Liar

Oh by the way, that story I read about a coup maybe happening in the Philippines? Way false, man. Just talked to my mom and she said everything is copacetic. Phew.

Here, There, and Everywhere

God damn it!

My copy of the Beatles' Rubber Soul has a scratch on it, so I can't listen to "I'm Looking Through You"! Fuck!

Speaking of the Beatles, I asked my Fortran professor after class if he's from Liverpool. A dude I know was like, real serious, "I think it's England." After the prof explained to the dude that Liverpool is in England, it turned out the prof had studied in Liverpool a bit but has been told that he has a North Country accent. Then he went on about the Beatles and their accents whose intensities vary depending on their background, such as John having a heavy Liverpudlian accent and knowing Scouse because he came from a real working-class family.

So my professor is a Beatles fan, which is cool. I would have liked to have ridden the elevator with him to continue our little chat--just for the sake of conversation and not so much ass-kissing--but the "England" guy had to talk to him about stuff actually concerning the class so I left.

I used to dislike the Beatles when I was a kid. Then I got really obsessed with them, but now not so much. I realized just how much I really like them this morning during my Hydraulics class. My professor (the one with the ear hair who is, by the way, a boring and verbose motherfucker) was talking about surface tension and gave an example of beetles "knowing" about this and hence they can walk on water. When he mentioned that I thought to myself, "When did they do that?" I was thinking maybe it was an obtuse reference to John Lennon saying "We're more popular than Jesus" and it took me a while to figure out that my prof was actually talking about bugs.

And speaking of Jesus...It snowed in the DC area recently so the ground is wet all around here. On the train station floor, I saw what seemed to be the face of Jesus Christ drawn in the mud. Now I am a good Catholic boy and I don't mean to be blasphemous, but I was wondering about the possibility that this could have been a miracle. Of course it's purely coincidental that the mud took the shape of Christ and one might imagine a lot more things that the mud might look like. Incidentally, a study just ended about a statue of the Madonna that shed tears of blood a decade ago which concluded that the incident was "supernatural". Hmmm...

There is a Light that Never Goes Out

I'm very nervous right now. I just came across an article online and--although for me, its veracity is questionable--it seems that a coup d'etat is brewing in the Philippines, and while it won't be the first, it's pretty scary. I remember waking up one night to the sound of gunfire and explosions and flashes of light. We shall see if it ever comes to that.

I sure hope it doesn't.

Epic Problem

I am addicted to porn. :'(

Now there is precedence. We must celebrate our, er, idiosyncrasies.

It was the birthday of a high school buddy a couple of days ago. Happy birthday, Io. Ingat, pare.

In case you weren't wondering, I was joking. I'm not the first to admit to this sort of thing. I think it was Michael Douglas.

Aladdin Sane

I had a lot of fun by myself today. Not that way, sicko! After my classes ended before noon today, I decided to go crazy and watch two, count 'em, two movies. What was I thinking?! I'm insane! Watch out!

First: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. It's a Wes Anderson movie which means I know I like it even before I see it, and the first five seconds of the movie only serve as proof that the movie is a classic.

One of my favorite aspects of any Wes Anderson movie is the soundtrack, and The Life Aquatic is no different. Mark Mothersbaugh, late of Devo, does the score once again, and once again it's utterly charming. But the best and most interesting part of the soundtrack are the David Bowie songs that were Jobim-ized by Seu Jorge. Beautiful, just beautiful.

But perhaps the best thing The Life Aquatic (and I'm going to be biased here) are the Filipino pirates! Hooray! Hearing Bud Cort (Harold and Maude) speaking Filipino was pretty funny and seeing Bill Murray (Steve Zissou) kill them all to The Stooges' "Search and Destroy" was just super.

So that movie started at noon and ended around two so I had two-and-a-half hours to kill before Sideways started. So I left the theater to look for someplace to eat. Being in the middle of DC, I knew this place called Ollie's Trolley was nearby. I was told to go there by friends of mine. The thing with that place is that they only accept cash, which can be a problem for me, but after ascertaining I had enough I went there and had a burger and their fries, which they season with 25, yes, twenty-five spices. Mmmm.......... If you're ever in the area...

