12/8/13

So I'm relaxing on a faux-leather couch with some thick warm socks on my feet and a 90's + shoegaze + lo-fi mix churning in another tab. I have a Chinese final to study for but I'm lazy on Dayquil and leisure is a more important consideration at the moment. Non-drowsy my ass.

It's cold outside; hibernation weather. I've been in bed most of the last four days with a cold. Last night I woke up in a delirium, freezing cold, but drenched in sweat. My body was baking the disease out of me. It was frightening, but it passed. I'm feeling better today. An illness can be a great opportunity for refreshment--like a forced holiday. It not often that I'm even able to take government holidays. I should get sick more often.

Our house is a disaster right now. We moved in at the start of the month, and can't really unpack until the current tenants move out. Double-habitation at the moment. Again, though, it's like forced refreshment. No maintenance to do besides the little normal things like dishes. We haven't gone about the business of setting up standards of appearance for our furniture arrangements yet.

I'm an English major yet again. I made the decision three weeks ago, and time spent since has been like meeting myself again. I don't know what influenced me to do anything but English for the past 3 years, but I'm glad events converged to send me back this way.

I'm going to try to read all of the books on this list. Sci-fi & fantasy novels have never effectively interested me, but it is incontestable that they interest the rest of the world. I plan to set out to discover why. I am almost done with The Fellowship of the Ring, I'll post a review once I'm done. It is weird to read a book that is so much more than a book, but a massive pop-cultural phenomenon. It inhabits both worlds, and in 2013, I think it's futile to try to read it as just a book. For instance, Frodo is Elijah Wood in my head, and Middle Earth is New Zealand.

I set up an account on this site. It tracks my thoughts on movies that I watch. I like it.

I'm thinking about writing a story about a ghost who died of loneliness, but his death trapped him into the physical structure of the house in which he died, and it takes the courage and sensitivity of the current inhabitants of the now-subdivided house to free him from his loneliness.

I love this song.

Time for a nap...

3/31/13

Word to the hood. 

This week included:

☠Skateboarding in the sunshine (it's finally spring!)
☠Talking to an INSANE OLD LADY in a hot tub (more on this later)
☠Watching Return of the Living Dead

☠Eating delicious pizza

☠Almost getting an A on a computer science test

I'd say it was a pretty good week. 

We met the crazy old lady at Downata Hot Springs. If you ever feel like going to Downata Hot Springs, don't be afraid, but don't expect too much. It is a beautiful drive north from Logan to Downey, ID. It's nestled at the foot of some very Idahoan hills (sage and volcano rocks). Admission is cheap, and the hot tub could be found in a Hampton Inn, but all in all it was a fun experience. We were just getting soaked when a baggy octogenarian in a purple Speedo one-piece and handmade purple beanie that very much resembled one of these slumped into the pool and presently began to tell us one of the most depressing stories I have ever heard. She once had a nephew who was an FBI agent who ended up being killed in a shootout with a fugitive, and the funeral was horrifying because his wife threw herself across the casket and wailed in front of the entire gathering. Brilliant way to break the ice. Next, she bombarded us with all sorts of wisdom, including:

1. China is this close to shutting down all of our technology and subsequently attacking us alongside North Korea, so you better learn quick how to "cut wood and shoot guns".

2. Missionary work pays, because after serving a mission in Hawaii, she was able to purchase a manufactured home in Downey for under $40k with a sprinkler system. 

3. Computer programming isn't "real".

4. Sitting in a hot-tub and bothering strangers is great for your arthritis. 

Take these sage mantras to heart, they are important. Also remember that if you ever need to hide from a nosy old hag, try the sauna--she doesn't know the child-proof code!

This week wasn't too eventful really, just a lot of school work and work work. I have now worked at Smith's Marketplace for 1,000 hours. I made this Facebook post to commemorate the milestone. Not to brag or anything, but it was probably the most popular post I have ever made. Nbd nbd...

Butchya...brevity. K bye. 

In honor of Easter: 

3/24/13

Hello!

I'm writing tonight still riding a cloud that we jumped aboard Thursday night and rode through the weekend. I had such an excellent time, I'd like to tell you about it.

