self-titled: ^_^

is the sound spiderman makes. and by god, the new spiderman game is awesome. a pitch perfect recreation of manhattan and you get to swing around and shit and it roolz.

I regret that I will spend the following many years in the greater boston area. I say this because i will not in any near future get to use the "i'm new in town" line and that, in fact, I will never be in that situation where EVERYTHING is new. instead i've doomed myself to being lame and constricted because i'm not new and in a semi-familiar place.

On friday i am going to las vegas to meet tim and adam and various roommates and people from my junior year. i expect this to be a very grand time.

on yesterday i went ot trivia night at our house with jonathan and potential roommate #2. We weren't doing very well until the final question, which was "who was the first person on the cover of tv guide" and we bet it all with my guess of lucille ball, and we were right and, while it seemed that everyone guessed lucy, not everyone bet the whole hog on it. so we got 4th place and won a VHS copy of the woody harrelson movie "cool blue." The only other thing that i really contributed was naming Grape Ape from the hanna barbara cartoons. however it was a good freaking time and i hope to return for bigger glory.

Comic books continue to be good to me. I bought a box not to long ago in which to store my comic books and for my birthday katie decorated the hell out of it with old comic book pictures and it is sort of freaking awesome. but also, comic books from the 70s and 80s were silly looking. it's all these cheesy ass looking superheroes plastered all over it and it is freaking awesome.

On friday katie and i saw the michael moore movie, which despite not completely disagreeing with his politics, i took issue with because, as a movie, it was seriously flawed in many ways. Then we had mcdonalds and then i went to southie for poker but it turned out the poker game was off so i just came home and watched tv and stuff.

on saturday i went to tony's and watched the sox and played a little poker and then went to legal seafood with tony and his brother and had a really amazing meal. calimari and oysters and then a super great cut of salmon and a good hunk of tony's tuna sashimi style. however i came home with a goddam GIANT headache and a stomach that felt like it was going to burst at any second, so i was not able to go out with katie like i think she wanted and i felt crappy because of that. i fell asleep at like 9 until 1 am and then watched nick at nite until i could fall asleep again at like 4 am.

on sunday i bought an air conditioner for me from my parents for my birthday, read some comics, watched some tv and went to sleep.

i bought the metric cd today and the end result is that i totally want to marry emily haines.

so last night after i came home from trivia night, i went to sleep. at like 1am i woke up and the power was out. at 4 i woke up and the power was out. at 5:30 i woke up and the power was out. The power remained out until i left for work. i was worried that i, like, didn't pay the electric bill or something, but that was assuaged when i got up at 5 to investigate and saw that there were no lights on in the building and there was a nstar truck across the street. Actually, i just consulted my clock and it looks like the power stayed off until noon, which is a 12 hour outage which is like super crazy.

luckily i came back home at it was on. and then i played spiderman.

i'm such a fucking loser, it's awesome.

been a while... like i care.

on last saturday i went to see the decemberists. the decemberists were good, played a bunch of songs and then left for encore. when they came out for the encore they treated me to something i haven't seen since when jude and i went to see acoustic junction at the wetlands and they went all acoustic at the end of the night ("the wind" was pretty special in that context). so yeah, decemberists said "fuck the PA" and played acoustic the rest of the night. first off was a touching colin solo "red right ankle" then they played some other songs, including everyone's favorite song about how your mom services sailors at night to earn enough money to feed you. that song included a man walking around in a big bushy fake beard playing the bass drum through the audience.

