let's get on the same page

• i got my hair cut. short.
• that grey hair really is sneaking up on me.
• i'm in san jose now for work. but as i think i've probably said before, the inside of a conference center looks mostly the same no matter where you go. same with airports and hotel rooms.
• i do, however, have a king-sized bed in this particular room. last night i slept sideways.
• i am sick as a dog and i can't seem to shake it.
• there are forklifts whizzing by me every few seconds, which is pretty cool. did you ever see that german forklift safety video? it's awesomely bloody and campy and i never did find out if it was for real or not but it sure is awesome.
• i'm in computer transition. it's not really an excuse for not writing on here since transition or not i am very rarely more than 30 feet from a keyboard. it should, however, make the music recording process a bit easier this time around.
• i do, eventually, plan on recording some more songs.

dublin: everything else

here's the rest of everything i scribbled in dublin. i feel like a butthead for being to lazy to type this out for so long.

last night we ate at eddie rockets (like johnny rockets, only eddie's). surely a very expensive market research study is behind this. [turns out they're not connected. who knew?] Similarly so for tk maxx. [who are connected to tj maxx.] i ordered the atomic burger in desperate search for some spice (they don't seem to like spice very much here) and even though it had jalapeños and chili on it, it was still...middlingly spicy. but delicious.

we've done a ton of tour bus rides. some of the drivers tell the same jokes as each other ("if you look closely at the ground level of the department of defense, you can see de-fence!") but they're all quite funny and it's a surprisingly effective way to see some things you don't have time to see up close. i'd recommend it to anyone.

you can walk pretty much everywhere here in about 10 minutes. the crosswalk system is mind-boggling, so everyone jaywalks. which is dangerous if you're always looking the wrong way for oncoming traffic. on more than one occasion we could have known first hand what it would be like for a double-decker bus to crash into us (to die by your side...). the walk signals here make laser gun noises to alert you that it's ok to cross the street.

i've taken a lot of photographs of buildings. and statues. i've already forgotten the stories behind most...but they sure are nice to look at. it's a beautiful city. you can see basically all of it from the guinness storehouse's "gravity bar," which is only 7 stories up.



guinness is like budweiser here, which is funny. they have branding in the windows of almost every pub. it has the same effect on the locals, it seems, as budweiser's stateside omnipresence has: people who order guinness seem to me to be people who only drink guinness. everyone else drinks cooler beers, like bud and heineken. crazy world.

we toured the dublin castle today, which remains a functional government building. strange to think that ireland has only been a completely sovereign nation for 85 years. they've had a woman president since 1995 and will until at leat 2014. cool.


saw a fish & chips place that apparently springsteen himself has visited (lots of other famous folks, too) but we'd already eaten chips at a different place across the liffey, about a 10 minute's walk away. [too bad really, apparently burdock's has the best fish & chips in all of ireland, if those reviews are to be believed.]
it was supposed to rain the whole time we were here. we fly out tomorrow morning, and no rain yet. [it did rain the morning we left.] it's been about 40º - 50º F, too. which is outright balmy compared to nyc lately. i'd really like to stay here a while longer.

dublin: first impressions

god damn, i am miserably bad at following through with my promises these days. blame crackdown. here's the first bit of pictures and some scribblings from my recent trip to dublin. i've tried to remain faithful to whatever it is that i seemed to mean at the time.

(most of my pictures look like this. i have no idea what it is.)

i find myself eavesdropping a lot. on every conversation i can, actually. i like the accent, i guess. and how they call people "lads" instead of "guys."

(molly malone statue at grafton street)

our hotel room is nice. the bathroom sink has a shallow basin and a faucet with comically aggressive water pressure, which makes for a pretty cool booby-trap.

(looking out over dublin from the top of the guinness storehouse. i'm getting my hair cut really soon, mom.)

the city's centre (see what i did there?) doesn't have many (any) tall buildings.

there don't seem to be any investment bankers lurking about here.

(the black stuff.)

the street signs (when there are any) are right on the corners of buildings and they're really easy to miss. it's easy to get lost but the city seems small so thusfar it's also been easy enough to get found again.

