Not my patience of course, your patience.  This is just a fun idea I had in my head; you’re the one that has to put up with it.  So here’s my glorious idea:

Starting with the song that’s on my iTunes right this second, I’m going to list my favorite lyric from this and the next nine songs that come up (I’m in shuffle mode, as I often am when I listen to anything in iTunes).  Ten songs total.  No skipping.  Thus, if I don’t know a song very well, I’m going to look up the lyrics and find something I like the best.  If you like this idea – steal it!  Just either give me credit, or link me so I can read, at the very least.  Haha.  To be fair, I’m probably not the first person with this idea, so I’m just going to pretend like I am.

1. Brand New – Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don’t
“These are the words you wish you wrote down.  This is the way you wish your voice sounds – handsome and smart.  Oh, my tongue’s the only muscle in my body that works harder than my heart.”

2.  Vanessa Carlton – Hands On Me
“We climb Tibetan mountains where we can barely breathe.  I see the Dalai Lama, I feel him blessing me – and all the constellations shine down for us to see.”

3.  Justin Timberlake – Lovestoned (I Think She Knows It)
[Ed. Note - I should've skipped this one.  I'm staying honest, though!]
“She shuts the room down, the way she walks and causes a fuss – the baddest in town.”

4. Thrice – The Earth Will Shake
“Heaven sent reply, however small – evidence of life behind these walls.  Born and bred in this machine, wardens dread to see us dream.  We hold tight to legends of real life – the way it was before.”

5. Five Iron Frenzy – Anchors Away
“The advertising dollars buy the right to stifle antonyms, to sterilize the truth with fiction, so we can sing their corporate hymns.”

6. Moby – Porcelain
[Ed. Note - One, this song is slim pickens for lyrics.  Also, I skipped over the original number six which was Girl Talk's "Pump It Up" - mostly 'cause those aren't his lyrics.]
“In my dreams I’m dying all the time – when I wake it’s kaleidoscopic mind.  I never meant to hurt you, I never meant to lie – so this is goodbye.”

7. Notorious B.I.G. – 1970-Somethin’
“My momma water burst.  No spouse in the house, so she rolled herself to the hospital, to see if she could get a little help.  Umbilical cords wrapped around my neck; I’m seein’ my death and I ain’t even took my first step.”

8. NOFX – Eat The Meek (live)
“The factory mass producing fear.  Bottled, capped, distributed near and far;  sold for a reasonable price.  And the people they love it, they feed it; brush with it, bathe with it, breathe it – inject it direct to the blood – it seems to be replacing love.”

9. The Killers – I Can’t Stay
“There is a majesty at my doorstep, and there is a little boy in her arms.  Now we’ll parade around without gameplan, obligation or alarm.”

10. Sublime – Pool Shark (acoustic)
“I’ve got that needle and I can’t shake, but I can’t breathe – I take it away, but I want more and more.  One day I’m gonna lose the war.”

Sad, on that last one.  Seriously, songs where the writer essentially predicts exactly how his/her own death will happen is kind of a mindfuck.  One side of your brain wonders if it was just a coincidence, and the other side wonders if it’s just a case where the artist just knew him or herself *that* well.  Again – depressing no matter what.

So, to counteract the depressing end of my list – here’s Bert & Ernie lip-syncing to M.O.P.’s “Ante Up”.  I can’t watch this without smiling, at the very least.

Thinking of that song now (if you don’t know, it’s by an amazing ska band called “The Aquabats” – listen to them now), it oddly fits the dream I had last night.

“Big ones, little ones
Fat ones, skinny ones
Protect me from their venomous drug
That springs from the needles of fangs
Attacked by snakes”

Of course there’s more to it than that… but I love that song, so I had to reference it somehow.

So last night had been kind of a crappy night to begin with. I sat by myself on my computer ’til about 2:30am. I tried going to bed, and it was one of those nights where I was tired as hell, but just couldn’t sleep to save my life. (I found out that Jackie was having the exact same problem. Weird.) So, after about an hour of just laying around trying to keep my eyes closed, I did what I always do – started surfing random things on my phone. Spent about an hour reading FML. Read Twitter for as long as I could. Ended up playing PSP for a little bit. I was still up at about 4:45a, and I’d just about had it when I think I finally fell asleep for a little bit.

