June 2006 Archives

Last night I had a dream that a few friends and myself had become fed up with drama situations and decided to pack up and move to Alaska. It was a strange dream-state anagram of friends and it was a strange dream-state anagram of drama situations, I'm sure both were directly influenced by the friends I saw over the weekend and conversations I had in both Madison and Milwaukee last night. We were in a location that felt familiar but was simultaneously WI-like and tropical, and it was implied via dream-logic that the area of Alaska we were going to was not in fact cold but instead even more tropical. Our plans of flight were difficult to pull off and had to be done in secrecy because of an on-going war. When the conquesting army hit our location while we were trying to sneak away, abandoning our possessions, it turned out that I was not a concern of theirs and, actually, they were mostly people I have known through the Best Buy's I've worked at and wanted to know why I hadn't picked up my uniform and weapon so I could join in. When I said I didn't know what the hell was going on they shook their heads, said they didn't either but why should it matter, and with a few condescending remarks in jest they kept moving. Returning to my friends, now they're pissed at me. Association by proxy. I knew some of "the enemy" and therefore must be in league. Now everyone's upset with me. Deals are off. I say Fuck You and start preparing for Alaska on my own, which now involves some sort of boat. I cast off, my friends come with, but in some sort of protest they dump their belongings over the side. Alarm goes off.

Driving in Madison with my 11-year old sister Alexa yesterday I start asking her about Summer School. She's taking a cooking class and tennis lessons and she loves them both. She's a straight-A student and was very upset when she got a B on one test this last quarter. She's entering 6th grade and could multiply by fractions and solve for x when I tossed out problems like [3x-9 = 0]. She wants to be a Marine Biologist--or, possibly, she was being a smartass when she told me this, considering she added with comical enthusiasm So I can study the Great Beluga Whale! I explained to her that when I was a kid at the Madison schools you didn't take summer classes unless you had screwed up and failed some of your classes during the year, risking being held back. I told her that in grade school when I did convince my parents to let me take an Astronomy course over on the west side of town I got irritated with being held to the same expectations for tests/homework/presentations as I would in school while it wouldn't ever count for anything academically, and they were sick of having to drive me to Madison's west side and pick me up 4 days a week so we all called it quits. It's true--I didn't want to do homework or take tests unless I felt I was getting something out of it. We were paying for me to take a class that I was interested in it. The content they actually churned out was dull and basic and there was absolutely no reason for me to be concerned how they felt I was as a student: it wasn't for school. So, as such, I said Fuck it to the homework they gave me and didn't show remorse when they asked me about it. They reprimanded me and I said fine, I'm not coming back.

Lex's study habits are a complete 180 from when I was a kid. I was for sure not an A-student. However--the story goes that I taught myself to read when I was only three. This is neither true nor false--I worked at my own pace. Apparently I grew very upset at that age that I couldn't go through books on my own and my mom picked up a few See Spot Run and Go! Dogs, Go!-like books and started going over them with me. I also had a little fischer-price record player that had those read-along He-Man and Gremlins books and such, and on my own during the day I would follow the namesake and read along, and I would also take books I had memorized and try to place phoenetics to words. One day at the store with my mom I looked up at the counter and tried to sort out a word on one of the boxes she was purchasing. When I put together the Puz with the zle I got excited and my mom was pissed that I had ruined her surprise. If I had been my kid I probably would've been like Way to go, now you get nothing. Yeah, see how smart you are? Idiot.

Regardless- this is an example of how I've always been. As long as I can give the appearance of results without effort, I'm in. Back at the Prospect place I frustrated the hell out of Alex because I wouldn't tell him how I managed to put posters up at the ceiling level. At Best Buy I loved watching other employees stumble through a Netflix pitch, trying to make cancellation commitments and credit card verifications not sound so bad, only so I could find another customer within earshot and in two lines have them following me up to the register. Want some free movie rentals? Yeah there's a catch--you have to know where you live. And as a kid I was happier bringing home a B without trying than I was an A with five hours of studying. I had enough credits to graduate when I was halfway through my sophomore year and I took nothing but CP and AP classes not because it would look good on a transcript but because I didn't want to take the easy way out. It pissed a lot of teachers off and my parents off and I didn't end up with grades that would help me out much in the college-realm. But it was usually the same story. I received a D in 6th grade math in Middle School. Two weeks into 7th grade I scored the highest out of all three grades in the school on a standardized math exam so they bumped me up a class. D's went to A's and B's. They decided to make this habit so anytime I started doing poorly they went ahead and gave me more work, or something of enhanced difficulty. In 8th grade the "increased workload" policy simply became more work I was ignoring, as I spent the majority of my time not in school but at the UW Children's Hospital instead--which is a different story for a different time. Kind of.

