Oregon Trail, part 5

If weddings could fit in medicine bottles, the foremost warning on the label would be "Adults will be compelled to dance if ingested with alcohol." They should corral anyone over 40 into a little holding pen once the actual dance music starts instead of letting the dance floor turn into some grotesque tableau of Kafka-esque proportions. Seeing your own parents bumping emphatically to "Baby Got Back" generates an instant repressed memory, like when you see the baby crowning in "Knocked Up." Brother Matt wonders aloud if little brother Greg is going to have to be the one to drive us back to the hotel. Luckily, it doesn't happen, and everyone saves face.

On Sunday morning, I wake up at 7 am as I've done every morning this trip. I must've been on west coast time my entire life, because I've never been on such a regular sleep schedule. I'll file that away under the "Pro" column for working in LA next year.

Is rapid river-rafting one of those after-wedding traditions I haven't heard of? I initially didn't want to go because I thought it would be all Cynthia's family, but Matt signed up, so I have nowhere else to be, and luckily it turns out awesome. My parents bought a bunch of hats and sunglasses at Wal-Mart to protect from the sun; they turn out to all be matching yellow Oakland A's hats which makes us look silly but helps us identify eachother when our kayaks get far apart on the river. Basically, the deal is that they give everyone an inflatable kayak (some people get into larger boats as a group), and we are supposed to make our way 2 miles downstream where they will pick up the people and equipment and drive them back. In between here and there? Rapids!

You cannot help but smile as you go down a section of rapids. They don't involve much of a dropoff, but the water throws waves back at you several feet high, and if you don't have your kayak pointed into it, it's not just going to get into your boat but capsize you. Not many people have trouble with this part, though it is an art to guide yourself around rocks using the oar. The pyromaniac kid apparently has a grab-bag of various death wishes; he throws his boat down the river without due process as his irritated dad yells for him to stay behind. At one point, he gets caught in a whirlpool which makes his boat spin around lazily for a minute while he's trapped there. Later on, he inevitably falls out of his kayak and bruises himself in the upper chest on a rock. He'd do it all over again, I'm sure.

Our party of 25 or so has the river all to ourselves because everyone else got spooked by the thin cloud cover and morning temperature over 80°. Everyone claims that the clouds will "burn off" later in the day, and it takes me a few minutes to figure out what this phrase means. I say that I've never heard anyone use those words to describe clouds disappearing and someone mocking asks me, "where did you grow up?" Not in this hick state, for sure. Um, New Hampshire...

After kayaking, I feel like I should have some newfound extreme upper-body strength, but disappointingly, I'm not sore at all. David treats us all to soft-serve at the boathouse, and before we go, we all congratulate him on his marriage. Cynthia is there, but without her makeup during the rafting, she looks 5-10 years older. She must be in her mid- to late thirties. I try to be a little fun with my goodbye to cousin Rachel by saying, "See you in another 10 years!" She is laughing, but then I say with a straight face, "Yeah... maybe by then you won't be so weird." I rarely get to see someone's smile droop faster than that; I guess my charm is lost on the Minnesotans because cousin Kira also refuses to hug me. Her mom Becky has to force us into a tri-person hug. What gives with your family, Becky?

Matt had all these prognostications of doom about our travel itinerary that began at 6 pm and ended at 9 am. What, me worry? That just means the flight will go by faster because we'll be sleeping the whole time! I'm glad I was stupid enough to believe that over the weekend because otherwise I would've been in as sour a mood as Matt was. The reality is hell on earth - hell 30,000 feet above earth, rather. I spend the final leg of the journey in that nervous limbo where you don't know if you are going to throw up. Triumphantly stumbling into Logan, I realize I still have to drive to the Manchester airport that morning to pick up my mom where she landed. I get a single hour of sleep on the couch in Matt's apartment, and that chases away the dizzying headache from exhaustion. Because I don't know how to get out of Boston in a car, my brother drives in front of me to guide me to I-93 North, and he doesn't seem happy about it. Why can't people just get used to the fact that I'm a retarded driver?

When I get home, the cats are wailing out of hunger because they hadn't been fed in five days. Ha, just kidding; the neighborhood kids came by each day to scoop out their cat kibble. Because I'm now on Zurich time I say goodnight at 1 pm and decide that I probably only have enough stamina for one trip like this per year.