I woke up at about 7:30a with that all-too-familiar tickle in my nose… blood. I haven’t had a bloody nose in forever, but one decided to wake me up after only about 3 hours of sleep. I dealt with it, and went back to bed. This time, sleep came easy… this is where the dream started, though.

So where I start remembering, I find myself in what feels like a radio station. This isn’t any place I recognized… but it had the distinct feel of work. I don’t remember any of my coworkers either, although I interacted with about two or three of ‘em. While in the middle of some random conversation, a deliveryman swings in – I find out that this deliveryman goes around, providing radio stations with a giant stack of music-related magazines… stuff like Rolling Stone, Blender, Spin in addition to all the different trade pubs. As he’s leaving, I get the thought in my brain, “Hmm… maybe he has some extras on his truck. I’d love to get some to read at home.”

So I leave this building… on a bike. A pedal bike. Out through the parking lot, and it’s here where I kind of realize where I am. I don’t immediately recognize my surroundings, but I get the distinct feeling that I’m in my hometown of Fulda, MN. I speed over to where the truck is headed (for some reason, it’s at a building that only a couple of buildings down from where I was at) and talk to the guy. He’s a little bit of a smartass, but he tells me that he actually does have a stack of magazines that he wasn’t able to drop off, and that I could have ‘em.

Elated, I hop on the bike, balance the stack of magazines on the handlebars, and start to head home. (Oddly enough, in the dream I was heading to my old home on Baltimore Ave. – not the house I spent more time in, the house on Front Street.) So I get about a block away (I’m riding on the sidewalk for some reason, like I used to do when I was a kid) and coming up to a street crosswalk – I see a King Cobra, hood flared out, looking like it’s coiled to attack. I didn’t panic. Hell, I wasn’t even afraid at all – my first thought was actually, “What the hell? Those aren’t indigenous to this part of the country…” As I ride past it, it tries to strike, and misses. I laugh it off, and continue on.

That’s when I start noticing that in the block ahead, there are actually quite a few cobras on the sidewalk – so I switch over to riding on the street, almost losing half of my magazines in the process. (For some reason, these magazines were a high priority, ’cause I clung to them whenever anything happened.) So now I’m riding in the street, and I swerve right away to miss yet another cobra. Just as I start to think, “Jesus, this is getting crazy… where are all of these snakes coming from?” I look around, and kind of gasp in horror. The street is filled, FILLED with full-grown King Cobras and little mini baby Kings.

So I speed up. In the process of trying to swerve out of the way of all these attacking snakes, I end up losing the bike and just running – still carrying this burden that is the stack of magazines. And that’s when something starts happening that is a reoccurring event in many of my dreams. The float-running. My feet touch ground for about 3 steps, then I push off like for a long jump and just float. Only in this situation, I was going more vertical with each jump than forward. I panic… these super-high floats are allowing this horde of snakes to catch up. This goes on for a block.

That’s when I woke up to the sound of my phone… Jackie was calling. I was breathing all erratically and shaking like a madman. It was pretty fucking intense. I wouldn’t consider the dream a nightmare, but at the same time I’ve not had any dream that’s affected me like that in a long while.

It’s after a dream like that where I definitely start wondering what it all means. After a little one-on-one time with Google, I found a decent enough site (the Dream Moods Dictionary) and looked around a bit. So, first things first, I guess you could technically qualify this as a “chase dream”. Here’s what they had to say about that:

“As with most of the common dreams, they often stem from feelings of anxiety in your waking life. Running is an instinctive response to physical threats in your environment. Your actions in the dream parallel how you respond to pressure and cope with fears, stress or various situations in your waking life. Instead of confronting the situation, you are running away and avoiding it. Ask yourself who is the one chasing you so that you can gain understanding and insight on the source of your fears and anxieties.

The pursuer or attacker who is chasing you in your dream may also represent an aspect of yourself. Your own feelings of anger, jealousy, fear, and possibly love, can assume the appearance of threatening figure. The shadowy figure can also symbolize rejected characteristics of your self.”

