I have so much I need to do and so little I feel like doing....

I think I'm going to skip my first class today. There's never really a point in going to it anyway. I need to get this short film stuff taken care of. I was going to do it last night, but I got home and W. was on. After listening to him, I got to listen to Gephardt and Daschle. I was hoping one of the three would say something worth listening to, but all three were completely predictable. After they were done with their bi-partisan crap, I was feeling a little tired, so I ended up doing nothing. I watched about another hour of tv and then I went and collapsed on my bed. No reading of Minneapolis ordinances for me last night. Just you wait - I'm going to know them all and then they won't be able to screw me ever again.

D'ot! I felt like such an idiot tonight. I showed up for my Russian class totally unprepared and the first twenty minutes or so seemed to completely exploit that fact. I just wanted to curl up and disappear for a while. I made it. I got home and got some great junk mail - one application for a credit card and one letter saying I won $1 million. There are some new ploys! I'm hungry and dirty and tired.

Woohoo! Liverpool beat Birmingham yesterday 1-1 (5-4 penalties) to win the league cup - their first trophy since they won the same competition back in 1995. Gnak!

In other news... I'm sore today. We lost our soccer game last night 8-1. They ended the game 15 minutes early because there is a 7 goal mercy rule. I played poorly and the rest of the team only did so-so also. I'm sore because I got whiplash from colliding with a player from the other team - ouch.

I finally did my laundry and went grocery shopping yesterday. There were a lot of people doing laundry yesterday, so I was lucky to get down there just as someone else was finishing using the washers. As for grocery shopping, it was a bit of a pain in the ass. The Nicollet overpass over 94 was completely covered in deep slush. It was like walking in one big, long puddle about 2-3 inches deep. Yuck. Hopefully they get that cleaned out soon. I'll bet most of it froze over last night.

I have lots to do today before I leave, so I should get going. I was going to do a lot of it last night, but when I got home from the game, I was really tired and sore, so I flopped down on my bed and fell asleep shortly thereafter.

This post is originally from 2/25/01, but had to be added later....

It's been a few more days since I've really been online again. Right now, I don't know what's going on. I'm actually in a pretty good mood, but for some reason I listening to music I usually only listen to when I'm depressed or pissed off or something (The Cure, The Smashing Pumpkins, and R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People album). Our weather this weekend has been both weird and wonderful at the same time. There have been a few minor breaks, but otherwise it has been nearly steady precipitation since Friday evening. It started snowing, but then the temperature rose above freezing, so it rained today. By the time we left the Dinkytowner tonight, it was snowing again. It's a nice, wet snow also, so we can make snowballs and snowmen.

So, what's with the last few days? Well, Wednesday night, Corey, Molly, and I hung out at the Dinkytowner. Thursday night Scrabble I lost to Molly again. Friday night was the Atmosphere/Sage Francis/Aesop Rock show at the SPSC. While attending to back door security, we played Scrabble again. Arthur won, but more importantly, I nearly caught up with Molly. Sure, I still took third, but I was a lot closer. The show was pretty great and afterwards a group of 8 of us went to the Dinkytowner. Annemarie also joined us after she finished with Bijou. We stayed there until closing time at 4 and then Arthur, Morgan, Molly, and I went to Perkins in St. Paul near the Ford factory. We would have stayed there longer than we did, but Arthur's parents paged Morgan at 5:45 to find out where he was. I guess they were (understandably) angry, so we left there about 6. Morgan dropped me off back home at 6:15. I started reading War and Peace (plus I was feeling a little funny from all the Coke and coffee I had drunk) and finally went to bed about 8. I woke up about 1:30 and watched tv until I had to leave for Bijou. I had forgotten about the monster truck rally at the Metrodome tonight, so it took longer than expected to get to campus. Jonathan and I sat around going through discarded junk from the closet and then he, Molly, and I watched The Apartment. Afterward, we went to the Dinkytowner again. Molly left about 1:15, but Jonathan and I stayed until 2:45. We tossed around some snowballs while waiting for the bus and finally got home about 3:30. Right now I'm eating some pizza rolls and going online for the first time in days. I don't think I can stay up to listen to the cup final later this morning, so here's hoping that Liverpool wins their first trophy in 6 years today....

...another one bites the dust.... I just finally heard the news that director Stanley Kramer died on Monday. I guess he was 87, but - and I know I've said this before - it just seems that so many of the greats have been dying lately. See ya, Stanley.

