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Blog - October 2005 |
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This page stores my blog entries from October 2005. The entries are dated October 13, October 16, October 27, and October 31.
Self-discovery at Work / Concert: Flogging Molly and Street Dogs flog drink the Radisson dry / The Adventures of a 28-year-old Chaos: a day with The Crew Thursday, October 13, 2005 Returning to work from vacation proved to be more difficult than I imagined. I found myself struggling a bit to get back up to speed, and I faced a few changes at the beginning of the week that kept me from speeding up as fast as I would have liked. On the plus side, I did accomplish what I wanted, and I successfully took on added responsibility. I learned a bit about myself with the added responsibility. When my supervisor asked if I felt comfortable doing something for him, I felt hesitant, believing that I hadn't been doing my own job long enough to be able to do this task. In the end, I found that I had no difficulty at all doing so. From all this, I learned a little better about how to judge my own knowledge of something. I know things a bit better than I realize; it's just a self-confidence thing that gets in the way. I think that uncertainty unfairly holds me back from doing things that I'm perfectly capable of achieving. This instance should prove valuable whenever I start taking drum lessons, since I know I'll have similar doubts. Moreso, I learned that I should trust my gut (and another's assessment of the situation) as to my suitability of a task. If my drumming instructor thinks I'm ready to, for example, try executing a disco beat or add a second bass drum into the drumming equation, then I should have some faith in his assessment. A lot of that, of course, would depend on how much I trust my instructor and whether I think he honestly believes that I am that capable. I guess, again, that has to do with faith more than anything else. I know I normally don't like talking about work, but I felt that if I could frame these instances more in the reference of me and my personal growth, then I should be ok. ***** On Friday night, Pam and I went to the Radisson Hotel to see Flogging Molly and the Street Dogs. We saw both bands play at CSUS some time ago. The Radisson seemed like a rather odd place to hold a concert of this type. The Cove at the Radisson usually housed jazz and similar shows. On top of that, a local radio station's punk show hosted the concert event, making it into a "punk rock prom." This ought to be interesting. The prom, interestingly enough, didn't really factor much in my perspective. I spent a decent amount of time in the merchandise area while the radio station had its fun. Overall, I got Flogging Molly's "Drunken Lullabies" and Street Dogs' "Back to the World" albums at $10 each, and I bought a cool Street Dogs t-shirt that has a scally-capped Mike McColgan singing into a microphone. The third band, besides the aforementioned groups, was some band called A.D.D. Allegedly they're a local-ish band, but I have never heard of them. Unfortunately, I still really haven't heard them. Pam and I spent all but three songs of their set standing in line, waiting to get in. Ticket and security checks took entirely too long. The band wasn't too bad. The Street Dogs took the stage next, mostly playing stuff from their first album with a few songs from their new one. They also did a cover of the Ramones' "Commando", which sounded pretty cool. The song that surprised me, and seemed most unlike the rest of their repetoir, was the song "Drink Tonight." I remember them introducing this as being an old hardcore song. For some reason I thought they said it was a cover, but, according to the booklet in "Back to the World", the band wrote the lyrics and music. It's a great song, but with their usual semi-relaxed straight-ahead rock n' roll, it does seem a bit out of place. But, mind you, I will never complain if they continue to write and record similar material. Mike finished their set off by talking and directing clapping and other crowd participatory elements from a tree he climbed a bit earlier. Mike jumped off the tree and onto the stage, making room for the "election" of the King and Queen of the Punk Rock Prom. I spent that time waiting in line at the Flogging Molly merchandise table. Flogging Molly lit the place on fire from the start. The sound quality wasn't very good in the Radisson's Cove, but FM sounded spot-on. Dave King didn't seem the least bit drunk, either, which was a surprise (he did, however, try to assist that with a Guinness or two during the show). They did the usual hits, including "Black Friday Rule", "Selfish Man", and "Screaming at the Wailing Wall". They played a few songs I didn't recognize, but some of them might have been on "Drunken Lullabies" and not on the live album of theirs. Dave King tried to talk football with the crowd, dismayed to see and hear that we're really only familiar with American football. He did get us to chant the Irish football fan chant and advised us as to when we could hop into a local pub and watch some soccer (a game toward the World Cup, I believe). As Pam and I left the Radisson, disgusted by the horrid mess left by the fans, the unannounced $7 parking fee, and the ridiculous wait in line, we reflected on those points and how the bands played that night. It was a good night, and it was good enough to warrant wanting to see the Street Dogs again on November 19, when they'll headline their own tour. We probably wouldn't go to the Radisson for a concert again, and we certainly will try to get there much earlier so we don't miss any bands (this occasion was beyond our control; we got there as fast as we could). ***** So, another J-High gangmember turned 28 (with only 2 more to go) yesterday. We got together this past weekend for a day of Chaos and general fun. Our fun started at a mutual friend's house with a bit of drinking and general chatter. Talks about booze, Bino's gig, dinner, booze, getting out for miniature golf, and more booze dominated the discussions until we all decided to bound off to Scandia. Maybe it's my general desire to do the best at whatever I do, or maybe it's some sort of innate Scottish pride pumping through my veins, but I always try to do my very best with miniature golf. If someone else is doing better than I am, then I feel like I'm not doing well enough. If I start faltering, I get frustrated. Eh. I probably just take it a little too seriously. But then, on this day, I probably was just exhausted from my first week back from work after a vacation.
