technolo-hah

screw you, technology. fuck you. turnabout is fair play, after all. i'm sure most of you recall my recent delightful adventures surrounding the untimely demise of the power supply to my laptop. these things happen, i understand. but it just keeps getting better all the time. a couple days ago, my half-ass wireless provider announced that it would become no-ass, a.k.a. no longer provide residential wireless service. thanks, folks. maybe blowing all your money on an advertising campaign centered around bus stops for like six months wasn't the best call. on the other hand, it is probably not all their fault. this is, after all, "comcast country". they've got the building to prove it now. anyway, i've got a little less than a month before they stop offering service. i guess this relieves any worries i might have had about getting out of any possible service contract i might have agreed to (although my education has also informed me of several other possible defenses). however that all turns out, the old adage about things in threes held together here: my phone is now also fucking with me. the screen does not turn on when i open the phone, and none of the buttons are responsive. the end result is that i cannot call or text anyone. i apparently can receive phone calls, although i only got one and i expected another. i don't even know how i actually answered the one; the call time on it registered a zero and the phone may or may not have technically picked up when i opened it in response to the call. in any event, i am somewhat less than pleased.
in better news, school is over for the year at noon tomorrow. i couldn't have made it through this with a lot of support from all over, and i appreciate it. it has been one hell of a bullshit ride. hopefully things will close out alright tomorrow; signs point to yes. this is a pretty chilled out exam compared to the others; i get to bring a lot of shit in. the only thing is that we can bring in all the cases, and i am not going to. there was no book, but rather a copy-center supplement that was somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 pages and cost fifty bucks. i declined to purchase it, as none of the cases were edited and i can access all of them on lexis, which i did all semester long. i am by no means a perfect environmental steward, but the idea of printing 500 pages for one day where i would use something like one percent of them seemed pretty horrific. it also would have been a pain in the ass to print it all out. i typed up a synopsis for each case as part of my review, and hopefully that will be sufficient. we'll find out soon enough, i guess.
i'm just ready to be done at this point, and i'm glad that feeling didn't crop up so early this semester. last time, i was ready to be done from day one, and by the time exams rolled around i was sleep-walking through every day just ticking down the hours until i got to go back to some things and people i knew and loved in a place where i could feel comfortable as myself. people change constantly on their own in an organic way, but sometimes there is a marked discontinuity in one's life and the resultant identity crisis is a little more unbearable. in the immortal words of t-rex (the comic dinosaur, not the band), the ravages of puberty leave no-one unscathed. that is one thing everyone has to go through, but i think it is comparable to some extreme changes people go through at other points in their lives. not that i've done any growing up recently, but i do know that when i came here i had a lot of problems just making it through each day and i don't feel that way anymore.
i've been doing a little more simple cookery lately, and i do enjoy that. nothing wild because that would require a couple investments i cannot afford to make right now. but i was fixated on making a couple things recently. for some reason i really really wanted veggie tacos. for like a couple days, until i just had to do it. i almost relented and made real ones but i couldn't find the frozen ground turkey i always use, so veggie it would be. there is some boxed dry mix i used to get and use back home, but i couldn't find it out here, so i went with one of those fake beef things that looks like the frozen ground turkey, all in that tube thing. textured soy protein or whatever, beats tofu in my book. they turned out great. today i made a heady delish pizza with pesto, six cheese blend that did not have enough fontina, and capicola (prosciutto HOLY SHIT I SPELLED IT RIGHT is too expensive). that's alright, i love capicola. i left it in just a touch longer than i would have liked, but it turned out just fine. i have way too much cheese, but garlic bread was on sale so hopefully i can work it to throw the cheese on the bread at the right time in cooking so as to fully toast the bread without burning the cheese. the mixture of frozen and refrigerated goods is tricky business, for me anyway. i've got some tomato sauce that has to go, and bread with red sauce is a fine meal in my book, so no complaints about all that.
the never-ending quest for good music continues, as always, with moderate success. you know, ups and downs, strikes and gutters. some dude gave me a fairly professional cd at the show last week (hey! i'm missing a show right now!). i figured i'd check it out; the last time someone at a show gave me a cd of a band i didn't know anything about it was back forty (i'm listening to an old one of theirs right now - opening for smokestack, the ann arbor band that couldn't miss but did). it was considerably less professional, but the content was far superior to what i wound up with last week. some band called the big dirty, mediocre funk-rock semi-jazzy fusion thing. vocals are thankfully minimal, as they are totally atrocious. if they want to get rid of these cds, they should probably keep giving them away. fortunately, the archive has provided me with some more than listenable material. the current new pick is SeepeopleS. i thought it was a pretty dumb name, but they have a bit of a buzz going on their behalf these days, so i figured i would check them out. i'm satisfied. what they do isn't the most original thing i've ever heard, but i think they do what they do well. contemporary neo-psychedelic indie rock/pop. easy to pick out the massive radiohead/flaming lips/perry ferrel influence, but there is some other stuff going on there too. i can dig it, worth checking out if you are a fan of the influences as it is somewhat derivative. in my book, that doesn't damn a band when they pick a certain part of the breadth of someone else's work and go deeper, which is what these guys do. the guy sounds great with a ton of vocal effects going, but without them he veers into trite nasal indie bullshit sound. the musicianship is unimpeachable, however, especially the drumming, which is not usually something that jumps out at me. the band overall has a nice big sound with massive sonic waves cresting and crashing, mostly courtesy of the keyboard work. worth a try if you're looking for something along those lines.
i realize some people have a freshly functional record player to revel in, but i am surprised no one has had anything to say about the owlandbear link from the other day. there is some seriously good music on that site, and something for just about everyone that you'd have a hell of a time finding anywhere else. if you didn't look, maybe you should, i'm just sayin'. and while you're looking, also check that foodery link to witness the sheer selection. choosing will hopefully be the most difficult thing about tomorrow.