Monday, December 19, 2011

Tailgating


So law classes sometimes bring out random memories. This will be a quick post about such a memory. Those of you who read this know that, at times, I can be dense. I know, shocking. So the event that brought this out was a case in my ethics class, where someone kept fucking up, and the judge kept trying to give the guy hints to stop fucking up and gently telling him what he should do, until the idiot lawyer was a complete lost cause and the judge had to sanction him. Here’s the story:

Before I spent my year in China, I frequently went to concerts. Not that I’d go to every show that came through town, but usually at least 4-5 shows a year. Since I returned I’ve been to three concerts: Misfits, Darkest Hour and some random outdoor electronic fest (which I should probably write about at some point, but synopsis: crazy music, weird clothing, and lots of people on drugs. Saw one kid need to be resuscitated by EMTs. It was weird). Before I left for China, my last concert in America was Warped Tour, which I attended with friend of the blog Alex. The main draws for us were Coheed & Cambria, Underoath and some other bands which I can’t remember at the moment and are irrelevant anyway.
This was the first concert we had attended together where each of us were 21+, so on the way to the venue, we decided to stop and get some beer to pregame the festivities. We picked up a Sam Adams mixer and some cups and continued on our way to the venue. We pay for parking and get our spot, pop the trunk and crack open some beers and just hang out for a bit before heading in. Within 5 mins, a plain clothes officer on a bike has pulled up next to us asking for IDs. We show him our age and he tells us there’s an open container law in this town. Keep in mind this is our first beer and I’m sober.

Me: “Really?”
Officer: “Yes, there’s an open container law. You can’t be drinking out of those bottles.”
Me: “Crap, do we need to pour these out?”
Officer: “No, but there’s an open container law.”
Me: “So what should we do?”
Officer: “You just can’t be drinking out of the bottles.”
Me: “Hmm…. Wait. We have cups! If we drink out of the cups, is there a problem?”
Officer: “I can’t tell you to drink out of the cups. I just want to remind you of the open container law. You need to keep those bottles hidden.”
Me: “So the cups are okay then?”
Officer who surprisingly hasn’t slapped me yet: “Just keep those drinks hidden. I don’t care how you do it.”
Me: “Gotcha.”

I am dense.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

So It Begins....

So I hope to begin a new project on the blog, which I will explain in this post. Now, this is meant to be a 10 part series, and given the speed with which I post, I expect it to be finished sometime in 2016. However, given the nature of the concept, that’s actually not an issue. The inspiration of this comes from the Boston Globe. When I was in college, they separated the comics and crossword puzzle into a separate ‘life’ section (cannot remember the name of it for the life of me. anyone know what it was or if they still do it?). To beef up the content, they’d usually have a feature on something to do in the city and some random interviews/event listings/whatever. One thing that always caught my eye was an interview where they’d ask a local ‘celebrity’ to shuffle his/her iPod and list the first 10 songs that appeared, with no cheating to hide embarrassing selections. I always found this fascinating.


I am a music junkie. I have over 13000 songs on my computer and I do believe that I’m one of the few people who can say they actually have some of everything. Songs range from Bach to the Beatles, to Jay Chou to Bury Your Dead. I maintain my Super Awesome Playlist that forces me to cycle through all of my songs and not just keep listening to recent favorites until I get sick of them. While the playlist is no longer several thousand songs long (I changed my formula to make it a little more dynamic and adaptable to new music purchases), my goal every year is to listen to each song at least 1-2 times so I an try and rate everything and find new songs that maybe I’ve overlooked in the past or that I may now appreciate as my musical taste evolves and I get older.


I have music on pretty much all of my non-sleeping non-classroom time. I’ll run through somewhere between 100-150 songs a day. While I haven’t always been so extreme in my habits, I have always been listening to music. While some people define their lives by television or movies (or books/non-electronic entertainment for the more enlightened members of society), I use music. I can listen to certain songs and go straight back into the mindset that I had when that song was in heavy rotation, or perhaps my thoughts on the first time I heard it. While the nostalgia can be nice, it can also lead to unpleasant memories depending on the song.


So this is all a grandiose way of saying I want to do the random shuffle 10 song trick, and write an essay about each song and the mindset it puts me in. As a disclaimer, I may not be entirely honest with it being completely random. If a song elicits nothing out of me, I’m not going to write about it, just as I won’t write about songs that bring similar memories/emotions. This is slightly different than my usual posts on funny/stupid things that happen to me, and I may attempt to break things up with some moments of comedy, but this is my current course of action. I hope to knock out one or two before the end of the year, but we’ll see how that goes. Hopefully, this turns out to be as interesting a concept in reality as it is in my head.


(Current Song: Oasis “Morning Glory)