Please Come Dive In Puddles With Me

Gareth Campesinos! of the frequently-lauded-by-me Los Campesinos! commented me on MySpace today. It was in response to a kind of catty remark I left them about how their Philadelphia show was 21+ and I was curious if anyone in the band was even 21. He fucking owned me and I felt like such a loser, haha. But Gareth! Second-tier lyricist of my dreams (only to Britt, of course, who is simply grown-up American GX)! Pretty cool. Peep that shit, link to the left.

I just had a bowl of ice cream... for the third time today. I guess I can live with that because I've been telling myself that when the weather gets bearable, I'm going to run when I'm not riding my bike when I'm not doing push-ups. Safeway makes Butterfinger ice cream which should really be considered a controlled substance by the FDA. You take a bite. "Mm, so good." You fill a bowl and you enjoy to the point where the ice cream acts as a pair of headphones and blocks out the rest of the world. You go back for seconds... and then thirds. And it can really become a problem when you live out winter in a sedentary fashion.

Which kind of brings me to my next point: I can't wait for some good romps around the forest and down down the train tracks. There's nothing I see more in my mind lately than what lies on the other side of Route 52. It's another world, another school district (Unionville-Chadds Ford). First, there are the neighborhoods. Who lives in there? Is that youth I see? No matter, for I am venturing down the train tracks, separated from the rest of the universe on both sides by amazing Pennsylvania forest. Every now and then you come to a large farm and beautiful, rolling deserted fields... the kind I always imagined reading in with a female (Isobel Campbell?). It's the best way to spend a Sunday afternoon or a Wednesday after school. I need it. When the fuck are the leaves and warm weather making a return? Anyone have a Farmer's Almanac handy?

Finally yrs,
Joe (watching Degrassi for the first time in forever... um.)


P.S. Aw fuck, Leap Day! It got away from me too quickly... See you in four years, 29.2!

Fuck

HEY, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY. STOP JERKING ME THE FUCK AROUND AND DENY ME ADMISSION, ALREADY.

Look, I'm tired of coming home from school every day with this thought in my head: "Hey, it would be really awesome if I got a letter from Temple today." And I open the mailbox. And it's J. Crew catalogs and it's bills and it's overdraft notices addressed to me and it's rent checks from some guy in Havre De Grace, Maryland. And I walk in, slightly dejected, to my house and I check TUportal and see that my application is still on "Hold" like it has been since December 14, 2007. If I got in, my first tuition check and I would be a high enough priority to be notified by now. So, I wait in fuckingturmoil while they sit in their cubicles trying to figure out why I was such a mediocre student and why I thought to only apply to two schools. At the same time, my guidance department is laughing their ass off because I wasn't athletic enough to pay any mind and I wasn't sensible enough to apply to more than two schools and that I spent all my money on a shit high school, paying a shit guidance department to do absolutely nothing that doesn't involve patting someone's back in the cafeteria so I can't even afford the one place I got into.

Your OwlNet Session has timed out.

Fuck you, fuck OwlNet! I don't need your bullshit!

HAGGARD

This is what the school week does to me. This is how I feel before going to bed Thursday nights, later than any other night of the week. Why do I do this to myself?

Oh My God

Just a little while ago, walking through the hall between homeroom and second period study hall, I felt the most incredible spirit-crush. It was horrible! I can't wait to get out of this fucking place. I don't know what it was. Oh, I do. I said Hi to one of my old teachers, he's now academic dean and suddenly I was just sad. This guy used to be cool, now he's stressed-the-fuck-out and ambitious. He's faking it, just like over 3/4s of the rest of the school with him. I'm even guilty of it - that's when my spirit gets crushed. Oh. My. God.

Mother, Won't You Hear My Desperate Cries I'm Calling In?

I find it hard to make room for a band like Neutral Milk Hotel and a songwriter like Jeff Magnum anymore. I love In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, don't get me wrong. The record came out ten years ago this month, replete with magazine articles and blog entries about its legacy. I love it - but I can't listen to it anymore. It just aspires to be too much for my liking. I think it's that Jeff Magnum, the figure behind NMH, is just like too much of a fragile, abnormal, hard to relate with guy for me. I'm reading about him on Slate as I write this. "At home in the collective's base of Athens, Ga., or out on his peregrinations, Mangum cut a strange figure: a long-locked, intense-looking man with a gale-strength singing voice who liked to wear garish thrift-store sweaters and embellish the cuffs of his pants with cartoon sketchings." I can't listen to people like that because I don't think they would like me if they met me. I am nothing like that. I don't do anything that he does, so that kind of drives me away from his music. It did't initially, when I didn't know much about Magnum, just that he had a fucking knack for melody and clever songwriting. Then, the whole "Two-Headed Boy" movement got to me... all like, the "beautiful sadness" in those songs were way too much. I'd have to be feeling really self-serious to listen to that without cringing or skipping over it after a few seconds of play. This is someone who cried for days and almost blamed himself for what happened after reading Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. I cry when I read lots of books, but it just feels weird to listen to someone like Magnum, unstable and always taking things to the extreme - like his near-silence since 1998.

His mysticism bothers me almost to a point of disgust. The same goes for people like Bob Dylan, Sam Beam (pre-Woman King), Morrissey, Brian Wilson, Panda Bear... my mind is blanking but there are more. I can listen to these people in doses sometimes, but the alienation their lives and music are centered on just alienates me. That music doesn't please me. What does is like, the opposite: music that is literally social. Stuart Murdoch's storytelling about the kids you know at prep-school in Belle and Sebastian, Broken Social Scene's communal approach to making music, punk bands like the Loved Ones that are writing for us, not to get rid of some crazy fucking demons.

And then of course, there's Los Campesinos!, lol, whose record I still can't get over. I've listened to Hold On Now, Youngster... way too much the last few days. It doesn't like speak strictly for me because it's not like I can relate to every single lyric on the record. But it's like the lives of several likeminded teenagers being played out in stereo. It's not just the lyrics either, they play music amazingly and like, it's clever; the parts where they decide to yell along a line with whoever is taking lead, the windy little synth parts in the album's midsection, the aural cacophony of their sound in general. Glockenspiel, distorted guitars, xylophone, violin, synth, drums that sound like they're about to be knocked over. Don't let me talk about this record any longer, talk about it yourselves! Ask me to burn it for you (it's not available stateside yet, but I'm a little pirate so...)! Hopefully, you won't regret it.

Unalienatedly yours,
Joe

New Search Powers

My friend is going through a crisis (I hope she doesn't mind I'm mentioning it.) It's kind of a quarterlife thing where she's at college and realizing everything is different and there aren't friends at that stage in life. Where I'm going is this: that's exactly what I've been afraid is going to happen to me as soon as next-fucking-year, so lately my life has been a mad rush to be alive and have good times and some other, erm, things. But I think I'm moving at a good pace, mostly. I'm able to take most things in because I'm not doing schoolwork. I have to spend the week without most of my friends most of the time anyway, so I never take that shit for granted. Anyway, here are pictures from Alex's surprise party and a few of the aftermath.

How the fuck do I get less noise on this camera? I thought it was going to be God's gift to me, but whenever I shoot at 400 ISO or above without flash, the pictures look amazing on the camera but so shitty on my computer. Anyone know? Didn't think so...























































































































That's a wrap, life rules, pretty much.