:: a.whisper.in.water ::

:: Sunday, August 03, 2003 ::

Why Yes Sir, I Happen to be Both Sweet AND Fresh. Why Do You Ask?
In yet another instance of my doing something catalogued by this blog's initial inspiration, my copy of Hail to the Thief has found itself out of its cozy little jewel case and in an optical drive more often than not this past week. I imagine this compulsive listening phase would have come much sooner had I not put off seriously listening to it for so long; I bought it from a Best Buy outside of Pittsburgh on one of the finest weekends the summer had to offer my humble traveling spirit for the sweet sum of $10. Danny, much like myself, was most pleased with the appearance of the $10 popular CD (as opposed to the bargain basement CD), which was a long time coming, and showed his support by snagging his own copy of HttT. Incidentally, my tomorrow may involve some Allison, if all goes to plan; she finds herself in a position of needing a laptop, and I'd be a fool not to see her in general, but doubly so to abandon an errand of nerdery. I'm going to have to branch out a little socially; Ram remains resolutely in Pittsburgh, and Danny's summer is deliciously out of synch with mine, in that he's gone for two weeks that I'm here, and I'm gone for the week in between when he's at home. It's small solace that he's shifting his academic roots away from Duke to the much-closer UMD, a move I've been avoiding ever since I received a thick envelope from Haverford during the latter half of senior year.

Speaking of which, I'm in DC for (three-fourths of) the remainder of the summer, now that lab work has ended. I haven't been able to find my last 2 paychecks (totaling ~$1200!!), though doubtless they've found themselves absorbed by the mass of paper and plastic that came home with me. I'll be spending the 9th - 17th in lovely Boston, smack in the middle of which is my 5th concert ever: RADIOHEAD. I'm already getting a little too psyched to go, and am reading up on back concerts. I can't seem to find the one Jenn told me about the first time I spoke with her on the phone, a nifty little show that featured Spiritualized as an opening act. The prospective setlists from this tour look very full of new stuff, but Nate's Florence show has a couple of numbers from way back, which is a total fucking relief, as I'd had my doubts that they'd ever want to play anything pre-Kid A ever again. Note the presence of "Just" in their first encore. I shiver with antici...

pation. The gaming situation hasn't been as drab as I feared it would be, to my pleasant surprise. I hereby announce my casual return to the realm of Starcraft under the handle of "exit.music," so if any of the HCA crowd want some long-distance crafting, I'm game. Beyond that, it's been SimCity 2000 on the laptop, and Quake 3 Arena on the new computer in gorgeous detail. It's really only being played for variety's sake; UT is an embarrassingly better deathmatch-styled shooter. (Thank God; I accidentally closed this window, and the faithful blogger hath saved my post.)

The Jenn situation has been odd, but not awful after a quantum-breakup evening (wherein things were apart and together within the span of a single phone conversation). I hesitate to post regarding it, but the point isn't at all that she's anything close to awful, but rather that I've been feeling a little off ever since the incident. I just feel slightly crippled by a renewed fear of fucking things up and doing the Wrong Thing, which may include keeping a yet-higher baseline level of happiness about the relationship. It means the world to me, and still influences my actions and thoughts to the degree that it did before (if not moreso), in that I still feel compelled to buy Jenn gifts when I'm out, or tell her about little things that I see (like an interview with Amy Lee, lead singer of Jenn's new musical interest, Evanesensce, which features her passing our little Decent Human Being test quite easily), but to put it simply, I'm still a little wary (scared?) to return to that level of interaction, as much as I'd like to. Oh well. The trick is not to let it bleed too much into the rest of life. She's at Sandy Island, and I dearly hope she's having fun. At the very least one of our vacations should be unambiguously wonderful.

Music: The Pixies - The Purple Tape. It's a neat, cheap little addition to the Pixies aficionado's collection in much the same way as the Beatles Anthologies series; numerous songs whose final versions ended up years down the road have their beginnings here, proving that the Black Francis & co. were delightfully insane from the very start. An early version of "Subbacultcha" makes it abundantly clear that "Distance = Rate x Time" was originally a jarringly incongruous bridge within the former, and simply wound up a completely different song (for the better, no doubt) on Trompe Le Monde. Tangentially, a search for "trompe le monde" pointed me at this particular well-written blog. Both song references dropped are big hits with my indierawker-side, with the url coming from a Superchunk single of the same name off of Here's Where The Strings Come In.

:: Aziz 2:47 AM [+] ::
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