After our round of golf, we had to bounce downtown for a gig by Bino's band, Razorblade Mona Lisa (see my previous review). They played in a small room that housed an art show as a part of the Second Saturday festivities in town. The thought of Bino's band providing "background music" seemed odd and contrary, but it worked well. Some of us officially missed the beginning of the set due to us acquiring dinner. Unofficially, we were there, since we could hear the band start playing as we sat in the Teriyaki #3 that was right next to the art room. I wasn't sure how a bunch of people would be able to just walk around and look at art, but, when we walked into the room, we found out that the people weren't. Razorblade Mona Lisa crammed themselves into a corner. The fans took up the rest of the space along the chairs and tables, standing around and watching the show. Pam asked if I could take some pictures, to which I happily obliged (a few of the pics appear in this entry). So, while Bino and crew ran through their set list, I found as many angles as I could (everything except lying down and shooting up from below) to get some good shots. Knowing how Bino loves to bounce around, I thought I'd get in a few good shots before the show ended.
Bino's band, again, played very well. I do not know their material that well at all, and I didn't recognize the cover songs they performed. I remember one of the cover songs (a Joy Division cover?) that got my foot tapping, and I think I felt some sort of vibe through the whole set. They might have had some time constraints on their set list due to other bands playing at particular times, but an hour not only goes by fast but gets filled up rather quickly with songs.
The birthday boy's lady and hostess both presented a cheesecake. We watched as the candles were blown out, and we slowly devoured the culinary masterpiece. And that, roughly, is how one of us celebrated turning 28 with us. Our next new 28-year-old will come along in mid-December. I do not know if or what we'll do then, but I'm sure it'll be prime time for another get-together. As I watch the others turn 28, I slowly get ready for my 29th. I'm not sure how I'll mark the occasion for myself at all. I feel like I don't do enough each year. Every birthday should be cause for celebration merely for the sake of celebrating the fact of actually seeing another one, right? We'll see. I have vacation time I could always use near then. I could just confine my celebration during the weekend; I get a three-day weekend for mine anyway. Or, I could do what one of my co-workers does and just celebrate it the whole month long.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
My loyalty to the Chicago White Sox is a strange one to me. I have been a fan since '90 or '91 when I started watching Carlton Fisk, Frank Thomas, and Ozzie Guillen play on WGN. Fisk was one of my favorite players when I collected baseball cards (from '87 to '93), and Big Frank followed to continue my faith and hopes for this club. I've owned a total of one shirt (recently discarded due to numerous half-dollar-sized holes in it) and one cap (a one-size-fits-all cap with plastic adjustible back that I still have; a cap I nearly lost on Eastern Avenue when in high school). I have seen the White Sox play once back in '93 when they played the A's in Oakland. I don't get upset if they don't win, and I don't really get overly happy when they do. This partially changed this year. I have been rather happy watching my team take control of the AL Central and stay on top until the end. Certainly, their dip in the middle-end made it exciting and nerve-wracking, but they held it off. Then to see them sweep Boston and take 4 of 5 from Anaheim, I'm riding pretty high on this. I can't quite say that I'm very excited at the moment, but I may just be in silent shock, incapable of expressing how cool this is. I don't have some of the cool calls that the Hawk and Wimpy made during those telecasts I watched. No combination of "ducksnort", "can of corn", "ducks on the pond", or "you can put it on the board .... YES!" can really express it right now. So, some things will change this year. Sadly, I'm not sure I'll replace my old White Sox cap. I never wear baseball caps anymore, even though I may start doing so if I had one that actually fit. I'll still keep that old cap in remembrance of all those years waiting for this day. Instead, a new White Sox jersey may be in my future. I'll just need to figure out which player I'll get, though. Go Sox!