Now, Lexi is in Orchestra, Tennis, Dance. She's the lead in plays, both school-produced and via an outside Drama class she was in. She's gone as far as she can on swimming lessons and is just waiting until she meets the requirements to be certified as a Junior Lifeguard. She's being Babysitter-certified in a few weeks and my parents have yet to consider her old enough to even watch herself for extended periods of time. She's taken TAG-classes in Advanced Reading and things like Origami. She won a competition at her school that had her perform a radio skit she herself wrote on the statewide Public Station. And she gets straight A's. In short-she's one of those kids that always pissed me off when I was in school. I hated those kids. I'm proud as shit as her Brother but if I was her age and one of her peers: I have no doubt that she would be my goddamn nemesis.

Maybe it's the 11-year age difference, what my parents learned between having a kid at 18 and having a kid at 30. I'm not sure. We are simultaneously similar and opposite, however. We are Yin and Yang. More aptly, we are Wuji and Taiji, the Delimited and the Absolute. I was independence; In the summertime I would go to La Crosse or Arcadia for weeks at a time and stay with relatives. I came to my own conclusions about religion as of the age of 6 and during the days I was responsible for myself starting at 9 or 10. Alexa tends to listen closely to my parents and adopt their points of view. She is nervous about being left to her own devices and prefers being given a track to follow or directions to consider. The second to last time I was down she made an anti-Bush crack that caught me off guard. When I asked her what it was about Bush that she disagreed with, she fumbled through an explanation of his outsourcing of port regulation to foreign interests. I pointed out that she was piecing this together from things my parents have said and that while I wasn't advocating the Bush Administration she should come to her own conclusions.

I--as the non-lifetime-movie version of the rebellious kid--ended up coming full circle to be just like my parents. I'm okay with that. Over the weekend my friends Chris and Jessica taunted me a bit about how young my parents look and act (they came to a Death Cab for Cutie show with me about two months back and came out drinking with us afterwards) and they placed my Dad at low-thirties and my Mom at late twenties. I talk very similar to my Father, both in inflection and tone, and I CAN talk about movies, shows, books, bands, work, etc with my parents and not feel like I'm "reporting in". I can only remember seeing my father inebriated a small handful of times while growing up and it was never the sort of thing to bury itself in my memory, surfacing years later to cause me great angst. It would be at weddings, if anything, and--for lack of a better description--he would be just plain silly. He'd be very excitable, happy that I was there and that I was his son, and he would start swearing liberally in good humour, as opposed to his usual four-lettter word restriction to while in excrutiating pain or when Duke was losing. As such, when my parents came out to Milwaukee for our first "get the parents drunk" day at Lakefront and Wolski's, I held great trepidation that they would frown on my affinity for The Alcohol. They had a good time, a better time on the 2nd go, and after Death Cab they met me and my friends at the bar beforehand and joined us for drinks post-show, fitting right in with us early-mid twenties folk.

My sister and I can also be peers instead of siblings. She's young but she's quick and as far as throwing down on juice boxes and forts goes--she holds her own. She loves video games and can play without handicap on Croquet now, and she tries her damndest at Frisbee Golf. My parents are satisified that I'm living on my own and paying my way; I'm not calling them up every other week looking for groceries or cash for rent, and as such they have little to hold against me. So the once every two months that I make my way to Stoughton to visit I occasionally get put into a weird position, where they're playing parents to my little sister and social peers to me. I bullshit with my dad, hear the no-holds-barred about my extended family and how they're doing from my mom, and when they have a moment of having to scold my sister it's almost like I'm seeing things from this position of someone who can do no wrong. I don't know if she sees it that way but it's a fear that I hold that she might.

So driving with my little sister in Madison, the same venture that had me spitting out math problems and random bits of trivia to test and engage her with, I asked what she would do if I packed up and moved to California. She didn't really have a response other than she'd have to come visit me often. The fact of the matter is I feel content in two situations: Oftentimes when I'm out with my friends, is the first. Not every outing, not every situation, but there are moments I'd say several times each month where I'm out with my friends enjoying some drinks and enjoying some company and I'll have an epiphany-like moment where I feel 100-percent at home and okay with the world. The other, the one that's most common, is when I'm driving. Be it coming from work or to/from Madison, if I have good music going, nothing on my agenda, and free time to think? I don't want it to end. If I was debt-free I would take a camera, a journal and my guitar and take off without a destination. Put in a couple months of wandering and then come back. I'd love to get out of the country at some point, I've never even hit the Candian border. I wouldn't do like a pre-planned and price-tagged trip out to specific countries where they show you the sights and have you partake in parasailing or any sort of hermetically sealed, packaged and polished snack-sized dilla, I'd rather just make it up as I go along. Hang out and read, fuck with the locals. Dress up in a giant fork costume and wake people up in Japanese hotels at 4 in the morning, handing out shirts that read Go Fork Yourself. Wait--that was definitely Tom Green.