They played close to 6 songs in this acoustic setting, closing with a way slowed up cover of the smith's "ask" which was way better than the original and this really nice, calm full audience singalong. it was rad.

there was this chick standing next to me and i saw her get hit on, while the main band was playing, twice. it was weird, guys just came up to her and were like "how are you doing?" "can i buy you a drink?" I didn't know that actually happened.

oh. my. god. i MAY have just seen adam brody in the clips for next week's celebrity poker showdown. now, i'm not entirely sure, but if it was him, i think that i will have to take the day, or week, off. ohmygod that would be the best thing in the universe.

ps. the north shore? it's no the oc. not even close.

monday night i met katie at tequila rain because there was some free smirnoff event. i drank a lot of vodka drinks that were unfortunately all containing more sugar than kool-aid and i think that was the key reason i was miserable on tuesday at work.

last night, last night being wendesday, i hung out with tony and jonathan. by the end of the night, tony and i had started waxing intelluctual and we spent a good portion of time discussing how we should come up with an entirely new way of approaching certain subjects, like instead of approaching psychology with a mathematics perspective, approaching mathematics with a psychology background. How we intend this to work we aren't quite sure, but during all of our discussion, we did discover how exponents work and by god, it was weird.

hahah awesome, the older brother from malcolm in the middle just went all in on a 2-7. god bless him. he's going to lose unfortunately, but it's still highly respectable.

oh yeah, so after the decemberists show on saturday night i'm walking home, right, and suddenly, all the lights on the street just go off. the entire block and then some was pitch black. so i navigated a bit by candlelight, then i sat down, and did the only thing i could do and write. i ended up writing 15-20 pieces of quadruple size post-its, and it's your typical bullshit that you can expect to be written at 1am, alone, by candlelight. i haven't reread it but i'm pretty sure i have a good concept of what it contains.

ps you should see my coffee table type thing right now.... absolutely covered with comic books. last week or so i had organized it so the comics only took up 1/3 of the table, but since then i've spent approximately $150 on comics and it's just a goddam mess.

my birthday coincides with free comic book day, and i guess that rocks. since i have no one to hang out with at least i can go to the comics shop and get shit like teen titans go! for free. actually, jonathan brought up my birthday when we went to foxwoods sunday (yeah, i went to foxwoods sunday), which a.) surprised me since i don't recall telling him ever it was my birthday and b.) was the first time anyone (including me i feel like) recognized my birthday since last year.

I'm predicting big things. Let's count off my birthdays going back through time.

07/03/00 i'm not sure exactly, but i'm pretty sure this was the day that jude presented me with a burger king big kids meal chicken run toy. i'm sure we saw a movie to commerate the date.

july 3 2001. this was the year of my 20th birthday. it was celebrated by celebrating lori's premiere episode of the real world. i may have felt a little eclipsed.

july 3 2002. 21. well, this had to rock. first went out with katie and oly and mike and that crew and then the next night was a party at 3 sutherland at sean and john's with all of my, at the time, senior peeps.

july 3, 2003. nobody remembered it was my birthday, whoops. makeshift dinner at sunset cantina followed by about 2 beers at cityside before i think i may have left my obviously not into it friends and meet tony but i'm not sure.

july 3, 2004: i already know jonathan is gone for the third, but i think we're going out the 2nd. katie's gone by then. it's looking like a historically unspectacular birthday. kickass.

it's not like i want to be 23. when people ask me my age i still, desperately, want to say 21. getting older is lame when you've got nothing to show for it like i do.

ok, guess i'll go to bed now.

I guess i can do this.

So philly, or bensalem rather, was pretty much ho-hum. basically a lot of hard work, getting up at 4:30 to be at the warehouse at 5 to walk around drinking coffee and looking intimidating to the drivers and occasionally helping out with going over their delivery manifest or whatever. then at 10:30 or so we'd break, go grab lunch, and then to the room to nap. i watched a lot of ABC Family. saw family matters for the first time in ages, and of course plenty of full house, step by step, two of a kind and 7th heaven. then at around 7 greg and i would either grab dinner and head back to the SDO or head back to the SDO and then grab dinner. the night visit was to go over all the boxes that came back, run some queries and determine that yes, the drivers failed to report anything properly. i feel bad as hell for the SDO manager and his right hand dude. guy, scott, was there when we arrived in the morning, and stayed until past midnight. by day 3 his eyes were just scary to look at. A life of honest work like that I can do without.

