Seriously, how did I not find this earlier?




I adore him beyond belief. John K. Samson rights all wrongs.

Also check out John Darnielle's commentary at the end. So excellent. I will remember these two like my parents remember Dylan and Cohen.

I NEED TO GO TO BED BECAUSE NEW ENGLAND AWAITS.

Thank you, Postsecret, for the 9th grade memory.

I've just returned from an excellent Mountain Goats show in Grand Rapids. It was, without a doubt, one of my favorite live experiences to date. Here are some (mostly paraphrased) gems from the always-quotable John Darnielle:

Douchebag in audience: "FREE BIRD!"
JD: "I'm going to assume you're doing that because you want to hear my thing about how I feel about people who do that, because you probably think it's funny, but it's kind of boring to me now because I've been doing it for sooooo looooong. [Long pause] Though Jonathan Meiburg has been known to actually start playing "Free Bird" if you call it out to him."
(Meiburg is the lead singer of Shearwater, whom I discovered when they opened for TMG four years ago. I LOVED that their spirit was still present this time around, too.)

"So this is a song about.................hm. [Long pause. Laughter from audience.] Haha. Hm. Yeah, I guess it's about.......... Well, you know, the things we do to test those who love us. I mean, the Almighty spends so much of the Bible talking about his capacity to forgive us. 'Ohhhhhh reeeeeaallly.'"
(This was before Psalms 40:2, my favorite song from the new album.)

"It's so nice to be here with you guys tonight. This is the first time we've played these songs as a band in front of an audience, and you always feel a little rusty at the beginning of a tour, still getting your bearings with all the comings and goings, so it's great that you've been so awesome. [Pause] I feel like I have to add a legal disclaimer because I did play these songs in Europe a few weeks ago, but that was just me and a guitar and not the band. So this is still the first time for this kind of situation. [Pause] There, that was me being 5 years old, arguing every point into the ground. I feel good justifying it to my 5-year-old self. You should always be good to your 5-year-old self."

"So it's like six of one, half a dozen......Hail Marys."

"So this song is called Deutoronomy 2:10. [Pause] You know, when you have a sort of megalomaniacal side, like anyone who has the idea of 'Oh, let me write songs and perform them in front of a group of strangers!' -- whenever you write a song with that kind of a title, you wonder what it would be like if it became the new 'Going to Georgia' of the set. Like, instead of that, you have people shouting out 'DEUTORONOMY 2:10!!!!!!!'" That would be a nice counterpoint to, like, those people who hold the John 3:16 signs, you know?"

"These next 2 songs are about Genesis. The thing that's always struck me about Genesis is the absence of God in it. That and the part about circumcision. I was going to write a song about that, about a foreskin touching someone's forehead or whatever, but then I realized that all the reviews would say 'wow, he's really preoccupied with the whole foreskin issue, that must be representative of some big part of his life.'"

"You know, whenever I go to these kinds of shows, where the songwriter tells these true stories, or stories I assume to be true, I always wonder if it would be more interesting if I totally just made something up. Like, 'This next song was inspired by the Aztec god So-and-So, who descended upon me in a dream and whispered the opening verse in my ear, after which he ripped.....something or other.'"

"And this verse is interesting to me because....okay, well, maybe I shouldn't go into....You know what, this is Calvin College, so I can get away with this. It's the [stuff I don't remember], and the complexity and the....effulgence (Can I say that? "Effulgence?") of it all."
(The venue was part of Calvin College and the crowd seemed to be mostly students.)

"Okay, so I realized I can't reference 'Going to Georgia' and then some guy in the audience goes 'YEAH!' and then not play 'Going to Georgia.'"
(Going to Georgia was the last song of the encore, and it was well worth the wait. They didn't play it when I saw it 4 years ago, and it's probably one of my top 5 Goats songs, so I about died hearing it tonight.)

