If there is a God, he’s definitely making up for that one time where I couldn’t get tickets to see that one overhyped band on my 17th birthday.

The Features. I bought their CD over the summer and really loved it. I actually had no idea they were opening until the day before the show. The drummer (Rollum Haas) was so much fun to watch. Definitely had a manic Keith-Moon vibe to him.

The Kings of Leon. Static? A bit, but it doesn’t mean they were awful! They just didn’t do the duck walk, destroy their revolving drum kits, or spit up blood on their scarf-draped microphones… which can be good or bad depending on your mood. (5 awesome points if you can match each gimmick to their musician) I would say that they were a band of John Entwistles, but they did move a lot more than he did. … lots of Who references today…
I hated the venue. Bands like these are not supposed to play in front of seated people. We were technically in the 6th row. That got upgraded to “right behind the guy who elbowed me in the boob twice”, which was upgraded to “against the stage, on Matt Followill’s side”.

I ended up getting Matt’s setlist from Nacho.

Setlist:
Read the rest of this entry »

Things are somewhat better… I guess.

I’m going through some kind of creativity block right now. I have to design a little sculpture for 3d design… and I have no ideas at all. I’m a class and a half behind. I’ve been trying to design some websites and do my computer graphics homework, but everything I do in Illustrator and InDesign looks like crap. I’ve looked at design sites and websites like deviantart.com. I’ve seen lots of good stuff, but I found myself more envious than inspired.

I’ve been staring at this computer screen since I got back from class at 11:20. It’s now 7:15PM and I have nothing. I need to stop forcing myself to be creative for a few hours. Roommate and I are seeing the Kings of Leon in Atlantic City tonight. I really like their music, but I’ve read (on Ross Halfin’s site and on other sites) that they’re kind of… static. (Static! Like my designs and illustrations!) We’ll see. Anyway, I believe the Features are opening for them. I think this is the first concert where I’ve known about the opening band’s music before the music of the band I went to see.

I want to drop this internship. Part 1 was over the summer. Part 2 seems to be taking over my life. It’s not like I’m working for an organization that I really care about. It’s an environmental organization. It’s got nothing to do with my major. All I do is make crafts and posters for these people. I don’t have time to think about my other classes because I’m thinking about the internship. I’ve got to get people to help, but getting people to help takes up more of my time.

The more she asks of me, the more I want to stop and sleep. And when I think of quitting, I feel awful. How come I can’t manage all of this at once? Everyone else seems to pull it off. People who have much harder majors pull it off. Leila’s got 5 classes, 3 jobs, and still manages to watch a shitload of TV a week. Maybe I’m just lazy. If I quit, I’ll be letting people down. I’ll be graduating late. I’ll be wasting more of my dad’s money. My dad works at a chemical plant in Newark and my mom was a postal worker. They both worked crazy hours. Although they never pressured me into getting “A”s for everything, I’m sure they wanted me to be better than what i am right now. I start to hate myself when I think of how much money I waste and what a big disappointment I must be.

I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know who I can talk to. I’m sure I can list a bunch of people who say they would listen, but I don’t know if I could pick someone off of that list that I would want to talk to. I have a hard time opening up to people. I even have a hard time opening up on this weblog… something complete strangers read. I’ve probably spent the last 2 hours writing this and deciding if I should publish it.

(I’m sorry for the whiny “poor me” entry. I’m sure there are people around the world in horrible situations that I can’t even imagine, and I feel awful for even complaining, but i’ve been feeling worse and worse lately and i don’t know how to make it stop.)

If the person living below us plays Green Day’s “Wake me up when september ends” one more time, I will scream. … or retaliate by playing “Queen Bitch” and jumping up and down.

Is anyone else extremely tired of hearing Green Day? It’s not that they’re bad… When I first listened to American Idiot, I liked it a lot… but then I heard it again. and again. and again. and again. and again. and again. and you JUST. CAN’T. ESCAPE.

and now for a meme (from rudecactus):

10 years ago:
I turned 10 years old, I started 5th grade, and I constantly played Green Day’s Dookie album. 5th grade was my “strong-like-bull” year. I didn’t get sick at all and recieved a little “Perfect Attendance” award at the end of the school year.

