well that was depressing

i was driving home with my mom after work and the rain never stopped falling. i think i tried calling my brother back about 5 times with no answer, he was at his swim meet. i had planned to drop my mom off at home and goto the meet and volunteer as a timer but family crisis stepped in. as i was pulling into the end of my driveway, i looked towards the doghouse, and through the rain i could barely make out the brown lump under the tree. my first thought was that it was my dog, skippy, she has a heart problem (tumor and her heart is starting to skip beats). I looked again and thought it was too small to be her. too bad it was. she wasn't breathing and was a soggy wet mess strewn out under a tree.

my mom and i ran over and started shaking her. slowly after what seemed like the longest minutes ever, she looked up with those sad eyes and i knew she was done. normally i would toss it to her being a bit on the slowside and fell asleep in the rain, but not this time, she didn't even have the energy to get up.

i've had this dog since i moved to jacksonville. 15 years, with us through the move from the beach to arlington, she's almost my brothers age, kind of scary. i was going to leave her there and wait for the rain to stop, i really didn't know what to do. my mom bent over and picked her up (this irish setter is a big dog) and carried her into the garage. for the next half an hour we dried her off and she must have drank a bucket full of water. i suspect heart attack, my dad says pneumonia and dehydration. i hope she makes it through the night.

politics: stupidity and bush hate.

i don't like bush. hey what else is new? what irks me however is that many people are taking the line that "bush is stupid, everything he does is bad and stupid, therefore vote for kerry". well i guess that is beneficial if you want kerry to win by any means necessary. i guess i'm idealistic, i'd hope that everyone votes for what they believe is the best direction for ALL of the American people, not a niche group, but all.

but saying that everything that Bush does is stupid, i think is infact stupid. it's a pretty picture that liberal friends and media have painted for us, and judging by a lot of what i've heard, that mentality is catching on.

the example that comes to mind right now was something that I read while I was in Canada. it was about scientific research on global warming and what this data means to the kyoto treaty. when i was at columbia, and a political debate sparked between two friends, the democrat always started off with the fact that bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto treaty. Now those of us who don't read anything go, "that goddamn bush, he's killing the environment, fuck bush". well that's one side.

did any of us really examine the kyoto treaty? it sets some lofty goals about greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide for one. bush gets kicked in the balls bc being the ... not outside the box thinker that he is, defends everything, and i mean everything with his MBA, in terms of money... and sometimes ol' fashion christian values. anyways. i can see why everyone attacks him on this, he makes it a money issue, when you say it's too expensive we don't want to pay and you are one of the most industrialized and materialistic nations in the world it seems a bit stupid to weigh money against the future of the planet.

the senate dismissed the treaty 95-0. maybe they are thinking monetarily too.

don't knock on bush because it's fashionable, get some real reasons and some facts to back yourself up. getting to the point, the kyoto treaty truly has some serious scientific flaws if you read the latest research done... that and it excludes massively populated countries like china. so what'd i read in the canadian newspaper? let's say you took everyone in the world and they stop breathing, we stop driving cars, we stop polluting. the amount of carbon dioxide that is generated by us and everything related to us is at most neglible. when scientist calculate how much CO2 is transfered in and out of forests/soil/oceans, the amount we generate is less than the uncertainty for these measurements. +/- . we could find this data to be less compelling later after we get more data, but you do get a good perspective scientifically to justify the economic reason. just a thought.

another thing that has been hanging on my mind is my friend who is leaving for a 10 week program for officer's school in the Marines. i hope him the best, but i'll never understand why he and many military personnel i've known (our town is home to one of the bigger naval bases) is diehard republican. they say they are loyal to our country, that's a slap in the face, i thought despite bipartisanship, we all love our country for the most part. i must have missed the part where fighting for your country made you conservative. why is party affiliation even related? i don't know, someone enlighten me. i think it's stupid to vote a particular way because it's the local opinion, just as it's stupid to call bush stupid and his policies stupid because it's the local opinion. i guess i think this way because i think everything he does is completely intentional, not that he is stupid, but does not have the nation's complete well being in mind.

in case anyone was wondering

intro note. I'll be in LA the weekend of June 18th if you are in the area and want to gimme a holler.

meat.
I flew home on the saturday of the last week of school, it rained all week. The days it didn't rain, I had to prime and repaint our upstairs and downstairs porches. I was ready to goto the beach, little did I know that that friday, my parents had booked our family tickets to fly out to Seattle.