After eating I still had about an hour-and-a-half to go, so I loitered around Barnes and Noble, which was boring. After less then an hour, I decided to fuck it and just go in and wait in the theater for the movie to start.

Four-thirty. The cinema darkens, the previews roll. Then Sideways starts. It's a Paul Giamatti movie, what else is there to say? That guy is one of the best actors around. It's funny as hell, although I found it very sad because I could relate so much with Giamatti's uneasy, unstable, and neurotic character. Please tell me it's not just me!

Fuck this Shit, Part II

I had writtten around five paragraphs and then I realized they weren't funny and were just boring old updtes so I decided, you know, fuck it.

By now I've gone to all my classes. So what else is new? School sucks.

Gawd, I hate school. I like...pie.

Fuck this Shit

Back to school! I always wondered as a kid why stores made such a big deal about going back to school. I'd see all their signs advertising their back-to-school sales and I would get very, very depressed.

I've aged a lot since then. I'm older, wiser, and I actually am looking out for my future. And you know what? Going back to school still sucks.

I go to a pretty high-end university in Washington DC but I get a discount and I am not nearly as wealthy as a lot of my schoolmates. For example, I don't have and iPod. Instead, I have a CD player, which is, like, so 2003. Another example is this great meeting I was lucky enough to see between two lovely young brats who saw each other for the first time since the winter vacation. One was admiring the other's obviously fashionable boots, which made me recall instantly the song 'Poses' by Rufus Wainwright where he sings about there never being such grave a matter as comparing a certain article of clothing, whether it is sunglasses or leather jackets, I can't remember.

I hitch a ride to school, so today I was there a lot earlier than my first class. So I went to the library and took a nap and checked out the book about the Velvet Underground called 'Up-Tight'. It's very reassuring to know that one's school is not as uptight, no pun intended, as one thinks. So it's cool that we have that book and similar ones on our shelves. The literature books are ace too.

I had three classes today. First: Hydraulics. Sounds fun, eh? Luckily the professor was in first-day mode, and so he gave a semi-interesting lecture of the history of hydraulics, beginning with those civilizations that were set up near rivers like Egypt, Mesopotamia, et cetera, if you still remember your ancient history. Alas, his lecture was not as interesting as his ear hair, which totally mesmerized me every time I saw the side of his head.

Second: Fortran. This is a freshman class that I have to take (I'm a junior) because I transferred from community college and had not taken a similar course before. We're off to a very bad start with that class. Very boring first lecture, binary and hexadecimal counting systems, blah, blah blah. The professor for this one has an interesting accent, Liverpudlian perhaps. Will have to ask him. I wonder if he's met the Beatles? He certainly is the right age.

Finally: Reinforced concrete structures. SNORE.

I guess it's pretty apparent by now that I am a civil engineering student. If you guessed so, you're right! Congrats! You should be glad you stayed in school. Anyway, I've two new classes to attend to-morrow. Oh, I can't wait!

I'm Indie, Baby

I saw two great foreign films this week. I'm really sleepy right now, but I want to write a bit about them, in case, you know, no one reads this.

Friday was the day after one of my cousin's birthday, and we planned to watch the new Wes Anderson movie. The audience was seated and the movie began--but it was the wrong movie! It was the new Adam Sandler movie! So we left and got our money back since there wasn't much we felt like watching. I must admit I did want to see A Very Long Engagement but then I didn't think it would be something she'd want to watch. So we rented.
She'd never seen There's Something About Mary so she rented that one. I too felt like seeing it, for since I'd last seen it I've found out that the guy who keeps singing throughout the movie is none other than Jonathan Richman. I wanted to rent Run Lola Run a.k.a. Lola Rennt because I've recently developed a crush on Franka Potente.