Sudoku success

My daily calender in years past has been The Onion or Red Sox-related, but this year it's suduko puzzles - one per day. They start the easiest on Monday (1 out of 5 stars) and get progressively more difficult until Sunday it's the hardest (5 out of 5 stars). I give an honest effort to solve the puzzle each day, and I can solve anything lower than 4 stars guaranteed. A 4-star puzzle is right at my preferred difficulty, and it usually requires overcoming a single tricky logical snag and then everything else falls into place. I can beat those puzzles about 75% of the time, but I've only completed about three 5-star puzzles total. They are a tough slog almost all the way through.

It's been my goal to complete an entire week's suduko puzzles (Monday to Sunday), and I hadn't been able to do it yet this year until last week. Hooray for me. I'll be very pleased when I can complete any sudoku puzzle like it's nothing, but until then, I must train...

Wedding music

Deciding what to a play at a wedding seems like tricky business to me. If you want everyone to enjoy themselves, it's essentially a no-win situation because of the demographics at play. There are songs that you can easily avoid, however, like Pachelbel's Canon and Enya's "Sail Away" (which were both played at David and Cynthia's wedding) because there must be no one left on earth who doesn't cringe at them. I kept myself sane throughout that whole ordeal by trying to imagine what I'd want played at my own wedding. A few songs popped into my head immediately because they are amazingly well-suited to the marriage atmosphere and they cannot be disliked:

Perfect Lovesong - The Divine Comedy
Look Up - Stars
Paris 2004 - Peter Bjorn & John
1 2 3 4 - Feist

I had the Divine Comedy song stuck in my head all weekend, and if my bride's family only gave me one song to put into the reception playlist, that would be it. Later, I further idealized my fantasy marriage by only admitting those under 40, who I figure will be only 5-10 years older than me at the time. This would allow me to play some more music for people who would be receptive to music of my generation:

The Shining - Badly Drawn Boy
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel
The Golden Age - Beck
Swimmers - Broken Social Scene
I Hope I Know You - The Clientele
Watercolours into the Ocean - Destroyer
Marry Me - St. Vincent
Winter Spring Summer Fall - The Postmarks
Something Changed - Pulp
Streets of Fire - The New Pornographers
Eyes - Rogue Wave
Cherry Blossom Girl - Air
Phantom Limb - The Shins

As the night continues, eventually people will start dancing for real...

The Magic Position - Patrick Wolf
I Love You - The Pipettes
Perfect - The Smashing Pumpkins
Such Great Heights - The Postal Service
Black and White Town - Doves
This Modern Love - Bloc Party
Buddy Holly - Weezer
Sister Jack - Spoon
To Go Home - M. Ward
The Sound of Settling - Death Cab for Cutie
Float On - Modest Mouse
You're All That I Have - Snow Patrol
Hard to Explain - The Strokes
LDN - Lily Allen
Number 1 - Goldfrapp
In This Home on Ice - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Finally, I'd be playing "All the Wine" by the National just for myself in my head.

Oregon Trail, part 4

What on earth does someone do on the day of their wedding? I would probably sit in the woods all morning drinking water and spitting it back out, afraid to ingest anything lest I throw it back up. I see cousin David on Saturday morning and he seems chipper, which means he's probably crazy. He's been wearing earings every time I've seen him, which still confuses me. Don't criticize, don't criticize...

Most of the able-bodied members on our side of the family go on a hike for a few hours about a hundred feet above the river. Nathaniel almost died on this trail, supposedly, when he was about five years old, but I think this story's been trumped up because it sounds like he just slipped near the side of a cliff. It actually is a moderately tricky trail with steep dropoffs that a child could zoom off easily if he or she weren't paying attention. Seven year-old cousin Caroline is unfazed, and for the entire three hour trek, she leads the way and even tailgates some old people into letting us all pass. Her dad, uncle Stephen, uses his GPS to locate geocaches, which are containers filled with logbooks and random trinkets placed by other people with coordinates and instructions on how to find them listed on the internet. He always carries a bunch of smalls around with him in case he finds a geocache because one of the traditions is to switch out the object found inside with one of your own.