This is lengthy and without form or reason and that's okay. I've got to walk out the door now, and I probably could go on and on indefinitely.

There is no connection between any of this and the dream. I wouldn't suggest anything of the sort.

On my trip home last weekend my parents ambushed me with an early birthday. By ambushed I mean I went to the store with my dad and he casually asked me what kind of birthday cake I wanted. I've never really cared for cakes, blasphemous as it is to some for me to say. I enjoy the cake part, but notsomuch the frosting, I also like the cookie part of chocolate chip cookes more that the chips. Regardless, I asked my father straight-up if he was fully aware that my birthday was at the end of the month. He was. I'm pretty sure this has something to do at least partially with the fact that I only see my parents about once every two months. Insert guilt here.

The other reasoning behind the ambush was that I didn't realize Mike and Maya and teamed up with my parents to fight crime, and that the benefits to be wrought were arriving three weeks before I enter my 23rd year so everyone decided to just go ahead and get it out of the way now. Their collaborative efforts:

I was going to just link to it but I wanted to point out the speakers. Do you see those things? This entire thing is gigantic. It's bigger than Maya is. Jesus. Those speakers though, they have mini-subs built on to them. I'm very impressed and very humbled. Any nicer and we'd be at that completely awkward level where I have to wonder if Mike is expecting me to put out.

It arrived yesterday and I broke it out. I have absolutely no idea how to play piano. I've got a musical ear and I can make do and pick up on things, but I'm a little envigorized to learn proper-like now that this thing can connect to the internet, download songs and lessons, different voices, make me coffee... It's a pretty damn cool keyboard, I have to say. I'm still a little angry because I think the only way I can match a gift like this is to offer the M&M's my first born child. And I was going to do that anyway.

I also took the M&M's out in Madison for their first excursion. We hit up Paul's Club, my Madison bar of choice, and neglected Lava Lounge, my old Madison bar of choice. We went to two of the bars on the square and the first one was indie as all hell. It actually came off as an indie dive bar, if that makes any sense, and I think with Paul's Club and The Great Dane would easily complete the triumverate of frequented bars if I lived in Madison. My buddy Jesse from the Eastside Best Buy came out as well, and we bumped into a girl named Aroby that I briefly worked with before transferring back out to Brookfield. She was carrying an empty liquor briefcase and it was no surprise to me when she turned out to be from Riverwest. Sorry, no offense meant, but Riverwester's usually have a way of standing out. After the bars we hit up Ian's Pizza (the real one, over towards Brothers) and I proved to Mike and Maya that Mac&Cheese Pizza is actually one of the greatest ideas stoners have ever produced. For serious, if you've never had Ian's Pizza: Go there and get the fucking Mac&Cheese Pizza. You will not be disappointed.

The last day there I think I almost made my dad cry when I beat him 8-2 in solo Croquet games. I have a fondness for bluffing. Note that I didn't say penchant, because bluffing tends to come back and bite me in the ass, but in a game like Croquet when you get the cat-and-mouse Poison game going I like to taunt and goad and pretend like I have a plan. With a game of this nature I also don't mind losing as long as I get to infuriate along the way. When Mike used me on the first hoop and sent me off course I told him I'd get revenge. Halfway around I used two epic turns to complete the course, become poison, and take him out at great distance. I lost the game but it didn't matter: I crushed his jovial spirit first.

Maddox's book came out last week. I picked it up. If you don't know who Maddox is then click here. If you come away unoffended then welcome, I'll see you in that really warm place once we've both passed away from old age or heart attacks or shark bites. The bit on "I can run faster, do math better and spell better than your kids. Therefore I've decided I'm fit to judge their artwork." is fucking hilarious, it's had me in tears a few times.

