she was a) there and b) alone.

So now all we had to figure out was where my roomate was. I still was too goddamn dumb to notice the note.

They came over, and I was calling my roommate for approximately the 875th time, and she finally picked up to a "WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?!" from me.

She said, "Oh, didn't you get my note?"

I looked behind my concerned friend who was standing directly in front of me. A small, legal-colored but not legal-sized piece of paper sat next to a big pile of boxes I meant to bring outside a week ago, directly behind him.

There was writing on it: "Hey, stopped by a party, back soon (heart), Katy."

Fuck.

So I had scared the living shit out of my friends, woken several people up, and totally freaked out...because I was drunk and oblivious.

Alcohol is bad, mmkay?

Like I said, these things always end up seeming like a good idea at the time.

Next time, I'm pacing myself. I'm drinking my pitcher and a half of beer over the course of three hours, and not an hour and a half. Then, maybe, I might actually be able to hold it.

I hereby apologize to the following people:
1. My friend's girlfriend who I called titalicious.
2. My friend whose girlfriend I called titalicious.
3. My friends who I freaked out for being paranoid.
4. My roommate for being paranoid.
5. Anyone who has managed to make it through this whole rambling post.

Especially #5.

Ugh. Hangover update tomorrow, I'm sure.