cape.

My sleep schedule is balls. Night is the only time I can concentrate on things I want to get done. In the day, all I want to do is drive around or play video games. I finished putting together the atta boy workdisk. Now I have to do the questions for the accompanying workbook. Friday is going to be a big day. I'm playing back the workdisk right now just to see if I like everything on it. Some of these songs are so beautiful that it makes my heart hurt. I can only hope that my bandmates feel the same way. Friday is going to be a big day.

"Now is the time for turning. The leaves are beginning to turn from green to red to orange. The birds are beginning to turn and are heading once more toward the south. The animals are beginning to turn to storing their food for the winter. For leaves, birds and animals, turning comes instinctively. But for us, turning does not come so easily. It takes an act of will for us to make a turn. It means breaking old habits. It means admitting that we have been wrong, and this is never easy. It means losing face. It means starting all over again. And this is always painful. It means saying I am sorry. It means recognizing that we have the ability to change. These things are terribly hard to do. But unless we turn, we will be trapped forever in yesterday's ways."

working loading click accept.

I'm working working on preparing for the pitch of my new project. It should go down on Friday. I hope it's good. I forget whether I already mentioned it, but I'm making a disk full of clips and songs, a little booklet of questions to go with it, and a Powerpoint-esque presentation of my ideas. Then I want to have what a corporate setting might refer to as a focus group. No, I'm not forming Hewhocorrupts II. The key to making everything happen as I'd like it to is organization. If I present my ideas in a coherent, organized fashion, then there's little room for misinterpretation or misunderstanding.

Anyway, I'm sifting through songs right now and my head hurts. Check out this sweet cover of New Noise:

goosepock.

Christmas shopping finished. Putting together the atta boy workdisk. EM2C.

soulseek.

I'm downloading music for the first time in forever. I usually stick to purchasing albums, but I'm making an exception for this very hard-to-locate music. It is the screamo of the late 90's that has disappeared from the main frame of the music world, only to be replaced by mallcore and brutal deathgrind. ::tears fall:: Nah, I dig some of that sometimes, but I'm heavily falling in love with this cluster of greatness. It's wonderful.

I'm preparing for atta boy.

wowie!

Deer is delicious. I've eaten it a bunch of times before, but I always forget how incredibly tasty it is. My roommate went home this past weekend and brought back deer bologna and jerky. I had a disk of the bologna (baloney?) and it is the sweetest most succulent meat of all. I wish they made deer everything. Burgers, hot dogs, cold cuts, jerky, ground deer, deer on a stick... Gee golly jeepers.

I practiced keyboard again tonight. I learned a lot of what the different knobs mean, finally, and I learned to record a sequence after wondering why the RECORD button never lit up before now. Instruction manuals! FTW!

So yeah, deer. My roommate is dandy. The other two: one is kindly yet somewhat distant and the other is a McDoucheFart wrapped in bacon and pan-seered until charcoal black who has an undeserved woodsman beard and leaves his Wii on all day. I hope its fan burns out. Twit.

Mmm mm, deer. Deer.
Deer.

dethklok.

I had a dream a couple hours ago right before I woke up about two potential plotlines for the show Metalocalypse. The first one is that for some reason Dethklok decides they want to incorporate a keyboardist, but that ends in disaster because he was either hired by the Illuminati or he just dies brutally on stage or maybe it's a she and she distracts the band to the point of brawling mayhem wherein she is inadvertently maimed and killed. Hmm. The second is that Dethklok decides to do a split EP with a hardcore band in which they each have their own songs on the record, but on one song they mash up. I figured that could go wrong if the Illuminati attempted to brainwash, hypnotize, or control the minds of the members of the hardcore band in order to "gather information," but General Crozier has actually had wicked assassin skills implanted in their heads. Or something. Maybe go MKULTRA style and control them with LSD. But they need to die during the stage performance of the mash up song. I think perhaps I'll write these episodes for fun just to get the hang of the scripting software I just obtained. Still no ideas for the series Dave and I will develop.

dear sister.

