Call of the Desert

Tomorrow I leave for Arizona. I'm ecstatic for numerous reasons, which will now be listed in order of appearance:

1. I get to see my family, which I've grown to realize, after talking to many people, is one of the most normal and loving families ever. I could say that I love them, but it has grown beyond that.

2. I get to see my high school and college friends, the people who I feel most comfortable around and who know how to get down.

3. I have consecutive days off, a phenomenon that has not occurred since the beginning of April. Yea, all right.

4. I get to leave Chicago for a little while. I love this city to death, but like any relationship, breaks are good. We'll make out like high school nerds when I get back.

5. Even though I never want to live there again, I get to see Arizona. Revisiting the miles of desert and concrete I grew up in is comforting.

Back in a few. Stay gold, Ponyboy.

BLOQUE PARTY

This post is a little late, but whatever. Last Friday was the Optimus block party, a yearly event where over 1,000 people from advertising and post-production houses mingle outside of the Optimus building amidst a flood of beer, food, music and glow necklaces.



Most of my night was spent restocking hundreds of cases of beer and ice. I'd never seen this much beer or rapid consumption in my life. By the end of the night I never wanted to open another case of beer in my life. Luckily for the last 3 hours of the night I manned the photo booth, scanning photos into a laptop.

Best story of the night: an intern catches a guy stealing beer

Guy: Oh man, I'm sorry. I just want to get a buzz.

Intern: You know you're stealing Kaliber.

Guy: Yea?

Intern: That's a non-alcoholic beer.

Guy: Ah shit! (removes all beer from backpack)

Nut cheeks

It was Jill's birthday on Monday so we celebrated at a quasi-biker bar called Twisted Spoke. This is just a preview of the awesomeness that is going to go down on August 19th when we have our joint b-day party, CSI:Miami themed of course.

Coals to the furnace!

I've been out of school more than a year now, and in a month I will have been in Chicago for a year.

I am obsessed with creation. I feel the need to constantly create, to make music or write or perform or shoot. Even if I am the only one who every hears or reads what I do, creating satisfies me. It makes me feel like I'm working towards some abstruse goal.

Even though I have worked on a lot of projects so far in Chicago, I feel like I haven't done enough. I think a lot of this stems from my participation in projects that aren't my own. I enjoy(ed) working on friends' projects but I need to produce work that is not dictated or restricted by others.

So here are my goals for the next year in Chicago:
1. Write more.
2. Say no more often when asked to participate in other people's projects.
3. Focus my efforts on one or two projects at a time.
4. Quit wasting my time on the internet/procrastinating in general
5. Finish everything.
6. Suckerpunch the world.

Geiser of magic

Today at Optimus I discovered a new phenomenon that is apparently sweeping the country. If you drop around 13 mentos into a 2 liter bottle of diet coke, the soda erupts like a whale's blowhole. Thank God for science.

Surrogate bitch

Kat is in France vacationing with her sister so Jill and I are the replacement caretakers of Swiffer the cat. Without Kat, Swiffer seems to have become lonely and more irritable. Case and point: as Swiffer rested on my bed I reached over her to grab my credit card statement. This apparently was not acceptable to her and she mauled my arm in a flash of drunken punk rock rage.

I retaliated the only way I could without resorting to physical violence: I dripped water on her head and she flipped out and ran away.

Some places are like people

During a typical day at Optimus I have to run tapes to various ad agencies and other post-houses around downtown Chicago. Most of them are in large skyscrapers with extravagent lobbies. I've always thought large office buildings have a bizarre atmosphere to them, but this is the strangest one I've found yet.

It is a gigantic empty marble space with high cielings and no adornments, only a few scattered groups of leather chairs. The detail that makes this lobby especially grotesque is the silence. Outside the cross streets of Grand Avenue and State Street buzz with activity typical to the downtown of a large city. Once you step inside this lobby and the door shuts you are suddenly surrounded by near-complete silence. I would not be surprised if someone who works or worked in this building went crazy one day and screamed just to kill the soundlessness for a moment.

And I applaud them.

The "west" side

I went out to a party last night on the west side of town where my friend Ted lives. The party got super crowded and at one point my backpack was stolen and then later recovered by Ted. Someone had taken it, realized there was nothing of value in it, and stuffed the bag and contents in the corner of a room behind a couch. Super.

And now a highlight of the night: I call this series of pictures, "The Same Glasses as Worn by Five Different People Who May or May Not Own the Same Pair of Glasses."

American-do

We made it. Another year free from British bondage. Now here's a bar graph to help you determine which part of your body is most likely to be injured by fireworks. Watch your trunks and others.

Pride and discrimination

This past weekend was gay pride weekend and since I live in the center of Boystown my neighborhood was crazy, especially for the Gay Pride Parade. I missed the parade because I had class but walked through the aftermath when I got home.



A mess of trash lines the sidewalks after the parade. Come on boys and girls, let's be gay for cleanliness too.



Something bad happened to this tree. It looks like it's trying to discard a comically oversized prophylactic.



I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the gay anarchists as they marched down the street.



Of course, the weekend wouldn't be complete without some religious nut proselytizing to "save" homosexuals. I wonder if they teach timing and good taste in Sunday school.