That aftenoon was the wedding. David has a Chinese Catholic mother and Jewish father, and Cnythia is Italian but, for some reason, not Catholic, so it was someone's great idea to make the ceremony a confusing amalgam of all their traditions. I don't think you should be allowed to do that. You have to go one way or the other with the traditions and stick with it or the whole exercise seems trite. One thing I didn't know going into the ceremony was that the glass-breaking at the end is not just a Jewish tradition but also an Italian one, and the number of pieces the glass shatters into signifies the number of happy years of marriage to follow. When David steps on the glass at the end I hear a single plink as it snaps in two. I was never really that optimistic.

The reception is more awkward than I thought it would be. Even though Matt has a law degree and I am a college graduate, we get sat at the kids table with the most sullen cousins of the bunch. This puts me in the position of being the most social person at the table which is not my preferred niche. I feel like crawling in a hole and dying for some reason, but having free wine seemed like the next best thing. Over the next hour or so, I must've been making funny faces or something because my aunt kept taking pictures of me and laughing, and a kid from the other family kept running by and sniping photos as well. I don't think I was that drunk...

While much of our family's youth is emotionally distant, the sister of the bride, cousin Nicole, is outgoing and cheerful and gets me onto the dancefloor for a song. When I get back, Matt thanks me for keeping Nicole from asking him. What a party pooper thing to say. I've never seen him dance before. If he'd only had half as much wine as I had, maybe he'd leave himself for once. He needs to take a cue from little cousins Caroline and Kira, who have been holding hands, spinning, and twirling eachother for about two days straight (even when there's no music). Who spiked their juiceboxes?

The most bizarre moment of the weekend, bar none, was when Aunt Rosie stood up to give a toast to her newly-married son. It was rambling and surreal. She didn't mention anything remotely relevant to the moment at hand but instead gave a speech about her family's proud values, which are Freedom, Decency, and Inventiveness according to her. As tumbleweeds rolled by, she then rambled about how these virtues manifest themselves in each of her siblings. Uncle Arthur travels the world and cleans the environment, Aunt Bobbi prosecutes exclusively murderers and child rapists (...), and my mom is on the Dartmouth admissions committee and contributes regularly to NPR. Not only are these things on the complete other side of the planet from relevance, but they are also so warped as to be completely untrue. Aunt Renée was in stitches by our table while Matt and I kept looking at eachother thinking, "Is this really happening?" Mercifully, David snatched the microphone away from his mom before she could get to Becky or Renée, but the damage was done in my mind. Aunt Rosie is a lunatic the likes of which scholars will pore over for generations.

Oregon Trail, part 3

I generally hate travelling, so I'd prefer to stay in my motel room crouched in some corner for an entire trip, but the maid's got to remake the beds and make more shampoo, so me and my brother Matt have to get outside for some period of time on Friday. Our parents have the rental car, so we have to walk around the town of Grant's Pass looking for something to do. The place is a piece of crap, and Matt deems it his own "personal hell." I approve of that assessment. For those who know me from the upper valley, it is like West Lebanon without the shopping: a strip of car dealerships, motels, and realtors (who would buy a house here?). The one time I get excited while baking in the cloudless 90° heat is when I see a Dollar Tree. Matt says no, we can't go in there.

The entire state of Oregon seems too cultured to have any chain stores or anything remotely franchised other than Dutch Bros. Coffee (the western Dunkin' Donuts?), so I'm in unfamiliar territory. Finally, my cousin Nathaniel and his girlfriend call back and we catch lunch at a cheap but decent Thai restaurant. He's one of few reasonable relatives, so it's all good, and I'm able to explain my situation efficiently with "I live at home; I work for my parents." I've used this on my extended family several times already, and it saves me a lot of hemming and hawing. It also cracks people up more than I'd expect, which means I'm finally getting the hang of describing what a loser I am.

Friday evening (the night before the wedding), both families get on a large flat jet boat (operated by Hellgate excursions) and roar down the river. On paper, it seemed like a bizarre activity, but it's kind of wet and fun. It could've been less wet, as the boat driver sadistically threw the boat into 360° spins to drench everybody. On the upside, I see why Oregon might be a place to live as opposed to the place where debtors and fraudsters are sent after they die. There are houses by the river that you'd need to be absolutely loaded to have. I wonder how much they like having boats buzzing by their luxurious homes at fifty miles an hour every 10 minutes in the summer.