The Life of the World to Come, the Mountain Goats' current album, is based entirely on Bible verses. John Darnielle, like me, is a lapsed Catholic. He has described the albums' content as "12 hard lessons" certain verses taught him. Read Pitchfork's review of The Life of the World to Come here.

I wrote about it on the other blog. Read the post here.

Teo's gone. He's at peace now. No more pain.

I don't understand how the world can keep existing when such a large part of one's own world has left it.

It might be time to say goodbye to Teo. He has gone downhill over the weekend and is having trouble walking to & from the paddock. He almost fell today. The vet is coming tomorrow; if he thinks it's time, we'll do what's right.

This is the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

I AM DONE WITH STANDARDIZED TESTS FOREVER AND THE NEW MOUNTAIN GOATS ALBUM IS ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC AND I JUST BOUGHT MY TICKET TO SEE THEM AND FINAL FANTASY IN GRAND RAPIDS ON NOV. 4.

All is right with the world.

New blog post on the eve of my weekend in Seattle! Time to face the phobia and board that plane!

New post up at the big girl blog. Read it here, along with a few others I've forgotten to advertise on the old LJ.

1. I never thought I'd live to see the day where someone could win a freestyle with a 90%. NINETY. It still blows my mind that people score over 80. But still, holy Edward Gal and Totilas, Batman. I am salivating: I also LOVE the epic, semi-spooky music. It just screams "Prepare yourselves, because I have the BEST HORSE IN THE WORLD AND POSSIBLY EVER AND YOU ARE GOING TO GET GOOSEBUMPS NOW."

2. Pete Campbell, I would do the Charleston with you any day of the week. If I knew how to do it. Even if you are a slimy douchebag.

3. It's cold enough to start wearing my fleece in the mornings. I'm not sure whether I love or hate this fact.

4. I got hired by Meijer (yeah, yeah, underachieving, but I still have a farm to run) and will start Sept. 15, while looking for something better in the meantime.

5. I'm not going to Waterloo after all, because we need more time to work together on the difficult stuff. But Struppie gave me 2's today for the first time since returning to work. I'm proud.

6. It was buy one, get one free coffee day at McDonald's. IT'S A TRAP, I TELL YOU.

I am obsessed with Mad Men. OBSESSED.

Funny how I start watching both it and Arrested Development, the two shows most beloved by Trinity staff, only after my internship ends.

I'm also an insomniac now, apparently. No more coffee after 5pm. Yikes.

Courtesy of ortugatay :

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. List fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you.

1. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Michael Chabon)
2. England, England (Julian Barnes)
3. The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford)
4. The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
5. The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
6. Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
7. A Complicated Kindness (Miriam Toews)
8. Lullabies for Little Criminals (Heather O'Neill)
9. The Stranger (Albert Camus)
10. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)
11. A Model World and Other Stories (Michael Chabon)
12. How We Are Hungry (Dave Eggers)
13. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
14. White Noise (Don DeLillo)
15. The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

I'm not going to that horse show because my mother came to her senses. I do, however, have to survive her impending three-and-a-half-week visit, which starts tomorrow, and then go to Waterloo the first weekend of September. I'm cool with that.

I went to Chicago this past weekend for Lollapalooza and Shearwater and it was CRAZY GREATNESS. I miss it.

I have a second-round job interview next week. It's for the new Meijer opening in my town. Yes, I'm slumming, but it's money, and you can't work full-time and full-tilt when you manage a horse farm. And it's not the only option, of course.

I need to think about interactive art and Millenium Park and then write about it on the grown-up blog. I also just plain need to update that blog, period. There's a half-written post waiting to be finished. I'll get to that tomorrow, when my energy returns.

"You have a choice. Either you go to [the horse show in] Kentucky or you cancel your trip to the wedding."

And so, because I refuse to cancel the wedding plans (because honestly, being there is more important than any fucking horse show), I'm forced to compete when I fear the horse won't be ready in time. We're close, but it'll be dicey. At least it's still almost 3 weeks away. I probably shouldn't have expressed concern and should have let her see for herself when she gets here in 2 weeks, because she refuses to trust anything I say and is convinced I say it only because I'm nervous and not because I have the horse's best interest in mind. But oh well.