I’ve read this before about chase dreams – the whole “you’re not facing an issue in your waking life”. And to be honest – that’s true in a couple of different ways. So far this evaluation is 1/1. So… the pursuer may represent an aspect of myself? That interests me. So I looked up snakes:

“To see a snake or be bitten by one in your dream, signifies hidden fears and worries that are threatening you. Your dream may be alerting you to something in your waking life that you are not aware of or that has not yet surfaced. Alternatively, the snake may be seen as phallic and thus symbolize temptation, dangerous and forbidden sexuality. If you are afraid of the snake, then it signifies your fears of sex, intimacy or commitment. The snake may also refer to a person around you who is callous, ruthless, and can’t be trusted. As a positive symbol, snakes represent healing, transformation, knowledge and wisdom. It is indicative of self-renewal and positive changes.”

Now, follow me with this, but this all seems kind of dead on. All of it. Now, the first time I witness the snake, I’m not afraid at all – even after it strikes at me. I’d like to interpret that as the positive symbol – self-renewal and positive changes? I’ve been longing for that in a big way in the past couple weeks. However, then my mood changes when I see a bunch of them. Afraid of commitment? ‘Fraid so. I love Jackie more than anything, but the idea of getting married scares the fuck out of me. And then there’s that whole “hidden worries and fears” thing. That just sounds right. I mean… *something* had to keep me awake last night. Well, dream meanings site, you’re 2/2.

Just for shits and giggles, I looked to see if magazines had some kind of meaning, being as how I was so attached to them in the dream. Turns out they do have a meaning:

“To read a magazine in your dream, indicates that you are opened to various new ideas. Consider also the theme and name of the magazine and its symbolism. “

Well, I don’t remember reading any of the magazines, but that’s pretty cool.

So, long story short, I guess even my dreams are telling me that I’m not doing a good job in my life of confronting my problems and taking care of them head-on. I really need to take this to heart (I know that dream reading isn’t exactly an established science or anything, but I do think that people are right on when they say dreams reveal stuff to us about our waking life) and just take the steps I need to make some changes.

Anyone else have any interesting dreams lately?

You know, the reason I usually don’t make lists of things for myself to do is because they usually don’t get done.  That, and the stuff that does get done is usually done specifically for the purpose of checking that thing off the list – not ’cause I actually want to do it or anything.  Le sigh.  Anyhow, it’s only a couple months late, but here’s how I fared on my Summer Checklist.  (Capitalized for pseudo-importance!)

- Make a much-needed trip home to Minnesota.
This was a big ol’ fail.  It wasn’t destined for failure though – things were actually back and forth right up until the Friday before I wanted to take off.  In the end, it was a money issue.  I could afford it the day I wanted to buy the tickets, but I had to wait to see what kind of time my boss would give me off from work.  We finally worked out a compromise (I was going to go from Tuesday to the following Monday, originally – the compromise was for me to be gone from Thursday to Sunday) instead and when I went back to buy tickets, the prices had escalated by about $100 or so.  It sucked to be so sure I was going for so long, only to be foiled at the last minute.  So, I had to miss Shelby’s wedding… and it sucks.  Seriously.  I’ll go into that some other time.

√ Listen to 10 albums from beginning to end.  (…and review them.)
Shit yeah, this is the one thing on the list that I totally dominated.  While I haven’t done one since then, I actually did 11 in the time I wanted to do 10.  Check out that blog for the reviews I did of the following:

1.  Dan Auerbach – Keep It Hid
2.  Eyedea & Abilities – By The Throat
3.  All That Remains – Overcome
4.  Dave Matthews Band – Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King
5.  Carbon Leaf – Nothing Rhymes With Woman
6.  Owl City – Ocean Eyes
7.  Jeremy Enigk – OK Bear
8.  Chrisette Michele – Epiphany
9.  The Dead Weather – Horehound
10.  Modern Science – S/T
11.  Tinted Windows – S/T

I liked most of them, except for Owl City and Chrisette Michele.  I really, really couldn’t get into Owl City, for some reason.  The kids seem to dig it, and that makes me feel super old.

- Get back on that damn treadmill!
Another fail.  I was doing pretty well for about two weeks.  Then the same thing happened that happens every other time – a week went by where I got off my schedule, I promised myself I’d make it up, and then I never did.  How am I supposed to keep all these promises I make to other people when I can’t even keep promises I make to myself?  Ack.

- Finish the two books I’m reading right now.
I literally only have 25-30 pages left of The Motorcycle Diaries, and I still didn’t even finish that one in the time I’d set for myself.  Such a shame.  I’ve been getting a little more in the reading mood lately though, so hopefully I’ll knock it out sometime soon.  I also started a third book (Max Brooks’ World War Z) – I want to for sure finish those three by the end of the year.