What in the hell is in Seattle? good question, I'm still not quite sure. Home of starbucks, I found the first Starbucks EVER in Pikes Market, fun place (the market that is), starbucks coffee tastes like shit. Space needle. Overpriced for a 400 ft. above land view of the surrounding city. Beautiful sunset though. Took a lake tour, the boat took us to the Univ. Washington's stadium and we circled by the Sleepless in Seattle house (who would have thought a single story house that floats on the water could cost $1 million+? baffles the mind. Then again we sailed past Bill Gates' house and that was $150 million+. Go figure. Beautiful house though, we were greeted by huge inflated hamburgers and milkshake set up for his son's birthday party. It's a shame you can't sail closer to his house, but everyone needs their privacy, especially on their property.

I was always told about the cultural mystique of Canada. I've been to Toronto, Windsor park, Montreal, Quebec, and don't remember anything too well, but this was my first time in Vancouver.

Final thoughts on Vancouver. Shopping is good, people are generally nicer (not necessarily friendlier, but less asshole-ish in general), girls wear too much makeup and are sub-par. This was downtown Vancouver, so... not quite representative of vancouver as a whole, but there were still way too much of the nouveau riche, hipster shit going on.

Is it me or do these Canadians have an Irish accent? They say "Ay" and "Cheers" a lot, it is cool, gives sentences a nice ring to them. More thoughts on Canada as I remember them...

Seattle Airport. Half asleep in the security checkpoint waiting to go through the metal detector. Pretty cute girl hopping around trying to take off her shoe. Digs in her purse, puts 2 cell phones and 2 digital cameras into the tote. boyfriend is complaining about having to take off his shoes. I'm still staring at the girl, still trying to figure out why the security guards keep messing with her. As she waits for her luggage she starts making out with her bf. Security guard says, hey this is a security checkpoint, not a love checkpoint. Who was this cute mystery girl? It was Drew Barrymore. She's a LOT skinnier in person, I guess the camera does add 10 lbs. either that or she went on a crazy work out plan.

At the other security table, I spied a girl folding up her Columbia sweatshirt. I was too tired to go talk to her, but... if you were the CU girl in the seattle airport this morning, I'm saying my Hi and good morning now.

I got home today after at least 8 hours of flight time and layover time from Seattle. At least I was greeted at the door by a package with new CD's to listen to. [Dan Fuller... ftp is down, b/c i'm on my laptop and haven't set one up yet. lazy.]

music.newshit

here's what came in the mail though.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Astallaslions- Lafcadio. really good, give it a listen
Pedro the Lion- Achilles Heel. similar to their last cd Control, not bad.
Ima Robot- Self titled. awesome, really fun to listen to.
Piebald- All ears All eyes All the time. tracks are hit or miss. some of them are awful, some are brilliant, good tracks tend to sound like they are ben folds' songs.
Fall Out Boy- My heart will always be the b-side to my tongue. meh it's ok, for an EP. got some good tracks on it, has a DVD extra too.

holler

bacchanal's weekend of fun has started. fuck'n a it was awesome. tommorow supposedly i need to get up at 6 am to go help out with columbia concerts. i'd love too actually, the problem is I have a research paper, for which i just found a new topic and started researching and is due monday. i am in trouble. i hope i can help out at least a little tommorow, I plan to send Matt Carpenter Dennis in my stead, plus everyone else who has said they want to volunteer, go do it. It'll be awesome.

So anyways, After I left Lehman library and Pupin today, I was so enticed by the rock wall they had. I must have done it about 6 times. I haven't been doing my rock climbing regimen almost all semester ($200 membership dooooown the drain) so I was excited to do a little climbing. It was mad easy. I ended up racing Matt twice, I ROCKED YOU BUDDY (that's not supposed to be a pun). Then the guy in charge wanted to race me and I rocked him too. Reflecting, I should enter the speed climbing event next comp I goto.

After that I saw the American Gladiator style fight thing. Contrary to what Mike [the Glassman] glass says, it is fun to fight girls. I got Evann to get up there and fight me. I have to hand it to her, she handedly kicked my ass. Those rugby girls... they are too damn good at kicking people's asses. I fell victim.

oh yea.... go see temptest tonight, well it's already started, but there is another one at midnight. This year's KCST show is really good stuff. ok. peas. on with the paper.

