bone in sub

at dinner with girlfriend:

her : “what do you want to get after dinner?”
me : “some fruit maybe.”
her : “what are you into?”
me : “you”
her : “but fruit-wise, what are you into?”
me : “christian bale”

i just celebrated in one party: my graduation, my 22nd birthday, my dad’s 50th birthday, father’s day. it was a big party. my uncle and i put together a band for my dad’s 50th and we played a few of his favorite songs as a big surprise, the first being rapper’s delight. we played the hook which is pretty unrecognizable while my dad was handed the (six pages of) lyrics, and the crowd reaction when we jumped into the actual song was amazing.

why did i have to do the electric slide for so many things in elementary school?

what’s the deal with that song, “i’m proud to be an american”?

why are groups of japanese businessmen so awesome?

i walked my graduation thing, that’s over with. no more school.

after 10000 years here i am; i think what happened is that i generally write in this to procrastinate, and since school is over and any work i’m doing is enjoyable now, i don’t have very much procrastinating to get done.

i got my official final transcript, i’m graduated with a bachelor of art in music performance. i was a little bit worried because i didn’t really watch any of the 20-something movies we had studied over the entire year in my film elective (that i needed to graduate), but i passed that. i also turned in my astronomy term paper (30% of the final mark) a week late for a total of 25% off. i passed with 6 As, a B, and 2 Ds. sick.

my latest project has been getting video editing going on my new macbook. i’m going to continue to edit in vegas 8, using parallels, because i don’t need a lot of power (all my source video is NTSC-DV widescreen, 720×480p) and i know the program. the problem was getting the video off of the minidv tapes - the new macbooks don’t have firewire, there’s literally zero hardware support for getting video off of panasonic cameras via usb2 in osx, and all of the windows programs either don’t behave in parallels or are terrible (dropped frames like crazy). i eventually settled on ripping to an external drive through another computer with firewire, a more than adequate solution. now i can process all these recital videos i’ve been shooting and free up all seven of my full tapes.

some fun stuff from weekend work in the past month:
(older guy picking out some paper) “it needs to be stiff. being stiff is a good thing in life. i’m not going to elaborate. yes i am. viagra is good for that.”

(different older guy getting cashed out by someone else) (to me:) “have you ever weight trained?” “yes, i work out” “you just have the bone structure for it. you know what i’m talking about. i bet you get great results.”

during a big sale, fat 30-something with his mother (???) buys the last of a product that was supposedly put on hold for an old bargain-hunting princess. BHP sees this after the purchase is finished and grabs onto it as he’s walking out the door and starts screaming. he doesn’t let go and starts yelling in a super whiny voice “STOP IT! YOU’RE HURTING ME! MOM!”. i love it, two people with a combined age of 100 acting like they’re both 5.

i saw star trek 2 weeks ago and terminator last week. star trek was probably the best looking movie i’ve ever seen, i mean supposedly there are ridiculous lens flares but somehow it didn’t bother me. terminator had the best sound of any movie that i can remember - the sound for all the robots was sooo perfect.

last weekend i took sunday off and drove with a couple other graduates of my program for a gig at michael stätlander’s farm/restaurant in collingwood (actually singhampton) for the wild leek festival. we played hand drums in the middle of a forest a little ways off from the festival. that might have been the best (high gourmet) food i’ve ever eaten? 12 famous/amazing chefs each prepared one dish. jamie kennedy made a water buffalo yogurt & sweet potato curry thing that was incredible. one of the members of nexus (robin) came and played with us for a bit.

over the past couple weeks i’ve started to see new street signs around the city.

they look like this:

awful! i think they’re disgusting, and i suspect they’re meant to match the horrible 1998-style trash bins that are also being installed all over. textured beige plastic belongs on children’s playgrounds and nothing else.

i’ll miss the old signs very much:

a fun time:

driving back from a gig in oakville (with my girlfriend and her harp in the car, she also played) last week, in a borrowed car. the car’s brakes had been really noisy for the past couple days, just making a scraping sound like they need new pads. something new happens when i’m backing out of the performance venue - when going in reverse, it’s like driving with the brakes on. it feels like i’m hitting something and it’s extremely loud. ok, that’s bad, whatever, don’t go in reverse.

i get on the QEW (arterial highway) heading back downtown at 11pm on a rainy night. as i’m getting up to speed, there’s a little bit of a “clunk” sound from the back of the car. i don’t think this is an issue. there aren’t many cars and the weather isn’t terrible, so i do 120 all the way.

around the kipling exit (20 minutes along), i slow down a little as traffic is increasing a bit. i say ’slow down’, but i mean ‘try to’, because when i press the brake pedal NOTHING HAPPENS. i press it all the way down, and feel the front brakes respond a tiny bit, this is a bad thing. since cars steer with the front wheels only, braking with the front wheels only (especially on a wet road) would make the car spin out. i feel myself losing a little bit of control even trying to slow with the front wheels only, so i give that up.

i have only one recurring nightmare: driving a car with brakes that barely work. i get it about once every two months, and i always wake up all sweaty with my heart beating fast, like hayden christensen in “star wars 2″.