5 years ago:
I started the 10th grade. I quit field hockey and pretty much devoted all free time to making graphics, drawing, coding, etc. I started to drift from my middle school friends, and became good friends with Abbie that year. I started art classes that year and the teacher told me that one of my paintings was a waste of paint. I wanted to tell her that the town was wasting their money by paying her to “teach”.

1 year ago:
i can’t remember. go to the archives.

Yesterday:
I went to class. Finished up my CG homework. Panicked. Ached. Screamed like a teenybopper with Elah over the other Harry Potter trailer.

5 songs I know all the words to:
- 85 – 90 % of Aerosmith songs
- all the songs on Appetite For Destruction
- Interstate Love Song by Stone temple Pilots
- Happy – the rolling stones
- moonlight mile – the rolling stones

5 snacks:
- fruitsnacks
- granola
- rice cakes with cottage cheese
- korovas (it’s russian candy. that’s what Leila calls it… i think it’s something like Milk Fudge)
- ice cream

5 things I’d do with $100 million:
- education
- buy a house in the philippines for dad
- mac + photoshop, illustrator, indesign + ipod/itunes
- invest
- charity

5 places I would run away to:
- Paris or southern france
- philippines
- italy
- somewhere warm
-

5 things I would never wear:
- uggs
- fleece vests
- shoes as high as the ones that the members of KISS wear
- houndstooth print. don’t like it.
- those… woven western poncho type of things.

5 favorite TV shows:
- Lost
- Desperate Housewives
- Grey’s Anatomy
- Late Nite with Conan O’Brien
-

5 favorite toys:
- the Wacom tablet
- the iPod (named Guildenstern. and, no, it hasnt died yet.)
- the record player that my mom and i found on the side of the road (it’s got an eight track player! i want to find one just to see how it works! i hear it’s awful! )
- [when i save up enough to get a mac, it will be listed here]
-

5 people I’m taggin:
greg
colleen
lene
grace
and you…. if you want to do one.

I have a tendency to write blog posts about nothing and save them for later. Most of them were crap and I don’t know why I save them. I deleted most of them today, but I still held onto a few… so I’m going to post them so I can clear out everything.

Here goes.

Today’s draft:
I love how I go into Target looking for toilet paper, nail polish remover, and a notebook and leave with half of the store in my cart.

Reasons why I should not be allowed to watch TV on Election Day: (written the day of or after election day 2004)
1. I eat and drink. A LOT. ( especially when my candidate has less electoral votes than the other. ) I believe I had a nice combination of pasta, grits, milk, candy corn, cinnamon muffins, cranberry juice, water, and popcorn in my stomach by 10.
2. I get sick, excited, and anxious about the outcome.
3. I go to bed early just a little depressed.
4. I wake up in the morning with a giant headache and the urge to throw up.

Listening in on Leila’s conversation at the wrong time (written last semester)
“surgically implanted vibrator”

Post #148 (written on the day we took a trip to washington dc)
I say that I don’t like talking about other people, but who am I kidding? I love it. Girls just seem to have this natural ability to talk and make fun of others.
There’s this girl my roommates don’t like. According to them, she’s the stupidest girl they’ve ever met. I didn’t know her and I couldn’t really agree with what they were saying about her. We went to Washington D.C. yesterday to visit the Holocaust museum and by the end of the trip, I was just sick of this girl. It takes about 3 to 3 1/2 hours to get from New Jersey to DC. Somewhere around hour 2, we decided to play “Would you rather…”. Basically, we describe two bad scenarios and the others have to choose which one they’d rather be in. Eventually, the girl pipes up and says, “I’ve got a good one! Would you rather… go through a window or a door?”

Post 330
I visited my cousin’s kids last night. The 3-year-old started singing Maroon5’s She Will Be Loved. It was so adorable. I told his older sister that she used to sing Backstreet Boys when she was his age and her response was, “NO! I DON’T LIKE THEM ANYMORE!!!! THEY DON’T HAVE ANY NEW GOOD STUFF!”

future music snob.

