I got my 4 credits and (the best part) I never have to take an algebra class again.
My GPA is now officially 3.58 and I have what - like 4 more semesters to bring it back up? No problemo.
I’d take a moment to pat myself on the back, but I’ve got a plane to catch.
Literally.
We gasp for air as the needy envelop us.
It makes us claustrophobic, dizzy.
She doesn’t yet see it in herself.
“Don’t leave me.”
She can. She did. She will.
The music fades in, the elevator door slides closed.
I don’t think she hears me.
Beware the pedestal, I tell her.
She wants saving.
Beware the potential, I tell myself.
She will find no savior here.
Everything is blooming and the grass outside our front window is so green it’s hard to look at it in direct sunlight. The sky is bright blue and the air is warm as the breeze blows against my face …
Must be less than 100 days to Dragon*Con.
Sweet.
A few bits for my friends in the graduating class of 2010.
(Please note the above was not written by Kurt Vonnegut, as was claimed on the Interwebz for awhile, but by Mary Schmich. Here’s the full New York Times article.)
Now get out there and get a job, dammit.
Someone needs to support me in my dotage.
If another only considers you an option, don’t consider them a priority.
Many global events are on today to celebrate the life and work of Douglas Adams.
For Denver locals, this from the Towel Day site:
In Denver, CO, you can celebrate Towel Day with a Happy Hour at Croc’s Bar & Grill, “towel in one hand and margarita in the other”. Our informant Mo adds “Croc’s has Happy Hour all night long including 100 free Tacos (get there early, I’m sure these will go fast) and $3 beer/wine/shots. I’m sure we’ll be easy to spot ;)”
And honestly, I wish I’d had this teacher in 10th grade:
At Capital High School in Santa Fe, NM, Mrs. Gunter’s 10th Grade English AP class will be celebrating Towel Day by dressing in a robe, pj’s and of course carrying a towel! They will be having a “bring your favorite cereal” breakfast while partaking in a Vogon Poetry slam.
Yep, you read that right: A Vogon Poetry slam. It’s such a neat idea, I might even plan one for next Towel Day. I’ve already got a shirt for it.
And regular poetry slams just aren’t awful enough.
Last Friday, completely on a whim, the Maestro and I hopped in the car and drove south to Albuquerque. Our decision was so made because two events in particular, both scheduled for Saturday, would afford us the opportunity to see many of my/our old friends.
I am ecstatic that I got to see as many of them as I did in one day. I am exiliarated by the re-connections with loved ones in the ‘Burque which have occurred in the past few months, some of which were cemented this past weekend. And I am exhuberant that I’m back home in Denver.
Don’t get me wrong, Albuquerque is wonderful. The mesa, the bosque, even the Rio Grande, which isn’t really at all grande anymore, are all beautiful. I love the blue sky, the white puffy Simpsons-esque clouds, and sunsets against the Sandias. I adore that New Mexico folk are super-duper-friendly and chatty, even at busy the gas stations and in grocery store check-out lines.
What I can’t stand is the rhythm. The Land of Mañana has always been the joke, I know. If it doesn’t get done today, then mañana. The problem, I think, is that mañana sometimes never comes.
Since we moved to Denver six years ago, we’ve seen entire neighborhoods change. The clean-up, if not outright gentrification, of the Five Points area. The creation of the RiNo Arts District. The new shopping areas, houses, and other infill on the land which once had only Stapleton Airport on it.
Some of the restaurants we enjoyed when we got here are long gone - Kiva and Walnut Cafe, to name two - but we’ve located new ones, sometimes in the same space as the old. The skyline of downtown alone has added no less than four new skyscrapers.
Rock Island, the venerable old-school goth club, closed and (though it cannot possibly be replaced) three more clubs popped up on other nights of the week. The faces we see at those goth nights here change so often, if we miss a few weeks, we encounter an entirely new crowd.
In my drive up San Mateo to Central, I saw that very little on the route has changed since I first lived in Albuquerque in 1989. Most of the buildings, with few exceptions, look exactly the same, but more stunningly, most still house the very same businesses they did decades ago. (Please note that I realize most of the massive growth in town is on the west side or in Rio Rancho, but those weren’t really my stomping grounds when I lived there, so I wouldn’t be able to compare them on a “then-and-now” scale.)
I’m not saying Denver is better for the progress it’s making. Not all of it is positive. At least two of those new skyscrapers had money problems and one of them has resulted in a fraud conviction. A lot of the new homes in Stapleton have been foreclosed upon and not every new strip mall is beautiful or helpful to the local economy. But there is a pulse of life and to business here which is much more ambitious.
Case in point: We stopped at a gas station on the way out of town and tried to use a credit card at the pump. After several tries, we went inside, and were informed none of the pump readers worked. There were no signs posted saying “please pay inside” or “out of order,” so we inquired further about the situation. “Don’t know. They just broke and the people who fix it haven’t fixed it yet.” How long have they been waiting? Two weeks. At a large chain, not a mom-and-pop station.
If that happened at a station here in Denver, you can bet it would have been fixed in less than a day, or heads would have rolled. Lost business over an equipment malfunction is not tolerated, that I know of, anywhere people like to make money. Yet there we were, dumbfounded at the prospect this station, close to the highway, might be hemorrhaging dollars while mañana and mañana and mañana went by.
The people I love in the ‘Burque may adore the lives they’ve built there as much as I love mine here and, as I said, I am not denigrating any part of their fair city. I simply find the differences fascinating, like comparing Budapest to Beijing … which is a topic for another day.
I might even get around to writing that one.
I meet a lot of musicians. It comes with the territory of being one myself, traveling to music festivals, and being a sometime producer / promoter.
Generally, the CDs I obtain from friends and acquaintances are - to put it as diplomatically as I can - not very good. Sometimes the music itself is what turns me off, but usually the culprit is bad production quality. It’s one thing to be called a “garage band,” but it’s another to actually sound like the recording was made in a musty, echo-y garage. Or Mom’s basement.
I finally got around to listening to a CD I picked up from new friends, Qod Torren, at the Kinetik Festival a couple of weeks ago. The surprise is that it’s not just enjoyable electronica, but includes some solid song-writing and good production quality.
I’m not going to do a full-fledged review here , because I despise that particular genre of writing - who is anyone else to tell me what I should and should not like, especially with something as visceral and personal as music taste? - so I’ll just leave you with a link to their website and their MySpace page, where you can listen to tracks yourself.
Oh, and they’re based in Las Vegas at the moment, which means I have yet another excuse to visit Sin City.
As if I need another.
Because you didn’t.
When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realize you are being ruled by people you went to high school with. You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing BUT high school. You make a fool of yourself in high school, then go to college to learn how you should have acted in high school, then you get into real life and that turns out to be high school again – class officers, cheerleaders, and all. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
So it goes, so it goes.