While the title of this entry is an ironic statement, one I might make with just the right hint of indignation in my tone to convey hip I am, I do love 'independent' and foreign films, and not because it's cool to do so. Thus I suppose it's taken quite a while for me to see Lola, given that it came out in '98. So let me hide behind the fact that it is quite difficult to find new foreign and 'independent' movies in the Philippines, which is precisely where I am not right now on account of my trying to get a good college education and while I am now in a place where such movies prove to be easy acquisitions, I am also broke.

Run Lola Run is a German film written and directed (and scored, I might add) by Tom Tykwer, then the boyfriend of the star of the film, Franka Potente. The plot is simple: Lola must obtain and deliver 100,000 Deutschemarks to her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) in twenty minutes, hence all that running. The whole movie looks like one whole techno music video but is also nice study on destiny and the ramifications of the little things that happen--things we do or fail to do, perhaps--as we approach that destiny. I had on good authority for almost a year now that it was a great movie, and boy, was it ever.
This is stuff I've thought about for a while now and thought I was just being paranoid or something, you know, like if I decided not to type this tonight and wait till morning. But it needn't be that momentous an event. When I decide to take a swig from the bottle of water that is next to my computer or even when I decide to blink my eyes--even those tiny things may influence the future. Is that called the butterfly effect? I may have to check that movie out too, but it looks so crappy.

I did get around to seeing A Very Long Engagement. Just came home from it tonight with my sister. It is a great movie, very touching. It's directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and stars Audrey Tautou, whom he also directed in Amelie. A wonderful love story, that's all.
The title to me sounds like the movie could be an old French comedy, which it isn't (although it would be considered a comedy in the classical sense that the Dantean trilogy is a comedy). Beautiful locations, nicely shot, in my opinion. Very French, very, very lovely.

I wonder if Jeunet and Tautou are a couple? It may very well be so. There are many examples of directors coupling with their leading ladies, like Tykwer and Potente, as well as Luc Besson and Milla Jovovich. I suppose the directors do get very close to the actors during filming and there will be mutual admiration, especially if they are making a great film. Then there is also something like that which goes on between Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino, where Tarantino seems to be in love with Thurman in a non-sexual way, as if he worships her like a goddess (and what man wouldn't?). It really shouldn't matter as long as they make great films, but for some reason it interests me.

Incidentally both Potente and Jovovich sport bright-red hair in Lola and The Fifth Element, respectively. Why is bright-red hair so hot?

WHFS, We Hardly Knew You

99.1 WHFS is a radio station that plays "alternative rock" here in the Washington DC area. Or, rather, it is a station that played alternative rock. At 12:00 pm EST Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye" faded out and was followed by "WHFS transmitiendo desde la ciudad capital de America: Esta es tu nuevo radio!" It is now a Spanish-language station targeted at a Central-American and Caribbean audience.

The change was a capitalist move, pure and simple, a way to make money off the growing Hispanic population of the area. It's all about money, a fact that any rational human being above the age of twelve should know, especially an American.

The sad part is that he doesn't. A lot of them don't. There is a petition to sign on the web to bring back the old format of WHFS. I signed it. I reviewed the other signatures. I wish I hadn't signed it. An alarming lot of the petition was bigoted libel aimed mostly at Mexicans as if Mexico is the only country in the Central American and Caribbean region. In my opinion, it's another glaring example that racism is alive and well in America. It merely hibernates until it has a reason, even a poor one, to rear its hideous head.

I hardly ever listened to 99.1. It's on my car's preset because there are only two rock stations here, but I always listen to CD's and when I do listen to the radio, it's mostly to public radio. The reason I signed the petition was a story I read about a girl who was introduced to Lloyd Cole's Rattlesnakes album by WHFS. I figured that a station that points a girl in the right direction like that can't be bad at all. Of course a lot has changed since 1984 and now the typical WHFS audience consists of people who will walk out on a Cure performance, which is just what happened when said legends were headlining the annual HFStival.

It is often pointed out that American society is one of immigrants, including the whites. The "Spics" that WHFS listeners so charmingly told to "go back to Mexico" have just as much right to their own radio station as the whites. And I'd rather it went to the Mexicans.