To wrap it up: My birthday is on June 29th, as MySpace will alert you in a couple weeks I'm sure. It's a Thursday, which is usually awesome anyway, but I've been debating between trying to get a bunch of people out or to just do the usual and collect free drinks along the way. If anyone wants to come out with us let me know sooner than later and I will figure out what's going on. If not I'll just plan on winging it like last year. I've never enjoyed birthdays, I've always thought they were uncomfortable. Might be because as a kid I usually had a broken bone or a case of chicken pox or a funeral to attend on my birthday. Last year, however, we just rolled around from noon til bar time and I got drunk and dumped beer on Alex Bryan's head. It was a good time overall. Judge's DOES offer 15 free pitchers of beer when you call in on the day of so if people want to tag along they'll have you covered. Currently I'm sitting at: Bar Hopping - Burritos [and / ] or La Fuentes - Bar Hopping - Wolski's - for the 13-hour pre-game and then we can start the real drinking.

And possibly Monocle shopping in there as well. If we could all roll like the Monopoly Guy I would be happy beyond description.

I'm sure by now everybody Ages 9-42 (M) and 14-16 (F) have noticed today's date. That's right: It's National Emo Day!

I haven't actually confirmed this but I did see it somewhere last night. Wikipedia is refusing to help me out on this one and as such we're totally not speaking.

Anyone who hasn't yet seen Dr. McNinja should click back there where I wrote the words Dr. McNinja and rectify that situation.Not the second Dr. McNinja, or now the third, but the first Dr. McNinja. Or the fourth. The current comic has Dr. McNinja fighting a velociraptor, then taming him and naming him Yoshi. He also helps track the bad guys by pulling up their MySpace blog, in a very detailed recreation with a lot of text for a sole Webcomic entry. I was impressed. I was more impressed when the bad guys emo out for an entry or two: Check that shit out. Or the fifth.

I really can't kill time today so I might have to cut this short [insert Jack's Sigh of Relief]. I do have some extended time off at the end of this week, two days of which I'm babysitting The Sister down in Stoughton and one day of which I'm rocking out at the Houston Calls concert. Anyone in the Milwaukee area should come to that show, on the 12th. Anyone in the Stoughton area--well I probably don't like you. You can try to get ahold of me but I'll probably claim that my phone was out of service or that I was stuck reading Dr. McNinja comics somewhere. That's how I fly, sorry. I don't fly very well, but I do fall pretty well and neither you nor gravity can tell me otherwise.

Ah, work.

I'm sorry... Are they serious? I saw a TV promo for this last night at my parents house and I actually thought it was going to turn out to be a Burger King or Geiko commercial. Wow. Apparently this is what a $320K/4-year trip to USC nets you now. There are words that spring to mind, but none of them seem to fit the bill. I think it's grounds for a new term to be created.

Glitter 2: The Glitterest? Wow, you really just Falcon Beached the shit out of that one, didn't you?

I caught The Walkmen at The Miramar on Friday night. I skipped out on a few of their shows over the past year or two, I'm glad I got to catch them at at a time in which I'll actually appreciate the band. The opening groups sounded okay but not anything more than that, and the first band had a female lead vocalist who made the Emo Kids in girl pants look like they move with poise and acrobatic ease. Walkmen rocked it proper-like, however, and they capped things off early enough that I could still hit Wolski's and Burritos with Tucker and Aaron. Them's good times.

Saturday I woke up and extricated myself from the Blatz so I could make that long-haul out to Stoughton. I haven't been back in a while. People there still seem to give off this Halo of Idiocy that I've just never been quite able to pinpoint. It's like when you have that friend whose house just has that... smell. Don't feel bad: My car is in the same boat. Carboat! My little sister had a dance recital in Oregon that I attended. It was cool, I don't get to see her too often and I'm more than happy to make the trip out to see anything she's in... but those recitals can be fairly disturbing. They should not be teaching certain "dance moves" to 12 and 13 year old girls. Contrary to popular belief they are not--and I repeat, not--in da club. One day, hopefully several, several years from now, they may in fact find themselves in da club. As for now, however, I'm quite glad that my 11-year old sister is still in the groups where they wear Kitty-Cat outfits and just try to stay choreographed. I also hold trepidation and fear for having to see this thing next year round because if group ascension takes place... Not cool.

We pulled the tried-and-true Beadle Method of ditching out during the intermission of the event (17 songs in of a program that was 34 songs long... I was not too disheartened) and I accompanied my parents, sister and two of her friends to the Humane Society where they have been in the process of trying to adopt a second dog. I don't like these places. I don't like them because I can't enter one without seriously considering the process of locating a volunteer form and filling it out correctly. My parents were still occasionally falling back to the debate of if they even SHOULD get a second dog, at which juncture I pointed out that by stepping foot into the Shelter they were beyond that point. You can't walk into one of those places and see the abandoned and abused animals and then walk away with an "Eh, maybe later" mindset. It doesn't happen. I've got more to cover on this venture, but it'll have to wait.