My uncle works for Google, and I asked him about the text messaging service they have. Can they report baseball scores? He doesn't know, and I immediately have a fantasy of being accepted into the company based on my ability to develop such a service. Unfortunately, texting "red sox score" to GOOGL actually does work. They really are too smart for me over there. I don't get too down on myself, because by texting Google, I watch the Sox sweep Chicago in four games over the weekend. I can think of fewer more satisfying text messages to receive than Boston 7 - Chicago 1 - Bot 7th.

Oregon Trail, part 2

A couple things you learn from reading SkyMall, the inflight catalogue: lost golfballs are one of mankind's foremost concerns, iPods must be submersed to be fully enjoyed, and shaving your legs is too difficult without a pedestal mounted to the shower wall. Wait, I must have that...

The family took a rent-a-car from the Medford airport to Grant's Pass where we checked into a La Quinta motel. I have few complaints about the place other than the continental breakfast is lame. They have a hundred channels on the tv and free wifi, which made me want to cry with joy. I immediately proceeded to illicitly download tv shows and music.

There wasn't much time to sit around at the motel because we had to attend a cookout for the bride and groom's families. The groom, David, seemed super-pleased and confident and just this side of annoying. Later I'd see why: his bride Cynthia has... a fine figure. The families didn't mingle that well during the cookout, and our family didn't even mingle that well amongst itself. This is the only situation where you'd need that really gregarious relative to break the ice. I tried to do my part by throwing a squeezy ball to and from a 2-year old from the other side, but she sucked at catching it, and I was disappointed. The only other mildly interesting attraction was the pyromaniac 12-year old who kept sticking his hand in the tiki torches. His dad threatened to "whoop his ass in front of everyone" and finally threw his hands in the air and told his kid to just put his hand in the fire and burn himself so he'd learn his lesson. The kid did stick his hand in the fire again, but when he burned himself, he just did it again.

Aunt Rosie, David's mother, is supposedly crazy based on what my mom has been saying for years. I don't know how weird this is, Aunt Rosie had me take a container of food garbage out into her front yard and bury it with a shovel. I thought it was all in the spirit of family cooperation, but she had me do it again and again in the night, and I'm a guest. Yes, I deem it weird.

Oregon Trail, part 1

Far-off cousin David decided to get a wife, so my family went to the west coast to attend the wedding. I dislike travelling because it puts me out of my element, but sometimes you do things just to get them over with. I can tolerate this.

Time to build character: Thursday morning, we get up at 4 am in Boston after spending the night at my brother Matt's. We take a 6 am flight from Logan airport to Pittsburgh, then connect to San Francisco, then end up in Medford, Oregon. The flights themselves weren't as much of a hassle as they could've been. On one flight, I was in the middle seat, and the window seat guy decided to move his knee into my zone. Okay, let's play that game, jerk. While keeping my leg firmly in my own territory, I relaxed my knee so that it rested onto his. Touchy touchy, you likey? After about 10 minutes, he shifted his weight and retreated his leg.

It was about 13 hours of travelling and layovers, and Matt complained frequently about how tired he was. He shouldn't have been reading so much on the plane. It's important to try to pass out while flying and lose sense of time. The noise-cancelling headphones worked wonders and let me listen to music and watch a movie on my laptop. I haven't completely decided what to write about "Me and You and Everyone We Know" yet. Or if I should.

Optic Nerve by Adrian Tomine

During one of my Boston excursions, I stayed over at Student House, so I was able to spend some time wandering Kenmore square on my own. I found a Boca Grande (Anna's rival in the burrito wars) and a place called Uburger (decent gourmet burgers, fries, and frappes) to get my eats. I also decided to visit the neighborhood comic shop, Comicopia, and add an extra superficial dimension to my personality by buying my first comic book. I'm decidedly not into superhero comics like Chase is, but I am perfectly made for the alternatives, like Harvey Pekar and Dan Clowes-type stuff. The only thing in the shop that interested me was Optic Nerve, which I'd describe as the graphic equivalent of a Casiotone for the Painfully Alone album.