First, though, I should mention that the beginning of the week was very busy, but I felt reinvigorated coming off of Spring Break, and I continually surprised myself with how much effortless energy I had to apply to homework, work, or whatever I was doing. It was quite heartening, since, as I've mentioned in previous posts, the end of winter has been a doldrums. I've switched from a canvas army jacket with wool liner to an uninsulated leather jacket, and I've put my heavy boots in the cupboard for the season. They were too small anyway.

When Wednesday came, I had prepared to spend the evening with Tiana and one of her wonderful friends from Rexburg, Haeli Johnson. We went out to dinner at Chili's (don't judge...this is Logan, Ut) and afterward spent the night laughing and philosophizing.

The next morning, I took off for SLC to meet my dad and uncle for four basketball games of the NCAA tournament. Four consecutive basketball games is not for the weak-hearted, or the health-minded, as all that is available to eat is fried, salted, and sugared enough to make Paula Deen say this.
However, I had a fun time, and I ate salad on Friday.

I had to return to Logan Friday morning for classes, although it was a little stupid because I didn't return until about 2 am and ended up sleeping through my morning classes anyways. BUT I didn't miss anything too important, and after I woke up was when the fun really began. Tiana came to Salt Lake with me Friday, and my wonderful friend since Kindergarten aka Mr. Manager Jason Birch of the Hyatt Place SLC hooked us up with a complimentary 6th floor suite for the night, complete with gift basket. But wait! There's more! Mr. Manager also took us out to a wonderful, free, delicious dinner at a fondue restaurant, which served as a segue to a fantastic night of debauchery and dancing, eventually ending back at the Hyatt around 4 AM.

Jason continued his streak of awesomeness the next day when he scored two free box tickets to the day's basketball games. We gave them to my dad and uncle, and the three of us sat in the upper bowl and watched Arizona beat Harvard, and Witchita State upset no. 1-ranked Gonzaga. It was great fun.

Today I had to work, and I'm getting up at 4 in the morning to study for a test, so that cloud we're on is on cloud death row, but I crashed my car into a bridge I'll let it burn I love it I don't care I love it.

Those pictures at the top were taken by my lovely fiance. We climbed to the wind caves in Logan Canyon over Spring Break with Steve Holt the incredible hiking chihuahua. I thought her pictures were great. And for the record, I spotted that mini rainbow, not Tiana. I'm like the director of that picture; she is the expendable peon.

There are only six weeks left in the semester. It's time to start planing my summer and fall. I've been thinking about doing an IT certification at the technical college over the summer (probably wrapping up early next winter) in order to get a job doing some hands-on computer work. I would greatly appreciate hearing from anyone with advice on that front. It's pretty reasonably priced, and the schedule seems flexible enough for my life.

I'm proud of Tiana this week because she made $100 selling found items from DI on etsy. Here is her shop, if you are interested.  I think it's awesome. I like having a lover who is so creatively productive. It is a pleasure to see the things she selects, creates, edits, steals or creates. I could never be with someone who didn't have a strong personal identity after being with Tiana. Admittedly, though, it is hard to believe I could be with anyone else at all after being with Tiana.

I heard this song on the way to SLC, and I was singing along embarrassingly loudly. It's a good one, I've liked it since I was 7.

Have a good week, everybody.

3/18/13

你好朋友!
Spring Break 2013 didn't turn out like I expected it to.

I wrote last week about how we planned to go to Southern Utah for a hiking trip. Well, things happened (or rather, didn't) and we couldn't afford to go. I was disappointed for a few hours, but my best friend was able to cheer me up quickly by pointing out that this was the perfect opportunity to WORK ON OUR MOVIE (which we did) and PLAN OUR WEDDING (which we did!).

So the week was spent doing those two things. I'm very excited about the movie. We have an entire outline for the story, and I am working on a first draft of the dialogue. After that is perfect, we will storyboard what we have and decide what's weird. Then production begins. I don't know where we are going to find the money to pull his off, but I feel certain that we are both ambitious enough about it to really make it happen. So if you know any amateur actors/actresses, give them a whats up in about six months.