√  Start a playthrough of Mass Effect… finally.
I never did finish it, but I am pretty far in.  I think it’s the next game I plan on finishing after my current playthrough of Resistance: Fall of Man.  Right now I’m in the middle of so many games it’s not even funny.  There’s The Conduit, Muramasa, Folklore, Shadow Complex, a bunch of games on PSP and DS…  so many console games got pushed aside when I started playing WoW.  Now that I’ve canceled WoW for the time being, my backlog is going to get a little work.

√ Get through at least 3 movies on my Netflix queue.
I actually did this one, surprisingly.  Dominated it more than I dominated the CD listening.  Got through 5 movies:

-Quantum of Solace (Good, but I wish I would’ve refreshed myself on Casino Royale beforehand.)
-Zack & Miri Make A Porno (More rom-com than I would’ve liked, but still a decent flick from Kevin Smith.)
-The Incredible Hulk (Just okay, but makes the eventual Avengers movie look WAY promising.)
-Beowulf (A fun popcorn movie, if anything.  BEOWULF!!!)
-Lucky Number Slevin (Actually dug this a LOT.  Josh Hartnett as a cocky badass works, surprisingly.)

Sadly, Netflix is another thing I’ve had to cut lately ’cause of the whole money situation.  I think I’m missing the instant streaming more than anything… it’ll be back soon enough.

- Get my website finished/redesigned.
I knew from the start that this was something that wasn’t even going to be attempted.  Regardless, I kept it on the list, and it’s no surprise that I failed this miserably.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t even open Photoshop once with the intention of working on something for my personal site.  Thinking about it more though – this is one of those things that I should really, really focus on.  A good website could help me land a decent job.  So yeah.  *kicks self in ass*

So… 4 failed, 3 succeded.  I guess the checklist wasn’t LARGELY unsuccessful, but it sure feels like it because I failed on the important stuff, and got all the tertiary stuff done.  I do like the idea of keeping lists though (ignore the first paragraph of this blog then, I guess) so I think I’ll do a Fall/Winter list.  The end of the year’s going to be here before we know it.  That scares the shit out of me.  2010 is a frightening number.

See how I take a meme that absolutely everyone is sick of and use it as a subject line?  Yeah.  I went there.

For the most part, I just felt the need to check in.  I haven’t written anything in a long while.  I want to go back over my summer checklist and see what I got done – hell, we’re already into October and I haven’t checked that.  Sad days.  I wish I could say that I’ve been busy… and actually, I guess I can say that.  I’ve been busier than I let on, even to myself.  However, not so busy that I couldn’t take five minutes to write in this damn thing every now and again.  Maybe Twitter’s poisoned my mind – maybe I’m only really living life 140 characters at a time.

That right there… that’s pretty fucking ridiculous.  Forget I said that.

So, Jackie and I have come upon some hard times lately.  It wouldn’t be so bad, except for I think my ability to have hope is wearing pretty thin.  Coming in November is my year anniversary of being laid off.  This wouldn’t be so bad if I already had a full-time job.  However… I still don’t.  Fact is, I’ve been too naive, gullible, stubborn – hell, any of a number of negative adjectives – about my situation.  I could have a job already; I’m pretty sure of this.  I haven’t given the job hunt my undivided attention EVER in this past year.  Mostly because of a twisted sense of hope, and the illusion of loyalty.

That L-word is a tough one to wrap my brain around, and it’s the biggest bitch of them all to deal with.  It’s what got me back in the doors of my former (and current) employer.  (Someone essentially felt a small shred of loyalty to me and made sure to get me back in the door.)  It’s what keeps me working so hard to try to impress someone – ANYONE.  (For what that’s worth, it seems I have been impressing people – even the right people – and still nothing pays off.)  And it’s what’s kept me around even after I’ve essentially been told there’s no real place for me.  (It’s a mindtrip when you work for someone you consider one of your best friends in a friendless town.)  It’s something I can’t shut off, and there have been so many instances this past year where I wish I could.  When I should have.  My willpower just isn’t what it used to be, I guess.

Not that things even seem to be completely bleak.  If there’s something that I like to think has rubbed off on Jackie, it’s that we strive to stay positive; to realize that things could be so much worse.  Also to realize that we really do have more control over our situation than it might seem.  And no matter what – we have each other.

