bone in sub

this is wild, hi-res photos of almost every rogers cellular node in toronto!

my phone is dying, my contract is up, and my plan is deprecated. i’m going to get a new phone provider (and phone) in the near future, i just have to do some research. i was looking over my old primus bills and it SUCKS, all these roaming and incremental charges for the smallest things. ugh!

i had my camera over at my uncle’s house while we were talking about making a high quality timelapse of dove, and i took this funny little video while i was there.

WHOA!!!!!

terminator 2 was actually a really fun movie to watch. i can’t believe the intro plot twist was never spoiled for me! some of the goofy parts like smiling when he gets the gun were strangely funny to me. that was a good way to kill all the time between waking up at 1am and work at noon.

at work yesterday i was thinking about huge twists in movies and what the audience reaction would have been right when it came out. at the beginning of terminator 2, all these people that had seen terminator seven years earlier expecting something similar only to have their minds blown… one of the best ones is the wizard of oz. imagine being in 1939 and never having seen a color movie. the reaction that you would have seeing the huge color reveal scene? it’s just cool to consider.

next on my tour of “late 80s and early 90s movies i haven’t seen for some reason” is the back to the future trilogy.

i watched the first terminator movie a couple days ago. it wasn’t boring, so i finished it, but it was a bad movie. i wasn’t expecting it to be good, i just wanted to see it because it seemed like an important pop-culture thing. i told a friend what i thought of it and he said “i don’t think i ever saw terminator 1. terminator 2 is a really, really good movie though”, so i’m going to try that next?

terminator 2: judgement day came out in july 1991 – i had just turned 4. somehow i remember a lot about the tv ads for it. nobody i know has as many clear memories that far back! i might be remembering the VHS release (i almost typed DVD!) ads, but i still would have been 4 for that too. insane.

tonight i got home from work, cleaned my place a little and made dinner, then put on abbey road and lay down for a minute. somewhere around “because” i fell asleep and didn’t wake up until i got a text at 1am. i felt very relaxed, but here i am eating breakfast at 5am when i don’t have to be at work for 7 hours.

i think i have a hardwired egg limit. i made 6 eggsworth of scrambled eggs with cheese this morning, and when i was almost done i could suddenly not bear to put any more in my mouth. i guess that puts it at 5, because when i have 4 hardboiled eggs i always feel like one more. incidentally my breakfast was like 1000 calories.

i got some new pants and a sweater from american apparel yesterday. it’s a new style for me and they fit great. in the past couple months i’ve learned to give up on ever getting significantly bigger, and i’m embracing being small. i mean i’m 6’2″, so i’m tall at least, but i hit a weight cap of 145 pounds at about 17. in the last 6 months i’ve gained 15lbs of muscle though! i think by november i’ll hit my limit for muscle mass (without getting serious), which is fine with me.

i need new shoes

the premiere of ‘the office’ and episodes 3 and 4 of ‘it’s always sunny in philadelphia’ on thursday night was the funniest 2 hours of tv since ‘look around you’.

after i posted my sleep video a couple weeks ago, i got a ton of feedback. a bunch of people said they felt guilty, creepy, or voyeuristic watching it. i can understand this – it’s kind of a private thing and it might be a little weird to watch 10 hours of me sleeping. i still found it weird that so many people said that. one of my friends made one of himself, and he described it as “not anywhere near as interesting” as mine. so i do know that i move an usual amount when i’m sleeping. nobody i’ve shared a bed with has ever said anything…maybe i’m subconsciously considerate?

when i told my uncle about the video, he told me he really wanted to make one of his 2½ year old son. tonight i went over and we set up lighting and the camera, and sometime in the next couple days i’ll go pick up the files and do the production on it. that’s going to be a great juxtaposition! we set everything up so it’s a decently-lit white bed (without being so bright he couldn’t sleep) and he’s wearing dark pajamas. i’m excited to see how it turns out.

now when i do situps, once i get past about 75 my legs get tired before my abs. it’s from forcing good form – i need someone to hold my feet on the floor. the gym? i like working out at home, though.

i’m so glad i dropped linguistics. having a free day every week is invaluable, plus i’ve been getting emails from my former TAs regarding assignments and homework. nauseating! it looked like a grotesquely boring class.

i’m going to arrange she’s leaving home for my recital. i’m definitely playing vibraphone

i am on a ridiculous sleep schedule this week. i’ve been on worse (awake 4pm to 8am), but i have to fix this for the weekend.

since i moved in (sept. 1) i’ve been working out every day. just situps and pushups, 50 or 100 situps every day and an increasing amount of pushups in 5 sets with 60s rests on mondays, wednesdays, and fridays. it’s been going great, at first i couldn’t even do 50 situps with my hands behind my head. hands behind head makes it a lot more work, i don’t know whether it’s a balance thing or just the added weight of my arms but i wasn’t able to do a solid 50 until the second week. now i can do 100 good-form situps without being exhausted after. i’ve hit two walls with push-ups, though.

at the end of the third week (20-30/set) i was having trouble figuring out when to breathe. i was really straining and holding my breath most of the time, and occasionally gasping on the ‘upstroke’. i worked something out and that helped a lot. now i’m at a wall i don’t know if i can pass:
at the beginning of my first year (in 2005) i broke my collarbone pretty solidly. it was a big pain and it hurt a lot, but it was healing ok until i broke it again in december of the same year. i took it easy after that and it healed fine. i had trouble with carrying heavy stuff or backpacks for a few months, but until now the only side effect has been i can’t comfortably put both of my arms way back behind my back; nothing functionally challenging. now at the end of long (for me) sets of 30 pushups, i have a serious ache in my right shoulder. maybe it will go away? maybe i’ll be a whiny old man? the goal of this pushup plan is to be able to do 100 consecutively at the end of the 6-8 week program. if i can get there i’ll be pretty happy.

