I’ve noticed that a lot of the e/n community has gone through growing pains this summer. Whole domains have gone down, madly respected sites have fallen in shambles, and crowd favourites have began to question their reason’s for existence. Having been caught up in one such debacle already, i can safely say that contemplating everything from your raison d’etre to your belly button lint doesn’t help the situation any. That was exactly the place where i tried to impose my personal perception of a whole genre of sites onto one site, and it backfired. For me at least. I found that i became totally irrelevant to shafted, no matter how amusing my posts were. I’m trying to get back to being a useful part of the posting community now, but the damage i contributed by my lengthy diatribes might be irreparable. I hope not. Anyhow, now another one of my perennial favourites, Illegal Op, seems to be having a few growing pains of its own. I think that’s inevitable for any site that boasts over a dozen people each posting about their lives on a daily basis. In the case of e/n change is good. The sites that aren’t soley composed of juvenile penis humour and porn are few and far between, and it hurts to see them start to crumble under their own reflective weight. It’s only when you stop to question your evolution that you become extinct.
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random cd adventure 6-10:
Various – y100 Sonic Session vol.3
reason: tori
1st listen – 6.5/10 || then: 7/10 || now: 7/10
best songs: hole’s “malibu,” tori’s “concertina,” live’s “i alone”
qu: “You have a tattoo of our band? You fool! Oh my god… you know when you get the lord you
can just change the ‘e’ to a ‘y’ … it could just say ‘holy’ – Courtney
Offspring – Smash
reason: modern rock radio
1st listen – 5.5/10 || then: 6.5/10 || now: 5/10
best songs: “self esteem,” “come out and play,” “gotta get away”
qu: “that’s ok ’cause i’ve got no self esteem”
Tori Amos – Cruel / Raspberry Swirl
reason: obsessiveness
1st listen – 6/10 || then: 7/10 || now: 6/10
best songs: “raspberry swirl” – lip gloss version
qu: “i can be cruel and i don’t know why”
hair
reason: doing props for the show
1st listen – 7.5/10 || then: 9/10 || live: 9.5/10 || now: 7/10
best songs: “hair,” “easy to be hard,” “flesh failures (let the sunshine in)”
qu: “the beauty of life, you can no longer hide. our eyes are open, our eyes are open, wide”
dave matthews and tim reynolds – live at luther college
reason: hearing it at the players’ house / spectacular guitar
1st listen – 9/10 || then: 7/10 || now: 8/10
best songs: “one sweet world,” “typical situation,” “seek up”
qu: “she thinks, we look at each other wondering what the other is thinking but we never say a thing; these crimes between us grow deeper”
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random cd adventure 1-5:
Meredith Brooks – Blurring the Edges
reason: “bitch”
1st listen – 6/10 || then: 7.5/10 || live: 6.5/10 || now: 5/10
best songs: “birthday,” “wash my hands,” “stop”
worst song: “my little town”
qu: “I stumble hard but i’m not sleeping in your bed”
Joni Mitchell – Blue
reason: classic album, “case of you”
1st listen – 5/10 || then: 7.5/10 || now: 6.5/10
best songs: “a case of you,” “this flight tonight”
qu: “songs are like tattoos”
Joan Osborne – Relish
reason: “One of Us”
1st listen – 7/10 || then: 9/10 || now: 8/10
best songs: “lumina,” “crazy baby,” “let’s just get naked”
qu: “babies will put things in their mouths – never heard of sin”
“here is the place, now is the time, let’s invent the kiss”
No Doubt – Tragic Kingdom
reason: popular
1st listen – 8/10 || then: 9.5/10 || now: 8/10
best songs: “sunday morning,” “spiderwebs,” “happy now”
qu: “you’re just like my ken and barbie doll, your name will never change”
Sarah McLachlan – Launch #4
reason: random
1st listen – 10/10 || then: 9.5/10 || now: 9/10
song: “building a mystery” (solo and acoustic)
qu: “you’re so beautiful with an edge and a charm, but so careful when i’m in your arms”
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Once, in 1st grade, we were assigned to do our writing homework on that wide-lined loose-leaf paper that children use. In my class there was a quiet and studious girl who may have been named Clarissa. She had the straightest brown hair i’ve ever seen. On that day she turned in her writing assignment and the teacher smiled. Clarissa had unexpectedly run out of loose-leaf the night before and so she erased her entire last assignment and used the paper over again for her homework. She always wrote lightly, so erasing a wasn’t a hard thing to do.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
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Ah, but that little blog invites the tale of how i wound up living with Matt. “Wound up” is the perfect phrase, since there was no intention involved. As early as March i was asking my friends from the Drexel Players where they were going to live. I pointedly neglected to turn in a housing deposit so i would be forced to get an apartment and as of right now i can asure you that was the best idea i ever had.
I had plenty of housing prospects, struck up at parties and while manning the box office. In fact, at a point we had a house full of people confirmed. Being the lowly and uninformed Freshman, i told potential roommates, all of them upperclassmen, that i had no idea where to begin but would look for places if they could give me a little direction. They all already lived off-campus so knew how to go about looking for a place, and i simply didn’t realize how easy it was.
Owing to both of those factors, really, i found myself potentially homeless in June, and headed into a grueling schedule of leading Orientations for new Freshmen. With only one day a week off (this was before the collarbone injury, which is another story entirely) i was afraid i’d never get to look for a place. I found someone in a similar situation and made the same plea to them: point me in a direction and i’ll do the work for us. I wasn’t really taken up on the offer, but to be fair i know that he was busy too. Despairing that i was doomed to live at home for the year, one day i was idly reading shafted and saw this (beware, huge load time, most of it is non-essential pictures tho). The rest, as they say, is history. I replied, Matt and i chatted, and once we saw a place or two together we grabbed a local paper and went hardcore searching. Once i realized how simple it was, i simply made sure our schedules were coordinated and booked appointments. And here we are now.
I suppose all of those other folks should have believed me when i said i would do the legwork for them. Oh well… there’s always next year.