Bringing the Drama

so yesterday i described my adventure at jazz fest. here are the pictures. the pictures i took are the first 9. my friend chad took the rest. you can observe the top left picture on the second page and the picture directly underneath that and see proof of sara watkins making eyes at me. my friend carla responded with “i can kind of see that”, but i told her “for someone with a crush, that counts.”

today i pretty much lounged around on a fairway and tracked golf balls with lasers. i’m volunteering at the zurich classic this weekend, so i was one of these guys except i was in the fairway. it was pretty fun, but near the end i was getting tired of it. some of those guys play SO SLOW, so there were big gaps in the last few groups. the two guys i spent most of the day with were much older than me, but full of wisdom. this one guy carlo told me 3 rules for a long marriage,

1. never go to bed angry. you may stay up late fighting, but never go to bed mad at each other
2. when you argue, argue with your clothes off. you’ll realize how stupid the argument is when you do that.
3. bathe every night together. (this one centered on spending quality time with your spouse. he later said he and his wife get up early every morning and walk 2 miles and just talk. i think they may have followed the rule early on in their marriage. i think i’d choose showering anyway. i’m not a fan of bathing anymore.)

now, for my married readers, you can maybe try these rules out if you have not already incorporated them. i must say, carlo did spend much of the day using his binoculars to check out females as they walked around, so just keep that in mind. he did mention he’s been happily married for 30 years, so they must be working for him. he gave me good job advice though, about how being happy is an important thing with your job. i’m going to see if maybe i can parlay this volunteer thing into a permanent job on the tour. it’d be pretty cool to go around the country giving instructions on how to shoot lasers. and i’m sure you’d get to play a lot of golf too.

so yesterday my friend chad and i left work early and went to jazz fest. it was AWESOME! the weather was perfect. i was worried about parking. i never like parking on the street, but we found a good place in city park and avoided paying to park. and when we got back, my car was still there. so it really was a double score. i asked chad a couple of times during the day “you know, we’d still be sitting at our desks right now”, and then we’d laugh at our friends still stuck at work. i kind of felt like ferris bueller.

we got there in time for the nickel creek interview. that was okay. it was moderated by some dope from the LA times and he didn’t really ask any questions of anything i didn’t already know. he kind of wasted time since the thing already had started 15 min late, PLUS they had brought their instruments and started things off by playing ‘you don’t have to move that mountain’. during the course of the interview, they were talking about playing new orleans and said “when we’ve played shows here, the crowd seems more energized, like they can appreciate live music more here.” good answer. then they played ‘sweet afton’. some audience questions followed, then they played one song from their upcoming album, which was an instrumental and it was killer. ‘scotch and chocolate’, and i think in honor of the title, when i get the album, i’ll pour myself a glass of scotch and eat chocolate. well, maybe just the scotch.

then chad and i left there and hung out to watch the red stick ramblers who were great. i love cajun music, esp when its fused with bluegrass. good stuff. after they were finished, we walked around some more. checked out some of the other stages, including this really cool jazz band. i don’t know why i don’t listen to more jazz.

we made our way back to the stage where NC would hit the stage and made it in good timing to get a spot reasonably close to the stage. it was PACKED. the show was good, but they didn’t play any new songs. they did mention that they’d be signing autographs at the virgin mega store tent. so after they finished, chad and i walked over and got in line. all i had to get signed was my jazz fest schedule i had printed off and highlighted. so that was cool to have i guess. better than a ticket stub. i asked when they’d play the house of blues again and chris did say they’ll hit up new orleans with their new tour, so that’s cool. he also told me, “i don’t normally tell people this, but i’m frickin stoked about this new record.” lots of artists say that, but after hearing ‘scotch and chocolate’, he may be on to something. plus he seemed very sincere when he said it, not one of those ‘yeah, i like the new sound’. i may have impressed sara watkins by just saying ‘hey, what’s up? y’all did good today’ and not “omigosh, i LOVE YOUR MUSIC!” chad got a picture where she’s making eyes at me. well, it looked like that on his camera. how the full picture looks may be different. i didn’t really have anything profound to say, it was the first time i got to meet my favorite band. i’ve met other bands, but nobody like nickel creek. i think only meet u2 or ryan would rank up there. seriously.

then after that, we tried to see bb king, but that stage was so crowded, we couldn’t see anything. they didn’t even have a video screen at that stage. wtf? we listened to a few songs and then left, both of us thinking our legs would just fall off.