So all afternoon into the night I played my keyboard. I learned Soaring Quails by HORSE the band and the first riff in Venus and Bacchus by Saetia, but between those two I learned the theme song to the sugar cube drama from HORSE the band's studio diary YouTube thingy, called Lawrence and Friends. But yeah, this song isn't as easy as it sounds. It feels like playing two separate rhythms from separate songs at the same time. But I'm doing it repeatedly for like an hour, right? And I start getting this incredible adrenaline rush as I begin to get it and then by the time I'm completely getting it I'm fucking pumped as shit and I don't know why, but I start to play Cutsman and I can play it faster than I've ever been able to play it coherently. My fingers were like, blurry. Then I play Soaring Quails incredibly fast. It was so strange. I've never really learned anything that hard before I guess. I suppose the determination led my body to act as if my life was in danger. I can still feel it now, actually, and this was over two hours ago. I'm really proud of myself though. Then I wrote a neat little riff that was pretty complex and recorded it. I'll use it in atta boy. I am preparing for atta boy.

I am preparing for atta boy.

Watch this and laugh:

dreams.

I've had a lot of aspirations and general things to do (long term and short term) come to me in the past several weeks. Here is a list of all of them: to become an actor, to be a stand-up comic, to write graphic novels, to write a screenplay, to play keyboard really well, to develop a program for [adult swim], to become enlightened, to grow up, to become more understanding of others, to eat good food, to write raps, to create grindcore on Fruity Loops, to work out, to create my own recipe for some kind of dish or baked good, to correct my sleep schedule, to start my dream band.

Some of those, I've done. Some of them are somewhat complete or in progress. Most of them, which are, mostly, the important ones, have not been accomplished. Some of those will never be.

gelatin.

So I played my first show with The Dead Outnumber The Living last night. I can't believe how out-of-shape I've become. I was completely winded by, like, the middle of the first song. I was kneeling all over the place and shit. My voice held out until the middle of the set. I really need to run the treadmill regularly or something. My neck feels like gelatin that has hardened a little bit and my lungs feel like balloons that you're trying to inflate but haven't been stretched enough. But nonetheless, it was a very fun night. The guys from Beyond Dishonor were very cool and the drummer's basement was fucking tricked out. I can't wait to design the floorplan to my own house and fill it with glorious things. Sigh... I'm still in bed right now, but I think I'll shower right after this typingness and get some food. Then I'll probably resort to playing Zelda all day. Maybe Metal Gear, actually. I think I might deserve some Qdoba tonight. We will see.

throw rug.

It's really early in the morning. I woke up at three to come back to my room with Katie. I was extremely groggy upon waking, but I slowly starting gaining energy and at this point the prospect of sleep is a pipe dream. (Oooh, see what I did there?) Basically, Katie is asleep and I'm trying to type really softly as I sit here with my bare ass on the snazzy throw rug I bought at Target at the beginning of the year. After I finish typing this, I'm going to start advertising this blog a little better because I like some general feedback on the thoughts I'm thinking. It's been a bit since the last post, so I guess I'll catch up on that:

In the past few weeks, I've had this glorifying sense of becoming enlightened. I feel like my morals and values are evolving and that I'm gaining this strange maturity that I've only imagined having before. I feel like I can't become angry at anything. I feel like I could make it through anything. I feel like I could bear the weight of a million Earths.

Also, I find myself more and more motivated to create. This winter, David and I are going to take a shot at developing a TV show for [adult swim] because I discovered that they accept idea submissions by mail. Furthermore, I'm growing a greater sense of endearment towards the band I'm in now. I was bummed at first when their style didn't really strike my main nerve, but I'm beginning to realize that I am a piece of the puzzle and that it's not all about what I want to think is good. I can sway the generation of the little aptitude graph towards my end of the polygon, but the other flares will be there too.

Speaking of bands, I finally gathered willing members for the project I've dreamt about for the past year or so: atta boy. I want to combine the real screamo and emo violence type stuff that has sort of died off since the late 90's with a little bit of not-taking-it-too-seriously. I want to be silly at times, but I do also want to express something meaningful with every measure we play. I want to let loose and, while keeping a style in mind, not be bound to a genre. I'm gonna play my keyboard, Dave's on drums, the sexy Jimi McCullian on bass, the prodigal James Kratzer on guitar, and a new face called Dan Palmer from Easton on the other guitar. I expect good things from it. We're getting together this winter to discuss everything and then we hope to actually begin the writing process when school ends for the year, so like late May. Then Dave and I think a single show at the end of the summer in a little room with some other bands will make for a good debut. I'm really excited.

I've just finished all of my classroom time for my fall courses with an exam for each coming up this week. I'm very pleased with how smoothly this first semester has gone. Often times, I don't even notice that I attend classes and simply enjoy being here on my own with some friends and an occasional plip of spending money to do fun things with.

