Secret Wilco Confession

I don't know when it happened, but Wilco has sort of become my favorite band. I still love the Decemberists, but Wilco has sort of edged them out of their prime spot as of late. I can't tell you how many times I've listened to Kicking Television, but it's a lot... a lot of times.

NEWS FLASH!

I went downtown last night to a bar and had a good time. That's right, for the first time ever going to a bar didn't suck. I went down there with Bucket, Joe and some of Joe's friends and it was a fairly pleasant experience.

School is fun so far. I have a paper that's going to be kicking my ass later this week if I don't get on the ball. We'll see what happens. I am kind of bummed that I don't have my film class tomorrow cause we don't have school.

I can't move my arms

I lifted with Dustin Wednesday and Thursday and consequently, I can't comfortably move my arms.

I'm almost done with my first week of class of the semester. Here's a brief summary;

Intro to Film and TV production: My favorite class ever.
History of Mass Media: Could be worse, Dr. Baldwin seems like a lot of fun
EN 140: The jury is out on this one.
MC 155: I enjoy this class in the same way I enjoy bad movies. I love the fact that Bob hates it. It's very entertaining.

Speaking of bad movies, I've probably watched the Across the Universe trailer a dozen or so times. I really don't think it's going to be a good movie, but I already know I'm going to like it. I suppose there's a slim chance it will be good, but I'm not holding my breathe. Just from watching the trailer I can tell you that the girlfriend will probably die and her brother definitely will. Jude will end up alone either way and it will still be the 1960's. I hate the 1960's. It's a very smug decade. I just read that they're going to be releasing 2 soundtracks for the film though. A regular 16 track one and the super deluxe 31 track version. Guess which one I'll be buying.

I saw Superbad again tonight. I agree with Matthew, it's 2/3 of a good movie.

You'll be pleased to know that I'm not reading Order of the Phoenix now. You're probably tired of hearing my views on that particular English teenage wizard. That isn't to say I'm giving up on my complete reread, I'm just taking a break. I think I'll probably pick up the series again around fall break. I can't wait for fall. Several stores I've been to are already selling Halloween merch. It's not even September. It's more than 2 months till All Hallows Eve. Capitalism is awesome.

That's all for now. I need to go brush up on my complete world knowledge.

I thought YOU had class.

I've been going to the REC center this week instead of running for 2 reasons.
1. My MP3 player has stopped functioning in a satisfactory manner.
2. I haven't been getting up till 10, and it's just too f*ing hot to run that late in the morning
The nice thing about the REC center is that I can watch TV while I use their magical exercise machines and today I got to watch some classic first season Arrested Development, hence the title of this post.

Harry Potter talk commences:

I finished book 4 on Sunday, but since I had already posted once on Sunday I decided not to post my analysis that day because I didn't want to overload my audience (myself and perhaps the other Matts). So here are my thoughts on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:

It's still a good book. Pretty much everything Barty Jr. does as Moody is justified as either part of Voldemort's scheme or just part of his personality manifesting itself, but I still think he's a better teacher than he has any right to be especially since he's spent the last decade or so in prison of some sort. I'm pretty sure it says he went to Azkaban as a teenager, so being generous he was 19, two years out of Hogwarts (unless he was home schooled, which is possible given his father). Maybe he majored in Secondary ed at Hogwarts, or maybe he was just a gifted educator. As well as being a great educator he is apparently an amazingly talented actor, convincing everyone for the better part of a year that he was Mad Eye would be no easy feat. Also, something Matthew brought up was the Barty's polyjuice supply, once he got to Hogwarts, it wouldn't have been that hard to keep making more polyjuice potion, but where did Barty get his first month's supply? Doesn't it take a month or two to make it? Wouldn't he need a shitload of it? I suppose Peter could have made it but was there enough time? The Quidditch World Cup is a couple of days before the first day of school, it's also the night that Barty breaks free from his dad. So they have like 2 days to set this whole plan in motion. It seems a bit dodgey to me. Also Hermione Granger keeps Rita Skeeter trapped in a jar for at least 2 days. She is a horrible human being. I love Hermione Granger.
Anyway the movie handles the last task and the graveyard scene better than the book does, but other than that the book is far superior to the film. Now that I'm done with book 4 I have finished all of the High School Era Harry Potter books. I read the first through fourth books for the first time during high school, and I'm pretty sure I haven't read them since. Also, now that I'm done with book four, I'm done with Harry Potter being a sympathetic character. I won't like Harry Potter the person again until I get to the 3rd to last chapter of book 7. He's such a dick.

