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Category Archives: from the road
SXSW 2008 – SXSW, I’m still in love with you
South by Southwest is a music festival that is explicitly designed for people like me. It’s a marathon. Four solid days of drinking and watching music, but not in a smelly outdoor camping kind of way, in small clubs that are within walking distance of each other starting from whenever you wake up and going until 2am bar close.
Last year we really took advantage of the free drinks. This year I don’t think I had more than 3 free drinks and I want to say they were all Dewar’s and ginger at Red Eye Fly. Generally speaking with the day shows, if you have good food/drinks/giveaways then the shows are going to be terrible. That way it’s a no-lose situation. Either you see good music like I did this year, or you eat and drink all day for free.
Once again this year we continued the now established tradition of hitting Mugshots during the siesta time between the day and night shows for some good cheap drinking. This year involved no shots though, which probably a good thing because it meant that I made it all the way through the weekend without throwing up.
Write ups when I get home.
First Lonestar tallboy at Emo’s
SXSW 2008 – Biggest asshole move
Biggest asshole move of the weekend? Jumping the line at Burbon Rocks to see the Helio Sequence. TOTALLY FUCKING WORTH IT. And to my credit, I had no intention of jumping the line, I was just drunk and asking where I was supposed to stand when she scanned us in.
SXSW 2008 – Famous person sighting
Sunday School
While in DFW visiting Jim and Adrienne, we had the unfortunate luck of running into a youth group at a restaurant on Sunday afternoon. They were the most obnoxious bunch I’ve ever seen, but I knew exactly what to expect from them. Adrienne was not so lucky, I guess she had never experienced them on the level that I have. So I thought I should write down the personality types for her future reference.
The “Cool” Guy – He is the guy that can play guitar. He wears the trendy clothes like the real cool kids at school, but sings songs about how much he loves God. The housewives at church secretly want their daughters to fuck him so they can live vicariously through them.
The Alpha Male – Easy to spot with wardrobe of I love Jesus t-stirts, he is generally short in stature but makes up for it with his obnoxiously loud voice and spastic antics. In terms of sheer annoyance, he is only matched by the Alpha Female.
The Quiet Boyfriend – He’s been dating the Church Lovin’ Girl since like first grade and just continues to show up because he thinks he will eventually graduate from hand-holding to sex. He’ll likely marry her when they turn 18 because he wants it so bad. He’s going to be sorely disappointed.
The Gay Guy – Easy to spot because he’s the one with a girl on each arm. He’s super-gay but continues to believe that church can fix him. The church girls love him because he’s so easy to talk to and will revel in the fact that they used to hang out with “one of those gays”, but will totally turn their backs on him when he comes out of the closet his sophomore year of college.
The Rebel Girl – She dresses like the cool kids and hates church but continues to show up to events for one of the following reasons: her best friend is super into church, her parents would give her a ton of hell if she stopped going, or she has managed to corrupt one of the church boys and they have sex/do drugs in church on a regular basis.
The Quiet Girl – Already dressing the part of the non-sexy librarian, she is difficult to spot because most the time you won’t even notice her since she almost never speaks. She’ll develop an uncomfortable relationship with her 15 cats when she’s 50 and still single.
The Alpha Female – She’s the most religious of all and has no qualms about telling you so at any moment. She is impossible to miss because her voice is piercing even when she speaks in a normal tone. You can never have a conversation because she won’t let you get a word in and if you do happen to you can rest assured she isn’t listening to you.
The Church Lovin’ Girl – She loves God, plain and simple. she’s easy to spot with her homemade WWJD bracelet and tons of other Jesus paraphernalia. If she is abnormally hot for the church crowd, she surely has a long-term boyfriend that she’s been dating since first grade, but she wants to save herself until marriage. She’ll either marry her high school sweetheart or turn into a crack whore by the time she’s 19.
Youth Minister Guy – You can’t miss the “adult” in the group. Most of the time, he’s going to be the mid-30s guy using hip slang from 5 years ago. He has a myspace page so he can “keep an eye” on the kids in the youth group and will likely be featured on an episode of “To Catch a Predator”. He lives by Wooderson’s quote from Dazed and Confused: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” He’ll be the Church Lovin’ Girl’s first customer when she breaks up with her boyfriend.
Yeah, yeah. I’m going to hell. Whatever.
Lake Tahoe x-mas
Oh yeah, I went to Lake Tahoe for x-mas. It is absolutely gorgeous there as you can see. I went with Jason, Balki, and Ezra. Here’s the trip in notable quotes:
“You are a bottle of jack away from closing that deal.”
“You need to start having sex with strangers.”
“I am a serial monogamist.”
“No matter what, Dan would tell you that he would have hit that.”
“Did you do that skiing?”
“I feel like every time I take a trip with you I lose a year off my life.”