I've been temporarily away from my 'puter the last few days, but I'm back now. Well, I'm sort of back. I'm busy running around with all of my work-related junk along with trying to do homework and take care of my classes. I'll make it through because I prefer to be busy like this.

Another reason I haven't been online is because I've been trying to vent some of my frustation in other ways. There are just too many events of late that have really pissed me off - everything from Bush to Ventura to NASCAR to stupid people - they're all driving me nuts. Perhaps it's better for everyone that I wasn't online, because otherwise this page would be full of my complaining about the recent events. Blah blah blah.

In more uplifting news, I received a phone call tonight from Corey. He's in town for a few days and he's going to meet me at the Dinkytowner Wednesday night. Atleast something can be positive.

Well, I'm going to stop short of going into my whole spiel and just say: nighty-night!

Early Sunday morning, and not surprisingly, here I am online. Friday was a quick and nearly wasted day, but yesterday was perhaps my most productive Saturday in a long time. Yes, I did sleep until 1:30, but I got up about 2 and got to work. I made an attempt at cutting my own hair and did a so-so job. The front and sides like fine, but the back? Well, let's just say that I kept my hat on most of the night. I borrowed a mirror from Jonathan tonight, so I'll fix the back tomorrow. Hey - saves me money. After my shower, I picked up my apartment, did the dishes, and swept the floors. I also did some minor furniture moving to improve the flow of the room. After making and eating dinner, I caught the bus to campus for Bijou. We had small numbers tonight for Foxy Brown and D.C. Cab, but I guess it's their loss, because both films were awesome. Sure, I was expecting to like D.C. Cab for the kitsch value of Mr. T, but the film was much funnier than I had expected. I NEED to get that movie now. As for Foxy Brown, how could you not love a film filled with sex, drugs, whitey, bad-ass black vigilante gangs, a fight in a lesbian bar, death by fire, death by airplane propellor, and penile amputation? After the movies, we went to the Dinkytowner - like I really needed to say where we went. We played a number of games of pool, and I didn't do too badly. Sure, I sucked in the game of 9-ball and the game of Screw Your Neighbor. Sure, I had one game of 8-ball where I had a huge lead on Molly and blew it. Other than that, I did beat Jonathan twice and Molly one other time (barely). I returned home here to receive the disappointing news that my soccer game for today (Sunday) has been cancelled. Well, I guess I can use the time to work on homework, but I was looking forward to playing. And now? Well, I guess we do the requisite time wastage online before going to bed. Liverpool plays City in FA Cup action today also - GO LIVERPOOL!!!

Another night that ran much later than expected. I didn't get home from the Dinkytowner (where I got my ass kicked in 2 consecutive games of Scrabble by John and Molly, respectively) until 3:30. I just finished typing up all the info about the selected short films and emailed it all to Brian. Hopefully I can get those booked tomorrow. Valentine's Day may have been lame, but the day after made up for it - Liverpool beat AS Roma 2-0 at the Olympic Stadium in Rome. This bodes very well for the return leg at Anfield!

I have tons more I'd love to write, but it's late, and I should have been in bed hours ago.

This turned into a much longer night than first expected. Now I'm home listening to Creedence and contemplating sleep. A rather disappointing Valentine's Day overall. Went to the Dinkytowner tonight and I was wide awake and energetic - then I hit a wall. Yeah, about 12:15 I just started to lose consciousness. I started falling asleep, but I couldn't bring myself to move my ass from the booth and head home. It was really dead in there tonight also. About 1, there was a 5 minute stretch where I was the only one there. It picked up a little after 1 as people stumbled in from the bars. Even so, not much going down. With that note, I think I'm going work my way across the room to my bed. Nighty-night!

Happy Valentine's Day all! Yeah, I know, I think it's a pretty pointless holiday also. In my opinion, people should treat each other the same every day as they do on Valentine's Day, but who's listening to me? Anyway, at first it would seem that this is going to be a disappointing day. As I think more about it, every Valentine's Day starts out this way for me. It's always something completely unexpected that happens that makes today cool. Well, I still have class and have to work today, but you never know, something may happen.

And there are the Academy Awards.... After further review, the nominations were pretty predicatable - even for a weak year in the movies. I was a little disappointed that Almost Famous wasn't nominated for Best Picture and that High Fidelity didn't get a single nomination, but such is life. My major hope overall is that U-571 doesn't win either of the sound awards it's up for, because it would be a tragedy to have to that movie forever known as an Academy Award winner (as was the fate of The Matrix a year ago). Enough about that.