it was a good day.

the trade off though was i had to miss bible study. i really like the new one i’m going to. i didn’t like having to miss it, but i was too tired to go. i hope to hang out with the guys later this weekend.

i tape this show called ‘ed’ during the day while i’m at work and then watch the rerun later. i used to watch the show when it was on regular tv, and i still watch it with it in reruns. the last one i watched today was the one where ed had a lucid dream. so he found out why he was so hesitant to having a relationship with frankie. it turned out he was scared because it might be too perfect. he had been burned in the past of building girls up only to have them let him down by not living up to the expectations. i thought about this, and realized i am more the opposite, if i don’t think its going to work out, then i don’t want to even pursue it. i have three non-negotiables, and if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may know a couple of them. (for those keeping score: be christian, like or be open to liking ryan adams, and be able to appreciate u2) you would think those wouldn’t be hard kept requirements, but as i alluded to the other day, like my friend jacob said about the blue album, i just don’t think i could date a girl who said something like “u2 is overrated and they suck”. i don’t ask that much when it comes to dating, just that i feel something real. the last girl i dated was everything i wanted on paper, but when we went out, there just weren’t any sparks. she was the safe bet though, i couldn’t find faults with her, but i just didn’t feel anything for her in my heart. i don’t want to settle for the safe bet. i want the challenge, so at the end of the day i feel i’m dating the dream girl and not that i grabbed the low hanging fruit.

so in the show, he wakes up from the dream where he realizes he still has some feelings for his dream girl, but ends up telling frankie he likes her anyway because he knows things can work out with frankie. eventually this leads to disaster, because he realizes frankie is not his dream girl (carol) and ends up hurting frankie. sometimes its better not to think and go for the less likely target. i’m always a person who’d rather just do something instead of not doing something and regretting it. it keeps me sane. last year i went out a couple of times with this girl who i met at a baseball game. i NEVER just call up some girl i randomly meet, but there was no way i was going to be able to live with myself if i didn’t do it. and even though things did not work out, and i ended up spending over $100 to learn from the experience, i don’t regret it one bit. so maybe next time i think “ah forget it, just ask her out and be done with it”, i’ll find ‘that’ girl that holds my interest and doesn’t make me think “for crying out loud, does she have to curse that much” or “i had no idea she was so clingy”.

so its like 6 am and i fell asleep on my couch again. i tend to do that during the weekends. good thing its not during the week because my ride to work would be here in 20 minutes. anyway, i figure its a good time to finally type the blog that’s been evading me for two days. friday night i went with a couple of friends to see a band called macrosick. (the site is pretty visually trippy, much like their live show, so you might also want to try their purevolume page). before we get to the show, let’s start from the beginning. i ran late getting to the house we were meeting at. as you can see in the comments from the previous post, i was supposed to be there at 6:15, yet i managed to get there at 6:25. so i’m already feeling awkward about making my friends late for a surprise birthday party. my friend’s jacob’s (now called JT to distinguish between married jacob and younger jacob) wife is pretty quiet, and i don’t really know her that well, so i felt awful when i discovered the party we were going to was at her parents’ house. don’t worry, we got there in plenty of time before the guest of honor arrived, and yet that doesn’t even begin to touch on the amount of awkwardness to follow. we get there and everyone knows each other except for me and my other friend jacob, since the three of us (two jacobs and me) were going to the show afterward. so you know how it is when you’re at a party and you don’t know anyone. then, not 10 minutes after we get there, this guy starts having a seizure. i’ve never been in a situation like that, but its weird in those first few minutes when people are trying to figure out if its real or if the guy’s tricking everyone. the first reactions were “dude, stop kicking the table”, “hey, you spilled a coke, watch out”, then when people realized he wasn’t acting, it got scary. not that it wasn’t before, but you figured out the fear was real. so everyone started praying, well, i think everyone. i’m not really into the whole speaking in tongues thing, so its weird when people around me start doing that. but that wasn’t really what i was focusing on at the time, its that this guy is having a seizure and i have no idea how serious something like that is and i’m wondering how long it takes the ambulance to get to the house. thnakfully, he started to come out of it, and a couple of minutes later the ambulance showed up. he was conscious when the ambulance took him to the hospital, and we heard a report later that they did the necessary tests and everything came back negative. so hopefully whatever problem the guy’s having can be fixed, i say that because apparently the guy does not have epilepsy. so of course, after the ambulance leaves, everyone is left to have a party. somehow everyone managed to look past it, and the party went pretty well. the guy was surprised (he showed after the ambulance left) and everyone had a good time. after the cake eating was done, we left for the show.