I'm also very excited about our wedding. Our vision is complete (or nearly complete) and all that's left to do is execute it. I expect a few challenges, though. I want very much for my family and friends to relax and simply feel the love of inclusion and the appreciation we have for them while at our wedding. I want it to be a golden memory that my loved ones will feel only positive about when remembering it. I am afraid that the stress of building it will ruin that for some, that religious differences will stop it for others, and that other unseen demons will complicate what--I believe--should come the easiest: the celebration of happiness. That is truly my intention in holding a wedding at all, to celebrate the happiness I have found with Tiana. I hope that we will be able to pull it off in such a way that everyone can share it with us for one evening that may serve as a launching-pad for lifelong friendships.

Between all our scheming this break, though, we managed to make it back to Rexburg for the weekend. We saw my family--who I love so much, and Tiana's family, who I also love. My family is on a diet. My dad has lost 20 pounds since I last saw him and my little brother Redge has lost weight as well as lost the upper chords of his vocal range. The only way to reclaim his lovely contralto at this point is...unmentionable...he is a man now, what more can I say?

On the drive back home I starting thinking about all the things I admire about my father. I'll share a few of them with you. For one thing, he is genuinely helpful, in a sincerely non-obligatory way. This is a rare but wonderful quality to find in a human. Another thing is that he is not afraid to admit his ignorance. I think this is why people find him so amicable. It is difficult to talk to someone when they either pretend to know more than they do in fact, or give off that impression by their silence. I can talk to my dad about any subject, freely and truthfully, with no fear of judgement. Those are just two of the ingredients that in part add up to my certainty of his unconditional love for me.

An unexpected highlight of our trip came while we were making copies of our wedding save-the-dates. We ran into a high school art teacher, Larry Prescott. He gave us a great big, genuine hug and told us we were great, and it really made me feel great. I have always appreciated directness. I admire very much people who are unashamed to express direct emotion to others. It's another of those rare qualities that I hope to emulate.

I feel excited to be very poor and very much in love.

Two songs this week betches:

3/9/13

This week has been full of the satisfaction that comes with quiet accomplishment, mixed with the bitterweet realization that what I've been anticipating has come, and is on its way away already.

I suspect it's simply the drag of winter that has caused the weight in me lately. It could be academic fatigue, or the fact that I don't make enough money to actually pay my bills (how do I pay my bills, then, you ask? I'm not really sure. It's a month-to-month process of getting lucky really), or some other unidentified pull, but it's undeniable that the last few weeks have found me heavy. It's been a great pleasure to steal extra minutes of sleep in the morning, to go to bed early in lieu of doing homework, to stay at home an entire day and get lost in an online fantasy; it's been equally difficult to conjure the vim and vigor required to be a productive human being.

I spend a lot of time deciding exactly what to blame. As a post-industrialization human, I expect myself to operate according to calendars and clocks and around holidays and weekends. However, I happen to exist on a tilted planet at a higher latitude than my ancestors originally inhabited. During winter, I feel as if my biological clock and my United States Citizen clock are in discord. This discord brings with it a sleepy magic, and I try to focus on that. Maybe you know what I mean.

In the end it doesn't matter at all the reason I am feeling a certain way. I try to keep that in mind. Reasons are impossible to assign anyway. I find it more worthwhile to synthesize my present into a valuable experience than to spend time hypothesizing on my past (at least in theory).

The anticipation I mentioned is due largely to Spring Break and the plans Tiana and I have for a hiking trip. We are going here. Upheaval Dome. It's a large crater in the middle of the southern Utah desert, near Moab. The geological jury is out as to whether it is an impact crater (the more popular possibility), or a salt dome. Either way, I'm very excited. I am very attracted to other-worldly landscapes, especially very isolated ones. Last summer I went to Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake with my lover and one of my best friends. We spent a few hours wading through ankle-deep, bathtub-warm milky water that seemed to stretch for miles in any direction, fading gently from navy to pink toward a horizon of salt crags. We imperceptibly grew cakes of salt up our legs as we walked about, sometimes near one another and sometimes surprisingly distant. If I had awoken from my normal life to inexplicably find myself in that landscape, I would have been easily convinced that I was the object of an alien abduction. I hope to find a magic like that again this week on our trip.