I was hoping to meet with Brian here in the office, but I haven't a clue as to where he is. I thought he was going to be here in the CAPC office, but apparently I was mistaken. Well, I had to come over to pick up D.C. Cab for this weekend anyway, so atleast I had another reason to come over here. Okay, enough bitching... time to par-tay?

I'm not sure what to make yet of the Academy Award nominees. They seem mostly pretty predicatable, but there were a few surprises. I'm kind of in a rush to go now, but I'll have more time to reflect later. Two glaring oversights include Björk as Best Actress (although she does share a nod for best song with her co-writers of "I've Seen It All") and Almost Famous in general. Almost Famous received 4 nominations and 3 of those were practically given: Kate Hudson and Frances McDormand both for Best Supporting Actress and Cameron Crowe for Best Original Screenplay. After that, the film was given the pity vote by being nominated for Best Editing. Okay, I'll bitch more later, but it's time to go to class for now.

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!! I almost forgot about the Oscars! Nominations are to be announced at about 7:30am our time. I intend to be sleeping then, but will certainly be up as soon as possible to find out who gets the nods.

Okay, I made it through another Monday. I didn't make quite as big an ass of myself this week in Russian. Silberman's class was even worth going to today. I even came home and watched the short film entries tonight. Then I looked in the mirror and realized that I need a haircut. I should give myself a haircut... it'd save me money.

Monday morning. Damn. I have no clue where the weekend went. Actually, I do, but I'm in denial. Especially about the Sunday that I wasted away watching tv. We won our soccer game in a hard-fought battle 2-1 last night. Now I have so much I have to do and so little time to do it in. Of course, I have no one to blame but myself.

Just got home a little while ago from the Dinkytowner when Molly dropped me off. Now we're both home, but chatting again. Actually, she just sent me a link to the new page she's working on - pretty cool. What's even cooler is the influx of Appletonians at the Dinkytowner tonight. Laura Korb came in and I wasn't sure at first if it was her, but then she just started to talking to me, so I guess that gave it away. Shortly thereafter, John revealed that he is from A-town. He's even from my neighborhood, which is even weirder. Then again, so is she. Shortly before we left, Maria had to give me more shit (jokingly, of course) about being there all the time. Then again, they were playing the Bouncing Souls' "Maniacal Laughter" album and she said she'd give me a carton if I could name the band, but I know that won't happen. How did she expect that I wouldn't know?! Fool! Okay, time to go back to my pink-tinged world.

I'm getting a little frustrated here. I've been working for hours on my page and I finally have it nearly perfected for super-fast color changes on the page. The only problem I'm having is with the links page, but I think that'll work as soon as I put a couple hours worth of work specifically into that. So what is frustrating me you ask? Even though I can get this all to work well with Internet Explorer 5.5, I'm trying to view it with Netscape 6, and it still won't appear correctly. I wish I knew why it wasn't working, but it's not making itself obvious to me. Grrrr....

Where have the last few days gone? Damned if I know. I do know that I looked like a complete idiot in my Russian class last night when prof kept calling on me and I didn't have a clue as to how to answer. I can handle calculus and physics and chemistry and psychology, but Russian? It is both my friend and my arch-enemy. In the end, I shall succeed though. I'm now carrying my Russian books with me everywhere I go and I'm going to learn Russian if it kills me. In other news - Carrot Top is at Mystic tomorrow night. No, I'm not going. I have no intention of going. I just wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to mention Carrot Top here. Okay, that's it I guess.

Oh! One more thing! I thought I should mention about the absolute euphoria I was in on Sunday. I woke up in the afternoon only to have the worst predicament of my life - do I watch Captain Ron or Planes, Trains, and Automobiles? Tough choice, but I made due. Later that afternoon, both L.A. Story and Father of the Bride were on. What a day! Of course, that day ended with us losing our soccer game 6-3 and me sore and in pain, but you can't win 'em all I guess.

I just got home again from another day/night out on the town. I slept until 2:30 in the afternoon, when I was awoken by a phone call from Molly telling me that Jonathan wasn't going to be driving today. I caught a bus an hour later to the SPSC for the Whole show. I had to leave after the meeting to go run Bijou, but I returned to St. Paul after that and was there for the end of the show and load-out (which I regretfully wasn't really helpful with). After finishing that, we went to the Dinkytowner again and we left there about 2:45. I still really need to go grocery shopping, but otherwise I have nothing else tomorrow except my soccer game - and that isn't until 9:45 at night. I was going to go see the Godard films at the Oak Street, but I don't know that I will anymore. Need to save money.