What to title this paper... "Mao thought Stalin was a poop head."

life is funny

it gets really depressing when you think about everything in your life that has happened in the past year, all you can say is that life is funny. that doesn't seem to do anything justice.

over the past two years i've grown apart from a lot of very good friends back at home, it's as if i'm in an entirely different world, universe even, when i'm at school. i guess it's happened to a few people i've known at columbia too. when you haven't seen someone in a long time you tend to drift apart, and the sad reality of life is that sometimes, you never see that person ever again.

i first heard from andrea, i appreciate her effort to keep me informed on what's going on with the folks from home. Jackie had gotten into an accident and had stumbled to the road to try to flag some help. She was killed by oncoming traffic in a hit and run. I was stunned, but it didn't hit me quite like before winter break when we had our first Columbia community incident. I thought at first that I had become desensitized to death, it keeps hitting closer and closer and we are on seven now.

tonight i tried to study EE. i did a little bit, frequency response isn't exactly hard. i got distracted and started reading my xanga subscriptions of my friends from highschool. they all stayed and went to University of Florida, their world is so foreign to me. everyone seemed to be doing their best to cope and blog their heart and soul onto some 1's and 0's floating through network relays. a lot of people went to the funeral, duncan flew home from Yale.

the man i fell in love with isnt dead... i can still feel him... hes just lost, because i drove him away. ill do anything to find him again... this was the introduction to jackie's last post. she had lost so much in the past month and now we have lost even more. i was trying to remember tonight about all the time we had spent together. we were pretty good friends back in highschool, i always felt like i had so much to say to her when we talked, so many laughs, so many smiles. i left for college, to put it simply, we just grew apart and we stopped talking, i didn't realize how permanent that would be. i'm so sorry...

i thought it would end after how last semester ended, there's no controlling life. take care of yourselves guys. really. love you all. life is funny.

casey at bat

wiffle ball on a nice 70 degree afternoon is amazing.

it's beautiful to point at micah and say "this one's out of the park" and two seconds later, the wiffle ball is cracked out of Hartley stadium.

another highlight of the day.

we have the hookah outside on Low steps and this black lady with two silver front teeth walks up to us.

woman: what are you guys smoking in there?
essa: tobacco
woman: oh. i'm my country we put the reefer in there, you ever tried mixing in some reefer and hash into there? you like smoking the reefer? eh eh.

freckles

there is something about girls with freckles (not a whole lot but some). i like it.

see!:



also interesting to note:

on the new Eyedea and Abilities cd, E and A, on track Two Men and a Lady, there are Chasing Amy sound clips sampled all over it. That's so awesome.

concerts nyc! go!

everyone go buy tickets for wednesday's concert. Motion City Soundtrack/Silverstein.
It's only $10 +$3.50 service charge @ knitting factory. it's going to be so awesome.

speaking of awesome, what's not awesome is that I may miss the best concert ever. EVER. well a line up so good that has been absent for a while.

another thing that's not awesome is that i promised elizabeth and aimee that i'd buy them damien rice tickets for friday as a sort of awesome joint birthday present thing for the two of them. those plans were foiled when i discovered they are sold out. fuck. i am so sorry...

@ the continental (home of the "sea monster" muhahahaha)

11:15
THE BANNER
10:30
THE BEAUTIFUL MISTAKE
9:45
FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND
9
ANATOMY OF A GHOST
8:15
EMERY
7:30
THE AKAS

wow. 4/5 good bands, well banner might be good, who knows. I am really considering skipping lab on monday for this. Wait... I don't have lab on monday! SCORE! eat it COLUMBIA. yea.. it's gonna be awesome semi hardcore goodness!!

back in the concert swing of things..

oh yea.. i have a 8 page rough draft to start writing now.. due in a few hours. SHIT.

tell me if you're going to any of these concerts.

racism

So... i really want some Cadbury eggs right now. Weird how easter candy is generally better than halloween candy. Religion totally one-upped over those silly pagans.

New York truly is filled with all sorts of people. (wow brilliant insight right?....) There is a certain ignorance to the real world you develop after being on campus for too long. The same holds true I think if you're just commuting around the city going from point A to point B. There is something almost impersonal about New York City, where everyone is doing their own thing and hustling to get from here to there and does not pay you the slightest attention. You kind of get used to that. As for being on campus, you kind of get used to people restraining themselves from making blatantly inflammatory comments or at least someone will protest it.