a bit of a history lesson, earthsuit broke into two bands with the keyboardist forming mute math and the lead singer forming macrosick. the show was at this old twine rope mill now called ‘twi-ro-pa’. so friday night, two bands were playing, macrosick was opening for the walkmen, and mudvayne was playing in the main room. twi-ro-pa has multiple rooms for concerts. anyway, what was weird was you could totally pick out the mudvayne people showing up and falling out of their cabs. i don’t know if the black clothing is a requirement for attending a mudvayne show, but that’s the way it seemed. i’ll save the “that kind of music sucks” rant for another time, but it was fun to sit out and sort of people watch who was coming to macrosick and who was going to mudvayne. we were standing outside the doors to the room where macrosick was playing while we did the people watching, so we saw several people, including seeing the walkmen roll up in two cabs to arrive without much fan fare. we thought about running up to them and going “i love your music!”, okay, well, maybe it was just me. the doors opened later than expected, but no big deal. macrosick came out and played and i was amazed. it was like JT said, “performance art”. the band was up there playing, the singer had this whole bowie thing going on, and then the visual effects on the wall behind the stage, being run by a guy considered in the band, it just made for a trippy experience. i thoroughly enjoyed it though, more than i thought i would. honestly i went because i heard they were good, but i really didn’t know what to expect. apparently they are on the cusp of being signed, which is cool, and i think they are better than 99% of what’s on rock radio these days. they don’t sound like anyone, which alone is a large reason. you can tell some influences though, but they are their own creative element. i think the most accurate description of the night was when we were talking to these people at the bar while waiting for drinks, JT described macrosick, “i don’t mean to pimp them because they’re my friends or anything, but i think they’re really f’n brilliant.”

the walkmen came out, and i thought they kind of sucked. maybe its because macrosick was so good and we had seen these guys get out of a cab, so it was hard to imagine them as rock stars? i don’t know. a few songs in, the guys from macrosick invited JT to come in the VIP room, which was in the back of the bar. of course, jacob and i got to go in the special room too. which basically was a room with couchs, beer, and water. so JT was talking with the lead singer from macrosick, who looked kind of run down. i’m sure it must be tough when the record label rep from NY misses the show he was supposed to be at and your performance isn’t what you thought. (that’s what i gathered). it was weird sitting there with more people i didn’t know, especially people in a band i had just seen who i thought were tremendous. anyway, i got to see what a band does when they go backstage for an encore. the walkmen finished their main set and walked in, sat down on some of the couches, decided on a song, then went back out and finished. all of that in a matter of two minutes. so that was kind of cool. we finished the night by popping in the blue album and singing along to the songs. apparently that is a concert tradition for the two jacobs, one that i can definitely live with. jacob actually said he broke up with a girl partly because she went with them to see a concert, and she did not enjoy them singing. “you don’t have to know the words, but if you can’t have fun singing “say it ain’t so”, there’s something wrong.” indeed.

so after being inspired by reading another blog where acronyms are used to describe members of the opposite sex, i will now describe my shopping experience at the gap tonight, and my near run in with hot gap chick (HGC). i needed a new belt thanks to the running, the working out, the WW points, etc. so i went to the gap tonight before going to walmart. i took one of my usual after 8 pm trips to avoid the traffic. it always works and tonight was no different. i arrived at the gap at about 8:15 and was the only one there, customer wise anyway. i walk in and head for the belts. the first person to come ask if i needed anything was HGC. its odd the amount of turnover the gap has since it seems there’s always someone new when i go. so i take my time to check out boxers and the sale rack, and proceed to the check out. i had not kept track of HGC since there was hardly anyone in the store, and what were the odds i’d end up getting someone else. so as i walk up to the counter, i see another girl up there who was not H at all. alas, my movements were too far, there was no turning back. i had passed the ‘gap body’ rack of overpriced soaps and the point of no return. as this non-HGC girl rang up my new belt and boxers, i saw HGC doing something over at the counter between the gap and gap kids. it was simply not meant to be tonight. quite the shame.

