Thursday, May 24, 2007

Movin!

Tomorrow morning the computer is boxed up, indicating the official start of the move. The end of course being when the cat transfers to the new location. I'll be offline for a few days, thanks to Comcast and the people in the apartment before me not shutting off their service...unless they left their cable modem on? We'll see :-P

Anyway, goodbye to this place. I have started over in so many positive ways in the past few months...especially the last 2. As of Saturday I will live around the corner from the source of much happiness in my life. Byebye St. Moritz!

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Tarantula

The 1st SP single is available on iTunes. You have to search 'Smashing Pumpkins Tarantula' at this point to find it, but it's there.

It's hard to judge an album based on one single of course, but compared to Machina and Adore it looks like they're somewhat back to some of the original rawkin' of SD/MCIS. Driving drums, wailing guitar solos...this will be a fun one to see live (as I will be doing July 27 and 28. Did I mention?) I'm excited for the rest of the CD now...as if I wasn't before :-P

San Francisco!!!!

Those tour dates I posted a little while ago turned out to be legit. They're doing dates in North Carolina too for some odd reason, but I am the ever-so-ecstatic proud co-owner of pairs of tickets to the 7/27 and 7/28 shows. Steph and I are going!!! Netphoria is already going nuts with who's going when and where and travel plans and all. Mike Gaddy already let me know he's going...somebody's driving down from Vancouver (I don't recognize the screen name, but I've met most of the Vancouver-area SP freaks...) It's going to be insane and I can't wait!!!!

The ticket experience was amusing. They've limited it to 2 tickets per person, you have to pick them up at Will-Call outside the venue, then you're shuffled directly in the door. No scalping is the goal, but of course there are ebay auctions up already (how this will work with the restrictions in place I have no idea...) So Steph and I went in to work this morning to use good computers on reliable high-speed internet, did the Ticketmaster thing right up to 11:00 (10:00 PDT- the official on-sale time), and had both confirmations by 11:01. Reports are that as of 11:08 there were no tickets left for any of the original 8 S.F. dates. Then they tacked on 3 more shows and those are sold out as well.

End result...we have to figure out how we're getting there and all now, but we'll fly out Friday, shows Fri & Sat evenings, come back Sunday, and I'll be one happy boy.

Oh, and the first single has leaked and it's the Pumpkins in old-school SD/MCIS era rawkin' mode. I can't wait for the rest :-D

Monday, May 14, 2007

Catching up...

Tonight I looked into what Sarah is up to.

Since she moved out I have made a point to not read her blogs, not check in on any of her online profiles...I let her be gone from my life. I don't know what made me look really. I guess it's a natural thing to be curious, looking back on a failed relationship, about what the other half of the equation feels about the whole mess. Part "Where are they now?" and part "do they realize what they threw away?" I think.

I learned nothing new really. She now owns a house, is randomly booty-calling with the same going-nowhere pot-head boy she was before she moved, working in 2 libraries to make ends meet, hating her parents under her breath, and happy to be back in Oklahoma (you know, the place she always mocked people for "settling" for.) She regrets being so wrapped up in our relationship, which makes me laugh in a sad way since it was always *me* pushing *her* to have other friends and do other things outside of our relationship. She never knew how or made any effort to do that.

Steph asked me last night what kinds of things Sarah and I fought about and it occured to me that we never had a problem with little tiffs over minor day-to-day details. We fought over idealogical things...the ability of people to believe in God and not be detrimental to society (she firmly believed that all faith, belief, or religion was wrong and misguided in any situation), the right of a woman to choose in every sense of the word (she didn't believe a woman could, in any situation, truly "choose" to not have a career), the fundamental desire of most of the human race to do the right thing (she was always convinced people were trying to fuck you over at every turn). Obviously those things didn't come up every day, but we had some major differences in how we saw the world that are only made more obvious and weighty in retrospect. More sad/amusing is that she still argues with herself on her LJ that she's not a negative person. Funny how everyone who has ever known her really well has come away with that impression eventually.

Sunday I took my mom to our newly-traditionalized Mother's Day Brunch at Le Central. I invited Steph as well because it's important to me that my parents have a chance to get to know her. The difference is already night and day from interactions with Sarah. I asked my mom today what she thought of my new girlfriend and she said, among other things, "it's nice that you're dating someone who doesn't dislike us." Yep. It is, isn't it?

There have been so many times in the last few weeks where I've found myself thinking of Sarah. Not because I miss her, but because there is such a vast difference between the relationship I was in for 5.5 years and the one I've been in for 6 weeks. I don't know how I could have thought that what I felt before was happiness or contentment. Or love for that matter.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Breaking news (?)