now this is happening in real life, i’m on a big highway with no brakes going 120, and my easily excited girlfriend is in the car. i decide to just not tell her what’s going on and get off at the next exit, assuming i can slow down enough. i carefully get in the left lane and completely stop using the accelerator. by the time i get to the lakeshore exit (before jameson) i’m going about 55 on the highway, and people are passing me angrily, and i don’t care. i’ve never taken this exit but luckily there was no crazy curve or sudden stoplight. i then proceeded to get all green lights on lakeshore all the way down to bay street. by the time i get down to about 20km/h, the front brakes are serviceable and i can stop with enough warning. i drop the harp off and take the car back to its mortified owners. “at least i got home faster!”

after my heart rate dropped back to normal and the adrenaline went away i felt awesome for surviving something like that.

tomorrow afternoon i have my last exam! assuming i pass everything, i’ll have this degree and be done with the hundreds of unpaid gigs and all the uneducational busy work. i have learned a lot, completely changed as a person/grown up, done a ton of fun things, and met some awesome folks, but i will be glad to be done, and have no intention of any further education anytime soon.

a couple things were especially cool in the last month: my final project for music recording was just “make an album, and write about the process”. that was it, open-ended. i recorded a classical harp album which i had a lot of fun doing, and for the writeup ended up writing about two pages on what i did, why, and what i thought of it. it was satisfying to write, and it took no time at all. this was in sharp contrast to the three research papers i wrote in the couple weeks preceding - writing about something i enjoy and know a lot about is GREAT. such a refreshing feeling after that crap.

speaking of research papers, one of my three non-performance classes posted the grades tonight. i turned it in one day late (10% off), had done it the night before, and it was two pages below the quota. i was pretty nervous about the grade. imagine my surprise when i see that i got a 78, AFTER the lateness penalty. that’s 25% of my grade and i got a similarly high mark on the midterm, i’m going to do well in that course!

the other unmusical courses are film and astronomy. the film exam i was SUPER worried about, because i hadn’t been to class or seen any of the movies since early january. i was expecting them to screen a few films and ask us to identify and discuss the segments, which i would have completely bombed, but there was NO screening whatsoever! i had never written for 3 hours straight, but that’s what the exam was. i smoked the two long essay questions (i think), so i feel like i did pretty well on that exam. last film exam i was petrified about and i got a high B, so that bodes well.

astronomy was amazing - every couple weeks i get on a big space kick, and spend a few hours reading about space. this combined with my good memory paid off well - in a class of 300 people, i was the first one out of the two hour exam. the proctor had to run and get the class roster for me to sign, and then read through my whole exam to make sure i didn’t actually skip a section. awesome. i felt great about that exam, and that doesn’t usually happen!

COME ON!

this is the shirt my university gave all of its students this year. this travesty was covered by an iron-on sticker with the correct spelling.

yesterday i had a bunch of time to kill in between rehearsals, so i brought my computer up to school so i could catch up on sending emails. upon opening it, wireless didn’t work at all, and when i restarted it took literally 10 minutes to get to desktop. i got an error about wireless drivers bla bla bla, and i couldn’t figure out how to fix it. this was a new feeling - i’ve always known how to fix (winxp) computers or at least where to start. i’ve learned a ton over the past month since i got this macbook, but i had to start from the beginning learning how drivers (.kexts) work and how to extract a new one from the install dvd and inject it. it was quite satisfying!

today is the last day of classes…for the rest of my life? i’m not ruling out graduate school later in life, but after 8 years of university, i’m done with writing papers and sitting through 2-hour lectures. the last concert i’ll play at this school is tonight, and i’m playing timpani in tchaikovsky’s fifth. yesterday in the dress rehearsal i detuned the 32″ with a solo roll. this is going to be a fun show! this semester’s conductor, ivars taurins, is a lot of fun to play under. not only does he have interesting interpretations of the score, he has intelligent things to say about my part and (most important, and selfish) asks for me to play as loud as the score actually asks for. i’d say an average dynamic of ff, and going up to a soloistic fff in some places.

i got marks back on one of my aforementioned research papers. after my recital, i spent a significant amount of time writing a paper for film, which i turned in a week late, followed by writing my astronomy paper in one 12-hour overnight stretch. a bunch of nonsense about terraforming mars, a topic i’m legitimately interested in, but not so interested that i could write 12 pages off the top of my head. after cursory research and a lot of faking, i turned it in 5 days late for a total of 20% off. yesterday i saw that i’d been given a 50 - i was happy to have (barely) passed, but a little disappointed that i didn’t do so well. after many years of writing all my papers the night before (and the morning of) the due date, i’ve gotten pretty good at getting As and Bs and still expending the minimum effort. i realized during rehearsal yesterday that i had actually gotten a 70, the 50% was after the ‘late fee’. writing a term paper for a 300-level astronomy course in one night and getting a B? i’m pretty happy about that.

i’ve managed to do every single research paper this year after the due date. like, do all of the research and actually write it after it was supposed to be turned in. oops! at least i have good excuses - these are all just elective classes i need to graduate (film, astronomy, latin america) rather than real subjects i enjoy (music performance). the last of these papers is why i’m awake right now, and also why i’m posting a blog entry instead of being productive. ugh

awesome: last may some friends and i got a gig teaching elementary school kids extracurricular music for a month. quincy and elliot, two of the most hilarious ones from one of the schools we taught at, are featured in this torontoist article. i couldn’t believe my eyes so i sent it to will, one of my friends that i taught with, and he confirmed it.

last night i cut my hair again, but this time i took a before & after:

subtle. the main difference is that it’s impossible to mess it up now, just wake up and it’s ready.