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[08 Jul 2009|04:48am] |
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Stevie Nicks, "Planets of the Universe" |
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You keep hearing comparisons to Tiger Woods and Barack Obama, but they're the wrong comparisons. Both those men had hard childhoods but are exemplars, now, of everything a man should be.
Michael Jackson didn't gather himself up to be that kind of person, and along with the music and dance, that failure is his legacy, too.
link
lately, kyrie's been expressing a lot of sentiments i share.
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[01 Jul 2009|03:09pm] |
now it's time for good idea, bad idea.
good idea: buying a trader joe's strawberry smoothie.
bad idea: downing the whole thing while waiting to cross an intersection.
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[26 Jun 2009|07:57pm] |
Claire Boucher and William Gratz had their sights set on the southern reaches of the Mississippi River when they packed their chickens, a sewing machine and 20 pounds of potatoes into a houseboat they crafted from scratch.
Calling themselves Veruschka and Zelda Xox, river names worthy of the grand adventure they envisioned, the young couple pushed off from the riverbank in north Minneapolis the first week of June.
article
apparently all strange journeys must at some point meet bemidji, minnesota. these kids are ridiculous.
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[25 Jun 2009|10:54pm] |
and this is what i've been waiting for someone to say. all the vitriol's just uninteresting. as someone said about another relationship's failure last weekend, any relationship has way more going on than the public is privy to. and sanford told his family months ago. not that the situation's defensible, but it's certainly a lot more sympathetic than spitzer or clinton.
and way more interesting than the one-liners everyone seems to have. zing!
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[31 May 2009|05:26pm] |
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Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, "La Femme Accident" |
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interview with au revoir simone, one of my favorite bands at the moment by a guestblogger at coilhouse, one of my favorite blogs.
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[29 May 2009|04:31am] |
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Talking Heads - Cities (Live) |
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i wrote this last night at 3am. it was #1 in a list i was beginning, but then i got to #2 and wrote about eight paragraphs, none of which i'm ready to post. followed that up with some writing tonight, eventually it will end up here. but not yet.
i'm rejoining the 21st century and getting a cell phone again. found a really good deal plus free phone, so i went ahead with it this afternoon. it was surprisingly painless. the rep on the other end of the line was interesting, his voice sounding drained.
"so what kind of phone do you want?"
"something basic, really."
"basic?"
"yeah, i mean, i don't need any frills."
"i mean you want a basic phone--is it a matter of price or do you not want the features?"
"yeah, i want to go as cheap as possible."
"okay, just wanted to make sure if you're cheap or you hate technology."
that got a hearty laugh out of me. it's rare to get a moment of sincerity out of such a corporate exchange over the phone. lately i find myself able to objectively laugh at myself--i take myself so much less seriously than i used to. there was a similar moment in the ER a couple weeks back, where i was able to sincerely laugh at myself courtesy of the physician's assistant's comment in a fairly humorless situation. i'm tempted to make a comment about how existentially that's a good place to be, but it's sort of the tip of the iceberg, and i'm not going to pat myself on the back when there's a lot more going on beneath the surface.
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[13 May 2009|03:36am] |
what the hell are two of my housemates sleeping on the couch for? i go downstairs to get some juice, i hear heavy breathing and realize the loveseat is folded out into a bed with two people curled up on it. they have a bed. a whole room, actually, called a bed-room.
but yeah, i really wanted my cran-raspberry juice. and it's delicious.
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[10 May 2009|02:08am] |
i was supposed to see star trek tonight, but went to the ER instead!
had this pain in my back on tuesday, thought it was from sitting on one of our couches weird, made sure to support my back. wednesday my abdomen hurt. it was its worst in the evening and kept me up all night, hobbling around, bending over, lying down. nothing was comfortable and what was position felt least uncomfortable kept changing.
thought the worst was over, and thursday and friday were marked by dull pain in my back and abdomen. then around 2pm saturday, i felt the worst pain in my abdomen i've ever felt. called my mom, who happens to be in the states with her parents right now, and told her about it, said i was thinking about the ER. toughed it out a little while longer, took a nap, woke up and the pain was even worse. i called one of my roommates (who's graduating this weekend and whose mom is in town) asking her to come home and take me to the ER.
i'm admitted, get a room, they ask if i can give a urine sample. i say i'm not sure but i'll try. i go to the bathroom and i pass a kidney stone into the sample cup. i never would have known. i looked at it after passing it and i was so confused--this came out of me just now?
i take it back, point it out to the nurse and say that i think it might be a stone. they run a CT and do some labwork on my blood. the CT came back that my kidney and ureter were swollen, and the PA started saying "so either the stone is invisible..." and i interrupt and say, "actually, i think i passed it right before the scan" and point at the sample. sure enough, it was a stone, and a big one at that. i hang out while they give me IV pain meds and run the labwork. everything comes back fine and i have a diagnosis.
there's another in my right kidney, but it's pretty far up. it might stay there forever or i'll pass it one day and go through the same ordeal. at least now i'll know what to expect. a week of anguish and confusion comes to a close, and i can go to my friend's graduation tomorrow minus one pebble that fell out of my body. (and hopefully minus kidney swelling after a lot of water-drinking and a good night's sleep.)
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[29 Apr 2009|09:51pm] |
First 100 Days
DAY 39: The Obamas sit silently around their Camp David dining table because Malia forgot to pack Scattergories.