To be honest, I need to stop waiting around on a position that’s never going to open up, regardless of if our cluster gets bought out or stays under it’s current corporate umbrella.  I need to stop stalling and start looking.  And then the hardest part – I need to start putting myself first and stop worrying about how much it’ll fuck over a friend if I leave.  Maybe I’m a little egomaniacal about that last part, but I have been told repeatedly that I’m a pretty key person in the current lineup of how things work… which is fine, if I were being compensated appropriately.

It sucks to even think about, but these are dire times.  I mean… it’s getting down to where we have to worry whether or not we’ll have money to buy basic groceries every couple of weeks.  I have to seriously think about giving our cat away because we can’t afford to get her fixed, much less keep buying food and litter for much longer.  I’ve cut out every possible extra thing from my budget, and I’m starting to mentally note what things I can sell in a pinch if we run into some kind of emergency.  This isn’t normal behavior.

Fuck, reading back over this quick – am I bipolar?  Maybe just expressively.  Up, down, up, down.  I promise, I’m not really this moody in real life.  Unless I’m at dart league.

So, long story short – I need to stop putting faith in other people to help me get a full-time job in my current company (I had to put faith in others – I was doing everything I possibly could for myself) and use my many skills to get a job somewhere else.

Then again, there’s the whole transportation situation… dammit, I don’t even want to go into that right now.  That’s another gripe for another night.

Another night.

This was originally going to contain more (much more!) content, covering my weird dreams lately, my birthday events, and probably some random stream-of-conscious ADD-type stuff, but I’ll save all that stuff for a post of its own.  Plus, I have other stuff I need to do right now.  In the meantime – a progress report on my summer checklist.  Awwwwwwwright.

- Make a much-needed trip home to Minnesota.
This is the most up-in-the-air thing on my entire checklist.  Really it all comes down to funds.  My mom gets married the last weekend in August, and that’s going to be the biggest deciding factor, money-wise.  Ideally I would like to go home to attend my friend Shelby’s wedding, which is technically in September (first weekend)… but I include it on the “Summer” list anyway.  I’ve been checking Allegiant for flights pretty regularly, and for some reason September has almost every weekend blacked out, and the flights that *are* there are $129-$139 each way.  Ouch.  Not looking good.

- Listen to 10 albums from beginning to end.  (…and review them.)
I’ve listened to two so far, and three more are being ripped into my iTunes so I can listen to them while on the treadmill.  No reviews yet, but I’m thinking I’ll get one up tonight, and probably a couple tomorrow.  The ones I have listened to already and planned so far are:

1.  Dan Auerbach – Keep It Hid
2.  Eyedea & Abilities – By The Throat
3.  All That Remains – Overcome
4.  Dave Matthews Band – Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King
5.  Carbon Leaf – Nothing Rhymes With Woman

- Get back on that damn treadmill!
I’m struggling with this one, but I’ve been feeling the negative effects of my size more and more lately, which should (I hope) be enough to get me back in the fitness room on a more consistent basis.  I’ve gotten on the treadmill once since I made my list, I just need to do it every night.  Or at least 3 times a week.  Something.  My metabolism has slowed to the point where I can sleep 14 hours and think nothing of it – and that starts this big chain reaction of negative stuff I don’t even want to go into right now.

- Finish the two books I’m reading right now.
I put a lot of time into Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries the other night, and I think another good night with it will be all I need to finish it.  Amazing book.  The other one is Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation… I have a feeling that once I tear back into that, I’ll have no problem finishing it at all.

√  Start a playthrough of Mass Effect… finally.
I can actually put a checkmark next to this one!  The other night I sat down for nearly two hours and started a playthrough as the main character John Shepard.  I’m really liking it so far, but it leads me to create a subgoal – finish Mass Effect before the end of summer.

- Get through at least 3 movies on my Netflix queue.
Haven’t made any progress on this, but I’ve got a couple of days off in Monday/Tuesday, and I just need to do it.  The movie I have currently is 007 – Quantum of Solace, a movie I really want to see, so there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to find some time to at least knock that one out.  Sadly, I don’t even know what the next movie on my queue is right now.

- Get my website finished/redesigned.
Oof.  I don’t know why I put this on my list, ’cause it seems like such a lofty (and time-consuming) goal, but it really is something I need to focus on sometime.  It just… hurts my brain to think about.  I love doing that shit, but the coding.  God, the coding.

