I’m only (not) sleeping

I do not sleep well. Lately, it has gotten pretty bad. This is essentially my thought process while trying to fall asleep.

10:30pm – get home from work, slightly buzzed (free whisky shooters!), going to watch a movie, have a few beers, hopefully become more sleepy

Midnight – movie over, tired, should sleep, but what about porn?

12:06 – okay, I should be able to sleep now, just let me get my iPod. Bob Dylan sounds good tonight

12:12 – love me some Bob Dylan, but only for three minutes at a time, which is a problem since his songs are so god damn long. Let’s switch to something else, side B of Mean Everything to Nothing.

12:45 – well that’s over, let’s listen to Tyler, the Creator rap about raping people

1:01 – my ears hurt and I want to roll onto my side but headphones are severely against that type of movement. Ditch the iPod, it is podcast time.

1:10 – remember that video of the white kid raping Burgers to Tyler? I NEED TO WATCH THAT RIGHT NOW

1:23 – found it

1:24 – okay, that wasn’t really worth it, but while I have my phone out I might as well see what twitter/instagram/tumblr is up to

1:34 – Shelby Fero is funnier than me. I still don’t get tumblr.

1:49 – SIMPSONS DOT GIF DOT TUMBLR DOT THISISAMAZING DOT COM

1:52 – podcast time now. For real.

1:53 – Greg Proops keeps talking about movies and baseball and stand up and I really need to get back on stage but I don’t think I want to but I’m going to lay here and thing of all the bits I used to tell seven months ago.

2:23 – podcast over. Time to finish the other podcast I fell asleep to last night.

2:46 – that one is over too. This pillow is uncomfortable. Maybe if I lay on my back and listen to Kanye West on my iPod I’ll fall asleep.

2:49 – Has any rapper lived longer off of one single verse than Nicki Minaj on Monster? I need to finish my OKCWGKTA post so I can relate to zero of my friends again.

3:03 – I am really bad at this. I should probably write about it.

3:12 – Well, my timeline caught up with me. Now what? Kanye is getting boring. Blues? No, not drunk enough, plus I forgot to put the beer in the fridge.

3:14 – Ugh, why won’t anyone retweet me? I thought my pizza tweet was pretty funny.

3:16 – thank God I don’t have internet access on my laptop right now. Maybe I’ll just play a few games of freecell

4:17 – the sun comes up really early now. I hate you, summer equinox.

I hate a girl, and that’s boring

I know how to read. Quite well actually, but occasionally I misread things. It happens on a daily basis, and it happened again today.

Twitter is a strange thing. This doesn’t really need to be explained to anyone: those who have twitter know what it is. Today, I saw a post that said “I hate a girl that’s boring”.

I read it as “I hate a girl, and that’s boring”, which you’ve probably figured out by now.

There is no real explainable reason as to why it appeared to me like that. Perhaps it was because I was busy catching up with a friend over coffee, or maybe because taking the time to hate someone is boring, and no one cares about it, especially the person projection the hate.

It takes a lot of time and effort to hate someone, and most things that require that much time and effort get boring, unless you’re getting paid to do it, and even still. Ever wonder how an athlete can get “burned out” playing a sport that pays them millions of dollars a year? Because that is all they’re doing, and that get’s boring.

Even still, I have instantly become obsessed with this phrase. Who hasn’t been in hate with someone so much that is boring to continue with the process? I know I have, which may by why it resonates so much.

The lesson here? Sometimes not being able to read can be worth it.

 

For Britt, Yesterday Ago

Yesterday, my friend and coffee house companion Britt called me up and issued me a challenge – compose a list of 21 songs, or whatever would fit on an 80 minute CD, that would answer the question “What kind of music do you listen to?”.

I’ll be honest, it was my birthday, I had just woken up, and was watching Mean Girls so I wasn’t really in the  mood for talking about which Beatles song best defines my musical selection. I passed it off and continued on with drinking beer all day long.

Then I stopped drinking beer and instead of going to bed I strapped on my iPod and thought about what Britt said. 21 songs. I could do that. Easy.

45 minutes and 75 songs later I realized this wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought, but slowly I whittled away at the list, getting it down to a respectable 21 songs sporadically spread over 69 minutes and 14 seconds.

The easy part was done, I had my songs, now I just needed to order them, which is by far the hardest part of this whole process.

I had a few different thoughts on how to order the songs – by year, alphabetically by song or artist, group the similar styled songs together – but none of those felt right. It just all ran together and almost had too much flow. How often to people listen to a collection of music that ever makes sense? I often spend days bouncing around between Eminem, Beach House, The Stone Roses, Foo Fighters and Norah Jones.

Music is sporatic. It is reactionary. It is in the moment. Music is quiet and simple when everything around you is loud and complex. Music is loud and complex when everything around you in quiet and simple. So that’s what the list became.

The list lives in a world where grunge leads to indie rap which leads to Radiohead which leads to acoustic guitar back to rap within a span of eight and a half minutes.

A space that has two teenage rappers opening for the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard, but that is music.

My music anyway.

This is an ordeal now

UPDATE: Look, I realize this is the first sentence of the first post, but there is already an update before anything happens. I was going to start this blog because I had random things I wanted to write about that weren’t necessarily about sports or music, so I made a list of ideas I had to write about.

That list got lost. So did the first post I was going to write.

It has been a long time since I’ve lost work on my computer. It reminded me why I always save my stuff before I turn my computer off. I did not do that yesterday, and today, I am frustrated, almost to the point where I just want to scrap this whole project. Alas, that would just be a terrible idea, so I’ll stick it out, re-write the previous post and continue on with this thing.

That is all. Proceed.

UPDATE TWO: I found the original first post from yesterday. It is now posted. All is right with the world again.

P.S. – this is what the alphabet would look like if the letters ‘q’ and ‘r’ didn’t exist.