This is how I Wilmington, DE

Dear credit card companies:

If you send me something from Wilmington, DE, I will recycle it immediately, no matter how much it looks like a wedding invitation. Please stop it.

-Matty

Birfday Weekend

Awesome.

Saturday:
-Up at 8 to get to work at 9.
-Arrive at work at 9:30 (I don’t get in trouble for this because I was the opener. No one else shows up on Saturdays until 10:30. But he didn’t show up until 11. And I’m in charge anyway.).
-Work ’til 3.
-Clean apartment.
-Girlfriend came over and cut my hair.
-Vacuum apartment.
-Go buy booze.
-realize I left my wallet at home and the most horrifically inconvenient place ever.
-get back home about 20 minutes later, having to take a roundabout route.
-get wallet.
-go to Zipps.
-get beer & liquor.
-go to Rainbow.
-get limes, Coke, Diet Coke, and Cranberry Juice (spend a ridiculously long amount of time debating between Cranberry Juice Cocktail and Cranberry Juice Lite)
-go to Arby’s for a quick birthday eve dinner.
-swing back home.
-eat Arby’s.
-guests arrive.
-set up music.
-take shower (notice the order of things here, because I’m horrid at timing).
-get sexy.
-party.
-reminisce about Hamm’s.
-see old friends.
-shotgun Hamm’s.
-dance to Destiny’s Child.
-dance to Soulja Boy. (yes. We did.)
-dance to Muscles.
-get cool presents.
-eat the cake Girlfriend made me.
-get drunk.
-pass out for a bit.
-bond over Beleza Tropical.
-pass out.

Sunday (the day)
-Triple Rock breakfast with Girlfriend.
-Biscuits & Gravy, Bloody Mary, and coffee
-partially drunk drive home (I wasn’t THAT drunk. It was a bloody mary buzz), featuring phone call with Anna.
-dropped the Deuce of Legend (a night of heavy drinking + coffee + Triple Rock breakfast clean plate club = Deuce of Legend)
-Napping/laying around with Girlfriend.
-Omega Wolf elections.
-reelected into Executive position (woo!).
-chilling at the Warren.
-tasty dinner at the Warren.
-for some reason, I now have to drive to St. Paul to pick up Lauren, drive her back to Minneapolis to go to trivia, and then drive her back. On my birthday.
-Trivia.
-I get myself a PBR and a Reuben.
-Steph buys me a PBR.
-Sean announces birthdays. He calls me Barry. He apologizes with a PBR.
-Lauren buys me a PBR.
-Girlfriend decides to DD. That’s why she’s my girlfriend. Because she’s awesome.
-I, single-handedly, get every question in the Music round correct (this is not actually true)
-We win trivia (prizes: $25 tab at the 331 club, $40 gift certificate at a hair salon)
-Girlfriend drives Lauren home. I ride shotgun, drunk.
-Girlfriend drives me home.
-drink water.
-pass out.

Monday (that’s right. It’s still going):
-wake up leisurely.
-decide to file taxes (since I’d been putting it off).
-discover I’m getting an ass-ton of money back from the government.
-realize that it was my money to begin with.
-realize I’ve just given an interest-free loan to the government.
-realize that the government has been using my interest-free loan to go to war.
-realize that the government has been using the rest of the taxes, which they take because I live here, work here, and enjoy certain rights, to go to war.
-realize that I really could have used that money last year, actually.
-stop caring because my wallet’s getting a nice bump that has nothing to do with what I normally expect to make in a given month.
-go to work at 3

That was my birthday weekend. It was the best birthday ever.

(Also, yes, I have a girlfriend. I’m going to refer to her as Girlfriend, because it’s consistent with the fact that I’m being less personal on this blog. But since she’s a part of my life now, I’m going to occasionally talk about her and our misadventures, and I’m going to call her Girlfriend. I do, however, call her by her actual name in real life. Although she sometimes does call me “Boyfriend” in real life because she’s funny.)

Because I suck at updating…

I will now update. That way, I can get better at it with practice.

Several things:
-Oh Pharaoh! went very well. I was proud of both my writing and performance. I got praise for both.
-I recently removed all of the applications from my Facebook, as well as removing myself from all of my groups, because I don’t care about that shit.
-Music I’m really into lately: Bangers & Cash, Klaxons, “Our House” by Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Atmosphere’s Strictly Leakage (free legal download), “The What” by Notorious B.I.G. feat Method Man, Ratatat Remixes Vol. 2 (free legal download), “Ice Cream” by Muscles, “How Beautiful You Are” by the Cure
-I just got new jeans for the first time in a really long time. They’re awesome.
-Secret project is stalled. I really need to work on it. Perhaps this shall be my motivator.
-Major writer’s block. I’ve been kind of depressed about it. I mean, I deal. But, still.
-writer’s strike ended. don’t know who my democratic candidate is (which is bothersome), trivia team came in second at Chuck and Sean’s Trivia in a tiebreaker, I got a promotion at work, and a bunch of crap happened to a bunch of celebrities that I don’t care about.

Later, homes.

Happy V.D.

I know, it’s a little early for V.D., but I just found this and wanted to share. You see, I (again) have no valentine this year, so I want to as each and every one of my delightful readers to be my valentine, via this:

I love you.

It finally happened.

I lost my virginity!

Just kidding. That happened years ago. (Sorry, sister. Sometimes you just have to say these things.)

Anyway, a dude came into the restaurant who I recognized. Since the place is close to a relatively small number of offices, when I see someone I recognize, I usually figure it’s a regular, and pay them no mind. He kind of lingered by the door, waiting for someone. When his friend came in, they came up to order. His friend goes, “have you eaten here before?” and he’s like “Oh, yeah,” confirming (or so I thought) my belief that he was a regular. I continue to pay him no mind (other than the usual, you know, customer service mind). As I’m toasting his tortilla he asks, “Did you used to work downtown?” And I turn around and say yes. “Retek?” I turn around slightly and meekly and I nod.