I was toying with the idea of giving the series a rest until the end of the semester, picking it up again when the fifth movie comes out on DVD. I've read part of 5 and all of 6 and 7 within the last couple of months, so I don't know if I'd be able to keep interested in them. Also I suppose I'll need to, you know, do homework and stuff starting in a week or so, so I probably won't have as much time for reading as I do now.

I still need to talk to Anna and Layne about book 7.

End Harry Potter Talk

The Lookout is ok. It doesn't have any kind of twist ending, so don't believe what the DVD box says.

Magical Supertime happy face!

Stardust is awesome.
Rush Hour 3 is horrendous.

I saw both of those movies yesterday, but more importantly I saw a metric assload of movie previews. Since I don't really watch TV, I don't really see a lot of movie previews. Most of the previews I see online are for movies I already know about and am probably going to see anyway. All the previews before Rush Hour 3 were for movies that looked to be as crappy if not more crappy than the feature presentation, except for American Gangster, which looks awesome. Most of the previews before Stardust were uninteresting except the one for Across the Universe . Across the Universe is a musical set in US during the 60's. It's about an English gent who comes to the states and falls in love with some chick and it uses exclusively Beatle's songs as the soundtrack. WOOT! It kind of looks and feel like Moulin Rouge, which is a movie I quite enjoy. So I'll probably end up seeing it and buying the soundtrack.

I'm not quite done with book four, so you'll have to wait for my next post for my insights into Harry Potter's fourth year at Hogwarts, sorry.

I hope we play frisbee tonight. It's been too long since I've participated in a good game of disc.

I promise this post won't be about work, Harry Potter or sleeping.

90.9 plays pretty good music between the hours of 10 pm and 12 am on Friday Night. It's the kind of music I wish the college station would play, the other college station, the one run by college students, the one that plays emo, screamo, nu metal and various other crap except for the 4 minutes a day when they play good songs. Really four minutes is a generous estimate. I don't think they play that much good music a day. I hear maybe two songs a week that I like on RAGE 103.7. It's pretty f*ing ridiculous. From what I understand 103.7 subscribes to some sort of crappy College Rock version of Now: That's what I call music. They get CD's of the "popular" "alternative" "songs" they rip the CD on their computer and then make a crappy playlist.

I think I'm going to see Stardust tomorrow with Pete and Steve. Rush Hour 3 also opened this weekend. So did Skinwalkers, which is a werewolf movie and I am therefore contractually obligated to see it. I'm probably not going to see it though.

I just e-mailed The Friday Night Music people telling them how much they rock.

night

Number 200!!! I think...

Brief work update (I promise) Jay hired some young guy named Jason to do route one. I'm really tired of work.

Not so brief Harry Potter update.
I realized a few days ago that this reread will probably be the last time I pick up any of the Harry Potter books for a long, long time. Unless she writes more books, which I think she might. Anyway I finished book 2 on Sunday... I think. I can't remember. Yeah, it must have been Sunday. Book 2 is really funny. It might be her best book... it's not, but if I were trying to defend her writing to someone, I would probably present Chamber of Secrets as exhibit A. Her best book is probably book 3, which I finished last night. I love book 3 so much, and it was a lot better rereading it with David Thewlis as the Lupin in my head. The big revelation scene in the Shrieking Shack has too much yelling and it seems like the situation could have been diffused a lot sooner if Lupin and Sirius would've been less vague about who they were intending to kill.

