Memories

when i was your age…

4 November, 2007 (21:48) | Memories

I think i had my first, "When I was your age…" moment a couple weeks ago.  Colin and I went out to see Rachel in Cleveland and we went to see Underoath and Poison the Well in concert.  If you’re not familiar with them, you’re not alone.  I’ve heard a few of their songs, nothing really my taste, but close enough, and I will never turn down a chance for some live music.  Now, to reminisce, I was definitely a concert goer when I was younger, and I’d always be in the  mosh pit; it was my second home.  So, for old times sake, I get in the pit at this show too.  I’ve having a great time, I’m a little bigger now, so i’m certainly holding my ground.  Now, one problem I’ve always had in the pit was when people are crowd surfing and I’m facing forward, they’ll come flying into the back of my head since I’m so much taller than the rest of the crowd.  A minor nuisance, I just lift the person forward and carry on with my moshing.  Now this particular night, someone is literally tossed into the air and as they land on my head, I’m struck pretty hard and stunned by what I can only assume to be a camera, or more likely an effing cell phone in their pocket.  Needless to say, that guy got tossed to the front of the crowd a little faster than he was planning.  I was ticked, and I had a bump on my head.  A few minutes later, i was retreating to where Rachel and Colin were, with the thoughts of, "When I was your age, we didn’t have cell phones!  We went to concerts with some cash, a ticket, and that’s all we needed!  You kids these days…"

Personal Update

mid-life crisis at 25.

31 October, 2007 (14:44) | Personal Update

turning 25 on the 16th…wow.  Deirdre just showed me a pic from my high school soccer days and said, "here’s you almost 10 years ago."  WTF  10 years ago??!  When the crap did that happen!?!?  shoot.  I havent done half of what i had hoped i’d do by the time i’m 25.  It’s really depressing, but most birthdays are for me.  That’s why I don’t work for that whole week.  Just so i don’t have the risk of having "a bad day" and getting even more depressed.  I don’t care if i sleep all day or if i am productive all day, the only thing that’s important is that I’m happy.  Egocentric and self-indulgant?  Mayhaps.  This year I’m going down to vegas.  WEEEEE.

As another indicator of how low ludicrous my degree is, I didn’t turn in the first assignment in one of my classes, half-arsed it through the whole class, it was supposed to be a professional writing class and I can’t think of one paper that I turned in.  But i got an A.  WTF.  When I first started back at school, i thought it was just me being an excellent slacker and social engineer, but now i realize it’s the lack of anything challenging, consequential, or pressured.  Mostly.  With one of the last 2 classes i have to finish, I have to write a 10 page paper.  That’s rather overwhelming to me.  I think i’ve written 1 twelve page paper before…at Pitt…during the whole semester.  This will give me 5 weeks to do it.  I think it might be our only grade, or the majority of our entire grade.   Joy in buckets i tell ya.

I think i found a good open mic to play at regularly on Monday nights.  I want to get a email list set up for people, and the most obvious/easiest for me would be to use the newsletter function built into this site.  So the trick is to get people to go through the registration process.  I might just try to do a batch user add with all my friend’s email addresses and set their passwords to something generic.  We’ll see what I can do…I do see that they hey ya acoustic cover in the downloads section has been downloaded 30 times though, and that’s pretty acceptable to me.  I think i’m going to jump into the studio, probably my uncle kenny’s, and record a demo CD to hand out to people.  That will give me some good quality recordings to replace the bad ones too.

Luke ravenstahl, the pittsburgh mayor, came by my house the other day.  he was walking through the hill district trying to get voters and i just so happen to notice him.  He came up to my door to meet me and shake my hand and ask me about what i did and how long i lived there and any issues I had.  I could have drilled him with questions like what is that "propel pittsburgh" committee doing, if anything, and why didnt i get on it, and why don’t you just take your own car to country concerts, and why don’t you chill out a bit when you’re obviously under the spotlight for being young and immature?  but that would have taken some preparation and relied on me being able to overcome the shock of seeing the mayor in my front yard, which did not happen.  Oh well.  Not like i vote anyway.  I am definitely seeing good stuff in the development of the hill district though, so i’d like to get behind him 100%, but dude just needs to be a little more considerate of how the city thinks of him and what he does.

 

Dreams

another visit to the land of the dead

29 October, 2007 (05:18) | Dreams

wow.  I think i see a trend going on here.  i woke up at almost 4:15am from this dream.  I had gone to bed about 4 am last night and slept until 5:30, and went to bed around 1am.  I’ll have to start recording the times and such of these dreams.  I’m going to leave out a few details to keep the authenticity of the dream; ie there were a few people in the dream that shouldn’t have been, but they weren’t family and they were distracting from the plot.  for reference sake though, I punched andrew bonnell in the face for giving me his AOL screenname so that I could contact him when i woke up.  but wow, i just realized something…I’ll come back to this after i tell the dream…