Once again I come to the end of another late night. I got home a little over a half hour ago from the Dinkytowner. Jonathan and I were there talking until shortly before 4. Molly was there also, but she left much earlier since she has to be to work 2 hours from now. Before heading over there, we were at Bijou and Molly and I watched Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (a highly recommended film I might add). In my film class today, we watched Battleship Potempkin and Man with a Movie Camera. I'm not sure why every film class has to show those two and only those two as examples of Soviet film, but c'est la vie. The time between class and Bijou was spent in the Bijou office. I was quite surprised to see that it had started snowing again. The weather this week has been so crazy! On Monday it was 30's and raining. As the temperature dropped, the rain formed sheets of ice and on top collected first slush and then snow. Tuesday was a little cooler, but not bad. Come Wednesday, the temperature had dropped down into the single digits above zero, but kept falling after sunset. Thursday and Friday, I don't think the temperature reached above zero and the wind chill was terrible. Early Friday evening it snowed, which mixed with the wind and the ice, made it all even worse. Saturday is supposed to be back in the mid-twenties again, but I'll believe it when I get outside in the morning.

I really need to work on my Scrabble strategy. I'm now 0-2 against Molly. It's not that I have such bad words, it's just that my word placement isn't very good. She only beat my by 15 points in the first game (of which Annemarie was also a part), but on Thursday night she took me by nearly 100 points! Ouch. I'll need to work on that.

I should probably get to bed soon because Saturday could be a long day. I'm hopefully going to be up in time to get to the SPSC for load-in of the Bobby Llama show. Then I have to run back over to the West Bank for Bijou. I'm undecided at this point whether I'll return to St. Paul after the movies or if I'll go straight to the Dinkytowner. I guess it's not that important right now. Time to read the news instead....

Boy, how this country varies as you venture in-land from the coasts! As I mentioned yesterday, the city of Denver is going to pay a 15 year old boy $1.2 million because a police officer shot him in self defense while the boy was committing a burglary 3 years ago. Well, it has now finally come out that the federal government, much like the state of New York, is refusing to prosecute any of the four officers who shot the innocent Amadou Diallo to death in New York City. As the well-publicized story goes, Diallo was standing in the lobby of his apartment building reaching for his wallet when the four officers thought he was reaching for a gun. In "self defense," the four officers fired 41 shots at Diallo, hitting him 19 times. A civil suit brought about by the family of Mr. Diallo is now expected to go forward and we don't know if anything will come of it. Hearing stories like this, between New York City and Denver, I know where I'd rather live... screw you Giuliani!

The excitement never ends when you ride Metro Transit! Yes my friends, I have another amusing anecdote for you from my travels aboard the public bus system of the Twin Cities, and this one ranks right up there with Blackman and Calvin the drunken, democrat mayoral candidate and definitely beats the drunk from last weekend. So, I was at the Dinkytowner tonight working on my new novel when I realize I almost forgot about the bus. I packed up my belongings and hurried out to the bus stop. The bus showed up on time and was headed toward the usual late night meeting place at 7th and Nicollet. As we passed over the Hennepin Avenue Bridge and came to the first intersection on the south end, a police cruiser headed the opposite direction flipped his lights on and made a u-turn in our direction. About a block down the road, he pulled the bus over. The officer walked upto the side of the bus and asked the driver, "You in a hurry to get somewhere? You were doing 41 in a 25 zone as you came over the bridge. Can I see your license?" As the driver fished for his license, I sat in the first forward-facing row trying to hide my giggling at the situation because the officer kept looking back at me. After obtaining the bus driver's license, the officer returned to his cruiser and I almost broke out in hysterical laughter. The only other passenger, a man seated in the back corner of the bus, murmured, "Must be bored." A few minutes later, as I'm starting to worry that we might miss the connecting bus, the officer returned to the driver's window with a speeding ticket. When the officer let us go, the driver sped off to reach the meeting point on time and I was worried we might get pulled over again. Luckily, we made it to the stop on time and now I'm home to do my Chekhov homework. The longer I live here, the more I can't imagine getting a car and missing all the fun of riding Metro Transit.