i think i wrote about it already, but the fact that i never really worked out a lot before combined with that i have an insane metabolism and i eat a TON has given me awesome muscle gains. i still have to buy a scale to accurately track it, but i definitely have chest, arm, and shoulder muscles that i’ve never had before, and my abs look great too. i don’t care about this enough to start planning meals and taking supplements, keeping healthy and getting fitter is enough for me. i don’t want to gain 50 pounds of muscle or anything. there’s my testosterone blog post of the year, back to writing about music/my psyche/the day-to-day mundane.

time has been going really slowly lately? i’ll be at the computer, send a message, and go do whatever (guitar, workout, cook, read, clean my room) for a while. something will make me go back to the computer (changing the music, getting bored, getting an IM) and i’ll see that only 5 to 10 minutes have passed when it’s felt like 30. i used to mess around on the internet and blow 3 hours without meaning to, and now a night in feels like forever? really weird.

last night around 2am i really, really wanted some ice cream. i haven’t gone out looking for snacks late at night yet in this neighborhood, so i had no idea if there were any 24-hour stores around. i went out for a walk, a little west of dufferin along bloor then east for a while. there’s a place around salem and bloor, pretty close, called “lucky 21″. i bought some ice cream and asked if they’re 24 hours…they’re 21 hours, closed 3-7am. no more 4am coke & doritos runs, but that was probably bad for me anyway. i also didn’t bring my wallet with me, just keys, phone, and $10. i totally lived in a WAY worse neighborhood for two years and wasn’t afraid of anything, so it’s funny to me that i’m apprehensive. i’ll get used to it, i’ve only lived here for 24 days.

what is this garbage? i like having a number of varied news sources on my rss reader, but i’m getting really close to taking cnn off.

something happened to my phone last night, and my entire phonebook is gone. i rebuilt some of it from facebook and my dialed/received call logs, but i’m still missing a lot of numbers. i was afraid this would happen for a while, but now that it actually did, it doesn’t seem so bad. anybody i can imagine myself needing to call is back in there for now, and if i need someone’s number it wouldn’t be very hard to find it.

this tom petty song is not only a classic, it has maybe the best alternate lyrics (see title) of any classic rock song. i was just messing around singing along with it, and when i tried it in the actual range, i was very surprised to hit the high note (“and i’m free, free fallin’”). that’s an A – i thought my vocal range topped out around a D. it’s literally the highest sub-falsetto note i can sing – Bb is just scratchy air – so the A doesn’t have the nicest tone, but that is awesome.

the funny part is i’m sitting here absolutely belting out this song right at dinnertime, wonder what the people living upstairs think.

i forgot how much i liked this movie. there’s a scene a third or halfway through that is just perfect in terms of cinematography and music. the music in the whole thing is good (for a film score), and i just really like it. “a payload with the mass of manhattan” and “the remainder of earth’s fissile material” is just so cool. plus it’s scientifically realistic? yep. i wish it didn’t have the whole horror movie aspect, but it’s still great. i also hate cillian murphy’s face.

british show “fonejacker” is great as well. i feel like it’s going to be the next ali G show and i will hate how popular it is in another 6 months, but who knows. the animation is HILARIOUS. here’s an example and here’s another one.

it’s going to be winter soon. i don’t like having to wear a coat all the time and sniffling and dreading going outside and not wanting to walk or bike as much, but i’m not dreading it as much this year. i like something about downtown when it’s freezing but very bright out – a bright winter day is just such an intense aesthetic, especially when there’s snow on the ground. i also love massive blizzards…when i don’t have to get to school in them. the really short days are awful though, getting out of class at 5pm to a night sky is not nice.

today i was going to go to a class i just added, linguistics, for the first time. i had a REALLY bad bike ride leaving don’s house, almost got doored twice and then a taxi almost hit me. bloor street sucks for biking. then, the lecture notes for the class were SO dry i could not imagine taking two full semesters of it, so i immediately dropped the class. that’s decision-making!

a long time ago, october 2005, i played drums at my uncle’s bachelor party. i showed up early to help set up, and after stuff was ready and i had a couple beers, i started playing a quick 12/8 groove, not unlike ‘fool in the rain‘. a couple of my uncle’s friends were plugging their amps in and were like “yeah! that’s it! the purdie shuffle!!! keep playing that, that’s awesome!!”. i had no idea what they were talking about, but it was kind of funny at the time.

present day, last week i think, i was in the studio and don was telling me about an episode of “classic albums” or something where bernard purdie was being interviewed. he explained some ‘crazy 12/8 shuffle’ that he plays on the show, and that it was an in-joke among his friends for a few weeks (back in 2005, around the bachelor party). it turns out i’ve been playing the “purdie shuffle” since i was 17!

super easy week this week rehearsal-wise, i’m just going to do a bunch of practicing. i think this girl is going to help me pick some new clothes sometime – i’m excited about that.

this weekend at work, this guy that likes REALLY bad music was covering for one of the regulars. he took the initiative to fill the 5cd changer with awful mix tapes, and rage against the machine’s greatest hits. almost all of the normal weekend people have significantly better taste than him. over the next 45 minutes, we took turns replacing his mixtapes with indie albums one by one. so passive aggressive.

i’ve been bad about recording my dreams lately; i think it’s because i’ve been sleeping way more than usual. the more i sleep, the more time between dreams and waking up (i think?).