Black: I'm totally going to kill someone in this room that's a wizard!
Harry: No I won't let you!
Lupin: Stand back Harry, Sirius is going to murder someone who is in the Shrieking Shack and has spent a lot of time at Hogwarts recently!
Ron: No don't!
Black: Yes, the time has finally come to end the life someone in that particular corner. (Sirius points vaguely to the corner of the room where Harry, Ron and Hermione were standing)
etc...

I kept wanting Ron to put the moves on Hermione in book three. Hermione shows a lot of vulnerability in book three, she really needed someone to be there for her. Ron totally could have hit that.


I didn't go running today or Monday. I'm going tomorrow, I promise. I just need to get some good music on my MP3 player. I've been listening to a Hell of a lot of Wilco lately. I really like Wilco, but I need something different for running purposes. Something that's distracting, yet compelling. I could just put a mix on there, but that usually doesn't work out because I usually just ending up skipping to the tracks I really want to hear, I feel with a whole album on there I'm more likely to listen to the whole thing.

Ok, I'm going to start reading book 4 now.
Night.

Hello, hello.

The first paragraph is about work

Well the first of the month is over at CMS, pretty much. It usually takes 2 days for the mail to go back to normal and yesterday was the second day. I must say it's been a pretty interesting week so far. It started with Adam getting fired for leaving mail in his van, again. Tuesday was Vicki's last day, and Meredith's last day for that matter, and we've been swimming in handsort ever since. They hired Darrell on Friday, he's doing Adam/my old route, Ricky was doing route 1, Scott's old route (Scott's now doing route 5) but today was his last day so Jay hired some lady named Diane to take over route 1. She won't show up tomorrow. They never do. Girls will not do my job, they are perfectly capable, but they just don't like that kind of work. So tomorrow we'll be short-handed, but I might get to do a route since Diane won't be there. So the worst part of the whole driver swap 2007 is the route 6 and 7 combo that's brining mail that used to arrive at 5:45 and 6:30 respectively, anywhere between 7:30 and 8, which means I'm not even running it till 7:40 at the earliest which means we're not getting done with pass 1 till 8:15 at the earliest. This blows. And it's really frustrating because we can't keep anyone long enough for them to get good at what they do, so we'll never get out early again.


The Second paragraph is probably going to be about Harry Potter, although I'm not really sure, I haven't written it yet.

I finished the first Harry Potter book this morning. It took me about 3.5 hours to read. It is a quick read. There is no mucking about in book 1. Second to last chapter they go through the trap door. The last chapter is the confrontation with Quirrell and the wrap up. It's all business. While rereading the book I was trying to figure out why I liked this book so immediately. I couldn't, but I did notice some things that struck me as odd.
1. In the first chapter Dumbledore call Prof McGonagall, "Professor McGonagall", were they not yet on a first name basis? I wonder if I was confused by the fact that she was called Professor the first time through considering I had no point of reference for her being a professor.
2. How long was baby Harry alone in his ruined house? Hagrid brought him to the Dursley's the night after Voldemorte died. What was the immediate aftermath of James and Lily Potter's death? Did Bathilda take Harry? What was going on?
3. Where did the hats go? No one wears their wizard hats anymore. All the students have hats in the first book. Of course it could be that they are wearing them all the time, Rowling just takes it is as a given when describing a characters appearance that the person is wearing a silly wizard hat.
4. Harry used to be kind of a likeable kid. What the hell happened.
I'm going to try to read the second book tomorrow. We'll see what happens.

The third paragraph is me talking about sleep.

I'm tired. I'm going to sleep.

Finally Over My Post-Potter Funk

It only took 7 days! Well, 8 at this point. Anyway....

Have you seen the Iron Man Comicon footage?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVRQjCG8tn4

Robert Downey Jr. is amazing. I wonder if he's always been this good. I need to see Zodiac.

Only two more Carbondale runs at work. Quel dommage.

So I don't know about you, but I'm totally ready for school to start. It's been a long, unproductive summer. I need something constructive to do.

ok. that's all.

Welcome Back!

Hello blog. I'm back. At least for now.

I know it's been a while since I last blogged, and I'm sorry. Well not really. But I have some stuff I feel like I needed to get out of my system and I feel you are the best avenue to said system venting.

