jeweled platypus

sunday, november 27, 2005

I like taking the train

while waiting for the train

inside the train, looking forward

These pictures of containers by Edward Burtynsky inspired the first picture. I think he’s my favorite photographer.

Next quarter I’m going to take a photography class with Richard Ross, which is very cool.

wednesday, november 23, 2005

The text wiki is working now! Almost. My awesome friends figured out the problem with it (line-endings and Perl paths), but I have to work on URL rewriting. I think the wiki had been completely broken for a year and a half.

They also fixed my space pen! The cap had stuck to the rest of the pen for several months, but somehow they pried it apart. However, my broken CD-ROM drive continues to stump them.

I like my friends. If I go to sleep before two AM, that means I didn’t hang out with them enough.

I’m going home for Thanksgiving this afternoon. Yay! I miss the LA Times, farmer’s market vegetables, and my sisters.

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tuesday, november 15, 2005

Something on a Sunday night

Asha (my roommate) and I went to a My Morning Jacket concert last night, which was quite exciting and enjoyable. First we got all dressed up, took the 40-minute bus ride into town, and arrived in time to buy tickets. The opening act was a guy named Saul Williams, whom I didn’t expect much of — some spoken word rap musician? But he was pretty cool and not too harsh, with poetic rhythmic songs and a nice theme. After that, the setup for My Morning Jacket took a long time. The crew put little owl figures and skulls on the equipment; the background music ranged from Prince to Kanye West to old country music.

Suddenly, in the dark, they started playing “Wordless Chorus”. Then the lights came on a little bit, then some more, and then the music was very good and noisy and melodic, just like My Morning Jacket should be. The band members all have long hair! The singer’s voice is just as wonderful in real life. They have energy and a sense of humor — they drew out the endings of a few of the songs, longer and longer until people weren’t quite sure whether to stop clapping. They played a bunch of songs from Z and some older ones (of course), a few of which I didn’t recognize but still enjoyed. “One Big Holiday” and “Mahgeetah” were very good. We danced and screamed a little and exclaimed over the sexiness of it all.

Eventually it was over, and we wandered down State Street looking for something that was still open. (Santa Barbara is practically dead after eight o’clock.) We shared a big raspberry-oatmeal-cookie-cake thing at a coffee shop, and then I remembered that we didn’t know what time the buses stopped running. Well, we found out — the last bus was at eleven, and it was twelve. So we strained our purses further and took a taxi.

Then — yes, then! — as we walked inside our house, there were our friends, and they were headed to a greasy burger place in Isla Vista. Well, why not? And we went and ate french fries with crazy boys and talked about syntactical quotations and whether or not tags are good for everything.