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25 February 2008
There are very few things that sour my tone to a shade of violent: talking to my mother about money and anybody about the lack of support for a LAMP infrastructure at HIR are the two of those; PC hardware troubleshooting is a third cause of stress, compounded by the data obliteration.
14 January 2008
Shing says there’s a special place in hell for people who shop for Christmas gifts exclusively at airports, but I’ve found airports are where I’ve received the most intense, truly full-bodied hugs. The ability to embrace someone as at an airport outside of the airport setting is not unlike the ability to cook authentic ethnic cuisine outside of its home country. On my visits to California, it seems every hug is an airport hug.
4 December 2007
As the Broadway stagehand strike closed and I rushed the box office for a ticket to “Cyrano de Bergerac” last weekend (and will do the same for “Rock ‘n’ Roll” before too long), I was reminded—as I was more consistently my last weekend in California than even I have recently allowed my introspection to persist—the extent to which my life is a bento box.
4 November 2007
Upon describing my apartment to my mother during a phone conversation (rather recently, already months after I’d moved in), annotating from my punch list—paint, halogen, cabinet hardware, and so on—she succinctly restated my bloviating with the phrase, “you’re living in a before.” One of the constants in my life is asymmetry, and I find myself applying this imbalance I once disdained as a lens of optimism to separate the apex of my existence from, more or less where I am now, its midpoint, with an ambition to set a median greater than the mean. What that ambition comprises, however, I have yet to cohere into a uniform and quantifiable after.
28 September 2007
On the flight back to Washington, I struck up a conversation with the gentleman seated next to me and when the discussion reached my job, he asked (and I paraphrase):
Do you think Republicans or Democrats use the internet more effectively?
“Neither,” I answered.
Let’s say the internet is a gun.
24 September 2007
Had I visited Montréal when I was 19, buying too much second-hand music, attuned to markers of soi-disant hipness through vodka hazes, and leading a life of dissipation, dressed in dubious vintage, it would’ve been the place I would’ve liked to grow old. It strikes me as a stubbornly unique place, the one city in all of North America that acknowledges its European colonial heritage as integral to its identity — Vieux-Port cobblestones, haute cuisine, and all things vintage — under a Francophone umbrella.
1 September 2007
When I was first in Chicago, I was five years old, between a bus from Toronto and a train to Los Angeles—though not my official point of entry into the United States, it has defied its own insignificance—a mere fingerprint on The Bean, if you will—and, with Burger King French toast sticks, become an integral part of this immigrant’s narrative. My memory allows little more than that I was there, but this time, two days in the august company of squared-shoed and trapezoid-spectacled enemies of my enemies, I know to take pictures, to take notes.
23 July 2007
What, I exclaimed. The British girl in the white sundress walking ahead of me turned around at my response and commented, ‘That is the most random thing I’ve ever seen.’
2008 December 25
Though I completed this chapter of my pop music autobiography in late September, a few weeks into my first semester at Georgetown, only now in the more apparent denouement of my existential crisis do I feel compelled to write its intentions, framed in the context of two gifts I received in November.
Data compiled by Audioscrobbler.
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