The primary reason I've come back to blog is because of a 17 year old English wizard that I have not and will never meet. Of course I'm talking about Harry Potter. I finished book 7 about four days ago, and I'll be honest, it's taken quite a toll on me. I haven't been sleeping well since I finished the book. I haven't been hungry since I finished the book. To put it succinctly I've been fairly depressed since I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The book isn't terribly depressing in and of itself. A bunch of people die and it's kind of sad when they do, but this sadness is nothing compared to the intensely depressing realization that this is the last time I will get to visit Harry's world. Sure I can reread the books anytime I feel like it, but it will never be the same as it was the first time.
I really can't explain why I love the Harry Potter books so much. It could be the escapist element. I love the idea of being a student at Hogwarts. (I would be a Hufflepuff and I would think that the Gryffindors were all tools, but I'd be cool to Harry, even though he's totally a dick)
But then again, I've never really needed help from books to escape. I've always had a pretty vivid imagination. And really the fact that Harry Potter is so universally popular should make me hate it, because I'm something of a contrarian. But for some reason I love the books, even though there are admitedly bad at times (most of book 7). I sometimes wonder if I read the books for the first time now, as a 23 year old, instead of when I was 16 I would feel differently about them.
Anyway, I hope they make significant changes when they make a movie out of Deathly Hallows, like a lot less polyjuice potion. I hope they make Ron and Hermione's kiss something cool and significant. I hope they change the ending, the horrible, horrible ending.
So that's my first post in 4 months. Hopefully it won't be my last.

Bad days...

I was going to write a really long post about how shitty my day was today, but I'm not going to. I'm going to write a really short one about how shitty my day was.

I got called into work this morning to do a route because Cal died last night. Cal was a good guy and he will be missed. I worked until I had to go to class, then I went to my classes, both of which were pointless today, then back to work (after a brief stop to pick up a ticket for the 940 showing of 300). Work sucked. 300 was good, but completely unsuprising. I got out of the movie and my car wouldn't start. It's sitting in the parking lot at Cape West 14.

I think God is trying to tell me something, and I think that something is, "Hey, I don't like you."

I still haven't restrung my guitar

It's almost been a month since I broke the string on my dad's guitar. I miss playing it.

I watched Confetti. It was ok. I gave it a 6 on IMDB. Maybe a bit more than it deserves. I thought it was supposed to be a romantic mockumentary. It was pretty much just a romantumentary though. There wasn't a lot of humor. There were funny parts, most of them involved Jimmy Carr, suprise suprise. The first part of the movie was a lot funnier than the second part. It was better than "Thank You for Your Consideration" though, which isn't really saying much. Borat is funnier than TYFYC.

I have a test tomorrow in MC 201. I should be sleeping so I can get up a little early and study a little bit before the test. Obviously I'm not because I'm typing this.

Speaking of things I need to do; I need to write a concert report for that concert I went to in Paducah. Paducah is a pretty neat town. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, I went to Paducah last Saturday to see a symphony concert. It was pretty cool. What was really cool was that on the way back we listened to 91.3, which is Murray's college station, and they were playing a bunch of kicking music. Arcade Fire, Neko Case, Mountain Goats, Sufjan, Beirut. How awesome is it to be driving around and to have "Postcards From Italy" play on the radio? I'll tell you. Pretty f-ing awesome!!!

Shabazzle!

March!

I thought of a neat phrase: Sassy Curtains. It's a euphamism, I just don't know what for. It sounds really dirty though. I was playing with my sassy curtains. We were playing with our sassy curtains.
He/She/It was playing with his/her/its sassy curtains.

I haven't posted much lately because I haven't had much to say. I've been working, going to school, and playing various games. That's about it. I'll let you know when something interesting happens.

Ash Wednesday

It's Lent! Yay!

I've given on up on the LOTR mmo beta. I've downloaded it 3 times. Three different methods. Once using the torrent. Once with their download manager, and once with their little small bite size files. All three times there were errors and missing components when I tried to install. I searched through the boards trying to find people with similar problems, and the solution given to those people by the administrators was the smaller file downloads. I'm done with it. I've spent the last week trying to get this game to work and it's just not going to happen.