So deirdre and I are driving around in a truck of sorts, and we drive by a store called SEKI and they only sell pepsi products.  not important at all, but I’m leaving it in there because it’s weird.  anyway, we were talking, she gets out, next thing i know is i’m in the estate driveway facing the road in a tractor pulling a cart, I loop to the right in the yard and come back around to drive behind the house and i look to the right where there is a lone pine tree and Dante is tied to it barking.  I park the tractor and run over to pet him and play around with him.  Someone else comes over, a young guy, I recognize him, but now that i woke up i can’t remember who he is.  But seeing him and dante confirmed to me that this was a dream, and I am visiting the dead.  I said, "so this is really afterlife i’m visiting, isn’t it?" and he just looked like he wasn’t allowed to confirm that to me.  Then I let Dante off the chain and walk inside the house with him up to the top left bedroom where there is a large bed in it’s normal spot and serah and J’aime are there.  This is where we’re talking with some guy and we get on the conversation of being able to talk to everyone there when I wake up.  He says that he has AOL IM and that if I sent him a message, he’d respond.  And so I’m l said, "well, i need to know your screenname"  and i was feeling stressed to get this information before I woke up.  And he said something like "oh well, you just message me and you’ll be good" and when he said that, I knew he was lying to me about having messenger at all.  this is where he is now andrew bonnell and i punch him in the face and yell at him for not being legit with me on an important topic and wasting my time.  j’aime and serah cool things down and we talk a little more about how this place is the afterlife.  We know that my dad is outside working on something.

Then I realize with nervous excitement, "Guys, this means that Barney (my grandfather) is probably out in the barn…do you want to go see him??"  J’aime seemed more excited than serah, but we decide we’ll go.  So we are walking downstairs talking about what he’ll be like and I start to get blurry vision, like i’m about to wake up, but i consciously force myself back to sleep.  When we turn the corner into the dining room, dante had followed us, and I note to serah how great it is to see dante.  I can actuall feel him.  I said how firm he feels and how short his hair is, just as I remember him.  I don’t know how to express how real this dream is besides that.  we are going to walk out the addition door, and when we get in the addition, it’s been worked on.  There’s a lot of work to be done, but all the walls are finished and there’s a stairway down to the basement.  I can see through it that there’s a light on downstairs, and I get the feeling that someone is down there…but I don’t find out…I fear that it was (grandmother’s mother? aunt? i forget), who hung herself in the basement.  Anyway, it’s obvious that my dad had been working on the place.  We go out on the deck and can see my dad over in the park working.  I ask Serah and J’aime if they want to spend anytime with him.  J’aime just looks at Serah as if it’s up to her and Serah says that she’d rather not.  So we walk down and I yell for my dad, thinking that he should introduce us, but Serah shows resistance, so I yell back nevermind.  It’s funny how common place it seems that we’re there.  Anyway, I step into the barn, and I am definitely a little scared as to what I’ll find, the lights are all on, the pocket door to the main area is shut and i loudly say, "Hello?"  Then I hear some feet on the gravel outside, and I turn and catch a glimpse of him before he turns quickly away out of shock and says, "Oh my goodness, Josh?!" as if he’s embarrassed.  He turns back around, big smile on his face, and kind of chuckles out of disbelief that we’re there.  He looks a lot like the pictures of him being old, grey hair and kinda fat.  He’s sweating and dirty like he’s been working, has a white baseball hat on that he takes off to meet us and he’s wearing some reddish over alls.  So we just start talking about how he looks alot like i thought he would, and how i always thought he looked so much different in pictures of him old vs him young.  My dad comes over as we talk by the stone wall infront of the barn.  Then, my dad’s friend Bruce shows up there too, and we’re talking as if he knows about visiting here all the time too.  Then i mention to Barney about how it seems that all hall men die around their 50s, and that uncle kenny and I were trying to remember how everyone had died.  He told me as far back as his grandfather that all died around then.  I don’t remember the reasons why.  I then asked him if there were any women, and he said there was one, and he goes to get like a genealogy book, but I never get to see it before I wake up.

So, the thing i just realized…I had just emailed serah today asking if she had any memories of caleb being normal, because I do not.  I wonder if i’m unable to dream about caleb being normal because I don’t have those visions in my head, so i replace him with other people that are around his age, like the guy outside with dante and andrew bonnell.  Then i remember from the movie "What dreams may come" that cuba gooding Jr was a doctor in robin william’s life, but he’s really his son.  And I’ll admit, that I have thought of andrew bonnell as a relationship i’d have with caleb.  Not that andrew and I even talk, but just that he’s around the same age and we get along pretty well.  With that, it’s an easier fit that Caleb is in these dreams too, and I did have the sense that he was always there, but as i reflect back, i can’t remember him being there.

I have such an urge to email serah and J’aime and see what they dreamed about last night, but I’m a little more rational than to think they had the same dream.  Wouldn’t that be messed up?

Thoughts & Ideas

i’d be a great eccentric millionaire

29 October, 2007 (00:22) | Thoughts & Ideas

I’d be a great eccentric millionaire. I was just thinking today about how much we rely on people’s names as sufficient identification. I would build the biggest house and make it so awesome, then invite tons of people that have the same name as me to live there so we’d have the same address. We’d only have to pay taxes once because they’d think only 1 person lived there. we could be at so many different places at the same time and people would all think it was one person.

Music

So give me what I got to get so i can go, cuz I aint washin’ dishes in the ditch

26 October, 2007 (14:54) | Music

Just rocking out to some music on a friday at work, ready to go home.  thought this song fit my current mood pretty well, musically, lyrically, and emotionally…

Beck – Soul Suckin’ Jerk

Memorable Quotes

life after a century

23 October, 2007 (13:48) | Memorable Quotes

"If you live to be one hundred, you’ve got it made. Very few people die past that age. "

– George Burns