Squares (wrote this a few days ago)
Last night, the person who is in charge of aparment complexes A- D knocked on our door and told us that someone reported a party that was going on in this apartment. I looked at her. I looked at our apartment.

Living room TV off. TV and Harry Potter editions of Scene It! on the table waiting to be played. One roommate on the neopets website and the other on mugglenet.com.

I looked back at her. “Uhhh, this apartment?”

a very late father’s day message (written about a week after father’s day)
If you are a dad, going to be a dad, or planning to be a dad:
Let’s say that you have a teenage daughter and she asks you to go to the store to buy pads or tampons for her because she got out of the shower and realized she ran out (P.S. and mom is not around for whatever reason)… Do not say no and let her bleed in the bathroom!!! Just get over it, go to the fucking store, and buy them! No one will think that YOU are menstruating! YOU SHOULD BE HAPPY YOU ARE GETTING HER TAMPONS AND NOT A PREGNANCY TEST.
happy belated father’s day.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005 Update:

I don’t know if I should shade in the background. Oh well… We hand it in today. I’m scared.

I kind of hate drawing semi-realistic self portraits. You try to make it as close as possible, then you look at it and go, “IS THAT REALLY WHAT I LOOK LIKE?! There’s got to be something wrong with it.” No, you’re really just that weird looking.

I hate drawing snakes. So far I’ve got rattlesnakes, pythons, boas, boomslangs, and milksnakes.

My first illustration project (self-portrait) is due Tuesday. I have an idea of what I’d like to do (hint: It involves a lot of snakes.), but I have no idea if I CAN finish it. My face is drawn, and, according to my roommate, it looks like me. Surprisingly, drawing the face was the easy part. If you’ve ever seen me work on a drawing, you will know that I’m crazy about making things look right. (Actually, you probably wouldn’t know that. I tend to stop drawing when I know that someone’s looking over my shoulder.) I will spend 15 minutes or more just to get the shape of a stupid nose right.

… I’d scan what I have so far, but the printer was one of the things I forgot at home.

[ I have 5 days and nothing else to do for my other classes. Judging from the time spent on some of my portraits, I know I can finish this. It's just the fact that I've got a deadline and I'm being graded on it that's got me nervous. ]

5 awesome points for anyone who knows what i’m doing for my self portrait.

I’ve been here for about 3 days and I’ve got a ton of stuff to do for everyone. I’ve got to come up with ideas for the Water Watch sign-up table with Roommate. I looked at some of the old posters. Very… high school bake sale. We’ll see… maybe I can make up for crappy ideas/posters by running the table for a few hours.

I agreed to do the JSU / Hillel website for some friends of mine. I’m not exactly sure what kind of look they’re going for… all I got was, “Make it better than the [insert other college] Hillel website.” I don’t know if that was a joke or not. Denise can’t do fancy crap in Flash yet. All Denise can do is make circles go from point A to point B.

And I’ve got Illustration… which seems like a challenge. I love it. Our first assignment is a self portrait. We can basically draw ourselves as anything in any medium. Leaving things open like that makes things harder for me. I’ve been thinking of drawing myself in the way I’ve been drawing stuff lately… or I could do the boring, traditional portrait.

I’ve also got a 3D design class and a Computer Graphics class…. yikes. I’m really afraid that this will be too much for me.

My first year, I packed all my stuff a week in advance and dropped off my car at a friend’s house in Pomona.
My second year, I packed my stuff the night before and left at six o’clock the next morning.
This year? It’s 8:23AM. I’m in my pajamas. My comforter is still in the dryer, my bedsheets are still on my bed, I’m not entirely sure how much underwear I have packed, and I’m still convinced that all I need for my first week is the following:
A) bedsheets / pillows
B) toothbrush / bath stuff
C) clothes
D) laptop + iPod
E) debit card

oh, and my student ID. another thing i need to add to the “need to find and pack” list. it’s kind of the key to the aparment.

Moving Day Update: (Sept 6, 2005)
I forgot my TV, printer, and that power strip thing.