ROAD TRIP 2004: LiveStrong
So I'm blogging from a WashU medical campus lab this morning. Behind me is Kristen, who is seriously turning me on injecting and pulling buffer from semi-dead mice. Yeah, it's Take Your Boyfriend to Work Day here in St. Louis, and I'm having fun reading David Sedaris in a corner and occasionally admiring the pretty tubes and oscill-whozits.
We saw Wilco at the Fox last night, a theater which could dominate Atlanta's Fox in a showtunes deathmatch. Unfortunately, it was a little ill-suited for a rock concert, a fact that I should have remembered from 9th grade when Thomas and I saw Lynyrd Skynyrd at the ATL Fox (Kristen pointed out how weird it was when they flashed the lobby lights before show). Maybe because my mind has a tendency to block out Dadaistic weirdness like seeing "Skynyrd" at the Fabulous Fox. Kristen and I were in the balcony, so it was a decent view but a little detached; I can't blame Wilco, because it's obvious that they now have more fans than they know what to do with. The audience was split between middle-aged Uncle Tupelo fans and high school Yankee Hotel Foxtrot devotees. It looked like the band tried to compensate for the enormous space by instituting a video screen behind the stage that played what looked like stock nature footage reflected and inverted and edited to synchronize with the music. It was good stuff, especially the skyscraper fly-bys on "Jesus, etc.", but maybe it was a little too good: I was so distracted by it that I hardly watched any of the pawn-sized band members. So I give a big-thumbs down to the venue, even though the inside of the Fox is breathtaking. I'm no snob, but I do prefer smaller venues for the opportunity they afford to observe the interactions between bandmates. Even we'd had front row tickets at the Fox, the whole stage configuration might still feel a tad bit arena.
Well, that's all for the Wilco part of the blog. Amy, is this what a Butch Walker blog feels like?
So Kristen's got a university apartment with a kitchen now, and so far we've made tortellini, cheddar chicken with warm bean salsa. Unfortunately, there aren't any really funny cooking stories of wayward pigeons and second-degree burns, but we did make some kickass food. She's totally running circles around her roommates, who can only compete with Easy Mac and french toast. We even made a complete grocery shopping trip yesterday (I pushed the cart!) that culminated in hauling frozen vegetables in our backpacks across 5 lanes of metro St. Louis traffic. Yessss. We're totally into this cooking thing now. I think we can aspire to be like Thomas's girlfriend's parents, who, when we dropped by their house in Davis, CA, whipped up some caprezze, a few steaks, and french-press coffee at 2 in the afternoon. For Kristen's birthday, in fact, I gave her a homemade cookbook that I've been secretly constructing for the past 2 weeks, along with Sondre Lerche's Two Way Monologue. The Sondre Lerche album actually has nothing to do with food, but I did pick it up off a recommended shelf in a Borders in Salt Lake City, so there's a high probability that it's a Mormon-recommended CD. Anyhow, I'm tempted to just throw out this whole meal plan thing altogether next year to try my hand at foraging and feeding myself-- it makes me feel independent. Like being a raccoon, or a yuppie, or something.
In the meantime, I'm going to chem and psych and bio lectures with my girlfriend (and feeling inferior) and busyin myself reading Tess of the d'Ubervilles (and feeling inferior) and having a blast. I'm not really looking forward to going back to Alpharetta after my little 10-day sojourn, but I guess I only have about 5 days until I leave to go back to school.
Speaking of school, I finally took heed of Rita's 10-week play-by-play of the registrar webpage and checked the fall time schedules online only to find that my classes sucked this quarter. So I just now did some 10-minute sleight-of-hand, and ka-boom:
-French 201: History, Culture, and Language
-Self, Culture, & Society
-Visual Language 1
-Problems in Gender Studies
That second one is my required Core sociology course, which means that I'll be taking Marx to bed every night and using Adam Smith as my doorstop, and then Visual Language means essentially Art for the Ivory Tower. Publically announcing my classes isn't really satisfying for anyone but me, but the accomplishment of arranging my classes so that I either have all morning or all afternoon free merits some sort of badge, or at least a blog. And now I am off to announce that to the Facebook which, with all its new gadgets, is my unofficial residence hall for the coming year.
And a road trip blog will be in order, as soon as I develop enough pictures to make it interesting.