WHITE SOX WIN! / When I Will Stop Moshing: A Short Philosophical Jaunt / Old Classmates: How are you? Thursday, October 27, 2005
With ill-fated season following ill-fated season, I didn't really think I'd ever see my White Sox win a World Series ... until this year. They, along with the San Francisco Giants, always seemed to lack that one (or, most of the time, few) elements to really push them over the top and into serious contention. Yet, somehow Jerry Reinsdorf translated those winning ways from my Chicago Bulls and made the moves necessary to give Chicago its first World Series title since 1917. I have not been as good of a White Sox fan as I could. Not having WGN anymore seriously hampers my ability to see any White Sox games at all. My old cap, dusty and small, sat more on my old Apple IIe than on my head (we'll ignore the fact that it's too small). My old White Sox t-shirt, a relatively generic one, gained rather large holes from much love and wear and currently resides in a garbage dump somewhere. Although, materialistically, I did not show the support, my heart and attention remained on my team. Now, being able to see my team win something so great, I feel even more devoted to them. I feel ... like that young kid again. You know the one. The one who sits in front of the TV, watching their favorite team play while looking through baseball cards for stats and comparison. The one who gets excited when his team does something well and gets disappointed when they don't. The one I remember being when I was 10-14 years old. The one that came out of me again this year. I couldn't be happier. The happiness for the players (Frank Thomas, Ozzie Guillen, Harold Baines, Paul Konerko, and everyone else) and the happiness for all the fans in Chicago and around the world who have been waiting any amount of the last 88 years for this to happen again. Hopefully, at some point, I'll find some way to express this happiness. Or, maybe I already have. Congratulations to all the White Sox. Woo hoo! ***** My love for concerts is one of the few things about me that hasn't changed in the last 14 years. I went
from a young kid who wore no ear plugs and bounced around in the mosh pits (the metal show circle pits; not this
"let's randomly run into each other" crap or "let's stand in one place and swing my arms around
like a moron" thing at some punk shows) to one who wears ear plugs and has no qualms to just sit in a seat
and watch. The ear-plug-wearing version of this concert-goer lasted as-is until a few concerts ago when I
felt the energy of the concert and just had to jump in. I found that, despite the ear plugs in my ears, I
could hold my own. ***** During one of those cleaning moods a couple of years ago, I ran across my old yearbooks. Yearbooks aim to capture the events and people from that particular year. The book itself ceases to be just a bunch of pages and became an envelope of time travel, taking me back to that particular grade level and year. Not only would I remember how I thought about things and saw the world back then, but I would be reminded of how much I've grown since then. I recently finished reading the Stephen King novella, "The Body." After watching "Stand By Me" while on vacation in Tahoe, I felt an itch to read that story to see how the movie changed it. I love the story just as much as the movie and enjoyed the segments that the movie either changed or glossed over altogether. One part that struck me was when Gordie (as an adult narrating the story) mentions how he remembers the sixth grade being the greatest time of his life. With some respects, I couldn't agree more for myself. Within the frame and mindset of sixth grade, it was one of the greatest years I remember. What other year could beat one in which one had his first best friend and discovered girls as one would for the rest of one's life? One has a certain feeling of freedom at that age as well, even though we're all bound to our parents and completely dependent on them for transportation. I related greatly to Gordie near the end when he recounts what happened to Teddy, Vern, and Chris after that summer of adventure. At this point in my life, I'm still in contact with a decent amount of old friends. I get some sense of what they do and how they're doing. It feels weird, actually, to ponder how one, like Gordie, would feel looking back on old friends who aren't around anymore. Despite whatever they do with themselves in life, one will still remember them when they were young and have some of the same reactions to each other. That weirdness of past familiarity settles over things for a bit but, sometimes, moves on towards renewed discovery. Such renewed discovery doesn't happen, of course, for those with whom I'm not in touch. Those yearbooks again transform into sources of wonderment and concern. As adolescents and adults, we learn so much about the world and about all the horrible possibilities for a person in life. Most of us avoid those and focus on living a good, happy life. Some, as is the nature of being human, find themselves in situations one wouldn't really want to be in. I'll see pictures of my old classmates and wonder what they encountered in life and how they turned out. Did Chris continue to be a weirdo and not really focus himself very well, or did he come out wonderfully with a solid family? Did Jason, Ben, and Kevin go on to be area-wide managers of major corporations, or are they sitting in jail somewhere? What about Olivia, Katie, and Karli? As small a world as this is, I could run into any one of these people. I've already run into one person a couple of times after seeing her leave after the first grade and go to another school. I get school publications for high school and university with blurbs from my fellow grads, but that doesn't tell me about the people before then. I hope they are all safe and living a happy life.