In the past couple of days, in the process of writing my last entry and cleaning everything up on the ol’ blog here, I realized something – I haven’t done a checklist in a long, long time!

It used to be a late-spring ritual of mine when I wrote my blog at LiveJournal and then later Myspace;  before the summer started, I would always sit down and hammer out a checklist of things I wanted to do over the summer.  I can’t remember ever completing any of these checklists, but they were fun to put together, and it was kind of a motivator for when I was bored.  So, even though the summer is half over – I think I’m going to whip up a short checklist for the rest of the season.

- Make a much-needed trip home to Minnesota.
- Listen to 10 albums from beginning to end.  (…and review them.)
- Get back on that damn treadmill!
- Finish the two books I’m reading right now.
- Start a playthrough of Mass Effect… finally.
- Get through at least 3 movies on my Netflix queue.
- Get my website finished/redesigned.

Damn.  I could realistically knock all of those out before the end of August.  I’m kind of excited to get things done. 

It’s been so depressing around these parts lately.

My birthday is coming up soon, and it’s caused me to jump back into thinking about my own mortality.  After all these years of dwelling on it, it’s still really kind of a hard thing to wrap my head around… I mean, eventually, we will all just cease to exist.  There’s no way to prevent it.  (And honestly, even if you could, would you?)  The thing that fucks me up the most is thinking about how we will be perceived and remembered by the people that are still around after we die.

The cold hard facts are that in the end, 99.99999% of us aren’t going to be remembered in the long run.  Part of me can’t handle that; knowing that eventually, it’ll be like I was never even on this planet at all.  The other part of me really doesn’t care – if the vast majority of people won’t be remembered, why should I be any different?

It gets my head spinning, really it does.  If I were a religious person, I’m sure I could find solace in thinking that I won’t need to care about any memory left behind when I die, ’cause I’ll be so busy reuniting with people in the afterlife.  That’s just… not the case, though.  And to be honest, I’m such a selfish person that even if I were religious, I know that the thought of being forgotten would still get to me.  It’s just how I am.  It’s not necessarily egomaniacal (even though it kind of is), it’s just unavoidable since I don’t ever think about the spiritual side of death - that’s where my mind always tends to end up.

As with every birthday in the past few years, the dwelling on death always leads me to question my current station in life.  Exactly a year ago, I felt pretty good about life.  I was working a full-time gig in a major radio market… and loving it.  I had a side job, but it was purely for the perks and extra money on the side – I didn’t need it.  I wasn’t really making any progress on working toward my dream job, but I was paying off outstanding debts and paving a pretty good path towards a decent future.  I at least had some breathing room (monetarily) that if something big were to go down, I was prepared.

Now?  I can’t believe how much things have changed in a year.  Now I’m working only part-time in radio (albeit the same market, so there’s that at least), and the side job I used to work for fun I now rely on for much needed money to pay for… everything.  Of course, that situation places me even farther from my dream job… and forget about paying debts on time, if at all.  Along with all that comes a crippling depression (which comes with the awesome pack-in of lower self-esteem).  Rad.

So, my birthday comes in a few days here.  I heard a saying recently: “A year in your twenties is worth two in your thirties, and worth five in your forties.”  To be honest, that makes a lot of sense to me.  On my birthday, I’ll have three years before I enter my thirties… that scares the bejeezus out of me.  Knowing that I could squeeze a potential fifteen years into the final years of my twenties is a really invigorating thought.  At the same time, it’s also depressing, because what happens if those three years are as bad (if not worse) for me than the past year has been?

The whole duality thing comes in again.  One part of me is saying that I can make those years count, and I really can.  The other part of me is saying that I can only do so much, and a lot of it is out of my hands.

*shrug*  I really need to get some sleep.

The backlash over the American Idol results is deafening – I couldn’t get on any of the social networking sites last night without hearing about it one way or the other.  Myself – I haven’t been keeping track of Idol that closely this year; I’d pop in from time to time when the roommates were watching it, just to see who was who, but that was about it.  I had heard of Adam Lambert – mostly because I was pulled into our living room once to hear him completely butcher Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”… and from that point on, I just couldn’t stand the kid.  (I mean c’mon, he completely ruined a genuinely good song – that’s hard to do!)  He had to lose – honestly,  I didn’t know if I’d be able to stand going to work if I had to spin an Adam Lambert single on the air ad nauseum.