So I'm blogging from a WashU medical campus lab this morning. Behind me is Kristen, who is seriously turning me on injecting and pulling buffer from semi-dead mice. Yeah, it's Take Your Boyfriend to Work Day here in St. Louis, and I'm having fun reading David Sedaris in a corner and occasionally admiring the pretty tubes and oscill-whozits.
We saw Wilco at the Fox last night, a theater which could dominate Atlanta's Fox in a showtunes deathmatch. Unfortunately, it was a little ill-suited for a rock concert, a fact that I should have remembered from 9th grade when Thomas and I saw Lynyrd Skynyrd at the ATL Fox (Kristen pointed out how weird it was when they flashed the lobby lights before show). Maybe because my mind has a tendency to block out Dadaistic weirdness like seeing "Skynyrd" at the Fabulous Fox. Kristen and I were in the balcony, so it was a decent view but a little detached; I can't blame Wilco, because it's obvious that they now have more fans than they know what to do with. The audience was split between middle-aged Uncle Tupelo fans and high school Yankee Hotel Foxtrot devotees. It looked like the band tried to compensate for the enormous space by instituting a video screen behind the stage that played what looked like stock nature footage reflected and inverted and edited to synchronize with the music. It was good stuff, especially the skyscraper fly-bys on "Jesus, etc.", but maybe it was a little too good: I was so distracted by it that I hardly watched any of the pawn-sized band members. So I give a big-thumbs down to the venue, even though the inside of the Fox is breathtaking. I'm no snob, but I do prefer smaller venues for the opportunity they afford to observe the interactions between bandmates. Even we'd had front row tickets at the Fox, the whole stage configuration might still feel a tad bit arena.
Well, that's all for the Wilco part of the blog. Amy, is this what a Butch Walker blog feels like?
So Kristen's got a university apartment with a kitchen now, and so far we've made tortellini, cheddar chicken with warm bean salsa. Unfortunately, there aren't any really funny cooking stories of wayward pigeons and second-degree burns, but we did make some kickass food. She's totally running circles around her roommates, who can only compete with Easy Mac and french toast. We even made a complete grocery shopping trip yesterday (I pushed the cart!) that culminated in hauling frozen vegetables in our backpacks across 5 lanes of metro St. Louis traffic. Yessss. We're totally into this cooking thing now. I think we can aspire to be like Thomas's girlfriend's parents, who, when we dropped by their house in Davis, CA, whipped up some caprezze, a few steaks, and french-press coffee at 2 in the afternoon. For Kristen's birthday, in fact, I gave her a homemade cookbook that I've been secretly constructing for the past 2 weeks, along with Sondre Lerche's Two Way Monologue. The Sondre Lerche album actually has nothing to do with food, but I did pick it up off a recommended shelf in a Borders in Salt Lake City, so there's a high probability that it's a Mormon-recommended CD. Anyhow, I'm tempted to just throw out this whole meal plan thing altogether next year to try my hand at foraging and feeding myself-- it makes me feel independent. Like being a raccoon, or a yuppie, or something.
In the meantime, I'm going to chem and psych and bio lectures with my girlfriend (and feeling inferior) and busyin myself reading Tess of the d'Ubervilles (and feeling inferior) and having a blast. I'm not really looking forward to going back to Alpharetta after my little 10-day sojourn, but I guess I only have about 5 days until I leave to go back to school.
Speaking of school, I finally took heed of Rita's 10-week play-by-play of the registrar webpage and checked the fall time schedules online only to find that my classes sucked this quarter. So I just now did some 10-minute sleight-of-hand, and ka-boom:
-French 201: History, Culture, and Language
-Self, Culture, & Society
-Visual Language 1
-Problems in Gender Studies
That second one is my required Core sociology course, which means that I'll be taking Marx to bed every night and using Adam Smith as my doorstop, and then Visual Language means essentially Art for the Ivory Tower. Publically announcing my classes isn't really satisfying for anyone but me, but the accomplishment of arranging my classes so that I either have all morning or all afternoon free merits some sort of badge, or at least a blog. And now I am off to announce that to the Facebook which, with all its new gadgets, is my unofficial residence hall for the coming year.
And a road trip blog will be in order, as soon as I develop enough pictures to make it interesting.
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