White Glove Tracking

Puts a whole new meaning to ‘group effort.’ Go team internets!

Nothing like this ever happens to me at Narita

No fair!

‘Circus’ by Farmers HelpPoint

I really, really like this spot, but it also really, really freaks me out.

Muxtape Sunday

We are moving in to our new place this week, so here’s a playlist I crafted to get myself actually packing. Wish us luck!

Kristoffer Ragnstam - Swing That Tambourine
Supergrass - Alright
The Len Price 3 - If I Ain’t Got You
Electric Six - Gay Bar
The National - Apartment Story
VHS or Beta - Night On Fire
Electric Touch - Lines
Thao - Travel
Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart
Sublime - What I Got
Rostam Batmanglij - Campus
White Shoes & the Couples Company - Kapiten Dan Gadis Desa

I Thee Wed

We attended the wedding of X and DO last night. It’s a strange, surreal feeling watching someone your own age make a decision usually reserved for grownups. X is only two years older than me, but she has already reached a place in life I do not project seeing myself in for at least another decade. What a brave girl. The two have been going out for two years, and they married a mere month after he proposed to her; my darling roommate N has been seeing her man-thing for eight years, and there is no talk of marriage on the horizon with them. What is going on with this world?

But I digress. X and DO are wonderful people. They are good for each other, and what a cute couple they make. They exhibited that wonderful, happy glow exhibited by people who are in love, and DO looked especially proud to be standing up there. He had one of those bewildered “My god, I can’t believe it’s her hand I’m holding, her hair I’m stroking” looks on his face the whole time. It would have moved you to tears, if that’s your sort of thing (only one set of eyes on our table that was not dry).

And now we can look forward to the babies they will be having. What do you get when you cross a Chinese and a Brazilian? Oh my goodness. Chizilians! X and DO are going to have the cutest, most beautiful little Chizilian babies! They will be wonderful parents, and I am going straight to hell in a handbasket for that terrible portmanteau.

The Sweet Secret Of A Summer Place

Barbecue, beer, and brats can only mean one thing, and I don’t mean drunken kinky photo-ops.

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One Morning, One Morning In May

The library reeks of frustration. Young men with stubbled jaws who engage me in conversation on lift rides to the fifth storey smell like freshly-ground coffee beans. These amicable fellows who misplace their razors and smell like a Starbucks—why do they gravitate towards me in lifts, where witty bantering is truncated by the electronic ding that lets you know you’ve arrived on your desired floor, and why so late in the semester?

The ambitions of sleep-deprived undergraduates saturate the air and anywhere, anytime, at any given nook and cranny of this building, thoughts and ideas are skipping across miles and miles of of myelinated neurons. Somebody needs to look into harvesting alternative energy from school-induced stress, if ever we run out of water or wind one day.

In one corner of the library, some mathematics student who should have his eyes fixated on the inherent wisdom of a statistics textbook is shunning his academic duties (he is stalking somebody on Facebook). We don’t know each other and probably never will, but he knows that for one week, there is a solid probability that he has something in common with the history student whose eyes should be fixated on the inherent wisdom of a Woodrow Wilson speech (she is updating a weblog).

But what we have in common are not riches or everlasting love or a desire to change the world; what we have in common is a little less heartwarming. What we have in common is.

I love the Discovery

The new Discovery campaign is great, but I wonder how long it’ll be before it drives me nuts.

My Poor Head Is Aching, My Sad Heart Is Breaking

1. How did I let it get this bad?

2. If I were not made out of propriety and chickenshit and irony, then yes. But I am sober and scared and cynical, so no.

3. And you. What is wrong, and why won’t you let me look after you?

4. Aaaaaarrrggghhh.

5. End of cryptic transmission.

We All Fall Down, There’s Not Enough Hours In A Day

This will be the last Coachella-related post, I promise! Here is a set of bands I took a great liking to when we were there, and I am currently busy pumping my iPod with their tunes:

Electric Touch - what nice, polite boys, and they have a solid repertoire of foot tapping-worthy numbers as well. An Austin-based foursome with an English frontman, a piano, and the good sense to do a lot of interacting with the mosh pit, they score high on charisma and catchy tunes.
Holy Fuck - their live performance was amazing, and from gig reviews I’ve been reading, ‘amazing’ is pretty much a word used constantly to describe their performances. But would you expect any less from a troupe that employs toy phaser guns to generate some sweet electronica beats?
VHS or Beta - when we sat down on the grass for lunch to dine to what we thought was Minus the Bear, I look up at A after a few minutes into the set to ask if she was sure it was Minus the Bear we were listening to. She checks her watch and says oh no, this is VHS or Beta. A fab accidental find, I think!

If anyone is at all interested in going to the fest next year, contact me and I can hook you up with Abid, the Best Taxi Driver in Southern California. He will try his best to get you into accommodations that do not cost an arm and a leg during festival weekend. Now if everything goes as planned, A and I should be hitting Austin City Limits come September for more great music and catching up with Caleb. Roll on Texas!