So last night, the seemingly impossible happened – the underdog won.  And holy hell, the loser’s rabid fanbase is PISSED.

Honestly, I smile a little inside.  Who doesn’t like saying (or thinking) “I told you so!”?  Reading stuff like this (especially from someone I consider a friend) though… it just rubbed me the wrong way:

“I doubt Kiss & Queen would have came for anyone else but Adam.  America is such a homophobic country & stupid at that.”

…America is a homophobic and stupid country just because the loser happened to be gay?  You’re telling me that it couldn’t have possibly been the fact that he’s seemingly tone deaf and can’t sing a song without screaming half of it?  Or that *gasp* more people liked Kris Allen?  I don’t care how dedicated a fan you are, that’s just about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard someone say.  It’s both maddening and hilarious how stubborn and mindless some of the show’s fans can get.  Throughout the season, it’s nothing more than a talent show popularity contest, but when someone’s favorite contestant loses, it’s all of a sudden not because they’re the least talented popular.  It’s gotta be because the populous is prejudiced over any number of said loser’s personality traits or sexual orientation.  I mean, ADAM WUZ THE BEST THEREZ NO WAI THAT STOOPID OTHUR KID WUN, HE SUXORZ!  AMERIKUH MUST HAET THA GAY PEEPS!

My friend Shawn summed up perfectly in his blog: if you’re an Adam Lambert fan, you really should’ve been praying for him to lose.  Hoping upon hope.  (Unless you paid lots of money to vote – then sour grape it away.  Even though that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of to spend money on.)  Kris Allen has more radio appeal.  He’ll be easy to market to the Hot AC-types.  Adam Lambert’s sound is something that he’ll be able to sell WAY better if he’s not locked into a contract with Simon Fuller’s record company.  Plus, look at the track record of past winners of American Idol… there are really only two names that are still hugely successful – Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson.  Everyone else has already kind of hit the downward spiral into mediocrity, last year’s winner David Cook included.  Pretty sure Adam Lambert would’ve fallen victim to the same cycle.

So I guess what I’m saying is that the eyeliner kids just need to stop with the crying and the attacks on people who didn’t like your pick.  In the long run, Lambo will do better without the help of Idol.  If he doesn’t… they can’t cry “Homophobes!”, ’cause they’ll be the ones to blame.

Have you ever just been feeling super good about things, even when you know you shouldn’t be?  I’ve been feeling that way a lot in the past week.  Sure, I’ve got collection agencies calling me twice a day; and I’m not really sure if I’ll ever have a steady full-time job in this town ever again; and my car is on its deathbed, figuratively; and seeing/speaking to friends back home makes me want to move back to be with them… but y’know, I’ve got a spring in my step, dammit, and it feels kind of nice for once.

I started working out again this past week, and that coincided with the restart of my music blog (My Year In Discs, for anyone reading who somehow doesn’t know).  More than likely that’s the reason for my chipper demeanor – I can already feel my metabolism picking up.  Plus, I like having that work out time to listen to new music; I really hadn’t been keeping up with things musically, and I’ve found that I really do like getting that exposure to new music consistently.  The working out also gives me a lot of time to mull stuff over in my mind, and it helps me out a lot with some of the bigger issues I have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Two members of my family have recently had surgeries.  Generally, people tend to stay away from unneeded surgery – really, there’s so much that could go wrong.  I read stories in the news all the damn time of negligent doctors doing negligent things ending in tragedy.  That freaks me out.  I don’t understand why anyone would go under the knife unless they absolutely, positively NEED to.  I’m not going to go into detail of who is getting what surgery, but I will say that the surgeries are not *completely* unnecessary, depending on how you look at them.  The one is a pretty damn selfless act, and it’s downright honorable.  It’s just the reasoning behind the act that gets me thinking.  The other one… the other one seems a little hypocritical, but I’m being assured that it will help in the long run.  Honestly, with money as tight as it is… I disagree with it.  I do.  However, happiness seems to have a price tag in this case, and I’ll come to get over my disdain in time.