In other sort of gaming news, I bought heroscape. It's kind of like Heroquest, but cooler. Spants and I played it on Monday. He beat me twice because I couldn't roll the dice to save my life and his units had immense defense. It's a big game. It takes a lot of room.

Joe comes home tomorrow. He's bringing a girl with him. My mom is freaking out about the house being a mess, which it isn't really... I'm mean, not more than normal.

Anyway, I've been playing a lot of 12. It's great fun.

I haven't posted in a while.

I just got studying for a test...sort of. I read the study guide and feel like i have a pretty good grasp on the concepts.

Associational
Institutional
Nonassociational
Anomic

BAM! Those are the four types of interest groups.

Apparently I've been able to actually retain some knowledge in this class, even though it's my sleepiest one.

I ganked Spant's copy of 12. I think I'm going to start a new game. I have a save file from when I rented it. I'm like 11 hours in on that file... but that was around halloween which was like 4 months ago. I tried picking it up from there, but I had no connection to it. I'm going to start over.

Did you know SEMO isn't closed on president's day!?? What kind of bullshit is that!?

I'm dling another British TV series to district me while I play video games. It's called Jeeves and Wooster. It stars Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. It's fun.

Also, God of War 2 comes out next month and is supposedly the greatest action game ever.

I still have Christmas candy

Been listening to a lot of Arcade Fire recently. Funeral is one of my favorite albums of all time.

My dad and I are doing a trivia night tonight in Kelso with some of his brothers. As much useless knowledge as I have, I'm really not that much of an asset when it comes to trivia nights because the questions are either ridiculously easy so that everyone would know them, or unnecessarily hard. Not a lot of questions fall in the middle ground, where I feel I am the most useful. That's why I like the Notre Dame Trivia nights so much. Chris/Betsy/Ted/Kent work so hard at having a good mix of questions and they usually do an excellent job. The reality TV category is the one exception. That whole thing was bogus.

So school's going well. I enjoy all my classes, even though I tend to nod off in political science and I'm really adapting rather well to my early morning class.

The super bowl is tomorrow. I'll probably watch it, or at least have it on while I play Battle for Middle Earth 2.

ok I gots to go.

Euchre tournament looming.

I need to leave in five minutes or so, so I'll make this short.

The first full week of school is under my belt. It feels like it should have been longer than a week, but there you have it. School is going pretty well. I have homework I have to do tomorrow which is nice, I suppose.

I was really productive this morning, but I spent the last 3 hours or so playing Battle for Middle Earth 2. Middle Earth would be a fun place to visit, but I don't know if I would want to live there. If I did live there, I would definately want to live there around the end of the second age. Maybe in Rohan. Hang out at Helms Deep. Practive archery and fencing. It would lots of fun. Untill Sauron was defeated, after that there'd would just be a lot of sitting around and farming. There wouldn't be any showers or toilets or soap.

My Jesus playlist is only nine songs long. I thought it would be much longer by now.

Planar Chaos: The set that made me hate Magic

Competitive Magic is not fun. It is tedious and complicated. Usually after pre-releases I am super stoked about Magic, but after Planar Chaos, it'll be a long time before I play magic again.

Hey we didn't do 35 thousand pieces of mail last night! We only did 22,800! So what time did I get out of work you ask? 9:30! That's right kids, what would have been potentially our earliest night since December was destroyed when route 5 broke down, around 4:50, in Dexter. They didn't end up getting to CMS till about 7:30, 2 hours late. AND Pat is gone all week! YAY! Work sucked hard yesterday.

I'm hungry so I'm going to eat a sandwich. Then I'm going to watch some Boston Legal and maybe take a nap. Then... TO Work!

Secret Post Number 11

HEY BLOG!
Where have you been all week?
What? You've been here the entire time, and it is I who have neglected you?
Well I had my reasons. For instance, did you know school started this week? Cause it did. It was very exciting. The highlight of school so far would be the game we played in political science on Friday. It was a blast.

