August 2008
4 posts
Goodbye tumblr
I’ve been talking about it for a while now, and have finally (or will soon) make the move to wordpress. I’ve decided not to import all the posts from tumblr to the new blog. So when justalifestory.com starts taking you to the new blog, you’ll still be able to find all the old stuff here.
Coma Baby from Bright Lights, Big City.
The...
Blogging thoughts
I haven’t been blogging much lately. I’m still trying to find the limits and boundaries of what exactly I want to put out here on the internet for anyone to see. Recently a friend told me she’s been reading my blog and keeping up on my life, but then we quickly realized a lot more is going on than the small amount I’ve written about out here on the internet.
I’ve...
Thanks for reading =)
Jerry: Excellent. I love your stories. You should start a blog. Me: I have a blog. Jerry: Oh yeah.
July 2008
12 posts
a stream of consciousness rant on hipsters (or...
(I’m not sure I conveyed my thoughts properly here. I deleted the post, but then a friend told me I should leave it up with this warning. I want to say something about it, but I don’t think this is exactly what I want to say. The article definitely got me thinking and talking with people about it. Maybe I’ll say more later.)
Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization,...
A week in the wilderness
A Bar Fight Before a Backpacking Trip. Photo by Greg Theilmann
We gathered at five am Sunday morning, seven of my closest friends and myself. None of us with more than a few hours of sleep, some of us with no sleep at all. All of us with a wild night behind us, ready to leave the confines of civilization for a week in the wilderness. After a 7+ hour drive we arrived at the trailhead in the...
How to Talk to Girls at Parties
If you have about twenty minutes to spare I recommend you read this short story by Neil Gaiman. I liked it.
“How to Talk to Girls at Parties”
... and music.
My favorite band’s latest album just leaked on the internet, if all goes well I’ll be listening to it as I sit in traffic this afternoon.
I don’t know much about it and I only heard about it recently, but it is apparently the second half of a double album (they released the first half last year, around the same time of year this one will be coming out). I don’t think they...
Movies
I feel like I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately. It seems like I go through phases watching a lot of movies at times and other times watching very few movies at all.
Last week for dinner and a movie night we watched an Italian movie called Malèna. I picked it out without knowing much about it. I was looking at the Italian section at Citizen Video, because I was going to get Bicycle...
Randomness to the extreme
You should all go out and see Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson right now. It’s really good.
I fell in love a few times this weekend in very strange ways, mostly with life, but also with tattoos — one that I saw and one that I only thought about. I still don’t want any myself.
Last week Ed Decker wrote this in cityBeat (I’ve enjoyed reading his column for...
The future and the present (and a blog post that...
I try not to think about the future nearly as much as I think about the present, but I’m a bit bored at work right now (I can only see the lack of anything new on myspace and facebook so many times before my mind starts to wander) and can’t help but think about how fantastic this weekend is shaping up to be.
Some friends and I have plans tonight for what should turn out to be an...
Materialism and Emotion
I’ve been thinking about philosophical materialism a lot lately — loosely stated, the view that the only things that truly exist are material, made of matter. I’ll admit, I don’t formally know too much about materialism, there are a ton of different types, and the form I am most familiar with, eliminative materialism, is often described as a pretty extreme form.
A few...
June 2008
22 posts
A constant theme and a new revelation
“…You know, just write a little every day”.
and
“But seriously, there is no future. The future doesn’t exist. We think “the future will be here soon” but it’s not true. All you get is a bunch of “nows”. The future is always one step ahead. And the past is over, don’t try doing anything with the past. You do it now or you do it never.”
I haven’t used a...
Living in the now
I didn’t get a chance to read West of Rome or Endgame, two of the books that I got from the library a few weeks ago. I however did read and greatly enjoy Full of Life. There’s something I really like about reading stories related to Catholicism, growing up catholic and their experiences written by ex-catholics.
I read Waiting for Godot for the book club last night, the discussion...
Oh the Internet... (I recently got unlimited text...
Me: Twitter on my cell phone is great
Me: i got to see that someone I've never met likes trader joes and hates whole foods while driving home at 10pm last night
Me: i deleted the Twitterfone number from my phone book though. too much potential for amazingly embarassing drunk dials
Mark: boo
Mark: I was going to screencap them all and make a coffee table book for you
Me: i can still drunk tweet with txts, but not voice
Me: although i'll probably be all connected for a few months, then run away to a hippy commune again and delete every reference to myself on the internet
Mark: oh god not another commune, just get a normal place to live in Seattle
NPR
Santa Cruz words:
While driving to work and listening to Morning Edition, a woman from the Annenberg center (which I still don’t know what they do, other than sponsor Morning Edition…) was talking about the roles of the wife in Presidential campaigning. I wasn’t paying too much attention until she started using words that caught my attention.
