beirut saved my life tonight...

last night i was on the telephone with kels(who is preggers, for anyone who didn't know that. and where did you have to be hiding to not know that?) and we were lamenting how we don't listen to new music right now, and we don't even know what's out there, because somehow we have managed to lose touch with all the music blogs we once frequented, etc. etc.

this talk spurred me to action and i headed back to all my old haunts, which are still there, doing what they do, thankfully. and just like that, i found a new band i love. now, i know all the cool kids already knew about beirut like five hundred thousand years ago when there were glaciers and cavemen and shit but i don't have enough time to spend making sure i'm cool, so when i say "new" don't fret; i mean "new" to me.

so, beirut. great stuff. i really like it. especially "elephant gun" right now, and "postcards from italy" but that's only 'cause i haven't had enough time to listen to more yet. i already can tell i am gonna pretty much think anything they do is great. it's just that kind of relationship.

god, i love finding new music to love. i can't believe i have let it lapse this long... it's like any of the other things i can't do without for long periods without experiencing serious repurcussions: writing, reading, charles. it's just the best feeling, when i find a new song to love, that i didn't even know existed. it makes me thrilled to be alive.

so yeah. i absolutely have to get my ipod-usb cord, 'cause this is quickly becoming a situation that requires serious ipod time.

intending to intend.

i am the biggest procrastinator in the world. no, actually, i bet there are some big-time procrastinators out there...but i can hang with the best of them. if there is something i am undeniably good at, it's procrastinating. and tetris. but procrastinating is more problematic. sometimes, i have procrastinated using tetris. there were entire semesters of college where tetris was my main procrastinational tool. but that's another story.

anyhow, i just wanted to say that i have shocked myself by actually doing something ahead of time, something that was shaping up to be a big time, prime candidate for procrastination central. that is, my Hunter College Graduate Application Letter Of Intent. what is that? some of you might know, but it's when the graduate school you are applying to makes you submit 500 words telling them what you "intend" to do. what you "intend" to do when or where or what is anyones guess, although i assume they are asking that you focus on what you "intend" to do when you are enrolled in their university, and i again assume you probably wouldn't want to write that you "intend" to procrastinate before completing any of your assignments by playing endless hours of tetris, even if that is what you "intend" to do. but you have to submit something, and according to my application booklet, they place a whole bunch of emphasis on what you tell them you "intend" to do. so, naturally, cue procrastination, right?

i know. it's bizarre. i'm not saying it's any good, believe me. i don't know what they are asking me to tell them, so that's made it a bit hard. and since i don't have any dazzling achievements to speak of, or write of, i can't pad my little intention statement with past accomplishments and claim that i will simply continue dazzling once they have allowed me entrance to their institute of higher learning.

i'm just happy i got it done. on march 20th. because it's due by april 1, and i fully expected to be crying at this very computer screen on march 31st, as per usual. but no. now i can save that time for trying to eek out a ten-page writing sample. don't these people know that i avoided writing ten pages of anything in college at all costs?

goodbye, kevin durant. see you in boston...

so, texas' loss to usc pretty much ruined my bracket, since i had them as national champ. you can do all your laughing and pointing now, it's ok. i have been subjected to it already. the rest of my bracket is relatively intact, but it will take a major blow to my opponent, cwiii, either in the form of a sweet sixteen loss by ucla or ohio state for me to even have a chance in hell. and maybe not even then. but whatever. brackets are only one part of the greatness of march madness. the other parts are what kept us in rapt attention all weekend.

whatever. i also spent the weekend sick, and that sucked, but what didn't suck at all was my random decision to buy a book on saturday morning, and for that book to be "what is the what" by dave eggers. it is one i had meant to read months ago, and never got around to picking up, but i must tell you that i am already almost done with it because it is one of the most compelling pieces of writing i have encountered in some time. i have to believe it is eggers' finest work, and perhaps so because it is a memoir that is not his own, but yet one i imagine resonated with him in ways that i cannot understand but that i know must be extraordinarily powerful. and beyond that, he is just a very, very good writer. it seems, at least to me, that there are less and less of those around these days. lately, writers seem to gain notoriety from things other than the fact that they are very, very good writers... and that is a shame.

cyril connelly, in another great work called "the unquiet grave" wrote:
the more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of any writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

this book is really amazing and is a great read, as well as an important one. i highly recommend it. as with any book i really take to, i am moving through it at an incredible clip, and i am actually trying right now to slow my pace, if only so i can still read it throughout the week. i am very pleased with the thinking i am doing as a result of it, with the frame of mind it is affording me... i don't really know anymore how i feel about this world, with all the things that i know go on around me, both near and far, and how much idealism i have left in me now(which might sound ridiculous, and might even be ridiculous, for someone like me to say, but i am just stating facts here, not analyzing their validity) but reading about these people, about this person, valentino, and his life and what it has been like and where it has led him and how he has felt through all of it has made me think a lot, and also feel a lot of things, and most importantly, it has had the effect, which i always value, of backing me out of the tight focus i have put on my life lately, and let me see a bit more of the picture, as they say. and i don't think that it has given me even one answer necessarily, but it is nice, even a relief, to zoom out. and my life has meant more to me in the last twenty four hours, and my love has become that much more vibrant in the past twenty four hours, and it feels good. it was needed.

read this book, i think it will be good for you.

more madness for your mind

the madness is in full swing, and the only downside thus far is that new york is a far less visible college basketball town than richmond, va. sure, there are thousands and thousands of college fans all over manhattan, but the comraderie is not the same, simply because there are so many people. down in va, just about everyone stops to take note when march madness rolls around, and as my sister confirmed for us last night, now that vcu is making a run at it, the entire town has got the madness, big time.