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Caveat Emptor

I'm rather pissed off right now because I may have been gypped 60 bucks from a guy at half.com. I was looking for a certain textbook and he was selling it the cheapest. He had the picture of the book right and all but when it got to me it was the old edition. Fuck. I've contacted him and I'm waiting for a response from him before I leave him any negative feedback (ebay etiquette). I'm giving him a week to at least respond. I suppose it was equally my fault since i failed to make sure which edition I needed, but him being the experienced seller that he is should have made sure that he put up the proper picture of the book. Also, in my defence, he had 2003 listed as the year of the book, which is the year i need. He just had the wrong edition.
So I decided to buy the correct book from another seller this time for 70 bucks, and this time I made sure I had the right edition and all. So all in all if the first guy does rip me off, then that's 130 bucks for the book, right? It seems like a lot, I know, but my school bookstore is selling it for 150 bucks so I still save. How fucked-up is that?

Having worked in a college bookstore, I can tell you first hand that those places rip students off. They buy the books wholesale really cheap and then the markup is extraordinary! Then if you want to sell your books back it's more likely you'll get back a tenth of what you originally payed for the book than the promised maximum of half, that is if they buy your book back at all. That said, don't take it out on the employees! It's not their fault that the books are that expensive or that they're not buying your books back. They're just doing their jobs. The bookstore has to make money and book buyback is dictated by whether there is on-campus or national demand for the book you're trying to get rid of.

The smartest way to go that I so far know of is to get your books through the miracle of the internet. It's cheap and you don't have to leave the house. Keep the title of this blog in mind though: caveat emptor! I had to learn that the hard way!

Drive My Car

Got my car serviced yesterday. Nothing major--replaced front brakes, cleaned rear brakes, and rotated tires. Eighty bucks that I don't mind spending. I drive a Subaru and I just love her. I've crashed it badly, hit a deer, hydroplaned and skidded and she's still in one piece, getting me places, never letting me down. Man, I love that car.

I archived all my stuff from last semester. Generally I would just throw that stuff out but now I've begun thinking about things like whether or not I'm going to be getting my engineering license after I get my degree. Should I decide to do so, then there will be that big test to worry about and hopefully I'll know where my notes are, and I can learn that shit all over again. A professor of mine once told me that you go to college to learn how to learn, and if you've learned something once then you can certainly learn it again. That's golden advice right there. Keep that in mind.

While getting that done, I was listening to two interesting albums: Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister and Love's Forever Changes. Both are great. They're very similar, too, though there's around thirty years between them. B&S do sound like they're from the sixties and I've just now thought about it but maybe the conjunction in their title gives their sound away (i.e. Chad and Jeremy, the Mamas and the Papas, etc.) Anyway, Sinister and Changes both have the whole Phil Spector wall-of-sound thing going on in them, which I always loved, and, of course, they're both just a solid bunch of songs. If you've got money to spare (who does?) you may want to consider either, particularly the Love LP. If a woman comes up to a man's room and sees those records she will think he is intelligent, sophisticated, and sensitive and then he has her. Trust me on that one.

Right.

On to vacuuming the house.

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Number One Blog

Got a lot done today.

Went to school to return library books, pay tuition, and see about which textbooks I'm going to be needing this sem.

I also applied for a job at the campus bookstore. If I get it, it'll be my second job in a college bookstore (I am starting to see a trend here). I don't plan to keep this job very long though. Campus bookstores hire a whole bunch of people during the rush of the first two weeks of school and I figured I could really use the cash and since I've expereience already then I can get cracking ASAP. After that it'll be all about studying for me. Have a GPA to worry about.

On the train home a grown man was picking his nose. It's a good sign that something like that happened the day I started this thing. Keep it coming.

I also bought bread and made arrangements to get my brakes and tires looked at tomorrow since I am not good with cars at all.

All this done before 1 pm. Am I the image of efficiency or what?