November 22th, 2005 My life has been invaded with 8 bit chiptunes! I don't know why it took so long for me to discover them, but they're so dope. Took April to Abiding in Christ on Saturday and it was good - Kyle talked about denying the self and iced out electric chair necklaces. I've got two 15 lbs turkeys in my fridge waiting to get roasted. I've never wanted a weekend so bad.	nopicyet
November 13th, 2005 Saturday night I went to the Evergreen college group and it was nice. The worship was much better than the usual Sunday morning stuff. Led by Michael, we only did a few songs, but spent much more time singing each one so it gave more chance to dig into lyrics. Kyle's was pretty good at giving his message too - I think he was more comfortable in our smaller setting so he opened up more. All in all not a bad way to spend a Saturday night. Not at all =) Sunday morning was spent at Jason's church off the 101, which was also cool. I went to help out with the old tele, and it was fun. From the acoustics of the tiny room, and an out-of-tune piano that was being played, my ears and hands were going through a lot of confusion, but it seemed that other people in the room were blessed from the music cuz some came over to tell me that it sounded good *shrug* Sometimes I get bored of my own guitar playing, but sometimes I have to remember that other people haven't heard it yet. April and I went to Chinatown on Saturday and stuffed our faces with bite sized deli delights and sugary treats. Yummy to the tummy.
November 8th, 2005 "Where there's Chinese food, there's leftovers." My counseling teacher gave some students a hard time about predestination a while back, and today he told us to pray to nature and our ancestors. Um, ok. The man bugs me a little bit. So things are just groovy on this side of Dawson's Creek. So I woke up randomly last night at like 2am, to find that Asleep In The Sea's new EP came out at like 1:30am and bragged three variations of CD packaging and free posters for the first 50 orders. When opportunities knock, I let them in, give 'em the Lay-Z-Boy and we play poker with iced tea. I spent some 1 billion hours debugging some code for class that I had whipped together all snappy previously. I'm not doing that anymore. I think I lost some hair on my head debugging today. It may be more intelligent to get things closer to "right" the first time around. That probably applies to most/all things. April and I got the Whatever and Ever Amen book, and it rocks and she plays it and I flip the pages and we have this routine where we get all lost in the codas and then laugh and smile and point at each other while playfully saying, "Oh YOoUuUuu!" Well something like that. I try playing some on the piano once in a while, and again I am reminded that learning a new (or unfamiliar) instrument is like instantly making myself feel retarded. Nothing against any other instruments, it's simply that the guitar is what I learned on and excel most at, and because of this I feel all warm and toasty inside whenever I pick one up. And anything else makes me feel like a tard. I know I could learn, but nothing ends a heated argument like saying, "awww, but I'm too laaay-zzeeeee."
November 1st 2005 - So God sent me a piano tuner man, who put some ideas in my head. Namely taking the worship ministry at my church more seriously. From my outburst of guitar practicing, it seems God has more in store for me =) We'll see. I'm also looking into teaching guitar through my church as well. I stopped by the mall last night to realize that the trick-or-treating of the future is no longer on the sidewalks of suburbs, but on the walkways of shopping malls. At 8pm the Del Amo Fashion Center was littered with little tykes in costumes and stores with signs saying, "Sorry! Ran out of candy." I remember back in the day, when my friends and I would run around the streets with our pillowcases full of processed sugar. I guess times have changed. It's funny how there are certain memories branded in my skull... ones that I can always refer to, ones that have forever changed me. Sometimes it seems that they're even more than just memories - they've become undefineable feelings. These standstills in time that seem to transport me back as if time had never passed and I'm right there again. Sometimes it's wonderful, sometimes it's haunting, sometimes it's nostalgic, and sometimes it's just painful. How I'd love to write about it all here, but there are too many people who will judge, and too many who won't understand. Someday.