so this week i went on a trip to huntsville for work. i went to monitor and help run a test on some stuff (electrical stuff, i don’t know enough about what it was to explain). basically, we subjected the components of a system to environments they would encounter during a shuttle launch. so from that aspect it was pretty cool since what we were testing were actually going to go on a future tank. i was holding in my hands something that would launch. huntsville is a pretty nice town. i would probably live north of it so i could be closer to nashville. i thought some about moving, which i’ve been thinking a lot about. staying at my current job may make it easier for me to move to huntsville then going somewhere else. i’m starting to get more responsiblity (i’m in charge of collecting the paperwork now ) which is okay, but i’m also getting more involved with testing hopefully since i really enjoyed being able to witness an actual test. the trip itself was uneventful. one of the guys at work, darryl, was also on the trip, so he and i ate together and hung out. i had never really talked with him before about non work stuff, so it was cool to get to know him. he’s got an understated louisiana accent, and i think its pretty cool.

last night i had another party at my house. i invited the people from my new bible study as long as my usual suspects of people. xbox was played, hamburgers were grilled, beer was drank, and the night was capped off by an intense game of ‘scene it’, which was won by the guys and yours truly answered the final ‘all play’ question. last night was part of the reason i’m thinking about putting off the moving. i like the circle of friends i’m starting to develop. i’m starting to find more people who are not into the sugarcoating their lives to seem more christian. so maybe my job isn’t that fun, but my life is a lot more than that. i hope to make the bbq parties a frequent thing over the summer. if only my friend thomas’ fiancee would have allowed him to come, we could have played 4 player ddr. that’s (thomas’ situation) a whole other post, and that’d be a rant, so maybe some other time.

today i watched the masters in all its glory in HD. sweet! except for the commentators. really, i’m not a fan of jim nantz during basketball because he’s really only there to provide the good cop to billy packer’s bad cop. its really stupid. and in golf, he’s not much better. sure, maybe he actually plays golf, but he doesn’t do anything but make every shot seem like its the best thing ever, or compare it to previous years, or just kiss tiger’s ass (which a lot of commentators do, because tiger is one of the best ever, but they don’t make other golfers seem like they have absolutely no chance to do well). watching the final round today, i was glad most of the action occurred without nantz commentating. the most ignorant thing i’ve ever heard at the masters, on 6 i think it was, when dimarco hit first, his shot stuck, then rolled off…verne lundquist goes “the mere vibration of tiger’s ball hitting the green caused dimarco’s ball to roll off”. then when they showed the replay dimarco’s ball was already half way down the hill when tiger’s ball landed. i don’t know, sometimes CBS’ announcers can just be idiots. golf balls don’t cause green sized vibrations, the ball would have to hit pretty close to have any effect on another ball, much less one 30 feet away.

i recorded the final round because i didn’t think i’d be able to watch it. i had a meeting at church. i was able to get to my parents in time to see the last 5 holes. tiger’s chip in on 16 was historic. 16 is a memorable hole. last year mickelson (my favorite player) holed a major putt, nicklaus made a major putt there to win his 6th masters in ’86. today tiger had a chip in from off the green for birdie that all but deflated dimarco’s chances of a comeback. to make a shot like that under all that pressure in that kind of situation (tiger was up one shot) was thought to be the back breaker. or so everyone thought. dimarco kept battling and tiger was the one to choke, allowing the way for a playoff. the most epic playoff i’ve ever seen was the 2000 PGA where tiger took down bob may in three holes. today tiger only needed one. it was great. i was glad tiger had to win the tournament instead of him just coasting to victory. i hold out much hope for this year’s golf season. its not tiger and the other guys. all those guys are good.

today my friend charity got married. this troubled me, but its a problem that’s been troubling me for quite some time, probably like 3 years. charity and i were really good friends at clemson. i met her on a mission trip, and after being promptly shot down asking her out, we grew to be good friends, in fact, i would say she was my best friend for at least two years. did i mention she is hot? she was also a strong christian, someone i looked up to at times when i was feeling weak. she moved down to charleston my senior year in hopes of getting into med school. she was always known to play an online video game on her computer, which she continued when she moved down to charleston. she got a job at a hospital after getting rejected on her first application to med school. she was going to gain some medical experience or something and then apply again the next year. she ended up meeting this guy from florida via the online game and before you knew it, he moved up to charleston. they started living together, she threw away her dreams of med school, and ended up supporting his part time schooling with two jobs. so add that to the fact that he wasn’t christian and she stopped going to church. so the past three years i would talk to our mutual friend rachel about how when charity got married, we’d both stand up at the ceremony when the minister would say “if anyone has any objections to this union…” last year when i went up to charleston to run in the cooper bridge run with my friend ryan, we met up with charity for dinner. i had invited her and the fiancee but he decided he didn’t want to come. he’s kind of anti social, much the opposite from my friend charity who’s a social butterfly type. ryan also knew charity from clemson, so it was kind of weird for him to sit at dinner and hear what had happened to her since school. the girl we had known who went to play volleyball on the weekends, who was going to be this big fancy doctor ended up supporting some non christian dude who played an online video game and took classes part time with no job.