If we fail because of her insistence, though, it'll be on her nose. In any event, there's no way she can keep me from the wedding, because I'm buying the ticket myself (just like I paid the entry fees myself, so whose call is it, anyway?), and she won't even be here to prevent me from getting on that plane.

What a paranoid, delusional, narcissistic, ridiculous woman. I'm pretty sure there will come a time -- after the horse retires and I run off to fully-funded grad school -- when we cease communication for awhile, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not looking forward to that day. Our relationship is damaged beyond repair.

Baaaaaarfaroni.

The end!

(Now, with that out of my system, back to less worry and more positive thinking...)

Attention Shakespeare fans: the following is HILARIOUS.

Titus Andronicus: Facebook edition.

"Titus added 'baking' to his interests." BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Somebody please pick my giggling, convulsing body up off the floor.

Tonight, out of nowhere, I remembered my love for this:


The night after this video was taken, I saw the Weakerthans live for the first time. "Gifts" was the first song of the encore. I have no adequate description for the emotions conjured by experiencing that song for the first time in that particular context. It is one of the few times in my life I have been rendered utterly speechless.

Still hoping I might find the capacity to let you know I know you're lonely...

The "mature" blog is up and running! There's only an introductory post so far, but more will soon follow, as inspiration has finally struck.

And so, without further ado, I present:

The Liminal Norm

N.B.: All self-deprecation is meant to be humorous. I wouldn't be me without the self-referential sardonicism.

Tonight, I cried while listening to Joni Mitchell in my car on the way back from Barnes & Noble, so I took a detour to the grocery store and bought a pint of chocolate Haagen Dazs, which I just finished. Talk about eating your feelings.

While I don't doubt that I'm experiencing post-GRE purposelessness, I am going to chalk this one up to PMS.

I'm very, very close to getting my shiny new legit grown-up blog up and running, but I have to channel the sentences swirling in my head onto the pages of my newly-purchased moleskines (always overpriced but always worth the buyer's remorse) and then type them up and then I will post a link and gradually phase out my writing in this now 6-years-old livejournal which is more an artifact of my somewhat sad-sack late adolescence than it is anything else.

Obligatory golf reference: nearly all of my picks missed the cut at the British Open, which means I'm not horribly concerned about the weekend (though if Tom Watson wins I might sing from the rooftops). On a related note, I nominate the following for tweet of the century:

"Oh well folks just arrived home after 7 hour drive, played horribly for 2 days. i couldnt hit a cows arse with a banjo." -- Ian Poulter on his Open performance.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA. I will never feel guilty about using Twitter ever again. Not when I can read quips like that.

What if I'm only satisfied when I'm at home,
Sitting in a city that'll never let me go?
What if I'm only satisfied when I'm alone?

- The Rural Alberta Advantage, "Edmonton"

I think the feeling I've been dreading is starting to creep over me. I'm growing accustomed to Michigan again, re-settling into my childhood home, regressing to the laziness of my high school self. The full-time, full-tilt frenzy of Providence is a distant, receding memory, replaced by a sprawling, snail's-pace Michigan summer. A month ago, I railed against the deceleration of time, floundering inside these hollow days that overwhelm like loose-fitting sweaters. Now, instead of feeling smothered by spare time, I crave it, ticking off barn chores in anticipation of an afternoon of television. And though I revel in vegetation, I detest my new-found aimlessness with every ounce of my being, as it severely contradicts the voracious ambition and motivation I've constructed over the last five years.

Oh. Wait. Screeching-halt realization: it's the first day of freedom from the GRE, and I'm left with several empty hours which I'd normally have filled by studying. No wonder I feel directionless.

Here's hoping I'll soon begin to fill the extra time with productive activity. Though maybe a few-day break is acceptable.