BrockLi Soup

Nothing says “We’d like very much to be citizens” like refusing to work for or buy from any American company for a day.

Seriously, who thought that “Nothing Gringo” was a good way to support the immigration movement in the US? Remember how everyone was upset about all the Mexican flags at the protests, so people started carrying American flags instead? Good move! A national boycott, though? Not helping.

I suppose this means that Mexico will be refusing a day’s worth of American aid, and Mexicans in the US will not be taking advantage of our assorted welfare programs and other benefits extended to those living here. So hey, thanks for that. Oh, and I guess the kids won’t be attending classes at our public schools tomorrow either, huh.

I drive to work, but I’m sure the fellas at the office will appreciate the fact that the Metro won’t be as crowded. Really, that’s about the only good thing that will come out of this.

Now that I’ve been home for a day and a half, I’ve had some time to regroup and catch up on sleep (I crashed for a few more hours this evening), but I still need a couple more days to recover.

When all was said and done, Nashville was great. I didn’t learn as much as I was expecting to (didn’t have to do much router configuration), but I got to know the guys I work with a lot better, had a lot of fun, and felt like I had accomplished something at the end of the week. It was an exhausting trip, but it’s nice to come home at night too tired to do anything but sleep, knowing that it’s because you put in a good solid 14 hours of work. After a week on conference schedule, though, real life seems pretty mundane.

As I told the guys a few days ago, I think I could do this once a month, if I didn’t have to drive. I guess our equipment is usually delivered by someone from the company we rent it from, but it didn’t work out this time for whatever reason, so Bryan and I drove a 16-foot rental truck back and forth. The ride down was uneventful - after about 13 hours of driving, we stopped for the night outside Nashville at the same place as Obie Trice, and finished the drive in the morning.

The drive home just plain sucked. We were figuring on leaving Nashville at about 5 on Thursday, and I thought we had to be back in Arlington at 4 on Friday to drop off equipment and return the truck. We figured we’d stop for a little sleep somewhere around midnight and we’d be fine, but we didn’t get out of there until 7 and needed to be back by 1, so we just drove through the night. It was a quiet trip because we alternated driving and sleeping, so there wasn’t much chance for conversation. We pulled in at the office at about 8:30, unloaded all of our stuff, and a couple of the guys took off to return the equipment and truck (Bryan had to go because he’s the one that rented the truck, but they sent me home to get some sleep). And then, of course, I slept forever.

At this point, I’ve got no clean clothes and sore feet. I must have walked 15 miles, all indoors, every day. The Gaylord Opryland is just plain enormous - compare the satellite view to the same zoom level at RIT. The big, round, glass-topped thing in the middle is the Delta Atrium. I overheard some guy saying it’s the biggest hotel in America that isn’t attached to a casino (I don’t have anything to back that up, but it sounds pretty good to me).

It was a lot of fun and a lot of work (and I got to go to Cooters), and I’m looking forward to the next one. For now, I want to veg in front of the TV, and then get back to sleeping.

I’ve spent 16 of the past 24 hours asleep, and it’s the best sleep I’ve had in months.

J: I’ve been hit by a Taurus and a pickup truck. And a boat, once.

If you ever meet a Canadian and a Luxembourgian in a bar, be very careful, because they will keep buying you drinks.

For the first time since Thursday, I’ve got about half an hour to sit down and do nothing - or so I hope. I’m across the street at the Radisson, just in case anything goes wrong (they’re doing a few sessions here), but I’ll only be here for another hour or so. It’s so nice to just sit down for a bit - we’ve been doing 14-15 hour days since Friday, but we’re running out of equipment and places to put it, so it looks like things will be a little quieter until we have to pull everything back out Thursday afternoon. Then, Bryan and I get to make the 13 hour drive back on Thursday and Friday, and I’ll probably sleep all weekend.

The Gaylord Opryland is fantastic, and I’m sure it would be a great place for a vacation. They’ve got quite a few restaurants, bars, and cafes, and all sorts of little shops. According to their website, there are NINE ACRES of indoor gardens, and I don’t doubt it - the place is enormous (according to some guy I overheard, it’s the biggest hotel in the US that isn’t attached to a casino). I’m sure it would be a wonderful place for a vacation, but I’ve only been able to spend about an hour a day in my room during waking hours. I’ve taken a few pictures of the place, but I probably won’t have a chance to post them till this weekend.

Been in Nashville since Thursday morning. I’ll be posting as soon as I have a half hour free - hasn’t happened yet, and it’s not looking good today.

In the past five or six years, I’ve worn glasses maybe a dozen times. I got them in eighth grade and replaced the lenses my sophomore year (I think). After I got contacts, I stopped wearing them altogether - I think it was my junior year, but I was wearing glasses in my senior picture, so I’m not sure. For the past six years, optometrists have been advising me to update my glasses, but I’ve never bothered to since I never wore them. It only bit me in the ass once, when I got pink eye last summer and had to go to Canada half blind. Shortly after that, Fonny lost a screw in his glasses and stole one from mine, so my eight year-old frames with six year-old lenses only have one arm, and are lost somewhere in my closet.