So if it doesn't snow like a demon tonight Matthew and I are going to the Magic Prerelease tomorrow, which means I should be going to bed nowish. I'm not particularly tired and, earlier this week I made the mistake of getting into yet another travel documentary series. This one featuring Ewan MacGregor and his friend Charlie Boorman going around the world on motorbikes. So I'm waiting on the next episode to finish downloading. It's about 95%. I just want to see how they get out of Mongolia. What should I do till that finishes downloading.... play some more Bookworm? Don't mind if I do.

Curse of the Flying Ninjas in the groovy House of Super Incest.

That's what I would've called Curse of the Golden Flower if I would have been in charge of naming it. I really enjoyed the movie though. I couldn't help thinking, while watching it, how awesome a Romance of the Three Kingdoms/Dynasty Warriors movie would be.

HEY!!! I don't have to work on Monday!!!!!!!!!

Dig it.

In other news class starts on Tuesday, but since I don't have any Tuesday classes, it starts for me on Wednesday. I'm somewhat excited about school starting... mostly because time seems to go by faster when school is in session.

I just took down the Christmas decorations, it was time. So now I feel that my household chore duties are done so I'm going to play some computer games for a while.

I dreamt that it was Saturday

Work has been the suck this week. I would tell you how much fucking mail we've ran this weekend, but the number is so obscene I'd lose my god damn PG rating. Let's just say that we've ran about 136 thousand pieces so far this week. Today is friday, fridays are always hellmouths of turmoil at CMS. We'll probably do another 35+ thousand pieces tonight. This blows.

In other news, today I was shocked after going to bed and one and then without even trying, waking up at 11:30 a full 10 and a half hours later. Wow!

So this weekend starts my semester of poverty. About $125 out of every paycheck from here till the end of the semester goes to semo. I also have 2 other bills that come monthly usually the second and third weeks, of 30 and fifty dollars respectively. The point is, I'll be spending a lot less money on stuff this semester.

Also, Rise of Legends rules. Sadly I can only play one mission at a time before the game chokes. Great game though.

The Sandman comes

I've been asleep for 22 out of the last 48 hours. How do I do it?


So here's a brief recount of one of the dreams I had last night.

I was at work, it was going to be an early night (unlike what we had last night: 30,000 on a Monday, Christ) but Jay and Jimmy were going to leave to go see a Semo basketball game. So Scott and I finished all the work and I clocked out and headed over to Spaeth's, who still had his Halloween decorations up by the way, so Spaeth's parents were haning out with my aunt Mary and Ian had all his friends over. It turns out Spaeth was with Matthew and Jonathan preparing to go to some sort of dance contest. I wasn't interested in a dance contest so I was just going to run home (that's something that happens a lot in my dreams, Me running) So I started down the hill and who should I encounter but Josh Lamouria. Josh was looking for his cat. It was a grey cat and I think her name was Charlie. So I helped him look for his cat in the woods around Spaeth's house and after finding 2 cats that weren't his, I found Charlie. We took Charlie back to Josh's house, which as it turned out was also located in the woods around Spaeth's house and there was a pool party going on at Josh's house (which as I understand it is also inhabited by Layne, Shad and Toph; not just in my dream but in real life. And technically in real life I think it's Layne and Shad's house) I didn't really want to stay for the pool party, but I stuck around and said hello to some people then Josh took me home. The End.

That was much more interesting than what really happened to me yesterday, trust me.

Quickly, before the pilgrims get here!

I haven't posted lately because I haven't done anything other than work the last week or two. I did go up to St. Louis for New Years eve. Terrence gave me the newest Fables trade.... It was sort of dissapointing considering that this was the Snow and Bigby story we've been waiting for for a year or so and they ended it in pretty much three issues. The story wasn't even all that good. I'm still going to pick up the trades when they come out... it'll probably start getting better again soon.

In other news... oh wait. There is no other news. Boston Legal is the shit by the way. I'd pick up season 2 now if I didn't have to get work Jimmy a birthday present.

Anyway. It's late.