The artist, Adrian Tomine, apparently started publishing the books right out of high school over 10 years ago, and he's only made 11 books so far (a book being about 30 pages). To be a fan of this guy and only be able to buy a product once a year must be brutal, but I suppose it's no worse than waiting 2-3 years for your favorite band's album. They only take about 20-30 minutes to read, however.

The content itself is mostly relationship and existential melodrama of the type that teenagers or post-grads could really relate to. One of Tomine's signatures is to end his storylines abruptly and unannounced (like the Soprano's finale). This sometimes comes off as trite and unnecessary (what happens next?!), but occasionally, it perfectly crystallizes a mood or feeling that would otherwise have been marginalized had the story continued. The story "Dylan & Donovan" (the cover of which is shown above), for example, cuts off at a particularly quiet but gut-wrenching moment between an emotionally distant family during a long car ride. Staring at those final panels and feeling them linger almost mournfully in the air helped me understand some of the unique artistic capabilities of the medium.

I've got six issues total, but I've only read five because I didn't realize that one was part of a three-part storyline. I hope to have the complete set of eleven after a couple more trips back to Boston. It all depends on how diligently that comic store stocks their wares, however.

Nite Owl #3

Nite Owl is a WMBR show on Saturdays that has a revolving door of various DJs that sign up for the slot a few weeks in advance. It basically provides a gateway for curious MIT students to get involved with the station and see what it's like to host a show without any commitments. In fact, it's how I was introduced to WMBR, so I can attest to how cool it is that it's there. I filled in this Saturday, and this is what I played:

Two Receivers - Klaxons
Eli - Caribou
Flower Gardens - Chad VanGaalen
Sister Jack - Spoon
Are You on My Side - Rogue Wave
We Shot the World - Ponys
Falling Through Your Clothes - The New Pornographers
Lady Lawyers - Oxford Collapse
Girls of Wild Strawberries - Guided By Voices
Now Now - St. Vincent
Unleashed! The Large Hearted Boy - Guided By Voices
The Zookeeper's Boy - Mew
I Remember - Figurines
The Dance of the Hours - The Clientele
Son - The National
Range Life - Pavement
On the Bubble - The Broken West
Neptune's Net - M. Ward
I Don't Believe You - The Magnetic Fields
Let the Cool Goddess Rust Away - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
The Party's Crashing Me - Of Montreal
Napalm Love - Air
Les Os - The Unicorns
So Long, Lonesome - Explosions in the Sky

I flirted with the idea of going outside my normal range (and maybe play some Beach Boys and Beatles) with the playlist because this is not my normal show. I ended up deciding to use the Nite Owl slot as an opportunity to advertise for Don't Stop Now by playing the kind of music that you'd hear on it. I would've taken requests if any had been made. Usually at an earlier time slot, people are much more likely to call in, but I guess since it's summer, not many people are on campus. I remember one particular time that I did Nite Owl where I got like a dozen legitimate callers. It was kind of annoying actually. This time, however, I was angry at how dead the lines were, and I expressed my hostility at the end of the show only half-jokingly.

Edit: I forgot to post a link to the show. This might be the first time I'm glad the previous show bled over into the file because they closed with "The Humans are Dead" by Flight of the Conchords.

In defense of "No I in Threesome"

I've read three or four reviews of Interpol's most recent album, "Our Love to Admire," as well as scattered internet opinions, and critics have pretty consistently appraised it as mediocre. Their reasons are basically the same: some of the songs are good, some are bad, and the bad outweighs the good. I don't disagree with them; this is an inconsistent album. What I take issue with is how the track "No I in Threesome" has been almost universally maligned while I consider it the album's highlight. After some thought, I've probably found the reason for such across-the-board dislike for the track.

Interpol has always been an incredibly consistent band. "Turn on the Bright Lights" is nearly perfect, while "Antics," though it carries some deadweight, never contained an actual dud. When "Our Love to Admire" was released, the reviews practically wrote themselves as critics could then contrast the band's newly erratic songwriting to that from their previous do-no-wrong era. All such a review needs is a cherry on top - an example of how wildly the needle flails on the quality dial - and the choice is too easy. They're given a track with a name that sounds like a joke (from a band that makes its name on seriousness) with lyrics, it seems, just as embarrassing. So why wasn't I among those eager to make "Threesome" my whipping boy? It might have something to do with the way I was introduced to the song.