So this, on top of the whole eye fungus fiasco, and the fact that my eyes have just been dry a lot lately, inspired me to make good use of me new health insurance and get some damn glasses, fer crissakes. I only have one set of contacts left, and with the upcoming business trip (oh, by the way, I’m going to be in Nashville for a week and a half) I decided to pay a little more at Hour Eyes so I could have them before I leave Wednesday. I’m still going to order more contacts; there’s no way I’m wearing glasses for racquetball or riding the motorcycle. For every day at the office, though, the glasses will work out better. Plus, I can watch Saturday morning cartoons in my jammies without having to put in contacts.

I forgot how weird it is to wear glasses, though. Everything moves a little different; I can’t explain it, but I think everyone who wears glasses knows what I mean. And every time I come inside, I reach up to flip them on top of my head, like I always do with sunglasses. It’s weird to get back into a routine you haven’t had in years - I’m sure I’ll forget them tomorrow morning - but I think it’s for the best.

(Oh, and for those of you I haven’t seen in a while - yeah, my goatee’s coming along nicely, and yes, my shirt is bleached.)

M: Nobody likes to sit in blood.

J: Yeah, she races Porches. M: What?! But she’s from Canada!

(at mini golf)

J: You’re swinging a stick around, and I’d rather get a busted knuckle than a busted penis.

Tips For Punk Show First-Timers

1. Don’t wear flip-flops. You will lose them. Boots are your best bet, because sneakers will come off easily too.
2. Don’t be surprised when people push you. I don’t know what things were like at the last N’Sync concert, but that’s not how it works around here. Standing there giving everyone a pissy look won’t earn you immunity
3. If mom or dad insists on escorting you to the show, they’re either really cool, or (more likely), you’re too young to be there. Don’t bump into my beer hand.

Of the three times I’ve seen Against Me, this was probably the weakest. Much like the last Flogging Molly show, this is due in a large part to the fact that I wasn’t there with the crew from school. Unfortunately, they were opening for Alkaline Trio this time around, so the place was pretty sparse when they went on and the crowd wasn’t as charged as usual. On top of that, it was an all-ages show, so most the crowd was under 18. It was kind of fun to just stand there and be buffeted by wave after wave of tiny little punk kids, and I laughed when they all sang along to “I’m drinking Irish tonight,” because I knew that most of them wouldn’t taste Guinness for another six years. The pit never really opened up, so it was 45 minutes of pushing back and forth.

Despite my gripes with the audience, the band put on a great show, as always. They played about half of Searching For A Former Clarity (opened with The Energizer, one of my favorites), and maybe a half-dozen older songs, finishing with Sink, Florida, Sink and Pints of Guinness. I only stuck around for Alkaline Trio’s first two songs - the first one featured a police siren, and the second sounded like generic pop-punk, so I didn’t have high expectations for the rest of the show.

It was definitely worth the ticket price, and the trip up there, and the $5.50 beer, but it didn’t hold a candle to their show in Buffalo (and the trip to Mighty Taco after the show is only part of the reason). Hopefully they’ll come through town again soon.

On a related note, Gogol Bordello is playing at Nightclub 9:30 tomorrow night. As much as I’d love to see them again, I already know that tomorrow is going to be a long day at work, and apparently I’m going to NYC for the weekend, so I should take a night off and maybe do some more laundry. Such is the life of a moderately responsible twenty-something.

For those of you who were interested, I posted my quick and dirty hack to fix my iTunes playlist woes. It won’t re-create the playlists, but I got the information I wanted.

And yes, I know it can be done in a few lines of Perl, but I know PHP much better than Perl, so this was the quickest (and easiest) way for me to do it.

On the bright side, I may have figured out why I’ve had a hard time seeing things lately. On the not-so-bright side, it might be eye fungus. I was kind of thinking about trying glasses again anyway.

I finally bought Tiger for my laptop a month or two ago. Rather than upgrading, I opted for the format-reinstall; I tried out all sorts of crap when I first got the thing, so there was a lot of stuff floating around that I didn’t know about, and I figured it would be nice to start fresh.

In the process, of course, I lost all my data. I backed up my music and some leftover notes and files from classes, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy was to re-establish my iTunes library. It’s worked out OK for the most part - I did keep the MP3’s, but I haven’t been using my laptop for music much lately anyway.

The one thing I didn’t think about was my playlists. I’ve had playlists for every quarter going back into 2003, with the songs that I heard a lot at the time. As I’ve surely mentioned before, my mind makes incredibly strong associations between songs and events or periods of time. As such, it was nice to have these playlists that were the soundtrack to my life at the time.

The library XML file was in my backup, so I can sift through that to find the information I want. Unfortunately, the playlists are stored in there as lists of track IDs, so doing it by hand would involve searching this huge text file for the ID I need, for a few hundred individual tracks.

Looks like it’s time to figure out the quickest way to parse XML…