Halloween 2005: a reflection Monday, October 31, 2005 I love Halloween. Halloween and the month of October has long been my favorite parts of the year. The initial changes in the weather create such a stunning, yet creepy, atmosphere. Dark grey clouds accompanied with colder temperatures help facilitate one's imagination for monsters and urban myths that spice up the Halloween experience. Despite how much I love the celebration of Halloween, I can't help but worry a little about the future of this observance. Trick-or-treaters appear to be fewer every year. Those years of buying three or four bags of candy to barely make it through the night have been replaced with barely making a dent in one bag. Schools, one by one, are gradually moving away from Halloween; if I recall correctly, in my area, one school this year made it punishable to wear anything remotely related to Halloween. That move concerned me quite a bit. I can understand moving Halloween towards involving everyone, including people who consider Halloween to be "devil worship" (regardless of how utterly ridiculous that concept is), but I'd hate to see the tradition of Halloween die too far away. Fortunately, I know there are millions of people like me who would want to keep such fun traditions alive. My costume this year came cheaply. All I had to buy was a black snap-brim cap (or "scally cap", if you prefer; which, while we're at it, I do). I checked out two books from the library (a book of poetry by Allen Ginsberg and "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac) and toted around my bongo drums. Mix with black t-shirt, black pants, black shoes, black socks, and home-grown goatee, and you have one instant beatnik! I felt rather happy with this choice and found a great way to expand my reading horizon. I did lack the small, wire-rim sunglasses, but they aren't necessary. Many people at work had no clue what I was, but a few knew exactly without much of a prompt. One actually read Kerouac for a class in high school, and I'm sure it had been numerous years since he had. Once I finish that book, I'll have to ask him what he remembers. Pumpkin carving has reached a new personal level. Instead of freestyling a simple design, I decided on creating my own design. Some of the designs in a book that accompanied some carving tools gave me some great ideas. Nearly all of this design was from my own imagination. Admittedly, I lifted the eye design from a different design, but that's the only thing I didn't create myself. This design may be used on any other jack-o-lantern and may not be used in a competition or publication without my approval. The finished product looks something like the image at the beginning of this entry. I may have to spend some more time planning my next costume. Maybe I can figure out something and work on it gradually over the course of the year. If I don't change my mind mid-stream or have a different mood a year from now, it'll work perfectly. Happy Halloween, everyone! |
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I hadn't played at Scandia in a couple of years, and they haven't changed much.
One thing they changed was their fee for golf: they now charge a flat $7.50 for unlimited rounds. If
I wanted to stay there a while, that would be a lot of fun. I think there are two or three different courses,
and I bet I haven't played one of them in ages. We played one round, and it included a couple of volcano
holes, some zany bounces, and a few holes-in-one.
During the time before I snapped off a few shots, I took the time to look around at the
art on display. Nearly all of the art was on sale, and all of it hung on the walls (no sculptures or such,
unfortunately). One series had some rather colorful, yet slightly creepy, clowns. I thought they were
rather well done myself, but some of the others thought they were a little too creepy. One artist had a few
pictures of nearly naked men in leather bondage gear. He framed each picture in a rather wide frame covered
in black leather. I really didn't have much appreciation for those. The ones that really got me, though,
were the ones by a cartoonist. The cartoonist did some drawings/paintings on pieces of wood (I think) that
included a kid with a bike, a skull-and-crossbones wearing something like a police cap, and, my personal favorite,
a eerie shadow with a white toothy smile, a blue hand, and a black cross in the background. The latter piece
was for sale, but someone had already bought it. Sadly, I do not know who the artist is, but I can probably
find out if I were to go back to that gallery. You never know: that artist might do something else I really
like and would then be able to buy something.
We hung around a bit, and then we bounded for home base. SciFi ran the
sequel to the Dungeons & Dragons movie, and the whole gang wanted to see this. We drank, watched, and
poked fun at it. The crew tried to determine the continuity, if any, from the first movie. I don't
think they gave this movie a particularly good review, but, after all, it is a low budget D&D movie. It
still has its fun and merits, as does any B Movie.