“This place smells like strippers.”
“I want to see the crutches work their magic.”
“So, are you into guys or girls?”
“It looks like Montbleu only brought out the starters.”
“In chinatown they call that a ‘rucky nickel’”
“I don’t see myself staying away past six am.”
A more coherent write-up another time.
x-mas and all that
Lake Tahoe trip complete. How do you celebrate x-mas at DFW airport?
With jager shots and dos equis, of course. More on the trip and my knee status later.
New Phone?
In my mad rush to get to the airport for Las Vegas, someone bumped into me pretty hard with their luggage. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I got out of the subway to catch the AirTrain. My phone looked like this:
I immediately recognized it as a cracked LCD, but attempted to turn the phone on and off repeatedly in hopes that it was just some kind of windows mobile crash. It wasn’t, obviously. That’s also when I realized how dependent I am on my cell phone. I only have a handful of phone numbers memorized and they were going to be of no use to me in Vegas. Luckily for me, the call history feature on this phone is laid out pretty well and though I did call some random people a million times, I managed to get a hold of Demanda and crew.
Getting a hold of them wasn’t enough though. I needed a phone and I needed it now. I wasn’t going to suffer all weekend without it. I need my entertainment box any moment I have more than ten seconds of idle time. I need to check bloglines and email and sports scores (Yeah, I can’t explain that one either) and sometimes I even look up directions. So on Friday I was on a mission to get a new phone. $70 in cabs and $375 later, I had a new phone, and an insane hatred of Las Vegas traffic. Motherfuck it couldn’t be worse. The one shining moment in the trip was finding a Zappos outlet store in Vegas (which happens to be the new headquarters for Zappos).
But I remember when I used to have everyone’s phone numbers memorized. In fact, I still remember the work phone numbers of the majority of my coworkers from NI. Unfortunately that too would do me little good, since a lot of them no longer work at the company. Now instead of phone numbers, I have the latest episode of I Love New York stuck in my mind. That’s a good trade-off.
To mitigate this problem I think I need to use the old buddy system. So, I need a phone buddy. We’ll exchange complete phone lists and memorize each others phone numbers. That way should my phone ever break again I can get all the important numbers by calling one person. Either that or I’ll just have to reallocate some TV watching memory. Yeah, sign ups for phone buddy start…now.
Chicago
A couple weeks ago, Jason, Kat and I made it out to Chicago for a quick weekend to burn some free Southwest flights that were about to expire on us. We managed to pack a good time into the weekend, but I’d have to say the highlight for me was the Museum of Science and Industry. Fuck the Field Museum and their shitty dinosaurs, the Science and Industry Museum in Chicago is home to the U-505, which is the first sub captured by the US during World War II. Now that may not sound too impressive to you, but it housed an Enigma machine onboard and was the key to the Allies decoding the German cryptography for years, eventually ending the war. I just wish would have had more time to look at it, the museum was closing just as we got to it.
The second best part though was the Body Worlds exhibit. There are a number of these exhibits traveling the country right now, if you’ve never seen the inside of the human body it is definitely something worth checking out. Some parts were awesome – like the body with six fingers and six toes and the knee replacement, but after a while it all started to run together.
One rather odd part was how they decided which hair they would leave on and where they would leave it off. One of the last exhibits involved a female ice skater, completely stretched out with her crotch right in your face. This is the one they decided to leave all the pubic hair on, of course. Creepy.
If you go see the exhibit, I have one suggestion, skip the majority of it and go straight to the guestbook at the end. I didn’t have enough time to go through them all, but that alone was worth the price of admission. I took pictures of a few of the remarks, but there were many more absolute gems. I particularly liked the eloquent political statements:
“It was cool to see how I started out. Not.”
“After seeing the babies, I think all of those who abort there children should be shot.”
These statements were, of course, in response to the pregnancy bodies, which is sure to get people worked up. The exhibit includes women at multiple stages of pregnancy. It’s a real peek into the minds of the general public. The first note I’m sure was left by a child. But I would guess that the second one was left by a woman, likely in her 30s. Her comment bothers me on so many levels, probably the worst of which is that I believe people who can’t tell the difference between “their” and “there” should be shot.
Wisconsin
It’s cold there, dontcha know. Right at freezing in fact, with mixed snow/rain/sleet. And they’re overly chipper about it too. The weather actually wasn’t all that bad. It’s actually what the weather is supposed to be like in New York, I just lucked out this year. Something to look forward to for next year, I guess. It’s whiter up there, and I’m not refering to the weather. I was watching a comedian once who made a joke about how there were no black people up north because they were too smart to live somewhere that cold. I saw four black people in my two days in Madison. And one hispanic guy, who overcooked my burger (of course). With that, I’m pretty sure I saw the majority of the local color. But the cheese curds. The cheese curds made it all worthwhile.