The best part of my week was taking my 12-year old orange Persian cat Gustav to get his annual haircut. They shaved 5 inches of fluffy fluffy feline into a suave little gentleman fit for a goddamned ragtime bowtie and vest. I am honored to call myself his cat daddy. (And believe me, I call myself that often.)

The really best part of my week was verbally brainstorming an idea for a short movie with Tiana. It might take a year or so to actually get it produced, but we have a pretty solid outline right now and I'm planning to wake up tomorrow and start working on some rough dialogue. I can't tell you anything about it because it's a secret so shut up. I'm really happy about the ideas we have had so far, though. I want to tell you but I can't. Just shut up.

I hope you all had moments worth remembering this week, and that you also have things worth looking forward to. I'm going to go play some Zelda on N64 now.

Here's another song to dance around to, from the other side of Deerhunter:  

3/3/13

Time to dust off the old blog.

In an effort to document my life and its doings, I'll try to do this thang every weekend.
End discussion of blogging.

Tiana (my fiance and the beautiful creature who took the photo at the head of this post) and I are getting married in T-minus 3 months & 4 days. I'm very excited for a few different reasons, chiefmost being that I am endlessly in love with her. The rest of the reasons run as follows: we're getting 10k from Obama just for making it official, our wedding is going to be bitchingly awesome, we're going on a honeymoon to Banff afterward (this all means about 2 weeks without fried chicken), and it will be the penultimately celebratory kick-off to a summer that will most likely be the best of my short life. I figure all ensuing summers to follow an exponentially graded curve downwards, ultimately claiming my life, happiness, and the control of my endocrine system until I am one miserable, immobile, and very stinky mound of dead youth wishing ardently for some scientist to invent a way for me to cling to the pathetic tatters of what was once worth living. Hmmm.

I have now been attending school full-time while working 20-30 hrs/week for roughly 8 months straight. This has been a long haul of doing a lot of things I would rather not do, for a long time without breaks. However, this lifestyle of misery punctuated with brief rages of freedom has yielded a few beneficial skills, which I am proud of. I have lain a foundation for future study in Computer Science, Chinese, and visual art. I have also discovered how much I enjoy mathematics. I'm considering doing a minor in it, in fact. I like all four of those disciplines for different reasons, although there is perhaps a common vein running through, which is that they are very challenging, yet contain exciting opportunities for advanced application. I hope to travel to China next summer. I hope to learn ample programming skills to land an exciting job. I hope to finish a BFA in painting and drawing, which involves displaying work in a gallery. As far as math goes, I just hope to tackle some complex problems and blow my own mind a little bit.

I've been thinking a lot about how to spend my time this summer. My current working list includes learning to skateboard, getting more involved with programming (any suggestions?), reading comics (I'm devouring Batman comics right now), and saving up to buy this succulent piece of electronic beauty: http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/juno106.php, as well as getting outdoors through hiking/camping/biking.

There's a little catch-up for anyone who may be interested in my life. I've come to the realization that I am a certifiable recluse (save for my interactions with Tiana and the 6 cohabiting animals I look after), and this blog is an attempt to remedy the situation by reminding you all that I'm still here, and I still wish to know and be known. I'm just tryin' to say word 2 my homies, ya feel?

Here's a bit of music I love right now with some heavy positive vibrations to bathe your mind in:

Lotus Plaza is an artist who typically plays with another band I like called Deerhunter. We saw Deerhunter live a year or so ago and he was by far the most impressive on-stage. I like what he brings to that band the most of anyone else involved, and everything I like about him in Deerhunter is available in concentrate form in Lotus Plaza.

Thanks for reading, and, as my current favorite coffee mug says, "You're Terrific!"

Sonnet 1

Meditations after Reunion
I could build a house with her. She could write
while I cook. The furniture could be
vintage, but never cheap, hip, or trite.
If within smelling distance of the sea,
we could forsake candles and closed windows;
watch the pages of our books warp; watch
the flocks of seasonal birds suck and blow;
measure our daughter with pencil notches
on the bathroom door. I could bury her
in the garden we started together,
and anticipate throughout the winter
tickling vines and soft sepal feathers
mixed with my earthy fingers. They’ll find me
there eventually, what’s left of me.