DAY 57: Secret service agent Ted Scharpling stumps fellow agent Neal Vianna when he asks Vianna what he would do if Michelle Obama came at the president with a modified Glock 19 automatic.
DAY 61: Chris Dillard of Bethesda, MD, receives the first new job under Obama's stimulus plan, being tasked with flipping the numbers on the White House scoreboard every time a new job is created.
DAY 89: To make up for missing the Opening Day first pitch, President Obama closes out the ninth for the Nationals.
DAY 95: President Obama furiously asks Cabinet who unlocked Sakura on his Street Fighter IV save file.
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[14 Apr 2009|11:35am] |
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score. i've secretly hated the elements of style since i heard about it in college. (much less secret is my hatred for english majors.)
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[31 Mar 2009|10:49pm] |
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#355
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[06 Mar 2009|12:34am] |
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i originally thought that the word "opine" was actually a french term, "au pine," meaning "to wax nostalgic about." in retrospect, "eau pine" would have made more sense, as there is a potential metaphor expressing the similarity between humanity's fascination with past events and how pine trees feel about water.
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[01 Sep 2008|06:25pm] |
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"I also saw Felicia Day at the show, who gave me a brush and told me to groom her. This is a thing that really happened, and it was bizarre, but not so bizarre that I wouldn't do it. It was like brushing a unicorn." link
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[29 Aug 2008|05:56am] |
if i'm not logged in, there are ads in the sidebar of my lj.
when did this happen.
it completely ruins the design and goes against everything about lj that i actually liked over the past seven years.
total betrayal. turns out this is what we had to look forward to when lj was shuffled around to sixapart and then the russians. awesome.
just looked it up: In addition, visitors who are not logged in to LiveJournal will now be seeing ads on Basic accounts and communities; the experience of logged-in users will not change.
yeah, my experience hasn't changed except for the fact that i noticed it immediately after logging out. what a load of garbage.
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[08 Aug 2008|12:49am] |
i cannot sleep. i'm usually restless before a flying day, but this is absurd. i can't sleep, at all. i'm so wired and worried and nervous about nothing in particular. a week from now i'll be excited--it'll be moving day, officially. showing up a week before that is kind of like showing up to the prom completely dressed about four hours beforehand. the DJ's setting up and the junior class is there putting balloons and other garbage up and you're there in a tux, probably a ridiculous tux. or a dress, for you ladies/transvestites.
maybe that taps into my nervousness: the thought of having nothing to really do over the next week. i feel so planless and so unprepared for what's ahead of me, and i don't feel comfortable burdening anyone else with any share of my job search or furniture search.
which is why i need to get on the ground in d.c. figure out what i'm going to do. develop a plan and follow through. (rhyme time.)
but i'm not there yet, i'm here, sleepless, about 24 hours away from walking out of the doors of washington dulles and into the future, with nothing to do with myself between now and then.
except fret and be nervous and sleepless.
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[06 Aug 2008|02:22am] |
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photos of my trip to england and wales are up on flickr. my photostream, and the tagged photos.
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[24 Jul 2008|06:19am] |
onion articles have come true before--take, for example, the prediction of adding another couple blades to a gillette razor. even though it has since happened, the article is still funny. this one, however, is so correct in its predictions that it's not funny. seven and a half years ago, it was probably hilarious--"haha, he'll be a bad president, but there's no way anyone can be that bad."
maybe bush read it and took it as a challenge. that would involve bush reading something, though (unlikely).
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[23 Jul 2008|05:48am] |
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i'm not sure i would have enjoyed this story if it came from anyone else. but it's amanda palmer, and i guess this is a sign of my reverence toward her. (a word of warning: the post gets somewhat graphic.)
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[18 Jul 2008|01:13am] |
i've been writing elsewhere, and it's time for that unveiling. i wanted to get a few weeks of posts under my belt before mentioning it semi-publicly so that i could be sure that i could sustain writing and posting daily.
the blog is called buntz and it's on wordpress. i've had the account for two years, but only started writing in it as of may.
the most popular post is called boing boing'd, and it deals with the furor over boing boing erasing all posts mentioning violet blue. violet herself actually linked me (twice--those links are nsfw, for the record) which was a pretty cool feeling, and explains why that post has been read more times than any other on the blog.
on mondays i do a recurring post called to what i am listening where i talk about the music that's been in my head lately. that link is to the latest installment, volume seven.
i also do more personal posts on fridays called pillaging the past, usually talking about something specific about me or that has happened to me.
other than that, it's the usual blog fare i suppose--mini-essays about things. the reason i started writing there instead of here is that this space (my livejournal account) has deep roots back through high school, and it would be strange for me to start writing in formal language, using capitalization and worrying about how things might be worded. it's difficult to explain, but i feel more comfortable with this being a more informal space for my writing, and that being a space with more structured writing and scheduling. the wordpress blog is somewhere that i can point other people to that represents its own distinct body of work, coherent on its own terms--if i were to do the type of writing here that i do there, it wouldn't make sense to me. doing that would involve a fundamental shift i'm not entirely comfortable with.
that said, i will still write here with the same regularity that i have over the past couple years (which is to say, not that regularly). as it is, i think i've posted here more since i've started the blog than i posted over the past twelve months. explain that, will you!
anyway, there you go.
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buntz's journal