Past few days + a good movie

It's really weird. Some days I wake up at 7:30 after having gone to bed at 3 AM and its enough sleep. Others, I sleep til noon or after and it's just not enough. I will sleep for eight hours, wake up, check some emails, and then go back to sleep. I'm gonna have to snap out of this real soon with reality coming to hit me in the face in a couple months.

Anyways, yesterday was a 'sleep the whole day' day and it ended in me missing an important test and not being able to meet with my group members as planned to get together and complete the group assignment for shitty OID. Well its now Tuesday night, and not only haven't I studied for the test I missed, I am not done with the assignment - and it's due tomorrow at 5 pm.

In my perennial quest to do as much wrong as possible before actually knuckling down and getting some work done, I decided I would watch this movie I got from Netflix with Nicholas Cage and Michael Caine about a guy who is an unhappy weather man on TV. This is a really good movie. It is kind of a reflection on a lot of the things I think about often: where will I be when I'm 40? Who will I be? Will I be defined by my failures or by my successes? Will I have any successes? The cover is pictured to the right.

This movie really gets at life in general in an enlightening yet very dark way, much like American Psycho did. I think I like this move equally well. Perhaps more, because of the lack of brutal murdering - which I am not a fan of (but could tolerate because it was all so tongue-in-cheek.

Anyways, you should check it out. I was truly impressed by Caine's character, and tormented, which one should be, by Cage's.

Over and out....oh shit I'm cooking pasta......

Horse & Burro Adoption

Well, it's 12:30 AM Sunday April 9, 2006. At the station. Cuz where else do I go after Underground shows than the ole station.

We just got finished with the post-gig hangout, which was decidedly short since everyone in the band was mad tired from last night.

What did we do last night, you ask? We practiced for tonight live on the air on WRCT.

But anyways, thanks to the massive email blasts which Horse/Knuckles, Hell, and H/K's friend Reuben Quintero sent out. Loads of people came. I really should have booked more student bands this year. Only now I realize it's the only way to get people out to a show (CMU students, at least).

After Reuben's band Vegemite Monster opened for us with some Blink 182-esque pop punk, East directed us to slowly go on stage one by one. We prefaced the entrance with a pow-wow style screaming session between East and myself in the back corner of the Underground.

On stage, Buckyballs started us with the laptop electronics, followed by Hell on clarinet, then Abacus Finch on clarinet, then me on my soprano sax (I entered the stage walking backwards. When I got up front I kept having these feelings of vertigo like the Earth was shifting and I was really dizzy, but when I stopped blowing so hard into my sop, and turned frontwards, the feeling went away.), and H/K followed me. I think I followed up the soprano playing by heading over to the extra snare drum (with the snare off), beating away while complementing H/K's drums. At times we were in tandem with each other. At times we were off, but that is the intention in free music.

That would make for not much fun. Insanity followed by restraint, followed by more insanity is the best way to go about making freely improvised music. We rocked out in that configuration for a couple minutes....and then we switched instruments....somehow that all went on for like and hour and forty-five minutes. If I were to try to tell you what happened between those first 5 minutes and the end.

Some highlights:

- yelling obscenities at the audience; completely uninhibited by the FCC

- Horse/Knuckles Knuckles/Horse on the floor with the electric guitar, sweating profusely, hair completely gone hay-wire

- Buckyball dropping the electric guitar on stage

- Denton breaking drum sticks for the hell of it

- me lying down on stage playing the soprano sax into the mic (also screaming "

- East aka Hell pouring water into one end of his sax and attempting to play it while tipping it the other way so that water ran into his mouth and out the open holes throughout the bore of the horn

- all of us yelling "HORSE......AND.......BURRO!!!!" at various times during the performance

- the Underground staff joining in.....

Wow. Good times were had by all....except the trapped freshmen.