22.1.09

the difference in you living out a self, and a self being lived in.

Last day of work was nothing special. Aly said she'd write a letter of recommendation though, if she could, which is awful nice of her to do. Saw more people today when I went in to pick up my check, which was nice. Said goodbye to more people. I may be back in the summer though, so it could be just a, "I will return" ala McArthur (sp?).

In other news, banjo is going to be good for my back, playing it correctly requires really good posture. This is a good thing, but also a painful thing, unfortunately. Currently listening to one of the "Best 27.4 Minutes of my Life". Let's just say, "we can not be stopped, no."

This one's 'Here is a Man'. I wrote it Freshman year of college, went back earlier this year and revised it.

Here is a man who once
Shot another
That I may live.
The bullet entered in the
Center of my attacker’s palm,
Shattering the bones
In a flash of blood and iron.
When that man passed away
From grief, this man
Was one of few
That threw a rose in his grave.

Here is a man who once
Loved me
That I might live.
He has loved as
No other can,
As no other could.
When I fell out of love,
He loved on; this man
Would have been one
That threw a rose on my grave.

Here is a man who is
Timeless,
Sinnlos,
A Zeitgeist by more than one meaning.
His memory –
It’s broken.

So here he sits
In a French Café,
Two hours away from another day of shelving books
In this small village,
Speaking a language he never knew,
He knows not my face as I pass by…
Remembers not my touch,
Nor the smell of gunpowder.

He carries with him, however,
A rose;
He is ready should I die.

Stripped cured and worn in order to protect you

I was listening to Meat Tape by P.O.S. (ok, it's a mixtape arranged by him, lots of stuff), and there's a Cecil Otter song where he has a bridge that goes "something something something, something something something, blood's coming out, time is running out" and he says this twice. Now I'm thinking, where have I heard this before? I'm racking my brains, walking home from work, and I start thinking it's the Plastic Constellations -- it's something they'd write, right? So I decide it's them, when suddenly, two songs later, TPC is playing Best Things. Best Things?! Awesome, I love this song. Whenever I listen to music I haven't listened to in a while, I try to remind my self what the chorus sounds like, and all of a sudden, wham! there's the lines in the prechorus. These guys all listen to the same fucking music. It makes me happy. And feel like less of a loser for listening to so much music.

I just tried installing Open Office 3 on Ubuntu. It ... didn't work. I can never get .jars to run from bash right, and I can't open the jar otherwise with sudo privileges. I tried this complicated process of turning some sort of rpm file into a debian file and then using dpkg, but that didn't work either, so in the end I just ended up reinstalling the Ubuntu 2.4 version. It's too bad, because I really want the new version, with all its new nifty features. I guess I'll just have to wait until Ubuntu compiles it themselves and sticks it in the repository.

On another front, I recently tried to update iTunes on my Windows side, only to find out the QuickTime installation failed. So I go to uninstall and reinstall, and lo and behold, I have no programs in my Add/Remove list. WTF? So I do some searches online, open up the registry via regedit, dick around, don't see anything unusual, and close it. A little while later, all my programs reappeared in the list. That was weird. I take the opportunity to remove Crysis, some compiler I don't use and QuickTime. However, I'm guessing it's some sort of infection, so I have to run a couple of tests over the next few days: checkdisk, Spy Sweeper scan, virus scan. I also need to defrag REALLY BAD. For some reason my hard drive is super slow, even for its rotation speed of 5400, but defragging doesn't even do all that much. W/e. Guinness makes it better.