He worked (and, shit, still may for all I know) in my office when I was a high-rolling computer programmer. That was awkward. I mean, we never worked together, and I’d be fucked if you asked me his name, or even what he did. But it was the first encounter I’ve had with someone at work who knows–who knows–about my old life. And then watches me put rice onto a tortilla.

Honestly, the thing I’ve been freaking out about the most, in regard to the new job is seeing someone from my old team. That would be really awkward. Someone who knows I got shit-canned and is wondering what I’ve been up to, and then sees me slinging burritos for less than half what I used to make–someone who would really think I’ve lowered myself.

I don’t regret changing my station in life, and I don’t apologize for it, but I do like having the opportunity to explain myself, or else have people just assume that I’m the type of guy who works in a fast food restaurant, and always has been.

Tragedy, Triumph, and Tasteless legwear

Saturday, the secret project kinda fell apart.

I mean, I’ve been working on the secret project since, um, August. One night, on a whim, I decided to just start writing a thing in a specific medium, and then over the course of the next few weeks, I worked on it more. And I’ve been working on it, in some form, since then. And Saturday was supposed to be a really big culmination of everything. And then it snowed. Due to scheduling issues over the course of the next, um, month and a half, we won’t be back on track until some time in January. I’m thinking late January. Luckily, I had a bunch of booze in my apartment.

So, I was able to complete some other aspects of the secret project on Saturday; just not the monolithic glorious clusterfuck that Saturday was supposed to be. And then I got drunk.

Long story short: Matty in cutoff shorts at a bar.

In other news (hey, remember that?!?), Veronica Mars is one of the best TV shows ever created.

Give him candy, or give him cancer?

I’ve gone two weeks without cigarettes. I’ve now replaced smoking with candy. Swedish fish, mostly.

One addiction made me cool, the other makes me fat. I think I’ve made the wrong choice.

(Just kidding. Losing weight is a lot cheaper, and easier, than losing cancer. I’m happy with my choice. And I really like candy.)

Saturday night…live?

This is extremely brilliant. Live sketch comedy? Who knew? I think it could be a hit.

In other news, I went to see Beowulf in 3D at the imax tonight. Sure, it was $14, but it was pretty dang stunning. It pulled no punches (actually, it pulled Angelina Jolie’s cgi nipples. Wait, “pulled [her] nipples” makes it sound like they actually pulled on…I mean, her nipples weren’t in the movie.), and it was honestly good to see something that was stylistically similar to Shrek have some extremely overt sexual overtones.

What follows is a discussion on “suspension of disbelief” in film.

I’m not entirely sure if the “motion capture” cgi accomplished anything in terms of adding to the film, except for the idea that entire landscapes can be facsimilated more easily than they could in live action. But, if Lord of the Rings has taught us anything, it’s that enormous live action fantasy epics are possible. The thing about film is that suspension of disbelief is not nearly as required as it is on stage, or in graphic media, or even the written word. On film, what you see is what you get, and since your mind does not need to fill things in (thereby, since the origin of the image comes from within the beholder, the beholder is more likely to believe it), what appears on film needs to be believable. Now, this can be circumvented in animated film by having something realistic (a princess, for instance) next to something fantastic, yet stylistically congruent (a dragon). This all changed with Jurassic Park putting live action on screen with cgi dinosaurs. The use of dinosaurs as the subject of the cgi made the process much easier to digest, since they weren’t human. CGI humans are still not perfect, and therefore somewhat distracting. In The Matrix: Reloaded you could tell in the fight between Neo and the 100 Agent Smiths when it stopped being Keanu and started being cgi Keanu. And it was distracting. And with Beowulf, where all of the characters are cgi, it’s hard to not think about that. I feel that a film like A Scanner Darkly utilized “rotoscoping” to make the trippy drug-addled hallucinations more believable, and it worked well. I’m just having trouble trying to figure out why Robert Zemeckis made the decision.

I haven’t had a ciggy in a week.

I want to start a book club.

Who’s with me!?!

Seriously. I want to start a book club. We meet, like, every two weeks. We read a book, and then we talk about it. They don’t have to be all intellectual. I don’t care. It’s more about the meeting and the talking (and drinking. We can meet at a bar. Or a coffee shop. Or a coffee shop that serves beer.), based on what I’ve heard about book clubs. It’ll be fun.

wardisco

So why’d I call it “This is how I War/This is how I Disco”?

That was going to be the name of my first EP.

Seriously. I wanted to record some sort of dance record and call it “This is how I War/This is how I Disco”. But when I realized that I had very little hope of actually doing this, I decided it would make a good name for a blog. Mostly I thought it sounded cool. And I continue to think this.

To me, “war” is how we go about our lives, doing the things we need to, and “disco” is how we enjoy ourselves. There are everyday struggles–work, relationships, money– that we have to get through. And in a lot of ways, it is a never ending battle. But we all enjoy ourselves, too. This is a dichotomy we’ve all experienced, between what we have to do, and what we like to do, and how both drive the other. So when I say “This is how I War/This is how I Disco”, I’m saying this is how I live life.

And I love dance music. So I say “Disco” to mean “enjoy myself”.

Also, I changed themes, because there were a few things that bothered me about that last one. If you had a chance to see it…I was about to say “consider yourself lucky”, but I didn’t really like it, so I’ll just say “I’m sorry”. Anyway, I like this one better, even if the dates are really weird.