Monday, December 27, 2004

Holiday Seasoned

Merry Christmas late!!!

It was a nice quiet Christmas... all of my siblings are not around right now so it ended up being Mom Gary me and Peter. We did the Present thing and the Dinner thing and Stocking thing and then we did the movie thing. We saw Lemony Snickett's A Series of Unfortunate Events. I don't think that people are going to get the setup of that movie quite as well if they have not read any of the books. Granted they are written for eight year olds but I read the first two when they got popular just to see what they were all about.

Tonight I am going to go out for my birthday (even though that was 12 days ago, its just so hard to plan anything around this time) we are going to go to the Piano Bar in the NYNY... otherwise known as the Bar at Times Square. They have dueling pianos there and people get drunk and sing along. I have always wanted to go there but never have. I hope that there are plenty of people there tonight... it would be fun with a crowd.

I have New Years Eve and Day off from work so that means I can actually do something cool for New Years. I am not sure what though. Peter wants to do the strip thing cause he just moved here and I have never done the strip thing but I am not sure I want to. I don't want to get stuck there I don't want to have to worry about driving or any of that. I want to go to a party where I can not think about things like designated drivers and I can just crash. hmm... I wonder how I could do both. I know that if we got to the strip we have to stay there until after the turning of the year. My parents are having a party and they invited me to invite my friends as well but I don't think all those people are going to fit into that house. bah. I'll tell ya what happens later.


Friday, December 24, 2004

give it up you wimp

ok so I think that I am just going to say screw it and let the other blog I have (not telling) be the incognito one cause thats where all the tricky stuff goes anyway. So now that I am no longer "hidden" or whatever it doesn't matter to me as much if I post pics. So I might do that ... but for now... I will just link up my shutterfly albums and my myspace.com acct. when I get to it.
IN OTHER NEWS
Ok so I accidentally ran across an old bf's webpage... cause he is on blogger and still lists barbershop as a style of music he likes... and since there are so few of us out here on the internet these days of course his name just popped right out at me. Weird huh? Anyways, it just goes to show you how life moves on with or without you. I'm glad he's happy and doing the whole domestic thing. Thats cool. Alright so I was going to post Patrick's other term paper and I had not done that yet so that is what I will do right now.
PATRICKS PAPER with his speech included

"Okay, last time. After coming to the conclusion that I wasn't going to get a good grade in this Feminist Psych class regardless of how good this paper was, I woke up this morning and wrote my last paper for it. Yes I'm pig-headed, but like all pig-headed sorts I'm quite sure I'm right. So here's my paper, it's not quite what was asked for and I'm pretty sure it's "below threshold" but I'm actually kind of pleased with it. I titled it "M is for Metaphor". Without further ado..." -Patrick

Firstly, let me apologize in advance. This is not a college paper.
I was standing in a high school gym, a man with iron grey hair and the strength of sorrow was handing out half-sheets of paper to people, to the people who were supposed to get a message. I was walking slowly towards him as he was loudly calling directions to the group of people who were picking up their papers, and he looked up at me and pointed. He pointed with his whole arm straight and his fingers partly open, like someone who’s accustomed to directing a crowd, and he called something out to me, I saw his lips move and I remember his rough, brisk voice but I don’t recall the words.

I was standing on a sidewalk at dusk, in a city, at the base of a tall building with someone important at the top, someone so important he didn’t even need to be mentioned. I was seeing as if through a video camera lens, and standing behind a square-jawed, clean-shaven white cop and his buddy. They were kneeling and practicing restraint techniques on a suspect. The one cop stood up with his hands in the air and his buddy called out his time and congratulated him, I looked down and a small fellow had been hog-tied into a bundle with something stuffed into his mouth to keep him quiet. I looked down the street to my left, and in the failing light of evening there was a single prison cell, built like a human-sized dog kennel made of black iron. A man in uniform was playing in it like a jungle gym, doing pull-ups to the encouragement of voices I could hear but not see. Further down the block were two more law officials, one had a machine gun and a grin, and he was making gestures pretending he was shooting. His pal egged him on, and the man did. He fired across the street, across three lanes of late evening traffic, of normal people going to normal places with normal lives. The first car through, a smallish SUV, kept driving and escaped harm. A second car screeched to a halt causing several cars to smash into a pileup behind it. A small blue car tried to follow the example of the first, accelerating through the stream of bullets, with no success. The bits of metal tore through car and driver, and my view followed this car as it careened into two parked cars on the far side of the road. I watched to see if anyone would get out, and heard the gun still firing. My view was diverted by another SUV that had been hit, which swerved around the corner. Cars stopped in chaos and drivers got out, and it seemed the gun had spread to other people, like a disease but one at a time. Normal men and women, who had been going normal places with normal lives. It appeared in another persons hands, and then jumped to another, and each kept the trigger pulled and bullets kept spraying everywhere until everyone had been hit and even still the gun kept travelling from hand to hand. Everyone was dying and the last fellow with the gun, the man with iron grey hair, curling up around his gut-wound as he died, kept the trigger pulled because it wasn’t really a choice it was just what one did when one had the gun. There was no reason for it except for the first man who had pulled the trigger and the man at the top of the building who had authorized it, and I cried. I cried alone amidst the dying men and women, in the full darkness of night through the morning. Crying because it seemed nothing could be done by the last one living, the last man on the sidewalk under a tall building with someone important at the top, someone so important he didn’t even need to be mentioned.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Singin and stuff

yesterday Peter and I sang together for the first time. He is an AWESOME singer but he sings SATB stuff not barbershop like me. I learned one of his songs so that we could sing together. He said that I have an awesome ear and later I heard him tell someone on the phone that I learned the song faster than the sopranos in his old choral group. We are forming a quartet that does his type of music and I will be singing alto. Its kinda cool because I have never done this kind of music before. At the same time it sounds weird to me. The songs are funny or in another language. I am used to having a story line in my music and singing in english. Actually, these two types of music are so different that I haveto sing differently to make it work because I'll tell you.. I am a very good barbershop singer. I have a lot of experience and several higher ups in the business stroking my ego. Pretty cool huh? I think so.. I have worked to get to this point and it is very important to me. Anyways, so my dad got me a keyboard for my birthday and I am starting to learn some theory stuff and this music thing is taking a whole new road for me.

In other news... I still have not gone out for my birthday. It is just too hard to plan something around sing outs and Christmas parties and work and Christmas and New Years and people visiting. So it looks like January. Oh well. At least I am trying to do something for it cause I rarely get to. I went out to dinner with Peter Mom and Gary. That was cool. And Pirate Tony and I went to Disneyland and saw my dad. That was cool too. After New Years my life is going to get crazy. Work is going to be nuts for the next three or four months (all the conventions in town) plus we are going into competition mode with the quartet and chorus (well, hosting mode with the chorus but we are getting ready for international again) and I will be in school. mi vida loca. Lets see how well I do huh? =D blah. Oh and I have to buy a car and find a place in the next 5 months. (my sis gets out of jail so I have to hand over the car I have been paying on and my mom and gary are moving to HI for a year... but its time to get out again anyway) Peter just got a job tutoring math and physics and chem that will pay him well and has as of yesterday made him very happy. So thats good for him. Well, I am still trying to figure this picture thing out so those posts will come later. bye for now.