charles and i have each other, which is more than enough college basketball enthusiasm. however, our friends don't get it at all; they keep asking us what we are doing for st. patricks day and when we tell them, in no uncertain terms, that we will be watching basketball, and only basketball(no parades), they look at us like we just said we were going to sit around and listen to some old john tesh albums. ITS MARCH FUCKING MADNESS PEOPLE! you don't have to know one blessed thing about college b-ball to find this shit interesting. it's a universal story, and it's great drama. and good lord, it only just started!

anyhow, enough about that. let's get to the opening round, which started yesterday while i was working a double, which means i missed out on watching a ton of great games and subsequently took today off because there is no way in hell i am missing the rest of them today. so far i have lost six in my bracket although i only had one team going past the next round(odu) so the future of my bracket is relatively in tact.

for some asinine reason, i picked gonzaga over indiana, which now i can't even comprehend how i thought that was a good idea. i don't even like gonzaga. it's not like it was a sucker pick or anything, although i guess now it certainly is. quote of the game, from commentator len elmore, which came directly after indiana executed a game punctuating dunk on the 'zags:

"you hear that? that's the sound of a bus warming up."

ouch.

i got screwed by texas tech, who i firmly believed would beat bc and that scowling motherfucker dudley... i lost the duke/vcu matchup but i don't mind because i am really happy for the rams...that's good, real deal march madness shit right there.

i got me some louisville love, for now, but i'm worried, because in another fatuous display of my limited college basketball knowledge, i took the cardinals all the way to the sweet sixteen... we will see if rick pitino can help me out here or if his really young squad will get their asses handed to them by acie law iv and texas a&m.

my other concerns involve unc, which i won last night, but who i have getting beat by texas in the sweet 16. i also have texas going all the way, so you see where i am going with this, but now that tyler has a new facemask, all bets are off. i made my predictions based on his previous facemask, which was eighteen sizes too big and was obviously the bane on his existence...

without the facemask issues, unc may go much further than i predicted. crap.

whatever. i took texas because i have some crazy friday the thirteenth black cat type of feeling that kevin durant and the 'horns are gonna tear through this bracket against stiff odds and make all the way to face off with joakim noah and florida. that's just what i'm saying, yo.

all right. i am gonna go get showered and head out for some supplies to survive the blizzard we are currently having(yesterday was flip-flop weather, mind you) and to get geared up for the games that will start in just about ONE HOUR.

the madness rules. go texas. and virginia tech, and florida, and oregon and...

learning lessons, march madness style

first of all, i have been seriously neglecting the blog here, so i figure i should mention that there is, as of yet, no fish. i just haven't made it happen. but i plan on it. so i guess, for now, i will just leave it as when there is a fish, i will post a picture. good enough.

what i have not been neglecting is college basketball, which for those of you in the back of the room, has entered the march madness phase of things. and well, it's madness.

i have been keeping some notes, not only to help me with my picks, even though i am hopelessly lost with all the pac 10 teams and mid majors and am almost certainly gonna screw it up regardless of notes. and i will now tell you some of what i have learned. as one of the tv commentators eloquently put it, the learning lessons.

first of all, i learned that commentators and analysts say some completely meaningless shit some of the time. and other times, they butcher the syntax of the english language so severely that you need a webster's and a legal pad to break it down and figure out what they were trying to say. here's an example: unfortunately i don't have the chaps name, but one of the dudes working the pitt-georgetown game on saturday night recounted a story from one of the seniors on the team about how aaron gray had been ogling his championship ring from a previous year. "he said there isn't a day that doesn't go by when aaron doesn't look at that ring...". so far as i can tell, that sentence cancels itself out completely, and may also tear a hole in the space-time continuum.

also notable: the making-up of words, like "sticktoitiveness" and phrases, like "in the back door like a muddy six-year-old" or more obtusely, the aforementioned "learning lesson".

aside from the commentating hootenanny(kind of like the "american morning playhouse" of yore) there was the actual basketball action, or more importantly, side plots like tyler hansbrough's hannibal lecter facemask, which t-bone was forced to don after duke's gerald henderson broke his nose thursday night. not only did espn keep showing this one shot of him standing there with the thing on bearing a facial expression that conveyed a bizarre cross between insanity and stupidity, but boston college kept knocking it half off his face, smushing his broken nose and sending poor tyler reeling around the court like he had just been on the receiving end of a face full of bees. good times.

then there's gramps, aka greg oden from ohio state, who seriously looks like he's pushing forty. i wrote a post about him a few weeks ago. trey suggested that he had the disease that robin williams had in "jack", which i would say is just as possible as anything else... something has to explain all those wrinkles on his forehead. aside from his basketball-related dominance, i always enjoy watching him trot down the court after making a monstrous shot. most of the time, he registers no expression at all. in fact, for all you can tell, he may just have looked up from the newspaper or something.

Other random observations that have made it into my notebook:

charles says that georgetown is dangerous because they run something called the princeton offense. he explained it, but really that's all i know. oh, and that he likes them all the way, maybe.

there is a jamont gordon from mississippi state, and a jamon gordon from virginia tech, and i have no idea what is up with that.

according to someone on tv, the hokies will "run it right up your backside", which i think is a good thing in this instance, and i like them to go kinda deep(don't worry, not into your backside).

i do not agree with tony kornheiser that louisville will make it past texas a&m and in to the sweet sixteen.

bc's jared dudley has the most mirror-perfected scowl i have ever seen. he must not have a roommate. or if he does, that person is highly amused.

in the bad mascot department(and i know all about bad mascots, having been to two different schools with two horrible mascots: the boston university terriers and the stony brook seawolves) we have the suny albany great danes. also a suny school, like my alma mater...what the hell is wrong with y'all?

that's all for now. i have a bracket to fill out. more, much much more, to come.