It’s time for bed and here I am typing this before I forget it!
Friday night, we went to see System of a Down at Xcel Center. For a gigantic arena, they have pretty good sound. The Mars Volta was really boring in that sense that you’re sitting there staring off into space, and all of a sudden you think, ‘oh, that band’s still on stage? huh.’ I was somewhat familiar with their music beforehand, but they were not great live. All 40 of them in the band, not great. The more-transfixing pre-show entertainment was the spot where some drunk kid had vomited huge chunks. A crowd had gathered around it, and people were tossing cash into the puddle. The brave/stupid kids would run up, grab the cash, and shake the chunks off onto the crowd. It was embarrassingly funny to watch. System was SO much fun. Serj is the ultimate Romanian showman. Holy crap, I think I liked it more than Billy Idol. Did I mention I’m going to two more concerts this weekend? In addition to my Iaido seminars? Insanity. The whole weekend, it was overcast and on-and-off raining, which I hate with burning passion. I went to kickboxing, then hid in places like the mall (goddamn, H&M might have been excitingly new, but going there 24 hours after it opened was painfully stupid) and cleaning out my closet. I was going to get rid of everything that was old and didn’t fit, but the weight loss is going better than expected, and it did all fit. I had to make some hard choices. Sigh. Later, we hung out at Dunn Brothers for a while before Chele’s party. I miss Paul a ton, not only for things like the fact that his ringtone matches his tshirt. When the band showed up, I realized I had seen one of the girls mostly-naked online earlier in the day. Shit is bizarre sometimes, muchachos. We went over to Chatterbox and played twisted versions of board games, and Wendy totally cheated, because it’s the only way I can explain her beating me over and over at Connect Four. There was a guy there that looked exactly like Uncle Jesse (Full House, not Dukes of Hazzard), and some bitches that wouldn’t give up the Atari. The best part of the night was when Earl analyzed our handwriting. (I know it’s the best part, because Bertine and Wendy have already posted their analyses, and I’ve been dying to do so.) Anyway, it was freakishly correct. He told me I’m very optimistic, very outgoing but need time to myself (I disagreed with this at first because I have trouble spending more than a couple hours in my house alone, but what he meant was something different), that I’m always the same no matter what situation I’m in, and that I have good instincts about people (I disagreed here, too, but then realized I’m really good at reading people right away; it’s interpreting their behavior once I get to know them that’s a problem). The kicker, though, was when he told me that I let people stick around longer than I should. I’m really bad at ending relationships. Yes, general hilarity ensued. I swear this is something I’m going to get right before I die. End it when you know it’s over. Don’t avoid it because you’re afraid of what will happen if you tell someone to go away. And, really, DON’T do that thing where you try to make people hate you so much they feel all empowered about their decision to leave you instead. This does not work! Trust me, I’ve only done it about 200 times now. You’d think I’d learn. [Come to think of it, I got this technique from someone and you know who you are. It never worked for you, either, did it? Ha.] I know it’s probably realistic to expect you’re going to have to leave a limb or two behind in the bear trap every time you end a friendship or relationship. Still, I’d prefer to dance my way out of the sideshow, rather than crawling. Something to keep in mind for the future! Sunday was brunch and a haircut with one of my favorite girls ever, Mahogany, and even that was not enough to stave off the immense crabbiness caused by the weather (I only realized later that it was PMS as well). I had signed a binding blood-oath with myself earlier in the week, stating that I would not, under any circumstances, make plans to go out on Sunday, so I could do house-and-sitting-around things. But you know what? I don’t want to do those things when it’s crappy outside. It just makes me tired. I have deduced from this that I am SOLAR-POWERED. So we went to see The Corpse Bride. It was pretty good, if really short. Oh, and I also forgot to mention that I went camera-shopping on Sunday. In order to force myself to make a new-camera decision (I wanted one for Prague/Budapest), I sold my old one to Bertine. I ended up getting a 5mp Canon Elph. The store-dude and various others promised me it would have all the photo-quality of the Canon I loved, but a much faster shutter and processor speed. It’s tiny, which is exactly what I wanted. When I get my 1gb SD card and sexy carrying-case from Amazon, I will be 100% hooked up. Tonight I went to school, and I’m so totally in love with my Arabic class. I was kind of overwhelmed last time, but this week I remembered a lot of it, and I’ve started to hear the accent. Somehow that’s key for me; I realized eons ago that the thing that made me good at languages was being able to hear it to the point it was recognizable. That way, it just filters directly into my head without the forced-remembering part. I’m shitty at memorizing vocabulary, but understand the math behind grammar, inflection, and the way sounds shift when combined. All languages share that universality. So yeah! It’s going well. I’m really excited to learn how to write it. Also, I love the people in the class. My class-bff Elina spent 20 minutes educating me on local hiphop. I have band names and URLs scrawled in amongst barely-readable Arabic words. Ike is still super-cute in his tweed driving cap. Francesca is exactly like you’d expect a Francesca to be: she wears a cardigan and silk scarf and has an east coast overeducated accent, even though you know she’s from Minnesota. She’s an author, and she really liked studying Latin because it didn’t require speaking (I didn’t understand that, because we always had to speak in both Greek and Latin). Wolf was wearing florescent-orange Chuck Taylors, and very nearly choked to death on his gigantic bubble tea. So yeah. It’s pretty amazing, this class. Well, I was going to ask you to do something participatory tonight, but it’s late and I don’t have my druthers. Next time, I swear! Ma’a al-salama, dudes.Jenni