When I moved to Santa Cruz I...
“It is not the places you see, it is not the things you do. It is not even the...”
– My friend Oliver’s mom on travelling (and life in general.)
Existentialist Book Club
The first meeting of the new existentialist book club happened last night. It was a much bigger success than the first time we tried it (that time Greg and I got totally smashed at Kadan’s happy hour while discussing the Brothers Karamazov and wearing all black). This time we picked a less ambitious book, The Stranger by Albert Camus, because it is shorter and already familiar to a lot of...
dream
I woke up pretty early this morning, not able to get back to sleep, after about an hour of being bored I lay back down in bed and was in that state where you’re half awake and half asleep. Finally I fell asleep and had this dream. It was the most vivid dream I’ve ever had:
I was at the carousel with my brother and his friend Jordan, but the building it was in wasn’t the actual...
Reach out and grab the brass ring →
I’ll admit it, I was a little happy to see this in the UT this morning. As much as I hate the place at times, I’m glad they’re getting talked about (and come on, the article totally makes the Balboa Park Carousel look way cooler than the one in Seaport Village, the title doesn’t even pertain to the Seaport Village Carousel).
In the eight+ years I’ve worked there on...
Dinner and a Movie
Movie night at PoppaDeuce continued this week with Paul’s pick of 24 Hour Party People a mockumentary of sorts about the music scene in Manchester in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I wasn’t terribly impressed with the movie, it was interesting but nothing amazing. I was however very happy with dinner.
This was the second week we made dinner before watching a movie. Big...
Azul en un mar de verde
Mark, Andrew, Brad and I went to the Mexico vs Argentina game at Qualcomm Stadium last night. The game was a lot of fun, how could it not be when you’re surrounded by 68,498 excited fans (a San Diego futbol record they tell us). We got to see Lionel Messi play, and score a goal. There were a ton more Mexico fans there than Argentina (to be expected). But there were...
Chronology of thoughts
I was reading the UT Letters to the Editor, and thinking that it could be difficult to take a letter and give it a short title that represents what the letter is about, and wondering how often the letter writer feels they are misrepresented by the title — and how much power that person has, I often decide to read or skip a letter to the editor based on the little title above it. Which in...
Simon and Garfunkel — The Only Living Boy in...
Randomness
As an update to my last post about books — I finished reading No Country For Old Men, the weight of the book hit me somewhere towards the end with about fifty pages to go. Until that point it was just a good story, but then it greatly affected me. I was sitting in the patio at Gelato Vero, it was a beautiful sunny morning and they were playing instrumental tango music and this message just...
May 2008
13 posts
Books
I’m two-thirds of the way through No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, I’m enjoying it, but not nearly so much as The Road, I think I just read that book at the proper time in my life. (Its funny how that works, coincidentally reading a book at the right time makes me enjoy it so much more). Life After God by Douglas Coupland was my “existential crisis” book of my...
I went to a new bar in town tonight. I went to the bathroom, the urinal was normal. There was a mirror on the wall next to the door, just like you’d expect. But below that where the sink should be was just a wooden table with a sink shaped hole and a bottle of hand sanitzer. It was really funny.
San Diego
I had a very love/hate evening with San Diego tonight. I’ve been exploring more side streets and off the beaten path of my neighborhood on my bike recently. I rode through Golden Hill then down into Florida Canyon and up Zoo Place to Balboa Park. Every time I go to Balboa Park when I’m not working I wish I spent more time there, its so nice. But every time I get off work I just want to...
I went up to Santa Cruz last weekend, and had a really good time with my friends. It was a nice little trip, the weather was wonderful and I didn’t use a computer for 4 days. But since I’ve been back, at work, on the computer, I’ve been reading random websites and the like. I’ve found myself using Google Reader’s shared items and notes a lot more since they updated it...
RFID
Two years ago or so I was a little bored one afternoon and decided to make an RFID blocking wallet. Little did it matter to me that I didn’t have any RFID chipped credit cards. I’ve used the wallet ever since, getting compliments from duct tape loving bouncers and cashiers the whole time. Well today I went to activate my new debit card, called the number, put in my info, hung up the...
Funny Bones
Last night I went to see Funny Bones, 4 New Comedies about Death at 6th at Penn Theatre in Hillcrest. It is four short comedies about death. It is apparently part of their Challenge Theatre series where they get playrights to agree to write a short play, without telling them what it must be about. Jude is acting in one of the shorts, so we went to check it out. As a bonus, one of the shorts was...
WatchThis is the coolest video I’ve seen in a long time. Thanks to Mark for sharing it with me.