I finally got a smack back into reality yesterday morning. I was on the 1/9 going down to Chinatown to meet up with my mom and little brother who had flew up to see me and we were going to get some lunch and wander around. On the 1/9, I find i'm on the same train as Jennie Cho, as some would know as our LLC CPA. We're talking, she starts me listening to the new Modest Mouse cd (which i declare to be very good), and one of the subway usuals starts looking for donations.

This isn't just any donation though, this is for Big News, the newspaper supposedly written and distributed by men and women that are trying to constructively and proactively get out of their rut. So the man walks around the train and goes through his intro about big news and how it is non-profit and how he is currently homeless. I look at this guy, I read faces pretty well, he's an asshole. The only other thing I noticed right off the bat was that he was wearing a new pair of Jordans. So nobody is immediately taking up his heed for donation to non-profit and assisting the homeless, so this is what happens 2 seconds later...

crazy man: "fucking mexicans, fuck them, girl (to Jennie) do you know what non-profit means?"

Jennie: non-profit is an organization... [abruptly cut off]

crazy man: fucking immigrants come to our country and don't even learn the fucking language fucking piece of shit

Jennie: hey I was born in this country [born in foxboro right behind the stadium mind you]

crazy man: stupid fucking immigrant

Jennie... at this point i thought she was going to rip that guys face off I was considering having a little talk with him and getting in a fight, but then i started seeing images of westside story style knife shit and i decided against it.

crazy man: walks up to this black guy next to us "do you know what a "... (i forgot what he said)" is? It's you asshole"

At this point I thought the black guy was going to get up and beat the shit out of him but he also showed restraint and had this bewildered look on his face, you know.. the WTF mate face.

Being an asshole and being xenophobic or racist or whatever, that's not even quite as disturbing as the fact that this man was a representative of a sort of charity. is this the way to go about garnering sympathy or goodwill in people? people like that, i honestly don't want to see them reintegrated back into the "real world". For all I care he can eat shit, and he probably does, I thought it was funny when I saw him when we got off the train and he was wandering aimlessly around the station walking behind girls and going "damn girl you got some good shit back there".

then comes the realization that the kind of people you meet at Columbia are on the whole creating a optimism about the general disposition of people. You don't see quite as often the blantantly racist or the hypocrisy and unfounded beliefs of the everyday. Maybe we stay this way, moving on to jobs and opportunities which place us in another similar social sphere where we are for the most part oblivious to the real world and the bullshit that's there. on a final note, someone get me some Cadbury eggs and fuck you subway guy....

+ other stuff to be retyped.

In his first comments since the release of the presidential daily brief, Bush said the document contained “nothing about an attack on America.”

“I’m satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America,” Bush said. He said the memo did not give the time or the place of an attack.

Are you crazy sir? Al Qaida is not some James Bond super villain that details his master plan as he is laser slicing your crotch off. Bush basically says that he did not find the memo compelling because it did not specifically say,

cc: from Al-Qaida to ....
"Dear America and President George W. Bush,

We would like to inform you that we will be attacking the United States at 11 am, September 11, 2001. We will do x, y, and z, and do it by means of a, b, and c. Just wanted to let you know, ciao!

Best wishes,
Osama. "

I mean give me a fucking break. If the memo tells you that
1. Al Qaida operatives are in the US
2. They have established a support system for their operatives
3. Suspicious activity points to a hijacking threat of some sort
4. PDB to Bush details Al-Qaida's wishes to attack the US for 6+ years

Does the memo that bush got need to entail exactly what is going to happen to constitute adequate reason to strongly prepare and look into a terrorist threat. Looking into is not walking out of the oval office taking a glance left and a glance right and saying, yep we're ok here. But seriously, I don't want to say that this memo was thrown aside and not considered that would be a bit ridiculous, but I do think we are able to say that not enough attention was placed on the implications of the memo. It would be one thing to know, to respond, and to fail, but to know and not give a full effort is utterly ridiculous. This is just intial response to this and I'm sure more will come out and more will be explained so this isn't to be taken as a final opinion. But judging from Bush's response that basically says that the memo doesn't explicitly say anything points to his administration not or not wanting to put two and two together.

bad religion

wow, thank you dan fuller for sending me the cd.

the new bad religion-the empire strikes first is fuckin amazing. i haven't heard a BR cd this good in a while.

i reiterate. AMAZING.

6/08/04 release date indeed muhahahahha.