so today they ended up getting married. i didn’t go mostly because it was all the way in charleston, because of the situation, and because i didn’t get an invitation. its been tough for me this week knowing its coming up because i keep going over in my head “what could i have done to prevent this from happening?” i went out with my friend judith last night, and she told me how she was in a similar situation, only she was the girl everyone was concerned about. she told me she wasn’t comfortable at church because she felt everyone judging her. she wanted to make an exception for the guy, even though she knew the whole “being unequally yolked is bad” applied to her too. at least the guy she was dating had a job. she gave me some good advice as to how to deal with the situation…pray for my friend.

btw, if you don’t understand the title, go rent this

lately i’ve been feeling there’s something more in almost every aspect of my life, like i’m searching for something. something more that i want from my job, something more i want from my church, something more i want from my social life. i’ve typed about how i’ve been underwhelmed with my job lately. i may have touched on how i’ve been not totally satisfied with church. a couple of weeks ago, i talked to the leader of the singles ministry if he met people outside of church. i was kind of looking for maybe a discipleship type deal. so i got his email and later in the week emailed him. i ended up getting a reply from some office worker with open appointments during the day. i of course work during the day, so the fact that the times to meet him were during the day, plus the email was from some other guy disappointed me. i guess that’s a problem with mega churches, there’s someone to do everything so there’s not much of a personal touch to some things. its hard to build real relationships when a lot of things are handled by other people, like email.

fast forward to tonight…i had met up with this guy zach at the mute math show. i had met him about a year ago but never really hung out with him or anything. i also talked to his friend jacob, and by the end of the night they had invited me to zach’s house for a small group. jacob even described it as “we just get together and throw darts and drink beer. but its with other believers, so its cool.” FINALLY, realness! so tonight i went and it was great. i wasn’t really looking for a structured bible study or a group where conversations were forced or driven a certain way. i probably got more out of tonight’s discussions than the last year of bible studies. so i think i’ve finally found a group i can count on to build me up. somewhere i can go be real with people and truly believe they care. it was awesome, and i’m very thankful for it. so maybe it won’t end my search completely, but it may satisfy my desire for more in my church life. cool.

i normally give people the benefit of the doubt at work. however the past couple of weeks i have not exactly had the easiest time working with certain people. the project i was working on involved gathering all the data for a big review meeting. i’m talking documents from different departments involving several different people being responsible for various things. i had a deadline of one day last week, and people were notified 2 weeks in advance. i even kept a spreadsheet updated daily with a list of who owed what. and you know what? i still did not get everything on time. and not because people didn’t have time to do the work, but that they were too lazy. they feel their other projects and assignments are more important than the information they owed me. and i’m talking about working with other adults who know exactly what’s going on. i suspect engineers have a bad rap in social situations because of just this kind of behavior. its just frustrating, and helps convince me that i should get a job back at my old job location, which i will hopefully be able to apply for later this week.

also, another donna story. i was building a linked webpage for all the information i was collecting. my boss wanted a hard copy of all the presentations. so she asked donna to print everything out. all the documents were in pdf format, all she had to do was go down a list and hit ‘print’. you know what? she couldn’t do it. she ended up printing things to multiple printers, mixing everything up, then promptly freaking out and complaining she couldn’t do it at 4:00 pm! so i had to stay late to help her get organized and make sure everything was done. i really don’t know how she keeps her job. i know she probably makes more than my sister, and i know my sister would be capable of printing things and keeping them organized. did i say she had all day to print these things? i don’t trust her to do anything. its not the first time she’s screwed up a simple task, and as i said today, i shudder to think of her getting a big responsibility that one of the bosses thinks she can handle and she screws that up. i’ll be standing off saying “i told you so”.