October 21st, 2005 - So I get spam like everyone else on the internet, and it fascinates me how they have those stupid little blurbs of text on the bottom half that make absolutely no sense. The latest one is this: "being in great torment and not knowing how to rid himself of his A FOX, running before the hounds, came across a Woodcutter the occasion of his death. Having been sent to Delphi with a All these monuments which you see, said the Monkey, are left the Hare to follow him. The Hare, scared by the noise," I don't know if anyone notices these little text delights before they delete them. Beautiful. So lately, I've had my computer hooked up to my TV for the purposes of watching these downloaded movies, and it's been interesting cuz I also had to type a term paper on this huge screen which is kinda fun. Geez, my room is so full of stuff. My APARTMENT is so full of stuff. So it seems that my most favoritistest bands are all indie or close to, and it's kinda nice. I can e-mail them and I get personal responses from the band members. I've ordered stuff twice from Asleep In The Sea and they always include a little hand doodling of some sort. The first one was a big boat, and then next was a tree with a rainbow. I'm still shopping for frames. Oh yeah, I still have to figure out what to do with Chris Ballew's beer straw that I got up in L.A. at the ending of the PUSA concert. I went to Jason's & Shannon's last night, which was chillaxin. He made this awesome "jason soup" that was spicy sour, but totally original. We wined, dined, and then I popped in The Wonder Years, and we all laughed and cried. Today April and I are supposed to go to the Getty, but we'll see cuz we're running late and it's lookin pretty cloudy outside. *shrug* we're just lovin' these new free-Fridays from hourly cut backs at work. Suckin up the freedom while we still have it. Last week I spent 5 hours working on Harold's computer in the Horn Center at school. Yeah, I lugged his computer over there and my monitor too. The dude at the service desk was like, "... is that your laptop?..." "Yes." Yeah, but I'm glad I enjoy it - the fixing, the programming, the whole package. Just more signs that I'm in the right direction.
October 20th 2005, I know it's horrible, but I kinda found a solution for those movies that I sorta feel like watching, but I don't jump on because of the $4 blockbuster fee. I just download them. I know it's old already, I'm not the first, but it just never appealed to me in the past. And it's almost like a gambling addiction or something cuz once you download one, you just start downloading anything and everything just cuz you can. So I've got this whole line up of things to download, some of them take an hour, some take days, and so I just leave the computer on constantly, day and night. And then my computer has these case fans that strobe green light, so at night when I'm trying to sleep it's like a UFO is landing in my room or something. At any rate, as I see it, I'm just downloading stuff that I otherwise would not spend the money for anyway. They adjust prices according to demand, and at today's prices I just don't make the cut off apparently. School has been good, generally. I'm loving my computer classes, and hating all the other ones. I guess I'm in the right field. I never know really what to type on here anymore, cuz sometimes it feels like "blogging" (a term that bugs me for some reason) is on the lame side, and it's almost arrogant to think that anyone really cares enough to read about every detail of your life. I dunno. I remember when blogging wasn't "blogging" and it was just "I have a website". Now everyone and their mom does it, and it's like, "WHO CARES?" Maybe just everyone's moms. At any rate, I've noticed that trends bug me. I'm kinda in the zone where I like things when they first come out (ya know, anything) but then when the whole world gets in on it and a movie comes out about it, it kinda kills it for me. Even those instant popularity kinda things, like super big movies and highly anticipated products just don't do it for me. I guess I've always wanted to just be against the flow. What's nice is that April has some of that in her too - I mean, just things here and there. For example, we have this anti-"dinner and a movie" policy cuz we just think its way plain and uninteractive and unoriginal etc. Quite honestly there's nothing really that wrong about it, but it's just that air of normality that just sounds lame. At Bristol Farms she and I spent something around an hour just tasting samples and ogling products we'd heard of or seen, but never personally tasted. We ate several cubes each of this "world's first hard cheese" which was a pretty tasty treat. Unfortunately it was $16/lb (that's pricey, right?) and the way we were wolfing it down, I didn't feel it would have been a lasting buy for us at that time. Maybe in the future when our young stomachs need to "slow down" for things or whatever older people do. So I just went to use the men's room and then the dude peeing next to me apparently thought his urine was crystal clean so he didn't need to wash his hands. That's cool, man, that's cool. Every now and then it seems like I gotta take a deep breath, step back, and go play tag or hide-and-go-seek or something, cuz everything around is so heavy, ya know? Just heavy. I wanna be not super rich, but enough so that I can do somethin spontaneous once in a while, ya know? Ya know? I guess I've never been too crazy about the posession type stuffs. Like, I don't care much about what kinda car I have (just fun lookin, but not expensive), or if I have a super nice house (just safe and fits my junk)... I just wanna travel, or eat fun stuff, or listen to good music, or watch fun performances, or whatever. It's not so much that I want to own things, but just that I want to experience things. Unfortunately some things REQUIRE that you own them to experience them (like playing a nice guitar or a proper audio device to hear good music), but not all things are like that.... I guess it's an arguable argument, but I could be onto something.