I get to see No Doubt tonight as they kick off their new tour here in Vegas.  I feel… like I should be more excited.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m stoked as hell, but going to live shows doesn’t elicit the same feelings for me that they used to.  Maybe it’s because all the shows I do get to see are filled with fans that are… kids.  It makes me feel ancient to be at a show and surrounded by teenagers that are easily ten years (or more) younger than me.

It’s not that I care that we like the same music… y’know, whatever.  It kills me to feel old, though.  “Getting old” has long been something I’ve dreaded, ever since I was younger.  Some of my friends have told me that once you hit 30 or so, something kind of snaps in you, and you start to feel okay about it… hell, you start to take pride in your age.  I don’t know if I’ll ever hit that spot, though.  I think said fear of getting old is the same reason I drag my feet on things like marriage and kids… those are adult things, and in my head I don’t want to have to be an adult.

Aww hell, I went and put myself into a crappy mood.  I’m a stop writing, lest this get any worse.

I don’t get why I don’t write more.  I guess when I’ve gotten in a pattern where all the writing I do is for work… writing in itself starts feeling like work.  Boo that.  Boo that indeed.

The current state of my life is… not so great.  Not to complain – I’m able to keep a roof over my head and keep myself fed.  Ha… that rhymed.  Really, that’s what’s important though, right?  Money is easily the biggest cause of stress in my life right now – and I know I’m not alone, but it doesn’t make things any easier.  It’s to the point lately where I’ve been having some serious thought about moving out of Vegas and just seeing if I can get a job back home.  (Word is that jobs are slightly easier to find up there.)  I can’t bring myself to do that though – too much pride.  I think I’ve said it before, but I feel like moving home would be admitting defeat to a certain extent.

Not to put too much about my job situation out there, but I’ve been in limbo for months now.  (And not the fun kind!  I could handle the fun kind.)  I feel like a broken record, but everytime I ask about any progress towards a FT job, I get the response “possibly, in a couple months”.  I wait a couple months, ask again, get the same answer.  Everything’s out of my hands, with the exception of going out and trying to find a new job – which I’ve found is all but impossible here in LV unless I want to move into sales.  Which I don’t. Not that there’s anything wrong with sales, but I did it for almost 3 years with Schwans, and it’s nothing that I really liked, at all.  Gah.  Enough with the whiny bullshit, though.  No one likes to hear about that.

I’m pretty excited for June to come – I’m actually getting to cover E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in LA for Spawn Kill.  I’ve always kept track of E3 stuff online, or on TV.  It’s going to be crazy to actually be covering it live.  The next few weeks will be a flurry of appointment-making and RSVP-ing, and then when June 2-4th rolls around, I’ll likely be running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to make time for this demo here, and this press conference there, and trying to maybe live Tweet and put some video stuff together.  Who knows?  Either way, I think it’ll be a great time, an awesome opportunity to make some contacts, and a pretty good way to get the site some exposure.

So… let’s veer off a little bit.  Have you ever been told that you are “too positive”, or that you “never lose your cool”?  Recently I was told just that… is that a bad thing?  I mean, I really do try to keep the appearance that I never freak out about anything – and to an extent, I don’t.  I mean, to me it doesn’t seem like freaking out helps anything, ever.  Given a choice of freaking out and letting my emotions take over vs. trying to think about whatever it is calmly – I’ll take the cautious thought every time.

A couple of people I’ve told about this have jokingly responded, “Well… that’s the fundamental difference between men and women.”

When I think more about it though, sometimes I wish I would just freak out.  Sometimes I wish I could just spend a week being way less than positive and moping around publicly.  It’s just not in me though.  Growing up, it seems like my family and I went through much, much tougher stuff than the trivial crap I deal with these days.  Not to say my problems are completely trivial – but by comparison, I’ve come through harder times with nary a scratch.

It boggles my mind when I know of people who’ve made it through rougher times than I have, and they dwell on the negativity – hell, some of them revel in it.  You just kind of want to step to them and say, “Hey!  You made it through alright!  Now stop being a whiny douchebag, ’cause I know you’re way better than that!”  Hell, I should just up and do that to random people on the street.  I’m guessing I’d get about 50/50 when it comes to good and bad responses.

Wow, this blog feels like it was kind of a waste of time (way whinier than I ever wanted it to turn out) but it was pretty cathartic, I won’t lie.  I’m feeling way better than when I started… or maybe that’s just the coffee starting to kick in.  Mmm… coffee.