(awesome neon sign in temple bar. why indeed.)

jetlag

i sure have missed you. i thought about you a few times while i was gone, even. "gone where," you say? well, for the first half of last week i was bumming around in the waldorf=astoria*. long story short, a free room came by way of my girlfriend (work related), and there aren't many things that i like more than sitting around and doing nothing, which is exactly what i did there while she worked. then at night we had some nice dinners. i didn't take a single picture of the place. so...imagine a hotel room. that's what it looked like. the rest of the events that transpired there need not be repeated.

and then we took off for a weekend in dublin. regular jetsetters, we are. and i did take a lot of pictures in dublin. i'll be posting a bunch later. i scribbled a bunch of notes to you while i was there, too. i'll spend some time later in the week decoding from those pages what it is exactly that i meant to tell you. i figure wherever i can, i'll include pictures to break up the babble. that'll be keen.



so i'll catch up with you soon with some irish shit. right now, it's bedtime. work tomorrow, you know.

* did you know it's a hilton hotel? gross.

pestilence

tragedy and danger have befallen the house of lords (which i've recently decided is what i'm calling roddy's 6 gallon tank) in the form of the dread pirate ick*. our brave little hero is currently undergoing treatment that turns his water blue. his only public reaction to the matter thus far, predictably, has been "this is bullshit." he has no further statement at this time and i ask that you respect his privacy as he deals with this matter in the only way he knows how: the manly way.

"this is bullshit."

* ick is really a parasite called Ichthyophthirius multifiliis, not a pirate.

unsubstantial

in the (far too) well recorded history of blogs, there have certainly been many updates the are...unneccessary. this is one such entry.

i've been casually playing around with php, mostly out of boredom. soon most of the pages on this site (not the blog, though) will be in php instead of html. i'll probably start making the easiest stuff live tonight. i'm more than a little excited, honestly. because i'm more than a little nerdy.

continuing right along this gnarly path, i got rid of the unsightly counter at the bottom of this page for something less...asenine. google analytics. i can't say enough nice things about it. or about you, strangers and friends, who come here. thanks to google analytics i now know that by a very narrow margin, more of you use firefox than use internet explorer. i am so proud of you. i'm beaming.

my friend adam, who is doing a lot more with his life than i am with mine, started a blog this month. he's a good writer and he's in peru doing interesting things so he's got plenty to write about. if you're looking for one more thing to read during the day, consider stopping by.

ybor city is tres speedy but they throw such killer parties

statistically speaking, today was the most depressing day of the year. because it was the monday of the most depressing week of the year. there are people who sit at desks and get paid to come up with this kind of thing. depressing, depressing people.

me, i was doing pretty good until i watched 24. and then i played gears of war and got my ass handed to me by foul-mouthed, wretched little children. now i hate myself for liking that godforsaken show, and for sucking at that godforsaken game. but i guess i'm still not depressed.

i saw the hold steady play at northsix last week. i wrote about it today at work, but i figured i'd mention it here too, since they were so god damn fucking amazing and i'm reluctant to use such strong language when my paycheck depends on it. here's a video of them on letterman the week prior. watch it and then believe me when i tell you that they were roughly ten million times better in person.

this weekend i had some pretty good food. there's a malaysian place on grand street (the little italy part, not the chinatown part) called nyonya and they have this dessert called peanut pancake which may or may not be laced with narcotics, because it took me to new and higher places, in a spiritual sense. make sure you get the coconut ice cream on it. i had some goat meat on west 160th street also. and a burrito. a really good burrito.

in february i'm going to dublin for a few days to see if it's really true what they say about the irish and drinking. my motives are purely scholastic, and i'll have a full report to you upon my return.

i tried to quit coffee for a while but today i remembered how much i like coffee. same goes for white castle, actually. damn.

new york is cold but i like where i'm living

it feels like it's been forever since my last bizarre subway experience, so i guess i've been due for one. today at pacific street a guy got on with a crumpled yellow piece of paper in his hand, all smiles and handshakes, and introduced himself in the brokenest of englishes to me, despite my headphones.