There's a report on a myspace bulletin that the Pumpkins have agreed to play some US dates in response to a lawsuit brought by some CA fans. (They sued for money due to the costs incurred for Chicago trips, and sued that those weren't *really* the "final shows." Kinda stupid if you ask me.)
The alleged dates:

Sun 07/22/07 San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
Mon 07/23/07 San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
Tue 07/24/07 San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
Wed 07/25/07 San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
Fri 07/27/07 San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
Sat 07/28/07 San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
Sun 07/29/07 San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
Tue 07/31/07 San Francisco, CA The Fillmore


I may be in CA in July! If this is all true...I have my doubts.

Monday, May 7, 2007

Quickie

A while ago I posted this on the old blog about the dangers of living like you were dying of cancer.

Today this story shows up on MSNBC.com. The guy shoulda read my blog!

Sunday, May 6, 2007

And thus it ends

Nothing major has ended :-P Just the All-Stars season of the Amazing Race. Eric and Danielle took it. Bah. 2 of the 3 final teams were all-female, an all-female team has never won...and friggin Eric and Danielle!?! Bah. The blondes should have had it. I guess I probably would have broken the TV or something if Charla & Mirna had been the big winners, so it's a good thing that didn't happen. I'm down to really only one show I care about on TV not in repeats and that's ever so helpful for productivity in the rest of my life.

Cinco de Mayo kicked ass this weekend. Headed down to the big celebration w/ Steph and the kids. Got there in a nice break between rains and wandered around for a couple hours. K1 and K2 both got turns on my shoulders, depending on what there was to look at and such. Fun times. I think the highlight was seeing semi-professional cage fighters go at it in those big inflatable sumo suits. They're funny when it's after-prom and people are screwing around, but actual big tough muscular guys in them take it to a whole new level of hilarity. K1 almost shook himself off my shoulders laughing.

The evening was even better. Finally had a first date with Steph. "First date?" you say? Well yes...we have been dating for 5 whole weeks now, but we've never actually had the chance to go out with just the two of us. We've met each other's parents, we've done dinner w/ my best friend and her man...but we'd never just had us-out time. Stephanie thought it sounded like a good way to spend the evening and she was correct, as usual. Mexican for dinner, then off to the Church where we were warned by the uber-whitey bouncer at entry that it was "Salsa Night" and "It's probably going to be 95% Hispanics in there. You OK with that?" Um...ok? But thanks for looking out for us dude. We were there waaaaay too early in the evening and nothing was happening. That meant we got in on the salsa lesson though! Free lesson, maybe 30-45 minutes of that, then bailed after the music failed to move our respective groove thangs. Braved the rain to run to Vinyl where Josh Wink was spinning. Lots more dancing, and the only other thing I'll share about the rest of the evening is that when we were running back to the car in the rain we saw a couple guys fly out of the Church and bolt across the street with 6 or 7 security guys after them. We stayed away obviously, but the last thing we saw was a guy on the ground being punched in the head and a bunch of security types watching. (The guy punching may have been security at that point...really couldn't tell).

So that was a great day, and today was quite happy-making for other reasons I won't get into here. Let's just say I'm a very lucky, very happy boy in many many ways. Life, she be good.

"Words can't define what I feel inside, who needs them?"

Friday, May 4, 2007

It's called self esteem

One of my jobs at work is running cognitive testing for a "Mild Memory Impairment" study. It's somewhat repetitive being the same tests over and over again, but watching the way people handle the tests is fascinating. Everybody approaches things differently, especially the problem solving portions of the testing. The one yesterday kind of bothered me though.

The woman did just fine on the testing. That's the weird part. She was pretty average in the number of trials to get the memory stuff right, she did really really well on the free recall memory task, missed only one on pattern recognition...she struggled a bit, but no more so than anyone else has. Throughout the whole 45 minute test though she kept assuring me she was just horrible at these things. Not just "Oh, this is hard," but total self-deprecation at every step. "I just don't understand what's going on here" while comprehending perfectly and not needing any clarification whatsoever. "I wish my husband was here, he's an engineer and he'd be really good at this; I'm just terrible!" before nailing the test on the first try. "I'm just guessing on this; I'm totally lost," before hitting 4 of the 6 patterns correctly on the 1st try (which is damn good). I just wondered what was going on her head that she felt the need to constantly assure me that she was no good. Of course with the impartial nature of my role in that room I couldn't at all contradict her and tell her she was doing just fine.

It just made me wonder...why? Is she just timid? Certainly looked that way, pulling the computer to the edge of the table so she could keep her hands in her lap the whole time. Is it a generational thing? Not really, because plenty of other women in that age group aren't afraid to have skills and education and ability. Why did she so often express regret that her husband wasn't there? Is she trained and told at home that she's no good? That's my fear, based on almost nothing. I hope hope hope that it's not the fault of a male figure in her life that she's so afraid to do well at things. That would be tragic.