No time to experience the wonderful bensalem nightlife, and i don't think i was missing anything. by 10pm i was wiped each night. then when i got home in an hour or two, forget about it. one thing i particularly enjoyed was not reaching for the wallet once, well, except when we saw van helsing (could have been a lot lot worse). aside from that, greg and i were living like kings. if bensalem and it's immediate surroundings had a national restaurant like applebees or chilis or whatever, you can almost guarantee we went there. and had appetizers and lunch/dinner and some beers. thanks staples!

so i'm driving home today, and i don't know what, but some stupid thing made me think about BRW. and i realized this: whenever i think about BRW i am, honestly, overcome with happiness that i no longer work there. It's like those times when you dream you're failing a class or missed a final or something and it's awful and then you wake up and are like "oh hey, i have my degree, eat my pants!" but A MILLION times better. Well, that scenario is more relief, the "hey, i don't work there anymore" is more along the lines of real bliss. i sound like i'm exagerrating here, but i'm not. I'm not a big count your blessings guy, but it's the kind of thing that makes me count mine. god damn i hated that job so much more than i ever would admit to while working there, and i admitted to it quite a bit.

played poker on friday, lost a little, not too much, no more than a night on the town, and poker lasted longer and i had more fun. full table, too, 11 people pretty steady for the night. bob busted it up early, and by early i mean 4am, just when i was hitting my stride. surprised i stayed awake, considering it was the day back from philly and i was going on 4 days of 4-5 hours sleep. but i think poker turns off the body's awareness of time. i mean, i sit there for 8 or 9 hours playing, and think nothing of it. 8 OR 9 HOURS. no breaks, just cards. it's awesome.

so after multiple visits to the comic shop last week, a few amazone book purchases here and there, i went BACK on saturday and bought another 10 or so books for like $25. i mean, how's that for value. i walked out of there with a bag FULL of goodies for twenty five bucks. also, i may have a problem. also, i downloaded the first 55 issues of some spiderman book by everybody's favorite (including seth cohen) brian michael bendis. i also picked up the first 2 of 3 books about a kid who discovers he's jesus.

speaking of seth cohen, i miss the OC dearly. i had a dream recently where i was hanging out with adam brody. probably shouldn't have told anyone that. to that i say eat my pants. last night i had a weird dream, a guy i knew was on trial for murder and i happened to be the prosecuting attorney. Bob from poker was the defense, but he was black. ANYWAY, i was pretty damn convinced that this guy on trial was guilty, but I was woefully unprepared for the case, plus the defense made cook case for character doubt. but i knew the reality of the situation was that the guy was creepy and very likely to murder someone, i just was doing a shit job establishing probable cause or character. there was a surprise witness (that unfortunately, was a surprise and i wasn't ready with any questions to bring out of him), anyway, this witness i think is my favorite part of the dream and, in fact, one of my favorite dream creations ever. The witness was a singular manifestation of the defendant's entire 5th grade class, ghostly in appearance, almost frankensteinian in composition, you could almost see it coming in and out of phase with reality and the voice was all changing timbre and shit. then i woke up. even with crazy 5th grade ghost collective,pretty sure i was losing the case.

i've been to two newbury comics and it's like both of them deny the existance of a new mirah cd. they have, literally, every other release of hers including the two side projects, but not the new one, and it's really pissing me off since the mp3s i got are hosed.

i keep waiting for an uncomfortably hot summer night so i can drink beer and listen to the music that is fitting of uncomfortably hot nights while drinking beer, but the heat will not come, and i guess that's ok. i try all the same, trying to recreate that musical feeling from those gross nights in the basement apartment on strathmore, or those early nights when the OC was just some show that happened to be on fox as i left the tv on after simpsons but then, oh wait, this show rules!, but without all the pieces in place it just doesn't work