i was understanding maybe one word out of every twenty, and a lot of those were the same few words over and over. he wanted my help translating a ticket he had just been written by transit cops (did you even know they really do that?!) for "reclining" on a crowded n-train. according to him, he just had his feet up, and the cops came over and asked his name and address and handed him a ticket. for fifty dollars.

he laughed it off though. told me how many hours of work at the restaurant it would be to erase it, and proceeded then to talk my ear off for the duration of my ride.

he said i had a nice face, that i would be popular in shanghai, where he was from. but that shanghai would make me miss new york. at this point in my smiling and nodding i think i might have agreed to visit him there.

he also went into a very detailed explanation of why it's important not to get married and at what age it becomes okay and mostly (i think) it came down to money but he kept saying "downstairs" and i don't know what he meant by that but i kinda doubt it's what you're thinking he meant. i really wish i could've understood more.

anyway, it was kinda cool. when i got up to leave he said "see you in shanghai" and i said "see you there" and then that was it.

oh yeah and he was wearing a bike helmet the whole time. no bike though.

my friend laura salierno has some photos up for the next month or so at a bar called punch and judy. i went to a reception there tonight and caught up with some people that i really should call more often. if you're around clinton street (there's music there all through the evening) you should stop by. one of the photos has me in it, which is kinda neat, if you're me. but all of them are really very wonderful.

the candy store

one of the main reasons i post less on here these days is that all the things i find myself wanting to write about are better written elsewhere.

there was something that i meant to write about but forgot to, though. when i read yesterday that somebody had died as a result of the same arctic swim i was bragging about, it popped back into my head. if you don't feel like reading the article, he didn't die from being cold or anything. he injured his spinal cord somehow by diving in. it's still a huge tragedy, i only mention that because i don't want my mom to freak out. hi mom.

but reading about something so sad reminded me of something else i saw that day. being that it's winter and coney island is decidedly a summer destination, most of the shops on or around the boardwalk are boarded up. it's a bleak scene, to say the least, when a crowd of over a thousand is gathered on the boardwalk in broad daylight, surrounded by closed shops. but some shops never close (nathan's hot dogs are better than almost everything), and a few seem to make a special effort to open up for coney island's best-attended off-season event.

after the swim, the crowd basically retreats en masse down stillwell avenue, and most seem to stop at nathan's, which is at the corner of stillwell and surf. a little further down surf avenue there is a candy shop. bright colors, candy apples, etc. the kind of candy shop that there probably aren't many left of and that can only still exist in places like coney island. we stopped at nathan's on the way out (even though we had also stopped there on the way in) and walking down surf avenue towards our car, we passed the candy shop.

the shops on either side were closed up, but the candy shop was open, and the owner was just standing in the doorway, looking defeated while throngs of people (including us) walked by with nathan's hot dogs in hand.

anyway. i just got the impression that he had opened the doors specially for the occasion, and not many people appreciated it. and that made me a little sad.

in other news, i wrote about this already for work, but roddy woomble's (he's the singer in idlewild) solo record my secret is my silence blew me away this week. even though it came out months ago. better late than never, right?

oh, and also, i got a big snail to live with roddy and eat algae. his name is spencer and i haven't taken a picture yet. this morning he was all hiding in his shell instead of crawling around and it has me a little worried. please keep him in your thoughts.

happy new year

happy new year, everybody. last new year's day i wrote some shit and...well now that i look back i realize that it was mostly incoherent. so nevermind.

but you know, january 1 is as good a day as any (some would say better even) to take stock a bit. current status: pretty rad. 2006 was a bit of a roller coaster (i guess they pretty much all are), but right now i really feel like i'm on the right track for some good things to happen to me in 2007*.

to celebrate my reckless optimism, i jumped into the ocean today. it wasn't so bad, since the air was almost 60°, but the water sure was cold. one of my partners in crime had the foresight to bring a waterproof camera, so i'll post pictures on here eventually as evidence, provided i don't look fat or something.

please believe me when i tell you that i will brag about this for months to come. if not years. you'd do best to smile and nod.

i've been listening a lot lately to margot & the nuclear so and so's. you might like them, too.


*impromptu resolution: use less parentheses (they really are a crutch for me).