I'd been waiting for months for this particular album to be released, and finally it appeared on the shelf in the WMBR studios. The only problem was that I wasn't there. Though I usually have a radio show on Friday nights this summer, I reguarly trade off with my radio partner Megan, and it was she who found the CD there. She was DJing that night, so I called and requested that she please play some new Interpol. Without looking at the track list, she popped in the disc and skipped to #2 because "track 2's are usually good." By the end of the song, we'd decided that this was no exception. If knowing beforehand that it was titled "No I in Threesome" might've poisoned our first impression, we wouldn't have noticed. The music itself made its point loud and clear before any prejudice could've.

The song begins with a few seconds of eery bass and strings and then clicks into a full-band trot accentuated by stately piano steadily chiming above it all. It has the kind of sound you'd find in the coda of an Arcade Fire song but with the guitar understated almost to the point of fatigue. It bursts awake during the chorus, mirroring the last desperate efforts of a man trying to resuscitate a doomed relationship.

Much is made of how erratic and banal Paul Banks' lyrics can supposedly be, but the effect is actually partly intended. Interpol delivers its music with a straight face, but that doesn't imply a lack of self-awareness. The unsettled and awkward manner in which Banks wields his metaphors is how he conveys his frustration at a life that defeats him as he struggles to wrap his head around it. For "Threesome," Banks is throwing whatever emotional leverage he has left behind a threesome overture, because after the "teethmarks of time" have eroded his romance, the only choice he has left is to go all-in. A cheeky line like "alone we may fight, so let us be three tonight" plays on how a couple will only stop bickering long enough to be polite to company and shows that Banks and co. are in on the tragic joke.

Far from being the nadir of the album, "No I in Threesome" is one of the all-around best songs in Interpol's catalogue. You just know it would make a fantastic music video, too.

Ice cream

Since the only ATM in town is a fifteen minute walk away from work, I'm often without enough cash to purchase a full lunch from the cafeteria. I do have enough to visit the vending machines, so yesterday I had a Three Musketeers for lunch and the day before that a bag of Skittles. They're not as filling as I need them to be, so I think about food during the day - foods I want to eat. Since I'm at a computer, I go look for pictures of food. I google some pictures, and they're all right, but not good enough, so I visited places like pizza.com and sandwich.com. Surprisingly, those sites are just placeholders. Nobody has bought the domain rights to pizza.com or sandwich.com! I finally struck gold with icecream.com. I don't know who owns it, but it has news about ice cream, recipes, fun facts, and links to ice cream brand websites. I like Starbucks coffee ice cream the best, so I was able to see that. There's also something called "the Flavor Transporter" at the top of the site next to Scooby Doo for some reason. I'm afraid to click on it because I don't know where it will send me. You can explore the site yourself if you find ice cream as tasty as I do. Yum.

Real World Sydney

I just got around to watching the hour-long premiere of the Real World Sydney, and I'm kind of excited about this season. It promises to be very watchable because a) the girls are all lookers and b) none of the guys seem like jerkoffs. I can watch girls be bitchy or stuck-up, but I can't stand watching guys act like douchebags. It seems like a miscarriage of justice when they still get what they want regardless of how much of a crappy person they are. Don't think that I'm implying that I'm such a great guy who should be the one getting who are what I want. I know perfectly well I get what I deserve, and I want others to as well. I'd like to believe that you can tell you're a good person by how well-liked you are, but... ehh I need to give up rationalizing how bitter I am (Bitterness! It tastes so sweet).

Along those lines, the girls really did get off to a catty start. There are four of them, though some of their names escape me because two are blonde. I felt an immediate kinship with Parisa, the Iranian girl, when she was the first to split from the club on the roommates' first night out because she wasn't having any fun standing in the corner judging everyone else. One of the guy roommates also called her a "Debbie Downer." I was all ready to be in her corner for the rest of the show, but the next day, she starting disparaging another girl, Kelly Anne, behind her back for being too drunk at the club, for Parisa didn't want to have to babysit her. It was the kind of passive-aggressive loud way of talking behind someone's back where you mean for them to hear what you're saying but are not courageous enough to say it to their face. When Kelly Anne confronted Parisa, she weakly justified herself with "how can i talk to you if you don't listen?" Kelly Anne stormed back to her bedroom and exclaimed, "God, what a bitch!" Totally!

