Blog

  • a proper blaghing

    as sorta lame as it is, i’ve been digging about half of what’s come down the pike at macappaday. and, through a rather lame digg that i can’t even find again, i found this article at lifehacker, which led me to this article, which finally turned me on to ecto, which i am using now and, i have to say, might actually lead me to post more too. with more links. now to get on that pesky re-design for the resume, and a new template/theme for this semi-irregular blog-ish thing.

  • credo

    “if i can’t make it understandable, i might as well make it beautiful.” the more i think about what i said to alex the other night, the more true it seems to become. i guess there are worse words to live by as a designer.

  • somewhere is where i want to be

    sliding up first avenue in the back of a mini-suv cab, rolling through red lights with abandon; but i don’t say a word: i just slink further into my slouch and let the city pour by me as i slowly let go of the fading warmth of catching up with old friends.  it’s nice to be back, if only for a second.

  • formal and effecient causation

    the new year is here, bringing with it, amongst many things (including anthony’s Program, videos of both anthony and i riding children’s toys outside of bodegas, a lovely steak dinner, and seeing the new year’s fireworks in central park from a moving cab), the new and improved wordpress 2.0.  so today, while throwing together an impromptu new year’s brunch, i updated my wordpress.  of course, not happy with default themes (though it is lovely), i started hacking through it, with reckless ignorence of php.  so, right now, this is what we’ve got.  hopefully this will continue to be an exercise in learning php, mastering css, all in hope of building my own theme to match the root domain.  seems like a lot of work for a blog that never gets updated, doesn’t it?  (what, were you expecting a resolution to post more often?  ha.)

  • everything looks perfect from far away

    i was just sitting on the fire escape, enjoying a bourbon and trying to spot a star, or venus even, in the tiny slice of sky defined by the backyard space between my building and the building behind us through the haze and city light (you can see a handful really late a night). someone in the building to our left was practicing piano, and the fountain in the yard behind us was, well, burbling, i guess. small moments of humanity and anonymous community make me love this sprawling city even more. after a long day of the hard new york facade on the subway and walking through the streets, we come home to open our windows to the summer evening breezes and let our lives carry gently from one window to the next. nights like this let me think that maybe i’ll be ok here.

  • haven't you heard?

    so i was walking to the 4th ave stop to catch the r train to fill out employment paperwork at the public, and as i was crossing 6th ave, a mom and her son were crossing 4th street. i had the crossing signal, but the kid looked down 4th street and then started crossing. his mom jerked him back and chided him, to which the kid responded “it’s called jaywalking, mom. haven’t you heard of it? we are in new york.” he then rolled his eyes and proceeded to lead his mom across the street.

  • somewhere down the line

    “bought a tape just the other day of a band i used to listen to: set me back a couple of beers, set me back a couple of tears.” ‘down the line’ by big wheel from “slowtown.” in the midst of many days off and broke, i’ve been scanning through the web. downloaded some live recordings from the slint reunion. visited peter searcy’s site and thought back to all the good times at big wheel shows, hanging with gret listening to “could you please and thank you,” and was struck by how much of my past is interwoven with his songs. then imported all of my arial m / papa m into my itunes, and thought back to my first few years at xavier and getting nat hooked on his stuff. what strikes me now is that music seemed to be more visceral, or kinesthetic, or just more important to my life back then (yeah, like it was so long ago). not that i don’t live and die by my music now, but, like everything else in high school (and even college), things just seemed to mean so much more than they do now. though i did go see be careful little hands with em and the other matt h. the other night, and it was pretty amazing. an experience i feel i haven’t had recently. with all this time on my hands, i’m trying to get things organized and look up shows i want to see in the near future. maybe with some planning i’ll rekindle the all out lust for music that came so naturally back then. aren’t i a little young to be obsessing about my “youth?”

  • why am i so (blank) all the time?

    “pickiness and loneliness are best friends. and they’re the enemies of happiness.” – some standup comedian on comedy central last night.

  • as seen from above

    after two hours of waiting and two hours of the warmest plane ride ever, we circle the indianapolis airport. from my window seat, indiana looks like a modrian painting, but in greys and browns rather than primary colors. beautiful in its flatness, just enough snow to create a tabula rasa, punctuated by plowed roads and stands of trees. flying into la guardia is something else entirely, same colors, but a different feel, carved into city blocks rather than farm plots, the curves and diagonals so much more obviously man-made, though cut with the same intent. it’s odd, and incredibly relevant, for an instant. and then it’s gone.

  • entitled: not a clever boy

    it’s an old quote for me, from the glory days of the ePitaLog, which i guess was my first stab at blogging, before i even knew what that was. i was so tragically unhip at the turn of the century. it’s also kinda broken now, as the links in the archived entries point to my old university server account (good old /~418593/). and i know it’s lame to reference the layout/design of a site in its title, but the song is just so adequate for this act of spitting words into the void of internet anonymity.