A week ago today, Katie and I celebrated our two year anniversary. There was a gap in between where we weren't together, but we choose to honor that day as the official beginning of our relationship anyway. It's a step towards reconciling that rough, confusing period of our lives and strengthening our relationship overall. It's not to say that that period isn't reflected on and that we completely ignore and condemn its happening, but we're working towards putting it comfortably behind us as a learning and living experience that has some negativity surrounding it. But anyhow, we went to dinner at this very nice Italian place near City Hall called Maggiano's. It's half upscale, half family style Italian dining with semi-reasonable prices considering its stature. They started us off with this delicious fucking bread with the most flavorful olive oil in existence to dab it in. It must have been like, extra extra extra virgin or something; I'm not really up on the standards of grading olive oil. Next, we had fried zucchini as an appetizer with this amazing garlic horseradish dipping sauce. Holy shit, this zucchini was incredible. And the order was so huge (even though we got a fucking half order) that we were tempted to fill up on it. It made a wonderful snack that night back at the dorm. The main course that I chose was lobster fettucine. This was alright. I was good, but it was the least fantastic part of the meal. It was fettucine with white cream sauce not quite alfredo with lobster, Italian sausage, peas and bread crumbs. It was a small order for an Italian dish and it was slightly baked on top which I don't really dig that much. Also, the sausage was kind of an odd ingredient in comparison to the others and it altered the flavor of the dish in a way that I began avoiding the pieces of it in order to enjoy it more. But then, oh, get ready to cum in your undies, Mr. Radogna. A slice of New York ricotta cheesecake. Huge. Strawberries. Decadent. Orgasm. It was a great meal.

I've been slowly making my way through two classic video games in my free time. The one I'm more focused on right now is The Legend Of Zelda: The Ocarina Of Time for the N64 and the other is Metal Gear Solid for PS1. I plan to re-beat the first three installments of the Gear series during my college career (very slowly) before finally buying MGS4 for the PS3. I think I'll be done with all four by the end of my junior year. But the Ocarina Of Time, Christ what a headache that can be. When I was younger, I called my mood during this game "determination" while I now refer to it as "utter frustration." Some parts are so fucking convoluted that I have no idea what I'm supposed to fucking do. I had to look at the GameFAQS at one point in order to remember that I have to somehow know to wander into the Temple of Time to learn the fucking Prelude of Light and then to know that I have to hit this fucking rolling Goron with a bomb before I can figure out how to venture into the Death Mountain Crater. And now I'm in the goddamned Water Temple. Fuck that shit. I'll give it three more hours of enraged searching before I GameFAQ through that whole fucking nightmare. Then after I beat it, I think I'll actually use the walkthrough in full just to get all the Gold Skulltulas and all the heart containers and the Biggoron Sword and whatnot. I fucking forgot about how the other sword fucking breaks after like ten swings and I got so pissed off. Fucking Zelda.

What else... Christmastime is here. I hope I get a nice little allowance to shop with. One of my favorite things to do in this whole world is to pick perfect gifts. I've gotten pretty damned good at it. I figure my main people to shop for are my parents, my brother, my nana, my uncle, Katie, and David. And then maybe like one gift each to some special folks like Matty and Keef and Lil' Mikey. And then my other gifting love: writing out cards. Christmas is the special time of the year where I really sit and reflect on my relationship with a person, then write out my unedited feeling on them in a blank card with a neat design on it. It's not like birthday cards because I suck at those. Birthdays aren't special for me. It is for the birthday person, but not me. Christmas is special for everyone. I pay no attention to the religious background of the holiday and focus it solely on the idea of friendship and togetherness as people. Of recognizing who you truly care about. Of exchanging tokens that symbolize how much you truly care about and know another person. It's a great exercise in humanity and I love doing every part of it.

Well, I think that just about sums everything up that I can bring to mind right now. Five hours from now I'll be heading to the Temple vs. Tennessee basketball game and then playing my first show with The Dead Outnumber The Living tonight in Trenton. It should be a good day. I guess I'll crawl back into bed now and try to fall asleep. If you read this, I highly recommend getting an account on this site, first commenting mine (^_^ pretty please? ^_^), and then starting your own. Think about what it's like to sign into your old Xanga account and see what you were like in middle school. Make one of those for your college years right here! And it's really good to sit and reflect focusedly on your life as you type. Now that I've caught up, I plan to make posts every day if I can. Anyway, take my advice.

Good night.