I was very happy to see the girls get past their initial animosity. It was looking like the four were going to establish separate blocs of two that would never interact with eachother. This is after the second day! Thankfully, one of the blondes took the laudable step of reaching out to Kelly Anne on the other side and saying that she wanted to be able to talk with her and that there was no need for anyone to whisper behind another's back. Kelly Anne was very amenable, so she then had a productive talk with Parisa about how her feelings, and everyone felt a huge weight lift. It's strange how quickly the girls then decided to be kind to one another, for if blondie hadn't made that peaceful overture to Kelly, they would've been perfectly content to let the silent hostility between them solidify for good. It must be a girl thing - as well as something I might do.

The first episode concerned itself with enough girl drama that the jury's still out for me with the guys, but for now they seem like honorable, upright gentlemen to me. They're being smart and not initially passing judgment on anyone during the first week. Before a week has passed, the sample size of time spent with anyone is too short to make an accurate determination of their character, am I right?

I just remembered the blondes' names: Trisha and Shauvon. They cute.

Blog philosophy

I get bored during the workday, and so notions pile up in my head that need some kind of outlet. Since graduation, I don't have friends to unburden myself onto, so I'm trying this out. Pretty standard reason for a blog - not having friends.

I came up with the title by taking it from an album that has really grown on me. I relate to the phrase "Strange Geometry" in a way that feels like a shared secret between me and the artist, which might make it personal enough for me to steal for my blog. I tried to come up with an original name, but it was just going nowhere. I can't even think of a name for my band that doesn't exist, and I've been trying for 4 years. Does that make me unimaginative? In my defense, the name Radiohead is from a Talking Heads lyric.

I don't know how much it would bother me if no one read this blog. I would certainly like comments and attention from friends and all that jazz, but just making my posts seems to serve my purposes. A blog that no one reads will be a nice companion to my radio show that no one listens to.

If you want to know what music I like and what I'm listening to (even at this very second), you can go to my facebook page. You know where that is, because that's how where you came from to get to this blog.

The last thing I want to mention is that I will try to suppress the urge to be a comedian. It doesn't work for me on the radio, and it doesn't work for me in print, either. The only way I can listen to or read whatever I say is if it's almost devoid of personality, oddly enough, which may make me boring, but it's the only way I can avoid hating the things I do. I feel like I've forced myself into stressful positions when I feel like I need to be clever or insightful at some moment or another. I've decided to have faith that I am naturally interesting without trying. Let the experiment begin!

Don't Stop Now #7

I DJ for the MIT campus radio station WMBR 88.1 FM, and I've been doing it all summer. This most recent friday, my playlist was as follows:

Expecting Brainchild - Guided by Voices
Keep the Car Running - Arcade Fire
Lloyd, I'm Ready to be Heartbroken - Camera Obscura
Marry Me - St. Vincent
Holy Chord - Dappled Cities
One Night Stand - The Pipettes
Please Please Please - Shout Out Louds
Une Année Sans Lumière - Arcade Fire
Kicked it in the Sun - Built to Spill
Slow Show - The National
2nd Moves to Twin - Guided by Voices
Objects of my Affection - Peter Bjorn & John
The Answer - Bloc Party
Untitled 4 - Sigur Rós
My Own Face Inside the Trees - The Clientele
Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives - Voxtrot
The Weight of the World - Editors
The Land Beyond - British Sea Power
Ones - Islands
The Great Salt Lake - Band of Horses
Major Leagues - Pavement
Know Which Way the Wind Blows - The Postmarks
Hugs & Kisses (Theme from A Sunny Day in Glasgow) - A Sunny Day in Glasgow
Graveyard - Chad VanGaalen
I Don't Mind - The Decemberists
Saltwater - Beach House
Cedric's War - The Besnard Lakes

The show went pretty well, though like always, I got some funny notions in my head that I wanted to articulate on air, but they came out kind of awkwardly. I don't know, maybe some people thought I was funny. If I don't say something, then I might as well just hook up my laptop and take a nap for two hours while music plays.

Edit: The show can be streamed from wmbr.org even though it's already happened. The first 5 minutes of the stream are the final 5 minutes of the previous show, so don't be freaked out by electronic music and australians.

C'est moi.